The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Last time I took the liberty of saying a few words about the task or the significance of a theosophical branch. What I said then is really something that cannot be emphasized enough, perhaps, for those who are in the theosophical movement or who want to participate in what is called theosophy today. Nothing is more common today than opposing, than fighting against mere theory, against mere teaching, and on the other hand, again, the desire for life, for sensation and feeling, for that which is not theory and not teaching; for no time has been so caught up in theories, teachings and dogmas - without one really knowing it - as the present one.

That seems to be a strong claim, and yet I would like to maintain it, even against those who object: Isn't that the dark ages, the dark dogma, and isn't our time beyond that? You will find a well-known magazine on display this week, in which the first page talks about a book that deals with Christianity and that comes from the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann. It is not obvious enough for us today to deal with the ideas of this writing. But a well-known fighter for the current renewal of Christian ideas has expressed ideas in the “future” in connection with this writing, which do give us food for thought because they are very widespread in our present time. Jentsch says that Hartmann said in this writing something that has often been said before, but that the logical mind of Eduard von Hartmann has stated as clearly as possible once again, so that everyone now knows that one can never again deal with any theoretical or systematic, doctrinal basis of religious views or truths. The time when religion was philosophically or theologically justified is over. Today we know full well – and in saying this he expresses something that will resonate in many hearts – that all systems of thought become entangled in contradictions and that only life, looking up into a world beyond, to a divine world order, can truly interest us.

The good man does not realize that, although he rejects all other dogmatics, two or three dogmas, even if they remain merely abstract, have a certain value for him. He wants to cast off all dogmatics, and he is precisely a dogmatist of the most pronounced kind. Although one does not want to be a dogmatist, and yet one is one, without knowing how strong one is as a dogmatist. This has also led to the fact that all similar movements - be it the “Giordano Bruno League” or the “Society for Ethical Culture” - more or less stand on a strictly doctrinal point of view, that it is therefore more important to them to spread teachings. Whether they are teachings about the right moral action or about monism or about a reform of our religious education in schools, which is to be replaced by a moral education that only amounts to a certain moral dogmatics - because something has to be taught after all - it makes no difference. So the old dogmas are replaced by new ones, by the dogmas of liberalism. Everywhere it comes down to doctrine, everywhere to the content of the word.

This is not at all necessary in the theosophical movement. I wanted to emphasize this point: Whatever we teach, whatever one or the other writes or teaches in his books, may it be high truths, and may there be many people who feel addressed by such truths because they represent a world system without contradictions and so on – that is not what matters in the theosophical movement. What matters is not what we teach, what we assert, what we say, but how we live together in the theosophical movement, what kind of attitude we develop. This attitude, which we should develop and want to develop, is that in our soul lives the consciousness of spiritual activity, the consciousness that thoughts, sensations, feelings are just as real forces in the world as magnetism, electricity, light or steam power. Not the one who admits that there is truth in the things spread in our literature is a true theosophist, but the one who, together with his fellow human beings, finds himself in the ever-recurring awareness in his soul that when he thinks, feels or wills something that may not even be translated into an external action, that it will then have an effect.

And when one of us speaks to such a congregation, which brings this awareness to him, then his words are quite different from the words of any other lecturer or any other speaker. Because then you will be sitting here in the knowledge that not only your physical body, which is here, is something real, but that your feelings and emotions and your thoughts, which pass through your mind, are as present as your physical body. And when you cross the threshold with this awareness and absorb the words that are spoken here, then these words will find the way they are meant to find into the world. The words of the theosophist are not spoken for the sake of one or the other agreeing or disagreeing with them. It is not whether they are true or not that is of primary importance, but the fact that they are forces. No matter how beautiful and excellent the thoughts expressed in the words of the individual may be, this is of less importance; what is of primary importance is through which channels these thoughts pass. A theosophical lodge or branch is the starting point for numerous channels through which these thoughts, when spoken, find their way out into the whole world.

But these words will only be heard in this way if the listeners are aware of a spiritual world. Then the speaker's powers are strengthened by the consciousness of each person present; then the spiritual forces are like those in an electric battery, and they penetrate out into the world like waves and are effective wherever the opportunity arises. It is this attitude, this consciousness, this life in the teaching that is important, not the content. Our teachings are drawn from the contemplation of the great spiritual connections of existence and from the contemplation of the nature of the human being. The goal is not that we know them, but that they have an effect. And this effect is important for the reason that these thoughts are the same ones through which everything in the world has happened for millions of years, ever since there has been a time. And as true as the world has become as it is now through these thoughts, so true will the world become in the future through the same thoughts, as it should and must become.

But there is a factor that must be involved in order for the right thing to happen in the future, and this factor is called “human being”, this factor is called “knowing and conscious human being”. We can say: There was a time when the great thoughts of the world order were realized by what we call the gods. At that time, man was still completely unconscious. At that time man could not yet participate in the building of the world. You see, man is now at the beginning of the development of his consciousness. He will approach times when this consciousness will draw ever wider and wider circles. Thus he will be ever more called upon to collaborate in what the gods once did. That is why we call our theosophy 'Divine Wisdom', because we have the wisdom from it, and because we must have our share if we want to set up our construction in the future.

In the future, man will be called upon in a broader sense to participate more consciously than he does today. Just as today's society creates a moral world order for itself, so too will a time come when spiritual forces will permeate the soul of man to a much greater extent than they do today, and the rigid social order will have a much deeper, more intense meaning. And just as man today only uses the laws of nature on the surface in order to do what lives and works in industry, so a time will come when man will use the spiritual laws of the world to make our institutions. Man will gain mastery over health and disease by applying the great laws of the world. There is a divine being in man at the beginning of his development, and to bring out this divine being and make it a creative one is the goal of Theosophy or 'divine wisdom'. Theosophy does not exist to satisfy the curiosity of those who want to know something about God, but to give people the strength to fulfill their task as a divinizing being. Although it may not happen in a short period of time, we will be able to realize this more and more.

What I would now like to summarize in one sentence may seem quite peculiar to some people, but it is a truth that the occultist knows as a natural scientist knows some other truth, some external truth. There is such a truth. I have already pointed this out in the twenty-seventh issue of Lucifer-Gnosis. It is connected with health in the world. It is a truth, admittedly, in the spiritual sense, and the connection is not so obvious. Ultimately, it is absolutely true that a healthy external physical body is the result of an inner life of the spirit in truth. To express myself more clearly, but somewhat remotely: a theosophical lodge, a theosophical branch is also a source of health. As you sit here together in the attitude of mind of which I have spoken, and absorb into your consciousness those truths which are nothing other than an echo of the great world thoughts that have created the harmonies of the world, tremble and vibrate through your soul the true thoughts of the world. And just as it is true that everything physical is an effect of the spirit, it is just as true that the state of the physical will be determined by the vibrations, by the waves that now tremble through your soul. If the thoughts that stimulate the wave vibrations of your soul are healthy, then these will also stimulate the physical vibrations, and these must then be healthy. By radiating these vibrations in all directions throughout the world, we are creating a source of health. A source of health emanates from the theosophical lodges. You will not notice this recovery in your life tomorrow or the day after. But in the future you may find that health is the result of the current pursuit of truth. We build healthy bodies for future generations by allowing our souls to cultivate the truth in spiritual life. We place ourselves in the whole course of time, we place ourselves in the course of the world, if we have the right faith.

Many say, yes: What harm has materialism done us? It has brought us many powerful devices and so much knowledge and understanding of life at all naturalist and medical gatherings. You can hear so much about life there. You can hear how great the hygienic progress is and so on, how much lower the mortality rate is today than it was a century ago. All this has been brought to us by the study of natural laws, a study that works with pure matter. But you also have to see deeper. You have to see that the outside does not always correspond to the inside, and that the outside is a very deceptive indicator of the inside.

Yes, we do not want to deny that great and magnificent things have been created in our age of materialism. But who created it? Here we come to a point that teaches us the difference between what man merely thinks, what merely lives in the human mind, and what lies deep in the bottom of his soul. You must strictly distinguish these two things. You go through the world and do your daily tasks according to what you think today. But what you think today is based on a reason that is not from today. What you think today is based on a deeper soul reason that is the result of the past. Even from a purely external point of view, even the materialistic thinkers of the nineteenth century grew out of the thinking of the past. They were educated in schools that had not yet fallen prey to materialism. Where did the great teachers of materialism such as Büchner, Vogt, Moleschott learn their subject, and why do their books have such a seductive quality? It is because their school was in a time when it had not yet been so taken over by materialism. In truth, we carry within us the essence of what we were in past lives. Indian philosophy tells us with profound wisdom: What you think today, you will become tomorrow. This applies to people and to all facts and beings in the world. Today, our thinking is superficial. Today, we are what we thought in the past.

They believe that we have overcome the old. People speak of the dark, gray Middle Ages. But the first times of the Middle Ages rest as our deepest being in our soul. At that time we lived in an earlier incarnation. What we think today, we will only be in a future incarnation. We should not be surprised that we think in a materialistic way, but nevertheless have reaped fruits that are the result of earlier epochs. What we have today is only the result of an age that we are inclined to look down on with ridicule and scorn. It was out of this deep realization that the impulse arose that led to the theosophical movement in the last third of the nineteenth century.

We are now facing the fruits of earlier times and earlier ways of thinking. But those who are watching over the signs of the times know that our thoughts, what we have in our souls today, determine our future life. This future will be an ever faster and faster unfolding of life. You must be aware that life does not proceed at the same pace in all ages. All those sitting here have heard many theosophical lectures, and I may therefore often say a word that is taken from deeper wisdom. We know that besides the physical plan there is the astral plan, and he who knows the higher life also knows how to predict the course of development in this higher world and to follow the course of progress.

If we compare the period from the time of Charlemagne to the end of the eighteenth century with the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, thus comparing a millennium with a century, we note the surprising fact that approximately the same things happened in both periods. The progress of the human wave was only ten times faster and it will be faster and faster in the time to come. Therefore, we must be prepared for the things that our thoughts bring about to become external reality in the not too distant future. This shows you the impulse from which the theosophical movement has flowed.

The recovery of the following generation should be due to our thoughts, just as we owe the progress we have made to the preceding generations. Those who look at the theosophical movement in this light may be called 'prophetic' in nature. But at all times, prophets have been, and had to be, those who really wanted to guide the course of events. For to determine what should happen in the future, on a large scale, one must first know what is lawful for that future. The great individuals who know what is lawful for the future have therefore given us the opportunity to get to know again the great laws of the world, which had been forgotten for so long, and to feel them for the spiritual and physical recovery of our race. Take this quite literally, that true thoughts have a healing physical effect, and that those thoughts, which are awakened in the theosophical lodge through our soul vibrations, are medical-medical forces that pulsate through humanity. Feel this truth, this truth of life, with all your soul and feel the importance in the theosophical movement, then you will come to another chapter and be able to grasp it.

There are many among us who say: Yes, the theosophical movement spreads a beautiful, high ethics, it spreads beautiful teachings that are consistent in themselves. But one should stick to it and not raise one's eyes and confuse people in mystical, mysterious, abstract and mental worlds. How many there are in the Theosophical Society who say: Leave us alone with the astral and mental realm, we want to develop the consciousness of unity. A certain shyness can be noticed towards what we know as the doctrine of the astral and mental. But one day it must be said: The one who wanted to exclude this teaching of these higher worlds from the theosophical movement was acting against the intentions that the great individuals, whom we call the masters, gave us. We might as well abandon the theosophical movement if we ban the teaching of the higher worlds from it. Certainly, one can speak of an ethic, of an ethical teaching today. This ethical teaching is already being introduced in schools. Ethical societies have been founded that attempt to establish and introduce general human duties without regard to this or that worldview, to this or that religious belief. But you can only establish duties based on what you know. But take a look at these teachings of duty. They are a true reflection, a perfect imprint of the material age in which we live. What you find in the way of new duties among the new enlightened ones is nothing more than the consequence of a materialistic world view, the consequence of what the eyes can see, ears hear and hands can touch. This is certainly idealism, and one can be a noble idealist in this field – without doubt. But this is the last consequence, the last outflow of a materialistic time.

And because even those who believe themselves to be idealists, and who aspire with their thoughts and feelings to a higher world and at least want to retain a dark foreboding of a higher world, because they want to start thinking, feeling and acting and not just talk, immediately fall back into materialistic habits of thought. Because there are many such people in the theosophical movement, the idea is spreading in it too: we should limit ourselves to such a materialistic ethics, to a unity consciousness that one cannot grasp and does not want to grasp because people are afraid of touching the higher worlds in a certain way.

The theosophists, who say that one should not speak of the astral and mental planes, also point out that a certain amount of theosophical truth can be spread with the mere intellect. They also want to hint at what is the deeper essence and foundation of all reality, as a divine reality underlying all realities. But to see it for themselves, to grasp it, to face it as it is, they shrink back from that. That would be just as if someone wanted to say: Yes, there is an electrical force, we want to admit it; but to apply it, to study it in order to construct electrical machines and so on, we do not want to get involved in that. That is dangerous, we could confuse ourselves, that gives the world a different picture. But such a one does not really approach the power of electricity. Rather, the right approach is taken by the one who says, “I want to get to know the power of electricity in every respect, so that I can bring it into existence and use it in the outer arrangements of men.” The first follower of the power of electricity would resemble the theosophist who says, “Let us not concern ourselves with the astral and mental worlds, but only with the consciousness of unity.” He would not apply spiritual power to the immediate present.

But if we do not want to just dream of the divine, not just have hunches, not just talk and at most feel vaguely, but actually implement it in reality, then we have to get to know it in its individual forms, as it reveals itself in the higher worlds, and then we can penetrate into the higher worlds. Just as we conquer our physical world by getting to know the individual forms of electrical power, we get to know our life as a tangible reality when we make this power our own. In the future, this power, which today is only realized in the world by universal beings, will be consciously realized and controlled by human beings.

It is not to satisfy our curiosity that we look into the spiritual world, not in vain do we seek to open the eyes of the mind and soul to those beings who do not live in the physical body, but as if from our passions and instincts and inner soul forces. It is not without reason that we rise to those beings whose body is not physical, whose body is woven from the same material as our thoughts are woven, to those beings whom we call the beings of the mental world. We rise to them in order to learn what needs to be woven into the world in which we live. That is a fundamental truth, that the spirit is always present. When you see a flower, you do not just see a physical object – today's science does not want to know anything about that: this flower is spirit, and its sensual form is only an expression of the spirit. I have said many times: if you have a surface of water and you let the water cool more and more, ice will form. Someone will now come and say: ice is real water, only in a different form. Then another person comes and says: But it is not water, it is solid and not liquid. Everyone knows that ice is condensed water, shaped by cold and differently formed. It is quite similar with the flower. In this flower you have only a differently formed spirit. Just as you can transform ice into water, so you can also dissolve the flower into its spiritual essence. Our physical world is nothing but astral and mental substance that has become too solid. All those sitting here are also mental beings and express themselves in their physical bodies in a condensed form. If you want to work for the greater good, you have to know the forces. If you want to create ice, you need to have cold and water. If you want to shape the physical world in the right way, you have to know the spirit.

You have to explore the forces of the spirit, not to satisfy our curiosity about the higher worlds and to learn all kinds of interesting things, but because we draw from them our knowledge for our practical life. What is astral today will be physical in the future; and what is mental today will be astral in the future and physical in the more distant future. When we speak of the astral plane in a theosophical lodge and allow these astral truths to permeate our soul and create vibrations in it, these souls will in the future be incarnated in people who are disposed to the astral plane. If we are then incarnated on earth again, these truths will flow out of us. What will then take physical shape through us are the things that descended into our soul as parts, as children of the astral world. We are here to bring down the laws of our work and life from the higher worlds. Therefore, the question cannot be whether one or the other likes to ascend to the higher worlds, but only whether we should and must ascend. That we should ascend, that there should come again an age which spiritualizes the world, which spreads spiritual views among mankind, this was the realization of the great beings who inspired the theosophical movement.

The age that lies behind us, the epoch in which man became material, was preceded by another. This era relied on great, exalted spiritual beings who were the teachers and guides of humanity. In ancient times, when great holy leaders guided humanity, all of these leaders were at least deeply imbued with the truths that the theosophical movement is spreading among humanity today, including the truth of the repeated incarnation of the human soul. If you imagine the relationship of the great teachers of antiquity to the masses, you will get an idea of the way of teaching in ancient times. Think back to those times and to the great advanced individuals who looked into the mysterious, secret structure of the world, which was closed to the eyes of others - as St. John expresses it in the Apocalypse. They spoke to people in a pictorial form that they could not yet grasp with their minds, but which they had to be prepared for in order to grasp with their minds in later incarnations. And that led to the form of language that was spoken at that time, to the language of legends, myths and fairy tales.

This is where you are sitting today. But all your souls were once embodied in those distant times, all your souls listened to one of the great teachers of the distant past as he told the fairy tales. These fairy tales were not of the same kind as those conceived from light, superficial fantasy, as today's are, but in these fairy tales the great truth of existence lived and breathed. And even if the truth was not expressed conceptually in them, it was not the conceptual that descended into your souls with the figures and persons of the fairy tale, but rather the intuitive perception. The fairy tales that you read in the Grimm's Fairy Tale Collection mostly contain such teachings of wisdom. When they were absorbed into the human soul, you learned them in such a way that today you are able to grasp the truths that were once contained in the fairy tale. It is the greatest untruth to say that fairy tales contain no truths. They contain the most ancient truths of the human race. The soul that allows the fairy tale to flow into it receives the seed of feeling for the truth, which later unfolds. In our youth, because everything in the world must repeat itself that has been there in the past, we must briefly relive those souls and states of mind that we went through in earlier times when we heard the eternal words of the saints of humanity. And when today a mother tells her child a fairy tale from the treasure of ancient times, then truth flows into the soul of the child. Thus the child is repeatedly prepared for his later age, when he is then able to absorb these truths with his mind.

If we look at it this way, we understand the course of time. We hear about the time that we have described, when the great mysteries of humanity were given, down to our time. Our time should become great through what man himself can produce. It had to gradually develop out of what was wrapped up in fairy tales, just as a child develops into greatness and independence.

It was good that humanity referred to itself, to its own soul, for a while. That is a middle state. And what has it led to? It has led to the saying: we cannot know anything about the beyond. We know nothing about what first opens up beyond death. It is a great immodesty to speak like that. Not those who know nothing about it can speak about it, but those who know something about it. Those who have correctly understood the theosophical movement in its deepest essence have also tried to grasp the right thing through this feeling. The insistence on itself has inevitably led man to ignorance. In the beginning, man's intellect sees only what lies on this side of death. So when he looks at himself, he cannot know anything of what lies beyond death. But they will get used to listening to the teachers who have already crossed the threshold of death in this life and who know how to tell about this life from their own experience.

What is happening here is giving rise to a new modesty. It is not immodesty when those who speak for the Theosophical Society emphasize time and again: “We do not speak our wisdom, no, we speak not our wisdom, we speak that which the great leaders and sages of humanity still teach us today. We do not speak of masters because we presume to draw the higher truths from ourselves, from our own source. We sit at the feet of the masters because we know that as long as we insist on our own rightness, as long as we do not make ourselves disciples of the masters, we must remain at the “I do not know” level. Out of this humility, we do not express our own thoughts. I speak through that which we want to inspire in the world, I speak the wisdom of the great, superior, wise guides who have left our stage of development behind them. And we try in every way to hear the voice of these masters. That is why teachings such as those in “Light on the Path” have been spread as the golden teachings of the theosophical movement. That sentence

Before the Masters can speak the voice, the wounding must be unlearned.

becomes our guiding principle. We try to unlearn the wounding. We try to break off the tip of each of our thoughts that wounds, because we know that words that hurt others reflect badly on the Word of the Master. Sharp thoughts that hurt reflect badly on the Master's words. But when our heart opens up like a bell flower, when our words are soft and mild and do not wound, then the voice of the masters, the word of the masters, goes through us purely and brightly like a bell.

You will hear the voice of the master when you can pass through the words that do not wound without resistance. Then you will hear the words of the master. Through such thoughts the thoughts of the masters flow. And when a person behaves in this way, the voice of the masters resounds through him, through what he thinks and says. The “masters of the harmony of thoughts and feelings” become audible to him. Those who have a true relationship with the Master speak in this sense. Only in this sense may they speak. Otherwise their word is not truth, but deception and falsehood. Everything that is brought as a message from the Master in any other sense is not true. It is true, however, that the thoughts and impulses of higher beings flow through the theosophical movement, if we do not want to spread our thoughts but make ourselves the instrument of those who today want to rekindle spiritual life in the world.

From the Questions and Answers

Can one cultivate the art of listening to the inner voice while out in nature?

The school of solitude in nature is very important. Most people cannot associate any true sensation with what was once called “silence in the forest”. And yet there is something very significant behind it. Imagine a very loud sound becoming weaker and weaker, and then imagine it falling completely silent. Otherwise, think of nothing. Then you will hear nothing around you. Imagine the same with light. You see light. The light grows dimmer and dimmer; then you see darkness. And yet, the darkness is not nothing. Darkness is as positive a sensation as whiteness. But you see, the nothingness of hearing and seeing is caused by the gradual weakening of light and sound. The complete darkness and soundlessness has occurred gradually. Ask yourself now, could this weakening and weakening of the sound not be continued even further? Below this nuance, down to where it is even quieter than when you hear nothing. In ordinary life, everyone admits this. One who always and always spends his money has nothing; but he can still have even less. He can get into debt. Then he has even less than nothing. When the tone goes deeper and deeper, you come to the point where you hear the tone again on the other side of nature. But first you have to learn to live the voice. In the beginning, this can be felt as a mood. If you did such exercises, you would already find that on the other side of the mental world, the new day is born for spiritual ears. Those who can do this are on the right track. A lot can be achieved with it. In our cities, however, it is almost impossible. It is easy in nature, where spring really greens, where the trees, the leaves and the forest look different every day. It is not for nothing that the occult sites where culture was cultivated were located in nature.

Are plant colors audible? I read a sentence from Stifter: “I heard the blue color of the flower.

Sounds in colors, and not just colors in sounds, also appear to have a less extensive sensitivity. This goes even further, that when another 'I' is pronounced, certain people have a certain color in their consciousness. The beginning of the Ninth Symphony has already been recomposed in colors. The physiologist Nussbaumer has studied this, as have French physiologists.

Do cities also have certain colors?

Yes, Berlin is gray, Vienna is red. The Gothic church is a piece of music in the astral, a sound structure in the mind.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! Today we need to pursue what we had started yesterday, by adding details to some of the requests. Above all questions, as difficult as they may be—be it in the religious sense, or anthroposophic sense—will be those related to knowledge which reaches into the future. Such knowledge into the future can only be understood if one is able to discuss all prerequisites for such knowledge, so to speak. You know, of course, that outer materialistic science also has certain knowledge of the future which is quite possible.

[ 2 ] Solar and lunar eclipses can be predicted to the second, and these predictive calculations depend upon having a definite insight into the details of the phenomena. In outer materialistic science it relates to this insight of the context of the phenomena being hidden, because it is presented in formulae; the formulae are learnt and one no longer really knows where they came from; they actually originate from observations made in the very same area to which they are applied. Nobody would be able to calculate the solar and lunar eclipse predictions if solar and lunar eclipses were not originally observed, forming a basis for observation and formulas obtained from these, which now continue as based on the belief of a regularity applied to these phenomena. The psychological process which takes place here is far more complicated than one is often aware of today. Things start becoming particularly complicated if they are not applicable only to outer, spatial mechanical or mathematical kinds of laws, but if they deal with what happens inwardly, in the intrinsic sense, in the course of the world. Because these questions are based on the prerequisites of modern consciousness they can barely be studied, that's why we find modern Bible explanations—and the priest must also be a Bible explainer—so difficult, like chapter 13 of the Mark Gospel and everything relating to this chapter. Besides that, in later translations this particular chapter has become extraordinarily difficult to understand because it relates to circumstances which have become the most corrupt.

[ 3 ] Now I would like, before I proceed into the situation of this chapter, to say something about the predictions in the Christian sense. You have the feeling that within the development of Christendom there had already been, especially in olden times, references to future events, and future events of the most important kind had already played a major role. You also get the feeling that present day people hardly believe such indications, and that they actually can hardly reckon with such indications being anything but illusion. One always gets the feeling, when such things do happen—in modern language use it would be called prophesy—that something else must play along, other than real knowledge of what will happen in the future. You must however make yourself familiar with it, it is after all also present in our time, in the time of intellectualism—and rightly so in this time—it has eradicated certain traditional, inherited, atavistic clairvoyance. There are clairvoyant people of the older kind who are still serving certain theorists, also of the 19th century, as examples from which they wanted to prove the existence of a supernatural world they could not experience for themselves. We only need to consider such a type of prediction, then we will see—quite equitably, whether we believe it or not—what is actually meant. Such cases could happen, and it has, if I take it as typical, and still occurred numerous times in the course of the last century, whereas in the present time it shows a certain decline. Such abilities are still common in country people. It could happen that someone sees in an advantageous moment in a dream, how he, riding a horse, falls and hurts himself. Such seeing is certainly a sight into the future and one can, even by being careful, find out everything with all the scientific chicaneries that exclude an influence on following events, one cannot speak otherwise but admit a true looking into the future exists. This is something which had been recorded by the most earnest theorists everywhere, up to the middle of the 19th century. You can find this writing originating from otherwise quite serious natural scientists from the first half of the 19th century, discussed in numerous journals. As I've said, whoever observes people today must see that such atavistic abilities have gone backwards and become drowned out by intellectual life; a condition which completely excludes looking into the future.

[ 4 ] Now, as we've said, we must at least familiarise ourselves with such abilities which can be called looking into the future, abilities present in ancient times and certainly understood in the surroundings of Christ Jesus, when he spoke in a certain way about the future. In order not to be misunderstood, I want to call your attention straight away to something else. When you take literature which appears as Christian literature according to the actual Gospels, according to the letters of Paul and others, of direct disputes attributed to the disciples, and you take the later literature of the so-called church fathers—under 'church father' it is meant those who were still students of disciples or at least scholars or the apostles not too long ago—when you take the literature of the church fathers, then you will often discover three characteristics.

The first characteristic is that these writings have become dried up of an actual living understanding for the Old Testament. You will clearly notice how everywhere in these writings, up to the "Shepherd of Hermas," the craving comes to the fore to depict the Old Testament intellectually, in this case interpreting it allegorically, therefore it is pulled out of a real encounter to a mere concept, into what is, so to say, intellectual. The restyling of concepts into allegory puts up with the tradition of the Old Testament as a tradition of facts, told as facts—in reality these are to be understood through the intellect. That is the first essential characteristic. [ 5 ] The second essential characteristic is that the Second Coming of the Christ is clearly mentioned everywhere in the writings, that is to say, exactly what is referred to in the 13th chapter of Mark's Gospel in the most delicate sense of the word. It was certainly, one must admit, the belief in the entire spirit of the church fathers' writings from the 4th century that the Second Coming of Christ can be predicted in the near future. They called people's attention to how the old world would fall apart and how the Christ would reappear, and added to this, the imagination was created that Christ would appear in a similar way, in the most wonderful way, strolling over the earth, as it had been the case before.

[ 6 ] The third element in the writings of the church fathers is what actually contributed a great deal to the church doctrine. Everywhere a kind of legal element developed, a warning to obey the bishops, the dogmas, to submit to the constitution in the developing church. So everywhere something was taking place which one could be referred to as this: To the believers it was said that they will fall into bad luck if they develop anything which comes from within themselves, while they are searching for a religious path.—The religious path given by the church's constitution and the legal constitution, which ordered obedience to the church, was something that has continued particularly in Catholicism to the widest extent, which even as an experience today can still oppose one very forcefully.

[ 7 ] I once, for example, had a conversation in Rome with a priest brought up in quite the Jesuit manner—it was very hard, to get this conversation going—indicating all the sources which gave him the basis of his teaching and also showing the way in which he was to arrive at the teaching content. He pointed out that one then had the written words containing the dogmatic church content, and those were all things which needed no proof, they simply had to be believed, in as far as dogma was concerned. He pointed out that only interpretation was allowed, one was not to criticise or prove anything in the Gospels, while reading them again and again; one had the church tradition which flowed into the breviary, and then one had a living example of the life of the saints.

[ 8 ] The former could not very well form the subject of a discussion involving this cleric because one had to admit that what the Catholic Church wanted to protect was presented in such an ingrained sense, that there was no way around it. But the latter, the relationship of the Catholic clerics to the saints, that of course is something which creates certain difficulties even with the Catholic clergy when they think about it, and here an objection could be used. Saints are fixed personalities valued by the church for their faultless manner in their direct, vital relationship to the supersensible worlds, either through the understanding of how they had found the revelation out of the supersensible world through their inner experience, or that they performed deeds which can only be understood through accepting these deeds as having been performed with divine assistance.

You may know that such a canonization in the Catholic Church requires a very detailed ceremony, preceded by the exact determination of how the relevant person lived and what he thought, a process which should not last years, but centuries. Further, this examination must end with a ceremony which exist of all those who come forward, who have something well founded to present regarding the living exchange the personality has in relation to the divine, and to some extent always enter into what is said in such a way, that the so-called Advocatus diaboli, the representative of the demonic world, who has to refute everything that the other side has to say for the relevant canonisation, is brought to attention. So there will be an extensive trial, at which the being who should be regarded as the Diabolus, the devil, will have on the other side, the Christ representative, for the Christ-like will always be drawn into the discussion with the devilish representative, when a saint is to be recognised.

[ 9 ] Now of course I could have interrupted this conversation with him, regarding the church always admitting to the possibility of lively exchanges with the divine, so that supersensible experiences were possible. It is however the dogma of the Catholic Church that such supersensible experiences which could take place, are devilish and that they must be avoided, one must be forced to flee from them. Of course, it is certainly the Catholic Church's dogmatism which says that all of Anthroposophy is objectionable from the basis that it claims to touch on insights in the supersensible worlds. For this reason, Anthroposophy is rejected because such an insight can only be arrived at with the help of the Devil; it is therefore evil. That is something which is judged by the Catholic Church as quite necessary, quite consistent. Things are already such that they must not be blurred. Whoever thinks reconciliation between Anthroposophy and the Catholic Church can without further ado be brought about, is mistaken. The Initiate knows, for the Catholic Church to be consequent from their side, it will regard Anthroposophy as devilish, and more than ever, the Catholic church today has allowed such consequences to become its custom.

[ 10 ] As an answer from the priest I received his claim that any exchange with the supersensible worlds may in no way be wished for; if it happens in this world it must be made clear that the divine principle has been besieged by the devil.—So, I said to him: If you now have such an exchange with the supersensible worlds, would you consider that as devilish?—He answered: Yes, he has on his side the talent to merely work with literature of the saints in order to know that something like that exists; but he doesn't desire to become a saint himself.—This is now the last sentence which would be expressed by these people, this person also did not express it because if he did, then the last sentence would be that he says: To regard me as a saint, the church has the right to wait for two to three centuries.

[ 11 ] We can draw all kinds of conclusions from this. You could for example connect all kinds of evil thinking habits to it which is relevant particularly at present, when someone says that everything which can be said about the causes of the war, one would only really know about after decades when all the archives have been combed through. If you have any sense for reality you would know that in a couple of decades everything would be so blurred that no truth would be discovered in the archives in order to determine something as some tradition, and you would know that one, I could call it, very insidious step could renounce what has been said out of the consciousness of the present. This is also something which must be considered more deeply, but it only belongs in parenthesis here: I only want to draw your attention to it, that with the proclamation of a saint, waiting for such a long time, things in question could have become thoroughly blurred, and you can have insight into the Catholic Church's extraordinarily difficult burden towards its real progress.

[ 12 ] These three characteristics you will find in post apostolic literature during the first four centuries: the allegoric explanation of the Old Testament, the reference to the Second Coming of Christ and the destruction of the old world, and the admonition of obedience to the superiors. We need to focus our present interest primarily on the middle one, the reference to the Second Coming of Christ, because to this reference we need to link line 6 of the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Mark: Many will come as though they came in my name and say: I am he, and will lead many astray.—In this chapter you find a remarkable reference; many will come and appear in the name of Christ, and they will forthwith be referred to one or another person who also designate themselves as Christ. Here you see something extraordinary. On this basis it is extraordinary to see—I will speak more closely about these things but I'm leading up to it—that already at this point in the Mark Gospel the reference is linked to the view of the church fathers of the post apostolic time. By presenting it thus, that the Christ will reappear in this way, it is at the same time the fulfilment of the prophecy that tempters will come who all want to be designated as Christs; and this is what also happened in the first centuries, in this sense many came to the fore, who actually referred to themselves as Christ. An astonishing amount of literature has been lost in the first centuries—these things can actually only be found through spiritual science.

[ 13 ] So we must say - and I have expressly spoken about it—if we look at the totality of facts, the Christian church fathers lived in a misunderstanding of the Gospels, perhaps even a really bad misunderstanding of the Gospels. When we actually bring our feelings into the Gospels, as I have shown you yesterday, when we really with our whole heart and entire soul find ourselves with ever more wonder towards the Gospels, then we would find it inordinately difficult to find our way with our intellect to the first church fathers. We discover with the first church fathers that we relatively early come to the end of understanding because the Gospel itself leads us into immeasurable depths, and we very clearly experience that in a certain way we actually feel uncomfortably touched when after our wonder at the Gospels we now turn to something which appeared in the church fathers.

[ 14 ] Now, this leads us on to something else. Later we will talk about the justification of prophecy but now we want to find our way into the situation in terms of contemporary history and so it appears to me, that if we want to understand the 13th chapter of Mark's Gospel, before anything else, we need to pose this important question: Can the fulfilment of the prophecy be asserted from a correct pursuit of the facts? Surely you first need to be able to understand in what way the prophecy should be fulfilled, and then you could ask, what are the facts? Then, isn't it true, that with something like the destruction of Jerusalem it is easy to raise a question, but when it comes to the destruction of the world which we are still expecting, and regarding the coming of the kingdom of God, modern thought only has information that it still has not happened, that under all circumstances it must have been an illusion, that you had in all cases to do with false prophesies; and then you only have the choice to either interpret these things out of the Gospels, or to follow what the first church fathers did with the Old Testament through allegorizing, or even to do anything as long as it is abstract. All of this is being done against the total feeling which is necessary in relating to the Gospels, which does not arise here. The most important question seems to me to be the impact of the prophecy, because that helps towards understanding the process of prophecy.

[ 15 ] I tell you, my dear friends, for me, the destruction of the world and the coming of the kingdom of God have simply already been fulfilled. We must swing around to look at the world in such a way that we learn to represent this statement as having been fulfilled. Towards this we certainly must penetrate more deeply with spirit into the words of Christ Jesus, as opposed to what usually happens.

[ 16 ] Those who were around Jesus knew exactly, just as the poor shepherds in the fields knew in their inner sight: Christ had arrived. They still knew precisely that the entire life of human beings on earth would have been different in ancient times and it would become something different at this historical moment, even if little by little. Gentle feelings are still around at present, but only gentle feelings. I have such a quiet feeling about it but that must be trained in an intensive manner, for example, as found in the art historian Herman Grimm, and perhaps it will interest you to look into something like this as well because psychologically it leads to what we need to attain, little by little.

The art historian Herman Grimm had roughly the following view: when we go back with our examination of history, from our time to the Middle Ages and further back to the migration of peoples, back to the Roman empire, we still may have the possibility to understand the history. We have such feelings today, we could say, through which we can understand the roman imperial age and roughly the roman republic. We are still capable today, to understand this. When we go back into Greek history with the same kind of soul understanding then we enter into the highest form of illusion if we believe we can understand an Alkibiades, Sophocles, Homer or someone similar. Between grasping the Roman world and the Greek world there is an abyss, and what has been inherited from the Greek world, so Herman Grimm says, is basically a fairy tale; here starts the world of fairy tales, a world into which we no longer can enter with our present day understanding. We must be satisfied with the inherited images presented to us, but we must take these in a general sense as a world of fairy tales, without intellectual understanding.—It still has a soft echo of something which human beings need to create; an inner feeling towards the historical development of mankind.

[ 17 ] This sensitivity of feeling will of course become completely distorted by those whose opinions are according to modern evolutionary theories, which simply go back from the present and consider modern human beings as the most perfect now than what was initially achieved. Here one arrives at a perspective from which one no longer can understand those who were around Christ. One also understands why, out of what soul foundations, such experiences and imaginations of today have become clothed in the scientific view when for instance you look at the answers the imminent thinker, Huxley, gave an archbishop; his words are quite understandable according to the modern perspective. The archbishop said the human being descended from this divine being; the godhead placed him without sin in the world, and that's who has descended into the present human condition.—This archbishop's opinion couldn't but let Huxley reply to this sentence with: I would surely be ashamed as a human being if I have descended so far from my divine origin, but I can be very proud from my animal standpoint of how far I have worked towards who I now am.—

Here you can precisely see the moral impulses entering into what we call objective science. The need to revert to moral impulses is everywhere for those who tinker with science, if this tinkering it is to be believed.

[ 18 ] You must be very clear about the ancient human being before the time of Christ, the heathen person, who without sin, was aware that everywhere, when he observed nature or when he looked into human life, he encountered the divine and nature simultaneously. In the rock spring he didn't just hear the rushing sound we hear today, but he heard what he perceived and interpreted as the voice of the divine. In every animal he saw something that had, so to speak, been brought about from a supersensible world, but despite its deep fall from the supersensible world, if one really understands it, still totally leads back to the contemplation of this supersensible world. In this way the ancient people could not imagine the supersensible world without the divine, being part of it.

[ 19 ] In Judaism, quite an intense feeling came to the fore. It was this: In whatever form or way the divine appears, man may not claim himself to also have the divine appearing in himself in a perfect form, but only at most as an inspiration, but not in its complete form. This was something the orthodox Jew didn't even want to touch in his thoughts; that which he still permitted for the rest of nature, that everywhere the divine may be revealed, and what he considered facts in his Old Testament, this he didn't allow to happen in people. For the surrounding heathen world, for the old way of observation, it was self-explanatory that the mineral kingdom, the plant and animal kingdoms were consequentially built on one another, and so, just like the rest of nature was divine, so also the human being is an incarnation of the divine. At the same time thousands had a firm belief that the human being was ever more losing the possibility through his outer life, to realize God within.

So, it had been an original human ability to create the divine within, but people gradually lost this ability. Those who surrounded Christ experienced that the divine, which had been in humanity earlier and which also appeared in the outer world, this divine element no longer could appear in humanity; it was given to the earth, it appeared everywhere through the Son of God but stopped appearing in mankind and can no longer appear in human children. It must come once again from elements outside the earth so that the last incarnation of the divine, which actually becomes a new time, can catch up, but it must come from outside—if I might express myself roughly—from the stock out of that which the earth had originally loaned.

[ 20 ] From this point of view—knowledge, at that time, my dear friends, was filled with feeling, which as such took place in immediate experience—from this point of view those around Christ looked on with feeling at that which had invaded the Roman Empire and was now being fulfilled in Asia. What was this, which was accomplished through the invasion of the Roman Empire into Asia? You need to look at what actually penetrated the consciousness of that time. The ongoing war was at that time outer events which in their final dependency were also derived from divine will. However, this was not the most important aspect; the most important thing was that those who sat on the thrones were Roman Caesars who through religion presented themselves as incarnations of gods, and that, as lawful. Caesar Augustus was according to law a recognised incarnation of the godhead. Some Caesars tried, through ceremonies which had been fulfilled in ancient times, to bring about a ritual action which was so close to human truths, to inner human truths, that the Caesars could allow these ceremonies to be fulfilled but transformed into earthly existence, in order for the divine to actually act, for the divine to be made real.

Penetration of these secret divine mysteries into the world can perhaps not be more strongly symbolized than through relating the story of (the Roman Emperor) Commodus, (son of Marcus Aurelius) when he searched for initiation and allowed the ceremony to be fulfilled, because the ceremony also included the symbolic slaughter of an uninitiated person; at his mystery initiation a man was really killed, murdered. In brief, one felt that by this penetration of the Roman Empire, the divine disappeared, and the divine is presumed to be that, thus in the presumption of the divine there is an incarnation of the ungodly, for man must incarnate into something. The divine was not incarnating, it had stopped, so if the divine was not incarnating then in meant the ungodly was incarnating, the enemy of the divine. You could interpret it as you wish, but you will only be right if you understand that those who surrounded Christ Jesus, had said: In the Roman Empire, which is spreading in the world, is the incarnation of the enemy of the divine.

[ 21 ] This is elementary, this is truly a discerning feeling and discernment in Christianity for those who were around Christ Jesus. Never again, from the Christian point of view, would that which had developed further as a dependence on the Roman Empire, be seen as anything other than an earthy bound realm, an empire of the world in opposition to the realm of Heaven. This means in other words: this world which existed then, the divine world, perished, it went under due to the Roman Empire. The downfall was accomplished in the first three centuries up to the middle of the 15th century, as I've mentioned to you. The downfall was accomplished. It is a perished world that now exists, a world that is no longer divine, a world that only gives news of the divine. One must turn to the last, who had become the first, to the divine incarnation of Christ in Jesus, who through his own power gave the possibility, through the handling—if I could use such an expression—through the handling of that which is associated with the fulfilment of the Holy Spirit in one, not by nature, but in a direct way to reach the divine-spirit world, which one can also find in nature when one has found the following of Christ Jesus through the spirit.

The world is coming to an end. The Christ is no longer coming as an earth dweller, but out of the clouds, out of the cosmos he will come again. In this way he comes to everyone who has the awareness of what was meant by the world before, which perished with the Roman Empire.

[ 22 ] My dear friends! It is an unpleasant truth for those who want to be within today's consciousness; they don't know what to do about it; it is an unpleasant truth certainly for those who from an erroneous view want to apologize for Christianity before the present time. It is an extraordinary chapter in the involvement of today's world when people come and say Christianity is impractical, Christianity is something which allows escape from the world, Christianity has a mystical atavistic element which makes it unworldly. Then others come along who want to excuse Christianity by discussing away what some are saying who considered the world in a strong spiritual light and who still have a relationship to the world. The excuse is given that things don't need to be understood, they are really not meant so badly regarding fleeing from the world and with it coming to an end, it has continued its progress from the first centuries up to now; the world is just and anything some fanatical priest or fanatical pastor claims about the downfall of the world from God, is really not so seriously meant, it has only come about through the Catholic influence; one must wipe it out.

In brief, my dear friends, the largest part of pastoral and theological work exists in this. Place your hand on your heart and learn through it, feel out of your heart what I have said regarding the necessity for the renewal of Christianity, for the Christian impulse, because the biggest part of what is being preached and discussed exists in the continuous retreat from the recognition of gross intellectualism and the piecemeal eradication of everything out of Christianity, which actually should be understood in a profound way through strong thinking, through such a powerful thinking that the world finds God through Christ, and when God has been discovered through Christ, which can also become practical because in the discovery of the divine, the divine grasped in thought, the godless world can be included to bring about the re-introduction of the divine.

[ 23 ] These powers must be carried in those of you who today want to speak about the renewal of Christianity, you must be able to say: Yes, today we have to look at the divinized world which started with the Roman Empire and goes back to the Roman Empire; but in this world we must not look for the divine. The world, however, can't remain without the divine. We must grasp that which does not come from the earth, something—speaking symbolically—which comes from the clouds, in a spiritual manner. We must find the Kingdom of Heaven in the place of the divinized earth kingdom. The Kingdom of Heaven has opened up and is to be found; and for this reason, we must be there to bring the divine into our earthly world. The downfall of the earth has taken place and continues to happen more and more. When we look at this earthly realm, we are then looking at the heavenly realm which Jesus Christ has brought. You must see, my dear friends, the realm of Heaven spiritually. We must see its arrival; we must be able to feel the fulfilling of what Christ meant when he spoke about the coming of his kingdom, the kingdom which he had to bring into the world and which does not speak out of nature; when it can however work into nature, then one can speak about this kingdom. This is primarily the feeling he stimulated in those who directly surrounded him. This is also what we must strive for in our words, when we really want to speak about these things.

[ 24 ] We see how it is stated in about the first 3 sentences of the Mark Gospel: After Christ left the temple—the temple in which one also heard something within the outer world of the divine—one of his disciples says to him: 'Look, what magnificent stones, and wonderful buildings.' Jesus however said to him: 'You see only the large buildings. There will not be one stone left on top of another, without man taking part in the process of destruction because from now on, all of the outer, ungodly world begins to become a world of destruction.' And he went away and spoke intimately. On the Mount of Olives, he spoke either intimately by himself through teaching people how to pray, or he spoke only to his most intimate disciples, to Peter, James, John and Andrew. To Peter, James, John and Andrew he only spoke about spiritual events as observed from the perspective of divine realms in contrast to destructive events in the world facing destruction.

[ 25 ] You see, I'm neither speaking allegorically, nor symbolically. If you felt that way, you would be putting it in my words. I'm speaking directly out of the situation experienced as it occurred, by me trying, certainly in the words of current speech, to indicate these things. I ask you to now take note of the situation. In order to experience the content of the 13th chapter of St Mark we are taken up the Mount of Olives. It ends with the word: "Awake!"—immediately followed by us being taken to the Last Supper—we are led to the first impetus for the coming of the divine kingdom through Christ placing it in front of us.

[ 26 ] Tomorrow we will continue speaking about it. What I'm saying to you is quite new, by addressing our current consciousness. I certainly want to speak honestly, as these things present themselves to me, because I believe that by only pointing to the very first elements can one come to a true and honest conviction of what is necessary today.

Let us look back at an earlier scene from the second part of Goethe's Faust, the scene in which I have often mentioned how it was made possible for Faust to unite with Helena. How is this possibility of Faust's union with Helena presented within the whole of the Faustian legend?

We know that in order to be united with Helena, Faust must first go to the region where even Mephistopheles cannot enter, to the realm called “the realm of the Mothers”. We have emphasized several times that Mephistopheles-Ahriman is only able to give Faust the key to the realm of the “unentered, unenterable”. We have also mentioned how in this realm of the Mothers we can find the eternal aspect of Helen of Troy, and we have mentioned how Goethe tried to solve the mystery of Helen's re-entry into the world. We have found that Goethe expressed this secret by allowing the homunculus to come into being, by allowing the homunculus to pass through the evolution of the earth's development, to catch up with this evolution of the earth's development, as it were, and that the homunculus, by dissolving itself dissolves in the elements, passes over into the elementary spiritual world, so that, by uniting with the archetype of Helen, which Faust brings from the mothers, he, as it were, “gives the re-embodiment with which Faust can now unite. Faust has, as it were, been elevated to the great arena of history; he seeks Helena. What does he need to seek Helena? Helena, the type of Greek beauty; Helena, the woman who brought so much ruin to the Greek world, but whom Goethe nevertheless presents to us in such a way that she also appears to us — and here I am referring to Gretchen — as being innocently guilty in the Greek sense. For thus Helen appears at the beginning of the third act: innocently guilty. Much guilt has been caused by her act. But Goethe seeks the eternal in every human nature and cannot reckon with guilt where he wants to present the evolution of humanity in the higher sense, but he can only reckon with the necessity of

If we now ask ourselves how Faust is put in a position to ascend to those spiritual realms where he can find Helena, we are confronted with the answer:

It is the mothers!
Mothers!

And Mephistopheles hands him the key to the Mothers. In a very characteristic way, we are shown that Faust is to descend to the Mothers; one could just as easily say ascend, because in this realm it is not important to distinguish between going up and going down in the physical sense.

The Mothers! Mothers! - it sounds so strange!

We hear the word from “Faust”. And when we recall how this realm of the Mothers is described, how they sit around the golden tripod, when we envision the entire scene of the realm of the Mothers, how could this journey of Faust into the realm of the Mothers be expressed? What are they, the Mothers, who reign eternally, but who are depicted as feminine and represent the forces from which Faust has brought forth the eternal, the immortal of Helen? If one wanted to express the whole fact at the point where Faust is sent to Helena, one would have to say: Faust will have to express his urge to Helena and to the Mothers by saying: The eternal feminine pulls us up or down – it does not matter now. We might just as well apply this last motive, which confronts us at the end of Faust, to the point where Faust descends to the Mothers. But with Faust on his journey to the Mothers and to Helen, we are standing on the soil of the old pagan world, the pre-Christian world, the world that preceded the Mystery of Golgotha. And at the end of Faust? We are confronted with a similar journey by Faust, the journey of the loving Faust, who wants to approach Gretchen's soul, but we are now with him on the ground of evolution after the mystery of Golgotha. And what does he strive for now? Still for the mothers? Not for the threesome of mothers. To the one mother, to the Mater gloriosa, who is to pave the way for him into the untrodden, the un-treadable, where Gretchen's soul dwells. The mothers, the eternal feminine too, are in the plural. The mother, the Mater gloriosa, is in the singular. And the striving towards the Mothers, in that it transports us into the time of evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha, and the striving towards the Mother, towards the gloriously magnificent Matter, in that it transports us into the evolution after the Mystery of Golgotha — does it not show us in a wonderful way, poetically magnificent, overwhelmingly magnificent, that which the Mystery of Golgotha has brought to humanity? From the threefold nature of still astral thinking, feeling and willing, humanity in Faust strives upwards towards the threefold nature of the eternal feminine. We have often described how the unity of the human soul in the I has come to humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. The three Mothers become the one Mother, the Mater gloriosa, through the fact that the human being has progressed in the way we know to an inner interpenetration with the I.

The entire secret of humanity's transition before the Mystery of Golgotha is embodied in the Faust legend. And this transition from the eternal feminine of the trinity to the eternal feminine of unity is one of the greatest, most wonderful, most beautiful intensifications in the artistic realization that is found in this second part of “Faust”. But however deeply we penetrate the secrets of Faust, we find everywhere what I have said pedantically, but not meant pedantically, in that I have said: Everything sounds so appropriate and professional.

I have already pointed out that if we want to fully understand the human context, we must point out that the human being is first of all connected to the macrocosm as a whole human being, just as the macrocosm is reflected in the human being as the microcosm. We must only remember that man's development on earth remains incomprehensible if we do not know that man bears within him that which is initially transitory for this earthly development, but which is permanent for man's development, and which has developed into human nature through the old Saturn, Sun and Moon developments. We know that the human physical body was already formed in the first stage during the old Saturn evolution. We know that it then continued to develop through the sun and moon evolution up to the earth evolution. As I have already pointed out, what united with man in the three preliminary stages of evolution, the pre-earthly evolution, has now entered into the outer earthly formation of man in various ways.

I could only briefly hint at what was said about the matter earlier, and it must remain a brief hint. I have said: We touch here on a momentous mystery. — And it is only natural that these things can only be hinted at. He who wishes to follow them up must undertake a meditation on what has been suggested. He will then find what he still desires, even if it takes a little time.

We must realize, however, that man, by completing the lunar evolution, has begun the terrestrial evolution, and has, as it were, passed through a kind of dissolution, spiritualization, a world night, in this transition from the lunar evolution to the terrestrial evolution, and only now has he emerged again into the material. Certainly, the tendencies he formed through the evolution of Saturn, Sun and Moon remained with him, including the tendencies towards the physical body. But he also absorbed them into the spiritual and then developed them out of the spiritual again, so that we have to think of a time during the evolution of the earth when man was not yet physical.

If we disregard everything else that contributed to the development of the fact that man forms himself physically and sexually in his earthly existence, we can say in general: Just as man entered in the first place as an ethereal human being, so too did he enter as an etheric human being. To be sure, in this ethereal human being the tendencies towards the physical human being, which developed during the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, were already present, but nevertheless they were formed in the etheric. I have already indicated this more precisely in Occult Science. And the physical must first develop out of the etheric. But Lucifer and Ahriman have their part in this whole process of development. For Lucifer and Ahriman intervene even before this, although their influence is repeated during the development of the earth, during the development of the moon and already during the development towards the moon in the whole development of mankind.

Now I have something to say here that is difficult to understand – not so much for the human intellect as for the entire human soul, I believe – but which really must be understood one day. Let us imagine: Man was once in the course of the earth before he gradually formed physically since the Lemurian and Atlantean times, ethereally, and - I will suggest this schematically - out of this ethereal, his physical gradually formed. Thus man was ethereal. Now we know that the etheric is a fourfold entity. We know the ether as a four-fold entity, so to speak. As we ascend from below, we know the ether as: heat ether; light ether; the ether with a material nature or also chemical ether, which, however, has its material nature in that the substance still fills the tone inwardly, the world harmony, the harmony of the spheres, for substances are substances because they are an expression of the world harmony. First of all, we have to imagine the world harmoniously. One tone, as it resonates through the world, causes, let us say, gold; the other tone causes silver; the third tone causes copper, and so on. Every substance is the expression of a certain tone, so that we can, of course, also speak of tone-ether. However, we must not represent the ether as it is perceptible on earth, but as a tone that fades away in the ether-spiritual sphere. And the last ether is the ether of life. So that man, if we still imagine him as ethereal, is formed ethereally by these four types of ether interlocking. We can therefore say: Man appears where the evolution of the earth is preparing to gradually allow the etheric human being to emerge from the etheric human being, as an etheric organism before becoming physical, where there is a mixed organization of warmth ether, light ether, material or tone ether, and life ether.

Now Lucifer and Ahriman are part of this whole process of the human becoming physical. They are always there. They take part in this whole evolution. They exert their influence. Of course there are special points where they exert this influence quite strongly, but they are always there, these special points, as you will find emphasized in “Occult Science”. Just as, I might say, the whole vegetative power is always in the plant, but asserts itself now as green foliage, now as a flower, so too have Lucifer and Ahriman always been present while man has developed through the various epochs of the earth's evolution, they are, so to speak, present in everything.

If you now disregard everything else (you can't always list everything), you can imagine this physical aspect of the human being, which arises from the etheric organization, in such a way (including everything else that I have described in 'Occult Science' and elsewhere, of course) that female and male forms arise. We are now disregarding everything else that contributes to this, but female and male forms arise. If Lucifer and Ahriman had not been involved, then the female and male forms would not have come into being, but rather what I once described in Munich: a middle form. So that we can truly say: it is due to Lucifer and Ahriman that the human form on earth was differentiated into a male and female form. And this is when we now imagine the state of approaching the earth, which is gradually solidifying through the mineral kingdom, when we also imagine that the earth is forming, physically solidifying, that in the earth's orbit there is also , we can imagine that the human being develops out of the ether of the whole earth and thus his character also approaches the physical of the earth, that in him, as it were, the etheric-mineral-physical meets with the mineral-physical of the earth. But Lucifer and Ahriman are at work, are truly at work. They have many means of exerting their influence on the evolution of mankind. And they use these various means for these or those processes, which they evoke.

Above all, Lucifer tends to develop the spirit of the ethereal; he actually does not want to let man become truly earthly, does not want to let him descend completely to earth. Lucifer is, after all, left behind in the development of the moon, and he wants to win man for himself, not letting him enter into the development of the earth. He seeks to achieve this by first of all seizing control of the forces of the heat and light ethers. He uses these forces in his own way in the processes that are now taking place as man becomes physical. Lucifer has power mainly over the heat and light ethers, and these he rules preferentially. He has already prepared himself well for this during the development of the moon, which he organizes in his own way. In this way he can influence the human becoming in a different way. By allowing man to become physical out of the ether, he can bring about the human form in a different way than would otherwise have happened, by taking hold of the warmth and light ether and exerting his power in a different way than would otherwise have happened. Just as he now rules and weaves in the warmth-light ether, it is not the human being that would otherwise come into being through this rule and weaving, but the female form of the human being. The female form of the human being would never have come about without Lucifer. It is already the expression of the emergence from the ether, in that Lucifer has just taken possession of the warmth-light ether.

Ahriman, in particular, has power over the ether of sound and life. Ahriman is at the same time the spirit of gravity. Ahriman endeavors to counteract Lucifer. In a certain way, this essentially brings about balance, in that the wise, progressive gods of luciferic power, who want to lift man above the earthly, oppose the ahrimanic power. Ahriman now actually wants to pull man down into the physical. He wants to make him more physical than he would otherwise be as a human being. Ahriman is prepared for this by the fact that he has particular power over the ether of sound and of life. And Ahriman works and weaves in the ether of sound and of life. And so the human physical form, as it emerges out of the ether into the physical, becomes physical in a different way from the way it would have become through the mere progressing gods, becoming the male form. Without the influence of Ahriman, the male form would be inconceivable, impossible. Thus we may say that the female form is woven out of the warmth and light of the ether by Lucifer, who instills in this form a certain upward striving. The male form is shaped by Ahriman in such a way that a certain striving towards the earth is implanted in it.

We can observe this, which is now so willed out of the macrocosmic world evolution, in a truly spiritual scientific way in the human being. If we take the female form, schematically drawn, we must say: Lucifer's warmth and light are woven into it in his own way. — Thus the physical female form is so woven that not only have the steadily progressing gods developed their forces in the light and warmth ether, but that Luciferic forces are also woven into this female etheric body. Let us now assume that in this female etheric body, that which the earth has given particularly, the consciousness of self, the consciousness that holds together, is tuned downwards; let a kind of tuned-down consciousness enter, which some people already call “clairvoyance”, a kind of dream-like, tr Then, in such a case, that which Lucifer has woven into light and heat ether emerges in a kind of aura, so that when female visionaries are in their visionary states, they are surrounded by an aura that has luciferic powers within it, namely that of heat and light ether. Now the point is that this aura, which now surrounds the female body when visionary states occur in a mediumistic way, is not seen as such. Because of course, when the female body is now in the midst of this aura (it is drawn), then the female organism sees into this aura and projects around it what it sees in this aura. It sees what is in its own aura. The objective observer sees something that he can name: the human being radiates imaginations, he has an aura that is formed from imaginations. This is an objective process that does not harm the observer. That is to say, when this imaginative aura is observed from the outside, by another person, it is simply an aura seen objectively, as something else is seen; but when this aura is seen from within, by the visionary herself, she sees only what Lucifer spreads within herself. There is a great difference between seeing something oneself and having it seen by others. An enormous difference!

This is why there is a great danger for a woman when visionary clairvoyance sets in if this visionary clairvoyance takes the form of imaginations. In this case, the woman needs to be especially careful. And it must always be assumed that the development must be taken firmly in hand, that it is a healthy one. Not to stop at all that one sees, not true, because that can simply be the actually luciferic aura, viewed from the inside, which was necessary to form the female body. And much of what female visionaries describe is interesting for a completely different reason than the reason why the female visionaries consider it interesting. If they describe or view it as if it were an interesting objective world, then they are quite wrong, then they are quite in error. But if this corresponding aura is seen from the outside, then it is what the ether has made possible for the female form in the development of the earth. So that we can say: A woman must take particular care when her visionary, imaginative clairvoyance begins to develop or manifests itself, because danger can very easily lurk there, the danger of falling into error.

The male organism is different. When we consider the male organism, Ahriman has woven his power into its aura, but now into the tone and life ether. And just as it is primarily the warmth ether in the case of woman, so it is primarily the life ether in the case of man. In woman it is primarily the warmth ether in which Lucifer works, and in man the life ether in which Ahriman works. When the man comes out of his consciousness, when the cohesion that expresses itself in him as ego consciousness is dampened, when a kind of passive state occurs in the man, then it is the case that one can see again how the aura asserts itself around him, the aura in which Ahriman has its power.

But now it is an aura that primarily contains the life ether and the tone ether. There is vibrating tone in it, so that one does not actually see this aura of the man so directly imaginatively. It is not an imaginative aura, but something of vibrating spiritual tone that surrounds the man. All this has to do with the form, not with the soul, of course; it has to do with the man in so far as he is physical. So that the one who looks at this form from the outside can see: the human being radiates — one can now say intuitions. These are the same intuitions from which his form was actually formed, through which he is there as the man in the world. There is a living, vibrant sound around you. Therefore, there is another danger for man when consciousness is dulled to passivity, the danger of only hearing this own aura, hearing inwardly. Man must be especially careful not to let himself go when he hears this own aura spiritually, for then he hears the Ahriman within him. For he must be there.

You see now how there would be no masculine and feminine in humanity on earth if Lucifer and Ahriman had not been at work. I would like to know how woman could escape Lucifer, how man could escape Ahriman! The sermon: one should flee from them, these powers – I have often emphasized this – is quite foolish, because they belong to that which lives in evolution, since evolution is already as it is.

But we can now say: Yes, by standing on earth as a man, in a male incarnation, he goes through his life, and what he is as a man, what he can experience as a man, what is the male experience, he has of it that this sounding life ether is in him, that he always has, so to speak, in himself, albeit mixed with Ahriman, chords of life that actually build up his male form. He has chords of life around him, in him, which only become visible and audible around him when he becomes medial.

Now let us assume that we are dealing with people who died at birth and want to express that they did not become “men” here during their incarnation. What would they say? They would say that this did not work at their birth, that they had the potential to become men in this incarnation, but that which makes a man a man did not work. They have been removed from what would have made them men in physical incarnation. In short, they will say:

We were removed early
From Lebechören.

That's what the blessed boys say.

We were removed early
From living choirs;
But this one has learned,

that is to say: he has gone through the experience, Faust. He has gone through the long life, through the long life on earth. He can convey something to us about this life on earth.

He will teach us.

So, in a sense, we have to look into the deepest depths of occult knowledge if we want to understand why a particular word is used in this particular poem. The commentator then comes along and says: Well, the poet chooses such a word: Lebechöre and so on. - Anything is fine with him, as long as he does not have to subject himself to the inconvenience of learning something. Through such things I would like to point out to you how appropriate and professional this Goethean poetry is in terms of the spiritual world view, what actually rests in this Goethean poetry.

Now, I may have made it difficult for you to understand something that is difficult for the human mind to grasp, in one direction or another, by pointing out characteristic points where Ahriman and Lucifer work in the world in such a way that we cannot escape them. For, however we may arrange it, when we prepare for an incarnation — for we must prepare for a male or female incarnation — if it is not Lucifer, then it is Ahriman. So it really is not possible to carry things so far as to say: one must escape both. — Not true, I have, so to speak, also made your heart heavy by showing you that there is a certain danger in observing one's own aura, as it were, looking into one's own aura. But therein lies the infinite wisdom of the world, that life is not like that, that it is a resting pendulum, but that it swings. And just as the pendulum swings to the right and to the left, so the life not only of humanity, but of the whole world swings to the Ahrimanic and Luciferic side. And only because life swings back and forth between Ahrimanic and Luciferic influences, maintaining its balance in between, is life possible. Therefore, something is set against what I have now described as dangerous. If it is a Luciferic influence, it is opposed by the Ahrimanic. If it is Ahrimanic, it is opposed by the Luciferic.

So let us take the female organism again. It radiates, as it were, a Luciferic aura. But by radiating it, it pushes back the life or tone ether, thus forming a kind of Ahrimanic aura around the female organism, so that the female organism then has the Luciferic aura in the middle, and further out the Ahrimanic aura. But this female organism can now, if it is not so inactive that it remains with its own aura, develop further. And that is precisely what is important: not to remain in an unhealthy way with the first imaginations that arise, but to apply all one's will power to penetrate through these imaginations. For one must ultimately bring it so far that one's own aura does not appear, but that it appears as if reflected back from a mirror plate, which is now an Ahrimanic aura. One must not look into one's own aura, but one must have what is in one's own aura reflected back from the outer aura. Thus you see, it is the case for the female organism that it receives the Luciferic mirrored back from the Ahrimanic and is thereby neutralized, thereby brought precisely into balance. Thus it is now neither Ahrimanic nor Luciferic, but it is defeminized, it becomes universally human. Truly, it becomes universally human.

I only ask you to feel this as it really is, how man, by ascending into the spiritual, by escaping the luciferic or ahrimanic power of his own aura, does not look into the luciferic or ahrimanic, but lets the one be reflected and thereby receives it back, asexually, without it being male or female. The feminine is neutralized into the masculine in the Ahrimanic, the masculine is neutralized into the feminine in the Luciferic. For just as the feminine-Luciferic aura surrounds itself with the Ahrimanic aura, so the masculine-Ahrimanic aura surrounds itself with the Luciferic aura, and there, just as in the case of the feminine, what one has within oneself is reflected back. You see it as a mirror image.

Now let us assume that someone wanted to describe this process. When would they be able to describe it? Well, what happens during clairvoyance also happens after death. The person is in the same situation. During clairvoyance, the feminine must neutralize itself into the masculine, the masculine into the feminine. This is also the case after death. What kind of images must arise then? Well, let us assume that a soul that was in a female organism has died, it would have to go through a lot after death, which is supposed to be a form of compensation for earthly guilt. Such a soul will then slowly strive towards neutralization from what it was bound to on earth. It will, as it were, strive towards the masculine after neutralization through the feminine. This neutralization should be such that striving towards the highest masculine is a release for it. If we find penitents after death, then it must be characteristic of them that in the spiritual world their yearning is to strive towards the masculine, the balancing element. The three penitents – the Magna peccatrix, the Mulier Samaritana, the Maria Aegyptiaca – are indeed in the wake of the Mater gloriosa, but they should strive for neutralization, for compensation. Therefore, the Mater gloriosa does work in the aura; it is very clearly expressed to us that the Mater gloriosa can work in her aura, has her own aura. Just listen:

Around them swirl
light clouds,
They are penitents,
a delicate folk,
around your knees
sipping the ether,
needing mercy.

You, the untouchables,
Do not find it strange
That the easily seduced
Come to you in confidence.

But they become aware of this only as a consciousness. It does not confront them as something that resounds like the heights of life. What resounds for them is what they are to experience in connection with the Mater gloriosa through the Christ. Therefore, we see the speeches of the three penitent women directed towards the masculine, Christ:

By the love that was at the feet
of Thy Son glorified by God...

And with the Samaritan woman, Mary:

By the well to which already of old
Abram led his flock...

And here it is spiritualized:

At the pure, abundant spring
That now flows forth from there....

The Christ calls Himself to the Samaritan woman: the true water.

And with Mary of Egypt we are already dealing with the Entombment:

At the most hallowed place,
Where they laid the Lord to rest....

We see how, in these three, that which lives in the aura wants to go out to that which neutralizes itself.

And if we ask what the man finds as that which neutralizes him, which lifts him out of masculinity, then it is the longing for the feminine that pervades the world.

Here the view is unobstructed,
the spirit uplifted.
There women pass by,
floating upwards;
the glorious center
in a halo of stars,
the Queen of Heaven,
I see it in the radiance.

He is not attracted directly by the Christ-male, as the penitents are, but he is first attracted by that which, as the female, belongs to the Christ. And that leads him in turn to the karmically connected Gretchen soul, again to the woman. There you see delicately interwoven into the poetry this deep mystery of man's relationship to the spiritual world. For how could it not, I would like to say, be felt with dismay when the occult facts are revealed to us: the disembodied soul, which still has the elements within it - nature, which must first be separated - which must neutralize itself through the feminine. And we see how, in the striving towards neutralization, because we are dealing with the masculine, Faust, the feminine must assert itself as “pulling towards”. Something quite wonderful is presented in this poem. And it is clearly and distinctly suggested to us that it should be so. Thus, through the mouth of Doctor Marianus, Faust will strive towards the feminine, that is, the spiritual eternal feminine, but the secret, the mystery. When he spiritually beholds the gloriosa mater, he says:

Supreme Ruler of the world!
Let me in the blue,
stretched out heavenly canopy
see your secret.

Now let us imagine: Faust striving for the spiritual world, longing to see the secret of the feminine in the Mater gloriosa. How can this be? Well, it will be possible for the light to be neutralized by its counter-radiation, that is, the female aura of light and warmth will appear, but radiated in the opposite direction, not as it flows directly. This must be neutralized, must be connected with the fact that this light has a counter-radiation. In the stretched-out canopy of heaven, the secret is seen: the woman with the aura, with the sun. When the light is reflected back from the moon: the woman standing on the moon. You know this image, at least you should be familiar with it. Thus we see Faust bearing desire, in the stretched-out canopy of heaven, to finally see the mystery: Maria, the woman clothed with the sun, the moon at her feet, reflecting back. And together with this secret, with this mystery in the expansive heavenly canopy, what he otherwise knows of the Mater gloriosa then forms the emotional and sensory content of the Chorus mysticus. For even that which is still human form in the Mater gloriosa is a parable, for that is the transitory thing about her human form, and all that is a parable. That which is inadequate, that is to say, that which is inadequate in human longing, only becomes adequate here. Here one receives the vision of the aura radiation in a sun-like way, the light of which reflects back from the moon, shines back: the ineffable, here it is done. That which cannot be grasped in physical life – that is sought, that which radiates out of the self in selfless return: here it is done. – Then, according to feeling, the whole thing said out of the mouth of man or said for the ears of man:

The eternal feminine draws us up.

One must say: to let 'Faust' take effect on oneself really means, with regard to many parties of 'Faust', directly entering into an occult atmosphere. - And if I wanted to tell you everything that could be said about 'Faust' in occult terms, we would have to stay up late for a long time. You would have to attend many lectures on it. But that is not necessary at all for the time being, because it is not so much a matter of absorbing as many concepts and ideas as possible, but rather, for us, it is really very important that our feelings deepen. And if we deepen our feelings and perceptions of this world literature to such an extent that we have a deep reverence for the working of genius on earth, in whose actions and creations the occult is truly present, then we will do the world and ourselves a great service. If we can feel the greatness of the spirit in the right reverent way, then this is a meaningful path to the gate of spiritual science.

Once again, it is less about raving and more about deepening our feelings. —- And I would give little to be able to tell you, for example, that the blessed boys' saying about being carried away from Lebechören leads to such occult depths; I would give little for the sake of these mere ideas if I could only know that your heart, your soul, your inner being is so touched when you express such a truth that you feel something of the sacred, profound forces that live in the world and pour into human creativity when that creativity is truly connected to the secrets of the world. If one can tremble at the fact that such depths can lie in a work of art, then this shuddering, which our soul, our mind, our heart has once experienced, is worth much more than the mere knowledge that the blessed boys say they are not united with living creatures. It is not the joy at the spiritual depth of the idea that should move us, but the joy that the world is so interwoven from the spiritual, that the reign of the spirit in the human heart has such an effect that such creativity can live in the spiritual development of humanity.

Question: The Key Points appear to be logically self-contained, but the criterion of whether something is realistic or not cannot be found in them.

Rudolf Steiner: It would be particularly good if the friends would speak out more clearly on this point. You must bear in mind that political economy as such is actually a very young form of thinking, hardly a few centuries old, and that in the realm of economic life, everything up to the great utopians has actually taken place more or less instinctively. Nevertheless, these instinctive impulses that people had were something that became reality.

To gain a more precise understanding, consider the following. Today, people often say: What we can think about the economy actually arises from economic class antagonisms, but also from the economic mode of operation, and so on. I don't even want to look at the most extreme view, as Marx and his followers advocate. Even economics teachers who lean more towards the middle-class view speak of the fact that everything actually arises from the economic fundamentals as if by automatic necessity. Nevertheless, when people discuss the individual concrete things, it is the case that the concrete institutions that have come into being to produce today's economic life are nothing other than the results of medieval thinking itself, certainly in connection with the various realities. But just consider what form was given to the Roman concept of property, which was a purely legal category, and what was created economically through this concept. It can be seen that these things were not treated scientifically, but that the legal categories, which were already conceived economically as legal, had a formative effect. Now the mercantilists and so on have come, who were not creative people, who were theoretical people. For example, it may be said that the advisers of Emperor Justinian, who created the Code of the Corpus Juris, were much more creative people than the later teachers of political economy. These people actually created not only a Justinian Code in our present sense, but in the further course of medieval development we see the opposing impulses developing precisely on the basis of what was laid down in this Justinian legislation.

And so we have come to the new era, to people whose thinking is no longer creative in an economic sense, but only contemplative. This contemplation really begins with Ricardo. Take, for example, the law of diminishing returns. This is a law that is just right, but absolutely not in line with reality. For practice will continually show that, if all the factors that Ricardo took into account are taken into account, what he called the law of diminishing returns will indeed follow, but the moment more intensive cultivation techniques are introduced, this law is thwarted. It does not hold true in reality.

Take something else, something more trivial. Take Lassalle's “iron wage law”. I must confess that I feel it is a certain scientific carelessness that one still finds stated that this law has been “overcome”, because things do not prove true. The fact of the matter is this: from Lassalle's way of thinking and from the view that labor can be paid for, nothing more correct can follow than this iron wage law. It is so logically strict that one can say: If one thinks as Lassalle had to think, it is absolutely correct that no one has an interest in giving the worker more wages than are just necessary to enable him to make a living. He will not give him more, of course. But if he gives him less, the worker will wither away, and the one who pays the wages must atone for this. It is basically impossible to get by without theoretically admitting the iron wage law. Even within the proletariat itself, people say: the iron wage law is wrong, because it is not right that in recent decades wages have been maintained at a certain minimum, which would also be their maximum. Yes, but why is Lassalle's iron wage law wrong? If the conditions under which he formulated it had continued – I mean the conditions from 1860 to 1870 – if the economy had continued to be run under the purely liberalistic view, the iron wage law would have become reality with absolute correctness. This did not happen. A reversal of the liberalist economy took place and today the iron wage law is constantly being amended by making state laws that effect a correction of reality that would have emerged from the law.

So you see, a law can be right and yet not in line with reality. I don't know of anyone who was a greater thinker than Lassalle. He was just very one-sided. He was a very consistent thinker.

When you are confronted with a law of nature, you can see it. When you are confronted with a social law, you can also see it, but it is only valid as a certain current, and you can correct it. Insofar as our economy is based purely on free competition – and there is still a lot that is based only on free competition – the iron wage law is valid. But because it would be valid under these conditions, there must be corrections with social legislation, with a certain working hours and so on. If you give entrepreneurs a completely free hand, the iron wage law applies. Therefore, there can be no purely deductive method in economics. The inductive method is of no help at all. It has followed Zyjo Brentano. We can only observe the economic facts – she says – and then gradually ascend to the law. – Yes, we don't come to any creative thinking at all. This is the so-called newer political economy, which calls itself scientific. It actually just wants to be inductive. But you won't get anywhere with it.

In economics, you absolutely need a characterizing method that seeks to gain the concepts by starting from different points, holding them together, and allowing them to culminate in concepts. This gives you a specific concept. Since you can never see the full range of facts, but only have a certain amount of experience, it will probably be one-sided in a sense. Now go through the phenomena again with the concept and try to verify it. You will see that this is actually a modification. In this way, by characterizing, you arrive at a concept that you modify by verifying, and you then arrive at an economic view. You must work towards views.

I would now like to work out such a conception in the lectures of the National Economy Course by showing you what always intervenes in the formation of prices. The method in economics is a highly uncomfortable method because in reality it amounts to the fact that one must compose the concepts out of an infinite number of factors. They must work towards economic imaginations! Only with these can you make progress. When you have them and they come into contact with something, they modify themselves, whereas it is not easy to modify a fixed concept.

You know what is known as Gresham's Law: good money is chased away by bad. If bad, under-value money, money minted at below its face value, is in circulation somewhere, it drives out money with good fineness, and that then migrates to other countries. This law is also an inductive law, it is purely an empirical law. But this law is such that one must also say: It is valid only as long as one is unable to secure the significance of money. The moment you are able, through entrepreneurial spirit, to secure the right of money, it would be modified. It would not die out completely. There is no economic law that is not valid up to a certain point; but they are all modified. That is why we need the characterizing method. In natural science, we have the inductive method, which at most comes up to deductions. But in general, deductions are much less important in natural science than one might think. Only induction is of real significance here.

Then you have pure deductions, which are found in jurisprudence, for example. If you want to proceed inductively, you introduce something into jurisprudence that destroys it. If you introduce the psychological method into jurisprudence, you dissolve jurisprudence. In that case, every human being must be declared innocent. Perhaps these methods can be introduced into reality, but then they will lead to the undermining of the legal concept that exists. So it may well be justified, but it is no longer jurisprudence.

In economics, you cannot get by with deduction and induction. You could only get by with deduction if it were possible to give general rules to which reality itself would yield the cases. I will mention only those who want to proceed purely deductively, albeit with a main induction at the beginning. Oppenheimer, for example, puts a main induction of history at the top with his settlement cooperatives and deduces an entire social order from it. Well, many years ago, Oppenheimer was already the settlement man and said: Now that I have got the capital, we will establish the modern cultural colony! – I replied: Doctor, we will talk about it when it has been destroyed. It had to fail because it is impossible, within the general economy, to establish a small area that would enjoy its advantages through something else, so that it would be a parasite within the whole economic body. Such enterprises are always parasites. Until they have eaten enough from the others, they remain - but then they perish.

Thus, in economics, you can only characterize by thinking your way into the phenomena. This also arises from the cause, because in economics, one must continually work into the future on the basis of the past. And as one works into the future, human individualities with their abilities come into play, so that basically, in economics, one can do nothing but stand on the quivive. If one intervenes in practice, then one must be prepared to continually modify one's concepts. One is not dealing with substance that can be plastically formed, but with living human beings. And that is what makes political economy a special kind of science, because it must be imbued with reality.

Theoretically, you will easily be able to see this. You will say: It is then extremely inconvenient to work in economics. But I do not even want to accept that. Under certain circumstances, as long as you still stand on the point of view that you want to write dissertations, for example, you can gain a great deal by following the relevant literature of recent times on some subject and by comparing the individual views. Particularly in economics, there are the most incredible definitions. So just try to compile the definitions of capital from the various economics textbooks or even larger treatises! Try to put them in a row, eight or ten of them! One comes to mind right now: “Capital is the sum of the produced means of production.” I have to say, I don't understand why the adjective is there. The opposite: unproduced means of production – you could also think of something under that, for example, nature, so the soil, and that is what the person in question will mean. But then, of course, he is unable to somehow justify how the soil can be capitalized after all. It is capitalized after all. So there is actually no way out, and that is based on the fact that one has such concepts, one must seek them out and must try to somehow enrich them. The concepts are all too narrow.

If you think that the realistic will be difficult for you in these considerations, I would like to say: the realistic could actually be easy! You say that the “key points” are logically self-contained. They are not, neither the “key points” nor the other things! I must emphasize that I did not want to be purely economic, but social and economic. This, of course, conditions the whole style and attitude of these writings, so that they cannot be judged purely economically. At the most, only individual essays in the three-folding writings can be judged in this way. But I certainly do not find them logically self-contained, because I was careful enough to give only guidelines and examples or, in fact, only illustrations. I wanted to create an awareness of what can be achieved by someone managing a means of production only for as long as they can be present; then it must be handed over to someone who can manage it themselves. I can well imagine that what is to be achieved in this way could be achieved in a different way. I just wanted to give guidelines. I wanted to show that a way out can be found if this threefold structure is properly implemented, if spiritual life as such is actually liberated, if the legal system is placed on a democratic basis, and if economic life is based on the factual and technical, which can be represented in the associations. And I am convinced that in the economic sphere, the right thing will happen.

I say that the people who are in the association will find the right thing. I want to count on people, and that is the realistic thing to do. A treatise on the “concept of work” would have to be written in such a way that you really find the concept of work in the economic sense. This concept must be freed of everything about work that does not create value, and not just economic value. So that must be eliminated first. Of course, this only leads to one characteristic. And it is this characterizing method that is important. Of course, this must be said methodologically.

Question: To what extent is inspiration necessary for economic knowledge?

Rudolf Steiner: What is meant is that this inspiration, if one takes the matter seriously, is actually not that extraordinarily difficult. It is not a matter of finding supersensible facts, but of making inspiration effective in the economic field, so that it cannot be particularly difficult.

The way in which labor is limited would require me to show that a person can perform work without it having economic value. That is a truism. A person can exert himself terribly with talking, and yet no real economic value comes of it. Then I would show how labor, even when it begins to have an economic significance, is modified in its value. Let us assume that someone is a woodchopper and performs a labor that actually creates value, and someone is a cotton agent, has nothing to do with woodchopping, but gets nervous just from his work, so that every summer he spends a fortnight chopping wood in the mountains. Here the matter becomes more complicated, because the agent will certainly be able to utilize the chopped wood, and he will receive something for it. But you must not evaluate what he receives in the same way as you evaluate the woodcutter's work. You must assume that if he does not chop wood for 14 days in summer, he can work far less as an agent in winter. In this case, you have to consider the support he receives from this work. The economic value of the wood chopped by the cotton agent is the same as the value of the wood chopped by the woodchopper; but the economic effect of his work, which falls back on his activity, is now essentially different.

If the value of the agent's chopping wood lies in the fact that it has an effect on his agency, then I have to investigate whether it is also true where someone stands on a treadwheel and climbs from one step to another, thereby making himself thinner. This is an effort for him, but there is no effect on the national economy. It is true, but I have to distinguish here whether the person in question is a rentier or an entrepreneur. The latter becomes more efficient as an economic value creator.

You have to gradually work out the matter in a characterizing way and then, if you go on and on and on, you get a direct value of the work and an indirect, reflective value of the work. In this way you arrive at a characteristic of the concept of labor. With this you can go back again to the ordinary woodchopper and compare what the woodchopping of the cotton agent means in the economic process with that of the professional woodchopper. In this way you can go from one level to another and you have to look everywhere to see how the concept works. That is what I call realistic. They have to show how the work is realized in the most diverse areas of life. Like Goethe with the concept of the primal plant: he of course drew a diagram, but meant a continually changing one. Economic concepts must be subjected to constant metamorphoses in life. That is what I mean.

Of course, you won't have much luck with such concepts. Teachers today do not accept this; they want a definition. But I have not found that the concept of work has been clearly defined in economics. One should characterize it, not constantly speak negatively about it. In economic debates, for example, I have found that work cannot be decisive for the price because it varies among individuals according to their personal strength. Negative instances can be found. But the positive is missing, that one advances to characterizing work in such a way that it actually loses its original substantial character and gets its value from other positions in which it is placed. When one begins to characterize in this way, then the substance is lost; in the end one gets something that plays entirely within the economic structure.

Labor is the economic element that originally arises from real human effort, but which flows into the economic process and thereby acquires the most diverse economic value in the most diverse directions. One should speak of the processes that lead to the evaluation of labor in the most diverse directions.

Inspiration is based on the fact that one comes up with how to progress from one to the other. It depends a little on the spirit that one finds just the right examples.

Question: Isn't a generic term necessary after all? Even with the characterizing method, isn't there a need to place emphasis on the causes by which the observed effects came about?

Rudolf Steiner: As far as the matter of effects is concerned, I agree that one must return to the causes. But just as in certain fields of nature it is the case that one finds the causes only by starting from the effects, so it is even more the case in the field of economics that knowledge of the causes is of no help if it is not gained from the effects. For example, the tremendous effects of a war economy are there. If one did not know them as effects, one would not evaluate the cause at all. It is therefore important to acquire a certain sense of the quality of the effects in order to be able to ascend to the causes. Certainly, in practice one will have to ascend to the causes. But that is what economics is based on for the practical. You learn to evaluate the effects, and by seeing the aberrations of the effects, you come to know the causes and then improve the causes. It is of little use to just get to know the causes. You have to get to the causes in such a way that you can say: I know them by starting from the effects. - An insight of such tremendous significance as the language center in the left hemisphere is, is only recognized from the effects: lost language - left hemisphere paralyzed. You first recognize the effect. Then you are led to examine the matter at all. So this recursive method is necessary.

Question: I cannot look at everything from an economic point of view that has to do with art and religion or even sport. Some of it can be viewed from an economic point of view, but not the whole?

Rudolf Steiner: I drive through an area and find extraordinarily artistic buildings in this area - I am, of course, describing an utopia. This is not just an artistic view. These artistic buildings are only possible on the basis of a very specific economic situation. If I drive through an area where there are a great many art buildings, I will immediately get an idea of how it is managed. If, on the other hand, I drive through an area where even so-called beautiful buildings are tasteless, I will get an idea of the economic situation of the area in question. And if I find only utilitarian buildings, I will get an idea of the economic situation of the area in question. Where I find artistic buildings, I can conclude that higher wages are paid there than where I find no artistic buildings. I cannot imagine that anything could be considered uneconomical. Everything, even the most exalted things, must be considered economically. If an angel were to descend to earth today, he would either have to appear in a dream, in which case he would change nothing; but as soon as he appears to people while they are awake, he would intervene in economic life. He cannot do otherwise.

Objection: I admit that it can be viewed from an economic point of view – but only if you want to! But it can also be viewed from other points of view.

Rudolf Steiner: You are entering a circle. All that can be said is that it is necessary to base the consideration on the economic point of view for the time being. This has only a heuristic value, a value of research and investigation. But if you want to find an exhaustive, realistic political economy, you will not be able to avoid characterizing the economic effects from all sides. You have to characterize what influence it has on the economic life of an area, whether it has a hundred excellent painters or only ten. Otherwise it is hard to imagine that economic life can be encompassed. Otherwise I would not have insisted so strongly on this emphasis. Precisely by emphasizing it, you always end up with definitions that basically do not apply in some area, or that have to be stretched to breaking point. It is actually impossible to define the income that a person should have by pointing out, for example, that he is entitled to “what he produces himself”. There is even this definition: someone is entitled to what he produces himself. It seems quite nice to make such a definition. In a certain field it is correct. But the sewer cleaner could not do much with it. The point is that in economics one should not single out one phenomenon from the sum total of phenomena, but should go through the whole sum. One must be aware: I start thinking economically because I can help those who cannot do so. But one must also be aware that economic thinking must claim to be quite total, to be a very comprehensive kind of thinking. It is much easier to think in legal terms. Most economists think in very legal terms.

Question: Opinions on what is “normal” in economics are so divergent that it is impossible to know what is normal?

Rudolf Steiner: I have no desire to compete with these notions of “normal” and “abnormal”. There is a saying: there is only one health and countless illnesses. - I do not recognize that. Every person is healthy in their own way. People come and say: There is a heart patient who has this and that little defect, which should be cured. - I have often said: Leave the little defect to the person. — A doctor brought me a patient who had injured his nasal bone so badly that he now has a narrowed nasal passage and gets so little air. The doctor said, “That needs an operation, it's a terribly simple operation.” I said, “Don't do the operation!” He has a lung that is so constructed that he is not allowed to get more air; it is fortunate for him that he has a narrowed nasal passage. So he can live another ten years. If he had a normal nose, he would certainly be dead in three years. So I don't attach much importance to 'normal' and 'abnormal'. I only understand the most trivial things by them. I very often say: a normal citizen. Then people will understand what I mean.

The question is asked about the value of statistics.

Rudolf Steiner: It is true that statistics can be of great help. But the statistical method is applied externally today. Someone compiles a statistic about the increase in house values in a certain area and then about those in another area, and puts them side by side. But that is not good. It only becomes reliable when the processes themselves are examined. Then we shall know how to evaluate such a figure. For there may come a time when a series of figures is special simply because an extraordinary event has occurred in the series. ...

Question: Does inspiration also occur when collecting numbers?

Rudolf Steiner: Inspiration also occurs in that when you have a series, a second series, a third, then you find out - now again through the spirit - which facts, if you look at them qualitatively, are modified in the first series by corresponding facts, say in the third series. As a result, certain numerical values may cancel each other out. In the historical method, I call this the symptomatological consideration. One must have the possibility to evaluate the facts and, if necessary, to weigh the contradictory facts correctly against each other.

Economics in particular is sometimes practiced in an extremely unobjective way. One has the feeling that statistics are handled in such a way that, for example, the balance sheets of the finance ministers of the various countries are drawn up from a party-political point of view. Where one wants to prove a certain party line, the numerical data is actually used, which can just as easily prove another. There is no use other than to be impartial in one's soul. Something elementary and original comes into consideration. In all the science that deals with the human being - yes, even if you want to list a science that leads you to learn how to treat animals, to tame them - your concepts must prove to be modifiable. And this is even more true in economics. That is where inspiration comes in. You have to have that. Don't hold it against me if I say it dryly.

I am convinced that many more of today's students would have this inspiration – for it is not something that floats terribly in nebulous mystical heights – if it were not actually expelled from them at school, even at grammar school and secondary school. We have the task today, when we are at university, to remember what was driven out of us at grammar school in order to enter into a living practice of science. Today it is practiced terribly dead. It happened to me in a foreign country that I spoke with a number of economics lecturers. They said: When we want to visit our colleagues in Germany, they say: Yes, come, but not to my lecture, visit me at home! - Today one really needs an unbiased insight into these things. ... This economics has particularly declined recently. It is really all connected with the fact that people have lost this creativity of the spiritual. Today, people really have to be pushed in the face if they are to believe a fact.

Now you can read articles in the newspapers about the spiritual blockade in Germany. Of course, it has been there for a long time. If we want to deliver the magazine 'Das Goetheanum' to Germany today, we have to deliver it at a cost price of eighteen marks per copy! Think of the technical and medical journals! They are impossible to obtain. Think of the consequences for culture! This is also an economic issue. Germany is under an intellectual blockade. ... The withdrawal of these journals is directly what should lead to the dumbing down in Germany. ... In Germany it has an economic character, in Russia it has already taken on a state character, you can no longer read anything that is not sold by the Soviet government itself. People become a pure copy of the Soviet system. At best, you can smuggle a book here or there.

Question: Is it not useful when observing the economic effects not to start primarily from the statistics, but from the observation of the facts that are available?

Rudolf Steiner: This approach is needed even when consulting statistics. Statistics only enable us to prove things in figures. It is clear that if you come to Vienna now, you only need to walk the streets and gain experience. You only need to look at the apartments your acquaintances lived in ten years ago and those they live in now. And so on, piece by piece. You can make such observations of the most terrible kind. You can see for yourself that an entire middle class has been wiped out, which basically only lives – yes, because it has not yet died. It does not live economically, because if you see what it lives on, it is terrible. You will start from there, but the number can still be extremely important to you as proof.

You have to have a certain “nose” for it; because if you can prove things in figures, the numbers will in turn take you a little further. For example, the devaluation of the crown in Austria: it is indeed laughable how little the crown means today, but not any old value can be reduced without something being taken away from others. If you now look at the victims of the currency, they can be found among those whose pensions and similar income have been devalued. Here you can follow the calculation, and the strange thing is that the calculation could no longer be right for Austria today, let alone for Russia. Austria should have the right to devalue the crown even further, since everything has already been exhausted, and yet it does not explain the state bank default. Of course, this can only be achieved by the blockade that has been brought about in some way. The moment you lift this blockade, people will have to take very different measures. ...

Question: Can the state, as long as there is wealth, seize this wealth by increasing the money supply?

Rudolf Steiner: The state can certainly survive by increasing the money supply, but when the point is reached that the rent has been used up, if it is not artificially maintained, it could actually no longer survive economically, even if it continues to produce banknotes, because the further production of banknotes would lead to a doubling of the rent, which would lead to an increase into infinity. The state must increasingly shut itself off.

Question: Does the state not live off the economic capital itself, which is invested in the enterprises?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, but off what is a pension in it.

Question: Yes, I mean, it sucks out the capital. The capital decreases?

Rudolf Steiner: To the extent that capital takes on the character of a pension. Because when the state absorbs it, it takes on that character. The state can certainly live, but it can no longer do economic work. That is no longer economics. It can only live off what has already been earned; it only draws on the old. It lives dead off the pension. In Austria, the point should have been reached long ago where the pension is dead. In Germany, it is still a long way off. It certainly could not go on in Austria if certain laws of compulsion did not exist, for example with regard to rent. They actually pay nothing – I think about twenty-five cents for a three-room apartment. The only way things can be maintained is by having certain things for free. In Germany, it is also the case that you may only pay a tenth for your apartment. It is only because of such things that things can be maintained in a certain social class that can afford to pay up to that point. In Austria, a certain social class has deteriorated to such an extent that it can no longer even pay the twenty-five cents. People who had an income, let's say, of three thousand crowns could live on it under certain circumstances; today that is a little over an English shilling. No, you can't live on that!

Today, economic phenomena are so terrible that people might start to take notice and realize that we should actually study the economic laws in such a way that it would help in a practical way. This attempt failed in 1919; but at that time the amount of foreign currency was not as high as it is today.

We could address the question: What does economic thinking mean? - Then: How do you arrive at a concept of work in an economic sense? - And then it would be good if someone were to continue to discuss the terms that I have already used in their own sense, quite freely. It would also be good if someone tried to work out the concept of entrepreneurial capital: what pure entrepreneurial capital is. If you want to characterize entrepreneurial capital in terms of its concept, you have to contrast it precisely with mere bond capital.

Today, allow me to shed some light on a very current topic that touches the immediate present from the point of view of Theosophy. The fact that it is possible for such a question, such a movement that directly engages cultural life, to be placed in the light of our worldview is demonstrated by a small piece of evidence from the last few days that is extraordinarily significant in several respects. It shows that practical people in particular recognize the need to deepen our culture through the theosophical worldview, and that on the other hand, in the broadest circles, theosophy is still something that seems quite unknown.

Last Sunday, a very strange article appeared in the “Tag”, on whose political content I do not want to go into at all, about Russia, Japan and peace, by Carl Peters. You can think what you want about the name Carl Peters; no one will dispute that he is one of the great practitioners of our day. In this article, he talks about the differences in the perception of the peace between Japan and Russia within the two countries. He mentions the manifesto with which this peace was proclaimed to the people in Russia, which contains the words that God may give his great blessing to these people, and for the development of Russia in the future. He then mentions the proclamation of peace to Russia. [The Mikado says in his peace manifesto]: The result of the war is due to the kind souls of our ancestors. Now that peace and quiet have been secured, we call upon the great ancestors to enable us to pass the fruits on to our descendants. The Emperor of Japan visits the temple to bring the news of the conclusion of peace to the imperial ancestors. ... [space] I am quoting this because of the words the author of the article says about it. He says: “The two have this in common, that they appeal to a spiritual fate in the world process.” The difference is that, according to the East Asian view, it is not a victory of the material. The Japanese view is more pantheistic, the Christian view more [monotheistic]. Which one is right cannot be determined by rational arguments. I would like to add the following remark: The Japanese are a [sober, almost mathematical] nation, so I do not assume that what we can believe plays a major role for them. If they assume an influence on earthly fate, it is based not on faith but on knowledge. I would like to suspect that High and East Asia possess certain spiritual knowledge that the highly developed West can only dream of. If they are able and willing to introduce such knowledge into our more or less flattening culture, they would provide us with ideal values that go far beyond what we can offer them. ... [space]

It is not what is contained in these words that we want to examine. The fact that they have been spoken by a so-called [practitioner] is what we want to put at the top of our consideration. Two things strike us. One is that the necessity for a spiritual deepening of our culture is pointed out in such harsh words [about forces that do not live in the material world], and on the other hand, reference is made to East Asia and the hope is expressed that our flattening culture should receive a refreshment from the East, in that the hope is expressed that these knowers can offer us more than we can offer them with our culture. The fact that one can know something about the forces emanating from people who no longer live in earthly existence is taken very seriously here by a man of the world.

It is very strange that on the one hand the necessity is so emphasized, and on the other hand at the same time there is no awareness that for thirty years there has been a movement in Europe that is not working from the remnants of an older people whose spiritual consciousness cannot be at its full height today, but that, I say, there has been a spiritual movement in Europe itself for thirty years, as there is Theosophy. This is completely forgotten; and no consideration is given to the fact that we may be called upon here to establish this spiritual culture in a completely different way than those East Asian peoples. The whole thing is a throwing of light on the one hand, after the longing for spirituality, for knowledge of the spiritual world, and on the other hand, I would like to say, a superficial conception of our own European aspirations.

More than any other question, what has been touched on here may interest us when discussing the women's issue. The theosophical movement can in no way be suspected of treating this matter in any reactionary way. Simply the way it has developed would flatly contradict such an assertion. Women have been among the best founders and collaborators of the theosophical movement from the very beginning. Yes, the actual founder of the Theosophical Society – Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – was a woman. And in terms of the sum of knowledge contained in the works of this woman, nothing that has been given in the cultural works of the last few centuries can match it.

You don't have to believe it. If you seriously immerse yourself in what this woman has given, then the conviction grows that what has just been said is a truth. And Annie Besant, her successor – another woman – has understood in a quite extraordinary way how to combine modern science, modern thinking, and a progressive outlook on life with the theosophical ethos and the theosophical movement in general.

Within the Theosophical Society, men and women work together. Never, in any way, does one have the feeling within the Society that gender plays any role in this. Yes, from one side, which has not grasped the Theosophical movement in its deepest essence, this movement has been called a feminine one; partly because it was founded by a woman, partly because perhaps now in the majority women work in the movement. This fact protects us above all from the prejudice that we could understand this matter in some kind of retrogressive, hostile sense.

But the theosophist is called upon to consider all these things in the light of spirituality, in the light of the highest spiritual culture. He must also do this with regard to this matter. Above all, we will notice that this women's issue, as it now presents itself to us, is a product of our modern world view, our modern thinking and feeling. The way it presents itself to us today would not have been possible a hundred years ago. Insofar as Theosophy is always concerned with clearly and distinctly understanding the spirit of humanity in different epochs, we will also have to clearly understand how this women's issue in particular has emerged from our culture. Theosophy is less concerned with criticizing and more with understanding in all directions. Therefore, it will be less programmatic about this issue of women's rights, but will rather have to explore what the cause of this issue is.

We do not get to the bottom of this issue as easily as we do with others. This is because Theosophy leads us deep into human nature. And this is more diverse and complicated than one might think. While the modern man could easily ignore the distinction between man and woman, the theosophist must look at this difference from the depth of human nature and ask himself whether, despite this difference, the peculiar cooperation that has emerged within the Theosophical Society could also benefit larger cultural circles, perhaps even give rise to a general world view on this question in the present day.

If we look back over time, we find that the perception of women, both of themselves and of the perception they had of the opposite sex, has changed greatly over time. Likewise, the external institutions within which the two sexes have lived have changed significantly. If we look at this superficially, we will not arrive at the real cause and basis. It is known that in the beginning of the time into which not history, but prehistory leads us, the woman played a substantially different role. It is known that patriarchy, the “father family”, with its peculiarly constituted inheritance law and other social institutions, arose from an original “mother family” - matriarchy, that woman had a privileged position with regard to matters relating to the offspring, such as inheritance law and so on.

The theosophist must ask himself: how is such a thing connected with the original spiritual forces of the world? This brings us to the discussion of a fact that has been touched on here several times, but which we must apply to this particular case. The basis of all human life in its historical development on earth is a natural one, one that has developed from an [instinctive] disposition to conscious, clear thinking, to conscious, clear institutions created by the intellect and certain moral concepts.

The original bonds of humanity had arisen from nature. Blood relationship was the original one. Institutions that created moral concepts are later placed in the place of ancient blood relationship.

The materialist sees nothing but the raw force of nature in this blood relationship. But anyone who has a spiritual worldview knows that what is expressed as instinct, what comes to the fore as drive, what is expressed as blood relationship, can all be traced back to spiritual forces, to spiritual beings that stand behind the sensual existence. Just as man today, more or less consciously, directs the social order, so originally the devas [or dhyans], divine powers, directed the context of humanity, [they ordered human conditions].

This working out of a spiritual basis, which is still unconscious to man, appears as drive and instinct. The bearer of this original instinct, based on spiritual essence, was woman. The ancient myths and legends of the peoples bear witness to this fact. [From the theosophical point of view this is easily provable, but this view can also be proved purely intellectually.] Only one thing needs to be mentioned. If you look at the images that go back to the earliest stages of human existence, you will have found in these images the tradition of an original female basis for the entire human race. The Greeks depicted their Zeus with a female bust.

The theosophical worldview takes us back to the very beginning of time, as far back as we can trace time on Earth, to those times when there was no gender separation, to those times of which we cannot speak in detail today, to those times when the sexes were not divided between two different individuals, but were united. Those familiar with scientific research will know that even natural science points to a being from prehistoric times that was not single-sex but two-sex. In this regard, I draw attention to the Darwinian Oskar Schmidt. Theosophy speaks of that time in which the pictorially represented prehistoric man was a fact. He was more inclined towards the female sex.

A little thought can make this clear. Reproduction was tied to the female sex at all times. That which was there as a basis was also expressed in the external social context. In the early days, this natural basis was translated into a kind of moral worldview, in terms of social institutions, rights and institutions.

That the spiritual power of man was particularly concentrated in woman, is shown to us even by the view that we find in Tacitus, where woman is seen as a prophetess, [called to proclaim from the spiritual world what will happen in the future – Velleda, Alruna –] who has to proclaim whether right or wrong exists, whether something should be undertaken or not. We find such views among various peoples. The fact that the spiritual, too, where it appears at the beginning of our times, where it appears as something new, as something wise, is rooted in the same natural foundation, emerges from such facts.

And now something else: Go back to the earliest times of religious world view, and you will find a common trait in all peoples that is connected with this natural basis of the human race, and on the other hand with the consciousness from which the oldest institutions and the thoughts and aspirations of humanity have developed. In sexual symbols, in images that are connected to this natural basis, the culture and religion of different peoples is expressed in very specific times. These are naive but beautiful and magnificent times when people, in sweet simplicity and naivety, associated nothing low or frivolous with these sexual symbols, where procreation was a power of nature and was symbolized in the woman, who showed herself in various forms of expression like the divine creation for them. There have been attempts to revive these views from a so-called sexual religion. There is no right to do it the way it was done. For the current basis of feeling is not such that one can feel one's way back to that original and unblemished state that was associated with these symbols, so that the way these old things are discussed today has something offensive about it for the connoisseur.

Only slowly and gradually did those institutions, those states of consciousness that are linked to the female origin of the human race, change into a different order, an order that, to put it briefly, was made by man, by the man who has broken away from this natural foundation, by the man who has nothing to do with the visible progress in the human race.

It is only through the law, through legal regulation, that the right of the man is introduced into the original right based on blood relationship, taken from the female point of view. Thus we see that it is only on this original basis of a religious world view, which starts from the generative powers of nature, that what we encounter in the remnants of ancient peoples, [Mongolian ancient tribes] as ancestral culture, develops. A power that worked directly was revered in woman.

Then, in place of the wise and the soothsayers, and in place of the veneration of the directly present female, there arises what is called the cult of the ancestors, the veneration of deceased members of the people who have rendered outstanding services for the good of the whole — male ancestors. They venerated what had an effect beyond death. You can still see this in the fact that the Mikado brings the message of peace and war to the graves of his ancestors. So we see the transition from female culture to male culture.

The conquest of institutions that have been linked to women by nature since time immemorial through reason and the thinking of man is slow and gradual. But something else is connected with this, something that I cannot better describe than as the transition from a primeval conservatism to an idealism that is gradually emerging in the world.

You can follow this in those periods of world development in which those old religious cultures of which I have spoken developed. These go back either to times when the divine-creative could be seen in the power of creation, or to times when it had long since died but still continued to work as something present. These cultures build on something in the past. At first, we find in world development those that build on humanity's starting point, that point to the old, to what has come from before, to what has been sacred since time immemorial, to nature, to the ancestors. This is the starting point of the human race, and gradually this view changes into a completely different one. In all peoples who have provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you will find the veneration of the ancestors in the veneration of the prophets, the veneration of those who proclaim the future. In all the peoples who provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you find, instead of ancestor worship, the worship of the prophets, the worship of those who proclaim the future, those who hold up the high ideals to the people. Primitive conservatism gradually gives way to idealism. The focus turns from the past to the future, even among the people from whom Christianity itself emerged. The prophets were the real great personalities, and hand in hand with them goes a detachment from the natural, from mere blood relationship, from all that points to the foundations of our race.

We see the tremendous depth of human development when we look at this turnaround. That which is connected with the relationship between the sexes, which is the subject of much discussion among anthropologists and others today, the so-called sense of shame, was not present at the starting point of our culture. [What was connected with the creation of man was not hidden; it was something natural, self-evident.] It only emerged at the time when a characterized change took place as a necessity. Where the power of nature gave way to reason and ideals, people began to cover what was considered to be a remnant of the natural foundations of the human race.

Take a closer look at this point. What is man ashamed of? Consider this feeling of shame in other areas. Everywhere you will find that man is ashamed when something is done by him in such a way that he actually more or less recognizes the demand that he could have done it better, that it is actually not right the way he did it. We can say something quite similar about the feeling of shame in general. It is there and refers to something that comes from ancient times and can be overcome, and which is as it should not be if we look to the future.

Here human instinct, human perception, points to something that the theosophical world view presents as realized in the distant future. Today I must point out that the development of humanity through the sexes is only a transitional stage, that just as humanity has emerged from the union of the two sexes in one individual, humanity is again heading for a state in which there are again not two, but only one sex. Thus you see our present development through the theosophical world view placed in a distant past and a distant future that are similar, that resemble each other in certain ways.

We can perceive how this fact is reflected in the most intimate expressions of the human race. Take a look at ancient artistic or semi-artistic representations of the divine creative power, at the way the ancient Egyptians associated it with the service of Isis, and compare it with the peculiar trait that emanates from Raphael's Madonna. What is natural, what is connected with the power of creation, can be seen to have been expressed in a semi-artistic way in ancient times. This creative power is shyly veiled in a Raphael Madonna, and we encounter a completely different, higher moment: love, a spiritual relationship that takes the place of the old natural relationship. The mother with the child, bathed in the magic of love. And the spiritual is expressed, as for example in the Sistine Madonna, in the protruding angel heads. The creative power is hinted at as a spiritual echo. There you see a great universal truth sensed by the artist.

The religions themselves take this path. Ascetic religions, such religions that are escapist, are not at the starting point of humanity. They only emerge at the time when the indicated change has taken place. It is magnificent and powerful in the times when this change is being prepared. The saviors in human development are mythically depicted as immaculately conceived. You have this with Buddha and with the other saviors of humanity and finally in the Christian religion itself. In religion, the original natural foundation is developed into the most sacred.

[Again, compare the Egyptian Isis service with these spiritualized religions.] This is wonderfully indicated in the transformation of Egypt, with the ideal and the spiritualized perception at the starting point of our era. Then you will feel this transformation in all humanity. That is why the theosophical world view is clear about the fact that the natural basis from which the human race originated is the external physiognomic expression of a spiritual being. This spiritual essence is the same that man will approach again in a conscious way in the future.

If we bear in mind that we are progressing from the spirit in its natural form to the spirit in its immediate form, then we will understand many things better that have taken place in the course of sexual development. Above all, we will better understand what I mentioned earlier: the replacement of ancient female institutions and female foundations by a male culture, in which we still live today. The natural basis was to be suppressed. At first it could only be suppressed in the area of external institutions, but otherwise it remained in place, and so we are confronted by a strange hybrid in our present-day institutions. Half of them are still based on what remains of the old natural basis with blood relationship, and half of them are steeped in human understanding, in moral institutions that have been poured over them. In our current institutions, both elements peek out in a colorful mix. [Basically, man has only whitewashed what the original natural basis of women's culture has provided him with; it shows through everything.] However, we will turn to the future with its culture and efficiency. Then this spirit will show itself in its actual, appropriate form, and in the light of a completely different view than the one that originally existed. When man originally wanted to raise himself to the Divine, when he wanted to raise his eyes to Him to whom the highest honor and worship must be paid, then he turned to the Power that is germinating and sprouting through man himself, creating naturally.

More and more, this view is changing into a completely different one, and today we are only just at the dawn of this other view. But for a select few, it has long since emerged. Three words in the wonderful, ancient Indian Vedanta wisdom already express the germ of this world view: Tat twam asi – that art thou. – And what does this mean? It means a great deal. When the Vedanta sage immersed himself in this “That thou art”, he turned to the whole great universe, he turned to everything outside of himself, to that with which he felt at one. He then said to every stone: You are of the same nature and essence as I – that thou art. Just as my hand belongs to me, so the stone belongs to a being, to which I also belong.

Everything around us is an invitation to look outside, to seek the divine in the world itself, not just to worship the spirit in the creative and generative forces that work through human nature itself. Tat twam asi is the worship of the divine spirit in all of nature, and with that, at the same time, the call to carry this divine spirit into our entire environment, to transform this environment so that the original state around us from which the human being himself has sprung will arise again.

From asexuality comes sexuality. From the male-female comes the male and the female. This difference will again submerge in the common, objective spiritual world when man will find his self in the great universe, when he will feel brotherhood and connection with the whole great universe, which has no gender, which is all the more perfect the more exalted it is above all similar differences.

When this thought lives completely so that he can permeate culture with this thought of the higher human being exalted above all gender, then the sun has risen. This is what shines for you today as the dawn of a new culture. Then the future of our culture is self-evident, the culture into which we must enter when idealism is further developed, and this culture must not carry anything in the outer world that has anything to do with gender. So we enter institutions and facilities that show us a cultural environment, a moral environment, that applies equally to men and women, that is the same for men and women.

That is the theosophical thought, and the theosophical ideal is to reorganize our institutions according to this, which have emerged [from an originally female culture that has passed through a male culture, to bring them into a higher state in which these two epochs will only exist in the Hegelian sense as dissolved moments].

This can only be in a culture that is spiritual in the best sense of the word, a culture that starts from what has nothing to do with gender differentiation. The one that is emerging in the theosophical movement is such a culture. For what does the theosophical worldview cultivate? The higher self in man, that nature and essence which has nothing at all to do with man and woman. For that in man which the theosophist looks at, that which he makes the object of his special consideration and study, the higher man, the spiritual man, appears in one embodiment as man, in another as woman. The one who lives as a man today has, like the other who lives as a woman, passed through as many male and female incarnations. Man and woman were an outward expression of the inner higher individuality, which is neither male nor female.

Thus, something that is male-female at the same time already lives in today's man, something that unites both sides. And a worldview that shows this male-female as the basis of both through the embodiments, a worldview that cultivates this, only prepares the ground on which man and woman are completely equal, not only in our legal institutions, but also in their feelings. Through “Tat twam asi” we overcome gender differences, and the cooperation between men and women in the Theosophical Society is a kind of model, a small beginning for a great, powerful culture that must develop in this direction in the future, where the two sexes will not live side by side in abstract equality, because the diversity can be greater than it is today. But what is the same is what matters. That is the external world that is formed around us.

What matters is not what we carry within us, but what lives around us outside. As long as man is selfish, as long as the whole culture is based on domination and personality, man draws the impulses for institutions from his female or male personality. But as soon as he creates what is grounded in the higher self, the inner being can be shaped as it likes, the outer world, which is reflected in the inner being, is the same. To use an image, set up two concave mirrors, a convex one next to a concave one, and place the same image in front of both. The convex mirror, the one that curves outwards, will show a different image than the concave mirror, but it is the same image in both cases. As long as there is male and female in the physical body, there will of course still be a convex and a concave mirror, but the same external world will be reflected. It must not be shaped in a one-sided way by one sex or the other.

Those who have grasped the spirit will see something infinitely higher in it. Only a materialistic view sees the spiritual as an effect of matter. The theosophist, however, comes to the conviction that all matter originates only from the spirit, that everything that is material today was once spiritual, and that everything we could observe at the starting point originates from earlier, spiritual foundations. In the same way, a future natural super-sexuality will arise from the present super-sexuality, which man himself creates. We will create our outer institutions, which we will bring into the world, to an equal extent out of the spirit of woman and man. They themselves will be the cause of the later natural effects. What man creates as asexual culture will later create a super-sexual nature.

Therefore, it was quite natural that the original culture reverted to the worship of that which was conservatively held from ancient times, to the worship of creative natural forces, to the worship of ancestors. The spirit preceded nature. Through it, nature was created. If one wanted to look up to the spirit, one had to look at the dawn of the world. But if you want to see the future, you have to work with it as a human being – in both the conscious and unconscious state. Then the prophetic view of the future takes the place of the old cult of ancestors and the worship of the family. We ourselves must prepare today what is to be in the future, what kind of external culture is to exist.

Thus a great, all-embracing cosmic horizon leads us to a solution of the women's question that opens up great perspectives for us. If today, through the theosophical worldview, the higher human nature is sought in man or woman and gender remains a completely private matter, then what is really being covered is not considered. In a sense, this is the higher development of feeling, which emerges as a sense of shame in times of transition. What used to be a shy concealment is now a holy overcoming.

This kind of reaching out and looking forward is a great and powerful ideal for the future. By developing the higher human being in man and woman, the theosophical worldview awakens such feelings in man and woman that create culture. Noble, beautiful feelings that transcend everything base must arise from this cultivation of the higher human nature. Culture originated from a kind of female foundation. And when we look back to ancient times, we can find the female generative powers revered as divine nature everywhere. This then developed into a [male] culture. Initially, we have a true antithesis to this [male] culture in today's women's movement, which can also be explained from it, [today the women's movement is a revolt against this male culture, and it is entirely justified].

But every one-sidedness in the world shows us its complement. What confronts us in external history presents itself to us ideally in a kind of counter-image. The one-sided older culture seeks a counterpart. The old feminine culture, the Isis culture, finds its ideal antithesis in the Osiris cult, which was dismembered, perished, and for which Isis longs. This is the image through which the female wants to complement herself, where a new thinking takes the place of the old culture.

Then another ideal appears in Christianity. In the beginning, Christianity had to be a masculine level of culture. But it was complemented. Just as the culture of Isis was complemented by an ideal of man, so this culture of man was complemented by an ideal of woman: in the medieval cult of Mary.

Goethe also hinted at the contrast between female and male culture in his “Faust”. “The eternal feminine draws us up,” he says in connection with the preceding verses. This is what he envisioned: higher culture will be the one in which the female counterpart of the male no longer needs to be longed for in the female and the female ideal no longer longed for in the culture of men, where the feminine no longer needs to be drawn up, but where the higher divine, the higher self, appears as the drawing force in man. This higher self, the whole human being, is what the theosophical worldview strives for. How could it not be that women are the first to understand what is now, at dawn, to be the culture of the future.

For thousands of years we have had a culture of man. Our whole culture is a male culture. Our modern justice, theology, medicine and so on are almost exclusively products of the male culture. Those who approach these things more deeply will easily find a physiological expression of the male soul. But if it is to be different now, then it is self-evident that the inspirer must be the woman. If the theosophical movement is to be understood more quickly, then it must be understood in this direction. Those who do not see it this way can call it a feminine in a pejorative sense today. But those who are clear about the fact that the great progress of culture takes place from the feminine to the masculine and from there to the masculine-feminine will find it self-evident that women can best understand this theosophical world view.

It is more difficult for a man to [free himself from the prejudices of today's culture], because he has grown up from an early age with the results of a man's culture. He should literally transform himself inwardly. He will also have to do so if he wants to be up to date. But all that is to come also prescribes for us the free interaction, the completely free cooperation of man and woman, the absolute equality in the perception of the higher self, the actual spirit of the human being.

Thus the former ideal of the eternal in man, which we encounter in the Osiris cult, and the eternal in woman, which has found a mystical formal expression in the new age and has been lived by poets and mystics, will be transformed into the ideal of the harmoniously structured human being, who is not afflicted with any one-sidedness. We can foresee a culture all around us that will bear the outer physiognomy of supersexuality. That is the task of the theosophical world view. We do not work with phrases, with words and programs, not with demands, but we seek to awaken the living life in the soul from the contemplation of the spirit, to open up the source that is self-creating. We do not just speak as Theosophists, but we indicate what, according to the nature of the facts, must develop in these souls.

So you can see from this particular question that European spiritualism, European theosophy, has something quite different to say than to reproduce the remains of old worldviews that have retained the cult of the ancestors. They have spirituality, the reference to the spiritual, but they do not have what we have as those who have to work according to ideals, not according to old habits. Spiritualism is certainly a necessity for us and it must come into the world; but not a spiritualism that carries the achievements of our culture to the graves of our ancestors – although we can understand and respect such a thing – but a spiritualism that is prophetic, that carries the best that we can develop within us to be burned for a fire that will be the beacon of our future.

Yesterday I gave you a description of the starry sky nearest to us. If you think back to this description, you will have to say to yourselves above all: if we draw such a picture of the starry heavens from spiritual knowledge, it looks quite different from what is otherwise said in this field today. Yesterday, precisely in order to make this emerge clearly, I spoke in the way I have just done. I had to speak in a way that must seem absurd, perhaps even ridiculous, to anyone who acquires knowledge about these subjects today through contemporary education. And yet, the fact of the matter is that a kind of healing of our sick spiritual life can only take place if this total change of perspective — especially of such things as we discussed yesterday — can take place.

And one would like to say: Wherever thinking takes place today, but thinking takes place in such a way that it runs into the old, conventional ideas, one sees on the one hand how thinking everywhere points to this new kind of spiritual knowledge. But one also sees how people are not able to keep up with such spiritual insight, and how they therefore actually remain at a loss everywhere and - which is perhaps the worst thing in the present moment of history - are not aware of their helplessness, indeed do not want to be aware of it.

Let us imagine how what I described yesterday from a completely different point of view is described today. Yesterday I spoke about the moon, Saturn, Jupiter and so on, and I presented the individualities, the spiritual individualities that can be associated with these words. I showed you, as it were, our planetary system as a gathering of spiritual beings that work out of different impulses, but in such a way that these impulses also have something to do with earthly events. We saw living beings appearing in the universe with a certain character. We could speak of living beings in Saturn, the Moon and so on. But the whole way of speaking differs from what is said about such things today. There is the assumption – I repeat it again – of a primeval nebula that existed once, which was in a rotating, circling motion and from which the individual planets split off, which today one looks at with complete indifference as more or less luminous physical bodies that rush along in space.

This view that the heavenly bodies are such indifferent bodies, to which nothing else can be applied than physics, especially mathematics, to calculate their orbits, to possibly explore whether the substances found on Earth are also present there, this indifferent view of the heavenly bodies, is something that has actually only become common among mankind in the last three to four centuries. And it has become customary in a very definite way. Today things are just not understood. Because man has lost the possibility of looking into the spiritual, or, as it was only the case in the later Middle Ages, at least to have a presentiment of it, it has also become possible to completely lose the spiritual. Then the physical concepts that arose on earth, the mathematical and computational concepts, were regarded as something certain, and now that was revealed out there in the celestial space was also calculated. A certain assumption was made here – I must already present these theoretical considerations today – we have learned how to calculate something on earth, how to do physical science on earth, and have now extended this calculation on earth, this physical science, to the whole of the heavens and believed that the calculation results that apply on earth also apply to the heavens.

On earth, we speak of time, of matter, of motion; for physicists, one could say, of mass, also of speed and so on: all concepts that have been gained on earth. Since the time of Newton, these have also been extended to the heavens. And the whole conception that one has of what is going on in the world is nothing more than a mathematical result obtained on earth and then projected into the heavens. The whole of Kant-Laplace's theory is indeed an absurdity the moment one realizes that it is valid only on the assumption that the same laws of calculation apply out there in space as on earth, that the concepts of space, time and so on are just as applicable out there as on earth.

But now there is a strange fact, a fact that is causing people a lot of headaches today. We live in a very strange time, which is announced by manifold symptoms. In all popular gatherings held by monists and other bundlers, people are presented with the fact that the stars shine out there through the known processes. The whole beautiful doctrine of spiral nebulae and so on, as presented to the outer eye, is presented to a believing audience by popularizing speakers and writers. And today's man has his education from these popular speakers and popular writers. But this education is actually, basically, only the result of what physicists and other so-called learned people thought and devised decades ago. In such popular gatherings, everything that was considered important by experts decades ago is reheated. But today the experts are being shaken up by something completely different. That which is shaking them up is, for example, the so-called theory of relativity.

This theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of relativity, is what concerns the thinking physicists today. Now, the details of this theory of relativity can be discussed, as I have already done here and there; but today we are not concerned with its inner validity, but with the fact that it exists and that physicists are talking about it. Of course there are physicists who are opposed to it, but there are many physicists who simply talk about the theory of relativity. But what does that mean?

Yes, it means that this theory of relativity destroys all the concepts on which our view of the movements and nature of celestial bodies in space is based. For decades, what is written in astronomy books today, what is still presented to a lay audience in popular lectures and books, has been valid; it has been valid. But physicists are working to dismantle and destroy the most popular concepts – time, movement, space – and declaring: none of it is as we thought it was. — You see, at least for physicists today it is already something of a matter of conscience to say, for example: I point my telescope at a distant star. But I have calculated that it takes so much time for the light from that star to reach the Earth. So when I look through my telescope, the light that enters my telescope has taken so many light-years. The light that enters the telescope must therefore have started out up there so many light-years ago. The star is no longer there, it is no longer there at all. I get the beam of light into my telescope, but what is in the extension of the telescope is not the star at all. And if I look at a star next to it, from which the light now takes much fewer light-years, it still arrives at the same time. I turn my telescope: the star comes to a point of light that was perhaps there so-and-so many years ago. Now I turn my telescope again: a star falls into my telescope that is not there at all, but was there a completely different number of years ago. And so I form views of my starry sky! Everything is there from the time when it was there, but actually it is not there at all. Actually nothing is there: everything is thrown over and under.

This is exactly how it is with space. We perceive a distant sound somewhere. When we approach it, it appears to us at a different 'pitch' than when we move away from it. Space becomes decisive for the way we perceive things. And of course that makes people scratch their heads. Time, which plays a role in all calculations, has suddenly become something quite uncertain, something merely relative. And of all that is so popularly drawn out into space, the modern physicist – and he is aware of this – can only say: There is something that was once there, is still there, will once be there. Well, there is something there. And that something that is there causes its light emissions to coincide with the crosshairs of my telescope at a certain point in time. — That is the only wisdom that remains, the coincidence of two events. So, what once happened somewhere, sometime, coincides with what is happening today in the crosshairs of my telescope. Only of such coincidences can one speak – says today's physicist – it is all relative; the concepts from which the world building has been theoretically constructed are actually of a merely relative, not at all absolute value. That is why physicists today are talking about a radical revolution in all the concepts of physics. And if you went straight from a popular lecture for laypeople to a lecture by a relativity theorist today, you would find that the popularizer is handing down to people something that is built on the ideas that the experts say: “It's all melted like snow in the sun!”

You see, we cannot just say that a physical world view has been built up out of certain concepts over the past three to four hundred years; rather, we have to say that today there are already enough people who have dissolved these concepts out of these concepts, who have destroyed them. After all, this world view, which is considered certain, no longer exists for a large number of thinkers. So the matter is not quite so simple that what is said from a completely new point of view may be ridiculed. Because what is said from the other point of view melts away in the present like snow in the sun. It is actually no longer there for those who understand something of the matter, or at least want to understand something. So that one actually stands before the fact that people say: What is described here from the point of view of spiritual science is absurd because it does not agree with what we consider to be right. But if they now take the relativity point of view, then these people must say: That is absurd, what we have considered to be right! That is how things stand today. But actually the majority of humanity is asleep, watching as if asleep as these things unfold and letting them happen. But it is important to realize that the worldview that has celebrated such great triumphs as such is actually in ruins today.

The facts of the spiritual world will only become clear to a wider public when people at least begin to loosen the pointy cap they sleep under. So, one does not just have the option of thinking that what speaks out of such a tone as I did yesterday is absurd in the face of today's science, because this science is, for example, quite negative in its theory of relativity; it actually says everywhere what is, and humanity will have to steer towards an understanding of that which is.

These things should be explained by such representations, as I tried to give them yesterday with regard to individual stars in our planetary system. But what do we see there? We see that, to a certain extent, it is precisely following the course of world development. What would an old-fashioned physicist, not a newcomer to physics (because most newcomers are relativists), what would an old-fashioned physicist say if he heard something as outrageous as what I said yesterday? If he did not immediately say that it is all crazy and twisted, and that is perhaps what he would say at first, he would still claim: That contradicts the firm foundations of science. But what are the firm foundations of science? They are the concepts of space, time and so on that have been gained on earth. Now the relativity theorists are destroying these concepts for the universe, declaring them invalid.

Anthroposophy, however, takes a practical approach: it disregards earthly concepts when talking about the moon and Saturn and Jupiter and so on. It no longer speaks in earthly terms, but attempts – however difficult it may be – to characterize Venus and Mars in a way that is no longer possible with earthly concepts. And so, in order to penetrate into the cosmos, we must be willing to lose our earthly concepts. I wanted to show you how the cosmos fits into contemporary spiritual life and how things stand in contemporary spiritual life. There is only a relationship with earthly concepts when one reaches out into the cosmos. Just imagine, when we go to the moon, as I characterized it yesterday, to those entities that are anchored in the moon as in a world fortress and actually live behind the surface of the moon - where they, if may I put it, their world business, when we come to these entities, which can only be approached with a clairvoyantly sharpened gaze, we find that these entities work in secret. Because what is inside the moon does not go out into the world, and everything that comes from the moon is reflected out of the world. Just as the moon does not absorb sunlight but reflects it, so it also reflects everything else that happens in the universe. Everything that happens in the universe is reflected back by the moon as if by a mirror. Processes take place within it that remain hidden.

But I have told you: the spiritual beings who are entrenched in this lunar fortress, as in the universe, and who conduct their world business in there, were once on earth before the moon split off from the earth. They were the first great teachers of human souls on earth. And the great ancient wisdom that is spoken of is basically the heritage of these lunar beings, who now live in secret within the moon. They have withdrawn themselves.

When one speaks in this way about the universe, moral concepts enter into the ideas that one develops. One forgets the physical concepts of the earth; moral concepts enter into the description. We ask ourselves: Why have these lunar entities withdrawn, why do they work in secret? Yes, when they were still on earth, they did indeed suggest an enormous wisdom to people. If they had remained on earth, they would have continued to suggest this wisdom to people, but people would never have been able to enter the age of freedom.

These entities had, so to speak, made the wonderful decision to withdraw from Earth, to retreat to a secluded place in the universe, far from human existence, in order to carry out their world business there, so that people would no longer be influenced by them, so that people could all absorb the impulses of the universe and become free beings. These entities have chosen a new dwelling place in the universe to gradually make freedom possible for people.

Yes, that speaks differently than is spoken of by the physicist, who, if he heard that the moon had split off from the earth, would simply calculate the speed at which it happened, the forces by which it happened, and would only ever have the earthly forces and the earthly speeds in mind. They are completely disregarded when we speak of the moon as I did yesterday. But if we leave aside the physical, what remains are such resolutions, such great cosmic-moral impulses. The important thing is that we move from physical verbiage, which applies to the physical conditions of the earth, to a discourse in moral ideas about the universe.

The important thing is that one does not merely put forward theories that are to be believed, but that there is a moral world order. This has completely confused the human soul in the last three to four centuries, that one has said: One can know some things about the earth, and, based on what is known on earth, calculate the universe and construct theories such as the Kant-Laplace theory, but with regard to the moral and divine order of the world, one must believe. This has greatly confused people, because the insight has been completely lost that one must speak in earthly terms about the earth, but that one must begin to speak cosmically the moment one rises up to the universe. There, physical speech gradually gives way to moral speech. What is otherwise at most imagined is practically carried out.

If you find a description of the sun by a physicist today, it is some kind of gas ball steaming out there, and its eruptions are described like terrestrial eruptions. Everything is projected onto this cosmic body in the same way as what happens on earth, and with the same calculations that we have acquired here, we then calculate how a ray of light passes the sun or the like. But the calculations we use here on Earth no longer apply when we go out into space. And just as the strength of light decreases with distance in a square, the laws no longer apply in outer space. We are only related to the universe in our morality. By rising above the physical as human to the moral, we here on earth become similar to what works in outer space as realized morality.

Thus we must say: in the ultimate sense, Anthroposophy is a science. It actually implements what arises as a demand. It no longer speaks in earthly concepts, except for the moral ones, which, however, are already supermundane on earth. It speaks in such moral concepts when it soars to the universe. This must be taken into account. And from this point of view, the concepts that we need to understand on earth must be gained, which cannot be understood just now.

You see, the beings that are anchored in the moon, I said, only work as if in a fortress. There they do their world business. For everything that the moon gives to the world, that the earth gives, is reflected and mirrored. But this is a state that has only just occurred in the course of evolution in the cosmic becoming. It used to be different. And into the, I would like to say, soft, slimy form that the earth itself and all beings once had, these beings worked when they still walked on earth. And it is in connection with these effects that the spinal cord column develops in both humans and animals. So that the spinal cord column in humans and in animals is an inheritance from very ancient times, when the moon beings were still connected with earthly existence. This can no longer arise today. The spinal column is an inheritance; it can no longer arise today.

But with regard to the four-footed animals, these entities made the spine so strong that it remains horizontal. In the case of humans, they made it so that it could become vertical, and the human being could then become free through the vertical spine for the universe and its influences at the moment when these lunar beings retreated to the lunar fortress.

And so we will gradually come to explaining the earthly from the universe, and to judging spiritual forces and impulses in the right way in earthly existence as well. It is the case that human minds have been invaded by ideas that have only emerged in the last three or four hundred years. And all of them under the influence of the view that the only thing one can apply to the whole universe to explain it is what one has gained from physical events and from the physical things of the earth. One has made the whole universe into a physical image of the earth. Now, however, people have realized: Something coincides with my crosshairs, but that was there once! The whole story does not apply in this way. And if one takes into account stars that are far enough away, today's physicist can say: What I record as a map is not there at all. I draw two stars next to each other: one of them was there, say, a thousand years ago, the other was there six hundred years ago. No, the stars were never there, side by side, as I see them in my crosshairs, coinciding as the rays of light.

So it all melts away, it is not really like that at all. With these concepts, you do not get what is out there. You calculate, calculate, calculate. It is just as if the spider weaves its web and then imagines that this web weaves through the whole world.

The reason for this is that these laws, according to which one calculates, no longer apply out there, but at most one can use the morality that is within us to get concepts of what is out there. Out there in the starry sky, things happen morally, sometimes also immorally, ahrimanically, luciferically, and so on. But when I take morality as a generic term, things happen morally, not physically. But this is something that must be rediscovered, because the other has become so firmly entrenched in people's minds over the last two or three centuries that even doubts such as those of the relativity theorists — for their negations have a great deal to be said for them — cannot dislodge it from people's minds. It is also understandable, because if even this last chimera, the time-space calculation that they perform, if even this still disappears from their minds for the starry sky, then there is nothing left in these minds, and people do like to retain something in them. For something else will only be able to be in it if one rises to the possibility of looking at the starry sky as we did yesterday.

Now we must realize that all this points to the fact that it is necessary for people of the present time to form clear ideas about what has actually happened in the last three to four centuries, and what has found its preliminary expression in the greatest of all wars that have ever taken place on earth, and in the chaotic conditions that will become even more chaotic in the near future. What is required of humanity is to really come to terms with these issues. And in this respect it is interesting to take a look beyond the Earth with its present level of intellectual development.

Within the civilization in which the Westerner with his American followers live, everything that has been developed in the last three to four centuries under the influence of a phenomenally magnificent technology and a magnificent world traffic - which is only now breaking down - is considered so solid that, of course, anyone who does not adopt the same concepts is a fool. Now it is true that the Orient is in a state of decadence, but one must also say: What one has to express again today from the sources of our own anthroposophical research, as I did yesterday, was, albeit in a completely different way, once in ancient times, still oriental wisdom.

We cannot accept this oriental wisdom in its old form today, as I have often discussed. We have to regain it from the Western mind, from the Western soul. But it was once, I would like to say, the custom to speak about the stars in the way that I began to speak about them yesterday, based on the old clairvoyance, on this dream-like old clairvoyance. Only that has been completely lost to humanity, and European humanity today considers all of this to be absurd, which was once considered the highest human wisdom.

Now, as I said, although this was once a great and original wisdom in the Orient too, today people there are in a state of decadence. But in a certain sense, at least externally and traditionally, something of such a way of looking at the universe has been preserved in the Orient, I would even say a soulful way of looking at the universe. And the technical culture of Europe impresses the Orientals very little. These souls, who today in the Orient lovingly engage with the ancient wisdom, fundamentally disdain what has developed in Europe as a mechanical culture and civilization. They study what concerns the human soul from their ancient scriptures. In this way, some inwardly experience an, albeit decadent, enlightenment, so that something of the soul's view of the world still lives in the Orient. And it is not unnecessary to also look at the way in which these people, who still have some kind of reflection of an ancient culture, look at the European-American intellectual scene. Even if it is only for the sake of comparison, it is still interesting.

A remarkable book has been published by a certain Rãmanãthan, an Indian from Ceylon, entitled “The Culture of the Soul among the Western Nations” [the title was written on the board]. This Rãmanãthan speaks in a remarkable way. He obviously belongs to those people over there in the Orient who, within Indian civilization, have said to themselves: These Europeans also have very strange scriptures, for example the New Testament. Now these people, to whom Rãmanãthan also belongs, have studied the New Testament - but of course in the way that the soul of these people can study the New Testament - and have absorbed this New Testament, the work of Christ Jesus, through the New Testament according to the state of their soul. And there are already people over there – as this book by Rãmanãthan shows – who now speak of the Christ Jesus and the New Testament from the remnants of an ancient culture. They have formed very specific ideas about the Christ Jesus.

And now this man writes a lot about these ideas of Christ Jesus, and of course he addresses the book - he wrote it in English - to the Europeans. He addresses the book, which is written by the Indian spirit about Jesus in the Gospels, to the Europeans, and he says something very strange to the Europeans. He says to them: it is quite extraordinary that they know nothing at all about the Christ Jesus. There are great things in the Gospels about Christ Jesus, but the Europeans and Americans know nothing about it, really know nothing about it! And he gives the Europeans and the Americans a strange piece of advice. He says to them: “Why don't you have teachers of the New Testament come from India, they will be able to tell you how it actually is with Christ Jesus.

So these people in Asia, who are dealing with European progress today and who then read the New Testament, tell these Europeans: If you want to learn something about the Christ Jesus, then you must have teachers come to you from us, because all the teachers who speak to you understand nothing about it, it is all misunderstood! —And he explains this in detail. He says: In Europe, at a certain time, a certain understanding of words took the place of an understanding of spiritual essence. The Europeans cling to a certain understanding of words with regard to all things. They do not carry a spiritual understanding in their heads, but the words they learn from their individual populations rise up into their heads, and then they think in words.

It is a remarkable way in which these Indians, despite their decadence, still come to this insight, because so far the story is quite striking. Even in physics and mathematics, thought is done in words today, not in things. In this respect, people today are quite strange. If someone wants to be very clever, then he quickly quotes: “For just where concepts are missing, a word comes at the right time.” But today it happens mostly out of the urge that the person in question has run out of all concepts: then the Goethean saying quickly comes to mind. But then he does not notice that. He does not realize that he is quite bitter in this vice at the moment when he criticizes it.

So this Indian says to the Europeans: You have only a word-understanding of all things, and you have extended this word-understanding over the New Testament, and thereby you have killed the Christ for four centuries. He no longer lives among you, he has been dead for four centuries. Get teachers from India so that he can be awakened again.

He says: For three to four centuries, the Europeans have known nothing at all about Christ. They cannot know anything because they do not have the concepts and ideas through which one can know something about Christ. — The Indian says to the Europeans: You need a renaissance of Christ Jesus. You have to rediscover the Christ, or someone else has to discover him for you, so that you have him again! - So says the Indian, after he has come to read the Gospel. He realizes that strange things have happened in Europe in the last three to four centuries. And then he says: If the Europeans themselves want to find out which Christ lives in the New Testament, they would have to go back a long way. Because this lack of understanding of Christ has been slowly prepared, and actually the Europeans would have to go back to Gnosticism if they still wanted to learn something from their own scriptures about the Christ.

A strange phenomenon! There is an Indian, who is only representative of many, who reads the New Testament and says to the Europeans: There is nothing that helps you more than going back to the Gnostics.

But the Europeans only have the Gnostics in the counter-writings. The Europeans know nothing of the Gnostics. It is a strange fact: the writings of the Gnostics have all been destroyed, only the polemics of the Christian church fathers against the Gnostics have survived, with the exception of the 'Pistis Sophia' and a few others, but these cannot be understood as they are, any more than the Gospels themselves can be understood. '

But now, if you are not a Gnostic but rediscover the Christ through modern spiritual science, the theologians come along and say: There the Gnosis is being warmed up again - the Gnosis, which they do not know, however, because they cannot know it from any external things. But 'warming up Gnosticism' is what it is, and that must not be done, because it distorts Christianity. This is also a divergence between East and West. Those who study the New Testament in the East find that one must go back to the first centuries. When theologians of the present day are confronted with something that appears as the description of Christ in today's anthroposophy, and which, to them, sounds like an unknown gnosis, they say: He wants to revive gnosis, that must not be allowed, it distorts Christianity.

Yes, the judgment of the Indian is quite remarkable. This Rãmanãthan actually says: What the Europeans now call their Christianity is falsified. The Europeans say: The Rãmanãthan falsifies our Christianity. But the Rãmanãthan comes quite close to the right view, albeit with his decadent view. The right thing is always a falsification of the wrong. It is only important to call these things by their right name. The right thing is always a falsification of the wrong, because if one did not falsify the wrong, one would not arrive at the right.

But that is the way things are today. Just think of the abyss you are looking into when you take this example from Rammanathan. For example, someone might say: Read the Gospels impartially. — It is difficult for a European today to read them impartially, after having been presented with the mistreated translations for centuries and having been educated in certain ideas. It is difficult to read them impartially. But if someone reads them impartially, even from his point of view, then he discovers a spiritual Christ in the Gospels. For that is what Ramanathan discovered in the Gospels, even if he cannot yet see it in the anthroposophical sense. But Europeans should still take note of this advice from the Ceylonese Indian: Let preachers of the Christ come to you from India, for you have none.

In these matters, one must have the courage today to look into the development that has taken place over the last three to four centuries, and only through this courage is it possible to truly emerge from the immense chaos into which humanity has gradually plunged. This tendency towards ambiguity clouds all concepts and ultimately also causes social chaos. For that which takes place between people does take place after all out of their souls, and there is already a connection between the highest truths and the destruction of external economic conditions. And so one must again be willing to lose one's earthly concepts if one wants to penetrate into the cosmos.

In yesterday's lecture I wanted to give you an example of how the cosmos fits into present-day spiritual life and how things stand in present-day spiritual life. A relationship with earthly concepts only exists when one comes out into the cosmos.

1. Methodology

[ 1 ] We have established what the relationship is between the world of ideas—attained by scientific thinking—and directly given experience. We have learned to know the beginning and end of a process: experience devoid of ideas and idea filled apprehension of reality. Between the two, however, there lies human activity. The human being must actively allow the end to go forth from the beginning. The way in which he does this is the method. It is of course the case, now, that our apprehension of that relationship between the beginning and end of knowledge will also require its own characteristic method. Where must we begin in developing this method? Scientific thinking must prove itself, step by step, to represent an overcoming of that dark form of reality which we have designated as the directly given, and to represent a lifting up of the directly given into the bright clarity of the idea. The method must therefore consist in our answering the question, with respect to each thing: What part does it have in the unified world of ideas; what place does it occupy in the ideal picture that I make for myself of the world? When I have understood this, when I have recognized how a thing connects itself with my ideas, then my need for knowledge is satisfied. There is only one thing that is not satisfying to my need for knowledge: when a thing confronts me that does not want to connect anywhere with the view I hold of things. The ideal discomfort must be overcome that stems from the fact that there is something or other of which I must say to myself: I see that it is there; when I approach it, it faces me like a question mark; but I find nowhere, within the harmony of my thoughts, the point at that I can incorporate it; the questions I must ask upon seeing it remain unanswered, no matter how I twist and turn my system of thoughts. From this we can see what we need when we look at anything. When I approach it, it faces me as a single thing. Within me the thought-world presses toward that spot where the concept of the thing lies. I do not rest until that which confronted me at first as an individual thing appears as a part of my thought-world. Thus the individual thing as such dissolves and appears in a larger context. Now it is illuminated by the other thought-masses; now it is a serving member; and it is completely clear to me what it signifies within the greater harmony. This is what takes place in us when we approach an object of experience and contemplate it. All progress in science depends upon our becoming aware of the point at which some phenomenon or other can be incorporated into the harmony of the thought-world. Do not misunderstand me. This does not mean that every phenomenon must be explainable by concepts we already have, that our world of ideas is closed, nor that every new experience must coincide with some concept or other that we already possess. That pressing of the thought-world within us toward a concept can also go to a spot that has not yet been thought by anyone at all. And the ideal progress of the history of science rests precisely on the fact that thinking drives new configurations of ideas to the surface. Every such thought-configuration is connected by a thousand threads with all other possible thoughts—with this concept in this way, and with another in that. And the scientific method consists in the fact that we show the concept of a certain phenomenon in its relationship with the rest of the world of ideas. We call this process the deriving (demonstrating) of the concept. All scientific thinking, however, consists only in our finding the existing transitions from concept to concept, consists in our letting one concept go forth from another. The movement of our thinking back and forth from concept to concept: this is scientific method. One will say that this is the old story of the correspondence between the conceptual world and the world of experience. If we are to believe that the going back and forth from concept to concept leads to a picture of reality, then we would have to presuppose that the world outside ourselves (the transsubjective) would correspond to our conceptual world. But that is only a mistaken apprehension of the relationship between individual entity and concept. When I confront an entity from the world of experience, I absolutely do not know at all what it is. Only when I have overcome it, when its concept has lighted up for me, do I then know what I have before me. But this does not mean to say that this individual entity and the concept are two different things. No, they are the same; and what confronts me in this particular entity is nothing other than the concept. The reason I see that entity as a separate piece detached from the rest of reality is, in fact, that I do not yet know it in its true nature, that it does not yet confront me as what it is. This gives us the means of further characterizing our scientific method. Every individual entity of reality represents a definite content within our thought-system. Every such entity is founded in the wholeness of the world of ideas and can be comprehended only in connection with it. Thus each thing must necessarily call upon a twofold thought activity. First the thought corresponding to the thing has to be determined in clear contours, and after this all the threads must be determined that lead from this thought to the whole thought-world. Clarity in the details and depth in the whole are the two most significant demands of reality. The former is the intellect's concern, the latter is reason's. The intellect (Verstand) creates thought-configurations for the individual things of reality. It fulfills its task best the more exactly it delimits these configurations, the sharper the contours are that it draws. Reason (Vernunft) then has to incorporate these configurations into the harmony of the whole world of ideas. This of course presupposes the following: Within the content of the thought-configurations that the intellect creates, that unity already exists, living one and the same life; only, the intellect keeps everything artificially separated. Reason then, without blurring the clarity, merely eliminates the separation again. The intellect distances us from reality; reason brings us back to it again. Graphically this can be represented in the following way:

[ 2 ] In this diagram everything is connected; the same principle lives in all the parts. The intellect causes the separation of the individual configurations—because they do indeed confront us in the given as individual elements⁵²—and reason recognizes the unity.⁵³ [ 3 ] If we have the following two perceptions: 1. the sun shining down and 2. a warm stone, the intellect keeps both things apart, because they confront us as two; it holds onto one as the cause and onto the other as the effect; then reason supervenes, tears down the wall between them, and recognizes the unity in the duality. All the concepts that the intellect creates—cause and effect, substance and attribute, body and soul, idea and reality, God and world, etc.—are there only in order to keep unified reality separated artificially into parts; and reason, without blurring the content thus created, without mystically obscuring the clarity of the intellect, has then to seek out the inner unity in the multiplicity. Reason thereby comes back to that from which the intellect had distanced itself: to the unified reality. If one wants an exact nomenclature, one can call the formations of the intellect “concepts” and the creations of reason “ideas.” And one sees that the path of science is to lift oneself through the concept to the idea. And here is the place where the subjective and the objective element of our knowing differentiates itself for us in the clearest way. It is plain to see that the separation has only a subjective existence, that it is only created by our intellect. It cannot hinder me from dividing one and the same objective unity into thought-configurations that are different from those of a fellow human being; this does not hinder my reason, in its connecting activity, from attaining the same objective unity again from which we both, in fact, have taken our start. Let us represent symbolically a unified configuration of reality (figure 1). I divide it intellectually thus (figure 2); another person divides it differently (figure 3). We bring it together in accordance with reason and obtain the same configuration.

[ 4 ] This makes it explainable to us how people can have such different concepts, such different views of reality, in spite of the fact that reality can, after all, only be one. The difference lies in the difference between our intellectual worlds. This sheds light for us upon the development of the different scientific standpoints. We understand where the many philosophical standpoints originate, and do not need to bestow the palm of truth exclusively upon one of them. We also know which standpoint we ourselves have to take with respect to the multiplicity of human views. We will not ask exclusively: What is true, what is false? We will always investigate how the intellectual world of a thinker goes forth from the world harmony; we will seek to understand and not to judge negatively and regard at once as error that which does not correspond with our own view. Another source of differentiation between our scientific standpoints is added to this one through the fact that every individual person has a different field of experience. Each person is indeed confronted, as it were, by one section of the whole of reality. His intellect works upon this and is his mediator on the way to the idea. But even though we all do therefore perceive the same idea, still we always do this from different places. Therefore, only the end result to which we come can be the same; our paths, however, can be different. It absolutely does not matter at all whether the individual judgments and concepts of which our knowing consists correspond to each other or not; the only thing that matters is that they ultimately lead us to the point that we are swimming in the main channel of the idea. And all human beings must ultimately meet each other in this channel if energetic thinking leads them out of and beyond their own particular standpoints. It can indeed be possible that a limited experience or an unproductive spirit leads us to a one-sided, incomplete view; but even the smallest amount of what we experience must ultimately lead us to the idea; for we do not lift ourselves to the idea through a lesser or greater experience, but rather through our abilities as a human personality alone. A limited experience can only result in the fact that we express the idea in a one-sided way, that we have limited means at our command for bringing to expression the light that shines in us; a limited experience, however, cannot hinder us altogether from allowing that light to shine within us. Whether our scientific or even our general world view is also complete or not is an altogether different question; as is that about the spiritual depth of our views. If one now returns to Goethe, one will recognize that many of his statements, when compared with what we have presented in this chapter, simply follow from it. We consider this to be the only correct relationship between an author and his interpreter. When Goethe says: “If I know my relationship to myself and to the outer world, then I call it truth. And in this way each person can have his own truth, and it is after all always the same one” (Aphorisms in Prose), this can be understood only if we take into account what we have developed here.

2. Dogmatic and Immanent Methods

[ 5 ] A scientific judgment comes about through the fact that we either join two concepts together or join a perception to a concept. The judgment that there is no effect without a cause belongs to the first kind; the judgment that a tulip is a plant belongs to the second kind. Daily life also recognizes judgments where one perception is joined to another, for example when we say that a rose is red. When we make a judgment, we do so for one reason or another. Now, there can be two different views about this reason. One view assumes that the factual (objective) reasons for our judgment being true lie beyond what is given us in the concepts or perceptions that enter into the judgment. According to this view, the reason a judgment is true does not coincide with the subjective reasons out of which we make this judgment. Our logical reasons, according to this view, have nothing to do with the objective reasons. It may be that this view proposes some way or other of arriving at the objective reasons for our insight; the means that our knowing thinking has are not adequate for this. For my knowing, the objective entity that determines my conclusion lies in a world unknown to me: my conclusion. along with its formal reasons (freedom from contradictions, being supported by various axioms, etc.), lies only within my world. A science based on this view is a dogmatic one. Both the theologizing philosophy that bases itself on a belief in revelation, and the modern science of experience are dogmatic sciences of this kind; for there is not only a dogma of revelation; there is also a dogma of experience. The dogma of revelation conveys truths to man about things that are totally removed from his field of vision. He does not know the world concerning which the ready-made assertions are prescribed for his belief. He cannot get at the grounds for these assertions. He can therefore never gain any insight as to why they are true. He can gain no knowledge, only faith. On the other hand, however, the assertions of the science of experience are also merely dogmas; it believes that one should stick merely to pure experience and only observe, describe, and systematically order its transformations, without lifting oneself to the determining factors that are not yet given within mere direct experience. In this case also we do not in fact gain the truth through insight into the matter, but rather it is forced upon us from outside. I see what is happening and what is there; and register it; why it is this way lies in the object. I see only the results, not the reason. The dogma of revelation once ruled science; today it is the dogma of experience that does so. It was once considered presumptuous to reflect upon the preconditions of revealed truths; today it is considered impossible to know anything other than what the facts express. As to why they are as they are and not something different, this is considered to be unexperiencable and therefore inaccessible.

[ 6 ] Our considerations have shown that it is nonsensical to assume any reason for a judgment being true other than our reason for recognizing it as true. When we have pressed forward to the point where the being of something occurs to us as idea, we then behold in the idea something totally complete in itself, something self-supported and self-sustaining; it demands no further explanation from outside at all, so we can stop there. We see in the idea—if only we have the capacity for this—that it has everything which constitutes it within itself, that with it we have everything we could ask. The entire ground of existence has merged with the idea, has poured itself into it, unreservedly, in such a way that we have nowhere else to seek it except in the idea. In the idea we do not have a picture of what we are seeking in addition to the things; we have what we are seeking itself. When the parts of our world of ideas flow together in our judgments then it is the content of these parts itself that brings this about, not reasons lying outside them. The substantial and not merely the formal reasons for our conclusions are directly present within our thinking.

[ 7 ] That view is thereby rejected which assumes an absolute reality—outside the ideal realm—by which all things, including thinking, are carried. For that world view, the foundation for what exists cannot be found at all within what is accessible to us. This foundation is not innate (eingeboren) to the world lying before us; it is present outside this world, an entity unto itself, existing alongside this world. One can call that view realism. It appears in two forms. It either assumes a multiplicity of real beings underlying the world (Leibniz, Herbart), or a uniform real (Schopenhauer). Such an existent real can never be recognized as identical with the idea; it is already presupposed to be essentially different from the idea. Someone who becomes aware of the clear sense of the question as to the essential being of phenomena cannot be an adherent of this realism. What does it mean then to ask about the essential being of the world? It means nothing more than that, when I approach a thing, a voice makes itself heard in me that tells me that the thing is ultimately something quite else in addition to what I perceive with my senses. What it is in addition is already working in me, presses in me toward manifestation, while I am seeing the thing outside me. Only because the world of ideas working in me presses me to explain, out of it, the world around me, do I demand any such explanation. For a being in whom no ideas are pressing up, the urge is not there to explain the things any further; he is fully satisfied with the sense-perceptible phenomenon. The demand for an explanation of the world stems from the need that thinking has to unite the content accessible to thinking with manifest reality, to permeate everything conceptually, to make what we see, hear, etc., into something that we understand. Whoever takes into consideration the full implications of these statements cannot possibly be an adherent of the realism characterized above. To want to explain the world by something real that is not idea is such a self-contradiction that one absolutely cannot grasp how it could possibly find any adherents at all. To explain what is perceptibly real to us by something or other that does not take part in thinking at all, that, in fact, is supposed to be basically different from any- thing of a thought nature, for this we have neither the need nor any possible starting point. First of all: Where would the need originate to explain the world by something that never intrudes upon us, that conceals itself from us? And let us assume that it did approach us; then the question arises again: In what form and where? It cannot of course be in thinking. And even in outer or inner perception again? What meaning could it have to explain the sense world by a qualitative equivalent? There is only one other possibility: to assume that we had an ability to reach this most real being that lies outside thought in another way than through thinking and perception. Whoever makes this assumption has fallen into mysticism. We do not have to deal with mysticism, however; for we are concerned only with the relationship between thinking and existence, between idea and reality. A mystic must write an epistemology for mysticism. The standpoint of the later Schelling—according to which we develop only the what (das Was) of the world content with the help of our reason, but cannot reach the that (das Dass)⁵⁴—seems to us to be the greatest nonsense. Because for us the that is the presupposition of the what, and we would not know how we are supposed to arrive at the what of a thing whose that has not already been surely established beforehand. The that, after all, is already inherent in the content of my reason when I grasp its what. This assumption of Schelling—that we can have a positive world content, without any conviction that it exists, and that we must first gain the that through higher experience—seems to us so incomprehensible to any thinking that understands itself, that we must assume that Schelling himself, in his later period, no longer understood the standpoint of his youth, which made such a powerful impression upon Goethe.

[ 8 ] It will not do to assume higher forms of existence than those belonging to the world of ideas. Only because the human being is often not able to comprehend that the existence (Sein) of the idea is something far higher and fuller than that of perceptual reality, does he still seek a further reality. He regards ideal existence as something chimerical, as something needing to be imbued with some real element, and is not satisfied with it. He cannot, in fact, grasp the idea in its positive nature; he has it only as something abstract; he has no inkling of its fullness, of its inner perfection and genuineness. But we must demand of our education that it work its way up to that high standpoint where even an existence that cannot be seen with the eyes, nor grasped with the hands, but that must be apprehended by reason, is regarded as real. We have therefore actually founded an idealism that is realism at the same time. Our train of thought is: Thinking presses toward explanation of reality out of the idea. It conceals this urge in the question: What is the real being of reality? Only at the end of a scientific process do we ask about the content of this real being itself; we do not go about it as realism does, which presupposes something real in order then to trace reality back to it. We differ from realism in having full consciousness of the fact that only in the idea do we have a means of explaining the world. Even realism has only this means but does not realize it. It derives the world from ideas, but believes it derives it from some other reality. Leibniz' world of monads is nothing other than a world of ideas; but Leibniz believes that in it he possesses a higher reality than the ideal one. All the realists make the same mistake: they think up beings, without becoming aware that they are not getting outside of the idea. We have rejected this realism, because it deceives itself about the actual ideal nature of its world foundation; but we also have to reject that false idealism which believes that because we do not get outside of the idea, we also do not get outside of our consciousness, and that all the mental pictures given us and the whole world are only subjective illusion, only a dream that our consciousness dreams (Fichte). These idealists also do not comprehend that although we do not get outside of the idea, we do nevertheless have in the idea something objective, something that has its basis in itself and not in the subject. They do not consider the fact that even though we do not get outside of the unity of thinking, we do enter with the thinking of our reason into the midst of full objectivity. The realists do not comprehend that what is objective is idea, and the idealists do not comprehend that the idea is objective.

[ 9 ] We still have to occupy ourselves with the empiricists of the sense-perceptible, who regard any explaining of the real by the idea as inadmissible philosophical deduction and who demand that we stick to what is graspable by the senses. Against this standpoint we can only say, simply, that its demand can, after all, only be a methodological one. To say that we should stick to what is given only means, after all, that we should acquire for ourselves what confronts us. This standpoint is the least able to determine anything about the what of the given; for, this what must in fact come, for this standpoint, from the given itself. It is totally incomprehensible to us how, along with the demand for pure experience, someone can demand at the same time that we not go outside the sense world, seeing that in fact the idea can just as well fulfill the demand that it be given. The positivistic principle of experience must leave the question entirely open as to what is given, and unites itself quite well then with the results of idealistic research. But then this demand coincides with ours as well. And we do unite in our view all standpoints, insofar as they are valid ones. Our standpoint is idealism, because it sees in the idea the ground of the world; it is realism because it addresses the idea as the real; and it is positivism or empiricism because it wants to arrive at the content of the idea, not through a priori constructions, but rather as something given. We have an empirical method that penetrates into the real and that is ultimately satisfied by the results of idealistic research. We do not recognize as valid any inferring, from something given and known to us, of an underlying, non-given, determinative element. We reject any inference in which any part of the inference is not given. Inferring is only a going from given elements over to other equally given elements. In an inference we join a to b by means of c; but all these must be given. When Volkelt says that our thinking moves us to presuppose something in addition to the given and to transcend the given, then we say: Within our thinking, something is already moving us that we want to add to the directly given. We must therefore reject all metaphysics. Metaphysics wants, in fact, to explain the given by something non-given, inferred (Wolff, Herbart). We see in inferences only a formal activity that does not lead to anything new, but only brings about transitions between elements actually present.

3. The System of Science

[ 10 ] What form does a fully developed science (Wissenschaft) have in the light of the Goethean way of thinking? Above all we must hold fast to the fact that the total content of science is a given one; given partly as the sense world from outside, partly as the world of ideas from within. All our scientific activity will therefore consist in overcoming the form in which this total content of the given confronts us, and in making it over into a form that satisfies us. This is necessary because the inner unity of the given remains hidden in its first form of manifestation, in which only the outer surface appears to us. Now the methodological activity that establishes a relationship between these two forms turns out to vary according to the realm of phenomena with which we are working. The first realm is one in which we have a manifoldness of elements given to sense perception. These interact with each other. This interaction becomes clear to us when we immerse ourselves into the matter through ideas. Then one or another element appears as more or less determined by the others, in one way or another. The existential conditions of one become comprehensible to us through those of the others. We trace one phenomenon back to the others. We trace the phenomenon of a warm stone, as effect, back to the warming rays of the sun, as cause. We have explained what we perceive about one thing, when we trace it back to some other perceptible thing. We see in what way the ideal law arises in this realm. It encompasses the things of the sense world, stands over them. It determines the lawful way of working of one thing by letting it be conditional upon another. Our task here is to bring together the series of phenomena in such a way that one necessarily goes forth out of the others, that they all constitute one whole and are lawful through and through. The realm that is to be explained in this way is inorganic nature. Now the individual phenomena of experience by no means confront us in such a way that what is closest in space and time is also the closest according to its inner nature. We must first pass from what is closest in space and time over into what is conceptually closest. For a certain phenomenon we must seek the phenomena that are directly connected to it in accordance with their nature. Our goal must be to bring together a series of facts that complement each other, that carry and mutually support each other. We achieve thereby a group of sense-perceptible, interacting elements of reality; and the phenomenon that unfolds before us follows directly out of the pertinent factors in a transparent, clear way. Following Goethe's example, we call such a phenomenon an “archetypal phenomenon” (Urphänomen) or a basic fact. This archetypal phenomenon is identical with the objective natural law. The bringing together discussed here can either occur merely in thoughts—as when I think about the three determining factors that come into consideration when a stone is thrown horizontally: 1. the force of the throw, 2. the force of gravity, and 3. the air's resistance and then derive the path of the flying stone from these factors; or, on the other hand, I can actually bring the individual factors together and then await the phenomenon that follows from their interaction. This is what we do in an experiment. Whereas a phenomenon of the outer world is unclear to us because we know only what has been determined (the phenomenon) and not what is determining, the phenomenon that an experiment presents is clear, because we ourselves have brought together the determining factors. This is the path of research of nature: It takes its start from experience, in order to see what is real; advances to observation, in order to see why it is real; and then intensifies into the experiment, in order to see what can be real.

[ 11 ] Unfortunately, precisely that essay of Goethe's seems to have been lost that could best have supported these views. It is a continuation of the essay, The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object.⁵⁵ Starting from the latter, let us try to reconstruct the possible content of the lost essay from the only source available to us, the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller. The essay on The Experiment came out of those studies of Goethe that he undertook in order to show the validity of his work in optics. It was then put aside until the poet took up these studies again in 1798 with new energy and, with Schiller, submitted the basic principles of the natural-scientific method to a thorough and scientifically serious investigation. On January 10, 1798 (see Goethe's correspondence with Schiller) he then sent the essay on The Experiment to Schiller for his consideration and on January 13 informed his friend that he wanted, in a new essay, to develop further the views expressed there. And he did undertake this work; on January 17 already he sent a little essay to Schiller that contained a characterization of the methods of natural science. This is not to be found among his works. It would indisputably have been the one to provide the best points of reference for an appreciation of Goethe's basic views on the natural-scientific method. We can, however, know what thoughts were expressed there from Schiller's detailed letter of January 19, 1798; along with this, the fact comes into consideration that we find many confirmations and supplementations to the indications in Schiller's letter in Goethe's Aphorisms in Prose.⁵⁶

[ 12 ] Goethe distinguishes three methods of natural-scientific research. These rest upon three different conceptions of phenomena. The first method is ordinary empiricism, which does not go beyond the empirical phenomenon, beyond the immediate facts. It remains with individual phenomena. If ordinary empiricism wants to be consistent, it must limit its entire activity to exactly describing in every detail each phenomenon that meets it, i.e., to recording the empirical facts. Science, for it, would merely be the sum total of all these individual descriptions of recorded facts. Compared to ordinary empiricism rationalism then represents the next higher level, it deals with the scientific phenomenon. This view no longer limits itself to the mere describing of phenomena, but rather seeks to explain these by discovering causes, by setting up hypotheses, etc. It is the level at which the intellect infers from the phenomena their causes and inter-relationships. Goethe declares both these methods to be one-sided. Ordinary empiricism is raw non-science, because it never gets beyond the mere grasping of incidentals; rationalism, on the other hand, interprets into the phenomenal world causes and interrelationships that are not in it. The former cannot lift itself out of the abundance of phenomena up to free thinking; the latter loses this abundance as the sure ground under its feet and falls prey to the arbitrariness of imagination and of subjective inspiration. Goethe censures in the sharpest way the passion people have for immediately attaching to the phenomena deductions arrived at subjectively, as, for example, in Aphorisms in Prose: “It is bad business—but one that happens to many an observer—where a person immediately connects a deduction to a perception and considers them both as equally valid,” and: “Theories are usually the overly hasty conclusions of an impatient intellect that would like to be rid of the phenomenon and therefore sets in its place pictures, concepts, indeed often only words. One senses, one even sees, in fact, that it is only an expedient; but have not passion and a partisan spirit always loved expedients? And rightly so, since they need them so much.” Goethe particularly criticizes the misuse to which the concept of causality has given rise. Rationalism, in its unbridled fantasy, seeks causality where, if you are looking for facts, it is not to be found. In Aphorisms in Prose he says: “The most innate, most necessary concept, that of cause and effect, when applied, gives rise to innumerable and ever-recurring errors.” Rationalism is particularly led by its passion for simple relationships to think of phenomena as parts of a chain attached to one another by cause and effect and stretching out merely lengthwise; whereas the truth is, in fact, that one or another phenomenon that, in time, is causally determined by an earlier one, still depends also upon many other effects at the same time. In this case only the length and not the breadth of nature is taken into account. Both paths, ordinary empiricism and rationalism, are for Goethe certainly transitional stages to the highest scientific method, but, in fact, only transitional stages that must be surmounted. And this occurs with rational empiricism, which concerns itself with the pure phenomenon that is identical to the objective natural laws. The ordinary empirical element—direct experience—offers us only individual things, something incoherent, an aggregate of phenomena. That means it offers us all this not as the final conclusion of scientific consideration, but rather, in fact, as a first experience. Our scientific needs, however, seek only what is interrelated, comprehend the individual thing only as a part in a relationship. Thus, seemingly, our need to comprehend and the facts of nature diverge from each other. In our spirit there is only relatedness, in nature only separateness; our spirit strives for the species, nature creates only individuals. The solution to this contradiction is provided by the reflection that the connecting power of the human spirit, on the one hand, is without content, and therefore, by and through itself alone, cannot know anything positive; on the other hand, the separateness of the objects of nature does not lie in their essential being itself, but rather in their spatial manifestation; in fact, when we penetrate into the essential being of the individual, of the particular, this being itself directs us to the species. Because the objects of nature are separated in their outer manifestation, our spirit's power to draw together is needed in order to show their inner unity. Because the unity of the intellect by itself is empty, the intellect must fill this unity with the objects of nature. Thus at this third level phenomenon and spiritual power come to meet each other and merge into one, and only then can the human spirit be fully satisfied.

[ 13 ] A further realm of investigation is that in which the individual thing, in its form of existence, does not appear as the result of something else existing beside it; we therefore also do not comprehend it by seeking help from something else of the same kind. Here, a series of sense-perceptible phenomenological elements appears to us as the direct formation of a unified principle, and we must press forward to this principle if we want to comprehend the individual phenomenon. In this realm, we cannot explain the phenomenon by anything working in from outside; we must derive it from within outward. What earlier was a determining factor is now merely an inducing factor. In the first realm I have comprehended everything when I have succeeded in regarding it as the result of something else, in tracing it back to an outer determining factor; here I am compelled to ask the question differently. When I know the outer influence, I still have not gained any information as to whether the phenomenon then occurs in this, and only in this, way. I must derive this from the central principle of that thing upon which the outer influence took place. I cannot say that this outer influence has this effect; but only that, to this particular outer influence, the inner working principle responds in this particular way. What occurs is the result of an inner lawfulness. I must therefore know this inner lawfulness. I must investigate what it is that is taking shape from within outward. This self-shaping principle, which in this realm underlies every phenomenon, which I must seek in every one, is the typus. We are in the realm of organic nature. What the archetypal phenomenon is in inorganic nature, the typus is in organic nature. The typus is a general picture of the organism: the idea of the organism; the animalness in the animal. We had to bring the main points here again of what we already stated about the typus in an earlier chapter, because of the context. In the ethical and historical sciences we then have to do with the idea in a narrower sense. Ethics and history are sciences of ideas. Their reality is ideas. It is the task of each science to work on the given until it brings the given to the archetypal phenomenon, to the typus, and to the leading ideas in history. “If ... the physicist can arrive at knowledge of what we have called an archetypal phenomenon, then he is secure and the philosopher along with him; he is so because he has convinced himself that he has arrived at the limits of his science, that he finds himself upon the empirical heights, from which he can look back upon experience in all its levels, and can at least look forward into the realm of theory if not enter it. The philosopher is secure, for he receives from the physicist's hand something final that becomes for him now something from which to start” (Sketch of a colour Theory).⁵⁷—This is in fact where the philosopher enters and begins his work. He grasps the archetypal phenomena and brings them into a satisfying ideal relationship. We see what it is, in the sense of the Goethean world view, that is to take the place of metaphysics: the observing (in accordance with ideas), ordering, and deriving of archetypal phenomena. Goethe speaks repeatedly in this sense about the relationship between empirical science and philosophy—with special clarity in his letters to Hegel. In his Annals he speaks repeatedly about a schema of science. If this were to be found, we would see from it how he himself conceived the interrelationships of the individual archetypal phenomena to be, how he put them together into a necessary chain. We can also gain a picture of it when we consider the table of all possible kinds of workings that he gives in the fourth section of the first volume of On Natural Science.⁵⁸

Chance
Mechanical
Physical
Chemical
Organic
Psychic
Ethical
Religious
Of a Genius

[ 14 ] It is according to this ascending sequence that one would have to guide oneself in ordering the archetypal phenomena.

4. Limits to Knowledge and the Forming of Hypotheses

[ 15 ] One speaks a great deal today about limits to our knowing. Man's ability to explain what exists, it is said, reaches only to a certain point, and there he must stop. We believe we can rectify the situation with respect to this question if we ask the question correctly. For, it is, indeed, so often only a matter of putting the question correctly. When this is done, a whole host of errors is dispelled. When we reflect that the object that we feel the need within us to explain must be given, then it is clear that the given itself cannot set a limit for us. For, in order to lay any claim at all to being explained and comprehended, it must confront us within given reality. Something that does not appear upon the horizon of the given does not need to be explained. Any limits could therefore lie only in the fact that, in the face of a given reality, we lacked all means of explaining it. But our need for explanation comes precisely from the fact that what we want to consider a given thing to be—that by which we want to explain it—forces itself onto the horizon of what is given us in thought. Far from being unknown to us, the explanatory essential being of an object is itself the very thing which, by manifesting within our spirit, makes the explanation necessary. What is to be explained and that by which it is to be explained are both present. It is only a matter of joining them. Explaining something is not the seeking of an unknown, but only a coming to terms about the reciprocal connection between two knowns. It should never occur to us to explain a given by something of which we have no knowledge. Now something does come into consideration here that gives a semblance of justification to the theory of a limit to knowledge. It could be that we do in fact have an inkling of something real that is there, but that nevertheless is beyond our perception. We can perceive some traces, some effects or other of a thing, and then make the assumption that this thing does exist. And here one can perhaps speak of a limit to our knowing. What we have presupposed to be inaccessible in this case, however, is not something by which to explain anything in principle; it is something perceivable even though it is not perceived. What hinders me from perceiving it is not any limit to knowledge in principle, but only chance outer factors. These can very well be surmounted. What I merely have inklings of today can be experienced tomorrow. But with a principle that is not so; with it, there are no outer hindrances, which after all lie mostly only in place and time; the principle is given to me inwardly. Something else does not give me an inkling of a principle when I myself do not see the principle.

[ 16 ] Theory about the forming of hypotheses is connected with this. A hypothesis is an assumption that we make and whose truth we cannot ascertain directly but only in its effects. We see a series of phenomena. It is explainable to us only when we found it upon something that we do not perceive directly. May such an assumption be extended to include a principle? Clearly not. For, something of an inner nature that I assume without becoming aware of it is a total contradiction. A hypothesis can only assume something, indeed, that I do not perceive, but that I would perceive at once if I cleared away the outer hindrances. A hypothesis can indeed not presuppose something perceived, but must assume something perceivable. Thus, every hypothesis is in the situation that its content can be directly confirmed only by a future experience. Only hypotheses that can cease to be hypotheses have any justification. Hypotheses about central scientific principles have no value. Something that is not explained by a positively given principle known to us is not capable of explanation at all and also does not need it.

5. Ethical and Historical Sciences

[ 7 ] The answering of the question, What is knowing, has illuminated for us the place of the human being in the cosmos. The view we have developed in answering this question cannot fail to shed light also upon the value and significance of human action. We must in fact attach a greater or lesser significance to what we perform in the world, according to whether we attribute a higher or lower significance to our calling as human beings.

[ 8 ] The first task to which we must now address ourselves will be to investigate the character of human activity. How does what we must regard as the effect of human action relate to other effects within the world process? Let us look at two things: a product of nature and a creation of human activity, a crystal form and a wheel, perhaps. In both cases the object before us appears as the result of laws expressible in concepts. Their difference lies only in the fact that we must regard the crystal as the direct product of the natural lawfulness that determines it, whereas with the wheel the human being intervenes between the concept and the object. What we think of in the natural product as underlying the real, this we introduce into reality by our action. In knowing, we experience what the ideal determining factors of our sense experience are; we bring the world of ideas, which already lies within reality, to manifestation; we therefore complete the world process in the sense that we call into appearance the producer who eternally brings forth his products. but who, without our thinking, would remain eternally hidden within them. In human actions, however, we supplement this process through the fact that we translate the world of ideas, insofar as it is not yet reality, into such reality. Now we have recognized the idea as that which underlies all reality as the determining element, as the intention of nature. Our knowing leads us to the point of finding the tendency of the world process, the intention of the creation, out of all the indications contained in the nature surrounding us. If we have achieved this, then our action is given the task of working along independently in the realizing of that intention. And thus our action appears to us as the direct continuation of that kind of activity that nature also fulfills. It appears to us as directly flowing from the world foundation. But what a difference there is, in fact, between this and that other (nature) activity! The nature product by no means has within itself the ideal lawfulness by which it appears governed. It needs to be confronted by something higher, by human thinking; there then appears to this thinking that by which the nature product is governed. This is different in the case of human action. Here the idea dwells directly within the acting object; and if a higher being confronted it, this being could not find in the object's activity anything other than what this object itself had put into its action. For, a perfect human action is the result of our intentions and only that. If we look at a nature product that affects another, then the matter is like this: we see an effect; this effect is determined by laws grasped in concepts. But if we want to comprehend the effect, then it is not enough for us to compare it with some law or other; we must have a second perceptible thing—which, to be sure, must also be dissolvable entirely into concepts. When we see an impression in the ground we then look for the object that made it. This leads to the concept of a kind of effect where the cause of a phenomenon also appears in the form of an outer perception, i.e., to the concept of force. A force can confront us only where the idea first appears in an object of perception and only in this form acts upon another object. The opposite of this is when this intermediary is not there, when the idea approaches the sense world directly. There the idea itself appears as causative. And here is where we speak of will. Will, therefore, is the idea itself apprehended as force. It is totally inadmissible to speak of an independent will. When a person accomplishes something or other, one cannot say that will is added to the mental picture. If one does speak in that way, then one has not grasped the concepts clearly, for, what is the human personality if one disregards the world of ideas that fills it? It is, in fact, an active existence. Whoever grasps the human personality differently—as dead, inactive nature product—puts it at the level of a stone in the road. This active existence, however, is an abstraction; it is nothing real. One cannot grasp it; it is without content. If one wants to grasp it, if one wants a content for it, then one arrives, in fact, at the world of ideas that is engaged in doing. Eduard von Hartmann makes this abstraction into a second world-constituting principle beside the idea. It is, however, nothing other than the idea itself, only in one form of manifestation. Will without idea would be nothing. The same cannot be said of the idea, for activity is one of its elements, whereas the idea is the self-sustaining being.

[ 19 ] So much for the characterization of human action. Let us proceed to a further essential distinguishing feature of it that necessarily results from what has already been said. The explaining of a process in nature is a going back to its determining factors: a seeking out of the producer in addition to the product that is given. When I perceive an effect and then seek its cause, these two perceptions do not by any means satisfy my need for explanation. I must go back to the laws by which this cause brings forth this effect. It is different with human action. Here the lawfulness that determines a phenomenon itself enters into action; that which makes a product itself appears upon the scene of activity. We have to do with a manifesting existence at which we can remain, for which we do not need to ask about deeper-lying determining factors. We have comprehended a work of art when we know the idea embodied in it; we do not need to ask about any further lawful relationship between idea (cause) and creation (effect). We comprehend the actions of a statesman when we know his intentions (ideas); we do not need to go any further beyond what comes to appearance. This is therefore what distinguishes the processes of nature from the actions of human beings: with nature processes the law is to be regarded as the determining background for what comes into manifest existence, whereas with human actions the existence is itself the law and manifests as determined by nothing other than itself. Thus every process of nature breaks down into something determining and something determined, and the latter follows necessarily from the former, whereas human action determines only itself. This, however, is action out of inner freedom (Freiheit). When the intentions of nature, which stand behind its manifestations and determine them, enter into the human being, they themselves become manifestation; but now they are, as it were, free from any attachment behind them (rückenfrei). If all nature processes are only manifestations of the idea, then human doing is the idea itself in action.

[ 20 ] Since our epistemology has arrived at the conclusion that the content of our consciousness is not merely a means of making a copy of the world ground. but rather that this world ground itself, in its most primal state comes to light within our thinking, we can do nothing other than to recognize directly in human action also the undetermined action of that primal ground. We recognize no world director outside ourselves who sets goals and directions for our actions. The world director has given up his power, has given everything over to man, abolishing his own separate existence, and set man the task: Work on. The human being finds himself in the world, sees nature, and within it, the indication of something deeper, a determining element, an intention. His thinking enables him to know this intention. It becomes his spiritual possession. He has penetrated the world; he comes forth, acting, to carry on those intentions. Therefore, the philosophy presented here is the true philosophy of inner freedom (Freiheitsphilosophie). In the realm of human actions it acknowledges neither natural necessity nor the influence of some creator or world director outside the world. In either case, the human being would be unfree. If natural necessity worked in him in the same way as in other entities, then he would perform his actions out of compulsion, then it would also be necessary in his case to go back to determining factors that underlie manifest existence, and then inner freedom is out of the question. It is of course not impossible that there are innumerable human functions that can only be seen in this light; but these do not come into consideration here. The human being, insofar as he is a being of nature, is also to be understood according to the laws that apply to nature's working. But neither as a knowing nor as a truly ethical being can he, in his behavior, be understood according to merely natural laws. There, in fact, he steps outside the sphere of natural realities. And it is with respect to this, his existence's highest potency, which is more an ideal than reality, that what we have established here holds good. Man's path in life consists in his developing himself from a being of nature into a being such as we have learned to know here; he should make himself free of all laws of nature and become his own law giver.

[ 21 ] But we must also reject the influence of any director—outside the world—of human destiny. Also where such a director is assumed, there can be no question of true inner freedom. There he determines the direction of human action and man has to carry out what this director sets him to do. He experiences the impulse to his actions not as an ideal that he sets himself, but rather as the commandment of that director; again his actions are not undetermined, but rather determined. The human being would not then, in fact, feel himself to be free of any attachment from behind him, but would feel dependent, like a mere intermediary for the intentions of a higher power.

[ 22 ] We have seen that dogmatism consists in seeking the basis for the truth of anything in something beyond, and inaccessible to, our consciousness (transsubjective), in contrast to our view that declares a judgment to be true only because the reason for doing so lies in the concepts that are present in our consciousness and that flow into the judgment. Someone who conceives of a world ground outside of our world of ideas thinks that our ideal reason for recognizing something as true is a different reason than that as to why it is objectively true. Thus truth is apprehended as dogma. And in the realm of ethics a commandment is what a dogma is in science. When the human being seeks the impulse for his action in commandments, he acts then according to laws whose basis is independent of him; he conceives of a norm that is prescribed for his action from outside. He acts out of duty. To speak of duty makes sense only when looked at this way. We must feel the impulse from outside and acknowledge the necessity of responding to it; then we act out of duty. Our epistemology cannot accept this kind of action as valid where the human being appears in his full ethical development. We know that the world of ideas is unending perfection itself; we know that with it the impulses of our action lie within us; and we must therefore only acknowledge an action as ethical in which the deed flows only out of the idea, lying within us, of the deed. From this point of view, man performs an action only because its reality is a need for him. He acts because an inner (his own) urge, not an outer power, drives him. The object of his action, as soon as he makes himself a concept of it, fills him in such a way that he strives to realize it. The only impulse for our action should also lie in the need to realize an idea, in the urge to carry out an intention. Everything that urges us to a deed should live its life in the idea. Then we do not act out of duty; we do not act under the influence of a drive; we act out of love for the object to which our action is to be directed. The object, when we picture it, calls forth in us the urge to act in a way appropriate to it. Only such action is a free one. For if, in addition to the interest we take in the object, there had yet to be a second motivation from another quarter, then we would not want this object for its own sake; we would want something else and would perform that, which we do not want we would carry out an action against our will. That would be the case, for example, in action out of egoism. There we take no interest in the action itself; it is not a need for us; we do need the benefits, however, that it brings us. But then we also feel right away as compulsion the fact that we must perform the action for this reason only. The action itself is not a need for us; for we would leave it undone if no benefits followed from it. An action, however, that we do not perform for its own sake is an unfree one. Egoism acts unfreely. Every person acts unfreely, in fact, who performs an action out of a motivation that does not follow from the objective content of the action itself. To carry out an action for its own sake means to act out of love. Only someone who is guided by love in doing, by devotion to objectivity, acts truly freely. Whoever is incapable of this selfless devotion will never be able to regard his activity as a free one.

[ 23 ] If man's action is to be nothing other than the realization of his own content of ideas, then naturally such a content must lie within him. His spirit must work productively. For, what is supposed to fill him with the urge to accomplish something if not an idea working its way up in his spirit? This idea will prove to be all the more fruitful the more it arises in his spirit in definite outlines and with a clear content. For only that, in fact, can move us with full force to realize something, which is completely definite in its entire “what.” An ideal that is only dimly pictured to oneself, that is left in an indefinite state, is unsuitable as an impulse to action. What is there about it to fire us with enthusiasm if its content does not lie clear and open to the day? The impulses for our action must therefore always arise in the form of individual intentions. Everything fruitful that the human being accomplishes owes its existence to such individual impulses. General moral laws, ethical norms, etc., that are supposed to be valid for all human beings prove to be entirely worthless. When Kant regards as ethically valid only that which is suitable as a law for all human beings, then one can say in response to this that all positive action would cease, that everything great would disappear from the world, if each person did only what was suitable for everyone. No, it is not such vague, general ethical norms but rather the most individual ideals that should guide our actions. Everything is not equally worthy of being done by everyone, but rather this is worthy of him, that of her, according to whether one of them feels called to do a thing. J. Kreyenbühl has spoken about this in apt words is his essay Ethical Freedom in Kant's View⁵⁹: “If freedom is, in fact, to be my freedom, if a moral deed is to be my deed, if the good and right is to be realized through me, through the action of this particular individual personality, then I cannot possibly be satisfied by a general law that disregards all individuality and all the peculiarities of the concurrent circumstances of the action, and that commands me to examine every action as to whether its underlying motive corresponds to the abstract norm of general human nature and as to whether, in the way it lives and works in me, it could become a generally valid maxim.” ... “An adaptation of this kind to what is generally usual and customary would render impossible any individual freedom, any progress beyond the ordinary and humdrum, any significant, outstanding ethical achievement.”

[ 24 ] These considerations shed light upon the questions a general ethics has to answer. One often treats this last, in fact, as though it were a sum total of norms according to which human action ought to direct itself. From this point of view, one compares ethics to natural science and in general to the science of what exists. Whereas science is to communicate to us the laws of that which exists, of what is, ethics supposedly has to teach us the laws of what ought to exist. Ethics is supposedly a codex of all the ideals of man, a detailed answer to the question: What is good? Such a science, however, is impossible. There can be no general answer to this question. Ethical action is, in fact, a product of what manifests within the individual; it is always present as an individual case, never in a general way. There are no general laws as to what one ought or ought not to do. But do not regard the individual legal statutes of the different peoples as such general laws. They are also nothing more than the outgrowth of individual intentions. What one or another personality has experienced as a moral motive has communicated itself to a whole people, has become the “code of this people.” A general natural code that should apply to all people for all time is nonsense. Views as to what is right and wrong and concepts of morality come and go with the different peoples, indeed even with individuals. The individuality is always the decisive factor. It is therefore inadmissible to speak of an ethics in the above sense. But there are other questions to be answered in this science, questions that have in part been touched upon briefly in these discussions. Let me mention only: establishing the difference between human action and nature's working, the question as to the nature of the will and of inner freedom, etc. All these individual tasks can be summed up in one: To what extent is man an ethical being? But this aims at nothing other than knowledge of the moral nature of man. The question asked is not: What ought man to do? but rather: What is it that he is doing, in its inner nature? And thereby that partition falls which divides all science into two spheres: into a study of what exists and into one of what ought to exist. Ethics is just as much a study of what exists as all the other sciences. In this respect, a unified impulse runs through all the sciences in that they take their start from something given and proceed to its determining factors. But there can be no science of human action itself; for, it is undetermined, productive, creative. Jurisprudence is not a science, but only a collection of notes on the customs and codes characteristic of an individual people.

[ 25 ] Now the human being does not belong only to himself; he belongs, as a part, to two higher totalities. First of all, he is part of a people with which he is united by common customs, by a common cultural life, by language, and by a common view. But then he is also a citizen of history, an individual member in the great historical process of human development. Through his belonging to these two wholes, his free action seems to be restricted. What he does, does not seem to flow only from his own individual ego; he appears determined by what he has in common with his people; his individuality seems to be abolished by the character of his people. Am I still free then if one can find my actions explainable not only out of my own nature but to a considerable extent also out of the nature of my people? Do I not act, therefore, the way I do because nature has made me a member of this particular community of people? And it is no different with the second whole to which I belong. History assigns me the place of my working. I am dependent upon the cultural epoch into which I am born; I am a child of my age. But if one apprehends the human being at the same time as a knowing and as an acting entity, then this contradiction resolves itself. Through his capacity for knowledge, man penetrates into the particular character of his people; it becomes clear to him whither his fellow citizens are steering. He overcomes that by which he appears determined in this way and takes it up into himself as a picture that he has fully known; it becomes individual within him and takes on entirely the personal character that working from inner freedom has. The situation is the same with respect to the historical development within which the human being appears. He lifts himself to a knowledge of the leading ideas, of the moral forces holding sway there; and then they no longer work upon him as determining factors, but rather become individual driving powers within him. The human being must in fact work his way upward so that he is no longer led, but rather leads himself. He must not allow himself to be carried along blindly by the character of his people, but rather must lift himself to a knowledge of this character so that he acts consciously in accordance with his people. He must not allow himself to be carried by the progress of culture, but must rather make the ideas of his time into his own. In order for him to do so it is necessary above all that he understand his time. Then, in inner freedom, he will fulfill its tasks; then he will set to at the right place with his own work. Here the humanities⁶⁰ (history, cultural and literary history, etc.) must enter as intermediaries. In the humanities the human being has to do with his own accomplishments, with the creations of culture, of literature, with art, etc. Something spiritual is grasped by the human spirit. And the purpose of the humanities should not be any- thing other than that man recognize where chance has placed him; he should recognize what has already been accomplished, what falls to him to do. Through the humanities he must find the right point at which to participate with his personality in the happenings of the world. The human being must know the spiritual world and determine his part in it according to this knowledge.

[ 26 ] In the preface to the first volume of his Pictures from the German Past,⁶¹ Gustav Freytag says: “All the great creations of the power of a people, inherited religion, custom, law, state configurations, are for us no longer the results of individual men; they are the organic creations of a lofty life that in every age comes to manifestation only through the individual, and in every age draws together into itself the spiritual content of the individual into a mighty whole ... Thus, without saying anything mystical, one might well speak of a folk-soul ... But the life of a people no longer works consciously, like the will forces of a man. Man represents what is free and intelligent in history; the power of a people works ceaselessly, with the dark compulsion of a primal force.” If Freytag had investigated this life of a people, he would have found, indeed, that it breaks down into the working of a sum of single individuals who overcome that dark compulsion and lift what is unconscious up into consciousness; and he would have seen how that which he addresses as folk-soul, as dark compulsion, goes forth from the individual will impulses, from the free action of the human being.

[ 27 ] But something else comes into consideration with respect to the working of the human being within his people. Every personality represents a spiritual potency, a sum of powers which seek to work according to the possibilities. Every person must therefore find the place where his working can incorporate itself in the most suitable way into the organism of his people. It must not be left to chance whether he finds this place. The constitution of a state has no other purpose than to take care that everyone find his appropriate sphere of work. The state is the form in which the organism of a people expresses itself.

[ 28 ] Sociology and political science have to investigate the way the individual personality can come to play a part appropriate to it within a state. The constitution must go forth from the innermost being of a people. The character of a people, expressed in individual statements, is the best constitution for a state. A statesman cannot impose a constitution upon a people. The leader of a state must investigate the deep characteristics of his people and, through a constitution, give the tendencies slumbering in the people a direction corresponding to them. It can happen that the majority of a people wants to steer onto paths that go against its own nature. Goethe believes that in this case the statesman must let himself be guided by the people's own nature and not by the momentary demands of the majority; that he must in this case advocate the character of his people against the actual people (Aphorisms in Prose).

[ 29 ] We must still add a word here about the method of history. History must always bear in mind that the causes of historical events are to be sought in the individual intentions, plans, etc., of the human being. All tracing back of historical facts to plans that underlie history is an error. It is always only a question of which goals one or another personality has set himself, which ways they have taken, and so on. History is absolutely to be based on human nature. Its willing, its tendencies are to be fathomed.

[ 30 ] By statements of Goethe we can now substantiate again what has been said here about the science of ethics. The following statement is to be understood only out of the relationship in which we have seen the human being to stand with respect to historical development: “The world of reason is to be regarded as a great immortal individual, which ceaselessly brings about the necessary and thereby makes itself master, in fact, of chance happening.”⁶²—A reference to a positive, individual substratum of action lies in the words: “Undetermined activity, of whatever kind, leads to bankruptcy in the end.” “The least of men can be complete if he moves within the limits of his abilities and skills.”—The necessity for man of lifting himself up to the leading ideas of his people and of his age is expressed like this: “Each person must ask himself, after all, with which organ he can and will in any case work into his age.” and: “One must know where one is standing and where the others want to go.” Our view of duty is recognizable again in the words: “Duty: where one loves what one commands oneself to do.”

[ 31 ] We have based man, as a knowing and acting being, entirely upon himself. We have described his world of ideas as coinciding with the world ground and have recognized that everything he does is to be regarded as flowing only from his own individuality. We seek the core of existence within man himself. No one reveals a dogmatic truth to him; no one drives him in his actions. He is sufficient unto himself. He must be everything through himself, nothing through another being. He must draw forth everything from himself. Even the sources of his happiness. We have already recognized, in fact, that there can be no question of any power directing man, determining the direction and content of his existence, damning him to being unfree. If happiness is to come to a person therefore, this can come about only through himself. Just as little as an outer power prescribes norms for our action, will such a power bestow upon things the ability to awaken in us a feeling of satisfaction if we do not do it ourselves. Pleasure and pain are there for man only when he himself first confers upon objects the power to call up these feelings in him. A creator who determines from outside what should cause us pleasure or pain, would simply be leading us around like a child.

[ 32 ] All optimism and pessimism are thereby refuted. Optimism assumes that the world is perfect, that it must be a source of the greatest satisfaction for man. But if this is to be the case, man would first have to develop within himself those needs through which to arrive at this satisfaction. He would have to gain from the objects what it is he demands. Pessimism believes that the world is constituted in such a way that it leaves man eternally dissatisfied, that he can never be happy. What a pitiful creature man would be if nature offered him satisfaction from outside! All lamentations about an existence that does not satisfy us, about this hard world, must disappear before the thought that no power in the world could satisfy us if we ourselves did not first lend it that magical power by which it uplifts and gladdens us. Satisfaction must come to us out of what we make of things, out of our own creations. Only that is worthy of free beings.

• 52. This separation is indicated by the solid lines.
• 53. This is represented by the dotted lines.
• 54. Meaning: that it exists—Ed.
• 55. Der Versuch als Vermittler von Subjekt und Objekt
• 56. Later footnote of the author: “In my introduction to the thirty-fourth volume, I said that the essay appears, unfortunately, to have been lost that could serve as the best support to Goethe's views on experience, experiment, and scientific knowledge. It has not been lost, however, and has come to light in the above form in the Goethe archives. It bears the date January 15, 1798, and was sent to Schiller on the seventeenth. It represents a continuation of the essay The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object. I took the train of thought of his essay from the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller and presented it in the above-mentioned introduction in exactly the same way in which it is now found to be in the newly discovered essay. With respect to content nothing is added by this essay to what I expressed there; on the other hand, however, the view I had won from Goethe's other work; about his method and way of knowing was confirmed in every respect.
• 57. Entwurf einer Farbenlehre
• 58. Zur Naturwissenschaft
• 59. Die ethische Freiheit bei Kant (Philosophische Monatshefte). Published by Mercury Press as Spiritual Activity in Kant.
• 60. Geisteswissenschaften, literally: “spiritual sciences”—Ed.
• 61. Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit
• 62. All quotations in this paragraph are from Aphorisms in Prose.

I hope you will permit me to insert into today’s proceedings at this Pedagogical and Artistic Congress an example taken from the art of recitation and declamation, and to make some observations of an interpolated nature.

Art is always a particularly difficult theme on which to speak, in that art is conveyed through immediate sensation – through immediate perception. It must be received as a direct impression. We are thus in a quite special position in speaking about art at a Congress where our aim is a clarification that is reached both through knowledge and through a whole style of education and teaching-practice. Certainly all the lectures that have been held here have stressed the necessity, in the case of Waldorf education, of introducing an artistic quality into the art of education and teaching in general. But when confronting art itself, one would prefer, as I hinted in a former lecture, to preserve a chaste silence. Now every argument, every show of feeling, every human volition ultimately passes over to form the ongoing stream of human civilisation. They are contained in the three greatest impulses behind all human evolution and all historical events: the ideals of religion, art and knowledge. And in our day an attempt is quite justifiably made to make art the bearer of our ideal of knowledge, so that some possibility may once more be found of our rising upward with our understanding from the realm of substance, of matter, into the spiritual. I have tried to show how art is the way to gain a true knowledge of man, in that artistic creativity and sensitivity are the organs for a genuine knowledge of man. Nature herself becomes a true artist the moment she ascends from the multiplicity of facts and beings of the universe to bring about man. This is not said merely as a metaphor, but as a deeper knowledge of the universe and of man. And again, confronted with art, it may be said that it is an intrusion when we want to speak artistically about art. To speak about art is to lead what is spoken back to a sort of religious perception. Thereby religion is grasped in its widest sense, in which it does not only embrace what we today rightly regard as explicitly religious – the quality of reverence in man – but also includes humour, as understood in the highest sense. [Note 29] A sort of religious feeling must always prepare the mood for art. For when we speak about art we must speak out of the spirit. How can we find words for works of art of the sublimest kind, such as Dante's Commedia, if our language does not embody moments of religious insight?

This was indeed felt, and rightly felt, when art came into being. Art originated at a time when science still formed a unity, a common whole along with religion and art. At the beginning of certain great works of art we hear words which, I would say, seem like a confirmation of these comments from world-history. It is truly out of a cosmic awareness that Homer begins his poem with the words:

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

Homer himself does not sing: Homer is conscious that he must raise his soul to the superhuman, the super-sensible; that he must place his words as a sacrificial gift before the higher powers he serves, if he is to become a truly artistic poet. (Of course, the question of Homer’s identity has nothing to do with this.) And if we survey a longer period, and come to one of the modern poets, we hear how Klopstock begins his Messiah with words that are indeed different, but formally sound quite similar:

Sing, immortal soul, of sinful man’s redemption,

Which the Messiah on earth in human form accomplished.

When we begin from the one poem and progress to the other, we pass through the period in which man traversed the great, immeasurable distance from complete surrender to the divine spiritual powers, whose earthly sheath he felt himself to be, to the point where man in his freedom started to feel himself a sheath only of his own soul. But there too, at the beginning of the great epoch of German poetry, Klopstock appealed to the invisible – as Goethe constantly did, even if he did not overtly say so. Thus among poets themselves we can observe the consciousness of a sort of translation into the super-sensible.

The super-sensible, however, does not speak in words. Words are in every instance prose. Words are in every instance components of a discourse, components of a psychic act which submits to the conditions of logic. Logic exists in order that we may become aware of external beings and occurrences in their external sense-reality; logic must not, therefore, intrude upon spiritual reality. The moment we arrive by means of logic at a prose sentence we must feel the solid earth under our feet. For the spiritual does not speak in human words. The spiritual world goes only as far as the syllable, not as far as the word. Thus we can say that the poet is in a curious position. The poet has to make use of words, since these are after all the instruments of human speech: but in making use of words he necessarily deserts his proper artistic domain. He can only achieve his aim if he leads the word back to syllable-formation. In the quantities, metres and weight of syllable-formation – this is the region where the word has not yet become word, but still submits to the musical, imaginative and plastic, to a speech-transcendent spirituality – there the poet holds sway. And when the poet has to make use of words, he feels inwardly how he has to lead word-formations back to the region that he left under the necessity of passing from syllable to word. He feels that through rhyme, through the entire configuration of the verse, he must again make good what is lost when the word abandons the concrete quantities and weight that belong to the syllable, and round it out artistically, imparting form and harmony.

Here we are vouchsafed a glimpse into the intimacies of the poet’s soul. This disposition is truly felt by a real poet. Platen is not alone in having left us some remarkable comments on what I have just attempted to describe:

Only to rambling dilettantes

Are formal strictures ‘senseless’. Necessity:

That is thy sacrificial gift, O Genius.

Platen invokes Genius, observing that it is inherent in Genius to fashion the syllables in accordance with quantity, metre and weight. Rambling off into prose is merely the foolishness of the half-talented. (Although, as I have mentioned, these make up ninety-nine per cent of our versifiers.) And not only Platen, but Schiller, too, puts it rather beautifully when he says:

It is the peculiar property of an untainted and purely quantitative verse that it serves as the sensible presentation of an inner necessity of thought; and conversely, any licence in the treatment of syllable quantities makes itself felt in a certain arbitrariness. From this perspective it is of particular importance, and touches upon the most intimate laws of art.

It is to the necessity inherent in syllable-quantities that Schiller refers in this pronouncement.

The declaimer or reciter, as the interpreter of the poet’s art, must give special attention to what I have just described. He has to conduct what comes before him as a poetical composition, which obviously communicates through words, back to quantity, metre and the weight of the syllables. What then flows out into the words has to be consciously rounded out so as to accord with the verse-structure and rhyme. In our own age, with its lack of artistic feeling, there has arisen a curious kind of declamatory-recitative art – a prosaic emphasis on the prose-sense, something quite unartistic. The real poet always goes back from the prosaic or literal to the musical or plastic. Before he committed the words of a poem to paper, Schiller always experienced a wordless, indeterminate melody, a soul-experience of melody. As yet without words, it flowed along melodically like a musical theme, onto which he then threaded the words. One might conjecture that Schiller could have conjured the most varied poems, as regards verbal content, out of the same musical theme. And to rehearse his iambic verse-dramas, Goethe stood in front of his actors with a baton, like a conductor, considering the formation of sound, the balance of the syllables, the musical rhythm and time-signature to be the essential, rather than the literal meaning. For this reason it has become necessary for our own spiritual stream to return to a true art of recitation and declamation, where what has been debased through the means of expression imposed upon the poet to the level of mere prose can once again be raised, so as to regain the level of a super-sensible formative and musical experience.

This work was taken in hand by Frau Dr. Steiner, who over the last decades has tried to develop an art of recitation and declamation in which something that transcends prose to become inwardly eurythmic, the imaginative and musical configuration of syllable-quantities, the imaginative quality of the sound, whether plastic or musical – in which all this is once more made apparent. This comes out differently in lyric, epic and drama – I shall deal with that presently. But we would first like to show how what is indicated here can in general be derived from poetry that is truly artistic.

As a first example you will hear “Ostern”, by Anastasius Grün, a poem particularly suited to such a passing-beyond-the-content and approach to the aesthetic form. It is a somewhat old-fashioned poem that is (in a rather narrow sense) topical, in being a poem dedicated to Easter. On the other hand it is not topical, in the sense that it dates back to the first half of the nineteenth century, an age when the poet still felt bound to acknowledge the necessity of plastic and rhythmical formative power. Let us accept the poem as it is – though it will nowadays be found tedious by those who attend to the prose content alone, as being rather antiquated in its imagery. Even allowing for its tediousness as prose, however, a genuine poet has here attempted to comply with the inner aesthetic necessity of the poem.

We shall then continue with a modern poet, with “An Eine Rose”, a sonnet by Albert Steffen. It is precisely in the sonnet that, with good will, we can discern how the verbal presentation is compensated by the strictly bounded form – this atones for the sin committed with regard to the words, and the whole is then rounded out and rendered euphonious. In the case of a poet like Albert Steffen, whose explorations extend into the hidden depths of his view of the world, it is interesting to observe how he simultaneously feels the necessity of transmuting what comes to light as a way of knowledge into the strictest aesthetic forms.

In the “Terzinen” of Christian Morgenstern we shall see how a peculiar poetic form – free terzetti – subsists on the basis of a feeling for continuity, for openness of form, in contrast to the sonnet which is based on a rounding-off of feeling. We shall see how the terzetti, albeit towards the end of the poem, have a quality of openness, while yet constituting a bounded whole from what flows into the words.

And then perhaps I may adduce three poems of my own: “Frühling”, “Herbst”, and “Weltenseelengeister”, in which I have tried to bring into strict forms the most inward experiences of the human soul – not the forms of conventional prosody or metrics, but forms which stem from the actual emotion, while at the same time they try to contain the amorphous, fluctuating, glittering life within the soul in internally strict forms.

Frau Dr. Steiner will now demonstrate these six, more lyrical poems. (“Ostern” is, of course, a long poem of which we will present only Part V.)

OSTERN

Und Ostern wird es einst, der Herr sieht nieder

Vom Ölberg in das Tal, das klingt und blüht;

Rings Glanz und Fühl’ und Wonn’ und Wonne wieder,

So weit sein Aug’ – ein Gottesauge – sieht!

Ein Ostern, wie’s der Dichtergeist sieht blühen,

Dem’s schon zu schaun, zu pflücken jetzt erlaubt

Die Blütenkränze, die als Kron’ einst glühen

Um der noch ungebornen Tage Haupt!

Ein Ostern, wie’s das Dichteraug’ sieht tagen,

Das überm Nebel, der das Jetzt umzieht,

Die morgenroten Gletscherhäupter ragen

Der werdenden Jahrtausende schon sieht!

Ein Ostern, Auferstehungsfest, das wieder

Des Frühlings Hauch auf Blumengräber sät;

Ein Ostern der Verjüngung, das hernieder

Ins Menschenherz der Gottheit Atem weht!

Sieh, welche Wandlung blüht auf Zions Bahnen!

Längst hält ja Lenz sein Siegeslager hier;

Auf Bergen wehn der Palmen grüne Fahnen,

Im Tale prangt sein Zelt in Blütenzier!

Längst wogt ja über all’ den alten Trümmern

Ein weites Saatenmeer in goldner Flut,

Wie fern im Nord, wo weisse Wellen schimmern,

Versunken tief im Meer Vineta ruht.

Längst über alten Schutt ist unermessen

Geworfen frischer Triften grünes Kleid,

Gleichwie ein stilles, freundliches Vergessen

Sich senkt auf dunkler Tag’ uraltes Leid.

Längst stehn die Höhn umfahn von Rebgewinden,

Längst blüht ein Rosenhag auf Golgatha.

Will jetzt ein Mund den Preis der Rose künden,

Nennt er gepaart Schiras und Golgatha.

Längst alles Land weitum ein sonn’ger Garten;

Es ragt kein Halbmond mehr, kein Kreuz mehr da!

Was sollten auch des blut’gen Kampfs Standarten?

Längst ist es Frieden, ew’ger Frieden ja!

Der Kedron blieb. Er quillt vor meinen Blicken

Ins Bett von gelben Ähren eingeengt,

Wohl noch als Träne, doch die dem Entzücken

Sich durch die blonden, goldnen Wimpern drängt!

Das ist ein Blühen rings, ein Duften, Klingen,

Das um die Wette spriesst und rauscht und keimt,

Als gält’ es jetzt, geschäftig einzubringen,

Was starr im Schlaf Jahrtausende versäumt,

Das ist ein Glänzen rings, ein Funkeln, Schimmern

Der Städt’ im Tal, der Häuser auf den Höhn;

Kein Ahnen, dass ihr Fundament auf Trümmern,

Kein leiser Traum des Grabs, auf dem sie stehn!

Die Flur durchjauchzt, des Segens freud’ger Deuter,

Ein Volk, vom Glück geküsst, an Tugend reich,

Gleich den Gestirnen ernst zugleich und heiter,

Wie Rosen schön, wie Cedern stark zugleich

Begraben längst in des Vergessens Meere,

Seeungetümen gleich in tiefer Flut,

Die alten Greu’l, die blut’ge Schergenehre,

Der Krieg und Knechtsinn und des Luges Brut.

Auf Golgatha, in eines Gärtchens Mitte,

Da wohnt ein Pärlein, Glück und Lieb’ im Blick;

Weit schaut ins Land, gleich ihrem Aug’ die Hütte,

Es labt ja Glück sich gern an fremdem Glück!

Einst, da begab sich’s, dass im Feld die Kinder

Ausgruben gar ein formlos, eisern Ding;

Als Sichel däuchtis zu grad und schwer die Finder,

Als Pflugschar fast zu schlank und zu gering.

Sie schleppen’s mühsam heim, gleich seltnem Funde,

Die Eltern sehn es, – doch sie kennen’s nicht,

Sie rufen rings die Nachbarn in der Runde,

Die Nachbarn sehn es, – doch sie kennen’s nicht.

Da ist ein Greis, der in der Jetztwelt Tage

Mit weissem Bart und fahlem Angesicht

Hereinragt, selbst wie eine alte Sage;

Sie zeigen’s ihm, – er aber kennt es nicht.

Wohl ihnen allen, dass sie’s nimmer kennen!

Der Ahnen Torheit, längst vom Grab verzehrt,

Müsst’ ihnen noch im Aug’ als Träne brennen.

Denn was sie nimmer kannten, war ein Schwert!

Als Pflugschar soll’s fortan durch Schollen ringen,

Dem Saatkorn nur noch weist’s den Weg zur Gruft;

Des Schwertes neue Heldentaten singen

Der Lerchen Epopeein in sonn’ger Luft!

Einst wieder sich’s begab, dass, als er pflügte,

Der Ackersmann wie an ein Felsstück stiess,

Und, als sein Spaten rings die Hüll’ entfügte,

Ein wundersam Gebild aus Stein sich wies.

Er ruft herbei die Nachbarn in der Runde,

Sie sehn sich’s an, – jedoch sie kennen’s nicht! –

Uralter, weiser Greis, du gibst wohl Kunde?

Der Greis besieht’s, jedoch er kennt es nicht.

Ob sie’s auch kennen nicht, doch steht’s voll

Segen Aufrecht in ihrer Brust, in ewigem Reiz,

Es blüht sein Same rings auf allen Wegen;

Denn was sie nimmer kannten, war ein Kreuz!

Sie sahn den Kampf nicht und sein blutig Zeichen,

Sie sehn den Sieg allein und seinen Kranz!

Sie sahn den Sturm nicht mit den Wetterstreichen,

Sie sehn nur seines Regenbogens Glanz!

Das Kreuz von Stein, sie stellen’s auf im Garten,

Ein rätselhaft, ehrwürdig Altertum,

Dran Rosen rings und Blumen aller

Arten Empor sich ranken, kletternd um und um.

So steht das Kreuz inmitten Glanz und Fülle

Auf Golgatha, glorreich, bedeutungsschwer:

Verdeckt ist’s ganz von seiner Rosen Hülle,

Längst sieht vor Rosen man das Kreuz nicht mehr.

Anastasius Grün.

[In a similar way, Vaughan here transmutes a religious meditation into haunting poetry:

THE NIGHT

(John, ii.)

Through that pure Virgin-shrine,

That sacred vail drawn o’r thy glorious noon

That men might look and live as Glo-worms shine,

And face the Moon:

Wise Nicodemus saw such light

As made him know his God by night.

Most blest believer he!

Who in that land of darkness and blinde eyes

Thy long expected healing wings could see,

When thou didst rise,

And what can never more be done,

Did at mid-night speak with the Sun:

O who will tell me, where

He found thee at that dead and silent hour:

What hallow’d solitary ground did bear

So rare a flower,

Within whose sacred leafs did lie

The fulness of the Deity.

No mercy-seat of gold,

No dead and dusty Cherub, nor carv’d stone,

But his own living works did my Lord hold

And Lodge alone;

Where trees and Kerbs did watch and peep

And wonder, while the Jews did sleep.

Dear night! this worlds defeat;

The stop to busie fools; cares check and curb;

The day of Spirits; my souls calm retreat

Which none disturb!

Christ’s progress, and his prayer time;

The hours to which high Heaven doth chime.

Gods silent, searching flight:

When my Lords head is fill’d with dew, and all

His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;

His still, soft call;

His knocking time; The souls dumb watch,

When Spirits their fair kindred catch.

Were all my loud, evil days

Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark Tent,

Whose peace but by some Angels wing or voice

Is seldom rent;

Then I in Heaven all the long year

Would keep, and never wander here.

But living where the Sun

Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tyre

Themselves and others, I consent and run

To ev’ry myre,

And by this worlds ill-guiding light,

Erre more than I can do by night.

There is in God (some say)

A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they

See not all clear

O for that night! where I in him

Might live invisible and dim.

Henry Vaughan.]

Sonnet:

AN EINE ROSE

Ich schaue mich in dir und dich in mir:

Wo ich die Schlange bin, bist du die Blume,

wir assen beide von der irdischen Krume,

in dir ass Gott, in mir ass noch das Tier.

Die Erde ward für dich zum Heiligtume,

du wurzelst fest, du willst nicht fort von ihr.

Ich aber sehne mich, ich darbe hier,

ich such im All nach meinem Eigentume.

Du überwächst den Tod mit deinen Farben

und saugst dir ewiges Leben aus dem Boden.

Ich kehre immer wieder, um zu sterben.

Denn ach: Nur durch mein Suchen, Sehnen, Darben,

nur durch die Wiederkehr von vielen Toden,

darf ich um dich, O rote Rose, werben.

Albert Steffen (1884-1963).

TO A ROSE

I see myself in thee, and thee in me:

But where I am the serpent, thou’rt the flower –

In both consumes and grows by earthly power

A god in thee, alas! mere beast in me.

To thee the Earth was given for thy shrine,

Thou clungst to her, nor wouldst uprooted be.

But I, I yearn, I hanker to be free,

And seek in the great All to grow divine.

Thou with thy shooting hues outleapst corruption,

Drawing eternal life from out of the soil,

Whilst I fall back, fall even to death’s repose.

Yet still I seek and I yearn – and after disruption,

And only through manifold deaths’ laborious toll

Dare court your deathless beauty, rose, red rose!

Trans. A.J.W.

Terzetti:

Was ist das? Gibt es Krieg? Den Abendhimmel

verfinstern Raben gleich geschwungnen Brauen

des Unheils und mit gierigem Gekrächz.

Südöstlich rudern sie mit wilder Kraft,

und immer neue Paare, Gruppen, Völker...

Und drüber raucht’s im Blassen wie von Blut.

Wie Sankt Franciscus schweb ich in der Luft

mit beiden Füssen, fühle nicht den Grund

der Erde mehr, weiss nicht mehr, was das ist.

Seid still! Nein, – redet, singt, jedweder Mund!

Sonst wird die Ewigkeit ganz meine Gruft

und nimmt mich auf wie einst den tiefen Christ.

Dies ist das Wunderbarste, dieses feste,

so scheint es, ehern feste Vorwärtsschreiten –

und alles ist zuletzt nur tiefer Traum.

Von tausend Türmen strotzt die Burg der Zeiten

(so scheint’s) aus Erz und Marmor, doch am Saum

Der Ewigkeit ist all das nur noch Geste.

Dämmrig Blaun im Mondenschimmer

Berge...gleich Erinnerungen

ihrer selbst; selbst Berge nimmer.

Träume bloss noch, hinterlassen

von vergangnen Felsenmassen:

So wie Glocken, die verklungen,

noch die Luft als Zittern fassen.

Christian Morgenstern

What is that – is it war? The evening skies

are dark with ravens, like a congested brewing

of evil, and gasping horrible, envious croaks.

Southward and east they steer with reckless force,

shifting in constellations, pairs and groups...

and over all the smoke – so pale, like blood.

I, like St. Francis, rise upon airy wave,

and feel beneath my feet earth’s solid ground

no more, no longer knowing what that is...

Be still! – No, rather let each voice resound!

lest all Eternity, become my grave,

enclose me like the depth that in Christ is.

Most wonderful is this: the fast‑

as-iron (it seems to me) forward advance –

and yet, all is a dream in which we sink.

Time prides herself (apparently) on all

her forts of stone and iron – yet, from the brink

of Endlessness, mere gestures all at last!

Dusky, blue, in moonlight quiver

mountains...self-remembrances

themselves, as they were mountains never.

Mere dreams! the last, abandoned fragment

of some primeval, vast escarpment:

like stopped bells, whose resonances

in the vibrant air augment.

Trans. A.J.W. after V. Jacobs.

[Stevens has made extensive use of this form, as in his “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”. This example comes from the section “It Must Give Pleasure,” part VIII:

What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,

Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,

Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,

Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and

On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,

Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,

Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,

Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?

Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Is it he or is it I that experience this?

Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour

Filled with expressible bliss, in which I have

No need, am happy, forget need’s golden hand,

Am satisfied without solacing majesty,

And if there is an hour there is a day,

There is a month, a year, there is a time

In which majesty is a mirror of the self:

I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

These external regions, what do we fill them with

Except reflections, the escapades of death,

Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof?

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).]

Lyric poems by Rudolf Steiner.

FRÜHLING

Der Sonnenstrahl,

Der lichterfunkelnde,

Er schwebt heran.

Die Blütenbraut,

Die farberregende,

Sie grüsst ihn froh.

Vertrauensvoll

Der Erdentochter

Erzählt der Strahl,

Wie Sonnenkräfte,

Die geistentsprossenen,

Im Götterheim

Dem Weltentone lauschen;

Die Blütenbraut,

Die farberglitzernde,

Sie höret sinnend

Des Lichtes Feuerton.

HERBST

Der Erdenleib,

Der Geistersehnende,

Er lebt im Welken.

Die Samengeister,

Die Stoffgedrängten,

Erkraften sich.

Und Wärmefrüchte

Aus Raumesweiten

Durchkraften Erdensein.

Und Erdensinne,

Die Tiefenseher,

Sie schauen Künft’ges

Im Formenschaffen.

Die Raumesgeister,

Die ewig-atmenden,

Sie blicken ruhevoll

Ins Erdenweben.

SPRING

The Sun’s bright beam –

a gash of light,

he soars above.

His blossom-bride

showered with colour,

greets him with joy.

And trustfully

the beam instructs

the daughter of earth

how solar powers

(the spirit’s progeny!)

in the heavenly spheres

eavesdrop on their harmonies;

the blossom-bride –

sprinkled and bright with colour –

she hears the light’s

cadence of flame!

AUTUMN

The world’s body –

its life for spirit yearns

amidst the shrivelling.

The germinal sprites,

crushed with matter,

gather their power.

And fruits of warmth

from far expanses

saturate earthly being.

And worldly senses

(ah, deeply seeing!)

behold the future

in forming power.

The daemons of space –

eternal breathings! – they gaze

reposefully at the world’s

unceasing weft.

Trans. A.J.W.

WELTENSEELENGEISTER

Im Lichte wir schalten,

Im Schauen wir walten,

Im Sinnen wir weben.

Aus Herzen wir heben

Das Geistesringen

Durch Seelenschwingen.

Dem Menschen wir singen

Das Göttererleben

Im Weltengestalten.

SPIRITS OF THE ANIMA MUNDI

In light is our being,

and human seeing,

sensations weaving;

from deep hearts upheaving

through soul’s wide wending

the spirit’s contending;

our song to men sending

of gods’ true perceiving,

world-forms decreeing.

Trans. A.J.W.

[ 1 ] A sentence in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's Philosophy of Nature strikes us like a flash of lightning illuminating the past and future path of the evolution of philosophy. It reads, “To philosophize about nature means to create nature.” What had been a deep conviction of Goethe and Schiller, namely, that creative imagination must have a share in the creation of a world conception, is monumentally expressed in this sentence. What nature yields voluntarily when we focus our attention on it in observation and perception does not contain its deepest meaning. Man cannot conceive this meaning from without. He must produce it.

[ 2 ] Schelling was especially gifted for this kind of creation. With him, all spiritual energies tended toward the imagination. His mind was inventive without compare. His imagination did not produce pictures as the artistic imagination does, but rather concepts and ideas. Through this disposition of mind he was well-suited to continue along Fichte's path of thought. Fichte did not have this productive imagination. In his search for truth he had penetrated as far as to the center of man's soul, the “ego.” If this center is to become the nucleus for the world conception, then a thinker who holds this view must also be capable of arriving at thoughts whose content are saturated with world and life as he proceeds from the “ego” as a vantage point. This can only be done by means of the power of imagination, and this power was not at Fichte's disposal. For this reason, he was really limited in his philosophical position all his life to directing attention to the “ego” and to pointing out that it has to gain a content in thoughts. He, himself, had been unable to supply it with such a content, which can be learned clearly from the lectures he gave in 1813 at the University of Berlin on the Doctrine of Science (Posthumous Works, Vol. 1). For those who want to arrive at a world conception, he there demands “a completely new inner sense organ, which for the ordinary man does not exist at all.” But Fichte does not go beyond this postulate. He fails to develop what such an organ is to perceive. Schelling saw the result of this higher sense in the thoughts that his imagination produced in his soul, and he calls this “intellectual imagination” (intellectuelle Anschauung). For him, then, who saw a product created by the spirit in the spirit's statement about nature, the following question became urgent. How can what springs from the spirit be the pattern of the law that rules in the real world, holding sway in real nature? With sharp words Schelling turns against those who believe that we “merely project our ideas into nature,” because “they have no inkling of what nature is and must be for us. . . . For we are not satisfied to have nature accidentally (through the intermediary function of a third element, for instance) correspond to the laws of our spirit. We insist that nature itself necessarily and fundamentally should not only express, but realize, the laws of our spirit and that it should only then be, and be called, nature if it did just this. . . . Nature is to be the visible spirit: spirit the invisible nature. At this point then, at the point of the absolute identity of the spirit in us and of nature outside us, the problem must be solved as to how a nature outside ourselves should be possible.”

Nature and spirit, then, are not two different entities at all but one and the same being in two different forms. The real meaning of Schelling concerning this unity of nature and spirit has rarely been correctly grasped. It is necessary to immerse oneself completely into his mode of conception if one wants to avoid seeing in it nothing but a triviality or an absurdity. To clarify this mode of conception one can point to a sentence in Schelling's book, On the World Soul, in which he expresses himself on the nature of gravity. Many people find a difficulty in understanding this concept because it implies a so-called “action in distance.” The sun attracts the earth in spite of the fact that there is nothing between the sun and earth to act as intermediary. One is to think that the sun extends its sphere of activity through space to places where it is not present. Those who live in coarse, sensual perceptions see a difficulty in such a thought. How can a body act in a place where it is not? Schelling reverses this thought process. He says, “It is true that a body acts only where it is, but it is just as true that it is only where it acts.” If we see that the sun affects the earth through the force of attraction, then it follows from this fact that it extends its being as far as our earth and that we have no right to limit its existence exclusively to the place in which it acts through its being visible. The sun transcends the limits where it is visible with its being. Only a part of it can be seen; the other part reveals itself through the attraction. We must also think of the relation of spirit and nature in approximately this manner. The spirit is not merely where it is perceived; it is also where it perceives. Its being extends as far as to the most distant places where objects can still be observed. It embraces and permeates all nature that it knows. When the spirit thinks the law of an external process, this process does not remain outside the spirit. The latter does not merely receive a mirror picture, but extends its essence into a process. The spirit permeates the process and, in finding the law of the process, it is not the spirit in its isolated brain corner that proclaims this law; it is the law of the process that expresses itself. The spirit has moved to the place where the law is active. Without the spirit's attention the law would also have been active but it would not have been expressed. When the spirit submerges into the process, as it were, the law is then, in addition to being active in nature, expressed in conceptual form. It is only when the spirit withdraws its attention from nature and contemplates its own being that the impression arises that the spirit exists in separation from nature, in the same way that the sun's existence appears to the eye as being limited within a certain space when one disregards the fact that it also has its being where it works through attraction. Therefore, if I, within my spirit, cause ideas to arise in which laws of nature are expressed, the two statements, “I produce nature,” and “nature produces itself within me,” are equally true.

[ 3 ] Now there are two possible ways to describe the one being that is spirit and nature at the same time. First, I can point out the natural laws that are at work in reality; second, I can show how the spirit proceeds to arrive at these laws. In both cases I am directed by the same object. In the first instance, the law shows me its activity in nature; in the second, the spirit shows me the procedure used to represent the same law in the imagination. In the one case, I am engaged in natural science; in the other, in spiritual science. How these two belong together is described by Schelling in an attractive fashion:

The necessary trend of all natural science is to proceed from nature toward intelligence. This, and nothing else, is at the bottom of the tendency to bring theory into natural phenomena. The highest perfection of natural science would be the perfect transfiguration of all laws of nature into laws of imagination and thinking. The phenomena (the material element) must completely vanish and only the laws (the formal element) must remain. This is the reason for the fact that the more the law-structure in nature, itself, emerges, as if it were breaking the crust, the more the covering element vanishes. The phenomena themselves become more spiritual and finally disappear. The phenomena of optics are nothing but a geometry, the lines of which are drawn by the light, and this light, itself, is already of an ambiguous materiality. In the phenomena of magnetism, all material traces have already vanished. Of the phenomena of gravity, which, even according to natural scientists, can only be understood as a direct spiritual effect of action into distance, nothing is left but their law, the application of which is the mechanism of the celestial motions on a large scale. The completed theory of nature would be the one through which the whole of nature would dissolve into intelligence. The inanimate and consciousless products of nature are only unsuccessful attempts of nature to reflect itself, and the so-called dead nature is, in general, an immature intelligence, so that the intelligent character shines through unconsciously in its phenomena. The highest aim of nature—to become completely objective to itself—can be reached by it only through the highest and last reflection, which is man, or, more generally speaking, what we call reason, through which nature returns in its own track and whereby it becomes evident that nature originally is identical with what is known in us as the intelligent and conscious element.

[ 4 ] Schelling spun the facts of nature into an artful network of thought in such a fashion that all of its phenomena stood as in an ideal, harmonious organism before his creative imagination. He was inspired by the feeling that the ideas that appear in his imagination are also the creative forces of nature's process. Spiritual forces, then, are the basis of nature, and what appears dead and lifeless to our eyes has its origin in the spiritual. In turning our spirit to this, we discover the ideas, the spiritual, in nature. Thus, for man, according to Schelling, the things of nature are manifestations of the spirit. The spirit conceals itself behind these manifestations as behind a cover, so to speak. It shows itself in our own inner life in its right form. In this way, man knows what is spirit, and he is therefore able to find the spirit that is hidden in nature. The manner in which Schelling has nature return as spirit in himself reminds one of what Goethe believes is to be found in the perfect artist. The artist, in Goethe's opinion, proceeds in the production of a work of art as nature does in its creations. Therefore, we should observe in the artist's creation the same process through which everything has come into being that is spread out before man in nature. What nature conceals from the outer eye is presented in perceptible form to man in the process of artistic creation. Nature shows man only the finished works; man must decipher from these works how it proceeded to produce them. He is confronted with the creatures, not with the creator. In the case of the artist, creation and creator are observed at the same time. Schelling wants to penetrate through the products of nature to nature's creative process. He places himself in the position of creative nature and brings it into being within his soul as an artist produces his work of art. What are, then, according to Schelling, the thoughts that are contained in his world conception? They are the ideas of the creative spirit of nature. What preceded the things and what created them is what emerges in an individual human spirit as thought. This thought is to its original real existence as a memory picture of an experience is to the experience itself. Thereby, human science becomes for Schelling a reminiscence of the spiritual prototypes that were creatively active before the things existed. A divine spirit created the world and at the end of the process it also creates men in order to form in their souls as many tools through which the spirit can, in recollection, become aware of its creative activity. Schelling does not feel himself as an individual being at all as he surrenders himself to the contemplation of the world phenomena. He appears to himself as a part, a member of the creative world forces. Not he thinks, but the spirit of the world forces thinks in him. This spirit contemplates his own creative activity in him.

[ 5 ] Schelling sees a world creation on a small scale in the production of a work of art. In the thinking contemplation of things, he sees a reminiscence of the world creation on a large scale. In the panorama of the world conception, the very ideas, which are the basis of things and have produced them, appear in our spirit. Man disregards everything in the world that the senses perceive in it and preserves only what pure thinking provides. In the creation and enjoyment of a work of art, the idea appears intimately permeated with elements that are revealed through the senses. According to Schelling's view, then, nature, art and world conception (philosophy) stand in the following relation to one another. Nature presents the finished products; world conception, the productive ideas; art combines both elements in harmonious interaction. On the one side, artistic activity stands halfway between creative nature, which produces without being aware of the ideas on the basis of which it creates, and, on the other, the thinking spirit, which knows these ideas without being able at the same time to create things with their help. Schelling expresses this with the words:

The ideal world of art and the real world of objects are therefore products of one and the same activity. The concurrence of both (the conscious and the unconscious) without consciousness leads to the real world, with consciousness to the esthetic world. The objective world is only the more primitive, still unconscious poem of the spirit, the general organon of philosophy, and the philosophy of art is the crowning piece of its entire structure.

[ 6 ] The spiritual activities of man, his thinking contemplation and his artistic creation, appear to Schelling not merely as the separate accomplishments of the individual person, but, if they are understood in their highest significance, they are at the same time the achievement of the supreme being, the world spirit. In truly dithyrambic words, Schelling depicts the feeling that emerges in the soul when it becomes aware of the fact that its life is not merely an individual life limited to a point of the universe, but that its activity is one of general spirituality. When the soul says, “I know; I am aware,” then, in a higher sense, this means that the world spirit remembers its action before the existence of things; when the soul produces a work of art, it means that the world spirit repeats, on a small scale, what that spirit accomplished on a large scale at the creation of all nature.

The soul in man is not the principle of individuality, then, but that through which he lifts himself above all selfhood, through which he becomes capable of self-sacrifice, of selfless love, and, to crown it all, of the contemplation and knowledge of the essence of things and thereby of art. The soul is no longer occupied with matter, nor is it engaged in any direct intercourse with matter, but it is alone with spirit as the life of things. Even when appearing in the body, the soul is nevertheless free from the body, the consciousness of which—in its most perfect formation—merely hovers like a light dream by which it is not disturbed. The soul is not a quality, nor faculty, nor anything of that kind in particular. The soul does not know, but is knowledge. The soul is not good, not beautiful in the way that bodies also can be beautiful, but it is beauty itself. (On the Relation of Fine Arts to Nature.)

[ 7 ] Such a mode of conception is reminiscent of the German mysticism that had a representative in Jakob Boehme (1575–1624). In Munich, where Schelling lived with short interruptions from 1806–1842, he enjoyed the stimulating association with Franz Benedict Baader, whose philosophical ideas moved completely in the direction of this older doctrine. This association gave Schelling the occasion to penetrate deeply into the thought world that depended entirely on a point of view at which he had arrived in his own thinking. If one reads the above quoted passage from the address, On the Relation of the Fine Arts to Nature, which he gave at the Royal Academy of Science in Munich in 1807, one is reminded of Jakob Boehme's view, “As thou beholdest the depth and the stars and the earth, thou seest thy God, and in the same thou also livest and hast thy being, and the same God ruleth thee also . . . thou art created out of this God and thou livest in Him; all thy knowledge also standeth in this God and when thou diest thou wilt be buried in this God.”

[ 8 ] As Schelling's thinking developed, his contemplation of the world turned into the contemplation of God, or theosophy. In 1809, when he published his Philosophical Inquiries Concerning the Nature of Human Freedom and Topics Pertinent to This Question, he had already taken his stand on the basis of such a theosophy. All questions of world conception are now seen by him in a new light. If all things are divine, how can there be evil in the world since God can only be perfect goodness? If the soul is in God, how can it still follow its selfish interests? If God is and acts within me, how can I then still be called free, as I, in that case, do not at all act as a self-dependent being?

[ 9 ] Thus does Schelling attempt to answer these questions through contemplation of God rather than through world contemplation. It would be entirely incongruous to God if a world of beings were created that he would continually have to lead and direct as helpless creatures. God is perfect only if he can create a world that is equal to himself in perfection. A god who can produce only what is less perfect than he, himself, is imperfect himself. Therefore, God has created beings in men who do not need his guidance, but are themselves free and independent as he is. A being that has its origin in another being does not have to be dependent on its originator, for it is not a contradiction that the son of man is also a man. As the eye, which is possible only in the whole structure of the organism, has nevertheless an independent life of its own, so also the individual soul is, to be sure, comprised in God, yet not directly activated by him as a part in a machine.

God is not a God of the dead, but of the living. How he could find his satisfaction in the most perfect machine is quite unintelligible. No matter in what form one might think the succession of created beings out of God, it can never be a mechanical succession, not a mere causation or production so that the products would not be anything in themselves. Nor could it be an emanation such that the emanating entity would remain merely a part of the being it sprang from and therefore would have no being of its own, nothing that would be self-dependent. The sequence of things out of God is a self-revelation of God. God, however, can only become revealed to himself in an element similar to him, in beings that are free and act out of their own initiative, for whose existence there is no ground but God but who are themselves like God.

If God were a God of the dead and all world phenomena merely like a mechanism, the individual processes of which could be derived from him as their cause and mover, then it would only be necessary to describe God and everything would be comprehended thereby. Out of God one would be able to understand all things and their activity, but this is not the case. The divine world has self-dependence. God created it, but it has its own being. Thus, it is indeed divine, but the divine appears in an entity that is independent of God; it appears in a non-divine element. As light is born out of darkness, so the divine world is born out of non-divine existence, and from this non-divine element springs evil, selfishness. God thus has not all beings in his power. He can give them the light, but they, themselves, emerge from the dark night. They are the sons of this night, and God has no power over whatever is darkness in them. They must work their way through the night into the light. This is their freedom. One can also say that the world is God's creation out of the ungodly. The ungodly, therefore, is the first, and the godly the second.

[ 10 ] Schelling started out by searching for the ideas in all things, that is to say, by searching for what is divine in them. In this way, the whole world was transformed into a manifestation of God for him. He then had to proceed from God to the ungodly in order to comprehend the imperfect, the evil, the selfish. Now the whole process of world evolution became a continuous conquest of the ungodly by the godly for him. The individual man has his origin in the ungodly. He works his way out of this element into the divine. This process from the ungodly to the godly was originally the dominating element in the world. In antiquity men surrendered to their natures. They acted naively out of selfishness. The Greek civilization stands on this ground. It was the age in which man lived in harmony with nature, or, as Schiller expresses it in his essay, On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, man, himself, was nature and therefore did not seek nature. With the rise of Christianity, this state of innocence of humanity vanishes. Mere nature is considered as ungodly, as evil, and is seen as the opposite of the divine, the good. Christ appears to let the light of the divine shine in the darkness of the ungodly. This is the moment when “the earth becomes waste and void for the second time,” the moment of “birth of the higher light of the spirit, which was from the beginning of the world, but was not comprehended by the darkness that operated by and for itself, and was then still in its concealed and limited manifestation. It appears in order to oppose the personal and spiritual evil, also in personal and human shape, and as mediator in order to restore again the connection of creation and God on the highest level. For only the personal can heal the personal, and God must become man to enable man to come to God.”

[ 11 ] Spinozism is a world conception that seeks the ground of all world events in God, and derives all processes according to external necessary laws from this ground, just as the mathematical truths are derived from the axioms. Schelling considers such a world conception insufficient. Like Spinoza, he also believes that all things are in God, but according to his opinion, they are not determined only by “the lifelessness of his system, the soullessness of its form, the poverty of its concepts and expressions, the inexorable harshness of its statements that tallies perfectly with its abstract mode of contemplation.” Schelling, therefore, does find Spinoza's “mechanical view of nature” perfectly consistent, but nature, itself, does not show us this consistency.

All that nature tells us is that it does not exist as a result of a geometric necessity. There is in it, not clear, pure reason, but personality and spirit; otherwise, the geometric intellect, which has ruled so long, ought to have penetrated it long ago. Intellect would necessarily have realized its idol of general and eternal laws of nature to a far greater extent, whereas it has everyday to acknowledge nature's irrational relation to itself more and more.

As man is not merely intellect and reason but unites still other faculties and forces within himself, so, according to Schelling, is this also the case with the divine supreme being. A God who is clear, pure reason seems like personified mathematics. A God, however, who cannot proceed according to pure reason with his world creation but continuously has to struggle against the ungodly, can be regarded as “a wholly personal living being.” His life has the greatest analogy with the human life. As man attempts to overcome the imperfect within himself as he strives toward his ideal of perfection, so such a God is conceived as an eternally struggling God whose activity is the progressive conquest of the ungodly. Schelling compares Spinoza's God to the “oldest pictures of divinities, who appeared the more mysterious the less individually-living features spoke out of them.” Schelling endows his God with more and more individualized traits. He depicts him as a human being when he says, “If we consider what is horrible in nature and the spirit-world, and how much more a benevolent hand seems to cover it up for us, then we cannot doubt that the deity is reigning over a world of horror, and that God could be called the horrible, the terrible God, not merely figuratively but literally.”

[ 12 ] Schelling could no longer look upon a God like this in the same way in which Spinoza had regarded his God. A God who orders everything according to the laws of reason can also be understood through reason. A personal God, as Schelling conceived him in his later life, is incalculable, for he does not act according to reason alone. In a mathematical problem we can predetermine the result through mere thinking; with an acting human being this is not possible. With him, we have to wait and see what action he will decide upon in a given moment. Experience must be added to reason. A pure rational science is, therefore, insufficient for Schelling for a conception of world and God. In the later period of his world conception, he calls all knowledge that is derived from reason a negative knowledge that has to be supplemented by a positive knowledge. Whoever wants to know the living God must not merely depend on the necessary conclusions of reason; he must plunge into the life of God with his whole personal being. He will then experience what no conclusion, no pure reason can give him. The world is not a necessary effect of the divine cause, but a free action of the personal God. What Schelling believed he had reached, not by the cognitive process of the method of reason, but by intuition as the free incalculable acts of God, he has presented in his Philosophy of Revelation and Philosophy of Mythology. He used the content of these two works as the basis of the lectures he gave at the University of Berlin after he had been called to the Prussian capital by Frederic Wilhelm IV. They were published only after Schelling's death in 1854.

[ 13 ] With views of this kind, Schelling shows himself to be the boldest and most courageous of the group of philosophers who were stimulated to develop an idealistic world conception by Kant. Under Kant's influence, the attempt to philosophize about things that transcended thinking and observation was abandoned. One tried to be satisfied with staying within the limits of observation and thinking. Where Kant, however, had concluded from the necessity of such a resignation that no knowledge of transcendent things was possible, the post-Kantians declared that as observation and thinking do not point at a transcendent divine element, they are this divine element themselves. Among those who took this position, Schelling was the most forceful. Fichte had taken everything into the ego; Schelling had spread this ego over everything. What he meant to show was not, as Fichte did, that the ego was everything, but that everything was ego. Schelling had the courage to declare not only the ego's content of ideas as divine, but the whole human spirit-personality. He not only elevated the human reason into a godly reason, but he made the human life content into the godly personal entity. A world explanation that proceeds from man and thinks of the course of the whole world as having as its ground an entity that directs its course in the same way as man directs his actions, is called anthropomorphism. Anyone who considers events as being dependent on a general world reason, explains the world anthropomorphically, for this general world reason is nothing but the human reason made into this general reason. When Goethe says, “Man never understands how anthropomorphic he is,” he has in mind the fact that our simplest statements concerning nature contain hidden anthropomorphisms. When we say a body rolls on because another body pushed it, we form such a conception from our own experience. We push a body and it rolls on. When we now see that a ball moves against another ball that thereupon rolls on, we form the conception that the first ball pushed the second, using the analogy of the effect we ourselves exert. Haeckel observes that the anthropomorphic dogma “compares God's creation and rule of the world with the artful creation of an ingenious technician or engineer, or with the government of a wise ruler. God, the Lord, as creator, preserver and ruler of the world is, in all his thinking and doing, always conceived as similar to a human being.”

Schelling had the courage of the most consistent anthropomorphism. He finally declared man, with all his life-content, as divinity, and since a part of this life-content is not only the reasonable but the unreasonable as well, he had the possibility of explaining also the unreasonable in the world. To this end, however, he had to supplement the view of reason by another view that does not have its source in thinking. This higher view, according to his opinion, he called "positive philosophy.”

It “is the free philosophy in the proper sense of the word; whoever does not want it, may leave it. I put it to the free choice of everybody. I only say that if, for instance, somebody wants to get at the real process, a free world creation, etc., he can have all this only by means of such a philosophy. If he is satisfied with a rational philosophy and has no need beyond it, he may continue holding this position, only he must give up his claim to possess with and in a rational philosophy what the latter simply cannot supply because of its very nature, namely, the real God, the real process and a free relation between God and world.”

The negative philosophy “will remain the preferred philosophy for the school, the positive philosophy, that for life. Only if both of them are united will the complete consecration be obtained that can be demanded of philosophy. As is well-known in the Eleusinian mysteries, the minor mysteries were distinguished from the major ones and the former were considered as a prerequisite stage of the latter . . . The positive philosophy is the necessary consequence of the correctly understood negative one and thus one may indeed say that in the negative philosophy are celebrated the minor mysteries of philosophy, in the positive philosophy, the major ones.”

If the inner life is declared to be the divine life, then it appears to be an inconsistency to limit this distinction to a part of this inner life. Schelling is not guilty of this inconsistency. The moment he declared that to explain nature is to create nature, he set the direction for all his life conception. If thinking contemplation of nature is a repetition of nature's creation, then the fundamental character of this creation must also correspond to that of human action; it must be an act of freedom, not one of geometric necessity. We cannot know a free creation through the laws of reason; it must reveal itself through other means.

[ 14 ] The individual human personality lives and has its being in and through the ground of the world, which is spirit. Nevertheless, man is in possession of his full freedom and self-dependence. Schelling considered this conception as one of the most important in his whole philosophy. Because of it, he thought he could consider his idealistic trend of ideas as a progress from earlier views since those earlier views thought the individual to be completely determined by the world spirit when they considered it rooted in it, and thereby robbed it of its freedom and self-dependence.

For until the discovery of idealism, the real concept of freedom was lacking in all systems, in that of Leibniz as well as in that of Spinoza. A freedom that many of us had conceived and even boasted of because of the vivid inner experience it touched on, namely, one that is to consist merely in the domination of the intelligent principle over the forces of sensuality and desire, such a freedom could be derived from Spinoza's presupposition, not merely as a last resort, but with clarity and the greatest of ease.

A man who had only this kind of freedom in mind and who, with the aid of thoughts that had been borrowed from Spinozism, attempted a reconciliation of the religious consciousness with a thoughtful world contemplation, of theology and philosophy, was Schelling's contemporary, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834). In his speeches on Religion Addressed to the Educated Among Its Scorners (1799), he exclaimed, “Sacrifice with me in reverence to the spirit of the saintly departed Spinoza! The lofty world spirit filled him; the infinite was his beginning and end; the universe his only and eternal love. He reflected himself in holy innocence and deep humility in the eternal world, and could observe how he, in turn, was the world's most graceful mirror.”

Freedom for Schleiermacher is not the ability of a being to decide itself, in complete independence, on its life's own aim and direction. It is, for him, only a “development out of oneself.” But a being can very well develop out of itself and yet be unfree in a higher sense. If the supreme being of the world has planted a definite seed into the separate individuality that is brought to maturity by him, then the course of life of the individual is precisely predetermined but nevertheless develops out of itself. A freedom of this kind, as Schleiermacher thinks of it, is readily thinkable in a necessary world order in which everything occurs according to a strict mathematical necessity. For this reason, it is possible for him to maintain that “the plant also has its freedom.” Because Schleiermacher knew of a freedom only in this sense, he could also seek the origin of religion in the most unfree feeling, in the “feeling of absolute dependence.” Man feels that he must rest his existence on a being other than himself, on God. His religious consciousness is rooted in this feeling. A feeling is always something that must be linked to something else. It has only a derived existence. The thought, the idea, have so distinctly a self-dependent existence that Schelling can say of them, “Thus thoughts, to be sure, are produced by the soul, but the produced thought is an independent power continuing its own action by itself, and indeed growing within the soul to the extent that it conquers and subdues its own mother.” Whoever, therefore, attempts to grasp the supreme being in the form of thoughts, receives this being and holds it as a self-dependent power within himself. This power can then be followed by a feeling, just as the conception of a beautiful work of art is followed by a certain feeling of satisfaction. Schleiermacher, however, does not mean to seize the object of religion, but only the religious feeling. He leaves the object, God, entirely indefinite. Man feels himself as dependent, but he does not know the being on which he depends. All concepts that we form of the deity are inadequate to the lofty character of this being. For this reason, Schleiermacher avoids going into any definite concepts concerning the deity. The most indefinite, the emptiest conception, is the one he likes best. “The ancients experienced religion when they considered every characteristic form of life throughout the world to be the work of a deity. They had absorbed the peculiar form of activity of the universe as a definite feeling and designated it as such.” This is why the subtle words that Schleiermacher uttered concerning the essence of immortality are indefinite:

The aim and character of a religious life is not an immortality that is outside of time, or behind time, or else merely after this time, but one that is still in time. It is the immortality that we can already have here in this temporal life and that is a problem, the solution of which continually engages us. To become one with the infinite in the midst of the finite, and to be eternal in every moment, is the immortality of religion.

Had Schelling said this, it would have been possible to connect it with a definite conception. It would then mean, “Man produces the thought of God. This would then be God's memory of his own being. The infinite would be brought to life in the individual person. It would be present in the finite.” But as Schleiermacher writes those sentences without Schelling's foundations, they do no more than create a nebulous atmosphere. What they express is the dim feeling that man depends on something infinite. It is the theology in Schleiermacher that prevents him from proceeding to definite conceptions concerning the ground of the world. He would like to lift religious feeling, piety, to a higher level, for he is a personality with rare depth of soul. He demands dignity for true religious devotion. Everything that he said about this feeling is of noble character. He defended the moral attitude that is taken in Schlegel's Lucinde, which springs purely out of the individual's own arbitrary free choice and goes beyond all limits of traditional social conceptions. He could do so because he was convinced that a man can be genuinely religious even if he is venturesome in the field of morality. He could say, “There is no healthy feeling that is not pious.” Schleiermacher did understand religious feeling. He was well-acquainted with the feeling that Goethe, in his later age, expressed in his poem, Trilogy of Passion:

From our heart's pureness springs a yearning tender
Unto an unknown Being, lofty, blameless,
In gratefulness unchallenged to surrender,
Unriddling for ourselves the Ever-Nameless
In pious awe –

Because he felt this religious feeling deeply, he also knew how to describe the inner religious life. He did not attempt to know the object of this devotion but left it to be done by the various kinds of theology, each in its own fashion. What he intended to delineate was the realm of religious experience that is independent of a knowledge of God. In this sense, Schleiermacher was a peacemaker between belief and knowledge.

[ 15 ] “In most recent times religion has increasingly contracted the developed extent of its content and withdrawn into the intensive life of religious fervor or feeling and often, indeed, in a fashion that manifests a thin and meager content.” Hegel wrote these words in the preface of the second edition of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1827). He continued by saying:

As long as religion still has a creed, a doctrine, a dogmatic system, it has something that philosophy can make its concern and use to join hands with religion. This fact, however, must not be approached by the inferior, dividing intellect through which modern religion is blinded. It considers the realms of philosophy and religion as being mutually exclusive and in separating them in this way assumes that they can only be linked together externally. The real relation, and this is implied also in the previous statement, is such that religion can, to be sure, be without philosophy. Philosophy, however, cannot be without religion, but comprises it within its own realm. The true religion, the religion of the spirit, must have such a credo, must have a content. The spirit is essentially consciousness of content that has become objective. As feeling, it is the nonobjective content itself and only the lowest stage of consciousness, and, indeed, of the very form of soul life that man has in common with the animals. It is thinking only that makes the spirit out of the soul, the soul with which the animal also is gifted. Philosophy is only a consciousness of this content, of the spirit and of its truth. It is consciousness of man's essential nature that distinguishes him from the animal and makes him capable of religion.

The whole spiritual physiognomy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) becomes apparent when we hear words like these from him, through which he wanted to express clearly and poignantly that he regarded thinking that is conscious of itself as the highest activity of man, as the force through which alone man can gain a position with respect to the ultimate questions. The feeling of dependence, which was considered by Schleiermacher as the originator of religious experience, was declared to be characteristically the function of the animal's life by Hegel. He stated paradoxically that if the feeling of dependence were to constitute the essence of Christianity, then the dog would be the best Christian. Hegel is a personality who lives completely in the element of thought.

Because man is a thinking being, common sense, no more than philosophy, will ever relinquish its prerogative to rise from the empirical world conception to God. This elevation has as its prerequisite the world contemplation of thinking, not merely that of the sensual, animal consciousness.

Hegel makes into the content of his world conception what can be obtained by self-conscious thinking. For what man finds in any other way can be nothing but a preparatory stage of a world conception.

The elevation of thinking above the sensual, its transcendence from the finite to the infinite, the leap into the supersensible that is taken with an abrupt termination of sensual content—all this is thinking itself; this transition itself is thinking. When such a transition is not to be made, it means that no thinking is taking place. In fact, animals do not go beyond sensual perception and immediate impression, and do not make this leap. For this reason, they have no religion.

[ 16 ] What man can extract from things through thinking is the highest element that exists in them and for him. Only this element can he recognize as their essence. Thought is, therefore, the essence of things for Hegel. All perceptual imagination, all scientific observation of the world and its events do, finally, result in man's production of thoughts concerning the connection of things. Hegel's work now proceeds from the point where perceptual imagination and scientific observation have reached their destination: With thought as it lives in self-consciousness. The scientific observer looks at nature; Hegel observes what the scientific observer states about nature. The observer attempts to reduce the variety of natural phenomena to a unity. He explains one process through the other. He strives for order, for organic systematic simplicity in the totality of the things that are presented to the senses in chaotic multiplicity. Hegel searches for systematic order and harmonious simplicity in the results of the scientific investigator. He adds to the science of nature a science of the thoughts about nature. All thoughts that can be produced about the world form, in a natural way, a uniform totality. The scientific observer gains his thoughts from being confronted with the individual things. This is why the thoughts themselves appear in his mind also, at first individually, one beside another. If we consider them now side by side, they become joined together into a totality in which every individual thought forms an organic link. Hegel means to give this totality of thoughts in his philosophy. No more than the natural scientist, who wants to determine the laws of the astronomical universe, believes that he can construct the starry heavens out of these laws, does Hegel, who seeks the law-ordered connections within the thought world, believe he can derive from these thoughts any laws of natural science that can only, be determined through empirical observation. The statement, repeated time and again, that it was Hegel's intention to exhaust the full and unlimited knowledge of the whole universe through pure thinking is based on nothing more than a naive misunderstanding of his view. He has expressed it distinctly enough: “To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy, for what is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable. . . . When philosophy paints its picture gray on gray, a figure of life has become old. . . . Minerva's owl begins its fight only as the twilight of nightfall sets in.”

From these words it should be apparent that the factual knowledge must already be there when the thinker arrives to see them in a new light from his viewpoint. One should not demand of Hegel that he derive new natural laws from pure thought, for he had not intended to do this at all. What he had set out to do was to spread philosophical light over the sum total of natural laws that existed in his time. Nobody demands of a natural scientist that he create the starry sky, although in his research he is concerned with the firmament. Hegel's views, however, are declared to be fruitless because he thought about the laws of nature and did not create these laws at the same time.

[ 17 ] What man finally arrives at as he ponders over things is their essence. It is the foundation of things. What man receives as his highest insight is at the same time the deepest nature of things. The thought that lives in man is, therefore, also the objective content of the world. One can say that the thought is at first in the world in an unconscious form. It is then received by the human spirit. It becomes apparent to itself in the human spirit. Just as man, in directing his attention into nature, finally finds the thought that makes the phenomena comprehensible, so he also finds thought within himself, as he turns his attention inward. As the essence of nature is thought, so also man's own essence is thought. In the human self-consciousness, therefore, thought contemplates itself. The essence of the world arrives at its own awareness. In the other creatures of nature thought is active, but this activity is not directed toward itself but toward something other than itself. Nature, then, does contain thought, but in thinking, man's thought is not merely contained; it is here not merely active, but is directed toward itself. In external nature, thought, to be sure, also unfolds life, but there it only flows into something else; in man, it lives in itself. In this manner the whole process of the world appears to Hegel as thought process, and all occurrences in this process are represented as preparatory phases for the highest event that there is: The thoughtful comprehension of thought itself. This event takes place in the human self-consciousness. Thought then works its way progressively through until it reaches its highest form of manifestation in which it comprehends itself.

[ 18 ] Thus, in observing any thing or process of reality, one always sees a definite phase of development of thought in this thing or process. The world process is the progressive evolution of thought. All phases except the highest contain within themselves a self-contradiction. Thought is in them, but they contain more than it reveals at such a lower stage. For this reason,, it overcomes the contradictory form of its manifestation and speeds on toward a higher one that is more appropriate. The contradiction then is the motor that drives the thought development ahead. As the natural scientist thoughtfully observes things, he forms concepts of them that have this contradiction within themselves. When the philosophical thinker thereupon takes up these thoughts that are gained from the observation of nature, he finds them to be self-contradictory forms. But it is this very contradiction that makes it possible to develop a complete thought structure out of the individual thoughts. The thinker looks for the contradictory element in a thought; this element is contradictory because it points toward a higher stage of its development. Through the contradiction contained in it, every thought points to another thought toward which it presses on in the course of its development. Thus, the philosopher can begin with the simplest thought that is bare of all content, that is, with the abstract thought of being. From this thought he is driven by the contradiction contained therein toward a second phase that is higher and less contradictory, etc., until he arrives at the highest stage, at thought living within itself, which is the highest manifestation of the spirit.

[ 19 ] Hegel lends expression to the fundamental character of the evolution of modern world conception. The Greek spirit knows thought as perception; the modern spirit knows it as the self-engendered product of the soul. In presenting his world conception, Hegel turns to the creations of self-consciousness. He starts out by dealing only with the self-consciousness and its products, but then he proceeds to follow the activity of the self-consciousness into the phase in which it is aware of being united with the world spirit. The Greek thinker contemplates the world, and his contemplation gives him an insight into the nature of the world. The modern thinker, as represented by Hegel, means to live with his inner experience in the world's creative process. He wants to insert himself into it. He is then convinced that he discovers himself in the world, and he listens to what the spirit of the world reveals as its being while this very being is present and alive in his self-consciousness. Hegel is in the modern world what Plato was in the world of the Greeks. Plato lifted his spirit-eye contemplatively to the world of ideas so as to catch the mystery of the soul in this contemplation. Hegel has the soul immerse itself in the world-spirit and unfold its inner life after this immersion. So the soul lives as its own life what has its ground in the world spirit into which it submerged.

Hegel thus seized the human spirit in its highest activity, that is, in thinking, and then attempted to show the significance of this highest activity within the entirety of the world. This activity represents the event through which the universal essence, which is poured out into the whole world, finds itself again. The highest activities through which this self-finding is accomplished are art, religion and philosophy. In the work of nature, thought is contained, but here it is estranged from itself. It appears not in its own original form. A real lion that we see is, indeed, nothing but the incarnation of the thought, “lion.” We are, however, not confronted here with the thought, lion, but with the corporeal being. This being, itself, is not concerned with the thought. Only I, when I want to comprehend it, search for the thought. A work of art that depicts a lion represents outwardly the form that, in being confronted with a real lion, I can only have as a thought-image. The corporeal element is there in the work of art for the sole purpose of allowing the thought to appear. Man creates works of art in order to make outwardly visible that element of things that he can otherwise only grasp in thoughts. In reality, thought can appear to itself in its appropriate form only in the human self-consciousness. What really appears only inwardly, man has imprinted into sense-perceived matter in the work of art to give it an external expression. When Goethe stood before the monuments of art of the Greeks, he felt impelled to confess that here is necessity, here is God. In Hegel's language, according to which God expresses himself in the thought content of the world manifested in human self-consciousness, this would mean: In the works of art man sees reflected the highest revelations of the world in which he can really participate only within his own spirit. Philosophy contains thought in its perfectly pure form, in its original nature. The highest form of manifestation of which the divine substance is capable, the world of thought, is contained in philosophy. In Hegel's sense, one can say the whole world is divine, that is to say, permeated by thought, but in philosophy the divine appears directly in its godliness while in other manifestations it takes on the form of the ungodly. Religion stands halfway between art and philosophy. In it, thought does not as yet live as pure thought but in the form of the picture, the symbol. This is also the case with art, but there the picture is such that it is borrowed from the external perception. The pictures of religion, however, are spiritualized symbols.

[ 20 ] Compared to these highest manifestations of thought, all other human life expressions are merely imperfect preparatory stages. The entire historical life of mankind is composed of such stages. In following the external course of the events of history one will, therefore, find much that does not correspond to pure thought, the object of reason. In looking deeper, however, we see that in historical evolution the thought of reason is nevertheless in the process of being realized. This realization just proceeds in a manner that appears as ungodly on the surface. On the whole, one can maintain the statement, “Everything real is reasonable.” This is exactly the decisive point, that thought, the historical world spirit, realizes itself in the entirety of history. The individual person is merely a tool for the realization of the purpose of this world spirit. Because Hegel recognizes the highest essence of the world in thought, he also demands of the individual that he subordinate himself to the general thoughts that rule the world evolution.

The great men in history are those whose special personal purposes contain the substantial element that is the will of the world spirit. This content is their true power. It is also contained in the general unconscious instincts of the people. They are inwardly driven to it and have nothing further to fall back upon that would enable them to resist the individual who has made the execution of such a purpose his own interest. The people gather around his colors. He shows them and brings into reality their own immanent purposes. If we appraise the fate of these world-historical individuals, we must say that they have had the good fortune to be the executive agent of a purpose that represented a step in the progress of the general spirit. We can call a ‘stratagem or reason,’ the way in which reason employs individuals as its tools, for it has them execute their own purposes with all fury of passion, and in so doing, it not only remains unharmed, but actually realizes itself. The particular is mostly negligible in comparison with the general; the individuals are sacrificed and abandoned. World history thus presents the spectacle of struggling individuals and, in the field of the particular, everything happens in an entirely natural fashion. Just as in the animal nature the preservation of life is purpose and instinct of the individual specimen, and just as general reason holds sway while the individual drops out, in the same way things also happen in the spiritual world. The passions work mutual destruction on each other. Reason alone wakes, follows its purpose and prevails.

Man as an individual can seize the comprehensive spirit only in his thinking. Only in the contemplation of the world is God entirely present. When man acts, when he enters the active life, he becomes a link and therefore can also participate only as a link in the complete chain of reason.

Hegel's doctrine of state is also derived from thoughts of this kind. Man is alone with his thinking; with his actions he is a link of the community. The reasonable order of community, the thought by which it is permeated, is the state. The individual person, according to Hegel, is valuable only insofar as the general reason, thought, appears within such a person, for thought is the essence of things. A product of nature does not possess the power to bring thought in its highest form into appearance; man has this power. He will, therefore, fulfill his destination only if he makes himself a carrier of thought. As the state is realized thought, and as the individual man is only a member within its structure, it follows that man has to serve the state and not the state, man.

If the state is confused with society, and if its end is then defined as the security and protection of property and individual freedom, then it follows that the interest of the individual as such is the last purpose for which the two are associated, and from this again it would follow that it is merely a matter of an arbitrary choice of the individual to become a member of the state or not. The state has, however, an entirely different relation toward the individual. As it is objective spirit, the individual man himself has objectivity, truth and morality only insofar as he is a member of it. The union as such is the true content and purpose, and it is the destination of the individuals to lead a generally valid life. Their subsequent satisfaction, activity and behavior has this substantial element of general validity as its basis and as its result.

What place is there for freedom in such a life-conception? The concept of freedom through which the individual human being is granted an absolute to determine aim and purpose of his own activity is not admitted as valid by Hegel. For what could be the advantage if the individual did not derive his aim from the reasonable world of thoughts but made his decision in a completely arbitrary fashion? This, according to Hegel, would really be absence of freedom. An individual of this kind would not be in agreement with his own essence; he would be imperfect. A perfect individual can only want to realize his essential nature, and the ability to do this is his freedom. This essential nature now is embodied in the state. Therefore, if man acts according to the state, he acts in freedom.

The state, in and by itself, is the moral universe, the realization of freedom, and it is reason's absolute purpose that freedom be real. The state is the spirit that has a foothold in the world, whereas in nature it realizes itself only in a self-estranged form as dormant spirit. . . . The fact that the state exists testifies to God's walk through the world. It has its ground in the power of reason that causes its self-realization through the force of will.

Hegel is never concerned with things as such, but always with their reasonable, thoughtful content. As he always searched for thoughts in the field of world contemplation, so he also wanted to see life directed from the viewpoint of thought. It is for this reason that he fought against indefinite ideals of state and society and made himself the champion of the order existing in reality. Whoever dreams of an indefinite ideal for the future believes, in Hegel's opinion, that the general reason has been waiting for him to make his appearance. To such a person it is necessary to explain particularly that reason is already contained in everything that is real. He called Professor Fries, whose colleague he was in Jena and whose successor he became later in Heidelberg, the “General Field Marshal of all shallowness” because he had intended to form such an ideal for the future “out of the mush of his heart.”

The comprehensive defense of the real and existing order has earned Hegel strong reproaches even from those who were favorably inclined toward the general trend of his ideas. One of Hegel's followers, Johann Eduard Erdmann, writes in regard to this point:

The decided preponderance that Hegel's philosophy is granted in the middle of the 1820's over all other contemporary systems has its cause in the fact that the momentary calm that it established in the wake of the wild struggles in the field of politics, religion and church policy, correspond appropriately to a philosophy that has been called—in reprehension by its antagonists, and in praise by its friends—the ‘philosophy of the restoration.’

This name is justified to a much greater extent than its coiners had realized.

[ 22 ] One should not overlook the fact also that Hegel created, through his sense of reality, a view that is in a high degree close and favorable to life. Schelling had meant to provide a view of life in his “Philosophy of Revelation,” but how foreign are the conceptions of his contemplation of God to the immediately experienced real life! A view of this kind can have its value, at most, in festive moments of solitary contemplation when man withdraws from the bustle' of everyday life to surrender to the mood of profound meditation; when he is engaged, so to speak, not in the service of the world, but of God. Hegel, however, had meant to impart to man the all-pervading feeling that he serves the general divine principle also in his everyday activities. For him, this principle extends, as it were, down to the last detail of reality, while with Schelling it withdraws to the highest regions of existence. Because Hegel loved reality and life, he attempted to conceive it in its most reasonable form. He wanted man to be guided by reason every step of his life. In the last analysis he did not have a low estimation of the individual's value. This can be seen from utterances like the following.

The richest and most concrete is the most subjective, and the element that withdraws the most into profundity is the most powerful and all-comprehensive. The highest and most pointed peak is the pure personality, which alone through the absolute dialectic, which is nature, encompasses everything within itself and at the same time, because it develops to the highest stage of freedom and insists on simplicity, which is the first immediacy and generality.

But in order to become “pure personality” the individual has to permeate himself with the whole element of reason and to absorb it into his self, for the “pure personality,” to be sure, is the highest point that man can reach in his development, but man cannot claim this stage as a mere gift of nature. If he has lifted himself to this point, however, the following words of Hegel become true:

That man knows of God is a communal knowledge in the meaning of the ideal community, for man knows of God only insofar as God knows of himself in man. This knowledge is self-consciousness of God, but also a knowledge that God has of man; this knowledge that God has of man is the knowledge that man has of God. The spirit of man, to know of God, is only the spirit of God himself.

According to Hegel, only a man in whom this is realized deserves the name of “personality,” for with him reason and individuality coincide. He realizes God within himself for whom he supplies in his consciousness the organ to contemplate himself. All thoughts would remain abstract, unconscious, ideal forms if they did not obtain living reality in man. Without man, God would not be there in his highest perfection. He would be the incomplete basic substance of the world. He would not know of himself. Hegel has presented this God before his realization in life. The content of the presentation is Hegel's Logic. It is a structure of lifeless, rigid, mute thoughts. Hegel, himself, calls it the “realm of shadows.” It is, as it were, to show God in his innermost, eternal essence before the creation of nature and of the finite spirit. But as self-contemplation necessarily belongs to the nature of God, the content of the “Logic” is only the dead God who demands existence. In reality, this realm of the pure abstract truth does not occur anywhere. It is only our intellect that is capable of separating it from living reality. According to Hegel, there is nowhere in existence a completed first being, but there is only one in eternal motion, in the process of continual becoming. This eternal being is the “eternally real truth in which the eternally active reason is free for itself, and for which necessity, nature and history only serve as forms of manifestation and as vessels of its glory.”

Hegel wanted to show how, in man, the world of thoughts comprehends itself. He expressed in another form Goethe's conception:

When a man's healthy nature acts in its entirety, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful. worthy and cherished whole, when inner harmony fills him with pure and free delight, then the universe, if it could become aware of itself, would rejoice as having reached its destination and would admire the peak of its own becoming and being.

Translated into Hegel's language, this means that when man experiences his own being in his thinking, then this act has not merely an individual personal significance, but a universal one. The nature of the universe reaches its peak in man's self-knowledge; it arrives at its completion without which it would remain a fragment.

[ 22 ] In Hegel's conception of knowledge this is not understood as the seizing of a content that, without the cognitive process, exists somewhere ready-made in the world; it is not an activity that produces copies of the real events. What is created in the act of thinking cognition exists, according to Hegel, nowhere else in the world but only in the act of cognition. As the plant produces a blossom at a certain stage of development, so the universe produces the content of human knowledge. Just as the blossom is not there before its development, so the thought content of the world does not exist before it appears in the human spirit. A world conception in which the opinion is held that in the process of knowledge only copies of an already existing content come into being, makes man into a lazy spectator of the world, which would also be completely there without him. Hegel, however, makes man into the active co-agent of the world process, which would be lacking its peak without him.

[ 23 ] Grillparzer, in his way, characterized Hegel's opinion concerning the relation of thinking and world in a significant epigram:

It may be that you teach us prophetically God's form of thinking. But it's human form, friend, you have decidedly spoiled.

What the poet has in mind here in regard to human thinking is just the thinking that presupposes that its content exists ready-made in the world and means to do nothing more than to supply a copy of it. For Hegel, this epigram contains no rebuke, for this thinking about something else is, according to his view, not the highest, most perfect thinking. In thinking about a thing of nature one searches for a concept that agrees with an external object. One then comprehends through the thought that is thus formed what the external object is. One is then confronted with two different elements, that is, with the thought and with the object. But if one intends to ascend to the highest viewpoint, one must not hesitate to ask the question: What is thought itself? For the solution of this problem, however, there is again nothing but thought at our disposal. In the highest form of cognition, then, thought comprehends itself. No longer does the question of an agreement with something outside arise. Thought deals exclusively with itself. This form of thinking that has no support in any external object appears to Grillparzer as destructive for the mode of thinking that supplies information concerning the variety of things spread out in time and space, and belonging to both the sensual and spiritual world of reality. But no more than the painter destroys nature in reproducing its lines and color on canvas, does the thinker destroy the ideas of nature as he expresses them in their spiritually pure form. It is strange that one is inclined to see in thinking an element that would be hostile to reality because it abstracts from the profusion of the sensually presented content. Does not the painter, in presenting in color, shade and line, abstract from all other qualities of an object? Hegel suitably characterized all such objections with his nice sense of humor. If the primal substance whose activity pervades the world “slips, and from the ground on which it walks, falls into the water, it becomes a fish, an organic entity, a living being. If it now slips and falls into the element of pure thinking—for even pure thinking they will not allow as its proper element—then it suddenly becomes something bad and finite; of this one really ought to be ashamed to speak, and would be if it were not officially necessary and because there is simply no use denying that there is some such thing as logic. Water is such a cold and miserable element; yet life nevertheless feels comfortably at home in it. Should thinking be so much worse an element? Should the absolute feel so uncomfortable and behave so badly in it?”

[ 24 ] It is entirely in Hegel's sense if one maintains that the first being created the lower strata of nature and the human being as well. Having arrived at this point, it has resigned and left to man the task to create, as an addition to the external world and to himself, the thoughts about the things. Thus, the original being, together with the human being as a co-agent, create the entire content of the world. Man is a fellow-creator of the world, not merely a lazy spectator or cognitive ruminator of what would have its being just as well without him.

[ 25 ] What man is in regard to his innermost existence he is through nothing else but himself. For this reason, Hegel considers freedom, not as a divine gift that is laid into man's cradle to be held by him forever after, but as a result toward which he progresses gradually in the course of his development. From life in the external world, from the stage in which he is satisfied in a purely sensual existence, he rises to the comprehension of his spiritual nature, of his own inner world. He thereby makes himself independent of the external world; he follows his inner being. The spirit of a people contains natural necessity and feels entirely dependent on what is moral public opinion in regard to custom and tradition, quite apart from the individual human being. But gradually the individual wrests himself loose from this world of moral convictions that is thus laid down in the external world and penetrates into his own inner life, recognizing that he can develop moral convictions and standards out of his own spirit. Man lifts himself up to the vantage point of the supreme being that rules within him and is the source of his morality. For his moral commandment, he no longer looks to the external world but within his own soul. He makes himself dependent only on himself (paragraph 552 of Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences). This independence, this freedom then is nothing that man possesses from the outset, but it is acquired in the course of historical evolution. World history is the progress of humanity in the consciousness of freedom.

[ 26 ] Since Hegel regards the highest manifestations of the human spirit as processes in which the primal being of the world finds the completion of its development, of its becoming, all other phenomena appear to him as the preparatory stages of this highest peak; the final stage appears as the aim and purpose toward which everything tends. This conception of a purposiveness in the universe is different from the one in which world creation and world government are thought to be like the work of an ingenious technician or constructor of machines, who has arranged all things according to useful purposes. A utility doctrine of this kind was rigorously rejected by Goethe. On February 20th, 1831, he said to Eckermann (compare Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann, Part II):

Man is inclined to carry his usual views from life also into science and, in observing the various parts of an organic being, to inquire after their purpose and use. This may go on for awhile and he may also make progress in science for the time being, but he will come across phenomena soon enough where such a narrow view will prove insufficient and he will be entangled in nothing but contradictions if he does not acquire a higher orientation. Such utilitarian teachers will say that the bull has horns to defend itself with, but there I ask why the sheep have none. Even when they have horns, why are they twisted around the sheep's ears so that they cannot be of any use at all. It is a different thing to say that the bull defends himself with his horns because they are there. The question why is not scientific at all. We fare a little better with the question how, for if I ask the question, ‘How does the bull have horns?’ I am immediately led to the observation of his organization, and this shows me at the same time why the lion has no horns and cannot have any.

Nevertheless, Goethe recognizes, in another sense, a purposeful arrangement in all nature that finally reaches its aim in man and has all its works so ordered, as it were, that he will fulfill his destination in the end. In his essay on Winckelmann, he writes, “For to what avail is all expenditure and labor of suns and planets and moons, of stars and galaxies, of comets and of nebulae, and of completed and still growing worlds, if not at last a happy man rejoices in his existence?” Goethe is also convinced that the nature of all world phenomena is brought to light as truth in and through man (compare what is said in Part 1 Chapter VI). To comprehend how everything in the world is so laid out that man has a worthy task and is capable of carrying it out is the aim of this world conception. What Hegel expresses at the end of his Philosophy of Nature sounds like a philosophical justification of Goethe's words:

In the element of life nature has completed her course and has made her peace as she turns into a higher phase of being. The spirit has thus emerged from nature. The aim of nature is her own death, to break through the crust of immediate sensual existence, to burn as a phoenix in order to emerge from this external garment, rejuvenated as spirit. Nature thus becomes estranged from herself in order that she may recognize her own being, thereby bringing about a reconciliation with herself. . . . The spirit therefore exists before nature as its real purpose; nature originates from the spirit.

This world conception succeeded in placing man so high because it saw realized in man what is the basis of the whole world, as the fundamental force, the primal being. It prepares its realization through the whole gradual progression of all other phenomena but is fulfilled only in man. Goethe and Hegel agree perfectly in this conception. [ 27 ] What Goethe had derived from his contemplative observation of nature and spirit, Hegel expresses through his lucid pure thinking unfolding its life in self-consciousness. The method by which Goethe explained certain natural processes through the stages of their growth and development is applied by Hegel to the whole cosmos. For an understanding of the plant organism Goethe demanded:

Watch how the plant in its growth changes step by step and, gradually led on, transforms from blossoms to fruits.

Hegel wants to comprehend all world phenomena in the gradual progress of their development from the simplest dull activity of inert matter to the height of the self-conscious spirit. In the self-conscious spirit he sees the revelation of the primal substance of the world.

Opening words by Leo Polak: Dear attendees and Mr. Speaker! As the chairman of the local Philosophy Association, I would like to welcome everyone here and believe that I have the right and the duty to make a very brief preliminary remark. We were in fact surprised that the Philosophy Association, a scientific association, organized an evening in the auditorium of the university with Dr. Steiner, whose relationship to philosophy was well known. Some people wanted to see this as a sanction and recognition of the scientific-philosophical value or significance of Dr. Steiner's work. I believe that both sides thought this wrongly. Firstly, our association did not spontaneously invite this evening's speaker from its own ranks, but merely responded to a request from the anthroposophical side to organize such an evening here, and rightly so, as I will have more to say in a few moments. Secondly, organizing this evening does not in any way imply agreement or unanimity with the work of Dr. Steiner. They know that in the same lecture halls here at the university, where, for example, critical philosophy, Kantian philosophy, is read, dogmatic, Thomist philosophy is heard, and rightly so. That is not to say the approval of those who gave rise to it, but purely and exclusively the objective attitude of science itself, which always and everywhere sees and examines everything and retains the good, which always and everywhere says, “audite et alteram partem”. Our philosophical association also wanted to express this idea. We did so in the justified conviction that the speaker this evening also holds exactly the same opinion. We also asked beforehand whether there would be an opportunity to give an account of a dissenting opinion afterwards, and, I might almost say, Dr. Steiner naturally agreed. So he also wanted to apply the “audite et alteram partem”. After these brief but necessary conditions, I ask the speaker to take the floor.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! In the various lectures that I have been privileged to give here in Holland since February 19th, on anthroposophical spiritual science and its practical orientation, my main concern has been to emphasize the practical aspects of these spiritual scientific endeavors. For these spiritual-scientific endeavors seek to accommodate the innumerable souls who, in the broadest circles of life today, long for something that arises out of the facts of this present time.

Today, however, my dear audience, allow me to speak from a completely different point of view. If, on the one hand, the anthroposophical spiritual scientist is condemned to seek their circles in the general public because of its practical approach to life, it is also the case that the roots of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science extend in a very precise way, I believe, into the philosophical foundations of human endeavor. And it is this connection between anthroposophy and philosophical research, with the way of thinking that is philosophical, that I would like to speak to you about today. I will try not to speak in generalizations, but rather to speak in three directions, in the hope that this will shed light on the connections between philosophical research and anthroposophical spiritual knowledge.

Within philosophical research, we recognize a wide variety of problems and problem formulations. Today, I would like to focus mainly on the relationships between anthroposophy and three problem formulations: the epistemological problem, the ontological problem and the ethical problem. It would be tempting, however, to also touch on the aesthetic problem, but that would mean taking up too much of your time.

The epistemological problem, in the way we find it presented today in philosophy in the most diverse forms, is concerned with justifying man's belief in the reality of the external world; it is concerned to show the extent to which we can assume a valid relationship between that which is present within our knowledge in our consciousness and that which we can regard as some kind of objective reality outside ourselves. This problem, as well as numerous others, swings back and forth between dogmatics and skepticism in the history of philosophy, one might almost say as a matter of course. And anyone who is familiar with the history of more recent epistemology knows how extraordinarily easy it is to fall into a kind of skepticism when faced with the epistemological problem. I will have more to say about this later. In any case, here we have something of what must be of particular interest to anthroposophical spiritual science in relation to philosophy: in a certain way, it presents epistemology in a very vivid and very pressing way for human research and knowledge of the limits of knowledge.

The second problem I would like to talk about is the ontological problem. It is much older than the problem of knowledge. It seeks to bring reality – namely insofar as this reality goes beyond the sensory – into consciousness in some way, by means of knowledge, from what man can experience in the entities of consciousness. Now anyone who is familiar with the history of the development of ontology knows that, basically, a very understandable skepticism has entered into the ontological problem since the time that the ontological proof of God's existence has fallen victim to criticism, especially since the criticism of Kantianism regarding this ontological proof of God's existence. Since that time, there has also been little inclination within philosophical research to find something in the ontological that can provide clues for placing oneself in the sphere of reality itself through the development of inner knowledge. So here, too, in a sense, we are approaching a kind of limit, which is probably felt much more clearly in the face of ontology than in the face of many epistemological problems.

With regard to the ethical problem, I would just like to point out in the introduction that, out of a certain – forgive the expression, it is only meant terminologically – philosophical despair, we have come to the so-called value theory in relation to the ethical problem in recent times. But that means basically nothing more than despairing of being able to see through the ethical impulses present in our consciousness in their connection with reality and therefore seeing as based on something that is supposed to have validity in our world view - the value - but which is nevertheless formulated in such a way that one does not want to imagine a certain relationship to reality, to objective being.

I did not want to say anything binding, but only point out certain forms that the three problems have taken and which give reason to intervene in these three problem formulations with anthroposophical spiritual science. Before I can do that, I would like to briefly discuss the methodology of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science here, which I also do in my public lectures. However, I then try to present the things as popularly as possible, which of course has its drawbacks, but in some respects perhaps also some advantages.

I would like to say only this much today about the methodology of anthroposophy: that the entire path of research in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is based on the development of soul forces that already exist in ordinary life, that are also applied in ordinary science, but which are initially obtained from both ordinary life and ordinary science at a certain level, a level to which they are brought by inheritance, by ordinary education and so on. I need not define this stage, to which certain soul-powers are brought, for it is generally known, and what I actually want to say with this will emerge from what I have to communicate about the further development of these soul-powers.

Anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher must, through careful inner soul work, further develop certain soul powers beyond those applied in ordinary life and in ordinary science. He must first further develop what is popularly known as the ability to remember, which underlies our memory, beyond what it is in ordinary life. The method of systematically ordered meditation and concentration, as I have described it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', and in other writings of mine in the anthroposophical literature, serves this purpose. The essence of this further development of the ability to remember is based on the fact that one forms ideas that can easily be overlooked. This fact, that one demands easily comprehensible ideas in the spiritual scientific method, has its profound significance. For nothing may be used for this further development of soul forces that could somehow be a reminiscence of life or that could somehow have an autosuggestive or even suggestive effect. Therefore, it is necessary to keep the images used in meditation and concentration as simple and straightforward as possible. It is not important that such images have a truth value in the usual sense, because they are not intended to point to any reality at all. They are only to be used to develop inner soul forces. Therefore, it is important that we not be deterred by the questionable character of the relationship between a representation and reality; whether the representation is fantastic, whether the representation is somehow made quite arbitrarily, is not the point, but rather that we can survey it in terms of its entire content, so to speak, like a mathematical representation, a geometric representation. Then it is a matter of mustering the strength to go through a certain period of time – this must be learned, at first one can only do it for a very short time, little by little one acquires a certain inner practice – then it is a matter of learning to rest with the whole intensity of the soul on such ideas.

Now a misunderstanding can arise right away. Because if it is done wrongly, if all the things that I have carefully compiled in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” are not observed, then the inner state of mind that is absolutely necessary for the spiritual scientific method to work properly will not be achieved. This state of soul must be exactly the same as when solving problems in geometry or in mathematics in general. In the same way that one is fully aware of one's will at work in the soul when constructing figures, when searching for any algebraic or other relationships, one must remain fully aware of the entire content of consciousness while resting on easily comprehensible ideas. It is therefore very important that anyone who is to become a spiritual researcher in an impeccable way should actually have at least a certain degree of mathematical training, and to such an extent that he has in particular acquired the way of thinking about mathematical problems.

Perhaps I may refer to a personal experience, the following one. I always think, when I am dealing with spiritual-scientific problems, which sometimes become quite difficult for one, because they often slip away from one when one already has them – I always think of the event that helped me decades ago, perhaps forty years ago, to get ahead on the path that I am about to characterize. It was the moment when I was able to grasp the strange fact in synthetic geometry for the first time – we don't want to dwell on the justification of this assumption now – that, based on the assumptions of synthetic geometry, the one infinitely distant point of a straight line on the right side is the same as the infinitely distant point on the left side. It was not so much this mathematical fact, but the whole way of thinking, how this assumption arises from the prerequisites of synthetic geometry, of projective geometry. I am only pointing this out here to draw attention to how the same state of mind, the same way of letting consciousness work, must take place in what I call meditation and concentration.

If one now does such inner soul work for a sufficiently long time — it depends entirely on the inner destiny of the person whether it takes a short time, two or three years, or much longer, until the first inner results of this further development of certain soul abilities occur, But out of the ordinary power of memory, by which we can conjure up past events before our soul, through the further development of this power of memory, a new soul power actually arises, a soul power of which we had no idea before. This soul power is developed memory, and yet it is quite different from ordinary memory. This soul power enables us to link certain states of our consciousness with other ideas than we usually do. In his everyday life, a person lives in the alternating states between waking and sleeping. We are, of course, familiar with the various physiological hypotheses that have been put forward about them, but these are of little interest to us here. What interests us is the state of ordinary consciousness. This ordinary consciousness is dulled, even paralyzed, to the point of complete dullness when we fall asleep, and returns to its bright state when we wake up. Of course, the human being does not arise spiritually and mentally when he wakes up; he must exist in some way between falling asleep and waking up. The fact is that during this time he does not use his senses, does not use his will organization, and does not use the mind that combines sensory perceptions. I will not go into the interruption of sleep by dreams, that would be taking it too far.

The person who has trained their memory in the way described is in exactly the same state in relation to their physical organism. When this trained memory awakens in them, they do not use their ordinary senses in the states in which they induce this memory. He knows how to switch them off, he knows how to switch off everything that is switched off during sleep. But his consciousness is not dulled. He lives in a conscious state, in a consciousness that is filled with content, and he knows that this content is of a spiritual-soul nature. Just as we otherwise receive soul-content in ordinary life through our senses, through the combining mind, so there is soul-content when the spiritual scientist makes use of the developed faculty of memory. Just as we have a sensory environment around us through our physical organism, so the spiritual scientist has a truly supersensible environment that permeates our sensory environment all around him. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a fact of the developing experience that occurs in the spiritual researcher; and any conceit, as if one were dealing with some kind of illusion, is simply excluded by the whole context of life in which one is placed by virtue of the method, which has only been outlined to you in principle, by which one reaches such a developed consciousness. One learns to recognize what it means to have consciousness in the body-free state.

I would like to show you, so that you can see that anthroposophical spiritual science does not speak from some vague, nebulous realm, but from concrete facts, to explain something very specific: our ordinary ability to remember, which is precisely what is needed to recall what we have once experienced. When this ability to remember is further developed in the way I have just described, then it becomes something else, and that is the peculiar thing. It is indeed developed memory, but there is no actual memory; the ability to remember has been transformed into an immediate perception of the spiritual, supersensible environment. This can be seen from the fact that once one has a spiritual-supernatural fact before one and can also characterize it, and one simply wants to recall this spiritual-supernatural state into consciousness again later from memory, one cannot do so immediately. It does not come up directly from consciousness. The ability to remember has been developed, and yet one does not remember exactly what one experiences through this developed ability to remember. You have to do something completely different if you want to see a spiritual state that you have once had again.

You then have to re-establish the conditions through which you called the fact before you. You can remember everything that led you to the moment of seeing the fact, then you can have the fact again, but you cannot simply reconstruct this fact from memory, as is the case with an ordinary memory. Therefore it is true when one speaks of the paradox: the one who writes his books as a spiritual researcher forgets the contents; he writes down the spiritual facts, so to speak, he takes them in, but he forgets them. Nor can he repeat a lecture from memory a second time, but he must recall the conditions under which he was placed before the vision the first time, then he can have the vision again. It is just as one can only have a perception again, if it is just a perception, by approaching the fact. Memory only gives one an image. The developed faculty of memory must simply go back to the event in the spiritual-supernatural world in order to be able to experience it again. This is, in a sense, the first step in entering the supernatural world, in developing the faculty of memory in a certain way so that it becomes a kind of supernatural faculty of intuition. In this way, one gradually comes to truly recognize the spiritual and soul as such, the spiritual and soul that underlies the human being, and the spiritual and soul that surrounds us in the outer world, which is also the basis of the facts and laws of nature.

And I want to characterize a second soul power in its further development. I believe that the development of this soul power as a power of knowledge must justifiably evoke even more contradiction than the development of the memory, because one does not want to accept this second soul power as a power of knowledge at all, it is the power of love. Of course, my dear audience, love is certainly considered to be something subjective. It is also in ordinary life. But if you apply certain spiritual research methods to the ability to love, as I have just described for the ability to remember, then something else emerges from the power of love, which is then also a power of knowledge of the supersensible world. The point is to first become aware of how you are actually undergoing a transformation every moment of your life, how you become a different person. You only have to look honestly into the depths of your soul and you will realize that what you are today was something different ten or twenty years ago. And you will have to say to yourself: In the vast majority of things, one has left oneself to the stream of life, one has had very little influence on the developmental conditions that have made one different from year to year, from decade to decade.

The spiritual researcher must move on to action in this area. He must, so to speak, take the development of his entire soul into his own hands through self-discipline. He must give himself certain directions, without thereby losing the naivety and the elementary of a full life. He must give himself certain directions and must be able to pursue what is formed out of him in metamorphosis, in careful self-observation. In this way, a certain soul power, which is otherwise latent, is drawn out of the depths of the soul. And love, which in ordinary life is bound to the physical organism, becomes independent of this physical organism in a similar way to soul power, just as the developed ability to remember does, except that the developed ability to remember conjures up images and imaginations of a supersensible world before our soul, whereas the developed power of love enables us to inwardly participate in what is presented to us in these images. Objectification of one's own soul life, absorption in objectivity, is the precondition for the knowledge of the supersensible and is achieved by developing the ability to love in this way. Through the development of the ability to remember, we attain the possibility of developing higher worlds of imagination, worlds of imagination about the supersensible. Through the development of the ability to love, we attain the ability to experience the inner reality, the essentiality of the supersensible.

I have only briefly sketched out what actually leads to the knowledge of a spiritual world, to which we belong with our actual inner human nature and in which we find the clues to the knowledge of the eternal nature of this human being. The real knowledge about the question of immortality is achieved on the path I have just characterized. In this way we come to know that part of us which passes through birth and death; we learn to recognize those worlds in which we live as [spiritual beings] before we descend to a birth or to a conception, and into which we also descend when we pass through the gate of death. But I will only hint at this; a more detailed explanation can be found in the literature, it would lead too far now.

Now, by means of such a method of spiritual research, two wrong paths of the human soul are, firstly, seen in the right way; but secondly, the conditions for avoiding them are created. The first thing is that in this way one gains a real insight into what memory actually is, by developing it. We need this power of remembrance; if we want to keep our ordinary life intact, we must be able to conjure up before our soul the images of our experiences from a certain point in our childhood that lies very early. We get to know this ability to remember through the insights I have just described, in that we say to ourselves: it actually prevents us from looking into our inner being. The mystic wants to look into the depths of the soul through direct experience. The spiritual researcher studies the dangers associated with such mystical introspection. It is a peculiarity of the soul life that what one has been experiencing since childhood between birth and death can not only arise in its original form at any given moment in consciousness, but that it can arise in the most diverse met amorphoses, so that there is the possibility that some experience, perhaps quite trivial, may gradually transform itself in the subconscious so that it later enters consciousness as a sublime-looking event. The mystic then perhaps believes he is immersing himself in some divine substratum of the soul and the world, while he has nothing but a transformed memory of life. The exact knowledge of the ability to remember leads us to avoid the mystical paths in the right way. Because if you have developed the ability to remember in the way I have described, you naturally remain a perfectly rational person. You only use this developed ability to remember when you want to. But if you have developed this ability to remember, you can really see through the ordinary memory. One can then take the path that the mystic only believes he can take. The mystic dwells in the same region of the soul where the memory is also present; basically, he sees only sensual, transformed memories. But the one who knows the developed memory, he, so to speak, sees through the ordinary memory region. Then, however, he does not get to see what a Tauler, a Mechthild of Magdeburg or anyone else believed they saw mystically, but he gets to see, but now from the inside, the material organs of the human organism. That is the real way, my dear attendees, to get to know people physically from the inside.

The mystic gets to know nothing else, so to speak, but the soul smoke, the soul mist that rises from the boiling internal organs. That is what needs to be said, that it is not at all the case that mystical raptures are present when one comes to self-knowledge through a developed memory. Rather, self-knowledge radiates into the real human organization, which can of course be recognized from the outside through anatomy and physiology, but its inner essence cannot be seen through. Here, my dear attendees, we reveal those things where we see the inner being of man in an inner connection with the surrounding nature in its various kingdoms. Only when we get to know the inner workings of the human organization in this way do we get to know the kind of physiology that shows the relationship between the various organs in their healthy and diseased states and what is present in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and in the other natural spheres and kingdoms.

This is where it is possible to internalize our medicine, which has advanced so far through external research, to build the bridge between pathology and a therapy based on a real understanding of the human being and the world; last spring I presented to doctors and medical students at our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach about such a deepening of medicine. And it is precisely in this field that one can show how the individual sciences can in turn be fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This was also shown for the other sciences by the university courses in Dornach last fall, which were given by thirty scholars in various fields of science, as well as by artists, by practical people, by commercial people. They showed how anthroposophical spiritual science can enrich the individual sciences by adding to what has led to such research triumphs in recent times, to what external research can offer, that which can be seen inwardly. For just as I have described, that through the real knowledge of the ability to remember, through its further development, the knowledge of the human being truly comes about, so too does a spiritual-supernatural knowledge of nature come about in this way.

The other pitfall to be avoided, which can be seen through with such further developed cognitive abilities, is that of dialectical-philosophical speculation, which is of course present to a certain extent within our scientific research, or at least our thinking. We research by observing phenomena and by causing phenomena through our own experiments. But we do not just apply our combining mind to it, for example in the methodical sense of doing natural science, which remains phenomenology, but we apply it to extrapolate beyond the empirical, and then we arrive at those constructions that are given in atomistics, in molecular theory. It is not the intention here to criticize the significance and justification of molecular and atomic theory, which has been confirmed by experiment. But that which, to a certain extent, is present as the supporting element of natural scientific phenomena in the form of atomistic thinking, is seen through in its unreasonableness when the second power of cognition, that which arises out of the power of love, is developed in the way described. Then we learn to recognize that we must remain within the outer empirical-sensory environment in the world of phenomena. Further penetration then depends on whether we actually get the spiritual-supersensible, and not just a small-scale translation of the sensory world of atoms.

Here, my dear audience, I would like to draw your attention to something that cannot be ignored, especially if you are a spiritual researcher. In philosophical epistemology, we speak of having sensory impressions. We speak of the quite legitimate research results of modern physiology, through which one wants to form an idea of the formation of an objective fact unknown to us, which then continues to the sensory organ. We speak of what takes place in the sensory organ, what possibly takes place in the corresponding brain sphere, and so on. In this way, one arrives at pushing the epistemological problem to the physiological problem in a certain sense, but one considers this problem at every single point in the world. One wants to go from a single phenomenon to what is behind it. One proceeds in exactly the same way as if one wanted to conclude something from a single letter on a written page. You read the whole page; the context of the letters on the whole page reveals the reason why the individual letter is as it is. In this way, we also remain within the world of phenomena. We do not speculate about the individual phenomena in terms of something underlying them, such as a “thing in itself.” Rather, we consider the context of the phenomena, reading the reality of the phenomena to certain totalities, one might say, studying them. This then leads us to that which is expressed spiritually in the phenomena, and can only be grasped spiritually with the supersensible powers of knowledge of which I have spoken.

In this way, I tried to penetrate deeper into the world through a kind of further development of the cognitive abilities of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. However, this also presents the epistemological problem to anthroposophy in a very specific way. This epistemological problem, as I have just mentioned, suffers from such things. We study in a certain way that which is supposed to be unknown to us. We then pursue it to the sense, to the brain. We come to the point where we find no transition to what actually lives in the soul. And if I — naturally leaving out much that could be said, but which is certainly well known to those present from the history of more recent epistemology — if I just pick out the most important things, so it might be the following: The conscientious epistemologist comes to the conclusion that he no longer allows the possibility, within the world of representation – on closer analysis, however, not only the world of representation arises, but also a part of the world of sensation – but let us stick to the world of representation – to relate the representations, as they live inwardly through logic, psychology, to some actual reality or to something that he would like to take as an actual reality. It comes about, so to speak, that one feels very strongly the pictorial character of the life of imagination in the empirical fact; to feel it so strongly that one sees no bridge from this experienced pictorial character of the life of imagination over into reality. Therefore, many of the newer epistemologists have given up trying to build a bridge from the life of imagination over into reality. They appeal to the will, to the will, which they felt to be the elementary point of contact with things; for them, the will has become the thing by which man is actually authorized to speak of the reality of the external world, whereas he should never actually be able to derive the reality of an external world from the world of imagination.

I believe that in this area of epistemology, an enormous amount of conscientious work has been done in recent times, and that ingenious things have come to light; the literature is indeed one of the richest. But I do not believe that one can recognize, by immersing oneself in this literature with a completely open mind, that one is standing on quite uncertain ground within this epistemology and that one cannot build a bridge from something in the soul to some reality that can reasonably be assumed. The world of imagination – if one can grasp it, it shows – really does have the character of a picture. No matter how significant the conclusions we arrive at in this pictorial realm of the life of imagination may be, we cannot escape from the pictorial to arrive at any kind of reality.

On the other hand, I do not believe that the way out of approaching reality through the will can be fully realized epistemologically. Because, dear attendees, in the imagination we are at least completely filled with the full clarity of day-consciousness; in the world of imagination we overlook exactly that which is happening, at least in the imagination, pictorially. In the activity of the will, we are asleep to a certain extent. We do not experience the activity of the will inwardly; it is not transparent to us. Therefore, it was particularly striking to me that a recent epistemologist who rejected the justification of the objective reality of the world of imagination and who assumed the activity of the will in order to establish a reality, Dilthey, that he did not refer to the experiences of the adult, but of the still dreaming child. It is indeed the case that we never come to a full awakening in relation to the actual inner essence of the will in our lives between birth and death if we do not develop the ability to love in the way I have shown. But when that happens, the whole inner soul condition changes. Then one comes to understand the reason why our imaginative life is essentially pictorial.

If one wants to grasp something like the developed capacity for knowledge, one must be prepared for a completely different state of mind. Then, of course, the usual conditions for understanding are not present. Understanding is much more an experience, an immersion in things. But the person must fulfill this prerequisite in order to penetrate into the matter at all. If one now approaches with the developed ability to remember, with one's soul experience — leaving aside bodily functions — and observes what, because of its pictorial nature, prevents the epistemologist from building a bridge to it, then one finds out why the life of imagination is essentially pictorial. One then examines precisely, but now with the developed ability to remember, what the relationship actually is between the imagination and the external, empirical world. And one finds: there is basically no relationship at all between what arises in us as an image and what is, so to speak, reflected back as images of our imagination when our organism is affected by the external world. There is no inner relationship at all between these images. There is a relationship between the content of the images and what is in the external world, but not between the essence, the being of this world of imagination and what is externally the environment. We are confronted with an environment and an inner world that are essentially distinct from one another. One can be reflected in the other, but they are different. Through the developed power of memory, one learns to recognize what actually lives in the imagination, which is essentially bound to the main human organization. It is not what comes from the outside world, which we can look at with our senses, but rather the echo of our prenatal or pre-conception spiritual being. That which essentially underlies our imaginative life is like the penetration of a shadow of our prenatal existence into our existence between birth and death. We think essentially with the powers with which we lived in the spiritual world before our conception.

This analysis is arrived at through the developed faculty of memory; hence the lack of affinity between what is actually the echo of a completely different world and what surrounds us in the external world. It is only in the course of our lives that we establish the relationship between what we bring with us from the prenatal world and what we perceive through our senses. This, ladies and gentlemen, becomes a fact. And now the epistemological problem no longer presents itself before our soul as a mere formality, but now it presents itself, so to speak, like the shadow of a very real world of facts. We learn to recognize what we actually want through conceptual cognition as human beings. Through this conceptual cognition, we want to bring two worlds into concordance: the prenatal purely spiritual world and the postnatal sensual world. The purely spiritual world dismisses us with a question, the sensual world gives us the answer.

I first tried to present this development of the human being in relation to truth in a philosophical way in my small epistemological work “Truth and Science”, where I tried to show how the grasping of reality is not a mere formal, but how man first stands vis-a-vis reality as a half, as a something that is made by himself as something not quite real; how he then acquires knowledge, especially in scientific work. That was purely scientific, philosophical-formal work based on Kantianism, an epistemology that then had to be supplemented by what I have just presented, so that light is shed by the recognition of the supersensible in methodology with regard to this supersensible, in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are some highlights with regard to the epistemological problem. This epistemological problem came to my mind particularly 30 years ago when I devoted myself to the study of the problem of freedom. I will just summarize in a few sentences what I explained in my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1892. I do not want to define freedom now, but just point out how it lives in everyone. It would be impossible to understand free actions in any way if the basis for those free actions were available to us as the result of an external, physical-sensory reality or as the result of an internal, organic reality. Only because we have images in our life of ideas, images that, as it were, mirror our prenatal existence as mirror images do not have reality but mirror what is in front of the mirror, only because such images, for which there is no external reality in relation to their essence, provide the impulses for our free actions; only because of this are free actions possible. If free acts were not based on pictorial impulses, they could not be free acts. The fact that a truly real epistemology leads us precisely to the pictorial character of the life of imagination, and in particular to the pictorial character of pure thinking, makes it possible to base a real philosophy of freedom on such an epistemology.

Now, my dear audience, how has the ontological problem been brought to skepticism? The fact that in the course of human development, which I have shown in relation to philosophy in my two-volume book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, humanity has increasingly lost the inner experience of reality, that humanity has virtually moved on to the pictorial character of conceptualized experience. Why did the ontological proof of the existence of God become invalid in a certain age?

In fact, if one studies the true history of philosophy, one finds that this refutation of the ontological proof of God's existence would have had no value at all for older times, because in those times, not only was the existence of God the existence of God with ontological proofs, but rather, one inwardly experienced the divine in the concepts, and by letting the concepts run dialectically, a reality lived in this dialectical process. This reality was lost inwardly more and more. That is the meaning of the development of the ego in humanity: that more and more the inner connection with reality was lost, so that finally the very theory of knowledge became necessary, which wanted to build a bridge from the non-existing, but merely pictorial concept to external reality. In ontology, this occurs at a higher level. We have mere dialectics instead of the dialectic full of content, instead of the real process, which lived as a supersensible process in the world of concepts. Our ontology – we have almost none anymore, but the one that still remained in older philosophers – is, I would like to say, the filtered dialectical product of an old, inner experience; inner experience that has become mere concept, mere conceptual web.

Now, what I have just characterized as the experience of a supersensible world through the developed powers of knowledge, leads one, as I have already mentioned, to ultimately rising to recognize the simultaneously real, for example, behind natural phenomena. The enrichment of therapy through spiritual science is based on the fact that what lives spiritually and soulfully in natural phenomena can be related to the recognized inner organs of the human being. At the same time, ontology takes on meaning again because the external and the spiritual and soul-like can be seen through objectively. So that what humanity, as humanity becoming free, has felt towards ontology is a kind of intermediate stage. In earlier times, through an instinctive experience of the concepts, reality was in the experience of the concepts. Then this was lost, had to be lost in the process of educating humanity to freedom, to life in pure concepts. For that is what it means to experience freedom: to be able to experience pure image concepts and to act accordingly. Now we are again faced with the possibility of giving ontology a content through the visions of the simultaneously spiritual-supersensible.

Dearly beloved, I have thus pointed out to you two fields of supersensible vision: that which, as it were, precedes our birth, and that which is the supersensible present at the same time.

And a third sphere reveals itself to man when, through a developed psychology, he first looks at what is not his imaginative faculty, but his will; the will and a part - I expressly say a part - of the feeling nature. These spheres, they also lie so far below the threshold of our waking consciousness, as our nocturnal experiences lie below this threshold for the ordinary consciousness. If one analyzes the facts of the soul without prejudice, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that the same intensity of inner experience that one sees in the dullness of sleep consciousness is also seen in the experience of what is actually the effect of the will in us.

A careful analysis of consciousness, which has been carried out by numerous psychologists, shows that the human being first experiences ideas of what he should want and what he should do. He does not then experience the whole intermediate stage, where what is imagined passes over into the organism of the will. Then he experiences the other end of this will life, he experiences the transition of his will into the outer deed; he looks at what is happening through him. What lies between these two extremes, that is experienced by man with exactly the same subdued consciousness as he has in deep sleep. The emotional life is not experienced with the same intensity as the imaginative life either, but with the intensity of the dream life. But what is important now is to look at how the actual life of the will is experienced with the dullness of the life of sleep. We not only sleep in time and wake in time, but also while we are awake, we sleep with a part of our being, with our volitional being. What makes us sleep in relation to our volitional being, the reason for this, becomes apparent when knowledge is developed in the way I have explained. If one succeeds in developing the ability to love to the point where one experiences the supersensible, then there arises as a special experience the living over into the process of the will, which otherwise does not enter into consciousness, which otherwise remains dull. One does indeed come to know not only the organs of the body, as I explained earlier, but one also comes to see that part of the will that is otherwise overslept in waking, in the same way as one otherwise looks at an external fact through the senses. One arrives at a self-knowledge of the will. And through this, my dear audience, the ethical world is integrated into the rest of the world, into the world in which natural necessity otherwise prevails. In this way, we learn to recognize something that is still extremely difficult to describe, even for today's ideas.

When we consider the content of our consciousness, we can ascribe certain intensities to it in its individual parts. We can then – this can be said with particular reference to certain senses – we can then go down to intensity zero with regard to certain contents of consciousness. But we can also – and this is usually given little attention, because the necessity for it only emerges in spiritual research – we can also go down from an objectivity with regard to the intensive experience of consciousness, we have to go into the negative. Yes, it turns out to be necessary not just to speak of matter, but to speak of matter, to speak of empty space and of negative matter; thus not just to speak of empty space, but to speak of emptied space, to bring the intensity below absolute zero. This is a concept that necessarily arises for the spiritual researcher when he attempts to make a transition from the essence of the life of thinking to the essence of the life of will and the relationship of this life of will to the physical-organic functions. If we imagine by name — it could also be the other way around —, if we imagine the processes that take place between the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily when imagining, if we imagine these processes as positive, then we must imagine the will processes as negative; to a certain extent, if one represents a pressure effect, we must imagine the other as a suction effect. These are more or less comparative ideas, but they lead to reality. I may briefly characterize this reality.

We usually imagine, through today's psychology, which has become more and more abstract, that there is an interaction between the processes of the brain, that is, the nervous organism, and between the soul and spiritual processes. Certainly, such an interaction exists. But the nature of this interaction presents itself before the developed ability to remember, as I have described it. That which actually comes to life in the act of imagining is not based on the progressive growth of the nervous organism, but rather, quite the opposite, on the wearing away of the nervous organism. Once this has been properly understood, then spiritual science will be followed on this point. I can only sketch it out here, but you will find detailed descriptions of the matter everywhere in our literature. Once this has been understood, you will say to yourself: you are deceiving yourself if you assume a parallelism between spiritual and mental processes and brain processes in the usual way; a deception that I will illustrate with an example.

Let us assume that someone walks over a soft road surface, a car drives over the soft ground, impressions are formed, footprints, wheel tracks. A being from Mars or wherever could now come and speculate about these impressions and say: under the surface of the ground there is a certain force that causes these impressions by pulling down and pushing up. There is no power there that causes these impressions, but they have been caused by a person who has walked over them, or a wagon that has driven over them. In what the spiritual-soulful is acting out, it simply finds a soil, a resistant soil on the physical organization, makes impressions, and in fact it even destroys the organic substance. So the organic substance is worn away. The organic processes are regressed. And by making room for the spiritual in this way, the soul penetrates. If we imagine the process as positive, then the will process is the negative, then the will process promotes organic growth, albeit in a roundabout way. But just as the process of imagination continues in the organism as a process of removal, as a process of destruction, and to a certain extent as a process of excretion of organic substance, so too does the will lie in the increased, more lively construction of the organic. This is the effect of willpower. In this way, we learn to see the interaction between the physical and the spiritual in a positive and concrete way. But through this we also learn to recognize how we not only have a nature around us that contains natural laws, but just as the will integrates itself into our own organism as a growth-promoting, growth-stimulating force, so the spiritual-soul element that we are aware of in our consciousness as ethical impulses integrates itself into the whole of nature around us.

In this way, through this supersensible knowledge, we find not only values, or something that merely corresponds to utility, but we actually find within the world that surrounds us, on the one hand, natural necessity and, on the other, objective ethical necessity. Ethical impulses are actually integrated into objective world existence. And what comes out of it – I would have to describe the process at length, but for now I can only characterize it by way of comparison – what comes out of it is this: we live in the world of natural necessity. The moral ideals arise within us. It is like with a plant. It develops leaves, flowers, and in the center of the flower, the seed of next year's plant. Leaves and flowers fall away, but the germ, which is inconspicuous, remains and develops into next year's plant.

From this point of view, which I have just discussed methodologically, the relationship between natural necessity, everything that surrounds us as natural necessity, and what arises in us as ethical impulses appears as follows. Natural necessity will undergo a process that cannot be understood merely as natural necessity, as Clausius, for example, wants to understand his entropy of the universe. Rather, there is a process of mortifying that which appears physical to us today, and how the germ lives in this physical [that which ethical impulses are] to the physical world of a distant future. And we come to realize that our physical world is the realized ethical world of a distant past, and our ethical impulses of the present are the germs of a physical world of the future. The ethical problem, understood anthroposophically, is part of the cosmological problem. Through this anthroposophical view, the human being is in turn incorporated into the whole cosmos.

This has important social implications. The ethical ideal, the ethical impulse, is intimately connected with the social impulse. The social impulses will only take hold of humanity in the right way again, they will only lead us out of the chaos of the present, when it is grasped that what man does here on earth is not something that disappears like smoke and fog, which is like ideology based on purely external, purely economic processes, but what has a cosmological significance so that, in fact, with a variant, the Christian word is true, which every person can pronounce, can repeat after the Christian master: “Heaven and earth will pass away” – that is, what surrounds us as the physical world will pass away – “but my word,” that is, the logos that lives in me also as the ethical, “will not pass away.” It creates a future world. Thus, that which lives in the human being expands into a consciousness that in turn integrates the human being into the cosmology of world evolution.

I just wanted to show you today, dear attendees, what the relationship is between anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and the epistemological problem; how, in fact, what makes this epistemological problem so difficult for today's philosophy, in that on the one hand, cannot get out of the image character of the life of imagination, and on the other hand, cannot really do anything with the will because it cannot be brought out into the bright clarity of consciousness, how this problem, when grasped anthroposophically, places the human being in reality. Because that which he was in reality before his birth or conception takes on the character of an image in our life between birth and death. In this way, what is in the human being in the form of an image is linked to the external reality that he experiences and to which he himself builds the bridge. If one looks between two realities — the external environment and the internal world of ideas —, one can basically come to no solution to the problem, because one is dealing with a [shading] in the actual impulses of the inner world of ideas, an influence of that which was our reality before birth.

The ontological problem is posed anew by the fact that the human being experiences real spirituality again, that is, not only thinks dialectically, but by thinking dialectically, the spiritual-substantial, the essential is within this dialectical thinking.

The ethical problem, viewed anthroposophically, places the human being within the whole of cosmic becoming. It elevates what we do as individuals to a world fact by showing that what is ultimately necessary for a comprehensive world view is that in what happens in a person, there is not only something that is enclosed by his skin, but that, apart from the fact that he experiences it subjectively, it is also a subjective fact, it is also an objective event for the existence of the world. We live the existence of the world with us. Something lives in us, it is our subjective experience, but at the same time it is an objective experience of the world. By connecting the ethical impulses in this way with the cosmological existence, the cosmic experience of existence, the human being transcends death in the same way as he transcends birth in the other way. By understanding the powers of imagination, one comes to understand existence before birth. By understanding the will, one gets to know the germinal forces in the human organization, that which cannot be lived out at all until death, that which lives in us as the germ lives in the plant.

And from there, the path, which I cannot even hint at because of the shortness of time, is to recognize the immortality problem, namely, life beyond death. We have become so unclear about the problem of immortality in recent times because we cannot see it properly by the hand of the other problem. We do not even have a word for this other problem in ordinary language. We talk about immortality, but we do not talk about being unborn, about unbornness. Immortality belongs to the realm of the unborn. Until we are able to think and talk about being unborn in the same way as we do about immortality, we will only grope in matters of faith and not come to certain knowledge.

Dear attendees, I am well aware of how much can be objected to what I have been allowed to explain today. Believe me when I say that the spiritual researcher raises the objections that can be raised, because he is aware of the difficult and questionable areas his research enters into. But perhaps these arguments have shown that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, insofar as it emanates from the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, is not concerned with wild fantasy, nebulous mysticism, or some kind of enthusiastic theosophy, but that it has to do with something that, at least in its striving, wants to continue on the path of serious, even exact science. To what extent this can be achieved today, I cannot say. But serious research is being pursued precisely because the tremendous scientific advances of recent times point not only to themselves, but at the same time beyond themselves. It is my heartfelt conviction that today's good natural scientist is not driven by the results of natural science research, but by what a natural scientist does with mind and soul, into the development of these soul abilities, which are already applied unconsciously in natural science research. He is driven to consciously develop these abilities and is then drawn into a truly concrete grasp of the spirit. A concrete grasp of the spirit, just as science is a concrete grasp of nature, of objective natural facts, that is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to achieve.

Discussion

Leo Polak: Since no one else wants to take the floor, I would like to do so myself. After we have heard about anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I would also like to hear something from the other side, I would like to say, from the purely philosophical side here, especially from the epistemological side. Because what pleased me most this evening was at least the striving to also give an epistemological foundation for this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as Dr. Steiner also tried to do in his works, which I am familiar with for the most part.

But then it became clear to me that there really is a fundamental contradiction, I would even say a contradiction, between anthroposophy and philosophy. In my opinion, this contradiction is not based on what Dr. Steiner founded it on. He explained somewhere that the real fact of the matter is that it is not philosophy that contradicts anthroposophy, but rather that philosophers, and especially Kant, do not understand philosophy. Now I believe that the whole attitude of philosophy towards anthroposophy is different from the opposite. I would like to say, even if it sounds a little immodest: philosophy is a little more modest; it will never dare to say, “This clairvoyant knowledge does not exist.” It will not dare to say that if Dr. Steiner believes and thinks that by developing certain soul forces he can expand memory or expand it to see a supersensible world, to see the higher world of ideas, to think with prenatal spiritual powers, and what else we have heard here, to purely spiritual in this sense, and when he thus directly beholds the supersensible non-ego, when he beholds what occurred before birth and after death, then we can simply say: We do not see this, we lack this cognitive faculty, in principle, not gradually, but in principle, and so we have to remain silent about it. The only thing we can critically note here is that it is a mistake to speak here of a mere extension of the known forces. Each time, the familiar force is not expanded, but transformed into and transferred into something that is fundamentally opposed to it. Remembering is always only remembering what one has experienced oneself. When remembering becomes beholding, when it becomes supersensible, it becomes something fundamentally different, an insight into something that is no longer and never can be a power of remembrance.

It is exactly the same with love. We do not believe for a moment, at least I am convinced, that it is a lack of my ability to love that I cannot immediately merge with that objectivity in which Dr. Steiner can, that I cannot experience the inner reality of the supersensible and therefore also solve the question of the supersensible when a before and after is experienced. I do not believe that, that is the only thing I can say; and what I can definitely say is that something new is being achieved here, and not just an expansion of our powers of knowledge and love.

But if epistemology and philosophy do not want to and cannot presume to pass judgment on spiritual powers, about which they themselves absolutely do not dispose, do not know and even cannot think, a seeing of a non-ego, then on the other hand, where the spiritual scientist turns to epistemology and wants to judge and condemn epistemological questions, she feels obliged to let her criticism be heard and to say: It is possible that clairvoyance has penetrated into the core of matter, even if epistemology does not recognize this whole matter as reality; this vision may be able to enter into the inner being of matter, but it has not entered into the inner being of epistemology; it has only been able to see epistemology and especially critique, the Kantian one, from the outside, without ever being inside.

It is clear that it would be taking this far too far if one were to expand on this with specific reasons. I would then need a whole evening here, just as the previous speaker would have needed this and more to express his view on epistemology. But there are some words that I just want to touch on briefly because they are of the utmost and greatest interest in principle. In the book 'Philosophy of Freedom', for example, Dr. Steiner particularly addresses the problem of knowledge, and perhaps the most characteristic sentence in the book is that, from the concept of knowledge as we have defined it, we cannot speak of limits to knowledge. Well, there could hardly be a more fundamental contradiction than that between critical epistemology, which I have the honor of representing here at the university and on which I give my lectures, and a statement like this, which rejects every limit of knowledge that the exact research work of so many of the greatest thinkers, and especially Kant, has taught us, could hardly be more fundamentally opposed than this between a theory that denies the limits of knowledge and one that establishes them. And this denial of origin is also the basis of the rest of the antagonism. Dr. Steiner has criticized critical idealism in this book and elsewhere, but he always remained outside the actual problem, never even touching on the essence of actual Kantianism. He believes that the phenomenon of nature is the nature of Kantianism, for which every nature, every material world, for example, not only exists as a physical world for Dr. Steiner, but there is also an ethereal body outside our physical body , we also have an astral body, we not only have the one spirit, but also four kinds of spirit, so to speak, which are then named with these Indian words: manas, budhi, atma and so on. But the physical body is denied by Kantianism as an independently existing reality; it is merely a phenomenon of the thing in itself. We also heard that day that one had even come to speculate, to a “thing in itself,” as if that were the most unreasonable thing one could do. And here, no less a figure than Kant said of the denial of this thing in itself: “I have shown with all my criticism that what we perceive, the things of the world of appearances, are not things in themselves, but appearances. That is, as is well known, the sum total of Kant's entire critique of knowledge: it would be incorrect to consider these appearances to be things in themselves; but it would be an even greater contradiction to want to deny the existence of any “thing in itself” at all. It would, of course, take me much too far afield if I were to elaborate on this point, but I can completely hint at Dr. Steiner's fundamental errors here with a few words: He has partly adopted Hartmann's criticism of idealism and in any case made the big mistake in it – which I believe I have shown in my book, and that is this – that idealism or the phenomenon of matter or nature, that one could arrive there only if one presupposes the reality of nature, the reality of /gap in the text]. This is quite incorrect and is based on the false formulation of this subjectivity of the content of perception. Not a single critical idealist in this sense says, as Dr. Steiner has him say, as he himself believes that it should be said, that colors merely depend on and exist for an eye, but every critical thinker knows here that that the eye is just as much a phenomenon and just as dependent and is not the eye [the first principle] but just as secondary, so he says: All colors exist only for and through the sense of color, the sense of sight, as a mental faculty. And in exactly the same way, all sounds in the whole world only exist if the sense of hearing is presupposed as the [primum], and not the ear or the brain. If one makes this single and absolutely necessary change in this whole critique of Dr. Steiner on Kantian idealism, then it collapses into nothing and then Dr. Steiner's only argument remains, but it is scattered and shown to have been insignificant. I would ask those experts who deal with epistemology to read the relevant passage from Dr. Steiner's work, and I would ask Dr. Steiner to consider the matter in this light and to see whether this change is not enough to show that what he has brought up here in a critical sense is unfortunate.

And there is still another fundamental difference between this merely formal, merely critical idealism and everything that Kant, I believe rightly, called enthusiastic, mystical idealism. The previous speaker wanted to make a fundamental distinction between mysticism and his teaching. I fear that some of those present here were unable or hardly able to find this difference. There was much in it that must be considered enthusiastic from a Kantian point of view, as belonging to that higher idealism. The higher / gap in the text] [is] not for me; for me it is only the pathos, the depth of experience. I believe that for some people what was presented tonight will have had a mystical quality, and quite rightly so. For mystical has always been used to describe that which is based on the direct content of the transcendent, the non-ego, that which is not directly given in the ego, that is, the non-ego. And it is precisely this insight into the supersensible, the other, the non-ego, the non-self-experienced, the previous and the subsequent, all these mystical things that we have heard proclaimed as the elements of anthroposophy. I would like to conclude with a motto from Kant's “Prolegomena”. It goes without saying that I cannot go into everything in detail, that would of course be impossible. Dr. Steiner said: “The interaction between brain and soul certainly exists.” We are very surprised at this certainty, since the whole critical theory of knowledge, in contrast to the psychology Dr. Steiner pointed to, not only denies this interaction in principle, but can also demonstrate the fundamental impossibility of interaction, because interaction requires two, two realities, and for critical idealism one of these realities does not exist materially as such, but in itself something else, something that is in itself psychic and ideal, just as we ourselves are, and just as one's own deeper opinion may be Dr. Steiner's own, but which he merely clothes in this uncritical, dogmatic, duplicated theory of perception, never speaking of images and even mirror images; when criticism shows, never Kantian criticism, that our perception never delivers images, never reproduction, but production. That would be the fundamental error, but I cannot go into that in detail now. The words of Kant with which I would like to end – there are actually two – I would first like to formulate the contrast between this clairvoyance and critical philosophy in Kant's words. Because “this much is certain and certain to me: anyone who has ever tasted criticism is forever disgusted by all the dogmatic drivel they previously had to make do with.” And further: “Criticism relates to ordinary school metaphysics” – and I would like to say also to this new metaphysics, to anthroposophy – “just as chemistry relates to alchemy or astronomy to divinatory astrology”. That is the one word that formulates the opposition in principle. The other is this: “Now suppose what seems most credible even after the most careful examination of the reasons. These may be facts or reasons, but reason does not deny that which makes it the greatest good on earth, namely, the prerogative of being the final touchstone of truth.

With this final touchstone of truth, we want to measure anthroposophy and theosophy. For, as Kant says - and with this I would like to conclude - otherwise you will become unworthy of this freedom and surely lose it.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to just touch on a few points and not keep you any longer. The first is the fundamental point that your esteemed chairman has brought forward, that there is not just a difference in degree between what I characterized as a developed ability to remember and remembering, but a fundamental contradiction. Nothing else emerges from my characterization, of course. Perhaps I may trace it back to the difficulty in communication through language, when your chairman introduced a word to justify his criticism that I have not used and would never use. I spoke of a further development of the ability to remember, not of an extension. I would like to explicitly draw attention to this. Extension is wrong. Further development can also lead to a form of the same thing, a metamorphosis that shows a fundamental opposition to that from which it developed. That just to point out how easily misunderstandings could arise within a critique. Because what I have explained is basically not changed by the fact that this principal opposition, which was already clearly included in my formulation, is particularly characterized. Because, my dear attendees, since there is of course an opposition, yes, a principal contradiction between what I have explained and Kantianism, I will never deny that.

I have never made a secret of the fact that, based on all my research results, I had to become an anti-Kantian. And what I have written in my “Truth and Science” and in my “Philosophy of Freedom” is, of course, to be taken as an examination of Kantianism based on years of effort. It is of little importance whether one says, perhaps with a somewhat imprecise expression, “Without the eye, there is no color,” as Schopenhauer actually said in various places, or whether one says, “Colors are not objective, but phenomena; the eye itself is a phenomenon.” Of course, that is all correct. And if one then goes on to say, “Without the sense of color, there would be no colors,” then one would really have to weave this into a critique, not just hint at it. Of course, all that is correct. And if one then goes on to say, “Without the sense of color, there would be no colors,” then one would really need to weave this into a critique not just in a suggestive way, but then one would need to go into great detail about how to characterize what is called the sense of color. For in my opinion, the transition to the sense of color, as soon as one wants to arrive at clear, sharply contoured concepts, is very mystical. Kantianism becomes a rather nebulous mysticism for me. And in the newer epistemology, Kantianism has become a nebulous mysticism for me in many ways. It would be more fruitful, ladies and gentlemen, to discuss the things that I have actually presented in the lecture. Because to pick out one thing from my “Philosophy of Freedom” is virtually impossible. This sentence stands in the middle of a long development. It is impossible to grasp its meaning without this long development.

When I say that one should not assume any limits to knowledge, it must be borne in mind that the meaning of this sentence emerges from the whole argument. This sentence can be understood in the most diverse ways. It can be understood in such a way that one does not initially speak of fundamental limits to knowledge, as do du Bois-Reymond in his Ignorabimus or as certain representatives of Kantianism do. But it can also be understood in such a way that one does not set any limits to research, but sees research as an [asymptotic] approximation to truth, so that one should not speak of limits to knowledge in order not to hinder the progress of research.

I don't want to try your patience too much by going into all the quotes from my writings, because that would take a really long time. I could only pick out certain things from the whole range of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and, you see, you have to start with certain things with a certain understanding. It seems to me that it is not acceptable to formulate the contrast between anthroposophy and mysticism so sharply, not only defining it so sharply, but also showing how anthroposophy can be used to avoid the danger of going astray into nebulous mysticism. It is not acceptable to describe anthroposophy as mysticism by means of pure definition. You can do that if you have made a definition of mysticism and subsumed everything that does not belong in that which you want to accept. But the progressive path of knowledge must be allowed to go beyond given definitions; you will also find in my “Philosophy of Freedom” that there is no need to rethink Kantianism. It has been considered from all sides precisely by these considerations, which I have tried to employ in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

Today, after I have passed my sixtieth year, it makes a strange impression on me when I am given the advice that I should consider Kantianism. As a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, because I didn't like my history teacher, I stapled the then-published edition of the Critique of Pure Reason into my school notebooks so that I could read Kant while the teacher was teaching history. Since that time, I have been studying Kant and I have followed this advice, given from various sides, to thoroughly consider Kantianism. That was forty-four years ago. If the admonition had not come at this point in Kantianism, with regard to which I want to confess that I am somewhat sensitive, I would not have kept you these few minutes with this purely personal matter, because that is what it is. Otherwise, I would have liked to have been mindful of the fact that I was speaking here only as a guest and therefore should have behaved as a guest. Perhaps I have already gone beyond what is necessary here by making this latter personal remark. But sometimes the personal is necessarily connected with the objective and may then be permitted as personal.

I would just like to have this mentioned for the reason that too little has actually been said about my lecture, and more of what has been formulated by me in completely different contexts has been criticized, which I find very understandable; for anyone who has been involved with Kantianism for forty-four years also understands the enthusiasm for Kant's critique of reason, for Kantian idealism; understands how one can speak of the “thing in itself”. I also appreciate all the objections that have just been raised, and I thank your chair for them. I don't want to bother you any further, but I would ask that what I actually presented in my lecture today be examined more closely.

Leo Polak: If I have perhaps given rise to misunderstandings in my words, I am happy to acknowledge my error. I see that there has also been constant talk here of further development, which I read in my notes as “expansion” of the power of remembrance. If, as the speaker himself says, he does not mean an extension, but something fundamentally new, then we fully agree on this point. And I have also given the reason why it would be unfeasible for me to go into these positive statements in more detail: because I lack all knowledge in this area. I can only say: I do not possess this ability of clairvoyance and therefore do not talk about something I do not know.

And if I might have been a little immodest again in the formulation of my advice, where it appears as if I am telling an older thinker and writer to consider this or that, I did not say he should study Kantianism; I know his work and know what he thinks about it. But he should reconsider his one argument against Kantianism – eyes, colors, sense of color – and I must stick to that. I know that Dr. Steiner has studied Kantianism, has read Kant, and so on; I simply wanted to state that in a sense he would have remained on the outside. Perhaps I am allowed to say one more thing, a saying that was not made this evening either, but that was taken from another book, “Philosophy and Theosophy”, the essay that deals with the relationship between these two, which says that Kant can only imagine a “thing in itself” in material terms, however grotesque it may sound. Therefore, I also understand why Dr. Steiner must deny the “thing in itself” if he thinks that the “thing in itself” must be imagined materially. This “thing in itself” would then be an “un-thing in itself”.

Rudolf Steiner: That is not there.

Leo Polak: Dr. Steiner says it is not there. Here it is!

Rudolf Steiner: You have the translation there. Then the sentence has been mistranslated. It doesn't mean that I refute Kant, that he could only imagine the “thing in itself” materially, but that I find that the “thing in itself”, if you want to imagine it impartially, could be imagined materially. This is not an objection that I am making, but one that many have already made, that the Kantian definition of the “thing in itself” does not exclude a material conception.

Leo Polak: Now this is the fundamental opposition of the whole of Kantianism to this doctrine, that Kant has shown by all means of epistemology and criticism, at any rate, that the “thing in itself”, whatever qualities it may have in addition , can only be in principle and fundamentally non-sensuous, supersensuous; that sensuous qualities are only the sense-thing, that is, the phenomenon. So if I also agree with Dr. Steiner, then so much the better. Then he will see that what he calls the supersensible world is not so far removed from what Kant says, only that Kant does not have a faculty of vindication. I think I have explained why I cannot go into Dr. Steiner's positive assertions: because I am a layman in that field, and that was the first commandment of spiritual science: one should not speak of what one does not understand. And if we can all finally agree that we want to understand and comprehend the world only with the means that the spirit provides us with — as Dr. Steiner ultimately also wants to do, even if he says that one can further develop the powers —, and if we want to understand the world with the spiritual powers that everyone feels within, and if we take as a point of reference, just as Kantianism does with all of critical philosophy, and just as Dr. Steiner does — I grant myself the concession of emphasizing, in a conciliatory way, that we agree — if one no longer, as a past period of science did, regards the objective, the material, the mechanical as the primary and original given, but rather, emphasizing the ego, the ego experience, the psychic, the inner life itself, and seeing, recognizing and knowing it as the primary, the founding, the starting and secure point of all science, then I believe that, marching separately, one can still beat unitedly the forces of of ignorance, of superstition and of enthusiastic mysticism, which, as I was pleased to hear, Dr. Steiner also regards as an opponent; marching separately, but unitedly overcoming these black forces of ignorance and superstition in order to achieve some light, some understanding, some insight, some comprehension. In this happy hope we want to agree and finally thank Dr. Steiner with all our hearts for what he has given with all his conviction after a long life of so many years as the result of his research. That it does not agree with our results, with the results of our research and others, that we object to in principle, I have considered it my duty not to keep to myself. Even if Dr. Steiner is a guest, I have not taken this into account and neither has Dr. Steiner. Even if the guests are friends, [gap in the text].