The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear children!

Today, now that we are at the end of our first school year here in our dear Waldorf School, let us inscribe on our souls something of why we are actually in this school. What does it mean that our dear friend Herr Molt, together with Frau Molt, founded this Waldorf School for you, my dear children, and for humankind? What does it mean that you come here every morning in order to learn something good? What does it mean, above all, that there are people who are taking great pains to guide you into life so that you will grow up to be good and capable people?

You know, my dear children, that I have often come here during this school year, and in each class I always asked you a question, a question that comes straight from my heart. I often asked you, “Do you love your teachers?” [“Yes!” shout the children.] And you know, you always answered me as warmly as you just did today.

Now there will be weeks in which you do not see your teachers for a while, and so now I want to say something different to you. I hope your hearts will often answer this question during vacation. Now I would like to say to you, “Now that you are not going to see your teachers, learn to be grateful to them.” In the same way that you have learned, tried hard to learn to love your teachers, now learn to feel firmly in your heart that you are grateful to your teachers, so that when you ask yourselves, “Am I grateful to my teachers?” you can honestly and heartily say, “Yes, I am grateful.”

Now there is something else I want to say to you. You see, my dear children, here with us it should not happen that as Waldorf School students you say, “Hey, school is over now; if s vacation. When we're in school, we have to work hard and learn, but now we can be lazy. We don't have to do anything. We're glad that we can be lazy.” You know that is not what we want to say. We should say something else; we should say, “Yes, it's a beautiful day. During the day we experience many beautiful things along with some that are sad and painful, but what would human beings be if they could not experience through their senses everything that divine spirituality has put into the world, everything that is so great and beautiful and true.”

But unless we can also sleep and rest, we cannot use our ears and eyes properly to hear and see all the beautiful things divine spirituality has put into the world. Think about how after enjoying the day, you have to rest at night, and then in the morning you are strengthened again. Your eyes see better and your ears hear better. If you had to stay awake all the time, you would surely not be able to enjoy and learn about life in all its truth and beauty the way divine spirituality made it. This is also how it is in life as a whole. You should not think, “Now that it's vacation we can be lazy;” you should think, “All of what we received from our dear teachers, everything that humankind has learned so that individuals can know it—we received all this, and now we need a little rest, so that when we have rested, we can go back into our classes and be fresher and more lively. In fact, we will each go into the next grade; with new forces we will once again take into our hearts what our teachers will give us through their love and hard work, what humanity has learned in service to humanity.” This is how we should think of it—that we are resting during the vacation to get strong again for the whole new school year.

Then, my dear children, I would like to tell you a little about what it means that this Waldorf School of ours exists, and what it means that we are here in this school. You see, the person you are going to grow up to be, this person has a physical body, a soul and a spirit. You each have a body, a soul, and a spirit. And when a person is very little and is born into the world, this body and soul and spirit are all very incomplete. In you, they are still incomplete, but they are supposed to become more complete. Herein the Waldorf School your body will be shaped to become skilled at everything a person has to do in life. Your teachers have worked hard at this on your behalf; you have been introduced to eurythmy, for example, which works to make your body very skillful in life, and many other things have been brought to you so that you will become people who are skillful and capable and strong in their bodies. When you are small, you are fairly clumsy. You have to become more skillful. It is the same with the soul which is in each one of you. But it has to be developed so that it can send out threads in all directions for life. This is like unwinding the strands from a tangled ball of yarn—the threads for your life have to be untangled from your soul. This is how the soul develops, and this happens for you so that you become good and capable with regard to your forces for life. Good strong forces for life have to be fetched up out of your souls. And your spirit—yes, my dear children, if we did not educate the spirit, we would not be human beings at all. The spirit must be educated so that we become very good and capable human beings.

Now you see, when a person has worked all day or when a child has played and learned well and then sleeps, sometimes dreams come to them from their sleep. Most of you have experienced dreams. Sometimes they are very beautiful dreams, sometimes ugly dreams. And now you are going to go rest during vacation. Then something will come to you that can be compared to a dream. You see, during vacation, when you think back to when you were in school, it may be that you think, “Oh, I had nice teachers, I learned a lot, I was glad to be able to go to school.” And when you think that, those are beautiful dreams during your vacation. And when you think, “Oh, I should have been less lazy; I didn't like to go to school,” and so forth, then you are having bad dreams during vacation. Think back often during this vacation to when you were in school; for example, think like this: “My thoughts are drawn back to the Waldorf School, where my body is shaped for skillful activity, where my soul is developed to be strong in life, where my spirit develops so that I can be truly human.” When you think often like this about how your body is being shaped, your soul developed and your spirit educated, you will send yourself a good dream for your time of rest, and then your vacation time will also contribute something to making you a good and capable person in life.

You know, when I came today, one of your good little fellow students gave me something. Let⁷s see what it is. Look, this is what he gave me—a washcloth and a flower! Now I guess I must wash myself and dry my hands, and perhaps the flower is meant to say that your lessons are something that blooms as beautifully as this nice little white flower. [Rudolf Steiner holds up the washcloth.] And perhaps this could remind us that what we learn here is also something we can use to wash away everything in our souls that is incomplete, all bad thoughts and feelings that want to make us be lazy and not pay attention. I would like to give you each a little spiritual cloth so you can wash away all the laziness and lack of hard work and inattentiveness, and so on. So I am very glad that you have given me this little symbol and that I can show you how to use it to wash away a whole lot of what should not be in your souls.

And look at this little flower! You have learned many things here that you needed to learn, and what you learned is so many little flowers like this in your soul. Think about this when you remind yourselves that your thoughts are hurrying back to the Waldorf School where your bodies are trained to be skillful, your soul is developed to be strong for life, and your spirit unfolds so that you can be properly human—and think about how flowers like this are being cultivated in your soul day after day, and how grateful you should be for that. Everything in life can be of service to us and help us think about what is right. That, dear children, is what I wanted to say to you.

Think about each other, too! You have gotten to know each other and also, I hope, learned to love each other. Think about each other very, very often, and think about how good it was that you came together so that your teachers could help you grow into good and capable people. Don't think, “Now we can be lazy,” but think, “We need to rest, and when we have rested we will come back and be fresh and ready to receive what our dear teachers bring to us.”

Arid now, although you will not yet be able to understand it, I would like to say a few words in your presence to your dear teachers, who have now put all the diligent work of the Waldorf School behind them, and I would like to shake their hands. First of all, I would like to shake hands with Herr Molt and Frau Molt for having created this Waldorf School for us so that we can try to do something for humanity in its dire straits. My dear friends—as I said, I am speaking to the teachers, but you children can also hear it and can remember it later—the years behind us have been bitter ones for humanity, years in which people beat and bloodied and shot each other. There are still other bitter things in front of us, for the times still look very bad. But then the Waldorf teachers were the first to find the courage to appear here and to start to believe something that I am convinced that people today must start to believe above all else. The Waldorf teachers came here and said, “Yes, we have to work on the children so that when we are old, something will have happened to the children that can prevent unhappiness and bitterness of this sort from overcoming people.” This requires a certain courage and it requires hard work, but above all it requires something that awakens in human hearts the possibility of not sleeping, but of staying awake. That, dear Waldorf teachers, is why I want to shake your hands so warmly. If many people would wake up and look at the decision you have come to instead of sleeping through it, if what happens here would find successors, then you would realize that you were the first to work at something that is so very necessary for our future as human beings.

Dear children, when your teachers came into school each morning, they were people who clearly grasped the task of our times and devoted themselves diligently to what was required of them. And it was always a warm moment for me when I asked you, “Do you love your teachers?” and you so heartily answered, “Yes!” During the vacation I will also wonder whether you are grateful to your teachers. But you, dear Waldorf teachers, let me warmly shake your hands. I thank you in the name of the spirit of humanity which we are trying to cultivate throughout our spiritual movement. In this spirit, I shake your hands for everything you have accomplished on behalf of the future ideals of humanity. Today is the day for us to be able to remember these things, and it is the day when you children should feel how grateful you ought to be to these teachers of yours.

There is still something I would like to say today. Alongside everything we have learned here, which the individual teachers have demonstrated so beautifully, there is something else present, something that I would like to call the spirit of the Waldorf School. It is meant to lead us to true piety again. Basically, it is the spirit of Christianity that wafts through all our rooms, that comes from every teacher and goes out to every child, even when it seems that something very far from religion is being taught, such as arithmetic, for example. Here it is always the spirit of Christ that comes from the teacher and is to enter the hearts of the children—this spirit that is imbued with love, real human love. This is why I want you children to feel that not only have you learned something here, you have also gradually learned to feel what it is for one person to love another. And so now as you are going on vacation, I would like you to think of all your schoolmates with a warmhearted “Until we meet again! Until we meet again, when we comeback strengthened into these rooms, when we can once again work with our teachers on what will make us into good and capable people.”

You see, dear children, you must consider how life here in this school is connected to the whole of human life. When people get old, they are seventy or eighty years old. Life brings joy and sorrow, beauty and ugliness. When we get old, we are seventy or eighty, as I said. We can compare our life to a day with twenty-four hours. If this day represents our life, then a year that we spend in this day of life would be about twenty minutes long, and your eight years in primary school would be something like two to three hours out of your whole life. So the time that you spend in the Waldorf School makes up two or three hours out of your whole life. And when we go through the other twenty hours we have for living, for working, for becoming aware of the spirit, for doing things with other people so that something good can happen in the world—when we go through these hours, it can be a real comfort for our hearts, a real strength for our lives, if we are able to realize that the two or three hours of life we spent in primary school gave us something for our whole life, gave us strength and spirit and the ability to work.

Let us say this to ourselves, my dear children, now on this last day of our first school year in the Waldorf School, but during the vacation, let us remember something else again and again. I would like to write it in your souls so that it blooms there like this cute little flower, so that you think of it often: “Let my thoughts hurry back to my dear Waldorf School, where my body is trained to work and to do good, where my soul is developed to be strong for life, where my spirit is awakened to be truly good and human.” We want you all to become such good and capable people someday, when you are grown up and out there in life.

I wanted to speak to you from heart to heart today. I wanted to say this to you out of love, and I say it to you so that you can take note of it. Once again, think of your thoughts hurrying back to your dear Waldorf School, where your body is shaped to work capably in life, where your soul is developed for strength in life, where your spirit is awakened to true humanity. That is how it should be. And so now we will leave each other, and when we come back, we will go on as we have done before.

Afterwards you will receive your reports.¹ Whoever gets a good report should not take it as an indication that it is now all right to be lazy, and whoever gets a bad report need not immediately start to cry, but should think about trying harder next year.

Out of the spirit of the Waldorf School, shake your teachers' hands and say to each other, “We will be back in fall to learn to do good work, to develop our souls to be strong for life, and to awaken our spirit to true humanity.”

And so, until we meet again!

• 1. At the end of the school year, instead of receiving grades, the children received brief characterizations of their behavior and of how they worked.

When a Greek philosopher was asked about the purpose of philosophy, he replied [in the following way]: Imagine there is a fair. Some people have various things to sell; others are there to look at everything; [manifold interests, interacting] – that is life at the fair. Not the most ignoble task is that of the philosophers, who look at everything without themselves participating in the fair. But sometimes mere exploration of things might not seem useful; pangs of conscience might arise from such knowledge, from knowing for the sake of knowing. [Should playing the “gawker” really be the noblest task? Does life justify knowing for the sake of knowing?] Such a thing seems to concern the few. But it is a general human concern. Every human being feels the urge to know something [about the things of life] without a principle of utility. Why should man, as he lives, have something beyond mere knowledge? [This is a question that has been asked at all times.] There is a higher world, [underlying reality of the external world], a supersensible world, and man has certain relationships to this world, which is cognizable to him if he rises to this world, which is possible through religious faith. The religious need, the longing, is no less now than it was in the past. But this world, in which one believes, can also be explored through knowledge. [So there are no limits to knowledge.] The prejudice that one can only believe in it is no longer justified today. Other prejudices are found in those who think monistically, [they think that human knowledge can never penetrate into these worlds. It should not say anything about them]. But man must then humbly acknowledge that there is a supersensible world. Part of this is the subject of our evening meditation today: [to show the relationship between man and the supersensible world].

The external world approaches man from two sides. Firstly, through the perception of the senses, and secondly, when man tries to look into his own inner being: suffering, joys, urges, raptures and so on. In everyday life, this is often much closer than the external world. Life forces us to look at it. But on closer reflection, it becomes clear that we have formidable obstacles on both sides. There is, as it were, a boundary in forms and colors in the outer world; but we can think them up. We come up against a wall when we turn our gaze out into the world; we are in a difficult position when observing the outer world. For it is difficult to eavesdrop on ourselves in this observation. We are especially hampered in separating ourselves from the outside world. We grow together with the outside, can no longer distinguish between the external and the internal, for example, at a beautiful sunrise. It is hopeless to want to separate: this is us and this is the outside world. Or with compassion that you have for someone - [all the strength of your soul is taken away] - with devotion or indifference to others. We know that something arises from the depths of the soul, but it is hopeless to try to separate the inner sense from the outside world, [from what presents itself externally and from the supersensible within].

Within oneself, objective knowledge of one's own being is difficult, much more difficult. Self-love is a constant obstacle. In this respect we are a good person, in that a bad one. Self-love confronts us like a second wall, preventing us from formulating it as: “We are such people.” Semi-conscious states show us quite clearly where we end up when we do not control ourselves from the outside world - [in the dream world]. There is a lawfulness when falling asleep; dream images are to be judged impartially. It is characteristic: someone dreams that they are with several people; these people have various very specific relationships with him, for example, antipathy. But the dreamer does not see this as people, but as a little dog that barks, the barking turns into bickering. The little dog says something like, “Oh, it was a misunderstanding, everything is fine again.

The logical character leaves the person. What prevails when you imagine a person as a puppy? You are emancipated from the control of the outside world. The state of mind transforms [into an appropriate image] of how [the unloved person] lives in the mind of the person. That is the real law, [the characteristic] of the dream world. People imagine that they are painters. That would be pleasing to the person concerned. Every imagination is subject to a mood of the will. What is valid in the dream is our self-will, our self-love, that is the determining principle. In the waking state, this self-will must be able to be controlled, [must be broken. Our entire organization depends on how our will works in our external life.]

[Let us consider fatigue.] Fatigue – what is it, why does it occur? It is not the muscles or the organs that tire. If the heart muscle had to rest, things would go badly for the human being. They do not tire, nor do we tire when we let our thoughts wander. [Everything that follows from the human organization does not tire.] But when we are thinking about a calculation or something like that, we tire; even when a muscle is not determined to be active from within, but by the conscious will of the person. The unconscious will, the power that makes the heart, lungs, diaphragm, etc. work, does not tire when the impulse comes from within; only when self-will, self-love, self-life are at work, then they interfere with the organism. These three are in constant struggle against the rest of the world; they have to submit to the general world order – and fight against it. Self-will [self-love] prevents us from recognizing ourselves; self-will must be broken in order to understand what it is. If a person could look inside themselves, they could discover the spiritual and psychological. Dreams show us how we build ourselves through self-will. (When we are awake, we are merged with the outside world. When we submit to our own will, we become tired. Tiredness is a constant rebellion against the workings of the organism.

The relationship between the human soul and the outside world must be established elsewhere. [A saying of Goethe's is:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels in the world as a large, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, when the harmonious comfort grants him a pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could feel itself, would reach its goal, exult and admire the summit of its own becoming and being. For what is the point of all the effort of suns and planets and moons, of stars and milky ways, of comets and nebulae, of becoming and becoming worlds, if not, ultimately, a happy person unconsciously enjoys his existence?]

How can we find what lives within us if we cannot detach ourselves from the external world? It becomes possible when we go beyond the ordinary, [when we rise above our immediate surroundings], when we devote ourselves to the contemplation of how the human being has come into being, when we reflect on ourselves, on the ego, on the enduring in change. But we must have pangs of conscience when we consider that the ego is repeatedly extinguished. Fichte, the ego philosopher, wants to construct an entire world out of the ego. Does the creation of the world stop for hours when we are asleep? [We must realize]: During the day we do not have the ego, but the image of the ego, like a figure in the mirror. The mirror image indicates that there is something that we only perceive in the mirror. Where is the activity of the I itself? How we have grown from epoch to epoch, our particular development is due to the particular coloring that the I has. Then there is getting over the extinguishing of the I. The idea is extinguished, but not the activity of the I. The core of the I is there in waking and sleeping, [there it shows itself to us in its reality]. We must ascend to the real grasp of the ego; our soul life will grow and become richer. The ego is to be looked at as if in a chemical laboratory some process. We must learn to feel. The task is difficult, but in the end it can lead to grasping the ego. It is difficult to get beyond imagining, to gain an impression of ourselves. Then there is the second thing that must guide us: Up to a certain point we remember; we cannot go back beyond the beginning. But it is absurd to believe that the I is not there [before]. Life, the character of the soul, is laid down in the child when it comes into the world Schopenhauer. The child will immediately push away, attack; the fundamental nature of the child remains even beyond the point where one remembers. How can the I be found as it was before?

We go to this point with our ideas. But we have to leap beyond those ideas. With our mood and our will, we go beyond our own will. We are placed in a certain ethnic and linguistic community. This is to be accepted as if I had not placed myself there. It is not based on knowledge, but on the decision of the will. Thus, with our retrospective view, we are led even further back. Then something strange happens, as if one had two glasses and poured water from one into the other, and the glass from which it was poured would never become empty – [or like gases that then result in water]. Something completely new arises. [Feeling and will come together and say: You have made your own destiny. Through a decision of the will, one has to accept one's fate, “in which I am stuck”, a feeling that one is stuck in one's fate. There one comes to the feeling of one's remaining, there we step out of ourselves behind the physical, sensual world, there we are permeated, souled by our I itself. Thus the wall is removed. In the world of imagination, it is like a wall; but our destiny is built by our I itself, out of the supersensible world. Today, the most important thing is not to look at the outside, but to experience within ourselves the feeling: “You are.”

[While a person surrenders to their will in a dream, they are guided by a world of images. There are symbols that affect the soul, not out of their own will, but out of certain necessities:] The imagination of love is like pouring from one vessel into another, whereby the one from which one pours is never empty. That is how love is. It does not help much to imagine it in the abstract. Not through definitions, but through comprehensible, symbolic images, [triangle], our soul continues to progress. If one allows such images to take effect, one comes to a separation from the external world. In this way, one grows together inwardly with the supersensible world, builds a bridge to it, and receives the assurance: “It is.” This has an immediate effect on life.

It also becomes clear through further reflection that earlier lives are [necessary, in which causes were laid for later lives].

Heroic natures will say to themselves: What we work for, we give to our descendants. [That would be] the most intimate thing we can experience; [if we were to] pass it on to the [next] generations, it would be lost [to us].

As the physical declines, the spiritual grows stronger, and it becomes tangible that something is growing within us that will give rise to a new life. Man experiences the spiritual and soul core within himself. Through this, man experiences eternity. [It is like an] elixir of life. He draws strength and confidence from such contemplations. Destiny is the supersensible law of karma. Man experiences the supersensible world and feels that he connects with these thoughts inwardly and then becomes useful in a new life to be built up, thus will not be a “gawker”. These are forces that move people forward - like the steam in the locomotive. Our thoughts are living weaving forces in the universe. The soul, which understands itself as living in the whole universe, feels its connection with it.

Answering questions Question: About Nietzsche.

Rudolf Steiner: [One should] not let one's own judgments flow when one wants to talk about certain personalities. As a cultural phenomenon, he is particularly interesting, growing up with Schopenhauer, Wagner, [with] Greek culture. Nietzsche is not a creative spirit. He loaded the fate of culture onto his own soul. He suffers from the positivism of the time. The fate of the heart will make him see others as mere [i.e., other than mere?] theory. Darwinism: ditto — applied to Nietzsche's life.

The life of ideas must be fertilized from within. Nietzsche tries; [he] does not come to the path of knowledge, seeks the supersensible in man in the contemplation of [?] the will. He is captivating because of the tragedy of his life. How one relates to spiritual science – objectively – is how one should relate to Nietzsche.

Question: [not handed down].

Rudolf Steiner: Surrender to a higher being without egoism promotes soul development. The same applies to prayer or meditation; this must be imbued with the original mood: “Not my will, but yours be done”.

[The] folding of the hands: It causes a promotion when the thought is serious. It is a kind of togetherness, according to human physiology. Naturalness - unvarnished - already causes the movement of the hands of the speaker.

The terrible catastrophe of last New Year's Eve, the destruction by fire of the Goetheanum, which will remain as a painful memory for the many who loved it, may provide occasion to connect today's thoughts about the anthroposophical knowledge and conception of the world with this Goetheanum. But a connection is all I have in view; for the lecture itself that I am to present to you is not to be essentially different in kind from those I have been permitted to give here in Basel, in this same hall, for many years past.

That dreadful calamity was just the occasion to bring to light what fantastic notions there are in the world linked with all that this Goetheanum in Dornach intended to do and all that was done in it. It is said that the most frightful superstitions were disseminated there, that all sorts of things inimical to religion were being practiced; and there is even talk of all kinds of spiritistic seances, of nebulous mystic performances, and so on.

In respect to all this, I should like today to answer, at least sketchily, the question: What is this Anthroposophy to which the Goetheanum was dedicated?

Many people were scandalized at the very name, “Goetheanum,” because they failed to consider the fundamental reason for this name, and how it is connected with all that is cultivated there as Anthroposophy.

For me, my dear friends, this Anthroposophy is the spontaneous result of my devotion for more than four decades to Goethe's world-conception, and to his whole activity. Of course if anyone studies Goethe's world-conception and what he did by considering only what is actually written in Goethe's works, and from that deduces logically, as it were, what may now be called Goethean, he will not find what gave occasion to call the Dornach Building the “Goetheanum,” But there is, I might say, a logic of thinking and a logic of life. And anyone who immerses himself in Goethe, not merely with a logic of thinking, but who takes up actively his impulse-filled suggestions, and tries to gain from them what can be gained—after so many decades have passed over humanity's evolution since Goethe's death—he will believe—no matter what he may think of the true value of Anthroposophy—that by means of the living stimuli of Goetheanism, if I may use the expression, this very Anthroposophy has been able to come into being through a logic of life, by experiencing what is in Goethe, and by developing his conclusions, in a modest way.

Now this Goetheanum was first called “Johannesbau” by those friends of the anthroposophical world-conception who made it possible to erect such a building. The name was in no way connected with the Evangelist, St, John; but the building was named—not by me but by others—for Johannes Thomasius, one of the figures in my Mystery Drama; because, above all, this Goetheanum was to be dedicated to the presentation of these Mystery Plays, besides the cultivation of all the rest of the anthroposophical world-view. But of course it was inevitable that this name, “Johannesbau,” should lead to the misunderstanding that it was meant for the author of St. John's Gospel.

Hence, I often said, I think even here in this place, in the course of the years in which the Goetheanum was being built, that for me this building is a Goetheanum; for I derived my world-view in a living way from Goethe. And then this name was officially given to the Building by friends of the cause. I have always regarded this as a sort of token of gratitude for what can be gained from Goethe, an act of homage to the towering personality of Goethe; not because it was supposed that what was originally given by Goethe would be cultivated in the best and most beautiful way in the Dornach Goetheanum, but because the anthroposophical world-view feels the deepest gratitude for what has come into the world through Goethe.

If, then, the name “Goetheanum” is taken as resulting from an act of homage, an act of gratitude, then no one, as I believe, can take exception to it. For the rest, it is quite comprehensible that anyone unacquainted with the anthroposophical world-view, when approaching the building on the Dornach hill, would be at first peculiarly affected by the two dove-tailed dome-structures, by the strange forms without and within, and so forth. But this building proceeded as an inner artistic consequence, from the anthroposophical world-view. Therefore, I shall be able to form the best connecting link with what the Building stood for, if I try first—today in a somewhat different way from the one I have employed here for many years—to answer the question: What is Anthroposophy?

To start with, Anthroposophy claims to be a knowledge of the spiritual world, which can fully take its place beside the magnificent natural science of our time. It aims to rank with natural science, not only as regards scientific conscientiousness, but it also requires that anyone who wishes, not merely to receive Anthroposophy into his mind, but to build it up, must, before all else, have gone through all the rigid and serious methods used today by natural science.

In all this the purpose of Anthroposophy is the complete opposite of what I have cited as the opinions of the world about it. With regard to these opinions, which I have given only in part, we can only be astonished that it is possible for ideas about anything to become fixed in the minds of the public, which are the exact opposite of what is really intended. For it can be flatly said that all I have mentioned as opinions of the world is not Anthroposophy, but that Anthroposophy purposes to be a serious knowledge of the spiritual world.

You well know, my dear friends, that today anything claiming to be knowledge of the spiritual world is regarded somewhat contemptuously, or at least with great doubt. The scientific education that mankind has enjoyed for the past three or four hundred years was of such a nature that in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the opinion came gradually to be held that, by means of the strict methods employed today by natural science, man can know what is presented to the senses in his environment, and also what the human intellect can deduce from sense-perception, with the help of its methods of experiment and observation. But on the other hand, knowledge of the spiritual is declined, by those very people who are firmly convinced that they stand on the strict basis of this natural-scientific world-view. For it is said, whether with a certain arrogance or with a certain despondency, that with regard to the spiritual there are barriers to man's knowledge, that with regard to the spirit man must be satisfied with concepts of belief.

Because of this there results a serious inner soul-discord for very many people who get their education from the natural science that is everywhere popularized today. The concepts of belief are handed down from ancient times. It is not known that they also correspond to concepts of knowledge which humanity attained at earlier stages, and that' these are still contained in the traditions, in what has been handed down. If they are accepted just as concepts of belief, then the soul is brought into contradiction with everything it takes in when it accepts what in our day is won for humanity and for practical life in such a rigorous way by the methods of natural science.

What is won in this way cannot really be called the possession of a small group of educated people; rather, this special mode of thought derived from natural science has already penetrated the instruction of the primary grades of school. And we might even say that the condition of soul that results from natural science, if not natural science itself, has been spread everywhere, ever farther and farther, even into the most primitive, outermost human settlements. This brings it about that many people do not know that their soul-longing is for concepts about the spiritual world similar to those they have about the natural world; but this causes in many of them, nevertheless, a discord of soul which is expressed in all kinds of dissatisfactions with life. People feel a certain inner unrest and perplexity. With the concepts and feelings they have, they do not rightly know how to take their place in life. They ascribe the trouble to all sorts of things, but the real cause lies in what I have said.

People today long for real knowledge-concepts about the spiritual world, not for concepts of belief. Such knowledge-concepts are what Anthroposophy strives for; but in doing so it must, of course, vindicate an entirely different concept of knowledge from the one we are accustomed to today. And if I am to characterize this concept, I should like to do it by means of a sort of comparison, which is, however, more than a mere comparison, and is to lead directly to the way in which Anthroposophy strives to know the super-sensible-spiritual.

Let us think first of the strange world which each of you knows as the other side of human existence, as it were, the other side of human consciousness—let us think of the dream-world. Each of you can remember the variegated, diverse, colorful pictures that appear out of the dark depths of sleep. If you observe dreams from the waking state, you will find that these are connected in some way with what one is or does while awake. Even when at times they are prophetic dreams, which is by no means to be denied, they are nevertheless connected with what the dreamer has experienced—only a natural formative fantasy acts in the most extravagant way to metamorphose these experiences. In a different way such dreams are connected with the human bodily conditions; difficulty in breathing, rapid heart-action, disturbances in the organism, are experienced symbolically in dreams in many ways.

Let us imagine for a moment, merely to develop the thought that is needed here, that a person lived in this dream-world, that he had no other world; he would never be able to emerge from this world, but' would regard it as his reality. If through some kind of outer forces, the human life took its course exactly as it does now, that we went about in the cities and did our work, but did not consciously see this work, just always dreamed, then we human beings would regard the dream-world as the only reality, just as the dreamer in the moment of the dream regards his variously decked-out dream-world as his reality» Only when we wake up can we truly form a judgment, from the waking point of view, by means of the way we are then related to the world of our environment, about the real value and significance of the dream, While remaining in the dream, we can come to no such judgment. It is only possible from the point of view of the waking life to judge to what extent the dream is related to life-reminiscences, or to bodily conditions. To form a judgment about the dream, one must first wake up.

Now the human being lives also in his will, for it is particularly the will that, upon waking, is projected into the events of the outer sense-world; man lives now in the pictures which this sense-world transmits to his soul. We have no judgment whatever about the reality, except the feeling of being in the sense-world, the feeling of union with this sense-world; and from this point of view—I might say of insertion of the whole soul-being into this world by means of the body—we at first regard it as reality, and the deceptive pictures of the dream as not belonging to this reality.

But now, especially when anyone surveys all that the pictures of the outer sense-reality give to him, certainly at some time the question will appear: How is what he himself experiences within him as his soul-spirit-being related to the transformations and the variability of the outer sense-world?

The great questions of existence present themselves when a man compares what he sees in the outer sense-world with what he feels as his own being, in his thinking and feeling, his sensing and his willing, rising out of the depths of his humanness,—those great questions of existence which may perhaps be comprised in the one question: What value, as reality, has that which pertains to the soul? This then expands to questions of soul-immortality, of human freedom, and numberless others that spring up. For one will soon feel how entirely different the experience is when looking outward and receiving sense-impressions, from that of looking inward and having soul-experiences. And from such experiences the question must of necessity arises Is it perhaps possible, through some kind of second awakening, a higher awakening, to attain from a higher standpoint knowledge about sense-reality itself, in the same way that a man acquires from the sense-reality a judgment about the dream-world, when, as a matter of course, he awakes in the morning?

When a man is convinced that the imagination of the dream can be judged with regard to its value as reality, only from the standpoint of waking life, then he must strive to gain a point of view which can in turn reveal something about the value as reality, of the higher value, of sense-experience itself.

And now the great question concerning a knowledge of spirit may be put this way: Can we perhaps wake up in a higher sense from our everyday waking consciousness? and does' there result from such second waking a knowledge about the sense-world, just as from the sense-world comes knowledge about the dream?

Now we can, of course, have a feeling about it, but exact observation gives us certainty about how the dream works. When dreaming we feel that our whole soul-life is laid hold of by vague powers. At the moment of waking, we feel that we now have control of our physical body. We feel that the extravagant concepts of the dream are disciplined by the physical body. And the reason we feel that these dream-concepts are extravagant is that, when waking up or going to sleep, there is a moment ' when we do not have the physical body completely in hand. Can a higher, a second awakening, be brought about by conscious soul-activity, in the same way that we are wrenched out of the dream, out of sleep, by the forces of the organism itself?

This question can only be answered when we test, I might say in a higher sense, whether the soul finds forces within itself for such a higher awakening; and only by finding the answer to this can a different form of knowledge-concept be produced from that to which we are accustomed today, and which leads only to one's saying with regard to the spiritual world, “Ignorabimus,” “We shall not know.”

Now we shall have to turn first of all—and Anthroposophy proceeds in this way—to those soul-forces that we already have, and ask: Can something higher, still stronger, be developed out of these soul-forces, just as the waking soul-life is stronger than the dreaming life? We may reason that even this waking soul-life of the adult person has been gradually developed from the dreamy soul-life that we had at the beginning as very little children. If we had stopped with the soul-life that was ours during the first three years on earth, we should see the world in a sort of dream-form. We have grown out of this dream-form.

This may give courage, to begin with, to seek certain soul-forces which can be developed still further than the development achieved since earliest childhood. And anyone who deals with such a problem seriously will turn first to a soul-force concerning which even significant philosophers of the present admit, as a result of purely philosophic deliberation, that it points to a spiritual activity of man which is more or less independent of the body. This is our power of recollection, residing in the memory.

Let us picture to ourselves what exists in our ordinary memory. Of course this memory is not a force with which immediately to penetrate into the super-sensible, spiritual worlds. Above all, we know that this memory is only in perfect order when we can bring to expression in the corporeal what is in the soul. But nevertheless, there is something peculiar here. Among our recollections appear pictures of experiences which were perhaps decades in the past. Something experienced in our relation to the sense-world and to ordinary people appears in varying pictures—according to one's organization—which are really very similar to dream-pictures, only more disciplined. And if our memory is good, there comes today from the soul-depths a living knowledge of what occurred years ago, and is not now before us in sense-reality. This is expressed in a very popular way, of course; but we must start from a definite point of view. So we may say: There are images in the memory which portray inwardly something which was, indeed, once present, something experienced, which is not now present.

And so the question may arise which is still vague at first, and naturally acquires significance only when one can answer it—but we shall see that it can be answered. It is this: Is it possible for anyone, by soul-spiritual work, to acquire a further soul-force, a transformation as it were of the memory-force, whereby he pictures not only what is no longer present, though it once was, but whereby he depicts something which does not exist in the earth-life at all, either through sense-perceptions or any intellectual combinations? This can be decided only by serious inner soul-work; and this soul-work consists of an inner education of the essential element of memory; namely, the capacity for imagining.

How, then, do representations come about? and how is the activity of representation accomplished in ordinary life? Well, outer things make an impression upon us. First, we have sense-perceptions; then from these sense-perceptions we form our concepts, which we carry in the memory. And we know that a certain force is required when we wish to call up a memory-concept of something witnessed in earlier years in which we were involved. But we know too that man surrenders passively to the outer world, in order to have true concepts of this outer world, to bring nothing fantastic into the pictures of it. And this passive self-surrender, assisted besides by all possible experimental methods, is right for natural science. But we can do something more than this with the conceptual life. We can try to take up with inner activity concepts of any content whatsoever—only their content must be easily survey-able, so as not to work suggestively; an idea that is difficult to survey, such as one brought up from the depths of the soul, may easily work suggestively, We now try to ponder with inner activity upon such a concept, so that we surrender ourselves again and again with our whole soul-life to this thought,

I have minutely described what I might call the technique of such surrender to an active living in representation, in my books, “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science;” here I want to sketch the principle involved. If anyone devotes himself again and again to the content of an idea, quite independently of the outer meaning of the concepts he employs inwardly, upon which he inwardly rests, with which he unites himself, to which he allows his whole being to open—if anyone surrenders himself in this way to such an idea, he will gradually notice that in this inner work, in the thinking and representation, a notable aliveness is developed, an aliveness which one must first come to know before an opinion can be formed about it. But when anyone does come to know it, he begins to think somewhat as follows: A muscle we continue to use becomes stronger; in exactly the same way the thinking force of our soul-life is strengthened, if we do not surrender passively to the impressions of the outer world, but work inwardly; if in this way we again and again bring the soul-life inwardly and livingly into a certain condition with regard to an idea.

In this way we finally reach the point where the thinking—which otherwise appears shadowy, even in memory-pictures, and exhausts itself just in the mere presentation of pictures—is filled with a soul-spiritual content, just as in life we feel that we are filled with the breath, with the circulating blood. Life-force, if I may speak in this way, streams into thinking that has thus become active.

Truly, real Anthroposophy, as spirit-knowledge, is based upon intimate, inner methods of the soul, not upon any sort of necromancy? it is based upon the changing of the soul-forces of knowledge by the soul itself, making them into something different. And anyone who strengthens his thinking more and more in this way comes at last—it may be even years later—to a very special experience, an experience that may be described as follows: When we call to mind only outer objects or outer actions, we dive down to a certain depth of the soul-life, and from this depth we must then draw up the recollections. But when we actively work on our thinking in the way I have described, we finally come to the point where we know that with this thinking life we go farther down than the power of recollection reaches.

It is an important experience when we have reached the point of observing the recollections as at a certain level to which we dive down in the ordinary consciousness, and from which we bring up memory-concepts; and then when we glimpse that deeper down in the soul-life there is another level to which we have now penetrated, and from which, with our strengthened thinking, we can draw up concepts that are not the same as those to which we first submitted ourselves, but are entirely different. And while we can represent in recollections what was once present in the human life, but is no longer present, so we now learn that when we draw from this deeper level, we come to concepts that are beyond anything one otherwise ever has in life.

Through this gate of knowledge we have now penetrated into the spiritual world; and the first experience that results is this: we get a really tableau-like retrospect of our whole earth-life up to the present. We might say that in a flash—that is a somewhat extreme statement, but it is almost so—our earth-life up to this moment lies spread out in mighty pictures before the consciousness, with time changed into space, as it were. But these pictures are truly different from those we should get if we were to sit down and draw forth in recollection all that can be drawn out of our life, and should get continuous pictures of this earth-life almost to the time of our birth. This tableau is intrinsically different from the one described before. You see, in ordinary recollections the concepts are passively formed, and contain altogether not much more than our impressions from the outer world. For example, in recollections we call to mind how we met some one, the effect someone had upon us, how a friendship was formed; or again, we experience the effect upon us of some natural occurrence, what we experienced of pleasure or suffering from it, or from the influence of some one, and so on.

The content of the tableau, as I have described it, attained by strengthened, invigorated thinking, is this: A man sees himself—the way he approached another person, as a result of his temperamental qualities, or of his own character, or the desire, or the love, he had. While mere recollection gives to a man what is brought to him from outside, this memory-tableau brings to the fore what he himself has contributed to the experience, what has come out of himself. In the ordinary recollection, let us say of a natural occurrence, he has before him what this occurrence brought of pain or pleasure, that is, the effect upon him of the outer world. In the memory-tableau it would be rather his longing to be in whatever region of the earth he had this experience. The part a man himself has taken in an occurrence is what he experiences in the memory-tableau, In short, I might say that this total impression a man has of his life is diverted from the outer world, and that it contains all his activity during life. One really sees himself as a second person. When anyone has this memory-tableau, he has little impression of his physical space-body; but he feels himself within all that he has experienced, and he feels at the same time that it is all a flowing, etheric world, so to speak. And with this flowing, etheric world, which contains his own life in mighty pictures as in an onward-flowing stream, one learns at the same time that the moving etheric world of his own existence is connected with the universal etheric world. When as physical human being with his physical senses, a man confronts the outer world, he feels that he is enclosed within his skin. He feels other things as outer things. He feels a strong contrast between subject and object, to express it philosophically. This is not the case when, with strengthened thinking, one enters into what I may call the fluctuating world of the second man, of the time-man, in contrast to the corporeal, physical space-man.

We can really speak of a time-body, for a man becomes aware simultaneously of his whole previous life, and he feels this previous earth-life as moving in a universal world, like unto itself. He can say, that to the solid, dense, physical world is added a more rarified world, in which one has spent his life in flowing movement. Only now does he come to know what an etheric world is, and what man himself is as second man, as second human being in this etheric world. But with all this one has reached only the first stage of super-sensible knowledge.

It is only because one feels himself to be a spirit-soul being in a spirit-soul world that he knows from direct perception, as it were, that the whole world is interpenetrated and interwoven by a spirit-soul substantiality, which man also holds within himself, But as yet he knows no more than this. And most of all, he does not yet know of another spirit-soul world besides that one which unites him as earth-man with the surrounding etheric world.

But now we can go farther. If a man has acquired this ability to experience himself in the etheric realm, to experience the etheric world along with himself, then he can rise to another kind of development of the soul-forces.

This consists in bringing about in the soul what I might call the opposite process to the one first characterized. First we try to make the thinking inwardly very active, very much alive, so that, instead of passive thinking, we have within an active flow of forces, surging and weaving. Now we must try with the same inner force of free will to suppress again the freely soaring thought that we have put into the soul.

In the soul-exercises to which I am alluding, everything that I describe for you must be done in the same way that the mathematician works out his problems; so that it is all carried out with complete self-possession, with nothing whatever in it of false mysticism, of fantasy, even of suggestion, or anything of the kind. The exercises must be performed in the soul with the same objective coldness with which a geometric problem is solved—for the warmth and enthusiasm come not from the method, but from the results. Nevertheless, we experience the following: that when we acquire this strengthened thinking, it is difficult to dispel the representations we get by it, especially those of the previous life, with which we can be completely engrossed if we want to dwell on them. But we must develop in us the strength to disperse the images again, just as we can call them forth, by our own activity. In other words, we must acquire the faculty to extinguish in our consciousness all thinking and imagining, after having first most actively kindled it. Even extinguishing of ordinary concepts is very difficult, but this is relatively easy in comparison with the obliterating of those concepts that have been set up in the soul by spiritual activity.

Therefore this obliteration means something entirely different. And if one succeeds, again through long practice—but these exercises can be done along with the others, so that both capacities appear simultaneously—if one succeeds in producing these strong, active processes of thought in his consciousness, and then in obliterating them again, something comes over the soul that I might call the inner silence of the soul—for we must have expressions for these things you know. There is no knowledge whatever of this inner silence in the consciousness of the ordinary life.

Of the two things needed by the spiritual researcher who wants to make research in the anthroposophical way, the first is the strengthened conceptual life, the strengthened thought-life, by means of which he comes to self-knowledge in the way indicated; the other is that he must cultivate a completely empty consciousness; in which all the thinking, feeling and willing, otherwise in the soul, is silenced—but silenced only after this soul-activity has been enhanced to the highest degree. Then this silence of soul is something quite special. It represents the second stage, as it were, of spirit-knowledge; and I can describe it somewhat as follows:

Let us imagine that we are in a great city where there is a terrific uproar, and we become quite deafened by it. We leave the city, and when we have walked for some time, we still hear the roar behind us, but the noise has already become somewhat less, and the farther we go the quieter it becomes. If we finally reach the stillness of the forest, it may be that all about us will be quiet. We have experienced the whole range from raging noise to outer silence. But now I can go farther. This will not take place in outer reality, of course, but the concept is an entirely real one, when we come to what I have just designated as silence of the soul, I will for once use a very trivial comparison: We may have a certain wealth and keep spending it; we have less and less and finally nothing at all. Then our wealth is zero. But we can go still farther; we can go into debt; then we have less than nothing. We know from mathematics that one can have less than nothing.

Well, it can be the same with quiet, with silence. From the noise of the world complete silence can be restored, equal to zero. This can even become less; it can become more silent than the silence that equals zero, more and more silent, negative silence, negative quiet. And that is really the case when the strengthened soul-life is blotted out, when the silence in the soul becomes deeper than zero silence, if I may express it so. A quiet is established in the soul-life that tends toward the minus side, a stillness that is deeper than the mere silence of the ordinary consciousness.

And when we have penetrated to this silence, when the soul feels that it is removed from the world—not only when the world around it is still, but when the soul feels that the world-quiet can only equal zero, but that the soul itself is in a deeper silence than the silence of the world—then, when this negative silence sets in, the spiritual world begins to speak, really to speak, from the other side of existence.

Ordinarily, we ourselves as human beings interrupt the quiet of the world with our words projected into the air, When we have established in ourselves this quiet that is deeper than zero-quiet, this silence that is deeper than mere silence, the spiritual world begins to speak; but it is a language to which we must first become accustomed, a language utterly different from the language of words, a language formed in such a way that we gradually become accustomed to it by drawing upon our knowledge of the sense-world, of colors, of tones, in short, all that we know of the sense-world. We use this to describe the special impressions of the spiritual world according to our experiences of the sense-world,

I want to call attention to a few details. Suppose that in this inner silence of soul we get the impression of the presence of something out of the depths of spirit which attacks us aggressively, as it were, and excites us in a certain way. We know first of all that it is a spiritual experience, that the spiritual world is revealing itself. We compare this with an experience we have had in the sense-world, and learn that in the sense-world this experience has about the same effect upon us as the color yellow. In exactly the same way that we coin a word to express something in the sense-world, so now we take the yellow color to express this spiritual experience; or in another case we might take a tone to express it. As we use speech to talk about the things of the sense-world, so now we make use of sense-qualities and sense-impressions in speaking about what is spiritually received from the spiritual world in the silence of the soul.

This is the way to describe the spiritual world. I have described it in this way in my book “Theosophy” and in “Occult Science,” and the descriptions need only to be rightly understood. We must understand that for the silence of the soul there is a new language. While we have articulated speech for outward expression as human beings, something comes to us from the spiritual world which we must put into appropriate words, but it can be apprehended only in a subtle way, and must be translated into human speech by using words formed from sense-perception.

And when you have these experiences in the silence of the soul, you come to know that the world of invigorated thinking that you had at first is really only a picture,—a picture of what you see only now, for which you only now have a language, a picture by which you penetrated into the silence of the soul. The spiritual world now speaks to you through the silence of the soul. And now you are able also to efface this whole life-tableau, which you yourself have formed, which has brought the earth-life etherically before you, as by magic. This inner quiet of the soul appears now also in the personal life as you live it here on earth. The illusion of that ego which exists only in the physical body now ceases.

Anyone who holds too firmly to his ego, through a theoretical or a practical egotism, does not succeed in establishing this silence of soul in the presence of his own life-tableau. A man who combats theoretical and practical egotism comes to see that he first has this ego to enable him to make use of his body in the physical life, that the body gives him the possibility of saying “I” to himself. If he then passes from this corporeal sense of the ego into what I have described as the etheric world, where one flows together with the world, where the world is etherically united with one's own etheric being, he will no longer hold firmly to this ego. He will experience that of which this life-tableau, to which he has lifted himself, is a picture. He will experience his pre-earthly existence, in a spiritual world, before he descended through conception and birth into a physical human body,

Anthroposophy does not speak from philosophical speculations about the immortality, the eternity of the human' soul, but it tells how, through a special development of the soul-forces, one may struggle through to the vision of the soul-being before it descended to the earth. There actually appears now to the silenced soul a direct view of the soul as it dwells eternally in the world of spirit. As we look in recollection at what we have experienced on earth, as the past earth-life awakes in memory, so now, after we have learned in the soul-silence the language of the world of spirit, as I have described it, events appear that have not existed in the earth-life at all, events by which we have been prepared for this earth-life before we descended to it,

And now one looks upon what he was before he came down to the earth-life. As long as he was still beholding the life-tableau, he knew that he himself and the world are permeated and interpenetrated by moving, weaving spirit—though finer and more etheric, it is still a sort of nature-spirit, which he finds in the world and experiences as akin to himself. But now, when he looks into the pre-earthly existence, being united with what father and mother give at birth, he sees the unity of the moral world-order and the physical world-order. In this pre-earthly existence are all the forces that are prototypes of the forms produced during the physical earth-life. Here one sees that the spiritual forces reign and weave in the human body even in the physical earth-life. One marvels at the structure of the human brain as it gradually takes shape. One notices how undifferentiated this brain was when the child was born, what it became with the seventh year of life, about the time of the change of teeth. One turns his gaze upon the inner, plastic, formative forces; and does not stop short with the indefinite dictum about heredity.

We know that what the child works out in the first years of' life alone, in the plastic formation of the brain and the whole organism, is the after-effect, the imitation, of the far-reaching, universal events experienced in the spiritual world, where the soul was among spiritual beings, in just the same way that we live among the creatures of nature and human beings on earth. And one now comes to know that the spiritual world works into the physical earth-world, and that the after-effects of this pre-earthly existence are contained in all that is active in the inner organization of our being; one knows that he himself is a soul-spirit-being within the physical corporeal.

As we go farther, a third experience must be added to what I have already described, I have called attention to the necessity of first overcoming the illusion of the ego; one must overcome the ordinary, everyday, theoretical or practical egotism; and one must understand that this ego of our earth-life is bound up with the physical body, and comes to consciousness first of all in the sensations of the physical body. But there is something in the physical earth-life which, when I name it, may perhaps cause a little disturbance here and there in one's theory of knowledge, because it is usually not counted at all among the forces of knowledge, and it may be found distasteful to place it there. But it must be done nevertheless. And anyone who has come in the way described first to the invigoration of thought and then to soul-silence, will understand that it must be done. There must be added to these, as a third, a higher development, a more intensive development, of what exists in the ordinary life as love: love for people, love of nature, love of all our work, love for what we do. All the love that already exists in the usual life can be increased by doing away with theoretical and practical egotism in the way described. Love must be intensified, And when this love is increased, when the expanded love-force is joined to the strengthened thinking and the silence of soul, one comes to a third experience, Man comes now to the conscious laying hold of the true form of the ego, when he comes to know not only the pre-earthly existence, but when he now learns by means of this that an augmented love-force further energizes the other developed, strengthened forces of knowledge. He comes to an exact experience: All that has been won has nothing to do with the physical body; you experience yourself outside the physical body; you experience the world as it cannot be experienced through the body. Instead of natural phenomena you experience spiritual beings. You experience yourself, not as a natural being between birth and death, but as a spiritual being in a pre-earthly existence.

If a man has won this, and there is added to it a heightened, increased capacity of love, the possibility of dedicating himself, of surrendering himself with his whole body-free existence, to what he sees here, then there comes to him the knowledge of what exists within man in the immediate present, independent of the physical and even of the etheric body. He gets a direct view of what rests within him and goes through the gate of death into the post-earthly existence, when we enter again into a spiritual world. Because he comes to know what he is in a body-free state, he learns also of that which continues to exist, free of the body, when the physical body is laid aside at death.

You see the purpose of it all is to come to the perception of the eternity of the human soul. But in particular, one attains by means of it to the perception of the true ego, that ego which goes through birth and death, of which one cannot say that it dwells in the body, but that it rests in the body. One learns at the same time of the movement and activity of this ego in the pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. One comes to know it in the same way that we know the human being here in the sense-physical existence through the sense of sight. Just as a man goes about here among the things of nature, among natural phenomena, among other people, so one learns to know, I might say, how the soul moves about in the pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. But one learns also that the soul's movement and its relations there are dependent upon an earlier earth-life. I said that one learns of the oneness of the moral and the natural; one learns that in the pre-earthly existence man is permeated not only by spiritual but also by moral impulses, While one merely perceives, during the continuance of the etheric life-tableau, that spirit streams through the whole world, one now learns that in the pre-earthly existence there pulsated through our soul-spirit-being the moral impulses which appear in the memory during the physical life, and especially in the moral predispositions» One has now come to know the oneness of the moral and the physical world.

But now, in this moral-physical world (physical only in the pictures shining up into the spirit from the physical existence)—in this world experienced by the soul in the spiritual realm, one comes to know how the soul, as man's real ego, lives in the spiritual world in conformity with the previous existence. Truly when we come to spiritual vision and escape from the illusion of the ordinary ego, then we come to know how the ego has already passed through the spiritual world between death and a new birth; we learn how it comported itself, in conformity with its former earth-life, in this world endowed with moral impulses; and we learn that it is all carried into this earth-life as an inner determination of destiny. We see this expressed in the tendencies of a person, or in the special coloring of the desire which drives a man to one thing or another in the earth-life.

This does not encroach upon freedom. Freedom exists within certain limits, in just the same way that we are free, when we have built us a house, to occupy it or not; but we will occupy it because we have built it for ourselves for a certain reason. In the same way we are still free, even though we may know that there are impelling forces in our physical body which cause us to turn this way or that in life, or to live in one way or another. On the one hand we can regard this as a destiny that we have woven for ourselves out of earlier earth-lives, out of the world through which we have passed that contains not only spiritual but also moral laws. These have permeated what we were in a former life with definite spiritual impulses, and out of these have formed the destiny for our earth-life. But we notice also, when we look at what comes from the former earth-life, in the way described, that it is the eternal in the soul that has determined our earthly destiny» After we have passed through the gate of death, and have united what is of moral or soul-nature with our soul-being, in order to bring greater harmony into our relation with the demands of the moral world—we carry this into the world and come down again into a new earth-life, with what I might call the resulting total from what we were in life and what the spiritual world has made of us between death and a new birth.

So you see the really important thing is first to develop a certain perceptive faculty, with which one can look up into the spiritual world.

You must bear in mind, my dear friends, that not everyone has the gifts of a mathematician. It is very difficult for most people even to have these geometrical concepts, that are really to be formed only in the imagination. Geometry is not a spontaneous element of nature, but we understand nature by means of it. We must first produce geometry within ourselves, and by means of geometry we create the forms which will lead us into the structure of the lifeless world. With just such inner rigor do we produce inner vision, by developing strengthened thinking, silence of soul, and love which has become a force of knowledge, so that we may apprehend the living, the sentient, the self-conscious. In the same way that we apprehend the lifeless through mathematics, we come to an understanding apprehension of the living, the feeling, the self-conscious, when we proceed in a purely mathematical way, and develop a certain kind of vision with vigor and exactness.

So we may say that anyone who is serious about Anthroposophy pursues it as if he were required to give account of the use he makes of his forces of knowledge to the strictest mathematician. The forming of mathematical concepts is elementary Anthroposophy, if I may speak thus. And when anyone has learned to develop this self-creativeness of mathematics in order to apply it to the lifeless things of the world, he gets the impulse to develop further the kinds of knowledge which will lead to the vision I have described to you. We come to know that the lifeless world has a different content when we know it mathematically—mathematics is elementary Anthroposophy—and we know the living, sentient, self-conscious world when we study it with complete anthroposophical understanding.

Therefore, what in ordinary life is called clairvoyance, or anything of the kind, must not be confused with what we have in Anthroposophy for obtaining knowledge of the spiritual world. When we call this clairvoyance—and of course we can do so—we must mean exact clairvoyance, just as we speak of exact mathematics, in contrast with the mystical, confused clairvoyance, which is usually what anyone has in mind when this word is used.

Now you will perhaps have received the impression from my description that this is difficult. Yes, it is difficult] it is not easy. Hence, many people who presume to have an opinion about what goes on in Dornach do not try to understand what appears so difficult to them, but judge according to the trivial, confused clairvoyance. And then the result is all that I mentioned at the beginning of my lecture» But the Anthroposophy with which we are concerned is an exact kind of knowledge, which can actually be understood by anyone with sound human intelligence, just as anyone can understand a picture without himself being a painter. To get Anthroposophy one must be an anthroposophical researcher; to paint a picture one must be a painter; but everything I have described can be understood by anyone with good common sense, if only he does not himself put hindrances and obstructions in the way.

To paint a picture one must be a painter; to judge it one must rely upon sound human nature. To build up Anthroposophy one must be a spiritual researcher; to understand Anthroposophy one need only meet the more or less well-given descriptions of it with his healthy, free human spirit, undisturbed by natural-scientific and other prejudices. But Anthroposophy is only in its beginning, and what I have perhaps not described very well today will be described better and better as time goes on; and then the time will come which has always arrived ultimately for anything new in humanity. How long it was before the Copernican world-view was accepted! It has nevertheless upset all concepts previously held. Today it is accepted as a matter of course, and is taught in the schools. What is considered by people today the quintessence of fantasy, of nonsense, perhaps madness, will later be a matter of course—just as it was with the Copernican world-theory. Anthroposophy can wait until it is a matter of course.

This Anthroposophy, above all else, was to be cultivated at the Dornach Goetheanum. Therefore—permit me to say this in conclusion—more than ten years ago friends of our cause conceived a plan to build an abode for this Anthroposophy, and commissioned me to carry out the plan—I was only the one to execute it—and this abode is the Goetheanum. If Anthroposophy were a theoretical world-conception, or even a mere idea of reform, what would have happened the moment the idea appeared to build a home for Anthroposophy? An architect would have been consulted who would simply have erected a building in antique, or Renaissance, in Gothic or rococo style, or something of the sort. But Anthroposophy does not work merely theoretically, merely as scientific knowledge; it passes over into the whole human being, lays claim to the whole human being. This is very soon noticed by the anthroposophical researcher.

You see when a man wants to think about outer nature, he needs his head, and if he wants to indulge in philosophic speculations, he needs it even more. What appears before the silent soul, as pertaining to the spiritual world, in the way I have described it to you, is something that appears more fleetingly. One needs presence of mind in order to take it in quickly; but one needs for it also his whole human being. The head is not enough. The whole human organization must be placed in the service of the spirit, in order to bring into the memory, into the recollection, what one sees spiritually without the body. To illustrate this, let me give a personal experience.

I have never been accustomed to prepare any lecture in just the way lectures are usually prepared; but it is my custom to experience spiritually the thoughts that appear necessary for a lecture, as one must also experience spiritually what one wishes to hold as the result of spiritual research. What is experienced in strengthened thinking and in the human soul must be conveyed into thought and for this mere head-thinking will not suffice. One must be united more intimately with the whole human being, if one wishes to express what has been experienced in the realm of spirit. There are various methods by which such experience can really be brought into the ordinary consciousness, so that it can be put into words. It is my custom, with pencil in hand, to write down, to formulate, either in words or in some kind of signs, all that comes to me from the spiritual world. Hence I have many cartloads of note-books, but I never look at them again. They exist, but their only purpose is to unite with the whole human being what is discovered in spirit, so that it is grasped not only with the head, so as to be communicated in words, but is experienced by the whole human being.

Anthroposophy does indeed lay hold of the whole human being, therefore it is in still another regard an expression of the Goethean world-conception. It is, to begin with, an expression of the Goethean world-conception, in that it was induced by Goethe's method of observing the metamorphoses, the transformations of life in the plant and animal world. In this Goethean mode of observation the thought is so alive that one can then try to strengthen it in the way I have described. But Goethe is also that personality who built the bridge from knowledge to art.

Out of his artistic conviction Goethe voiced this beautiful expression: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature which without art would never be revealed. This means that Goethe knew one lays hold in real knowledge of the ruling and weaving of spirit, and then implants this into substance, be it as sculptor or musician or painter. Goethe knew that artistic fantasy is a kind of arbitrary projection of what man can experience in its pure form in the spirit.

Any knowledge which, like Anthroposophy, is rooted thus in the life of the spirit, flows of itself into artistic creativeness. It comes into artistic activity, when one knows the human being in the way I have described, and sees how the pre-earthly forces work into the earthly-corporeal existence. Then one has the feeling that the human being cannot be comprehended with the mere intellect, merely in concepts. At a certain point abstract concepts must be allowed to pass over into artistic seeing, so that you feel: Man is created by nature as a work of art.

Of course this can easily be ridiculed, for nothing seems more dreadful to people nowadays than to hear anyone say that to know something it must be comprehended artistically. But people may declaim as long as they please about the need to be logical rather than artistic when something is to be understood—if nature works artistically, then man simply does not find out about it by logic. He must pass over to artistic seeing to learn the real secrets of nature.

This is what Goethe meant when he said: “Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature which without art would never be revealed.” And this is what Goethe meant also when, after years of longing, he reached Italy and believed he had attained his ideal of art. He said: “When I behold these works of art, I have the notion that the Greeks in the creation of their works of art proceeded by the same laws according to which nature creates, and I am on the track of those laws.”

Goethe was a personality who always aimed to transpose into a work of art whatever was comprehended as knowledge in the soul. Because Anthroposophy is of this same conviction, it was not possible simply to go to an architect and say: Build us a dwelling-place for Anthroposophy—and it would then have been built in Renaissance or antique or rococo style; our building has to be based on an entirely different conception of life and of art.

I have often compared the basic necessity here in a somewhat banal way with the relation of the nut-shell to the nut-kernel. The kernel of the nut, which we eat, is fashioned according to definite laws of form, but the shell is also made in accordance with the same laws. You cannot imagine a shell being fitted to the nut from the outside; the shell arises from the same laws of form as the kernel. So the forms of the outer visible building, what was painted in the domes, the sculpture placed in it, had to be fashioned as the shell, so to speak, of what was proclaimed within through the word, through art, spoken or sung. As the nut-shell to the nut, so this building had to be related to what was fostered within it. This was really the result not only of my conviction, but of that of many others. We have had eurythmy performances, the presentation of an art which has a special language in movement, in which the stage-picture consists of moving persons or moving groups? and the movements are not dance-movements, and not imitative movements, but an actual visible speech. We have developed here on the stage of the Goetheanum an expressive art of movement. The lines in which the human soul expresses itself harmonize in a beautiful way with the lines of the architraves, the lines of the capitals, the columns, with the whole form of the building, and with the paintings in it. What was cultivated within and the covering were one. When something was said from the platform, when what was learned in spiritual vision was put into words and sounded out into the audience-room, then what was spoken from the podium was the kernel which lived within. The artistic form had to correspond with the kernel. The style of the building in all its details had to come from the same impulse, from the same source as Anthroposophy itself. For Anthroposophy is not abstract, theoretical knowledge, but a comprehension of life, of the whole life. And therefore it becomes art quite spontaneously. It fulfils what Goethe said again: He who possesses science and art has also religion] he who possesses neither should have religion.

I might say, all that lived in the forms, all that may ever have been said or artistically presented in the Goetheanum, was intended to be comprised in a wood-carved group about 30 feet high, in which Christ, as the Representative of mankind, is portrayed in the Temptation by Ahriman and Lucifer.

This does not mean that Anthroposophy has anything to do with the forming of any kind of sect. Anthroposophy is far removed from hostile opposition to any religious conviction, or from any wish whatsoever to found a new religion. But Anthroposophy can show that real spiritual knowledge leads to the climax of religious development, to the Representative of humanity, Christ, to the incorporation of the Christ-God in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. It shows also how spirit-knowledge needs the picture of this central point of all earth-evolution, the picture of the Mystery of Golgotha. Quite certainly a man becomes religiously inclined through Anthroposophy, but Anthroposophy is not the founding of a religion.

What Anthroposophy wanted to offer artistically in the Goetheanum had to come from the same impulses from which the spoken word and the song proceed. It can even be said that when anyone stepped on the platform—I want to say this in all modesty—the forms of the columns, the whole form of the inner architecture, the inside sculpture and painting—all this was like an admonition to speak in a manner that would really approach the inner being of the listeners. It was like a continuous challenge to the speaker to put his word into this building in a worthy way.

To sum up: The building was to be an outer garment for Anthroposophy, which came wholly from the spirit of Anthroposophy, but was there for physical eyes to see» There was nothing symbolic, nothing allegorical. The whole building was created in its architecture, in its sculpture, in its painting, in everything connected with it, in such a way that what was livingly grasped in spirit-vision expressed itself, not in intellectual, symbolic forms; but living ideas and mobile thoughts about the spiritual world come to artistic expression in such a way as to be directly felt and seen. There was no symbol in the whole building, and if anyone maintains that the building had a symbolic meaning, he speaks as one who knows nothing about Anthroposophy.

And so the building was for the eye what Anthroposophy is to be for the soul of man. Anthroposophy has to be that kind of spirit which knows that a longing for the unveiling of the super-sensible vibrates and quivers through present humanity; that this humanity—made what it is by its scientific education, which intends to be generally popular, and already is to a certain extent—can no longer be satisfied with traditional concepts of belief; that concepts of knowledge must come, which tend upward to the spiritual world; and that unrest and dissatisfaction of soul result from the lack of such concepts of knowledge.

Anthroposophy wants to serve the present by providing in the right way what men need to take from this present into the near future. What Anthroposophy wants to be, invisibly, for human souls, the Goetheanum wanted to be, visibly, as vestment, as home. Had the Goetheanum been only a symbolic building, the pain at its loss would not have been so great, for then one could always bring it alive again in recollection. But the Goetheanum was not for mere remembrance. It was something intended to bring tidings from the spirit to the sense-world, and like any work of art, wanted to be manifested directly to the sense-world. Therefore with the burning of the Goetheanum, all that the Goetheanum wanted to be is lost.

But it has perhaps shown that Anthroposophy wants to be nothing one-sidedly theoretical, mere knowledge; it can be and must be a life-content in all realms. Hence, it had to build its abode in a style of its own. The Spirit, which Anthroposophy places before the soul, the Goetheanum wanted to place before the eyes. And Anthroposophy must place before the human soul what this soul really demands as the innermost need of the modern time; namely, a view, a knowledge, an artistic comprehension, of the spiritual world. Souls demand this because they feel more and more that only by experiencing the whole human destiny can they discover the complete human worth.

The Goetheanum could burn down. A catastrophe has swept it away. The pain of those who loved it is so great that it cannot be described. That structure which came from the same sources as Anthroposophy, and through it willed to serve mankind, had to be built for the sense-eye, had to be made of physical material. And as the human body itself, according to my description today, is the sense-image and the material effect of the eternal spiritual, but in death falls away, so that the spiritual can be developed in other forms, so also could that—permit me to close by comparing the Dornach misfortune with what happens in the usual course of the world—so could that be destroyed by flames which had to be made out of physical substance, in order to be seen by physical eyes. But Anthroposophy is built out of spirit, and only flames of spirit can touch this. Just as the human soul and spirit are victor over the physical when this is destroyed in death, so Anthroposophy feels alive, even though it has lost its Dornach home, the Goetheanum. It may be said that physical flames could destroy what had to be built of outer physical substance for the eye; but what Anthroposophy is to be for the further development of humanity is built of spirit. This will not be destroyed by the flames of the spiritual life, for these flames are not destroying flames; they are strengthening flames, flames that give more life than ever. And all that life which is to be revealed through Anthroposophy as life of knowledge of the higher world, must be tempered by the flames of the highest inspiration of the human being, his soul and his spirit. Then Anthroposophy will continuously evolve.

He who lives in this way in the spirit feels no less the pain caused by the passing away of the earthly, but he knows at the same time that surmounting all this depends upon the realization that the spirit will ever be victorious over matter, and in matter will be transformed ever anew.

Let us survey a few cosmological facts. Evolution is focused on the development of states of consciousness. The present state of consciousness is one stage – it is the fourth. It has been preceded by three and will be followed by three. We are now in the waking state.

The seer, looking back into the past, finds that this was preceded by a dream state; somewhat lighter than in our more highly developed animals; and duller, but more comprehensive than present-day man can imagine. This consciousness included the plant world. Man could then see life flowing through the plants, germinating, sprouting. It is something that we still find in some mediums: a duller but more comprehensive state of consciousness.

Before that, we find a state that we can call sleep trance; it is even duller and even more comprehensive; the entities were able to see not only life, but also directly pain and joy; today we can only see the gestures of it. The dream state symbolized pain and joy through form, just as dreams still symbolize today. Everything was expressed in symbolic forms in those days, and our present-day symbolizing is an atavism of the earlier state of consciousness. Even the sleep trance, this dreamless sleep consciousness, can still be studied in mediums today.

The third state of consciousness – looking backwards – is the deep trance; it is also called the induced trance. It is very rare today, but can be achieved in pathological states, and then the medium constructs chains of worlds.

So we have come to know four states of consciousness: deep trance, dreamless sleep, the dream state and waking daytime consciousness. Man has gone through these four states. What has been achieved at each stage must be summarized and passed on to the next in the bud.

This gathering together is called Pralaya, the unfolding is called Manvantara; the state of consciousness itself is called a planet.

The next state that awaits us is the psychic state, which is similar to the previous one and is associated with an expansion, but at the same time a maintenance of the waking state of consciousness. The consciousness now advances in stages: the expansion occurs, but with an alert daytime consciousness. This is the development of the clairvoyant. All the theosophical teachings come from this expanded state of daytime consciousness. This psychic state of consciousness now grants the clairvoyant insight into the beautiful life stream that can be seen flowing through all plants; it can be seen when you subtract the plant, it can best be compared to the color of a peach blossom and can also be seen in humans, only - clouded by Kama.

The next super-physical consciousness extends to all sensations, to pain and feelings. The clairvoyant learns to see them when he can see the astral body – and also the lower mental world.

The highest spiritual state of consciousness provides insight into the higher mental world and extends to the planets.

Thus, all further development is based on seven states of consciousness.

Each state of consciousness has seven life stages to go through. These are also called the seven kingdoms. They are: the first, the second, the third elementary kingdom, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom.

The physical body has already passed through the seven stages, the astral body will only penetrate them in the next round.

The passage through a realm is called a round.

Each state of life must again pass through seven states of form.

Between each state of life and the next there is another small pralaya.

The form states are designated as arupa (the actually still formless, only striving for development), rupa, astral, physical, plastic, intellectual, archetypal. The seventh state is the result of the six preceding ones; after the chela has been able to form himself plastically and intellectually, he creates, as it were, the skeleton to which the following can attach themselves, which in turn has to shoot out of the germ. It is the archetype.

Beyond the spiritual state of consciousness is the mastery; the spiritual state of consciousness is the highest that the chela can reach, in which he can see over all the others. After that, the mastery begins for him.

Our present physical state would shine for the clairvoyant in a color that most resembles a beautiful green; the astral state in a bright yellow; the rupa-form state in orange; the arupa-form state in rose red. The color tones of the future phases are blue, indigo, violet.

In the esoteric language, the preceding planets are called the “moon” and the sun.

The state of consciousness that man reached on the moon gave a result, as did the previous one; the first state of consciousness gave the deepest result.

The mystic finds within himself what he saw spread around him; what is now our inner life was once all around us; what our life with the world is now will later be our inner life; we have to assimilate everything. Our entire outer nature will fade away, but it will become inner life. What is spread out is called evolution, what is gathered together is called 'involution.

Thus, the mystic will find the earlier stages of expansion within himself when he delves into himself. The result of these earlier stages is ego-consciousness; the earth has the task of developing this ego-consciousness - Ahamkara the Indian calls it.

The ability to perceive is linked to the third state of consciousness, that of dream sleep; the mystic experiences it again, swimming directly in the stream of life, and he experiences it to an increased degree, since he transfers his present day consciousness to that state. The Indian calls this state Chita, the mystic language calls it “the waters, the sea of life”; Suso, Ruysbroek, Böhme - speak of a “merging in the heavenly tincture,” of a “tasting of life” - through direct insight into earlier states, which are found again in the depths of consciousness. It is a wandering back in time, not in space.

If you go back even further, you will find a state of consciousness that is only known to the chela who has maintained the continuity of consciousness even through sleep. The laws of nature are the only thing you can grasp from this state of consciousness. Today they are present in the rudimentary manas; manas is what is left of it. The chela perceives thoughts in a state of deep sleep – devachan. This state is created by raising the dreamless sleep to consciousness. The Indian calls it

The last state of consciousness, in which everything that can be seen in the rounds and planetary development is experienced, is deification or union with God, in fact: union with the primal creative power of a cosmos. “Mokscha” is what the Indian calls it. The chela only reaches it immediately before adeptness. What flashes up in man is not only the perception of thoughts, but also of the ‘I’. It is a merging with humanity; it is the realization: Budhi. That teaching, which has flowed out of the conscious seeing of Budhi, is therefore called ‘Esoteric Buddhism’.

We have thus become acquainted with the states of consciousness just described under the names: Ahamkara, Chita, Jujuksha or Manas, Mokscha or Budhi.

Through Ahamkara, man becomes aware of himself.

Through Chita, he becomes aware of the expressions of the beings around him.

Through manas, he becomes aware of the inner life of beings.

Through budhi, of the essence of the beings around him.

This continuous thread of development, which takes the states of consciousness through 343 stages, we call the Pitri.

So what does the gentleman say? He says: What you can grasp with your hands is science. The rest is a figment of the imagination. Everyone can imagine things and have them imagined, because you can't know anything about all that. And if people take comfort in all kinds of supernatural things, well, you don't have to take that away from them.

It is absolutely terrible to see the confusion in which this matter has ended up. But now I would like to show you that these gentlemen have completely forgotten how to think when it comes to this science. I would like to show you this with another passage from this book. For what does the gentleman do, who pushes everything that cannot be grasped with his hands into the realm of belief? He says: To speak of an ego, which should actually dwell in man as an eternal ego, is actually scientific nonsense, because the ego is, after all, only the sum of all that is otherwise in us. We are accustomed to summarizing everything we imagine, everything we feel, from beginning to end, into a whole. And then, when we have summarized it into a whole, we say “I.” – So says the Lord.

Now, however, he wants to make this clear. He wants to make it clear that the word 'I' really only summarizes everything that one experiences. Because then the 'I' is just a mere word if one only summarizes in this way. So he makes a comparison. He compares everything that a person experiences with a mass of soldiers, with a company of soldiers. So what I experienced as a child, what I played as a child, what I felt in the game, that is one troop of soldiers; what I experienced a little later is the other troop of soldiers, and so on; to this day, I summarize all of this as the individual soldiers are combined into a company, and I say “I.” So he says. So he compares all the individual experiences of the soul with a company of soldiers, and he summarizes them as one summarizes, and does not say, Miller and Lehmann and so on, but says: The company 12 and so on. So he summarizes everything that one experiences in the soul as I, into a company of soldiers. Then he continues: “On the other hand, a word must be said here about the ego, insofar as one can also understand by it the circumstance that from the period of life when consciousness is somewhat developed, man always feels as the same personality, as the same ego.” He says, then: Man must finally be weaned of the idea that he feels as an ego, he must be accustomed to the idea that it is only as if one were a company of soldiers.

"This fact, viewed from our standpoint, should have nothing particularly surprising about it. First of all, if we want to get to the bottom of this matter, we must be clear about what we actually mean by the individual personality in relation to the external world.” So at first he gives a nice admonition that we have to form an idea. He answers: ”It is the result of all kinds of individual ideas, but especially of those that summarize the direct interactions of the organism with the external world into a more or less compact whole. In our view, the idea of the self is nothing more than an abstract idea, and indeed of the highest order, built on the sum of all the ideas, feelings and desires of an individual, but in particular of all the ideas of the interrelations between one's own body and the outside world. The concept encompasses all of this, just as the concept of the plant kingdom encompasses the infinite sum of all plants. The word 'I' – now this is where it gets interesting! “is the representative of all these ideas, much as the military leader is the representative of all the individual soldiers. Just as one can say of the deeds of a military leader that he always forms the more or less obscure unconscious background for the ideas of the individual soldiers and army detachments, in exactly the same way the mass of individual concrete ideas and feelings forms the background of the concept of the ego."

Now, gentlemen, look at how the man thinks. Now, the book is very learned, that must be assumed, it is at the cutting edge of science. The man says: You have a company of soldiers and the commander. But you only summarize the soldiers; the commander is merely their representative. It is the same with the ideas and feelings. You summarize all the ideas and feelings and the ego is merely their representative.

Yes, but if the ego is the representative, just the word, then with the company of soldiers you must also see the army commander only as a word. Have you ever discovered that the army commander leading a company of soldiers is just a word composed of all the individuals? Now, you could imagine that the army commander is not particularly clever. Sometimes the ego is not particularly clever either. But to imagine that the army commander is nothing but a mere word - and that is what he needs as a comparison for how the ego relates to ideas - proves that when the cleverest people start talking about the supernatural, they become very stupid. Because, right, you can prove to them that when they make a comparison, it is without any logic. There is not the slightest logic in it.

After Mr. Erbsmehl has made this fine comparison, he continues: “From this it follows that the respective concept of the self is entirely dependent on the underlying idea. This is most clearly evident in the way it gradually develops in a child. But every adult thinking person can also account for how they feel in every respect as a different self today than ten years ago.

Now I ask Mr. Erbsmehl or Mr. Burle whether they feel like a completely different person than ten years before! Surely you can distinguish whether you are now a completely different person than ten years ago! But you come across passages like that in books at every turn today. The most ordinary facts of life are turned upside down. Of course it is mere nonsense when someone says that he feels he is a completely different person today than he was ten years ago. But that is what these gentlemen say. But the moment you start thinking about the self, whether it is the same today as it was ten years ago, you no longer get the chance to say: the self dies when the corpse dies. — Why is that?

I have already explained to you, gentlemen, that you cut your nails, skin flakes off and so on; all this happens in seven to eight years. You no longer have any of the material that you had ten years ago. Just as your skin flakes off, your insides are constantly moving away from your body. You see, your body is like this: it sheds its upper layer; then the next layer moves forward, then that layer sheds itself; then the next layer moves forward, sheds itself again, and after seven to eight years everything has shed itself. Where is that? Where is the body you had ten years ago? Yes, it has undergone the same process, only in a somewhat more complicated way, that the corpse undergoes when it is placed in the grave. The corpse dissolves into the earth. If you were to break the body down into such small pieces as the scales that are constantly falling off you, or as the nails you cut off when you cut them into such small pieces, you would not even notice that the body is going anywhere. You could blow it away. And so, over a period of seven to eight years, the physical body dissolves into the external world.

But if you still feel like an ego today, and the physical body died two to three years ago, then the ego has nothing to do with the physical body as you have it there. So you could say. But you see, it has so much to do with it that if, for example, you take a piece of chalk, you will say: I took the chalk. Every person says that. I had a schoolmate – I think I have told you this before – who, when he was nineteen or twenty years old, was on the way to becoming a real materialist. We often went for walks together, and he always said: It is quite obvious to me that we have no self, we only have a brain; the brain thinks. I always told him: Yes, look, you say: I walk, you even say: I think; why are you lying? If you really tell the truth, you would have to say: My brain thinks! — You don't even have to say “my” because “my” already points to an ego; there must already be an ego if you say “my”. People never say: My brain thinks, my brain walks, my brain takes the chalk. It doesn't occur to them at all, because in life a person cannot be a materialist. He would immediately say nonsense if he were a materialist.

But in theory, people make materialism their own and do not consider that real science knows that we no longer have the body we had eight to ten years ago, that the ego has remained. And in the same way you can remember back to your early childhood, to the second, third, fourth, fifth year. It would never occur to you to say that it is not the same self that used to run around as a boy back then. But let us assume that you have now reached the age of forty; by the age of thirty-three you have lost one body, by the age of twenty-six you have lost the second body, by the age of nineteen you have lost the third body, by the age of twelve you have lost the fourth body, by the age of five you have lost the fifth body. You have lost five bodies and your self has always remained the same. So this self is preserved throughout your entire life on earth.

But this self can also do something with your body. The body it loses, the ego can direct continuously. You see, when I walk, my legs, although they are old, are in reality only six to seven years old at most. But I direct them with the old ego that was already there when I walked around as a boy. The ego is still walking around. The ego directs the body during life on earth.

Now I have told you that during the period of time that you no longer remember, the child learns to walk, to speak and to think. Of course, you can no longer remember the time when you could not yet think. So you learn to walk, to move in general, to use your body, to speak and to think. You learn that. And to do that, you have to direct your body as well. You cannot, as a child still crawling on all fours, straighten up the body without your will. When you move your hand, the I says: I move the hand - the I with its will. But in the same way, the will also causes the child to straighten up. The child learns to speak with the will. The child learns to think with the will. So we have to ask: where does it come from that the child learns all this? And here we come to the fact that through the “whole of earthly life, despite the fact that the body is continually being replaced, the I always remains the same, that this I is still the same in the time when we have learned to think, to speak and to walk. This I was already active in the body.

If you cut off the tip of your nose — it only needs to be a small piece, right, because a lot of it is not healthy, but you can cut off so much that it does you no harm — and look at it under the microscope, you will again see such a wonderful body with a structure that is very beautifully built. Yes, gentlemen, you have no idea how beautiful the tiniest part of your nose is! Admirably beautiful! And so it is with every part of the human body. It is beautifully constructed, beautifully arranged. The best sculptor could not do better.

There is only one structure in the human organism where everything must be destroyed and only mere matter must be present – I already drew your attention to this last time – and that is the egg from which a human being develops. And at fertilization, the last act takes place; everything of the matter that has been formed is removed.

So that one can say: the bone is beautiful; everything in the material is beautiful. The tip of the nose is no longer as beautiful as the bone, but it is still beautiful. But the egg, from which a person will later develop, contains only a completely disordered material, because everything is fragmented in it. There is no atom, there is no formation at all. Why?

A human soul cannot simply enter a bone. Superstitious people sometimes believe that there is a little devil sitting somewhere in their bones or limbs. Well, sometimes this is the case in a somewhat figurative sense, but a human being cannot enter such a bone. Nor can a person enter the tip of your nose.

I knew a lady who claimed to have a little ghost in her left index finger, and she would ask it anything she wanted to know. If she should go for a walk, she would ask it, and so on. But of course that is nonsense, a superstition. What we have to say to ourselves is: into such a well-formed bone, or even into the tip of our nose, no human being, no human soul, no human spirit can enter directly. The thing is this: The human soul-spiritual, the actual I, can only enter the egg germ because there the substance is only dust, world dust. There the soul now works the world dust with the powers it has brought with it from the spiritual world.

If people believe that what a person is comes simply through ordinary inheritance from father and mother, then one must assume that the human being is already a little human being. But that is contrary to science. Science says that the protein is completely pulverized. And it is from this pulverized protein that the soul, which comes from the spiritual, from the supersensible world, actually builds the human body.

Now you may ask: But why does the child resemble the mother or the father? Yes, gentlemen, the reason for this is that the child always imitates. The one who says: This child is the spitting image of his father – could actually say something else. You see, if we wait a little while with the child, we have a child that looks very much like, say, its father or mother, although this is not at all how it is expressed. But such things are not the concern of the learned gentlemen. But, you see, let's wait a little, let's not judge already when the child is eight or fourteen days or a month old, let's wait until the child is three or four years old. That's when the child started speaking. Then someone comes along and says: Gosh, the father is German, so the child has also started speaking German. It must have inherited it from the father, because the father is German. That is quite remarkable! Since the child came out of the egg, the language must have been in the egg. It is just wonderful that the child, when it came out of the egg, out of the mother's body, could not yet speak! But, of course, the child did not inherit the ability to speak; the child acquired it through imitation. The language is similar to that of the father and mother. But it would not occur to anyone to say that the child inherited the language.

Likewise, the face is similar. But why is the face similar? Yes, because the soul, when it allows itself to be born through a mother or to be begotten through a father who is Mr. Miller, makes the face similar to the father or mother, just as the child later makes the language similar to the language of the father and mother. You just have to consider that. In speech, the child works out the sounds and words by making itself similar to its parents or educators. But even earlier, the soul unconsciously works on the face or even the gait, like a sculptor. And because the child is born into the family and makes itself similar, when it has no consciousness yet, the similarity arises in the same way as the similarity of speech arises.

You see, gentlemen, in this way one comes to the conclusion that man actually comes from the spiritual, from the supersensible world, and builds his body with all its similarities himself. Now just take a look at the little child. The little child is born. When children are born, sometimes, despite the fact that all mothers find them very beautiful, one cannot easily distinguish them from little animals. Isn't it true that human beings are such little animals when they are born – in relation to later, of course. They really are quite unsightly, these little children. But gradually the soul works inside and makes everything more and more similar to a human being, until the moment comes when the child learns to walk; that is, as I told you last time, it finds itself in the equilibrium position of the earth. Then the child learns to speak. It learns to use the organs in its chest, because these organs are located in the chest. Then the child learns to think, that is, it learns to use the organs in its head.

Now, let us think about this. The child learns to walk, that is, to keep his balance and to move. What does he learn when he walks? Well, he learns to use his limbs while walking. But you cannot use your limbs without using your metabolism at the same time. When you use your limbs, something of us is always burned. Substances are burned. Even when you just move an arm, substances are being burned inside it. Metabolism is connected to the limbs. Walking, keeping one's balance, moving has to do with metabolism and with the limbs.

Then the child learns to speak. What has that got to do with? Speaking has to do with the chest organs, with breathing. The child can already breathe when it is very small. But connecting words with the expelled air is what the child learns with the chest organs. So: keeping balance is connected with the limbs, speaking with the chest, and thinking with the head, the nerves.

But now, we have three parts of the human being. Note that there are only three. First, we have the limbs and metabolism; second, we have the chest; third, we have thinking, the head. We have three parts of the human being.

Now let us take a look at the child. When a child is born, it is not only outwardly dissimilar to an adult human being. The cheeks are dissimilar, the whole shape; it is dissimilar at the forehead; isn't it, the child is dissimilar on the outside. But on the inside it is even more dissimilar. The brain matter of a child is more like a brain pulp. And by the age of seven, by the time the child gets its second teeth, this pulp, this brain pulp, is beautifully formed. From the age of seven, the human brain has a truly wonderful structure. The soul, the spirit within it, has made it, the soul-spiritual within it.

But you see, gentlemen, we as children could not develop this brain so wonderfully up to the age of seven if we were not constantly in contact with the world. If, for example, you have a child who is born blind, you can immediately see that the optic nerves and thus a whole piece of the brain remain a kind of pulp. It is not beautifully developed. If a person is born deaf, the auditory nerves, which go from the ear and cross here (it is drawn), and then go over there, remain a piece of brain mush along the way. So we can only properly develop our brain in the first seven years of life because we have the senses.

But the things you can grasp with your hands outside, the brain does not train that. You could, for all I care, stuff tangible substances through the nostrils into the brain – you would ruin the brain, but it would not be educated. So all tangible matter is of no use to you in building up the brain in the first seven years. Only the finest matter that lives in the light comes into consideration, for example. Only ether comes into consideration.

You see, that is very important. We absorb the ether through all our senses. So what works from our head? It is not the physical body that works from the head into the child, and into the rest of the organism. The physical body does not work in the child while the child is developing its brain so wonderfully, but the etheric body does. The etheric body, which, as I have already mentioned, we continue to possess for two or three days after death, is at work in the child, and it is this that causes the human brain to develop perfectly, thereby making the child a thinking human being. So we can say: the etheric body is at work in the thinking.

There we have found the first supersensible element of the human being: the etheric body. A child could not develop its brain, it could not have a human brain inside it, if it could not work with the ether all around. Later, by straining the muscles, you can make the muscles stronger through the physical. But, let's say, for example, the left parietal lobe in the brain, you can't make it stronger with something physically tangible. If you want to make the muscle stronger, you can do that by attaching a weight to it and lifting it again and again, thus overcoming the heaviness. But you have to make the muscle stronger through the tangible. Just as you have the muscle here, the biceps, and can make it stronger by lifting and lowering weights, so, if you look at your head from the front, you have a lobe of the brain here. It hangs over here like the arm hangs here. You can't attach any weight to it. And yet, what happens in the arm muscle during training cannot be compared to what happens in this lobe of the brain! At the beginning, when we are born, it is a pulp; when we are seven years old, it is wonderfully developed. Just as the arm muscle becomes stronger through lifting and lowering the weight, that is, from something tangible, from something visible, so the brain becomes stronger through what is in the ether. Just as the human being is connected to the environment through his physical body, so he is also connected to the environment through his etheric body. And from that he has the thinking. Through that he forms the inside of his head in the first seven years.

Once the human being has developed thinking, then, I would like to say, he returns to speech. Learning to speak is something completely different than learning to think. Learning to think is precisely what works on the formation of our body. This makes us, so to speak, sculptural, I would say, this thinking. It works in us so that we truly become a complete human being by the age of seven. During this time, we also learn to speak. But you see, it is not possible for us to learn to speak in the same way as we learn to think. For when we speak, what happens then? Yes, gentlemen, you see, when you lift a heavy weight or strike with your arm with terrible force, your arm hurts. To hurt means to have a feeling. We really have a feeling when we exert any limb too much and somehow hurt it. Whenever we feel pain, we have hurt something, even if only very slightly. We have a feeling. But, gentlemen, all language comes from feeling. If you listen to the child, you can hear how language comes from feeling. The child will learn: “Ei, ei” in its language. What does it want to express when it says “Ei, ei”? It nestles up. It likes the person to whom it says “Ei, ei”. It lays its little head down when it says “Ei, ei”. And so it is with all words; it is the same with everything that is spoken: a feeling underlies it. Yes, the feeling does not come from the brain, and the feeling does not come from what the brain develops from.

You see, if there were no sunlight shining through our eyes, the ether around us would not be able to work on us. We could not live properly for the first seven years. During the first seven years, the child also has more feeling. It learns language by imitation. But feeling is at work in this imitation. And we have to say: light cannot evoke feeling. When we learn language through feeling, something else is present in us. That which then works in language, whereby the human being can speak, is not just the etheric body, it is then the human being's astral body. So that we can say: secondly, to learn to speak, we have the astral body – that is just an expression, I could just as easily say differently – we have the astral body, which works primarily in the chest, in breathing, which then transforms into speaking.

You see, it is always the belief that man, with his physical body, has, let us say, hunger and thirst. But that is nonsense. Imagine a machine that is driven by water. You have to give the machine water. All right, then it will work, and if you don't give it water, it will stop working. What does that mean: the machine stops working? It means that you have to give it water again, you have to let it drink. But the machine is not thirsty beforehand. The machine is not thirsty; it may stop working, but it is not thirsty beforehand, otherwise it would cry out. It does not do that. It is not thirsty.

What is the connection in humans? When a child is thirsty, it does not behave like a machine. It does not just stop moving. On the contrary, a child starts screaming when it is thirsty. What is the connection between thirst and screaming? Screaming is not in the substance, but it is also not in the ether. The ether can form the structure; it can thus form that which is our form. But the ether does not cause us to scream. If the ether were to cause us to scream, there would be a terrible, perhaps not a roar, but a continuous hissing in the world. Because if we look, it is the ether that, together with our eye, causes us to see. The ether is constantly entering our eye. That is why we see. Yes, but when the ether enters our eye, it does not start in the eye: s-s-s-e-] —, no, that is not the etheric body of the human being; it does not lisp. Just imagine if, just because we are looking, there were a constant whispering in a room, that would be a nice story! So the etheric body does not scream or whisper. There is something else there. That is the astral body. And when a child is thirsty and cries out, there is a feeling of thirst in the astral body. And this crying out is what brings the child's feeling to our ears.

But all that I have described to you now could not yet lead to my walking. Because, you see, if I form my body from the head through the etheric body, I could remain like a statue my whole life. My body could be formed, I could roar like a lion; my roar could still be formed from the astral body. But when I want to come into balance as a child, when I want to apply the will to walk, to grasp, to come into balance, where I always say: I walk, I grasp, I come into balance - there it is still the I that comes into it, which is something other than the etheric body and the astral body. And this I lives in the limbs and in the metabolism. When you move your limbs, it is the I that moves them. So you have three parts of the human being in addition to the physical body: you have the etheric body, the astral body and the I (diagram on page 138).

And you see, these three parts of the body can also be perceived if one only trains to do so. But modern science does not want this training. And now I will tell you how modern science actually behaves when it does not want this.

You have all dreamt before. While dreaming, you believe that it is all real. Sometimes you wake up with a terrible fear, for example when you are standing at the edge of an abyss and feel dizzy and about to fall. Now you wake up, completely drenched in sweat. Why? Well, because you thought the abyss was real. You are lying quietly in bed, it is not dangerous at all, but you wake up from the danger that you saw in the image. Imagine if you slept your whole life – that would be a nice story for some. There are those who sleep their whole life.

Once upon a time, there was someone who had learned the Copernican theory and was a terribly lazy fellow. Now, he was lying in the ditch. Another one came by and said, “Why are you lying there?” “Because I have so much to do!” “Well, you guy, you're lying there, you're not doing anything.” So he said, “I have to go around the sun with the earth, and I want to stay behind! It's uncomfortable for me, it's too much work!"

Not true, some people would not even want to go around the sun with the earth! But we do our whole waking life with. You see, if we only dreamt our whole life, then we in Europe could lie in bed, someone could take our body, maybe even our bed, so as not to wake us, and take it on a ship to America – of course, angels would have to do it, because people couldn't do it so quietly – but we could be shipped to America. We continued to dream there, all that could be done to us, we don't know anything about ourselves. If we were dreaming, we would never know how the nose touches, how the left hand touches the right hand. And yet, gentlemen, we would have a whole life. If you dreamt your whole life through, it would be something else – we would be able to fly in our dreams, for example. You can't fly on earth; in your dreams you fly. We would think of ourselves as completely different beings, and so on.

But consider, a world would be around us if we were to dream the whole of life. And we wake up. Let us say: I wake up and dreamt that during the night – let me take a very telling example – I was hanged, or beheaded. Let us assume that one dreams that one has been beheaded. Well, gentlemen, if you dreamt your whole life, you would naturally always believe that you had been beheaded. It wouldn't bother you as much as it does here. You would perhaps experience it more often, dreaming that you were being beheaded, and you would believe that it wouldn't bother you. Now you wake up – and lo and behold, you've taken a book with you into bed. While tossing and turning, it came to rest at the back. Now you are lying on it with your head on the edge of the book, and the fact that you are lying uncomfortably seems to you in your dream as if you had been beheaded. When you have woken up, you realize what the dream means; after awakening, you can explain to yourself where the dream came from.

So you have to wake up first. It's waking up that matters. People who dream their whole lives would think that the dream world is their only reality. We only start to think of the dream world as a fantasy world when we wake up.

Now, gentlemen, in bed, a person wakes up of his own accord and through the surrounding world, which shakes him up. But we only wake up from the life in which we are immersed, which we believe is only the tangible, when we make an effort. And how one awakens from it, I have just described in the book: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” Just as one wakes from a dream and knows that the dream is a world brought about by waking, so one wakes from waking through higher knowledge and then knows that our ordinary world comes from what one now perceives of the higher waking. One knows this.

Therefore, the future science must not just dream away in the world, always just trying: How do you do it in the laboratory, in the physics cabinet? but it must guide people to wake up now. Then one will no longer say: Man is only a physical, material body, but then one will say: Man consists of physical matter, of the etheric body, astral body and I. And of these one can then say: One now knows what wakes up from the corpse when one dies. Because the etheric body had to approach the physical body first and shape the physical body through the head. The astral body had to approach first, had to dig itself into the chest a little, then the person learned to speak. And the I had to approach the physical body and had to bring it into balance in the outer world. Through this, he learned to move his limbs and to adapt his metabolism to the movements. So the human being brings his etheric body, his astral body and the ego from the spiritual world, and he shapes the chaotic substance, which is pulverized, into an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. And what he brings with him when he comes into the world, he carries out again through death. I have already indicated to you how that is. It is so that if one really considers this higher science of waking up, one can speak about life after death and before earthly life in the same way as one speaks about this earthly life. We will do that next time. Then the question of how a person looks without a body, namely before fertilization, will be fully answered.

The next lecture will be on Monday at nine o'clock. It is a bit difficult now, of course, but that doesn't matter. The fact that it is difficult is only because people are never prepared for these things in their youth. If they were prepared, it would not be difficult for them at all. Today, I might say, people have to struggle so that they can learn later what is not prepared for people in their youth. But when you see that people today only manage to say: the commander is only the summary of a company of soldiers, then you will also see that today's science already needs to be improved. And that is what really leads to an understanding of the supernatural.

If we now continue our studies of karma, it is necessary for us in the first place to perceive how karma enters into man's development. We must perceive, that is to say, how destiny, interwoven as it is with the free deeds of man, is really shaped and moulded in its physical reflection out of the spiritual world.

To begin with, I shall have to say a few things concerning the human being as he lives on earth. During these lectures we have been studying earthly man in relation to the various members of his being. We have distinguished in him the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the organisation of the Ego. But there is yet another way of perceiving his several members, namely when we direct our gaze upon him, simply as he stands before us in the physical world.

In today's lecture—independently of what we have already been discussing—we shall therefore approach a different distinction of the members of the human being. Then we shall try to build a bridge between what we discuss today and that which is already known to us.

Observing the human being as he stands before us on the earth—simply according to his physical form—we can recognise in this physical form and configuration three clearly distinct members. If they are not generally distinguished, it is only because that which counts as science nowadays looks at the facts in a merely superficial way. It has no feeling for what reveals itself when these things are observed with a perception that is illumined from within. There, to begin with, is the head of man. Even outwardly considered, we can perceive that this human head appears quite different from the remainder of the human form. We need but observe the origin of man out of the embryo. The first thing we can see developing as human embryo is the head organisation. That is practically all that we can see to begin with. The whole human organisation takes its start from the head. All that afterwards flows into man's form and figure and configuration, is, in the embryo, a mere system of appendages. As physical form, man to begin with is head, and head alone. The other organs are there as mere appendages. In the first period of embryo existence, the functions these organs assume in later life—as breathing, circulation, nutrition and so on—are not undertaken as such from within the embryo. The corresponding functions are supplied from without inward, so to speak: provided for by the mother-organism, through organs that afterwards fall away—organs that are no longer attached to the human being later on.

Man, to begin with, is simply a head. He is altogether “head,” and the remaining organs are only appendages. It is no exaggeration to say that man, to begin with, is a head. The remainder is merely an appendage. Then, at a later stage, the organs which to begin with were mere appendages, grow and gain in importance. Therefore, in later life, the head is not strictly distinguished from the rest of the body. But that is only a superficial characterisation of the human being. For in reality, even as physical form, he is a threefold being. All that constitutes his original form—namely the head-remains throughout his earthly life as a more or less individual member. People only fail to recognise the fact,—but it is so.

You will say: Surely one ought not to divide the human being in this way—beheading him, so to speak, chopping his head off from the rest of his body. That such is the anthroposophical practice was only the fond belief of the Professor, who reproached us for dividing man into head-, chest-organs and limb-organs. But it is not so at all. The fact is rather this: that which appears outwardly as the formation of the head is only the main expression of the human head-formation. Man remains “head” throughout his whole earthly life. The most important sense-organs, it is true—the eyes and ears, the organs of smell and organs of taste—are in the actual head. But the sense of warmth, for example, the sense of pressure, the sense of touch, are spread over the whole human being. That is precisely because the three members cannot in fact be separated spatially. They can at most be separated in the sense that the head-formative principle is mainly apparent in the outward form of the head, while in reality it permeates the whole human being. And so it is too, for the other members. The “head” is also there in the big toe throughout man's earthly life, inasmuch as the big toe possesses a sense of touch or a sense of warmth.

Thus we have characterised, to begin with, the one member of the human being as he stands before us in the sense-world. In my books I have also described this one organisation as the system of nerves and senses; for that is to characterise it more inwardly. This, then, is the one member of the human being, the organisation of nerves and senses. The second member is all that lives and finds expression in rhythmical activity. You cannot say of the nerves-and-senses system that it finds expression in rhythmic activity. For if it did, in the perception of the eye, for instance, you would have to perceive one thing at one moment and then another, and a third and a fourth; and then return again to the first, and so on. In other words, there would have to be a rhythm in your sense-perceptions; and it is not so. Observe on the other hand the main features of your chest-organisation. There you will find the rhythm of the breathing, the rhythm of circulation, the rhythm of digestion and so forth ... There, everything is rhythmical.

This rhythm, with the corresponding organs of rhythm, is the second thing to develop in the human being; and it extends once more over the whole human being, though its chief external manifestation is in the organs of the chest. The whole human being is heart, is lung; yet lung and heart are localised, so to speak, in the organs, so-called. It is well known that the whole human being breathes; you breathe at every place in your organism. People speak of a skin-breathing. Only here, once more, the breathing function is mainly concentrated in the activity of the lung.

The third thing in man is the limb-organism. The limbs come to an end in the trunk or chest-organism. In the embryo-stage of existence they appear as mere appendages. They are the latest to develop. They however are the organs mainly concerned in our metabolism. For by their movement—and inasmuch as they do most of the work in the human being—the metabolic process finds its chief stimulus.

Therewith we have characterised the three members that appear to us in the human form. But these three members are intimately connected with the soul-life of man. The life of the human soul falls into Thinking, Feeling and Willing. Thinking finds its corresponding physical organisation chiefly in the organisation of the head. It has its physical organisation, it is true, throughout the human being; but that is only because the head itself, as I said just now, is there throughout the human being.

Feeling is connected with the rhythmic organisation. It is a prejudice—even a superstition on the part of modern science to suppose that the nervous system has anything directly to do with feeling. The nervous system has nothing directly to do with feeling at all. The true organs of feeling are the rhythms of the breathing, of the circulation ... All that the nerves do is to enable us to form the concept that we have our feelings. Feelings, once more, have their own proper organisation in the rhythmic organism. But we should know nothing of our feelings if the nerves did not provide for our having ideas about them. Because the nerves provide us with all the ideas of our own feelings, modern intellectualism conceives the superstitious notion that the nerves themselves are the organs of our feeling. That is not the case.

But when we consciously observe our feelings—such as they arise out of our rhythmic organism—and compare them with the thoughts which are bound to our head, our nerves-and-senses organisation, then, if we have the faculty to observe such things at all, we perceive just the same difference between our thoughts and our feelings as between the thoughts which we have in our day-waking life, and our dreams. Our feelings have no greater intensity in consciousness than dreams. They only have a different form; they only make their appearance in a different way. When you dream, in pictures, your consciousness is living in the pictures of the dream. These pictures, however, in their picture-form, have the same significance as in another form our feelings have. Thus we may say: We have the clearest and most light-filled consciousness in our ideas and thoughts. We have a kind of dream-consciousness in our feelings. We only imagine that we have a clear consciousness of our feelings; in reality we have no clearer consciousness of our feelings than of our dreams. When, on awaking from sleep, we recollect ourselves and form wide-awake ideas about our dreams, we do not by any means catch at the actual dream. The dream is far richer in content than what we afterwards conceive of it. Likewise is the world of feeling infinitely richer than the ideas, the mental pictures of it, which we make present to our conscious mind.

And when we come to our willing—that is completely immersed in sleep. Willing is bound to the limbs—and metabolic and motor organism. All that we really know of our willing are the thoughts. I form the idea: I will pick up this watch.

Think of it quite sincerely, and you will have to admit: You form the idea: “I will take hold of the watch.” Then you take hold of it. As to what takes place, starting from the idea and going right down into the muscles, until at length you have an idea once more (namely, that you are actually taking hold of the watch) following on your original idea—all this that goes on in your bodily nature between the mental picture of the intention and the mental picture of its realisation, remains utterly unconscious. So much so that you can only compare it with the unconsciousness of deep, dreamless sleep.

We do at least dream of our feelings, but of our impulses of will we have no more than we have from our sleep.

You may say: I have nothing at all from sleep. Needless to say, we are not speaking from the physical standpoint; from a physical standpoint it would of course be absurd to say that you had nothing from sleep. But in your soul too, in reality, you have a great deal from your sleep. If you never slept, you would never rise to the Ego-consciousness.

Here it is necessary to realise the following. When you remember the experiences you have had, you go backward—as along this line (see diagram). Beginning from now, you go backward. You generally imagine that it is so—that you go farther and farther backward along the line. But it is not so at all. In reality you only go back until the last time you awakened from sleep. Before that moment you were sleeping. All that lies in this intervening part of the line (see diagram) is blotted out; then from the last time you fell asleep until the last time but one when you awakened, memory follows once more. So it goes on. In reality, as you look back along the line, you must always interpose the periods of unconsciousness. For a whole third of our life, we must insert unconsciousness. We do not observe this fact. But it is just as though you had a white surface, with a black hole in the centre of it.

You see the black hole, in spite of the fact that none of the forces are there. Likewise it is when you remember. Although no reminiscences of life are there (for the intervals of sleep), nevertheless you see the black nothingness—that is, the nights you have slept through. Your consciousness impinges on them every time, and that is what really makes you call yourself: “I.” If it went on and on, and nowhere impinged on anything, you would never rise to a consciousness of “I.”

Thus we can certainly say that we have something from sleep. And just as we have something from our sleep in the ordinary sense of earthly life, so do we have something from that sleep which always prevails in our willing. We pass asleep through that which is really going on in us in every act of will. And just as we get our Ego-consciousness from the black void in this case (referring to the diagram), so likewise our Ego is inherent in that which is sleeping in us during the act of will. It is, however, that Ego which goes throughout our former lives on earth.

That is where karma holds sway, my dear friends. Karma holds sway in our willing. Therein are working and wielding all the impulses from our preceding life on earth; only they too, even in waking life, are veiled in sleep.

Once more, therefore: when we conceive man as he stands before us in earthly life, he appears to us in a threefold form: the head-organisation, the rhythmic and the motor-organisation. The three are diagrammatically divided here, but we will always bear in mind that each of the members belongs in its turn to the whole man. Moreover, Thought is bound to the head-organisation, Feeling to the rhythmic organisation, Willing to the motor-organisation. Wide awake consciousness is the condition in which our ideas, our mental presentations, are. Dreaming is the condition in which our feelings are. Deep sleep (even in waking life) is the condition in which our volition is. We are asleep in our impulses of will, even in waking life.

Now we must learn to distinguish two things about the head, that is, about our life of ideation. We must divide the head, so to speak, more intimately. We shall thus be led to distinguish between what we have as momentary ideas or mental pictures in our intercourse with the world and what we have as memory. As you go about in the world, you are constantly forming ideas according to the impressions you receive. But it also remains possible for you subsequently to draw the ideas forth again out of your memory. Moreover, the ideas you form in your intercourse with the world in the given moment are not inherently different from the ideas that are kindled in you when memory comes into play. The difference is that in the one case they come from outside, and in the other from within.

It is indeed a naïve conception to imagine that memory works in this way: that I now confront a thing or event, and form an idea or mental presentation of it; that the idea goes, down into me somewhere or other, as if into some cupboard or chest, and that when I afterwards remember it, I fetch it out again. Why, there are whole philosophies describing how the ideas go down beneath the threshold of consciousness, to be fished out again in the act of recollection. These theories are utterly naïve. There is of course no such chest where the ideas are lying in wait. Nor is there anywhere in us where they are moving about, or whence they might walk out again into our head, when we remember them. All these things are utterly non-existent, nor is there any explanation in their favour. The fact is rather as follows:

You need only think of this. When you want to memorise something, you generally work not merely with the activity of forming ideas. You help yourself by quite other means. I have sometimes seen people in the act of memorising; they formed ideas, they thought as little as possible. They performed outward movements of speech—pretty vehement movements, repeated again and again, like this (with the arms), “und es wallet und woget und brauset und zischt” (a line of Schiller's poem: The Diver). Many people memorise in this way, and in so doing, they think as little as possible. And to add a further stimulus, they sometimes hammer the forehead with their fist. That, too, is not unknown.

The fact is that the ideas we form as we go about the world are evanescent, like dreams. It is not the ideas which have gone down into us, but something quite different that emerges out of our memory. To give you an idea of it, I should have to draw it thus—

Of course it is only a kind of symbolic diagram. Imagine the human being in the act of sight. He sees something. (I will not describe the process in any greater detail; we might do so, but for the moment we do not need it.) He sees something. It goes in through his eye, through the optic nerve into the organs into which the optic nerve then merges.

We have two clearly distinct members of our brain—the more outer peripheric brain, the grey matter; and beneath it, the white matter. Then the white matter merges into the sense-organs. Here is the grey matter (see the diagram); it is far less evolved than the white. The terms “grey” and “white” are, of course, only approximate. Thus, even crudely, anatomically considered it is so: The objects make an impression on us, passing through the eye and on into the processes that take place in the white matter of the brain. Our ideas or mental presentations, on the other hand, have their organ in the grey matter, which, incidentally, has quite a different cell-structure, and there the ideas are lighting up and vanishing like dreams. There the ideas are flickering up, because beneath this region (compare the diagram once more) the process of the impressions is taking place.

If it depended on the ideas going down into you somewhere, and you then had to fetch them out again in memory, you would remember nothing at all. You would have no memory. It is really like this: In the present moment, let us say, I see something. The impression of it (whatever it may be) goes into me, mediated by the white matter of the brain. The grey matter works in its turn, dreaming of the impressions, making pictures of them. The mental pictures come and go; they are quite evanescent. As to what really remains, we do not conceive it at all in this moment, but it goes down into our organisation, and when we remember, we look within; down there the impression remains permanent.

Thus when you see something blue, an impression goes into you from the blue (below, in the diagram), while here (above, in the diagram) you yourself form an idea, a mental presentation of the blue. The idea is transient. Then, after three days perhaps, you observe in your brain the impression that has remained. Once more you form the idea of blue. This time, however, you do so as you look inward. The first time, when you saw the blue from without, you were stimulated from outside by a blue object. The second time—namely now, when you remember it—you are stimulated from within, because in effect the blueness has reproduced itself within you. In both cases it is the same process, namely a process of perception. Memory too is perception. In effect, our day-waking consciousness consists in ideation, in the forming of ideas; but there—beneath the ideation—certain processes are going on. They too, rise into our consciousness by an act of ideation, namely by our forming of ideas in the act of memory. Underneath this activity of ideation is the perceiving, the pure process of perception. And, underneath this in turn, is Feeling.

Thus we can distinguish more intimately, in our head-organisation or thought-organisation—the perceiving and the activity of ideation. What we have perceived, we can then remember. But it actually remains very largely unconscious; it is only in memory that it rises into consciousness. What really takes place in man is no longer experienced in consciousness by man himself. When he perceives, he experiences in consciousness the idea, the mental presentation of it. The real effect of the perception goes into him. Out of this real effect, he is then able to awaken the memory. But at this place the unconscious already begins.

In reality it is only here, in this region (see the diagram)—where, in our waking-day consciousness we form ideas—it is only here that we ourselves are, as Man. Only here do we really have ourselves as Man. Where we do not reach down with our consciousness (for we do not even reach to the causes of our memories), where we do not reach down, there we do not have ourselves as Man, but are incorporated in the world.

It is just as it is in the physical life—you breathe in; the air you now have in yourself was outside you a short while ago, it was the-air-of-the-world; now it is your air. After a short time you give it back again to the world. You are one with the world. The air is now outside you, now within you. You would not be Man at all, if you were not so united with the world as to have not only that which is within your skin, but that with which you are connected in the whole surrounding atmosphere. And as you are thus connected on the physical side, so it is as to your spiritual part: the moment you get down into the next subconscious region—the region out of which memory arises—you are connected with that which we call the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. Just as you are connected through your breathing with the air, so are you connected with the Third Hierarchy through your head-organisation, namely the lower head-organisation. This, which is only covered over by the outermost lobes of the brain, belongs solely to the earth. What is immediately beneath is connected with the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.

Now let us go down into the region, psychologically speaking, of feeling: corporeally speaking, of the rhythmic organisation, out of which the dreams of our Feeling life arise. There, less than ever do we have ourselves as Man. There we are connected with what constitutes the Second Hierarchy—spiritual Beings who do not incarnate in any earthly body, for they remain in the spiritual world. But they are continually sending their currents, their impulses, the forces that go out from them., into the rhythmic organisation of man. Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes—they are the Beings whom we bear within our breast.

Just as we bear our own human Ego actually only in the outermost lobes of the brain, so do we bear the Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc. immediately beneath this region; yet still within the organisation of the head. There is the scene of their activities on earth; there are the starting-points of their activity. And in our breast we carry the Second Hierarchy—Exusiai and the rest. In our breast are the starting points of their activity.

And as we now go down into our motor-organism, the organism of movement, in this the Beings of the First Hierarchy are active: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

The transmuted food-stuffs, the food-stuffs we have eaten, circulate in our limbs. There in our limbs, they undergo a process. It is really a living process of combustion. For if we take only a single step, there arises in us a living process of combustion, a burning-up of that which is, or was, outside us. We ourselves, as Man, are connected with this combustion process. As physical human beings with our limbs and metabolic-organism, we are connected with the lowest. And yet it is precisely through the limb-organisation that we are connected with the highest. With the First Hierarchy—Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones—we are connected by virtue of what imbues us there with spirit.

Now the great question arises (it may sound trivial when I clothe it in earthly words, but I can do no other), the question arises: What are they doing—these Beings of the three successive Hierarchies, who are in us—what are they doing?

The answer is: the Third Hierarchy, Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc.—concern themselves with that which has its physical organisation in the human head, i.e. with our thinking. If they were not concerning themselves with our thinking—with that which is going on in our head—we should have no memory in ordinary earthly life. For it is the Beings of this Hierarchy who preserve in us the impulses which we receive with our perceptions. They are underlying the activity which reveals itself in our memory; they lead us through our earthly life in this first sub-conscious, or unconscious, region.

Now let us go on to the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—Exusiai, etc. They are the Beings we encounter when we have passed through the gate of death, that is, in the life between death and a new birth. There we encounter the souls of the departed, who lived with us on earth; but we encounter, above all, the spiritual Beings of this Second Hierarchy—the Third Hierarchy together with them, it is true, but the Second Hierarchy are the most important there. With them we work in our time between death and a new birth—we work upon all that we felt in our earthly life, all that we brought about in our organisation. Thus, in union with these Beings of the Second Hierarchy, we elaborate our coming earthly life.

When we stand here on the earth, we have the feeling that the spiritual Beings of the Divine World are above us. When we are in yonder sphere, between death and a new birth, we have the opposite idea—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc., who guide us through our earthly life, as above described, live, after our death, on the same level with us—so to speak. And immediately beneath us are the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. With them we work out the forming of our inner karma. All that I told you yesterday of the karma of health and illness—we work it out with these Beings, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. And when, in that time between death and new birth, we look still further down—as it were, looking through the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—then we discover, far below, the Beings of the First Hierarchy, Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones.

As earthly man, we look for the highest Gods above us. As man between death and a new birth, we look for the highest Divinity (attainable for us human beings, to begin with) in the farthest depths beneath us. We, all the time, are working with the Beings of the Second Hierarchy, elaborating our inner karma between death and a new birth: that inner karma which afterwards comes forth, imaged in the health or illness of our next life on earth. While we ourselves are engaged in this work—working alone, and with other human beings, upon the bodies that will come forth in our next life on earth—the Beings of the First Hierarchy are active far below us, and in a strange way. That one beholds. For with respect to their activity—a portion, a small portion of their activity—they are actually involved in a Necessity. They, as the creators of the earthly realm, are obliged to follow and reproduce what the human being has fashioned and done during his life on earth. They are obliged to reproduce it—though in a peculiar way.

Think of a man in his earthly life: in his Willing (which belongs to the First Hierarchy), he accomplishes certain deeds. The deeds are good or evil, wise or foolish. The Beings of the First Hierarchy—Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—are under necessity to form and mould the counter-images thereto in their own sphere.

You see, my dear friends, we live together. Whether the things we do with one another are good or evil; for all that is good, for all that is evil, the Beings of the First Hierarchy must shape the corresponding counterparts. Among the First Hierarchy, all things are judged; yet not only judged, but shaped and fashioned. Thus between death and a new birth, while we ourselves are working at our inner karma with the Second Hierarchy and with other departed souls, meanwhile we behold what Seraphim, and Cherubim and Thrones have experienced through our deeds on earth.

Yes, here upon earth the blue vault of the sky arches over us, with its cloud-forms and sunshine and so forth; and in the night, the star-lit sky. Between death and a new birth the living activity of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones extends like a vault beneath us. And we gaze down upon them—Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—even as we here look up to the clouds, and the blue, and the star-strewn sky. Beneath us, there, we see the Heavens, formed of the activity of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. But what kind of activity? We behold among the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, the activity which results as the just and compensating activity from our own deeds on earth—our own, and the deeds through which we lived with other men. The Gods themselves are obliged to carry out the compensating action, and we behold them as our Heavens, only the Heavens are there beneath us. In the deeds of the Gods we see and recognise the consequences of our earthly deeds—whether this deed or that be good or evil, wise or foolish. And, as we thus look downward, between death and a new birth, we relate ourselves to the mirrored image of our deeds, just as in earthly life we relate ourselves to the vault of heaven above us.

As to our own inner karma, we ourselves bring it into our inner organism. We bring it with us on to the earth as our faculties and talents, our genius and our stupidity. Not so what the Gods are fashioning there beneath us; what they have to experience in consequence of our earthly lives comes to us in our next life on earth as the facts of Destiny which meet us from without. We may truly say, the very thing we pass through asleep carries us in our earthly life into our Fate. But in this is living what the corresponding Gods, those of the First Hierarchy, had to experience in their domain as the consequences of our deeds during the time between our death and a new birth.

One always feels a need to express these things in pictures. Suppose we are standing somewhere or other in the physical world. The sky is overcast; we see the clouded sky. Soon afterwards, fine rain begins to trickle down; the rain is falling. What hitherto was hovering above us, we see it now in the wet fields and the trees, sprinkled with fine rain. So it is when we look back with the eye of the Initiate, from human life on earth into the time we underwent, before we came down to this earth, that is to say, the time we underwent between our last death and our last birth. For there we see the forming of the deeds of the Gods in consequence of our own deeds in our last life on earth. And then we see it, spiritually raining down, so to become our destiny.

Do I meet a human being whose significance for me in this life enters essentially into my destiny? That which takes place in our meeting was lived in advance by the Gods as a result of what he and I had in common in a former earthly life. Am I transplanted during my earthly life into a district—or a vocation—which is important for me? All that approaches me there as outer destiny is the image of what was experienced by Gods—Gods of the First Hierarchy—in consequence of my former life on earth, during the time when I was myself between death and a new birth.

One who thinks abstractly will think: “There are the former lives on earth; the deeds of the former lives work across into the present. Then they were the causes, now they are the effects.” But you cannot think far along these lines; you have little more than words when you enunciate this proposition. But behind what you thus describe as the Law of Karma, are deeds and experiences of the Gods; and only behind all that is the other ...

When we human beings confront our destiny only by way of feeling, then we look up, according to our faith, to the Divine Beings or to some Providence on which we feel the course of our earthly life depends. But the Gods—namely those Gods whom we know as belonging to the First Hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—have, as it were, an inverse religious faith. They feel their Necessity among men on earth—men, whose creators they are. The aberrations human beings suffer, and the progressions they enjoy, must be balanced and compensated by the Gods. Whatever the Gods prepare for us as our destiny in a subsequent life, they have lived it before us.

These truths must be found again through Anthroposophy. Out of a consciousness not fully developed, they were perceived by mankind in a former, instinctive clairvoyance. The Ancient Wisdom did indeed contain such truths. Afterwards only a dim feeling remained of them. In many things that meet us in the spiritual history of mankind, the dim feeling of these things is still in evidence. You need but remember the verse by Angelus Silesius which you will also find quoted in my writings. To a narrow religious creed, it sounds impertinent:

I know that without me God can no moment live; If I come to naught, He needs must give up the Ghost.¹

Angelus Silesius went over to Roman Catholicism; it was as a Catholic that he wrote such verses. He was still aware that the Gods are dependent on the world, even as the world is dependent on them. He knew that the dependence is mutual; and that the Gods must direct their life according to the life of men. But the Divine Life works creatively, and works itself out in turn in the destinies of men. Angelus Silesius, dimly feeling the truth, though he knew it not in its exactitude, exclaimed:

I know that without me God can no moment live; If I come to naught, He needs must give up the Ghost.

The Universe and the Divine depend on one another, and work into one another. Today we have recognised this living interdependence in the example of human destiny or karma.

• 1. From The Cherubinic Wanderer. Book I. 8.

Man in his earthly existence varies in his conditions of consciousness; he varies in the conditions of full wakefulness, of sleep, and of dreaming.

Let us first put the question to ourselves: is it an essential part of man to live as earthly being in these three conditions of consciousness?

We must clearly realize that of earthly beings only man lives in these three conditions. Animals live in an essentially different alternation. They do not have that deep, dreamless sleep which man has for the greater part of the time between falling asleep and awaking. On the other hand, animals do not have the complete wakefulness of man between awaking and going to sleep. Animal “wakefulness” is somewhat like human dream; but the experiences of the higher animals are more definite. On the other hand, animals are never so deeply unconscious as man is in deep sleep.

Therefore animals do not differentiate themselves from their surroundings so much as man. They have not got an outer and an inner world, as man has. The higher animals, (Dr. Steiner means by higher animals, the warm-blooded vertebrates, birds and mammals. – Ed.) subconsciously, feel themselves, with their whole inner being, like a part of the surrounding world.

When an animal sees a plant, his first feeling is not: that is outwardly a plant, and I am inwardly a separate being—but the animal gets a strong inner experience from the plant, a direct sympathy or antipathy. It feels as it were, the plant's nature inwardly. The circumstance that people of our time are not able to observe anything that is not obvious, prevents them from seeing in the impulses and behaviour of animals that it is as I have said.

Only man has the clear and sharp differentiation between his inner world and the outer world. Why does he recognize an outer world? How does he come at all to speak of an inner and an outer world? Because every time he sleeps, his ego and his astral body are outside his physical and etheric body: he abandons, so to speak, his physical and etheric bodies and is among those things which are outer world. During sleep we share the fate of outer things. As tables and benches, trees and clouds are during wakefulness outside our physical and etheric bodies and are therefore described as outer world, so, during sleep, our own astral bodies and our ego belong to the outer world. And here something happens.

In order to realize what happens here, let us first start from what happens when we face the world in a perfectly normal condition of wakefulness. There are the various objects outside us. And the scientific thought of man has gradually brought it to the point of recognizing such physical things as belonging certainly to the outer world as can be weighted, measured and counted. The content of our physical science without doubt is determined according to weight, dimension and number.

We reckon with the calculations which apply to earthly things, we weigh and measure them, and what we ascertain by weighing, measuring and counting really constitutes the physical. We would not describe a body as physical unless we could somehow put it to the proof by means of scales. But those things like colours, and sounds, the feeling even of warmth and cold, the real objects of sense-perceptions, these weave themselves about the things that are heavy, and measurable and countable. If we want to define any physical object, what constitutes its real physical nature is the part that can be weighed or counted, and with this alone the physicist really wants to be concerned. Of colour, sound and so on he says: Well, something occurs from outside with which weighing or counting is concerned—he says even of colour-phenomena: there are oscillating movements which make an impression on man from outside, and he describes this impression, when it concerns the eye, as colour, when it concerns the ear, as sound, and so on. One could really say that the modern physicist cannot make head or tail of all these things—sound, colour, warmth and cold. He regards them just as properties of something which can be ascertained with the scales or the measuring rod or arithmetic. Colours cling, as it were, to the physical; sound is wrung from the physical; warmth and cold surge up out of the physical. One says: that which has eight has redness, or, it is red.

You see, when a man is in the state between going to sleep and waking up, his ego and his astral body are in a different condition. Then the things of dimension, number and weight are not there at all, at any rate not according to earthly dimension, number and weight. When we sleep there are no things around us which can be weighed, however odd it appears, nor are there things around us which can be counted or measured. As an ego and an astral body one could not use a measuring rod in the state of sleep.

But what is there are—if I may so express it—the free-floating, free-moving sense-perceptions. Only in the present state of his development man is not capable of perceiving the free-floating redness, the waves of free-moving sound and so on.

If we wish to draw the thing diagrammatically, we could do it like this. We could say: Here on earth we have solid weighable things (red) and to these are attached, as it were, the redness, the yellow, in other words, what the senses perceive in these things. When we sleep, the yellow is free and floating, and also the redness not clinging to such weight-conditions, but floating and weaving freely. It is the same with sound. It is not eh bell which rings, but the ringing floats in the air.

When we go about in our physical world and see something or other, we pick it up; only then is it really a thing, otherwise it might be an optical illusion. Weight must come in. Therefore, unless we feel its weight, we are apt to consider something that appears in the physical, as an optical illusion, like the colours of the rainbow.

If you open a book on Physics today you will see the explanation given—the rainbow is an optical illusion. Physicists look upon the raindrop as the reality; and then they draw lines which really have no meaning for what is there, but they seemingly imagine them there in space. They are then called rays. But the rays are not there at all, but one is told the eye projects them. Remarkable use indeed is made of this projection in modern Physics. Thus I assume we see a red object. In order to convince ourselves that it is no optical illusion, we lift it up—and it is heavy; thereby it guarantees its reality.

He who now becomes conscious in the ego and the astral body, outside the physical and etheric bodies, comes in the end to the conclusion that there is something like this in this free-floating, free-moving colour and sound; but it is different. In this free-floating coloured substance there is a tendency to scatter to the uttermost parts of the Earth. It has a contrary weight. (See Diagram 1) These things of the earth want to go down there to the earth's center (downward arrow); these (upward arrow) want to escape into universal space.

And there is something there similar to a measurement. You get it, for instance, if you have, let us say, a small reddish cloud, and this small reddish cloud is hemmed in by a mighty yellow structure; you then measure, not with a measuring-rule, but qualitatively, the stronger-shining red with the weaker-shining yellow. And as the measuring-rule tells you: that is five yards, the red tells you here: (see Diagram 1): if I were to spread myself out, I should go into the yellow five times. I must expand myself. I must become bigger, then I, too, should become yellow. Thus are measurements made in this case.

If it still more difficult to be clear about counting, because after all in earthly counting we mostly count only peas or apples, which lie side by side indifferently, and we always have the feeling that I we place as second one by the one, this one doesn't mind a bit that another one lies next to it. In human life it is of course different. There is sometimes the case that the one is directed to the other. But this is already verging on the spiritual.

In physical mathematics it is a matter of indifference to divisions what is added to them. But here it is not the case. When a one is of a definite kind, it demands—let us say—some three or five others, according to its kind. It has always an inner relationship to the others. Here number is a reality. And if a consciousness of it begins, as is the case when you are out there with your ego and your astral body, you also get to the point of ascertaining something like dimension, number and weight, but of an opposite kind.

And then, when sight and hearing out there are no longer a mere chaotic mingling of red and yellow and sounds, but you begin to feel things are ordered, then arises the perception of the spiritual beings, who realize themselves in these free-floating sense-experiences. Then we enter the positive spiritual world, and the life and doings of the spiritual beings. As here on earth we enter the life and doings of earthly things, ascertaining them with the scales and the rod and our calculations, so, by adapting ourselves to the purely qualitative, opposite weight-condition, i.e. by wanting to expand imponderably into the world-spaces and by measuring colour by colour, etc.—we come to the understanding of spiritual beings. Such spiritual beings also permeate all the realms of nature.

Man with his waking consciousness sees only the outside of minerals and plants and animal; but in sleep he is with all that is spiritual in all these beings of nature's realms. And when on awakening he returns again to himself, his ego and his astral body keep as it were the inclination and affinity towards the outward things and cause him to recognize an outer world. If man had an organization which was not designed for sleep, he could not recognize an outer world.

It is not a question of insomnia, for I did not way, “if a man does not sleep,” but “if man had an organization which was not designed for sleep.” The point is the being designed for something. Therefore, of course, man becomes ill if he suffers from insomnia, because his nature is not suited to it. But things are so arranged that man attains an outer world and to a vision of it, just because in sleep he passes the time in the outer world with the things he calls, when awake, the outer world.

And you see, this relationship of man to sleep gives the earthly concept of truth. How? Well, we call it truth when we can correctly reproduce inwardly something external, when we can accurately experience inwardly something external. But for this we require the arrangement of sleep. Without it we should have no concept of truth, so that we have to thank the state of sleep for truth. In order to surrender ourselves to the truth of things, we must pass our existence for a certain time with those tings. The things tell us something about themselves only because during sleep they are appreciated by us through our soul's presence with them.

It is different in the case of the dream-state. The dream is related, of course, with the memory, with the inner soul-life, with what preferably lives in the memory; when the dream is free-floating sound-colour world, it means we are still half outside our body. If we go completely down, the same forces which we unfold as moving and living in dream become forces of memory. Then we no longer differentiate ourselves in the same way from the outer world. Our inner being coincides with it. Then we live in it with our sympathies and antipathies so strong that we do not feel things as sympathetic or antipathetic, but that the sympathies and antipathies themselves show themselves pictorially.

If we had not the possibility of dreaming, nor the continuation of this dream-force in our inner life, we should have no beauty. That we have a disposition for beauty is due to the fact that we are able to dream. For prosaic existence we have to say: we have to thank the power of dreaming that we have a memory. For the art life of man we have to thank the power of dreaming that there is beauty. The manner in which we feel or create beauty is namely very similar to the weaving, creating power of dreaming.

We behave in the experience of beauty and to the creation of it—through the help of our physical body—as we behave outside our physical body or half bound to it, when we dream. There is really only a slight jump from dreaming to living in beauty. And only because in these materialistic times people are of such coarse temperament that they do not notice this jump, is so little consciousness to be found of the whole significance of beauty. Man must necessarily give himself up in dream in order to experience this free movement and life, whereas when one gives oneself up to freedom, to apparent inner compulsion, that is, if one experiences this jump one has no longer the feeling that it is the same as dreaming, that it is the same except that use is made of the powers of the physical body. This generation will long ponder what “chaos” meant in former times. There are most diverse definitions of “chaos.” Actually it can only be characterized by saying: when man reaches a state of consciousness in which the experience of weight, of earthly dimension just ceases, and things begin to become less heavy, but as yet with no tendency to escape into the universe, but maintain themselves still—let us say—horizontally, in equilibrium, when the fixed boundaries get blurred, when the swaying indefiniteness of the world is seen with the physical body still, but already also with the soul-constitution of dreaming, then you see chaos. And the dream is merely the shadowy approach of chaos towards man.

In Greece one still had the feeling that one cannot really make the physical world beautiful; it is half a necessity of nature; it is as it is. One cannot set up the Cosmos—which means the beautiful world—out of earthly things, but only out of chaos, by shaping the chaos. And what one makes with earthly things is merely an imitation in matter of the molded chaos.

This is always the case in Art; and in Greece, where the mystery-cults still had a certain influence, one had a very vivid image of this relation of chaos to Cosmos.

But when one looks round in all these worlds—the unconsciousness of sleep, the half-consciousness of dream—one does not find the Good. The beings who are in these worlds are predestined with all wisdom from the very beginning to run their life's course there. One finds in them controlling, constructive wisdom. One finds in them beauty. But there is no sense in speaking of goodness among these beings when as earth-man it is a question of our meeting them. We can only speak of goodness when there is a distinction between inner and outer world, so that the good can follow the spiritual world or not. As the state of sleep is apportioned to truth, the dream-state to beauty, so is the condition of wakefulness apportioned to goodness, to the Good.

This does not contradict what I have been saying during these days, that when one leaves earthly things and emerges into the Cosmos, one is induced to abandon also earthly concepts so as to speak of the moral world-order. For the moral world-order is necessarily as much foreordained in the spiritual world as causality is on this earth. Only there the predestination,—that which is appointed,—is spiritual; there is no contradiction.

But as regards human nature we must be clear: if we want to have the idea of truth, we must turn to the state of sleep; if we want to have the idea of beauty, we must turn to the state of dreaming, and if we want to have the idea of goodness, we must turn to the state of waking consciousness.

Man has thus, when awake, no vocation to his physical and etheric organization as regards truth, but as regards goodness. In this state we must most certainly arrive at the idea of goodness.

What does modern science achieve when it attempts to explain man? It refuses to rise from truth, through beauty to goodness; it wants to explain everything in accordance with an external causal necessity which corresponds only to the idea of truth. And here one entirely fails to reach that element in man which weaves and lives when he is awake. One reaches at the most only what man is when asleep. Therefore if you read anthropologists today with an alert eye, alert for the psychic peculiarities and forces of the world, you get the following impression. You say to yourself: Yes, that is all very nice, what we are told about man by modern science. But what sort of a fellow is this man really, about whom science tells us? He lies the whole time in bed ... he cannot apparently walk ... he cannot move. Movement, for example, is not in the least explained. He lies the whole time in bed.

It cannot be otherwise. Science explains man only when asleep. If you want to set him in motion, it would have to be done mechanically; wherefore, also, it is a scientific mechanism. One has to insert machinery into this sleeping man, to set this dummy in motion when he is to et up, and to put him to bed again in the evening.

Thus this science tells us absolutely nothing about the man who wanders about the world, who lives and moves and is awake; for what sets him in motion is contained in the idea of goodness, not in the idea of truth, which we gain chiefly from external things.

Now this is something which is not much thought about: one has the feeling, when a physiologist or anatomist of today describes man, that one would like to say: Wake u-p. Wake up! You are asleep, you are asleep! These people accustom themselves, under the influence of this way of looking at things, to the state of sleep. And as I have always said, people sleep through all sorts of things just because they are obsessed by science. Today, because the popular papers circulate everything everywhere, even the uneducated are also obsessed by science. There never were so many obsessed minds as today. It is remarkable with what words one must describe the real relationships of the present day. One must lapse into quite different epithets from those which are in common use today.

It is the same when the materialists try to place man in his surroundings. At the time of materialistic high-tide, people wrote books like one, for example, which stated in a certain chapter: Man is really of himself nothing. He is the product of the oxygen in the air, the product of the cold or warm temperature in which he is. He is really—so ends this materialistic description pathetically—a product of every air-current.

If one investigates such a description and imagines the man as he really is, as pictured thus by the materialist, he turns out to be a neurasthenic in the highest degree. The materialists have never described any other kind of man; if they did not notice that they described man when he is asleep, if they overdid their part and wanted to go further, they have never described him as anything but an extreme neurasthenic, who would die next day of his neurasthenia, who could not live at all, for this age of science has never grasped the idea of a living man.

Here lie the great tasks which must lead man out of present-day circumstances into such conditions in which the further life of world-history is alone possible. What is needed is a penetration into spirituality. The opposite pole must be found to that which has been attained. What was achieved during the nineteenth century7, so glorious for materialistic philosophy? What has been achieved?

In a wonderful way—we can say it sincerely and honestly—it succeeded in defining the outer world according to dimension, number and weight. In this, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries achieved an extraordinary and mighty work. But finer feelings of the senses, colours, sounds, flutter about as it were in the indefinite. Physicists have entirely ceased to talk about colours and sounds. They talk of airwaves and ether waves. But those are after all not colours or sounds. Air-waves surely are not sounds, but at most the medium by which sounds are continued. There is no grasp of sense-qualities. We have to return to that. In fact one sees today only what can be determined by scales and measuring-rod and arithmetic. All else has escaped one.

And now when the theory of Relativity introduces a grand disorder into the measurable, the weighable, and the countable, everything is split asunder and falls to pieces. But ultimately this theory of Relativity founders at certain points. Not with regard to concepts: one does not get away from the theory of Relativity with earthly concepts, as I have had occasion to explain already in another place, but with reality one always gets away form the Relativity-concepts, for what can be measured or counted or weighed enters through measure, number and weight into quite definite relationships in outer sensible reality.

It is a question of seeing how colours, sounds, etc., are broken in Reality through consideration of weight, i.e. of that which really makes physical bodies. But with this tendency something extraordinarily important is overlooked. We forget namely Art. As we get more and more physical, Art departs further from us. No one will find a trace of Art in the books on Physics today. Nothing remains of Art—it must all go. It is ghastly studying a book on Physics at all today if one has an atom of feeling for beauty. Art is overlooked by man just because everything out of which colour and sound weave beauty, is, and is only recognized when it is attached to a weighty object. And the more physical people become, the more inartistic they become. Just think. We have a wonderful Physics; but it lives in denying Art; for it has reached the point of treating the world in such a manner that the artist takes no more heed of the physicist.

I do not think, for example that the musician lays much value on studying the physical theories of Acoustics. It is too wearisome, he doesn't bother. The painter will also not study this awful colour-theory which Physics contains. As a rule, if he bothers at all about colours, he turns still to Goethe's colour-theory. But that is false in the physicist's eyes. The physicists shut one eye and say: Well, well, it doesn't matter very much if a painter has a true or a false theory of colour.

It is a fact that Art must collapse under the physical philosophy of today. Now we must put the question to ourselves: Why did Art exist in older times?

If you go back to quite ancient times in which man still had an original clairvoyance, we find that they took less notice of dimension, number and weight in earthly things. They were not so important to them. They devoted themselves more to the colours and sounds of earthly things.

Remember that even Chemistry calculates in terms of weight only since Lavoisier; something more than a hundred years. Weight was first use din a world-philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century. Ancient mankind simply was not conscious that everything had to be defined according to earthly measure, number and weight. Man gave his heart and mind to the coloured carpet of the world, to the weaving the welling of sounds, not to the atmospheric vibrations.

But what was the possibility that came from living in this—I might say—imponderable sensible perception? By it one had the possibility, when for instance, one approached a man, of seeing him not as we se him today, but one regarded him as a product of the whole universe. Man was more a confluence of the Cosmos. He was more a microcosm than the thing inside his skin that stands where man stands, on this tiny spot of earth. He thought of man more as an image of the world. Then, colours flowed together, as it were, from all sides, and gave man colours. There was world-harmony, and man in tune with it, receiving his shape from it.

Moreover, mankind today can scarcely understand anything of the way in which ancient mystery-teachers spoke to their pupils. For when a man today wants to explain the human heart, he takes an embryo and sees how the blood-vessels expand, a utricle or bag appears and the heart is gradually formed. Well, that is not what the ancient mystery-teachers told their pupils. That would have appeared to them no more important than knitting a stocking, because after all the process looks much the same. On the contrary they emphasized something else as of paramount importance. They said: the human heart is a product of gold, which lives everywhere in light, and which streams in from the universe and shapes the human heart. You have had the representation. Light quivers through the universe, and the light carries gold. Everywhere in light there is gold. Gold lives and moves in light. And when man lives on earth—you know already that it changes after seven years—his heart is not composed of the cucumber and the salad and the roast veal the man has in the meantime eaten, but these old teachers knew that the heart is built of light's gold, and the cucumbers and the salad are only the stimulus for the gold weaving in the light to build up the heart out of the whole universe.

Yes, those people talked differently and you must be aware of this difference, for one must relearn to talk thus, only on another plane of consciousness. In painting, what once was there, but then disappeared, when one still painted by cosmic inspiration, because weight did not yet exist,—this painting has left its last trace in, let me say, Cimabue, and the Russian Icon-painting. The Icon was still painted out of the macrocosm, the whole outer world. It was so to speak a slice out of the macrocosm. But then one began in a blind alley, one could not get further, for the simple reason that this world-philosophy no longer existed among mankind. If one had wanted to paint the Icon with inner sympathy, not merely by tradition and prayer, one would have to have known how to handle gold. The treatment of gold on the picture was one of the greatest secrets of ancient painting. It consisted in bringing out the human figure from the gold background.

There is a vast abyss between Cimabue and Giotto. Giotto began what Raphael later brought to perfection. Cimabue had it still from tradition. Giotto became already half a naturalist. He noticed that tradition was no longer alive inwardly in the soul. Now one must take the physical man, now one has no longer the universe. One can paint no longer out of the gold; one is compelled to paint from the flesh.

This has gone so far that painting has practically reverted to what it had so much of in the nineteenth century. Icons have no weight at all; they were snowed in out of the world; they are weightless. The only thing is, one cannot paint them any more today. But if they were to e painted in their original form, they would have no weight at all.

Giotto was the first to begin painting objects so that they have weight. From which it arose that everything one paints has weight, even in the picture, and then one paints it from the outside, so that the colours have a relation to what is painted, as the physicist explains it, that the colour appears there on the surface by means of some special wave-vibration. Art has finally also had to be reckoned with weight, which Giotto began in an aesthetic-artistic way and Raphael brought to its highest point.

Thus we may say: there the universal slipped out of man, and heavy man became what one can now see. But because the feelings of the ancient times were still there, the flesh became, so to speak, heavy only to a minimum degree, but still it became heavy. And then arose the Madonna as counter to the Icon—the Icon which ahs no weight, the Madonna which has weight, even if she is beautiful—beauty has survived. But Icons are no longer paintable at all, because man does not feel them. If men today think they can feel Icons, it is an untruth. Therefore also the Icon-cult was steeped in a certain sentimental untruth. It is a blind-alley in Art. It becomes dependent on a scheme, on tradition.

Raphael's painting, built as it is on Giotto's development fro Cimabue, can remain Art only so long as the light of beauty streams upon it. To a certain extent it was the sunny Renaissance painters who still sensed something of the gold weaving in the light, and at least gave their pictures the luster of gold, making it irradiate them from outside.

But that came to an end. And thus naturalism came into being, and in Art mankind sits between two stools on the ground, between the Icon and the Madonna and is called upon to discover what pure vibrating colour and pure vibrating sound are, with their opposite weight, opposed to measurableness, and ponderable countability. We must learn to paint out of colour itself. However elementary and bad and tentative, it is our job to paint out of colour, to experience colour itself; freed from weight, to experience colour itself. In these things one must be able to proceed consciously, even with artistic consciousness.

And if you look at the simple attempts of our programs, you will see that there a beginning is made, if only a beginning, to release colours from weight, to experience colour as an element per se, to cause colours to speak.

If that succeeds, then, as against the inartistic physical world-philosophy which lets all Art die out, an Art will be created out of the free element of colour, of sound, which once more is free from weight.

We also sit between two stools, between the Icon and the Madonna, but we must get up. Physical Science does not help us to do it. I have told you, one must stay on the ground if one applies only physical science of man. But we have to get up now; and for this we need Spiritual Science. That contains the life-element which carries us from weight to imponderable colour, to the reality of colour, fro bondage even in musical naturalism to free musical Art.

We see how in all provinces it is a question of making an effort, of mankind waking up. It is this we ought to take up—this impulse to awake, to look round and see what is and what is not, and to advance ever onwards wherever the summons calls.

These things already touch the nerve of our time.

I have described how the modern philosopher comes to admit to himself: where does this intellectualism lead? To build a gigantic machine, and place it in the centre of the earth, in order to blow up the earth into all corners of the universe—he admitted it is so. The others do not admit it!

And so I have tried in different places to show how the ideas of only thirty or forty years ago are dissolved through the theory of Relativity—simply melted away like snow in the sun—so I have tried to show you how the summons is to be found everywhere really to strive towards Anthroposophy. For the philosopher, Eduard von Hartmann says: if the world really is as we imagine it—i.e. as he imagined it in the sense of the nineteenth century—then we really must blow it up into space, because we cannot endure any longer on it; and it is only a question of progressing far enough till we are able to do it. We must sigh for this future time when we can blow the world into universal space.

But the Relativists, before that, will see to it that mankind has no concepts left. Space, Time, Movement are abolished. Even apart from this, one can reach such profound despair, that in certain circumstances one sees the highest satisfaction in that explosion into the whole universe.

One must, however, make oneself clearly acquainted with the meaning of certain impulses in our time.

Mountainous country; in the distance, Hilary's house, in the vicinity of the workshops, which are not seen. Hilary's house has no upper floor; no corners or angles, and is crescent shaped. A waterfall on the left of the stage, facing audience. A rivulet runs from the waterfall between little rocks across the stage.

Johannes is seen sitting on a rock to right, ignorant of the presence of Capesius, on the left of stage.

Johannes:
The towering masses with their silent life
Brim up the air with riddles manifold,
Yet ask no maddening questions such as slay
A soul that seeks not for experience
But only for serenity in which
It may behold life's revelation clear.
See how these colours play among these cliffs,
How calmly dumb the bare expanses lie,
How twilight clothes the woods in green and blue;
This is the world in which Johannes' soul
Will rest and weave to-morrow's fantasies.

Johannes' soul shall feel within itself
The depths and distances of this its world;
And by creative powers this soul shall be
Delivered of its hidden energy
And make known that the world's enchantment is
Only appearance glorified by art.
Yet could Johannes ne'er accomplish this
Did not Maria through her love awake
With gentle soul-warmth forces in his soul.
I must acknowledge fate's wise leadership
In drawing me so closely unto her.
How short a time it is since I have known
That she is by my side; how closely knit
Hath been in these few weeks Johannes' soul
Into a living unity with hers.
As spirit she lives in me though far off;
She thinks within my thought when I call up
Before my soul the objects of my will.

(Maria appears as a thought of Johannes.)

Maria here before me! but how strange!
She must not thus reveal herself to me!
This stern cold spirit-face, this dignity
That chills my earthly feelings—
'tis not thus Johannes will or can Maria see
Draw nigh to him. 'Tis not Maria—this—
Whom by kind fate's decree wise powers have sent.

(Maria disappears from Johannes' vision.)

Where is Maria whom Johannes loved
Before she had transformed his soul in him
And led it up to ice-cold spirit-heights?

And where Johannes, whom Maria loved,
Where is he now?—He was at hand e'en now.
I see no more Johannes, who did give
Me back unto myself with joy. The past
Cannot and shall not rob me of him thus.

(Maria again appears before Johannes' vision.)

Maria:
Maria as thou fain wouldst her behold
Lives not in worlds where shines the light of truth.
Johannes' spirit treads illusion's realm
By fantasy misled; set thyself free
From strong desire and its alluring power.
I feel in me the turmoil of thy soul;
It robs me of the calmness that I need.
'Tis not Johannes who directs the storm
Into my soul; it is another being,
O'er whom he was victorious in the past.
Now as a wraith it roams the spirit-plains;—
Once known for such, it straight will fade away.

Johannes:
That is Maria as she really is,
Who of Johannes speaks as he appears
To his own vision at the present time.
Long since into another form he rose
Than that which errant fancy paints for me
Because I am content to let my soul
Amuse itself with dreams in slothful ease.
But not yet doth this being hold me fast.
Escape from him I still can—and I will—
He often calls me to his side and strives
To win me for myself by his own powers—
Vet will I strive to free myself from him.
Long years ago he flooded my soul's depth
With spirit being; none the less to-day
No more do I desire to harbour him.

Thou stranger being in Johannes' soul
Forsake me—give me back my pristine self
Before thou didst commence thy work in me.
I would behold Johannes free of thee.

(Benedictus appears at Maria's side, equally as a thought of Johannes.)

Benedictus:
Johannes, heed the warning of thy soul;
The man who, flooding thee with spirit, rose
To be thy nature's primal energy,
Must at thy side still hold his faithful sway
And claim that thou transform his being's powers
Through thy will into human deeds. He must
Himself concealed, work out his task in thee,
That thou some day mayst reach what thou dost know
To be thy being's distant future goal.
Thy personal sorrow thou must bear through life
Fast locked within the chamber of thy soul.
So only shalt thou win thyself, if thou
Dost bravely let him own thee more and more.

Maria (seen as a thought of Johannes):
My holy earnest vow doth pour out strength,
Which shall preserve for thee what thou hast won.
Me shalt thou find in those cold fields of ice,
Where spirits must create light for themselves,
When darkness wounds and maims the powers of life.
Seek me within those cosmic depths where souls
Wrestle to win God-knowledge for themselves
By conquest that wins being from the void;
But never seek me in the realm of shades,
Where outlived soul-experience wins by guile
A transient life from out illusion's web,
And dream's frail phantoms can the spirit cheat;
So that in pleasure it forgets itself
And looks on serious effort with distaste.

(Benedictus and Maria disappear.)

Johannes:
She saith illusion ...
... yet 'tis passing fair.
It lives; Johannes feels in it himself,
He feels Maria's nearness in him too.
Johannes would not know how spirit works
To solve the riddles of the soul's dark depths.
He would create and would as artist work.
So may that part of him still lie concealed,
Which consciously would gaze on cosmic heights,

(He sinks into further meditation.)

(Capesius rises from his seat; as it were arousing himself out of deep thought.)

Capesius:
Did I not clearly feel within my soul
That which Johannes, dreaming over there,
Wrought as the pictures of his longing heart?
Within me glowed to life thoughts not mine own—
Such as he only could originate.
The being of his soul lived in mine own,
I saw him younger grown, as he beheld
Himself through vain illusion, and did mock
The ripe fruits that his spirit had achieved.

But hold! Why do I now experience this?
For seldom may the spirit-searcher see
The being in himself of other souls.

I mind, that Benedictus often said
That only he—and only for a while—
Can do this, whose good destiny ordains
That he shall be upraised one further step
Upon the spirit path. May I thus read
The meaning of what happened even now?
Seldom indeed could this thing be allowed;
For 'twould be terrible if aye the seer
Could see the inner being of men's souls.

Did I see truly?—or could it have been
Illusion let me dream another's soul?
I must enquire from Johannes' self.

(Capesius approaches Johannes, who now notices him for the first time.)

Johannes:
Capesius—I thought thee far from here.

Capesius:
Yet my soul felt. itself quite near to thine.

Johannes:
Near mine—at such a time—it cannot be!

Capesius:
Why dost thou shudder at these words of mine?

Johannes:
I do not shudder ...

(At this moment Maria joins them; this enables both Johannes and Capesius to speak their next words to themselves.)

(To himself):
... how his steady glance
Doth pierce me to mine inmost depth of soul.

Capesius (to himself):
His shudder shows me that I saw aright.

(turning to Maria.)

Maria, thou dost come in fitting time.
Perhaps thy tongue may speak some word of cheer
To solve the problem which oppresseth me.

Maria:
I thought to find Johannes here, not thee.
Forboding bade me seek the problem's weight
In him—but thou, I fancied, wast content,
Devoted to that glorious enterprise
Which we are offered here by Hilary.

Capesius:
What care I for it? It disturbs me now—

Maria:
Disturbs thee? Didst thou not express delight
To think thy projects might be realized?

Capesius:
What I have lived through in this fateful hour
Hath changed the former purpose of my soul,
Since all activity in work on earth
Must rob me of my new clairvoyant powers.

Maria:
Whoe'er is suffered to tread spirit-ways
Finds many a hint to shape his destiny.
On soul paths he will try to follow them,
Yet they have not been rightly understood
If they disturb his duties on the earth.

(Capesius sits, and is plunged in thought while the vision of Lucifer appears to Maria.)

Lucifer:
Thine effort will not bring thee much reward,
New force begins to stir within his heart
That opes the portal of his soul to me.
Maria, gaze with thy clairvoyant sight
Upon his inmost soul; and there behold
How he doth free himself on spirit-wings
From thy warm loving bonds of work on earth.

(Lucifer remains on the scene.)

(Maria turns towards Capesius to rouse him from his meditation, but at the same moment he seems to rouse himself of his own accord.)

Maria:
If on the spirit-path Johannes felt
The nature of his duties hinder him,
'Twould not be right, but 'twould be natural.
For he must work upon the outer plane.
Thy task is to expound the spirit-lore
To other men and such a task as this
Cannot impede the progress of thy soul.

Capesius:
Far more than when they work on outer things
Do spirit forces lose themselves in words.
Words make one reason o'er what one has seen,
And reason is a foe to seership's power.
I had a spirit-vision even now
Which only could disclose itself to me
Because the soul which was revealed to me,—
Although our earthly bodies are close friends,—
Had never been by me quite understood.
If I saw truly, I am no more bound
By any ties unto this work of earth.
For I must feel persuaded that high Powers
Now set another goal before my soul
Than that prescribed for it by Hilary.

(He places himself in front of Johannes.)

Johannes, tell me truly, didst thou not
A while ago feel old, outlived desires
That lived within thee like thy present self,
While thou wast lost in meditation deep?

Johannes:
Can then my spirit's struggle work to form
Experience within another's soul?
And can such vision make mine error strong
To find its way to life in cosmic space?

(Johannes again falls into meditation.)

(Maria turns her face towards Lucifer and hears him say:)

Lucifer:
Here too I find the soul's gate open wide.
I'll not delay but use this chance at once.
If also in this soul a spirit-wish
Is born, that work of love must come to naught
Which doth bode ill to me through Hilary.
I can destroy Maria's might in him:
And thus can add her power unto mine own.

(Capesius at this moment straightens up self-consciously, and, during the following speech, shows an increasingly definite conviction.)

Capesius:
My doubts dissolve: that which I saw was true;
I was allowed to see Johannes' life.
So is it also clear that his world could
Only unfold itself because mine own
Ne'er sought to draw near his with Reason's power.
The spirit-path hath need of solitude,
Co-operation is but meant for those
Who reasoning, can each other understand.
For from such intercourse the soul attains
The wide dominions of the worlds of light.
Example in old Felix can I find;
He seeks on paths that none but he may know
In proud seclusion for the spirit-light.
He sought and found because he kept himself
From ever grasping things by reason's strength.
In his track will I follow, and thy work,
Which hampers seership's power with earthly things,
Shall no more lead Capesius astray.

(Exit.)

Maria:
So 'tis with man, what time his better self
Sinks into spirit-sleep and strong desire
Is all his being's food until again
True spirit-nature wakes in glowing light.
Such is the sleep all human beings sleep
Before clairvoyant powers have wakened them.
They know not they are sleeping, though awake
They seem awake, because they ever sleep.
And seers do sleep, when they would fain awake
By hast'ning forth from their true spheres of life.
Capesius will now withdraw from us.
It is no transient whim; his mental life
Draws him away from us and from our plans.
It is not he that turns himself from us;
The dread decree of fate is plainly seen.
And so we who are left must consecrate
Our powers with more devotion to our work.

Johannes:
Maria, do not of Johannes ask
That for new aims at such a time as this
He should gird up his soul, who like that other,
Needs spirit-sleep in which he may mature
The forces which are germinating there.
I know that I in time to come shall dare
To work for spirit-worlds—but do not now
Appeal to me for services—not now.
Think how I drove away Capesius ...
Were I ripe for this work—he would be, too.

Maria:
Capesius away? Dost thou not—dream?

Johannes:
I dreamed while conscious, ... yea, I woke in dreams.
What would seem fantasy to cosmic powers
To me proved symbol of my present state.
Right well I know my wish was my true self;
My thinking only was another self.
And so Johannes stood before my soul
As once he was, ere spirit seized on him
And filled his being with a second self.
He is not dead; ... Johannes' living wish
Createth him companion of my soul.
I may have stunned him, but not overthrown.
A living man, he claims his natural rights
Whene'er that other self must sink to sleep.
And always to awake—exceeds its powers.
It was asleep throughout the time in which
Capesius could experience in himself
How my first nature tore me from myself.
My dreams did seem to him the sign of fate
And so in me and not in him doth work
The power which drove him forth, and which forbids
Our spirit to be turned to work on earth.

Maria:
The spirit-powers are coming—call on them.
To cosmic spirit-sources turn thy gaze
And wait until the powers within those depths
Discover that within thine own true self
Which stirs with conscious life akin to theirs.
Their magic words will show thine inward sight
That which makes them and thee an unity.
Cast out thine own brain's interfering speech,
That spirit may speak in thee as it wills;
And to this spirit-speech give thou due heed.
'Twill carry thee beyond the spheres of light
And link thee to true spirit-essence there.
Thy misty visions sprung from times long past
Will then grow sharp and clear in cosmic light,
But will not bind thee since thou hast control.
Compare them with these elemental forms,
With shadows and with phantoms of all kinds,
And place them near to demons manifold
And so discover what they really are.
But in the realm of spirits root thyself,
Who primal source to primal source do bind,
Who dwell close linked with dormant cosmic powers
And order the processions of the spheres.
This view of cosmic things will give thee strength,
Amid the surging sea of spirit-life,
To blend thyself and inmost soul in one.

The spirit bids me tell thee this myself;
But now give ear to what thou knowest well
Though 'tis not wedded yet to thy soul-depths.

Johannes (still sitting on a rock to right of stage. He collects himself for a determined effort):
I will give ear—I will defy myself.

(From both sides advance elemental spirits. From the right of stage creatures like gnomes. They have steel-blue-grey bodies, small as compared with men; they are nearly all head, but it is bent forward and downward, and is lilac and purple in color, with tendrils and gills of various shades of the same hue. Their limbs are long and mobile, suitable for gesticulation, but ill-adapted for walking. From the left of stage come sylph-like figures, slender and almost headless; their feet and hands are partly fins and partly wings. Some of them are bluish-green, others yellowish-red. The yellowish-red ones are distinguished by sharper outlines than the bluish green ones. The words spoken by these figures are accompanied by expressive gestures developing into a dance.)

Chorus of the Gnomes (dancing, hopping, and gesticulating in rhythm):
We harden, we strengthen (said sharply and quickly)
The nebulous earth-dust;
We loosen, we powder
Hard-crusted earth-boulders;
Swift shatter we the hard,
Slow harden we the loose.
Such is our spirit-kind.
Of mental matter formed
Full-skilled were we before
When human souls still slept (said slowly and dreamily)
And dreamed when earth began.

Chorus of the Sylphs (a swaying motion in rhythm):
We weave and we unweave
The web of watery air;
We scatter and divide
Seed forces from the sun;
Light-force condense with care;
Fruit-powers destroy with skill;
For such is our soul-kind
From rays of feeling poured,
Which ever-living glows
That mankind may enjoy
Earth-evolution's sense.

Chorus of the Gnomes (dancing, hopping, and gesticulating in rhythm):
We titter and we laugh (said sharply and quickly)
We banter and grimace,
When stumbling human sense
And fumbling human mind
Beholds what we have made;
They think they understand
When spirits from our age
Weave charms for their dull eyes (said slowly and emphatically).

Chorus of the Sylphs (a swaying motion in rhythm):
We take care, and we tend,
Bear fruit and in spirit,
When young mankind's dawn-life
And old mankind's errors
Consume what we have made
And childlike or greyhaired
Find in time's stream dull joy
From our eternal plans.

(These spirit-beings collect in two irregular groups in the background, and remain there visible. From the right appear the three soul forces: Philia, Astrid, and Luna with ‘the Other Philia.’)

Philia:
They ray out the light
As loving light-forms
To ripeness so blest,
So gently they warm
And mightily heat
Where embryo growth
Would reach actual life;
That this actual life,
May make souls rejoice
Who lovingly yield
To radiant light.

Astrid:
'Tis life that they weave,
And help to create,
In beings at birth;
They shatter the earth
And densify air;
That change may appear
In strenuous growth.
Such strenuous growth
Fills spirits with joy
Who feel that they weave
A life which creates.

Luna:
They thoughtfully mould,
Alert to create
In flexible stuff;
They sharpen the edge
And flatten the face,
And cunningly build
The clearly-cut forms;
That clearly-cut forms
The will may inspire
With cunning to build,
Alert to create.

The Other Philia:
They gather the blooms
And use without care
The magical works;
They dream of the true,
And the seeming protect;
That germs which lie hid
May wake into life.
And clairvoyant dreams
Make clear unto souls
The magical web
That forms their own life.

(These four soul forces disappear towards the left; Johannes, who during the preceding events was deep in meditation, rouses himself.)

Johannes:
‘And clairvoyant dreams
Make clear unto souls
The magical web
That forms their own life.’
These are the words that still distinctly ring
Within my soul; that which I saw before
Passed in confusion out of my soul's ken.

Yet what a power stirs in me, when I think;
‘The magical web
That forms their own life.’

(He relapses once more into meditation; there appears to him as a thought form of his own a group composed of: The Spirit of Johannes' youth, with Lucifer on its right and Theodora's soul on its left.)

The Spirit of Johannes' youth:
The life within thy wishes feeds my life,
My breath drinks thirstily thy youthful dreams;
I am alive when thou dost not desire
To force thy way to worlds I cannot find.
If in thyself thou losest me, I must
Do grievous painful service to grim shades:—
O guardian of my life ... forsake me not.

Lucifer:
He never will forsake thee,—I behold
Deep in his nature longings after light
Which cannot follow in Maria's steps.
And when the radiance which is born of them
Doth fully light Johannes' artist-soul
It must bear fruit; nor will he be content
To cast this fruit away in yonder realm
Where love divorced from beauty reigns alone.
His self will no more seem of worth to him
Which fain would cast his best gifts to the shades,
Because it sets by knowledge too much store.
When wisdom shall throw light on his desires
Their glorious worth will be revealed to him;
He only can think them of little worth
So long as they hide darkly in the soul.
Until they can attain to wisdom's light
I will be thy protector—through the light
I find deep-seated in the human soul.

He has as yet no pity for thy woes,
And ever lets thee sink among the shades
When he is striving up the heights of light.
For then he can forget that thou, his child,
Must lead a miserable phantom life.
But henceforth, thou wilt find me at thy side
When as a shade thou freezest through his fault.
I will exert my rights as Lucifer

(At the word ‘Lucifer’ the Spirit of Johannes' youth starts.)

Reserved to me by ancient cosmic law,
And occupy those depths within his soul
He leaves unguarded in his spirit-flight.
I'll bring thee treasure that will light for thee
The dark seclusion of the shadow-realms.
But thou wilt not be fully freed till he
Can once again unite himself with thee.
This act he can delay ... but not prevent.
For Lucifer will well protect his rights.

Theodora:
Thou spirit-child, thou liv'st Johannes' youth
In gloomy shadow-realms. To thee in love
Bends down the soul which o'er Johannes broods
From realms ablaze with light, aglow with love.
She will from thine enchantment set thee free
If thou wilt take so much of what she feels
As shall procure thee life in blessedness.
I will ally thee with the elements
Which labour unaware in cosmic space
And ne'er descend to wakefulness of soul.
With those earth-spirits thou canst fashion forms,
And with the fire-souls thou canst ray out power,
If thou wilt sacrifice thy conscious life
Unto the Will that works with light and power
But without human wisdom. So shalt thou
Preserve thy knowledge,` only half thine own,
From Lucifer, and to Johannes give
The services which are of worth to him.
From his soul's being I will bring to him
What causeth him to crave thy being's aid,
And find refreshment in the spirit-sleep.

Lucifer:
But beauty she can ne'er bestow on thee
Since I myself dare take it far from her.

Theodora:
From noble feeling I will find the germ
Of beauty which grows ripe through sacrifice.

Lucifer:
From free-will she will tear thee and instead
Give thee to spirits dwelling in the dark.

Theodora:
I shall awaken sight by spirit filled
That e'en from Lucifer free knows itself.

(Lucifer, Theodora, and the Spirit of " Johannes' youth disappear. Johannes, awaking from his meditation, sees ` the Other Philia approaching him,)

The Other Philia:
And clairvoyant dreams
Make clear unto souls
The magical web
That forms their own life.

Johannes:
Thou riddle-speaking spirit—at thy words
This world I entered! Of its mysteries.
One only-is important for my soul:
Whether, as living in the spirit worlds,
The shadow dwells who sought with Lucifer
And Theodora to be shown to me.

The Other Philia:
He lives—lives as a semblance waked by thee.
E'en as a glass in pictures loth reflect
All things by light upon its surface thrown
So must whate'er in spirit-realms thou see'st—
Ere full maturity gives thee the right
To such clairvoyance—mirrored be in life
Within the realm of half-waked spirit-shades.

Johannes:
'Tis but a picture, mirrored thus by me?

The Other Philia:
Yet one that lives and keeps its hold on life
So long as thou dost keep within thyself
An outlived self which thou indeed canst stun
But which as yet thou canst not overthrow.
Johannes, thine awakening is but false
Until thou shalt thyself set free the shade
Whom thine offence doth grant a life bewitched.

Johannes:
What thanks I owe this spirit, who brings truth
Into my soul.—I needs must follow her.

Curtain falls slowly, while ‘the Other Philia’ and Johannes remain quietly standing
The Soul's Awakening

Dear attendees! As a continuation of the spiritual-scientific considerations that were presented here the day before yesterday, today I would like to give a continuation of what was suggested, a continuation that is intended to apply the gained perspectives to the significant question of human destiny.

In the lecture the day before yesterday, dear attendees, it was pointed out that spiritual science is entirely based on the inner work of the human soul, and I would like to briefly reiterate a few thoughts from the day before yesterday's lecture. The point of spiritual research is never, as in the other sciences that extend to the outer life and to the outer world of facts, to cultivate outwardly perceptible activities for the senses, never to carry out the outer world in any way at all, but the path into the spiritual world is an intimate path of the human soul. And one link in this path of the human soul, by which this soul prepares itself to enter the spiritual world, as was already indicated the day before yesterday, is a special way of treating what we call human imagination, human thinking.

I said: By allowing us to look into his inner spiritual laboratory, as it were, the spiritual researcher must point out that the human soul's imagining and thinking must be treated in a completely different way than they are treated in everyday life or in external science. In external science, we consider the thought, the idea, the concept that we have acquired on the basis of sensory observation or on the basis of experiment or in some other way; we consider the concept as that which we have acquired, as that which reflects the external world to us. And in that it depicts, be it processes in the external world, be it laws, natural laws or the like in the external world, we are satisfied when we have, so to speak, arrived at the thought, when we have arrived at the idea of what is going on outside, or how the external processes are connected in a lawful way.

But this is where spiritual scientific research begins, where the work of the mind, the life of the mind in everyday life or in external science ends. The point of spiritual scientific research is not to have a thought, not a thought as a reflection of the external world, but to live with the thought, with the idea in the inner soul. So that, as I have already mentioned, in this inner exercise, in this inner work of the spiritual world, it does not matter at all whether we are in the thought, in the idea, through which we practice the soul, through which we advance the soul, as it were, in higher self-education, whether we depict something external in the thought, in the imagination, whether in the ordinary sense of external science or of external life these thoughts are images of something in the external world; they can be symbols, as I mentioned. What matters is that we sink a thought into the soul, that we become completely one with that thought, that we divert all attention from what otherwise occupies us in the world, and, as it were, fix all the powers of the soul within us on this one thought.

And now we must immediately recognize, by doing this, that we are carrying out a completely different task than the tasks of ordinary science. In the tasks of ordinary, external science, we can stop when we have the thought, we can be satisfied when we have the thought. And we are convinced in ordinary science when the thought logically satisfies us, when the thought corresponds to our sense of truth; then we can stop our research work for the time being. This is not the case with the way one does spiritual research. It is never the case that you stop when you have the thought, which you place at the center of your consciousness through arbitrariness, through an inner will initiative; you basically have nothing when you have placed the thought at the center of your consciousness and directed the attention of all the powers concentrated in the soul to it. Just as one has very little when one has sunk the seed of a plant into the earth, so one has very little when one has fixed the thought in the soul. One must wait until the forces from the air, the forces from the earth, the forces from the sun and so on interact to develop the plant germ into a plant - one must wait and see what is not done by us, what is done by the cosmos, what is done by the outer world.

In exactly the same way, we as spiritual researchers must treat a thought. We must, as it were, sink it into the soil of the entire soul life and then wait and see what it becomes in it. We cannot help ourselves other than by repeating the same process of looking at a thought every day. It does not take long, minutes are enough every day, but it must be repeated every day; and it takes a long, long time. And all we can do is wait and see what becomes of this thought by devoting all the powers of the soul to it and looking at nothing else, feeling nothing else, sensing nothing else but this thought. The important thing in spiritual research is to watch something growing within ourselves. While in other research it is important to carry out a certain task and to explore the lawful connection through thought, that is, while it is about doing something that has, I would say, a beginning and an end through our own will, in spiritual research we have to watch what becomes of the growing, sprouting thought in us.

And then the time comes – earlier for some, later for others, depending on how their destiny is laid out – then the time comes when forces hidden in the soul become active and more and more active, and by applying that inner energy, which we otherwise cannot summon up in our everyday life and in ordinary science, we really bring about what can be said to truly tear our soul-spiritual out of the physical-bodily, and it leaves the physical-bodily. By expressing this thought and calling attention to the fact that it is a spiritual-scientific method, one immediately touches something in this spiritual-scientific method that completely contradicts the thinking habits of the present time. . By expressing this thought and calling attention to what spiritual-scientific method is, one immediately touches something in this spiritual-scientific method that completely contradicts the thinking habits of the present time. These thought habits of the present time cannot imagine that it is really possible for a person to find such inner strength in his soul, that his spiritual and mental self is so torn from the physical and bodily as the hydrogen is torn from the water by the procedures used by the chemist. But everything depends on whether the human being, by continuing to do what has just been described at its most elementary level, really comes to perceive another person living within him, another person who underlies our existence and who does not need to use the external senses to have a world around him, who does not need to use the mind, which is connected to the brain or the nervous system, to have an external world around him.

The world view, esteemed attendees, which corresponds to today's thinking and which often emphasizes that it stands on the solid ground of the so admirable natural science, this world view often speaks of the limits of human knowledge, it speaks of it in such a way that it says : Yes, there may be a spiritual world, a supersensible world that underlies the sensual facts and everything that can be known through the intellect, which is connected to the brain, but humans are not designed to penetrate this world. And we know that there have been philosophies over and over again in the course of human development, philosophies that have endeavored to determine the limits of human knowledge.

Basically, these limits of knowledge are only the limits of those insights that are bound to the physical and bodily. And why this is so can also be seen by the spiritual researcher if he really applies the methods described in a few strokes to his soul life. For a very peculiar phenomenon occurs when one endeavors, through ever more energetic and energetic concentration of the soul power in the indicated sense, to become, as it were, completely one with that which one has placed at the center of one's perception, one's thinking, one's entire consciousness. After a time, one notices how something really does grow inwardly, something really does contract inwardly, namely our soul-spiritual nature, which is dependent on the body. But after some time one notices that one is heading straight for the opposite extreme. Not only do all kinds of other thoughts keep coming into one's attentive consciousness and confusing one on the path one is seeking with one's soul life, but this is something that can be overcome relatively quickly. However, what the spiritual researcher encounters when he tries to develop his soul is that, while he first experiences an increase of the forces that otherwise underlie thinking - [at a certain point there occurs what could be called “a darkening, a weakening” of this inner soul force], and that which the soul experiences there is, basically, quite harrowing. For one experiences nothing less than a feeling of approaching powerlessness, a powerlessness that says to oneself: Alas, these soul powers are not sufficient to penetrate the whole extent of the spiritual world! It comes over the consciousness like a terribly paralyzing sleep. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what those philosophers do not allow themselves to approach when they speak of the limits of knowledge, but what the soul, I would say unconsciously feels when it philosophizes.

For not only that lives in the depths of the soul, of which the soul is aware in ordinary life, but down there in the depths of the soul, in the hidden depths of the soul, there lives so much that is not in everyday consciousness. And the fact that we know nothing about it does not mean that what is down there in consciousness is not effective. There, in the unconscious, is something that the spiritual researcher experiences at the moment when he has this feeling of powerlessness, of which I have just spoken. The spiritual researcher notices: there is an unconscious fear in the soul, a fear of losing the ability to perceive and understand the world. And there is no other way to overcome this fear, as soon as it becomes conscious, than to intensify the already described efforts of concentrating the soul life more and more. Then, I would say, into the empty space of consciousness, in which the power that otherwise underlies thinking and feeling had already been paralyzed, there enters that which can enter through the increased strength and inner energy of the soul life.

It was a hidden fear, one that had not come to consciousness, when Kant spoke of the limits of human knowledge. He felt that knowledge in which the body helps us cannot go beyond the realm of sensory life and the laws of sensory life. He did not want to make use of the spiritual scientific method. He called it, although he sensed that there was something like a development of the soul towards independence from the physical body, he called it: “an adventure of reason”. And Goethe gave the great, one may say the powerful answer, that one must dare to pass this adventure of reason.

Powerlessness is what one really has at the bottom of one's soul, what is always at the bottom of one's soul. And one would like to say, honored attendees, that this powerlessness at the bottom of the human soul is fully justified. For if this powerlessness were not there, then the urge of man would be invincible to use the soul-spiritual powers forever for that which leads beyond the sensory world. But the fact that we feel, perceive and recognize the world of the senses is based on the fact that we, I would say, become accustomed to our physical body, to the physical-bodily, and that we regard it as a necessity to live in relation to the world in this physical-bodily. Just as one carries out a chemical experiment in such a way that it leads to the abnormality of external nature and thereby unravels nature, so one must develop something abnormal in the soul, something abnormal for everyday life, in order to truly look into the spiritual world, I would say through inner chemistry.

And by living in the spiritual world, one certainly gets a different idea of this newly acquired knowledge than one had of all knowledge before. Yes, knowledge is something that so many people associate with the idea that one actually recognizes best when one limits oneself to the intellect and the outer senses, which basically leave us sober and cold, and which occupy only a part of our life. The moment the spiritual researcher truly enters the spiritual world in the manner described, the moment he has torn his soul and spirit away from the physical body, he is surrounded by a spiritual world just as he is surrounded by a sense world within the body. In the same moment in which the spiritual researcher truly enters this world of the spiritual, in that same moment he feels as though he has awakened in this spiritual realm. But at the same time he feels that he can no longer be with the world with only a part of his soul life, as in outer knowledge, but that he must immerse his entire being in what presents itself to him as the spiritual world.

Just as abstract, I would even say sober and dry, as the world is that only animates and occupies part of our soul as the world of ordinary knowledge, the connection with the spiritual world is just as intensely effective in our soul. One can say: in the ordinary sense of the word, intellectual knowledge of the external world cannot hurt or cause us pain. In the moment when we enter the spiritual world in the way described, we must immerse ourselves with our whole soul in the beings that belong to the world into which we are entering. Everything we recognize there makes the deepest, most intense impression on our sense of pleasure or pain, on our sense of sublimity or on our sense of oppression. Our whole being is immersed. With our whole being, we have to live with the world in which we live, whether it be full of sorrow or joy. And again, it is fear, but a secretly felt fear that does not come to consciousness, which prevents the ordinary consciousness from immersing itself in this world. Truly, one does not become poorer in world content when one approaches this spiritual world. On the contrary, honored attendees, one becomes richer in world content, because one realizes what this fear of a subconscious powerlessness is actually based on. It is based on the fact that the world is much richer, infinitely richer in its glory, in its greatness, in its inner lawfulness, than what we are only able to think when we make use of the powers that are bound to our body.

And the riches of the world are what immediately arise before the soul in an overwhelming and numbing manner when it confronts the spiritual world through inner strength. But the soul, which is bound to the physical with its consciousness, feels, despite knowing nothing about it, it feels powerless, and it wants to avoid this powerlessness out of fear, the powerlessness that exists in the face of the spiritual world. Therefore, we see how, on the one hand, people shrink back and delude themselves about the limits of knowledge, so that they say that knowledge cannot penetrate into the spiritual world at all, or, on the other hand, when they have a deep yearning for the spiritual world, they satisfy it in a completely different way than the one described. The way described is that of genuine, true spiritual research. But the way described presupposes that one is serious about freeing oneself from the physical body. This can only be achieved through increased inner soul activity, this can only be achieved through the application of an energy that is never necessary for us as inner energy in everyday life or in everyday science.

But people want to apply the very thing they are accustomed to in everyday life when they approach the higher worlds. Human consciousness, after all, feels precisely the powerlessness described, and, I might say, in a way that is quite understandable, this consciousness feels this powerlessness described precisely when it wants to confront the more intense, the richer, the more exalted world of the spirit. Therefore, man would prefer to eliminate what dwells in his body rather than exerting himself to a greater extent in order to recognize the spiritual world. The feeling of hidden powerlessness makes him come to the conclusion that precisely because he is powerless in the face of spiritual life, he must eliminate the means by which he recognizes in ordinary life; instead of developing it, he wants to eliminate it. Then he does not approach to recognize the spiritual world, to develop his inner being, but then he approaches and seeks either through some external events or by using, as one says, a medium in whom precisely the spiritual, instead of being developed, is asleep, he tries to gain knowledge of the spiritual world through the automatism of the bodily life of the medium, without his inner involvement. There is only the fearful shrinking from reliving the experience of unconsciousness. For this feeling of unconsciousness must be experienced; only by overcoming it, by consciously experiencing it, does man advance in knowledge. But in the secret feeling of this feeling of unconsciousness, it is precisely that which man wants to shut out, that which leads him to spiritual knowledge. That is why so many seek through mediums or spiritists to communicate with them from the spiritual world. It is easy to see that this search through mediums or spiritists is the extreme, the ultimate expression of the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the spiritual world.

But our time, honored attendees, needs strength, needs power, because as the outer life becomes more and more complicated and complicated by the wonderfully developing natural science, especially in its social ramifications, man, in wanting to penetrate the spiritual world, must develop ever stronger and stronger powers. That which appeals to weakness, to the exclusion of the spiritual and soul, can never have a future; it can lull and lull man to sleep in the face of what is to be brought out of the hidden depths of the soul.

Now one can imagine how much what has been said is rejected as – let me say it again – a mental laboratory process of the thought habits of our present time, how much it is rejected, one can imagine when one sees that just the opposite extreme of what has been described has become the ideal for a large part of the educated people of today. For where is the spiritual researcher led when he enters the spiritual world by the method just described? He is led to say to himself: Not only does the world of sense live in your surroundings, but a spiritual world also lives in your surroundings! And he recognizes: This spiritual world contains the causes, the foundations for the existence of the world of sense. But the ideal of very many who truly believe that, as trained and educated people, they stand on the firm ground of natural science, with which, as I mentioned the day before yesterday, spiritual science is in fact completely in harmony. But most of those people, whose nature has been indicated, who believe that they see the ideal in eliminating everything that is found in the characterized way, believe that the ideal of knowing nature is to see only mechanically interacting causes and facts everywhere, to eliminate everything spiritual from external natural processes. That is the ideal of very many who have the thinking habits of the present day.

And it is basically considered a remnant of old superstition to see anything in nature or behind nature that is spiritual; [rather, one wants to] explain as much of nature as possible only by facts that are built according to the pattern of what can be observed by the senses. In this way one wants to comprehend external physics, biology, physiology and even the processes of the soul. I hinted at this the day before yesterday.

The ideal of a knowledge that excludes everything that the spiritual researcher comes to when he applies spiritual scientific methods is the ideal of the most educated people, many of the most educated people of today. So one might say: mechanical natural order is what is taken as the basis of nature. And the counterpart to this, dear ladies and gentlemen, is the observation of human life. Once we have become accustomed to seeing nothing but mechanical order in nature, we then become accustomed to rejecting precisely what the spiritual researcher must come to. And a sum of coincidences is basically what people see in what befalls them in their lives between birth and death, in the physical life of the body.

So how does a person relate to what happens in this life between birth and death? When something happens to him that he regards as a stroke of fate, for better or for worse, his initial response to this stroke of fate is what can be called the sympathy and antipathy of the mind. Just as a person searches for causes and effects in nature outside, he basically leaves what plays a role in his destiny as a mere series, as a mere sequence of coincidences.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, since we can say that the spiritual-soul content awakened in the spiritual researcher actually slumbers in the human being in ordinary life, it must be said that even in the fully waking life, when a person is engaged in action, when a person acts in such a way that he uses his outer body and the outer sense world to carry out actions, something in the person also sleeps. And what sleeps there prevents him from seeing a connection in the process that is unfolding, in the coincidences of life. Basically, what happens to man in the context of life is the same as what happens to many people in the course of history and still does today in the face of natural facts. A person who does not study natural science sees the sun rise and set; he observes the individual positions of the sun; for him, external facts exist that occur over time and in space. Then he, with his thinking, with his science, with his methods, approaches what are otherwise external facts, and he brings coherence into this world of external facts by replacing mere staring at the facts with the coherence that is expressed in the laws of nature. Man does not bring such a connection into what he calls external life coincidences, initially, because the forces within him that mean the same for this area as the forces of cognition mean for the facts of external nature, remain dormant for ordinary life. We must apply our knowledge to the facts of external nature in order to see laws in external nature. According to ordinary habits of thinking, man is not inclined to apply to that which takes place as his fate between birth and death such inner processes as he applies to the facts of external nature. And I will now indicate the path that arises for spiritual research in order to bring a similar law into the sequence of events of fate, as external thinking brings it into the sequence of natural facts.

What we call fate, I would like to say, let us look at it only - not to say anything special about it now, but only to illustrate what I want to say later - let us look at what we call fate, first of all for the life between birth and death, for the outer life that always surrounds us, in which we are always wrapped up and which our fate imposes on us.

We can say that when we look at ourselves in any particular phase of our lives: What are we actually in this phase of our lives? Yes, we say: we are a self, we are an I; we have a certain inner soul life. But certain things in this inner soul life that lie on the surface, we learn to understand and look at quite differently when we look back at earlier phases of our lives. If, for example, after we have turned fifty or forty-five or forty years old, we allow ourselves to look back – say, to the time we went through between the tenth and the eighteenth or twentieth year – when we look back at the so-called coincidences of fate that occurred in our lives at that time, yes, when we fully realize what lies in these coincidences of fate, then we will very soon be able to say the following to ourselves: You can do something now. You are able to think in this or that way, to act in this or that way. Basically, you are nothing other than this ability, this ability to understand, this ability to act. That you understand something more or less spiritually, that you act in one way or another, that is basically what you are. Why is it you? Just think how you would be different, how you would really be a completely different inner self if the events had not occurred that you can look back on between the tenth and twentieth year. They forged you into what you became; what you became there is concentrated in your self. These events now act out of you in many ways. They have concentrated you in essence; they have formed your self. And when we study our self at a particular moment in our life, we find it, I might say, put together like the sum of an addition from the addends. One can now survey one's life in this way. It is not a matter of finding all kinds of interesting things in one's life. What in ordinary life we call self-observation does not actually lead the soul very far beyond itself. But there is a special way of developing one's soul life when one really comes to look at the experiences of fate one has with sympathy or antipathy, but when one looks at them in such a way that they are the basis for what one actually is.

It is not this insight that is important in spiritual research, but the feeling that You have found yourself as a result, as a product of your destiny! This feeling can be increasingly awakened in oneself. And now two things can come together: what one has previously awakened as a spiritual researcher through the concentration of thought, of feeling, as it has been described, what one has experienced as the emergence of the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily, and the development of this feeling. They can meet in the soul, these feelings, just as in ordinary life between birth and death one is actually the result of fate.

And when one meditates in this way, when one develops this coloring, this nuance of feeling in the soul, when one concentrates more and more on how, as it were, the inner self of the human being flows out completely and into the current of our destiny, when one makes these ideas completely alive within oneself, when one comes to literally see: Yes, what you are in your inner being, as your self, you see flowing into your destiny. When this becomes very much alive, when it is repeated again and again, so that it becomes a habitual inner experience, then we indeed experience a transformation, a transformation of our soul life. We experience such a transformation, such a transformation of our soul life, that only now is it experienced as a fulfilled, complete whole, which can be called the spiritual-soul that is free from the body.

And this soul-life, this spiritual-soul life, which is free from the body, shows itself to us, honored attendees, when we continue the spiritual scientific methods, as they have been described, and shows itself to us as that which underlies our life between birth and death. It does not reveal itself by logical deduction, but by developing such an inner life as has been described, the soul, as it were, opens a spiritual eye, to use this expression of Goethe's; as if the eye had not yet developed and only developed in the course of life and then our vision opened, it is like this when we work on our inner being, that a new person arises in our inner being, a person who now stands before us in such a way that he is now not just the result of fate, as it has been stated in a trivial way for the time between birth and death, but that he really grows together with his fate.

And now something new arises; so if one has developed the soul, something arises again that can be called: the perception of a secret fear otherwise hidden in the soul. So when you let the soul, as it were by seeing it in the river of fate, snatch itself from the body, then, then you discover - not what you are as a bodily human being - but then you discover within the spiritual world, which you have already conquered in the way described, you now discover yourself. Now you discover what you never knew about yourself before, now you discover the true human being. Now you discover the human being that underlies the ordinary human being who lives between birth and death – or, for that matter, between conception and death. Now we discover the human being who descends from a spiritual world as the true cause of physical human existence, who has an attraction to what can be given to him through the ancestral line, through parents and pre-parents, who brings down the forces from the spiritual world that only form themselves through what can be given to him materially through parents and pre-parents. And now, honored attendees, a fact to which, I would say, the great modern thinker Lessing pointed with deep inner truth, now a truth becomes the realization that what is at work in our body is the result of previous lives on earth. And that what works hidden in our body, without us being able to sense it in our ordinary life, that this is like a germ that after death first enters a spiritual world and, after it has developed in this spiritual world in such a way as the plant germ must develop, it pulls itself together again, so to speak, for a new life on earth. The realization that the whole of human life proceeds in such a way that there are repeated earthly lives for man, this realization must be acquired by the soul's distinguishing itself from the physical body.

In the ordinary experience, honored attendees, one basically has only a single reference to what lives in us as a human core, which goes from life to life and always stays in a spiritual world between death and a new birth. In spiritual knowledge, one lives in this core of life, in this essence of the human being. In ordinary life, we only have a certain point of reference for this when a person falls asleep at night. Spiritual scientific observation shows that falling asleep is conditioned by the fact that what is the core of a person's soul and spirit really lifts itself out of the physical body. But because the powers are not developed, as has been mentioned today, this spiritual-soul core of being remains unconscious from falling asleep until waking up. But very often, as everyone knows, something emerges from this unconsciousness of ordinary sleep life: the chaotic, but often also very interesting, structures of the dream.

What presents itself to a person in a dream is very often observed incorrectly. Among the many dream images – I cannot, of course, go into great detail about what a dream presents, although it would be very interesting to see what one can experience there – the most interesting dreams are probably those in which someone in later life, for the dream life, the dream consciousness, sees some scene in which people appear with whom he may not have had any contact for a long time, many of whom may have died, people with whom he now enters into relationships in his dream consciousness. Whole stories can unfold. If you look at such a dream in the sense of an ordinary memory activity, you are very much mistaken. It would take too long to explain this sentence in more detail, although it can be explained in more detail.

If you want to properly assess the events of a dream that take place in the unconscious mind, you don't have to look at the content at all. These images, everything that takes place, is basically only as significant for the essence of the dream as it would be if one were to say: 'There is a sheet of paper, on it I find a vertical line, a line that goes askew from right to left, one that goes askew from left to right, and so on. In this way he would describe all the letters that are on the paper. But it is not the person who describes the letters on the sheet of paper who is relating to the paper in the right way. Rather, the only person who relates to it in the right way is the person who, having learned to read, deciphers the meaning of what the letters, combined into words, express, without even bringing into his consciousness what the letters look like. What the dream presents is, in relation to what it is in essence, really nothing but letters, which, however, are not as exact as the letters of our ordinary writing, but change with each dream. And it is a deeper realization that can look at the dream and decipher it, just as we remain unconscious of the unconscious when we read the forms of the individual letters and words; that is what is actually contained in the processes of the dream, it is more the character of the human soul core that conjures up these images.

For example, we dream that a person who has long since died tells us this or that, that he does this or that with us. We do not dream it because this image of the dream wants to tell us something special, but we dream it because our soul essence has an inner quality, an inner power, which can best be visualized in this way, can best be visualized by putting itself into a relationship, symbolically into a relationship with a person, with this person whom one has encountered in life. That which is not expressed in the dream at all, which is at the bottom of the soul as the inner strength of the soul, as the character of the soul, that is the essential thing. And if one engages in the scientific recognition of the dream experience, precisely through the method of spiritual research that has been mentioned, by perfecting it in this way, if one engages not in interpretation but in the scientific recognition of the dream experience, then one also finds in the dream experiences that something that is in a person is shaped by special circumstances - which could also be described, but which the short time available today does not allow - into such images. And spiritual research shows us that what a person has acquired in the time between death and a new birth has matured in him a life core, a life germ.

We act and think in the life between birth and death, but what we think and how we act always expresses only a part of what we are, namely the part that lives through the fact that we are in a body. Just as the essence of the other person, who has been described and discovered through spiritual science, is hidden in the everyday life of the person, so this core of being is hidden in the human being. Only through those special occasions in our particular life, in our dream life for example, does the human soul core, which is free of the body when we fall asleep or awaken and is not yet completely at one with the bodily life, reveal itself. how it is mirrored in the bodily life, with which it is still imperfectly united, and what has passed through the human being in every action, but has been stored away, what has remained, what we have not fully lived out, what we have incorporated into our inner self. In dreams, that which passes through the gate of death reveals itself, that which passes through a spiritual world to reappear in a new life on earth. However, one can only recognize it through the dream if spiritual research has preceded all of this, honored attendees!

Thus we see how, in the course of spiritual research, man not only has to experience the unconsciousness of which we have spoken, and how, in overcoming this unconsciousness, he has to find his way into the spiritual world, but we also see how man has to discover his true self first.

Now, before this discovery, man has a secret fear. For the process is the process of losing ourselves in the body as human beings, while discovering ourselves as true human beings who go from life to life. As a spiritual researcher, the human being must first get used to looking at himself outside of himself in the world; he must first get used to discovering himself in his fateful work, and by mustering the courage to overcome the fear and shyness one has of oneself, one discovers oneself in one's true self. And now you discover that this true self is the forge of that which otherwise appears to us as the result of the coincidences of life. You now discover yourself in your destiny. And a completely new feeling, a completely new experience, interweaves and surges through the soul.

We are confronted by a heavy blow of fate, a blow of fate that we otherwise only face when it causes us bitterness and suffering, when it shakes our mind and we feel unhappy under its influence. If, as a spiritual researcher, you have discovered your higher self in the way described, you say to yourself: You have gone through many earthly lives with this higher self of yours. You have lived, thought and acted in these earthly lives in such a way that you have brought with you a certain quality in your soul from previous lives. This quality of the soul adheres to you just as the magnetic force is in the magnet. This quality, this power, exerts a secret attraction on the event that has entered your life as a misfortune, just as a magnet attracts iron filings. You have sought out this misfortune for yourself!

Do we not see in life what can be, once we have gained this point of view, honored attendees? We go through life. Much, much passes our eyes, ears, minds, feelings and wills. We meet many people. Among many and many people there is one whom we, as it were, feel attracted to by mysterious forces of our being, with whom we enter into a life partnership in friendship or otherwise. Why did we do that? Because the forces that we brought with us from previous lives were seated within us, and because these forces were attracted to what lives in this person's soul, just as a magnet is attracted to iron filings. This force passed by the other person. But through this we shape for ourselves everything that we now experience together with this person as fate.

In the same way, however, we also shape our destiny by descending from the spiritual world in which we live between death and new birth to the new birth. In our physical existence on earth, there are those forces that our ancestors can give us through inheritance. We are drawn to those forces that we need according to the qualities of our soul, and we connect with them. We notice the secret bond that exists between us – long before birth, before conception – and that which can be given to us by the hereditary powers of our ancestors. Indeed, more exact spiritual research even shows us, honored attendees, that this bond has been forming long before there can be any talk of our birth or our conception.

Once logic takes the place of what is currently believed to be logic, but is in fact pure illogic, a completely different way of thinking will take hold. Today, many people say: You can see that a person who displays certain qualities in life must have inherited these qualities from his or her parents or ancestors. Spiritual science wants to come and show that the human being, as a core, so to speak, envelops the inherited qualities he has chosen for himself. According to today's thinking, we should be glad that external science has brought it to recognize how the qualities of ancestors revive in descendants, as ordinary physiology can explain.

And particularly the core of this logic is what people want to play out when they say: you can see that in genius. If you observe genius, you can see that the qualities that are concentrated in genius can be found in the parents, grandparents and so on and so forth. Genius usually occurs at the end of a developmental series. Nice logic, that! Because it is quite similar to when someone finds it particularly helpful to explain that they are wet when they have fallen into water and are being pulled out. Of course, if you are at the end of a line of inheritance, you must bear the qualities that surrounded you in the body through that line of inheritance, just as water surrounds you when you fall into a stream. But there would be real logic in the matter if one could show that what lived in the ancestors as qualities of genius would live in the descendants. Not by looking up from the genius to the ancestors, but by descending from the genius to the descendants, that would be real logic. You don't even realize how you are contradicting all logic when you proceed in this way, when you judge as it happens. Because you will stay pretty, that you always look for the qualities of genius in the descendants. One need only point out great geniuses and then show how it sometimes looks, especially with their descendants! Here one will soon find that what a person has worked for himself, what he is inside, that this is what provides the attractive force for events, for all the processes of outer life that converge in his destiny.

Thus we will be able to say: From birth to death, we bring order into the succession of our other coincidences of fate when we recognize ourselves, when we overcome our fear of ourselves and recognize ourselves in our true humanity. Because then we also recognize that we have brought misfortune upon ourselves because we want to steel ourselves against this misfortune, because we lacked a strength and the lack of this strength evoked an attribute in us that forms an attraction for precisely this misfortune.

In addition to such a worldview, which thus discovers the actual human being in destiny, comes the realization that the only reason the human being does not want to discover himself in his destiny is because he is afraid of arriving at this view. This is difficult, honored attendees, but once the truths of spiritual research have been discovered, then one does not need to be a spiritual researcher – although, as I explained the day before yesterday, to a certain extent everyone today can become a spiritual researcher by observing the rules written in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. To a certain extent, I said – but one does not need to be. Once the truths of spiritual research have been expressed, they can be understood and recognized by the sense of truth that exists in everyone, provided it is unbiased.

Just as one does not need to be a chemist to benefit from everything a chemist produces – here one does not need to understand it, only to benefit from it – so one does not need to be a spiritual scientist to find truth, because, to use a trivial word, to find truth is the benefit of spiritual scientific discoveries. Just as one can apply chemical products in life, so can one apply that which spiritual research brings, because it is there and one only needs to approach it without the prejudices that come from ordinary habits of thought, which have been sufficiently described, if one only does not approach it, it will have an effect on the natural person.

The spiritual researcher relies on nothing else, on no authority, he relies on nothing else but the fact that he discovers and explores nothing but what lives in every soul. Through his knowledge, nothing is added to reality; what he discovers lives in every soul. Therefore, it only needs to be expressed, therefore what lives in the depths of every human soul must profess what the spiritual researcher has to say.

Even if this is not yet the case today, yes, if it must seem understandable, as I said the day before yesterday, that today much more opposition, disregard, scorn and ridicule is being expressed towards what the spiritual researcher has to say, it is still true that the development in the next future will proceed in such a way that people will just be willing to acknowledge that human life in truth continues through many earthly lives, that fate becomes understandable to us when we see the higher human being prevailing even in the indicated way, in this fate. Thus men will be willing to recognize this, as they have been willing to recognize that which, as it was said at the time, “contradicts the healthy five senses,” namely, that it is not the earth that stands still and the sun that moves around and the stars that move around, but that it is the other way around, that the earth moves around the sun.

Those who come today and say, “What the spiritual researcher has to say contradicts the healthy five senses!” are on the same ground as those people who came at the time of Copernicus and said, “Well, that the sun should stand still, that contradicts the healthy five senses!” No healthy, thinking person can acknowledge that. As in those days – I have already said this here in earlier years – as in those days, when Copernicus's new teaching was accepted, Giordano Bruno came and said: Our five senses have taught us that up there is the blue firmament and under this firmament the stars revolve. But the truth is that there is no blue firmament up there, but that only the limitations of human perception set the firmament - the firmament feigns to you - while the universe goes out into infinity and embedded in the universe are the innumerable stars. Just as Giordano Bruno had to reveal the spatial firmament as a mere appearance, which is evoked by the limitations of human perception, so spiritual science must, I would say, reveal the temporal firmament of the human soul life, which is limited by birth or, let us say, conception and death. Just as there is no firmament above, there are no limits where birth or conception and death are concerned. Only human observation and human thinking in ordinary life are limited there; and this one life is embedded in the whole stream of time.

Today, esteemed attendees, we stand at precisely the same turning point in spiritual knowledge as the world stood in relation to natural knowledge when Giordano Bruno had to step forward and emphasize the deception of the outer space firmament, just as we today must emphasize the deception of the time firmament, of birth and death. But when people will understand, even without becoming spiritual researchers - because just as there are individual chemists, individual astronomers, there will always be individual spiritual researchers in the future - when people have put aside all prejudices against spiritual research, just as they have put aside all prejudices against the scientific world view, then, just as the scientific world view has flowed into the activities of our outer life, how it has, I might say, built up everything around us in our outer life in the modern world, so too will spiritual science, in relation to the life of the soul, into which we live as human beings by living towards the future, that is, into what the spiritual-scientific ideas are.

And above all, it should be noted that these spiritual scientific ideas are incorporated into our feelings and perceptions. And how different these feelings and perceptions become when they are permeated, imbued and suffused with spiritual scientific ideas, for example when we ask ourselves the question of fate. We will find fate intimately linked to what the higher part of ourselves, the actual spiritual soul that goes from birth to birth, accomplishes. Just as we see the laws of nature in the external nature as the connection of the external natural facts, so we will see our higher self, ruling in our destiny.

Of course, the question can always be raised, I just want to say that as an interjection, dear ladies and gentlemen, whether this will always continue in this way for all eternity with earthly life. Well, only as long as the earth is under the same conditions as it is now, will earthly life continue in this way. Spiritual science leads us straight back – you can read more about this in my 'Occult Science' – to very different conditions on Earth. There, the human being has also developed out of very different conditions into a life that leads him through repeated lives on Earth. And when the Earth has taken on completely different forms, there will also be completely different conditions on Earth, as physics already teaches us, then the human being will also take on completely different forms. This life on earth is an intermediate state, from one birth to the next. But as we now live this life on earth, spiritual science is what brings coherence to all our coincidences of fate, what allows us to grow together with our destiny. And it is certainly the case in our time, and I do not want it to be felt as out of place, when it is said that the difficult time that we are going through in these days, weeks and months must particularly direct our souls to such an understanding of human destiny. We see – as I mentioned the day before yesterday – how, in countless sufferings, but also in countless acts of courageous bravery, in admirable acts of sacrifice, what must be lived out in the course of history is being lived out precisely through today's events.

And how can a person who finds himself in these events feel a sense of belonging to these events, how can he feel a sense of belonging to these fateful events of our time, if he can feel how the secret bond of attraction, which has been said to emanate from his being and to prepare his destiny, has placed him precisely in this fateful time? How does one feel, growing together with such a difficult time, when one feels the growing together between the human being in the higher sense and destiny in the sense of spiritual science? And how does that trust grow, which we must have in events, when one sees the connection between the human being and his destiny? On the one hand, we see how we, with our higher self, have chosen this time as our appropriate lifetime, as the lifetime that most closely corresponds to the qualities that we have hidden in our core being, and how we have placed ourselves in this time. In this way we also gain confidence: we will have the strength to truly fulfill the demands that this time must place on us. Not through mere admonitions, not through mere coaxing, not in some sentimental way do we want to be prompted by spiritual science to have confidence, but by saying to ourselves: one thing always demands another. The qualities in our soul that have brought us into this time are connected with others that will also enable us to lead what our time lets us experience to such ends as were presented in the lecture the day before yesterday as arising from the demands of our time.

We do not rely on admonitions, not on sentimental coaxing, but on the knowledge that we can have of the forces that are there to overcome, after the forces were there that led us into the time. For man gains, when he really immerses himself in spiritual science with his soul, honored attendees, that he gains a full awareness of it: Yes, down there in your depths, there are soul forces that you know nothing about, but that can come up from these depths! Above all, man gains trust in himself, trust in the forces that are in him, in the depths of his soul. This is what lies in spiritual science itself as a strengthening soul force. And if we again take up the thread of what I allowed myself to take up the day before yesterday, of Central European culture, how it is, one might say, enclosed by its enemies as if in a great fortress, we can say: this trust is strengthened in us in yet another way.

The day before yesterday, I pointed out how this Central European culture is truly called upon to develop a very special spiritual life, and how this spiritual life can be characterized by saying that the members of other nationalities are born into their nationality; as they are born, so to speak, people stand within their nation, and when you see [how other nations emphasize the national principle], you always find it traced back to the fact that the person was born into that nation. That is precisely what is peculiar about the Central European people, that they are becoming. To use Goethe's words: “Whosoever strives, we can redeem him” — that is the motto of the Central European. To discover what one is, that is the essential thing. To discover during one's lifetime what one is as a Central European cultural being, that is the peculiarity of the Central European, the seeking, the striving.

And so we find, when we look, I would say, properly at the folk spirits of the Central European people, we find, as germinally predisposed, everywhere, the very thing that spiritual science wants to express as its innermost lifeblood, which it hopes will increasingly incorporate itself into culture. And there we see that the germs appear everywhere in the Central European cultural soul, just as it is true that the germs, if cultivated in the right way, must develop into flowers and fruits, so it is true that we may trust that will bear blossoms and fruits and that it will not be possible to prevent this Central European spiritual life from bearing these blossoms and fruits, no matter how many enemies arise against it in the east and west and north and south. For the forces lie within it, the forces do not lie in anything that comes from outside this Central European spiritual life.

So we see, to pick just a few examples, how there are people within Central European intellectual life who are completely immersed in it with all its soul forces and who, I would like to suggest, are pointing to what spiritual science in its full light wants to present to humanity. In this connection I would like to draw attention to a spirit who, especially under the present conditions, has had even less influence on Central European intellectual life, but who is truly completely immersed in it and is characteristic of this Central European intellectual life in the deepest sense: one could call him 'Goethe's deputy'. I am talking about Herman Grimm, the great art historian of the second half of the nineteenth century. I do not want to go into the peculiarities of Herman Grimm's art research, which is so misunderstood by many, today. But I would like to point out that Herman Grimm wrote wonderful novellas and also an extraordinarily significant novel, “Unüberwindliche Mächte” (Insurmountable Forces) is the title.

I would like to draw attention to something in this work of art – which has not been recognized, which is contained in this work of art and which we recognize as characteristic of Central European intellectual life – in just a few strokes. I would like to highlight a few characteristic features. Herman Grimm attempts to depict the fate of people, but everywhere he feels the need to work as an artist towards what spiritual science should bring to the living scientific life of humanity, namely: to link human fate not only to what can be presented externally as events that can be pursued by the mind, but to what stands behind these events.

He has written a novella, 'The Songstress', a very remarkable novella. I mention this novella not because I want to prove something about spiritual science through a work of art, but for the opposite reason, because I want to show how someone who has immersed themselves in spiritual science can find that here an artist describes something in such a way that the spiritual researcher feels: he does not describe certain spiritual processes in a dilettantish way, but he describes spiritual processes in such a way that they correspond to what the spiritual researcher must gradually discover. In this singer, we find a portrayal of how a somewhat flirtatious but nevertheless spiritually advanced lady exerts a great attraction on a person who has to face her in life. But the lady attracts him, the one who loves her so much, and repels him again. And now the novella is constructed in such a way that the one who writes it, who gives the story of himself, is not the lover, but someone else who takes part in telling it in the first person. He says that he has become acquainted with the lady's lover, that he has seen how the lover is drawn to and then repelled by the lady, and how the lover finally comes to be completely ostracized by the lady, and how he comes to lose all comfort and all hope and all security in life. Now we see how the other man, who is his friend, later meets him on a journey, after he has already lost all confidence in life, how he takes him to his house, how he finds out about him, how he is so saddened to death that he really no longer wants to live. So this friend brings the singer herself; she is to come to the house so that the two can meet again. Meanwhile, however, the lover has arranged it so that when the two, the friend and the singer, arrive at the friend's home, the shot is fired and the lover ends his life by suicide upon their arrival. And now we see, as described in a wonderful way by Herman Grimm, how this lady is in the friend's house in the next few nights and how she experiences - after the lover has killed himself - how she experiences, in spirit form, what has passed through the gateway of death from her lover. And Herman Grimm lets us sense that what has gone out through death is actually the determining factor of fate. It is so much a part of this that precisely through the effect that emanates from the appearance of the dead person, I would say the ghostly apparition, the lady herself wastes away and finally dies.

Again, just as with the dream, I do not want to place too much emphasis on the content that is presented, but rather on the fact that here we have an artist who does not stop at the mere one-sided reality of the external sensory world and in the mere summary of the external coincidences of fate, as one says, but who tries to see the chains of human destiny in their connection with what passes through the gateway of death and also to represent it artistically.

Herman Grimm does this not only once, as he shows with his great novel “Unüberwindliche Mächte”. He shows this by letting the novel's heroine, young Emmy, experience how the one who has become the most precious thing in the world to her is murdered. He does not end up by suicide, he is murdered. She is already ill, the heroine, but with the death of her lover she now wastes away. And now Herman Grimm vividly describes how very peculiar death is, how what has passed through the gate of death plays a role in the case of the person who has been shot – he has been shot, has not ended his life by suicide – how this is still connected with the soul of the living, how it affects the living, how it forms a mysterious bond and actually causes the infirmity in this being, Emmy. And now Herman Grimm describes even that which only the spiritual researcher can understand in its full significance: he describes how the spirit form, which passes through death into the spiritual world, really rises. Herman Grimm wonderfully describes how, still in the physical body, I would say imitating head and hands and the whole figure, the spirit rises and passes into the spiritual world, in order to unite as a spirit, as the spirit of Emmy, with the spirit of her beloved friend. Here, too, Herman Grimm shows that he seeks the forces that actually play out human destiny in the spiritual world. Thus we see in this artist how the germ of spiritual-scientific deepening is present in Central European intellectual culture.

Sometimes this germ in the Central European spiritual culture comes to the fore in a very peculiar way. Just to mention one example out of the hundreds and hundreds that could be mentioned, I would like to highlight that of a German schoolmaster who once wrote a treatise on the immortality of the soul. He wanted to publish the second edition of this treatise. A friend of his published it in the posthumous writings. Strangely enough, this friend of the school director, Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, makes a very interesting interpretation in a note. He says that the school director wrote to him before his death saying that if he himself were to publish a second edition of this essay, he would have to describe what he had come up with, namely that in the life between birth and death, a spirit soul being is built up through what the person has worked for, and this passes through the gateway of death into the spiritual world.

When one sees how the way in which Central European intellectual life forms thoughts and feelings, how it tends, how it points everywhere to what spiritual science wants, how the germ points to the blossoms and the fruits, all this points to spiritual science.

And again I would like to say: This too becomes clear to us, especially when we look at the Austrian part of Central European intellectual life and cite some examples, and this too becomes clear to us, as was touched on the day before yesterday, that at the bottom of the soul there is pain and suffering and struggle and that only by conquering pain and suffering and struggle and, as we have seen today, by overcoming fear and powerlessness, is it possible for the human being to develop his life's treasure. This, too, presents itself to us in the outer life, in the whole way of striving, and this now especially, I would like to say, in the Austrian part of Central European intellectual life.

There is a spirit, a wonderfully attractive Austrian spirit, Bartholomäus Carneri. When Darwinism entered modern intellectual life, other spirits developed it in such a way that they drew the logical consequences and formed a one-sided world view, the one-sided world view of materialism. Bartholomäus Carneri wrote books such as the wonderful 'Morality and Darwinism'. Even if one does not agree with the content - because, of course, Carneri only came to a beginning and did not know spiritual science - if one goes into such a book as he wrote in the last period of his life, the book 'Modern Man', then one sees how this man, who was so rooted in Austrian Central European intellectual life, could not help but grasp Darwinism not only intellectually, but also in terms of what man carries in his mind as a moral force. And so Bartholomäus Carneri drew emotional and moral consequences from Darwinism and founded an idealism in a wonderful way based on Darwinism. One may consider this to be wrong, but this peculiar idealism of Bartholomäus Carneri is characteristic of Central European intellectual life.

And we can look at another mind that is truly characteristic, I would say, precisely for a certain state of development of Central European intellectual life, at the Austrian poet Robert Hamerling, who at the same time, as his book “The Atomism of the Will, shows that he was also a great philosopher who, in his last years, prophetically presented the mechanization of human life in his “FHomunkulus” and pointed out the necessity to overcome this mechanization of life.

However, esteemed attendees, we have not yet found the inner strength to fully feel everything that had a vital, spiritual effect in spirits such as the aforementioned Herman Grimm, Bartholomäus Carneri, and Robert Hamerling. Those who often dominate literature today have had completely different things to do. But our great fateful time will show where the great nerves of Central European cultural life lie.

There have been people who could not sufficiently delve into the greatness that lies in the characterization, but who have instead admired the greatness of a spirit that is supposed to be particularly outstanding, that has been particularly admired in recent years, and that was met with astonishment when he, as a Frenchman, spoke out so hatefully against Central European intellectual culture. I am referring to Romain Rolland, the author of the novel 'Jean-Christophe'. It is fair to say, esteemed attendees, that just as Robert Hamerling and Herman Grimm had a deep sense of reality, in that they knew that they had to seek reality in its fullness even where the senses no longer reach, as true as it is in Romain Rolland, in his “Jean-Christophe”, one might almost say hatred of reality, a tendency to grotesquely distort reality because it only wants to be looked at externally. And the much-admired novel, which in the eyes of many is supposed to be one of the greatest, “Jean-Christophe”, is, in the eyes of anyone who can feel this, who can feel the roundness and essence of a being, this novel is, in its creation of the hero, Jean-Christophe, a chaotic mishmash, mixed together from the characteristics of Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler.

Just as the elements of these four greats could never be combined in a person by nature, so too can this chaos never come together in a healthy artistic nature. Those who knew what Romain Rolland and his real art were like were really not surprised that this Romain Rolland so grotesquely misjudged Central European intellectual life after the war broke out. If only we could really get to the bottom of things, then many things would be understandable, especially in the present.

However, all this cannot make us despondent. It was said the day before yesterday and was also referred to again in today's lecture: that which is built on the surface of human life over an underground, over the struggle and war of opposing powers, contains fear and powerlessness, but something is built over it that must nevertheless be the courage to face life and the development of life; and so it is in the outer world as well. And it is perhaps no coincidence that the peculiarity that strikes us with such wonderful sympathy in Bartholomäus Carneri's philosophical writings has arisen in a life that has been physically and bodily heavily burdened in a paralyzed body; in a body that was paralyzed for a long time, Carneri has struggled to the insights of his noble idealism. There we see how treasures of the mind are wrested from the body. And Robert Hamerling, he lay for decades prostrate with a serious illness. Born of suffering is that which elevates people after it has been born! That which arises from suffering can be precisely that which permeates life with the highest delight and the highest joy.

When one peers into the secrets of life and discovers such peculiarities – the latter is only, I might say, particularly emphasized because it does not appear to be a coincidence – when one discovers such peculiarities, then one will find all the more in this Central European intellectual life the character that it yearns everywhere for such a deepening of the spirit as the future must demand of people. Everywhere minds are at work to find that which Goethe did not write into his “Faust” in his youth, but only later, after Goethe himself had matured, incorporated into his Faust.

Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, [gavest me] everything,
Why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
Turn thy face to me in the fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature of a kingdom,
The power to feel and enjoy it. Not
Coldly marveling visitors you only allow,
allow me to look into her deep chest,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
past 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 topples, crushing neighboring branches and trunks, and the hill thunders hollowly as it falls. Then you lead me to the safe cave,then you show me myself, and my own heart is opened to its deep, secret wonders.

There we see, I would say, the whole gamut of human experience; already we see, in a foreboding way, the whole gamut of human experience, as it is to be opened up by what spiritual science is to explore for the human being of the future. But precisely because this Central European spiritual life has the character of striving, the character of becoming, it will strive more and more to see the related everywhere, to see a related everywhere, to also live in a related in outer nature. The spirit within man will find the spirit outside, truly recognize the brothers in the forest and meadow and in all that is alive. That is to say, the human self will expand and merge with and become immersed in the whole universe. And man will be led to the secure cave, and the mysterious wonders of the spirit's becoming and essence will open up – when he overcomes his fear through spiritual science, to find his true self in the great stream of destiny.

Oh, the forces that are set against this Central European spiritual life feeling like a single, great spiritual organism are also part of this Central European spiritual life. If I may again draw attention to something personal, not to bring up something personal, but only to clarify something, I would like to say: It is difficult for the people of Central Europe to really achieve what they have been predestined to achieve, to achieve, to grow together into a whole, because they have to achieve it through life – not through what they themselves do not strive for, through physical birth, but through the life they choose for themselves in their destiny. That is why it made a significant impression on me – and I am allowed to mention this personal thing, because I really spent half of my life in my Austrian homeland, and the other half of my life in the German Reich, and therefore, putting both on the same scale, I was really able to compare them well. I am allowed to mention such things because I have not only But I can say this because I have not only acquired intellectual but also sensitive judgment in the course of my life. It made a harrowing impression on me when I was sitting in a hotel in Weimar with Herman Grimm and the conversation, which at the time Herman Grimm directed to various really urgent and interesting things, then also came to the Austrian poet Grillparzer, this quintessentially Austrian poet. Herman Grimm said to me at the time: “Grillparzer, I can't understand him; I've been told that Grillparzer is also supposed to be a great German poet. I once passed through Munich, stayed there for a few days, and had some volumes of Grillparzer's dramas sent to me from the library. I tried – says Herman Grimm – to see if I could feel what people say, that Grillparzer is also a great poet. But it seemed to me as if Grillparzer were not a German poet at all, but as if what is in his dramas were translations from a completely foreign language. Thus spoke the honored guest, whom I myself had to describe today as a characteristic spirit, as one of the deepest and most meaningful spirits of Central European intellectual life. Therefore, he may be cited for the fact of how strong the sense of individuality is in the individual members of this Central European cultural humanity.

Even if these people of Central European civilization did not belong to different nationalities, even if they all belonged to one nation, like Grillparzer and Herman Grimm, they are so individually constituted that they can only find each other after great difficulties. This is connected with the opposing forces that are present. But the greater these opposing forces are, the greater must be the forces that are applied to shape the whole into a unified, organic whole. Then it will be in that, as in a cultural current bed, that deepening for the spiritual life can and must be found that can only be truly found within Central Europe, because this Central European spiritual life tends towards the spiritual deepening that I have taken the liberty of indicating today with a few very inadequate, but still a few strokes as the goals of spiritual science. This Central European spiritual life cannot rest until it has developed the blossoms and fruits of what lies within it as a germ.

And anyone who has learned to rely on the driving and sustaining power of inner spiritual forces knows from this inner knowledge that this Central European spiritual life, however besieged and threatened it may be and however fought and waged against it may be by its enemies, will not disappear from history until it has incorporated everything that it has to give to world culture.

And this, esteemed attendees, is still a great and mighty undertaking, for we recognize this spiritual life of Central Europe not yet as blossoms and fruits, but as a germ that must develop. And it is on the driving force of the germ that those who today seek courage and strength for our fateful days from spiritual knowledge itself build. This Central European spiritual life will not let go of what is inherent in it through minds like Goethe and all the others. Goethe has spoken a great and powerful word with regard to the unified recognition of the world as spirit and as outer physicality for those who shrink back in fear of self-knowledge and in the powerlessness to recognize the world. For them, Goethe has also spoken the right words, always finding the right words from his, I would say instinctive, spirit of knowledge, by saying, picking up on a word spoken by another, one of the fainthearted: “No created spirit penetrates into the innermost part of nature!”

No, says Goethe, what is in man is capable, if only it is properly developed, of penetrating into the innermost part of nature and into the inner nerve of the world. Therefore, Goethe says in his powerful language, rejecting Haller's “No created spirit penetrates into the innermost part of nature”:

I have been hearing this repeated for almost sixty years.
And I curse it, but furtively.

Haller continues:

Happy the man to whom she
Only shows the outer shell.

- namely, nature - and Goethe then says:

Nature has neither core
nor shell,
All at once it is everything.
You alone are tested most of all,
Whether you yourself are core or shell.

Central European intellectual life, however, has the task of developing the kernel into the shell in its soul everywhere. And so today, in a few words, let me summarize in a way that is in keeping with my feelings what I wanted to illustrate in today's and also in yesterday's lecture, to the effect that man is truly created not only to interior of nature, to penetrate the spirituality that permeates nature, but is also created to recognize itself in the flow of its destiny, to be reconciled with this destiny and to understand why it has grown together with the destiny of its time.

Goethe points to the same sentiment with meaningful, though simple words. He points out that what man seeks in spiritual development is indeed a mystery, but a mystery that can be fathomed. Goethe knew that the world is overwhelming, which can already justify the powerlessness of knowledge, but he also knew that this powerlessness can be overcome, that man can penetrate the veil of nature. That is why we want to conclude this reflection with Goethe's words, because they truly and sensitively summarize what is the attitude of spiritual science, what spiritual science wants to illustrate:

When observing nature, you must
always consider everything as one;
nothing is inside, nothing is outside.

Goethe says that what is hidden deep within us we find on the outside, and what we recognize as external, including the outer courses of fate - as spiritual science says - we recognize as the fates of the higher human being.

For what is within is without.
So seize without delay
Sacred public secret.

That, most honored attendees, is Goethe's attitude, that, in full development, will be the attitude of spiritual science and will be able to underlie that soul mood, that soul strengthening, which can arise from spiritual science, in difficult times, but also in such fateful times as we are experiencing today, as we are experiencing them again in our present.

Spiritual scientific findings concerning rights and moral and social forms of life

You will have seen from the three lectures I have given here to characterize the way anthroposophically orientated spiritual science relates to three different fields of human endeavour in the sciences, that with this spiritual science it is above all important to develop ideas that relate to the reality of things and make it possible to enter into the fullness of real life in order to gain knowledge of that real world. We may say—and this will have been evident from the whole tenor of my lectures—that for a relatively long period in the evolution of human science, concepts in accord with reality have only been gained in the field of natural science that is based on the evidence of the senses. In some respects these concepts are exemplary scientific achievements. However, with regard to reality they only go as far as lifeless nature—I think it is reasonable to say this. Lifeless nature exists not only where it is immediately apparent to the senses but also as a mineral element in the life forms and mind-endowed entities that live in the physical world. In modern science, people have a grasp of things that is exemplary. I think we have very clear evidence of this in the applications of natural science in human life, applications that have been perfected and are tremendously successful. When concepts are applied to human life we can, under certain conditions, see how far they are in accord with reality. A watch cannot be constructed if one has the wrong concepts of mechanics and physics; it would soon tell us that the wrong concepts have been used.

This is not the case with all areas of life, and especially in the areas we are going to consider today, reality does not always immediately make it clear if we are dealing with concepts that are in accord with it, if they have been gained on the basis of reality or not.

In the field of natural science it is relatively safe to use concepts that are not in accord with the truth, for they will show themselves to be erroneous or inadequate for as long as one stays within the field of natural science, that is, theoretical discussion which may then also be put into practice. However, when it comes to social life, the life of human communities in any form, we have to consider not only how to gain concepts but also how to bring these to realization. Under present-day conditions there are spheres of life where inadequate concepts can indeed be introduced. The inadequacies of the ideas, notions, reactions and so on will then show themselves; but in some respect people living entirely with a natural scientific bias will be helpless in face of the consequences of such concepts. In a sense it would be reasonable to say that the tragic events which have now come upon the human race are essentially connected—more than one would think, and more so than can be even hinted at in one brief lecture—with the fact that for long periods of time people did not know how to develop concepts that were in accord with reality, concepts that could be used to encompass the facts of real life. These facts of real life have become too much to handle for humanity today. In many ways the inadequate ideas humanity developed in the course of centuries are being reduced to absurdity in a most terrible way in these tragic events.

We discover what really lies behind this if—let us now take a view that is different from those taken in the previous lectures—we first of all look at the way attempts have been made again and again in recent times to establish a general human philosophy on the basis of natural science, the way people have tried to introduce natural scientific thinking, so exemplary in its own sphere—let me repeat this over and over again—to all spheres of human life—psychology, education, politics, social studies, history, and so on.

Anyone who knows about developments in this direction will know the efforts people who think in the natural scientific way have made to apply the ideas and concepts they have evolved in natural science to all the above spheres of life. Proof of this is available in hundreds of ways, but let me just give some characteristic details. They may go some way back, but 1 think we can say that the trend they reflect has continued to this day and has indeed been growing.

Someone who in my view is an outstanding scientist spoke at two scientific gatherings in 1874 and 1875 on the sphere of rights, issues concerning morality and law, and human social relationships. In the course of those lectures he said some highly characteristic things. He actually claimed that anyone who in terms of modern scientific education has the necessary maturity ought to demand that the natural scientific way of thinking should be made part of people’s general awareness, like a kind of catechism. The inner responses, needs and will impulses arising in human beings as the basis of their social aspirations would thus have to be closely connected as time goes on with a purely natural-scientific view of the world that would be spreading more and more. This is what Professor Benedikt said at the 48th science congress.⁸⁰ He said the scientific view of the world needed to gain the breadth, depth and clarity to create a catechism that would govern the cultural and ethical life of the nation. It is his ideal, therefore, that everything in social life that speaks out of the cultural, heart-felt and will-related needs of people should be a reflection of natural-scientific ideas!

With regard to psychology, the same scientist said that it, too, had become a natural science since it followed physics and chemistry in casting off the ballast of metaphysics and no longer took hypotheses for its premises that were unfathomable for our present-day organization.

Many scientists—including Oscar Hertwig, whom I mentioned the day before yesterday, Naegeli and many others—emphasize again and again that natural science can only work effectively in its own field. The scientific ideas that are developed are such, however, that the way in which they are developed, as it were, prevents humanity from searching and striving for other spheres of reality than those that can at best be reached with natural science. I have quoted things people said some time ago, but if we were to quote today’s speakers we would find that they are entirely in the same spirit.

It is reasonable to quote Benedikt, who is a criminal anthropologist, for although he wants to take the purely scientific point of view also in looking at social life, he still has so much purely naive conceptual material in him which is in accord with reality that much of what he says—really going against his own theoretical theses—does truly extend into the reality of the world. On the whole, however, one may say that this tendency or inclination to develop a whole philosophy based on natural-scientific concepts, which are excellent in their own field, has gradually produced a quite specific philosophy, and one might almost get oneself a bad name by actually putting the philosophy that has developed out of this tendency into words. Today someone may do excellent work in his field, and if he then establishes a philosophy he extends knowledge which in its own field is indeed excellent to the whole world, and above all also to areas of which he in fact knows nothing. We can certainly say therefore that we have an excellent science today and its contents relate to things which people understand thoroughly. But then there are also philosophies which generally speaking are about things people do not understand at all!

This is certainly not without significance when it comes to the sphere of social life. Here man himself is the reality factor. Human beings are in these social spheres and anything they do is indeed such that anything that lives in their philosophy of life does enter into their impulses and into the social structures and the way in which people live together. This is why the kind of things were created which I referred to briefly at the beginning today.

In what I am saying today, I want again, as in the first three talks, base myself more on individual aspects of real life, on findings made in what I call spiritual investigation. I hope that with the aid of these I will be able to show how we should approach the fields of social studies in spiritual research.

A particular problem arises for modern people who have scientific knowledge, and whose life of ideas is based entirely on scientific training, when they approach the sphere of social life and immediately have to consider a fundamental concept, which is the concept of human freedom. This concept, which doubtless has many nuances, has in some respect become a cross that has to be borne in modern thinking about the world. For on the one hand it is extraordinarily difficult to understand the social structure of today without having clarity with regard to the concept of freedom. On the other hand, however, someone who is thinking in the natural scientific way, in the thinking habits of our time, will hardly know what to do with the concept of freedom. We know that disputes concerning this concept go back a long way and that there have always been two factions, though the nuance has varied—the ‘determinists’ who assumed that all human actions are in a way predetermined, in a more naturalistic or some other way, so that a person only does things under an unknown yet existing compulsion or causality; then there were the ‘indeterminists’ who denied this and concentrated more on subjective reality, that is, on what human beings experience inwardly as they develop their conscious awareness, and who maintained that genuinely free human actions were independent of such fixed predetermination which would exclude the concept of freedom.

Considering the way in which natural science has developed so far it is truly impossible to make something of the concept of freedom in that science. Anyone who makes a training in natural science the basis for establishing a sociology will be forced, in many respects, to take the wrong view of that concept of freedom and produce a structure for life that takes no account of the concept of freedom, ascribing everything to particular causes that lie either outside or inside the human being. In some respects such an approach is easy, for it allows one in a way to determine the social structure from the beginning. It is easier to reckon with human actions if they are predetermined than if one must expect a spirit of freedom in the human being to play a role.

It would be wrong to present as a concept of freedom some kind of visionary concepts, vague mystical ideas that would tend to be more or less the opposite of what modern natural science has to offer. We have to realize that a science of the spirit is only justifiable if it does not go against the true meaning of progress in natural science. Because of this, I must again start today by relating the fundamental concept in developing social life, which is the concept of freedom, to such natural scientific ideas as can be gained with the help of the science of the spirit.

According to the customary natural scientific concepts, human beings depend for their actions on the peculiarities of their organization. These are themselves investigated, as I have shown the last time, by applying the law of conservation of energy like a formula to the inner life, and this leads to the concept of freedom being excluded. If it is true that human beings are only able to develop energies and powers by transforming things they have taken in, then it will, of course, be impossible for the soul to develop any energies and powers of its own—which would be the requirement if freedom were to become a reality.

In the science of the spirit it is, however, evident that it is absolutely necessary to put the whole of the knowledge gained in the natural sciences on a new basis in this particular area. Admirable factual discoveries have been made in the natural sciences, as I have also said in the preceding lectures. But concepts and ideas about nature are so narrowly defined that it is not possible to have a comprehensive view of those discoveries. In the last lecture I referred to the way in which the science of the spirit makes it possible to relate the whole sphere of the human soul and spirit to the whole sphere of the living body, and that it then emerges that we need to relate the actual life of ideas to the life of the nerves, the life of feeling to the ramifications and to anything depending on the breathing rhythm, and the life of the will to metabolism.

If, for a starting point, we take the natural scientific view of the relationship between the life of ideas in the human soul and the life of the nerves, someone familiar with modern scientific ideas will have to say: ‘Processes occur in the life of the nerves; they are the causes of parallel processes in the life of ideas.’ Since there has to be a process in the nerves—and by definition this has its causal origin in the whole organism—for every idea-forming process in the soul, the corresponding process in the mind cannot be free, seeing that the process in the nerves is apparently the result of causal conditions existing in the organism. It thus has to be subject to the same necessity as the corresponding process in the nerves.

That is still the view taken today. It will not be like this in future, seen from the natural scientific point of view! People will then look with very different eyes at certain new approaches that have already been developed in natural scientific research. It will however mean that the directions to be taken in research are indicated out of the science of the spirit, for this alone can make it possible to throw a truly comprehensive light on the findings made in natural science.

The strange thing the spiritual investigator finds is that the life of our nerves relates in a quite specific way to the corresponding rest of the organism. We have to say it is like this: In the life of the nerves the organism destroys itself in a specific way, it is not built up in it. And in the life of the nerves—if we take it as pure life in the nerves, not nutritional life in the nervous system—the first processes to be considered are not growth or development processes, but processes of involution, of destruction.

One is easily misunderstood in this area, for it is still completely new today. And in one short lecture it is difficult to bring in all the concepts that will prevent such misunderstanding. So I simply have to accept the danger of being misunderstood. What I can say is that the life of the nerves as such proceeds in a way that is completely different from all the other organic processes that serve growth, reproduction and the like. The latter mean development in the ascent. This includes the development of cells, the cell division processes we can observe in reproduction and growth processes, as something side by side with cells that are still in the life of reproduction, or at least a degree of partial reproduction. When the human organisation—it is similar for the animal organization, but this is only of minor interest to us today—extends into the life of the nerves, it partly dies off in that life of the nerves. Going into the life of the nerves, developing processes are broken down. We may thus say that even from a purely natural scientific point of view it is evident—and the life of the red blood cells runs to some degree parallel to the life of the nerves—that division processes come to a stop as they enter into nerve cells and red blood cells. This is wholly factual evidence of something which a conscious mind with vision is able to perceive: that the nerve cannot have part in anything that is in any way productive, but that the nerve inwardly brings life to a halt, so that life comes to an end where the nerve branches.

By having a nervous system, we are, as it were, bearing death in us at the organic level. To compare what is really going on in the life of the nerves with something else in the organism, I’d have to say, strange though it may sound: ‘The unconscious processes in the life of the nerves cannot be compared with the process, for example, which happens when someone has taken in food and this food is processed in the organism for constructive development. No, the actual process in the nerves—as a process in the nerves, and not a nerve nutrition process—can be compared to what happens in the organism when it breaks down its tissues because of hunger.’ It is thus a destructive and not a constructive process which extends into the nervous system.

Nothing of any kind can emerge or result directly from this nervous system. This nervous system represents a process that has been stopped, a process that shows itself in progress in the cell life of reproductive cells and growth cells. There it is progressive; in the neural organs it is stopped. In reality, therefore, the life of the nerves merely provides the basis, the soil, on which something else may spread.

The principle which spreads on top of this life of the nerves, extending over this life of the nerves, is the life of ideas—initially stimulated by the outer senses—entering into the life of the nerves. It is only if we understand that the nerves are not the reason for forming ideas but merely provide a basis by having destroyed organic life, that we understand that the principle which develops on the basis of this life of nerves is something foreign to the life of nerves itself.

The mind and soul principle developing on the basis of a life in the nerves which is destroying itself is so foreign to it that we may say: It really is just as when I walk along a road and leave my footprints behind me. Someone following those footprints should not derive the shapes he sees in my footprints from any kind of forces in the soil itself, coming, as it were, from inside the soil to produce my footprints. Every expression of inner life may be seen in the nervous system, like my footprints in the soil, yet it would be wrong to explain the life of mind and soul as something inwardly ‘arising from the nervous system’. The life in mind and soul leaves tracks in the prepared soil, a soil that has been prepared by ‘forgoing’ the possibility of the nerve continuing its own productivity, if I may put it like this in symbolic terms.

Perceptive vision also shows the life in mind and spirit which thus develops on a basis of destruction, of a dying process in the human being, to be connected with organic life, initially the life of nerves; but in such a way that this life of nerves provides only the conditions, the soil, something which has to be there to provide the basis on which it can be active in this place. Seen from the outside, the principle which is active here may seem to arise from the nervous system, to be bound to the nervous system, but this life in soul and spirit is as independent of the nervous system as a child is of his parents when he develops independent inner activity, though the parents are, of course, the soil or basis on which the child must develop. Just as we may see the parents as the cause of the child if we look at this from outside, and just as the child is wholly free in developing his individual spirit and we cannot say that when the child develops independence there is not an activity in him which is in no way connected with his parents, we have to say in exactly the same way that the principle which is coming alive and developing in terms of mind and spirit becomes independent of the soil which it needs to thrive.

I am just referring briefly here to a system of ideas that will develop further in the course of time—the science of the spirit is only in its beginnings now—by taking certain ideas from natural science to their highest extreme. Those very ideas from natural science will not lead to the exclusion of human freedom but to a way of explaining and understanding freedom actually in natural scientific terms, for they will make people observe not only constructive and progressive processes in the organism but also those that are destructive, paralysing themselves in themselves. They will show that if the element of soul and spirit is to arise, the organic principle cannot continue in a straight line of development and so produce something non-physical. No, as the non-physical, spiritual principle begins to come into existence, this organic principle must first prepare the soil by destroying itself, breaking itself down, within itself.

When the ideas of constructive development, which are the only ones to be considered nowadays, have ideas about destructive development added to them, this will bring tremendous advances in the natural scientific approach. A bridge will be built that needs to be built because natural science must not be shut out today—a bridge from nature as it is understood to the sphere of social life which still needs to be understood.

A natural science that is incomplete prevents us from developing the concepts needed for the sphere of social life; once it is completed, its inner sterling character, inner greatness, will help us to establish the right kind of sociology.

I have thus presented, albeit briefly, the fundamental concept of social life, the concept of freedom. This has been set out fully in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, published in 1894, and the inner reasons given there accord fully with what I have now shown in a more natural scientific way. This is also evident from what I have written in my book The Riddle of Man⁸¹ which appeared almost two years ago. Let us now continue our consideration of the connection between man’s life in spirit and soul and other spheres of existence.

The last time and today I referred briefly to the way in which this element of mind, spirit and soul is connected—as life of ideas with the life of the nerves, as life of feeling with life in the breathing rhythm, and as life of will with metabolic life. This only shows the connection in one aspect, however. Just as natural science will one day, when it has perfected itself in this direction, relate the threefold soul as a whole—as I have shown—to the whole bodily human organism, so will spiritual science be able to look for the connections of the human mind and soul with this spiritual principle, that is, in the other direction.

On the one hand, the life of ideas has its bodily foundation in the life of the nerves, on the other it is connected with the world of the spirit, a world to which it belongs. This world, with which the life of ideas is also connected, can only be discerned through perceptive vision. It is perceived by a mind that has reached the first level of this vision, which I have called imaginative perception, or perception in images. This is gained out of the soul itself, like the opening of an inner eye. I characterized this in my first lecture.

As the life of ideas relates to the life of nerves in the body, which is its physical foundation, so it also arises from the realm of the spirit, a purely non-physical world that is seen to be a real world when we come to observe this reality with that vision in images. This real world is not contained within the sense-perceptible world. It is, as it were, the first world that goes beyond the senses, bordering directly on our own.

Here one finds that the relationship which the human being has to the world around him, as he is aware of it in his mind, is only part of his total relationship to the world; anything we have in our conscious awareness is a segment of the reality in which we are. Below this level of awareness lies another relationship to the surrounding world, to the natural world and the world of the spirit. Even the connection between our life of ideas and the life of the nerves in the body has been pushed below the threshold of conscious awareness and can only be brought up from there with an effort if one wishes to characterize it the way I have done today. On the other hand the relationship of our life of ideas to the spiritual world which we can only perceive in images is also such that it does not enter into our ordinary conscious awareness, though it does enter into human reality.

In the human mind we have first of all everything that has been stimulated by the senses and by the rational mind which is bound to the senses; this is the usual content of the conscious mind. Below this, however, lies a sum total of processes that initially do not come to ordinary awareness, but arise as a spiritual principle, which can only be perceived in images; this plays into our soul nature just as sounds, colours, smells and so on play into the everyday life of our souls. Ordinary conscious awareness thus rises, as it were, from another sphere which itself can only be brought to conscious awareness if we are able to perceive in images. The fact that people do not know of these things does not mean that they do not exist in reality. Moving through the world we bear the content of our ordinary conscious awareness with us; we also bear with us everything that comes from the ‘imaginative’ spiritual world, as I’ll call it for the moment.

It is of tremendous importance, especially at the present time, to understand that the human being relates to the world around him in this way. A field for research—I am far from underestimating this field, I appreciate its significance—and there was every reason for it to come up at the present time, has indeed come up at the present time. It is like a powerful pointer to man’s relationship to the world around him which I have just characterized as the spiritual world of images, a relationship that is only little known so far. It is a feature of our present time that much comes to human awareness that can really only be encompassed with the means of insight given through the science of the spirit. Humanity is called upon to perceive these things today in that one’s nose is rubbed in them, to put it plainly, with life taking a course where people cannot avoid seeing them. Yet modern people still cannot overcome their reluctance to tackle this with the means for insight provided by the science of the spirit. They therefore try to use the means of ordinary natural science or concepts developed in relation to other things to approach areas which today literally cry out for investigation.

The field I am referring to is that of analytical psychology, also called psychoanalysis, which is, of course, particularly well known in this city.⁸² What makes it remarkable is that a field opens up to challenge the investigator that lies outside our ordinary conscious awareness; it must refer to something that lies below the threshold of that awareness. People are, however, trying to work with what I may call inadequate tools in this field. As they endeavour to apply these inadequate tools also in practice—only therapeutically and educationally, to begin with, perhaps, but perhaps also pastorally—we have to say that the matter has more than theoretical significance. I am, of course, not in a position to discuss the whole field of psychoanalysis. That would need many lectures.⁸³ Let me, however, refer to some of the principles, some of the real aspects in this context. Psychoanalysis is a field where investigation and social life meet in a point, as happens also in other fields of this kind which we’ll be considering today.

Above all, and as you are no doubt aware, analytical psychology essentially has to do with bringing ‘lost’ memories back to mind for therapeutic purposes. The thesis is that the psyche contains certain elements that do not come to conscious awareness. It is then widely assumed that these memories have gone down into the unconscious or the like, and efforts are made to go and cast light below the threshold of consciousness by using the ordinary memory concept and enter into regions not illuminated by our ordinary consciousness.

Now I did already mention in these lectures that the science of the spirit has the task of illuminating the human memory process in a very major way. Again it will not be possible, of course, to avoid all the misunderstandings that can arise with such a brief review of the subject. I have heard it said, for example—several times, not just once—that psychoanalysis was really on the same road as the science of the spirit which I represent; it was only that psychoanalysts took some things in a symbolic way, whilst I took things which those enlightened psychoanalysts considered to be symbolic to be realities. That is a grotesque misapprehension, and you cannot characterize the relationship of psychoanalysis to the science of the spirit in a worse way than by saying that.

To understand this we need to take another look at the nature of the memory process. Let me emphasize once again that the process of forming ideas, the activity of doing so, is something which in the inner life of man essentially relates only to the present. An idea as such never goes down to some unconscious level of the mind, just as a mirror image seen when passing a mirror will not settle down somewhere so that it may come up again the next time you pass the mirror. The coming up of an idea is a phenomenon that begins and ends in the present moment. And anyone thinking that memory consists in there ‘having been’ an idea which ‘comes up’ again, may well be an excellent Herbartian psychologist, or a psychologist in some other direction, but is not basing himself on a genuinely observed fact.

What we have here is something entirely different. The world in which we live is filled not only with the sensory perceptions that enter into our present life of ideas through eye or ear. This whole world—and that of course also means the natural world—is based on a world that has to be perceived in images, a world which initially does not come to conscious awareness. The contents of this world of images act parallel to my momentary life of ideas: as I form an idea, letting these momentary processes take their course in me, another process runs parallel to them, with a current of unconscious life moving through my soul. This parallel process causes inner tracks to be left—I could characterize these in all detail, but have to limit myself to brief indications here—and these are observed when memory arises later.

When memory arises, therefore, it is not a matter of an old idea, which might have been stored somewhere, being brought back again. Instead we look inwards at tracks left in a parallel process. Memory is a process of perception directed inwards.

The human soul is capable of many things at an unconscious level which it is not able to do consciously in ordinary life. To compare the process that occurs when a ‘forgotten’ event ‘comes back to mind’, doing so in very general terms—let me emphasize this: in very general terms—with something else, I would say that it is quite similar to sensory perception using the outer senses. The difference is that with the latter I recreate my perceptions in temporary images that only exist for the moment. Anything I recreate from memory is a specific form of inner perception. Within myself, I perceive the residue of the parallel process; this has remained stationary. As a crude analogy, recall is a process in which the soul reads at a later time something that had gone parallel to the forming of an idea. The soul has this ability, at an unconscious level, to read in itself what had been developing when I formed an idea. I did not know this at the time, for the idea blocked it out. Now it is recalled. Instead of having a sensory perception of something on the outside, I perceive my own inner process. That is the real situation.

I am fully aware that a fanatical psychoanalyst—none of them see themselves as fanatical, of course, and I know this, too—will say that he has no problem in agreeing to this explanation of memory. But in fact he’ll never do so when considering these things in practice. Anyone who knows the literature will know that it is never done and that this is in fact the source of countless errors. For people do not know that it is not a matter of past ideas that linger somewhere in the unconscious, but concerns a process that can only be understood if we understand the way in which an imaginative world plays into our world in a process that runs parallel to the life of forming ideas.

The first significant errors arise because a wrongly understood memory process forms the theoretical basis and is applied in practice in analytical psychology. When we penetrate to the real process of remembering, there can be no question of looking for elements in the soul which psychoanalysts consider to be pathological in memories that linger somewhere. It is a matter of perceiving how the patient relates to a real, objective world of non-physical processes, which he is, however, adopting in an abnormal way. This makes a huge difference, something which we must of course think through in every possible aspect.

Psychoanalysts who apply their natural scientific training one-sidedly in an important sphere of real life also fall into another kind of error. They use dream images for psychological diagnosis in a way that cannot be justified in the face of genuine observation. We need genuine observation and concepts that relate to reality so that we may enter into this strange, mysterious world of dreams in the right way. This is only done if we know that human beings have their roots not only in the environment in which they live with their ordinary conscious minds but—even in the life of ideas, as we have seen, and later we’ll also see some other things—in a world of spirit. Our ordinary conscious awareness comes to an end when we sleep, but that connection with the world that remains at a subconscious level does not come to an end.

There is a process—I cannot characterize it in detail, time being short—in which the special conditions pertaining in sleep cause the things we live through in connection with our spiritual environment to be clothed in symbolic dream images. The content of those dream images is quite immaterial. The same process—the relationship of the human being to his spiritual surroundings—may appear as a particular sequence of symbolic images for one individual and as a different one for another. Anyone with the necessary knowledge in this field knows that typical unconscious processes in the psyche assume the garb of widely differing reminiscences of life in all kinds of different people, and that the content of the dream does not matter. You only come to realize what lies behind this if you train yourself to ignore the content of the dream completely and consider instead what I’d call the inner dynamic of the dream. It is a question of whether a foundation is first laid with a particular dream image, then tension is created and then an evolution, or whether the sequence is different, starting with tension which is then followed by resolution.

It needs a great deal of preparation before one can consider the evolution of a dream, the whole drama of it, wholly leaving aside the content of the images. To understand dreams one must be able to do something that would be like seeing a play and taking an interest in the scenes only in so far as one perceives the writer behind it and the ups and downs of his inner experience. We must stop wanting to grasp dreams by abstract interpretation of their symbolism. We need to be able to enter into the inner drama of the dream, the inner context, quite apart from the symbolism, the content of the images. Only then will we realize how the soul relates to its spiritual surroundings. These cannot be seen in the dream images which someone who does not have vision in images uses for reality under the abnormal conditions of sleep, but only through awareness in images. The drama that lies beyond the dream images can only be understood if we have imaginative awareness.

As you are probably aware, research in analytical psychology also extends—and in a way this is most praiseworthy—to mythology. Many interesting things have been discovered, and other things that are enough to make your hair stand on end. I won’t go into detail, but it is important to see that individual scientists still work in such a way today that they one-sidedly develop a limited area, taking no account of scientific discoveries that have already been made, though these can often throw much more light on the matter than one is able to do oneself.

An old friend of mine who died quite some time ago wrote a very good book on mythology. He was Ludwig Laistner.⁸⁴ After going right round the world, as it were, with regard to the origin of myths, he showed in a very interesting way that if you want to understand myths it is not at all important to consider the content, that is, what they tell—doing so in one way in one place and in a different way in another—or the actual images of those myths; no, in that case, too, it is important to let the dramatic events come to light that come to expression in the different mythological images. Laistner also considered the connection between mythological images and the dream world, doing so in a way that was still elementary but nevertheless correct. His studies therefore provided an excellent basis for connecting research into dreams with the investigation of myths. If in mythology, too, people were aware that it is merely images that come across into dream consciousness from the creative sphere of myths, images which arbitrarily, I would say, represent the actual process, that would be a much more intelligent way of working. As it is, people working in analytical psychology—and I do fully recognize their importance and that they work with the best and truly honest good will—attempt things that must be askew and one-sided because their means are inadequate.

There is very little inclination to go really deeply into things, and to get help from spiritual life to understand reality in terms that relate to reality. More recent research in psychoanalysis did, apart from the ordinary concept of memory and the kind of dreams that have their origin in individual life, also involve taking account of a ‘super-individual unconscious’,⁸⁵ as it is called. At this point, however, a research method pursued with such inadequate means has led to a most peculiar result. There is a feeling—and we have to be thankful that such a feeling at least exists—that this inner life of the human psyche is connected with a life of the spirit that lies outside it; however, there is nothing one can do to perceive this connection in real terms. I honestly don’t want to find fault with these scientists, and I greatly respect their courage, for in a present world which is so full of prejudice it needs real courage to speak of such things; but it has to be pointed out—especially because these things also enter into practical considerations—that there is a way of overcoming such one-sidedness.

Jung, a scientist of great merit who lives here in Zurich, has taken refuge, as it were, in trans-individual, super-individual unconscious spirit and soul contents. According to him the human soul relates not only to memories which the individual has somehow stored or the like, but also to things that lie outside its individual nature. An excellent, bold idea—to relate this life in the human psyche not only by the means of the body but also in itself to soul qualities in the outside world; it certainly merit's recognition. The same man does, however, ascribe what happens in the soul in this way to a kind of memory again, even if it is super-individual. You cannot get away from the concept of mneme, or memory, though we can’t really speak of memory any longer when we go beyond the individual element. Jung puts it like this: you come to see that ‘archetypal images' live in the soul, images of the myths evolved among the ancient Greeks—archetypes, to use Jacob Burckhardt’s term. Jung says, significantly, that everything humanity and not only the individual person has gone through may be active in the soul; and as we do not know of this in ordinary conscious awareness, this rages and rises up unconsciously against the conscious mind, and you get the strange phenomena that show themselves today as hysterical and other conditions. Everything humanity has ever known of the divine and also of devilish things rises up again, Jung says in his latest book; people know nothing about it, but it is active in them.

Now it is highly interesting to look at an investigation done with inadequate means, taking a characteristic instance. This scientist has come to say, in an extraordinarily significant way that when people do not consciously establish a connection with a divine world in their souls, this connection is created in their subconscious, even though they know nothing about it. The gods live in the subconscious, below the threshold of conscious awareness. And a content of which they know nothing in their conscious minds may come to expression in that they ‘project’ it, as the term goes, on to their physician or another person. Thus a memory of some devilry may be active in the subconscious but not come to conscious awareness; it rages inside, however; the individual must rid himself of it; he transfers it to some other person. The other person is made into a devil; this may be the physician, or, if he does not manage to do this, the individual does it to himself.

From this point of view it is most interesting to see how a scientist comes to his conclusions about these things. Let us look at one of the latest books on psychoanalysis, The Psychology of the Unconscious by Carl Gustav Jung.⁸⁶ He writes that the idea of God is simply a necessary psychological function of an irrational kind. Jung deserves great merit for acknowledging this, for it means that for once recognition is given to the nature of the human subconscious as being such that people establish connections with a divine world in their subconscious. The author then goes on to say that this idea of God has absolutely nothing to do with the question as to the existence of God. This last question, he says, is one of the most stupid questions anyone may ask.

We are not concerned with the scientist’s own view of the idea of God. He may be a very devout person. What concerns us here is what lives in the scientist’s own subconscious life of ideas, if I may use that term. Inadequate means of research mean no less than that one says to oneself: The human soul has to establish relationships to the gods below the threshold of consciousness; but it has to make these relationships such that they have nothing to do with the existence of God. It means that the soul must of necessity content itself with a purely illusory relationship; yet this is eminently essential to it, for without this it will be sick. This is of tremendous import, something we should not underestimate! I have merely indicated how inadequate the means are with which people are working in a quite extensive field.

I’ll now continue my description of the human being and the way he needs to relate to his social environment. The life of feelings—not now the life of ideas, but the life of feelings—has its physical counterpart in the breathing rhythm, as I said, and on the other hand also relates to spiritual contents. The element in the spirit which corresponds to the life of feelings the way the life of the breathing rhythm does at the physical level, can only be penetrated, being a spiritual content, a content of spiritual entities, spiritual powers, with an ‘inspired’ mind, as I have called it in these lectures.

This inspired mind opens up not only the spiritual content that fills our existence from birth, or let us say conception, until death, one also comes to see things that go across birth and death and have to do with our life between death and rebirth, that is, of a spirit that is alive even when the human being no longer has this physical body.

Whereas the human being gains a basis for this physical body through physical heredity, the principle which is born out of the inspired world, creates its physical expression in the breathing rhythm. But into this life of feeling—whereas initially only elements coming between birth and death play into the life of ideas which the human being knows in his ordinary conscious awareness—enters everything by way of powers and impulses that has been active during the time from the last death to the present birth. This will be active again between this death and a new birth. The core of the human being’s eternal reality plays into this life of feeling.

The third thing to be noted is that the human being’s life of will relates on the one hand really to the lowest functions in the human organism, to metabolism, something which in the widest sense comes to expression in hunger and thirst. On the other hand it relates in the spirit to the highest spiritual world, the intuitive world, which I have mentioned on several occasions in these lectures. We thus do indeed have a complete reversal of the situation.

Initially the life of ideas is subconsciously in touch with the world of images, and with the life of nerves in its other aspect. In a world that projects beyond our personal life in a body as the core of our reality, the life of feeling goes towards the spiritual side. And the life of will, which comes to physical expression whenever there is a will impulse in some metabolic process, and therefore in the lowest processes in the organism, is on the spiritual side connected with the highest spiritual world, the intuitive world.

We have to enter into this region if we want to investigate ‘repeated lives on earth’, as they are called. Impulses that go from one life on earth to another cannot be grasped in images, let alone in our ordinary conscious awareness, and not even with inspired consciousness. This needs intuitive awareness. Impulses from earlier lives on earth enter into our life. Impulses from this life will enter into later lives on earth. The only possible character our investigations can have at this point is one of having developed a sense for real intuitions, not the wishy-washy kind of which we speak in ordinary life.

The complete conscious mind thus perceives the complete human being as he lives in soul and spirit in three ways—in ideas, feelings and will impulses, all of which rise up and go down again. For he has his basis in three ways in a living physical body and takes his origin in the world of the spirit. The science of the spirit takes us to the eternal in man not in any speculative or hypothetical way, but by showing how the conscious mind must develop if it is to behold the eternal core of the human being who develops in successive lives on earth.

This complete human being—not an abstract human being presented in natural science or by naturalists in an empty, abstract set of ideas that do not hold the whole of reality—this complete human being is part of a social life. Our ordinary conscious mind is able to understand the natural world outside in so far as it is not organic but something in the lifeless, mechanical sphere—in modern science this is often the only thing considered to have validity and be worth considering. This level of the mind is not able, however, to find concepts that are wholly viable when it comes to social life if they have evolved in the pattern used in everyday thinking. The secret of social life is that it does not develop according to the concepts we have in our ordinary thinking but does so outside the sphere of the conscious mind, in impulses that can only be grasped with the higher levels of conscious awareness of which I have spoken.

This insight can throw light on many things which in our present social life must inevitably end in absurdity because the concepts people want to apply to it do not relate to reality. So there we are today, with concepts gained from an education based on natural scientific ideas, and we want to be creative in social life. But this social life needs additional concepts that differ from those we have in our ordinary thinking—just as the subconscious life of the psyche presenting in psychoanalysis also calls for additional concepts.

In the first place three areas in social communities need to have light thrown on them through anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. I’ll only be able to give a rough outline, for the science of the spirit is still in its beginnings and many things still need to be investigated. I will thus merely characterize the general nature of the strands we have to see running from spiritual scientific insights to insight into social life.

Three spheres of social life may be seen. The first sphere where what I have been characterizing just now applies, is the sphere of economics. We know that economic laws live in our social structure, and that we need to know these laws. Anyone involved in legislation or government and anyone who runs any kind of firm which is after all part of the social structure in life as a whole must work with the laws of economics.

The economic structure, as it exists in real terms, cannot be grasped if we apply only the concepts gained in the natural scientific way of thinking, concepts that govern practically the whole of people’s thinking today. The impulses that are active in economic life are entirely different from those in the natural world, and that includes human nature. In basic human nature, our view rests on questions of need, for example. Issues concerning the meeting of needs are the basis of our external economic order. To gain genuine insight into a social community with its economic structure I need to perceive how depending on the geographical and other conditions the means are available to meet human needs. For the individual we start from the question of needs, but to consider the economy we must start from the opposite side. Then we do not consider what people need but what is available to people in a given area as community life develops. This is just a brief indication. Many things would need to be said if we wanted to consider the economic structure in its entirety. Yet the economic structure of a country or community, which is really an organism, cannot be dealt with by using concepts taken from ordinary natural science.

That may lead to some very strange things! Here it is reasonable to say something in particular because I am truly not just referring to it in the light of current events. People might object that I have been influenced by these current events, but that is not the case. What I am going to say now is something I spoke of in a course of lectures I gave in Helsingfors before the present war started.⁸⁷ My reasons for referring to it now have therefore nothing at all to do with the war. I need to say this in advance, so that there shall be no misunderstanding.

At that time in Helsingfors—that is, before the war—I showed how we can go astray if we want to grasp the social structure of human communities wholly with natural scientific ideas. For my example I chose someone who falls into this error to the greatest degree—Woodrow Wilson.⁸⁸ I referred to the strange way in which Woodrow Wilson—academic thinking had in this case advanced to statesmanship—said that if one considers the days of Newtonism, when a more mechanical view was taken of the whole world, one can see that the mechanical ideas which Newton and others had made current had also entered into people’s ideas of the state, their ideas of social life. It is wrong, however, to consider social life in such a narrow way, said Woodrow Wilson; we have to do it differently today and apply Darwinian ideas to social life. He was thus doing the same thing, only with the ideas that are now current in natural science.

Yet Darwinian ideas are of as little use in understanding social structures as were Newtonian ones. As we have heard, not all Darwinian ideas are actually applicable in organic life. This remained at a subconscious level for Wilson, however, and he did not realize that he was making the very mistake which he had identified and censured just before.

Here we have an outstanding example of people unable to realize that they are working with inadequate tools that will not cope with reality when they try to master and understand social life today. Such a situation, where the tools are inadequate even as people make world history, is something we come across wherever we go. And if people were able to see through what is happening here, they would be able to see deeply into the deeper causes of the phrase mongering that goes on at present, reasons that are generally not apparent to the world today.

Economic structures cannot be understood if we use natural scientific concepts—whether gained from Darwinism or Newtonism—for these only apply to the facts of nature. Instead, we must move on to other concepts.

I can only characterize these other concepts by saying that they must rest on if not perhaps a clear idea, then at least a feeling of entering wholly into the social structure, so that ideas come up that belong to life in images. It needs the help of image-based ideas to get a picture of a real social structure that exists in one place or another. Otherwise we only get abstractions of no value that have no substance to them.

We no longer create myths today. But the power to create myths was an impulse in the human soul that went beyond everyday reality. Today, people must take the same inner impulse which our forebears used to create myths; they created, if I may put it like this, images of a spiritual reality out of powers of imagination that related to that reality; we must have ideas in images of economic systems. We cannot create myths, but need to be able to see the geographical and other situations of the terrain together with the given character of people, the needs of people, in such a way that they are seen together with the same power that was formerly used to create myths, a power that is alive and active in the spiritual sphere as the power to form images and which is also reflected in the economic structure.

A second sphere in social life is the moral structure and the moral impulse that lives in a totality. Again we go down into all kinds of unconscious spheres to investigate the impulses revealed in human moral aspirations—moral in the widest possible sense. Anyone wishing to intervene in this, be it as a statesman, be it as a parliamentarian, or also as the head of some firm who wants to take a leading role, will only understand the structure if he is able to master it with concepts that have at least a basis in insights gained through inspiration.

This is even more necessary today than people tend to think; intervening in this social aspect in so far as moral impulses are involved. These moral impulses need to be studied truthfully and in real terms, just as the impulses of organic life cannot be invented but have to be studied by considering the organism itself. If people were to think up concepts about lion nature, cat nature, or hedgehog nature, if you will, the way they think up concepts in thinking up Marxism today, or other socialist theories, and failed to study nature in reality, and if they were to construct purely a-priori concepts of animal nature, they would arrive at strange theories about the animal organization.

The important point is that the social organism also has to be studied in absolutely real terms where moral principles in the widest sense are involved. The forces of need that human beings bring into play—they, too, are moral powers in the wider sense—can only be mastered if we investigate the real social organism on the basis of ideas that have their roots in the inspired world, even if these ideas are only dimly apparent. Today we are still a long way away from such a way of thinking!

In the science of the spirit one comes to study the nature of the impulses that live among the people in Central Europe, Western Europe or Eastern Europe in real terms and in detail. One comes to see in very real terms how the different inner impulses arising from the social organism are just as real and well-founded as the impulses that arise from the physical organism. One comes to see that the way nations live together is also connected with these impulses that can be studied from deep down. In the science of the spirit one finds that the structure of the soul differs greatly between the West and the East of Europe, and one comes to know that such a structure must become part of the whole of European life. Let me remind you that I have been talking about the different soul structures that underlie European social life for decades, speaking out of purely spiritual scientific ideas.⁸⁹ The discoveries made in the science of the spirit are confirmed by people with empirical knowledge who know the reality of life. Look in yesterday’s and today’s issues of the Nene Zürcher Zeitung [major Swiss paper] for what is said there about the soul of the Russian people and Russian ideals, taking a Dostoevskyan view.⁹⁰ There you have complete proof—I can only refer you to this, time being too short for a detailed description—in observations made in an outer way of a result arising very evidently from something that has been put forward for years in the science of the spirit.

You then come to study social impulses and energies in real life. As it is impossible to master life with concepts far removed from reality, this life gets on top of people. They no longer know how to encompass life with concepts as abstract as those used in the sphere of natural science. These prove inadequate in the social sphere. This life, which is surging and billowing deeper down and has not been grasped in conscious awareness, has therefore brought about the catastrophic events we are now going through in such a terrible way.

A third sphere we meet in social life is the one we call the life of rights. Essentially the social structure of any body is made up of economic life, moral life and the life of rights. All these terms must be taken in the spiritual sense, however. Economic life can only be studied in a real sense if we think in images; moral life and its true content can only be studied with the help of inspired ideas; the life of rights can only be understood with the help of intuitive ideas, and these, too, must be gained from full and absolute reality.

We can thus see how the insights sought into nonphysical aspects with the science of the spirit apply to different spheres of social life. In the field of education, too, which essentially is part of the social sphere, fruitful concepts will only arise if we are able to develop image-based concepts so that we may see life which is as yet unformed in images that arise in us—not in the abstract terms that are so common in education today but on the basis of genuine vision in images—and also guide it on that basis.

The life of rights, concepts in the sphere of rights—just think how much has been written and said about this in recent times. Basically, however, people have no really clear idea of even the simplest concepts in the sphere of rights. Here, too, we merely need to consider the efforts of people who want to work entirely out of a training in the natural sciences, Fritz Mauthner, for instance, author of the highly interesting dictionary of philosophy.⁹¹ Read the entry on law, penal law or, in short, everything connected with this, and you’ll see that he dissolves all known ideas and concepts, and also existing institutions, showing that there is no possibility whatsoever, nor ability, to put anything in their place. It will only be possible to put something in their place if people look for what they are seeking in the structure of rights in the world that is the very foundation of social structures, a world open only to intuitive perception.

Here in Zurich I am able to refer to a work in which the author, Dr Roman Boos, has made a start with looking at the sphere of rights in this way.⁹² An excellent beginning has been made in basing real issues in the sphere of rights on the situations pertaining to the structure of rights and the social structure and arriving at realistic ideas concerning individual details in the sphere of rights. Study such a work and you will see what is meant when we demand that social life as a life of rights should be studied in a realistic and not an abstract way, developing our ideas about it in real terms, encompassing it with concepts that relate to reality. It is of course harder to do than if we construct utopian programmes and utopian government structures. For it means that the whole human being has to be considered and one must truly have a sense of what is real.

I have made the concept of freedom the fundamental one in order to show that although we are looking for laws pertaining to the world of the spirit, the concept of freedom is wholly valid in the science of the spirit. It will not be easy, however, to study these things in real terms. For we then come above all to realize the complexity of reality, which cannot be encompassed in one-sided concepts that are like stakes put in the ground here or there. One realizes that as soon as we go beyond the individual person we must encompass this reality in concepts that are like the concepts used in the science of the spirit which I have described in these lectures.

Let me give you a powerful example. People like to live with biased ideas, concepts gained in their habitual way of thinking. When the first railway was built in Central Europe, a body of medical men—learned people, therefore—was also consulted. This has been documented, though it may sound like a children’s tale. The doctors found that no railway should be built, since it would cause damage to people’s nervous systems. And if people insisted after all on having railways, one should at least put high board fences on either side of the railway lines so that people would not get concussion when a train went past.⁹³ This expert opinion from the first half of the 19th century was based on the habitual way of thinking at that time. Today we may find it easy to laugh about such a biased opinion; for those learned gentlemen were, of course, wrong. Developments have overtaken them. Progress will overtake many things which ‘esteemed gentlemen’ consider to be right.

There is, however, another question, strange though it may seem. Were those learned gentlemen simply wrong? It only seems so. They were certainly wrong in one respect, but they were not simply wrong. Anyone who has a feeling for the more subtle things in the development of human nature will know that the development of railways does in a strange way relate to the development of some phenomena of nervousness which people suffer at present. Such a person will know that whilst it may not be as radical as those learned gentlemen put it, the trend of their opinion was partly right. Anyone who truly has a feeling for the differentiated nature of life, for the difference between our life today and life at the turn of the 18th to 19th century will know that railways did cause nervousness, so that the learned doctors were right in some respect.

The idea of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, which is still applicable to some natural event or some natural human phenomenon, does not apply when it comes to the social structure. Here it is necessary for a person to develop a faculty for more comprehensive ideas by training his inner abilities in a wholly different way. Those ideas need to encompass a social life that goes far beyond anything which one-sidedly abstract ideas taken from natural science—and they have to be abstract—are able to encompass.

Time being short, I have of course only been able to give brief indications that the sphere of social science, of economics, of social morality in the widest sense, law and everything connected with it, will only be mastered when people overcome the laziness which is such an obstacle today. For essentially it is laziness and a fear of genuine ways that lead to insight which prevent people from looking at the world in the light of spiritual science.

In spite of being permitted to give a course of four lectures, I have of course only been able to refer briefly to some things. I am fully aware that I could only give some initial ideas. It also was merely my intention to make the connection to the individual sciences known today in form of initial ideas. I know that many objections can be raised, and am thoroughly familiar with the objections that may be raised. Anyone who bases himself on the science of the spirit must always raise all possible objections for himself at every step, for it is only by measuring his insights against the objections that one truly develops from the depths of the soul the potential vision in the spirit that can cope with reality.

Yet though I am aware how imperfect the ideas I have presented have been—it would need many weeks to give all the details which I was able merely to refer to briefly as results—perhaps I may think after all that I have given some idea in at least one direction, and that is that spiritual science has nothing to do with stirring things up because one has some abstract ideal or other. It is a field of research which the progress of human evolution actually demands at this time. Someone who is working in this field of investigation and truly understands its impulses will know that it is exactly the areas that are demanded in the present time—like the field of psychoanalysis of which I spoke—which show, if truly penetrated, that they can in fact only come fully into their own if illuminated by what we are here calling spiritual science with an anthroposophical orientation. I wanted to show that this is not something dependent on sudden whims or vague mysticism but is pursued in all seriousness by people who are serious investigators, at least in their intentions. I therefore presented a number instances to show that current scientific thinking can gain a great deal from the science of the spirit which we have today.

I do not believe this science of the spirit to be something completely new. We need go back no further than Goethe to find the elementary beginnings in his theory of metamorphosis. These merely need to be developed further in the science of the spirit—though not with abstract, logical scientific hypotheses. They need to be developed in a way that is full of life.

As I myself have been working with the further development of the Goethean approach for more than 30 years, I privately like to refer to the approach called spiritual science with anthroposophical orientation as Goethe’s approach taken further. If it were entirely my own choice, I’d like to call the building in Dornach which is dedicated to this approach a Goetheanum,⁹⁴ to indicate that this spiritual science with anthroposophical orientation is not something new suddenly emerging into the light of day as something arbitrarily developed from a single case but something which the spirit of our age is calling for and also the spirit of human evolution as a whole.

It is my belief that people who have gone along with the spirit in human evolution have in their best endeavours at all times pointed to the principle which must today show itself as the fruits and flowers of scientific endeavour so that genuine, serious insight into the life of the spirit may be established. This must be done with the same seriousness and integrity which has also be brought to the development of natural science in recent centuries and especially in more recent times, a science which those working in the science of the spirit do not reject or denigrate.

My aim in giving these lectures has not been to fight other sciences or go against them in any way, but to show—as I said in my introduction—that I appreciate them. I believe they are great not only in what they are today but also in what may still develop. In my view it shows greater appreciation of natural scientific and other modern ways of thinking if one does not merely stay at the point where one is, but believes that if we enter wholly into everything that is good in the different fields of science, this will not only permit the logical development of some philosophy or other which then does not take us further than what already exists in its basic premises, but will be able to bring forth something that is alive. Spiritual science with anthroposophical orientation wants to be something which thus has life and is not merely based on logical conclusions.

Questions and answers

From the question and answer session⁹⁵ which followed the lecture given in Zurich on 14 November 1917

Question. How does the lecturer explain the process of forgetting?

Well, this is something that can be dealt with briefly. The process of forgetting essentially is due to the fact that the process I referred to as running parallel to the forming of ideas and on which memory depends has a phase of ascent and one of descent. To be more easily understood I might mention that a process which is not the same, but exemplifies the process we are considering, was something Goethe called the ‘fading away of sensory perceptions’. This fading away of sensory perceptions—when a sensory perception has come to an end, the effect of it is still there but fading—is not the process on which forgetting is based, but it helps to clarify the situation. It is exemplary, as it were, of the whole process which occurs there. Let me emphasize that I see this as a process which is mental and physical and not physiological, though it does extend into the physiological aspect. You will find more details about this in my books. But this process, too, has a phase when the effect dies down, and that is the basis of forgetting. The ascending phase is the basis of remembering, and the descending phase of forgetting. The process of forgetting is not all that surprising, I would say, if one takes the view of remembering which I have been presenting.

Question. What does it mean if someone never dreams, or is never aware of his dreams? How should we consider this phenomenon in psychological and anthroposophical terms respectively, that is, how does such a person differ from others in mind and spirit?

This is quite a problematical issue. It is easy for people to say that they never dream, but it is not really the case. What we have here is a certain weakness relating to the subconscious processes that give rise to dreaming. This weakness means a person is unable to bring up from the subconscious what is meant to be read from this subconscious, as I put it metaphorically. Everyone dreams. But just as there are other weaknesses, so some people are in a condition where it is impossible to bring their dreams up to conscious awareness. This weakness should not, however, be regarded the way we may regard an organic weakness, say. It can easily arise if the mind is outstanding in some other area. Thus we are told that Lessing never dreamt. In his case this would have been due to the fact that his was an eminently critical mind. By concentrating his powers as strongly as we know him to have done, thus using them in one aspect of his inner nature, Lessing weakened them in another area. We therefore should not see this weakness as something really bad; it may have to do with strengths in other areas.

To interpret such a thing ‘psychologically’ and ‘anthroposophically’ is, of course, one and the same thing for a spiritual scientist. It cannot even be said that someone with a certain weakness in bringing dreams to mind would also have a weakness, for example, relating to processes that are part of imaginative perception. This need not be the case at all. Someone may not have much of a gift for what is ordinarily called dreaming, and yet develop powers of imaginative perception and so on by using the methods I have given in my books, especially in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. It may be the case that when he now uses his powers specifically for imaginative perception of the world, in full conscious awareness, to look into the world of the spirit—we might say clairvoyant insight if the term can be used without prejudice—this may actually suppress ordinary dreaming, though the reverse may also be the case.

I know a great number of people who use the exercises described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds in their souls and experience a transformation in the life of dreams, which is also described in the book. Ordinary dream life is vague in its contents. It changes strangely under the influence of awakening imaginative perception.

The inability to bring dreams to mind thus points to nothing more than a partial weakness in someone’s nature, and this should be regarded in the same way as when someone has strong muscles in another sphere, and someone else’s muscles are weaker. It is something that lies entirely in the nuances of the way in which people are constituted.

• 80. Moriz Benedikt (1835–1920). Zur Psychophysik der Moral mid des Rechts. Zwei Vortraege gehalten in der 47. und 48. Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher. Wien 1875.
• 81. See note 3.
• 82. See note 79.
• 83. Rudolf Steiner had given two lectures on anthroposophy and psychoanalysis in Dornach on 10 and 11 November 1917: Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology’ (from GA 178), tr. M. Laird-Brown; Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1990.
• 84. Laistner, Ludwig (1845–1896). Das Raetsel der Sphinx, Grundzüge einer Mythengeschichte, Berlin 1889. See the Rudolf Steiner’s story of his life (GA 28, various translations), chapter 15.
• 85. See Jung, C. G., Psychology of the Unconscious Chapter 5.
• 86. Ibid.
• 87. The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita (GA 146). about Wilson in the 5th lecture, on 1 June 1913.
• 88. Wilson, (Thomas) Woodrow (1856–1924), 28th President of the USA 1913-1921. In The New Freedom, in a chapter on the meaning of progress, he wrote that a government was not a machine but a living entity. It was subject not to the theory of the universe but to that of organic life. It was elucidated by Darwin and not Newton. He went on to say that live political constitutions had to be Darwinian in structure and in the way they were used.
• 89. See e.g. Steiner R. The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls (GA 121); tr. A. H. Parker; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1970.
• 90. This was a review of a volume of Dostoevsky’s political writings which had been published by Piper & Co. in Munich in 1917. It appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 13 November (No. 2134) and 14 November 1917 (No. 2141). The review presents Dostoevsky as someone who took the Slavophile movement to its perfection in Russia, decisively demanding that people ‘turn away from St Petersburg’ and that Russian culture should again have its focus in ‘Moscow’—turning away from Western decadent intellectual thinking and concentrating once more on the thinking of the Russian ‘people’ ...
• 91. Wörterbuch der Philosophy, 1. Bd., München & Leipzig 1910.
• 92. Boos, Roman (1889–1952), social scientist. Active representative of anthroposophy and the threefold commonwealth impulse. His treatise on a labour contract was published by Duncker und Humblot in Munich and Leipzig in 1910.
• 93. The expert opinion of the Royal Bavarian College of Medicine has not survived; its original existence is therefore disputed by some. Reference to it is however made in Hagen, Rudolf, Die erste deutsche Eisenbahn, 1885, p. 45, and in Kemmerich, Max, Kultur- Kuriosa, Munich 1909, p. 282 & 295. Kemmerich was unable to give an ‘authentic source’, but spoke of a ‘sufficiently well-known fact’.
• 94. In a public lecture which Rudolf Steiner gave in Basle on 18 October 1917, he said for the first time that he would like to call the ‘St John’s Building’ in Dornach the ‘Goetheanum’. ‘... Most of all—providing it is not misunderstood—I would like to call the world view which thus arises in a scientific way after the sources from which it has arisen for myself, calling it Goetheanism. In the same way I would greatly prefer to call the building out there in Domach, which is dedicated to this world view, the ‘Goetheanum’, providing this does not lead to misunderstanding upon misunderstanding.’ Published in German in Freiheit—Unsterblichkeit—Soziales Leben (GA 72).
• 95. Some of the questions did not relate directly to the subject and have therefore been omitted.