The Rudolf Steiner Archive

What I have said during these evenings has been directed to showing, from the most various points of view, that that aspect of events which is generally accepted as the history of mankind is, in many respects, a superficial one. How, for an understanding of the present condition of affairs, it is peculiarly necessary that we should not be led into any illusions as to this superficial way of regarding mankind's historic evolution in these latter days. We must not on any account assume that what holds good, and what I am about to say, of the more or less final phase of the historic evolution covered by the Fifth post-Atlantean age,—that that holds good for the whole course of human history. We must have no such ideas. For this final phase, however, what I am about to say holds good

From the socialist side, it is always being pointed out that the whole course of human history is, in actual reality, to be traced in economic processes alone,—in the processes of industrial life, in the class-warfare that has resulted from the processes of economic life. And on the foundation of this economic matter-of-fact world, as a sort of superstructure upon it, are supposed to have grown up all those developments that we see in the way of Law, Moral Conventions, and especially spiritual life, including, of course, Art, Religion, Science, etc. As applied to the whole course of human history that is, of course, nonsense. One cannot but ask oneself: What has led to this nonsensical idea? V/hat has led to such a nonsensical idea is that, as a matter of fact, and in respect of this particular last phase of human evolution in our own modern times, the thing has a basis of truth in it. Amongst the events which ushered in this modern age we have to note those changes in our earthly evolution that I mentioned yesterday, which were brought about by the discovery of America, by the discovery of the sea-route to the East Indies. But, besides this, the latest phase of mankind's evolution must be marked by us as that of the great spiritual upheaval which was accomplished at the beginning of the modern age, and which we call The Reformation.

The time has come, my dear friends, when this Reformation, too, must be recognised for what it really was. And when one goes further into all that we were leading up to yesterday, and acquires a deeper view of history, not a merely superficial one, then, indeed, one finds that what is in appearance a spiritual transition at the beginning of the modern age—the Reformation—really rests, rests solidly, upon something that Is, after all, at bottom, economic in character. And it is just from a perception of this economic basis lying at the root of the Reformation, and from seeing nothing else, that the socialist view arose, that all historic evolution has been simply the outcome of class-warfare and of economic conditions.

If we examine, not by the light of illusion, but by the light of truth, what took place and the things that underwent a metamorphosis through the Reformation at the beginning of the modern period of historical development, we can but say: A tremendous shifting of status undoubtedly took place with considerable rapidity at this time, when the modern age was beginning. The way in which the shifting of the population took place was this; that the land and soil in Western Europe, particularly, were, before the Reformation set in, possessed by different peoples from those who possessed it afterwards. For those people who before the Reformation were the leaders, and on whom the social structure more or less depended, lost their position through the Reformation. All landed property before the Reformation was, to a much greater extent than is commonly supposed, dependent on the lordship of the priesthood, and in all manner of ways. Before the Reformation, the lordship of the priests was remarkably powerful in determining the character, for instance, of economic conditions. Those who possessed landed estates possessed them to a very large extent as a sort of agents and under an obligation of some sort or another in connection with the offices of the Church.

Now, if one examines the actual course of history from a perhaps not very idealistic but therefore all the more truthful point of view, one finds that, with the Reformation, the old estates of the Church and Spiritual Orders were torn from those who held them, and transferred to the temporal lords. This was very largely the case in England. It was also very largely the case in Germany,—in what later on was Germany. In what later was Germany, many of the territorial Princes went over to the Reformation. But this was not Invariably,—not to put it too aggressively,—this was by no means invariably out of zeal for Luther or the other Reformers; it was a hungering for the estates of the Church, a craving to secularise the estates of the Church. Any number of estates that belonged to the spiritual power in the Middle Ages passed actually over to the temporal, the territorial princes. In England, it happened that a large number of those who had possessed land and holdings were dispossessed, evicted, and they emigrated to America. A large number of the American settlers—the point was alluded to yesterday in a different connection—were the evicted holders of landed property.

Economic conditions, then, played a leading part in the metamorphosis which went on under modern historic evolution, and which is commonly called the Reformation. On the face of it, the thing was like this:—Openly, people say that a new spirit must find Its way into men's hearts, that under the old church administration the temporal and spiritual have become too closely combined, that a more spiritual road to Christ must be sought, etc, etc. Whilst deeper down, less obviously on the surface, a shifting of economic strata is taking place through the transference of estates from spiritual to worldly owners.

Now this is connected with a fact whose roots stretch wide into the history of general evolution; and we can only understand these particular isolated facts of modern history when we glance back over a somewhat wider range of human evolution. We have only to glance back at that phase of human evolution which we term the Egypto-Chaldean age, which, as you know, ended in the middle of the 8th century before Christ, from which point the Graeco-Latin age began, lasting down to about the middle of the 15th century.

If we go back to the ancient Egyptian, the ancient Chaldean civilisation,—well there, we have as ruling powers quite a different type from what became the ruling powers later on. People nowadays take little account of the great upheavals that have come about in the course of historic growth. The powers that were peculiarly the ruling ones in that early age—the age that ended about the middle of the 8th century before Christ—were the sort of people who, in the traditional language of Spiritual Science, one would call “Initiates.” The Egyptian Pharaohs were, down to a certain date, invariably persons who were initiated. They were initiated into the secrets of cosmology, and regarded what they had to do on earth in the light of this cosmology When one says a thing of this sort to the modern man, he finds a certain difficulty in understanding it, for the simple reason that the modern man, from his own special mode of consciousness, thinks to himself: “It is all very well, but, after all, those Pharaohs, and the Chaldean initiates, too,—or so-called initiates—did a great many things that were highly reprehensible.” Well, one might, of course, argue that modern rulers, who are not initiates, also do a great many things that are hardly in accordance with the highest moral standards,—but that, here, would be obviously away from the point. One must, however, point out that in the world that lies beyond the senses the gods are not all good ones, but that there are also gods whose action is in every way contrary to men's interests, as commonly understood. So, one is by no means entitled to believe that anyone who is a real initiate must necessarily act from virtuous motives. And in speaking, as I am doing now, of the Pharaohs as Initiates, all that it must be understood to mean is that they acted on impulses inspired from the spiritual world. That these impulse's might often be very bad ones will be contested by nobody who has become in our sense acquainted with all the many divine, spiritual powers that lie behind the world of sense,—powers of a supersensible nature. But the true initiate,—he who could receive into his will, not merely receive into his consciousness, but into his will, what divine spiritual powers bestowed upon him,—he was in truth the ruler, down to the middle of the 8th century before Christ. Then began the age when, if one actually divests it of all the various illusions that pervade popular history,—when one may say that the real ruler was the Priest. The temporal ruler,—even when he was a Charlemagne—was always more or less dependent on the priesthood. Priest-rule was, to a much greater extent than is commonly supposed, even in the middle-ages of European civilisation, the really determining element. It entered into everything, it made itself felt everywhere, and was for the social structure also the element which, above all others, was the determining one. And the people who possessed land and estates held them to a very large extent of the Priesthood. Such regular soldiers as there were in old days, before the middle of the 8th century B.C., were troops in the service of the Initiates. Such regular soldiers as there were in the 4th post-Atlantean age, in the Graeco-Latin age down to the middle of the 15th century, were, taken as a whole, mercenaries of the priest-lords. And all enterprises, too, such as the Crusades, were, as a whole essentially military expeditions undertaken, if I may so express it, on behalf of the ruling priesthood. In one way and another, everything that was done had some connection with the rule of the priesthood.

We may say, then, that in the Egypto-Chaldean age, the Rulers were of the Initiate type; from the middle of the 8th pre-Christian century down to the middle of the 15th century the rulers were of the Priest type. From this time on, the type that was really the ruling one for actual historic developments was the Economic man. The economic man was the one who ruled. It does not really matter by what name he was called. The farther on one goes in the history of mankind, the less do names matter. The thing that gave a man a sort of basis for domination was that he was in a position to play a part in the world of finance and industry. Just as the essential feature about the Priest and the Initiate of old days was that these respective types of ruler could intervene in economic affairs,—only they did so from higher motives,—so now the man of the economic type of modern times was able to intervene in practically every detail of the social fabric.

Yes, but along with that, there goes something else besides, something that I have already indicated in connection with the Initiate type of ruler. The Initiate type of ruler works through his will, receiving into his will the motive-forces of the higher worlds. With the Priest type, this is no longer the case. It was not, at bottom, the spiritual life that was realised in the priest type, but the intellectual life. And accordingly, in that civilisation where the priest type were markedly predominant, the markedly predominant, the essential element is the intellectual one.

In Asia, in the East, it is not the intellectual which is the essential thing, but the spiritual life. For even what we still have as civilisation there to-day, fallen as it is very greatly into decay, yet it is still the relics of what once was the civilisation of Initiate of what was a spiritual civilisation. When the religious impulse of the East was transplanted to Europe, it became merged in the intellectualist conception of the priesthood. From the initiation into the real facts, into the spiritual world, they produced—Theology, an intellectual extract of the facts of the spiritual world. But this priest type, which intellectually boiled down the facts of the spiritual world and made them known in an intellectual form, so all that the people really got was an intellectualised religious element, they were in their turn again replaced in the strict meaning of that term, at the beginning of the modern age, by the economic type of man. One can show in detail in many cases exactly how this economic type of man came to be top. I shall come to that presently. Now the question naturally arises: How does it come about that the course of historic evolution undergoes such considerable changes? How does it really happen? Well, at the bottom of that, again, there is something which makes it necessary for one not to rest content with a surface view of historic life, but to go deeper down. If one studies history at all,—what passes as history,—one sees at once that the historians are writing on the assumption, as I said before, that the psychic evolution of man has undergone no very great fundamental change whatever in the course of history. In the view of the materialist thinkers, there was once a time when the ape, or a creature like an ape, wandered about the earth; and then, through all sorts of accidents, though of course very slowly,—science relies a great deal on length of time nowadays,—this ape-like creature developed into—Man. But, once there, man has remained practically unaltered, according to them, in all that relates to his state of consciousness, to the condition of his soul. A modern man thinks of the ancient Egyptian as being perhaps rather more of a child, because he was not yet so “clever,” he did not know so much as the man of to-day; but in the general constitution of his soul, the modern man pictures the ancient Egyptian as being pretty much the same as himself. And yet, if we go back to the time before the 8th century B.C., the constitution of man's soul then was quite, quite different from what it was later on, after the middle of the 8th century B.C. If one takes the soul of the man of to-day, in its present conformation, and knows no other, one can really form no picture to oneself of what went on in the soul of the sort of man who lived actually before the 8th century B.C.

The people of that time were of such a kind as still to be in living connection with their previous incarnation. These people were so constituted,—unless, indeed, they belonged to one of the Hebraic tongues, when it was different,—but if they belonged to any of the wide-spread heathen nations, so-called “heathen nations,” then, for them, everything that went on in their souls was the outcome of previous incarnations, of previous lives upon earth. And they were distinctly conscious that what was going on in their souls was the spiritual fruits of the spiritual worlds. For people such as this, no doubt whatever existed that what was the principal part of themselves was not inherited from their father and mother, but had come down out of spiritual worlds and united itself with the part which came to them from their father and mother. The constitution of these peoples souls was one which rested entirely on a spiritual form of civilisation. Hence it was possible for social life, as it existed amongst them, to be guided and directed by their Initiates, by those who were to a certain degree initiated into spiritual things in a real, actual way, not intellectually through their thoughts. In those days, when one talked to anyone and spoke of spiritual facts, one was speaking of things with which he was quite familiar. Everybody, in fact, pictured himself as a centaur. His physical body he looked upon as having undoubtedly come about through transmission in the flesh; but, on top of all that, was what had come down out of the spiritual world. Everybody knew that. Everybody looked on himself as a sort of centaur.

Then came the age that began with the 8th century before Christ,—roughly speaking, with the foundation of Rome. In that age,—it Is a fact that we have already considered from other points of view,—in that age the spiritual contact of the real actual kind was lost. People, however, still retained through their Intelligence a kind of spiritual touch with the world of spirit. Man, indeed, no longer pictured himself actually as a centaur, as though a higher spiritual being came down from above and settled upon something else that was inherited through the blood; still, he was clearly conscious that his intelligence, his world of thought, was not dependent on his blood, not dependent on his physical body, but that it had a spiritual origin.

One cannot, for instance, properly understand that great philosopher, Aristotle, unless one knows that Aristotle, in calling the highest part of the human soul “Diagnosticon,” was clearly conscious that this, the highest part of the human soul, which is an intellectual part, has been rained down from the worlds of soul and spirit. Aristotle knew that quite well; indeed, everybody, even down into the early times of Christianity, knew this quite well. This consciousness, that the human intelligence is of a divine spiritual origin, this consciousness was not lost until the 4th century after Christ. It was in the 4th century after Christ that men first really ceased to believe that the power of thought they bear within them comes from above, and is rained down upon them at their birth out of the worlds of soul and spirit. It was a great change, that, in men's souls. If we look back at the first, second and third Christian centuries, we find the men of that time able to say to themselves: Of course, I was born of father and mother, but I know,—not merely, I have puzzled it out, but I know, just as I know that my eye sees the light, so I know that my intelligence comes from the gods. It was an immediate consciousness that people then possessed, just like the consciousness aroused by a direct perception.

It was only after the fourth century that the feeling entered more and more into men's souls that up here, in this bony empty cavity,—for an empty cavity it is, as I have often had occasion to explain to you,—here, up here are seated the organs of intelligence, and this intelligence Is somehow connected with heredity, with blood-relation- ship. It was only during this period, when the transition was finally effected from a belief in the divine nature of the intelligence to a belief in its transmission along physical paths,—it was only then that what I may call the intellectualising of the religious impulse through the rule of the priesthood could be finally effected. And when the intellectualising process was very far advanced, and people had come to regard the intelligence as bound up solely with a man's bodily constitution, then it was all up with the rule of the priest, too. Priest-rule could only hold its ground so long as people could be made to understand the old traditions of the divinity of the intelligence. The economic type of man emerged at the moment, the epoch-making moment, when the belief in the divinity of the intelligence had vanished, and when man's feelings were leading him ever more and more to the belief that it was the physical man which is the actual vehicle, the organ for the evolution of thought. You should only know what a fight, priest-rule fought, and how it is still fighting even to-day. Anyone, for instance, who is acquainted with catholic theological literature, knows how priest- rule is still fighting—fighting with every conceivable philosophic argument—to maintain that the intelligence which has its seat in man is something additional that comes to him from without. Read any sort of catholic theological literature that you happen to come across, and you will find them no longer denying what, indeed, for the present- day man no longer admits of denial, that all the rest of his attributes are bound up with his bodily frame, but they cling fast to the intelligence as an exception, as something that is of a divine spiritual nature and has nothing to do with man's bodily frame. And yet, in the general consciousness of mankind it is not so. In respect of the general consciousness of mankind, a feeling has grown up ever more and more among men, a sense that it is our body, too, which enables us to think, which Is the basis of the intelligence as of other things. And so ever more and more man has arrived at a consciousness that he is really only a physical being. And it was only under the sort of spirituality which proceeds from regarding oneself as a merely physical being that it was possible for the economic type of man to make his way to the top.

And so there exist, you see, spiritual reasons deeper down for the economic type of man having come to the top. He has, however, come to the top, and in socialistic theories this fact has been handled and exploited to the disregard of all others. The business-man has been the ruling type ever since the Reformation; and from this you can see, too, what kind of spirit really is the ruling one in the various religious denominations that have come up since the Reformation Recognise quite clearly, without any illusions, what that spirit is, my dear friends: Temporal science is to permeate with its technique the whole of our external everyday life, and we do not mean to have the complete chain of this external science interrupted by all sorts of religious matter. Faith is to be kept very nicely in a special little box all to itself, and as far away from the external affairs of life as possible. Science, one thing,—a separate banking- account; Faith, another thing,—a separate banking-account, and they must never on any account be amalgamated. We want our faith; indeed, we want to be religious people, says the business type of man,—the more religious, the better, according to many of them; and one sees them going off very ostentatiously to church with their prayer-book under their arm. Oh, certainly! But then, that banking book,—religion must not intrude there, with that religion has nothing to do, except, perhaps, on the first page, where one always sees written in banking-books, “By the Grace of God,” but then that is only a little bit of blasphemy, of course. The complete chain must not be broken. Otherside [Otherwise?] people might perhaps find out that the Reformation was, in many respects, only a roundabout way of arriving at the secularisation and confiscation of Church estates and of claiming them for the temporal lord. Of course, if one were a German princeling, for instance, or an English lord, one could very well say: We are going to create a new historic epoch by taking away the land and estates from those who have hitherto held them. That is what the modern socialist says: We are going to expropriate the owners of landed property. But naturally people did not say that at the beginning of the new modern age; they did it, and threw a haze over it all with: We are founding a new religious faith. So people do not know their real reason for being religious; but it makes them feel comfortable to spread this illusion over the real grounds for their being so religious. That is how the economic type of man came up.

The consciousness that one is living out a spiritual life within one has gradually disappeared. That is the deeper-seated, spiritual root of the matter. If we go further hack still, before the third post-Atlantean age, which ended about the middle of the 8th pre-Christian century,—beginning in the 3rd to the 4th millennium B.C., we come again to a quite different conformation. Paradoxical as it may seem to the men of to-day, in the 4th or, 5th millennium B.C. there was not a man on earth who believed that what was transmitted from his father and mother was the essential part of him. At that time men were absolutely convinced that they were wholly, in respect of all essentials, descended from heaven, If I may so express it. That was men's rooted belief. They did not look on themselves as being of earthly origin; they looked on themselves as spiritual beings, sprung from a spiritual origin. And the period when men first began to feel themselves to be physical human beings in the body was designated by the Jews, “The Fall,” at the beginning of things, when Original Sin first overtook man. As a matter of fact, however, Original Sin has overtaken man more than once. It overtook him first at the beginning of the 3rd post-Atlantean age, when he ascribed one part of himself to his father and mother, to his blood, and merely believed that a spiritual something had come down on top of that. It overtook him for the second time when he began to regard his Intellectual part as more or less hereditary. That second “Fall” came about in the 4th century after Christ; for from that time on, intellectual capacity was regarded as something hereditary, as something bound up with the bodily nature. And there will be other “Falls” in the time to come.

Our task to-day is to return to spirituality by a different route. And, to do this, we must have the possibility, before anything else, of getting back to a spiritual form of intellectual life. We must have the possibility of attaching a sense to this existence on earth such that this sense itself is once more the revelation of a spiritual reality. Take, for instance, the things in my “Occult Science.” It cannot be said that the kind of intellectuality with which these are apprehended has a bodily origin; for it is not with the physical understanding that one arrives at what is there said about the universe and about man. It is a re-education of man back to that conception of his intellectual nature which is a spiritual one. And for this, modern mankind must first of all be willing to regain the faculty of looking on their Intellectual nature as something divinely spiritual. Then, Indeed, will it be possible to start on the road back to spiritualisation. It is a task upon which mankind must enter with full consciousness,—to return again to spiritualisation, and, first of all, to a thorough spiritualising of the intelligence. People must learn once more to think in such a way that their thought is permeated with spirituality. The best way to begin is by considering ethical concepts, and bringing them back to the moral imagination, to the moral intuitions, as I did in my “Philosophy of Freedom.” If in the moral sense one sees something which, as I expressed it in the “Philosophy of Freedom,” derives its impulses directly from the spiritual world, then that is a first beginning towards the spiritualisation of the intellect. I did this in my “Philosophy of Freedom” very cautiously and gently, for in the 19th century there was truly not much to be looked for as regards the spiritualising of anything. But this Is the road that will have to be taken.

The Economic type of man, who came up at the Reformation, regarded it as his special mission to make all intellectuality a matter merely of the body. What this business type of man really did during the Reformation period was to tear himself violently loose from the spiritual foundation of man's life on earth. One can see it illustrated in individual cases. At the beginning and during the first half of the 15th century, there was a man in England, Thomas Cromwell,—not Oliver Cromwell, but Thomas Cromwell, quite a different person,—who played a very important part in introducing the principles of the Reformation into England. There was one person, James I, who still made an effort to save the old dominion of the priesthood; and one best understands James I if one looks on him as a Conservator,—a man who was trying to conserve the rule of the priesthood. Only, his plans were thwarted by others. And amongst the people who came to the top at that time, and who were, so to speak, the earliest type of economic man, was Thomas Cromwell. It is impossible to understand Thomas Cromwell unless one recognises that he was one of those people who have a very short life between death and rebirth, before taking on a body here on earth again. And it is just those people who are unusually numerous among the ruling types coming to the top in modern times, who have had but a short life in the spiritual world before their present life here on earth.

As you know, I have often said here that one of the most significant phenomena in latter-day history is that for the ruling types it is the selection of the worst that takes place. You know that for years past I have taken occasion to tell you so repeatedly. Those who are, in reality, the rulers, the governors, are a selection of not the best. It has come about with the times that those who are really the best in this modern age have remained below, and those who have been selected for the top, for the leading positions, that is, are not infrequently anything but the best. Very often it has been a selection of the least fitted. And this selection of the least fitted has been founded, in so far as relates to their human nature, in the fact that they were fulfilling an earth-life which had only a very short space of time between the last life on earth and this one. It is a fact which one finds stamped upon many of the leading personages of modern times, that they have had a quick return to earth after a brief life in the spirit. In their preceding life between death and new birth they have received into them but little of spiritual impulse; but they are all the more impregnated with that which this earth alone can give. The Economic type, especially, have been men whose preceding spiritual life was a short one, who were permeated through and through with what the earth, as such, alone can give. I do not mean to say that there have not also In modern times been people who have passed a fairly long stage of time between death and birth and who are notable in modern times; but they have been thrust into the background. So the course of man's historic evolution fated it to be; such was the common karma of mankind.

And man's modern life was played out under these conditions. It is really pitiful, how frequently a phenomenon it is in modern times to see men who in their inward natures are far superior, looking up to men who are far, far worse than themselves, as special authorities. It is a common phenomenon. And these revered authorities are truly not people who in any way represent picked men of the best type. The time has indeed come when people must stop so naively chanting the praises of modern civilisation, and examine the plain, unadorned facts. Men must acquire the habit of considering life not in its more superficial aspect, but of considering it according to the inner configuration of men's souls. And this is just one of the facts that has to be considered, that one has to distinguish between the kind of men whose life in the spirit, between birth and deaths is a comparatively long one, and those whose life in the spirit has been comparatively short. One must consider people from their spiritual aspect. It is only by thus considering people from their spiritual aspect, that it becomes possible with clear consciousness to bring order into the social structure. Any really deep understanding of what is socially requisite to-day will only be acquired when such an understanding is sought for in a groundwork of spiritual knowledge.

In the last three days, I have made it my task to show you in what way the civilisation of our times must be regarded in respect of the possibility for mankind's further evolution. Our earth, as an earth with all that is upon It, has already entered on its downward stage, on the stage of its decline. I have often told you that keen-sighted geologists themselves have already noted this fact. It is even now possible to demonstrate by purely external physical science, and according to the most exact geology, that the earth has already begun to crumble away, that the ascending phase of its evolution is at an end, and that the solid ground we tread on is actually breaking up beneath us. But it is not only the mineral kingdom of the earth that Is breaking up; all organic life that moves upon the earth is more or less in a state of decomposition, of falling away. The bodies of plants, of animals, of men, these, too, are no longer in their ascending stage of evolution, but are going downhill. Our physical organisation is not now what it was, for instance, before the fourth century after Christ, or what it was in the times of ancient Greece. Our organisation is a perishable one, and along with us the earth is in its decadence. V/hat Is physical about the earth is in its decadence. I called attention to this phenomenon for the first time some years ago in a lecture at Bonn; but as a rule, not sufficient importance is attached to these things. The bodies we live in are crumbling away. But, as a set-off against this, we must reflect:

Our bodies are crumbling away; but it is just out of these crumbling bodies of ours that what is spiritual can best develop, if only we give ourselves up to it. In the old bodies, you see, it was like this, supposing I make a diagram: Here is the body (Diagram I black) and, all through, the body is permeated with its spiritual element; here is the spiritual element, all over It like this (red).

Now to-day it is like this (diagram II): our body, if we draw it diagrammatically, Is crumbling away in many places. It is crumbling, it is falling away; and everywhere the spiritual element is spurting out of it, escaping from the body. If we only set ourselves to do so, we can inwardly within our souls lay hold everywhere of the spiritual element, because of this crumbling away of our bodies. But it is absolutely necessary that we should not rely upon the physical. It is, on the contrary, absolutely necessary for us, because of this, our crumbling condition, to turn to the spiritual. Everything physical is breaking up; everything physical on earth has begun to go to ruin, and one dare not rely any longer on the physical nature. The only thing we have to look to Is just what, to use a homely phrase, is spurting out from the spiritual soul-element,—spurting out because the physical element is in ruin.

There is one thing to be learnt from this, my dear friends. We are connected through our bodies with the physical conditions of the earth; and the earth's conditions express themselves socially in economic conditions. Now, as everything is crumbling away, as everything is in decadence, so also, in a certain respect, economic conditions are in a state of decadence; and only a fool could believe that It Is possible to-day to regenerate economic conditions simply by means o economic conditions alone. Anyone to-day who dreams of bringing about an economic paradise on earth by purely economic measures, is much the same as someone who has a corpse in front of him and believes that he can galvanise it back into life, wake it up again. So you can take all the theories that are based on pure economics to-day, listen to people telling you how the economic life can be adjusted so as to work by itself according to its own laws, listen to them telling you about the conditions under which production Is to be carried on, how the transition is to be effected from private ownership to communal ownership, etc.,—it is all founded on the false belief that one can, regenerate the economic life out of the resources of the economic life itself. Whereas the truth is that in the economic life, as elsewhere, everything physical is of itself going to ruin.

When anything is going to ruin of itself, then all one can do is to keep putting it right from time to time. That means that we want a remedy from this economic life, which of Itself is in a constant state of break-down, if the economic life were left to itself; if one did what Lenin and Trotsky want to do with it, it would be continually breaking down, continually falling sick. And therefore, one must have the remedy constantly at hand, too, as a counteractant to the economic life. That is, one must have, beside it, the independent spiritual life. If you have a sick man, or someone who is continually liable to fall sick, then, alongside, you must continually have the doctor. If you have an economic life which, owing to the earth's evolution, is constantly ripe for its fall, when left to itself, then you need to counteract it with the continually healing power of the spiritual life. That is the inward connection. It is part of a sound cosmogony that we should acquire an independent spiritual life. Without this independent spiritual life, to act as a perpetual source of healing wisdom, alongside an economic life that is constantly liable to break down,—without this, mankind will never get further. To attempt to regenerate the economic life out of its own resources is sheer folly. We must establish a healing source in the form of an independent spiritual life beside this economic life, and bridge them both over with the neutral Life of Rights. We shall never arrive at any adequate understanding of what is necessary in the present day, unless we have learnt to perceive that the earth's physical life is already sinking to ruin. It is because this is not perceived that there are so many people to-day who believe that the economic life can be regenerated by all sorts of remedies conjured up out of the life of economics itself. They do not exist. The only possibility that does exist is continuously and unceasingly to keep the economic life going by means of the independent spiritual life established alongside it. And only those can trace all the mysterious interweaving of these threads in our life who have learnt to read it by the light of a really modern cosmogony.

Just reflect how serious the whole situation is, how one must look on and see men rushing to destruction, if they still persist in believing that the economic life can be regenerated out of itself,—if they will not acknowledge and turn to that which is spurting forth from the crumbling physical world, which is able to stand alone and to be a continual source of healing. People ask: What is the remedy for revolutions? Well, when the downward forces have accumulated in cries in quantity sufficient to make a revolution, then the revolution comes. The only way to counteract revolution is continuously and unceasingly to apply the counteracting force. And unless a spiritual life is established as a continual healing force to withstand the economic life, then the economic life comes to a head and breaks out in revolutions.

It is high time, indeed, my dear friends, that the things we are here dealing with should be taken In all their gravity, in their full weight, and that people should not have the idea that Spiritual Science is a thing to play with. It will not be played with. You cannot dish up real Spiritual Science as a Sunday afternoon sermon. What people are used to making out of the old religious creeds,—taking all sorts of teachings about reincarnation and karma to regale themselves with in the privacy of their own souls,—that cannot be got out of this teaching, not if it is taken seriously. This teaching means to lay hold upon actual life. This teaching is bent upon becoming deeds, by the very force of what it is. And so it is not in accordance with some private personal whim that what is living within our Spiritual Science must now find expression in all manner of social ideas as well. It is really a matter of course. It is all part of the same thing. Naturally, anyone who talks of development and evolution in the modern natural-science sense, and has not a glimmering notion that Evolution is first an ascent and then a descent, will not be ready either to understand that we are living in a downward stage with respect to the earth's evolution; and such a person will take what is on its downward path, and try to wring from it forces for a regeneration,—That is no longer possible.

What I have, above all, had at heart in the course of these three lectures, my dear friends, is that you might see in all its extent and reality the deep seriousness of Spiritual Science and all that is connected with it. With the things of Spiritual Science there can be no playing. it can only be played with when it is watered down to all sorts of mystical, eclectic stuff,—then you can play with the things of Spiritual Science. Those people do very wrong who go and think that they can play with it, for all that. The things of Spiritual Science cannot be played with,

There is a great deal of opposition from various quarters to whit this Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy stands for. it will meet with opposition from almost all those people who want to play, to “mysticise,” I should like to call it,—who want to mysticise with the life of Spiritual Science,—“mysticism,” “mysticise”. Those people who want to mysticise will not, in the long run, get on very well with Spiritual Science, because they do not like to be reminded of the seriousness of life. That is why Spiritual Science has so many opponents. To-day, especially, there are numbers of opponents; and to-day, especially, there are numbers of opponents, turning out to oppose it from every sort of mysticising hole and corner. There is now to be a renewed attack made on this Spiritual Science on the ground that it is scientific in character, and that all genuine experiences of the spirit-worlds must come through direct spiritual communication,—that nothing of a scientific nature, no sort of scientific concept, must enter into it, and so forth; there is a fresh attack on foot from the corner where we have done a good bit of work, but which still keeps on pouring out a succession of slimy stuff,—mysticising stuff, in this very direction. Another book has appeared from the Munich quarter,—though possibly from different publishers,—which is at bottom intended as an attack of this sort,—mystical book, called “The Living God.”

When one sees these things in the present day, in an age when the social situation is so critical, it shows how spiritual frivolity and cynicism of a spiritual kind have taken possession of men's lives. All that must be got rid of.

This is, indeed, the time when we must set ourselves in all seriousness to examine the most important question in life, and ask ourselves: What can we do, what can we do with all our might and main, to lay hold of those forces which are actually in accordance with the age?

My dear friends, here stands this Building of ours, here it stands, waiting for the world to take it seriously, with such seriousness as really to perceive that it has been built in the consciousness of a perishing age, and in order to receive and take up the spiritual essence out of this age as it falls. Here we must be swayed by no belief that it is possible to preserve what is old what is ripe to perish and fall away. The faith that must inspire us here is that out of the on-rushing ruin it is possible to save and bring forth the spiritual essence,—one which must be quite unlike the old. A little transformation of our civilisation cannot do it. We have to recognise, and boldly face the recognition, that it is only with the great impulses of civilisation that we can accomplish what will take mankind the necessary step forward towards the future. And we must take counsel with our own selves, how to find strength really to take up these new impulses. We must have courage to make plain to people, as well as we can, what is meant by the earth being in decadence, and that what has lasted on down into our days as civilisation, and which we have grown up with and become used to,—that this, too, is passing away in the ruin; but that out of this ruin we must rescue and bring forth a new spirituality, a spirituality that can be carried on with us into other worlds, when this earth has finally sunk and passed away.

To work with clear consciousness towards a regeneration of Art, of Science, of Freedom, that is a work that should centre round this Building. In erecting this Building an attempt has been made to bid in a sort of way, defiance to the Past, in the shapes and lines of it, and so forth. And in the same way, practically, we must have the courage to grasp all that can be got from the fact that the Building actually stands here. We shall never get right, my dear friends, if we go on clinging to little remedies. We shall only get right by resolutely and consciously keeping before men's eyes the necessity for a new form of spiritual civilisation, for that alone can be the true starting-point for a new form of social civilisation. For the social order cannot any longer be evolved out of the economic order, but only out of a spiritual element that shall have sunk into the economic one. And we must clearly realise that the Economic type of man is played out, and that another type must come to the top,—the type of man who is a World-man, one who is conscious that there lives within him not only what he has inherited through earthly descent, but who is conscious that there live within him, also, forces of the sun and the heaven of stars, forces of the world above the senses. In such forms as people can understand, we must bring this to their consciousness; and then alone shall we be doing something towards the real progress of mankind. By merely transmitting all sorts of mystical teachings we can do no good whatever. Our mysticism must be actual spiritual life—active spiritual life.

That is what I wanted to make you realise to-day. This Building at Dornach ought to be regarded as being, without undue pretensions, the actual starting-point for a great world—movement, a world-movement which Is altogether international, a world-movement which embraces every kind of branch of spiritual life. This Building at Dornach should be the starting-point from which -to cast off all fondness for what is perishing and to receive the impulse of that force which is making for an actual renewal of man's consciousness. If we could establish something of this sort in the world, which should form a starting-point from whence to take up the spiritual essence out of the ruin of the physical earth,—if we could say: We put up the Building at Dornach to be the monument of this starting-point, to attract people's eyes to our purpose there,—if only we could create something of this kind, then we should be fulfilling what lies in the very impulse of the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy. But we need to summon up our energies and create what shall speak to mankind in actual facts,—speak by facts in such a way as to make them see: “Look! We are aiming here at something that lies in the direction of actual progressive evolution in human consciousness, in science and art as well as in religion.” If we are in a position to speak from positive facts in this way, then we shall accomplish far more than by trying to throw ourselves into all sorts of things at which other people are aiming. We should realise that what we have to aim at is a new thing. If we are able to do this, then we shall be accomplishing a worthy task. But there we must commune with our souls, my dear friends, and try to set our hands in this way to the task of Anthroposophy.

More on this subject, then, next Friday at 7 o'clock.

[ 1 ] “The bud vanishes in the breaking of the blossom, and one could say that the former is contradicted by the latter. In the same way, the fruit declares the blossom to be a false existence and replaces it as its truth. These forms are not merely different from one another but they crowd each other out as they are incompatible. Their Quid nature makes them at once into moments of the organic whole in which they not only do not contradict each other, but in which the one is as necessary as the other, and it is only this equal necessity that constitutes the life of the whole.”

In these words of Hegel, the most significant traits of his mode of conception are expressed. He believes that the things of reality carry within themselves their own contradiction and that the incentive for their growth, for the living process of their development, is given by the fact that they continually attempt to overcome this contradiction. The blossom would never become fruit if it were without contradiction. It would have no reason to go beyond its unquestioned existence.

An exactly opposite intellectual conviction forms the point of departure of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841). Hegel is a sharp thinker, but at the same time a spirit with a great thirst for reality. He would like to have only things that have absorbed the rich, saturated content of the world into themselves. For this reason, Hegel's thoughts must also be in an eternal flux, in a continuous state of becoming, in a forward motion as full of contradictions as reality itself. Herbart is a completely abstract thinker. He does not attempt to penetrate into things but looks at them from the corner into which he has withdrawn as an isolated thinker. The purely logical thinker is disturbed by a contradiction. He demands clear concepts that can exist side by side. One concept must not interfere with another. The thinker sees himself in a strange situation because he is confronted with reality that is full of contradictions, no matter what he may undertake. The concepts that he can derive from this reality are unsatisfactory to him. They offend his logical sense. This feeling of dissatisfaction becomes the point of departure. Herbart feels that if the reality that is spread out before his senses and before his mind supplies him with contradictory concepts, then it cannot be the true reality for which his thinking is striving. He derives his task from this situation. The contradictory reality is not real being but only appearance. In this view he follows Kant to a certain degree, but while Kant declares true being unattainable to thinking cognition, Herbart believes one penetrates from appearance to being by transforming the contradictory concepts of appearance and changing them into concepts that are free from contradictions. As smoke indicates fire, so appearance points at a form of being as its ground. If, through our logical thinking, we elaborate out of a contradictory world picture given to us by our senses and our mind, one that is not contradictory, then we gain from this uncontradictory world picture what we are looking for. This world picture, to be sure, does not appear in this form that is free from contradictions, but it lies behind the apparent one as true reality. Herbart does not set out to comprehend the directly given reality, but creates another reality through which the former is to become explainable. He arrives in this fashion at an abstract thought system that looks rather meager as compared to the rich, full reality. The true reality cannot be a unity, for a unity would have to contain within itself the infinite variety of the real things and events. It must be a plurality of simple entities, eternally equal to themselves, incapable of change and development. Only a simple entity that unchangeably preserves its qualities is free from contradictions. An entity in development is something different in one moment from what it is in another, that is, its qualities are contradictory at various times. The true world is, therefore, a plurality of simple, never-changing entities, and what we perceive are not these simple entities but their relations to one another. These relations have nothing to do with the real being. If one simple entity enters into a relationship with another, the two entities are not changed thereby, but I do perceive the result of their relationship. The reality we perceive directly is a sum of relations between real entities. When one entity abandons its relation to another and replaces it by a relationship with a third entity, something happens without touching the being of the entities themselves. It is this event that we perceive, namely, our apparent contradictory reality. It is interesting to note how Herbart, on the basis of this conception, forms his thoughts concerning the life of the soul. The soul is, as are all other real entities, simple and unchangeable in itself. This entity is now engaged in relations with other beings. The expression of these relations is life in thought-pictures. Everything that happens within us—imagination, feeling, will—is an interplay between the soul and the rest of the world of real entities. Thus, for Herbart, the soul life becomes the appearance of relations into which the simple soul-entity enters with the world. Herbart has a mathematical mind, and his whole world conception is derived fundamentally from mathematical conceptions. A number does not change when it becomes the link of an arithmetical operation. Three remains three, whether it is added to four or subtracted from seven. As the numbers have their place within the mathematical operations, so do the individual entities within the relationships that develop between them. For this reason, psychology becomes an arithmetical operation for Herbart. He attempts to apply mathematics to psychology. How the thought-images condition each other, how they effect one another, what results they produce through their coexistence are things calculated by Herbart. The “ego” is not the spiritual entity that we lay hold of in our self-consciousness, but it is the result of the cooperation of all thought-pictures and thereby also nothing more than a sum, a last expression of relationships. Of the simple entity, which is the basis of our soul life, we know nothing, but its continual relation to other entities is apparent to us. In this play of relations one entity is entangled. This condition is expressed by the fact that all these relationships are tending toward a center, and this tendency expresses itself in the thought of the ego.

[ 2 ] Herbart is, in another sense than Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel, a representative of the development of modern world conception. Those thinkers attempt a representation of the self-conscious soul in a world picture capable of containing this self-conscious soul as an element. In so doing they become the spokesmen for the spiritual impulse of their age. Herbart is confronted with this impulse and he must admit the feeling that this impulse is there. He attempts to understand it, but in the form of thinking that he imagines to be the correct one, he finds no possibility of penetrating into the life of the self-conscious being of the soul. He remains outside of it. One can see in Herbart's world conception what difficulties man's thinking encounters when it tries to comprehend what it has essentially become in the course of mankind's evolution. Compared to Hegel, Herbart appears like a thinker who strives in vain for an aim at which Hegel believes actually to have arrived. Herbart's thought constructions are an attempt to outline as an external spectator what Hegel means to present through the inner participation of thought. Thinkers like Herbart are also significant for the characterization of the modern form of world conception. They indicate the aim that is to be reached by the very display of their insufficient means for the attainment of this aim. The spiritual aim of the age motivates Herbart's struggle; his intellectual energy is inadequate to understand and to express this struggle sufficiently. The course of the philosophical evolution shows that, besides the thinkers who move on the crest of the time-impulses, there are also always some active ones who form world conceptions through their failure to understand these impulses. Such world conceptions may well be called reactionary.

[ 3 ] Herbart reverts to the view of Leibniz. His simple soul entity is unchangeable; it neither grows nor decays. It existed when this apparent life contained within man's ego began, and will again withdraw from these relations when this life ceases to continue independently. Herbart arrives at his conception of God through his world picture, which contains many simple entities that produce the events through their relations. Within these processes we observe purpose-directed order. But the relations could only be accidental and chaotic if the entities, which, according to their own nature, would have nothing in common, were left entirely to themselves. The fact that they are teleologically ordered, therefore, points toward a wise world ruler who directs their relations. “No one is capable of giving a close definition of deity,” says Herbart. He condemns “the pretensions of the systems that speak of God as of an object to be comprehended in sharply drawn contours by means of which we would rise to a knowledge for which we are simply denied the data.”

[ 4 ] Man's actions and artistic creations are completely without foundation in this world picture. All possibility to fit them into this system is lacking. For what could a relationship of simple entities that are completely indifferent to all processes mean to the actions of man? So Herbart is forced to look for independent tools both for ethics and for esthetics. He believes he finds them in human feeling. When man perceives things or events, he can associate the feeling of pleasure or displeasure with them. We are pleased when we see man's will going in a direction that is in agreement with his convictions. When we make the opposite observation, the feeling of displeasure overcomes us. Because of this feeling we call the agreement of conviction and will good; the discord, we call morally reprehensible. A feeling of this kind can be attached only to a relationship between moral elements. The will as such is morally indifferent, as is also the conviction. Only when the two meet does ethical pleasure or displeasure emerge. Herbart calls a relation of moral elements a practical idea. He enumerates five such practical-ethical ideas: The idea of moral freedom, consisting of the agreement of will and moral conviction; the idea of perfection that has its basis in the fact that the strong pleases rather than the weak; the idea of right, which springs from displeasure with antagonism; the idea of benevolence, which expresses the pleasure that one feels as one furthers the will of another person; the idea of retribution, which demands that all good and evil that has originated in a person is to be compensated again in the same person.

Herbart bases his ethics on a human feeling, on moral sentiment. He separates it from the world conception that has to do with what is, and transforms it into a number of postulates of what should be. He combines it with esthetics and, indeed, makes it a part of them. For the science of esthetics also contains postulates concerning what is to be. It, too, deals with relations that are associated with feelings. The individual color leaves us esthetically indifferent. When one color is joined to another, this combination can be either satisfactory or displeasing to us. What pleases in a combination is beautiful; what displeases, is ugly. Robert Zimmermann (1824 – 1898) has ingeniously constructed a science of art on these principles. Only a part of it, the part that considers those relations of beauty that are concerned with the realm of action, is to be the ethics or the science of the good. The significant writings of Robert Zimmermann in the field of esthetics (science of art) show that even attempts at philosophical formulations that do not reach the summit of cultural impulses of a time can produce important stimulation's for the development of the spirit.

[ 5 ] Because of his mathematically inclined mind, Herbart successfully investigated those processes of human soul life that really do go on with a certain regularity in the same way with all human beings. These processes will, of course, not prove to be the more intimate and individually characteristic ones. What is original and characteristic in each personality will be overlooked by such a mathematical intellect, but a person of such a mentality will obtain a certain insight into the average processes of the mind and, at the same time, through his sure skill in handling the arithmetical calculations, will control the measurement of the mental development. As the laws of mechanics enable us to develop technical skills, so the laws of the psychological processes make it possible for us to devise a technique in education for the development of mental abilities. For this reason, Herbart's work has become fruitful in the field of pedagogy. He has found many followers among pedagogues, but not among them alone. This seems at first sight hard to understand with regard to a world conception offering a picture of meager, colorless generalities, but it can be explained from the fact that it is just the people who feel a certain need for a world conception who are easily attracted by such general concepts that are rigidly linked together like terms of an arithmetical operation. It is something fascinating to experience how one thought is linked to the next as if it were through a self-operative mechanical process, because this process awakens in the observer a feeling of security. The mathematical sciences are so highly appreciated because of this assurance. They unfold their structure, so to speak, through their own force. They only have to be supplied with the thought material and everything else can be left to their logical necessity, which works automatically. In the progress of Hegel's thinking, which is saturated with reality, the thinker continually has to take the initiative. There is more warmth, more direct life in this mode of thinking, but it also requires the constant support of the soul forces. This is because it is reality in this case that the thinker catches in his thoughts, an ever-flowing reality that at every point shows its individual character and fights against every logical rigidity. Hegel also had a great number of pupils and followers, but they were much less faithful than those of Herbart. As long as Hegel's powerful personality enlivened his thoughts, they exerted their charm, and as long as his words were heard under its spell, they carried great conviction. After Hegel's death many of his pupils went their own paths. This is only natural, for whoever is self-dependent will also shape his own attitude toward reality in his own fashion. We observe a different process with Herbart's pupils. They elaborate the master's doctrine, but they continue the fundamental stock of his thoughts without change. A thinker who finds his way into Hegel's mode of thinking penetrates into the course of the world's development that is manifested in innumerable evolutionary phases. The individual thinker, of course, can be stimulated to follow this course of evolution, but he is free to shape the various stages according to his own individual mode of conception. In Herbart's case, however, we deal with a firmly constructed thought system that commands confidence through the solidity of its structure. One may reject it, but if one accepts it, one will have to accept it in its original form. For the individual personal element, which challenges and forces us to face the self of another thinker with our own self, is lacking here.

[ 6 ] “Life is a miserable affair; I have decided to spend mine by thinking about it.” Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1861) spoke these words in a conversation with Wieland at the beginning of his university years, and his world conception sprang from this mood. Schopenhauer had experienced personal hardship and had observed the sad lives of others when he decided upon concentrating on philosophical thought as a new aim of life. The sudden death of his father, caused by a fall from a storehouse, his bad experiences in his career as a merchant, the sight of scenes of human miseries that he witnessed as a' young man while traveling, and many other things of similar kind had produced in him the wish, not so much to know the world, but rather to procure for himself a means to endure it through contemplation. He needed a world conception in order to calm his gloomy disposition. When he began his university studies, the thoughts that Kant, Fichte and Schelling introduced to the German philosophical life were in full swing. Hegel's star was just then rising. In 1806 he had published his first larger work, The Phenomenology of the Spirit. In Goettingen, Schopenhauer heard the teachings of Gottlob Ernst Schulze, the author of the book, Aenesidemus, who was, to be sure, in a certain respect an opponent of Kant, but who nevertheless drew the student's attention to Kant and Plato as the two great spirits toward whom he would have to look. With fiery enthusiasm Schopenhauer plunged into Kant's mode of conception. He called the revolution that his study caused in his head a spiritual rebirth. He found it even more satisfactory because he considered it to be in agreement with the views of Plato, the other philosopher Schulze had pointed out to him.

Plato had said, “As long as we approach the things and events merely through sensual perceptions, we are like men who are chained in a dark cave in such a way that they cannot turn their heads; therefore, they can only see, by means of the light of a fire burning behind them, the shadows upon the opposite wall, the shadows of real things that are carried between the fire and their backs, the shadows of each other and of themselves. These shadows are to the real things what the things of sensual perception are to the ideas, which are the true reality. The things of the sensually perceptible world come into existence and pass again, the ideas are eternal.”

Did not Kant teach this, too? Is not the perceptible world only a world of appearances for him also? To be sure, the sage from Koenigsberg did not attribute this eternal reality to the ideas, but with respect to the perception of the reality spread out in space and time, Schopenhauer thought Plato and Kant to be in complete agreement. Soon he also accepted this view as an irrevocable truth. He argued, “I have a knowledge of the things insofar as I see, hear, feel them, etc., that is to say, insofar as I have them as a thought picture in my mind's eye. An object then can be there for me only by being represented to my mind as a thought image. Heaven, earth, etc., are therefore my mind's imaginations, for the “thing in itself' that corresponds to them has become my mind's object only by taking on the character of a thought representation.”

[ 7 ] Although Schopenhauer found everything that Kant stated concerning the subjective character of the world of perception absolutely correct, he was not at all satisfied with regard to Kant's remarks concerning the thing in itself. Schulze had also been an opponent of Kant's view in this respect. How can we know anything at all of a “thing in itself"? How can we even express a word about it if our knowledge is completely limited to thought pictures of our mind, if the “thing in itself” lies completely outside their realm? Schopenhauer had to search for another path in order to come to the “thing in itself.” In his search he was influenced by the contemporary world conceptions more than he ever admitted. The element that Schopenhauer added to the conviction that he had from Kant and Plato as the “thing in itself,” we find also in Fichte, whose lectures he had heard in 1811 in Berlin. We also find this element in Schelling. Schopenhauer could hear the most mature form of Fichte's views in Berlin. This last form is preserved in Fichte's posthumous works. Fichte declared with great emphasis, while Schopenhauer, according to his own admission, “listened attentively,” that all being has its last roots in a universal will. As soon as man discovers will in himself, he gains the conviction that there is a world independent of himself as an individual. Will is not a knowledge of the individual but a form of real being. Fichte could also have called his world conception, The World as Knowledge and Will. In Schelling's book, Concerning the Nature of Human Freedom and Matters Connected with This Problem, we actually find the sentences, “In the last and deepest analysis there is no other being than will. Will is fundamental being and will alone can claim all its predicates: To be without cause, eternal, independent of time, self-assertive. All philosophy is striving for just this aim, to find this highest expression.”

That will is fundamental being becomes Schopenhauer's view also. When knowledge is extinguished, will remains, for will also precedes knowledge. “Knowledge has its origin in my brain,” says Schopenhauer, “but my brain must have been produced through an active, creative force. Man is aware of such a creative energy in his own will.” Schopenhauer now attempts to prove that what is active in all other things is also will. The will, therefore, is, as the “thing in itself,” at the root of all reality that is merely represented in the thought pictures of our mental life, and we can have a knowledge of this “thing in itself.” It is not, as Kant's “thing in itself,” beyond our perceptive imagination but we experience its actuality within our own organism.

[ 8 ] The development of modern world conception is progressive in Schopenhauer insofar as he is the first thinker to make the attempt to elevate one of the fundamental forces of the self-consciousness to the general principle of the world. The active self-consciousness contains the riddle of the age. Schopenhauer is incapable of finding a world picture that contains the roots of self-consciousness. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had attempted to do that. Schopenhauer takes one force of the self-consciousness, will, and claims that this element is not merely in the human soul but in the whole world. Thus, for him, man is not rooted with his full self-consciousness in the world's foundation, but at least with a part of it, with his will. Schopenhauer thus shows himself to be one of those representatives of the evolution of modern world conception who can only partially encompass the fundamental riddle of the time within their consciousness.

[ 9 ] Goethe also had a profound influence on Schopenhauer. From the autumn of 1813 until the following spring, the young Schopenhauer enjoyed the company of the poet. Goethe introduced him personally to his doctrine of colors. Goethe's mode of conception agreed completely with the view that Schopenhauer had developed concerning the behavior of our sense organs and our mind in the process of perception of things and events. Goethe had undertaken careful and intensive investigations concerning the perceptions of the eye and phenomena of light and colors, and had elaborated their results in his work, Concerning the Doctrine of Colors. He had arrived at results that differed from those of Newton, the founder of the modern theory of color. The antagonism that exists in this field between Newton and Goethe cannot be judged properly if one does not start by pointing to the difference between the world conceptions of these two personalities. Goethe considered the sense organs of man as the highest physical apparatuses. For the world of colors, he therefore had to estimate the eye as his highest judge for the observation of law-determined connections. Newton and the physicists investigated the phenomena that are pertinent to this question in a fashion that Goethe called “the greatest misfortune of modern physics,” and that consisted in the fact that the experiments have been separated, as it were, from man.

One wants to know nature only according to the indications of artificial instruments and thereby even intends to limit and to prove what nature is capable of.

The eye perceives light and darkness and, within the light-dark field of observation, the colors. Goethe takes his stand within this field and attempts to prove how light, darkness and the colors are connected. Newton and his followers meant to observe the processes of light and colors as they would go on if there were no human eye. But the stipulation of such an external sphere is, according to Goethe's world conception, without justification. We do not obtain an insight into the nature of a thing by disregarding the effects we observe, but this nature is given to us through the mind's exact observation of the regularity of these effects. The effects that the eye perceives, taken in their totality and represented according to the law of their connection are the essence of the phenomena of light and color, not a separated world of external processes that are to be determined by means of artificial instruments.

It is really of no avail that we attempt to express directly the nature of a thing. What we are aware of are effects, and a complete account of these effects might possibly encompass the essence of that thing. Vainly do we endeavor to describe the character of a man; we put his deeds and actions together, however, and a picture of his character arises before our eyes. Colors are the actions of light; they are what light does and suffers. In this sense we can expect information from them concerning the nature of light. Color and light are indeed in close relation but we must think of them both as belonging to nature as a whole; for it is nature as a whole that is ready to manifest itself in special ways to the sense of the eye.

Here we find Goethe's world view applied to a special case. In the human organism, through its senses, through the soul of man, there is revealed what is concealed in the rest of nature. In man, nature reaches its climax. Whoever, therefore, like Newton, looks for the truth of nature outside man, will not find it, according to Goethe's fundamental conviction.

[ 10 ] Schopenhauer sees in the world that the mind perceives in space and time only an idea of this mind. The essence of this world of thought pictures is revealed to us in our will, by which we see our own organism permeated. Schopenhauer, therefore, cannot agree with a physical doctrine that sees the nature of light, not in the mental content of the eye, but in a world that is supposed to exist separated from the eye. Goethe's mode of conception was, for this reason, more agreeable to Schopenhauer because Goethe did not go beyond the world of the perceptual content of the eye. He considered Goethe's view to be a confirmation of his own opinion concerning this world. The antagonism between Goethe and Newton is not merely a question of physics but concerns the world conception as a whole. Whoever is of the opinion that a valid statement about nature can be arrived at through experiments that can be detached from the human being must take his stand with Newton's theory of color and remain on that ground. Modern physics is of this opinion. It can only agree with the judgment concerning Goethe's theory of colors that Helmholtz expressed in his essay, Goethe's Anticipations of Future Ideas in Natural Science:

Wherever it is a question of problems that can be solved through poetic divination producing imaginative pictures, the poet has shown himself capable of the most excellent work; wherever only a consciously applied inductive method could have helped, Goethe has failed.

If one sees in the pictures of human imagination only products that are added to an already complete nature, then it is of course necessary to determine what goes on in nature apart from these pictures. But if one sees in them manifestations of the essence contained in nature as Goethe did, then one will consult them in investigating the truth. Schopenhauer, to be sure, shares neither the first nor the second standpoint. He is not at all ready to recognize sense perceptions as containing the essence of things. He rejects the method of modern physics because physics does not limit itself to the element that alone is directly given, namely, that of perceptions as mental pictures. But Schopenhauer also transformed this question from a problem of physics into one of world conception. As he also begins his world conception with man and not with an external world apart from man, he had to side with Goethe, who had consistently drawn the conclusion for the theory of colors that necessarily follows if one sees in man with his healthy sense organs “the greatest and most exact physical apparatus.” Hegel, who as a philosopher stands completely on this foundation, had for this reason forcefully defended Goethe's theory of colors. He says in his Philosophy of Nature:

For the description of the color phenomenon that is adequate to its concept, we are indebted to Goethe, who was attracted early by the phenomena of color and light and who was drawn to their contemplation especially in painting; his pure and simple sense of nature had to revolt against such barbarism of reflected thought as is found in Newton. Goethe took up everything about light and color that had been stated and experimentally demonstrated since Plato. He conceived the phenomenon as simple, and the truest instinct of reason does consist in the ability of approaching a phenomenon from that side that allows its simplest representation.

[ 11 ] For Schopenhauer, the essential ground for all world processes is the will. It is an eternal dark urge for existence. It contains no reason because reason comes into existence only in the human brain, which in turn is created by the will. Hegel sees the spirit as the root of the world in self-conscious reason, and in human reason, only as individual realization of the general world reason. Schopenhauer, by contrast, recognizes reason only as a product of the brain, as a mere bubble that comes into being at the end of the process in which will, the unreasoning blind urge, has created everything else first. In Hegel, all things and processes are permeated by reason; in Schopenhauer, everything is without reason, for everything is the product of the will without reason. The personality of Schopenhauer exemplifies unequivocally a statement of Fichte, “The kind of world conception a man chooses depends on the kind of man he is.”

Schopenhauer had bad experiences and had become acquainted with the worst side of the world before he decided to spend his life in contemplation of it. It is for this reason that he is satisfied to depict the world as essentially deprived of reason as a result of blind will. Reason, according to his mode of thinking, has no power over unreason, for it is itself the result of unreason; it is illusion and dream, produced out of will. Schopenhauer's world conception is the dark, melancholy mood of his soul translated into thought. His eye was not prepared to follow the manifestations of reason in the world with pleasure. This eye saw only unreason that was manifest in sorrow and pain. Thus, his doctrine of ethics could only be based on the observation of suffering. An action is moral only if it has its foundation in such an observation. Sympathy, pity, must be the source of human actions. What better course could be taken by a man who has gained the insight that all beings suffer than to let his actions be guided by pity. As everything unreasonable and evil has its roots in will, man will stand morally the higher the more he mortifies his unruly will in himself. The manifestation of this will in the individual person is selfishness, egotism. Whoever surrenders to pity and thereby wills not for himself but for others, has become master of the will.

One method of freeing oneself from the will consists in surrendering to artistic creations and to the impressions that are derived from works of art. The artist does not produce to satisfy a desire for something; he does not produce his works because of a will that is selfishly directed toward things and events. His production proceeds out of unegotistic joy. He plunges into the essence of things in pure contemplation. This is also true of the enjoyment of art. As long as we approach a work of art with the desire stirring in us to own it, we are still entangled in the lower appetites of the will. Only when we admire beauty without desiring it have we raised ourselves to the lofty stage where we no longer are dependent on the blind force of will. Then art has become for us a means to free ourselves for the moment from the unreasoning force of the blind will to exist. The deliverance takes place in its purest form in the enjoyment of the musical work of art, for music does not speak to us through the medium of representative imagination as do the other arts. Music copies nothing in nature. As all things and events are only mental pictures, so also the arts that take these things as models can only make impressions on us as manifestations of imaginations. Man produces tone out of himself without a natural model. Because man has will as his own essence within himself, it can only be the will through which the world of music is directly released. It is for this reason that music so deeply moves the human soul. It does this because music is the manifestation of man's inner nature, his true being, his will, and it is a triumph of man that he is in possession of an art in which he enjoys selflessly, freed from the fetters of the will, what is the root of all desire, of all unreason. This view of Schopenhauer concerning music is again the result of his most personal nature. Even before his university years, when he was apprenticed to a merchant in Hamburg, he wrote to his mother:

How did the heavenly seed find a place on the hard ground on which necessity and poverty struggle for every little spot? We have been banished from the primordial spirit and are not to reach up to him. Yet, a pitiful angel has begged the heavenly flower for us and it blossoms in full glory rooted in this soil of misery. The pulsation's of the divine art of music have not ceased to beat through the centuries of barbarism, and a direct resonance of the eternal is preserved in this art for us, understandable to every soul and exalted above even vice and virtue.

[ 12 ] From the attitude that is taken toward art by the two antipodes of world conception, Hegel and Schopenhauer, one can learn how a world conception deeply affects the personal relation of man toward the various realms of life. Hegel, who saw in man's world of conceptions and ideas the climax toward which all external nature strives as its perfection, can recognize as the most perfect art only the one in which the spirit appears in its most perfect form, and in which this spirit at the same time clings to the element that continuously strives toward the spirit. Every formation of external nature tends to be spirit, but it does not reach this aim. When a man now creates such an external spatial form, endowing it as an artist with the spirit for which material itself strives without being capable of reaching it, then he has produced a perfect work of art. This is the case in the art of sculpture. What otherwise appears only in the inward life of the soul as formless spirit, as idea, is shaped by the artist out of matter. The soul, the inner life that we perceive in our consciousness as being without shape, is what speaks out of a statue, out of a formation of space. This marriage of the sensual world with the world of the spirit represents the artistic ideal of a world conception that sees the purpose of nature in the creation of the spirit, and therefore can also recognize the beautiful only in a work that appears as immediate expression of the spirit emerging in the form of nature. Whoever, like Schopenhauer, however, sees in all nature only mental pictures, cannot possibly recognize the ideal of art in a work that imitates nature. He must choose an art as his ideal that is free of all nature, that is to say, music.

[ 13 ] Schopenhauer considered everything that leads toward the extirpation, the mortification of the will quite consistently as desirable, for an extirpation of the will means an extinction of the unreasonable in the world. Man is to give up will. He is to kill all desire within himself. Asceticism is, for this reason, Schopenhauer's moral ideal. The wise man will extinguish within himself all wishes; he will annihilate his will completely. He will reach the point where no motivation forces him to exert his will. All striving consists merely in quietistic yearning for deliverance from all life. In the world-renouncing life-views in Buddhism, Schopenhauer acknowledged a doctrine of profound wisdom. Compared to Hegel's, one can thus call Schopenhauer's world view reactionary. Hegel attempted everywhere to affect a reconciliation of man with life; he always strove to present all action as a cooperation with a reason-directed order of the world. Schopenhauer regarded enmity to life, withdrawal from reality and world flight as the ideal of the wise man.

Hegel's mode of world and life conception contains an element that can produce doubts and questions. Hegel's point of departure is pure thinking, the abstract idea, which he himself once called “an oyster-like, gray or entirely black” being (in a letter to Goethe on February 20, 1821), of which he maintained at the same time should be considered the “representation of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit.” The aim that he reaches is the individual human spirit endowed with a content of its own, through whom first comes to light what led only a shadow-like existence in a gray, oyster-like element. This can easily be understood to mean that a personality as a living self-conscious being does not exist outside the human spirit. Hegel derives the content-saturated element that we experience within ourselves from the ideal element that we obtain through thinking. It is quite comprehensible that a spirit of a certain inner disposition felt repulsed by this view of world and life. Only thinkers of such a selfless devotion as that of Karl Rosenkranz (1805–1879) could so completely find their way into Hegel's movement of thought and, in such perfect agreement with Hegel, create for themselves structures of ideas that appear like a rebirth of Hegel's own thought structure in a less impressive medium. Others could not understand how man is to be enlightened through pure idea with respect to the infinity and variety of the impressions that pour in on him as he directs his observations toward nature, crowded as it is with colors and forms, and how he is to profit if he lifts his soul from experiences in the world of sensation, feeling and perception-guided imagination to the frosty heights of pure thought. To interpret Hegel in this fashion is to misunderstand him, but it is quite comprehensible that he should have been misunderstood in this way.

This mood that was dissatisfied with Hegel's mode of thinking found expression in the current thought that had representatives in Franz Xaver von Baader (1765–1841), Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832), Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797 – 1879), Christian Hermann Weisse (1801–1866), Anton Guenther (1783–1863), Karl Friedrich Eusebius Thrahndorff (1782–1863) Martin Deutinger (1815– 1864), and Hermann Ulrici (1806–1884). They attempted to replace the gray, oyster-like pure thought of Hegel by a life-filled, personal, primal entity, an individual God. Baader called it an “atheistic conception” to believe that God attained a perfect existence only in man. God must be a personality and the world must not, as Hegel thought, proceed from him like a logical process in which one concept always necessarily produces the next. On the contrary, the world must be God's free creation, the product of his almighty will. These thinkers approach the Christian doctrine of revelation. To justify and fortify this doctrine scientifically becomes the more-or-less conscious purpose of their thinking. Baader plunged into the mysticism of Jakob Boehme (1757–1624), Meister Eckhardt (1250– 1329), Tauler (1290–1361) and Paracelsus (1494–1541), whose language, so rich in pictures, he considered a much more appropriate means to express the most profound truths than the pure thoughts of Hegel's doctrine. That Baader also caused Schelling to enrich his thoughts with a deeper and warmer content through the assimilation's of conceptions from Jakob Boehme has already been mentioned.

In the course of the development of the modern world conception personalities like Krause will always be remarkable. He was a mathematician who allowed himself to be swayed by the proud, logically perfect character of this science, and attempted a solution of the problems of world conception after the model of the method he was used to as a mathematician. Typical of this kind of thinker is the great mathematician, Newton, who treated the phenomena of the visible universe as if it were an arithmetical problem but, at the same time, satisfied his own need concerning the fundamental questions of world conception in a fashion that approached the belief to be found in revealed religion. Krause finds it impossible to accept a conception that seeks the primal being of the world in the things and processes. Whoever, like Hegel, looks for God in the world cannot find him, for the world, to be sure, is in God, but God is not in the world. He is a self-dependent being resting within himself in blissful serenity. Krause's world of ideas rests on “thoughts of an infinite, self-dependent being, outside of which there is nothing; this being comprises everything by itself and in itself as the one ground, and that we have to think of as the ground of reason, nature and humanity.” He does not want to have anything in common with a view “that takes the finite or the world as the sum total of everything finite to be God itself, idolizing and confusing it with God.” No matter how deep one may penetrate into the reality given to the senses and the mind, one will never arrive in this way at the fundamental ground of all being. To obtain a conception of this being is possible only if one accompanies all finite observation with a divinatory vision of an over-worldly reality.

Immanuel Hermann Fichte settled his account with Hegelianism poignantly in his essay, Propositions for the Prolegomena of Theology (1826), and Contributions Toward a Characterization of Modern Philosophy (1829). Then, in numerous works, he tried to prove and elaborate his view that a conscious personal being must be recognized as the basis of all world phenomena. In order to procure an emphatic effect for the opposition to Hegel's conception, which proceeded from pure thought, Immanuel Hermann Fichte joined hands with friends who were of the same opinion. In 1837, together with Weisse, Sengler, K. Ph. Fischer, Chalybäs, Fr. Hoffmann, Ulrici, Wirth and others, he began the publication of the Journal for Philosophy and Speculative Theology. It is Fichte's conviction that we have risen to the highest knowledge only if we have understood that “the highest thought that truly solves the world problem is the idea of a primal subject or absolute personality, which knows and fathoms itself in its ideal as well as real infinity.”

The world creation and preservation that comprises the world reality, consists solely in the uninterrupted consciousness-permeated will-direction of God, such that he is only consciousness and will, but both in a highest union, therefore, only person, or person in the most eminent sense of the word.

Chr. Hermann Weisse believed that it was necessary to proceed from Hegel's world conception to a completely theological mode of conception. In the Christian idea of the three personalities in the one deity, he saw the aim of his thinking. He attempted to represent this idea as the result of a natural and unsophisticated common sense and did so with an uncommon array of ingenuity. In his triune, Weisse believed that in a personal deity possessing a living will he had something infinitely richer than Hegel with his gray idea. This living will is to “give to the inner godly nature with one breath the one definite form and no other that is implied at all places in the Holy Writ of the Old and New Testaments. In it, God is shown prior to the creation of the world as well as during and after that event in the shining element of his glory as surrounded by an interminable heavenly host of serving spirits in a fluid immaterial body, which enables him to fully communicate with the created world.”

[ 14 ] Anton Guenther, the “Viennese Philosopher,” and Martin Deutinger, who was under his influence, move with the thoughts of their world conception completely within the framework of the catholic theological mode of conception. Guenther attempts to free man from the natural world order by dividing him into two parts—a natural being that belongs to the world of necessary law, and a spirit being that constitutes a self-dependent part of a higher spirit world and has an existence comparable to an “entity” as described by Herbart. He believes that he overcomes Hegelianism in this manner and that he supplies the foundation for a Christian world conception. The Church itself was not of this opinion, for in Rome Guenther's writings were included in the Prohibitory Index. Deutinger fought vehemently against Hegel's “pure thinking,” which, in his opinion, ought to be prevented from devouring life-filled reality. He ranks the living will higher than pure thought. It can, as creative will, produce something; thought is powerless and abstract. Thrahndorff also takes living will as his point of departure. The world cannot be explained from the shadowy realm of ideas, but a vigorous will must seize these ideas in order to create real being. The world's deepest content does not unfold itself to man in thoughtful comprehension, but in an emotional reaction, in love through which the individual surrenders to the world, to the will that rules in the universe. It is quite apparent that all these thinkers endeavor to overcome thinking and its object, the pure idea. They are unwilling to acknowledge thinking as the highest manifestation of the spirit of man. In order to comprehend the ultimate substance of the world, Thrahndorff wants to approach it, not with the power of knowledge, but of love. It is to become an object of emotion, not of reason. It is the belief of these philosophers that through clear, pure thinking the ardent, religious devotion to the primordial forces of existence are destroyed.

[ 15 ] This opinion has its root in a misconception of Hegel's thought world. Its misunderstanding becomes especially apparent in the views concerning Hegel's attitude toward religion that spread after his death. The lack of clarity that began to prevail regarding this attitude resulted in a split among Hegel's followers into one party that considered his world conception to be a firm pillar of revealed Christianity, and another that used his doctrine to dissolve the Christian conceptions and to replace them by a radically liberal view.

[ 16 ] Neither party could have based its opinion on Hegel if they had understood him correctly, for Hegel's world conception contains nothing that can be used for support of a religion or for its destruction. He had meant to do this with respect to any religion as little as he had intended to create any natural phenomena through his pure thought. As he had set out to extract the pure thought from the processes of nature in order to comprehend them in that way, so he had also, in the case of religion, merely the intention to bring its thought content to the surface. As he considered everything that is real in the world as reasonable just because it is real, so he held this view also in regard to religion. It must come into existence by soul forces quite beyond those that are at the disposal of the thinker when he approaches them in order to comprehend them.

It was also an error of such thinkers as Fichte, Weisse, Deutinger and others that they fought against Hegel because he had not proceeded from the realm of pure thought to the religious experience of the personal deity. Hegel had never set himself a task of this kind. He considered that to be the task of the religious consciousness. The younger Fichte, Weisse, Krause, Deutinger and the rest wanted to create a new religion through their world conception. Hegel would have considered such a task to be as absurd as the wish to illuminate the world through the idea of light, or to create a magnet out of the thought of magnetism. To be sure, in Hegel's opinion, religion has its root in the idea, just as the whole world of nature and the spirit. For this reason, it is possible that the human spirit can rediscover this idea in religion, but as the magnet was created out of the thought of magnetism before the human mind came into being, and as the latter only afterwards has to comprehend the magnet's creation, so also religion has become what it is before its thought emerged in the human soul as an illuminating part of world conception. If Hegel had lived to experience the religious criticism of his pupils, he would have felt compelled to say, “Take your hands off all foundation of religion, off all creation of religious conceptions, as long as you want to remain thinkers and do not intend to become messiahs.” The world conception of Hegel, if it is correctly understood, cannot have a retroactive effect on the religious consciousness. The philosopher who reflects on the realm of art has the same relation to his object as the thinker who wants to fathom the nature of religion.

[ 17 ] The Halle Yearbooks, published from 1838 to 1843 by Arnold Ruge and Theodor Echtermeyer, served as a forum for the philosophical controversies of the time. Starting with a defense and explanation of Hegel, they soon proceeded to develop his ideas independently, and thus made the transition to the views that are called “radical world conceptions” in the next chapter. After 1841, the editors called their journal, The German Yearbook, and, as one of their aims, they considered “the fight against political illiberality, against theories of feudalism and landed property.” In the historical development of the time they became active as radical politicians, demanding a state in which perfect freedom prevails. Thus, they abandoned the spirit of Hegel, who wanted to understand history, not to make it.

Do not think that I wish to take the floor this evening for the purpose of speaking of an understanding between the various classes of the present population, in the same way that the ruling classes, the hitherto ruling classes in particular, so often speak of reconciliation and understanding. I would like to speak to you this evening about a quite different kind of understanding, about the understanding that is being challenged by the social facts that are speaking loudly today and by the great historical forces that are currently entering the course of human development. I would like to speak of what seems to me to be demanded of the proletarian movement in particular, of these historical forces that are today, one might say, revolutionizing the world.

To speak of a different understanding is forbidden by almost the whole of modern life, the life that certain people call modern civilization. What voices have we heard within this modern civilization over the last few decades! Let us remember how the hitherto ruling classes have perceived this modern civilization, one might say, right up to the terrible catastrophe of war which has come as a horror to mankind in recent years. How often has it been said how far we humans have come in creating, in producing! How we have brought it about that thought can be sent far across the earth in a short time, how connections have been created between the most distant countries, how spiritual life in all its forms has gained a tremendous expansion. Well, I could go on singing the praises of modern civilization for a long time, not the way I want to sing them, but the way they have been sung by this ruling class. But let us now look at things from the other side. How was this modern civilization, to which so many songs of praise have been sung, actually possible? It was only possible because it was, so to speak, undermined by those who, from the innermost essence of their humanity, could not agree with what the bearers of this modern civilization were doing. And so, alongside all this, which one could also call a kind of luxury culture, one could hear the voices coming from the other side, which essentially always ended with the words: It can't go on like this! As wonderful as your civilization may be for you, it is impossible for it to go on any other way than for the vast majority of the earth's population to have no direct share in it. They have to feel excluded from this civilization, they have to watch from the outside, so to speak, but on the other hand they have to work hard for this civilization!

Has anyone on the other side shown any understanding in recent decades for the reasons and background from which such a call has emerged? You can't say that. In general, certain people today speak a very strange language. Over the last few days, I have witnessed some of what has taken place here in Bern at the League of Nations Conference. You could hear all kinds of beautiful speeches, that is, speeches that the gentlemen thought were very beautiful. But anyone who is able to look a little deeper into what is being expressed in the world-changing deeds that are going through Europe today could hear, above all, in what was said there, that the most important question of the present, the question that is of ever-increasing concern to a large part of humanity, was being talked and thought past. The actual nerve of the social question was talked and thought past! This conference showed extraordinarily little understanding for this question, and one was reminded of something else, namely the weeks of the spring and early summer of 1914, when one could hear many a strange speech from the hitherto ruling circles and their leaders. One could cite many similar speeches, such as the one made by a leading statesman in a Central European country to a parliament in 1914, in which he said: “Thanks to the energetic efforts of the European cabinets, we can hope that peace among the great powers of Europe will be secured for the foreseeable future. - This was still being said, with all possible modifications, in May and June 1914.

And then? Then came what killed millions of people, what crippled millions of people. So well foreseen was that which also asserted itself alongside that to which one sang such hymns of praise as modern civilization!

I myself, if I may make this personal remark, had to speak differently from these statesmen at the time. Before a meeting in Vienna in the spring of 1914, I had to say: Anyone who looks at the life of contemporary European humanity sees in it something like a creeping cancer that must break out. - Well, we can leave it to the judgment of mankind today as to who was a better prophet: the one who spoke of a cancerous disease that broke out so terribly in the so-called world war, or those who thought that, thanks to the efforts of the cabinets, a longer peace was in prospect. Just as in those days these gentlemen talked past what was gathering as a black cloud in the political sky of Europe, so today certain people talk past what is most important: the social powers and forces entering the life of the nations of the earth. Since things are like this, there is really very little prospect of bringing about an understanding through reason, so to speak. But an understanding on the other side, as I have already said, can be sought. And this understanding seems to me to arise if we take the following starting point.

Until our time, the proletarian population was basically in a completely different situation than it will be from now on. Anyone who has not only thought about the proletarian movement from a certain theoretical point of view, but who has experienced this proletarian movement in such a way that he has lived with it, knows that what the modern proletariat experienced was the great, penetrating criticism of what the institutions and maxims of the hitherto leading circles have done for centuries, for three to four centuries. What the modern proletarian experienced was the living, world-historical critique of everything they believed they had to impose on humanity. And basically, what was going on within the proletariat was a great, powerful critique. While the hitherto leading circles lingered within their bourgeois culture, to which they sang such hymns of praise, while they could hear in their lecture halls that which served their state, while they heard in their theaters the illusory world of their affairs, while they did many other things, what they perceived as such a salutary modern civilization, the proletarian masses came together in the hours they could spare from the heavy, arduous work of the day to reflect on the serious questions of human development, the serious questions of world history. After all, modern technical development and the capitalist development connected with it had taken the modern proletarian away from all other human contexts, which, for example, the old craft had provided, had placed him next to the machine, harnessed into the capitalist world order and thus excluded from the immediate feeling of what the leading, leading circles were doing. Then the proletarian's spiritual gaze turned to the general and, from a certain point of view, the highest interest of humanity. And in the proletarian assemblies that was driven which then always had to sound out again in the cry: It can't go on like this!

But what developed there was also a powerful, magnificent criticism of the previous policy, the previous economic management of the leading circles. This has now entered a new stage. And to really follow this entry into a new stage with attention seems to me to be one of the most necessary social tasks today.

How has the modern proletarian felt about the social order that has developed over the last three to four centuries, since the time when modern capitalism and modern technology entered the development of mankind? How did the modern proletarian feel about all this, which he had to look at as if he were standing on his feet, which he, as far as he could use it, wanted to absorb with his intimate share, so that he would also have something for his soul? The old leading circles spoke to him of various powers and forces at work in the historical development of mankind; they spoke to him of all kinds of moral world orders and the like. But he, the modern proletarian, who looked up to what these ruling classes were doing, felt little of the power, of the inner originality of such moral world orders; He felt that the actions, the thoughts, the feelings of the leading, governing circles are essentially shaped by the way they can live by virtue of their economic forms, their economic order, through which they are able to establish their civilization as a kind of superstructure on the misery, on the oppression of larger masses of humanity who had to work for them.

And so there arose in the modern proletariat what was the truth in relation to the reality of these newer thoughts about the development of mankind. The modern proletarian felt a truth about what the others fantasized about in a certain lying way; they spoke of a moral, of a divine world order, through which people are brought into mutual social relations on earth. The proletarian felt this to be a profound lie. And he felt that the truth in all this is that people live as they can by exploiting economic life for their own convenience, for their own benefit. And so the materialistic conception of history arose - and one must now say, as the proper inheritance of what was bourgeois science - the conception which did not admit that the actually effective forces in the historical development of mankind were anything other than economic forces. And that became the belief that everything that is human religion, human science, human spirituality, rises above the economic forces like a kind of “superstructure”, and that below it the economic forces reign as the only reality on which at most the superstructure acts back. The modern proletariat was right in the face of what the bourgeois world order has made of social life - a mere economy.

The second thing that emanated from Karl Marx's power of thought and spread into the proletarian assemblies, into the proletarian souls, is not the intellectual question, as I have just characterized it in the materialist view of history, but the legal question. This culminates in the one word that you all know, but which had an electrifying effect within the modern proletarian movements, which evoked understanding in the innermost feelings of the modern proletarian souls when it was presented to these proletarian souls by Marx and his successors: it is the word of surplus value. And behind much of what has been said around this word of surplus value, what the modern proletarian actually feels to be his most important human question, lies the question which is more or less consciously or unconsciously, more or less merely felt or posed with the intellect, but which is deeply felt. What sense does my work actually have within the modern social order? And it must be said that Karl Marx's various answers are brilliant. - But today we live in a time in which we must go further than even Marx went, especially if we understand Marx in the right way, not in the direction of the opportunist politicians, but in a completely different direction, as we shall see in a moment.

When the modern proletarian raised the question of the meaning of his labor and this became for him the question of his position within modern society, of his human dignity, he was repeatedly confronted with the problem that his labor was, as it were, absorbed by the capitalist economic process. He experienced that his labor had become something that it could only appear to be, namely: a commodity. The modern proletarian, who can only acquire his labor power anew as his only “possession”, experienced that he must also carry his labor power to the market, must have his labor power treated according to the rules of supply and demand, as otherwise objective commodities separated from man are treated on the commodity market.

Now the peculiarity of human life is that things can occur in this human life which are real, but which are not truths, which are lies of life. And one such lie is that human labor can ever become a commodity. For human labor power can never enter into any comparisons, any price comparisons with commodities. It is something fundamentally different from commodities. It is therefore a lie if that which can never become a commodity is nevertheless made into a commodity. Even if this is not expressed in such a clear manner, it is nevertheless something that is perceived as, I would say, the center of the proletarian question of modern times. Because human labor power has become a commodity, the legal relationship that should exist between the entrepreneur and the worker over work has become a purchasing relationship. And modern bourgeois national economists do indeed talk as if it were possible within economic life to exchange commodity for commodity on the one hand, and commodity for labor on the other.

The fact that a so-called labor contract exists in the modern sense of the word does not change the matter; for a legal contract can only be concluded about the relationship between entrepreneur and worker in the sense that we shall see later. Human labor could only be liberated from its commodity character - and it must be liberated - if the only contract possible between the employee and the employer were not the contract for the work performed, but the contract for the distribution of the jointly produced goods or services in a way that serves the healthy organism in the right sense. This is the demand that lies behind the Marxist theory of surplus value. At the same time, this is the way in which one must go beyond the merely Marxist conception. And the question must be asked: How does the wage relationship end? How does a commodity distribution contract take the place of the labor contract?

But with this we have indicated the second thing that repeatedly ran through the soul of the modern proletarian and which was hurled at the leading circles as a powerful criticism.

And the third, that was the conviction that everything that takes place in modern life and which has led to these conditions into which we have now got, does not consist in a harmony, not in a work of modern men arising from a common purpose, but in a struggle between groups of men in which one of them has the advantage at first; that is the class struggle of the modern proletariat with the leading classes.

Truly, these three points: the materialist conception of history, the theory of surplus-value and labor-power, and the theory of class struggle have been studied with more contemporary force than anything that has been written within bourgeois society in recent times. For it was recognized that what human development has come to in the last centuries is merely a result of economic forms. All other interpretations are basically a great lie of humanity.

And so the whole intellectual life, as it had become a kind of cultural luxury for the ruling class, became an “ideology” for the modern proletariat, a word that was heard again and again. It became a mere fabric of thoughts and feelings and sentiments, which were expressed as smoke emanating from the true reality of economic life.

But one does not understand the matter if one only understands it in this way. One only understands the matter correctly if one knows that in the face of this desolating ideology, this soul-killing ideology, which is essentially a legacy of the thinking of the hitherto ruling class, in the modern proletarian soul, which had time to think about human dignity and about truly becoming a human being on the machine and in the enclosure of the capitalist economic process, a real longing for a true spiritual life, not for a spiritual luxury, not for abundance, awoke. One can still often hear in bourgeois circles today how the modern proletarian question, viewed from this or that side, is actually a bread-and-butter question. Certainly, it is a bread-and-butter question; but there is really no need to talk about the fact that it is a bread-and-butter question in an assembly where proletarian understanding prevails. For it is not a question of thinking in the same way as a bourgeois sociologist and pedagogue, for instance, who now travels about a great deal in many regions, and who, among other things, recently coined the words: You only have to really know modern poverty once, then you will already come to the longing for a humanization of human society. - Behind such words there is usually nothing more than the question: How can one continue in the delusion of the old life of the ruling circles and how can one in the best way let chunks fall off for those who should not participate in this life of the ruling class? How can labor be dealt with while maintaining the existing social order? - It is not a question of bread. If it is a question of bread, then it is above all a question of how bread is fought for, out of which soul motives.

This has to do with much deeper historical forces than those who often talk about history from this perspective even suspect. And today the three questions which I have just characterized have reached a new stage in that there is much in them which one is not yet able to express clearly, but which can be heard by those who have an ear for the workings of historical forces, for the sounds which herald the great world-historical upheavals. Today the proletarian movement is no longer a mere criticism, today it is that which is called upon by the world-historical powers themselves to take action, to raise the great question: What must be done? - And here it seems to me that what I characterized earlier must be transformed somewhat, transformed in such a way that, in contrast to the purely material life as it has developed up to now, another life should develop that allows the oppressed part of humanity to have an existence that is truly humane in soul as well. That is the first question, the question of spiritual life: How can we transform the luxury ideology, the affluent spiritual life, into that which, from the innermost nature of man, man must really experience for an existence worthy of man?

The other thing that has developed, apart from this spiritual life, is precisely that which has turned the proletarian's human labor power into a commodity in the field of legal life. This could only develop because in the social order that emerged under capitalism and modern technology, law became a prerogative in many respects. How can the prerogative be replaced by law, within whose order the human labor power of the proletarian is stripped of the character of a mere commodity?

And the third question is: how can what has developed as class struggle continue to develop in other forms? The proletarian has felt very well that what must happen in life can only develop in this mutual struggle. But he perceives the struggles that have taken place in the course of modern history as those that must be overcome. And so the question of the necessity of class struggles will now, at the present stage of development, be transformed into the question: How do we overcome class struggles? - The question of surplus value, which has moved into the realm of privileges within the social order as it has developed over the last few centuries, this question of surplus value gives rise to the other question: How to find in human society, in the true sense of the word, a state of law satisfactory to all men?

With regard to the first question, the spiritual side of the social question, one only has to see how deep the abyss is between the hitherto ruling classes and those on the other side who are striving for a new world and social order. And here it must be said that what fills the modern proletarian with spiritual life has basically been inherited from the bourgeois class, which has been able to cultivate science, art and so on. - But this spiritual life had a different effect within the proletariat, for the proletarian was in a different position in relation to what he had inherited in the way of science and the like than in relation to what arose as modern spiritual life among those who were bourgeois, the leading circles. One could be a very convinced follower of modern intellectual life, one could consider oneself very enlightened, but one stood as a member of the ruling class within such a social order, which was not at all organized according to this modern intellectual life. One could be a natural scientist like Vogt, a scientific popularizer like Büchner, one could believe oneself to be completely enlightened - that was perhaps good for the head, for the intellectual conviction; but it was not suitable for understanding the position of man in real life. For the way these people stood in life could only be justified by the fact that the social order derived from quite different powers, from religious, from outdated moral world views, or at any rate from other powers than those which had presented themselves as scientifically certified powers to these ruling, leading classes. Therefore, that which is the modern scientific spirit and to which the proletarian simply brought himself from the culture of modern times had a completely different effect on the proletarian soul.

I may recall a small scene that illustrates this particularly well, this different effect of modern spiritual life on the proletarian, who was compelled to grasp this modern spiritual life not just for the head, but for the whole person, for his entire position within humanity.

Many years ago, I once stood on the same podium in Spandau with Rosa Luxemburg, who has now come to such a tragic end. At that time she spoke about science and the workers, and as a teacher at the workers' education school I had a few things to add to her words on the same subject. This topic, “Science and the workers”, gave her the opportunity to express precisely that which is so characteristic of the intellectual life of the modern proletariat. She said: “The sentiments - despite the conviction of the head - the sentiments of the modern leading class of humanity are still rooted in views as if man came from angelic beings who were originally good; and from this origin, in terms of feeling and sentiment, these ruling classes justify the differences in rank and class that have emerged in the course of development. But the modern proletarian is driven in a quite different way to take bourgeois science seriously. He must take seriously when he is taught how man was not originally an angelic being, but climbed about on trees like an animal and behaved most indecently. Looking back to this origin of man in the sense of the modern world view does not justify differences in life, class and status in the same way that others believe it to be justified, it justifies a completely different idea of the equality of all people.

You see, that's the difference! The proletarian was compelled to take what the others took as a head conviction, which did not go very deep, no matter how enlightened they were, he was compelled to take it up with his whole person, to take the matter with the bitterest seriousness of life. As a result, however, it wove itself into his soul in a completely different way. One must simply become attentive to such things, then one will already recognize in what sense the modern social question is above all a question of spiritual life and strives for the development of a spiritual life that satisfies all people.

Then, if you look into the causes of everything that I have only been able to describe today, I would like to say, in a stammering manner, because if you really wanted to describe it in detail, it would require too much elaboration, if you research the causes and then ask yourself: what development must be striven for? - then we can say the following: today it is really not a question of whether materialistic culture is the real foundation of spiritual life, but of how we can arrive at a spiritual life that can truly satisfy the human soul, the soul of all human beings. Today it can no longer be about a critical interpretation of what surplus value is, what human labor power represents itself as within the capitalist world order, but today the question arises: How can human labor power be freed from the character of a commodity and how can we ensure that “surplus value” does not remain a prerogative but becomes a right? And if there must be struggles within the human social order, can they be class struggles, can they be the struggles that have gradually emerged over the course of recent centuries?

Today we are at a stage of development where criticism alone is no longer decisive, but where the question is decisive: What is to be done? - For those who look at the foundations of life, the answer is, I would say, very radical. It may look less radical to some than it is, but it is a radical answer. Because proletarian thinking is in many respects only the legacy of bourgeois thinking, because proletarian habits of thought are the legacy of bourgeois habits of thought, the first questions to be considered are: How can the damage caused by capitalism be eliminated? How can the oppressive nature of the commodification of human labor power be eliminated? How can the class struggle be overcome in a humane way?

These questions must be asked from a much deeper perspective today. And great demands are made today by the historical facts themselves on the habits of thought, on the thoughts of the proletarian. For it is up to him to be equal to the times, to ask himself: How can we get beyond the unhealthy foundations of today's material historical life? How can we get beyond the devastation that the cycle of surplus-value production has wreaked on life, on legal life? How do we get beyond the devastation of modern class struggles? The three most important modern social questions are transformed from the negative into the positive.

If we look at the causes of current living conditions, we find that there is actually a tendency to continue what the bourgeois world order has brought about. Many people are asking themselves today: How can we overcome capitalism? How can we overcome private ownership of the means of production? - And they then come to the ancient order of human social institutions, that of the cooperative and the like, that is, they come to regard a common ownership of the means of production as an ideal.

This is understandable, and truly, it is not out of any bourgeois prejudice that these things should be discussed here, but solely from the point of view of: Is it possible to achieve what the modern proletarian wants in the way that some socialist thinkers believe they can achieve it today? Is it possible, by resorting to the framework of the old state and inserting into this old state what is the economic order, only in a different form, to bring about a redemption from the oppression brought about by the past?

Let us look at the modern state. It came into being because at a time - in the 16th and 17th centuries - when modern technology and modern capitalism were also developing, the leading circles, who then had to call the proletariat more and more to the machine, found that their interests were best satisfied within the framework of the state. And so they began to allow economic life to run into the state in those branches where it was convenient for them. And especially when modern achievements came along, large parts of economic life, such as the postal, telegraph and railroad systems, were taken over into the economy of the state, which had been handed down from time immemorial. At that time, intellectual life was also incorporated into the modern state structure!

And more and more this fusion of economic life, the legal life of the state and intellectual life took place. This fusion not only led to all the unnatural conditions associated with the oppressive conditions of modern times, but this fusion also ultimately led to the devastating effects of the world war catastrophe.

Those who think today from the historical facts will not ask: What should the states do? - on the contrary, they may be forced to ask: What should states refrain from doing? - For what they do and thereby bring about, we have indeed experienced in the killing of ten million people and in what crippled eighteen million people.

And so perhaps the question does come to mind: What should states refrain from doing? - This is what I can only hint at here, but what can truly be asked from the deep foundations of a true social science. If you look at certain political and social conditions as they have, I would say, typically developed, but also as they have typically led to their well-deserved end, then you need only look at Austria, for example, which in the 1960s turned towards a common constitutional system in the Austrian Reichsrat.

What had emerged at that time - I spent three decades of my life in Austria, got to know the conditions thoroughly, got to know what developed as constitutional life in the Austrian state at that time - truly fitted the mishmash of different nations like a glove. And for anyone who can really follow historical facts, it is clear that it was precisely what was founded in Austrian constitutional life at that time, what became Austria's policy in the sixties and seventies, that contributed to the end to which the present years have led.

Why? Well, at that time an Austrian Imperial Council was founded. Initially, the purely economic curia, the curia of the large landowners, the curia of the markets, the cities and industrial towns, the curia of the rural communities were elected to this Austrian Imperial Council. They had to represent their economic interests in the state parliament. And they made rights, they made laws out of their economic life. Only rights that were a transformation of economic interests were created. With regard to the law, however, we are not dealing with the same thing that we are dealing with on the ground of economic life. On the ground of economic life one has to do with human needs, with the production of goods, the circulation of goods, the consumption of goods. In the field of legal life, however, one has to do with that which, apart from all other interests, concerns man, in so far as he is purely only man, in so far as he as man is equal to all other men. Judgment must be based on quite different grounds when the question is asked: What is right? - than: What must be done in order to introduce any product into the cycle of economic life? - The unnatural coupling of the economic curia with legal life is what is eating away at the so-called Austrian state as a cancer.

These things could be illustrated by many examples throughout the modern states. It is not a question of merely studying these things, but of finding the right point of view from which one can gain an insight into true reality, into that which lives and weaves, not into that which people imagine to be the right thing politically or economically.

And again, look at the German Reichstag, of blessed memory, at this democratic parliament with equal voting rights, in which there could be a representation of interests like the Farmers' Union, but in which there could also be a representation of a mere spiritual community, like the Center! There we see something welded, melted into purely political life that belongs only to intellectual life. And to what unnatural conditions has this led! Again, one could cite many examples in addition to this one. If one wants to get to know the life of modern mankind, one must be able to approach it radically from this point of view. One must really have the courage to look such things in the face, then one will come to something that modern people do not yet want to admit, I would even like to say that people of all parties do not want to admit it. But what alone can be the impulse for a recovery of our social organism is the recognition that from now on there can no longer be a welding together, a coupling together of the three areas of life - spiritual life, legal life and economic life - but that each of these areas has its own laws of life, that each of these areas must therefore also give itself its social formation from its own sources.

In economic life only the interests of commodity production, commodity consumption and commodity circulation can prevail. The fundamental laws of this economic life must be decisive for administration and legislation. In the field of legal life that must prevail which springs directly from the human consciousness of law, that in which all men are really equal as men. In the field of spiritual life, that which can flow from the natural human endowment in full free initiative must prevail.

Modern Social Democracy has made inroads - I would like to say, from a completely different point of view, but that cannot affect us here today - in a single area, in that it has the proposition in its views: Religion must be a private matter. - The proposition must be extended to all branches of spiritual life. All spiritual life must be a private matter in relation to the rule of law and to the cycle of economic life. That spiritual life alone which is directed to its own powers, that spiritual life alone which always proves its reality out of its own impulse, that will not be a spiritual luxury, that will not be a spiritual abundance, that will be a spiritual life which must be longed for by all men in the same way. In looking at medieval spiritual life, for example science in relation to religion and theology, the following sentence has often been uttered: Philosophy, the wisdom of the world, is trailing behind theology. - Well, it was also believed that this had changed in more recent times. It has changed, but how has it changed? The secular sciences have become the servants of secular powers, of states, of economic cycles. And they really haven't gotten any better as a result. And why have they not become better? When one sees that there is basically a unified current, a unified force, from the highest branches of spiritual life down to the utilization of man's individual abilities, as they are carried by capital and capitalism, then one sees to the bottom of the question that arises here. Anyone who does not separate the functions and activities of capital in the modern social order from the rest of spiritual life is not looking at the bottom of the matter. Working on the basis of capital is only possible in a society in which there is a healthy, emancipated intellectual life, from which the development of such abilities based on capital can also grow.

What has happened in more recent times need not always be as grotesque as it once was when a modern, very important researcher, a physiologist, wanted to characterize what the Berlin Academy of Sciences, that is, the learned gentlemen of this Berlin Academy of Sciences, actually were: he called them, these learned gentlemen, “the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns”. You see, things had changed. Science was no longer the servant of theology; but whether it had risen to a higher dignity by becoming the servant of the state is another matter.

I would have to speak a great deal if I wanted to offer you the well-founded, well-reasoned truth in all its parts that only the reversal of that movement which has occurred in recent times, namely the liberation of spiritual life in all branches from state life, can lead to the recovery of our social organism. How differently will the lowest teacher feel if, in all that he has to represent, he knows himself to be dependent only on administration and legislation, which is built on the basis of spiritual life itself, than if he has to carry out the maxims, the impulses of political life! The teaching profession was once supposed to develop. It is precisely in this area that the servant class has developed. And this servant state in this field truly corresponds to what has developed in the field of economic life. In antiquity it was called the “nourishing state”. The exploitative and exploited classes have developed in more recent times. However, the two went hand in hand. One is not possible without the other.

All that which relates to the personal relationship between man and man - and this personal relationship from man to man also relates to what employees and employers agree with each other - all this can only be administered by that part of the social organism which is organized independently on the basis of spiritual life. Everything connected with rights, and with rights above all the labor relationship, must remain the domain of the political, the constitutional state. But that which is connected with commodity production, commodity circulation and consumption must become a separate member of the social order, in which only the laws of life of this organism are active.

Thus, by entering into the foundations of these things, one arrives at the radical view, which for some will prove uncomfortable, that for the health of our social relations three independent social organizations must develop side by side, which will work together in the right way precisely because they do not have a uniform centralization, but are centralized in themselves: a parliament which administers spiritual affairs, an administration which serves only these spiritual affairs; a parliament and an administration of the constitutional state, the political state in the narrower sense; a parliament and an independent administration of the economic cycle for itself; like sovereign states side by side, so to speak. Through their coexistence, they will be able to realize what the modern proletarian soul wants, but which cannot be achieved by a mere centralist nationalization of the social order.

Just take economic life for example. Today it is attached on the one hand to the natural foundations. One can also improve these natural bases by improving the soil and the like, then the working conditions can become more favorable by improving the working bases; but there is a limit beyond which one cannot go. Such a limit must also be reached on the other side. Just as economic life is attached to nature, which is outside, so on the other side must stand the rule of law. From this constitutional state, rights and laws are determined in such a way that they are separate from economic life. Just as the judge has to judge separately from his family or human relations when he judges according to the law, just as he allows his human will to function from a different source than in everyday life, so, even if it is the same people - for it will be the same people who rule through all three areas of social organization - when they judge from the modern constitutional state, they will judge according to quite different principles. For example, to cite just one, the measure of work that a person can perform, the time in which a person can work, will result precisely from the human demands of life. All this must be independent of the price formation that prevails in economic life. And just as, on the one hand, nature imposes pricing on economic life, so, on the other hand, free, independent humanity must always first decide on labor out of a sense of justice. And from the political state, which stands outside economic life, labor must be placed within economic life. Then labor is price-forming; then the character of a commodity will not be imposed on labor, then labor participates in the formation of the price, is not dependent on the price formation of the commodity. Just as nature acts on economic life from without, so must law, which is embodied in human labor, act from without.

It may be - for this may be objected - that the prosperity of a social organism becomes in a certain way dependent upon it, when labor first asserts its right; but this dependence is a healthy dependence, and it will lead to a healthy improvement in the same way as, for example, the improvement of the soil by technical means, when it is necessary or expedient or proves possible. But labor will never be able to set prices in the same way that it must set prices in accordance with human dignity if economic life is placed within the framework of the modern state as in a large cooperative. Economic life must be removed and left to its own devices. Legal life, political life, security life must be taken out and placed on its own. People have to speak from the most democratic basis about that which affects all people. Then this will have the right effect on economic life and what must come from it. This will never be able to happen from a cooperative or state institution of any kind. We will see that, if things remain the same as the present oppressors have developed from other, historical foundations, the new oppressors will also develop in the same way if real democratic foundations are not created outside of economic life.

Just as the legal life of the state must stand outside economic life, so must the entire intellectual life from the lowest school up to the university. Then that which develops out of this spiritual life will be able to be a real spiritual administration of the other two branches of life. Then it will be possible for that which is formed as profit in economic life to be genuinely supplied to the community from which it is taken. Then it will be possible for something similar to take place for the material goods, as today only for the beautiful spiritual goods. For the spiritual goods of modern society are actually the most precious of all. It is so: with regard to this spiritual good, it is true that what is produced is given to the general public at least thirty years after death, becomes free property, can be administered by everyone. People today truly do not put up with this with regard to material goods

Possession in social life is not what these or those social economists so often dream of in a strange way; it can only be understood in this way for social life: Possession is the exclusive right of disposal over a thing; possession in the productive sense, in the sense of land, is a right. And this right can only be made into a right, instead of a privilege, which corresponds to the legal consciousness of all men, if the formation of judgement takes place on a ground where only the right is determined, if it becomes possible that that which has resulted as profit can be transferred through the rule of law into the disposal of the spiritual organization, so that the spiritual organization has to find the right individual abilities for that which is no longer used for production, that is, for human service, but becomes mere profit. In this way it will become possible to bring ever new individual abilities to mankind.

But in order that there may really be a power which leads in the right way, not into bureaucratism, but into the free administration of the individual mental faculties of men, that which must be taken as property from one side, it is necessary that the constitutional state should supervise property, that is, the right of property, and that it should not itself become the owner, but that it should be able to hand over free property to that intellectual circle from which it can best be administered. From this you can see that from such backgrounds one arrives today at radical views which will surprise even you; but for my part I am convinced that the facts of world history demand such things of men today. I am convinced that what the modern proletarian wants cannot be achieved in any other way than by extending his hand to the separation of powers. That is the only possible “foreign policy” today. And strangely enough, each individual territory can carry it out for itself. If Germany were to take up this idea for itself today, as I recently expressed in an “Appeal to the Germans and the Cultural World”, which has attracted many signatures, if the Germans were to take up this tripartite division today, then perhaps they could negotiate with the others in a different way than they can today, when they stand there as a unified state that has been completely overcome, completely overcome precisely by its former centralization, and is basically incapable of doing anything.

I do not mean to take sides, but only to say that what I am saying can become the basis not only of all domestic policy, but also of true foreign policy, for the reason that each individual country, each individual people can carry it out for itself alone. Today, if one considers the enormously telling facts, one is led to the conviction that it is no longer merely a matter of changing some of the conditions according to the old ideas, but that it is necessary to base them on new ideas, new facts. In recent years we have heard quite often that there have never been such terrible events as those of the last four and a half years as long as mankind has had a history. You can hear that more often today. But what should be the echo to this assertion is not heard so often today, namely: Never before have people had such a need to rethink, to relearn as they do today, when the social question points to what most needs to be relearned, points to what is most talked and thought past.

Today it is clear that it is the people who have to act. You don't have to come up with ready-made programs! What I have developed here is not a program, is not a social theory. What I have developed here is a realistic theory of humanity. I do not imagine that I can draw up a program for all the conditions that are to arise; the individual cannot do that on his own. For just as individuals cannot form language, which is a social phenomenon, on their own, but just as language is formed in the coexistence of people, all social life must develop in the coexistence of people.

For this, however, people must first be in the right relationship to one another. [The same person can be in the economic parliament, in the democratic parliament, in the spiritual parliament at the same time; he will only have to see how he always has to find the judgment from the objectivity of the circumstances from the different sources.

How people will administer legal, economic and spiritual life when they are properly related to each other, what people will say about the social, that is what one should fathom; not put forward an abstract, theoretical program about what is right in all cases! To bring people into such a relationship that they work together in the right way - one might think - is something the modern proletariat in particular would understand, and this for the simple reason that the modern proletariat has seen how the various interests, the legal, the economic and the spiritual interests work against each other. In this way they are brought into such mutual action that they produce, out of their own forces, a humane existence for each, a viable organism for the whole. Even if it is radical, I believe that nothing else is needed than good will and insight to translate this social program, which is not a program in the common sense - it has to be called that because there are no other words - into life. However, this will make the social question appear to be what it really is. There are certain people who believe that the social question that has arisen will be solved if we do this or that, [...] no, the social question has arisen because people have reached a certain stage of development. And now it is there and will always be there and will always have to be solved anew. And if people are not prepared to accept ever new solutions, the forces will ultimately lead to such disharmonies that they must increasingly lead to revolutionary upheavals of the social order. Revolutions must be defeated step by step on a small scale; then they will not occur on a large scale. But if one does not defeat that which enters into life day by day as legitimate revolutionary forces, then one need not be surprised if that which one does not want to be aware of discharges itself in great upheavals. Rather, in a certain sense, this must be seen as something understandable.

So I believe that it is precisely in the proletariat that an understanding could develop for a truly far-reaching overview of the social question as it arises in this tripartite organization of the social organism. And I am convinced that if some understanding develops, the proletarian will only then realize how he is the true modern man in the true sense of the word. He, who has been torn out of the old legalities, placed next to the barren machine, harnessed into the soulless economic process, has the opportunity to think about what is worthy of man, about what makes human life truly worthy of man, alongside this killing and destroying of man; he has the opportunity to think about it from the fundamental bases and to consider man as a pure human being. That is why one can also believe that if what is hidden in the modern proletarian class consciousness, what lies behind it, develops out of it: the consciousness of human dignity - “an existence worthy of man must be granted to all men” - then with the solution of the proletarian question, with the liberation of the proletariat, the solution of a great world-historical question of humanity will take place. Then the proletarian will not only redeem himself, then the proletarian will become the redeemer of all humanity in humanity. Then, with proletarian liberation, the whole of humanity, that which is worth liberating in this humanity, can be liberated at the same time.

It may well be that the fourth century A.D. has emerged from our considerations as a particularly significant turning point in human development, and I would like to say a few words about what actually took place in this 4th century.

One of the characteristic minds of this 4th century is, of course, Augustine, and when we look at Augustine, we have a true representative of this period before us. To a certain extent, with a part of his being, which he lived out primarily in his youth and in his early years, Augustine points quite clearly back to ancient education. And then we see a rather abrupt transition in his case, which led him to absolute submission to the Roman Catholic Church, so that Augustine became the one who, in a certain respect, set knowledge and insight aside for himself and inwardly and subjectively practically took the concepts of faith completely seriously by professing the opinion that he did not see what the basis of the truth was that he should recognize, and that he professed the truth to which he had finally decided only because the Catholic Church prescribed it. Augustine came to this opinion through hard struggles in life. For a certain period of time, he paid homage to the doctrine known as Manichaeism, the orientalizing doctrine of Mani. This doctrine is one of those that I have already characterized from a certain point of view in these evening reflections. I said: Again and again, from the times that we have come to regard as Indian, Persian, Chaldean-Egyptian, from these ancient times, views emerge as a kind of reaction against what is built up from the development of the primarily intellectual capacity of humanity. The Manichaean doctrine was one such. It just so happens that in those days, in the times when Augustine became acquainted with the Manichaean doctrine in his African homeland, such views actually appeared in a somewhat dubious form. Augustine was initially quite captivated by the Manichaean doctrine. But then he came into contact with a bishop of the Manicheans, Faustus, and the whole way in which this man represented the Manichean doctrine then disgusted Augustine. But through much of what was presented to Augustine, certainly not only as shallow dialectics but perhaps as empty verbiage, one must nevertheless glimpse something essential in this Manichaean doctrine, and this essence can only be inwardly understood if one approaches this Manichaean doctrine from the points of view have been asserted in these considerations, this Manichaean doctrine.

Not much of the true records of such teachings to mankind in modern times has been preserved; only what the Christian teachers of the first centuries quoted and then fought against has been preserved. Thus the most important information from ancient times has come down to us only through the quotations of opponents. But perhaps someone who can empathize with such things will also sense something of the essence of the Manichaean doctrine itself from Augustine's particular attitude towards it. Augustine turns away from the Manichaean doctrine for the reason that he says he has sought the truth, sought the truth in the sun, in the stars, the clouds, the rivers, the springs, the mountains, in the vegetable, in the animal beings, in short, in all that which could confront him as visible. He did not find it there, because all of this offered him only external material things, but he was looking for the spiritual. Then Augustine turned away from the Manichaean doctrine to Neoplatonism, which I have already characterized from a certain point of view. Neoplatonism turned away from the sensual world. It took little account of it and wanted to connect with the All-One in its inner being in a kind of mystical abstraction. This is what attracted Augustine in his later years, and what he presents against the Manichaean doctrine already contains what he had acquired through his immersion in Neoplatonism, in the non-representational, immaterial, non-sensual, abstract world. In relation to the world in which he now placed himself, what Manichaeism could offer him seemed to him, to a certain extent, to be no more than a registering of external, material things, which are then passed off as the divine. But those who come to spiritual science today will first learn to see these things in the right way. Let us consider, from the point of view of today's spiritual science, what may actually be at hand. I have already characterized to you: when one ascends to imaginative, to inspired knowledge, then one gradually becomes acquainted with the inner organs of the human being, concretely acquainted, and it does not result in that mystical world of fog that so many false mystics dream of, but rather it results in an objective insight into the inner organicity of the human being. It is precisely by understanding this inner organicity of man as a result of the spirit, by being able to see through it spiritually, that one gets to know it as material. I will give you an example of this. Let us say that a person who thinks more abstractly gets to know a so-called hypochondriac. An abstract thinker will easily say of a hypochondriac: There is actually nothing particularly wrong with him physically, he is only mentally ill. He is always dwelling too much on his own inner life, he lives entirely absorbed in introspection, as it were, and as a result judges the things of the outer world wrongly, often judging them as if they were persecuting him or the like. In any case, however, he comes into a false relationship with the outer world. And so it easily comes about that we say of the hypochondriac: there is nothing actually wrong with him physically, he is only mentally ill. Such an abstraction comes about because we have not yet penetrated to the actual inner structure of the human organization. This inner structure of the human organization is such that the human being is a threefold creature. There we have the head organization, which, as I have often explained, extends throughout the whole organism, but whose main seat is in the head and is therefore referred to as such; there we have the rhythmic organization of the chest organs, which includes breathing and blood circulation; and there we have everything that exists in the metabolic organism and the limb organism that is connected to it.

Now the fact is that in the head organization the individual organs are turned towards the outer world and are therefore outer sense organs. But in the other limbs of the human organism, too, we find that the organs, in addition to being digestive organs, are also sensory organs to a certain extent, and we find a kind of correspondence, a kind of polarity, between the organs of the head and the organs of metabolism. The organs of metabolism are also sense organs, only they are sense organs that are not directed outwards, but rather to the processes within the human skin. And so we find, for example, that the human being, in his head organization, directed outwards, has the sense of smell; with this he smells what is outside in his environment. Corresponding to this sense of smell, among the digestive organs, is the liver. The liver, so to speak, smells what is inside the person, in its environment. These things must be spoken about quite objectively if one wants to ascend to knowledge at all.

Now, you see, you have to direct your attention to the fact that what is, so to speak, the relationship of the organ of smell to the outside world corresponds to the relationship of the liver to the inner human processes. Now, in a hypochondriac, the liver is always out of order, quite simply as, if you will, a physical organ out of order. That is precisely what occurs in spiritual science, that it not only leads up into a nebulous spiritual realm, but that it also recognizes the material in its essence through the application of its methods, that it can therefore look into the functions of the material. And because liver complaints are usually associated with very little or no pain, they do not appear as a physically perceptible illness, but rather as a mental experience when the liver is not in order and therefore smells wrong on the inside. To the person who really sees through things, the hypochondriac is no different than someone whose liver is not in order and who therefore internally perceives what it very easily perceives as not exactly pleasantly smelling, not in a normal way, but in an overly sensitive way with his sick liver. He constantly smells himself inside, and this smelling, that is what actually underlies the hypochondriacal disposition. You see, you cannot characterize spiritual science as nebulous mysticism, because it leads to a truly objective knowledge of the material world as well. Materialism in particular does not come to these things because it only ever looks at them in abstract forms. Imaginative and inspired knowledge always explains so-called mental illnesses in terms of their physical foundations. From a spiritual scientific point of view, there are many more reasons to explain so-called physical illnesses from a spiritual point of view than there are to explain so-called mental illnesses. As a rule, mental illnesses are the most physical, that is to say, they are based on the most physical causes. And so it must be clear that anyone who sees through the spiritual world will also come to recognize the working of the spiritual in the material. He does not see the liver merely as what it presents itself as to the anatomist who dissects the corpses, but he sees the liver as an organ formed within, which in its outer form differs from the organ of smell, but nevertheless represents a metamorphosis of this organ of smell. And so much of what the spiritual researcher has to say about the material world will be, because he traces it back, I might say, to its spiritual causes, that he points precisely to the revelations of the material, because one recognizes the spiritual much more through the revelation of the material than through all kinds of mystical ravings and mystical nebulous so-called immersions into the inner self. They all arise, after all, from a certain reluctance to concern oneself with real knowledge and to brood over it in one's innermost being, which, after all, arises from nothing more than a certain disposition of physical organs. To practice mysticism in a nebulous sense is itself a kind of mental illness on a physical basis.

You see, something like the seeing of the spiritual in the material, that was what Augustine encountered in Manichaeism. But he was already too much born into - as is well known, he had the Greek mother Monica - the longing to get out of the physical, so that he could not have stuck with it. Therefore, he turned to Neoplatonism, and in this detour through Neoplatonism, he turned to Roman Catholicism.

We can see, then, how in this 4th century, in which the formative years of Augustine's education fall, people actually turned away from the spiritual contemplation of the external world and also of the inner world of man. This turning away was bound to happen. This turning away was bound to happen because man could never have become free, could never have become a free being, if he had felt himself to be only a part of the outer world, as I characterized it in the past evenings. Man had to, so to speak, get out of this amalgamation with the outer world. He had to turn away from the outer world for once. And the culmination of this turning away from the outer world, I would say, the point where man left consciousness: You are a member of the outer world, as the finger is a member of your organism - the culmination lies in this 4th century AD. What characterized the period before this fourth century AD was an evolution of humanity that basically came entirely from the human organism, I would say from the blood. In the southern regions of Europe, in North Africa and the Near East, human beings had already come to be abandoned, as it were, from their own human essence, in so far as it is a physical, an etheric one, and to ascend to an indeterminate state. For one might say that people had to develop into such an emptiness, into a void, where nothing is dependent on blood any more, where what is the view of life is no longer formed from the racial nature of man, people had to develop into such an emptiness in order to enter into intellectuality. What all the individual peoples had developed in terms of worldviews, knowledge and so on before this 4th century AD - of course, this is an approximation when specifying such a point in time - had arisen from their blood blood, just as we develop up to the change of teeth, which we also do not form out of our intelligence, but out of our organic substances, or how we develop up to sexual maturity, finally also out of the organism, and at the same time to the maturity of judgment. Thus everything that these peoples had produced in their old, instinctive imaginations and inspirations developed out of the blood. This had a racial origin everywhere. And when two races, two peoples of different bloods mixed somewhere, then the one people remained down below, they became slaves, while the other population rose to a certain extent, forming the upper ten thousand. Both these social differences and that which lived in the knowledge in the souls of men was entirely a result of race, of blood. But now these southern peoples, these peoples sitting around the Mediterranean, worked their way out of their blood. Now they worked their way through to a, if I may say so, purely spiritual level. For it was in the sphere of the purely spiritual that intelligence had to be developed.

You see, if man had continued to develop only from these Mediterranean peoples after the 4th century AD, he would have been, so to speak, without a foundation. The blood had nothing more to give. From the racial foundations nothing more developed in the way of soul abilities. Man was, so to speak, dependent on developing out of these regions into a vacuum, figuratively speaking.

This vacuum, that is to say this area of development free of racial factors, was now entered by the people of this Mediterranean region. They had to have something else to lean on. They had to receive from outside what used to come to them through their blood. And they received it in that calculating people, who at that time still knew from the old wisdom teachings how things actually are, transferred the old state views of the Roman Empire to the religious realm and founded the outer Catholic Church. This outer Catholic Church preserved what had previously emerged from the different races in the way of spiritual life; it preserved what the ancient times had kept and condensed it into dogmas. These dogmas were to be propagated. Nothing more was brought forth from man, but what was there was condensed into dogmas. And with that, an inanimate element was introduced from which man could really receive from outside what he had previously received from within. For the Latin language was propagated as a dead language, and the life of knowledge proceeded in the Latin language.

And so one had the one spiritual current, which consisted in the fact that what the old view of life had brought ran out, so to speak, in a dead element. If nothing else had come, this dead element would gradually have had to die out. The whole so-called culture would have had to die out. Admittedly, one would have had a high point, for it was a high point that had been lived up to at that time. The Catholic Church itself has taken over many Gnostic, Manichaean elements, only it has discarded the terminology. It has propagated the old world views. She also took up the old cult forms, preserved them and passed them on in a dead language. What thus continued to live was just as incapable of bringing forth anything that could have advanced civilization as, for example, a woman alone is incapable of bringing forth a child.

That was only one side of the being that was now necessary to move forward. The other side of the nature consisted in the fresh blood that the Germanic and other peoples migrating from Eastern Europe had in them. There was blood again. And the peculiar thing was that these peoples, in their development, if we do not take the word now in a judgmental way, but purely objectively in terms of terminology, were lagging behind the southern peoples. The southern peoples had, as it were, advanced at a gallop to the highest level of civilization, from which intellect then emerged. This stood at its highest level of development in the 4th century AD and was now to become established, to continue to live on as a dead intellect. Thus we have the survival of this dead intellect and the emergence of the Germanic blood of the other peoples who emerged to meet it.

If we now study the external historical processes, we come to something extraordinarily interesting. We come to say that in a certain period of time a complete transformation, a metamorphosis of Western life, is taking place. We see, in fact, that in a large, wide area of Europe, the old culture is dying out and a kind of peasant culture is emerging as a result of the so-called migration of peoples. What the upper crust had as their culture in the old Roman Empire is dying out. What remains is what the broad, settled population had, and something similar, albeit different, was also brought by the Germanic tribes. Within this rural way of life, where people actually lived in small village communities and told each other very different things in these small village communities than what the Catholic priests preached to them, within these areas where the village communities were, the Catholic religion was now spread by external power.

That was the one current that was in Latin. What did the people know who saw how their churches were built, how wisdom was passed on in Latin? What did these people, who were the mainstay of the villages at the time, know about what was going on? What they knew about were the stories they told each other in the evening after work, stories that consisted largely of musings, as we have come to know them from the ancient Egyptians and the like.

It was quite a worldview here, going through the time from the 4th to the 8th, 9th, 10th century through the village communities, which had long since been abandoned in the southern regions, at least among the upper crust. A fine culture had long since emerged from these foundations among the upper classes. And now, in the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries, we see - I have recently explained this in more detail in Dornach, I will only mention it here briefly - how the cities gradually crystallized from the mere village communities. The culture of the city begins, and it is as if the human being is torn away from the outer nature when he is concentrated together in the cities. This city culture, which we can follow from Brittany to Novgorod, deep into the Russian Empire, from above down to Spain, into Italy, everywhere this strange pull towards the city.

And if we look at what actually lives in this transition to urban life, then for those who can study history inwardly, it has a great similarity, an essential similarity to what happened when, after the Trojan War, the cities in Greece developed more out of a farming culture. What happened in Greece in the year 1200 BC was repeated up here now, around the year 950 or thereabouts – all these numbers are approximate – and much as 1200 and 950 years make a difference, so much were these people, who came over from the east as Germanic people, actually behind those in whose area they were now invading. If you add these numbers, the pre-Christian to the post-Christian, you get 2150 or 2160 years, and that is approximately the number of years that lies between two such successive cultures. You can see this from history if you really want to study history. If you ask yourself: how far behind were these Germanic peoples? - it is the length of a cultural epoch. A cultural epoch has lasted just that long, and so one can calculate the degree of maturity of backward peoples by their degree of backwardness.

Now we can also gain a certain clue as to why the fourth cultural epoch, which brought about the actual development of the intellect, begins around 747 BC and, let us say, ends in 1413. That gives you 2160 years. That is the length of such a cultural epoch. Of course, if we go further back, these numbers become somewhat blurred. But that is natural, because historical development cannot be characterized with mathematically exact numbers. These peoples brought something into the blood of the other, the southern population, which was basically there earlier. That was the other current.

And now the world-historical marriage was concluded between what was floating over in the Latin language and what was working its way up to the surface in the vernaculars, in very backward vernaculars. What could develop further had to emerge from these two elements. This then led to the development of the so-called consciousness soul in the 15th century, as I have often mentioned.

The old culture would have had to disappear completely if this new element had not been integrated into it, which in turn was now surrounded by this southern element. The backward and the advanced balanced each other out, and in place of a purely intellectual culture there arose a culture of consciousness.

In this culture, the intellect became a mere shadow. One no longer lived in it as in a grave, but it became a shadowy product, something that only lives in inner activity. And in this way the human being was, as it were, freed from being inwardly possessed by the intellect. He could apply the intellect in his inner activity and could now pass over to the outer observation of nature, as Galilei, Copernicus and Kepler did. But first the intellect had to be freed. If you look at everything that has emerged in European civilization since the beginning of the 15th century, you will see everywhere how it can be traced back to the penetration of this Germanic element into the old Latin-Roman. You can see this quite clearly down to the individual personalities.

Man had, so to speak, stepped into the void by developing from the south. But there was a strong awareness among the leading spirits that with the development of the intellect one enters into something empty. Certain personalities did not want to steer towards something new. If I now hypothetically put this under the aspect of historical development, then what could be said in the time that followed the 4th century AD can be expressed something like this. One could say: We either release the intellect, we let it develop, then the following happens. Whereas in the past what permeated man inwardly with spiritual and soul forces arose from him, he has now reached a highest point where his development has become free, so that he can develop into the void. What no longer clings to his body must, further developed, lead to man penetrating into a spiritual world from without. That was one thing one could have said to oneself. Or one could also say: We retain the old wisdom, we preserve it. Then we can say to people: By developing yourself intellectually up to the 4th century, you have now come to an end. You must not go further. You have come to nothing. Look back now, behind you, not ahead of you; do not continue to walk in the void, so that you may find a new spirituality by walking further. Steeped in this instinct to preserve the old and to hold the intellect back so that it does not develop further, the Eighth General Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869 was convened, which made a Catholic dogma out of what is then expressed in the words: Man has “unam animam rationalem et intellectualem”, he has a soul that is thinking and spiritual. But beyond this soul he has nothing, nothing further that is spiritual, for if anything spiritual had been ascribed to him, the way would have been open for him to develop into a new spirituality. Therefore, the tripartite human being was denied the spirit after body, soul and spirit, and only individual spiritual properties were attributed to his soul. He did not have body, soul and spirit, but body and soul, and the soul had thinking and spiritual properties, was rational and intellectual. It could not go further. That had now become dogma. It was nothing more than a statement of what actually existed in the matter of preserving the old and rationally processing the old, which was also intended to prevent further progress on the path of spiritual development. What was to become the child of the two merging currents was to be extinguished.

And that is what has continued to have an effect over the course of the 15th century and into our time. On the one hand, the human being has instinctively matured to gradually engage the intellect, of which he was already completely master, in inner activity. On the other hand, he was unable to keep this activated but shadowy mind in his spiritually empty interior, where it could have become active only on its own shadowiness. Although one would think that one would not try to process a shadow inwardly, that became the subject of all philosophy of that time, which therefore has only a shadowy quality. This is how Kantianism ultimately came about, which only has forms and categories, and which, like the other philosophies of the time, only splashes around in this shadowy realm.

It thus became clear that a shadowy intellect alone could not be used; it had to be filled with something else, and that is now the other side, and that could only be the outside world, that could only be external nature. This did not happen for some reason, for example, because man was once childlike and now gradually came to an understanding of nature, but because man needed it for his development. He needed fulfillment. In the last four to five centuries, we have experienced this fulfillment. The shadowy mind has taken hold of nature. This led to a climax. Right in the middle of the 19th century, the mind had become most shadowy.

While the mind itself is the most spiritual, it had been completely disregarded because it had become a shadow. But they had a developed, extensive natural science. The intellect had become filled with what nature offered from the outside, but the possibility of seeing the soul was fading more and more. This soul could be seen less and less, because when one turned to the outside world, one actually had only the shadowy intellect. That is why psychology, the study of the soul in the 19th century, became more and more, I would say, nominalistic, pure word skirmishing. It is downright bleak to read in the psychologies of the 19th century how people keep talking about feeling, wanting, thinking, and actually only have the words, until Fritz Mauthner finally comes and makes the great discovery that all knowledge consists of words and that people have only ever been mistaken when they sought for something behind the words.

This is characteristic of the 19th century, not of humanity, but of the 19th century. In this respect, Mauthner's discovery is not so bad after all. The 19th century, especially when it spoke of the soul, only wove in words, until people finally recognized this weaving in words, this constant juggling with thinking, feeling and willing, apperception ion and perception and everything possible, that which has emerged in English psychology since Alume, especially in the 19th century since John Stuart Mill, this juggling with mere words, until it became too stupid for people. And they said: Now we have found out something so beautiful in natural science through experimentation, so we also experiment with the soul. - Devices had been developed that could emit signals when a person had a perception. One could then know when this perception became conscious, when a person moved his hand as a result of this perception; one could experiment nicely. Until recently, the tendency has been to assess children's abilities, not by putting oneself in the child's place, by a certain devotion to this childlike mind, but by using apparatus to test memory, thinking, and all sorts of other things, as is reported, for example, in Russian schools, where the old style of testing is no longer used, but where abilities are determined from the outside with the help of apparatus. However, this Bolshevik view has already penetrated into our areas. Certain opponents of anthroposophy would also like to determine in such an external way whether this anthroposophy is based on truth, but that only corresponds to a Bolshevik prejudice. All this has its origin in the fact that, by ignoring the spirit, people have gradually come to apply the shadowy intellect to nature and, while producing a magnificent natural science, have left the soul-life unconsidered. But now this soul is asserting itself again, from the depths of the human being, and wants to be explored. To do this, it is necessary to go back the way we came, to remember it, so to speak.

Even if modern science believes itself to be independent, it is still under the influence of the dictate of the Church that man consists only of body and soul and has no spirit. We must come to the spirit again. And basically, spiritual science is just this striving to come to the spirit again and thus to explore the soul of man again, that is, to explore man himself. One will pass through an element that is indeed unpleasant for many, through the organization of man; but it is precisely through this that one will find the truly spiritual in man. But that means that spirit must be reintroduced into the contemplation of humanity. Today, however, there is a considerable obstacle to this, a formidable obstacle. One would almost be afraid to speak of this obstacle, because it is very slippery ground, but the whole signature of the time must be examined. People must become aware of what is actually the impulse of our time. You see, we must consider the following.

Since the middle of the 15th century, when man has lived in the shadowy mind and actually experienced his entire soul existence as a shadow, since that time man has been completely dependent on external nature. And so he gradually came to investigate the external phenomena of nature experimentally, not only in the way that Goethe, who was still inspired by the spirit of antiquity, investigated them, but to seek behind the phenomena for something that is basically also only a kind of phenomenon, but which must not be placed within them. Man came to atomism. Man came to think of the sense world as having another invisible sense world, smaller beings, demonic beings, the atoms. Instead of moving on to a spiritual world, he moved on to a duplicate of the sensual world, again to a sensual but fictitious world, and in this way his cognitive faculty froze for the external sense world. And in the course of the 19th century, this produced more and more something that had always been present, but which only emerged with full radicalism from this complete paralysis of the ability to perceive the external sensory world in the 19th century. That was the over-intellectualization of the law of the conservation of energy. It was said: In the universe, new forces do not arise, but the old ones merely change; the sum of the forces remains constant. If we consider any given moment, so to speak cutting out of world events, then up to this moment there was a certain sum of energies; in the next moment these energies have grouped themselves somewhat differently, they have moved around differently, but the energies are the same; they have only changed. The sum of the energies of the cosmos remains the same. You could no longer distinguish two things. It was perfectly correct to say that measure, number and weight remain the same in the energies. But that is confused with the energies themselves.

Now, if this energy doctrine, this law of the constancy of energy, which today dominates all of natural science, were correct, then there would be no freedom, then every idea of freedom would be a mere illusion. Therefore, for the followers of the law of the constancy of energy, freedom increasingly became an illusion. Just imagine how people like Wundt, for example, explain the freedom that one does feel after all. If I, let us say, am the donkey of the famous Buridan between two bundles of hay, left and right, which are the same size and the same taste, then if I were free, that is, if I were not pushed to one side or the other, I would have to starve to death because I could not make up my mind. When I have to decide not only between two such things, but between many, then, according to such psychologists, I am driven to it nevertheless, but because there are so many concepts that shoot into each other, what obsesses me inside and what works in confusion there, I decide at last and, because I cannot see what actually compels me to do it, I get the feeling of freedom. Yes, it is not ridiculous, it is really not ridiculous for the reason that what I have told you now – I did not expect at all that one would begin to laugh – is stated in numerous very learned works as a great achievement of modern thinking, which is born out of natural science; thus it is actually indecent toward science to laugh about something like that. Well, you see, freedom would be impossible if the law of conservation of energy were true. Because then I would be determined by everything that has gone before at every moment, the energies would merely be transformed, and freedom would have to be a mere illusion. This is what has happened as a result of the development of mankind in the 19th century, through the establishment of the law of the constancy of energy, that we have a view of nature that excludes freedom as an idea, makes it impossible, that makes man unconditionally a product of the necessary order of nature. Things were already prepared, I would like to say, people have felt this way for centuries. What about things like moral responsibility, ethics, religious conviction, which really cannot exist if there is only a natural order? The materialists of the 19th century were honest in a way, they therefore denied these ethical illusions of the old days and really did explain man as only a product of natural necessity. But others could not go along with this, partly because they did not have the courage, like David Friedrich Strauf? or Vogt, or partly because they had sinecures within which they were obliged to speak of freedom, ethics, and religion. You can't go into such things there. The matter had been awkward for a long time, and so it came about that people said to themselves: Yes, with science, you can only do something about necessity. This science proves that the world has emerged from a primeval nebula and that each successive state has always necessarily developed from the earlier one, that the sum of forces has remained constant and so on. With this science, there is no starting point for ethics, religion and so on. So away from this science! Nothing with science, only faith! You have to have a double accounting, on the one hand for the outside world, for the natural world: science; on the other hand, faith, which now determines ethics, even proves God. So we save ourselves to a completely different area than that of science.

The after-effects of this peculiar state of affairs can be seen everywhere since the emergence of newer spiritual science. Those who want to save this belief are called Zaun, Niebergall and Gogarten, and I could tell you a whole series of people, Bruhn, Leese, who think that the field of faith must be saved; when science breaks in, things get bad. So science, everything is accepted, everything is allowed to go, only what we want is called something else: faith. Now, as I said, it was the law of the conservation of energy, but that is only a dogmatic, now a scientific-dogmatic prejudice. Because in the end, what does it actually mean? You see, someone can do the experiment, can say: Yes, I stand in front of a bank building and watch how much money is brought in, and form statistics from that. And then I observe how much money is carried out and also make statistics about that, and I see, nevertheless, the same amount of money is carried out that was carried in. Now I am supposed to still rise to the idea that people work in there! What comes out is only the converted money. It is purely the law of the constancy of the size of money. Very nice experiments have been carried out, which, it seems, have been extended to students. The heat energy of the food has been calculated, and it has been calculated what these people have done, and it has been correctly calculated what was eaten and worked out: the law of conservation of energy! This law of conservation of energy is based on nothing more than a whole series of such prejudices. And if we do not rise above this law of conservation of energy, we will continue to extinguish the spiritual with this law of conservation of energy. For this law of conservation of energy is the implantation of intellect in external nature and the disregard of the soul.

We can only penetrate further into the soul if we in turn penetrate into the spiritual , and to penetrate into this spiritual realm means nothing other than to truly understand what actually entered into world evolution at the beginning of the Christian era as a completely new impulse, the Christ Impulse. I have already mentioned that it was understood in the way that it could be understood by one or other school of thought. But today we are compelled to understand it anew. For a time it was understood in such a way that people did not want to admit that the intellect, going out into the void, could come to a new spiritual realization. I have already told you that Neoplatonism took the Christ into the human soul. This has remained the custom until now. As we penetrate outwards, we must also think of the Christ as being connected with the outer world, that is, we must bring him into the evolution of the outer world. But that is precisely what is being fought against in anthroposophy: not only talking about the Christ in empty phrases, but also seeing him in connection with the whole evolution of the world. And when it is said that it is truly a cosmic event, that a cosmic being has really appeared in a human body, in Christ, that just as sunlight on the earthly plane unites with the earth every day, permeating the earth as something cosmic, so too in the spiritual realm such things take place, this is still not understood, especially by today's scholars. But it is necessary that what has been gained in the field of natural science should be applied to the inner world, so that this intellect, which has become a shadow, but precisely for that reason has become applicable to the outer world as a free human faculty, should also become applicable to the inner world. Therefore, the ascent to imagination, to inspiration, must come about, and thus the ascent to real spiritual knowledge must come about.

The necessity of natural science arises from the historical development of humanity, and the necessity of ascending to spiritual science arises from the existence of natural science. Turning to spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense is not a quirk, but an historical fact of development in itself. But, as I said, it is necessary to tread on thin ice in order to point out where the obstacles are. On the one hand, the obstacles are to be found in something like the law of the conservation of energy. In the 19th century, two laws were intended to limit the human intellect in two ways to that which lives only in the earthly-sensual, in the material. One of these laws was decreed by a council of natural scientists as the law of conservation of energy. If this law is correct, then human knowledge cannot advance to the acknowledgment of the spiritual and of freedom, but must remain at the level of a mere mechanical necessity, and then it must remain at the level of a mere soul, which gradually becomes shadowy. But then one cannot go beyond what has already been established by the eighth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869.

These are the two councils: one that started from the natural science side. The other council stands in polar opposition to it. It is the one that in 1870 declared the infallibility of the papal chair when it speaks ex cathedra. In order to arrive at knowledge, people no longer appeal to the spiritual, but to the Roman Pope. The Pope is the one who decides ex cathedra on what is to be true or false as Catholic doctrine. The decision about truth and error is brought down from spiritual heights to earth, into the material world. Just as our knowledge is immersed in the material world through the law of the constancy of force, so is the living development of the human being in the spiritual immersed in the material through the dogma of infallibility. The two belong together, the two relate to each other like the north and south poles.

What we need in the development of humanity, however, is a free spirituality. The ruler must be the spiritual itself, and man must find his way into the spiritual. Therefore, we need the ascent into the spiritual. We need this ascent to raise ourselves up, on the one hand, from the defeat that the spirit has suffered as a result of the law of the conservation of force being established, and from the other defeat that it has suffered as a result of all that is religious having been materialized by the decision about right and wrong being brought down to earth from Rome. It is understandable that a breakthrough in the path of the spirit is not easy today, because the world is thoroughly superficial and is terribly proud of its superficiality. It lets authorities decide, but the authorities sometimes decide in a very strange way. I recently read an article written by a professor who teaches here but lives in a neighboring town, because a local paper had asked him to give an authoritative judgment on this anthroposophy. This professor wrote all sorts of things in this article. Then, in the middle of it, you come across a strange sentence. It says that I claim, in describing the spiritual world, that one can see in this spiritual world how spiritual entities move freely like tables and chairs in physical space. Now that is Traub's logic! Seeing tables and chairs move in physical space – I don't want to examine the mental state of the author at the moment when he wrote such a sentence! But today the journals turn to people of such spiritual caliber when an authoritative decision is to be made about spiritual science. People are strange sometimes. For example, there is a fence. Because I have to give a lecture tomorrow, I read this booklet by Laun yesterday. I always asked myself: Yes, why does Laun talk such nonsense? I actually couldn't understand it because I didn't hear any human voice; it was something very hollow. However, I did come across a very strange sentence, which roughly reads – I don't have the pamphlet here –: It is true, however, that a Catholic Christian, if he were to judge anthroposophy, would actually be like a person who could not know anything about anthroposophy. – That is literally what it says. You can really believe Canon Laun, because then he says quite correctly: Yes, it would be self-evident that a Catholic Christian cannot know anything, because since July 18, 1919, Christians have been forbidden to read the books. They are not forbidden to write counter-writings, but they are forbidden to read the books! - They are not allowed to know anything. There are really strange people.

And that is just the other extreme, this state of having arrived at a completely passive devotion, now not to a spiritual thing, but to something very worldly, to something that definitely exists in the material world. And so one could enumerate many more examples. If one wanted to describe the morality of our time in a little cultural history, one would find many a cute little document. But I will give you just one more example. Here a dangerous heresy – you can guess what it is – is discussed in a feature from Göttingen. But the editors apparently count on the fact that the readers who read this have not read anything at all, have actually not heard anything correct about the subject under discussion. Therefore, a note of fourteen lines is made, and in these fourteen lines, Anthroposophy and Threefolding. I will spare you the treatise on Anthroposophy; I will just read you the last sentence, which is about the threefolding: “The movement strives for the highest possible development of humanity. It has also defined its views with regard to the state. It seeks a division into economic, financial and cultural states!” There you have the threefold order: in the economic, financial and cultural state! So you see, this is how one tries to educate those one is addressing in such criticisms, and one can educate them in such a way. One writes such articles by making comments in which one shows oneself to be so well informed! It is difficult to really struggle through to an understanding of the spiritual world, especially when on the one hand there is the impulse of world-historical development and on the other hand there is the scientific way of thinking, which, one might say, has only been perverted into its opposite with the discovery of the law of the constancy of energy or power. Much will rise up against this work, which consists in the cognizant grasping of the spiritual world. But this work must be done, and even if the opponents have the power to crush it for a time, it must arise again, because if we are to learn from history, we must not only learn to speak from this history, but we must learn to fuel our will and warm our hearts from this history! If we allow history to have this effect on us, then it will show us what our deeds must fulfill, what must penetrate into the spiritual, into the legal-national, into the economic as spiritual.

That is what I wanted to say in conclusion. I wanted to give you an objective presentation of how natural science grows out of the course of human development, and to give, at the end, this perhaps only as an appendix, the realization that it is a lesson of real history, not an agnostic history, that we have lived through in the 19th century, but that it is a teaching of real history: we human beings, we must through to spiritual knowledge!

Today, we shall discuss in broad outline a chapter from the knowledge that the spiritual researcher can gain in the way characterized the day before yesterday. To an even greater degree than in yesterday's lecture, everything said today could be considered a kind of fantasy. After the discussions of the day before yesterday, however, it may well be assumed that what is to be presented today in the form of a simple narrative is to be regarded as a sum of research results that arise from the observation of the higher worlds. So today, simply told, is what man experiences when he progresses after death through the various worlds through which he is destined to go.

We shall begin at the point in a person's life when he is about to pass through the gate of death, when, in the way described yesterday, he discards his physical body and ascends into another, spiritual existence. What the human being experiences immediately after passing through the gate of death, after discarding the physical body, is what should be considered first.

The first impression that our astral body and our ego have after a person's death is that the person can look back on their life that has just passed, the one between birth and death, can look back on a comprehensive memory tableau. The individual events of the past life, which have long since vanished from the spiritual view, appear before the soul at this important turning point in life, so to speak, with all their details. And if we ask ourselves how such a thing is possible, we can at least make what presents itself to the clairvoyant eye comprehensible to ourselves by pointing to those all-too-familiar moments in life that those who have once been in mortal danger, such as a fall in the mountains or near drowning, tell us about. They say that in such moments their whole past life stood before their eyes as in a great painting. What is told in this way can certainly be confirmed by spiritual science.

But how is it that in such moments the whole of one's past life appears before one's eyes as in a great tableau? It is because that which one can see with one's physical eyes or grasp with one's physical hands, that is to say, what is called the physical body of man, is permeated and imbued with the etheric or life body. This is the second and already invisible link of the human being, which prevents the physical body in the time between birth and death from following the physical, chemical and laws implanted in it. This etheric or life body, this second body of man, is, so to speak, our faithful fighter against the disintegration of the physical body.

Now it may be understandable that for a physical eye, that for physical science, with the onset of death, the entire human being seems to succumb to this death; for that which passes through the gate of death, which then has those impressions that are to be described, that is only present for spiritual knowledge, only for a clairvoyant eye. But everything that exists only for spiritual knowledge must necessarily appear as nothingness to the physical eye.

You will see nothing in the eternal void,
not hear the step you take,
find nothing solid to rest upon.

Thus speaks Mephistopheles in Goethe's “Faust”. It will be like this forever. This description shows Mephistopheles to be the representative of a world view that focuses only on external, physical existence and sees nothing in everything that can be attained through knowledge beyond this physical existence. But he who has a presentiment and a realization that forces slumber in the human being, which can be developed so that spiritual worlds break into this human soul as light and color break into the operated eye of the blind-born, will also become eternal. This human soul, who has a presentiment of such higher knowledge, will reply to materialism with the words that Faust utters to Mephistopheles:

In your nothingness I hope to find the All.

Just as Faust hopes to find the All in the nothingness, so we too must go to the nothingness of the materialistic attitude and view if we want to grasp that which passes through the portal of death and then has its impressions when there are no longer any physical tools, no physical organs through which an external world can be mediated. This nothing of the materialist, this fundamental essence of human nature for the spiritual view, that is what this enormous tableau of memories presents, in which all the individual experiences of the last existence are included, and in a higher sense, are also included as after that shock that a person experiences when his life is in danger, when he is about to drown. What actually happens to a person when they face mortal danger? Due to the shock they have suffered, their etheric or life body has been loosened from their physical body for a short while. Now, however, this etheric or life body in humans - let it be explicitly stated: in humans - is also the carrier of memory, and in ordinary life, when this etheric or life body is connected to the physical body, then the physical body is a kind of obstacle, a kind of hindrance to the emergence of all the individual memories, all the individual mental images. But when the etheric or life body is lifted out of the physical body for a short while by such a shock, then the whole life appears in a memory painting before the soul, and we then have in such a person at the moment of drowning drowning we have a kind of analogy to what happens immediately after death, when the etheric or life body is released with all its powers, since the physical body is discarded at death.

This is the one experience that comes after the human being has crossed the threshold of death. But we must characterize it more precisely. This experience is quite peculiar. It is not that we experience the events of the past life exactly in the same way as we went through them in life. In life, the events of the day make an impression on us of pleasure, of joy, of pain, of suffering. They approach us in such a way that we have sympathy and antipathy for them. In short, these events stir our emotions, and also spur us on to exercise our will, our desire, in this or that way. All these things, our pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, our sympathy and antipathy, our interest in the outer phenomena of existence, all this is, for the time just discussed, as if extinguished in the human soul, and the memory picture stands there, truly like a picture. If we have a picture before us, a scene we imagine, where we would suffer terribly - we endure it objectively, neutrally, when it is presented to us in the picture. But so does the memory picture of the whole of life come to our soul: we experience it without the participation that we have otherwise had in life.

That is one thing. The other is that the human being now experiences something immediately after passing through the gate of death, which he has only become acquainted with to a very small extent between birth and death, if he has not become a spiritual researcher himself. In life we are always outside of things, outside of the entities that are around us. The tables, the chairs are outside of us, the flora spread over the field is outside of us. The impression immediately after death is as if our being would pour out over everything that is outside of us. We plunge into things, as it were, we feel at one with them. There is a feeling of the soul spreading and expanding, a merging with the things in the external environment as images. This experience lasts for different lengths of time, as spiritual research shows us with the methods we have been talking about; but in general it is a brief experience after death. Today, after more exact clairvoyant research on this subject, we can even speak of how long the time period is for each individual, depending on their individuality. You know that different people, in their normal state of life, can stay awake for different lengths of time, if need be, without being overcome by sleep. One person can keep awake for three, four, five days on my account, another can only do it for thirty-six hours, and so on. As long as a person on the average has been able to keep awake in the normal state of life without being forced down by sleep, so long, on the average, does this tableau of memories last. So it is to be calculated in days and is different for different people.

Then, when this tableau of memories has come to an end, when it has gradually faded, for it shows a gradual darkening, the person feels something like certain forces withdrawing within him and something that was previously in his nature being expelled. That which is expelled is now a second corpse of man, an invisible corpse; it is that in man which he cannot take with him from his etheric or life body through the following experiences in the spiritual world. While the physical body has already been rejected and returned to its physical substances and forces, the etheric or life body is now being pressed out and distributed into that world which we call the ether world, which in turn is a nothing for the one who can only see and think materialistically, but which interweaves and interlives everything for the one whose spiritual eyes are open. Now, however, something remains of this expressed etheric or life body, which can be described as an essence, as an extract of everything that has been experienced. It is, as it were, the experiences of the last existence between birth and death, crowded together into a germ, which now remain united with what the person is. So the fruit of the last life, compressed, remains.

So what does a person have in the further course of their after-death life? The person retains what we call the carrier of their ego, what we call their ego itself; but this ego is initially enveloped by what we have characterized as the third link of the human being after the physical and etheric or life body, this ego is enveloped by the astral body. We could say that the human being's astral body is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, of joy and pain, of urges, desires and passions. All that twitches through our soul during the day as lust and suffering, as urges, desires and passions, the astral body is the carrier of it, and every night I and the astral body leave the physical and the etheric or life body of the human being, which remain in bed during sleep. Now, after death, we have united the ego and the astral body with that life essence, of which we could just say that it has been extracted as a fruit or germ from the etheric or life body. With these members of his being, the human being now continues his journey through the so-called soul world. If we want to understand what the spiritual view of the human being can reveal to us about this world, then we must first realize that it is the astral body that is the carrier of everything that is enjoyment, desire, interest in the things around us. Yes, the astral body is the carrier of all pleasures, desires, all pains and sufferings, even of the basest desires, the desires that are linked, for example, to our nutrition. The physical body is a structure of physical and chemical forces and laws. It is not the physical body that feels pleasure and enjoyment in relation to food and stimulants, that is the human being's astral body. The physical body only provides the tools so that we can procure such pleasures, which take place in the astral body. Now, anyone who has gained an understanding that the human being's astral body is something real, something actual, not just a function, a result of the interaction of physical and chemical processes, will not be surprised when it is said that at the moment of death, when the physical body is discarded, the astral body does not immediately lose its desire for the pleasures. Indeed it does not. Let us take a blatant case, for my sake, of a person who was a gourmet in life, who enjoyed delicious food. What happened to him at the time of death? He lost the opportunity – because he discarded his physical tools – to obtain the pleasures in his astral body. But the craving for these pleasures remained in his astral body. The result of this is that the person is now in the same situation with regard to these pleasures – albeit for different reasons – as he would be if he were in a place in the physical life where he suffers from burning thirst and there is nothing far and wide that can quench that thirst. After death, the astral body suffers from a burning thirst because the physical organs through which this thirst can be satisfied are not there. The tools have been laid aside, but the craving for these pleasures has remained in the astral body. The consequence of this is that man is now in the same situation with regard to these pleasures, the astral body suffers a burning thirst. In the astral body are still all those instincts, desires and passions that can only be satisfied by the physical tools. Therefore, it is understandable, simply from this logical consideration, what the spiritual researcher must say in this area: After discarding his etheric or life body, the human being goes through a time in which, with regard to his innermost being, he must unlearn all longings and desires that can only be satisfied through the physical tools of the physical body. This is the time of purification, of cleansing, during which all longings for anything in the astral body must be uprooted, longings that can only be obtained by man by putting his physical tools to work.

We will find it understandable that, again, depending on the individuality of the person, the time will vary that must be gone through for the sake of this purification, for the sake of this uprooting of desires that only go to the physical world. But the human being also undergoes this time in such a way that it does not merely count in days, but that, according to the research of the science of the next life, it takes up about one third of the life in the physical world that has passed between birth and death. It is understandable to those who are able to look more deeply that the time of purification takes up about a third of one's lifetime. If you look at human life, you find that this human life between birth and death clearly falls into three thirds. The first third of life is there for the human being's abilities and talents, which come into being through birth, to work their way through the obstacles of the physical world. There is a kind of ascending life in the first third. The human being gradually takes possession of his physical organs as a spiritual being. Then comes the next third of life, which lasts approximately from the ages of 21 to 42 on average. The first lasts until the age of 21. This second third of life takes up the development of all those powers that a person can unfold by interacting with his inner being, with his soul, with the outside world. By this time, he has already formed the organs of his physical and etheric or life body plastically, so he no longer has any obstacles in them. He is fully grown. His soul enters into direct relationship with the outer world. This lasts until the time when man must begin to draw again on his physical and etheric or life body, and this then happens for the rest of his life. Then man draws again, little by little, on what he has formed plastically in his youth. We have been able to point out the wonderful connection that exists between youth and old age. If during the time when the inner human being is plastically formed in the organs of the human being, if the human being acquires certain qualities, if during this time he has overcome various impulses of anger in his soul, if he has gone through what we call the feeling of devotion, then the effect of this comes to expression precisely in the last third of life. In the middle third, this goes on as in a hidden stream. And what we call 'conquered anger' comes to the fore in old age as 'just mildness', so that in conquered anger lies the cause of mildness. And from the mood of devotion that we cultivate in our younger years, at the end of our lives comes that quality that we see in people who can enter into a community and, without saying much, have the effect of blessing.

It is clear that a person's life is divided into three thirds. In the first third, the person works towards his physical body; in the last third of life, he feeds on his physical body again; in the middle third of life, the soul is, so to speak, left to its own devices. This middle period must, as it seems understandable, correspond to the period of purification after death. There the soul is free of the physical body and etheric or life body and is in a similar relationship to its spiritual environment as in the second third of life.

What the spiritual researcher is able to see, we can logically understand if we take a look at ordinary life. We can understand that the stated time is an average figure, and that for some people the time of purification will be longer, for others shorter. It will be longer for those who, with all their passions, are devoted to a purely sensual existence, who hardly know anything other than the satisfaction of those pleasures that are tied to the physical organs of the body. But for those who, in their ordinary lives, by penetrating into art, by knowledge, are already able to see the spiritual secrets of existence that penetrate through the veil of the physical, who, even if only intuitively, grasp the revelations of the grasp the revelations of the spirit through the veil of the physical, for him the time of purification will be shorter, because he will pass through the gate of death prepared for everything that can only come from the spiritual world as satisfaction.

So here we have a time that man goes through between death and a new birth, which differs essentially from the time immediately after death, which is counted in days. During this time, which is counted in days, we have a neutral memory tableau, in the face of which all our interest and participation fall silent. During the time of purification, however, we have everything in our soul that has drawn us to our experiences through longing for pleasure, through longing for desire. It is precisely our emotional life, our life of feeling, that is what takes place in the soul during this time of purification.

Now, however, spiritual research shows us a remarkable peculiarity of this time of purification. As strange as it sounds, it is nevertheless true: this time of purification runs from back to front, so that we have the impression that we are first going through the last year of our physical life, then the year before last, and then the third last. And so we live through our lives, purifying and cleansing ourselves, as in a mirror image, going through it in such a way that it appears as if it were going from death to birth, and at the end of the time of purification we stand in the moment of birth. First old age, then middle age, all the way back to childhood, we go through life.

Now no one should imagine that this is only a terrible time, only a time in which one experiences burning thirst and goes through longings. All this is certainly there, but it is not the only thing. We also relive everything that we have already gone through spiritually between birth and death, we also relive the good events of life in such a way that we have them before us again, as it were, in a mirror image. We will soon see what that is like by looking at this time even more closely. Suppose a person had died at the age of 60. Then he first experiences the 59th, then the 58th, the 57th year of life and so on; he only experiences everything backwards in a kind of mirror image. What remains is that we feel as if we are poured out over the things and beings of the world, as if we are in all beings and things in it. Now let us take the fact that in a life that lasted until the age of 60, we would have offended someone at the age of 40. So we relive twenty years at triple speed. When we arrive at the age of 40, we relive the pain that we caused the other person, but we do not experience what we went through at the time, but what the other person went through. If we have caused someone pain out of a sense of revenge or out of a surge of anger and then, after death, looking back, we come to that moment, we do not feel the satisfaction we experienced, but rather what the other person experienced. We are placed in his position in spirit. And so it is with everything we experience as we journey backwards in time. We relive all the good deeds we have done in life, the beneficial effects they have had on those around us.

We experience this with our soul, which feels as if it has been poured out into the whole environment. This is not without effect, but by experiencing everything, the person takes with them certain impressions from all these situations. We can characterize this as follows. But I would like to make it clear that these things can only be characterized comparatively with words, because you can understand that our words are coined for the physical world and are actually only applicable to this physical world in the right sense. If we use these words - and we could not otherwise communicate about all the mysterious worlds that open up to the spiritual eye - then we must be aware that these words only have an approximate meaning. What is being relived can only be characterized as follows: When a person perceives the pain he has caused another, when he relives this pain after death, he feels it as an obstacle to development. He says to himself in his soul: What would I have become if I had not caused this pain to the other? This pain is something that holds back my whole being from a degree of perfection that it could otherwise have achieved. And so the person says to himself in the face of everything he has spread in the way of error and lies, of ugliness in his surroundings: These are obstacles to development, something that I myself have placed in the way of my perfection. And from this a power is formed in the human soul, which leads to the fact that man in the state in which he now lives between death and a new birth, absorbs the longing, absorbs the will impulses to remove these obstacles from the path. That means that, step by step, we take on impulses in our backward migration to make amends in the next life, to balance out the obstacles we have placed in our own way.

Therefore, we must not believe that what we are going through is merely suffering. It is suffering and deprivation, and it is painful when we see all that we have caused ourselves loaded onto our own soul; but we experience it in such a way that we are glad to be able to experience it, because only through it can we absorb that strength that enables us to remove those obstacles from our path. And so all these impulses that we absorb during the time of purification add up, and when we go back to the beginning of our last life, there is a mighty sum that lives in us as a tremendous urge to make up for everything in a new life, in the following stages of existence, that needs to be made up for in the sense described. Thus, at the end of the time of purification, we are endowed with the strength to develop our will in the future in such a way that compensation is made for everything wrong, ugly, and bad that we have done. This is a power of which man can get some idea if, through wise self-knowledge, he familiarizes himself with the pangs of conscience it causes him when he thinks back to what he has done to this or that person. But all this remains merely a thought in life. It becomes a mighty creative urge during the time of purification between death and a new birth. And equipped with this creative urge, the human being now enters into a new life: the actual spiritual life.

If we want to understand this spiritual life that man enters after the time of purification, then we can do so in the following way. It is difficult to capture in words the very different experiences that the spiritual researcher has when he examines the life between death and a new birth, the very different essential impressions that cannot be compared to anything that the eye can see in the world of the senses and the brain-bound intellect can think, to capture it in the words of our language; but one can get an idea of what the spiritual researcher can experience as a new world through his insight into the spiritual world, in the following way. When you look around you and want to understand the world, when you want to understand what is around you, then you do this by thinking, by forming ideas of the things that are around you. It would be a logically absurd idea if someone were to think that you could scoop water out of a glass in which there is none. It would be just the same if you imagined that you could extract or scoop out of a world of thoughts and laws when there are no thoughts and no laws in it. All human knowledge, all human insight would be vain dreams, would be nothing but fantasy if the thoughts that we ultimately form in our minds did not already underlie things as thoughts, that things have sprung from thoughts. All those who believe that thoughts are only something that the human mind forms, that is not the basis of things as the actual forces of action and creation of things, should just give up all thinking altogether; for the thoughts that would be formed without corresponding to an external world of thoughts would be mere fantasies. Only he thinks truly who knows that his thinking corresponds to the outer world of thoughts and, as in a mirror, awakens the outer world of thoughts within us; he knows that all things originally sprang from this world of thoughts.

Thus, for us human beings, thought is the last thing we grasp of the things, but it underlies them as their first. The creative thought underlies the things, but the thoughts of men, through which man ultimately recognizes, differ in a certain, very significant respect from the creative thoughts outside. When you try to look into the human soul, you will say to yourself: however this human thinking may roam in the horizon of thoughts and ideas, as long as man thinks, as long as he tries to fathom the secrets of things through his thoughts, they will resemble something that is far removed from all creativity. That is the fateful quality of human thoughts, that they have lost the productive, the creative element that is contained in the thoughts that interweave and live through the world outside. Those thoughts that permeate the outside world are imbued with the element that first sprouts up in the human interior like a mysterious substratum of our existence. You know that your ideas, if they are to be transformed into will, must first be submerged into the depths of human existence, that the thought itself is not yet permeated by the will. But the thought that works outside in the world is permeated and interwoven with will. And that is precisely what is unique about the spirit, which objectively interweaves things outside, that it is creative. But through this it is no longer mere thought, through this it is spirit. The thought of human nature has come about through the will being pressed out of the spirit and this appearing like a reflex first out of man. To the spiritual eye, it is nowhere to be seen outside, separate from the creative.

Man enters into this spirit, which contains will and thought locked together in itself, as into a new world, when he has passed through his time of purification after death. And just as we live here in this world, which we pass through between birth and death, surrounded by the impressions of our senses, surrounded by everything our mind can think, so, as we are surrounded and enclosed by the physical world, so man is surrounded by the creative spiritual world everywhere after the time of purification. And he is within this creative spiritual world, he is part of it and belongs to it. This is also the first experience that occurs when the time of purification is over: man does not feel himself in a world that surrounds him with a horizon of things that he can perceive, but he feels himself inside a world where he is creative through and through. Everything that a person has taken in during their last life and even earlier lives, insofar as it has not yet been processed, and in particular everything that is in the described extract of their etheric or life body, everything that is left behind in his astral body, as that mighty impulse that wants to balance the obstacles that have been noticed, everything that is in man, he now feels it productively in himself, he now feels it creatively.

Now, life within productivity is something that is best described by the term bliss or beatitude. You can observe the blissful feeling at a comparatively lower level in everyday life when you see a hen sitting on an egg, hatching it. The warmth of bliss lies in the act of producing. In a higher sense, one can perceive this bliss of production when the artist can transform into the material world what has matured in his soul, when he can create. The whole human being is imbued with this feeling of bliss when passing through the spiritual world.

What does a person bring with them into the spiritual world? They bring with them everything they have gained in the way of fruits, of essence, from their last and other previous lives, which we could say the day before yesterday had come to our soul as an experience , but that in the life between birth and death, because he has a boundary at the physical and etheric or life body, the human being must first keep it within himself and cannot work it into his overall being. Now the physical and etheric or life body is no longer there, now he works in pure spiritual substantiality, now he imprints on it everything he has experienced in the last life, but which he could not work into himself because of the limitations of his physical and etheric or life body.

If we now concern ourselves with the length of time during which man productively works into the spiritual what he has gained in the last life, then we must ask ourselves above all: Does this law of repeated earthly lives, to which we have been pointed, have a certain meaning? Yes, it has a meaning, and this is shown by the fact that a person, after having gone through one incarnation, does not appear in a new life when he can undergo the same experiences again, but only when the earthly outer world has changed in the meantime so that he can undergo completely new experiences. Anyone who reflects a little on evolution will find that, even in physical terms, the earth's physiognomy changes considerably from millennium to millennium. Consider what it might have looked like here, where the city is now, at the time of Christ, how it was quite different, and how this patch of earth has changed since that time; and consider how what we call the moral, intellectual and other spiritual development of humanity has changed over the course of a few centuries. Consider what children absorbed during their first years of life a few centuries ago, and consider what they assimilate during their first years of life today. The earth changes its physiognomy, and after a certain time the human being can enter the earth again and everything is so changed that he can now experience something new. Only when the human being can experience something new, only then does he enter this world anew.

The time between death and a new birth is determined by the fact that when a person incarnates, say in any given century, he grows into very specific hereditary circumstances through the birth. We know that we cannot imagine the human core of being, the spiritual soul of the human being, as if it were added together from the qualities of the parents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and so on. We have emphasized that just as the earthworm does not grow out of the mud, the human soul does not arise out of the physical. The soul arises out of the soul, as does the living out of the living. We have emphasized that this human soul points us back to a previous life and that it comes into existence through birth in such a way that it draws together the hereditary characteristics. But when we consider the soul, we must also realize that when we look back on a previous life, we carry with us from that earlier human life, through birth, those qualities that gradually unfold in the course of time between death and a new birth. We then take with us through the gate of death what we have newly gained between birth and death, what we have not yet been able to draw from a previous life. So that we now carry through the gate of death everything that has been gained bit by bit in the last life. We can now, when we go through life in the spirit between death and a new birth, only develop this in a new relationship if we do not depend on finding the inherited conditions that we had in the previous existence in this new existence. In a previous existence we had absorbed into our soul certain qualities of our ancestors. We would not encounter anything new in a new existence if we were to encounter the qualities of our ancestors in the same way. If we have embodied ourselves in a particular century, then, in order to be able to live out our lives in a new existence in this direction as well, we have to pass through the spiritual world until all those inherited qualities to which we previously felt drawn, and to which we would feel drawn for as long as they are present, have been lost. Our re-embodiment depends on those qualities that have been handed down through the generations having disappeared. So when we look up to our ancestors, we find certain qualities in our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on, which have been passed down through inheritance to our present existence. Now, after death, we enter the spiritual world. We remain there until all the qualities to which we felt attracted in this embodiment have disappeared in the line of inheritance. But that takes many centuries, and spiritual research shows that the time takes so many centuries that we can say, for example, that certain qualities are inherited from generation to generation. It takes about seven hundred years, then the qualities that are passed down from generation to generation have disappeared to such an extent that we can say: What we found in our ancestors at the time has evaporated. But now qualities must develop to such an extent that they again pass through seven hundred years. And we come to the point where we can indicate two times seven hundred years as the time - it is, of course, only an average figure, but it shows itself to spiritual research as the time that elapses between death and a new birth - until the soul enters into existence again through a new birth.

Now, above all, we must educate ourselves about the fact that everything that is already spiritual here on earth rises up into this spiritual world. We have just emphasized that what we take into our spirit is creative outside in the spiritual world. We have seen that we ourselves are in a certain way in this creative world with our creativity. This spiritual world, which is creative outside, is reflected in a certain way in our own soul. Insofar as our own soul experiences spiritual things, goes through a spiritual life, the spiritual-soul experiences of our inner being are also citizens of the spiritual world. Just as the spiritual world extends down into the physical world, so our spiritual world extends up into the general spiritual world. But this explains to us what spiritual research claims: That which is in man in relation to his various elements of being, that lays aside the outer covers, and what remains is the spiritual, and grows up into the productive spiritual world; it is also explained to us that the spiritual conditions, everything of the soul that takes place here in the physical world, lays aside the outer covers and lives up into the spiritual world. Let us take the love that a mother has for her child. This grows out of the physical world. At first it has an animalistic character. Sympathies connect mother and child, which are a kind of physical force effect. But then that which grows out of the physical world is purified, the love of the two beings is ennobled; this love becomes more and more soulful and spiritual. In death, everything that originates in the physical world is likewise cast off like the outer shells. But on the other hand, everything that is built up in this love in the soul and spirit within this physical human shell remains, just as the human inner self lives on into the spiritual world, so that the love between mother and child lives on in the spiritual world. There they find each other again, no longer limited by the barriers of the physical world, but in that spiritual environment where we do not have things outside us, but where we live and weave and are in things. Therefore, one must imagine that which reigns in the spiritual world as the result of the relationships of love and friendship established in the physical world; one must imagine them as being much more intimately connected than the bonds of love and friendship that are formed in the physical world. And it is absurd to ask whether we will see again after death those with whom we live in love and friendship in the physical world. We not only see them, but we live in them; we are, so to speak, poured out over them. And everything that is woven within the bounds of the sense world only acquires its true meaning when we grow up into the spiritual world with the spiritual part of it.

Thus we see the spiritualization not only of the human being, but of humanity in its noblest relationships in the spiritual realm that man passes through between death and a new birth. But it is also there that all the impulses that the human being has brought into the spiritual world are transformed into living archetypes. We saw that the human being entered the spiritual world with an essence of the etheric or life body, that is, with an essence of all the experiences he has had between birth and death. We see the human being entering the spiritual world with that mighty impulse that allows him to make amends for the wrongs he has done. The human being weaves this together into a spiritual archetype. And the time he spends in the spiritual world passes in such a way that this image is woven more and more so that it receives the fruits of the previous life and the urge, the will to make amends for the wrong, the ugliness he has done, more and more interwoven. And so, during that time, the human being is able, on the one hand, to plastically shape into the body that is made available to him for re-embodiment all the abilities he has acquired in previous lives, and, on the other hand, because he has woven into his original image has woven into his image the urge, the impulse to make good what he has done that was wrong, ugly, evil, attracted by circumstances that allow him to make up for this wrong, this ugliness that he has done. We enter into existence through birth with the will to enter into such circumstances that allow us to make up for imperfections in our previous life. Thus, through a hidden will, we seek out pain in appropriate cases when we have the unconscious realization, arising from our prenatal urge, that only by overcoming this pain can we remove certain obstacles that we have previously placed in our way.

Thus we see how the human being passes through the spiritual world, in which he can plastically develop his physical body even before the new birth. And now we also see how that which we have woven into our archetype is only gradually united with our life after birth. For he does not know life who believes that everything that develops in life in the way of abilities and soul powers already lies within the child. He who can truly observe life sees the human being entering existence through birth and sees how the human being only gradually finds himself in life, how in the early years the human being by no means already has within him what he can become. We can understand life much better if we say: Man only gradually unites with what he has woven as a spiritual archetype in the time between death and a new birth. Those who look at life without prejudice can see how, as a child, the human being is still surrounded by the spiritual atmosphere that he has woven for himself between death and a new birth, and how he gradually adapts to his own archetype, which he has not yet interwoven with the physicality that he brings with him at birth. While the animal is interwoven with its archetypal image from birth, we see the individual human being only gradually growing into the archetypal image that he has woven for himself through the repeated lives on earth up to this last one. And we understand the physical-sensual side of human life best when we grasp it in this way: we see it as the shell of an animal, an oyster, which we find by the wayside. As long as we want to understand it as merely assembled, out of mud, for example, we will not be able to understand this shell. But if we assume that what is shown layer by layer on the shell is secreted from the interior of an animal that has left this shell, then we understand the structure.

We do not understand the life of man between birth and death if we merely want to understand it from itself, if we want to understand it in such a way that we merely draw together what is in the immediate environment. We can say for a long time that man adapts to his environment, his people, his family. Just as little as we can understand the oyster shell without an oyster, we will not understand human life if we consider it to be formed only out of its immediate environment. It becomes clear and comprehensible, however, when we can assume that the human being comes from a spiritual and soul world and that in this spiritual and soul world he has processed the achievements, the essence, the fruits of previous lives, and that he has reshaped his new existence with the help of this processing. Thus, life itself can only be understood through that which lies above life; the physical world can only be understood through the spiritual and soul worlds.

This is the cycle of the human being through the world of the senses, soul and spirit. If we see the human being in this way, then we have, as it were, only a part of his complete life cycle in his physical-sensual life. And if we pursue it in the right way, our knowledge is not just a theoretical knowledge that tells us this or that like the external science, but it is a knowledge that shows us objectively how life between death and a new birth acquires meaning and significance, in that what we accumulate here is processed in a higher world. From such knowledge springs knowledge and willpower for life, springs meaning and significance, confidence and hope for life. We do not need to ascribe to such knowledge that we look bleakly into past lives, of which we might say: Now, it is claimed that we have caused our own pain. To the pain is added this bleakness! No, we can say to ourselves: This law is not only one that points to the past, but also one that points to the future, showing us that overcome pain is an increase in strength that we utilize in the new life, and the more we work, the more we have overcome pain, the stronger our strength will be. In the higher sense, one can only suffer in happiness; it is a fulfillment from past lives. Through pain we can develop strength, and the strength acquired by overcoming pain means an increase for the future life. And we will confidently pass through the gate of death, knowing that death must be brought into life so that this life can increase from level to level. This seems to justify the statement that Spiritual science in this sense is not just a theory, it is the sap and the strength of life, in that it flows directly into our entire spiritual existence, making it healthy and strong and vigorous. Spiritual science is that which confirms the words that must live in the soul of every spiritual researcher and indeed every person who has some inkling of the spiritual world, as words of truth, as guiding words for their ever-intensifying, healthy and powerful life, which sees an increase of strength even in overcoming pain. These words are confirmed:

Riddle upon riddle arises in space,
Riddle upon riddle runs in time;
Solution is brought only by the spirit,
Which seizes itself
Beyond the boundaries of space
And beyond the course of time.

A lecture such as was given the day before yesterday could easily give the impression that a people's soul should only be spoken for out of mere sympathy. If the spiritual researcher were to speak about these matters today purely out of sympathy, out of mere passion, then one could be certain that what he has to say has no particular value in terms of spiritual research, or that what he has to say, because it is imbued with passion, must be fundamentally untrue. Now, to what extent what was said the day before yesterday may, despite all this, be spoken as coherent with the deepest insights of spiritual science of the present day, that should emerge for you from the way in which the spiritual researcher must relate to one or the other folk soul.

We already know from the very elementary presentation in anthroposophy that when we speak of folk souls, we do not mean what the outer, exoteric world understands by an abstract term. We may say that quite definite entities, with archangelic rank — one has only to read about it in the lecture cycle on 'The Mission of Individual National Souls' — entities with a consciousness that is higher than human consciousness, guide the affairs of nations. And we look up to these folk souls, so we speak of them as real, actual entities, indeed more real entities than we human beings ourselves are. How does the human being enter into a relationship with these folk souls in relation to his spiritual soul? We will first raise this question.

We know that man alternates between waking and sleeping in relation to his consciousness; we know that man has to be awake within his physical and etheric bodies and that he then, between falling asleep and waking up, dwells in his astral body and in his I. If a person is outside of their physical body with their astral body and I between falling asleep and waking up, then they are in a region that is completely different in relation to the folk soul, to which they primarily belong in a particular incarnation, than the region in which the person is in relation to the folk soul when they are in their physical body. Through his language and many other things, man is born into the realm of his folk soul. How does this folk soul affect the human soul, that which is taken out of the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, but which is present in the body during waking? How does the folk soul of the people to which a person belongs affect the individual soul of the person?

It actually only has an effect during the time in which the human being is immersed in the physical body, from the moment of waking until the moment of falling asleep. The human being is immersed in the forces of the physical and etheric bodies, and what I would like to call the tentacles of the folk soul, the soul of the people to which the human being belongs in a particular incarnation, is also immersed in these forces. And we not only submerge in our physical body, we also submerge in a certain part of our folk soul, we live from waking up to falling asleep while we are in our physical body, with what is going on in the physical body, within the folk soul. We experience what we experience in communion with the folk soul during our waking hours, only that the folk soul does not speak directly into what is fully conscious in the I, that it speaks more into the subconscious of the astral body from the etheric body, that it tinges, nuances, gives our feeling and temperament a certain direction. This is the essential way in which we relate to it. The one who, through his corresponding initiation, is able to observe all that is involved when a person submerges into the physical body, he sees, looks at the encounter with the folk soul when submerging into the physical body. But he also sees something else. And when I speak of this, you will soon recognize that objectivity must prevail within what the spiritual researcher has to say about one or other folk soul.

The spiritual researcher lives in those moments when he is strengthened and illuminated in the right way by the spiritual and soul life and enables it to live consciously and independently of the body. He lives in such a way that he can observe where the human being is, even when he is outside of his physical body with his soul and spirit, with his astral body and I. The spiritual researcher observes how every human soul, unconsciously, between falling asleep and waking up, immerses itself in the entire environment of the folk souls that are relevant for a particular time. While the human being is immersed in the physical body, he is with the national soul of his nation. In the state of sleep, he is with all the other national souls of the time in question, with the exception of the one with which he is in the physical body during the waking state.

The spiritual researcher has ample opportunity to become acquainted with the characteristics of the other national souls, because as soon as he becomes aware of himself in his disembodied state, he lives spiritually and soulfully with the other national souls in the same way that he lives with his own national soul in the physical body. In this state it would be quite impossible to allow one's ordinary passions to lead one to speak in a one-sided way about the one folk soul. But when the spiritual researcher consciously lives with these other folk souls, this consciousness also shows him that every person unconsciously connects with the other folk souls between falling asleep and waking up, but somewhat differently than with his own folk soul. When you enter your physical body, you get to know the individual folk soul with its essential characteristics, essentially its activity in its effect on you, albeit in the subconscious. During sleep or in the state of initiation, one gets to know the other folk-souls, not as individuals, but in their interaction; only one's own folk-soul is not present. The others interact as in a round dance, and in that which their round dance activity is, one lives in it, as one lives with one's own folk-soul in the physical body during the day. Thus one lives

5 not with the peculiarity of the one national soul, but with the interaction. There is only one thing by which one can be condemned, quite certainly condemned, to be torn out of the normal togetherness with the dance of the national souls and to be together with only one foreign national soul in the body-free state, that is, in sleep. Do understand me: it is not normal to be with a foreign folk soul; but you can achieve it if you passionately hate this other folk soul. In this way you condemn yourself to be torn out of the dance of the other folk souls and to be together with this one folk soul in a sleeping state, as you are with your own folk soul during the waking state.

Yes, these are objective truths that spiritual research reveals. It shows you that it is bitterly serious about the sentence that is often spoken by spiritual science: that what confronts us in external reality, maya, is great deception, and that behind this aja, behind this veil, there are truths which he who is content with the veil of Maja cannot comprehend with his intellect and does not want to comprehend with his will. There are still many people in our time who cannot yet see what lies behind the veil of Maya, and therefore cannot understand that there is such a supersensible, invisible world and that in it the relationship of the human soul to the other folk-souls is quite different from anything one could dream of. If one takes spiritual science seriously precisely where it points to the spheres that are connected with our life, then one must bear that spiritual science points to conditions in the spiritual world that are so uncomfortable to immerse oneself in, even just with one's consciousness, that one resists it with one's will. One does not want to submerge, one would like the truth to be different with regard to very many things. That not only the intellect but also the will resists what spiritual science often has to say as something bitterly serious, that is something we may also bring before our soul one day. And from feelings that can be stimulated by such a discussion as the one just expressed, we feel that the principle we have within our spiritual movement, of a certain work, without distinction of race, color, nationality and so on, is so closely connected with the deeper essence of our spiritual-scientific movement that it is actually nonsense for anyone who truly understands the profound seriousness of spiritual-scientific truths not to support this first principle. It is indeed nonsense, for to hate the nature of some folk soul in the deepest human being means to condemn oneself to be in the subconscious with this folk soul during sleep in exactly the same way as one is in one's subconscious during waking with the folk soul that is one's own. For the normal interaction with national souls during sleep is this: to be together with the whole range of others for an age. That man must not become one-sided, the wise arrangement of the world takes care of that.

We have often emphasized that what a person has to go through in the next few years, the time between death and a new birth, depends to a certain extent on the after-effects of the life in the body between birth and death. Now, as we can see from what has just been discussed, being with the soul of a nation is part of this life in the body. This coexistence with the folk soul, I said, tinges us, nuances us; we take what the folk soul arouses as an impulse in our soul and spiritual being with us into the spiritual world when we pass through the gate of death, and we have to gradually shed it as such. If we bear this in mind, it will be readily understandable to us that it depends on the way in which the human being lives with his national soul, how he still stands in the aftermath of this national soul immediately after death.

Let us consider two European nations in terms of what has just been suggested: the Russian and the French people. The life of the folk soul is such that the folk soul must be active in a different way with its consciousness than a human being is with his consciousness. How is a human being active with his consciousness? He directs his gaze outwards to the horizon of external facts and can also turn his gaze back to his own soul. We know that human beings differ from one another in certain respects. Goethe, for example, belongs to the one group, with his objective view of things; Schiller, on the other hand, belongs to the other group, and is more concerned with his own inner life, and accomplishes what he has to create more from there. The souls of nations are also like this, but only approximately, because their consciousness is of a completely different nature than human consciousness. The national souls stand in a different relation to the individual members of the nation. When they direct their gaze outwards, it is more a glance of the will, sending impulses into the individual members of the nation. In this way they work objectively outwards, directing themselves towards the individual members of the nation. Or they can live more within themselves. The French national soul, in particular, belongs to the national souls that live more inwardly, one might say, and do not worship a national soul realism that spreads over the individuals, but a national soul idealism that lives more within itself. This French national soul, as it permeates the French people today, has a certain stability of consciousness in that it looks back to an earlier time.

I have often pointed out that we have our ordinary physical waking consciousness by immersing ourselves in our spatial body. After death, we have our consciousness by looking back in time at our earlier life. There we can already sense the characteristic of a higher consciousness, which unfolds not in space but in time. It kindles its self by looking back to ancient Greece, for it is essentially a kind of repetition, a reawakening of ancient Greekness. This ancient Greek element lives again in the French national soul, just as the Egyptian-Chaldean element of the third post-Atlantic cultural period lives again in the Italian national soul. Therefore, the Italian national soul has more opportunity to stimulate the sentient soul in the individual human beings who belong to the nation. The actual nature of the French national soul stimulates the intellectual or the emotional soul of the individual. This can be demonstrated quite clearly in detail. Indeed, even the individual historical facts can be explained in a wonderful way if one consults these general results of spiritual research.

Let us just point out a few things in this direction. Consider: what was the peculiarity of the Egyptian folk soul? At that time, there was still astrology that had a direct effect on the soul. The folk soul looked out at the movements of the heavenly bodies, did not see, as today's people do, only material processes in what happened in the cosmos, but really perceived the active spiritual beings behind what was going on outside. Their relationship to the whole cosmos was the same as that of a person to another person, in that they know that a soul looks at them through the whole physiognomy. Thus, everything was a physiognomy to the ancient Egyptians, and they perceived the soul in nature. The meaning of the further development in the new time lies in the fact that what used to be, as it were, an elementary ability, was directly ignited in the physical body of the human being, that it became his inwardness in the newer time, in our fifth post-Atlantic age. And just as what the Egyptian went through was more elemental, so the Italian, in what he repeats, in what he goes through in his sentient soul, goes through it more inwardly, in that he experiences in the sentient soul that which is spiritual and cosmic, but now more interiorized. What could be more internalized than the Egyptian astrology in Dante's Divine Comedy? The true resurrection of ancient Egyptian astrology, but internalized!

And in the same way we could prove that ancient Greek life is to be found, not in the consciousness of the individual Frenchman, but in the working of the impulses of the folk soul. This can be traced right down to the latest invention and into the details; it is just that such research is not taken seriously enough. Greece and, as the other peoples called it, “the barbarians,” even that is reviving. Thus one could prove that in all French literature and art — I do not mean consciously, but in the deeper impulses — ancient Greek life is revived in the way it must be revived in our time. We are therefore dealing with a national soul that has absorbed everything that was in Greek culture, a national soul that therefore has an extraordinarily strong effect on individual human beings, permeating and taking hold of them. The consequence of this is that when the individual French soul enters the physical and etheric body, it enters into the weaving and essence of the sharply defined activity of the national soul. He finds the impulses of this national soul sharply defined. That is why the Frenchman, by absorbing in his physical body this sharp, concise life and weaving of the national soul, lives more in it than in his elementary sense of self, that he lives more in the image, in the idea he forms of the Frenchman, which surges up from the national soul. He lives from the image of the Frenchman. And everything that is of great importance to him is connected with this image: 'Gloire' and so on. The Frenchman lives in his own image, which comes up from the etheric body. This fantasy image is strongly influenced and interwoven with the spiritual and soul nature of the individual, and the person takes it with them as an image that is strongly moved in the etheric body when they enter the spiritual world after death. It is very difficult for them to get rid of. It is very difficult for them to get rid of their ether image. The image he has formed of himself clings to him, is firmly connected to him.

The attitude of the Russian national soul towards the individual is quite different. This Russian national soul does not have to repeat any of the post-Atlantic cultures in the same way as the French nation; it is a youthful national soul that leaves few imprints on the etheric body. Therefore, when the individual belonging to this Russian national soul immerses himself in his physical body, little of significance happens to him. Consequently, when he enters the spiritual world, he takes little of significance with him, few ethereally woven images of the imagination.

Thus, the souls differ in relation to their national souls after death. On the one hand, we have the host of those individual souls who have passed through death, who carry into the spiritual world sharply woven images of their own being, and on the other hand, in the east, we see young souls ascending, belonging to a young national soul, bringing little in the way of sharply woven human images flooding in the etheric body.

Now, as I have often discussed, we are on the threshold of the great event of the coming time: the appearance of the Christ in a very special way. I do not need to discuss this today. But since the last third of the nineteenth century, He has been preceded by the spirit whom we call the spirit of Michael, the champion of the spirit of the sun, in his struggle to prepare humanity for the Christ event. Now everything depends on the spiritual world preparing for this event, which is to befall humanity spiritually, in an appropriate way. But this can only happen if work is done in the spiritual world, as it were, on the pure development of the Christ, who will appear in the etheric in the future, since he is to appear to man as an etheric form. But for this it is necessary that he who marches before the spirit of the sun, that Michael, fights a battle in the spiritual world. For this battle he needs the help of the souls who, through their bodies, have just been drawn up into the spiritual world, of those souls who bring little of sharply defined imaginative images with them into the spiritual world. And so we see the spirit Michael and in his wake a number of Russian souls fighting for the purity of the spiritual horizon and in a hard struggle with the souls that have come from the West, which bring sharply defined images of fantasy. These must be dispersed and dissolved. We have been seeing this battle between East and West in the making since the last third of the nineteenth century. It is a fierce battle that is to serve the progress of humanity and which consists in the spiritual struggle of European East against European West, in spiritual Russia waging a fierce spiritual battle against spiritual France. This, my dear friends, is one of the most harrowing events of the present time: to see how, to the same extent that the physical alliance between West and East is being carried out down here in the field of great deception, the sharp struggle of the European East, Russia, against the European West, France, is taking place up there in the spiritual world. We have here one of those cases that have such a shattering effect on the spiritual researcher, where one can see how what is behind the veil of the outer sense world is often the opposite of what happens down here in the realm of deception. But I would always and always admonish not to believe that one can determine such things through speculation. Anyone who, from what I have said in individual cases – that the spiritual presents itself as the opposite of what occurs in the realm of the great Maja – might conclude that it must always go to the opposite when it comes from the physical to the spiritual, would be very much mistaken. For there are cases in the spiritual world in which things take place exactly as they do in the physical. Between this case and the other, where they take place in such stark contrast as in relation to the alliance between France and Russia in the physical and spiritual, there are all possible gradations.

Today, we still have little sense of the impulses through which real spiritual science must communicate. I would say that our time has become, in a sense, careless, especially with regard to what appears to be worth communicating to the individual person; for very little is asked about the responsibility that lies behind what is to be communicated for the one who has to consider the connection between the spiritual and physical worlds. Perhaps I may say something to you, not for personal reasons, but only to illustrate, in connection with my lecture the day before yesterday. You see, in this public lecture, where of course I can only speak externally, exoterically, I do not speak as exoterically as one might think, and I would be glad if, especially in such lectures, one would take into consideration the cultural task that spiritual science has. In particular, the fact that spiritual science is behind it is expressed in the way in which what needs to be said is emphasized and said. It is not a matter of arbitrary ideas or something that has been cobbled together. Take this one example: I said that if one wants to assess the circumstances of the individual European nations in this war, one should proceed historically, that one should consider, for example, that Austria received that mission in the Balkans at the request of British politicians, and that basically everything that has happened to Austria is a consequence of what was imposed on it at the behest of Britain. And I said that this must be taken into account, that it must be taken into account that as a result Austria, and with it Germany, came into particular antagonism with Russia, and that England has abandoned its own work and is now fighting against Germany, while the Central Powers and Russia have come into antagonism because Austria, at England's behest, was entrusted with the Balkan mission and also, by coming to the aid of the Turks, was supposed to hold back the influence of the Russian East. Of course, in an exoteric lecture intended for a general audience, one can only hint at what might affect the perceptions that should be stimulated today. But what is behind this event? Outwardly, exoterically, we see English politics on the side of Russian politics, which has come to its consequences precisely through an act of England. We see that outwardly. The spiritual researcher who looks at things in the spiritual world can make a very peculiar discovery today, a most remarkable discovery. Let us assume that the spiritual researcher would look from bottom to top by taking a certain perspective point. He would take the perspective point below the physical plane and look up to the astral plane. He could also take it above the astral plane. Then he would see what is happening on the physical plane and, as it were, also what is happening on the astral plane. It would merge. It is not true that if one looks up from below or down from above through the astral plane, one sees through the astral to the physical and vice versa. If one now looks at the physical plane, it is true that England is fighting against Turkey since Turkey declared war on Russia. But that is mere Maya, for in reality the astral being of England is fighting with Turkey against Russia. So that one has the spectacle of England fighting for Russia in the northwest and for Turkey in the southeast, thus against Russia. Only one thing is decisive for the physical plane and the other for the astral plane.

When one is confronted with such knowledge of the world, one feels that one cannot, of course, communicate this knowledge to the public, but it does urge one to emphasize this one point about England's inconsistency in the East. The fact that this one point is emphasized arises from the recognition of the spiritual connections. This is how I would like to point out the responsibility that one simply has when compiling the individual truths and the way in which one presents them.

If one feels one's occult responsibility, then one does not pick and choose at random, as today's book-makers or journalists do, but one must extract what is to be said from the essence of the current situation. It is not to say something personal, but to draw your attention to the fact that spiritual science, when it steps forward before the world with full responsibility, should really be taken very seriously and should not be confused with all that is spreading today as journalism and book-making and which, in the way it is combined, is very far removed from such a sense of responsibility towards the spiritual powers of the time. I would like to draw your attention, my dear friends, to the seriousness of spiritual science, especially in our time. For our time shows us a serious face in many respects, a very serious face, and only those who understand the seriousness of this face will be able to cope with this time.

To substantiate this, I would also like to bring before you a context that is of interest to the student of spiritual science. It has been said many times that spiritual science truly does not enter the present because it arises from the arbitrariness of one person or another, or because one person or another has made it his ideal out of his own inclination and would like to bring it to other people, but because now is the epoch when the spiritual beings, which otherwise kept the gate of this truth to be revealed to mankind closed, have opened it so that this wisdom flows down into the human soul. And we are approaching a time when people will have to absorb more and more wisdom, which is appropriated by the soul not only in abstract concepts, not only in gray ideas of the mind. We are living towards times when what we call imagination wants to enter into human souls, into human minds. One would like to say, when one sees through the matter: There they hang, like dense clouds hanging over the landscape before a storm, there they hang in the spiritual world and want to enter human minds, and wait until these human minds are ripe. Yes, that is the time; that is how it is.

Now there is a peculiar law: that which is imaginative, which wants to enter into human minds and cannot yet be received as imagination in any age, casts something like a mirage-like image just as far down below the physical plane as it itself is above the physical plane. The imaginations evoke passions in human beings, feelings, urges, instincts, which express themselves in antagonism. And if we take today the instincts, the outbursts of passion with which the nations insult each other, they are nothing other than the result of imaginations that should be taken up by the European nations but cannot be taken down, for they are reflected in the subconscious of human beings in such instincts and passions that contradict the truth. Basically, we can say that all the discharge of instincts and passions that we are experiencing in the present is an expression of the fact that renewed imaginations want to break into the world of human cultural development. All the often so sad phenomena that the war brings to the surface are the transformed imaginations that humanity cannot grasp.

Again, and this never seems unimportant to me, I would like to point out that one should not say: So every war is transformed imagination. Wars can also be something completely different. Today's war is what I have said. Generalization, which is important for understanding the physical plane, is not important for the spiritual world. Here, things must be investigated individually.

Today we see – and I would now like to present an appearance from a certain perspective for you to consider and also explain – today we see how members of different nations persecute each other in hatred and how they insult each other. Where does this come from? Now, since we have already taken on board in all seriousness the essence of repeated earthly lives, it does not seem particularly incomprehensible to us that the soul passes through different nationalities in its repeated lives. Someone who is incarnated today in a German body may already be preparing in his innermost being to undergo the next incarnation in an English body; someone who is incarnated today in an English body may already be preparing to undergo the next incarnation in a German body. Man is already this dual being, this duality. Outwardly, we stand before the world – not only in relation to the external physical-sensual view, but in relation to many other things – quite legitimately linked to the nature and weaving of the national soul through our physical body; but within, something is already asserting itself that will be quite different for the next incarnation. Now, of all the many things man is hostile towards, he is often most hostile towards his own innermost being. He fights against that the most. He does not know that it is his innermost being. Take an Englishman, who is predestined by the innermost part of his soul to be a German in his next incarnation. There we see him today, fighting against his own inner being. He fights against the next German incarnation. This comes to expression today in the fact that he rails shamefully against everything German. Because he sees the goal in the German body, he rages against what, in the spiritual world, is his innermost being. It is basically a conflict of the soul with itself, and only externally, in the Maja, is it the case that over there, beyond the Channel, people here in Central Europe are being ranted against. Basically, what is being ranted about refers to one's own soul. This shows the deep tragedy that must overcome people in their whole being and in their innermost impulses when, where the matter becomes bitterly serious, they compare the outer Maja with what is within.

And so we can see the souls of nations as real living entities that permeate and pervade the individual closed individuals. And what the individual experiences, he experiences in connection with his national soul. On the physical plane, in the outer life, people face each other today. One nation blames the other for the war and believes it is saying something special. But what about this blaming of guilt? The karma of each nation and the karma of the nation in question are, of course, connected with what the soul of the nation is experiencing in the people and directing into the individual etheric bodies and thus also into the astral bodies. Thus the individual nations live side by side and with one another in relationships that are an expression of the relationship between their national soul and the karma of the national soul. And when one nation experiences this or that through another, when this or that happens to one nation through another, it does not happen without it being connected with the innermost karma. Insofar as the national soul is a closed entity, there is also a national karma. And while in the outer exoteric one believes that one nation does this or that to another, it is the case that each nation experiences its own individual national karma in what it experiences. When one of them inflicts a defeat on the other, something takes place in the defeated nation that it has inflicted on itself through its own karma. And when one speaks in the very rough manner, as is outwardly justified, of the right of one and the other, it is really no different than when an old man sees a small child beside him, fresh and growing into youthful vigor, and he says, “Why am I getting older, why does decay show itself more and more to me? I see: the child takes away my strength; as it grows older, the child takes away my strength. While he is losing his strength in a perfectly natural way, he can succumb to the delusion – he will not do it, but I have heard of such things – that the child is taking his strength from him. You can see right away that this is nonsense, because the causal connection lies in every single being. But it is the same with the karma of nations. Nations live side by side, and when one conquers the other, the victory is due to its karma; even if with the same victory the other nation must succumb, the defeat is caused by the karma of the other nation. Thus spiritual science really does bring peace to the soul, even if on the other hand it also realizes that the forces acting against each other must indeed act against each other.

It is precisely through such things that one would like to point out today that spiritual science does not want to be just a game with sensational concepts, but that spiritual science, when viewed in its bitter seriousness, really shakes and shakes our soul and makes a different being out of man when he takes it seriously. We must only take a good look at this, really take a good look at how superficially it is sometimes taken as a mere intellectual game, and how it should actually be taken as something that can truly make a completely different being out of a person. And much will come of engaging in such things, much of understanding the connections will come about.

When two people have different views about something that is happening in front of them, one of them will usually be wrong. It will be easy to prove that one of them is wrong. But the individual life of a human being is different from the life of nations. We must not identify the life of nations with that of individual human beings, nor must we believe that the deeds of nations can be subject to the same impulses of judgment as the lives of individual human beings. Otherwise, one judges in a way that one would never judge if one had a blue horizon about the relations between nations, as is the case, for example, when one says that one must declare war on Germany because it has violated Belgium's neutrality – as has been said – one must declare war on moral grounds. In politics, it is simply nonsensical to apply the same categories that are rightly applied in judging individuals. Because it is quite natural that Germany's interest requires it to advance on Belgium, and England's interest requires it to prevent that. At the moment you sincerely admit that the interest is there and there, you have something that indicates that there are contrasting interests. When two people claim something contrary, it will be necessary to prove that one of them is wrong. When two nations have to do something contrary, then they must do it. And to believe that the judgment of one side can sweep away that of the other is just as foolish as if someone were to say: You drew me a tree that has a branch here, one there, one there; that is quite wrong, the tree looks like that. And now he draws it so that the branch is here and the other one is there and so on. One person has drawn it from one side and the other from the other. Of course, you can put that together. But what is happening in world history cannot be balanced out by mere observation. When the souls of nations, with their different mindsets, have to do things through their people, it is impossible to somehow decide by judgments like: one is right and the other is wrong. There are contrasting interests that must necessarily be discharged in phenomena such as today's. You cannot refute what is said on one side or the other. Just as one must not believe that the karma of one does not stand independently beside that of the other, so one must not believe that one can refute the judgment of the other with the judgment of the one. For the one nation may have interests which it would be a breach of duty for the statesman of the other nation to oppose, while it is the duty of the statesman of the first nation to stand up for these interests.

Judgments of people, judgments in the consciousness that we have on the physical plane within our physical bodies, only come into consideration in the field of the mind and balance each other dialectically, with one knocking the other out of the field. The consciousnesses of the folk-souls judge differently. They also have judgments that differ from each other, but these judgments are not merely judgments of the mind, they are facts. When one judgment defeats the other in the human sphere, then it does not hurt, then one kills, but one does not see it as a death. But it is different when what prevails in the consciousness of the souls of nations, and what is not just an abstract judgment, but what works as facts, when that collides. Then one must recognize the necessity, the iron necessity, that it has come to this. And then one must have the possibility of adopting, so to speak, a form of judgment in one's mind, a form of spirit that does not agree with the form of spirit that one encounters in everyday life.

One must think, as it were, with the folk souls, not with the individual human souls. If one thinks with the individual human souls, then it is quite natural that one tries not to make a judgment that contradicts that of the other, because then one would not be able to live socially in the human world. If you have to think and feel with the soul of the people, then there will come times when it is impossible to relate to it in any other way than by identifying with it and considering its content to be justified, without stepping out of this people's soul, without comparing what it has to do with what the others have to do. Because that is the business of the others, it cannot be brought together in a common consciousness, it goes from consciousness to consciousness. From this point of view, you will understand that one can ask: What does the German people have to say about its mission, considering that it considers itself to be the descendant of Fichte, Schiller and the other greats? It has to say that what it is undertaking today is the outward expression of its spiritual mission and that it cannot fail to fulfill it. Those who are part of the people must feel with all their being that it must happen. And there is no possibility that anyone, when one sharply defines what must happen for the German people, could call this an attack. The attack, the assault on the other people only begins when one starts to curse about the other people. These are things that must be understood very deeply today: to stand up positively for the essence of a people basically means no more than what can be compared to the fact that one can only take care of one's own body, that it is in order, and not in the same way for another body.

Please note that this is a decisive factor for the judgment that we can gain from the sources of spiritual research.

And when we look into the weaving and nature of the folk souls and what is behind them, behind what is happening on the outside, I would like to say that for the spiritual researcher, especially today, the matter is becoming very, very serious, extraordinarily serious. But this seriousness is also fitting for our time, and it is as if the fact that we have seen the greatest military conflicts were connected with the great demand of the time to found a culture that takes into account what lies behind the veil of sense perception. And those who have the right sense will judge precisely what is taking place in the outer world today, who see in the outer events something like signs, like mighty world symbols for the dawning of something completely new in the evolution of mankind.

I said: Not only does the intellect and its prejudices rebel in man against what spiritual science has to say about the supersensible entity behind the external things, but the mind, the impulses of the will, rebel. They do not want it because the soul must change its way of thinking and feel and perceive differently about many things. — That I said. Yes, that is also a truth. You see, we not only sleep at night, we also sleep during the day, only that at night our attraction to the physical body is so strong that it permeates our astral body and our ego like a fog and dulls our consciousness. When we now descend with the same astral body and the same ego into our physical body to satisfy our desires, then what we develop as consciousness is permeated by the influences of the national soul and there again consciousness is interspersed, so that down there, despite our belief that we are quite awake, there is always something asleep in us. Basically, something is always asleep in us, and that in itself is a sleep within us, just as the folk soul works within us, because it does not happen with the same consciousness with which we make our day-waking judgments. And to this, to the sleep of the day, which is only covered by ordinary consciousness, to this also belongs the working over of the folk souls of the other nations. They also have an effect in a certain way on the sleeping human mind and produce different phenomena than during sleep, but they do produce phenomena on the physical plane.

For example, while the German people had an evolutionary theory through Goethe that came from the very depths of the German being itself, they left it unnoticed and accepted Darwinism. Just as the Italian people have to develop the sentient soul, the French the intellectual soul, and the English the consciousness soul, so the German has to develop the I, and much about the nature of the German people becomes understandable when one feels and realizes how everything that is German culture wells up from the I. This connection between the ego and the most sacred spiritual goods is a characteristic of the Central European people.

It is particularly evident in one phenomenon. If we take the occult truths themselves and look towards the West: external culture has little connection with what appears as mysticism, as occultism. There are actually always two parallel currents. It is not easy to find anything in an ordinary bookshop in Paris that is connected with occultism; you have to go to other places that present it. Now we see how it is in the German to bring everything out of the ego, how the German has Jakob Böhme, how German cultural development is unthinkable without this occult influence. Think of Goethe and Lessing. There are not two currents flowing side by side, but there is one stream, there is real life interwoven and permeated with the spiritual, and one cannot approach this with a materialistic view, as is propagated by the “Star of the East”, that Christ is still incarnating in a physical human being. Hence the necessity arose, as did the antagonism between Germany and England, which could not be allowed to wait until war brought it about: to clearly separate what German occultism is from what English occultism is. And perhaps one or other of them will now reflect on why this split has become necessary. But I only wanted to give a hint. Because some people may see a kind of archetype in the compilation of facts, the justification of facts, when they look at the letters from Grey and Annie Besant today: the way of proving, of putting things together, is very similar in both. But I only wanted to point out how what emerges from the German people is connected to the innermost soul. When the German is awake, he adheres, for example, to the profound theory of development of Goethe, who presented the sequence of organisms but took the impulse for the arrangement from the deepest interior of the I. I say this as a fact, without sympathy or antipathy. Half a century later, Darwin reproduced it from the consciousness soul, but with a materialistic slant. The world understood it more easily, and the German world also preferred to accept the theory of evolution in a Darwinian rather than a Goethean form. Goethe even founded a color theory out of the depths of the German being; the physicists still regard it as nonsense today, because the outer world has adopted Newton's color theory. When will the Darwinian and Newtonian theory be taken instead of Goethe's theory of development and color? Then, when within the German people, people are asleep and the other soul of the people can have an effect. There we have this sleeping in the midst of waking. And when the people are shaken up, they still fail to recognize the matter, then they realize: something is not right —, then they go and take their box in which they have the medals received from England. They send them back and just forget to send back the English coloring of the theory of evolution or the Newtonian coloring of the theory of colors. In particular, one could prescribe the example of a certain coloration of Haeckelianism as a good recipe. One experiences many things there. For example, one could still experience it in these days; one could hear that in a special scientific society in German cities a lecture was given about what has been disturbed in the international nature of the peoples by this war, and how attention was drawn to something that is true if you apply larger scales, but not if you apply those that this gentleman with his ordinary professorial mind applies. If you start from these standards, it sounds very strange when this gentleman says: Internationalism must reappear as soon as the war is over, because otherwise the German would lose a lot, and it would in turn, a special metaphysics would awaken that the German had previously unfolded, while he is glad that this German spirit, with its inclination towards the supernatural, has been flooded by the nations, who have little inclination towards the supernatural. — One could experience this in these days in a special economic lecture: the fear of the awakening of the German essence.

Much could be said, but I wanted to express just a few thoughts about what can be gained by taking seriously, bitterly but blissfully, an external view of life, which flows like a magic breath through us when we take spiritual science in its full depth. To consider, feel and sense this is our task in our time, and with such feelings we may survey this time and feel united with those who are standing outside and who have to stand up for what karma demands with their blood and their souls.

Thus we summarize what our knowledge and our task should be and what should inspire confidence in the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
The fruit of the spirit comes to life —
Guiding souls, conscious of the spirit
Into the realm of the spirit.

The words of the ancient Greeks, addressed to man, sound like a deep spiritual admonition: “Know thyself!” These words can be applied to general knowledge of human nature, not so much to personal knowledge. In this way, knowledge of human nature is, as it were, designated as the summit of all human knowledge and striving. And we can also feel from the way this word sounds to us that it is not meant merely in a scientific-theoretical sense, but that it is meant as a spiritual admonition in a moral-religious sense. And one would like to say: After the expiration of a many-sided, self-contained spiritual development epoch of humanity, today a kind of counter-word stands before our soul. This counter-word was pronounced almost fifty years ago and has today, in a certain way, even been forgotten, disappeared from the consciousness of mankind. Nevertheless, the whole modern state of mind, what one carries within oneself today as the great soul conflicts, lives under the influence of this newer word. It is the word that Du Bois-Reymond pronounced, the word: “We cannot recognize,” the word: “Ignoramus, ignorabimus.” Even if many today believe themselves to be beyond the confession of this word, in the way we relate to the world as humans, this word is still deeply involved. It is, so to speak, the confession, expressed or unexpressed, of the results of scientific research in their significance for a general knowledge of the world and view of life.

But anyone who has been involved in intellectual life for decades and has observed how this intellectual life has developed over the last three to four centuries can do no other than justify, as it were, what is regarded as knowledge today in relation to science. Natural science has indeed achieved so much in terms of exploring the external world of the senses; it has achieved so much in terms of applying instruments and experimental methods to research into this external world and its great laws, and it has confirmed and corroborated what it has discovered through the manifold empirical, technical and practical applications, without which we could no longer imagine our modern life. This natural science assumes that it can gain knowledge of the world that is as independent as possible of what man, out of his desires and his prejudices and preconceptions, can bring to the knowledge of the nature of things and world processes. And it is precisely by excluding all personal factors that science has achieved all its successes. But now, precisely the person who stands quite honestly on the ground of natural science, who sees through how beneficially this natural science has worked precisely for the knowledge of external nature, must say more and more to himself, out of the handling of the applied methods: to those regions in which the human soul-spiritual reigns, precisely natural science, as it has developed today, cannot penetrate. One might say, not because of its shortcomings, but precisely because of its merits.

If we survey what has been achieved in the various fields of natural science, we will see that this science naturally also strives to return to the human being. It strives to apply its methods to the nature of the human being. But it can only research the external, bodily, physical nature of the human being. We see this most clearly when the scientific method is applied to the human being, when experimental psychology is used, and when truly magnificent scientific research methods are employed. We see how the expressions of the soul in the human constitution are examined. But we become aware that through all these investigations we cannot get at what can be called the eternal in human nature, what must be called that in human nature, in the face of which man carries the deep longing to recognize it in its true essence, and from which he at least initially has hope that it will arise for him as something beyond the limits of earthly life, as something beyond birth and death and having an effect beyond it. Nothing should be said here against such experimental methods as those of experimental psychology. The very field of research from which I take the liberty of speaking to you this evening recognizes the full validity of these methods. But precisely because they can be seen through from this point of view, even within their limitations, it must be said that these methods cannot approach the actual essence of the soul and spirit. And this was what compelled a few insightful researchers to admit that natural science cannot reach what, on the one hand, is the nature of matter itself and, on the other, the nature of human consciousness. But if man cannot explore how his consciousness, that is, the soul-life at work within him, takes hold of matter, then he must bid farewell to that great challenge: “Know thyself!” Then we would have concluded that period of human spiritual development since ancient Greece with the admonition “Know thyself!” as a beautiful, powerful — but nevertheless only one illusion of humanity. Then we must confess: this demand cannot be fulfilled. The deeper one penetrates into the spirit of nature research, the more one must admit from the point of view of anthroposophy that those who speak of the “ignorabimus” of natural science are right, who speak of the fact that there are limits to natural science that it cannot exceed. But the question arises as to whether the human mind can be easily consoled by the mere recognition of such limitations, and whether it does not seek from the outset to disregard what the human heart desires in this respect, as something particularly prejudicial.

The aim of what I would like to characterize to you this evening as anthroposophical research is to provide an answer to this. It seeks to recognize the extent to which this demand of the soul is somehow justified. Many people today see what science has achieved on the one hand, and on the other hand they feel that science cannot get to the actual soul-spiritual. And so many of those who do not want to stop at the confession of the limits of human knowledge turn to one or other kind of mysticism, that mystical way of looking at things that attempts to reach that which relates to the eternal in the human being by immersing oneself in one's own inner self. And through such mystical contemplation many beautiful things have been brought up from the depths of the human soul, from the depths of life that otherwise remain in the subconscious or unconscious. Through such mystical contemplation many people have come to believe that what is brought up from the depths of the soul, what is present in man, is directly rooted in the divine-spiritual existence, so that by brings the divine-spiritual to revelation in the recognition of the human being himself, and thereby advances to the exploration of the eternal character of man and to the connection of man with the divine.

Thus anyone who raises the big questions of human existence today finds themselves, I would say, between two cliffs that seem to set insurmountable limits to knowledge: on the one hand, natural science, and on the other, mysticism. However much mysticism promises, however beautiful and magnificent it draws from the human soul, most mystical attempts cannot stand up to truly scientific and disciplined knowledge. For anyone who has been accustomed to judging all things, including those within himself, by the conscientious methods of natural science, will soon find that what the mystic often brings up from the depths of his soul is nevertheless nothing other than what he may have received or acquired in the outer world in the form of ideas or feelings from some distant period in the past feelings, which then, perhaps through a beautifully working imagination, have grown into powerful images, but which ideas and feelings, by descending into the depths of the human being, have been changed by the human organism, which for external knowledge has such a secret and meaningful connection with the soul. And it is precisely to the deep soul-searcher that it reveals itself, how that which one, in a mystical way, has gained, one holds for eternal, is nothing more than a modified, even modified by the human organism itself, result of memory.

And so, in the end, if one wants to approach deeper experiences, the great questions of human existence, one must admit: natural science offers no possibility of penetrating into these questions. It closes its insights in one area, so that with its insights one can only recognize the external aspects of the human being, and one cannot get close to the human being with them. This is the necessary conclusion that one must come to. Especially serious and honestly meant natural science does not come close to the human being. And mysticism, as it usually appears at first, does not come from within the human being. By penetrating into the world, natural science does not come from the world to the human being; by penetrating into the human being, mysticism does not come out into the world from the human being. If we allow ourselves to be deeply affected by what the soul receives from these two perspectives, we cannot but ask ourselves once more: Is it not perhaps possible to go even further than what mysticism gives on the one hand and what knowledge of nature gives on the other?

Now, in the lecture I was privileged to give at the Urania a few days ago, I took the liberty of pointing out how anthroposophy, as spiritual research, strives to take a close look at what a person acquires in memory. And so, in the end, memory turns out to be what can be deepened. Today, as a few days ago, I do not wish to delve into deep philosophical or epistemological discussions, but to remain with popular consciousness. Such discussions could be made, but what is meant from the point of view under discussion here will be best understood if I stick to the popular.

What lives in our memory, what makes our personality complete, so that we are able at any moment to conjure up before our eyes what we have been through, is indeed brought into the human soul through impressions from the outside world. They are sensory impressions that we absorb and process with our ideas, and which change in the human being in an unknown way and then come up again; they come up of their own accord or with effort, when the person needs them, and are brought up by the person from the soul. And if we want to visualize what actually lives in the memory for the human soul, we can come to no other conclusion than to say to ourselves: It is like something that is reflected from the mirror of the soul, which lies deep and forever in our human being, even if it is after a long time. The external world is reflected in our soul because we have memory, because we have the ability to remember. And as I said, even if I am not immediately able to explain the nature of this mirror of the soul due to the limited time and circumstances, the image will suffice for our understanding. We do not get to the bottom of the essence of our soul with our memory. Just as when we have a mirror before us, we see what is in front of the mirror, so memory, in the mystically evoked images, offers us nothing other than the reflection of the outer world. If one wants to see what is behind the mirror, then the mirror must either be removed or the mirror must be smashed. In a sense, we have to break through this inner mirror, this power of memory within us, in order to look deeper into our being. And we break through this soul mirror, that is, we go even deeper into the human being through that which this mirror allows us to see as mysticism, when we inwardly bring our thinking, which we otherwise allow to be stimulated by experiments, into activity, when we meditate and concentrate on a particular thought content, repeatedly strengthening the soul forces.

I described it in detail in my Urania lecture and discussed it in my books: how, through a special activity of thinking, we can go below the memory level and look more deeply into our being. One might assume that we would then see what our physical organization is. For there is no doubt that, for ordinary consciousness, we only penetrate to the memory mirror in our soul, and in doing so, the processes of the physical organization change the image from the outside, which we see in the soul mirror, into a distorted image. But if we create an ever more activated thinking, with which we live inwardly as with our blood and our breath, so that our whole being participates in this inwardly living thinking, we penetrate deeper into our human nature, then not a physical human being is revealed to us, but a spiritual-soul being, which can only be revealed to us through this strengthened thinking. Then that in man reveals itself to us which is entirely of a spiritual-soul nature, which remains unconscious to consciousness, but which, by its own nature, shows that it was present before man, through birth, even through conception, entered upon his earthly existence.

That this can be the case can be understood when we consider how memory, through its own content, indicates to us that we are not dealing with the presentation of a present event, but with a past one. We have the same certainty about the character of our experience when we approach the event that characterizes us, which leads us deeper than mystical contemplation. Then we gain a mental picture of all that is actually creative in that first epoch of man's life, in which such a wonderful plastic activity is carried out on the sensory nervous system, on the brain and on the rest of the human organization. But through such contemplation we follow the human soul-spiritual being beyond birth and death; we look into a spiritual world in which we were as spiritual-soul human beings with our core being before we descended into this earthly world and clothed ourselves with what our ancestors gave us, with a physical human body.

It is certainly the case that one comes to this view not only through that nebulous gift of man that is today called “clairvoyance”. Even if one uses the word “clairvoyance” for what I have just spoken of, one must address this as exact clairvoyance. For the one who sets out on the path of spiritual research like an exact scientist activates thinking in such a way that this thinking brings forth from the human being not only the memory images, but also things that lie below the ability to remember, that were creatively in the human being before the ability to remember had developed, before the human being began his earthly existence.

This is one side of the coin that anthroposophical research turns to when faced with the two principles characterized. It seeks to deepen the spiritual through exact thought processing and, on one side, goes beyond birth to the realization of the eternal essence of the human being. But just as one must recognize how the mystic develops what he so beautifully calls his contemplation, which leads him to illusions, how one must recognize this if one wants to arrive at a scientific knowledge and not stop at the points where the mystic , how one must strive for knowledge of the prenatal human being in the continuation of the mystical, and on the other hand, one must try to take a further step in spiritual knowledge by deepening scientific research. And that arises in the following way.

Yes, we come up against limits, especially when we honestly apply scientific methods to the world; we come up against limits when we apply them to natural processes in a real way. We come up against limits that we formulate in the concept of “material consciousness” and so on. But it is one thing to recognize these limitations and to say, “The human being cannot go beyond these limits”, and to have to reassure oneself, or to begin to struggle with all of one's humanity precisely at these limits, saying, “Perhaps these limits arise from the fact that one limiting the abilities one has within oneself here in order to perfect natural science – but then, if one continues to struggle, using one's full human abilities to struggle with these ideas, which will then gain boundaries; perhaps then one will go beyond these boundaries. I know that an objection can easily be raised; people will say: Yes, it is so good, so beneficial that science has understood how to exclude the human element from scientific methods, to stick to measuring, counting, the results of the scales, and so on, in other words, to separate what is known as research methods, what is recognized, from the human being. It is dangerous to mix people back in.

If you do this in the way that anthroposophical research wants, namely that you first stand on the point of view of science, that you have fully mastered the objective detachment of research methods from the human being and have introduced personal struggle into the detached, then something else comes out. Then you respect the demands of natural science and at the same time you introduce the human element into the objectivity of natural science. And here one must say: if you have absorbed yourself in the knowledge of the natural sciences of the last few centuries, especially the nineteenth century, so that you have, so to speak, completely imbued yourself with the spirit of the natural sciences, and can one still give oneself with one's whole personality, precisely to the things that science describes, then a gift of human nature, which is otherwise not at all regarded as a power of knowledge, becomes a power of knowledge. This devotion to something that is attained as something objective ultimately also becomes an objective expression of human love. When one can express this way of thinking with full respect for the scientific way of thinking, after having surveyed the phenomena of the world from a scientific point of view as far as possible, when one musters enough heroism in research to immerse oneself in what is scientifically given with such devotion, as one otherwise only immerses oneself when one develops love in the world, especially human love, then love itself becomes knowledge, and then, with the love that has undergone the metamorphosis to become the power of knowledge, one penetrates behind what science is able to give.

This is the work not of a day, but of long epochs of human life, to penetrate to those entities that lie beyond the boundaries of science. But what then emerges is the following: At the moment when one breaks through those boundaries, as it were, and looks behind the scenes that are erected by scientific knowledge, something about the human being himself becomes strangely transparent, which previously always remained opaque: we wake up in the morning, spend our day with a waking consciousness out of the forces of our earthly feelings and our soul, we fall asleep in the evening. What happens to the soul and spirit in the physical and bodily is beyond human consciousness. What plays into human life are confused dreams without cognitive value. So that we can say: the entire development of human life consists of what we live through while awake and what we spend while sleeping. And we do not pay attention to the fact that when we look back, we always piece together the morning and the evening, and let that fall out of consciousness that we cannot reach with it, that withdraws from consciousness, that we switch off the stretches that we have slept through. Now the question arises as to whether what sleep gives us spiritually and mentally is not just as important as what being awake gives us.

Of course, only being awake can be considered for our outer life, and the more civilization has turned to mere observation of the outer life, the more it relies on observing the waking state. But for the life of the human being itself – something that even level-headed philosophers have already conceded – what happens in the abundant third of life on earth that we sleep through is no less essential than what we experience while awake. But it only becomes vividly apparent when we have broken through the boundaries defining things through the struggle with nature through ultimate perceptions. Then it happens that the empty space of experience, which we otherwise sleep through, which otherwise contains nothing for us except dreaming, that this empty space of knowledge is filled with content, that we learn to look at that which otherwise shrouds itself in the darkness of sleep. Just as we can look back on what presents itself in waking life as the knowledge that we, as physical-sensory human beings, have experienced with the earth and its phenomena, so now knowledge of a spiritual-soul nature arises from the state in which the human being finds himself from falling asleep to waking up. The darkness between falling asleep and waking up is illuminated, this third of our life becomes transparent to us, and what we see is then our true self, the form of thinking, feeling and willing. We see that which, without our consciousness knowing it, is constantly at work within us, shaping our spiritual and psychological being. We see through to the content as that which is separated from us by the gate of death when we lay down the physical body. As sleep becomes transparent to us, we learn to recognize the true nature of human immortality. When we look beyond the mystical, when we go further than ordinary mysticism, we get to know the prenatal nature of the human being when we take natural science seriously, but when we begin to struggle at the boundary, we get to know what immortal existence the human being carries within. And so, for us, the human being comes together in its development, in that we see, so to speak, how a prenatal human being enters into the physical human organization, I would even say becomes more and more absorbed in this physical human organization, how the physical human organization becomes more and more becomes mightier and mightier, how that which has entered into the human being through birth, in the physical human existence, fades more and more in the further development of the human being, how, so to speak, the human being from this side becomes more and more a physical-bodily being. But in the same measure as this development proceeds, in the same measure as the spirit and soul that are innate in us submerge in the physical body, so that which appears to us, when we observe sleep, as the future being of the human being emerges.

As we look more and more towards the end of the normal human life, we see how, on the other hand, the spiritual-soul being of the spiritual post-mortal human existence emerges in contrast to the dying spiritual human life of prenatal existence. In every moment of earthly life we see a measure of what the human being has brought with them from the eternal worlds into earthly existence, what they are forging in order to carry it through the gateway of death into a spiritual world; cognitively we advance to immortality. The path I am describing to you, in order to arrive at an understanding of the human being by going beyond mysticism and natural science, is not one that can be dismissed by casually labeling it “clairvoyant.” This is a path in which one knows how each step follows the previous one, just as the mathematician knows how one mathematical derivation follows another. The path that I have been able to sketch for you – with reference to the books mentioned – is the path of anthroposophy, the path that leads to the unborn and immortal nature of the human soul in a way that could be explained to a strict mathematician, and which shows how one does not have to stop at the world in order to penetrate into the human being, as one does not have to stop at the human being in mysticism in order to penetrate into the world, but how one can connect the knowledge of the world with the knowledge of the human being. If enough natural science and enough mysticism is pursued in this way, then the possibility will arise for the future spiritual civilization of humanity to fulfill the word that approaches man so powerfully admonishing, the word “know thyself!”

Such knowledge as I have just described, however, differs from the knowledge that is bound to the nervous system, which is essentially knowledge of the head. And allow me to make a personal remark, which is, however, completely factual. As a spiritual researcher trying to penetrate this realm, which I call the realms that one has to pass through before birth and after death, one is aware that you cannot get by with the thinking that otherwise serves you in life. You have to develop a strengthened thinking that engages the whole person. One does not become a medium through this, but the whole human being must be taken up by such thinking. Such thinking penetrates into feeling, into emotion, and even demands that the human being surrender himself to it with the whole content of his will. At the same time, thinking about spiritual content is such that it cannot be incorporated into the memory in the usual way, like any other. Here too I would like to make a personal comment: You see, when a spiritual researcher gives a lecture like the one I am giving here, he cannot prepare it in the same way as other scientific lectures. In that case he would only appeal to memory. But what has come about through such a deepening cannot be assimilated by memory, it must be experienced again and again in every moment. It can be brought down into those regions where we put our knowledge into words, but one must endeavor to do so with one's whole being. And that is why I have a profound experience of only being able to incorporate into human language that which I succeed in researching in the spiritual world. And by incorporating it into human language, it also becomes incorporated into memory; I only succeed when I draw or write down a few lines, so that not only the head but also all the other organ systems are involved. You have to feel the need to take one or the other to help you, because you can't manage it, it fluctuates when you want to grasp it with your head. The important thing is that I express the thought with lines and thus fix it. So you can find whole truckloads of old notebooks of mine that I never look at again. They are not there for that either, but so that what I have laboriously extracted from my mind can be developed to the point where it can be clothed in words and thus brought to the memory. Once it has been written, one has participated in the spiritual production with something else in one's organism than merely with the head, with thoughts, then one is able to hold on to that which wants to escape. The rest of the human organization is initially uninvolved, unconsciously more dormant than the mental processes, and when we incorporate something into our will, we make use of those organs that are in a state that we describe as dormant when we are awake. We are actually only awake in our thoughts and imagination, for the way in which our mental images penetrate into our organism as a volitional decision, to become a movement of the hand or fingers, remains completely shrouded in darkness in ordinary consciousness. Only the spiritual researcher will recognize what happens between the process in the brain and the movement. And so spiritual knowledge, which is not ordinary head knowledge, is entrusted to the whole human organization. By acquiring knowledge of the human being from within the whole human being, one is able to apply this knowledge of the human being, which can take the prenatal and the after-death as a tangible reality, to practical life in a completely different way than one would be able to without this true knowledge of the human being.

Now those who are grounded in anthroposophical research dare, I would say, through a twist of fate that also extends to the other areas of human education, pedagogy and didactics, to introduce human education into practical life. Those who imbibe the knowledge of the human being that has been brought forth from such research as I have mentioned acquire a more refined instinct, a spiritualized instinct, for everything that develops in the human being through the different ages from birth to death. We must then only have the courage to look at human development, the knowledge of which we need, at a higher level, in the same way as we otherwise look at anything with strict scientific methods that lies within the scientific world.

For example, the following arises: We are always thinking about what the effect of the soul and spirit on the physical body of the human being might actually be. But we do not consider that we should not apply the methods of speculation to such questions, but should also apply the methods of observation to such questions. When real observation of human beings is developed humanely, then we see – I am speaking from a popular point of view – how in the first age of the child, from birth to the change of teeth, in a wonderful way the most significant abilities of the human being emerge from the indeterminate depths of his being. We see how the dynamic develops through which the human being, as an upright creature, places himself in the world in his balance, how speech and thought emerge from the depths of the soul and are physically realized. But what we see culminates organically in the change of teeth. This has the peculiarity of being a unique event in human life. What happens during the change of teeth does not repeat itself. In a sense, a conclusion is made with a sum of forces in the human organization. Only someone who does not know this human organization can believe that the change of teeth stands alone. No, it does not stand alone, it stands as the outwardly perceptible expression of what is going on in the whole human organism. The human being is going through something that he will no longer go through in later life, otherwise he would always change his teeth in a periodic sequence. But those who observe the human being are aware of this significant transformation of the spiritual and psychological nature of the human being But this change, which takes place during this epoch of the human being's life, is not observed. If I were to present what educators and didacticians should know, what underlies the human knowledge I want to talk about here, it would go far beyond the scope of a lecture, and so I will just sketch it out.

Take memory, for example. On superficial examination, we say that memory behaves in a certain way up to the change of teeth, then it changes somewhat. But it is something different, the memory before the change of teeth and the memory after the change of teeth. Today, due to our scientific attitude, we do not have the right talent for observation for such intimate expressions of human nature. For a correct observation, it can be seen that the wonderful memory before the change of teeth is nothing more than the completion of habits expressed from within. From the forces of habit, memory is built up until the teeth change. If it is a memory that can be compared to a habitual movement, then one can say that for memory one image follows another.

In short, what we call memory undergoes a metamorphosis when children change teeth around the age of seven. It undergoes a metamorphosis from more physical-bodily experience to spiritual-soul experience. Once one begins with such an observation, further ones arise that are tremendously characteristic of the further development of the human being. For example, when one has acquired the instinct of observation, when one has assimilated the knowledge of spiritual research, one sees that the child, up to the change of teeth, is an imitative being. Of course, one must not take such things crudely, but the child in the first period of life is, so to speak, one single large sense organ. We can compare the whole life of the child in the first period with a single sense organ, we can compare it with the internal organization of the eye. Just as the eye takes in the external world and, through the application of willpower, builds up the image of what is impressed upon the eye organ through the agency of the organic within, so the child is constantly striving to reproduce what is present in its environment through imitation, which emerges from the inner being. The child is entirely sensory organ, entirely active sensory organ. Because the whole being of the child functions as a sense organ, the child not only imitates and inwardly experiences, in a dreamy state, quite unconsciously, what is external movement, gesture, what is speech sound, what is thought in speech sound, but it always arises - and this is the peculiar thing - from this starting point: the imitative child observes the moral significance of the gestures of father and mother. The moral significance of facial expression, for example, finds its counterpart in the child's sense of it; it becomes ingrained in the child, in its physical organization. The child organizes itself right down to the cellular level by empathizing with what is happening in its environment. Only when we consider the implications of this will we be able to distinguish between what is inherited and what is acquired in this way during the first childhood epoch through imitation from the environment. Then we will see the wonderful interaction between the environment and the child, and the real, for the sober-minded observer mystical, concept of the science of heredity will be able to be placed on a completely different footing. But it also shows the special nature that the human being brings with them, in that they enter earthly existence as spiritual-soul beings with an etheric body, which is something that is unfamiliar to today's way of thinking. What characterizes the child is a bodily-religious being. It is actually the case that the child is given over with its body to the physical outer world and its moral content, just as we can be given over in a religious mood to something that reveals itself to us as divine. It is in a bodily-religious mood; because this mood is purely bodily-religious, it does not, of course, have the mood of piety and similar states that later become mental religiosity. But if we follow the development of the human being, we see how what remains in the body until the teeth change then appears differently, how what is completely contained in the bodily-physical in the first epoch moves into impulses of feeling and will. And when we send our children to primary school, we must realize that the inner life of the child undergoes a metamorphosis. After the final point mentioned, which is the change of teeth, what was physical experience is partially left behind in the physical development and appears in a different form as soul and feeling. That which was first in the growth forces, in the plastic formative forces, that which has worked in the body as spiritual-soul during the change of teeth, part of this detaches itself and transforms into the free soul-spiritual after the change of teeth. And what we call growth, what has been working in the body, gradually transforms into the spiritual-soul. If we pay attention to this and are equipped with this knowledge, then we as teachers and educators face the child to be educated with our whole attitude and all our knowledge in the right way. Then we know that in this physical, bodily, sensual being, which is in a religious mood of devotion to its environment, as it grows into a bodily-religious being, the spiritual-soul being that was there in the pre-earthly existence. Let us put ourselves in the shoes of an educator who is confronted with the child in this way. He will be aware of his responsibility, he knows that the spiritual worlds have sent him to guide a being that he has to guess at and unravel through its physical expressions. He will stand before the being in such a way that he devotes himself to helping everything that the child has brought with it from the spiritual and soul worlds to truly come to manifestation. And with reverence for his calling, the educator will stand before the child, seeing with each month, with each year, that all that it has brought with it from the spiritual and soul world is transformed into the physical and bodily. And he will observe the way in which he can influence the child, and he will be able to perceive what was bodily-physical before the transformation, in the first epoch until the change of teeth; in the second epoch, from the change of teeth until sexual maturity, it transforms itself as a transition into the soul, and only with sexual maturity does it transform itself into the spiritual. The human being then presents himself to us in such a way that what has been experienced in his organization in the first years of childhood now comes to expression in his spiritual grasp of the world: the bodily-religious becomes spiritual-religious. Now we can see the connection between what is physical and what becomes soul and spirit. Now we no longer speculate about the physical and bodily, about spirit and soul; now we see how, in the different ages of life in human development, the spiritual and soul-like is directly revealed. Now we gain an understanding of the human being based on the interaction between body and soul, on the basis of observing human beings, which becomes the basis for proper human education.

By the will of fate, the opportunity arose to apply what results from such observation in a practical, didactic and pedagogical way in the years when one is able to guide the destiny of the child. In Stuttgart, Mr. Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School as a free elementary school, to which the lower classes of the middle school were later added. The leadership was given to me. I was now able to apply the methods that result from the human knowledge described above. The aim is to initially leave aside what is otherwise called the “teaching goal”, and to read this from the human development itself.

What I have described is only a rough sketch, but it can be observed from day to day in a new form in the child through the pedagogical instinct that arises from working with the child. Through this, one can see how the child's life unfolds; one can see what dictates what you, as an educator, should bring to the child each week, each month, and that you let the human being's inner being dictate what you, as an educator, should bring to the child. For example, when you first send your child to primary school, it is only natural that he or she should have an aversion to learning to read and write. And that is understandable. Consider that these strange signs, which we call letters and by which we read and write, which are something completely foreign to the human being, have emerged from the original characters in a long cultural development. The original writing emerged from the images and signs of what it represented; it was even closer in expression to what it meant; it was still similar to what one perceived directly. The child who comes to school and is supposed to learn the derived characters feels no affinity with the characters that are foreign to his or her perception. This understanding only awakens with sexual maturity and is quite different from that between the sixth and eighth years and between the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth years of life. The child, because it is only there emotionally, relies on the pictorial, which presents itself to it in the same way as sensory perception and sensory vision. If we recognize this, then we will introduce the right educational impulses for this age; but then we must move on to those things that we have introduced in our school in Stuttgart. The aim is to bring the child to a stage where they can draw by painting and paint by drawing. They should not be engaged only with their heads and eyes, but with their whole being. It is amazing what emerges in terms of pictorial quality when children draw and paint. If this is properly directed, it is possible to develop the letters, writing and reading from what is close to the children. We learn to read after learning to write because reading only involves the head, whereas writing involves the whole person.

This is an example of how we try to achieve, through practical pedagogy and didactics, what human education should achieve, based on knowledge of the human being. The person who looks at how the human being is predisposed in terms of their religious life will also find the opportunity to bring in the moral-religious impulses. In this way, the following is revealed: It is remarkable how children between the ages of nine and ten, in the first third of the second stage of life, go through something like this in this stage of life. All this takes place unconsciously. We see how the child, having changed teeth, makes the transition from being an imitative being to one who, in response to the authority of the educator and teacher, acquires everything. You will believe the person who wrote the “Philosophy of Freedom” thirty years ago when he says that he does not approach you as an advocate for authority, but precisely when you have recognized from that “Philosophy of Freedom” what freedom means , then one can also appreciate that it is out of the lawfulness of the human being that the child, from the change of teeth to the time of sexual maturity, is a being that completely imitates what it sees in its teacher or educator. We see that the child not only wants to model itself on the teacher or educator through language, in accordance with its own inner laws, but that it wants to model itself on the whole of human life. When the child has become immersed in this necessary, self-evident sense of authority, we see how it undergoes a kind of crisis between the ages of nine and ten. Everything happens emotionally and intuitively, the child does not give it any thought, but it approaches the teacher and wants something special. And if we want to put it into words, the child thinks: Until now, the beautiful was beautiful because the teacher and educator thought it was beautiful, until now the true was true because the teacher and educator thought it was true. But from this point on, the child feels: Who justifies this authority before the whole world, where did it get the true and the beautiful as true and beautiful? The child is going through a crisis, it knows nothing of what I have formulated here, it only senses something. And we, as teachers and educators, must observe this moment so that the right word can be spoken from the educator to the child, over and over again, if necessary. For it is a matter of the fact that our actions in this moment of crisis determine the whole of later life, whether it is full of joie de vivre and security or is alienated and inwardly paralyzed.

An educational method of this kind shows us that we, as educators, must do what is beneficial for life as a whole. If we enter into such a study of life, we will see how something that is properly introduced into a child at an early age only comes to fruition in later life. I will give you an example here. We know people who, when they get older, perhaps when they are very old and enter into some society, they do not need to say much, they are something that brings calm, peace, something that blesses into society. These are people who, often only through the nuance of their words, through the way they speak, can have a magnificent effect on their fellow world, with moral impulses, dispensing grace. If we are not satisfied with observing life in shorter periods, and if we make the effort and are able to observe the whole of human life, then we know that such people, who bring such blessings, had the good fortune as children to look up in adoration to other people or to something that was shown to them. From this veneration between the ages of ten and fourteen develops that which makes us benefactors in later life, which, figuratively speaking, I want to say: No hand can rise in blessing in later life that has not learned to fold in prayer in childhood. This is just a pictorial way of indicating how a true knowledge of the human being brings such things to the child that the feeling for moral good and the antipathy for evil grow and live, that they grow as the human body itself grows. One has the feeling that if one brings sharp contours into definitions to the child, it would be as if one were to shackle the child's organism. We must give the child concepts and impulses that can grow like the organism, that can grow spiritually and soulfully, that spiritually carry within them the inner possibility of becoming ever richer and richer, so that later one can look back with joy in one's memory that the child's life has sprouted in the aged human body. I would like to show you with a few pictures how a real knowledge of the human being, gained in the way I described at the beginning of my lecture, can be applied to the education and development of the child. You will see in the Stuttgart School how it will have to prove to you what I have described to you here, how it provides, so to speak, the practical proof of life that exists to a certain degree, even if we want to be modest about the results.

It could now be objected that only those who have undergone what qualifies them to look into the spiritual world can have an interest in such knowledge of man. But it is not so. Although anyone who has gone through the path of knowledge, as described for example in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” can verify for themselves what spiritual research says, this is not even necessary for judgment, just as anyone who is not a painter themselves can judge the beauty of a picture. Although only the researcher can describe the spiritual world, those who have retained a healthy sense of judgment can certainly see through the truth or untruth of what is being researched from the spiritual world. Therefore, those who profess this spiritual research should not be portrayed as a sect or as blind.

Anthroposophy does not want to be a sect; it wants to be a continuation of scientific research, which has developed over centuries to its culmination in the nineteenth century, and we are still in the process of developing it today. Only by following these guidelines can it become a true knowledge of the human being and thus the basis for an education that is appropriate for humanity and in keeping with human dignity. For it is not only through knowledge of the world that we can cope in life, since neither science nor mysticism can lead the human being to a full knowledge of his or her own humanity. For it is like breathing: there must be an interaction, a kind of inhalation and exhalation, between knowledge of the world and knowledge of the human being. But such knowledge alone can only be the basis for an education that pursues the spiritual and soul aspects of the human being until they are transformed into the physical and bodily aspects. It is the basis for that aspect of the state of human culture that needs to be transformed. For anyone who looks at today's life will be able to say to himself: This state cannot be transformed by external transformation, it cannot be brought about by it alone, what we desire for the continuation of our civilization, which is threatened, but only by that which comes from the spirit, and only those human deeds and actions that are borne by the spirit will fit in with social progress.

Let me summarize briefly: spiritual knowledge gives man, immersed in spirit, the ideas that can fill his whole being, that can lead to spirit-filled deeds, to spirit-filled actions and to a spirit-filled social, to a spiritual human coexistence steeped in love. And that is what we will most urgently need in the near future.

Who could doubt that one can look at astronomy hopefully if the talk is of the world origin? For astronomy is rightly a science for which we not only have high respect because it leads us with weighty knowledge in the vastnesses of the universe. It is also something that speaks in spite of any abstractness and roughness most intensely to our souls and minds. So one can say: one can understand that the human soul hopes to get explanation of the deepest secrets of existence looking up at the starry heaven, which speaks so deeply to our mind if we open ourselves to it at night.

We want to ask ourselves from the viewpoint of spiritual science, what has astronomy to say about the origin of the universe? Perhaps, that what results from these considerations appears to somebody in such a way, as if a flower of hope is picked to pieces in a certain way. Someone who gets this impression, nevertheless, consoles himself with the fact that astronomy has just brought such miraculous results to us in the last decades that we have enough reason to be very glad about these results as such—also intellectually. However, we are led by this deeper knowledge of the newer time in this field to the fact that just this deepening of astronomy makes us less hopeful if we try to get explanation about the big questions of origin and development of the universe directly. There we can point to the fact that just to that what the physical research experienced as an immense deepening since Copernicus by observations or by courageous speculations in the course of the nineteenth century something was added that introduces us in a before unexpected way in the material character of the universe. Whereas one had once to confine oneself to state out of the boldness of the human thinking that if we look at the stars worlds face us at which we should look similarly as at our own world, the spectral analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen enabled us to investigate the material nature of the stars directly by the physical instrument. Hence, one can venture an assertion reasonably based on immediate observation that we detect the same materials with the same qualities in the different suns, in the nebulae and in the other things that face us in space as we find them on our earth.

That is why one can say that since the middle of the nineteenth century our science was seized by the knowledge: we rest here as human beings within a material world with its laws, with its forces. From the effect which these material laws of the earth show in the so-called spectroscope, and because the same effects are sent from the most distant space to the spectroscope, one can conclude that in the whole space, as far as the material world is considered, the same materiality and the same laws of materiality have poured forth. While it was once in certain respect only a kind of geometrical calculation to investigate the movements of the stars, the brilliant connection of spectral analysis with the so-called Doppler effect enabled us to observe not only those movements which happen before us in such a way that we recognise them as on a surface drawn as the movements of the stars. But since that time we can also include the Doppler effect, a little shift of the spectral lines, in those movements of the stars because the stars come closer or go away from us; while it was only possible once to calculate really what happened in a plane which stands vertically to our line of sight. Such a principle, as it is the connection of the Doppler effect with spectral analysis, is the basis of tremendous achievements of astronomy. What now the human being could invent as a kind of worldview as it turns out if we consider the space filled with suns, planets, minor planets, with nebulae and other things and their intertwined movements and their lawful affecting each other—about this worldview we say: we can understand that such a picture appeared to the human mind that strove for knowledge as a model of clearness, of inner substantiality, if one pursues to encompass reality with the thinking.

If we visualise what it means to calculate a thing that fulfils the space: the big and the small things move in such a way, the one has an effect on the other. If we visualise, what it means to be able to think such a clear thought in the space, we visualise it comparing it to any other physical effect that we see in our surroundings, for example, with the turning green of the trees in the spring or with the blossoming of a plant. Some people who stand or stood vividly in science know how bitter it is if they are compelled at first on the ground of completely outer consideration repeatedly to reach for concepts that can be thought by no means to an end if it concerns, for example, imagining a growing, developing plant, apart from more complex phenomena like animal organisms. Even already in the phenomena of chemistry and physics of our earth evolution some rest remains to us in the effects of heat et cetera even if we want to understand things, which our eyes see, and our ears hear, with clear concepts. If we look at space and can comprise it in such a picture that expresses itself in clear changes of location, in mutual relations of movement, then it is comprehensible that this has a beatific effect on our inside. Then we say to ourselves: such explanations that we can give of the movement of the stars in space and their mutual effect are very clear in themselves so that we can generally consider them as an example of explanations. Small wonder, hence, that this thought of the fascinating clarity of the astronomical worldview seized numerous human beings. It was very instructive for someone who pursued the theoretical science of the nineteenth century that the excellent spirits of the nineteenth century used approaches that were predetermined by the just characterised fascinating sensation.

Excellent spirits of the nineteenth century thought possibly in that way, we see out in space, see the mutual relations and movements of the stars, if we transform them into thoughts, a picture of miraculous clearness originates. Now we try to see into that little world into which, however, only the speculating thought can see which one built up as hypotheses in the nineteenth century more and more: the world of atoms and molecules. One imagined that every material consists of smallest parts which no eye and no microscope can see which one has to assume, however, hypothetically. Thus, one assumed that—as one has many stars in space—here are as it were smallest stars, the atoms. Then from the mutual arrangement of the atoms, as they are grouped together, arises—indeed, only hypothetically—that what can wake the picture in us in microcosm: here you have a number of atoms, they relate to each other in a certain respect and move around each other. If the atoms relate to each other and move, this means that the material, which composes these atoms, for example, is hydrogen or oxygen. All materials can be referred to small atoms of which they consist. These small atoms are grouped again, and then certain groups form the molecules. However, if one could look into these atoms and molecules, one would have in microcosm an effigy of the clearness, which we have outdoors, where the space is filled with stars. It was attractive for some thinkers of the nineteenth century if they could say to themselves, all outer phenomena, light, sound, elasticity, electricity and so on lead back to such effects that are caused by the movements and forces of atoms that happen as the forces and movements on the large scale if we see out into space. A strange picture originated in some spirits: if we look into the human brain, it also consists of materials and forces, which we find in the world outdoors. If one were able to look into the smallest things of the human brain, in the circulating blood, one would recognise something like smallest atomic and molecular worlds that are effigies of the big universe in microcosm. One believed if one could pursue mathematically what arises from the atoms and their movements, then one would be able to recognise that a certain kind of atomic movements—working on our eye—cause the impression of light, another kind the impression of warmth. Briefly, one imagined to be able to reduce all phenomena of nature to a small, tiny astronomy, to the astronomy of the atoms and molecules. Almost the word had been stamped which played a big role in the sensational talks that during the seventies Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1815-1896, German naturalist) held about the “limits of the knowledge of nature,” the word of the “spirit of Laplace.” This had become a kind of catchword and meant nothing else than that it would have to be the ideal of a physical explanation to reduce everything that we see round us to astronomical knowledge of the movements of atoms and molecules. Laplace was that spirit who surveyed the celestial mechanics. That spirit who could bring in this overview of the stars in space in smallest molecular and atomic things would approach, so to speak, more and more the ideal to recognise our nature astronomically.

Hence, we can say that there were people who believed: if I have the impression, I hear a tone, or I see red, a movement goes forward in truth in my brain. If I could describe these movements as the astronomers describe the movements of the stars, then I would understand what it concerned understanding the natural phenomena and the human organism. Then we would have the fact in our consciousness: I hear the tone C sharp, I see red. However, in truth it would be in such a way: if we perceive red, a little atomic and molecular universe takes place in us, and if we knew how the movements are, we would have understood, why we perceive red and not yellow, because with another movement yellow would happen.

Thus, astronomical knowledge became an ideal in the course of the nineteenth century, penetrating any physical knowledge with the same clear concepts, which apply to astronomy. One can say, it is interesting largely to pursue how under the influence of such a thought the theoretical natural sciences developed. I would like to point to something that faced me many years ago. I knew a headmaster who was an excellent man, also as a headmaster. However, he occupied himself during his remaining school activity to invent such a physical system along which one can also get without the attractive or repulsive forces valid since Newton's time. Thus,, that headmaster—Heinrich Schramm—whose works are rather significant, tried in his book The General Movement of Matter as a Basic Cause of All Natural Phenomena to get rid of the gravitational force except that what already the astronomical knowledge had removed.

It was very interesting what this man tried in a certain ingenious way at first. For if we believe that light, sound and heat are nothing else than movements of the smallest mass particles, if astronomical knowledge is able to shine everywhere, why should we still assume those weird, mystic forces reaching from the sun to the earth through the empty space? Why should one not also be able to assume instead of this mystic gravitational attraction in which one had believed up to now such a force between the atoms and molecules? Why should one not be able to shake this too? Indeed, this man succeeded—without considering a special attractive force—in understanding the attraction of the heavenly bodies and the atoms. He showed: if two bodies are confronted in space, nevertheless, one does not need to suppose that they attract each other, because someone does not assume such an attraction—so Schramm meant—who does not believe in such a thing like hands shaking in space. The only thing that one is allowed to assume is that small moved mass particles which push from all sides like small balls, so that from all sides small balls push the two big balls. If one exactly calculates now and does no mistake, one finds that simply because the hits between both balls and those that are caused from without result in a difference. The forces, which one assumed, otherwise, as attractive forces from without can be substituted by hits from without, so that one would have to replace the attractive forces by pushing forces, which attract the matter.

With tremendous astuteness, you find this thought carried out in the cited writing. I could bring in later writings of the same character; however, Schramm treated the thing first. Thus, Schramm could show how completely according to the same law two molecules exercise attraction just like the biggest heavenly bodies. Thus, astronomical knowledge became something that gained ground in the biggest space and worked into the smallest, assumed particles of matter and ether. This stood as a great ideal before the thinkers of the nineteenth century. Who did his studies in this time knows that one applied this ideal to the most different phenomena that astronomical knowledge was just a radical ideal. One is allowed to say that everything was suitable—at first during the seventies—to promote this ideal, because to that all the results of the more precise investigation of the conditions of heat were added. In the sixties, one recognised more and more what Julius Robert Mayer had shown already during the forties of the nineteenth century ingeniously: the fact that heat can be transformed into other natural forces according to particular numerical ratios. The fact that this is the case, we realise if we touch a surface with the fingers intensely, for example, the pressure changes into heat. If we heat a steam engine, the heat changes into the locomotive forces of the machine. As heat changes into motion or compressive force into heat, the other natural forces, electricity et cetera change likewise into natural forces of which one thought that they are transformable. If one connected this thought with the laws of astronomical knowledge, one could say, what faces us there differs in relation to reality only because a certain form of movement within the world of the atoms and molecules changes into another. We have a certain form of movement in the molecules, a little, complex astronomical system, and the movements change into other movements, one system into another system. Heat is transformed into locomotive force et cetra that way.

One believed to be able to figure everything out this way. So big and tremendous was the impression of astronomical knowledge that it provided such an aim. We have now to say that at first still a little was gained concerning a theory of world evolution with all these thoughts. Why? There we have to look around at the ideas of those people who were in the immediate cultural life and ideals of their time. For I do not want to start immediately from that which spiritual science has to say and what can be easily contested by its opponents. We can convince ourselves the easiest how these things happened if we look a little closer at that speech About the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature that Du Bois-Reymond held on the Conference of German Naturalists and Physicians in Leipzig on 14 August 1872.

There Du Bois-Reymond spoke highly of this ideal of an astronomical knowledge and said that true natural sciences exist only where we can lead back the single natural phenomena to an astronomy of atoms and molecules, anything else is not valid as an explanation of nature. Thus, somebody would have explained the human soul life scientifically if he had succeeded in showing how after the model of astronomical movements the atoms and molecules must form a group in the human being to let appear a human brain. At the same time, however, Du Bois-Reymond drew attention to the fact that we have done still nothing for the explanation of the soul and its facts by such an astronomical explanation. For he said, assuming that the ideal is fulfilled that we can really say, the movements of the atoms happen within the brain after the model of astronomical movements: by the perception of the tone C sharp this movement complex arises, by the perception of the colour red another—then we have satisfied our need of causality scientifically. However, no one, Du Bois-Reymond emphasised, could realise, why a certain kind of movements just changes into the experience of our soul: I perceive red, I hear organ tone, and I smell rose smell or such.

For Du Bois-Reymond drew attention to something that already Leibniz had stressed and that nothing can be objected. If we imagine—if it depends only on movement—a gigantic human brain, so that we could walk in it like in a factory where we can observe all movements of the wheels and belts and could show: there is a certain movement—we draw it nicely and calculate it as we can calculate the movements of the planets around the sun. However, nobody would know if he did not know it from other things that this movement, which I observe there, corresponds in the soul to the experience: I see red. He would not be able to figure this out, but he would be able to find out only laws of movement and can say to themselves, the movement runs this or that way, this and that happens in space. However, he would not be able to find the connection between these movements thought according to the model of astronomy and the peculiar experience: I see red, I hear organ tone, and I smell rose smell. If he did not know from anywhere else where from these experiences are, he would never be able to conclude them from the movements of the atoms. Du Bois-Reymond even said rather crassly: “Which conceivable connection exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and, on the other hand, with the original, not further definable, undeniable facts: I feel pain, I feel desire, I taste sweet, smell rose smell, hear organ tone, see red, and the immediately flowing certainty from that: so I am? It is absolutely and forever incomprehensible that it should not be irrelevant to a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen etc. atoms in which way they lie and move in which way they lay and moved in which way they will lie and move.”

What Du Bois-Reymond said there did not completely comply with natural logic; for just in this crass expression we can see that it is not irrelevant to a number of molecules—to material parts—in which way they lie and move. For you know that it is not irrelevant to sulfur, saltpetre and coal in which way they lie side by side. If they lie side by side under certain conditions, they yield gunpowder. It is also not irrelevant in which relation one has brought the carbon to the hydrogen; but it concerns whether the material is led with the movement to another material with which it is used and can maybe form an explosive force. This quotation was overshot if it also had a shade of correctness. However, already Leibniz had recognised the correct thing: the fact that there no kind of transition exists between the astronomical movement of the molecules and atoms and between the qualities of our experience and our inner soul life. It is not possible to bridge this abyss with the bare astronomical science as a “movement.”

We have to get out this clearly from the various mistakes in the speech of Du Bois-Reymond. Nevertheless, this is the valuable of this speech: it was something like a reaction, like a feeling against the omnipotence and the infinite wisdom of the astronomical knowledge. If we take into consideration what we are able to make evident so clearly, we find the possibility to transfer it to the big astronomical knowledge. If we assume what is certainly justified that one cannot find the bridge to the experiences of soul and mind from the astronomical knowledge of the movement of the smallest mass particles anyhow, then, however, one cannot bridge from that what the big astronomy offers to any effects of soul and mind which fill the space! If it is true and we imagine the human brain so increased that we could walk in it and look at the movements in it like at the movements of the heavenly bodies, and if we could perceive nothing of mental counter-images in these movements of our brain, we do not need to be surprised if we stand in such an enlarged brain—namely in the universe—and cannot find the bridge between the movements of the stars in space and the possible mental-spiritual activities which cover the cosmic space. They would also relate to movements of the stars like our thoughts, sensations and soul experiences relate to movements of our own cerebral mass. When Du Bois-Reymond spoke this, everybody who could think could conclude what was never done up to now: if that is right which Du Bois-Reymond showed with some certainty, one must also say, if anything mental or spiritual fills the space, no astronomy, no astronomical knowledge can say anything against or for that spiritual or mental filling the space, because one cannot conclude anything spiritual from movements.

With it, it was necessary to say, the astronomer must restrict himself at the description of that what goes forward in the universe. He cannot at all judge about the fact that on a large scale soul experiences of cosmic kind belong to the movements of the stars as our soul experiences belong to the movements of mass particles in the brain. With it, already in the seventies of the nineteenth century astronomy was limited. However, one would have had to ask quite different from Du Bois-Reymond asked, namely, is there any possibility to penetrate in another way to find the mental and spiritual beings filling the cosmic space?—Therefore, spiritual science points in contrast to astronomy to something that we discussed repeatedly in these talks: the fact that the human being is able to develop his cognitive forces to higher levels than he has them in the normal life. If these cognitive forces have been lifted to a higher level, it is possible to find other things in space and time than that at what one looked as the ideal fulfilment of space and time in the nineteenth century: the astronomic movements of forces and atoms in space.

However, we must not think too poorly about what the external natural sciences have to say concerning the evolution of the world. For the scientific facts, which have led, indeed, to a certain radical ideal of an astronomical molecular and atomic knowledge, developed something that we have to regard almost as a model of a scientific, deeply in the secrets of existence shining fact. Even if it has a limited significance, nevertheless, it is a fact of very first rank. Today it can be indicated only because what it concerns is the answer of the question: “What has astronomy to say about the origin of the world?”

  In order to answer this question, one has to point to the fact that within the scientific thinking, research and experimentation it is clearly proved that it is right, indeed, in general that we can transform natural forces into each other that we can transform, for example, heat into work or if we have done any work this into heat. However, that is right with a quite weighty restriction. While on one side it is valid: heat can be transformed into mechanical work, into kinetic energy and kinetic energy again into heat—we must say on the other side that if one wants to transform heat back into work, in kinetic energy, this cannot happen unlimitedly. We realise this the clearest with the steam engine. We produce the movement by heat, but we cannot at all transform all heat into kinetic energy. Some heat gets always lost, so that we always have to calculate with all processes in nature where heat is transformed into movement with a loss of heat, as it is sure with a steam engine. For even with the best steam engines we can only transform about one quarter of the heat into movement, the other is emitted into the cooler, into the surroundings et cetera. We are able to do it only in such a way that we must realise that a part of the heat—as heat—is emitted in the cosmic space.

The knowledge that, indeed, kinetic energy can be completely transformed into heat but heat cannot completely retransformed into kinetic energy has also become in exterior relation one of the most fruitful knowledge for the science of the nineteenth century. Since thermodynamics is based merely on this knowledge, so that a big part of our present physics is built on it what has been characterised just here as the knowledge that heat cannot be retransformed completely into kinetic energy, but that always a rest of heat remains which is emitted. This has been shown apodictically by such investigations as for example those of the famous physicist Clausius (Rudolf C., 1822-1888, German physicist) who generalised this sentence that with all processes in the universe this sentence must be applied. Hence, we deal with all conversion processes where heat plays a role, with a transmission of heat in that work which is just considered with the facts of our nature. However, because always by the transformation a rest of heat remains, one can easily understand that the final state of our material development will be the transformation of all kinetic energy, of all other work in nature into heat. This is the last that must result: every physical process must convert itself into heat because always a rest of heat is left. Thus, all world processes run in such a way that heat will become bigger and bigger which results as a rest and at last the result must be that all movement processes will have been transformed into heat. Then we would be concerned with a big world chaos that exists only of heat, which can no longer be retransformed. Every life process that the sun causes on earth leaves rests of heat; at last, everything that shines from the sun to us tends to pass over to a general heat death.

This is the famous “Clausius's heat death” into which any material development of the universe must discharge. Here physics delivered a knowledge for that who generally understands something of knowledge that is quite apodictic against which one cannot argue. Our material universe heads the heat death in which all physical processes will once be buried.

There we have something from physics that we can transfer immediately on the entire astronomy. If we were only able to see movement changing into heat, we could say, the universe could be infinite forwards and backward, does not need to end. However, physics shows in the second law of the mechanical theory of heat that the material processes of the universe head the heat death. One can be convinced: if it were not so difficult, if one must not have such a lot of mathematical prior knowledge and go into difficult physical processes, much more people would know something of Clausius's heat death than it is really the case.

There we have brought something in our astronomical worldview that signifies development as it were. Imagine how fatal it must be for a materialistic knowledge to open itself to this apodictic result! Someone who only considers the spiritual and mental as concomitants of the material movements must suppose immediately that everything mental and spiritual is buried in the heat chaos, which our material world heads. Thus, all culture for which the human beings strives, all beauty and effectiveness of the earth would once meet their death with the general heat death at the same time.—One can now say that in particular this general heat death has become somewhat fatal for the astronomical knowledge. Not all astronomers take the easy way out like Ernst Haeckel in his Riddle of the Universe. He means, the second law of the mechanical heat theory contradicts, actually, the first one that all heat is convertible. Indeed, one cannot deny—Haeckel also knows this—that our solar system hastens to such a heat death, but he consoles himself saying: if the whole solar system is doomed to die the heat death, it will once collide with another world system, then heat originates from the collision again—and then a new world system originates!—However, he does not consider that a clash of the slags and rests is already considered in the general heat death, so that one cannot hope for consolation from that.

There are also serious people who feel urged to get the possibility from the physical-astronomical knowledge to understand the world development almost try to come beyond the general heat death. There the attempt of the Swedish researcher Arrhenius (Svante A., 1859-1927) may be mentioned who refers in his book The Becoming of the Worlds (1908) in manifold way just to such questions from the viewpoint of physical chemistry, physics, astronomy, and geology. One can say, here the attempt is already done in somewhat wittier way than Haeckel did to overcome the theory of the general heat death. However, if one regards everything that Arrhenius tries to adduce, one must say, it is persuasive in no way. Only briefly, I would like to characterise what is taught from this side about the overcoming of the general heat death. Of course, one cannot deny that our solar system heads the general heat death. However, besides it Arrhenius represents another idea that is based on certain assumptions of Maxwell (James Clerk M., 1831-1879, Scottish physicist) and his so-called pressure of radiation. This is something that is opposite to the former attraction of the world masses that perpetually radiates from the single heavenly bodies into space to the other heavenly bodies generating pressure caused by various natural forces.

This pressure which as it were the heavenly bodies send into space is able—because it is a force radiating in the cosmic space—to carry the smallest particles of matter which are pushed off by a heavenly body. Arrhenius now tries to show by all kinds of considerations that it is natural that, as long as special conditions do not take place, these phenomena caused by the radiation pressure prevent the general heat death by no means. But Arrhenius believes that such special conditions are caused by the fact that as it were this cosmic dust becomes nebulae which are in particular material states—for example, by the fact that in such nebula any star drives from anywhere, would have compressed the matter that it has taken away, and increased the temperature that way. If it were possible that such a star that meets the matter drives in such a nebula, attracts the matter and compresses it, increases the temperature, we would have something that causes an increase of temperature in the cosmic space again, and we would have something that could be transformed again into work. Arrhenius shows wittily that the cosmic dust that approaches to such a nebula is in another position—as it were, it is carried away in such a position in which it escapes from the general trend of the heat death.

I could indicate only briefly, what is also indicated too briefly in Arrhenius's writing. However, someone who goes into that which has led to the assumption of the general heat death cannot help admitting that the possibility is only virtual, that in a nebula, even if the temperature rises, the heat death could be detained. Since, nevertheless, these are only fallacies, and the law of the general heat death is such a general one that we must admit if we properly proceed: according to the physical laws the stars, which collide with a nebula, have only to bring the rest of their former existence with them. Thus, these processes, which happen in the nebula, must also be included in the trend of the universe to the general heat death.

Now it is typical that Arrhenius still goes on and includes the possibility in his idea of the radiation pressure that a heavenly body could push seeds of living beings to the other by the radiation pressure. Indeed, one can prove—with a big appearance of correctness—that the cold through which certain plant seeds and animal gametes would be carried would work preserving on them, so that one could suppose by calculation only that life was carried from one heavenly body to the other heavenly body by the radiation pressure. One could work out this, for example, for the distance from the earth to Mars. Then one spares the earth—instead of saddling the earth with it—the possibility, as one wants it, otherwise, in physics, geology et cetera, to have produced life because then one can say: the earth does not need to have produced life, because it can have flown to it from other heavenly bodies.—Besides, it does not issue a lot. For, will one attain anything special with it that one moves the question of the origin of life to other heavenly bodies? There we have the same difficulties, only that on the earth the conditions hinder us to accept the origin of life on other heavenly bodies. Generally, these matters can show how apparently materialistic prejudices influence well-intentioned enterprises of the present, which start from the eternity of life. Since the whole line of thought is materialistic, so that one does not take into account that life could have its origin here as well as in that what could be thought as radiation from one heavenly body to the other. This shows that in the present even well-intentioned thoughts suffer from placing themselves on the ground of materialism.

Thus, the same faces us everywhere: the study of physical laws, material laws, material forces is used, so that as it were everything that physics finds is transferred to the big world edifice, and one tries to imagine the origin of the universe with these forces. We have realised that such thoughts exceed the limits of the astronomical knowledge everywhere. Since the astronomer cannot at all conclude anything that deals with the forces, which cause the becoming of the world from that what he has before himself. We can realise again that our thinking and feeling are mental processes which cause material processes quite certainly, for example, in our brain, even in our blood. Someone who feels sense of shame to whom the blush rises in his face can convince himself of the fact that mental processes entail material processes. However, someone who admits that the mental-spiritual causes material processes in us has to say to himself, if I stood in the human brain and studied the outside movements, I would only see movements in the movements; there I would not at all anticipate that I include the movements that are caused by the spiritual-mental processes. I ignore the spiritual-mental causes.—May it not seem comprehensible that the astronomer studying the heavenly bodies is urged to develop the causes one or the other way that any star moves one or the other way? Are we allowed to conclude from the bare movements or from the dynamic laws: the sun must be positioned in a certain way to the earth, the moon must be positioned in a certain way to the earth, must orbit the earth in a certain way, and thereby these movements can result? Astronomy can generally decide nothing in what way they are caused in the mental-spiritual. Therefore, we can come just from the field of astronomy to the necessity to point by quite different means to the true causes also of the universe. There I can point—today just only with a few words—to the connection of earth, sun and moon.

Their mutual life and their relations of motion have developed, as these three heavenly bodies relate to each other. If we want to recognise why the sun, earth and moon relate to each other just as they relate today, we must not only move up from those forces on earth which we recognise as the physical-mechanical to the space, but we must still move up from other processes which happen on earth. Most certainly we have if we look at the human being something before us that belongs to the whole earth and its connection with the sun and moon as the blossoming of flowers or any other process—or as an electric process in the air. Certainly, the human being belongs with all that he is to the earth, and it is an abstraction if one only thinks the earth as the geologists do, as an only inorganic, inanimate thing, but one has to include the human beings in the whole processes of the earth.

At first, we have the difficulty that we must distinguish two things if we want to understand the difference between human being and animal in the right way. With the animal, the type predominates, so that an individual ego is not effective in its whole development between birth and death in so determining way, as this is the case with the human being with his individual ego, which expresses itself in education and the cultural life. This distinguishes the human being from the animal with which the type predominates. Now it is in such a way that such things go over by transitions into each other. With the animal, the type predominates, but the type goes into the human nature.

The further we to go back in time, the more we find that the human being is also a generic being, and we see the individual more and more originating from the type. On the ground of the type, the individual emerges. We have the ideal of a human future before ourselves, which says to us, the individual, the ego-nature of every human being will be victorious over the type in the course of the earth development. Nevertheless, going back we just realise the type on the ground of human development. Going back, we have also approached another condition of consciousness more and more in which the human being was connected dream-like, vividly with a spiritual world. That is why we must regard these two things as related: the type and the pictorial, dreamlike consciousness of the ancient times on the one hand and, on the other hand, the development of the individuality and our individual consciousness by that what the human being has to obtain in the course of the times. Such an emergence of the individuality from the type, the intellectual from the clairvoyant-dreamlike must be searched in its origins within the whole world development. Since, so to speak, as the stone which falls to the earth is controlled by the general world laws, this emergence of the human individuality and intellectuality from the human type and clairvoyance is also connected with the big cosmic laws which work everywhere in space. We have already done a step in this direction when we characterised the significance of geology for spiritual science.

We could show there that we can trace back the earth to a condition in which such processes are earthly, telluric, which only happen today if our thoughts and sensations work like decomposing in our organism, so that we find—if we go back to the earth origin—such epochs in which the earth was in a process of decomposition. That knowledge shows—what is shown more exactly in the Occult Science—which has been characterised in these talks that as it were the whole earth has sheltered from too extensive a decomposition process by the fact that it has separated the moon. The moon had to be separated from our earth so that that condition could be overcome which can be described as a decomposition process within the earth evolution.

We do not only have a mechanical-physical process, but we have to regard the extrusion of the moon as such a process that became necessary because the earth sheltered, while she expelled the moon, from too extensive a process of decomposition. The earth could thereby get a new relation to the sun directly. Since while it had the moon in itself, this decomposition process was so that the effect of the sun could not penetrate the terrestrial atmosphere—if we imagine the terrestrial atmosphere at that time. Therefore, only a new condition had to be caused, so that earth and sun could catch sight of each other. With it, with the cleaning of the terrestrial atmosphere—what became only possible with the extrusion of the moon—the condition of forces came into being which gradually transformed the old generic consciousness into the self-consciousness, into the intellectual consciousness. Thus, the extrusion of the moon, the cleaning of the terrestrial atmosphere and the direct relation of earth and sun are connected with the entire human development. We could now go back even further and would find such a condition of our earth development in which the earth was still connected with the sun.

We would also find that the separation of sun and earth happened in order to make the existence of conscious beings generally possible on earth. Only by the repulsion of the earth from the sun that force system came about which made it possible that beings could become conscious. Thus, the ancient clairvoyant consciousness became possible by the repulsion of the earth from the sun—and the advance to a higher consciousness, an intellectual consciousness by the extrusion of the moon from the earth. If we ascend clairvoyantly to that what external astronomy cannot give, we have to regard the cosmic forces as the reasons of the separation of the sun and the remaining planets from the earth—that is we come to spiritual causes.

I could only indicate the principle. Of course, everybody could ask, did the human being already exist, when earth and sun separated? Indeed, he existed, only under other conditions. It is a matter of course that the human being, as he lives under the current conditions, would not be possible if the sun were together with the earth. However, this would be no objection. We receive spiritual causes for the movements of the heavenly bodies. Now we do no longer stop at that to which astronomy pointed more than one century ago at the mere utilisation of physical laws saying: the earth was once connected with the sun in a big gas ball, that started rotating, and thereby the planets and also the earth were separated and later also the moon from the earth. - Now, we do no longer get around to asserting that such a thing happens only due to mechanical-physical laws, but inner, spiritual reasons must be there why the earth separated from the sun.

The earth was separated from the sun, so that the human being was raised to the conscious experience, and the moon was separated from the earth, so that he can advance to his higher consciousness. Briefly, we start bringing that in the astronomical worldview what we must bring in—namely into the astronomical worldview of the small brain that what we must bring in if we want to go over from the mere movement of the cerebral atoms to the conclusion: I see red, hear organ tone, I smell rose smell et cetera.—Thus, we must go forward if we want to find the transition from that what the popular astronomy can give us, to that what the causes of the events are in space. Hence, those who want to stop at the ground of external physics should confine themselves to investigate this only what movements or what forces are what is to be recognised astronomically. They should confess that another progress of knowledge is necessary if astronomy wants to come to an explanation of the becoming of the universe, should confess that they would have to stop as representatives of a rationalistic and empiric astronomy at the explanation of the becoming of the universe.

Considering this, it turns out that the great and significant results of modern astronomy fit in our spiritual-scientific world edifice quite wonderfully. Take the Occult Science. There is shown how our earth has gradually developed, how it goes—just like the single human being in the successive earth-lives—through developmental stages how, so to speak, a planet goes through developmental stages. There our earth is led back to a former planetary stage, this stage to an earlier one, so far, as one can trace back it, up to a stage, which is called “Old Saturn” with which, however, not our today's Saturn is meant, but a planetary predecessor of our earth.

The same cognition that is quite independent of any outer physics and any speculation, shows that a planetary predecessor of our earth, just this Old Saturn, was mere heat and that spiritual forces intervened in this condition of heat, so that spiritual forces took possession of the heat chaos. All development is thereby caused up to our earth. In addition, spiritual science shows that really the material under our feet is dying off. In the talk What Has Geology to Say About the World Origin?, we have shown that geology has advanced so far to agree with us that the earth crust is dying off. We understand everything that we know of the earth crust only well if we understand it as dying off. However, in this fact is contained that the spiritual becomes free from the material. If among us the planetary material dies off, the spirit gets free from it.

We have another possibility now! We can point to the nebula—there we have no speculations after the model of the physicists, nevertheless, do not stop at the heat death—and can say, indeed, there we have the things in which all remaining processes are transformed into heat. However, as with the beginning of the earth spiritual powers seized the heat state, spiritual powers lead the nebulae into which by the heat death the solar systems discharge from the heat death to new solar systems. There is, actually, nothing more astonishing than the accordance of one of the most admirable laws of the nineteenth century in its application to astronomy—like the application of the second law of the mechanical heat theory—with the positive, actual results of astronomical observations.

If you do not take the speculative inventions of all kinds of radiation, but if you start from that what one can obtain from the spectroscope or from the photography of the astronomical phenomena, you realise that everything complies down to the last detail with that what one can obtain as evolution of the worlds from spiritual science. For it shows how that what one sees as an astronomical spatial picture is the result - the spiritual result—of spiritual beings. We can say different from the modern astronomical physicists: the human being has no reason to fight against the heat death or to be afraid of it, because he knows that from it new life will blossom as from the old heat chaos life blossomed which we have now before ourselves. Because a real repetition and increase of life is possible this way—not only from that what Arrhenius assumes that life is winded up like in a clockwork anew and takes place in the nebula anew, but development is only possible if a spiritual element works from one heat state to the other. If our world substance is buried in the grave of heat, the spirit has advanced a step and conjures up higher things, higher life from the heat chaos. Hence, the final state of the earth embodiment—the Vulcan stage—is in the Occult Science that which points to this what looks out as a new life from the grave of the heat death. Therefore, the name “Vulcan” is used. If we challenge astronomy, we can just realise that the external science complies deeply with that what spiritual science has to give.

Indeed, people will say repeatedly, you spiritual scientists are daydreamers, because the right result of exact science absolutely contradicts what you believe to get from spiritual science.—Anybody could then say, you have seriously spoken even of Moses, but we know that all that is overtaken. Since the glorious natural sciences have taught us long since, we are way beyond the world development of Moses—natural sciences have shown this.—Those speak that way who only are present from without. However, let us ask the others who were present not from without, but more from within. There I know a very significant physicist who has considerable share of the development of optics, Biot (Jean-Baptiste B., 1774-1862), who said, either Moses was as deeply experienced in sciences as our century, or he was inspired.

A leading physicist of the nineteenth century said this. Now those who write popular books about worldviews maybe mean, indeed, a physicist thinks that way who deals only with the outside of the phenomena. Nevertheless, those who go deeper into the being of the organic show that one was chased away from the spirit in the course of the nineteenth century where one searched the natural causes. -- How did Liebig (Justus von L., 1803-1873, chemist) think, who deeply penetrated into the being of the organic, about the relations of the world, to which he had dedicated his research efforts, to the spiritual world? He says that these are the opinions of dilettantes who derive the authorisation of their walks on the border of the fields of physical research to explain to the unknowing and gullible audience how world and life originated, actually, and how far, nevertheless, the human being has come concerning the investigation of the highest things.—People may say: have you never heard that Lyell (Charles L., 1797-1875) founded a geology? Have you never heard about the big progress, which came with him, that he overcame those worldviews, which still count on spiritual forces?—I could bring writings by Lyell forward to you that make deep impression today. However, just Lyell said once, in which direction we pursue our investigations, everywhere we discover the clearest proofs of a creative intelligence, of its providence, power and wisdom.

The founder of the newer geology says this. Now the people could come and say, nevertheless, Darwin (Charles D., 1809-1882, English naturalist) has overcome the influence of any spiritual forces. Darwin showed how by purely natural processes the evolution of the organisms happens.—However, Darwin himself wrote: “I opine that all living beings that ever have been on earth are descended from a prototype into which the creator breathed life.”—So people can also not quote Darwin who says there, we are daydreamers if we speak of spiritual beings and spiritual forces. Then still people maybe come and say, do you not know the basic nerve of any scientific development of the nineteenth century, which has deeply influenced any development? Do you know nothing about the basic law of the transformation of the natural forces?—We have just spoken of it today, have realised that the transformation of the natural forces does not contradict what spiritual science has to say.

However, the people could want to refer to Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1878, German physician and physicist), to the founder of the law of the mechanical heat equivalent as well as of the transformation of the natural forces. However, Julius Robert Mayer did the strange dictum: I exclaim wholeheartedly, a right philosophy can be nothing else than propaedeutics for the Christian religion!—The things are different everywhere if one goes back to the origins and to those who created these origins who are the great pathfinders on the way of human knowledge, and not to their followers, nor to those who want to find lightweight ideas—like the newer astrophysicists—and want to encompass the whole world with it. If one goes not to the latter but to the former, one can say, spiritual science completely agrees with the great pathfinders.

Hence, spiritual science knows that it can position itself in the development of the human mind, and that it advances harmoniously with the development of humanity with everything that has promoted the human development. If a merely external, physical astronomy wants to devise the evolution of the universe, one may remind those who act in such a way of a general quotation in the Xenien by Goethe and Schiller:

To infinite heights the firmament extends,
However, the little mind also found the way to them.

We must shelter from the fact that the little mind finds its way to the firmament. For we can show that just as little as the consideration of the brain leads us to a spiritual-mental life, but that this is separated from the mere movements and this can go beyond them, just as little the consideration of the external movements and laws is able to penetrate in the spirit of the universe. Hence, there it remains true in a certain way what Schiller means speaking to the astronomers:

Do not chat to me so much about nebulae and suns!
Is nature only great, because she gives you to count them?
Your object is the most elated, admittedly, in space;
But, friends, the elated does not live in space!

Schiller means that. It is right if one regards the movable appearance in space only. It is not right if one goes into what—as a spiritual—emits the laws of space.—Thus, the words remain true: ascending with the mind to the stars always causes the notion of the spiritual-divine in every mind. If we want to ascend, however, with our cognition, our cognition has to go the way: per aspera ad astra—through severity to the stars, through the thorns to the roses

However, this is the way of spiritual knowledge. Just the spiritual-scientific way to the stars shows that it brings along the human being to say to himself: as my materials and those which are in my surroundings are spread out in the whole universe—as the spectroscope shows--, the spiritual that lives in me is spread out in the whole universe and belongs to it. My corporeality is born out of the universe—my soul and mind are born out of the universe. It remains true what should be characterised here once again with some words which I already stated on another occasion: it remains true that the human being can only come to the entire world consciousness if he gets clear about the question which astronomy cannot answer: the question of his share of the world and his destination in the world. It is true that the answer to this question can give him security of life, optimism, hope of life if he knows from the spiritual-scientific knowledge what the words mean:

The wealth of materials approaches the human sense
Mysteriously from the depths of the universe.
The spirit's word flows clarifying
In the soul's grounds from cosmic heights full of contents.
They meet in the human inside to reality full of wisdom.

The objection might easily be raised to an address such as this to-day that symbolic and allegoric meanings are forced out of something which a poet has created in the free play of his imaginative fancy. The day before yesterday we set ourselves the task to explore the deeper meaning of Goethe's ‘Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,’ as it was then presented to our eyes. It will always happen that such an analysis or explanation of a work of fantasy will be turned down with the remark: ‘Oh, all sorts of symbols and meanings with profound applications are looked for in the figures of the work.’ Therefore I want to say at once that what I shall say to-day has nothing whatever to do with the symbolic and allegoric interpretations often made by Theosophists about legends or poetic works. And because I know that again and again the objection has been made to similar explanations which I have given: ‘We are not going to be caught by such symbolic meanings of poetic figures,’ I cannot stress the fact sufficiently that what is to be said here must be taken in no other sense than the following. We have before us a poetic work, a work of comprehensive imaginative power or fantasy, that goes to the depths of things: ‘The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.’ We may well be allowed the question, whether we may approach the work from any particular point of view, and attempt to find the basic idea, the true content of this so poetic a product.

We see the plant before us. Man goes to it and examines the laws, the inner regularity, by which the plant grows and flourishes, by which it unfolds its nature bit by bit. Has the botanist, or even someone who is no botanist, but arranges the growth of the plant in his imagination, the right to do it? Can one object: the plant knows nothing of the laws you are discovering, the laws of its growth and development! This objection against the botanist or the lyric poet who expresses the sensations derived from the plant in his poetry would have the same weight as the objection one could bring against such an explanation of Goethe's story. I do not want things to be taken as if I were to say to you: There we have a Snake, which means this or that, there we have a Golden, a Silver, and a Brazen King, who stand for this or that. I do not intend to expound the story in this symbolic, allegoric sense, but more in such a way that as the plant grows according to laws of which it is itself unconscious, and as the botanist has the right to discover these laws of its growth, one must also say to oneself that it does not follow that the poet Goethe was consciously aware of the explanations which I shall give you. For it is as true that we must consider the inevitability, and the true ideal content of the story as it is that we discover the laws of the plant's growth; that the plant grows in accordance with the same inevitability which originated it, though it is itself unconscious of it.

So I ask you to take what I shall say as if it presented the sense and the spirit of Goethe's methods of thought and idea-conception and as if he who, as it were, feels himself called upon to put before you the ideal philosophy of Goethe, were justified—that you might find a way to it—in expounding the product of Goethe's invention, in emphasizing the figures, and in pointing out their correlation—just as the botanist demonstrates that the plant grows in accordance with laws he has discovered.

Goethe's psychology or soul-philosophy, namely, what he considers determinative for the nature of the soul, is illustrated in his beautiful Fairy Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; and if we are to understand each other in what I have to say it will be a good thing if, in a preliminary study, we make the spirit of his soul-world clear. It has been already pointed out in the previous address that the world-conception represented here starts from the view that human knowledge is not to be looked upon as something stationary once for all. The view is widely held that man is as he is to-day, and being what he is he can give unequivocal judgment on all things; he observes the world with his sense-organs, takes in its phenomena, combines them with his reason, which is bound to his senses, and the result is an absolute knowledge of the world which must be valid for all. On the other side—but only in a certain way—stands the spiritual scientific world-conception which is represented here. This starts from the premise that what is to become our knowledge is continually dependent on our organs and our capacity for knowledge and that we ourselves are, as men, capable of development; that we can work on ourselves, and raise higher such capabilities as we have on a given level of existence. It holds that we can educate them, and they can be developed still further, even as man has developed himself from an imperfect state to his present position, and that we must come to a deeper penetration of things, and a more correct view of the world by rising to higher standards. To put it more clearly, if also more trivially: if we leave out altogether a development of humanity and look only at people as they are around us; and then turn our eyes on those men whom one reckons as belonging to primitive races in the history of civilization, and if we ask ourselves what they can know of the laws of the world around us and compare it with what an average European with some ideas of science can know of the world, we shall see there is a great difference between the two. Take, for instance, an African negro's picture of the world and that, let us say, of an European monist, who has a sense of reality through having absorbed a number of the scientific ideas of the present age: the two are entirely dissimilar.

But on the other hand Spiritual Science is far from depreciating the world-picture of the man who takes his stand on pure materialism, and from declaring it invalid. It is more true to say that in these things it is considered that in every case a man's world-picture corresponds to a stage in human evolution, and that man is able to increase the capabilities in him and to discover by means of the increase other new things.

It lies thus in the purview of Spiritual Science that man reaches ever higher knowledge by developing himself, and what he experiences in the process is objective world-content, which he did not see before because he was not capable of seeing it. Spiritual Science is therefore different from other one-sided world-conceptions, whether spiritualistic, or materialistic, because it does not recognize an absolute, unchangeable truth, but only a wisdom and truth belonging to a given stage of evolution. Thus it adheres to Goethe's saying: ‘Man has really always only his own truth, and it is always the same.’ It is always the same because what we instil into ourselves through our power of learning, viz., the objective, is the same.

Now how does man succeed in developing the capabilities and powers that lie in him? One may say that Spiritual Science is as old as human thought. It always took the view that man has before him the ideal of a certain knowledge-perfection, the object of his aspiration. The principle contained in this was always called the ‘principle of initiation.’ This initiation means nothing other than increasing the powers of man to ever higher stages of knowledge, and thereby attaining deeper insight into the nature of the world around him. Goethe stood completely and all his life long, one may say, on this principle of development towards knowledge, this principle of initiation; which is shown us most particularly in his Fairy Tale.

We shall understand each other most easily if we proceed from the view which is held most often and most widely to-day, and which is to a certain extent in opposition to the initiation-principle.

To-day one can hear in the widest circles those people who think about such things and believe themselves to have an opinion on them representing, more or less consciously, the point of view that in what concerns truth and objective reality only physical observation, or objects of physical observation can be decisive in formulating ideas. You will constantly hear it: that alone can be Science which is based on the objective foundation of observation, and by this one understands so frequently is meant only the observation of the senses and the application of the human reason and capacity to formulate thoughts to these sense-observations. Every one of you knows that the capacity to formulate ideas and concepts is a capacity of the human soul among other capacities and every one of you also knows that these other capacities of the soul are our feeling and our will. Thus, even with this comparative superficial review, we may say: man is not merely an ideating, but also a feeling and willing being. Now those who think they must put forward the purely scientific point of view will always repeat: in science, only the power of thought may enter, never human feeling, never what we know as will-impulses, for otherwise that which is objective would become clouded, and that which the power of thought might achieve by being kept impersonal, would only be prejudiced.

It is correct enough that when a man introduces his feeling, his sympathy or antipathy, into the object of a scientific enquiry, he finds it repulsive or attractive, sympathetic or antipathetic. And where should we be if he were to consider his desire as a source of knowledge, so that he could say about a thing, I want it or I do not want it? Whether it displeases or pleases you, whether you desire it or not, is entirely the same to the thing. As true as it is that he who believes himself able to stand on the firm ground of science can confine himself only to externals, so true it is that the thing itself compels you to say it is red, and that the impression you get concerning the nature of a stone is the correct one. But it does not lie in the nature of the thing that it appears to you ugly or beautiful, that you desire it or not. That it appears to you red has an objective reason; that you do not desire it has no objective reason.

In a certain respect modern psychology has got beyond the point of view just described. It is not my task here to speak for or against that tendency of modern psychology which says: ‘When we consider psychic phenomena and the soul-life, we must not confine ourselves only to intellectualism, we must regard man not merely in what concerns the power of conception, we must also consider the influences of the world of feeling and will.’ Perhaps some of you know that this belongs to Wundt's system of philosophy, which takes the will to be the origin of soul-activity. In a way that is in some respects fundamental, whether one agrees with it or not, the Russian psychologist Losski has pointed out the control of the will in human soul-life, in his last book called ‘Intuitivism.’ I could say much to you if I wanted to show how concerned the theory of the soul is to overcome the one-sidedness of intellectualism, and if further, I wanted to show you that the other powers also play a part in human soul-power.

If you carry the thought a step further, you will be able to say that this shows how impossible the demand is that the power of formulating ideas, limited as it is to observation, may lead to objective results in science. When science itself shows its impossibility, shows that everywhere Will plays a part, on what grounds would you then establish the purely objective observation of anything? Because you prefer to recognize only matter as objective, subject as you are to the tricks played by the will and your habits of thought, and because you have not the habit of thought and feeling to recognize also the spiritual element in things, therefore you omit the latter altogether in your theories. It is not a question, if we want to understand the world, of what kind of abstract ideals we set before us, but of what we can accomplish in our souls.

Goethe belongs to those people who reject the principle most categorically that knowledge is produced only through the thinking capacity, the one-sided capacity to form ideas. The prominent and significant principle expressed more or less clearly in Goethe's nature is that he considers that all the powers of the human soul must function if man is to unravel the riddles of the world.

Now we must not be one-sided and unjust. It is quite correct, when the objection is raised that feeling and will are qualities subjected to the personal characteristics of a man, and when it is asked where we should come to if not only what the eyes see and the microscope shows, but also what feeling and will dictate were considered as attributes of things! All the same that is just what we have to say in order to understand someone who, like Goethe, stands for the principle of initiation and development, namely, that, given the average feeling and will in man to-day, they cannot be applied to the acquirement of knowledge, that, in fact they would lead only to an absolute disharmony in their knowledge. One man wants this, the other that, according to the subjective needs of feeling and will. But the man who stands on the ground of initiation is also quite clear that of the powers of the human soul—thinking, representation, feeling, will—the capacity to construct thoughts and to think has advanced furthest, and is most inclined and adapted to exclude the personal element and to attain objectivity. For that soul-power which is expressed in intellectualism is now so advanced that when men rely upon it, they quarrel least, and agree most in what they say. Feeling and will have not had the chance of being developed to this point. We can also justifiably find differences when we examine the region of ideas and their representation. There are regions of the idea-life which give us completely objective truths, which men have recognized as such, quite apart from external experience, and these truths are the same if a million people differ in their opinions about them. If you have experienced in yourself the reasons for it, you are able to assert the truth even if a million people think otherwise. For instance, everyone can find such truths confirmed as those dealing with numbers and space dimension. Everyone can understand that 3 x 3 = 9, and it is so, even if a million people contradict it. Why is this the case? Because regarding such truths such as mathematical truths, most people have succeeded in suppressing their preference and their aversion, their sympathy and their antipathy, in short, the personal factor, and letting the matter speak for itself. This exclusion of the personal in the case of thought and the capacity to formulate ideas has always been called the ‘purification’ of the human soul, and considered the first stage on the way to initiation, or, as one might also say, on the way to higher knowledge.

The man who is versed in these things says to himself: It is not only with regard to feeling and the will that people are not yet so far that nothing personal enters into it, and that they can verify objectivity, but also with regard to thought the majority are not yet so far as to be able to give themselves up purely to what the things, the ideas of the things themselves say to him, as everyone can in mathematics. But there are methods of purifying thought to such a point that we no longer think personally, but let the thoughts in us think, as we let mathematical thought do. Thus, when we have cleansed thought from the influences of personality, we speak of purification or catharsis, as it was called in the old Eleusinian mysteries. Hence man must reach the point of purifying his thinking, which then enables him to comprehend things with objective thought.

Now, just as this is possible, so is it also possible to eliminate all the personal factor from feeling, so that the appeal of things to the feelings has no longer any say, to the Personal, or to Sympathy and Antipathy; nothing but the nature of the thing is evoked, in so far as it cannot speak to mere concept capacity. Experiences in our souls which have their roots or origin in our feelings, and which therefore lead to inner knowledge, and lead deeper into the nature of a thing, speaking however to other sides of the soul than mere intellectualism, can be purified of the personal element as well as thought, so that feeling can transmit the same objectivity as thought can. This cleansing or development of the feelings is called in all esoteric doctrine ‘enlightenment.’ Every man capable of development, and striving after it in no casual way, (that lies in intention of the personality) must take pains to be stirred only by what lies in the nature of the thing. When he has reached the point where the thing rouses in him neither sympathy nor antipathy, where he allows only the nature of things to speak, so that he says: whatever sympathies or antipathies I have are immaterial and are not to be taken into consideration, then it lies in the nature of the thing that the thought and action of the man assume this or that direction—then it is a declaration of the innermost nature of the thing. In esoteric doctrine this development of the will has been called ‘consummation.’

If a man takes his stand on the ground of spiritual science, he says to himself: ‘If I have a thing in front of me, there is in it a spiritual element, and I can so stimulate my mode of conception, that the essence of the thing is represented objectively through my concepts and ideas. Hence there is present in me the same thing that works externally, and I have recognized the essence of the thing through my mode of conception. But what I have recognized is only a part of the essence.’ There exists in things something which can speak not to thought at all, but only to feeling, and indeed only to purified feeling or to feeling which has become objective. The man who has not yet developed in himself by this cultivation of the feelings such a part of the essence, cannot recognize the essence along these lines. But for the man who says to himself that feeling as well as the capacity to think can provide a basis of knowledge (not the feeling as it is, but as it can become by means of well-founded methods of the teaching of cognition) for such a man it becomes gradually clear that there are things deeper than thought possibilities, things which speak to one's soul and the feelings. There are also things which reach even down to the will.

Now Goethe was particularly convinced that this really is the case, and that man really has in him these possibilities of development. He stood firmly on the ground of the principle of initiation, and he has shown us the initiation of man through the development of his soul and the development of the three powers of will, feeling and thought by representing them in his Fairy Tale.

The Golden King represents the initiation for the thought-capacity, the Silver King represents the initiation with knowledge capacity of objective feeling, and the Brazen King the initiation for knowledge capacity of the will. Goethe has emphasized that man must overcome certain things if he wishes to receive these three gifts. The Youth in the story represents man in his struggle for the highest. As Schiller in his Æsthetic Letters depicts man's aspiration towards complete humanity, so Goethe depicts in the Youth man's aspiration for the highest, wanting straight away to reach the Beautiful Lily, and attaining then inner human perfection, given him by the three Kings.

How that happens is pointed out in the course of the story. You remember that in the subterranean Temple, into which the Snake looks because of the earth's power of crystallization, one King was in each of the four corners. In the first was the Golden, in the second the Silver, in the third the Brazen King. In the fourth was the King who was a mixture of the other three metals, in whom, therefore, the three composite parts were so welded that one could not distinguish them. In this fourth King, Goethe depicts for us the representative of that stage of human development in which will, thought and feeling are mixed together. In other words he stands for that human soul which is governed by will, thought and feeling, because it is itself not master of these three capacities. On the other hand in the Youth, after he receives the three gifts from the three Kings separately, so that they are no longer chaotically mixed, that stage of knowledge is represented which does not allow itself to be ruled by thought, feeling and will, but which, on the contrary, rules over them. Man is ruled by them as long as they flow chaotically and intermingled in him, as long as they are not pure and independent in his soul. Until man has reached this separation, he is not capable of being effective through his three knowledge-capacities. When he has reached this point, however, he is no longer the subject of Chaos, but on the contrary himself controls his thought, his feeling and his will, when each is as pure and unalloyed as the metal of the respective Kings: his mode of Conception, pure as the Golden King (for nothing is mixed in him); his mode of Feeling, where nothing is added or mixed, but pure as the Silver King; and so too the Will, pure as the brass of the Brazen King; Concepts and Feelings no longer govern him, for he stands, in his nature, free; he is capable, in a word, of comprehension by means of thought, of feeling and will as required, making use of each separately. He can grasp according to necessity and the nature of things either by means of thinking, feeling or willing. Then he has advanced so far that the whole pure knowledge-capacity which we see in thought, feeling and will, leads him to a deeper insight, and he really steeps himself in the current of events, in the inner nature of things. Of course only experience can teach that this is possible.

Now it will not be difficult to agree, after what I said just now, that if Goethe makes the Youth represent striving mankind, we may see in the Beautiful Lily another soul-condition, namely, that soul-condition which man attains when the beings lying in things spring forth in the soul, and he thereby raises his existence by blending the things in himself with the nature of things in the external world. What man experiences in his soul by growing out of himself, by becoming master of the powers of the soul, victor over the chaos in his soul; what man then experiences, that inner blessedness, that unity with things; their awakening in him, is shown us by Goethe in his representation of the union with the Beautiful Lily. Beauty here is not merely aesthetic beauty, but a quality of man brought to a certain stage of perfection. So that we shall also now find it easy to understand why Goethe makes the Youth proceed in his effort to reach the Beautiful Lily, in such a way that all his powers at first disappear. Why is this?

We understand Goethe's presentation of such a scene if we hold fast to a thought he once expressed: ‘Everything which gives us mastery over ourselves without liberating us, leads us into error.’ Man must first be free, he must reach the point of being master of his inner soul-powers, and then he can attain union with the highest soul-condition, with the Beautiful Lily. But if he sets out to attain it unprepared, with still immature powers, they are lost and his soul is shrivelled. Hence Goethe points out that the Youth seeks this liberation which will make him captain of his soul. The moment his soul-powers are no longer chaotic, but are purified, cleansed and ordered, he is ready to reach that condition of soul which is symbolized by his union with the Beautiful Lily.

So we see that Goethe constructs these figures in free creative fantasy, and if we look upon them as representing soul-powers, we see that they permeate and work in his whole soul. If we look upon them like this, if we are as sensitive to these figures as in a way Goethe was—Goethe who unlike a second-rate didactic poet was not content to say what this or that soul-quality meant, but used it to express what he felt himself, then we shall realize what is expressed in these poetic figures. And therefore the various figures stand in the same personal relationship to each other as the soul-powers of a man stand to each other.

It cannot be clearly enough insisted upon that there is no question of the characters meaning this or that. That is certainly not the case. Rather is it that Goethe felt this or that in this or that soul-activity and transformed his feelings in connection with one or the other soul-activity into one or the other figures.

Thus he created the sequence of the story's events, which is still more important than the figures themselves. We see the Will-o'-the-Wisps and the Green Snake, and that the former cross over from the other side of the river and reveal quite peculiar qualities. They absorb the gold greedily, even lick it from the walls of the Old Man's room, and then throw it about prodigally. The same gold which in the Will-o'-the-Wisps is a sign of worthlessness, as we are also shown by the fact that the Ferryman has to refuse it—otherwise the river would surge up¹—the Ferryman may take only fruits in payment—this gold—what effect does it have in the body of the Green Snake? The Snake, after taking it, becomes internally luminous! And the plants and other things round her are also lit up because she takes into herself what in the case of the Will-o'-the-Wisps is a symbol of worthlessness.

But a certain importance is ascribed even to them. You know that the Old Man at the critical moment calls upon the Will-o'-the-Wisps to open the Temple gates, so that the whole train can enter in. Precisely the same thing which happens here in the case of the Green Snake, is to be found in the human soul, a thing we came across particularly clearly two days ago in the conversation between Goethe and Schiller. We saw that Schiller, as he spoke with Goethe about the way in which nature should be regarded, was still of the opinion that the drawing with a few strokes by Goethe of the proto-plant was an idea, an abstraction, which one receives when one omits the differentiating features and puts together the common ones. And we saw that Goethe thereupon said that if that was an idea, then he saw his ideas with his eyes. At this moment there were two quite different realities in opposition. Schiller trained himself completely to take Goethe's way of looking at things; so that it shows no lack of honour to Schiller if he is taken as an example of that human soul which moves in abstractions, and preferably in those ideas of things which are comprehended by the mere reason. That is a particular inclination of the soul, which, if a man wishes to attain a higher development, can, in certain circumstances, play a very dangerous part.

There are people whose inclination lies in the direction of the abstract. Now when they combine this abstraction with something they come across as soul-power, this is, as a rule, the concept of unproductivity. These people are sometimes very acute, they can draw fine distinctions, and connect this or that concept wonderfully. But you also often find with such a soul-condition, that the spiritual influences, inspirations, are excluded. This soul-condition, characterized by unproductivity and abstraction, is represented to us in the Will-o'-the-Wisps. They take up the gold wherever they find it; they lack any inventive faculty, are unproductive and can grasp no ‘ideas.’ These ideas are alien to them. They have not the will unselfishly to yield themselves up to things, or to stick to facts or to use concepts only as far as they are interpreters of facts. All they care about is to stuff their reasons full of concepts, and then scatter them about prodigally. They are like a man who goes to libraries, collects wisdom there, and takes it in and then gives it out again correspondingly. These Will-o'-the-Wisps are typical of that soul-capacity which is never able to grasp a single literary thought, or feeling, but which can nevertheless grasp in beautiful forms what creative spirits have produced in literature. I do not mean to say anything against this kind of soul. If a man did not have it nor cultivated it when he was insufficiently endowed with it, he would lack something which must be present when it comes to the real capacity for knowledge. In his picture of the Will-o'-the-Wisps, in the whole circumstances in which they appear and act, Goethe shows the manner in which such a soul-type functions, in relation to other soul-types, how it harms and benefits. In truth, if someone wanted to climb to higher stages of knowledge and had not this faculty of soul, there would not be the means to open the Temple for him. Goethe shows the advantages equally with the drawbacks of this soul-condition. What he gives us in the Will-o'-the-Wisps represents a soul-element. The moment it wants to lead an independent life in one direction or another, it becomes harmful. This abstraction leads to a critical faculty which makes men learn everything indeed, but incapable of further development, because the productive element is missing in them. But Goethe also clearly shows how far there is value in what the Will-o'-the-Wisps represent. What they contain can become something valuable; in the Snake the Will-o'-the-Wisps' gold turns to something valuable in so far as she illumines the objects round about her.

What lives in the Will-o'-the-Wisps, when worked out in another way, will become extremely fruitful in the human soul. When man strives so to regard his experiences of concepts and ideas and ideal creations not as something abstract in themselves, but as capable of leading to and interpreting the realities round him, so that he thinks as selflessly and willingly of his observations as of the abstract quality of the concepts, then he is as regards this soul-power in the same position as the Green Snake: then he can produce light and wisdom out of the purely abstract concepts. Then he is not brought to be in the vertical line which loses all connection and relation to the horizontal plane. The Will-o'-the-Wisps are the Snake's relatives, but of the vertical line. The gold-pieces fall through the rocks, are absorbed by the Snake which thereby becomes inwardly luminous. He who approaches the things themselves with these concepts absorbs wisdom.

Goethe gives us also an example of how one is to work on the conceptions (Begriffe). He has the conception of the proto-plant. Primarily it is an abstract conception, which, were it worked out in the abstract, would become an empty picture, killing all life, as the gold, thrown down by the Will-o'-the-Wisps, killed the Pug-dog. But just think what Goethe does with the conception of the proto-plant. If we follow him on his Italian journey, we see that this conception is only the ‘leit-motif’ going from plant to plant, from being to being. He takes the conception, goes from it over to the plant, and sees how this is made in one or another shape, taking on quite different shapes, in lower or higher places, and so on. Now he follows from step to step how the spiritual reality or form creeps into every physical form. He himself creeps about like the Snake in the crevices of the earth. Thus for Goethe the conception-world is nothing else but that which can be spun into objective reality. The Snake for him is the representative of that soul-power which does not struggle upward selfishly to higher regions of existence in an attempt to raise itself above everything, but which continually and patiently lets the conception be verified by observation, patiently goes from experience to experience. When man not merely theorizes, not merely lives in the conceptions, but applies them to life and experience, then he is as far as this soul-power is concerned, in the position of the Snake. This is so in a very wide sense. He who takes philosophy not as a theory, but as what it is meant to be, he who regards the conceptions of spiritual science as exercises for life, knows that just such conceptions, even the highest, are meant to be applied in such a way that they merge into life and are verified by daily experience. The man who has learnt a few conceptions but is incapable of applying them to life is like a man who has learned a cooking-book by heart, but cannot cook. As the gold is a means to throw light on things, so Goethe illuminates the things round him by means of his ideas.

This is the instructive and grand thing about Goethe's attitude to Science, and his every effort, that his ideas and conceptions have reality and have the effect of lighting up all objects round him. The day before yesterday special importance was laid on the universality in Goethe which gives the reason why we never have the feeling: that is Goethe's ‘meaning.’ He stands there, and when we see him, we find only that we understand things better which before were not so clear. For this reason he was capable of becoming the point of agreement between two hostile brethren, as we saw the day before yesterday.

If we wanted to discuss every feature in this fairy tale and characterize every figure in it, I should have to speak not for three hours but for three weeks on it. So I can give you only the deeper principles contained in the story. But every feature shows us something of Goethe's method of thought and his opinion of the world.

Those soul-powers which are represented in the Will-o'-the-Wisps, in the Green Snake and in the Kings, are on one side of the River. On the other side lives the Beautiful Lily, the ideal of perfect knowledge and perfect life and work. We heard from the Ferryman that he can bring the people (gestalten, forms) from the other side to this, but can take no one back again. Let us apply this to our whole soul-mood or soul-condition and our improvement.

We find ourselves on earth as beings with souls. These or the other soul-capacities work upon us as talents, as more or less developed soul-powers. They are in us; but we have also something else in us. In us human beings if we take ourselves properly there is the feeling, the knowledge that the powers of our soul, which finally interpret the nature of things to us, are closely related to the elemental spirits (grundgeister) of the world, with the Creative, Spiritual forces. The longing for these creative forces is the longing for the Beautiful Lily. Thus we know that everything derived on one hand from the Beautiful Lily, strives on the other to return to her. Unknown forces unmastered by us have brought us from the world on the other side over the river-boundary to this side. But these forces, characterized by the Ferryman, and working in the depths of unconscious nature, cannot take us back again, for otherwise man would return, without his work and co-operation, to the kingdom of the divine, precisely as he came over. The forces which as unconscious nature-forces have brought us over into the kingdom of struggling humanity, may not lead us back again. For this other forces are required; and Goethe is aware of it. But he wants to show also how man must set about being able to re-unite with the Beautiful Lily. There are two ways. One leads over the Green Snake; we can cross by it and gradually find the kingdom of the spirit. The other way goes across the Giant's shadow. We are shown that the Giant, otherwise without strength, stretches out his hand at dusk, and its shadow falls across the River. The second road leads over this shadow. Whoever wishes therefore to cross by clear daylight to the kingdom of the spirit must use the way provided by the Snake; and whoever wishes to cross at dusk can use the way leading across the Giant's shadow. Those are the two ways to reach a spiritual picture of the world. The man who aspires to the spiritual world—not with human concepts and ideas, not with those forces which are symbolized by the worthless gold (as spirits of bare sophistry) and the Will-o'-the-Wisps—but by proceeding patiently and selflessly from experience to experience, succeeds in reaching the other bank in full sunlight.

Goethe knows that real research does not stop at material things, but must lead over beyond the boundary; beyond the river which separates us from the spiritual. But there is another way, a way for undeveloped people, who do not want to take the road of knowledge, but a way represented by the Giant. He himself is powerless, only his shadow has a certain strength. Now what is powerless in a true sense? Take all the conditions possible to man when his consciousness is reduced, as in hypnotism, somnambulism and even dream-conditions; everything by which the clear consciousness of day is subdued, whereby man is subject to lower soul-power than in clear consciousness, belongs to this second way. Here the soul, by surrendering its ordinary daily functional power of the soul, is led into the real kingdom of the spirit. The soul, however, does not itself become capable of crossing into the spiritual kingdom, but remains unconscious and is carried across like the Shadow into the kingdom of spirit. Goethe includes in the forces represented by the Giant's shadow everything which functions unconsciously and from habit, without the soul-powers which are active during clear consciousness taking part. Schiller, who was initiated into Goethe's meaning, once, at the time of the great upheavals in Western Europe, wrote to Goethe: ‘I rejoice that you have not been roughly caught in the shadow of the giant.’ What did he mean? He meant that had Goethe travelled further West, he would have been caught in the revolutionary forces of the West.

Then we see that the objects of man's quest, the height of knowledge, is represented in the ‘Temple.’ The Temple represents a higher stage of man's evolution. Goethe nowadays would say that if the Temple is something hidden, it is under the narrow crevices of the earth. Such an aspiring soul-force as is represented in the Snake can feel the shape of the Temple only dimly. By absorbing the ideal, the gold, she can illumine this shape, but fundamentally the Temple can be there to-day only as a subterranean secret. But though Goethe leaves the Temple as something subterranean for external culture, he points out that to a further-developed man this secret must be unlocked. In this he indicates the current of Spiritual Science which to-day has already caught up wide masses of people, which in a comprehensive sense seeks to make popular the content of Spiritual Science, of the principle of initiation, and of the Temple's secret. The Youth is therefore to be regarded in this truly free Goethean sense as the representative of aspiring mankind. Therefore the Temple is to rise beyond the River, so that not only a few individuals who seek illumination can cross and re-cross, but so that all people can cross the River by the bridge. Goethe, in the Temple of Initiation above the earth puts before us a future state, which will have arrived when man can go from the kingdom of the senses into the kingdom of the spiritual, and from the kingdom of the spiritual into the kingdom of the senses.

How is this attained in the Fairy Tale? Because the real secret of it is fulfilled. The solution of the story is to be found in the story itself, says Schiller, but he has also pointed out that the word that solves it is inserted in a very remarkable way. You remember the Old Man with the Lamp, which illuminates only where there is already light? Now, who is this Old Man, and what is the Lamp? What is its curious light? The Old Man stands above the situation. His lamp has the peculiar quality of changing things, wood into silver, stone into gold. It has also the quality of shining only where there is already a receptivity, a definite kind of light. As the Old Man enters the subterranean Temple he is asked how many secrets he knows. ‘Three,’ he replies. To the Silver King's question, ‘Which is the most important,’ he answers: ‘The open one.’ And when the Brazen King asks whether he would tell it them also, he says: ‘As soon as I know the fourth.’ Whereupon the Snake whispers something in his ear and he says at once:

‘The Time is at Hand.’

The solution of the riddle is what the Snake whispered in the Old Man's ear, and we have to find out what that is. It would lead us too far to say at length what the three secrets mean. I shall only hint at it. There are three Kingdoms which in evolution are so to speak stationary: the mineral, the vegetable and the animal Kingdoms, which are completed, as compared with progressive man, who is still developing. The inner development of man is so vehement and important that it cannot be confused with the development of the other three nature kingdoms. What the secret of the Old Man contains is the fact that one Kingdom of nature has arrived at the present point of a full-stop, and this is what explains the laws of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. But now comes the fourth kingdom, that of man, the secret which is to be revealed in the human soul. The secret which the Old Man must first discover, is of this kind. And how must he discover it? He knows of what it consists, but the Snake has to tell him first. This indicates to ns that man has still to go through something special, if he wants to attain the goal of evolution as the three other kingdoms have done. What this is the Snake whispers to the Old Man. She tells how a certain soul-power must be developed, if a higher stage is to be reached; she says that she has the will to sacrifice herself for this, and she does in fact sacrifice herself. Hitherto she has made a bridge when here and there someone wished to cross; but now she will become a permanent bridge, by falling in pieces, so that man will have a lasting connection between this side and that, between the spiritual and the physical. That the Snake has the will to sacrifice herself must be taken as the condition of revealing the fourth secret. The moment the Old Man hears that the Snake will sacrifice herself, he can even say: ‘The time is at hand!’ It is that soul-power which adheres to the external. And the way to be trodden is not to make this soul-force and inner science the ultimate end but self-surrender. That really is a secret, even if it is called an ‘open secret,’ that is, when any who will can know it. What is regarded in a wide circle as end in itself—everything we can learn in natural science, in political science of civilization, in history, in mathematics and all other sciences can never be an absolute end. We can never come to a true insight into the depths of the world, if we consider them as ends in themselves. Only if we are at all times ready to absorb them and regard them as means, which we offer as a bridge to let us cross over, do we come to real knowledge. We bar ourselves off from the higher, true knowledge unless we are also ready to sacrifice ourselves. Man will get an idea of what initiation is only when he ceases to carve for himself a world-conception out of external-physical concepts. He must be all feeling, with all-attuned soul, such a soul as Goethe describes in his ‘Westöstlichen Divan’ as the highest acquisition of man:

‘And so long thou hast not this, Death and Birth!
Thou art but a sorry guest, on this dark Earth.’

Death and Birth! Learn to know what life can offer, go through with it, but surpass, transcend yourself. Let it become a bridge for you, and you will wake up in a higher life and be one with the essence of things, when you no longer live in the illusion that, cut off from the higher ego, you can exhaust the essence of things. When Goethe speaks of the sacrifice of the idea and the soul-material, in order to acquire new life in higher spheres, and of the deepest inner love, he likes to think of the words of the mystic Jacob Böhme, who knows from experience this self-surrender of the Snake. Perhaps Jacob Böhme has pointed out just this to him and made it so clear to him that a man can live, even in the physical body, in a world which otherwise he would tread only after death, in the world of the eternal, the spiritual. Jacob Böhme knew also that it depends on the man, whether he can, in the higher sense, slide over into the spiritual world. He shows it in the saying: ‘Who dies not before he dies, is ruined when he dies.’ A significant saying! Man, who does not die before he dies, that is, who does not develop in himself the eternal, the inner kernel of being, will not be in a position, when he dies, to find again the spiritual kernel in himself. The eternal is in us. We must develop it in the body, so that we may find it outside the body. ‘Who dies not before he dies, is ruined when he dies.’ So it is also with the other sentence: ‘And so death is the root of all life.’

Thus we see that the things of the soul can only illumine a place where light already is: the Lamp of the Old Man can only shine where there is already light. Once more our attention is directed to those special soul-powers, of devotion and religious self-surrender, which for hundreds and thousands of years have brought the message of spiritual worlds to those who could not seek the light by way of Science or otherwise. The light of the different religious revelations is represented in the Old Man, who has this light. But to him who does not bring an inner light to meet the sense of religion, the Lamp of Religion gives no light. It can shine only where light already is and meets it. It is the Lamp which has transfigured man, which has led all mortality across to a life of soul.

And then we see that the two Kingdoms are united through the Snake's sacrifice. After it goes, so to say, through incidents symbolic of what man has to go through in his higher development in an esoteric sense, we see how the Temple of Knowledge is brought by means of all the three human soul-powers across the river, how it rises and each soul-power performs its service. This is meant to show that the soul-powers must be in harmony, since we are told: the single personality can achieve nothing; but when all work together at a favourable moment, when the strong and the weak co-operate in the right relationship, then the soul can acquire the ability to reach the highest state, the union with the Beautiful Lily. Then the Temple moves out of the hidden crevices up to the surface for all who strive in truth after knowledge and wisdom. The Youth is endowed with the knowledge-powers of thought by the Golden King: ‘Know and recognize the highest.’ He is endowed with the knowledge-powers of feeling by the Silver King, which Goethe expresses beautifully with the words: ‘Tend the sheep!’

In feeling are rooted art and religion, and for Goethe both were a unity—already at the time when he wrote on his Italian journey concerning Italy's works of art: ‘There is necessity, there is God!’

But there is also the doing—when man does not apply it to the struggle for existence, but when he makes it into a weapon for gaining beauty and wisdom. This is contained in the words spoken by the Brazen King to the Youth: ‘The Sword in the left hand, the right free!’ There is a whole world in these words. The right hand free to work the self out of human nature.

And what happens with the Fourth King, in whom all three elements are mingled together? This mixed King melts into a grotesque figure. The Will-o'-the-Wisps come and lick what gold there is off him: man's soul-powers here still want to examine what sort of stages of human development, now overcome, there once were.

Let us take yet another feature: namely, when the Giant comes staggering in and then stands there like a statue, pointing to the hours: when man has brought his life into harmony, then the subordinate has a meaning for what is intended to be methodical order. It ought to express itself like a habit. The unconscious itself will then receive a valuable meaning. Hence the Giant is depicted like a clock.

The Old Man with the Lamp is married to the Old Woman. This Old Woman represents to us nothing else but the healthy, understanding human soul-power, which does not penetrate into high regions of spiritual abstractions, but which handles everything healthily and practically, as, for instance, in religion, represented by the Old Man with the Lamp. She is the one to bring the Ferryman his pay: three heads of cabbage, three onions and three artichokes. Such a stage of development has not passed beyond the contemporary. That she is so treated by the Will-o'-the-Wisps is no doubt a reflected picture of how abstract minds look down with a certain amount of scorn on people who take things in directly by instinct or intuition.

Every point, every turn of this story is of deep significance, and if we enter into one more explanation, it must be of an esoteric kind, and you will find that one can really only give the method of explanation. Bury yourselves in the story, and you will discover that a whole world is to be found there, very much more than it has been possible to indicate to-day.

I should like to show you in two examples how much Goethe's spiritual world-view runs through his whole life, how in things of spiritual knowledge he stands in agreement in extreme old age with what he had written earlier.

While Goethe wrote ‘Faust’ he adopted a certain attitude which harks back to a symbol of a deeper evolution-path of nature. When Faust speaks of his father, who was an alchemist, and had taken over the old doctrines credulously, but had misunderstood them, he says that his father also made

‘... a Lion red, a wooer daring, Within the Lily's tepid bath espoused.’

Faust I, Scene II, p. 32.

That is what Faust says, without knowing its significance. But such a saying can become a ladder leading to high stages of development. In the Fairy Tale Goethe shows in the Youth the human being striving for the highest bride, and that with which he is to be united he calls the Beautiful Lily. You notice this Lily is to be found already in the first parts of ‘Faust.’

And, again, the very nerve of Goethe's philosophy which found expression in his Fairy Tale, is to be found also in ‘Faust:’ in Part II, in the Mystic Chorus, where Faust confronts the entry into the spiritual world, where Goethe sets down his avowal of a spiritual world-conception in monumental words. He shows there how the ascent on the road of knowledge follows in three successive stages, namely, the purification of the thought, the illumination of feeling and the working out of will. What man attains through the purification of the thought leads him to recognize the spiritual behind everything. The physical becomes a symbol of the spiritual. He goes deeper still, in order to grasp what is unattainable to thought. He then reaches a state at which he no longer regards things by means of thought, but is directed into the thing itself, where the essence of it, and what one cannot describe become accomplished fact. And that which one cannot describe, that which, as you will hear in the course of the winter addresses, must be thought of in another way, that whereby one must advance to the secrets of the will, he labels simply ‘the indescribable.’ When man has completed the threefold road through thought, feeling and will, he is united with what is called ‘eternal womanhood’ in the Chorus Mysticus, the goal of the human soul's development, the ‘Beautiful Lily’ of the Fairy Tale.

Thus we see that Goethe utters his deepest conviction, his secret revelation there also, where he brings his great confessional poem to an end, after rising up through thought and feeling and will to union with the Beautiful Lily, up to that state which finds its expression in the passage of the Chorus Mysticus, which expresses the same thing as Goethe's philosophy and spiritual science, as well as the Fairy Tale:

‘All things transitory
But as symbols are sent:
Earth's insufficiency
Here grows to Event:
The Indescribable,
Here it is done:
The Woman-Soul leadeth us
Upward and on!’

• 1. and the waves rear up like horses—aufbäumen. Ed.

“Spiritual science aims to show what can be gained in widening one's spiritual horizons. It can be said that for the purpose of gradually entering into the whole outlook inherent in spiritual research, anyone immersing himself in Herman Grimm?s spirit has the finest precepts.”—Rudolf Steiner, GA 62

This is a lecture, given by Rudolf Steiner, entitled Die Weltanschauung eines Kulturforschers der Gegenwart, Herman Grimm, und die Geistesforschung and contained in the volume Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung (Results of Spiritual Research) GA 62. The series in which this lecture was given at the Architektenhaus in Berlin, may be said to underline its overall importance for Rudolf Steiner: Held January 16th 1913 subsequent to a lecture January 30th on Raphael. Also known as, Herman Grimm, Contemporary Culture and Spiritual Developments, and Anthroposophy.

This single lecture is the 8th of 14 lectures in the lecture series entitled, Results of Spiritual Investigation, published in German as, Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung. Translated by Peter Stebbing

Translated by Peter Stebbing

It could easily appear as though what is set forth here as spiritual science stood in isolation to what is otherwise proclaimed and of a tone-setting nature in the cultural life of the present. However, it can only appear so to one who conceives of this spiritual science in a somewhat narrow-hearted sense, seeing in it nothing more than a sum of teachings and theories. On the other hand, whoever recognizes it as a spiritual stream open to new sources will become aware that parallels can be drawn to modern cultural life in various ways. It will be seen that this manner of viewing life called spiritual science can be applied to other, in some degree related directions. A direction of this sort is the subject of today's considerations—as represented by a prominent personality of modern cultural life, the art historian and researcher Herman Grimm.

Herman Grimm [the son of Wilhelm Grimm of the Brothers Grimm] was born in 1828 and died in 1901. He appears indeed as a quite characteristic figure of modern life, and yet he is, at the same time, so distinctive and unique as to stand apart. Today's considerations can connect especially well onto this personality. To anyone having occupied himself with Herman Grimm, he appears as a kind of mediator between all that relates to Goethe, and to our own spiritual life.

By reason of his marriage to the daughter of a personality, who stood close to the circle of Goethe, namely the sister of the romantic poet Clemons von] Brentano,[ Bettina Brentano [1785-1859], Herman Grimm was connected in a quite special sense with everything associated with the name of Goethe. Herman Grimm was related to her in that she was his mother-in-law, the same Bettina Brentano who had brought out Goethe's remarkable exchange of letters with a child. Bettina Brentano's unique memorial shows us Goethe enthroned like an Olympian, a musical instrument in his hands, while she presents herself as a child grasping at the strings. From the Frankfurt circle of La Roche, in her relation to Goethe she was able (like few others) to enter into Goethe's spirit. Even if some things as presented in the letters are inexact, being colourfully mixed together in various ways—a combination of poetry and truth—it still has to be said: Everything in this remarkable book, Goethes Brefwechsel mit einem Kinde [Goethe's Exchange of Letters with a Child], grew in a heartfelt manner out of sensing Goethe's whole outlook. In a wonderful way, it grants us an echo of his wisdom-imbued worldview. Bettina Brentano was married to the poet Achim von Arnim [l781-1831], who had contributed to bringing out the fine collection of folk poems called Des Knabens Wunderhorn [1806] [The Boy's Magic Horn]. By virtue of the connection with this circle—as mentioned, Gisela Grimm, Herman Grimm's wife, was one of the daughters of Bettina von Arnim—Herman Grimm grew up from youth onwards, as it were, amid personalities who stood in close proximity to Goethe. In all that he took up in his education, Herman Grimm absorbed something of an immediate, elemental spiritual breath of Goethe. Thus, he felt himself as belonging to all those who had stood personally close to Goethe, even though he was still a child the time of Goethe's death [in 1832J, rather than one who had “studied” Goethe and Goetheanism. Herman Grimm counted as having taken into himself, in a direct and personal way, something of Goethe's essential being, his magical power, his natural humanity.

With inner participation, Herman Grimm experienced the development of German cultural life during the decades of the mid-nineteenth century. In doing so, he established, so to say, his own “kingdom” within this German cultural life. He can be called a spirit who, in an individual manner, starts out from whatever stimulated him, that furthered the development of his own powers. In this way, out of the whole range of cultural life, a realm subdivided itself for Herman Grimm that suited his aims, a realm in which he felt at home. Within this domain in which Herman Grimm felt himself at home, he understood himself to be, lo to say, the spiritual “governor” with respect to Goethe. Goethe's spirit appeared to him as though it lived on. And in seeking out what derived from Goethe and what was compatible with him in cultural life, entering into this, it was always the essence of Goethe that he sought. This then became a yardstick for him in evaluating everything in cultural life.

These were decades of struggle in German cultural life, decades in which everything to do with Goethe receded, following his death. So much else of immediate everyday concern stood in the forefront, rather than what proceeded from Goethe. During that period, numerous other things asserted themselves in the cultural life of Germany, while little was heard of Goethe. On account of his connection with Goethe, Herman Grimm regarded himself as one whose task it was, quietly yet actively to cultivate and carry over Goethe's ethos to a future time that he certainly hoped would come, a time in which Goethe's star would shine out once more in the European spiritual firmament.

In that he regarded himself as, so to say, the “governor” of Goethe's spiritual domain, Herman Grimm stood somewhat apart in his relation to cultural matters. It seemed appropriate, if not self-evident to see him as having the air of a “lord.” Even in his stature, his physiognomy, his gestures, in his conduct, there was something about him suggestive of an aristocrat. And, it can be said: For anyone not accustomed to looking up to someone as to a lordly personality, Herman Grimm's whole demeanour as though compelled acknowledgement of the aforementioned status. I still fondly recall being together with Herman Grimm in Weimar, which he often liked to visit. On one occasion, he invited me as his only guest to a midday meal. We spoke about various matters that interested him. We also talked—and I was pleased that he wanted to have this conversation with me—about his comprehensive life-plans. And when a certain time had passed after the meal, he said, in his inimitable, humorous and quite natural manner, such that one accepted it from him as something innate, “Now, my dear Doctor, I wish graciously to dismiss you!” As though a matter of course, it actually made a self-evident impression on me. And it accorded with Herman Grimm's whole manner of conducting himself, so that, one granted him a certain air of lordliness.

Herman Grimm's whole lifework bears something of the same attribute. One cannot take up one of his major or minor writings, with their harmonious and so succinctly constructed sentences without feeling: all this affects one as though the author's personality stood behind it, regarding one with soulful participation. This contributes to the wonderful quality in Herman Grimm's writings. In every respect they are the product of his soul-imbued personality and have their immediate effect as such. In this way, his style takes on a certain justified, noble pathos. However, this noble pathos is mitigated everywhere by the individual, human element that breaks through. One accepts his style despite its elegance. Everywhere, one senses his origins in having sincerely absorbed Goethe's spirit. Yet this is not all; it becomes apparent that with him the Goethean element has undergone something of the development of German Romanticism. We sense in Herman Grimm's style a liberation from all that can broadly be termed “commonplace” or “customary.” We have the impression of a singular personality secluded within himself.

Herman Grimm's orientation could possibly have led to a certain one-sidedness, had something else not played a part, binding him closely to tradition; Herman Grimm was, after all, the, son of Wilhelm Grimm and the nephew of Jakob Grimm. Known for inaugurating modern linguistic research, these two collected the German fairy tales that have in the meantime profoundly permeated German life. They listened to the sagas and fairy tales told them by simple folk, that were almost forgotten and remembered by only a few remaining souls. Brought to life again by the Brothers Grimm, they now live on.

Despite a refined style in everything he produced, Herman Grimm also had close ties to popular tradition, combining this with what might otherwise have been a one-sided direction. We still have to stress something further by which he appears harmonious and complete. In taking up the works of Herman Grimm, we encounter something of his adaptability—a capacity to connect with the various spiritual phenomena in which he immersed himself in the course of his life. A certain isolation is required for someone to submerge themselves fully in the phenomena and facts of past centuries. This adaptability, this quality of “softness” with regard to Herman Grimm acquires its “skeleton,” however, its necessary “hardness,” by reason of something else that intervened in his upbringing. Both his father and his uncle belonged to the “Göttingen Seven,” who in the year 1837 submitted their proclamation protesting the abolition of their country's constitution. They were consequently expelled from the University of Göttingen. Thus, already as a child, Herman Grimm experienced a significant event and its aftermath. For there were consequences both for his father and his uncle, in that they not only lost their positions, bur their daily bread as well, at the time. Herman Grimm often referred to how he had experienced historical change in this way, even already as a nine-year old boy, and not merely via book-learning.

At a time when little was said of Goethe in Germany, attention having been diverted to other things, Herman Grimm viewed himself as a representative of Goethe's ethos. But he did experience a resurgence of interest in Goethe and was himself able to contribute to it. At the beginning of the seventies of the nineteenth century, he was able to hold his famous Goethe lectures [“Goethe-Vorlesungen” 1874-75] at the University of Berlin, also published in book form. Anyone getting hold of it as a young person, and able to find the right relation to it, will undoubtedly speak of it in later years as being of special significance. And, as set forth in this book, Herman Grimm clearly shows himself as someone who knew the various ramifications of Goethe's soul life.

We gain a clear sense of how Herman Grimm viewed a personality such as Goethe. We find nothing of a small-minded biographical compulsion—to flush out all manner of more or less indifferent traits. Rather do we find an immersion in everything that was important for Goethe's development—the endeavour to pursue what Goethe experienced in life, what lived in his soul, and how this re-constituted itself, taking on form to become a creation, of Goethe's phantasy. How, he asks, in forgetting everything of a particular life experience, did this re-arise for Goethe to become the product of creative phantasy—a new experience?

Thus, in Herman Grimm's interpretation, Goethe raises his life-experiences a stage higher, to a sphere of pure spiritual contemplation. We see Goethe ascend to spiritual experiences. Herman Grimm demonstrates this with regard to each of Goethe's works. And we gladly follow him in pursuing this course, since with Herman Grimm nothing intrudes that can otherwise so easily enter into such a portrayal—that a single soul-force, e.g., reason or phantasy, becomes paramount, as it were, and one no longer feels the connection to immediate life. Herman Grimm goes no farther than he can go as an individual in contemplating Goethe's work. In the end, we are led by Herman Grimm to the point where the work takes its start from Goethe's life experience. One feels oneself transported everywhere into unmitigated spiritual life. Goethe becomes a sum of spiritual impulses. This breath of the spiritual extends throughout Herman Grimm's Goethe book.

What Herman Grimm ascribed to Goethe in this way has its roots deep in Herman Grimm's spiritual configuration. Long before commencing these considerations that led to his lectures on Goethe, a grand, a colossal idea had stood before him—the idea of viewing occidental cultural life as a whole in the same way he had done, individually, with regard to Goethe. The idea stood before his mind's eye of following three millennia of western cultural life so as to reveal everywhere how human sensibility transforms everyday events in the physical world to what the human soul experiences upon ascending to the realm of “creative phantasy,” as Herman Grimm called it. Thus, he becomes a unique kind of historian. For Herman Grimm, history was, so to say, something altogether different from what it is for other modern historians.

History is, after all, customarily studied in that documents, materials, are first collected, and from these the attempt is made to present a picture of humanity's development. Although materials, external facts, were of enormous importance for Herman Grimm, they were nonetheless not at all the main thing. He often entertained the thought: Could it not be that for some epoch or other precisely the most significant documents, the decisive ones, have disappeared without a trace—lost, so that one actually passes by the truth most of all in focussing too conscientiously and exactly on the documents? Hence, he was convinced that, in abiding most faithfully by external documents, one is least of all capable of providing a true picture of human development. Only a falsified picture could arise in keeping strictly to external documents alone.

However, something else has arisen in the cultural life of humanity. What took place outwardly, what happened has, thanks to leading individualities, undergone a spiritual rebirth. This is evidenced by personalities who have transformed it artistically, who have utilized it for cultural purposes. Thus, in looking back for instance to the time of ancient Greece, Herman Grimm said to himself: Some documents exist concerning this Greek age, but these are insufficient to enable one to understand the Greek world. Yet what the Greeks experienced has found its rebirth in the works of Greek art, has been re-enlivened by significant Greek personalities. Immersing oneself in them, letting the Greek spirit affect one, a truer picture of the Greek world is attained than in merely assembling external facts. In this way, the facts themselves disappeared, so to say, for Herman Grimm. One is inclined to say, they melted away from his world-picture. What remained in his world-picture was a continuous stream of what he called the creations of “folk-phantasy.”

In contemplating Julius Caesar, for example, he not only took account of the historical documents, he considered what Shakespeare had made of Caesar as of equal significance, comparable to what is contained in the existing documents. Through characteristic human beings he looked back at the age in question. For Herman Grimm, the course of humanity's development became something always handed on from one personality to another, seeing it as a spiritual process encompassed by what he termed creative phantasy. Proceeding from this point of view, he sought to gain a picture of the creative folk-phantasy at work in western culture—a sense of the actual course of events in the development of humanity, so as to be able to say: The epochs of western culture follow one upon the other, supersede each other—from the earliest epochs up to the present, i.e., from the oldest times to which he wished to return, up to his own period, the age of Goethe. They therefore represent an ongoing stream, the influence of folk phantasy within western cultures.

Starting out from this urge, he turned his attention early on to that grandiose phenomenon of western cultural life, Homer's “Iliad.” This occupied him for a period of time during the 1890s, leading to his truly exemplary book, Homer. One gladly takes up this volume again and again in wanting, from a modern viewpoint, to immerse oneself in the beginnings of the Greek world. Adopting his general standpoint, it shows us Herman' Grimm from another side. His gaze is directed to the world of the gods as depicted in Homer's “Iliad”—to the battling Greek and Trojan heroes, and the question arises for him: How do matters actually stand with regard to this interplay of the world of the gods with the normal human world of warring Greek and Trojan heroes? This becomes a question for him. It is indeed striking, what a tremendous difference there is in the Homeric portrayal, between the humans walking around and the nature of those beings described as immortal gods. And Herman Grimm attempts to present the gods in Homer's sense as portraying, so to say, an “older” class of beings wandering on the earth. Even if Herman Grimm, in his more realistic way, sees these beings as “human beings,” he does look back into a culture that in Homer's time had long lost its significance, a culture that had been superseded by another, to which the Greek and Trojan heroes belong. Thus, Herman Grimm has an older and a younger class of humanity play into one another in Homer's “Iliad;” and what has remained over of real effects of a class of beings that had lived previously, enters for Herman Grimm (in Homer's sense) into what takes place between Greece and Troy.

Herman Grimm saw the further progress of humanity in this way—as a continual supplanting of older cultural cycles by newer ones and an interplay of older cycles with newer ones. Each new cultural cycle has its task, that of introducing something new into the general development of humanity. The old remains extant for a while and still interacts with the new.

It can be said that what Herman Grimm investigated, to the extent possible in the last third of the nineteenth century, has now to be set forth once more from the point of view of spiritual science. He did not look further back than the Greek age. For this reason, he was unable to arrive at what recent spiritual research describes in looking to the lofty, purely spiritual beings of primeval antiquity, exalted above the human being. He did, however, frequently touch upon results of recent spiritual research—as nearly as anyone can without conducting such research themselves.

In going back to earlier stages in the development of humanity, we attempt, in spiritual research, to show that we do not arrive at the animal species in the sense of the Darwinian theory that is interpreted materialistically nowadays. Rather, we attempt to show that we come to purely spiritual ancestors of the human being. Prior to the cycle of humanity in which human souls live in physical bodies, there is another cycle of humanity in which human beings did not yet incorporate themselves in physical bodies. Herman Grimm leaves the question undecided, so to say, as to what was actually involved with the “gods,” before human beings stepped onto the earth. However, he does recognize the ordered sequence of such cycles of humanity. And this results in an important point of contact with what spiritual science presents. That he takes account of such regular periodic stages taking place ~~ brings him especially close to us.

He attempts to extend his spiritual observations over three millennia. The first millennium for him is the Greek millennium. With Herman Grimm, one is inclined to say, there is something like an undertone in his manner of characterizing the Greeks, as though he were to say: In looking to the Greeks, they do not appear constituted like human beings of today, particularly in the oldest periods. Even someone like Alcibiades [ca. 450-404 B.C.] appears to us like a kind of fairy-tale prince, it is as though one beheld what is superhuman. Still, out of this Greek world that, as already mentioned, Herman Grimm presents as being altogether unlike the later human world, there towers ell that arose in the subsequent Greek world end in what follows, becoming the most important constituent of our cultural life. And finally, at the end of the first thousand years contemplated by Herman Grimm, the most significant impulse in humanity's development stands before his soul: the Christ impulse.

Herman Grimm is sparing in what he has to say about the figure of Christ, just as he is restrained in various other matters. But the occasional observations he makes show that he would as little go along with those who would “dissolve” Christ, as it were, to the point of a mere thought impulse, as he would go along with those who want to see Christ Jesus only in human terms. He emphasizes that two kinds of impulses actually proceed from the figure of Christ—one of colossal strength, that continues to work on throughout the further development of humanity—and the other impulse which consists in immense gentleness. Herman Grimm sees the entire second millennium of western cultural development taking shape in such a way that the Greek world is as though absorbed by the Christ impulse and the resulting mixture of Christianity and Greekness is incorporated into the Roman world, overcoming it. Out of this something quite unique arises. That is his second millennium, the first Christian millennium. The Roman element is not the main thing for him, but rather the Christian impulses. Everything of a political or external nature disappears for Herman Grimm in this millennium. He looks everywhere at how the manifold Christ impulse makes itself felt. His conception of Christ is neither narrow. nor small, but broad. When a book on the life of Jesus, La Vie de Jesus [1863], by Ernest Renan was published, Herman Grimm referred to it in the periodical he edited at the time, “Künstler und Kunstwerke” [Artists and Works of Art]; he attempted to show how pictorial representations of the Christ figure had undergone changes over the centuries both in the visual arts and in literature. He sought to demonstrate how the Christ impulse undergoes changes. He pointed out that people had always conceived of the Christ impulse according to their own outlook. In Ernest Renan he saw an instance of someone in the nineteenth century who conceived of Christ once again in a narrow sense only.

In Herman Grimm's view, Christianity needed about a thousand years to send its impulses into the rivulets and streams of western spiritual life. Then came the third millennium, the second Christian one, in which we still find ourselves today. It is the millennium at the dawn of which spirits such as Dante and Giotto arose, as also artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and so on, followed by the works of Shakespeare and Goethe. These cycles in the development of humanity, an ongoing stream_, he spoke of as an expression of the being of creative phantasy. Again and again Herman Grimm sought to present in lectures give to his students, this rhythmically subdivided, ongoing stream of humanity's development. Herman Grimm aimed to show how single creations had their place within the unbroken flow.

Thus, for him, Michelangelo, along with Raphael, Savonarola, Shakespeare and others, such as Goethe, were in a manner of speaking the spiritual constituents that become explicable on seeing them against the background of the ongoing stream of creative phantasy. For Herman Grimm this was especially apparent at the source, in the ninth or the tenth century before our era, with Homer. Thus, Herman Grimm addresses himself in an immediate way to the human soul, in drawing our attention to a specific work of art—be it Raphael's “'Marriage of Mary and Joseph,” a painting, of the Madonna, or one of the creations of Leonardo da Vinci, or. later, of Goethe. He grants us the feeling of standing as though directly within the unique qualities of the particular work. In considering with him the arrangement of colours, the figures and their gestures, while standing inwardly before the work of art, there emerges for us something like a tableau of the entire progress of humanity—now called forth by a single entity in that onward-flowing, all-encompassing stream of creative phantasy—over three millennia.

Thus, with Herman Grimm, one is first conducted into the intimate aspects of the work of art in question and is then led up to the summit from which the total stream can be surveyed. However, that is not something he considered in a theoretical manner. It seemed entirely natural for Herman Grimm to look at the totality of the onward flowing spiritual stream of humanity's development in this way. As he explained it to me, as mentioned at a midday meal, with his whole soul. he actually lived, as a matter of course, within this spiritual stream, and he could not look at a single phenomenon in any other way than as though it were excerpted from this mighty stream of humanity's development.

The whole of western cultural development, seen as folk phantasy, stood before his soul, though not as a general abstract idea, but filled with real content. He saw himself as inwardly connected with this luminous content extending over millennia, such that everything he wrote appears to one as individual segments of an enormous work. Even in only reading a' book review by Herman Grimm, one has the impression as though it were cut out from a colossal work setting forth the whole development of humanity. One feels oneself positively placed before such a colossal work, having opened it, and as though one were reading a few pages in it. It is the same with an article or an essay by Herman Grimm. And one comprehends how Herman Grimm could say of himself, in the evening of his life, in writing the preface to his collection of Fragments, that the idea had floated before him of a portrayal of the ongoing stream of folk phantasy, and that therein the whole of western culture had appeared to him, A particular subject he had pursued appeared as if it had been taken out of a finished work. However, he placed no more value on what had been printed than on what he had only written down, and on what he had written down, no more value than on what lived in his thoughts.

In referring to this, one would like to add a further impression, without putting it into an abstract formula—having been fond of Herman Grimm, remaining so, and in valuing his work and the kind of person he was. Herman Grimm was never able to reach the point of actually carrying out what stood before his mind's eye as something so beautiful, so colossal, so magnificent that even his works on Homer, on Raphael, on Michelangelo, on Goethe, appear to us as fragments of this comprehensive, unwritten work. We read the lines of the introduction to the Fragments mentioned above with a certain feeling of wistfulness. He states there that, though it would most likely not come about, it would perhaps be feasible to rework into a book what he had to say to his students year after year—and newly revised every year—concerning the progression of European cultural life in the last form these lectures took. One reads these lines today the more wistfully, as it did indeed not come to such a rewriting. We had to see Herman Grimm pass away, knowing what lived in his soul intended for present-day culture—having this sink with him into the grave.

We have characterized the sweeping cultural horizons underlying Herman Grimm's written works. Spiritual science intends to show what can be gained in widening one's spiritual horizons. It can be said that for the purpose of gradually entering into the whole outlook inherent in spiritual research, anyone immersing himself in Herman Grimm's spirit has the finest precepts. Apart from the breadth of his horizons, we see how he approached the phenomena, how his thoughts and feelings led him to everything he wrote in his comprehensive works on Homer, Raphael, Michelangelo and Goethe. And, bearing in mind what is set forth in his other writings, one sees that Herman Grimm distinguishes himself in significant ways from other spirits, in possessing attributes belonging to the kind of soul-deepening we have spoken of in describing the path the soul has to take in order to enter the spiritual worlds.

We have stressed that for the spiritual path, the intensity of soul-forces has to become greater. Deeper soul-forces are to be called forth that otherwise slumber. Inner strength, inner courage and boldness are required to a greater extent than in ordinary life; concepts are to be grasped more sharply. The soul needs to identify itself more fully with its own being, with the forces of thinking, feeling and willing. Initial signs of this are evident everywhere with Herman Grimm, by which he was, for example, in a position to describe works of art in such an intimate and personal way, as in the case of Raphael and Michelangelo. This is a precursor, however, to further illuminating the spiritual world. The basis of Herman Grimm's historical research does not lie in what is nowadays called “objectivity,” but in his allying himself with the cultural phenomena he portrays, as accords with the spiritual world. In this way, wholly forgetting itself and yet in a rare sense conscious of itself, the soul immerses itself in the corresponding cultural manifestation.

This becomes particularly evident when he directs his attention to a single cultural phenomenon, such as Raphael, elevating this to the overall stream of human spiritual life. His impressions then become bold, powerful ideas—and what others do not venture to say with the same shade of feeling, or with the same subtlety of ideas, Herman Grimm does venture, becoming in this way a representative of the spirit. And he then stands before us with such boldness that we are sometimes reminded of the Gospel writers. It is just that they wrote more in keeping with mysticism, while Herman Grimm wrote in the sense of a modern spiritual discourse. Just as the Gospels reach upward to attain the horizon of mankind as a whole, so Herman Grimm reaches upward with his Raphael book to the horizon of mankind as a whole.

It is miraculous when, in his audacious way—seemingly tearing his soul out of himself and striding as though alongside Raphael—as in an overall stream of evolution—he erupts in words that can truly tell us more than any mere presentation of world history: “Raphael is a citizen of world-history; He is like one of the four rivers that according to the belief of the ancient world flowed out of Paradise.”

In letting such a sentence duly affect one, Herman Grimm's perception of Raphael takes on an altogether different character, compared to what other authors have to say. Hence, for Herman Grimm, the various personalities of history merge into the overall stream of spiritual life. It could also be said, he brings the highest spiritual spheres down to the personal element. And in speaking the following heartfelt words, Herman Grimm further expresses his relation to leading cultural figures:

“If, by some miracle, Michelangelo were called from the dead, to live among us again, and if I were to meet him, I would humbly stand aside to let him pass; if Raphael came by, I would follow him, to see whether or not I might have the opportunity of hearing a few words from his lips. With Leonardo and Michelangelo one can confine oneself to reporting what they once were in their day; with Raphael one has to start from what he is for us today. Concerning the two others, a slight veil has passed over them, but not over Raphael. He belongs among those whose growth is as yet far from being at an end. we may imagine that Raphael will present ever new riddles to future-generations of humanity.” [Fragments, Vol. II, p.170]

This counts as a characteristic mood, rather than as something normally objective in the sense of what is normally demanded nowadays. But if does describe matters in such a way that we feel ourselves transposed, in an immediate way to what had lived in Herman Grimm's soul in writing- such sentences. It becomes understandable that such a spirit had to struggle in coming to terms with such a world-historical figure as Raphael. Oddly, as he himself relates, it was quite different for him, in describing the life of Michelangelo. The portrayal of the life of Michelangelo by Herman Grimm is a marvellous document, though in some respects perhaps, it counts today as having been surpassed. Seen against the background of the life of that time, the figure of Michelangelo stands out significantly from other figures—as also from the unique description of the city of Florence. Herman Grimm places a tableau before us in contrasting two spiritual entities, Athens and Florence. With that, the weaving together of three millennia as characterized by Herman Grimm, appears as a mighty background upon which Dante and Giotto appear, along with other painters of that time—followed by figures such as Savonarola, and finally Michelangelo himself, evident.

It becomes evident that Herman Grimm responded differently to Raphael and his surroundings than to Goethe, while presenting everything with no less familiarity. In the case of Herman Grimm's Goethe portrayal, we sense everywhere that he had grown up as a spiritual descendant of Goethe. With his Michelangelo portrayal, we feel how he enters into everything personally, wandering the streets, visiting every palace in Florence. ... other matters, as it were. Besides personally acquainting himself with other matters, he succeeds in standing as it were, before Michelangelo, and in depicting his actual manner of working. All this is as though cast from the same mould.

This differs from what he presents concerning Raphael. There we sense a wrestling with the material, with the spiritual image of Raphael. It is as though Herman Grimm were never able to achieve satisfaction. He describes having taken up the material again and again, while nothing appeared adequate to him of what he had already published. That was true even of his last works—of what he finally attempted as a portrayal of Raphael's personality. This remained a fragment, appearing in the collection of essays entitled Raphael as a World Power, from which the sentences derive that were just read out.

Why did Herman Grimm struggle with the material, precisely in the case of Raphael? It is because he could only present something to his own satisfaction in uniting himself completely with the material. In Raphael, however, he saw a spirit characterized in the words quoted: “Raphael is a citizen of world-history. He is like one of the four rivers that, according to the belief of the ancient world, flowed out of paradise.” And thus, with every statement applied to him, Raphael grew to giant size. Herman Grimm could never be satisfied, since he could not capture this “world-power” in a book. If the comprehensive breadth and grace of his spirit is evident in the portrayals of Homer, Michelangelo and Goethe with his Raphael discourse we see the profound uprightness, the profound honesty of Herman Grimm's personality.

Whoever takes up his book on Homer will possibly find it not scholarly enough. But Herman Grimm states on the very first page, that this book is not meant to be a contribution to Homer research. As already set forth; here, Herman Grimm could conduct himself in this and similar matters much like a spiritual “lord.” Thus, it appears quite natural that, in collecting his ideas on Goethe for publication, he boldly started out from the view that every other book he had come across concerning Goethe fell short. What seems like brazenness to some, can be taken for granted in the context of his literary and artistic abilities.

That is how he relates to everything in cultural life. Hence for those who adhere to the standpoint of erudite scholars, Herman Grimm's Homer book may seem intolerable. All the many questions that have been raised concerning Homer—whether or not he actually lived, whether the “Iliad” was put together from so and so many details, and so forth—all that did not concern him. He took it as it was. In this way, however, it became clear to him how wonderfully it is composed, how what comes later always refers to what preceded it. Everything that shows this inherent composition appears to us inwardly coherent. But apart from that, what appears most salutary for a spiritual researcher, is his immersion in the soul-life of the Homeric heroes. Everywhere, we see Herman Grimm's soul-imbued style extend to the soul-life of Homer's heroes. Everywhere we see the Achilles-soul comprehended, the Agamemnon-soul, the Odysseus-soul, and so on. As a description of souls, this book is overpowering in its effect, in spite of the familiarity of the stylistic presentation! We are led not only to the heights of historical contemplation, but also deep into the souls of the single Homeric figures, some scholars will inevitably say, Herman Grimm has taken the “Iliad” at face value, with disregard for the whole of Homer research and all preliminary study, accepting it verse for verse! Indeed, he does so—quite “amateurishly”—and the dry conclusion could then be: There someone has written a book without any preliminary study.

Did Herman Grimm in fact write this book without any preliminary study? Anyone concerning himself with the works of Herman Grimm will find the preliminary studies, only they look different from the preliminary studies of the usual experts. The preliminary studies of Herman Grimm lay in soul studies, in immersing himself in the secrets of the human soul. And one can convince oneself that no one could have shed such light on the Homeric heroes without those preliminary studies. Herman Grimm looks for what held sway in Homer's Phantasy. But what he says reveals him to be the finest knower of human souls. We may expect remarkable things of him in considering the way viewed Homer's heroes—from Achilles to Agamemnon to Odysseus. How did he find the words to write, in his Homer book and other works, what can seem to the researcher so uncommonly spiritual? He was able to do so on account of quite definite preliminary studies. And these are to be found among the works of Herman Grimm's first period.

Above all, we have the wonderful collection of novellas [1862] that is perhaps less read today than other modern products of its kind. However, these should be read by those who take an interest in spiritual things. As a collection of novellas, it is an intensive attempt to get to know human souls, to fathom human secrets and the soul's activity beyond the physical plane. The first of these novellas, “The Singer,” belongs to Herman Grimm's earliest phase as an author. In this work it is shown how a man acquires a deep, passionate yearning for a woman of a broad spiritual nature. However, these two personalities are never able to come together. The woman sends this ardent man away from her social circle, while everything lives on in the man's soul in the way of impulses that drew him to her. On the other hand, what proceeds from his soul saps at his bodily strength. Set forth as corresponds to spiritual research, we see him gradually destabilized in his soul. He is taken in by a friend to live on his estate, becoming, however, entangled again in the woman's “net.” The friend recognizes that it is high time to fetch this person his friend adheres to so completely. She does come—but too late. Whereas she is in front of the house, the individual concerned shoots himself.

And now comes something, taken up unreservedly in spiritual research, which Herman Grimm so often touches upon in artistic expression, but allows to devolve into indefiniteness. Briefly and succinctly he describes how, in the singer's imagination the deceased lives on. The scene is unforgettable in which, feeling her entire guilt in the death of this man, she sees him approaching from the realm of the dead, night after night. This now fills the content of her soul. It is not described as being a mere figment of her imagination, but in the sense of someone who knows there are secrets that reach beyond the grave. It is a wonderful description, that tells how the friend plants himself in front of the woman when she says the deceased comes to her—continuing right up to her final letter to the friend, in which she expresses that she herself now feels close to death. For her, the deceased, to whom she was so closely bound, had drawn her towards him from the realm of the dead. Probably no modern author has found the right tone, in touching on the spiritual world with such sincerity.

In spiritual research we present how, in going through the portal of death, what otherwise always remains united with the human being—also in sleep—the so-called etheric body, raises itself along with the higher soul-members, out of the physical body, passing over into the spiritual world. In the field of spiritual research, we draw a picture of how the corpse-remains behind and how the human being with his ether body loosens himself, step by step, one member after the other, from the physical body. The etheric body is then for a time the enclosure for the higher soul-members of the human being. That is an idea with which those who approach closer to spiritual research can become more and more conversant. In what follows we shall be able to consider in what an admirable way the artistic soul of Herman Grimm touches upon these facts of the spiritual world. This will lead us again to the question as to why, for deeper reasons, Herman Grimm did not develop his cultural discourse into a comprehensive work.

Apart from his novella, Herman Grimm wrote a further work, a novel, Unüberwindliche Mächte [1867], [Insurmountable Powers], in which, as with his work in general, his refined style leads us to a contemplation of the world and of life. Particularly remarkable is what might be called the clash of two cultures in miniature. The one world adheres to title, status and rank. Deriving from an old lineage, an impoverished count lives in the afterglow of his hierarchical status. Wonderfully contrasted in this novel is the way in which the world of old prejudices and rankings encounters the New World. The quite different views and notions of America play into this. The individual identifying himself with hierarchical prejudices, whom Herman Grimm calls Arthur, encounters Americans. He meets Emmy, the daughter of Mrs. Forster, who has grown up with American values. We see this count passionately enraptured by Emmy.

It would be impossible even to outline the rich content of this novel adequately. We encounter the whole contrast of Europe and America. In addition, there is the contrast of the old Prussian milieu and the newly constituted Prussian milieu arising as the outcome of wars. It is a tremendous cultural “painting” in which the characters are featured, and from which they emerge. Only this much can be indicated: that, as a result of the confluence of these streams, Arthur, the count, dies a tragic death right before he was to marry Emmy. A deluded relative considers himself the rightful heir to the count's lineage, seeing the count as a bastard. Stung with envy and jealousy, he opposes the count, and on the eve of his marriage, the count is shot down by this individual.

Someone wanting to contemplate this novel merely rationalistically might consider it as concerned with the unbridgeable prejudice outstanding, However, the expression “insurmountable powers” can perhaps hardly seem more justified than when Herman Grimm, unintentionally indicates the idea of karma, the idea of the causal connection of destinies in human life—as though knotted together one after another. We see him depict forces at work in destiny that can only come into play in working over from earlier embodiments—from previous earth-lives. He does not describe this in speaking theoretically of “forces” or of “karma,” but in simply letting the facts speak for themselves, giving expression to these powers that, then appear in a certain way corresponding to the ideas of spiritual research. We see a karmic destiny unfold; we see insurmountable karmic powers come to expression. And we see something further:

Emmy remains behind. The final glance that fell into Arthur's eyes as he lay there, his heart shot through, was when she bent over him and their eyes met in a certain expression. An utterance of Herman Grimm remains unforgettable, in saying, the spirit gave way at the moment his eyes assumed the peculiarity of appearing as no more than physical instruments. But now we encounter once more Herman Grimm's penetration of worlds that lie beyond death—what one would like to call his chaste penetration of worlds out of which souls work on, in remaining real once they have gone through the portal of death.

In a brief concluding chapter, Herman Grimm shows us Emmy gradually becoming infirm. It is entirely characteristic of his close connection to matters of soul and spirit, that he describes Emmy's approaching death. She is brought to Montreux. Montreux and its surroundings are uniquely described. However, Herman Grimm does not describe Emmy's passing like authors who have no relation to spiritual matters, but rather as someone taking account of how the secrets of death, of the realm beyond, speak to the soul. I would render something incomplete if I did not add in conclusion Herman Grimm's own words on the death of Emmy:

“This was Emmy's dream.

“Between midnight and morning, she believed she woke up.

“Her initial glance at the window, through which a pale light streamed in, was free and clear and she knew where she was. She also heard her mother, who slept next to her, breathing, However, a moment later, with a sense of pressure she had never felt before, overwhelming anxiety overcame her. It was no longer the thoughts that had tormented her during the last few days, but as though a giant hand were holding all the world's mountains over her by a thin thread, and that at any moment the fingers holding them could loosen, and the whole mass would fall down on her, to remain lying on her eternally. Her eyes wandered hither and thither looking for a glimmer of light, but there was none; the light of the window extinguished, her mother's breathing no longer audible, and stifling loneliness all around, as though she would never come alive again. She wanted to call out, but could not; she wanted to touch herself, but not a limb obeyed her. All was completely silent, completely dark; no thoughts could be grasped in this frightful, monotonous anxiety: even memory was taken from het—and then, at last a thought returned: Arthur!

“And wondrously now, it was as if this one thought had transformed itself into a point of light that became visible to the eyes. And to the extent the thought grew to become boundless longing, this light grew, spreading out, and suddenly, as though it sprang apart and unfolded itself, it took on form—Arthur stood before her! She saw him, she recognized him at last. It was surely he himself. He smiled and was close beside her. She did not see whether he was naked, nor whether he was clothed: but it was him, she knew him too well; it was he himself, no mere phantom that had taken on his form.”

Thus, Herman Grimm has the one who has long since gone through the portal of death approach her, now a seeress; at the moment of her death she approaches the deceased, addressing his soul: “She did not see whether he was naked, nor whether he was clothed: but it was him, she knew him too well; it was he himself, no mere phantom that had taken on his form.”

“He stretched out his hand to her and said, ‘Cornel’ Never had his voice sounded as sweet and enticing as now. With all the strength she was capable of, she tried to raise her arms towards him, but she was unable to do so. He came still closer and stretched out his hand closer to her, ‘Come!’ he said again.

“For Emmy it was as though the power with which she attempted to bring at least a word over her lips, would have been capable of moving mountains, but she was not able to say even this one word.

“Arthur looked at her, and she at him. With only the possibility of moving a finger, she would have touched him. And now, most terrible of all: he appeared to shrink back again! ‘Come!’ he said for the third time. Sensing he had spoken for the last time, that the terrible darkness would break in again upon his heavenly gaze, filled now with a fear that tore at. Her as frost splits trees, she made a final attempt to raise her arms to him. It was impossible to overcome the weight and the cold that held her captive—but then, as a bud bursts open, from which a blossom grows before our eyes, there grew out of her arms, other shining arms, out of her shoulders, gleaming new shoulders. And lifting these arms toward Arthur's arms, his hands grasping her hands, and floating slowly backwards, drawing her after him, the whole magnificent figure with him, rose out of Emmy's.”

The emergence of the etheric body out of the physical body cannot be described more wonderfully, in having been undertaken by a pure artist-soul. That was a spirit, that was a soul that lived in Herman Grimm, of which we may say that it came close to what we seek so eagerly in spiritual research. Herman Grimm provides evidence that, in approaching the -twentieth century, the modern human being sought paths to spiritual life.

So we turn gladly to Herman Grimm, wanting only to continue further on the same path. We see him elevate the creations of Raphael, the creations of Michelangelo, the experiences of Goethe, the Greek-soul of Homer, to the stream that he sees flowing onward as “creative phantasy” through millennia. We then know how close Herman Grimm was, in his entire feeling and perception, to what lives and weaves as the soul-spiritual behind all physical reality. For when Herman Grimm refers to his “creative phantasy” we are not dealing with total abstraction. In so far as it is still perhaps a matter of residual abstraction, to that extent it can seem necessary to break through the thin wall separating Herman Grimm from the living spirit, effective not only as creative phantasy, but living as immediate spirit_s effective behind the entire sense world. It could appear a form of unwarranted restraint, to say no.- more than Herman Grimm in speaking of the continual onward working of the phantasy of humanity. After all, as an artist, he touched so intimately on the still living soul that has gone through the portal of death. Hence, it will not be difficult for us, where Herman Grimm speaks of creative phantasy, to see the living spirit that, as spiritual researchers, we seek behind the sense world.

Perhaps it will not seem unjustified if it is even asserted that-, for a spirit that struggled so honestly and uprightly for truth—wanting to approach this creative phantasy ever and again—it was, after all, too much of an abstraction for him. It urged him to grasp the living spiritual element, and for that reason the great work he intended could not come about—since if it had been written, it would have had to become a work that portrayed the spiritual world not merely as creative phantasy, but as a world of creative beings and individualities.

Spiritual research has not been placed into the modern age arbitrarily. It is demanded by seeking souls of our time—seeking souls to whom, as we have seen, Herman Grimm.so-clearly and. characteristically belongs. In this way we can become aware that with spiritual research we do not stand as alien and isolated in modern cultural life. We have been able to look to Herman Grimm as to a related spirit. Even if he does not share the same standpoint completely, we do nonetheless stand—or can at least stand, immeasurably near to him. It is better to contemplate such a figure as a whole, rather than scrutinizing every detail—to look at the harmony of soul with which Herman Grimm can affect us, its mildness and then again keenness and strength of soul, with which he can likewise affect us. We may treat this or that question differently from Herman Grimm, but I know that it is not altogether out of keeping with his style, if I summarize what I actually wanted to say in the following words; One could arrive at the thought—let us call it for that matter a delusory thought, one that could be entertained as a beautiful illusion: If higher spirits, other-worldly spirits wanted to acquaint themselves prefer with what happens on the earth by means of reading, they would prefer most of all to read such writings as those in which Herman Grimm depicts the earthly destinies of human beings.

This feeling can reverberate as though from almost every line of Herman Grimm's writings, lifting one upwards to a sphere beyond the earth. One then feels so akin to this personality that, if one were to characterize what has been said today concerning Herman Grimm, a beautiful saying could come to mind that he himself employed in eulogizing his friend Treitschke [Heinrich von Treitschke, German historian, 1834-56] whom he valued so much.

“With what existential joy did this human being stand in life. What courage he showed in battle. What a gift lie had for language. How new his latest book. How little could those take exception to his ‘elbows’ in the general exchange of ideas. They too will join in declaring: ‘Yes, he was one of ours!’”

These words are at the same time the last words that Herman Grimm wrote and had printed, as we know from the publisher of his works, Reinhold Steig. And I should like also, in conclusion, to summarize this evening's considerations with the words: With what existential joy did Herman Grimm stand in life; how mild—and yet how individual! How little can even those distance themselves from him, if they but understand themselves aright, who differ from him in their ideas and in other ways! And, proceeding from whatever field of investigation, how closely allied to him must those feel who seek paths to the spirit! What kinship to him must they feel, when his mild figure appears before them—prompting them to break out in the words: Yes, he was one of ours!