The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In order to arrive at a view of the world fitting for today, we need wider horizons than those available to mankind in this materialistic age. This applies especially in connection with spiritual science, and I have already referred to this necessity repeatedly in the preceding lectures. By wider horizons I mean that to comprehend today's world, and in particular human events, we shall have to have recourse to concepts which originate in spiritual science. The fact that the greater part of humanity has so far rejected such wider conceptual horizons in relation to all fields of life and knowledge is connected with the karma of the present time.

With these wider concepts in the background we can characterize one aspect of our life by saying that, objectively, evolution has outdistanced mankind in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today's events most thoroughly demonstrate this situation. One of the most prominent events of the age of materialism is material progress, that is, progress involving all the things that can be accomplished in the world by material means. This material progress is served by the sciences of the age of materialism. And it is especially typical of these sciences that they are growing ever less and less interested in the spiritual world; they strive more and more to become a mere summation of concepts and ideas which can be applied to external material phenomena.

The course of this development finds its strongest expression in the most external of all material matters: mechanical procedures. Factories, industry, machines, these things have attained the highest degree of perfection during this age of materialism. And it is in the very nature of these things that progress in these fields has been non-national—you could say, international; it is world progress. For whether a railway or something similar is built in England, Russia, China or Japan, the laws which have to be taken into account, the knowledge needed, are the same everywhere, since everything is accomplished in accordance with mechanical requirements which are detached from man. In these fields an international principle has indeed taken hold in the widest possible manner.

Over the years, during our lectures on spiritual science, we have often said, in connection with one aspect or another, that there is a body on the earth, a body which is spread over the whole earth. This body needs a soul, and this soul should be equally international. Spiritual science was claimed to be this soul, for it comprises knowledge which is not bound up with any particular individual or group on the earth but can be understood by every single person, wherever he may be, just as physical things in external, material culture—such as a railway or a locomotive—can be understood. We have often stressed that a blessing and salvation for human evolution can only come about if the development in the bodily realm is accompanied by a development in the realm of soul and spirit. For this to take place it would be necessary for people to make just as much effort to understand spiritual matters as external circumstances force them to make—they would far rather be forced than use their freedom—to understand the demands of material progress. So far this has not happened, but it will obviously have to come about as human evolution proceeds. However long it is delayed, it must happen in the end. However much disastrous karma is conjured up because human beings do not want to make the effort, it will happen in the end, for what is to happen will indeed happen.

It is because material progress has run ahead of the good will for spiritual knowledge that mankind has been outdistanced by this material progress and everything it contains by way of passions and urges in human souls. Externally this shows most emphatically in the fact that it is not ideas which strive towards harmonious co-existence of human beings on earth—in other words, not Christian ideas—which are uppermost, but those which, in utmost excess, divide mankind and lead back to cultural periods which one might suppose to have been long overcome. The monstrous anomaly lies in the way nationalism was so forcefully able to take hold of the nations as they lived side by side in the nineteenth century. This shows that in their soul development human beings have not kept pace with material progress.

When people at last come to accept spiritual science on a wider scale, not only in theory but as a fulfilment of their total soul need, then they will, of necessity, have to arrive at different concepts. And such different concepts will help them to comprehend things which cannot possibly be comprehended by materialistic thinking as it is at present. Some matters can only be understood on the basis of corresponding ideas. But, like anything else, ideas must live in order to grow, which means they need soil in which they can flourish. And the soil in which ideas can flourish is nothing other than an attitude of soul prepared by spiritual science. Were materialistic progress to continue its development along the lines of the nineteenth century, people would grow ever poorer in ideas. Put simply: No ideas suitable for comprehending the world would occur to people. Any thoughts they might have about the world could only be stimulated by means of experiments, or by what they could see with their own eyes. The modern insistence on experimentation is nothing other than a paucity of ideas. If the present trend were to continue, mankind would grow ever poorer in ideas. But since a certain intensity of spiritual life is necessary, since human beings must develop some degree of intensity in certain impulses, they will have to discover these impulses in other sources if they cannot find them in the substance of ideas.

When was there an age brimming over with ideas, an age when genuine ideas flourished? You could say that a particularly characteristic and fruitful age was the period extending from Lessing to German Romanticism, to Novalis, or even to the philosophical idealists, among whom we can count Schopenhauer in addition to Hegel and Schelling, as well as those I have quoted in my book Vom Menschenrätsel as being the philosophers who sounded a universal resonance which has since died away during the age of materialism. Ideas were truly abundant then. Hence the contempt in which that time is held today! Look at it, so rich and pregnant with ideas, ideas seeking to fathom nature and the evolution of mankind throughout history! Today we gather ideas from the spiritual world about human evolution, about the various post-Atlantean periods and the impulses belonging to them, knowledge which has only become fitting in the present age. Yet just look how close this is to that fertile idea brought forward by Schelling, Hegel, Novalis, Franz von Baader—though it originated with Jakob Böhme. They said that human evolution passed through a period of history—this was as much as they could see without the help of spiritual science—a first period of history in which the principle of God the Father ruled. This was the period characterized in the Bible by the Old Testament and the heathen religions. They called it the Age of the Father. This was followed by the Age of the Son, during which the idea of the Mystery of Golgotha was to become embedded in mankind. Finally, as an ideal for the future, they saw the Age of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, which they also called the Age of John, for they believed that not until then would the great impulses of the John Gospel be realized.

How infinitely meaningful is such an idea, compared with the desolate, unfruitful talk of human evolution, which is nothing but an abstract idea, in which what follows after is added to what came before as if it were just another link in a chain. How profound by comparison is Schelling's ‘theosophy’ which he developed on from Jakob Böhme! This ‘theosophy’ of Schelling attains such lofty heights that, by comparison, the later thoughts of theologians represent a steep decline. Schelling fights his way through to the realization that what matters in Christianity is not so much its doctrine. This doctrine is seized upon by modern progressive theology as if Christ Jesus were no more than a teacher. What matters for Schelling is not the doctrine, but the fact of the Mystery of Golgotha. We must look up to the fact of the Mystery of Golgotha, the fact of the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ Jesus.

In similar vein we could quote a great many superior, far-reaching ideas originating at that time. With what is the existence of such far-reaching ideas connected? Those who were inspired by such ideas have something in common: They are not narrow-mindedly nationalistic. Their standpoint is that of someone whom they would have called a ‘citizen of the world’. I do not know whether this can be understood today, when so many expressions have become empty phrases. How far removed from anything narrow-mindedly nationalistic is, for instance, a spirit such as Goethe! How far removed from anything narrow-mindedly nationalistic is such a work as Goethe's Faust! Never mind what its origins were. Of course Faust can only stem from the culture of Central Europe. But in the form it has achieved as a poetical work at the hands of Goethe it would be absurd to ask Faust to show you his birth certificate. Yet this absurdity has become a reality, a fact, in our time. Everything that is happening today is, fundamentally, simply a denial of the heights once reached by mankind in such a work as Goethe's Faust. Yet such a work shows us that mankind could have progressed further than is the case today, or indeed than will be the case in the near future.

I have told you, however, that the human soul needs a certain degree of intensity in its impulses. If it cannot reach up to ideas, it will take this intensity from elsewhere, from obscure, unconscious soul forces, from forces that rush up from the spirit of the blood. Fundamentally, nationalism is nothing other than a consequence of the lack of ideas. Mankind's primary need now is the will to rise up to ideas. But it has to be said: if this is to succeed, something else will be needed, too: namely, an understanding for the element of grace which can come from the spiritual world. For it is not possible to win through to the spiritual world from a starting-point of a limited sum of preconceived opinions. The spiritual world can only be reached by keeping the soul open for whatever wants to enter in, by desiring not merely to judge, but also day by day to enrich one's ability to judge.

So to begin with it is above all necessary that insight should take hold of human beings. We live in the age which is to grasp hold of the consciousness soul. So this age must strive for insight. But insight can only come about in ideas that span the world; for insight to come about, reality must be filled with ideas. Yet, especially with regard to the most recent events, our age is thoroughly disinclined to accept ideas. An abstract concept, however logical, however convincing, is not an idea. An idea must be born of living reality. Nowadays we see hardly any ideas come into being. Instead we are surrounded by an insistence on abstract concepts. Ideas can, however, become slogans—though if they do, not much damage can be done, because human souls cannot work in slogans that are related to ideas; their absurdity becomes too obvious. But abstract concepts are different. Abstract concepts can become slogans in a very intense way, and their meaning is so obvious because they refer basically to things that are close at hand. So human beings, who are so wary of taking in anything far-reaching, seize on them greedily. But abstract concepts do not have a basis in reality. There are great numbers of them all around us today, but those who can see beyond what is immediately obvious know that their powerlessness is all the greater.

One of the many abstract ideas ruling us today is that of eternal peace. In the way this is handled it is an entirely abstract concept which does not spring from a living understanding of reality, and yet it appears to those who do not desire to widen their horizons as something entirely convincing. These people say: The various states—and they do not wonder whether this expression ‘the various states’ has any reality—ought to create an inter-state organization, something that stretches across the entire world and is constructed after the pattern of a single state. Furthermore, something called ‘inter-state law’ is to be established. The idea is beautiful and so everybody finds it convincing. The various states are to commit themselves to keep the peace and they must also create legal norms which can centain their various mutual interests. All very nice! It would be equally nice if, to heat a room, all we needed was the abstract concept of warmth instead of having to light the stove. It is irrelevant whether an idea is nice, or convincing. For what could be more convincing than the thought that our need for stoves and the like really means that nature is a terrible despot!

It is irrelevant whether an idea corresponds to the feeling that it is nice or, perhaps, humane. What matters is whether an idea grows out of reality. But to aim for ideas which grow out of reality it is first of all necessary to study reality. Any narrow-minded brain—excuse the expression—can come up with nice programmes for states to follow in order to achieve peace. But such a brain cannot attain to ideas which correspond to reality and are born out of reality. It does not even feel that the spiritual world is a reality with its own laws, though this is considered a matter of course as far as the material world is concerned. People think the world can be set to rights by means of a few sentences. They have no feeling for the fact that the world is a reality in which all kinds of real impulses work in contrast to one another. And by becoming intoxicated with programmes made up of abstract ideas, they prevent the world from entering into the realities.

Sometimes a fruitful, genuine idea is expressed in the same words as a living idea; what matters is that we should be moved by the way it lives. Today, however, something that is alive appears to people as something utterly paradoxical. Thus, over the course of the nineteenth century, and also in the twentieth century, in various parts of the world the idea of disarmament was born, the idea of limiting militarism. This is a nice idea, but it must not remain abstract if it is to become fruitful! It must take account of reality. For this to happen, reality must be studied. It is all very well to meet somewhere and say: All countries must disarm. This is quite easy, especially as the idea is convincing. But either none of them will actually do so, or some of them will not do so. And even if they all did so, they would very soon start to rearm again if the initial impulse is not truly alive. But if you try to point out only those impulses which are truly fruitful, you are in danger of being considered by most people to be utterly foolish, for these days what is most sensible is considered to be most foolish. When I say ‘sensible’ in this connection I mean that which is most in tune with reality.

As I said, the idea of disarmament, the idea that all militarism should gradually be dismantled, is a good idea. But it will never be possible to realize it by reaching a formal conclusion about it in some committee of representatives from all states. It can only become reality if a corresponding reality takes hold of it. What do I mean? How can disarmament be achieved? Yes, it is necessary to be very concrete in one's expressions. It is indeed a fact that at a number of points during the nineteenth century it could have been possible to draw closer to the thought of disarmament and transform it into a real idea. How, for example?

Supposing someone had had the idea before the year 1870? How could it have been realized? Before 1870 a step could have been taken towards the idea of disarmament, a step which would have been very fruitful for mankind. But now I have to say something that today would be regarded as utterly foolish: No approach to the idea of disarmament could have been made by means of some kind of treaty between the various states! This is totally fruitless, however nice it may sound. It would, however, have been fruitful if a particular state, one that was in a position to do so, had begun to disarm, had made disarmament a reality for itself. To do this, people would have had to be capable of reckoning with realities.

Let us now look at a few states in Europe in order to point to what is a reality. Can Russia disarm? Certainly not just like that, for beyond Russia lies Asia, and if Russia were to disarm she would have no defences against the invading peoples of Asia, who would most certainly not disarm. So for Russia disarmament is out of the question. There was no German Reich before the year 1870, but how about the entity that did exist at that time? Could it have disarmed? On the eastern border there would have been a state that was not in a position to disarm, so it follows that here, too, disarmament would have been impossible. But there is one state which could have disarmed, thus setting a wonderful example and at the same time bringing into reality in modern times what it is always trumpeting forth with words—and that is France. Before 1870, France was in a very good position to disarm, and in consequence the war of 1870 would never have taken place. Even since then, as regards Europe—not the colonies—France would still have been in a position to proceed with disarmament at any time. This would have been a beginning, and attention could then have been turned to the East.

Obviously, those whose thinking is abstract will object: Ought France to have exposed herself to the danger of attack by Germany? There would have been no such danger, because if a country becomes involved in a war, the cause is invariably the fact that it is capable of war, that is, that it practises militarism. It can be forced to practise militarism. But no country which does not practise militarism would be attacked if its neighbours had no interest in attacking it. Switzerland, of course, has never been in a position to do without militarism. You cannot apply the conditions of one situation to those of another. Equally you may not say in the abstract that Germany would in any case have coveted Alsace-Lorraine. This is nonsense. Why should she have coveted Alsace-Lorraine under any circumstances? Bismarck said that to annex Alsace-Lorraine merely because some of the population were German was an impossible and crazy academic theory! The only reason there has ever been is one of military security. For so long as France is a military power in possession of Alsace, you can reach Stuttgart more quickly from France than you can from Berlin. The only reason there has ever been for attaching Alsace to the German Reich is that of achieving military protection on the western frontier. This may seem to be a paradoxical idea at first, but for our abstract thinking, which is the twin brother of materialism, realities do indeed appear to be paradoxes.

If you picture to yourselves that France started to disarm before 1870, you will begin to realize just how much could have been set aside, if only thinking at that time had been based on reality. By considering such ideas, a thinking based on reality could be greatly expanded. Naturally, ideas based on reality do not always come to fruition, for the simple reason that other impulses might be stronger. But this says nothing against reality. A flower will grow entirely in accordance with its own real laws. But if a cartwheel flattens it, it cannot develop. Our thinking must be true, and if an idea fails to come to fruition at some point, this is of itself no proof that it was not based on reality.

This is what I wanted to say about saturating ideas with reality. It is as pointless to have a wonderful idea about some machine, if you lack the mechanical knowledge with which to construct it, as it is to have all sorts of ideas about states and the like if you are incapable of gaining insight into the real impulses, which in this case could be attained through an understanding of the spiritual realm, the spiritual world. This, then, is one of the points to be made: the saturation of ideas with reality.

The other concerns the extent of the horizon, the will to extend one's view to wider horizons. In the last lecture I read to you some of the judgements on the nature of the German people expressed by someone who is, after all, an important personality, judgements which he expressed in a long novel about recent times, which caused a very considerable stir. But all these judgements derive from a narrow horizon, an attitude of not wanting to look further than a few inches beyond the end of one's nose. Living with such narrow horizons brings about disharmony in the world. You can have the most beautiful ideas about the peaceful co-operation of the nations, but if your horizons are narrow, then those beautiful ideas will stand for nothing, or at most will work destructively. For what you really think, has the opposite effect of what you are saying with your beautiful ideas. The important thing is to make for reality. One reality which faces us at the moment is what—in our idle way of expressing ourselves—we call the present war. In reality it is no longer a war, though in some ways it can still be compared with events which in the past were described as wars. This war came about, of course, as a result of the most varied impulses, but to gain insight into them we simply have to form ideas which are based on reality.

The time which should be used for working on ideas based on reality is used today instead to show that the world in most recent times has forgotten everything that took place during human history up to the time when today's tragic events commenced. Of course it is reasonable to talk in connection with such events of all sorts of horrors and atrocities. But these ought to be taken for granted if you consider the experiences of mankind throughout history. Such things really ought not to be used to deafen us in relation to more profound matters with which we are faced and the recognition of which could alone bring people to a point of view that is fruitful.

Let us today turn to something which can easily be recognized by anyone who grasps matters externally, on the physical plane, but which is illuminated more clearly if it is considered in conjunction with ideas put forward in the lecture cycle on the folk souls. Among the various causes which have led to today's tragic events, there are a number which could become increasingly clear – to those also who consider the external world by itself – if only people would be willing to extend their horizons. The British Empire possesses one quarter of the entire land surface of the globe. The British Empire and France and Russia together possess one half. A coalition between Russia, France, the British Empire and America would account for approximately three quarters of the earth's land surface. So there would be one quarter left over. This figure ought of itself to speak volumes to those who work with reality. Let us, however, look at that quarter which is contained in the British Empire.

Here we have, to start with, the quite small territory covered by England, Scotland and Ireland. England, Scotland and Ireland by themselves in no way constitute the British Empire. To speak of these three territories is to speak of a region of the world which gave birth to that great man Shakespeare and also to incomparable thinkers and, in earlier times, great statesmen. Only good aspects are to be found. All that we find here is supremely suited to play a great role in the fifth post-Atlantean period. What we do not find is the British Empire: namely, those three island regions attached to Europe, together with all that can be called their colonies in the widest sense. Especially in recent decades the impetus for the whole development of this British Empire comes from the relationship of the motherland to the colonies. You can discover what endeavours are being made thus to shape the relationship between the motherland and the colonies.

What the British Empire is striving for is a close-knit relationship between the motherland and the colonies. I have told you about the application of occult forces, and it is these forces that are being used to achieve this goal. If these forces were allowed to work in their own region, no possible harm could come of them. But if the goal is something egoistic, whether for an individual or a group, then their effects cannot but be harmful. It is not at all easy to achieve this relationship between motherland and colonies. Those who imagine that world peace can be achieved by means of programmes and an interstate organization obviously have no idea what forces have to be used in reality to achieve a welding of the British motherland to her colonies in a way that will create the kind of totality which suits the British Empire. At the basis of this endeavour is what they there call imperialism. This is what has always been striven for in recent times, though out of entirely materialistic impulses—but this is what has been striven for. Every means that might serve this idea has been found acceptable from a certain point of view. It was necessary for the British Empire to achieve closer links with its colonies. To make this possible an impulse was needed that would steal into people's hearts and turn their minds towards something they would not otherwise have found acceptable. It is with this that the war in Europe is connected, for out of the mood of this war certain impulses will arise which the British Empire needs in order to create a uniformity between the motherland and her colonies. For those who study the processes of the physical plane it is not only interesting but extremely important to note how all those who think along abstract lines have been mistaken with regard to what I am saying.

Read what these ‘clever’ people wrote while this war was approaching—I mean clever in the sense in which I frequently use this word. They all reckoned with a defection here and a revolt there and another there, if war were to break out. But nothing of the kind has happened—indeed, the exact opposite has come about. If people's thoughts had been based on reality they would have said: If the British Empire wants to draw its colonies closer together, if it wants to generate impulses there which will tend towards going along with the motherland, then it needs a war, and this war is the means to that higher, so-called end desired by the state. And wherever such thoughts are thought, the end sanctifies the means.

Now is the moment when this fact should become particularly obvious to people. Speaking at present about the evolution of the British Empire, we should always take two significant streams into consideration. The one is the more or less puritanical stream—this word only describes one element of it, though probably correctly—which comes into its own in all that is excellent in the British nation. This puritanical stream was to a great extent dominant in British politics right up to the nineties of the nineteenth century. But during the nineties a change came about, when the imperialistic stream became stronger and more important than the puritanical stream.

Certain people had a good feel for the approach of imperialism—indeed, it is remarkable how good this instinct was. Let me draw your attention to a curious incident which shows rather clearly how these things are linked. While we were in London, shortly before the founding of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, Mrs Besant was then by no means the person she later became. As you know, she always had the tendency to be whoever she had to be, depending on which influences had a hold over her. She was extremely popular in the circle of those who were called the theosophists in London at that time. Anyway, there were various sides to her. At that time—it was the beginning of the century—she gave a lecture on theosophy and imperialism. The imperialistic impulses were developing rapidly. Mrs Besant's line of argument was rather against imperialism. And we could see how, from that moment onwards, she was finished in London, even among those who were then theosophists. A few personal friends stood by her, but everybody else was through with her because she had dared to say something against imperialism. In such things are revealed the forces which, if you can penetrate them, bring you to the point at which you can see how things are interconnected at a higher level.

Until quite recently a remnant of the puritanical element was still at work in England. Though politics were being led by puppets, marionettes, there was nevertheless something puritanical about these marionettes, about Asquith and Grey. This had to be removed so that the impulses I was speaking about could come into their own; and what now came was the most willing marionette of all with regard to everything I have described to you. But there is nothing puritanical left. Let us look first at the negative side: the cynical rejection of the idea of peace with the hypocritical justification that it is being rejected because what is wanted is peace. Nowadays the craziest things can be said with impunity and without being taken amiss. That is the negative side. On the positive side we have an event of the greatest imaginable importance: the gathering of colonial ministers, which is one of the first actions of this man who has been placed by a negative miracle in one of the highest positions in the world. At last the public is beginning to notice what is going on. But the public did not notice until it had had its nose rubbed in it, whereas those who live in ideas based in reality have seen it clearly for some time.

It is impossible to find your way about in the realm of reality if you have no inclination to accept genuine ideas. Only then can you look at the world in such a way: You see something which you consider is insignificant; then you see it again, and yet again and still consider it insignificant; but on the fourth and fifth occasion you realize that it is important because it is a significant symptom of future events. Not everything is equally important, but you have to have a sense for what is important, and this sense can only be gained if you take into your soul those impulses which can only come about on the basis of spiritual science.

In the last few days somebody handed me a most interesting essay by a very popular British writer who is now a journalist. He is connected with the military, and in everything he writes he reveals how he is linked with the threads that are being spun. The essay he wrote recently in The London Magazine is significant enough. It was handed to me, as they say, by chance. But there is no chance in such occurrences. It is most interesting what this military author, linked as he is with the threads that are guiding events, has to say about the current situation:

‘Our people had, and have, the will to conquer ... In that grand spirit the war has been fought, and the memory of our unquenchable determination to conquer will be the noblest heritage that we shall bequeath to our successors, the sons and daughters of England and of her glorious Dominions ... We shall have a million square miles of German colonial territory in our hands. We shall have many million veteran officers and men. We shall have greater naval predominance than before. The world will possess indubitable proofs that our Empire is one and indivisible, that its spirit is unconquerable, and that the martial qualities of the race are worthy of its glorious past ... We have all the moral and material attributes of power on a scale hitherto undreamed of ... But the war will end one day, and then how shall we stand? Taking Army, Navy, and resources together, we shall be the first military Power in the world.’

Is not a peculiar impression given when someone believes so urgently that he must fight against ‘militarism’ and then states what a lofty ideal it is to be the predominant military force in the world!

‘We shall be recognised as the mainstay of the Alliance.’

This ought to be read in France.

‘We have taken the leading part in the Alliance, and the leadership of Europe belongs to us of right.’

Now he takes Kipling's words, ‘We have the ships, the money and the men’, and makes them his own.

‘... and if Parliament would vote supplies for a couple of years and then adjourn sine die, most of us would be content.’

Such things are an expression of those impulses and instincts which are connected with the strings that are being pulled. They may be observed entirely objectively, without taking sides in the way in which no doubt well-meaning, though short-sighted, patriots tend to take sides. Why should such things not be observed? They are objective facts! The impulses that live in mankind are objective facts which historical events bring to the fore.

While it is essential for us here to avoid taking sides at all costs, it is equally important, especially in lectures, to strive to speak with the utmost objectivity. As you will see, as soon as you speak with the utmost objectivity, the facts themselves provide you with proof.

It is impossible to gain an understanding of the world without being willing to take note of facts. This so-called answering note from the Entente, this New Year's Eve gift to the world—my dear friends, it is unlikely that a document composed as this one is will be found again however far you search in history, and this applies both to the basis on which it is written and to the way it is set out and composed. What is written there will have the direst consequences, yet the best way to read it is to skip every single sentence and to realize: Nothing that appears in writing in this document matters! What matters is that behind it there stands what I have been describing to you, and that it is this that is the aim. Of course nobody would dream of saying so in a note. And if you ask whether it can be achieved by means of negotiations, the answer is, obviously, No. Of course such a thing cannot be achieved by means of peace negotiations. It can only be achieved by creating guarantees, and guarantees are contained in dominance. Guarantees mean that the one who wants the guarantees is the only one who can decree what they shall be and that all the others no longer have any say in the matter, and all this is brought about by the interrelationships of power. At present there is a long way to go before this can be achieved. But to live under the illusion that this is not the goal would mean a great lack of responsibility towards the sense for truth that human beings ought to have.

Let nobody suppose that what I have said is directed against the British people, for I make a distinction between this British people and those who pull the strings—if I may use this expression—those who stand behind the events in the way I have frequently described. Neither is it necessary to identify oneself with such impulses, though obviously it cannot be my task to prevent someone from doing so. Also, I shall not prohibit, either in thought or feeling, anyone within our Movement from identifying with such impulses. But let such a one say what is true and not that he is identifying himself with the ideal of the rights of small nations and the like. Let him be clear that he desires to dominate the world. Then we shall be understanding one another in the realm of truth, and that is what matters. We shall make progress if human beings are true. If they say what is really true, we shall make progress. However terrible the truth may be, it will get us further than what is untrue. This is what we should inscribe on our hearts. We make better progress with this than with what is untrue.

Obviously, it would be foolish to imagine that a world power could be moved by all kinds of persuasion or by all manner of propositions to give up its aims. Obviously, it would be foolish to adopt an attitude of high-handed morality and apply all kinds of moral yardsticks. I told you the story of the Opium Wars expressly to turn you away from moral yardsticks. What matters is to speak the truth, to say what is true. It would be far better for the world—though not for those who pull the strings—if we could all say baldly and cynically: This is what is wanted.

This, then, is the meaning in this particular field, of our guiding line and goal: ‘Wisdom lies solely in truth’.

These lectures on the theme of current events are particularly suited to helping us realize what we can gain for our soul by striving to acquaint ourselves with spiritual knowledge. I have often stressed that this spiritual knowledge must not remain merely theoretical. We must make it come alive by filling it with those hallowed feelings and other impulses which belong to it, so that it can give to our souls that impetus and mood which will enable us as scientists of the spirit to relate to events in the human realm in a manner differing from that of someone who is not a spiritual scientist.

We have reflected in various ways on how individual human beings belong to particular nations, nationalities. But what the individual bears within him that belongs to mankind as a whole—that part of him which is not specialized and individualized with the characteristics of a particular nation—it is of this that spiritual science helps us to become fully aware, for the main content of anthroposophical spiritual science is valid for every individual human being, regardless of any differences among various groups. Indeed, even the national differences are seen differently from an anthroposophical point of view since, in contrast to the non-anthroposophical point of view, we are able to consider objectively what constitutes these differences—the various aspects can be seen objectively.

We are familiar with the threefold nature of our soul in that it consists of the sentient soul, the intellectual or mind soul and the consciousness soul, all three being filled, spiritually permeated, enlivened by our egohood. When the Italian folk soul works into individual human beings, it is the sentient soul that is influenced by the forces and impulses with which it works. In the French individual it is the intellectual or mind soul, and in the British individual the consciousness soul through which the folk soul works. For the folk souls of Central Europe it is the ego that is receptive, and for those of the Slav peoples the spirit-self. If we could fill ourselves with an understanding of this, we should no longer be tempted to form judgements in the way in which they are so frequently formed.

A certain person heard this and was furious, because he understood anthroposophical spiritual science to be saying that in the German nation the folk soul works through the ego, as if this was something higher than a folk soul working through the consciousness soul. This was his own misunderstanding! For in spiritual science different aspects of knowledge are viewed objectively, side by side. The folk souls have tasks to do and to accomplish them they have to work into their nations. But as regards the working of the folk souls in human souls we must realize that in our fifth post-Atlantean period a certain development has to take place. And those who are drawn towards anthroposophical spiritual science ought to feel themselves in the forefront of this development.

How does the folk soul work down into the human soul and mind? To start with we have to note that this working is subconscious and only partially rises up into consciousness. The individual human being feels that he belongs to one nation or another. On the whole, the folk soul works on the individuality via the maternal principle. It is the maternal principle that is embedded in the realm of the folk soul. The effect of the paternal principle is to detach the individual, as a physical and etheric being belonging to nature, from the group. I have frequently discussed this in past years. In the Christian world view this is even expressed in the Gospels. This, too, I discussed some time ago. As things are today, it is in the first instance through the blood that the folk soul works into the individual, and also through what corresponds in the etheric body to blood. Naturally, this is more or less an animal impulse, and it remains at the animal level for by far the greater part of mankind today. Through his blood the individual belongs to a particular nation. The mysterious forces and impulses working in the blood are very difficult to describe since they are extraordinarily complex and manifold. Suffice it to say that they lie beneath the surface of consciousness.

People are far more conscious in all those aspects of their make-up which belong to mankind as a whole, irrespective of national differences. That is why the pathos, the passion, the affectation of belonging to a particular nationality bursts forth with a kind of elemental force. People do not attempt to apply logical reasons or judgements when it is a question of specifying or sensing their attachment to their nationality. It is his blood, and his heart which is influenced by his blood, that bind the individual to his nationality and let him live within it. The impulses in question are subconscious, and it is a good step forward if we can at least succeed in recognizing the subconscious nature of this situation. It is important especially for those who are approaching spiritual science if they can undergo this development in themselves and come to feel about these things in a way that differs from the way the rest of mankind feels.

When people who do not belong to spiritual science are asked what binds them to their nation they will—indeed, they must—answer: My blood! This is the sole idea which they are capable of forming about their sense of belonging to a particular nationality. A student of spiritual science, however, ought gradually to reach a point at which he is able to give not this, but a different answer. If he cannot gradually develop to a point where this different answer is possible, this means that he sees spiritual science as something purely theoretical, not practical and living. Someone who does not study spiritual science can only say: I am connected to my nationality through my blood, through my blood I defend what lives in my nation, it is my blood that obliges me to identify with my nationality. One who does study spiritual science, however, must answer: I am connected with my nationality through my karma, for this is a part of my karma. As soon as concepts of karma are brought into the question, the whole relationship becomes much more spiritual. Someone who does not follow spiritual science will summon his blood to account for the pathos, the impulsiveness of everything he dces as a member of a particuiar nation. But someone who has developed through spiritual science will feel connected to one nation or another through his karma.

The matter becomes spiritual. Externally such a person might act in the same way; even if he feels this more spiritual aspect he might do the same things. But inwardly he will feel, spiritually; his feeling will be quite different from that of a person who feels his links with his nation purely at an animal level.

Here you see one of the points at which belonging to spiritual science changes the soul, brings a new mood into the soul. But at the same time you see how much the general consciousness of our time is lagging behind what could already be known by those who want to know it. In the general consciousness of our time the individual's attachment to a particular nation can only be seen as something that lives in the blood, or in that which is not at all of the blood but which is regulated in connection with the blood and out of this perception of the blood. A far freer view of nationality will gain ground once the whole matter is viewed as a matter of karma. Then certain delicate concepts will arise for someone who perhaps attaches himself consciously to a certain nation, thus bringing about a change of karma.

But however we view the matter, whether in the less complete sense shared by the greater part of mankind today, or in the more complete sense that can be attained through the study of spiritual science, nevertheless the fact remains that the general situation of the world today means that mankind is differentiated into groups. Nothing could make us more painfully aware than current events that this differentiation into groups is still for the most part prevalent. In addition, this differentiation into groups is mingled with quite other conditions and facts because it is to be even more difficult for human hearts and souls to gain an understanding of the reasons for the painful enmities, the painful disharmonies that have arisen amongst mankind today.

In short, we are touching on something pervaded by tragedy which should have nothing to do with ordinary logic or ordinary, superficial judgements. For whether these things are seen as a matter of blood or as a matter of karma, blood lies below, and karma above, logic. As a result, what we have been discussing must of necessity result in conflicts in human coexistence and these conflicts must be seen to be necessary. To believe that these conflicts can be judged in accordance with those concepts that apply to individual human beings must lead to the greatest errors. The widespread discussion of conflicts among nations in the same terms as those applicable to conflicts between individuals is the gravest mistake. I have already said that concepts such as justice and freedom apply to individual human beings. To claim them as parts of a programme for nations proves from the start a lack of knowledge about the characteristics of nations and a lack of will to enter into the question of national characteristics.

For those who understand these things and are capable, through spiritual knowledge, of seeing what is factually and naturally necessary, there is something paradoxical about the belief expressed in so many publications today, for it is comparable with the shark who makes a pact with the little fishes which he normally eats, saying: It is utterly inhumane to eat little fishes; I shall cease doing so! By saying this, he is condemning himself to death, for it happens to be the way of the world that sharks eat little fish!

It is necessary to come to a profound sense for the fact that it is not possible to understand the world without seeing the reality of the necessary conflicts leading to all that is tragic in the world. And to believe that something like Paradise is possible on the physical plane shows a total lack of comprehension of the peculiarities of the physical plane. Paradise does not exist on earth. There can be no comprehension among those who strive to realize the new Jerusalem as a Utopia on earth or who, like the social democrats, want to bring about some other satisfactory solution. There is a profound law which says that human beings, in so far as they live here on the physical plane, can only reach a satisfactory view of reality if they are aware that higher worlds also exist, and that they are connected in their souls with these higher worlds. Only if we understand that we are citizens of higher worlds can a satisfactory view be attained. Therefore, when spiritual consciousness was extinguished, a time had to come when mankind could no longer understand why so much disaster, so many conflicts, are present on the earth. These conflicts can only be resolved when we feel ourselves not only to be living in the physical world, but also in the spiritual world. Then we may begin to grasp that just as man cannot always be young but has also to grow old, so there has to be a breaking down of what was once built up—conflict and destruction as well as creation. When you understand this, you also understand that conflicts have to arise between groups of human beings. These conflicts are the tragic element of world events, and they must be seen to be something tragic.

In order to conjure up before your soul the living concept, the living idea that I am trying to describe, let me remind you of a rather caustic remark once made by the poet Friedrich Hebbel. He was, as you know, a genius of a somewhat ponderous caste, one who wrote rather laboriously, despite a considerable fund of worldly humour. I told you on another occasion that he was not at all far from a view of the world which would have accorded with spiritual science. Thus he once jotted down in his notebook the following theme: Plato, reincarnated, takes his place in a secondary school where the teacher is dealing with the subject of Plato. He cannot understand a word of what Plato is supposed to have said and the teacher scolds him severely for this. Hebbel wanted to work this idea into a dramatic episode. He never actually did so, but you see that he did indeed consider bringing the idea of reincarnation into a play.

Hebbel was a contemporary of Grillparzer and knew him. As I said, Hebbel was a somewhat sombre, melancholy genius, but after he had seen Grillparzer's plays The Golden Fleece, Thou shalt not lie! and A Dream is Life and so on, he said—and this is most interesting: Grillparzer depicts tragic conflicts, but only those of which it can be said that, if people were clever enough to see through the situations, it would be possible to resolve them in the end. According to Hebbel, the tragic circumstances in Grillparzer's plays only come about because the characters are not clever enough to see through the tragic situations. This, he says, is not really tragic. Real tragedy among human beings only comes about when those involved are as clever as anything and yet none of their cleverness and caution can help them, so that conflict becomes inevitable.

What Hebbel as a dramatist calls real tragedy is something that we ought to introduce as a concept into human evolution, human destiny, so that we do not continue for ever to form the naive judgement that one thing or another might have been avoided. Situations which lead to conflicts such as the present one cannot be avoided. And all those declamations about blame are totally out of place in face of a truly penetrating judgement.

It was for this purpose that I arranged these lectures which we have been conducting over the past days and weeks. I arranged them in order to demonstrate clearly that even in the case of an event such as the Opium Wars it is impossible to speak of blame in the way blame is meant in situations involving individual human beings. Concepts such as guilt, freedom, and so on, which can be applied to individual human beings, cannot be applied to souls living on other planes, and folk souls do not live on the physical plane but only work into the physical plane through individual souls. Their abode lies in other spheres, on other planes.

Such things are sensed nowadays by some isolated individuals. But they are not understood when we judge events on the basis of concepts which are customary today, instead of making the effort to take into account the actual evidence. To stand up today as a member of a nation and pronounce judgement on other nations in a manner that is only justified when referring to individuals proves nothing except one's own backwardness in the ability to judge. It is, though, a historical necessity, because certain statesmen are backward in relation to what could be known today, that this backwardness, this ignorance, is brought to bear even in the most terrible historical documents, as a result of which infinite rivers of blood will flow. On the other side stands the possibility of stressing again and again, for those who want to hear it, that the progress and salvation of mankind depend on finding judgements from the realms of spiritual life.

There is indeed a sense in some quarters for that which is necessary as a basis for judgement; but it cannot be brought into consciousness. I shall give you an example, for if I may say so, spiritual science will only be absorbed into our very flesh and blood if we learn to observe ordinary, everyday reality from the viewpoint of spiritual science. In England, in the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, the historian Professor Seeley was active. What he taught was in many cases decisive for what later came to live in many souls. Seeley was perhaps the first English historical imperialist. His imperialism was historical and his history imperialistic, for he viewed British history as it had developed over the centuries from the point of view that the trend had always been towards the foundation of the great British Empire which now covers one quarter of the habitable surface of the earth. His lectures appeared in print in the seventies and were frequently reprinted; sometimes there was a new edition every year, for he had very many students. In these lectures he sought to gather up all the separate facts which made the British Empire what it is today. He saw it as something in the nature of divine providence that all the different pieces came together in the way in which they did, as a result of different impulses. He even asks: How did it all happen? And answers expressly: No individuals decided all these things, performed all these actions at just the right moment, which joined yet another portion to the British Empire with the aim of creating the greatest imperium that had ever existed; no, all this happened in earlier times as though by instinct.

The various parts came together by instinct and in Seeley's view there is a divine and spiritual order in the way they did so. Now, he says, it is our task to lift up into consciousness what has hitherto taken place instinctively and to round off what arose thus instinctively with our consciousness into an imperium such as has never existed on the earth before. He saw it as his task as an imperialistic historian consciously to penetrate what had come together unconsciously. Seeley intends, as it were, to bring into the present consciousness of the tifth post-Atlantean period all that contributed to the rise of the British Empire out of the still-atavistic forces belonging to the laws of the fourth post-Atlantean period. But as we have pointed out, it was not only reasoned, intellectual thinking which took hold of the instinctive coming-together of the different parts. As I have told you, during the final decades of the nineteenth century certain members of occult streams began—not with ordinary consciousness, but with occult consciousness—to expand this British Empire by placing before their souls, and the souls of their pupils, maps which showed what still had to come about if the British Empire was to beam its forces over the whole world. In these occult circles the following idea was consciously cultivated: The fifth post-Atlantean period belongs to the English-speaking peoples. Based on this, all the arrangements were carried out and all the details elaborated. No doubt the Regius Professor was not aware of this; but others were and used all of it consciously in their impulses. This needs to be recorded.

We shall speak more about what it was that they were aware of. But when people are not aware of something it nevertheless creeps into their soul and occupies them in a certain way. Thus, in our time, an extraordinary collaboration came about between something occult hovering in the background and pulling strings, and something of which people are unaware, but which lives in the forefront of events on the physical plane.

One must know such things if one wants to form judgements in the proper way. Over the last few weeks I have quoted a number of peculiar incidents, such as the matter of the Almanach of Madame de Thèbes and others. No doubt you remember. Now consider the following quite objectively without taking sides in any way. It is something extraordinary even for somebody who only thinks in the ordinary way; but for those who observe spiritual connections it is something that demands more than mere consideration, it demands to be meditated upon and taken into one's impulses: Is it not extraordinary that as early as the nineties of the nineteenth century an English book should have been published that was written by three editors of The Times and given the title The Great War of 189-? The timing was handled in a somewhat dilettante fashion. Though the date suggested is rather earlier, the reference is to the present war. This book contains a small error, for we are told that the war will break out as a result of the assassination of the Bulgarian Prince Ferdinand and that it will then escalate into the European conflagration covering the world. What is foretold in detail about this European conflagration covering the world is remarkably prophetic and has been confirmed in the main by subsequent events. We can truly say that the book's greatest error is the confusion between the Bulgarian Prince Ferdinand and Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and the placing of the assassination in Sofia instead of Sarajevo. I consider that there is a significance which should not be underestimated in the appearance of a book in 1892 which so remarkably accurately portrays a future event. Only by endeavouring to form judgements which are not abstract, but founded on what actually exists, can we develop the capacity to see the hidden configuration of things.

Naturally enough, even those who were able to see what was to come misplaced certain details—this is inevitable when speaking about such things. It is not always possible to foresee everything accurately. But we ought to ponder on the fact that there were people at that time who had such strong reasons for going into these matters that they even went as far as publication. I am telling you all this, especially in connection with all that we are considering, so that you can sharpen your capacity for forming judgements. It is essential to have the will to look facts in the face and see how they relate to one another. In earlier lectures here I said: In the fifth post-Atlantean period we can only make progress if we strive on the one hand to achieve Imagination, and on the other to let the facts speak for themselves. All preconceived judgements are doomed increasingly to become empty phrases. Least of all can abstract thinking—as opposed to thinking that is bound up with actual facts—lead to judgements about the tragic conflicts in the world, the tragic play of impulses which work in the way I have described.

There exists today a knack, linked with world history, a knack of saying things which seem very convincing to many people but which, in fact, reveal nothing on which it would be worth basing a judgement. Let us consider a judgement such as the following: Those in power in the British Empire did not want war. To back this up, suitable correspondence, telegrams, letters and so forth, about all sorts of proposals for conferences and so on are are quoted. People who judge, not on the basis of reality but abstractly, can indeed be convinced by these things, because the material available to back up such a statement can sound very convincing. But for a judgement to be valid it must not only be convincing or correct in the abstract, it must live in reality. It is perfectly possible, under certain circumstances, to prove that those in power in the British Empire—or rather those who mattered—did not want a war, and with such proof the greatest impression can be made in the whole of the periphery. In order to prove it—I say ‘prove’—it is not even necessary to speak a direct untruth; yet in reality it remains an untruth. Why? Because it is, in fact, true and can be proved to be true, and yet this truth is not worth a snap of the fingers and is totally irrelevant.

You may be certain that those in power in the British Empire would very much have preferred to prevent the conflict in so far as the British Empire is a participant. But what those who matter wanted to achieve by means of the war—this they certainly desired with every ounce of energy at their disposal. Had it been possible to achieve this without a war, they would obviously greatly have preferred it, and from the beginning it was not at all out of the question that these aims might have been achieved by means other than war. To do this it would have been necessary to create some sort of substitute, some international arrangement, by means of which representatives of the various states could have come together to decide certain matters. If you take care to ensure in advance that you have a majority in such a body, then of course you can achieve your aims without a war, as long as the minority are prepared to go along with you.

So you see, in the last resort it is not a matter of whether one wanted to wage or prevent war, but of what one's aims were in the first place. And the objective observer cannot fail to see that the aim was indeed the one about which I have given you a number of hints—it is only possible to hint. As always, I beg you to take into account that I am not passing a judgement on moral grounds, but placing the concept of tragedy on the scales; I am saying that when conflicts are tackled by means of battles, when much blood is spilt—this stems from the tragedy of those conflicts. In contemplating this tragedy externally, we must, of course, have the will to be affected by these things in a way that differs somewhat from the ordinary.

How often do we hear: A share of the blame for this war must be laid at the door of those opinions, sensations and feelings which such people as Treitschke and Bernhardi spread among the German people. It can be quite grotesque, for the names of these writers have often enough been cited as belonging to deceivers, even by people who are convinced in the most honest way that this hits the nail on the head. Sometimes Nietzsche is included, sometimes others as well. There is much to be learnt by taking into account what such things are based on, in what I might call ‘the realm of what is true’. But before going into this from the spiritual point of view—for much can be learnt about the spiritual realm by attending to ordinary things—let me draw your attention to the way in which just such phenomena as the German historian Treitschke can illustrate for us everything that is so tragic in human evolution. The only thing is that one must not make judgements of an utterly superficial kind.

Had I been inclined to make judgements of a superficial nature, I should for some time now certainly have looked upon Treitschke as a social monster. I only met him once, at a time when he was already totally deaf. You wrote your questions on scraps of paper and he then replied. When I was introduced to him, he asked: Where are you from? I wrote down that I was an Austrian. He replied: Well, well,—he was loud-spoken, since he could hear nothing—Austrians are either geniuses or rascals, one or the other; and so forth. With Treitschke it was always like this: If you did not want to count yourself a genius, you had had it. He was a vivacious man with considerable depth of character, and he often expressed himself in sharply defined terms. He wrote a much cited history of the German people. It is quoted in a certain way, but it could easily be quoted in another way, too, for anyone who wanted a collection of anti-German vulgarities could just copy them straight from Treitschke. However, this is not what people do. Instead, they seek out passages which are far less frequent than those in which Treitschke tells his people the truth about themselves. They seek out passages which are written, so they think, in a ‘Prussian and militaristic’ manner.

In this connection I want to introduce you to a rather interesting judgement. It stems from a man who was quite justified in forming it, because he, too, was a historian. He was also particularly interested in Treitschke's definite antipathy towards more recent history and developments in England. Treitschke certainly entertained this antipathy and it soon became obvious when you got to know him.

This historian, who knew Treitschke well, wrote that Treitschke's dislike of modern England was based partly on historical, and partly on moral grounds, for

‘Britain's world-predominance outrages him as a man almost as much as it outrages him as a German. It outrages him because of its immorality, its arrogance and its pretentious security. And not without justice’

please note this

‘he delineates English policy throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as aimed consistently at the repression of Prussia, so soon as English politicians discovered the true nature of that state and divined the great future reserved for it by destiny. Had not England been Prussia's treacherous but timid enemy in 1864 and 1866, and again in 1870–71, and, above all, in 1874–75?’

This is what this historian says in his discussion of Treitschke's antipathy towards England. The strongest point he makes in Treitschke's favour is his

‘conviction, which becomes more intense as the years advance, that Britain's world-predominance is out of all proportion to Britain's real strength and to her worth or value, whether that worth be considered in the political, the social, the intellectual, or the moral sphere.’

He continues:

‘It is the detestation of a sham ... That which Treitschke hates in England is what Napoleon hated in England—a pretentiousness, an overweening middle-class self-satisfaction, which is not really patriotism, not the high and serious passion of Germany in 1813 and 1870, but an insular, narrow conceit; in fact, the emotion enshrined in that most vulgar of all national hymns, “Rule Britannia”.’

He goes on:

‘... But Treitschke is seldom witty, though often grossly if unintentionally offensive. He is as unable as Heine to see anything fine in the English character.’

You see, this is another judgement about Treitschke. And while we are just discussing this historian, let me read to you a judgement he formed about someone else, much-maligned Bernhardi:

‘But what marks out this work’

the book in question is the one which is constantly quoted these days as being particularly abominable

‘from all others of the same kind, giving it something of the distinction of a really epoch-making book, is that it represents a definite attempt made by a German soldier to understand not merely how Germany could make war upon England most effectively, but why Germany ought to make war upon England.’

All this is written about Treitschke and Bernhardi by the English professor Cramb, who from his own point of view could be called the English Treitschke. If you delve into the matter, you will find an extraordinary similarity between the tone of Cramb and that of Treitschke, for Cramb, equally, is utterly preoccupied with making clear that the British Empire must dominate the world and that everything must be done to bring this about. You could say that he speaks about England in the way Treitschke speaks about Germany, allowing of course for the differences between an Englishman and a German. Here you see how one of two men—each of whom, speaking from his own point of view, must needs say the opposite of the other—is nevertheless capable of appreciating what the other says. In a certain sense a point had been reached at which what had to be laid aside could indeed be laid aside, in order to come to what is above the individual and belongs to history.

It is therefore an extremely depressing relapse, a backward step for people, to find that now, even in the most weighty documents, judgements come to expression which are utterly inapplicable. There is really no need to go at all far in order to find tangible truths. But to do so one needs the keen sense which today can only be maintained through some connection with spiritual science. On another front there is something equally grotesque: The Russian plan to gain possession of the Dardanelles and Constantinople has existed and been admitted for centuries; yet at the same time the Russians claim to be entirely blameless, absolutely blameless. Here, in a historical document of the first water—the Tsar's decree that has recently been going round the world—we have the juxtaposition once again: We are absolutely blameless, but we mean to conquer, yet we are blameless. In Russia, too, people have not always held the opinions they hold today.

Take Kuropatkin for instance. In 1910 he published a book The Tasks of the Russian Army. In this book there is a remarkable passage which those who speak of Russia's great blamelessness could do well to mark and digest. It says:

‘If Russia does not bring to an end her interference in something foreign to her, yet of vital interest to Austria, then a war over the question of Serbia can be expected to break out in the twentieth century between Russia and Austria.’

The Russian general Kuropatkin wrote this in 1910. Of course he had in mind what existed on the Russian side that could lead to a war with Austria over the Serbian conflict.

The question now arises: Why is the truth being so distorted at present? The answer is that something has got to be said, yet it is not as easy as all that to speak the truth. I hinted at this yesterday. The things that are said are intended to spread a fog over the truth so as to distract people's attention from the truth. That is why arguments are chosen which will have an immediate sentimental appeal for those who lack the will to get to the bottom of things.

If only people could come more and more to understand above all the full significance of the many unconscious or subconscious untruths. I have often pointed out that it is no excuse to say that one believes something just because so and so said it. Of course I do not mean that many people do not believe in what they are saying, but this is not the point. These things work in the world, and those who make statements have a duty to take the trouble to find out the truth; merely believing something is not enough. Someone might speak quite truly when he says that he wanted to prevent the war. But this truth is not worth a fig in view of the fact that he intended to use other means instead to achieve his desired aim, the aim he is striving for with all his might. To reverse the truth in this way, whether unconsciously or subconsciously, is something much worse than an untruth, even though it appears to be the truth.

This is now the immensely difficult karma of mankind: that people do not feel in duty bound to pursue the actual, real truth and truthfulness that lives in the facts—indeed, that the very opposite of this seems to have started to rule the world and to be all set to do so ever increasingly. External deeds are always the consequence of what lives in mankind in the way of thought. They are the consequence of untruthfulness, which may indeed appear in the guise of truth because it can be ‘proved’, though only superficially. What lives in the judgements of human beings can become, on another plane, the thundering of cannon and the spilling of blood. There is certainly a connection between the two. The conclusion we have to draw from this is that we must enter ever more deeply into the facts, that we must develop a sense which can lead us to see in the appropriate places those things which can really throw light and reveal what is essential.

Even within the limits enjoined upon us by discretion at the present time when one speaks of these matters, one cannot discuss the Mystery of Evil without profound emotion. For here we touch upon one of the deepest mysteries of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, upon something which meets with little understanding today. Man's sensitivity to these things is but little developed as yet. Nonetheless, in all the so-called secret societies of recent times repeated attempts have been made to give certain indications, in the form of symbols, of the Mystery of Evil and the Mystery of Death which is related to it. But since the last third of the nineteenth century these symbolical representations have seldom been treated seriously, even in the Masonic communities, or have been treated in the manner I indicated here two years ago with reference to important events of the present day.^T1

The indications I gave on that occasion were not without a deeper motive, for he who understands these things knows what unplumbed depths of human nature we touch upon here. There is ample evidence that in reality the will to understand these things scarcely exists today. But the will to understand will assuredly come with time and we must ensure by every means at our command that it is awakened. When speaking of these matters one must sometimes give the impression of wanting to criticize certain aspects of the contemporary scene. Even what I said yesterday, for example on the subject of the ideological aspirations of the bourgeoisie since the last third of the nineteenth century can also be regarded as a criticism if taken superficially. Nothing of what is said here is intended as a criticism; I simply wish to characterize, so that we are aware of what forces and impulses have been operative. From a certain point of view it was necessary that these impulses should predominate. One could show that it was a historical necessity that the Bourgeoisie of Europe should remain asleep from the forties to the end of the seventies. Nonetheless the knowledge of this ‘cultural sleep’ ought to have a positive effect; it ought to awaken today certain impulses of cognition and volition which will prepare the ground for the future.

In the present epoch of the Consciousness Soul two mysteries (as I have already indicated, I can only speak of them within certain limits) are of particular importance for the evolution of mankind—the Mystery of Death and the Mystery of Evil. From a certain angle the Mystery of Death which is related to the Mystery of Evil during the present epoch, immediately raises the vital question: what is the meaning of death for human evolution?

I recently said once again that what passes for science today takes the line of least resistance in these questions. For most scientists death is simply cessation of life, irrespective of whether it is the death of a plant, animal or human being. Spiritual science however cannot take the easy road by treating everything alike. Otherwise the death of a man could be equated with the end of a watch, the death of a watch. For man death is something totally different from the socalled death of other beings. We can only understand the phenomenon of death against the background of those forces which are operative in the universe and which, when they lay hold of man, are responsible for his physical death. Certain forces, certain impulses are active in the universe: but for them man could not suffer death. Man is part of the universe; these forces also permeate man and when they are active in man they cause his death. The question now arises; what do these forces which are active in the universe accomplish apart from bringing death to man? It would be a mistake to imagine that their sole purpose is to bring death to man; that is only a secondary effect. It would never occur to anyone to say: the function of a railway engine is to wear down the rails. Yet that is what actually happens; the engine gradually wears down the rails, it cannot do otherwise. But that is not its function—it is designed for a different purpose. If one were to define a locomotive as a machine whose function is to wear down the rails, one would obviously be talking nonsense. Nonetheless there is no denying the fact that there is a connection between the wearing down of the track and the nature of the locomotive. It would be equally mistaken to say that the forces in the universe which bring death to man exist for this sole purpose. This is only a secondary effect. Their real function is to endow man with the capacity to develop the Consciousness Soul. You see how close is the connection between the Mystery of Death and the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and how important it is that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch the Mystery of Death should be revealed to all. For the task of the forces which as a secondary effect bring death to man is to implant in him, in the course of his evolution, not the Consciousness Soul, but the capacity to develop the Consciousness Soul.

This leads not only to an understanding of the Mystery of Death, but also encourages us to think precisely in matters of importance. In many respects modern thinking—and again this is not intended as a criticism, I merely wish to characterize—is, if I may use the familiar expression which is much to the point, simply ‘sloppy’ (schlampig). The thinking current in modern science is almost without exception typical of the kind of thinking that says: the function of the locomotive is to wear down the rails. Most scientific pronouncements today are on this level. Such thinking will prove to be inadequate if we wish to create in the future a state of affairs beneficial to mankind. And in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul this can only be achieved in full consciousness.

I must constantly remind you that this is a truth of profound importance for our time. We frequently hear of people who, drawing upon a seeming fund of wisdom, suggest various social and economic measures, in the belief that it is still possible today to make these recommendations without the help of spiritual science. Only those who think in contemporary terms, in conformity with the needs of the time, realize that all proposals for a future structure of society which are not grounded in spiritual science are a snare and delusion. Only those who are fully aware of this think in conformity with the needs of the time. Those who still listen to the various learned discourses on political economy which are devoid of spiritual content are asleep to the demands of our time.

These forces, which must be described as the forces of death, took possession of man's corporeal nature in earlier times—how, you will find in my book Occult Science. They first penetrated into his soul life at that time. For the remainder of his earth evolution man must assimilate these forces of death, and in the course of the present epoch their influence upon him will be such that he brings to full expression in himself the faculty of the Consciousness Soul.

The method I adopted when enquiring into the Mystery of Death, i.e. into the forces which are active in the universe and bring death to man, is equally valid for indicating the forces of evil. Even the forces of evil are not designed to promote evil actions within the human order—that again is only a secondary effect. If these forces did not exist in the universe man could not develop the Consciousness Soul; he would be unable to receive as he should in the course of his future evolution the forces of the Spirit Self, the Life Spirit and the Spirit Man. He must first pass through the stage of the Consciousness Soul if he wishes to receive after his own fashion the forces of the Spirit Seif, the Life Spirit and the Spirit Man. And to this end he must, in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, i.e. up to the middle of the fourth millennium, fully unite his being with the forces of death. This lies within his power. But he cannot unite his own being with the forces of evil in the same way. The forces of evil in the cosmos are such that only in the Jupiter epoch will he be able to assimilate them as he now assimilates the forces of death. One can say therefore that the forces of evil act upon man with less intensity, they take possession of only a part of his being. In order to understand the nature of these forces of evil we must not look to their external effects, but must look for evil where it reveals its true nature, where it acts as it must of necessity act, because the forces which appear as evil in the universe also play into man. And here we touch upon something that can be spoken of only with deep emotion, something we can only express if we assume at the same time that it will be received with the greatest seriousness. If we wish to enquire into evil in man we must not look for it in the evil actions of society, but in evil tendencies. We must first of all ignore completely the consequences of these tendencies which are manifested more or less in a particular individual and turn our attention to the evil tendencies themselves. The question then arises: in which men are evil tendencies active in our present fifth post-Atlantean epoch, those tendencies which, in their secondary effects, are so clearly manifested in evil actions? Which men are subject to these evil tendencies?

We receive the answer to our question when we attempt to cross what is called the ‘threshold of the Guardian’ and to acquire a real understanding of the being of man. And the answer is this: since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, evil tendencies are subconsciously present in all men. It is precisely this influx of evil tendencies into men that marks his entrance into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Expressed somewhat radically one could say with every justification: he who crosses the threshold of the spiritual world discovers that there is not a crime in the calendar to which every man, in so far as he belongs to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, is not subconsciously prone. Whether in a particular case this tendency leads to an evil action depends upon wholly different circumstances and not upon the tendency itself. If we are to tell mankind the plain unvarnished truth today, we cannot escape unpalatable facts.

The pressing question then arises: what is the purpose of these forces which induce evil tendencies in man, what is the purpose of these forces in the universe when they first infiltrate man's being? They are certainly not present in the universe in order to provoke evil acts in human society. (The reason why they promote evil acts will be discussed later.) These forces of evil do not exist in the universe for the sole purpose of inducing man to commit criminal acts any more than the forces of death exist simply to bring death to man; their function is to awaken in man, when he is called upon to develop the Consciousness Soul, the tendency to open himself to the life of the spirit, as I described yesterday.

Man must assimilate these forces of evil which are operative in the universe. By so doing he implants in his being the seed which enables him to experience consciously the life of the spirit. The purpose of these forces of evil which are perverted by the social order is to enable man to break through to the life of the spirit at the level of the Consciousness Soul. If he did not open himself to these tendencies to evil he would not succeed in developing consciously the impulse to receive from the universe the spirit which henceforth must fertilize the whole sphere of cultural life if it is not to perish. Our best course is to consider first of all what is to become of those forces of which the evil actions of men are a caricature and to ask ourselves what is destined to happen in the course of the evolution of mankind under the influence of these forces which, at the same time, are the source of evil tendencies.

When one speaks of these things one must touch upon the very core of human evolution. At the same time they are related to the calamities that have overtaken mankind at the present time and will still befall it. For those disasters, like flashes of summer lightning, are harbingers of quite other things that are destined to overtake mankind—lightning flashes that today often reveal the reverse of what is destined to happen. These observations are not a reason for pessimism, but rather should serve to arouse us and stimulate us to action.

Perhaps we shall best achieve our purpose if we start from a concrete phenomenon. I spoke yesterday of an important impulse in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul—the development of an active concern on the part of every man for his neighbour. This mutual concern for each other must grow and develop in the course of man's subsequent evolution on earth, especially in four domains. First, as man prepares his future development, he will see his fellow man in a progressively different light. Today, when a little over a fifth of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul has run its course, man still shows little inclination to see his fellow man as he will have to learn to see him in the course of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, up to the fourth millennium. Men still ignore the most important element in others, they have no real understanding of their neighbour. In this connection they have not taken full advantage of what art has implanted in their souls in the course of their different incarnations. Much can be learned by studying the development of art and on different occasions I have given many an indication of what can be learned from the evolution of art. If one observes the symptoms, as I have urged in these lectures, it is undeniable that in almost every branch of art artistic creation and appreciation are at a low ebb. Everything that has been undertaken in the field of art in recent decades clearly demonstrates that art is passing through a period of decadence. The most important contribution of art to the evolution of mankind is the training it provides for an understanding of future problems.

Every branch of culture, of course, has many ramifications and consequently all kinds of secondary effects, but art by its very nature embodies something that leads to a deeper and more concrete understanding of man. He who makes a thorough study of the artistic forms in painting and sculpture, or of the nature of the inner rhythms in music and poetryand the artists themselves often fail to do this today—he who has a deep inner experience of art is imbued with something which enables him to understand the human being in his picture-nature. In the epoch of the Consciousness Soul mankind must develop the capacity to comprehend man symbolically. You are already familiar with some of the basic principles of this symbolical understanding. When we look at the human head we are reminded of man's earliest beginnings. Just as a dream is seen as a memory of the sensible world and thereby receives its characteristic stamp, so for those who understand reality everything pertaining to the sensible world is an image of the spiritual. We must learn to perceive the spiritual archetype of man through his picture-nature. In future man will become to some extent transparent to his fellow man. The form of his head, his gait, will awaken in us an inner sympathy and understanding of a different nature from what we find in human tendencies today. For we shall only know man as an ego being when we have this conception of his picture-nature, when we can approach him with the fundamental feeling that what the physical eyes perceive of man bears the same relation to the true super-sensible reality of man as the picture painted on canvas bears to the reality which it depicts. We must develop this fundamental feeling in ourselves. We must approach man in such a way that we no longer see him as a combination of bones, muscles, blood, etcetera, but as the image of his eternal, spiritual being. Supposing a man walks past us; we would not recognize him if he did not awaken in us the realization of what he is as an eternal spiritual super-sensible being. This is how we shall see man and this is how we shall be able to see him in the future. When we perceive human forms and movements and all that is associated with them as an image of the eternal, we shall feel warmth or coldness and of necessity will gradually be filled with inner warmth or coldness. As we go through life we shall come to know man very intimately; towards some we shall feel warm, towards others cold. Worst of all will be the situation of those who evoke neither warmth nor coldness. We shall have an inner experience of others in the warmth ether that penetrates our etheric body; this will be the reaction of the enhanced interest that must be developed between men.

A second factor must provoke even more paradoxical emotions in contemporary man who has not the slightest desire to accept these new ideas. But perhaps in the not too far distant future this antipathy will be transformed into sympathy for the right understanding of man. This second phase of future development will bring a totally different understanding between men. In order to achieve this the two millennia from now until the end of the fifth postAtlantean epoch will not suffice; a longer period will be necessary, reaching into the sixth epoch. Then, to the knowledge of the ego will be added a special capacity, the capacity to feel, to sense in our neighbour when we approach him his relationship to the third Hierarchy, to the angels, archangels and archai. And this will be developed through an increasing recognition that man's response to language will be different from that of the present day. The evolution of language has already passed its zenith. In reality language has already become abstract.^T2 At the present time a wave of profound untruthfulness is sweeping over the world in that attempts are being made to create institutions on a linguistic basis. Men no longer have the relationship to language which reveals through language the being of man.

I have quoted on various occasions an example which may serve as a first step towards an understanding of this matter.^T3 I cited it again in a public lecture which I gave in Zürich because it is important to draw the attention of the public to these things. I pointed out in this lecture that a surprise awaits us when we compare the articles of Herman Grimm on the methodology of history (for he was a typical representative of Central European culture) with those of Woodrow Wilson. I carried out this comparative study most conscientiously and showed that it is possible to substitute certain passages of Woodrow Wilson for passages in Hermann Grimm, for the wording is almost identical. Equally one could exchange whole passages of Grimm on historical methodology for those of Wilson on the same subject. And yet there is a radical difference between the two which we perceive when we read them without concern for the content (for the content as such, taken literally, will have increasingly less importance for mankind in the course of their future evolution). The difference is this: in Grimm, everything, even the passages with which one may not agree, are the fruit of personal endeavour; he has wrestled with them sentence by sentence, step by step. In Wilson everything seems to be prompted by his own inner daimon which subconsciously possesses him. What is important is the source, the origin of these writings: in the one case it is directly at the threshold of consciousness, in the other case in the daimonic promptings which find their way from the subconscious into consciousness ... so that one can say: the writings of Wilson are in part the product of possession.

I quote this example in order to show you that it is no longer of significance today that the words should be identical. I always feel extremely sad when friends of our movement bring me articles of some pastor or professor and say: Do look at this, it sounds quite anthroposophical! Now in our present cultural epoch even a professor who dabbles in politics may well write things which, taken literally, of course are in keeping with the realities of our time. It is not the exact words that matter, but the region of the soul whence these things arise. It is important to discover behind the words their spiritual source. All that I have said here does not spring from a desire to lay down definite principles. It is the ‘how’ that matters. It is important that these words should be permeated by that Force which derives directly from the spirit. He who finds a verbal similarity between the articles of the pastor or professor and what I have said here without feeling that my words spring from a spiritual source and are imbued with spiritual substance because they reflect the totality of the anthroposophical Weltanschauung, he who ignores this ‘how,’ fails to understand me if he does not distinguish between modern opinions that smack of Anthroposophy and Anthroposophy itself.

It is of course not very pleasant to point to examples of this kind because the tendency today is often to take the opposite course. But when we speak in earnest, if our words are not intended simply as an anodyne, a kind of cultural soporific, it is a duty, it is a necessity even, not to shrink from selecting such examples, though they may be distasteful to many. For those who are in earnest about the future must be prepared to face the consequences for everyone if they ignore the fact that the world may be fated to have its organization determined by a half-baked American Professor. It is not easy to speak of realities today because many are satisfied with the life of illusion. Nonetheless one speaks of realities in those spheres where it is absolutely necessary, and where it is important, or at least should be important, for man to hear of them.

Men must learn to see through words; they will have to acquire the capacity to grasp the gesture in language. Before this epoch, before this fourth millennium has run its course, men will have learnt to listen to one another differently from the way they do at the present moment; they will find in language an external expression of man's relation to the third Hierarchy, to the angels, archangels and archai, a means whereby he can attain to the super-sensible, to the spirit.

And thus the soul of man will be heard through language and this will lead to a totally different community life. And a large part of the so-called forces of evil must be transformed so that it will be possible by listening to what a man says to hear the soul through the words. Then when the soul is heard through the words people will experience a peculiar sensation of colour and through this sensation of colour arising from language men of all nations will learn to understand one another. A particular sound will evoke the same sensation as the perception of the colour blue or of a blue surface. Another sound will evoke the same sensation as the perception of the colour red. The normal sensation of warmth we feel when we look at a man becomes to some extent colour when we listen to him. And we shall have to experience in ourselves what echoes from human lips to human ears on the wings of sounds. This will be experienced by man in the future.

Thirdly, men will experience inwardly the emotional reactions of others. In this respect language will play an important role—and not only language. When one man confronts another he will experience in his own respiration the emotional configuration of the other. In future time respiration will adapt itself to the affective life of the person who confronts us. In the presence of one man we shall breathe more rapidly, in the presence of another we shall breathe more slowly. According to the changing rhythm of our respiration we shall feel the kind of man with whom we are dealing. Think how the social life of the community will be cemented, how intimate corporate life will become! It will be a long time, no doubt, before this goal is achieved. It will take the whole of the sixth postAtlantean epoch and the early years of the seventh epoch before respiration is adapted to the life of the soul. And in the seventh epoch, a part of what is now the fourth stage of development will be realized. That is, when men belong to a community of their own volition, they will have to ‘digest’ one another, if you will pardon this crude expression. When we are compelled to will this or that in common with another, or will to want it, we shall have inner experiences akin to those which we have in a primitive form today when we consume a certain food. In the sphere of will men will have to ‘digest’ one another, in the sphere of feeling to ‘breathe’ one another; in the sphere of understanding through language they will have to experience one another through sensations of colour. And men will come to know one another as ego-beings when they learn to see each other as they really are.

But all these forces will be more inward, more related to the life of the soul. They will be fully developed only in the course of the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan epochs. The earth evolution of mankind already demands psychic and spiritual indications of this development. The present age with its strange and calamitous development is the revolt of mankind against what is destined to follow from these developments which I have just described. Because in future all particularist tendencies in society must be abandoned, mankind rebels, and the trivial doctrine of national self determination is noised abroad. What we are witnessing today is a revolt against the divinely ordered course of evolution, a struggle to resist the inevitable. We must be aware of these things if we are to lay a firm foundation for an understanding of the Mystery of Evil. For evil is often a secondary effect of the force that must intervene in human evolution. When a locomotive that has to cover a long distance strikes a bad section of the track, it destroys the rails and comes to a halt. In its evolution mankind is moving towards the goals I have described to you. And it is the task of the Consciousness Soul to recognize that mankind must press forward consciously to these goals. But the present lines are badly laid and it will be some time before better lines are in position, for often people proceed to replace the old lines by others which are not a whit better.

But, as you see, spiritual science has no wish to be pessimistic. It sets out to show man where he really stands in evolution today. But it demands nonetheless that, at least for certain solemn moments of recollection, he can renounce certain current tendencies. And because men find it so difficult to make this sacrifice, because, in spite of everything, everyone immediately reverts to his old routine, it is extremely difficult to speak frankly on these matters today. For we touch upon here—and this is characteristic of our time—problems of the nature of evil which threaten to destroy mankind today and one must constantly exhort men to wake up.

Indeed, many things can only be discussed within certain limits and in consequence much will be omitted entirely or deferred to another occasion. Let us take an example that concerns us closely and do not take it amiss if I present it in the following way. A week ago I was asked to say something on the subject of the symptomatology of Swiss history. I have given the matter most careful thought from every angle. But if I, as a foreigner, were to embark upon the symptomatology of Swiss history from the fifteenth century until the present day in the presence of Swiss nationals here in Dornach, I would find myself in a very strange situation. Let me illustrate the problem from another angle. Suppose that in July of this year (1918) someone in Germany or even in Austria had described the events and personalities as people do today, imagine what an outburst there would have been if he had portrayed five, fifteen or thirty years ago, for example, the conditions in Austria today! I am aware, therefore, that I would cause grave offence if I were to speak of Swiss history as the Swiss will speak of it here in Switzerland twenty years hence. For people cannot do otherwise, given their innate conservatism, than close their ears to what must be said from the standpoint of the future. It is true that in many spheres ordinary people—and after all we must count ourselves amongst them—especially in spheres that touch them closely, are unwilling to hear the truth. They prefer an anodyne. I assure you that I would give offence if I did not temper to some extent the subject on which I have been asked to speak. In the light of further reflection I think it is best to leave matters alone for the present. For judgements which are passed now—and from which one would dissent to some extent—are reminders that, if we wish to portray certain events today, we should do as I did yesterday. When one criticizes the Russian revolution and when one describes the relationship of the bourgeoisie to the broad masses and to the more radical elements of the extreme left, any such criticism is regarded here in Switzerland as relatively harmless, as an edifying Sunday afternoon sermon and is tolerated. And then one can abandon oneself, I will not say to the illusion, but to the pious hope that what I have said will penetrate into a few souls and will prove more efficacious than the normal Sunday afternoon sermons ... although even in matters of moment, the experience of recent years has often demonstrated the contrary. But to comment on the immediate situation is not the task of one, who not being a Swiss national, would speak to the Swiss of their own history. When I gave a general survey of recent history in a public lecture in Zürich^T4 I had of course to speak with a certain reserve, although I did not hesitate to indicate the radical consequences which must be drawn from the facts. It is extremely convenient for the majority of people today to look upon Woodrow Wilson as a great man, as a benefactor of mankind. But if one denies this and speaks the truth, the truth is found to be unpalatable and one is regarded as a mischief-maker! And this has always been the case with those truths which are drawn from the well-spring of the super-sensible. But today we are living in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul and it is necessary that mankind should be aware of certain truths.

There is really no point in continually repeating the obvious—that people today are not receptive to spiritual ideas. The question is not whether people are receptive or not, but whether we ourselves take the necessary steps in order to bring before mankind the necessary truths when the opportunity arises. And in addition we should harbour no illusions about the receptivity of mankind to truths. We must be quite clear that, today especially, men are seldom receptive to what is vitally necessary for them ... and that they insist upon ordering the world in a way that does not correspond with the true evolutionary impulse of our epoch. Indeed one experiences the bitterest disappointments in this domain. But one accepts them without resentment, in order to learn from them what we are to do under certain circumstances.

I will speak later of these matters in greater detail. It would have been a splendid thing if only a few people could have been found in Central Europe who, from an understanding of certain Masonic impulses, could have realized the significance of what I said here two years ago on the subject of secret societies. But, inevitably, there was no response. One cannot imagine a more sterile attitude than that of Central European Masonry in recent decades. This is shown by the fact, frequently mentioned, that one meets with resistance when one refuses to amalgamate in any way the teachings of spiritual science with the Freemasonry of Central Europe. On the other hand when a super windbag, the so-called Nietzsche specialist, Horneifer, appeared and talked solemn nonsense about symbolism and the like, he was taken seriously in many quarters. The deeper reason for all this is that certain demands are made upon those who wish to take up spiritual science, and this is by no means easy! One finds today advocates of a renewal of the spirit who explain to people that they need only lie down on a couch and relax and the higher ego, God, and heaven knows what else will awaken in them and then there will be no need to wrestle with these terrible concepts of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. One need only listen to one's inner voice, surrender passively, then the higher mystical ego will manifest itself and one will feel and experience the presence of God in oneself.

I have known statesmen who prefer to listen to these ‘pundits’ who recommend them to take the easy path to the higher ego rather than listen to the teachings of spiritual science. A friend told me recently that one of these pundits had said to him when he was still one of his disciples: you have no idea how stupid I am! Yet this very man who confessed to his stupidity in order to show that intelligence is not needed in order to introduce men to the primal sources of wisdom, this man has a large following everywhere. People prefer to listen to such men rather than to those who speak of the thorny path ahead if man is to understand the task of the Consciousness Soul, who tell us of four aspects of evolution or that men must experience one another through warmth, through a sensation of colour, through respiration, that they must ‘digest’ one another. In order to arrive at an understanding of this, one must swallow a whole library of books—a most unpleasant prospect! But people find this prospect unpalatable, most unpalatable! But if people find this prospect unpalatable, that is due to the impulse which is impelling our age towards catastrophe, to the tragedy of our time. This situation, however, is no cause for pessimism; rather is it a call to energetic action, to translate our knowledge into deeds. And this cannot be repeated too often.

I mentioned yesterday the problem of suction and pressure in connection with the Russian revolution. I leave it to each of you to ask yourselves if this problem after all is not a matter deserving of careful reflection. Otherwise people might say: It is true that in Russia the bourgeoisie failed to unite with the peasants, but here in Germany we are more fortunate, bourgeoisie and peasants will join forces and then socialism will come into its own. But they forget that many people in Russia said the same and it is precisely because people held this view that Russia collapsed.
We will continue our discussion tomorrow.

• T1. Kosmische und menschliche Geschichte, Vol II and Vol III (Bibl. Nrs. 171 and 172).
• T2. See Die Wissenschaft vom Werden des Menschen, August–September, 1918 (Bibl. Nr. 183).
• T3. 14th March, 1918, Das geschichtliche Leben der Menschheit und seine Rätsel (in Bibl. Nr. 67) and 30th March, 1918, Anthroposophischer Lebensgaben (in Bibl. Nr. 181).
• T4. Die Geschichte der Neuzeit im Lichte geisteswissenschaftlicher Forschung, 17th October, 1918 (included in Bibl. Nr. 73).

We have seen that necessity must be thought of in connection with the past, that the world contains as much necessity as it does past. For, as we tried to recognize, the past is reflected in the present. And there was another element involved: we hope to be so strengthened by our striving for clarity about just such concepts as we have been considering that we will be fit to take up the study of the truths of spiritual science. It is disastrous in many respects to have a great longing for what we might term deep spiritual-scientific truths if we shy away from strengthening our minds and thinking by taking in and thoroughly mastering concepts of a demanding nature. They are what disciplines our souls and spirits. And if we take pains to remain inwardly true in the process, no danger can ever threaten us from genuine spiritual-scientific concepts.

I have already mentioned, however, how often many people's longing for spiritual-scientific truths is found to outweigh their longing to work their way through to substantial concepts. Right at the beginning of our efforts in spiritual science there were some individuals who declared that they could not attend my lectures because they sank into a kind of sleep-state as a result of the concepts being discussed. A few especially mediumistic natures even carried things to the point of having to leave the lecture hall in Berlin. And one woman was actually found collapsed in sleep outside the hall, so powerful had been the lulling effect of the search for clear concepts!

The reproach was once made to Goethe that he created “pallid concepts” with his ideas about the metamorphosis of plants and animals and the primal phenomena of color. In his “Prophecies of Bakis,” which I have already had occasion to discuss, he inserted a passage referring to this avoidance of what people were calling “pallid concepts.”¹ As a matter of fact, this quatrain was also greatly misunderstood by those who tried to interpret these “Prophecies of Bakis.” Goethe said, “Pallid dost thou appear to me”—the concept, the idea—“and to the eye dead. How is it that you call forth holy life from founts of inner strength?” Goethe expressed with such accuracy the way people react who don't like to listen to clearly defined concepts, and therefore fall asleep, and who are always wanting to hear grand-sounding words about mysterious matters of the kind that give them something to dream about but never challenge them to think. They say, “Pallid dost thus appear to me, and to the eye dead”; they say it to those who want to speak occasionally on more sharply defined concepts. And they ask them, “How is it that you call forth holy life from founts of inner strength?” Goethe answers them, Passive would be your enjoyment if I could show you perfection.

Only the lack of it lifts you to levels beyond your own self.

In other words, the absence of those perfections that delight the eye or the senses in general proves elevating. Deadness overtakes those who do not attempt to take in and energetically work through what people often refer to as “pallid concepts.” It is therefore necessary, if we are to banish all traces of Baroque mysticism from the spiritual science we are pursuing, to devote ourselves occasionally to a concern with concepts of the utmost precision.

Thus far I have been talking about necessity. The question is now whether all the concepts that we tend, in ordinary life, to lump together with the concept of necessity really all deserve to be so linked. People say that what is necessary happens. But is this actually always the case? I would like to answer with a comparison that will clarify the matter. Let us suppose that we have a river with a gradually rising mountain chain beyond it, and we notice a stream or brook starting to run down from the heights. Let's imagine that something prevents our seeing beyond this point. We study the course of the stream or brook as it conforms to the contours of the mountain range and can state that according to what we are able to see from our vantage point it is a matter of necessity that this brook flows into this river. The mountain's formation conditions this, so that our sentence, “This brook flows into this river,” would unquestionably state a necessary fact. But now let us imagine that somebody decided to regulate the course of this brook, diverting it so that it flows in another direction. That person would have obviated the necessity, which would then not have developed. My comparison is crude, but it is a fact in life and in evolution that necessities don't always have to happen. We have to keep happenings and necessities apart. Two different concepts are involved here.

Now let us return to several previous concerns. First, let us review the insight we arrived at yesterday: that the past affects the present, appearing in reflection in it. But let us recall still another occasion on which mention of mirror images was also in order. We have often made a point of describing what takes place in human perception during ordinary waking consciousness. Human beings are really always outside their bodies and their bodily functions with that part of them that is engaged in the cognitive process; they live inside the things under study, as I've often said. And the fact that a person comes to know something is due to the reflection in his body of this experience he has inside things. So we can say that we are outside our bodies with one part of our perception, and our experience within things is reflected in our bodies.

If we now imagine ourselves looking at the color blue, we experience the blue of a flower, of chicory for example, but we do so unconsciously except for the fact of its reflection in our eyes. Our eyes are a part of our reflecting apparatus. We see the experience that we have in the chicory by allowing it to be reflected in our eyes. And we experience tone similarly. The life we live in tone is experienced unconsciously, and only becomes conscious through being reflected by our hearing organism. Our entire perceptive organism is a reflecting apparatus.

This is what I tried to establish as philosophical fact at the last Congress of Philosophers at Bologna.²

Cognition is thus engendered by reflection from our organism, by a reflecting of what we experience. And as you mull over this concept of reflection, both the reflecting of the past in the present and the reflecting of our present experience through our perceptive organism, you will have to admit that what is thus added to a thing or to an event in the form of reflections is a matter of total indifference to them, something that in neither case has anything directly to do with them. As you observe a mirror image you can quite well imagine that everything in it is as it is whether or not it is under observation. Reflections are therefore elements added to what is reproduced in them. That is especially the case with cognition; whether we develop this or that particular insight is not of the least consequence to the mirror image.

Now imagine yourselves walking through a landscape. Do you believe that the landscape would be any the less beautiful or in any way less whatever it is if you were not passing through it and experiencing it as a series of reflections engendered by your organism? No, those are elements added to the landscape and matters of total indifference to it. But is it a matter of indifference to you? No, it is not. For by walking today through a landscape that is reflected in your inner being and experiencing what is thus reflected, you will have become to some extent a different person in your soul tomorrow. What you experienced—a matter of total indifference to the landscape—signifies for you the beginning of an inner richness that can keep on growing there.

But what does all this really mean? It means, with reference again to the landscape metaphor, that we can say, “This situation was thus and such up to this point.” The fact that you walked through the landscape is a further addition to it. The landscape is reflected in you, becoming a further experience in your soul. Now how did what is continuing to grow there come into being? It did so as the result of something quite new being added to what had previously occurred. Something was really engendered in your soul out of nothingness, for contrasted with what had previously occurred, the reflection is of course a nothingness, a real, absolute nothingness. In other words, you relate to something to which there was no necessity to relate. You are an addition to it. You are added to a necessary happening as a living element that relates to it in a way not conditioned by previous events, since you could have stayed away. In that case, all that you gained from the reflection would not have become a part of the situation.

As you ponder examples of this kind, you become acquainted with the concept of chance; the real concept of it is to be found there. And you also gather from such examples that beings, things endowed with being, have to come up against each other, really to collide, for chance to occur. But we see from this that such a thing as chance can occur in the universe. If that were impossible, the enrichment of soul described above could not take place.

In this sense chance is a thoroughly legitimate concept. It is a real occurrence in cosmic events, and it shows us that new aspects of relationship can be garnered in cosmic evolution as products of reflection. If it were impossible for one participant to be linked with others without bringing about reflection in the cosmic process, then the occurrence of everything comprised in the term chance would be wholly out of the question. If the meadow through which you pass were to act as the agent of your passage, pulling you there with strings, and no reflection were to come about in you as described because of the meadow's total indifference, but the meadow were instead actively to imprint its impression on you, then the outcome could be called law-abiding necessity. But though it is hard to imagine it, there could then be no such thing as a present! There would be no present! And what would come of that? Why, beings who have no desire for such a linking up cannot progress any further if they follow such a course. They have to go back again. That is indeed the law governing devils and ghosts; they have to go out again by the door through which they entered. Goethe's Faust depicts this; they can't introduce any new evolutionary waves, and must return to the place they came from. And it is due to the possibility that new evolutionary waves can be set in motion in the developmental process of the cosmos that freedom exists.

In all our cognitive experiences, except for a certain category of them, no pure reflection takes place; the reflection is imperfect insofar as all kinds of impulses are combined with it. Concepts formed on the basis of past cognitive experience are imperfect. Once we have arrived at a pure concept, we no longer need merely to recall it; we can always create it anew. Though it becomes habitual, it is a habit that has finished with the past, and new reflections are constantly being summoned up with it. The concepts we form are pure reflections, which come to us from the beyond as additions to the things perceived. Therefore, when we form an impulse into concepts, it can be an impulse to freedom. That is what I attempted to develop at greater length in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.³ That is exactly the thought developed there.

But the concept of chance necessarily includes the concept of freedom. We must accustom ourselves to entertaining sharply defined concepts, for these are of immense significance for life. I want to cite an instance that has often been discussed here, but it is especially illuminating in the present context. Let us assume that we are studying illness. We must invariably look at illness from the standpoint of the present, never from the standpoint of the past, i.e., of necessity. This means enlivening the standpoint of the present by giving help to the full extent possible. Only if the illness terminates in death may we bring in the concept of necessity, realizing that necessity was involved. Anything other than this is the living present. We must be rigorous in adopting the standpoint that necessity inheres in the past; life rules the present. This example shows us that if we try to illumine concepts with the help of more fruitful viewpoints, we will acquire a certain knack for dealing with them.

A good deal could certainly be said on the subject of chance, and that will be done as time goes on. But for now I wanted to define the concept of chance and to clarify the extent to which it is valid. The easiest way to regard events after learning a little bit about karma is to say that everything is caused by karmic necessity. If someone has an incarnation at this point in time, then his life after death, and then his next incarnation, he calls something experienced in this second incarnation the consequence of the former life. But it is not absolutely necessary to look at things from the standpoint of the present; the consequence could be looked for further on, in the third incarnation. Something can occur then that we might be expecting to happen in the karma of the present incarnation. But an occurrence in the present incarnation may well be just the start of a karmic sequence, a reality generated by something presently living as a result of the reflection process. And the essential point here is that something is turned into a reality by a living element as a result of a reflection that is itself unreal. That is the way chance develops into necessity; when chance becomes a thing of the past, it is transformed into necessity.

On an occasion of great suffering, Goethe made a most beautiful statement, called by him “the word of a wise man.” He was speaking about the growth process of humanity, and said, “The rational world is to be looked upon as a single immortal individual engaged in a continuous bringing forth of what is necessary.” That is, bringing forth something, and when it has been brought forth, it is interwoven into the past and becomes necessity, “thus making itself the master of the element of chance.” A glorious saying to meditate upon! We can learn something from it too: Goethe wrote this sentence while experiencing great suffering, suffering that focused his entire feeling, his whole soul life, on the growth process of the human race, and caused him to ask what the actual course of this growth was. And there was wrung from his soul the realization that the rational world, the human race, brings forth what is necessary, and thus makes itself master over chance, in other words, incorporates chance forever into necessity.

I want to digress here for a moment. An insight such as I have just cited makes valuable material for meditation; it contains so much that flows into us as we meditate upon it. We shouldn't rest content with a mere abstract grasping of such a sentence, which emerged from Goethe's soul in his extreme old age, in 1828, when he was in the throes of great suffering. A great deal of life is packed into such a saying. And the digression I would like to make is this: our insights are always to be looked upon as grace bestowed upon us. And it is just those individuals who garner knowledge from the spiritual world who are aware what a matter of grace such knowledge is when they have prepared themselves to receive it, when their being reaches out to receive what flows to them from the spiritual world. One can experience over and over again how suitably prepared one must be for the reception of spiritual knowledge, how one must be able to wait for it, for one is not at just any and every moment in a condition to receive a particular insight from the spiritual world.

This fact must be stated in just such situations as ours, for it is only too easy for misconception to be piled upon misconception concerning the conditions under which supersensible insights flourish and can be fruitfully disseminated. Numbers of individuals come to me asking questions out of the blue about this or that, and often requesting information about matters that, at the time of questioning, are remote from my concern. They demand that I give them the most exact information. People are commonly convinced that a person who speaks out of a connection with the spiritual world knows about everything it contains and is always in a position to give out any information desired. And if he can't answer a question immediately, the comment is often made that the questioner is probably not supposed to be given the information, or something of the sort.

What we are dealing with here is too crude a conception of the relationship that exists between the spiritual world and the human soul. We should realize that “readiness for truth” is especially required for a direct reception of truths from the spiritual world. Misconceptions about these things must gradually be eliminated. Of course, people at some remove from the realm of truth in the life of the spirit feel a need to ask all sorts of questions, and answers can be given them from the investigator's store of memory, based on past research. But uninvestigated truths should not be requested out of the blue from spiritual researchers. Instead, it should be realized that the investigator feels requests for information about still unresearched matters to be like knife- cuts in his body, to use a physical analogy.

Definite laws govern everything that can lift human beings into the spiritual world. We need to familiarize ourselves with these laws to lessen misunderstandings about the flowing of spiritual truths into the physical world. Only by freeing ourselves from every trace of egoism—and this includes the desire for information on just any subject—will we create healthy conditions for the sort of movement this should and must be. Certain spiritual truths simply must be incorporated into the world today. But they should not encounter the kind of aspirations brought in from the world we formerly lived in or be pursued according to our erstwhile habits. The spiritual movement should not be undermined by them. In most cases, spiritual movements have been undermined by people's failure to adapt their habitual ways to spiritual truths, instead of bringing their accustomed habits to the reception of those truths. And so it could come about that a society was founded in the eighteenth century based upon what Jacob Boehme introduced into the spiritual life of Europe.⁴ It is now correctly reported that this society had a number of members, but only one—the founder of the society—survived. I certainly hope that more than one will do so in our case! But that was what happened in one attempt to establish a society. It is said, too, that a tremendous number of those who became members turned later on into really peculiar human beings. I don't want to go into all the further details reported about the adherents of that eighteenth century society at this point.

When we familiarize ourselves with the spiritual world, as we do in the process of absorbing spiritual science, we develop an ever growing sense of what it is to participate in it. And we prepare ourselves to make the right kind of understanding ascent into higher worlds by taking in, in the form of sharply defined concepts, the world we live in. Those who are unwilling to think as penetratingly about chance and necessity as we have been attempting to do here will not find it easy to rise to a conception of providence. For you see, we can learn a great deal from the spiritual beings who surround us.

The mental niveau of our time is that of mindlessness. I've tried to give you an idea of it by citing some of Fritz Mauthner's comments. I want to add one of the most curious remarks he has made so that you will see what an honest man is capable of, a man who not only says of the prevailing science of the day that it is the only science in existence and that we have overcome the ignorance of our stupid ancestors, but who honestly accepts the prevailing outlook and then goes on to draw some remarkable conclusions about a certain matter.

I once described Mauthner as “out-Kanting Kant.” He did not just write a Critique of Pure Reason, but a Critique of Language. He really got going on words. He invented a definition for the way a word moves from one category to another. I am deliberately citing an incorrect example from his Dictionary of Philosophy, but it is one that he himself held to be correct. The earlier periods of Latin civilization had a word for truth: veritas. Now Mauthner says that the word veritas was introduced into more recent German use, was simply taken over, to become the German word Wahrheit. He terms words in this category “borrowings” (literally “loan translations”). And he traces words thus borrowed through civilization after civilization with tremendous acuity and conscientiousness, tracking down their wanderings and transformations. He does an incredible amount of rummaging around in words. Nowhere does he share Faust's longing to behold “germs and productive powers”; he simply rummages around in words with utmost zeal.

He made attempts like the following: Let us imagine some people or other with its characteristic views. Mauthner cares only about the words derived from these views, for, to him, thinking consists of words. Now, he says, there are the words, but they can be traced back to another people. The second group, where we now come upon the words, borrowed them from the first group and transformed them. And he actually perpetrates the following: (I must cite the example, as it is really too nice for words to show you the way adherents of the present outlook must think to be faithful to it. It is vitally important not to pass lightly over things of this sort.) Mauthner traces various borrowings, looking for the various transformations that have come about in words. Among them the following:

Kaffee (“coffee”), borrowed from another language and still a foreign word in the sense that in German at least the way it is written and spoken is not homogeneous. “Potato” is an English loan from some Red Indian language; in the German Kartoffel there is either a borrowing or a bastardization based upon a shift in meaning; whereas in Erd-apfel (“earth-apple”) and Grum- or Bodebirn (“ground-pear”) we are dealing with cases of transliteration or of description.

The Romans adopted the Greek custom of crowning victors of a race, or on the occasion of a feast, with a wreath, and wreaths of flowers were also used elsewhere for these purposes. But it was only at the time of the Renaissance that the term “crown” was re-introduced in noun and verb form; there were poets' crowns and crowned poets, with the word “crown” signifying “wreath” as in Latin. The plant species used was native to Greece, and was imported, in historical times at least, both as a plant and as a word. The German Lorbeer (“laurel”) (the shrub, not the berry; “baccalaureus” became in turn the symbol of an academic title, the baccalauriat; in French, bachelier; its meaning twisted again to become the English “bachelor”) became the “vegetable of fame” of Speidel's jesting. And crowned poets from Petrarch to Tennyson were called “poets laureate.” The cheap laurel needed no replacement. The myrtle-wreath, which, as a result of faulty observation, or of a still more mistaken popular etymology, was regarded somewhere in the Orient as the symbol of sexual life and later became a chastity symbol, was more easily acquired in Germany as a weed than as a blossom; German brides therefore wear wreaths or crowns of the genuine leaves and false blossoms. Palms are replaced at Easter by pussy-willows as the only seasonal green plant available. And because palms, which in the Orient are the obvious plants for decorative purposes, have lent their name as a prefix to such terms as Palm Sunday and Palm Week in characterizations of the festival season, the green willow branches substituted for them have been designated “palm branches” and “palm catkins.”

As you see, Mauthner traces borrowed terms and words like these in their transmutations from one national region to another. And then he adds, “In the case of verbs too there is no end to the carry-over from Christianity to western peoples of such actual borrowings. The migration of the real facts of the Christian ritual and of Christian thinking may be studied in this book (cf. the article on Christianity).”

If we open the book to that article we come upon a remarkable sentence; “I want to state and demonstrate one thing only in regard to the development of Christianity as the creation of the Germanic and Germanic-Roman peoples, and to the way it still dominates western civilization, for the time being, in western usage, vocabulary and concerns. That is, that Christianity as a whole represents the most prodigious borrowing, or chain of borrowings, that it is possible to find in a scrutiny of history.”

What, then, is Christianity, according to Mauthner? A collection of borrowings! There were words at the time Christianity began. And if we want to find Christianity in Europe today, we'll have to make a search for borrowed words! What Mauthner is claiming is that Christianity is nothing but a collection of such borrowings. The whole civilization of Europe would have to have developed quite differently if certain words had just not happened to get borrowed! But the important thing to note here is that this finding is the logical consequence of current scientific assumptions. It is a consequence logically and honestly reached, and those who fail to draw it are simply less honest than Mauthner. Those who have adopted today's scientific outlook can only agree that all of Christianity means nothing more to them than a collection of borrowed words.

Somebody might object that Mauthner is only pointing out the fact that “coffee” entered our language as a borrowed word, but not how coffee itself was introduced into Europe. It is true that Mauthner didn't indicate that Christianity had to be introduced into Europe because it was a collection of borrowings. He made no assertion whatever on this score. This objection cannot be made without further ado; instead we have to say that those who think in the style of modern science are simply incapable of judging the matter. They are excluding themselves from any discussion of the issue; that is the point.

Small wonder, then, that a man who, in addition to all that I've had to say about him, is also really quite a clever fellow, says,

I don't go as far as James does (Psychology, p. 297) when he holds it impossible to improve memory.⁵ It would not be impossible to render the organs that serve memory capable of greater achievement by exercising them, as has been shown to be possible in the case of the muscles. It is certainly true that educational psychology, which believes that it can strengthen memory in the young by senseless exercises, is based upon the old associative psychology, which sees in memory the mental picture of a force, just as it does in the case of imagining other such mental pictures which this force learns to play with. If memory is nothing more than activity in the same sense that the soul is nothing more than its experiences, then nothing remains to be strengthened. Iron will that does not permit itself to forget useful knowledge and exerts itself to remember when remembering is required is a facet of character, and an individual's memory is in this sense unalterable, as character is. But quite aside from all such considerations, the pointless drilling that goes on in schools is every bit as senseless as the training of the wrong muscles for some special use of the limbs would be. A person who has learned nothing in his younger years except to walk on his hands can make no use of this capability later unless he intends to become a circus performer.

In Mauthner's opinion, schoolchildren receive training that teaches them a wrong use of their brains, analogous to a person's learning only to walk on his hands, an equally useless ability. But although this is clear to Mauthner, he has absolutely no suggestions as to what should take the place of this schooling. (I have explained to you how, in this respect too, furthering what we are developing in eurythmy is important).

Walking on their hands, with their heads down, is the chief training being given our young people. Bible verses (in the elementary grades), memorizing all the tributaries of some foreign river (in the middle school), tables and professional data presented in reference books (at the university level) form the memory training defended on the basis of an assumed strengthening of memory! On the occasion of my state examinations in the history of jurisprudence, I was required to list the 13 prerogatives of a cardinal in their God-ordained order, not forgetting the prerogative of a pallium woven by a particular group of nuns in a particular convent.

Schools should limit themselves to training character, to training it for the function of finding the easiest and best means of access to useful concepts of the real world.

By now we might expect this gentleman to be suggesting what the substitute for the above should be. People of any intelligence can only agree that the way mental training has been carried on ought not to continue, so they expect to hear what he suggests instead. But the article ends right there! There is nothing more! He has been chasing his pigtail in vain, to use yesterday's metaphor. Almost every article in his dictionary creates the impression that he is unsuccessfully chasing the pigtail hanging down behind him.

If we work our way through the concepts necessity and chance and learn to recognize that the human world is to be regarded as an “immortal individual” continuously bringing necessity about and thus establishing dominion over chance, and then add to this the concept that must be acquired if we are to understand how the spiritual world streams into the human soul, we gradually work our way through to a concept of something elevated above necessity and chance, and that is providence. It is a concept attained by a gradual working up to it.

I have often called your attention to the fact that merely looking at the world conveys nothing as to the effect of activities going on in it. It would be good to cultivate the right feeling for what I've just been saying by concerning ourselves in depth with the genius of language that lives behind words, instead of doing as Mauthner does in his concern with speech. Mauthner's data could even assist such an effort on occasion, for the tremendous zeal with which he has ferreted things out can sometimes bring a person contemplating the activity of the genius of language to significant insights that he might not otherwise become aware of. The genius of language does indeed guide us to a plane elevated above necessity and chance. A great deal we participate in goes on around us as we are speaking, without our having a true knowledge of it because we are incapable of lifting it fully into our consciousness. This is the spiritual world, holding sway around us. And to take just a random example, when we speak, these spiritual worlds speak too. We should make the attempt to be aware of this.

Let us try to make a small beginning with it. We have associated necessity with the past and chance with the immediate present. For if everything were necessity, it would also be of the past, and nothing new could ever come into being. That would mean that there could be no life. So if we involve ourselves and our own lives in the world's evolution, we would be confronted by necessity or the reflected past, and in our current life by what is called chance. These two interact. We have two streams: our present life, which we think of as simply chance, and the reflected past or necessity flowing along underneath it. What is considered real from the ordinary physical standpoint can only be related to the past, to necessity, if reality is taken to mean conformity with what already exists. The real has to belong to the past, to the necessary, while what is in the living process of coming into being always has to be freshly produced. Our life is lived in this, and we have to develop living concepts that flow out of necessity to deal with that life. Here, we cannot be onlookers at something corresponding to the concept; we can only live in it. When our own lives confront the stream of evolution, we can therefore preserve the past in the developing stream of life by now transforming the reflected picture into a present element. And we can make it into an ongoing present.

We can make a human virtue of transforming into ongoing life the past that has become rigid necessity, carrying reflections further, keeping them alive and evolving in ourselves. And what name do we give the virtue that carries the past into further life stages? Loyalty! Loyalty is the virtue related to the past, just as love is the virtue related to the present, to immediate living.

But speaking of these matters brings us to what I want to say about the genius of language that we need to become aware of. Wahrheit, the German word for truth, has no connection whatsoever with the Latin veritas; it suggests the past and necessity and ordinary truth, for it is related to the German bewahren (“to preserve”), to bewähren (“to hold good”), to währen, (“to last”), with all that is carried over into the present from the past. And there is a still stronger suggestion of the same meaning in the English language, which translates both the German wahr (“true”) and the German treu (“loyal”) as “true.” And if we want to describe someone telling the truth and being believed, the old German saying auf Treu und Glauben (“on trust,” “in good faith”) is still in use, with treu rather than wahr. Here we see the genius of language at work, and its work is wiser than what human beings do.

And when we ascend from the concept of loyalty to that of love, and then to what I have described in the past as grace, a state of being we have to wait for, we come to the concept of providence; we enter the world where providence holds sway.

If Fritz Mauthner were to concern himself with providence, he would of course search out the source from which it is borrowed and trace the connection of the German Vorsehung (“providence”) to sehen (“to see”) and vorhersehen (“to foresee”), and so on. But a person concerned with reality searches for the world indicated when the union of chance and necessity plays the dominant role rather than either one alone. And the world referred to is that in which there is no such thing as the past in our sense.

I have often told you that when we look into the spiritual world and see the past, it is as though the past had remained standing; it is still there. Time becomes space. The past ceases to be simply the past. Then the concept of necessity also ceases to have any meaning. There is no longer a past, a present, and a future, but rather a state of duration. Lucifer remained behind during the moon evolution in exactly the same way that someone on a walk with another person may stay behind, either out of laziness or because his feet are sore, while his companion keeps on walking. Lucifer has as little directly to do with our earth existence as a person who stays behind has to do with places eventually reached by his companion. He stayed behind during the moon evolution, and there he still remains. In the spiritual world we cannot speak of past things, but only of a state of duration. Lucifer has remained as he was on the moon. All our concepts of necessity and chance change when we look into the spiritual world; providence holds sway there.

I wanted at least to particularize the realms in which what we call necessity, chance and providence are to be sought. This has been a beginning only, and we will return to these matters after spending some time on others. For we must devote ourselves occasionally to studies of a kind that more “mystically” oriented natures may consider unnecessary in a movement like ours. I must regard them as very necessary, however, because I believe that it is also essential for every genuine mystic to occupy himself with thinking.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet, dramatist, and novelist. The quoted quatrain is from his poetry collection entitled The East-West Divan, published in 1819. The poems are influenced by ancient Persian and Arabian poetry.
• 2. Sixth International Congress for Philosophy, Bologna, 1911.
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 4. Jacob Boehme, 1575–1624, German pantheist mystic. He was a shoemaker by profession and the first philosopher to write in German rather than in Latin.
• 5. William James, 1842–1910, American psychologist and Pragmatist philosopher. Published Principles of Psychology in 1890

It is exceedingly difficult for modern consciousness to see any relation between the soul and spirit of man and the purely material, physical world around him; and there is, indeed, some justification for the failure to understand Anthroposophy when it says that the soul and spirit of man—that is to say, the astral body and ego—leave the physical and etheric bodies and continue to exist outside them.

Where, then, are the astral body and ego? This is the question put to us by people who draw their knowledge from the materialistic consciousness of the present day. They naturally cannot conceive that an element of soul may find its place within the bounds of space. At most they can recognise that somewhere or other air exists and that space is pervaded with light—but the idea that soul and spirit exist in space is, for them, beyond the realm of possibility.

This impossibility is but a short way from that other impossibility of conceiving whither the soul and spirit pass when, at the moment of death, they leave the human body. True, modern man says he can “believe” in such things. The moment, however, he begins to make use of his own powers of thought, he finds himself immersed in endless conflicts. These conflicts cease when he strives upwards to Spiritual Science. But the ideas which have then to be assimilated are somewhat strange and unfamiliar to modern man, and he can approach them only slowly and by degrees. At this point let us turn to the consideration of certain facts of spiritual history which today are but little known in the outer world.

We know that the old traditional conceptions, which were incorporated later on into various religions and became matters of faith, may be traced back to primeval wisdom. We know that in ancient times there existed the Mystery centres which really fulfilled the functions alike of churches, places of learning and schools of art. These Mystery centres were the source of all the knowledge which flowed into the masses of the people, and of the impulses determining their activities.

In these centres the initiates dwelt—men who by dint of special training had attained to higher knowledge. As a result of the tests through which they had passed, they had entered into a definite relation with the cosmos—a relation which enabled them to learn, by giving heed to cosmic processes, to the progress of cosmic events, what they wished to know with regard to the world.

It is only the later, more or less corrupt forms of such an understanding that have been preserved for us in external history. You know that in Greek temples, where the oracles were given, certain individuals were wont to pass into a mediumistic condition, and when, at certain times, vapours rose out of the earth, these individuals fell into a state of consciousness which at the present day would be called “trance” by those who persist in maintaining a superficial attitude towards spiritual things. No true knowledge, no knowledge corresponding to reality can ever be attained through trance; everything is a confused jumble and has no foundation in fact. But in times when the old methods of entering into relationship with the cosmos had already deteriorated and become corrupt, people turned to the oracles as a last resource. And all that was revealed from this trance-like consciousness was looked upon as a revelation of the aims of the Divine-Spiritual Beings behind all cosmic processes. Men ordered their lives in accordance with the utterances of these oracles.

Now at the time when men turned to the oracles, they had already lost the faculties which had once been possessed by the initiates in the Mysteries. That was why they relied upon other and more external means for regulating their actions. I shall now try to make clear to you one of the ways by which, in very ancient times, those initiated into the Mysteries penetrated into the secrets of the universe, into secrets which expressed the purposes of the Divine-Spiritual Beings whose mission it is to direct and govern the phenomena of Nature. Such initiates, after they had undergone a long period of preparation during which they so worked upon their whole being that they were able to observe the more subtle life-processes, finally reached a point in their development when, gazing upon the rising sun, they entered into a definite mood. This was a practice to which the old initiate constantly applied himself. He tried to become spiritually receptive to all that took place at daybreak. When the sun was slowly rising above the horizon, a feeling of awe and intense inner devotion was called up in the soul of the initiate. It is difficult today to form any conception of this mood—it was a feeling of the deepest reverence combined with a yearning for knowledge.

A last echo of this mood can, I think, still reach us from the outer world when we read the wonderfully beautiful description of the rising sun by the German poet and writer, Johann Gottfried Herder. This description was, however, written more than a hundred years ago, and it differs from anything that might emanate from some of the insignificant modern poets. For Herder looks upon the sunrise as a symbol of all waking life—not only in Nature, but also in the human soul, in the human heart. The feeling of dawn within the human soul itself, as though the sun were rising from inner depths—this was wonderfully portrayed by Herder when he tried to show how the poetic mood entered into human evolution, and how this poetic feeling had once upon a time been quickened by all that man could experience when he looked at the rising sun.

Still more intensely was the mystery of the sunrise felt by a man such as Jacob Boehme, whose first work was called, as you know, Aurora, or the Coming of Dawn. And the following words from Goethe's Faust: “Up, Scholar, away with weariness—bathe thy breast in the morning red,” are not unconnected with the secrets of the dawn.

The farther we go back in the history of human evolution, the more wonderful do we find the moods that were awakened in the human soul at the moment of sunrise, when the first rays of the morning sun carried down on their waves the pulsating, quickening light of the cosmos. And in the centres of the Mysteries, the old initiates, when they had prepared themselves in a definite way, were able, just at this moment of sunrise, to put their most solemn and sacred questions to the cosmic spirits, and to send these questions, rising from the depths of their hearts, far out into cosmic space.

Such an initiate said to himself: “When the sun sends the first rays of light down upon the earth, that is the best time for man to send his questions out into the wide spaces of the cosmos.” And so the old initiates poured out into cosmic distances the riddles which filled their souls and hearts. They did not, however, look for answers in the trivial way that we are used to in our physical science; they entered into a mood in which they said: “We have now given over our riddles and our questions to universal space. These questions rest now in the cosmos; they have been received by the gods.”

People may think as they like about such things. They were as I have described them; such were the practices in ancient times. Then the initiates waited, and again at night-time they made their hearts ready. But now they did not give themselves up to a questioning mood; they made themselves receptive, and in a devotional mood they stood awaiting the rays of the full moon as it rose above the horizon. They felt that now they would receive an answer from the cosmos. In the older Mysteries this was a very usual procedure. At certain times, questions and riddles were sent out into cosmic space, and the answers were sent back to earth by the gods through the rays of light from the full moon.

In this way man communed with the cosmos. He was not then so proud that he turned over certain questions in his head, as a modern philosopher might do, and then immediately expected an answer. He was not so conceited as to believe that he could sit down with a piece of paper in front of him, and by means of the human brain alone solve the great riddles of existence. Rather did he believe that he must hold counsel with the divine-spiritual powers working and weaving in the cosmos if he were to discover the answers to cosmic riddles. For he knew: “Outside me, in the cosmos, I do not find merely the content of my ordinary sense-perceptions. A spiritual element is everywhere living, working and weaving. And at the moment when the rays of the sun penetrate to me, I can myself send out to meet them the whole content of my will.” This secret has been completely lost to modern research. At one time, however, such things were understood by man and lived in him as true knowledge and wisdom. In Europe, one of the last to reserve this tradition was Julian the Apostate. He was imprudent enough to take these things seriously, and as a result he fell a victim to his enemies.

Nowadays men describe the sun by saying that it sends its rays down upon the earth. The old initiate would have said: “That is only the physical aspect. The spiritual truth is that men live upon the earth and upon the earth they develop their will, and while the rays of the sun pour down from the heavens upon the earth, man can send his will out into the direction of the sun—far out into cosmic space.” On the waves of the will which as it were streams out from the earth towards the sun, the old initiates sent forth their questions into the cosmos. And while a man of today says: “There on the other side is the moon, and the moon sends its rays down upon the earth”—the old initiate said: “That again is only the physical aspect. The truth is that thoughts are brought down to the earth on the waves of the moonlight.” Thus the old initiate entrusted his questions to the rays of will which stream up, from the earth towards the sun, and he received the answers from the rays of thought which come down to the earth from the moon.

Modern science knows only one side of the picture. The scientist sees only the physical properties of sun and moon. The old initiate said: “While the sun continually sends its light down upon the earth, the earth sends its rays of will—the combined will-forces of all the human beings living on earth—into the cosmos. And when man allows the light of the moon to shine upon him, rays of thought are sent down to him from out of the cosmos.”

The human organism has undergone many changes. Anyone, therefore, who is today seeking super-sensible knowledge cannot proceed in the old way. Man's power of understanding is cruder than it was in ancient times. It is true, of course, that even today the rays of his will stream out into the cosmos. But he no longer feels that the rays of his will could carry his questions out into the cosmos; they no longer burn within him, as once they did. He has become too intellectual, and the intellect cools the intensity of all questions. We have very little feeling or the insatiable yearning which once existed in man for knowledge of the most sacred riddles of the universe. We are no longer passionately eager for knowledge; we are merely inquisitive and would like to know everything as quickly as possible without taking the trouble really to understand the world around us.

In our present age only lovers like to dream in the moonlight! Men of learning would deem it frightful superstition if they were asked to believe that answers to the most burning riddles of existence could be brought down to them by the rays of the moon. For modern man, the world is utterly bereft of the spirit, and he understands nothing of the spirit which reveals itself everywhere in the world; or, if he speaks of the spirit he does so in a vague, pantheistic sense, with no concrete knowledge of how, for instance, the rays of the will are related to the rays of the sun, how human forms of thinking are related to the light coming from the moon.

By means of an initiation suited to modern times, however, we are enabled to enter once more into relationship with the cosmos and with the spirit of the universe. The only difference is that the modern intellect has to do it in another way. The preparatory exercises leading to initiation are described in my books, particularly in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment The purpose of such exercises is to bring the man of today to a point at which it is possible for him really to receive answers to his questions—not merely in his modern pride to turn the questions over in his head, and expect answers to arise from his own brain. The latter method may indeed result in exceedingly clever ideas; but mere “cleverness” can never lead to true answers to the riddles of life. This continual turmoil in his head shuts man off from the universe.

The modern initiate must also ask questions, but he must have patience and not expect to receive the answers immediately. The modern initiate gradually reaches a stage in his development at which he no longer merely observes the outer world in order to satisfy his curiosity with the impressions received through his eyes, ears and other senses. True, he receives external impressions by means of his senses, but while he observes just as definitely, just as intimately as others, all that is around him—the flowers, the sun, moon, stars, other human beings, plants and animals—while he turns his senses in all directions, and allows all these external impressions to flow through and into him, he sends out to meet them a current of force from his own being. And it is this force which represents the question he wants to ask.

Such a man looks, maybe, at a beautiful flower. He does not, however, look at it merely passively, but fixes his gaze upon its yellow colour, and allows yellow to make an impression upon him, At the same time he sends his question out towards the yellow of the flower; he plunges the questions and riddles of existence into the colour yellow, or perhaps into the rosy colour of the sunrise or into some other perception. He does not render up all the questions of his heart to one particular impression—as, for example, to the impression of the rising sun—but he pours them out into each and all of his sense-perceptions. Were he now to expect to receive his answers from these sense-perceptions themselves, it would be just as if an old initiate had sent his problems out towards the sunrise and had then expected the answers to come from the sun, instead of waiting, as we know he did, until the time of the full moon. The old initiate had to wait at least fourteen days; for it was at the time of the new moon that he put his questions to the rising sun, and he received his answers only when the moon was full.

A modern philosopher would hardly be prepared to wait as long as fourteen days. By that time he would expect his book to be in the hands of the printers; or, let us say, he would have expected this before it became so difficult to find a publisher! Today, however, he must again learn to have patience. When a man delivers his questions over to the impressions of his senses, when he allows these questions to be plunged in all manner of things, he must not expect that these same sense-impressions will immediately bring him anything in the nature of a revelation. He must wait—and this is easy for him if he has carried out the preparatory exercises for a long enough time—wait often for a long, long while, until at last all that he has rendered up to the world outside rises up within him in the form of an answer. Should you throw out questions at random, in a haphazard kind of way, you might perhaps receive fortuitous answers of a kind—answers which might afford certain people a measure of egotistical satisfaction—but of one thing you may be sure: they would not be real answers. You must cast your problems into flower and ocean, into the great vault of heaven and its stars, into everything which comes to you as an impression from without—and you must then wait until sooner or later the answers emerge from your innermost being. You have not got to wait for exactly fourteen days; it is not for you to determine, as the old initiates were able to do, the duration of the period. You have merely to wait until the right moment comes, the moment when all that was previously external impression becomes inward experience, and the answer rings from your own inner being

The whole art of spiritual investigation, of investigation of the cosmos, consists in being able to wait, in not imagining that answers will be immediately forthcoming. It follows also, as a matter of course, that definite questions must be put if answers are to be obtained. Should you enquire from those who have already obtained true knowledge, as this is understood in the sense of modern initiation, you will hear the same thing from them all. Such a man may perhaps tell you the following story: “When I was thirty-five years old I became aware of this or that great problem of existence, and all that I had experienced in connection with it entered profoundly into my being. At that time I entrusted this problem to some particular impression which came to me from the outer world; and when I was fifty years old the solution to the problem arose from within me.”

In days of old, the initiates placed their questions within the womb of space in order that out of space they might be born again. The solar element passed through a lunar metamorphosis. Today the riddles that man would fain unravel, all that he fain would learn in converse with spiritual Beings, must first be laid by him within the stream of time. The cosmic element must appear once more, born out of the human soul after a period of time determined by the cosmic powers themselves. But it is necessary for man to reach a point where he is able to feel and know when a divine, cosmic answer stirs within him, and to distinguish between such an answer and one that is merely human.

Thus the real content of ancient initiation is still present, but in another form. It is, however, necessary to be quite clear about the following. If a man desires to penetrate into the great mysteries of existence, he must be able to enter into a spiritual relationship with spiritual Beings, with cosmic Beings. He must not remain a hermit in life, he must not try to settle everything to please himself in his own egotistical way. He must be willing to wait until the cosmos gives him the answer to those riddles and problems which he has himself sent out into cosmic space.

It is evident that if a man has once learnt to send the forces of his soul out into the cosmos and to receive cosmic forces into himself he is much better able to understand the mysteries of birth and death than he was before he had attained to such knowledge. When a man has begun to understand how the element of will inherent in the soul streams out towards the rays of the sun, how it streams into all the sense-impressions he receives from the outer world—he also begins to understand how his soul and spirit stream out into the universe on the waves of a spiritual element, of a cosmic element, when his physical body has fallen a victim to the forces of death. Moreover, he learns to understand how spirituality is brought back again to earth by the moon, by the moonlight. He realises that his highest thoughts are given back to him from cosmic space. For although in this present age thoughts rise up from within man's own being, it is, nevertheless, the lunar element in the human organism that generates the thoughts.

In addition to all this, a man who has had these experiences learns to measure the true significance of certain transitory phenomena which stand, as it were, midway between processes regarded as physical and cosmic in their nature, and those which are cosmic and spiritual. The man of today, owing largely to his materialistic education, describes everything from the physical point of view. He says: “An eclipse of the sun is due to the fact that the moon comes between the sun and the earth, cutting off the rays of the sun.” This is a physical explanation, built up from physical observation and as obvious as if we were to say: “Here is a light, and there an eye. If I place my hand in front of the eye, the light will be darkened.” As you see, it is a purely physical, spatial explanation, and that is as far as modern consciousness goes.

We must strive once more for a true knowledge of such phenomena. They are not of everyday occurrence, and on the comparatively rare occasions of their appearance they should be studied not only from their physical but also from their spiritual aspect.

At the time of a solar eclipse, for instance, something totally different takes place in the part of the earth affected from what is happening when there is no eclipse. When we know that on the one hand the rays of the sun penetrate down to the earth and on the other hand the forces or rays of will stream out to meet the sun, it is possible to form some idea of how a solar eclipse can affect these radiations of will which are altogether spiritual in their nature. The sunlight is blocked by the moon; that is a purely physical process. But physical matter—in this case the body of the moon—is no obstacle to the forces streaming out from the will. These forces radiate into the darkness, and there ensues a period of time, short though it may be, in which all that is of the nature of will upon the earth flows out into universal space in an abnormal way. It is different altogether from what takes place when there is no eclipse. Ordinarily, the physical sunlight unites with the radiations of will streaming towards it. When there is an eclipse, the forces of will flow unhindered into cosmic space.

The old initiates knew these things. They saw that at such a moment all the unbridled impulses and instincts of humanity surge out into the cosmos. And they gave their pupils the following explanation. They said: Under normal conditions the evil impulses of will which are sent out into the cosmos by human beings are, as it were, burned up and consumed by the rays of the sun, so that they can injure only man himself, but can do no universal harm. When, however, there is an eclipse of the sun, opportunity is given for the evil which is willed on earth to spread over the cosmos. An eclipse is a physical event behind which there lies a significant spiritual reality.

And again, when there is an eclipse of the moon, the man of today merely says: “Now the earth comes between the sun and the moon; hence we see the shadow cast upon the moon by the earth.” That is the physical explanation. But in this case also the old initiate knew that a spiritual reality was behind the physical fact. He knew that when there is an eclipse of the moon, thoughts stream through darkness down upon the earth; and that such thoughts have a closer relationship with the subconscious life than with the conscious life of the human being. The old initiates often made use of a certain simile when speaking to their pupils. It is, of course, necessary to translate their words into modern language, but this is the gist of what they said: “Visionaries and dreamers love to go for rambles by moonlight, when the moon is full. There are, however, certain people who have no wish to receive the good thoughts coming to them from the cosmos, but who, on the contrary, are desirous of getting hold of evil, diabolical thoughts. Such people will choose the moment of a lunar eclipse for their nocturnal wanderings.”

Here again we approach a spiritual reality in a physical event. Today we must not absorb such teaching in its old form. Were we to do so, we should be led into superstition. But it is very necessary to reach a point at which we are able once more to perceive the spiritual which permeates all cosmic processes. Eclipses of the sun and moon, recurring as they do in the course of every year, may really be looked upon as “safety-valves.” A safety-valve is there to avert danger, to provide an outlet for something or other—steam, for instance—at the right moment. One of the safety-valves which makes its appearance in the cosmos and to which we give the name of a solar eclipse, serves the purpose of carrying out into space in a Luciferic way, the evil that spreads over the earth, in order that evil may work havoc in a wider, less concentrated sphere. The other safety-valve, the lunar eclipse, exists for the purpose of allowing the evil thoughts which are present in the cosmos to approach those human beings who are desirous of being possessed by them. In matters of this kind people do not, as a rule, act in full consciousness, but the facts are nevertheless real—just as real as the attraction of a magnet for small particles of iron. Such are the forces at work, in the cosmos—forces no less potent than the forces we analyse and investigate today in our chemical laboratories.

Man will not be able to free himself from the forces in his being which tend to drag him downwards until he develops in himself a certain feeling for spiritual concepts such as these. Then only will the path leading to a true comprehension of birth and death be opened up to humanity. And such a comprehension and understanding is sorely needed by humanity today, when men are plunged in spiritual darkness. We must learn again what it really signifies when the sun sends its light towards us. When the sunlight streams towards us, the surrounding space is made free for the passage of those souls who must leave their physical bodies and make their way out into universal space. When the sun sends its light down to earth, the earth sends human souls out into cosmic space, where these souls undergo many metamorphoses. Then, in a spiritual form, they approach the earth once more, passing in their descent through the sphere of the moon, and taking possession once again of a physical body which has been prepared for them in the stream of physical heredity. It will not be possible for us to enter into a right relationship with the universe until such time as we begin to feel and experience these things in a real and living way.

Today we learn astronomy, spectroscopy and so on. We learn how the rays of the sun penetrate down to earth, and we fondly imagine that there is nothing more to be said. We learn how the rays of the sun fall upon the moon, and from the moon are reflected back again to earth, and we look upon the moonlight in this way only, taking into consideration merely its physical aspect. By such means the intellect is brought into play. Intellectual knowledge cuts man off from the cosmos and tends to destroy inner activity of soul. This inner life of soul can be reawakened, but man must first win back for himself his spiritual relationship with the cosmos. This he will be able to do only when he is once more to say to himself: “A man has died. His soul is radiating out towards the sun. It streams out into the cosmos, traveling the path made for it by the rays of sunlight, until it comes into a region where space has an end, where one can no longer speak in terms of three dimensions, but where the three dimensions are merged into unity. In this region, beyond space and beyond time, many and various things happen: but later on, from the opposite direction, from the direction of the moon, of the moonlight, the soul returns once more and enters into a physical human body, is born again into earthly life.”

When man learns once more that the souls of the dead go out to meet the light rays of the sun, that the shining beams of the moon draw the young souls back again to earth, when he learns to feel concretely how natural processes and phenomena are everywhere permeated with spirit—then there will arise once more on earth a knowledge which is at the same time religion; a truly devotional knowledge. Knowledge that is based entirely upon materialism can never become religion. And religion that is founded on faith alone, that does not spring from the fountain of knowledge, can never be made to harmonise with all that man sees and observes in the universe around him. Today men still repeat certain prayers from ancient times. And if anyone maintains—as I have done in the booklet entitled “The Lord's Prayer”¹—that deep spiritual truths are concealed in these ancient prayers, the clever modern people say: That is mere visionary dreaming, mere fantasy. But it is not fantasy; it is based on knowledge of the fact that these prayers, which can be traced back to ancient times, and which tradition has preserved for humanity, have been conceived out of a profound understanding of cosmic processes. We must win back for ourselves once more a knowledge and an understanding that will enable us to call up in our souls a feeling akin to religion whenever we are confronted by great cosmic events. We must be able to say, with the men of old: “O sun, thou sendest towards me the rays of thy light. These rays form a pathway to me upon earth—and along this pathway, but moving in the other direction, the souls of human beings, the souls of the dead stream out into cosmic space.” And again: “O moon, thou shinest down with gentle radiance upon the earth from thy place in the heavens. And borne on the waves of thy gentle light from far cosmic spaces, are those souls who are on their way once more into earthly existence.”

That is how we can find again the connection between the light and radiance of the outer world and all that lives and weaves in the inner being of man himself. We shall then no longer say thoughtlessly: “Man is surrounded by the physical universe and he can form no conception of what will become of his soul, when, separated from the body, it passes out into this purely material universe.” On the contrary, we shall know that while the piercing rays of the sun make their way through space, they are all the time working towards the forces streaming out from the human will, and preparing a pathway for them. We shall recognise also that the moon does not shed its gently undulating light over the earth without aim or purpose, but that a spiritual element surges and streams through space, borne on the waves of the moon-beams.

When once perceptions such as these enter into our consciousness, we shall no longer be able to look with indifference on a plant, let us say, when it is bathed in the light of the early morning sun. For at such a moment very special processes are taking place in the plant. It is then that the juices in the plant are carried up by its delicate vessels into blossom and leaf. It is then that the rays of the sun, as they fall upon the plant, make way for the forces of will coming from the earth. And it is not only the juices described by our modern scientists which stream through the plant at such a moment; those forces of will which have their seat in the depths of the earth, stream upwards also from the root of the plant into its flower. And in the evening, when leaves and petals close, when the rays of the sun no longer prepare a pathway for the emanations of will streaming upwards from the earth, the inner activity of the plant ceases for a time, and its life rests.

The plant, however, is also exposed to the gentle light of the moon. The moonlight does not cast its spell on lovers only—it has an influence too on the sleeping plant. Interwoven with the moonlight, cosmic thought streams down into the plant and works within it.

Thus in the plant-world we learn to look for the combined forces of “earthly will” and “cosmic thought.” And we study the form of many different plants in order to discover how far each one is woven out of “cosmic thought” and of “earthly will.” And when we learn how spiritual, healing forces spring up from these cosmic thoughts, and from this earthly will, the healing properties of plants make themselves known to us, and we learn to see in the plant the medicinal herb. But it is only when one has attained to an intimate knowledge of cosmic processes that it becomes possible to recognise the remedial potentialities of the several plants.

We must win this knowledge afresh. We must reach the point, when we can understand how the human head is actually moulded in the image of the earth herself. In the human embryo it is the head which first takes shape. It is moulded in the likeness of the earth, and the rest of the body is joined on to it. When the human head is bathed in light, and the sunlight penetrates it, then that which in the human head is analogous to “earthly” will shines out into the cosmos with a living power.

If, now, we consider a plant whose root contains the forces of “earthly will” in marked degree, we can be sure that the root of such a plant seeks continually to evade the light of the sun; and we can be equally sure that it is specially subject to the influence of the moonlight, which, feebly though its rays seem to us to shine down upon the earth, nevertheless penetrates right through to the roots of the plants.

If, by burning the root of such a plant, we bring to it the element of light, and if we preserve the ashes thus obtained and make a powder out of them, then we have the means to prove how such a powder is able, by virtue of the cosmic processes inherent within it, to work upon the human head, for the forces of will in the head are similar in their nature to the forces of will in the earth. The point is that we should learn to fathom the connection which everywhere exists between matter and spirit—a connection which does not differ whether we are dealing with the smallest particle of matter or the greatest mass. Then we shall be able to do something which at present holds good only for mathematics; we shall be able to apply to the whole realm of nature truths which first come to us as purely spiritual apprehensions.

A cube, we know, is made up of six squares. Such a thing can be spun out of thought; it is a thought-picture. In salt, in ordinary cooking-salt, we find the cube again in nature herself, and here we discover the connection between a spiritual principle—something “thought out”—and a material substance in outer nature. But I ask you:—What does the average man of today know of the degree in which spiritual forces—cosmic forces of thinking, earthly forces of will—are present in the root of any particular plant? And yet the process is the same as that which we carry out today, albeit in the most abstract manner possible, when we first conceive of the cube, and then proceed to find it again in ordinary salt.

What we do today only when we are thinking in terms of mathematics, we must learn to do again with everything that comes within the range of the human soul. The study of mathematics does not, as a rule, give rise to a devout, religious attitude of mind. Such a man as Novalis could, it is true, be rapt in devotion when given up to the study of mathematics. For Novalis, the science of mathematics was a great and beautiful poem. But one comes across few people who enter into a devout mood of soul when studying mathematics!

When, however, we go a step farther, when we conjure up the spirit from the depths of man's being and bear this spirit out into the cosmos, where of course it already is (one merely learns to recognise it again)—then science becomes permeated with religion; harmony between religion and science is once again achieved.

• 1. Anthroposophical Publishing Company. Second English edition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The study of Spiritual Science should always go hand in hand with practical experience of how the mind works. It is impossible to get entirely clear about many things that we discussed in the last lecture unless one tries to get a kind of living grasp of what thinking involves in terms of actualities. For why is it that among the very persons whose profession it is to think about such questions, confusion reigns, for example, as to the relation between the general concept of the “triangle-in-general” and specific concepts of individual triangles? How is it that people puzzle for centuries over questions such as that of the hundred possible and the hundred real thalers cited by Kant? Why is it that people fail to pursue the very simple reflections that are necessary to see that there cannot really be any such thing as a “pragmatic” account of history, according to which the course of events always follows directly from preceding events? Why do people not reflect in such a way that they would be repelled by this impossible mode of regarding the history of man, so widely current nowadays? What is the cause of all these things?

The reason is that far too little trouble is taken over learning to handle with precision the activities of thinking, even by people whose business this should be. Nowadays everyone wants to feel that he has a perfect claim to say: “Think? Well, one can obviously do that.” So they begin to think. Thus we have various conceptions of the world; there have been many philosophers—a great many. We find that one philosopher is after this and another is after that, and that many fairly clever people have drawn attention to many things. If someone comes upon contradictions in these findings, he does not ponder over them, but he is quite pleased with himself, fancying that now he can “think” indeed. He can think again what those other fellows have thought out, and feels quite sure that he will find the right answer himself. For no one nowadays must make any concession to authority! That would deny the dignity of human nature! Everyone must think for himself. That is the prevailing notion in the realm of thought.

I do not know if people have reflected that this is not their attitude in other realms of life. No one feels committed to belief in authority or to a craving for authority when he has his coat made at the tailor's or his shoes at the shoemaker's. He does not say: “It would be beneath the dignity of man to let one's things be made by persons who are known to be thoroughly acquainted with their business.” He may perhaps even allow that it is necessary to learn these skills. But in practical life, with regard to thinking, it is not agreed that one must get one's conceptions of the world from quarters where thinking and much else has been learnt. Only rarely would this be conceded to-day.

This is one tendency that dominates our life in the widest circles, and is the immediate reason why human thinking is not a very widespread product nowadays. I believe this can be quite easily grasped. For let us suppose that one day everybody were to say: “What!—learn to make boots? For a long time that has been unworthy of man; we can all make boots.” I don't know if only good boots would come from it. At all events, with regard to the coining of correct thoughts in their conception of the world, it is from this sort of reasoning that men mostly take their start at the present day. This is what gives its deeper meaning to my remark of yesterday—that although thought is something a man is completely within, so that he can contemplate it in its inner being, actual thinking is not as common as one might suppose. Besides this, there is to-day a quite special pretension which could gradually go so far as to throw a veil over all clear thinking. We must pay attention to this also; at least we must glance at it.

Let us suppose the following. There was once in Görlitz a shoemaker named Jacob Boehme. He had learnt his craft well—how soles are cut, how the shoe is formed over the last, and how the nails are driven into the soles and leather. He knew all this down to the ground. Now supposing that this shoemaker, by name Jacob Boehme, had gone around and said: “I will now see how the world is constructed. I will suppose that there is a great last at the foundation of the world. Over this last the world-leather was once stretched; then the world-nails were added, and by means of them the world-sole was fastened to the world-upper. Then boot-blacking was brought into play, and the whole world-shoe was polished. In this way I can quite clearly explain to myself how in the morning it is bright, for then the shoe-polish of the world is shining, but in the evening it is soiled with all sorts of things; it shines no longer. Hence I imagine that every night someone has the duty of repolishing the world-boot. And thus arises the difference between day and night.” Let us suppose that Jacob Boehme had said this.

Yes, you laugh, for of course Jacob Boehme did not say this; but still he made good shoes for the people of Görlitz, and for that he employed his knowledge of shoe-making. But he also developed his grand thoughts, through which he wanted to build up a conception of the world; and for that he resorted to something else. He said to himself: My shoe-making is not enough for that; I dare not apply to the structure of the world the thoughts I put into making shoes. And in due course he arrived at his sublime thoughts about the world. Thus there was no such Jacob Boehme as the hypothetical figure I first sketched, but there was another one who knew how to set about things. But the hypothetical “Jacob Boehmes”, like the one you laughed over—they exist everywhere to-day.

For example, we find among them physicists and chemists who have learnt the laws governing the combination and separation of substances; there are zoologists who have learnt how one examines and describes animals; there are doctors who have learnt how to treat the physical human body, and what they themselves call the soul. What do they all do? They say: When a person wants to work out for himself a conception of the world, then he takes the laws that are learnt in chemistry, in physics, or in physiology—no others are admissible—and out of these he builds a conception of the world for himself. These people proceed exactly as the hypothetical shoemaker would have done if he had constructed the world-boot, only they do not notice that their world-conceptions come into existence by the very same method that produced the hypothetical world-boot. It does certainly seem rather grotesque if one imagines that the difference between day and night comes about through the soiling of shoe-leather and the repolishing of it in the night. But in terms of true logic it is in principle just the same if an attempt is made to build a world out of the laws of chemistry, physics, biology and physiology. Exactly the same principle! It is an immense presumption on the part of the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, or the biologist, who do not wish to be anything else than physicist, chemist, physiologist, biologist, and yet want to have an opinion about the whole world. The point is that one should go to the root of things and not shirk the task of illuminating anything that is not so clear by tracing it back to its true place in the scheme of things. If you look at all this with method and logic, you will not need to be astonished that so many present-day conceptions of the world yield nothing but the “world-boot”. And this is something that can point us to the study of Spiritual Science and to the pursuit of practical trains of thought; something that can urge us to examine the question of how we must think in order to see where shortcomings exist in the world.

There is something else I should like to mention in order to show where lies the root of countless misunderstandings with regard to the ideas people have about the world. When one concerns oneself with world-conceptions, does one not have over and over again the experience that someone thinks this and someone else that; one man upholds a certain view with many good reasons (one can find good reasons for everything), while another has equally good reasons for his view; the first man contradicts his opponent with just as good reasons as those with which the opponent contradicts him. Sects arise in the world not, in the first place, because one person or another is convinced about the right path by what is taught here or there. Only look at the paths which the disciples of great men have had to follow in order to come to this or that great man, and then you will see that herein lies something important for us with regard to karma. But if we examine the outlooks that exist in the world to-day, we must say that whether someone is a follower of Bergson, or of Haeckel, or of this or that (karma, as I have already said, does not recognise the current world-conception) depends on other things than on deep conviction. There is contention on all sides!

Yesterday I said that once there were Nominalists, persons who maintained that general concepts had no reality, but were merely names. These Nominalists had opponents who were called Realists (the word had a different meaning then). The Realists maintained that general concepts are not mere words, but refer to quite definite realities. In the Middle Ages the question of Realism versus Nominalism was always a burning one, especially for theology, a sphere of thought with which present-day thinkers trouble themselves very little. For in the time when the question of Nominalism versus Realism arose (from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries) there was something that belonged to the most important confessions of faith, the question about the three “Divine Persons”—Father, Son and Holy Ghost—who form One Divine Being, but are still Three real Persons. The Nominalists maintained that these three Divine Persons existed only individually, the “Father” for Himself, the “Son” for Himself, and the “Holy Ghost” for Himself; and if one spoke of a “Collective God” Who comprised these Three, that was only a name for the Three. Thus Nominalism did away with the unity of the Trinity. In opposition to the Realists, the Nominalists not only explained away the unity, but even regarded it as heretical to declare, as the Realists did, that the Three Persons formed not merely an imaginary unity, but an actual one.

Thus Nominalism and Realism were opposites. And anyone who goes deeply into the literature of Realism and Nominalism during these centuries gets a deep insight into what human acumen can produce. For the most ingenious grounds were brought forward for Nominalism, just as much as for Realism. In those days it was more difficult to be reckoned as a thinker because there was no printing press, and it was not an easy thing to take part in such controversies as that between Nominalism and Realism. Anyone who ventured into this field had to be better prepared, according to the ideas of those times, than is required of people who engage in controversies nowadays. An immense amount of penetration was necessary in order to plead the cause of Realism, and it was equally so with Nominalism. How does this come about? It is grievous that things are so, and if one reflects more deeply on it, one is led to say: What use is it that you are so clever? You can be clever and plead the cause of Nominalism, and you can be just as clever and contradict Nominalism. One can get quite confused about the whole question of intelligence! It is distressing even to listen to what such characterisations are supposed to mean.

Now, as a contrast to what we have been saying, we will bring forward something that is perhaps not nearly so discerning as much that has been advanced with regard to Nominalism or to Realism, but it has perhaps one merit—it goes straight to the point and indicates the direction in which one needs to think.

Let us imagine the way in which one forms general concepts; the way in which one synthesizes a mass of details. We can do this in two ways: first as a man does in the course of his life through the world. He sees numerous examples of a certain kind of animal: they are silky or woolly, are of various colours, have whiskers, at certain times they go through movements that recall human “washing”, they eat mice, etc. One can call such creatures “cats”. Then one has formed a general concept. All these creatures have something to do with what we call “cats”. But now let us suppose that someone has had a long life, in the course of which he has encountered many cat-owners, men and women, and he has noticed that a great many of these people call their pets “Pussy”. Hence he classes all these creatures under the name of “Pussy”. Hence we now have the general concept “Cats” and the general concept “Pussy”, and a large number of individual creatures belonging in both cases to the general concept. And yet no one will maintain that the general concept “Pussy” has the same significance as the general concept “Cats”. Here the real difference comes out. In forming the general concept “Pussy” which is only a summary of names that must rank as individual names, we have taken the line, and rightly so, of Nominalism; and in forming the general concept “Cats” we have taken the line of Realism, and rightly so. In one case Nominalism is correct; in the other. Realism. Both are right. One must only apply these methods within their proper limits. And when both are right, it is not surprising that good reasons for both can be adduced. In taking the name “Pussy”, I have employed a somewhat grotesque example. But I can show you a much more significant example and I will do so at once.

Within the scope of our objective experience there is a whole realm where Nominalism—the idea that the collective term is only a name—is fully justified. We have “one”, “two”, “three”, “four”, “five”, and so on, but it is impossible to find in the expression “number” anything that has a real existence. “Number” has no existence. “One”, “two”, “three”, “five”, “six”,—they exist. But what I said in the last lecture, that in order to find the general concept one must let that which corresponds to it pass over into movement—this cannot be done with the concept “Number”. One “one” does not pass over into “two”. It must always be taken as “one”. Not even in thought can we pass over into two, or from two into three. Only the individual numbers exist, not “number” in general. As applied to the nature of numbers, Nominalism is entirely correct; but when we come to the single animal in relation to its genus, Realism is entirely correct. For it is impossible for a deer to exist, and another deer, and yet another, without there being the genus “deer”. The figure “two” can exist for itself, “one”, “seven”, etc., can exist for themselves. But in so far as anything real appears in number, the number is a quality, and the concept “number” has no specific existence. External things are related to general concepts in two different ways: Nominalism is appropriate in one case, and Realism in the other.

On these lines, if we simply give our thoughts the right direction, we begin to understand why there are so many disputes about conceptions of the world. People generally are not inclined, when they have grasped one standpoint, to grasp another as well. When in some realm of thought somebody has got hold of the idea “general concepts have no existence”, he proceeds to extend to it the whole make-up of the world. This sentence, “general concepts have no existence” is not false, for when applied to the particular realm which the person in question has considered, it is correct. It is only the universalising of it that is wrong. Thus it is essential, if one wants to form a correct idea of what thinking is, to understand clearly that the truth of a thought in the realm to which it belongs is no evidence for its general validity. Someone can offer me a perfectly correct proof of this or that and yet it will not hold good in a sphere to which it does not belong. Anyone, therefore, who intends to occupy himself seriously with the paths that lead to a conception of the world must recognise that the first essential is to avoid one-sidedness. That is what I specially want to bring out to-day. Now let us take a general look at some matters which will be explained in detail later on.

There are people so constituted that it is not possible for them to find the way to the Sprit, and to give them any proof of the Spirit will always be hard. They stick to something they know about, in accordance with their nature. Let us say they stick at something that makes the crudest kind of impression on them—Materialism. We need not regard as foolish the arguments they advance as a defence or proof of Materialism, for an immense amount of ingenious writing has been devoted to the subject, and it holds good in the first place for material life, for the material world and its laws.

Again, there are people who, owing to a certain inwardness, are naturally predisposed to see in all that is material only the revelation of the spiritual. Naturally, they know as well as the materialists do that, externally, the material world exists; but matter, they say, is only the revelation, the manifestation, of the underlying spiritual. Such persons may take no particular interest in the material world and its laws. As all their ideas of the spiritual come to them through their own inner activity, they may go through the world with the consciousness that the true, the lofty, in which one ought to interest oneself—all genuine reality—is found only in the Spirit; that matter is only illusion, only external phantasmagoria. This would be an extreme standpoint, but it can occur, and can lead to a complete denial of material life. We should have to say of such persons that they certainly do recognize what is most real, the Spirit, but they are one-sided; they deny the significance of the material world and its laws. Much acute thinking can be enlisted in support of the conception of the universe held by these persons. Let us call their conception of the universe: Spiritism. Can we say that the Spiritists are right? As regards the Spirit, their contentions could bring to light some exceptionally correct ideas, but concerning matter and its laws they might reveal very little of any significance. Can one say the Materialists are correct in what they maintain? Yes, concerning matter and its laws they may be able to discover some exceptionally useful and valuable facts; but in speaking of the Spirit they may utter nothing but foolishness. Hence we must say that both parties are correct in their respective spheres.

There can also be persons who say: “Yes, but as to whether in truth the world contains only matter, or only spirit, I have no special knowledge; the powers of human cognition cannot cope with that. One thing is clear—there is a world spread out around us. Whether it is based upon what chemists and physicists, if they are materialists, call atoms, I know not. But I recognize the external world; that is something I see and can think about. I have no particular reason for supposing that it is or is not spiritual at root. I restrict myself to what I see around me.” From the explanations already given we can call such Realists, and their concept of the universe: Realism. Just as one can enlist endless ingenuity on behalf of Materialism or of Spiritism, and just as one can be clever about Spiritism and yet say the most foolish things on material matters, and vice versa, so one can advance the most ingenious reasons for Realism, which differs from both Spiritism and Materialism in the way I have just described.

Again, there may be other persons who speak as follows. Around us are matter and the world of material phenomena. But this world of material phenomena is in itself devoid of meaning. It has no real meaning unless there is within it a progressive tendency; unless from this external world something can emerge towards which the human soul can direct itself, independently of the world. According to this outlook, there must be a realm of ideas and ideals within the world-process. Such people are not Realists, although they pay external life its due; their view is that life has meaning only if ideas work through it and give it purpose. It was under the influence of such a mood as this that Fichte once said: Our world is the sensualised material of our duty.² The adherents of such a world-outlook as this, which takes everything as a vehicle for the ideas that permeate the world-process, may be called Idealists and their outlook: Idealism. Beautiful and grand and glorious things have been brought forward on behalf of this Idealism. And in this realm that I have just described—where the point is to show that the world would be purposeless and meaningless if ideas were only human inventions and were not rooted in the world-process—in this realm Idealism is fully justified. But by means of it one cannot, for example, explain external reality. Hence one can distinguish this Idealism from other world-outlooks:

We now have side by side four justifiable world-outlooks, each with significance for its particular domain. Between Materialism and Idealism there is a certain transition. The crudest kind of materialism—one can observe it specially well in our day, although it is already on the wane—will consist in this, that people carry to an extreme the saying of Kant—Kant did not do this himself!—that in the individual sciences there is only so much real science as there is mathematics. This means that from being a materialist one can become a ready-reckoner of the universe, taking nothing as valid except a world composed of material atoms. They collide and gyrate, and then one calculates how they inter-gyrate. By this means one obtains very fine results, which show that this way of looking at things is fully justified. Thus you can get the vibration-rates for blue, red, etc.; you take the whole world as a kind of mechanical apparatus, and can reckon it up accurately. But one can become rather confused in this field. One can say to oneself: “Yes, but however complicated the machine may be, one can never get out of it anything like the perception of blue, red, etc. Thus if the brain is only a complicated machine, it can never give rise to what we know as soul-experiences.” But then one can say, as du Bois-Reymond once said: If we want to explain the world in strictly mathematical terms, we shall not be able to explain the simplest perception, but if we go outside a mathematical explanation, we shall be unscientific. The most uncompromising materialist would say, “No, I do not even calculate, for that would presuppose a superstition—it would imply that I assume that things are ordered by measure and number.” And anyone who raises himself above this crude materialism will become a mathematical thinker, and will recognize as valid only whatever can be treated mathematically. From this results a conception of the universe that really admits nothing beyond mathematical formulae. This may be called Mathematism.

Someone, however, might think this over, and after becoming a Mathematist he might say to himself: “It cannot be a superstition that the colour blue has so and so many vibrations. The world is ordered mathematically. If mathematical ideas are found to be real in the world, why should not other ideas have equal reality?” Such a person accepts this—that ideas are active in the world. But he grants validity only to those ideas that he discovers outside himself—not to any ideas that he might grasp from his inner self by some sort of intuition or inspiration, but only to those he reads from external things that are real to the senses. Such a person becomes a Rationalist, and his outlook on the world is that of Rationalism. If, in addition to the ideas that are found in this way, someone grants validity also to those gained from the moral and the intellectual realms, then he is already an Idealist. Thus a path leads from crude Materialism, by way of Mathematism and Rationalism, to Idealism.

But now Idealism can be enhanced. In our age there are some men who are trying to do this. They find ideas at work in the world, and this implies that there must also be in the world some sort of beings in whom the ideas can live. Ideas cannot live just as they are in any external object, nor can they hang as it were in the air. In the nineteenth century the belief existed that ideas rule history. But this was a confusion, for ideas as such have no power to work. Hence one cannot speak of ideas in history. Anyone who understands that ideas, if they are there are all, are bound up with some being capable of having ideas, will no longer be a mere Idealist; he will move on to the supposition that ideas are connected with beings. He becomes a Psychist and his world-outlook is that Psychism. The Psychist, who in his turn can uphold his outlook with an immense amount of ingenuity, reaches it only through a kind of one-sidedness, of which he can eventually become aware.

Here I must add that there are adherents of all the world-outlooks above the horizontal stroke; for the most part they are stubborn folk who, owing to some fundamental element in themselves, take this or that world-outlook and abide by it, going no further. All the beliefs listed below the line have adherents who are more easily accessible to the knowledge that individual world-outlooks each have one special standpoint only, and they more easily reach the point where they pass from one world-outlook to another.

When someone is a Psychist, and able as a thinking person to contemplate the world clearly, then he comes to the point of saying to himself that he must presuppose something actively psychic in the outside world. But directly he not only thinks, but feels sympathy for what is active and willing in man, then he says to himself: “It is not enough that there are beings who have ideas; these beings must also be active, they must be able also to do things.” But this is inconceivable unless these beings are individual beings. That is, a person of this type rises from accepting the ensoulment of the world to accepting the Spirit or the Spirits of the world. He is not yet clear whether he should accept one or a number of Spirits, but he advances from Psychism to Pneumatism to a doctrine of the Spirit.

If he has become in truth a Pneumatist, then he may well grasp what I have said in this lecture about number—that with regard to figures it is somewhat doubtful to speak of a “unity”. Then he comes to the point of saying to himself: It must therefore be a confusion to talk of one undivided Spirit, of one undivided Pneuma. And he gradually becomes able to form for himself an idea of the Spirits of the different Hierarchies. Then he becomes in the true sense a Spiritist, so that on this side there is a direct transition from Pneumatism to Spiritism.

These world-outlooks are all justified in their own field. For there are fields where Psychism acts illuminatingly, and others where Pneumatism does the same. Certainly, anyone who wishes to deliberate about an explanation of the universe as thoroughly as we have tried to do must come to Spiritism, to the acceptance of the Spirits of the Hierarchies. For to stop short at Pneumatism would in this case mean the following. If we are Spiritists, then it may happen that people will say to us: “Why so many spirits? Why bring numbers into it? Let there be One Undivided Spirit!” Anyone who goes more deeply into the matter knows that this objection is like saying: “You tell me there are two hundred midges over there. I don't see two hundred; I see only a single swarm.” Exactly so would an adherent of Pneumatism stand with regard to a Spiritist. The Spiritist sees the universe filled with the Spirits of the Hierarchies; the Pneumatist sees only the one “swarm”—only the Universal Spirit. But that comes from an inexact view.

Now there is still another possibility: someone may not take the path we have tried to follow to the activities of the spiritual Hierarchies, but may still come to an acceptance of certain spiritual beings. The celebrated German philosopher, Leibnitz, was a man of this kind. Leibnitz had got beyond the prejudice that anything merely material can exist in the world. He found the actual, he sought the actual. (I have treated this more precisely in my book, Riddles of Philosophy.) His view was that a being—as, for example, the human soul—can build up existence in itself. But he formed no further ideas on the subject. He only said to himself that there is such a being that can build up existence in itself, and force concepts outwards from within itself. For Leibnitz, this being is a “Monad”. And he said to himself: “There must be many Monads, and Monads of the most varied capabilities. If I had here a bell, there would be many monads in it—as in a swarm of midges—but they would be monads that had never come even so far as to have sleep-consciousness, monads that are almost unconscious, but which nevertheless develop the dimmest of concepts within themselves. There are monads that dream; there are monads that develop waking ideas within themselves; in short, there are monads of the most varied grades.”

A person with this outlook does not come so far as to picture to himself the individual spiritual beings in concrete terms, as the Spiritist does, but he reflects in the world upon the spiritual element in the world, allowing it to remain indefinite. He calls it “Monad”—that is, he conceives of it only as though one were to say: “Yes, there is spirit in the world and there are spirits, but I describe them only by saying, ‘They are entities having varying powers of perception.’ I pick out from them an abstract characteristic. So I form for myself this one-sided world-outlook, on behalf of which as much as can be said has been said by the highly intelligent Leibnitz. In this way I develop Monadism.” Monadism is an abstract Spiritism.

But there can be persons who do not rise to the level of the Monads; they cannot concede that existence is made up of beings with the most varied conceptual powers, but at the same time they are not content to allow reality only to external phenomena; they hold that “forces” are dominant everywhere. If, for example, a stone falls to the ground, they say, “That is gravitation!” When a magnet attracts bits of iron, they say: “That is magnetic force!” They are not content with saying simply, “There is the magnet,” but they say, “The magnet presupposes that supersensibly, invisibly, a magnetic force is present, extending in all directions.” A world-outlook of this kind—which looks everywhere for forces behind phenomena—can be called Dynamism.

Then one may say: “No, to believe in ‘forces’ is superstition”—an example of this is Fritz Mauthner's Critique of Language, where you find a detailed argument to this effect. It amounts to taking your stand on the reality of the things around us. Thus by the path of Spiritism we come through Monadism and Dynamism to Realism again.

But now one can do something else still. One can say: “Certainly I believe in the world that is spread out around me, but I do not maintain any right to claim that this world is the real one. I can say of it only that it ‘appears’ to me. I have no right to say more about it.” There you have again a difference. One can say of the world that is spread out around us. “This is the real world,” but one can also say, “I am clear that there is a world which appears to me; I cannot speak of anything more. I am not saying that this world of colours and sounds, which arises only because certain processes in my eyes present themselves to me as colours, while processes in my ears present themselves to me as sounds—I am not saying that this world is the true world. It is a world of phenomena.” This is the outlook called Phenomenalism.

We can go further, and can say: “The world of phenomena we certainly have around us, but all that we believe we have in these phenomena is what we have ourselves added to them, what we have thought into them. Our own sense-impressions are all we can rightly accept. Anyone who says this—mark it well!—is not an adherent of Phenomenalism. He peels off from the phenomena everything which he thinks comes only from the understanding and the reason, and he allows validity only to sense-impressions, regarding them as some kind of message from reality.” This outlook may be called Sensationalism.

A critic of this outlook can then say: “You may reflect as much as you like on what the senses tell us and bring forward ever so ingenious reasons for your view—and ingenious reasons can be given—I take my stand on the point that nothing real exists except that which manifests itself through sense-impressions; this I accept as something material.”

This is rather like an atomist saying: “I hold that only atoms exist, and that however small they are, they have the attributes which we recognize in the physical world”—anyone who says this is a materialist. Thus, by another path, we arrive back at Materialism.

All these conceptions of the world that I have described and written down for you really exist, and they can be maintained. And it is possible to bring forward the most ingenious reasons for each of them; it is possible to adopt any one of them and with ingenious reasons to refute the others. In between these conceptions of the world one can think out yet others, but they differ only in degree from the leading types I have described, and can be traced back to them. If one wishes to learn about the web and woof of the world, then one must know that the way to it is through these twelve points of entry. There is not merely one conception of the world that can be defended, or justified, but there are twelve. And one must admit that just as many good reasons can be adduced for each and all of them as for any particular one. The world cannot be rightly considered from the one-sided standpoint of one single conception, one single mode of thought; the world discloses itself only to someone who knows that one must look at it from all sides. Just as the sun—if we go by the Copernican conception of the universe—passes through the signs of the Zodiac in order to illuminate the earth from twelve different points, so we must not adopt one standpoint, the standpoint of Idealism, or Sensationalism, or Phenomenalism, or any other conception of the world with a name of this kind; we must be in a position to go all round the world and accustom ourselves to the twelve different standpoints from which it can be contemplated. In terms of thought, all twelve standpoints are fully justifiable. For a thinker who can penetrate into the nature of thought, there is not one single conception of the world, but twelve that can be equally justified—so far justified as to permit of equally good reasons being thought out for each of them. There are twelve such justified conceptions of the world.

Tomorrow we will start from the points of view we have gained in this way, so that from the consideration of man in terms of thought we may rise to a consideration of the cosmic.

• 2. “Unsere Welt ist das versinnlichte Material unserer Pflicht.” The rendering given is that of Professor Robert Adamson, in the series of Blackwood's Philosophical Classics for English readers. Alternative words for versinnlichte might be “sense-perceptible” or “tangible”. The quotation is from Fichte's work, Über den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung (1798).

Today we want to undertake a consideration that may seem out of place in the series of considerations we have been pursuing here, but which will nevertheless be useful for understanding the whole.

It is an ancient question as to how man can bring that which is really in the world outside into his knowledge, into his world of ideas. For us, the question is not as urgent as it must be for people outside our spiritual-scientific stream, because we know that it is possible to live one's way up into the spiritual worlds and to gain certainty about a true being, about a true reality behind the external reality that is present on the physical plane, by penetrating into the spiritual worlds. But only from the present into the future will humanity in general be able to rise to such a point of view of extra-bodily knowledge, as it were, and for a long time to come the question will have an infinitely great significance, how one can get into the knowledge, into the world of ideas of existence, of reality.

It is important for us to have some knowledge of this question because we must try to pave the way for an understanding with those who are still somewhat outside or even very much outside our spiritual movement. We must be able to provide information about the riddles and questions that those who have not yet come closer to this spiritual movement feel when they hear one or the other of the results of spiritual research. The question I have in mind is truly the most profound, the most tragic question that humanity has ever asked itself. For however much philosophical and other scientific investigation has been carried out, the question I have indicated arises from a state of mind and has an effect on the whole state of mind and mood of the person.

Man, let us approach the matter from this point of view, wakes up in the morning from a world that must remain unknown and mysterious to him if he does not penetrate into spiritual science, and he makes his thoughts about the world into which he enters when he wakes up. In these thoughts, he then wants to obtain what can be called a world view. The person who truly approaches these things with all their soul senses something of the weakness of the life of thought, of the life of ideas. He senses, one could say, this: that he is condemned in his inner being to live in ideas about the nature of the processes of the outer world, to make such ideas for himself; and he finds, again, that these ideas are, so to speak, only ideas after all, that they are not strong enough to absorb real being into themselves.

We feel this weakness of the imaginative life particularly when we reflect on the memory images. We bring up from past epochs of life what facts and experiences we have gone through. We bring them up by imagining them afterwards, perhaps after a long time. We must keep saying to ourselves: Yes, we have the experience only in our imagination, and the imagination does not have the power to conjure up reality anew.

This is one way in which we can truly feel how powerless the human being is, so to speak, in the face of the full-bodied, full-bodied reality of his imaginative life. The other is when we enter the world of the creative imagination. In this world of the creative imagination, we can conjure up beautiful and satisfying images in our minds, and we can feel how we are unable to somehow penetrate into real existence with what we conjure up in our imagination. The more materialistically minded people assume that the feelings that one can have towards this world of fantasy images. They say: When you form ideas about a higher spiritual world, about God and the spiritual world, what guarantees do you have that these ideas you form are anything other than figments of the imagination? What guarantees do you have that with these ideas, even if they give you the deepest bliss, you are penetrating into a world of genuine reality? What underlies the feelings in the face of this powerlessness of imagining, of forming ideas, has led to the, one might say, millennia-old philosophical struggle with regard to the question: How can man, with his concepts, his ideas, penetrate into a reality?

There are enough schools of philosophy, even if we disregard the most extreme skepticism, which believe that a satisfactory answer to this question, a satisfactory solution to this mystery of the human mind, has not yet been found. Certainly, people can pass over these world mysteries, these questions, with a certain mental complacency. But even those who pass by with their consciousness and live their lives in this way will still feel that this dissatisfaction with the riddles of the world makes waves in their astral body and evokes certain moods towards the world, melancholic moods; moods that one might try to overcome with cynicism can arise. But such a passing by of the world's riddles can certainly not lead to real satisfaction in the inner soul life, to the harmony of the soul.

For us, it is necessary to approach these riddles of the world in the same way that we have to approach many things; it is necessary for us to look into the essence of human nature and ask where this riddle comes from, why it exists. That it can be experienced as infinitely tragic has been shown by certain philosophers who have almost despaired in the solution of this riddle and have spoken of a deity that, as it were, misleads humanity in the chaos of world phenomena and has created human nature in such a way that it cannot arrive at a satisfactory world view.

Now let us recall something that has been discussed often in this or that context, but which can be useful to us precisely in the face of these world riddles. We have often spoken about what our life of thoughts, senses and ideas actually is. I have said that basically it is a kind of reflection. It is indeed the case - I have dealt with this particularly clearly here - that in the case of human beings we are dealing with what I will schematically indicate here: This is the physical body. Outside of this physical body, there lives, as it were, in the infinite universe, that which is the actual soul-spiritual essence of the human being. In the waking life of the day, this spiritual-soul essence extends into the bodily-soul essence. This creates a reflection, and this reflection is actually what we perceive as the content of our waking life. Truly, our body is like a mirror, and just as we do not see the mirror, but rather what is reflected in the mirror, so when a person is awake, we do not see what is actually happening in the body, but we see the reflection, what is reflected in it from the external physical world.

But to the extent that we are in the waking consciousness of the day, our I, that which we are as spiritual beings, is also in this world of mirror images. For the world around us is Maja, it is a sum of mirror images. Our waking self is in this sum of mirror images, and basically, as beings on the physical plane, we are nothing more than a mirror image among mirror images.

Let us just realize that for a moment. What remains of our entire imaginative life, in so far as we are on the physical plane, when we extinguish our day-consciousness? Then the I is also extinguished. When it is not mirrored, as is the case in deep, dreamless sleep, then the I is also extinguished. And when we wake up and have the world of mirror images before us, then our I is also in this world of mirror images; so that, insofar as we live on the physical plane, we can have nothing of ourselves but a mirror image.

We go through the world as beings of the physical plane and never have anything of ourselves but a mirror image. We live in the world; but insofar as we are conscious, we have before us, not the living fact, but the reflection of this living fact. We live as mirror images among mirror images; and what we learn to recognize through spiritual science – that we live as mirror images among mirror images, as Maja among the components of the great Maja – is what man feels when he feels the powerlessness of all spiritual experience in the face of the fully-fledged reality. In everyday life, a person does not say to himself, “I am a reflection among reflections,” but he does feel it, and he feels it most keenly when he asks himself, “How can I, with this reflection, attain the real, fully-substantial existence?”

Let us try to understand what is going on here. Imagine you have a reflective wall in front of you; it reflects what is spread out in the room, for example a table. However, you do not see the table, but you see the reflection. Imagine you wanted to go into the reflection, take the table out and place something on it. You would not be able to do that because you cannot place plates or soup bowls on the mirrored table. Just as it is impossible to place plates and soup bowls on the mirrored table, it is equally impossible to derive the essence of the soul's immortality from what a person experiences on the physical plane and has around him between birth and death in a waking state. For the real soul is immortal, not its reflection, which we experience on the physical plane. Just consider that very clearly.

Man longs to recognize that which continually eludes him and which, while he lives on the physical plane, only continually presents him with a mirror image. The philosophies of all times have endeavored to deduce reality from the mirror images, to prove immortality from the mirror images. They have undertaken the task, symbolically speaking, of taking the table out of the mirror image, putting it in the room and placing plates and bowls on it.

If you go through the philosophies that are not fertilized by spiritual science, they appear to you as such a futile endeavor. Basically, if you try to go through my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, you will find in it the story of how, since the beginning of mankind's philosophical struggle, philosophy has, as it were, tried to get the table out of the mirror and put plates and bowls on it. Therefore, now that we do have such a spiritual-scientific movement, a final chapter had to be added to the book, which shows that what was there before must be supplemented by spiritual science, which is not concerned with mirror images but with realities. Now you might say: Then the book is certainly one that we do not need to read, because why should we concern ourselves with the futile struggle of humanity? Why should we take philosophy into consideration at all, since it is only concerned with the futile efforts of humanity? Yes, it is not like that at all, it really is not! What we do when we immerse ourselves in this struggle, which is indeed futile from a certain point of view, is nevertheless something infinitely meaningful, something that cannot be replaced by anything else. Philosophy will certainly always remain fruitless for the knowledge of the immortal soul nature, for the knowledge of the spiritual world and also of the divine being, but it will not remain fruitless for the development of certain human powers, for the development of certain human abilities. Precisely because philosophy as such proves unsuitable for attaining the things mentioned, because it remains, as it were, insensitive to them, it strengthens all the more the powers of the human soul. And even if it cannot convey knowledge, it does, by being a concentrated life of thought, prepare the soul to make itself suitable for penetrating into the spiritual world. What we gain by working out philosophy lifts us into the spiritual world more than anything else. Precisely because no forces are lost in acquiring real knowledge, therefore all forces are applied to the elevation of human abilities. But we must accept precisely from this consideration that experiencing on the physical plane, because it is an experience in images, has something unreal, something unreal, and that basically, by immersing ourselves in the philosophical world, we are experiencing something unreal in soul and spirit. But does it have a meaning, does it have a significance, that we experience soul and spirit on the physical plane as something unreal? Can we find a wisdom of the world order in this? We have to ask ourselves such a question, and to answer it, we have to bring some insights of spiritual science to mind.

When a person has progressed a little through meditation, through concentration, in short, through intensifying his spiritual-soul experience, he enters into an experience that is, as it were, an alert sleep, a living in the spiritual world. And the first experience that a person has when he is, as it were, at the starting point of the initiation, is such that the person experiences moments when the spiritual world enters his consciousness in a dream-like, shimmering, flickering way. He only realizes this afterwards, when he says to himself: Now you have experienced something of the spiritual world. Usually, disciples of initiation pay too little attention to this experience, otherwise they would progress more easily.

If man did not lose consciousness during sleep, he would live in this spiritual world during the whole time, from falling asleep to waking up. He is really in it the whole time in a world of objective weaving of thoughts. Those who carefully follow the instructions in “How to Know Higher Worlds” will find that, when they wake up, they know: you emerge as if you had been swimming under the sea and now you are emerging into the air; you emerge as if you had been weaving with your soul experiences in a world of thoughts. It is as if you were to catch the last shreds of this experience when you wake up.

This can make a great impression, although it is immediately lost and usually very difficult to hold onto in the memory. But it is important for those who want to move forward to catch just such moments of awakening, because that is when consciousness arises: Before you woke up, you were in a weaving objective world of thought with your astral body, and by immersing yourself in your physical body, you encounter your physical body, which reflects back to you what you have lived through all night, at first in such a way that it glitters in the soul. This awareness can arise and should be noted, and it is extremely important that it arises. When one has such an awareness, one begins to know why it is difficult to really get the thoughts one experiences during sleep and also during initiation into the physical world, into physical thinking; for one lives with one's thoughts quite differently out of the body than in the body.

To make this clear, let us consider the moment of waking up and being awake. When you wake up, you and your spiritual being dive into your physical body. It is not surprising that you continue to live in the weaving of thoughts, because you have been living in the weaving of thoughts throughout the whole night while you were asleep. What happens is as follows. Imagine – I will draw it schematically – you enter your physical body from the outside. While you are not yet inside, but still outside, you are in a wonderful world of weaving thoughts, in which the spirits of the next higher hierarchies develop their activity. Before you wake up, you are in the world of the angeloi, the archangeloi, the archai and so on with your soul-spiritual experiences. Just as you are in the physical world among animals, plants and minerals, you are in the world of the higher hierarchies during sleep. And this being-in, this working of the higher hierarchies on your soul being, that happens precisely with the powers of thought that prevail there. And now you dive into your physical body. By diving into the physical body, you concentrate your thoughts by being captivated by the small part of the body that your head encloses. There you have to concentrate and draw together what is spread out outside. What happens is that the life of thought moves in and submerges into the nervous system. The life of thought actually moves through the senses into the nervous system. And what happens then? It actually happens that the physical substance is continually seized by the thought experience, first the substance of the etheric body, then also the physical substance. And indeed, when you stuff a thought into the physical, it has a kind of killing effect; by grasping a thought in your physical body, you actually kill something in your nervous system. “Killing” is actually the right word for it.

We now think something – and after some time we reflect on what is inside us. So many nerve corpses as we have cherished thoughts are now in us. What remains when we have thought something is really nothing but corpses, so that when we fall asleep at night, we have to leave our physical body to itself so that it can dispose of the thought corpses that we have created during the day through our thinking.

Do these thought corpses have to be there? Yes, they have to be there, because these thought corpses are actually the imprints of thinking; and if we could not form these thought corpses, we would be just as unable to consciously grasp a thought during the day as we are at night. During the night we are involved in the weaving of thoughts in the spiritual world. We do not have a physical body at our disposal into which we could press the thought corpses. During the night, the thought passes away and dissolves in the universal life of thought. The difference is that during the day we can hold on to thoughts by turning them into corpses that we can bury in the physical body. There the life of thought hardens, and this hardening has the effect that we can have the life of thought consciously.

This is the more exact process. Here we have another example of how materialism fails to explain everything. The materialist believes that he must look for the cause of thinking in what goes on inside, in the process of putting corpses into the ground. But what actually takes place are processes of secretion of thought, processes of the dead body. And the nervous system is there so that the process of secretion can be produced through the activity of thought. What thought leaves over, what it cannot use, what it expels, is examined by physical physiology. But during the waking hours of the day something takes shape that can be called the dying away of thinking in the physical body. The powers of thought that one develops are used to produce, as it were, casts or imprints of oneself. The forces go into these casts. During the night they do not go into such casts, for then we live, as it were, in the general ocean of spiritual existence. But because we cannot form such impressions in normal life without initiation, our thoughts also dissolve in this general sea. When we want to grasp them in the morning, they have simply dissolved; not even memory can hold on to them.

So if we grasp the process very precisely, we can say: some thought process develops. As it enters our body, it produces those secretions in the nerves. But before it produces these secretions, it reflects itself. Before it passes into the body and the bodily activity, it first reflects itself; the evocation of this activity is a reflection.

Imagine looking at an object with your eyes or hearing a sound with your ears or tones resonating. The sound resonance is outside. This sound enters the ear. A process begins in the auditory nerves, namely this cadaverization and secretion. And what you hear is therefore the reflected sound, actually an inner echo.

In this way, in our everyday experience, we are completely in a world of mirror images, and our own being is interwoven into this world of mirror images. For we would grasp our true being if we felt ourselves floating outside our body in the spiritual realm, if we felt: Now one of the angeloi seizes you; now you are weaving in the angeloi, you merge into the realm of the archangels, into the realm of the primal forces and so on. - Then we would feel carried into the realms of the higher beings. We would feel the immortality of the soul and know: just as these beings carry the happenings in the world from world age to world age, so they carry us with them from world age to world age. But in ordinary life, man does not perceive this. He is immersed in the physical body, and the experience of one's own self in true being dies during life in the physical body, and only the world of mirror images remains.

We can therefore shine a deep light into the process of knowledge, and one would wish that an awareness of the nature of this process of knowledge would truly take hold of the age. For this recognition of the world as a sum of mirror images, and the recognition that the actual being lies behind it, that is already an ascent to what humanity is really meant to be led to through spiritual science. We can therefore say no more and no less than: Man enters the physical plane, and by entering the physical plane, he is actually transferred from the world of reality into a world of unreality, into a mere world of images. And we must feel the full gravity of this realization, that we stand within a world of images when we think on the physical plane, when we perceive and imagine.

Thus we can say that the spiritual entities, by handing us down to the physical plane, have taken us out of the world of real reality and placed us in a world of unreality. And we recognize this at first as a fact of the spiritual world, even if it is not yet the world plan. We only recognize it as a fact of the world plan when we raise the question: Why are we, insofar as we are beings of the real physical world, placed in a world of unreal images? Why? - Suppose we were not, suppose we were placed on the physical plane in such a way that we had not images but realities. What does that actually mean? It would mean that we perceive the physical world; for example, we hear a sequence of sounds. The effect of this sequence of sounds goes into our ear, into our auditory nerves, and causes a change there. If we were only able to enjoy what is going on in the auditory nerves and were unable to project it up into our imaginations, then we would be in reality; we would have realities, not images. But that is not the case. We are really thrown out of the world of realities and placed in a world of images, in a world of unrealities. If we were really in the world of realities, in a world of reality, then we could never have the opportunity to give reality to a world ourselves, because we cannot give reality to what we experience as reality. An object that I take in my hand from the outside is something. It is not just an image, the object is something. Just as I cannot push the table that I see in the mirror, I cannot do anything real with the world that is only given to me in images. But if it is a matter of us creating realities ourselves, then it is just right that we live in a world of images, because then the images have no reality, but we can give them reality. Do we do that?

Yes, my dear friends, we do, in one area of our lives we do that. We do that when we act morally. In the moment when moral impulses flash through our mental life, in that moment we create something in the world that would not be there without us. When we imagine the world, we have only images; when we act morally, we place realities into the world. We would never be able to live with our morality in a world that would already appear to us as real. For then we would encounter the world everywhere with what we want to do morally.

Take animals, for example. They experience the world quite differently from human beings. They do not experience it as a world of images, but as a world of real realities. This is why animals cannot develop morality. Human beings can develop morality because they can place moral impulses into the world themselves, which is otherwise only a world of mirror images. What man lets flow into the world as moral impulses flows into the world as a reality that comes from him. The gods have placed us on the physical plane and made our spiritual experience a world of unreality, so that we may be in a position to place moral impulses as reality into this unreality. There you have creation out of nothing, creation into nothing through images that are only pictures, only unrealities.

If we look again at the sleeping person, we can say: insofar as this sleeping person is outside of his physical body and his etheric body, he experiences the world of weaving thoughts, into which the beings of the higher hierarchies are interwoven. But something else also permeates and flows through this world. What is it? The beings of the higher hierarchies are not merely thought beings; they are real beings, they have substance, and what they have as substance we do not experience in our thoughts, but in our will, namely in the will that is permeated by love. In our will, by placing the moral impulses into the world, which is otherwise only a world of images for us, we bring down the substance of the higher beings into our world. What we really do out of moral impulses is nothing other than bringing down the substance of the beings of the higher hierarchies into our world.

Our thoughts, when we live with our spiritual and soul being in our physical body after waking up, are mirrored in a part of our body: so to speak, the products of the deposit of our waking thought life are formed in the nervous system. The nature of moral impulses, which basically come from the nature of the higher hierarchies, goes into our whole body, permeating our whole being, our whole organism, not just the nervous system; so that the human being can be seen as twofold: as a nervous human being, and alongside that, the whole of the rest of the physical human being, into which everything that is experienced in the person's moral impulses flows. But we come out of the world of spiritual realities by immersing ourselves in our physical body. As we immerse ourselves in our physical body, emerging from the worlds of thought, they flicker and glitter, reflecting back, forming the corpses of thoughts in the nervous system. We just do not perceive this flickering and glittering in our ordinary lives. Thoughts live in us, but they are not living beings in us; they are reflected, and what we perceive is a kind of reading of the dead thoughts. But these thoughts that reflect themselves are a living thing, and that has great significance in the order of the world. When a person stands before you and you look at this person and are aware: he perceives, he thinks, what is in his mind as a web of thoughts goes into his nervous system, is reflected in everything perceptible, in sounds and colors - what happens to the spiritual light that goes into him, that makes impressions on his nervous system? What happens to the impressions that arise? You see, the cherubim come, collect this light and use it for the further world order, and we are all the candlesticks that are set up in the world order. By thinking, perceiving and imagining, we are the candlesticks of the cherubim in the world order. Just as this light here in the physical world illuminates space, so we are the candlesticks in the spiritual world for the cherubim. When we think, light arises in us; the light of thought radiates out from us and illuminates the world in which the cherubim live.

When we carry into our body from the world of hierarchies those substances from which moral impulses are born and these penetrate our entire organization, our volitional impulses, our actions, take place. Everything we do is the result of these volitional impulses being active in us. It is not just what happens externally in the world through us, but, insofar as it is moral action, this moral action is gathered by the seraphim, and this moral action is the source of warmth for the whole cosmic order. Under the influence of people who act immorally, the seraphim freeze, that is, they receive no warmth with which they can heat the whole cosmic world. Under the influence of moral action, the seraphim acquire the powers by which the cosmic world order is maintained, just as physical warmth maintains the physical world order.

You see, the worldview that spiritual science gives us becomes very real. It brings us to the realization: When you think, when you imagine, you are the kindled light of the cherubim. When you act, when you do something, when you unfold the will, then you are the source of warmth, the source of fire of the seraphim. We stride through the world, conscious that we are not useless good-for-nothings in it, but stand in the world order for the benefit of the whole world order, and conscious that it is also in our power to be a source of darkness in the world. For if we want to be dull and stupid and not think, then we increase the darkness, and the consequence of this is that the cherubim have no light. If we are bad and immoral, we increase the coldness in the whole world order, and the seraphim have no warmth.

Spiritual science does not give us mere theories, as external science can do if it is not a practical science and leads to technical application. Spiritual science gives us something through which we first learn to know what we as human beings are in the whole order of the world. What follows from spiritual science, the essential, is what is important. It is a heightened sense of responsibility towards our humanity. One feels what tasks one has towards the cosmos by being human. One feels that one can be human in the right sense and can be human in the wrong sense, that one can give one's all to darkness and cold or to light and warmth in the world order.

With this practical goal in mind, one would like to bring spiritual science into the world so that it can take hold of hearts. For one can be sure that spiritual science will then really be able to create a new human soul condition and thus a completely new form of human experience on earth and further in the universe, that it is not just a matter of passing on knowledge, but a source of true, genuine life forces. It is so ardently desired that this be grasped, be grasped so very deeply by those who today feel the urge for this spiritual science! For this spiritual science is still too much taken as something external, still too much so that it, like other knowledge, is to satisfy curiosity or, let us say, the thirst for knowledge. But the seriousness with which spiritual science is placed in life must grow. That is what our time so urgently needs: not just belief in the spiritual world, but the possibility of relating to the spiritual world in such a way that the human soul truly draws near to the spiritual world. And as the child draws nourishment from its mother's breast, so does the human soul draw the substance of life for a new form of earthly experience, of earthly activity, of knowing itself in the spiritual order of the world, from what spiritual science is able to reveal to it.

Only when the relationship of people to spiritual science is imbued with this magical breath of feeling and perception will spiritual science be understood in its true, innermost core. But it will be necessary for it to take root in particular among those who participate in a common work of spiritual scientific endeavors.

What else should our building be if not something in which we all participate – especially those who are working on it – participate as a community, in a confluence of attitudes that spiritual science awakens! That is the tremendously important and significant thing. If the building is erected in this spirit, then it will not only be this dry building with its forms, but will be something that radiates far out into the world; it will be what those who worked on it have created in loving, genuine collaboration. Whatever they have poured into the structure, whatever they have left behind in it, no matter how loosely it may be connected with the structure, if it is directed in love towards what the structure should be, then it may be the smallest activity. And if it flows from the human attitude that seeks to merge with the cosmic order, then this structure will be something that is not just dead, but alive, truly alive.

That is the secret of our thought corpses, that we can always revive them again for a certain time. And the other side, that of remembrance, I discussed last time: that which thoughts have produced in us as thought corpses and which remains in its form, just as human corpses remain on earth, can be revived by later soul forces. And when a memory emerges, that which is only a thought corpse will shine again in us for a while in a living way.

Let us work to ensure that our building is similar in the human order, so that those who come to see it are unconsciously transported into the sphere of love with which it is built! For then it will not be merely a collection of dead forms, but something that comes to life when you look at it, like the thought-corpses of memory. And then, for all future time, the way we work on it will determine whether this structure will be something that can be revitalized again and again by those who encounter it.

By allowing these thoughts to work on our soul, we gain a living relationship to this building of ours, the living relationship that humanity really needs by living from the present into the future. For much will not be allowed to remain dead, but will have to live, but will only be able to live through the emergence of that new attitude that must be a result of spiritual science and spiritual knowledge.

In the course of the last few days we had occasion to refer once again to the turning point in Western civilization in the fourth century A.D. with the example of John Scotus Erigena. In the present, when so many things are supposed to change, it is particularly important to understand clearly what really happened then to the human soul constitution. For it is a fact that we too are living in an extraordinarily significant moment in humanity's evolution; it is necessary for us to pay heed to the signs of the times and to listen to the voices of the spiritual world, so that out of the chaos of the present we may find a path into the future.

In the fourth century A.D., changes took place in the souls of those belonging to the leading nations and tribes, just as in our century changes in part have begun to develop, in part will still occur. And in John Scotus Erigena we have observed a personality who in a certain way was influenced by the aftereffects of humanity's world view prior to the fourth century A.D.

We shall now call to mind other things that also make evident this change of character. As far as can be done in a more outward manner, we will consider from this standpoint how the study of nature developed, in particular people's views of health and illness. We shall confine ourselves, first of all, to historical times. When we ask what the views concerning nature, particularly human nature in connection with health and illness were, and look back into the early Egyptian period, we can for the first time speak of any similarity between these ancient views and ours now. Yet, in regard to health, illness, and their natural causes, these ancient Egyptians held opinions still differing significantly from ours. The reason was that they thought of their relationship with nature quite differently from the way we think of it today. The ancient Egyptians certainly were not fully aware that they were gradually separating from the earth. They pictured their own bodies—and they naturally started by considering what we call “body” in an intimate connection with the forces of the earth. We have already mentioned in the last lecture how such a concept arises, how it is that the human being pictures himself in a certain sense closely bound inwardly to the earth through his body. I referred to the ancient soul forces in order to illustrate this. It was altogether clear to the ancient Egyptians that they had to see themselves as part of the earth, similarly to how the plants must be seen as belonging to the earth. Just as it is possible to trace the course of the sap or at least the earth's forces in plants more or less visibly, so people in ancient Egypt experienced the working of certain forces that, at the same time, held sway in the earth. Therefore, the human body was seen as belonging to the earth.

This could only be done because a view of the earth prevailed that was quite different from the view prevalent nowadays. The ancient Egyptians would never have thought of representing the earth as a mineral body the way we do it today. In a sense, they pictured the earth as a mighty organic being, a being not organized in quite the same way as an animal or man, but still, in a certain respect, an organism; and they considered the earth's masses of rock as a skeleton of sorts. They imagined that processes took place in the earth that simply extended into the human body.

The ancient Egyptians experienced a certain sensation when they mummified the human corpse after it had been discarded by the soul, when they tried to preserve the shape of the human body by mummification. In the formative forces proceeding from the earth and forming the human body, they beheld something like the will of the earth. They were trying to give permanent expression to this will of the earth. These Egyptians held views concerning the soul that seem somewhat alien to a person of today. We shall now try to characterize them.

It must be emphasized that when we go back to early Egyptian times, and even more so to the ancient Persian and Indian epochs, we find that, based on instinctive old wisdom, the doctrine of reincarnation—the return of the essential human entity in successive earth lives—was widespread. We are mistaken, however, in assuming that these ancient people were of the opinion that what we know as soul today is what always returns. Especially the Egyptian concept demonstrates that such a view did not exist. Instead, it must be pictured like this: The soul-spiritual being of man lives in spiritual worlds between death and a new birth. When the time approaches for this being to descend to the physical earth, it works formatively in the human body, in what comes through heredity from the successive generations. On the other hand, these ancient people did not think that what they bore in their consciousness during life between birth and death was the actual psycho-spiritual being that lives between death and a new birth and then shapes the human corporeality between birth and death. No, these people of antiquity pictured things differently. They said: When I find myself in the waking state from morning until evening, I know absolutely nothing of the soul-spiritual matters that are also my own affairs as a human being. I must wait until my own true being, which worked on me when I entered into earthly existence through birth, appears to me in half-sleep or in image-filled sleep, as was the case in these ancient times.

Thus, the ancient human being was aware that in his waking state he was not meant to experience his actual soul being; instead, he was to look upon his true soul entity as upon an external picture, something that came over him when he passed into the frequently described dreamlike, clairvoyant conditions. In a certain sense, the human being in former times experienced his own being as something that appeared to him like an archangel or angel. Only beginning in ancient Egypt, people started to think of this inner human essence as belonging directly to the soul.

If we try to characterize how the ancient Egyptians pictured this, we have to say the following. They thought: In a dream image, my soul-spiritual being appears to me in its condition between death and a new birth. It shapes the body for its use. When I look at the form of the body, I see how this soul-spirit being has worked like an artist on this body. I see much more of an expression of my soul-spiritual being in my body than if I look within. For that reason I shall preserve this body. As a mummy, its form shall be retained, for in it is contained the work the soul has done on the body between the last death and this birth. That is what I retain when I embalm the body and in the mummy preserve the image on which the soul-spiritual being has worked for centuries.

By contrast, the ancient Egyptians considered the experiences of the human being in the waking state between birth and death differently: This is really like a flame kindled within me, but it has very little to do with my true I. My I remains more or less outside my soul experiences in the waking state between birth and death. These soul experiences are actually a temporal, passing flame, enkindled in my body through my higher soul being. In death, they are extinguished once again. Only then does my true soul-spirit being shine forth, and I dwell in it until the new birth.

It is true that the ancient Egyptians imagined that in the life between birth and death they did not properly attain to an experience of the soul element. They viewed it as something that stood above them, enkindled their temporal soul element and extinguished it again; they saw it as something that took from the earth the earth's dust to form the body. In the mummy, they then tried to preserve this bodily form.

The ancient Egyptians really placed no special value on the soul element that experiences itself in the waking state between birth and death, for they looked beyond this soul nature to a quite different soul-spirit essence, which ever and again forms new bodies and passes through the period between death and a new birth. Thus, they beheld the interplay of forces between the higher human element and the earth. They really directed their attention to the earth, for to them, the earth was also the house of Osiris. Inner consciousness was something they overlooked.

The development of Greek culture, which began in the eighth century B.C., consisted precisely in man's placing an ever increasing value on this soul element that lights up between birth and death, something the ancient Egyptian still viewed as enkindled and subsequently dying flame. To the Greeks, this soul element became valuable. But they still had the feeling that in death something like an extinction of this soul element took place. This gave rise to the famous Greek saying I have characterized often from this viewpoint: "Better a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shades." This saying was coined by the Greeks as they looked upon the soul element. To them, the latter became important, whereas it had been less significant for the ancient Egyptians. This development is connected with the view of health and illness held by the ancient Egyptians.

They thought that this soul-spiritual element, which does not really enter properly into human consciousness between birth and death, builds up the human body out of the earth elements, out of the water, the air, the solid substances of the earth, and the warmth. And since the ancient Egyptians believed that this human body was formed out of the earth, they set great store by keeping it pure. During the golden age of Egyptian culture, maintaining the body in a pure state was therefore something that was especially cultivated. The Egyptians thought very highly of this body. Hence, they felt that when the body became ill, its connection with the earth was in some way disturbed, in particular its relationship to the earth's water, and this relationship had to be restored. Therefore, there were hosts of physicians in Egypt who studied the relationship of the earthly elements to the human body. Their concern was to maintain people's health and, when it was disturbed, to restore it by means of water cures and climatic treatments. Already in the heyday of Egyptian civilization, specialized physicians were at work, and their activity was principally directed at the task of bringing the human body into the proper relation with the earth's elements.

Beginning with the eighth century B.C., particularly in Greek civilization, this changed. Now, the consciously experienced soul element became really important. People did not see it anymore in as close a connection with the earth as people in ancient Egypt had done. For the ancient Egyptians, the human body was in a sense something plantlike that grew out of the earth. For the Greeks, the psycho-spiritual element was the factor that held together the earth elements; they were more concerned with the way these elements in the body were held together by man's soul and spirit. On this basis developed the scientific views of Greece. We find them especially well expressed by Hippocrates, the famous Greek physician and contemporary of Phidias, Socrates, and Plato.¹ This view of the importance of the human soul element, which becomes conscious of itself between birth and death, is already clearly developed in Hippocrates, who lived in the fourth century B.C.

We would be very much mistaken, however, if we believed that this soul-spiritual element lived in Greek consciousness in the same way we experience it in our consciousness today. Just reflect on how poor, how abstractly poor this thing is that modern man calls his soul! When people speak of thinking, feeling, and willing, they picture them as quite nebulous formations. It is something that no longer affects the human being substantially. It had a substantial effect on the Greeks, for they had an awareness that this psycho-spiritual being actually holds together the elements of the body and causes their interplay. They did not have in mind an abstract soul element as people do today. They had in mind a full, rich system of forces that gives shape above all to the fluid element, bestowing on it the human form. The Egyptians felt: The soul-spirit being that finds its way from death to a new birth gives form to this fluid element. The Greeks felt: What I experience consciously as my soul element, this is what shapes the water; it has a need for air and then develops the circulatory organs in that form. It causes the conditions of warmth in the body and also deposits salt and other earthly substances in the body.

The Greeks actually did not picture the soul separately from the body. They imagined it molding the fluid body, bringing about the presence of air through inhaling and exhaling. They pictured the soul causing the conditions of warmth in the body, the body's warming and cooling processes, the breathing and movement of the fluids, the permeation of the fluids with the solid ingredients—actually representing only about 8% of the human body. The Greeks pictured all this in full vitality. They attached special importance to the shaping of the fluids. They imagined that in turn a fourfold influence was at work in these fluids due to the forces active in the four elements, earth, water, air, and warmth. This is how the Greeks pictured it.

In winter, human beings must shut themselves off from the outer world to a certain extent, they cannot live in intimate contact with it. They must rely on themselves. In winter, above all the head and its fluids make themselves felt. There the part of the fluids that is most waterlike works inwardly in the human being. In other words, for the Greeks this was phlegm or mucus. They believed all that is mucous in the human organism to be soul-permeated and particularly active in winter. Then came spring, and the Greeks found that the blood made itself felt through greater activity; the blood received greater stimulation than in winter. This is a predominantly sanguine time for human beings, emphasis is placed on what is centralized in the arteries leading to the heart and is active in the movement of fluids. In winter, it is the movement of the phlegm in the head, hence, this is the reason why the human being is then particularly inclined to any number of diseases of the mucous fluids. In spring, the blood circulation is especially stimulated.

The Greeks pictured all this in such a way that matter was not separated from the soul aspects. In a sense, blood and phlegm were half soullike, and the soul itself with its forces was something half physical in moving the fluids.

When summer approached, the Greeks imagined that the activity of bile (they called it yellow gall), which has its center in the liver, is particularly aroused. The Greeks still had a special view of what this is like in the human being. For the most part, people have lost this view. They no longer see how, in spring, the skin is colored by the blood's stimulation. They no longer notice the peculiar yellow tinge coming from the liver where this so-called yellow bile has its center. In the rosy flush of spring and the yellowish tinge of summer, the Greeks saw activities of the soul.

When autumn came, they said: Now, the fluids having their center in the spleen, the fluids of black bile, are particularly active. In this way, the Greeks pictured in the human being movements and effects of fluids that were directly under the influence of the soul. Unlike the Egyptians, the Greeks considered the human body by itself, apart from the whole of the earth. Thus, they came closer to the inner soul configuration of the human being as it is expressed between birth and death.

As this civilization progressed further, however, particularly as the Western element, the Latin-Roman element, gained ground, this view, which we find especially in Hippocrates who based his medical science on it, was to a certain extent lost. Hippocrates held that the soul-spiritual nature of man manifesting between birth and death causes these mixtures and separations of the fluids. When these do not proceed as the soul-spiritual influence intends them to go, the human being encounters illness. The soul-spiritual element actually always strives to make the activities of the fluids run their normal course. This is why the physician has the special task of studying the soul-spirit nature and the effect of its forces on the activities of the fluids in addition to observing the illness. If the activity of the physical body somehow tends to cause an abnormal mixture of fluids, then the soul element intervenes. It intervenes to the point of a crisis, when the outcome in the struggle between corporeal and soul-spiritual elements hangs in the balance. The physician must guide matters in such a way that this crisis occurs. Then, at some point in the body it will be evident that the bad fluid combination is trying to come out, to escape. Then it is the physician's task to intervene in a proper way in this crisis, which he has introduced in the first place, by removing the fluids that have accumulated in the way described above and that are resisting the influence of the soul-spiritual element. The physician accomplishes this either by means of purging or by bloodletting at the right moment.

Hippocrates' manner of healing was of a quite special kind and connected with this view of the human being. It is interesting that such a view existed that pictured an intimate relationship between the soul-spirit element as expressed between birth and death and the system of body fluids. Things changed, however, when the Latin-Roman influence continued this development.

This Roman element had less inclination for a full comprehension of the form and the system of fluids. This can be clearly seen in the case of the physician Galen² who lived in the second century A.D. The system of fluids that Hippocrates saw was no longer so transparent to Galen. You really have to picture it like this: Today, you watch how a retort in a chemistry laboratory is heated by a flame underneath, and you see the product of the substances inside. For Hippocrates, the effect of the soul-spiritual element in the fluids of the body was just as transparent. What took place in the human being was to him visible in a sensory-supersensory way. The Romans, on the other hand, no longer had a sense for this vivid view. They no longer considered the soul-spiritual element that dwells in man in its connection to the body. They turned their glance in a more abstract, spiritual direction. They only understood how the soul-spiritual being can experience this spirit within itself between birth and death.

The Greeks looked at the body, saw the soul-spiritual in the mixing and separating of the fluids and, to them, the sensory view in its clarity and vividness was the main thing. To the Romans, the essential thing was what a man felt himself to be, the feeling of self within the soul. To the Greeks, the view of how phlegm, blood, yellow, and black bile intermingle, how they are, in a manner of speaking, an expression of the earthly elements of air, fire, water, earth in the human being became something they saw as a work of art. Whereas the Egyptians contemplated the mummy, the Greeks looked upon the living work of art. The Romans had no sense for this, but they had an awareness for taking a stand in life, for developing inner consciousness, for allowing the spirit to speak, not for looking at the body but for making the spirit speak out of the soul between birth and death.

This is connected with the fact that at the height of Egyptian civilization, four branches of knowledge were especially cultivated in their ancient form: geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. In contemplating the heavenly element that formed the human body out of the earth, the Egyptians imagined that this body is molded in its spatial form according to the law of geometry; it is subject to the influences of the stars according to the laws of astrology. It is involved in activity from within according to the laws of arithmetic and is inwardly built up harmoniously according to the laws of music—music here conceived not merely as musical tone elements but as something that lives in harmonies in general. In the human being. as a product of the earth, in this mummified man, the Egyptians saw the result of geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. The Greeks lost sight of this. The Greeks replaced the lifeless, mummified element, which can be comprehended by means of geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music, with the living soul element, the inner forming, the artistic self-development of the human body.

This is why we note in Greek culture a certain decline of geometry as it had existed among the Egyptians. It now became a mere science, no longer a revelation. The same happened with astrology and arithmetic. At most, the inner harmony that forms the basis of all living things remains in the Greek concept of music.

Then, when the Latin element came to the fore, the Romans, as I said, pictured this soul-spiritual being as it is between birth and death together with the inner spirit now expressing itself not as something that could inwardly be seen but inwardly experienced, taking its stand in the world through grammar, through dialectics, and through rhetoric. Therefore, during the time when Greek culture was passing over into Latin culture, these three disciplines flourished. In grammar, man was represented as spirit through the word; in rhetoric, the human being was represented through the beauty and forming of the word; in dialectics, the soul was represented through the forming of thought. Arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music continued to exist, but only as ancient legacies turned science. These disciplines, which in ancient Egypt had been very much alive, became abstract sciences. By contrast, the arts attached to man—grammar, rhetoric, dialectics—took on new life.

There is a great difference between the way a person thought of a triangle in ancient Egypt prior to Euclid and the way people thought of it after Euclid's time. The abstract triangle was not experienced in earlier times the way it was conceived later on. Euclid signified the decadence of Egyptian arithmetic and geometry. In Egypt, people felt universal forces when they envisaged a triangle. The triangle was a being. Now, all this became science, while dialectics, grammar and rhetoric became alive.

Schools were now established in accordance with the following thinking: Those people who want to be educated have to develop the spiritual potential in their already existent soul-spiritual human nature. As the first stage of instruction, they must master grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. Then, they have to go through what remains only as a traditional legacy but forms the subjects of higher education: geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. These then were the seven liberal arts, even throughout the Middle Ages: grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. The arts that came more to the fore were grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics; the arts that were more in the background, conceived by the ancient Egyptians in a living manner as they stood on a relationship to the earth, were the subjects of higher learning.

This was the essential development between the eighth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. Look at Greece in the fourth century or in the third or fifth centuries. Look at modern Italy. You find everywhere in full bloom this knowledge of the human being as a work of art, as a product of the soul-spiritual element, of life of the spirit through dialectics, rhetoric, and grammar. Julian Apostate³ was educated in approximately this way in the Athenian school of philosophers. This is how he saw the human being.

Into this age burst the beginning of Christianity. But by then all this knowledge was in a certain sense already fading. In the fourth century it had been in its prime, and we have heard that by John Scotus Erigena's time only a mere tradition of it existed. What lived in the Greeks based on the view I have just characterized, then was transmitted to Plato and Aristotle who expressed it philosophically. When the fourth century B.C. drew near, however, people understood Plato and Aristotle less and less. At most people could accept the logical, abstract parts of their teachings. People were engrossed in grammar, rhetoric, dialectics. Arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music had turned into sciences. People increasingly found their way into a sort of abstract element, into an element where something that had formerly been alive was now to exist only as tradition. As the centuries passed, it became still more a tradition. Those who were educated in the Latin tongue retained in a more or less ossified state grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. Formerly a person would have laughed if he had been asked whether his thinking referred to something real. He would have laughed, for he would have said: I engage in dialectics; I do not cultivate the art of concepts in order to engage in anything unreal. For there, the spiritual reality lives in me. As I engage in grammar, the Logos speaks in me. As I engage in rhetoric, it is the cosmic sun that sends its influences into me.

This consciousness of being connected with the world was lost more and more. Everything became abstract soul experiences, a development that was completed by Scotus Erigena's time. The ideas that had been retained from earlier times—from Plato and Aristotle—were only comprehended more or less logically. People ceased to find any living element in them.

When the Emperor Constantine⁴ made Rome the ruling power under the pretext that he wished to establish the dominion of Christianity, everything became entirely abstract. It became so abstract that a person like Julian Apostate, who had been educated in the Athenian school of philosophy, was silenced. With an aching heart, he looked at what Constantine had done in the way of ossifying concepts and ancient living ideas, and Julian Apostate resolved to preserve this life that had still been evident to him in the Athenian schools of philosophers.

Later on, Justinian ruled from Byzantium, from Constantinople, which had been founded by Constantine.⁵ He abolished the last vestiges of these Athenian philosophers' schools that still possessed an echo of living human knowledge. Therefore, the seven wise Athenians—Athenians they were not, they were a quite international group, men from Damascus, Syrians, and others gathered from all over the world—had to flee on order of Justinian. These seven wise men fled to Asia, to the king of the Persians,⁶ where philosophers had had to escape to already earlier when Zeno, the Isaurian,⁷ had dispersed a similar academy. Thus we see how this knowledge, the best of which could no longer be comprehended in Europe, the living experience that had existed in Greece, had to seek refuge in Asia.

What was later propagated in Europe as Greek culture was really only its shadow. Goethe allowed it to influence him and as a thoroughly lively human being, he was seized with such longing that he wished he could escape from what had been offered to him as the shadow of Greek culture. He traveled to the south in order to experience at least the aftereffects.

In Asia, people who were capable of doing so received of Plato and Aristotle what had been brought across to them. This is why during the sixth century Aristotle's work was translated based on the Asian-Arabic spirit. This gave Aristotle's philosophy a different form.

What had in fact been attempted here? The attempt had been made to take what the Greeks had experienced as the relationship between the soul-spiritual element and the body's system of fluids, what they had seen in full physical and soul-spiritual clarity and formative force, and to raise it up into the region where the ego could be fully comprehended. From this originated the form of science tinged with Arabism, which was especially cultivated in the academy of Gondishapur⁸ throughout the whole declining age of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. This form of science was brought in later centuries by Avicenna⁹ and Averroes¹⁰ by way of Spain into Europe and eventually exerted a great influence on people such as Roger Bacon¹¹ and others. It was, however, a completely new element that the academy of Gondishapur meant to bestow on mankind in a manner that could not endure by way of the translation of Aristotle and certain mystery wisdom teachings, which then continued in directions of which we shall talk another time.

Through Avicenna and Averroes, something was introduced that was to enter human civilization with the beginning of the fifteenth century, namely, the struggle for the consciousness soul. After all, the Greeks had only attained to the intellectual or rational soul. What Avicenna and Averroes brought across, what Aristotelianism had turned into in Asia, so to speak, struggles with the comprehension of the human I, which, in a completely different way, has to struggle upward through the Germanic tribes from below to above—I have described this in the public lectures here during the course.¹² In Asia, on the other hand, the I was received like a revelation from above as a mystery wisdom. This gave rise to the view that for so long provoked such weighty disputes in Europe, namely, that man's ego is not actually an independent entity but is basically one with the divine universal being. The aim was to take hold of the ego. The I was supposed to be contained in what the Greek beheld as the being of body, soul, and spirit.

Yet, people could not harmonize the above with the I. This is the reason for Avicenna's conception that what constitutes the individual soul originates with birth and ends with death. As we have seen, the Greeks struggled with this idea. The Egyptians viewed it only in this way—the individual soul is enkindled at birth, extinguished at death. People were still wrestling with this conception when they considered the actual soul element between birth and death, the true soul element. The I, on the other hand, could not be transitory in this manner. Therefore, Avicenna said: Actually, the ego is the same in all human beings. It is basically a ray from the Godhead which returns again into the Godhead when the human being dies. It is real, but not individually real. A pneumatic pantheism came about, as if the ego had no independent existence but was only a ray of the deity streaming between birth and death into what the Greeks viewed as the soul-spiritual nature. In a manner of speaking, the transitory soul element of man is ensouled with the eternal element through the ray of the Godhead between birth and death. This is how people imagined it.

This shows to some extent how people of that age struggled with the approach of the I, the consciousness of the ego, the consciousness soul. This is what occurred in the span of time between the eighth century B.C. and the fifteenth century A.D., the middle of which is the fourth century A.D. People were placed in a condition where the concrete experience, which still dwelled in the mixing and the separating fluids and beheld the soul element in the corporeal being, was replaced. A purely abstract state of mind, directed more toward man's inner being, replaced this vivid element of perception.

It is indeed possible to say that until the fourth century A.D., Greek culture predominated in Romanism. Romanism only became dominant when it had already declined. In a sense, Rome was predestined to exert its activity only in its dead element, in its dead Latin language, in which it then prepared the way for what entered human evolution in the fifteenth century. This is how the course of civilization must be observed. For, once again, we are now faced with having to seek the way toward knowing of the approach of spiritual revelations from the higher worlds. Once again, we must learn to struggle, just as people struggled then.

We must be clear about the fact that what we possess as natural science came to us by way of the Arabs. The knowledge we have acquired through our sciences must be lifted up to Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. In a certain sense, however, we must also steel our faculties by means of observing the things of the past, so that we acquire the strength to attain what we need for the future. This is the mission of anthroposophical spiritual science. We must recall this again and again, my dear friends. We should acquire quite vivid perceptions of how differently the Greeks thought about soul and corporeal aspects. It would have sounded ridiculous to them if one had listed seventy-two or seventy-six chemical elements. They perceived the living effect of the elements outside and of the fluids within.

We live within the elements. Insofar as the body is permeated by the soul, the human being with his body lives within the four elements the Greeks spoke about. We have arrived at the point where we have lost sight of the human being, because we can no longer view him in the above manner and focus only on what chemistry teaches today in the way of abstract elements.

• 1. Hippocrates, 460–377 B.C., known already in antiquity as the greatest physician.
  
  Phidias, 500–435 B.C., Greek sculptor in Athens, master of classical style.
  
  Plato, 427–347 B.C., Greek philosopher, pupil of Socrates.
  
  Socrates, 470–399 B.C., moral philosopher in Athens, developed Socratic dialog to teach his students to think for themselves.
• 2. Galen, A.D. 129–199, outstanding physician in the days of the Roman emperors; personal physician to Marc Aurel. In his writings, he tried to compile all medical knowledge of antiquity.
• 3. Julian Apostate, A.D. 332–363, nephew of Constantine the Great, Roman emperor from A.D. 361–363.
• 4. Constantine I., the Great, A.D. 288–337, Roman Emperor from A.D. 306–337. Made Christianity the state religion in 324.
• 5. Justinian I, see note 8, Lecture IV.
• 6. “... to the king of the Persians ...”: Chosrau Nurshivan (king from A.D. 531–580) invited the sages from all over the world, particularly those versed in medicine, to Persia. He is frequently considered the founder of the academy of Gondishapur.
• 7. Zeno the Isaurian, A.D. 426–491, Byzantine emperor from A.D. 474–491, closed the school of philosophers in Edessa in 487.
• 8. Gondishapur (Djundaisabur), city founded by the king of the Sassanides, Shapur I (242–272). It was the cultural center of the kingdom for a long period.
• 9. Ibn Sina Avicenna, 980–1037, Persian philosopher and physician, author of over 100 books.
• 10. Ibn Roshd Averroes, 1126–1198, Arabian philosopher and universal scientist. Physician from Cordova. Following Aristotelianism, he attempted to combine philosophy and faith. His rational faith led to his banishment.
• 11. Roger Bacon, around 1216–1294, English Franciscan, called doctor mirabilis on account of his comprehensive knowledge. He included natural scientific perceptions in his theological manner of thought.
• 12. See note 2 to Lecture XVI.

In recent lectures given here my endeavour has been to show how in the middle of the 19th century a flood of materialism burst into the evolutionary process of humanity, and how from different sides it was felt that a flood of materialism of this kind had never previously been known, and that furthermore there was a certain significance in the way it had arisen I also tried to bring home the fact that men must arm themselves if they are to continue along the path of evolution once laid down for humanity.

Particularly in the most recent lectures¹ I described the efforts that were made from different quarters concerned with the furtherance of cultural aims akin to those of spiritual science to inculcate an element which was deemed necessary in order to demonstrate to men that something entirely new must be added to the old. Naturally, a very great deal more could be said about this subject, and as time goes on, there will be opportunities for speaking of many aspects of it—for illustrations will have to be given of what was presented in the first place more in the form of narrative. Today, however, I want to show that towards the middle of the 19th century there were evidences in the external spiritual life, too, of a feeling that a crucial point had been reached. In the external spiritual life—that is to say, in the different philosophical movements, the literary movement and so on—there are evidences that a convulsive element interpolated itself into the course of evolution. As numbers of illustrations could be given, it is obviously only possible to select one or two.

I will take as our starting-point today, two examples from European literature. These examples will show that in the hearts and minds of some men there was a feeling that significant things were taking place in the invisible worlds.

One of these examples is Gutzkow's novel “The Mahaguru”—the great Guru.² The second—remarkably enough it was written at about the same time—is the extraordinarily interesting drama which ends with the cry: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!”³ So far as my knowledge of it goes, it seems to me to represent a crowning point in Polish literature of the 19th century.

It is remarkable that in the thirties of the 19th century, the young freethinker Gutzkow—then in his twenties—should have chosen this particular material in order to point to much that was astir at that time, linking it on to a personage who subsequently became the Dalai-Lama in Tibet—the “Mahaguru,” as he called him.

A few brief words will suffice to outline this picture of conditions apparently so remote from those prevailing in Europe, yet in reality infinitely pertinent to them, “The Mahaguru” was published in the thirties of the 19th century—at the dawn, therefore, of the age of materialism.

One of the principal characters in the novel is a man who makes models of gods. What is such a man in Tibet? He is one who models figures of gods out of all kinds of substances (as we today work with clay or plasticine); he makes models of gods according to the traditions strictly laid down in the Tibetan canon. The details of these figures must be absolutely correct: the proportions laid down for the facial structure, the size and position of the hands—all must be exact. The hero, or rather one of the heroes of the novel, has descended from an ancient stock, the members of which have always been engaged in the trade of making gods, and he is an expert in his craft. His fame is widespread and his figures of gods are bought all over Tibet. In modeling one of the chief gods, a very terrible thing happens to him.—We must of course try to put ourselves into the heart and mind of a Tibetan before the whole import of the word “terrible” in this connection will be clear to us.—To the heart of a devout Tibetan it is a terrible thing that befell this maker of gods. In the figure of one of the chief gods, the length between the nostrils and the upper lip was not correct, not in accordance with the canon. This was a terrible and significant matter. The man had departed from the ancient, time-honoured canon and had made the space between the nostrils and the upper lip a little larger than was prescribed.

In Tibet this is a dreadful sin—nearly or perhaps just as dreadful as when someone in the West today states to an audience of orthodox believers that the existence of the two Jesus boys was necessary in order that Christ might descend into Jesus—or when he speaks of a faculty of knowledge higher than the ordinary faculty, so that he must be accused of inducing his followers to engage in experiments with clairvoyance and the like. Such teachings are sheer fantasy—that is what is said today. But in the days described in this novel it was an equally outrageous sin that in a figure of one of the chief gods the nostrils should lie too far above the upper lip. The only thing that is different is the actual form of punishment. Today, the most that happens is that lectures crammed with inaccuracies are delivered and other “justifiable” measures adopted. But at that time in Tibet the maker of gods was obliged to appear before the supreme tribunal of the Inquisition—the dread Council of black Inquisitors.—That is how it would be designated in terms current in Europe today.

So the maker of gods was obliged to set out for Lhassa and present himself before the tribunal—police are not necessary in Tibet, for the people obey automatically; when they are told that they must appear before the tribunal of the black Inquisition, there is no need to fetch them. So the maker of gods set out with his brothers and his enchanting daughter, a great Tibetan beauty.

With her masterly knowledge of the Tibetan canon, this daughter had been helping him devotedly and efficiently for many years and was an altogether lovable character. The brothers of the man were obliged to accompany him because they were co-responsible for what he had done. The caravan party now set out for Lhassa where the sinner must appear before the black tribunal. When they had traveled some distance from their home on the way to Lhassa, they came upon a curious troop of men, also bound for Lhassa, weeping, dancing, whistling, beating all kinds of instruments, and led by a Shaman. He was an acquaintance, a youthful playmate of the daughter of the maker of gods, and he knew the members of the caravan party, at the head of which was the man on his way to judgment in Lhassa, weighed down by the sinfulness he had incurred with his falsely-made god. The Shaman impressed upon him the danger of his position, saying that it would be a good thing if the real Dalai-Lama were still on the throne, but possibly the new Dalai-Lama had already been found and would be ruling Tibet from Lhassa. If that were so, things might be even worse, for the Vice-Regent was able in certain circumstances to be merciful in the administration of justice—but if the new Dalai-Lama were installed there was no telling whether or not the supreme penalty would have to be paid. And when the canon had been violated as seriously as the maker of gods had violated it by placing the nostrils too high above the upper lip—naturally the penalty would be death.

So the sinner learns that the Dalai-Lama, the Mahaguru, may soon be found. What does this mean in Tibet? The Tibetans are convinced that the soul of the great Bodhisattva who rules over Tibet passes from one body to another. When a Dalai-Lama dies, a new Dalai-Lama must be sought for—on an entirely democratic basis, for the Tibetans are thoroughly democratic in their attitude. No rank is hereditary, nothing transmitted from father to son by way of the body is of any account. According to Tibetan ideas this principle is utterly inconsistent with the dignity of the Dalai-Lama. Therefore when a Dalai-Lama dies the priesthood must set about finding a new Dalai-Lama, and then every young boy must be inspected—for the great soul might have incarnated in the very poorest family. The whole country must be searched and every boy in every house and on the roads scrutinised; if one of them shows signs of what is considered by the priesthood to indicate the necessary intelligence, be has the prospect of being acclaimed as the Dalai-Lama. The conviction is that in the boy who shows the most signs, the great soul of the Bodhisattva has incarnated, and then he is the Dalai-Lama. In the interval, while the search continues for the incarnation of the god in human form, a Vice-Dalai-Lama must rule the country temporarily.

Gutzkow's story continues.—It is already being rumoured that the new Mahaguru or the new Dalai-Lama will eventually be crowned in Lhassa, brought there with all honours.—And here I must interpolate an episode narrated by Gutzkow; he interpolates it in a slightly different place in the story, but what we are trying to do is to get a picture of his “Mahaguru.”

The beautiful girl was journeying with her father, the sinner. According to the Tibetan Constitution, his brothers are also fathers because a kind of polyandry is customary there. When a man marries, his brothers also marry the same woman. So the brothers of a father are also fathers, although one is the actual chief. The caravan procession is beautifully described in the book: the fathers are in front, then the chief father (the sinner) and his beautiful daughter. While she was still a small child and was just beginning to help her father, she had a companion with whom she liked to play, who at that time had been very dear to her and whose memory she still cherished. The Shaman at the head of the shrieking, whistling band had also been one of her early playmates and he was the brother of the one who had been her dearly-loved companion.—I have had to interpolate this in order to make what comes later more intelligible.—

The whole caravan moves on towards Lhassa, and on arriving there it is learnt that the new Mahaguru, the new Dalai-Lama, has been installed with all the honours due to him. But first we are told how the great sinner who has made the nostrils too far above the upper lip in a figure of one of the chief Tibetan gods is led before the black tribunal.

During the terrible proceedings of the tribunal it is made clear that this is a sin whose only expiation is death. Meanwhile the sinner is thrown into prison together with his family, to await a further trial in which all the sins ever committed by him are to be enumerated.—It must be emphasised that until now he had committed no sin other than that of having made the distance between nostrils and upper lip barely a millimeter too long in one of his figures. But in Tibet that is a crime punishable by death.

With pomp and splendour the new Dalai-Lama has been installed in office. We are told of many Tibetan customs, also of what goes on around the Court at Lhassa. Exact and lengthy descriptions are given in the book. In this setting, with the honourable rank of a Chinese Envoy at the Court, was a man who also had a charming young sister and who had reached a certain degree among the mandarins of China. He was a mandarin of the 6th degree but was hoping soon to be raised to a higher rank. Actually the ideal to which he aspired was the Order of the Peacock's Feather. But while this Chinese Envoy is dreaming his dreams, the most daring of which is to be made a member of the high Order of the Peacock's Feather, the new Dalai-Lama has been installed in his glory. The new Dalai-Lama knows that he has made the sun, the moon, the stars, the lightning and the clouds, the plants and the stones, and he explains to those who now come to pay their respects to him how he created it all, that he is the creator of everything that is visible in the wide universe and also of what is invisible—that he is therefore the primal creator of the visible world and of the invisible worlds connected with it.

Now in Tibet—as elsewhere—there are two parties. But these two parties are still closely bound up with the spiritual evolution of mankind in very ancient times. The two parties, whose priests belong to different sects, are usually designated by their headgear: the Yellow Caps and the Red Tassels. These two parties are in perpetual conflict with one another. In our language—for in Tibet these things are closely connected with the spiritual—we should say; the Yellow Caps are connected with the Luciferic element, the Red Tassels more with the Ahrimanic. These traits come to expression not only in their doctrines but also in their deeds: the Luciferic element is predominant in the doctrines and deeds of the Yellow Caps, the Ahrimanic element in those of the Red Tassels. In consequence of this—to explain why would lead us too far afield—the Red Tassels are bent upon ensuring that the Dalai-Lama at Lhassa shall be regarded as the lawful god who has created the plants, the animals and men; it is in their interest that the new Dalai-Lama shall be found and that the whole country shall believe him to be the lawful god—whereas the Yellow Caps are always indignant when the new Dalai-Lama is found and sits on the throne. For in Tibet, as well as the Dalai-Lama there is a Teshu-Lama, whose followers are found more among the northern Tibetans and the Mongol tribes. The Teshu-Lama strives his whole life long to overthrow the Dalai-Lama and usurp the throne. The Yellow Caps, then, support the Teshu-Lama and try to put him on the throne.

The man who aspires to the Order of the Peacock's Feather is now faced with the fact that a new Dalai-Lama is there. China, his country, holds a kind of mandate over Tibet. The Teshu-Lama is out to contest the throne, so there is opportunity here for intrigue. The man now begins to intrigue by arranging a kind of warlike caravan column to go to the Teshu-Lama and reinforce his power. But in reality his aim is not that the Teshu-Lama shall come to the throne but that the Chinese regiment shall be able to tighten the reins. In the confusion caused by this action, the beautiful daughter of the sinner is able to escape from the prison, and something unheard of happens: in the garden where only the god, the Dalai-Lama, may walk, she comes across him—and lo! the Dalai-Lama was her childhood's playmate who one day had suddenly disappeared and in the intervening time had been trained to become the Dalai-Lama. He is now the Dalai-Lama and encounters this girl, the daughter of the sinner. A deeply-interesting dialogue now ensues.—You can well imagine the situation that may arise when the girl, who had loved her playmate very intensely, encounters this playmate who is convinced that he has created the sun, the moon and the stars, and she is not altogether disinclined to believe in her god. But the priests discovered the shameful thing that had happened and threw the girl back into prison. The Dalai-Lama, however, sitting on his soft silken cushions, surrounded by all his other appurtenances, continues to meditate on how he directs the lightning and the clouds, how he has created and sustains the other phenomena of the visible world.—

The further course of the story brings us once again to the black tribunal. There is a terrible scene because the sinner, who to begin with had nothing on his conscience except the fact of having made the nostrils and upper lip of the god about a millimeter too far apart, now appears as an arch-criminal. He had gone mad in prison and had made out of some kind of substance—similar to what we should now call plasticine—most curious figures of gods. Just imagine it—A Tibetan tribunal confronted with a whole number of false figures of gods made by the culprit in prison! A howl of anger arises, no matter how he tries to vindicate himself; the judges sit around and the long galleries are full of people. The judges are monks who lay down the correct measurements of each feature in the case of every single god, how much larger the stomach of a god may be than that of an ordinary man, and so on; all the sins thus committed by the man with the figures made in prison are enumerated one by one. It is a dreadful affair and the fanatical judges pour their wrath on the sinner. He and his party are again thrown into prison, together with his daughter whose particular charm consists in the fact that because her feet are not too minute they differ from the excessively small feet customary in the Far East—in other respects, too, she is a lovely creature. But the followers of the aspirant to the Order of the Peacock's Feather cause a commotion in Lhassa and in the confusion a fire breaks out, burning the very house where the girl is imprisoned. She appears at the top of the house amid the smoke and flames at the moment when the Dalai-Lama is passing by with his brother, the Shaman, who, knowing all that has happened, has helped him to escape. At the crucial moment the human heart of the god, the Dalai-Lama, is moved. Instead of sending thunder and lightning to help, he throws himself into the flames, rescues the girl and brings her to the ground. He flees with her to a lonely, mountainous region together with his brother—and the Teshu-Lama, supported by the Yellow Caps, is enthroned in his place. So the beautiful girl goes off with the Mahaguru and his brother, the Shaman, and the Mahaguru is now married to her. After a year the Shaman dies. The good Dalai-Lama lives to an advanced age and for many long years is his wife's only husband. He actually outlives her, becomes a solitary old man and has long ceased to imagine that he rules over the lightning and the thunder, that he has created the mountains, forests and rivers, that sun, moon and stars circle in their courses according to his will. In his last years he becomes a Yogi, striving to acquire the wisdom that will lead his soul into the spiritual worlds. He stands on one leg, the other coiled around it like a serpent, one hand held behind him, the other raised upwards; he stands there with only his lips moving. The poor from the valley bring him food, but he never changes his posture.—The description of this final scene is most remarkable. We are told how the man who had been made the Dalai-Lama does indeed, in old age, find his god; how his soul dissolves into the elements which he was trying to understand and of which for a certain period in his life he had believed himself to be the creator.

The novel is a very remarkable product of the thirties of the 19th century, a work in which a comparatively young man describes with profound insight, customs prevailing in the strange country of Tibet. These customs are relics, surviving in the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, of many things that existed in quite different forms in the Atlantean age, that is to say, the fourth main period of earth-evolution. The outward significance lies in the fact of such a novel having been written when it was; it shows that a human soul felt the need to portray something that in truth can be understood only by those who have at least some inkling of the evolutionary course of mankind, in its spiritual aspect too. One man in Europe at all events divines that in this strange country, in many Tibetan customs seeming to us so grotesque, there is preserved more faithfully than anywhere else—in caricature, of course—what was present in a quite different form in the Atlantean world. That is the outward significance, added to the fact that this novel was written at the time it was, and that attention is directed to a country which affords most telling evidence of how in the so-called Yellow Caps and Red Tassels there still live the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces with which the men of Atlantis, especially in the fourth Atlantean epoch, were well acquainted and with which they worked.—But something else as well is inwardly significant in this novel, “The Mahaguru.”

Inwardly significant is what is presented to us in the scene of the proceedings at the black Inquisition-tribunal. The sinner makes a remarkable speech in self-defence. As we know, he had made a great number of gods during his imprisonment; but he made them when be was in a state of madness. There is a fine description of how the first symptoms of madness already became apparent on the way to Lhassa, how the condition became more and more acute and finally broke out in the form referred to. In a state of complete madness he had made all kinds of figures which violated the canon in the most atrocious way. We learn a great deal about the Tibetan canon from Gutzkow's powerful description; but we also learn something quite remarkable.—We are told that this great sinner, as the offspring of his forbears, has become a maker of gods—as is invariably the custom in Tibet. The figures he made had always been correct in every detail: the proportions and positions of the limbs, the length between nostrils and upper lip, and the like. Never once had it happened that the measurement between nostrils and upper lip had been one iota too long—but it did happen once, and he must expect death as the penalty. But now, as a madman—that is to say, in the condition where his soul is already to some extent outside his body—he uses his body in such a way as to produce utterly heterodox figures of gods. And now, he who knows nothing about Art except what is laid down by the canon for the making of gods, makes a long speech in his own defence, a speech in which, in his madness, he talks about principles of art. For one who understands these things it is a most moving scene. As long as the connection between the man's four bodies was intact, only the negligible mistake in the measurement between nostrils and upper lip could occur. But now, after the astral body and etheric body have loosened from the physical body, the man becomes an artist, producing grotesque, but for all that, artistic figures. The Inquisition does not understand this and believes that he had allied himself with evil in order to destroy the works of the gods.—The description of the moving scene at the tribunal reminds us of many things I have said about the aberrations of the human soul towards the one abyss or the other. In the soul of the young Gutzkow, too, the thought arose that there may come a time when men will no longer be able to find their equilibrium.—And now he places such men in the setting of a Tibetan religious community, because these problems can be brought home more vividly by presenting sharply contrasting situations, and because the novelist is able to show how art suddenly comes upon the scene. Art bursts forth from a human soul who has gone astray in the abyss, a human soul who has drawn near to Lucifer in order to save himself from the Ahrimanic claws of the Red Tassels, who are there as the unlawful judges. A profound law is indicated here—the law of man's connection with the spiritual world and its abysses: the world of Lucifer and the world of Ahriman.

Before continuing this particular line of thought, I want to say something about the Polish drama by Zigmunt Krasinski, which ends with the words: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean?” A translation of parts of it, under the title “La Comedie Infernale,” was given by Mickiewicz in his lectures in Paris in the year 1842.⁴ I must emphasise that I am not in a position to form a judgment of the drama from the purely artistic point of view because I know only the idea and intention underlying it. The fine impressions of this drama given by Adam Mickiewicz in his lectures enables me to speak about its basic idea and intention, but I can say nothing about it as a work of art. This reservation must be kept in mind. It is possible, however, to speak about the drama in this way, for Mickiewicz analysed its underlying idea and intention. The passages in French are so excellent that by studying what Mickiewicz says one is immediately impressed by its grandeur and significance. This conviction is still further strengthened when one reads Mickiewicz's rendering of the beautiful preface on the spirit of poetry. This is obviously a drama that has sprung from the very depths of the human soul. It presents the secrets of the life of soul in a wonderful way.

The chief character is a Polish Count; speaking to him and bending towards him from left and right are good angels and bad angels, the former intent upon leading mankind to the good side of evolution, the latter to the bad side. The relevant scenes are translated into French and show with what wonderful simplicity the Polish poet was trying to depict the relations of the beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angeloi to the hero of the drama, the old Count. We then learn of the Count's family life which has suffered on account of his personal characteristics. He lives entirely in the Past as it plays into his personal life, in the past history and evolution of the human race; surrounded by pictures of his parents and forbears, he also lives in the past of his Polish ancestral stock. He pays very little heed to the Present and so can find no real link with his wife. But in what has come to him through heredity, in what has been implanted in him through the blood refined through many generations, there is also in him an unusual spirituality, a sense for the realities of those worlds which hover above the earthly world. The result is that he can find no inner link with his wife. He lives entirely in the spirit, and the manner of his life is such that he is regarded by those around him as a god-gifted prophet. His wife has just borne him a son. We then come to the scene of the child's baptism, but the Count himself is not there. He can find no bond with anything earthly. This baptism and the circumstances associated with it send the child's mother insane. The Count had gone away, and when he returns to the house after the baptism, he learns that his wife has been taken to a madhouse.

Strangely enough we are again confronted with a case where the members of a man's constitution have loosened. We are told of the words that had been uttered by the wife before she went mad. Before the baptism the idea came to the mother that misfortune would surround the child because her own talents and human qualities had not made her equal to living, like her husband, in the spiritual world, and that she was incapable of bearing a child who would be able to live with sufficient intensity in the spiritual worlds to win the father's love. And with all the strength of her soul she longs to penetrate into the spiritual worlds in order to bring down for her son what is to be found in yonder worlds. Her wish is to bring from the spiritual worlds everything that would imbue the child with spirituality. This drives her insane and she is put into a madhouse—or asylum, as we should say nowadays.

The old Count searches for and finds her there, and she speaks deeply moving words to him. First of all, she declares that she wants to bring out of the spiritual worlds for the child those qualities that will enable the father to love him—and then she speaks wonderful words to this effect: I can traverse all worlds; my wings carry me upwards into all the worlds; I would fain gather up everything that is there and instill it into my child; I would fain gather all that lives in the light of the spirit and in the heavenly spheres in order to make my child a poet.—One passage in particular is deeply indicative of the poet's intuitive conception of the spiritual world. It is where he lets the old Count say, on hearing that his wife has become insane: Where is her soul now? Amid the howling screams of maniacs! Darkness has enshrouded this bright spirit who was full of reverence for the great universe ... She has sent her thoughts into the wilderness, searching for me!

The father then goes to the child who had been born physically blind but who has become clairvoyant. The child speaks of his mother. Some time after this scene, remarkable words are uttered by the Count. In the meantime the mother has died. The child had told his father that his soul could always soar, as if on wings, to where the mother now dwelt—the mother he had not known. While the child is describing how he looks into the spiritual world, he relates something which he himself could not have heard but which the father had heard from the wife when she was already insane, as her last wish. The Count speaks remarkable words—remarkable for those who understand these things in the light of spiritual science. He asks: Is it then possible that one who has passed through death retains for a time the last ideas he had before death?

So we see how mother and child go to pieces physically, and are transported in a certain abnormal, atavistic way into the spiritual world. Around the Count whose spirit lives entirely in the Past, they go to pieces physically and are transported atavistically into the spiritual worlds.

We cannot fail to perceive an inner connection between this atavistic transport into the spiritual world of those around the old Polish Count and of the Tibetan maker of gods in the novel “The Mahaguru” who, after he becomes insane and has gone to pieces physically, describes principles of art and produces an entirely new world of gods. The Polish drama, perhaps even more clearly than the novel, makes us aware of the cry which goes forth from humanity: What will befall if the souls of men cannot receive teachings concerning the spiritual worlds in the right and pure form? What will become of humanity in the future? Must human beings go to pieces physically if they are to enter the spiritual worlds?—

Earnest souls were inwardly compelled to put these grave questions to destiny. And as we read the preface to “The Undivine Comedy” we feel that these questions stood in all their urgency before the soul of the Polish poet. There is perhaps no finer, no more poignant description of this tragic situation than is given in the preface to this drama.

Confronting the Count who has seen his family go to pieces around him, is a forceful personage who will have nothing to do with the Past; inwardly he is a Tartar-Mongolian character, outwardly a personality who has imbibed the socialistic doctrines of Fourier, Saint Simon and others, who will stop at nothing in order to destroy all existing conditions and to establish a new social order for mankind, who says; The world of the Past in which the Count lives must be exterminated root and branch from the earth.—A despot is presented to us, a despot who is bent upon universal destruction, who will not tolerate things as they are. A battle begins between the bearer of the Past and the bearer of the Present, a vehement battle, brilliantly described. The scenes that have been translated into French amply justify this praise.

There is also a dialogue between the despot and the old Count; a dialogue that could take place only between men in whose souls two world-destinies confront each other. A battle wages in which the old Count appears with the clairvoyant child. The child and the old Count perish and the despot is the victor. The whole of the Count's faction is exterminated. The old order is overcome, the despot has gained the mastery; the Present has triumphed over the Past.

The description of the field of battle is magnificent. And then still another scene is presented. After the battle the despot stands with a friend, looking upwards towards a high rock gleaming with the golden light of the sun that is setting behind it.—And suddenly he has a vision. The friend sees nothing unusual, he sees only the rock gleaming in the setting sun. But the despot who has burdened his soul so heavily, with whom the impression remains of the old Count whose life has been so full of experiences—the despot stands there—and sees over this mountain pinnacle the figure of Christ Jesus.—

From this moment onwards he knows: Neither the old Count, the representative of the Past, who lives in the spirit in an atavistic way and has been able only to save the Past that is breaking up around him, nor he himself who lives in the immediate Present, has won the real victory. He knows that a battle will ensue but that neither of the two will be victorious—neither the Past which can lead only to atavistic life in the spiritual world, nor the Present, of which he, the despot, is the representative. The Present, basing itself upon doctrines such as those of Fourier and Saint-Simon, mocks at angels and teachings about God. Christ Jesus Who now appears to him shows him: Victory lies neither on the one side nor the other, but in that which is above them both.—And the One—Christ Jesus—whom the despot now beholds over the pinnacle gleaming golden in the rays of the setting sun, draws from him the cry: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!”—Thereupon he falls down dead. This is the tragic consequence brought about through what is higher than the two streams which are presented in such magnificent contrast in this drama. As is clear from the single scenes, we have in this wonderful product of Polish literature a magnificent expression of Polish Messianism. We see how with the coming of the modern age it behoves men to ask weighty, far-reaching questions concerning the destiny of the human race.

• 1. “The Occult Movement in the 19th Century.” Course of 10 lectures.
• 2. “The Mahaguru” has not been translated into English.
• 3. See notes later in lecture on “The Undivine Comedy” (Krasinski).
• 4. An English translation, of the drama, with the title “The Undivine Comedy,” and Mickiewicz's analysis, was published in 1875. A later translation with a preface by G. K. Chesterton was published in 1924. (George Harrap & Co., London.)