The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The rulership of Michael in its cosmic, spiritual aspect shows us, as you will have gathered from what I have already told you, that he occupies a special position among those spiritual Beings whom we call the Archangeloi. And precisely because of its bearing upon the central theme of these lectures, we shall appreciate the significance of the fact that in the centuries preceding the founding of Christianity, Michael sent his impulses—his ‘cosmopolitan’ impulses—from the Sun to the Earth. As time went on, these cosmopolitan impulses disappeared: the Cosmic Intelligence fell away from Michael and by the eighth century A.D. had arrived on Earth. In earthly evolution we then find men whose thoughts were produced out of themselves, who are, as it were, ‘self-made’ thinkers. This personal, self-engendered thinking was then cultivated in preparation for the next reign of Michael. As we have seen, the wise Masters of the School of Chartres worked in unison towards this end with those souls who had been connected with the previous reign of Michael and who were predestined to develop the once cosmic but now earthly Intelligence. They were predestined to carry their work on into the nineteenth century when—at first in the spiritual world—it became possible, through the Imaginative Cult I have described to you, to prepare for what the Anthroposophical Movement was intended to achieve.

Since the last third of the nineteenth century we have been living in the initial stage of the new reign of Michael; throughout this time, and above all in our own day, preparation has to be made for what must come to pass in the twentieth century. For before the end of this present century a considerable number of human beings who have unfolded real understanding of Anthroposophy will have passed through a briefer period between death and rebirth than is usual and will again be united on the Earth under the leadership of those who were the Masters of Chartres and with those who have remained in direct connection with the sovereignty of Michael. This will take place in order that under the spiritual guidance of these two groups of beings the final, hallowed impulse may be given for the development of the spiritual life on Earth.

Anthroposophy can only be of real significance for those who want to ally themselves with it, when with a certain inner, reverent fervour they become conscious that they may indeed have their place within a sphere of happenings like those described yesterday. This realisation will not only kindle inner enthusiasm but also be a source of strength, giving us the knowledge that it is our task to be the continuers of what was once alive in the ancient Mysteries.

But this consciousness must be, and indeed can be, deepened in every direction. For in the light of what was said yesterday, we look back to the time when, united with a host of super-earthly Beings in the spiritual realm of the Sun, Michael sent down upon Earth those impulses and signs which inspired the deeds of Alexander on the one side and the Aristotelian philosophy on the other. Out of these impulses arose the last phase of the inspired Intelligence on Earth. Then, together with human souls who on his behalf carried out this work on Earth, together with his spiritual hosts and the hosts of human souls around these leading spirits, Michael witnessed the Mystery of Golgotha from his abode on the Sun. Truly our souls may be stirred by picturing that moment when Michael, together with a host of Angeloi, Archangeloi and human souls, witnessed the Christ departing from the Sun in order to enter the bodily sheaths of a man and, through what He could experience in a human body on Earth, to unite Himself with the further evolution of humanity. But for Michael himself this was at the same time the sign that henceforward he must allow the heavenly Intelligence, hitherto in his keeping, to stream down like holy rain upon the Earth, to fall away gradually from the Sun. And when the ninth century of the Christian era had come, those around Michael perceived: The content of what had been guarded hitherto under Michael, is now down below, upon the Earth.

What mattered now was that in complete harmony with the sovereignty of Michael there should arise all that came into the world through the Masters of Chartres and also through certain chosen souls in the Order of the Dominicans. In short, there came about the phase of evolution which from the beginning of the fifteenth century inaugurated the epoch of the Consciousness Soul—it is the phase of evolution in which we ourselves are living. Approximately in the first third of the preceding epoch, that is to say during the first third of the epoch of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, as an outcome of Alexandrianism, the super-earthly Intelligence had spread in Asia, Africa and parts of Europe. Following upon this, came the time when Michael, the foremost Archangel-Spirit of the Sun, knew that the Cosmic Intelligence was passing away from this realm, away from his administration: the conditions were now established for the development of the Intelligence on the Earth. A further phase of development on Earth began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian era, when Gabriel became the administrator—as I explained in my previous lecture—while Michael was free from his earlier obligations in the Cosmos.

Michael was now in an unusual position. In other circumstances, when an Archangelos is not himself the ruling Spirit in the affairs of Earth, he lets his impulses pour, nevertheless, into what the other Archangeloi are bringing to pass. The impulses from all the seven consecutive Archangelic rulerships flow in continually—it is simply that one rulership predominates in a particular age. When, for example, in earlier epochs of evolution, Gabriel was the leading Spirit, it was paramountly those impulses of which he was the actual ruler that flowed into earthly evolution; but the other Archangeloi were also at work. Now, however, when Gabriel was exercising his dominion, Michael was in the unusual position of being unable to participate from the Sun in the affairs of the Earth. Truly it is a strange position for a ruling Archangelos to perceive that the activity he has been wielding through long ages has, for the time being, come to an end. And so it was that Michael said to those who belonged to him: For the time during which we cannot send impulses to the Earth (it is the period which ended about the year 1879) we must set about a special task, a task within the realm of the Sun. It was to be possible for those souls who have been led by their karma into the Anthroposophical Movement, to behold in the realm of the Sun the deeds performed by Michael and his hosts while Gabriel was holding sway upon the Earth.

This was detached from the otherwise regular sequence of deeds taking place between gods and men. The souls connected with Michael—the leading souls of Alexander's time, the leading Dominicans with those of less eminence who had gathered around them, and a large number of aspiring human souls in association with the leading spirits—these souls felt torn away from the age-long connection with the spiritual world. There, in super-sensible worlds, those human souls predestined to become Anthroposophists experienced something never previously experienced by human souls between death and rebirth in the super-earthly realm. In earlier times during the period between death and a new birth, the karma for the future earthly existence had been elaborated by human souls in connection with leading spiritual Beings. But no karma had ever previously been elaborated in the same way as was the karma of those predestined to become Anthroposophists. Never before in the realm of the Sun between death and rebirth had there been accomplished such work as was possible under the leadership of Michael when, as was now the case, he was free of the concerns of the Earth.

Something came to pass in the super-sensible worlds. It was something that lies implanted deep down in the hearts of the majority of Anthroposophists to-day, although in the unconscious, wrapt in sleep or dream. And the Anthroposophist speaks truly when he says to himself: Within my heart there lies a secret although I am yet unconscious of it. It is a secret mystery wherein are reflected the deeds of Michael in realms beyond the Earth when, before my present incarnation, I was serving him. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Michael, being free of his wonted tasks, was enabled to work in a special way, and I was working under him.

Michael gathered his hosts, he gathered from the realms of the Angeloi and the Archangeloi the super-sensible Beings who belonged to him, but he gathered, too, human souls who in one way or another had been connected with him. And thus there arose a kind of School—a great and ever-widening super-sensible School. In the same way that a kind of heavenly Conference had taken place at the beginning of the thirteenth century between those who worked together as Platonists and Aristotelians, a super-sensible tuition now took place, from the fifteenth into the eighteenth centuries, under the direct leadership of Michael—a super-sensible schooling in which the great Teacher, ordained by cosmic decree, was Michael himself. Thus, before the super-sensible cult that took its course during the first half of the nineteenth century in mighty Imaginations, as I have told you, numbers of human souls had already received a super-sensible schooling whose results they now carry subconsciously within them. These results come to expression in the urge felt by such people to come to Anthroposophy. The urge that brings them to Anthroposophy is indeed the outcome of this schooling. And it can truly be said: At the end of the fifteenth century, Michael gathered his hosts of gods and of human souls in the realm of the Sun and gave them teaching which extended over long periods of time. This teaching was to somewhat the following effect.—

Since the human race has peopled the Earth in human form, Mysteries have existed upon the Earth: Sun Mysteries, Mercury Mysteries, Venus Mysteries, Mars Mysteries, Jupiter Mysteries, Saturn Mysteries. Into these Mysteries the gods poured their secrets; in these Mysteries men were initiated when they were fit for Initiation. Thus it has been possible for the human being on the Earth to know what proceeds on Saturn, on Jupiter, on Mars and so forth, to know, too, how happenings in these spheres work into the evolution of mankind on Earth. Always there have been Initiates who, in the Mysteries, communed with the Gods. With an old, instinctive clairvoyance, these Initiates received the impulses coming to them in the Mysteries. But even meagre traditions (thus spoke Michael to those who belonged to him) even meagre traditions of this have almost vanished from the Earth. The impulses can no longer stream into the Earth. It is only in the lowest-lying region—that of physical procreation—it is there and there alone that Gabriel still has the power to let the Moon-influences flow into the evolution of humanity. The ancient traditions have almost disappeared from the Earth and therewith the possibility to nurture and cultivate the impulses streaming into the subconscious life and into the differently constituted bodily natures of men. We, however, turn our gaze back to all that once was brought in the Mysteries as a gift of the Heavens to men; we survey this wonderful tableau. And also we look downwards across the flow of the ages. And there we find the places of the Mysteries, we see how the heavenly wisdom streamed into these Mysteries, how men were initiated, how from our hallowed realm in the Sun the Cosmic Intelligence poured down to men in such a way that the great Teachers of humanity received truly spiritual ideas, thoughts, concepts. These ideas and thoughts were inspired into them from our hallowed realm in the Sun. These inspirations have vanished from the Earth. We see them only when we look back into epochs of antiquity ... stage by stage we see them disappearing from earthly evolution during the time of Alexander and its aftermath—and down there below we see the Intelligence that has now become earthly, spreading gradually among men. But the vista has remained with us. We yet behold the secrets that were once divulged to the Initiates of the Mysteries. Let us bring this fully into our consciousness! Let us bring it to the consciousness of those spiritual Beings who are around me, those Beings who never appear in earthly bodies but have their existence only in an etheric form. But let us bring it, too, to those souls who have often lived on Earth in physical bodies, those who are actually there now, and who belong to the Michael community—let us bring it to the consciousness of these human souls. We will image forth the great Initiation-teaching which once streamed down in the ancient fashion, through the Mysteries, to the Earth. We will present this to the souls of those who in their life of Intelligence were linked with Michael.—

And then—if I may use an earthly, and in such a context an almost trivial expression—then the ancient Initiation-Wisdom was “worked through.” In a great and comprehensive heavenly School, Michael taught the contents of what he was now no longer able to administer himself. It was an overwhelming deed—something that in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries and on into the eighteenth, caused such profound disquiet and alarm to the Ahrimanic demons on Earth that a remarkable thing happened. Between heavenly deeds and earthly deeds at this time polaric contrast was established. In the heights, in the spiritual world, there was this sublime School, gathering together the old Initiate-Wisdom in a new form, calling up into the Intelligence-filled consciousness, into the Consciousness Soul of predestined human beings between death and rebirth, what in earlier times had been man's treasury of wisdom in the Intellectual Soul, the Sentient Soul, and so forth. In inner words, seeming stern in many respects when they were uttered, Michael placed before those who belonged to him the picture of cosmic relationships, the anthroposophical relationships. These souls received teaching which unveiled the secrets of worlds. Below, on the Earth, the Ahrimanic spirits were at work.—And here it is necessary to point without reserve to a secret. Outwardly regarded it will seem unacceptable in face of modern culture, but it is nevertheless a divine secret and one of which Anthroposophists must be cognisant in order to be able to lead civilisation in the right way to the end of the twentieth century.

While Michael above was teaching his hosts, there was founded in the realm lying immediately below the surface of the Earth, a kind of sub-earthly, Ahrimanic school. The Michael School was in the super-earthly world; in the region beneath our feet—for the spiritual is actively at work in the sub-earthly region also—the opposing Ahrimanic school was founded. And in that particular period, when no impulses were streaming down from Michael bringing heavenly inspiration to the Intelligence, when the Intelligence on the Earth was, for the time being, left to itself, the Ahrimanic hosts strove all the harder to send their impulses up from below into the development of the Intelligence in mankind. It is a truly overwhelming picture. The Earth's surface—Michael above, teaching his hosts, revealing to them in mighty, cosmic language the ancient Initiate-Wisdom, and below, the Ahrimanic school in the sub-strata of the Earth. Upon the Earth, the Intelligence that has fallen from the Heavens is unfolding. For the time being, Michael holds his School in heavenly isolation from the earthly world—no impulses stream down from above—and there below are the Ahrimanic powers, sending up their impulses with all the greater strength.

There have always been souls incarnated on the Earth who were aware of this sinister situation. Anyone conversant with the spiritual history of this epoch, especially the spiritual history of Europe, will everywhere find evidence of the fact that there were individuals here and there—often quite simple men—who had an inkling of this sinister situation: abandonment of humanity by the Michael rulership, and impulses rising from below like demonic vapours, striving to conquer the Intelligence.

It is remarkable how closely the revelations of wisdom are bound up with the human being, if all that springs from such revelations is to be beneficial. This is the secret which must here be touched upon.—A human being whose task it is to proclaim the Michael wisdom feels that in a certain respect he is following the right course when he tries to put into words, when he wrestles to find the terminology to express, what is, in very truth, the wisdom of Michael. Such a one feels, too, that he is further justified when with his own hand he writes down this wisdom; for then the flow of the spiritual is directly connected with him and streams, as it were, into the forms of what he is writing, into what he is doing. Thus he willingly communicates this wisdom to others in the form of reading material when it is written down by him in his own hand. But when through mechanical means, through the medium of the printed book, he sees his work duplicated, he has a feeling of uneasiness. This has to be endured, for the method is in keeping with our age. Nevertheless, the feeling of uneasiness is never absent from one who stands within the life of the Spirit together with what he has to proclaim.

In connection with the lecture yesterday, somebody has asked me whether, as Swedenborg has hinted, the letter (Buchstabe) is not, after all, the ‘last outflow’ of the spiritual life. That indeed is so! It is the last outflow of the spiritual life so long as it flows through a man in a continuous stream from the Spirit. But when it is fixed by mechanical means as it were from the other pole, when it comes before the eyes of men as printed letters, it becomes an Ahrimanic spiritual power. For, strange to say, it is that Ahrimanic school which worked in opposition to the School of Michael in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—it is that Ahrimanic school which brought the art of printing, with all its consequences, to Europe. Printing can be the soil from which demonic powers, well adapted to combat the rulership of Michael, may spring.

An Anthroposophist must be able to perceive the significance and meaning of realities in life; he must recognise that printing is a spiritual power but precisely that spiritual power which Ahriman has placed in opposition to Michael. Therefore to those who in his School at that time were being taught by him, Michael constantly gave this warning: When you descend again to the Earth in order to give effect to what has here been prepared, gather men around you, make known the essentials by word of mouth, and do not regard the ‘literary’ effects produced in the world through the printed book as of foremost importance.—Hence the more intimate method of working from man to man is more truly in accord with Michael's way. If, instead of working merely through books, we meet together with one another, letting the impulses flow into us in the sphere of the human and the personal, and only then using the books as aids to memory, shall we be able to inaugurate the stream that—imponderably at first—is destined to flow through the Anthroposophical Society. It is inevitable that we should make use of books for we must also become masters of this art of Ahriman's—otherwise we should be delivered into his hands. We must be able to reckon truly with the Ahrimanic spirit of the times, otherwise tremendous power would be given to him. Thus it is not a matter of merely ousting the printed book but of bringing it into relationship with what works in a directly human way. So it would not be right, as a result of what I have just put before you, to say: ‘Away with all the anthroposophical books!’ Thereby we should be delivering up the art of printing to the most powerful enemies of the Michael wisdom; we should be making it impossible for our anthroposophical work to thrive, as thrive it must, until the end of the century is reached. What we must do is to ennoble the art of printing through our reverence for the Michael wisdom. For what is it that by way of the art of printing Ahriman is intent upon achieving in opposition to Michael? Ahriman is intent upon conquest of the Intelligence. There is evidence of it everywhere to-day. Conquest of the Intelligence, which asserts itself wherever conditions are favourable. And when do we find the Ahrimanic spirits most potent in their attacks against the coming age of Michael? We find them at those times when a diminution or lowering of the consciousness takes place in human beings. These Ahrimanic spirits then take possession of human consciousness, they entrench themselves within it. For instance, in the year 1914, many individuals in a lowered state of consciousness became entangled in events which led to the outbreak of the terrible World War. And within the lowered consciousness of such men the hosts of Ahriman promoted the World War—promoted it by way of human beings. The real causes of that War will never be brought to light by documents contained in archives. No, one must rather look deeply into history and perceive that there, at some particular point, stood an influential personality, at this point another, and there again another—and these men were in a lowered state of consciousness. That was the opportunity for Ahriman to take possession of them. And if you want to realise how easy it is in our age for men to be possessed by Ahriman, you need think only of this example.

What happened, when, with the printed volumes they had brought with them, the Europeans arrived in North America in times when Indians were still to be found in the eastern part of the land? When the Indians saw these volumes with their strange characters of script they took the letters to be little demons. They had the right perception for these things. They were terribly frightened when they looked at all these little demonic entities—a, b, and the rest, as they appear in print. For these letters, reproduced in such a different way, do contain something that fascinates, something that casts a spell over the modern mind; and only the good outlook of Michael, with eyes open to the human element in the proclamation of wisdom, can lead men beyond the danger of this lure. But evil things may happen in this domain.

At this point let me say the following.—There are certain secrets connected with the vision of world-existence which cannot be penetrated before a somewhat advanced age in life. Each particular period of life enables one who possesses Initiation-science to behold the individual secrets of existence. Thus between the twenty-first and forty-second years of life—not before—such a man is able to gaze into the Sun-existence; between the forty-second and forty-ninth years into the Mars secrets; between the forty-ninth and fifty-sixth years into the Jupiter secrets. But to behold the secrets of worlds in their interconnections, one must have passed the age of sixty-three.¹ Therefore before I myself was in this position, I should not have been able to speak of certain things of which I now speak without any reserve. Before the vision can penetrate into anything related to the Michael Mysteries, to the influences working from the spiritual realm of the Sun, one must look upwards from the Earth through the Saturn existence into the secrets of worlds. One must be able to experience, to live within that twilight of the spiritual world which proceeds from the ruler of Saturn, from Oriphiel, who was the leading Archangelos at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and who will again assume the leadership when the Michael Age has run its course.

To such vision, however, shattering, overwhelming truths connected with the present age are revealed. As we have seen, the art of printing spread over the Earth through the Ahrimanic school working in opposition to the School of Michael, and because of this, ‘authorship’ on a wide scale has arisen on the Earth. Who, then, were ‘authors’ in earlier times, before printing was in existence? They were men whose writings could be known only in the narrowest circles, in circles, moreover, that were properly prepared. Into how many hands did a book find its way before printing was in use? Think of the following, and you will be able to judge how things were. A kind of substitute for the later art of printing was already in existence in ancient Chinese civilisation and had reached a high level of perfection. A kind of printing art had been established there—also in an Age when Michael was ruling above; and when below there was an Ahrimanic anti-rulership. But nothing very much came of it. In those times the power of Ahriman was not yet so powerful and he was still unable to make really effective attempts to wrest from Michael the rulership of the Intelligence. The attempt was renewed in the time of Alexander but then again was unsuccessful.

Ahriman's influence in the printing art of the modern age, however, has assumed deep significance. Authorship has, so to speak, been popularised. And something has become possible, something that is as great in a wonderful, brilliant, dazzling way as, on the other hand, the necessity is great to receive it in absolute equableness of soul and to estimate it according to its true significance. First attempts have been made, attempts which from Michael's realm may be characterised by saying: Ahriman has appeared as an author. For Michael and his circle, this is a deeply significant happening to-day. Ahriman as an author! Not only have men been possessed by him as I indicated in the case of the outbreak of the War, but in that he manifested on Earth through human souls, he himself appeared as an author. That he is a most brilliant author need be no cause for astonishment; for Ahriman is a mighty, all-embracing spirit. True, he is not by nature fitted to promote the evolution of mankind on the Earth according to the intentions of the good gods; he opposes it. Nevertheless in his own sphere he is not only a thoroughly useful but a beneficent power—for beings who on one level of world-happenings are benefactors are exceedingly harmful on another. It need not be assumed, therefore, that in characterising the works of Ahriman they must come in for unqualified rebuke. Provided one is conscious of what they are, one can even admire them. But the Ahrimanic character must be recognised!

Michael teaches how recognition can be made to-day if men are willing to listen to him. For the Michael schooling has worked on and still to-day it is possible for men to draw near it. Then it teaches how Ahriman himself as an author has made attempts—first attempts of a deeply shattering, deeply tragic character—working, of course, through a human being. Nietzsche's Anti-Christ, his Ecce Homo, his autobiography, and the annotations in The Will to Power—those most brilliant chapters of modern authorship with their often devilish content—Ahriman was their writer, exercising his sovereignty over that which in letters on the Earth can be made subject to his dominion through the art of printing! Ahriman has already begun to appear as an author and his work will continue. On Earth in the future alertness will be necessary in order that not all the productions of authorship shall be deemed of the same calibre. Works written by men will appear, but some individuals at least must be aware that a Being is training himself to become one of the most brilliant authors in the immediate future: that Being is Ahriman! Human hands will write the works, but Ahriman will be the author. As once the Evangelists of old were inspired by super-sensible Beings and wrote down their works through this inspiration, so will the works of Ahriman be penned by men.

The further history of the evolution of humanity will present itself in two aspects. Endeavours must be made to propagate in the earthly realm—to the greatest extent possible—what was once taught by Michael in super-sensible Schools to souls predestined to receive it; endeavours must be made in the Anthroposophical Society to be reverently mindful of this knowledge and to impart it to those who will be incarnated in the coming times, until the end of the century has arrived. And then, many of those who for the first time are learning of these things to-day will come down to the Earth again. The time will be short. But meanwhile on Earth much that has been written by Ahriman will appear.

One task of Anthroposophists is this: steadfastly to cultivate the Michael Wisdom, to bring courageous hearts to this Michael Wisdom, and to realise that the first penetration of the earthly Intelligence by the spiritual sword of Michael consists in this sword being wielded by those into whose hearts the Michael wisdom has found its way. And so the picture of Michael in a new form may inspire each single Anthroposophist—Michael standing there within the hearts of men, beneath his feet the production of Ahrimanic authorship. Such a picture need not be painted in that external form in which during the time of the Dominicans the image was often fixed—above, the Dominican Schoolmen with their books, below, crushed under their feet, the heathen wisdom as represented by Averröes, Avicenna and the rest. Wherever it was a matter of portraying the battle waged by Christian Scholasticism against heathendom, these pictures are to be found. But in the spirit there must be this other picture: Devotion to Michael as he enters into the world, laying hold of the Intelligence upon Earth; and—in order that one may not be bedazzled—alertness with regard to the brilliant work of Ahriman as an author through the whole of the twentieth century. Ahriman will write his works in the strangest places—but they will be there indeed—and he is preparing pupils for his purposes. Even in our day, much in the subconscious is being schooled in such a way that souls will be able to incarnate again quickly and become instruments for Ahriman as an author. He will write in all domains: in philosophy, in poetry, in the sphere of the drama and the epic; in medicine, law, sociology. Ahriman will write in all these domains!

This will be the situation into which mankind will be led when the end of the century is reached. And those who are still young to-day will witness many samples of how Ahriman appears as an author. In every sphere watchfulness will be needed—and reverent enthusiasm for the Michael Wisdom.

If we can permeate ourselves with these things, if we can feel ourselves standing within the spiritual life in the sense of the indications here given, then, my dear friends, we shall place ourselves as true Anthroposophists into the civilisation of the present time. Then, maybe, we shall realise more and more deeply that a new Impulse is going out from the Christmas Foundation at the Goetheanum, that in truth only now are there being presented to the Anthroposophical Society things whereby this Society can see itself as it were in a great cosmic mirror—in which the individual, too, together with the karma which leads him into the Anthroposophical Society, can see himself reflected.

That is what I wanted to lay on your hearts in these lectures. For it is to hearts that the words are chiefly spoken. The hearts of men must become the helpers of Michael in the conquering of the Intelligence that has fallen to the Earth. Just as once the old Serpent was destined to be crushed by Michael, so must the Intelligence that has now become the Serpent be conquered by Michael, be spiritualised by Michael. And whenever the Serpent appears in its unspiritualised state, made Ahrimanic, it must be recognised through the vigilance, the alertness which belongs to the anthroposophical spirit and is developed through the Michael-like tenor of soul.

• 1. See True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigations. Lecture 6. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

I have been asked to speak in these lectures about paths leading to a knowledge of the super-sensible world. This knowledge, and our knowledge of the phenomenal world, the fruit of years of patient and diligent study, to which we owe the magnificent achievements of modern times, are complementary. For reality can be apprehended only by the person who is able to reinforce the remarkable discoveries which the natural and historical sciences have added to our stock of knowledge in recent times with insight derived from the spiritual world.

Wherever the external world confronts us we are in no doubt that it is both spiritual and physical; behind every physical phenomenon will be found in some form or other a spiritual agent which is the real protagonist. The spiritual cannot exist in a vacuum for the spiritual is operative at all times and actively permeates the physical at some undefined time or place.

I propose to discuss in these lectures how the world in which man lives may be known in its totality, on the one hand through a consideration of his physical environment and, on the other hand, through the perception of the spiritual. In this way I hope to indicate the true and false methods of attaining such knowledge.

Before touching upon the actual subject matter of these lectures tomorrow I should like to offer a brief introduction so that you may have some idea of what to expect from them and what purpose I have in view. They are concerned in the first place to bring home to us the question: why do we undertake spiritual investigation at all? Why, as thinking, feeling, practical persons, are we not prepared to accept the phenomenal world as it is and take an active part in it? Why do we strive at all to attain knowledge of a spiritual world? In this context I should like to refer to an ancient conception, an old saying that embraces a truth ever more widely accepted and which, inherited from the earliest days of human thinking and aspiration, is still found today when we inquire into the Ground of the world. Without in any way using these ancient, outmoded conceptions as a basis, I would like, none the less, to call attention to them whenever the occasion arises.

From the East there echoes across thousands of years the saying: the world that we perceive with our senses is Maya, the Great Illusion. And if, as man has always felt during the course of his development, the world is Maya, then he must transcend the ‘Great Illusion’ to find ultimate truth. But why did man look upon this world of sense-impressions as Maya? Why, precisely in the earliest times when men were nearer to the spirit than they are today, did the Mystery Centres arise, Centres that were dedicated to the cultivation of science, religion, art and practical living, whose aim was to point the way to truth and reality, in contradistinction to that which, purely in the external world, was the Great Illusion, the source of man's knowledge and activity? How is one to account for those illustrious sages who trained their neophytes in the ancient, holy Mysteries and sought to lead them from illusion to truth? This question can only be answered if one reviews man more dispassionately, from a more detached angle.

“Know thyself!”—such is another ancient saying that comes down to us from the past. From the fusion of these two sayings—‘the world is Maya,’ from the East, and ‘know thyself!’, from ancient Greece—there first arose the quest for spiritual knowledge amongst later humanity. But in the ancient Mysteries, too, the quest for truth and reality had its origin in this twofold perception that, in the final analysis, the world is illusion and that man must attain to self-knowledge.

It is, however, only through life itself that man can come to terms with this question, not through thinking alone, but through the will, and through full participation in the reality immediately accessible to us as human beings. Neither in full consciousness, nor in clear understanding, but with deep emotion, every man the world over can say to himself: ‘Such as is the outer world that you see and hear, that you cannot be.’

This feeling goes deep. One must reflect upon the implication of these words: ‘Such as is the external world that you perceive with your five senses, that you cannot be.’ When we look at the plants we see the first green shoots emerge in springtime; they blossom in summer and towards autumn they ripen and bear fruit. We see them grow, fade and die: the duration of their life-cycle is a single year. We see, too, how many plants absorb from the soil certain substances which build up the main stem. On the way here yesterday evening by road we saw many extremely old plants which had absorbed quantities of these hardening substances in order that their life-cycle should not be limited to a single year, but should be extended over a longer period of time and thus would bear new growing-points on their stems. And it is given to man to observe how these plants grow, fade and die.

And when he observes the animals, he realizes their impermanence; so too with the mineral kingdom. He observes the mineral deposits in the majestic mountain ranges. And armed with his scientific knowledge, he realizes that they too are impermanent. And finally he turns to some conception such as the Ptolemaic or Copernican system, for example, or some conception borrowed from the ancient or later Mysteries—and he concludes as follows: all that I see in the splendour of the stars, all that irradiates me from sun and moon with their wondrous and complex orbits—all this, too, is impermanent. But apart from impermanence, the kingdom of nature has other attributes. These are of such a kind that man, if he is to know himself, should not assume that he and all that is impermanent—the plants, minerals, sun, moon and stars—are similarly constituted.

Man then comes to the conclusion: I bear within me some quality that is different from anything I see and hear around me. I must arrive at an understanding of my own being, for I cannot find it in anything that I see and hear.

In all the ancient Mysteries men felt this urge to discover the reality of their inner being, whereas all the transient phenomena of space and time were felt to be an expression of the Great Illusion. And so, in order to arrive at an understanding of man's inner being, they looked beyond the findings of sense-perception.

And here they experienced a spiritual world. How to find the right path to the spiritual world will be the subject of these lectures. You can readily imagine that man's first impulse will be to follow the same procedure he adopted in exploring the phenomenal world. He will simply transfer the method of sense-perception to his exploration of the spiritual world. If, however, investigation into the phenomenal world is usually fraught with illusion, then it is probable that the possibilities of illusion will be increased rather than diminished if the methods for investigating the phenomenal world are also applied to the spiritual world. And, in effect, this is what happens. In consequence we merely become the victims of an illusion all the more compelling.

And again, if we harbour vague anticipations, nebulous enthusiasms, unaccountable presentiments from dark corners of the soul, dream-fantasies about the spiritual, it will remain forever unknown to us. We remain in the world of conjecture; we share a belief, but have no real knowledge. If we are content simply to adopt this course, the spiritual will become not better known to us, but progressively more unknown. Thus man may go doubly astray.

On the one hand, he pursues the same line of enquiry in relation to the spiritual and phenomenal world. And the phenomenal world is found to be illusion. If he pursues the same approach to the spiritual world, as the ordinary spiritualists sometimes do, then he is subject to even greater illusions.

On the other hand he can follow the other way of approach. In this case no attempt is made to investigate the spiritual world along clear-cut, intelligible lines, but through self-induced belief and nebulous enthusiasm. Consequently the spiritual world remains a closed book. No matter how urgently we pursue the path of vague conjecture and emotional enthusiasm we shall know progressively less about the spiritual world. In the first instance the illusion is magnified, in the second, our ignorance. As against these two false paths we must find the right path.

We must bear in mind how impossibly difficult it is to substitute a knowledge of the true self for a knowledge of the Great Illusion in the sense I have indicated; and furthermore, if one intends to prepare oneself for a true, authentic approach to spiritual understanding, how impossible it is, in a state of illusion, to overcome all these nebulous feelings about the true self and come to a clear perception of reality. Let us look quite impartially at what is here involved. A materialist can never feel such deep admiration and respect for the recent scientific discoveries of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and others as the man who has insight into the spiritual world. For these men, and many others since the time of Giordano Bruno, spared no effort in order to gain insight into what the ancient Mysteries considered to be the world of Maya. There is no need to accept the theories advanced by Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Copernicus, Galileo and the rest. Let others theorize about the universe as they will; we have no intention of being drawn into their arguments. But we must recognize the tremendous impetus given by these men to the detailed, factual study of specific organs in man, animals and plants, or of some particular problem relating to the mineral kingdom. Just imagine how much we have learned in recent times about the functions of the glands, nerves, heart, brain, lungs, liver, etc. as a result of their stimulating researches. They deserve our greatest respect and admiration. But in real life this knowledge can take us only to a certain point. Let me give you three examples to illustrate my point.

We can follow in great detail the first human egg-cell; how it gradually develops into a human embryo, how the various organs evolve step by step and how, from the tiny peripheral organs the complex heart and circulatory system are built up. All this can be demonstrated. We can follow the organic growth of the plant from root to blossom and seed and from this factual information we can construct a theory of the universe that embraces the Cosmos.

Our astronomers and astro-physicists have already done this. They set up a theory of the Cosmos showing how the world emerges from a stellar-nebular system which assumed a progressively more definite form and was capable of spontaneous generation. But despite all this theorizing, we come ultimately face to face once again with the essential being of man, the problem of how to respond to the injunction, ‘Know thyself!’ If we know only the self that is limited to a knowledge of the minerals, plants, animals, human glandular and circulatory systems, we know only the world man enters at birth and leaves at death. But, in the final analysis, man feels that he is not limited to the temporal world. Therefore, in face of all that knowledge of the external world yields in such grandeur and perfection, he must answer from the depths of his being: all this you affirm only between birth and death. But do you know your essential self, your true essence? The moment that the knowledge of man and nature has moral and religious implications, the human being whose organs can only apprehend the world of the Great Illusion is reduced to silence. The injunction, “Know thyself, so that thou mayest know in thine innermost being whence thou comest and whither thou art going,” this problem of cognition, the moment religious issues are raised, cannot be answered at this limited level of understanding.

On entering the Mystery Schools the neophyte was left in no doubt that however much he may have learned through sense-observation, this information could offer no answer to the great riddle of human nature when religious issues were involved.

Furthermore, though we may have the most precise knowledge of the structure of the human head, of the characteristic movements of man's arms and hands, of his gait and stance, though we may respond never so sensitively to the forms of animals and plants in so far as we can know them through sense-observation, directly we try to give artistic expression to this information we are again faced with an unanswerable problem.

For how have men hitherto expressed through art their knowledge of the world? They owed their inspiration to the Mystery teachings. Their knowledge of nature and its various aspects was related to the existing level of understanding, but at the same time it was enriched by spiritual insight.

One need only look back to ancient Greece. Today a sculptor or painter works from the model—at least this was the practice until recently. He sets out to copy and imitate. The Greek artist did not work in this way, although he is alleged to have done so; rather did he sense the spiritual human form within himself In sculpture, if he wished to portray an arm in movement, he was aware that the external world was informed by a spiritual content, that every material object has been created out of the spirit and in his work he strove to recreate the spirit.

Even as late as the Renaissance a painter did not use a model; it served only as a stimulus. He knew intuitively what activated hand or arm and expressed this information in his rendering of movement. Merely to portray the external and superficial aspects of the world of Maya, merely to copy the model, does not advance our understanding; we do not see thereby more deeply into man, but are concerned only with externals and so remain a spectator outside him.

From the standpoint of art, if we fail to transcend the world of Maya we are faced with the formidable problem of human nature and no answer is vouchsafed us.

And again, on entering the old Mysteries, it was made clear to the neophyte who was about to be initiated: if you remain within the world of Maya, you will be unable to penetrate the essential being of man or of any other kingdom of Nature. You cannot become an artist. In the sphere of art it was found necessary to remind the neophyte of the clear injunction, “Know thyself,” and then he began to feel the need for spiritual knowledge.

But, you will object, there are thoroughly materialistic sculptors. After all they were no mere amateurs and knew what they were about. They too knew how to draw forth the secrets from their model and invest their figures and motifs with these secrets. That is indeed so, but whence did they derive their knowledge? People fail to realize that this ability did not come from the artists themselves. They owed it to earlier artists who in their turn had it from their predecessors. They worked from a tradition. But they were unwilling to admit this because they claimed they owed everything to themselves. They knew how the old masters worked and imitated them. But the earliest of the old masters learned their secret from the spiritual insights of the Mysteries. Raphae1 and Michelangelo learned it from those who still drew on the Mysteries.

But true art must be created out of the spiritual. There is no other solution. As soon as we touch upon the problem of man, any perception of the Great Illusion has no answer to life's problems, to the problem of man's destiny. If we are to return to the fountain-head of art and artistic creativity we must recover insight into the spiritual world.

Now a third example. The botanist or zoologist can gain wonderfully detailed knowledge of the form of every available plant. The bio-chemist can describe the processes that take place in plant life. He can also tell how foodstuffs are assimilated in the metabolic system, are absorbed by the blood vessels in the walls of the alimentary canal and are carried in the blood to the nervous system. A gifted anatomist, physiologist, botanist or geologist can cover a wide field of the world of Maya, but if he intends to use this knowledge for purposes of healing or medical treatment, if he wishes to press forward from the outer, or even the inner constitution of man to his essential being, he cannot do it.

You will reply: but there are doctors in plenty who are materialists and have no interest in the spiritual world. They treat patients in accordance with the methods of natural science and yet they achieve results.

That is so. But they are able to affect cures because they too have behind them a tradition based upon an old world-conception. Old remedies were derived from the Mysteries, but they all shared a remarkable characteristic. If you look at an old prescription, you will find that it is highly complicated. It makes considerable demands upon those who prepare it and who apply it to the particular purpose laid down by tradition. If you had gone to an old physician and had asked how such a prescription was made up he would never have replied: first I make chemical experiments and ascertain whether the materials behave in such and such a way; then I try it out on the patients and note the results. Such an idea would never have occurred to him. People have no idea of the circumstances prevalent in earlier epochs. He would have replied: I live in a laboratory (if I may call it that) that was equipped on the basis of the Mystery teaching and when I light upon a remedy I owe it to the Gods. He was quite clear on this point, that he was in close communication with the spiritual world through the whole atmosphere engendered in his laboratory. Spiritual beings were as unmistakably present to him as human beings are to us. He was aware that through the influence of spiritual beings he had attained a higher dimension of being and was able to achieve more than would otherwise have been possible. And he proceeded to make up his complicated prescriptions, not from natural knowledge, but as the Gods dictated. It was known within the Mysteries that, in order to understand man, one should not be identified with the world of Maya, but press on to the truth of the divine world.

With all their knowledge of the external world men are further today from the truth of the divine world than were the ancients with their knowledge derived from the Mysteries. But the way back must be found again.

From the third example it is evident that if we seek to heal, even though equipped with the widest possible knowledge of nature (that is, of the world of Maya), then we are faced again with the unsolved problems of human life and destiny. If we wish to understand man from the standpoint of Maya, the “Great Illusion,” from the standpoint of the “Know thyself” which is demanded for the purposes of healing, then we shall be unable to advance a single step further in our understanding.

And so, in the light of these examples, we can say: he who wishes to bridge the gap between the world of Maya and the “Know thyself” will realize, the moment he approaches the human being with religious feeling, as a creative artist, as healer or doctor, that he stands before a void if his sole starting-point is the world of illusion. He is powerless unless he finds a form of knowledge that transcends the knowledge of external nature, which is knowledge of Maya, the Great Illusion.

Let us now draw a comparison between the way in which men sought, out of the spirit of the Mysteries, to reach a comprehensive knowledge of the world and the way in which this is attempted today. We shall then be in a position to find our bearings in relation to the paths leading to this comprehensive knowledge

A few thousand years ago the world and its divine Ground or essence were spoken of very differently from the way in which authorities speak to-day. Let us look back to that epoch a few thousand years ago, when a sublime and majestic knowledge flourished in the Mysteries of the Near East. We will attempt to look more closely into the nature of this knowledge by giving a brief description of its characteristics.

In ancient Chaldea, the following was taught: man's soul forces reach their maximum potentiality when he directs the eye of the spirit to the wonderful contrast between the life of sleep (his consciousness is dimmed, he is oblivious of his environment) and his waking life (he is clear-sighted, he is aware of the world around). These alternating conditions of sleep and waking were experienced differently thousands of years ago. Sleep was less unconscious, waking life not so fully conscious. In sleep man was aware of powerful, ever changing images, of the flux and movement of the life of worlds. He was in touch with the divine Ground, the essence, of the universe.

The dimming of consciousness during sleep is a consequence of human evolution. A few thousand years ago waking life was not so clear and lucid as today. Objects had no clearly defined contours, they were blurred. They radiated spiritual qualities in various forms. There was not the same abrupt transition from sleep to waking life. The men of that epoch were still able to distinguish these two states, and the environment of their waking life was called ‘Apsu.’ This life of flux and movement experienced in sleep, this realm that blurred the clear distinction between the minerals, plants and animals of waking life, was called ‘Tiamat.’ Now the teaching in the Chaldean Mystery Schools was that when man, in a state of sleep, shared the flux and movement of Tiamat, he was closer to truth and reality than when he lived his conscious life amongst minerals, plants and animals. Tiamat was nearer to the Ground of the world, more closely related to the world of man than Apsu. Apsu was more remote. Tiamat represented something that lay nearer to man. But in the course of time Tiamat underwent changes and this was brought to the notice of the neophytes in the Mystery Schools. From the life of flux and movement of Tiamat emerged demoniacal forms, equine shapes with human heads, leonine forms with the heads of angels. They arose out of the warp and woof of Tiamat and these demoniacal forms became hostile to man.

Then there appeared in the world a powerful Being, Ea. Anyone today who has an ear for sounds can feel how the conjunction of these two vowels points to that powerful Being who, according to these old Mystery teachings, stood at man's side to help him when the demons of Tiamat grew strong. Ea or Ia, became later—if one anticipates the particle ‘Soph’—Soph-Ea, Sophia. Ea implies approximately abstract wisdom, wisdom that permeates all things. Soph is a particle that suggests (approximately) a state of being. Sophia, Sophea, Sopheia, the all-pervading, omnipresent wisdom sent to mankind her son, then known as Marduk, later called Micha-el, the Micha-el who is invested with authority from the hierarchy of the Angels. He is the same Being as Marduk, the son of Ea, wisdom—Marduk-Micha-el.

According to the Mystery teachings Marduk-Micha-el was great and powerful and all the demoniacal beings such as horses with human heads and leonine forms with angels' heads—all these surging, mobile, demoniacal forms, conjoined as the mighty Tiamat, were arrayed against him. Marduk-Micha-el was powerful enough to command the storm wind that sweeps through the world. All that Tiamat embodied was seen as a living reality, and rightly so, for that is how they experienced it. All these demons together were envisaged as the adversary, a powerful dragon which embodied all the demoniacal powers born out of Tiamat, the night. And this dragon-being, breathing fire and fury, advanced upon Marduk. Micha-el first smote him with various weapons and then drove the whole force of his storm-wind into the dragon's entrails so that Tiamat burst asunder and was scattered abroad. [>The “Poem of Creation” says: “The North Wind bore (it) to places undisclosed.”] And so Marduk-Micha-el was able to create out of him the Heavens above and the Earth beneath. Thus arose the Above and the Below.

Such was the teaching of the Mysteries. The eldest son of Ea, wisdom, has vanquished Tiamat and has fashioned from one part of him the Heavens above and from the other the Earth below. And if, O man, you lift your eyes to the stars, you will see one part of that which Marduk-Micha-el formed in the Heavens out of the fearful abyss of Tiamat for the benefit of mankind. And if you look below, where the plants grow out of the mineralized Earth, where minerals begin to take form, you will find the other part which the son of Ea, wisdom, has recreated for the benefit of mankind.

Thus the ancient Chaldeans looked back to the formative period of the world, to the forming from the formless; they saw into the workshop of creation and perceived a living reality. These demon forms of the night, all these nocturnal monsters, the weaving, surging beings of Tiamat had been transformed by Marduk-Micha-el into the stars above and the Earth beneath. All the demons transformed by Marduk-Micha-el into shining stars, all that grows out of the Earth, the transformed skin and tissue of Tiamat—this is the form in which the men of ancient times pictured whatsoever came to them through the old attributes of the soul. That information they accounted as knowledge.

Then the priests of the Mysteries anticipated the future by studying the psychic powers of their pupils. And when the neophytes had developed adequate strength of soul they were in a position to understand the first elementary lessons that children are taught in school today—that the Earth revolves round the Sun and that worlds are formed from nebulae. This knowledge was a well-guarded secret in those days. The teaching given openly was concerned, on the other hand, with the deeds of Marduk-Micha-el which I have just described to you. In our schools and universities today—and they lay no claim to secrecy—and even in our primary schools the Copernican system and astro-physics are taught, subjects which, in ancient times, only the sages dared undertake or were permitted to undertake and then only after long preparation. What every schoolboy knows could, in those days, be learned only by Initiates. Today all this is part of the school curriculum.

There was an epoch dating further back still than the epoch of the old Chaldean Mysteries, when people spoke only of such things as I have described—of Ea, of Marduk-Micha-el, of Apsu and Tiamat. They abhorred everything taught by these ‘eccentric’ Mystery teachers about the movements of the stars or of the sun; they wished to study, not the invisible, but solely the visible and tangible, though in the personified or symbolic forms revealed through old clairvoyance. They rejected the knowledge which the old Initiate-teachers and their pupils had acquired. Then came the time when the primeval wisdom was gradually diffused from the East, and both forms of knowledge were treasured. Men set great store on the manifestations of the Beings of the spiritual worlds, the deeds of Marduk-Micha-el, for example; and equally they treasured what could be illustrated diagrammatically—the sun in the centre and the planetary bodies revolving round it in cycles and epicycles. Then, in the course of time, insight into the spiritual worlds, the worlds of demons and gods, was lost and intellectual knowledge was fostered, the knowledge which we prize so highly today and which reached its zenith in the early years of our epoch. We are now living in an epoch that ignores the spiritual, even as the phenomenal world was ignored by those to whom the spiritual was self-evident. We have to anticipate the time when we shall again be in a position to accept side by side with the teachings of astronomers, astrophysicists, zoologists and botanists a knowledge of spiritual realities derived from spiritual insights. This epoch is now imminent and we must be ready to meet it if we are to accomplish our task and rediscover amongst other things the religious source of art and the art of healing.

Just as in ancient times the spiritual dwelt amongst men whilst the material world was contemned, to be followed by an epoch when material knowledge was fostered and the spiritual suppressed, so now the time must come when we must transform our vast, comprehensive knowledge of the external world, so deserving of admiration, into a renewed knowledge of the Mystery teachings. Since the material science of today has torn down the edifice of the old spirituality, so that nothing survives of the ancient structure save, at most, those fragments that we unearth, we must once again recover the spiritual; but there must be a full and clear understanding of everything we bring to light when we delve into the history of past epochs. We must find our way back to the spiritual through a new creative art imbued with religious feeling, through a new art of healing and through a new knowledge of the spirit that permeates the being of man.

These are three examples which I have given you today in the hope that we may strive to renew the Mysteries which shall give us an understanding of the Ground and principle of the world in its entirety and an understanding of man who shall work as a fully integrated person rather than as a narrow materialist to promote the welfare and enlightenment of his fellow men.

In the last lecture I spoke of how the forces of karma take shape, and today I want to lay the foundations for acquiring an understanding of karma through studying examples of individual destinies. Such destinies can only be illustrations, but if we take our start from particular examples we shall begin to perceive how karma works in human life. It works, of course, in as many different ways as there are human beings on the earth, for the configuration of karma is entirely individual. And so whenever we turn our attention to a particular case, it must be regarded merely as an example.

Today I shall bring forward examples I have myself investigated and where the course of karma has become clear to me. It is of course a hazardous undertaking to speak of individual karmic connections, no matter how remote the examples may be, for in referring to karma it has become customary to use expressions of everyday language such as: “This is caused by so-and-so; this or that blow of destiny must be due to such and such a cause, how the man came to deserve it” ... and so forth. But karma is by no means as simple as that, and a great deal of utterly trivial talk goes on, particularly on this subject!

Today we will consider certain examples of the working of karma, remote though they may be from our immediate life. We will embark upon the hazardous undertaking of speaking about the karma of individuals—as far as my investigations make this possible. I am therefore giving you examples which are to be taken as such.

I want to speak, first, of a well-known aestheticist and philosopher, Friedrich Theodor Vischer. I have often alluded to him in lectures, but today I will bring into relief certain characteristic features of his life and personality which can provide the basis for a study of his karma.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer received his education at the time when German idealistic philosophy—particularly Hegelian thought—was in its heyday. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, a young man pursuing his studies among people whose minds were steeped in the Hegelian mode of thinking, adopted it himself. The absorption in transcendental thoughts that is characteristic of Hegel strongly appealed to Vischer. It was clear to him that, as Hegel asserts, thought is the Divine Essence of the universe, and that when we, as human beings, think, when we live in thoughts, we are living in the Divine Substance.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer was steeped in Hegelian philosophy. But he was a person who displayed in a very marked way the traits and characteristics of the folk from which he sprang. He had all the traits of a typical Swabian: he was obstinate, dogmatic, disputatious, exceedingly independent; his manner was abrupt, off-hand. He also had very striking personal peculiarities. To take his outward appearance first, he had beautiful blue eyes and a reddish-brown beard, which in spite of its scrubbiness he wore with a certain aesthetic enthusiasm! I say “aesthetic enthusiasm” because in his writings he minces no words about men who wear no beards, calling them “beardless monkey-faces”! As you see, his language is anything but restrained; all his remarks come out with the abrupt, off-handed assurance of a typical Swabian.

He was a man of medium height, not stout, in fact rather slight in build, but he walked the streets holding his arms as if he were forcing a way for himself with his elbows—which is an exact picture of what he did in a spiritual sense! So much for his outward appearance.

He had a passionately independent nature and would say just what he pleased, without any restraint whatever. It happened one day that he had been slandered by “friends” in the Stuttgart Council—such things are not unusual among friends!—and he was severely reprimanded by the Council. It chanced that on the very same day a little son was born to him—the Robert Vischer who also made a name for himself as an aestheticist—and the father announced the event in the lecture-hall with the words: “Gentlemen, today I have been given a big Wischer (wigging) and a little Vischer!”

It was characteristic of him to speak very radically about things as he found them. For example, he wrote an amusing article entitled: “On the Foot Pest in Trains.” It enraged him to see people sitting in a railway carriage with their feet up on the opposite seat. He simply could not endure it and his article on the subject is really enchanting.

What he wrote in his book on fashions, [Mode und Zynismus. Stuttgart, 1878.] about the ill-breeding and lack of adequate clothing at dances and other entertainments, had better not be mentioned here. To put it briefly, he was a very original and forceful personality!

A friend of mine once paid him a visit, knocking politely at the door. I do not know whether it is a custom in Swabia, but Vischer did not say “Come in,” or what is usually said on such occasions. He yelled out “Glei”—meaning that he would be ready immediately.

While still comparatively young, Vischer embarked on a weighty task, namely that of writing a work on aesthetics according to the principles of Hegelian philosophy. These five volumes are a truly remarkable achievement. You will find in them the strict division into paragraphs which was habitual with Hegel, and the characteristic definitions. If I were to read a passage to you, you would all yawn, for it is written in the anything but popular style of Hegel, all in abrupt definitions, such as: The Beautiful is the appearance of the Idea in material form. The Sublime is the appearance of the Idea in material form, but the Idea predominates over the material form. The Comic is the appearance of the Idea in material form, but the material form predominates over the Idea ... and so on and so forth. These statements are certainly not without interest, but the book goes a great deal further. As well as the abrupt definitions, you have what is called the “small print,” and most people when they are reading the book leave out the large print and read only the small—which as a matter of fact contains some of the very cleverest writing on aesthetics that is anywhere to be found.

There is no pedantry, no Hegelian dialectic here; it is Vischer, the true Swabian, with all his meticulousness and at the same time his fine and delicate feeling for the beautiful, the great and the sublime. Here, too, you find Nature and her processes described in a way that defies comparison, with an exemplary freedom of style. Vischer worked at the book for many years, bringing it to its end with unfaltering consistency.

At the time when this work appeared,. Hegelianism was still in vogue and appreciation was widespread. Needless to say, there were opponents, too, but on the whole the book was widely admired. In course of time, however, a vigorous opponent appeared on the scenes, a ruthless critic who pulled the book to pieces until not a shred of good was left; everything was criticised in a really masterly style. And this critic was none other than Friedrich Theodor Vischer himself in his later years! There is an extraordinary charm about this critique of himself in his Kritische Gangen (Paths of Criticism).

As aestheticist, philosopher and man of letters, Vischer published a wealth of material in Kritische Gangen, and subsequently in the fine collection of essays entitled Altes und Neues (Old and New). While still a student he wrote lyrics in an ironic vein. In spite of the great admiration I have always had for Vischer, I could never help being of opinion that the productions of his student days were not even student-like, but sheer philistinism. And this trait came out in him again in his seventies, when he wrote a collection of poems under the pseudonym “Schartenmayer.” Here there is philistinism par excellence!

He was an out-and-out philistine in regard to Goethe's Faust. Part One ... well, he admitted there was something good in it, but as for Part Two—he considered it a product of senility, so many fragments patched together. He maintained that it ought to have been quite different, and not only did he write his Faust, der Tragodie dritter Teil, in which he satirises Goethe's Part Two, but he actually drew up a plan of just how Goethe ought to have written Faust. That is philistinism and no mistake! It is almost on a par with what du Bois-Reymond, the eminent scientist, said in his lecture “Goethe, nothing but Goethe.” He said: “Faust is a failure. It would have been all right if Faust had not engaged in such tomfoolery as the invocation of spirits or the calling up of the Earth-Spirit, but had simply and straightforwardly invented an electrical machine or an air pump and restored to Gretchen her good name ... ” And there is exactly the same kind of philistinism in what Vischer says about Faust.

Perhaps it would not be put like this in Wurttemburg, but in my homeland in Austria we should say that he gave Goethe's Faust a good “Swabian thrashing”! Such expressions differ slightly in meaning, of course, according to the districts where they are used.

It is these traits that are significant in Vischer. They really make up his personality. One might also, of course, give details of his life, but I do not propose to do that. My aim has been to give you a picture of his personality and with this as a foundation we can proceed to a study of his karma. Today I wanted simply to give you the material for this study.

A second personality of whose karma I want to speak, is Franz Schubert, the composer. As I said, it is a daring venture to give particular examples in this way, but it is right that they should be given and today I shall lay the foundations.

Here too, I shall select the features that will be needed when we come to speak of Schubert's karma. Practically all his life he was poor. Some time after his death, however, many persons claiming to have been not only his acquaintances but his “friends” were to be found in Vienna! A whole crowd of people, according to themselves, had wanted to lend him money, spoke of him affectionately as “little Franz” and the like. But during his lifetime it had been a very different story!

Schubert had, however, found one real friend. This friend, Baron von Spaun, was an extraordinarily nobleminded man. He had cared for Schubert with great tenderness from the latter's earliest youth, when they were schoolfellows, and he continued to do so in later years. In regard to karma it seems to me particularly significant—as we shall find when we come to consider the working of karma—that Spaun was in a profession quite alien to his character. He was a highly cultured man, a lover of art in every form, and a close friend not only of Schubert but also of Moritz von Schwind. He was deeply sensitive to everything in the way of art. Many strange things happen in Austria—as you know, Grillparzer was a clerk in the fiscal service—and Spaun too, who had not the slightest taste for it, spent his whole life in Treasury offices. He was an official engaged in administering finance, dealing with figures all the time. When he reached a certain age he was appointed Director of Lotteries! He had charge of lotteries in Austria—a task that was most distasteful to him. But now just think what it is that a Director of Lotteries has to control. He has, so to speak, to deal at a high level with the passions, the hopes, the blighted expectations, the disappointments, the dreams and superstitions of countless human beings. Just think of what has to be taken into account by a Director of Lotteries—a Chief Director at that. True, you may go into his office and come out again without noticing anything very striking. But the reality is there nevertheless, and those who take the world and its affairs in earnest must certainly reckon with such things.

This man, who had no part whatever in the superstitions, the disappointments, the longings, the hopes, with which he had to deal—this man was the intimate friend of Schubert, deeply and intensely concerned for his material as well as his spiritual well-being. One can often be astounded, outwardly speaking, at what is possible in the world! There is a biography of Schubert in which it is said that he looked rather like a negro. There is not a grain of truth in it. He actually had a pleasing, attractive face. What is true, however, is that he was poor. More often than not, even his supper, which he was in the habit of taking in Spaun's company, was paid for with infinite tact by the latter. Schubert had not enough money even to hire a piano for his own use. In outward demeanour—Spaun gives a very faithful picture here—Schubert was grave and reserved, almost phlegmatic. But an inner, volcanic fire could at times burst from him in a most surprising way.

A very interesting fact is that the most beautiful motifs in Schubert's music were generally written down in the early morning; as soon as he had wakened from sleep he would sit down and commit his most beautiful motifs to paper. At such times Spaun was often with him, for as is customary among the intellectuals of Vienna, both Schubert and Spaun liked a good drink of an evening, and the hour was apt to get so late that Schubert, who lived some distance away, could not be allowed to go home but would spend the night on some makeshift bed at his friend's house. On such occasions Spaun was often an actual witness of how Schubert, on rising in the morning, would write down his beautiful motifs, as though they came straight out of sleep.

The rather calm and peaceful exterior did not betray the presence of the volcanic fire lying hidden in the depths of the soul. But it was there, and it is precisely this aspect of Schubert's personality that I must describe to you as a basis for the study of his karma.

Let me tell you what happened on one occasion. Schubert had been to the Opera. He heard Gluck's Iphigenia and was enraptured by it. He expressed his enthusiasm to his friend Spaun during and after the performance in impassioned words, but at the same time with restraint. His emotions were delicate and tender, not violent. (I am selecting the particular traits we shall need for our study.) The moment Schubert heard Gluck's Iphigenia, he recognised it as a masterpiece of musical art. He was enchanted with the singer Milder; and Vogl's singing so enraptured him that he said his one wish was to be introduced to him in order that he might pay homage at his feet. When the performance was over, Schubert and Spaun went to the so-called Bargerstubi (Civic Club Room) in Vienna. I think they were accompanied by a third person whose name I have not in mind at the moment. They sat there quietly, although every now and again they spoke enthusiastically about their experience at the Opera. Sitting with others at a neighbouring table was a University professor well known in this circle. As he listened to the expressions of enthusiasm his face began to flush and became redder and redder. Then he began to mutter to himself, and when the muttering had gone on for a time without being commented on by the others, he fell into a rage and shouted across the table: “Iphigenia!—it isn't real music at all; it's trash. As for Milder, she hasn't an idea of how to sing, let alone bring off runs or trills! And Vogl—why he lumbers about the stage like an elephant!”

And now Schubert was simply not to be restrained! At any minute there was danger of a serious hand-to-hand scuffle. Schubert, who at other times was calm and composed, let loose his volcanic nature in full force and it was as much as the others could do to quiet him.

It is important for the life we are studying that here we have a man whose closest friend is a Treasury official, actually a Director of Lotteries, and that the two are led together by karma. Schubert's poverty is important in connection with his karma, because in these circumstances there was little opportunity for his anger to be roused in this way. Poverty restricted his social intercourse, and it was by no means often that he could have such a neighbour at table, or give vent to his volcanic nature.

If we can picture what was really happening on that occasion, and if we remember the characteristics of the people from whom Schubert sprang, we can ask ourselves the following question. (Negative supposition is of course meaningless in the long run, but it does sometimes help to make things clear.) We can ask ourselves: If the conditions had been different (of course they couldn't have been, only, as I say, the question can make for clarification)—if the conditions had been different, if Schubert had had no opportunity of giving expression to the musical talent within him, if he had not found a devoted friend in Spaun, might he not have become a mere brawler in some lower station in life? What expressed itself like a volcano that evening in the club room, was it not a fundamental trait in Schubert's character? Human life defies explanation until we can answer the question: How does the metamorphosis come about whereby in a certain life a man does not, so to say, live out his pugnacity but becomes an exquisite musician, the pugnacity being transformed into subtle and delicate musical phantasy?

It sounds paradoxical and grotesque, but for all that it is a question which, if we consider life in its wider range, must needs be asked, for it is only when we study such things that the deeper problems of karma really come into view.

The third personality of whom I want to speak is Eugen Dühring, a man much hated, but also—by a small circle—greatly loved. My investigations into karma have led me to occupy myself with this individual, too, and as before I will give you, first of all, the biographical material.

Eugen Dühring was a man of extraordinary gifts. In his youth he studied a whole number of subjects, particularly from the aspect of mathematics, including branches of knowledge such as political economy, philosophy, mechanics, physics and so on.

He gained his doctorate with an interesting treatise, and then in a book, long since out of print, followed up the same theme with great clarity and forcefulness. I will tell you a little about it. The subject is almost as difficult as the Theory of Relativity, but, after all, people have been talking about the Theory of Relativity for a long time now and, without understanding a single word, have considered, and still do consider it, quite wonderful. Difficult as the subject is, I want to tell you, in a way that will perhaps be comprehensible, something about the thoughts contained in this earliest work of Dühring.

The theme is as follows.—People generally picture to themselves: Out there is space, and it is infinite. Space is filled with matter. Matter is composed of minute particles, infinite in number. An infinite number of tiny particles have conglomerated into a ball in universal space, have in some way crystallised together, and the like. Then there is time, infinite time. The world has never had a beginning; neither can one say that it will have an end.

These vague, indefinite concepts of infinity were repellent to the young Dühring and he spoke with great perspicacity when he said that all this talk about infinity is devoid of real meaning, that even if one has to speak of myriads and myriads of world-atoms, or world-molecules, there must nevertheless be a definite, calculable number. However vast universal space is conceived to be, its magnitude must be capable of computation; so too, the stretch of universal time. Dühring expounded this theme with great clarity.

There is something psychological behind this. Dühring's one aim was clarity of thought, and there is no clear thinking at all in these notions of infinity. He went on to apply his argument in other domains, for example to the so-called “negative quantities.” Positive quantities (e.g. when something is possessed) are distinguished from negative quantities by writing a minus sign before the latter. Thus here you have 0 (zero), in one direction plus 1, and in the other direction minus 1, and so on.

Dühring maintains that all this talk about minus quantities is absolute nonsense. What does a “negative quantity,” a “minus number” mean? He says: If I have 5 and take away 1, then I have 4; if I have 5 and take away 2, then I have 3; if I have 5 and take away 4, then I have 1; and if I have 5 and take away 5, then I have 0. The advocates of negative quantities say: If I have 5 and take away 6, then I have minus 1; if I have 5 and take away 7, then I have minus 2.

Dühring maintains that there is no clarity of thinking here. What does “minus 1” mean? It means: I am supposed to take 6 from 5; but then I have I too little. What does “minus 2” mean? I am supposed to take 7 from 5; but then I have 2 too little. What does “minus 3” mean? I am supposed to take 8 from 5; but then I have 3 too little. There is no difference between the negative numbers, as numbers, and the positive numbers. The negative numbers mean only that when I have to subtract, I have too little by a particular amount. And Dühring went on to apply the same principle to mathematical concepts of many kinds.

I know how deeply I was impressed by this as a young man, for Dühring brought real clarity of thought to bear upon these things.

He displayed the same astute discernment in the fields of national economy and the history of philosophy, and became a lecturer at the University of Berlin. His audiences were very large and he lectured on a variety of subjects: national economy, philosophy, mathematics.

It so happened that a prize was offered by the Academy of Science at Göttingen for the best book on the history of mechanics. It is usual in such competitions for the essays to be sent in anonymously. The competitor chooses a motto, his name is contained inside a closed envelope with the motto written outside, so that the adjudicators are unaware of the author's identity.

The Göttingen Academy of Science awarded the prize to Eugen Dühring's History of Mechanics and wrote him a most appreciative letter. Therefore Dühring was not only recognised by his own circle of listeners as an excellent lecturer, but now gained the recognition of a most eminently learned body.

Along with all the talents which will be evident to you from what I have been saying, this same Dühring had a really malicious tongue—one cannot call it anything else. There was something of the malicious critic about him in regard to everything in the world. As time went on he exercised less and less restraint in this respect; and when such an eminently learned body as the Göttingen Academy of Science awarded him the prize, it acted like a sting upon him. It was quite in the natural course of things, but nevertheless it stung. And then we see two qualities beginning to be combined in him: an intensely strong sense of justice—which he undoubtedly possessed—and on the other hand an extraordinary propensity for abuse.

Just at the time when he was stung into abuse and sarcasm, Dühring had the misfortune to lose his sight. In spite of total blindness, however, he continued to lecture in Berlin. He went on with his work as an author, and was always able, up to a point, of course, to look after his affairs himself. About this time a truly tragic destiny in the academic world during the 19th century came to his knowledge—the destiny of Julius Robert Mayer, who was actually the discoverer of the heat-equivalent in mechanics and who, as can be stated with all certainty, had been shut up in an asylum through no fault of his own, put into a strait-jacket and treated shamefully by his family, his colleagues and his “friends.” It was at this time that Dühring wrote his book, Julius Robert Mayer, the Galileo of the 19th Century. And it was in truth a kind of Galileo-destiny that befell Julius Robert Mayer.

Dühring wrote with an extraordinarily good knowledge of the facts and with a really penetrating sense of justice, but he lashed out as with a rail in regard to the injuries that had been inflicted. His tongue simply ran away with him—as, for example, when he heard and, read about the erection of the well-known statue of Mayer at Heilbronn, and of the unveiling ceremony. “This puppet standing in the market square at Heilbronn is a final insult offered to the Galileo of the 19th century. The great man sits there with his legs crossed. But to portray him truly, in the frame of mind in which he would most probably be, he would have to be looking at the orator and at all the good friends below who erected this memorial, not sitting with his legs crossed but beating his breast in horror.”

Having suffered much at the hands of newspapers, Dühring also became a violent anti-Semite. Here too he was ruthlessly consistent. For example, he wrote the pamphlet entitled Die Ueberschätzung Lessings und dessen Anwaltschaft für die Juden, in which murderous abuse is hurled at Lessing. It is this trait in Dühring that is responsible for his particular way of expounding literature.

If you want one day to give yourselves the treat of reading something about German literature that you will find nowhere else, that is totally different from other treatises on the subject, then take Dühring's two volumes entitled Literaturgrössen (Great Men of Letters). There you will find his strictly mathematical way of thinking and his astute perspicacity, applied to literature. In order, presumably, to make it plain how his way of thinking differs from that of others, he sees fit to rechristen the great figures of the German spiritual life. He speaks, in one chapter, of “Kothe” and “Schillerer,” meaning Goethe and Schiller. Duhring writes “Kothe” and “Schillerer” and adheres to this throughout. The nomenclature he invents is often grotesque. “Intellectuaille” (connected with “canaille”) is how he always refers to people we call intellectualistic. The “Intellectuaille”—the Intellectuals. He uses similar expressions all the time. But let me assure you of this: a great deal in Dühring's writings is extraordinarily interesting.

I once had the following experience. When I was still on friendly terms with Frau Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche and was working on unpublished writings of Nietzsche, there came into my hands the material dealing with the “Eternal Recurrence”, now long since printed. [Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part III.] Nietzsche's manuscripts are not very easy reading, but I came across a passage where I said to myself: This “Eternal Recurrence” has some definite source. And so I went over from the Archives, where Nietzsche's note-books were kept, to the Library, and looked up Dühring's Wirklichkeitsphilosophie (Philosophy of Reality), where, as I thought, I was quickly able to find this idea of “Eternal Recurrence”. I took the book from the shelves of the Library and found the passage—I knew it and found it at once—where Dühring argues that it is impossible for anyone with genuine knowledge of the material facts of the world to speak of a return of things, a return of constellations which once were there.

Dühring tried to disprove any such possibility. At the side of the passage in question was a word frequently written by Nietzsche in the margin of a book when he was using it to formulate a counter-idea. It was the word: “Ass”!

The familiar epithet was written in the margin of this particular page. In point of fact we can find in Dühring's writings a great deal that passed over, ingeniously, into Nietzsche's ideas. In saying this I hold nothing against Nietzsche. I am simply stating the facts as they are.

In respect of karma, the most striking thing about Dühring is that he was really able to think only mathematically. In philosophy, in political economy, in mathematics itself, he thinks mathematically, with mathematical precision and clarity. In natural science, too, he thinks with clarity but, again, in terms of mathematics. He is not a materialist, he is a mechanistic thinker. He conceives the world as mechanism. And moreover he had the courage to carry sincere convictions to their ultimate conclusions. For truth to tell, anyone who thinks as he did cannot write about Goethe and Schiller in any other way—leaving aside the abuse and taking only the essential substance of what is said.

So much for the fundamental trend of Dühring's thought. Add to this the blindness while he was still young, and the fact that he suffered no little personal injustice. He lost his post as lecturer at the University of Berlin. Well ... there were reasons! For example, in the second edition of his History of Mechanics he cast all restraint aside. The first edition had been quite tame in its treatment of the great figures in the field of mechanics, so tame that someone said he had written in a way which he thought would make it possible for a learned body to award him a prize. But in the second edition he no longer held himself in check; he let himself go and fairly filled in the gaps! Someone remarked—and Dühring often repeated it—that the Göttingen Academy had awarded a prize to the claws without recognising the lion behind the claws! But when the second edition appeared the lion had certainly come into the open!

In this second edition there were in truth some astounding passages, for example in connection with Julius Robert Mayer and his Galileo-destiny in the 19th century. On one occasion when Dühring was in a towering rage about this, he called a man he considered to be a plagiarist of Mayer—namely Hermann Helmholtz—so much “academic scaffolding,” “wooden scaffolding.” Later on he enlarged upon this theme. He edited a periodical Der Personalist, where everything had a strongly personal colouring. Here, for example, Dühring enlarges upon the reference to Helmholtz. He no longer speaks about wooden scaffolding, but when the postmortem examination had revealed the presence of water in Helmholtz's brain, Dühring said that the empty-headedness had been quite obvious while the man was still alive and that there was no need to wait for confirmation until after his death! Refinement was certainly not one of Dühring's qualities. One cannot exactly say that he raged like a washerwoman. His way of abusing was not commonplace; neither was there real genius in it. It was something quite unique.

And now take all these factors together: the blindness, the mechanistic bent of mind, the persecution he certainly suffered—for the dismissal from the University was not altogether free from injustice, and indeed countless injustices were done to him during his life ... All these things are connections of destiny which become really interesting only when we study them in the light of karma.

I have now given you a picture of these three personalities: Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the composer Schubert, and Eugen Dühring. Having outlined the biographical material today, I will speak tomorrow of the karmic connections.

I began my lecture yesterday with a brief outline of a man's experiences in sleep, and of how in a certain sense they presage his experiences after death. These sleep-experiences lie beyond the so-called threshold which, in course of our days here, has often been mentioned. The experiences I am now going to describe are gone through by all human beings when asleep, though they do not rise up into ordinary consciousness in life on Earth, but are accessible only to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Because they do not enter consciousness, we should not believe they do not exist; they do exist, and we go through them. If I am allowed a simile—it is as though a man were led through a room blindfold. He does not see anything, but he has to exert himself to walk, and he can have some experience of many things in the room, although he cannot see them. What I am going to describe concerning the time between going to sleep and waking is plunged, as it were, in darkness, since the consciousness is blind to it, but it is positively lived through by human beings, and the effects of all we experience in sleep enter our waking life. Thus we understand rightly what anyone goes through, from the time of waking until going to sleep, only when we look upon it as combining the after-effect of his last sleep with whatever he does through his physical and etheric bodies during the day.

Now when a man goes to sleep, at first an indefinite feeling of anxiety comes over him. In ordinary life on Earth this anxiety does not rise into consciousness, does not actually manifest; but it is there as a process in the man's astral body and Ego, and he carries over its results into his waking state during the next day. If this anxiety were not carried over, were not to work in waking life as a force in physical body and etheric body, the man would be unable to hold together his physical constitution so that, for example, it may secrete salts and similar substances in the right way. This secretion, necessary for the organism, is throughout an effect of subconscious anxiety during the life of sleep. First of all in sleep, therefore, we enter what I might call a sphere of anxiety.

Then a condition arises in the soul like a continuous swinging to and fro, from a state of inner tranquillity to one of uneasiness—such a movement to and fro that, if the man were conscious of it, he might believe he was alternately beginning to faint and then recovering. Thus the anxiety sets going a constant alternation between self-control and the losing of it.

Thirdly comes a feeling of standing on the brink of an abyss with the ground giving way under one’s feet and that at any moment one might fall into the depths.

You see that at this moment when a man is falling asleep, conditions in the Cosmos are already beginning to rise from the physical to the moral. For the second state we enter on going to sleep can be properly judged only when we recognise that moral laws in the Cosmos have the validity of natural laws on Earth—only, that is, when we feel their reality with the same certainty we have in speaking of a stone falling to the ground, or of an engine driven by its steam. Nevertheless, in earthly life, because a man's strength is still limited, he is for the present protected by the kindly guidance of the world from experiencing consciously all that he goes through unconsciously every night.

The ordering of the Cosmos is such that even the things which shine out in the greatest beauty, the most lofty splendour, must have their roots in sorrow, suffering and renunciation. In the background of every beautiful appearance are pain and self-denial. In the universe this is just as inevitable as that the angles of a triangle should add up to 18o degrees. It is mere foolishness to ask why the Gods have not so organised the Cosmos that it would give men pleasure only. They bring about necessities. This was indeed divined in the Egyptian Mysteries, for example. They called the conscious perception of what occurs in sleep—the anxiety, the swinging to and fro between keeping hold of oneself and become powerless, and the standing on the brink of an abyss—the world of the three iron necessities.

These experiences during sleep produce in the man, again unconsciously, a profound yearning towards the divine which he then feels to be filling, penetrating, permeating, the whole Cosmos. For him, then, the Cosmos resolves itself into a kind of hovering, weaving, ever-moving cloud-formation, in which one is living, able at every moment to feel oneself alive, but at the same time realising that at any moment one could be submerged in all this weaving and living. A man feels himself interwoven with the weaving, surging movement of the divine throughout the world. And in the pantheistic feeling for God which comes to every healthy human being during waking life, there is the aftermath, the consequence, of the pantheistic feeling for God which is experienced unconsciously during sleep. A man then feels his soul to be filled with an inner unconscious conviction, born, one might say, out of anxiety and powerlessness; and filled also with something like an inner force of gravity in place of the ordinary gravity of the physical world.

The Rosicrucian mystery-teachings gave expression to what comes over a man when he sinks into the realm of the three iron necessities. The experience that would come to the pupils immediately after going to sleep was explained. They were told: Your daytime experiences sink into moving, floating cloud-formations, but these reveal themselves as having the nature of beings. You yourself are interwoven with these clouds, and you hover in anxiety and powerlessness on the edge of an abyss. But you have already discovered what then should be brought to your consciousness in three words—words which should pervade your whole soul: Ex Deo nascimur. This Ex Deo nascimur, so vague for ordinary consciousness, but raised into consciousness for students of the new Mysteries, is what a man first experiences on entering the state of sleep.

Later in these lectures we shall see how this Ex Deo nascimur plays an historic part also in the world-evolution of mankind. What I am now describing is the part it plays during earthly existence in the life of each single man, personally, individually.

If the man continues to sleep, the next stage is that the ordinary view of the Cosmos, as seen from the Earth, ceases. Whereas at night the Earth the glittering, shining stars are there for him, together with the Moon, and by day the Sun playing upon his senses, at a certain moment during sleep he sees how this whole starry world vanishes. The stars cease as physical entities, but in the places where they appeared physically to the senses there come forth from their rays—which have vanished—the genii, the spirits, the gods, of the stars. For conscious Inspiration the Cosmos changes into a speaking universe, declaring itself through the music of the spheres and the cosmic word. The Cosmos is then made up of living spiritual beings, in place of the Cosmos visible to the senses from the Earth.

This is experienced in such a way that, if a man became conscious of it, he would feel as if the whole spiritual Cosmos, from every side, was pronouncing judgment on what he has made of himself as a human being through all his deeds, both good and evil. He would feel that in his human worth he was bound up with the Cosmos.

What comes to him first of all, however—and if he could experience it consciously, as Inspiration does, he would notice this—is bewildering, and he has need of a guide. In the present period of human evolution this guide appears if, during life on Earth, a man has woven in his soul and heart a thread uniting him with the Mystery of Golgotha; if, that is, he has created a bond with the Christ, who, as Jesus, went through the Mystery of Golgotha. The feeling that immediately lays hold of a man at the present time—we will speak tomorrow of other epochs—is that, in the sphere he now enters, his bewildered soul would surely disintegrate if the Being who has come to be the very life of his conceptions and feelings, and of the impulses of his heart—if the Christ were not to be his Guide.

The approach of the Christ as Guide—who in this sphere must be conceived of as connected with the life of the Sun, just as the man is connected with earthly life—is felt again in the same way that it was when a medieval Mystery School brought it before the souls of the pupils with the words: In Christo morimur. For the feeling is that the soul must perish should it not die in Christ, thereby dying into cosmic life.

In this way a man lives through the experiences of sleep. After perceiving the stars of the Cosmos in their essential being, and because he cannot attain to conscious wakefulness in this sphere, a longing comes over him to return to the sphere where he is conscious. That is why we wake; it is the force by which we are awakened. We develop an unconscious feeling that, because of what we have absorbed from the real being of the stars, from the star Gods, we shall not be spiritually empty when we wake; for we bring down with us, into the daily life of the body, the spirit dwelling in our soul.

The pupils in the medieval Mystery Centres were made aware of this feeling, the third in the series of nightly, personal experiences of human beings on Earth, by a third saying: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus. This threefold experience of the spiritual world lying beyond the Guardian of the Threshold—who is ignored only by men of the present epoch—is thus perceptible in three stages, and at the same time they imprint on the human soul what can truly be called the Trinity—the Trinity which permeates spiritual life, weaving and living throughout it.

What I have been describing here is experienced by a man every night in a picture, and into this picture are woven his daytime experiences, going backwards in time. Just as we find our earthly experiences interwoven with those of natural processes during waking life, so during the night we experience this backward repetition interwoven with memories of the starry world. But all this is at first a picture.

This can be realised only when a man has gone through the gate of death. Here on Earth it is a picture experienced backwards. It becomes real only when, after three or four days, we have completed the panoramic survey of our memories described yesterday, and we enter the spiritual world no longer in terms of pictures, as we do every night, but in reality.

If anyone wishes to bring before his soul with a right understanding the experiences that are gone through consciously after the gate of death is passed, the following must be borne in mind. The Gods, the spiritual Beings we meet from the metamorphosed stars, take a different cosmic direction in their lives from that followed by human beings in earthly existence. Here we touch on a very important truth about the spiritual worlds, though it is not generally recognised when the spiritual worlds are spoken of theoretically and with little perception. When we are conscious as earthly men in earthly existence, we have a physical body and an etheric body so organised that a later experience always follows an earlier one and we find ourselves carried along in a particular stream of time. It is characteristic of our physical and etheric bodies to take this direction in the Cosmos. In so far as we are human beings, we experience everything in this sequence.

Those beings whom we met on rising to life between death and rebirth—when we discover the reality behind the pictures of our sleep-experience—move and come towards us always from the opposite direction. So that, in accordance with what in earthly life is called time, we must say: The Gods have spiritual bodies—one could equally well say, bodies of light—with which they move from the most distant future towards the past.

During the time between death and rebirth our bodies are of this same nature; we acquire them just as here on Earth we acquire the physical substance of our physical body. Divine bodies clothe us, and with them we draw round us what in my book Theosophy I have called Spirit-Man and Life-Spirit. By so doing we find our direction reversed, and so we live through our life backwards until we reach our birth and conception. In life on Earth we start from birth or conception, and—if we think of a circle—during existence on Earth we complete the top half. When that existence is over, we return through the lower half of the circle to our birth and conception. Just as on leaving our home we might walk in a certain direction and return, completing a circle in space, so—since in the world we enter after death there is no space—we have now to complete a circle in time. In time, it is a going out and coming back. Between birth and death we go out and then, having had this experience, we go backwards through the experiences of our nights as spiritual realities, until we return to the point of time at which we started.

In this materialistically thinking age little is said about such circles of life, and we have to go back in human evolution on Earth if we are to find words to express what really happens. If we turn to the old Oriental wisdom, with its less conscious insight into things than we have to-day, and its dreamlike clairvoyance, we find there a wonderful expression, evidently derived from an insight we can recover if we cross the threshold with real understanding, and pass the Guardian consciously when entering the spiritual world.

When the spiritual world is described in theories built up at any rate half-intellectually, it is not far removed from a materialistic picture of the Cosmos. It shows a human being as beginning his life at birth, then becoming a child and later a youth or young girl, growing older and approaching death—and then on and on in a straight line which naturally is never brought to an end. Anyone with knowledge of Initiation knows how nonsensical it is to talk of an end. This road has no ending: it turns back on itself. And the wonderful expression used by the old Oriental Initiates to describe this fact is “the wheel of births”.

There is much talk of this “wheel of births”, but little of it nowadays points to the truth. In fact we have accomplished the first revolution of this wheel at the end of our journey around the stars, which takes about one-third of our whole earthly life—the time, that is, we spend in sleep on Earth. We have then completed the first revolution, and in the life between death and rebirth we can await further revolutions of the wheel.

That is how it is when, with knowledge awakened through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, we make our way into the worlds lying behind the veil of the sense-world. These are worlds that once, in a remote period of evolution, were open to man as a heritage from a past age, when he associated with divine-spiritual Beings in the way described. It is only when some insight into the spiritual worlds takes us back to ancient times, when people knew about these worlds, that it becomes possible to understand all that has come down to us from the old wisdom. And then we are filled with wonder at this primeval wisdom of mankind. So that anyone who has received Initiation at the present time can do no other than look up to those ancient days of man's earthly existence with admiration, with reverence.

Something else can be seen from this—that only through the Spiritual Science of to-day can we arrive again at the true form in which things were perceived of old. People who want to shut out modern Spiritual Science have no means of understanding the language spoken by those who possessed the primeval wisdom of mankind; hence they are fundamentally unable to picture things historically. Those who know nothing of the spiritual world are often quite naive in the way they expound and interpret the old records of primeval peoples. So, in documents which perhaps contain primeval wisdom now obscured, we find ringing out such wonderful words as “the wheel of births”. These words must be understood by rediscovering the reality to which they allude. People who want to give a picture of the true history of mankind on Earth must therefore not shrink from first learning to know the meaning of the language used in those far-off days.

I might very well have begun by picturing the historical evolution of mankind in the terms used in the ancient records; but then you would not have heard words used merely as words, as they so often are in the world to-day. Hence, if one is to give a true picture of that part of the world of reality lived through by a man during his historical period, one has to start by describing his relation to the spiritual worlds. For only in this way are we enabled to find our way about in the language used, and in all that was done in those ancient times to maintain a connection with the spiritual worlds.

Yesterday I described how the Druid priests set up stones and screened them in such a way that, by gazing into the shadow thrown within this structure and looking through the stones, they could gain information concerning the will of the spiritual worlds which impressed itself into the physical. But something else also was connected with this. In the spiritual world there is not only a going away, but also always a coming back. Just as there are forces of time which carry us forward through physical existence on Earth, and after death draw us backwards again, so, in the structures set up by the Druids, there are forces descending from above and also forces ascending from below. Hence in these structures the Druid priests watched both a downward and an upward stream. When their structures were set up on appropriate sites, the priests could perceive not only the will of divine Spirits coming down from the Cosmos but—because in the upward stream the one-dimensional prevailed—they could perceive the good or bad elements which belonged to members of their community and flowed out from them into the Cosmos. Thus these stones served as an observatory for the Druid priests, enabling them to see how the souls of their people stood in relation to the Cosmos.¹

All these secrets, all these mysteries, are connected with things that have remained from ancient times, and exist now in so decadent a form. They can be understood only when through the power of individual Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, the world of the Spirit is raised once more out of its hidden existence and brought into consciousness.

These circular movements—which are of course meant metaphorically, since one is moving in the one-dimensional realm—are gone through repeatedly during a man's life between death and a new birth. And as with this revolution—going out from birth to death and returning from death to birth—so do others take their course in the whole of a man's life between death and rebirth, but in such a way that there is always a change of level between the experience of the going out and the experience of returning. In the first round of the wheel of birth, the distinction lies in our experiencing the out-going half up to death, and the return half—which lasts, when measured by earthly time, for a third of our life on Earth—immediately after physical death. Then the first round has been completed. Others follow, and we go on making such rounds until we come to a very definite place from which we can journey back in the way I shall be picturing tomorrow. We continue to complete these rounds of the wheel until we reach the point, in our life as a whole, which indicates the death we experienced in our last incarnation.

Thus in circles—though our first experience after death is a looking backwards, a living backwards—we live through what we underwent between our last death and last birth into Earth-existence. Each of these circular journeys corresponds in its outgoing to a cosmic life of sleep. If one were to describe further these circles, one would say that the outgoing always corresponds with a life after death, in that a man with his whole being goes out more into the cosmic world and is conscious of living within it—of becoming one with it.

When a man comes back into himself from the cosmic world, this return corresponds with his working on what he has experienced there, and now realises to be united with himself. As here on Earth we must have alternate sleeping and waking for a healthy life, between death and a new birth we have always to experience a flowing out into the Cosmos, when we feel ourselves to be as great and all-embracing as the Cosmos itself, and perceive the creations and deeds of the Cosmos as our own. We identify ourselves with the whole Universe so entirely that we say: That which you beheld with your physical eyes as an Earth-dweller; that which looked down on you in its physical reflection as the Cosmos of stars—in this you are now living. It is not, however, as physical stars but as divine-spiritual Beings that they are now uniting their existence with yours. You have, as it were, dissolved into the life of the Cosmos, and the divine-spiritual Beings of the Cosmos are living within you. You have identified yourself with them. That is one part of the experience we pass through between death and a new birth—whether you call it cosmic night or cosmic day. The terms used on Earth are naturally a matter of indifference to the Gods living in the spiritual world. In order to bring home to ourselves what we experience out there, we have to use earthly forms of speech, but they must be such as will correspond with the reality.

The times in which we grow together with the Cosmos, identify ourselves with the whole Cosmos, are followed by other times when we draw back, as it were, into a single point within ourselves—when everything we first experienced as being poured out into the whole Cosmos is now felt as a cosmic memory, inwardly united with ourselves. We feel the wheel of births as though perpetually turning, carrying us out into the Cosmos and back into ourselves, there to experience in miniature what we have lived through out there. Then we go out again, and return again, following a spiral path. The wheel of births can indeed be described as a spiral movement, perpetually turning in on itself. In this way, between death and a new birth, we progress through an alternation of self-experience and self-surrender. To say this, however, takes us only as far as if we were to describe events on Earth in the course of the twenty-four hours by saying: Human beings sleep and wake. We have merely gone that far with such a description of a man's experience between death and a new birth in the spiritual world. For the outgoing surrender and the drawing back again of the self in the spiritual world are similar to waking and sleeping in earthly life. And as in earthly life only those events a man has lived through find a place, so in the completion of these wheels of births and deaths the spiritual events involved are those a man has actually experienced between death and rebirth. In order to grasp these events we must form a sound conception of how matters really stand for a man in earthly life.

Strictly speaking, a man is awake only in his conceptual world and in a closely connected part of his world of feeling. When he intends to do anything, if only to pick up a pencil, his intention lives in a concept and shoots down into the will, which then makes a demand on the muscles, until the further concept of having grasped the pencil comes to him. All this activity, expressing his will and desire, remains shrouded in darkness for his earthly consciousness; it resembles his life of sleep. Only in our concepts and in part of our feeling-life are we normally awake. In the other part of our feeling, the part that approves or disapproves the actions of the will, and in the will itself, we are asleep.

Now we do not take our thoughts with us after death. We take them into that life after death as little as we take them with us at night. In the world between death and a new birth we have to form our own thoughts in keeping with that world. We do, however, take with us that which lies in our subconscious—our will and the part of our feeling connected with it. It is precisely with everything of which we are unconscious in earthly life, with all that lives in our impulses and desires, and in our will influenced by the senses, and with all that lives spiritually in our will—it is with all this that we go through the time between death and rebirth, making conscious our cosmic thoughts about our unconscious experiences on Earth.

If we wish to understand the times lived through immediately beyond the gate of death, we must be clear that the experiences which come to the soul from the physical body take on another aspect directly we no longer possess a physical body. It is not your physical body, with its chemical substances, that experiences hunger and thirst; these are experiences of the soul. But it is through the physical body that all such cravings are satisfied here on Earth. Hunger lives in the soul, and in earthly life hunger is satisfied through the body; through the body thirst is quenched, although thirst, too, lives in the soul. When you have passed the gate of death you no longer have a physical body, but you still have thirst and hunger. You carry them through the gate of death, and for a third of the length of your life on Earth, while you are going backwards through your nights, you have time to disaccustom yourself from thirst, hunger, and all other desires experienced only through the body. Herein consists the inner experience after death of this third of your life on Earth: everything that can be gratified only through the body—or at any rate only in earthly life—is purged from the soul, and the soul is freed from these desires. We shall see later what lies further on.

I have now given you a description of part of a man's experience after he passes through the gate of death—a description based on what we have gone into to-day. To-morrow we will look further into the life between death and rebirth, in its connection with the whole earthly evolution of mankind. We must, however, be clear about the scope of the events which enter into earthly life. A great deal that can now be investigated only through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition was at one time open to people through a kind of instinctive vision. The night was not such a closed book for them. Their waking life took a more dreamlike course, and in its dream-pictures revealed more of the spiritual world.

I should like now to draw attention to something you will see more clearly during the next few days. We are living in an age when human beings are exposed in the highest degree to the danger of losing all connection with the spiritual world. And perhaps, as we are so close here to centres reminiscent of the old European Druids, it will be appropriate to mention certain symptoms, which, though not harmful in themselves, show not only what is taking place on Earth but also what is happening spiritually behind the scenes of existence.

Now consider medieval man, including his shadow-side; consider the so-called Dark Ages; compare all this with mankind to-day. I will take only two symptoms which can show us how, from the spiritual standpoint, we should look upon the world. Turn to a medieval book. Every single letter is as though painted in. We seem actually to see how the eye rested on those characters. The writer's whole mood of soul, when it rested upon the written letters in those days, was attuned to enter deeply into whatever could come to him as revelations of the spiritual worlds.

And now consider a great deal of handwriting to-day—it is hardly legible! The letters cannot give one anything like the pleasure one has from a painting; they are thrown on the paper as though with a mechanical movement of the hand—or so it appears very often. Moreover the time is already beginning when there will no longer be any writing by hand—nothing but typewriting—and we shall no longer experience any connection with the words on the paper. This, and the motorcar, are the two symptoms which show what is going on behind the scenes of existence, and how human beings are driven away more and more from the spiritual world.

Do not think I want to come before you as a typical reactionary who would like to put a stop to cars and typewriters, or even to this terrible handwriting. Anyone who realises how the world is going knows very well that such things have to be; they are justified. Hence there is no question of abolishing them; I am saying only that in dealing with them we should be on our guard. These things have to come and must be accepted in the same way that we accept night and day, although enthusiasm for them may be found chiefly among people who are strongly inclined to materialism. All these developments, however, the illegible handwriting, the distressing noise of typewriters, and the quite horrible rushing of motorcars—all this has to be faced in order that men should rightly develop a vigorous approach to spiritual knowledge, spiritual feeling, and spiritual will. There is no question of fighting against the material, but of getting to know its reality and necessity; and also of seeing how essential it is that strength of spirit should be brought to bear against the crushing weight of physical existence. Then, through a swing of the pendulum between cars and typewriters and Imaginations and insight into the spiritual world—the fruits of spiritualscientific work—the healthy development of mankind can be furthered, which otherwise can only be prejudiced.

This has to be said particularly in Penmaenmawr, for here, on the one hand, we perceive how the Imaginations from the old days of the Druids remain, as I have already described; while on the other hand we discover how forcibly these Imaginations are destroyed by the rushing of motorcars through the atmosphere.

• 1. See the volume of four lectures given by Dr. Steiner in September, 1923, shortly after his return to the Continent from Penmaenmawr. The volume is entitled: Man in the Past, the Present and the Future. These three lectures are followed by a fourth, The Sun-Initiation of the Druid Priest and his Moon-science. (Rudolf Steiner Press, London.)

Yesterday I wanted to show how we must come to an education, steeped in artistic form. I drew attention to how in earlier times the teacher took his start from the artistic, which he did in higher education by treating as arts what today has become entirely abstract and scientific, namely, grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. This was done in such a way that the young human being started by recognizing in his teacher: This man can do something which I cannot do. And through this alone the right relationship was established between the younger and the older generations. For this relationship, my dear friends, can never develop along the path of intellectuality. As soon as one stands consciously on the ground of the intellect or without the ideas inwardly revealed in the intellectual or mind soul, there is no possibility of differentiating between human beings. For human nature is so constituted that when it is a matter of making something clear through the consciousness soul, everyone thinks that the moment he has concepts he is capable of discussing them with anyone. Thus it is, with the intellect. For the intellect neither man's maturity nor his experience comes into consideration; they only do so when it is a question of ability. But when their elders have ability the young quite as a matter of course pay tribute to maturity and experience.

Now, in order to understand these things thoroughly we must consider from a different point of view the course taken by mankind's evolution. Let me tell you what spiritual science has discovered about the course of history, with regard to the intercourse between men.

External documentary history can go back only a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha and what is to be found can never be estimated rightly because spiritual achievements, even in the time of ancient Greece, cannot be grasped by modern concepts. Even for the old Grecian times quite other concepts must be used. Nietzsche felt this. Hence the charm of his brief, unfinished essay on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, where he deals with philosophy in connection with the general development of Greek culture up to the time of Socrates. In Socrates he saw the first flicker of pure intellectuality; everything philosophical in the tragic age of Greek development proceeded from wide human foundations for which, when expressed in concepts, these were only the language through which to convey what was experienced. In the earliest times philosophy was quite different from what it later became. But I only want to mention this in passing.

I really want to point out that with spiritual Imagination, and especially with Inspiration, we can look back much further into human evolution and, above all, into men's souls. Then we find when we go very far back, some seven or eight thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, that the young had a natural veneration for great age. This was a matter of course. Why? Because what exists today only in earliest youth existed then for the whole evolution of man.

If we look at the human being with less superficiality than is often done today, we find that the whole evolution of the human soul changes at about the change of teeth, during the sixth, seventh or eighth year. Man's soul becomes different, and again it changes at the time of puberty. I have discussed this fully in my book The Education of the Child from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science. On occasion it is noticed that man's soul becomes different in the seventh year and again in the fourteenth or fifteenth. But what people no longer notice is that changes still take place at the beginning of the twenties, at the end of the twenties, in the middle of the thirties, and so on.

Whoever is able to observe the life of soul in a more intimate way knows such transitions in man, that human life runs its course in rhythms. Try to perceive this, let us say, in Goethe. Goethe records how he was cured of certain childlike religious ideas by the Lisbon earthquake, thus about the time when he was changing his teeth, and how puzzling everything was for him. He tells how as a small child he began to reflect: Is there a good God ruling the world, when one sees that countless people have been swept away through these terrible fiery forces in the earth?—Especially in these decisive moments of his life, Goethe was prone to let external events work upon his soul so as to be conscious of its changes. And he says concerning this period of his life that he became a strange kind of pantheist, how he could no longer believe in the ideas imparted by the older people in his home and by his parents. He tells how he took his father's music-stand on which he set out minerals, placing on top a little candle that he lit by holding a burning-glass to catch the first rays of the morning sun. In later life he explained that he had wanted to bring an offering to the great God of Nature by lighting a sacrificial fire, kindled from Nature herself.

Take the first period of Goethe's life, then the following one, and so on till you piece together this whole life out of parts of about the length of his childlike episode, and you will find that with Goethe something always happened during such times fundamentally to change his soul. It is extraordinarily interesting to see that the fact of Schiller's urging Goethe to continue Faust only found fruitful soil in Goethe because at the end of the eighteenth century, he happened to be at a transitional period of this kind. It is interesting too that Goethe re-wrote Faust at the beginning of a following life-period. Goethe began Faust in his youth in such a way that he makes Faust open the book of Nostradamus. There we have the great scene:

“What powers celestial, lo! ascend, descend
Each unto each the golden vessels giving!”

But turn the page and there we find:
“Thou, Spirit of the Earth, to me art nearer.”

Goethe rejects for Faust the great tableau of the macrocosm and allows only the earth-spirit to approach him. And when at the beginning of the nineteenth century he was persuaded by Schiller to revise Faust he wrote the “Prologue in Heaven.” Anyone who observes his own life inwardly will discover that these changes hold good. Nowadays we only notice them when we deliberately train ourselves to look deeply into our own life.

In ancient times, six thousand, seven thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, these changes were so noticeable that they were experienced in the life of soul as the change of teeth or puberty is today. And, indeed, approximately up to the middle of life, up to the thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, life was on the up-grade. But then it began to decline. People experienced the drying-up of life. But while certain products of metabolism become deposited through sluggishness in the organism and the physical organism becomes increasingly heavy and lethargic, it was also felt that up to the greatest age the soul and spirit were on the ascent, how the soul is set free with the drying up of the body. And people in olden days would not have spoken with such ardour of the patriarchs—the word itself only arose later—had they not noticed externally in men: True, he is getting physically old, but he has to thank his physical aging for lighting-up his spirit. He is no longer dependent on the body. The body withers, but the soul becomes free.

In this modern age it is most unusual that such a thing happens, for instance, as occurred at the Berlin University. Two philosophers were there, the one was Zeller—the famous Greek scholar—and the other Michelet. Zeller was seventy years old and thought he ought to be pensioned off. Michelet was ninety and lectured with tremendous vivacity. Eduard von Hartmann told me this himself. Michelet is supposed to have said: “I don't understand why that young man doesn't want to lecture any more.” Michelet was, as I said, ninety years old!

Today people seldom keep their freshness to such a degree. But in those times it was so, especially among those who concerned themselves with spiritual life. What did the young say when they looked at the Patriarchs? They said: It is beautiful to get old. For then one learns something through one's own development that one cannot know before. It was perfectly natural to speak in this way. Just as a little boy with a toy horse wants to be big and get a real horse, so, at that time, there was the desire to get old because it was felt that something is then revealed from within.

Then came the following millennia. It was still experienced up to a considerable age, but no longer as in the old Indian epoch—in the terminology of my Occult Science. At the zenith of Greek culture, man still had living experience of the change occurring in life in the middle of the thirties. Men still knew how to distinguish between body and spirit, and said: At the age of thirty, the physical begins to decline, but then the spiritual begins to blossom forth. This was experienced by the soul and spirit in the immediate presence of men. The original feeling of the Greeks was based upon this, not upon that phantasy of which modern science speaks. To understand the fullness of Greek culture, we should bear in mind that the Greeks were still able in consciousness to come to thirty, five-and-thirty, six-and-thirty years, whereas a more ancient humanity grew in consciousness to a far greater age. Herein consists the evolution of humanity. Man has more and more to experience out of Nature unconsciously what is for a later time; this requires him to experience it consciously for consciously it must again be experienced. Whoever observes himself can recognize the seven-yearly changes; the length of time is not pedantically exact, but approximate. A man who looks back to the period of his forty-ninth, forty-second, thirty-fifth years can recognize quite well: At that time something happened in me by which I learnt something which out of my own nature I could not previously have done, just as I should not have been able to bite with my second teeth before I had them. To experience life concretely is something that has been lost in the course of man's evolution. And today if anyone does not inwardly train himself to observe, these epochs from the thirtieth year onwards are completely blurred. Comparatively speaking, an inner transformation can still be noticed at the beginning of the twenties—even up to the end of the twenties, though it is then rather less noticeable. But with the present human organization man receives something from his natural evolution only up to his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year, and this limit will recede more and more. In earlier times men were not free in their organization, destined as they were to have these experiences out of their own nature. Freedom has become possible only by the withdrawal of Nature. To the extent Nature ceases freedom becomes possible. Through his own striving, through his own powers, man must arrive at finding the spiritual, whereas formerly, the older he became the more did the spiritual thrive.

Today emphasis is no longer placed on what the old become merely by growing older. Intellectualism is left which, between the eighteenth and nineteenth years, can develop so that from then onwards one can know with the intellect. But as far as intellectuality is concerned, one can at most reach a greater degree of proficiency but make no qualitative progress. If one has fallen a victim to the desire to prove or to refute everything intellectually, one cannot progress. If someone puts forward what is the result of decades of experience but wants to prove it intellectually, an eighteen-year-old could refute him intellectually. For whatever is possible intellectually at sixty is equally possible at nineteen, since intellectuality is a stage during the epoch of the consciousness soul which in the sense of deepening is of no help to progress, but only to proficiency. The young may say: “I am not yet as clever as you are; you can still take me in.” But he will not believe the other to be his superior in the sphere of intellect.

These things must be emphasized to become intelligible. I do not wish to criticize. I am saying this only because it is part of the natural evolution of humanity; we should be clear about the following characteristic of our age, namely, that if man does not strive out of inner activity for development and maintain it consciously, then with mere intellectualism at his twentieth year he will begin to get rusty. He then receives stimuli only from outside, and through these external stimuli keeps himself going. Do you think that if things were not like that people would flock to the cinema? This longing for the cinema, this longing to see everything externally, depends on the human being becoming inwardly inactive, on his no longer wanting inner activity.

The only way to listen to lectures on Spiritual Science, as meant here, is for those present to do their share of the work. But today that is not to people's liking. They flock to lectures or meetings with lantern slides so that they can sit and do as much as possible without thinking. Everything just passes before them. They can remain perfectly passive.

But our system of teaching is ultimately of this character, too, and anyone who on educational grounds objects to the triviality of the modern object lesson is said to be behind the times. But one has to oppose it, for man is not a mere apparatus for observing, an apparatus that wants simply to look at things. Man can live only by inner activity. To listen to Spiritual Science means to invite the human being to co-operate with his soul. People do not want this today. Spiritual Science is an invitation to this inner activity, that is to say, it must lead all studies to the point where there is no more support in external sense-perception because then the inner play of forces must begin to move freely. Not before thinking moves freely in this inner play of forces can Imagination be reached. Thus the basis for all Anthroposophy is inner activity, the challenge to inner activity, the appeal to what can be active when all the senses are silent and only the activity of thinking is astir.

Here there lies something of extraordinary significance. Just suppose you were capable of this. I will not flatter you by saying that you are. I only want to ask you first to assume that you are capable of it, that you can think in such a way that your thoughts are only an inner flow of thoughts. What I called pure thinking in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was certainly not well named when judged by outer cultural conditions. For Eduard von Hartmann said to me: “There is no such thing, one can only think with the aid of external observation.” And all I could say in reply was: “It has only to be tried and people will soon learn to be able to make it a reality.” Thus take it as a hypothesis that you could have thoughts in a flow of pure thought. Then there begins for you the moment when you have led thinking to a point where it need not be called thinking any longer, because in a twinkling—in the twinkling of a thought—it has become something different. This rightly named pure thinking has at the same time become pure will, for it is willing, through and through. If you have advanced so far in your life of soul that you have freed thinking from outer perception, it has become at the same time pure will. You hover with your soul, so to speak, in a pure flight of thought. But this pure flight of thought is a flight of will. Then the exercise or the striving for the exercise of pure thought begins to be not an exercise in thinking only but also an exercise of the will, indeed an exercise of the will that goes right to the center of the human being. For you will make the following remarkable observation. It is only now, for the first time, that you can speak of thinking, as it is in ordinary life, as an activity of the head. Before this you really have no right to speak of thinking as an activity of the head, for you know this only as external fact from physiology, anatomy, and so on. But now you feel inwardly that you are no longer thinking so high up, you begin for the first time to think with the heart. You actually interweave your thought with the breathing process. You actually set going of itself what the Yoga exercises have striven for artificially. You notice that as thinking becomes more and more an activity of the will it wrenches itself free first from the breast and then from the whole human body. It is as though you were to draw forth this thinking from the extremity of your big toe! And if with inner participation you study what has appeared with many imperfections—for I make no claims for my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—if you let it work upon you and feel what this pure thinking is, you will experience that a new man is born within you who can bring out of the spirit an unfolding of the will.

Does man know before this that he has a will? He really has no will, for he is given up to instincts connected with his organic development. He often dreams that he does this or that out of an impulse of the soul, but he really does it because of the good or bad condition of his stomach. But now you know that you have permeated the physical organism with what fills it with consciousness. You do not need to be a clairvoyant for this. All you need do is to be interested in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and let it work upon you. For this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity cannot be read as other books are today. It must really be read so that once you get into the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you have the feeling that it is an organism, one member developing out of another, that you have found your way into something living. People immediately say: Something is going to get into me which will take away my freedom. Something is entering me that I do not want to have.

People who entertain such thoughts are like those who were to say that if the human being at two or three years has to get used to speaking a certain language, he will thereby lose his freedom. The human being ought to be warned against language for he will no longer be free when brought into this chance association of ideas. He ought to be able to speak at will now Chinese, now French, now German. Nobody says this because it would be too absurd, and life itself refutes such nonsense. On the other hand there are people who either hear or see something of Eurythmy and say that it, too, rests upon the chance association of the ideas of individuals. But one should be able to assume that philosophers would say: One must look into this Eurythmy and see if in evoking gestures we may not have the foundations of a higher freedom and find that it is only an unfolding at a higher level of what is in speech.

So one need not be surprised—for really nothing that goes beyond intellectualism is regarded without prejudice today—that people get goose-flesh when one tells them that a certain book must be read quite differently from other books, that it must be read in such a way that from it something is really experienced. What is it that must be experienced? It is the awakening of the will out of the spiritual. In this respect my book was intended as a means of education. The intention was not only to give it content but to make it work educationally. Hence you find in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an exposition on the art of forming concepts, a description of what takes place in the soul when one does not keep with one's concepts to the impressions from outside, but lives within the free flow of thoughts.

That, my dear friends, is an activity which aims at knowledge in a far deeper sense than the external knowledge of Nature, but it is at the same time artistic, wholly identical with artistic activity. So that the moment pure thinking is experienced as will, man's attitude becomes that of an artist.

And this, my dear friends, is like-wise the attitude we need today in the teacher if he is to guide and lead the young from the time of the change of teeth to puberty, or even beyond puberty. The mood of soul should be so that out of the inner life of soul one comes to a second man, who cannot be known as is the outer physical body, which can be studied physiologically or anatomically, but who must be livingly experienced and may rightly be called, in accordance with the real meaning of the terms, “life body” or “ether body”. This cannot be known through external perception but must be inwardly experienced. To know this second man a kind of artistic activity must be unfolded. Hence there is this mood in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity which most people never discover—everywhere it touches the level of the artistic. Only most people do not discover this because they look for the artistic in the trivial, in the naturalistic and not in free activity. Only out of this free activity can education really be experienced as art, and the teacher can become an artist in education when he finds his way into this mood. Then in our epoch of the consciousness soul all teaching will be so arranged as to create an artistic atmosphere between teacher and pupil. And within this artistic atmosphere there can develop that relation between led and leader which is an inclining towards the leader, because he can do something which he is able to show forth artistically, and one feels that what he can do one would like to be able to do oneself. Thus no opposition is aroused because it is felt that one would destroy oneself by opposing.

Because of the way writing is taught today, it often happens that even as a child—for in the child there is always a being who is cleverer than the teacher—one asks: Why should I be bothered to write? I have no kind of relationship to writing—which is really what the North American Indians felt when they saw European script. They felt the black signs to be witchcraft. The feeling of the child is very similar. But let us awaken in the child what it means to look at black, red, green, yellow, white. Let us call up in him what it is when we surround a point by a circle. Let us call up the great experience contained in the difference there is when we draw two green circles and in each of them three red circles, then two red and in each of them three green, two yellow with three blue ones in them, then two blue containing three yellow circles. We let the children experience in the colors what the colors as such are saying to the human being, for in the world of color lives a whole world. But we also let the children experience what the colors have to say to one another, what green says to red, what blue says to yellow, blue to green and red to blue—here we have the most wonderful relation between the colors. We shall not do this by showing the child symbols or allegories, but we shall do it in an artistic way. Then we shall see how out of this artistic feeling the child gradually puts down figures out of which the letters then develop as writing once developed from picture-script. How foreign to the child today are B, G, or any other sign that has developed through inner necessity to its present form. What is a G, K, or U to a seven-year old? He really has not the slightest kinship with it. it has taken the human being thousands of years to acquire this relationship. The child must acquire an aesthetic relation to it. Everything is exterminated in the child because the written characters are not human; and the child wants to remain human.

In order to understand youth in its relation to the older generation we must go right into the art of education. The cleft between age and youth must be bridged not by hollow phrases but by education that is an art, education which is not afraid to find its support in real spiritual-scientific knowledge. That is why I said a few days ago: Where does this art lead to? It leads to experience of the real spiritual. And where goes what the age has gradually developed in such a way that it believes it must be given as a matter of course to the young? Where does that lead? It does not lead to the Spirit but to that which is devoid of Spirit. It is regarded a sin to bring the Spirit into what goes by the name of knowledge and science.

Science does not leave the human being alone even in earliest childhood. It cannot very well be otherwise. For the teacher is so drilled in systematized botany (and many books are entirely given over to systematized botany) that he believes he is committing a sin if he speaks to the children about botany in a way that is not scientific. But what is found in a botanical textbook cannot mean anything to a child before he is ten, and it is not until he is at least eighteen or nineteen that it can acquire any real significance for him.

Such is the situation. Now I have no intention of creating another intellectual theory about education. The aim is to create an artistic atmosphere between the older and the younger. But when this comes about, something happens which must occur if young people are to grow into the world in a healthy way. What the human being of today grows into can be described quite concretely. Between the ninth and tenth years an undefined feeling lives in the soul of every human being who is not a psychopath. There need not necessarily exist either a clear or unclear concept of this. But it begins to live within the human being from his ninth or tenth year. Up till then what is called the astral body alone is concerned with man's life of soul. But from that time onwards the force of the ego nature first begins to stir. It is not formulated in concepts. But in the life of feeling, deep within the soul, there lives unconsciously a question in the heart of the growing human being. This question takes different forms in different people. But a question arises which put in the form of a concept might be expressed as follows: Up to now the astral body has believed in other human beings; now I need something that somebody says to me so that I may believe in him or in others in my environment. Those who as children have most resisted this are those who need it most. Between the ninth and tenth years the human being, to strengthen his ego, begins to be dependent on an older person in whom he can trust—without this trust needing to be drummed in—in whom he can believe with the help of the artistic atmosphere that has been created. And woe betide it if this question which may still be one for many children up to their sixteenth or seventeenth year and sometimes even to the years I mentioned yesterday, the eighteenth or nineteenth—woe betide it if nothing happens to enable this question of the young to be answered by the old so that the young say: I am grateful that I have learnt from the old what I can learn only from the old; what he can tell me, he alone can tell me, for it will be different if I learn it when I am old.

Through this can be created something in an educational way which, applied in the right way, can be of the greatest significance for the epoch of the consciousness soul, which, in fact, in the earliest times of the Patriarchs, was already alive between young and old. Then, every young person said to himself: The old man with his snow-white hair has experiences which can only come when one is as old as he. Before then the necessary organs are not there. Therefore he must tell his experiences to us. We are dependent on what he relates because he alone can relate it. Certainly I shall one day be as old as he. But I shall not experience what he tells for thirty-five or forty years. The times will have progressed by then and I shall experience something different. But what I want to learn is only to be learnt from him.

Here is something in the spiritual realm which may be compared with feeding at the mother's breast. Just as the infant might say: “I too shall one day give the breast to a child, but now it is my mother who must give it to me”—so it is in the spiritual life. In the foundations of the spirit life of the world it is as though a chain were there, reaching from the past over into the future, which must be received by each generation into itself, must be carried onwards, re-forged, perfected. This chain has been broken in the age of intellectualism. This was generally felt among those growing up about the turn of the nineteenth century. Try to feel that you did experience something of the kind, even if at the time you were not able to express it. Try to sense that by feeling this, you were feeling about it in the right way. And if you sense this you will realize the true significance of the youth movement today, the youth movement which has, and must have, a Janus-head, because it is directed towards experience of the spiritual—an experience of the spiritual which carries thought so far that it becomes will, that it becomes the innermost human impulse.

We have been seeking now for will at its abstract pole where it is thought. In the days to follow we will seek it in the deeper spheres of man's being.

During the epoch of the consciousness soul the most abstract elements come consciously to life in the inner being of man, yet also in the subconscious, in what man desires of life, most concrete things are seeking to find their way into existence.

The human being who is growing into the epoch of the consciousness soul is held fast today in the abstract ideas of the head. But there lives outside man's head, if I may so express myself, the desire to experience more than the head is able to. To begin with man has only a connection with Nature formed between her and his head. Everything he absorbs in science, so far as he regards it as valid, is acquired from Nature through the head. Between man and Nature today there always stands man's head. It is as though everything that comes to the human being from the world were to pour itself into the head, as though the head were entirely choked up so that it lets nothing through its dense layers that could bring about a relation with the world. Everything remains stuck fast in the head. Man thinks everything through only with his head. But he cannot, after all, live merely as a head. For joined to the head there is always the rest of the organism. The life of the rest of the organism remains dull, unconscious, because everything is directed towards the head. Everything stops short there. The rest of man receives nothing from the world because the head allows nothing to reach it. The head has gradually become an insatiable glutton. It wants everything that comes from the world outside, and man is obliged to live, where his heart and the rest of his organism is concerned, as if he had nothing whatever to do with the surrounding world.

But these other parts of the organism develop wish, will, capacity for desire; they feel themselves isolated. For instance, the eyes catch colors and allow only scanty remains to be experienced in the head, so that the colors cannot work down, they cannot reach the blood nor the nervous system in the rest of the body. It is only in his head that man still knows something about the world. But he has all the more capacity for intensely desiring with the rest of his organism to meet the outside world. This again is something living in the maturing human being—this desire to find some kind of connection with the world not only with the head but with the rest of the organism; to learn to think not only with the head but with the whole man; to learn to experience the world with the whole man and not only with the head.

Now human beings today still have the capacity of learning to experience the world with the whole man at an early age. For what I have just been saying refers to the grown man. Before the change of teeth a child still has the faculty of grasping the world with his whole being. This is shown, for example, in the fact that it would be a mistake to suppose that the baby's experience when sucking milk is as abstract as an adult's. When we drink milk we taste it on our tongue, and perhaps round our tongue. But we lose the experience of taste when the milk has passed our throat. People ought to ask why their stomach should be less capable of tasting than the palate—it is not less but equally capable of tasting; only the head is a glutton. In the grown man the head claims all taste for itself. The child, however, tastes with its entire organism and therefore with its stomach. The infant is all sense-organ. There is nothing in him that is not sense-organ. The infant tastes with his whole being. Later this is forgotten by man; and this tasting is impaired by the child learning to speak. For then the head which has to take part in learning to speak begins to stir and develops the first stage of insatiability. The head in return for giving itself up to learning to speak reserves for itself the pleasures of tasting. Even as regards “tasting the world,” connection with the world is very soon lost. Now this “tasting the world” is of no particular importance, but the relation of the whole human being with the world is.

You see, we can get to know an important philosopher such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for example, in various ways. Every way is right. I do not wish to stress any one of the following in particular. It is wonderful to go deeply into the philosophy of Fichte—which not many people do nowadays because they find it too difficult—and much is gained from it, yet they would have gained far more if with strong feeling they had walked behind Fichte and had seen him appear, planting the whole sole of his foot and especially his heels firmly on the ground. The experience of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's walk, the curious way he stumped his heel on the ground, is something of tremendous power. For those able to experience each step with the whole being, this would have been a more intensive philosophy than all Fichte was able to say from the platform. It may seem grotesque, but perhaps you will feel what I am trying to say.

Today such things have been entirely lost. At most a man, who not twenty but fifty years ago was a boy, can remember how some philosophy of this kind still existed among the country folk. In the country people still got to know each other in this way and many expressions with the wonderful plasticity of dialect reveal that what today is seen only with the head was then seen with the whole man.* (An incident is quoted here which is untranslatable because of the Austrian idiom.)

As I have said, these things have been lost. Human beings have reduced themselves to their head and have forced themselves to believe that the head is their most valuable part. But this has not brought them to an ideal condition, because the rest of human nature asserts its claims in the subconscious. Experiencing through something other than the head is lost today with the change of teeth in early childhood. If you have an eye for these things you can see the walk of the father or the mother in the son or daughter decades later. So exactly has the child lived itself into the adults around him that what he has felt becomes part of his own nature. But this living ourselves into something no longer spells culture with us. Culture is what the head observes and what can be worked out by means of the head. Sometimes people dispense with the head, and then they write down everything and put it in the archives! Then it goes out of the head into the hair where it cannot be retained because at thirty they no longer have any hair!

But really I am not saying this as a joke, nor for the sake of being critical, for this is all part of the necessary development of humanity. Men had to become like this to find through inner effort, inner activity, what they can no longer find in a natural way; in other words, to experience freedom.

And so today, after the change of teeth, we must simply pass over to a different way of experiencing the surrounding world from the way of the child who experiences it with his whole being. Therefore primary school education in future must proceed by way of the artistic I described yesterday, so that through the outer man the soul-nature of another human being is experienced. If you educate the human being by what is abstract and scientific, he experiences nothing of your soul. He only experiences your soul if you approach him through art. For in the realm of the artistic everyone is individual, each one is a different person. It is the ideal of science that everyone should be alike. It would be quite a thing—so say people today—were everyone to teach a different science. But that could not be, for science confines itself to what is the same for all human beings. In the realm of the artistic each human being is an individuality in himself. But because of this there can come about an individual, personal relation of the child to the man who is alive and active artistically, and this should be so. True, one does not come to the feeling for the whole man as outer physical being as in the first years of childhood, but to a feeling for the whole man in the soul of the one who is to lead.

Education must have soul, and as scientist one cannot have soul. We can have soul only through what we are artistically. We can have soul if we give science an artistic form through the way it is presented, but not through the content of science as science is understood today. Science is not an individual affair. Hence during the primary school age it establishes no relation between teacher and pupil. All instruction must therefore be permeated by art, by human individuality, for of more value than any thought-out curriculum is the individuality of the teacher and educator. It is individuality that must work in the school. What grows between teacher and pupil from the change of teeth to puberty—what is the link between them?

What binds them together is solely what man brings with him into his earthly existence from super-sensible, spiritual worlds, from his pre-earthly existence. My dear friends, it is never the head that recognizes what man brings with him out of his pre-earthly life. The head is made for the purpose of grasping what is on the earth. And on the earth there is only the physical part of man. The head understands nothing of what confronts one as the other human being and comes from pre-earthly existence. In the particular coloring the artistic impulse gives to the human soul there lives and weaves what the human being has brought down from pre-earthly existence; and between the period of the change of teeth and puberty the child is particularly disposed to feel in his heart what meets him in the teacher as coming out of pre-earthly existence. A young child has the tendency to feel the outer human form in its earthly shape; from his seventh to his fourteenth or fifteenth year he seeks—not through theoretical concepts but through the living-together with human beings—what does not lend it self to be grasped in concepts but is manifested in the teacher; and it resists conceptual form. Concepts have form, that is to say, external limits. But human individuality in the sense described has no external limits, only intensity, quality; it is experienced as quality, as intensity, very particularly in the period of life referred to. It is experienced, however, through no other atmosphere than that of art.

But we are now living in the epoch of the consciousness soul. The first treasures we acquire for the soul in this epoch consist in intellectual concepts, in abstractions. Today even the farmer loves abstractions. How could it be otherwise, for he indulges in the most abstract reading—the village newspaper and much else besides! Our riches consist really in abstractions. And therefore we must free ourselves from this kind of thinking, through developing what I spoke of yesterday. We must purify our thinking and mould it, into will. To this end we must make our individuality stronger and stronger, and this happens when we work our way through to pure thinking. I do not say this out of idle vanity, but because that is how I see it. Whoever works his way through to pure thinking as I have described in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity will find that this does not bring him simply to the possession of a few concepts which make up a philosophic system, but that it lays hold of his own individuality, of his pre-earthly existence.

He need not suddenly become clairvoyant; that will only happen when he is able to behold the pre-earthly. But he can confirm it by gaining the strength of will that is acquired in the flow of pure thoughts. Then the individuality comes forth. Then one does not feel happy with a philosophic system in which one concept proceeds from another and everything has rigid outlines. But one feels compelled to have one's being in a living and weaving world. We acquire a special kind of life of soul when we experience in the right way what is meant by the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

Thus it is a bringing down of pre-earthly existence into the life of the human being. But it is also the preparation for the vocation of teacher, of educator. Through study we cannot become teachers. We cannot drill others into being teachers, because each one of us is already a teacher. Every human being is a teacher, but he is sleeping and must be awakened, and Art is the awakener. When this is developed it brings the teacher, as a human being, nearer to those whom he would educate. And as a human being he must come near to them. Those who are to be educated must get something from him as a human being. It would be terrible if anyone were to believe it possible to teach just because he knows a great deal. This leads to absolute absurdity. This absurdity will be apparent to you if you think about the following picture.

Now take a class in a school. There are perhaps thirty pupils in the class. Among these pupils there are, let us say, two geniuses, or only one, for that is enough. If we have to organize a school we cannot always give the post of teacher to a genius just for a future genius to be able to learn all he should be able to learn. You will say that this would not matter in the primary school. If the child is a genius he will go on to a higher school and there certainly find geniuses as teachers. You would not say this because experience does not bear it out—but you must admit the case may arise that the teacher is faced with a class in which there are children predestined to become cleverer than he is himself. Now our task of teacher consists in bringing the children not merely to our degree of cleverness, but to the full development of their own powers.

As teachers, therefore, we may come into the position of having to educate somebody who will be greater than we. It is impossible to provide schools with enough teachers unless one holds to the principle that it does not matter if the teacher is not as clever as the pupil will be some day. Nevertheless he will still be a good teacher because it does not depend on the giving out of knowledge but on activating the individuality of the soul, upon the pre-earthly existence. Then it is really the child who educates himself through us. And that is the truth. In reality we do not educate at all. We only disturb the process of education when we intervene too energetically. We only educate when we behave in such a way that through our own behavior the child can educate himself. We send the child to primary school in order to rid him of troublesome elements. The teacher should see to it that the troublesome elements are got rid of, that the child escapes conditions under which he cannot develop. So we must be quite clear upon this point: we cannot cram anything into a human being through teaching and education. What we can do is to see to it that the human being, as he grows up, should succeed in developing the abilities within him. That we can do, but not through what we know but through what stirs inwardly within us in an artistic way. And even if the rare thing should happen that as teachers we are not particularly endowed with genius—one should not say this, but in spite of your youth movement you are old enough for me to say it—if the teacher has only a kind of instinctive artistic sense he will offer less hindrance to the growth of the child's soul than the teacher who is inartistic and tremendously learned. To be tremendously learned is not difficult.

These things must for once be said most emphatically. For even when spoken clearly, our age does not hear them. Our age is terribly unreceptive for such things. And regarding those who assure one that they have understood everything, after thirty years it is often apparent that they have understood nothing whatever. Thus the configuration of soul in the human being is what is essential in practical pedagogy, in instruction and education, during the child's life between the change of teeth and puberty. And after this the human being enters a period of life in which, in this age of the consciousness soul, still deeper forces must work up out of human nature if men are to give anything to one another.

You see, the feeling with which one man meets another is tremendously complicated. If you wanted to describe the whole round of sympathies and antipathies, and the interworking of sympathies and antipathies with which you meet another man, you would never come to an actual definition. In fifty years you would not succeed in defining what you can experience in five minutes as the relations of life between man and man. Before puberty it is pre-eminently an experience of the pre-earthly. The pre-earthly sheds its light through every movement of the hands, every look, through the very stressing of words. Actually it is the quality of the gesture, the word, the thought, of the teacher that works through to the child and which the child is seeking.

And when as grown-up people—so grown-up that we have reached the age of fifteen or sixteen or even beyond!—we meet other human beings, then the matter is still more complicated. Then, what attracts or repels others in a human being actually veils itself in a darkness impenetrable to the world of abstract concepts. But if, with the help of Anthroposophy, we investigate what one can really experience in five minutes but cannot describe in fifty years, we find that it is what rises up from the previous earth-life or series of earth-lives into the present life of the soul, and what is exchanged. This indefinite, indefinable element that comes upon us when we meet as adults is what shines through from earlier lives on earth into the present. Not only the pre-earthly existence but everything the human being has passed through in the way of destiny in his successive earth-lives.

And if we study what is working upon the human being we find how today, in the epoch of the consciousness soul—because everything is pushed into the head and what we take in from the outer world cannot get through to man as a whole—our head culture sets itself against what alone can work from man to man. Human beings pass one another by because they stare at each other only with the head, with the eyes—I will not say, because they knock their heads together! Human beings pass one another by because only what plays over from repeated earth-lives can work between man and man, and modern culture does nothing to develop a sense for this. But this must also be brought into our education; we should be able to experience what is deeper down in man, what plays over from previous earth-lives. This will not be achieved unless we draw into our education the whole life of man as it is lived out on earth.

Today there is only a feeling for the immediate present. Therefore all that is asked of education is that it shall benefit the child. But if this is the only thing that is asked, very little service is rendered to life. Firstly, because the question is put one-sidedly, one gets a one-sided answer; and secondly, the child should be educated for the whole of life, not only for the schoolroom or the short period after school so that he does not disgrace us. But we need an understanding for the imponderable things in life, an understanding for the unity in man's life as a whole as it unfolds on earth.

There are human beings whose very presence, at a certain age, is felt by those around them as a benediction. There are such human beings. If we were to look for the reason why such people, not through their acts but through their being, have become a blessing to those around them, we would find that as children they were fortunate to have been able in a natural way to look up to someone in authority whom they could revere. They had this experience at the right time of life. And because they were able to revere, after many years they become a blessing to the world around them. It can be expressed concisely by saying: There are human beings who can bless. There are not many who can bless. But it is a question of the power to bless. There are men who certainly have the power to bless. They acquire it in later life, because in their childhood they have learnt to pray. Two human gestures are causally connected: the gestures of praying and blessing; the second develops from the first. No one learns to bless who does not learn it from prayer. This must not be understood sentimentally or with the slightest tinge of mysticism, but rather as a phenomenon of Nature is observed—except that this phenomenon is nearer to us in a human way.

Now we have to care for a child hygienically so that he can grow in accordance with nature. If you were to devise an apparatus for a child that would keep him a certain size so that he could not grow, so that even the size of his arm would not change and the young human being would remain as he is all his life, this would be terrible. The human being must be treated in such a way that he can grow. What would it be like were the little child not to change, were he to look no different ten years hence? It would be dreadful were he to remain as he is at four or five. But in school we supply the children with concepts and cherish the notion that they should remain unchanged for the whole of the children's lives. The child is supposed to preserve them in memory; fifty years hence they are to be the same as they are today. Our school text-books ensure that the child remains a child. We should educate the child so that all his concepts are capable of growth, that his concepts and will-impulses are really alive. This is not easy. But the artistic way of education succeeds in doing it. And the child has a different feeling when we offer him living concepts instead of dead ones, for unconsciously he knows that what he is given grows with him just as his arms grow with his body.

It is heart-breaking to witness children being educated to define a concept, so that they have the concept as a definition only. It is just the same as if we wanted to confine a limb in an apparatus. The child must be given pictures capable of growth, pictures which become something quite different in ten or twenty years. If we give him pictures that are capable of growth, we stimulate in him the faculty through feeling to find his way into what is often hidden in the depths of the human individuality. And so we see how complicated are the connections We learn to come to a deeper relation to human beings through the possibility being given us in our youth for growth in our life of soul.

For what does it mean to experience another human being? We cannot experience other people with dead concepts. We can comprehend them only if we meet them in such a way that they become for us an experience which takes hold of us inwardly, which is something for our own inner being. For this, however, activity in the inner being is needed. Otherwise our culture will reach the point which it is fast approaching. People go out to luncheons, dinners and teas, without knowing much about one another. Yet it is about themselves that, relatively speaking, modern people know most. And what do they instinctively make of their experiences? Suppose they go about among the people they meet at lunch or dinner. At most they think—Is he like me or is he different? And if we believe him to be like ourselves, we consider him a fine fellow; if he is not like ourselves, then he is not a fine fellow and we do not trouble ourselves about him any longer. And as most men are not the same as ourselves, the most we can do is sometimes to believe—because really it would be too boring to find no fine fellow anywhere—that we have found someone like ourselves. But in this way we do not really find another human being but always ourselves. We see ourselves in everyone else. For many people this is relatively good. For if they were to meet somebody who in their opinion was not altogether, but yet to a certain extent, a fine fellow, and were really to comprehend him, this would be so overwhelming an experience that it would quite drown their own manhood, and by a second encounter their ego would be drowned still more deeply. In the case of a third or fourth there would be no approaching him at all, for by that time he would certainly have lost himself! There is too little inner strength and activity, too little kernel, too little inner individuality developed, so that people for fear of losing themselves dare not experience the other human being. Thus men pass one another by.

The most important thing is to establish an education through which human beings learn once again how to live with one another. This cannot be done through hollow phrases. It can be done only through an art of education founded upon a true knowledge of the human being, that art of education referred to here. But our intellectualistic age has plunged the whole of life into intellectuality. In our institutions we actually live very much as if no longer among human beings at all, we live in an embodied intellect in which we are entangled, not like a spider in its own web, but like countless flies which have got themselves caught.

When we meet anyone, do we feel in any sense what this human being can become for us? Do we judge today as humanly as this? No, for the most part we do not—present company is always excepted—for the most part we do not but we ask—well, perhaps on the door of a certain man's house there will be a little plate with an inscription “Counselor at Law,” conveying a concept of some kind. So now we know something about this man. In another case the inscription is “Medical Practitioner.” Now we know that the man can cure us. In another case the inscription is “Professor of English.” And now we know something about him—and so on and so forth. If we want to know something about chemistry, how do we set about it? We have no other means than to enquire if somewhere there is a man who is a qualified chemist. What he can tell us then is chemistry. And so we go on. We are really caught up in this spider's web of concepts. We do not live among human beings. We trouble ourselves very little about human beings. We only concern ourselves with what is on paper. For many people that is their only essential fact. How else should they know what kind of man I am unless it is written down somewhere on paper!

This, of course, is all rather an overstatement, and yet it does characterize our epoch. Intellectuality is no longer merely in our heads but it is woven around us everywhere. We are guided by concepts and not by human impulses.

When I was still fairly young, at Baden near Vienna I got to know the Austrian poet Hermann Rollett, long since dead. He was convinced that the right thing was development towards intellectualism, that one must develop more and more towards the intellectual. At the same time, however, he had an incurable dread of this, for he felt that intellectualism only takes hold of man's head. And once when I visited him with Schröer, we were talking with him and he began to speak in poetical fashion about his incurable fear in regard to culture. He said: When one looks at human beings today, they cannot use their fingers properly; many of them cannot write; they get writer's cramp, their fingers atrophy. When it is a question of sewing on trouser buttons, only tailors can do that! It is dreadful; the limbs are atrophying. The fingers and the limbs will not only get less skillful but they will also get smaller, they will wither away and heads will get larger and larger. That is how he described his poet's dream and then he said he thought the time would come when only balls, balls which are heads, would be rolling about over the surface of the earth.

That was the cultural dread I met with in this man in the last third of the nineteenth century. Now he was also a child of his age, that is to say, he was a materialist, and that was why he had so great a dread that at some point in the future such living heads would be rolling about on the earth. Physical heads will not do this. But to a serious extent the etheric and astral heads do it already today. And a healthy education of the young must preserve human beings from this, must set human beings upon their legs again, and lead them to the point where, if they are pondering over something, they will feel the beating of their heart again and not merely add something to their knowledge. With this we must reckon if in preparation for man's future, we penetrate ourselves with the art that must enter education. What more there is to be said on this subject I shall try to develop for you tomorrow.

[ 1 ] An attempt to derive a general view of world and life from the basis of strict science was undertaken in the course of the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte (1798–1857). This enterprise, which was presented as a comprehensive world picture in his Cours de Philosophic Positive (6 vols., 1830–42), was sharply antagonistic to the idealistic views of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel of the first half of the nineteenth century. It also opposed, although not to the same degree, all those thought structures that were derived from the ideas of evolution along the lines of Lamarck and Darwin. What occupied the central position of all world conception in Hegel, the contemplation and comprehension of man's own spirit, was completely rejected by Comte. He argues: If the human spirit wanted to contemplate itself, it would actually have to divide into two personalities; it would have to slip outside itself and place itself opposite its own being. Even a psychology that does not confine itself to the mere physiological view but intends to preserve the processes of the mind by themselves is not recognized by Comte. Anything that is to become an object of knowledge must belong to the objective interconnections of facts, must be presented objectively as the laws of the mathematical sciences. From this position there follows Comte's objection to the attempts of Spencer and other thinkers whose world pictures followed the approach of scientific thinking adapted by Lamarck and Darwin. So far as Comte is concerned, the human species is given as a fixed and unchangeable fact; he refuses to pay any attention to Lamarck's theory. Simple, transparent natural laws as physics uses them for its phenomena are ideals of knowledge for him. As long as science does not work with such simple laws, it is unsatisfactory as knowledge for Comte. He has a mathematical bent of mind. If it cannot be treated clearly and simply like a mathematical problem, he considers it to be not ready for science. Comte has no feeling for the fact that one needs ideas that become increasingly more life-saturated as one rises from the purely mechanical and physical processes to the higher formations of nature and to man. His world conception owed a certain lifeless and rigid quality to this fact. The whole world appears to him like the mechanics of a machine. What escapes Comte everywhere is the element of life; he expels life and spirit from things and explains merely what is mechanical and machinelike. The concrete historical life of man appears in his presentation like the conceptual picture that the astronomer draws of the motions of the heavenly bodies. Comte constructed a scale of the sciences. Mathematics represents the lowest stage; it is followed by physics and chemistry and these again by the science of organisms; the last and concluding science in this sequence is sociology, the knowledge of human society. Comte strives to make all these sciences as simple as mathematics. The phenomena with which the individual sciences deal are supposed to be different in every case but the laws are considered to be fundamentally always the same.

The reverberations of the thought of Holbach, Condillac and others are still distinctly perceptible in the lectures on the relation between soul and body (Les Rapports du Physique et du Moral de L'homme) that Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) gave in 1797 and 1798 in the medical school founded by the National Convention in Paris. Nevertheless, these lectures can be called the beginning of the development of the world conception of the nineteenth century in France. They express a distinct awareness of the fact that Condillac's mode of conception for the phenomena of the soul life had been too closely modeled after the conception of the mechanical processes of inorganic nature and their operation. Cabanis investigates the influence of age, sex, way of life and temperament on man's intellectual and emotional disposition. He develops the conception that the physical and the spiritual are not two separated entities that have nothing in common but that they constitute an inseparable whole. What distinguishes him from his predecessors is not his fundamental view but the way in which he elaborates it. His predecessors simply carry into the spiritual the views they have derived from the inorganic world. Cabanis is convinced that if we start by observing the world of the spiritual as open-mindedly as we observe the inorganic, it will reveal its relation to the rest of the natural phenomena.

Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) proceeded in a similar way. He also wanted first to observe the processes of the spirit without bias as they appear when we approach them without philosophical or scientific prejudice. According to this thinker, one is in error if one conceives the soul as a mechanism as Condillac and his followers had done. This mechanistic character cannot be upheld any longer if one honestly observes oneself. We do not find in us an automaton, a being that is directed from without. We always find within us spontaneous activity and an inner self. We should actually not know anything of the effects of the external world if we did not experience a disturbance in our inner life caused by a collision with the external world. We experience our own being. We develop our activity out of ourselves, but as we do this we meet with opposition. We realize not only our own existence but also an external world that resists us.

[ 2 ] Although they started from de Tracy, two thinkers—Maine de Biran (1766–1824) and André-Marie Ampè re (1775–1826) were led by the self-observation of the soul in entirely different directions. Biran is a subtle observer of the human spirit. What in Rousseau seems to emerge as a chaotic mode of thought motivated by an arbitrary mood, we find in Biran in the form of clear and concrete thinking. Two factors of man's inner life are made the objects of observation by Biran who is a profoundly thoughtful psychologist: What man is through the nature of his being, his temperament, and what he makes out of himself through active work, his character. He follows the ramifications and changes of the inner life, and he finds the source of knowledge in man's inner life. The forces of which we learn through introspection are intimately known in our life, and we learn of an external world only insofar as it presents itself as more or less similar and akin to our inner world. What should we know of forces outside in nature if we did not experience within our self-active soul a similar force and consequently could compare this with what corresponds to it in the external world? For this reason, Biran is untiring in his search for the processes in man's soul. He pays special attention to the involuntary and the unconscious element in the inner life processes that exist long before the light of consciousness emerges in the soul. Biran's search for wisdom within the soul led him to a peculiar form of mysticism in later years. In the process of deriving the profoundest wisdom from the soul, we come closest to the foundation of existence when we dig down into our own being. The experience of the deepest soul processes then is an immersion in the wellspring of existence, into the God within us.

[ 3 ] The attraction of Biran's wisdom lies in the intimate way in which he presents it. He could have found no more appropriate form of presentation than that of a journal intime, a form of diary. The writings of Biran that allow the deepest insight into his thought world were published after his death by E. Naville (compare Naville's book, Maine de Biran. Sa vie et ses pensées, 1857, and his edition, Oeuvres inédités de Maine de Biran). As old men, Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy belonged to a small circle of philosophers; Biran was a younger member among them. Ampè re was among those who were acquainted with Biran's views. As a natural scientist, he became prominent through the extension of Oersted's observation concerning the relation of electricity to magnetism (compare above in Part II Chapter I). Biran's mode of conception is more intimate, that of Ampè re more scientific-methodical. Ampè re follows with interest the interrelationship of sensations and conceptions in the soul, and also the process through which the spirit arrives at a science of the world phenomena with the aid of thinking.

[ 4 ] What is significant in this current of world conception, which chronologically represents the continuation of the teachings of Condillac, is the circumstance that the life of the soul itself is decidedly emphasized, that the self-activity of the inner personality of the human being is brought into the foreground of the investigation, and that all these thinkers are striving nevertheless for knowledge in the strict sense of natural science. Initially, they investigate the spirit with the methods of natural science, but they do not want to treat its phenomena as homogeneous with the other processes of nature. From these more materialistic beginnings there emerges finally a tendency toward a world conception that leans distinctly toward the spirit.

[ 5 ] Victor Cousin (1792–1867) traveled through Germany several times and thus became personally acquainted with the leading spirits of the idealistic period. The deepest impression was made on him by Hegel and Goethe. He brought their idealism to France. As a professor at the école normale (1814), and later at the Sorbonne, he was able to do a great deal for this idealism through his powerful and fascinating eloquence that always produced a deep impression. Cousin received from the idealistic life of the spirit the conviction that it is not through the observation of the external world but through that of the human spirit that a satisfactory viewpoint for a world conception can be obtained. He based what he wanted to say on the self observation of the soul. He adopted the view of Hegel that spirit, idea and thought do not merely rule in man's inner life but also outside in nature and in the progress of the historical life, and that reason is contained in reality. Cousin taught that the character of a people of an age was not merely influenced by random happenings, arbitrary decisions of human individuals, but that a real idea is manifested in them and that a great man appears in the world merely as a messenger of a great idea, in order to realize it in the course of history. This produced a profound impression on Cousin's French audience, which in its most recent history had had to comprehend world historical upheavals without precedent, when they heard such a splendid speaker expound the role that reason played in the historical evolution in accordance with some great and fundamental ideas.

[ 6 ] Comte, with energy and resolution, found his place in the development of French philosophy with his principle: only in the method of science, which proceeds from strict mathematical and directly observed truths as in physics and chemistry can the point of departure for a world conception be found. The only approach he considered mature was the one that fought its way through to this view. To arrive at this stage, humanity had to go through two phases of immaturity—one in which it believed in gods, and subsequently, one in which it surrendered to abstract ideas. Comte sees the evolution of mankind in the progression from theological thinking to idealistic thinking, and from there to the scientific world conception. In the first stage, man's thinking projected anthropomorphic gods into the processes of nature, which produce these processes in the same arbitrary manner in which man proceeds in his actions. Later, he replaces the gods with abstract ideas as, for instance, life force, general world reason, world purpose, and so forth. But this phase of development must give way to a higher one in which it must be understood that an explanation of the phenomena of the world can be found only in the method of observation and a strictly mathematical and logical treatment of the facts. For the purpose of a world conception, thinking must merely combine what physics, chemistry and the science of living organisms obtain through their investigation. Thinking must not add anything to the results of the individual sciences as theology had done with its divine beings and the idealistic philosophy with its abstract thoughts. Also, the conceptions concerning the course of the evolution of mankind, the social life of men in the state, in society, etc., will become clear only when the attempt is made to find in them laws like those found in the exact natural sciences. The causes that bring families, associations, legal views and state institutions into existence must be investigated in the same way as the causes that make bodies fall to the ground and that allow the digestive organs to operate. The science of human social life, of human development, sociology, is therefore what Comte is especially concerned with, and he tries to give it the exactness that the other sciences have gradually acquired.

In this respect he has a predecessor in Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). Saint-Simon had presented the view that man would only learn to guide his own fate completely when he conceived of his own life in the state, in society and in the course of history in a strictly scientific sense, and when he arranged it like a process following a natural law. For awhile, Comte was on intimate terms with Saint-Simon. He parted ways with him when it seemed to him that Saint-Simon's views turned into all sorts of groundless dreams and utopias. Comte continued to work with a rare zeal in his original direction. His Cours de Philosophic Positive is an attempt to elaborate, in a style of spirit-alienation, the scientific accomplishments of his time into a world conception by presenting them merely in a systematized survey, and by developing sociology in the same way without the aid of theological and idealistic thoughts. Comte saw no other task for the philosopher than that of such a mere systematized survey. The philosopher would add nothing of his own to the picture that the sciences have presented as the connection of facts. Comte expressed thereby, in the most pointed manner, his view that the sciences alone, with their methods of observing reality, have a voice in the formulation of a world conception.

[ 7 ] Within German spirit-life Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) appeared as a forceful champion of Comte's thought. This was expressed in 1865 in his Natural Dialectic. As a further exposition, he expounded his views in his book, Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific World Conception and Art of Life (1875), and in numerous other writings in the fields of mathematics, natural science, philosophy, history of science and social economy. All of Dühring's work proceeds, in the strictest sense of the word, from a mathematical and mechanistic mode of thought. Dühring is outstanding in his endeavor to analyze his observations of nature in accordance with mathematical law, but where this kind of thinking is insufficient, he loses all possibility of finding his way through life. It is from this characteristic of his spirit that the arbitrariness and bias is to be explained with which Dühring judges so many things. Where it is necessary to judge the conflicts of life in accordance with higher ideas, he has, therefore, no other criterion than his sympathies and antipathies that have been aroused in him through accidental personal circumstances. This man, with his mathematically objective mind, becomes completely arbitrary when he undertakes to evaluate human accomplishments of the historical past or of the present. His rather unimaginative mathematical mode of conception led him to denounce a personality like Goethe as the most unscientific mind of modern times, whose entire significance consisted, in Dühring's opinion, in a few poetical achievements. It is impossible to surpass Dühring in his under-valuation of everything that lies beyond a drab reality as he does in his book, The Highlights of Modern Literature. In spite of this one-sidedness, Dühring is one of the most stimulating figures in the development of modern world conception. No one who has penetrated his thought-saturated books can help but confess that he has been profoundly affected by them.

[ 8 ] Dühring uses rude language for all world conceptions that do not proceed from strictly scientific basic views. All such unscientific modes of thought “found themselves in the state of childish immaturity or feverish fits, or in the decadence of senility, no matter whether they infest entire epochs and parts of humanity under these circumstances or just occasionally individual elements or degenerated layers of society, but they always belong to the category of the immature, the pathological or that of over-ripeness that is already decomposed by putrefaction,” (Course of Philosophy). What Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel achieved, Dühring condemns as the outflow of a professorial wisdom of mountebanks; idealism as a world conception is for him a theory of insanity. He means to create a philosophy of reality that is alone adequate to nature because it “does away with all artificial and unnatural fictions, and for the first time makes the concept of reality the measure of all ideal conceptions”; reality is conceived in this philosophy “in a manner that excludes all tendencies toward a dreamlike and subjectivistically limited world conception.” (Course of Philosophy)

[ 9 ] One should think like a real expert in mechanics, a real physicist who confines himself to the results of sense perception, of the logical combinations of the intellect and the operations of calculations. Anything that goes beyond this is idle playing with empty concepts. This is Dühring's verdict. Dühring means to raise this form of thinking, however, to its justified position. Whoever depends exclusively on that form of thinking can be sure that it supplies him with insight concerning reality. All brooding over the question of whether or not we actually can penetrate into the mysteries of the world process, all investigations, which, like Kant's, want to limit the faculty of knowledge, are caused by logical distortion. One should not yield to the temptation of a self-sacrificing self-denial of the mind that does not dare to make a positive statement about the world. What we can know is a real and untarnished presentation of the real.

“The totality of things has a systematic order and an inner logically consistent structure. Nature and history have a constitution and a development that correspond to a large extent to the general logical relations of all concepts. The general qualities and relations of the concepts of thought with which logic deals must also be valid for the special case, that its object is the totality of being, together with its chief forms. Since the most general thinking decides to a large extent what can be and how it can be, the highest principles and the main forms of logic must set the standard for all reality and its forms.” (Course of Philosophy)

Reality has produced for itself an organ in human thinking in which it can reproduce itself mentally in the form of thought in an ideal picture. Nature is everywhere ruled by an all-penetrating law that carries its own justification within itself and cannot be criticized. How could there be any meaning in an attempt to criticize the relevance of thinking, the organ of nature? It is mere foolishness to suppose that nature would create an organ through which it would reflect itself only imperfectly or incompletely. Therefore, order and law in this world must correspond to the logical order and law in human thinking. “The ideal system of our thought is the picture of the real system of objective reality; the completed knowledge has, in the form of thoughts, the same structure that the things possess in the form of real existence.”

In spite of this general agreement between thinking and reality, there exists for the former the possibility to go beyond the latter. In the element of the idea, thinking continues the operations that reality has suggested to it. In reality all bodies are divisible, but only up to a certain limit. Thinking does not stop at this limit but continues to divide in the realm of the idea. Thought sweeps beyond reality; for thought, the body is divisible into infinity. Accordingly, to thought it consists of infinitely small parts. In reality, this body consists only of a definite, finite number of small, but not infinitely small parts. In this way all concepts of infinity that transcend reality come into existence. From every event we proceed to another event that is its cause; from this cause we go again to the cause of that cause and so forth. As soon as our thinking abandons the firm ground of reality, it sweeps on into a vague infinity. It imagines that for every cause a cause has to be sought in turn so that the world is without a beginning in time. In allotting matter to space, thinking proceeds in a similar way. In transversing the sky it always finds beyond the most distant stars still other stars; it goes beyond this real fact and imagines space as infinite and filled with an infinite number of heavenly bodies. According to Dühring, one ought to realize that all such conceptions of infinity have nothing to do with reality. They only occur through the fact that thinking, with the methods that are perfectly appropriate within the realm of reality, rises above this realm and thereby gets lost in the indefinite.

[ 10 ] If in our thinking, however, we remain aware of this separation from reality, we need no longer refrain from applying our concepts borrowed from human action, to nature. Dühring, as he proceeds from such presuppositions, does not even hesitate to attribute to nature in its production an imagination any more than he does to man in his creation. “Imagination extends . . . into nature itself; it has its roots, as does all thinking in general, in the processes that precede the developed consciousness but do not produce any elements of subjective feelings” (Course of Philosophy). The thought upheld by Comte, that all world conception should be confined to a mere rearrangement of the purely factual, dominates Dühring so completely that he projects the faculty of imagination into the external world because he believes that he would simply have to reject it if it occurred merely in the human mind. Proceeding from these conceptions he arrives at other projections of such concepts as are derived from human activities. He thinks, for instance, that not only man could, in his actions, undertake fruitless attempts, which he then gives up because they do not lead to the intended aim, but that such attempts could also be observed in nature.

The character of the tentative in the formations of nature is not at all alien to reality itself, and one cannot see why one should allow only one half of the parallelism between nature outside man and nature in man, just for the sake of pleasing a shallow philosophy. If subjective error of thinking and imagining springs from the relative separation and independence of this sphere, why should not a practical error or blunder of the objective and non-thinking nature be possibly the result of a relative separation and mutual alienation of its various parts and driving forces? A true philosophy that is not intimidated by common prejudices will finally recognize the perfect parallelism and the all-pervading unity of the constitution in both directions. (Course of Philosophy)

[ 11 ] Dühring is not in the least shy when it is a question of applying the concepts to reality that thinking produces in itself. But since he has, because of his disposition, only a sense for mathematical conceptions, the picture he sketches of the world has a mathematical-schematic character. He rejects the mode of thought that was developed by Darwin and Haeckel and does not understand what motivates them to search for a reason to explain why one being develops from another. The mathematician places the forms of a triangle, square, circle and ellipse side by side; why should one not be satisfied with a similar schematic coordination in nature as well? Dühring does not aim at the genesis of nature but at the fixed formations that nature produces through the combinations of its energies, just as the mathematician studies the definite, strictly delineated forms of space. He finds nothing inappropriate in attributing to nature a purposeful striving toward such definite formations. Dühring does not interpret this purposeful tendency of nature as the conscious activity that develops in man, but he supposes it to be just as distinctly manifested in the operation of nature as every other natural manifestation. In this respect, Dühring's view is, therefore, the opposite pole of the one upheld by Friedrich Albert Lange. Lange declares the higher concepts, especially all those in which imagination has a share, to be justifiable poetic fiction; Dühring rejects all poetic imagination in concepts, but he attributes actual reality to certain higher ideas that are indispensable to him. Thus, it seems quite consistent for Lange to separate the foundation of the moral life entirely from all ideas that are rooted in reality (compare above, to Part II Chapter III). It is also consistent if Dühring wants to extend the ideas that he sees as valid in the realm of morality to nature as well. He is completely convinced that what happens in man and through man belongs to the natural events as much as do the inanimate processes. What in human life is right cannot be wrong in nature.

Such considerations contributed to making Dühring an energetic opponent to Darwin's doctrine of the struggle for existence. f the fight of all against all were the condition of perfection in nature, it would have to be the same with man's life:

Such a conception that claims to be scientific is the most immoral thing thinkable. The character of nature is in this way conceived in an anti-moral sense. It is not merely indifferent to the better morality of man but it is actually in agreement and in alliance with the bad moral principles that are followed by scoundrels. (Course of Philosophy)

According to Dühring's life-conception, what man feels as moral impulses must have its origin in nature. It is possible to observe in nature a tendency toward morality. As nature produces various forces that purposefully combine into stable formations, so it also plants into man instincts of sympathy. By them he allows himself to be determined in his social life with his fellow men. In man, the activity of nature is continued on an elevated level. Dühring attributes the faculty to produce sensations automatically out of themselves to the inanimate mechanical forces.

The mechanical causality of the forces of nature becomes, so to peak, subjectified in the fundamental sensation. The fact of this elementary process of subjectification is evidently incapable of any further explanation, for somewhere and under some conditions the unconscious mechanism of the world must develop a feeling of itself. (Course of Philosophy)

But when the world arrives at this stage, it is not that a new law begins, a realm of the spirit, but merely a continuation occurs of what had already been there in the unconscious mechanism. This mechanism, to be sure, is unconscious, but it is nevertheless wise, for “the earth with all it produces, as well as all causes of life's maintenance that lie outside, especially in the sun and all influences that come from the whole surrounding world in general—this entire organization and arrangement must be thought of as essentially produced for man, which is to say, in agreement with his well-being.” (Course of Philosophy)

[ 12 ] Dühring ascribes thought and even aims and moral tendencies to nature without admitting that he thereby idealizes nature. But, for an explanation of nature, higher ideas are necessary that transcend the real. According to Dühring, however, there must be nothing like that; he therefore changes their meaning by interpreting them as facts. Something similar happened in the world conception of Julius Hermann von Kirchmann (1802–84), who published his Philosophy of Knowledge in 1864 at about the same time Dühring's Natural Dialectic appeared. Kirchmann proceeds from the supposition that only what is perceived is real. Man is connected with reality through his perception. Everything that he does not derive from perception he must eliminate from his knowledge of reality. He succeeds in doing this if he rejects everything that is contradictory. "Contradiction is not,” is Kirchmann's second principle, which follows his first principle, “The perceived is.”

[ 13 ] Kirchmann admits only feelings and desires as the states of the soul of man that have an existence by themselves.

Knowing forms a contrast to the other two states, to feeling and desire. . . . It is possible that there is in knowing something underlying, perhaps something similar to, pressure and tension, but if it is conceived in this way it cannot be grasped in its essence. As knowing, and it is only as such that it is to be investigated here, it merely makes itself into a mirror of another being. There is no better parable for this than the mirror. Just as the mirror is the more perfect the less it shows of itself and the more it reflects another being, so it is also with knowing. Its essence is the pure reflection of a being other than itself, without mixing in its own state of being. (Philosophy of Knowledge, 1864)

One cannot imagine a greater contrast to Hegel's mode of conception than this view of knowledge. While with Hegel the essence of a thing appears in thinking, in the element that the soul adds in spontaneous activity to the percept, Kirchmann's ideal of knowledge consists of a mirror picture of percepts from which all additions by the soul itself have been eliminated.

[ 14 ] To judge Kirchmann's position in the intellectual life correctly, one must consider the great difficulty with which somebody who had the will to erect an independent structure of world conception was met in his time. The results of natural science, which were to produce a profound influence on the development of world conceptions, were still young. They were just sufficient to shake the belief in the classical idealistic world conception that had had to erect its proud structure without the aid of modern natural science. In the face of the wealth of detailed knowledge, it became difficult to reconstruct fundamental philosophical thoughts. The thread that led from the scientific knowledge of facts to a satisfactory total conception of the world was gradually lost in the general consciousness. A certain perplexity took hold of many. An understanding for the lofty flight of thought that had inspired the world conception of Hegel was scarcely to be found anywhere.

[ 1 ] In future there will be found in these columns something in the nature of anthroposophical ‘Leading Thoughts’ or principles. These may be taken to contain advice on the direction which members can give to the lectures and discussions in the several Groups. It is but a stimulus and suggestion which the Goetheanum would like to give to the whole Society. The independence of individual leading members in their work is in no way to be interfered with. We shall develop healthily if the Society gives free play to what leading members have to offer in all the different Groups. This will enrich and make manifold the life of the Society.

[ 2 ] But it should also be possible for a unity of consciousness to arise in the whole Society—which will happen if the initiative and ideas that emerge at different places become known everywhere. Thus in these columns we shall sum up in short paragraphs the descriptions and lines of thought given by me in my lectures to the Society at the Goetheanum. I imagine that those who lecture or conduct the discussions in the Groups will be able to take what is here given as guiding lines, with which they may freely connect what they have to say. This will contribute to the unity and organic wholeness of the work of the Society without there being any question of constraint.

[ 3 ] The plan will become fruitful for the whole Society if it meets with a true response—if the leading members will inform the Executive at the Goetheanum too of the content and nature of their own lectures and suggestions. Then only shall we grow, from a chaos of separate Groups, into a Society with a real spiritual content.

[ 4 ] The Leading Thoughts here given are meant to open up subjects for study and discussion. Points of contact with them will be found in countless places in the anthroposophical books and lecture-courses, so that the subjects thus opened up can be enlarged upon and the discussions in the Groups centred around them.

[ 5 ] When new ideas emerge among leading members in the several Groups, these too can be brought into connection with the suggestions we shall send out from the Goetheanum. We would thus provide an open framework for all the spiritual activity in the Society.

[ 6 ] Spiritual activity can of course only thrive by free unfoldment on the part of the active individuals—and we must never sin against this truth. But there is no need to do so when one group or member within the Society acts in proper harmony with the other. If such co-operation were impossible, the attachment of individuals or groups to the Society would always remain a purely external thing—where it should in fact be felt as an inner reality.

[ 7 ] It cannot be allowed that the existence of the Anthroposophical Society is merely made use of by this or that individual as an opportunity to say what he personally wishes to say with this or that intention. The Society must rather be the place where true Anthroposophy is cultivated. Anything that is not Anthroposophy can, after all, be pursued outside it. The Society is not there for extraneous objects.

[ 8 ] It has not helped us that in the last few years individual members have brought into the Society their own personal wishes simply because they thought that as it increased it would become a suitable sphere of action for them. It may be said, Why was this not met and counteracted with the proper firmness? If that had been done, we should now be hearing it said on all sides, ‘Oh, if only the initiative that arose in this or that quarter had been followed up at the time, how much farther we should be today!’ Well, many things were followed up, which ended in sad disaster and only resulted in throwing us back.

[ 9 ] But now it is enough. The demonstrations which individual experimenters in the Society wished to provide are done with. Such things need not be repeated endlessly. In the Executive at the Goetheanum we have a body which intends to cultivate Anthroposophy itself; and the Society should be an association of human beings who have the same object and are ready to enter into a living understanding with the Executive in the pursuit of it.

[ 10 ] We must not think that our ideal in the Society can be attained from one day to the next. Time will be needed, and patience too. If we imagined that what lay in the intentions of the Christmas meeting could be brought into existence in a few weeks' time, this again would be harmful.

Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts given out as suggestions from the Goetheanum

[ 11 ] 1. Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the universe. It arises in man as a need of the heart, of the life of feeling; and it can be justified only inasmuch as it can satisfy this inner need. He alone can acknowledge Anthroposophy, who finds in it what he himself in his own inner life feels impelled to seek. Hence only they can be anthroposophists who feel certain questions on the nature of man and the universe as an elemental need of life, just as one feels hunger and thirst.

[ 12 ] 2. Anthroposophy communicates knowledge that is gained in a spiritual way. Yet it only does so because everyday life, and the science founded on sense-perception and intellectual activity, lead to a barrier along life's way—a limit where the life of the soul in man would die if it could go no farther. Everyday life and science do not lead to this limit in such a way as to compel man to stop short at it. For at the very frontier where the knowledge derived from sense perception ceases, there is opened through the human soul itself the further outlook into the spiritual world.

[ 13 ] 3. There are those who believe that with the limits of knowledge derived from sense perception the limits of all insight are given. Yet if they would carefully observe how they become conscious of these limits, they would find in the very consciousness of the limits the faculties to transcend them. The fish swims up to the limits of the water; it must return because it lacks the physical organs to live outside this element. Man reaches the limits of knowledge attainable by sense perception; but he can recognise that on the way to this point powers of soul have arisen in him—powers whereby the soul can live in an element that goes beyond the horizon of the senses.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 14 ] 4. For certainty of feeling and for a strong unfolding of his will, man needs a knowledge of the spiritual world. However widely he may feel the greatness, beauty and wisdom of the natural world, this world gives him no answer to the question of his own being. His own being holds together the materials and forces of the natural world in the living and sensitive form of man until the moment when he passes through the gate of death. Then Nature receives this human form, and Nature cannot hold it together; she can but dissolve and disperse it. Great, beautiful, wisdom-filled Nature does indeed answer the question, How is the human form dissolved and destroyed? but not the other question, How is it maintained and held together? No theoretical objection can dispel this question from the feeling soul of man, unless indeed he prefers to lull himself to sleep. The presence of this question must incessantly maintain alive, in every human soul that is really awake, the longing for spiritual paths of World-knowledge.

[ 15 ] 5. For peace in his inner life, man needs Self-knowledge in the Spirit. He finds himself in his Thinking, Feeling and Willing. He sees how Thinking, Feeling and Willing are dependent on the natural man. In all their developments, they must follow the health and sickness, the strengthening and weakening of the body. Every sleep blots them out. Thus the experience of everyday life shows the spiritual consciousness of man in the greatest imaginable dependence on his bodily existence. Man suddenly becomes aware that in this realm of ordinary experience Self-knowledge may be utterly lost—the search for it a vain quest. Then first the anxious question arises: Can there be a Self-knowledge transcending the ordinary experiences of life? Can we have any certainty at all, as to a true Self of man? Anthroposophy would fain answer this question on a firm basis of spiritual experience. In so doing it takes its stand, not on any opinion or belief, but on a conscious experience in the Spirit—an experience in its own nature no less certain than the conscious experience in the body.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 16 ] 6. When we look out on lifeless Nature, we find a world full of inner relationships of law and order. We seek for these relationships and find in them the content of the ‘Laws of Nature.’ We find, moreover, that by virtue of these Laws lifeless Nature forms a connected whole with the entire Earth. We may now pass from this earthly connection which rules in all lifeless things, to contemplate the living world of plants. We see how the Universe beyond the Earth sends in from distances of space the forces which draw the Living forth out of the womb of the Lifeless. In all living things we are made aware of an element of being, which, freeing itself from the mere earthly connection, makes manifest the forces that work down on to the Earth from realms of cosmic space. As in the eye we become aware of the luminous object which confronts it, so in the tiniest plant we are made aware of the nature of the Light from beyond the Earth. Through this ascent in contemplation, we can perceive the difference of the earthly and physical which holds sway in the lifeless world, from the extra-earthly and ethereal which abounds in all living things.

[ 17 ] 7. We find man with his transcendent being of soul and spirit placed into this world of the earthly and the extra earthly. Inasmuch as he is placed into the earthly connection which contains all lifeless things, he bears with him his physical body. Inasmuch as he unfolds within him the forces which the living world draws into this earthly sphere from cosmic space, he has an etheric or life-body. The trend of science in modern times has taken no account of this essential contrast of the earthly and the ethereal. For this very reason, science has given birth to the most impossible conceptions of the ether. For fear of losing their way in fanciful and nebulous ideas, scientists have refrained from dwelling on the real contrast. But unless we do so, we can attain no true insight into the Universe and Man.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 18 ] 8. We may consider the nature of man in so far as it results from his physical and his etheric body. We shall find that all the phenomena of man's life which proceed from this side of his nature remain in the unconscious, nor do they ever lead to consciousness. Consciousness is not lighted up but darkened when the activity of the physical and the etheric body is enhanced. Conditions of faintness and the like can be recognised as the result of such enhancement. Following up this line of thought, we recognise that something is at work in man—and in the animal—which is not of the same nature as the physical and the etheric. It takes effect, not when the forces of the physical and the etheric are active in their own way, but when they cease to be thus active. In this way we arrive at the conception of the astral body.

[ 19 ] 9. The reality of this astral body is discovered when we rise in meditation from the Thinking that is stimulated by the outer senses to an inner act of Vision. To this end, the Thinking that is stimulated from without must be taken hold of inwardly, and experienced as such, intensely in the soul, apart from its relation to the outer world. Through the strength of soul thus engendered, we become aware that there are inner organs of perception, which see a spiritual reality working in the animal and man at the very point where the physical and the etheric body are held in check in order that consciousness may arise.

[ 20 ] 10. Consciousness, therefore, does not arise by a further enhancement of activities which proceed from the physical and etheric bodies. On the contrary, these two bodies, with their activities, must be reduced to zero—nay even below zero—to ‘make room’ for the working of consciousness. They do not generate consciousness, they only furnish the ground on which the Spirit must stand in order to bring forth consciousness within the earthly life. As man on Earth needs the ground on which to stand, so does the Spiritual, within the earthly realm, need a material foundation on which it may unfold itself. And as a planet in the cosmic spaces does not require any ground beneath it in order to assert its place, so too the Spirit, when it looks—not through the senses into material—but through its own power into spiritual things, needs no material foundation to call its conscious activity to life.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 21 ] 11. The Self-consciousness which is summed up in the ‘I’ or ‘Ego’ emerges out of the sea of consciousness. Consciousness arises when the forces of the physical and etheric bodies disintegrate these bodies, and thus make way for the Spiritual to enter into man. For through this disintegration is provided the ground on which the life of consciousness can develop. If, however, the organism is not to be destroyed, the disintegration must be followed by a reconstruction. Thus, when for an experience in consciousness a process of disintegration has taken place, that which has been demolished will be built up again exactly. The experience of Self-consciousness lies in the perception of this upbuilding process. The same process can be observed with inner vision. We then feel how the Conscious is led over into the Self-conscious by man's creating out of himself an after-image of the merely Conscious. The latter has its image in the emptiness, as it were, produced within the organism by the disintegration. It has passed into Self-consciousness when the emptiness has been filled up again from within. The Being, capable of this ‘fulfilment,’ is experienced as ‘I.’

[ 22 ] 12. The reality of the ‘I’ is found when the inner vision whereby the astral body is known and taken hold of, is carried a stage further. The Thinking which has become alive in meditation must now be permeated by the Will. To begin with we simply gave ourselves up to this new Thinking, without active Will. We thereby enabled spiritual realities to enter into this thinking life, even as in outer sense perception colour enters the eye or sound the ear. What we have thus called to life in our consciousness by a more passive devotion, must now be reproduced by ourselves, by an act of Will. When we do so, there enters into this act of Will the perception of our own ‘I’ or Ego.

[ 23 ] 13. On the path of meditation we discover, beside the form in which the ‘I’ occurs in ordinary consciousness, three further forms: (1) In the consciousness which takes hold of the etheric body, the ‘I’ appears in picture-form; yet the picture is at the same time active Being, and as such it gives man form and figure, growth, and the plastic forces that create his body. (2) In the consciousness which takes hold of the astral body, the ‘I’ is manifested as a member of a spiritual world whence it receives its forces. (3) In the consciousness just indicated, as the last to be achieved, the ‘I’ reveals itself as a self-contained spiritual Being—relatively independent of the surrounding spiritual world.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 24 ] 14. The second form of the ‘I’—first of the three forms that were indicated in the last section—appears as a ‘picture’ of the I. When we become aware of this picture-character, a light is also thrown on the quality of thought in which the ‘I’ appears before the ordinary consciousness. With all manner of reflections, men have sought within this consciousness for the ‘true I.’ Yet an earnest insight into the experiences of the ordinary consciousness will suffice to show that the ‘true I’ cannot be found therein. Only a shadow-in-thought is able to appear there—a shadowy reflection, even less than a picture. The truth of this seizes us all the more when we progress to the ‘I’ as a picture, which lives in the etheric body. Only now are we rightly kindled to search for the ‘I’, for the true being of man.

[ 25 ] 15. Insight into the form in which the ‘I’ lives in the astral body leads to a right feeling of the relation of man to the spiritual world. For ordinary consciousness this form of the ‘I’ is buried in the dark depths of the unconscious, where man enters into connection with the spiritual being of the Universe through Inspiration. Ordinary consciousness experiences only a faint echo-in-feeling of this Inspiration from the wide expanse of the spiritual world, which holds sway in depths of the soul.

[ 26 ] 16. It is the third form of the ‘I’ which gives us insight into the independent Being of man within a spiritual world. It makes us feel how, with his earthly-sensible nature, man stands before himself as a mere manifestation of what he really is. Here lies the starting-point of true Self-knowledge. For the Self which fashions man in his true nature is revealed to him in Knowledge only when he progresses from the thought of the ‘I’ to its picture, from the picture to the creative forces of the picture, and from the creative forces to the spiritual Beings who sustain them.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 27 ] 17. Man is a being who unfolds his life in the midst, between two regions of the world. With his bodily development he is a member of a ‘lower world’; with his soul-nature he himself constitutes a ‘middle world’; and with his faculties of Spirit he is ever striving towards an ‘upper world.’ He owes his bodily development to all that Nature has given him; he bears the being of his soul within him as his own portion; and he discovers in himself the forces of the Spirit, as the gifts that lead him out beyond himself to participate in a Divine World.

[ 28 ] 18. The Spirit is creative in these three regions of the World. Nature is not void of Spirit. We lose even Nature from our knowledge if we do not become aware of the Spirit within her. Nevertheless, in Nature's existence we find the Spirit as it were asleep. Yet just as sleep has its task in human life—as the ‘I’ must be asleep at one time in order to be the more awake at another—so must the World-Spirit be asleep where Nature is, in order to be the more awake elsewhere.

[ 29 ] 19. In relation to the World, the soul of man is like a dreamer if it does not pay heed to the Spirit at work within it. The Spirit awakens the dreams of the soul from their ceaseless weaving in the inner life, to active participation in the World where man's true Being has its origin. As the dreamer shuts himself off from the surrounding physical world and entwines himself into himself, so would the soul lose connection with the Spirit of the World in whom it has its source, if it turned a deaf ear to the awakening calls of the Spirit within it.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 30 ] 20. For a right development of the life of the human soul, it is essential for man to become fully conscious of working actively from out of spiritual sources in his being. Many adherents of the modern scientific world-conception are victims of a strong prejudice in this respect. They say that a universal causality is dominant in all phenomena of the world; and that if man believes that he himself, out of his own resources, can be the cause of anything, it is a mere illusion on his part. Modern Natural Science wishes to follow observation and experience faithfully in all things, but in its prejudice about the hidden causality of man's inner sources of action it sins against its own principle. For the free and active working, straight from the inner resources of the human being, is a perfectly elementary experience of self-observation. It cannot be argued away; rather must we harmonise it with our insight into the universal causation of things within the order of Nature.

[ 31 ] 21. Non-recognition of this impulse out of the Spirit working in the inner life of man, is the greatest hindrance to the attainment of an insight into the spiritual world. For to consider our own being as a mere part of the order of Nature is in reality to divert the soul's attention from our own being. Nor can we penetrate into the spiritual world unless we first take hold of the Spirit where it is immediately given to us, namely in clear and open-minded self-observation.

[ 32 ] 22. Self-observation is the first beginning in the observation of the Spirit. It can indeed be the right beginning, for if it is true, man cannot possibly stop short at it, but is bound to progress to the further spiritual content of the World. As the human body pines away when bereft of physical nourishment, so will the man who rightly observes himself feel that his Self is becoming stunted if he does not see working into it the forces from a creative spiritual World outside him.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 33 ] 23. Passing through the gate of death, man goes out into the spiritual world, in that he feels falling away from him all the impressions and contents of soul which he received during earthly life through the bodily senses and the brain. His consciousness then has before it in an all-embracing picture-tableau the whole content of life which, during his earthly wanderings, entered as pictureless thoughts into his memory, or which—remaining unnoticed by the earthly consciousness—nevertheless made a subconscious impression on his soul. After a very few days these pictures grow faint and fade away. When they have altogether vanished, he knows that he has laid aside his etheric body too; for in the etheric body he can recognise the bearer of these pictures.

[ 34 ] 24. Having laid aside the etheric body, man has the astral body and the Ego as the members of his being still remaining to him. The astral body, so long as it is with him, brings to his consciousness all that during earthly life was the unconscious content of the soul when at rest in sleep. This content includes the judgements instilled into the astral body by Spirit-beings of a higher World during the periods of sleep—judgements which remain concealed from earthly consciousness. Man now lives through his earthly life a second time, yet so, that the content of his soul is now the judgement of his thought and action from the standpoint of the Spirit-world. He lives it through in backward order: first the last night, then the last but one, and so on.

[ 35 ] 25. This judgement of his life, which man experiences in the astral body after passing through the gate of death, lasts as long as the sum-total of the times he spent during his earthly life in sleep.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 36 ] 26. Only when the astral body has been laid aside—when the judgement of his life is over—man enters the spiritual world. There he stands in like relation to Beings of purely spiritual character as on Earth to the beings and processes of the Nature-kingdoms. In spiritual experience, everything that was his outer world on Earth now becomes his inner world. He no longer merely perceives it, but experiences it in its spiritual being which was hid from him on Earth, as his own world.

[ 37 ] 27. In the Spirit-realm, man as he is on Earth becomes an outer world. We gaze upon him, even as on Earth we gaze upon the stars and clouds, the mountains and rivers. Nor is this ‘outer world’ any less rich in content than the glory of the Cosmos as it appears to us in earthly life.

[ 38 ] 28. The forces begotten by the human Spirit in the Spirit-realm work on in the fashioning of earthly Man, even as the deeds we accomplish in the Physical work on as a content of the soul in the life after death.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 39 ] 29. In the evolved Imaginative Knowledge there works what lives as soul and spirit in the inner life of man, fashioning the physical body in its life, and unfolding man's existence in the physical world on this bodily foundation. Over against the physical body, whose substances are renewed again and again in the process of metabolism, we here come to the inner nature of man, unfolding itself continuously from birth (or conception) until death. Over against the physical Space-body, we come to a Time-body.

[ 40 ] 30. In the Inspired Knowledge there lives, in picture-form, what man experiences in a spiritual environment in the time between death and a new birth. What Man is in his own Being and in relation to cosmic worlds—without the physical and etheric bodies by means of which he undergoes his earthly life—is here made visible.

[ 41 ] 31. In the Intuitive Knowledge there comes to consciousness the working-over of former earthly lives into the present. In the further course of evolution these former lives have been divested of their erstwhile connections with the physical world. They have become the purely spiritual kernel of man's being, and, as such, are working in his present life. In this way, they too are an object of Knowledge—of that Knowledge which results with the further unfolding of the Imaginative and Inspired.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 42 ] 32. In the head of man, the physical Organisation is a copy, an impress of the spiritual individuality. The physical and the etheric part of the head stand out as complete and self-contained pictures of the Spiritual; beside them, in independent soul-spiritual existence, there stand the astral and the Ego-part. Thus in the head of man we have to do with a development, side by side, of the physical and etheric, relatively independent on the one hand, and of the astral and Ego-organisation on the other.

[ 43 ] 33. In the limbs and metabolic part of man the four members of the human being are intimately bound up with one another. The Ego-organisation and astral body are not there beside the physical and etheric part. They are within them, vitalising them, working in their growth, their faculty of movement and so forth. Through this very fact, the limbs and metabolic part of man is like a germinating seed, striving for ever to unfold; striving continually to become a ‘head,’ and—during the earthly life of man—no less continually prevented.

[ 44 ] 34. The rhythmic Organisation stands in the midst. Here the Ego-organisation and astral body alternately unite with the physical and etheric part, and loose themselves again. The breathing and the circulation of the blood are the physical impress of this alternate union and loosening. The inbreathing process portrays the union; the out-breathing the loosening. The processes in the arterial blood represent the union; those in the venous blood the loosening.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 45 ] 35. We understand the physical nature of man only if we regard it as a picture of the soul and spirit. Taken by itself, the physical corporality of man is unintelligible. But it is a picture of the soul and spirit in different ways in its several members. The head is the most perfect and complete symbolic picture of the soul and spirit. All that pertains to the system of the metabolism and the limbs is like a picture that has not yet assumed its finished forms, but is still being worked upon. Lastly, in all that belongs to the rhythmic Organisation of man, the relation of the soul and spirit to the body is intermediate between these opposites.

[ 46 ] 36. If we contemplate the human head from this spiritual point of view, we shall find in it a help to the understanding of spiritual Imaginations. For in the forms of the head, Imaginative forms are as it were coagulated to the point of physical density.

[ 47 ] 37. Similarly, if we contemplate the rhythmic part of man's Organisation it will help us to understand Inspirations. The physical appearance of the rhythms of life bears even in the sense-perceptible picture the character of Inspiration. Lastly, in the system of the metabolism and the limbs—if we observe it in full action, in the exercise of its necessary or possible functions—we have a picture, supersensible yet sensible, of pure supersensible Intuitions.

Good morning, gentlemen! So, you probably have another question?

Mr. Müller asks what might cause a change in the pupils?

Dr. Steiner: That is a very personal question! You would have to come down to the Clinical Therapeutic Institute; when I go down again, I will tell you so that you can come then. That is a medical matter.

Another question: what does the vertical stripe on the sides of the fish mean?

Another question: a man who drank an awful lot of alcohol died eight weeks ago. In the last few days before he died, he ate chocolate and sugar, which he had never done in his life. Why do you think that was?

Dr. Steiner: Now, regarding the question of the longitudinal stripe in fish, you must be clear about the following. When you look at any being, be it of the plant or animal world, you have to ask yourself how these beings relate to the outside world. You see, plants have their green color, first of all, in their leaves. This green color in the leaves comes from the fact that the plant has a very specific relationship to light and warmth. The plant absorbs what comes from the light on the one hand and gives back something else, which it does not absorb. And that is where the green color of the plant comes from.

Likewise, you may ask yourself: what is the reason for one or the other in the case of fish? Now I would just like to point out that you will see that fish that live more in cloudy water have a much darker color than those that live in bright water. Those fish that seek out the darkness are bluish, even black. Those fish that live in lighter places are lighter in color themselves. So you can see how the external influence of light and warmth affects the fish.

And consider other animals that live in areas where there is a lot of snow, for example polar bears. They themselves take on a white color. Everything that lives is somehow exposed to the environment.

Now, in the case of fish, there is a very clear relationship between their own being and their environment. And these stripes on the edge are there to make the fish finely sensitive to light and warmth in their environment. So the fish become particularly sensitive as a result. This is not so useful for them - I have spoken of this before - for the way they move, but it is useful for the way they process light and warmth internally, so that this is a kind of nerve organ.

As for your other question about the man who drank alcohol all his life and now, before his end, began to become very pious and ate the pious chocolate and sugar – you say: the last days before his death – well, this phenomenon can easily be understood when compared to numerous others that occur throughout life. I have met many people who have grown old. As they grew old, for example, they saw their handwriting become more and more shaky. The handwriting became shaky; they could no longer write properly, and it was precisely in their handwriting that they had grown old. They might have had a handwriting in which they wrote, let's say, Lehfeld (clear, distinct), and then they wrote: Lehfeld (shaky). But then, in the last days before their death, it turned out that they could write in a certain clear handwriting again; they could suddenly write well again. I have met many people who had regained their former ability to write clearly before their death. It has also been observed in numerous cases – I am not just sharing my own observations in this area, but well-attested observations that have been made – that people who have learned some language as a child – as a child they may have been in some foreign country, learned a language and forgot it again; that does happen; let us assume that as a forty- or fifty-year-old man, they had absolutely no opportunity to communicate with anyone else in this language – suddenly, a few days before their death, they begin to speak this language quite understandably again. It came out again! Yes, you see, these are very significant phenomena. What is actually going on here? This is what happens: when a person dies, his physical body, that is, one part of his being, remains on earth; it dissolves into the earth, is destroyed by the earth. I have already told you that the next part of the human being, the etheric body, gradually dissolves into the general cosmic ether a few days after death. And then, the astral body and the real self remain for the human being to pass through the spiritual world. They then pass through the spiritual world.

There is a complete separation of the individual members of the human being. And anyone who has an eye for it can observe in someone whose death is near how the various members, physical body, etheric body, astral body, separate from one another. Now, what does it mean when someone changes his writing a few days before his death? Yes, gentlemen, we do not write with our physical body! What do we actually write with? We write with the I! We use the physical body only as a tool of the I when we write. And our I does not grow old! With your I, you are as young today as you were when you were born. The I does not grow old. The astral body does not age to the same extent as the physical body. But it is the physical body that one has to use as a tool if one wants to write, so the physical body has to grasp the pen with its hand. Now, as a person grows older, he becomes weaker and weaker and can no longer properly access his physical body. But not only that, but all kinds of things are deposited in the physical body itself. And the result of this is that the person can no longer use his fingers properly. He becomes clumsy, trembles, instead of making firm strokes when he writes. When a person is close to death, the etheric body begins to separate from the physical body. There is a loosening. Sometimes this can happen a few days before death; sometimes it happens at the last moment. It cannot be said that one should no longer try to heal a person whom one has observed for days before his death, that he could also die; on the other hand, what has become loose can be joined together again. One must always, as long as a person is alive, try to heal him under all circumstances. But the fact is that in many people the etheric body loosens for days before death.

Now, when the etheric body loosens, the person becomes stronger. That a person becomes stronger when his etheric body loosens, you can also see from something else. There is a kind of madman who develops tremendous strength, quite extraordinary strength. You might often be amazed at what such a madman can achieve in terms of strength. Not only are the beatings he gives out much more severe than those of others, but furniture that no one would think of lifting can sometimes be lifted with ease by a madman. So you see, something strange happens that distinguishes such a person from a normal person. What happens in the case of the insane person? Well, in the case of the insane person, the etheric body is always somewhat loose, or the astral body is loosened. Now, the human being is not exactly strong through the physical body, but weak. He must serve the physical body through the etheric or astral body. It is quite correct to say in the vernacular: “Something is loose in him” - something is loosened. The people sometimes speak very correctly because an instinct for the supersensible is present in the people, and in such old folk sayings one should not see something contemptible, but something that is absolutely true. When the etheric or astral body of a madman has become loosened and thus strong, then, as a madman, he is in the same position as someone whose etheric body has already become loosened because he is dying in a few days. And when he becomes stronger in the etheric body, he can write better again. When he becomes stronger in the astral body – because everything that one has forgotten is in there – then he draws out of the astral body what he has forgotten and can again speak the language he used to speak.

But now take your case. You see, I didn't know the man and therefore don't know how he lived. Perhaps you knew him? Then you can answer certain questions. Did you know him well? Well, you see, with a person like that, it is very important to consider whether he had a woman or someone else in his life. Perhaps it could have been you who constantly told him how harmful it is to drink so much alcohol? (This is confirmed.) Now, there we have something that will lead us on the trail. He had people around him who always admonished him not to drink so much because it is not good for him. With this man, as they say, it went in one ear and out the other. This is another popular saying that is not without foundation. It is true that man is so constituted that certain things go in at one ear and out at the other. Why? Well, because the astral body does not hear them. The ear is only the instrument of hearing. The astral body does not hear.

But now it happens that the astral body hears the matter, but the physical body does not participate because the person in question is too weak. Now think about this. The man heard from Mr. Erbsmehl himself on my account: You are a completely crazy guy – I'm saying it quite radically now, aren't I – because you get drunk every other moment! That's not on, it's inhuman! and so on, and the man swallowed it all. That's what happened, it happens in life that people swallow the matter and then move on again. But his astral body has kept something of it. Perhaps you said it so strongly and so often that the astral body and the etheric body could not get away without keeping it. As long as they were stuck inside the physical body without any hindrance, they did not hear anything. At the moment when the physical body became so relaxed that the etheric and astral bodies were loosened, yes, then suddenly the thought came into the person through the etheric and astral bodies: Mr. Erbsmehl might have been right after all! Maybe it is completely crazy that I have drunk so much throughout my life. Now I want to do penance, now that things have been loosened up, as you can imagine. The astral body and the ether body say: Aha, now he is not drinking alcohol, now he is drinking chocolate and sugar water! Perhaps he would have drunk lemonade too, if there had been any. The fact that something like this can happen proves, especially to the person who looks at things sensibly, that all kinds of things can get into a person that do not come out. I also told you the opposite case once. The opposite case was where the story did not remain in the astral and etheric bodies, but entered the physical body too strongly, where, so to speak, one listened far too much to the matter. The opposite case is this: a former acquaintance of mine — he was a very learned gentleman — it happened one day that his consciousness and memory left him. He no longer knew who he once was, what he had done; he no longer knew anything of his entire erudition. He had forgotten everything. He didn't even know that he was himself, that he was he. But nevertheless, his mind was clear. His mind was working clearly. He went to the train station, bought a train ticket and traveled far. He had also taken money with him, what little he had left. He could travel far. When he arrived at the station for which the ticket was valid, he bought a new ticket. And he did that several times, not knowing anything about what he was doing. But the mind is so separate from the actual person that everything happened quite rationally, as animals act rationally - as I have often shown you in many a good example - without having an ego. Now that he found himself again, his memory came back. He knew who he was, and his learning also came back to his mind. But he found himself in Berlin in a shelter for the homeless! That's where he ended up last. He left from Stuttgart. It was later established that he left from there. He was unconscious in Budapest and so on. He was able to make the journey from Berlin to Stuttgart again. Then someone from his family, who was terribly worried, picked him up. He was able to do that again. He then ended it by committing suicide. One time it was due to unconsciousness, the other time it was suicide.

But what is going on in such a case? Yes, you see, I actually have this man I've been telling you about in front of me, so that I could actually paint him anytime. The man had eyes that made you think they wanted to go deeper and deeper into his head. He had something here at the front, as if his nose had dug into – all very subtly suggested, of course – the physical body. He spoke to you in a very strange way. He spoke to you in such a way that he was completely convinced of his words in a different way than another person. You had the feeling that he always tasted his own words on his tongue and swallowed them, he liked them so much. He likes it so much when he speaks, he swallows it all in. And if you contradicted him in any way, he would get quite angry. But he didn't show much of this anger on the outside, but his face distorted. If a car rattled somewhere on the street, he would jump terribly; if you told him any kind of news, he would jump just as much, whether it was happy or sad.

You see, this person had listened too much, and everything expressed itself immediately in his physical body. And so he had the habit of always burying his astral body very deep in his physical body; he didn't keep anything to himself, like your alcoholic, but everything was buried in the physical body until the physical body was ready to also move his own self for a while.

There you have the opposite case. In the case of this alcoholic, the admonitions remained in the astral body and came out when it loosened. In the case of the other person I told you about, the astral body became so deeply embedded in the physical body that the physical body also left on its own.

So you see, there are indications everywhere in the human being that these higher limbs, these supersensible limbs, are intimately connected with his physical body and with his etheric body. All this shows you, however, that you can really only get to know life by looking at such life contexts, which directly reveal to you: There is a physical body in a person, there is an etheric body in a person, there is an astral body, there is an I.

You can also see from the case where the person suddenly develops a completely different appetite under the moral pressure of what he has left in the astral body in life, how other phenomena can also occur. There is the following example. I will tell you an interesting story now. There was once a woman who dealt in vegetables and similar things. It is still the time that lies far behind us. The woman went from house to house with her vegetable basket. Now, she was always seen as a woman who saw life from a greengrocer's point of view. She laughed when someone said something funny; otherwise she was indifferent to life. She carried her vegetables into the houses, took her money and spent her life that way. Once she came to an apartment and wanted to sell vegetables. There was no one else there but the master of the house, who opened the door for her. And this master of the house had a very special look. He looked at people very sternly and had often noticed that when he looked at people with his special look, people would talk about things they would otherwise remain silent about. Now the following came to light; this is a very well-attested fact. This vegetable woman came to the man; he looked at her. She was frightened. He said nothing at all, just looked at her. He saw that she was frightened, didn't say a word, but kept looking at her. Now she was not only frightened, but said, “Don't look at me like that! Please don't look at me like that, I'll tell you everything!” He said nothing, but kept looking at her. So the woman said, ‘Yes, but I only did it out of fear.’ He said nothing again, he just kept looking at her. ‘Don't look at me like that, I really wouldn't have done it if I hadn't done it out of fear!’ He said nothing again, just kept looking at her. “Yes, I want to tell you everything, but don't look at me like that!” He looked at her. ‘I want to tell you everything! Yes, you see, I wouldn't have murdered it if I hadn't, if I hadn't done it out of fear!’ He continued to look at her. “Yes, I was so afraid of people, the child would have said something very bad about me, and so I did it out of fear. I wasn't even properly conscious!” And you see, this woman told him about a child murder she had committed from A to Z! What happened there?

The thing is this: this man had a certain keen eye. When a person has normal eyes, well, he talks to others, he doesn't particularly pierce them. When someone has an eye that can easily fixate, which then becomes penetrating, then magnetizes, one could say, the etheric body of the person. And the conscience is located in the etheric body. If the etheric body is properly connected to the physical body, well, no, when something stirs in it, the person will immediately push it down. But if the etheric body is magnetized by such a look, then this etheric body loosens. And if a person has something on his conscience, then it loosens and comes up and disturbs the astral body and the ego. And the consequence of this is that through this loosening of the conscience that has happened to the etheric body, the person makes confessions that he would not otherwise make.

These are the things that show, in turn, how the etheric body, when it is artificially loosened from the physical body, works independently and how the physical body actually hides much in the person that the person carries within himself. And that comes out when the etheric body loosens, possibly - not always, but possibly - before death.

There has also been a lot of abuse in these matters. If you were a bit of a life observer before the war, you could find the same thing over and over again in every hotel or wherever people pick up letters that are piled up where letters are usually piled up: something with the label of an American company. The same thing was everywhere. What had happened back then? Well, an American company had been founded that had branches. There was one in Berlin, in Frankfurt, in most of the larger cities. So business must have been good! It was announced that anyone who wanted to gain power over humanity would receive little books from this American company. All he has to do is send in a certain amount of money and he gets little books, and these little books contain instructions on how to gain power over humanity. Well, all the traveling salesmen, all the agents, they thought to themselves: “That's a nice thing, gaining power over people. Gosh, we'll sell a lot of those, no one will be able to resist us!” These little books immediately started to contain instructions on how the person concerned should adjust his eyes so that he does not look the other in the eye, but at the point between the eyes, he should stare fixedly; then the other person is magnetized and comes under his influence and does what he wants. Well, you know, the wine travelers and the other travelers have had all this sent to them. And you could see that, especially in hotels where such agents had stayed, these letters and things were always sent in bulk. Most of them didn't do better business because of that, but American society did do good business. It was of no use to most of them, but it might have been of use to a few; and they did something that no one should do under any circumstances, because it is a sin against human freedom. No person may aspire to get power over another person in such a way! And if nature gives it to him, as it did to that person of whom I told you, then it can indeed become bad enough under certain circumstances, but then it is nature that gives something like a special look; it is much less abused than with the person who wants to learn the matter. Now, during the war these follies have decreased and now they actually no longer exist. But one can say that one can learn from these things, on the one hand, how people themselves exploit the spiritual, and how the worst materialists – because they were mostly materialists, who allowed these things to come to them – also turn to the spiritual when it is a matter of making a profit with the spiritual. They do not believe in him, but they turn to the spirit when it is a matter of making a profit with the spirit! So I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that these things can be terribly abused.

But there are many other things to be considered. What people consciously strive for in this little book is, after all, practiced, albeit to a lesser extent, by some people who also achieve something with it for themselves. Perhaps you have occasionally attended meetings where speakers have spoken. Now, you will admit that the conviction that emanates from the speaker does not always play the only role, but that a tremendous amount of what emanates from the speaker as an influence also plays a role. And that is the case; the most popular popular speakers are sometimes those people who gain influence over crowds of people or other masses in an improper way. One does indeed have very special experiences in this time.

For example, I am currently writing essays about my own life at the Goetheanum. These essays, which some of you may have read, strive with a certain intention to tell the story as simply as possible, without embellishment, in the most straightforward way, with no particular emphasis. Now a critic has already been found who particularly criticizes this, who says, I do not bring poetry and truth like Goethe, but truth with all sobriety. Yes, that is precisely what I am striving for! And I do not strive at all to achieve what is demanded of such a critic. In the case of such a critic today, there is precisely that which, in contrast to a sober style, is a 'drunken' style. And, isn't it true, this drunken style is almost everywhere today. It is no longer important to people to somehow make an impact with what they say, but they need words that overwhelm others. That is where the wrong influence begins. If you write in the way I try to write, you have an effect on the ego, which has free will. But if you write in a drunken style, you have an effect on the astral body, which is not so free but is in fact unfree. You can influence the astral body especially when you talk to people in a way you know they like to hear.

Those people who do not want to convince in this way but to persuade usually use as sentences and words what pleases others, while the one who wants to tell the truth cannot always say what pleases others. For in our time it is even so that as a rule people do not like the truth. So just from the way a person writes his sentences, one can see: If a person writes his sentences in such a way that they are logical, that one sentence follows from the other, then he will have an effect on the ego of the other person, which is free. If a person writes his sentences in such a way that they are not logical, but rather are intended above all to please the other person, to stir up the other person's desires, urges, instincts, passions, then he will act on the other person's astral body, which is not free. And that is a characteristic of our time, that freedom is so often talked about, and that the greatest sin against freedom actually comes from public speaking and writing today. Actually, public speaking and writing is misused everywhere.

So you will understand the ordinary conditions of life better if you can distinguish between the I and the astral body in such a way that you can see how you can have an effect on one or the other. You will also be able to understand better such a phenomenon as when, before dying, a person starts to write again, or speaks a language again that he has forgotten, or, under a moral influence that he has ignored all his life, eats things that he would otherwise never have eaten. There you can see how the I is embedded in the physical body and loosens up.

Another question: last time, Dr. spoke about arsenic. Today, the opium question has become topical in Switzerland. Some time ago, an article by Dr. Usteri was published in the “Goetheanum” about the poppy plant in connection with opium. Would it be possible to hear something about opium?

Another question: About two years ago, the Einstein theory was introduced to the public. Today, we hear little more about it. Has this theory actually been proven, or has it also been neglected?

Dr. Steiner: Well, I would have to talk about Einstein's theory at length, because it is difficult to discuss Einstein's theory briefly. If you want to understand it properly, you need mathematical knowledge. But the strange thing about Einstein's theory was that everyone talked about it without understanding it, but only on authority, because, as I said, you need some mathematical knowledge. But insofar as one can understand something without mathematical knowledge – there is no time for that today – I would like to explain something so that you can see how it is based on truth on the one hand, and a great error on the other. People are still talking about it today. The general public is such that it takes to something when it is spread through the newspapers; but it does not remember anything. The public has forgotten it today, but the relevant university professors are now Einsteinians. So among the actual scholars, Einstein's theory is much more widespread today than it was years ago. I will discuss some of this next time, as far as one can do it in a very popular way. I just need more time than we have today. — Does anyone else have a question?

Question: I would particularly like to know the difference between alcohol and opium. According to Dr. Usteri's article, we can assume that poppy juice has an upward effect, while alcohol has a downward effect.

Dr. Steiner: You see, gentlemen, here we must ask ourselves: when a person drinks alcohol, what part of his being is influenced? The I. And this has the blood circulation as its tool in the physical body. The influence of alcohol on the I reveals itself physically in the blood circulation. So that the human being is very strongly influenced by alcohol in that which actually constitutes his life, in the blood circulation.

With opium, it is the case that it has a particularly strong effect on the astral body, and it affects it in such a way that the person draws it out of the physical body. You see, it is the case that he then perceives this drawing out of the astral body from the physical body as a very great sense of well-being. He is rid of his physical body for a while, and he perceives that as a sense of well-being.

People easily say, as you have probably heard, that sleep is sweet. But when we are asleep, we cannot really feel the sweetness of sleep because we are asleep! We cannot feel the sweetness of sleep; we can only experience it in retrospect. And because we experience it in retrospect, it may happen that people say that sleep is sweet. But when a person takes poppy juice or opium, he feels this sweetness, because in his body he is actually as if asleep and yet awake at the same time. This allows him to enjoy the sweetness, and he feels this sweetness and feels tremendously well in it. It is as if his whole body is permeated with sugar, with a very special sugar, with sweetness through and through. But at the same time his astral body is free from the physical body, and so he perceives, even if not clearly, all kinds of things. He does not have ordinary dreams, but perceives the spiritual world. He makes great journeys through the spiritual world. He likes that. It lifts him up, as you say, into the spiritual world. When he drinks alcohol, on the other hand, his physical body is completely taken up, right down to his blood. His astral body is not freed. Everything is taken up even more by the physical body. Therefore, when a person drinks alcohol, his physical body takes up much more of him than usual. That is precisely the difference. With opium, the soul and spirit are freed, firstly enjoying the physical body in its sweetness, but secondly it goes on journeys, whereby it enters the spiritual world, albeit somewhat disorderly, but nevertheless into the spiritual world. And the Orientals have much of what they describe in the wrong way, but still from the spiritual world, from opium, hashish and the like.

These are the things that show you, in turn, how one cannot understand such things in any other way than by taking into account the higher members of human nature.

We will continue the discussion next Saturday at nine o'clock.

The word initiation belongs to the field of theosophy. When one speaks of theosophy or spiritual science, one should not have the feeling of dealing with something that has only come into being recently. Theosophy is as old as thinking, the yearning of humanity for something eternal, something lasting, which, as a supersensible element, underlies everything that is transitory. In the course of his existence, man becomes more and more familiar with the things and beings around him, insofar as they make an impression on him, hindering or promoting his volitional impulses. He comes to a more or less clear understanding of these things through the forces that prevail behind them; he cannot get to know that which is hidden behind the visible in this way.

Spiritual science is now based on two solid pillars. They may seem like hypotheses to someone who has not yet penetrated spiritual science, but they are certain facts for someone who is increasingly immersed in it.

The first pillar is the belief that behind everything the mind can perceive as the visible world, there is an invisible world, and the second pillar is that man is able to penetrate into this world of the invisible and hidden. Those people who are completely fascinated by materialistic views will consider such a pursuit as fantastic. The judgment of our contemporaries says that in the childhood stage of humanity, people dreamt of something inexplicable behind appearances; because they could not see, they dreamt of gods, ghosts! But today, through science, man has penetrated into the laws of existence, he stands on the manly stage of his existence and could no longer hold on to such childish views.

It is absolutely true that our admirable science has offered us the opportunity to see everything that transcends the knowledge of the physical plane quite differently from how our ancestors saw it. But if, at the same time, it wants to replace the views of our ancestors about the knowledge of the invisible, if, for example, it presents only the most perfect knowledge of the physical as the ideal of natural science, then it is no longer true for us.

Anyone who, knowing the laws of mechanics, looks at a watch, for example, will be able to say, based on this law: This is how the wheels turn, this is how the entire mechanism of the clock moves. He can explain the clock completely from itself. But can we therefore say that the watchmaker is superfluous? If we should ever be able to explain the world like a clock from itself completely and utterly, that does not make what lies behind the world unnecessary.

Others say that there may well be something transcendental behind the sensual, but that we are limited in our knowledge and that human beings are not capable of penetrating into the knowledge of this transcendental. Therefore, they say, there is no need to concern ourselves with it. All this belongs to the realm of faith or belief, and should remain where it belongs.

Spiritual science, however, says the opposite. It says that it is possible for man to gain knowledge of these worlds, that he can make himself capable of penetrating into the supersensible. Admittedly not with the abilities and means that the naturalistic researcher applies in his research; with those one cannot penetrate into the realm of the supersensible. But there are dormant powers in man that he can develop. When he develops them, something occurs for him that can be compared to the operation of a person born blind. It is a tremendous event for a person born blind when the bleak darkness that has surrounded him until now disappears and the world of light and colors emerges for him out of the darkness. A world that has always been around him and that he could not perceive, he can now perceive. But it is an even more powerful, glorious, and higher event for a person when, through inner awakening, through rebirth, inner spiritual senses are awakened in him. Goethe was well informed in these matters. He says: There are many unrecognized and unacknowledged worlds around us, spiritual worlds, and no man today has the right to deny them because he does not recognize them. That would be just as logical as if the blind wanted to deny the world of colors and light around him because he cannot perceive them.

We can develop the ability to perceive the worlds around us. Goethe points this out when he says: Our eyes were indifferent, as yet non-seeing organs. The moment the elemental powers of light conjured up the eyes, a new world of light and color was there for the human being. The development is endless and goes on and on, and when man develops these non-sensory, these supersensible spiritual senses, then new, unknown, unrecognized worlds open up for him, but they were always around him.

Our contemporaries, however, are not inclined to recognize this. Spiritual science encounters much opposition, it is said that it deals with dreamt, fantastic objects. The spiritual scientist can best see how justified it is that people of the present day make this accusation against spiritual science. But it is necessary today to present this spiritual science to people. Humanity will recognize it, it just needs time.

When we speak about the development of such organs and abilities that lie within the human being and that open up new worlds for the human being, we are dealing with people who could be called “we-people” or “man-people”.

When we pick up newspapers or magazines that deal with these things, they say, “We cannot recognize,” or, “One cannot recognize.” They consider the spiritual scientist to be immodest when he says, “We can recognize.” But what is immodest? To want to decide something that one knows nothing about. It is logical to only talk about and decide something that one knows something about.

The source is already indicated, from where what spiritual science says is taken. It is taken from those worlds that can be entered when man develops his spiritual senses. The ordinary knowledge that man has consists of a series of judgments and so on, which man strings together, and this thread constantly slips out of his hand, constantly leaves him. It also leaves him when he sinks into sleep, when happiness and suffering, joy and pain, everything that surrounds him in his daily life, disappears for him. But no one can say, if he possesses logic, that this sum of joy and suffering, of pain and sorrow, etc., disappears in the evening and reappears in the morning. It survives the state of sleep, and man must ask himself: Where then is man's soul, that which we feel as our inner being, that which enchants and moves us, where are these inner powers while we sleep until the moment when they move back into man and become scouts for the world around us? Where is that which conjures up a world of dreams for us, of light, color, warmth and cold? Where is it during the state of sleep? There knowledge escapes man and it also escapes him when death occurs, when that mysterious hour occurs in which man leaves his physical cover forever. Has then the whole content of the soul gone with those physical organs when man no longer retains any physical organs? There it is again, where knowledge of the senses escapes man. Man can say: there must be something behind it, but the man who lives in the world has no need to know what death's gate closes, what sleep hides, we are here to create, to work in the visible world, what do we care about the invisible? But if man could develop his full activity in the sensual, then that could well apply, then he could say: may there be something after death! But the knowledge of what lies beyond death has the greatest significance for life. For the forces in the invisible continually extend into the world of the senses, and we can make use of them if we gain access to the supersensible world. The person who knows nothing of it will gradually, as he lives estranged, be weak and powerless in the knowledge of the supersensible world even in the sensual world. Every object, every being in our environment is permeated by the supersensible world, and we behave weakly and powerlessly if we know nothing of this supersensory. Take, for example, a piece of iron: it contains supersensible magnetic power. If we know nothing of this power, we can only use this iron halfway. And so, everywhere in the sensible, supersensible forces and entities lie dormant. Knowledge of the supersensible is necessary for the human being; it is not something that merely satisfies curiosity. The human being needs this knowledge for his work and activity in this world.

This supersensible world can be reached by developing the powers and abilities that lie dormant in people. Spiritual science points people to these powers and abilities and shows them how to develop them. Spiritual science is not new; there have always been initiates in humanity, and initiation is nothing more than the development of these supersensible powers in people. However, very few people know that there have always been initiated people who were prepared in initiation or secret schools and were able to use the powers and abilities developed there to have experiences in the supersensible worlds just like ordinary people in the sensual world. Such people were always called initiates.

Only those who had passed exact tests in moral, intellectual and spiritual respects could be admitted to such a school, so that they would be able to use those powerful experiences that open up to man when he has crossed the gates to the higher worlds in the right way for the benefit of his fellow human beings. Therefore man had to pass tests; he could only become a disciple if he passed such tests. Of course, people imagine them differently than they actually lie behind them. A person can become initiated if he is able to cross the great secret threshold that lies between the sensual and the supersensual. Initiation is nothing more than what in everyday life would be an operation for someone born blind, but even greater and more powerful, because the senses that make a person capable of perceiving the spiritual worlds are operated on for the person to be initiated. These senses are present in every human being in the germ, they only need to be developed, and that is what is called initiation.

The elementary knowledge that is imparted in Theosophy is only the foundation for a much, much higher knowledge. Even this elementary knowledge of Theosophy today is already one that could not be imparted to wider circles until recently. For it is not without danger for people when they approach this knowledge, although these dangers are often wrongly assessed and exaggerated. The abilities that lie dormant in every soul are those that must be developed: we call them thinking, feeling and willing. Every soul has these abilities. It is a fact that through the habitual exercise of these faculties, when man develops them in the right way, he becomes able to open up a whole range of worlds.

These three abilities can be trained to penetrate ever higher and further into the spiritual worlds if the person has patience and energy to devote to their training. When the person has risen to a certain level, only then are they ready to become an initiate.

We distinguish preliminary stages and actual initiation. However, there is something else associated with it that justifies keeping this knowledge secret from the general public. It still exists as a secret in the sense that for those who are not yet known, for those who have not yet penetrated, what Theosophy communicates initially seems strangely paradoxical; one must not associate anything magical with it. However, there is something else associated with it that justifies the fact that this knowledge still has to be kept secret from the general public. Even what is communicated gives the impression of being fantastic and strange, so that many consider it immature; the spiritual scientist is well aware of this and it cannot be otherwise. But when a person ascends to the sources that underlie everything here in the world of sense, then the human being's judgment about the world and life is so radically transformed that one can say it must seem completely and utterly paradoxical to the ordinary person, so that he cannot do anything with it.

One must be prepared slowly and gradually to be able to bear the truth, and a large part of the secret training consists of learning to bear the great, all-encompassing truths. Initiation comes to him who is prepared and developed to be able to bear these truths. The time must come when a larger number of people, for their good and further development, must have the opportunity to receive this initiation.

Thus we speak first of a preliminary training. In this training, there must be a development of thinking, feeling and will. The former is easily neglected. There is often a greed to be able to look into the supersensible worlds. But those who are to make such knowledge possible for people must first insist that firm, secure thinking be developed first, a thinking that is free of sensuality. What is sensuality-free thinking? If we recall how much of our thinking is built on sensuality: we see the world around us, we absorb its impressions through our senses. An image remains in the person, a memory remains of it, then we think about it; we calculate, everything that is reminiscences of external impressions in our thinking, if we disregard what has been ignited by the outside world, then so little remains that a philosopher says: “It is impossible for a person to develop a thought that is not fueled by the outside world.” Plato had a strange inscription placed above his Temple of Truth: “No stranger to geometry may enter here.” This is not to be taken literally, but rather to mean that one does not necessarily need to learn geometry in order to penetrate into the supersensible world, nor did Plato mean that with this inscription, but that everyone must think as one must think in geometry if one wants to penetrate into the higher worlds. A child, when it learns 2 x 3 = 6 with beans or on the fingers, learns the truth that 2 x 3 = 6. But it is not necessary for a person to learn thinking based on a number in this way. Using points instead of beans is much more useful. It is necessary to arrive at this truth through inner contemplation and to thus obtain contemplation that is free from the senses. For example, a circle is constructed through thinking that is free from the senses. A circle that I draw on the board is a series of chalk mountains when I look at it under the microscope; it is not a circle, the senses cannot give it, it must be there in the inner vision. One must seek the circle in a vision free of the senses.

There is such a thinking free of sensuality in all fields, even if it is denied by some people, for example, for the living beings around us. This has been proven by Goethe. He says in his “World View”: Just as man can construct a triangle, so he can also construct a plant, he calls this the original plant. The archetypal plant is a spiritual being and Goethe says: With this plant in mind, one can follow all plants in their becoming, growing and flourishing. People do not easily understand what Goethe means by this. Schiller was once with him at a lecture given by the naturalist Batsch. The subject was botany. As they were leaving, Schiller said to Goethe, “It is strange how we look at the world in a fragmented way, with no one pointing out the great unifying bond.” Goethe, who had already developed his morphology at the time, replied that there could be another way of looking at it, and drew his “primordial plant” in front of Schiller. Schiller said that this was just an idea, and Goethe replied to him quite sadly: “But then I have my idea in mind.”

He was clear that this was no mere idea. What he had grasped in the primal plant was not just a thought, but he was clear that the plants were created from the spiritual worlds according to this image of the primal plant. How the plants came into being has been grasped here by the human spirit. This is a living thinking into the world of thinking that is free of the senses. We have within us a source from which the whole material world has sprung, and we can resurrect this source. But we can only do so if we have the strength to let the spirit come forth from us. Man can also shape the evolution of history, the course of human development out of himself.

There have been thinkers of this kind. People thought they were fantasists, for example Hegel in his philosophy of history. That is a purely ideal history of humanity. Not all the details in it are to be represented by me, but the principle applies, this attitude underlies the work. There is a kind of mathematics of history, and those who allow themselves to be fertilized and inspired by it will see that it is possible to speak of inner mathematics in relation to history as well.

But all this is not necessary for today's man; but it was demanded in all secret schools in the first stage a thinking free of sensuality in all fields. Elementary Theosophy gives this. How it speaks about the various members of human nature, we do not see them when it presents the development of man, these are images from spiritual experience. Man must live into them with his whole thinking. This is done so that man learns to detach himself from sensuality with his thinking. Initiation is needed to explore the supersensible worlds, but understanding does not require it; only ordinary human logic is needed. For every simple mind, for the most uneducated, there is access to that which Theosophy gives in terms of sensuality-free thinking.

And we should not undervalue what is given to us in theoretical theosophy. The student who approaches the higher worlds is told: first familiarize yourself with what is communicated by those who know about man, his development, his past and future. You must become thoroughly familiar with it. Why is that? Because only those who have trained their thinking in these areas can be protected from certain dangers of supersensible knowledge. When a person enters these invisible worlds, he experiences feelings that are completely unknown to those who do not experience them. He feels in the depths of his soul as if he were standing on a sheet of ice. The ice melts away on all sides, and he sees that the ice has now melted and there is water under his feet. That is how the person feels, because everything he has known so far, his sensory experiences, prove to be a collection of illusions; they melt like ice that has become water. The person realizes that all the ideas he has known so far through his senses are not the real ones. He feels as if he has no grounding. There is a certain difference, the analogy is flawed, like all analogies. Nothing special is happening in the external world when the person who is being initiated undergoes this, but something tremendous is happening within the person. It is not what we see and hear that changes, but all the ideas we have had about it so far sink into the indefinite. It is as if everything we have previously considered to be truth is no longer truth.

This is heightened by another impression. When a person crosses the threshold of the higher worlds that separates the physical from the supersensible, they perceive something completely new. Things and experiences that they could not have dreamt of before approach them. This cannot be compared to anything that a person perceives in the sensory world. But there is one thing that is the same in both worlds and in all worlds that are accessible to man: it is thinking, the kind of thinking that man acquires when he thinks without sensuality. He needs this thinking up there to distinguish illusions from reality, deception from truth. Here in the physical, wrong thinking is corrected by the things themselves; if someone wanted to turn a machine, an incorrect crank, the machine would not work properly or would stand still. In the higher worlds, however, we are solely the beings who have to give ourselves our firm direction. There we cannot distinguish between illusion and reality, between deception and truth, if we are unable to give ourselves this fixed direction through our trained thinking; if we are incapable of doing so, we cannot find our way in these higher worlds. Our thoughts are what will guide us safely, for they are the same here in the physical and there in the spiritual worlds.

Only when the disciple has overcome this preliminary stage is he ready to cross the threshold that leads to the higher worlds, which he cannot see without the supersensible organs of perception that he has developed. Here too we must describe a field that is quite unknown to many: feelings must be developed by moving from mere thinking, from ideas, to what is called imagination, images. Through this imagination, true feeling is trained so that we can pass through things to their eternal, immortal essence, in the sense that Goethe says: “All that is transitory is but a parable.” We become accustomed to seeing things in this way, as a parable for the eternal, when we become students.

Today, we can hear the magic word “evolution” being bandied about everywhere. People talk about how man, a subordinate being, has risen, has become more and more perfect, and has evolved from a lower being to his present form. They put forward abstract ideas. Those who really want to penetrate the development of the world and of man must learn to transform their concepts into images. Only in this way can he penetrate behind the veil; we must learn this, the teacher makes clear to the pupil what is meant by it, in such a dialogue, which is never held, but which nevertheless belongs to a development of the pupil that lasts for months, sometimes years: 'Look at the plant, it thrusts its roots into the earth, stems rise from the earth, leaves, finally flowers and calyxes. The corolla rises towards the sun, and within it rests the fruit. By stretching its calyx towards the sunbeam, its innermost part is drawn out, so that it can produce new seeds and thus new plants. The plant owes its ripening to the kiss of the sunbeam, so that it can produce something similar. Now compare the human being with the plant, but in such a way that you compare the human being's head with the plant's root. What the plant extends purely and chastely toward the sunbeam, its organ of fertilization, the human being shamefully hides and extends toward the earth. The human being is the transformed plant; he freely extends the head, which represents the root of the plant, out into the cosmos to absorb those forces as the plant also absorbs them when it receives the power from the sunbeam to produce seeds. We thus understand a saying of the great Plato: 'The soul of the world is crucified on the cross of the body of the world'. The soul of the world develops through the living beings; it lives in plants, animals and human beings. These are its bodies, the kingdoms of nature. We find this symbolically indicated in the cross. The three kingdoms are in the downward-pointing beam, the plant with its roots in the earth, the upper beam is man, who freely stretches into the cosmos what is at the plant root, in the middle the animal, the crossbar, which corresponds to the horizontal position of the animal. That is the deepest meaning of the cross in all religions. This was made clear to the disciple. Man has risen from the plant. Look at the plant, why is it allowed to stretch freely towards the sunbeam? The whole substance of the plant is chaste, free from desire, but it has no consciousness through which it can perceive like man. It sleeps like man in the night. Man has bought the consciousness he now has by permeating the pure, chaste plant substance with passion and desire. The plant substance has become flesh in him. In this substantial that has become flesh, man lives in waking consciousness. Now look into the future, when the human being will have transformed himself. He will have purified the impure, desire-filled fleshly substance; human nature will become pure and chaste again. Then the lower organs of desire will have fallen away, he will be equipped with higher organs and a higher consciousness, and he will stretch out his pure, chaste organs of fertilization towards the spiritual sunbeam of the holy love lance. He who can look into the process of world evolution knows: There are organs in the human body that will wither away, that will wither away, and those that will be developed higher and higher, that will bring forth similar things in a pure and chaste manner, equipped with a higher consciousness. This real ideal, which stands before the eyes of the human being as a disciple, as something that will truly reach all of humanity, gives a different concept of development than abstract concepts. When we turn to this real ideal, which is called the Holy Grail, when we survey this development, then we pursue such a development not only with thoughts, not only with the mind, but our feelings are carried away. Shivers run through the one who follows the course of human development in this way, and what we then feel is something that passes like a breath through the soul. Then we develop inner organs in our soul and new worlds appear to us – through such intimate processes of the inner being, the spiritual organs are awakened. As thinking was developed before, so now feeling is developed.

If the student has the energy to go further and further, to experience the world in images within himself, then the world of the spiritual rises, the world of the astral. This is the preparation for crossing the threshold.

Then the will is developed through the so-called occult writing. What is found in the whole of the Apocalypse, in the Gospel of John, such images belong to the occult writing. When we immerse ourselves in it, we educate our will to enter the spiritual worlds. The first seal is one that brings to mind the beginning and end state of our becoming on earth. We are introduced to the state of the earth when the temperature was much higher than on today's earth. Even then, man was connected to the earth; even then, he was united with the earthly body in a different form. This is expressed in the man whose feet are in the metal flow. They consist of liquid metal. Just as other spiritual beings created in fire in the human being at that time, so will be the final state of man. The earth will be fire again, and man will be able to create with the power of fire. This is indicated by the fiery sword that comes out of the mouth. In these images, everything is of profound significance, every sign, every number. Such a seal refers to the deep secrets of existence. When man familiarizes himself with this writing, he penetrates into the spiritual essence behind the phenomena of our existence. In this way, the will of man becomes one with the will of nature; magical powers flow out from man into the cosmos, his will plunges into every being, he feels one with the whole cosmos, he merges into the whole cosmos. He gradually becomes one with the powers of the beings around us. If a person patiently works his way through occult writing, then his will, by penetrating the whole cosmos, becomes not only volitional, but also seeing and, in particular, hearing. Then it becomes truth what Goethe expresses when he speaks of the spiritual worlds, he speaks of the way the will is developed, as just described. Then it is truth:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In brother spheres of song,
And its prescribed journey
she completes with a thunderclap.

Those who wanted to understand it have sought mystery in these words, but they are borrowed from reality. The spiritual sun resounds for those who have developed the spiritual ear, that is, who have a developed will and have expanded it to include spiritual hearing, which is higher than astral vision. And in the words: “The young day is already born for spiritual ears,” even the expression “spiritual ears” is true. This is not a mythical image; it is truer than one generally assumes.

Today we have been talking about the principle of initiation; tomorrow we want to talk about its so-called dangers.

The awakening of the individual can only be achieved through patient and energetic progress. Step by step, spiritual science reveals the lofty goal that man can achieve. Man should not merely reflect on his inner self, that is mere phrase. He must merge in the universe, in the cosmos, for that contains our ego.

By patiently absorbing the beings around us, we develop our inner selves in such a way that we learn to embrace the whole cosmos with love.

Then we may recognize our higher self. We have arisen in the womb of the world, we must connect with the secrets of the world's womb, we must recognize them. In the harmony between the inner and outer world, in the balance between the life that we feel as our deepest within us and what we recognize as the highest outside of us, we can find bliss, knowledge and peace. Initiation is something that not only reaches into the inner being of the human being, but also reaches far out into the world. Every step you take must be in harmony with the beings that belong to you, except for you. It is not by looking into your inner self, but by breaking away from your selfish ego, that you reach a higher level of being. As a guiding principle, as a motto for each person to be initiated, there are Goethe's words, which express that a person can only create harmony when he frees himself from his own ego. Only then can he find his own center when he aligns the inner and the outer in concepts.

For all power strives onward into the distance
To live and work here and there
But on every side the stream of the world
the stream of the world, and sweeps us along with it.

In this inner storm and outer battle, the spirit hears a word that is difficult to understand:
From the force that binds all beings, man frees himself who overcomes himself.