The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is now to be called original about the whole figure

?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few months ago, the British Colonial Secretary remarked that the world's centre of gravity has shifted from the Baltic and Atlantic to the Pacific. His observation is certainly indicative of the transformation now taking place in the social structure of the whole world. Only now, in fact, is the world gradually beginning, in circumstances that have arisen in the course of centuries and have changed so significantly as a result of the cruellest of wars, to realize the consequences of something that has long been brewing—the fact that not only economic and social relationships, but the whole of human relationships throughout the world are tending to transform themselves into a totality, a single entity.

If this is true, however, then the change in external economic organization (directly determined by the conversion of world trade into a world economy from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards) must also be followed by a profound spiritual transformation throughout the world, of which perhaps only the beginnings can be discerned today.

Yet we must also remember that, however social structures may change throughout the world, there live within them human beings who must reach an understanding as men if they wish to establish a relationship with one another. Understanding between men, however, involves trust. And trust involves a kind of insight into the souls of others. In Western civilization to date it has only been possible, generally speaking, to extend our horizons slightly, to include the Continent of Europe and its immediate colonial dependencies. A world-wide view has yet to be found.

Starting from one or two features of the historical background, which yet are directly reflected in man's life today, I shall try this evening to indicate what is actually happening in this direction. To do so, I shall first have to say something about understanding and attempts at understanding within Western civilization itself.

If you listen to the way educated Englishmen speak about Europe, about Central Europe and in particular about Germany, which has set the tone in certain respects for so long in Central Europe, what they say—and write in their books—is usually something like this: With us, everything rests on a democratic basis. The individual very largely determines what happens in spiritual and also in economic life. The greater part of public affairs is left to individual initiative. But when we look across at Central Europe—I do not want to claim that what they say is absolutely correct, only to illustrate what is in fact a widely-held view—a certain autocracy becomes apparent, a system of administration by officials—very capable, of course—who determine, from the centre of national life, the nature of individual human relationships. There is—or was before the war, at least—always this pointed reference to a centralized and more or less autocratic system. If we were then to look further East, we should have to say, following the same line of thought: further East, we find not just autocracy, but a kind of patriarchal autocracy. This is pervaded, not only by the ordinances of administrators, but also by a religious impulse: men therefore feel that what they do on earth is actually ordained by spiritual, extra-terrestrial powers and entities, the impulses from which are absorbed into their feelings.

Behind this English attitude there certainly lies something of great importance, which affects all the social structures of the present day. We can say: the further West we go, the more man with his whole thinking and feeling is bound up in the affairs he has to manage. This comes out most clearly when we look at economic affairs. In the West, what a man wishes to accomplish in economic life he accomplishes by attention to practical detail. He has an immediate personal relationship with the externals of life. In Central Europe, as the psychologically perceptive observer cannot help noticing, things are rather different. There is a tendency towards what the Englishman, from his standpoint, calls “academic administration by the state:” a tendency for certain ideas to prevail which are regarded as correct. These are expected to shape laws and inform administrative principles, and are set forth from the beginning in an administrative, a political system. The individual who comes to the affairs of actual life, even economic affairs, may look to economic practice first of all; but he is always looking over his shoulder at something of a juridical-political character that belongs to one of these systems. And he regards his personal activities as a part of such a system. The Englishman has no inclination to think up a system of this kind; his eye is only on the concrete details of life, not on the overall system that imposes itself upon them.

At this point, our attention is drawn to a historical phenomenon that has become particularly important in very recent times. For millions upon millions of people, the name of Karl Marx is of extraordinary significance. The rigidly dogmatic and formula-ridden Marxism that occupied the souls of many millions of men like a kind of religion, fifty years or so ago, has been modified in many ways. Yet for the broad masses of the European proletariat, the name Marx still denotes a prophet of social reorganization. On this occasion, I am not concerned to demonstrate the errors of Marxism. I only want to point to a certain aspect of Marx as a historical phenomenon.

Marx was educated in Central Europe, in Germany, where he absorbed a disposition towards the kind of systematization of ideas that I have just been describing. Then, however, he went to the West, to France and in particular to England, in order to study concrete details of the social and economic development of recent times. What he studied were concrete details—for that is all that exists in the British working-class. What he constructed from them is a system of social organization such as only a Central European temperament can create. And this system took root, not primarily in the West, but in Central Europe. And we may say: the concrete details that Marx observed in the West he shaped into a grand systematic edifice of ideas, which his disciples have made increasingly dogmatic and increasingly theoretical. It came to be regarded as the ideal organization of human society as a whole from the economic standpoint. And when its exponents had the opportunity of realizing it in Eastern Europe, it became, in a sense, the ideal economic and political organization—though in fact it has not been realized to any great extent, and even this little is gradually leading to absurdity. The essential point, however, is that we can see quite clearly, just with a phenomenon like this, how fundamentally the mode of thought even in Central Europe differs from that in Western Europe. From this, however, we must suppose that the variations throughout the world are very much greater still, and that only an impartial attitude, quite free of preconceptions, is capable of gaining a conspectus of these variations.

What strikes us as diversity within the small sphere of Western civilization must be seen today against a world background. This is because our present-day structures, including the social ones, are affected by world conditions as these have developed historically in East and West, just as they are affected by philosophical impulses, in the way I have described here in the last few days. A similar approach will be in place when we attempt to depict present-day social structures.

In so many of these, a great deal survives in a disguised form, so that its origin is only dimly visible. What originated long ago in the East exists side by side with what is specifically Central European and with what is just beginning to appear in the West as a quite new configuration. This is true of the social structures as it was of the philosophical situation throughout the world.

When we look across at the East—which, at some time in the future. Western structures will have to be extended to include—we can see in the modes of thought and social attitudes of people today definite survivals of ancient institutions and ancient impulses from which these arose. Decadent as it has become in the East, everything that can still be observed today points back to times when the Orient was ruled by a variety of priest-theocracies. In a way possible and appropriate to the culture of the time, their leaders embodied in the social structures things that they felt they had to ascertain from the spiritual worlds by means of the old instinctive spiritual vision, as I have described in the last few days. On the basis of historical documents, people today describe the priestly hierarchies as ruling by teaching the populace that all natural phenomena were inhabited by divine and spiritual entities, and that by certain magical operations one could gain the favour of these gods, or their love. This is true of a later epoch of the Oriental priest-theocracies, but it is precisely a later epoch, when the original qualities of the Orient were already in decline.

It is true that, in ancient Oriental civilization, certain select individuals sought a kind of connection with the spiritual world which was based on things that have no charms at all for us today. It was based on certain quite material activities of the human body: potions that were brewed and substances that were eaten. They regarded as a secret the fact that, by the consumption of these potions and substances, man's normal sensory activity is suspended, and he is taken back to times when there was as yet no sense of purely external natural law and when spiritual life, too, was not yet so abstract as it later became—times when the moral and spiritual element was still united with the physical and natural. These priest-scholars sought to return to primeval ages in the development of the earth itself by associating their metabolism with certain material essences of the outside world.

What they were actually asserting we again become capable of understanding when, by the quite different modern path into super-sensible worlds, we come to know what I expounded in my fifth lecture: that through spiritual insight into his own nature man experiences within himself a kind of world-memory. He thus goes back, in his spiritual vision of course, to times when for men natural laws were not as they are today—expressing themselves more or less by chance—and spiritual laws were not so abstract as they are today. In consequence, spiritual vision arrives, not at the purely mechanistic Kant-Laplace nebula, but at an origin of the earth that is to be interpreted physically and spiritually. As I have demonstrated in the last few days, the world-memory men gain in this way is achieved entirely without manipulating the physical, in a spiritual way by spiritual exercises. This was not so in those early Oriental times, when men established contact with the spiritual world through stimulating their unconscious instincts by associating their metabolism with essences of one type or another. They knew what each plant in nature could develop from their instinctive life by a kind of dream-like spiritualization; they knew that, if this or that plant was eaten, the effect upon their organism was such that they could transport themselves to a particular area of spiritual activity. This was in fact the way in which the high priests of the Oriental theocracies, who also had complete power over social and political structures, originally established contact with the spiritual world. They believed they had thereby obtained impulses that proved to be the actual guiding impulses for social life.

We may say: The subsequent belief, or rather superstition, that to this or that natural object this or that “spirit” was linked, is already a product of cultural decadence. The original implication was that, if we allow these natural objects to affect us in a certain way, we shall be led to a particular kind of spiritual being, from whom we can receive various impulses, including social ones. Oracles, star-gazing, everything astrological was basically a product of the decline of these older views, towards which, however, objective science today is already being led, if dimly as yet. Objective science has given up seeing crude polytheism deep down in all primitive peoples, and can now perceive a monotheism of primitive man. In the same way, it will arrive at the outlook that has been evolved by consideration of the historical background and by spiritual investigations such as I have described.

On the one hand, therefore, there existed a complete awareness of how impulses from extra-terrestrial nature, from spiritual entities, manifest themselves in human nature itself—these impulses had, after all, been obtained by stimulating the instincts, by a spiritualization of the instincts. Yet at the same time people could not help attaching some importance to what displayed itself in these instincts, which they ascribed to the particular quality of the blood, let us say in a family with a particular constitution. In the manifestations of this instinctive life also, they detected social impulses sent into the world from extra-terrestrial spheres. When decadence later set in, it was natural, for the men who were striving for power, to take over, quite arbitrarily, the general view that looked to this manifestation of the instinctive life, which they sought in blood and in what could be discovered through its spiritualization. In this way, however, something unspiritual and (based on blood) something patriarchal entered Eastern life as a whole. We can only discuss this patriarchal element, of course, by referring to what is known; but its point of departure lies in the relations that the old priest-rulers of the Orient sought with the spiritual world. For this reason, all the social configurations of the Orient are steeped in this religious element, this awareness that divine and spiritual powers must prevail in everything on earth, and that ultimately no man should give orders unless he has first allowed the power of the divine word to flow into the spirit, the soul that is to give them. Impulses initially felt as religious, as impulses of grace from extra-terrestrial powers, thus assumed for social life the character of commandments. Even when, in certain Eastern civilizations, we appear to be confronted with laws in the later sense of the word, we soon find, when we analyse the spirit of legislation such as that of Hammurabi, for example, that it is based on impulses of the commandment type, which derive from what was regarded as the commerce of the elect with the spiritual world.

In an increasingly attenuated form, this has survived in all the social configurations that rest on ecclesiastical and religious foundations. And however much these things are disguised in social structures today, we can see, even in those left-wing associations that rest on a religious basis, that the ancient Oriental impulses I have described still operate in an attenuated form. There is much in present-day social structures that we cannot understand at all if we are not in a position to ask: In what sense do human souls cling to such structures? They cling to them because, in these souls' subconscious depths, there still remain legacies of the religious inclinations of the Orient. This is true even where the religious views themselves have taken on quite different forms, forms that have detached themselves from economic life, as is the case with the religions of the West. That the effect of Oriental religions is felt even in detailed features of economic life could be observed in Eastern Europe right down to the Great War.

To understand social configurations, we must discuss the spiritual impulses that inform them. For the description often given these days of social structures really only relates to their external appearance, as can be shown quite clearly by an example such as the following.

Today, it is clear, we can only look with horror at the social organization that is trying to establish itself in Eastern Europe. Yet in considering what is going on there today, we cannot help remembering what happened some eight hundred years ago, in China. Here, quite suddenly, men sought and very largely realized a political system that aimed at ordering all the affairs of man, even those of an economic nature, in every detail on behalf of the state. At this period in China, there were government authorities that fixed prices from week to week, authorities that laid down how the land was to be cultivated here, there and everywhere, authorities that provided country people with the seed for the year. At this period in China, an attempt was made to impose a high rate of tax on people who were particularly rich, so that gradually their fortunes passed to the general public. Remembering all this, we may say: the social configuration sought in Europe in our time by certain circles was largely realized eight hundred years ago, over a period of three decades, until the Socialist government concerned was overthrown and its supporters expelled from China. For thirty years, a system persisted whose features, if we described them without mentioning China, might very well be taken to refer to present-day Russia.

We can point to such things if our aim is to direct attention to the surface features of social structures. For here we can see that Socialism, as it is popularly understood, need not be solely a product of our own time, but could arise eight hundred years ago there in the Far East on quite different cultural foundations.

Yet if we look at the spirit of these two social structures, we observe a significant difference. In the Chinese Socialism there clearly survive features of the theocracy that had always ruled over China, and does so still; in modern Russian Socialism there is embodied an abstract thinking, culled from natural science, which has nothing whatever to do with man's consciousness of a connection with spiritual worlds. Things that appear the same in their outward form are not the same when we consider them spiritually.

Looking at human history from this standpoint, we shall find that the particular form of the theocratic state—or rather, theocratic social structures—lasted for a definite period. When the Asiatic theocracies were at their zenith, the tribes in Western and Central Europe were still in an entirely uncivilized state. In moving over to Europe, what was theocratic in form has gradually assumed a quite special shape.

If we are sufficiently unprejudiced, we can discover a transitional form in the Platonic Utopian state. There is certainly something here faintly reminiscent, I would say, of the Oriental priestly hierarchies. For this reason, no doubt, Plato wished to choose as leaders of his state those who had become—in the Greek sense, it is true—wise men, philosophers. Within Greek civilization, in fact, the philosopher took the place of the Oriental priest. Yet Plato's Utopia derives, after all, from the social outlook of his own time, in the sense that it reproduces what was currently felt about society; and in it we can recognize a form into which Oriental society had already developed. No longer was a relationship of man to super-sensible powers sought. The religious feelings appropriate to this relationship were more or less taken over from the Ancient East; what the Greeks themselves evolved, however, was something that had played no particular part in early Oriental society, and ultimately plays no particular part even in the social structures we meet in the Old Testament. What was now elaborated independently was the relationship of man to man.

We encounter this relationship in its purest form when we look into the life of the soul in Greece. Here, man still felt a certain intimate association between the spiritual and the physical in his make-up. In conscious inner life, there was for the Greek as yet no separation of body and spirit, such as there is for us. We look within and apprehend the mind in a very diluted form, metaphorically speaking; so that, comprehending it by ordinary consciousness, we can have no conception how it activates the vigorous body or is influenced by it. For the Greeks it was different. And that is why Goethe longed to achieve their outlook in his own experience. The Greeks had no such concept of body and spirit as we have. For them, spiritual and physical were one. Not until Aristotle, a late Greek, does the distinction begin to creep in. Although Plato's views are often presented abstractly, the spirit in which he spoke is one that saw the body everywhere permeated by soul, even in its organic functions, and felt the soul to be so powerful that it could everywhere extend its antennae towards the physical organs. The attitude to the soul is more physical, to the body more spiritual. Such a view is linked at the same time, however, to a particular feeling that grows up between men. And from this view has arisen what is characteristic of the civilization of Central Europe.

If we look with a sensitive eye at the felt relationship between man and man among the Ancient Greeks, and recognize how it has evolved from man's old relationship to the divine, we can say: what was previously an attitude permeated by religion has transformed itself into the legal attitude, the political attitude. Out of this, out of a combination of the nature of Greek and Roman, there then arose something that could maintain itself in social configurations. The priest gradually becomes merely the successor of the Oriental national leaders, for, although he may have kept himself in the background, the priest in the Orient was always the real spiritual leader, even with Darius and Xerxes. There comes to the fore a mode of thinking that cultivates ideas based on the relationship between man and man. And this goes so far that even religious life is swallowed up by this legal current, as I would call it. A juridical element enters man's world-picture, and even the cosmology of the time; and this element then remains almost throughout the Middle Ages and can be detected when we study the political views of, say, Augustine or Aquinas. Religious impulses themselves, while remaining what they are, take on legal forms.

This entry of legal forms into man's religious, cosmological views is eloquently documented in the wonderful picture of the Last Judgment that faces us as we enter the Sistine Chapel in Rome. It is at its most monumental here in this picture in which Christ appears as judge over all the world. His status as judge magnificently symbolizes the transition from a purely religious and devotional element to that conception which permeates religious feeling with a legal element—one that is carried over into the theory of man's world government and guidance.

This legal element informs all the social structures of the Middle Ages and much that persists in those of today. When we remove the disguise, we observe the presence of this legal element, and see how it has transmitted to us religious impulses from ancient times. And in modern political systems, right down to their terminology and the workings of their laws, where these go back to the Middle Ages, we perceive how, in the middle period of human experience and in the civilization between East and West, this legal and logical element has made its appearance.

We may say: what was Oriental and theosophical changes into something legal and logical; the sophia of the Orient becomes the logos of the Occident; and from the logos there develops in turn the juridical structure, which then proceeds to reproduce itself.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the legal element also determined social configurations. You need only study the economic ordinances of the period: everywhere you will find that social structures are shaped by something which is permeated by ancient Oriental religiosity and is juridical.

Nowadays, we observe the religious element still active in the less formal human groupings or in those that arise from religious denominations, whereas in the major social structures that are the nations we observe the operation of legal thinking. We notice, however, that with the transition from medieval to modern history the religious element allows itself to be pushed more and more into the background, whilst the legal one becomes increasingly predominant.

At this stage, the legal element invades economic configurations. What I am now describing can be traced in all its detail in the history of Roman Law. We can see how concepts of property, customs of ownership, and everything economic in fact, has been decisively determined by a social mould of this nature.

Yet in the course of human development an independent economic element does assert itself increasingly in the West, the nearer we come to modern times. We can say: in earlier periods, economic activity is completely cradled in religious and legal forms. It is in the West that the economic element first emancipates itself in human thinking.

You need only examine the economic element as it presented itself to the Phoenicians, and compare it with the economic systems of modern times (though admittedly these are only at an early stage in their development). You will realize the difference: Phoenician economic life is the product of the impulses I have described; Western economic systems have gradually emancipated themselves from them.

Religion and law are thus joined by a third current which, at any rate at first, tends to endow economic conditions with a social configuration of their own. This trend derives from the West, which in turn has adopted, to a greater or a lesser extent, something of what originated in the East and in the region between. We can see, for example, how, in American civilization especially, economic conditions, unaffected by other cultural currents, evolve along their own lines, until trusts and syndicates emerge. We can see, too, how Western man is inclined to attempt to separate economic from religious life, though he is less successful in separating it from what he later absorbed from juridical thinking and feeling. Even so, we are clearly aware how economic configurations, in their social aspect, are gradually struggling free of the intellectual straightjacket that was imposed on them while they were still under the sway of the legal element. Increasingly, we find economic life pure and simple attaining its emancipation. There can then evolve categories that derive from economic life itself.

At this point, however, we become aware of something that must establish relationships between men and between peoples, yet also lead to conflicts between peoples, and indeed conflicts within nations. We perceive that, in the ancient Orient, the religious element included the legal and economic ones; that the legal element subsequently became more or less distinct, but still contains the economic one, whilst the religious element has become more independent; and that now, in the West, an independent economic life is seeking to develop. Perceiving this, we must also consider how the various cultural patterns of humanity stand in relation to these currents.

And here we may conclude that the theocratic and patriarchal element, with its roots in the East, can really only produce something consonant with an agrarian system, with a social organization based principally on the cultivation of land, on an arable economy. We thus observe a certain correlation between agrarian life and the theocratic element. Moreover, this has its effect on all the social structures of more modern times. In admitting that the theocratic element continues to inform social structures right down to our own times, we must also realize that, because other branches of human activity have come to the fore, they have come into conflict with it, to the extent that in agrarianism, in accordance with the nature of human agriculture, the theocratic element seeks to maintain its position. The correlation exists. A split occurs in it, however, when human activities of another kind seek to assert themselves.

Here we may point to something that can be regarded as a barometer for this aspect of world history. I recommend you some time to study the Austrian parliamentary proceedings of, say, the seventies of the last century. You can observe, sitting in this parliament, men who believe that the old order, with its roots in theocracy and jurisprudence, is intimately associated with agriculture. They are faintly aware of something that later became a great flood, the influx of Western produce—including it is true country produce—deriving from a mode of thought and a social order built on a quite different branch of the economy—on industrialism. Although this is only faintly audible in the various parliamentary speeches, yet we can perceive precisely here, where so much has come together and may be studied, something that illuminates world-wide perspectives.

To what is here developing in the West, the theocratic mode of thought is less applicable than it is to any other branch of the economy. What is developing is industrialism. Naturally, land cultivation is not included in it. But land cultivation itself is then caught up by social configurations that are distinctly reminiscent of the tutelage of industrial thinking.

Yet industrial thinking today, however much it has developed its technical structures, has still not assumed the social structures appropriate to it. On the one hand, we can see the correlation between the theocratic mode of thought, with its patriarchal essence, and the agrarian system. We can see, for example, that in Germany, right down to the present day, it has been impossible for agrarian thinking and industrial thinking to come to terms properly, for reasons I have indicated. We can see this correlation, therefore; but on the other hand we can also see how everything appertaining to commerce is, in the last analysis, correlated with politics and the law.

That is why, in the ancient Orient, commerce is a kind of appendage to the patriarchal administration of human affairs. And in the form that is socially significant for us today, commerce really develops alongside the legal element. For what is required between man and man in trade is something that develops particularly in the juridical sphere. In so far as it did develop in the Orient, the way was prepared by certain commandments, transposed into legal terms but definitely regarded as divine. Commerce, however, has achieved its social organization only within the political and legal current in human development. We can say, therefore, that it is the commercial aspect of economic life that has proved to be particularly suited to political systems based on law and legal thinking.

At the same time, it is true that—because in the whole man everything must be connected with everything else—the political and legal element has also linked up with the industrial sector of economic life. As we go further and further West, therefore, we find that, although men evolve their personal relationship to anything chiefly from industry and the things associated with it, yet they also take over features of commerce. For with social structures as they are today, any undertaking is viewed, in point of fact, in the light of its commercial function in the social order. The industrialist himself sees his own undertaking within a commercial framework, so that in this way too the second current, the legal one, maintains its influence on the economic life of the West.

In other present-day social structures, we can see even more clearly how this politico-legal element continues to exert an influence below the surface among the broad masses of the people. As concomitants of modern technical life, all kinds of social structures have emerged. We need only recall the trade unions. We correctly perceive the nature of these only when we realize that economic conditions have created them. Nevertheless, those who see these things in a vital manner know that, even if the unions emerge from economic conditions—associations of metalworkers, printing trades unions and so on—the way men behave within them, the way they vote, the way they look at things and discuss them, is the parliamentary, political and legal one, the administrative way. It is something that derives from the second current I have described. The ideas appropriate to the third current are still in their infancy, and it still has to take its social patterns from what is old.

At the present time, therefore, we can see three principal types of social configuration existing side by side, widely differentiated of course in one direction and another. They co-exist in such a way that, we may say, history is deployed in space. And in adapting ourselves to any individual social configuration—an economic association, a political association or a religious community—we do in fact, since each of them is in contact with the others, enter a community where elements that have arisen successively in history now co-exist. They have now become shuffled together in space, and call for our understanding today, for this is the time when mankind must regain, at a higher level, the nai'vet^ from which creativity originally sprang.

It was once proper that primitive economic and political life should be poured into the theocratic mould. At a later period, a duality developed, taking over from earlier times the religious element, and evolving the political and legal element, incorporating economic life. So, today, economic life cries out for independent organization, for vital human ideas that can operate once more in a formative manner, as the vital impulses! of the legal forms of Greece and Rome, and the Orient's religious impulses, once operated. Since these three currents in human development are now mutually diverging, however, we must be able to consider them independently. We must look at the spiritual side of social structures, initially the only effective one; must look at their legal side, which became the dominant one in the Middle Ages; and must look at their economic side, for which a spiritual aspect must also be sought.

This has been put forward simply as a reflection on the antecedents of present-day social structures. It is intended to indicate that, in order to understand these structures, we must enter with real understanding upon the contemplation of those world-wide perspectives to which I drew attention at the beginning of this lecture. To do so, however, we shall have need of vital thought. That this vital thought is needed can be seen on the one hand from the sociological tone of my observations here; but it also emerges from direct contemplation of contemporary life. Everywhere, people are longing to begin to permeate economic life with the vital thought-impulses appropriate to it.

In this respect, of course, educated men of the West are of peculiar interest. In an extraordinarily significant treatise written in England in the very year before the fearful event of the Great War, a notable Englishman pointed out how fundamentally the English way of thinking differs from the German one—in the sense that I indicated at the beginning of my observations today. But he points out something else too: what strikes him is that, within the German-speaking population of Central Europe, there has always existed thought. And he observes that thought is the element in the human soul that in the most intimate way points continually to the great enigmas. Through civilizations that cultivate thought, as the German does, we are confronted again and again with the deepest riddles of man and the cosmos, even if—and here comes the tail-piece characteristic of this man of Western Europe—even if, he says, we perceive the futility of supposing their solution.

Well, it was proper to speak of the “vanity” of a solution when one could only point to the thought that emerged by abstraction from the body of law and logic; for, although as thought it may rise to supreme heights, this still remains a kind of dead thought. Anyone, however, who becomes aware that in our time the souls of men can provide a birth-place for vital thought, will speak, not perhaps of a final solution, but of a path that can lead to our being able to solve, at least for that particular period, the social problems that face us at any time.

For it is probably true that, once thinking about social structures has appeared in human evolution, we cannot speak of being able to solve the social problem all at once, but must rather say that among the evolutionary impulses that must survive into the future are included reflections about social organization. We can say, therefore: It is true that we shall not be able to speak of solutions, but of a vital human thinking that in a conscious way will first perceive the goals and in a conscious way will then move towards the solution of the social riddles of existence.

At the time when materialism—mainly theoretical materialism—was in its prime, in the middle and still to some extent during the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the writings of Buchner and Vogt (‘bulky Vogt’ as he used to be called) had made a deep impression upon people who considered themselves enlightened, one could often hear a way of speaking that is occasionally also heard today, because stragglers from that epoch of theoretical materialism are still to be found in certain circles. When people do not flatly deny the possibility of a life after death, or even here and there admit it, they are wont to say: Well, there may be a life after death but why should we trouble about it during life on Earth? When death has taken place we shall discover whether there is indeed a future life, and meanwhile if here on Earth we concern ourselves only with the affairs of earthly existence and take no account of what is alleged to come afterwards, we cannot miss anything of importance. For if the life after death has anything to offer we shall then discover what it is!

As I said, this way of speaking could be heard time and time again and this is still the case in wide circles today; in the way the subject is expressed it may often, in a certain respect, almost seem acceptable. And yet it is utterly at variance with what is disclosed to spiritual investigation when the facts connected with the life between death and rebirth are considered in their spiritual aspect. When a man has passed through the gate of death he comes into contact with many and infinitely varied forces and beings. He does not only find himself living amid a multitude of super-sensible facts but he comes into contact with definite forces and Beings—namely, the Beings of the several higher Hierarchies. Let us ask ourselves what this contact signifies for one who is passing through the period of existence between death and the new birth.

We know that when an individual has spent this period of life in the super-sensible world and passes into physical existence again through birth, he becomes in a certain way the moulder of his own bodily constitution, indeed of his whole destiny in the life on Earth. Within certain limits the human being builds and fashions his body, even the very convolutions of his brain, by means of the forces brought with him from the spiritual worlds when he enters again into physical existence through birth. Our whole earthly existence depends upon our physical body possessing organs which enable us to come in touch with the outer physical world, to act and moreover to think in that world.

If, here in the physical world, we do not possess the appropriately formed brain which, on passing through birth we formed for ourselves out of the forces of the super-sensible world, we remain unable to cope with life in this physical world. In the real sense we are fitted for life in the physical world only when we bring with us from the spiritual world forces by means of which we have been able to build a body able to cope with this world and all its demands. The super-sensible forces which man needs in order to fashion his body and also his destiny are received by him from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies with whom he has made contact between death and the new birth. What we need for the shaping of our life must be acquired during the time that has preceded our birth since the last death. Between death and the next birth we must approach, stage by stage, the Beings who can endow us with the forces we need for our physical existence.

In the life between death and rebirth we can pass before the Beings of the higher Hierarchies in two ways. We may recognise them, understand their nature and essential characteristics, be able to receive what they can give us and what we shall need in the following life. We must be able to understand or at least to perceive what is being offered us and what we shall subsequently need. But we might also pass before these Beings in such a way that, figuratively speaking, their hands are offering gifts which we do not receive because it is dark in the higher world in which we then live. Thus we may pass through that world with understanding, with awareness of what these Beings are offering us, or we may pass through it without understanding, unaware of what they wish to bestow. Now the way in which we pass through this spiritual world, which of the two ways we necessarily choose in our life between death and the new birth, is predetermined by the after-effects of the previous life and of earlier lives on Earth. A person whose attitude in his last life on Earth was unresponsive and antagonistic to all thoughts and ideas that may enlighten him about the super-sensible world—such a person passes through the life between death and rebirth as if through a world of darkness. For the light, the spiritual light we need in order to realise how these different Beings approach us and what gifts we may receive from them for our next life on Earth—the light of understanding for what is here coming to pass cannot be acquired in the super-sensible world itself; it must be acquired here, during physical incarnation on Earth. If, at death, we bear with us into the spiritual life no relevant ideas and concepts, we shall pass unknowingly through our super-sensible existence until the next birth, receiving none of the forces needed for the next life. From this we realise how impossible it is to say that we can wait until death itself occurs because we shall then discover what the facts are—whether indeed we shall encounter any reality at all after death. Our relationship to that reality depends upon whether in earthly life we have been receptive or antagonistic in our souls to concepts or ideas of the super-sensible world that have been accessible to us and will be the light through which we must ourselves illumine the path between death and rebirth.

Something further can be gathered from what has been said. The belief that we have, so to say, only to die in order to receive everything that the super-sensible world can give us, even if we have made no preparation for it—this belief is utterly false. Every world has its own special mission. And what a man can acquire during an incarnation on Earth he can acquire in no single one of the other worlds. Between death and the new birth he is able, in all circumstances, to enter into communion with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But in order to receive their gifts, to avoid having to grope in darkness through life there or in fearful loneliness, in order to establish contact with those Beings and receive their forces, the ideas and concepts which are the light enabling the higher Hierarchies to be visible to the soul must be acquired in earthly life. And so an individual who in earthly life during the present cycle of time has rejected all spiritual ideas, passes through the life between death and rebirth in fearful loneliness, groping in darkness. In the next incarnation he will fail to bring with him the forces wherewith to build his body efficiently and mould his organs; he can fashion them in an imperfect form only and consequently he will be an inadequate human being in his next life.

We realise from this how Karma works over from one life to the next. In one life a man deliberately scorns to develop in his soul any relationship with the spiritual worlds; in the next life he has no forces wherewith to create even the organs enabling him to think, feel or will the truths of spiritual life. He remains dull and indifferent to spiritual things and spiritual life passes him by as though in dream—as is so frequently the case today. On the Earth such an individual can take no interest in spiritual worlds; and his soul, after passing through the gate of death, is an easy prey for the Luciferic powers. Lucifer makes straight for such souls. Here we have the strange situation that in the next life in the spiritual world, the life that follows the dull, unreceptive one, the deeds and the Beings of the higher Hierarchies are indeed illumined for such an individual but in this case not as a result of what he acquired in earthly life but by the light which Lucifer sends into his soul. It is Lucifer who illumines the higher worlds for him when he passes into the life between death and rebirth. Now, he can, it is true, perceive the higher Hierarchies, recognise when they are offering their gifts to him. But the fact that Lucifer has tainted the light means that all the gifts have a particular colouring and character. The forces of the higher Hierarchies are then not exactly as the human being could otherwise have received them. Their nature then is such that when the human being passes into his next life on Earth he can certainly form and mould his body, but he moulds it then in such a way that although he becomes an individual who is, admittedly, able to cope with the outer world and its demands, in a certain respect he is inwardly inadequate, because his soul is tinged with Lucifer's gifts or at least by gifts that have a Luciferic trend.

When we come across individuals who have worked on their bodies in such a way that they are able to make effective use of their intellect and acquire certain skills which will help them to raise their status in the world, although to their own advantage only, snatching at what is in their own interest, dryly calculating what is beneficial to themselves without any consideration for others—and there are many such people nowadays—in these cases the seer will very often find that their previous history was what has been described. Before they began to display their dry, intellectual, sharp-witted character in life, they had been led through their existence between death and rebirth by Luciferic beings who were able to approach them because in the preceding incarnation they had lived an apathetic, dreamy existence. But these traits themselves had been acquired because such individuals had passed through an earlier existence between death and rebirth groping in darkness. The Spirits of the higher Hierarchies would have bestowed upon them the forces needed for fashioning a new life, but they were unable to receive these forces; and that in turn was because they had deliberately refused to concern themselves with ideas and concepts relating to a spiritual world. That is the karmic connection. Such examples do certainly occur; they appear before the eyes of spirit only too frequently when with the help of powers of spiritual investigation and knowing the conditions of human life, we penetrate into higher worlds.

It is therefore wrong to say that here on Earth we need concern ourselves only with what is around us in earthly existence because what comes later will be revealed in all good time. But the form in which it will be revealed depends entirely upon how we have prepared ourselves for it here.

Another possibility may occur. I am saying these things in order that by understanding the life between death and rebirth, life between birth and death may become more and more intelligible.

When we study life on Earth with discernment, we see many human beings—and in our time they are very numerous—who can, as it were, only ‘half think’, whose logic invariably breaks down when faced with reality. Here is an example: A certain free-thinking cleric, an honourable man in all his endeavours, wrote in the first Freethinkers' Calendar as follows: Children ought not to be taught any ideas about religion for that would be against nature. If children are allowed to grow up without having any ideas about religion pumped into them, we find that they do not of themselves arrive at ideas of God, immortality, and so forth. The inference to be drawn from this is that such ideas are unnatural to the human being and should not be drummed into him; he should work only with what can be drawn from his own soul. As in many other cases, there are thousands and thousands of people nowadays to whom an utterance such as this seems very clever, very subtle. But if only genuine logic were applied the following would be obvious: If we were to take a human being before he has learnt to speak, put him on a lonely island and take care that he can hear no single word of speech, he would never learn to speak. And so anyone who argues against children being taught any ideas about religion would logically have to say that human beings should not have to learn to speak, for speech does not come of itself. So our free-thinking cleric cannot propagate his ideas by means of his logic, for both he and his logic come to a halt when confronted by the facts. His logic can be applied to a small area only, and he does not notice that his idea, assuming one can get hold of it, cancels itself out.

Anyone who is alert to his surroundings will find that this inadequate, pseudo-thinking is very widespread. If with the help of super-sensible research we trace the path of such an individual backwards and come to the regions through which his soul passed between the last death and the last birth, when this illogical mentality was caused, the seer often finds that this type of human being, in his last life between death and rebirth, passed through the spiritual world in such a way that he encountered the spiritual Beings and forces while under the guidance of Ahriman; and that although those Beings would have bestowed upon him what he needed in life, they could not make it possible for him to develop the capacity for sound thinking. Ahriman was his leader and it was Ahriman who contrived that the gifts of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies could only be received by him in a form that would finally result in his thinking coming to a halt when confronting actual facts, and in his inability to make his thinking exhaustive and valid. A large proportion of those human beings—and their number is legion—who are incapable of genuine thinking today owe this to the fact that in their last life between death and rebirth they were obliged to submit to Ahriman's guidance; they had somehow prepared themselves for this in their last earthly life—that is to say, in the incarnation preceding the present one.

And what was the course of that preceding life as viewed by a seer? It is found that these were morose, hypochondriacal individuals, who shied away from facts and people in the world and always found it difficult to establish any relation with their environment. Very often they were intolerable hypochondriacs in their previous life; on medical examination they would have been found to be suffering from the type of illness occurring very frequently in hypochondriacs. And if we were to go still further back, to the life between death and rebirth that preceded the hypochondriacal incarnation, we should find that during that period such human beings were obliged again to forego the right guidance and could not become truly aware of what the gifts of the higher Hierarchies would have been. And how had they prepared themselves for this fate in the life preceding the last two incarnations? We should find that they had developed what it is certainly true to call a religious, pious attitude of soul but an attitude based on sheer egoism. They were people with a pious, even mystical nature emanating from egoism. After all, mysticism very often has its origin in egoism. An individual of this type might say: I seek within myself in order that there I may recognise God. But what he is seeking there is only his own self made into God! In the case of many pious souls it becomes evident that they are pious only in order that after death one or another of their spiritual inclinations may bear fruit. All that they have acquired is an egotistic attitude of soul.

When in the course of spiritual research we trace the sequence of three such earthly lives, we find that in the first, the basic attitude of the soul was that of egotistic mysticism, egotistic religiosity. And when today we observe human beings with this attitude to life, we shall be able, by means of spiritual investigation to trace them back to times when souls without number developed a religious frame of mind out of sheer egoism. They then passed through an existence between death and rebirth without being able to receive from the spiritual Beings the gifts which would have enabled them to shape their next life rightly. In that life they became morose and hypochondriacal, finding everything distasteful. This life again prepared them for the ensuing one when, having passed through the gate of death, Ahriman and his hosts became their leaders and the forces with which they were imbued manifested in the following earthly life as defective logic, as an obtuse, undiscerning kind of thinking.

Here, then, we have another example of three successive incarnations. And we realise again and again what nonsense it is to believe that we can wait until death to establish connection with the super-sensible world. For how this connection is established after death depends upon the inner tendencies of soul acquired here on Earth towards the super-sensible world. Not only are the successive earthly lives connected as causes and effects, but the lives between death and the new birth are also connected in a certain way as causes and effects. This can be seen from the following.

When the seer directs his gaze into the super-sensible world where souls are sojourning after death, he will find among them those who during part of this life between death and rebirth are servants of those Powers whom we may call the Lords of all healthy, budding and burgeoning life on the Earth. (In the very lengthy period between death and rebirth, innumerable experiences are undergone and in accounts of the present kind, parts only can be described.) Among the dead we find souls who for a certain length of time in the super-sensible world co-operate in the wonderful task—for wonderful it is—of pouring, infusing into the physical world everything that can further the health of beings on the Earth, can help them to thrive and blossom. Just as in certain circumstances we can become servants of the evil spirits of illness and misfortune, so too we can become the servants of those spiritual beings who promote health and growth, who send down from the spiritual world into our physical world forces that help life to flourish. It is nothing but a materialistic superstition to believe that physical hygiene and external regulations are the sole means of promoting health. Everything that happens in physical life is directed by the beings and powers of higher worlds who are all the time pouring into the physical world forces which in a certain way work freely, upon human or other beings, either promoting or harming health and growth. Certain specific spiritual powers and beings are responsible for these processes in health and illness. In the life between death and rebirth man co-operates with these powers; and if we have prepared ourselves in the right way we can experience the bliss of co-operating in the task of sending the forces which promote health and growth, from the higher worlds into this physical world. And when the seer enquires into why such souls have deserved this destiny, he becomes aware that in physical life on Earth there are two ways in which human beings can execute and think about what they want to achieve.

Let us take a general look at life. We see numbers of human beings who carry out the work prescribed for them by their profession or office. Even if there is no radical case of any one of these people regarding their work as if they were animals being led to the slaughterhouse, it is at least true to say that they work because they are obliged to. Of course they would never neglect their duty—although of course anything may happen! In a certain sense it cannot be otherwise in the present phase of man's evolution; the only urge such people feel towards their work is that of duty. This does not by any means suggest that such work should be criticised root and branch. It should not be understood in this sense. Earth-evolution is such that this aspect of life will become more and more widespread; nor will things improve in the future. The tasks that men will have to carry out will become increasingly complicated in so far as they are connected with outer life and men will be condemned more and more to think and do only that to which duty drives them. Already there are hosts of human beings who do their work only because duty forces them to it, but on the other hand there will be people who look for a Society such as ours in which they can also achieve something, not simply from a sense of duty as in everyday life but for which they feel enthusiasm and devotion. Thus there are two aspects of a man's work: has it been thought out or done as an outer achievement merely from a sense of duty, or has it been done with enthusiasm and inner devotion, solely out of an inner urge of his own soul? This attitude—to think and act not merely out of a sense of duty, but out of love, inclination and devotion—this prepared the soul to become a server of the beneficent Powers of health and salutary forces sent down from the super-sensible world into our physical world, to become a servant of everything that brings health and to experience the bliss that can accompany these circumstances.

To know this is extremely important for the general well-being of man, for only by acquiring during life the forces that will enable him to co-operate with the Powers in question will he be able to work spiritually for an ever intensifying process of healing and betterment of conditions on the Earth.

We will now consider still another case, of one who makes efforts to adapt himself to his environment and its demands. This by no means applies to everybody. There are some people who take no trouble to adjust themselves to the world and are never at home with the conditions either of spiritual or outer physical life. For example, there are individuals who notice an announcement that here or there an anthroposophical lecture will be given; they go to the place but almost as soon as they get seated, they are already asleep! In such cases the soul cannot adapt itself to the environment is not attuned to it. I have known men who cannot even sew on a button to replace one that has been torn off; that again means that they cannot adapt themselves to physical conditions. Countless cases could be quoted of people who cannot or will not adapt themselves to life. These symptoms are very significant, as I have said. At the moment, however, we will think only of the effects upon the life between death and rebirth.

Everything becomes cause and everything produces effects. A man who makes efforts to adapt himself to his environment, someone, that is to say, who can actually sew on a button or can listen to something with which he is unfamiliar without immediately falling asleep, is preparing himself to become, after death, a helper of those Spirits who further the progress of humanity and send down to the Earth the spiritual forces which promote life as it advances from epoch to epoch. After death we can experience the bliss of looking down upon earthly life and co-operating with the forces that are perpetually being sent to the Earth to further its progress, but this is possible only if we endeavour to adapt ourselves to our environment and its conditions. To be rightly and thoroughly understood Karma must be studied in details, in details which reveal the manifold ways in which causes and effects are connected here in the physical world, in the spiritual world and in existence as a whole.

Here again light is thrown upon the fact that our life in the spiritual worlds depends upon the mode of our life in the physical body. Each world has its own specific mission; no two worlds have an identical mission. The characteristic phenomena and experiences in one world are not the same in another. And if, for example, a being is meant to assimilate certain things on Earth, it is on Earth that he must do so; if he misses this opportunity he cannot acquire them in some other world. This is particularly the case in a matter which we have already considered but of which it will be well to be thoroughly aware. The matter in question concerns the acceptance of certain concepts and ideas needed by man for his life as a whole. Let us take an example that is near at hand. Anthroposophy is a timely and active force in our epoch. People approach and accept Anthroposophy during their life on Earth in the way known to you, but again the belief might arise that it is not necessary to cultivate Anthroposophy on Earth, for one will be in a position after death to know how things are in the spiritual worlds; that moreover the higher Hierarchies will also be there and able to impart to the soul what is necessary.

Now it is a fact that having passed through the phase of development leading to the present cycle of evolution, the human being, with his whole soul, has been prepared to contact on Earth the kind of anthroposophical life that is possible only while he is incarnated in a physical body. Men are predestined for this and if they fail they will be unable to establish relationship with any of the spiritual Beings who might have been their teachers. One cannot simply die and then, after death, find a teacher who might take the place of what here, during physical life on Earth, can come to souls in the form of Anthroposophy. We need not, however, be dejected by the fact that many individuals reject Anthroposophy and it is therefore to be assumed that they will not be able to acquire it between death and the new birth. We need not despair about them for they will be born in a new earthly life and by that time there will be a strong enough stimulus towards Anthroposophy and enough Anthroposophy on the Earth for them to acquire it. In the present age despondency is still out of place, but that should not lead anyone to say: I can acquire Anthroposophy in my next life and so can do without it now. No, what has been neglected here cannot be retrieved later on.

When our German Theosophical Movement was still very young I was once giving a lecture about Nietzsche, during which I said certain things about the spiritual worlds. At that time it was customary to have discussions and on this occasion someone got up and said that such matters must always be put to the test of Kant's philosophy, from which it would be evident that we can have no knowledge of these things here on Earth and can begin to know them only after death. That, quite literally, was what the man said. As I have repeatedly emphasised, it is not the case that one has only to die in order to acquire certain knowledge. When we pass through the gate of death we do not experience anything for which we have not prepared ourselves. Life between death and rebirth is throughout a continuation of the life here, as the examples already given have shown. Therefore as individuals we can acquire from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies only that for which we have prepared ourselves on Earth—perhaps by having become anthroposophists. Our connection with the Earth and our passage through the life on Earth have a significance which nothing else can replace.

A certain form of mediation is, however, possible in this connection and I have already spoken of it. A person may die and during his lifetime have had no knowledge at all of Spiritual Science; but his brother or his wife or a close friend were anthroposophists. The man who has died may have refused to have anything to do with Anthroposophy during his life; perhaps he consistently abused it. Now he has passed through the gate of death and Anthroposophy can be conveyed to him in some way by other personalities on Earth. But there must be someone on Earth who passes on the knowledge to him out of love. Connection with the Earth must be maintained. This is the basis of what I have called ‘reading to the dead’. We can render them great benefit even if previously they would listen to nothing about the spiritual world. We can help them either by putting what we have to say into the form of thoughts, conveying knowledge in this way, or we may take an anthroposophical book, visualise the personality concerned, and read to him from it; then he will learn. We have had a number of striking and beautiful examples in our Movement of how it has been possible in this way to benefit the dead. Many of our friends read to those who have died. I recently had an experience that others too may have had. Someone asked me about a friend who had died very recently and it seemed that he was trying to make himself noticed by means of all kinds of signs, especially at night, creating disturbance in the room, rapping and so on. Such happenings are often indications that the dead person wants something; and in this case it was quite evident. In his lifetime the man had been very erudite but had always rejected any knowledge of the spiritual world that might come his way. It became obvious that he would greatly benefit if a particular Lecture Course containing the subject-matter for which he was craving, were read to him. In this way very effective help can be given beyond death for something left undone on Earth.

The fact that can convince us of the great and significant mission of Anthroposophy is that Anthroposophy can bridge the gulf between the living and the dead, that when human beings die they have not really gone away from us but we remain connected with them and can be active on their behalf. If it is asked whether one can always know whether the dead soul also hears us, it must be said that those who do what has been described with genuine devotion will eventually become aware from the way in which the thoughts which they are sending to the dead live in their own souls that the dead person is hovering around them. But this is an experience, a feeling, of which sensitive souls alone are capable. The most distressing aspect is when something that might be a great service of love is not heeded; in that case it has been done unnecessarily for the person concerned, but it may still have some effect in the general pattern of worlds. In any case one should not grieve excessively about such lack of success. After all, it happens even here that something is read to people who do not listen!

These things may well give a true conception of the seriousness and worth of Anthroposophy. But it must constantly be emphasised that the conditions of our life in the spiritual world after death will depend entirely upon the manner of our life here on Earth. Even our community with others in the spiritual world depends upon the nature of the relationship we sought to establish with them here. If there has been no relationship with a human being here on Earth it cannot be taken for granted that any connection can be established in the other world between death and rebirth. The possibility of being led to him in the spiritual world is as a rule dependent upon the contact established here on Earth—not necessarily in the last incarnation only but in earlier lives as well.

In short, both objective and personal relationships established here on Earth are the decisive factor for the life between death and the new birth. Exceptions do occur but must be recognised as such. What I said here at Christmastime (in Lecture Five) about the Buddha and his present mission on Mars is one such exception. There are numbers of human souls on the Earth who were able to contact the Buddha—even in his previous existence as Bodhisattva—as a result of inspirations received from the Mysteries. But because the Buddha was incarnated for the last time as the son of Suddodana, then worked in his etheric body as I have described¹ and has now transferred his sphere of activity to Mars, at the present time the possibility exists that even if we never previously came in contact with the Buddha, we can establish a relationship with him in the life between death and rebirth; and we can then bring the results of that contact with us into the next incarnation on Earth. But that remains an exceptional case. The general rule is that after death we find those individuals with whom we had actual contacts here on Earth and continue these relationships in that other state of existence.

What has now been said is closely related to the information given during this Winter about the life between death and the new birth, and the aim has been to show that if Anthroposophy remains simply a matter of theory and external science, it is only half of what it ought to be; it fulfils its true function only when it streams through souls as a veritable elixir of life and enables these souls to experience in depth the feelings that arise in a human being when he acquires some knowledge of the higher worlds. Death then ceases to appear as a destroyer of human and personal relationships. The gulf between life here on Earth and the life after death is bridged and many activities carried out with this in mind will develop. The dead will send their influences into life, the living their influences into the realm of the dead.

My wish is that your souls will feel more deeply that life is enriched, becomes fuller and more spiritual when everything is influenced by Anthroposophy. Only those who feel this have the right attitude to Anthroposophy. What is of prime importance is not the knowledge that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, that he passes through many incarnations, that the Earth too has passed through the several incarnations of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, and so forth. The most important and essential need is to allow Anthroposophy to transform our lives in a way commensurate with the Earth's future. This feeling can never be experienced too deeply, nor can we bestir ourselves too often in this connection. The feelings we bear with us from these meetings and then move through life under the stimulus of the knowledge of the super-sensible worlds acquired here—these feelings are the really important element in anthroposophical life. Merely to have knowledge of Anthroposophy is not enough; knowledge and feeling must be combined. We must realise, however, how false it is to believe that without any understanding of the world we can do it justice. Leonardo da Vinci's saying is true: “Great love is the daughter of great understanding.” He who is not prepared to understand will not learn how to love.

It is in this sense that Anthroposophy should find entry into our souls, in order that from this influence which proceeds from our own being a stream of spirituality may find its way into Earth-evolution, creating harmony between spirit and matter. Life on the Earth will, it is true, continue to be materialistic—indeed outer life will become increasingly so—but as man moves over the Earth he will bear within his soul the realisation of his connection with the higher worlds. Outwardly, earthly life will become more and more materialistic—that is the Earth's karma—but in the same measure, if Earth-evolution is to reach its goal, souls must become inwardly more and more spiritual. My purpose today was to make a small contribution towards understanding this task.

• 1. See Lectures Three, Five and Six of the course, The Gospel of St. Luke

Yesterday I gave you pictures of two or three personalities. In order to allow for the possibility of proof and confirmation, at least as far as external details are concerned, it is necessary to choose fairly well-known personalities and in describing them to you I have pointed in each case to characteristic qualities which can afford clues for the spiritual scientific investigator and help him to follow up the karmic relationships. This time I have chosen subjects which will also enable me to deal with a problem that has been put to me by members of our Society. Simply stated, it is as follows. Constantly, on every suitable occasion, reference is made—and of course correctly—to the fact that in very early times there were Initiates possessed of a lofty wisdom and at a high stage of development, and the question arises: If human beings pass through repeated earth-lives, where are these highly-initiated personalities? Where are they today? Are they to be found among the human beings who have been led to reincarnation at the present time? I have accordingly chosen examples which will enable me to deal with this very problem.

I gave you, as far as was necessary, a picture of the hero of the freedom of Italy, Garibaldi; and if you take what I said yesterday and add to it all that is well-known to you about this personality—a whole wealth of information is available about him—I think you will still find a very great deal in Garibaldi that is puzzling and that opens up significant questions.

Take two events of his life which amused you yesterday.—He became acquainted through a telescope with the girl who was to be his life-companion for many years, and he learnt of his own death-sentence when reading his name for the first time in print. There is still another very striking event in his life. The life-companion whom he found in the way I have described, and who stood at his side with such heroism, was the sharer of his life for many years. He certainly managed to see something very good through his telescope! Later, she died, leaving him alone, and he married a second time, this time not through a telescope—not even a Garibaldi is likely to do such a thing more than once!—this time he married, shall I say, in a perfectly conventional bourgeois manner. But for Garibaldi the marriage lasted no longer than one day. So you see, there is this other very striking fact in Garibaldi's relations with the ordinary bourgeois conditions of this world.

And now we come to something else of importance. The things I am describing to you come, as it were, with a sudden jerk to one accustomed to occult researches of this kind; they are clues that enable his vision to penetrate right into an earlier life or into a number of earlier lives. And in Garibaldi's life there is still another circumstance which raises a formidable problem.

Garibaldi, you know, was a Republican in his very bones; he was a Republican through and through. I made that abundantly clear in yesterday's lecture. And yet in all his plans for the liberation of Italy he never set out to make Italy into a Republic, but rather into an Empire under Victor Emanuel. That is an astonishing fact. When one looks at Garibaldi's whole life and character and then considers this fact, it really does astonish one.

There we have on the one hand Victor Emmanuel, who could of course reign as king only over a liberated Italy. And we have on the other hand Mazzini—also deeply united in friendship with Garibaldi—who, as you know, stood for a long time at the head of what was intended to be an Italian Republic, for he was willing to come forward only as the founder of an Italian Republic. The karmic relationships of Garibaldi will never be solved unless we take note here of a special set of circumstances.

In the course of a few years—Garibaldi, you know, was born at Nice in 1807—there were born within an area of a comparatively few square miles, four men who had a significant connection with one another in the wider course of European circumstances. In Nice, at the beginning of the 19th century, Garibaldi was born; in Genoa, not far away, Mazzini; in Turin, again not far, away, Cavour; and from the House of Savoy, once more at no great distance, Victor Emanuel. These four men are all quite near to one another in respect of the times and places of their births. And it is these four men together who, if not agreeing in thought, if not even acting always in mutual agreement, nevertheless established the country which became modern Italy.

You can see how the very way in which these four personalities are brought together in history suggests that they have, not only for themselves, but for the world, a common destiny. The most significant among them is, without doubt, Garibaldi himself. Taking into consideration all human conditions and relationships, we cannot but agree that he is by far the most significant figure of the four. Garibaldi's mentality, however, expresses itself in an elemental way. Mazzini's mentality is that of a learned philosopher; Cavour's that of a learned lawyer. And as for Victor Emmanuel's mentality ... well, there is no doubt about it, the most important among them all is Garibaldi. He possesses a quality of mind and spirit that expresses itself with elemental force, so that one cannot remain indifferent towards it. One cannot remain indifferent, for one simply doesn't know whence these traits come ... as long as they are looked at from the standpoint of the personal psychology of a single earth-life.

Now I come back to the question: Where are the earlier Initiates? For certainly it will be said that they are not to be found. But, my dear friends—I shall have to say something paradoxical here!—if it were possible for a number of human beings to be born today at the age of seventeen or eighteen, so that when they descended from the spiritual world they would in some way or other find and enter seventeen- or eighteen-year-old bodies, or if at least human beings could in some way be spared from going to school (as schools are constituted today), then you would find that those who were once Initiates would be able to appear in the human being of the present day. But just as little as it is possible, under the conditions obtaining on earth today, for an Initiate, when he needs bread, to nourish himself from a piece of ice, just as little is it possible for the wisdom of an older time to manifest directly, in the form that you would expect, in a body that has received education—in the present-day accepted sense of the word—up to his seventeenth or eighteenth year. Nowhere in the world is this possible; at all events, nowhere in the civilised world. We have here to take account of things that lie altogether beyond the outlook of the educated men of modern times.

When, as is the custom today, a child is obliged as early as the sixth or seventh year to learn to read and write, it is torture for the soul that wants to develop and unfold in accordance with its own nature. I can only repeat what I have already told you in my autobiography, that I owe the removal of many hindrances to the circumstance that when I was twelve years old I was still unable to write properly. For the capacity of being able to write, in the way that is demanded today, kills certain qualities in the human being.

It is necessary to say such a thing, paradoxical though it may sound, for it is the truth. There is no help for it—it is a fact. Hence it is that a highly evolved individual can be recognised in his reincarnation only if one looks at manifestations of human nature which are not directly apparent in a man, if he has gone through a modern education, but reveal themselves, so to speak, behind him. We have in Garibaldi a most striking example of this. What did civilised men, including Cavour, or at all events the followers of Cavour, think of Garibaldi? They regarded him as a madcap with whom it was useless to discuss anything in a sensible manner. That is a point of which we must take note; for there was much in his arguments and in his whole way of speaking that was bound to appear illogical, to say the least, to people enamoured of modern civilisation. Very often the things he says simply do not hold together. But when we are able to see behind a personality, and can look at that which in an earlier earth-life was able to enter into the body, but in this earth-life, because modern civilisation makes the bodies unfit, was not able to enter into the body—then we can begin to have an idea of what such a personality really is. Otherwise we are right off the track, for what is of most importance in such a personality lies right behind the things he can reveal externally. A good conventional man of the world, who simply expresses himself in the way he has learned to do, and in whom we see merely a reflection of the teaching and education he has received at school and elsewhere—such a man you can “photograph” in his moral and spiritual nature. He is there. A man, however, who comes over from other times bearing a soul filled with great and far-reaching wisdom, so that the soul cannot express itself in the body, can never be estimated with the means afforded by modern civilisation by what he does in the body. Above all, Garibaldi cannot be judged in that way. In his case it is rather like having to do—I am speaking metaphorically—with spiritualistic pictures, where a phantom becomes visible behind. With a personality like Garibaldi, you see him first as he is according to conventional standards, and behind you see something spiritual, a spirit-portrait, as it were, of that which in this incarnation cannot enter fully into the body.

When we take all this into consideration, and particularly if we meditate upon the special facts I have mentioned, then our vision is indeed led back from Garibaldi to a true Initiate who to all appearance lives out his Garibaldi-life in a quite different way, because he is unable to come down into his body.

If you consider the peculiar characteristics of Garibaldi's life to which I drew your attention, you will not find this so astonishing after all. A man must surely be somewhat of a stranger to earthly conventions if he finds his way into family relations through a telescope! Such a happening is certainly not usual, and it was not the only one in Garibaldi's life. In the characteristic style of his life there is something that points right away from ordinary alignment with bourgeois conventions.

Thus, in the case of Garibaldi, we are led back to an Initiate-life, and it was a life in those Mysteries which I described to you some months ago as proceeding from Ireland. Garibaldi, however, is to be found in an offshoot of those Mysteries at no great distance from here, in Alsace. There we find him, as an Initiate of a certain degree. And it is moreover fairly certain that between this incarnation in the 9th century, A.D., and his last incarnation in the 19th century, there was no further incarnation, but a long sojourn in the spiritual world. There you have the secret of this personality. He received all that I have described to you as the wisdom of Hibernia, and he received it at a very high stage of Initiation. He was within the places of the Mysteries in Ireland, and was actually the leader of the colony that came over later into Europe.

It goes without saying that just as an object reflected in a mirror becomes different in its reflected form, so all the wisdom of that time and place, embracing as it did the physical world and the spiritual world above it—all the wisdom in which an Initiate of those times participated, as I described it to you a few months ago—had to express itself during the 19th century in accordance with the civilisation of that period. You must accustom yourselves, when you find a philosopher in bygone times, or when you find a poet or an artist, not to look for the same individuality in the present epoch as a philosopher, poet or artist. The individuality passes from earth-life to earth-life, but the way in which he is able to live out his life depends upon what is possible in a particular epoch. Let me here insert an instance that will make this plain.

We will take another very well-known personality, Ernst Haeckel. Ernst Haeckel is famous as an enthusiastic adherent of a certain materialistic Monism—enthusiastic, one may say, to the point of fanaticism. He is well enough known to you; I need not give you any description of Haeckel. Now when we are led back from this personality to a former incarnation, we come to Pope Gregory VII, the monk Hildebrand, who afterwards became Pope Gregory VII.

I have chosen this instance so that you may see how differently the same individuality may express himself externally, in accordance with the cultural “climate” of the period. One would certainly not expect to look for the reincarnation of Pope Gregory VII in the 19th century representative of materialistic Monism.

The things that a man brings to manifestation on the physical plane, with the means afforded by external civilisation, are far less important to the spiritual world than one is inclined to suppose. Behind the personalities of the monk Hildebrand and Haeckel lies something wherein they are alike and this is of much greater account than the differences between them. One of them fights to the utmost to enhance the power of Roman Catholicism, and the other fights to the utmost against Roman Catholicism, but for the spiritual world it makes little difference. These things, fundamentally speaking, are important for the physical world only; they are quite different from the underlying elements in human nature which count in the spiritual world. And so we need not be astonished, my dear friends, if we have to see in Garibaldi an Initiate from an earlier age, an Initiate, as I said, of the 9th century. In the 19th century this comes to expression in the only way possible during that century. You will agree that for the whole way in which a man takes his place in the world, his temperament, his qualities of character are of importance. But if everything that made up Garibaldi's soul in an earlier incarnation had emerged in the 19th century, together with his temperament, he would most certainly have been regarded as a lunatic by the men of the 19th century. He would have been considered quite mad. As much of him as could emerge—that, externally, was Garibaldi.

And now, once we have been led in a certain direction, explanations light up for other karmic connections. The other three men of whom I have spoken, who were brought together again with Garibaldi in one region and approximately in the same decade, had been his pupils in that distant time—mark well, his pupils, assembled from distant parts of the earth, one from far away in the North, another from far away in the East and the third from far away in the West, called from all corners of the earth to be his pupils.

Now in the Irish Mysteries a definite obligation went with a certain degree of Initiation. It consisted in this, that the Initiate was bound to help on his pupils in all future earth-lives; he must not desert them. When, therefore, owing to their special karmic connections they make their appearance again on earth at the same time as their teacher, this means that he must experience the course of destiny with them; their karma has to be brought into reckoning with his own. If Garibaldi had not, at an earlier time, been associated as teacher with the individuality who came in Victor Emmanuel, then he would have been in very deed a Republican and would have founded the Republic of Italy. But behind all abstract principles are actual human lives passing from one earth-existence to another. Behind lies the duty of the Initiate of old towards his pupils. Hence the contradiction, for in accordance with the conceptions and ideas facing Garibaldi in the 19th century, he became quite naturally a Republican. What else should he have been? I have known a number of Republicans who were faithful servants of royalty. Inwardly they were Republicans, for the simple reason that in a certain period of the 19th century—it is long past now, at the time when I was a boy—everyone who counted himself an intelligent person was a Republican. People said: Of course we are Republicans, only we must not show it in the outer world. Inwardly, however, they were Republicans. So, of course, was Garibaldi, except that he did not show it in the outer world. He did not carry his republicanism into effect and those who were inspired by him could not understand this. Why was it? Because, as I have explained to you, he could not desert Victor Emmanuel, who was karmically united with him. He was obliged to help him on; and this was the only way he could do it.

Similarly the others, Cavour and Mazzini, were karmically united with Garibaldi, and he was able to do for them only as much as their capacities allowed. Whatever could proceed from all four of them, that alone Garibaldi was able to bring to fulfilment. He could not go his own way independently.

From this deeply significant fact, my dear friends, you can see that many things in life can be explained only from out of an occult background.

Have you not often experienced how at some moment of his life a person does something that is quite incomprehensible to you? You would not have expected it of him; you cannot possibly explain it from his character. You feel that if he were to follow his personal character, he would do something different. And you may be right. But there is another man living near him, with whom he is karmically united, as in Garibaldi's case. Why does he act as he does? It is really only against an occult background. that life becomes explicable. And so, in the case of Garibaldi, for example, we can truly say that we are led back to the Hibernian Mysteries—it sounds like a paradox but it is a fact. If we turn our gaze to the spiritual, we find that what meets us in external life on earth is, in many of its aspects, Maya. Many people with whom you are constantly together in ordinary life—if you could tell them what you are able to learn about them by looking through to the individuality behind—would be exceedingly astonished, they would be utterly bewildered. For what a man expresses outwardly—and this is particularly so in the present age, for the reasons I have given—is the merest fraction of what he really is, in terms of his former earth-lives. Many secrets are hidden in the things of which I am now speaking.

And now let us take the second personality of whom I gave you yesterday a brief characterisation—Lessing, who at the end of his life came forward with his pronouncement on repeated earth-lives. In his case we are led very far back, right back into Greek antiquity, when the ancient Mysteries of Greece were in their prime. Lessing was an Initiate in these Mysteries. And with him, too, we find that in the 18th century he was unable, so to speak, to come right down into his body. In the 13th century, as a repetition of his life in ancient Greece, we find an incarnation when he was a member of the Dominican Order, a distinguished Schoolman with subtle and penetrating concepts; and then, in the 18th century, he became the journalist par excellence of Middle Europe.

Take that drama of tolerance, Nathan the Wise, or such a book as The Dramatic Art of Hamburg—read for yourselves certain chapters of that book and then read The Education of the Human Race. These writings are comprehensible only on the assumption that all three incarnations of this personality have worked upon them: the Greek Initiate of olden times (read Lessing's treatise, How the men of old pictured death); the Schoolman, versed in medieval Aristotelianism; and lastly he who, with all this resting in his soul, found his way into the civilisation of the 18th century. Then, if you will keep in mind what I have just told you, a certain fact will become clear, a most striking and surprising fact.

It is remarkable how Lessing's life gives one the impression of a continual search. He himself brought this characteristic of his spiritual nature to expression when he uttered the famous saying, which has been quoted again and again (quoted, however, with very little understanding, by people who have no particular desire to strive after anything at all): “If God held in his right hand the whole full Truth, and in his left the everlasting striving after Truth, I would fall down before Him and say, ‘Father, give me what thou hast in thy left hand’.” A Lessing could say that. But when a mere pedant says it after him, it is of course intolerable. Lessing's whole life was indeed a search, an intense search. This comes to expression again and again in his works, and if we were honest with ourselves we should have to admit that many of Lessing's utterances are clumsy on this account, precisely those that are the most full of genius. People do not dare to admit that they stumble over them, because in history and literature Lessing is accounted a great man. In truth, however, his sayings often trip one up, so to speak; or, rather, they give one a feeling of being stabbed. You must, of course, become acquainted with Lessing himself to understand this. If you take up the book by Erich Schmidt, the two volumes on Lessing, then even when Erich Schmidt quotes him word for word you will not feel as though his utterances impaled you. Not at all! They may be the utterances of Lessing as far as the sound of the words goes, but what is written in the book before and after them takes away their edge.

It was not until the end of his earthly life that this seeker came to write The Education of the Human Race, which closes with the idea of repeated earth-lives. What is the explanation?

My dear friends, the way to understand this fact is through another fact I once mentioned. In the quarterly periodical [Das Reich. The articles are contained in the volume of the Complete Edition of Rudolf Steiner's works entitled, Philosophie und Anthroposophie. (Bibliographical No. 35.)] now discontinued, edited by our friend Bernus, I wrote an article on The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and I drew attention to the fact that it was written down by a boy of seventeen or eighteen. The boy himself understood not a word of it. We have external proof of that. He wrote down this Chymical Wedding from beginning to end. The last page is not extant, but he wrote down the whole of the Chymical Wedding, without understanding a word of it. If he had understood it, he would have been bound to retain the understanding in later years. The boy, however, became a pastor, a good, honest pastor of the Württemberg-Swabian type, who wrote exhortations and theological treatises which are distinctly below the average, and very far indeed from having anything to do with the content of the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. Life itself proves to us that it was not the Swabian pastor-to-be who wrote this Chymical Wedding out of his own soul. It is an inspired writing throughout.

So we may not always have to do with a man's own personality; there may be times when a spirit expresses itself through him. But there is a difference between the good Swabian pastor Valentin Andreae, who wrote those conventional theological treatises, and Lessing. Had Lessing been Valentin Andreae, merely transported into the 18th century, he might perhaps have written in his youth a beautiful treatise on the Education of the Human Race, bringing in the idea of repeated earth-lives. But he was not Valentin Andreae; he was Lessing, Lessing who had no visions, who even—so it is said—had no dreams. He banished the inspirer—unconsciously of course. If the inspirer had wanted to take possession of him in his youth, Lessing would have said: Go away, I have nothing to do with you. He followed the path that was normal for an educated man in the 18th century. And so it was only in extreme old age that he was mature enough to understand what had been in him throughout his life. It was with him as it would have been with Valentin Andreae if the latter had also banished the inspirer, had written no trivial, edifying sermons and theological treatises, but had waited until he reached a grey old age and had then written the Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz consciously.

Such are the links that unite successive earth-lives. And the day must come when this will be clearly understood. If we take a single earth-life, whether it be that of Goethe, or Lessing or Herbert Spencer or Shakespeare or Darwin, and look at what emerges from that life alone, it is just as though we were to pluck off a flower from a plant and imagine that it can exist by itself. A single life on earth is not comprehensible by itself; the explanation for it must be sought on the basis of repeated earth-lives.

And now we shall find it most interesting to study the two personalities of whom I spoke yesterday, Lord Byron and my geometry teacher. (You will pardon me if I become personal here.) They had in common only the construction of the foot, but this is a feature that specially repays attention. If one follows it up in an occult sense, it leads one to a peculiar condition of the head in an earlier earth-life. I have shown you a similar connection in the case of Eduard von Hartmann.—There is no getting over it. One can do no other than simply relate such things, as vision reveals them to one. No external, logical proofs, no proofs in the ordinary sense, can be given for these things.—When we follow the lives of these two men, it appears to us as though the lives they led in the 19th century had been shifted out of place. For we find, first of all, a contradiction of something mentioned here a few weeks ago—that in the course of certain cycles of time, those who were once contemporaries will incarnate again as contemporaries. Everything, of course, has its exceptions. In the spiritual world there are rules, but there are no rigid schemes. Everything is individual.

Thus in the case of these two personalities one is led back to a period when their lives ran together. I would never have found Byron in this earlier life if I had not found this geometry teacher of mine at his side. Byron was a genius. My geometry teacher was not even a genius in his own way. He was not a genius at all, but he was an excellent geometrician, quite the best I have ever come across, because he was a genuine geometrician and nothing else. In the case of a painter or a musician, you know that you are dealing with a one-sided man. For as a matter of fact, people are significant only when they are one-sided. As a rule, however, a geometrician in our time is not one-sided. A geometrician knows the whole of mathematics; when he constructs something in geometry, he always knows how to state the equations for it. He knows the mathematical, calculating side of it all. But this geometry teacher, though an excellent geometrician, was properly speaking no mathematician at all. He understood, for example, nothing whatever of analytical geometry. He knew nothing of the geometry that has to do with calculating and equations; in that respect he sometimes did the most childish things. On one occasion it was really very humorous. The man was so entirely a constructive geometrician and nothing else that he arrived by means of constructive geometry at the fact that the circle is the locus of the constant quotient. He found it out by construction, and since no one had found it before by construction, he regarded himself as its discoverer. We boys, who were as yet unsophisticated and had a good store of high spirits left in us, knew that in our book of analytical geometry it is shown how one sets up such and such an equation and the circle comes. We took the occasion to change the name of the circle and to start calling it by the name of our geometry teacher. The “N.N. line” we called it (I won't give his real name). This man had in fact the one-sidedness of the constructive geometrician to the point of genius. That was what was so significant about him; his character and talents were so clearly defined. People of the present day are not like that at all; you cannot get hold of them; they are like slippery eels! My teacher was anything but a slippery eel; he was a man with sharp corners, and that even in his external appearance. He had a face shaped like this—quite square, a most interesting head, absolutely four-angled, nowhere round. Really, you could study in the face of the man the right-angled nature of his peculiar constructive talent. It was most interesting.

Now, in vision, this personality is found directly by the side of Byron, and one is led back to early times in Eastern Europe, one or two hundred years before the Crusades. I once told you how, when the Roman Emperor Constantine founded Constantinople, he had the Palladium—which had been taken originally to Rome from Troy—removed from Rome to Constantinople. The transference was carried out with tremendous pomp and ceremony. For the Palladium was regarded as a particularly sacred object, which bestowed power upon whoever had it. It was firmly believed in Rome that as long as the Palladium lay beneath a pillar in the city, the power of Rome resided in it, and that this power had been brought across to Rome from the once mighty city of Troy, devastated by the Greeks. And so Constantine, whose destiny it was to transplant the power of Rome to Constantinople, caused the Palladium to be taken across to Constantinople with great pomp and ceremony, though to begin with, quite secretly. He caused it to be buried, a wall built about it, and set up an ancient pillar that came from Egypt, over the spot where the Palladium lay. On the top of the pillar he placed an ancient statue of Apollo, so arranged as to look like himself. Then he had nails brought from the Cross of Christ. And out of these he made a sort of halo for the statue, which was, as I have said, an ancient statue of Apollo and at the same time was supposed to represent himself. And so there the Palladium lay, in Constantinople.

Now there is a legend which has later assumed strange forms, but is in reality very, very ancient. Later, in connection with the Testament of Peter the Great, it was revived and transformed, but it goes back to very ancient times. The legend tells how at some time in the future the Palladium would leave Constantinople and come further up towards the North-East. Hence the idea in the Russia of a later time that the Palladium must be brought from the city of Constantinople into Russia, in order that all that is connected with the Palladium, and had been corrupted under the rule of the Turks, might have its place in the rule of Eastern Europe. Now these two personalities in olden times—it was one or two hundred years before the Crusades but I have not been able to fix the exact year—resolved to go out from what is now Russia to Constantinople in order, by some means or other, to capture the Palladium and bring it into the East of Europe.

They did not succeed. Such a project could never have succeeded, for the Palladium was well guarded. There was no possibility of getting hold of it, and those who knew how it was guarded were not to be won over. But an overwhelming pain took possession of these two men. And the pain that entered into them like a piercing ray, paralysing them both in the head, manifested in Lord Byron in his being somewhat like Achilles who was vulnerable in the heel, for Byron had a defect in his foot. On the other hand he was a genius in his head, which was a compensation for the paralysis he had suffered in that earlier earth-life. The other man also, on account of the paralysed head, had a defective foot, a clubfoot. But let me tell you (for it is not generally realised) that man does not get geometry or mathematics out of his head. If you did not step the angle with your feet, your head would not have the perception of it. You would have no geometry at all if you did not walk and grasp hold of things. Geometry pushes its way up through the head and comes forth in ideas. And in anyone who has a foot such as my geometry teacher had, there resides a strong capacity to be alive to the geometrical constitution of his limbs and his motor organism and to re-create it in his head.

If one penetrated more deeply into this geometry teacher of mine, into his whole spiritual configuration, one gained a significant impression of him as a human being. There was something really delightful about his way of doing things! Fundamentally speaking, he did everything from the point of view of a constructive geometrician and it was as if the rest of the world were simply not there. He was a singularly free human being, but one had only to observe him closely enough to feel as though some inner spell had once held sway over him and had brought him to the one-sided condition I have described.

But now in Lord Byron—I have mentioned the other man only because I should not have been able to get at the truth about Lord Byron if he had not put me on the track—in Lord Byron you can truly see karma working itself out. Once, long ago, he goes across from the East to fetch the Palladium. When he is born in the West, he goes eastward to help the cause of freedom, the spiritual Palladium of the 19th century. And he is drawn to the very same region of the earth to which he had gone long ago, from the other side. It is really staggering to see how the same individuality comes to the same locality in one life from one direction, in another life from another direction; first, attracted by something that is still deeply veiled in myth, and later by what had become the great ideal of the “age of enlightenment.” There is something in all this that stirs one very deeply.

The things that come to light out of karmic connections are indeed startling. They always are. And in this realm we shall come to know of many other striking, paradoxical things. Today I wanted to give you a grasp of the remarkable way in which the connections between earlier and later earth-lives can play into human existence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

In our examination of the Wrangell brochure on “Science and Theosophy”, we have tried to consider various ideas that show how someone who wants to stand firmly on the ground of modern science is nevertheless pushed towards the recognition of knowledge of spiritual life. And as you have seen, we have fewer objections to Wrangell's pamphlet than the fact that we have only had additions to make in the sense of spiritual science. So in this pamphlet there is, as it seems at first, a subjective judgment about how the path of the modern scientist to spiritual science is, how, in other words, one can be a modern scientist and still find the path to spiritual science.

It is important to consider this train of thought, because it seems to me to be absolutely necessary that those who stand on the ground of spiritual science clearly recognize that the objections of so-called scientists are not at all really scientific, but come from the fact that today one can be an excellent scientist who knows how to use materialistic scientific methods quite well in some field of science and can be a complete amateur in all other world-view questions.

Now today, so to speak, in continuation of the thoughts developed on the basis of the brochure, I would like to develop some other thoughts that are important for us. I would like to show how the present development of humanity has reached a point that should suggest to the insightful scientist, to the one who really takes science seriously and appreciates it, that he should engage in spiritual scientific study and not do it the way it has been done so far: to regard it as something to be rejected from the outset.

I have, as some of you may recall, in the context of the considerations related to the Wrangell brochure, in some respects actually sung the praises of the materialistic scientific method. I have said that it has produced great and significant results in recent times, that one need only gain a correct point of view in relation to this materialistic scientific method and one will appreciate it and not underestimate it. We will familiarize ourselves with its results, precisely if we necessarily intend to draw the threads between it and spiritual science.

Now, I would first like to start from a kind of scientific train of thought that can show us how the thinking scientist — precisely when he understands himself in the right way — should knock on the door of spiritual science. I would like to draw attention to a chapter of modern natural science that also has great significance in socio-ethical terms, but which cannot achieve this in a way that is satisfying for the human being until and unless natural science has found the path to spiritual science. I would like to discuss some of the lines of thought in so-called criminal anthropology.

One of the great researchers in criminal anthropology is Professor Dr. Moriz Benedikt, whom I have mentioned before. He was one of the first to examine the brains of criminals in a thoroughly modern and systematic way, by dissecting criminals, especially murderers who had been sentenced to death. The results were so surprising compared to many of the pre-existing theories that, at first, after the first few examinations, he thought he was dealing with a kind of scientific adventure and not at all with something on the trail of the truth. When he examined the brains of criminals, then, those familiar with the configuration and structure of the normal human brain would always see very specific internal structures with very specific characteristics that differ from the structure of the brain of a person who is not a criminal. And so that we don't go too far afield, I will stick to the main feature.

It was found that a certain part of the human brain, called the occipital lobe, which covers the cerebellum, is too small in the case of criminals, so that it only covers the cerebellum sparsely or not at all, whereas it would otherwise cover it completely.

Now imagine dissecting the brain of a criminal and finding that this criminal brain differs from a normal brain in that the occipital lobe does not completely cover the cerebellum. Then you have to come to the conclusion that If you are born in such a way that you cannot possibly develop the occipital lobe to such an extent that it covers the cerebellum, then no matter what you do in life, you will become a criminal and consequently you cannot help it. And if you now examine ape brains, the same peculiarity can be seen: the occipital lobe does not completely cover the cerebellum. So you have to say: In the various developmental stages on the way from ape to man, it should also be noted that man has progressed beyond the ape's development and has become a more perfect being because his occipital lobe has grown and completely covers the cerebellum. This means that when a person becomes a criminal, he falls back into the ape's organization. In the criminal, then, we have to do with an outspoken atavism. This means nothing other than that there are individuals among human beings who, in the structure of their brains, have atavistically reverted to the ape-like image. These atavistic individuals become criminals.

Now think of the ethical and social consequences of such a view and then you will know what it means to have to accept these facts under the auspices of the current materialistic world view – I do not mean the prevailing natural science. For the facts are there and only a fool could deny them. So anyone who allows themselves to be guided by the materialistic worldview is confronted with the challenge: just look at the brains of criminals and you will see that the structure of the brain regresses to that of an ape. So you can clearly see how what is revealed in man in terms of morality is simply a consequence of the material organization of the physical. There you see it quite clearly. The man who had this brain had become a criminal precisely because he had this brain. With the same necessity with which the clockwork serves us, if it is working properly, to catch the ten o'clock train, while a clockwork that is not working properly, which perhaps only shows seven o'clock, makes us late for the train, with the same necessity a brain that has not fully developed the occipital lobe indicates a criminal person who is retarded. Since you would certainly not be able to bring yourself to fantasize a demon into the clock that drives the hands around, you will also not be able to bring yourself to dream the demon “soul” into the brain. |

To resist the proven results of criminal anthropological investigations of criminal brains so readily is to pursue an ostrich-like policy in science, to simply refuse to reckon with those things that have been absolutely researched.

Now, as you know, there is still a philosophy besides materialistic science. But if you look at this philosophy, perhaps especially at those who are often counted among its most important representatives today, you will find that this philosophy is completely powerless in the face of materialistic methods. The concepts that philosophers arrive at either boil down to, as I showed you with Otto Liebmann, who is a very astute person and who says that one cannot get beyond certain points, that one cannot cross certain boundaries. I gave you the example of the chicken egg. Or take the philosophy of Rudolf Eucken in Jena, and you can see how they talk around it and dress up the words nicely, but how the concepts that are developed cannot approach the materialistic methods. They are like the actions of someone who is standing on one bank of a river and is making every possible effort to get to the other bank, but cannot get there.¹ Over there is the materialistic scientific method, but he cannot get over to it; therefore, philosophizing remains just beating about the bush.

What is actually going on here? Well, let us go back to something we have known for a long time; let us go back to the division of the human being into physical body, etheric body, astral body and I. Let us start with this roughest classification, as it has presented itself to us in the course of our spiritual scientific investigations, and ask ourselves: What happens when we look at something external and sensual – and a criminal mind is also something external and sensual – what happens then? The external sensuality acts on our sense organs. These are in the physical body. That is where sensual perception comes about. Nobody denies this. We would be fools if we, as spiritual scientists, were to deny it. It would be foolishness if we did not concern ourselves with the results I have cited from criminal anthropology. We cannot deny their validity either, for they prove conclusively that the criminal has the brain of an ape and the normal human being no longer has this ape-like brain. So when we philosophize, as today's philosophers do, what are we doing? In which regions of the human being do we then move? Then we move in the sphere of the I. Today, all philosophical concepts are there. And you will see that even those who are most astute in their philosophy today are all swimming in the region of the I, as it were. You can find scientific proof of this in the introductory chapter of my Rätsel der Philosophie (Puzzles of Philosophy), where I have shown how philosophy in our time tends to be essentially a swimming in the I. But between natural science and philosophy there is a wide distance, that is the river over which philosophy cannot cross, that is, the philosophical concepts are on one side - inwardly in man - and all sensual perceptions are outside, on the other side.

I once had a clear, if only symptomatic, insight into the abyss between philosophy and scientific perception – but I ask you to bear in mind that this is only meant to be symptomatic – when the sixtieth birthday of Ernst Haeckel was celebrated. I took part in the celebration in Jena. Various people spoke there, supporters of Haeckel and so on. Now it was interesting for me to see what would happen if Haeckel's philosophical colleagues, among whom was Dr. Rudolf Eucken, would propose a so-called toast during the lunch, as is so common, because then one could somehow see how the representatives of philosophy of a university relate to the representatives of natural science and sensory perception. The toast – proposed by Eucken – had the following content; I will only give the main idea. Eucken said something like: at a birthday party like today's, it is customary to say what particularly characterizes the birthday child. Now, I have tried to think of what could particularly characterize our birthday child, but I have not found anything special in my own thinking. So I asked the daughter of our guest of honor and she told me that it is one of the characteristic peculiarities of our guest of honor that he cannot manage his tie, for example, when he wants to turn it down. - In this tone the toast continued.

Now, as I said, what the representatives of philosophy at a university had to say about the representative of sensual, scientific perceptions was symptomatic of what I encountered. It is really symptomatic, because there is no real bridge between today's philosophy and science, because the concepts of philosophers are very thin and the sensual facts that science brings to light are beyond their reach. You cannot cross over with philosophical concepts.

Now I have already drawn your attention to the fact that there is a possibility of bringing the facts of natural science into play, of really bringing them into play. This possibility consists in really engaging with the spirit of Goethe's scientific observations. Just remember that I explained to you how Goethe came to regard the skull bones, despite their quite different external form from the vertebrae, as transformed spinal vertebrae. I called your attention to this theory of transformation when I told you that our boiler house is only a transformation of our main building, in that it is enlarged on the one hand and stunted on the other. I also pointed out to you in another lecture that when one ascends from ordinary concepts to spiritual-scientific concepts, one has to set the concepts in motion. I recommended reading Goethe's poems about the metamorphosis of plants and animals. There you will see how mobile the concepts are, and how he has shaped all of this.

If you take what I have said on various occasions and combine it with what we need to be guided by today, then you will say to yourself: If I take the sensory perceptions directly, they are more limited, but if I move on to the Goethean worldview, then such a vertebral bone appears to me to be more elastic, softer, so that it gradually becomes part of the skull. I look into the creative nature. I see how, for example, the individual skull bones in fish are very similar to the dorsal vertebrae, and how the transition to humans occurs by developing the dorsal vertebrae into skull bones... *

You can only follow this mentally, however; you cannot see it with your senses. If you wanted to see it with your senses, you would have to observe for thousands, millions of years, how one passes into the other. So you have to spiritualize the observation, the sensory perception.

You see, Goethe instinctively did this spiritualization of sensory perception correctly. I have often referred to the momentous conversation between him and Schiller when they once walked out of the Natural History Society in Jena after a lecture by the botanist Batsch. Schiller said that he had found everything only side by side in Batsch's lecture. Goethe then drew his archetype, which one gets when one moves from one plant form to another. Schiller said: “But that is not a perception, that is an idea.” Goethe replied: “Then I have my ideas before my eyes.” He was aware that he not only saw the individual transformations, but that he saw a plant in all its parts. This is based on the fact that Goethe instinctively observed everything not only with his physical senses, but by immediately capturing physical perception in the observation of the etheric body. That is, Goethe takes the metamorphosing perception - and this is a continually moving perception - into his view of nature. As a result, the whole sensory world comes into motion for him. The particular is then only a special expression of a very general one, but not of a general one as abstract philosophers make it, but of a general one that winds its way through the individual sensory perceptions. There you see a raising of sensory perception into the imaginative that arises in man when one does not disdain to add his etheric body to sensory perception.

You will not understand what Goethe wrote about animals and plants if you do not consider that he included the etheric body. Now you have already pushed it a little higher. We would have done something if we had pushed the philosophical concepts over here as well, so that they could approach [the perceptions] (...).²

Now take what we have often considered over the years. It is part of the first step of “How to Know Higher Worlds”: that one can raise physical, objective perception to a higher level, to imaginative perception. But do you remember the characteristic that I have given over and over again - in countless places in our cycles it says - what this imaginative view consists of? It consists of the fact that the I works its way back into the etheric body. As long as one only forms objective concepts, as the philosopher also does - for the fact that he works in the spirit is only his megalomania - one does not get any further. One must pass from the objective to the imaginative, that is, as soon as life enters into the concepts, one passes from the mere ego back into the etheric body. One works the astral body into the spirit-self, that is, one can say that the philosophical concepts become imaginative concepts or ideas, if one can still apply the word “concept” there.

But now things have come together: the imaginative concepts are no longer separated from the metamorphosing perceptions by a gulf, but are immediately adjacent.

We will now see that while philosophy and sense perception are separated by a gulf and cannot come together because physical perception takes place in the physical body and the philosopher in the ego , here, however, [it was apparently drawn again] the imaginative concepts and the perceptions come together because the objective concept is in the physical body and the metamorphosed concepts are in the etheric body. So there is a deepening in both directions. On the one hand, we have to approach the world with the whole human being, and on the other hand, we have to deepen the concepts by bringing them to life, by transforming them into imagination.

Philosophers want to avoid this. They cannot engage with the concept of imagination, and natural scientists cannot engage with the metamorphosing perception. But spiritual science brings this about. Our entire spiritual science is precisely an answer to the question: How does the rational human being, living in his astral body, perceive the metamorphosing perceptions living in his etheric body? How does he think them? That is what is so important, that we really know that we bring the outer world closer to the inner world, that they approach each other, that we bring them together.

Now we can gain a ray of hope with regard to the reality of criminal anthropology. Of course, someone who is born with a occipital lobe that does not properly cover the cerebellum will have to walk around with such an ape-like occipital lobe for their whole life. But where does such an ape-like occipital lobe come from? From a spiritual science point of view, it arises as a result of the previous life, because what a person used to be in the past creates their physical development from the inside out. This is how they create the structure of their body and brain, and thus also of their occipital lobe. We can therefore say: If a person walks around with an atrophied occipital lobe, then in his previous life he did not gain enough strength to form the occipital lobe normally. This is not really a consolation, because there is always the possibility that such a person will become a criminal, because the occipital lobe cannot become enlarged. One could say that people are then divided into two parts: those who have a too small occipital lobe and who are born to be criminals, and those who have a fully developed occipital lobe and who do not become criminals. For the materialistic world view, there is hardly any error here. It will come to this conclusion. Theoretically, there is no other answer for spiritual science either, but since it knows that the physical body is not the only body, but also carries an etheric body within it, the situation changes for it. For if a person is born with an atrophied occipital lobe, that is, with an unfavorable disposition, then we can still educate this person properly. We can shape the education in such a way that we teach him the appropriate moral and ethical concepts. Although the physical body cannot be changed in the present incarnation, the etheric part of the occipital lobe can. It can be enlarged by what a person is taught through proper education. Thus, it is possible to help a person who, due to a previous incarnation, has a occipital lobe that is too short, by means of a suitable education. By educating such a person correctly, we make the etheric part of the occipital lobe larger and the person in question can thus be saved from becoming a criminal.

Now, given the fact that those who have become criminals have a too-short occipital lobe, one would also have to do the reverse experiment. One would have to dissect normal people and prove that they all had normally developed occipital lobes; and in doing so, one might discover that even in normally developed people, some have occipital lobes that are too small, but nevertheless have not become criminals, precisely because their etheric occipital lobes have grown larger through appropriate education.

Ethical education adds something to the etheric, not to the physical, constitution. However, education must be organized in such a way that it corresponds to spiritual laws. If you take what has been developed as an educational principle in the small publication “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”, you will find that the principles of development from seven to seven years have been followed. When one begins to grasp these laws and to implement them in appropriate measures, then one intervenes more deeply than with the purely rationalistic educational methods that have been common practice for a long time. One does not get any further with what has emerged as Froebelism. With all the educational methods that are practiced today, one only gets to the I. But as long as you only reach the I, you cannot do anything, the occipital lobe remains too small. But if you eavesdrop on the secrets of spiritual existence and turn them into educational measures, you will enter the etheric body. There you really normalize the etheric body, that is, with spiritual science you gain powerful concepts, concepts that really have power over the human being, that can change him. If you take the concepts that can be gained today - whether from observation of the world of sensory perception, or from abstract talk, which comes only from the ego - you will not get any educational principles or principles for social life that really have an effect on people. The concepts remain powerless. You can search through whole libraries - and enough has been written about education - but all of it is a will to rule out of the ego, whether you believe you are educating more theoretically or otherwise. As long as it is not eavesdropped on the secret of human nature and the spiritual principles of education and thereby made effective into the etheric body, as long as it remains powerless against what grows in the human being. As we approach the world with concepts that are becoming more powerful, we also approach what is becoming and growing in the world, so that we do not incorporate anything theoretical. If we go from philosophical to imaginative concepts, as spiritual science does, and if you go from sensory perception to metamorphosing perception, we approach our principles to the spiritual, and then we will gain appropriate measures and principles from spiritual science.

From what I have said, you can see how right and how necessary it is in our time - after centuries of development have pointed the world to mere sensory perception and thereby pushed it back to mere comprehension in the ego - how necessary it is to bring external perception and inner soul life closer together again, both for contemplation and for practical life. With spiritual science, we gain powerful concepts that intervene in life, concepts that really have something to do with life. Concepts such as those of Eucken's philosophy never intervene in real life. With spiritual science, we touch reality, we touch it where it is more real than sensory perception.

When we approach reality with our ordinary concepts and with ordinary sensory perception, we look at what is on the surface; we look with our sensory tools. For example, we look at the mountain with its plant world. And now there are two types of people: some look at the mountain with its plant world and forget themselves (Haeckel), while others look at nothing of the external world, but only talk in terms and stare into space; as a result, philosophy becomes empty (Eucken's philosophy). Spiritual science approaches reality with metamorphosing perception and thus looks at something that is not expressed on the surface, but at something that lies beneath. But even when it looks at the human being, it goes from the mere sensory perception of the physical sense organs back to the metamorphosing perception (etheric body) and from the mere philosophical concept to the imaginative conception and thus has something like an underground channel between the mere sensory perception (physical sense organs) and the mere philosophical concept (I). Now you will also understand that a bleak world view must arise if spiritual science does not take hold, because philosophy will naturally be completely powerless with its concepts in the face of the human being. Sensory perception cannot be denied; it will become less and less possible to deny it. So it is natural that the materialistic world view will say: What can you do about becoming a criminal? What can you do about having a short occipital lobe? Imagine what this must do to the concept of responsibility and to legal concepts! We must face up to this prospect. It is cowardly not to face it.

However, there is a way to go beyond this by working on the etheric body from within through appropriate good education, so that the etheric occipital lobe is developed. But this education must be an education of the heart and of love, as shown in the essay 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'. When one realizes this, one says to oneself: Of course, a person with a short occipital lobe will walk around with the shortened occipital lobe his whole life and be tempted. But by developing the etheric occipital lobe, he will always be able to find the necessary balance. Spiritual science will thus become a great factor when those who only know the achievements of the materialistic world view knock at the door of spiritual science.

Secondly, I would like to show you another thing that can be taken from the life of the soul. Especially in our time, we have the opportunity to see that feelings, for example feelings of hatred, are spreading throughout entire communities. Now someone who still has a naive worldview, when asked why they hate, will of course not know exactly why something is hateful because they still have a naive worldview. They might say, “I hate because I find it hateful.” Now there is a psychological world view today that goes beyond this naivety, that knows more than that one hates something because it is hateful, just as the criminal anthropologist knows more than the person who believes that a person became a criminal because he was a bad guy and did not improve; because the criminal anthropologist knows that the person in question has a occipital lobe that is too small. And so it is also a naive judgment to say: I hate this or that because it is hateful. Now, there too, people have already risen to a correct judgment. If you take a closer look at human nature, you can see how the feelings that are developed in the soul belong to the soul's tools, to its living conditions. And if one does not look naively but with real observation of the facts at the world of the soul today, one comes to the conclusion that a certain amount of need to hate is stored up latently in man without it becoming visible. He must hate. And when so much hatred has accumulated that the barrel overflows, so to speak, he seeks an object for his power to hate. Now consider the way in which a person comes to a worldview. We endeavor to show how one can come to a spiritual-scientific worldview in an objective way. But one does not always come to a spiritual-scientific worldview, or even to a materialistic worldview, because of this, but because one is emotionally predisposed to it. What logically speaks for a worldview comes into consideration only in the second or even third place. Go, for example, to the meetings of the Communists or materialists and examine what they present to logically found their worldview, then you can see that it is not their logic but their feeling that is predestined. And so it is with the spiritual worldview. Perhaps you have the mystical worldview because it appeals to your feelings and does you more good than a materialistic worldview. The emotional and affective factor plays an enormous role here. It is the same with hatred of the outside world. When a person hates something, the psychologist will not ask: What is the object like? but rather: What is the person like? The need for hatred is in him and the object arises by itself. He must hate, as one must eat at certain times. This is a realization that contemporary psychology has already achieved.

I have in my hand a copy of the journal “Die Zukunft” from September 25, 1915. It contains an essay by Franz Blei entitled “Truths.” It discusses something like what I have done now. It then explains what Avenarius - Franz Blei is a student of Avenarius - has established in his empirical criticism. This is summarized in individual sentences and there you will find very beautifully expressed in these sentences what can already be understood today as the results of psychological research: “Pure feelings are to be assumed theoretically as preexisting feelings laden with ideational components and not experienceable. Practically, we know of no feeling that has no ideational component.” This sentence does not exactly concern what we need, so we do not want to dwell on it. It is not necessary for us to peel it apart, otherwise we would have to go into the concepts that were used. But another sentence may be more important for us, namely: “Pure ideas are to be assumed to preexist humanly conceived ideas and cannot be experienced purely. Practically, we know of no idea (thought, image) that has not already served as a component of a feeling.

So, when an idea arises in us, we must ask ourselves: what feeling has driven us to this idea? The idea arises in one person: the world can be broken down into atoms. What feeling drove him to this? In another, the idea arises: the world has a hierarchy, a ladder. - What feeling drove him to that? So the component of feeling is in it everywhere. And when someone hates, what feeling drives him to it? Blei says: “It is not ideas that evoke feelings, but pure feelings take possession of ideas that can satisfy those feelings.” For example: the Social Democrat hates the bourgeois. He hates him because he needs a quantity of hate and he turns that against the bourgeois. Or the anti-Semite needs hate and the Jew presents himself for the purpose. Franz Blei says in point 8: “It is not the truth of an idea in itself that decides whether it is accepted by people, but its affective content.”

So you see, he already knows that too! You don't become a materialistic monist because you see the truth, but because you are predestined by your feelings, and you don't become a spiritualist because it is true, but because you are predestined by your feelings.

The essay continues: “Ideas are accepted whose probability is zero, others together again and at the same time with those that are the opposite of the first. Think of the multiplicity of the ”Thou shalt not kill!” Here only the believer is allowed an objection, to which Hegel once gave the expression of the “cunning of the idea”, which uses our passions for its realization, in that people think they are working for themselves, while in reality they are doing it for the “world spirit. The Christian believer speaks of the inscrutability of God's ways.

The whole essay is therefore about the fact that it is not the ideas, the so-called truths, that take hold of people, but the emotional content.

Anyone who looks at the world today, at how it has gradually developed, will find this quite right and it is very significant that a school of philosophy like Avenarius' has come to realize that the social democrat hates the bourgeois not because he finds him hateful, but because he himself needs a certain amount of hate. So Avenarius' school of philosophy has already come to understand this today.

But let us consider what social consequences this has. Imagine for a moment – and one would say that this point of view, if one still has any real feelings at all, must become the very bitterest of soul-pills – that you seriously accept these things as truths. Then you will have to say to yourself: In this case, truth no longer decides anything, but emotions do. I am admitted to a worldview, but only because I do not know the truth. This leads to absolute desolation. There is no escape. Just as there is no escape in criminal anthropology from admitting that a short occipital lobe makes a criminal, so there is no escape from external psychology from the fact that people are driven by their affects to what they call truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche has attempted to express this most clearly, most significantly and most convincingly in the most diverse variants of his world view. All of Nietzscheanism is based on this. I have quoted the passage myself in my book “Friedrich Nietzsche, a fighter against his time”. The question there is: What is truth? And because Nietzsche did not accept the correctness of this sentence because of the truth, but rejected it because of the whole preparation of human subjectivity, Nietzsche wanted to put an end to fantasy [of the will to truth], that is, also to Christianity. Therefore, he wrote “Antichrist”, the next one was to be “The Immoralists” and the whole thing was then to be “The Will to Power”.

Desolation and absolute nihilism is what such schools of philosophy lead to, with their realization that those who are predisposed to believe that they can best relate to the world by adhering to matter, become materialists; and those who believe that they live through a dependence on the spiritual world become spiritualists out of their affect.

- Now, my dear friends, all you have to do is take one thing, you just have to open the last chapter of “Theosophy”, where the path to knowledge is described, and take the fact that is taken as a starting point. It is not based on the idea that one should logically speculate in order to arrive at these truths, but it is based on the idea that it is necessary to develop and shape the whole affective world of the human being, the direction of feeling, in a certain way. It deals with what underlies the search for truth. It tackles what psychology points to, but does not know how to deal with. Why do we not refute materialism with logical arguments, why do we not establish spiritualism with logical arguments? Because all this means nothing. Rather, something else is to be shown. It is to be shown: You have to do this and this with your affects so that you are no longer guided by the subjective, but... . [space].

Take this chapter of “Theosophy” and you will see that everything depends on an objectivization of the affective life, and then you can see how this intervenes in the impasse of the modern worldview... [The final sentences are no longer decipherable in shorthand.]

• 1. was obviously drawn on the blackboard; however, the drawing has not been handed down.
• 2. Here are a few more lines in the original shorthand that do not reveal any coherent meaning.

When we speak of the great world and the small world, of the macrocosm and the microcosm, we are referring to the whole universe and to the human being. Goethe, for example, spoke in these terms in Faust. He called the whole cosmos ‘the great world’, and the human being ‘the small world.’ We have already had many occasions to observe how manifold and complicated are the relationships between man and the cosmos. Today I would like to remind you of some of the things we have spoken about at various times, connecting these with a consideration of humanity's relationship to the cosmos. You will remember that when we spoke of the senses and of what man, as the possessor of his senses, is, we said that the senses lead us back to the ancient Saturn phase of evolution. That is where we find the first impulses for the development of the senses, the first seeds of the senses. You will find these things described again and again in previous lecture cycles. Now, obviously, the early seed-like phases of the senses during the Saturn period are not to be imagined as if they already resembled the senses as we know them today. That would be foolish. As a matter of fact, it is extremely difficult to imagine what the senses were like during ancient Saturn development. It is already difficult enough to picture the senses as they were during the ancient Moon period. Even that far back in time they were thoroughly different from the senses we know now. Today I would like to throw some light on what the senses were like during the ancient Moon phase of evolution. By that time they were already in their third phase of development—Saturn, Sun, Moon.

As regards their form, the senses of today are much more dead than were the senses of Old Moon. At that period the sense organs were much livelier, much more full of life. Because of this they were not suited to provide the foundations for fully conscious human life, but were only suited to the dreamy clairvoyance of Moon man. Such clairvoyance excluded the possibility of freedom. There was no freedom to act or to follow impulses and desires. Humanity had to wait for the Earth phase of evolution before it could develop the impulse to freedom. Thus, the senses during Old Moon were not the basis for the kind of consciousness we now have, but rather for a consciousness that was both more dull and more imaginative than ours. As I have often explained, it was much more like today's dream consciousness. People generally assume that we have five senses. We know, however, that this is not justified, but that, in truth, we must distinguish twelve human senses. There are seven further senses that must be included with the usual five, since they are equally relevant to earthly, human existence. You know the usual list of the senses: sense of sight, sense of hearing, sense of taste, sense of smell, and sense of feeling. The last of these is often called the sense of touch and is mixed together with the sense of warmth, although more recently there are some who distinguish the one from the other. In earlier times these two completely distinct senses were mixed together, confusedly, as a single sense. The sense of touch tells whether something is hard or soft, which has nothing to do with the sense of warmth. And so, if one really has a sense—if I may use that word—for the way humanity relates to the rest of the world, one will have to distinguish twelve senses. Today I would like, once again, to describe these twelve senses.

The sense of touch is the sense that relates us to the most material aspect of the external world. With our sense of touch we, so to speak, bump into the external world; through touch we are continually involved in a coarse kind of exchange with the external world. Nevertheless, the process of touching takes place within the boundaries of our skin. Our skin collides with an object. What then happens to give us a perception of the object must, as a matter of course, take place within the boundaries of our skin, within our body. Thus, what happens in touching, in the process of touch, happens inside us—

The sense that we shall call the sense of life involves processes that lie still more deeply embedded in the human organism. This sense exists within us, but we are accustomed to ignore it, for the life sense manifests itself indistinctly from within the human organism. Nevertheless, throughout all our daily waking hours, the harmonious collaboration of all the bodily organs expresses itself through the life sense, through the state of life in us. We usually pay no attention to it because we expect it as our natural right. We expect to be filled with a certain feeling of well-being, with the feeling of being alive. If our feeling of alive-ness is diminished, we try to recover a little so that our feeling of life is refreshed again. This vital enlivening or damping down is something we are aware of, but generally we are too accustomed to the feeling of being alive to be constantly aware of it. The life sense, however, is a distinct sense in its own right. Through it we feel the life in us, precisely as we see what is around us with our eyes. We sense ourselves through the life sense just as we see with our eyes. Without this internal sense of life we would know nothing about our own vital state.

What can be called the sense of movement is still more inward, more physically inward, more bodily inward. Through feelings of well-being or of discontent the life sense makes us conscious of the state of the whole organism. Having a sense of movement, on the other hand, means being able to be aware of the way parts of the body move with respect to each another. I do not refer here to movements of the whole person—that is something else. I am referring to movements such as the bending of an arm or leg, or the movements of the larynx when you speak. The sense of movement makes you aware of all these inner movements that entail changes in the position of separate parts of the organism.

A further sense that must be distinguished is the sense we will call balance. We do not normally pay any attention to it. If we get dizzy and fall, or if we feel faint, it is because the sense of balance has been interrupted. This is exactly analogous to the way the sense of sight is interrupted when we close our eyes. When we relate ourselves to the world, orientating ourselves with respect to above and below and to right and left so that we feel upright, we are employing our sense of balance, just as we employ the sense of movement when we are aware of internal changes of position. Our sense of balance, therefore, is due to a distinct sense. Balance is a proper sense in its own right.

The senses mentioned so far involve processes that remain within the bounds of the organism. If you touch something, you have collided with an external object, it is true, but you do not get inside it. If you come up against a needle you will notice that it is pointed, but of course you do not get inside the point. Instead, you prick yourself, and that no longer has anything to do with touching. Everything that happens, happens within the boundaries of your organism. You can touch an object, to be sure, but everything you experience through touch takes place within your skin. Thus, experiences of touch are internal to the body. What you experience through the life sense is likewise internal to the body. It does not show you what is going on somewhere outside you; it lets you look within. Equally internal is the sense of movement: it is not concerned with how I can walk about in the world, but with the internal movements I make when I move part of myself or when I speak. When I move about externally there is also internal movement. But the two things must be distinguished from one another: on the one hand there is my forward movement, on the other, there is the movement of parts of me, which is internal. So the sense of movement gives us internal perceptions, as do the senses of life and balance. In balance, too, you perceive nothing external—rather, you perceive yourself in your state of balance.

The first sense to take you outside yourself is the sense of smell. With smell you already come into contact with the external world. But you will have the feeling that smell does not take you very far outside yourself. You do not experience much about the external world through the sense of smell. Furthermore, people do not want to have anything to do with the intimate connection with the world that a developed sense of smell can give. Dogs are much more interested. People are willing to use the sense of smell to perceive the world, but they do not want the world to come very close. It is not a sense through which people want to get very involved with the outer world.

With the sense of taste we get more deeply involved with the world. When we taste sugar or salt, the experience of its qualities is already very inward. What is external is taken inward—more so than with smell. So there is already more of a connection established between inner world and outer world.

The sense of sight involves us even more with the external world. In seeing we take into ourselves more of the properties of the external world than we do with the sense of smell. And we take yet more into ourselves with the sense of warmth. What we see, what we perceive through the sense of sight, remains more foreign to us than what we perceive through the sense of warmth. The relationship to the outer world perceived through the sense of warmth is already a very intimate one. When we are aware of the warmth or the coldness of an object we also experience this warmth or coldness—we experience it along with the object. On the other hand, in experiencing the sweetness of sugar, for example, one is not so involved with the object. In the case of sugar we are interested in what it becomes as we taste it, not in what it is out there in the world. Such a distinction ceases to be possible with the sense of warmth. With warmth we are already participating in what is within the object perceived.

When we turn to the sense of hearing, the relation to the external world acquires another degree of intimacy. A sound tells us very much indeed about the inner structure of an object—more than what the sense of warmth can tell, and very much more than what sight reveals. Sight only gives us pictures, so to speak, pictures of the outer surface. But when a metal resonates it tells us what is going on within it. The sense of warmth also reaches into the object. When I take hold of something, a piece of ice, say, I am sure that the ice is cold through and through, not just on its outer surface. When I look at something, I can see only the colours at its outer limits, on its surface; but when I make an object resonate, the sounds bring me into a particular relationship with what is within it.

And the intimacy is greater still if the sounds contain meaning. Thus we arrive at the sense of tone: perhaps it would be better to call it the sense of speech or the sense of word. It is simply nonsense to think that perception of words is the same as perception of sounds. The two are as distinct and different from one another as are taste and sight. To be sure, sounds open the inner world of objects to our perception, but these sounds must become much more inward before they can become meaningful words. Therefore it is a step into a deeper intimacy with the world when we proceed from perceiving sounds through the sense of hearing to perceiving meaning through the sense of the word. And yet, when I perceive a mere word I am still not so intimately connected with the object, with the external thing, as I am connected with it when I perceive the thoughts behind the words. At this stage, most people cease to make any distinctions. But there is a distinction between merely perceiving words and actually perceiving the thoughts behind the words. After all, you still can perceive words when a phonograph—or writing, for that matter—has separated them from their thinker. But a sense that goes deeper than the usual word sense must come into play before I can come into a living relationship with the being that is forming the words, before I can enter through the words and transpose myself directly into the being that is doing the thinking and forming the concepts. That further step calls for the sense I would like to call the sense of thought. And there is another sense that gives an even more intimate sense of the outer world than the sense of thought. It is the sense that enables you to feel another being as yourself and that makes it possible to be aware of yourself while at one with another being. That is what happens if one turns one's thinking, one's living thinking, towards the being of another. Through living thinking one can behold the I of this being: the sense of the I.

You see, it really is necessary to distinguish between the ego sense, which makes you aware of the I of another person, and the awareness of yourself. The difference is not just that in one case you are aware of your own I and, in the other, of someone else's I. The two perceptions come from different sources. The seeds of our ability to distinguish one another were sown on Old Saturn. The beginnings of this sense were implanted in us then. The basis of your being able to perceive another person as an I was established on Old Saturn. But it was not until the Earth stage of evolution that you obtained your own I; so the ego sense is not to be identified with the I that ensouls you from within. The two must be strictly distinguished from one another. When we speak of the ego sense, we are referring to the ability of one person to be aware of the I of another.

As you know, I have never spoken of materialistic science without acknowledging its truth and its greatness. I have given lectures here that were for the express purpose of appreciating materialistic science fully. But, having appreciated it, one must deepen one's knowledge of materialistic science so lovingly that one also can hold up its shadow side with a loving hand. The materialistic science of today is just beginning to bring its thoughts about the senses into some kind of order. The physiologists are finally recognising and distinguishing the senses of life, of movement and of balance from one another, and they have begun to treat the senses of warmth and touch separately. The other senses about which we have been speaking are not recognised by our externally-orientated, material science. And so I ask you to carefully distinguish the ability to be aware of another I from the ability you could call the consciousness of self. With respect to this distinction, my deep love of material science forces me to make an observation, for a deep love of material science also enables one to see what is going on: today's material science is afflicted with stupidity. It turns stupid when it tries to describe what happens when someone uses his ego sense. Our material science would have us believe that when one person meets another he unconsciously deduces from the other's gestures, facial expressions, and the like, that there is another I present—that the awareness of another I is really a subconscious deduction. This is utter nonsense! In truth, when we meet someone and perceive their I we perceive it just as directly as we perceive a colour. It really is thick-headed to believe that the presence of another I is deduced from bodily perceptions, for this obscures the truth that humans have a special, higher sense for perceiving the I of another.

The I of another is perceived directly by the ego sense, just as brightness and darkness and colours are perceived through the eyes. It is a particular sense that relates us to another I. This is something that has to be experienced. Just as a colour affects me directly through my eyes, so another person's I affects me directly through my ego sense. At the appropriate time we will discuss the sense organ for the ego sense in the same way that we could discuss the sense organs of seeing, of sight. With sight it is simply easier to refer to material manifestations than it is in the case of the ego sense, but each sense has its own particular organ.

If you view your senses from a certain perspective you can say: each sense particularises and differentiates my organism. There is a real differentiation, for seeing is not the same as perception of tone, perception of tone is different from hearing, hearing is not the same as perception of thought, perception of thought is not touching. Each of these senses demarcates a separate and particular region of the human being. It is this separation of each into its special sphere to which I want you to pay especially close attention, for it is this separation that makes it possible to picture the senses as a circle divided into twelve distinct regions. (See diagram.)

The situation of these powers of perception is different from the situation of forces that could be said to reside more deeply embedded within us. Seeing is bound up with the eyes and these constitute a particular region of a human being. Hearing is bound up with the organs of hearing, at least principally so, but it needs more besides—hearing involves much more of the organism than just the ear, which is what is normally thought of as the region of hearing. And life flows equally through each of these regions of the senses. The eye is alive, the ear is alive, that which is the foundation of all the senses is alive; the basis of touch is alive—all of it is alive. Life resides in all the senses; it flows through all the regions of the senses.

If we look more closely at this life, it also proves to be differentiated. There is not just one life process. And you must also distinguish what we have been calling the sense of life, through which we perceive our own vital state, from the subject of our present discussion. What I am talking about now is the very life that flows through us. That life also differentiates itself within us. It does so in the following manner (see diagram). The twelve regions of the twelve senses are to be pictured as being static, at rest within the organism. But life pulsates through the whole organism, and this life is manifested in various ways. First of all there is breathing, a manifestation of life necessary to all living things. Every living organism must enter into a breathing relationship with the external world. Today I cannot go into the details of how this differs for animals, plants and human beings, but will only point out that every living thing must have its way of breathing. The breathing of a human being is perpetually being renewed by what he takes in from the outer world, and this benefits all the regions associated with the senses. The sense of smell could not manifest itself—neither sight, nor the sense of tone—if the benefits of breathing did not enliven it. Thus, I must assign ‘breathing’ to every sense. We breathe—that is one process—but the benefits of that process of breathing flow to all the senses.

The second process we can distinguish is warming. This occurs along with breathing, but it is a separate process. Warming, the inner process of warming something through, is the second of the life-sustaining processes. The third process that sustains life is nourishment. So here we have three ways in which life comes to us from without: breathing, warming, nourishing. The outer world is part of each of these. Something must be there to be breathed—in the case of humans, and also animals, that substance is air. Warming requires a certain amount of warmth in the surroundings; we interact with it. Just think how impossible it would be for you to maintain proper inner warmth if the temperature of your surroundings were much hotter or much colder. If it were one hundred degrees lower your warmth processes would cease, they would not be possible; at one hundred degrees hotter you would do more than just sweat! Similarly, we need food to nourish us as long as we are considering the life processes in their earthly aspects.

At this stage, the life processes take us deeper into the internal world. We now find processes that re-form what has been taken in from outside—processes that transform and internalise it. To characterise this re-forming, I would like to use the same expressions that we have used on previous occasions. Our scientists are not yet aware of these things and therefore have no names for them, so we must formulate our own. The purely inner process that is the basis of the re-forming of what we take in from outside us can be seen to be fourfold. Following the process of nourishing, the first internal process is the process of secretion, of elimination. When the nourishment we have taken in is distributed to our body, this is already the process of secretion; through the process of secretion it becomes part of our organism. The process of elimination does not just work outward, it also separates out that part of our nourishment that is to be absorbed into us. Excretion and absorption are two sides of the processes by which organs of secretion deal with our nourishment. One part of the secretion performed by organs of digestion separates out nutriments by sending them into the organism. Whatever is thus secreted into the organism must remain connected with the life processes, and this involves a further process which we will call maintaining. But for there to be life, it is not enough for what is taken in to be maintained, there also must be growth. Every living thing depends on a process of inner growth: a process of growth, taken in the widest sense. Growth processes are part of life; both nourishment and growth are part of life.

And, finally, life on earth includes reproducing the whole being; the process of growth only requires that one part produce another part. Reproduction produces the whole individual being and is a higher process than mere growth.

There are no further life processes beyond these seven. Life divides into seven definite processes. But, since they serve all twelve of the sense zones, we cannot assign definite regions to these-the seven life processes enliven all the sense zones. Therefore, when we look at the way the seven relate to the twelve we see that we have 1. Breathing, 2. Warming, 3. Nourishing, 4. Secretion, 5. Maintaining, 6. Growth, 7. Reproduction. These are distinct processes, but all of them relate to each of the senses and flow through each of the senses: their relationship with the senses is a mobile one. (See drawing.) The human being, the living human being, must be pictured as having twelve separate sense-zones through which a sevenfold life is pulsing, a mobile, sevenfold life. If you ascribe the signs of the zodiac to the twelve zones, then you have a picture of the macrocosm; if you ascribe a sense to each zone, you have the microcosm. If you assign a planet to each of the life processes, you have a picture of the macrocosm; as the life processes, they embody the microcosm. And the mobile life processes are related to the fixed zones of the senses in the same way that, in the macrocosm, the planets are related to the zones of the zodiac—they move unceasingly through them, they flow through them. And so you see another sense in which man is a macrocosm.

Now, someone who is thoroughly versed in contemporary physiology and knows how physiology is pursued today could well say to us: ‘This is all just clever tricks; it is always possible to find relations between things. And if a person has divided up the senses so as to come out with twelve, of course he can relate them to the twelve signs of the zodiac; and the same goes for distinguishing seven life processes which can then be related to the seven planets.’ To put it bluntly, such a person might believe that all this is the product of fantasy. But this is truly not the case, for the human being of today is the result of a slow process of unfolding and development. During Old Moon, the human senses were not as they are today. As I said, they provided the basis for the ancient, dreamlike clairvoyance of Old Moon existence. Today's senses are more dead than those of Old Moon. They are less united into a single whole and are more separated from the sevenfold unity of the life processes. The senses of Old Moon were themselves more akin to the life processes. Today, seeing and hearing are quite dead, they involve processes that occur at the periphery of our being.

Perception, however, was not nearly so dead on Old Moon. Take any of the senses, the sense of taste, for example. I imagine all of you know what that is like on Earth. During the Moon era it was rather different. At that time a person was not so separated from his outer surroundings as he is nowadays. For us, sugar is something out there: to connect with it we have to lick something and then inner processes have to take place. There is a clear distinction between the subjective and the objective. It was not like this during Old Moon. Then, the process was much more filled with life and there was not such a clear distinction between subjective and objective. The process of tasting was more like a life process, more like—say—breathing. When we breathe, something real happens in us. We breathe in air but, in so doing, all the blood-forming processes in us are affected-all these processes are part of breathing, which is one of the seven life processes and does not permit of such clear distinctions between subject and object. In this case, what is outside and what is within must be taken together: air outside, air within. And something real happens through the process of breathing, much more real than what happens when we taste something. When we taste, enough happens to provide a basis for the typical consciousness of today, but on Old Moon tasting was much more similar to the dreamlike process that breathing is for us today. We are not nearly so aware of ourselves in our breathing as we are when we taste something. But on Old Moon, tasting was like breathing is for us now. Man on ancient Moon experienced no more of his tasting than we experience of our breathing, nor did he feel a need for it to be otherwise. The human being had not yet become a gourmet, nor could he become one, for tasting depended on certain internal happenings that were connected with his processes of maintenance, with his continued existence on Old Moon.

Sight, the process of seeing, was also different on Old Moon. Then one did not simply look at external objects, perceiving the colour as something outside oneself. Instead, the eye penetrated into the colour and the colour entered through the eyes, helping to maintain the life of the viewer. The eye was a kind of organ for breathing colour. The state of our life was affected by how we related to the outer world through our eyes and by the perceptual processes of the eyes. On Old Moon, we expanded upon entering a blue region and contracted if we ventured into a red region: expanding-contracting, expanding-contracting. Colour affected us that much. Similarly, all the other senses also had a more living connection, both with the outer world and with the inner world of the perceiver, a connection such as the life processes have today.

And what was the sense of another ego like on Old Moon? There could not have been any such sense on Old Moon, for it is only since the Earth stage of development that the I has begun to dwell within us. The sense of thought, of living thought as I previously described it, is also connected with Earth consciousness. Our sense of thought did not yet exist on Old Moon. Neither did humanity speak. And since there was nothing like our perception of each other's speech, the sense of word was also absent. In earlier times the word lived as the Logos which streamed through the whole world, including humanity. It had significance to man, but was not perceived by him. The sense of hearing was already developing, though, and was much more filled with life than the hearing of today. That sense has, so to speak, now come to rest on Earth, to a standstill. When we listen, we stay quite still, at least as a rule. Unless a sound does something of the order of bursting an eardrum, hearing does not change anything in our organism. We remain at rest within ourselves and perceive the sounds, the tones. This is not how things were during Old Moon. Then the tones really came close. They were heard, but that hearing involved being inwardly pervaded by the tones, it involved inwardly vibrating with the sounds and actively participating in their creation. Man participated actively in the production of what we call the Cosmic Word, but he was not aware of it. Thus we cannot call it a sense, properly speaking, although Moon man participated in a living fashion in the sounds that are the basis of today's hearing. If what we hear today as music had been played on Old Moon, there would have been more than just an outward dancing! If that had happened, all the internal organs, with few exceptions, would have reacted the way my larynx: and related organs react when I use them to produce a tone. Thus, it was not a conscious process, but a life process in which one actively participated, for the whole inner man was brought into vibration. These vibrations were harmonious or dissonant, and the vibration was perceived in the tones.

The sense of warmth was also a life process. Today we are comparatively calm when we regard our surroundings; we just notice that it is warm or cold outside. Of course we experience it to a mild degree, but not as during Old Moon, when a rise or fall in temperature was experienced so intensely that one's whole sense of life changed. In other words, the participation was much more intense: just as one vibrated with a tone, one experienced oneself getting inwardly cooler or warmer.

I already have described what the sense of sight was like on Old Moon. There was a living involvement with colours. Some colours caused us to enlarge our body, others to contract it. Today we can only experience this symbolically, if at all. We no longer collapse when confronted with red, nor do we inflate when surrounded by blue—but we did do this on Old Moon. The sense of taste has also been described already.

The sense of smell was intimately bound up with the life processes on Old Moon. There was also a sense of balance, it was already needed. And the sense of movement was much livelier. Today we have more or less come to rest in ourselves—we are more or less dead. We move our limbs, but not much of us actually vibrates. But just imagine all the movement there was to be aware of on Old Moon when tones generated inner movement.

Now, as for the sense of life, you will gather from what I have been saying that no sense analogous to our sense of life could have been present on Old Moon. At that time one was altogether immersed in life, in life as a whole. The skin was not the boundary of inner life. Life was something in which one swam. There was no need for a special sense of life since all the organs that today are sense organs were organs of life in those times—they were alive and they provided consciousness of that life. So there was no need for a special sense of life on Old Moon.

The sense of touch came into being along with the mineral world, which is a result of Earth evolution. On Old Moon there was nothing analogous to the sense of touch that we have developed here on Earth in conjunction with the mineral realm. There was no such sense on Old Moon where it was no more needed than was a sense of life.

If we count how many of our senses were already to be found on Old Moon as organs of life, we find there were seven. Manifestations of life are always sevenfold. The five senses unique to Earth evolution fall away when we consider Moon man. They join the other seven later, during our Earth evolution, to make up the twelve senses, because the Earth-senses have become fixed zones as have the regions of the zodiac. There were only seven senses on Old Moon, for then the senses were still mobile and full of life. Thus there was a sevenfold life on Old Moon, a life in which the senses were still immersed.

This account is the result of living observations of a super-sensible world which—initially—is beyond the limits of earthly perception. What has been said is just a small, an elementary part of all that needs to be said to show that our account is not the product of arbitrary whims. The more one presses on and achieves a vision of cosmic secrets, the more one sees that all this talk about the relation of seven to twelve is not just a game. This relationship really can be traced through all the manifestations of life. The relation of the fixed stars to the planets is a necessary outer expression of it and reveals one of the mysteries of number that underlie the cosmos. And the relationship of the number twelve to the number seven expresses one of the mysteries of existence, the mystery of how man, as bearer of the senses and faculties of perception, is related to man as the bearer of life. The number twelve is connected with the mystery of how we are able to carry an I. The establishment of twelve senses, each at rest in its own proper region, provided a basis for earthly self-awareness. The fact that the senses of Old Moon were still organs of life meant that Moon man could possess an astral body, but not an I; for then the seven senses were still organs of life and only provided the basis for the astral body. The number seven is concerned with the mysteries of the astral body just as the number twelve is concerned with the mysteries of the human I.