The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I may say that the question of how one should speak about the arts is one with which I have actually wrestled throughout my whole life, and I will take the liberty of taking as my starting point two stages within which I have attempted to make some headway with this wrestling. It was for the first time when, at the end of the 1880s, I had to give my lecture to the Viennese Goethe Society: “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic.” What I wanted to say at the time about the essence of the arts made me feel like a person who wanted to speak but was actually mute and had to use gestures to express what he actually had to point out. For at that time it was suggested to me by certain conditions of life to speak about the nature of the arts through philosophical judgments. I had worked my way out of Kantianism into Herbartianism in philosophy, and this Herbartianism met me in Vienna in a representative personality, in the esthetician Robert Zimmermann. Robert Zimmermann had completed his great History of Aesthetics as a Philosophical Science a long time before. He had also already presented to the world his systematic work on Aesthetics as a Science of Form, and I had faithfully worked my way through what Robert Zimmermann, the Herbartian aesthetician, had to communicate to the world in this field. And then I had this representative Herbartian Robert Zimmermann in front of me in the lectures at the University of Vienna. When I met Robert Zimmermann in person, I was completely filled by the spirited, inspired, excellent personality of this man. What lived in the man Robert Zimmermann could only be extraordinarily and deeply appealing. I must say that, although Robert Zimmermann's whole figure had something extraordinarily stiff about it, I even liked some things about this stiffness, because the way this personality, in this peculiar coloring that the German language takes on in those who speak it from German-Bohemia, from Prague German, from this linguistic nuance, was particularly likeable. Robert Zimmermann's Prague German was exceptionally appealing to me in a rare way when he said to me, who was already intensively studying Goethe's Theory of Colors at the time: Oh, Goethe is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! A man who couldn't even understand Newton is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! And I must say that the content of this sentence completely disappeared behind the flirtatious and graceful manner in which Robert Zimmermann communicated such things to others. I was extremely fond of such opposition.

But then I also got to know Robert Zimmermann, or perhaps I already knew him, when he spoke as a Herbartian from the lectern. And I must say that the amiable, likeable person completely ceased to be so in aesthetic terms; the man Robert Zimmermann became a Herbartian through and through. At first I was not quite clear what it meant when this man entered, even through the door, ascended the podium, laid down his fine walking stick, strangely took off his coat, strangely walked to the chair, strangely sat down, strangely removed his spectacles, paused for a moment, and then, with his soulful eyes, after removing his spectacles, let his gaze wander to the left, to the right, and into the distance over the very small number of listeners present, and there was something striking about it at first. But since I had been intensively studying Herbart's writings for quite some time, it all became clear to me after the first impression, and I said to myself: Oh yes, here we are entering the door to Herbartism, here we are putting down the fine walking stick of Herbartism, here we are taking off our Herbartism coat, here we are gazing at the audience with our glasses-free eyes. And now Robert Zimmermann, in his extraordinarily pleasant dialect, colored by the Prague dialect, began to speak about practical philosophy, and lo and behold, this Prague German clothed itself in the form of Herbartian aesthetics.

I experienced this, and then, from Zimmermann's subjective point of view, I understood well what it actually meant that the motto of Zimmermann's aesthetics on the first page was the saying of Schiller, which was indeed transformed into Herbartianism by Robert Zimmermann: The true secret of the master's art lies in the annihilation of material by form – for I had seen how the amiable, likeable, thoroughly graceful man appeared to be annihilated as content and reappeared in Herbartian form on the professorial chair. It was an extraordinarily significant impression for the psychology of the arts.

And if you understand that one can make such a characterization even when one loves, then you will not take amiss the expression that I now want to use, that Robert Zimmermann, whom I greatly admired, may forgive me for using the word ” Anthroposophie', which he used in a book to describe a figure made up of logical, aesthetic and ethical abstractions, that I have used this word to treat the spiritualized and ensouled human being scientifically. Robert Zimmermann called his book, in which he carried out the procedure I have just described, “Anthroposophy”.

I had to free myself from this experience, in which the artistic, so to speak, appeared to be poured into a form without content, when I gave my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. I was able to accept the fully justified part of Zimmermann's view, that in art one is not concerned with content, not with the what, but with what is made out of the content of what is observed and so on through the imagination, through the creativity of the human being. And from Schiller we also saw Herbart taking form. I could well see the deep justification for this tendency, but I could not help but contrast it with the fact that what can be achieved as form by real imagination must be elevated and must now appear in the work of art in such a way that we get a similar impression from the work of art as we otherwise only get from the world of ideas. To spiritualize what man can perceive, to carry the sensual into the sphere of the spirit, not to extinguish the material through form, that was what I tried to free myself from at the time, from what I had absorbed in a faithful study of Herbart's aesthetics.

However, other elements had also been incorporated. A philosopher of the time, whom I liked just as much as Robert Zimmermann, who is extremely dear to me as a person, Eduard von Hartmann, he wrote in all fields of philosophy, and at that time he also wrote about aesthetics, about aesthetics from a partly similar, partly different spirit than Robert Zimmermann had written. And again, you will not interpret the objectivity that I am trying to achieve as if I were being unkind for that reason. Eduard von Hartmann's aesthetics can be characterized by the fact that Eduard von Hartmann took something from the arts, which were actually quite distant from him, and called it aesthetic appearance. He took what he called aesthetic appearance from the arts, just as one would roughly proceed by skinning a living person. And then, after this procedure, after he had, so to speak, skinned the arts, the living arts, Eduard von Hartmann made his aesthetics out of them. And the skinned skin — is it wonderful that it became leather under the hard treatment it then received at the hands of the aesthete, who was so far removed from the arts? — That was the second thing I had to free myself from at the time. And I tried to include in my lecture at the time what I would call the mood: the philosopher, if he wants to talk about the arts, must have the renunciation to become mute in a certain respect and only through chaste gestures to hint at that which, when speaking, philosophy can never quite penetrate, before which it remains unpenetrating and must hint at the essential like a silent observer.

That was the mood, the psychological characterization, from which I spoke at the time in my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”.

Then later on I was given the task of making a second stop on the way to the question that I characterized at the beginning of my present consideration. It was when I spoke to anthroposophists about the “essence of the arts”. And now, in view of the mood of the whole environment at that time, I could not speak in the same way. Now I wanted to speak in such a way that I could remain within artistic experience itself. Now I wanted to speak artistically about art. And I knew once more that I was now on the other side of the river, beyond which I had stood at the time with my lecture “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. And now I spoke in such a way that I carefully avoided slipping into philosophical formulations. For I felt that slipping into philosophical characterization immediately takes away the actual essence of art from the words. The inartistic quality of mere concepts used to stir up the forces from which speech arises. And I tried to speak about the arts from that mood, which in the strictest sense avoids slipping into philosophical formulations. Today I am supposed to speak about the psychology of the arts again.

It is not particularly easy, after having lived through the other two stages, to stop at any other point. And so I could not help but turn to life with my contemplation. I sought some point through which I could enter into life through my contemplation of the artistic. And lo and behold, I found the amiable romantic Novalis as if he were something self-evidently given. And when, after this glimpse of Novalis, I ask myself: What is poetic? What is contained in this special form of artistic experience in poetic life? — the figure of Novalis stands before me alive. It is strange that Novalis was born into this world with a peculiar basic feeling that lifted him above the external prosaic reality throughout his entire physical life. There is something in this personality that seems to be endowed with wings and floats away in poetic spheres above the prose of life. It is something that has lived among us humans as if it wanted to express at one point in world history: this is how it is with the external sensual reality compared to the experience of the truly poetic. And this personality of Novalis lives itself into life, and begins a spiritual and thoroughly real love relationship with a twelve-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn. And all the love for the girl, who is still sexually immature, is clothed in the most magnificent poetry, so clothed in poetry that one is never tempted to think of anything sensually real when considering this relationship. But all the fervor of human feeling that can be experienced when the human soul floats freely above prosaic reality, as in poetic spheres, all the fervor of this feeling lives in this love of Novalis for Sophie von Kühn. And this girl dies two days after her fourteenth birthday, at the time when other people are so strongly touched by the reality of physical life that they descend into the sexuality of the physical body. Before this event could happen to Sophie von Kühn, she was transported into spiritual worlds, and Novalis, out of a stronger consciousness than the instinctive-poetic one that had been with him before, decided to die after Sophie von Kühn in his living soul experience. He lives with the one who is no longer in the physical world. And those people who approached Novalis after that time with the most intimate human feelings say that he, walking around alive on earth, was like someone who had been transported into the spiritual worlds, who was talking to something that is not of this earth, does not really belong to this earth. And within this poetic reality, transported into prose, he himself feels that what other people see only in the control of external forces, the fullest expression of the will, merging into reality, already appears within the poetic-ideal world, and he speaks of “magical idealism” to characterize his direction in life.

If we then try to understand everything that flowed from this wonderfully formed soul, which was thus able to love without touching reality, external reality, which was thus able to live with what was truly wrested from it before a certain stage of external reality was reached, if we open ourselves to all that then flowed from this Novalis soul, then we receive the purest expression of the poetic. And a psychological question is resolved simply by immersing oneself in the artistic stream of poeticization that flows from Novalis's poetic and prose writings.

But then one has a strange impression. One has the impression, when one delves psychologically into the essence of the poetic in this way, into a reality of life, into that of Novalis, that one then has something floating behind the poetic that resonates through everything poetic. One has the impression that this Novalis emerged from spiritual and soul spheres, bringing with him what, with poetic radiance, showered the outwardly prosaic life. One has the impression that a soul has entered the world that has brought with it the spiritual and soul in its purest form, so that it has inspired and spiritualized the whole body, and that it has absorbed space and time into the state of mind, which was spiritual and soul, in such a way that space and time, stripping off their outer being, reappeared poetically in the soul of Novalis. In Novalis' poetry, space and time seem to be devoured.

You see, with a strong soul and a strong spirit, poetry enters the world, and out of its strength it integrates space and time. But it overwhelms space and time, melting space and time through the power of the human soul, and in this melting of space and time through the power of the human soul lies the psychology of poetry. But through this process of melting space and time in Novalis, something resounds that was like a deep fundamental element within it. You can hear it everywhere, you can hear it through everything that Novalis has revealed to the world, and then you cannot help but say to yourself: What soul, what spirit is, it came to light there, to remain poetic, to poetically melt space and time by appropriating space and time. But there remained at first something as the foundation of this soul, something that lies most deeply within the human soul, so deeply that it can be discovered as a creative power by shaping the deepest inner conditions of the human organism itself, by living in the innermost being of the human being as soul. Musicality, the musical, the sounding artistic world, was a fundamental element in all of Novalis's poetry. This reveals itself out of the harmony of the world and is also what creates artistically out of the cosmos in the most intimate aspects of the human being.

If we try to enter the sphere in which the spiritual and soul-life in man create most intimately, then we come to a musical form within the human being, and then we say to ourselves: Before the musician sounds his tones out into the world, the musical essence itself has taken hold of the musician's being and first embodied, shaped into his human nature the musical, and the musician reveals that which the world harmony has unconsciously placed in the depths of his soul. And that is the basis of the mysterious effect of music. That is the basis for the fact that, when speaking about music, one can really only say: The musical expresses the innermost human feeling. — And by preparing oneself with the appropriate experiences for contemplation, by entering into this Novalis poetry, one grasps what I would call the psychology of music.

And then one's gaze is drawn to the end of Novalis's life, which occurred in his twenty-ninth year. Novalis passed away painlessly, but surrendered to the element that had permeated his poetry throughout his life. His brother had to play for him on the piano as he died, and the element that he had brought with him to infuse his poetry was to take him back when he died, passing from prosaic reality into the spiritual world. To the sound of the piano, twenty-nine-year-old Novalis died. He was searching for the musical homeland that he had left in the full sense of the word at his birth, in order to take the musicality of poetry from it.

So one settles in, I think, from reality into the psychology of the arts. The path must be a tender one, the path must be an intimate one, and it must not be skeletonized by abstract philosophical forms, neither by those that are taken from rational thinking in the Herbartian sense, nor by those that are a bone from external observation of nature in the Gustav Fechnerian sense.

And Novalis stands before us: released from the musical, allowing the musical to resonate in the poetic, melting space and time with the poetic, not having touched the external prosaic reality of space and time in magical idealism, and then drawing it back into musical spirituality.

And the question may arise: What if Novalis had been physically organized to live longer, if what had musically resonated and poetically spoken in the inner effective psychology of the human soul and human spirit had not returned to its musical home at the age of twenty-nine, but had lived on through a more robust physical organization, where would this soul have found itself? Where would this soul have found itself if it had had to remain within the prosaic reality from which it had departed at the time when it was still time, without contact with outer space and outer time, to return to the spaceless world of music?

I have no desire to give this answer in theoretical terms. Again, I would like to turn our gaze to reality, and there it is; it too has played itself out in the course of human development. When Goethe had reached the age at which Novalis withdrew from the physical world out of his musical and poetic mood, the deepest longing arose in Goethe's soul to penetrate into that artistic world which had brought it to the highest level in the development of that entity which can express itself in space and time. At this stage of his life, Goethe felt a burning desire to go south and to discern in the works of art of Italy something of that from which an art was created that understood how to bring the genuinely artistic into the forms of space and time, especially into the forms of space. And when Goethe stood before the Italian works of art and saw that which could speak not only to the senses but to the soul from out of space, the thought escaped his soul: here he realizes how the Greeks, whose work he believed he recognized in these works of art, created as nature itself creates, and which natural creative laws he believed he was tracking down. And he was overwhelmed by the spiritual and the soul-stirring that met him in the forms of space, the religious feeling: There is necessity, there is God. — Before he had moved to the south, he had searched for God together with Herder in the reading of Spinoza, in the spiritual and soul-stirring expression of the supersensible in the external sensual world. The mood that had driven him to seek his God in Spinoza's God together with Herder had remained. He had not found satisfaction. What he had sought in Spinoza's philosophy about God was awakened in his soul when he stood before the works of art in which he thought he could again discern Greek spatial art, and the feeling escaped him: There is necessity, there is God.

What did he feel? He apparently felt that in the Greek works of art of architecture and sculpture, what lives in man as spiritual and soulful has been created, what wants to go out into space and what gives itself to space, and when it becomes pictorial, also spatially to time. And Goethe has experienced the other thing psychologically, which is on the opposite pole to the Novalis experience. Novalis has experienced how, when man penetrates into his innermost being in space and time and wants to remain poetic and musical, space and time melt away in human comprehension. Goethe experienced how, when the human being works and chisels his spiritual soul into the spatial, the spatial and temporal does not melt away, how it surrenders in love to the spatial and temporal, so that the spiritual soul reappears from the spatial and temporal in an objectified way. How the spirit and soul of the human being, without stopping at the sensory perception, without remaining seated in the eye, penetrates to get under the surface of things and to create the architecture out of the forces that prevail under the surface of things, to shape the sculpture, experienced Goethe in those moments that led him to the saying: “There is necessity, there is God.” There is everything that is of divine-spiritual existence in the human subconscious, that man communicates to the world without stopping at the gulf that his senses form between him and the world. There is that which man experiences artistically when he is able to impress, to chisel, to force the spiritual-soul into the forces that lie beneath the surface of physical existence. — What is it in Novalis that makes him, psychologically, musical-poetic-creative? What is it in Goethe that impels him to feel the utter necessity of nature-making in the plastic arts, to feel the utterly unfree necessity of nature-making in 'the spatial, in the material works of art? What is it that urges him, despite the feeling of necessity, to say: there is God?

At both poles, with Novalis and with Goethe, where at the one pole lies the goal that the path to the psychological understanding of the poetic and the musical must take, and where at the other pole lies the goal that the psychological understanding must take if it grasp the plastic-architectonic. At both poles lies an experience that is inwardly experienced in the field of art, and in relation to which it is its greatest task of reality to also carry it outwardly into the world: the experience of human freedom.

In ordinary mental, physical and sensual experience, the spiritual and soul-like penetrates to the organization of the senses; then it allows the senses to glimpse what external physical and material and in the senses, external physical-material reality encounters inner spiritual-soul existence and enters into that mysterious connection that causes so much concern for physiology and psychology. When someone is born into life with the primal poetic-musical disposition, which is so self-sustaining that it seeks to die out under the sounds of music, then this spiritual-soul-like does not penetrate to the sensory organs Then it permeates and spiritualizes the whole organism, shaping it like a total sensory organ, and then it places the whole human being in the world in the same way as otherwise only the individual eye or the individual ear is placed in the world. Then the soul-spiritual takes hold within the human being, and then, when this soul-spiritual engages with the material world externally, it is not absorbed into the prosaic reality of space and time, but space and time are dissolved in the human perception. That is how it is at one pole. There the soul lives poetically and musically in its freedom, because it is organized in such a way that it melts the reality of space and time in its contemplation. There the soul lives without touching the ground of physical prosaic existence, in freedom, but in a freedom that cannot penetrate into this prosaic reality.

And at the other pole, there lives the soul, the spiritual part of man, as it lived, for example, in Goethe. This soul and spiritual part is so strong that it not only penetrates the physical body of man right down to the sense openings, but it penetrates these senses and extends even beyond the senses. I would say that in Novalis there is such a delicate soul-spirituality that it does not penetrate to the full organization of the senses; in Goethe there is such a strong soul-spirituality that it breaks through the organization of the senses and beyond the boundaries of the human skin into the cosmic, and therefore longs above all for an understanding of those areas of art that carry the spiritual-soul into the spatial-temporal. That is why this spirituality is organized in such a way that it wants to submerge with that which extends beyond the boundaries of the human skin, into the ensouled space in sculpture, into the spiritualized spatial power in architecture, into the suggestion of those forces that have already internalized themselves as spatial and temporal forces, but which can still be grasped externally in this form in painting.

So it is here too a liberation from necessity, a liberation from what man is when his spiritual and soulful self is anchored in the gulfs of the sensory realm. Liberation in the poetic-musical: freedom lives in there, but it lives in such a way that it does not touch the ground of the sensual. Liberation in sculptural, architectural, and pictorial experience: but freedom is so strong that if it wanted to express itself in any other way than artistically, it would shatter the external physical-sensual existence because it dives below the surface.

This is felt when one truly engages with what Goethe so powerfully said about his social ideas, let us say in “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years”. What cannot be entrusted to reality, if it is to be shaped in freedom, becomes musical-poetic; what in contemplation one must not bring to the reality of sensual physical imagination, if it is not to destroy external reality, what must be left in the formation of spatial and temporal forces, must be left in the mere reproduction of the block of wood, because otherwise it would destroy the organic, to which it is death, becomes sculpture, becomes architecture.

No one can understand the psychology of the arts without understanding the greater soul that must live in the sculptor and the architect than in normal life. No one can understand the poetic and musical without penetrating to the more that lives in the spiritual and soul life of a human being, who cannot allow this spiritual more, this spiritual projection of the physical organization to the physical and sensual, but must keep it behind it in freedom. Liberation is the experience that is present in the true comprehension of the arts, the experience of freedom according to its polar opposites.

What is man's form is what rests in man. This form is permeated in human reality by what becomes his movement. The human form is permeated from within by the will and from without by perception, and the human form is initially the external expression of this permeation. Man lives in bondage when his will, his inwardly developed will, which wants to enter into movement, must stop at the sphere in which perception is taken up. And as soon as man can reflect on his whole being, the feeling comes to life in him: There lives more in you than you, with your nervous-sensory organization, can make alive in your intercourse with the world. Then the urge arises to set the dormant human form, which is the expression of this normal relationship, in motion, in such movements that carry the form of the human form itself out into space and time. Again, it is a wrestling of the human interior with space and time. If one tries to capture it artistically, the eurhythmic arises between the musical-poetic and the plastic-architectonic-picturesque.

I believe that one must, in a certain way, remain inwardly within the arts when one attempts to do what still remains a stammering when talking about the arts and about the artistic. I believe that not only is there much between heaven and earth that human philosophy, as it usually appears, cannot dream of, but that what lies within the human interior, when conditions with the physical body enter into, first brings about liberation within the artistic towards the two poles. And I believe that one cannot understand the artistic psychologically if one wants to grasp it in the normal soul, but that one can only grasp it in the higher spiritual soul of the human being, which goes beyond the normal soul and is predisposed for supersensible worlds.

When we look at two such eminently artistic natures as Novalis and Goethe, I believe the secrets of the psychology of the arts reveal themselves to us phenomenally, out of reality. Schiller once felt this deeply when he spoke the words at the sight of Goethe: Only through the dawn of the beautiful do you enter the realm of knowledge. In other words, only by artistic immersion into the full human soul can you ascend into the regions of the sphere toward which knowledge strives. And it is a beautiful, I believe an artist's saying, when it is said: Create, artist, do not speak — but a saying against which one must sin, because man is, after all, a speaking being. But just as it is true that one must sin against such a word: “Form, artist, do not speak” – it is also true, I believe, that one must always atone for this sin, that one must always try, if one wants to talk about the arts, to form in speaking. Artist, do not speak; and if you are obliged to speak about art as a human being, then try to speak in a creative way, to create through speech.

[ 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.

Today, anthroposophy is for many people a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into a realm that serious science should not concern itself with through knowledge. And those who, among the many specialized subjects to which a scientist can currently devote himself, want to accept something similar to what anthroposophy talks about, find, or claim to find, that the way anthroposophy wants to recognize is the opposite of true science. It is still difficult for anthroposophy to seriously engage with contemporary science on a large scale. The representatives of science prefer to be able to categorize this dubious intellectual construct as a form of scientific enthusiasm or a philosophically decorated form of superstition.

But it cannot be said that minds disposed to enthusiasm and superstition find much joy in anthroposophy. Of course, some people of the kind who get an excited heart and nimble legs when there is talk of any kind of “Sophia”, or even of something “occult”, also believe they hear words in anthroposophy that they can think about in their own way. They fail to hear, out of politeness to themselves, that anthroposophy does not particularly value their thoughts. And those who talk about anthroposophy without any intention of engaging with it think they are being witty when they refer to their “hysterical, eye-rolling” followers. But for the real enthusiasts, the whole nature of anthroposophy is not sensational enough; it appears to them to be too much in the guise of thinking, which they prefer to avoid.

It is not easy to respond to this fluctuating image of anthroposophy with a brief description of its intentions. Not only do we have to talk about something that many consider recognizable and scientific, we also have to talk about the other differently.

Almost half a century ago, at the 45th Naturalists' Convention in Leipzig, one of the greatest naturalists of modern times, in his famous Ignorabimus speech, forbade the recognition of nature to enter the territory that Anthroposophy wants to speak about. It might therefore seem as if the spirit of modern natural science was to be renounced. This is not the case. Anthroposophy takes its place most earnestly on the ground of this natural science. It recognizes the blessings that have come from the scientific and intellectual treatment of observation and experiment. It seeks to work in no other spirit than that which is fostered by the modern scientific ethos. It seeks its true co-workers among those who can imbibe this ethos with understanding.

But she also sees the possibility of penetrating into a supersensible realm without having to deny the spirit of modern natural knowledge. The fate of many a thinker of the latest time makes a deep impression on her. I will mention here one of the most important, Franz Brentano, who, although little known to a wider public, has been of profound influence for a narrower circle of students. Brentano wanted to establish a modern psychology. The brilliant scientific results of the 1860s and 1870s, when he made his decision, had a suggestive effect on this excellent thinker. He wanted to work on the science of the soul in the spirit of natural science. One volume of this work appeared in the 1870s. There were to be four or five. However, he was unable to follow up the first one. A sigh in this first volume reveals the reason. Brentano soon found himself limited to dealing only with the everyday details of mental life by what he believed to be the true spirit of natural science. How the representation follows the perception, how attention works, how memory works, etc. – one could believe that one could elucidate these in the sense in which one observed and experimented on nature. And when he was writing his first volume, Brentano still thought he could continue in this spirit and still advance to the questions that seemed to him the essential ones for the science of the soul. What were all the individual investigations for, he exclaimed in despair, if they did not succeed in learning something about the questions that Plato and Aristotle had already considered essential: about the preservation of the spiritual and mental part of man after the decay of the physical body. Brentano was a thoroughly honest thinker. He wanted to continue in the spirit in which he had begun; and in no other way could he reach his highest goal of soul research. He could not do that. The natural scientific orientation of thought, if it honestly remained on its own ground, could not penetrate to these highest goals.

We must grasp this impossibility and, on the basis of this understanding, come to the other way of investigating the soul and spirit if we want to gather fruits equal to those of natural science. Anthroposophy comes to this understanding. It regards the thinking human being who conducts research about nature. He will best achieve his goal if he lets thinking only speak about the facts of nature. If he uses it only to bring these facts into such a context that they say everything about themselves, and he adds nothing of his own. It is right that science sees its ideal precisely in such a relationship to thinking. Goethe had this scientific ideal in mind in its fullest purity. Modern scientific thinking has not yet reached this purity. It leaves scientific ground when it advances beyond the world of phenomena and its forces to atomistic or energetic hypotheses.

But with such a kind of research one does not get to the soul-spiritual. For if you look at the world around you, everything you see must be a being of the senses. You come to nothing that could underlie it. And if you look inward, you see nothing but the external world as it is processed by the soul. This external world is, however, manifoldly transformed within. The impressions have passed through emotional experiences and will impulses. The imagination has transformed them. In this transformation they are incorporated into memory. The prudent person will still recognize what has been taken in from outside even in the transformation. He will not fall into the error of many a mystic, who mistakes for an inner revelation a completely different world, when it is only a reflection of the external world, transformed within.

False mysticism is one danger for anthroposophical spiritual research. It passes off memories that have been transformed as the knowledge of a supersensible being that manifests itself through the human being. From the clear insight into this fact, anthroposophy draws part of its means of knowledge. It does not stop at mere memory. It develops the soul in such a way that the faculty of memory itself is transformed. This is brought about by exercises that work as precisely in the inner activity of the soul as the physicist works externally when he makes his instruments to eavesdrop on nature's secrets. Certain ideas that are not brought in from memory are treated in the same way as remembered ideas. They have to be easily comprehensible ideas that one forms oneself or that one allows another to give one. It is important that nothing of the processes involved in ordinary remembering interfere with the mental activity to which one devotes oneself with such ideas. However, one does live completely in the activity that unfolds during remembering. It is now a matter of continuing such practice until one feels, so to speak, inwardly permeated by a being that makes the thinking power appear to be pulsating with life. In this way, thinking as a real process has been lifted out of the physical body. With ordinary thinking, one lives in the processes of the physical body. With the thinking that one has now attained, one lives in the etheric body. One has elevated into consciousness a process that otherwise takes place unconsciously through the physical body. One's own personal being has moved into the etheric body that has become conscious. We see the consequences. The past life since birth, which otherwise forms a subconscious stream from which the echoes of experiences emerge like waves in memory, either voluntarily or involuntarily, becomes in its entirety an immediate present experience. One feels oneself in it with one's I, as one otherwise feels oneself in one's physical body. Experiences that took place ten years ago are felt to be as much a part of oneself as the hand and the head. One experiences oneself in the etheric or formative body, but as if in a process. In this way one gets to know the ether, which forms spatially but is temporal in nature. One lives in images, but these are not static, they are mobile.

These images then merge with the physical being. One notices that one's consciousness has entered the realm of processes that work on the physical organs as the forces of nutrition, growth and reproduction. But one experiences all this in the same way as one experiences the activity of a sensory organ. One feels compelled to perceive the etheric being not as sharply distinguished from the external world, but as connected with the etheric external world, as one perceives the experience that occurs when the eye sees. Thus the etheric processes within will appear connected to etheric processes in the external world, as the perceptions within are connected to the external objects being looked at when seeing. The only difference is that in the ordinary process of seeing, fleeting thoughts arise for the inner being in the present moment, while in the etheric picture gazing it becomes clear how the etheric world actually works on the human organization inwardly.

But this experience is not like the ordinary life of memory. In the time when one is cognizing in this way, one lives only in pictures; and one sees this quite clearly. It would be an unhealthy element if one were to mistake the experiences for something other than pictures. One would then enter the region of illusion, hallucination, mediumistic imagination. This is a path that must not be taken. The reality that one erroneously senses in “dreaming”, in hallucination and the like, arises from the fact that the soul experience flows down into the physical, and from the physical it is given, as it were, the density of reality. For anthroposophical spiritual research, everything must remain in the realm of conscious life, and this knows that what it experiences is only images, as in memory images.

Reality must enter this world of images through further fully conscious exercises, not through unconscious physical processes. The next stage of practice lies in the development of an ability that one does not love in ordinary life. It is forgetting. First, you imitate memory by allowing images to be present in consciousness; you imitate forgetting by using full willpower to remove these images as if you had never had them. This makes you receptive to the perception of realities that are completely closed to ordinary consciousness. You take them into the etheric body like you absorb oxygen when breathing.

One can call the cognitive experience in images the imagination; the second stage, in which a spiritual-soul reality penetrates into the imagination, can then be called inspiration. Anyone who associates only what is described here with these names cannot possibly take offense at the fact that all kinds of evils have been attributed to the names of enthusiastic mystics.

Inspiration first leads to an understanding of the soul. In imagination, one lives in the soul, but one does not look at it. Only when one has freed oneself from imagination is one's own soul perceived by looking. Everything that lives in it as a thought is felt in the same way as hunger, as consuming one's own being; the will, on the other hand, is felt in the same way as satiety, as building up one's own being. The emotional experiences appear as the rhythmic back and forth between the two forms of feeling. In the will, a world comes to life that is not there for consciousness in ordinary life. If we want to understand it, we must reflect on our relationship to the will in our ordinary lives. We are familiar with the idea that this or that should be done. But we know nothing about the way in which the hand or leg is moved. We only see the movement, the unfolding of the will. What lies in between is as much immersed in darkness for consciousness as the processes from falling asleep to waking up. Into this darkness the spiritual shines. In the act of will, man, as it were, breathes in the spirit; in the activity of imagination, he breathes it out. The perception of being permeated with the spirit produces the feeling of satiation in the act of will; the activity of imagination is felt as a surrender of one's own being, as a consuming.

This opens up the possibility of educating oneself about sleeping and waking. During sleep, the soul sinks into the spirit. It then dwells precisely in the element that withdraws from its consciousness during will activity. It is in the world of the will, but outside the body. It is interwoven with the creative forces of the world. In wakefulness, it lives in the body, but the spirit that guides the will is not conscious of it. Its presence is limited to the sphere of the body. In inspiration, the will activity that is working in the body becomes visible. It is opposed in its nature to the external creative forces of the world. It consumes the body. Physically, there is a consumption, a breakdown of the body in the will. But these are felt precisely as saturation by the spirit. In the imagination, the body is created. Perception works in the same way as will; it destroys the physical. In the imagination that follows perception, the destruction is reversed. This is felt as an exhalation of the spirit.

From the experience of these inner processes of the soul, the path leads to an understanding of birth and death. Through birth, inspiration beholds the soul life that existed in the spiritual element before birth – or conception – as it will exist in the physical. The same applies to the soul life beyond death. In imagination, the personality is traced back to birth; in inspiration, it is pointed beyond. The life of the soul is thus recognized as an imagistic life during the time from birth to death. The external world can be reflected in the human being because he has suspended his soul life at the time of conception. It has poured itself out into the bodily life. New soul life is created in the experience of the external world.

Anthroposophy does not initially lead to life after death, but to life before birth – or conception. The consciousness of Western civilization has lost this focus on the prenatal life of the soul. Therefore, it denies the possibility of grasping immortality through knowledge at all. It would relegate the acceptance of immortality to the sphere of faith. It is right if it merely wants to develop an interest in life after death. But anthroposophy seeks knowledge in this area. It must develop interest in the other direction. Only when one has an overview of what part of the soul was present at the time of conception can one recognize how the soul shapes the body. In this knowledge, however, lies the other in relation to death. If the soul becomes a concrete reality for contemplation, then so does the transformation that the outer world undergoes in the soul through ordinary consciousness. One recognizes the lasting element in human life that has nothing to do with the body and that is led through death to the realm of the spirit.

What has been described as forgetting borders on the soul's capacity for love. It can therefore be brought to such an extent that what is conveyed through the body in love occurs as a pure spiritual experience. Then one perceives not only a uniting and separating of one's own being with the spirit, but a real standing within the spiritual reality. Inspiration becomes intuition. This level of knowledge can be given such a name because it has a similarity in a higher realm to what is called in ordinary life. Only there, intuition is an immediate awareness of a context that applies to the physical world, without logical mediation; intuition in the higher sense is the experience of the spiritual in such a way that what is imagined and inspired acquires objective validity, as if, by determining the weight of an object given to the eye in the image, it acquires objective validity.

In its own essence, the spirit is seen in the soul through intuition. And that is the one that returns in repeated earthly lives. Just as the soul exists only in the image during earthly life and has its reality in the prenatal, the spiritual does not even have an image in earthly life as I. It is only present there as a black circle within a white surface, or like the processes of sleep within life. What one addresses as “I” is a void for the ordinary consciousness. The real ego effects are the after-effects of previous earthly lives. The present ego can only develop its effects in the following earthly lives.

By living in the realization of the relationships between successive earthly lives, one arrives at an understanding of the relationship from spirit to spirit. The universe reveals itself as a spirit universe. The succession of earthly lives is a reflection of this spiritual universe. Therefore, intuition, which can see through this succession, can venture to penetrate to a certain degree into the spiritual essence of the world. In an act of will, the fulfillment of one's own nature with the spirit is seen. In an experience that is not indifferent to our will, but determines it in a fateful way, a spiritual emptiness appears, a longing. This is carried within us as a consequence of previous earthly lives. We build our lives out of such longings. Everything that is not done out of pure thought wells up out of this subconscious life-stream as fate. It is possible to will purely, because the etheric has come out of the etheric to the independent entity in man. As soon as one enters the realm of imagination, freedom is immediately lessened. There, everything proceeds consciously; one lives circumspectly. But one can only form images that lie within the laws of the etheric world. In the field of inspiration, one's soul is integrated into the general world of souls, just as one's physical soul is integrated into the breathing process. One experiences oneself as a part of the whole. And in intuition, everything in life that does not flow from mere thoughts is felt to be a fateful connection of repeated earthly lives. What is realized out of pure thoughts in freedom has only one reality in the one physical life on earth. For the following ones, it only has a meaning in that the person experiences inner satisfaction in accomplishing free actions. This consequence of freedom leaves inner traces that then show their effects in the following lives on earth.

Intuition offers the possibility of penetrating into the spiritual foundations of the universe. One experiences there, for example, the difference between the sun and the moon. One experiences this through observing their effect on human beings. Just as the outer world of the senses lives on in the human being as content for thinking and feeling, etc., so the sun and moon live on in growth and reproduction. The effect of the sun is seen in everything related to growth and will; the effect of the moon in decomposition and thinking. The effect of the sun in the human inner being conditions the ability to remember by exciting the inner being, whereby the outer sensory impressions are reflected. The effect of the moon conditions all devotion and love. It paralyzes and deadens the inner being. In this way, the human being is able to relive the outer world within himself.

Once one has been enabled in this way to recognize the deeper basis of the sun and moon effects, one's view can sharpen for what is sun- and moon-like in the earthly environment. For example, we see in plants both a tendency to break down and to build up. We see the moon-like quality in the solidifying of the substance, and the sun-like quality in the blossoming and sprouting. And we then recognize the relationship to the human organism. A plant that carries a certain salt is recognized for its healing effect on a pathological process in the human organism. Of course, today's medicine will reject such findings. It simply knows nothing of what can be recognized with such inner clarity through supersensible vision, as it is also present in mathematical thinking. For this vision, the human organism is different from that for physical research. And the beings of external nature are also different. One no longer perceives limited organs in the organism. Not lungs, liver, etc., but processes: the lung process, the liver process. And in the same way, one perceives not the plant but its formative process. This also makes it possible to judge the interaction of the one and the other process when they flow into each other through the administration of medication. One penetrates into the intimate relationships of the human being with his natural environment.

Life is brought to the historical assessment of human development through the means of knowledge of anthroposophy. One has tried to recreate the view of the historical process of becoming according to a beautiful scientific idea. This idea is known: that the human germ, before birth, passes through the forms in a shortened development, which are realized in stages in the animal series. Accordingly, it has been thought that a people at a later stage of culture can also be understood as representing a later age of the individual human being, so to speak. One looks at the ancient oriental peoples and sees humanity at the childhood stage in them. In the Greeks and Romans, one sees the youth stage captured. The more recently civilized peoples would then have entered into manhood. This view presents only a vague analogy. Through real observation, something quite different is found. When one reaches a certain age, one's intuitive perception is awakened to intimate soul processes that are, as it were, held back from unfolding in the physical body. It is like the human germ, which passes through the animal series in a rudimentary way, but is prevented from realizing the corresponding form at a certain stage. The body points to earlier stages of development as it grows; the soul does this at the end of life. In the older stages of human development, what is currently shown in the soul's rudiments was actually present in the human body. People were organized differently. At present, a clear parallelism between the physical and the soul-spiritual can be seen in the child and adolescent stages of life. One need only think of sexual maturity with its accompanying psychological phenomena. For a more subtle observation, such a parallelism is also still noticeable up to the end of the twenties. But then the physical processes become, so to speak, too firm to have such mental side effects. The mental and spiritual life emancipates itself from them and continues in dependence on education and the life experiences aroused by the outside world. This was different in earlier epochs of human development. In those times, the human being also developed spiritually and mentally simply by developing physically. The significance of this fact can be seen from the fact that, as a result, the human being not only participated in the ascending physical development with all his or her mental activity, as is the case now, but also in the descending one. Today, at most, he or she participates in the descending physical development only through what arises from it as mental decline. But if we are able to correctly assess the mental and spiritual rudiments just described, we come to the insight that in older epochs, especially in old age, people have attained a state of mind that meant a spiritualization of their entire being. That is why the views about a spiritual foundation of the world all come from older times. But this leads to a historical view according to which humanity records the culture that arises from physical development at ever younger stages. While the Greeks were still able to draw the strength for their spiritual culture from the development of their physical bodies in the first thirty years of their lives, the present-day civilized nations only manage to make use of their physicality until the end of their twenties. But this brings about an understanding of historical life that shows man his place in historical evolution. Great human tasks become apparent from history. One sees the necessity for humanity to deepen spiritually. For the time that began around the fifteenth century only developed what is possible in accordance with the development of the body until the end of the 1920s. These were the great achievements of the Galilean-Copernican age. Humanity would have to become rigid in them if completely different guiding forces of existence did not set in. Scientific life must be fertilized by the study of the supersensible. What man can experience through imagination, inspiration and intuition must be given to an existence that can no longer draw from the development of the physical. From the sense of human development, the emergence of an anthroposophical spiritual science appears as a necessity of the present epoch.

[Concept for the above text, from notebook 496, 1920/1921)

1.) Anthroposophy is seen as a fantastic attempt at knowledge. Taken as superstition.

2.) The enthusiasts take no pleasure in anthroposophy.

3.) It is difficult to speak of its essence in a nutshell.

4.) Du Bois-Reymond forbade to penetrate into the realm of the supersensible in a scientific way.

5.) Not opposed to science.

6.) The usual scientific method cannot penetrate into the life of the soul. Example Franz Brentano.

7.) Impossibility to go beyond the phenomena through external research. Hence the contempt for Oken-Schelling's natural philosophy. The ideas lose their content.

8.) But with such research, one also cannot approach the soul and spirit. The wrong path of false mysticism sees into the interior. But it only finds the reflection of the sensory outside world.

9.) In anthroposophical research, the ability to remember is transformed. Thoughts are absorbed into the etheric world. One detaches oneself from the body. 10.) One then lives in images. With full composure, one expands one's personality through one's experiences since birth. One has thereby become entirely a sensory organ.

11.) One must consciously remain in the soul realm. Slipping back into the body realm gives rise to dreams, hallucinations, etc. One then mistakes the pictorial-experiential for reality.

12.) One notices that one has entered the realm of body formation. One has taken the forces of growth up into consciousness.

13) One must now progress to supersensible perception. This happens through the process of imitation of forgetting.

14) One transforms the imagination into an inner power, which one then perceives just as little as the eye. But this power, which has flowed back into the inner being, opens up the vision of the soul's outer world. The astral aspect comes to the fore. The moments of waking up and falling asleep become representational. An interrelationship becomes visible that can be compared to breathing. Oriental wisdom therefore consciously transformed the breathing process.

15) In a further step, that which sends no impressions into consciousness during sleep is recognized as that which connects with the physical at birth (conception). This also passes through death.

16) You have thus come to an understanding of the interrelationship of your own human being with the outside world, but you have not yet grasped the spiritual outside world itself.

17) This happens through the further development of the method of forgetting. The power is trained in the soul, which otherwise works in dependence on the body as love. One thereby transfers one's own experience into that of another. The spirit reveals itself in its reality. The repeated lives on earth are recognized.

18) Intuition offers the possibility of seeing the inner world without false mysticism. And the outer world in its spiritual background. Just as ordinary soul experiences are an abstract reflection of the sensory outer world, so the material inside of a person is an effect of the spiritual content of the outer world.

19) This makes it possible to deepen medical knowledge. The natures of the natural kingdoms are seen through and their relationship to the organ processes of the human being is revealed.

20) The effects of the sun and moon are recognized. Their relationship to the inner processes of the human organization.

21.) Life is brought into the historical development of humanity.

22.) The artistic experience becomes conscious perception. This opens up a source for the artistic. Goethe spoke with a sense of what is entering the realm of experience. The unconscious is not affected. For one does not symbolize; one does not allegorize. One lives one's way towards artistic perception with insight. Dornacher Bau. Its forms arise from the same source as anthroposophy. — Eurythmy.

23.) Education is stimulated. A real knowledge of human nature is developed. From this arises the art of forming human beings.

24) Social conditions can be understood with a thinking based on anthroposophy. Natural science works with sharply defined contours towards a goal. Such ideas are not suitable for grasping the essence of capital, labor, money, etc. Such ideas can only be thought. They have no inner life. Anthroposophical ideas are alive. They connect with life. They become social sympathies and antipathies; they take hold of feeling and pulsate through will. They are absorbed into social life just as life forces are absorbed into the human organism. But that needs the present.

25) It was intellectualism that made natural science great. It will be supersensible vision that penetrates into life.

[ 1 ] Sleep has often been called the younger brother of death. This simile illustrates the paths of the human spirit more exactly than a superficial observation might feel inclined to assume. For it gives us an idea of the way in which the most manifold incarnations passed through by this human spirit are interrelated. In the first chapter of this book, Reincarnation and Karma, Concepts Compelled by the Modern Scientific Point of View, it has been shown that the present natural-scientific mode of thought, if it but understands itself properly, leads to the ancient teaching of the evolution of the eternal human spirit through many lives. This knowledge is necessarily followed by the question: how are these manifold lives interrelated? In what sense is the life of a human being the effect of his former incarnations, and how does it become the cause of the later incarnations? The picture of sleep presents an image of the relation of cause and effect in this field.¹ I arise in the morning. My continuous activity was interrupted during the night. I cannot resume this activity arbitrarily if order and connection are to govern my life. What I have done yesterday constitutes the conditions for my actions of today. I must make a connection with the result of my activities of yesterday. It is true in the fullest sense of the word that my deeds of yesterday are my destiny of today. I myself have shaped the causes to which I must add the effects. And I encounter these causes after having withdrawn from them for a short time. They belong to me, although I was separated from them for some time.

[ 2 ] The effects of my experiences of yesterday belong to me in still another sense. I myself have been changed by them. Let us suppose that I have undertaken something in which I succeeded only partially. I have pondered on the reason for this partial failure. If I have again to carry out a similar task, I avoid the mistakes I have recognized. That is, I have acquired a new faculty. Thereby my experiences of yesterday have become the causes of my faculties of today. My past remains united with me; it lives on in my present; and it will follow me into my future. Through my past, I have created for myself the position in which I find myself at present. And the meaning of life demands that I remain united with this position. Would it not be senseless if, under normal conditions, I should not move into a house I had caused to be built for myself?

[ 3 ] If the effects of my deeds of yesterday were not to be my destiny of today, I should not have to wake up today, but I should have to be created anew, out of the nothing. And the human spirit would have to be newly created, out of the nothing, if the results of its former lives were not to remain linked to its later lives. Indeed, the human being cannot live in any other position but the one which has been created through his previous life. He can do this no more than can certain animals, which have lost their power of sight as a result of their migration to the caves of Kentucky, live anywhere else but in these caves. They have, through their deed, through migration, created for themselves the conditions for their later existence. A being which has once been active is henceforth no longer isolated in the world; it has inserted itself into its deeds. And its future development is connected with what arises from the deeds. This connection of a being with the results of its deeds is the law of karma which rules the whole world. Activity that has become destiny is karma.

[ 4 ] And sleep is a good picture of death for the reason that the human being, during sleep, is actually withdrawn from the field of action upon which destiny awaits him. While we sleep, the events on this field of action run their course. For a time, we have no influence upon this course. Nevertheless, we find again the effects of our actions, and we must link up with them. In reality, our personality every morning incarnates anew in our world of deeds. What was separated from us during the night, envelops us, as it were, during the day.

[ 5 ] It is the same with the deeds of our former incarnations. Their results are embodied in the world in which we were incarnated. Yet they belong to us just as the life in the caves belongs to the animals which, through this life, have lost the power of sight. Just as these animals can only live if they find again the surroundings to which they have adapted themselves, so the human spirit is only able to live in those surroundings which, through his deeds, he has created for himself and are suited to him.

[ 6 ] Every new morning the human body is ensouled anew, as it were. Natural science admits that this involves a process which it cannot grasp if it employs merely the laws it has gained in the physical world. Consider what the natural scientist Du Bois-Reymond says about this in his address, Die Grenze des Naturerkennens (The Limits of the Cognition of Nature): “If a brain, for some reason unconscious, as for instance in dreamless sleep, were to be viewed scientifically”—(Du Bois-Reymond says “astronomically”)—“it would hold no longer any secrets, and if we were to add to this the natural-scientific knowledge of the rest of the body, there would be a complete deciphering of the entire human machine with its breathing, its heartbeat, its metabolism, its warmth, and so forth, right up to the nature of matter and force. The dreamless sleeper is comprehensible to the same degree that the world is comprehensible before consciousness appeared. But just as the world became doubly incomprehensible with the first stirring of consciousness, so the sleeper becomes incomprehensible with the first dream picture that arises in him.” This cannot be otherwise. For, what the scientist describes here as the dreamless sleeper is that part of the human being which alone is subject to physical laws. The moment, however, it appears again permeated by the soul, it obeys the laws of the soul-life. During sleep, the human body obeys the physical laws: the moment the human being wakes up, the light of intelligent action flashes forth, like a spark, into purely physical existence. We speak entirely in the sense of the scientist Du Bois-Reymond when we state: the sleeping body may be investigated in all its aspects, yet we shall not be able to find the soul in it. But this soul continues the course of its rational deeds at the point where this was interrupted by sleep.—Thus the human being, also in this regard, belongs to two worlds. In one world he lives his bodily life which may be observed by means of physical laws;in the other he lives as a spiritual-rational being, and about this life we are able to learn nothing by means of physical laws. If we wish to study the bodily life, we have to hold to the physical laws of natural science; but if we wish to grasp the spiritual life, we have to acquaint ourselves with the laws of rational action, such, for instance, as logic, jurisprudence, economics, aesthetics, and so forth.

[ 7 ] The sleeping human body, subject only to physical laws, can never accomplish anything in the realm of the laws of reason. But the human spirit carries these laws of reason into the physical world. And just as much as he has carried into it will he find again when, after an interruption, he resumes the thread of his activity.

[ 8 ] Let us hold on to the picture of sleep. If life is not to be meaningless, the personality has to link up today with its deeds of yesterday. It could not do so did it not feel itself joined to these deeds. I should be unable to pick up today the result of my activity of yesterday, had there not remained within myself something of this activity. If I had today forgotten everything that I have experienced yesterday, I should be a new human being, unable to link up with anything. It is my memory which enables me to link up with my deeds of yesterday.—This memory binds me to the effects of my action. That which, in the real sense, belongs to my life of reason,—logic, for instance,—is today the same it was yesterday. This is applicable also to that which did not enter my field of vision yesterday, indeed, which never entered it. My memory connects my logical action of today with my logical action of yesterday. If matters depended merely upon logic, we certainly might start a new life every morning. But memory retains what binds us to our destiny.

[ 9 ] Thus I really find myself in the morning as a threefold being. I find my body again which during my sleep has obeyed its merely physical laws. I find again my own self, my human spirit, which is today the same it was yesterday, and which is today endowed with the gift of rational action with which it was endowed yesterday. And I find—preserved by memory—everything that my yesterday, that my entire past has made of me.—

[ 10 ] And this affords us at the same time a picture of the threefold being of man. In every new incarnation the human being finds himself in a physical organism which is subject to the laws of external nature. And in every incarnation he is the same human spirit. As such he is the Eternal within the manifold incarnations. Body and Spirit confront one another. Between these two there must lie something just as memory lies between my deeds of yesterday and those of today. And this something is the soul. It preserves the effects of my deeds from former lives and brings it about that the spirit, in a new incarnation, appears in the form which previous earth lives have given it. In this way, body, soul, and spirit are interrelated. The spirit is eternal; birth and death rule in the body according to the laws of the physical world; both are brought together again and again by the soul as it fashions our destiny out of our deeds. (Each of the above-mentioned principles: body, soul, and spirit, in turn consists of three members. Thus the human being appears to be formed of nine members. The body consists of: (1) the actual body, (2) the life-body, (3) the sentient-body. The soul consists of: (4) the sentient-soul, (5) the intellectual-soul, (6) the consciousness-soul. The spirit consists of: (7) spirit-self, (8) life-spirit, (9) spirit-man. In the incarnated human being, 3 and 4, and 6 and 7 unite, flowing into one another. Through this fact the nine members appear to have contracted into seven members.)

[ 11 ] In regard to the comparison of the soul with memory we are also in a position to refer to modern natural science. The scientist Ewald Hering published a treatise in 1870 which bears the title: Ueber das Gedaechtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der organisierten Materie (Memory as a General Function of Organized Matter). Ernst Haeckel agrees with Hering's point of view. He states the following in his treatise: Ueber die Wellenzeugung der Lebensteilchen (The Wave Generation of Living Particles): “Profound reflection must bring the conviction that without the assumption of an unconscious memory of living matter the most important life functions are utterly inexplicable. The faculty of forming ideas and concepts, of thinking and consciousness, of practice and habit, of nutrition and reproduction rests upon the function of the unconscious memory, the activity of which is much more significant than that of conscious memory. Hering is right in stating that it is memory to which we owe nearly everything that we are and have.” And now Haeckel tries to trace back the processes of heredity within living creatures to this unconscious memory. The fact that the daughter-being resembles the mother-being, that the former inherits the qualities of the latter, is thus supposed to be due to the unconscious memory of the living, which in the course of reproduction retains the memory of the preceding forms.—It is not a question here of investigating how much of the presentations of Hering and Haeckel are scientifically tenable; for our purposes it suffices to draw attention to the fact that the natural scientist is compelled to assume an entity which he considers similar to memory; he is compelled to do so if he goes beyond birth and death, and presumes something that endures beyond death. He quite naturally seizes upon a supersensible force in the realm where the laws of physical nature do not suffice.

[ 2 ] We must, however, realize that we are dealing here merely with a comparison, with a picture, when we speak of memory. We must not believe that by soul we understand something that is equivalent to conscious memory. Even in ordinary life it is not always conscious memory that is active when we make use of the experiences of the past. We bear within us the fruits of these experiences even if we do not always consciously remember what we have experienced. Who can remember all the details of his learning to read and write? Moreover, who was ever conscious of all those details? Habit, for instance, is a kind of unconscious memory.—By means of this comparison with memory we merely wish to point to the soul which inserts itself between body and spirit and constitutes the mediator between the Eternal and that which, as the Physical, is inwoven into the course of birth and death.

[ 13 ] The spirit that reincarnates thus finds within the physical world the results of its deeds as its destiny; and the soul that is bound to it, mediates the spirit's linking up with this destiny. Now we may ask: how can the spirit find the results of its deeds, since, on reincarnating, it is certainly placed in a world completely different from the one in which it existed previously? This question is based upon a very externalized conception of the web of destiny. If I transfer my residence from Europe to America, I, too, find myself in completely new surroundings. Yet my life in America is completely dependent upon my previous life in Europe. If I have been a mechanic in Europe, my life in America will take on a form quite different from the one it would take on had I been a bank clerk. In the one case I shall probably be surrounded in America by machines, in the other by banking papers. In every case my previous life determines my surroundings, it attracts, as it were, out of the whole environment those things which are related to it. This is also the case with my spirit-soul. It surrounds itself quite necessarily with what it is related to out of its previous life. This cannot constitute a contradiction of the simile of sleep and death if we realize that we are dealing only with a simile, although a most striking one. That I find in the morning the situation which I myself have created on the previous day is brought about by the direct course of events. That I find on reincarnating an environment that corresponds to the result of my deeds of the previous life is brought about through the affinity of my reborn spirit-soul with the things of this environment.

[ 14 ] What leads me into this environment? Directly the qualities of my spirit-soul on reincarnating. But I possess these qualities merely through the fact that the deeds of my previous lives have implanted them into the spirit-soul. These deeds, therefore, are the real cause of my being born into certain circumstances. And what I do today will be one of the causes of my finding myself in a later life within certain definite circumstances.—Thus man indeed creates his destiny for himself. This remains incomprehensible only as long as one considers the separate life as such and does not regard it as a link in the chain of successive lives.

[ 15 ] Thus we may say that nothing can happen to the human being in life for which he has not himself created the conditions. Only through insight into the law of destiny—karma—does it become comprehensible why “the good man has often to suffer, while the evil one may experience happiness.” This seeming disharmony of the one life disappears when the view is extended upon many lives.—To be sure, the law of karma must not be conceived of as being so simple that we might compare it to an ordinary judge or to civil justice. This would be the same as if we were to imagine God as an old man with a white beard. Many people fall into this error. Especially the opponents of the idea of karma proceed from such erroneous premises. They fight against the conception which they impute to the believers in karma and not against the conception held by the true knowers.

[ 16 ] What is the relation of the human being to his physical surroundings when he enters a new incarnation? This relation is composed of two factors: first, in the time between two consecutive incarnations he has had no part in the physical world; second, he passed through a certain development during that period. It is self-evident that no influence from the physical world can affect this development, for the spirit-soul then exists outside this physical world. Everything that takes place in the spirit-soul, it can, therefore, only draw out of itself, that is to say, out of the super-physical world. During its incarnation it was interwoven with the physical world of facts; after its discarnation through death, it is deprived of the direct influence of this factual world. It has merely retained from the latter that which we have compared to memory.—This “memory remnant” consists of two parts. These parts become evident if we consider what has contributed to its formation.—The spirit has lived in the body and through the body, therefore, it entered into relation with the bodily surroundings. This relation has found its expression through the fact that, by means of the body, impulses, desires, and passions have developed and that, through them, outer actions have been performed. Because he has a corporeal existence, the human being acts under the influence of impulses, desires, and passions. And these have a significance in two directions. On the one hand, they impress themselves upon the outer actions which the human being performs. And on the other, they form his personal character. The action I perform is the result of my desire; and I myself, as a personality, am what is expressed by this desire. The action passes over into the outer world;the desire remains within my soul just as the thought remains within my memory. And just as the thought image in my memory is strengthened through every new impression of like nature, so is the desire strengthened through every new action which I perform under its influence. Thus within my soul, because of corporeal existence, there lives a certain sum of impulses, desires, and passions. The sum total of these is designated by the expression “body of desire.”—This body of desire is intimately connected with physical existence, for it comes into being under the influence of the physical corporeality. The moment the spirit is no longer incarnated it cannot continue the formation of this body of desire. The spirit must free itself from this desire-body in so far as it was connected, through it, with the single physical life. The physical life is followed by another in which this liberation occurs. We may ask: Does not death signify the destruction also of this body of desire? The answer is: No; for to the degree in which, at every moment of physical life, desire surpasses satisfaction, desire persists even when the possibility of satisfaction has ceased. Only a human being who does not desire anything of the physical world has no surplus of desire over satisfaction. Only a man of no desires dies without retaining in his spirit a certain amount of desire. And this amount must gradually diminish and fade away after death. The state of this fading away is called “the sojourn in the region of desire.” It can easily be seen that the more the human being has felt bound to the sense life, the longer must this state persist.

[ 17 ] The second part of the “memory remnant” is formed in a different way. Just as desire draws the spirit toward the past life, so this second part directs it toward the future. The spirit, through its activity in the body, has become acquainted with the world to which this body belongs. Each new exertion, each new experience enhances this acquaintance. As a rule the human being does a thing better the second time than he does it the first. Experience impresses itself upon the spirit, enhancing its capacities. Thus our experience acts upon our future, and if we have no longer the opportunity to have experiences, then the result of these experiences remains as memory remnant.—But no experience could affect us if we did not have the capacity to make use of it. The way in which we are able to absorb the experience, the use we are able to make of it, determines its significance for our future. For Goethe, an experience had a significance quite different from the significance it had for his valet; and it produced results for Goethe quite different from those it produced for his valet. What faculties we acquire through an experience depends, therefore, upon the spiritual work we perform in connection with the experience.—I always have within me, at any given moment of my life, a sum total of the results of my experience. And this sum total forms the potential of capacities which may appear in due course.—Such a sum total of experiences the human spirit possesses when it discarnates. This the human spirit takes with it into supersensible life. Now, when it is no longer bound to physical existence by bodily ties and when it has divested itself also of the desires which chain it to this physical existence, then the fruit of its experience has remained with the spirit. And this fruit is completely freed from the direct influence of the past life. The spirit can now devote itself entirely to what it is capable of fashioning out of this fruit for the future. Thus the spirit, after having left the region of desire, is in a state in which its experiences of former lives transform themselves into potentials—that is to say, talents, capacities—for the future. The life of the spirit in this state is designated as the sojourn in the “region of bliss.” (“Bliss” may, indeed, designate a state in which all worry about the past is relegated to oblivion and which permits the heart to beat solely for the concerns of the future.) It is self-evident that the greater the potentiality exists at death for the acquirement of new capacities, the longer will this state in general last.

Naturally, it cannot be a question here of developing the complete scope of knowledge relating to the human spirit. We merely intend to show how the law of karma operates in physical life. For this purpose it is sufficient to know what the spirit takes out of this physical life into supersensible states and what it brings back again for a new incarnation. It brings with it the results of the experiences undergone in previous lives, transformed into the capacities of its being.—In order to realize the far-reaching character of this fact we need only elucidate the process by a single example. The philosopher, Kant, says: “Two things fill the soul with ever increasing wonder: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Every thinking human being must admit that the starry heavens have not sprung out of nothingness but have come gradually into existence. And it is Kant himself who in 1755, in a basic treatise, tried to explain the gradual formation of a cosmos. Likewise, however, we must not accept the fact of moral law without an explanation. This moral law, too, has not sprung from nothingness. In the first incarnations through which man passed the moral law did not speak in him in the way it spoke in Kant. Primitive man acts in accordance with his desires. And he carries the experiences which he has undergone through such action into the supersensible states. Here they become higher faculties. And in a subsequent incarnation, mere desire no longer acts in him, but it is now guided by the effect of the previous experiences. And many incarnations are needed before the human being, originally completely given over to desires, confronts the surrounding world with the purified moral law which Kant designates as something demanding the same admiration as is demanded by the starry heavens.

[ 18 ] The surrounding world into which the human being is born through a new incarnation confronts him with the results of his deeds, as his destiny. He himself enters this surrounding world with the capacities which he has fashioned for himself in the supersensible state out of his former experiences. Therefore his experiences in the physical world will, in general, be at a higher level the more often he has incarnated, or the greater his efforts were during his previous incarnations. Thus his pilgrimage through the incarnations will be an upward development. The treasure which his experiences accumulate in his spirit will become richer and richer. And he thereby confronts his surrounding world, his destiny, with greater and greater maturity. This makes him increasingly the master of his destiny. For what he gains through his experiences is the fact that he learns to grasp the laws of the world in which these experiences occur. At first the spirit does not find its way about in the surrounding world. It gropes in the dark. But with every new incarnation the world grows brighter. The spirit acquires a knowledge of the laws of its surrounding world; in other words, it accomplishes ever more consciously what it previously did in dullness of mind. The compulsion of the surrounding world decreases; the spirit becomes increasingly self-determinative. The spirit, however, which is self-determinative, is the free spirit. Action in the full clear light of consciousness is free action. (I have tried to present the nature of the free human spirit in my book, Philosophie der Freiheit, (Philosophy of Freedom—Spiritual Activity.) The full freedom of the human spirit is the ideal of its development. We cannot ask the question: is man free or unfree? The philosophers who put the question of freedom in this fashion can never acquire a clear thought about it. For the human being in his present state is neither free nor unfree; but he is on the way to freedom. He is partially free, partially unfree. He is free to the degree he has acquired knowledge and consciousness of world relations.—The fact that our destiny, our karma, meets us in the form of absolute necessity is no obstacle to our freedom. For when we act we approach this destiny with the measure of independence we have achieved. It is not destiny that acts, but it is we who act in accordance with the laws of this destiny.

[ 19 ] If I light a match, fire arises according to necessary laws; but it was I who put these necessary laws into effect. Likewise, I can perform an action only in the sense of the necessary laws of my karma, but it is I who puts these necessary laws into effect. And new karma is created through the deed proceeding from me, just as the fire, according to necessary laws of nature, continues to be effective after I have kindled it.

[ 20 ] This also throws light upon another doubt which may assail a person in regard to the effectiveness of the law of karma. Somebody might say: “If karma is an unalterable law, then it is wrong to help a person. For what befalls him is the consequence of his karma, and it is absolutely necessary that it should befall him.” Certainly, I cannot eliminate the effects of the destiny which a human spirit has created for himself in former incarnations. But the matter of importance here is how he finds his way into this destiny, and what new destiny he may create for himself under the influence of the old one. If I help him, I may bring about the possibility of his giving his destiny a favorable turn through his deeds; if I refrain from helping him, the opposite may perhaps occur. Naturally, everything will depend upon whether my help is a wise or unwise one. [The fact that I am present to help may be a part of both his Karma and mine, or my presence and deed may be a free act. (Editor.)]

[ 21 ] His advance through ever new incarnations signifies a higher development of the human spirit. This higher development comes to expression in the fact that the world in which the incarnations of the spirit take place is comprehended in increasing measure by this spirit. This world, however, comprises the incarnations themselves. In regard to the latter, too, the spirit gradually passes from a state of unconsciousness to one of consciousness. On the path of evolution there lies the point from which the human being is able to look back upon his successive incarnations with full consciousness.—This is a thought at which it is easy to mock; and it is easy to criticise it negatively. But whoever does this has no idea of the nature of such truths. And derision as well as criticism place themselves like a dragon in front of the portal of the sanctuary within which we may attain knowledge of these truths. For it is self-evident that truths, the realization of which lies for the human being in the future, cannot be found as facts in the present. There is only one way of convincing oneself of their reality: namely, to make every effort possible to attain this reality.

• 1. I can imagine that there are many people who consider themselves standing at the pinnacle of knowledge and who consider the present exposition “completely unscientific.” I can understand these people, for I know that this objection forces itself upon anyone who has no experience in the domain of the supersensible and who, at the same time, lacks the necessary restraint and modesty to admit that he still might learn something. Such people, however, should at least refrain from stating that the processes described here “contradict the intellect” and “cannot be proved by the intellect.” The intellect cannot do anything but combine and systematize facts. Facts can be experienced, but not be “proved by the intellect.” With the intellect, you cannot prove a whale. Either you must have seen it yourself, or you must let somebody describe it who has seen one. It is the same with the supersensible facts. If we have not yet attained to the point where we can see them ourselves, then we must permit them to be described to us. I can assure everyone that the supersensible facts which I describe in the subsequent pages are just as “factual” for the one whose higher senses are opened, as is the whale.

[ 1 ] The creator of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious”, Eduard von Hartmann, died on June 6, 1906. The world view that emerged in this work must arouse the warm interest of anyone who is interested in the intellectual currents of our age. And the creation of Eduard von Hartmann is one of those that are born entirely out of the character of the soul life of the last third of the nineteenth century. And more than from any other achievement of the immediate past, important directions of this soul life will be able to be derived from Eduard von Hartmann in the future. For he has followed up the aforementioned “Philosophy of the Unconscious”, which appeared as early as 1869, with numerous other works in which he has expressed his views on the most diverse major questions of humanity and also on many of the endeavors and intellectual currents of his era. None of these writings has achieved anywhere near the success of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious”. In a short time, it made Eduard von Hartmann a famous man. And not only within the German-speaking areas, but far beyond them. The work was translated into a number of languages.

[ 2 ] The significance of this success is all the more impressive when viewed in the context of the character of the time in which the book was published, and when one considers how much the world view represented in it was actually opposed to all the inclinations of Eduard von Hartmann's contemporaries. In it, he advocated a point of view from which insight could be gained into the spiritual foundations behind sensual reality. Hartmann sought to explore and reveal this spiritual reality in a truly bold manner. And his contemporaries in the broadest circles were tired and even weary of such research. This was the case with both the learned and the unlearned. In many cases, people had lost all understanding of philosophical thought. The unlearned had realized that none of the great hopes that had been aroused by the brilliant philosophical views of the first half of the century had been fulfilled. Whether this realization was really justified or whether it was based on a delusion because one had never really come to a true understanding of the spirit of these world views is not to be further discussed here. To characterize Eduard von Hartmann's appearance, it is sufficient to consider that the belief had become general that there was actually nothing to this whole way of philosophizing; that it only led to idealistic airy creations that stand on no firm ground and therefore cannot help man when he seeks satisfaction for the great riddles of his existence. Only Schopenhauer's writings have had a certain effect since the 1850s, due to their easy comprehensibility and because they spoke with warmth about important, immediate questions of humanity in a way that was particularly contemporary at that time. It was precisely the retreat of idealistic confidence and spiritualized hope for life that permeated the creations of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel that led to Schopenhauer, the “philosopher of pessimism”, achieving a late impact. Many people despaired of any kind of spiritual uplift being able to bring true elevation in life. Therefore, they willingly submitted to the arguments of a philosopher who even tried to prove the insignificance of life in a very pleasing form. But by the time the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” appeared, the inclination towards Schopenhauer had already largely disappeared.

[ 3 ] But no particular inspiration could come from the official centers of work in the field of philosophy. For there, with the loss of understanding for the previous philosophers, a certain perplexity had set in. There was a lack of all mental acuity, indeed of all courage, to really face the great world problems. They labored endlessly to explore how far human cognitive powers could actually go, and in doing so, they never got to the point of seriously recognizing anything, because they were constantly asking the same question over and over again: whether it was even possible to recognize anything at all. Kant's ideas were endlessly raked over in order to “orient oneself by them”. Anyone who has looked into the whole business can understand that this official philosophy could not have any effect on wider circles. Hermann Lotze had indeed attempted to describe a large, comprehensive body of ideas in his “Mikrokosmos” (1856-1864). But he could not succeed in conquering the field against a spiritual power that was then trying to take over the lost posts of philosophy everywhere. Lotze's approach was too diffuse, too much like a feuilleton. Gustav Theodor Fechner had also made many attempts to recognize the spiritual connections of the world. In 1851, he published “Zend-Avesta, or on the Nature of Heaven and the Hereafter”, in 1864 “On the Physical and Philosophical Theory of Atoms”, and in 1861 “On the Question of the Soul, a Journey through the Visible World to Find the Invisible”. At the time, these writings also had no profound effect. And that is understandable, because they came at a time when the natural sciences had taken a significant upswing. In them, people believed they could find the only sure ground of “facts” that could be trusted. And Fechner's way of looking at things was not such that the powerful advance from that side could have been repulsed by it. Due to a peculiar chain of circumstances, Fechner's achievements have only found a few supporters in our time. And this 'fact' shows the decreasing influence of scientific materialism today. In the last half of the nineteenth century, it had indeed earned real merits in the advancement of the human spirit. (Compare what was said about this in the previous article: “Haeckel, The World's Mysteries and Theosophy.”) And Gustav Theodor Fechner's way of philosophizing certainly offers some beautiful points of view and some quite fruitful suggestions. But in the main it builds a fantastic edifice of ideas on the basis of rather arbitrary analogies. And anyone who today believes that Fechner's revival can overcome the decaying materialism has neither gained the right relationship to natural science nor to true spiritual research, which is so urgently needed at present.

[ 4 ] Hartmann's appearance therefore fell in a time that was averse to all philosophizing and had turned its interest entirely to natural science. From this, people sought to construct a world view that, given the circumstances, had to be quite materialistic. Matter and its forces were to be the only reality, and all spiritual phenomena were to be nothing more than an expression of material effects. Those who thought differently were simply assumed by large sections of society to have not yet overcome their old prejudices and to have not yet arrived at the “only reasonable” philosophy of reality.

[ 5 ] And into this fell a phenomenon like the “philosophy of the unconscious”. Eduard von Hartmann took a challenging position towards natural science. He did not ignore the facts of natural science. Rather, he showed his full acquaintance with them everywhere. Indeed, it was precisely by making a particular use of facts from the field of natural science that he sought to prove that the spirit rules behind all sensory phenomena. The results that he arrived at through his purely speculative thinking are indeed very different from the spiritual facts that are reached by the actual spiritual research given in occultism. But in an age that was very much inclined towards a materialistic attitude, they were nevertheless numerous and ingenious demonstrations in favor of a world view that takes the spiritual into account. How many people had believed that they had clearly proven that natural science had forever “driven out the spirit”. And now someone dared to prove the “spirit” as real, precisely on the basis of what natural science itself teaches in many cases.

[ 6 ] The manner in which Hartmann has attempted this can only be indicated here in a few lines. Only a few of the many facts Hartmann has used may be mentioned here. For example, consider the so-called reflex movements of animals and of man. The eye closes when it is confronted with an impression that threatens it. Rational, conscious thought does not have time to become active. We are not dealing here with a process that is guided by the consciousness of the animal or human being. Nevertheless, it proceeds in such a way that reason is in it, and if conscious reason had to organize a similar process, it could not turn out differently. It is guided by an unconscious reason that is active within it or behind it. But reason can only give rise to the phenomena of such a fact; it cannot carry out the process itself. A will is needed for this. But again, this will is not a power of the conscious soul. It is therefore present as an unconscious one. Thus, in addition to unconscious reason, there is also an unconscious will behind the sensory facts. Another fact is given by instinctive actions. One need only look at the rational way in which animals build their homes, how they carry out actions that bear the character of expediency. Eduard von Hartmann derives his view from the healing power of nature, indeed from the creative work of the artist and the genius in general, which flows from the source of unconsciousness. To characterize this view, it is permissible to quote the sentences that are found in my book Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century) (Volume II, pp. 164-165, Berlin, Siegfried Cronbach) for this purpose:

[ 7 ] "Man cannot - in the sense of Eduard von Hartmann - be content with the observation of facts. He must progress from facts to ideas. These ideas cannot be something that is arbitrarily added to the facts by thinking. There must be something corresponding to them in the things and events. These corresponding ideas cannot be conscious ideas, because such only come about through the material processes of the brain. Without a brain, there is no consciousness. We must therefore imagine that the conscious ideas of the human mind correspond to an unconscious ideal in reality. Like Hegel, Hartmann also regards the idea as the real thing in things, which exists in them beyond what is merely perceptible, accessible to sensory observation. However, the mere idea content of things could never bring about a real event in them. The idea of a sphere cannot push the idea of another sphere. The idea of a table cannot make an impression on the human eye either. A real event presupposes a real force. To gain an idea of such a force, Hartmann draws on Schopenhauer. In his own soul, man finds a force through which he gives reality to his own thoughts and decisions, the will. Just as the will expresses itself in the human soul, it presupposes the existence of the human organism. Through the organism, the will is a conscious one. If we want to think of a force in things, we can only imagine it as similar to the will, the only force that we know directly. But again, we must disregard consciousness. So, outside of us, there is an unconscious will in things, which gives ideas the possibility of becoming real. The content of ideas and will in the world, in their union, constitute the unconscious basis of the world. – Even though the world exhibits a thoroughly logical structure on account of its content of ideas, it owes its real existence to the illogical, irrational will. Its content is rational; that this content is a reality has its reason in the irrationality.»

[ 8 ] It is clear that Hartmann assumes a spiritual world as the basis of the one that reveals itself to man through his . external senses. This is what his view of the world has in common with occult knowledge. Only the way in which both arrive at this spiritual world is what distinguishes them. Occult knowledge shows that man does not need to stop at the outer senses in terms of his perceptive faculty. It says: There are dormant abilities in man; and if he develops these in the same way as he has developed his external senses up to now, then he will perceive the spiritual world directly, just as he perceives the ordinary sensual world with his eyes and ears. The philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann does not recognize such a development of man to a higher capacity for perception. For it, there is no perception other than that of the external senses. One can only combine the perceptions of these external senses, examine them with the intellect, dissect them, and reflect on their causes. Then one comes to realize that behind what one sees, hears, etc., there is something else that one does not perceive. This imperceptible spiritual reality is thus recognized through logical conclusions. It must remain a mere world of thought for man. — If occult knowledge advances on the basis of a higher human faculty of perception to a richly structured spiritual world, Hartmann's supersensible world of thought remains meager. It is composed only of the two elements, the unconscious will and the unconscious idea.

[ 9 ] If we realize this, it will be easy to see what is lacking in Eduard von Hartmann's view of the world to enable it to rise to the spiritual world. But such clarity will enable us to do justice to it within its limits. It is precisely because Hartmann does not go beyond sensory perception that he feels all the more compelled to look around him in this sensory world and to see exactly where it already requires thorough thinking to speak of a spiritual basis. This is Hartmann's strength in the face of scientific materialism. He can show how the conclusions of natural science are reached only by superficial observation of the facts. He can prove that the results of natural science itself urge us to seek spiritual causes in all phenomena. In this way he is able, for example, to give the materialistic natural scientists a picture of their own science which differs considerably from their own. This caused the materialistic-minded natural scientists to raise a vehement objection to the “philosophy of the unconscious”. They declared the creator of the same to be a dilettante in the field of natural science. With such a manner one usually has a very easy stand vis-à-vis a larger public. The public does not examine things closely. When the “experts”, who, according to the public, must know what they are talking about, say: “This philosophy is no good, because the philosopher does not understand the facts he is talking about”: the public will swear by such a statement. And the philosopher may then present the best reasons for his view: that does not help him at all.

[ 10 ] Hartmann recognized the futility of such a path. Therefore, he chose a much more clever one to refute the scientific materialists thoroughly. A path against which there was absolutely nothing to save the scientific superficiality. Allow me to present this path of Eduard von Hartmann's in such a way that I can reproduce what I have already said about it, namely in a lecture that I gave on February 20, 1893, at the Vienna Scientific Club and which was printed in the July 1893 issue of the Monatsblätter des wissenschaftlichen Klubs in Wien: “In one chapter of his book (the ‘Philosophy of the Unconscious’), Eduard von Hartmann attempted to deal with Darwinism from a philosophical perspective. He found that the prevailing view of the time could not withstand logical reasoning, and sought to deepen it. The result was that he was accused of dilettantism by natural scientists and condemned in the strongest possible terms. In numerous essays and writings, he was accused of lacking insight into scientific matters. Among the opposing writings was one by an unnamed author. The statements made in it were described by respected natural scientists as the best that could be said against Hartmann's views. The experts considered the philosopher to have been completely refuted. The famous zoologist Dr. Oskar Schmidt said that the work of the unknown author had “fully confirmed the conviction of all those who are not sworn to the unconscious that Darwinism – and Schmidt meant the view of it held by the natural scientists – is right”. And Ernst Haeckel, whom I also regard as the greatest German natural scientist of the present day, wrote: 'This excellent work says everything in essence that I myself could have said about the «philosophy of the unconscious ' — When a second edition of the work appeared later, the name of the author was on the title page: Eduard von Hartmann. The philosopher had wanted to show that it was not at all impossible for him to familiarize himself with the scientific way of thinking and to speak the language of natural scientists if he wanted to. Hartmann thus provided proof that it is not the philosophers who lack an understanding of natural science, but rather the representatives of the latter who lack insight into philosophy.” - That was indeed a harsh lesson that Eduard von Hartmann taught the materialistic natural scientists. Even if it cannot be said that the latter were driven to some thoroughness in relation to spiritual research by it: Hartmann's position towards them and probably also that of spiritual research in general has been put in a world-historically significant light by it.

[ 11 ] If the “philosophy of the unconscious” is thus vastly superior to materialistic natural science, then Eduard von Hartmann placed himself from the outset in an awkward position with regard to spiritual research, due to his epistemology, which, to a certain extent, follows Kantian lines. He characterized the common view of man as naïve realism. He said: “This common view sees real things in the perceptions of the senses. Now, however, it can easily be shown that this view is wrong. For the fact that man sees an object in a certain color, perceives it with a certain smell, etc., is due only to the fact that his eyes, his olfactory organ, etc., are built in a certain way. If he had other organs instead of eyes and olfactory organs, he would perceive something completely different. Thus, perceptions are not real things, but only phenomena that are caused by the sensory organs in their own way. The ordinary person who considers them real is therefore living in a delusion. Rather, one must assume that the true reality lies behind the perceptions of the senses as a cause. And it is precisely for this reason that Hartmann seeks to overcome the naive realism of the ordinary person. He seeks to fathom through thinking what lies behind the apparent true reality. In doing so, he admits in a certain limited sense that man can develop to a higher level of knowledge. He sees his own point of view as one that slumbers in every person, and to which the naive realist only does not rise.

[ 12 ] How close it would have been, now that Hartmann had already gone so far, to say to himself: Could one not rise to an even higher level of knowledge? Could there not be a higher capacity for knowledge, which would also make my point of view appear to be a delusion, just as the point of view of naive realism appears to me? Hartmann never wanted to draw this obvious conclusion. That is why occult knowledge has always remained completely incomprehensible to him. This was due to the limitations of his mind. He was simply unable to go beyond a certain point. He did, however, make every effort in a certain respect. When Sinnett's “Esoteric Teaching of Secret Buddhism” appeared in the 1880s, thus giving the theosophical trend of the times its first literary expression, Hartmann wrote a detailed essay on this book. Now, it can be said that in that Sinnett book, theosophy was presented in a much too dogmatic way to be of much help to a thorough thinker, and that the “secret Buddhism” contained too much stereotyped, even directly erroneous, which made access difficult; but one must nevertheless find that Hartmann fell victim to a certain type of his mind in this direction of research, as he also did with other phenomena of spiritual research. He had encapsulated himself at an early stage in the thought-forms he had once established, and thus lost any possibility of even understanding anything else. Therefore, for him, a relationship to other research was never possible other than a purely comparative one, in which he would simply compare every other thought with his own and then say: what agrees with me is right; what does not is wrong. In a certain sense, therefore, Eduard von Hartmann's critical attitude towards the achievements of others was such that in individual cases there was no need to wait to hear what he would say. Anyone who was familiar with his philosophy and then took up a different point of view could always know what Hartmann would say about the latter, even before he himself had spoken.

[ 13 ] Hartmann also dealt with minor contemporary phenomena of spiritual research, such as hypnotism and spiritualism, without arriving at anything other than a rather stereotyped registration in his thought forms. This is why many of Eduard von Hartmann's later books are far less inspiring than his first. Of course, he modified his original results in some points, and that is why it is wrong for the public to judge him mostly according to his first creation, the “Philosophy of the Unconscious”. He often complained bitterly about this one-sided assessment of his philosophy. But the reason for this is also that, with regard to his fundamental ideas, Hartmann has not provided anything in many of his later writings that any expert in his principles could not actually develop for themselves. There are few authors in relation to whom it can be said with as much justification as with Hartmann: in order to gain what they offer in their later works, one no longer actually needs them. A reasonably talented person can, for example, construct for himself the essentials of what is contained in the “Categories” or in the “History of Metaphysics” in the sense of Hartmann, if he knows and understands his previous writings.

[ 14 ] It is easy to misunderstand what constitutes Hartmann's pessimism. The fact that he was originally influenced by Schopenhauer's school of thought has given the “philosophy of the unconscious” a pessimistic slant. However, it should not be overlooked that Hegel and Schelling, with their by no means pessimistic way of thinking, also had an equally strong influence on Hartmann as Schopenhauer. It would go far beyond the scope of this article to discuss Hartmann's relationship to the three philosophers mentioned or to other thinkers. Therefore, without such an elaboration, Hartmann's relationship to pessimism will be briefly characterized.

[ 15 ] Since the “philosophy of the unconscious” sees the spirit of the world as composed of two elements, the unconscious will and the unconscious idea, it cannot regard the course of world development as entirely rational and good. For although the idea is rational and logical for it, the will is not. But the world can only have come into being through the will. It has already been said above that a force is necessary for real creation. The powerless idea can create nothing. Hartmann therefore comes to the conclusion that the world is there at all because of the irrational will, and the idea can do nothing but take possession of the will in order to annul creation again. The process of the world consists, then, in the idea feeling itself unsatisfied by the fact that it has been called into existence by the will; it thus feels creation as its suffering, and strives to free itself from this suffering. It is again permissible to quote a few sentences from my book “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert” (pp. 165f.) in this connection: “The reign of the irrational is expressed in the existence of pain, which torments all beings. Pain outweighs pleasure in the world. This fact, which can be explained philosophically from the illogical will element of existence, is sought by Eduard von Hartmann to be substantiated by careful consideration of the relationship between pleasure and pain in the world. Anyone who does not indulge in any illusions, but objectively considers the evils of the world, cannot come to any other conclusion than that pain is present to a far greater extent than pleasure. From this, however, it follows that non-existence is to be preferred to existence. But non-existence can only be achieved if the logical-rational idea destroys the will, existence. Hartmann therefore sees the world process as a gradual destruction of the irrational will by the rational world of ideas. The highest moral task of man should be to help overcome the will.” It is clear that the ‘philosophy of the unconscious’ is diametrically opposed to occult spiritual research. For the latter, in a nutshell, must see the world and thus also man in a developmental current that ultimately leads everything to the divine, that is, to the good original being.

[ 16 ] But in Hartmann's case, this comprehensive pessimism is combined with a strange subordinate optimism. For his pessimism is not intended to lead to a turning away from existence, but on the contrary, to a devoted participation in it. He believes that only this pessimism can lead to moral action.

[ 17 ] As long as man believes that pleasure and happiness can be attained, he will not - according to Eduard von Hartmann's assumption - give up the selfish pursuit of them. Only one thing can bring real healing from all egoism. That is the realization that all belief in pleasure and happiness is an illusion. If a person is clear about this, then he will give up all such striving. Now one could say, however, that under such conditions all existence is pointless; and the “philosophy of the unconscious” would therefore actually have to recommend to man the annihilation of his existence. Hartmann replies that absolutely nothing would be achieved if the individual wanted to extinguish his existence. For what ultimately suffers is not only the individual spirit, but the All-Spirit. If suffering is to cease, the existence of the All-Spirit itself must be extinguished. This cannot be achieved by the individual destroying himself, but rather by the individual placing his work in the service of the whole. All the work of humanity must work together to ultimately free the All-Spirit from its suffering. The whole development of civilization is nothing other than working towards this goal. The development of the world consists in the redemption of the Godhead from the suffering of existence through the work of humanity. The individual must renounce his own happiness and place all his efforts at the service of the redemption of the deity. It cannot be the task here to show how Hartmann, in a rather fantastic way, presupposes that humanity could be educated to this end, ultimately through a common decision, through a united striving to radically destroy existence and to redeem the deity.

[ 18 ] Even if one has to admit that in such extreme points of philosophical thought the “philosophy of the unconscious” loses itself in unfathomable depths, it cannot escape the discerning reader that Hartmann has made many beautiful statements in particular. One such must be seen in particular in the discussion of the various moral viewpoints in his “Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness”. There he has listed all possible moral views of life, from crass egoism to religious selfless devotion to work in the service of humanity as a whole. And even though a touch of pessimism lies over all these statements, with the paradoxical goal of redeeming the world spirit from its suffering: anyone who is able to disregard this radical end point can still gain a great deal from Hartmann's individual works. The same can be said of the book: “The Religious Consciousness of Humanity in the Gradual Sequence of its Development”. Here Hartmann wants to show how, in the course of history, humanity gradually struggles through the various religious standpoints to the worship of that All-Spirit, as it is conceived of as “the Unconscious”. To him, all previous religions appear as a preliminary stage of the “religion of the spirit”. That the “spirit” lives in each individual, and that life must consist in the redemption of this suffering spirit: this is to be the content of such a future religion. Christianity, too, can only be a preliminary stage to this “religion of the spirit”. It gives itself over – Hartmann believes – to the illusion that the All-Spirit suffered in one person, the Son of God: but the sum of all persons must take the place of this one person. All must feel themselves to be suffering sons of the One Spirit, called to redemption. Hartmann is convinced that the scientific theology of the new age must lead to a “self-destruction of Christianity”. It must ultimately dissolve through the contradiction that arises from reflecting on the impossibility of the work of redemption being brought about by a single individual. If Hartmann's explanation once again reveals a complete misunderstanding of Christianity, the creator of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” has nevertheless provided many important details in this area, and in this respect he is far superior to contemporary theologians and philosophers in terms of his acumen and independence of thought.

[ 19 ] It would be interesting to also explain how, despite the inadequacy of his basic principles, Hartmann also achieved much that was excellent in the individual in his “Aesthetics”. However, due to a lack of space, this must be left out of consideration here.

[ 20 ] Eduard von Hartmann offers much that is stimulating to anyone who studies him. And he cannot be without benefit to spiritual research. In him we have a personality who, on the one hand, shows an energetic struggle to free himself from the prejudices of the materialistic spirit of the age, but who, on the other hand, cannot rise to the realm of real spiritual insight. In his case, one can see how the way of thinking of the present takes away the freedom of the spirit to such real vision. — And there is one more thing that should not be overlooked about this personality. Hartmann not only dealt with the highest questions of life, but he also penetrated all the questions of the time: cultural questions, politics, social economics, legal questions, etc. And everywhere he proves himself to be a thinker who wants to remain firmly on the ground of reality, who does not want to lose himself in fantastic utopias and abstract future perspectives. Yes, his sense of reality in this respect is in a strange contrast to his radical, and really often bottomless, dreams in the highest questions and goals of humanity. His conservatism in politics and socialism sometimes has something philistine about it, but it is also very healthy. That is why he will also be valuable for the spiritual researcher in this respect. The latter has every reason to beware of fantasies and to remain firmly grounded in reality. Hartmann can provide an excellent example of this. Whether one wants to accept this or that from him is not so important; but it is important that one can always receive fruitful suggestions from him.

[Dearly beloved!]

It is not possible to determine exactly when the Book of the Dead was written. In any case, it is one of the most important documents, because it shows us that in such early times in Egypt a world view, a deepening, prevailed which aimed strictly at a unified world and which, on the other hand, already had the strange urge in itself to understand death as a symbol, to understand death in such a way that it does not appear as the terrible in itself, but that it appears as that which can be seen as a symbol, as a mere allegory, which still stands high above [life]. If death is to be overcome, it is certain that death can only be overcome spiritually. It essentially deals with the transition from physical life to life after death - and that means nothing other than life in general. We can describe even more precisely what is contained in the Book of the Dead. It contains chants, hymns to the sun god Ra, to Osiris, the son of the sun god, hymns which are preferably put into the mouths of the dead. These dead who have made their way to the afterlife, these dead are to experience something, they are to gain knowledge [of what they have seen and what they are aware of from those who are no longer bound to the body. That is the first part. The second part consists of the dead person being held up to account in a kind of judgment for the debts he has incurred. He is weighed, and depending on the findings, his value appears in the overall structure of the universe. Those who have reached a high level will not - as is often said - come to Osiris, but they will become "Osiris. It is curious that the book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the [sun] god Ra, the second part deals with human destiny, the third part then shows the path to reach Osiris, the path that leads to deification. This book thus represents the path to life, the path from the individual life to the total life, which is achieved through the realization and deification of man.

The details of the Book of the Dead are important in the most diverse ways for the history of the development of world views. In the Book of the Dead, for example, we find the myth of Osiris' battle with Typhon, Osiris' enemy, hatred. Isis had to find Osiris again in the universe, and she then brings forth the younger Osiris, Horus, whom she describes as the deification of the universe. We find this in the Book of the Dead.

But then we also find the doctrine of the seven-part man in it. The Egyptians thought of man as being made up of the body, the spiritual body and the mummy.

So we have three stages:
[1.] Heart, sensation or mind,
[2-] Genius and creation,
[3-] the Holy Spirit and intelligence.

These are roughly the details of this Book of the Dead, which was in any case much better known in antiquity than in later times. In later times, the awareness of the teachings as they are expressed in the Book of the Dead has been lost. However, we often find the teachings of the Book of the Dead again in Greece, and the entire Greek spiritual life in the post-Pythagorean period can only be understood if one assumes that [its] views were the teachings of this Book of the Dead, the tripartite division of the human path of knowledge and the eventual merging into the Osiris nature. If one assumes that they were transplanted to Greece and that essentially the same views lived there. However, it must be noted that the Egyptians did not have an intermediate stage that played a greater role among the Greeks, namely the myth developed with [a certain sense of] beauty. The Greeks loved to embellish everything with beauty. We have therefore been compelled to regard the entire Greek religion, the entire Greek world view, which stands between Pythagoreanism and Platonism, as an aesthetic one. We can do this if we see it as born out of Greek myth, but in its spiritualized form.

We know the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, the myth of the Argonauts and so on. However, we can always assume - and we have to hold on to this - that the myth exists in a threefold meaning:

[1] The first meaning is that in its immediate form as the purely naturalistic conception,
2. then as a human, as a symbol and
3. thirdly as the divine.]

And the third, the divine, was the concept that was taught only to a select few, only to a few who had prepared themselves for it. We can already prove this historically. We are told of Samothrace, an island, that the deities there were nothing other than names for other deities. However, it is not to be believed that they were the same as the names of Greek or Egyptian deities. For outsiders, they had the same names. But for the insiders, they were deeper understandings of the entire myths and stories of the gods.

The best-known Greek myth is that of Demeter and her daughter Persephone and then the myth of Dionysus, which has already been mentioned several times. Demeter, one of the supreme female Greek deities, was first understood in a naturalistic sense. She had a daughter with Zeus, Persephone. She was stolen by Hades, the god of the underworld. Hades had asked to be allowed to take this daughter as his wife in the underworld. She was only to remain in the upper world temporarily. She was to remain two thirds in the upper world and one third in the underworld. This myth, which is alive everywhere in Greece in its naturalistic meaning, was also that which was to be found in certain mysteries, namely that on which the Eleusinian Mysteries were based. This myth also had a threefold meaning. The naturalistic meaning lies simply in the fact that one understands the actual as such, that one has a mythological history of the gods. The second conception would then be something that took place in [Greek] life, and that was the marriage of the Ionian spirit with the Doric.

The Greek people were divided into tribes. Among the most important were the Dorians and the Ionians. The myth of Demeter had originated among the Dorians, and the Ionians had adopted it and mixed it with the myth of Dionysus. We are interested in the Dionysus myth because it leads to an esoteric view. Dionysus is also a son of Zeus and Demeter. He was torn to pieces and only managed to save his heart. From this, Zeus had formed the younger Dionysus. But he could no longer take the limbs. It is therefore the case that the world represents the scattered limbs. This therefore represents the marriage of the Dorian Persephone with the Ionian Dionysus. The fusion of these two views has thus taken place in this myth.

But what remains to be noted is the third, the divine conception. We can only understand this historically if we stick to the sparse information we have. We are first referred to the temple in which the service of Demeter takes place. This Demeter service is a service in which we encounter the three deities mentioned. Demeter herself is one of the greatest deities of Greece, symbolically shaped, with the inscription: "I am the origin of the soul, I am the origin of the spirit." At her side, Persephone is presented to us with the inscription: "I am death and carry within me the secret of life." Her brother Dionysus is presented to us with an even stranger inscription: "I am death, I am life, I am rebirth and adorned with wings." - If we understand this, we come to the interpretation of one of the most important Greek myths. Demeter loses her daughter. She has to give her Persephone to Hades. She could return to her mother if she had not already partaken of the fruit of the pomegranate with Hades and was therefore unable to return completely. This Persephone is supposed to save her brother. Only this makes it possible - now in a deeper sense - for Persephone to return, for Dionysus to sacrifice himself. We have to look at these two in context again. We must recognize that sacrifice is what matters here. This is shown to us by the fact that Orpheus - who is originally credited with having communicated the deeper content of this to the Greek people - was also sacrificed, for he is also said to have been torn apart and to have lived on as a spirit by having flowed out into the world matter. The child of eternal life must be sacrificed to Hades, to Pluto. We can only understand this if we see the material world in Pluto. Thus, according to the esoteric view, we see in Demeter the universal spirituality, the primordial mother of intelligence, and in Hades the material world. In the whole Persephone myth we see the necessity of Persephone's falling away from her mother. The daughter must enter matter. She must partake of the pomegranate of the underworld. Now she can no longer save herself from matter and therefore a second sacrifice is necessary. Persephone's brother, Dionysus, must sacrifice himself again. He must allow his [own] spiritual nature to flow out into the gross nature, so that Persephone now enters into a spiritual marriage with her brother, but can flow back again to the original spirit of the primordial mother, Demeter. This mystery of the spirituality's necessary departure from itself, this immersion of the spirits in the material and this longing of the spirit to return to the spiritual is expressed in the Demeter myth.

This was the vivid experience that was to be taught to those who were introduced to the Eleusinian Mysteries. They were to be given the urge to find their way back from matter to the spiritual primordial mother. This is what lived in Greece in the spirit of a few chosen ones and what carried the whole world view between Pythagoras and Plato. What lived as the deeper spirit in these personalities from Empedocles through Anaxagoras to Socrates and Plato sometimes appears to be merely a logical chain of thought, as presented to us by the philosophers. But it is an exposition of Greek myth, an exposition that was cultivated wherever a deeper foundation was sought. This is what appears to them as a mere logical chain of thought.

I would like to point out another myth, which was cultivated even more frequently than the Demeter myth, which is perhaps easier to understand, and which was cultivated in order to gradually lead initiates into a deeper spiritual understanding of the world. I would like to refer to the myth of the Argonaut voyage. This shows in each of its individual sentences that it can only be understood as the symbolic clothing of a deeper wisdom. Phrixos and his sister Helle set off on the ram [...] to the barbarian king. On the way, Helle falls into the sea and Phrixos alone reaches the coast on the ram. When they reached the barbarian people, the ram was sacrificed to the king. But the ram's skin was hung up in the sacred grove of the gods and guarded by a great dragon. Jason, together with Orpheus, Heracles, Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Meleager, Peleus, Neleus, Admetus, Pirithoos and many others, undertakes to retrieve this ram's skin [- the golden fleece]. These are the great heroes of Greece. It is significant that Jason, with the representatives of the highest Greek spirituality, undertakes to retrieve the skin. He actually wins the skin and brings it back. The dragon guarding the skin is defeated by Jason. The dragon's teeth are then sown, and out of these grow fierce men who fight each other. Finally, in short, he gets the fleece with the help of the sorceress Medea. On the way back, however, Medea decides to dismember [her] little brother Apsyrtos. The father Aietes collects the pieces and therefore does not reach the fugitives. The fleece is brought back to Greece.

We must also interpret this in a threefold sense. Firstly natural, secondly human and thirdly divine. [As a human event it is of no interest, but in its divine meaning this myth perhaps leads most deeply into the Greek intellectual world.] Phrixos is divine vision, that which points us to the abyss of divine being, to the premonition of an infinite depth. Nothing else is expressed in the personality of Phrixos. [Brightness is the personality, the representative of man before his fall into sin, for whom the struggle of the spirit with materiality has not yet existed] - the undivided humanity, which is connected with nothing other than the infinite vision of infinity. [Both set out on the path to the most sacred thing they have. And the representatives of the human soul first come to the sacred grove of the gods in order to sacrifice to it and to begin the path of life with this human soul]. We have only one other person in the Argonaut train. Phrixos begins his journey through life into the realm of the barbarians on the other side of the sea. This is to be understood as the realm of passions, the realm of sensuality. The human soul is to be sacrificed to the realm of materiality. It is to be sacrificed to the waves and bustle of the world. As a result, one thing is lost, the original innocence. It is initially submerged, lost. It is initially something that has flowed out into existence. [It is something that is initially completely lost, which is why it has sunk into the Hellespont. The soul is led into life, where we have nothing but a dark urge, where we must find our way back to the higher life]. But [the soul] must be redeemed anew, just as Persephone was redeemed by Dionysus. It must be redeemed. What had to be sacrificed to life must be redeemed. It must be redeemed here by Jason, the Greek hero. The ram is sacrificed to the gods. Only the ram's skin, that which surrounds the human soul as a shell, is first hung up in the sacred grove of the gods and carefully guarded by the dragon. This is initially nothing other than what is given in the Book of the Dead. [The ram's skin] is the representative of enlightenment, of knowledge. It must first be redeemed from the fury of the terrible powers that lurk before it. The king's son Jason must overcome these forces through knowledge in conjunction with spiritual and physical forces. He must lead this ram's skin back to Greece, supported by Medea, a female figure. I have already pointed out that the female figure signifies a state of consciousness in Greek. The soul must be redeemed with the help of Medea's magical power. From this immersion she can then be led back up to her deification, her divinization. That is the deeper meaning of the Argonaut saga.

The fact that the young son of Aietes, Medea's brother, has to be killed so that Medea's father cannot reach [the fleeing Jason] also has its significance. The one who has achieved this must leave behind many things that have been in his life. He has to leave some things behind, for the reason that [he cannot be caught up] on the path to deeper knowledge. This is how the saga of the Argonauts concludes. Basically, it is nothing more than a different version, more tailored to the individuality of man, of the myth that we also encounter in the Demeter myth.

This conception of the Greek myth then confronts us in a philosophically one-sided formation in a personality that represents a kind of fall from grace for the Greek world view: in Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. He first pointed out in an intellectual or rational way that sensual knowledge cannot satisfy man. He pointed out that man cannot get to the bottom of things and that the weighing up and weighing down of the world cannot be the truth, but that the truth must be something much deeper, that it can only be purely spiritual. He first put this into this form: true existence can only be achieved through pure thinking, through the deepest knowledge, while the senses only present us with a dream. - Parmenides thus divides the whole of existence into two parts, into sensual illusion on the one hand and intellectual, mental existence on the other. But there is still something that he could not find, and that is the ego. He could not find the figure of Dionysus in the figure of Persephone, in the urge to emerge from the sensual, the spirit. Parmenides did not take this [step]. He only saw that which is enchanted in the sensual world and on the other side Demeter [and Hades], the materiality. But he was unable to find the path that unites the two.

In a slightly different form, we encounter the same thing in Empedocles, who said that the primordial being had dissolved into a series of elements, into fire, water, earth and air. In these four elements he saw nothing other than individual eternal manifestations of the primordial being, the eternal world spirit. And in every single thing he saw certain mixtures of the four elements, even in man. The fact that the human being also consists of a mixture of the same elements as the world means that the human being can understand the world. The same can be recognized by the same. This is the same thing that Goethe says:

Were not the eye sun-like,
it could never behold the sun.
If God's own power were not in us,
how could the divine delight us?

This view was already held by Empedocles. He even had the view that the essence reigns in all being, [so that] he already [anticipated] the saying in Goethe's "Faust": "Exalted Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything ..." [anticipated]. Empedocles already recognized this totality of being. He believed that before it rises to the higher, it must pass through the lower stages. The spirit must pass through the stages of inorganic, elementary existence, the stages from plant to animal existence up to the form of man, and always follow them. This is why he sees love and hate as what brings the elements together. Empedocles thus describes life as a constant struggle between love and hate. In this way, the worldly sage also repeats the battle between [Osiris-Isis and Typhon] and the battle between Persephone and [Hades].

So we see in the Empedoclean doctrine nothing other than the elaboration of what [Empedocles] could get to know in the Greek mystery schools. We shall see that he does not consider anything incomprehensible that is described to the philosophers as incomprehensible.

We are told that human existence is not completed in the single individuality, but that this human existence was already there before it entered the individual personality, and that it will also be there again in other forms and shapes after it leaves this personality. In short, [Empedocles] stands on the standpoint of the transmigration of souls, of metempsychosis. He was initiated into the teachings of the Pythagoreans. The philosophers could not understand how Empedocles arrived at this doctrine if he assumed that the soul is a mere mixture of the four elements, but still ascribes to it a special existence in that it can take on different forms. We will understand that Empedocles sees in these four elements nothing other than the one eternal primordial being that has poured itself into existence, and that we therefore have to see in them only a special form of existence that flows back again to the primordial being. Thus in the spiritual conception of Empedocles we have something higher than the merely sensual. Empedoclean philosophy is nothing more than a philosophical dissection of the Argonaut legend, the legend of Demeter and Persephone and so on.

These teachings were then adopted by Socrates and Plato, and we are not to understand the historical Socrates in the figure of Socrates when we encounter him in the Platonic dialogues. Socrates appears to Plato as the master of the school, and he represents the school in his conversations. Socrates was regarded by Plato as such a leader. In the Platonic Discourses, it is not the historical Socrates who is the main subject, but the spiritual leader, the one who leads from the lowest levels of knowledge up to the highest. We cannot understand the meaning of the Platonic Conversations if we do not understand them as a mental image of mystical instruction, as instruction and guidance from the lowest to the highest levels of knowledge.

The other day I mentioned the talk about the immortality of the soul. This is usually understood as if immortality were to be proven by a logical thread. But it is not a question of proving the immortality of the soul, and what has been written about whether the proof has succeeded or failed. If it is said that the proof is no longer congenial to us today, then the person concerned only shows that he has not grasped the whole spirit of the "Phaidon". It is not a question of proving whether the soul is immortal, but of something quite different. We can assume that Plato also went through the schools of [the] Sophists. Protagoras was the founder of the "phrase: he is portrayed [in the Platonic dialog "Protagoras"] as someone who led knowledge astray. But we must not forget that Socrates was a profound [ironist]. We must not forget that the Greeks had their own conception of irony, that they understood it as something that was necessary for the illumination of the whole world view. Socrates fought the sophists with irony. What are the sophists? The sentences uttered by Protagoras characterize them:

["Man is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are - of those that are not, that they are not." And:] We cannot prove anything rigorously. One thing can be said of every thing, but the opposite can also be said of every thing. This seemed to be the destruction of all knowledge. Even today it seems as if the sophists were playing a vain game with ideas, as if they wanted nothing more than to talk about every thing. Vanity was their purpose, as the measure of all things was only purpose. The Sophists by no means took this absurd and downright frivolous standpoint. The Sophists are, if I may say so, the personalities within Greek intellectual life who wanted to reduce to absurdity the knowledge that flows purely from the intellect, but who also put into practice in a different way the old Apollonian sentence: "Man is the measure of all things", which means nothing other than that man has to rise and seek within himself. - Do not recognize yourself with random intellectual knowledge, but immerse yourself in your true self. - They adjusted themselves to pure logic on a trial basis in order to lead them all the more surely into error. You can prove the one, and you can prove the other. But the sophists only wanted to show the worthlessness of logic. It is worthless to stop at what we encounter externally, at purely intellectual knowledge. Man would have to be just as unsatisfied in this knowledge as he would have to be unsatisfied within a purely mindless sensory life.

Plato had become acquainted with this sophism, and he apparently fought it, not because he regarded it as a worthless phenomenon, but as an irony. He took the standpoint of Protagoras, and Protagoras always falls short of Socrates, who does not want to grasp the world through reason, but through immediate life and through the mind. But this is not a different point of view from the one put forward by the Sophists. The sophists wanted to be opposed because they wanted to expose the absurdity of these propositions in order to show where each proposition leads. Thus Socrates, by leading beyond sophistry, led to deeper knowledge. He liberates his students from the belief in reason. This redemption is expressed to us in all those conversations [in which the sophists, Socrates' immediate predecessors, are combated]. The Discourses are written for the sole purpose of disabusing people of the belief in the provability of higher knowledge. That is the purpose of the Platonic Discourse. No one will believe that a flower can be proved. No one will seek proof that a flower exists. It is enough if we experience existence. You cannot prove a thing. You can prove the connection between things. You can prove that some fact must be there, from a context that you have already perceived. But you can never prove a thing that you have absolutely not perceived. So it is not a question of proving something logically, but of expanding the field of experience, of opening up the field of experience into a metaphysical realm. Something should be opened up that lies behind experience. [So it should not say: Here you have experience, and you should pay attention to something that lies behind it. It should not be deduced logically, but experienced spiritually. It should not be proven, but experienced.

This is also the case in the "Phaidon". You have to experience what Socrates means by "soul". He does not want to prove that the soul is immortal, but he wants to lead his students to experience the soul in the same way as the body. The "Phaidon" is about the discovery of the soul. It is about experiencing the soul. When his students have really experienced "soul, then [its] characteristics will soon become clear to them. If you want to be shown a flower, you show him the flower and don't let him prove it.

This is what is meant by the Socratic method. The Socratic method is usually understood in a much more trivial way. The Socratic method means nothing other than the opening of a completely new field of experience, the opening of new senses, the opening of a new field of experience, and the teaching of Socrates is such that every person can be led to such higher [cognitive] powers. And the leading to such powers in the Socratic method is the conversation.

We will find in the conversations the most profound method and the truest mysticism, and we will see the form in which [Greek] mysticism has expressed itself in the most profound and experiential way. I am convinced that Plato's teaching can only be understood superficially, that the doctrine of ideas can only be seen as an emptiness of ideas, if one does not draw this doctrine of ideas from the depths of Greek spiritual life, if one does not take into account the tragedy of life that the myth of Demeter expresses by showing that the dearest thing Demeter has must first fall away in order to then seek the way back again. And in the Argonaut legend, it is depicted that man must lose himself on the path of life in order to be able to redeem himself again with the help of his new powers. That saga thus expresses to us the deep tragedy that lies in the fact that [knowledge] must first be lost, sunk into the depths of materiality, and that it can only be found again by way of complete self-denial - and only by giving up many a love. And this expresses that this rediscovery of the highest knowledge is linked with the true redemption of this knowledge, with the finding of the infinite in the finite, with the overcoming of individuality, that therefore this knowledge can only be achieved through one of the most original forces that rule in man; and this again expresses itself meaningfully through the emergence of human vision, that which Phrixos has to sacrifice first, the vision which leads us into the indeterminate and into the deepest depths, which leads us to the point that we can never be satisfied and that we can only find ourselves on the perpetual path back to Demeter. This realization means the infinite path to rediscover lost knowledge. This is expressed in the distinction between the lower and higher consecrations.

When Schelling passed from his youth to a later age, he distinguished the teachings of his youth, which express the most spiritual and profound. He later expressed this philosophy of his youth as a lower consecration compared to his later one, because the height of that vision had dawned on him, in which he recognized that there are abyss-like depths that can never be reached [with the ordinary powers of thought]. The realization of certain spiritual powers to encompass this world is what he calls [higher] consecration. To lose this faith altogether in comparison to the lower consecration and to believe and experience the omnipotence of the infinite depth, which has been lost to us, is the infinite love into which the divine principle has flowed and can be found again through this infinite. This is what he calls the "higher consecration."

Answer to the question:

Question about the sacrifice of Abraham.

These teachings of the Old Testament are a distortion. Jewish secret teachings then emerge, in which these things are then pulled together again. It is the same as in the legends of Demeter, Persephone and Dionysus. In them the doctrine of man is carried out in a tangible way. The Abraham sacrifice would correspond to the second stage of the human stages, the necessity of sacrificing one's loved one. It is undoubtedly taken from religious systems in which this school of thought lives.

It must be assumed for a whole series of Christian myths that in the year 1 there was no awareness of the esoteric side at all. Paul was the founder of Christianity, which has lived in the church right up to our time.

If I interpret the "Sistine Madonna" esoterically and someone tells me that Raphael knew nothing about it, I say: Yes, it doesn't need to be. If that is attempted, I have to be pleased and regard it as a perfectly justifiable thing. I am always pleased when people try to show this. The philosophers in the pulpits don't get involved in esotericism. The most important is Kühnemann.

In Empedocles, there is something we cannot understand. We can only present [it] as something incomprehensible; all modern research deals only with the purely natural conception of the matter and finally only with the question of its origin, with the question: How could something like this have developed?

If a snail were to crawl through a hall in which Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was being played, the snail would probably hear nothing of all that from which the people who are in the same hall are moved into the most beautiful sensations. The tones of the symphony are expressed in the air waves of the hall, these air waves spread to all sides; they are the outer expression of the magnificent tonal coherence. This sound connection goes through the organism of the snail as well as through the organism of the human being. In the human being it evokes sensations of the highest kind, the snail remains untouched by it. It is in the same medium, in the same oscillating tonal vein as the human being, but it knows nothing of what is going on around it. A world is around it, and it is in this world, but it has no idea of this world. And nevertheless, this world of the sound-weight is not in another place, where the snail is not, but in the same place, where also everything is, what the snail needs. The space in which the snail is located is thus filled by the facts which the snail can perceive, but it is also filled by a sum of facts which the snail cannot perceive.

We have thus established that appearances can live around a being without the being having any idea of them, and we can raise the question whether we humans do not perhaps also live in a world which is filled with facts and appearances of which we initially perceive nothing, of such facts and appearances which relate to our world in the same way as the tonal texture of the Ninth Symphony to that which a snail is able to perceive. The question must therefore touch us, whether that, what we feel and perceive in a space, in which we are, is everything, what occurs in our environment. There could be facts in our environment which are not there for us simply because we have not developed the organs for the perception of these facts. There could be beings in our world or we humans ourselves could develop into beings who are able to perceive far more than what is in our world around us. There could be comparatively a similar relationship between more or less developed people, as between the snail and the people.

This is the question which must awaken in us conjecture upon conjecture about the unknown worlds surrounding us, and this is also the question which is to be answered by the theosophical movement. It is essentially the task of the theosophical movement to acquaint us with worlds that surround us daily and hourly, with worlds within which we live, but of which we know nothing under ordinary circumstances. Theosophy does not want to acquaint us with worlds that lie beyond ours, not with worlds that are to be found in places inaccessible to us, but with those worlds that continually project into our world, that always surround us, but that remain unknown to us because our organs are not open to them. At first we can only speak of these worlds. We can only point to them and invite you to take part in the work by which man's senses are opened to these higher worlds, so that he is able to perceive them as he is able today only to perceive the ordinary world. I would like to speak to you about such worlds in the next lectures.

First of all I would like to speak of the world which we call in Theosophy the astral world. It will show itself to us as a world which is not far from us, which is everywhere where we are. In the space where we are at present, it is just as real as the world you see. The astral world is a higher world, which with its appearances surges and waves through the world, in which you are, just as the symphonic tone-wave surges through the world of the snail, but is not perceived by it. So we are not talking about something that is to be found outside our world, but we are talking about something that permeates our world in every point of its existence. The theosophical view teaches us to recognize various such worlds; it teaches us first of all to recognize that world which is known to us from everyday life: the physical world - that world, therefore, which every human being is capable of feeling with his sense organs, the world which we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, the world in which we find the objects of nature, the minerals, the plants and the animals. This world is interspersed, interspersed, if I may so express myself, by a higher world, by the so-called astral world, which we now want to get to know. Just as one fluid mixes with another, finer fluid, so that one fluid interpenetrates the other in all parts, so the astral world interpenetrates our world of the physical; and this astral world is in turn interpenetrated by a still higher world, which we call the mental world, which is the spiritual world proper. Thus three worlds are interlocked, one always interspersing the other, but man with his present organs perceives only the physical world. Gradually to open the sense for the invisible and under ordinary circumstances inaudible worlds, that is the task of theosophy.

What is the astral world? When we speak of the astral world, the quickest way to understand it is to seek out, among all the world views that have recognized a spiritual world in addition to the physical, those that have spoken of the astral world and its relationship to man. The Christian worldview also knows this astral world. In the first centuries of Christianity, not only two natures were distinguished in man, as later and more superficially: body and soul, but three were distinguished: body, soul and spirit. Soul and spirit have always been regarded as the components of man in all deeper world views since ancient times. Go back to those peoples who lived in our regions long before the Germanic tribes. If you look at the temples of those ancient Celtic peoples, you will find that they had an altar in the center surrounded by three circles of columns. These three pillar circles signified nothing other than the threefold nature of man: Body, Soul, Spirit. The physical nature is known. By the soul nature was understood in all deeper religions and world views what we call in the theosophical world view the astral. Under the expression "spirit" one understood the actually eternal of the nature of the human being. Body, soul and spirit make up the threefold nature of man. Modern natural science has studied the body quite closely. Through it we are connected with everything that is around us. We are not single, self-contained beings. We could not live physically if our environment were different. If you think of the temperature of the physical world as being ten to twenty degrees higher than the temperature of our air circuit, man could not live in it. Not only does our life depend on what goes on within the confines of our skin, but also on the life of the phenomena in nature around us. In a certain respect, we are only a result of what is going on around us. If there were no plants in the world, we could not feed ourselves. Only by being able to maintain the physical metabolism, we are able to live physically. Man is completely dependent on his physical environment, that is, he is a physical being within the whole physical nature, he belongs to this physical nature. The materialists of the 19th century rightly saw it this way. Our body is the effect of the physical environment. We live in the physical world with the physical world.

Now you know that for this body a very definite moment occurs in which it no longer obeys those laws which it obeyed under the ordinary conditions of life, that is the moment of death. At the moment of death, the body that belongs to us no longer obeys the same laws that it has obeyed throughout life; and yet it is natural laws that it obeys. When we have died, our physical organism returns to the natural substances that acted in this body during our life. Chemical and physical forces work in our physical body during our life. Our digestion is a physical process, our breathing is a physical process. What goes on in our eye when we see is also a physical process; it is something very similar to the process on the photographic plate when you have your picture taken. We are physically a confluence of physical and chemical forces, but we cease to be a confluence of chemical and physical forces when we succumb to death. This body then no longer holds together; it flows over into the stream of general physical phenomena. But the human body as such cannot possibly be only a chemical and physical composition, because at the same moment when the chemical and physical forces are left to themselves, they go completely different ways, they join the stream of the general chemical and physical processes. They no longer generate the processes of seeing, hearing and thinking, but they enter into completely different processes. So something must have been there, which called them to build up an organism during our life. This organism is composed of no other substances one hour before death than one hour after death. The physical composition is exactly the same, but the life element is no longer there. That is no longer there which calls these physical substances to a powerful action, as they would never work if they were left to themselves.

This leads us to see that this physically and chemically constructed body, because it is an impossibility in only physical and chemical respect, must be lived through and flowed through by a higher principle, which organizes, sails through and lives through the lower one. The next principle that lives through our body is that which prevents its parts from falling apart while we are still alive; and that which causes this is what we call the astral element in man.

We can say exactly what the astral element in man is. It is that which causes all people who have such an element in them to let something happen in them, which we call pleasure and displeasure in the broadest sense. Pleasure and displeasure is something that occurs in our body and in the bodies that are similar to us in astral relation and that cannot be caused by the chemical and physical substances. Take a crystal or any other physical substance composed of chemical substances. Everything can happen to it that otherwise happens in the physical, but not desire and displeasure. This is to be found only in man himself and in those beings which are organized like man. These beings are interspersed with an element which can feel pleasure and displeasure. If you bump a stone, it will fly on or strike somewhere and make an impression. If you impress such a natural object in this or any other way, you can see it from the outside; you can even subject it to a process that destroys it, but it will never feel pleasure or displeasure. Pleasure and displeasure reach as far as the astral world reaches. And just as I belong to the external world through the processes of a chemical and physical nature which take place within me, so I really and really have all the various shades of pleasure and displeasure within me, and through these various shades and manifestations of pleasure and displeasure I belong to a world which permeates and sails through our physical world and which is as much outside me as within me. In space there is not only air that sustains physical bodily life, but space is also interspersed with an astral world in which we humans participate just as we participate in the outer physical world. And just as we could not live as physical beings without letting the physical force flow through our organism, so we could not live as pleasure and displeasure beings, as astral beings, without participating in what is going on in the astral world, what lives and weaves in it, and what continually pervades and spiritualizes us. Just as in the physical world we are separated by our skin and thereby individualized, so we are also closed in the general astral world. We are individualized within it as individual astral entities and participate in this astral world around us.

We have now pointed to a world which permeates and pervades and surges through our physical world, just as the sound world of the Ninth Symphony surges through the world in which the snail also lives. In ordinary life, man perceives the world through his senses, but he is not able to perceive that world which intersperses and weaves through him and constitutes his own astral organism. Now the fact that we do not perceive a world is no reason to say that this world is not there. Why do you perceive every other person sitting here as a physical being? Because your eyes are set up to perceive the physical light rays through your eyes. Your eyes can perceive the physical bodies of the other people around you. These physical bodies are real to you. They would not be there for you if your eyes were not there to see them. Likewise, in each of these other people, pleasure and displeasure are present in myriad shades. A world just as rich as the one you see with eyes is in each of you; it is a rich world of pleasure and displeasure. And just as real as your physical body, is a second body that permeates the physical body, by which this physical body is completely permeated. You must not

say that only what you see, what you can physically perceive, is real, because each of you knows that a world of desire and displeasure lives in it just as really as muscle flesh and nerve fibers live in it. Only because your spiritual eyes are not open, therefore you do not see these realities. If your eyes were open to it, then with every other human being, just as you perceive his skin color and his clothes, you would also be able to perceive him flowing through with forces and substantialities, with entities that are real, which we can call pleasure and displeasure beings. For the one whose sense is open to these realities, this world is as real as the physical world.

Thus, in every human being, apart from the physical body, there is also the astral body, which is so called because for the seer it shines in a bright light, which is an expression of his whole life of pleasure and displeasure, of everything that lives in him as feeling. Just as not only you yourself know that you consist of flesh and blood, but the other people can also perceive this, so the feelings of pleasure and displeasure are only there for you alone as long as not another person perceives them. Somewhat larger than your physical body is your astral organism, somewhat protruding above the same. Think of a hall in which a meeting is being held and in which the various speakers are speaking. When a clairvoyant looks through the hall with his seeing eyes, he not only perceives the words that are spoken, not only the sparkling eyes and the speaking physiognomies, he sees something else: he sees how the passions play over from the speaker to the other people, he sees how the sensations and feelings light up in the speaker, he sees whether a speaker speaks, for example, out of revenge or out of enthusiasm. In the case of the enthusiast he sees the fire of the astral body emanating, and in the case of the great multitude of people he sees an abundance of rays; these in turn call forth desire or dislike in the speaker. There is an interaction of the tempe raments which takes place openly and clearly before the seer. This is as real a world of which we are a part as the outer world in which we live.

Not in vain, not without purpose, has the theosophical movement pointed out to man these invisible worlds of which men are a part, into which we are continually sending our effects. They cannot speak a word, cannot grasp a thought, without feelings working out into space. As our actions work out into space, so do the feelings; they permeate space and influence people and the whole astral world. Under ordinary circumstances, man is not aware that a stream of effects emanates from him, that he is a cause whose effects can be perceived everywhere in the world. He is not aware that he can also cause harm by sending out into the world currents of desire and displeasure, of passions and urges, which can affect other people in the most harmful way. He is not aware of what he causes with his emotional life.

Our knowledge is not destined to a purposeless existence; it is not there merely to know, it is not there for its own sake. It has become a beautiful phrase of occidental scholarship that knowledge is there for its own sake. Whoever delves into Oriental wisdom finds something else than knowledge for its own sake. He knows that knowledge is about being active in the world in the sense of this knowledge. We get to know the physical world in order not to manage in the physical nature like in a chaos. And we get to know the higher nature in order to operate in this higher nature in a conscious way. He who knows and masters this higher nature learns to work in it consciously; he learns to control his thoughts and not to let them work haphazardly, not to let them go haphazardly either, but to keep them in check; he learns to control his inner life, to regulate his inner life so that it has a ennobling effect on the environment in the most ideal sense. Thus the higher worlds, which - let me emphasize this - are just as real as our physical world, indeed even more real, acquire an immense significance for the physical world. If you know that what is going on in the astral woe is much more important for the world process than what you are able to see and do in the physical world, you will also correctly estimate this world in its importance.

If you go up even further, you would find worlds that are even more important than the astral world. The Christian religion also speaks of this. What the latter calls the "soul" is the astral world, what it calls the "spirit" is what you know in Theosophy as the "mental plane". Why is the higher, the astral world so infinitely more important than the physical world? Because the physical world is nothing but the expression of this astral world, the effect of the astral world. I would like to give you, as an explanation, a phenomenon that will show you how infinitely more significant what goes on in the astral world is than what takes place in the physical world. What I have to say is called in the teachings of mysticism and in theosophy the mystery of birth and death. It is one of the greatest mysteries or mysteries of the world. We speak of seven world mysteries.

Those who think trivially - and today's world is only too inclined to think trivially - will easily accuse us of gushing and obscurity. But we Theosophists know what the three words mean, which were often mentioned in the first centuries of Christianity, when Christianity was still one of the deepest religions in the world: Perceive, Think, Assume. - These three words were mentioned next to each other. The fact that assuming was mentioned next to perceiving and thinking shows us that people were not as immodest in regard to knowledge as they are today. Yes, people today are immodest in regard to knowledge, immodest because they are dismissive of everything that their senses and intellect do not comprehend. Do you think that if the snail would dare to say that here in the hall there is nothing else than what it perceives, would we not have to say of this snail that it has a great immodesty with regard to knowledge? Make no mistake. In the worst sense of the word it is the same with the human being when he says: What my mind cannot perceive and cannot comprehend, that does not exist in this world. - Two things, perceiving and thinking, are what give us beauty, greatness and number in the world. But there is a third thing that makes us always humble, that makes us strive, that leads us deeper and deeper into the world: that is the supposition, the supposition that there could be something else than what we know.

The theosophical movement differs in this from all other cognitive movements. What does the ordinary scientist want, who is proud of his culture and immodest about his ordinary cognition? He wants to pursue all that he can perceive and recognize, and he wants to spread his knowledge on innumerable things. It is as if the snail crawls around in all directions and perceives what it can perceive - it would perceive nothing but what its snail organs can perceive. So it is also with the people. That is why the assumption has been added to the perception and the thinking, the assumption that - if we develop further - higher sense organs will open up to us, which will open up to us what is usually closed to us in the world. Thus, the attitude of the theosophist differs from that of the ordinary scientist in that he wants to develop himself, that he honestly and righteously believes in the development of his abilities, and that he makes an effort to work on himself. This, honored guests, is theosophical attitude: to work on oneself, so that higher organs open up to us, so that we are able to perceive something meaningful and important in what surrounds us. This must become more and more an occidental attitude, if occidental mankind does not want to be completely absorbed in the materialistic current. When this theosophical attitude becomes more and more widespread, then it will be understood that all those things which are external physical facts and phenomena are the consequences, the effects of deeper causes, which lie in the astral world or in still higher worlds. Usually the occidental science is satisfied with studying the body in all its components. But the theosophical mind asks: Did this body assemble itself? Where could be the reason for it? Can we believe that the forces outside in nature feel the need to assemble themselves into man? No. Whoever is able to see in the higher world knows that man, before he lives in the physical organism, lived in an astral existence before his birth. As true as we had an astral existence before our physical existence, before birth, so true we have an astral existence also after our birth, and this extends further than our physical body. All this is included in what we call the mystery of birth and death.

Theosophy understands the importance of the third word: supposing. What I suspect today may become knowledge tomorrow, and what I suspected yesterday became certainty today. Who trusts in the deeper of this supposition, does not believe in limits of knowledge; he says to himself: I do not believe that what I recognize at any time is the deepest. - And so we are clear that even in the most important phenomena of nature their laws, their essences are deeply veiled. "Mysterious in the light of day, nature cannot be deprived of the veil". Mysterious, mysterious, is nature, is the whole life, and to penetrate into it is the task of man. For to work with the mysteries is man's task.

We speak of seven great mysteries of life. There are seven great mysteries that reveal to us the seven great phases of life. The "unspeakable ones" they are called. The fourth of these great mysteries, into which we shall be gradually introduced through these lectures, is the mystery of birth and death. It is not that we need to lift a veil to understand the mystery of birth and death. The body that lives between birth and death is visited by another body that lives only in the astral world. Our astral body exists before our physical body. It is the basic note of our sentient life, the basic note of our temperament and passions. This is what the seer sees in the astral world. Before the human being is born, this basic note, which each of us carries within us, builds up the physical body. Our physical bodies do not build our passions, desires and temperaments, but these come from another world and choose the corresponding bodies. Therefore, every human being is endowed with a very specific soul entity. Whoever is able to really study man knows that men differ from each other, that there are not two men who are the same with regard to passions, desires and physical body nature. In terms of physical body nature, they may be only slightly different from each other, but tremendously different are people in terms of their astral nature.

Before a human being is born, the seer sees flowing towards the place of birth the astral body of the human being, the sum of his desires, urges and passions, which later develop in the physical body and interact with the outer world. And within this astral body, as the innermost being of the incarnating man, is the actual higher spirit being of man. From a still higher world this higher spirit being of man descends, and within the astral world this higher spirit being of man surrounds himself with what we call desire substance, astral substance. Thus it rushes through the astral world with lightning speed. The seer sees it in the astral world long before he is born. It is present in a luminous bell-shaped form and descends upon the human body to spirit it through. What we say about such an astral substance today easily attracts the reproach of rapture, and it is natural that if we speak in this way in today's world, we may receive this reproach. We must therefore be all the more careful. We must not allow ourselves to speak of it in this way, nor should we speak of it unless we are as firmly and securely at home in this world as we are in the physical world.

I consider it a requirement of a teacher of Theosophy that he should advocate only so much of the teaching as he can in his best conscience answer for; that is, I require of every Theosophical teacher that he should say only that of which he himself has a direct knowledge, an immediate knowledge. Not a word should the theosophical teacher speak about these higher worlds if he is not able to research them himself; exactly with the same right as no one can speak about chemistry who has not studied it. Therefore, in the lectures I will say only what I am able to say with absolute certainty. No one is able to describe the astral world in its entirety; it is richer and more extensive than our physical world. I admit that also the spiritual researcher can err in the individual, just as one can err in the physical world, for example, if one wants to determine the height of a mountain. But just as such an error in the individual can not be a reason to deny the physical world, so a man can not be tempted to deny the reality of the astral world because of an error in the individual.

Before man is born for the physical world, he lives as a driving being with his "body of desire" in the astra-l world. In the astral world, there is not birth and death in the same sense as in the physical world. In the astral world the mystery of the so-called elective attraction is valid. It is the same as in this physical world with our desires and wishes. As one desire develops from another, so it is in the astral world. One being develops from another through an eternal procreation, without birth and death. The beings are subject only to the elective attraction, not to the birth and the death. Where does it come from that the physical beings are subject to birth and death? This is the question I wanted to point out today. Where do birth and death come into the physical nature? I have said that before man lives in the physical world, he lives in the astral world and there he is subject to the elective attraction; birth and death would not exist there. But now there is birth and death, because the astral forms the middle point between two other worlds.

Man is a citizen of two worlds. He points down to the physical world and up to the highest, the spiritual world. Through his astral nature, man connects the spiritual world in its eternity with the physical world. For a long, long time, through several cosmic epochs, man was a merely astral being. Today we stand in the fifth "root race", the post-Atlantean time, preceded by the fourth and the third. Only in the third "root race", in the Lemuri period, man became a physical being; before that he was closer to the astral world. But at that time, when man was still an astral being, he did not yet have the power of the spirit. The higher, the spiritual soul only united with the astral being at the moment when the spiritual united with the physical. And this united spiritual-physical requires birth and death for the physical. Therefore, because man is the locus of the highest spiritual, he must be born and die within the physical. The astral being is neither born nor dies. The spiritual being will preserve its eternity by destroying the physical being again and again from time to time in order to ascend again into the spiritual and then to descend again into the physical world. Goethe indicated this in his prose hymn "Nature": life is its most beautiful invention, and death is its artifice to have much life.

This interaction of birth and death, the mystery of the whole life, shall occupy us further in these lectures, and also the beings of the astral world, of which we have mentioned little so far, we will get to know, in order to realize that there are more beings than man in his present materialistic attitude can dream of.

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.

[In these lectures I would like to give a picture of the theosophical world view that is completely free of any dogmatics, by trying to show what is peculiar to our own spiritual life by looking at phenomena of it.]

Those who know how strongly I have resisted anything propagandistic, any kind of propaganda, will also know how strongly I have opposed the view that Theosophy is about importing some alien, oriental world-view into our time, and how I have emphasized that Theosophy must be life; direct, real life. If Theosophy were something that had only come into the world through the Theosophical Society, then one could indeed have very little trust in it. How could it be that humanity would have to wait thousands of years for the new gospel of Theosophy! Rather, it is the renewal of the spiritual current rooted in the human soul that we are dealing with in the Theosophical Society. But what should interest people of the present time most is to see how their favorite geniuses are completely imbued with what is called Theosophy, the theosophical worldview.

Apart from all the rest, there is one great German personality whose work, especially the work of his later life, is completely rooted in this worldview: Goethe. The combination of Goethe and theosophy may initially come as a surprise; but anyone who, like me, has been studying Goethe for more than twenty years, in particular the profound Goethean “Faust” poetry, will become more and more familiar with what I will try to explain today. Over the years, I have come across many explanations of Faust, many Faust researchers, and many attempts to penetrate the marvel of this Faustian poetry. What I will present to you has come to me alone, in the most unforced way, all by itself. In the first of the two lectures I will speak about Goethe's gospel, proceeding from Goethe's “Faust” poetry, and in the next lecture I will give some views of Goethe from this point of view. We will then try, after I have inserted a lecture on the basic concepts of theosophy, to grasp Goethe where he reveals himself to us most profoundly and is least understood: in his fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, which one only has to understand to get a deep insight into the wisdom of the world on the one hand and into the innermost nature, into the innermost soul of Goethe on the other. In a casual way, these Goethe lectures can be followed by reflections on the great initiates of all times and on Ibsen. I will then try to insert a lecture on the significance of Siegfried, Parzival and Lohengrin.

Goethe was a theosophist by nature, by the innermost meaning of his life. Above all, he was a theosophist because he never accepted any limits to his understanding, any limits to his knowledge and work, but was deeply imbued with the idea that there is no human point of view from which we cannot advance to a higher one, from which the world reveals itself not only in a broader context but also in a more meaningful way. Goethe's entire makeup was determined by the world view we are discussing here. His world view assumed that man stands in a deeply related relationship to the rest of the world and that this rest of the world is not merely material, not merely outwardly physical, but equally spiritual, that a divine, creative, active spirit expresses itself in the whole world. This, one could say, is pantheism. But pantheism assumes that an indeterminate divine essence spreads throughout the world and also animates man. The theosophical world view, however, assumes that it is not an indeterminate, incomprehensible essence, but a spiritual essence to which we can ascend more and more, and that we can enter into a relationship with this spiritual essence; [ascend to a living relationship with the great God].

Goethe was suited to this kind of relationship by his very nature. Even as a seven-year-old boy, he sought out the god. He built an altar with plants and stones and incense on top, took a burning glass, and when the first rays of the rising sun shone in through the window, he collected the sunbeams so that they ignited the incense. Thus this compilation was an altar for him, on which he performed a service to nature, a service to the gods. [He wanted to ignite a sacrificial service from the fire of nature], so innate was this world view for him. When he then got to know more and more about the world itself in Leipzig and delved into the individual sciences, an insight came to him that is entirely theosophical. He tells us about it in “Poetry and Truth”. He says: “When we survey the various religions and philosophies of the world, we find something in common everywhere, a common core of truth. Wherever religion, philosophy, or worldview has emerged, whether in mythical-allegorical or philosophical form, everywhere man seeks to find the connection between his lower self and the deepest part of his soul, which is called the divine and through which he can gain a connection with the divine itself. Thus the wise of all times have shown the pendulum swing between the lower and the higher self, and we see how this is expressed in fairy tales, myths and legends; it can be found everywhere.

When Goethe himself passed the threshold of death after his studies in Leipzig and had returned to Frankfurt, he devoted himself to mystical studies. You can read in “Poetry and Truth” what kind of impact Goethe had from that time, and what emerged in him when he had become thoroughly familiar with natural science during his time in Strasbourg. This is expressed in no better way than in the fact that he decided to express the whole human urge for wisdom and for oneness with the divine nature in a great poem, the “Faust” poem. In doing so, he draws on the world of legends through which the late Middle Ages suggested the contrast between the old and the new era.

Faust is the kind of person who wants to free themselves from all tradition, from the basic ideas of the Middle Ages, and to penetrate from their own breast to a higher knowledge. Goethe did not let Faust perish, as the sixteenth century still did, but rather he redeemed him through the power of his own striving soul. In doing so, he placed the entire problem on a new footing, so that even today we must feel every word of this poem as an expression of our own thoughts and feelings. I will discuss some of the details in the following lectures. For now, I must lead you directly into what this is about.

First of all, after Goethe had presented Faust as a striving human being in his youth and brought his “Faust” poetry with him to Weimar, and had risen to a purer knowledge and worldview, he placed his “Faust” on a new foundation in the 1890s. At the beginning of Faust we find the Prologue in Heaven. Here Goethe wants to show us what his Faust epic is about. He wants to tell us nothing other than this: human destiny is not determined only in this physical world, it is determined in higher, spiritual worlds. If you remember my lectures this winter, I said at the time: the physical world that surrounds us is not the only world; there are higher worlds, the world of the soul or the astral world and what we call the devachanic world, the spiritual world, heaven. That which undergoes a struggle in the outer world is not only significant for the outer world, but is a reflection of forces from the supersensible worlds. When we penetrate into the soul world, we enter into a world of colorful existence. The astral world can be perceived by those whose spiritual senses are open as a world glowing with colors, of a beauty and sublimity, but also of a dreadfulness and cruelty that are never found in our physical world. The devachanic world can be described as a sounding one. The Pythagorean music of the spheres can truly be heard by those whose spiritual ears are open; it is not merely an allegory, but a reality.

It is therefore extremely interesting that Goethe, quite appropriately, I would say using a technical term of the mystic or theosophist, describes this world of Devachan in his “Prologue in Heaven”. The planets and the sun are endowed with souls. Goethe speaks appropriately in the sense of mysticism; so he must also express that he finds that sound in this world. And so he really does begin this “Prologue in Heaven”:

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

The sun does not sound in the physical sense, and anyone who says that it is only an image is saying a superficiality. You can see where Faust, having gone through the purification, is to be raised to Devachan, how precisely Goethe speaks of this devachanic world:

For spiritual ears the new day is already born

Here Goethe speaks of spiritual ears, of the sounds of the spiritual world. We describe it not in the form of poetic images, but in the language of theosophical science. In the “Prologue in Heaven,” almost every word can be interpreted in a way that is consistent with our worldview. In this, we see an important principle of human existence. You all know about the law of karma. You know that when a person passes through the gate of death, they take with them the experiences they have had in this world, and that they then take the fruits of this world with them in such a way that they extract, so to speak, something eternal from this earthly world. Because his thoughts are a reflection of the spiritual world, he can take the fruits with him into the spiritual world. It is entirely in keeping with the law of karma when God calls out to the angels:

And what floats in fluctuating appearance
Attach it with lasting thoughts.

Of course, anyone who wants to can say that these are poetic images. But anyone who, like Goethe, not only dealt with mysticism practically for decades before writing these things, but also became thoroughly acquainted with medieval mysticism, knows that Goethe drew these things from mystical thinking and perception. We know that the theosophical worldview traces its basis back to the great sages, to higher spiritual individuals who have already reached the level that the average person will only rise to in the future. These great sages are the great teachers of humanity. It has been criticized that Theosophy speaks of such unknown sages. Goethe also speaks of such unknown sages when Faust, imbued with the vanity of knowledge in the first monologue, wants to grasp the source of life and has already glimpsed a reflection of divine life.

Only now do I recognize what the wise man says:
'The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, disciple, and bathe unflinchingly
The earthly breast in the dawn!'

This is an expression that occurs in the mystics of all times. Jakob Böhme called the work with which he began his mystical career “Aurora”. Goethe puts “dawn” in quotation marks. He expresses something that he knew from his practical mysticism as an inner experience, not a general phrase, a general saying; he speaks entirely in the technical mystical sense.

If we take a look at Faust, what do we see in the first part? You know that we distinguish between a lower self, the self that experiences the world through the doors of the senses and, purified through many paths, finally ascends to the higher self. If you read through the first part, you will find a description of the struggle of the lower self of man with the surrounding world. Faust must first pass this struggle before he can come to the truly mystical realization within himself. From the very beginning, he strives for this realization. And again, we are faced with some sentences that only those familiar with the theosophical worldview can understand. When Faust recognizes his connection with the higher self, he turns to the earth spirit. This is a masterpiece of the description of the soul's life; [the astral body of the earth, spiritually wrought and woven from the fruits of the immortal soul's garment].

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge and surge, weaving to and fro! Birth and grave, an eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life, so I create at the whirring loom of time and weave the living garment of the Godhead.

This description, especially the last line, is very meaningful for every mystic. It expresses how the soul, from the earlier experiences of this self, works and weaves a form that remains eternal.

Faust must turn away like a timid, twisted worm. He is not yet mature enough to penetrate to the sources of life. He must guide his self through the world by the hand of the tempter Mephistopheles. Goethe gives this a form in the sense of ancient Hebrew mysticism. “Mephis” means “corrupter”, and “Tophel” means “liar”. These are the forces and entities that are always present in the world as obstacles. While man strives forward, they hold him back, and in the moral world they become the tempters. The tempter is Mephistopheles. He leads Faust through the regions of the lower self, through all kinds of experiences of our lower self.

We see how Faust is unsatisfied by the science of the mind. The highest learning can be no more than an occupation with the sensory world. He is then led through passion and so on to purification. Faust now wants to approach the spirit from whom he had to turn away. He encounters this spirit again in the scene “Forest and Cave”. He can now address the spirit in such a way that he can express a fundamental belief, as you can find it in any theosophical book. It appeals to him that this spirit can show him that in all beings we find our brothers, as we are connected to all, and that when we find our kinship with all brothers, we find our own divine self. In a beautiful way, Goethe describes in images the ascent of man in his knowledge.

Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything,
why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
turn thy face to me in the fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature for my kingdom,
the strength to feel and enjoy it. You do not allow cold, astonished visitors, you grant me the privilege of looking into their deep chests, as into the bosom of a friend. You lead the line of the living before me, and teach me to know my brothers in the silent bush, in air and water.

It is wonderful that Goethe led his Faust to this confession of looking into one's own self. After going through a series of temptations, Faust, who in his lower self sees the transience of life, gains insight into the possibility of truly recognizing the higher self.

Faust, after having been deeply crushed by the misfortunes of life, is now to be led up to higher levels. Before that, he only experienced what can be experienced by the lower egoism. Now he works at the imperial court for the lower self of others. In the midst of this work, in the midst of the transience of the world, Faust is brought to an immediate mystical point of view. Goethe himself rejected the view that the second part of “Faust” is anything other than the purest expression of truly mystical soul life. He was asked by a friend whether he wanted to end his “Faust” as he wrote in the first part:

A good man in his dark urges
Is well aware of the right path.

Oh no, replied Goethe, Faust ends in old age, and in old age one becomes a mystic. But that would be enlightenment. Once Goethe had attained a worldview that allowed a free view into the spiritual world, he could no longer let Faust end in the sense of the Enlightenment. So in 1827, he said to Eckermann about the second part of Faust: I have conceived Faust in such a way that the images are also interesting, dramatic for the mind. Everyone can take pleasure in the images. But for the initiate, there is something quite different in my “Faust”. You will see that many a riddle is hidden in it. Although Goethe did not include anything inscrutable in the second part of “Faust”, there is something that cannot be found for the superficial mind.

At court, the emperor demands that Paris and Helen appear before everyone. We are confronted with a problem that takes us beyond the physical world. Goethe captures it in its deepest sense. Faust must descend to the “mothers”. The scholars have interpreted many things into it. For those who are endowed with mystical knowledge, it is clear what is meant here. In all mysticism, the highest soul of the world has always been described as something feminine. This is quite appropriate, because what man calls knowledge, higher life, arises in his soul when he allows himself to be fertilized by the forces that work in the universe. Knowledge is a fertilization process; that is why all mysticism has sought the eternal in the feminine, in the “mothers”. The theosophical world view sees the highest that the human soul can achieve in the higher, upper trinity, in Sanskrit: Manas, Budhi, Atman; spirit self, life spirit and actual spirit of man. This higher trinity must be developed in man if he is to come to true self-knowledge. But then he attains the connection with the eternal sources of existence. Goethe indicates that this is a trinity by having the tripod set up among the mothers, with fire flowing out of it. Mysticism knows this fire as the primal matter. Faust can use it to bring up the spiritual essence of Paris and Helen. The spiritual essence is not above or below, which is why Mephistopheles says:

Sink then! I could also say: rise!

This shows how that which is eternal, brought up by Paris and Helena, is brought up from the soul-spiritual world.

But in order for man to rise to this pure spiritual level, it is crucial that he is so far purified that the desires of the body, the lower qualities of the soul and the instincts are purified, that man no longer craves this highest spiritual, but that he relates to this highest in a selfless way. When Faust brings it up, he demands it passionately, and that causes an explosion. Faust still needs to be purified and cleansed. He must learn the secret of how human nature is structured, how the three members of body, soul and spirit work together to form a whole. Established psychology only recognizes body and soul. It is a science that has stopped at two-thirds of the human being because it does not recognize the threefold nature of the human being. School psychology may feel very learned, but to anyone who sees through things, it is the most amateurish thing imaginable. Faust is meant to recognize how body, soul and spirit connect, this deep secret of human nature. At this point, we can eavesdrop on Goethe at his most profound, as he has become a complete mystic, as he has immersed himself in the knowledge that is also found in our theosophical textbooks.

First, Faust is to get to know the soul. This is presented to us in a peculiar but appropriate way, by leading Faust back to the laboratory where he was before and where the homunculus is now being created. This homunculus is nothing other than an image of the human soul. And it is wonderfully understandable every word, if you touch the homunculus as a soul without a body, as a soul that has not yet incarnated. The homunculus

does not lack spiritual qualities,
But it is all too lacking in the tangible and practical.

When the soul is free of the body, when it appears without the covers of physicality, then it is clairvoyant, not dependent on seeing through the senses. It sees into the innermost part of human nature. It does not just perceive what has an external color, sounds in external tones, but it perceives the impulses, the most intimate thoughts of the person. This is something that can be perceived clairvoyantly, the extra-physical world. Goethe lets the homunculus be clairvoyant. The entire dream of Faust is described by the homunculus, who sees into the depths of the human soul. We can go through the entire second part of “Faust” in this way: the soul is expressed in the homunculus.

The third part of the human being, the body, is that which has developed from the most imperfect to the most perfect, not only in the sense of natural science, but also in the sense of mysticism. But mysticism does not just look at how the physical has developed from the most imperfect to the most perfect, as modern science does. Mysticism also shows how the physical has developed through the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, and finally to the human being. The body has developed along this path until it has become capable of connecting with the soul. In the second part of Faust, Goethe presents this gradual development of the physical body in magnificent images. He has the homunculus Mephisto and Faust led to the fields of the 'Classical Walpurgis Night'. There he is brought together with Proteus, who guides the transformation of the physical form, and with the wise men Thales and Anaxagoras, who know how the physical transformations take place. It is shown how this homunculus, as a soul, can acquire a body by living through all the kingdoms of nature. It must begin at the bottom, with the mineral kingdom, and then slowly move on to the higher realms. Goethe describes in a wonderful way how this embodiment rises from the mineral kingdom to the plant kingdom. Goethe coined an expression to describe this so wonderfully vividly:

It grunet so

- the plant structure!

Only at a certain stage of development, what is called sex life, that this connects with all the formative forces that were present earlier. Goethe expresses this by letting Eros connect with the homunculus struggling for design at this stage. This is how Goethe described how the soul is structured until it is ready to receive the spirit. We have reached the end of the second act of the second part of Faust. Faust has learned the secret of how the three parts of human nature are connected: the immortal, the eternal, which is in the realm of the “mothers”, the soul and the body. This is how a person can incarnate. This is how that which also lived physically in the external world and belonged to times long past, Helen, can also incarnate again. We meet her again at the beginning of the third act. She has incarnated, Helen is standing before Faust in the flesh. Thus Faust has passed through mystical knowledge, he has experienced the secret of becoming human.

I have said that in every mysticism the soul in man is presented as something feminine. Then the struggle for the higher, the striving for the higher is expressed precisely in Faust's striving for Helena. Faust unites with Helena. This is initially the symbolic expression of an inner experience. Faust seeks the higher, and there the spiritual is born. Poetry expresses this symbolically through the union of the soul's masculine and feminine, whereby higher spiritual knowledge is begotten: Euphorion. Euphorion represents how the spirit in human nature comes to life in mystical moments. The mystic knows these moments. But there is one thing he still has to learn: At first, what he experiences is only a fleeting moment, only a celebratory moment in life, a moment of mystical insight; then he must return to his profession, to his everyday studies. These mystical insights are celebratory moments; but celebratory moments die quickly: Euphorion dies quickly. What follows is drawn deeply from mystical consciousness. Euphorion, after he has disappeared again into the spiritual realm, calls out to his mother Helena:

Do not leave me alone in the dark realm,
mother!

This is a voice that everyone who has experienced mystical moments has heard at some point. The spiritual always calls to the soul, the “mother”: “Do not leave me alone, seek me!” Here theory cannot speak, only direct experience can speak, in order to recognize the full depth of what is at stake here. The mystical moments of celebration are represented by Euphorion. Faust's serene worldview, in comparison with what has happened at the imperial court, now comes to light. Faust is now to be led to experience not only individual moments of celebration of mystical contemplation, for that is still an imperfect state. The perfect mystic works from the spiritual world; he works selflessly, like a messenger of the deity, as if the deity itself were creating. This is how it is with Faust when he has reached higher levels.

But Faust is not yet so far that he is above all the temptations that the lower self suffers. Nothing must speak to the mystic's senses anymore; the senses must become a gateway for the spiritual. Once again, for the last time, Faust succumbs to temptation. Something disturbs his eye, so he has the hut of Philemon and Baucis removed. That was the last external temptation; henceforth he can no longer be tempted by his senses.

But there is still something in man that appeals to his lower self, that is the memory that still clings to his lower self, that repeatedly pulls him down into this lower world. This is symbolized by the fact that worry approaches Faust. But this trial also comes from him. Faust goes blind. Now it is suggested that, by going blind, Faust becomes a seer: a bright light shines within, while it becomes dark and gloomy on the outside. He has become a mystic in the most beautiful sense, he has become a clairvoyant, he sees into the spiritual world.

Faust has gone through a struggle through the stages of the lower and higher self to the depths of the mystical worldview. This struggle between the lower and higher is a struggle between good and evil. Now, in a spirited riddle in the second part of the first act, Goethe has just hinted at how good and evil work together to allow the human fighter to pass through the middle for purification. Commentators have tried in vain to explain this line.

What is both dreaded and always welcome?
What is longed for and always chased away?
What is constantly defended?
What is harshly scolded and accused?
Whom may you not summon here?
Whom does everyone like to hear named?
What approaches your throne's steps?
What has banished itself away?

You will hardly find a solution to these riddle words in Faust commentaries. But for those who know the deeper meaning of “Faust”, they will be resolved naturally. We can go through line by line and need only say “evil” for the first line and “good” for the second, and we have the complete solution to the riddle. This is how Goethe describes the battle between good and evil in man, and he has Faust become a mystic.

Goethe can only hint at the last stages of development, and he uses mystical symbolism. Every line is deeply significant for the mystical path, the mystical stages that the mystic goes through in practical development. And then, at the end, Goethe indicates to us that this is what he really meant in the second part of “Faust”. He stood there alone when he came to this mystical realization.

If you read “Faust” in your youth, you will find a lot, later you will find more and more and even later still more. Today, I too have been able to describe only a glimpse of what is in “Faust”. The second part of “Faust” is something quite different from what was intended in the first part. The old Goethe is only understood if you take it so deeply. He knew that there were many people around him who would defend the young Goethe against the old one. In a moment of resentment, he spoke out about those who only want to accept the earlier works and what is otherwise easy to understand, saying, “Goethe has grown old.” To them he cries:

They praise Faust
And what else
In my works roars
In their favor.
The old Mick and Mack
That is very happy;
It means the pack of ragamuffins,
One would not be more!

Goethe knew that “he still was it,” also knew that he could not be understood.

In the second part of “Faust”, Goethe has hidden many secrets for the initiate who wants to hear them. And then, to suggest that he wants “Faust” to be understood in a mystical sense, he has closed the second part with the “Chorus mysticus”. There he shows us how he sees nothing in the ephemeral but a parable for the imperishable, for the eternal. That is the view of mysticism or theosophy, that what is present in the senses is only a parable for the imperishable. That which man can never attain in the sensual world, that which he strives for in the sensual world, to recognize the real meaning of life, this “inadequate” becomes an “experience” in the higher world through practical mysticism; and what cannot be described can be experienced. Then the spiritual powers slumbering in man are awakened; he not only perceives with his senses, but is led up into the higher worlds. That which is “indescribable” for the sensual world is done, now in the higher worlds. And that which the mystics of all times have called the 'feminine', the highest, that to which the lower strives, that which Goethe sought in the 'mothers', in the 'feminine', the 'eternally feminine', the highest in the human soul, that draws man upwards. This is the fundamental confession of Goethe, the mystic, which he has expressed here and which shines back on all that he has mysteriously incorporated into his “Faust”:

All that is
transient is but a parable;
The inadequate
Here it becomes an event;
The indescribable
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
Draws us on.