The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends! Included in esoteric development, and in true insight, is all that may be found along the way of a person’s attempting to attain an understanding of what it means to live and actually exist in a world in which the senses and the entire corporeal organization are not mediators, and so therefore to live in one’s spiritual-soul nature, which really is a person’s natural state as a member of the spiritual-soul world.

Now to this end, and in general to attain this, to live in the world in a spiritual-soul manner, to this end the multifaceted, more or less meditative soul-life exercises have come, exercises for our souls that are to be pursued vigorously and tenaciously. And a picture of this should be developed, of what a person’s soul can undergo along the way from an experience of the world of physical sensation, the world known through the senses, to an experience of the spiritual world. A picture should initially be developed in these class-sessions, by means of the various deliberations and individual verses appended to the deliberations, a certain picture that includes the possibilities and the prerequisites, from one to the next, of how they are enabled into becoming objects of meditation.

When, after the elapse of a certain time, these Class lessons, which really are impartations from the spiritual world, as I have very often already spoken about, these Class lessons will come together, so that what can be described in the lessons and accomplished through meditation, and it is a karmic fulfillment for those who can accomplish it, what can be accomplished through these meditations will come together as a clear picture and will become for you a first step in esoteric development.

And now it proceeds, from the very different considerations cultivated here in previous lessons, already put forth, how the person in this way can gradually lift himself out of his earth existence-awareness into an experience of being with the cosmos, the feeling, the development of an inner sense that can carry him to the ends of the world, to where the spiritual may be confronted. As long as a person shrinks from this, only entering into a relationship merely through reasoning and understanding with the things around him that are sense-perceptible, persisting in this manner it is impossible, taking the soul-spiritual so lightly, it is impossible for him to truly connect to spirit-soulfulness, the content of which most certainly is the human approach to truth.

You see, my dear friends, as I have very often stressed, healthy human understanding can grasp it all. If one just exerts oneself with sufficient strength, free of preconceptions, one can grasp all that Anthroposophy will present. But straightaway in the pursuit of this apprehension by healthy human understanding, the question immediately comes to mind of whether any particular individual is in reality karmically called today to take part in Anthroposophy, or whether not.

You see, there are two possibilities. It may happen that a person hearkens unto the content of anthroposophical truth, and such a person may allow the content of anthroposophical truth to work effectively on himself, so as to find himself illuminated. It is of course self-understood, my friends, that all here present belong to this group of men and women. For those who do not belong to this group of men and women, but nonetheless somehow take part in the class as members, these people would certainly not be taking part honorably. And all, all initially rests on honor in esoteric life, on a person’s soul and spirit manner of being completely saturated with honor. There is another group of men and women however, that finds what is offered by Anthroposophy to be fantasy, belonging more or less to the visionary realm. People in this group show, through their attitudes, that their karma does not align them with the others, with those who with healthy human understanding far removed from corporeality and the senses can grasp truth free of the senses, who can grasp inner knowing free of the senses.

Being bound together, either in having the sense in common of being bound to corporeality, or of having the sense of not being so bound, this certainly constitutes a great differentiation today between human beings. For if and when you honestly identify, innately within yourself, the sort of common sense grasped in Anthroposophy, then this common sense of Anthroposophy is grasped in its immediacy, regardless of one’s general liking for it. And this common sense, grasped honorably in Anthroposophy, is actually the beginning of esoteric pursuit. And one should really appreciate that attaining this common understanding is the beginning of esoteric pursuit. One should not overlook this point. When, by means of this attainment, one goes out and acts in accordance with this initiatory common understanding, which is given in this school, convened for this purpose, then one will be following the esoteric path ever more and more closely. As the case may be, someone may find this or that meditative verse given here personally suitable and applicable, and may utilize it. In doing this, however, one must do it in accordance with the given explanations and clarifications, which fully delineate and characterize the utilization of these meditative verses for inner human life.

It is about really perceiving quite a bit more deeply and good-heartedly. Although this can also happen merely in thoughts, it is about perceiving and taking note of the mineral environment around us, and of the plant environment, and of whatever else is in our immediate earth environment. It is about making ourselves directly aware of how this earthly environment is close to us. In relationship to us it is very close. It is about how we as people of earth, bearing our physical embodiment, are closely, very closely, related to everything around us, with everything that has mineral qualities, plant-like qualities, animal qualities, and so on. And so we might say, with inner honesty, we might ask ourselves the question, what is this all about? Why do I take on the physical substance of the earth after I have been born? Why do I keep dragging myself through earth existence from birth to death until my organism is no longer capable of struggling with its earth-bound material nature, until my physical life on earth comes to an end with death? In order to comprehend this personal human conundrum, we must seek out and perceive in depth our closely associated physical surroundings. In doing this we will also come to know more and more what sort of departure point that esoteric life can be, for we will feel, in doing things in physical life upon the earth, we will feel that in reality we ourselves are blind, as if groping about in the dark.

And please consider carefully, my dear brothers and sisters, please consider carefully the people nurtured into adulthood today in the customary way. They are born, then they become situated in earthly life, and then they become known purely through the external relationships associated with this or that sort of work. They don’t really grasp the inter-relationships of their work with the whole of human existence. It probably doesn’t cross their minds at all, except in knowing that they work in order to eat. It doesn’t cross their minds, truth be told, that the plants they eat contain cosmic forces from the depths of space, forces that wend their way through the human organism, and in a certain sense, by eating they bring into being a cosmic inner development and progression. Most people today cannot identify at all with this first glance leading away from the materialism of the times. They stand firm, at least initially, in the simple observation of earth relationships, and in life they remain spiritually blind to what lives in the darkness, to what is the starting point of a true esoteric development.

And then one may then turn one’s glance away, turning from what lives all around about on the earth, whether engaged merely in thoughts or in the reality of it, one may then turn one’s glance up and out into the heavens, the heavens beset with stars. One gazes at the wandering stars, one gazes at the fixed stars, one is filled with and dwells in the unending grandeur out there confronting a person while gazing out at the world-all, at the universe. One says inwardly that as a human being, I am innately related to and interconnected with what is there resplendent in outer space, just as I am innately related to and interconnected with what surrounds me in the material world.

In reality, in this outward glance at the heavens beset with stars, we have the feeling of not just living in the darkness, but rather also of ourselves becoming free in living in the darkness, of our vaulting up with our spiritual-soul nature into and among the stars, vaulting ourselves out and up to what is in place there, to the stars in their grouped images. And please note, if a person can really and enthusiastically take up this viewing of the starry heavens, then the starry heavens will become an overabundance of imaginations. You have probably seen various old paintings, in which not merely starry groups are portrayed, but in which the star-groups are formed up together in animal symbols. Someone has drawn the group of stars standing in Aries or in Taurus not just as star-groupings, but rather as symbolic arrangements picturing a ram, a bull, and so forth.

Today people think that of course this was present as a free-form unfolding of the will of the ancient inhabitants of the earth, and due to the constellations having been called by these names, then the pictures were made accordingly. This was certainly not the case, but rather just the opposite, for in ancient times, the shepherds on the moors were not simply gazing out upon the star-beset heavens with physical eyes, but rather, they were also deeply immersed in dream-awareness or in sleep-awareness while out there with their herds, and they were wandering eyes-closed in soul out in the depths of space. And what they saw there was not just the star-groupings of visible observation. They took in the actuality, which was somewhat later differently portrayed in pictures. They took in the actuality of the imaginations, the actuality of the depths of space filled with truth.

Today, we can no longer return, creeping back to the instinctive clairvoyance just described in such a manner, to the actual experiences of simple shepherds of long ago. But we can do something else. With a great deal of concerted effort, we can place ourselves, whether in thoughts or in reality, into the starry heavens themselves. We can perceive the depths, and at the same time the enormity of majesty shining down upon us, presenting itself there before us as illumination. And we can come gradually to revere what spreads out there before us in the depths of space. And the reverence itself, the fervor of reverence, is what can call forth out of our souls an experience, an experience of the external sensory image of the stars being swept away and the starry heaven becoming an imagination for us. And then, when the starry heaven becomes an imagination for us, then we feel ourselves being taken up, up and along by our soul-gazing.

You see, up to the time of Plato, when gazing about, one still also felt something quite different in regard to the physical eyes. Plato himself described seeing in such a way, so that when looking out upon a man and seeing in the sense described by Plato, something flowed out from the eyes, a tracing of the man spread out, in ancient times, forming a spread-out connection. Something streamed forth from the eyes and encompassed the other person. The etheric streamed out. As when I stretch out my physical hand and grasp something, and I know in the grasping that with my physical hand I am connected, just so in the times of ancient instinctive clairvoyance, a person knew that etheric substance went out of the eyes and fastened upon what was being looked upon. Today a person merely believes that the eyes are here, and that what is seen is over there. Over there the seen object sends light-waves out through the intervening space, waves that impinge on the eyes, impinging in some way or another so as to be taken in by the soul. Please note that materialists most definitely speak of the soul, but it is placed way down within, and not at the forefront, and they speak of this impingement as somehow being taken in by the soul as truth. But this is not really the case. It is not simply a working into the person from what is present around him. It is also, quite definitely, an outward streaming of a human being’s inner etheric nature.

And we should take our etheric body as the truth in its connectedness to the great world around us, when the star-beset heaven becomes the great folio of the world, the tome on which the imaginative mysteries of world existence have been inscribed, if and when we have the ability to behold it.

The perception may come to us, however, that when present here upon the earth, present in this robust sensory reality, that in reality it is a sort of blindness. It is living in darkness. When your heart and mind soar aloft, you live within what otherwise just shines upon you from the great world all around. You live within the shining of the great surrounding world. But you take your own etheric existence-awareness out there into the broad flowing streaming of this shining of the world. You yourself go along with your etheric existence-awareness.

And the shining ceases to be a shining. It can no longer remain nothingness, when we ourselves sink completely into it. We extend our inner experience of reality out into this shining. And this experience (about which I have written) becomes an enmeshment, a weaving into the shining of the cosmos. Previously we lived blind in the darkness of earth existence. Now we live out there, our etheric existence-awareness having been woven into the shining of the cosmos.

So, we can have this experience, that we weave into the shining of the cosmos. Initially I will draw this as a picture: [It was drawn on the board.] the life of blindness in the darkness of existence-awareness on earth [as a white arch], living out and beyond in the far reaches of the world [gold rays], then the shining of stars at the end, in which world-imaginations can be perceived by us in reverence [red waves].

But having woven ourselves out and beyond, we are certainly out there now in our etheric nature within this imaginative fabric of the world. When we actually get to being within the imaginative fabric of the world, we are certainly no longer in our physical bodies. We have struggled through the empty ether into the experience of world-imaginations.

It happens straightforwardly, you see, as when someone here in the physical world writes something down, and having learned to read, then just reads it. Through our weaving out and beyond into the cosmos, since the gods have inscribed for us world-imaginations in the cosmos, we arrive there and we see these world-imaginations from the other side [drawn as arrows in the first drawing]. We live first here upon the earth [second drawing, in the inner circle], then we soar aloft up to world-imaginations [second drawing, outside the wavy circle], but there we read from the outside.

Yes, my dear friends, brothers and sisters, the zodiac speaks a meaningful speech, if and when looked upon from the other side and not from the earth. It speaks as Ares the Ram, Taurus the Bull, Gemini the Twins, Cancer the Crab, and Leo the Lion, if and when one encompasses it from the outside. And for our understanding, it is a deed, this encompassing of it from the outside. And we begin to read the mysteries of the world. And what we read are the deeds of high spiritual beings. In a novel we read about the deeds of men and women. When looking and seeing things from the other side of the zodiac, things are seen otherwise than as seen from the earth outward, as seen by Moses, who always looked upon God merely from behind, from the earth outward. Initiation consists of seeing from the other side. It is not merely a sort of outward gazing. It becomes a reading. And what one reads are the spiritual deeds of the high spiritual beings, who have brought it all into its present state.

And when we read in this silence sufficiently long, when we nourish and broaden our souls inwardly in this reading, then we may begin to hear in a spiritual manner. Then the gods speak to us. Then we dwell within the spiritual world, when the gods speak to us.

Now look, my dear brothers and sisters, it can be done, as the adept can tell you; the soul can broaden itself out and beyond, can be enmeshed in the depths of the cosmos, can come to world-imaginations, can gaze from the other side upon the deeds of gods. It is so; it is possible to hearken in a spiritual manner unto the gods’ speech. But perhaps someone really gets to the state the adept has described, really deepening, deepening oneself in understanding, deepening oneself in full-blooded courage, deepening in the heart, not simply approaching it stubbornly, not merely saying, well, if I could do it, well, then it would also please me, it would interest me, but I can’t worry about it now. When someone quite differently really takes this description up, takes it up as something that is actually possible, when one begins to take it up as something not just to be considered, but to be revered and loved, then one can take it up as a meditation. Ever and again it then becomes one’s way, finally, to actually come into the esoteric life.

And you will find this way, if and when in meditating you deepen yourself in the words. [The first lines were written on the board.]

1. I live in the dark domain of earth,
2. I move ¹ in the shine of the stars,
3. I read in the spirit’s deeds,
4. I hear in the god’s speech.

With the necessary feeling this inner meditative way is lived, experienced, works wonders in, and transforms the human soul. It must flow rhythmically again and again through the soul, for it actually leads a person through to his own world-being, contained within himself.

But it is necessary that it should come to light within properly, so that after one has spoken it quite a while in one’s head, it should also be taken up by, should start coursing within one’s heart, for it is there that one makes the journey out into the etheric world-all, and then into the spiritual world-all on the other side of the etheric world-all. It is necessary, in coursing along such a pathway, to take one’s heart along in one’s experiencing, and to allow it to rule, to allow one’s heart to rule in the perceiving, so that it can join according to its nature in the translation of oneself out and beyond. But in coming into ruling our perceptions properly in this way, it is good initially, in traveling along this whole meditative pathway, it is good thoroughly and inwardly to observe what lies in these words.

I live in the dark domain of earth,
I move in the shine of the stars,
I read in the spirit’s deeds,
I hear in the god’s speech.

You should try to imagine this as if someone were speaking to you from a great spiritual distance, as if you were not thinking it, but rather as if you were listening to and hearing another being speaking to you. One should imagine, really imagine, that another being is speaking to you out of unknown depths. Then the right feeling may be developed for what one hears here. This proper feeling lives in the second part of the verse. [The second part of the verse was written on the board.]

5. Yearning fills me in earth’s darkness,
6. Comforting me is the stars’ shine,

In that I am aware, that most certainly I am living upon the earth in the darkness as if blind, then I yearn to get out. Out there, the shining of the stars is my consolation, broadening my very existence.

Comforting me is the stars’ shine,

Now from the other side,

7. Teaching me are the spirits’ deeds,

And when I read them,

8. Making me² is the gods’ speech.

Now you know how to utilize this correctly. Call this inner meditation up with vigor into your heart and mind as you are employing it. As if out of depths of spirit, as if someone were speaking to you, in this manner listen to and hear the lines of the upper verse, bringing to bear on each line the corresponding feeling, so that you experience in the meditation the following: first listen carefully to it, then bring it vigorously to the forefront of your heart and mind as a perception, then again listen carefully, and again bring it vigorously into your heart and mind, … and so forth. [During the speaking of the following lines, connecting lines consisting of long curves were drawn on the board connecting lines 1 and 5, 2 and 6, 3 and 7, and 4 and 8.]

I live in the dark domain of earth,
Yearning fills me in earth’s darkness,
I move in the shine of the stars,
Comforting me is the stars’ shine,

I read in the spirit’s deeds,
Teaching me are the spirits’ deeds,

I hear in the gods’ speech,
Making me is the gods’ speech.

This meditation is at first a dialogue, a meditation in which the first line is always taken objectively, while the second streams out as a feeling from the heart.

Then, while trying once again to bring them to the forefront, enmeshed and working in each other, try to experience with moderate force of will the experience contained within the dialogue. [The third part of the verse was now developed and written as lines 9, 10, 11, and 12.]

From depths of spirit sounds forth:

I live in the dark domain of earth,

The heart answers:

Yearning fills me in earth’s darkness,

And the will perceives the impulse in the dialogue between lines 1 and 5:

9. The earth’s darkness would put me out, ³

Then one remembers back, after having progressed through this dialogue, to the interchange between lines 2 and 6, and to the experience contained within:

I move in the shine of the stars,
Comforting me is the stars’ shine,
10. The stars’ shine would wake me. ⁴

Then one remembers back, while carrying all this, to what sounds forth from spirit depths, and the answer of heart-felt courage:

I read in the spirit’s deeds,
Teaching me are the spirits’ deeds,

And the resultant experience by means of the will:

11. The spirits’ deeds would summon me, ⁵

distantly from the spiritual world. And now the most sublime, wherein one feels in dialogue with the gods themselves, wherein the gods not merely allow a reading, but rather actually speak:

I hear in the gods’ speech,
Making me is the gods’ speech.
12. The gods’ speech would deliver me. ⁶

It not only witnesses me, it begets, it brings forth, engenders, delivers me.

Now let us envision the entire meditation. The meditation in its entirety progresses as a dialogue, line for line, with one in dark spiritual depths under the dominion of spiritual beings, standing there in the lines at the top of the verses, speaking to us. The heart always gives answer:

I live in the dark domain of earth,
Yearning fills me in earth’s darkness,

I move in the shine of the stars,
Comforting me is the shine of stars,

I read in the spirit’s deeds,
Teaching me are the spirits’ deeds,

I hear in the gods’ speech,
Making me is the gods’ speech.

Now I remember each individually and connect the outflow of the will to it, as a memory of what has already happened.

I live in the dark domain of earth,
Yearning fills me in earth’s darkness.
The earth’s darkness would put me out.

I move in the shine of the stars,
Comforting me is the stars’ shine.
The stars’ shine would wake me.

I read in the spirits’ deeds,
Teaching me are the spirits’ deeds,
The spirits’ deeds would summon me.

I hear in the gods’ speech,
Making me is the gods’ speech.
The gods’ speech would deliver me.

This is the correct way to proceed, to come to the stage of the dialogue in the meditation, the dialogue in memory, and then by means of the will to a reinforcement of this memory.

When one actually starts with an inward demeanor of devotion, doubly so, with one’s entire soul inwardly constituted and brought into conformity with what I have just written, when one inwardly envisions it and begins to experience it, when one takes it up not as a mechanical meditation, but rather as a true experience of the soul, then setting things up in this way specifically awakens a relationship of the soul with the spiritual world.

One must really appreciate, however, even in the last set of verses, the specific manner I have just described. It should be experienced as discourse and answer, the discourse of the spirit and the answering discourse of the heart. But one must properly appreciate that initially one’s awareness, which will certainly be attained, is extinguished through the darkness of earth. One must feel as if awareness is overcome, in an instant of extinguishing sleep, and as if there in the second line there is an awakening, as if after the awakening, the calling of the gods to return to them is heard by us, as if one feels, henceforth, that the gods are calling out to us. They are summoning us, out of their own being’s word emerging from the word of worlds, in order to place us as beings of soul and spirit in the spiritual world, there to bear us, there to bring us forth, there to engender us.

When these nuances of inner experience are played out in soul, attention centered on the spiritual beings who speak to us, our heart’s vitality brought forth in devotion to the spiritual beings, then yes, then our souls are in motion, and gradually our souls are in fact brought onto the esoteric path. And we must be clear, as we experience the three stanzas in our souls, as well as we are able, in the manner described, we must be clear that something subliminal, yet powerful, is coming into being in our souls. If we would only live faithfully in these three stanzas, as I have described, our soul would thereby be fashioned, unbeknownst to us, so that when the first line is intoned, we would be just at the point of origin of life on earth, where the etheric body has just been constituted.

Were we to picture this with quick inner vitality, then it would sound forth from the spirit.

I live in the dark domain of earth,

Then more or less unconsciously we hearken unto and approach in spirit the moment our etheric body was constituted. And out of pre-earthly existence, out of the existence between death and a new birth, a force is working in our hearts, which we bring to bear in simple purity.

Yearning fills me in earth’s darkness.

And yearning after the spiritual is without doubt a legacy of ours from pre-earthly existence. And it is always the same, when placed at the beginning of earth existence, what is felt within the heart and works outwardly, that is what flames up in us from pre-earthly existence.

I move in the shine of the stars,

Here we again align with the beginning of our life on earth. The proper consolation, perceived by us, can be given to us by the shining of the stars. Through it, we will be placed back into our hearts’ answer.

Comforting me is the stars’ shine.

Again, there is a return to one’s beginnings on earth:

I read in the spirits’ deeds,

The heart remembers being instructed by high spiritual beings in pre-earthly existence.

Teaching me are the spirits’ deeds,

under whose care and among whom I lived and moved, before I descended down upon the earth.

I hear in the gods’ speech.

We hearkened unto the gods between death and a new birth. We perceive now that what is spoken by the gods is not to be imparted as that which is spoken by men and women. We bear witness, we recognize⁷ that the gods’ speech is fashioning, creating, quickening, making:⁸

Making me is the gods’ speech.

Finally, if and when we can appreciate it, then the right sense also comes into lines 9,10,11, and 12.

I live in the dark domain of earth,
Yearning fills me in earth’s darkness.

[Line 9 was written down once again, just to the right of the curved line connecting lines 1 and 5 together.]

The earth’s darkness would put me out,

it puts out, extinguishes my present earth-life, as I am transported back past the time between death and being reborn, back into my earlier incarnation. Then I understand, this is why my awareness has been extinguished, for until now my awareness was that of the present incarnation. The moment I fall asleep I will be transported back again, so that I can divine and sense myself moving within my earlier earth-incarnation.

I move in the shine of the stars, Comforting me is the stars’ shine,

[Line 10 was written down once again, just to the right of the curved line connecting lines 2 and 6 together.]

The stars’ shine would wake me,

I will be placed back as I was then, as I was in the preceding incarnation, if it were to wake me. For me, it depends on karma, it depends on what is appropriate for my destiny, for me it depends on the other side.

I read in the spirits’ deeds,
Teaching me are the spirits’ deeds.

[Line 11 was written down once again, just to the right of the curved line connecting lines 3 and 7 together.]

The spirits’ deeds would summon me,

summon me to the fulfillment of my karma, with the forces that stem from my prior life on earth.

I hear in the gods’ speech.
Making me is the gods’ speech.

[Line 12 was written down once again, just to the right of the curved line connecting lines 4 and 8 together.]

The gods’ speech would deliver me.

All that I am becomes clear to me, when into my present existence, my earlier earth existence floods in, gleams, moves, rumbles, becomes enmeshed. Then there I am. At first, I am present merely as a future becoming, germinative, only to achieve full apparency when eventually passing through the portal of death. Then from the previous earth existence into the present something gleams, interpenetrates, works effectively, making me into the human being I really am, summoning me to be the human being I really am.

Thoroughly infused with this, with its reality, so that really, while we seem to be in the customary world of physical earth existence, our soul takes the journey back, back until it arrives at the former earth life, then we will come to know the importance of what we experience in such a thing. And in the awareness of this importance, that as a gleaming-stream washes through the whole of our thinking, feeling, and willing, in this awareness we will then be infused in our meditation with the feeling of enchantment. This enchantment is essential, for in this way the meditation works effectively in the right way. One may name it an inner feeling of enchantment, a magical feeling, on the grounds that nowhere else on the earth do we find such a comparable feeling, for this feeling is totally disconnected from all corporeality. Even if we cannot yet come out of the physical body with our thinking, with our imagination, this feeling of enchantment, this magical feeling that we experience, coming out of the importance of all that we are doing soulfully, this stands there in the pure spiritual world. In this feeling of enchantment, in this magical feeling we experience the pure spiritual-soulful element. There we stand, drawn into the spiritual-soulful world.

In such manner, as we experience it, esoteric striving is fulfilled for us. And that, for the time being, that is what I have attempted to lay before your souls today, my dear brothers and sisters.

• 1. webe: Luther translated Acts 17:28, Denn in ihm leben, weben und sind wir, but Tyndale at the same time translated it, “For in him we live and move and have our being.” Weave in this sense is somewhat archaic in English except for the idiom “to weave a web of lies”.
• 2. Schaffend ist mir: making me is not only English-derived, but carries the emotional theme of this line better than the Latin-derived fashioning me (with which it is cognate), creating me (which is too conceptual), or quickening me (which is archaic).
• 3. The verbs in lines 9-12 are all in the autocausative or subjunctive tense, emphasizing willful intentionality and possibilities. Using would as the auxiliary verb correctly emphasizes the willful nature of these lines.
• 4. erwecket mich is transitive “the stars’ shine would wake me”, again showing intentionality, and is not the intransitive erwachen “I awaken in the shine of the stars”.
• 5. Rufen mich means to call me or to summon me; in a trial a judge says to call or to summon the next witness.
• 6. zeuget is cognate with segue, a transition from one state to another, so “beget, sire, produce, engender, and bring forth” could all be used, but “deliver” has the same double meaning as the German, as in a judge saying “deliver the witness,” and as in a midwife “delivering a child.” Zeugen means both “to testify” and “to procreate.”
• 7. vernehmen
• 8. schaffend

[ 1 ] Max Dessoir's book Beyond the Soul (Vom Jenseits der Seele) contains a brief section in which the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science advocated by me is portrayed as scientifically invalid. Now it might seem to many that a discussion with people who take Dessoir's point of view about science must prove altogether unfruitful to anyone advocating spiritual-scientific anthroposophy. For, such an advocate asserts the existence of a purely spiritual region of experience that a Dessoir fundamentally rejects and consigns to the realm of fantasy. Discussion of the findings of spiritual-scientific knowledge, therefore, might only seem possible with someone who already has reason to believe that such a spiritual-scientific region exists.

This view would be correct if the advocate of anthroposophy presented nothing more than his own inner personal experiences and simply placed them beside the results of the science based on sensory observation and the scientific processing of such observations. Then one could say: the adherent of natural science refuses in fact to regard the experiences of the spiritual researcher as realities; the researcher in the spiritual realm can only make an impression with his findings on those who have already adopted his own point of view.

[ 2 ] This opinion, however, rests upon a misunderstanding of what I mean by anthroposophy. It is true that this anthroposophy is founded upon soul experiences that are attained independently of sense impressions and independently of scientific judgments based only upon sense impressions. Therefore the two kinds of experiences, sensory and extrasensory, seem at first to be separated by an unbridgeable chasm.

But this is not so. There is a common ground where both approaches must meet, and where discussion is possible. This common ground can be described in the following way.

[ 3 ] Out of experiences that are not just personal to him, the advocate of anthroposophy believes himself justified in stating that human activity in knowledge can be developed further from the point at which those researchers stop who want to base themselves only upon sensory observation and intellectual judgment of such observation.

To avoid continuous, long-winded paraphrases, I would like to use the word “anthropology” from now on to designate that approach in science which bases itself on sensory observation and the intellectual processing of such observation, asking the reader to permit me this uncommon usage. In what follows, "anthropology" means only what I have just described. In this sense, anthroposophy believes itself able to begin its research where anthropology leaves off.¹

[ 4 ] The advocate of anthropology limits himself to relating his intellectual concepts—experienced in the soul—to his sense perceptions. The advocate of anthroposophy observes that these concepts—apart from the fact that we relate them to sense impressions—are able in addition to unfold a life of their own within the soul. And that, by unfolding this life within the soul, these concepts effect a development of the soul itself. The advocate of anthroposophy sees how the soul, if it is sufficiently attentive to this development, discovers spiritual organs within its own being. (In using this expression "spiritual organs," I am adopting and extending the linguistic usage of Goethe when he speaks in his world view of “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears.”) ² Such spiritual organs, therefore, are for the soul what sense organs are for the body. These spiritual organs must of course be understood as being entirely of a soul nature. Any attempt to connect them with one or another bodily configuration must be strictly rejected by anthroposophy. Anthroposophy must not picture these spiritual organs as extending in any way beyond the soul realm or encroaching upon the structure of the body. It would regard any such encroachment as a pathological configuration, to be strictly excluded from its domain. The way anthroposophy portrays the development of our spiritual organs should be strong enough proof—to anyone who really informs himself about it—that the researcher in the real spiritual realm arrives at the same conclusions as anthropologists about abnormal soul experiences like illusions, visions, and hallucinations. ³ Any confusion of anthroposophical findings with abnormal, so-called soul experiences rests entirely upon misunderstanding or insufficient knowledge of what anthroposophy actually maintains. And anyone who studies and understands anthroposophy's description of the path to development of our spiritual organs will certainly not fall prey to the notion that this path could lead to pathological configurations or states. The insightful person, in fact, will recognize that every stage of soul experience that a human being passes through on the anthroposophical path to spiritual perception lies in a realm that is entirely of a soul nature; alongside this realm, our sensory experience and normal intellectual activity will continue, unaltered, as they were before this soul realm opened up for us. The great number of misunderstandings holding sway in precisely this area of anthroposophical knowledge stems from the fact that it is difficult for many to bring something of a purely soul nature into the sphere of their attention. The power to picture mentally ⁴ fails such people the moment this ability is not supported by the sight of something sense-perceptible. Their power to picture mentally is then dampened down, even below the level of dreams, into dreamless sleep, where it is no longer conscious. One could say that such people, in their consciousness, are filled with the aftereffects or the direct effects of sense impressions, and that, alongside this fullness, a sleep is occurring that blocks out what would be recognized as being of a soul nature if it could be grasped. One could even say that the essential nature of soul phenomena is subject to such profound misunderstanding by many people just because they cannot wake up to the soul element as they can to the sense-perceptible content of consciousness.

The fact that there are people in this situation whose degree of attention is only at the level produced by ordinary external life need not surprise anyone who can grasp the point, for example, of a reproach which Franz Brentano made to William James on this subject.

Brentano writes that one must “differentiate between our activity of perceiving and its object, i.e., between perceiving and what is perceived” (“and these two differ from each other as certainly as my present memory differs from the past event I am remembering; or, to make an even more drastic comparison: they differ as much as my hatred of an enemy differs from the object of this hatred”), and Brentano adds that one sees this error cropping up here and there. He continues:

William James, among others, embraced this error and went to some length to validate it at the International Congress on Psychology (Rome, 1905). Because, according to James, when I look out into a room, my vision appears along with the room; and, furthermore, because my mental images of sense-perceptible objects differ only in strength from the visual images directly stimulated by these objects; and, finally, because we call some objects beautiful, yet the difference between beautiful and ugly is connected to differences in emotions: therefore, soul and physical phenomena should no longer be regarded as two different classes of phenomena!

I find it hard to understand how the speaker himself could not feel the weakness of these arguments. To appear at the same time does not mean to appear as the same thing; just as existing at the same time does not mean existing as the same thing. Descartes could therefore recommend without self-contradiction that one deny—at least initially—the existence of the room I see, and regard as indubitable only the existence of my vision of the room. But if James' first argument is invalid, then obviously the second is also; for, what does it matter whether imagining differs from seeing only in degree of intensity, since, according to James, even if the degree of intensity were the same in both, the total congruency of imagining with seeing would still only represent congruency with a soul phenomenon? In his third argument, James speaks of beauty.... It is certainly a strange logic that could conclude—from the fact that pleasure in the beautiful is of a soul nature— that the object with whose appearance the pleasure is connected must also be of a soul nature. If that were so, then every dislike would be identical with what one dislikes, and one would have to be careful not to regret a past mistake, since, along with this remorse, the mistake, being identical with the remorse, would repeat itself.

With arguments like these, however, we need not fear that his authority—to which, among German psychologists, there is unfortunately added that of Mach—will cause many to fail to recognize the most obvious differences.⁵

Actually, this “failure to recognize the most obvious differences” is no rare occurrence. It is based on the fact that our power of mental picturing can unfold the necessary attentiveness only for sense impressions, whereas the actual soul activity that is also occurring is present to consciousness as little as what is experienced in a state of sleep. We are dealing here with two streams of experience; one of these is apprehended in a waking state; the other—the soul stream—is grasped simultaneously, but only with an attentiveness as weak as the mental perception we have in sleep, i.e., it is hardly grasped at all. We must by no means ignore the fact that during our ordinary waking state, the soul disposition of sleep does not simply cease, but continues to exist alongside our waking experience, and that the actual soul element enters the realm of perception only when the human being awakens not only to the sense world—as this occurs in ordinary consciousness—but awakens also to a soul existence, as is the case in seeing consciousness. It hardly matters now whether this soul element is denied—in a crudely materialistic sense—by the condition of sleep (to the soul element) that accompanies our waking state, or whether, because unseen, the soul element is confused with the physical, as in James' case; the results are nearly the same: both lead to fatal nearsightedness. But it is not surprising that the soul element so often remains unperceivable, if even a philosopher like William James is unable to differentiate it correctly from the physical.⁶

[ 5 ] With people as little able as William James to distinguish between the actual soul element and the content of what the soul experiences through the senses, it is difficult to discuss that region of our soul's being in which the development of spiritual organs is to be observed. For, this development occurs precisely where his attention is unable to direct itself. This development leads from an intellectual knowing to a knowing that sees.⁷

[ 6 ] But now, through the ability to perceive the actual soul element, we have as yet fulfilled only the very first precondition, which makes it possible to direct our spiritual gaze to where anthroposophy seeks the development of soul organs. For, what meets this gaze at first compares to anthroposophy's description of a soul-being equipped with spiritual organs the way an undifferentiated living cell compares to an organism endowed with sense organs. The soul becomes conscious of possessing the individual spiritual organs themselves, however, only to the extent that it is able to use these organs. For, these organs are not something at rest; they are in continuous movement. And when they are not in use, one also cannot be conscious of their presence. For them, therefore, perceiving and being used are synonymous. In my anthroposophical writings, I describe how the development—and along with it the perceptibility—of these organs comes to light. I will indicate here only a little of what can be said in this regard.

[ 7 ] Anyone who devotes himself to reflection on the experiences caused by sense-perceptible phenomena encounters questions everywhere that this reflection seems unable to answer at first. The pursuit of such reflections leads the adherents of anthropology to set certain limits to knowledge. One need only remember how Du Bois-Reymond, in his discourse on the limits of natural science, states that one cannot know the essential nature of matter or of the simplest phenomenon of consciousness. Now one can stop short at such points in one's reflections and surrender to the opinion: there human knowledge is in fact confronted by insurmountable barriers. And one can resign oneself to the fact that knowledge is attainable only on this side of the barrier, and that beyond this only inklings, feelings, hopes, and wishes are possible, with which “science” could have nothing to do.

Or else one can start at such points to form hypotheses about a region transcending the sense-perceptible world. In this case one employs the intellect, believing that it is justified in extending its judgments out over a region of which the senses perceive nothing. In such an undertaking, one runs the risk that nonbelievers will declare that the intellect has no right to judge a reality for which it lacks the foundations of sense perceptions. For only sense perceptions could provide a content for the intellect's judgment. Without such content, its concepts must remain empty.

[ 8 ] Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not relate to “limits of knowledge” in either of these two ways. It does not form hypotheses about the supersensible world because it must agree with those who feel that any basis for reflection is lost if mental pictures are left in the same form as when taken from sense perceptions, and yet are to be applied in a realm transcending the sense world.

Anthroposophy does not relate to “limits of knowledge” in the first way either, because it realizes that in our encounter with these so-called limits of knowledge, something can be experienced by the soul that has nothing to do with the content of mental pictures gained from sense perception. If the soul focuses only upon this latter content, then, if its self-examination is honest, it must admit that this content can reveal nothing directly to our activity of knowing except a copy of what we experience through the senses. The situation changes if the soul goes further and asks itself: What can be experienced within the soul itself when it fills itself with those mental pictures to which it is led when confronted by our usual limits of knowledge? After sufficient self-examination, the soul can then say to itself: Through such mental pictures I cannot, in the ordinary sense of the word, know anything; but in the event that I really make this powerlessness of my knowing activity inwardly visible to myself, then I become aware how these mental pictures work within my own self. As ordinary cognitive pictures, these mental pictures remain mute; but the more their muteness communicates itself to our consciousness, the more these mental pictures take on an inner life of their own that unites with the life of the soul. And the soul then notices how, with this experience, it is in a situation comparable to that of a blind being who has also not experienced much development of its sense of touch. Such a being would at first keep bumping into things. It would feel the resistance of outer reality. And from this generalized sensation, it could develop an inner life for itself, filled with a primitive consciousness that no longer has merely the general sensation of bumping into things, but that differentiates this sensation and distinguishes between hardness and softness, smoothness and roughness, etc.

[ 9 ] In the same way, the soul can hold and differentiate its experience of the mental pictures it forms in its encounter with the limits of knowledge. The soul learns to experience that these limits represent nothing more than what arises when the soul is touched by the spiritual world in a soul way. The dawning awareness of such limits becomes an experience for the soul that can be compared with the experience of touch in the sense world.⁸ What the soul formerly regarded as limits to knowledge it now sees as a soul-spiritual touching by a spiritual world. And out of the soul's attentiveness to its experiences with the various pictures it makes for itself at this borderland, the general sensing of a spiritual world differentiates for the soul into diverse perceptions of a spiritual world. In this way, the spiritual world's lowest form of perceptibility, so to speak, becomes an experience. This characterizes merely the very first opening of the soul to the spiritual world. But it also shows that the spiritual experiences striven for in what I mean by anthroposophy do not point in the direction of general, nebulous, emotional experiences that the soul has of itself, but rather in the direction of something that can be developed in a lawful way into a true inner experience. This is not the place to show how this first primitive spiritual perception can be intensified by further soul practices in such a way that one can speak of other, in a certain way, higher kinds of perception besides this soul-spiritual blind groping. For a description of such soul practices I must refer the reader to my anthroposophical books and essays. Here only the basic principle of spiritual perception was to be indicated of which anthroposophy speaks.

[ 10 ] I would like, through a comparison, to clarify still further how the whole attitude of soul in anthroposophical spiritual investigation differs from that of anthropology. Picture to yourself a number of wheat kernels. These can be used as food. But one can also plant them in the earth so that other wheat plants can grow from them. Likewise, one can hold mental pictures—gained through sense impressions—within one's consciousness in such a way as to experience them as copies of sense-perceptible reality. Or, one can experience these mental pictures in such a way as to let work in the soul the power these pictures exercise through what they are, irrespective of the fact that they reproduce sense perceptions. The first way that mental pictures were described as working in the soul can be compared with what becomes of wheat kernels when they are taken up as food by a living being; the second way, with the production of a new wheat plant from each kernel.

This comparison, to be sure, is only meant to focus on the fact that from the seed there arises a plant similar to its progenitors; and that from a mental picture working in the soul there arises within the soul a power that is effective in developing spiritual organs. And one must also consider the fact that our first awareness of such inner powers can only be kindled by mental pictures that work as forcefully as those mental pictures we described as occurring at the borderland of knowledge; once awakened, however, this awareness of such powers can find other mental pictures that can also be effective—to a lesser degree, it is true—in helping one progress upon this path.

[ 11 ] At the same time, this comparison points to a result of anthroposophical investigation into the essential nature of our life in mental pictures. Just as a seed, when it is processed into food, is lifted out of the course of development that lies within its own primal being and that leads to the formation of a new plant, so a mental picture too is diverted from its own essential course of development when it is used by the picturing soul to reproduce a sense perception. The development particular to a mental picture through its own essential nature is to work as a power in the development of the soul. Just as little as one discovers the plant's laws of development when one investigates the nutritive value of its seeds, can one discover the essential nature of mental pictures when one investigates the way mental picturing brings forth a cognitive reproduction of the sense-perceptible reality it communicates. This does not mean to say that such an investigation cannot be undertaken. This is just as possible as investigating the nutritive value of seeds. But just as a study of the nutritive value of seeds addresses something different than the developmental laws of plant growth, so an epistemology that investigates how the cognitive power of mental pictures reproduces reality informs us about something different than the essential nature of our life of mental picturing. Just as little as it lies prefigured in the essential nature of a seed to become food, does it lie in the essential nature of mental picturing to provide cognitive reproductions of reality. Yes, we can even say that it is as completely external to the seed's own nature to use it as food as it is to the actual nature of mental pictures to use them to reproduce reality in cognition. The truth is that in its mental pictures the soul grasps its own evolving being. And only through the soul's own activity does it occur that mental pictures become the mediators of any knowledge of reality.⁹

[ 12 ] Now, as to how mental pictures become mediators of such knowledge, anthroposophical observation, which employs spiritual organs, arrives at different conclusions than those epistemologists do who reject this observation. Anthroposophical observation reveals the following.

[ 13 ] Mental pictures, as they are in their own primal nature, do in fact form a part of the life of the soul; but they cannot become conscious in the soul as long as the soul does not consciously employ its spiritual organs. As long as these mental pictures are active in a way corresponding to their own essential nature, they remain unconscious in the soul. The soul lives by virtue of them, but can know nothing of them. These mental pictures must dampen down their own life in order to become conscious soul experiences for ordinary consciousness. This dampening down occurs with every sense perception. Thus, when the soul receives a sense impression, there occurs a laming of our life in mental pictures; and the soul experiences this lamed mental picturing consciously as the mediator of our knowledge of external reality.¹⁰ All mental pictures that the soul relates to an outer sense-perceptible reality are inner spiritual experiences whose life has been dampened down. Everything that one thinks regarding the outer sense world consists of deadened mental pictures. Now it is not as though the life of mental pictures were lost, however; it leads its existence, separated from the realm of consciousness, in the unconscious spheres of the soul. And there it is to be found again by our spiritual organs. Now, just as the deadened mental pictures can be related by the soul to the sense world, so the living mental pictures grasped by our spiritual organs can be related to the spiritual world.

The mental pictures described above as occurring to us at the borderland of knowledge are those that, by their very nature, do not let themselves be lamed; therefore, they resist any relation to sense-perceptible reality. Precisely through this fact, they become the points of departure for spiritual perception.

[ 14 ] In my anthroposophical books, I have called the mental pictures that are grasped as living ones by the soul “Imaginative mental pictures.” One misunderstands what is meant here by “Imaginative,” if one confuses it with the pictorial form of expression that must be used to point to such mental pictures in a suitable way. What is actually meant by "Imaginative" can be clarified in the following way. When someone has a sense perception, while the outer object is making an impression on him, the perception has a certain inner strength for him. When he turns away from the object, he can then only represent it to himself in an inner picture. But this mental picture has little inner strength. It is shadowy, so to speak, when compared with the mental picture that occurs while the outer object is present. If a person wants to enliven the mental pictures that are present in his soul in the shadowy form characteristic of ordinary consciousness, he saturates them with the aftereffects of sense perception. He makes the mental picture into an image he can observe [inwardly]. Such images are certainly nothing other than the results of interaction between mental picturing and sense perception. The “Imaginative” mental pictures of anthroposophy do not arise at all in this way. In order to bring them forth, the soul must know this inner process of uniting the life of mental pictures with sense impressions so exactly that it can prevent any sense impressions—or their aftereffects, as the case may be—from flowing into its life of mental picturing. One can achieve this exclusion of perception's aftereffects only if one has learned to know how mental picturing is gripped by these aftereffects. Only then is one in a position to unite the spiritual organs in a living way with the essential being of mental picturing and thereby receive impressions from spiritual reality. Through this, the life of mental pictures is permeated from an entirely different quarter than in sense perception. One's experiences are essentially different from those to be had from sense perceptions. And yet it is possible to describe these experiences. This can be done in the following way.

When the human being perceives the color yellow he does not merely have a visual experience in his soul; a nuance of feeling accompanies what the soul experiences. This feeling may vary in strength from person to person, but it will never be totally absent. In the beautiful chapter of his Color Theory on the sensory-ethical effects of colors, Goethe describes in a quite vivid manner the participation of our feeling in red, yellow, green, etc. Now when the soul perceives something in a particular region of the spirit, it can happen that this spiritual perception is accompanied in the soul by the same nuance of feeling as occurs in the sense perception of yellow. One knows then that one is having a particular spiritual experience. In this mental picture, of course, one does not confront what one confronts in a sense perception of a yellow color. Yet, as a nuance of feeling, one has the same inner experience as when the eye is confronted by a yellow color. One says then: I perceive the spiritual experience as “yellow.” In order to express oneself even more exactly, one could perhaps say: I perceive something that is like “yellow” for my soul. But this description is unnecessary for anyone who has learned from anthroposophical literature how the process leading to spiritual perception occurs. This literature points clearly enough to the fact that the reality accessible to spiritual perception does not confront the spiritual organs like a rarefied sense-perceptible object or process, or in such a way that it could be reproduced through mental pictures that are perceptible in the ordinary way.¹¹

[ 15 ] Just as the soul, through its spiritual organs, learns to know the spiritual world lying outside of the human being, so it also learns to know the spiritual being of man himself. Anthroposophy regards this spiritual being as a member of the spiritual world. Anthroposophy proceeds from observation of one part of the spiritual world to mental pictures about the human being of what reveals itself in the human body as a spiritual human being. Working from the opposite direction, anthropology also arrives at mental pictures about the human being. When anthroposophy develops the kinds of observations described in this essay, it arrives at views about the spiritual being of man that manifests in the sense world through its body. The flower of this manifestation is human consciousness, which allows sense impressions to live on in the form of mental pictures. By proceeding from experiences of the spiritual world outside man to man himself, anthroposophy ultimately finds the human being living in a sense-perceptible body and, in this body, elaborating his consciousness of sense-perceptible reality. The last thing anthroposophy, on its path, discovers about the human being is the soul's living activity in mental pictures, which anthroposophy is able to express in coherent imaginative pictures. Then, at the end of its path of spiritual investigation, so to speak, anthroposophy can employ its vision further and see how the real life of mental pictures is lamed by the perceiving senses. With the light it sheds from the spiritual quarter, anthroposophy shows this lamed life of mental pictures to be characteristic of man's life in the sense world, insofar as he forms mental pictures. In this way, as one of the last results of its investigations, anthroposophy arrives at a philosophy of the human being. What lies on its path down to this point is to be found purely in a spiritual realm. With the results of what it has found on its spiritual path, anthroposophy arrives at a characterization of the human being who lives in the sense world.

[ 16 ] Anthropology investigates the realms of the sense world. Proceeding on its way, it also arrives at the human being. He presents himself to anthropology as drawing together the facts of the sense world in his bodily organization in such a way that from this drawing together a consciousness arises through which outer reality is presented in mental pictures. The anthropologist sees mental pictures arising from the human organism. In observing this, he must come to a halt in a certain sense. With mere anthropology, he cannot apprehend the inner, lawful connectedness of mental pictures. Just as anthroposophy, at the end of its path through spiritual experiences, still looks at the spiritual being of man—insofar as this manifests through the perceptions of the senses—so anthropology, at the end of its path through the sense world, must look at the way the sense perceptible human being is active in mental picturing in its encounter with sense perceptions. And when it observes this, anthropology finds that this activity is not sustained by the organic laws of the body, but by the thought-laws of logic. But logic is not a region that can be entered in the same way as the other regions of anthropology. In thinking that is governed by logic, laws hold sway that can no longer be regarded as those of the bodily organization. As the human being works with these laws, the same logical activity reveals itself in him that anthroposophy encounters at the end of its path. It is just that the anthropologist sees this logical activity in the light shed from the sense-perceptible realm. He sees the lamed mental pictures and, by acknowledging the existence of logic, he also concedes that in these mental pictures laws are operative from a world that is indeed united with the sense world, but does not coincide with it. In man's life of mental pictures, which is carried by a logical activity, there manifests to the anthropologist the sense-perceptible human being who extends into the spiritual world. In this way, as the final results of its investigations, anthropology arrives at a philosophy about the human being. What lies on its path up to this point lies purely in the sense world.¹²

[ 17 ] If these two paths—the anthroposophical and the anthropological—are followed in the right way, they meet at the same point. Anthroposophy brings with it to this meeting a picture of the living spiritual human being and shows how he develops, in sense-perceptible existence, the consciousness that is present between birth and death while the life of supersensible consciousness is lamed. Anthropology, at this meeting point, shows a picture of the sense-perceptible human being who apprehends himself in consciousness, but who extends up into spiritual existence and lives in that essential beingness which reaches beyond birth and death. At this meeting point, a really fruitful understanding is possible between anthroposophy and anthropology. This understanding will occur if both progress to a philosophy of the human being. The philosophy of the human being that emerges from anthroposophy will in fact produce a picture of him painted in an entirely different medium than that provided by an anthropological philosophy of the human being; but those who look at both pictures will be able to find a harmony between their mental pictures similar to that between the negative of a photograph and the corresponding positive print.

[ 18 ] This essay, I hope, has shown how the question raised at the beginning—about the possibility of a fruitful discussion between anthropology and anthroposophy—can be answered in the affirmative, especially from the anthroposophical point of view.

• 1. Although the anthroposophy advocated by me stands on a completely different ground, with its results, than the presentations of Robert Zimmermann in his book Anthroposophy (1881), still I believe myself justified in using the concept by which he characterized the difference between anthroposophy and anthropology. As the content of his anthroposophy, however, Zimmermann only draws together into an abstract schema the concepts provided by anthropology. For him, the knowing vision that is the basis for what I mean by anthroposophy lies outside the domain of scientific procedure. His anthroposophy differs from anthropology only through the fact that the former first submits the concepts it receives from the latter to a process like that of Herbart's philosophy, before making these concepts into the content of its purely intellectual schema of ideas.
• 2. A more detailed presentation and justification of this notion of “spiritual organs” can be found in my book The Riddle of Man, Mercury Press, 1990, page 125ff. and in my books on Goethe's world view.
• 3. The inner experiences that the soul must undergo in gaining the use of its spiritual organs are described in a number of my books, but especially in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and in the second part of Occult Science, an Outline.
• 4. Sich Vorstellen means to visualize, to picture to oneself mentally. The ability to “place something before oneself inwardly is a crucial factor in spiritual development and as such is referred to constantly in this essay. How do we hold something up before our inner eye? What is the attention we focus upon it? Who does this? What is the nature of mental pictures (Vorstellungen) themselves? Such questions are among the many painful riddles that ordinary consciousness cannot solve, and that bring us up against an invisible world. Translator.
• 5. See F. Brentano, Research into a Psychology of the Senses, Leipzig, 1907, p. 96f.
• 6. The awakening of those soul faculties which, in ordinary consciousness, are unawakened is described in more detail in my book The Riddle of Man, page 132ff.
• 7. For a more extensive validation of what is stated here, please see addendum 1: The Philosophical Validation of Anthroposophy.
• 8. Limits to knowledge like those discussed above do not merely present themselves in the small number of which most people are aware; they occur in great number along the paths that intelligent reflection, according to its own inner nature, must take in order to gain a relation to true reality. Please see addendum 2: The Appearance of Limits to Knowledge.
• 9. A more detailed case is made for these views in the last chapter of my book The Riddles of Philosophy: “Sketch of a Perspective of an Anthroposophy.”
• 10. Please see addendum 3: The Abstractness of Our Concepts.
• 11. For further clarification of what has just been expressed, please see addendum 4: An Important Characteristic of Spiritual Perception.
• 12. Like the thoughts before footnote 7, what has been indicated here can be clarified further in a certain direction by addendum 1: The Philosophical Validation of Anthroposophy.

[ 1 ] If we reflect upon ourselves, we soon come to realize that, in addition to the self we encompass with our thoughts, feelings, and fully conscious impulses of will, we bear in ourselves a second, more powerful self. We become aware that we subordinate ourselves to this second self as to a higher power. At first, this second self seems to us a lower being when compared to the one we encompass with our clear, fully conscious soul and its natural inclination toward the good and the true. And so, initially, we may strive to overcome this seemingly lower self.

A closer self-examination, however, can teach us something else about this second self. If periodically we look back on what we have experienced or done in life, we make a strange discovery, one that becomes more meaningful for us the older we become. Whenever we think about what we did or said at some time in the past, it turns out that we did a great many things we actually understood only at a later date. When we think of things we did seven or eight years ago—or perhaps even twenty years ago—we realize that only now, after a long time, is our mind sufficiently developed to understand what we did or said then.

Of course, there are people who do not make such self-discoveries because they do not try to. Nevertheless, this sort of soul-searching is extraordinarily fruitful. For in such moments as we become aware that we are only now beginning to understand something we did in our earlier years-that in the past our minds were not mature enough to understand what we did or said then-a new feeling emerges in our soul. We feel ourselves as if sheltered by a benevolent power presiding in the depths of our own being. We begin to trust more and more that, in the highest sense of the word, we are not alone in the world and that whatever we can understand or do consciously is fundamentally only a small part of what we accomplish in the world.

[ 2 ] After we have gone through this process of discovery a number of times, an insight that is theoretically easy to understand can become part of our practical lives. We know, in theory at any rate, that we would not get very far in life if we had to do everything in full consciousness, rationally understanding all the circumstances and ramifications in every case. To see that this is so we need only consider how and when we accomplish those acts that are the wisest and most important for our existence. A moment's thought will reveal that we act most wisely in the time between birth and the moment at which memory, that first moment we can remember when in later years we try to recall our early life, begins.

This is to say that, as we think back to what we did three, four, or five and more years ago, we reach a certain point in childhood beyond which our memory does not extend. Our memory does not go back any further. Parents or other people can tell us what happened before that time, but our own memory does not go back beyond a certain point. This is the point in our lives when we first began to perceive ourselves as an I. People whose memory is intact can usually remember back to, but not earlier than, this moment.

Our souls, however, have already performed their wisest deeds before this time. Never again in later life, after we have attained full consciousness, will we be able to accomplish such splendid and tremendous deeds as those we accomplished out of the unconscious depths of our souls in the first years of childhood. As we know, we bring the fruits of earlier lives on earth with us into the physical world at birth. For example, at birth our physical brain is still an incomplete and unfinished instrument. The soul must then work on it, adding the finer, detailed structures that make it the medium of all the soul's faculties. In fact, before the soul is fully conscious, it works on the brain to transform it into an instrument to express all the capacities, aptitudes, characteristics, and so on, that it has as a consequence of earlier lives. This work on our own body is guided from a perspective that is wiser than anything we can achieve later with our full consciousness. Moreover, during this time when the brain is being transformed, we must also acquire the three most important capacities for life on earth.

[ 3 ] The first capacity we must learn is to orient our body in space. People today do not realize what this means and that it touches on the most essential differences between human beings and animals. Animals are destined from the beginning to achieve their equilibrium in a certain way: one is destined to be a climber, another a swimmer, and so on. Animals are so constituted that from the outset they can orient themselves in space correctly. This is true even of primates. If zoologists were aware of this, they would put less emphasis on the number of similar bones, muscles, and so forth that human beings and animals have. After all, this is not nearly as important as the fact that human beings are not given an innate way to achieve equilibrium in space but must develop it out of their total being.¹

It is significant that we must work on ourselves to develop from beings that cannot walk into ones that walk upright. We achieve our vertical position, our position of equilibrium in space, by ourselves. In other words, we establish our own relationship to gravity. Those who do not wish to consider the question deeply will, of course, easily dispute our explanation on apparently good grounds. They may claim, for example, that we are just as well constituted for walking upright as climbing animals are for climbing. Upon closer examination, however, we find that animals' orientation in space is determined by their physical organization. In human beings, however, it is the soul that establishes the relationship to space and shapes the organization.

[ 4 ] The second capacity we learn out of ourselves from our essential being—which remains the same through successive incarnations—is language. This allows us to relate to our fellow human beings and makes us bearers of the spiritual life that permeates the physical world primarily by means of human beings. It has often been emphasized, and with good reason, that someone stranded on a desert island who had had no contact with other human beings before learning to speak would never learn to do so. What we receive through heredity, on the other hand, what is implanted in us for development in later years, does not depend on our interactions with other human beings. For example, we are predisposed by heredity to change teeth in our seventh year. Even on a desert island our second set of teeth would grow if we reached that age. But if our soul being, the part of us that continues from one life to the next, is not stimulated we will not learn to speak. In a sense, we must sow the seed for the development of the larynx in the time before our earliest memory-before we attain full I-consciousness-so that the larynx can then become an organ of speech.

[ 5 ] There is still a third, even less well known, capacity that we learn on our own through what we bear within us through successive incarnations. I am referring here to our ability to live within the world of thoughts and ideas, the world of thought itself. Our brain is formed and worked on because it is the tool of thinking. At the beginning of life, the brain is still malleable because we must shape it ourselves to make it an instrument for the thinking appropriate to our essential being. The brain at birth is the result of the work of forces inherited from our parents, grandparents, and so on. It is in our thinking that we bring to expression what we are as individuals in conformity with our former earthly lives. Therefore, after birth, when we have become physically independent of our parents and ancestors, we must transform the brain we have inherited.

[ 6 ] Clearly, then, we accomplish significant steps in the early years of life. We work on ourselves in accordance with the highest wisdom. In fact, if we had to rely on our own intelligence, we could not achieve what we must accomplish without our intelligence in the first few years of our lives. Why is this so? Why must all these things be accomplished from soul depths that lie outside our consciousness? Because, in the first years of our lives, our souls, as well as our whole being, are much more closely connected with the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies than is the case later.

Clairvoyants, who can trace the spiritual processes involved because they have undergone spiritual training, discover that something tremendously significant happens at the moment when we achieve I-consciousness, that is, at the moment of our earliest memory. They can see that, during the early years of childhood, an aura hovers about us like a wonderful human-superhuman power. This aura, which is actually our higher part, extends everywhere into the spiritual world. But at the earliest moment we can remember,² We can experience ourselves as a coherent I from this point on because what had previously been connected to the higher worlds then entered the I. Thereafter, our consciousness establishes its own relationship to the outer world.

This conscious relationship to the outer world does not yet exist in early childhood. In childhood, a dream world still seems to hover about us. We work on ourselves with a wisdom that is not in us, a wisdom that is more powerful and comprehensive than all the conscious wisdom we acquire later. This higher wisdom works from the spiritual world deep into the body; it enables us to form the brain out of the spirit. We can rightly say, then, that even the wisest person can learn from a child. For the wisdom at work in children does not become part of our consciousness in later life. It is obscured and exchanged for consciousness.

In the first years of life, however, this higher wisdom functions like a “telephone connection” to the spiritual beings in whose world we find ourselves between death and rebirth. Something from this world still flows into our aura during childhood. As individuals we are then directly subject to the guidance of the entire spiritual world to which we belong. When we are children—up to the moment of our earliest memory—the spiritual forces from this world flow into us, enabling us to develop our particular relationship to gravity. At the same time, the same forces also form our larynx and shape our brain into living organs for the expression of thought, feeling, and will.

[ 7 ] During childhood, then, we work out of a self that is still in direct contact with the higher worlds. Indeed, to a certain degree, we can still do this even in later life, although conditions change. Whenever we feel that we did or said something in earlier years that we are only now coming to understand, we have an indication that we were guided by a higher wisdom at that earlier time. Only years later do we manage to gain insight into the motives of our past conduct. All this indicates that at birth we did not entirely leave behind the world we lived in before entering into our new, physical existence. In fact, we never leave it behind completely. What we have as our part of higher spirituality enters our physical life and remains with us. Thus, what we bear within us is not a higher self that has to be developed gradually, but one that already exists and that often leads us to rise above ourselves.

[ 8 ] All that we can produce in the way of ideals and artistic creativity—as also the natural healing forces in our body, which continuously compensate for the injuries life inflicts—originate not in our ordinary, rational minds but in the deeper forces that work in our early years on our orientation in space, on the formation of the larynx, and on the development of the brain. These same forces are still present in us later. People often say of the damages and injuries we sustain in life that external forces will not be of any help and that our organism must develop its own inherent healing powers. What they are talking about is a wise, benevolent influence working upon us. From this same source also arise the best forces that enable us to perceive the spiritual world—that is, to have true clairvoyance.

[ 9 ] We can now ask why the higher powers work on us only in the early years of childhood. [ 10 ] It is easy to answer one half of this question, for if these higher forces continued to work on us in the same way into later life, we would always remain children and could never achieve full I-consciousness. What worked previously from without must be transferred into our own being.

But there is a more significant reason, one that can tell us more about the mysteries of human life. Spiritual science teaches that we have to consider the human body at the present stage of the earth's evolution as having developed from earlier conditions. People familiar with spiritual science know that in the course of this evolution various forces have worked on our whole being—some on the physical body, others on the etheric body, and others again on the astral body.³ We have evolved to our present condition because beings we call luciferic and ahrimanic have affected us. Through their forces, our essential being became worse than it would have been if only the forces of the spiritual guides of the world, those who want to advance our development in a straight line, had worked on us. Indeed, suffering, disease, and death can be traced to the fact that, in addition to the beings who advance our development in a straight line, luciferic and ahrimanic beings are also at work and continuously thwart our progress.

What we bring with us at birth contains something that is better than anything we can make of it in later life. [ 11 ] In early childhood, the luciferic and ahrimanic forces have only a limited influence on our being. Essentially, they are active only in what we make of ourselves through our conscious life. If we retained the best part of ourselves in its full force beyond the first phase of childhood, its influence would be too much for us because the luciferic and ahrimanic forces opposing the part of ourselves that is better than the rest would weaken our whole being. Our constitution as human beings in the physical world is such that, once we are no longer soft and malleable as children, we can no longer stand to have the forces of the spiritual world continue to affect us directly. The forces that underlie our orientation in space and the formation of the larynx and the brain would shatter us if they continued to influence us directly in later life. These forces are so powerful that our organism would waste away beneath their holiness if they continued to work on us. However, for the activity that brings us into conscious contact with the supersensible world, we have to call upon these forces again.

[ 12 ] This leads us to a realization that is very significant if we understand it rightly. In the New Testament it is put thus: “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3) What then seems to be the highest ideal for a human being if the above statement is correctly understood? Surely that our ideal must be to approach ever closer a conscious relationship with the forces that worked on us, without our awareness, in the first years of childhood. At the same time, we must realize that we would collapse under the power of these forces if they were immediately and too easily to affect our conscious life. That is why a careful preparation is necessary to achieve the capacities that lead to a perception of supersensible worlds. The goal of this preparation is to enable us to bear what we simply cannot bear in ordinary life.

[ 13 ] Our passing through successive incarnations is significant for the overall evolution of our essential being, which has undergone successive past lives and will continue to go through future lives. The evolution of the earth runs parallel to our own. At some point in the future, the earth will have reached the end of its course; then the planet earth, as a physical entity, will have to separate from the totality of human souls—just as when we die the body separates from the spirit, and the soul, in order to live on, enters the spiritual realm between death and rebirth.⁴ From this point of view, our highest ideal must be the striving to make all the fruits to be gained in earthly life truly our own before we die.

[ 14 ] The forces that make us too weak to bear those forces that work on us in childhood originate in the organism of the earth. By the time this separates from humanity, we must have advanced to the point of giving over our whole being to the forces that presently work on us only in childhood. Only when we have reached this level can we claim to have attained our goal. Thus, through successive earthly lives, we must gradually make our entire being, including our consciousness, an expression of the forces that work on us under the guidance of the spiritual world in early childhood. This is the purpose of evolution.

After such considerations, the realization that we are not alone takes hold of our soul. This realization imbues us with humility, but also with a proper consciousness of our human dignity. We realize at the same time that something lives in us that can prove at all times that we can rise above ourselves to a self that is already surpassing us and will continue to do so from one life to the next. As this realization assumes a more and more definite form, it can have a very soothing, heartwarming effect and, at the same time, imbue the soul with the appropriate humility and modesty. What lives within us is truly a higher, divine human being, and we can feel ourselves pervaded by this being as by a living presence of whom we can say, This is my inner guide in me.

[ 15 ] Given this, the thought easily arises that we should strive in every way possible to achieve harmony with that part in us that is wiser than our conscious intelligence. Thereafter, our attention will no longer be directed to the conscious self but will be focused instead on an expanded self, and from this perspective we can then combat and eradicate all our false pride and arrogance. From this feeling we will gradually come to a right understanding of our present incompleteness. We shall come to see that we will become complete when the comprehensive spirituality at work in us has the same relationship to our adult consciousness that it had to our unconscious soul life in early childhood.

[ 16 ] Even though we may not remember anything from our first four years of life, we can safely say that the active influence of the higher spiritual realms lasts for about the first three years. By the end of this period we have become able to connect the impressions from the outer world with our I-concept. To be sure, this coherent I-concept cannot be traced back beyond the first moment we can remember. This is a moment that is difficult to locate, for with the awakening of distinct I-consciousness, our memory may be so weak that it cannot be recovered later. Nevertheless, we may say that people generally remember as far back as the beginning of the fourth year. In other words, we are justified in saying that the higher forces that have a decisive influence on us in childhood can work on us for three years. It follows that our constitution in the present, middle phase of the earth's evolution enables us to absorb these higher forces for only three years.

[ 17 ] Now if, through some special cosmic powers, we could somehow remove the ordinary I from a person—if the ordinary I that has accompanied a person through successive incarnations could be separated from that person's physical, etheric, and astral bodies—and we could then replace the ordinary I with an I that is connected with the spiritual worlds—what would happen? After three years this person's body would fall apart! If such a thing were to happen, world karma would have to do something to prevent the spiritual being connected to the higher worlds from living in this body for more than three years. [During the transition from childhood to the following stages, our organism retains its viability because it can still change during this period. In later life it can no longer change, and therefore cannot survive with the self connected directly to the spiritual worlds.] Only at the conclusion of our earthy lives will we be able to retain the forces within ourselves that allow us to live with that spiritual being for more than three years. Then we will be able to say, Not I but this higher self in me, which has been there all along, is now at work in me. Until then, we will not be able to experience this. At most, we will be able to feel the presence of this higher self, but our actual, real human I will not yet be able to bring the higher self fully to life.

[ 18 ] Let us now assume that a human organism were to enter the world at some moment in the middle of the earth's lifetime, and that, at a certain point by means of certain cosmic powers, this organism was freed of its I and received in its stead the I that is usually active only in the first three years of childhood—the I that is connected to the spiritual worlds we live in between death and rebirth. How long would such a person be able to live in an earthly body? Such a person would be able to survive in this earthy body only for about three years. After three years, world karma would have to intervene and destroy this human organism.

[ 19 ] What we have assumed here did actually occur at one time in history. When the human organism known as Jesus stood on the banks of the Jordan to be baptized by John, his I left his physical, etheric, and astral bodies. But after the Baptism, that organism bore within itself the higher self of humanity in fully conscious form. The self that works on us with cosmic wisdom in childhood, before we are conscious of it, was then fully conscious in Jesus of Nazareth. And by this very fact, this self, which was connected to the higher spiritual world, could live in this human body for only three years. Events then had to follow a course that brought an end to Jesus' physical life three years after the Baptism.

[ 20 ] Indeed, we have to understand the external events in the life of Jesus Christ as resulting from the inner causes discussed above. They are the outer expression of these causes. [ 21 ] This reveals the deeper connection between the guide in us—which radiates into our childhood as into a dark room and always works under the surface of our consciousness as our best self—and what once entered into human history to live for three years in a human sheath.

[ 22 ] This “higher” I, which is connected to the spiritual hierarchies, entered history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth—an event that is symbolized by the spirit descending in the form of a dove, saying: “This is my well beloved Son, today I have begotten him” (Matthew 3: 17). (Such is the original meaning of the words). What is revealed here? If we hold this image of the Baptism before our eyes, we have before us the highest human ideal. That is what is meant when the gospels tell us that Christ can be seen and known in every person. Even if there were no gospels and no tradition to report that a Christ once lived, our knowledge of the nature of the human being would tell us that Christ is alive in us.

[ 23 ] To know the forces at work in childhood is to know the Christ in us. The question then arises whether this realization also leads us to acknowledge that Christ at one time really lived on earth in a human body? We can answer “yes” to this without requiring any documents, because true clairvoyant self-knowledge convinces people in our time that there are forces in the human soul that come from Christ.

In the first three years of childhood these forces are active without any effort on our part. They can also work on us in our later life—if we seek Christ in ourselves through contemplation. It was not always possible to find the Christ within; indeed, as clairvoyant perception reveals, prior to Christ's life on earth, there were times when no amount of contemplation would have helped people to find the Christ. Clairvoyant cognition teaches us that this is so. Between the time when Christ could not be found within and the present, when he can be found in this way, lies Christ's life on earth. It is because Christ lived on the earth that we can now find him within, in the way I have indicated. Thus, for clairvoyant perception, the fact that Christ lived on the earth is proven without recourse to any historical documentation.

[ 24 ] It is as if Christ had said: Human beings, I want to be an ideal for you that presents to you on a higher, spiritual level what is fulfilled in the body. In the early years of life we learn out of the spirit, first, to walk—that is, we learn, under the guidance of the spirit, to find our way in earthly life. Then we learn to speak—to formulate the truth—out of the spirit. In other words, we develop the essence of truth out of speech sounds. Finally, we also develop the organ for our life as earthly I-beings. Thus, in the first three years of life, we learn three things. We learn to find the “way,” that is, to walk; we learn to represent the “truth” with our organism, and we learn to express “life” in our body through the spirit. There is no more meaningful paraphrase imaginable of the words “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)

Most meaningfully, therefore, the I-being of Christ is expressed in the words: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life!” The higher spiritual forces form our organism in childhood—though we are not conscious of this—so that our body becomes the expression of the way, the truth, and the life. Similarly, the human spirit gradually becomes the conscious bearer of the way, the truth, and the life by permeating itself with Christ. Thereby we transform ourselves in the course of our earthly life into the power at work in us in childhood.

[ 25 ] Words such as these about the way, the truth, and the life can open the doors of eternity for us. Once our self-knowledge has become true and substantial, these words will resound for us from the depths of our soul.

[ 26 ] What I have presented here opens up a twofold perspective on the spiritual guidance of the individual and of humanity as a whole. First, as individuals, we find the Christ, the guide in us, through self-knowledge. We can always find Christ in this way because, since his life on earth, he is always present in us. Second, when we apply the knowledge we have gained without the help of historical documents to these documents, we begin to understand their true nature. They are the historical expression of something that has revealed itself in the depths of the soul. Therefore, historical documents should be regarded as part of that guidance of humanity that is intended to lead the soul to itself.

[ 27 ] If we understand the eternal spirit of the words “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” in this way, we do not need to ask why we have to enter life as children even after having passed through many incarnations. For we realize that this apparent imperfection is a perpetual reminder of the highest that lives in us. We cannot be reminded often enough—we need to be reminded at least at the beginning of each new life – of the great truth of what we really are in our innermost essential being, that underlies all our earthly lives but remains untouched by the imperfections of earthly existence.

[ 28 ] It is best not to present too many definitions or concepts when talking about spiritual science or theosophy [anthroposophy] or about occultism in general. It is better to describe things and to try to convey an idea of what they really are like. That is why I have tried here to give you a sense of what is characteristic of the first three years of life and of how this relates to the light that radiates from the cross on Golgotha. The description I have given bespeaks an impulse in human evolution that will make St. Paul's words “Not I, but Christ in me” come true. All we need to know is what as human beings we really are; on the basis of this knowledge we can then gain insight into the being of Christ. Only after we have arrived at this Christ-idea through a real understanding of humanity, and after we have understood that to find Christ we must seek him in ourselves, will turning to the Bible be useful for us. No one has a greater or more conscious appreciation of the Bible than those who have found Christ in this way.

Imagine that a Martian who had never heard anything about Christ and his works, came down to earth. This Martian would not understand much of what happened here, and much of what interests people today would not interest this visitor. However, this Martian would be interested in what is the central impulse of earthy evolution, namely, the Christ-idea as expressed in human nature. Once we understand this, we will for the first time be able to read the Bible correctly, for we will then see that it expresses in a wonderful way what we have first perceived within ourselves. You see, we do not need to be taught a particular appreciation of the gospels. When we read the gospels as fully conscious individuals, what we have learned through spiritual science enables us to fully realize their greatness.

[ 29 ] I am hardly exaggerating when I claim that there will come a time when the general opinion will be that people who have learned to understand and appreciate the content of the gospels through spiritual science will see them as scriptures intended for the guidance of humanity and that their understanding will do the Bible more justice than anything else has so far. It is only through understanding our own inner being that we can come to see what lies hidden in these profound scriptures. Now, if we find in the gospels what is so completely part of our own being, it follows that it must have entered the scriptures through the people who wrote them. Thus, what we have to admit concerning ourselves—and the older we get, the more often we have to admit it—namely, that we do many things we don't understand fully until many years later: this must also be true for the writers of the gospels. They wrote out of the higher self that works on all of us in childhood. Thus, the gospels originate in the same wisdom that forms us. The spirit is revealed physically in the human body as well as in the writing of the gospels.

[ 30 ] In this context, the concept of inspiration becomes meaningful once again in a positive sense. Just as higher forces work on the brain in the first three years of childhood, so the spiritual worlds imbued the writers of the gospels with the forces out of which they wrote their gospels. These facts reveal the spiritual guidance of humanity. After all, if there are people in the human race who write documents out of the same forces that wisely shape human beings, then humanity as a whole is truly being guided. And just as individuals say or do things they understand only at a later age, so humanity as a whole produced evangelists as mediators who provided revelations that can be understood only gradually. These scriptures will be understood more and more as humanity progresses. As individuals, we can feel a spiritual guidance within us; humanity as a whole can feel it in persons who work as the gospel writers did.

[ 31 ] The concept of the guidance of humanity we have just established can now be expanded in many ways. Let us assume a person has found students or disciples, that is, people who declare their faith in him and become his loyal followers. Such a person out of genuine self-knowledge will easily realize that having found students gives him the feeling that what he has to say does not originate within him. Instead, spiritual forces from higher worlds want to communicate with the students and find in the teacher a suitable instrument for revealing themselves.

[ 32 ] Such a teacher may then reason as follows: When I was a child, I worked on myself by means of forces that came from the spiritual world. The best I can now contribute here must also come from higher worlds. I must not consider it as part of my ordinary consciousness. Indeed, such an individual may feel that something like a daemon—the word daemon here refers to a benevolent spiritual power—works from the spiritual world through him on the students.

According to Plato, Socrates felt something like this when he spoke of his daemon as something that guided and directed him.⁵ Many attempts have been made to explain Socrates' daemon. However, to explain it we must accept the idea that Socrates could feel something akin to what emerges from the above considerations. Based on this, we then realize that during the three or four centuries when the Socratic principle prevailed in Greece, Socrates introduced a mood into the Greek world that served as preparation for another great event. The mood I am referring to accompanied the realization that what we perceive of an individual does not comprise the whole of what enters this world from the higher one. This mood continued to prevail long after Socrates' death. The best people who had this feeling later also best understood the words “Not I, but the Christ in me.” They realized that Socrates had to speak of a daemon-like force working out of the higher worlds, but through the ideal of Christ it became clear what Socrates had really meant. Of course, Socrates could not yet speak of Christ because in his time people could not yet find the Christ-being within.

[ 33 ] Here again we feel something of a spiritual guidance of humanity; nothing can enter the world without preparation. Why did Paul find his best followers in Greece? Because Socratism had prepared the ground there. That is, more recent events in the development of humanity can be traced back to earlier events that prepared people to allow the later events to work upon them. This gives us an idea of how far the guiding impulse of human evolution reaches; it puts the right people at the right time in the place where they are needed for our development. In facts such as these the guidance of humanity is evident in a general way.

[ 34 missing ]

• 1. For a further description of the essential differences between human beings and animals, see Wolfgang Schad, Man and Mammals, (Garden City, NY: Waldorf Press, 1977) and Rudolf Steiner, Study of Man, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1966).
• 2. Steiner describes the aura in Theosophy, 140–153.
• 3. The physical body is the corporeal aspect of the human being, related to the mineral kingdom. The etheric body, or body of formative forces through which life unfolds, is related to the plant kingdom. The astral body bears desires, pleasure and pain, and the qualitative world of emotions, and is related to the animal kingdom. See Occult Science, 21–28.
• 4. For a description of earth evolution, see Occult Science, chap. 2.
• 5. Socrates, 470–399 B.C., Greek philosopher and teacher. Plato, 427–347 B.C., Greek philosopher, the most famous student of Socrates.

[ 1 ] My father had been promised by the management of the Southern Railway that he would be assigned to a small station near Vienna as soon as I should have finished at the Realschule and should need to attend the Technische Hochschule. In this way it would be possible for me to go to Vienna and return every day. So it happened that my family came to Inzersdorf am Wiener Berge. The station was at a distance from the town, very lonely, and in unlovely natural surroundings. [ 2 ] My first visit to Vienna after we had moved to Inzersdorf was for the purpose of buying a greater number of philosophical books. What my heart was now especially devoted to was the first sketch of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre.¹ I had got so far with my reading of Kant that I could form a notion, even though immature, of the advance which Fichte wished to make beyond Kant. But this did not greatly interest me. What interested me then was to express the living weaving of the human mind in a sharply outlined mental picture. My strivings after conceptions in natural science had finally brought me to see in the activity of the human ego the sole starting-point for true knowledge. When the ego is active and itself perceives this activity, man has something spiritual in immediate presence in his consciousness – thus I said to myself. It seemed to me that what was thus perceived ought now to be expressed in clear, vivid concepts. In order to find a way to do this, I devoted myself to Fichte's Theory of Science. And yet I had my own opinions. So I took the volume and rewrote it, page by page. This made a lengthy manuscript. I had previously striven to find conceptions for the phenomena of nature from which one might derive a conception of the ego. Now I wished to do the opposite: from the ego to penetrate into the nature's process of becoming. Spirit and nature were present before my soul in their absolute contrast. There was for me a world of spiritual beings. That the ego, which itself is spirit, lives in a world of spirits was for me a matter of direct perception. But nature would not pass over into this spirit-world of my experience.

[ 3 ] From my study of the Theory of Science I conceived a special interest in Fichte's treatises Über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten² and über das Wesen des Gelehrten.³ In these writings I found a sort of ideal toward which I myself would strive. Along with these I read also the Reden an die Deutsche Nation.⁴ This took hold of me much less at that time than Fichte's other works.

[ 4 ] But I wished now to come also to a better understanding of Kant than I had yet been able to attain. In the Critique of Pure Reason this understanding refused to be revealed to me. So I attacked the problem with the Prolegomena zu einer jeden Künftigen Metaphysik.⁵ Through this book I thought I recognized that a thorough penetration into all the questions which Kant had raised among thinkers was necessary for me. I now worked more consciously to the end that I might mould into the forms of thought the immediate vision of the spiritual world which I possessed. And while I was occupied with this inner work I sought to get my bearings with reference to the roads which had been taken by the thinkers of Kant's time and the succeeding epoch. I studied the dry, bald Transcendentalen Synthetismus⁶ of Traugott Krug just as eagerly as I entered into the tragedy of knowledge by which Fichte was possessed when he wrote his Bestimmung des Menschen.⁷ The history of philosophy by Thilo of the school of Herbart broadened my view of the evolution of philosophical thought from the period of Kant onward. I fought my way through to Schelling, to Hegel. The opposition between the thought of Herbart and of Fichte passed before my mind in all its intensity.

[ 5 ] The summer months of 1879, from the end of my Realschule period until my entrance into the Technische Hochschule, I spent entirely in such philosophical studies. In the autumn I was to decide my choice of studies with reference to my future career. I decided to prepare to teach in a Realschule. The study of mathematics and descriptive geometry would have suited my inclination. But I should have to give up the latter; for the study of this subject required a great many practice hours during the day in geometrical drawings, but in order to earn some money I had to have leisure to devote to tutoring. This was possible while attending lectures whose subject-matter, when it was necessary to be absent from lectures, could afterwards be taken up in readings, but not possible when one had to spend hours assigned for drawing regularly in the school.

[ 6 ] So I had myself enrolled for mathematics, natural history, and chemistry.

[ 7 ] Of special import for me, however, were the lectures which Karl Julius Schröer gave at that time in the Hochschule on German literature. He lectured during my first year on “Literature since Goethe” and “Schiller's Life and Work.” From the very first lecture he impressed me. He developed a survey of the life of the spirit in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century and placed in dramatic contrast with this Goethe's first appearance and its effect upon this spiritual life. The warmth of his manner of treating the subject, the inspiring way in which he entered into the selections read from the poets, introduced us through an inner process into the nature of poetry.

[ 8 ] In connection with these lectures he had the habit of requiring “practice in oral and written lectures.” The students had then to deliver orally or read what they themselves had prepared. Schröer would give informal suggestions during these student performances as to style, manner of delivery, and the like. My first discussion dealt with Lessing's Laokoon. Then I undertook a longer paper. I worked up the theme: “To what extent is man in his actions a free being?” In connection with this paper I drew much upon Herbart's philosophy. Schröer did not like this at all. He had not shared in the enthusiasm for Herbart which then prevailed in Austria both in philosophical circles and also in pedagogy. He was devoted completely to Goethe's type of mind. So everything which was derived from Herbart seemed to him pedantic and prosaic, although he recognized the discipline of thought to be had from this philosopher.

[ 9 ] I was now able to attend also certain lectures at the university. I took great satisfaction in the Herbartian, Robert Zimmermann. He lectured on “Practical Philosophy.” I attended that part of his lectures in which he developed the ground principles of ethics. I alternated, generally attending his lecture one day and the next that of Franz Brentano, who at the same period lectured on the same field. I could not keep this up very long, for I missed too much of the courses in the Hochschule.

[ 10 ] I was deeply impressed by learning philosophy in this way, not merely out of books, but from the lips of the philosophers themselves.

[ 11 ] Robert Zimmermann was a notable personality. He had an extraordinarily high forehead and a long philosopher's beard. With him everything was measured, reduced to style. When he entered through the door and mounted to his seat, his steps seemed to be studied, and all the more so because one felt: “With this man it is obviously natural to be like that.” In posture and movement he was as if he had formed himself thus through long discipline according to the aesthetic principles of Herbart. And yet one could entirely sympathize with all this. He then slowly sat down on the chair, cast a long glance through his spectacles over the auditorium, then slowly and precisely took off his glasses, looked once more for a long time without spectacles over the circle of auditors, and finally began to lecture, without manuscript but in carefully formed, artistically spoken sentences. There was something classic in his speech. Yet, owing to the long periods, one easily lost the thread of his discourse. He expounded Herbart's philosophy in a somewhat modified form. The close logic of his teaching impressed me. But it did not impress the other hearers. During the first three or four periods the great hall in which he lectured was full. “Practical Philosophy” was required for the law students in the first year. They needed the signature of the professor on their cards. From the fifth or sixth lecture on, most of them stayed away; while one listened to the classical philosopher, one was in a very small group of auditors on the farthest benches.

[ 12 ] To me these lectures afforded a powerful stimulus, and the difference between the views of Schröer and Zimmermann interested me deeply. The little time I did not spend in attendance at lectures or in tutoring I utilized either in the Hofbibliothek⁸ or the library of the Hochschule. Then for the first time I read Goethe's Faust. In truth, until my nineteenth year, when I was inspired by Schröer, I had never been drawn to this work. Then, however, it won a strong claim upon my interest. Schröer had already begun his lectures on the first part. It happened that after only a few of the lectures I became better acquainted with Schröer. He then often took me to his home, told me this or that in amplification of his lectures, gladly answered my questions, and sent me away with a book from his library, which he lent me to read. In addition he said many things about the second part of Faust, an annotated edition of which he was already preparing. This part also I read at that time.

[ 13 ] In the library I spent my time on Herbart's metaphysics through Zimmermann's Aesthetic als Formwissenschaft⁹ which was written from Herbart's point of view. Together with this I made a thorough study of Haeckel's Generelle Morphologie.¹⁰ I may say that everything which I felt to be entering into me through the lectures of Schröer and Zimmermann, as well as the reading I have mentioned, became a matter of the deepest mental experience. Riddles of knowledge and of world conception shaped themselves within me from these things.

[ 14 ] Schröer was a spirit who cared nothing for system. He thought and spoke out of a certain intuition. Besides, he gave the greatest possible care to the manner in which he clothed his views in language. For this reason he almost never lectured without manuscript. He needed to write things down undisturbed in order himself to give the requisite attention to the bodying forth of this thought in appropriate words. Then he read a lecture in such a way as to bring into prominence its true inner meaning. Yet once he spoke extemporaneously about Anastasius Grün and Lenau. He had forgotten his manuscript. In the next period, however, he treated the whole topic again, reading from his manuscript. He was not satisfied with the form he had been able to give to the matter extemporé.

[ 15 ] From Schröer I learned to understand many concrete examples of beauty. Through Zimmermann there came to me a developed theory of beauty. The two did not agree well. Schröer, the intuitive personality with a certain scorn for the systematic, stood before my mind side by side with Zimmermann, the rigidly systematic theorist of beauty.

[ 16 ] Franz Brentano, whose lectures also on “Practical Philosophy” I attended, particularly interested me through his personality. He was a keen thinker and at the same time given to reverie. In his manner of lecturing there was something ceremonious. I listened to what he said, but I had also to observe every glance, every movement of his head, every gesture of his expressive hands. He was the perfect logician. Each thought must be absolutely complete and linked up with many other thoughts. The forms of these thought-series were determined by the most scrupulous attention to the requirements of logic. But I had the feeling that these thoughts did not come forth from the loom of his own mind; never did they penetrate into reality. And such also was the whole attitude of Brentano. He held the manuscript loosely in his hand as if at any moment it might slip from his fingers; with his glance he merely skimmed along the lines. And this was the action suited to a merely superficial touch upon reality, not for a firm grasp of it. I could understand his philosophy better from his “philosopher's hands” than from his words.

[ 17 ] The stimulus which came from Brentano worked strongly upon me. I soon began to study his writings, and in the course of the following years read most of what he had published.

[ 18 ] I felt in duty bound at that time to seek through philosophy for the truth. I had to study mathematics and natural science. I was convinced that I should find no relationship between these and myself unless I could place under them a solid foundation of philosophy. But I perceived a spiritual world, none the less, as a reality. In clear vision the spiritual individuality of every one revealed itself to me. This found in the physical body and in action in the physical world merely its manifestation. It united itself with that which came down as a physical germ from the parents. Dead men I followed farther on their way in the spiritual world. After the death of a schoolmate I wrote about this phase of my spiritual life to one of my former teachers, who had been a close friend of mine during my Realschule days. He wrote back to me with unusual affection; but he did not deign to say one word about what I had written regarding the dead schoolmate.

[ 19 ] And this is what happened to me always at that time in this manner of my perception of the spiritual world. No one would pay any attention to it. From all directions persons would come with all sorts of spiritistic stuff. With this I in turn would have nothing to do. It was distasteful to me to approach the spiritual in such a way.

[ 20 ] It then chanced that I became acquainted with a simple man of the plain people. Every week he went to Vienna by the same train that I took. He gathered medicinal plants in the country and sold them to apothecaries in Vienna. We became friends. With him it was possible to talk about the spiritual world as with one who had his own experience therein. He was a personality of inner piety. He was quite without schooling. He had read very many mystical books, but what he said was not at all influenced by this reading. It was the outflowing of a spiritual life which was marked by its own quite elementary creative wisdom. It was easy to perceive that he read these books only because he wished to find in others what he knew for himself. He revealed himself as if he, as a personality, were only the mouthpiece for a spiritual content which desired to utter itself out of hidden fountains. When one was with him one could get a glimpse deep into the secrets of nature. He carried on his back his bundle of medicinal plants; but in his heart he bore results which he had won from the spirituality of nature in the gathering of these herbs. I have seen many a man smile who now and then chanced to make a third party while I walked through the streets of Vienna with this “initiate.” No wonder; for his manner of expression was not to be understood at once. One had first in a certain sense to learn his spiritual dialect. To me also it was at first unintelligible. But from our first acquaintance I was in the deepest sympathy with him. And so I gradually came to feel as if I were in company with a soul of the most ancient times who – quite unaffected by the civilization, science, and general conceptions of the present age – brought to me an instinctive knowledge of earlier eras.

[ 21 ] According to the usual conception of “learning,” one might say that it would be impossible to “learn” anything from this man. But, if one possessed in oneself a perception of the spiritual world, one might obtain glimpses very deep into this world through another who had a firm footing there. [ 22 ] Moreover, anything of the nature of mere dreams was utterly foreign to this personality. When one entered his home, one was in the midst of the most sober and simplest family of country folk. Above the entrance to his home were the words: “With the blessing of God, all things are good.” One was entertained just as by other village people. I always had to drink coffee there, not from a cup, but from a porridge bowl¹¹ which held nearly a litre; with this I had to eat a piece of bread of enormous dimensions. Nor did the villagers by any means look upon the man as a dreamer. There was no occasion for jesting at his behaviour in his village. Besides, he possessed a sound, wholesome humour, and knew how to chat, whenever he met with young or old of the village folk, in such fashion that the people liked to hear him talk. There was no one who smiled like those persons that watched him and me going together through the streets of Vienna, and these persons simply perceived in him some thing quite foreign to themselves.

This man always continued to be, even after life had taken me again far away from him, very close to me in soul. He appears in my mystery plays in the person of Felix Balde.

[ 23 ] It was no light matter for my mental life at that time that the philosophy which I learned from others could not in its thought be carried all the way to the perception of the spiritual world. Because of the difficulty that I experienced in this respect, I began to fashion a form of “theory of knowledge” within myself. The life of thought in men came gradually to seem to me the reflection radiated into physical man from that which I experienced in the spiritual world. Thought experience was to me the thing itself with a reality into which – as something actually experienced through and through – doubt could find no entrance. The world of the senses did not seem to me so completely a matter of experience. It is there; but one does not lay hold upon it as upon thought. In it or behind it there might be an unknown reality concealed. Yet man himself is set in the midst of this world. Therefore, the question arises: Is this world, then, a reality complete in itself? When man from within weaves into this world of the senses the thoughts which bring light into this world, does he then bring into this world something foreign to it? This does not accord at all with the experience that man has when the world of the senses stands before him and he breaks into it by means of his thought. Thought then appears to be that by means of which the world of the senses expresses its own nature. The further development of this reflection was at that time a weighty part of my inner life.

[ 24 ] But I wished to be prudent. To follow a course of thought too hastily to the extent of building up a philosophical view of one's own appeared to me a risky thing. This drove me to a thorough-going study of Hegel. The manner in which this philosopher set forth the reality of thought was distressing to me. That he made his way through only to a thought world, even though a living thought-world, and not to the perception of a world of concrete spirit – this repelled me. The assurance with which one philosophizes when one advances from thought to thought drew me on. I saw that many persons felt there was a difference between experience and thought. To me thought itself was experience, but of such a nature that one lived in it, not such that it entered from without into men. And so for a long time Hegel was very helpful to me.

[ 25 ] As to my required studies, which in the midst of these philosophical interests had naturally to be cramped for time, it was fortunate for me that I had already occupied myself a great deal with differential and integral calculus and with analytical geometry. Because of this I could remain away from many lectures in mathematics without losing my connection. Mathematics was very important for me as the foundation under all my strivings after knowledge. In mathematics there is afforded a system of percepts and concepts which have been reached independently of any external sense impressions. And yet, said I to myself constantly at that time, one carries over these perceptions and concepts into sense-reality and discovers its laws. Through mathematics one learns to understand the world, and yet in order to do this one must first evoke mathematics out of the human mind.

[ 26 ] A decisive experience came to me just at that time from the side of mathematics. The conception of space gave me the greatest inner difficulty. As the illimitable, all-encompassing vacuity – the form in which it lay at the basis of the dominant theories of natural science – it could not be conceived in any definite manner. Through the more recent (synthetic) geometry, which I learned by means of lectures and in private study, there came into my mind the perception that a line which should be prolonged endlessly toward the right hand would return again from the left to its starting-point. The infinitely distant point on the right is the same as the point infinitely distant on the left.

[ 27 ] It came over me that by means of such conceptions of the newer geometry one might form a conception of space, which otherwise remained fixed in vacuity. The straight line returning upon itself like a circle seemed to be a revelation. I left the lecture at which this had first passed before my mind as if a great load had fallen from me. A feeling of liberation came over me. Again, as in my early boyhood, something satisfying had come to me out of geometry.

[ 28 ] Behind the riddle of space stood at that period of my life the riddle of time. Might a conception be possible here also which would contain within itself in idea a return out of the past by way of an advance into the infinitely distant future? My happiness over the space conception caused a profound unrest over that of time. But there was then visible no way out. All efforts of thought led only to the realization that I must beware especially of applying the clear conception of space to the problem of time. All clarification which the striving for understanding could bring was frustrated by the riddle of time. [ 29 ] The stimulus which I had received from Zimmermann toward the study of aesthetics led me to read the writings of the famous specialist in aesthetics of that time, Friedrich Theodor Vischer. I found in a passage of his work a reference to the fact that more recent scientific thought rendered necessary a change in the conception of time. There was always a sense of joy aroused in me when I found in others the recognition of any cognitional need which I had conceived. In this case it was like a confirmation in my struggle toward a satisfying concept of time.

[ 30 ] The lectures for which I was enrolled in the Technische Hochschule I always had to finish with a corresponding examination. For a scholarship had been granted me, and I could draw my allowance only when I showed each year the results of my studies. [ 31 ] But my need for understanding, especially in the sphere of natural science, was but little aided by these required studies. It was possible then, however, in the technical institutes of Vienna both to attend lectures as a visitor and also to carry on practical courses. I found everywhere those who met me half-way when I sought thus to foster my scientific life, even so far as to the study of medicine.

[ 32 ] I may state positively that I never allowed my insight into the spiritual world to become a disturbing factor when I was engaged in the endeavour to understand science as it was then developed. I applied myself to what was taught, and only in the background of my thought did I have the hope that some day the blending of natural science with the knowledge of the spirit would be granted me.

Only from two sides was I disturbed in this hope.

[ 33 ] The sciences of organic nature were then – wherever I could lay hold of them – steeped in Darwinian ideas. To me Darwinism appeared in its leading ideas as scientifically impossible. I had little by little reached the stage of forming for myself a conception of the inner man. This was of a spiritual sort. And this inner man I thought of as a member of the spiritual world. He was conceived as dipping down out of the spiritual world into nature, uniting with the organism of nature in order thereby to perceive and to act in the world of the senses.

[ 34 ] The fact that I felt a certain respect for the course of thought characterizing the evolutionary theory of organisms did not render it possible for me to sacrifice anything from the conception. The derivation of higher out of lower organisms seemed to me a fruitful idea, but the identification of this idea with that which I knew as the spiritual world appeared to me immeasurably difficult.

[ 35 ] The studies in physics were penetrated throughout by the mechanical theory of heat and the wave theory of the phenomena of light and colour.

[ 36] The study of the mechanical theory of heat had taken on for me the charm of a personal colouring because in this field of physics I attended lectures by a personality for whom I felt quite extraordinary respect. This was Edmund Reitlinger, the author of that beautiful book, Freie Blicke.¹²

[ 37 ] This man was of the most captivating lovableness. When I became his student, he was already very seriously ill with tuberculosis. For two years I attended his lectures on the theory of heat, physics for chemists, and the history of physics. I worked under him in the physics laboratory in many fields, especially in that of spectrum-analysis.

[ 38 ] Of special importance for me were Reitlinger's lectures on the history of physics. He spoke in such a way that one felt that, on account of his illness, every word was a burden to him. And yet his lectures were in the best possible sense inspiring. He was a man of a strongly inductive method of research. For all methods in physics he liked to cite the book of Whewel on inductive science. Newton marked for him the climax of research in physics. The history of physics he set forth in two parts: the first from the earliest times to Newton; the second from Newton to recent times. He was an universal thinker. From the historical consideration of problems in physics he always passed over to the perspective of the general history of culture. Indeed, quite general philosophic ideas would appear in his discussions of physics. In this way he treated the problems of optimism and pessimism, and spoke most impressively about the legitimacy of setting up scientific hypotheses. His exposition of Kepler, his characterization of Julius Robert Mayers, were masterpieces of scientific discussion.

[ 39 ] I was then stimulated to read almost all the writings of Julius Robert Mayers, and I was able to experience the truly great pleasure of talking face to face with Reitlinger about the content of these.

[ 40 ] I was filled with a deep sorrow when, only a few weeks after I had passed my final examination on the mechanical theory of heat under Reitlinger, my beloved teacher succumbed to his grievous illness. Just a short while before his death he had given me as his legacy a testimonial of personal qualifications which would enable me to secure pupils for private tutoring. This had most fortunate results. No small part of what came to me in the following years as means of livelihood I owed to Reitlinger after his death.

[ 41 ] Through the mechanical theory of heat and the wave theory of light and of electric phenomena, I was impelled to a study of theories of cognition. At that time the external physical world was conceived as motion-events in matter. The sensations appeared to be only subjective experiences, as the effects of pure motion-events upon the senses of men. Out there in space occurred the motion-events in matter; if these events affected the human heat-sense, man experienced the sensation of heat. There are outside of man wave-events in the ether; if these affect the optic nerve, light and colour sensations are generated within man.

[ 42 ] These conceptions met me everywhere. They caused me unspeakable difficulties in my thinking. They banished all spirit from the objective external world. Before my mind there stood the idea that even if the observations of natural phenomena led to such opinions, one who possessed a perception of the spiritual world could not arrive at these opinions. I saw how seductive these assumptions were for the manner of thought of that time, educated in the natural sciences, and yet I could not then resolve to oppose a manner of thought of my own against that which then prevailed. But just this caused me bitter mental struggles. Again and again must the criticism I could easily frame against this manner of thinking be suppressed within me to await the time in which more comprehensive sources and ways of knowledge should give me a greater assurance.

[ 43 ] I was deeply stirred by the reading of Schiller's letters concerning the aesthetic education of man. His statement that human consciousness oscillates, as it were, back and forth between different states, afforded me a connection with the notion that I had formed of the inner working and weaving of the human soul. Schiller distinguished two states of consciousness in which man evolves his relationship to the world. When he surrenders himself to that which affects him through the senses, he lives under the compulsion of nature. The sensations and impulses determine his life. If he subjects himself to the logical laws and principles of reason then he is living under a rational compulsion. But he can evolve an intermediate state of consciousness. He can develop the “aesthetic mood,” which is not given over either on the one side to the compulsion of nature, or on the other to the necessities of the reason. In this aesthetic mood the soul lives through the senses; but into the sense-perception and into the action set on foot by sense-stimuli the soul brings over something spiritual. One perceives through the senses, but as if the spiritual had streamed over into the senses. In action one surrenders oneself to the gratification of the present desire; but one has so ennobled this desire that to him the good is pleasing and the evil displeasing. Reason has then entered into union with the sensible. The good becomes an instinct; instinct can safely direct itself, for it has taken on the character of the spiritual. Schiller sees in this state of consciousness that condition of the soul in which man can experience and produce works of beauty. In the evolution of this state he sees the coming to life in men of the true human being.

[ 44 ] These thoughts of Schiller's were to me very attractive. They implied that man must first have his consciousness in a certain condition before he can attain to a relationship to the phenomena of the world corresponding to man's own being. Something was here given to me which brought to greater clarity the questions which presented themselves before me out of my observation of nature and my spiritual experience. Schiller spoke of the state of consciousness which must be present in order that one may experience the beauty of the world. Might one not also think of a state of consciousness which would mediate to us the truth in the beings of things? If this is granted, then one must not, after the fashion of Kant, observe the present state of human consciousness and investigate whether this can enter into the true beings of things. But one must first seek to discover the state of consciousness through which man places himself in such a relationship to the world that things and facts reveal their being to him.

[ 45 ] And I believed that I knew that such a state of consciousness is reached up to a certain degree when man not only has thoughts which conceive external things and events, but such thoughts that he himself experiences them as thoughts. This living in thoughts revealed itself to me as quite different from that in which man ordinarily exists and also carries on ordinary scientific research. If one penetrates deeper and deeper into thought-life, one finds that spiritual reality comes to meet this thought life. One then takes the path of the soul into the spirit. But on this inner way of the soul one arrives at a spiritual reality which one also finds again within nature. One gains a deeper knowledge of nature when one then faces nature after having in living thoughts beheld the reality of the spirit.

[ 46 ] It became clearer and clearer to me how, through going forward beyond the customary abstract thoughts to these spiritual perceptions – which, however, the calmness and luminousness of the thought serve to confirm – man lives himself into a reality from which customary consciousness bars him out. This customary state has on one side the living quality of the sense-perception; on the other the abstractness of thought-conceiving. The spiritual vision perceives spirit as the senses perceive nature; but it does not stand apart in thought from the spiritual perception as the customary state of consciousness stands in its thoughts apart from the sense-perceptions. Spiritual vision thinks while it experiences spirit, and experiences while it sets to thinking the awakened spirituality of man.

[ 47 ] A spiritual perception formed itself before my mind which did not rest upon dark mystical feeling. It proceeded much more in a spiritual activity which in its thoroughness might be compared with mathematical thinking. I was approaching the state of soul in which I felt that I might consider that the perception of the spiritual world which I bore within me was confirmed before the forum of natural scientific thought.

[ 48 ] When these experiences passed through my mind I was in my twenty-second year.

• 1. Theory of Science.
• 2. The Vocation of the Scholar.
• 3. The Nature of the Scholar.
• 4. Addresses to the German Nation.
• 5. Prolegomena to all Future Metaphysics
• 6. Transcendental Synthesism.
• 7. Destiny of Man.
• 8. The Public Library.
• 9. Ii>Aesthetics as the Science of Form.
• 10. General Morphology.
• 11. THöferl.
• 12. .Open Vistas

Well, gentlemen, has anyone thought of anything else today?

Questioner: I have a question about the purpose of carnival. Is there anything we can hear from Dr. Steiner about that? Where does the carnival celebration come from, what does it mean?

Dr. Steiner: So you mean, what is the purpose of carnival? Well, you see, the carnival festival cannot be understood by asking about its purpose, because, at least according to the way it is celebrated today, you will admit that after all, humanity could do without carnival over the years. So you can say that, from today's point of view, the carnival festival is basically pointless. But it no longer has its original meaning either. It has gone with such things as carnival festivals, just as it has gone with the medals, with the robes and so on. They used to have their good sense; little by little they have lost that sense. Well, it is not true that the other festivals of the year are also gradually disappearing; little by little, if they are no longer revived in their meaning, they lose their significance. Not much has been done yet to restore the significance of Carnival. In fact, Carnival would have a profound impact on all of social life if it regained the original meaning it had, for example, in ancient Rome, where it was celebrated a little earlier.

If we go back to ancient Rome, we find the following. People back then were also divided up, if one may say so, as they are here in the present day: one was a civil servant, the other was a warrior, the third was a laborer, and so on, and the division was even harsher then than it is today, at least in a social sense. For a slave could even be bought as a human being! So one can say that the differences between people in ancient Rome were still very, very significant. But the awareness that one had this or that position should be lost, at least for a few days of the year. Isn't that right? Today we talk about democracy and mean, at least initially and more in the theoretical sense, that all people are equal. Now, the Romans did not believe that at all, but for them, the one who was born into any higher class was only a real human being. You know that even in our times, the saying still applied to certain people: “A man only begins with a baron.” So those who are below the baron are not human.

In ancient Rome, this was of course extremely pronounced. Even if the nobility was not introduced in the same way as it appeared later – because that is a medieval institution from the so-called feudal period – there was still a great difference between the classes in ancient Rome. But now, for a few days a year, people were supposed to be equal, democracy was supposed to prevail. Of course, it was not possible for people to come with their ordinary faces, otherwise they would have been recognized; so they had to wear masks. Then they were what the masks were. There was also a person who was the carnival king. During these days he could do whatever he wanted. He could give orders when otherwise he only received orders. And the whole of Rome went mad for a few days, out of place; and people could also behave differently towards their superiors, did not need to be polite to them - so for a few days, to make people equal! And this institution naturally led to people not exactly weeping and mourning during these days; for it pleased them to be able to live like that for a few days. The carnival revelry then developed out of this joy: People only played crazy tricks when they were freed for a few days. And so the whole carnival merrymaking came about.

The result of this was that, because people liked it very much, it has been preserved. But things are preserved without people knowing the original meaning. So carnival remains only as the time when you do crazy things – because you were allowed to do crazy things. Then the church decided that it was necessary to have Ash Wednesday immediately afterwards, so that people would feel that they were guilty, that they were not allowed to do everything they wanted, and so on. And since Christianity, at least in earlier times, had developed the custom of making people do without, Lent was established. And it was naturally expedient to attach Lent to the carnival season, because then people did without the least; they did everything they liked as well as they could. Afterwards it is much worse not to eat the things one has eaten before. It was then as if time had not gone forward. And so these festivals came together.

The only thing was that in Rome, Carnival was much earlier, around our present-day Christmas time, because everything was moved a little to a later season. That is how we got today's carnival. I believe that the date of the carnival in all other areas is based on the Easter season. But that, as I hear, only leads to it being celebrated twice!

Well, that is what needs to be said in answer to this question. It can be said of many things in humanity that they originally had a meaning but then later lost that meaning. Then one wonders: Why all this?

Well, maybe someone has something else to ask today.

Questioner: I would like to ask the doctor if he would perhaps continue the story from last time.

Questioner: I would like to ask Dr. whether it is possible for people to insult another person or cause him pain, that is, to influence others? Mrs. A had a three-year-old child who always saw entities coming in through the door and windows. The child often had restless nights, and especially when the woman had washed her underwear – the woman borrowed things in the house – the child always became restless. Finally, there was nothing left; then the woman died later. I would like to ask Dr. Steiner if something like this would be possible?

Dr. Steiner: These are, of course, things that touch on all kinds of areas in which superstition can play just as strong a role - because people are gullible - but also the facts. You just have to be clear about the fact that there are connections in the world that cannot be easily traced physically. I will start from very simple connections.

Look at it this way: take a grape harvest. You harvest the grapes and press them, prepare them, put them in barrels, store them in the cellar. Now, you will notice that when the next wine is ready - when the time comes for the wine to ferment again - it becomes restless. He remains, without having a physical connection, still in contact. This is a simple fact that shows you that there are such connections in nature itself that cannot easily be followed with the eye and so on.

Now, as you know, there is already a way to bridge the ordinary visibility. You only need to remember that even in inanimate nature there are devices today that overcome the ordinary visible – not the finer visible, but the ordinary visible. You only need to think of radiotelegraphy! What is radiotelegraphy based on? It is based on the fact that you have an electricity exciter somewhere; initially, no wire connects to it, but it stands alone. Somewhere else, without any connection to it, there is an apparatus that contains certain fine discs that can be set in motion. Such an apparatus is called a coherer. At first glance, they have no physical connection at all, but when you excite electricity here, it causes the signs to move there; and if you connect it to a device, you can receive the messages there, just as you can receive electricity through the wires. Of course, it is based on the fact that electricity propagates, but you just can't see it; it propagates without a gross physical connection. So even in inanimate nature you have a connection that is such that you can say: at least to a certain extent, the visible is overcome.

Now we can take the matter further. Imagine certain twin brothers or sisters. When they reach a later age, even twin brothers and sisters who are not physically connected can be in touch with each other. One may be here and the other there. Nevertheless, it can be observed that at a particular time one of the twins may fall ill, for example, and the other, who is further away, also! Or one of them will become saddened by something at a certain time; and so will the other. All such things show you that there are effects in the world that cannot immediately be explained as physical influences.

But if you now approach the animal kingdom, you soon realize that there are perceptions in animals, for example, that humans do not have. Suppose, for example, an earthquake or a volcanic eruption occurs in some area that is very damaging to people. People just sit there quietly; you can sometimes see the animals moving away and leaving the area for days beforehand! From this too you can see that there can be a sense of something for the animals that you do not perceive physically. If one were to perceive it physically, then man would also be able to perceive the matter.

From all this you can see that there are connections that are possible in the world outside the physical. Now, when we look at such finer connections, we come to the fact that sometimes people feel something inside them that they certainly could not have perceived physically. For example, I will say: There is a person somewhere - these things have happened in hundreds and thousands of cases - who suddenly flinches and sees something in front of him like a picture - it is of course only a dream - and he cries out and says: My friend! But the friend may be far away; he may be experiencing it in Europe, or he may be in America. My friend! Something has happened to him! It turns out that he has died. So these things do happen. Once again, we can see how such effects can take place without there being any physical connection.

Yes, but it must be said that it is good for our human race that these things are not all too widespread; because just think, if your head were capable of perceiving everything that one person or another thinks or says about you, for example, then it would be a terrible story! Isn't it true, you know, if you have a telegraph device, then the device must first be set up, the wire must first be switched on, and then the transmission takes place. Likewise, in wireless telegraphy, this must be in order, must not be disconnected (pointing to the drawing), then the transmission takes place. Now, in general, in the case of a fully healthy person, it is so that the person is not connected to all the currents that are going on; he is disconnected; but in special cases it can certainly happen that one is connected to something.

Take for example – I cannot go into your case in detail for the good reason that you probably do not know how strongly it is attested; but I will go into a similar case, and then you will be able to explain this too. I only want to talk about things that are absolutely authenticated, because otherwise it is very easy to end up with mere talk. You probably did not experience the case yourself, but read about it or heard it related? So I will only go into what is well authenticated. Suppose: A woman A had an argument during her pregnancy with a woman B who lives in the neighborhood. It does happen, doesn't it, that people argue with each other. Now perhaps this woman B, who lives in the neighborhood, cursed woman A very strongly, and woman A was terribly frightened when woman B shouted and swore. As a result, the child that is born may become somewhat dependent on Ms. B, but Ms. B may also become somewhat dependent on the child. It may well be that the child becomes receptive to what Ms. B gives it as underwear or the like when she washes it. But on the other hand it can also be important for Mrs. B to receive underwear; she then needs, because she does have a little remorse about what she did to Mrs. A, to have something from this house to continually reassure her; and in the moment when she is then deprived of it, she seeks to get it in every possible way. People who want to get something like that, without being thieves by nature, can steal all kinds of things. They become thieving only for these things; otherwise they do not steal, but seek to get these things in every way. Then it can even happen that, when these things are withdrawn from them, because there are also spiritual and mental influences on a person's health, they suffer from a kind of inner wasting away, from a wasting fever and die, or let us say, even from a heart or nerve attack. That is entirely possible.

So you can say: These things happen in the world, and these things can be explained, because, even without a physical connection, an influence is exerted by one person on the other under certain circumstances. But then you always have to be able to go into the cause. It could have been a completely different cause in this case you mentioned. But if, for example, there had been a row between the two women during pregnancy, this could be the cause of an intervention between this woman and the child at a later stage. Now, gentlemen, it was requested that I speak a little further about what I said the other day. I showed you how people in ancient India lived under very different conditions four to five thousand years ago. And it was precisely through this special Indian nature and the way the peoples were together that these ancient Indians developed the view of the physical human body.

The Egyptians, on the other hand, who had their country entirely under the influence of the Nile, who owed everything they were, so to speak, to the Nile, they have, because man also becomes aware of the ether through this, developed the view of the etheric body of man.

The inhabitants of Assyria and the Babylonians, because the particularly pure air and the high altitude made it easy for them to observe the stars at certain times of the year, developed the astral body as a concept.

And the Jews, who actually had to wander in their early days, who were never settled close to anyone, only later settled, who thought and felt more out of the inner nature of man, they developed the view of the human ego.

Thus, the conception of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I has gradually developed. You see, the word Yahweh means nothing other than: I am the I-am. That is the meaning of the word. Since Yahweh is considered the supreme God, this confession of the supreme God clearly points to the human ego.

If we follow the development of the story, we find that all these peoples have actually expressed more in their thoughts and feelings what they have experienced. The Indian has experienced a fertile, rich nature - everything is in a state of perpetual bloom and growth: a rich, lush nature. So he actually perceived the richness of the physical, and he developed the view of the physical body from his own view. The Egyptian, on the other hand, saw that only the Nile, which you can see, can help him; so he developed the doctrine of the ether, and so on. But all these people actually developed everything they experienced.

In contrast to this, there was another people. We can say (a drawing is being made): here is ancient India, here Arabia; here then Egypt, there flows the Nile. Now it goes over here, and here we have a land facing Africa, which then connects to Europe. Here again would be Assyria, as I told you last time, here Egypt, here India; here would be Palestine, where the Jews settled; and here we have Greece. In this Greece, peoples settled who had immigrated from the most diverse areas of Asia and Europe, and who thus mixed with each other there. They also found original inhabitants when they immigrated, but the Greek people gradually developed on this peninsula of Europe. These Greek people were actually the first, one might say, to open their eyes and see something of the world that was not only experienced from within. The Indians experienced nature from within; the Egyptians experienced the effects of the ether; the Assyrians experienced the astral body in the stars; the Jews experienced their ego. The Greeks were actually the first, as I said, to turn their eyes outward and look at the world. The others did not really look at the world. So one can say: The Indians and the Egyptians, nor the Babylonians nor the Jews, had a particularly developed view of nature; they did not know much about nature because they did not open their eyes and look out. It was only with the Greeks that an understanding of nature arose, because the Greeks opened their eyes and looked outwards. And so it was only in Greece that man really became aware of the external world.

You see, the Indians knew very well: this physical world here is part of the whole world, and I came out of the spiritual at birth; I go back into it after death. The Egyptians believed that the mummies had to be preserved so that people could come back; but they also paid particular attention to the spiritual. The Babylonians saw the will of the spirits in the starry sky that they observed, in the astral. So they also believed in spirits. And you know that the Jews were of the opinion that Jehovah, Yahweh, would lead them back to those ancient times when the patriarchs lived. So basically they also looked to what connects man to the spiritual world.

With the Greeks, it became different. They were actually the first to have become attached to the external world. The earlier peoples did not care much about the external world. The Greeks were very interested in the outer world; and there is a Greek saying that says: It is better to be a beggar in the upper world, that is, he means in Greece, on earth, than a king in the realm of shadows, that is, of the dead. So the Greeks, above all, have grown fond of the world and have thereby also gained a view of nature for the first time.

The other peoples, for example, developed a view of man. Among the Indians, in particular, there was already a certain view of man in the most ancient times. But they did not gain this view of man by taking dead people to the dissecting room and cutting them up! If the Indians had to do that, they would never have gained their view of man. Rather, they sensed how the liver and lungs behave in the individual parts of the human body - this was still possible in those days. They knew this through inner knowledge. This is what led the Indians to their great wisdom: they knew through inner sensing and feeling how the liver works and so on. Today, people only know how a piece of meat tastes in their mouths. The Indians knew how a piece of meat behaves in the intestines, what the liver does, what the gall bladder does, through inner experience, just as people today feel the pieces of meat they eat in their mouths.

The Egyptians developed geometry because they needed it. They had to determine again and again where the fields were located; after all, the Nile flooded everything every year. This is also something that can be invented out of the head. The Babylonians developed astrology, the knowledge of the stars - again something that has nothing to do with the earthly; they had no strong interest in the earthly. And the fact that the Jews have no strong interest in the earthly is shown by the fact that a Jew is more likely to have an interest in anything than in what is actually in the world of the senses around him; he is good at thinking, but he has no real interest in what is in the world of the senses around him.

The people who are most interested in what is in the sensory world around them are the Greeks. If you do some research, it is interesting to note that they saw the whole world differently from the way we see it today. That is very interesting. Today we see the sky as blue. The Greeks did not have the same impression of the color blue as we do, but saw the sky as much darker, almost blackish, with a slightly greenish tinge. They perceived red particularly strongly. With our dull perception of red, we can no longer imagine the strong impression that the red color made on the Greeks! It is precisely because humanity has gradually developed a sense of blue that humanity has in turn moved away from the sensual impression. So the Greeks first became particularly attached to what existed outside of them. And that is why the Greeks were particularly skilled at developing what we today call mythology. The Greeks worshipped a whole pantheon of gods: Zeus, Apollo, Pallas Athena, Ares, Aphrodite; they saw gods everywhere. They worshipped a whole pantheon of gods because what they loved as external nature seemed to them to be everywhere still alive and spiritualized. Not as dead as it is with us, but everywhere still animated and spiritualized, it seemed to them. So they worshiped the gods everywhere in the nature itself that they had come to love.

But as a result, during the Greek era, all those people who had become dependent on Greek civilization, Greek culture, and Greek intellectual life forgot what the Indians, the Egyptians, and the Babylonians had actually experienced in spiritual terms.

Now you will know, gentlemen, how great an influence Greece actually had on the whole development of mankind. This continues to this day! Anyone who can send their son to grammar school today still has him learn Greek. But in the past it was much more widespread. In the past, you were a donkey, so to speak, if you couldn't speak Greek or at least read Greek writers and poets. Greece has had an enormously strong influence on the world because it was the first to take an interest in this external world.

Now, while this interest in the external world was developing in Greece, the important thing happened in Asia, that from there the mystery of Golgotha developed, that is, when Greece was already overcome, when everything was actually already under Roman rule. But what does this Roman rule mean? It was, after all, completely imbued with the Greek spirit. The educated Romans had also all learned Greek, and anyone who was educated in Rome knew Greek. Greek had gained the greatest influence everywhere. While Greek was spreading in this way, in a little-known Roman province in Asia – at that time Palestine, the Jews had been overcome, Palestine had become a Roman province – a man appeared, Jesus of Nazareth, who said something completely different from anything that people had ever said before. And as you can imagine, because he said something so special, he was not immediately understood by others either. Therefore, at first he was understood only by a few.

What did this personality, Jesus, actually say when he appeared in Palestine? Well, this personality, Jesus, said in the way he was able to express it at that time: Yes, people today believe – that was the “today” at that time – everywhere that man is an earthly creature. But he is not. He is a being that comes from the spiritual world and when it dies, returns to the spiritual world. Today, when Christianity has been in effect for almost two thousand years, one is surprised that such a thing was said at the time. But at that time it was not so. The Asian and African conceptions of the spirit were little known or widespread in Greece. There, people were more turned towards the world. And so, especially against the worldly Hellenism that existed in Rome, what Jesus of Nazareth taught in the first place was something tremendously significant.

But in doing so, he would not have done anything different from resurrecting what earlier peoples, the Indians, the Egyptians and so on, had already said. Only what I have just told you would have been resurrected; only what was already there would have come back. But that Jesus of Nazareth not only revived what was already there, but he also said the following. He said: Yes, if I had only listened to what people could tell me today, I would not have come up with the teaching of the spirit at all, because people no longer really know anything about the spirit. That came to me from outside the earth. And so he realized that he was not just Jesus, but that an entity had emerged in his soul that was the Christ. To him, Jesus was the one who was born of the mother's womb on earth. The Christ was the one who entered his soul only in later times. The truth has emerged in his soul from the fact that people are spiritual by nature.

Now we must ask ourselves: How were the various ancient teachings cultivated in India, in Egypt, in Babylonia and also among the Jews? If you look around at the spiritual life today, you will find the church on one side and the schools on the other. At most, the rulers of the church argue with the rulers of the schools about the extent of the influence of the one on the other; but they are separate from each other. This was not the case with these ancient peoples, neither with the Indians nor the Egyptians nor the Babylonians nor even the Jews. Everything that was connected with religion in those days was at the same time connected with schools; it was one and the same thing to serve both the church and the school. Much of it has, of course, been transplanted into our time; but it is not the same as it was in ancient times, when the priest was also the teacher. The priest was the teacher both in India and in Egypt, Babylonia and so on. The priest was the teacher. And where did he teach? Well, he taught where the service was also performed, where the cult was held. The cult was generally connected with teaching. These were the mystery schools. They did not have churches and schools, but they had such places, that is, such institutes, which were both at the same time, and which we call mysteries today. But the general view was that one must be careful with everything that could be learned there.

You see, gentlemen, that was an old view: that a person should only be mature enough to receive certain knowledge. This has been completely lost today. And so everywhere you had those who held the highest dignity in the mysteries, called “fathers”. This is still reflected, for example, in the Catholic Church, where certain priests are called fathers. In ancient times, among the Indians, the Egyptians, the Babylonians and so on, everywhere those who were actually initiated into the knowledge, who had insights, were called “fathers”. And when these fathers had taught those who had been accepted by them, whom they believed could make them mature, then they also had them, just as they had been called “fathers,” called them “sons.” And all the rest of the people who did not enter into the mysteries, who were not accepted, were called the “children” of the fathers; or they were also called sons and daughters. Now, you can understand that a certain view has emerged. This view consisted in the fact that people, who were much more devout then than they are today, really felt that those who were in the mysteries were their fathers in a spiritual sense as well; they gladly regarded them as their fathers, as their spiritual fathers. And above all, they believed that these spiritual fathers were in closer contact with the gods than they were outside; they outside must first receive the message, the knowledge, from the fathers. And so, gradually, people became very dependent on the fathers. The state that the Catholic Church would like to restore today, I believe, wholeheartedly, was a matter of course in the ancient times. It was like that everywhere. No one rebelled against it. People simply said: If you want to be a real human being, then you either have to be a father yourself, then you communicate directly with the gods, or you have to learn something about the gods from the fathers. So you are a human being because those who are in the schools, in the mysteries, tell you something. This is how the distinction between children of God and children of men, between sons of God and sons of men, came about. Those who were in the mysteries were called the sons of God because they, in turn, looked up to the gods as to their fathers. But those who lived outside, to whom only what was in the mysteries was proclaimed, were called the children of men or sons of men. And so people were divided into sons of God and sons of men or human children. Today this seems even ridiculous to people, but in those days it was quite natural. Today, people do make distinctions – admittedly not in Switzerland, but I don't know whether something similar is gaining a little ground there; but in neighboring countries, right away – now it has ceased somewhat, but it wasn't long ago that one distinguished excellencies from ordinary people, the barons from ordinary people; this was more taken for granted. But in the old days it was simply taken for granted that a distinction was made between the sons of the gods, the children of the gods and the children of men.

The one who then called himself Christ Jesus, who was so named, said: A son of God, a child of the spirit, is not acquired through another human being; rather, everyone becomes one through God Himself. It is only a matter of becoming aware of it. The old man said: The Father from the Mysteries must make one aware of this. - The Christ Jesus said: One already carries the seed of the divine within oneself, and one can, if one only makes the right effort, bring it out of oneself.

But with that, Christ Jesus taught that which makes people all over the world the same in their souls. And the greatest difference that has been overcome by Christ Jesus is that between the Sons of God and the sons of men.

People have misunderstood this in all sorts of ways – the ancients because they did not want the idea to arise that it was no longer possible to distinguish between the Sons of God and the children of men, and the later generations because they no longer knew what was meant by it. Just as the later generations no longer knew the carnival, they also no longer knew what was meant by “sons of the gods” and “sons of man”. That is why the Bible, the New Testament, continually adds that Jesus Christ is sometimes called the Son of God and sometimes the Son of Man, while all the passages that speak of the Son of God and the Son of Man actually mean that both can be used in the same sense; that is why they are spoken of alternately. But if you don't know that this has led to that, you can't really understand the Gospels at all. And they are actually being understood today in a very bad sense, especially by those who profess to do so.

In this way you have presented emotionally what actually came into the world through Christ Jesus. And if I first deal with the external things today, I must say: You see, there were also other great differences between people everywhere. One need only think of ancient India. There were distinctions, like the animals or classes of animals: the Brahmins, the priests, the country people, the laborers. The Egyptians, on the other hand, had a whole army of slaves. The castes were not so strictly separated from each other, but they were still present to a certain extent. Yes, even in Greece and Rome there was still the difference between freeborn and slaves. These external differences have only been wiped out in modern times because the difference between the children of the gods and the children of men has been wiped out. So there was also an enormous influence on the whole social life of humanity from what happened in Palestine through Christ Jesus.

But now one can actually ask about everything: Yes, is it the case that it can be found out where the spiritual actually comes from outside of the earth into the human being? You see, in this respect it is even very difficult to talk today, because today everything is actually only considered materialistically. For example, let us say, language. You know that different languages are spoken in different areas, different countries of the world; but still, the languages all have a secret similarity. The similarity does not have to be as striking as, say, in Germany and England, in Germany and in Holland. But still, it is the case that the languages, despite being different, have a certain similarity. One can find that, for example, the language spoken in India, even if one does not understand it immediately, if one engages with it, the individual word images are similar to those of the German language.

And what do people say when they want to explain something like this today? They say: Well, such a language originated in one place on earth - because everything should only come from the earth - then the peoples migrated, carried the language somewhere else, and it changed a little. But it all comes from one language.

This is the greatest scientific superstition that has emerged in modern times. Because, you see, gentlemen, this scientific superstition is exactly the same as the following: Imagine a person lives in India and he gets warm when the sun shines. Now, the view is formed: man can get warm. - Now, later, people in Europe discover that they also get warm in summer. They also get warm. Now they don't use their intellect to help them, but their senses. They say: “You can't explain getting warm from the present; but in ancient India, people got warm; they emigrated to Europe and transplanted the property of getting warm to Europe.” Yes, gentlemen, if someone says that, then of course he is crazy. But the philologists say the same thing! They do not say, when a language in Europe is similar to a language in India, that the same influence from outside the Earth has worked in India as in Europe, but they say: the language has migrated! If in two regions a person gets warm, one will not say that the property of getting warm was brought here by migration, but one looks up to the common sun, and it warms both those in India and those in Europe. When two languages are found that are similar in distant places, it is not because the language has migrated, but because the common influence, just as the influence of the sun is there for the whole earth, the common influence of extraterrestrials is effective on the peoples of the most diverse areas of the earth. But because men definitely do not want to admit that an extraterrestrial influence takes place in the spiritual, they think up all kinds of things, which one just does not notice are crazy, because they are so learned. If people were not afraid of being thought crazy, they would deny everywhere that the sun warms, but they would say: In primeval times the property of becoming warm arose once, and that has been transplanted over the whole earth. They would deny the influence of the sun, if that were not crazy! This is something that must be taken into account if one wants to understand the origin of Christianity.

It's already too late to answer any further questions today; we can talk about it next Saturday.

In the gathering held here just after the Christmas Course we turned our attention to things that can deepen medicine in an esoteric sense. And we tried—to the extent to which this is possible in such brief meetings—to penetrate into the esotericism of medicine, in the way that is suitable for younger medical aspirants today. In formulae for further contemplation and elaboration, we received things that can quicken the sense for medicine and emphasis was laid upon the necessity of having this sense for medicine.

I picture to myself that you have worked upon these things for a time, my dear friends. Naturally, my idea of this work is not that people sit down and ponder about such things theoretically, but that from time to time, when the inner need is felt, they let these things work upon and develop the soul. It was inevitable, from the very way in which these things came before us, that one perfectly definite fact should emerge—a fact which I believe to be of importance for our gathering now. Because of the very concentrated form in which the esoteric things were given at the first gathering, one or another, to a greater or lesser degree, must have realized that it was necessary to face certain inner difficulties. The purpose of esoteric teachings is not always to make life as easy as possible for us. In a certain respect the opposite is certainly the case. They are also there in order to make life more difficult, to make us realize the difficulties of understanding the world, of really getting to know the world and human beings. So that when we become alive to these difficulties, we take the opposite path of development from that which is so often taken in our civilization today. We take the opposite to a superficial path of development. It is only by becoming alive to the difficulties existing as between the outside world and the human being that a person can be deepened in soul. I think, therefore, the best way now will be if, bearing these inner difficulties in mind, you will bring them forward in the form of questions and we will then make matters that can really promote the development of our subject into the theme of our discussions. I would ask you, to begin with, to tell me what inner and outer difficulties have arisen in your own circle. Difficulties will have arisen both for the practitioner and for the student. There are a number among you who are now approaching the end of their studies; they will have found quite specific difficulties and we will try to find their solution. All of you have received the first circular letter and you will have realized that in connection with definite questions there is a very great deal to say. I would like to ask if any question, definite or indefinite, has arisen, for such questions will surely lead us further. In this way we shall get away more from theoretical study and reach matters which lie in the realm of actual experience.

Question: A participant asked about the course of the year, the Calendar of the Soul, definite constellations of the stars and whether one must be consciously aware of these.

That is not essential. You mean observation of the constellations as they are at a particular time. It is, of course, a help if one is able to look at the visible constellations. But if I have understood you aright you mean: How are things, really, if we allow the formulae we have been given to work upon the soul? These things work through their own inherent mantric power; orientation in the outer world according to the stars can, of course, be a help but you must remember the following. Take the most striking example of a human-cosmic relationship that can still be observed today, namely the menses. It is obvious that they are determined cosmically yet they are not so determined in the present epoch. They were cosmically determined in a much earlier phase of cosmic evolution in which our earth was also involved. Then, in the course of time, they became independent, were emancipated from the external cosmos, so that nowadays there is no direct dependence. Therefore, one cannot say nowadays that the phases of the moon are coincident with menstruation. This cannot be said. But it is certainly true to say that there was once a time when the one coincided with the other; then they separated. The moon phases exist on their own. Menstruation takes its own independent course. Here is one example of separation. The other that I will mention is not governed by the phases of the moon but by the daily phases of the moon. Ebb and flow were once coincident with certain influences of the moon. Again there was separation. The moon is on its own, ebb and flow on their own.

These things also hold good in the working of mantric power. Mantric power is certainly of such a nature that what happens in the human being as a result of it was at one time coincident with cosmic processes, but separation has now taken place, so that a proper orientation is necessary. If we want this help from the outside world we must say to ourselves first of all: What is to happen in the inner being is inscribed in the cosmos. But in contemplating this we must make ourselves inwardly independent and be able to experience inwardly and quite on our own, emancipated from the cosmic happenings. Therefore it is not unconditionally necessary to reckon with the constellations of the stars in the working of a mantram. Equally it cannot be a question of the menses being regulated according to the external phases of the moon, because the menses have become a process of the world of nature. Today it is the case that the whole of our inner life that is to be influenced by mantrams must take place in emancipation from the outer cosmos.

In connection with other subjects I have often had to speak of this as the difference between Eastern and Western esotericism. The whole standpoint of the oriental is this: the human being has come forth from the cosmos, he must return there, he must be united with the cosmos again. Think of the posture of the Buddha. It is a return to earlier conditions. This is shown by the Buddha's whole posture, the crossing of the legs one over the other, the elimination of the limb structures. The position of the arms, too, is such that the whole relationship to the earth is paralyzed. We see how the human being again members himself into the cosmos. He goes back again. So it is, in reality, with the whole of Eastern esotericism. It is a going backwards. Our Western esotericism can only be a going forward, an ever-increasing emancipation. For this reason it is not so inwardly comfortable and when applied in certain domains particularly it does not make for inner ease.

Of course, if you have some specific, pathological condition before you, and when you look at the constellations you find, for example, that the condition definitely set in when Saturn was in opposition to the moon, this naturally has a certain significance. For if you now come as a healer with Saturn and moon, that is to say, in earthly terms, with lead and silver, saying: I will apply the lead cosmically and the silver in the earthly form, trying to pulverize it, to dissolve it; I will change it into the earthly form, thereby producing the same constellation that is expressed in the heavens in the opposition to the moon, then you can heal in the sense of the cosmic forces. But at the same time you bring the human being into a condition which throws him back into earlier stages of evolution. Whereas if you take your start directly from the given earthly state—the connection of the human being with lead, with silver—then you are working in something that is in a process of emancipating itself within the human being and you are looking not into the past but into the future. In this case you will certainly be doing something similar, but you get at it from within, by getting to know the nature of the lead and the silver, realizing that the lead works as substance, the silver through what it actually becomes when it is broken into pieces, dissolved, resolved into atoms. But you are comparing it with the human nature that is already emancipated, not with the cosmos. This is the way in which one must proceed. Therefore it may certainly be a help to think about the actual constellations of the stars. But to begin with, we shall have to use all our power to lend ourselves to the inner activation of soul by the mantric formulae we have been given, and seek for everything more from within.

Question: What must I do out of the ego when I am meditating?

From out of the ego? Meditation consists, does it not, in the following. As a modern person you feel that you must understand every sentence. This is emphatically an activity of the ego in the present incarnation. Everything you do intellectually is an activity of the ego. In the present incarnation the intellect predominates and everything else is overshadowed by the ego, works upwards at the most like a dream, and is unconscious. In contrast with this, meditation means elimination of this intellectual striving and, to begin with, taking the content of the meditation just as it is given—purely according to the sounds of the words. When you approach the content of the meditation intellectually you bring your ego into movement before you absorb the meditation, for you think about the content; it is outside you. If you let the meditation be present in your consciousness just exactly as it is given, not cogitating over it at all but simply letting it be in your consciousness, then your ego is working in you not from the present incarnation but from the past. You hold the intellect still, simply transporting yourself into the word-content which you hear inwardly, not outwardly; you transport yourself into this word-content and as you do so your inner being works within the content of the meditation—the inner being which is not that of the present incarnation. But thereby the content of meditation becomes—not something for you to understand merely—but something that works within you in reality; so that finally you become aware of: Now I have experienced something I was unaware of earlier.

Take a simple meditation which I have often given: “Wisdom lives in the Light.” If we think about this we can extract many very clever things but equally frightfully stupid things from it. “Wisdom lives in the Light” is there in order to be heard inwardly. When you hear this inwardly that within you which listens does not come from your present incarnation but what you have brought with you from former earthly lives. It is this that thinks and experiences, and after some time there lights up within you something you did not know before, that you cannot think out with your own intellect. Inwardly you are much further than your intellect. Your intellect contains only a tiny extract of what is really there.

After all, you must take what is given in Anthroposophy absolutely concretely and objectively. Just think about the following: With the change of teeth the human being really renews his whole physical body. This must be taken as a fundamental fact. That the human being gets second teeth is really only the most external symptom of all, merely, a fragment of what is going on. Just as the so-called milk teeth are replaced, so is the whole human organism replaced. After the change of teeth, so far as his physical substance is

concerned, the human being is entirely new in comparison to what he was when he was born. The modern view which jumbles everything together is that the human being is born, passes through a metamorphosis with the change of teeth and then goes on developing. It is not like this. The truth is that when the human being comes physically into the world he has, as well as the so-called milk teeth, a body that is a product of hereditary development. He has received a body that is the product of what is contained in the whole line of ancestry. The physical body of the first seven years—if we express it in figures—comes from here. From the seventh to the fourteenth year the human being has a body, too, but this body has not been produced from the first by transformation. What the human being has brought with him to the earth has intervened here.

Picture it as follows: the human being has had his body. This body which has come to him from the line of heredity is a model; he has it as a model. Into this body he takes earthly substance. If he were to work only with the forces he brings with him from pre-earthly existence he would elaborate this earthly substance which he takes into his body in the first seven years into quite a different form. He would call forth quite a different form. He does not come at birth with the tendency to give form to a being with eyes, ears, nose, like the being who stands on the earth. He enters with the tendency to structure the human being in such a way that very little is structured by way of the head through his pre-earthly being; it is especially upon everything else that the greatest care is expended. What is stunted in the embryonic life is developed in the astral, in the ego organization. Of the physical embryo, therefore, we must say: Physical nature in the embryo is developed in a wonderful way but the pre-earthly human being has very little indeed to do with it. On the other hand the pre-earthly human being plays the very greatest part in all that lies around the embryo. It lives in what is demolished in the physical world, amnion, chorion, and so on. Within this lives the pre-earthly man.

You can picture it rather like this. To begin with, the cosmos is copied. This is what the human being wants, in reality, to do when he has come down from the pre-earthly into earthly existence. Why does he not do it? Because a model is already provided. And in accordance with this model, with the substances received, he transforms the pre-earthly during the first seven years of life. His inherent tendency would be to form a more spherical being, a being organized into a sphere. This is transformed in accordance with the model and so the pre-earthly forces work out this second physical man who is there from the seventh to the fourteenth years, but to begin with, by adhering to the model which comes from the forces of heredity.

There, you see, you have two, actually distinguishable entities of forces in the human being. How can you understand these force entities? Take, with the outlook and feeling of the physician, the book Occult Science and read where the earth's evolution is spoken of. At first there is a Saturn evolution, then a Sun evolution. If you follow the description of the Earth evolution you will find that until the separation of the sun, sun, moon and earth were one, combined together in one. Afterwards there is a separation of earth and sun, earth and moon. Up to the middle of this evolution, therefore, the human being lives in the cosmos. He lives in sun and moon just as he lives in the earth. After the separation of the sun he lives outside the sun; after the separation of the moon, outside the moon. Until the separation of the sun, therefore, the cosmic forces were working upon man's nature; those forces, too, which are today outside the earth in the moon and in the sun were working in the human being because he belonged to the world in which the sun and moon were still present. There followed for the human being an evolution during which sun and moon were outside.

There was a phase of evolution which contained within it all that today is both earthly and of the nature of sun and moon; later on, the extra-earthly emancipated itself from the earthly. The earthly went on along its own path, it dried up, hardened, became physical—and you find this today in the stream of heredity; it has densified within the stream of heredity. What the human being has received since the separation of the moon and sun lies in the forces working in from the cosmos. That is the point. So that in the model that is received in order that the second man may be elaborated, you have a model that really represents a primeval, artistic principle given by father and mother, originating when sun and moon were still united with the earth. It was then that the forces which really give the human being his earthly configuration were developed. For you will readily understand that the configuration of the human being is an earthly one. Try to think of the being of man entirely removed from the earth. What could be done with it? You would be extremely unhappy if after death you were to make use of anything like legs. Legs have purpose only when the earth's forces of attraction pass through them, when the legs are within the sphere of the earth's forces of attraction. Legs—and arms and hands, too—have meaning and purpose only on the earth. So that a whole section of the human organism, in the way it is developed, has purpose only when we are earthly man. What we are as Earthly man has no meaning so far as the cosmos is concerned. Therefore when we come to the earth as beings of spirit and soul, our wish, to begin with, is to form quite a different organization. We want to build a sphere and to generate all kinds of configurations within this sphere, but we have no wish for this being with whom the cosmos itself can do nothing. This being is given us as a model and we build up the second man in accordance with this model.

In the first life-period, therefore, there is a perpetual struggle between what comes from us out of the previous incarnation and what comes from hereditary development; the two elements fight with each other. The illnesses of childhood are the expression of this fight. Just think how intimately the whole inner being of soul and spirit is bound up with the physical organization during early childhood. When the second teeth appear you can see how they push up against the first, how they still have tussles with each other, and in this same way the whole second man has tussles with the first. But within the second man there is the super-earthly being; in the first a foreign, earthly model. These two work into one another and if you observe this inter-working truly you can see how, if the inner man, who as a being of soul and spirit was present in pre-earthly existence, has too much the upper hand for a time, working into the physical very strongly and having, willy nilly, to adjust itself by dint of effort to the model, that it damages the model by striking up against it everywhere, saying: I want to get this particular form out of you—then the fight expresses itself as scarlet fever. If the inner man is tender, so that there is a continual shrinking back, a wish to mold the in-taken substances more in accordance with their own nature, and resistance is put up to the model, the struggle comes out as measles. What is, in reality, a mutual struggle expresses itself in the illnesses of childhood. Moreover, it is only possible to understand truly what comes later if these things can be properly reckoned with.

It is, of course, very easy for the materialists to say that all this is stupid, because children still retain a likeness to their parents after the change of teeth and not only up till that time. Such talk is nonsense. The fact is that one being is weaker, directs himself more in accordance with the forces of heredity, builds up the second man with a greater resemblance to the model. This naturally comes out in the appearance, but the same thing has been going on when the being has adjusted itself more in accordance with the model. On the other hand, there are human beings who after the change of teeth become very unlike what they were before. In such cases what comes from the pre-earthly life of soul and spirit is strong and they adhere less to the model. We have therefore simply to see these things in their right connection.

The following, too, must be remembered. Everything that has to be taken in must, in the first place, be taken in by the child and elaborated inwardly in such a way that the ego and astral body enter into intimate contact with the foodstuffs. Later on this need not be the case any longer. The human being is never afterwards in the position of being so strongly compelled to work out, according to a model, something that is independent as is the case during the first seven years of life. During those years he must work up in his ego and astral body everything he takes in; he must work it up in such a way that it can be molded in accordance with the model. This process must be helped; and the world has arranged for it, inasmuch as milk is able to bear a very great resemblance indeed to an etheric structure. Milk is a substance which really still has an etheric body and because this substance, when it is taken by the child, still works up into the etheric, the astral body is able at once to take hold of the milk and then there can arise the close inner contact between what is thus taken in and the astral body and ego organization. For this reason there is an inward, intimate connection in the child between the external foodstuffs and the inner organization of spirit and soul.

In the whole way in which the child drinks milk you can actually see how his astral body and his ego are taking hold of the milk you can see it with your very eyes. And now, as a physician, you must realize the remarkable process of working up what is going on. On the one side, meditate in mantrams, letting the mantram work upon you, freeing your forces of soul on the one hand; and on the other hand, meditate simply upon the child. Picture to yourself how the being of spirit and soul comes down and makes its way to the physical foodstuff, ignoring the model to begin with, and then picture what is going on between the being of spirit and soul and the foodstuff—a process that is now directed in accordance with the forms contained in the model. If you form a true picture of an excessively strong working of the spirit and soul, the picture crystallizes into that of scarlet fever. A picture of a too feeble working of the spirit and soul which wavers in the face of the model and becomes the picture of measles.If you picture these things in meditation you carry over ordinary meditation into medical meditation. It is dreadful that people today want to grasp everything with the intellect. In medicine really nothing can be grasped with the intellect. With the intellect one could at the very most grasp the diseases of the minerals—and there it is not a question of curing. Everything medical must be grasped by direct perception and the faculty for this has to be developed.

You cannot notice this process in a grown-up person. The digestive tract takes over the foodstuffs—it is a process transacted inwardly; whereas in the child, astral body and ego take over the foodstuffs. Unfinished forms of human nature have there to be directed and fashioned in accordance with the model. When you meditate upon the child, you see a mighty metamorphosis going on. You see the spirit and soul lighting up, as it were, and the in-taken foodstuffs cast into darkness and shadows; you see there how the second man is formed out of light and darkness, in colors, as it were. You see how the pre-earthly in man is a brightness and how the external foodstuffs are a darkening. In the child a brightness comes upon the darkness, a brightness that comes from the pre-earthly. The milk goes in as darkness. The brightness and the darkness together give rise to manifold colors. What is white in the physical is black in the spiritual; always the opposite.

These things make it possible for the ego to be active in quite another way than is usual in life. What a feeble effort it is that we make in the act of ordinary, intellectual thinking. Intellectual activity is man's greatest weakness. He simply carries one concept to another. But if you observe the child in the way now described you will meditate in such a manner that your ego organization is thoroughly involved in the effort.

These things, in their further course, must also be heeded in our pedagogy. In a school like the Waldorf School we have children between the ages of seven and fourteen. At this age things have changed. The second man has been developed. The child before us has been molded out of pre-earthly existence according to the model that has been cast off; forces of heredity, naturally, have remained in the child. They have been brought into the model, into the imitation of the model. The child is now much too unearthly. For now the forces that come from beyond the earth have worked on the child with special strength and the swing of the pendulum has gone to the opposite side. Formerly, this was externally visible in the human being; he was entirely the product of heredity. Now that which is to be seen externally has arisen entirely from within. It is the external world that has now to be mastered. What has hitherto worked without consideration for the earthly world, with consideration only for the human model, must direct itself to the outer world. Between the seventh and fourteenth years, astral body and ego organization must work in such a way that this super-earthly being is again adjusted to the external conditions of earth existence. This process has its culmination at puberty. At that age the human being is placed wholly within earthly conditions; he enters into his relationships with earthly conditions; the earthly is membered into his being. Therefore the element of greatest importance in the generation of the second man between the seventh and fourteenth years is what the human being brings with him from pre-earthly existence. For this reason his own specific karma only begins to work after puberty. Then the earthly works in. A culmination is reached at puberty and the third man now begins to develop.

The second man—so far as the substance is concerned—is thrown off and the third man is developed. The process does not reach so far as actual form, it only gets as far as life. If it were to get to form, we should get third teeth, because the human being is now governed by external conditions. Within these outer conditions it is the case that the human being again takes in what is extra-human. When he was being governed by the model he was directed entirely in accordance with the human. So long as he was governed by the model he was governed by something passed on by heredity. But in this there lies, in reality, something that is dried up. Since the separation of the sun it has really broken off from the root of his being and is dried up, withered. Therefore the forces of heredity contain the most pathological forces and when he is governed by the model the human being really absorbs innumerable causes of illness. He absorbs few such causes during the period after the change of teeth because then he is governed by the external world; climate, everything contained in the outer air, etc., are less harmful. Between the seventh and fourteenth years the human being is healthy; then again there begins a period when he is again susceptible.

All these conditions must be observed in such a way that you have the picture of man in your mind. If you have this picture of man in mind, then you also meditate rightly. Then you will be able to combine what you learn with what you meditate upon and what you have learned does not remain theory but becomes practice, because you uncover the power that enables you to perceive these things. This is what is so urgently needed today. It is impossible to achieve anything in medicine so long as we persist in thinking that evolution goes forward in a straight line. The human being is in reality constituted from separate streams of development which take their course in periods of seven years; what comes later is linked to what is earlier; it is not a one-sided continuation but different conditions are always intervening. Continuous evolution in this sense, where the earlier alone is the cause of the later, is only to be found in the mineral kingdom, less in the plant kingdom and least of all in the human kingdom.

Let us try to picture the plants. How do people proceed today when they picture the plants? There is the soil of the earth. The seed is pictured as being laid into the soil and then the plant grows out of this. People are naive enough to think as follows: Hydrogen is a very simple molecule, consisting of two atoms. All kinds of things are imagined to form combinations. Alcohol is certainly a very complicated molecule. Carbon is there combined with hydrogen and oxygen and then one has something more complex. And now there come still more complicated substances with more and more complicated molecules. There was a period during the eighties and nineties of the last century when the titles of these were very complicated, consisting of more than three lines in length. Yes, the molecule has become terribly complicated! And now still more so. Then it becomes a seed, and a seed is a most highly complicated combination. Then the plant grows out of the seed. But all this is nonsense. The basis of the seed formation is, in reality, that earthly matter tears itself away from the principle of structure and passes over into chaos, becomes chaotic, contains no more forces of matter in itself. Then, when no earthly structure is present, what is working out of the cosmos can assert itself. The cosmic declares its readiness to mirror the cosmic structure in the minute. In the seed formation the “nothingness” asserts itself over against the earthly and the cosmos works into the nothingness.

Frau Dr. Kolisko could tell you an interesting fact which entirely confirms this. During investigations into the function of the spleen we took small rabbits and excised the spleen. In spite of this the rabbits were quite well. They did not die of the operation, but a long time afterwards, from colds. It was quite possible to see how the rabbits live on without the spleen. When one of the rabbits died, we were able to see what had happened and in the place of the spleen there had appeared tissue which had assumed a decidedly spherical form. What had really happened? We had excised the physical spleen and by doing this had artificially driven earthly substance into chaos, made it accessible to the cosmic forces, and something resembling a seed formation had come into being. There had arisen, in an extremely primitive form, something that resembled the structure of a seed—an image of the cosmos. This quite harmless vivisection, therefore, confirmed a matter of great significance, for this is what appears to spiritual-scientific observation.

Take a quartz crystal. It is an earthly thing. Why? Why is the quartz crystal an earthly thing, retaining its form really in a very pedantic, rigid way? The quartz gets its form from an inner force and if you break it apart with a hammer the single parts always retain the tendency to be six-sided prisms, self-contained, six-sided pyramids. This tendency is present. You can as little rid the quartz of this tendency as you can get pedantry out of a man who is pedantic by nature. You may atomize a pedantic person, but he will still remain pedantic. The quartz does not allow itself to come to the point where the cosmos can do anything with its forces. Therefore the quartz has no life. If the quartz could be pulverized to such a degree that in the single fragments it no longer had the tendency to be governed, in the single fragment, by its own forces, something living and cosmic would grow out of the quartz. This is what happens in the formation of a seed. In the seed, matter is driven out to such a degree that the cosmos can intervene with its etheric forces. The world must be seen as a perpetual entering into chaos and again an emergence from chaos. What is contained in quartz also came at one time from the cosmos, but it remained at a standstill, has become Ahrimanic. It no longer exposes itself to the cosmic forces. As soon as anything enters into the realm of the living it must always pass through chaos.

This again is something which will help you to meditate in the sense of medicine. And you can also picture the developed plant—how it grows from leaf to leaf, and so on. You come to the formation of the seed in the fruit. Whereas you otherwise picture the seed plant as brightness it now becomes dark, quite dark. Then again comes the light, when the forces from outside take hold. In this way, too, you can make an imaginative picture from the being of the plant. When you are aware of an object which you call “plant”—then it is an imaginative meditation. You should not remain in the sphere of the intellectual but in the sphere of the concrete, inner picture. The intellectual element is merely there for the purpose of presenting what is known, in the form of thoughts.

Suppose you write down the word Menschenkind. This word is taken from something that has been perceived. Very well. The word Menschenkind reminds you of a Menschenkind (a human child). But suppose you take the word and say: I like the i, so I will put that first, I like the n, so I will put that next, then the sch and so on. You can put the word together in a different way but nothing that you can make anything of will come out of it. This is what people are doing with concepts all the time. The concept is only the spiritual term for the perception. People separate and combine concepts and think in acts of thinking. They do this, too, when they are observing the external world. They cover up observation with thinking and so they live today outside reality. This is possible as long as one is working with the science that stands outside reality, with geometry and arithmetic. But if we want to go in for medicine we cannot stand outside reality. If we do, then we also stand outside reality in medical practice itself.

Today I may begin with an experience of my own. Once I had the opportunity to visit a man in the afternoon, around two o'clock. He was lying on a daybed and at first he seemed so absorbed in his own thoughts that he didn't notice that I and another person had entered. He continues to reflect and seems to pay no attention to those around him. One can get the impression – and I ask you to put every word on the scale – that one is standing before a person who has been intensively occupied with difficult questions and problems all morning, then had lunch and is now using this time to let his soul go over what he has been working on. One can get the impression of this personality, who is covered up to his chest by a blanket, as an extremely fresh person, whose mental freshness is also expressed in the fresh color of his face. One can get the impression of a very rare human forehead, which is actually a combination of a beautiful artist's forehead and a thinker's forehead, the impression of a personality who reflects completely freshly on the great problems of humanity. This personality, who could have impressed the person who saw her in this way, had already been insane for more than three years when she offered this picture. Such moments as the one described alternated with terrible ones, but we want to hold on to this moment.

The personality was Friedrich Nietzsche, whom I had not seen before and could not see again afterward. You can appreciate that such a vision is in itself something profoundly significant from a spiritual-scientific point of view. Because the description actually contradicts the true facts, I said: One could have received this impression. One must bear in mind a peculiar phenomenon: that a contradiction arises between the inner and the outer. At that time Nietzsche no longer knew anything of his work. He did not know that he had written his writings, did not know his surroundings and much more. And yet he looked so fresh, as if imbued with a deep thought, lying on the bed, and one could have carried within oneself a strange sensation, which those who have been dealing with spiritual problems for some time will understand better, namely the sensation: How is it that this soul still hovers around this body?

A deep examination of Nietzsche's personality and his mental work can, to a certain extent, provide an answer to this question. Indeed, in Nietzsche we have a very peculiar personality before us. It will hardly be possible for anyone who somehow takes the position: either I accept or I reject – who cannot selflessly engage with what this personality was in itself. It may be that anthroposophists in particular take umbrage with my writing 'Friedrich Nietzsche, a fighter against his time'. For it is in the nature of our time that it says: Well, anyone who talks about Nietzsche like that must also be a Nietzschean. But I can say: If I had not succeeded in making this fact: to delve into a personality without considering my own experiences, then I would not speak of it today as I can and may speak of it.

There is a point of view of independent objectivity. It is as if one were the mouthpiece of the other being. In the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, this kind of consideration is also necessary for its own sake. It would probably make a strange impression on Nietzsche's personality if he could perceive today within the brain what Nietzsche's followers and opponents write. Both would then touch him in a most peculiar way. He would have a loathing for all his deeds. His words would stand before his soul: “What is the fate of all believers...; only when you have all denied me will I return to you.” And now, after we have presented the feeling that we could have received at Nietzsche's sickbed, we want to try to get an idea of Nietzsche as it appears through himself and through modern intellectual life.

Nietzsche stood at this time quite apart from many other minds. We may grasp the character of his soul best by saying that much of what was concept, representation, idea, conviction for other people became for him sensation, feeling, innermost experience. Let us call up before our minds the images of modern intellectual life over the last fifty to sixty years, which also passed before him. The materialism of the 1950s, which had adherents in almost all civilized countries, said: Nothing is real but matter and its motion. That matter takes on the form we see it in is caused by motion. In the brain, motion causes thought. We remember the time when it was said that language was a development of animal sounds. We also remember that experience and sensation were thought of as higher instincts. We remember that it was not the worst minds that formulated such thoughts. The most worthy and consistent even found a certain satisfaction in them. There was not one who would have thought: I do not see with satisfaction the rule of matter. Most said: I find the highest bliss in the thought that everything should dissolve. - Many could get intoxicated by that. We consider the fact that in this world view a system also came about, and that it reached its highest flowering through it.

And then we paint a different picture, the picture of the soul concept of such a person, who directs his gaze to the great ideals of humanity, who directs his gaze back to Buddha, Hermes, Pythagoras, Plato, who could be uplifted by the figure of Christ Jesus, the bearer of human spiritual deeds, the bearer of all that elevates the human heart. We paint for ourselves the picture of a man who could feel all this. And we realize that this man said to himself: Ah, all the Buddhas, Hermes, Pythagoras, Plato, they all only dreamed of lofty spiritual ideals, of something that could uplift them.

I am not telling you something that I have invented. I am describing the soul of many people in the 1960s. These thoughts were present in people who were overwhelmed by materialism and who considered ideals to be a mere fantasy. And a deep tragedy settled upon the souls of such people. Friedrich Nietzsche lived in such a time as a student and young professor. He educated himself in such a time. He was not related to any of the other spirits. His type was quite different from that of his contemporaries. One can understand him in spiritual scientific terms. If one takes into account that the human being consists of several bodies, then one can know that even the young Nietzsche was exceptional in the way his ether body and physical body were put together. Nietzsche had a much weaker connection between his etheric body and his physical body, so that what this personality experienced inwardly in his soul was experienced in a much more spiritual way, much more independently of the physical body, than is the case with other people.

Now it was first the student Nietzsche who was led into the world of the Greeks. For him, there were now two currents in his soul life. One we call something innate, lying in his karma. This was a deeply religious trait, that was a mood of his being, a trait that must worship something, look up to something. Religious feeling was there; and through the peculiar way in which this etheric body was connected to the physical body, what was a condition for this was present in him: an enormous receptivity for what could be read and heard between the lines of the books and between the words of the teachers, what could be felt and sensed. Thus he formed a picture of the ancient Greek world that completely filled his soul, a unique picture that lived more in feeling than in clear imagination. If we want to visualize it as it was experienced by the young Nietzsche, we have to consider him and his time.

Nietzsche had a loose connection with the materialism of his time. He could understand it, but this materialism was something that hardly touched him. Since his etheric body was only slightly connected to the physical body, the materialistic time touched him only as a floating figure is touched by the hem of the dress barely touching the ground. Only one thing was present in him as a dark feeling, the feeling of the deep dissatisfaction of such a world view. The feeling that a person who has such a world view faces the bleakness, the emptiness of life; that was what touched his soul like a faint hint. Above that arose what lived in his soul as an attitude toward Greek culture. We understand this when we learn to comprehend what lived in his soul. This image was not one in which sharp words could be chosen. We will try to present it as it can reveal itself to us through spiritual science.

The spiritual scientist looks into an ancient human development, of which history no longer knows anything. Only clairvoyance can illuminate these times, when wisdom was very different from later times, when people who were ripe for it were initiated into the mysteries and through the initiates were brought to an understanding of human development. If we want to get an idea of the lower mysteries, we have to imagine a special process. This initiation or teaching did not take place as it does today. Learning consisted of something quite different. Let us assume that the thought, which man today expresses so dryly, that spiritual beings descended into the material, but that the material ascended and developed until it became the present human being, that this thought, which is so sober, was presented in an important image at that time. One could literally see the descent of the spirit and the ascent of the material. This took place literally; and what the student saw there was wisdom to him; it was science to him, but not expressed in concepts, but tangible in intuition. There was something else as well. The picture the student saw was such that he sat before it with great, pious feelings. He received wisdom and religion at the same time. Besides, the whole picture was beautiful. It was true, genuine art. The student was surrounded by art, wisdom and religion combined into one.

It is rooted in the course of human development that what was united was separated: art, science and religion. For there could have been no progress in human development if people had kept all this united. In order for each to be perfected in the individual, what had previously been united had to be separated: science, art and religion, in order to be able to flow together at a higher level of perfection later on. What now presents itself in sharp contours, think of it as shrouded in a veil so that one merges into the other. And think that in Greek cultural life an echo of the ancient development of humanity is being lived out and only a dark inkling, a feeling of it, remains in Greek cultural life.

So you have the feeling that this was alive in young Nietzsche; that was the fundamental sound of his soul. The dullness of sensual existence is suffering; to endure it, art, science and religion are given to us. To spread salvation over this suffering is the basic mood of his soul. The image of Greek art increasingly came into his field of vision. Art became a great means for him to endure life in the sensual. And so he grew up. He was in this frame of mind when he graduated from high school. As is often the case with such natures, he was able to acquire with great ease what others can only acquire with difficulty. It was easy for Nietzsche to acquire the external tools of the philologist and thus bring order into his basic mood. Then came the time when he perfected himself more and more. Now we see how gradually an inkling of the ancient spiritual connection of the various currents of humanity dawns on him. He sensed this connection as an indefinite darkness. He sensed a higher power that ruled in the individual personalities. When he immersed himself in the real Greek way of thinking, in the thoughts of Thales, Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, a remarkable idea formed in him that distinguishes him so much from others. He himself once said: When I immerse myself in Greek philosophy, I cannot do it like others, like others do it; that is only a means for me. Now he is developing what distinguishes him so much from other thinkers. We can best make this clear to ourselves by means of an example. Let us take Thales. An ordinary scholar takes up the teachings of Thales, but for him Thales is more or less a historical example. He studies the spirit of the time in him. For Nietzsche, all the thoughts of this philosopher are only an approach, only a way to the soul of Thales himself; Thales stands before him in the flesh, vividly. He forms a friendship with him, he can associate with him, he has a purely personal relationship of friendship with him. Every figure becomes real for Nietzsche, is truly related to him. Look at what he wrote, look at that essay: “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,” 1872/73, and you will find it there. He is there to make friends through philosophy with those he describes. But when you enter into such intimate relationships, it means something completely different for the heart and soul than our dry science. Just think how dull a learned history is! It can only be a learned hypothesis.

Love, suffering and pain, the whole range of the soul's emotions, can only be experienced by ordinary people in relation to the people who surround us in everyday life. Everything from the deepest pain to the highest bliss, the whole gamut of feelings, could be experienced by Nietzsche in relation to the souls that arose for him from the gray depths of the mind. The beings to whom he felt drawn lived in completely different realms than his daily environment. What ordinary people feel in everyday life takes place in Nietzsche in relation to his friends, who have arisen for him out of the spiritual world. Thus, a spiritual world was available to him in which he felt suffering, joy and love. He was always somewhat floating above reality, the world of the senses. This is the great difference that distinguishes him from the other people of his time.

And now let us see how this life was shaped! Above all, we see his great ease of comprehension. He had not yet completed his doctorate when the University of Basel asked his teacher Ritschl, the great philologist, whether he could recommend a student for a professorship. He recommended Nietzsche, and when, in view of Nietzsche's youth, it was asked whether he was really suitable, Ritschl wrote: “Nietzsche will be able to do anything he wants.” So the young scholar became a professor in Basel. He was appointed doctor when he was already a professor, and without an exam, because the gentlemen before whom he was to take the exam said: “But, colleague, we can't examine you.” These things go their easy course, floating above reality, quite understandably.

Then a twofold event happens for him. He gets to know the soul content of a person who has already died and of a living person. He gets to know a soul in Schopenhauer, which he cannot contemplate like a human being whose philosophical system he looks at and admires, and whose teachings he would swear by, but he has a feeling towards him as if he would like to say to him, “Father!” And he gets to know Richard Wagner, who had remarkable experiences of the soul that touched on what Nietzsche felt when contemplating Greek culture. We need only sketch out a few lines to describe Richard Wagner. We need only recall that Richard Wagner said: There must have been a time when all the arts were united. He himself felt the great ideal of humanity to bring the arts together again as an artist, to unite them and to cast a religious, consecrating mood over them. Now we think of how something in Nietzsche came to life that conjured up in his soul that original state of humanity when the arts were still united. We think of his words: “If you want to describe the true human being, you must take into account that something higher lives in every human being. If you want to describe true humanity, you must go to the figures that reach beyond sensuality.” He was always a little suspended over the reality of the sensual world. In his search for that higher, for the figures that reach beyond sensuality, he was led to the “superman,” to the spirit-filled superman. Thus he created his pure, serene, mythical figures.

In this sense, he was led to the higher language, to music, to the language of the orchestra, which could become the expression of the soul. Let us recall what lived in Richard Wagner's soul: Shakespearean and Beethovenian figures stood before him. In Shakespeare, he saw acting figures. He saw figures whose actions take place when they have felt soul, when they have had feelings of pain and suffering and feelings of supreme bliss. In Shakespeare's dramas, according to Richard Wagner, the result of the soul experiences of the characters appears. This is a drama that seeks solely to externalize the inner life. And in Shakespeare, one can sense the experiences of the soul of the characters. Alongside this, the image of Beethoven the symphonist appeared to him. In the symphony, Wagner saw the reproduction of what lives in the soul, in the whole gamut of feelings between suffering and bliss. In the symphony, the soul's feelings are given full rein, but do not become action, do not enter the room. Once, in the conclusion of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, this inner experience in Beethoven's music seemed to him to want to externalize itself with all its might. Wagner wants to step in at this point. He wants to continue Beethoven in a certain sense. He wants to bring about a synthesis, a unification between Shakespeare's and Beethoven's art. Something of that primeval human culture was alive in Wagner. What lived in him as an impulse must have appeared to Nietzsche as the realization of his most significant dreams.

Nietzsche had a different relationship with Schopenhauer. He read Schopenhauer with fervor. As with every school, he also had reservations about Schopenhauer. All the more was the feeling in him to call him “father.” He had a deep relationship with him. Schopenhauer was not as heavy for him as Richard Wagner. He feels the purifying, ennobling influence of Schopenhauer. Thus we see the genesis of his work “Schopenhauer as Educator.” All this arose from the feeling of saying “father” to him. One cannot imagine a picture that could create a more vivid bond between the living and the dead.

But there was something in Nietzsche's question that Schopenhauer did not answer. The question of cultural connections always came to his mind. He had intuitively grasped the original state of humanity, in which great individual spirits, the initiates, taught and led men in the mysteries. Thus he arrived at the concept of the “superman,” who, he believed, must necessarily arise out of the history of natural evolution. That is his concept of the superman, as the sentence shows: “By raising itself to the great human being, nature fulfills its highest goal, the great personality.” Thus, for him, nature and man are linked together. And now everything he experiences becomes something other than theory. It becomes a very personal emotional experience. It becomes something in which his pain, his joy, his desire for action glows. What he says is less important than that what he says points to what was glowing in his heart. And from the fading away of what he experiences in his soul, his first significant work emerges: 'The Birth of Tragedy'. There he almost falls on how Greek culture developed from ancient Greece, from the state of the united arts. And one may say: here something of the deep truth is touched upon. He knows nothing of that primeval culture which one gets to know through spiritual science. He only senses it. He believes that the first beginnings of art would have played themselves out in grotesque, paradoxical forms; that human beings would have indulged in wild, grotesque figures. And he describes it as if it had taken place in an instinctive state, whereas the art of the mysteries was the highest expression of the spiritual. As man stood in the mysteries, Nietzsche felt as if man had made himself a work of art, as if he had imitated the rhythm of the stars, the world event in dance, as if he had wanted to express the law of the world. But Nietzsche considered all this to be instinctive feeling. He did not know that the laws of the world were given to people in the purest and most noble symbolic forms by initiates in the mysteries. That is why all this has such a wild expression in Nietzsche. But it is an inkling of the actual.

But how does Nietzsche view later tragedy? He said that it was all an expression and fruit of a later time; that man had already fallen out of touch with the divine; that he no longer imitated the laws of the world in his dance; he only imitated it in pictures. He saw in it a serene image of the original, but not the original itself. Thus, already in Sophocles we have an Apollonian art that expressed the original in the static image. [Gaps in the transcript.] And through Richard Wagner, Nietzsche was led back into the old Dionysian element. You see how the conclusion of his writing “The Birth of Tragedy” is a mixture of longing, presentiment, and confusion.

But now, more and more, he was confronted with external reality. He became acquainted with what modern culture had put in the place of the old. What he had been unable to recognize in the first period of his life, what modern materialism had produced, he now became acquainted with. And from the mood that I described, that many of the noblest minds found almost a blessing in materialism, he now got to know something in his way. Now all ideals passed from his view. He once said that all these old ideals were 'put on ice' for him. Now they appeared to him as a legitimate evil, arising from human weakness. The writing of “Human, All Too Human” began.

Now comes the second period of his life. He experienced the materialistic world view in such a way that, in his own way, he had to immerse himself in it. It was his fate that he had to lock up everything he wanted to think in his soul. And just from this world view, from Darwinism, something like a release dawned on him, which in turn led him out of materialism. He looked at the development of humanity in a Darwinian way. He said to himself: Man has developed out of animality. But he also drew the consequences of this view. He had to draw them because he wanted to see clearly in relation to materialism. Because he had to live with it. So he came to the conclusion: If I look at the animal forms, I see in them the remains of an earlier culture. If I look at man, I must say that he contains as a possibility the state of perfection of the future. I may call the ape a bridge between man and animal. So what is man? A bridge between the animal and the superhuman. Thus the superhuman slumbers in man. Nietzsche felt, could not help feeling, what it means to live in such a way that what can become appears. That was the lyrical mood of his “Zarathustra”, in the Song of the Superhuman, the song that describes the future. Feeling bound him to this thought; feeling was what filled him.

And now we see how another thought is linked to this. All lyrical moods resonate in “Zarathustra”. But Nietzsche had no such points of reference as we have in Theosophy. That did not exist for him. The idea of reincarnation did not enter his field of vision, the idea that the “superman” lives in man as a higher divine self in the human body. We see the “superman” recurring, so that we see the consoling ascending line of development, not the repetition of the same. Nietzsche knew nothing of this. Yet there is a mysterious connection between what he said and our spiritual-scientific view. For Nietzsche, the idea of the eternal return of the same was now linked to the idea of the superman. The idea presented itself in a strange way and revealed itself to him in such a way that all things had already existed countless times. This thought was Nietzsche's true, very own thought. How you all think and feel, you have thought and felt countless times, and so you will think and feel countless times. This thought now combined with that of the superman. He had to feel his way into both thoughts.

Now imagine Nietzsche's organism, think of the loosening of the etheric body, which was always ready to separate from the physical body. Imagine a man who takes the thoughts he forms terribly seriously, and imagine his mood: as I am, as I feel, so will I be and feel forever. And now consider how he felt the loosening of his etheric body. He felt it in such a way that for a hundred days of the year he had the most terrible headaches. Then you can understand how this came to life in his soul: this was there countless times, it will return countless times. On the one hand, we feel comforted by the thought of the superhuman, on the other hand, we feel desolate at the thought of the eternal return of the same. And we understand moods like this: “Happy the man who still has a home!” We feel much of what is connected with the feeling of home. We feel something of the idiosyncrasy of Friedrich Nietzsche that is connected with the fate of the world view of the 19th century. He had to feel the feeling of homelessness. It is a testimony to how the world views of their time live in a deeply feeling soul, and how longing arises in it for a spiritual home.

Thus we see how it is only through Theosophy that it becomes possible to arrive at a synthesis of wisdom, art and religion, which are to be reunited into a great culture through spiritual science. Imagine the idea of the eternal return of the same developed further, so that it means reincarnation, only in this way does the thought acquire its true content, and you are filled with the hope that the union of wisdom, art and religion will arise anew. It is not the return of the same, but a constant perfecting.

We may say that a great question appears to us in Nietzsche's life, the question: How is it possible for a truly deep soul to live in the materialistic world view? In Nietzsche's soul, we have before us a soul that was unable to find the answers to the anxious questions of our culture. It lacked what we find through the anthroposophical worldview. And let us imagine another soul that has the opportunity to find these answers through anthroposophy, which gives us answers to the questions that the deepest souls must feel. Nietzsche posed these questions, but could not answer them. Longing filled him, and this longing destroyed him. He is proof that the great problems posed by the spirit must be answered by anthroposophy. The answer to longing is the remedy for Nietzsche's cry. And this remedy lies in anthroposophy. Longing was the power of Nietzsche's soul, which remained so alive that it maintained the exterior of this personality as an imprint of inner aliveness. It was as if, beyond the death of the spirit, the soul wanted to remain with the body in order to catch something of the answers that Nietzsche could not reach, that he longed for and that ultimately destroyed him. From Nietzsche's soul we can feel the necessity of anthroposophy. Let us imagine him as the great questioner, as the questioner of the questions of humanity, the answers to which determine the necessity of an anthroposophical spiritual science. ON THE MISSION OF SAVONAROLA Berlin, October 27, 1908

The word 'mission' is perhaps not quite the right one to use when considering this unique phenomenon at the end of the 15th century. And there is perhaps something else associated with the personality of Savonarola that suggests to us that it would be much more important than defining the mission of Savonarola. This other thing would be for those of us who belong to the anthroposophical worldview and world movement to familiarize ourselves with the essence of Savonarola, because there are many lessons to be learned from his activities and character. In a figure like Savonarola, we can see at the dawn of the modern era the point to which the development of Christianity had come by the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century. And we can see precisely what kind of activity is not effective. We can see what kind of activity is needed to further human development.

It might also be necessary to show how certain one-sided currents are precisely unsuitable for strengthening and introducing Christianity. We will not take long, but just a few detailed strokes to visualize the effectiveness of Savonarola. And beside him will stand out another figure, that of a very different Dominican friar, a friar who painted the monastery from which Savonarola's earnest words had been silenced with wonderful, delicate paintings: Fra Angelico da Fiesole. He is there at the dawn of this new era, as if to show that Christianity at that time expressed itself in two forms. One could carry within oneself the whole wonderful vision of the Christian figures and events, as they live in the hearts of men. One could also, in a simple way, without worrying about what was going on outwardly, without worrying about what the Church was doing, what the popes were doing, just paint what one experienced as Christianity within oneself. And that is then proof of what Christianity could become in a soul at that time. That is one way, but the other way is – and this is the way of Savonarola – to live Christianity in that period of time. If you were a person like Savonarola, with a certain amount of certainty, a strong will and a certain clarity of mind, you could do what he did: believe at a relatively young age that you could live a truly Christian life within an order like that, where the true rules of the order were to be followed. If you also had what Savonarola had, the deepest moral convictions, you also looked at what was going on in the world. You could compare Christianity with what was going on in Rome, with the truly worldly life of the Pope, the Cardinals, or how it was expressed in the magnificent creations of Michelangelo! One could observe how in all Catholic churches masses were read in the strictest worship, and how people felt that they could not live without this worship. But one could also see that those who were under the gown and stole and chasuble indulged in a liberality in their civil life that what is striven for today as liberality is child's play by comparison. One could see that what is wanted today from a certain side and what is striven for as a tendency is realized up to the highest steps of the altar.

And one could combine an ardent belief in the higher worlds with an absolutely democratic sense: the rule of God and no human ruler! That was one of Savonarola's heartfelt desires. One could admire the Medicis for all they had done in Italy, for all they had brought Italy, but one could also, as Savonarola did, regard the great Medici, Lorenzo de' Medici, as a tyrant.

You could be Lorenzo de' Medici and think about having a quarrelsome Dominican preach as you wished. Lorenzo de' Medici was a man of noble thoughts. He could grasp various things, for one must look at things from two sides. He had invited Savonarola to Florence, and from the very beginning Savonarola went against the grain of Lorenzo as his patron. And when Savonarola became prior of the monastery, he did not even comply with the custom of paying a visit of thanks to Lorenzo. When this was pointed out to him, and also that Lorenzo had summoned him to Florence after all, he said: “Do you believe that it was Lorenzo de' Medici who summoned Savonarola to Florence? No, it was God who summoned Savonarola to this monastery in Florence!”

But Lorenzo, as a nobleman, donated many things to the monastery, and one could believe that one could tame Savonarola somewhat by giving to the monastery. But he gave away all these gifts and declared that the Dominicans were there to keep the vow of poverty and not to collect riches.

Who were Savonarola's enemies, really? All those who had established the configuration, the domination on the physical plane. Nothing deterred Savonarola. He went straight ahead. He said: There is a Christianity. In its true form, it is unknown to people. The church has distorted it. It must disappear, and in its place must arise new organizations, in which will be shown how the true Christian spirit can shape the outer reality. He preached these sentences over and over again. At first he preached with great difficulty, for at first he could only force the words out with an effort. But he became an orator, whose following grew larger and larger, whose oratorical talents increased more and more.

The ruling powers were initially liberal; they did not want to do anything against him. An Augustinian friar was sent to deliver a speech that would sweep away Savonarola's power. And one day an Augustinian friar spoke on the subject: “It does not behoove us to know the day and hour when the divine creator intervenes in the world!” The Augustinian monk spoke with flaming words, and one would like to say, knowing the currents that have flooded through Christian life: the whole confession of Dominicanism stood against Augustinianism. And Savonarola prepared for battle and spoke on the same theme: “It behooves us well to know that things are not as they are. It behoves us to change them and then to know when the day and hour will come!” The people of Florence cheered him as they had cheered the Augustinian monk. He was considered dangerous not only in Florence, but also in Rome and throughout Italy. After tremendous torture and falsified records, he was sentenced to death by fire.

That was Savonarola, who lived at the same time as the other Dominican monk, who painted a Christianity that hardly existed in the physical world. And if we recall a word spoken by a remarkable man, what it means for Savonarola: Jacob Burckhardt, the famous historian of the Renaissance, formed the opinion that at that time the development of life in Italy had reached such a point that one was on the verge of secularizing the church, that is, of making the church a worldly organization, we see that Savonarola represented the eternal conscience of Christianity.

Why was it that Savonarola, who stood up for Christianity with such fire, remained ineffective after all? Because he is an historical figure. This was the reason: that at this dawn of the New Era and at this dusk of the Church, when Savonarola represented the conscience of Christianity, something had to be brought forward against the external institutions of Christianity. The test has been passed that even a figure like Savonarola was not needed to restore Christianity. Those striving in spiritual science should learn from this that something else is needed, something objective, something that makes it possible to tap the deep sources of esoteric Christianity. Such an instrument can only be Anthroposophy. The figure of Savonarola is like a distant sign shining in the future, indicating that anthroposophists should teach not by the means by which one could believe in those days to rediscover Christianity, but by the means of anthroposophical spiritual science. As an anthroposophist, one can learn a great deal from this figure.

Dear attendees,

If today, as an outsider, one considers the attitude and way of thinking of spiritual science – or, as one is accustomed to calling it, theosophy – and tries to form an opinion about the peculiarity of this spiritual science or theosophy based on the usual conceptions of our time , then an outsider can very easily form the, in a sense, justified opinion that spiritual science is something that conjures up high ideals before the human soul: ideals that tend towards certain insights - perhaps the outsider will say, towards supposed insights - about the human soul, about nature and spirit. And outsiders will say to themselves: Well, these ideas, these insights are very beautiful, they satisfy the human soul that longs for inner certainty, and so it is understandable that many profess Theosophy out of this thirst. And when those who have something to say in spiritual science express what they know about the world of appearances and what goes beyond what our natural science - which is admired by spiritual science - has to say, the outsider may say to himself: Yes, what the spiritual scientist has to say about natural phenomena sounds fantastic. The fantastic element is something that the outsider must notice at first. Those who are immersed in spiritual science will find it extremely understandable that the outsider finds so much fantasy in spiritual science. Those who really want to be grounded in natural science can only say: I can't do anything with it. That is quite understandable. If we now consider, by contrast, a person who has penetrated somewhat deeper into theosophy, who has familiarized himself with what is really presented to the striving soul, who has informed himself about what the human soul and human spirit are, we can see feelings of a completely different kind arising in him. Such a person can direct his gaze to what our present age, out of its scientific views, has to say about the task, goal, and value of spiritual life and its engagement in practical work. And here it sometimes seems truly fantastic to the person who is familiar with spiritual science what the materialistic attitude has to say about individual branches of spiritual life. One need only listen to what is offered in the field of education and pedagogy. To the spiritual researcher, it seems like a collection of empty phrases and words. One can look around in the wide range of what educational cultural endeavors are and will find all kinds of fine words. Who has not heard the words that everything that is implanted into the human soul should be avoided, because it is about the education of the human individuality. But who can say anything other than fantastic, empty words if they cannot grasp the true concept of what the human individuality is. Compared to spiritual science, materialistic science appears as a sum of abstractions; it appears as something unrealistic. And if you cannot convince yourself that spiritual science not only has to cultivate life practice, but that it is capable of realistically getting to the bottom of things, you misunderstand the importance of realistic knowledge for life practice.

When we reflect on the growing child, in relation to whom we have an educational task, with the ideas of spiritual science, then, as this child finds its way into life, we are overcome by the feeling that we have a sacred mystery before us in this being, which we can only solve with deep reverence. In every growing soul we sense that there is something in it that is different from anything we see. We sense an unknown in the developing human being, and we are right. Our awe and reverence cannot be great enough when we face the education of the child, and our humility before every being that always confronts us like a new mystery cannot be great enough either. I would not dare to speak about it if I had only been occupied with spiritual science. But I dare to speak about it because for fifteen years as an educator I have felt the sacred riddles myself.

From the point of view of the modern man, it is child's play not only to scoff but also to refute with the appearance of reason the fantastic idea of the re-embodiment of man, the idea of the reappearance of the human soul in a new life. Today, this idea of re-embodiment will only be mentioned in as much as it is pointed out that our soul, which today lives through the time between birth and death in our body, has often gone through life and that we live through the present life as a cause in order to experience the effects and fruits later. Theoretically, this idea is easy to refute. The matter looks different when one is involved in practical educational work and sees the child's soul growing and developing from week to week, from year to year, with the right feelings. If one starts from the premise that one wants to educate correctly, one must say to oneself: You have to intervene in what has been laid down for millennia. And if you look at every expression of the child from this point of view and take every measure accordingly, then you will see how fruitful the education is. Anyone who knows the laws of so-called logical refutation knows how little a theoretical refutation means. But if you work in the spirit of this view, then you feel its truth.

Now one is indeed faced with a difficult task if one wants to see clearly what is growing in the developing child's soul. Everyone knows the purely external facts. But who has not experienced in life how powerless the educator often is when certain tasks are set by external laws or by the demands of parents, how powerless he feels when the tasks set contradict the abilities and talents that are present in the child. Who has not felt and seen in life that we often cannot achieve anything, even with the greatest effort, if the child's talent does not meet us halfway. How often does life show us how powerless we are, not only because of the child's lack of talent, but also because of our lack of insight.

We have tried to educate the child; however, it is not immediately apparent when we have educated the child wrongly. If we follow a pupil in his later life, something peculiar often becomes apparent to us, namely that he must later squeeze talent and aptitude out of his soul through difficult struggles. And we realize: if we had recognized this, we would have been able to help him, we would have saved him much effort in what could only come later. And we realize how necessary it is to focus on this difficult question: what about the child's abilities and talents, and how should we approach the educational tasks?

Even today, there is understandable confusion regarding these fundamental questions, because there are still influential suggestive ideas and suggestive concepts that understandably have a numbing effect on people, and such concepts guide the whole of human thinking. One such concept is that of inheritance. When talking about a child's disposition and talents, who would not initially think: What has been inherited from parents and ancestors? I have already pointed out that Goethe once expressed the words with very understandable modesty, but they stem from deeper insights:

From my father I have the stature, the serious conduct of life, from my mother the cheerful nature and the desire to tell stories.

And after he expresses some more inheritance relationships, he concludes with the words:

What is now to be called original about the whole figure

?

Posterity has already answered this in part, and a later posterity will still answer it.

Anyone who has studied Goethe for a little more than twenty years has a right to speak about him without bias. All respect for the Frankfurt councilman, from whom Goethe inherited “the stature to lead a serious life”! And when one sees the mother's mobile, loving way of looking at life and dealing with people, then one also realizes what Goethe means to say about what he inherited from his mother, “the cheerful nature and the desire to tell stories.” Try adding all this up and see what comes out. When one adds up and reflects on all that was inherited, one finds: What Goethe could not inherit was precisely that which was effective – that was the actual Goethe himself, that was what allowed the guiding powers to flow in. They used the inheritance that presented itself to them to express [what was special about him.

And it is the same with every individual, as with great and significant people. You can't get by if you want to trace everything back to heredity and don't take into account the individuality that unfolds according to its own laws. For those who look at this life impartially, the question of how what we may trace back to our ancestors, what is visibly there, relates to the individual, is by no means simplified. What is inherited is not denied by spiritual science. But how does spiritual science relate to what is incorporated into what is inherited? After all, inheritance can be seen everywhere. There are people who say that when new traits appear that we do not find in our ancestors, we can still think of heredity, because the traits that we have inherited may have been present in our other ancestors, but they had no opportunity to develop them. This is something that is often said. If you talk like that, then you really have a very vague concept of traits. That is not realistic; one can dream up concepts anywhere. Such people seem to me like someone who says: every brick has the potential to fall on someone's head. But there has to be someone there [for the brick to fall on]. Those who think realistically cannot speak of potential in this way.

It is the task of true education to separate what is inheritable from what is not. Basically, one could – because it is popular today to delve into the animal kingdom – get an idea of heredity. The chicken egg contains what is inherited, but warmth must be added from the outside. Thus we see that an essential prerequisite is warmth, which is not present in the germ itself. Nevertheless, a superficial consideration shows that in animals the things are hereditary, while in humans we must certainly also speak of non-heritable things. Consider how, in the animal, what we call instinct is undoubtedly there from the start, and visibly so, in that it must lie in the line of inheritance; and the animal is a generic creature in that it inherits all the qualities that are more abundant in it than in man, for example, in relation to skill. In this respect, man is worse off than the animal. When he is humble, man tends to twist the concepts according to humility, or when he is proud, to twist them according to pride. And when he is proud, he is inclined to say that animals are far below man. This does not apply in such an absolute sense. Everyone can read about how culture has developed, how long it took human intelligence to come up with paper production, for example. The wasps had already invented paper long before that. So when we look at the animal kingdom, we can see that intelligence is simply realized directly from instincts. One could conclude from this that humans are actually no more intelligent than animals.

There are certain things that humans cannot inherit. Everyone will admit that the ability to build a wasp nest is inherited. But no one should doubt that a person who is placed in a wasteland will never develop language or self-awareness. Language and human self-awareness cannot be inherited; they are not passed on to the next generation, they must always be learned anew. Thus, outward appearances teach that the most important things are not to be judged as they are in the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, who would deny that there are indeed things that are inherited? Who would deny that? When Schopenhauer says that he inherited much of his thinking nature from his mother and much of his will nature from his father, who would deny that there is something important and true in this, even if it is expressed in a misleading way. Thus we see that man actually comes into existence with inherited traits, and we have the task of distinguishing these inherited traits from that which is not inheritable. Experience shows this. Now someone might say: We are happy to admit that language and self-awareness cannot be inherited, but we do not need to make such a subtle distinction, because that takes care of itself; if a person is born into a particular language area, it will simply follow that [he speaks that language].

But what if there are perhaps non-inheritable characteristics that we first have to extract from the deeper sources of human individuality? In this case, it is not quite so easy to distinguish these abilities and talents that lie at the core of a person's being from the inherited characteristics. It is certainly a matter of heredity when seven musicians come from the Bach family. Nevertheless, anyone who takes a practical approach to education will not be able to do other than to single out the inner core of the being from what is inherited. Here one must be completely clear about how the conditions of heredity present themselves in life. We see when a child comes into existence that it resembles the father or the mother more, that it has certain qualities that point to the mother and certain qualities that point to the father. Anyone who looks at life with an open mind will soon notice that there is indeed a difference between what is transmitted from the father and what is transmitted from the mother to the children. Of course, the circumstances mix, but one can still distinguish between what is maternal and what is paternal. And if you look deeper, it becomes clear how the two parts are distributed: it turns out that everything we see in inherited traits and that relates to the quality of intelligence or judgment, to the agility of intelligence or judgment, can be traced back to the mother's traits. And those qualities that can be summarized by saying that the strength of character, the strength and the power to face life, everything that is of a strong-willed nature in the son and daughter, can be traced back to the qualities of the father. I am not saying that the child's intelligence leads back to the mother's intelligence, but I am saying that the child's intelligence leads back to qualities of the mother's intelligence, and the child's strength of character leads back to qualities of the father's character.

If we look at these things more closely, it soon becomes apparent that there are great differences in the way parental life progresses and in the characteristics of the child's life, especially with regard to whether a child is, so to speak, an early child of marriage or a late one. If a child is born later, it shows the educator completely different relationships to the parents than if it is born during the parents' youth. Observation shows that in children born late in marriage, those qualities of the mother or father that have already been lived out in a certain way in their profession tend to emerge more strongly, and in these children the imprint of the parents is much more clearly visible. There is much greater flexibility of intelligence, and the character is much less clearly defined. It is interesting to consider these facts in relation to the child, because we have to take them into account and ask ourselves: what is it that carries the inheritance?

Inheritance is a process that takes place in the physical world. What is inherited? What is inherited is what has actually entered the physical body. If we say that the qualities of intelligence are inherited, we must know that what appears in the child is bound to the physical body, for example to the brain. Because we receive this as an instrument, so to speak, it is natural that we show hereditary traits. We inherit the more intimate formation of the organs and have to adapt to them. Thus it is explainable - because we have inherited organs - that we are dependent on these organs. A somewhat crude comparison: if you are born without a hand, you see how dependent you are on it. It is basically always the physical that comes into consideration when we speak of inheritance, as I have done now. And from this crystallizes that which shows itself to the practical observation of life as an individual core, which we do not understand when we trace it back to inheritance conditions.

The child comes into the world with a certain agility of intelligence and judgment. We look at the mother and see the origins. We study the child's character by looking at the father and thus gain insight into the child's character. But then something strange remains – and that is the most important thing for the educator. Only when he brings this into harmony with heredity can everything [that happens in education] be successful. The judgments that develop have qualities that point to the mother. But within this type of judgment, there are indications of very specific spheres of life that cannot be traced back to the mother. Within the mother's qualities, one child may show an inclination towards music, for example, while another may gravitate towards mathematics. It would be a serious mistake to direct the child's intelligence in any particular direction. The nature of the intelligence can be inherited, but the specific direction, the aptitude for this or that, may be revealed by the nature of the intelligence, but it cannot be inherited. It is left to us as educators to look at the mother and to understand the mobility of the intelligence, for example, why the child must think slowly or quickly. But it still remains for us to understand the inclination towards this or that, towards the specifically individual.

In other respects, strength of character and self-will clearly emerge as traits inherited from the father, and we understand this in the child when we look at the father. But there is one thing we cannot understand. Something emerges, crystallizing like a nucleus: that is the direction of interest towards which this character is turning. We see this direction of interest in one child, and a different direction of interest in another – these are specifically individual.

And if we are clever as educators, we will ask: What are the judgmental qualities of the mother and the character traits of the father? But if we want to educate properly, we need to know the direction of interest of the character and the direction of intelligence. It is very easy to confuse these two aspects. This is why, in a family where a child takes after the father, the father has a difficult time bringing up the child. And conversely, where the child takes after the mother, the mother has a difficult time. Children who take after their father are easier for their mother to bring up. Children who are particularly mother-oriented are more easily brought up by the father. If a child is father-oriented, then it has the will impulses of the father; the father cannot transfer the direction of interest, but the talents occur within the mother's sphere. One consequence is that the father will understand little of the child in this area; the child will take after the father in character, and the mother is best able to cultivate the talents. If, on the other hand, the child takes after the mother, the mother will find it difficult to direct the child's interest; the father can do that:

A talent develops in seclusion,
a character in the stream of the world.

Talents develop in the mildness of the mother's care; characters develop in the firmness of the father's care. This is a golden principle.

As a rule, people do not approach us in such a way that they clearly represent a mixture of the qualities inherited from father and mother; as a rule, it is the case that either more paternal or more maternal influence comes to the fore. This gives rise to extraordinarily important principles for the educator. If we assume that the maternal element predominates, then we can often see that the child appears to be of excellent character, and it is easy to guess the specific talent in this abundance of intelligence. But if the paternal element is suppressed, then it becomes really difficult for us to find the special direction of interest in the suppressed paternal inheritance. In such cases we, as educators, must supply what has not been provided by heredity. We must look particularly at the father to see whether he is relaxed or firm, and then we must replace what has been left out of the inheritance. We can do this by looking at the opposite side. We soon find the talents and abilities, but what is not given in the inheritance, we must replace through education.

What should the educator do? There is something infinitely important here: if he sees that what can be inherited from the father is not pronounced sharply enough, then he must work to ensure that the talents are not left without guidance. He must work to direct the child's attention to such activities and pursuits that correspond to his talents. The talents must be tied to external objects. The interests must be awakened. A child who is inclined towards the mother, we must especially accustom to the fact that it has the objects corresponding to its talents in the environment, to which we draw its attention. But we must not follow the principle: the child has its own abilities, so we let it follow them.

Now, let us assume that a child takes after his father, then it becomes difficult for us to guess the talents, abilities and aptitudes. On the other hand, the direction of interest confronts us with an extraordinarily strong will impulse. This interest will express itself in the intensity of desire. And we must be especially careful not to assume that the direction of interest will always point to the right gift. In such a case, we must pay particular attention to studying the interests in the right way. But if we allow interests to mature for which there is no gift, we harm the child. What expresses itself as a soul quality and does not correspond to any gift is reflected back into the soul. This is a constant source of illness that disturbs the physical nervous system. Many such disturbances can be traced back to a failure to harmonize interests with gifts and talents. It will show - which is extremely instructive to see - how certain interests express themselves impulsively, but lead to clumsiness, while others lead to skill. Far too little attention is paid to this. But one should carefully distinguish between the interests. And then, as an educator, one has the task of keeping away what would lead the interest to clumsiness.

The best way to get along is to ask yourself: What is the father like and what is the mother like? - and then carefully examine what appears as a crystal core within the paternal and maternal inheritance treasure. In this sense, we can say that education must really be based on knowledge and not on empty phrases such as “educate harmoniously” or “take the individuality into account”. How can we educate harmoniously if we do not know what the interests are? How can we emphasize the individuality if we do not know how to find what is specifically individual?

Now, this is only one side of education. The human being is not placed in the world for his own sake, but for the sake of humanity. We cannot merely take into account what appears in the child as inherited. The educator will soon realize that with the law of karma a great, harmonious relationship is expressed in spiritual-scientific terms. You can easily observe outside [in nature] how a being is placed where it belongs. The edelweiss does not grow in the lowlands, but on mountain heights. Every being grows into its environment and cannot thrive where it does not fit in. It is the same with the human core, which fits into the “environment” to which it belongs. Things fit together better than one might think. That is why the talents go well with the mother and the interests go well with the father. Nevertheless, we have to look at something else. The human being is not designed to speak his own language, but that of the community into which he is born. That is the generic. Thus, through the common language, the whole way of thinking and feeling penetrates into the soul.

This can be observed to a certain extent. Try to compare the soul of a Franconian person with that of a West Prussian person, and try to realize how the respective way of thinking and feeling works within him. It is the same with everything into which the human being is placed in accordance with the species. If we educate consciously, we must know that we do not educate the human being only individually. Just as we cannot give him his own language, we cannot do anything extra for each child as educators. Human nature is designed so that the human being fits into what is there in the cultural process. The human being must be educated into what belongs to humanity; it must take root in him. If we bear this in mind, we shall say to ourselves: In the face of these elements we seem quite powerless. If we look at the talents and at the demands of life, it may seem impossible to us to bring harmony into them.

[Only the intimate observation of the human being can help us here]. I will describe two children to you, [put them before you as examples]. One of them was born into an environment where a particular language was spoken. They grew up with this language; it became the property of their soul – a part of the whole inner human being. Anyone who has reflected on the relationship between language and the human being will know that through language, the human being not only learns to think logically, but also to feel. For example, the way the A or U sound works in any language has an enormous effect on the soul's capacity for feeling. Language provides a “skeleton” for feelings and sensations. If we place next to this child, who is completely interwoven with his language, so that he has not only learned to think in language but also to 'be' in language, another child who, by the will of fate, is forced to learn and make another language his own after he has barely learned his mother tongue. We will observe how his soul life is much more mobile, much less grounded. I would like to say that a language that acts like a “skeleton” of the soul gives more robust natures. A language that wears our soul like a “dress” makes the soul more fluid, less solid. The result is that the soul of such a child is much more easily influenced; it cannot face the external influences of life with such robustness.

If we now leave aside the language, it can teach us that it is of great importance for education when what is later to be the educational principle and purpose in life connects with the earlier stages. All erraticism in education destroys the soul life in an enormous way. One of the greatest damages to the soul is when one does not build on what has gone before. On the other hand, conscious building has a wonderful effect. If you have a child with a weak character and you sit down with him from time to time and begin to speak very subtly of what he did three years ago, you can do much more to correct the present than you can by directing your thoughts to the present. You can make the biggest mistakes if you lash out at the child with punishments and disciplinary measures out of anger. When the deed is fresh, it is easy to make mistakes. Life is not without contradictions, you cannot help but make mistakes, but they can be improved. If you are inclined to punish, sit down with the child and talk about a previous misbehavior; the child has moved on and no longer feels the previous one so strongly. Feelings become dulled; they take a completely different path than thoughts and memory. It turns out that we can discuss the past objectively, and the more often we do this, the more we can refresh our memory and turn our attention to the past, and the more we can do for the development of character.

These are the individual rules that arise for the unbiased observer. However, one needs the perspective of spiritual science to group the details correctly. But then one can see the big picture and draw important principles from it. One is forced to look not only at the individual, but also at the whole. Then, however, one must look for harmony between the individual, single nature and the general human nature. By going back to the past, you can draw a certain sympathy. You will find it very difficult to reconcile the child's selfishness with the demands of the environment, but when you go back to past experiences, you will see how the child responds to them. The educator must reconcile the earlier with the later. He must see to it that what the individual human being must harmonize with the demands of all humanity happens by drawing on the past. You educate all the better the more you draw on the child's earlier experiences.

So you have to gather together these things that are good for raising children. In particular, it is a wrong to leave pronounced talents undeveloped and thus put the child in constant conflict with the environment. All these are causes of illness. Suppressed talents and interests creep into the human soul and can later manifest as mental illnesses. We commit a sin against human health when we leave a person's talents undeveloped and his interests unused. And we also do wrong when we fail to take into account the need for adaptation to the environment. If we do not do this, then what arises as a contradiction between the child's soul and the demands of life seems to be pushed back into the soul and is felt as a deep dissatisfaction in life. And for all people who go through life and always complain: I have such a difficult time in my soul - then the soul's judge must say: Yes, there are interests that should have been legitimately cultivated, there are talents that should have been developed, and that has been missed. And that is why the person cannot cope with putting themselves into life and is unsatisfied.

One could easily say: What you are talking about is based on more intimate properties of the soul that can be discovered within the intelligence and the direction of the will. But these are precisely the most important things for the educator; they are the core of the soul and where he can do the most harm. Why? The interests and talents we cultivate initially lead to a certain agility of judgment, and at thirty years of age it is dexterity of the fingers and hands. If someone is thirty years old and handles something clumsily, it leads back to the time of about his seventh year, when he has not yet learned the agility of thought. And the apathy that sets in when we do not develop the interests that shows up as a casual attitude in all practical tasks. Above all, it must be noted that it is precisely the individual essence of the child that is expressed in these qualities.

The humanities scholar will recommend that the child be kept busy, but in such a way that it happens through play. Why does the child play, and why should he play? I will mention something from later life. You know a phenomenon in life, fatigue. Where does fatigue come from? You will often get the answer that it shows up in the evening when the muscles are worn out. Is it true that muscles can come into a state of fatigue by their own nature? If that were so, then the muscles that move your heart would have to be resting from fatigue. It is not in the nature of the muscle to get tired. The muscle does what it is supposed to do; it does not get tired. The heart muscle remains unaffected by external activity. Fatigue only occurs when you ask your muscle to do something that relates to the outside world, that is connected with a conscious action. We can say that a mismatch between our muscles and the demands of the outside world causes fatigue. This is true: fatigue comes from the internal organization not matching the outside world. It shows that there is a certain contradiction between the outside world and the internal organization.

I only want to draw attention to one thing: we must be clear that the human process of culture cannot proceed only according to the implanted laws, so that it only corresponds to the inner [physical] organization. The essence of the human soul life is not directed towards the preservation of the species, but towards the development of the soul-spiritual. Two currents are expressed here: progress [of the soul-spiritual] and that which is inner [bodily] organization. It is written in the eternal laws of existence that man must sacrifice purely organic laws to spiritual laws. He who sees through these things will not complain about it. But he will find it understandable that, on the other hand, a balance is necessary. We must be prepared for life in a healthy way, so that we can grasp external things with our hands and think about external things with our brains. A balance must be created, and this will only be achieved if we are able, at certain times, to cultivate an activity that is not directed towards the outside world, but is content with the activity itself.

When it comes to play, our inner nature follows what is required here. We do our child the greatest favor when we shape the play individually, and in doing so we strengthen our inner being. If you shape the play in a stereotyped way, you can see the consequences. Today, people want to fit everything into a template; they do not even want to admit that clothing should be tailored to suit the individual. It is the basic trait of contemporary culture that even those people who are the worst Nietzschean followers [i.e. the worst individualists] will still eat together at a “table d'hôte”. We must not allow this to influence our education, especially not in play. We have to organize play in such a way that we individualize, that we pay careful attention to the talents and interests of this or that child, otherwise we are committing a sin.

This can lead us to the realization that it is necessary for us as practical educators to believe in the spiritual in the child and not in the muscles, which are supposed to have the strength to counteract their wear and tear. The soul should be left to its own devices in play, and the material should not interfere, so that the child can be free from the “tiresome” influence of the outside world. If we do not believe in an inner soul-being that liberates itself, then we cannot educate practically. But if we approach the subject in a truly practical way, we can see something else of significance; we can also recognize that it is necessary to be free from the coarse material laws of the outer world in childhood. The earlier these laws impinge upon the child, the more they take hold, and this does not allow free activity in play. Childhood needs truths that do not slavishly adhere to what is in the outside world; it needs truths that it can embrace with heart and soul. That is why fairy tales and myths should be given to the child's soul; in this way, inner truths liberate the soul. Mankind used to do this out of a sure instinct, and in our time it will be necessary to take more account of this.

Now one may ask: how does an educator acquire these special talents? It is not really that difficult, because what I have already mentioned is actually the main thing that belongs to the educator, and in a very comprehensive way: the holy awe for what wants to break free as the individual core of the human being. If we have a sense of awe for that which has been preparing itself for millennia and in whose development we must assist, then a sense of responsibility arises that blesses us, that is, it has a certain quality: it makes us “genius” in our education. The educator often has no idea why he is doing the right thing. The child itself tells him what it needs. What is necessary in the educator's profession is love, which is characterized by the fact that we learn to love the blossoming of the child's abilities; and we will see what love can do in the spirit. In the outer life, love may often be blind. When love is directed towards the inner becoming, it opens the soul, for behind this love there is always a mighty faith – the faith that truly enables us to view life in the right sense and that shows us the human being as standing in a world of spiritual life as well as of sensory life, and that we have to establish the connection between them. In the child we see the spirit descending, the marriage of the spirit with the body. And when we see in the child how the spirit unites with the body, then our educational activity can become an expression of what we can call the actual belief in life, which may be expressed in the words:

It surges to the human mind
From the depths of the world, full of mystery
The rich abundance of matter,
It flows from the heights of the world
Into the depths of the soul, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They find each other in the human heart
To form a reality full of wisdom.

If you reflect on what has been presented here in the last few reflections, it will be clear to you that the evolution of modern humanity contains within itself two, one might say, opposing impulses for its further development, two opposing impulses which, in a certain way, must be avoided by what spiritual science is to bring into this evolution. We have contrasted the two impulses in the most diverse ways. We have shown how one impulse, after having been prepared for a long time by various forces that we have shown and that are rooted in the supersensible or subsensible worlds, has united for human thinking and striving in what can be called the physical relationship of beings and forces – we said kinship – and that which is joined to this thinking and striving for the kinship of beings, especially for the consideration of human existence, if one uses the word as we have used it, is birth. As a kind of social ideal, so to speak, what we have called bliss stands alongside this sense and striving for physical kinship and physical origin of beings, which in the 19th century in particular has developed into the principle of mere utility. On the other hand, we have seen that this is countered by another impulse, which is less directed towards how man comes into existence through birth than towards pondering the problem: how does man go through the gate of death? So instead of birth, there is contemplation and striving for an understanding of death. Instead of the physical kinship of forces and beings, there is the contemplation of evil, pain, and suffering in the world. And as a kind of social ideal, this is joined by what we can call the redemption from or in existence, liberation, and so on.

We have seen that the culture of the West strives more for what is indicated on the left (see diagram on page 238), while the culture of the East strives more for what is indicated on the right, insofar as these cultures do not feel fertilized by the general human sense and aspiration, by the general human ideal, but abandon themselves to what, as it were, befits them by virtue of their national and climatic and other local peculiarities. We have seen how, under the influence of these general impulses, individual concepts and ideas also take on a certain coloration, nuance. We have seen how what can be called the struggle for existence, the selection of the fittest, and so on, fits so well into the main impulses that are preparing in Western culture, and how this has been opposed in the East, and in no less scientific a way than the struggle for existence emerged in the West, by what can be called the mutual assistance of beings. And I have explained to you how what was to be achieved in the West through the one-sided principle of the struggle for existence, which is based on the principles that I explained to you last time, should lead to an understanding of the development of living beings. It was said that what best exists in the struggle for existence lives on, what exists worst perishes, so that, as it were, what exists better, that is, what is relatively perfect, develops out of what is imperfect. What the struggle for existence means is mutual assistance, according to those Eastern sciences whose truly significant results Kropotkin summarized in the book I mentioned to you the other day. They believe that the best chances for development towards perfection are found in those animal species in which the principle of mutual assistance is most widespread.

And so we could cite many things that would testify to the way in which these two polar impulses have really come into humanity's evolution today, so to speak. This is what we must, I would say, look at with seeing eyes; for if spiritual science is to fulfill its task, then it is essential that both one-sidedness and both polarities be avoided and that they work together to form a wholeness. What I am going to draw today and tomorrow — today in preparation, tomorrow we will then move on to the consequences — will not be drawn in the sense that it must, under all circumstances, be placed in the world as if by mechanical necessity. Rather, it is meant that evolution tends towards these things, and that we must avoid what the one-sided development of these two poles could bring. If we do not recognize what, so to speak, if the word is not pressed, wants to come into existence, then we cannot find the right way to bring the synthesis, the summary, into life, which alone can be achieved through spiritual science.

If we first consider everything that is, as it were, carried by these abstractions here (see diagram on page 238), we have to say: that (on the left) is a spiritual cultural impulse that wants to come to life and that has its full justification in the one tendency of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural epoch. I have shown you how this fifth post-Atlantic cultural epoch has developed human beings in such a way that, on the one hand, they must strive for what Goethe calls the archetypal phenomenon, the pure, hypothesis-free, un-fantastic observation of what external natural phenomena present to the senses: the archetypal phenomena. That is one thing. The other (on the right) is an ever-increasing number of imaginations emerging from the depths of the human soul and freely shaped by that human soul. These imaginations will, one might say, arise with inner soul necessity in certain people of our fifth post-Atlantic period. Just as people in this fifth post-Atlantic period will be increasingly inclined, on the one hand, to observe nature and its phenomena impartially, to search for archetypal phenomena instead of hypotheses, so, on the other hand, people will be particularly inclined to allow imaginations to arise from their souls that can lead deeper into the spiritual world.

Today we have no idea where humanity is heading in this respect. One can oppose the direction in which we are heading, but this will not stop it and prevent its coming into existence. More and more people will stop inventing all kinds of hypotheses about natural phenomena; they will truly devote themselves purely to what is a spiritual representation of the phenomena, as Goethe did in his physical considerations. Goethe once said so beautifully: One does not make hypotheses about natural phenomena; the blueness of the sky itself is the theory; one should not look for anything behind the phenomena when they are purely understood. All the pondering over all kinds of atomic configurations, over atomic constructions, will cease; the senses will be directed purely at the phenomena and will only put them together, these phenomena, in such a way that they explain themselves. Today, this is only just beginning, but it will continue to develop further and further. Today it is in its infancy, and those who, for example, have studied chemistry in recent decades know what atomic constructions have been built, purely hypothetically. Such things are often bandied about to people by all kinds of monistic and other lay associations long after they have been overcome by science. There is a wide-ranging discussion, especially with regard to the hypothesis about atomic structures, and it is not uninteresting to take a good look at what has been discussed. For most people still get a slight shudder at the success of science in this field when they hear about the atom of this substance looking like this, the atom of that substance looking like that, and so on. People do not then consider that these are pure hypotheses, pure figments of the imagination, which are being bandied about. In particular, van't Hoff was one of those chemists who recently constructed bold stereometric forms in order to understand the atom. And we know – at least most of us will know – that theosophists of a certain orientation have also been very much involved in this nonsense about the structure of the atom. A crazy science, which can never be a science, the so-called occult chemistry, has been built up and has indeed found particular favor among those who want to approach it from theosophy or the like. But van't Hoff has not remained unchallenged. Chemists with good insight, such as Kolbe, have spoken out against what Kolbe calls van't Hoff's hallucinations.

From this you can see, by the way, that not only the spiritual is referred to as hallucinations, but that natural scientists themselves also sometimes apply this term to each other's findings. Yes, Kolbe, who wants to stop at pure phenomena in chemistry, even used the beautiful saying and said: Van't Hoff rides the chemical Pegasus, which he will have borrowed as a naturalist from the veterinary school of pharmacy that is friendly with his laboratory, and in this riding of the chemical Pegasus he finds all kinds of bold stereometric forms. One can only hint at the inner workings of science. It would take many, many lectures to show the assumptions on which what is presented to laymen today as a certainty is based. All these things, these speculations, with which the second half of the 19th century in particular has experimented with regard to the natural world, will gradually have to be left out, because science will become more and more science will become more and more convinced that these speculations are nowhere justified by the sequence of phenomena, that one can always put forward the most diverse hypotheses, and that just as much can be said for or against each of them. On the one hand, the pure recording of phenomena will be a justified impulse.

On the other hand, however, in this fifth post-Atlantic period, which, as we have heard, will last for many centuries, the human soul will be just as likely to be inclined to form imaginations. Many will consider these imaginations to be mere fantasy, mere figments of the imagination. But these imaginations will be created by the human soul to gradually lead this human soul into the realm of the spiritual world. That this consists in the fifth post-Atlantean time is based on a certain fact, on a fact that can be seen through by spiritual science, which is still far from being based on external physiology, but which can already be envisaged by spiritual science. The entire human constitution of the organism has truly become different compared to the overall constitution of the Greco-Latin period, which began in the 8th century BC and ended in the 15th century AD. Today, this can only be recognized through the observing consciousness; but it can be recognized.

Man consists essentially of the same earth-like, water-like, air-like, warmth-like elements as outer nature. He is likewise permeated by the light-like, he is permeated by the chemical-legal, he is permeated by the living like the outer nature. Thus man is permeated by the coarse physical as well as by the etheric; only subtle differences emerge in the human constitution in the successive periods of human development. Although people today generally believe in evolution in nature, they are not inclined to go into the finer details of evolution. The human body in connection with soul and spirit was quite different in the Greco-Latin period than it is during our present fifth post-Atlantic period. The main difference lies in the fact that during the Greco-Latin period, that which can be described as an earthy element, that is, that which, in contrast to the watery element, has an earthy constitution, a firm cohesion, insofar as this is present in the human organism, was closely bound to that which can be called the life ether. So that one can say, if one retains the old - today disputed, but what does that matter to us? - designation of earth and life ether: there was a close interaction of the life ether with the earth-like, thus with the solid element in man during the Greek-Latin development up to the 15th century. And the peculiarity of the present human being is that there is a loosening between the ether of life and the earth-like element. So there is a loosening. The ether of life in today's human being is no longer as firmly connected to the earth-like element as it was during the Greco-Latin cultural epoch.

These are things that can be established. Today, however, I would like to direct your thoughts to a different area and come back to this tomorrow to give you some reasons for the fact that I have just mentioned: that what a person experiences in his whole organism experiences because of the life ether within him, is, in our time, much more separated from what is experienced as a result of the earth-like element than it was in Greco-Latin times. But this means that the experiences due to the earth-like element require a pure looking at the outer world. Precisely because the earth-like element is loosened up, it becomes possible to look at the archetypal phenomena unclouded by hypothesis. And because the life ether is separated, it becomes possible to experience in this separated life ether that which permeates human beings with imaginations rooted in the supersensible world. It is precisely through this loosening that this is the case.

Now, in those cultures that are dominated by Western ideas (see diagram on page 252), the human organization, because it always develops one-sidedly, tends to draw attention to what is experienced in man by virtue of the earth-like element. In cultures that are inclined towards evil, death, liberation and mutual assistance, nature tends to focus more on what can be experienced as a result of the life ether. These are the two one-sidednesses: the one-sidedness of the West, which is experienced more as a result of the earthly, earth-like element in man, the one-sidedness of the East, which is experienced more as a result of the one-sided experience in the life ether.

These considerations lead us into the deepest secrets of evolution in our time. And they must be clearly envisaged, for otherwise humanity is threatened, as it were, by the one-sided assertion of polar opposing impulses. Today this evolution, of the one and the other, has not yet progressed very far, but for those who do not want to play the ostrich in the face of life, who want to numb themselves to the sight of reality, it is already clearly perceptible, if only they have the concepts to master the things. On the one hand, there is an ever-increasing urge to accept only what is sensually real, and on the other hand, an urge to accept only what comes from the imaginative world as the justified, not only in knowledge – perhaps even least of all there – but in everything that permeates and shapes life, which one wants to push into social life. These things develop within it. For one group, the one on the left (page 252), this can already be clearly seen; for the other group, we are only at the very beginning of a different insight. One impulse is to fight imaginative life, at least for the sake of knowledge, and to accept only the mere phenomenon. You see this tendency purely expressed when you consider all that Darwin himself has written. For it was Haeckelian doctrine that first introduced hypotheses and theories into Darwinism. In the work of Darwin we always find the desire to describe the phenomena. He only draws the broad lines from the presuppositions to which I recently drew your attention, and he draws the broad lines from what life strives for within this cultural community, now in turn only to accept the external physical and to focus more and more only on the external physical, to fight the imaginative world, to eradicate the imaginative world, even from social life. And so, I would say, a very specific human ideal arises from this complex of concepts: a human ideal that eats into everything and wants to permeate everything, that wants to make man a knower in a certain way, a knower who overlooks the external physical world but is dismissive of everything that leads to the spiritual world. Sometimes he deceives himself about the fact that he actually behaves negatively, by coining all kinds of words for strange concepts that are supposed to be spiritual, often even mystical, but which in reality amount to nothing more than what I have now characterized.

This is the case, for example, with Bergsonian philosophy. Of course, many people today believe that Bergson's philosophy is a kind of mysticism and that it intervenes in contemporary life as a kind of mysticism. But what matters is not what people think about something, but what emerges in reality. And yet this supposed mysticism will lead not to a refutation, but to a support for a merely positivistic world view.

Of course, this cultural impulse contains all the elements needed to bring about the primal phenomenal; but it also prepares the way for the one-sidedness of labeling everything imaginative as a product of fantasy and expunging it from the so-called scientific, and that with regard to man as a cognizer.

With regard to the human being as an agent, as a social being, it was also preparing itself for the fact that more and more the principle of the mere usefulness of experience and action in what is externally perceptible, what is externally there , what has value for man between birth and death, comes to the fore, and everything else is, as it were, only there to be harnessed in the right way into a blissful world or into a utilitarian world, which is there in the sensory world. Laws and ideals are made in order to be able to enjoy the sensual-real better, so to speak. This tendency can be clearly perceived in both the utopians and the socialists of the West. It is everywhere, I might say from Moras to Comte, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, it appears everywhere in theory. But it also appears in the habits of life, it permeates social feeling, social thinking, but also social action. And one can say: the ideal of man that develops under the influence of these impulses, which are here only roughly indicated by a few abstractions, that is the specter, one could say, of the bourgeois, who, like a kind of ideal, haunts everywhere where the characterized one-sided impulse wants to drive itself one-sidedly into existence. It is only a deception about the most essential if today the socialist often thinks that he is no longer dominated by the bourgeois ideal. He often strives all the more for the bourgeois ideal, in that he also wants for himself, little by little, what was granted to the bourgeois through the time in which the bourgeois just emerged. The bourgeois recognizes the sensual world and regards that which is valid for him. Concepts and ideas are only there to hold the sensual world together with brackets. The bourgeois experiences himself in that which is essential for the time between birth and death, and regards everything else that can be thought up in terms of social institutions and social ideals, insofar as it can further that which is included between birth and death.

Many who are today deeply immersed in these bourgeois ideals will fiercely resist them in their consciousness. But the same applies to them, perhaps only in a different way, as Mephisto says: “The little people never feel the devil, even when he has them by the collar.” So people often do not notice the things that influence them most.

Well, I characterized to you last time how the spiritual, if one had achieved what certain circles wanted with Blavatsky, but which was then thwarted, as well as how the spiritual should have been placed in the service of the purest bourgeois ideal: Information centers should have been set up where the media would have been used to obtain many a stock market secret and other secrets for life “through the power of the mind and the mouth”. That this urge is not without resonance in the hearts of contemporary people can be seen from much documentary evidence; for it is not so rare that letters come to me from people who write again and again that they have lost their fortune and that I should tell them for this or that kind of lottery, out of communications from the spiritual world, which number will be drawn, and similar things. You laugh about it, but these things are not so very rare, and especially from such circles of society that you would often be amazed if you were to be told the titles of the people who write such and similar things.

So also the spiritual, the power to look into the spiritual world, is not envisaged by this one-sided impulse in such a way that one should enter into the spiritual world, but that, if such powers already exist, one should grasp them in the physical world in order to further the physical world with regard to the principle of usefulness. That is one-sidedness. Today I will describe it in abstract terms, tomorrow it will be more concrete.

The other one-sidedness that threatens the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantic period is that which is influenced by those concepts and ideas in a one-sided way, where the great achievements of the phenomenal world are more rejected, but instead the cultivation of imaginations is envisaged above all. This is even more in its infancy than the other one-sidedness. But anyone who is familiar with the development of Russian intellectual life is also familiar with the many one-sided tendencies in this area. For within some Eastern circles, the tendency towards significant imaginations is becoming more and more pronounced. Anyone who is interested can see for themselves what form these imaginations take by reading the first volume of Solovyov's translation, which I would recommend. In the “Three Conversations” at the end of the volume, you will find how this most important of Russian philosophers develops truly significant , significant imaginations arise in this intellectual world, this penetration into the spiritual world, even if it is often one-sided, even if it is often wrong — that is not the point now, but the point is that this develops as a certain disposition. This is characteristic of the other one-sided impulse of our evolution of the fifth post-Atlantic period. A life will develop that attaches little importance to world phenomena, but more and more importance to the imaginations that a person brings forth from himself, imaginations that can often intensify to a visionary life. A special preference for such a visionarily shaped life will develop with all that it entails.

That which is under the western impulse, disregards the spiritual connections, goes to the physical-sensual; what is there the individual must therefore include the spiritual connections, because they are only to appear physically, in the physical forces, that is, it must flow into the power organization of social life as much as possible. Therefore this one-sided organization of power strives for great empires, for mighty organizations that destroy the individual. If such things are only just beginning today and therefore cannot be seen by those who do not want to see them, this does not do anything for the recognition of the truth. In the East, on the other hand, the spiritual is directly present in the individual human being. It is only in his individuality that man can make the spiritual real here in the physical world. Therefore, everything that is influenced by these impulses strives for the dissolution of external power organizations, for the dissolution of everything that seeks to hold people together through treaties, laws, state organizations, and so on. Such things often conceal themselves. But when great power structures and organizations arise in the East today, it is initially only a reaction against the very principle of the East, namely, forming nothing but small communities with a sectarian character, not only in the field of religious life, but also in the field of social life, of views on the most ordinary, everyday coexistence. All this strives for the dissolution of the imperialist. And the ideal of humanity that is developing is that of a person who wants to go through life to free themselves from life, to go through death as strong as possible, to overcome the impulses of evil as strongly as possible, to seek liberation from what is only valid between birth and death. This is the goal within these cultural communities: to go through life in such a way that the human being can focus entirely on the imaginative world wrestling within him, developing a kind of cosmos, a soul cosmos within himself, unconcerned with external connections. While, on the one hand, external connections will become more and more important and more and more important, while people will dream more and more of external connections and seek bliss more and more in external connections, on the other hand, there will always be the “desire to break free” in human life. While in the West the ideal of humanity is the bourgeois, in the East the ideal of humanity is – I cannot find a better word at the moment – the pilgrim, as one says in some German dialects: the 'Bilcher', who and who basically continues on this pilgrimage until he passes through the gate of death, in order to enter into the true liberation with a strong soul that has borne all experiences. If this impulse develops one-sidedly, it will deny the firm standing in the other impulse.

These are the two one-sidedness: on the one hand, the mere life in the phenomenon, in the appearances, on the other hand, the mere life in the imaginations that do not want to tie in with the outer life. And what threatens, because everything in the world must collide, is that these two one-sided impulses enter into conflict with each other, more and more into the fight. This struggle will be one of the hallmarks of the fifth post-Atlantic period. On the one hand, there will be ever-increasing efforts to create coercive organizations, and on the other hand, efforts to dissolve them. The matter is not yet so obvious, because there is always the idea that what is unfolding today, for example, in the Russian East as a seemingly great empire, is a reality. But with such things, one encounters much more slogans and false ideas than what really exists. There are no greater contradictions in reality than between what is preparing in the imperialism of the European and American West and what is preparing in the East, even as far as the East of Asia. These are complete contradictions. And what is reviving the West in many respects, what is called the national principle there, is regarded today as something the same or similar to what is called Pan-Slavism in the East. There is no greater nonsense than this; for Pan-Slavism is anything but something national. It is only seemingly characterized by the slogans of the West as something national for the Pan-Slavists themselves; in reality it is that which is about to dissolve the national. However paradoxical these things may still appear today, because what is totally different from each other is often referred to today as something the same, however paradoxical what I have to say seems, it is deeply rooted in the really moving forces. [Written on the blackboard: ]

Thus we see how two one-sided impulses threaten synthetic evolution and must be clearly understood, because all knowledge and ideas and ideals, whether based on knowledge or in the social sphere, can only be properly established for the future, if one is truly aware of these impulses, if one knows that when one reflects on law or morality or religion or any natural phenomenon, these two concepts from the subconscious of the human soul always strive to emerge and want to shape the concepts. If we consider the development from the fourth post-Atlantic period, the Greco-Latin period, up to our fifth post-Atlantic period, we can see how what I will present to you as a fact tomorrow must necessarily come to the fore in culture and set the tone. If we consider characteristic phenomena, we can see this. Take, for example, a phenomenon such as a drama by Calderon, who died in 1681 but whose work represents the after-effects of the fourth post-Atlantic period, the Greco-Latin period. Let us consider, for example, the following representation of Calderon: The hero of this representation, Cyprianus, is a pagan magician with a thirst for knowledge, who has studied everything that a pagan magician of his time can study. So this drama, written at the beginning of the 17th century, presents us with this Cyprianus, but still entirely in the sense of the fourth post-Atlantic culture, as a pagan magician who has studied everything “with great zeal” and who is now thinking deeply about religious and epistemological questions, who wants to know “what holds the world together at its core”. And while he is striving for such knowledge, an evil demon appears to him in both a spiritual and physical sense, promising to truly introduce him to the world he seeks, to let him find “what holds the world together at its This evil demon, who appears to him in human form, causes Cyprianus to also feel love, which he had not known before, love longing. The evil demon also kindles this love yearning in a young girl in order to bring about a collision with Cyprian's love yearning. And so in the drama we are led to Justine, who is a true Christian. But the demon gets to her and wants to bring her together with Faust, that is, with Cyprianus. She resists, and the demon has no power over her. That is in Calderon's mind, because she is a Christian. Then the demon seizes an opportunity. He cannot bring Justine – Gretchen – herself to Cyprianus; so he takes a phantom out of her. He separates this out, and he now brings this phantom in human form to Cyprianus, who now believes he has Justine in his arms. But she soon reveals herself as a ghost. Now Cyprian addresses the evil demon in a similar way: “Evil figure, leave me or transform this ghost into a human being of flesh and blood!” But the evil demon has no power over her, not only because Justine has just been to confession, but because she is a Christian. And when Cyprianus sees this, he also decides to long for Christianity – he is a pagan magician until now – and the demon cannot prevent him from doing so. After he has undergone long trials, has learned the secrets of nature and the spirit in nature over the course of a year, but has also accepted the Christian principle, the Christian impulse, he appears at the same time that Justine's father and Justine have been sentenced to death as Christians. And he now appears to them and demands to become a Christian. They also die together. And the demon appears, riding on a snake, and proclaims how the one who can thus receive the Christ impulse within himself can be redeemed.

Of course, I need not say, for I have already indicated it many times by misspelling, that in this Calderon's Cyprianus we have a true forerunner of Faust. But there is a characteristic difference, and we want to consider this characteristic difference. We do not want to dwell on what some particularly clever-thinking aesthetes have said about this drama: that it insults the modern aesthetic sense when Calderon, after the death of Justine and Cyprian, because it is enough to have seen him appear in the interplay of passion, all the way to tragedy, to the purely human. There is no need for the demon to appear and seal it. One can leave that to the very clever people of the present day, who just don't know that the people of the past, including Calderon, were interested in what the evil demon himself then experiences. But as I said, I don't want to get into that, I want to draw attention to another difference that really comes into consideration. If you experience Justine, with the differences that naturally arise, because one is a 17th-century Spanish drama and the other is Goethe's Faust, and if you look at things and see certain similarities – with differences – between Justine and Gretchen, for example, then one is bound to say: this figure of Gretchen is very similar to the figure of Justine in her artistic disposition, in everything. But in the overall development of the drama, there is a significant and important difference. Cyprian and Justine experience physical death, physical martyrdom, together, and with that, Calderon's drama concludes. Then there is only the demon, riding on the snake, who seals this, who pronounces the meaning of it.

With Goethe, we see something quite different. If we take the whole of “Faust” now, with its first and second parts, during the course of the drama at the end of the first part, Gretchen goes through the gate of death, and Faust develops further. And at the end, we see how Faust and Gretchen are brought together. But Gretchen, who has long been in the spiritual world above as a soul, is introduced to Faust. That is the bold, great, and powerful thing about Goethe: even at the end of Faust, he still brings Faust and Gretchen together, but Gretchen as a soul that passed through the gate of death long ago. The man, the poet of the fifth post-Atlantic age in the form of Goethe is much more spiritual than the poet in Calderon, who still represents the echo of the fourth post-Atlantic age. Of course, Calderon was better at looking into the spiritual world than Goethe. Therefore, on the one hand, there are Justine and Cyprian, both passing through the gate of death as physical human beings, and on the other hand, there is the spiritual world: the demon riding the snake and other spiritual events. But I would like to say that the two are clearly separated. And that is the important thing: in the fourth post-Atlantean period, when there is a close connection between the life ether and the earthly, the spiritual and physical worlds are strictly separated. Now the two views diverge, that which is experienced between birth and death, and that which is experienced in the spiritual world. But the relationship, the connection, must also be sought for this. This is expressed so wonderfully and powerfully in the fact that Faust and Gretchen do not die at the same time, and yet the end of the second part of Faust brings them together: the spiritual and physical worlds are poetically interwoven. In this Faust creation, you have one of the first great attempts at connecting the two things with each other for the fifth post-Atlantic period: the physical world of phenomena, of appearances, and the spiritual world of imaginations. And that was precisely the difficulty for Goethe - one can see this from his conversations with Eckermann - to present the powerful final Imagination that brings Gretchen, who has long since passed through the gateway of death, together with Faust again, and thus makes the whole world that Faust experiences after the death of Gretchen, this world of physical experiences that Faust has experienced after her death, meaningful for Gretchen as well. Of course, Faust is also dead when he meets Gretchen, but it can be seen that Gretchen's effect is intended in connection with Faust, while all of Faust's experiences from the beginning of the second part to the death that he himself undergoes at the end are intended in connection with what is mentioned above in the spiritual world, where Gretchen is already present.

Thus Goethe himself first presented a spirit that attempts to combine the two one-sided views and to create a synthesis. And it is precisely this that one can find so consciously in Goethe. Just imagine how Goethe, for his part, also strove for an understanding of the relationship between living beings, but not by seeking a merely physical order, but by trying to fertilize these relationships through the imagination, which arose in him through contemplation. This is beautifully expressed in Faust, where we see Goethe poetically expressing what he had already understood about the connection between living beings, which Faust expresses in the beautiful words in “Forest and Cave”, which I have often quoted:

Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
Why I asked for. You did not turn your face to me in vain
In the fire.
You gave me the magnificent nature for my kingdom,
Strength to feel and enjoy it. Not
You only allow cold, astonished visitors,
Grant me to look into their deep chests
As into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living Before me, and teach me my brothers In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce, falling, crushing neighboring branches
And neighboring trunks, sweeps down,
And the hill thunders hollowly with its fall,
Then you lead me to the secure cave, show
Then myself, and my own breast
Secret, deep wonders open up.

Here we see the world of phenomena understood purely, but as a gift from that exalted spirit whom Faust wants to approach. Humanity must become more and more aware that external nature must not be speculated upon, for if it is speculated upon, senseless theories will gain more and more ground; that external nature must rather be observed purely, but that the secrets of this external nature will reveal themselves to men of the fifth post-Atlantean age, through imaginations arising from the soul, which will reveal the spirit of nature. Man will come to know that which forms his cognition, his knowledge and his social life from two sides: on the one hand, from an ever-widening and deepening knowledge of the outer connections of the immediate sensory world, and on the other hand, from the grasping of real imaginations originating in the spiritual world. We will continue these reflections tomorrow. Today, I wanted to provide preparatory ideas, and tomorrow we will then move more into the specifics of spiritual life.

Today, following on from yesterday's reflections, I would like to say a few words that may serve to summarize some of the things that have been said over time, in order to give a kind of summary explanation of the Mystery of Golgotha. Of course, when speaking about this central point of human life in modern times, one can only give something aphoristic, something episodic, so to speak, a section of all that we have to work through in abundance in order to understand this Mystery of Golgotha.

If one wants to understand the Mystery of Golgotha aright, then one must realize that the whole of the older mystery being, which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, gradually petered out and had already dried up to a very great extent by the time the Mystery of Golgotha was to take place, that this ancient mystery being, in its very essence, pointed to this central event on earth, to this Mystery of Golgotha. If one allows oneself to be properly affected by what I have tried to present in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”, one will find that in the symbolic-ritual mode of presentation, which was practised in the old mysteries, the most diverse secrets of the world were enacted with dramatic power before the neophyte, before the one to be initiated. But at the center of all the rites and symbolism practiced in the mysteries to deepen human knowledge was the secret of the human being dying within the body, who, so to speak, anticipates death, who dies to everything that he can live if he only orients himself towards the sensory world, and who then, out of an inner soul strength, awakens to a higher life precisely through this passing through dying, through this experience of dying.

The way in which this was presented in the mysteries, in order to stimulate people's inner experience, was very similar to what later actually took place in Palestine as the Mystery of Golgotha. And one could say: at the center of earthly evolution stands the cross raised on Golgotha. There humanity can look and see the Christ going through death, but in an image that has directly spoken an eternal language to the neophytes, to those to be initiated. This Mystery of Golgotha was anticipated in the ancient mysteries, so that these ancient mysteries were in a sense a preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha itself. In a certain sense, it is cosmic, and can take place individually in a single human being.

What takes place in a single human being when they truly undergo the experience of initiation? That which is born with them, which carries the inherited qualities, which can be cultivated in the ordinary sense of the word through ordinary education, descends into the unconscious. It dies away, becomes paralyzed, and out of the depths of the soul arises the higher self of man, the self that does not belong to this physical world, but which is called to carry out a mission in this physical world. What takes place in the inner being of man is an individual process, a resurrection of the better, the higher self of man. Before that, he does not have this higher self in his consciousness. If we now extend this process to the whole earth, if we think of the whole earth as a kind of living being, of conscious living being, as it actually is in reality, then we have to say: Up to the Mystery of Golgotha in the course of the historical development of mankind did not have its higher self, for this higher self did not move into the earth with that which developed out of the earth, and thus did not live in the old pagan wisdom, nor in Jewish wisdom either. It did not live with the earth at all. And now this higher self of the Earth dwelled in the man Jesus of Nazareth, as we know, through the baptism of St. John at the Jordan, and since the fulfillment of the Mystery of Golgotha, it has been an effective impulse in earthly life. Through this, earthly life has attained its higher self. Thus one can say: Microcosmically, a certain special inner process takes place in every human being who only strives for and wants it; macrocosmically, the same process is given for the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. What the microcosmic awakening of the higher self is in man, the Mystery of Golgotha is macrocosmically. But this already implies that the Christ-being, which dwelt in the man Jesus of Nazareth, was not on earth before, but descended from spiritual, from cosmic heights and united with the earth evolution.

But something else is also given. It is given that in order to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha, a different knowledge is needed, a different realization than that which man gains from the contemplation of external nature, which man receives by looking around in ordinary life. A transformation of man is necessary. And the transformed man can then attain a kind of knowledge through which he comprehends the Mystery of Golgotha. This Mystery of Golgotha stands as a fact of world history, but one must always distinguish between this fact, which stands there in the course of the historical becoming of humanity, and between the comprehension of this fact, what concepts a person can muster to understand this fact, this Mystery of Golgotha. When the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, the ancient mystery wisdom had, in a sense, already faded away. But remnants of it still existed. And those who still possessed such remnants, who still had tradition or even inner vision and could communicate the results of this inner vision to other people, were called upon to contribute something to the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. In other words, the ancient mystery wisdom was used to understand the Mystery of Golgotha. On the one hand, there is the fact, the Mystery of Golgotha, and on the other hand, there is what people tried to do to understand this Mystery of Golgotha.

Lest I be misunderstood, I would like to add here again: It is not necessary to be clairvoyant to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha; but it is necessary to understand the results obtained through clairvoyance with the help of common sense, and thereby to gain in one's soul concepts, perceptions, ideas that go beyond the world of the senses and embrace the supersensible world as well. Just as one does not need to be a spiritual researcher oneself in order to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha, but one needs to take in what comes from spiritual insight in order to understand the Mystery of Golgotha with the help of these concepts, which are meaningless in the face of the mere sensual world, in the same way an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha could be taken in from the ancient mystery wisdom. That which was originally mystery wisdom was used in the first centuries of Christianity to understand the Mystery of Golgotha. And finally, nothing but mystery wisdom flowed into the Gospels. This is what I have just tried to present in my book 'Christianity as a Mystical Fact'. In a sense, the Gospels were the ancient mystery wisdom applied to the mystery of Golgotha. The best concepts, ideas and inner soul experiences that people had were collected in an attempt to understand this mystery of Golgotha in the right way.

That was in the first centuries of Christianity. But this mystery wisdom has since been completely lost. If it is presented to people today and they are appealed to their common sense, they can no longer understand anything of this mystery wisdom. It speaks in a language that is no longer accessible to the present human being. One only gradually comes to an understanding of the traditions from the mystery wisdom that have been preserved when one recognizes the same field again through newer spiritual science, which was present in atavistic recognition as ancient mystery wisdom. This newer spiritual science can be thoroughly understood by the healthy human mind, but not the old mystery wisdom, which can only be understood when one has worked one's way into the results of the newer spiritual insight. And so it came about that as people lost more and more touch with the ancient mystery wisdom, they also lost the means to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha. The mystery wisdom dried up, and the Mystery of Golgotha could no longer be grasped.

We see this in a large part of contemporary theology. This theology wants to understand the mystery of Golgotha from the same source of knowledge from which, for example, natural science is built today. We have often said here that people are increasingly pushing for the impossible, trying to completely obliterate the Christ and only understand Jesus of Nazareth, or, as one of these theologians says, the “simple man from Nazareth”. Christ has been lost to theology because, from the point of view of external sensual science, Christ in Jesus simply cannot be understood. The old supersensible science, the heritage of the mysteries, has been lost to man. Even in the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, the last great mysteries, such as those in France, were destroyed by the invading Romanism, which is the embodiment of matter-of-factness everywhere. In the last century before the emergence of Christianity, the ancient Druid mysteries were destroyed by Roman troops at a certain site in France. Hundreds and hundreds of initiates were transported from life to death in a few days. One can say that it was an inquisition long before the Catholic Inquisition. And if only history were not a fable convenue, we would know of other things than are usually told about the Roman Caesar, for example, we would know of his persecution of the ancient mystery ways, and we would see in him one of those who set themselves the task of rooting out whatever mystery inheritance had come into the time. Nevertheless, echoes of the old mystery wisdom always remained, even into the Middle Ages and up to the 18th century, and with the help of this old mystery wisdom one could still understand the Mystery of Golgotha in a certain way. The impossibility of understanding the Mystery of Golgotha only arose in the 19th century. And in the 19th century we actually see the modern “theology develop in such a way that more and more the concept of Christ is lost, that fewer and fewer people understand something of the actual essence of the Mystery of Golgotha, namely those people who make an effort to really understand something, who do not accept things at the dictation of an external church.

What, then, can it actually be when we consider the science of initiation in the present day in relation to the Mystery of Golgotha? It can only be that mystery wisdom be found again, so that through this new mystery wisdom the Mystery of Golgotha can once more be understood by people. It is really so: if evolution were to continue in the same way as it has led to Western natural science, to Galileism, to Copernicanism, then the Mystery of Golgotha would completely disappear from the increasingly barbaric life of the West. This is what should be taken most seriously in the present day. If the official ideal of knowledge as it is held today were to become generally accepted, we would have a situation in the West in which, relatively soon, there would be a civilization — if one could still call it that — that one would actually have to call barbarism, that no longer knows anything, that no longer speaks of the Mystery of Golgotha. It could be that within this barbarism, the cult of the Roman Catholic Church, for example, would have been preserved by external means of power. But those who think would no longer associate any meaning with the actions that take place there. They would perceive them as external things, as the ceremonies that the ancient Germans performed in relation to their Odin and so on were perceived as external things in a certain period. That would rob the evolution of the earth of its meaning, for this evolution of the earth can only have its meaning through the effect of the Mystery of Golgotha.

I would like to express this as I have often done. Let us assume that a Martian came down to this earth who had not experienced anything of the earth, because among the Martians nothing would have been experienced of the earth's conditions, and he would see everything that is present on the earth here. He would find it quite incomprehensible. But at the moment when he would see a reproduction of Leonardo's 'Last Supper' and contemplate what is depicted there, he would be able to connect it with life on earth. I often wish to mention this because in this picture, in a particularly expressive representation, everything that belongs to the Mystery of Golgotha is in fact of universal significance, of such significance that by correctly understanding it, one grasps the meaning of life on earth. But first one needs the concepts, the ideas, in order to understand that which is fact. These concepts and ideas are lacking in today's external education. They must be known again. They must live again from within people; and they have disappeared in such a way that we should not long for a renaissance of old ideas today. That would not help today's humanity. We do not need a renaissance, we need a naissance, we need a complete rebirth of spiritual life, not a revival of the old, but a birth of a new one we need.

In contrast to this, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as it is meant here, can refer to its actual foundations. What then is the basis of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? Let us look at the world around us. We see it developing in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. In recent times, natural science has produced a great deal about what takes place in the development of the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. It will continue to produce much that sheds light on the evolution of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. These natural sciences have not produced anything special about the human being. For if you really delve into what natural science has produced about man from a description of his anatomy, his physiology and so on, you will find that this natural science actually only considers what makes man appear as the final link in the animal series. As a natural science, it is quite right, but it only considers what makes man appear as the highest link in the animal series, as it were, as the most perfect animal. But natural science does not consider anything that actually makes man appear to us as man, that sets him apart from the other kingdoms of the universe that surround him. Our spiritual science is truly concerned, not in an amateurish way, but in a conscientious and searching way, with a deepening of what natural science has to say about the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal. And if people today would only listen to what anthroposophy has to say, they would not think that anthroposophy is a cult, that it is something cultivated by a few “aunts”. Rather, they would see that it is something quite different, that in terms of the rigour of science and research it can fully compete with the methods of natural science, and that what it produces is only richer than what external science gives.

Is it not actually laughable when natural science fights against anthroposophy? Anthroposophy does not take anything away from natural science. It stands before natural science and says: Yes, you are right in the field you are researching. It only adds what it then researches about the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. And who has the right to deny what they have not yet researched, if one does not dispute what they have researched! One cannot really imagine a stronger tyranny than that which is exercised over what one has not researched and does not want to research. But where does anthroposophically oriented spiritual science end up when it researches the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms in its method? It comes to realize that what can be found by the scientific method, by observing the external sense world, can certainly be applied to the knowledge of man, but only in such a way that it explains in concepts what is dying in man: how man dies, how he already begins to die when he is born, how he is in descending development. If you want to understand the withering away of man that begins at birth, and that comes to an end in a single moment at death; if you want to study this entire descending development, then look at nature, then research all the laws of nature. And when you have investigated all the laws of nature and apply them to man, then you get the dying laws of man, then you get that which dies (knows) in man.

Now, on the other hand, it must be said that at the moment of birth, not only is there a dying away, but also an ascending (red). You cannot find this ascending development through today's scientific observation, however much you may have shaped it into an ideal. That which is being revived in the human being, which is always there alongside this dying away, cannot be grasped from the sensory; it can only be grasped from the supersensible. Anthroposophy must add the knowledge of the supersensible to the sensory so that the human being can be understood at all. You can see from this that if you want to get to know man at all, you have to appeal to the science of the supersensible. You only get the human being as a mortal being when you look at the sensual. The Christian religions, which have never been concerned with real knowledge, saw the rise of natural science, which deals with mortal man; so, as I already indicated yesterday, they deal with the immortal, with that which does not die, and place it before the soul egoism of man.

The matter is different when one deals with what an ascent, an evolution is, with what becomes and becomes and becomes more and more from the birth of man and what reaches its culmination on earth when man passes through the gate of death. Since one must appeal, because one must appeal, not to feeling, not to faith, but to knowledge, one must speak of the Unborn, of the Unbirth, a word of which I have often said that it must gradually enter our vocabulary. Just as with the word “immortal,” so too the word “unborn” must enter into the vocabulary of modern people, for we are no more born in relation to our higher being than we are dying in relation to this higher being. But the traditional religions were only concerned with what is sensory science. They negate death with a mere word, with mere hopes and with mere faith. They do not point to what can be spiritually recognized; they condemn what can be spiritually recognized through supersensible methods and research.

This is essentially a characteristic of what we call here anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It is essentially dependent on ascending to the supersensible. But by ascending to the supersensible, it brings to humanity something that is akin in essence to the ancient mystery wisdom, which can therefore lead again to an understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. Therefore, in the context of the whole course of development of the present day, we are dependent on seeking anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in order not to let the insights of the Mystery of Golgotha disappear altogether.

No matter how much what is done today at our universities as natural science approaches its ideals, it cannot stop the disappearance of the Mystery of Golgotha. No matter how much that which is developing as history approaches its ideal, it cannot stop the disappearance of the mystery of Golgotha. And one can actually say that for the one who looks into what prevails in our public education today, it is quite clear: everything tends to make the understanding of the mystery of Golgotha disappear. The traditional religions will never be able to stop this disappearance, because they only preserve the empty words of that which once had a meaning, but which can no longer make sense to the human mind unless it is rediscovered through consciously applied spiritual research. From this you can see how intimately connected the progress of understanding the Mystery of Golgotha is with the evolution of true spiritual knowledge. Such things would not be said if they did not impose themselves as something that must necessarily be grasped by the present. If one were to develop this spiritual science only out of subjective curiosity about the supersensible, one would feel far too modest to say that the progress and understanding of Christianity depends on the advancement of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It is only because this fact is so absolutely compelling, because one cannot escape it if one has a real sense of what is happening, that one speaks it out and is not afraid of being accused of immodesty and perhaps fantasy by those people who do not want to look at the seriousness of the times.

Today the times are so serious that one cannot but knock at the door of the deepest truth, behind which lie those truths that humanity needs today. Western civilization, with its American offshoot, will degenerate into barbarism if the understanding of Christ is not preserved. But as humanity has done it, and as it is still minded to continue it today, the understanding of Christ will disappear. Only in those who today realize that it is necessary to arrive at a new understanding of the spirit, at a new path in the knowledge of the supersensible, only in them is there a true, earnest and strong will to preserve the understanding of the Christ Mystery for humanity. But there will be no social life, as it is understood today out of dull, often perverse instincts, if the understanding of Christ is completely lost. For this social life will only develop if people can live together in one mind. What can this commonality be? This commonality can only be what Paul already referred to with the words: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” As many people as will be able to say, “Not I, but the Christ in me”, will be able to come together as members of one humanity, without distinction of nationality or other differentiations, and establish a new social life.

We see that many people are striving towards this today. We see individual nations once again unfurling the flag of nationality, as it were. What is the essence of such a development? I have already characterized it here from certain points of view. The essence is the old religion of Yahweh. It consisted in Yahweh being the leader of the people, and indeed the one Yahweh was a leader of the Jewish people. Today, when nations put their nationality first, they all come only to the Yahweh, only each has its own form of Yahweh. It cannot be the true Jahve, but only a mirror image. A figure can be mirrored many times. Actually, it is the case that people in the present, because they have lost the old mystery wisdom that could point to the mystery of Golgotha, have all more or less accepted the Jahve religion under the leadership of the liberal-secular “chief rabbi” Wilson! He who spoke of the mirage of the “League of Nations,” that is, of an abstraction in place of the concrete Christ impulse that runs through human minds, has found faith, until he destroyed it, through his own behavior, admittedly very soon, among those who are still able to think a little.

What matters is that people find their way out of Jahvistic nationalism and towards a universal grasp of Christ, towards that which reveals man only as man, but does not impoverish him in relation to nationality, but rather enriches him. This is only possible if we first pave the way to an understanding of the supersensible. Only when we have the ideas and concepts that lead into the supersensible can we also understand the mystery of Golgotha, which is an event that has to do with the supersensible, not with the sensual world. What has taken place in the sensual world from the mystery of Golgotha is only the outer reflection. What really happened is not grasped by anyone who only grasps the outer reflection; it is only grasped by someone who can raise his thoughts, his ideas, into the supersensible world. What does one grasp then, if one does not want to raise oneself to the supersensible in the newer way?

If we imagine the beginning of the earth here (see drawing), then we grasp that if we only elevate ourselves to what is the content of natural science today, that which was once the wisdom of the ancient mysteries, then descends, and which will have reached its nadir in the third millennium (O). No matter how much natural science we pursue, in the West we are barbarians and in the 3rd millennium we will also be barbarians in America. We then only grasp that which dies in earthly life, and we only live that which dies in earthly life. We then try to derive everything from the observation of the earthly, but we only come to the mortal. We need to grasp the point where the cross is raised on Golgotha and to comprehend what happened there, what was still grasped by the remnants of the old mystery wisdom, but which gradually faded, which is now already dark, and which must now be illuminated (blue) by what arises on the new, on the anthroposophical path as a path into the supersensible. The rescue, the understanding of the event of Golgotha, is closely related, as it were, to the anthroposophical deepening of humanity, to a new real knowledge of the essence of man. Hence the name anthroposophy, which means: wisdom that arises when man finds himself in his higher self.

You can't really find a more concise name than “anthroposophy” if you want to describe knowledge that is not about humans, like ordinary history, anthropology or the like. But if we want to point to what is known in man: when man does not see through his eyes or hear through his ears, but wants to recognize through his soul and spirit, when we want to point to what the higher man can know, then it must be called not “science of man” but “science of man”, as the science of the higher man, as anthroposophy. And anthroposophy transposed into the macrocosm is Christology! What happens to the individual human being when he proves suitable to absorb anthroposophical knowledge, happens to universal humanity when it increasingly decides to grasp the event of Golgotha in its true spiritual essence. Is it not, on the other hand, most peculiar that those who most violently oppose this clear confession of the Mystery of Golgotha are precisely those who claim to officially interpret the Mystery of Golgotha for humanity? But this fact exists and must be faced. We must look at it, we must not close our eyes to it, but by opening our eyes to it, we must get ideas about how to approach a truly honest advancement of Christianity. However, I still hear the words that a famous church prince, Cardinal Rauscher, once spoke in the Austrian House of Lords in the 1860s: “The Church knows no progress!” This basically states the Church's program, the program that I was able to give you a rough idea of yesterday. I believe that those who deal with such things as the emergence of new spiritual ideas, even those who deal with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, take far too little account of what it actually means when the traditional religious denominations rise up against something that can only found the progress of Christianity. Unfortunately, it is far too little known that, for example, an author of every such Catholic book, even if it is about philosophy and logic, has to get the imprimatur of the archbishop! And if you know it, you take it as a randomly picked fact and are not at all aware of the implications of it. Therefore, one does not judge in the right way what is now running up against the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that has been inaugurated from here. And that is why I am obliged to refer you again and again to what the enemies of the truth, the enemies of the truth to be striven for today, repeatedly and repeatedly put forward.

Today I need only read you a small sample, but you will be able to have enough of this small sample if you have an appreciation of what is actually happening when, on the one hand, you hold in your heart what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science honestly wants in relation to Christianity, and on the other hand, you see how those who call themselves Christians encounter this spiritual science. Here is an announcement of the publication – it has appeared in a violet cover – which is a summary of the “Spectator” articles:

(Sent in.) “The secret of Dornach.” “After six years of existence, 'The Mystery of Dornach' is now finally being uncovered more and more thoroughly by a number of Catholic newspapers: first by the Basellandschaftliche Sonntagsblatt, then recently by the Protestant Schulblatt and the Catholic Schweizerschule, and today by a series of articles in the 'Schweizerisches Protestantenblatt' under the title 'Theo- und Anthroposophie'. This is how esu explains, among other things:...” You really can't read all this anymore, you can't get it all anymore, what is being brought up by the other side! “It was only a few years ago, in 1914, that an anthroposophical branch broke away from the Theosophical Society in Basel, whose head and representative is Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who built a theosophical place of worship and a theosophical or anthroposophical university for mystics and adepts in Dornach at a cost of several million. This new foundation is called the “Secret Order of the Star in the East”, also the Goetheanum, formerly the Johanneum. Dr. Steiner has published numerous writings about this sect, and in Basel he occasionally gives propaganda lectures that are well attended (so far), as well as in various cities in Switzerland, Germany, Russia and Austria.

This sample is again from a strictly Catholic newspaper, the “Basler Volksblatt”! You see, things are sent out into the world that lie in such a frivolous way that they are capable of presenting as the signature of Dornach that which I have fought against from the very beginning – the “Star of the East”. So they lie in the most frivolous way, by attributing to us what we have fought from the very beginning as nonsense, as frivolity. This is “Catholic truthfulness” here in the area, because it seems that it is seen as Catholic truthfulness, because at the same time you will find a report about the Dorneck-Thierstein militia. It says:

"From the area. Dorneck-Thierstein Shield Force (introductory) The general assembly of the Dorneck-Thierstein Shield Force, which met in Grellingen on June 27, 1920, had now proven that all the pessimistic ‘ifs and buts’ that had been held against it in the past were not yet in place in our Schwarzbubenland. What a joyful surprise went through the hall when the Reverend Mr. Pfarrer and editor M. Arnet...». Dr. Boos has called him a liar and a spiritual poisoner here. I do not know whether anything has been done on that side in response to this statement by Dr. Boos – from here, from this place – which happened some time ago. Has anything been done? (Interjection from Dr. Boos: No, nothing!) So nothing has been done yet, even though Father Arnet von Reinach was called a liar and a poisoner of minds from this very spot. And now: “What a joyful surprise went through the hall when the Reverend Mr. Pfarrer and editor M. Arnet from Reinach and the Reverend Mr. Pfarrer Hauß from Münchenstein stepped into our midst with a small group of guards. The enthusiasm was even greater when Father Gallus Jecker, Superior of the Mariastein Monastery, appeared in the simple Benedictine robe,” and so on, and now comes the following: ”Reverend Father Arnet of Reinach was given the floor for his presentation. In short and pithy sentences, as a true sentinel, he outlined the main features of the storms that the Catholic But time and again, enlightened and strengthened by the Holy Spirit, men arose to take up the fight against falsehood and unbelief, so that in the end the Catholic Church always achieved the final victory.

So here is the “fight against falsehood” taken up in the most frivolous way, with lies told about the opposite of what is fact! Then one speaks in such phrases: “After the speaker had briefly discussed the Theosophical question, he pointed out mainly that our Catholic people should study more Catholic reading instead of novels of all kinds.” Then it goes even further: “Reverend Mr. Pfarrer Hauß spoke with convincing sharpness on the basis of examples about the necessity of the shield defense groups. Fr. Gallus O.S.B. warmly and ideally welcomed the awakening of the Catholic youth. Every village should have a protective forest of enthusiastic Catholics, young and old, to protect the village and the community from these terrible avalanches of unbelief. Regarding theosophy, Rumpel pointed to the Catholic conference of north-west Switzerland in Dornach. He was of the opinion that this day would be particularly suitable for founding the anti-theosophical movement, which is developing not only on the Catholic but also on the Protestant side, so that the entire Christian-minded Swiss population can be effectively influenced in the near future. The agitation center in Dornach must be fought at all costs. The main points of the annual program of the Dorneck-Thierstein shield-bearers are briefly mentioned: “Promotion of the Catholic press” – this Catholic press, which delivers such samples! – “through individual work in the communities, mainly at the turn of the quarter. Strong support for the fight against Steiner's ‘theosophy’, fight against materialism, the Jewish domination of the press and literature, socialism and liberalism. Promotion of the missionary work. Support for the Catholic school issue (choice of Catholic teachers, etc.). Fight against civic education. Elimination of fire brigade rehearsals on Sundays” and so on.

You see what is called ‘truth’ here! But the matter is hidden in all sorts of masks. At the same time, here you will find a report from Arlesheim about some kind of meeting where it says: “It [the school and community center] can also continue to serve cultural purposes in a different way, by housing Arlesheim's two largest public libraries, those of the Verkehrsverein and the Catholic Volksverein. Finally, it also wants to help alleviate the housing shortage and provide more accommodation than before. Did they dream that the increase in accommodation would one day give way to a “mysterious” foreign infiltration from the Dornach hill? The citizens and residents of Arlesheim will therefore see things clearly at the next municipal assembly, as they once did when refusing a certain building subsidy to the Anthroposophists and so on.

Now, basically, by citing such examples, one only describes the “truthfulness” of a large part of contemporary humanity, because ultimately these are the leaders, and the led are sometimes not so much better than the leaders. They are usually much better when the leaders are like that. But since they still want to be led, even if they are better, nothing special can come of it.

Unfortunately, it always has to be against one's own will that such things are mentioned here. But it must always be stated on the one hand what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants and should do, especially in the face of the mystery of Golgotha, and on the other hand, what is running against it. And there is a great deal of opposition, and what can be mentioned here is only some of the worst of it. All the more reason for us to take what we have grasped of the anthroposophical impulses and absorb it into our hearts and our will. For it depends on whether people decide to seek the path to the spirit again whether or not there will be a Christianity in the future. Christianity must be based on the words of Jesus: “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

Only in truth can one find wisdom – that was the motto we wrote when we tried to have “principles” printed for the Anthroposophical Society. But can contemporaries who speak untruth in this way in any way invoke Christ Jesus, who was certainly not the error, untruth and death! Let us understand in the right way what the Christ-word is: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Therefore, let us take up the sense for truth in our hearts, in our minds. Only in this way will we find the possibility of promoting and cultivating a right further development of Christianity. Untruth will certainly not be able to do that.