The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today, I would like to precede the reflections of these three days with an introduction that will initially provide orientation from a certain point of view regarding the relationship between the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science movement and older spiritual research movements. You have noticed, and I have often mentioned and characterized, how it has become necessary due to the conditions of our time to treat the knowledge and cognition of supersensible things, which we speak of within our spiritual scientific movement, differently than the knowledge and cognition that was brought to people in the old mysteries. You are also aware that the comparison of this spiritual-scientific knowledge of the present with the initiatory knowledge of the ancient mysteries is justified, despite the differences between the two. It is true that the ancient mystery teaching imparted knowledge that was based on an atavistic, one might say half-dream-like state of consciousness of the person seeking knowledge. The modern spiritual knowledge we are speaking of here is such that everything in it, down to the smallest detail, must be attained with full consciousness, with a consciousness that is completely equal to the consciousness we have, for example, when we absorb and process geometrically or mathematically comprehensible truths. Thus, the fully awakened spiritual experience is attained through this modern spiritual movement in a soul life that must be completely illuminated with the same light that also illuminates our waking day life when we are truly awake. But this knowledge, like the instinctive, half-dreamlike knowledge of the ancient mysteries, is meant to lead to the higher supersensible forms of existence.

We have often spoken of the special character of this ancient mystery knowledge. We have pointed out that it goes back to an original knowledge, to an original wisdom of humanity. It is only obscured by the prejudices of the modern materialistic-Darwinian view that humanity did not start its development from animal-like conditions, but from conditions for which there is no analogue at all in the present-day physical world, but which so encompassed the life of the soul that knowledge of the spiritual was instinctively acquired and was present throughout the inhabited earth of that time. We must, however, bear in mind when considering this fact of supersensible original knowledge that in that primeval time mankind had a more naive, more elementary, one might say more innocent, view of life. In a sense, those impulses which the divine-spiritual beings themselves laid into the souls were in that primeval mankind. So that one can say: In the sphere which we might today call the moral, the beings of primitive times were simply the instruments for the deeds of the divine spiritual beings, so that one cannot speak of any personal responsibility of these human beings, of the possibility of personally sinning, for that time, nor of an actual straying from the will of that Divine-Spiritual from which, after all, the human soul-life has emerged. But this also includes the reason why it was possible in those older times to spread the means in humanity, to keep spread in humanity a knowledge of supersensible things. This knowledge, if it is true knowledge, even in its atavistic state of primeval times, is in reality connected with the control of certain forces of material existence. Today we are proud of the fact that we have formed our technology out of our few scientific ideas, that in this sense we control nature to a certain extent through our knowledge of nature. In a completely different way, however, prehistoric man was able to control the various natural forces of material existence by virtue of the knowledge that was his in his innocent state of mind. This state of mind prevented him from using the supersensible knowledge given to him by the gods to harm humanity.

From my descriptions you know that this early humanity was not as dense as the later humanity and that in some respects it was much less material. This also meant that the impulses of divine-spiritual existence could express themselves in a much more direct way than was later the case. What gradually occurred in the development of humanity is, of course, the connection of the spiritual-soul-like with the physical-material. In a sense, man descended deeper and deeper into matter. But with this descent into matter, there also arose what might be called the possibility of sinning, the possibility of deviating from the paths that came from the impulses of the divine-spiritual beings themselves, thus the possibility of doing evil, and therefore also the possibility of applying supersensible knowledge in an evil sense. This possibility only arose at a certain point in human evolution. At this point, however, something very special occurred. It was only then that the most important mystery being actually concentrated in the oracle sites, in the mysteries, in the true sense of the word. You know this from the description of the Atlantean world that I gave in my book “Occult Science”. There, so to speak, the knowledge of the supersensible worlds was withdrawn from the broad masses of humanity, and this knowledge became the property of those initiated into the mysteries. So that the development goes so that actually more and more the supersensible knowledge fades from the great mass of people and is preserved in its actual form in the mysteries. But these mysteries, as you know, still contained a great deal of ancient wisdom and preserved it until almost Christian times, some of them until much later. But various mysteries with the very deepest knowledge, such as one, or rather two, in the area of present-day France, were wiped out by the Romans in the century before the emergence of Christianity, as I recently hinted to you, wiped out root and branch, even in a terribly bloody way. And in these places, which must be pointed out, a wonderful, penetrating knowledge still flowed within Europe in the last pre-Christian centuries, which has since completely disappeared for Europe. This also happened in other places in Europe.

Then, only in very narrow circles could the wisdom of the ancient world be preserved. In these circles, where one very rarely found people who could penetrate into the supersensible worlds from their own experience, it was also the case that knowledge of the supersensible worlds was then applied in the worst , in the national-socialistic sense, which even today comes to light in the cases that I have been characterizing here for years, namely as the work of certain secret societies of the English-speaking population.

Now, there is a certain way in which those people who actually think entirely in the spirit of ancient times about the knowledge of supersensible worlds still present the reasons why the mystery knowledge was so carefully withheld from the masses by the bearers of the mysteries. The obedient representatives of secret societies, who preserve this knowledge with greater or lesser justification, in a better or also in a very questionable way, still speak today of the fact that a certain kind of knowledge, the highest kind of knowledge about the supersensible, cannot be delivered to the masses, because today the masses are absolutely not ripe for certain contents of this knowledge. These things are said, and the way it is substantiated from certain quarters is always significant. It is necessary that we talk about this a little today in the introduction, because I have all sorts of important things to talk to you about tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. We have to do this because the principle is being followed from here, with regard to the dissemination of knowledge of the supersensible worlds, to put it bluntly, from the point of view of the democratic being.

You know that I have not held back, at least to a certain extent, even from the broadest public, certain supersensible insights. And insights of the kind that I present today in public lectures, although they are little understood, are considered by very worthy representatives of today's mystery teachings to be insights that should not be communicated to the public in this way. One cannot go as far as certain peaks of knowledge, but these insights must be presented to the public at a certain level, if only for the reason that, as I have often emphasized, they must be incorporated into the social impulses that are most urgently needed by present-day humanity and humanity in the near future. And so it has come about that I have continued with the communication of such insights, which, as I said, are unfortunately very little understood. The most important things, which are already being incorporated into public lectures and which one would often think have a deeply moving effect, are actually received in such a way that one can see that the souls that receive them are actually sleeping a very healthy sleep as these things resonate in their ears. But nevertheless, these things must be communicated to the public today, and in a certain form I have repeatedly tried to bring them forward to an even higher level within the Anthroposophical Society, although not the best experiences have been made in the process.

Everyone will see it as ridiculous to hand over higher geometry to someone who does not know elementary geometry. The comparison is misleading, like all comparisons, because what is given as a certain higher knowledge in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not quite the same as elementary geometry, although it only appears to be so. The fact is this: if you do not know elementary geometry, you will reject higher geometry when it is presented to you because you are aware that you do not understand it. But if you present the higher knowledge of anthroposophy to someone who does not yet have the elementary knowledge of anthroposophy, they will accept it. He understands them just as little as the other person understands higher geometry, but since the insights have to be clothed in popular words that can be understood, he believes he understands them, scoffs at them or talks about them like Pastor Kully, and then we have the impossible situation of the higher insights being brought to humanity in a completely distorted form, in a dishonest form. But to bring true knowledge to people in a false form means to contribute to the destruction of humanity. Therefore, it would be necessary to assume an understanding of such things, to assume that this higher knowledge should be preserved from those who do not already have the lower knowledge. But for decades now, quite bad experiences have been made within the Anthroposophical Society, which could actually urge one to stop the whole proclamation of the supersensible world system, if, for example, one had the old ideas about secrecy regarding supersensible knowledge. For, what one does experience! The gossip, the inner and outer gossip, has indeed been no small thing over the decades; and even in recent times we have had to experience it, when we were obliged, to our great regret, to protect our writings from a possible false understanding of certain facts, that from a certain side a naive and foolish revolt has arisen. It is of no use to leave these things unspoken because there is no complete and thorough understanding of them, especially of their sacredness. If there were an awareness of the place of supersensible knowledge in the whole social life of man, it would never have been possible for those things which belong to the most sacred matters of humanity to have been carried out into the world in such a distorted, lying form, where they have been stripped bare in such a way. But despite all this, even if a large number of people treat what should be treated with the utmost seriousness as a light-hearted game, it is still necessary, urgently necessary, that these things be brought to humanity today. The duty towards the spiritual world, the duty towards the spiritual guiding powers of humanity, must be considered higher today than that which can be observed from the outside in the manner just described. The time has come when a certain sum of supersensible knowledge must be handed down to the world.

As a rule, supersensible knowledge remains harmless when it is expressed in abstract terms about spiritual things; but seriousness is immediately called for – if seriousness is called for at all – when it is a matter of supersensible knowledge of the older initiates. Such things are indeed completely comprehensible only to him who can now in turn find the wisdom of the old initiates through his own researches. The old initiate said: If one imparts occult truths only in groups of three, then as a rule one can indeed cause all kinds of social harm; one can stultify people, one can lull people to sleep, one can befuddle them, and so on; but when one imparts all sevenfold forms of the secrets of the supersensible worlds, then one imparts to people something that, if they are maliciously inclined, must lead to evil. The initiate says: To impart the supersensible knowledge in a threefold form may possibly only cause external social harm; to impart it in a sevenfold form means danger at the moment when people who are capable of evil in some direction approach these sacred secrets. What does that mean?

You see, there is a kind of harmless mysticism. Such harmless mysticism is practised when people sit together in small circles in a sectarian way and make all kinds of statements to a number, let us say seven, eight or a hundred people, about the etheric body, the astral body, about re-embodiment, about karma and so on, in short, when one speaks in abstract sentences about these things in much the same way as one speaks about the things of ordinary life, without being in a different state of mind than in ordinary life, at most in a mystical devotion of a nebulous kind and the like. Of course, what stands out as bad is that ultimately the people who sit down together in this way do, let's say, steal a little from the dear Lord, when it would be much wiser if they would sew or knit or cook or wash or do something similar in the same hour in which they make such mystical communications to others. In fact, such abstract dabbling in supersensory truths is basically no better than the other activities that are now being organized through numerous channels with so-called world views. But you know: we, on our anthroposophical ground, have never got involved with such abstract stuff where it was taken seriously. We have, of course, always emphasized that one must have certain substantial insights into the human being, into the nature of the universe, and so on, if one really wants to form ideas about the supersensible. The aim of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has always been to bring spiritual-scientific knowledge into real life, into medical life, into social life, into the life of scientific experiment and other areas where, above all, it is necessary to bring in supersensible knowledge before one can think of achieving a social recovery from our catastrophic conditions. But if, let us say, we apply supersensible knowledge to medicine, then we immediately enter the field of which the true initiates know that it can cause evil in the hands of evil people. For when we exert our soul powers, thinking, feeling, and willing, as we initially carry them in their abstractness in our soul, then these soul powers are very, very strong mere images, applied to ordinary consciousness mere images, very shadowed images. There is only a very low intensity of reality in it (triangle). What people can think is, I would say, an image of an image; what they can feel even more so; and they do not descend into their will at all, they only see it in images of external events that take place on the physical plane as a result of this will. Since what a person experiences is so little connected with reality, not much harm can be done. One does indeed enter into the realm of abstract concepts. One can speak very beautifully about Atma, Buddhi, Manas and so on, but one is actually speaking of abstract words, of words that are far removed from really drilling into reality.

With our instincts, that is, with all that underlies our being, we say our temperament, and with what else underlies our instinctive being, we are already more in reality. With what, for example, our hunger is, what becomes of our hunger as a result of our will instincts, we are very much in our reality; and if it were not for hunger and the will instincts connected with hunger, which are often perverted today, there would be no Russian Bolshevism and the like. Reality is more closely connected with this life (square), out of which thinking, feeling and willing (triangle) rises only like a shadow, with this life of our instincts, our drives, our temperaments. This reality is just as threefold as our soul life is threefold; this reality is also fourfold and has always been represented as such by the initiates. And if we look at the human being as a whole, we see a sevenfold being. But the lower members, those in which the human being repeats the animal in a certain way, are present with a much more intense reality than the shadowy, distilled abstraction of thinking, feeling and willing.

But now, when we grasp the supersensible worlds, if only in the abstract, our knowledge does reach into our instinctual life, into our temperament, into our life of drives, and with that it reaches into the world of real facts, into reality. One would like to say: If one draws this world of the soul, as it exists today in the human being, very thinly, one would like to draw the world of the instinctive, the impulsive, the temperamental, very thickly and realistically, and supersensible knowledge plays into this world (see drawing). But this world must only be ennobled, otherwise it becomes an evil world. Therefore supersensible knowledge can only have an ennobling effect on this world, so that at the moment when one approaches realities with supersensible knowledge, when one plunges into material things, it depends entirely on whether it is done in a pure, ethical, free spirit or whether it is done in an impure, immoral, unfree, that is, emotional, instinctive, animalistic spirit.

These things have been seen through by the keepers of the original human world wisdom, who have locked away the higher knowledge in the mysteries for those prepared for it. But this secrecy is not something that can be asserted today as an absolute necessity, and those people who today, for example, belong to secret societies and in the abstract sense want to assert the necessity of secrecy about the higher knowledge are completely wrong. They are wrong because such people do not understand the signs of the times at all. They preserve old traditions, they still say today what the great teachers of mystery wisdom said thousands of years ago. It is interesting, for example, that in the books of Aelena Petrovna Blavatsky, precisely where Blavatsky speaks most ingeniously about occult things, you will find attitudes towards the concealment of occult knowledge occult knowledge, opinions that are no longer valid today, which Blavatsky held because she had learned them from those who had no idea of the actual necessities of the present time. And so Blavatsky behaved like a personality who might just as well have lived thousands of years ago; she had no idea of the necessities of present-day life, talked about the necessary concealment of certain mystery truths, just as the mystery priests talked thousands of years ago. As a result, even if one does not want to, one becomes untruthful to one's fellow human beings in the present. And certain supersensible currents become untruthful to their fellow human beings in the present in the most eminent sense precisely from this point of view, because the times in which we live today speak a clear and distinct language, and this language proclaims an extraordinary aberration in the spiritual and soul realms among people.

Only recently I called your attention to a literary phenomenon of the most significant kind, namely, to the book The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler. I told you that this book has a profound influence on young people, especially on the student youth of Central Europe, and that when I recently had to speak to the students of the Stuttgart Technical University about the significance and nature of of spiritual-scientific-anthroposophical research, I went into this lecture with the impression that Spengler's ideas about the decline of the Occident make on today's youth, especially on academic youth. You will perhaps have noticed how justified it is to speak today of the profound impact of Spengler's ideas, because far beyond the borders of Central Europe, everywhere where literary phenomena are observed today, Spengler's book is taken into account. The Times has even repeatedly published detailed reviews of the book.

What is the strange theory that comes to light in this Spengler book? We find it set forth in a thick volume by a man who, as I have already mentioned, has a genius for mastering any of a dozen or fifteen sciences, and who presents his arguments in the manner in which arguments are presented in science today. The fact that Benedetto Croce, who has since attained great eminence, has said foolish things about this book, although he has otherwise said sensible things, need not mislead us. that it is shown how the whole of the Western world, with its American offspring, is growing old and becoming senile, how death at the beginning of the third millennium is imminent for Western culture, how barbarism must break in, how, roughly around the year 2200, what is now Western civilization must be replaced by barbarism. We find this, as I said, substantiated with all the tools of today's science, and we have to recognize that only spiritual scientific deepening can arise against such a terrible view, terrible above all because of the scientific tools with which it appears, that only spiritual scientific deepening is capable of showing the point where in the human soul itself arises that which must replace what is today Western civilization, and that only spiritual scientific deepening is capable of showing how this must happen, approximately around the year 2200. can only arise from spiritual-scientific deepening, and that only spiritual-scientific deepening is capable of showing the point where, in the human soul itself, that which the West in turn drives out of ruin wells up. If the Occident only retained what is now being taught at universities, grammar schools, secondary schools, and primary schools, and what is being taught through our newspaper literature and our popular scientific literature, Spengler's calculation that barbarism would sweep over this Occident in 2200 would be justified. Only an appeal to the will of the human soul, as can be made by spiritual science, because it ignites spiritual forces in this human soul, because it opposes the external forces that are everywhere pushing towards decline today with the force that man must oppose out of his will, only spiritual science has the right to rebel today against such scientific armament as presented by Oswald Spengler. Ordinary, profane refutations of Spengler's book are a mockery.

But what do we learn from Spengler's book in particular? From the way it is conceived as a whole, from the way the research is processed in it, we see that Spengler's thinking has emerged entirely from the thinking of the broad masses of today's educated humanity, only that Spengler is immensely more clever and ingenious than the average person today. Therefore, he says the opposite of what the average person of today says about many things, but what he says is only a straightforward continuation of what the average person of today thinks, what the average person of today considers to be right. But how does this book strike us, which makes a harrowing impression on thousands and thousands of souls today, when we look at it with the unbiased gaze that comes from the wisdom of initiation? It throws almost complete light on the innermost structure of the traditional world-view of today, on the current current thinking. The remarkable thing about Spengler's book is that one can be ingenious — Spengler is ingenious, extraordinarily ingenious — and yet say the greatest follies; for his book also contains the greatest follies, but follies that only an ingenious person can actually find today. Other people are not capable of finding such great follies as Spengler has found. Now imagine the confusion that a book must cause in the mind, where on every page one can admire both genius and folly at the same time!

Today, extremes collide in a way that one might not have dreamed of a hundred or a hundred and twenty years ago. And if today's philistines reproach me for calling someone both a genius and a fool, I have to say that I reserve the right to do so today. Perhaps I shall make the mistake of calling Oswald Spengler a genius and a fool at the same time, because he is both at once. But that is what one is when one outgrows the strange configuration of today's literature. One must be as clever as Spengler, as fundamentally clever, to think up such idiotic nonsense as Spengler has thought up. A person of little intelligence would not arrive at Spengler's fascinating and dazzling assertions, for example, that the right, the true socialism is Prussianism, and that Western civilization, which will decline and fall by the year 2200, has no other way out than to become completely Prussian, that is, completely socialist in Spengler's sense. And a brochure that is considered a supplement to the book “The Decline of the West,” “Prussianism and Socialism,” is full on every page of the most ingenious insights that can be gained into individual details of the intellectual and social essence of today. What Spengler says, for example, about Russianity sometimes reminds me – although I must always take into account everything I have just said about Oswald Spengler – of many things I myself said many years ago about Russianity, about the future of Russianity and about the nature of the Russian people. And since Spengler declares that he will expand on what he says about Russianness, especially in terms of its scientific justification, in his second volume of “The Decline of the West,” I have to say: I look forward to that “brilliant cabbage” that will be said about the future of Europe under the influence of the further development of Russianness in this second volume.

You see, today you have to be paradoxical if you want to describe truthfully what is actually around us, and you can't get by without describing in such a paradoxical way what is beneath us. A third thing that can also be found in Oswald Spengler: he describes pessimism all the way. For it is pessimistic to say that in the year 2200 all Western civilization will have been replaced by barbarism. And it is particularly pessimistic when you prove this with twelve to fifteen sciences as rigorously as Spengler does. But Spengler worships this pessimism in a certain way, with religious humility. He indulges in this pessimism, I might say he glorifies this pessimism, this socialism or this Prussianism, which will take hold of the whole world, because only through organization and saturation of society in the Prussian spirit can the necessary downfall be postponed until the year 2200. That is pessimism, isn't it? But the whole thing that Oswald Spengler has before him as this socially Prussianized world, this Western world that will still be alive until the year 2200 and then dying, is still glorified by him, so to speak. He describes it with inner fire, but it is not a lasting fire, it is a theatrical fire, if you watch closely.

I don't like to talk abstractly, I prefer to talk in facts. And if you were to ask why: why does a brilliant man, just because he has a keen eye for certain details of contemporary civilization, have to be so foolish at the same time? Why does such a fundamentally clever man have to claim such stupid things at the same time? Why must such a man, who paints pessimism, paint this pessimism with a theatrical fire that makes this pessimism, if one can forget that it leads to destruction, appear like a grandiose optimism, like an invitation to admire this catastrophic downfall? Why is that all?

I would like to answer with a very specific sentence: Oswald Spengler, while thinking entirely in terms of natural science, demands psychology for the 20th century, but he has not the slightest idea about the human soul. Why? Because the moment he utters the words “theosophy” or “occultism” – he seems to be unaware of anthroposophy – he turns red and becomes quite angry. This is why his brilliant approach can only be devoted to the shell, not to the inwardness through which the soul must be sought. Therefore, his fire cannot be that which arises from the elemental primal forces of man, but is basically only a theatrical fire. Oswald Spengler turns red when he mentions the words “theosophy” and “occultism,” and it seems that he can hardly find any other purpose for occultism and theosophy than to use them to foster Bolshevism and Spartacism into a kind of parlor socialism. This is again the grandiose stupidity of a man whose genius is born of the intellectual substance of the present. But at the same time it testifies that where there is no idea, but only a red head in the face of intellectual deepening, that is precisely where the most confusing cultural phenomena of the present must come to light, even if they appear in a genial way.

That is what I wanted to say today by way of an introduction to the important considerations that I will present to you tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

If we make a survey of what takes place in the civilized world today, of what is present in it, we actually find—indeed, we may say this after the many explanations which have already been given—that civilization is increasingly falling into ruin. If we understand what spiritual science can tell us about the secrets of the universe, we must realize quite clearly that everything that takes place outside in the physical world has its source in the spiritual world. The causes for what takes place at any time in the historical development of mankind also lie in the spiritual world. Another truth, which cannot be called to mind too frequently, is that in the present moment of time, humanity's condition requires each individual to contribute something toward the reconstruction of culture from his own inner being. We no longer live in an age in which it suffices to believe that the gods will help. In the present time, the gods do not count on human beings recognizing them and their intentions, and much that a short time ago was not yet left to mankind is left to men's decisions today.

Such a truth must be grasped in all its gravity, and basically by each one individually. To do this it will be necessary, above all, to understand a number of things that we have outgrown. Gradually, in the course of the materialistic age, one might say that the human being has reached the point of grasping everything from a certain absolute standpoint, a standpoint, moreover, that differs according to the human being's age. When a person is twenty-five years old today, he feels called upon to judge everything. He believes that it is possible to have a final opinion about everything without undergoing any kind of development. Perhaps when he reaches the age of fifty, he may Look down with a certain sense of superiority upon his faculty of judgment twenty-five years ago. At age twenty-five, however, he will in no way feel drawn as a result of his upbringing to seek and reckon with the more mature judgment of a man of fifty.

Among the causes underlying our present chaos, the one just outlined is by no means the least important; instead, it is one of the most significant, though admittedly one that had to exercise its influence upon the whole evolution of mankind. Only by man's feeling completely emancipated in a certain sense from the whole world context; by adopting an absolute standpoint not only personally in the life between birth and death, but at any given moment of this life; by assuming the standpoint that he is able to judge everything in a sovereign manner; only because this illusion was added to the many other illusions of life—and in the merely physical world everything is in a sense illusion—the course of human development will gradually lead the single human being toward freedom.

We should bear in mind, however, the great difference between our present epoch, which sets out from this standpoint, and the past epochs in which entirely different life impulses lay at the foundation of human existence. We must pay heed to the life impulses of former times, which in turn are intended to become those of the future, to which all efforts in the present should be directed again. Indeed, such earlier life impulses must be observed. They only disappeared slowly and gradually in the course of human evolution, and we underestimate the whole tempo of modern spiritual development if we do not perceive the speed with which, in a few centuries, materialistic impulses have melted away a tremendous amount of the spirituality that once existed.

In order to gain some starting points for a real study of the present, which we shall pursue tomorrow, let's turn our minds back to, say, the best period of ancient Egyptian life. Naturally, in the life of ancient Egypt or ancient Chaldea, there certainly existed social institutions in the outer world as well. These social structures were inaugurated and implemented by certain human beings. However, these individuals did not make judgments by pursuing thoughts in their wise heads on how to come up with the best social arrangements, or by following their opinions on what might be right for the communal life of people. Instead, they turned to the initiation centers. In actual fact, the sage who was initiated into the mysteries of the universe in these centers was the actual leading advisor of the highest social rulers, who, depending on their rank and maturity, were in large part themselves initiates into the cosmic secrets. When one was supposed to make provisions concerning the affairs of the social order, one did not consult the clever human brain—in the literal sense of the word—but one consulted those who were capable of interpreting the heavenly signs. For one knew that when a stone falls to the ground this is connected with the forces of the earth; when it rains that has to do with the forces of the air—the atmosphere. If, on the other hand, human destinies should be fulfilled that are supposed to interact with each other, this has nothing to do with any natural laws that can be figured out in the above manner. It has to do with those laws that could be traced in the cosmos by means of what makes the course of the stars evident. So, the course of the stars was read in the same way we read the time of day from a clock. We do not say, “One hand of my clock is down here on the right, the other is on the left.” Rather, we say, “We know that this position indicates that the sun has set so many hours ago, and so forth.” Likewise, these individuals who could read the course of the stars said to themselves, “This or that constellation of the stars signifies to us one or the other intention on the part of those divine spiritual beings who guide and direct everything we may call human destiny.” One beheld the intentions of those accompanying spiritual beings of the cosmos by looking up to the course of the stars. One was clearly aware that not everything that man has to know reveals itself here on earth; indeed, the most important things he has to be aware of, the forces that work in his social life, reveal themselves in manifestations observable in the cosmos outside the earthly sphere. One knew that the concerns of humanity here on earth cannot be managed unless one investigates the intentions of the gods in the realm outside earth. Therefore, everything that was to be accomplished here within the social order was connected with the sphere outside the earth.

Where do we find any inclination today to investigate these great signs visible in the cosmos outside the earth, when here or there the belief arises again that some reform movement should be introduced? A far more important symptom than materialism, than anything which has arisen in the form of natural scientific materialism, is the fact that man no longer consults the cosmos outside the earth in regard to his earthly concerns. One does not become spiritual by setting up theories concerning the human being or anything in the universe; one will only become spiritual if one understands how to connect humanity's earthly concerns with the cosmos outside the earth.

In that case, however, one has to be convinced, above all, that the affairs of this world do not allow themselves to be arranged according to the judgments acquired by mere natural scientific education. Then, one has to be able to introduce into the whole civilizing education the capacity to connect the sphere transcending the earth with earthly concerns once more. Then, it was necessary, above all, to discern more clearly how this capacity was lost in the course of human evolution, and how we gradually arrived at the point of wanting to judge everything only from an earthly standpoint. Let us consider something that is now prevalent in the world, a component of social agitation.

You have all heard of the effort appearing everywhere to introduce compulsory labor—to require a person to work by means of some social order based on the legal decrees of this social order—no longer to appeal merely to what obliges man to work, namely, hunger and other motivations, but in fact to establish compulsory labor legally.

We see how, on one side, this compulsory labor is demanded by socialistic agitation. We note how, in Soviet Russia, this compulsory labor has already led to a downright rigid form, with human life taking on the aspect of life in the barracks. We also find that radical socialists enthusiastically uphold compulsory labor. We see also how the sleeping souls of the present receive news such as this, how government officials here or there have even determined to introduce compulsory labor. One reads this like any other news item, and does not pay it much attention. One rises in the morning as one usually does, eats breakfast, has lunch, goes into the country for the summer holidays, returns again and, in spite of the fact that the most important and fundamental events are taking place in the world, one behaves as one has always been accustomed to behave. Yet, mankind should not insist on clinging to old habits. Mankind should take seriously what it is that matters today, namely, having to relearn about all conditions of life. Even when we see that the demand for compulsory labor is being opposed, what are the viewpoints from which these matters are attacked? We have to admit that the opponents are as a rule not much brighter than those who advance these demands. For the most part, they will ask, “Well, can a person still find joy in his work?”—or something like that. All the reasons cited for and against the above are worth more or less the same, because they arise from the same judgments that are limited only to what takes place here between birth and death; they do not originate from a sufficient insight into life. When the spiritual scientist comes and says, “Go ahead and introduce compulsory labor, but in ten years you will have terrible results, for suicides will increase at an alarming rate,” people will view such a statement as fantasy. They will not recognize that this conclusion is derived from an inner knowledge of the relationships existing in the universe. They will not be willing to study spiritual science and to discover the basis from which one can find such a judgment justified. Instead, people will go on living as usual—some getting up in the morning, breakfasting and lunching, traveling into the country for the summer and more of the same, others sleeping away their time in some other manner, refusing to take these questions seriously. Still others will found clubs, social associations, women's associations, and so forth—things that are admittedly quite nice—but when such efforts are not connected to the actual cosmic order, they lead nowhere. Our age is much too conceited to abandon absolute standpoints which assume that, at any age, one definitely has a conclusive judgment about all things.

During these days and in the last few weeks I explained the way in which the various branches of the threefold social organism have originated in the different territories of earth evolution. I said that, fundamentally speaking, all our spiritual life is only a transformation of what originated a long time ago in the orient. But when we look into what was described on numerous occasions in the past few weeks from one aspect, and investigate it in regard to the standpoints which I have indicated just now, we find that, insofar as it referred to human destiny, all this knowledge of the Orient was deciphered from the course of the stars, from what exists outside the earth, and the Greek concept of destiny was the last ramification of such extraterrestrial wisdom.

Then came the knowledge arising from the Middle region. As we indicated, this was a more juristic knowledge; it was something that man drew more out of his own being. It was not linked with observations of the cosmos outside the earth. I told you that the higher-world outlook of the Occident has been permeated with a juristic element, how the events that run their course in humanity's development were placed under juristic concepts. Punishment is meted out by a cosmic judge just as the human judge hands down a penalty for some external misdeed. It was a juristic view, a juristic manner of conception, that permeated the entirely different form of the Oriental conceptions concerning the spiritual world.

This view of the spiritual world was connected with the fact that in the initiation centers those who were found to be sufficiently mature were initiated into the nature of that which was sent down to earth from invisible realms by what was revealed in the visible. Then, the events that were to take place on earth were guided according to the intentions of initiation. Naturally, in the case of such a knowledge it is necessary to take into consideration more than the singular standpoint of any given age, by which one believes oneself able to make an absolute judgment on all sorts of matters. From the viewpoint of initiation, the whole evolution of man must be considered, also what the human being brings into earthly existence through birth, and what can reveal itself to him when, in earthly life, he beholds a revelation of the super-sensible existence.

In recent times, something that was basically a science of the heavens has become permeated with a juristic element. This celestial science itself and its fate must be considered a little now. The sacred knowledge of the Orient was something that was cultivated in its purest form in the initiation centers perhaps 10,000 years ago in the Orient. Later on, although no longer in such pure form, it was cultivated in Egypt in a still relatively pure manner. Having become popularized in a certain sense, it was used by swindlers and conjurers on the streets of the later imperial Rome, although transformed into visible magic tricks. This is, after all, the course of world events; something that is sacred in one epoch can turn into the most unholy thing in a later age. While the highest Oriental knowledge belonged to the streets in the later imperial Roman time, juristic thinking was developing out of Romanism itself on the basis of the Tate Egyptianism, and subsequently dominated the world. In the ages that followed, but only slowly and gradually, what had once been brought down from the stars as human wisdom in the Orient grew dim and finally died out. For, even in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas⁹¹ still said, “Human destiny, all of destiny occurring in the sublunar world, is guided by the Intelligences of the stars. It is, however, by no means something inevitable for man.” So this Catholic-Christian church father of the thirteenth century does not refer to stars, to planets, merely as physical planets; instead, he speaks of the Intelligences that dwell in these planets who are the actual rulers of what should be called human destiny. What had once arisen in the Orient was really still present in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth centuries, although in its last ramifications, as an aspect of the Christian Catholic Church. It is simply a terrible misrepresentation of the present Catholic Church to withhold these matters from the faithful, so that the church can declare it a heresy, for example, to assume that the individual stars and planets are ensouled and permeated with spirit. By doing this, the Church not only denies Christianity; it even denies its last teachers who still had a more direct connection with the sources of the spiritual life than does the present age in any sense. Therefore, one must point out that it was not so very long ago that the conception was completely abandoned which still pictured the world as permeated with spirit. If people would teach the truth today concerning what still held sway in the spiritual life of the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; if, following preconceived opinions, they would not distort what prevailed in those times, then even this would still have a fructifying effect for a spiritualization of the present world-view. The materialism, the natural scientific materialism, or the materialism of the mystics or theosophists, particularly the materialism of the Catholic Church, could not exist. For what is contained in the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church originated from the purest spiritual science; and this pure spiritual science beheld the spirit everywhere in the universe.

All that was beheld as spirit in the universe by the eye of the soul has been discarded. The universe became pervaded with materialism. For that reason, naturally, nothing remains except words of faith. For example, behind the Trinity, the doctrine of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, stand the most profound mysteries. On the other hand, there is nothing contained any longer in what is taught today as the dogma of the Trinity. On one side, there is the doctrine, the belief of the religious denominations, on the other side, natural science devoid of spirit. Neither can save humanity from the misery into which it has fallen. In order to render rescue possible, it is necessary that a sufficiently large number of people rouse themselves inwardly. For, particularly in the present epoch, the possibility exists in man's inner being to pick up those threads of a soul-spiritual kind which, if their power is inwardly experienced in the proper way, lead to an understanding of what can be gathered from spiritual science for an illumination of the life of nature as well as the social life. One should not wish to retain at all costs the bad habits of one's inner life, however they have developed during the past few centuries. These bad habits are based on the opinion that if one can keep quiet and be passive, the gods will eventually enter into one, reveal everything within, and mystical depth will be illuminated by an inner light, and so forth. The present age is not suited for that. It demands an inner activity of soul and spirit from the human being; it demands that man turn and look at what is trying to reveal itself within. Then, he will find under all circumstances what wishes to reveal itself within, but he must be willing to unfold such inner spiritual activity. One must not believe, however, that much can be gained by some inner pseudomystical doings; above all else, one has to trace the spirit in the external things of the world.

I have called your attention to what happened, for example, in the East, in Asia. Once upon a time, so I told you, conditions in Asia were of a kind that the human being felt his heart expand, felt his soul grow warm, when, guided by the thought of the sacred Brahman, he directed his glance to the mighty external symbol of the swastika, the hooked cross. It made his inner life unfold. This inner mood of soul meant a great deal to him. Today, when an Oriental receives an ordinary Russian 2,000 ruble note—which is not worth much, for small change will no longer do for buying anything, only thousand ruble notes—he sees on it the beautifully printed swastika. Those thousand-year-old feelings that once upon a time inwardly beheld the sacred Brahman when the eye was directed to the swastika are certainly stirring. Today, the same emotional qualities arise on seeing the 2,000 ruble note.

Do you believe that one has a spiritual view of the world if one does not look at something like that and say to oneself, “Those are the Ahrimanic powers who are at work here; herein lies a super-earthly intelligence, even though it is an Ahrimanic intelligence?” Do you believe that it suffices merely to say, “Oh, that is the external material world! We direct our glance heavenward to spiritual things; we don't pay any attention to things for which people only have words?” If you seek for the spirit, you must look for it even where it turns up in the mighty aberrations of external world evolution itself, for there you can find the starting point for other aspects.

It is the tragedy of modern civilization that people believe that only human forces are at work everywhere, forces which arise between birth and death. Actually, our world is permeated all over by super-sensible forces, spiritual powers which manifest themselves in the various events that take place. If one wishes to do something, if one tries to realize intentions so that this or that result may come about, one needs to look to those benign spiritual powers capable of working against other spiritual powers; and the spiritual powers that can oppose the others have to be born in man through his own inner activity.

In regard to all this, however, one actually does need to look up into the spiritual world. This is something that is most inconvenient to many people. This is why the great majority of people in the world find even talk of initiation science unpleasant. For there is one thing that initiation science must make clear, under all circumstances, to the human being. Man is organized, in the first place, in the direction of his intellect. Certainly, there are other aspects to his organization such as digestion, metabolism, heartbeat, breathing, and physiological processes. He bears instincts within, hence, soul entities, and so forth. In addition, he bears within him what is termed intelligence, and the present age is especially proud of this intelligence. But where does our intelligence come from? Materialism believes that our intelligence is derived from those processes that occur below in the liver, in the heart; they then become more refined and turn into the processes within the brain. These processes in the brain are just a little different from those that take place in the liver or the stomach, but these same processes produce thinking. We know that this is not so. Those processes that run their course in the brain just as those in the liver or the stomach would cause no thinking at all. Up in the brain something takes place; out of the constructive processes destructive ones are constantly developed.

Here, not only upbuilding, but disintegrating processes are at work; matter is forever falling out into nothingness. Thus, we are not dealing with an upbuilding in the brain. Any constructive process only serves to nourish the brain, not to produce thinking. If you wish to focus on those brain processes that have something to do with thinking, and you wish to compare them to the remaining organism, you must not compare them to the constructive processes, the processes of growth, but to the processes of elimination. The brain is constantly involved in elimination, and, as I said, the processes of destruction, of disintegration, of death, are the accompanying phenomena of intelligence. If our brain were incapable of elimination, we would be unable to think. If our brain would only contain upbuilding processes, we would exist in a dull, instinctive condition; at most, we could attain to quite dir dreams. We arrive at clear thinking precisely because the brain secretes and eliminates substances. Thinking only functions parallel to processes of elimination. It is only because the human organization eliminates what is useless to it that thinking establishes itself out of the spiritual world.

Now take the thinking that has developed especially since the middle of the fifteenth century, the thinking of which modern man is so proud. It comes into being because we destroy our brain, because we bring about in it processes of disintegration, of elimination. Suppose that you are Trotsky or Lenin, traveling to Russia—transported there on orders of Ludendorff⁹² in a sealed railway carriage and escorted by Dr. Helphand⁹³ (it was such a train, going from Switzerland through Central Europe, which brought Lenin accompanied by people like Dr. Helphand to Russia under Ludendorff's protection)—suppose you are such a person and you believe that out of the processes representing intelligence—the only processes from which natural scientific thinking of the past few centuries has emerged—the social order could be developed. What kind of a social order will that turn out to be? It will be a reproduction of what takes place within the brain during the thinking processes. Do not think that what we develop without is different from what we develop within, if the only processes employed are thinking processes! If you try to establish a social order with them, it will be something destructive, just as thinking processes in the brain cause destruction—exactly the same thing. Thinking, applied to reality, destroys. One can gain insight into such matters only when one Looks into the deeper secrets of the being of man and the whole world. This is why humanity needs to pay attention to these things if any sort of valid judgment concerning public affairs is to be rendered. It does no good at all today to base discussions about any social concerns on the suppositions of the past few centuries, for they no longer hold water. It is important here to realize that completely different processes must come to pass in the human spiritual life; again, the science of initiation must step in and draw from spiritual resources what can never be gleaned from mere sources of human intelligence. A social science of the present can only emerge as a consequence of spiritual science. This can and must be grasped from its very foundation.

This is what is in fact important for modern man, namely, that he does not attain a relationship with spiritual science merely in some superficial manner, but that he learns to recognize how completely spiritual science is linked to human destiny for the future.

In order that a person can gauge something like this, a feeling must develop in the human being for what is asserting itself with profound earnestness out of the spiritual resources. For such a feeling to come about, however, much must be eliminated, above all else the generally prevailing frivolity. Recently, in a lecture that I gave for local teachers, I indicated a Symptom in which such frivolity appears today. One of our friends in London made efforts to arrange a gathering of a number of artists here in August. It was for the purpose of their becoming acquainted with our building and forming a sort of center from which the impulse could go out that is now so necessary if the building is ever to be completed. An English journalist was informed, not one from an ordinary daily paper but from a magazine that calls itself “Architect,” in other words, a publication that wishes to be taken more seriously. The journalist was even given a description in writing of what was intended. This fellow was so flippant and frivolous, however, that he wrote, “A visit to Dornach is anticipated by such and such persons. Dr. Steiner himself has promised to acquaint the visitors with what is going on there, and it is believed that ten days will suffice for this excursion. Of this time, four days will be spent on travel, and during the remaining six days, the visitors will be able to recuperate from the shock they will have experienced following their first impression of Dornach.” So, this frivolous character has no idea what he is supposed to write about, and for his penny-a-line, is only capable of making a stupid joke so that his readers can accordingly continue to maintain a frivolous mood.

Things have gone so far that the general mood of people is spoiled from the very outset, spoiled by this kind of journalist; there is no longer any question of anything being accomplished. The only thing such journalists can do is seize the opportunity to make some stupid, frivolous joke. No progress will be made if the earnestness with which such matters should be discussed is not understood. One will get no further if such matters are considered to be insignificant; if, from a certain jaded standpoint, one says, for example, “Oh, one cannot take such a journalist so seriously!” From a certain point of view, one certainly need not give much credit to such penny-a-lining, but it must be evaluated according to what effect is has in the world.

These matters are indeed serious and of such a nature that they induce us again and again to say, “This building here is intended to be a Landmark for what should take place for the sake of mankind's ascent!” To be sure, from certain quarters, no effort has been spared to make the building what it is now. Destiny, too, contributed its necessary share. It is, alter all, true that at the outset this building was erected here chiefly as the result of efforts made by the Central European countries. But when Central Europe's financial resources began to touch rock bottom, the neutral countries were ready in a most significant, commendable manner to do something for this building. Those from Central Europe who were able to do something for the building spared no effort throughout the time of the war psychosis, stirred up by hate and opposition, to maintain this site in such a manner that people from every part of the world, from all nationalities, could gather together here. This building was saved and maintained throughout all the years of chauvinism; nobody was denied the opportunity here to encounter others in a spirit of friendship, no matter what part of the world he came from. All this, however, demonstrates the impossibility of completing this building by relying on the earlier resources; it shows the necessity for efforts by those countries that are in a financially favorable position, for they are at the beginning of a period where they are not encumbered by financial disaster and are certainly in a position to do something for the building. One would hope that a message like the following will not one day spread through the world: A landmark for the dawning spiritual life was to be erected. Those people who were swept away by the cataclysmic world events and then perished left behind as a last legacy as much as they could accomplish. Those, on the other hand, who were not swept away, who could have begun the new life, did not realize what those who were doomed left for them.

• 91 . Thomas Aquinas: 1226–1274; compare Rudolf Steiner: The Redemption of Thinking, GA 74 (Spring Valley, Anthroposophie Press, 1983).
• 92 . Erich Ludendorff: 1865–1937, German general.
• 93 . Alexander Helphand, died in 1924, Russian socialist, for a time a political refugee in Germany. He played an important role in bringing about the Bolshevic revolution as well as the peace of Brest-Litovsk (1918).

The fifteenth century ushered in an era for the civilized humanity of the Northern Hemisphere, in which the human individuality began to develop more and more in full I-consciousness. The forces which elaborate this I-consciousness will grow increasingly stronger and all the phenomena of life—of life in the broadest sense—will take place in the sign of this development of the individuality. This, however, means that what comes from the spiritual world and plays into our physical world will take such a course that, in humanity as a whole, the individual element of the human being will take on greater importance. For it is not simply a matter of individual human beings thinking in an egotistical way, 'we are individuals': it is rather a matter of the whole development of humanity taking such a course that the individual human element can work into it.

Every age, every epoch, that we can trace in the course of human evolution developed some particular quality, just as now it is that of individuality. These characteristics are impressed into human evolution through the particular action of spiritual powers working into the physical life of humanity on earth. But precisely because of the separateness that we see in the individual human being today when the individuality is developing—when I-consciousness is developing fully, when the consciousness-soul is, as it were, giving itself contour, becoming integrated in itself—the special characteristics of this epoch are not directed from the spiritual world as they were in earlier epochs, and very exceptional things are making their appearance within humanity's evolution. And the human being who, through the development of his individuality is being increasingly educated for freedom, must also take up a conscious stand more and more to what results from this. Above all it is essential that a social life take shape, but a social life which, from our point of view, must have deep inner foundations. This must take shape despite the fact that the strong egoistical forces of the consciousness-soul, which are opposed to a social life, are emerging ever more strongly from the depths of existence. On the one side we have the strong egoistical forces of the consciousness-soul and, on the other, the all-the-greater necessity of founding a social life consciously. And we must take a conscious stand towards everything that can foster this social living together. We have shown in the past,¹ and from the most varied points of view, how differently the human beings of the West, the European Centre, and of the East are placed in the whole course of human evolution. We have pointed to different things that are peculiar to the human beings of the East, Central Europe and the West. And we want now to turn to a phenomenon that can already show us externally how these differentes within humanity express themselves in the civilized world.

We know that, under the influence of our modern scientific way of thinking about social life, a certain view of life has been developed. This comes to expression particularly strongly in the broad masses of the proletariat which has come into being in our technological age, our intellectual age. I have presented all this, insofar as it touches the social question, in the first part of my Towards Social Renewal (Kernpunkt der sociale Frage). Today I want only to indicate the diversity of views among the broad masses of humanity concerning the social question. We have, clearly differentiated, the social views of, let us say, the proletariat, which then, however, colour other strata of the population. We have, distinct from that of other peoples, the conception of life held in die West, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries. In these countries, under the influence of the modern technology and industry, there has also developed among the broad masses that materialistic concept of life which has often been characterized here. This arose side by side with materialism or was directly produced through the materialism of other classes. This socialist conception of life, however, developed in such a way that it stands entirely under the aegis of economic strife, for it is permeated by economic concepts, thoughts and struggles that are little penetrated by the struggle for a philosophy of life (Lebensanschauungskämpfen). This is the characteristic stamp of what is going on in the socialist world of the Anglo-Saxon West. And because the actual character of modern public life as a whole has hitherto been the economic life, it was from the economic conditions of the Anglo-Saxon proletariat that the impulses of socialism arose.

The impulses coming to expression in the Great Strike movement are significant precisely as a characteristic of what is taking shape in this respect in the West. Even if it seems that the discrepancies which are there could be settled, it only seems so, for such settlements would not be real; very significant effects will issue from the deeper forces playing in these conflicts. And although, by virtue of the whole make-up of the West, no genuine philosophies or concepts of life (Lebensauffassung), develop from these impulses, we can nevertheless dearly perceive how the views of life which do develop, and which have developed in recent times, have taken their incentive from the impulses present there [in the West].

In fact, Karl Marx,² who was born in Central Europe and was nurtured in the Central European stream of thought, had to go to England in order to absorb the practical impulses (Lebensimpulse) which had developed there. He, however, transformed them into a theory, into a conception of life. And Marxism as a theory of life has found little external expression in the West. Where it has come to external expression, however, is in Central Europe. In the aims of the social democracy there, it has taken on fully the nature of a philosophy. What in the West are economic impulses leading to economic conflict, were diverted and fixed into legal-political concepts which lived then in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century as Marxist ideology and took hold of the broad masses of the population. It also found its way into the areas stretching towards the East, to those parts of Europe which begin to take on the character of the East. But here again it expressed itself in another form. Economic in the West; political in the Centre; and in the East it assumes a distinctly religious character. A distortion exists, which occurred with the inundation of the East through Peter the Great³ —,and now Lenin⁴ and Trotsky.⁵ This arises because the Bolshevism making itself felt there is in fact a foreign import. If it were not for that distinction it would be far more evident that, even now, Bolshevism has a strong religious element which, however, is completely materialistic. It works through earlier religious impulses and will continue to do so. And it is precisely in this that its terrible aspect will show itself throughout all Asia, because it works with all the fervour of a religious impulse. The social impulse in the West is economic, in Central Europe is political, and works with a religious fervour eastwards from Russia over into Asia. Over and against these impulses which move through the development of humanity there is a great deal that is utterly unimportant. And anyone who does not see, in the most intense sense, something of symptomatic importance in such things as the present [1920] strike of the British miners simply has no understanding at all of the foment of deeper forces in the whole of our present development.

All this, however, which can be described externally in this way, has deeper causes—causes which lie ultimately in the spiritual world. The more recent life of humanity can only be understood if one understands this differentiation—a differentiation into the Western economic element, the Central European political-legal one, and the religious element—the spiritual element in the East which takes on a religious character but is actually the momentum of a decadent spirituality that still finds expression in the East. This shows itself so strongly that one must say: It is natural for the West—and this is carried out thoroughly by it—to have everything of an economic nature; purely economic aspirations can have no success in the Centre because all economic aims there assume a political character. The great outer failure in Eastern Europe has come about because, through the tradition of Peter the Great, what arises out of a spiritual-religious impulse, i.e. Pan-slavism or Slavophilism, has taken on a political character. Behind this political character, which has produced all the dreadful things that have developed in the European East and has set its characteristic stamp on all the aspirations of the East since Peter the Great, there is, fundamentally, always the spiritual tendency of Byzantium, that is spiritual Byzantine religiosity, and so on. The individual phenomena of history become comprehensible only if they can be seen in this light. One can say: To a certain extent, everything that is still in Europe—also towards the West, even into France—can be reckoned as belonging to the European Centre, for what is characteristic of the West is actually Anglo-Saxon. And, in its basic instincts, this 'Anglo-Saxondom' moves completely with the impulses that have arisen naturally within human development in the last three or four centuries. It was thus precisely in the West that these impulses could best bring about the development of all that was then forced upon the social life through the modern scientific way of thinking and all its achievements. This way of thinking and its achievements, together with the inherent nature of Anglo-Saxondom, was the foundation for the world dominion of the Anglo-Saxon. The brilliant rise of commerce, trade and industry which has come out of modern science, everything which led to the great colonizations, has arisen, in fact, through the confluence of the natural-scientific mode of thought and the character of Anglo-Saxondom. And this was sensed deep down in the instincts of die West.

One can actually point to a significant moment of modern historical development, to the year 1651, when the ingenious Cromwell with his Navigation Act⁶ brought about that configuration in English navigation and in all English trade which was the foundation for everything in the West which later arose. One can also point to how, for outwardly inexplicable reasons, French merchant shipping suffered its greatest decline just as Napoleon's star was in the ascendant. What takes place in the West takes place out of the forces lying in the actual direction of humanity's development. It takes place out of a completely economic way of thinking, out of the impulses of economic ideas. This is why everything which comes from Central Europe and is conceived not out of economic points of view, but out of political-legal-militaristic ones must succumb to them. We have a crude example of how, based an a political-military standpoint, Napoleon, with his 'Continental System',⁷ tried to counteract from the European continent everything that had resulted from Cromwell's Navigation Act. This Navigation Act was conceived and created entirely out of economic instincts. Napoleon's 'Continental System' at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a political conception. But a political conception is something that projects from earlier times into the modern age—it is antiquated, is actually an anachronism. This is why this political conception could be no match for the modern conception from which the Navigation Act arose. On the other hand, in the West where thinking follows the lines of economics in the sense of the new age, political affairs, even if they take an unfavourable course, do not fundamentally.

Consider the fact that from Europe France colonized North America. She lost these colonies to England. The colonies freed themselves again. The first, the French colonization in the eighteenth century, was a political act and bore no fruit. The English colonization in North America was entirely out of economic impulses. The political element could be destroyed—North America freed itself and the political connection no longer existed. But the economic connections remained intact.

Thus are things linked in human evolution. And we can safely say that history also shows that when two do the same thing it is in fact not the same. When Cromwell, at the right time and out of economic impulses, created his Navigation Act—which, for the other powers, was extraordinarily tyrannical and even, one could say, brutal—this arose nevertheless from an economic thinking. When, in modern times, Tirpitz⁸ created the German navy and merchant fleet it was conceived politically, purely politically and without any economic impulse—in fact, against all economic instincts. Today it has been wiped off the face of the earth because it was planned and conceived contrary to the course of human evolution. And thus it could be shown, with regard to all individual phenomena, how this, let us say historical threefoldness, really does exist; in the East, but in a decadent form today, something which points back to ancient times of Eastern evolution and has a spiritual character; in the Centre something which today is also antiquated and always, to a greater or lesser extent, takes an the form of the political-legal-militaristic; in the West the State is really only a decoration, the political has no real significance—what preponderates here is economic thinking. Whereas Germany has gone to pieces because the State has absorbed the economy, because industry and commerce have submerged and bowed down under the power of the State, we see in the West how the State is sucked up by the economic life and everything is flooded by the economic life. This, viewed externally, is the differentiation covering the modern civilized world.

But what one can view in this way externally is, after all, basically brought to the visible surface only from the underlying depths of the spiritual world. Everything in the spiritual development of modern times is designed towards setting up the individuality—the individuality in the West in a Western way, in an economic way; the individuality of the Centre in the already antiquated political-militaristic way; the individuality of the East in an antiquated way, in accordance with the ancient spirituality that is now completely decadent. This has to be borne by the spiritual world, and it is borne by the fact that both in the West and the East—we shall consider only these two regions for the time being—a peculiar and deeply significant phenomenon is appearing. And it is this: very many people—at least relatively many—are being born who do not follow the regular course of reincarnation.

You see, this is why it is so difficult to speak about such a problem as reincarnation, because one cannot speak about it in the abstract sense that is so popular nowadays. For it is a problem pointing indeed to something that is a significant reality in the evolution of humanity, but it can have exceptions. And we see how both in the East and the West—we shall have to speak of the Centre in later lectures—people are born whom we cannot regard in such a way that we can say: There lives in this person, in the completely usual way, an individuality that was there in an earlier life, and then again in a subsequent earlier life, and which will be there in a later life and again in a still later life. Such reincarnations form the regular course of human evolution, but there are exceptions. What confronts us as a human being in human form does not always have to be as it outwardly appears. The outer appearance can, in fact, be just appearance. It is possible for us to confront human beings in human form who only appear to be human beings of the kind that are subject to repeated lives on earth. In reality these are human bodies with a physical, etheric and astral body—but there are other beings incarnated here, beings who use these people in order to work through them. There are in fact a large number of people, for example in the West, who are not simply reincarnated human beings but are the bearers of beings who have taken an extremely premature path of development and who should only appear in the form of humanity at a later stage of their evolution. Now these beings do not make use of the whole human organism but use chiefly the metabolic system of these Western human beings. Of the three members of the human nature they use the metabolic system and do so in such a way that, through these human beings, they work into the physical world. For one who can observe life with a certain accuracy, people of this kind even show outwardly that this is how it is with them. Thus, for example, a large number of those individuals who belong to Anglo-Saxon secret societies and who have great influence—we have spoken on a number of occasions in past years of the roll of these secret societies⁹ —are actually the bearers of premature existences of this kind which, through the metabolic system of certain people, work into the world and seek out a field of action through human bodies and do not live in normal regular incarnations. The leading personalities of certain sects are of this nature, and the overwhelming majority of a very widespread sect that has a great following in the West is made up of individuals of this kind. In this way a completely different spirituality is working into present-day human beings and it will be an essential task to be able to take up a stand towards life from this point of view.

One should not think in an abstract way that everywhere and without exception human beings are subject to repeated lives on earth. This would mean that we do not attribute to external semblance the quality of semblance. To face the truth means even in cases like these, to seek truth; to seek reality where outer appearance is so deceptive that beings other than human beings are incorporated in human form, in a part of the human being, namely in the metabolic system. But they also work in the trunk, in the rhythmic system and in the sensory-nervous system. There are in fact three kinds of beings of this nature who incarnate in this way through the metabolic system of different people of the West.

The first kind of beings are beings that have a particular attraction to what, in a sense, are the elemental forces of the earth; that have an inclination towards, a feeling for the elemental forces of the earth and are thus able to sense how, in any particular place, colonization could be carried out in accordance with the conditions of the climate and any other conditions of the earth, or how a trading connection can be established there, and so on.

The second kind of spirits of this nature are those that set themselves the task within their sphere of action of suppressing consciousness of self, of preventing full consciousness of the consciousness-soul from emerging, and thus produce in other people around them, amongst whom something like this spreads like an epidemic, a certain desire not to call themselves to account concerning the real motives behind their actions. One could say that such an utterly untrue report, or such an utterly untrue document, as the one by the Oxford professors that has been published in the last few days¹⁰—such an utterly, even absurdly, untruthful document—must be accounted to the pupilship of this untruthful element which does not wish to look into the real impulses, but glosses over them; uses beautiful words, and all the while there is beneath it nothing, basically, but untruthful impulses. I am not suggesting here that these Oxford professors—who are probably perfectly upright men in themselves (I do not impute strong Ahrimanic impulses to them)—are themselves bearers of such premature beings; but the pupilship to such beings lies within them. These [second kind of] beings, therefore, incarnate through the rhythmic system of certain people in the West.

The third kind of beings that work in the West are those which make it their task to cause the individual abilities in the human being to be forgotten—those abilities which we bring with us from the spiritual worlds when, through conception and birth, we come into physical existence—and to turn human beings more or less into a stereotyped replica of their nation. This is what this third kind of being gives itself as its special task: to prevent the human being from coming to individual spirituality.

So, while the first kind of beings had an affinity with the elemental nature of the ground of the earth, of the climate and so on, the second kind has a particular tendency to breed a certain superficial, untruthful element, and the third type of being the tendency to root out individual abilities and to turn people more or less into a stereotype, a copy of their nation, their race. This last class of beings incarnates in the West through the head system, through the sensory-nervous system. Thus we have here, observed from different angles, the characteristic of the Western world. We have characterized it, if I may put it so, by getting to know a fairly large number of people who are scattered in secret societies, in sects and the like, but whose humanity is constituted in the fact that it is not simply a matter of repeated incarnations, but the incarnation, in a way, of beings who in their development are prematurely here an the earth and who, therefore, attract particular followers or radiate like an epidemic their own exceptional qualities onto other human beings. These three different types of beings do indeed work through human beings and we understand human character only if we know what I have just related—if we know that what lives in public life cannot be simply explained superficially but has to be explained in terms of the intrusion of spiritual forces of this kind.

The appearance in Western human beings of these three kinds of forces, of beings at this particular stage of development, is encouraged by the fact that it is given to the West to develop a specifically economic way of thinking. The economic life is, as it were, the ground and soil from which something like this can spring up. And what then, in total, is the task these beings have set themselves?

They have set themselves the task of keeping life as a whole restricted to the mere life of economics. They seek gradually to root out everything else—everything of the spiritual life which even where it is most active, has shrunk into the abstractness of Puritanism—to root out spiritual life, to chip away the political life and to absorb everything into the life of economics. In the West the people who come into the world in this way are the real enemies and opponents of the threefold impulse. The beings of the first type prevent die emergence of an economic life that stands as an independent entity alongside the political-legal and spiritual facets of the social organism. The beings of the second type, who make superficiality, phrase-mongering and untruthfulness their task, seek to prevent the establishing, alongside the economic life, of an independent democratic life of the State. And the third kind of being those that suppress the individual abilities of the human being and do not want the human being to be anything other than a kind of stereotype of his race, his nation—work against the emancipation and independence of the spiritual life.

Thus in the West there are such forces which work in this way against the impulse of the threefold social organism. And anyone who, in a deeper sense, wishes to work for the spread of this threefold impulse must be aware that he has also to take into account spiritual factors like these that are present in human evolution. Indeed the powers on which one must call when one wants to bring something new into the development of humanity are faced not only with the things that any hard-headed philistine notices but also with things that are only laid open to a spiritual knowledge. What use is it when people of today regard this as superstition and do not want to hear that such spiritual beings intrude through human beings? They are nevertheless there, these spiritual beings! And anyone who does not merely want to go through life with a sleeping soul, but with a fully awake soul, can observe the influences of these beings everywhere. If only, from the presence of the effects, people would allow themselves to be convinced a little of the existence of the causes!

This is the characteristic we find when looking towards the West. The West takes on this form because it lives completely in the most fundamental expression of the present epoch—in economic concepts, economic thinking.

The East had once a grand and lofty life of spirit. All spirituality—with the exception of what is striven for in Anthroposophy and is trying to give itself new form—all spirituality of the civilized world is, in actual fact, a legacy of the East. But the real glory of this religious-spiritual life was present in the East only in ancient times. And today the Eastern human being, even in Russia, finds himself in a strange disharmony because on the one hand he still lives in the ancient spiritual element of his heritage and, on the other, there is also working in him that which comes out of the present epoch of human development; namely the training towards becoming an individuality. This brings about a situation such that, in the East, there is a strong decadence in humanity; that, in a sense, the human being cannot become a full human being; that hard on the heels of this Eastern human being, as far west as Russia, is the spiritual heritage of ancient times. And this has the effect that when today the consciousness of this Eastern human being is lowered, when he is in a condition of sleep or dreaming, or in some kind of mediumistic trance state which is so very frequent in the East, he is then, indeed, not entirely impregnated by another being as in the West, but this being works into his soul nature; these beings, as it were, appear to him. Whereas in the West it is premature beings of three kinds that are at work (which I have ennumerated), in the East it is retarded beings, beings that have remained behind from an earlier evolutionary stage of perfection and who now appear to human beings of the East in a mediumistic state, in dreams, or simply during sleep, so that the human being in a waking state then bears within him the inspirations of such beings; is inspired during the day by the after-effects of beings of this kind who come over him during the night.

And here again there are three types of beings working in the East who likewise have a great influence. Whereas in the West one has to draw attention to individual human beings through whom these beings incarnate, in the East one must point to a kind of hierarchy that can appear to the most varied people. Again it is three types of beings; not, however, beings that incarnate through people but beings that appear to people and also inspire them during sleep at night.

The first type of these beings prevents the human being from taking full possession of his physical body, hinders him from finding a connection with the economic element, with the public conditions of the present-day in general. These are the beings who seek in the East to hold back the economic life as it is needed in the threefold social order.

The second type of beings are those that produce over-individualization—a kind of, if I may put it so paradoxically, unegoistic egoism. This is all the more subtle in the way it is so frequently found in people, particularly of the East, who fancifully attribute to themselves all possible selflessness—a selflessness which, however, is in fact a particularly subtle form of self-seeking, a particulary subtle egoism. They want to be absolutely good, they want to be as good as it is ever possible to be. This, too, is an egoistic sentiment. This is something that can be called, paradoxically, an unegoistic egoism, an egoism arising from an imagined selflessness.

The third type of being that appears, in the way described, to human beings of the East are those beings that hold back the spiritual life from the earth; that spread, as it were, a dull mystical atmosphere over human beings, as can be found so frequently today, particularly in the East. And again, these three types of spiritual beings, which work down from the spiritual world and do not incarnate into human beings, are the enemies of the threefold social organism. In this way the threefold impulse is hemmed in from the spiritual side in the East and from the human side, as described, in the West. Thus we see here the spiritual foundations underlying the differen-tiation.

We still have to add to this what is hostile to the threefolding in the European Centre so that, from a spiritual point of view, we gradually gain an idea of how one must equip oneself in order that the opposing powers—whether from the spiritual world, as in the East, or from human beings, as in the West, or from the Centre of Europe, in a way which I shall relate tomorrow—can be met by the threefold idea with an impulse that is of the greatest conceivable importance for humanity's evolution. And in order to know how one must act with regard to these things one must be equipped with an armour of thoughts.

• 1 . See Die soziale Grundforderung unserer Zeit—In geänderter Zeitlage, twelve lectures, Dornach and Bern 1918, (GA 186).
• 2 . Karl Marx (1818–1883), founder of scientific capitalism.
• 3 . Peter the Great (1672–1725), Tsar of Russia.
• 4 . Lenin, actually Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924).
• 5 . Trotsky, actually Leib Bronstein (1879–1940).
• 6 . Cromwell's Magna Charta Maritima strengthened the position of the English fleet by decreeing that foreign goods could be imported only on English ships or ships of the country of origin. This measure struck a blow primarily at the Dutch hegemony in international carrying trade.
• 7 . Napoleon's decree from Berlin on 21 November 1806 imposed the strictest blockade of the British Isles by closing the entire Continent to trade and commerce with England.
• 8 . Alfred von Tirpitz (1849–1930), German Admiral of the the Fleet and statesman, creator of the German naval fleet.
• 9 . See, et al., the lectures from 20 to 22 January 1917, Das Geheimnis des Lebens nach dem Tode in Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen. Das Karma der Unwahrhaftigkeit, Zweiter Teil, twelve lectures, Dornach 1917, (GA 174); Individuelle Geistwesen und ihr Wirken in der Seek des Menschen, nine lectures in different cities, 1917, (GA 178); and Die okkulte Bewegung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert and ihre Beziehung zur Welikultur, thirteen lectures, Dornach 1915, (GA 254).
• 10. In October 1920, professors and doctors of Oxford University sent an appeal to the professors of art and science in Germany and Austria, in order, as it says there, '...to remove the bitter enmity that has arisen under the influence of patriotism...' and to find a reconciliation through the 'brotherly feelings of study'—article entitled Die Völkeruersühnung (The Reconciliation of Peoples) in the Basel Nationalzeitung of 20 October 1920.

To understand the world without understanding Man is impossible. That is the net result to be derived from our studies here. And for that very reason I wish today to contribute a little more to the understanding of Man. Let us then start from the disparity between the organisation of the head and that of the limb man—a subject on which we have already frequently spoken here.

First of all I would remind you that the head-organisation, as it meets us in the life between birth and death, is the outcome of all those formative processes which have been undergone from the last death to the earthly embodiment of this present life. From this we must conclude that everything connected with the head-organisation does not, in its conformity to law, follow those rules and forces to which we are adapted as earthly beings. Through the bodily organisation which we receive in this particular incarnation we are adapted to Earth-life. We have spoken a little of how this is manifested. We complete one revolution, of taking nourishment and digesting it, every 24 hours. Thereby we are adjusted with respect to the cycle of nourishment and digestion to the movement of the Earth in 24 hours. Something is accomplished in us, as it were, resembling what takes place in the processes of the Earth within the Universe. Our head, however, we virtually bring with us in its organisation at birth; therefore the head is primarily adjusted not to earthly relationships, but to such as are really from beyond the Earth. The head therefore is in a peculiar position in relation to the rest of man. A comparison may serve to make clear the position of man's head during the early epochs of his Earth-life.

Suppose we were on board a ship. The ship makes various movements in different directions. If we have a compass, we see that the set of the magnetic needle does not follow the movement of the ship, but points always to the magnetic North Pole. It is independent of the movements of the ship. The ship's movements can indeed be themselves regulated by the constant position of the magnetic needle. In a sense it is the same with the human head. Man does many things in the physical world with the rest of his organism: the head in a sense has no part in what he does in earthly life. It is always organised with its inborn forces in accordance with the extra-earthly. It is a very important fact that we have in the human head something organised in this way for the extra-earthly. Nevertheless there is always an interaction between the organisation of the head and that of the rest of man. This interaction is only gradually brought to completion in the course of the time that passes between birth and death. The head, as we receive it from the super-earthly worlds at birth, is organised primarily for the life of ideation. It is in a sense so constructed that the life of ideas can use it as an instrument. If it were to develop only on the basis of the forces which it receives on leaving the super-earthly worlds, it would develop solely as an organ of ideation or thought; our connection with the world through the head-organisation would in course of time be entirely lost. We should, as it were, so pass through earthly life with our consciousness as to develop by means of the head ideas only—that is, no more than pictures of earthly life. We should become more and more conscious of extending beyond our organisation which is connected with the Earth-being, of extending beyond it with our head; as though through our head we were beings who were strange to the Earth and developed only pictures of all that is connected with earthly life.

This is not so, and precisely for the reason that the rest of the organism sends its forces into the head. If we enquire into the quality of these forces, which from childhood onwards are more and more directed from the rest of the organism into the head, if we wish to describe them, we must look for them particularly in the forces of the Will. The rest of the organism is continually impregnating the Thought-nature of the head with Will-forces. Thus we can say, in effect, speaking diagrammatically, that we acquire the head as the bearer of ideas, as the result of the foregoing incarnation; while the Will-forces are sent into it from the rest of the organism. What has just been said takes place not only in the life of soul, but shows its effects in the bodily life also.

As head-man we are born in this earthly world as beings of thought and ideation, and the forces of ideation are at first very powerful. They ray out from the head into the rest of the organism, and it is they which during the first seven years of life enable the forces which manifest in the second dentition to work out of the rest of our organism, these same forces consolidate in us also the life of Thought, which is not consolidated until we acquire the second teeth. They are the actual forces which produce the teeth; so that when we have the teeth, these forces are set free, and can assert themselves in the life of ideas. They can then form ideas, and in a corresponding way build the power of memory. Clearly outlined ideas can begin to find a place in our thought. As long however as we are employing the forces in the formation of the teeth, they cannot show themselves as true consolidating forces in the life of ideas.

As we grow beyond the seventh or eighth year, the Will which is essentially bound up with the lower man and not with the head, begins to manifest, and now comes the time when it would, as it were, shoot its forces up into the head. This cannot however come about so easily; for our head, which is organised for the extra-earthly, would not be able to receive these strong forces which the metabolic system, as vehicle of the Will, wishes to send forth to it. These forces must first be stemmed; they must make a halt until sufficiently filtered, toned down, given more of a ‘soul’ character, to make their influence felt in the head. This halt is made at the end of the second septennial period. When the Will-forces are arrested in the organisation of the larynx—for that is the way they manifest; in the male organisation they suddenly break forth in the change of voice. In the female organisation they manifest differently. These are the Will-forces coming to a standstill, as it were, before they reach the head. Thus we may say that at the end of our second septennial period, the Will-forces are arrested in the speech organisation. At that time they are sufficiently filtered and “souled” to make their influence felt in the head-organisation. Having reached the age of puberty, and the change of voice which runs parallel with it, we have reached the point when the faculty of thought and ideation can work together with the Will in the head.

Here we have an example of how with our Spiritual Science we can point concretely to events. The abstract philosophies which make their influence felt in modern times—Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea for instance—all remain in the abstract. Schopenhauer took pains to describe the world in its ideal character on the one hand, and its will character on the other; but he remains, as it were, in the mere abstract. So also does Eduard von Hartmann. They all remain in the abstract. To be concrete is to observe how, through these two halts—at the first and second septennial periods—in quite definite and distinct ways Idea and Will meet in the cosmic system of the human head. The essential thing is that we can point to that which is of the soul and spirit and show how it manifests and reveals itself in the outer physical world. So too, we see the forces of the head, which are sent forth to the body and manifest therein in the forming of the teeth, work together with the forces of the body sent to the head, which prepare themselves, by what they undergo in the formation of speech, to become true soul-will. In the formation of speech they are arrested and held back and only then do they press forward into the head.

Thus we must understand Man in his process of formation, and look at what actually goes on with him. I have said that the human head is no more adjusted to the earthly relations of man than is the magnetic needle to the movements of the ship. The needle is independent of them, and the human head is in the same way independent of the earthly connection.

Here we have something which gradually leads to the physiological concept of freedom. Here we have the physiology of what I have set forth in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, namely, that one can only understand freedom by grasping it in sense-free thinking—that is to say, in the processes taking place in man when he directs pure thinking by his Will and orientates it in accordance with certain defined directions.

We see how man comes step by step to study rightly the mutual relationship of the soul-and-spirit and the physical-corporeal, and how the process of speech-formation can be really understood by conceiving of it as a product of two sources from which the human being is supplied—the sources which are in the head-man on the one hand and in the limb-man on the other.

We can now experience more fully how impossible it is to say that some kind of communication of the will is carried from the brain through the motor nerves. The brain only derives its full power of volition from the rest of the organism. Of course you are not to imagine this as if you could draw it in a diagram, for the process of speech-formation not only was prepared earlier, but is something which goes through the whole of life and only appears in its most characteristic feature in the special time of transition. Thus we must understand clearly how man is adapted to an earthly as well as an extra-earthly life.

He is so adapted to earthly life that certain forces which the animal brings to their conclusion, man does not bring to a conclusion in his purely natural organisation. The animal is, as it were, born ready-equipped for all its functions. Man has to be taught to acquire these functions for himself. What thus takes place in man is really only an outer expression of something that takes place in him organically If we study the metabolism of the animal correctly, we find that it goes further than that of man. The metabolism of man must be held back at an earlier halting place. What in the animal is carried to a certain stage—must in man be arrested at an earlier stage. Superficially expressed, man does not carry digestion so far as the animal; the digestive process ceases earlier. He retains, through the arrested digestion, forces which become the vehicle for what he sends to the head through the Will.

As you see, human nature is complicated; and if one does not wish to take the trouble really to study its complications—why then, one arrives at a science such as we have in the external science of today! One does not arrive at the real nature of Man. The essential nature of Man will only be revealed when Spiritual Science is allowed to illuminate natural science. If however, it is with Man as I have described, and the connection between Man and the extra-human world outside him is as we have described it in these studies, then you will see that the extra-human world can only exist for Man if it has a certain resemblance to him, to his organisation. We have seen that as limb-men we are adapted to earthly relationships, but that through the head-organisation we have removed ourselves as it were out of earthly relations, like the ship's compass on the ship. Now something of this kind must take place also in the extra-human world. There must, for instance, be adaptation to the human limb-nature. Something must lift itself out beyond, there must be something that does not belong.

How does modern natural science study Man? It studies him as though he had no head. Of course it studies the head too, but how? As a kind of appendage to the rest of his organism. What natural science produces for the comprehension of human nature is only calculated to explain the part outside the head, not the human head itself; that must be explained from the spiritual world.

I might have used the following comparison. I might have said—I have already spoken of it recently—that the human head sits upon the rest of the human organism as people sit in a railway carriage. They take no personal part in the movement. They sit still and allow the carriage to move. In the same way, the human head sits at ease. It regards the rest of the organism which is adapted to the outer world, as its coach, and allows itself to be carried. It is itself organised for a very different world. And this is how it must be in the outer world also. A natural history of man, such as we have today, really speaks of a headless man, it does not understand his true nature at all. And an astronomy constructed on the same principles would not correspond to the whole extra-earthly world, but only to a certain part of it; the other part that is withdrawn from this main part, is not considered at all. As a matter of fact the trend of natural science for the last three or four centuries has been such that it has developed the movements of the Universe, disregarding a certain content of this Universe, just as the rest of natural science disregards the human head. Therefore astronomy has derived forms of movements such as ‘The Earth revolves in an elliptical path round the Sun’, which are as little correct for the Universe as the natural science of today is for the whole being of Man. They do not correspond to the actual facts. Hence we must so often point out that the Copernican view must be fructified by Spiritual Science. Many mystics, and theosophists too, are fond of preaching: ‘The world of senses around us is Maya.’ But they do not draw the ultimate logical conclusion, otherwise they would have to say: ‘Even the world of the Copernican system, this movement of the Earth around the Sun is maya, is an illusion, and must be revised.’ For we must realise that within it is something which can no more be recognised on the basis of the hypothesis employed by Copernicus, Galileo—or even Kepler—than the whole nature of Man can be understood from the principles of modern science.

Now when we come to treat of a subject like this, we must at the same time point to something which has already taken place in human evolution. If we call to mind what we have often said—that in olden times there was a kind of primeval wisdom of which man had but a dreamy atavistic consciousness, but which in its content far surpassed what we have since acquired—if we remember all this, we shall not find it difficult to bear in mind also that the idea of the world which was held in olden times was quite different from any cosmology possible today. For what was the cosmology of our forefathers—that is, of ourselves in our former Earth-lives? What was it?

The cosmology that man had in those times consisted far more than it does now in what man brought into the world at physical birth. We may still find in children, if we understand how to observe them aright, something like a picture of the world in which man lived before descending to physical life. In later life however, and indeed very early in later life, this picture vanishes. In olden times this picture endured. What existed in earlier epochs of spiritual evolution as an astronomical description of the solar or planetary system and its relation to man, was something man felt within him, although he experienced it in a dream-like state. Today we look back upon those times of our ancestors with a certain arrogance, yet they were times when we really knew there was something within ourselves that had connection with Mars, Mercury, and so on. That was part of the inner consciousness of the human being. It disappeared however as man developed further. In primeval times he saw only the outer constellation, but felt within himself an inner constellation, an inner cosmic system. Not only did he perceive a cosmic system outside him; but in his own head, which today is merely the vehicle of the—shall I say—indefinite life of ideas, there within, shone the Sun, with the planets circling round. In his head man carried this cosmic picture, and it had an inner force which worked upon the rest of the organism and influenced what he received at birth, or rather at conception, from the Earth-forces; that too was influenced, so that the rest of man was also drawn into this adaptation to the planetary forces.

And now we can carry the thought a little further. Man is born into this world, and as a heritage he receives—let us say—in the first place, the power to acquire his teeth, the milk-teeth. These are completed approximately in the circle of the first year. The second teeth need seven times as long; they are brought forth by the human organism itself. This points in the deepest sense to the fact that a certain rhythm which we bring with us at birth and which relates to the yearly revolution is slowed down by seven times in our earthly life. By seven times is the yearly revolution slowed down, and this is expressed in the fact that man has introduced into his division of time the relation of one to seven—day and week. The week is seven times as long as the day. This is an expression of how something takes its course in man which goes seven times slower than what he brings into physical existence at birth. Man will not understand the actual processes in the human being until he is able to see quite clearly and exactly how something within him which, as it were, was brought in from conditions outside the Earth, has to be slowed down by seven times during the earthly period.

The ancient Mystery teaching spoke much of these facts. If I were to express in our language what the old Mystery teachings—the ancient Hebrew Mystery teaching, for example—said from their atavistic knowledge of these matters, I should have to put it in this way.—The old Hebrew teachers explained to their pupils: Jehovah, who is the true Earth God, who added the Earth-organisation to that of Saturn, Sun and Moon—Jehovah has the tendency to slow down seven times what comes from the Moon-organisation. In relation to the course of the Earth something in the human being wants to go at accelerated speed. I might even say that the old Hebrew Mystery teacher said to his pupils: Lucifer runs seven times as fast as Jehovah. This points to two movements, two currents in human nature. These two currents also exist in extra-earthly nature—only there they are present in a somewhat different form. The thought however, which we here approach, is one not very easy to understand. We can perhaps gain insight into it by starting from social relationships, and then coming back to the cosmic-tellurian relationships.

I have often spoken in public lectures of something I should like to express here. When we contemplate the misery of the present time, we find the peculiar fact that the whole intelligence of modern humanity has developed in a way that is quite estranged from reality. It is a peculiar fact that, in practical life, we find more inefficient people than efficient. This is patent, for instance, as I have shown, in the fact that in the nineteenth century there was much discussion concerning the effect of the gold-standard upon international economic relations. You can go through the Parliamentary reports of that century, and try to form an idea from them of what people then thought would be the result of mono-metalism, the gold-standard. They regarded it as something which would make free trade possible unhindered by imposition of duty. Throughout the united economic domains of the world this was predicted wherever the gold-standard was extolled. What has actually come about? The imposition of duty. Little by little the actual relations have developed in such a way that everywhere duties have been imposed. That is the actual outcome.

Judging superficially one might say: Well, those people must have been very stupid! But they were not at all stupid; among those who had pledged themselves to the promotion of free trade by the gold-standard, were very able and clever persons, but they had no sense of reality, they reckoned only according to logic. They could not dive into the true relationships, any more than can our modern scientists comprehend the organisation of the heart, liver, spleen and so on. They make abstract theories and hold on to them; although they are materialists they remain rooted in the abstract. That is why such an occurrence is possible as that related in the following anecdote, which is founded on fact and is really very illuminating.

In a certain Academy of science there was a physiologist, a learned man, who developed a theory as to the varying length of time particular birds can fast. He made out a beautiful schedule. He had large cages of birds placed in his corridor and he starved those birds to ascertain how long they could live without food. He registered the times and obtained some lovely big numbers as a result. He elaborated these in a paper which he read at an Academical Meeting. Now in the same house there lived on the floor above another physiologist who did not apply the same methods. After the learned treatise had been read, he rose and said: ‘I must unfortunately object that these figures are not correct, for I had such pity on the poor birds that I fed them in passing.’ Now things do not always have to happen just like this! This is an anecdote. But it is founded on fact; and really much of the material underlying our exact science has been obtained in a like way. Someone in the background has ‘fed the birds’ instead of their having starved as long as the schedule showed. If one has a sense for reality, one cannot very well work with statistical methods of that kind; they do not hold out much promise. But this sense for reality is wholly lacking in modern humanity. Why is this so? It is due to a certain necessity of the evolution of humanity; and we can understand the matter as follows:

Picture it to yourselves in this way. The man of ancient times looked into this outer world. By means of all that he bore within him, he viewed the relationships and connections of the world outside. He formed also his theory of the stars from out of his own inner stellar system. He had ‘a sense for reality’ and he carried it in his senses. This sense for reality has disappeared in the course of man's evolution. It will have to be developed again, it will have to be developed to the same degree inwardly as it formerly was outwardly. We must really cultivate this sense for reality in our inner being by the training we receive in Spiritual Science; only then shall we be able to develop it in the world outside. If man were to keep straight on in the path in which he has been evolving with modern intellectuality, he would at length be quite unable to perceive what is going on around him, and then it could easily happen that while the cry is heard, ‘Free Trade is coming!’ in reality it will be Customs restrictions that are being established. This is continually happening in the various domains of so-called practical life. What happened then in a big thing happens today in small things everywhere. The ‘practical’ man predicts one thing, the opposite happens. It would be interesting to keep an account of what ‘practical’ men have predicted as ‘certain to happen’ during the last years of the war. Always the opposite came about, especially in the later years, precisely because there was no longer any sense for reality among the people. This sense however, can arise in no other way than by developing it first within. In future times no one will be considered a practical man or a thinker attuned to reality, who disdains to educate himself in his inner being through Spiritual Science, in a manner that cannot be done through the outer world today. We must carry into the world outside what we develop within. Hence the necessity for Spiritual Science; for people cannot arrive at the relation of the heart to the liver if they do not first acquire the method for it by means of a training in Spiritual Science. In earlier times people could say: the heart is related to the liver somewhat as the Sun to Mercury in the outer world; and man knew something of how this relationship of Sun to Mercury was drawn from the super-sensible world into the sense world. This is now no longer understood, nor can it ever be thoroughly understood if the foundation, the basic impulse for this comprehension, be not acquired from within. It is not through clairvoyance alone that man can make it his own. By clairvoyance the facts of Spiritual Science are investigated; but man acquires this sense when he enters with his whole thought and feeling into what has already been discovered by clairvoyant methods, and regulates his life accordingly. That is the essential point. What is of moment is to study the conclusions of Spiritual Science, not to satisfy a curiosity for clairvoyance. That must be emphasised again and again. For in the whole development of human culture, this application of the methods of Spiritual Science to outer life and to the knowledge of the great world, the world outside man, is of quite special importance.

When we consider what we thus have to look upon as the original head-organisation, when we consider it in the course of our life, we see how it gradually becomes permeated with all in our organisation that is adapted to the world outside. Thus we must learn to understand the world outside man from man's own organism, from the human limb-organisation; and there, only such things as I have already hinted at can help us. I have shown the contrast that exists between the waking and sleeping conditions of man. These are contrasting conditions, and when one condition is passing over into the other, that is to say, when we wake up and when we go to sleep, then we pass through a zero-point of our existence. The moment of awaking and the moment of falling asleep must have something to do with one another.

This indicates that if we try to turn the day-course of man into a geometrical figure, we can employ neither a circle nor an ellipse; for if we were to ascribe to the sleep condition one part of the ellipse, the conditions of awaking and falling asleep should fall apart; and this they cannot do. We shall see how even in outer appearance they present a similarity; they cannot fall apart. Thus we cannot draw the geometrical figure which is to correspond with man's daily round in a circular form nor in an elliptic form. We can only draw it as a looped line, a lemniscate. When we say: Man falls asleep out of the waking condition into the sleep condition, then with the lemniscate it is possible to show him coming out of sleep again through the same condition; and we have a curve, a line which truly corresponds to the daily course of human life. There is no other line for the daily course of life than the lemniscate, for no other line would lead the awaking through the same point as the falling asleep.

There is more than this. If we give attention to human evolution in childhood especially, we have to say: we wake up virtually the same as we went to sleep. We wake up the same in respect of the principal alternating conditions of

waking and sleeping. But if we rightly observe life, we cannot exclude the sleeping condition from human life as a whole. We instruct our children during the day. Out of all we bring to the child, much of it is not his at once, but becomes so only the next day, after the Ego and astral body have passed through the night-condition; only then does the child duly receive what we have given him by day. We must always have this in mind and regulate our teaching and education accordingly. Thus in regard to the alternating condition of day and night, we can say: we sleep, and on awaking come to the same place where we fell asleep; but in regard to human evolution, we shall have to say: we press forwards a little. We progress in another direction.

Hence we may not draw the line quite as a lemniscate; but in such a way that we come out a little further on, and so attain a progressive lemniscate. (A).

Thus when we observe the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, and continue the evolution, we obtain a spiral. This spiral is ultimately connected with our evolution, and our evolution again is connected with the whole cosmic system. Therefore we must seek this same line as the basis of the movements of the Universe. If, instead of abstract geometry, man had applied concrete geometry to celestial space, the concrete geometry that proceeds from a study of the whole man, he would have arrived at something different. For in the ancient wisdom one had this line (A). And one did not speak of Mars as moving along any other kind of line than this one. Gradually it was all forgotten. Man calculated instead of knowing. What was the result? It was a line which goes forward like this (B). But in that line one can get no further.

So man took this line and set circles upon it (C) and acquired the epicycloid theory.

The Ptolemaic theory is the last remnant of the old primeval wisdom. On its foundation Copernicus made a further simplification, and modern astronomy still speculates on that today—but in such a way that it much prefers to consider ellipses and circles than that inwardly curving line which presents a continuous spiral. Then people wonder that the observations do not agree with the calculations, and that fresh corrections have to be made continually.

Reflect how the whole theory of Relativity has been constructed on an error in Mercury's time of rotation. Only, the correction was attempted in a different way than would have been the case if one had gone back to Man's relation to the whole Cosmos. Of this more in the next lecture.

Our lectures, in that period of time before I had to go away some weeks ago, all tended to show how that which we call Spiritual Science can pass over into real life. They tended to show how that which we call the Cosmos stands in a certain inner connection with what we ourselves inwardly experience in man. And if you just survey the lectures given upon this very theme, I beg you once in a way, radically to ask yourselves this question:—What would it signify for the sum total of the evolution of humanity if these most penetrating, most significant results of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science would only penetrate into the life of those human beings working and living in a social relation with each other. They would know that man, while he attains his consciousness in a physical body, is all the time preserving something in this physical body which points to the period of time before his birth, or rather before his conception, when he was in a condition in which he was filled with a longing once again to have the life between birth and death. He carried within him then the feeling that the soul that has lived for a long time in the Spiritual world again needs the perception of the world obtainable through the bodily senses in order to progress further, and also needs actions performed in a physical body. This conscious contemplation of the pre-existence of the soul, if really understood in the right way, would not remain a mere theoretical view, but would lay hold of one's Feeling and Will, and thereby become a direct force in life.

We can see this my dear friends, in the humanity of the present- age.—They all show something of a lack of initiative, in its broad outlines. This lack of initiative, which broadly speaking, works in a weakening way on all these forces which are necessary in order to turn our decaying life once again into an ascending one, can only be bettered when man becomes conscious of his community with the Spiritual world. That however cannot be brought into the human soul through any theoretical considerations, but only through the living perception of what man was before he descended into the physical world.

Again, if that which looks beyond the time which we pass here as human beings between birth and death, is not the object simply of a vague belief but of a clear cognition, it does not work so abstractly in man as do the religious confessions of to-day, but works concretely, as a direct force of life, Man then works in such a way that what lies in his labour extends beyond his death; and because a man can take up such ideas into himself, life is thereby poured into everything which as a rule man only knows.

Just think for a moment. To-day we have a widely-extended Science of Nature; and as regards this external Science, we must say that man has progressed enormously; but the last few years have shown that this progress has not improved humanity in any moral respect. Such persons as Wallace and others, to whom I have often pointed when I wanted to emphasise that years ago, they were quite right when they said, “We have indeed made immense progress with respect to our knowledge of the outer world, but as regards our moral nature, humanity compared with primeval times, has not progressed.”

This progress must come to-day, in this historic Age, because human beings cannot remain as they are now, in their present disposition of soul. But how can this change be brought about? How can the more theoretical view of the world be animated? Let us take an apparently coarse example. In our human life, we make use of coal. We know that this coal is a relic of old forests, and so fundamentally it is a plant-substance. But now, how is this plant-substance, how is the whole world of plants connected with man as such? Just reckon over a few thousand years and see how much carbon dioxide, carbonic-acid the air would then contain,—because we breathe out carbon dioxide into the air with each expiration,—and you will find that it is a large quantity.

In the course of a few thousand years it would be an enormous quantity. In the course of a few thousand years, it would cause man to disappear; it would extinguish life. But now the plants absorb this carbon dioxide, and excrete the carbon; they form their body out of that which they absorb from man's cast-off produce; and these plants which once covered the Earth, now compose our layers of coal, our coal strata.

You see, that is an extraordinary transformation. At first it is more the qualitative aspect which comes into consideration; because naturally that coal was not formed by our breath but by other beings; but this qualitative aspect has to be considered. That which in a sense we excrete from ourselves, furnishes the basis for what we again use from the Earth. Thus far one can think, according to the theoretical results arrived at by Science.

Spiritual Science leads us further, I must remind you of what I have told you. It is true that man lays aside his physical body when he goes with his soul and spirit into the Spiritual worlds; but I also told you that the physical body, which is laid aside, signifies just that which builds up the Earth again.

As in our expiration we give carbon to the plant-world, so we give our body to the entire Earth. And what we see around us, my dear friends, is simply the product of such beings as ourselves, beings who, during the Moon, Sun and Saturn epochs were our predecessors, and who gave to the Earth that which composes the Earth to-day. When future worlds come, there will live in them that which we now excrete as our bodily substance. That is a thought of infinite scope, if one follows it out, because from our knowledge of nature (which is but a half-knowledge), we can get the connection of man with the entire world, and it is important that we should get that, extremely important; for if we bring together all that has been laid down as a foundation in our earlier lectures, we must say; that in our entire human nature, not merely in our thinking but in our entire nature, even as far as our external body, lives what we have worked upon in ourselves as our moral ideals. That dualistic philosophy, which can build no bridge between the natural world and the moral sphere, cannot imagine how what we have in our moral ideals can be connected with the very processes in our muscles; but if one can look at the world as we have tried to do in our recent lectures, one sees how what we think in our moral ideals incorporates itself into the very processes of our body. One sees that the Spiritual and bodily processes are interwoven and form a unity.

This method of looking at things ought to become general. If only it were taken up as part of the education of children, human beings would grow up who would not look on one side to a world developed from a nebulous condition, out of which, the Sun, the Stars and the Planets have condensed, and from which too, through the welding-together of matter void of morale or being, humanity has developed in order finally to return back into a purely natural condition. That which springs up in our souls as moral Ideals would then again be one with what stood at the starting point of our Cosmic evolution in its purely natural existence. We human beings would then realise that we are called upon to incorporate into the life of nature, what we experience as moral ideals. And then, in future worlds, we should know that what we now experience morally will re-appear as the Laws of Nature.

If only children could grow up to-day under the influence of such a perception, they would be able to take their place in the world in such a way that they would feel themselves as part of the Cosmos, and would thereby have a feeling for life drawn from these very forces which they would absorb into themselves with their knowledge of the Cosmos. Indeed, being educated to action, they would then know that whatever they do is to be imprinted in the entire Cosmos. If only that were the prevailing feeling, how differently human beings would live; whereas to-day man asks himself: “What am I really in this world?” He sees himself standing alone, sprung forth from indefinite Nature-forces, and permeated with moral ideals like soap bubbles. Such a man can be crippled in his very feeling for life. When he looks up to the stars he sees them passing through Cosmic space, but he feels he has no connection with them. They themselves have only arisen in a natural way. They are perishable worlds, falling to pieces, serving no purpose, and having no inner Spirituality.

We must bear in mind what a life-force for humanity might be developed from a Spiritual method of looking at things. That must be pointed out again and again, because that is just what human beings to-day understand least of all. They say that a Spiritual view makes a man live apart from the world; but my dear friends, it is the present modern view which makes one avoid the world. Why is this so? Because it works with the dogmas of the past, which in the past served a good purpose, because they then arose from a certain instinctive clairvoyance. But this instinctive clairvoyance has now disappeared, and human beings have no longer any relationship to it. The dogmas still retained are no longer understood. It is not a question of their falsity, but of modern humanity having no longer a living relationship with them. And outside of the dogmas still maintained, humanity to-day only has a nature science devoid of spirit. Anthroposophy will give a spirit-filled Science of nature, a science able to animate man, and that which trickles, as a knowledge of the spirit, into nature, will then transform itself in man in the same way as do the food-substances in a physical respect. That knowledge is transformed in man into Social Force, and one would experience it if one earnestly realised that Spiritual knowledge is nourishment for the soul, and can be absorbed and digested—if I can use that expression—it can be digested and re-appear as a force working socially. We can get social impulses in no other way than by taking up Spiritual cognition from surrounding Nature. Anyone who thinks he can carry out social reforms from any other impulse, thinks about the things of this world as one who meditates about man and wishing to explain him as clearly as possible, and in order to explain him to himself, forbids him food. Whoever speaks to-day of social forms without having Spiritual knowledge, does the same thing with reference to the social order of humanity as a man who wishes to explain man and prescribes for him a hunger cure. That is just what stands as a deep absurdity in the modern views of humanity, and which it cannot see through.

When we enter this life between Birth and Death, what we carry with us from the Spiritual worlds is only like an image, and fundamentally the whole of our soul-life is a life of images, pictures. But in former Ages this picture-life was animated by what then already existed in the natural perception as spirit. In ancient times there existed no concept of nature which was not filled with spirit. People to-day can read older views, but they read nothing there of a Natural Science, that is, of a natural Science devoid of spirit. Whoever goes back, even into the 13th or 14th Centuries, and reads the things written and spoken of nature there, may mock at the childishness, the superstition then existing; but the essential is, that all the things described then were described as permeated by spirit. To-day, on the other hand, we try as far as possible to see the phenomena of nature without spirit. Indeed, we regard it as the very perfection of our scientific observations to see them without spirit.

That which we take up out of nature without spirit, can however no longer work animatingly in the pictorial existence of our soul. We remain at a standstill in this respect and will not admit that it is merely an image. But this image, which is really the image of a past life, will not be fructified by the present life around us. This present life should be fructified by the past life, so that it can then be carried through the Gate of Death into the Spiritual worlds. It is only Spiritual Science livingly beheld which can give man that which it has to give him.

Just take, for instance, the dogmas of the old books of religion. Many men to-day fight against these because they find and consider them nonsensical; but they are in no wise nonsensical. Even such a dogma as that of the Trinity has a most profound sense. It was read by human beings from nature itself by means of the old instinctive clairvoyance, and for thousands of years in the evolution of humanity that dogma gave man an infinite amount. The external Churches have preserved such dogmas, but to-day they hardly exist except as a certain vocal sound. Men to-day feel no need to develop a relationship with what was an object of an ancient clairvoyance, and so it remains something which has no relationship to man to-day, because of his modern nature, although at one time it was a living soul-nourishment. And again, apart from these dogmas, we have our external Science of Nature, in a state of utter deprivation, which kills the soul unless it is permeated by the spirit.

These are the two basic evils which Spiritual Science as studied here, has to keep in mind: in order once more to give to the soul something which will animate it, and give it force, so that it can feel itself directly as a member of the entire Cosmos, and feel that responsibility in its social work which proceeds from knowing that as single individuals, even our tiniest action has a Cosmic significance for the whole evolution of the future. We have to look beyond that narrow circuit in which we are enclosed by reason of our lack of education; for that narrowing which man has himself brought about will increase more and more. That is why Spiritual Science meets with so much difficulty, because fundamentally that which it seeks to be, does not consist merely of words, nor thoughts, not merely ideas, but that which can permeate all those thoughts, flow through the words as the very Spiritual blood of life, and then trickle directly into each human soul. It is for that reason that, in any advocating of Spiritual Science, it is far more a question of how we speak than of what we say. We see to-day the most violent conflict between Materialism and Spiritualism. This conflict simply rests on the fact that human beings simply will not see what deep foundations this utterance has:—The truth always lies midway between two directly opposite associations.

My dear friends, is it true that God is within us? Is it true then that we are in God? It is true that we are in God. These two assertions are direct opposites. Both are true. God is in us, and we are in God; but the two assertions are polar opposites. The real truth, the whole truth lies between the two. The nature of all the conflict of ideas in the world rests on this—that human beings always tend to a one-sidedness, which is true, but only a one-sided truth; whereas the real truth lies between two opposite assertions. We must know both in order to get at the reality. For instance, to-day, in the present state of the evolution of the world, one must have the most earnest will to learn all we can of material existence above all, and not propagate the desire of those people who say: “We will only occupy ourselves with the Spirit: we do not want to know Matter.” To learn as much as possible of Matter is one side of human cognition, one thing for which the Will of man, must strive. On the other hand one must learn to know the Spirit, because between those two, lies what we are, and ought really to strive for. Both are wrong.—those who say the world is only Matter and those who say the world is only Spirit are wrong—For what is matter? Matter as human beings know it, is that which has remained behind from the Spirit, after the Spirit has become Spirit. Your own human form, my dear friends, is only what was once a thought of the Gods, which I here draw in red—the Divine workings of thought.

Just think; even as water that freezes gets a solid form, so this Divine thought gets a form and becomes the sheaths of man, (Blue). Then a new thought of God makes itself valid in the inner being of man, and then goes out again, (Red) and this Divine thought (left) was once transformed from a form which in still older times was also a thought of the Gods. Whatever we see as matter is nothing else than spirit which has become a firm form, and that which we perceive as the human spirit is simply a young form, a form engaged in the process of becoming. These two—Spirit and Matter—are only different because of their ages in the world—they only are of a different age. The mistake made about them does not consist in our applying ourselves either to Matter or to Spirit, but in wanting to maintain in the Present what we should so maintain in Life, which we should so fructify, that it may become something for the future.

Now just think. We bring something over into the present from our pre-existence in the Spiritual world; we bring that over as a Spiritual psychic life. But if we permeate that with a barren external spiritless Science of Nature, we harden it, we do not keep it germinal, we do not allow it to grow up for future worlds. We Ahrimanise it.

And if we try and grasp that which is already form, which is Divinity itself grown old and crystallised itself in form if we seek to grasp that in a nebulous way, through a nebulous mysticism into which we dream all kinds of things, we do not support ourselves on that which is given us by the Gods as our bodily support. And thus we Luciferise Matter. What is nebulous mysticism? Man should look into himself. He should recognise from out of the Cosmos that which he is in his own physical organism in his life between birth and death. Instead of that he cherishes the fantasy that he has a God within him. He has indeed a God within him, but he does not attain that through mystical fantasy, for he thus Luciferises what he should see in the later form of his own bodily sheaths. These are false views of Matter and Spirit, about which human beings come into strife with one another, for Matter and Spirit are one and the same, but at different ages of life.

That is something which it is very necessary our present Age should perceive; otherwise it can never come to an understanding of the social life. The attempt must be made to-day really to enter with one's thoughts into the true reality; but human beings do not want to do this,—they prefer to remain on the surface of things. A pretty little story was told to me a few days ago, which occurred a few weeks back in Zurich. Probably it has already been related to some of you here. One of our friends spoke at a University Celebration in Zurich about the scientific significance of Anthroposophy. A socialistic thinker in reply, got up and said: “One should not educate man to-day to such mystic phantasy, but to exact Science, for did not Goethe say: Into the inner being of nature no creative spirit can penetrate.”

You see, what this Swiss delegate brought forward rests simply on a superficial knowledge of what Goethe did say, For Goethe, quoting the above utterance of Halley said: “I have heard this repeated for 60 years and have sworn at it the whole time.” That is how the Spiritual Life is carried on to-day. That represents the accuracy with which men know things, and thus in a certain degree do they become authorities. Thus, do men strive to learn to know the world. Whether one man believes Goethe himself uttered what he swore at for 60 years, or whether as National Economists do they perform things such as I will characterise now, is really a matter of indifference. A very learned National Economist wrote a book about the free and the fixed formation of prices. He had to investigate a good deal as to the way in which, as I might say National Economy could be made social. Amongst the many things he discussed, is also the following. He says: Even George Brandes (who was himself no deep thinker) said: The people in their economic and social deeds are not guided by reason but by instinct.” Therefore, things should be explained to the people. That is what this National Economist is advocating. One must bring enlightenment to the people.

Now, my dear friends to this one could reply: In our many Universities, there are a great number of these National Economists, they are all enlightened, but when they arrange things amongst themselves, they are working exactly under the same institute instincts as the others,—neither more nor less. And so, as things are fashioned, especially to-day by our highly developed intelligence, as regards social life these same instincts remain, and are working. But now we must go further, we must now ask ourselves: How can we bring light into this working of the instincts, for that alone can be of social significance. It is simply nonsense to suppose that the majority of human beings can be guided by this; they cannot. Something must come in which can enter and transform these instincts. Reason cannot enter into them. We have here to remind ourselves of that ancient instinctive perception, (See Diagram) which has developed into our intellectuality; but this intellect lives only in the inner Spiritual life of man. On the other hand, the external forces working socially are permeated by instinct. Into this instinct something must penetrate which is related to the old instinctive vision, but which has an impulse from Spirituality. That is Imagination. Imagination must enter. (See Diagram) Imaginations as we call them in Spiritual Science, can alone give the force which can bring light to those instincts.

That which enables us to understand things to-day scientifically and externally; Botany, Zoology, Mathematics,—can be furnished by the intellect, but not that which implies human co-operation. There must enter what we have called Imagination. Imaginations must permeate the social life—that is the essential thing. In all social life which has developed from olden times up to recent times, there have lived the human instincts. It is actually only since the 2nd, and last third of the 19th Century that man has entered that age which no longer requires the old instincts. You can prove this exactly. Even at the turn of the 18th and 19th Century there still lived these ancient instincts in the social life of man. The uncertainty of man's instincts first appeared in that Age when intellect developed in its most shining form. Then tradition alone remained.

Just think, my dear friends, what gigantic efforts were made in the 19th Century, in order still to have moral views. Men had to preserve in the most abstract way what was still maintained from ancient times; and of necessity the old moral ideals were still propagated, though they were then petrified. We need to-day a rebirth of morality for that alone can produce what is social, that cannot come from the intellect, but simply and solely from moral intuition. Moral fantasy must raise itself to the Spiritual world, in order to fructify itself out of that world. That is now the essential, otherwise man faces the loss of moral impulses.

Those abstract Confessions which tend to belief alone cannot find in their faith the necessary strength for life to-day. Faith can give one something for the egoism of one's own soul; but with that egoism alone, at most one can live as an individual, separate being. If we want to enter into action, and that means social action, it is then necessary that we should be permeated with a Spiritual-psychic life-blood, and that can only come from a concrete Spiritual life. This consciousness of the Life-Force must flow through the Anthroposophical Movement into the Anthroposophical view of life. Especially from this point of view must one make oneself acquainted with these important concepts which to-day need a justification and defence.

Pantheism is a very favourite reproach against Anthroposophy, Pantheism, i.e., giving reverence to the things around us, for God lives in those things. That is heresy to the modern Confessions; and why? Why is it that the modern Confessions call our Anthroposophy a heresy? Because these Confessions are permeated through and through with materialism.—If the Jesuit regards the world around him simply as Matter, it is of course blasphemy to say that this Matter is Divine, is God. But can Anthroposophy help it if the Jesuits regard the world around them simply as Matter? It is not Matter, it is Spirit; and that which the Jesuits perceives as Matter in the world, that Anthroposophy has to show as illusion. We do not explain as Divine the world which we assert—is an illusion;—of course not, we do not claim that for Divine existence. Of course it is quite different to take what is around us and explain that as Divine, at the same time realising external sense-phenomena as illusion, than to regard it as mere Matter and then explain that the grossest Matter is Divine.

You see how far asunder these things are, and we must not grow weary of really trying to make these things valid before the world. Otherwise there may be a repetition of what happened lately, when something was printed in a Swiss Newspaper by way of objection to my methods of attaining Spiritual knowledge. There it was asserted that I said that one can see the Spirit; but that cannot be, because the Spirit is not sensible, and only the things of sense can be perceived. One cannot grasp the Spirit, and therefore one cannot see it.

You see, what a hopeless way this is; the writer maintains nothing else but that—he cannot see the Spirit, and therefore no one can see the Spirit. One can know nothing of the Spirit because one cannot grasp it. And in such variations, the thoughts of a whole Newspaper goes on. What works so terribly destructively to-day, is the fact that people have not the consciousness that they should read such things to the end. “Into the inner being of nature no creative Spirit can penetrate”—thus ran the first two lines; but the person reading them stopped there, and did not notice that Goethe added; “I have heard this said for 60 years, and have cursed it all the time.”

What we must look for everywhere to-day is the prevailing superficiality. I have often pointed this out, but it cannot be done too often. We must trace everywhere this terrible clinging to superficiality. It can be chiefly seen where it works so terribly to-day externally, i.e. in the sphere of Social Economics; There people will not dive down into that which lies in the very essence of things. For instance, I have been told to-day, that people are constantly saying that “The Threefold State” (book) is so difficult to understand,—well, that they want something which they can understand much more easily. But, my dear friends, if, with these things that can easily be understood, nothing is done in social life, but men have simply bungled, it is necessary to grasp what is a little difficult, which requires effort. It is strange to demand that a thing be made more comprehensible, for it is really necessary for our modern social thinking that we should make an effort. Things one can easily understand have worked so abstractly, so ruinously to-day. To demand that such things should be made more comprehensible, is simply frivolous. It really is. Indeed, it is not a question that one should not cultivate such inwardly frivolous thoughts as “This is difficult”—for if it were given in any such form as is desired, it would simply give people something else with which they could bungle. For really objective work this apparent difficulty simply must be overcome, it simply urges us to make a study of that book. That is the essential. In this earnest way should one try to enter into these things, in such serious times as these.

A lecture published in The Golden Blade, 1990. Also known as: The Influence of the Planets on Man, The Ego and the Sun, or Atomism. It is the thirteenth of seventeen lectures in the volume Perspectives on Humanity's Development.

The civilisation of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch—the period of the development of the Mind Soul in humanity—was directed from the Greek Mysteries. In other words: the indications upon which the culture of the human mind was based issued from the Mystery-Sanctuaries which existed here and there in Asia Minor and Southern Europe. Now the secret of man's connection with the Sun was an essential part of these Mystery-teachings. From the book Theosophy we know that the Ego lights up within the Intellectual or Mind Soul and enters into possession of its full, inner force during the age of Consciousness, or Spiritual Soul.

Now because the Ego of man was destined from a certain point of view to be awakened during the age of the culture of the mind or intellect, it was quite natural that the Mysteries of that age should have been concerned with the secrets of the Sun and their connection with the human Ego. In the book Riddles of Philosophy it is said that the Greek's life of thought consisted in an actual perceiving of the outer world. The Greek's thought was at the same time a perception, just as we today have a perception of colours or sounds. The thoughts and conceptions of the Greek were not brought into being merely by inner activity of the soul, but they were born as it were from the objects themselves. In this respect Goethe's thinking undoubtedly possessed qualities in common with Greek thought. This is quite clear from his famous conversation with Schiller. Schiller stated that Goethe's conceptions were not perceptions, but ideas, and to this Goethe retorted that he actually saw his ideas before him, that he perceived them objectively.

The life of thought in Greece was associated with a very definite inner experience which arose when men looked at the world around them. They regarded the substance of the ideas which thus lit up before them as being the creation of the Sun. With the rising Sun they beheld the appearance in space of the life of ideas, and this life of ideas passed away again with the setting Sun. Men have now quite lost the faculty of perceiving and experiencing spirituality in the world around them. When the Sun rises they see only the phenomena of light and colour which there appear. And it is the same when the Sun sets in the red glow of evening. The Greeks felt that the world of ideas came to them at sunrise and passed away from them at sunset. They felt that in the darkness of the night they were bereft of the world of ideas. And when they looked at the sky, which seems to us to be blue, but for the colour of which the Greeks used a word which simply meant “darkness”, they felt that their world of ideas came to an end at the boundaries of visible space. Beyond this world of space the Greek divined the existence of other worlds—the worlds of the thoughts of the Gods, which he connected with light. These worlds seemed to him to be concentrated in the living Sun, and to withdraw during the night into the spaces of the dark firmament. Without some insight into this entirely different world of perception and experience, we cannot understand the further evolution of man's life of soul. This faculty of inwardly living perception functioned for a certain period of time, but then the most advanced representatives of the human race, those who still received their training in the Greek Mysteries, began to feel that their power to perceive the spiritual radiations from the living Sun in cosmic space was waning, and they saw salvation in the Mystery of Golgotha, inasmuch as the impulse coming from the Mystery of Golgotha made it possible for them to rekindle the light within their own being. And they tried now to experience the light by entering in spirit into the events connected with the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now the intellect alone can give us no real knowledge of what has really come to pass in the life of humanity through the ages. A great and far-reaching metamorphosis took place in man's life of soul and must never be forgotten when we are studying the course of evolution. We who have been living in the era of the development of the Consciousness Soul since the beginning of the fifteenth century have in our inner, intellectual activity, only a shadowy reflection of the spirituality which pervaded the life of the mind in the fourth Post-Atlantean period of civilisation. And the task before us is to awaken a faculty of the soul which will quicken in this shadowy intellect of ours a living understanding of the universe. The shadow-intellect that is characteristic of all modern culture has fettered man to the Earth. He has eyes only for earthly things, particularly when he allows himself to be influenced by the claims of modern science. In our age it never occurs to man that his being belongs, not to the Earth alone, but to the Cosmos beyond the Earth. Knowledge of our connection with the Cosmos beyond the Earth—that is what we need above all to make our own.

We take earthly life today as the basis of our ideas and concepts and build up a conception of the Universe in line with the conditions of this earthly life. But the picture of the Universe thus arising has been evolved by simply transferring earthly conditions to the world beyond the Earth. By means of spectro-analysis and other methods—admirable as they are in their way—a conception of the Sun has grown up which is really modelled wholly upon earthly conditions. Everyone is familiar with the appearance of luminous, incandescent gas, and this picture is then transferred to the Sun in the heavens. But we must learn to think of the Sun in the light of Spiritual Science. The Sun which the physicist believes to be a luminous body of gas out in cosmic space is spiritual through and through. The Sun receives the cosmic light and radiates it to the Earth, but the Sun is not physical at all. It is spiritual in its whole nature and being. The Greek was right when he felt that the Sun was connected with the development of his Ego, for the development of the Ego is associated with the intelligence and the faculty of forming ideas. The Greek conceived the rays of the Sun to be the power which kindled and quickened his Ego. His was still aware of the spirituality of the Cosmos, and to him the Sun was a living being, related to the human Ego in an absolutely concrete way. When a man says ‘ I ’ to himself, he experiences a force that is working within him, and the Greek, as he felt the working of this inner force, related it to the Sun. The Greek said to himself: Sun and Ego are the outer and inner aspects of one and the same being. The Sun out there in space is the Cosmic Ego. What lives within me is the human Ego.

As a matter of fact, this experience still comes to those who have a deeper feeling for Nature. The experience is not nearly as vivid as it was in the days of Greece, but for all that it is still possible to become aware of the spiritual forces indwelling the rays of the Sun in springtime. There are people here and there who feel that the Ego is imbued with a new vigour when the rays of the Sun begin to shine down upon the Earth with greater strength. But this is a last faint echo, an outward shell of an experience that is dying out altogether in the abstract, shadowy intellectualism prevalent in every branch of civilised life today. The task before us is to begin once again to realise and understand the connection of the being of man with super-earthly existence.

If we study and compare many things that are to be found in anthroposophical literature, we shall be able to understand the way in which the Sun is related to the Ego, and we shall also realise that the forces which stream down to the Earth from the Sun and from the Moon are entirely different in character and function. In a certain respect, Sun and Moon stand in polar antithesis. The forces streaming from the Sun enable the human being to become the bearer of an Ego. We owe to the rays of the Sun the power which moulds the human form into an image of the Ego. The forces which determine the human form from outside, even during the period of embryonic life, are the active forces of the Sun. While the embryo is developing in the mother's body, a great deal more is happening than modern science dreams of. Modern science is of the opinion that the forces all originate from the fertilised germ, but the truth is that the human embryo merely rests there in the body of the mother and is given form by the Sun forces. These Sun forces are, of course, associated with the Moon forces which are also working but in a different way. The Moon forces work above all in the inner, metabolic processes. We may therefore say: the Sun forces give form to the human being from outside. The Moon forces radiate outwards from within the metabolic process; they are centrifugal forces. This does not contradict the fact that these Moon forces are working, for instance, in the shaping and moulding of the human countenance. The Moon forces stream out from a centre in the metabolic system and work as it were by attraction upon the forming of the human face, differentiating the features, but there is an interplay between these Moon forces and the Sun forces. The organism that is connected with procreation is subject to the Sun forces. The whole being of man is involved in this way in the interplay between the forces of the Sun and the forces of the Moon.

A distinction must be made, however, between the Moon forces that work in the inner processes of metabolism in man, and the forces that originate in the metabolic processes itself. The Moon forces stream into the metabolic process, but this metabolic process has forces of its own as well. And these are earthly forces. The substances and forces in the vegetable and other foodstuffs work in the human being by virtue of their own inherent nature. They work here as Earth forces. Metabolism is primarily an outcome of the working of Earth forces. If the substances of the foodstuffs were merely to unfold their own forces within the human organism, there would be nothing but a chaotic play of forces in man. The fact that these forces work without intermission to renew and upbuild the being of man, is due not to the Earth at all, but to the Moon. The human being is shaped from within outwards by the Moon, and from without inwards by the Sun. Because the rays of the Sun are received through the eye into the head-organisation. The Sun forces work within the organism as well, but for all that they are still working from outside.

And so on the one hand the development and evolution of the Ego of man is dependent upon the forces of the Sun. Without the Sun, man could not be an Ego being living on the Earth; on the other hand there could be no such thing as propagation, there could be no human race without the Moon. It is the Sun which places man as an individual on the Earth, and it is the Moon that charms down the human race to Earth—the human race conceived here as one whole. The human race as the physical product of the generations is a product of the Moon forces which have worked in the generative process. As an individuality, however, man is the product of the Sun forces.

If, therefore, we want to understand the human being and the human race as a whole, we cannot do so by studying merely those conditions which obtain on the Earth alone. The efforts of geologists to understand the being of man by investigating the nature of the Earth are all in vain. Man is not primarily a creation of the Earth. He receives his shape and form from the Cosmos; he is an offspring of the world of the stars, above all of Sun and Moon. From the Earth are derived only those forces which are contained in the substances of the Earth. These forces work outside the human being and also within him when they are introduced into his organism either through eating or drinking. But within the organism they are received into the realm of forces of a super-earthly nature.

The processes that take place within the human being are by no means an affair of the Earth alone. They are through and through an affair of the world of stars. This is the kind of knowledge that we must struggle to reach once more.

Think of the human being as he stands there before us in his physical body. This physical body takes in the foodstuffs from the outer world and the forces of the foodstuffs continue to work within the body. But the physical body is permeated by the astral body and in the astral body the Moon forces are actively at work. The Sun forces too play into the astral body. The etheric body is there in the middle, between physical and astral body.

When we study the forces of foodstuffs, we find that, to begin with, they are active in the physical body and are then taken hold of by the astral body in which the influence of Sun and Moon are working. But between the physical body and astral body the etheric body is fulfilling its functions. The forces in the etheric body come, not from the Earth but from all directions of cosmic space. The products of the Earth, the substances which exist in the solid liquid or aeriform condition, are taken in by the human being and worked upon by the forces of Sun and Moon. But forces streaming in from all directions of cosmic space are also working in the human organism. The forces contained in the foodstuffs themselves come from the Earth, but from cosmic space the etheric forces stream in. These etheric forces also take hold of the foodstuffs and work upon them in such a way that they become inwardly responsive to light and also to warmth. We say, therefore: the human being is part of the Earth because he has a physical body. His etheric body relates him to the whole environment of the Earth. Through his astral body he is involved in the weaving forces of Sun and Moon.

Now these influences of the Sun and Moon in the astral body are modified and differentiated in a high degree as they work upon the ‘upper’ man. By ‘upper’ man I mean, in this case, the part of the organism that is encircled and permeated by the bloodstream which passed upwards from the heart in the direction of the head. The ‘lower’ man, then, comprises the other part of the organism—that part which lies below the heart.

Thus we have the upper part of man, including the head and everything that is organically connected with the head. The formation of this part of the organism is dependent, mainly, upon the Sun's influences. Its most important period of development is during embryonic life. The Sun's influences work upon the embryo in a very special way, but these influences continue to be active when the human being is born and is living in the physical world between birth and death. The astral influences working upon that part of the human organism which lies above the heart—speaking very roughly, for it would be necessary to go into more precise detail if we were describing the blood circulation—these astral influences are then modified by the influences of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.

The planet Saturn circles round the Sun and sends forces to the Earth. These forces of Saturn work in the whole astral body of man, but above all in the part of the astral body which corresponds to the ‘upper’ man. They stream into the astral body, pervade it, and are the essential factor in bringing about a proper connection between the astral body and the physical body. When, for instance, a man cannot sleep properly, that is to say, when his astral body will not leave or come down again properly into his etheric and physical bodies or in some other way is not rightly connected with the physical body—this is due to an irregularity in the working of the Saturn forces. In other words, Saturn is the heavenly body which, by way of the human head, promotes and is responsible for setting up the proper relation of man's astral body to his etheric body and his physical body. And it is the Saturn forces too which mediate the connection of the astral body to the Ego, because of Saturn's relation to the Sun. Saturn's relation to the Sun is expressed in space and time inasmuch as Saturn accomplishes its orbit around the Sun in a period of thirty years.

In the human being, the relationship of Saturn to the Sun is expressed in the connection of the Ego with the astral body and in the way in which the astral body is membered into the whole human organism. The connection of Saturn with the upper part of the astral body was regarded as a factor of great importance in ancient times. In the Egypto-Chaldean period, three or four thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Teachers and Sages of the Mysteries judged a human being according to his relation to Saturn—which was revealed by the date and time of his birth. For these Sages knew quite well that the position of Saturn in the heavens at the time of man's birth enabled his astral body either to function regularly or irregularly in his physical body. Knowledge of these influences played a very important part in olden days. But the onward progress of evolution is denoted precisely by the fact that in our age, which, as you know, began in the fifteenth century, we have to become free of these forces and influences.

Please do not misunderstand me This does not mean that Saturn is not working in us nowadays. Naturally the Saturn forces work in us, just as they worked in the Ancients, but we must now learn to make ourselves free and independent of them. And do you know how we can make ourselves free? Nothing is worse than to give oneself over to the shadowy intellectualism of our age. If we do that, the Saturn forces run riot within us and give rise to the so-called nervous troubles that are so very prevalent in our time. When a man suffers from ‘nerves’ as we say, it is because his astral body is not properly connected with his physical organisation. This lies at the basis of the morbid nervous symptoms which are so common nowadays. Our striving should be to unfold real vision, to attain Imagination. If man can achieve nothing better than the forming of abstract concepts and ideas, nervous symptoms are bound to increase in severity, because this intellectual activity tends to alienate him from the influences of Saturn, which are still at work within his being. His astral body will be torn away from his nerves, and he will be driven more and more into a state of nervous tension and excitability. The nervous complaints of our age must be recognised in their cosmic aspect, for they are caused by an irregular working of the Saturn forces.

Just as Saturn works chiefly in the upper part of the astral body and in the whole astral body inasmuch as the astral body is connected with the organism as a whole through the nervous system, so is Jupiter active in thinking.

When a man thinks, one part of his astral body is active. It is pre-eminently the Jupiter forces in the astral body which strengthen the thinking faculty, and Jupiter is responsible for permeating the human brain with astral forces.

Now the influences of Saturn continue throughout the whole of man's life. The beginning of a human life may really be said to consist of the first three periods of ten years. This is the period of growth, for as a matter of fact the activity of the growth forces does not wholly cease until after the thirtieth year. And our whole life and our health depend on how our astral body has developed during the thirty years. Saturn needs thirty years to complete its orbit around the Sun and this has its exact parallel in the life of man.

The development of the faculty of thinking takes place essentially during the first twelve years of life. Again we find the parallelism in the orbit of the planet Jupiter.

Just as Jupiter has to do with thinking, so has Mars to do with speech.

Mars works upon a still smaller part of the astral body than that with which Jupiter is concerned in connection with the thinking of man. And the development of the forces which finally express themselves in speech, is dependent upon the working of Mars within our being. Man learns to utter the first sounds of speech in a period which corresponds approximately to half the time required by Mars to complete its orbit around the Sun.

We see, then, that the development of faculties situated primarily in the region of the human head is connected with the Saturn forces, the Jupiter forces, and the Mars forces. The forces of the three outer planets, therefore, work on within the astral body through the life of man. The Sun is connected more directly with the Ego, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars are concerned respectively with the behaviour and functioning of the astral body in the human organism, with the faculty of thinking and with the faculty of speaking.

The Sun is connected with the Ego. And then we come to the inner planets, as they are sometimes called, the planets which are nearer the Earth and lie between the Earth and the Sun, whereas Saturn, Jupiter and Mars lie on the other side of the Sun. The forces of these inner planets are likewise connected with the being of man. We will take Mercury to begin with.

Like the Moon, the centre, from which the Mercury forces work, lies in the inner being of man, and it is only in connection with the forming of the human countenance that Mercury works from outside. The Mercury forces work in the part of the human organism that lies below the region of the heart. From there these Mercury forces stream into the human organism. The working of the astral body in the breathing and circulatory functions of the human organism is regulated by Mercury. Mercury acts as the intermediary between the astral body and the rhythmic processes in the being of man. The Mercury forces act as the intermediary between the astral body and the rhythmic functions in the human organism. Because this is so, the Mercury forces intervene, as do the Moon forces, in the metabolic processes as a whole, but only in so far as the metabolic process is subject to rhythm and reacts in turn upon the rhythmic functions.

We come next to Venus. Venus works pre-eminently in the etheric body of man. The cosmic forces chiefly active in the etheric body, therefore, are those of Venus.

Then we come again to the Moon. The Moon forces in the human organism work in polar antithesis to the Sun forces. From within outwards the Moon forces lead substance over into the realm of the living and are therefore connected with procreation. The Moon stimulates not only the inner, reproductive processes of the organism, but the procreative process as well. Thus we have:

You see now in what way processes in the human organism are dependent upon the Cosmos. On the one side man is bound up with the earthly forces through his physical body. And on the other side he is bound up with his whole cosmic environment through the etheric body. The cosmic forces, however, work in different ways in his being as we have heard. This differentiation originates in the astral body in which the forces of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Moon are contained. By way of the Ego, the Sun works in man. Suppose that as the result of his earlier incarnations a man has within his being forces which predestine him to be a thinker in the earthly life upon which he is entering. He prepares for his descent to the Earth and—since Jupiter takes a definite time to complete his orbit—he will choose a moment for his birth when the rays of Jupiter pour directly down upon him.

In this way the heavenly constellations provide conditions into which a human being may be born—conditions which are determined by his previous earthly lives.

In the age of the Consciousness Soul, of course, it is the task of man gradually to make himself free of these conditions. But he must free himself from them in the right way.

In speaking of the Saturn influences, I said that it is a question of trying to replace shadowy intellectualism by real Imagination. In the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds indications are given which, if they are followed, can make us independent of the cosmic forces, although none the less these cosmic forces continue to work in our being.

Man is born on Earth into conditions determined by a constellation in the heavens, but he must equip himself with forces which make him independent of this constellation. It is to this kind of knowledge—a knowledge of man's connection with the Cosmos beyond the Earth—that our civilisation must attain. Man must learn to realise that the forces of heredity described by modern science are not the only forces at work in his organism. To imagine such a thing, my dear friends, is the purest nonsense. It is pure nonsense to think that the maternal organism contains those forces which are then transmitted by heredity and so build up a heart, a liver and the other organs. There would be no heart in the human organism if the Sun did not build it into the organism of man, neither would there be a liver if Venus did not place it into the organism. And so it is with each single organ. Their presence in the human organism is due to the working of cosmic forces.

These are the things that humanity must once again learn to understand. Man must realise that the mysteries of his being cannot be explained by a science which deals merely with earthly phenomena. Around man live other creatures—and they too are not merely creatures of the Earth. It appears, to begin with, as if the minerals were entirely earthly in their nature. But in the minerals, too, changes have taken place which were due to the forces working in the cosmic environment of the Earth. The crystallised forms of the metals are all due to the play of forces from beyond the Earth. The metals were given shape and form at a time when the Earth's forces were not yet working in their full strength, but when cosmic forces were working in the Earth. The healing forces contained in the minerals, above all in the metals, are connected with the way in which these metals were formed within the Earth by the working of cosmic forces.

In the first epoch of Post-Atlantean times, when the ancient Indian civilisation was at its prime, man felt and knew himself to be a citizen of the whole wide universe. Although he had not yet developed the forces which modern humanity is so proud to possess, he was in the true sense of the word, MAN. By the time of the Chaldean epoch, however, man's attention had already begun to be diverted from the Sun. He had become a kind of amphibium—a creature who is thankful when the rays of the Sun pour down upon it, and when it need not always be confined to its dark burrows in the pound. But in our time one cannot say that man even resembles a creature like the mole, for he is really much more like an earthworm who has eyes at most for what has first been sent out into space from the Earth and comes back again as rain. This is really all that men see in the way of forces from beyond the Earth. But this the earthworms also see! In his materialism today man has become an earthworm. He must rise above this earth state, but he can only do so by realising and knowing his connection with the Cosmos beyond the Earth.

Our task therefore, is to raise ourselves above the earthworm state into which our civilisation has fallen, and bring a new spiritual life into being.

After the historical considerations we have undertaken, we shall explore today a few things about contemporary man. This will provide us with the possibility of observing more accurately the place of contemporary man in the whole course of time. We should be clear that in the way the human being stands before us as spiritual, soul, and bodily being, he is differently oriented in three directions. We see this already when we look at the human being purely outwardly. In his spirit, man goes through the world independently of outer phenomena, while in his soul he is not as independent of these outer phenomena. One need only consider certain relationships that are visible throughout life in order to discover how the real soul life has certain connections with the outer world. One can be depressed or uplifted in one's soul. Recall how you have often felt depressed in a dream, and how the root of this mood of depression had to be traced back to the irregularity of the breathing rhythm. One could say that this is merely an elementary example, and yet all soul life is never without a similar connection with the rhythmic life that we go through in the rhythm of our breathing, of our blood circulation, and the outer rhythmic life of the entire cosmos. Everything that takes place in the soul is connected with the world rhythm.

Whereas as spiritual beings we can feel highly independent of our environment, we cannot do the same regarding our soul life, for our soul life lies imbedded within the whole world rhythm.

Furthermore, we stand within universal world phenomena as bodily beings. Again, at first we may proceed from merely elementary examples. Man, as a bodily being, is heavy, that is to say, he has weight. Other merely mineral beings also have weight. Mineral beings, plant beings, animal beings, and the human being as a bodily being all partake in this universal weightiness, and we must actually lift ourselves above this universal weightiness when we wish to make the body a physical tool of the spiritual life. We have often mentioned that if it were only the physical weight of the brain that mattered, the weight would be so great (1300 to 1500 grams) that all the blood vessels lying underneath the brain would be crushed. The brain, however, is subject to the Archimedean principle, since it floats in the cerebrospinal fluid. It loses so much weight by floating in the cerebral fluid that it actually weighs only 20 grams and therefore presses on the vessels at the base of the brain with only these 20 grams. You can see from this that the brain actually strives much more upward than downward. It counteracts heaviness. It tears itself free of the universal gravity and thereby acts like any other body that is placed in water and loses as much of its weight as the weight of the displaced water.

You thus can see an interplay between our whole bodily being and the outer world. With our soul weavings we are not only integrated in a rhythm but are fully enmeshed in the outer physical life. If we stand on a given point of the earth, we press down upon that place; when we move to another point, we press down upon that new place. In our human body, we are as much physical beings as the physical beings of the other kingdoms of nature.

We therefore can say that with our spiritual being we are to some extent independent of the outer world; with our soul being we are part of the rhythm of the world; and with our bodily being we are part of the rest of the world as though we were not also soul and spirit. We must consider this distinction carefully, for we do not attain an understanding of the higher being of man if we do not look at this threefold relationship of the human being to his entire environment. Now, let us look for a moment at man's environment. In man's environment (I am now summarizing what we have considered over the course of many months from different viewpoints) we first have all that is ruled by natural laws. Picture the whole universe ruled by natural laws and, included in these natural laws, the totality of this visible, sense-perceptible world.

Simple consideration shows that we are dealing here only with the actual earthly world. Only foolhardy and unjustified hypotheses of physicists can maintain that the same natural laws we observe on the earth around us are also applicable in the extraterrestrial cosmos. I have often pointed out to you how surprised the physicists would be if they were able to ascend to the place where the sun is. Physicists regard the sun as something comparable to a large gas oven without walls, more or less like a burning gas. If one arrived at the place in the cosmos where the sun is, one would not find such a burning gas. Instead one would find something totally unlike what the physicists imagine. If this (sketching) encloses the space that normally we picture as taken up by the sun, not only are there none of the substances found on earth, but there is even an absence of what we call empty space. Imagine, to begin with, filled space. On earth you always have a filled space around you. If it is not filled by solid or liquid substances, it is permeated by air, or at least by warmth, light, and so on. In short, we are always dealing with filled space. You also know, however, that it is possible, at least approximately, to create an empty space by extracting the air from a container with an air pump.

Imagine we have a filled space that we will designate with the letter A, preceded by a plus sign: +A. Now, as we make this space emptier and emptier, A will become smaller and smaller, but as the space is still filled we continue to use the + sign. We can imagine—although this is not actually possible under earthly conditions, for we can render space only approximately empty—that it would be possible to produce a completely empty space. Then, in this part of space that we have made empty, there would only be space. I will designate this with 0. It has 0 content. Now, we can do with this space the same thing that you do with your wallet: if your wallet is filled with money, you can take more and more out until finally there is nothing in it. If you want to spend more money, you cannot take anything more out of your wallet, as it is already empty. You can, however, go into debt. You have -0 in your wallet if you incur debts. You can think of this space in the same way: it is not only empty but you could say that it exerts suction because there is less than 0 in it: -A. It can be said of this space exerting suction—which is not just empty but has a content, which is the opposite of being filled by matter—that it is occupied by that space which one must imagine as filled out by the sun. The sun therefore has an inward suction; it does not exert pressure like a gas. The sun space is filled with negative materiality.

I only present this as an example in order for you to see that earthly lawfulness simply cannot be applied to the extraterrestrial cosmos. We must think of totally different relationships in the extraterrestrial cosmos from those we have learned to know in our environment on the earth. We must say that we are surrounded by lawfulness within earthly existence, and into this lawfulness is included the world of substances that is initially accessible to us. Now picture earthly existence. All you need to do is to picture the processes in the mineral world; place them before your soul, and you have that which, in so far as you see it, is completely encompassed by this lawfulness of earthly existence. Therefore we can say that the mineral world is encompassed by this lawfulness; yet something else is also encompassed by it. When we walk around, or even when we are carried around, in short when we act as objects in the physical world, we live in the same lawfulness as the mineral world. In relation to earthly lawfulness, it is immaterial whether we carry a stone around, whether it is moved, or whether a human being is carried around or moves himself; regarding this lawfulness, it is the same thing one way or the other. You need only consider that the only thing that comes into consideration regarding earthly lawfulness is a change in location of man's body, which he may, however, bring about himself. This is connected with other things. If you study only earthly lawfulness, what happens within the skin of man or what takes place in his soul can be quite irrelevant. Only the change in location within earthly space need be considered.

We thus can see that in addition to the mineral world there is the human being who has been moved (that is, outwardly moved). The only relationship of the outer world to man, in so far as that world is earthly and confronts our senses, is the relationship to the human being moved outwardly. If we seek any other relationship to man, we must at once refer to something else, and then we come to our extraterrestrial environment, for example, when we study the environment of the moon, that is, whatever emanates from the moon. It is a fact that many people are still aware of something of the effect of the moon on the earth. Many people believe in such effects of the moon on the earth, e.g., the connection of the phases of the moon with the quantity of rainfall. Learned people in our time consider this a superstition.

I have told you, some of you at least, of an amusing sequence of events that once took place in Leipzig. The unusual natural philosopher and aesthetician, Gustav Theodore Fechner, went so far as to write a book about the influence of the moon on weather conditions. He was a university colleague of the well-known botanist and natural scientist, Schleiden. Schleiden, as a modern materialist, was convinced, of course, that what his colleague Fechner was advancing about the influence of phases of the moon on the weather could only be based on superstition. In addition to the two scholars at the University of Leipzig there were also their wives, Frau Schleiden and Frau Fechner. At that time, the conditions were still so primitive that rain water needed to be collected for wash day. Frau Fechner said that she believed in what her husband had published concerning the influence of moon phases on the weather. She wanted to reach an agreement with Frau Professor Schleiden, who did not believe in what Fechner maintained, about when was the most efficient time to place out rain barrels in order to collect the most rain. Frau Fechner suggested that Frau Schleiden put out her barrels at different times, since according to Schleiden's opinion she should get just as much water as Frau Fechner. However, despite the fact that Frau Professor Schleiden considered the views of Professor Fechner to be exceedingly superstitious, she still chose to place her rain barrels out at the exact same times as Frau Fechner.

Now, the influence of the forces of other planetary bodies is less perceptible to our modern scientific consciousness. However, if one were to study more closely—as is to happen now in our scientific-physiological institute in Stuttgart—the line of growth followed on the stem by the leaves of plants, for example, one would find how each line is related to the movements of the planets, how these lines are, as it were, miniature pictures of the planetary movements. One thus would find that many things on the surface of the earth are comprehensible only when one knows the extraterrestrial and does not merely identify the extraterrestrial with the earthly, that is to say, when one presupposes that a lawfulness exists that is cosmic and not earthly.

We therefore can say that we have a second lawfulness within cosmic existence. Only when one begins to study these cosmic influences—and it is possible to do so quite empirically—will one have a true botany. Our plant world does not grow up out of the earth in the way conceived by a materialistic botany; rather it is pulled out by cosmic forces. What is pulled out in this way by cosmic forces in the process of growth is then permeated by the mineral forces that have saturated this cosmic plant structure so that it becomes visible to the senses. We thus can say firstly that the plant world is included in this cosmic lawfulness. Secondly, all that pertains to the inner movement of man—that is, a definitely physical movement, but within man—is included in this cosmic lawfulness (this is not as easy to establish as in the case of the plant world, because it achieves a certain independence from the rhythm of the outer processes; nevertheless, it imitates this rhythm inwardly). The outwardly moved human being, therefore, is included in the earthly lawfulness, but when you look upon your digestion, upon the movement of the nourishing substances in the digestive organs, when you look beyond merely the rhythm to the actual movement of the blood through the blood vessels—and there are many other things that move inwardly in man—you have a picture of what moves inside of the human being regardless of whether he is standing still or walking about. This cannot be integrated into the earthly lawfulness without further consideration but rather must be integrated into the cosmic lawfulness in the same way as are the forms and also the movements of the plants; in the human being, however, these forms and movements proceed much more slowly than they do in the plants. We therefore can say that the inner movements of man are also included in the cosmic lawfulness.

Now you could consider taking the cosmos into undefined distances; somehow in this way everything has an influence upon the life that develops on the earth's surface. Yet if these were the only two lawfulnesses that existed—that is, the earthly and cosmic lawfulnesses, in the way I have presented them to you—then nothing would exist on the earth but the mineral and plant kingdoms, for the human being, of course, would not be able to exist there. If the human being were present, he could move outwardly and the inner movements could take place, but this of course would not yet make up a human being. Neither would animals be able to be present on the earth under such conditions; in reality, only minerals and plants could exist. Cosmic lawfulness and cosmic content of being must be penetrated and permeated by something that is no longer a part of space, by something concerning which we cannot speak of space at all.

Naturally, everything that is included in the cosmic and earthly lawfulnesses must be thought of as existing in space; now, however, we must speak of something that cannot be thought of as existing in space, although it permeates the whole of cosmic lawfulness. Just imagine how in the human being the movements, that is his inner movements, are connected with his rhythm. To begin with, all that we call the movement of the nourishing substances within us merges into the movement of the blood. However, this movement doesn't take place in such a way that the blood simply flows through the veins as nutritive juice. Not only does the blood itself move rhythmically, but beyond that this rhythm has a definite relationship to the breathing rhythm through the consumption of oxygen by the blood. We have within us this dual rhythm. I pointed out once how the inner soul lawfulness is based upon the 4:1 ratio of the blood rhythm to the breathing rhythm in such a way that meter and verse measure are actually dependent upon it.

We thus see that what takes place as inner movement is related to rhythm, and rhythm, as we have said, is related to the soul life of the human being. In a similar way we must bring what we have in the movement of the stars into a relationship to the world soul. We therefore can speak of a third lawfulness within the world soul in which is encompassed: 1) the animal world, and 2) all the rhythmic processes related to the bodily human being. These rhythmic processes within man have a relationship to the whole world rhythm. We have already spoken about this, but I would like to bring it up again in relation to our further considerations here. You know that the human being takes approximately eighteen breaths per minute. Multiply that by sixty and you have the number of breaths per hour; multiply that total by twenty-four and you have the total for one day, approximately 25,920 breaths for the average human being in the course of a day. This number of breaths per day thus forms the day/night rhythm in the human being. We also know that the spring equinox moves through the constellations bit by bit each year, so that the point at which the sun rises in spring moves forward in the heavens. The length of time that it takes the sun to arrive again at its original point is 25,920 years. This is the rhythm of our universe, then, and our own breathing rhythm over twenty-four hours is a miniature picture of it. Hence, with our rhythm we are woven into the world rhythm, with our soul into the lawfulness of the world soul.

Now, there is a fourth lawfulness that lies at the basis of the entire universe as well as of the three previously mentioned lawfulnesses, namely, that within which we feel included when we become conscious of ourselves as spiritual human beings. In this process of becoming conscious of ourselves as spiritual human beings, we achieve clarity about these facts. At first we may not comprehend this or that about the world and, in fact, because of today's intellectualism, which has become a universal cultural force, very little indeed is comprehended. At a certain stage in our human evolution, we initially comprehend very little with our spirit. It is inherent, however, in the self-recognition of the spirit that it says to itself that as it evolves no boundaries can be imposed on its evolution. The spirit must be able to develop into the universe through knowing, feeling, and willing. By bearing the spirit within us, then, we must relate ourselves to a fourth lawfulness within the world spirit.

1.) Lawfulness within earthly existence
a) The mineral world b) The externally moved human being

2.) Lawfulness within cosmic existence
a) The plant world b) The inner movements of the human being

3.) Lawfulness within the world soul
a) The animal world b) The rhythmic processes

4.) Lawfulness within the world spirit
a) The human being b) The nerve-sense processes

Only now do we arrive at the real human being encompassed therein, for a human being could not really have existed merely within the other three lawfulnesses. Only now do we find the human being, but specifically that part of him that is his nerve-sense apparatus, all of what is, to begin with, the physical bearer of the spiritual life, the nerve-sense processes. When we look at the human being we consider first the entire human being in whom the head is the main bearer of the nerve-sense organs; then we consider the head itself. A human being is human, so to speak, by virtue of the fact that he has a head; the head is the most human part of man. In the human being as a whole and in the head, we already encounter the human being twice.

Now, when we consider what I have just described as a summary of what we have discussed in the last few weeks, it gives us to begin with a picture of the human being's connection with his environment; not merely the spatial environment, however, for the spatial world is related only to the first two lawfulnesses; we also have to do with the world that is non-spatial, which is related to the third and fourth lawfulnesses. It has become increasingly difficult for the contemporary human being to conceive that something could exist not within space or that sometimes it is not meaningful to speak in terms of space even when speaking of realities. Without such a conception, however, one can never rise to a spiritual science. If one wishes to remain within the confines of space, one cannot arrive at spiritual entities.

Last time I spoke here I told you about the world conception of the ancient Greeks in order to point out how in other eras the human being looked at the world differently from today. This picture of which I have just spoken to you can become evident to the human being in the present era; he arrives at it if, simply and without prejudice—that is undisturbed by the waste products sometimes offered by contemporary science—he observes the world.

I must add a few things to what I told you previously about the ancient Greek world conception so that we are able to see its connection with what I wished to present to you with this scheme. You see, if a human being is very clever he may say that the spatial world consists of some seventy-odd elements that have varying atomic weights and so on; those elements, he maintains, enter into syntheses; one can perform analyses on them, and so forth, and, based on chemical connections and chemical separations, one can explain what happens in the world regarding those seventy-odd elements. That they could be traced back to some earlier origin should not occupy us at the moment. In general, those seventy-odd elements are considered valid today in popular science.

A Greek—not in a contemporary incarnation, in which he would, of course, think like everyone else today if he were well educated—an ancient Greek, let us say, if he could appear in our present-day world, would be prompted to say, “Well, this is all very well and good, these seventy-odd elements, but one does not get very far with them; they actually tell us nothing about the world. We used to think quite differently about the world; we conceived of the world as consisting of fire, air, water, and earth.”

A contemporary person would reply, “That is a childish way to comprehend matters. We are far beyond that. We do, in fact, accept the aggregate states; in the gaseous aggregates we grant you the validity of the aeriform, in the fluid aggregates the watery, and in the solid aggregates the earthy. Warmth, however, does not mean at all the same thing to us as it does to you. We have moved beyond such childish notions. What constitutes the world for us we find in our seventy-odd elements.”

The ancient Greek would respond to this, “That is very nice, but fire—or warmth—air, water, earth are something entirely different from what you conceive. You do not understand in the least what we thought about it.”

At first our contemporary scholar would be curiously affected by such comments and would have the impression that he was encountering a human being from a more childlike stage of cultural development. The ancient Greek, because he would be immediately aware of what the modern scholar had in his head, would probably say, "What you call your seventy-two elements all belong to what we call earth; it is very nice that you differentiate it and analyze it further, but for us the properties that you recognize in your seventy-two elements belong to the earth. Of water, air, and fire you understand nothing; of those you have no conception.”

This Greek would continue—you can see that I do not choose an Oriental from an ancient cultural period but a knowledgeable Greek—“What ,you say about your seventy-two elements with their syntheses and analyses is all very nice, but to what do you believe it is related? It is all related merely to the physical human being once he has died and lies in the grave! There his substances, his entire physical body, undergo the processes that you learn to recognize in your physics and chemistry. What it is possible for you to learn within the structural relationships of your seventy-odd elements is not related at all to the living human being. You know nothing of the living human being because you know nothing of water, air, and fire. It is necessary first to know something about water, air, and fire in order then to know something about the living human being. With what is encompassed by your chemistry you know only what happens to man when he is dead and lying in the grave, the processes undergone by the corpse. That is all you come to know by means of your seventy-odd elements.”

If the ancient Greek went any further than this in this discussion he would not be a great success with our contemporary scholar, though he could go to the trouble of clarifying his views in the following way: “Your seventy-two elements are all what we consider earth. We may simply be regarding a general quality, but even if you analyze it further, you arrive merely at a more specific knowledge, and a more specific knowledge will not enable you to penetrate into the depths. If you acknowledged what we designate as water, however, you would have an element in which, as soon as it is weaving and living, earthly conditions are no longer active alone; water, in its entire activity, is subject to cosmic conditions.”

The ancient Greek's understanding of water was not limited merely to its physical characteristics but extended to everything that influences the earth as lawfulness from the cosmos, in which the movement of the water substance is encompassed. Within this movement of water substance lives the plant element. In distinguishing whatever is in the living and weaving water element from everything earthly, the ancient Greek saw in this living-weaving element the whole lawfulness of the life of vegetation, which is encompassed by this watery element. We thus can place this watery element schematically somewhere on the earth, but in such a way that it is determined from out of the cosmos. Then we can picture the mineral element, the actual earthly element, sprouting from below upward in a variety of ways, permeating the plants, infiltrating them, as it were, with earthly elements (see sketch).

What the ancient Greek thought about the watery element, however, was something essentially new, and it was for him a quite definite perception. The Greek did not view this conceptually; rather, he saw it in pictures, in imaginations. Of course we must go back to Platonic times (for Aristotle corrupted this way of viewing), even to pre- Platonic times, in order to find how the truly knowing Greek saw in imaginations what lives in the watery element and actually bears the vegetation, how he related everything to the cosmos. Now, however, the ancient Greek would continue, “What lies in the grave after a human being has died, what is lawfully penetrated by the structural laws that work in your seventy-odd elements, is inserted between birth—or let us say conception—and death into the etheric life working from the cosmos. This etheric life permeates you as a living human being; you will not understand any of this if you do not speak of water as a separate element, if you do not regard the plant world as being tethered in the watery element, if you do not see these pictures, these imaginations.”

“We Greeks,” he would say, “certainly spoke about the etheric body of the human being, but we were not spinning the etheric body out of our fantasy. Rather we said: if one watches in spring the sprouting, greening plant world gradually and variously coloring itself, if one sees this plant world bearing fruit in summer and observes the leaves withering in autumn, if one follows this course of the year in the life of vegetation and has an inner understanding for it, what then appears before the eye of the soul connects with one just as strongly as one is connected with the mineral world by the bread and meat one eats. In a way analogous to eating one connects with what is outwardly visible in the plant world during the course of the year. Then if one penetrates oneself with the perception that everything happening in the course of twenty-four hours is like a miniature-image of this, repeating itself through one's entire life, then we have within us a miniature image of what constitutes the surrounding world out there from the watery, etheric element, from the cosmos. Whenever we regard this outer world with true understanding, we can say that what is out there also lives within us. We say that the spinach grows out there; I pick it, cook it, and eat it, and thereby have it in my stomach, that is, in my physical body; in the same way we can say, out there, in the course of the year, lives and weaves an etheric life, and that I have within myself.”

The Greek was not conceiving of the physical water; rather, what lay at the basis of his conception was what he grasped in his imagination and brought into living connection with the human being. Thus he would say further to our contemporary scholar, “You study the corpse that lies in the grave, because you study only the earth—your seventy-odd elements are only earth. We studied the living human being; in our time we studied the human being who is not yet dead, who grows and moves out of an inner activity. That is impossible without rising to the other elements.”

Thus it was with the ancient Greeks, and were we to go still further into the past, the airy element and then the fire or warmth element would meet us in full clarity. We will also consider these later. And that is what is so characteristic of our cultural evolution since the first third of the fifteenth century, that the understanding for these connections has simply been lost; thereby the understanding for the living human being was also lost. We study only the corpse in science today. We have often heard that this phase in the history of humanity's evolution had to come, had to come for other reasons, namely, so that humanity could undergo the phase of the evolution of freedom. However, in the process a certain understanding of nature and the human being has been lost since the first third of the fifteenth century. The understanding of natural science up to now has limited itself to this one element, earth, and now we must find the way back. We must find our way back through Imagination to the element of water, through Inspiration to the element of air, through Intuition to the element of fire.

What we have seen and interpreted as an ascent in higher cognition—the ascent from ordinary object cognition through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition—is fundamentally also an ascent to the elements. We will speak further about this in two days.

If an Oriental sage of ancient times—we must return to very ancient times of Oriental culture if we are to consider what I wish to say here—one who had been initiated into the mysteries of the ancient East, were to turn his gaze on modern Western civilization, he might say to its representatives, “You are really living entirely in fear; your whole mood of soul is governed by fear. Everything you do, but also everything you feel, is saturated with fear and its reverberations in the most important moments of life. Since fear is closely related to hatred, hatred plays a great role in your entire civilization.”

Let us make this quite clear. I mean that a sage of the ancient Eastern civilization would speak in this way if he stood again today among Western people with the same standard of education, the same mood of soul, as those of his ancient time. He would make it plain that in his time and his country, civilization was founded on a completely different basis.He would probably say, “In my day, fear played no part in civilized life. Whenever we were to promulgate a world conception, allowing action and social life to spring from it, the main thing was joy—joy that could be enhanced to the point of a complete giving of oneself to the world, that then could be enhanced to love.” This is how he would experience it, and he would indicate as a result (if he were rightly understood) what were from his point of view the most important ingredients, the most important impulses, of modern civilization. If we knew how to listen to him in the right way, we would gain much that we really need to know in order to find a starting point for trying to get a grip on modern life. Actually, an echo of the ancient civilization still prevails in Asia, though strong European influences have been absorbed into its religious, aesthetic, scientific, and social life. This ancient civilization is in decline, and when the ancient Oriental sage says, “Love was the fundamental force of the ancient Oriental civilization,” then certainly it must be admitted that but little of this love can be traced directly in the present. One who is able to discern it, however, can see even now, in the phenomena of decline of the Asiatic culture, the penetration of this primeval element of joy, of delight in the world and love for the world.

In those ancient times there was in the Orient little of what afterward has been required of man since the thought resounded that found its most radical expression in the Greek saying, “Know thyself!” This “Know thyself” actually entered human historical life only in the ancient Greek culture. The ancient Eastern world conception, comprehensive and light-filled, was not yet permeated by this kind of human knowledge; it was in no way oriented toward directing man's gaze into his own being.

In this respect the human being is dependent on the conditions prevailing in his environment. The ancient Oriental culture was founded under a different effect of sunlight on the earth, and its earthly conditions were also different from those of the later Western culture. In the ancient East, man's inner gaze was captured, one could say, by all that surrounds the human being as the world, and he had a special Inducement for giving over his entire inner being to the world. It was cosmic knowledge that blossomed in the ancient Oriental wisdom and in the view of the world that owed its origin to this wisdom. Even in the mysteries themselves—you can infer this from all you have been hearing for many years—in all that lived in the mysteries of the East there was no actual adherence to the challenge, “Know thyself!” On the contrary—“Turn your gaze outward toward the world and try to let that approach you which is hidden in the depths of cosmic phenomena!”—that is how the challenge of the ancient Oriental culture would have been expressed.

The teachers and pupils of the mysteries were compelled, however, to turn their gaze to the inner being of man when the Asiatic civilization began to spread westward. As soon, indeed, as mystery colonies were founded in Egypt and in North Africa, but particularly when the mysteries began to develop their colonies still further to the West—a special center was ancient Ireland—then the teachers and pupils of the mysteries coming over from Asia were faced, simply by virtue of the geographical conditions of the Western world and its entirely different elemental configuration, with the necessity of cultivating self-knowledge and a true inner vision. Simply because these mystery pupils, when still in Asia, had acquired knowledge of the outer world—knowledge of the spiritual facts and beings lying behind the outer world—simply through this, they were now able to penetrate deeply into all that actually exists in man's innermost being. In Asia all this could not have been observed at all. The inward-turning gaze would have been paralyzed, so to speak. By means of all that was brought from the East to the Western mystery colonies, however, man's gaze having long been directed outward so as to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, was now enabled to penetrate into man's inner being. It was actually only the strongest souls who could endure what they perceived. Man's inner being actually first came to the consciousness of humanity in these mystery colonies transported from the Orient and founded in Western regions.

One can indeed realize what an impression was produced by this self-knowledge on the teachers and pupils of the Oriental mysteries if we repeat a saying that was addressed to the pupils over and over again by the teachers who had already cultivated that vision of man's inner being, a saying that was to make clear to them in what kind of mood of soul this self-knowledge was actually to be approached. The saying to which I am referring is frequently quoted. In its full weight it was uttered only in the more ancient mystery colonies of Egypt, North Africa, and Ireland as a preparation for the pupil and as a reminder for every initiate regarding the experiences of man's inner being. The saying runs thus, “No one who is not initiated in the sacred mysteries should discover the secrets of man's inner being; to utter these secrets in the presence of a non-initiate is forbidden; the mouth uttering these secrets lays the burden of sin upon itself, and the ear burdens itself with sin when it hearkens to those secrets.”

Time and again this saying was uttered from the inner experience that an individual, prepared by Oriental wisdom, was able to attain when he penetrated, by virtue of the earthly conditions of the West, to knowledge of the human being. Tradition has preserved this saying, and today it is still repeated—without any understanding of its innermost nature—in the secret orders and secret societies of the West that outwardly still have a great influence. It is repeated only from tradition, however. It is not uttered with the necessary weight, for those who say it do not really know what it signifies. Even in our time, however, this saying is used as a kind of motto in the secret orders of the West: “There are secrets concerning man's inner being that can be transmitted to people only within the secret societies, for otherwise the mouth uttering them is sinful, and the ear hearing them is likewise sinful.”

One must say that, as time has evolved, many people—not in Central Europe but in Western lands—learn in their secret societies what has been handed down as tradition from the researches of the ancient wisdom. It is received without understanding, although as an impulse it actually often flows into action. In more recent centuries, actually since the middle of the fifteenth century, the human constitution has become such as to make it impossible to see these things in their original form; they could be absorbed only intellectually. One could receive concepts about them, but one could not attain a true experience of them. Individual shad only some intimations of it. Many people could penetrate into this realm of experience through such intimations.

Such people have sometimes adopted strange forms of outer life, as, for instance, Bulwer Lytton, who wrote Zanoni.¹ What he became in his later life can be grasped only if one knows how he received, to begin with, the tradition of self-knowledge, but how, by virtue of his particular, individual constitution, he was also able to penetrate into certain mysteries. He thereby became estranged from the natural ways of life. Precisely in him it is possible to see what a man's attitude toward life becomes when he admits into his inner experience this “foreign” spiritual world, not merely into his concepts but into his whole mood of soul. Many facts must then be judged by other than conventional standards.

It appeared, of course, quite outlandish when Bulwer traveled about, speaking of his inner experiences with a certain emphasis, while a young woman who accompanied him played a harp-like instrument, for he always needed to have this harp-music in between the passages of his talk. Here and there he appeared in gatherings where everything else went on in a completely formal, conventional way. He would enter in his rather eccentric garb and sit down, with his harp-maiden seated in front of his knees. He would speak a few sentences; then the harp-maiden would play; then he would continue his talk, and the maiden would play again. Something coquettish, in a higher sense of the word—one cannot help characterizing it in this way at first—was thus introduced into the ordinary world where pedantic human convention has made such increasing inroads, particularly since the middle of the fifteenth century.

Humanity has little idea of the degree of conventionalism into which it has grown; people have less and less idea of it simply because it comes to seem natural. One sees something as reasonable only insofar as it is in line with what is “done.” Things in life, however, are all interconnected, and the dryness and indolence of modern times, the relationship human beings now have to one another, belongs to the intellectual development of the last few centuries. The two things belong together. A man such as Bulwer Lytton, of course, did not fit into such a development; one can quite well picture to oneself people of more ancient times traveling about in the world accompanied by a younger person with some pleasant music. The disparity between one attitude of soul and another need only be seen in the right light; then such a thing can be understood. With Bulwer Lytton, however, something lit up in him that no longer could exist directly in the modern intellectual age but only as tradition.

One must, however, recover the knowledge of the human being that lived in the mystery colonies of which I have spoken. The ordinary human being today is aware of the world around him by means of his outer, physical sense impressions. What he sees, he orders and arranges with his intellect. Then he looks also into his own inner being .Basically this is the world that man surveys and out of which he acts. The sense impressions received from outside, the mental images developed from these sense impressions, these mental images as they penetrate within, becoming trans-formed by impulses of feeling and of will, together with everything that is reflected back into consciousness as memories—here we have what forms the content of the soul, the content of life in which modern man weaves and out of which he acts. At most modern man is led by a kind of false mysticism to ask, “What is actually within my inner being? What does self-knowledge yield?” In raising such questions he wishes to find the answer in his ordinary consciousness. This ordinary consciousness, however, only emerges from what actually originated in outer sense impressions and has been transformed by feeling and will. One finds only the reflections, the mirror-images, of outer life when looking in to one's inner being with ordinary consciousness; and although the outer impressions are transformed by feeling and will,man still does not know how feeling and will actually work. For this reason he often fails to recognize what he sees in his inner being as a transformed mirror-image of the outer world and takes it, perhaps, as a special message from the divine, eternal world. This is not the case, however. What appears to the ordinary consciousness of modern man as self-knowledge is only the transformed outer world, which is reflected out of man's inner being into his consciousness.

If man really wished to look into his inner being, he would be obliged—I have often used this image—to break the inner mirror. Our inner being is indeed like a mirror.We gaze on the outer world. Here are the outer sense impressions. We link mental images to them. These mental images are then reflected by our inner being. By looking into our inner being we arrive only at this mirror (see drawing below, red). We see what is reflected in this memory mirror (red arrows). We are just as unable to gaze into man's inner being with ordinary consciousness as we are to look behind a mirror without breaking it. This, however, is precisely what was brought about in the preparatory stage of the ancient path of Oriental wisdom: the teachers and pupils of the mystery centers that came to the West could penetrate directly through the memories into the inner being of man.Out of what they discovered they afterward spoke those words that actually were meant to convey that one had to be well prepared—above all in those ancient times—if one wished to direct one's gaze to the inner being of man.

What, then, does one behold within the human being? There, one sees how something of the power of perceiving and thinking, which is developed in front of the memory-mirror, penetrates below this memory-mirror. Thoughts penetrate below this memory-mirror and work into the human etheric body, into that part of the etheric body that forms the basis of growth but is also the origin of the forces of will. In looking out into the sunlit-space and surveying all that we receive through our sense impressions, there radiates into our inner being something that on the one hand becomes memory images but that also trickles through the memory-mirror, permeating it just as the processes of growth, nutrition, and so on permeate us.

The thought-forces first permeate the etheric body, and the etheric body, permeated in this way by the thought-forces, works in quite a special way on the physical body. Thereupon a complete transformation arises of the material existence that is within the physical body of man. In the outer world, matter is nowhere completely destroyed. This is why modern philosophy and science speak of the conservation of matter, but this law of the conservation of matter is valid only for the outer world. Within the human being,matter is completely dissolved into nothingness. The very essence of matter is fully destroyed. It is precisely upon this fact that our human nature is based: upon being able to throw back matter into chaos, to destroy matter utterly,within that sphere that lies deeper than memory.

This is what was pointed out to the mystery pupils who were led from the East into the mystery colonies of the West, especially Ireland. “In your inner being, below the capacity for memory, you bear within you something that works destructively, and without it you could not have developed your thinking, for you must develop thinking by permeating the etheric body with thought-forces. An etheric body that is permeated with thought-forces, however, works on the physical body in such a way as to throw its matter back into chaos and to destroy it.” If, therefore, a person ventures into this inner being of man with the same attitude with which he penetrates as far as memory, he enters a realm where the being of man wants to destroy, to extinguish, what is there. For the purpose of developing the human, thought-filled “I” or ego, we all bear within us,below the memory-mirror, a fury of destruction, a fury of dissolution, in relation to matter. There is no self-knowledge that does not point with the greatest intensity toward this inner human fact.

For this reason, whoever has had to learn of the presence of this source of destruction² in the inner being of man must take an interest in the evolution of the spirit. With all intensity he must be able to say to himself: spirit must exist and, for the sake of the continuance of the spirit, matter should be extinguished.

It is only after humanity has been spoken to for many years about the interests connected with spiritual scientific investigation that attention can be drawn to what actually exists within the human being. Today we must do so, however, for otherwise man would consider himself to be something different from what he really is within Western civilization. Within Western civilization man is the sheath for a source of destruction, and actually the forces of decline can be trans-formed into forces of ascent only if man becomes conscious of this, that he is the sheath for a source of destruction.

What would happen if man were not to be led by spiritual science out of this consciousness? Already in the evolution of our time we can see what would happen. What is isolated, separated, as it were, in the human being, and should work only within him, at the single spot within where matter is thrown back into chaos, now breaks out and penetrates outer human instincts. That is what will happen to Western civilization, yes, and to the civilization of the whole earth. This is shown by all the destructive forces appearing today—in Eastern Europe, for instance. It is a fury of destruction thrust out of the inner being of man into the outer world, and in the future man will be able to find his bearings regarding what actually flows into his instincts only when a true knowledge of the human being once again prevails, when we become aware once more of the human source of destruction within, which must be there, however, for the sake of the evolution of human thinking. This strength of thinking that man must have in order that he may have a world conception in keeping with our time, this strength of thinking which must be there in front of the memory-mirror, brings about the continuation of thinking into the etheric body, and the etheric body thus permeated by thinking works destructively upon the physical body. This source of destruction within modern Western man is a fact, and knowledge merely draws attention to it. If the source of destruction is there without man being able to bring it to consciousness, it is much worse than if man takes full cognizance of this source of destruction and from this stand-point enters into the evolution of modern civilization.

When the pupils of these mystery colonies, of which I have spoken, first heard of these secrets, their immediate response was fear. This fear they learned to know thoroughly. They became thoroughly acquainted with the sensation that a penetration into man's inner being—not frivolously in the sense of a nebulous mysticism but undertaken in all sincerity—must instill fear. This fear felt by the ancient mystery pupils of the West was overcome only by disclosing to them the whole significance of the facts. Then they were able to conquer through consciousness what had to arise in them as fear.

When the age of intellectualism set in, this same fear became unconscious, and as unconscious fear it is still active. Under all kinds of masks it works into outer life. It is suited to the modern age, however, to penetrate into man's inner being. “Know thyself” has become a rightful demand. It was by a deliberate calling forth of fear, followed by an overcoming of this fear, that the mystery pupils were directed to self-knowlege in the right way.

The age of intellectualism dulled the sight of what lay in man's inner being, but it was unable to do away with the fear. It thus came about that man was and still is under the influence of this unconscious fear to the degree of saying, “There is nothing at all in the human being that transcends birth and death.” He is afraid of penetrating deeper than this life of memory, this ordinary life of thought, which maintains its legitimacy, after all, only between birth and death. He is afraid to look down into what is actually eternal in the human soul, and from this fear he postulates the doctrine that there is nothing at all outside this life between birth and death. Modern materialism has arisen out of fear, without having the least intimation of this. The modern materialistic world conception is a product of fear and anxiety.

This fear thus lives on in the outer actions of human beings, in the social structure, in the course of history since the middle of the fifteenth century, and especially in the nineteenth century materialistic world conception. Why did these people become materialists, that is, why would they admit only the outer, that which is given in material existence? Because they were afraid to descend into the depths of the human being.

This is what the ancient Oriental sage would have wished to express from his knowledge by saying, “You modern Westerners live entirely steeped in fear. You establish your social order upon fear; you create your arts out of fear; your materialistic world conception has been born from fear. You and the successors of those who in my time established the ancient Oriental world conception, although they have come into decadence now—you and these people of Asia will never understand one another, because with the Asiatic people, after all, everything sprang ultimately from love; with you everything originates in fear mixed with hate.”

This certainly sounds radical, so I prefer to try to bring the facts before you as an utterance from the lips of an ancient Oriental sage. It will perhaps be believed that such a one could speak in this way were he to return, whereas a modern person might be considered foolish if he put these things so radically! From such a radical characterization of these things, however, we can learn what we really must learn today for the healthy progress of civilization. Humanity will have to know again that rational thinking, which is the highest attainment of modern times, could not have come into existence if the life of ideas did not arise from a source of destruction. This source must be recognized, so that it may be kept safely within and not pass over into outer instincts and thence become a social impulse.

One can really penetrate deeply into the connections of modern life by looking at things in this way. The world that manifests as a source of destruction lies within, beyond the memory-mirror. The life of modern man, however, takes its course between the memory-mirror and the outer sense perceptions. Just as little as the human being, when he looks into his inner being, is able to see beyond the memory-mirror, so far is he from being able to penetrate through all that is spread out before him as sense perception; he cannot see beyond it. He adds to it a material, atomistic world,which is indeed a fantastic world, because he cannot penetrate through the sensory mental images.

Man is no stranger, however, to this world beyond the outer, sensory mental images. Every night between falling asleep and awakening he penetrates this world. When you sleep, you dwell within this world. What you experience there beyond the sensory mental images is not the atomistic world conjectured by the visionaries of natural science. What lies beyond the sphere of the senses was actually experienced by the ancient Oriental sage in his mysteries. One can experience it, however, only when one has devotion for the world, when one has the desire and the urge to surrender oneself entirely to the world. Love must hold sway in cognition if one wishes to penetrate beyond the sense impression. It was this love in cognition that prevailed especially in the ancient Oriental civilization.

Why must one have this devotion? One must have this devotion because, if one sought to enter the world beyond the senses with one's ordinary human I, one would be harmed. The I, as experienced in ordinary life, must be given up if one wishes to penetrate into the world beyond the senses. How does this I originate? This I is formed by the human being's capacity to plunge into the chaos of destruction. This I must be forged and hardened in that world lying within man as a source of destruction. With this I one cannot live beyond the sphere of the outer sense world. Let us picture to ourselves the source of destruction in whole human organism. What I am portraying is to be understood intensively, not extensively, but I would like to sketch it for you. Here is the source of destruction, here the human sheath. If what is inside were to spread out over the whole world, what would then live in the world through man? Evil! Evil is nothing but the chaos thrust outside, the chaos that is necessary in man's inner being. In this chaos,which must be within man, this necessary source of evil in man, the human I, the human egoity, must be forged. This human egoity cannot live beyond the sphere of the human senses in the outer world. That is why the I-consciousness disappears in sleep, and when it figures in dreams it often appears as though estranged or weakened.

The I, which is actually forged in the source of evil, cannot pass beyond the sphere of the sense phenomena. Hence to the perception of the ancient Oriental sage it was clear that one can go further only through devotion, through love, through a surrender of the I—and that on penetrating fully into this further region one is no longer in a world of Vana, of the weaving in the habitual, but rather in the world of Nirvana, where this habitual existence is dispersed.

This interpretation of Nirvana, of the sublimest surrender of the I, as it exists in sleep, as it existed in fully conscious cognition for the pupils of the ancient Oriental civilization—it is this Nirvana that would be alluded to by an ancient Oriental such as the one I introduced to you hypothetically. He would say, “With you, since you had to cultivate the egoity, everything is founded on fear. With us, who had to suppress the ego, everything was founded on love. With you, there speaks the I that desires to assert itself. With us, Nirvana spoke, while the I flowed out lovingly into the entire world.”

One can formulate these matters in concepts, and they are then preserved in a certain way, but for humanity they live as sensations, as feelings, fluctuating and permeating human existence. Such feelings and sensations constitute what lives today on the one hand in the Orient and on the other in the West. In the West, human beings have a blood, they have a lymph, that is saturated by egoity forged in the inner source of evil. In the Orient, human beings have a blood, a lymph, in which lives an echo of the longing for Nirvana.

Both in the East and in the West these things escape the crude intellectual concepts of our time. Intellectual understanding strives somehow to draw the blood from the living organism, put it on a slide, place it under a microscope, look at it, and then form ideas about it. The ideas thus arrived at are infinitely crude, even from the point of view of ordinary experience. This is all that can be said. Do you believe that this method touches the subtly graded distinctions between the people who sit here next to one another? The microscope naturally gives only crude concepts about the blood, about the lymph. Subtle shades of difference are to be found even among people who have come from the same milieu. These nuances, however, naturally exist much more intensely between human beings of the East and those of the West, although only a crude picture of them can be gained by the modern intellect.

All this thus lives in the bodies of the human being from Asia, Europe, and America, and in their relation to one another in outer social life. With the crude intellect that has been applied in the last few centuries to the investigation of outer nature, we shall not be able to tackle the demands of modern social life; above all we shall not be able to find the balance between East and West, though this balance must be found.

In the late autumn of this year (1921) people will be going to the Washington Conference,³ and discussions will take place there about matters that were summed up by General Smuts,⁴ England's Minister of South Africa, with, I would say, an instinctive genius. The evolution of modern humanity, he said, is characterized by the fact that the starting point for cultural interests, which has hitherto been in the regions bordering the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, is now moving to the Pacific. The culture of the regions situated around the North Sea has gradually spread throughout the West and will become a world culture. The center of gravity of this world culture will be transferred from the North Sea to the Pacific.

Humanity stands face to face with this change. People still talk, however, in such a way that their speech emerges out of the old, crude concepts, and nothing essential is reached—although it must be reached if we are really to move forward. The signs of the times stand with menacing significance before us, and they say to us: until now only a limited trust has been needed between human beings, who in fact were all secretly afraid of one another. This fear was masked under all sorts of other feelings. Now, however, we need an attitude of soul that will be able to embrace a world culture. We need a trust that will be able to bring into balance the contrasts of East and West. Here a significant perspective opens up, which we need. People today believe that economic problems can be handled quite on their own account—the future position of Japan in the Pacific, or how to provide all the trading peoples on earth with free access to the Chinese market, and so on. These problems, however,will not be settled at any conference until people become aware that all economic activities and relations presuppose the trust of one human being in another. In the future this trust can be attained only in a spiritual way. Outer culture will be in need of spiritual deepening. I wished today to look from a different viewpoint at matters we have discussed often before. Tomorrow we shall speak further in this way.

• 1 . Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, 1803–1873.
• 2 . “Source of destruction,” Zerstoerungsherd; -herd suggests a furnace or oven as well as a source.
• 3 . Washington Conference, a disarmament conference held from November 1921 to February 1922.
• 4 . Jan Christiaan Smuts, 1870–1950.

This lecture is included in Volume 207 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961. It is lecture 1 of 11 from the lecture series: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy Vol. I. Also known as: At the Center of Man's Being: I, or Fundamental Impulses in the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Times.

If an an oriental sage of early times, who had been initiated into the Mysteries of the ancient East, were to turn his glance towards modern Western civilisation, he might perhaps say to its representatives: “You are living entirely in fear; your whole mood of soul is governed by fear. All that you do, as well as all that you feel, is saturated with fear and its reverberations in the most important moments of life. And since fear is closely related to hatred, so hatred plays a great part in your whole civilisation.”

Let us make this quite clear. I mean a sage of the ancient Eastern civilisation would speak thus if he stood again to-day among Western people with the same standard of education, the same mood of soul, as those of his own ancient time. And he would make it plain that in his time and his country civilisation was founded on a quite different basis. He would probably say: “In my days, fear played no part in civilised life. Whenever we were concerned to promulgate a world-conception and let action and social life spring from it, the main thing was joy—joy which could be enhanced to the point of a complete giving of oneself in love to the world.” That is how he would put it, and in so doing he would indicate (if he were rightly understood) what were from his point of view supremely important constituent factors and impulses of modern civilisation. And if we knew how to listen to him in the right way, we should gain much that we need to know in order to find a starting point for trying to get a grip on modern life.

In fact, an echo of the ancient civilisation still persists in Asia, even though strong European influences have been absorbed into its religious, æsthetic, scientific and social life. This ancient civilisation is in decline, and when the ancient oriental sage says, “Love was the fundamental force of the ancient oriental culture,” then it must certainly be admitted that but little of this love can be traced directly in the present. But one who is able to discern it can perceive even now, in the phenomena of decline of the Asiatic culture, the penetration of this primeval element of joy—delight in the world and love for the world.

In those ancient times there was in the Orient little of what was afterwards required of man when that word resounded which found its most radical expression in the Greek saying, “Know thyself!” This “Know thyself” entered the historical life of man only when the early Greek civilisation set in. The old eastern world-picture, wide-ranging and light-filled, was not yet permeated by this kind of human knowledge; it was in no way orientated towards directing man's glance into his own inner being.

In this respect man is dependent on the circumstances prevailing in his environment. The ancient oriental civilisation was founded under a different influence from the sun's light, and its earthly circumstances were also different from those of Western civilisation. In the ancient East, man's inner glance was captured by all that he experienced in the surrounding world, and he had a special motive for giving over his entire being to it. It was cosmic knowledge that wove in the ancient oriental wisdom, and in the world-conception that owed its origin to this wisdom. Even in the Mysteries themselves—you can infer this from all you have been hearing for many years—in all that lived in the Mysteries of the East there was no fulfilment of the challenge, “Know thyself!” On the contrary—“Turn your gaze outwards towards the world and endeavour to let that approach you which is hidden in the depths of cosmic phenomena!”—that is how the precept of the ancient Oriental civilisation would have been expressed.

The teachers and pupils of the Mysteries were compelled, however, to turn their glance to the inner being of man when the Asiatic civilisation began to spread westwards; as soon, indeed, as Mystery colonies were founded in Egypt and in North Africa. But particularly when the Mysteries began to develop their colonies still further to the west—a special centre was ancient Ireland—then the teachers and pupils of the Mysteries coming over from Asia were faced, by virtue of the geographical features of the West and its entirely different elemental configuration, with the necessity of cultivating self-knowledge and a true inner vision. And simply because these Mystery pupils, when still living in Asia, had acquired knowledge of the outer world and of the spiritual facts and beings lying behind the outer world—simply by the strength of this fact, they were now able to penetrate deeply into all that exists in man's innermost being.

Over there in Asia all this could not have been observed and studied at all. The inward-turning glance would have been paralysed, so to speak. But by means of all that the men of the East brought to the Western Mystery centres, their gaze having long been directed outwards so as to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, they were now enabled to pierce through into man's inner being. And it was only the strongest souls who could endure what they perceived.

We can indeed realise when an impression was produced by this self-knowledge on the teachers and pupils of the Oriental Mysteries if we repeat a precept which was addressed to the pupils over and over again by the teachers who had already cultivated that vision of man's inner being, a precept which was to make clear to them in what mood of soul this self-knowledge was to be approached. The precept I mean is frequently quoted. But in its full weight it was uttered only in the older Mystery colonies of Egypt, North Africa and Ireland as a preparation for the pupil and as a reminder for every Initiate in regard to the experiences of man's inner being. The precept runs thus: “No-one who is not initiated in the sacred Mysteries should learn to know the secrets of man's innermost being; to utter these secrets in the presence of a non-Initiate is inadmissible; for the mouth uttering these secrets then lays the burden of sin upon itself; likewise does the ear burden itself with sin when it hearkens to those secrets.”

Time and again this precept was uttered from out of the inner experience to which a man, prepared by Oriental wisdom, was able to attain when he penetrated, by virtue of the terrestrial configuration of the West, to the knowledge of man. Tradition has preserved this precept, and to-day it is still repeated—without any understanding of its intrinsic nature—in the secret orders and secret societies of the West which, externally, still have a great influence. But it is repeated only from tradition. It is not uttered with the necessary weight, for those who use it do not really know what it signifies. Yet even in our own time this word is used as a kind of motto in the secret societies of the West: “There are secrets concerning man's inner being that can be transmitted to men only within the secret societies; for otherwise the mouth uttering them is sinful, and the ear hearing them is likewise sinful.”

We should be aware that in the course of time many men in Western countries (I am not speaking of Central Europe) learn to know in secret societies what has been handed down as tradition from the researches of the ancient wisdom. It is received without understanding, although as an impulse it often flows into action. In later centuries after about the middle of the 15th century—the human constitution became such as to make it impossible to see these things in their original form; they could be understood only intellectually. Ideas about them could be picked up, but a true experience of them could not be attained, though individuals had some inkling of it.

Such men have sometimes adopted strange forms of outer life, as for instance Bulwer Lytton, the author of “Zanoni.” What he became in his later life can be understood only if one is aware of how he received, to begin with, the tradition of self-knowledge, but how, too, by virtue of his individual constitution, he was also able to penetrate into certain mysteries. Thereby he became estranged from the ordinary ways of life. Precisely in him one can observe what a man's attitude towards life becomes when he admits into his inner experience this different spiritual world; not only into his thoughts, but into his whole soul. Many facts must then be judged by other than conventional standards.

Of course, it was something quite outlandish when Bulwer travelled about, speaking of his inner experiences with a certain emphasis, while a young person who accompanied him played a harp-like instrument, for he needed to have this harp-music in between the passages of his talk. Here and there he appeared in gatherings where everything else went on in a quiet formal, conventional way. He would come on in his rather eccentric garb and sit down, with his harp-maiden seated in front of his knees. He would speak a few sentences; then the harp-maiden would play; then he would continue his talk, and the maiden would play again. Thus something coquettish in a higher sense of the word—one cannot help characterising it in this way at first—was introduced into the conventional world where Philistinism has made such increasing inroads, above all since the middle of the 15th century.

Men have little idea of the degree of Philistinism into which they have grown; they have less and less idea of it just because it comes to seem natural. They see something as reasonable only in so far as it is in line with what is “done.” But things in life are all interconnected, and the dryness and sleepiness of modern times, the relation human beings now have to one another, belongs to the intellectual development of the last few centuries. The two things belong together. A man like Bulwer, of course, did not fit into such a development; one can quite well picture to oneself people of older times travelling about in the world accompanied by a younger person with some pleasant music. One needs only to perceive the distance between one attitude of soul and another; then such a thing will be seen in the right light. But with Bulwer it was because something lit up in him that could no longer exist directly in the immediate present, but appeared only as a tradition in the modern intellectual age.

We must, however, recover the knowledge of man that lived in the Mystery colonies of which I have spoken. The average man to-day is aware of the world around him by means of his sense-perceptions. What he sees, he orders and arranges in his mind. Then he looks also into his own inner being. The sense-perceptions received from outside, the ideas developed therefrom, these ideas as they penetrate within becoming transformed by impulses of feeling and of will, together with all that is reflected into consciousness as memories—here we have what forms the content of the soul, the content of life in which modern man lives and out of which he acts. At most he is led by a false kind of mysticism to ask: “What is there really in my inner being? What does self-knowledge yield?” In raising such questions he wants to find the answers in his ordinary consciousness. But this ordinary consciousness gives him only what originated in external sense-perceptions and has been transformed by feeling and will. One finds only the reflections, the mirror-pictures, of external life, when looking into one's inner being with ordinary consciousness; and although the outer impressions are transformed by feeling and will, man is still unable to tell how feeling and will are actually working. For this reason he often fails to recognise what he perceives in his inner being as a transformed reflection of the outer world, and takes it, perhaps, as a special message from the divine eternal world. But this is not so. What presents itself to the ordinary consciousness of modern man as self-knowledge is only the transformed outer world, which is reflected out of man's inner being into his consciousness.

If man really and truly desired to look into his innermost being, then he would be obliged—I have often used this image—to break the inner mirror. Our inner being is indeed like a mirror. We gaze on the outer world. Here are the outer sense-perceptions. We link conceptions to them. These conceptions are then reflected by our inner being. By looking into our inner being we get only to this mirror within. We perceive what is reflected by the memory-mirror. We are just as unable to penetrate into man's inner being with ordinary consciousness as we are to look behind a mirror without breaking it. This, however, is precisely what was brought about in the preparatory stage of the ancient way of Eastern wisdom so that the teachers and pupils of the Mystery colonies that came to the West could penetrate directly through the memories into the innermost being of man. Out of what they saw they afterwards uttered those words which were meant to convey that one must be well prepared—above all in those ancient times—if one desired to direct one's glance to the inner being of man. For what does one then behold within?

There, one perceives how something of the power which belongs to perception and thought, and is developed in front of the memory-mirror, penetrates below this memory-mirror. Thoughts penetrate below the memory-mirror and work into the human etheric body—into that part of the etheric body which forms the basis of growth, but which is equally the source of the forces of will. As we look out into the sunlit space and survey all that we receive through our sense-perceptions, there radiates into our inner being something which on the one hand becomes memory-ideas, but also trickles through the memory-mirror, permeating it just as the processes of growth, nutrition and so on permeate us.

The thought-forces penetrate first through the etheric body, and the etheric body, permeated in this way by the thought-forces, works in a very special manner on the physical body. Thereupon a complete transformation sets in of that material existence which is within the physical body of man. In the outer world, matter is nowhere completely destroyed. This is why modern philosophy and science speak of the conservation of matter. But this law of the conservation of matter is valid only for the outer world. Within the human being, matter is completely dissolved into nothingness. The very being of matter is destroyed. It is precisely upon this fact that our human nature is based: upon being able to throw back matter into chaos, to destroy matter utterly, within that sphere which lies deeper than memory.

This is what was pointed out to the Mystery pupils who were led from the East into the Mystery colonies of the West, and especially of Ireland. “In your inner nature, below the powers of memory, you bear within you something that works destructively, and without it you would not have developed the power of thought, for you have to develop thought by permeating the etheric body with thought-forces. But an etheric body thus permeated with thought-forces works on the physical body in such a way as to throw its matter into chaos and to destroy it.”

If, therefore, a person ventures into this inner being of man with the same frame of mind with which he penetrates as far as memory, then he enters a realm where the being of man has an impulse to destroy, to blot out, that which exists there in material form. For the purpose of developing our human, thought-filled Ego we all bear within us, below the memory-mirror, a fury of destruction, a fury of dissolution, in respect of matter. There is no human self-knowledge which does not point with every possible emphasis towards this inner human fact.

For this reason, whoever has had to learn of the presence of this centre of destruction in the inner being of man must take an interest in the development of the spirit. With all intensity he must be able to say to himself: Spirit must exist, and for the sake of the maintenance of the spirit matter may be extinguished.

It is only after one has spoken to mankind for many years of the interests connected with spiritual scientific investigation that one can draw attention to what actually exists within man. But to-day we must do so, for otherwise man would consider himself to be something different from what he really is within Western civilisation. Enclosed within him he has a fiery centre of destruction, and in truth the forces of decline can be transformed into forces of ascent only if he becomes conscious of this fact.

What would happen if men should not be led by Spiritual Science to this awareness? In the developments of our time we can see already what would happen. This centre which is isolated in man, and should work only within him, at the one single spot within, where matter is thrown back into chaos, now breaks out and penetrates into human instincts. That is what will happen to Western civilisation; yes, and to the civilisation of the whole Earth. This is evidenced by all the destructive forces appearing to-day—in the East of Europe, for instance. It is a fury of destruction thrust out of the inner being of man into the outer world; and in the future man will be able to find his bearings in regard to what thus penetrates into his instincts only when a true knowledge of the human being once again prevails, when we become aware once more of this human centre of destruction within—a centre, however, which must be there for the sake of the development of human thought. For this strength of thought that man needs in order that he may have a world-conception in keeping with our time—this strength of thought, which must be there in front of the memory-mirror, brings about the continuation of thought into the etheric body. And the etheric body thus permeated by thought works destructively upon the physical body. This centre of destruction within modern Western man is a fact, and knowledge merely draws attention to it. If the centre of destruction is there without any awareness of it, this is much worse than if man takes full cognisance of it, and from this conscious standpoint enters into the development of modern civilisation.

It was fear that seized upon the pupils of these Mystery colonies when they first heard of these secrets. This fear they learnt to know thoroughly. They became thoroughly acquainted with the feeling that a penetration into man's innermost being—not frivolously in the sense of a nebulous mysticism but undertaken in all sincerity—must arouse fear. And this fear felt by the ancient Mystery pupils of the West was overcome only by disclosing to them the whole weight of the facts. Then they were able to conquer by consciousness what arose in them as fear.

When the age of intellectualism set in, this same fear became unconscious, and as unconscious fear it still exists. Under all manner of masks it works into outer life. It belongs, however, to our time to penetrate into man's inner being. “Know thyself” has become a rightful demand. It was by a deliberate calling forth of fear, followed by an overcoming of it, that the Mystery pupils were directed to self-knowledge in the true way.

The age of intellectualism dulled the sight of what lay in man's inner being, but it was unable to do away with the fear. Thus it came about that man was and still is influenced by this unconscious fear to the degree of saying, “There is nothing at all in the human being that transcends birth and death.” He is afraid of penetrating deeper than this life of memory, this ordinary life of thought which maintains its course, after all, only between birth and death. He is afraid to look down into that which is eternal in the human soul, and from out of this fear he postulates the doctrine that there is nothing at all outside this life between birth and death. Modern materialism has arisen out of fear, without men having the slightest idea of this. The modern materialistic world-conception is a product of fear and anxiety (Angst).

So this fear lives on in the outer actions of men, in the social structure, in the course of history since the middle of the 15th century, and especially in the 19th century materialistic world-conception. Why did these men become materialists—why would they admit only the external, that which is given in material existence? Because they feared to descend into the depths of man.

This is what the ancient Oriental sage would have wished to express from out of his knowledge by saying: “You modern Westerners live entirely steeped in fear. You found your social order upon fear; you create your arts out of fear; your materialistic world-conception has been born from fear. You and the successors of those who in my time founded the ancient Oriental world-conception, although they have come into decadence now—you and these men of Asia will never understand one another, because after all with the Asiatic people everything sprang ultimately from love; with you everything originates in fear mixed with hate.”

These are strong words indeed, but I prefer to try to place the facts before you as an utterance from the lips of an Oriental sage. It will perhaps be believed that he could speak in such a manner if he came back, whereas a modern man might be considered mad if he put it all so radically! But from such a radical characterisation of things we can learn what we really must learn to-day for the healthy progress of civilisation. Mankind will have to know again that intelligent thinking, which is the highest attainment of modern times, could not have come into existence if the life of ideas did not arise from a centre of destruction. And this centre must be reckoned with, so that it may be kept safely within and not pass over into our outer instincts and thence turn into a social impulse.

One can really penetrate deeply into the connections of modern life by looking at things in this way. Thus the realm that manifests as a centre of destruction lies within, beyond the memory-mirror. But the life of modern man takes its course between the memory-mirror and the outer sense-perceptions. Just as little as man, when he looks into his inner being, is able to see beyond the memory-mirror, so far is he from being able to pierce through all that is spread out before him as sense-perceptions; he cannot see beyond it. He adds to it a material, atomistic world, which is indeed a fantastic world, because he cannot penetrate through the sense-images.

But man is no stranger to this world beyond the outer sense-images. Every night between falling asleep and awakening he enters this world. When you sleep, you dwell within this world. What you experience there beyond the sense-images is not the atomistic world conjectured by the visionaries of natural science. What lies beyond the sphere of the senses was in fact experienced by the ancient Oriental sage in his Mysteries. It can be experienced only when one has devotion for the world, when one has the desire and the urge to surrender oneself entirely to the world. Love must permeate the act of cognition if one desires to penetrate beyond the sense-perceptions. And it was this love that prevailed especially in the ancient oriental civilisation.

Why must one have this devotion? Because if one sought to pierce beyond the sense-perceptions with one's ordinary human Ego, one might be harmed. The Ego, as experienced in ordinary life, must be given up, if one wants to penetrate beyond the sense-perceptions. How does this Ego originate? It is brought into existence by man's capacity to plunge into the chaos of destruction. This Ego must be tempered and hardened in that realm which lies within man as a centre of destruction. And with this Ego one cannot live on the far side of the outer sense-world.

Let us picture to ourselves the centre of destruction in man's inner being. It extends over the whole human organism. If it were to spread out over the whole world, what would then live in the world through man? Evil. Evil is nothing else but the chaos thrust outside, the chaos which is necessary in man's inner being. And in this necessary chaos, this necessary centre of evil in man, the human Ego must be forged. This human Egohood cannot live beyond the sphere of the human senses in the outer world. That is why the Ego-consciousness disappears in sleep, and when it figures in dreams it is often as though estranged or weakened.

The Ego which is forged in the centre of evil cannot pass beyond the realm of the sense-perceptions. Hence to the ancient oriental sage it was clear that one can go further only by means of devotion and love, by a surrender of the Ego; and that on penetrating fully into this further region one is no longer in a world of Vana, of weaving in the habitual, but rather in the world of Nirvana, where this habitual existence is dissolved.

This interpretation of Nirvana, of the sublimest surrender of the Ego, as it occurs in sleep and as it existed in fully conscious knowledge for the pupils of the ancient oriental civilisation—it is this Nirvana that would be pointed out to you by such an ancient sage as I placed hypothetically before you. And he would say: “With you, since you had to develop Egohood, everything is founded on fear. With us, who had to suppress Egohood, everything was founded on love. With you, there speaks the Ego that desires to assert itself. With us, Nirvana spoke, while the Ego flowed out into the world in love.”

One can formulate these matters in concepts and they are then preserved in a certain sense, but for humanity at large they live in feelings and moods, permeating human existence. And through such feelings they bring about a living difference to-day between the East and the West. In the West, men have a blood, a lymph, that is saturated by an Egohood tempered in the inner centre of evil. In the East men have a blood, a lymph, in which lives an echo of the longing for Nirvana.

Both in the East and in the West these things escape the crude intellectual concepts of our time. Intellectual understanding draws the blood from the living organism, turns it into a preparation, places it under a microscope, looks at it and then forms ideas about it. The ideas thus arrived at are infinitely crude even from the point of view of ordinary experience. That is all one can say about it. Do you think that this method touches the subtly graded differences of the people who sit here next to one another? The microscope, of course, gives only crude ideas about the blood, the lymph. Subtle shades of difference are to be found even among people who have come from the same milieu. But these shades of difference naturally exist much more emphatically between the men of the East and those of the West, although only a crude idea of them can be had by modern thinking.

All this comes to expression in the bodies of the men from Asia, Europe and America, and in their relation to one another in outer social life. With the crude understanding that has been applied in the last few centuries to the investigation of external nature we shall not be able to tackle the demands of modern social life; above all we shall not be able to reach an adjustment between East and West. But this adjustment must be found.

In the late autumn of this year (1921) people will be going to the Washington Conference, and discussions will take place there about matters which were summed up by General Smuts, the Minister of Africa, with his instinctive genius. The evolution of modern humanity, he said, is characterised by the fact that the seed-ground for cultural activities, which has hitherto been in the regions bordering the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, is now moving to the Pacific. The culture of the countries situated round the North Sea has gradually spread throughout the West and will become a world culture. The centre of gravity of this world culture will be transferred from the North Sea to the Pacific.

Mankind stands face to face with this change. But men still talk in such a way that their speech savours of the old crude ideas and nothing essential is reached—although it must be reached if we are really to go ahead. The signs of the times stand with menacing significance before us and their message is: Until now only a limited trust has been needed between men, who in fact were all secretly afraid of one another. Their fear was masked under all sorts of other feelings. But now we need an attitude of soul that will be able to embrace a world civilisation. We need a confidence which will be able to bring into balance the relationship between East and West. Here a significant and necessary perspective opens out. The assumption to-day is that economic problems can be handled quite on their own account—the future position of Japan in the Pacific, or how all the trading peoples on earth may have free access to the Chinese market, and so on. But these problems will not be settled at any conference until men become aware that all economic activities and relations presuppose the trust of one man in another. In future this trust will be attained only in a spiritual way. Outer civilisation will be in need of spiritual deepening.

This lecture is the first of eleven lectures in the lecture series entitled, Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy Volume I. It is also known as, The Center of Man's Being, part 1, and Evil and the Power of Thought.

Were an Oriental sage of ancient times, initiated in the Mysteries of the East (we must go back to very ancient times of Oriental civilisation, in order to contemplate what I wish to say), to turn his gaze on present-day Western civilisation, he would perhaps say to those belonging to this Western civilisation: To say the truth, you live entirely immersed in fear, fear rules your whole soul-constitution. In the most important moments of life fear permeates all you do—all you feel, too, and its results; as fear is closely related with hatred, hatred plays an important part in your whole civilisation.

Do not misunderstand me. I mean: were a wise man of the ancient civilisation of the East to stand amongst Western people with the same degree of culture and the same soul-constitution he used to possess in his time, then he would speak in this way and would perhaps give people to understand that indeed in his time and in his country, civilisation was built up on completely different foundations. Probably he would say: In my days, fear really played no part in the life of civilisation. In my days, when a world-conception had to be brought into the world, so that deeds and social life may spring out of it, the chief part was played by a joyful kind of pleasure, able to transform itself into devoted surrender to the world, into love.

This is what he would feel, and from his point of view he would show us the most important component parts, the most important impulses of present-day civilisation. And were we able to listen to him in the right way, then we would acquire thereby a great deal of what we really need in order to find the point from which we must start.

After all, a reminiscence of the ancient civilisation is still to be found in Asia, although strong European influences have entered its religious, aesthetic, scientific and social life. This old civilisation is decadent and when the wise man of the ancient East declares that love was the fundamental force of the ancient civilisation of the East, we must indeed say: In the present time, little of it can be seen directly. But he who is able to see, can positively discern this influence of an original element of pleasure, joy, love of the world and towards the world, even in the manifestations of decadence to be found in Asiatic culture.

In ancient times, the East contained little of what was demanded of man later on, when the word resounded, appearing in its most radical form in the Greek saying: Know thyself. This “Know thyself” entered man's historical life only with the appearance of the earlier stage of Greek culture. This kind of human knowledge did not as yet pervade the encompassing, enlightened world-conception of the ancient East, for it really did not turn its eye towards man's inner being. In this connection man is dependent on the circumstances ruling in the world around him. The ancient Oriental culture was founded under another influence of the Sun's light on the earth, under another influence of the earth's condition, than those appearing in the later civilisation of by what surrounded him as world, and he felt particularly induced to devote himself to the world with all his inner being. What weaved in this old Oriental wisdom and in the conception of the world arising out of this old Oriental wisdom, was knowledge of the world. Even the Mysteries—you can gather it from all that has been said to you in this connection for quite a number of years—and that which lived in the Mysteries of the ancient East, did not contain a real following of the demand: “Know thyself!” “Turn your gaze into the world, try to approach what lies hidden in the depths of the world's manifestations,” this could be taken as a demand of the ancient Eastern civilisation. But when Asiatic culture began to spread more toward the West, and Mystery colonies were founded in Egypt and Northern Africa, the teachers and disciples of the Mysteries were compelled to turn their gaze toward man s inner being. Particularly when the colonies of the Mysteries extended still farther West—there was a special site in ancient Ireland—the teachers and disciples of the Mysteries who came over from the East had to face the necessity of man's knowledge of self, of a real inner contemplation of man, because of the geographical conditions of the West, and consequently, the completely different elementary formation of the Western world. What these disciples of the Mysteries had already acquired in Asia in the shape of outer knowledge of the world, and knowledge concerning spiritual facts and beings lying at the foundation of the outer world, this enabled them now to penetrate deeply into what is really contained within man.

It would have been impossible to observe it over there, in Asia. The gaze turned toward man s interior would have become, so to say, lifeless. But what was brought into the Mystery colonies of the West as an acquisition gained by contemplating the world outside, now made it possible to look into man's interior. Indeed, one might say that at first only the strongest souls could bear what could be seen in man's inner being. Man's inner being rose into the consciousness of mankind in these Mystery colonies of Eastern origin founded in Western countries. A word addressed to the disciples by teachers of the Mysteries who already possessed this look into man's interior can really show what an impression this self-knowledge of manmade on these Mystery teachers; the word I mean is often quoted. But only in the earlier Mystery-colonies of Egypt, North-Africa and Ireland it was uttered for the disciple's preparation, and the initiate's attention in general, in respect of the experiences of man s inner being. The word which was then uttered was this one: No one who is not initiated in the holy Mysteries should gam knowledge of the secrets of man's inner being; it is not allowed to speak of such secrets before a non-initiate; for sinful are the lips that utter these secrets and sinful the ear that hears these secrets.

This word has often been uttered from out [of] an inner experience, from out that which a human being, prepared by the wisdom of the East, could experience when he advanced to a knowledge of man through the earthly conditions prevailing in the West. This word has been preserved traditionally; to-day, however, it is in constant use, but misunderstood, in its innermost essence, in secret orders and in secret societies of the West, that have really quite an influence in the world outside. But it is no longer spoken with the required earnestness, because people no longer know what they are saying when they utter these words. But even at present it does indeed happen that this word is taken as a motto in the secret orders of the West: Secrets exist concerning man's inner being; they must only be revealed in secret societies, for sinful are the lips that utter them and sinful the ear that hears them.

It must be said that in the course of time, many people (not those of Central Europe, but those of Western countries) learnt a great deal within their secret societies of what had been preserved traditionally from the investigations of an ancient wisdom. This knowledge is taken up without being understood at all, and to a great extent, enters into human actions as an impulse. It is indeed so, that during the last centuries, already since the middle of the 15th century, man's constitution rendered it impossible for him to see these things in their original form; he could only conceive them intellectually. It was possible to have an idea of them, but not to experience them. Single individuals only had premonitions. But these premonitions led many a human being into the sphere of the experiences that count most of all. Such people have at times taken up the strangest attitude towards life, for instance, Lord Bulwer, the author of Zanoni. We can understand him in his later years only if we know that he first acquired a traditional self-knowledge of man, but owing to his particular individual constitution, he was already able to penetrate into certain mysteries. This made him go further away from what is natural in life. In his case it is possible to see what an attitude toward life is assumed by a man who assimilates this differently-organised spiritual world, not only in thoughts, but in the whole attitude of his soul, in his inner experience. Then, many a thing must be judged differently, but not in the usual narrow-minded way. Of course, it is awful that Bulwer went about speaking with a certain emphasis of his inner experiences, accompanied by a younger female being, with a harp-like instrument on which she played in the intervals between his sentences. He appeared here and there at parties where he had often appeared quite formally and properly, sat down in his somewhat strange attire and before him sat the “harp-girl.” He said a few sentences, then the girl played, he continued talking and then the girl played again. Thus, in a higher sense, he brought something frivolous into this narrow-minded world, this narrowmindedness into which people sank more and more, especially since the middle of the 15th century.

People do not realize the degree of narrow-mindedness they have reached, and will know less and less about it, because it is becoming natural. Only ones “behaviour is looked upon as sensible. But there is a connection in the things in life, and modern dryness and sleepiness, the attitude of people toward each other, these belong to the intellectual evolution that arose in the last centuries. There is a connection in such things. A man like Bulwer does not fit into this evolution; it is quite possible of course to imagine elderly people going about the world, accompanied by younger people playing pleasant music. But the difference between the two soul-constitutions must only be seen in the right light, then also this will appear in its right light. In Bulwer something shone forth that he could not have acquired directly in our modern intellectual age, but only traditionally. We must, however, learn again what man's knowledge of self used to be in the Mystery-colonies I have mentioned.

The every-day man of the present age sees the world around him through the outer physical sense-impressions. He combines what he perceives, with his understanding. He also sees into his own self. This is really the world looked over by man, out of which his actions proceed. The sense-impressions he receives from outside, what he evolves out of these sense-impressions in the shape of representations, and that part of the representations transformed by impulses of feeling and impulses of will and directed towards man's inner being, then ray back again into consciousness as memories. This is what constitutes the soul s contents, the contents of the life in which man lives in the present time and out of which his actions proceed. Present-day man will at the most ask with a false kind of mysticism what is really contained in his inner being and what self-knowledge reveals. In bringing forward such a question he wants to find an answer through his usual consciousness. But out of this usual consciousness nothing else except outer sense-impressions, transformed by feeling and will, can arise. Only reflections, mirrored images of outer life, can be found by looking into man's inner being with the usual consciousness, and even when the impressions from outside have been transformed by feeling and will, man nevertheless does not know how feeling and will really work. Because the outer impressions have been transformed, man often takes what he sees within him as a special message from a divine world, an eternal world and not as the mirrored image of the outer world. But it is not so. What appears to a normal consciousness as self-knowledge, is only the transformed world outside reflecting itself into his consciousness from his inner being. If man really wants to look within himself, then—I have often used this image before—he would have to break this inner mirror. We look at the world outside. We have the outer sense impressions and connect them with thoughts. These thoughts then get reflected from within. By looking inside us, we only come as far as this inner mirror. We see what this mirror reflects in the form of memory. Just as we cannot look behind a mirror without breaking it, so we cannot look into man s inner being. The preparation given be the old wisdom of the East to the teachers and disciples of the Mystery-colonies that came over to the West, enabled them to see clearly behind memory into man's inner being. What they saw there, caused them to speak the words that were really meant to explain how well prepared one had to be, especially in those ancient times, before looking into man's inner being. What can be seen within man?

There we can see how something pertaining to the force of thought and perception which develops in front of the memory-mirror, penetrates under this memory-mirror. Thoughts penetrate below this memory-mirror and exercise an action on man's etheric body, in that part of man's etheric body which lies at the foundation of growth, and also at the foundation of the origin of will-forces'. When we look out into the sunlit space and survey all that comes to us through sense-impressions, something shines in our inner being, changing, it is true, into memory-thoughts on the one hand, but nevertheless oozes through the memory-mirror which pervades us just as the processes of nutrition, growth, etc. pervade us. The thought-forces first permeate the etheric body, this now exercises quite a particular action on the physical body. A complete change of the material being existing in man's physical body takes place in the physical body. Matter nowhere undergoes a complete destruction in the world outside. For this reason, the newer philosophy and natural sciences speak of the conservation of matter. But this law of the conservation of matter only applies to the outer world. Within man, matter is completely changed back into nothingness. Matter is completely destroyed in its essence. Our human, nature is based on this very fact: that we are able to throw back matter into chaos, destroying it completely deeper down than where I memory is mirrored.

This is what the disciple of the Mysteries who was led from the East into the Mystery-colonies of Ireland, and of the West in general, had to learn: within you, beneath your capacity of memory, you have something in you as man, that aims at destruction; if it would not be there, then you would not have been able to evolve your thinking. For your thoughts must develop through the forces of thought which permeate the etheric body. But an etheric body permeated with the forces of thought, has such an action on the physical body that matter is thrown back into chaos and destroyed.

When man therefore sets out in this frame of mind to investigate man's inner being, he will first come as far as memory, then he will enter a region where the human being wants to destroy, to annihilate what is there. Beneath our memory-mirror each one of use possesses the mama of destruction, of dissolution as far as matter is concerned, in order that man may develop his thoughtful Ego. There is no human self-knowledge that does not point out most earnestly this human fact.

Therefore, he that is to see this centre of destruction in man must take an interest in spiritual development. He must be able to say with the greatest earnestness: the spirit must subsist and for the sake of the spirit's existence, it is permissible that matter should be annihilated. Only when mankind will have heard for years about the things pertaining to spiritual-scientific investigations, it will be possible to show what is to be found in man. But it must be pointed out already to-day, for without this knowledge man will have illusions concerning himself, and concerning what he really is within the civilisation of the West. Within the world's evolution, man is the enveloping frame of a centre of destruction, and the downward forces can only be changed into ascending forces if man will realize that he envelops a destructive centre.

What would happen if man were not led to this state of consciousness through spiritual science? Well, already in the evolution of the present times we can see what would happen. What is to be found, as it were, isolated and separated from man, and should only exercise its action in man, play only this one part in man of throwing matter back into chaos, this instead comes out of the isolation and enters man's outer instincts. This will take place in genera! in the civilisation of the West and of the earth. It can be seen in everything appearing to-day as destructive forces, for instance in Eastern Europe. This is destructiveness thrown out from within and man will only be able to face the future in the right way, in connection with what goes on in him instinctively, if a real knowledge of man will again be there, if man will again be shown this centre of destruction inside him, which must however be there for the sake of the development of human thought. This very force of thinking man must possess in order to acquire the world-conception needed in the present age, this force of thinking which must exist in front of the memory-mirror, effects the continuation of thinking into the etheric body. The etheric body permeated with thought works destructively on the physical body. This centre of destruction exists in the modern man of the West; knowledge points it out. It is far worse, however, when this centre exists and man is unable to reach it with his consciousness, than when man acquires a fully conscious knowledge of this destructive centre and proceeds from this point of view into the modern evolution of civilisation.

Fear was the first thing that befell the disciples when they heard of these secrets in the Mystery-colonies. They learnt to know it thoroughly. They thoroughly learnt to know the feeling that fear arises when they looked into man's inner being, not dishonestly, in a hazy kind of mysticism, but honestly. The disciples of the Mysteries of the West were only able to overcome this fear because they were shown the full weight of the facts. Then they were able to conquer consciously what had to arise in the shape of fear.

Then, when the intellectual age appeared, this fear became an unconscious feeling and continues working as an unconscious fear. It exercises an action on life outside, hidden under all kinds of aspects. But it is in conformity with the present age to look into man's inner being. “Know thyself”, becomes a justified demand. Through the fear that was conjured up, and then through the overcoming of this fear, the disciples of the Mysteries were led to self-knowledge in the right way. The intellectual age dimmed the look for what was contained in man's inner being, but it was unable to drive away fear. Thus it came about that man stood and stands under the influence of this unconscious fear and reached the point of saying: There is nothing in man beyond birth and death. Man is afraid to look below the life of memories, the usual life of thoughts, which legitimately exists only between birth and death. He is afraid to look into what is really eternal in the human soul and on this fear, he establishes the teaching that there is nothing beyond this life between birth and death. Modern materialism has sprung out of fear and has not the slightest idea that it is so. This modern material world-conception is a product of fear.

Thus fear lives in the outer actions of human beings, in the social configuration and in the historical process ever since the middle of the 15th century; it lives especially in the materialistic world-conception of the 19th century. Why did human beings become materialistic, i.e. why did they only take into consideration the outer aspect in material existence? Because they were afraid to descend into the depths of man.

This is what the ancient sage of the East wished to express in the words: You modern people of the West live entirely in fear. You found your social organisations on fear, follow your artistic pursuits out of fear, and your materialistic world-conception is born out of fear. You and the successors of those who founded the old Oriental world-conception during my time, though they have fallen into decadence—you and these people of Asia will never understand each other, for in the people of Asia everything is born out of love, whereas in your case everything springs out of fear which is related with hatred.

Of course, this may sound drastic, but I am trying to bring it before you by making an old Oriental sage say it. Perhaps it will not appear too incredible if he were to speak like that supposing he were to arise again, whereas a present-day man would be looked upon as a fool were he to bring forward such things so drastically. But the drastic character of these things can show us what we have to learn to day for the sake of civilisation's healthy progress. Mankind must get to know again that, what constitutes the highest achievement of more recent times, namely intellectual thought, could not be there at all, unless the life of thought rises from within, out of a destructive centre which must be recognised in order to keep it in its place, inside, and prevent it extending to the outer instinct, and entering social impulses.

By looking over such things, it is possible to look deeply into the connections of life during more recent times. The world appearing as such a destructive centre, is to be found within us, beneath the mirror of memory. But the life of present-day man takes its course between that which the memory-mirror offers and the outer sense-perception. He adds to it a material atomistic world, which is a phantastic world because he cannot break through the representations gained through the senses.

But man is no stranger to the world lying beyond the outer representations gained through the senses. Every night, between falling asleep and waking up, he penetrates into this world. When you sleep, you are within this world. What you experience then, lies beyond the representations gained through the senses and is not the atomistic world set up by the dreamers of natural sciences. What the old Oriental sage experienced in his Mysteries, was the world lying beyond the sphere of the senses. It is only possible to experience it through devoted surrender to the world, when we are seized by the impulse of giving ourselves up completely to the world. Love must be active in knowledge if we wish to penetrate behind the sense-impressions. Especially the old civilisation of the East possessed this love in their knowledge.

Why must this resignation be acquired? Because, if we wish to get beyond the sense-world with our usual human Ego, we would suffer damage. We must give up our usual Ego if we want to enter this world beyond the senses. How does the Ego arise? Through the human being diving down into a chaos of destruction,—this is how the Ego is formed. This Ego must be steeled and hardened in that world existing within man as the world of a destructive centre. With this Ego it is not possible to live beyond the sphere of the outer sense-world.

Let us imagine the centre of destruction in man. It spreads over the whole human organism. What I am describing, is to be understood intensively, not extensively; but I will draw it schematically.¹ Here is the centre of destruction and here is the human frame. If that which is inside, were to spread over the whole world, what would then live in the world through man? Evil! Evil is nothing but the necessary chaos existing inside man, which has been thrown out. The human Self, the human Ego, must be hardened in this chaos, in what must exist in man and must remain in him as a centre of evil. This human Ego cannot live beyond the human sense-sphere in the outer world. Hence Ego-consciousness disappears in sleep and when it appears in dreams, its appearance is often a strange and a weak one towards its own self. The Ego which really undergoes a hardening process in the centre of Evil existing within man, cannot go beyond the sphere of the sense manifestations. Hence, the old sages of the East were of the opinion that only through resignation, only through love, it was possible to enter the supersensible sphere, only by giving up the Ego—and that on entering this world completely, one does not live in a world of Vana, one does not live in the woof of what is habitual, but in a world where this usual existence has been blown away, where there is Nirvana. This conception of Nirvana, the utmost resignation of the Ego, as in sleep, which existed as a fully-conscious knowledge in the disciples of the ancient civilisation of the East, this is what an old Oriental sage would point out, such a sage as I have placed hypothetically before your souls. He would say: With you, everything is grounded in fear, because you had to evolve the Ego. With us, everything was grounded in love, because we had to suppress the Ego. With you, an Ego desirous of asserting itself, speaks. With us, Nirvana spoke in the Ego's loving outpouring into the whole world.

These things can be grasped in thought and remain to a certain extent preserved there, but in the world of mankind they live as sensations, as fluctuating feelings and permeate human life. In such feelings and sentiments, they constitute what lives to-day on the one hand in the East, and on the other hand in the West. In the West, people have a kind of blood, a kind of lymph-fluid which is saturated with the Ego, hardened in the inner centre of Evil. In the East the human beings have a kind of blood, a lymph, containing the echo of the Nirvana-longing. In the present-day such things do not enter into the consciousness of the people of the East and of the West, owing to the uncouth way in which people think, for intellectual thought has something very uncouth. Intellectual thought somehow tries to bleed the human organism, to convert it into a microscopic slide and observe it under the microscope in order to form thoughts about it. The thoughts thus obtained, are terribly uncouth, even from an everyday aspect of experiencing things. This is what can at all be said in this connection: Do you think that it is able to grasp the finely-shaded differences to be found in the human beings that are for instance seated here next to each other? The microscope of course only gives unpolished, uncouth concepts of the blood and lymph. But finely-shaded differences even exist in people who come out of the same surroundings and conditions. But these shadings exist most intensively in human beings of the East and of the West; the intellect of course, can only grasp them quite bluntly and coarsely.

This is what takes place in the bodies of the Asiatic, European and American people and rules their reciprocal attitude in social life outside. The coarse, uncouth understanding employed in the last century for acquiring knowledge on nature outside, will not suffice to tackle the demands of a more recent social life and especially the adjustment between East and West will not be found. But this adjustment must be found.

Towards the end of the autumn people will be streaming to the Washington Conference where the statement made from out an instinctive genius by General Smuts, England's Minister for Africa will be discussed. He said that mankind's modern evolution is characterised by the fact that the starting point of civilisation's interests, which used to be in the Northern Sea up to now, will be transferred to the Pacific Ocean. A world culture is arising out of the civilisation of the countries lying around the Northern Sea, but the centre of gravity of this world-culture will be transferred from the North-Sea to the Pacific Ocean.

Mankind is facing this change. But people still talk to-day in such a way that what they say proceeds from the old coarse kind of thinking, so that nothing real and essential is reached; yet it must be reached, if we want to proceed. The signs of the times stand menacingly and significantly before us and tell us: So far, a limited trust and confidence sufficed in the intercourse of human beings that were really all of them afraid of each other in secret. Except, that this fear hid under the cloak of all kinds of other feelings. But now we require a soul-attitude able to encompass a world-culture. We need faith and trust of such a kind, that through them East and West will be balanced. Important points of view open out, which are just those we need. People to-day think that it is only meet and right to deal with economic questions—which position Japan will have in the Pacific Ocean, ways and means of organizing China in order that all the other nations on earth engaged in trade may find an open doorway, etc.

But these questions will not be settled in any world conference until man will have acquired consciousness of the fact that faith from one man to the other is a part and being of economics. This faith and trust will in future be gained only in a spiritual way. The civilisation in the world outside will need a spiritual deepening. To-day I only wished to show you from another side what I have often tried to assert here in this direction.

• 1. The schematic drawing can unfortunately not be reproduced.