The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Gentlemen, at our last session I started to answer your question about the inner organs of man. Of course, this subject must be seen from a broad perspective and treated from its foundations. We saw how William Windom, who died while delivering a speech, expressed his own inner condition by reading it off, as it were, from his body. After citing another case, we found in examining certain facts about the course of human life that the mortality rate is highest in man's infancy, that human beings die most frequently in their early years. In the period from birth up to the change of teeth at age seven, the mortality rate is at its peak, though it diminishes with the third, fourth and fifth years.

The human being is healthiest from the time of his change of teeth to puberty. This is indeed so, and if we ourselves are careful to prevent the causes of ill health, such as bad posture, which can lead to curvatures, and foul air, which can afflict the internal organs, we can count on children to be healthiest during their school years. The illnesses that do befall them then are for the most part due to external causes. Not until the teens does the danger again arise when man can fall ill from processes arising within his own constitution.

These illnesses, however, are quite different from those of early childhood.

I have mentioned that infants are highly susceptible to suppuration of the blood. It can become so purulent that symptoms of jaundice appear. In children, irregular digestion frequently results in diarrhoea. They also get thrush—those little white pustules in various places—and another, completely different kind of illness, so-called infantile convulsions. A childhood disease that is particularly prevalent these days is infantile paralysis, which can also affect adults. It is extremely damaging; the children cannot move their legs and become quite paralyzed. This disease is increasing rapidly. Perhaps you have read that schools have had to be closed in the province of Thüringen because of an epidemic there.

Thus, we can see that childhood illnesses have a distinctive character; they are quite different from the diseases man gets in later life. Scarlet fever and measles are specifically childhood illnesses, though adults, too, can contract the latter. But we must now ask ourselves why children are particularly susceptible to all these illnesses.

We can explain this susceptibility only if we know how forces work in the human body. When we examine the human embryo in the first, second or third months of pregnancy, we see that it is utterly different form what the human being later becomes. In the first and second months the child is all head; the other organs are only appendages to the head. What later turn into limbs, hands and feet are little stumps, and the actual lung and abdominal region are not yet functioning.

You see, if you take the human embryo (a sketch is drawn here) it looks like this. It is enclosed in a kind of sack, to which are attached blood vessels from the body of the mother. These blood vessels penetrate throughout the embryo, which the mother supplies with blood and nourishment. The other matter is supplementary and is later discarded. In comparison to the rest of the body the embryo's head is huge. See (pointing to the drawing), this is the head; the rest consists of appendages not yet functioning. This part will later become the heart and digestive system. The blood circulation is provided from outside, from the mother. These little stumps will develop into hands and feet. So we can say that the embryo is all head. Its other organs are insignificant because the mother's system provides all the nourishment and air. Hence, during the first few months, the embryo consists primarily of a head.

People are surprised that mental illnesses are hereditary. In fact, mental illnesses are always based on physical ailments; they arise from a malfunctioning of the body. Neither the spirit nor the soul can fall ill. Though mental illnesses are always rooted in physical problems, people wonder how they can occur through heredity, which indeed they can do. If a parent, particularly the mother, suffers from tuberculosis or another disease like arteriosclerosis, which admittedly occurs rarely in younger persons, the children do not necessarily become afflicted with these illnesses but instead can suffer from mental deficiencies. People are surprised about this, but need it puzzle us, gentlemen? Whatever the child can inherit must be inherited first of all from its head. Therefore, if the mother is consumptive, one need not be surprised that her condition is not passed on to the lungs of the unborn child, which, after all, are not even functioning yet. The condition is rather carried over into the head and comes to expression in the brain. Thus, nobody should be surprised that the disease inherited is quite different from that of the parent. Venereal disease, for example, can appear in children as an eye disease. It is no wonder, for when the child's head is developing, its eyes are exposed to what afflicts the parents; its eyes are in an environment that's venereally diseased! So it is not at all surprising.

When the child is born, everyone knows that the most completely formed part of it is its head. In the succeeding years it is the rest of the body that grows the most; the head has much less growing to do than the other organs. This fact tells us how, in reality, the inner organs of man function. Materialistic science cannot form an accurate conception of this because it fails to realize that all growth proceeds from the head. In the child everything is regulated from the head. We can see this most clearly in the embryo, which is nothing more than a head. But even after birth all inner processes are regulated from this part of the body. The digestion, the blood circulation and all other activities in human organization are directed by the head.

Suppose that a child is born whose blood circulation is too slow. For some reason, through some hereditary factor, it can happen that the child's blood circulation is too slow. Let us imagine this case. (See drawing.) Here is the child's heart, and here, its arteries; through both the blood is travelling too slowly. The heart is being formed from the head, but even when the head functions perfectly, the circulation can still be too slow. Thus, even though the heart is properly developed, the blood doesn't flow into it correctly. This is often the case in earliest infancy. The head is perfectly developed, but the blood flows too slowly into the heart. Poor circulation may result simply from keeping the child in stifling air. It cannot breathe properly, and its circulation slows down. The blood circulation may slacken also if the baby is not properly nourished. Then its blood cannot thoroughly penetrate the body. The head may be in excellent shape and try to form the heart aright, but the blood circulation remains sluggish. What happens in such instances is that, because the blood is not circulating well enough, certain substances that normally would be pushed down from the heart into the kidneys and expelled remain in the body; they stay in the blood. When these substances that should have been discharged stay in the system, the blood suppurates.

In the seventh, eighth or ninth years, this danger is not so acute as it is in the earliest years of childhood. You see, the fact that a child has its second set of teeth shows that its body is sufficiently strong; if it were not, the teeth would not come in properly. Why? Well, you must understand that what is contained in a tooth comes out of the whole body. The second teeth emerge from within the whole system; they are the product not just of something in the jaw but of the whole body. This is true only of the second teeth, however, for the first teeth, the so-called milk teeth, are completely different. They are the result of heredity, of the fact that the child's mother and father have teeth. Only after the milk teeth are expelled in the course of the first seven years does the child get its own teeth. The body must make the second teeth for itself.

Actually, a child nine or ten years old already has its second body. It has already completely discarded the one it had inherited, and comes into possession of its own body only around the age of seven. During these first seven years it demonstrates that it was born with enough resistance to tolerate air and nourishment. After it has built up its body and produced its second teeth, the danger of falling ill is no longer so acute. The danger is most acute in earliest infancy while it is learning to cope for itself in breathing, eating, that is, everything that once was done for it within the protection of the mother's womb. In these early years the head is actually in good shape; only with age does it become less perfect. In old age the head doesn't work as well as it did in infancy. It must think and occupy itself with the surroundings and so something often goes amiss. But the infant does not yet need to learn anything, go to school or possess skills. The head works only on the child's own body, and in most cases it does this quite well. During these tender years, however, when the human being is just becoming used to the world, the rest of the body is quite vulnerable. Modern science also has described these matters but not quite as I have, for what I tell you is exact. Popular science does not really comprehend the whole process and cannot explain why the human being is most vulnerable in its earliest years. It cannot come to terms with this fact because it explains away the soul and spirit.

In reality, soul-spiritual elements are united with the child, mainly with the head, while it is still in the mother's womb and after birth. The forces that work on the child from within the head are invisible soul-spiritual forces. Should any of you think that this is merely an arbitrary opinion, you would be committing the same error as one of the following men. Suppose one man says, “Here is a piece of iron,” and the other says, “Fine! I'll shoe my horse with it.” The first man then says, “No, it would be stupid to shoe your horse with this. It's a magnet, and it has a hidden force. Magnets are used for quite other things than for shoeing horses!” The one man thinks the piece of iron should be used for a horseshoe, while the other knows that it is a magnet containing an invisible force. Well, the person who says, in accordance with materialistic science, “The head is nothing but a bit of bones and brains,” is just like the fellow who says of the magnet, “This is a horseshoe.” Indeed, it is not a horseshoe, nor is the head of the infant just flesh and bone. Within it invisible forces are working like a sculptor to build up the whole organism. The human form is among those things the child keeps as an inheritance, but the forces that, during the first seven years, tirelessly build up this form from the head are brought into the world not from the parents but from quite another source.

Suppose a man received these forces from his parents. Well, gentlemen, if a parent is a genius, does that make the child a genius as well? Or if a child is a genius, does that mean the parents were also highly gifted? Not at all! Goethe, for example, was certainly a genius, but his father was a dreadful philistine, and his mother was a kind and pleasant woman who could tell a good story but surely was no genius. Goethe's son was rather stupid; he was no genius either. Whatever pertains to the soul and spirit is not hereditary; it is brought into this world from quite other realms and then is united with the part that is inherited. Aside from the time he spends in his mother's womb, man lives before birth as a being of soul and spirit.

The only reason people disavow this today is that all through the Middle Ages the Catholic Church forbade anyone to ascribe to man a life of soul and spirit before birth. It assumed that the soul was created at birth by a God whose nature was also assumed. So throughout the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church forbade the concept of pre-existence, as it was called, meaning “existence before, prior to birth.” Modern materialistic science has merely followed suit and then congratulated itself on its cleverness. Now people think they are extraordinarily clever to hold this opinion; unfortunately, they fail to realize how they were conditioned to do so.

In truth, man not only inherits a physical existence from his parents and forebears but also brings into the world a soul-spiritual element that works within him. If one does not acknowledge that the soul-spiritual aspect is present before birth, one cannot see that the same soul and spirit remain after death; at most, one can believe it. Knowledge of the immortality of the soul is dependent on knowledge of its existence before birth. If one maintains that the soul came into being with the creation of the body, then, of course, a divine creator would have the privilege of letting the soul disappear upon the body's dissolution. If, however, it is the soul that builds up the body in the first place, then it certainly remains unaffected when the body dies.

Thus, the existence of the human soul follows readily from all the aspects that one can correctly observe. Indeed, how could the soul die, since it is the soul itself that builds up the physical body! One would have to investigate far different regions to discover whether or not the soul can perish. In future lectures we shall consider this question and find that it cannot die in these realms either. It obviously cannot die with the body because it is the soul that built it up.

We have now become acquainted with illnesses that originate because the soul-spiritual element works out of the head, and the body is malfunctioning. But the blood circulation can also be too slow. Stagnation sets in and the blood then suppurates. Still, something entirely different can happen, too. The infant may be too weak to absorb nourishment through its intestines into its blood. Because the body is too weak, nourishment does not pass through the villi and the child becomes afflicted with diarrhoea. What should have been absorbed to remain longer in the body is expelled. Because the food was not properly digested, diarrhoea results, and the substance is discharged unchanged. This is connected with something else. Obviously, a child can get diarrhoea in different degrees, and it may even get summer cholera. Whatever the degree, however, it is only the first stage. If the child cannot digest its food for a considerable length of time, its inner organs cannot be built up properly. The head constantly wants to work on them, but the inner organs cannot be correctly constructed because the necessary substances are lacking. Say you were working on a statue and ran out of clay but continued to make empty-handed motions in the air. In a like manner the head starts to move and fidget around when the child lacks the substance from which its organs can be built. It wants to form the heart or stomach but can only aimlessly fidget about because the substances the head should have received have been eliminated causing diarrhoea.

The educated but materialistic scientist faces a complete puzzle here. He examines the child, discovers diarrhoea and prescribes some medication to stop it. As a result, food will merely accumulate in the intestines because they cannot be absorbed, and the child will get nothing more than a swollen stomach. If one were to examine the organism further, one would discover that the heart is malformed, that it is an empty pouch, or that the lungs are empty sacks. They want to be formed but lack the necessary substances. The forces originating from the head that penetrate into the lungs, which may now be empty sacks, need something to grasp and work with. I can grasp this chair and shake it or, without having taken hold of it, I can merely fidget about like an idiot. But what happens when the head forces fidget about in the lungs? Convulsions occur. A rational explanation of convulsions must acknowledge that the head is fidgeting around and finds no support. Diarrhoea may be explained materialistically but convulsions can no longer be accounted for along these lines.

All this demonstrates that in the infant the soul-spiritual processes are at their height of activity. Later, this activity subsides. Up to the child's sixth or seventh years, however, these spiritual forces are so active that they can separate minute amounts of matter from food that will constitute the second teeth. Imagine having to do that yourself! You would have to be clever enough to distinguish the magnesium salts and carbonates contained in the food. Even if you could do that you would first have to analyse the teeth chemically and learn from them themselves. The teeth made artificially today are not living teeth; no one really knows how teeth are produced. Yet minute portions of the nourishment the child receives up to its seventh year are withdrawn to make the second teeth. Furthermore, to correctly separate the various substances you would need to know not only the chemical composition of food and teeth but also the activity in the stomach. What happens to the minute particles secreted in the second or third years? How do you retain them long enough in the blood stream so that, at just the right time, during the sixth and seventh years, they will penetrate the jaws to build up the teeth? All this that must be accomplished is done unconsciously by the child's soul and spirit. No one here would feel insulted if I said that you cannot produce or make one hair grow on your head. But a child can. It drives the proper substances to the spot where the hair takes root and then offers them to the light, for hair grows under the influence of light. All this occurs in the child, but modern science is unwilling to consider these aspects. It leaves people in the dark by refusing to acknowledge that soul-spiritual forces work within the organism that originate, not from the parents, but from the spiritual world.

Let us return to this matter of hair. Man normally grows hair only on certain parts of his body, but once, ages ago, he was covered completely with a shaggy growth of hair. Why did he lose it? I will not give you a theory, which anyone can dream up, but merely point out some facts. Consider another creature, the pig. When pigs are free in nature, they are covered with hair, but domesticated pigs lose it. In their natural habitat wild boars grow thick coats of fur; when they are domesticated and in surroundings not originally their own, they lose it. Man, like the domesticated animals, did not originally live under today's conditions. But there was a time when, under the influence of light and warmth, he grew hair all over his body, and we may witness this fact today in an embryo a few months old. During the first months of pregnancy the whole embryo, insofar as it is only a head, is covered with hair. Later, the hair disappears. I have already explained how plants in their first stage of growth utilize light and warmth from the previous year. Likewise, the child has hair on account of the light and warmth emanating from the mother. Only later is it lost. So a consideration of hair, too, can show us how forces of soul and spirit work on the body.

I have said that the human being is most healthy during the school years, between the ages of seven and fourteen. Why is this so? Only those children who can develop those strong forces that produce the second teeth survive. During that period, the child unfolds vigorous forces, but they must first be acquired in the earliest years through radical adaptation. Everything that the head accomplishes within the organism is most pronounced during those early years. Though the child is unaware of its activity, the head must really exert itself and be a great artisan. It has to overcome the body's constant resistance all by itself because it gets no support in its continual and taxing efforts during the first seven years. This tremendous strain causes all those illnesses I have told you about.

Let us now suppose that the circulation of the blood is malfunctioning, not on account of its absorbing too little nourishment, but because it absorbs too much. This can also happen. Indeed, the parents, who often think it is best to stuff the baby with food, may not be as wise as the organism. They can hardly be reproached for this practice, though, because it is usually quite difficult to tell when the child has had enough. Children know their limits, as a rule, through their own inherent wisdom and instinct. If the mother produces too much milk, however, and it is fed to the child, its instinct will become uncertain through eating too much. Now, if too much food is absorbed by the system, the head cannot keep up; it cannot handle too large an amount and will try to eliminate the surplus. The food has already been absorbed into the blood through the intestines, however, so the head cannot eliminate the surplus in the normal way. What does it do then? It discharges the superfluous substances through the skin. Measles and scarlet fever are the result.

These illnesses differ completely from diarrhoea and convulsions. A child gets the latter because it does not receive enough food and its forces fidget around aimlessly within the body. When too much food is absorbed, however, it must somehow be eliminated, occasionally even through the lungs. Diphtheria and pneumonia are the body's defence measures used to rid itself of substances it cannot otherwise eliminate through the skin. When one understands the human being and the processes that occur in the body, one finds it quite natural that an infant is susceptible to these illnesses.

A child can be afflicted with yet other diseases. Take the case of a child who is too weak to produce his second teeth. His milk teeth were inherited and required no effort from his system. Now, it can happen that the forces unable to produce the new teeth are diverted into the lungs. The lungs become inflamed and the child gets pneumonia. You see, the human body is extremely complicated, and when a child falls ill with pneumonia the doctor should examine the condition not only of the lungs but also of the kidneys, stomach, etc. When an illness arises, one must always examine the whole body and not just the part immediately affected.

When a child has reached the age of seven, however, its breathing processes have become sufficiently developed to function without the intervention of the head. In the infant the head must constantly regulate the breathing. It must not only build up the teeth but also care for the organs of breathing. When the head has been relieved of these tasks at age seven or eight, the child is now in a position to breathe properly. It is of utmost importance to realize that with the second teeth the child can bring order into its breathing, and can receive its second lungs and bronchi, as it were, which have by now been built up. The child no longer breathes with a weak inherited organism but with the new one that has been built up. Now it is in quite a different situation; now it has support. It is one thing if the child has inherited from, say, a weak mother and father, a breathing apparatus that must be directed from a head that is too weak, and it is quite another thing if it has properly built up a second apparatus suited to its needs. A head that is too weak simply cannot build up the lungs properly. Thus, because from age seven to fourteen the organs of breathing are in such fine shape, the individual is then at his healthiest. The positive aspect of these years is that the breathing process is at its best. With the onset of puberty, however, some of the nourishment is now diverted to this development. In the younger child substances are not yet absorbed through the later processes of puberty, but now digestion must take a completely new form. The reason is easily understood, for something completely new has come into play and its food is diverted in a new direction. From the age of puberty onward the mature organs of breathing cause the digestive organs to readjust so that the right counter-pressure is exerted from the stomach and intestines, since some of what earlier constituted the overall pressure was diverted. Now, the proper counter-pressure must come about. No wonder that anaemia and other illnesses afflict girls of this age since the organism must take time to adjust.

From age seven to fourteen the child enjoys its greatest protection from illness. In earlier years the head must make a tremendous effort to work into the rest of the organism and it must adjust to this task. Then, during the school years, the child is at its healthiest. The second breathing system is unhindered and can freely distribute the oxygen to the benefit of both the brain and the digestion. As I have mentioned before, things can be upset only through outside causes—activities in school and the like.

But now the child reaches puberty. Look at a boy. Up to this point he has perfected his body and is as healthy as a human being can be. He has successfully renewed his organism and everything has gone smoothly. But with the onset of puberty his metabolism begins to affect his whole body. The processes of digestion begin to work upward into his breathing system and, as a result, his voice changes. At the age when he must again reform his organism, the metabolic system becomes influential. This is expressed in a deepening of the voice. He must make new exertions and again illnesses threaten.

You see, only when we observe the human being in this manner are we able to answer the question one of you gentlemen posed last time. Otherwise, we cannot even think about it, let alone learn anything. But knowing now that it is the head that works the most during the first seven years, what conclusion may we reach? You must understand that, while the head is developed in the mother's organism, it is not merely formed by conception and substance but by the whole universe. The mother's substances represent only the foundation on which the form occurs. The head is a representation, an image of the universe. Its roundness indicates the working of the whole universe, and it is no idle fancy that the starry heavens work upon the skull, which is sometimes covered by a stupid looking hat. It is as true as this fact that I've mentioned to you before. Suppose we have a compass; the magnetic needle always points north, not just anywhere. Now, no one thinks that the needle contains the forces that determine its position. Everyone agrees that it is the magnetic forces of the earth, and that the needle takes its direction from these earthly forces. Everyone comprehends that. Yet, in regard to human embryonic development, men falsely think it all arises from conception. It would be just as clever to think that the direction pointed to by the magnetic needle was determined by its own forces.

The human head represents the whole cosmos, and this it is that has worked upon it. In addition, these forces bestowed by the universe continue to work within the child through its head. To build up the lungs, for example, the head must receive the right forces from the universe. To perfect the kidneys, forces must be received from far-off regions, from Jupiter, for instance. This is no idle fancy. It can be investigated just as other, physical matters can be investigated. Thus, when a child is born, it carries within its head all the forces of the universe.

Of course, it is nonsense to say that the moon, sun or Jupiter have an influence on an organ, or to cast a horoscope thinking the planet Jupiter, for example, is dominant. The head is formed from the whole universe, and the forces that work on the human being during the first seven years have been given to the head from the cosmos. During the next seven years, man becomes increasingly accustomed to the earth's atmosphere, so that whereas before he was influenced by the stars, he is now influenced by the air.

After this period the substances of digestion and the metabolic system play such an important part that they can even affect the voice. What does this mean? It is all a result of what we absorb through digestion from the earth. I have already explained to you this process of how, for example, substances from the earth must first be made lifeless within the intestines. This becomes man's main task when he reaches puberty. At that time he becomes dependent on the earth. As males we owe our voices first of all to the air, but the deepening results from the action of earthly substances. We can be born on earth because originally we were beings of the stars. After birth we let the forces we have brought with us from the starry worlds echo within our organisms. Then we become beings of the air. Only at puberty are we assigned to the earth to become its beings. Only then do we become attached to those things that fetter us to this planet. Thus, you see the course of man's descent to the earth from the cosmos.

Often materialists blindly fantasize about human development. They do not realize that man gradually accustoms himself to the earth and then, in old age, grows away from it. For what happens in old age? The forces we possess in advanced age we also possessed in youth. They hardened the bones while the other parts stayed pliable. But in old age the forces contained in the bones pass into the rest of the body, and the initial result is arteriosclerosis. The arteries harden, and the brain can calcify. Actually, the brain must always contain a minute amount of what arises through calcification. The child would be dull if its brain lacked these minute traces of calcium secreted by the pineal gland. The soul could not act; it would not have the substances in which to work. But if later in old age too much calcium is secreted and calcification occurs, the soul again cannot direct matters because it encounters too much resistance. This can result in paralysis or apoplexy or some other kinds of stroke. One can also become senile, since one can no longer take hold of and use the brain. Calcification in other parts of the body has the same effect, lifting one out of the region of the earthly forces. Thus we can see how man, up to the end of puberty, grows into the forces of the earth and how, later, when the secreted deposits become increasingly resistant and the soul's activity is impeded, he grows away from the earth.

So you see that it is, in fact, possible to discover what man has received and brought down from the universe. But one must not fall for superstitions such as a certain star is influencing the lung of a thirty-five year old man even though the lung has indeed been built up by the forces that initially descended from the stars into the head of the infant.

By examining such things scientifically, one arrives at a real science of the spirit. A spiritual science exists, and it can be studied just like any other science. We can belittle ancient times as much as we like, but in those days people did know something. Granted, we cannot bring back the past; what was right for people then is not so for us today. But if once again we have men who understand the world and man, men who know that the human head is not just produced in the mother's womb as a kind of pinhead, then we shall also have better politicians. You see, gentlemen, a person who knows nothing of these matters and of the nature of the human being cannot be a good politician simply because he will not know what people need. It is absolutely essential that once more there be men who really know something about the world. This is what we must strive for.

Schools must again teach people something of value. Today, much importance is placed on learning the skills required for making machines. Nothing can be said against this from the standpoint of spiritual science because it is quite worthwhile. But the skills needed to cope among human beings are neglected. An abstract social science, ignorant of man's needs, was invented and this is taught instead. Above all, one must study man as we have done here, but unhappily what I told you is not taught. Look back on your own school days! Where is something like this taught today? That is what our age lacks. Teaching men the things they learn today is about as good for them as feeding them rocks instead of bread. Maybe the stomach of a goose can take rocks but that of a human being cannot! To do so would ruin the digestive system, and when you teach men what is being taught today, you actually ruin their heads. You know that the arm becomes weak if it is unused, and the head also becomes weak if it is not used in the right way. While the head was developing in the mother, it received forces from the stars. If it is told nothing about them, if it entertains no thoughts of them, it grows weak, just as muscles do when they are not exercised. If the child learns nothing of the real world, it remains weak. The worst thing about conditions today is that people have weak heads and do not understand anything about one another. They separate themselves according to social standing and do not speak to those of other classes. This is like training a man to become an athlete while neglecting his biceps. If, in educating men, I leave their heads weak, they will not know the very thing that matters most. This is how things stand.

When children have finished building up their organisms with inherent, unconscious wisdom and have received their second teeth, it is of utmost importance to impart to them something that they have previously employed unconsciously. Then do they become proper human beings, people who can direct their thoughts properly and conceive of spiritual science in the right way. Once social thinking is ruined, nothing rational can be achieved. But if we make use of a genuine science of the spirit, much can be improved in that respect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question is asked about the value of statistics.

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

Question: Does inspiration also occur when collecting numbers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ 1 ] Now, Gentlemen, I have not yet fully answered the last question about colors. We will take it a little further or complete it.

[ 2 ] First of all, today we have to consider a most interesting question, namely, the human color itself. You know, of course, that over the face of the earth are people showing skins differing in color. The Europeans to whom we belong are called the “White Race.” Well, we know indeed that a man in Europe is not quite healthy when he is cheese-white. He is healthy when he shows his natural, fresh color, created by himself inwardly, through the white.

[ 3 ] But now besides this European coloring we have four other principal colors of the skin. We will consider this a little today because one actually understands the whole of history and the whole social life, even modern social life, only if one can turn to the race-characteristics of humanity [see drawings]. Only then can one rightly understand the spiritual element if one first studies how the spirit works in man precisely through the skin-color.

[ 4 ] I should now like to put the racial color before you in this way. Let us start from Europe where we ourselves are living. Here we have therefore—I can draw it for you only roughly—first Europe; bordering on Europe: Asia, England, Ireland; here Japan, China; further India, India proper, Arabia; here we have Africa. Thus: Europe, Asia, Africa.

Now we will sketch in the men as they are in the corresponding regions. We call ourselves in Europe the white race. If we go over to Asia we have the yellow race, principally in Asia. And when we go over to Africa there we have the black race. Those are the original races. All others living in these regions are the consequence of migration.

So if we ask: What races belong to these parts of the earth?—Then we must say: To Asia belongs the yellow race, the Mongolian; to Europe belongs the white race or the Caucasian race, and to Africa belongs the black or Negro race. The Negro race does not belong to Europe and it is naturally only mischievous that it now plays so great a role in Europe. These races are, as it were, at home in these three parts of the earth.

[ 5 ] Now we will consider the color of these three races. I have already told you that color has to do with light. When one sees the black of universal space through the illumined universe, then it appears blue. When one sees light, illumination through the dark air, it appears reddish, as in the glow of morning and evening.

[ 6 ] Let us just simply consider colors on ordinary objects. You first distinguish—let us say—black and white. These are the most striking colors, black and white. What is the position then with a black body? A black body assimilates in itself all the light that falls upon it and mirrors back none at all.

So if you have a black body, it takes the light that falls on it, absorbs everything into itself, and gives none back. It therefore appears black because it reflects no light.

When you have a white body it says: I do not need the light, I will only use what is in myself, I send all the light back. It is therefore white.

Thus a white body sends back all light and we see its surface light, white. A dark body absorbs all the light and also all the warmth and throws back no light, no warmth at all, and therefore appears black.

[ 7 ] You can study that more closely if you consider the following. Suppose there is some object on the earth which takes up all light. In the first place it gives back a little light and so appears bright. But it allows itself time and takes up the most light possible. When it can take up no more and one brings it into the light, then it appears black.

[ 8 ] Now, suppose there is a tree. It stands at first on the earth's surface and takes up a certain amount of light. But it absorbs a good deal of both light and warmth. That goes on until the time when it falls below the earth. When, for a length of time,—but that means thousands or millions of years—it has remained beneath the earth, what does it become? Black coal. It becomes black because it took up light and warmth into itself when it was a tree. It does not give that out unless we destroy it. If we burn it then it yields it, but if we only bring it into the air for a time it keeps it. It has taken up so much light and warmth that it gives nothing out—we must destroy it. That is the condition of coal.

[ 9 ] Let us suppose that the object does not take up further light, it sends all back again, then something of such a nature will be white. That is the snow in winter. It reflects all light, it takes up no light and no warmth and thus becomes white. You see by this difference between coal and snow the relation that exists between objects on earth and universal space.

[ 10 ] Let us apply that to man in universal space. Let us look just at the blacks in Africa. These blacks in Africa have the characteristic of absorbing from the universe all light and all warmth. They take it up. Now this light and this warmth in the universe cannot go through the whole body because a human being is always a human being even if he is a black one. It does not go through the whole body but stops short on the surface of the skin, and therefore the skin itself becomes black.

Thus a black man in Africa is one who absorbs the most possible warmth and light from the universe and assimilates it in himself. Through the fact that he does this the forces of the cosmos work over the whole man like this [see drawing]. He takes up light and warmth everywhere and uses it in himself. Now there must be something which helps him in this assimilation.

Well, you see, what helps him in particular is his posterior brain. In the Negro the posterior brain is specially developed. That goes through the spinal cord and can work over all the light and warmth that is in him.

Hence alt that is connected with the body and metabolism is strongly developed in the Negro. He has, as one says, a strong desire-life, instinctive life [see drawing]. And since he actually has the sun-like, light and warmth, on the surface of his skin, his whole metabolism proceeds as if there were a cooking by the sun itself in his interior. Hence comes his desire-life. There is really a continuous cooking going on within him, and what stokes the fire is the posterior brain.

[ 11 ] Sometimes man's organization throws off further byproducts. That is to be seen just in the Negro. The Negro not only has this cooking in his organism, it not only boils there, but he also has a frightfully crafty and observant eye. He peers craftily and very observantly. You can easily take this as a contradiction. But it is like this: If there in front is the nerve of the eye [see drawing], the nerves go just into the posterior brain; they cross there [see drawing]. The nerve goes into the posterior brain, and since that is specially developed in the Negro therefore he peeps out so craftily, is such a sly observer of the world. [ 12 ] If one begins to understand the matter, it all becomes clear. But modern science does not make such studies as we do and so it knows nothing about these things.

[ 13 ] Let us now pass over from the black to the yellow man. Yellow is already related to the red, and so light is reflected to some extent but much is absorbed. However, the yellow man throws back more light than a black. The black man is an egoist, he takes up all light and all warmth. The yellow Mongolian gives indeed some light back, but he absorbs a great deal. That makes him what he is [see drawing]. Thus he takes up much light but gives some back. He contents himself with less. This less amount of light cannot work in the whole metabolism, and so the metabolism must be referred to its own force. That works chiefly in the breathing and blood-circulation.

Thus in the yellow race—Japanese, Chinese—the light and warmth work principally in breathing and blood-circulation. If you have ever met a Japanese, you will have noticed how he pays attention to his breathing. When he talks to you he keeps himself under restraint so that his breathing may be in good order. He has a certain feeling of well-being in breathing.

This means that less is worked over in his interior, it is principally worked upon in the breast [see drawing]. This causes the yellow man to develop strongly, not the posterior brain, but the middle brain. It is there that his breath and blood-circulation are maintained. The yellow Asiatic lives rather less in the metabolism.

You can notice that too by his walking. He has a less energetic walk. He does not work so strongly with the limbs and the metabolism. The Negro is more to the fore in racing and outer movement that is governed by desires. The Asiatic, yellow man, develops more an inner dream life and therefore the whole Asiatic civilization has this dreamer-element.

Thus he is not only living more in himself; he absorbs something from the universe. And so it comes about that the Asians have such wonderful poems about the whole universe. The Negro has not got this quality. He takes everything into his metabolism and really he only digests the universe.

The Asiatic breathes it into himself, has it in his blood-circulation. And so he can also give it out from himself when awake. For speech is in fact only a metamorphosed breathing. Yes. Gentlemen, they are beautiful, wonderful poems. The Asians are altogether an inward people. They scorn the European today because they say: They are external people. We shall see why immediately. That then is the yellow race [see drawing] and it is connected with color in the way I have told you.

[ 14 ] Now let us look at ourselves in Europe. We are a white race in regard to the universe, for we must give back all external light. We give back all light and. in fact, all warmth too. The warmth has to be very powerful if we want to take it into us. And when it is not there we are stunted, as we see by the Eskimos. There is the human being [see drawing] of such a nature that he throws back all light and warmth. He absorbs them only when they become powerful. He throws them back and develops only the light and warmth that arise in his inner being through his own inner activity.

Yes, neither breathing nor blood-circulation comes to help him, nor the creation of warmth; but he must himself work out light and warmth through his brain, that is, through his head. We actually throw back all external light and warmth. We ourselves must give the color to our blood. That then presses through the white and so we obtain the human color of the Europeans. It is from within.

And so indeed we are such a white body as assimilates everything within and throws back all light and warmth.

And whereas the Mongolian mainly needs the middle brain, we Europeans use the frontal brain, the anterior brain. Through this fact the following is shown. The man with the posterior brain has mainly the desire-life, life of instinct: the one here with the middle brain has the feeling life, situated in the breast; and we Europeans, we poor Europeans, have the thought-life that sits in the head. Thereby, as it were, we do not feel our inner man at all. For we feel the head only when it is ill. Otherwise we do not feel it.

But this makes us aware of the whole outer world and we easily become materialists. The Negro becomes no materialist, he remains man inwardly, only he develops the inner desire-life. Nor does the Asiatic become materialist, he remains at the feeling-life, he does not bother about external life as the European does. Of the latter he says: He is only an engineer, concerning himself only with outer life.—He is, in fact, since he must develop his frontal brain, assigned to the outer world, and everything is connected with that.

[ 15 ] Thus we are the white race, inwardly the white is colored through our blood. Then there is the Mongolian, the yellow race; and then there is the black race. And we can understand that quite well when we start from the colors—then the whole thing is explained.

[ 16 ] Now you only need to consider how that is. The Negroes live on a part of the earth where the sun oppresses them very much indeed, penetrates into them. So they give themselves up to it, absorb it fully into their bodies, become friendly with it, reject nothing.

With the Asians—more comes to them from the heat of the earth. They do not give so much back. They are no longer so friendly with the sun.

And with the Europeans—here the fact is that they would actually obtain nothing from the sun if they did not evolve their own human element. Europe has therefore always been the starting point for all that develops the human element in connection with the outside world.

Inventions have very seldom been made in Asia. They can be assimilated, but inventions themselves, by which the Asians can apply what is produced through practical experience with the outer world—these the Asians cannot make.

[ 17 ] For instance, this is what once happened with a screw-steamer. Some Japanese had learnt about it through stealthily watching Europeans, and they also wanted to manage it alone. Previously the Europeans had always been in charge and directed things. Now the Japanese wanted to manage the steamer alone. The English remained behind on the shore. Suddenly the Japanese who were on board fell into evident despair, for the steamer continually revolved round itself. They could not make out how to bring the proper forward motion to the revolving movement. The Europeans who knew how to do it naturally grinned tremendously on the shore. This independent thought which the European develops in familiarity with the environment is not possessed by the Asiatic peoples. The Japanese will therefore develop all European inventions, but they will not think out something by themselves.

As regards the human race, men all over the earth are actually dependent on one another. They must help each other. That is a consequence of their natural ability. [ 18 ] That is connected, you see, with the whole of man's development. Think for a moment of a black man; his desire-life is especially evolved, all that boils in the interior. This gives much ash, and the ash is deposited in the bones. He is therefore more developed in his bones than a man of the white race. The latter rather directs to the blood what he has inwardly and his bones are more finely developed. Thus the Negro has coarsely developed bones, the European has more finely developed bones. And the Asiatics, the yellow race, stand in between.

[ 19 ] You can observe by the manner in which a Japanese stands and walks that in his bone-structure he stands between the European and the African. The Africans have these strong bones continuously in movement. The European has more the blood system. The Japanese has all that acts on the breathing and from the breath on the blood-circulation.

[ 20 ] But now, Gentlemen, men on earth do not simply remain where they are. If one were to go back into ancient times, one would already find that the yellow race belonged to Asia, the white race to Europe and the black race to Africa. But it has also always happened that people have wandered out. And it can happen that either the yellow wander to the East or the blacks wander to the West. And that was once done. The yellow have always wandered eastwards. There they have come to those islands which lie between Asia and Australia [see scheme]. When the yellow wander over to the East they become brown. There arose the Malayans who became brown. Why?

Yes, why do they become brown? What does it mean to become brown? Well, when they are yellow they throw back a definite degree of light; the rest they absorb. When they become brown through the different way in which they now live in the sun—for they come from another part of the earth—then they throw back, reflect, less light. They take more light into themselves. So these brown Malayans are migrated Mongolians, but who now, since the sun works on them differently, accustom themselves to absorb more light and more warmth.

But consider how they have not the nature tor this. They have already accustomed themselves to have a bony structure which limits them to a definite degree of warmth. They have not the right nature for taking up so much warmth as they now take up as Malayans.

The result of this is that they begin to become unusable people, people who break to pieces in the body, whose body dies away. This is in fact the case with the Malayan population. They die of the sun. They die of the Fast. One can say that whereas the yellow, the Mongolians, are still men in full strength, the Malayans are already a dying race. They are dying out.

[ 21 ] In ancient times the Negroes wandered over to the West—today circumstances are different, they can do it less—but they wandered westwards in ancient times; there had always been a ship passage, and there were still islands over the whole Atlantic Ocean, for earlier this was in fact a continent. Now when the blacks wandered west they could no longer absorb so much light and warmth as in their native Africa. Less light and warmth reaches them. What is the result? Their nature is organized to take up as much as possible of light and warmth and actually in that way to become black. Now they do not get as much light and warmth as they need in order to become black. So they become copper-red, become Indians. That comes from the fact that they are obliged to reflect something of light and warmth. That gleams a copper-red. Copper is itself a body which must reflect a little light and warmth.

They cannot hold out against this and so die in the West as Indians. They are again a race that is going under, they die from their own nature which gets too little light and warmth. They die from the earthly, and the earthly element of their nature is their desire-life. They can no longer develop that properly, whereas they still get strong bones. Since much ash goes into their bones these Indians can no longer hold out against it. Their bones become frightfully strong, but so strong that the whole man goes to pieces by reason of his bones.

[ 22 ] You see, this is how things have developed, so that these five races have come about. One might say: Black, yellow, white in the center: as a side-branch of the black the copper-red, and as a side-branch of the yellow the brown: those are always the dying-out parts.

[ 23 ] The whites are actually those who evolve the human element and so they are assigned to themselves. When they migrate they somewhat take on the characteristics of the other regions, yet they do not go to pieces as a race, but rather as individuals. But instead they do something else altogether.

You see, all that I have been describing to you are things that go on in man's body, and the soul and spirit are more independent of it. And so soul and spirit can be most active in the European, since they make most claim on him. He can more easily bear going into different parts of the earth.

Hence it also once came about that starting from up above there [see scheme] a great migration of people went over as far as India. A stream of white people struck into a region where the population was yellow. Thus arose the Hindus, a mixture of Mongolian and Caucasian. Hence came the very beautiful Indian poetry, the most beautiful in existence. But again at the same time something of which one notes that it has already become inert, because the white element is not in its own territory.

[ 24 ] And so one can say that the white man can go everywhere, today even lo America—and all the white inhabitants of America have come from Europe. The white element therefore comes into American regions, but something happens to man when he comes to America from the Europe for which he is naturally constituted. It means that some demand must be made on the posterior brain. As European in Europe he has made demands chiefly on his frontal brain. Now in America there flourish those people who were once actually decadent Negroes—that is to say, they do not flourish, they are going to pieces—the Red Indians. When one comes there a conflict always arises in the head between the anterior and the posterior brain.

It is found that if a family moves to America and settles there, then the descendants have the peculiarity of acquiring somewhat longer arms. The arms and legs grow rather more when the European settles in America—not in himself, of course, but in his descendants. That comes from the fact that things move over through the middle brain to the posterior brain when as European one comes to America.

[ 25 ] But at the same time something very peculiar comes about in the American. Now the European lives entirely in his inner being, does he not—especially if he is a thinker. If he is no thinker, he barely reflects at all, but that produces a life which is not quite filled up. But as soon as the European settles in America he no longer is such a brooder. So the following arises: When you read a European book, things are always proved. One cannot get away from the proving. One reads through a whole book, reads through 400 pages, only proofs. Even if it is a novel there is always proving. For the most part, nothing is proved at the end on the 400th page.

The American does not do that. When you read an American book everything is put forward as a statement. There again it is a going-back, nourished by the instinct. The animal proves nothing; the lion does not prove that he will devour another animal, he will devour it. If the European wants to do anything, it must first be proved. Today that is the great difference between the European and the American. Europeans prove, Americans affirm.

[ 26 ] But that is not to say that what they affirm cannot be just as true, it is even realized more through the whole man. The Americans have that in advance of the European. On the one hand they approach decadence—the American Indian is decadent—but when one begins to go to pieces one becomes clever. So the Europeans become clever when they go over: they disaccustom themselves from the proving. [ 27 ] This wanting to prove is not exactly a quality to bring one forward. If one is to do something in the morning, one can begin with proving, and at night on going to sleep one can still not do it, because one still must prove. The American will not do that, because he has not been trained at all to prove. And so it comes that America will quite certainly go ahead of Germany in some things. One can make quite interesting observations. If one takes up a European book it proves somewhat as follows—let us say it is a book about the digestive system of the cockchafer—such books are indeed written. It begins by proving: “The animal species of the cockchafer contains also digestive organs, they only withdraw from ordinary observation, one must penetrate deeper into the whole organization of the cockchafer.”—Well, so it goes on. One has to prove everything.

The American begins with: “When one dismembers a cockchafer then one finds in it that and that”—he affirms as he observes.

And so you see in the case of the Europeans: they no longer develop their racial character on behalf of their whole organization. They develop rather the qualities of soul and spirit. For this reason they can penetrate into all other parts of the world. The process of becoming decadent is naturally a slow one.

[ 28 ] The sun always sends more or less of warmth and light down to the earth. Now we have the Vernal Point in the Fishes, as I have told you. Previously it was in the Ram, Aries. After some time it will be in Aquarius: only then will the true American civilization come.

Before then civilization will go more and more over to America. One who will, can already see today how powerful the Americans are becoming and how Europe is getting increasingly impotent. And the reason why no kind of peace can now come to Europe is because Europe no longer actually understands its own land.

Now all civilization moves over to America; it will take a long time, but when the sun's vernal point has entered the Sign of Aquarius then it will send down its rays to earth just in such a favorable way that the American culture and civilization will be especially powerful. That is already to be seen today.

[ 29 ] It is very remarkable: In Europe over here what we call Anthroposophy can be developed. It must be developed out of the Spirit—that does not come at all out of racial characteristics. It must be developed out of the Spirit. And the men who are unwilling to approach the Spirit will plunge Europe into disaster.

[ 30 ] The Americans do not yet need it, especially those who travel over there. For they can still maintain themselves on racial characteristics. And so over in America, curiously enough, arises something remarkable. Anyone who reads American books really attentively, who reads parliamentary speeches, one who takes a general interest in what goes on in America today, will say to himself: Good gracious! That is very remarkable. We in Europe develop Anthroposophy out of the Spirit. Over there they develop something that is a kind of wooden doll of Anthroposophy. Everything becomes materialistic.

But for one who is not a fanatic, there is something similar in American culture to what is anthroposophical science in Europe. Only everything there is wooden, it is not yet alive. We can make it alive in Europe out of the Spirit: those over there take it out of instinct.

[ 31 ] You see, one cart notice that in all detail. The time will one day come when this American “wooden man”—which actually everyone is still—when he will begin to speak. Then he will have something to say very similar to European Anthroposophy.

One can say that we in Europe develop Anthroposophy in a spiritual way; the American develops it in a natural way. Therefore when I explain anthroposophical matters I can so often point out: Well, that is how it is anthroposophically, and that is the American caricature of it [sketch]. That is the caricature of it.

[ 32 ] But if someone is a fanatic and has come to Anthroposophy not through the inner life but through fanaticism, then he finds the very sharpest invectives for Americanism because—well, man abuses the apes chiefly—since the ape is like himself—as a caricature. And so it is really such a remarkable affair as between North and South Pole, between what we achieve spiritually in Europe and what is gained over there in America in a natural way.

[ 33 ] Books on natural science in America do not look at all as they do in Europe. They really talk continually of Spirit, but they represent it to themselves in the crudest, most material way. Hence Spiritism has also arisen in America in recent times. For what does Spiritism do? It wants to talk of the Spirit and imagines it as cloud-phenomena, would prefer everything to be like cloud-phenomena. And so Spiritism is an American product, it aims at the Spirit but in a materialistic way.

It is in fact so interesting that in America materialism simply flourishes, but actually on the way to the Spirit; while in Europe if someone becomes a materialist he dies as human being. The American is a young materialist. In fact, all children are at first materialistic, and then grow to what is not materialism. So too will the American blatant materialism sprout to a spiritual element. That will be when the sun rises in the Sign of Aquarius.

[ 34 ] Now, you see, in this way we can realize what we as Europeans have as a task. Our task as Europeans is not at all always to abuse the Americans, but naturally we must found over the whole earth a civilization which is put together from the best.

[ 35 ] If one thinks about things as the Prince of Baden does who has been taken in by the American European Wilson, then it does not do. For Wilson was not a true American. He had actually taken all his theories from Europe and therefore made things so dreadfully theoretic. But genuine Americanism will one day unite with Europeanism which will have taken a more spiritual path. When one studies something in this way one sees the attitude one should take in the world.

[ 36 ] And so it is really quite interesting: On the one hand we have the black race, which is most of all earthly. When they go westwards, they die out. We have the yellow race, which is between earth and cosmos. When they go to the East they become brown, connect too much with the cosmos, die out. The while race is the future one, is the race creating in the Spirit. When they moved over to India they developed the inward, poetical and spiritual Indian culture. When they now go to the West they will develop a spirituality which does not so much grasp man's inner being, but turns to the spirituality of the outer world.

[ 37 ] And so in the future, purely out of the racial characterization those things will emerge which one must know in life so that one takes the right stand. Men are getting less and less adjustment in life. They want indeed to have everything fall from the skies and not actually to learn.

[ 38 ] This has come about through the fact that in the last third of the 19th century nothing more of a human element was provided in education, particularly in scientific education. Knowledge of man is so difficult to present nowadays. Materialistic scholars themselves realize this, they get no farther.

It was very interesting at the last Natural Science Conference. One of these scientists had especially realized it—one does not advance, one learns nothing of the human being through science today.—But he did not go on to say: “We must develop towards Anthroposophy:” he said: “Give us corpses so that we may dismember them.”

[ 39 ] You see, that was all he could say: Give us corpses! People want to have more corpses, they want to study the dead man. That was a right catchword: Give us corpses!—Whereas we here can do without corpses, for we want to observe and study the living man. For that it is only necessary to open one's eyes and through one's eyes somewhat the soul, for one finds the living man everywhere. One meets nothing but living men. Only one must be able to live with them, so that they may make known to one what a human being is.

But the learned scholars of today have really quite weak eyes; they do not see man. And then they fervently beg “Give us corpses!” Then they can study them. Give us corpses! This was the position in educational centers in recent years, recent decades. People have taken in nothing there pertaining to man. And so knowledge of man has disappeared from all science.

[ 40 ] That is why I dealt with this question in the first chapter of my “Threefold Commonwealth.” I had to show how those who had not been occupied with science but with work had advanced and now naturally wanted science. But the others, the bourgeois, could not give them this, which they appeared to have. And thus arose the great calamity in civilization. The workers demanded science and it was not there, because only a science was there that is devoid of man.

I have shown that in the first chapter of the “Threefold Commonwealth” because that must first be understood if one talks of the social question. So that it was in fact necessary for the “Threefold Commonwealth” to begin with it in the first chapter.

[ 41 ] Now, we have dealt with colors somewhat further today.

Question: The one question is: why does it heal completely when a person inflicts a wound on himself, a cut, for example, while if you cut off a piece of flesh, for example, there is always a scar left behind; for thirty to forty years the person concerned has had no feeling at such a point. He wants to know how this is possible, since it is said that it renews itself every seven years!

The second question concerns the finds in Egypt. It is reported that a mummy, a tomb, has been found, and that during the opening of the tomb or while working in the passage, two engineers, the main conductors, died of poisoning. In the first case, it was thought that it was an ordinary heart attack or something like that; then later the same fate befell the other. It was mentioned in the magazines that poisons may have been used at the time of embalming the mummy to prevent people from entering the tombs. I cannot believe that poisons would last that long. Or did gases develop in the air spaces, causing death to occur after a very short time? Or could the poisons that were used in Egypt at that time be preserved for so long?

Some clothes were found with them. These clothes were aired: they immediately crumbled to dust. Subsequently, attempts were made through chemistry to prepare these substances again in order to preserve them for posterity.

Then grain was found in the tombs of the pharaohs that had been lying there for thousands of years. This grain was sown and was still said to be viable.

I would like to ask whether all of this was possible under normal conditions.

For example, according to the newspaper reports, it took them eighty days to get to the main tomb and to move the main stone. But it was as if the mountain had collapsed and the tombstone, the large stone, had rolled over it. Or as if everything had collapsed afterwards by detonation, since the burial places were so difficult to reach – how was that possible?

Dr. Steiner: First of all, with regard to wound healing – if we answer the questions one after the other – the incised wounds that one makes when operating: These cuts heal more or less well. That must be stated first: they heal more or less well. And indeed, one can observe how the cuts sometimes heal really extraordinarily well, so that one has to look very closely later when one comes to the place where the cut was and one wants to discover the scar. On the other hand, there are other cuts – and you don't just mean surgical wounds, but also when you cut yourself, right? – that heal extremely badly; the scar is thick and you can often find a very hard scar. Now I'll tell you something. As a boy, I used to carve a lot with knives myself. I had a peculiar habit back then of always having to have a pocket knife – I went a long way to school – you have to have something like that, don't you. But I always lost the pocket knife, and so a lot of knives had to be supplied. I did a lot of carving and, among other things, I cut myself very badly here and here, as you can see from the carving. But you have to look very closely if you still want to see the trace of it; it has almost completely healed. But if you look very closely, you can see this cut, which was a gaping wound and bled a lot. But you can hardly see it anymore. On the other hand, with some cuts the edges, the thick scars, can be seen for a long time. Now, what causes these thick scars? You see, the human body is formed entirely from the inside out; you have seen that from the way I have described the formation of the human body, and I have also told you that everything that has to be formed by the human body has to be formed from the inside, right up to the surface of the skin. Now, what causes colds? I have also spoken to you about this. Colds are caused by the fact that one does not develop one's own warmth alone, but that the external warmth or cold has an effect on one, that one is treated like a piece of wood by the environment, so that the cold comes so quickly that one cools down, so that one perceives the cold merely as a stimulus, that it opposes what comes from within. All of this is foreign to the human body and is fought by it. Now, at the moment when you cut yourself, whether it is through a clumsiness, a mishap, or an operation, at that moment there is still a foreign instrument at the site where only the human body should be at work. The knife penetrates into the space where blood and nerves and muscles and so on should actually be at work. So at this point there is a very lively struggle between the forces that are inside the body and the forces that are penetrating. They are, after all, intruders. And in order to ward them off, the inner physical matter of the human body clumps together all around, creating the scar. It clumps together to prevent these forces from penetrating further. So the scar is a protective covering that is formed initially to keep the foreign forces from penetrating. The scar always develops initially.

Now, suppose you are young, for example, very young, like I was when I made these cutlet stories; I was ten, eleven, twelve years old. Yes, when you are so young, the etheric body is in full activity, it is extremely active. When the etheric body is as strong as it is in early youth, then, when the physical matter falls away, the scar will simply heal gradually; the substance of the tissues is arranged in the appropriate way. Suppose you are older; then the etheric body, especially at the site of the scar, is not so strong as to overcome this. It does it again, does it a second time, because it cannot overcome the place where the scar is attached, because it cannot get over it. Because it always depends on the strength or weakness of the etheric body whether a scar is formed or gradually eliminated. Injuries in childhood will always leave weaker scars than injuries inflicted later. But each person is different; some people maintain an exceptionally strong etheric body throughout their entire lives, and they overcome scars more easily than others whose etheric body is weakened.

If a person is a farmer, for example, who always works outside in the fresh air, who never works hard in carbonic acid air, at most in winter when he is not working, in carbonic acid air - he alternates more between winter and summer in good and bad air - he has a stronger etheric body. It is not the case that the farmer is always only in fresh air. There is the well-known saying, isn't there: Why is the air so good in the country? - Because the farmers don't open the windows! If the farmers opened the windows, the air wouldn't be so good! - But that is just by the way. - The person who lives in the country always has a strong change between oxygen-rich and carbonic acid air. As a result, he lives in completely different, healthier conditions. This is not only evident in the scarring of wounds, but also in other formations. If you go out to the countryside, as you know, people walk around barefoot in summer, without boots. Every now and then someone might step on a rusty nail, but out there it doesn't mean much! He takes off the nail, wipes the blood with a dirty finger – everything is dirty, the nail is dirty, the blood he wipes away is dirty – it festers a bit, but it's done and healed in no time. It doesn't matter.

Someone who is only accustomed to living in the city has a much more sensitive etheric body. It may happen that someone has a small pimple; he shaves, hurts himself – and dies from it! I am telling you the truth: someone shaved, hurt himself while shaving, and simply died from the small pimple because blood poisoning set in immediately. That is, the blood poisoning occurred because of the weakness of the etheric body. The etheric body was no longer strong enough to immediately eliminate the invading poisons and foreign substances in the right way. For that you need a robust, lively etheric body. But that is precisely the case with farmers. Now it is getting weaker and weaker; but when you went out into the countryside in my youth, you could see these robust etheric bodies of the farmers! Of course, when the right age is reached, especially for farmers, they fall apart because the etheric body then falls away and because the astral body is not very strong in farmers. But the etheric body is very strong. That is why everything heals much faster there than in city dwellers. The earth profession has something tremendously healthy.

You see, all this can of course be known; but in our social conditions it cannot be changed for the time being. First of all, knowledge of these things must be spread. It can surely be understood that the scars are more or less pronounced depending on the strength of the etheric body, and that the healing of things that are connected to it as external substances that do not belong in the body also takes longer or shorter. A knife, for example, is an external substance; dirt that enters the body is an external substance – the body must immediately defend itself accordingly, and so on. And when one knows this, then one is no longer surprised that some wounds no longer heal at all, because people then have an emaciated, worn-out etheric body. This comes about in particular from the fact that work is no longer in harmony with nature; it comes not even so much from the carbon dioxide-rich air, but simply from the fact that one is no longer connected with nature. If someone is in the office or workshop all day, what they are dealing with has nothing to do with nature. Think of our incredible culture, which has gradually emerged: it separates people completely from nature; it creates ever more harmful and harmful substances that are ever more alien to what is natural.

A major change has taken place in recent times. We usually do not look at things from a spiritual point of view, but they must be considered from a spiritual point of view. Just think about it: in the past, people wrote by hand. Today, we work with the typewriter. Apart from the movement and so on, what is the most important factor for our health when writing? I would like to say that, among the more hidden things that come into play when writing, the smell of ink is the most important for health. And the smell of ink was not more harmful with the earlier ink production, but in a certain sense it was even corrective. What you have worn out, what you have had through unnatural exposure, that you have strained your hand, that has actually been compensated for by the old ink production, by the gall-apple ink production. What you got from the gall-apples smelled so that it continually strengthened the etheric body, even if not much, but still something. When, as you know, they started making aniline ink, producing purely chemical ink, no longer drawing on nature but, as they say in chemistry, making synthetic ink, then the human being was completely cut off; and aniline ink has an odor that is almost the opposite of what the smell of ink used to achieve. Now, of course, people are switching to typewriters. Of course, the movements you have to make, the clattering – there are already typewriters that type silently, but that is only the latest design – that is not the worst thing, but the worst thing is the dirt that is used to make the ink. It completely ruins the human etheric body, to the extent that people develop heart disease from typing because the heart is primarily powered by the etheric body. Culture is also making progress in this area; but it is never balanced out other than through knowledge that one can have about what is really at work. It is indeed true, is it not, that the present is increasingly resisting progress. Now, of course, that must not be the case; but there is a certain instinct underlying it, which consists in noticing, even if one does not know for sure, that more and more harmful things come up precisely with the progress of the future. It is connected. But it is so. Now, as for your other question, how it comes about that these extraordinarily dangerous things occur first when old mummy graves are uncovered: It is not only the case with old mummy graves, but it is also the case, for example, where there are no mummy graves, as in Egypt, but where otherwise the graves are well preserved and are rock tombs. When you enter such a place, there is an extremely toxic air present, which, if I may say so, comes towards you and is extremely dangerous and harmful. Now, what causes this?

It will seem strange to you, gentlemen, that I have to go to such lengths to explain such a thing, but only in this way can you understand it. You see, man does not live on earth just once, but - as I have already indicated to you - he lives in repeated lives on earth, he comes again and again. But when he returns, man is quite different from what he was before. You would all probably be very surprised if a painter came who knew enough about spiritual science to paint the whole company sitting here in a previous life! You would be amazed to see how each of you looked quite different in an earlier life. It would be very interesting! You will come again, won't you? When you have now lived and gone through death and gone through the spiritual world, you will come again. The power that is there to form the later body - it is not only formed from mother and father, but it is also formed by what is in us now and is carried through death into the spiritual world - this power continues to work. What works within the previous earthly bodies remains.

But now it is so that you can say: Does man really have the power to transform that which is in him today and which is so closely connected with the body he has, so that there is a completely different body? - Today no one could transform the spiritual forces within his body in such a way that the other body could be formed. But you cannot die and be reborn immediately either, there has to be a period of time, and a fairly long period at that, in between. This long period in between really has to be there. All the forces are transformed during that time. And under normal circumstances, if you have not been a criminal or a similar person, this period between death and a new birth takes quite a long time. So when do you come back to earth? You come back to earth when the conditions in which you lived have changed completely. Certainly, some people get back into the old conditions; that hurts them very much. But normally you only come back to earth when the conditions have changed completely. So you are not born back into the old conditions.

Yes, what is it that ensures that these old conditions have become completely different? You see, you never have to just fantasize, but you have to stick to the realities. The forces that we have when we are not living on earth, but between death and a new birth, are such that they also work on earth here. These forces flow to us from all the stars and everywhere. But these are actually our forces. We are just not on earth during that time. While we are on earth, our forces work from the earth; when we are not on earth, they work from the heavens. And these are precisely the forces of destruction. They destroy the circumstances in which we were.

This is easily understood in terms of external circumstances, but it goes further, into nature itself, gentlemen! It goes further, into nature itself!

Imagine, under today's conditions, a person is being buried or cremated. After some time, there is an awareness that there is hardly anything left of this person. And if you finally go to the cemeteries and look after fifty or sixty years to see what is left under the place where someone of our ancestors is buried, you will only find a few remains of bones, which will have dissolved. So there is nothing left of what has to be destroyed; after all, our whole body has to be destroyed if we are to be reborn. But even if outwardly nothing is visible of our body, there is still very much there; and he who can see the finer substances, he finds that in the place where a person is buried, even where a person is cremated, what is simply still present of the person continues to have an effect for a long time. All this must be destroyed first.

Now, the Egyptians had a specific intention behind their practice of mummification. They basically wanted to prevent people from having to come back down to earth. They did not want that at all; because by embalming the corpse, they prevent the descent. They wanted to preserve the comfort of being in the spiritual world. And the result of this was that they not only preserved the mummies, but they used materials with such great knowledge that the physical cohesion remained so beautifully in the form that we still have the mummies in museums today. They are an exact imprint of what the person actually was in those days.

Well, gentlemen, first of all, it is necessary that what has been preserved for thousands of years is like poison, because it is destructive. It actually belongs to the forces of destruction. There are an enormous number of destructive forces in a mummy. In fact, when you look at a mummy, the dust coming out of it is all destructive forces coming out. These destructive forces are there for the reason I have stated, because the human being actually wants to destroy, from the extraterrestrial, that which was there, in that form as well. Now it is there, and he has sent his destructive forces into it. So it already has its destructive forces within itself.

Secondly, however, the Egyptians used very special substances to preserve these mummies. These substances are particularly hostile to destruction. And these substances behave in such a way in a short time that they create a poisonous atmosphere. There is always a poisonous atmosphere around a mummy. This comes from the religious beliefs of the ancient Egyptians.

Now, of course, something else comes into play. Where did the Egyptians get such substances that turned into poison in a relatively short time, while they themselves could work with them quite well? You see, today's people have no idea about the power of language! The power of language in ancient times, including in Egypt, was enormous. Imagine you have a fire that causes a lot of smoke. If you blow into the fire, you change the shape of the smoke. You can make the smoke swirl in any way you like by blowing lightly; you can thus change the shape of the smoke. The blowing does not matter much. But if you start whistling a little song, then that is also a continuous blowing and so on. In this way you can shape the smoke flames according to the content of the little song. Ancient people always knew that the substance changes completely when they speak into it in any way, and especially when they use certain words. Now they used their spices for embalming, for preparing the mummies. They did not work with these spices in the way we work today, but they always worked in such a way that something was spoken during the embalming process that would be something like this today: “Whoever approaches my body will find death.” But it was spoken in such a tone and in such language that the material took it on, so that during the embalming this power passed over into the substance of the spices. It lives in them. Today's man can no longer believe this, but it is so. So if you have a mummy and you can get hold of the material it is still contained in it today: “Whoever approaches my body will die from it, will meet their death.” And that happens because the material has now received the power that was infused into it through the word.

Today, this is only present in the very last remnants. But go into a Catholic church – there the priest no longer has the power to subdue the spices with the word; but he does use a lesser power: he burns incense. Now the whole procedure that takes place would be completely ineffective if the right thing were done first, then the incense were lit, then certain prayers were spoken into the incense, or thoughts were sent. But that does not happen, instead the incense is made; certain words are spoken into it - they are then in the incense, and they then have an effect on the people who are in the incense atmosphere. Therefore the smell of incense is an important means for the conversion of sinners.

So you see, gentlemen, the last remnants of all this still remain! But this embalming was actually a religious act, and the matter was changed. You see, a man I know well, who approached Asian graves - the Egyptian graves are particularly characteristic of this, but the Asian ones have it too - found that You cannot approach these graves at all beyond a certain limit; you know that if you go any further you will faint or die. So you cannot get close; the toxic atmosphere holds you back. This is because the substances with which the corpses were treated have in fact been imbued with the word, the damaging, destructive word.

But now something else comes. Isn't it true that if man has been on earth, say, ten centuries ago, a millennium ago, his powers change. He passes through the time between death and a new birth. He comes again. Now he has the powers to build up the new body. He has these powers. He only has them because he can overcome all destructive powers in the spiritual. So the power that works from the seed is strengthened precisely by this. Because today a person could not form a human seed into a body that he wants now, but it would just become the body that was there centuries ago. The power that lies in any seed must also be old, it must have been there from the beginning. With the present power, nothing can be achieved in any seed. You see, in order for the seed to have any effect on the plant at all next year, it must be withdrawn from the external forces during the winter and turned towards the internal forces of the earth. These forces are destructive forces for everything external.

Now these grains of corn, which were placed in the Egyptian royal tombs, were actually buried with the destructive forces. So while everything that is the present body is destroyed when the human being brings his body into contact with the destructive forces, what lies in the seed has the opposite relationship. This is particularly strengthened in its life force. As a result, it can happen – it is not the case with all grains, but with many – that the same thing occurs as otherwise only occurs during the winter: that the plant seeds are together with the destructive forces of the corpses and their forces are even preserved, maintained. There they are effective even after a long time like fresh grains of grain.

And so one must realize, especially when looking at such things, that in life things happen that cannot be understood at all with materialistic science because spiritual forces are really at work. And spiritual forces immediately start to be effective when a certain time has elapsed in the course of life.

Suppose the following. Of course, this is something that I can only tell you about, but it is possible for a person to really look back at earlier lives on earth, for themselves and for other people who were with them. But then the people from the past have transformed themselves into spirit. Nothing of them remains. So if, let us say, a person who lived in ancient Greece is now a very wise person, is reborn and can see his form from ancient Greece, how he used to walk around, then he sees it in spirit, sees it really in spirit. If suddenly, through something or other – I don't know, through a devil – what he sees in spirit were to be transformed into a real human being, that is to say, if he were to encounter himself again as a physical human being, he would die from it. You cannot physically meet the past. You will die! And the one who would see a past incarnation as it really was physically, would also face the forces that absolutely want to kill the future, really kill it. That's how it is. Now, this gives rise to quite unnatural conditions. Just imagine, the people who were mummified in Egypt in their bodies, who are now lying there in their forms, have long since returned to earth, have long since returned! So that they have lived, or are living now, and their earlier forms are there. These earlier forms not only have an effect on the people who have returned, but when a person has returned, they also have a destructive effect on other people who are in the vicinity of such a preserved form. So that in reality an enmity actually comes from every mummy against human life. There is no other possibility: an enmity comes from them for human life. People actually do not pay attention to all this. And that is why it can of course also happen that mummies, which belonged to particularly ambitious people with great power and in which much secrecy has been kept, are said to be able to survive for a long time and to have a harmful effect, can actually have such a bad effect that if you come close to them, you can get sick and possibly even die. Hence these inexplicable things that are now coming out.

Now the third point remains: according to this information, it is extremely difficult to get to these graves today. It is indeed terribly difficult. And when we hear about the old mysteries today – as we often do – it is also the case that one can ask: Where are these mysteries? Yes, one would first have to dig deep into the rocks to find caves; in these caves one would see, if one could decipher them, all kinds of interesting writing. Today, all of this is basically covered by rocks, rocks that have grown together so much, with scars, these scars that arise when you work on rocks, have grown together so much that today, if you look at it superficially, you don't even notice that these rocks didn't come from nature, but were actually worked by human hands. And it was the case that the Egyptians wanted the graves to be protected. So they carved them deep into the rock and then made artificial structures over them, which gradually transformed over the millennia to look like natural rock formations or hills.

This leaves only one question, but it will lead you to understand much of the history that would otherwise remain a mystery. Well, I would like to know how it would be possible for a number of people today, no matter how many, to muster such forces as one must imagine were necessary to build these things! Even to destroy them would take as much time as you said! Just imagine, the Pharaohs – as the Egyptian kings were called – had the power to influence people through their strong spirituality. If you can influence people through material things, you can certainly influence people through words. We do not do that today because today people should be convinced of what they hear. But those ancient Pharaohs had tremendous power. Therefore they could have an enormous effect on people's strength, on their ability to work. But now you have to take another phenomenon into account to understand this. You see, the average person can lift and move certain things, and so on. But have you not already seen when someone goes mad that tremendous strength grows in him? You can sometimes be amazed at the strength a person gets for lifting things he would otherwise not be able to lift, for carrying things he would otherwise not be able to carry at all! And what strength he gets when he wrestles with you! You can easily have overcome him when he was not yet crazy; when he goes crazy, he immediately overpowers you. That is how man's strength grows when he has gone mad.

Now the Egyptians were not like that. But they were not as level-headed as we are today either. They lived in a dream-like existence and had enormous strength. And today, people have no idea how few people were needed in ancient Egypt to roll a huge stone, sometimes very high, and bring it to its destination. Man today can no longer imagine that there were times when five people could take an enormous boulder from afar and carry it high up. The powers of people in ancient Egypt were just tremendously great. And of course that could only be achieved by developing the powers of these people by virtually making them into slaves. But slavery was not only used for this purpose; this became apparent when humanity had already weakened and the intellect had already awakened. In the period that followed the Egyptian period, physical strength was already diminished with the advent of the intellect. Slavery takes on the appearance of wanting to keep it going and demanding the right to keep it going. But in the past it was different; then they made the whole nature of man dull and dull and dreamy, because in this way they could increase his physical strength. And with such artificially developed physical strength, things like these royal tombs were created, for which, today, such a huge amount of work is needed just to destroy them!

Not true, the most erroneous views are being spread about all these things for the reason that today, mostly the most materialistically-minded people are approaching these things. They cannot understand what is actually there. Someone digs up a royal tomb and must die. People are terribly surprised by this because they do not know that this was actually intended by the ancient Egyptians, that he would die. They had the means to work through time.

Just imagine this: Let us say you are in Basel and you have a radio telegraph; someone in Berlin intercepts the telegram and hears what you are saying in the radio telegraph. Right, that is far away in space, very far away. Why? Because in our radio telegraph, which we have discovered, we overcome space and are able to act through space. What is transmitted by radio appears quite elsewhere. The radio message goes through space and comes to life in another corner. Yes, gentlemen, imagine, here you release the radio message: Whoever hears what I say dies! And now imagine that a very nervous person, a terribly impressionable person, hears this here. He hears: “Whoever hears what I say will die.” Of course, he must already be very nervous, but he can also really die from fright, especially if the person speaking, the person giving the radio message, is a madman. For the forces that live in the speech of the madman are much more overpowering than the forces that live in the speech of the prudent. So if a madman speaks and someone hears his words, they can die.

Now the Egyptians had the possibility of preserving such things in their graves, of placing such sayings in them. They do not work through space, but through time. And when the Englishman pokes his nose into it, he does not know that the words put into the spices are working in the smell that goes into his nose.

The person who listens nervously to the radio telegraph and hears the radio message from the madman must at least die of fright. But the other person dies without even hearing anything, because it is in the smell. He dies from it. Into this, the “radio message” - if I may use the expression - is conjured up; and one actually puts oneself into temporal telepathy with what the ancient Egyptians did. They wanted to kill the one who poked his nose into it. This only happens because they have known the art of speaking the appropriate words into the spices so that they work.

You see, when you approach what can be known spiritually, you will no longer be amazed at things. But the strange thing is that man, by going everywhere and making his investigations, sometimes comes across, as these last cases show, in a rather unpleasant way, how the spirit works. Those upon whom the spirit has the strongest effect, in that it kills them, would, if they could spread wisdom after their death, speak the truth! Well, that does not work. So we have to express it ourselves, the counsel from the spiritual world.

Good morning, gentlemen! Perhaps someone has also thought of something for today's hour?

Question: How are we to understand the miracles related in the Bible about Moses – the stilling of the sea?

Dr. Steiner: You see, that was based not so much on a sudden miracle as on the fact that Moses was very knowledgeable. He was not just what he is portrayed as in the Bible, but he was actually a student of the Egyptian high schools, the mysteries. And in these schools they taught not only about the spiritual world, but also about the natural world from a certain point of view. Now in the sea there is the time of the ebb and the flow, of such a rising and then again going back, and the thing was just this, that Moses knew how to organize the crossing over the Red Sea so that he went over with his people at a time when the sea had gone back and a sandbank, which had become visible as a result, that is, had been laid bare, could be used to go over. So the miracle is not that Moses dammed up the Red Sea and fought it, but that he actually knew more than the others, that he could choose the time in the right way. The others did not know that. Moses had calculated the matter so that he arrived at just the right time - he knew that it took so long, or rather that it had to go quickly so that one would not be surprised by the sea again. Of course, all of this seemed like a miracle to the others. In these things, one must always make sure that knowledge actually underlies the things, not some other things, but knowledge.

This is the case with most things reported from ancient times. The people were amazed because they did not understand the matter, did not know. But then, when you know that there were very clever people in ancient times too, then you can explain things. Otherwise, there is not much to explain about these things.

Perhaps someone has a question?

Question: Can the spiritual culture that flows from Tibet into the rest of Asia still satisfy these people, or does it fall entirely into decadence?

Dr. Steiner: Well, you see, Tibetan culture is a very old culture, and it is a culture that actually comes from the ancient Atlantic period. You just have to imagine that there was a time when most of Europe was under water, and the water only receded towards Asia. In contrast, there was land where the Atlantic Ocean is today. Where we cross over to America between Europe and America today, there was land. So that was an ancient time when the ratio of land and water was quite different from what it is today.

But now, in the time that lies five, six, seven thousand years back, the same culture was in Asia as on this Atlantic continent, which was thus in the place that is now covered by the sea between Europe and America. Over there in Asia, there was a culture in those days that has been preserved in the clefts, in the subterranean caves of Tibet. This Atlantic culture was, of course, completely submerged when the sea came between Europe and America and Europe rose up; but in Tibet, over there, it was preserved. But now this culture was actually only suitable for those ancient times, where people lived under completely different conditions than today. You just have to imagine that in those days the air was not the same as it is today, that people were not as heavy as they are today, but that people had a much lower weight, that the air was much denser. Actually, in those days the air was always interspersed with a thick fog, which made it possible to live in a completely different way.

Now, writing and reading or anything like that didn't exist back then, but people had signs. These signs were not put on paper. Paper didn't exist. But they weren't put on parchment either; they were scratched into rocks. These rocks had been hollowed out by people, and into the interior of these caves they then scratched, as it were, their secrets; so that one must actually understand the signs they made if one wants to know what these people imagined.

Now you may ask: Why did these people keep it so secret? Yes, you know, the oldest architecture was not at all about building on the outside, but rather digging into the rocks and making dwellings in the rock. So that is the oldest form of architecture. It is not surprising that the oldest form of architecture in Tibet is the same. But such a culture gradually comes to decadence and decline. And what was later created in Tibet is such that it is no longer really useful in the present day, because Tibetan culture is older than Indian culture. Indian culture only emerged after the earth had taken on the form it has today. Tibetan culture is therefore very old. And this Tibetan culture has preserved in a poor form what was previously present in a relatively good form. Thus, the principle of rule in particular has been developed in Tibet in a rather unpleasant form. In Tibet, the one who is to be the ruler actually enjoys divine worship; and this divine worship is basically already prepared. One actually chooses there, I would say, in a transcendental way. The Dalai Lama, who is thus chosen as ruler, comes about in such a way that long before, when the old Dalai Lama is still there and one realizes: Now, this old Dalai Lama may soon die -, a family is determined somewhere, and one says: The new Dalai Lama must come from this family. - That was the case in Tibet in earlier times. It was not a hereditary rule. That was not the case, but a priesthood that actually rules in reality determines a new family from which a Dalai Lama should emerge.

Now, if a child was born into this family, it was kept until the old Dalai Lama died. You can imagine that the greatest mischief was done with this. If the old Dalai Lama no longer suited someone, they simply looked for a child and said: “The soul of the old Dalai Lama must now enter this soul.” But first he had to die. The priesthood took care of that at the right time, and then, for the sake of the people's faith, the soul of the old Dalai Lama entered the child. In this way the people have driven it to the fact that actually the whole nation believed: the same soul that is in any Dalai Lama was already in the Dalai Lama many thousands of years ago. It is always the same soul, they thought. Actually, for the people it has always been the same Dalai Lama; he has only changed the outer body.

It was not like that in the old culture that was there before; but that is quite extraordinary nonsense that has arisen. However, you can see from this that it has gradually become more important for the priesthood to do things in such a way that their rule was secured.

However, this does not prevent us from discovering great scientific secrets that people in ancient times once had, despite the fact that if we manage to decipher these signs that are engraved on the rocks, but to which Europeans have only rarely had access, the priesthood has gradually come to see that it was important to conduct things in such a way as to ensure their rule.

Now it is like this: the same knowledge that was once there, that came to people as if in a dream fog, this same knowledge is to come to people again through anthroposophy. But that cannot happen in the Orient. You see, in the Orient a new knowledge, a new realization, will never come about in the same way as here in Europe, because the Oriental body is not suited to it. The experiments that have to be carried out to achieve the things I have just told you about can only be done in the West, not in the East. But the Oriental is conservative to a degree that the European can hardly imagine. He does not want anything new, and so of course what we are doing here in Europe makes no particular impression on him. If, on the other hand, you can tell him that significant wisdom comes to light from the old crypts, as these rock caves are called, and that is old, then it makes a very powerful impression on him. The Europeans also have a little of this: you only have to look at the higher degrees of the Masonic lodges when you enter them! As for Anthroposophy, well, they are a little interested in that because they are also concerned with supersensible things; but they do not go into it very deeply. If, on the other hand, you tell them: This has been found, this was an ancient Egyptian wisdom or an ancient Hebrew wisdom, they are delighted! They go into it right away, because human beings are such that what is newly found does not make a real impression on them; on the other hand, what is ancient, even if it is not understood, is what makes a very considerable impression on people. Therefore, one can assume that it is quite possible, because it is a matter of ancient wisdom that can be found in Tibet, that it can be used to achieve a certain revival. Because many things have also been lost to the Asians, because the most important Asian culture, Indian culture, was only established later. So much of what Asians do not know could be found in Tibet. Now, the people there do not really have the opportunity to spread the word properly, because the old Tibetan priesthood did nothing to spread it; they just wanted to keep the old rule for themselves. Knowledge is power when it is kept secret. And when the Europeans came to Tibet, they did not understand the things. So there is not much prospect that the real Tibetan truths can be spread; they live on in old traditions. Because the thing is still so that much has just come down to posterity, and that one can already have an idea of what is actually hidden there. But it is difficult to imagine any actual dissemination. The matter is decadent, as you say in the question; but if one goes back to what is written in the crypts, and not to what the priesthood says, then one will be able to get hold of something extraordinary. It will just be extraordinarily difficult to decipher it. Without anthroposophy it is difficult to find. Anthroposophy can decipher it, but does not need to, because it finds the thing itself.

Question: How could Europe do something to turn around such a downward trend in Asia?

Dr. Steiner: That is a very good question! You see, if Europe does not do something, then the world will have to go downhill! Because in Asia, as can be seen from the words I have just said, people hold on to the old, but do not know any progress. You can see that in China. China is at the same stage as it was thousands of years ago. The Chinese had many things thousands of years ago that were only discovered in Europe much later: paper, the art of printing, and so on, they already had there. But they do not accept progress, they keep it in the old form.

The Europeans, on the other hand, when they come to Asia, what do they do? The English brought the Chinese opium and such things in the first half of the 19th century! But the Europeans have actually done nothing right so far to spread any kind of real spiritual life in Asia. It's also difficult because people just don't accept it.

You see, that's where it's interesting: you know, there are also European missionaries; they go over there with European religion, European theology and want to spread European culture in Asia. Yes, that makes no impression on the Asians! Because then these missionaries describe a Christ Jesus to them as they imagine him. The Asian says: Yes, when I look at my Buddha, he has much more excellent qualities! - So that does not impress them at all. They would only be impressed if Jesus Christ were presented as he was here in these lectures some time ago, also in response to your questions. Then, of course, it would make an impression. But the Asian would still be conservative, reactionary, and initially mistrustful.

It is also very strange, gentlemen: You see, there are individual students of the old wisdom. These students in Asia have learned something from Tibetan scholars, sages, Tibetan initiates. The initiates themselves do not deal with the Europeans; but students have dealt with them after all. Yes, sometimes one is quite extraordinarily amazed. I have already told you many things that will have amazed you, such as the influence of the universe on man. If you really want to research that, it takes a very long time. I can truly say: Some of what I can tell you today took forty years before I could say it! Because you can't find it overnight, but you have to find it over the years. Now such things are found. For example, what I have told you about the moon, that it has a population that has to do with the population of the earth in that reproduction is regulated by it. Yes, gentlemen, you really don't find that on the paths that current science takes; nor do you find it overnight, but you do find it over the course of many years. It is so! Then you have it. Yes, but then, when you have it, suddenly a strange light dawns on you about what the students of the oriental initiates say. Before that, you don't understand it at all. People talk, let's say, of spirits of the moon and their influence on the earth. The European scholars say: That's all nonsense, what they say! But when you come to it yourself, you no longer say that it is nonsense, but you are just amazed at what these old minds knew many thousands of years ago, and what has been lost to humanity again! It is even a great impression that one can get: one researches these things oneself with tremendous effort, and then one comes to the conclusion that it has already been known before, and only in a way that is incomprehensible today, sometimes even not understood by those who say it, has come down from ancient times. So one can certainly have a certain respect, a great respect, a great esteem for what was once there.

Now, if the Europeans want to do something in Asia, it would be necessary for them to start by studying anthroposophy! Otherwise they will not be allowed to do anything there. Contemporary European science and technology do not impress the Asians, for they regard contemporary European science as childish, as something that only deals with outward appearances, and they have no need for outward European technology. They say, “Why should we slave at machines? That is inhumane!” They don't find it impressive at all, and they see it as an infringement of their rights when railways and factories are built over there; that's what the Europeans are doing. But they actually hate that over there. So you can't go about it that way either. You also have to learn something from the old days. And in the old days, people actually had a certain spirit for how to proceed.

Do you see why today's European culture should not be able to do something in Asia? After all, one person did manage to do something in Asia with Greek culture! That was in the 4th century BC, before the founding of Christianity: Alexander the Great succeeded. Alexander the Great did manage to bring much of Greek culture to Asia. That is now there inside. What Alexander brought to Asia has even come back to Europe in a roundabout way, through Spain, the Arabs and the Jews! But how did Alexander the Great manage to bring these things to Asia at all? Only by not proceeding as today's Europeans do. Europeans consider themselves the clever people, the absolutely clever people. When they go somewhere else, they say: they are all stupid; so we have to bring them our wisdom. Yes, but the others can't do anything with that. Alexander didn't do that; instead, he first entered into what the people had. He only very slowly, in a small way, let something of his flow into what the others had, appreciated and respected what the others had.

And that is the secret of all successful endeavor: to bring something to the situation. Despite all the things that can be said against the English, despite the fact that it is a sad chapter in English history, for example, that the English brought opium to China out of pure selfishness in order to make money from it, and despite all the other can be said against the English, one must still say this: not exactly in the intellectual realm, but even there – but especially in the economic realm, the English always know to respect what is customary among the peoples to whom they come. They simply know how to respect that! The Germans, for example, respect that the least. The Germans are therefore unhappy in all colonization because they do not even think about what it looks like for the people where they want to have their colonies. They are supposed to adopt what the Germans themselves have in the middle of Europe, head over heels! Of course that doesn't work. That is why it is the case that development has taken this path: England is happy to maintain its colonies, even when the colonists revolt and do all sorts of things – economically, England always retains the upper hand. So the English do understand how to respond to the nature and character of foreign peoples. The English also wage war quite differently from the way the Germans wage war, for example. How does a German imagine waging war against a people? I do not want to speak out against war, but just tell how the Germans imagine it: Well, you just have to go and defeat this nation. The English do not do that, but they watch first, rather they stir up another nation and let them smash each other, and they watch as long as it possibly can, that is, they let the people finish each other. That is how history has always been. That is precisely how this English empire was founded. The others, don't they, never really know which way the wind is blowing. The English have a certain instinct for respecting the peculiarities of foreign peoples. That is why the English have succeeded in achieving such colossal economic superiority. In England, it would certainly never have occurred to anyone to do what has now been done in Germany, namely to introduce the Rentenmark. Of course, there is now a huge shortage of money in Germany. Nobody has any money. But when the Rentenmarks were issued – the so-called stable-value money – people saw it as something terribly clever! Of course, it was the stupidest thing that could have been done. Because as long as every paper money in England is covered by gold, there is no way around it, economically, than to do the same all over the world: to have gold backing for every paper money. If you create money for which there is no gold backing, then this money must either immediately decrease in value, that is, the exchange rate must fall, or if you do it artificially, as you are doing now with the stable-value money, then the goods will become all the more expensive. Isn't that right, now you have a Rentenmark in Germany; it is always worth a Mark. Yes, but, gentlemen, you only get as much as you used to get for fifteen pfennigs, so in reality it is still not worth more than fifteen pfennigs. That it does not fall, that it has “stable value”, that is just an illusion. And so it is: one thinks in Germany, but one has no sense of observing the realities.

You see, there is a very nice anecdote about how different nations study natural history, say, for example, of a kangaroo or some other animal that is in Africa. The Englishman goes to Africa – just as Darwin, in fact, in order to come to natural science, made his trip around the world – and looks at the animal where it really lives. There he can see how it lives, what its natural conditions are. The Frenchman takes this animal from the desert to the zoological garden. He studies it in the zoological garden; he does not observe the animal in its natural environment, but in the zoological garden. But what does the German do? He doesn't care about the animal at all, what it looks like, but he sits down in his study and starts thinking. He is not interested in the thing itself - according to Kantian philosophy, as I told you the other day - but only in what is in his head. Then he thinks about something long enough. And after thinking about it long enough, he says something. But that doesn't correspond to reality.

But this is only relative with regard to the English. For the way in which people in ancient times influenced people is no longer understood in Europe today - how Alexander the Great apparently left everything as it was and only very gradually and slowly did what he had to bring from Greece to Asia. This is no longer understood in Europe. But the Europeans would have to get used to it again. Therefore, the first thing the Europeans would have to learn is not just to carry over to Asia what they already have, but above all, the Europeans should learn very carefully what the Asians know; then they would know, for example, what Tibetan wisdom is. Then they would not tell people in the old way, but in the new way, but would use what Tibetan wisdom is. And then, if they respected the culture of others, they would achieve something with it. That is what Europe must learn right now. Europe is actually a large theoretical structure. Europe theorizes, but basically has no practice. It is true! Europe also does business in a theoretical way, just by thinking things up. That works for a while. It is not always possible in the long run. But Europe is particularly unhappy in the spread of spiritual culture because it does not understand how to engage with others. Here, too, spiritual science must bring about a change of heart. But how can that be done today? You see, gentlemen, the point of anthroposophy is to act in the spirit of a true practice of life. Well, you have to start somewhere. What have I done myself, gentlemen? I once wrote about Nietzsche - and people believed that I was now a follower of Nietzsche. If I had written as people would have wanted me to after some of my views, I would have written: Nietzsche is a great fool, Nietzsche has asserted this and that folly, one must fight Nietzsche to the death, and so on. I would have written a pamphlet against Nietzsche; I could have ranted almost as much as Nietzsche himself ranted, but it would have been of no use at all! I took up Nietzsche's teaching; I presented what Nietzsche himself said and only let Anthroposophy flow into it. Today people come and say: He used to be a Nietzschean, now he is an Anthroposophist. - Precisely because I am an Anthroposophist, it has been written about Nietzsche as it has been written by me! Then I wrote about Haeckel in the same way. Of course I could have written: Haeckel is a blatant materialist who understands nothing about the spirit and so on. Yes, gentlemen, in that case nothing would have been done; but I took Haeckel as he is, and did the same with everything. I did not deny the facts, but took things as they are. And so, at least through anthroposophy, we have a beginning of what we must do if we are to carry culture over to Asia! Above all, one would have to know exactly what the ancient Brahmins claimed and what the Buddhists claim. One would then have to present Buddhism and Brahmanism to the people, but also incorporate what one considers to be correct. This is how, for example, the disciples of Buddha himself did it. Shortly before the emergence of Christianity, Buddha's disciples spread Buddhism in Babylon, over by the Euphrates and Tigris, but in the way I have just described to you, by speaking to people in such a way that they could understand something. In ancient times, it was not at all a matter of pushing through theories just for the sake of being stubborn. The Asians do not understand European obstinacy at all. It is quite the case that, for example, the relationship between the Brahmins and the Buddhists is not the same as that between Catholics and Protestants. Today, Catholics and Protestants teach their doctrines in a purely theoretical way: one believes this, the other something else. There is hardly any other difference between the Brahmins and the Buddhists than that the Brahmins do not worship the Buddha and the Buddhists do. And so they actually get along with each other in a completely different way than Protestants and Catholics get along with each other in Europe.

It is now the case that you have to have a sense of reality if you want to spread culture! I would say that you can literally sweat blood when you see how Europeans are doing business in Asia today. In the process, everything that Asia has is destroyed, and nothing comes of it. Now, of course, the real misery is that Europe itself is in misery and that it is very difficult to imagine how Europe is to get out of this misery. The great misery of this is that Europe itself is now in decline, that Europe cannot really get out of all the cultural damage it is in unless people decide to embrace a real spiritual culture. Many still do not believe this today. And so it is the case today that all the people who have come to Europe from Asia, for example, have really found: These Europeans are actually all barbarians.

You have probably also heard that all sorts of Asians, cultured Asians, clever Asians, are wandering around Europe; but they all think that the Europeans are actually barbarians. And they have this opinion because so much of the old science of the spirit, of the old knowledge of the spirit, has been preserved in Asia that what the Europeans know seems childish to them. Everything that is so admired in Europe seems terribly childish to people in Asia!

You see, the Europeans have developed in such a way that even their great technical advances are actually all terribly young. For example, it is interesting that when you go to certain museums where there are remains from ancient European times, you can sometimes be terribly amazed. You can be amazed, for example, in Etruscan museums, where the remains of what was Etruscan culture are, a culture that once existed in Europe, at how skilled people were, for example, in dental treatment. They were already treating teeth quite skilfully, inserting a kind of filling, and that was made of stone! All this was lost in Europe, and a barbarism really did occur in Europe. By the time we speak of the migration of peoples – in the 3rd to 7th centuries AD – everything in Europe had actually been barbarized. And it was only after this time that things were conquered again. Of course, today we are terribly surprised at all the things that have been achieved! But they were already there once. Where did they come from back then? Back then they more or less came over from Asia! The Asians then also lost the external technology they had. The Chinese still have some of it. But in spiritual culture itself, the Asians are in fact still ahead of the Europeans today. And if we in Europe can't find anything better than what the Asians have in spiritual culture, why then should we have missions and the like in Asia at all? That is not necessary at all!

So the spread of culture in Asia only makes sense again when Europe itself has a spiritual science. If Europe can give Asians spiritual science, then perhaps the Asians will also accept that European technology be brought to them. But now, don't they just realize that the Europeans don't know anything except this technology. And it is precisely the case among Asians that it makes a great impression on them when, for example, they come to Germany - when a real Asian, who is educated, learned, comes to Germany today; it has been seen, for example, in well-educated Chinese scholars: when they come to Germany and they are told about Goethe and Schiller - they pay attention! The scholar says, “Yes, Goethe and Schiller were not as clever, not as wise as the old Asian personalities were, but still, there was something of spirituality.” But in the 19th century, all that quickly diminished, all that quickly disappeared. And today, the Chinese scholar sees in the German, for example, a terrible barbarian. He says, “With Goethe and Schiller, German culture has perished.” The fact that the railroad was invented in the 19th century does not impress him. He is still somewhat impressed by Goethe's Faust, but he still maintains that his great Asian personalities were much wiser. This is something that the European must realize first of all. He should realize that the Asian does not care about such concepts as the European has; he does not care about them at all, but the Asian wants images, like the images in the monasteries of Tibet. The Asian wants images. These abstractions, these concepts that the European has, the Asian does not want them, they hurt his brain, he does not want them.

And a symbol like the swastika, for example, the so-called swastika – this symbol was an ancient sun symbol – it was widespread throughout Asia. The old Asians still remember that. Certain Bolshevik government officials were clever enough to use this ancient swastika as their symbol, just like the German nationalists. This makes a much greater impression on the Asians than anything that Marxism is. Marxism consists of concepts for thinking; that does not impress people. But such a sign does impress people. And if you don't understand the people, if you don't engage with them, but come to them with something that is completely alien to them, then you will achieve absolutely nothing among them.

So it is that here too it is shown that in Europe everything depends on having spiritual knowledge, a spiritual science.

Perhaps you have also heard that a large two-volume book has been published by a certain Spengler – I have heard that he even gave a lecture in Basel once – a book by Oswald Spengler: 'The Decline of the West', that is, the decline of Europe and America. The man shows how everything that is now there in so-called European culture must perish. That is obvious. He regards it as sick, it must perish. Well, gentlemen, what is there today in external culture must also perish. Something new must be built from within, from the spirit. But the external must perish. That is why the book is about the decline of the West. You can hardly say anything against the book, against what he says about the decline of the West, about what is necessarily said in terms of outward appearances. But now the Spengler comes to what he regards positively, what presents itself to him as new. And what does he show, gentlemen? What is that in Oswald Spengler? That is Prussianism! So that all of Europe must adopt Prussianism; that must be the culture of Europe's future, Spengler believes.

Well, I don't know what he said in Basel, because I can't imagine that it would have made a big impression on the Swiss if he had shown that Prussianism must come out of this downfall! But you see that a very important person, a clever person, like Spengler, can very well see: yes, what is there must perish; but the future must be one of brutal force. He says this quite openly: in the future there can only be the brutal, powerful conqueror – that is what he means.

Now, if the most widely read book is one of the most widely read books in Germany is of course one of the most widely read books in Germany, that of Oswald Spengler - and the Oriental, the Asian, compares what is in it with his own intellectual culture, and has to say to himself: That is one of the smartest people in Europe! And then he considers his own highly developed spiritual science, albeit in a fantastic, ancient way, and says: Yes, what kind of people are these, these most intelligent people in Europe? They can't bring us anything!

Well, gentlemen, I now have to go on a trip to Paris; I will let you know when we will continue this matter.

The Mystery of The Ego

Enq. I perceive in the quotation you brought forward a little while ago from the Buddhist Catechism a discrepancy that I would like to hear explained. It is there stated that the Skandhas — memory included — change with every new incarnation. And yet, it is asserted that the reflection of the past lives, which, we are told, are entirely made up of Skandhas, "must survive." At the present moment I am not quite clear in my mind as to what it is precisely that survives, and I would like to have it explained. What is it? Is it only that "reflection," or those Skandhas, or always that same EGO, the Manas?

Theo. I have just explained that the re-incarnating Principle, or that which we call the divine man, is indestructible throughout the life cycle: indestructible as a thinking Entity, and even as an ethereal form. The "reflection" is only the spiritualised remembrance during the Devachanic period, of the ex-personality, Mr. A. or Mrs. B. — with which the Ego identifies itself during that period. Since the latter is but the continuation of the earth-life, so to say, the very acme and pitch, in an unbroken series, of the few happy moments in that now past existence, the Ego has to identify itself with the personal consciousness of that life, if anything shall remain of it.

Enq. This means that the Ego, notwithstanding its divine nature, passes every such period between two incarnations in a state of mental obscuration, or temporary insanity.

Theo. You may regard it as you like. Believing that, outside the ONE Reality, nothing is better than a passing illusion — the whole Universe included — we do not view it as insanity, but as a very natural sequence or development of the terrestrial life. What is life? A bundle of the most varied experiences, of daily changing ideas, emotions, and opinions. In our youth we are often enthusiastically devoted to an ideal, to some hero or heroine whom we try to follow and revive; a few years later, when the freshness of our youthful feelings has faded out and sobered down, we are the first to laugh at our fancies. And yet there was a day when we had so thoroughly identified our own personality with that of the ideal in our mind — especially if it was that of a living being — that the former was entirely merged and lost in the latter. Can it be said of a man of fifty that he is the same being that he was at twenty? The inner man is the same; the outward living personality is completely transformed and changed. Would you also call these changes in the human mental states insanity?

Enq. How would you name them, and especially how would you explain the permanence of one and the evanescence of the other?

Theo. We have our own doctrine ready, and to us it offers no difficulty. The clue lies in the double consciousness of our mind, and also, in the dual nature of the mental "principle." There is a spiritual consciousness, the Manasic mind illumined by the light of Buddhi, that which subjectively perceives abstractions; and the sentient consciousness (the lower Manasic light), inseparable from our physical brain and senses. This latter consciousness is held in subjection by the brain and physical senses, and, being in its turn equally dependent on them, must of course fade out and finally die with the disappearance of the brain and physical senses. It is only the former kind of consciousness, whose root lies in eternity, which survives and lives for ever, and may, therefore, be regarded as immortal. Everything else belongs to passing illusions.

Enq. What do you really understand by illusion in this case?

Theo. It is very well described in the just-mentioned essay on "The Higher Self." Says its author:

"The theory we are considering (the interchange of ideas between the Higher Ego and the lower self) harmonizes very well with the treatment of this world in which we live as a phenomenal world of illusion, the spiritual plane of nature being on the other hand the noumenal world or plane of reality. That region of nature in which, so to speak, the permanent soul is rooted is more real than that in which its transitory blossoms appear for a brief space to wither and fall to pieces, while the plant recovers energy for sending forth a fresh flower. Supposing flowers only were perceptible to ordinary senses, and their roots existed in a state of Nature intangible and invisible to us, philosophers in such a world who divined that there were such things as roots in another plane of existence would be apt to say of the flowers, These are not the real plants; they are of no relative importance, merely illusive phenomena of the moment."

This is what I mean. The world in which blossom the transitory and evanescent flowers of personal lives is not the real permanent world; but that one in which we find the root of consciousness, that root which is beyond illusion and dwells in the eternity.

Enq. What do you mean by the root dwelling in eternity?

Theo. I mean by this root the thinking entity, the Ego which incarnates, whether we regard it as an "Angel," "Spirit," or a Force. Of that which falls under our sensuous perceptions only what grows directly from, or is attached to this invisible root above, can partake of its immortal life. Hence every noble thought, idea and aspiration of the personality it informs, proceeding from and fed by this root, must become permanent. As to the physical consciousness, as it is a quality of the sentient but lower "principle," (Kama-rupa or animal instinct, illuminated by the lower manasic reflection), or the human Soul — it must disappear. That which displays activity, while the body is asleep or paralysed, is the higher consciousness, our memory registering but feebly and inaccurately — because automatically — such experiences, and often failing to be even slightly impressed by them.

Enq. But how is it that MANAS, although you call it Nous, a "God," is so weak during its incarnations, as to be actually conquered and fettered by its body?

Theo. I might retort with the same question and ask: "How is it that he, whom you regard as 'the God of Gods' and the One living God, is so weak as to allow evil (or the Devil) to have the best of him as much as of all his creatures, whether while he remains in Heaven, or during the time he was incarnated on this earth?" You are sure to reply again: "This is a Mystery; and we are forbidden to pry into the mysteries of God." Not being forbidden to do so by our religious philosophy, I answer your question that, unless a God descends as an Avatar, no divine principle can be otherwise than cramped and paralysed by turbulent, animal matter. Heterogeneity will always have the upper hand over homogeneity, on this plane of illusions, and the nearer an essence is to its root-principle, Primordial Homogeneity, the more difficult it is for the latter to assert itself on earth. Spiritual and divine powers lie dormant in every human Being; and the wider the sweep of his spiritual vision the mightier will be the God within him. But as few men can feel that God, and since, as an average rule, deity is always bound and limited in our thought by earlier conceptions, those ideas that are inculcated in us from childhood, therefore, it is so difficult for you to understand our philosophy.

Enq. And is it this Ego of ours which is our God?

Theo. Not at all; "A God" is not the universal deity, but only a spark from the one ocean of Divine Fire. Our God within us, or "our Father in Secret" is what we call the "HIGHER SELF," Atma. Our incarnating Ego was a God in its origin, as were all the primeval emanations of the One Unknown Principle. But since its "fall into Matter," having to incarnate throughout the cycle, in succession, from first to last, it is no longer a free and happy god, but a poor pilgrim on his way to regain that which he has lost. I can answer you more fully by repeating what is said of the INNER MAN in ISIS UNVEILED (Vol. II. 593): —

"From the remotest antiquity mankind as a whole have always been convinced of the existence of a personal spiritual entity within the personal physical man. This inner entity was more or less divine, according to its proximity to the crown. The closer the union the more serene man's destiny, the less dangerous the external conditions. This belief is neither bigotry nor superstition, only an ever-present, instinctive feeling of the proximity of another spiritual and invisible world, which, though it be subjective to the senses of the outward man, is perfectly objective to the inner ego. Furthermore, they believed that there are external and internal conditions which affect the determination of our will upon our actions. They rejected fatalism, for fatalism implies a blind course of some still blinder power. But they believed in destiny or Karma, which from birth to death every man is weaving thread by thread around himself, as a spider does his cobweb; and this destiny is guided by that presence termed by some the guardian angel, or our more intimate astral inner man, who is but too often the evil genius of the man of flesh or the personality. Both these lead on MAN, but one of them must prevail; and from the very beginning of the invisible affray the stern and implacable law of compensation and retribution steps in and takes its course, following faithfully the fluctuating of the conflict. When the last strand is woven, and man is seemingly enwrapped in the net-work of his own doing, then he finds himself completely under the empire of this self-made destiny. It then either fixes him like the inert shell against the immovable rock, or like a feather carries him away in a whirlwind raised by his own actions."

Such is the destiny of the Man — the true Ego, not the Automaton, the shell that goes by that name. It is for him to become the conqueror over matter.

The Complex Nature of Manas

Enq. But you wanted to tell me something of the essential nature of Manas, and of the relation in which the Skandhas of physical man stand to it?

Theo. It is this nature, mysterious, Protean, beyond any grasp, and almost shadowy in its correlations with the other principles, that is most difficult to realise, and still more so to explain. Manas is a "principle," and yet it is an "Entity" and individuality or Ego. He is a "God," and yet he is doomed to an endless cycle of incarnations, for each of which he is made responsible, and for each of which he has to suffer. All this seems as contradictory as it is puzzling; nevertheless, there are hundreds of people, even in Europe, who realise all this perfectly, for they comprehend the Ego not only in its integrity but in its many aspects. Finally, if I would make myself comprehensible, I must begin by the beginning and give you the genealogy of this Ego in a few lines.

Enq. Say on.

Theo. Try to imagine a "Spirit," a celestial Being, whether we call it by one name or another, divine in its essential nature, yet not pure enough to be one with the ALL, and having, in order to achieve this, to so purify its nature as to finally gain that goal. It can do so only by passing individually and personally, i. e., spiritually and physically, through every experience and feeling that exists in the manifold or differentiated Universe. It has, therefore, after having gained such experience in the lower kingdoms, and having ascended higher and still higher with every rung on the ladder of being, to pass through every experience on the human planes. In its very essence it is THOUGHT, and is, therefore, called in its plurality Manasa putra, "the Sons of the (Universal) mind." This individualised "Thought" is what we Theosophists call the real EGO, the thinking Entity imprisoned in a case of flesh and bones. This is surely a Spiritual Entity, not Matter, and such Entities are the incarnating EGOS that inform the bundle of animal matter called mankind, and whose names are Manasa or "Minds." But once imprisoned, or incarnate, their essence becomes dual: that is to say, the rays of the eternal divine Mind, considered as individual entities, assume a two-fold attribute which is (a) their essential inherent characteristic, heaven-aspiring mind (higher Manas), and (b) the human quality of thinking, or animal cogitation, rationalised owing to the superiority of the human brain, the Kama-tending or lower Manas. One gravitates toward Buddhi, the other, tending downward, to the seat of passions and animal desires. The latter have no room in Devachan, nor can they associate with the divine triad which ascends as ONE into mental bliss. Yet it is the Ego, the Manasic Entity, which is held responsible for all the sins of the lower attributes, just as a parent is answerable for the transgressions of his child, so long as the latter remains irresponsible.

Enq. Is this "child" the "personality"?

Theo. It is. When, therefore, it is stated that the "personality" dies with the body it does not state all. The body, which was only the objective symbol of Mr. A. or Mrs. B., fades away with all its material Skandhas, which are the visible expressions thereof. But all that which constituted during life the spiritual bundle of experiences, the noblest aspirations, undying affections, and unselfish nature of Mr. A. or Mrs. B. clings for the time of the Devachanic period to the EGO, which is identified with the spiritual portion of that terrestrial Entity, now passed away out of sight. The ACTOR is so imbued with the role just played by him that he dreams of it during the whole Devachanic night, which vision continues till the hour strikes for him to return to the stage of life to enact another part.

Enq. But how is it that this doctrine, which you say is as old as thinking men, has found no room, say, in Christian theology?

Theo. You are mistaken, it has; only theology has disfigured it out of all recognition, as it has many other doctrines. Theology calls the EGO the Angel that God gives us at the moment of our birth, to take care of our Soul. Instead of holding that "Angel" responsible for the transgressions of the poor helpless "Soul," it is the latter which, according to theological logic, is punished for all the sins of both flesh and mind! It is the Soul, the immaterial breath of God and his alleged creation, which, by some most amazing intellectual jugglery, is doomed to burn in a material hell without ever being consumed (being of "an asbestos-like nature," according to the eloquent and fiery expression of a modern English Tertullian), while the "Angel" escapes scot free, after folding his white pinions and wetting them with a few tears. Aye, these are our "ministering Spirits," the "messengers of mercy" who are sent, Bishop Mant tells us —

"...to fulfil
Good for Salvation's heirs, for us they still
Grieve when we sin, rejoice when we repent;"

Yet it becomes evident that if all the Bishops the world over were asked to define once for all what they mean by Soul and its functions, they would be as unable to do so as to show us any shadow of logic in the orthodox belief!

The Doctrine is Taught in St John's Gospel

Enq. To this the adherents to this belief might answer, that if even the orthodox dogma does promise the impenitent sinner and materialist a bad time of it in a rather too realistic Inferno, it gives them, on the other hand, a chance for repentance to the last minute. Nor do they teach annihilation, or loss of personality, which is all the same.

Theo. If the Church teaches nothing of the kind, on the other hand, Jesus does; and that is something to those, at least, who place Christ higher than Christianity.

Enq. Does Christ teach anything of the sort?

Theo. He does; and every well-informed Occultist and even Kabalist will tell you so. Christ, or the fourth Gospel at any rate, teaches re-incarnation as also the annihilation of the personality, if you but forget the dead letter and hold to the esoteric Spirit. Remember verses I and 2 in chapter xv. of St. John. What does the parable speak about if not of the upper triad in man? Atma is the Husbandman — the Spiritual Ego or Buddhi (Christos) the Vine, while the animal and vital Soul, the personality, is the "branch." "I am the true vine, and my Father is the Husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away . . . As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the Vine — ye are the branches. If a man abide not in me he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered and cast into the fire and burned."

Now we explain it in this way. Disbelieving in the hell-fires which theology discovers as underlying the threat to the branches, we say that the "Husbandman" means Atma, the Symbol for the infinite, impersonal Principle, while the Vine stands for the Spiritual Soul, Christos, and each "branch" represents a new incarnation. (During the Mysteries, it is the Hierophant, the "Father," who planted the Vine. Every symbol has Seven Keys to it. The discloser of the Pleroma was always called "Father.")

Enq. But what proofs have you to support such an arbitrary interpretation?

Theo. Universal symbology is a warrant for its correctness and that it is not arbitrary. Hermas says of "God" that he "planted the Vineyard," i. e., he created mankind. In the Kabala, it is shown that the Aged of the Aged, or the "Long Face," plants a vineyard, the latter typifying mankind; and a vine, meaning Life. The Spirit of "King Messiah" is, therefore, shown as washing his garments in the wine from above, from the creation of the world. (Zohar XL., 10.) And King Messiah is the EGO purified by washing his garments (i. e., his personalities in re-birth), in the wine from above, or BUDDHI. Adam, or A-Dam, is "blood." The Life of the flesh is in the blood (nephesh — soul), Leviticus xvii. And Adam-Kadmon is the Only-Begotten. Noah also plants a vineyard — the allegorical hot-bed of future humanity. As a consequence of the adoption of the same allegory, we find it reproduced in the Nazarene Codex. Seven vines are procreated — which seven vines are our Seven Races with their seven Saviours or Buddhas — which spring from Iukabar Zivo, and Ferho (or Parcha) Raba waters them. (Codex Nazaraes, Vol. III., pp. 60, 61.) When the blessed will ascend among the creatures of Light, they shall see Iavar-Xivo, Lord of LIFE, and the First VINE. (Ibid., Vol. II., p. 281.) These kabalistic metaphors are thus naturally repeated in the Gospel according to St. John (xv., 1).

Let us not forget that in the human system — even according to those philosophies which ignore our septenary division — the EGO or thinking man is called the Logos, or the Son of King of Soul and Queen of Spirit. "Manas is the adopted Son of King — and Queen —" (esoteric equivalents for Atma and Buddhi), says an occult work. He is the "man-god" of Plato, who crucifies himself in Space (or the duration of the life cycle) for the redemption of MATTER. This he does by incarnating over and over again, thus leading mankind onward to perfection, and making thereby room for lower forms to develop into higher. Not for one life does he cease progressing himself and helping all physical nature to progress; even the occasional, very rare event of his losing one of his personalities, in the case of the latter being entirely devoid of even a spark of spirituality, helps toward his individual progress.

Enq. But surely, if the Ego is held responsible for the transgressions of its personalities, it has to answer also for the loss, or rather the complete annihilation, of one of such.

Theo. Not at all, unless it has done nothing to avert this dire fate. But if, all its efforts notwithstanding, its voice, that of our conscience, was unable to penetrate through the wall of matter, then the obtuseness of the latter proceeding from the imperfect nature of the material is classed with other failures of nature. The Ego is sufficiently punished by the loss of Devachan, and especially by having to incarnate almost immediately.

Enq. This doctrine of the possibility of losing one's soul — or personality, do you call it? — militates against the ideal theories of both Christians and Spiritualists, though Swedenborg adopts it to a certain extent, in what he calls Spiritual death. They will never accept it.

Theo. This can in no way alter a fact in nature, if it be a fact, or prevent such a thing occasionally taking place. The universe and everything in it, moral, mental, physical, psychic, or Spiritual, is built on a perfect law of equilibrium and harmony. As said before (vide Isis Unveiled), the centripetal force could not manifest itself without the centrifugal in the harmonious revolutions of the spheres, and all forms and their progress are the products of this dual force in nature. Now the Spirit (or Buddhi) is the centrifugal and the soul (Manas) the centripetal spiritual energy; and to produce one result they have to be in perfect union and harmony. Break or damage the centripetal motion of the earthly soul tending toward the centre which attracts it; arrest its progress by clogging it with a heavier weight of matter than it can bear, or than is fit for the Devachanic state, and the harmony of the whole will be destroyed. Personal life, or perhaps rather its ideal reflection, can only be continued if sustained by the two-fold force, that is by the close union of Buddhi and Manas in every re-birth or personal life. The least deviation from harmony damages it; and when it is destroyed beyond redemption the two forces separate at the moment of death. During a brief interval the personal form (called indifferently Kama rupa and Mayavi rupa), the spiritual efflorescence of which, attaching itself to the Ego, follows it into Devachan and gives to the permanent individuality its personal colouring (pro tem., so to speak), is carried off to remain in Kamaloka and to be gradually annihilated. For it is after the death of the utterly depraved, the unspiritual and the wicked beyond redemption, that arrives the critical and supreme moment. If during life the ultimate and desperate effort of the INNER SELF (Manas), to unite something of the personality with itself and the high glimmering ray of the divine Buddhi, is thwarted; if this ray is allowed to be more and more shut out from the ever-thickening crust of physical brain, the Spiritual EGO or Manas, once freed from the body, remains severed entirely from the ethereal relic of the personality; and the latter, or Kama rupa, following its earthly attractions, is drawn into and remains in Hades, which we call the Kamaloka. These are "the withered branches" mentioned by Jesus as being cut off from the Vine. Annihilation, however, is never instantaneous, and may require centuries sometimes for its accomplishment. But there the personality remains along with the remnants of other more fortunate personal Egos, and becomes with them a shell and an Elementary. As said in Isis, it is these two classes of "Spirits," the shells and the Elementaries, which are the leading "Stars" on the great spiritual stage of "materialisations." And you may be sure of it, it is not they who incarnate; and, therefore, so few of these "dear departed ones" know anything of re-incarnation, misleading thereby the Spiritualists.

Enq. But does not the author of "Isis Unveiled" stand accused of having preached against re-incarnation?

Theo. By those who have misunderstood what was said, yes. At the time that work was written, re-incarnation was not believed in by any Spiritualists, either English or American, and what is said there of re-incarnation was directed against the French Spiritists, whose theory is as unphilosophical and absurd as the Eastern teaching is logical and self-evident in its truth. The Re-incarnationists of the Allan Kardec School believe in an arbitrary and immediate re-incarnation. With them, the dead father can incarnate in his own unborn daughter, and so on. They have neither Devachan, Karma, nor any philosophy that would warrant or prove the necessity of consecutive re-births. But how can the author of "Isis" argue against Karmic re-incarnation, at long intervals varying between 1,000 and 1,500 years, when it is the fundamental belief of both Buddhists and Hindus?

Enq. Then you reject the theories of both the Spiritists and the Spiritualists, in their entirety?

Theo. Not in their entirety, but only with regard to their respective fundamental beliefs. Both rely on what their "Spirits" tell them; and both disagree as much with each other as we Theosophists disagree with both. Truth is one; and when we hear the French spooks preaching re-incarnation, and the English spooks denying and denouncing the doctrine, we say that either the French or the English "Spirits" do not know what they are talking about. We believe with the Spiritualists and the Spiritists in the existence of "Spirits," or invisible Beings endowed with more or less intelligence. But, while in our teachings their kinds and genera are legion, our opponents admit of no other than human disembodied "Spirits," which, to our knowledge, are mostly Kamalokic SHELLS.

Enq. You seem very bitter against Spirits. As you have given me your views and your reasons for disbelieving in the materialization of, and direct communication in seances, with the disembodied spirits — or the "spirits of the dead" — would you mind enlightening me as to one more fact? Why are some Theosophists never tired of saying how dangerous is intercourse with spirits, and mediumship? Have they any particular reason for this?

Theo. We must suppose so. I know I have. Owing to my familiarity for over half a century with these invisible, yet but too tangible and undeniable "influences," from the conscious Elementals, semi-conscious shells, down to the utterly senseless and nondescript spooks of all kinds, I claim a certain right to my views.

Enq. Can you give an instance or instances to show why these practices should be regarded as dangerous?

Theo. This would require more time than I can give you. Every cause must be judged by the effects it produces. Go over the history of Spiritualism for the last fifty years, ever since its reappearance in this century in America — and judge for yourself whether it has done its votaries more good or harm. Pray understand me. I do not speak against real Spiritualism, but against the modern movement which goes under that name, and the so-called philosophy invented to explain its phenomena.

Enq. Don't you believe in their phenomena at all?

Theo. It is because I believe in them with too good reason, and (save some cases of deliberate fraud) know them to be as true as that you and I live, that all my being revolts against them. Once more I speak only of physical, not mental or even psychic phenomena. Like attracts like. There are several high-minded, pure, good men and women, known to me personally, who have passed years of their lives under the direct guidance and even protection of high "Spirits," whether disembodied or planetary. But these Intelligences are not of the type of the John Kings and the Ernests who figure in seance rooms. These Intelligences guide and control mortals only in rare and exceptional cases to which they are attracted and magnetically drawn by the Karmic past of the individual. It is not enough to sit "for development" in order to attract them. That only opens the door to a swarm of "spooks," good, bad and indifferent, to which the medium becomes a slave for life. It is against such promiscuous mediumship and intercourse with goblins that I raise my voice, not against spiritual mysticism. The latter is ennobling and holy; the former is of just the same nature as the phenomena of two centuries ago, for which so many witches and wizards have been made to suffer. Read Glanvil and other authors on the subject of witchcraft, and you will find recorded there the parallels of most, if not all, of the physical phenomena of nineteenth century "Spiritualism."

Enq. Do you mean to suggest that it is all witchcraft and nothing more?

Theo. What I mean is that, whether conscious or unconscious, all this dealing with the dead is necromancy, and a most dangerous practice. For ages before Moses such raising of the dead was regarded by all the intelligent nations as sinful and cruel, inasmuch as it disturbs the rest of the souls and interferes with their evolutionary development into higher states. The collective wisdom of all past centuries has ever been loud in denouncing such practices. Finally, I say, what I have never ceased repeating orally and in print for fifteen years: While some of the so-called "spirits" do not know what they are talking about, repeating merely — like poll-parrots — what they find in the mediums' and other people's brains, others are most dangerous, and can only lead one to evil. These are two self-evident facts. Go into spiritualistic circles of the Allan Kardec school, and you find "spirits" asserting re-incarnation and speaking like Roman Catholics born. Turn to the "dear departed ones" in England and America, and you will hear them denying re-incarnation through thick and thin, denouncing those who teach it, and holding to Protestant views. Your best, your most powerful mediums, have all suffered in health of body and mind. Think of the sad end of Charles Foster, who died in an asylum, a raving lunatic; of Slade, an epileptic; of Eglinton — the best medium now in England — subject to the same. Look back over the life of D. D. Home, a man whose mind was steeped in gall and bitterness, who never had a good word to say of anyone whom he suspected of possessing psychic powers, and who slandered every other medium to the bitter end. This Calvin of Spiritualism suffered for years from a terrible spinal disease, brought on by his intercourse with the "spirits," and died a perfect wreck. Think again of the sad fate of poor Washington Irving Bishop. 1 knew him in New York, when he was fourteen, and he was undeniably a medium. It is true that the poor man stole a march on his "spirits," and baptised them "unconscious muscular action," to the great gaudium of all the corporations of highly learned and scientific fools, and to the replenishment of his own pocket. But de mortuis nit nisi bonum; his end was a sad one. He had strenuously concealed his epileptic fits — the first and strongest symptom of genuine mediumship — and who knows whether he was dead or in a trance when the post-mortem examination was performed? His relatives insist that he was alive, if we are to believe Reuter's telegrams. Finally, behold the veteran mediums, the founders and prime movers of modern spiritualism — the Fox sisters. After more than forty years of intercourse with the "Angels," the latter have led them to become incurable sots, who are now denouncing, in public lectures, their own life-long work and philosophy as a fraud. What kind of spirits must they be who prompted them, I ask you?

Enq. But is your inference a correct one?

Theo. What would you infer if the best pupils of a particular school of singing broke down from overstrained sore throats? That the method followed was a bad one. So I think the inference is equally fair with regard to Spiritualism when we see their best mediums fall a prey to such a fate. We can only say: — Let those who are interested in the question judge the tree of Spiritualism by its fruits, and ponder over the lesson. We Theosophists have always regarded the Spiritualists as brothers having the same mystic tendency as ourselves, but they have always regarded us as enemies. We, being in possession of an older philosophy, have tried to help and warn them; but they have repaid us by reviling and traducing us and our motives in every possible way. Nevertheless, the best English Spiritualists say just as we do, wherever they treat of their belief seriously. Hear "M. A. Oxon." confessing this truth: "Spiritualists are too much inclined to dwell exclusively on the intervention of external spirits in this world of ours, and to ignore the powers of the incarnate Spirit." (Second Sight, "Introduction.") Why vilify and abuse us, then, for saying precisely the same? Henceforward, we will have nothing more to do with Spiritualism. And now let us return to Re-incarnation.

YOU HAVE seen from my lectures of the last few days that it is necessary, for a complete understanding of the human being, to distinguish the various members of the human organism and to realize the incisive difference between that which we may call the human head organization and that which constitutes the rest of the human organization. As you know, the rest of the human organization consists of two members, so that on the whole we obtain a three-fold membering, but for the comprehension of the significant impulses in mankind's evolution with which we are faced at the present time and in the immediate future the differentiation between head man and the organization of the rest of man is primarily important.

Now, if we speak spiritual-scientifically about the human being by differentiating between head man and the rest of man, then these two organizations are, at the outset, pictures for us, pictures created by nature herself for the soul element, for the spiritual element, whose expression and manifestation they are. Man is placed in the whole evolution of earth humanity in a way which becomes comprehensible only if one considers how different is the position of the head organization in this evolution from that of the rest of the human organization. Everything connected with the head organization, which chiefly manifests as man's life of thought, is something that reaches far back in the post-Atlantean evolution of mankind. When we focus our attention upon the time which followed immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe, that is, the time of the sixth, seventh, eighth millennium before the Christian era, we shall find a soul mood holding sway in the regions of the civilized world of that period which can hardly be compared with our soul mood. The consciousness and whole conception of the world of the human being of that time can scarcely be compared with that which characterizes our sense perception and conceptual view of the world. In my Occult Science, an Outline {Anthroposophic Press, New York} I have called this culture which reaches back into such ancient times, the primeval Indian culture. We may say: the human head organism of that time was different from our present head organism to a great degree and the reckoning with space and time was not characteristic of this ancient people as it is of us. In surveying the world, they experienced a survey of immeasurable spatial distances, and they had a simultaneous experience of the various moments of time. The strong emphasis on space and time in world conception was not present in that ancient period.

The first indications of this we find toward the fifth and fourth millennium in the period we designate the primeval Persian period. But even then the whole mood of soul life is such that it can hardly be compared with the soul and world mood of the human being of our age. In that ancient time, the main concern of the human being is to interpret the things of the world as various shades of light, brilliancy, and darkness, obscurity. The abstractions in which we live today are completely foreign to that ancient earth population. There still exists a universal, all-embracing perception, a consciousness of the permeation of everything perceptible with light and its adumbration, shading, with various degrees of darkness. This was also the way the moral world order was conceived of. A human being who was benevolent and kind was experienced as a light, bright human being, one who was distrustful and selfish was experienced as a dark man. Man's moral individuality was, as it were, aurically perceived around him. And if we had talked to a man of this ancient, primeval Persian time about that which we call today the order of nature, he would not have understood a word of it. An order of nature in our sense did not exist in his world of light and shadow. For him, the world was a world of light and shadow; and in the world of tones, certain timbres of sounding he designated as light, bright, and certain other timbres of sounding he designated as dark, shadowy. And that which thus expressed itself through this element of light and darkness constituted for him the spiritual as well as the nature powers. For him, there existed no difference between spiritual and natural powers. Our present-day distinction between natural necessity and human freedom would have appeared to him as mere folly, for this duality of human arbitrary will and the necessity of nature did not exist for him. Everything was to be included for him in one spiritual—physical unity. If I were to give you a pictorial interpretation of the character of this primeval-Persian world conception, I would have to draw the following line. (It will receive its full meaning only through that which will follow.)

Then after this soul mood of man had held sway for somewhat more than two thousand years, there appeared a soul mood, the echoes of which we can still perceive in the Chaldean, in the Egyptian world conception, and in a special form in the world conception whose reflection is preserved for us in the Old Testament. There something appears which is closer to our own world conception. There the first inkling of a certain necessity of nature enters human thoughts. But this necessity of nature is still far removed from that which we call today the mechanical or even the vital order of nature; at that time, natural events are conceived of as identical with Divine willing, with Providence. Providence and nature events are still one. Man knew that if he moved his hand it was the Divine within him, permeating him, that moved his hand, that moved his arm. When a tree was shaken by the wind, the perception of the shaking tree was no different for him from the perception of the moving arm. He saw the same divine power, as Providence, in his own movements and in the movements of the tree. But a distinction was made between the God without and the God within; he was, however, conceived of as unitary, the God in nature, the God in man; he was the same. And it was clear to human beings of that time that there is something in man whereby Providence that is outside in nature and Providence that is inside in man meet one another.

At that time, man's process of breathing was sensed in this way. People said: If a tree is shaking, this is the God outside, and if I move my arm, it is the God inside; if I inhale the air, work it over within me, and again exhale it, then it is the God from outside who enters me and again leaves me. Thus the same divine element was sensed as being outside and inside, but simultaneously, in one point, outside and inside; people said to themselves: By being a breathing being, I am a being of nature outside and at the same time I am myself.

If I am to characterize the world conception of the third culture period by a line, as I have done for the primeval Persian world conception by the line of the preceding drawing, I shall have to characterize it through the following line:

This line represents, on the one hand, the existence of nature outside, on the other hand, human existence, crossing over into the other at the one point, in the breathing process.

Matters become different in the fourth age, in the Graeco-Latin age. Here the human being is abruptly confronted by the contrast outside-inside, of nature existence and human existence. Man begins to feel the contrast between himself and nature. And if I am again to draw characteristically how man begins to feel in the Greek age, I will have to draw it this way: on the one hand he senses the external and on the other the internal; between the two there is no longer the crossing point.

What man has in common with nature remains outside his consciousness. It falls away from consciousness. In Indian Yoga an attempt is made to bring it into consciousness again. Therefore Indian Yoga culture is an atavistic returning to previous evolutionary stages of mankind, because an attempt is made again to bring into consciousness the process of breathing, which in the third age was felt in a natural way as that in which one existed outside and inside simultaneously. The fourth age begins in the eighth pre-Christian century. At that time the late-Indian Yoga exercises were developed which tried to call back, atavistically, that which mankind had possessed at earlier times, quite particularly in the Indian culture, but which had been lost.

Thus, this consciousness of the breathing process was lost. And if one asks: Why did Indian Yoga culture try to call it back, what did it believe it would gain thereby? one has to answer: What was intended to be gained thereby was a real understanding of the outer world. For through the fact that the breathing process was understood in the third cultural age, something was understood within man that at the same time was something external.

This must again be attained; on another path, however. We live still under the after-effects of the culture in which a twofold element is present in the human soul mood, for the fourth period ends only around the year 1413, really only about the middle of the fifteenth century. We have, through our head organization, an incomplete nature conception, that which we call the external world; and we have through our inner organization, through the organization of the rest of man, an incomplete knowledge of ourselves.

That in which we could perceive a process of the world and at the same time a process of ourselves is eliminated; it does not exist for us.

It is now a question of consciously regaining that which has been lost. That means, we have to acquire the ability of taking hold of something that is in our inner being, that belongs to the outer and the inner world simultaneously, and which reaches into both.

This must be the endeavor of the fifth post-Atlantean period; namely, the endeavor to find something in the human inner life in which an outer process takes place at the same time.

You will remember that I have pointed to this important fact; I have pointed to it in my last article in Soziale Zukunft (The Social Future) {Soziale Zukunft, Vol. III: Geistesleben, Rechtsordnung, Wirtschaft (Spiritual Life, Rights order, Economy), Vol. IV: Dreigliederung und soziales Vertrauen (The Threefold Social Order and Social Confidence) (not translated into English) where I seemingly dealt with these things in their importance for social life, but where I clearly pointed to the very necessity of finding something which the human being lays hold of within himself and which he, at the same time, recognizes as a process of the world. We as modern human beings cannot attain this by going back to Yoga culture; that has passed. For the breathing process itself has changed. This, of course, you cannot prove clinically; but the breathing process has become a different one since the third post-Atlantean cultural period. Roughly speaking, we might say: In the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch the human being breathed soul; today he breathes air. Not only our thoughts have become materialistic; reality itself has lost its soul.

I beg you, my dear friends, not to see something negligible in what I am now saying. For just consider what it means that reality itself, in which mankind lives, has been transformed so that the air we breathe is something different from what it was four millennia ago. Not only the consciousness of mankind has changed, oh no! there was soul in the atmosphere of the earth. The air was the soul. This is it no longer today, or, rather, it is soul in a different way. The spiritual beings of elemental nature of whom I have spoken yesterday, they penetrate into you, they can be breathed if one practices Yoga breathing today. But that which was attainable in normal breathing three millennia ago cannot be brought back artificially. That it may be brought back is the great illusion of the Orientals. What I am stating here describes a reality. The ensouling of the air which belongs to the human being no longer exists. And therefore the beings of whom I spoke yesterday—I should like to call them the anti-Michaelic beings—are able to penetrate into the air and, through the air, into the human being, and in this way they enter into mankind, as I have described it yesterday. We are only able to drive them away if we put in the place of Yoga that which is the right thing for today. We must strive for this. We can only strive for that which is the right thing for today if we become conscious of a much more subtle relation of man to the external world, so that in regard to our ether body something takes place which must enter our consciousness more and more, similar to the breathing process. In the breathing process, we inhale fresh oxygen and exhale unusable carbon. A similar process takes place in all our sense perceptions. Just think, my dear friends, that you see something—let us take a radical case—suppose you see a flame. There a process takes place that may be compared with inhalation, only it is much finer. If you then close your eyes—and you can make similar experiments with every one of your senses—you have the after-image of the flame which gradually changes—dies down, as Goethe said. Apart from the purely physical aspect, the human ether body is essentially engaged in this process of reception of the light impression and its eventual dying down. Something very significant is contained in this process: it contains the soul element which, three millennia ago, was breathed in and out with the air. And we must learn to realize the sense process, permeated by the soul element in a similar way we have realized the breathing process three millennia ago.

You see, my dear friends, this is connected with the fact that man, three millennia ago, lived in a night culture. Yahve revealed himself through his prophets out of the dreams of the night. But we must endeavor to receive in our intimate intercourse with the world not merely sense perceptions, but also the spiritual element. It must become a certainty for us that with every ray of light, with every tone, with every sensation of heat and its dying down we enter into a soul-intercourse with the world, and this soul-intercourse must become significant for us. We can help ourselves to bring this about.

I have described to you the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha in the fourth post-Atlantean period which, if we wish to be accurate, begins with the year 747 B.C. and ends with the year 1413 A.D. The Mystery of Golgotha occurred in the first third of this period, and it was comprehended at the outset, with the remnants of the ancient mode of thought and culture. This ancient way of comprehending the Mystery of Golgotha is exhausted and a new way of comprehension must take its place. The ancient way does no longer suffice, and many attempts that have been made to enable human thinking to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha have proved unsuitable to reach up to it.

You see, dear friends, all external-material things have their spiritual-soul aspect, and all things that appear in the spiritual-soul sphere have their external-material aspect. The fact that the air of the earth has become soul-void, making it impossible for man to breathe the originally ensouled air, had a significant spiritual effect in the evolution of mankind. For through being able to breathe in the soul to which he was originally related, as is stated at the beginning of the Old Testament: “And God breathed into man the breath as living soul,” man had the possibility of becoming conscious of the pre-existence of the soul, of the existence of the soul before it had descended into the physical body through birth or through conception. To the degree the breathing process ceased to be ensouled the human being lost the consciousness of the pre-existence of the soul. Even at the time of Aristotle in the fourth post-Atlantean period it was no longer possible to understand, with the human power of comprehension, the pre-existence of the soul. It was utterly impossible.

We are faced with the strange historical fact that the greatest event, the Christ Event, breaks in upon the evolution of the earth, yet mankind must first become mature in order to comprehend it. At the outset, it is still capable of catching the rays of the Mystery of Golgotha with the remnants of the power of comprehension originating in primeval culture. But this power of comprehension is gradually lost, and dogmatism moves further and further away from an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Church forbids the belief in the pre-existence of the soul—not because pre-existence is incompatible with the Mystery of Golgotha, but because the human power of comprehension ceased to experience the consciousness of pre-existence as a force, the air having become soul-void. Pre-existence vanishes from head-consciousness. When our sense processes will become ensouled again, we shall have established a crossing point, and in this crossing point we shall take hold of the human will that streams up, out of the third stratum of consciousness, as I have described it to you recently. Then we shall, at the same time, have the subjective-objective element for which Goethe was longing so very much. We shall have the possibility of grasping, in a sensitive way, the peculiar nature of the sense process of man in its relation to the outer world. Man's conceptions are very coarse and clumsy, indeed, which maintain that the outer world merely acts upon us and we, in turn, merely react upon it. In reality, there takes place a soul process from the outside toward the inside, which is taken hold of by the deeply subconscious, inner soul process, so that the two processes overlap. From outside, cosmic thoughts work into us, from inside, humanity's will works outward. Humanity's will and cosmic thought cross in this crossing point, just as the objective and the subjective element once crossed in the breath. We must learn to feel how our will works through our eyes and how the activity of the senses delicately mingles with the passivity, bringing about the crossing of cosmic thoughts and humanity's will. We must develop this new Yoga will. Then something will be imparted to us that of like nature to that which was imparted to human beings in the breathing process three millennia ago. Our comprehension must become much more soul-like, much more spiritual.

Goethe's world conception strove in this direction. Goethe endeavored to recognize the pure phenomenon, which he called the primal phenomenon, by arranging the phenomena which work upon man in the external world, without the interference of the Luciferic thought which stems from the head of man himself; this thought was only to serve in the arranging of the phenomena. Goethe did not strive for the law of nature, but for the primal phenomenon; this is what is significant with him. If, however, we arrive at this pure phenomenon, this primal phenomenon, we have something in the outer world which makes it possible for us to sense the unfolding of our will in the perception of the outer world, and then we shall lift ourselves to something objective-subjective, as it still was contained, for instance, in the ancient Hebrew doctrine. We must learn not merely to speak of the contrast between the material and the spiritual, but we must recognize the interplay of the material and the spiritual in a unity precisely in sense perception. If we no longer look at nature merely materially and, further, if we do not “think into it” a soul element, as Gustave Theodore Fechner did, then something will arise which will signify for us what the Yahve culture signified for mankind three millennia ago. If we learn, in nature, to receive the soul element together with sense perception, then we shall have the Christ relationship to outer nature. This Christ relationship to outer nature will be something like a kind of spiritual breathing process.

We shall be aided by realizing more and more, with our sound common sense, that pre-existence lies at the basis of our soul existence. We must supplement the purely egotistical conception of post-existence, which springs merely from our longing to exist after death, by the knowledge of the pre-existence of the soul. We must again rise to the conception of the real eternity of the soul. This is what may be called Michael culture. If we move through the world with the consciousness that with every look we direct outward, with every tone we hear, something spiritual, something of the nature of the soul element stream out into the world, we have gained the consciousness which mankind needs for the future.

I return once more to the image: You see a flame. You shut your eyes and have the after-image which ebbs away. Is that merely a subjective process? Yes, says the modern physiologist. But this is not true. In the cosmic ether this signifies an objective process, just as in the air the presence of carbonic acid which you exhale signifies an objective process. You are dealing here with the objective element; you have the possibility of knowing that something which takes place within you is at the same time a delicate cosmic process, if you become but conscious of it. If I look at a flame, close my eyes, let it ebb away—it will ebb away even though I keep my eyes open, only then I will not notice it—then I experience a process which does not merely take place within me, but which takes place in the world. But this is not only the case in regard to the flame, if I confront a human being and say: this man has said this or that, which may be true or untrue, this then constitutes a judgment, a moral or intellectual act of my inner nature. This ebbs away like a flame. It is an objective world process. If you think something good about your fellow-man: it ebbs away and is an objective process in the cosmic ether; if you think something evil: it ebbs away as an objective process. You are unable to conceal your perceptions and judgments about the world. You seemingly carry them on in your own being, but they are at the same time an objective world process. Just as people of the third period were conscious of the fact that the breathing process is a process that takes place simultaneously within man and in the objective world, so mankind must become aware in the future that the soul element of which I spoke is at the same time an objective world process.

This transformation of consciousness demands greater strength of soul than is ordinarily developed by the human being of today. To permeate oneself with this consciousness means to permit the Michael culture to enter. Just as it was self-evident for the man of the second and third pre-Christian millennium to think of the air as ensouled—so must it become self-evident for us to think of light as ensouled; we must arouse this ability in us when we consider light the general representative of sense perception We must thoroughly do away with the habit of seeing in light that which our materialistic age is accustomed to see in it. We must entirely cease to believe that merely those vibrations emanate from the sun of which, out of the modern consciousness, physics and people in general speak. We must become clear about the fact that the soul element penetrates through cosmic space upon the pinions of light; and we must realize, at the same time, that this was not the case in the period preceding our age. That which approaches mankind today through light approached mankind of that former period through the air. You see here an objective difference in the earth process. Expressing this in a comprehensive concept, we may say, Air-soul-process, Light-soul-process. This is what may be observed in the evolution of the earth. The Mystery of Golgotha signifies the transition from the one period to the other.

My dear friends, it does not suffice, for the present age nor for the future age of mankind, to speak in abstractions about the spiritual, to fall into some sort of nebulous pantheism; on the contrary, we must begin to recognize that that which today is sensed as a merely material process is permeated by soul.

It is a question of learning to say the following: there was a time prior to the Mystery of Golgotha when the earth had an atmosphere which contained the soul element that belongs to the soul of man. Today, the earth has an atmosphere which is devoid of this soul element. The same soul element that was previously in the air has now entered the light which embraces us from morning to evening. This was made possible through the fact that the Christ has united Himself with the earth. Thus, also from the soul-spiritual aspect, air and light underwent a change in the course of the Earth evolution.

My dear friends, it is a childish presentation that describes air and light in the same manner, purely materially, throughout the millennia in which Earth evolution unfolded. Air and light have changed inwardly. We live in an atmosphere and in a light sphere that are different from those in which our souls lived in previous earthly incarnations. To learn to recognize the externally-material as a soul-spirited element: this is what matters. If we describe purely material existence in the customary manner and then add, as a kind of decoration: this material existence contains everywhere the spiritual! This will not produce genuine spiritual science. My dear friends, people are very strange in this respect; they are intent on withdrawing to the abstract. But what is necessary is the following: in the future we must cease to differentiate abstractly between the material and the spiritual, but we must look for the spiritual in the material itself and describe it as such; and we must recognize in the spiritual the transition into the material and its mode of action in the material. Only if we have attained this shall we be able to gain a true knowledge of man himself. “Blood is quite a special fluid,” but the fluid physiology speaks about today is not a “special fluid,” it is merely a fluid whose chemical composition one attempts to analyze in the same way any other substance is analyzed; it is nothing special. But if we have gained the starting point of being able to understand the metamorphosis of air and light from the soul aspect, we shall gradually advance to the soul-spiritual comprehension of the human being himself, in every respect; then we shall not have abstract matter and abstract spirit, but spirit, soul, and body working into one another. This will be Michael-culture.

This is what our time demands. This is what ought to be grasped with all the fibers of the soul life by those human beings who wish to understand the present time. Whenever something out of the ordinary had to be introduced into human world conception it met with resistance. I have often quoted the following neat example: In 1837 (not even a century ago), the learned Medical College of Bavaria was asked, when the construction of the first railroad from Fuerth to Nuremberg was proposed, whether it was hygienically safe to build such a railroad. The Medical College answered (I am not telling a fairy tale, the documents concerning it exist): Such a railroad should not be built, for people who would use such a means of transportation would become nervously ill. And they added: Should there be such people who insist on such railroads, then, it is absolutely necessary to erect, on the right and left side of the tracks, high plank walls to prevent the people whom the train passes from getting concussion of the brain. Here you see, my dear friends, such a judgment is one thing; quite another is the course which the evolution of mankind takes. Today we smile about such a document as that of the Bavarian Medical College of 1837; but we are not altogether justified in smiling; for, if something similar occurs today, we behave in quite the same manner. And, after all, the Bavarian Medical College was not entirely wrong. It we compare the state of nerves of modern mankind with that of mankind two centuries ago, then we must say that people have become nervous. Perhaps the Medical College has exaggerated the matter a bit, but people did become nervous. Now, in regard to the evolution of mankind it is imperative that certain impulses which try to enter Earth evolution really should enter and not be rejected. That which from time to time wishes to enter human cultural development is often very inconvenient for people, it does not agree with their indolence, and what is duty in regard to human cultural development must be recognized by learning to read the objective facts, and must not be derived from human indolence, not even from a refined kind of indolence. I am concluding today's lecture with these words because there is no doubt that a strongly increasing battle will take place between anthroposophical cognition and the various creeds. We can see the signs for this on all sides. The creeds who wish to remain in the old beaten tracks, who do not wish to arouse themselves to a new knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, will reinforce their strong fighting position which they already have taken up, and it would be very frivolous, my dear friends, if we would remain unconscious of the fact that this battle has started.

I myself, you can be sure, am not at all eager for such a battle, particularly not for a battle with the Roman Catholic Church which, it seems, is forced upon us from the other side with such violence. He who, after all, thoroughly knows the deeper historical impulses of the creeds of our time will be very unwilling to fight time-honored institutions. But if the battle is forced upon us, it is not to be avoided! And the clergy of our day is not in the least inclined to open its doors to that which has to enter: the spiritual-scientific world conception. Remember the grotesque quotations I read to you recently where it was said that people should inform themselves about anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science through the writings of my opponents, since Roman-Catholics are forbidden by the Pope to read my own writings. This is not a light matter, my dear friends; it is a very serious matter! A battle which arises in such a manner, which is capable of disseminating such a judgment in the world, such a battle is not to be taken lightly. And what is more; it is not to be taken lightly since we do not enter it willingly. Let us take the example of the Roman-Catholic Church, my dear friends; matters are not different in regard to the Protestant Church, but the Roman-Catholic church is more powerful—and we have to consider time-honored institutions: if one understands the significance of the vestments of the priest when he reads the Holy Mass, the meaning of every single piece of his priestly garments, if one understands every single act of the Holy Mass, then one knows that they are sacred, time-honored establishments; they are establishments more ancient than Christianity for the Holy Mass is a ritual of the ancient Mystery culture, transformed in the Christian sense. And modern clergy who uses such weapons as described above lives in these rituals! Thus, if one has, on the one hand, the deepest veneration for the existing rituals and symbolism, and sees, on the other hand, how insufficient is the defense of and how serious are the attacks against that which wishes to enter mankind's evolution, then one becomes aware of the earnestness that is necessary in taking a stand in these matters. It is truly something worth deep study and consideration. What is thus heralded from that side is only at its beginnings; and it is not right to sleep in regard to it; on the contrary, we have to sharpen our perception for it. During the two decades in which the Anthroposophical Movement has been fostered in Middle Europe, we could indulge in sectarian somnolence which was so hard to combat in our own ranks and which still today sits so deeply embedded in the souls of the human beings who have entered the Anthroposophical Movement. But the time has passed in which we might have been allowed to indulge in sectarian somnolence. That which I have often emphasized here is deeply true, namely, that it is necessary that we should grasp the world-historical significance of the Anthroposophical Movement and overlook trifles, but that we should also consider the small impulses as serious and great.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Methodology

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

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

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

2. Dogmatic and Immanent Methods

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

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

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

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

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

3. The System of Science

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

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

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

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

Chance
Mechanical
Physical
Chemical
Organic
Psychic
Ethical
Religious
Of a Genius

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

4. Limits to Knowledge and the Forming of Hypotheses

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

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

5. Ethical and Historical Sciences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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