The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Esteemed Attendees!

As I did last winter, I would like to take the liberty of speaking this evening about a topic that is intimately connected with the development of German intellectual life, and thus deviate from what I have been privileged to do for many years, both in this city and in other cities in Germany: to speak about a narrower topic of the spiritual-scientific worldview.

This deviation is certainly close to the human heart due to the great, momentous events in which the German people find themselves, due to the facts unfolding around us, which on the one hand represent a severe test, but on the other hand must become the source of many significant hopes for the future.

And besides, I don't think there's any need to speak out of a narrow-minded nationalistic spirit when one ties the great periods of German intellectual life to the spiritual-scientific considerations that have been cultivated here over the years. For it is my conviction, not based on some obscure feelings, but, as I humbly believe, on the recognition of the facts, that precisely what I have often shown here as a striving into the spiritual worlds is contained in its most significant germ in the most diverse endeavors of German intellectual life, in the flowering of this intellectual life.

If spiritual science wants to be science, then one could very easily – I would say – from a certain point of view, a matter of course, a matter of course that is superficial after all – one could very easily say: science must be international. And wanting to tie science to certain popular endeavors is unacceptable from the outset. So many people say. And it is so obvious when one speaks in this way that the matter of course already becomes superficial.

I will just say about this comparatively: for example, the moon is international, dear attendees, the same moon for all peoples; but what the different peoples have to say about the moon, from the soul, arises from their different dispositions. Now one could indeed say: that may apply to poetry, to literature. But if science is to become a worldview, then what science has to say must be objective, must be exactly the same for all people. But whether science penetrates deeply into the sources of existence or remains on the surface – to name only these two extremes – depends on the different dispositions of the individual peoples, on the impulses that the individual peoples have to give to humanity with what science is to them. And it is of the greatest importance that these impulses, these forces [...] arise out of the inherent qualities of the peoples! This is what is important for the overall development of humanity, not what can be common to all in the abstract sense!

To [hint] at what is actually meant here, one need only recall a saying of Goethe. When Goethe, on his great journey to the south, had not only viewed and explained the most diverse works of art in his own way, but had also studied natural facts and natural beings, he wrote to his friends in Weimar: After all that I have seen of knowledge and nature, I would most like to make a trip to India - not to discover something new, but to see what has already been discovered in my way.

The way of looking at what one is able to bring from the soul to the world phenomena and the world weaving is what matters. And that is intimately connected with the folk souls. And when one speaks, most honored attendees, of the German national soul and its effect within the German nation, it seems immediately obvious to anyone familiar with the course of German development that the summit reached by the German national soul at the end of the eighteenth century, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, must be reached. There, a worldview background was created, a background of knowledge, by minds such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which, within European intellectual life, became a second [...] flowering period after the Greek one, through Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing and others who belong to them. Behind Goethe's “Faust” and the other great poetic and artistic achievements stands what German world view has created in the field of thought development in those days.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, appears first before the souls of today in such a way that it seems so obvious to consider German minds in connection with the development of their nationality. Johann Gottlieb Fichte appears first as the great orator in the “Speeches to the German Nation”. If you consider what was achieved by those speeches, each word of which must still ignite in the German soul today, for the simple reason that in one of the most difficult times in German history, every mind was invigorated and strengthened by these words, and how they actually shed light on the possibilities for German development. And because these speeches arose from the most intimate feeling for German national character and from the most intimate kinship with the innermost forces of the German national soul.

But how easily one would say: Yes, what Fichte spoke to the German people in his enthusiastic, fiery speech back then will easily find its way into every soul. But if you start from what Fichte's world view actually is, then you come to something difficult to understand. Oh, honored attendees, if only this prejudice of the difficulty of understanding such creations as Fichte's, Schelling's, Hegel's could fade away: Never could a personality like Johann Gottlieb Fichte have delivered his “Speeches to the German Nation” if one had not experienced that world view in one's soul, which only appears difficult to understand and which he felt, always felt, had arisen in him as if through a dialogue with the German national spirit itself. For that is how he felt about what he had to say!

Now, spiritual science, esteemed attendees, as it is meant here, is based entirely on the premise that there are dormant forces in the human soul that are not used in ordinary external life, not even when one intelligently observes this , nor in ordinary external science; but which must first be developed, [which must first] be brought out of the depths of the human mind, and developed into what can be used for Goethe's expressions: spiritual eyes, spiritual ears - through which one can look into, listen to, the spiritual world - spiritual eyes, spiritual ears!

Spiritual science assumes that such a real inner sense is not bound to a physical organ, but slumbers purely in the soul, but can be brought out of it. Spiritual science assumes that such a sense is able to perceive a real spiritual world that is around us and to which we belong with our souls and with our spirit, just as we belong to the physical-sensual world with our body. Only that when we look at the physical-sensual world with the organ of the physical-sensual body, it presents itself to us, which dies with our death. Whereas when the inner sense of man proceeds just as scientifically as the other senses or external science and through the external mind bound to the brain or nervous system, when the inner sense proceeds in this way with regard to the spiritual world, then man comes to the observation of those forces that are within him and that permeate the entire external world. [He comes to the observation] of those forces that represent for him the eternal, the immortal forces of the soul that go through births and deaths.

To awaken such an inner sense, such inner forces, was Fichte's, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's, unchanging striving for a worldview. He strove for such a sense. He could only do so because this unique quality - we will see later why I say “unique” - of the German national spirit lived in him, this will to acquire in one's own soul, through an elevation, through a strengthening, through a development of the soul forces, something that cannot be acquired if these soul forces are not strengthened , but which is one and the same – not a vague fantasy is meant here – which is one and the same as that which, as spirit, as real, objective spirit, is as objective as the external natural objects are objective for the senses, which, as spirit, permeates and interweaves the world.

For Fichte, the human self was able to live into this human self if the human self was able to grasp itself inwardly in such a way as to grasp what pulses and weaves and lives through the world as its secrets.

Fichte believed that when a person comes to experience this inner self, this center of the soul, in the right sense, in a truly direct and powerful way within themselves, then not only does he live as an individual human being in such inner experience, but then the life of the world, the world spirit, that which is the creative spirit in all things of existence, lives in this inner experience.

This desire to recognize with the innermost sense organ is what is so characteristic of Fichte. And it is characteristic of him because it was in his very nature. It was in his nature to grow together with that which made an impression on him. He did not just hear something, he did not just see something, but when he heard something, when he saw something, he put the whole feeling and life of his personality into what he heard, into what he saw. He was so immersed in what he perceived that he felt creatively immersed in it – recreating the world, recreating nature, recreating every other human life. This was present in him as a personal disposition.

To illustrate this, I would like to mention a few episodes from the life of Fichte, or rather Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He was a small boy of seven years old, a simple weaver's son; there he stood once at the edge of a stream that flowed past his father's small house. He had thrown a book into the stream! And he stood there crying, watching the book float away. Then his father came along and saw what had happened. The fact was that last Christmas his father had given the boy, who was precocious and did well at school, the “Horned Siegfried” as a present. On the boy, on the seven-year-old boy in the blue farmer's coat, the child of simple people, the mighty, the primeval Germanic deed of “Horned Siegfried” made such a powerful impression that he became completely absorbed in it. And then it turned out that one had to say: Although he used to be so diligent, conscientious and dutiful at school, he is now less attentive. He was reproached for this.

What did the seven-year-old boy do? He said to himself: “I like ‘Siegfried’, I love him, I am attached to him; but he must not take my duties from me, so I throw him into the water.

And again: He had turned nine years old. The neighboring landowner had come to the village where Fichte lived to hear the pastor's sermon there on a Sunday. He had arrived too late to hear the sermon. Then someone came up with a solution. They said: “There is a boy of nine who is so good at listening to sermons that he might be able to repeat the most important parts by heart.” And so they brought in nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He stood there awkwardly in his blue peasant's smock. Once the ice was broken, so to speak, he began to develop the sermon as he had heard it. But not, as children relate, by reciting the words from memory. Rather, he recreated them! So that one could see: the inner fire of the soul had grown together with what had reached him from the pulpit. Even as a boy, he was so intimately united with what was around him that he absorbed everything from the world. That was what he realized, and what led him to his world view, [what led him] to his world view in such a way that he felt: What lives as will in the individual person does not live merely as will in that individual person, but what lives as will in the individual person is like that drop taken from the sea, but which is of the same kind as the whole sea. The will that man learns to recognize in his ego, that throbs, lives and weaves through all existence as the will of the world. And when man pronounces “I,” the will of the world speaks in him.

Thus in his world view, the individual ego grew together with the will of the world. And as if on the wings of the will, what radiates from the divine-spiritual existence, from the divine-spiritual will existence, shines into the human soul as duty.

To him, duty became the highest, the most significant, that which enters a person as a duty – in relation to the world and its phenomena – as a task; this was an immediate inspiration of the divine spirit of will, which pulses and weaves and lives through the world.

And so, in his will as in his ego, Johann Gottlieb Fichte felt at one with the existence of the world. He believed that when he spoke, he spoke not out of personal arbitrariness but out of that which the God who wants to speak in the soul wants to say. And one really cannot imagine that anyone could have been more earnest than Fichte was when, for example, he spoke to his audience in Jena and tried to convey to the souls of his listeners what he had experienced in his soul as a world-certainty.

It was not a matter of merely communicating certain content, certain sentences, so that they would be heard, as was the case with other speakers; no, but for him, when he ascended the lectern, it was a matter of carrying in his soul something to carry in his soul something of which he knew - in true humility, in all modesty: “The world-will, ruling through the world, speaks through me; it must be carried into the souls of my listeners on the wings of my words. And there must be established that connection between the souls of my listeners and the divine-spiritual world-will, by which I myself am aglow and inspired.

And deep within his soul – within Fichte's soul – was the realization that the deepest thing in the world must be grasped by the innermost part of the soul. In turn, here is a short story, which is familiar to those who have studied Johann Gottlieb Fichte, about how he made the following demand of his listeners, for example. As an example of how he sought to establish an immediate personal connection with his listeners, he said: “Gentlemen, think the wall.” And so the people thought about the wall; it was easy for them. After he had let them think about the wall for a while, he said: “And now think about the one who just thought about the wall!” Then the people were already somewhat strangely touched; they did not really know what they should do; they were referred to their own inner being. They should become strong in themselves, in their own inner being, that which, as something impersonal and spiritual, permeates and interweaves the world.

In this way he sought to reach his listeners. And his words were not words shaped in the ordinary way. People who knew him well said: His speech rolls along like thunder, and his words are discharged like individual lightning bolts. He sought not merely to educate good souls, but to educate great souls.

And another said of him: Oh, with Fichte it is so that he lives and moves in the realm of the invisible world of thought; not like one who dwells within, but like one who rules this invisible world.

It was out of such a spirit that Fichte then, in his Berlin lectures from 1811 to 1813, said things that were probably not often uttered before a university audience. He spoke of a “new sense”, of a spiritual sense that is necessary for man if he wants to know the eternal in contrast to the temporal. He spoke of this by comparing this sense with another sense that prevails in ordinary life. He said: “My dear listeners! If a single soul – he meant Fichte's soul – were to appear among a number of people who cannot see Fichte and have never seen Fichte, would they not declare what he has to say to be fantasy? But it is the same with everything that your senses can see compared to what man can see when the new sense - as Fichte called it - the spiritual vision, opens up to him, through which a new world arises.

A genuine spiritual-scientific striving is developed here out of German scientific striving! And Fichte said, being aware of the contrast between this German striving and the Romance striving in relation to knowledge, Fichte said: This striving, that is a striving that emerges from the original source of the living, and that does not merely want to establish a knowledge of the dead.

Even more thoroughly than Fichte was able to do, one can point to certain Western views of eternity, which show quite clearly how different Fichte is from the world development of humanity than, for example, similar spirits from the Romance, French tradition. Take the excellent philosopher Descartes, Cartesius, who was active in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In a similar way to Fichte, he wants to start from what is in the soul: “I think, therefore I am” - “Cogito ergo sum”. But what does it represent? An endeavour to use the intellect to clarify what one already has. Fichte's energetic activity strives to develop in the soul something that one does not yet have, in order to recognize the actual, deep secrets of the world. And one need only mention one thing that comes to light particularly strongly in Cartesius, in Descartes. Descartes also tried to gain clarity about nature from the innermost depths of his spirit, from the innermost depths of the human spirit. About that which is around us. But he does not start from the living and therefore cannot come to the living. And it is characteristic of Cartesius, of Descartes, that he regards not only the other natural phenomena, but also the animals as inanimate, as moving, soulless machines. This is no exaggeration, this is a genuine Descartesian theory: only man, who experiences a soul within himself, actually has a soul in the true sense of the word. The rest of nature is soulless.

Compare this view of nature as something soulless, compare the directly living in Fichte: the soul of man stands in it in the divine will, which pulses and weaves through the world. He looks at external things, but he looks at them in such a way that man is called upon to see in external, material things that in which he has to see the divine will... ... and living everywhere, everywhere ensouled.

The time will come, honored attendees, when people will indeed pay attention to these differences between the individual nations, because the realization of these differences of such outstanding minds must bear fruit. We Germans have no need to prove all that we have now heard from some outstanding personalities on the enemy side. We Germans have no need to join in the tone of not only the misjudgment but the slander of German intellectual life, as we can hear it everywhere. But we do have reason to penetrate into the peculiar, into the essence of German intellectual life.

And then, like Fichte's follower, we see standing before us, also unrecognized, but as a personality who will already celebrate his resurrection, Joseph Wilhelm Schelling. Schelling does not stand there like Fichte. That is precisely what is significant in German intellectual life, this versatility, this diversity. He does not stand there like Fichte; Fichte stands there as if emerging from the contemplation of the individual personality, becoming aware of the world-will pulsating and interweaving through the world. Fichte's entire personality is active out of the will. Out of the soul, out of this German soul – for which the other languages of the West do not even have a literal translation – out of this German soul, Schelling creates his magnificent view of nature and spirit, which only appears difficult to understand.

For Schelling, nature is not something dead, something merely mechanistic; rather, nature is that which has been created out of the same forces over the course of millennia and millennia, out of the same forces that the human soul feels within itself when it truly goes within. And then Schelling looks at nature and can say to himself: That which lives and moves out there in nature – the same powers of the human soul that now come into being in human souls – have created that, have created a foundation for themselves, a preparation; so that they can arise and appear internalized in the human mind, in the human soul.

And so, for Schelling, soul and nature grow together in such a way that he coins the certainly one-sided sentence: To recognize nature is to create nature!

It does not matter at all whether one becomes a follower or an opponent of these great people, whether one agrees or declares oneself to be an opponent of what these great minds have expressed; today this can even appear childish; it does not matter; but what matters is to look at these personalities and to see the best in their personalities, their spiritual striving. It must not be a matter of repeating what someone has said out of the spirit of his time, but of strengthening and empowering oneself in relation to one's own soul forces, in order to perhaps create something completely different today from what Fichte can give than what Fichte gave.

If you see it the way those who heard Schelling, Friedrich Joseph Wilhelm Schelling, did – I myself met people who heard him in his old age and who fully confirmed what those who were young when Schelling was young had to say, when Schelling was at the University of Jena at the end of the 1790s. This is how they spoke, for example – I am telling you what Schubert, who himself was a deep spirit who wanted to penetrate into the depths of the human soul, wrote in his diaries after hearing Schelling in Jena: If someone came during a few afternoon hours on a weekday, Schubert says, you saw an eventful life in Jena. But this eventful life did not come from some kind of frequent celebration, not from some other kind of gathering; rather, this eventful life was because the hour was approaching when not only students, but mature men of all professions went to Schelling's lecture hall. Schubert continues: “The personal impression Schelling made on me was of a great, powerful man.” When Schelling spoke, it seemed to him as if he were standing there and his spiritual musings were directly connected to the spiritual world and his words were shaped in such a way that he grasped what he had to say from what he looked into: the spiritual world.

Fichte came across as a powerful person, as a powerful representative of the German essence. Schelling came across as an educator, a philosophical educator, who appeared to his listeners as if he was surrounded by an aura of spirituality, which he knew how to communicate even as a young man to those who listened to him. And those who heard him in his old age – as I said, I myself still knew people like that – [they] assured that the eye, which still sparkled in old age, spoke of the immediate personal nature of nature, which presented itself to him in the communications that he sought to give to humanity, not out of prudent wisdom, but out of an inner vision of the spiritual world. And Schelling speaks of the so-called [intellectual] views. In this way we have coined the word in his way for the new sense, for the spiritual sense, the spiritual sense that can be awakened in man and is able to look into the spiritual world. Schelling's way of speaking of this spiritual sense may be one-sided; but the fact that it could be spoken of with such earnestness in German intellectual life is one of the most significant intellectual blossoms, in the presence of which one must feel in the right sense.

The third person to be considered among those who created the world view from which Goethe's “Faust” and the other works of art emerged is Hegel. In Hegel, we again notice how he strives to relive in what the soul experiences in itself as an individual soul that which permeates the world, that which pulses through the world. But while Fichte sought this in the will and Schelling in the mind, Hegel sought it in pure, senseless thought. And when thought becomes completely pure, when thought does not lean on that which the senses observe externally, but when thought creates itself as free thought out of the soul, then for Hegel it is not the human soul alone but for Hegel it is the divine world-being that penetrates into the soul and that now kindles its world-thoughts, which gave rise to things outside, in the human soul as the light of the soul itself.

In Hegel, we have a remarkable kind of mysticism that does not want to revel in dark feelings, not a mysticism that wants to live only in feeling, because it believes that in feeling alone it is more closely in touch with the secrets of the world than in thinking. We have a mysticism in Hegel that is intellectually clear and yet not intellectually superficial, a mysticism that is suffused with the light of ideas, with the light of thought. But Hegel seeks to bring to life in his soul those thoughts that truly bring man together with divine thoughts. I would like to say: mystical, but not mystical darkness, but mystical light, mystical brightness.

Hegel did indeed oppose the idea that the new meaning, the inner meaning, should become something that man could only receive through a special disposition; and that is why he criticized Schelling, who spoke of [intellectual] intuition. In a sense, Hegel was right, because for every human being – you only need to read about it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” , for every human being, this new sense is attainable if only he wants to develop it. And this new sense, basically it lives most beautifully, most gloriously in that man, in the German, to whom Fichte, when he showed him his seemingly so dark, arbitrary teaching, wrote in 1794: Philosophical endeavor, like every pure philosophical endeavor, weaves itself into the spirituality of your feeling; for this pure spirituality of your feeling is actually the touchstone. - So Fichte wrote to Goethe in 1794.

And Goethe himself, in the beautiful essay he calls “Contemplative Judgment,” spoke of the fact that there cannot be only one way of looking at the world that relies on the external senses. Rather, just as the power of judgment judgment otherwise judges only about the external sensory experiences, so the power of judgment can develop an impulse in itself, which unfolds an inner life, so that it sees the spiritual, as the senses see the sensual.

Kant still had this inner vision, this vision of the spiritual through the human spirit, of the divine spirit through the human spirit. Goethe said: Let us then bravely face this adventure of reason! And it is from this inner sense that everything Goethe wanted to offer to science was created. And Goethe, in his scientific and cognitive struggles, showed most clearly how the German mind must understand the world differently than the Western mind.

In his early youth, Goethe encountered what Descartes' worldview had become within the development of the French world view. While Descartes still regarded animals as machines, de La Mettrie had already written the book “Man a Machine”! The mechanistic worldview, rooted in the French national character, is a mechanistic view of the world, a view of the world as a mechanism.

And when this worldview was presented to young Goethe, he said, from his German worldview: “Now they are telling us about atoms that collide with each other; this great world machine. If only they would explain to us how this beautiful and diverse world can arise from these colliding atoms. But after they have shown us how the atoms collide and push each other, they do not explain anything more about it!

Now, this striving has been preserved in the mechanism to this day. The mechanistic world view is actually the French world view. Of course, esteemed attendees, this is not meant to apply to the individual members of a nation; individuality can rise above nationality, above that which has been discussed and which arises from the character, from the inner nature of nationality. And here I believe that the right thing has been said. I would like to let the voice of a man be heard, the voice of a man who may perhaps be heard when considering the striving of the French nation towards a scientific world view. This man says:

"Thirst for truth is not a French passion. Appearance is more important than essence, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, the shiny more than the fertile, public opinion more than conscience. This means that the center of gravity of the Frenchman is not within himself, but in the others, in the multitude. Individuals are zeros; the digit that forms them into a number comes from outside: that is the sovereign, the writer of the day, the most-read newspaper, in a word, the current master of fashion. All this can be deduced from an exaggerated sociability; it stifles in the soul the courage to resist, the power of judgment, personal conviction, the cult of the ideal."

This was not written by a German out of one-sided national sentiment, but rather, dear honored attendees, it was written in 1875 by Amiel, Henri Frederic Amiel, the French Swiss at the University of Geneva! He could know as someone who, although he was deeply familiar with German intellectual life, was bound to French intellectual life by his blood ties. And in 1862, Amiel wrote the following:

"I feel a common bond with a Goethe, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Leibniz, who are nevertheless sufficiently different from one another, while French philosophers, orators or mathematicians leave me cold despite their great qualities, because they do not carry the sum of general life within them, do not control all of reality, gag me or make me suspicious. What the French lack is direct knowledge of the living unity, a sense of the sacred, a feeling for the mysteries of being; what is theirs is the foundation of specialized sciences, the art of making a book, it is style, politeness, grace, a sense of order, art for art's sake, discipline, elegance, truth in the details, staging, proselytizing zeal, strength in practical conclusions. But for the journey through Inferno and Paradise, other guides are needed; they are rooted to the earth, in the realm of the finite, changing, historical, and limited. Mechanism and dualism are the pinnacles of their intellectual flight. To break out of this circle, they must force themselves.

One does not want to present a one-sided view, not out of national sentiment; therefore one must choose something that is said by someone who says it out of his own attachment, out of his blood ties to the French nation.

But the time has come when, just as other things, the relationship between the individual elements of the nation must be recognized objectively. And once one has achieved something like Fichte's achievement – Fichte, for whom that which lives outside in the world of the senses is, so to speak, the nationalized field of duty – if one compares that with what lives in the British, in the English world-view, then one need only point to where one will, take old Baco of Verulam, who would accept nothing except what the senses see externally – everything else is an 'idol' to him; and his book about idols is an attempt to prove that what man can grasp in his soul has no objective validity beyond sensuality. And if we go up to Spencer and all those who have a similar view, we arrive at the latest English world view, which has been developed out of the English view: it calls itself pragmatism. What is this pragmatism? It is not something that applies to us Germans. For us Germans, as with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, it is something that experiences truth, and by experiencing truth, one lives together with the world spirit. But the Romance peoples and the British have no conception of the objective world spirit at all. It is something that will only be fully recognized in the future. [...] Truth [...] is something that arises in the soul as a result of this soul growing together with the world spirit itself. Then the soul brings this truth to bear on external things, and the external things become a revelation of spiritual truth. What are they to pragmatism, to this pragmatic product of a worldview? A caricature! I say this, as I said, out of pure fact, not out of any antipathy. For this pragmatism, truth is only of value insofar as one connects concepts and ideas in the spiritual, which are actually only brackets, only bands that bind together the external sensual facts, so that one can find one's way in the external sensual world. Truth has no meaning in itself, has no value in itself.

A person, for example, commits an act; he has thoughts. All this is expressed. We seek the soul for thoughts and actions. The soul is a real being for us. And as we grow together with the truth, the soul itself becomes a reality for us, it is grasped as a reality.

For pragmatism, the soul is a concept that was formed to orient oneself, to hold together the otherwise disintegrating thoughts of man as with a bracket. Truth is what is useful if one wants to understand the world. - The pragmatist forms concepts and ideas with a view to usefulness, so that he can find his way in the world.

One has only to compare this with what lives in the characterized summit of German intellectual life, and one will be able to get an idea of the spiritual world position of the German within the developmental history of humanity.

But now something else comes. If you look at Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, they are great, important minds, geniuses; they represent the coming together of man with the secrets of the world from three different sides: from the side of will, from the side of thought, and from the side of feeling. If anyone today still thinks – and most people do, in fact, think – that it must be so, that they are difficult [to read and understand], then I may well express my conviction that there is a way to present what these spirits have achieved in such a form that even the simplest mind can grasp what it is about, if it only wants to. These spirits can be fruitfully employed in schools; [that they cannot be fruitfully employed there] is merely a prejudice. But the peculiar thing that confronts one when one contemplates these spirits, esteemed attendees, is that in their triplicity something like a unity hovering over them asserts itself! One has the feeling that something is being expressed in three ways, invisibly prevailing over the three. It is what one might call: the German folk spirit itself.

Amiel - again the French Swiss - has sensed something of the fact that the German folk spirit itself seeks to grow together in the souls with the innermost reason for things. Therefore Amiel says:

“Perhaps only the Germanic spirit has the need to think for itself, to search for the very basis of things.”

Amiel therefore goes on to say:

“The German spirit, like the collective inspiration, passes into these characteristic personalities; it speaks through them.”

Therefore, dear attendees, it could happen that personalities actually came along, personalities whose work is largely forgotten today. Therefore, I may speak today by wanting to reopen this as if it were a faded, forgotten pursuit of the development of German thought. Personalities who are largely forgotten today, they appear after the great personalities just mentioned. And the strange thing is that, while these personalities are smaller minds, less ingenious, after the three greats, they even show greater achievements in the field of spiritual searching, more penetrating achievements than the great ones who preceded them. Of course, the great ones need stimulation; but the lesser ones who follow usually achieve greater things, at least more penetrating things, from what has once been stimulated within German intellectual development. They are closer to the soul's inner search for the concrete spiritual world, for the search for spiritual entities that can be found with the characterized sense, just as one finds concrete external natural objects and natural facts through the external senses.

And among these lesser spirits is the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Certainly, there are not many today who still occupy themselves with this Immanuel Hermann Fichte; but Immanuel Hermann Fichte – to mention only that – already stands there and says: the human being whom we observe with our outer senses, the human being who is made of flesh and blood, is bound to the perishable earthly in terms of his material and his powers. But in this human being there is another human being. This other human being – I mentioned him earlier in these lectures. People still laugh about it a lot today. But they will not always laugh! That other person, whom Immanuel Hermann Fichte calls the “ethereal man”, is a supersensible, higher person who has certain higher powers through which he is just as connected to the eternal spiritual aspect of existence, to the whole universe, as his perishable body is bound here to the physical-sensory powers of the earth. And the etheric body, which Hermann Immanuel Fichte assumes, is what first builds the physical body!

And another spirit can appear before us, again more or less forgotten, but no less significant and no less characteristic for the innermost freedom and for the innermost strengthening of the forces of German intellectual life: that is Troxler. Who still knows him today? But how he stands before him who got to know him! Troxler wrote his beautiful lectures on a world view in the 1840s. In them, we see emphasized, again and again, how the human being who stands before us with his senses lives within a spiritual world, a spiritual human being who has a spiritual world around him just as the sensual human being has a sensual world around him. Troxler speaks of abilities that the soul has, which are only hidden in ordinary life. Troxler speaks of what he calls the “super-spiritual sense”.

What does he mean by that? When Troxler speaks of the super-spiritual sense, he means that the senses we usually call that and that have different organs are not the only organs of perception for humans; but that humans can perceive another world with new organs, with new senses, with purely spiritual senses, which is just as full of content as the external physical world.

I have said here before that many people today believe that there is a spiritual world in general. And anyone who bandies a few pantheistic terms about, thinking they are talking about a spiritual world – spirit, spirit and more spirit – is merely bandying abstract terms! Spiritual science speaks of the individual spiritual beings that can be seen; just as one does not always say only “nature, nature, nature!” when faced with the external physical world, but rather “lilies, tulips, carnations” and so on. Specifically, one shows what physical nature produces individually. In the same way, one can show what spiritual nature shows individually. This is what Troxler means when he speaks of the 'super-spiritual sense'. And then he speaks of the 'supersensible spirit', which is not dependent on sensuality, but which knows itself within the spiritual, which feels itself as a body within the spiritual.

But Troxler goes even deeper in his discussion of this spiritual, this higher human being, who goes through births and deaths. And it is wonderful how Troxler – not in an abstract, indefinite way – addresses the higher human being in a very definite way. Even if this is a faded, forgotten tone in the development of German thought, it lives in it. And whether one notices what is alive there or not is certainly important for understanding; but even if one has not noticed it, it lives in the development of German thought and will be noticed! It will celebrate its resurrection as an actual spiritual science!

Then Troxler sees that in the human soul, insofar as it experiences itself between birth and death in the outer physicality, three forces live - as the most beautiful forces according to Troxler's world of vision. First there is the power of faith - that which man has as the power of faith. What a person has as love power, he has it as the power of his soul, but in the soul, insofar as this soul lives in the body. Behind the power of faith, however, there is another, higher power for the soul itself, and Troxler calls this spiritual hearing. That is to say, he believes that the human being can develop the outer form, so to speak, the shell for a spiritual hearing, through which the human being, when he becomes aware of it, can perceive the language of spiritual beings, which speak of the eternal secrets of existence. Thus, faith appears as the outer shell of a much deeper power, an eternal power in man. Spiritual hearing is love, the power of love, which expresses itself in the body as the most beautiful, greatest flowering of the human soul. Nevertheless, for Troxler this is only the outer expression of the power of spiritual touch, of spiritual feeling. The one who loves has the most beautiful flowering of human existence on earth. For him, love is the shell for the powers of which he can become aware, which extend the spiritual organs in the material world so that he can touch the spiritual world as he touches physical things with his physical senses of touch.

And what lives in us as the power of hope is in turn the shell for Troxler, the power of spiritual vision.

So that Troxler sees a higher person in the ordinary person - a higher person who has a spiritual sense just as the physical person has a physical hearing; who has a spiritual feeling just as the physical person has a physical feeling and who has a spiritual vision, a spiritual soul. And that we can be seeing, loving and hearing people in the body, that is for Troxler because, when we go through the gate of death, our soul goes out of the body. The power of faith then appears as spiritual hearing, the power of love as spiritual touch, the power of hope as spiritual strength.

It is in this spirit that Troxler also expresses the following very beautifully. He knows that, in terms of feeling, we are closer to things on a human and spiritual level than with the mere abstract mind. But one can develop such thoughts that are just as close to the direct experience of the thing as feelings usually are. Nor does Troxler seek a sentimental mysticism. This is foreign to the essentially German nature! That vague, hazy sentimentality of mysticism is not part of the German character; it is also foreign to Troxler. But Troxler nevertheless speaks of “thoughts felt” - of thoughts that, like feelings, live as thoughts in the soul. He speaks of “intelligent feeling” and of sensitive thoughts - thoughts that touch the spiritual life!

Troxler is completely imbued with this view. And he once speaks of how he feels in harmony with the entire spiritual life of the German people through such a view, insofar as this spiritual life has appeared in great personalities after Christ. There Troxler says once - I will read these words to you myself:

"Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body... a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which was the higher inner man... In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire internal spiritual human being who carries all the limbs of the external one on his spirit body. Lavater writes more and thinks the same; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about the Bonn under-skirt and the Platner soul-corset, which are said to be hidden in the coarser body-skirt and , we also hear him asking: “What is the purpose of and where did these extraordinary abilities and desires come from that lie dormant in us, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cutting through our earthly shell? ... In the stony limbs of

of man

“grow and mature in a way that is unknown to us... We could”

says Troxler further.

"cite a myriad of similar ways of thinking and creating, which in the end are only different perceptions and representations in which... the true, only teaching of the individuality and immortality of man is contained.

Troxler also speaks of the possibility of a science of man on the path of knowledge he sought, through which – to use his own terms – the “super-spiritual sense” in union with the “supernatural spirit” can grasp the supernatural essence of man in his “anthroposophy”.

Troxler cites these [individual personalities], and many others could be cited who, entirely from the essence of German national identity, sought the way to the real, true spiritual world. And before Troxler's [inner eye] stood a certain science. He thought: When man observes man himself with his senses and explains this observation with his mind, which is connected to the senses, then anthropology arises – the science of man through the senses. But anthropology arises from man observing man as a sensual being; but the spiritual man, the higher man with the awakened senses that we have already spoken of, can also observe man; then a higher science arises. In 1835, Troxler spoke beautifully of this higher science, as anthropology is, saying:

Although it is highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which... must reveal itself in every anthroposophy... must reveal itself, is moving upwards, it cannot be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts it with as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

This German spiritual life developed entirely out of the German national character. And is it not wonderful to experience such a phenomenon as this: In the 50s of the last century, a simple pastor in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck published a simple little book, a wonderful little book that is at the height of spiritual science, that stands apart from all materialism, but also from all mere intellectual and conceptual considerations, that sets out to consider the human soul in such a way that it can grasp spiritual reality.

Some of the simple Rocholler writing, which is simply written for seeking circles, may seem fantastic, but that does not matter; what matters is that we have here a simple person, at the pinnacle of education, leading a way into the spiritual worlds. It is the intention that counts. That is why intentions such as this little book, which was published in Waldeck in 1856, are so infinitely important. And anyone who might think that I am choosing to present these phenomena in order to prove something is quite mistaken.

However, over the past few decades, circumstances have developed in such a way that even the vast majority of scholars were numbed by what Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had created, and descended from this height, thinking: the one-sided, materialistic Darwinism had proved powerful, the French materialism had proved powerful.

But what I am characterizing is not something that can be explained away by German intellectual life alone; rather, hundreds and hundreds of such phenomena could be cited. When people actually become aware of this, they will see the depth of German insight that can be drawn from German national character. For that is what really strives for a German world view, from German intellectual life.

Perhaps it may be mentioned, just as an aside, how profound these things actually are. Who among physicists, overwhelmed by French mechanism and English utilitarian philosophy, does not laugh inwardly when he praises them outwardly? I may well speak about the matter, for more than thirty years have passed since I endeavored to bring out the deep significance of Goethe's Theory of Colors in opposition to that theory of colors which is completely overwhelmed by Newtonism and by mechanism in general. Whenever you talk to a modern physicist about Goethe's theory of colors, all you get is, “Goethe's theory of colors doesn't tell you anything.”

This is quite understandable for someone who is familiar with today's circumstances; but there is something here. And that is that Goethe, through his direct coexistence with the mystery of the color spectrum, has created a tremendous work about nature and dared to oppose the intellectual appropriation by the British in Newton, and that the world has not understood it. But the chapter has yet to be written: Goethe - also in the theory of colors - is right against Newton, when one will grasp even more deeply what Fichte calls Germanness within Europe.

I could point to many other minds. As I said, you only need to pick them out. For example, I could point out a soul researcher - Schultz-Schultzenstein is his name, that is certainly a German name: Schultz-Schultzenstein - who tries to place the soul life of man under the concept of “rejuvenation” in the 1850s of the last century. Schultzenstein was able to offer some wonderful insights! He said that the human soul can only be properly understood in its life here between birth and death by observing the experiences it has as feelings and thoughts at the various stages of its life. And as it progresses, one can follow how the soul, like a previous skin, sheds what has already been experienced, and something continuous, something alive is renewed and rejuvenated within the soul.

I can point to another mind, whose literary activity also began in the 1850s and who died unnoticed in 1880. In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” - [...] already in the first edition, which appeared in 1900 - I referred to Karl Christian Planck. He was a mind that was aware of how it created from German national character. Who knows him! But that does not matter, because what was in him as a force is at work in the German character, is at work in Central Europe and brings forth what belongs to the best life in Central Europe.

I would like to mention just one thing to show Karl Christian Planck's originality. Today, from the point of view of natural science, anyone who believes that they understand everything – to look at it the way the French look at the earth, the way the English observer looks at the earth, the way the geological observer looks at the earth – they look at the universe that consists of matter. For Planck, such an observer of the earth is like someone who would look at a tree only in terms of the trunk and the wood, and not in terms of the essence of the tree, the leaves, the blossoms and the fruits! For Planck, we do not see the earth in its entirety if we do not also see the whole human being on the earth. Planck looks at the earth as a spirit would, from the outside. And in what the geologist sees, we see only part of the earth, like the trunk, the wood of the tree, but nothing else of the nature of the earth. For Karl Christian Planck, the Earth is not only a living being, but a living, spiritualized living being. And what the physical human being himself is – as a flower, as a fruit – that belongs to the essence of the Earth. – A spiritual – Goethe would say – a spiritual worldview. And Christian Karl Planck is aware that he comes to such a spiritual worldview from the depths of the German people. Planck already expresses this beautifully in the 1860s. He has written several books; the books he has written breathe the breath of such a worldview. In 1864, in his book “Grundlinien einer Wissenschaft der Natur” (Foundations of a Science of Nature), he expresses beautifully how he is aware that he has come to his view, which sees the spirit in nature, from the depths of the German essence. I will read the words to you myself:

What power

writes Planck

deep-rooted prejudices from the previous view from his

the author's

writing, the author is fully aware of this; but just as the work itself, despite all the unfavorable circumstances, which, according to the author's

situation and professional position,

a work of this kind has been opposed, but has fought its way to its realization and its path into the public, so he is also certain that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.

What our medieval poetry has unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation as the times mature. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, which was met with harm and ridicule (as Wolfram describes it in his Parzival)

In 1864, before Wagner, these words were truly written!

finally, in the strength of its unceasing striving, it attains the highest; it looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which is attained by its hero, that conversely receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the enduring knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.

Karl Christian Planck died at the age of eighty. He left behind a writing that he called “The Testament of a German”; the first edition was published in 1881; the second edition by Diederichs Verlag in 1912. Who has dealt with it?

Well, people had other things to do! For example, they had to deal with the books published by the same publishing house by a man who lives in a rigid spirit - of course, that is not meant as a criticism of him at all; they also dealt with the books by the French philosopher - his name is still Bergson - a French name! He is the one who, since the beginning of the war, has not found enough defamatory words for the German worldview and German intellectual life. I think I actually said last year that this Bergson kept saying to his Frenchmen in Paris: the Germans once had a significant intellectual life, but now they have completely degenerated; all that can be seen is their mechanistic life. I said last year that in earlier times, good Henri Bergson would recite Novalis and Goethe and Schiller to you, in a time when he might not yet have called it “mechanical.” It cannot be emphasized enough. One looked out into the world with admiration. Not only now, during the war and the period of hatred – I have also tried to point out before what Bergson's “philosophy” is like.

A special feature of Bergson's philosophy is the following: He comes up with an idea; but he puts it forward in a light-hearted way. It consists in saying that one does not proceed correctly when one looks at the development of the world in such a way that one regards the subordinate beings as the origin of what man descends from, because one must start from man. That is indeed a very good thought: we must start from man. Man is the most original thing before any other being of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdom existed. This is not understood today, but it is nevertheless founded in the writing on the reorganization of the world view of Bergson.

This also emerged in Planck's work: before the other things were there, man was there, albeit in different forms, and then he pushed away certain things that he could not use in his development, and so man came into being by excluding the plant and animal kingdoms. Just as man secretes his bones inwards, so that which is placed at the top, the plant kingdom, the mineral kingdom, secretes itself out of itself. This is a thought, esteemed attendees, that will become established in German intellectual life once the material colorations of Darwinism have been refuted and correctly illuminated.

All right, Bergson presents this; but I was able to show – as I said, just before the war, so that people would not think that it is only under the influence of the war events that things are now being characterized as they are here – I was able to show that precisely this idea, which – in a somewhat simplified form – the French philosopher Henri Bergson – that this idea, which already in the 1870s, 1882 [published], lived in the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss – also a faded, forgotten aspiration of German intellectual life – was powerfully and energetically advocated by Preuss!

I am quoting a few words in which I have cited this Prussian, this German view of the matter; I am quoting these words from Pruss's book “Geist und Stoff” - 1899 in second edition already published. It says:

"It may therefore be time to establish a [different] doctrine of the origin of the organic species, which is not only based on one-sidedly established propositions from descriptive natural science, but is also in full agreement with the other laws of nature, which are at the same time also laws of human thought. A doctrine, at the same time, that is free of any hypothetization and is based only on strict conclusions from scientific observations in the broadest sense; a doctrine that rescues the species concept according to actual possibility, but at the same time adopts the concept of evolution as proposed by Darwin and seeks to make it fruitful in its realm.

The center of this new doctrine is man, the only species on our planet that recurs: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the older observers started with natural objects and then went so astray that they could not find the way to man, which Darwin only managed in the most miserable and thoroughly unsatisfactory way by seeking the progenitor of the Lord of Creation among the animals, while the naturalist would have to start with himself as a human being, in order to gradually return to humanity through the whole realm of being and thinking.

It was not by chance that human nature emerged from the development of all earthly things, but by necessity. Man is the goal of telluric processes and every other form that emerged alongside him borrowed its features from his. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos...

When its germs had arisen, the remaining organic residue no longer had the necessary power to produce further human germs. What did arise became animal or plant...

and so on. Bergson, the Frenchman, either does not know this German predecessor – which, in the case of a philosopher, would of course be just as big a mistake as if he knew him and did not name him; but the latter is to be assumed in the case of Bergson! He accuses today's Germans of mechanism! In the meantime, it has been possible to show that entire pages in Bergson's books have been copied from the Germans, whom he now disowns. Entire pages of arguments have been copied from Schelling and Schopenhauer by Henri Bergson! This is perhaps not a mechanical way of constructing intellectual life.

I would like to say: With something like this in the background, Germany's enemies now dare, insofar as they are represented by such personalities, to defame and belittle the German essence. But precisely from what is now at stake, in the world-historical development, this German essence will learn to assert that which lies at the bottom of its being, also in world-historical becoming.

Dear attendees, what is happening now – before world history – needs little saying to characterize it as one might imagine an objective act is characterized: There are enemies surrounding Central Europe. One need only mention a few figures that will speak strongly in the future, when things will be seen differently than Germany's enemies see them now: 777 million people, not counting the Italians, stood around Central Europe facing a group of 150 million. 777 million against 150 million. Do they need to be envious of this Central Europe? Well, the property of these 777 million people covers 68 million square kilometers, compared to the 6 million square kilometers of property owned by the 150 million in Central Europe. And these 777 million – multiplied by Italy – against these 150 million, they are in a position where they not only want to fight with weapons, but also want to have the better part of the rest of the world, want to starve the 150 million people. And leading people - people called “great personalities” from Germany's side - they indulge in the most vicious accusations and slanders of the spiritual life that has emerged in the 6 million square kilometers in the middle of Europe and show how little they understand of what is alive there.

Besides Bergson, there is, for example, the French philosopher Boutroux – shortly before the war, he was still traveling around in Germany, even giving lectures in German about the close scientific relationship between Germans and Frenchmen! Now he is saying things like this to his fellow Parisians: The Germans imagined that they had come to the end of all searching. With this, they also imagined that they were at the center of the divine order of the world and that they could rule over all men. [...]

We do not need to fall into this tone; but it is necessary to point out such facts and to get to know the facts. After all, Boutroux also managed – well, the Frenchman is witty – to make a joke not too long ago: the Frenchman, the Englishman and the German are talking about the pursuit of a worldview, of knowledge of external things; Boutroux said to his partner: the Frenchman, if he wants to get to know a camel, goes to the menagerie, looks at a camel and then describes it. The Englishman goes to the area where camels live, looks at the camel and then describes it. The German neither goes to the menagerie to see a camel nor to the area where camels live in distant lands, but goes into his room and studies the camel in its inwardness in its being and creates the camel in himself out of his being. The French are witty! Just this joke about Boutroux comes from Heinrich Heine!

And so much more could be said. It must be said: the German does not really need to fall back into the ways of those around him! But the German has all the more need to engage with that which is currently the best part of his nature in the pursuit of knowledge. The German nature will also overcome those prejudices which arise from the fact that, under the influence of French and English materialism, a person who searches for spiritual science is still considered today to be a dreamer, a person who does not live in reality: Oh, when you see someone like Planck or [someone like] Preuss – well, these people can spin theories, but to engage with reality, to see what lives in reality, that's what the “practitioners” are for; someone like Planck, you can't use him for life!

I could give many examples; I will just mention one in connection with Planck, since I was allowed to discuss him: about 35 years ago (Planck died in 1881) he wrote words that I will even read out. He was not a diplomat; he was not a politician; he was not one of those preachers who believe that they have a complete understanding of the workings of the world, that they have “lived it all,” who know how to speak authoritatively about everything from a broad perspective and disdain those who live only in the spiritual world. He was none of these. He was a simple man of vision! But a man who was able to see into the course of events. And what he developed before 1881 is written in his Testament of a German. He died in 1881. In it he wrote about what presented itself to him in the development of Europe. And he looked at it with discerning eyes. He wrote that war must come. And about this war he wrote the following words:

“If a people, universalistic and central by its very nature, is now in the sharpest contrast to its earlier history, unites to form a pure nation-state and, for all others, increases to the highest military armament, what else can be the consequence in a time of the highest national aspirations than ultimately the most comprehensive clash?”

So says the “impractical man of world view”! How many people who were practically inside the circumstances did not believe, when the war broke out, that the Italian would also stand against Central Europe! But the impractical man of conviction knew how to say this in 1881. Not only will the Russian East rise up against Central Europe, but as in the past we will also have to defend ourselves in the West and in the South.

“It is not only the antagonism of political interests that must provoke him,”

"but, as it is now becoming increasingly clear, above all the conflict of economic interests in their still nationally bound, still inorganically opposed form. And the more the contradictions and evils that this state of affairs brings about in relation to the universalistic increase of means of communication, which have already been discussed earlier, must come to the fore, the sharper the tension that arises on all sides as a result.

And to this is added another contrast, in which the inherent one-sidedness of our Western culture has created an enemy, and which, by the nature of things, must become hostile above all to the German spirit. From the very beginning, as we saw, Western Christianity and its striving for a full, humanly present mediation of the divine content has gone hand in hand with the rigid otherworldliness and bondage of the Oriental and Byzantine essence, for which ecclesiastical and political power and authority directly coincided. In this rigid unity, the Christian East remained just as unfreely confined as, conversely, in the West, the free national development overgrew religious unity and pushed it into the background. But the one-sided, secular, and outwardly material character of Western culture, which is rooted in this, has also made it possible for the unfree East to appropriate these external cultural means without having to absorb the deeper, free, spiritual side of that development. On the contrary, it only helped him to confront the West, which had fallen into a one-sided national separate existence, all the more consciously in the self-confidence of his distinctive religious and political unity, and thus, in view of the still unfinished state of other Slavic tribes and the disintegrating Turkish Empire, to claim an even more far-reaching significance for himself. And precisely because of this, by the very nature of things, he becomes an opponent of the nation, which also in this respect has its central and unifying human and universal calling, of the Germans, and especially of that empire, which for a long time has based its existence precisely on the comprehensive interweaving of German and foreign elements.

No political cleverness, no love of peace on the part of Germany can prevent this hostile clash within the current merely national order. For more powerful than all cleverness is the nature of the circumstances; and already now, despite the friendly attitude of Germany and Austria, the hostile mood of the Russian East is only emerging all the more clearly because one could not give it a free hand in everything, but had to set a certain goal. And if it comes to a fight one day, then, however much we have to fight it for the good of Europe, the latter will not stand by our side, but as in the east, we will also have to defend ourselves in the west and south at the same time; on all sides, national jealousy will rise up against the new empire in their midst.

But it is precisely the realization that in this last and most difficult struggle the completely inadequate nature of all previous purely national orders comes to light, that above all the universal position of the German nation, linked as it is to a series of foreign elements, is completely incompatible with it and could only lead to unending struggles. This realization will give this bloodiest of struggles its forever decisive significance and will open the minds of the nations, which are now still trapped in dull externalities, to their ultimate and lasting calling. The realization will dawn, amidst blood and tears, that it is never the mere nation-state and its commercial society that can bring peace and reconciliation, but only that of the universal law of vocation, that only in it lies the renewing rebirth for all the inner wounds, for the relationship of states to one another, for the degenerate conditions of the Orient, and for the corruption and externalization of one's own education. If the first struggle, which was intended to prevent our national awakening, has brought it to completion precisely for that reason, then conversely the second, which is caused by the very inadequacy of all this national order, will also lead beyond it forever to the humanly universal goal.

It is from the German spirit that a renewal of humanity must come, so that there may be a victory over that which lives in a sense indicated by these facts and which has come from an un-German spirit, especially in more recent times, and which can be characterized by saying: the power of incompetence that crushes all justified striving must be recognized. The German spirit is strong and vigorous and will recognize this in this area and will heal the world in this area when it becomes aware of what still lives in German intellectual life as a forgotten pursuit in many cases.

We have been able to glance over to the West on many an occasion. Finally, let us glance over to the East with a few words. This whole East, yes, how does it present itself? Central Europe?

The German essence: can it be characterized in relation to the West in such a way that one can say that one truly does not need to belittle the West in any way. One can know that the scientific spirit emanated from Italy before the dawn of the newer intellectual life. This scientific spirit has emerged from the south. One can know that the French spirit also gave rise to the rational conception of the world; that the sense of utility emerged from the English spirit, the view of the world in such a way that everything is placed in the utility. But just how far removed this British spirit is from the German spirit, well, you can tell by the fact that if someone wanted to try to characterize Fichte's theory of knowledge, where he repeatedly attempts to describe the self feeling and experiencing itself in the world spirit, if you are able to fully penetrate this field of knowledge, it would look strange linguistically alone...

If I say: “I represent the I” – not even that could be adhered to, [instead of the German word “ich” the English “i”] – not even that could be adhered to, that one [in English] goes from the lower-case “i”, as one writes in German, to the capital “I”, when you have experienced the “I” – Fichte calls it “reproduction”, the progression of culture in the “I” – within yourself, how should you call it when you want to move from the small “I” to the large “I”, since grammatically the personal “I” is written “I” everywhere.

You could say: the German essence relates to the Western essence in the same way that the Italians were the contemplatives, the French shaped reason, the utilitarian principle shaped the English; but the principle of internalization is part of the German essence. The Italian looks at the world. By looking at the world, he says: the world is quite right; but it just needs to be reshaped a little, it needs to be made to correspond to our ability, not a compulsory language, but a word that has been experienced. It is precisely when you look deep, deep inside, especially into the best sides of intellectual life, that this word is true.

The Frenchman says: This world is also worth / gap in the transcript ]. The Englishman says: [gap in the transcript] The German says: I also like the world. And within himself, he wants to create a small image of the world. The Russian, yes, one only needs to think of such characteristic figures as Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky's “The Brothers Karamazov”. But this type of Karamasov character is poured out over the whole of the East in the nineteenth century. [...] Ivan Karamasov himself says: I would still accept God; but I cannot accept the world from God. The world, in the Russian sense, is actually something that should be replaced by another, namely by the one that is made for the Russian people.

It is a seemingly radical word, but anyone who follows the development of Russian thought in the nineteenth century will find it to be true. For it is indeed strange: from the first decade of the nineteenth century in Russia it is emphasized that in the Russian countryside there lives - Dostoyevsky said it, for example, despite the greatness of Dostoyevsky, one must also bear in mind the greatness of Dostoyevsky -: the Russian person is the one in all people who, through his universal humanity, must place his spiritual life in the place of others. And man faces the world in such a way that one can say: in the nineteenth century, he is increasingly coming to say to himself: European intellectual life is decrepit and has had its day. That must be eradicated. Russian intellectual life would be young; it must dominate. The Russian language means joy, means love. The West – and that includes Central Europe, but also France, Italy, Spain and England – means struggle, means war, means selfishness. This is the underlying tone of all [Russian] intellectual life in the nineteenth century.

Outwardly it does not appear so strongly; but it is so. Only strange: Who is then actually the first to have pronounced the nature of the Slav, from which they then want something quite different than lies in the Russian national spirit? They claim that a noble man spoke of it first, and they have built on that. Who was it that first characterized the matter so beautifully, coined a word, an idea, on which they then based the whole of the nineteenth century? Herder! Herder was basically the first Slavophile. But the word of a Slavophile has degenerated into megalomania. And it came to pass that it resounded again and again: Europe is decrepit, and Russian intellectual life must take the place of European intellectual life.

Dear attendees, as I said, just one more fact: in 1885 a book was published that was written by the Russian Yushakov. Yushakov stands on a somewhat different cultural ground than the one I have just mentioned – the literary counter-image, presented for that which has emerged up to the present day and up to our current terrible events – Yushakov, 1885, a remarkable book! He does not look to the West, but to the East, to Asia, to the Asian peoples. Now, as Jusakhov says in his, as I said, remarkable book: These poor Asians, they have shown themselves how they have gradually struggled from their cultural life up to the corresponding present culture, they have shown it as the struggle between two spiritual beings. But this struggle represents a reality in Asia. According to Yushakov, the two spiritual powers under whose influence the Asians were, were represented as the good Ormuzd and the evil Ahriman.

Ahriman was always the one who was the negation of Ormuzd. Jushakow says to the Iranian peoples, to whom the Persians and Indians also belonged: Ahriman, the evil spirit, took away these fruits of both material and spiritual culture from them.

But what have the European peoples of the West done? - Jushakow asks. They have squeezed out of those Asian peoples what those peoples had acquired under the influence of the good Ormuzd! Russian culture must intervene here. Russian culture is the only one capable – Jusakhov says, I am not saying this – of lovingly embracing the Asian peoples. Two powers stand in the world that will bring happiness in the future – and above all happiness to the Asian peoples; these two powers are – I am not saying this, Jusakhov is saying it! , these two powers are: the Russian peasant and the Cossack, the two great representatives of [Russian] humanity - says Yushakov in 1885. And he does not go to Asia to bring love to the Asians, to bring love to the Asians in turn, sooner or later the evil that the Western peoples have brought over Asia, which he could not really talk about in those days in the case of Germany, will be brought to light.

Strangely enough, the book is called “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”. And there Yushakov says in relation to this: The English show by their treatment of the Asian peoples as if they believed that these Asian peoples were only dependent on this unloving English love. And then Jushakow says how he imagines the relationship between his people and the English. He says to England - these are his words, his own words:

"England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland - I can only rejoice that

my Russian fatherland [according to Yushakov]

is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as splendid as it is sad.

Thus in 1885 the Russian Yushakov on England.

He is probably not primarily concerned with the alliance between Russia and England, but with restoring the blessings of Ormuzd to the Asians. Russia will now cross over to Asia, says Yushakov, because in Russia the alliance between the all-fertility developing farmer and the all-chivalry bearing Cossack is rooted in a deep culture, Yushakov believes, and they will prefer to spread Russian spirituality across Asia first.

Thus writes one of those minds that thought this way in Russia and already expressed it in the 1820s – in 1829: Western Europe and Central Europe are decrepit, have outlived their usefulness. But we in Russia, we have the right to bring this Europe under our rule. And when we have it – so says Kireyevsky – when we have it, then we will share what we have with the others, insofar as it is right.

This is not only the “right” thing to do in the political sphere, since the falsified “Testament of Peter the Great”, but also in the entire intellectual and cultural life. And what is going on through this Russophile: the excellent Russian philosopher Solowjow has said it himself. And you can read this in my book 'Thoughts During the Time of War' – it is not available at the moment, but it will be published again in a while. Solowjow himself said it: what is alive in Russian intellectual life comes from what one could call: Russia still has a long way to go before she attains the maturity of her own nature; for Russia is still today, in fact, in the midst of it, thoroughly in the midst of unclear mysticism. That is all. One has to be 'mystical' if one is to be able to say: This German spiritual life seeks the tool of mystical endeavor. On the contrary: fully conscious thoughts, light-imbued, thought-filled views, clear views; the German seeks an image of the world in order to shape his own being as similarly as possible to this image of the world.

The other nations should not be disparaged. But what can they recognize that the German strives for, that he strives for consciously, so that he makes his own image of man similar to the image of the world? The Italian cannot strive for it so consciously if he only strives from his nationality. He would have to be taught this, as it were, by suggestion, so that what is a striving for knowledge in him would have more of an effect than a morality.

The Frenchman wants it more as an intellectual art, to give the mind pleasure, to give the mind a sense of well-being. This is basically something that lies in the fundamental character as a French imprint of the mechanistic view of nature.

The Englishman wants – he would certainly also accept Fichte's science if one could transform its truths into a principle or a machine, if one could place it in the pragmatic order of life, could make pragmatism out of it, as it was mentioned today.

The Russian still needs unclear, hazy mysticism everywhere today. I have already mentioned Ivan Karamazov from Dostoyevsky's work “The Brothers Karamazov”, who is a true representative of the Russian who has absorbed Western European culture. God would be there, yes, God, but in mystical obscurity. And one can say: when the Russian becomes atheistic, he wants a mystical atheist. The Russian can become atheistic, but he almost wants the atheist to be revealed to him by God! You could also teach him Fichte's philosophy, you could also teach him Hegelianism; but then it would have to be found mysteriously on an altar somewhere or at least bear the imprint that it came into the world in a mysterious way!

In short, the various nations surrounding the German nation still stand today in such a way to this German spiritual life that there is truly every reason for the German to become aware of the germs and roots and diversity in his spiritual being! And the fruits and blossoms will come when the German becomes truly aware of this, aware of it precisely through the difficult time of trial in which he is currently mired.

Yes, what has been attempted to be presented in brief, dear attendees, developed on the 6 million square kilometers in the center, compared to the 68 million square kilometers in the surrounding area! And as if by bonds, which are also bonds of the spirit, this Central Europe is held together. The alliance between Germany and Austria is truly such a bond, one that is also based on the commonality of the spiritual life flowing through the two countries, through the two national territories.

I may say this because I have lived in Austria for more than half of my life, almost thirty years, and have participated in all the times of these thirty years in the way in which the German essence must live there in Austria, must live in multiform Austria. I have come to know what it means to take the word of one of the most German of Austrians – Robert Hamerling, the greatest son of Austria in the second half of the nineteenth century – and to feel it in the innermost being of someone who grasps the sense of belonging in Central Europe. Robert Hamerling said: “Austria is my fatherland; but Germany is my motherland”.

Robert Hamerling, as early as 1862, in his wonderful poem 'Germanenzug', spoke of this inwardness of the German world-view. Does it not appear to us in a beautiful form, this inwardness of the German world-view, when we see, for example, how Jakob Böhme, in very early times, speaks of how the German strives for knowledge, but in such a way that he wants to use it to enter into the spirit of the world? He expresses it so beautifully:

“When you look at the depths”

he means the depths of heaven

“And the stars and the earth, you see your God. And in you live and are you also. And the same God rules you also.” “You are created from this God and live in the same. Also, all your knowledge is in this God. And when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

Fine words! If we take this, which I have tried to illustrate today: it turns out that in this internalization of the German essence – in this desire to grasp what, as divine spirituality, permeates and animates the world within one's own inner being – lies the profound world-historical calling of the German. And it is so intrinsic to the German that it really stands out like a second wave in the great upheaval of the human race. If we look across to the Orient – looking differently than the Russian Yushakov – then we find in the Asian peoples how they have dreamed of, how they have also once tried to penetrate into the spiritual that lives and breathes through the world. They tried to bring the I so close that it was as if asleep, [that] the actual human inner being was asleep, and so the human being could merge into what the life of the world spirit in the principle of the All interweaves and lives through the world. Now that the greatest impulse for the evolution of the Earth has been introduced – the Christ Impulse – the Asiatic type is no longer the one that can dominate the human race.

The German nature has found the right way to penetrate into the spiritual world in the sense of the Christ impulse, so that the ego is not eradicated as it was in Asia; [but that which is sought in the future of the world as a divine-spiritual, that is achieved through the elevation, through the strengthening - not through the weakening - of the ego. But the I is precisely exalted, strengthened, in order to grow together with the whole world. Thus ancient human striving continues in the newest form, as in historical vocation the essence of the German spirit.

This is beautifully shown by Robert Hamerling, the Austrian German, in his “Germanenzug”, in which he describes in beautiful words how the ancient Germanic peoples, the ancestors of the Germans, once migrated from Asia to Europe, so that we take part in it, that we take part in the setting sun, in the mild twilight that spreads; and when everything sinks into a deep sleep, only one remains awake: the blond Teut. While everyone else sleeps, he is occupied with the thoughts of the future German being, the German task. The genius, the spirit of the German people, appears before the blond Teut and speaks to him of the future of the German people. This is how Robert Hamerling feels it and expresses it through the genius of the past to the blond Teut just as the Germanic peoples, the ancestors of the Germans, are crossing over from east to west. Thus speaks the genius:

"To whom will break the word from soul depths
Like your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly in string sounds
His innermost? Who zich'n the sense so magnificent
Into the heavenly blue, granite hieroglyphics
Of the soul's upsurge from the narrowness of life?
Who finally ties the strands
Of the inquisitive thought to the stars
So boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Who is so high, so deep, his urge, his hunch?
Who grasps the near and far so faithfully?
Where is every earthly and heavenly zone
reflected as in your thinking, O Teuton?

And how related, but on a higher level, appears the spiritual search for the divine reason of the world. Here, too, the genius of the German people speaks to the blond Teut as if through Robert Hamerling's mouth, from that which I just hinted at through the words of Jakob Böhme, where devotion becomes knowledge, where devotion becomes the world view, devotion to the divine spiritual forces of the world. This is how Hamerling has the blond Teut say to the genius of the German people:

"But however proudly you may strive,
Soaring high above other swarms,
You will always retain the ancient, sacred fire:
The dream-filled drunkenness of God
of the ancient Asian homeland. This holy ray, a temple fire, will glow in your chest and soul, remain with you and be your pilot at the helm! You only strive because you love: your most daring thought will be a devotion that seeks to merge with God."

Yes, the German needs to become aware of his German essence. Then he will find the right relationship to the events of the present! For he may trust in that which exists as the source, the root and germ of spiritual striving within the German nation. And whatever has such germs may be felt with hope and confidence that its blossoms and fruits will develop, despite everything that rises in hostility in the world against this spiritual foundation in German development.

I think that a truly objective, not a narrow-minded, consideration of the German nature says this. And the German can rely on such an objective consideration. Then he can also look objectively at the way in which one not only simplifies but also defames what extends over 6 million square kilometers compared to 68 square kilometers.

Anyone who looks at this, at the roots and the hoped-for seeds, blossoms and fruits of the future, may summarize what today's contemplation was, summarize it sentimentally in a few words. Words that are intimately connected with the whole feeling of the German essence, all German essence. They, too, are by Robert Hamerling, and they, too, prove how Central Europe has been welded together from this side and from the other side of the Ore Mountains, but has also been welded together by this common spiritual weaving and essence in this Central Europe.

Therefore, let us conclude today's reflection with a word from Robert Hamerling, the Austrian German, a word that summarizes in a sensitive way what I have tried to bring before your soul in a longer exposition - an unfortunately all too long exposition. Robert Hamerling says out of the sentiment from which he said “Austria is my fatherland, but Germany is my motherland”:

“And if ever the day
Should prove hostile to the German name,
From ocean to ocean shall run
The course of the German spirit!”

Naturally, it will only be possible to lay down certain guidelines in our presentation of the real nature of the art of declamation, as an exhaustive discussion would require us to penetrate into a fair number of the intimacies and inner aspects of man's physical, psychic and spiritual life. Last time, we were able to see the remarkable way in which blood-circulation, pulse-beat and breathing-rhythm interpenetrate each other in the human organism something of which the poet in his act of creation already has some apprehension, and all of which sounds forth again in the poem, as indeed it should whenever this is realized through either declamation or recitation. Recitation stands midway between singing and mere speech. In speech, everything that in singing is still bound up with numerical relations is transformed into something of inner intensity: when we pronounce a word, it is as though the elements which live in song were compressed from spatiality into something two-dimensional yet through its intensive force, the two-dimensional plane still gives expression, albeit of a different kind, to what was present in the singing. And between these, between singing and spoken prose, lie recitation and declamation. It may be said that recitation and declamation are a kind of singing on the way to becoming mere words, but held back, and arrested midway along this path: it is this “midway” character which makes the essential nature of recitation so extraordinarily difficult to grasp. Here again, it is the task of an intimate psychosomatic observation to seize on those elements, through which the arts of declamation and of recitation are sharply distinguished. For it is deeply founded in the very nature of poetry that, in one case, a poem is recited, and in another declaimed.

Deeply founded in the nature of poetry is the way in which all those things that in music and singing, in pitch, harmony and so on, take on a kind of independent, external existence, are here turned inward – in poetry they are so far turned inward that nothing external remains except time, which finds expression in the metre, in the long and short syllables. Now, although we look in recitation mainly for the metrical element, where pitch, and even tone-colour, and that which produces harmony, etc., is laid aside, yet the element of differentiation still makes itself felt. We have not yet proceeded as far as the mere word, where the element of differentiation in the actual substance of the word is removed and is no longer apparent.

When it comes to reciting, the physical processes involved take the following course. [Note 6] Essentially, recitation depends upon what takes place when inhaled air penetrates into our body, and through the breathing-rhythm, into the movements of the cerebral fluid which also fills the spinal cord right into the nervous-sensory apparatus of the brain. [Note 7] The breathing-rhythm presses, so to speak, against the organs of mental representation, and along this path is brought to a kind of stasis: this path ultimately becomes the inhaling-process, which is then followed by that of exhalation, as in this case the rhythm is always twofold. When this process is carried to its farthest limit, prose-representations arise. If, however, it is consciously checked before its ultimate stage, and the metre deriving from the breathing-rhythm is not destroyed, there arises what lives in recitation. Hence we can say: it is a striving from world observation to mental representation that should manifest itself in recitation; and this is why recitation is in essence the representative art appropriate to epic and narrative verse.

At the other extreme stands declamation. This is bound up with the very opposite process, in which the soul-life is not linked with the representational element, but with that of volition. Now, when we will something, when we pass over into a will-impulse – what actually is it that is overcome? (This happens unconsciously, of course, for many people but consciously for those who exercise self-observation.) Here, in fact, one must always overcome a world of harmony, a world of inner consonances and dissonances. It is from harmony, from an inner experience closely resembling what hovers behind music, that the will-impulse is ultimately formed: when the breath-stream strikes up into the brain and flows back again, descends through the canal of the spinal cord, and strikes into the whole metabolic process – and this again strikes into the pulse-beat of the blood-circulation. With this passage from above downwards is thrust into our will-nature, mainly bound up as it is with exhalation, all that lives in man in the way of vanquished or allayed harmonies, inner discords, consonances, and so on. Thus the very opposite element is brought to expression and mediated through the word, when the word is made the bearer of an impulse of will.

And when, in a poem, we let sound forth what lives within us not merely as an external narrative, but sending forth what lives in us as we exhale our breath – then, indeed, we enter the sphere of the dramatic. But this can, or rather should be described only as the last step: for the dramatic also evolves out of the epic, when this has been developed through some folk-disposition, for instance. Those who, working in this way out of a folk-disposition, give poetic form to the epic, have a grasp of man’s inner nature to which they give outward expression in the external representations. Thus, where we find such a folk-disposition, a dramatic element sounds into the epic. Recitation becomes declamation.

Today we hope to make clear to you how this comes about, by the recitation of the beginning of Goethe’s “Achilleis”. Here Goethe transposed himself completely into the epic feeling, the epic metre of the Greeks, into the entirely metrical hexameter: so that inwardly, the conscious grasping of the in-breathing process which tends toward representation is predominant. Secondly, and by way of contrast, we shall take an epic of the Nordic world, from an earlier age – part of the magnificent Finnish Folk-epic, the Kalevala. Here you will see how the dramatic element arises in the epic itself, and consequently how recitation in epic metre quite naturally becomes declamation – how, therefore, epic recitation subtly results in dramatic declamation.

With this, then, we will begin our practical demonstration. Frau Dr. Steiner will give a reading from Goethe’s “Achilleis”.

Hoch zu Flammen entbrannte die mächtige Lohe noch einmal

Strebend gegen den Himmel, und Ilios’ Mauern erschienen

Rot durch die finstere Nacht; der aufgeschichteten Waldung

Ungeheures Gerüst, zusammenstürzend, erregte

Mächtige Glut zuletzt. Da senkten sich Hektors Gebeine

Nieder, und Asche lag der edelste Troer am Boden.

Nun erhob sich Achilleus vom Sitz vor seinem Gezelte,

Wo er die Stunden durchwachte, die nächtlichen, schaute der Flammen

Fernes, schreckliches Spiel und des wechselnden Feuers Bewegung,

Ohne die Augen zu wenden von Pergamos’ rötlicher Feste.

Tief im Herzen empfand er den Hass noch gegen den Toten,

Der ihm den Freund erschlug, und der nun bestattet dahinsank.

Aber als nun die Wut nachliess des fressenden Feuers

Allgemach, und zugleich mit Rosenfingern die Göttin

Schmückete Land und Meer, dass der Flammen Schrecknisse bleichten,

Wandte sich, tief bewegt und sanft, der grosse Pelide

Gegen Antilochos hin und sprach die gewichtigen Worte:

‘So wird kommen der Tag, da bald von Ilios’ Trümmern

Rauch und Qualm sich erhebt, von thrakischen Lüften getrieben,

Idas langes Gebirg und Gargaros’ Höhe verdunkelt:

Aber ich werd’ ihn nicht sehen. Die Völkerweckerin Eos

Fand mich, Patroklos’ Gebein zusammenlesend; sie findet

Hektors Brüder anjetzt in gleichem frommen Geschäfte:

Und dich mag sie auch bald, mein trauter Antilochos, finden,

Dass du den leichten Rest des Freundes jammernd bestattest.

Soll dies also nun sein, wie mir es die Götter entbieten,

Sei es! Gedenken wir nur des Nötigen, was noch zu tun ist.

Denn mich soll, vereint mit meinem Freunde Patroklos,

Ehren ein herrlicher Hügel, am hohen Gestade des Meeres

Aufgerichtet, den Völkern und künftigen Zeiten ein Denkmal.

Fleissig haben mir schon die rüstigen Myrmidonen

Rings umgraben den Raum, die Erde warfen sie einwärts,

Gleichsam schützenden Wall aufführend gegen des Feindes

Andrang. Also umgrenzten den weiten Raum sie geschäftig.

Aber wachsen soll mir das Werk! Ich eile, die Scharen

Aufzurufen, die mir noch Erde mit Erde zu häufen

Willig sind, und so vielleicht befördr’ ich die Hälfte.

Euer sei die Vollendung, wenn bald mich die Urne gefasst hat!’

Also sprach er und ging und schritt durch die Reihe der Zelte,

Winkend jenem und diesem und rufend andre zusammen.

Alle sogleich nun erregt, ergriffen das starke Geräte,

Schaufel und Hacke, mit Lust, dass der Klang des Erzes ertönte,

Auch den gewaltigen Pfahl, den steinbewegenden Hebel.

Und so zogen sie fort, gedrängt aus dem Lager ergossen,

Aufwärts den sanften Pfad, und schweigend eilte die Menge.

Wie wenn, zum Überfall gerüstet, nächtlich die Auswahl

Stille ziehet des Heers, mit leisen Tritten die Reihe

Wandelt und jeder die Schritte misst und jeder den Atem

Anhält, in feindliche Stadt, die schlechtbewachte, zu dringen:

Also zogen auch sie, und aller tätige Stille

Ehrte das ernste Geschäft und ihres Königes Schmerzen.

Als sie aber den Rücken des wellenbespületen Hügels

Bald erreichten und nun des Meeres Weite sich auftat,

Blickte freundlich Eos sie an aus der heiligen Frühe

Fernem Nebelgewölk und jedem erquickte das Herz sie.

Alle stürzten sogleich dem Graben zu, gierig der Arbeit,

Rissen in Schollen auf den lange betretenen Boden,

Warfen schaufelnd ihn fort; ihn trugen andre mit Körben

Aufwarts; in Helm und Schild einfüllen sah man die einen,

Und der Zipfel des Kleids war anderen statt des Gefässes.

Jetzt eröffneten heftig des Himmels Pforte die Horen,

Und das wilde Gespann des Helios, brausend erhub sich’s.

Rasch erleuchtet’ er gleich die frommen Äthiopen,

Welche die äussersten wohnen von allen Völkern der Erde.

Schüttelnd bald die glühenden Locken, entstieg er des Ida

Wäldern, um klagenden Troern, um rüst’gen Achaiern zu leuchten.

Aber die Horen indes, zum Äther strebend erreichten

Zeus Kronions heiliges Haus, das sie ewig begrüssen.

Und sie traten hinein; da begegnete ihnen Hephaistos,

Eilig hinkend, und sprach auffordernde Worte zu ihnen:

‘Trügliche, Glücklichen Schnelle, den Harrenden Langsame, hört mich!

Diesen Saal erbaut’ ich, dem Willen des Vaters gehorsam,

Nach dem göttlichen Mass des herrlichsten Musengesanges;

Sparte nicht Gold und Silber, noch Erz, und bleiches Metall nicht.

Und so wie ich’s vollendet, vollkommen stehet das Werk noch,

Ungekränkt von der Zeit; denn hier ergreift es der Rost nicht,

Noch erreicht es der Staub, des irdischen Wandrers Gefährte.

Alles hab’ ich getan, was irgend schaffende Kunst kann.

Unerschütterlich ruht die hohe Decke des Hauses,

Und zum Schritte ladet der glatte Boden den Fuss ein.

Jedem Herrscher folget sein Thron, wohin er gebietet,

Wie dem Jager der Hund, und goldene wandelnde Knaben

Schuf ich, welche Kronion, den Kommenden, unterstützen,

Wie ich mir eherne Mädchen erschuf. Doch alles ist leblos!

Euch allein ist gegeben, den Charitinnen und euch nur,

Über das tote Gebild des Lebens Reize zu streuen.

Auf denn! sparet mir nichts und giesst aus dem heiligen Salbhorn

Liebreiz herrlich umher, damit ich mich freue des Werkes,

Und die Götter entzückt so fort mich preisen wie anfangs.’

Und sie lächelten sanft, die beweglichen, nickten dem Alten

Freundlich und gossen umher verschwenderisch Leben und Licht aus,

Dass kein Mensch es ertrüg’ und dass es die Götter entzückte...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[Sidney is one of the few English poets to transpose himself into the classical feeling for hexameter verse with even qualified success; in his case furthermore it is the pastoral, emblematic aspects of this representational, recitative mode which emerge, rather than its narrative possibilities. The following passage is an extract from the “First Eclogues” in Book I of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.

DORUS:

Then do I thinke in deed, that better it is to be private

In sorrows torments, then, tyed to the pompes of a pallace,

Nurse inwarde maladyes, which have not scope to be breath’d out,

But perforce disgest, all bitter juices of horror

In silence, from a man’s owne selfe with company robbed.

Better yet do I live, that though by my thoughts I be plunged

Into my live’s bondage, yet may disburden a passion

(Opprest with ruinouse conceites) by the helpe of an outcrye:

Not limited to a whispringe note, the Lament of a Courtier,

But sometimes to the woods, sometimes to the heavens do decyphire,

With bolde clamor unheard, unmarckt, what I seeke what I suffer:

And when I meete these trees, in the earth’s faire lyvery clothed,

Ease I do feele (such ease as falls to one wholy diseased)

For that I finde in them parte of my estate represented.

Lawrell shews what I seeke, by the Mirre is show’d how I seeke it,

Olive paintes me the peace that I must aspire to by conquest:

Mirtle makes my request, my request is crown’d with a willowe.

Cyprus promiseth helpe, but a helpe where comes no recomforte.

Sweete Juniper saith this, thoh I burne, yet I burne in a sweete fire.

Ewe doth make me be thinke what kind of bow the boy holdeth

Which shootes strongly with out any noyse and deadly without smarte.

Firr trees great and greene, fixt on a hye hill but a barrein,

Lyke to my noble thoughtes, still new, well plac’d, to me fruteles.

Figge that yeeldes most pleasante frute, his shaddow is hurtefull,

Thus be her giftes most sweet, thus more danger to be neere her,

But in a palme when I marke, how he doth rise under a burden,

And may I not (say I then) gett up though griefs be so weightie?

Pine is a maste to a shippe, to my shippe shall hope for a maste serve?

Pine is hye, hope is as hie, sharpe leav’d, sharpe yet be my hope’s budds.

Elme embraste by a vine, embracing fancy reviveth.

Popler changeth his hew from a rising sunne to a setting:

Thus to my sonne do I yeeld, such lookes her beames do aforde me.

Olde aged oke cutt downe, of newe works serves to the building:

So my desires by my feare, cutt downe, be the frames of her honour.

Ashe makes speares which shieldes do resist, her force no repulse takes:

Palmes do rejoyce to be joynd by the match of a male to a female,

And shall sensive things be so sencelesse as to resist sence?

Thus be my thoughts disperst, thus thinking nurseth a thinking,

Thus both trees and each thing ells, be the bookes of a fancy.

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586).] [Note 8]

Now a passage from the Kalevala: and we will try, despite the exigency of a translation, still to read this in such a way as to show all the things I have discussed.

From the Kalevala: Rune XIV (Conclusion)

Then the reckless Lemminkainen,

Handsome hero, Kaukomieli,

Braved the third test of the hero,

Started out to hunt the wild-swan,

Hunt the long-necked, graceful swimmer,

In Tuoni’s coal-black river,

In Manala’s lower regions.

Quick the daring hunter journeyed,

Hastened off with fearless footsteps,

To the river of Tuoni,

To the sacred stream and whirlpool,

With his bow upon his shoulder,

With his quiver and one arrow.

Nasshut, blind and crippled shepherd,

Wretched shepherd of Pohyola,

Stood beside the death-land river,

Near the sacred stream and whirlpool,

Guarding Tuonela’s waters,

Waiting there for Lemminkainen,

Listening there for Kaukomieli,

Waiting long the hero’s coming.

Finally he hears the footsteps

Of the hero on his journey,

Hears the tread of Lemminkainen,

As he journeys nearer, nearer,

To the river of Tuoni,

To the cataract of death-land,

To the sacred stream and whirlpool.

Quick the wretched shepherd, Nasshut,

From the death-stream sends a serpent,

Like an arrow from a cross-bow,

To the heart of Lemminkainen,

Through the vitals of the hero.

Lemminkainen, little conscious,

Hardly knew that he was injured,

Spake these measures as he perished:

‘Ah! unworthy is my conduct,

Ah! unwisely have I acted,

That I did not heed my mother,

Did not take her goodly counsel,

Did not learn her words of magic.

Oh! for three words with my mother,

How to live, and how to suffer,

In this time of dire misfortune,

How to bear the stings of serpents,

Tortures of the reed of waters,

From the stream of Tuonela!

‘Ancient mother who hast borne me,

Who hast trained me from my childhood,

Learn, I pray thee, where I linger,

Where, alas! thy son is lying

Where thy reckless hero suffers.

Come, I pray thee, faithful mother,

Come thou quickly, thou art needed,

Come deliver me from torture,

From the death-jaws of Tuoni,

From the sacred stream and whirlpool.’

Northland’s old and wretched Shepherd,

Nasshut, the despised protector

Of the flocks of Sariola,

Throws the dying Lemminkainen,

Throws the hero of the islands,

Into Tuonela’s river,

To the blackest stream of death-land,

To the worst of fatal whirlpools.

Lemminkainen, wild and daring,

Helpless falls upon the waters,

Floating down the coal-black current,

Through the cataracts and rapids

To the tombs of Tuonela.

There the blood-stained son of death-land,

There Tuoni’s son and hero,

Cuts in pieces Lemminkainen,

Chops him with his mighty hatchet,

Till the sharpened axe strikes flint-sparks

From the rocks within his chamber,

Chops the hero into fragments.

Into five unequal portions,

Throws each portion to Tuoni,

In Manala’s lowest kingdom,

Speaks these words when he has ended:

‘Swim thou there, wild Lemminkainen,

Flow thou onward in this river,

Hunt forever in these waters,

With thy cross-bow and thine arrow,

Shoot the swan within this empire,

Shoot our water-birds in welcome!

Thus the hero, Lemminkainen,

Thus the handsome Kaukomieli,

The untiring suitor, dieth

In the river of Tuoni,

In the death-realm of Manala.

Trans. J. M. Crawford.

I think that from these two examples, Goethe’s “Achilleis” and the Kalevala, you will be able to see how on the one hand in the “Achilleis” you have something experienced as a perception – as breathed-in, I might say, and on the way to being transformed into a placid mental representation. But one does not let it arrive there: it is held back so that what should terminate in representation does not quite become a purely conceptual representation; it is arrested on the way there, and becomes what we might call an ‘enjoyed’ representation. Thus, halted on the way from perception to a concept, it is not conceptually grasped, but enjoyed. This expresses itself best in metre, in a quiet verse-measure. When, however, the will-element wells up from the human being, bearing on its waves the will-impulse as a representation – then, the force which would become the will to an act, would become an external deed, is held back; and just there, where the will-impulse still lives within man and moves him to speak, it becomes vocal, and the voice is so formed that the will lives in the waves of vocal expression. Here the transition is the very reverse of the previous one: there, we had to do with a transition from the activity of perception to the repose of mental representation; now we have the opposite – from the repose of representation to volition. But the will element is held back where it would transform itself into external movement, into life in the outer world. Just this outward movement is held back and, instead of plunging into action, it lives on the stream of the words.

All that I have here indicated takes place in recitation and declamation respectively. And we can study psychosomatically, through observation of man himself, both these forms as I have just described them – something which was actually practised in former times in a more instinctive way. In earlier methods of declamation and recitation, it was possible to differentiate very clearly between the epic and the dramatic, and also to discern, within the epic, the dramatic element; and also their interweaving in the lyric, where again both interpenetrate in the rhythm. At the present time, we must raise what used to be present more spontaneously and instinctively in methods of recitation, although with the more prosaic modes of recitation it hasbeen for some time forgotten – this must now be raised into consciousness. It must not, of course, live in the reciting just as I have presented it, when I described the more corporeal processes: this connection with the artistic formation of the breath as I have presented it must rather become a feeling, an inner perception. It is along this path that an art of recitation will be found. One must be able to study the paths taken by human consciousness.

If once more we observe the path along which the predominant inbreathing-process tends toward mental representation, our consciousness then lays hold of what is en route to becoming representation. And here we can experience two paths: either we enter into abstract prose-representation, in which case we arrive at the formation of a concept; or we do not grasp these abstract prose-representations, but enter into a movement which, before the fact comes to be represented, places us in the inbreathed air and all that it does in our body – thus our consciousness floats, as it were, on the inbreathed air, and we arrive, because the psycho-spiritual frees itself from the bonds of the body, at a sort of unconscious condition. It is not allowed to reach this state, however. It is arrested: it is held up in the region of the vowels; instead of allowing it to issue in the formation of a concept or entering an unconscious state, we move in the region of the vowels – a movement of “enjoyment”. This is what is done by these poets who revel in assonance. In this experience of the breathing-process which has not quite arrived at representation, we have consciousness moving on the waves of assonance, the repetition of the vowels (which is in fact also present, in weaker form, in terminal rhyme). This is what takes place here. When, on the other hand, the will is active, what is within strives outward: and instead of checking consciousness before it leads to purely conceptual representations, we arrest it where the will streams outward, and hold the impulse back, keeping it under control, so to speak. We then bring into this life of volition something which has entered that poetry in which the element of will in particular streams out from man’s inner being – that part of man’s nature with which the Nordic races were especially endowed, and which they brought to expression when they gave themselves over to the creation of poetry. When they were unable to live themselves out in external deeds, these Nordic-Germanic peoples arrested the impulse, the urge and impetus to external deeds, and expressed the movement poetically on the waves of the out-flowing impulses of will. This lives in the incessantly repeated consonants of alliteration: in this the will, which streams through the breath and the whole body, has life. In the movement of alliteration it is just this will element that is active, just as in assonance, in the repetition of the vowels, there is laid into the innermost nature of the words that inhaled breath which fails to become representation, and expresses itself, wave-like, in the movement of assonance.

We would like to demonstrate assonance with a second example, the “Chor der Urtriebe” by Fercher von Steinwand. And then the element of alliteration, illustrated by a reading from Jordan’s Nibelunge. Now it was Jordan’s particular endeavour to bring out once more the real nature of alliteration. Of course it is natural that the modern German language did not quite achieve this: for this reason, a faint breath of coquetry hovers over Jordan’s poetry. This, however, is not important. It is better, for our purposes, to make use of a revival of alliteration, rather than trying to revive the old and far too difficult alliteration, which in fact no longer appeals to the modern soul.

From “Chor der Urtriebe”:

 Ist’s ein Schwellen, ist’s ein Wogen, 

 Was aus allen Gürteln bricht? 

 Wo wir liebend eingezogen, 

 Dort ist Richtung, dort Gewicht. 

 Hätt’ uns Will’ und Wunsch betrogen? 

 Sind wir Mächte, sind wir’s nicht? 

 Was es sei, wir heischen Licht – 

 Und es kommt in schönen Bogen! 

 Jeglichem Streite 

 Licht zum Geleite! 

 Schleunigen Schwingungen 

 Zarter Erregung, 

 Weiten Verschlingungen 

 Tiefer Bewegung 

 Muß es gelingen, 

 Bald durch die hangenden, 

 Schmerzlich befangenden 

 Nächte zu dringen. 

 Über den Gründen, 

 Über den milden 

 Schwebegebilden 

 Muß sich’s verkünden, 

 Geister entzünden, 

 Herzen entwilden. 

 Hat es getroffen, 

 Find’ es euch offen! 

 Seht ihr die erste 

 Welle der Helle? 

 Grüßt sie die hehrste, 

 Heiligste Quelle! 

 Schnelle, nur schnelle! 

 Hellen Gesichtes 

 Huldigt dem Scheine, 

 Hütet das makellos ewiglich-eine 

 Wesen des Lichtes! 

 Mag es, sein wechselndes Streben zu feiern, 

 Farben entschleiern! 

 Wecken wir lieblichen Krieg, daß sich trunken 

 Lösen die Funken! 

 Laßt uns die Tiefen, die schaffend erschäumen, 

 Laßt uns das Edle, was streitend gesunken, 

 Laßt und die Kreise, die Fruchtendes träumen, 

 Strahlend besäumen! 

 Fercher von Steinwand (1828-1902) 

[Two examples may help clarify the characteristic effects of assonance in English poetry. The first is a passage from Swinburne’s “Tristram of Lyonesse – Prelude: Tristram and Iseult”.

These are the signs wherethrough the year sees move,
Full of the sun, the sun-god which is love,
A fiery body blood-red from the heart
Outward, with fire-white wings made wide apart,
That close not and unclose not, but upright
Steered without wind by their own light and might
Sweep through the flameless fire of air that rings
From heaven to heaven with thunder of wheels and wings
And antiphones of motion-moulded rhyme
Through spaces out of space and timeless time.
So shine above dead chance and conquered change
The spherèd signs, and leave without their range
Doubt and desire, and hope with fear for wife,
Pale pains, and pleasures long worn out of life.
Yea, even the shadows of them spiritless,
Through the dim door of sleep that seem to press,
Forms without form, a piteous people and blind,
Men and no men, whose lamentable kind
The shadow of death and shadow of life compel
Through semblances of heaven and false-faced hell,
Through dreams of light and dreams of darkness tost
On waves innavigable, are these so lost?
Shapes that wax pale and shift in swift strange wise,
Void faces with unspeculative eyes,
Dim things that gaze and glare, dead mouths that move,
Featureless heads discrowned of hate and love,
Mockeries and masks of motion and mute breath,
Leavings of life, the superflux of death—
If these things and no more than these things be

Left when man ends or changes, who can see?

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

And secondly:

THE WINDHOVER
To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

¤ ¤

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).] [Note 9]

From Die Nibelunge: Sigfrid-Sage, Canto 20:

Als die sinkende Sonne den Strom der Sage,

Den smaragdenen Rhein, errötend im Scheiden,

Mit Geschmeiden umgoss von geschmolzenem Golde,

Da glitten bei Worms durch die glänzenden Wellen

Hinauf und hinabwärts zahlreiche Nachen

Und führten das Volk vom Festspiel heimwärts.

Dem geregelten Rauschen und Pochen der Ruder

Am Borde der Boote melodisch verbunden,

Erklangen im Takt auch die klaren Töne

Menschlicher Kehlen: in mehreren Kähnen,

Die nah aneinander hinunter schwammen,

Sangen die Leute das Lied von der Sehnsucht,

Die hinunter ins Nachtreich auch Nanna getrieben,

Als die Mistel gemordet ihren Gemahl.

Lauschend im Fenster des Fürstenpalastes

Lag Krimhilde und harrte des Gatten.

In banger Befürchtung bittersten Vorwurfs

Verlangte nun doch nach dem fernen Geliebten

Ihre sorgende Seele voll Sehnsucht und Schmerz.

Sie fühlte sich schuldig und ahnte des Schicksals

Nahenden Schritt. So vernahm sie, erschrocken

Und trüben Sinnes, den Trauergesang.

Während der Wohllaut der uralten Weise

Vom Rhein heraufklang, regten sich leise

Ihre Lippen und liessen die Worte des Liedes,

Welche sie kannte seit frühester Kindheit,

Also hören ihr eigenes Ohr:

‘O Balder, mein Buhle,

Wo bist du verborgen?

Vernimm doch, wie Nanna

Sich namenlos bangt.

Erscheine, du Schöner,

Und neige zu Nanna,

Liebkosend und küssend,

Den minnigen Mund.’

Da klingen von Klage

Die flammenden Fluren,

Von seufzenden Stimmen

Und Sterbegesang:

Die Blume verblühet,

Erblassend, enblättert;

Der Sommer entseelt sie

Mit sengendem Strahl.

Beim Leichenbegängnis

Des göttlichen Lenzes

Zerfallt sie und folgt ihm

In feurigen Tod.

‘O Balder, mein Buhle,

Verlangende Liebe,

Unsägliche Sehnsucht

Verbrennt mir die Brust.’

Da tönt aus der Tiefe

Der Laut des Geliebten:

‘Die Lichtwelt verliess ich,

Du suchst mich umsonst.’

‘O Balder, mein Buhle,

Wo bist du verborgen?

Gib Nachricht, wie Nanna

Dich liebend erlöst?’

‘Nicht rufst du zurück mich

Aus Tiefen des Todes.

Was du liebst, musst du lassen,

Und das Leid nur ist lang.’

‘O Balder, mein Buhle,

Dich deckt nun das Dunkel;

So nimm denn auch Nanna

Hinab in die Nacht.’

Wilhelm Jordan (1819-1904).

[A revival of alliteration seems never to have appealed to English poets in modern times. There are, however, a number of good translations of the Old English alliterative poem Beowulf; part of it is translated in this example:

Sorrowful sat in the Hall of the Hart, the Dane King Hrodgar

Mourning the brave one fallen, the dear friend dead.

Bowed was the hoary head and his heart was heavy,

Speechless a while, Then speedily sent he and bade them bring

Beowulf hither, the Grendel slayer, Agatheon’s son,

Straightway the Aethling answered his summons, strode thro’ the Hall,

First mid his followers all and the flooring strained at their feet,

Came to the King. With kindly custom he greeted him,

Questioning courteous if quiet the night.

Then answer made Hrodgar, strength of the skylding

Ask not of rest nor of night! renewed is the anguish

Doomed to the Danesmen. Aeskere is dead –

Aeskere, Irmenlow’s brother, of Aethlings the best.

Trusty in council was he and of comrades truest.

Foremost still at my side in the stress of the battle,

When man came breast against man and the boar tusks meet.

Here in the Hall of the Hart is he felly murdered

By a fiend most foul – which one I wot not.

Some there be of my fellows who warden the marshlands

Tell how twain there be such at times in the twilight

Ghostly figures haunting the homestead and vastly tall.

One was in woman’s shape and what stalked beside her

With menacing mien man’s form wore.

Yet huger them thinketh than human fashion.

Grendel they term him, the old ground tillers

Since times of yore – and his sire none guesseth

Nor knoweth none if brethren he boasteth

Nor kindred claimeth ’mongst grimly ghosts.

Bleak their abode and barren; holes where the wolf howls.

Trans. E. Bowen-Wedgwood.]

We see how in the first poem with its assonances, there lives the representational element, checked on the way to becoming a concept and held fast in enjoyment; and how in the second, which is built up on alliteration, on the repetition of consonants, there lives the element of will, checked on its way outwards and realizing itself in inner movement on the waves of the words, on the waves of a will-impulse that has been grasped conceptually.

You will see that in bringing the impulse of spiritual science to bear on aesthetic considerations there is no temptation to introduce those abstractions which so easily find their way into intellectually-derived studies of art. It will be evident from such studies as we have pursued here, even though we have only been able to indicate certain guidelines – how an understanding is brought to art, yet an understanding that is also a perceptive power, and which thus becomes a knowledge of things. Art and knowledge are gradually interwoven into a living spiritual perception, which makes itself felt and demands to be put to the test in that very sphere where man himself becomes an instrument of artistic expression. Knowledge such as this does not observe art from without, but is gained from an inner participation in art – and knowledge such as this can become the bridge that leads to the practice of art.

Especially when learning the art of recitation, you will find in such knowledge a support quite different from anything deriving from all those techniques of respiration based on external, materialistic and mechanistic observation of the human body, which result in voice-production that is purely external and mechanical. An inner awareness in the learning of an artform becomes possible. And now, in conclusion, I will just draw attention to a few instances of things which have to be learnt in recitation. What is at stake, for instance, is not how the voice or the tone can be sustained by some kind of external method of manipulating the breath, or placing the voice, in the way taught by some bad singing-teachers. The essential thing is that what should stay in the unconscious must still remain there when we are learning a subject such as this – a man should not just be wrenched out of everything unconscious through clumsy treatment of the body. Rather, through proper artistic formation and artistic treatment we can train our breathing so that the whole process remains in a certain sphere of the unconscious, and yet is drawn up into the soul-element which gives it artistic expression. We can then, for instance, develop a sustained tone by practising this where it is particularly preponderant: in the recitation of something of a sublime and exalted nature. If we try, when reciting such noble verse, to develop the sustained tone on a foundation of actual feeling, the poise of the voice and the breathing will develop of themselves, out of a true feeling for what is actually being recited.

We can develop correct intonation, and bring out the tone, by reciting examples of the ridiculous or comical; the required strengthening of the tone that we need in the rise and fall of speech for declamation or recitation we can achieve by practising the tragic; and we can learn to attenuate and mollify the tone by practising the joyful. We discover how it is really the soul-element which we grasp, and which must come to expression in recitation and declamation, and how, when we grasp it rightly, we draw the physical and corporeal after. We do not first adjust the physical with clumsy techniques that will rein our handling of these matters and lead, not to the development of a real art, but to mere routine. We enter upon a quite genuine, and yet straightforward practise and study of art. But this will only be obtained if there is in our knowledge so much of aesthetic sensibility, that with it we can approach art; and only if, on the other hand, our perception of man is so far evolved that in those arts which make use of man as an instrument, we can see man himself revealed – a revelation of art pierced through by the pulsating, pervading spirit of man.

Through these few guiding principles, scanty as they are, I hope to have shown you at least the direction in which an art-form as subtle and intimate as recitation and declamation leads: but this path can only be followed when the attempt is earnestly made to find the bridge between art and science. When I drew attention to this as one aspect, at the outset of the course, it was no mere empty phrase. The intention was to show you, taking the art of recitation and declamation as an example, that we do not merely set before ourselves the abstract ideal of unifying religion, art and science; but in pursuing true spiritual perception, leading to real spiritual knowledge, we do actually achieve something in the way of bringing knowledge to art and illumining artistic creation through knowledge. Thus will man be able to enter more and more consciously into art, and will be able to bring forth more and more consciously what he needs from art in the course of his evolution towards an absolutely free and truly human consciousness.

[ 1 ] If we turn our attention to what was said to the Greeks by the teachers and leaders of ancient Egypt about the direction and guidance of the spiritual life of their country, we may trace a remarkable parallel between that which is manifested in the individual life of man, and that which governs human evolution as a whole. It is related that when a Greek once asked an Egyptian, who had guided and led his nation from ancient times onwards, he answered, ‘In the times of yore, the gods ruled and taught us, and only afterwards men came to be our leaders.’ The Egyptians named Menes to the Greeks as their first leader on the physical plane to be recognized as a human leader. That is to say, the directors of the Egyptian people alleged that in earlier times the gods themselves—as Greek records confirm—guided and led the Egyptian nation. Such an assertion, coming down to us from ancient times, must, however, be rightly understood. What did the Egyptians mean when they said, ‘Our kings and great teachers were gods?’

The man who thus answered the question of the Greek meant that if any one had gone back into the ancient times of the Egyptian nation, and had asked those people who felt something within them like a higher consciousness, or wisdom from higher worlds: ‘Who are really your teachers?’ they would have answered: ‘If I wanted to tell you about my real teacher, I should not point to such and such a person and say, ‘That is my teacher,’ but I should first have to put myself into a clairvoyant state (it is known from spiritual science that this was comparatively easier in ancient times than it is now), and then I would find my real inspirer and teacher, who comes to me only when the eyes of my spirit are opened.’ For in ancient Egypt beings who were not incarnated in a physical human body came down amongst men. In those remote ages, it was the gods who still ruled and taught the Egyptians, and by “gods” they understood beings who had preceded man in evolution.

[ 2 ] According to spiritual science, the earth passed through an earlier planetary condition, called the Moon-state, before it became Earth. During this condition man was not yet human in the present sense of the word. On the old Moon were present beings not possessed of the present human forms and differently constituted, who nevertheless were then at the evolutionary stage which man has now attained on earth. We may therefore say, that on the ancient Moon-planet which has perished, and out of which the Earth afterwards originated, there lived beings who were man's predecessors. In Christian esoteric language they are called Angel-beings (Angeloi). The beings immediately above them, Archangels (Archangeloi), were human at a still earlier period. The angels, or angeloi in Christian esotericism, Dhyanic beings in eastern mysticism, were ‘men’ during the Moon-period. Now these beings, during the present Earth-period, are a stage farther advanced than man—those of them, that is to say, who completed their evolution on the Moon. Only at the end of the Earth's evolution will man have arrived at the stage which those beings had reached at the end of the Moon-period.

When the Earth-state of our planet began and man appeared on earth, these beings were not able to appear in an external human form, for the human body of flesh and blood is essentially a product of earth, and is only adapted to the beings who are now human. The beings who are a stage farther advanced than man could not be incarnated in human bodies. They were only able to take part in the government of the earth by illuminating and inspiring those people in primeval times who had attained the stage of clairvoyance. Indirectly, then, through such clairvoyant persons the angels intervened to guide the destinies of earth.

[ 3 ] Thus the ancient Egyptians still remembered a time when the leading personalities of the nation were clearly conscious of their connection with what are called gods, angels, or dhyanic beings. Now what sort of beings were these, who were not incarnated in a human form of flesh and blood, but who influenced mankind in the way we have described? They were man's predecessors, advanced beyond the human stage.

[ 4 ] There is in these days much misuse of a word which may in this connection be applied in its true meaning, the word “Superman.” If we really wish to speak of “Supermen,” it is these beings who may rightly be so called. Human during the Moon-period, the planetary stage preceding our Earth, they had now outgrown humanity. They were only able to appear in an etheric body to clairvoyants. It was thus that they came down to earth from spiritual worlds and ruled here even as late as post-Atlantean times.

[ 5] These beings had, and still have, the remarkable quality of not being obliged to think; in fact, we might even say that they cannot think at all as man does. How then does man think? More or less in this way. He starts from a certain point and says, “I understand this or that,” and from that point he then tries to understand various other things. If this were not the method of human thought, school-life would not be such a difficult period for many. We cannot learn mathematics in a day, because we have to begin at a certain point and go slowly forwards. This takes a long time. We cannot survey a whole world of thought at a glance, for human thought runs its course in time. A system of thought does not enter the mind in a flash. We have to make an effort and have to exert ourselves, in order to find the sequence of thought. The beings described above are without this human peculiarity. A far-reaching train of thought comes into their minds with the same rapidity with which an animal makes up its mind that it will snatch at something which its instinct tells it is eatable. Instinct and reflective consciousness are in no wise distinct in these beings; they are one and the same. Just as animals have instinct at their stage of evolution, in their kingdom, so these dhyanic beings or angels have direct spiritual thought and conceptions. By virtue of this instinctive inner life of conception they are of an essentially different nature from human beings.

[ 6 ] Now we can easily understand why it is impossible for these beings to use a brain or physical body like ours. They have to use an etheric body, because the human body and brain only allow of thoughts in time, whereas these beings do not develop their thoughts in time, but feel the wisdom that is approaching them blaze forth, as it were, spontaneously within them. It is impossible for them to think erroneously in the sense in which man does. The process of their thought is a direct inspiration. Hence the personalities who were able to come into contact with these super-human or angelic beings were conscious that they were in the presence of unerring wisdom, Therefore, even as late as ancient Egyptian times, when the man who was the human teacher or king was in the presence of his spiritual guide, he felt thus the command which he is giving, the truth which he is enunciating, is literally right and cannot be wrong. This was also felt by those to whom the truths were passed on.

[ 7 ] The clairvoyant guides of the human race were able to speak in such a manner that in their words people believed they were receiving exactly what came down from the spiritual world. In short, there was a direct current down from the higher spirit-hierarchies which were directing humanity. [ 8 ] Thus what works on the individual in early childhood may be seen working on humanity at large in the form of the next world of spirit-hierarchies which hovers over human evolution as a whole. This is the next kingdom of the angels or super-human beings, standing a step higher than man, and extending directly into spiritual spheres. They bring down to earth from those spheres what is worked into human civilization. In the child, it is on the formation of the body that the higher wisdom leaves its impress; in human evolution of past ages, it was civilization that was so matured.

[ 9 ] Thus the Egyptians, who described themselves as being in connection with divinity, felt that the soul of humanity was open to the action of spirit hierarchies. Just as the soul of a child opens its aura to the hierarchies up to the time mentioned in the preceding pages, so, through its work, did the whole of humanity open its world to the hierarchies with which it was connected.

[ 10 ] This connection was most important in those teachers whom we call the holy teachers of India, the great teachers of the first post-Atlantean or Indian civilization, which unfolded itself in southern Asia. When the Atlantean catastrophe was over, and the physiognomy of the earth had changed, so that the new conformation of Asia, Europe, and Africa had evolved in the Eastern hemisphere, the civilization led by the ancient great teachers of India began. This was before the time we have mentioned as reported in ancient records. The man of today is apt to get quite a wrong idea about these teachers. If, for example, one of the great Indian teachers were to be confronted with an educated man of the present day, the latter would gaze upon him with astonishment, and perhaps say, “Is that a great teacher? I should never have thought it.” The words “clever” or “learned” in the sense of modern culture could not be applied to the holy teachers of ancient India. They had nothing clever to say. They were simple, homely people, who would have answered even questions of everyday life in the simplest fashion possible. And there were many periods during which scarcely anything could be elicited from them but what would seem, to an educated man of today, insignificant. On the other hand, there were certain times when these holy teachers were revealed as something more than simple, homely men. At these times they were obliged to be together to the number of seven, because what each individual was able to feel had to combine harmoniously with the feelings of the other six teachers, as though in a consonance of seven sounds. For it was then possible for each one to see something according to his particular gift and degree of development. Assuming that we know how to decipher the real occult records, we find that from the harmony of the separate parts which each individual was able to see, there arose the primeval wisdom which comes down to us from ancient times. These records are not the revelations of the Vedas, however much we may admire them. What the Indian holy teachers taught is of much earlier date than the composition of the Vedas, and it is only a feeble echo of their wisdom which lies before us in those mighty works. But when each of these men was in the presence of a super-human predecessor of humanity, was gazing clairvoyantly into higher worlds, and listening clairaudiently to what was being taught through that predecessor, it was as though the sun shone from their eyes. What they were then able to say worked with overpowering force on their environment, so that all who heard them knew that it was not human life or wisdom that was speaking, but that gods, super-human beings, were influencing human civilization.

[ 11 ] The ancient civilizations had their rise in this sounding to mankind of the knowledge of the gods. Only by degrees in post-Atlantean times was the door closed into the divine spiritual world which in the Atlantean period had still been wide open for the human soul. And in the various countries and nations it was felt that man was thrown ever more and more on his own resources. What is revealed in the case of a child appears in humanity in a different way. The divine spiritual world is first diffused into the unconscious soul of a child, and the soul works upon the formation of the body. Then comes the moment at which the child learns to feel itself an ‘ego’ and this is the moment to which its memory goes back in later life. This is what makes it possible to say that the wisest of men may still learn something from the soul of a child. From this point, however, the individual is left to himself. The ego-consciousness comes into being, and everything combines to make it possible for him to remember his experiences.

So, too, in the life of nations there came a time when they began to feel themselves shut off from the divine inspiration of their early forefathers. Just as the child becomes gradually shut off from the aura that floats about its head in its earliest years, so in the life of nations did the divine ancestors withdraw themselves more and more, and mankind was left to its own research and to its own knowledge. When history speaks in this manner, the fact of the guidance of humanity is realized Menes was the Egyptian name of him who inaugurated the first human civilization, and it is at the same time hinted that man thereby became liable to error, for thenceforward he was left to look for guidance to the instrument of his brain. That man was liable to fall into error is symbolically indicated by the fixing of the date of the construction of the labyrinth at the time when humanity was abandoned by the gods; for the labyrinth is an image of the convolutions of the brain as the instrument of man's own thoughts—windings in which the thinker is able to lose himself. The Orientals called man, as a thinking being, Manas, and Manu stands for the first great thinker. The Greeks called the first organizer of the human principle of thought Minos, and with him is associated the myth of the labyrinth, because it was felt that, since his time, mankind had gradually passed from the direct guidance of the gods to a guidance in which the “ego” feels the influence of the higher spirit-world in a different way.

[ 12 ] Besides those predecessors of man, the true supermen, who had completed their humanity on the Moon and had become angels, there are, however, other beings who did not perfect their evolution on the Moon .The beings called dhyanic in Oriental mysticism and angelic in Christian esotericism, consummated their evolution on the ancient Moon, and when man began his earthly career were already a stage higher than he was. But there were other beings who had not finished their evolution on the ancient Moon, any more than the higher categories of Luciferic beings had finished theirs. When the Earth-state of our planet began, man as we have described him was not the only being there. He felt also the inspiration of divinely-spiritual beings; otherwise, like a child, he would have been unable to progress. Accordingly, besides these childlike human beings, and acting through them, there must have been also present on the earth beings who had completed their evolution on the Moon. But between these and man there were yet other beings who had not finished their evolution on the Moon—beings of a higher order than man, because, even as early as the ancient Moon-period, they might have become angels or dhyanic beings. At that time, however, they had not come to full maturity. They were angels in a backward state, yet they far outdistanced man as regards everything which man called his own. Generally speaking, they are beings occupying the lowest grade in the ranks of Luciferic spirits. They hold a middle position between men and angels, and with them begins the kingdom of Luciferic spirits.

[ 13 ] Now it is extremely easy to get an erroneous idea of these spirits. We might ask why did the divine spirits, the regents of good, allow them to fall short, and thereby admit the Luciferic principle into humanity? And it might further be objected on this ground, that surely the good gods turned everything to good. This question is obvious. And another misunderstanding which might arise, is expressed in the idea that these are “evil” spirits. Both ideas are merely misunderstandings; for these spirits are by no means purely “evil,” although the origin of evil in human nature is due to them. Since they stand midway between man and superman, they are, in a sense, more perfect than men. In all the qualities which human beings have to acquire for themselves, these spirits have attained a high standard, and they only differ from man's predecessors described above in being able to incarnate in human bodies whilst man is being evolved on Earth. This is because they did not consummate their humanity on the Moon.

The dhyanic or angelic beings proper, who are the great inspirers of humanity, and to whom the Egyptian referred as being still their teachers, did not appear in human bodies. They could only manifest themselves through human beings. On the other hand, the beings in a mid-position between men and angels were still able, in very early times to incarnate in human bodies. Hence amongst the human race inhabiting the earth in the Lemurian and Atlantean periods, we find people whose innermost soul-nature was that of an angel in a backward state. Not only ordinary people were going about the earth, who through their successive incarnations were to arrive at the ideal of humanity, but beings who only outwardly appeared like them. These had to bear a human body, for the outward form of a human being in the flesh is dependent on earthly conditions. Especially in more ancient times did it happen that beings belonging to the lowest category of Luciferic individualities were present amongst men. And so at the same time that the angel-beings were working on human civilization through man, Lucifer-beings were also incarnated and founding human civilizations in various places. And when in the old folk legends it is related that in some place there lived a great man who was the founder of a civilization we are not to understand that such a Lucifer-being was necessarily the vehicle of evil but rather that human civilization was to receive countless blessings from him.

[ 14 ] Now it is known through occult science that in ancient times, particularly in the Atlantean period, there existed a kind of primitive human language, a manner of speech, which was the same all over the earth, because “speech” in those days came much more out of the depths of the soul than it does now. This may be gathered from the following: In Atlantean times, people felt all outward impressions in such a way that if the soul wished to express anything outward by a sound, it was constrained to use a consonant. What existed in space pressed for imitation in a consonant. The blowing of the wind, the murmur of the waves, the shelter given by a house were felt and imitated by man in consonants. On the other hand, the sorrow or joy which was felt inwardly, or was observed as feeling in another being, was imitated in a vowel. From this we can see that the soul became one, in speech, with outer events or beings. [ 15 ] The following instance is taken from the Akashic Records: A man drew near a hut, which was arched in the ancient fashion and gave shelter and protection to a family. He noticed this, and expressed the protective arch by a consonant; and by a vowel he expressed the fact, which he was able to feel, that within the hut the embodied souls were comfortable. Thence arose the thought “shelter”; “there is a shelter for me—shelter for human bodies.” The thought was then poured forth in consonants and vowels, which could not be otherwise than they were, because they were a direct impression of experience and had but one meaning. [ 16 ] This was the same all over the earth. It is no dream that there was once an original human root-language. And, in a certain sense, the initiates of all nations are still able to feel that language. Indeed there are in all languages certain similar sounds which are the remains of that universal language.

[ 7 ] This speech was prompted in human souls by the inspiration of the super-human beings, man's true predecessors, who had perfected their evolution on the Moon. From this it may be seen that if that evolution alone had taken place, the entire human race would practically have remained one great unity, and there would have been uniformity of speech and thought all over the earth. Individuality and diversity could not have been developed, nor at the same time could human freedom. In order that man might become individual, cleavages had to take place in humanity, and the difference of language in different parts of the world is due to the work of those teachers in whom a Luciferic spirit was incarnated. According as a particular angel-being, who had fallen short in his evolution, was incarnated in a particular race, was he able to instruct its people in a particular language. Thus the ability to speak a separate language is, in all races, traceable to the illuminating presence of these great beings who were angels in a backward state and who stood far above the people of their immediate environment. For instance, the beings described as the original heroes of the Greeks and other nations, and who worked in a human form, were those in whom an angel who had fallen short was incarnated. Therefore these beings must by no means be characterized as entirely “evil.” On the contrary, they brought to man that which predestined him to be a free human being all over the globe, and they differentiated what otherwise would have constituted a uniform whole everywhere on earth. This is not only true of languages but of many other departments of life. Individualization, differentiation, freedom, we may say, come from the beings who fell short in their Moon-evolution. It is true that it was the purpose of the wise rulership of the cosmos to bring all beings in planetary evolution to their goal, but if this had been done in a direct way particular ends would not have been attained. Certain beings were therefore arrested in their development because they were to have a special mission in the progress of humanity. Since the beings who had fulfilled their mission on the Moon would only have been able to educate a uniform human race, beings who had fallen short on the Moon were set against them, and it thereby became possible for these backward ones to turn into good what appeared as a defect.

[ 18 ] This opens up the question, why do evil, wickedness, imperfection, and disease exist in the world? This problem should be looked at from the point of view from which we have just considered the imperfect angel-beings. Everything which at any time exhibits imperfection or backwardness will be turned into good in the course of evolution. It is obvious that this affords no justification for bad actions on man's part.

[ 19 ] Why does a wise Providence allow certain beings to lag behind and not reach their goal? There will be good reason for it at the time following the formation of such a purpose. For it was when nations were not yet able to guide and govern themselves that the teachers of particular periods and individuals arose. And all the different race-teachers, Cadmus, Cheops, Pelops, Theseus, etc, are, in one aspect, angel-beings in the depths of their souls. From this it appears that in this respect also, humanity is really subject to direction and guidance.

[ 20 ] Now at every stage of evolution there are beings who lag behind and do not attain the possible goal. Let us look once more at the ancient Egyptian civilization which ran its course thousands of years ago in the Nile valley. Super-human teachers manifested themselves to the Egyptians, who said that these teachers guided mankind like gods. At the same time, however, other beings were also at work, who had only half or partially attained the angelic stage. Now we must fully understand that the souls of people of the present day had attained a definite stage in the Egyptian period. But it is not only man who gains by letting himself be guided; the beings directing him attain thereby something which furthers their evolution. For instance, an angel is something more after he has guided humanity for a while, than he was before that guidance began. His guiding work helps him to progress, and this is true not only of one who has completed his evolution as an angel, but also of one who has lagged behind. All beings are able continually to advance; everything is in a state of perpetual development; but at every stage beings are left behind. Thus, in accordance with what has just been said, there can be distinguished in the ancient Egyptian civilization the divine leaders or angels, the semi-divine leaders who did not quite attain the angelic stage, and the men. But certain beings in the ranks of the angels again lag behind; they do not bring all their powers into expression when guiding humanity, but remain behind as angels during the ancient Egyptian stage of civilization. Similarly some of the incomplete angels lag behind. Thus while men below were progressing, certain of the beings above, the dhyanic spirits or angels, fell behind in their evolution. When the Egypto-Chaldæic civilization came to an end, and the Graeco-Roman period began, certain guiding spirits from the former period, who had fallen behind in their evolution, were present. But they could not use their powers, for other angels or half-angelic beings had replaced them, and that meant that their own evolution was at a standstill.

[ 21 ] Hence there comes under our notice a category of beings who might have used their powers during the Egyptian period, but did not at that time use them fully. In the ensuing Graeco-Roman period they were not able to use them, because they were replaced by other guiding spirits, and all the conditions of that time made their intervention impossible. But just as the beings who had not reached the angelic stage on the old Moon were, during the Earth-period, once more allotted the task of interposing actively in human evolution, so also the beings who, as guiding spirits in the Egypto-Chaldæic civilization, had stopped short in their development, had lagged behind, later received the mission of intervening again in civilization. We shall be able to watch a later period of civilization in which beings sent to be guides are certainly there to direct the normal progress of evolution, but in which, at the same time, other beings are intervening who were left behind at an earlier stage, and more particularly those who fell behind during the ancient Egyptian period. The civilization to which we are referring is our own. We live at a time when, side by side with the normal directors of humanity, others are interposing who were left behind in the ancient Egyptian and Chaldæic period.

[ 22 ] Now we have to look upon the evolution of events and beings in such a way that occurrences in the physical world must be considered only as effects or manifestations, the true causes of which are to be sought in the spiritual world. On the one hand our civilization is in the main marked by an upward movement towards spirituality, and this tendency of certain people towards spirituality is the manifestation of the spiritual directors of our contemporary humanity, who have attained their own normal stage of development. In everything which tends to lead man up to the great spiritual wisdom-truths transmitted to us by theosophy, these normal guides of our evolution are manifested. But the beings out-distanced during the Egypto-Chaldæic civilization are also affecting the tendencies of our age. They are manifest in much that is being thought and done at the present and will again be manifest in the near future. They are revealed in everything which gives a materialistic stamp to our civilization, and may often be seen even in aspirations after spiritual things. In our age we are virtually experiencing a revival of Egyptian civilization. The beings who are to be looked upon as the invisible directors of that which takes place in the physical world fall accordingly into two classes. The first includes those spiritual individualities who have passed through their own normal course of development up to the present time. They were able to interpose in the guidance of our civilization, whilst the directors of the preceding Graeco-Roman period were gradually finishing their task of guiding civilization during the first thousand years of Christianity The second class, who work simultaneously with the first class of beings, are spiritual individualities who did not complete their evolution during the Egypto-Chaldæic civilization. They were obliged to remain inactive during the ensuing Graeco-Roman period, but are now able to resume their activity because our present age has points of resemblance to the Egypto-Chaldæic period. It thus comes about that many things arise in contemporary humanity which look like a revival of ancient Egyptian forces, but there is also much which is like a materialistic resuscitation of forces which then worked spiritually. To illustrate this, we may point to an example of the way in which ancient Egyptian knowledge has been revived in our days.

Let us think of Kepler. He was quite possessed by the feeling of the harmony of the cosmos, and this idea was expressed in his important mathematical laws of the mechanism of the heavens, the so-called laws of Kepler. These are outwardly very dry and abstruse, but in Kepler they were the outcome of an understanding of the harmony of the universe. We may read in Kepler's writings that in order to discover what he did, he was obliged to go to the sacred Egyptian mysteries, purloin their temple-vessels, and by this means bring knowledge into the world, the importance of which to humanity would only be known in later times.

This utterance of Kepler's is by no means an empty phrase, but contains a dim consciousness of a revival of what he had learned in the Egyptian period, during a former incarnation. We may certainly entertain the idea that Kepler assimilated the ancient Egyptian wisdom during one of his previous lives, and that it reappears in his soul in a new form, adapted to a later age. That a materialistic impulse should enter our civilization through the Egyptian spirit is quite intelligible, for Egyptian spirituality had a strong materialistic tendency, which found expression, for instance, in embalming the physical bodies of the dead. This meant that the Egyptian attached value to the preservation of the physical body. This has come down to us from the Egyptian period in a different form, but in one corresponding to our time. The same forces which had not then run their course, affect our age, but in a different way. The temper of mind which embalmed dead bodies gave rise to that which idolizes the merely material. The Egyptian embalmed dead bodies and thereby preserved what he accounted valuable. He thought that the development of the soul after death was connected with the preservation of the physical material body. The modern anatomist dissects what he sees, and thinks that in this way he understands the laws of the human organism. Thus in our modern science are living the forces of the ancient Egyptian and Chaldæic world. At that time progressive forces, they now lag behind, and must be recognized for what they are if a correct estimate is to be formed of the character of the present time. These forces will injure a man of the present day if he does not know their real significance. If he knows their effect and thereby brings himself into the right relation to them, he will take no harm from them, but will turn them to good account. They must be used, for without them we should not have the present great achievements in technology and industry. They are forces belonging to Luciferic beings of the lowest stage, and the danger lies in the fact that if they are not recognized aright, the materialistic impulses of the present time are thought to be the only possible ones, and the other forces, which lead up to the spiritual world, are not taken into consideration. For this reason any clear diagnosis is certain to discern two currents of thought in the present age. [ 23 ] Now if a wise Providence had not allowed certain beings in the Egypto-Chaldæic period to fall short in their evolution, our contemporary civilization would have been wanting in necessary weight. In that case only those forces would be operative which would bring man into the spiritual world by main force. People would be only too ready to yield themselves up to those forces, and would become dreamers. The only life they would wish to know about would be one which is being spiritualized as fast as possible, and their standard of action would be a view of life showing a certain degree of contempt for what is physical and material. But the present epoch of civilization can only fulfill its mission if the forces of the material world are brought to the fullest perfection, and if thus by degrees their sphere too is won for spirituality. Just as the fairest things may become corrupters and tempters of mankind if pursued in a one-sided way, so if this one-sidedness took root, there would be great danger that all kinds of good efforts would come into manifestation as fanaticism, True though it is that humanity is helped forward by its noble impulses, it is also true that wild and fanatical advocacy of the noblest impulses may bring about the worst of results as far as true evolution is concerned. Only when people strive after the highest modestly and sensibly, not out of wild fanaticism, can anything beneficial to the progress of humanity take place. In order that the work done on earth at the present day may have the necessary weight, and that material beings of the physical plane may be understood, the wisdom which directs the government of the world left those forces behind which would normally have completed their evolution during the Egyptian period; and it is these which are now directing man's attention to physical life.

[ 24 ] It is obvious from the foregoing that evolution takes place under the influence both of normally progressive beings and of those who lag behind. Clairvoyant vision is able to trace the co-operation of both classes of beings in the super-sensible world, and hence is able to comprehend the spiritual events of which the physical facts surrounding humanity are the manifestations.

[ 25 ] We observe that, in order to understand cosmic events, it is not enough to have spiritual eyes and ears opened to the spiritual world by some kind of exercise. This only means that we see what is there, that we are cognizant of spiritual beings and know that they are entities of the soul-world or spirit-sphere. But it is also necessary to recognize what kinds of beings they are. We may meet some being of the soul or spirit world, but we do not necessarily know whether it is progressing in its evolution, or whether it belongs to the category of powers that have lagged behind; whether therefore it is pushing evolution onwards, or hindering it. Those people who acquire clairvoyant faculties and do not at the same time gain complete understanding of the conditions of human evolution which we have described may know absolutely nothing of the nature of the beings whom they meet. Mere clairvoyance must be supplemented by clear judgment of what is seen in the supersensible world. There is urgent necessity for this especially in our own time, but it had not always to be so much considered. If we go back to very ancient civilizations, we find different conditions. If in the most ancient Egyptian times a person was clairvoyant, and was confronted with a being from the supersensible world, the latter had, as it were, written on his forehead who he was. The clairvoyant could not mistake him. Now, however, the possibility of misunderstanding is very great. Whereas humanity in early times still stood very near the kingdom of the spiritual hierarchies and could see what beings it was meeting, it is now very easy to be mistaken. The only protection against being severely injured is the effort to gain ideas and conceptions like those indicated above.

[ 26 ] A person who is able to look into the spiritual world is called esoterically a “clairvoyant,” but merely to be clairvoyant is not enough, for such a man might be able to see well enough although unable to discriminate. He who has acquired the faculty of distinguishing the various beings and events of higher worlds, is called an “Initiate,” Initiation brings with it the possibility of distinguishing between different kinds of beings. It is possible to be clairvoyant in the higher worlds without being an initiate. In ancient times distinguishing between spirits was not specially important, for when the ancient occult schools had brought a pupil so far as clairvoyance, there was no great danger of error. Now, however, this danger exists to a high degree. Therefore in all esoteric training, care should be taken that initiation should be acquired in addition to clairvoyance. In proportion to the extent of his clairvoyance must a man become capable of distinguishing between the various kinds of supersensible beings and events.

[ 27 ] In modern times the powers guiding humanity are faced by the special task of bringing about a balance between the two principles of clairvoyance and initiation. Leaders of spiritual training had necessarily to pay attention to this at the beginning of the modern era. Therefore the esoteric spiritual movement which is adapted to present conditions, always makes a point of maintaining the right proportion between clairvoyance and initiation. This became necessary at the time when mankind was passing through a crisis with regard to its higher knowledge. That time was the thirteenth century. About the year 1250 was the point of time when mankind felt itself most shut out from the spiritual world. A clairvoyant looking back upon that period sees the following: The most eminent minds of that time who were striving after some kind of higher knowledge could only say to themselves: “What our reason, our intellect, our spiritual knowledge are able to find out is limited to the physical world around us. With all our human endeavor and power of perception, we cannot reach a spiritual world. We only know of it by accepting the information concerning it which our forefathers bequeathed us.” This was the time when direct view of the higher worlds was obscured. That this can be said of the era in which scholasticism flourished, is not without significance.

[ 28 ] About the year 1250 was the time when men were compelled to fix a boundary between what they were able to apprehend for themselves, and what they had to believe from the impression made upon them by the traditions which had been handed down. What they could find out for themselves then became limited to the physical world of sense. Afterwards, however, came the time when there was more and more possibility of again winning a view of the spiritual world. But the new clairvoyance was of a different kind from the old, which virtually became extinct just about the year 1250. In the new form of clairvoyance, western esotericism was obliged strictly to uphold the principle that initiation must be the guide of spiritual sight and hearing. This was the special task assigned to an esoteric current which then entered the stream of European civilization. As the year 1250 drew near there arose a new kind of guidance into the super sensible worlds.

[ 29 ] This guidance was prepared by the spirits then standing behind outer historical events, who centuries before had provided for the kind of esoteric training which would be rendered necessary by the conditions prevailing in 1250. If the term “modern esotericism” be not misused, it may be applied to the spiritual work of those very highly evolved personalities. External history knows nothing of them, but what they did is apparent in every form of civilization which has developed since the thirteenth century.

[ 30 ] The importance of the year 1250 for the spiritual evolution of humanity is specially apparent if we look at the result of clairvoyant research given in the following fact: Even those individualities who had attained high stages of spiritual development in previous incarnations, and who were re-incarnated about 1250, were compelled for a while to undergo a complete clouding over of their direct view of the spiritual world. Quite enlightened individuals were as though cut off from the spiritual world, and their only knowledge of it was through their remembrance of earlier incarnations. Thus we see how necessary it was that from that time onwards a new element should be brought into the spiritual guidance of humanity. This element was true modern esotericism. By its means it is for the first time possible rightly to understand how that which we call the “Christ-impulse” may intervene to guide in all eventualities, not alone the individual, but the whole of mankind.

[ 31 ] Between the accomplishment of the Mystery of Golgotha and the beginnings of modern esotericism, lies the first period of the working of the Christ-principle in human souls. During that period, people received Christ to a certain degree unconsciously as far as their higher spirit-forces were concerned, and this caused them afterwards, when they were obliged to receive them consciously, to make all kinds of mistakes, and to lose themselves in a maze instead of understanding Christ. In primitive Christian times we may trace the adoption of the Christ-principle by the lower soul- forces. Then came a new period, in which mankind of today is still living. Indeed, in a certain respect, people are only now beginning to understand the Christ-principle with the higher faculties of their souls. In the further course of this work it will be shown that the decline of supersensible knowledge down to the thirteenth century, and on the other hand its slow revival since that time, coincide with the interposition of the Christ-impulse in human evolution.

[ 32 ] We may therefore take modern esotericism to mean the raising of the Christ-impulse to be the motive power in the guidance of souls desiring to work their way to a knowledge of higher worlds, in accordance with the evolutionary conditions of modern times.

Before Christmas, in the first cycle of these talks, I discussed the basic concepts of theosophy so far that I can probably venture to begin with the discussion of the most important question which there can be for the human being that of his own origin and goal. In the last two talks I tried to show that the theosophical world view is the basis of Goethe's works, and I try to deepen this Goethean world view from the theosophical point of view in the next talks. Today, I have inserted this talk because it probably joins both talks, which I held during the last fourteen days, about the theosophical idea of the origin, of the descent of the human being, spoken in the modern sense of the word.

Somebody who speaks today about the origin of the human being has to take that into consideration which the present natural sciences have compiled about this topic in the second half of the 19th century. You may assume that the results of the natural sciences are something absolutely certain that they are something against which one cannot struggle. Just this scientific idea about the origin of the human being has undergone such a fundamental change in the course of the last years that hardly one of the younger serious researchers stands even today on the same point of view on which the Darwinist research stood. Somebody who concerns himself with this science knows how strong these changes are. You know that the scientific materialistic point of view still took for granted more or less before short time that one has to derive the human being generally, the whole human being from lower animal ancestors that one has to imagine that our earth was once inhabited by imperfect beings and that the human being himself gradually developed through slow perfection of these beings without any influence of other forces up to his present summit. Today this purely materialistic point of view is shocked by the natural sciences.

One has believed that this scientific point of view has one single counter-pole. One has only regarded these two cases as possible until the foundation of the theosophical movement: either the natural evolution theory in the sense of the materialistic world interpretation or a supernatural creation history, as well as it is shown in the Bible. The Bible and the natural sciences are still established like two polar opposite matters. One has also imagined that the biblical idea of six creation days would have completely controlled the old times and that only the modern times which have progressed so marvellously far substituted it for a natural creation history. However, one left aside one matter. One did not know that the ideas, which the opponents of our so-called supernatural creation have formed to themselves in the last time and with which they struggled against the Genesis, the Six-day Work, are also for the so-called orthodox Christian doctrine and its adherents not older than at most 300, 400 or 500 years. All those who have generally concerned themselves with the investigation of these matters scholarly did not really take the Bible as it is available to us literally before this time. Taking the Bible literally, the view that its contents are to be taken literally was never shared by the serious, also Christian, researchers in the former centuries.

We can go back to the times in which Christianity originated. It arose from older world views. However, we cannot enter into discussion of that today. I would only like to point to the fact that we have in the outgoing age of the Greek philosophy a creation doctrine which goes back to the name Plato, and that this doctrine is most nicely developed with Aristotle. Plato says: God forms the bodily world according to his ideas, which are the models. Also the human body came into being from the archetype, the idea of God. What lives in this body as human consciousness is an after-image of the divine consciousness. The goal of human knowledge is recognising what God recognised. Striving for this goal the human being realises that his spirit must be eternal, because it is an eternal idea of God. Aristotle, the neo-Platonism, the Christian Gnosticism, they all live in such ideas of the origin and the goal of the human being. In the Christian Gnosticism we have a creation doctrine which I have to characterise to show you how little applicable the ideas were which the opponents of the supernatural creation history have recently still formed.

One imagined that in the course of times, since primal times, the human being was developing, that he did not have the same figure, not the same being as today, that he developed up to this being finally. In the end, one imagined that in different lower animal forms reminders of the former shaping of the human being exist. It is somewhat difficult to make these ideas clear to anybody because they are unfamiliar to the modern human beings. What faces us as a physical human being did not exist always in such a way as it is today. It was more similar to animals, and those animals who are most related to the human being also show such a condition approximately as the human being had at that time. If we go back to still older times, we come to more and more imperfect creatures. This was the view of the Gnostics. They did not suppose as the materialistic view does it that the human being came into being by himself from the lower animal kingdom; but they were clear to themselves about the fact that from a being that was still similar to a monkey the human being could never have developed unless a higher being had grasped and developed this being up to a higher figure. One could make that quite clear if one wanted to talk about it out of former ideas. But it suffices to show that the Gnostics had another creation doctrine than one normally states.

You find it clearly expressed with St. Augustine. He did not teach the faith in the literal interpretation of the Bible, but he imagines the development of the beings in such a way as I have just demonstrated. He imagines the influence of a spiritual world which achieves a perpetual rise of the being, while the external process is really that we were physically imperfect beings first, that then a spiritual influence took place and we became physically advanced beings, that then a spiritual influence came again and that we became then again higher beings until the highest spiritual influence took place and the human being developed as a human being. This approximately is the view of St. Augustine. He considers the Six-day Work in the Bible as a beautiful allegory. He is of the opinion that one can no longer pass such a view, as I have developed it as a gnostic one, in the purely gnostic form. He imagines that in the concepts of the Bible external allegories must be given because the large mass cannot understand it if one speaks in such abstract higher ideas. Hence, the creation history should be revealed figuratively, as well as it is commensurate with the popular ideas. You can find the same with Scotus Eriugena, with all great church teachers of the Middle Ages, also with Thomas Aquinas and up to the 14th century. You can explain the real course of the Western scholarship and science to yourselves if you get it clear in your mind.

Then, in the 14th, 15th centuries, this old evolution doctrine disappears. More and more it becomes apparent that the faith in the literalness of the Bible becomes authoritative in the church. We have to retain these facts. In the following centuries the human being is no longer familiar with them. All memories of such interpretations of the Bible had got lost, so that in the 19th century people believed to give something quite new with a natural creation history. Indeed, according to the materialistic way of thinking of the newer time, this creation history completely became materialised, while one faced it with spiritual concepts once. The creation history by Darwin and Haeckel has nothing to do with the real scientific facts, has nothing to do with that which one might investigate. There was also a natural creation history once; it was interpreted in the spiritual sense only, so that one deals not only with material processes, but also with a spiritual impact.

The facts have clearly spoken during the very last years, and numerous researchers have returned again to a more non-material view of development. However, there we have another researcher, Reinke, who has made his discussions about development in an anti-Darwinist way, significant in particular for us, because he returned to the old ideas without knowing the old evolution doctrine. He speaks of perpetual “impacts” of spiritual kind which evolution has experienced. He called these impacts dominants. This is a scanty outset of a return to former ideas. Development is said to progress no longer by itself, by purely material forces from imperfect to more perfect beings, but a more perfect being can only originate from an imperfect one because a new dominant strikes, a new force impact of spiritual kind which causes the progress, in contrast to the materialistic doctrines of Darwin, Lamarck, Haeckel et etcetera This term exactly reminds someone who looks deeper at the matter of something that Heine said: “poverty comes from pauvretè.” It is the paraphrase of the matter with another word. Only the theosophical world view again gives a creation history which faces up to the documents of the religious confessions in such a way, as the researchers till 13th, 14th centuries faced up to them, and let us now develop this creation history with some words.

If one wants to recognise the human being concerning his origin, one has to get clear about the nature of the human being. Someone who takes the view that the human being is only the connection of these physical organs: hands, feet, lung, heart et etcetera up to the brain has no other need to explain the origin of the human being than from material forces. That is why the question becomes different for him than for someone who considers the human being as an entirety. He considers the human being as a being that consists not only of body, but also of soul and mind. We have already seen to what extent the human being consists of three members: body, soul and mind. Body, soul and mind are the members of which the human being consists. What one calls psycho-spiritual has been subsumed by the modern psychology in one single concept, in the concept of the soul. The confusion of the modern psychology is that it does not differentiate between soul and mind or spirit. Theosophy has to point to this over and over again. What is soul-being from one side, what feels and imagines and thinks about the everyday things, all that is also soul for us theosophists.

The spirit begins only where we notice the so-called eternal in the human being, the imperishable. Plato said of it that it feeds itself with spiritual food. Only the thought that is free of the sensuous that rises to the character of eternity that is seen by the spirit if the spirit does no longer see through the gates of the senses outward but looks into his inside, this thought only constitutes the contents of the spirit. The Western researcher knows this thought only in one single field, in the field of mathematics, of geometry and algebra. There are thoughts which do not flow towards us from the outside world which the human being creates only from his inside, intuitively. Nobody could obtain a mathematical theorem only from observation. We could never recognise from observation that the three angles of a triangle amount to 180 degrees.

However, there are thoughts that do not refer only to space, but are pure thoughts that are free of sensuousness and refer to everything else in the world, to minerals, plants, animals and in the end also to the human being. Goethe tried in his morphology to give a botany of sorts which has such thoughts free of sensuousness. There he wanted to fathom how nature lives in its works. Someone who sinks and delves with feeling and sensation in that which Goethe gives in his theory of metamorphosis experiences something in it like a big raise to the etheric heights. If you are raised higher and higher to the recognition of such thoughts which are modelled on the mathematical in space, you get to the great mystics who inform us about soul and spirit. Hence, the mystic also calls mysticism “mathematics” – mathesis , not because mysticism is mathematics, but because it is built up corresponding to the sample of mathematics.

Goethe was such a mystic. He wanted to establish a world which raises us from the only psychic to the spiritual. What the human being does with his reason in the everyday life this sensible understanding of the immediate temporal and transient reality is raised to a higher level, into the pure thought-world. You can there experience something in yourselves if you rise to the pure thought if you can abstract from the sensuousness-imbued thoughts what belongs to the eternal. Theosophy calls this first element of the spirit also manas. I have tried to translate this term with “spirit-self” in my Theosophy. It is the higher self that separates itself from that which is limited only to the earthly world.

As well as now the thought can be raised to a higher sphere, the world of feelings can also be raised to a higher sphere. That world of joys and desires is apparently a lower world than the world of thoughts, but if it is raised to the higher regions, it is even higher than the world of thoughts. The eternal in the feeling is higher than the thought. If you raise the feeling to the higher spheres like the thought in mathematics, then you experience the second being of the spirit. The academic psychology only knows the lower feeling. It acts as if everything amounts to nothing more than the lower feeling. But in our world of feelings this eternal lives as a rudiment, and theosophy calls it buddhi. I have given it the name “life-spirit”, as the second spiritual being of the human being. Raise your thoughts up to the recognition of an eternal, and then you live in manas. Raise your feeling and sensation up to the eternal, and then you live in buddhi.

This life in buddhi exists only as a rudiment with the present human beings. The human beings can already think manasically sometimes if the thinking is regulated, is subjected to the logical world principles. However, there is also a thinking which wanders around aimlessly, that has got a thought and immediately another thought, always alternating. This is the everyday thinking. There is a higher thinking that is logical and coherent that feeds itself from the eternal according to Plato and is blessed with the eternal. If now a feeling has risen to this world, to such a world principle, it lives in buddhi. This means nothing else than a kind of eternal principles of feeling. Who lives in the everyday life can also err, can also stray with his feeling. However, someone who experiences the eternal norms of feeling in himself as the thinker experiences the eternal norms of the manasic thinking has the same certainty and clearness of feeling in himself as the thinker has clearness of thinking. Theosophy describes this as a spiritual human being who experiences the spirit in himself. This was also the deeper substance of Christ. The human being experiences Christ, lives with Christ, and participates in Him. Christ is the same as buddhi.

If the mere external will which is the mostly unconscious in the human being rises to the highest world principle it is hard to talk of this highest development of the human spirit, one can only indicate it then one speaks of the true spirit, of the spirit-man or, with a Sanskrit term, of atma. For the human will can be purified from the personal. These are the three members of the spiritual: manas, buddhi, and atma. As a substance is dissolved in water, these three members are dissolved in the soul. Where everything intermingles, the human being cannot normally make a distinction of that which wanders there aimlessly. Hence, the modern psychologist describes a real chaos as soul.

If that which lives out as the highest spiritual in the soul intermingles with the lower qualities of the soul, if it appears as a lower feeling, if it enjoys life in desire instead of love, we call it kama. Kama is the same as buddhi, only buddhi is the selflessness of kama, and kama is the selfishness, the egoism of buddhi. Then we have in ourselves our everyday reason which wants the satisfaction of our personal needs. We call this reason, in so far as it expresses manas, ahamkara, the ego-consciousness, the ego-feeling in the soul. So that speaking of the human soul we can also speak of buddhi which enjoys life in kama, and if we speak of manas or the real spiritual of thinking, we speak of the reason which enjoys life in the ego-consciousness, in the ahamkara.

I tried to show the gradual education of the human being, the purification of the human being from the psychic to the spiritual, in a book that I wrote some years ago, in my Philosophy of Freedom. You find there in the concepts of the Western philosophy what I have shown now. There you find the development of the soul from kama to manas. I have called ahamkara the ego, manas the “higher thinking”, the pure thinking, and buddhi not yet pointing to the origin the “moral imagination.” These are only other expressions of the one and the same matter. With it we have recognised the psycho-spiritual nature of the human being. This psycho-spiritual nature is embodied in that which the external natural sciences describe to us. This psycho-spiritual nature is, actually, the human being. It has something like a cover around him: the external physical corporeality.

The theosophical view is that the psycho-spiritual nature of the human being existed sooner than the present figure, than the physical corporeality of the human being. The human being did not originate in the physical but in the psycho-spiritual. This psycho-spiritual, atma, buddhi and manas, forms the basis of all physical creation. Plato also speaks of it if he says that the spirit of the human being must be eternal, because it is an idea of God. What develops as forms on earth approaches the eternal spiritual part of the human being.

We can imagine now that we are in a very distant point of the past. There we have the psycho-spiritual nature of the human being on one side. I believe that the materialistic thinking of the present is hardly able to imagine this psycho-spiritual nature. That is why since centuries the modern thinking is not accustomed to imagine the psycho-spiritual. On the other side, we have the sensuous life in the very distant past. How have we to imagine the sensuous life? The natural sciences teach us that we come to a human being of imperfect figure investigating the beings in the relics of the layers of earth. Going back farther we find times in which the human being was not in the present figure on earth. Only monkeys and related animals existed. Going back still farther we find that also the monkeys were absent and that only lower mammals existed. Still sooner there were reptiles and birds, and still sooner we find animal species of immense size and mightiness, the saurians, the ichthyosaurs. They lived in other way than today. Then, farther back, we find even more imperfect animals, until we come to an age where we cannot prove that there was any living animal. Physical life must have existed there in a still plant-animal form.

Theosophy points to conditions of the earth development of which is also spoken in science: the earth was not always the solid mineral ground, on which we walk today. It was in a liquid-soft condition once. If you look at certain earth formations, at mountains, you can still detect how they became hardened from a soaking-liquid condition. The whole earth was once still in an igneous-hot condition like an immense fire body. Theosophy points to the fact that still sooner a gaseous, an etheric condition of the earth existed. Everything that exists now in solid or liquid or airy condition on earth existed also at that time in a quite subtle etheric condition. You can imagine it approximately if you take a piece of ice; this is a solid matter. You melt it, and then it gets to a liquid, watery condition. You evaporate the water, while you heat it up. Then you have again in an airy-vaporous condition what was liquid before.

The whole earth was once in a much finer, thinner etheric condition. Akasha is the finest form in which before primeval times everything was in the etheric condition that meets us now as solid, liquid et etcetera on earth. The solid granite of our primeval mountains, all metals, all salts, all kinds of limestone, everything that is on our earth now also all plant and animal forms existed at that time in this subtle akasha. Akasha is the subtlest form of matter.

The human body is composed of all substances of the earth. All the kinds of matter are found in any chemical composition in the human body. At that time all these substances were in the akasha state and in this akashic matter now the psycho-spiritual being of the human being incarnated. This was another figure than that of today. In this akashic matter everything was still undifferentiated that differentiated later. Everything was in it that became mineral, plant, animal forms later. In this akashic matter in which the human being incarnated all animal forms were still contained, just as everything that became human form later.

If one wants to form an idea about the processes within the earth development which happened in these primeval times, one must strictly distinguish the duality. The human being is a duality; he is composed of two beings. On top is the divine-spiritual core of the human being: atma, buddhi, manas. In this divine-spiritual human being, the desire lives to become a human being. It drives him down. Descending he forms a cover from this desire, an astral body. On the earth animal-like beings formed, resulting from the still uncertain earth masses. These beings came from a still earlier earth state, the old lunar state, and a previous incarnation of the earth.

When this old moon had finished its cosmic existence, beings remained like a seed which had lived on the old moon; these were beings which were neither animals nor human beings, they were between animal and human being, a kind of animal-humans. They came out again, when the earth started to form. In these animal-humans the wildest impulses, instincts and desires lived. They could not yet take up the higher spirituality in themselves at first; they had to experience a purification of their astrality to be able to take up the higher principles in themselves. These are the physical ancestors of the human being of which Gnosticism, St. Augustine, and the scholastics speak. These were animal-like figures which lived in a more malleable body material than the physical matter is today, much softer than the lowest animals have it, for example, the jellyfishes and molluscs. These were beings which lived in a translucent corporeality, partly in very beautiful forms, partly in quite grotesque forms. They had no upright posture, they lived in swimming-floating posture; they had no marrow, this formed only later, still no warm blood, they did not yet have two sexes. They lived with all that later became plant, mineral, and animal like in a common astral state of the earth. At that time, the astral body of the earth had all earthly beings in itself. This astral earth consisted of the astral bodies of the human animals and was surrounded by a spiritual atmosphere where the monads, the spiritual human beings lived. These spiritual human beings waited above, until they could unite with the astral bodies below. But at first these astral bodies were not yet purified enough; everything impulsive of the animals, the instincts and passions had to be largely separated. They were eliminated as particular astral structures. These isolations took place repeatedly. These isolated structures hardened, and the other realms of our earth came from them.

We have to imagine that two astralities were there, an upper purer one and a lower denser one. The upper one, descending deeper and deeper, has an effect on the lower one. Thereby this separates the coarser parts from itself. The separated parts are condensed. The other realms of nature, which are now round us, come into being that way. The human being himself keeps the finest parts to himself. Thus the whole environment was connected with the human being; he separated them from his nature.

The astral matter below was condensed to reptile-like animal forms; they were still cold-blooded. They were not shaped like for example an ichthyosaurus from which we find leftovers even today. There are no leftovers of these formations at all, because these bodies were fine, soft bones only existed much later. The psycho-spiritual being unites first with these formations from above; both fertilise each other. More and more a densification of the matter takes place. It merges into an igneous-liquid state. This was about the middle of the age which we call the Lemurian one. This age preceded the Atlantean one. This igneous-liquid mass is criss-crossed by currents which condense gradually more and more to the later bones; the respiratory organ and heart organ with the bloodstream, the different organs of the human body form from these currents. Everything that is too coarse for the human being is separated repeatedly. For example, the wildness of the lion is separated. Outside an animal form of coarser substance comes into being: this later becomes the lion. In the human being his courageous, his aggressive qualities remain. The cleverness and cunning is separated; it forms the being fox outside, and the human being keeps to him what he can use of cleverness.

Then another developmental state of the earth follows. It became more compact, more solid. The human being was thereby forced to adapt himself to this more solid structure of the physical life on earth. He was able to do this only because he handed over a part of his being to the coarser materiality. From this part of the human being the first most imperfect animal world originated. Thus this is as it were a shell which the human being cast off once. It originated from the human nature. However, the true human nature thereby ascended to a higher level. The human being was freed from the impact which he had from the lower animal world. We see these last creatures which the human being repelled deposited in the first layers of earth. These are crustaceans, shellfish which the human being separated from himself. He became a somewhat purer being that way. It is like in a solution in which coarser parts have settled down. The further development takes place in such a way that the human being again hands over a part of his nature to materiality. Worms and fish originated from that. This is a cover again which the human being cast off.

In the second state, the human being had taken on a matter which is like our airy matter. The human being was incarnated there as an aerial being. It may seem peculiar to the materialistic thinker, but someone who familiarises himself with theosophy finds that the other creation history is a speculative fiction and that this theosophical creation history can already be evident to the everyday reason. Because the human being embodied himself with his soul in more delicate matter, in aerial matter, it was possible that he cast another cover off, that he separated animals from himself. At that time, the earth had already built up a somewhat more solid skeleton, and the human being formed in that which one calls fire mist. One speaks there of the sons of the fire mist. This came about because the human being cast his covers off which developed then to birds and reptiles on the other side. However, when the human being had advanced so far when he had advanced to this fire matter, he was able to take up a new impact from without. As well as we have seen in the outset of our earth how with the physical matter that united which the psycho-spiritual human being had cast off as the coarser nature, he united in the period of which we speak now and which already parallels states of strong densification of our earth, with higher spirit. At first this happened because buddhi descended and became kama. The human being thereby became warm-blooded differing from the lower cold-blooded beings. Also other creatures became warm-blooded on earth.

Up to a certain point of development there were only cold-blooded and passionless beings; the others originated in the middle of the Lemurian age. Also the two sexes developed from one. The human being repelled the lower beings which still live on as reptiles and when he was already warm-blooded, he repelled the birds from himself. Because of these separations he became mature to take up the spirit in his first figure. This is the race that appears as mind-endowed for the first time. In the Lemurian age, the human being came to a densified materiality, he became fleshly. This is the Lemurian human being. He lived on our earth at a time in which a lot of the old fire matter still existed. In this Lemurian age, the whole race completely perishes by volcanic catastrophes caused by the fire. Only some remain and live on.

The Atlantean period took place in the regions that are today covered with the floods of the Atlantic. Here once again something is separated from the human being: the higher mammals come into being. The human being still had the nature of the higher mammals in himself at first. He still had in himself what one calls apes. They all are separations of lower parts of his nature. The human being developed to a higher level only because he cast off the lower parts. What I called ahamkara came to the fore. In the first Atlantean time, ahamkara appears with the corresponding development of memory and language in the human race. Self-consciousness became consciousness of egoism. Hence, the first Atlantean time is also a time in which more and more the harsh egoism developed. We will still hear and read to which excesses the developed ahamkara led. The higher mammalian nature was cast off, so that we must not regard the apes as ancestors; rather we have to regard the human being as the first-born on our earth.

The human being exists incarnated in akasha, and everything that exists besides him was gradually eliminated by him. The human being and the animals adapted themselves to the relations and circumstances and became what we can get to know today. Paracelsus knew this and said that the human being himself has written down the letters of his whole being. So we must not regard the ape as an ancestor, but as a descendant of the original human being. It is strange that this theosophical approach reminds, quite elementarily, of a remark of the naturalist and botanist Reinke (Johannes R., proponent of neo-vitalism, 1849-1931). He says in his book The World as Action that the ape does not appear as an ancestor of the human being but as a degenerated human being dropped out of humanity.

This view agrees quite exceptionally with that which the natural sciences teach in these fields. They teach that the very first rudiment of the human brain, of the childish human brain in particular, is very similar up to a certain degree to an ape brain but that the developed human brain differs from the ape brain. So that the ape brain looks like something that takes a completely different course of development. However, the Darwinist view wants to base its theory of the relationship of the ape with the human being on the first impression. At that time, the human being cast off the ape nature, so that he could develop freer, upward to nobler qualities. The apes thereby degenerated and developed in another direction. The ape is not at all to be regarded as an ancestor of the human being. However, this furthers the human development.

After the human being had developed buddhi, kama and ahamkara, he was able to receive the first principle of the spirit again in himself: manas. Manas, the logical thinking, the inferring thinking developed since the last time of the Atlantean age and in our whole fifth age from this refined human nature. Thus the human being had to experience wisdom in egoism, in ahamkara, after he developed buddhi first up to kama; thus he had to lead a selfish life. But then wisdom developed again in purer form, so that the human being is able today to think logically. He ascends once to a higher kind of spirituality working out the buddhi nature from the kama nature and from the everyday feeling in order to ascend to even higher levels of spirituality. We speak of it later after we have got to know the levels of development still more exactly.

I could only outline the theosophical view generally speaking. This is the evolution theory, the theory of the origin of the human being in the theosophical sense. This is the descent theory which is destined to substitute that which has suffered essential losses by the real scientific facts in the last time.

Nevertheless, I would still want to read out some words of the botanist Reinke to show that my explanations do not completely contradict the scientific ideas and that today it is necessary to think a new kind of “creation history”. He expresses the following there: “It is clear from the start which deep contrast exists between this view that I have just explained and the view and research method of our science. We do not look for theories generally but rely on facts. Hence, the natural sciences would have to bring themselves to confine themselves to facts only. Up to now, the facts do not at all exist. I must protest against it if the case is shown as if zoology, anatomy etc. have delivered the facts. If a picture should be derived from it, it is fancy.”

At the same time, this naturalist does not yet understand that it is impossible to receive a view of the origin of the human being from the external facts one day. One is never able to do this, because the origin of the human being was not in the sensuous but in the psycho-spiritual. Not before one ascends from the sensuous to the psycho-spiritual if one ascends to a view that is no longer fantastic but spiritual, we can get again to a descent theory really satisfying the human being. Leading the human being to a satisfying descent theory is the task of theosophy. The “natural” creation history can no longer give satisfaction today. On one side, the need for spiritual knowledge makes itself noticeable, and, on the other side, the facts have disproved the evolution theory. The natural sciences are never able to say anything about the origin of the human being. If the origin of the human being is to be recognised, it can only happen in the sense of spiritual knowledge. Leading the present again to such spiritual knowledge is the task of the theosophical world view.

Answer to question

Question: Were the crustaceans the first living beings which were separated?

The crustaceans were not the first living beings, which were separated. Of course, these were mono-cellular living beings. However, these were not like the present-day mono-cellular living beings, they were in quite different conditions.

Question: How has one to imagine the fiery-liquid surface of the earth in the Lemurian age and the existence of beings on it?

Not the total surface of the earth was in the fiery-liquid condition, only the residential place of the beings was fiery-liquid. With the separation of the mineral beings something existed like a kind of leftovers, already almost like an impact of a skeleton which could accommodate beings that have taken on any solid shape. Palaeontology can only verify what had taken on solid shape.

Question: Is the future separation furthered by vegetarianism?

It is hard to speak about that because this question, even more than other questions, challenges the human feeling. However, I would like to speak impartially about the question. Indeed, the further refining of the human being is eminently supported by vegetarianism. With it should not be said that it is possible and good for any person to live as a vegetarian. The question is another if one asks whether one should become a vegetarian, than if one asks: what does vegetarianism achieve? Vegetarianism fosters the spiritual intuition and is also advantageous for the actions. At the same time, it is also a question of heredity. However, I would like to oppose a prejudice.

Indeed, in these fields the materialistic thinker can have an experience reaching up to a certain degree, but not a sufficient one. One says that people have become weak due to vegetarianism that they cannot stand the vegetarian way of life. This is right and is wrong. It is right that many people who occupy their thinking only with kama manas who have merely sensuous objects as content of their thinking and to that the usual scholarship, law, physiology or also medicine belong where the content of the ideas are merely taken from the sensory world , do not find everything in vegetarianism that they need. For all those who think, imagine and feel in the area of reason which is directed upon the sensory world, come to a point where they can collapse due to vegetarianism. There are many people of such kind. However, it must not be. I have got to know people in this field who themselves were learnt thinkers who were physiological, historical thinkers with whom it was not possible that the brain was properly nourished if they lived only vegetarian.

But the case changes immediately if the human being develops spirituality. As soon as he gets to the spiritual cognition, as soon as he lives in the spiritual, then it is possible that he can exist with vegetarianism. Then vegetarianism furthers the spiritual life, and the human being advances so far that he has an even higher future in prospect. I speak of this higher future in the next talks, on the 16th February, 23rd February and 2nd March where I speak about Goethe's Secret Revelation.

Question: What has one to understand by a psycho-spiritual being?

We will still see where the spirit has its origin. We have to imagine this spiritual impact within the human development as an influence coming from without. With it a view of nature is not injured or the opinion is justified that this is a dualism. Also hydrogen and oxygen give water. But someone who knows that does not need to be a dualist.

Question: What was there really as a human being, before the spiritual impact took place?

Up to a certain point the human being is the triad: mind, soul and body. If we advance somewhat upward, we have the bodily-psychic human being on the earth, connected with the physical of the earth. This bodily-psychic human being is incarnated there at first in a much finer and brighter matter than the later human being. A densification perpetually takes place there. That is why we also speak of the so-called “sons of the fire mist.” We deal there with a configuration of the human being. However, I would not like to portray this figure in a public lecture because if one puts it just like that it looks bad. The preconditions do not exist to understand this figure.

In the "fire mist" the incarnations happened in akasha at last. Physics of our time has no knowledge of this akasha. What we now have as an impact is the rudiment of eternity, the spirit, if we speak of spirit with the present-day human being, we speak of eternity. The consciousness which it concerned at that time was not at all the same as the consciousness in the hypnosis or in the trance states. It exists, approximately, in an especially lively dream. This was the condition of consciousness before the impact of the spirit.

Question: Why has any progress to happen by densification of matter, whereas we consider the delicate matter as progress?

The general form of consciousness was illuminated, but also limited by densification up to the material development of the senses.

Question: Is the akasha substance an etheric or astral substance?

The astral substance is the higher substance. The akasha substance stands between the physical and astral matters. It is the most delicate physical matter, in which the thought can develop immediately.

Question: How could one perceive the human being in these delicate conditions?

In the time when the human being was still aerial it was possible to perceive him by hearing, as a vibration, but not with the eye.

Question: Which influence did the impact of the spirit have on sexuality?

With the impact of the spirit the single beings became uni-sexual. Before both sexes existed in one being, it was hermaphrodite. At that time, the reproduction was similar to that of our mono-cellular beings.

Question: What is the origin of the theosophical world view?

One taught in pictures once. This is no longer possible today. Hence, one has to express the ideas in a language understandable to the reason, especially for our scientists. One should consider these matters as the physicist considers his, as a useful working hypothesis. This gives conviction bit by bit.

When Dr. Steiner was asked to tell some additional details about the process of the separation of the ape, he answered approximately in such a way:

Imagine an ancestor who has two descendants. One of these descendants can take up the divine spark in his form. He develops upwards and becomes a human being. The other descendant has a form created from coarser substances; he cannot take up the spark. He develops downwards and becomes an ape.

In the preliminary talk, I already drew your attention to the both basic conditions of spiritual science or theosophy. I said that spiritual science rests on two pillars: first, on the fact that the human being realises that behind our sensuous world which you can see with eyes and touch with hands a spiritual, supersensible world of the facts, events and beings exists; secondly, that the human being can become able to intervene in this spiritual world recognising and on a higher stage even acting. Briefly, spiritual science expresses its conviction that there is a spiritual world and that it is accessible to the human being.

From the most different sides, spiritual science should be illumined in the course of these winter talks. Today, we look at its relation to natural sciences. Indeed, some among you may see in this talk a kind of aberration from the regular course. They come to these talks especially in order to get to know the results of spiritual science and the experiences in the higher worlds. In the main, real theosophists take the view that they have found their relation to the scientific results. Therefore, they regard the explanation of such matters as the relation of spiritual science to results of the natural sciences as somewhat boring sometimes. However, we come to so specifically spiritual-scientific subjects in the next talks that the today's intermezzo may probably be bearable, in particular with regard to the fact that the sharpest attacks and the strongest misunderstandings concerning spiritual science come just from those who pretend to stand firmly on the ground of natural sciences. Above all, be clear in your mind that in the today's talk I do not speak opposing natural sciences. With the big impact that the scientific prepositions exert on our contemporaries it would be really an awkward undertaking to get into opposition to the natural sciences. For you can hear repeatedly: the natural sciences stand on the ground of facts, of experience, and everything that does not comply with these facts and experiences must be expelled to the field of speculative fiction. You get this information from many sides concerning such things, as I want to explain just in these winter talks on spiritual science.

It is most adequate—in view of the general educational conditions in our time—if the today's talk explains the relation of the natural sciences to spiritual science as objectively as possible without pros and cons. However, from the start I want to note that spiritual science does not dispute with the natural sciences especially where it concerns only scientific facts. This could not be at all its task. Who would attack the building of strict facts anyhow? Who would argue anything against that which is certain by experiment and experience in the scientific field? Spiritual science is completely based on experiences. Admittedly, on experiences, as they have been characterised last time, on experiences in the higher, in the spiritual worlds. However, with regard to the methodical principles it completely complies with scientific demands. It agrees with the natural sciences that experience forms the basis of any knowledge at last. Thus, I do not give my view on certain scientific results of the present in the introduction of a series of spiritual-scientific talks because this is not necessary. Rather I want to show how one must look at the scientist in his scientific thinking. This is important: pursuing the scientific thought process, as it is offered to us.

It may be very good if we look back at the German cultural life for a short time. It offers a picture of the whole spiritual life of the last decades. Above all, the following comes into consideration: the natural sciences have become for many people something that they never were once. Slowly and gradually, for four centuries it has prepared itself. However, in the 19th century, it has come only to the climax of that what prepared there slowly. The natural sciences have become something that one could call a kind of religion, a kind of creed, or better said, single persons have believed to be able to form a kind of creed, a kind of religion from the scientific results of our time. It is much more important for spiritual science than discussions about scientific facts to a look at the way in which a kind of new religion, a kind of new creed has come about based on putative scientific facts. Someone who looks impartially at our cultural life cannot misjudge that people oppose the assumption of the spiritual world, oppose the religious feeling, while they refer to the fact that new scientific results would disprove any reference to a spiritual world. In certain circles, one almost believes to have removed every reference to a spiritual world with the results of the natural sciences. Hundred years ago, nobody was inclined to draw such a conclusion from the scientific facts. Indeed, there have also been earlier quite materialistic confessions of the most radical kind; but they have never put up the assertion, one could explain the world only materialistically according to the “true science.” The term “true science” exerts an ineffable magic power on our contemporaries!

One speaks much of former dark times of the religious fury, religious disputes, and religious persecutions. I do not varnish or defend these things. However, if you compare these processes of former centuries which humiliated the feeling and thinking of humanity, nevertheless, you realise something peculiar with an impartial look at the development of the human soul. Someone who thinks impartially finds that confirmed everywhere that I only assert now. Indeed, many times were dark and intolerant, but intolerance with an immense arrogance of infallibility has remained to our time! This inner intolerance commits no riots and persecutions, although one can already experience that one calls the police and the prosecutor against anybody who reports about the spiritual world. However, these are exceptions; our time is tolerant outwardly. Only in relation to thinking, One considers everybody a fool, a daydreamer, or at least an ignorant man who cannot share the creed of those who say there: from the scientific facts follows that one cannot state anything about the spiritual side of the world.

This attitude has prepared itself slowly. In the 19th century, one came with it on the climax. It is well reasoned that this has come that way. If we look for the reason, we must say, the reason is connected with the big progress of humanity. We realise that in the newer time the human beings have investigated the external physical world with all imaginable instruments and skilfully developed methods, which are more than amazing. We see how it has begun with astronomy and with the view of the astronomical world edifice how then the physical world has been conquered gradually by that what can be investigated with the armed eye and understood with the intellect. In the 19th century, it has appeared that this kind of research not only is able to see into in the lifeless nature, but it has also deeply illumined the living nature.

He who is able to pursue the spiritual life objectively knows that it signified an immense progress when during the thirties of the 19th century Schleiden (Matthias Jacob Sch., 1804–1881, German botanist) discovered the smallest part of plants and animals, the cell (together with Theodor Schwann, 1810–1882). It became obvious that many former conjectures had to disappear because of the facts, which one now discovered by means of the microscope and the new research method. One has thought a lot about what this organism is actually inside which composes our living beings. One had now discovered what corresponded to the thinking and feeling of the 19th century so much: one saw obviously how the organism builds itself up from countless and extremely small living beings. One saw now how they co-operated and yielded the human organism. Now that was accessible to the actual research, which one had assumed and bothered so much.

One had done a look at the world of life that way. Then it was a big progress when Kirchhoff (Gustav Robert K., 1824–1887, German physicist) and Bunsen (Robert Wilhelm B., 1811–1899, German chemist) announced the spectral analysis. The spectroscope, this miraculous instrument, proved that the same materials, which compose our earthly world, also exist in the universe. One recognised this by the facts, which the spectroscope delivered. Then Darwin came with the overabundant wealth of facts that show how the living beings change under the influence of external conditions, dependent on the place where they live. He succeeded in investigating the rests of primeval living beings that are in the layers of our earth. When the paleontological research came along forming a bridge between history and natural sciences, then the significant basics were given for the feeling and thinking of the 19th century. They got their solid, sure support.

In particular in Germany, one felt the blessing of such solid, sure support. Just in Germany, one had a great, idealistic-philosophical spiritual worldview that was connected with names like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. One had a range of daring, superior mental attempts behind himself. Now one was of the opinion that these attempts would have something subjective-arbitrary, something that everybody can experience or not. What Hegel, what Fichte has thought, they have thought it for themselves; another may find different things. With it, we come—one meant—in a tangle of worldviews. However, this happens only if we leave the firm ground of facts if we omit, for example, to realise how the smallest organism is composed of smallest living beings. For we would ascertain that the thousands who look into the microscope see and describe the same things. Everybody who knows the layers of the earth must describe them in the same way. This is the sure, firm ground of facts.

One has not remained to it saying, he who stands on this ground of facts is on the safe side, and we leave all remaining untouched. If one had stopped on the ground of facts, never would have originated creeds, religious problems from it. The true natural sciences that are based on observation with exclusion of the supersensible world will always be on the safe side, even if they confine themselves to the sensory phenomena. They will come to sure facts. However, these facts have worked suggestively, were mesmerising! On these scientific facts, one founded a kind of scientific atheistic or materialistic religion, a kind of creed. Now one could say, with every creed it is possible that the human being is steady and strong in life, the right thing will be found in the course of human evolution, and it does not depend on how the human being stands to the questions of the supersensible world. However, just this idea will appear in the course of these talks that it is not right to think that it is irrelevant how the human being feels and thinks. We shall just prove that feeling and imagining are a real world, and that not only the future of the earth, but of the entire human race depends on the human thinking.

We shall see in the course of the winter talks how deep and true this sentence is. Spiritual science does not deal with theoretical bickering but has to work for the human being usefully and in suitable way. Whether the single material body consists of atoms or not, whether the single material organism is composed of single cells or not, whether in the remaining heavenly bodies the same materials are as on earth or not, all that are wholly factual questions. But by the decision of these factual questions one never states something about the destiny of the human soul or mind. If one keeps to establish and describe the facts, and does not cross this border to the soul area, then there can be no conflict between natural sciences and spiritual science. However, one has not just remained to this. One built up theories; one constructed mental pictures with which generally no soul being, no spiritual existence can be combined.

We only need to have a look back at some decades of development. Today it is already almost forgotten when in the 19th century the so-called theory of energy and matter appeared. However, it would be good just for someone who stands beyond spiritual science to consider the real reason of the theory of energy and matter.

Imagine the picture of the dry theory of energy and matter as it was at that time. It went philosophically out from that which the scientific facts had brought. One had found that the human being consisted of single cells. One had discovered chemical and physical processes and had said, all our bodies would consist of molecules and atoms, and the phenomena would originate from the play and the movement of the atoms round us. Those who are now forty, fifty years old and have the academic education behind themselves remember the time lively when the so-called theory of heat controlled everything. The big discoveries in the field of thermodynamics had assumed such a shape that one imagined any gas consisting of millions smallest parts, molecules and atoms which are in an endless complex movement, knock at each other and rebound and thereby produce the phenomena of heat. What was there heat? Nothing but a result of that which exists outdoors in space as a manifold play of moving and colliding atoms. One said it soberly at that time: what you feel as warmth is nothing but a movement that the smallest parts of the bodies accomplish, and the degree of heat depends on the power of the impacts, on the vehemence of the movements. Thus, nothing was in the outside world for the theory of heat available as the whirling atoms, and what one meant with the word “warmth” was a subjective sensation, an effect on the human organism or on the brain which one also imagined materially. Not only the warmth or heat, everything was imagined as such a movement of the atoms! One must retain this. For: if you come once to the materialistic mental picture, it is like a juggernaut: it devours the spiritual, as well as the molecules and atoms have devoured it.

If you take books of that time about the phenomena of light, you can find soberly said: what you call red or blue is only an effect on your nerves, is only in you. Outdoors in the world is no light and no colour, there is only the ether penetrating the whole world, and the peculiar movement of this ether works on you and causes the sensation of colour. Thus, the light is objectively outdoors in the world as a movement of the cosmic ether, and what you feel is nothing, actually.—Briefly, the empty space became the true reality, filled with moving atoms. One assumed that all phenomena arose from this. Somebody who would have expressed himself radically could have said the following: imagine all human brains as not existing, what remains then? Nothing but the empty space, filled with atoms, if you like, with moving atoms of the ether and of the matter having weight.

However, any perception, any sensation in you like the sensations of smell, taste, warmth etc. do no longer exist; this is subjective and not objective. People like Büchner (Ludwig B., 1824–1899) and Vogt (Carl V,, 1817–1895) only drew the consequence from this premise in the middle of the 19th century. You find the merits of these men emphasised in my writing World Views and Approaches to Life in the 19th Century because they have had the iron consequence to draw the conclusions of such a view. If nothing else existed outdoors for the phenomena of colour and sound than the moving atoms and molecules, it was quite natural that the thinker said, then nothing else exists in the human being than matter, consisting of moving atoms and molecules.—Vogt had only to draw the unequivocal consequence: thoughts are produced by the movements of the cerebral molecules like other things by liver and kidneys et cetera.—This opinion bred much bad blood and was only a consequence of premises, which others had who only did not go so far. With it, it was connected inevitably that one divided this world of atoms and molecules that one regarded as the absolute in materials, which one could discover. One was of the opinion that the whole matter is only movement and can be divided in atoms and molecules. One considered life also only as a complex movement of atoms in the living bodies. One recognised that single bodies could be taken to pieces, water, for example, to hydrogen and oxygen, sulfuric acid to hydrogen, sulfur and oxygen.—However, there comes a border, where the chemical research cannot accomplish any further decomposition. Where from does this come? This is why simple elements form the basis of our materials. There are about seventy elements; all our materials are composed of them.

How does water originate? By the fact that its elements oxygen and hydrogen that, otherwise, are apart side by side, penetrate themselves. The materialists of the 19th century primarily relied on this fact that one assumed a particular number of elements. In every chemical book, you can find them: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, sulfur, phosphorus, fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine and so on. Everything living and lifeless originates from a more or less complex composition of molecules, and one considered the complex of the human soul—all the human feelings, sensations, mental pictures, ideals et cetera in himself—also as nothing else than the result of the cooperation of his compound molecules and atoms. Indeed, single persons like Haeckel said that it is absurd to explain the soul as a mere result of the cooperation of lifeless small atoms. Hence, Haeckel formed the view that the atom already has a soul for itself. He is of the opinion that all these atoms that build up such an organism have a small soul and that many small souls yield the human soul.

It is probably the most daring, the most adventurous superstition to speak of such an atomic soul! Here begins a chapter of scientific superstition that flows then into such concepts as cell soul, soul cell and the like. It would lead us too far to pursue this further. We are concerned to characterise the sense and the spirit of natural sciences as they have presented themselves. Nevertheless, we look back at the time when a kind of materialistic creed joined to the physical-scientific suggestion. This has immense spiritual results. He who does not take the matters seriously can easily pass over them. However, it is true that this scientific creed excludes any independence of soul and mind from that, it excludes to speak of mind and soul. For this view, that what the human soul experiences begins with the first activity of the organism and disappears with the decay of it. The human being is nothing else than a built up machine which, during the sixty to eighty years of its existence, produces phenomena like thoughts, sensations and feelings, and if it disintegrates, it is over, because all these phenomena are nothing but the assemblage of molecules. Thus, Vogt and all those thought who have drawn the daring, radical conclusion from the scientific premises.

Then another party came in natural sciences. One of it is the famous Du Bois-Reymond (Emil Heinrich D., 1818–1896, German physiologist). He held an important talk in a Leipzig meeting of scientists and physicians in which he brought up something that forms the object of many discussions still today. He said: we are in the natural sciences so far that in us the scientific ideal has developed that, for example, all light phenomena, all colour phenomena and sound phenomena can be led back to the work of atoms and molecules. The rest is appearance; however, these are the realities. Everything that originates comes into being and persists because these atoms combine, collide, and oscillate. If it were possible—Du Bois-Reymond meant—to give the suitable movement and position of the atoms for every phenomenon, then the world would be explained scientifically. However, with this scientific explanation something would not and could not be explained. Du Bois-Reymond also pointed to the teachings of the great German philosopher Leibniz (Gottfried Wilhelm L., 1646–1716) in those days.—Imagine once—Du Bois-Reymond said approximately: you could analyse and describe a human brain in all its movements clearly, and now imagine it enlarged, so that you can go for a walk in it like in the machinery of a factory. Look at the whole: you see enormously complex movements in it, you find complexities in it with which one can compare nothing in the world; but you see movements only. Natural sciences will never be able to explain the transition, which causes that one can say: I smell rose scent. Here is an uncrossable limit of knowledge. One cannot explain how the human nature becomes conscious. Hence, he speaks his “ignorabimus:” we shall never know.—He says, one is never able to cross these limits; the human being will never know how consciousness originates from motion.

Du Bois-Reymond did not only put this riddle before the world, but six other. In The Seven World Riddles (1880), you find that he admits not to understand how life originated and how the first distribution of matter came about. He admits that matter must have been distributed from the outset. On the question, where from motion comes, he says: one can never know this!—Du Bois-Reymond counts all that to the seven world riddles, and in Haeckel's book The World Riddles (1895–1899) you can read that this has been written as a kind of reply to DuBois-Reymond's Seven World Riddles. Then he says also, it is true that there are seventy elements that consist of materials, which are quite different in relation to the single elements; but everything originates from the combination of atoms and molecules.—One assumed one thing just as fixed: the immutability of the atoms. What is an atom remains an atom. Büchner emphasised the sentence repeatedly: the motion of the atoms changes, but what is an atom sulfur, an atom oxygen etc. remains an atom sulfur, an atom oxygen. This was announced now as the immutability of the materials in the elements, the eternity of the atoms. In his World Riddles (The Riddles of the Universe), Haeckel emphasises nothing stronger than the eternity of the matter. This was one thing that one fixed. The other what Du Bois-Reymond fixed was that limits are put to the natural sciences: one can never know how consciousness comes into being.

Based on these premises, different groups formed. One said: howsoever the things may be, we remain at our old religious creed. We let the researchers think what they want to believe, we do believe; but in relation to science we keep to the determined facts.—The other, more courageous ones said: Indeed, if the real is the atoms in motion, the seventy elements and in between the ether atoms, everything else is appearance, which exists only as long as a motion exists.—This is no longer science, this is a creed! This is something that spreads to everything that concerns the spiritual world, which is for such a creed nothing else than a manifestation of the wholly material facts.

It was already a courageous venture when on the Lübeck meeting of scientists and physicians, in the end of the eighties, the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932) held a talk The Overcoming of the Scientific Materialism. Ostwald showed that for the logical thinking the concept of matter generally disintegrates into nothing. One can unfold this logical thinking very easily: what do you see in the world? You see bodies! What are these bodies? They are something that is a certain colour, a certain shine, a certain temperature, something that you can smell and taste. Attempt to retain everything that you perceive in such bodies. If you take away what you perceive as smell, as taste, as touch, what remains to you? Nothing at all! A body is before the logical thinking nothing but a conglomerate, the sum of its qualities.

What has one taken as a basis of light, of colour? Nothing but movements of the ether! One fulfilled the entire space with ether. He who is known with theoretical physics knows how one calculates ether waves etc. and that everything that one finds there is a result of calculations. The ether can never be an object of immediate observation. If it produces the discernible things, how can one perceive it itself? The ether was the most fantastic idea that one could assume. Thus, the natural sciences are based on something fictional. One had nothing but results of calculations. The absolute and most certain that should be there for the scientific thinking was nothing but something calculated. In my The Philosophy of Freedom, you can read up how this thought cancels out, so that one can compare it to Münchhausen who draws himself out of a swamp with his own shock of hair. This is made clear there. However, on the human beings, and if they believe to be ever so logical, never reasons, never real facts, but suggestions work. There work all possible concepts, which move through thousands and thousands canals into the souls. Thus, the elements and atoms became a natural premise also with those who had no possibility to survey the matters and did not know at all, why one assumes such matters. It was a general suggestion.

At this time, one of the biggest progress of the human investigation of nature occurred, namely the investigation of the living as Darwin made it so popular. The infinite wealth of facts that have become known to the world was in such a way that one had to say: if it had occurred at a spiritual time when one knew that spirit forms the basis of all material phenomena, then one would have found countless reasons just in these facts for the work and being of the spirit. One would have found the spirit working on the change and transformation of the organisms. Darwinism never generated materialism. Materialism, which comes from those mental pictures, as I have just characterised them, made Darwinism materialistic. It made such a high-minded thinker and researcher as Ernst Haeckel also materialistic. While Haeckel could have performed great things for spiritual science with his researches, he was tied up with materialism by the suggestive influence of his time.

If the matter were in such a way even today, one would not be inclined to talk of spiritual science, and it is still temporarily impossible to convince those who are on the ground of the scientific explanations. One has to let them go their own ways, and the spiritual researcher must also go his ways. If it were in such a way even today as it was at that time, one would have to say: the spiritual science can be content in itself.—However, things have changed. Just those who have participated in everything that is regarded as natural sciences have also witnessed—even if only slowly—the biggest reversal taking place just in the field of scientific thinking. Times will come when one will not be able to understand that one could ever think such a thing as it is popular still today. Probably it may seem as if the natural sciences advance in our present triumphantly with this materialistic worldview, as if one succeeded by well-prepared investigations in generating living from the proteins in the laboratory. Then they would say, we could generate living material of which whole living beings consist, and there are for the naturalist virtually delightful facts, which show that one can treat lifeless substance with certain toxic substances by which effects arise like symptoms of an intoxication. The substances resulting from it look like living crystals: by their forms, they create the impression to be alive, although they are not yet. Thus, one can assume that one comes to the point where from molecules and atoms life and, on the other side, spirit comes into being.

On one side, this seems to be the case. On the other side, what is there? Something that works stronger than everything that Ostwald said from the point of view of a scientific logic against materialism. There we see another scientific attitude slowly preparing and becoming necessary. In the middle of the nineties, Becquerel (Henri Antoine B., 1852–1908), the great physicist, discovered certain radiations in certain substances containing uranium. These have particular effects that express themselves making the air electrically conducting or causing a certain change of the photographic plate, as for example the X-rays. You know that one also got around in the last time to finding such rays in connection with the element radium. But as interesting it is that there is something that one has not known once, the entire kind and effect of these rays was so strange, so different from the ideas that one had up to now that many people already became uncertain in their view that the atoms are something everlasting and only combine and separate. We have substances there, which behave quite oddly in the world coherence just like radium and uranium.

They emit, in particular radium, but their radiations are almost inexhaustible. All that would harmonise with the old view; but the most important is that one can let emit such a material like radium that one can separate certain parts and can keep back a part. There are, for example, such radiations which make the air electric, and which one can separate then in such a way that one has their effect on the photographic plate. It is in such a way that one can separate the different qualities, so that one has substances that do no longer have the first qualities. A quality is taken away from one substance and the other gets it. In every bookstore, you can buy treatises about that today. However, this is not yet the significant. It is significant that permanently rays separate and go out into the space. Indeed, certain reasons compel us to suppose that these rays run out once. Today, one can already prove that certain substances are diminished in short time, in a time hardly to be expressed, however, that the substances that can go adrift transform themselves strangely enough into quite different substances, so that for a big number of researchers the fact is that radiations of radium transform themselves into helium.

We see that radium sends its radiations into the space. According to the old theory what would have to happen there? Nevertheless, at most the atoms go adrift, separate if they are something invariable. However, there we see that they send out radiations perpetually, and now we can assume nothing else than that the atoms disintegrate and split to the smallest particles. Others show clearly that for a big number of substances this atomic decay is possible. Thus, we realise that that which one regarded as the most lasting once, as the absolute—whereas everything else counted only as a result of it—today also disintegrates. This scatters today. Reasonable hope exists that that applies to all atoms. What is the atom in future? It is something that originates and forms. Every atom forms, has a certain lifetime, and dissolves after a certain time again. There you have transformed what is the steadiest for materialism into a being that originates and passes. If one sees that radium goes over into the helium element, one sees that there material changes into material. There one gets the idea that the dream of the old alchemists that materials can be transformed into other materials has reality.

In some books, we already find indications that the modern scientific research suggests what the alchemists have dreamt. There are already scientists who have done interesting considerations about certain processes. Once one said, there are copper salts that are joined, for example, of copper and chlorine. If one separates them, one has copper and chlorine again. One sees in it that the atoms lie together, and if one separates them again, it is chlorine and copper. Indeed, something essential occurred to some persons who have started thinking and what the spiritual scientist stresses repeatedly: if you combine the materials that you have separated as copper and chlorine again, then heat must originate. If these two substances combine, heat is spread. The fact that heat appears there is something real and it is as real as copper and chlorine are combined. If one wants to separate both again, one must add heat again. We perceive the warmth. Nobody has ever perceived atoms and molecules. However, do we not recognise what is in the phenomenon? If you bring together copper and chlorine, this is, as if you squeezed out the heat, as it were, like flour from the flour bags. If one wants to have the flour bags full again, one must just put flour again into them. Thus, the heat would be the filling.—With it, we have attributed reality to the heat and have made clear that one has to count not only on molecular effects, but that these materials themselves are possible only because of this heat.

If now we consider that the atoms disintegrate under our hands, we must ask ourselves, do these natural sciences lead on their crossroads—where the atoms scatter, the most certain up to now—to the recognition of that which they once regarded as external expression, as an appearance? The natural sciences lead to this view today!

Today, the entire atomic theory falters that has been the base of the natural sciences long time. Today, the facts are in such a way that the theories that are not based on facts must fall. Atoms and molecules are nothing factual, but something fictional. If this falls because it itself is an effect, we must ask, of what is it an effect? At first, people will attempt to come again to something else that forms the basis. Today, they are just speaking of liquid electricity. Very nice is what Balfour (Arthur James B., 1848–1930, British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary) said: if we imagine atoms, we can only say, something like a fluid flows through the world, and the atoms are in it like ice lumps in the water.—This is a nice picture. However, whereto does it lead? Try once to continue it. It leads to that point where the natural sciences get around to recognising as the actually real what they have denied once what was only an appearance for them. This was a weird belief that colours exists only in my head that outdoors only small particles exist that knock and press each other and thereby produce the sensations of light, colour and sound. These mental pictures will soon have to disappear due to the power of the facts. It will become obvious that what we see and hear is real, and that it was a great speculative fiction to think a material world behind this world. This material world will scatter and disintegrate. On will appreciate what is behind it. Then that will have to move up which one experiences and can experience. Then one will recognise that the atom can be nothing else than frozen electricity, frozen heat, frozen light. Then one has still to advance so that one has to realise that everything consists of compressed spirit. There is no matter! What is matter relates to the spirit as ice relates to the water. If you dissolve the ice, there is water. If you dissolve matter, it disappears as matter and becomes spirit. Everything that is matter is spirit, matter is the external manifestation of the spirit.

It will still last long, until one has to draw the last consequence that not the eye has formed the light, but the light the eye, and the tones that we hear the ear. Then one will realise that any matter is born out of the spirit, and one will lead the true scientific facts, without logical interruption, back to spiritual science. The scientific facts will be the best basis of spiritual science. He who stands on the spiritual-scientific point of view looks admiring at the natural sciences on the crossroads. The suggestions have them tempted to believe that matter is the only one. They have not been content to examine the material world, but they have added a second world. This was the tragedy, the impossible. The spiritual researcher recognises the existent natural world completely. The spiritual scientist can never adopt a fictional and dreamt up world of invariable atoms and oscillations of the fictional ether, this fantastic world of materialism. He rejects them as superstition. Superstition was the belief in material atoms behind our perception. One said, every atom could be perceived if one has the instruments.—Nothing is behind that what we perceive but only the spirit and the spiritual world into which we penetrate! We search this behind the phenomena. We search no world of atoms surging up and down, but the world of the spirit in the world of the sensuous phenomena. On the wrong track is somebody who believes to find another material world behind the external phenomena. Those who build even today on it like on facts have to be corrected. The time will come when this fantastic superstition is recognised as such and when a lot of that which one regards from this side as superstition turns out to be right. The right basic principle of natural sciences, stopping on the ground of the facts, leads them even to the crossroads where it becomes obvious whether the facts agree with the theories. The facts do not agree with them, the theories scatter like nothing! The element and the atoms disintegrate that one had regarded as the steadiest basis from which one wanted to explain the spirit and the consciousness. What we want is certainty, and we can get it only by the fact that we perceive the spirit in ourselves.

Thus, the natural sciences will discharge into the spiritual science. Today, they stand in the crossroads. Some people do not yet recognise it, others can realise it. The time will come when a wonderful harmony exists between the knowledge of scientific facts and the assertions of spiritual science. It will never assert something that contradicts the scientific facts. Spiritual science also admires the works of the spirit in materialism; but it establishes no cloud-cuckoo-land. Spiritual science wants to understand the world to work in it. About hundred years ago, one had natural sciences in Germany, which sailed under full canvas into the materialism of the 19th century, natural sciences that started recognising nothing else than what one can see with eyes and touch with hands. The result was that also that which was thought out became something material, something concrete. The great philosophies that moved in expressions and concepts, which were not everybody's taste, were pushed aside. However, the people who condemn Hegel and Schelling understand as a rule nothing at all of these spirits who looked so deeply into the world, as none of those suggest who believe to be way beyond them. However, they moved in strongly sublimated concepts.

Goethe stood between these two parties right in the middle of them. Hence, he could anticipate how the natural sciences would sail into materialism and, on the other side, he found opportunity to penetrate to the problems and to build the connecting bridge between religion and natural sciences. Therefore, he could say so nicely that once the time would come when philosophy and natural sciences unite. However, he added, for a while they must still go separate ways.—They have gone separate ways, without understanding each other. Today, we also have two currents, materialism that has outlived itself that sees its steadiest, most absolute basis disintegrating by its own methods, that destroys itself, and a philosophy that discharges into theosophy or spiritual science. It is not the abstract-spiritual, but the concrete-spiritual that tries to bring forward facts of the higher world to humanity that will no longer be there as abstract, but as concrete spiritual science.

We shall experience in not too distant time that a nice alliance between the scientific view and the spiritual-scientific one. We shall realise how the scientific facts are useful for the spiritual view and the spiritual view is useful to the natural sciences. Therefore, the bridge is built. The human mind can prosper only if its ways of activity harmonise with each other. The mind would have to become crippled if the natural sciences remained without spiritual science and spiritual science would have to be content with the thought: nevertheless, you cannot take over the natural sciences to the spiritual.—However, the course of the world development will bring peace. It will build the bridge between faith and knowledge. It will bring an infinite progress and harmony between faith and knowledge.

How many people long for external peace, for outer harmony and outer happiness of the human beings! Nevertheless, everything outer is appearance of the inside and the outer human life can be only a result of the inner one. A happy outer human life originates if there are hopeful souls. They will know how to found the right social peace, and from the inner peace, the outer peace will come. Therefore, it seems to be not without meaning to look at these natural sciences in the crossroads and to show how the one reaches a dead end, the other, however, leads quite clearly to the areas, which are also those of spiritual science. Thus, they will co-operate from now on and the world edifice will be enriched from two sides. It will be a great, perfect harmony, and this will be in the human being the inner harmony of the soul that is the last purpose of spiritual science.

There is in our culture certainly no document that has intervened so deeply and so intensively in the whole spiritual life as the Bible. One would have to write a history, not of centuries, but of millennia if one wanted to describe the effect of the Bible on humankind. If one completely wanted to refrain from the influence of this document on the mainstream, one would still find something immeasurable in the Bible concerning the influence and the deep effects on the human soul. Certainly, one may say that just our modern time presents exceptionally many things, because one could show that today not only those who stand on the ground of the Bible are deeply influenced by this human document, but also that those who have turned away from the Bible are subject to its influence. For the Bible is really not only a document, although it is it in the most particular measure, because it fulfils the soul with a sum of images about the world and life giving the soul a worldview, but the Bible was, for millennia, an enormous means of education of the souls.

It has meant something not only to the imagination, and means something to it even today, but it is maybe important and more essential what we must regard as an effect on the emotional life, on the ways of thinking. There we must often admit today that the Bible only developed the emotions, the sensations of those who combat the Bible.

But who looks around only a little at the spiritual life of humankind, in particular at that of our western humankind and that which is connected with it, that will note what an immense reversal has taken place concerning the position of humankind or, at least, of a big part of humankind to the Bible.

Those who stand still firmly on the ground of the Bible today could maybe think too little of that to which is pointed with it. They could say, even if there may be some people who turn away from the Bible who state that the Bible can no longer be that for humankind what it was for millennia, it is presumably only a temporary phenomenon. We believe in the Bible; whatever the gentlemen say who believe to stand on the ground of science, it may seem to them fantastic—we rely on the Bible! One could find this judgment among certain personalities very much common, and it is only a matter of course. For someone who is still able to take the happiness, the certainty and the strength of his soul from the Bible cannot put enough in the balance according to his character against those phenomena that exist around him as criticism and refusal of the Bible.

However, such a judgment would be rather careless. It would be even selfish in a certain way, for the human being—if he pronounces such a judgment—says to himself: the Bible gives me this or that; whether it gives the same to other human beings, I do not care about.—Such a human being does not pay attention to the fact that humankind is a whole. What single human beings experience, think and feel at first flows down into the whole humankind and becomes common property.

Somebody who says, I do not want to hear what the critics and the scholars say about the Bible today, I do not care about it judges only for himself. He does not remember whether also his descendants, whether those human beings who follow him can have the chance to gain such a satisfaction from this document if criticism and science are about to take this document away from humankind. The power of the authorities who are involved in the life of this document is big and strong. It means, actually, to act blind and deaf towards that which goes forward round one if one wants to start only from the just characterised point of view of naive faith, undeterred faith. Today one has to hear what can shake the respect and the meaning of this human document with our fellow men. The shock, the radical changes that took place in the course of the last centuries with reference to this document are enormous.

Still a few centuries ago, the Bible was believed to be something that enjoyed unconditional authority; it was believed to be of higher divine origin. This belief, this assumption is shaken long-since and will be shaken more and more by always new reasons. At first, neither our modern science nor the present natural sciences turned against the old view of the Bible. Already more than hundred years ago, the more materialistic way of thinking—we are allowed to use the expression, because we have often explained it here—considered the Bible from the purely external point of view. We speak about the Old Testament first. For centuries, it was believed to be—like the New Testament—an inspiration of higher powers. It was believed to be written out of a consciousness that could rise to a sphere of truth to which the sensuous consciousness could not rise.

The first to shake this belief in the fact that the Bible was written out of a higher human consciousness, that it is due to another authority than to any authority of a human writer was that one said to oneself: if one reads the Bible, it turns out that it is no uniform document. In the eighteenth century, the French doctor Astruc (Jean A., 1684–1766) wrote, one says, the human beings would have written under the influence of higher powers the chapters of the Bible that we call the history of creation by Moses. However, we read the creation story and find that single parts are not in accordance with each other; we find stylistic and objective contradictions. Hence, we must suppose that not a single author, Moses or anybody else, wrote this document, because somebody who describes the conditions successively as a single person would not bring in inner contradictions.

I can only outline all these contradictions: old documents would be taken from different sides and combined by various authors. These were the first objections against the Bible. We want now to characterise the spirit of this kind of opposition against the spiritual origin of the Bible, apart from that how the things happened.

One sees there how immediately in the beginning in tremendous, overpowering pictures the creation is unrolled. In them, the so-called Six-Day Work is told. One tells further on how within this creation the human being originated, how he came to the sin, how he developed from generation to generation. There one notes that in the first parts, in the first verses, a name is chosen for the divine powers, for God, different from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. One sees there that really these two names of the divine alternate, the Elohim and Yahveh or Jehovah. There somebody must ask himself, should an author have called the divine with two different names? Where from this may come? He says to himself that that or those who put together the document finally found old traditions or also old documents which they interlinked and formed a whole from them. The one may come from this tribe, the other from that tribe, and one interlinked them. This one makes itself noticeable. Starting from this one notes, going on, that similar and other contradictions appear.

Thus, one got around to separating and tearing the original documents in different pieces. If today anybody wanted to put together a Bible from the different pieces and fragments from which one thought that it must be composed, if anybody printed with blue letters everything that one counts among one document, with red letters what among a second, with green letters what among a third and so on, then a strange document would originate. However, it has already come about—the so-called Rainbow Bible!

The ancient, venerable document is there, one would like to say, disassembled in the single pieces from which it should be composed. The Bible is, of course, a document of which one believes, however, to be able to prove that it is due not to Moses, but that parts of it originate from this or that clerical council in relatively late time. Other parts of the Bible are put together from legends and myths that one gathered from here and there from religious views of this or that school. What became a whole this way cannot be believed to be something that was brought into history with a raised human consciousness that is able to behold into the spiritual worlds.

However, nobody is allowed to believe that these both talks, which I have to hold today and on Saturday, are intended to lower any way the diligence and the sedulity of the works just only briefly outlined. To somebody who knows the spiritual means that was used to tear the Bible to small pieces and to explain them, the diligence and the sedulity and the skill of the researchers of all these works become apparent. They appear to him as the most tremendous that was maybe performed in science. In relation to the formal, in relation to the industrious research one cannot find anything comparable. If we look closely at the result of this research performed by modern theologists, so just from those, who due to their profession believe to stand on the ground of Christianity, we must say to ourselves, it must cause another relation to the Bible as it was for centuries. If this research comes to fruition, the Bible—many things had to be discussed to reason it in detail—cannot longer exist as the document that comforts and raises the human beings in the saddest problems of life.

Apart from that, numerous human beings have looked around in the fields of scientific research, in geology, in the developmental history of animals and plants, in the history of civilisation, in anthropology and so on. These human beings are hardly able to conceive anything reading the Bible. One has to be also fair in this respect and not position oneself simply on the ground of naive faith and say that this signifies nothing. They are often those who are the most conscientious ones in their feeling of truth, in their thirst for knowledge. They say to themselves, I see that research standing on firm ground has found

That the earth developed throughout geologic periods,
That the earth developed from a mist of higher temperature to the present form,
That the inanimate develops and from this inanimate the living being,
That everything developed from the simple up to the most complex being, the human being,
That the forms of civilisation ascended to the modern complex forms.

Numerous human beings say, if we see which tremendous geological periods were necessary to receive the earth when it had not yet produced amphibians nor mammals, if we survey all that and open ourselves to that, what shall we to do if the Bible tells us that the world was created within six or seven days? We have no use neither for the creation in six or seven days nor for anything else. Which use are we able to make of the Flood, of the miraculous rescue of Noah if we read that Noah brought so many animals in the ark, and so on?—Thus, it happens that some human beings gifted with dignity and serious sense of truth oppose so sharply and vigorously against the Bible based on the modern scientific viewpoint, in so far as it wants to extent to a worldview. All that exists in our worldview. We are not able to deny all that.

However, there the question arises: does one take all things really into consideration that are to be taken into consideration in relation to the Bible if either the first viewpoint, the historical one, or the second, the physical-historical view is asserted? There one has to say that already the third viewpoint exists in relation to the Bible, a viewpoint that develops from that real research method and human viewpoint that is characterised in these talks as the spiritual-scientific or anthroposophic one. We have to deal with this viewpoint in relation to the Bible today and the day after tomorrow. What a viewpoint is this? One often says today, the human being is not allowed to rely on external authority, he has to approach world and life without presuppositions and to investigate truth, and one believes to insult just the Bible if one takes up such a viewpoint. Does one really insult the Bible with it? One can compare the spiritual-scientific or anthroposophic viewpoint to something that happened to humanity concerning something else, even if less significant, some centuries ago. We come to an understanding of the spiritual-scientific viewpoint concerning the Bible the easiest, if we compare it with the radical changes in relation to the view of the earth.

There we see that all schools, the lower and the higher ones, taught about the external nature in the whole Middle Ages following up old writings, indeed, writings of a great personality, of the old Greek philosopher and naturalist Aristotle. Thus, if you could go back with me to the sites of the spiritual life of the older time, you would find that that was not communicated in the old schools and training centres which was found in laboratories, but which was printed in the books by Aristotle. Aristotle was the authority and his books were the Bible of the natural sciences at that time. Where one only communicated and taught what Aristotle had already said about the matters. Now the times came when a new aurora arose concerning the view of nature, the new way of the physical view of Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei and all the others up to now. What was the basic feature of this aurora? While one had taken before Aristotle as a firm starting point, and spoke about nature as he had spoken, now Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei used their own senses of observation and research. They themselves looked at nature and investigated what life could show them. Thus, they wanted to describe and explain nature according to that which they themselves had seen. There they came into conflict with the teachings of Aristotle's strict believers.

It is more than a mere anecdote, it means the deep truth of a process that happened at that time: one tells that a believer of Aristotle was asked to have a look at a corpse and to observe that it is not right that the nerves go out from the heart—as Aristotle teaches—but from the brain. The believer of Aristotle was persuaded to look at this. Then, however, he said, if I look at this, it seems that nature contradicts Aristotle. However, if nature contradicts Aristotle, I do not trust nature but Aristotle.—Natural sciences faced tradition that way. The view of the researcher was rejected in the light of that which was reproduced and repeated as tradition for centuries. If we read Giordano Bruno's writings, we see the opposition against Aristotle out of the new spirit that tells and explains what the human being himself should see.

We look at the whole matter again differently today. We face the immediate scientific observation and Aristotle differently. We know that a lot of that which was read out from him in the Middle Ages was only an ambiguous interpretation of his writings. Aristotle was a researcher out of the spirit of his time who looked immediately into nature and communicated what he was able to say. If we understand Aristotle correctly, if we can defer to what he said, then he does no longer seem to contradict the immediate scientific observation, as he seemed to contradict at that time. Then we can become his admirers again, because just concerning the origin of the nerves from the heart instead of from the brain, it becomes apparent that he meant something else, namely something that is still correct for our time.

In a quite similar way, the spiritual-scientific research faces not only these documents—the writings by Aristotle—but also the western original document, the Bible. What has happened in relation to the observation and investigation of the external nature since the sixteenth century takes place again in relation to the investigation of the spiritual undergrounds of the world. Out of the spirit of that research, I have characterised in the last three talks, how humankind tries to penetrate again into those worlds that are not discernible by the outer senses. However, they are discernible to the higher developed senses of the human being, to the spiritual senses of the human being with which we can behold also in the spiritual world as we can see with the physical senses in the physical world.

It is not necessary to keep on explaining because I have often enough said that the human being is able to develop the forces in himself that he can perceive not only the sensuous things, but that he can perceive a spiritual world between and behind the sensuous, a spiritual world that is much more real than the sensuous world. With good reason, humankind had forgotten the methods of spiritual research for a while. The big progress, the big conquests in the physical world were done because the instruments were perfected in such a way, as it was the case during the last centuries. However, if one thing extends in the human nature, other abilities take a backseat. That is why we see how during the last centuries the scientific methods blossomed for the external physical world of facts. Never were instruments that are more stupendous invented to pick up the secrets of nature and to investigate her principles. The concerning abilities were extended and perfected tremendously, but those abilities have withdrawn with which the human being is able to behold into in the spiritual world. Hence, it is not surprising that the human being was convinced that the spiritual could also be explained from the material existence.

However, we stand before the dawn of an epoch today when humankind becomes aware again that there are still instruments and tools different from those in the physical and physiological laboratory where they are used so excellently. Indeed, we have to do it with an instrument that differs thoroughly from the other. We deal with the basic and original instrument that we have to see in the human being himself. We get to know the human being by the methods of concentration and meditation in the course of the winter. These are other methods that the human being can apply to his soul and by which he gets around to seeing the environment unlike he has seen it before. He can get around to saying to himself: I am like an operated blind-born who could deny the colours and the light of the world before.—However, the moment had now come that he himself could see. Now he could see that something else is behind that which the senses and the mind perceive. Now he sees into the spiritual things; now he does not know, not hypothetically, by speculative philosophy that the sensuous, the material is only like a compression of the spiritual, that that which we see with the senses relates to something spiritual behind it as ice relates to water. The water is thin, the ice is solid, and somebody who is not able to see the water, but can see the ice would say, there is nothing round the ice.—Somebody, who can see only with the senses, states that there is nothing but sensuous processes, nothing but sensuous events everywhere.

However, we must penetrate into this supersensible field, into these supersensible events, and then we can recognise and explain the spiritual. Who has not developed spiritual ears and eyes sees nothing but compression—like the ice in the water—all over the world, as well as the primordial mother of substance, the spiritual in which the sensuous is only embedded does not appear to him. If the geologist shows us how, for example, a human being could sit on a chair in the universe and could watch how the world has developed: the external sensuous view would be as the natural sciences describe it. Spiritual science has to object nothing to that which natural sciences have to say in the positive sense. However, it becomes apparent to someone who is in the right know of the physical science that before the first forming of the physical the spiritual was there. There it becomes apparent how the progress became only possible because the spiritual helped, and that the spirit is mostly involved in the development.

So this spiritual worldview points to the fact that the human being can make himself the instrument of the investigation of the important bases of the world, and, finally, our view gets around to investigating the spiritual original grounds and beginnings independently. Thus, spiritual science stands there, independently of any document. It says, we do not do research in a document first. We do not do research as it was done once, in the books by Aristotle, we do research in the spiritual world. We adapt ourselves in such a way: what you learn as usual school geometry, the Euclidean geometry, was written down in its first beginnings by Euclid, the great mathematician. Today we can accept it as a document and understand it historically. However, who learns geometry at school today, is he still learning after the elementary book of Euclid? One works, learns, and recognises by the things themselves. If one constructs, for example, a triangle, the internal lawfulness appears to the mind out of the thing itself. Then with that which you have gained in such a way, you can move up to Euclid and recognise what he already wrote in his textbook. Thus, the spiritual scientist does also research, regardless of the books, only with his organs how the world has developed. He finds the development of the world, the development of the earth at that time before the earth crystallised in its present form. He investigates the spiritual processes and finds how at a certain point our mind starts in the earthly existence; he shows that the human being appears first and has not developed from subordinated creatures, but that he was first there as a descendant of spiritual beings.

We can go back to former times when still the spiritual primordial grounds existed. We find the human being connected with these spiritual processes, and only later, the lower creatures develop besides the human being. As well as in the development generally certain things remain behind and other advance, the lower also diverted from the higher. The spiritual researcher knows that spiritual organs can be developed by methods that the spiritual researcher is able to show.

Thus, the spiritual research teaches the origin and evolution of the world according to principles which are independent of any document, only out of own principles, as well as one learns mathematics regardless how it has developed in the course of history. In the same way as the researcher has appropriated knowledge of this wisdom, he approaches the Bible. He looks at the Bible. It becomes apparent now, why there are contradictions in the Bible from the viewpoint of the historical-critical biblical studies as well as from the viewpoint of scientific research. Both viewpoints come from one big error that originated from the fact that one thought generally to be supposed to understand the truth of the Bible from the viewpoints of physical-sensuous perception. One thought that it is possible to approach the Bible with such criteria. One did not yet have the research results of the anthroposophic spiritual science.

I want to show with single examples what I have just said. Spiritual science shows us that we come investigating the earthly creation with the methods of geology et cetera only to a certain point, and that then the human development seems to proceed backwards in the uncertain. Why? The sensuous science, may it hope it ever so much, will never be able to pursue the human being back to the origin, because sensuous science can find the sensuous only. However, the mental and spiritual have led the way of the sensuous in the human being. He was soul first and at even former times, he was spirit, then he descended to the earthly existence. Only as far as the physical life is involved in the descent of the human being in the earthly existence, natural sciences can show this course of development.

We cannot investigate the soul life with the usual forces of the sensuous observation. Geology can also be no guide to us. It gives us the investigation of that which remained behind as sense-perceptible matters. It can only say what one would see if anybody sat on a chair in the universe and saw everything that developed on earth. Spiritual science does not defer to this. However, one must have developed spiritual eyes and ears to see the human being as a spiritual being in primeval times. If one does not have these organs, the soul and the spirit of the human being disappear. However, if one has the spiritual eyes, the sensuous disappears, and the spiritual picture originates. One cannot see this, however, in the same way as the sensuous. One must appropriate quite different concepts of knowledge if one wants to go back to such primeval times. What one sees developing there from the human being when it was only a soul does not appear in sensuous concrete perception as the external sensuous world offers it. This appears to us as pictures. Our consciousness becomes a picture consciousness, an imaginative consciousness by the development of the internal forces of the soul. Then the consciousness is filled with pictures. We see in another condition of consciousness, what has happened at that time, now in pictures. Pictorial is that which goes forward inside of the seer.

The rudiment that still exists of the seer's gift is the dream. However, it is chaotic. The vision of the qualified seer also exists in such pictures, but these pictures correspond to reality. It corresponds to the condition as the physical-sensuous human being can make a distinction whether his mental images correspond to reality or are only fantasy. Who wants to stop with the sentence: “The world is my mental image” and “the external things only stimulate the mental image,” to that I might propose that he should have a piece of glowing iron in his nearness and feel how it burns. Then he has to leave it and feel whether the mere mental picture still burns in such a way. There is just something that makes a distinction between the mere mental picture and that perception that is stimulated by the external object. Hence, one is not allowed to say that the seer lives only in the phantasms. He has just so developed in this field that he can make a distinction what is a mere speculative fiction, or what is a picture of the reality of a spiritual-mental world. The pictures become the means of expression of a spiritual-mental world. If the seer looks with supersensible senses back at times, before there are sensuous objects, the true spiritual beings and events present themselves. The spiritual researcher speaks not about forces that are abstractions, but about real beings. As to him, the spiritual phenomena become truth and beings, and the spiritual world becomes populated again by spiritual beings.

Imagine the primeval development of the human being when a force or being intervened in his evolution, in his whole figure that this being or force differs certainly from other beings who have intervened even earlier. We can trace back the spiritual-mental of the human being who is quite supersensible even further; we can trace back it in even higher spheres where we find even higher beings. If the spiritual researcher approaches the beginning of the Bible, it becomes apparent to him that the pictures are exactly given which show the mental-spiritual in the development of the human being, before he has come into the physical life. The spiritual researcher is able to say to himself—if he finds his own imaginations again in the external documents—that he recognises them as truth. If he goes back now to the times when the human being was connected with the even higher spheres, he has to choose another name for these basic beings, and he finds really that the passages which lead the way of the fourth verse of the second chapter have another name of God. It complies exactly with the results of spiritual research that a new name of God appears from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. Thus, we are as spiritual researcher in the same position in which today an expert of geometry is. He can find geometry out of himself, and then he appreciates the work of Euclid who found the same. Thus, we see the development in the marvellous pictures of the Old Testament, and now something extremely strange appears. The text of the Bible becomes light and clear, as it could not become with the scientific critics.

A researcher said: what the elohim did must be due to a side different from that which comes from Yahveh If anyone wants to apply that seriously, it is weird. We want to try it. Imagine this passage in the Bible: “The serpent which was the most cunning of all creatures the LORD God had made asked the woman: Is it true that God has forbidden you to eat from any tree of the garden (Genesis 3:1)?” If you read “God” instead of “Elohim” or “Yahveh,” it is not translated correctly. It is weird. In the original text you read, “The serpent which was the most cunning of all creatures Yahveh had made.” Where you read, “Is it true that God has forbidden you ... you read “Elohim” in the original text. In the translation, the woman keeps on saying “God.” Then in the eighth verse, one says, “The man and the woman heard the voice of the LORD God.” However, you read in the original text, the voice of the Yahveh God.—Thus, we have now put together the story of the serpent, so that it becomes explicable that those who used the names “Yahveh” or “Elohim” meant different beings. According to the opinion of the Bible critics, this comes from different traditions.

The passage “Is it true that God has forbidden you to eat from any tree in the garden?” comes from the Elohim tradition.—You see, the Bible is really so composed of pieces that even in the middle of the sentences the different traditions are taken together.

If you approach the Bible with spiritual-scientific research, then you recognise that this must also be that way. There is talk of the fourth verse of the second chapter that the world creation goes over from the elohim to the Yahveh God. He is that power which unfolds everything that happens then up to the Fall of Man. Spiritual science shows that Yahveh is that God who speaks within the human being in our ego, he is the I-am. This being of the I-am causes everything that is said from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. This being, Yahveh, who intervenes now, is a being who belongs to a former development, but seceded ... (gap in the transcript). Hence, there is talk of the Yahveh God. However, the serpent knows nothing about Yahveh; therefore, it must turn to that which is of its own substance, up to the moment when this takes place which has just to take place by Yahveh. Only in the eighth verse of the third chapter, the name Yahveh appears again.

Thus, you get the consciousness by spiritual research that the Bible is a document in which nothing is accidental. A modern author may ask himself, why should this God not assume another name?—The ancient initiates do not have these stylistic forms of the modern authors. Where exactly and precisely should be spoken, you cannot talk in any stylistic form. What there is written and what there is omitted has its meaning. If the name Yahveh appears and if it is omitted, this means something highly essential. However, you must carry out the principle to read the Bible extremely exactly. Read the Bible if you have it! Read the Six-Day Work. You find the passage, if you keep on reading from the first verse of the second chapter to the Sabbath, “When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens...” One interprets these verses normally as a hint to the preceding, as if the Seven-Day Work had been told and one still said now, the Seven-Day work was made in such a way.—“This is the story of the heavens and of the earth after their creation,” and then, “When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens” (Genesis 2:4).

Who studies the original text, detects the following: The fourth verse of the second chapter does not refer to the preceding, but to the following; even as later—in the chapter after the Fall of Man—“This is the list of Adam's descendants” (Genesis 5:1) refers to the following, to the next generations, to that which originated from Adam. This is said in the same way as: which follows there, “This is the story of the heavens and the earth after their creation” (Genesis 2:4). Here the same Hebrew word is used. Someone who reads exactly knows that the creation of the spiritual world is described from the words “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” to the third verse of the second chapter. Then from the fourth verse of the second chapter on it is said: after the heavens and the earth were created the following is described. It is the most wonderful transition if one understands the matter, from the Six-Day Work to the following. Who gets involved in these matters finds that no better composed book exists than the Bible, in particular its oldest parts. The confidence that one is able to approach the Bible without spiritual research, that one is able to approach it with external documents has dissolved this perfect and harmonious work, so that it seems to be composed of nothing but pieces and fragments.

One also has to follow up on the principle to read the Bible exactly and to have it. One does not have the Bible if one has only the text that suggests what it depends on. One must have the principle to go into the Bible. It is told to us during the fourth day of the Six-Day Work how the sun and moon originate, how the sun and moon cause day and night (Genesis 1:14–18). Already before, however, it was spoken in the Bible of day and night (Genesis 1, 5). One can deduce from that: day and night, which depend on the sun and moon (Genesis 1: 14–18), cannot be meant with “day” and “night,” which do not depend on the sun and moon (Genesis 1: 5). Here one can see a palpable tip where the Bible speaks of the sensuous solar day and the sensuous solar night. These originate due to the rotation of the earth around the sun. However, we can see, where the Bible points beyond this sensuous day to the supersensible, the spiritual.

Those who could investigate the Bible spiritually said always to themselves if anyone has the visionary gift and can find the sense of the Bible in reality, this sense of the Bible must have come also from visionary gift. If we are able—because our soul has put itself in another state of consciousness—to look into the tremendous pictures of the Bible, then we know that the writer must also have been under the inspiration of the spiritual world. We may probably say: the time begins when one should understand more and more that there are four levels to look at the Bible today.

The first level is that of naive faith. It takes the Bible with undeterred certainty and anticipates nothing of the objections that are made against the Bible today.

The second level: these are the clever people, the Bible critics, who find—either by investigating internal contradictions or by the scientific point of view—that the Bible was the primitive legend work of a humankind not yet doing research. They are way beyond the Bible, they do no longer need it, and they attack it from the most different directions and say: it was good for the childish humankind. Now, however, humankind has outgrown the Bible.—These are the clever ones, the freethinkers.

Then there is the third level: the human being outgrows this cleverness. Indeed, the human beings of this level are also freethinkers, but they are way beyond this second point of view; they see symbolic and mythical covers of inner soul experiences in the stories of the Bible—the Old and the New Testaments. You see what the human soul imagines shown in the Bible in symbols in the abstract. Some freethinkers have been forced to this attitude. They had to transform the viewpoint of the freethinker into that of the mythical symbolist.

Then there is the fourth point of view. This is that of spiritual science I have characterised today. The day after tomorrow we follow up on this spiritual-scientific viewpoint. It shows the spiritual facts again in simple descriptions, indeed, in such a way as one can see these spiritual facts in imaginations. These are the facts that are described in the Bible.

Someone who had to leave the naive viewpoint and has become a clever person or maybe a symbolist as researcher may get to the viewpoint on which the spiritual researcher stands, and then he can become able to take the Bible again literally, to take the words literally in a new sense to understand them really.

For centuries, one did not criticise the Bible in reality. The Bible critics have fought against their own imaginary creation, against that which they themselves have made of the Bible. The adversaries of the Bible are such even today; they fight against their own imaginary relation, against that which they believe to understand of it; they do not affect the Bible at all. The Bible can be taken literally, one must only understand the words correctly.

There is a certain tendency today that turns against such a remark: not the letter, the spirit must decide. “The letter kills, the spirit brings back to life,,” and you name it from certain relations of the letters.

I wish we could bring the real Bible letter of the world again as soon as possible. The world would be surprised about the contents of the original text. As something completely new, it will appear to humankind. One is not allowed to peddle the saying around: the letter kills, the spirit brings back to life. It is usually the gentlemen's own spirit that is reflected in the letters (Faust I, v. 578–579). That applies to the symbolist in particular. If he is trivial, he puts something trivial into the symbols; if he is witty, he puts something witty into the symbols. It is with this word like with Goethe's words:

And so long as you don't have it,
this: “Die and be transformed!”
you will only be a gloomy guest
on the dark earth.

These words suggest how the human being should come beyond the sensuous view, generally beyond the usual nature. Who would take these words as an instruction to neglect the physical has ignored that the spirit develops bit by bit from the physical. That also applies to the letter and the spirit. You must have the letter first, then you can decipher it, and then you find which the spirit is. Indeed, the letter kills, but it creates the spirit at its death, and this saying corresponds to the other: who does not have it, this “die and be transformed” remains only a gloomy guest on the dark earth.

I could draw your attention only to the criticism of the Bible and to the viewpoints, which spiritual science takes towards the Bible. From the few indications I have given today, you may guess that by the work of spiritual science something like a recapture of the Bible can take place. Spiritual science shall find wisdom, independently from the Bible. However, spiritual science comes and recognises then what flowed into this Bible, and then one experiences what many have experienced out of spiritual science towards the Bible. Some things could elevate them, but the most do no longer make sense to them. Only with the help of spiritual science, the human beings understand what is said with this or that in the Bible. However, there are still other contestable passages, and one comes to the viewpoint to say, in the Bible are passages that contain deep spiritual truth, but something flowed into it that was integrated as something inorganic.—If you go on, you discover something again, and you notice that it was due to you yourselves that you were not far enough to understand the matter. You reach the point to say to yourselves, where I have believed once that the sense of the Bible cannot be maintained compared with science, there I see now: I understand the one that I have to consider the Bible with trust and admiration; I do just not yet understand the other. However, the time comes when I understand it, and I find the viewpoint where I can look into it.

Spiritual science leads to the right appreciation of the Bible. We have spoken about the beginning of the Bible, about the creation from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint. The biblical studies have to go through a crisis. The investigations of spiritual science are coming up to meet them, and in new figure the old light of the Bible shines again to humankind in the future.

Dear attendees! I am well aware that there are many personalities who, based on their education, are called upon to judge and who will not find what I will venture to present this evening scientific, and that the various reasons and objections to the spiritual science meant here must actually have been exhausted by those who represent them, I would say, from their own nature. Due to the limited time available, I cannot go into objections today. In fact, if I do not want to be too verbose – I would actually have to give a whole series, a cycle of lectures – I can only give a brief, cursory sketch of what the essential goal of the spiritual science just mentioned is.

I would like to draw attention to just one thing from the outset: that what is most unusual, what most often gives rise to objections to what is presented here, is that it is not about the expansion of any kind of scientific or other knowledge or other knowledge in any direction, in the way that this knowledge already is, but that it is a matter, dear honored attendees, of developing a completely different kind of knowledge instead of, or rather in continuation of, the one that people are accustomed to according to our present-day consciousness of time. This spiritual science wants to show that the usual, familiar knowledge is not suitable for penetrating into the reality of the world in which the fundamental and most meaningful questions about the human being are rooted, the questions about human immortality and human freedom.

But there is another factor that must be taken into account if we are to arrive at the right kind of spiritual science. This is that in order to penetrate to a different kind of knowledge that can only penetrate into such questions as those mentioned, in order to penetrate to this knowledge, one must first have had, with one's whole soul, with one's whole knowledge and other human struggles, must have had two-sided experiences, not just experiences that are otherwise recognized as experiences of knowledge, but experiences that are really connected with human development in its deepest, most meaningful sense. Experiences that, so to speak, bring people together with everything that leads them to the limits of reality in the loneliness of knowledge, and so on, and so on.

So these experiences are two-sided, honored attendees. The one who wants to advance spiritually must first have experienced what can happen in our soul in the face of the desire for knowledge when it appropriates, in one way or another, the knowledge of nature that has reached such a high level of development and such tremendous perfection in our time, or at least in such a way that it can have an experience of what knowledge of nature reveals to the soul, what it gives it. I can only indicate and characterize natural knowledge. I am not inclined to belittle natural knowledge in any way. Those who enter into spiritual science will see that it recognizes natural science, especially in the form that corresponds to the new era.

Knowledge of nature is suitable for penetrating to a certain degree into reality. But this knowledge of nature comes to certain areas where it has to develop concepts, and in the face of these concepts, what the soul has in its deepest depths as a goal of knowledge usually fails. Such concepts are already the concepts of matter as the carrier of material existence, as they are handed down to us through observation of the senses.

You may be aware of the amount of honest, conscientious, and serious thought that has gone into such ideas in order to arrive at their meaning, such as the idea of matter or force and the like. But anyone who not only tries to speculate, to philosophize about such ideas, but who follows with his soul everything that the soul can muster to form such ideas out of experience and thought, comes to say to himself: It is in the nature of the human organization to form such ideas, to form such alternating in the changing world and then leave it at that, not to penetrate any further, because – as I said, I can only give results, you can find the rest in my books – because man is forced to put these ideas forward in order to have, so to speak, a backing to develop the other life, namely the life of knowledge.

What is the situation with these images? It is like a mirror. You stand in front of a mirror, dear ones, and see yourself in it. The mirror is necessary for you to see yourself in it. Certain images in our organization are necessary for us to arrive at other images. They are there like a mirror of the soul. If we want to penetrate into these ideas in the same way as we usually do into our external reality, it is as if we wanted to break the mirror to find out what we see in it. This is actually the case with all borderline ideas in the knowledge of nature.

If you wanted to continue in the same way, you would be in the same situation as if you wanted to break a mirror to find out what is behind it and what causes you to see yourself in it. This is also the experience that one has when reflecting on what is taken for granted in philosophy. If one wants to penetrate behind the surface of things through philosophy and speculation, it is like breaking a mirror to discover what one will not find behind it.

Now, for someone who sees something like this in the direct experience of the soul, the significant and important question arises: What is it about human nature that we must inevitably come up against such limits, that we must indeed place something in front of us that we can use as a counterweight, that we do not break, to put it figuratively, but simply have to leave in our everyday consciousness? Where does that come from? When one investigates this question, one arrives at a meaningful human soul experience, a secret of the soul; one arrives at recognizing how something in human life, in the whole human organization, is connected with this mirroring nature of our knowledge of nature. One can answer spiritually researched questions of the soul life to a certain extent.

What would human soul life be like if it were not like this, if we did not have this mirror in front of us? One would have to miss an element in this human soul life that is absolutely necessary for this human life, for human existence between birth or conception and death. If human knowledge were such that it could disappear into this borderline perception, then the human soul would have to do without the possibility of grasping in love that which it can only see in the mirror through its emotional life. The nature of the mirror, which is connected with our outer sensuality, is at the same time that which ensures that we do not face external reality in a coarse and unintimate way, but rather that our thoughts fail at the moment when they kill love in a dry and sober way. We must be organized in such a way that we cannot go further on the path of ordinary sensory knowledge or its dissection than we can, so that we do not lack the ability to love.

I would like to make this very clear: the fact that we are limited to these two sides is what makes us capable of love, and so the spiritual researcher comes to realize through direct soul experience that knowledge of nature cannot lead to true reality, because delving into ordinary knowledge, into this true reality, causes the ability to love to dry up in man. This is the first experience one has when on the path of spiritual science.

What I have told you now is described in more detail in my book 'The Riddle of Man'. It arises as a direct, real experience; that is one thing. There are very many people who have not quite clearly or more or less intuitively realized that knowledge of nature does not lead to the depths of human soul life, or to spiritual existence at all. Such people have doubts about the knowledge of nature and then turn to another kind of knowledge. This other kind of knowledge gives the second experience I have to talk about, which must be preparatory for the spiritual researcher. The first is the failure of knowledge of nature, the second is the failure of another kind of knowledge, which very many people seek at the moment when they often only instinctively doubt knowledge of nature. That is mysticism. Mysticism is to be understood only in the sense that I myself will characterize it.

Mysticism in the ordinary sense is understood to mean immersing oneself in one's own soul life with the means available in everyday consciousness. One wants to remain there, but one tries to turn one's attention away from the sensual world, one tries to become blind and deaf to it, so to speak, to sink down into what one can experience in one's own soul life. This mystical knowledge is described by many as very satisfying, since the path of the external does not lead to the secrets of existence, does not lead to the core. What is called philosophy is a hybrid. Many branches of philosophical knowledge tend towards what I call mystical here, others towards knowledge of nature. Anyone can gain knowledge by immersing themselves if they let Meister Eckehart or other mystics take effect on them.

The experience shows that by diving into the depths of the soul life with the ordinary consciousness, whether it is meant more or less scientifically, mystically or religiously, one also comes to unsatisfactory results in this way, as in the external way of knowing nature. If we are honest, if we are fully conscious, if we are not a dreamer or a fantasist, we will always be able to say to ourselves on the mystical path of higher self-knowledge: Something intrudes into what one experiences inwardly in contemplation, something that is connected with the subjective experience, that does not penetrate below the foundations of the subjective human will, something colored by what one gives shape to, and in the end one says to oneself: Even in this way, one does not go further than images, very meaningful, often inwardly shattering images perhaps, that arise from an intimate coexistence with the core of the world, but actually only images. One learns to recognize the pictorial character as a mystical experience, especially when one wants to penetrate mystically into human experience with full real deliberation.

And so we are confronted with a certain limit here as well. What is it in the human organization that makes it necessary for us to come up against a limit even with mystical knowledge? What would a person lack if, following the ideal of certain mystics, they were able to immerse themselves in the depths of their soul in such a way that they collided with the essential core of existence, where the core of our soul life also lies? Just as we previously lacked the ability to love, so now another soul ability would be unable to be our own if we were able to penetrate to the core of our own existence and that of the world through mystical contemplation; a meaningful, indispensable soul ability would not be there, that is the ability to remember. On the path that leads us to the core of existence with everything we experience in the world, we would not be able to encounter in our soul the power that makes us capable of remembering as human beings. We have to keep our imagination, our perception, our feeling and our will separate through our organization, because the ability to remember is placed in the middle of them. By immersing ourselves in ourselves, we must be able to remember.

We see, two already harrowing experiences are there from which the spiritual researcher must start, and the spiritual researcher must have the courage to say to himself: These are essentially the two ways in which one can somehow penetrate with the ordinary consciousness. He must also have the courage to reshape this ordinary consciousness, to give it a different character, to awaken, as it were, from this ordinary consciousness a different, higher consciousness, which relates to the ordinary consciousness as the ordinary consciousness relates to the sleeping consciousness. We know how the soul struggles for the strength to make a distinction between what is in reality and what is in dreams. It is necessary to awaken from the ordinary consciousness that we need for our knowledge from morning to evening to a higher consciousness, and only in this higher consciousness can we experience what is connected with the real riddles of the human soul.

Just look at the question of immortality, esteemed attendees. Today it is really placed in the quest for knowledge of people, and since people today have become accustomed to making scientific demands on such questions, no longer wanting to be satisfied with the traditional way, it is a scientific task to discuss such questions as the question of immortality. A great many people are mistaken. Many try often to somehow prove, more or less philosophically or more or less amateurishly, that something lives in the human being that outlasts death, but that is not enough, dear attendees.

One must realize: anyone who can only provide evidence that something survives death has actually done nothing special for the question of immortality. Because the question at hand is whether, when a person has discarded his physical body, a high level of consciousness is still associated with his soul essence without him living physically. All the rest are subordinate questions. For example, whether some ethereal fluid, a nebulous being, lives on as the soul, cannot interest the human being if he cannot penetrate to the realization that the continuation of life is conscious, that consciousness is possible without the organization of the body; for it is clear to spiritual science and natural science is clear that our ordinary consciousness, the everyday one, is so intimately linked with the physical life organization that one can only speak of a functioning, a powering of this ordinary consciousness when this consciousness is carried by the bodily organization.

It is therefore incumbent upon the spiritual researcher to show that consciousness is possible without physical life. Now, esteemed attendees, I would like to point out to you, so to speak, for the sake of context, some things that can support us in understanding what I am about to show, such as the knowledge of nature, even if it honestly strives to do so, can only get to a certain point in relation to the human soul and cannot go beyond it. I could give hundreds and hundreds of examples that would point in the same direction. I will give an example from literature, so that it can be verified, an example that you can find under the title 'On the Subconscious Self' by Waldstein, which was published in Wiesbaden. Waldstein cites an experience through which a kind of limit of scientific observation is revealed to him, but to the spiritual researcher much more.

He was once standing in front of a bookseller's shop window as a naturalist. His eye fell on a book that showed the title “Mollusken”. The naturalist had to smile when he looked at the title page, but was not aware of any reason to smile when he read the title of the book “Mollusken”. So he takes the following recourse to get to the bottom of the matter. He closes his eyes and pays close attention to what he can now hear, and in the distance he hears a hurdy-gurdy, which is barely playing a melody, to which the observer, who has to smile, learned to dance in very early years; he is aware that he did not pay attention to the melody at the time, only to the steps he had to learn and to what he experienced with his partner; but after decades, when he stands in front of the mollusc book, the reminiscence comes from the depths of his soul. That sound, which was not clearly absorbed at the time, comes up in the soul and causes a smile.

The spiritual researcher must pay particular attention to such things, because they show the caution that must be exercised. Many a person believes himself to be a mystic and experiences this or that through delving into the soul. What comes up is often only the long-gone organ tone, which one takes only for a deeply mystical experience, because such things also transform themselves.

Many examples could be given where mystics, who consider themselves to be very profound, tell you all kinds of things about inner experiences that take them to the boundary of the spirits and are nothing but an old hurdy-gurdy. But it is precisely in such experiences, dear attendees, that one finds the whole meaning of what human memory is. You may know that we cannot develop our self-awareness without memory. Self-awareness is very closely related to the continuous ability to remember. But the ability to remember is also one that is very often connected with the subconscious, with the so-called unconscious soul forces of our soul life. It is therefore particularly important to bear in mind that spiritual science, which seeks to penetrate into the reality of the spirit, is clear from the outset that everything that is connected with the ordinary ability to remember does not lead to knowledge of the spiritual world at all. The fact that we recognize that we are led to a certain limit, beyond which we must go if we want to enter the spiritual world, results in very specific difficulties, which are such that many people say: What a spiritual researcher says is unbelievable. This is said because what he says is very far removed from the usual thinking that people are accustomed to.

People are accustomed to thinking in such a way that everything that is carried by memory radiates into their entire mental life. I said that the spiritual researcher must have the courage to develop a different way of knowing. He can achieve this in two ways. By making himself capable of leading such a soul existence that, with the connection of memory for a period of time – you cannot be a spiritual researcher all day long – develops such strength in his soul that it determines the soul, sets it in motion, but without the ability to remember being used. How is this ability attained? It is attained through a very specific kind of meditative life. This is a kind of inner contemplation, but under very specific conditions. In our ordinary everyday consciousness, the soul power is at work in that we perceive the outer world and form our ideas about what comes to our attention. In sensory perception and in the life of imagination, that which connects us to reality on one side brings about revelation.

Those who do certain soul exercises, which are suitable for combining into one, in a sense, what is otherwise drawn together in perception and imagination, arrive at a completely different way of imagining, of knowing. To do these exercises, one must try to bring into consciousness such images that can be surveyed as completely as possible. To do this, it is necessary to be quite sure that these images cannot be drawn from ordinary or subconscious memory. Those who want to do the exercises would do well to seek advice or look for them in the literature of spiritual science. You can do it approximately, and that will lead you to your goal, but you have to make sure that you fully understand what is present in your consciousness. However, it does not have to be abstract thoughts that are symbolically connected to external reality; they should not depict anything superficial, because what is an external image is linked to memory. For example, we have to let the idea of the flooding light be present in our consciousness. And if you keep coming back to such exercises, if you bring it to the point where the whole power of the soul can concentrate in meditation on such ideas, which you fully grasp, where you are quite clear about them: only where there is no memory of what you have put together in the present will it work its way into consciousness – a kind of thinking will immediately come that at the same time encompasses what the soul has to establish against the external perceptions. One becomes blind and deaf to them, but one performs the same activity that is otherwise performed in external perceptions.

In this way one arrives at an imagination that works with the means of perception, at a kind of union of the power of perception and the power of thought. And when this is developed more and more, one notices: something arises in the soul that was not there before. You get to know new sides to people that have been slumbering in the depths of the soul, you learn to go beyond the ordinary way of thinking in the human soul nature, but the realization that 'time becomes space' occurs, the strange thing is that you can look back on what you have experienced. Ordinary memory, which is tied to ordinary day-consciousness, shows: the experience has passed; we present the experience anew by having it again in memory; we cannot look back on the experience.

When one has done such exercises, the past is present; one looks into time, a new soul ability arises, a new reality. If one is able to see the spiritual in the sensual, before one discovers that what only appears as past in the ability to remember, what can always be seen spiritually, is there, then, dear ones, one can have penetrated to this new kind of cognitive ability, then one arrives at feeling more and more, which can be described as a new self-awareness.

This new self-awareness must be experienced if one is to have even a rough idea of it. Some people rightly find lectures on spiritual science more difficult than others because our words are only shaped for the sensual and therefore our words are not very suitable for the supersensible. However, the spiritual researcher is forced to use words in a different sense than the ordinary one. He must use words through gestures, must point to what is going on in the soul. Words are gestures of the soul. He must count on the receptivity of every human soul that rests in the unconscious. In this way one arrives at a new kind of self-awareness. Only now does one get a true-to-life idea of what it means to experience oneself in one's soul and spiritual life independently of the physical organization. Why? Just as you have the table outside of you, so in this experience you have your own bodily organization outside of you. You experience yourself very certainly in a self-awareness that is independent of the bodily organization.

Now, however, a second exercise is necessary. At first, when you do such exercises, you only gain this self-awareness, and in it you feel constrained, trapped in a soul existence. It is as if you knew you had eyes, but they did not have the transparent glass liquid. You then feel the eyes within you, but you do not feel connected to the objective world through the eye. So self-awareness awakens first; but you feel as if you are in a mental haze, but you do not feel connected to the mental outside world. You know you are in it, but self-awareness must first become transparent. One arrives at this through further exercises. When one develops such thinking, which is at the same time a form of perception, one soon recognizes that one plunges into a world of images; one does not just have the new self-awareness as a basis for experiences, but lives in a world of images. It just flows towards one, but one becomes opaque in one's self-awareness.

You now have to acquire the ability to suppress the images that are flooding in through further exercises. You achieve this by strengthening your will more and more. Strengthening the will – which is usually directed outwards – in such a way that it is now directed towards one's own development, towards practising strict self-education, for example, towards seeing clearly what one has experienced, towards directing the will inwards, towards suppressing perceptions and images, towards becoming master of them in the new self-awareness; this makes it transparent and reaches the point of seeing only - although this only gives the experience - the truly spiritual world, which is just as truly there before the human soul as the world of colors is before the eye, the world of sounds before the ear. This is a world of spiritual beings and spiritual processes, to which we belong with our soul being just as we belong with our physical body to the external world perceived through the senses.

That is the way to reach the spiritual world on the one hand. This must be an experience that is based on the lack of results of mere natural science and mere mysticism. One comes to grasp the world as pure spirituality, so that one then retains a view of what I have called the past, that which lives in time. It is quite natural that one broadens one's view, extending it beyond the limits of birth or conception. As man searches up to his ancestors, looking up, so he looks through his inner soul to spiritual research, to what lived and breathed in the spiritual world before man became aware of the world. The spiritual researcher proceeds differently than the natural scientist; the spiritual researcher must show a way, not results like the natural scientist.

I have described the path that the human soul must take in a strictly regulated way in order to recognize the prenatal, spiritual, and soul aspects within itself. All speculations about immortality must ultimately lead to unsatisfactory results if one seeks the immortal as a goal to strive for. You cannot, all speculation fails. In the one path, you find the prenatal soul that lives in us and truly comes from the spiritual world, like what lives in us physically from our parents. This momentous experience becomes particularly harrowing for the soul when this soul comes to truly understand how this prenatal life, this spiritual, soul existence, is connected to the things we otherwise have around us in our ordinary consciousness.

I do not like to talk about spiritual research, about personal experiences. But all these things are personal experiences that have been taken to the point of objectivity. I must confess that one of the most harrowing experiences of my inner soul life in this area was when I once, I would say, beheld with the human thinking, the imagining, as I had practiced it as described, our prenatal human soul existence, purely spent in the spiritual world. The prenatal soul experience reveals itself through the experience. If you manage to shape your exercises more and more so that there is possibly nothing abstract about them, but rather you live completely into the image, if you manage to awaken the way you live to such liveliness, as otherwise only the experience of sensory perception is, if you live so vividly in the soul as otherwise only in sense perception, then, however strange it may be for today's thinking, the intuitive knowledge comes, then the previous earth life is experienced, the prenatal, purely spiritual life is experienced, which penetrates through the last of the thoughts, the spiritual reality, which was already its physical reality before. When a person, through the strengthening of his soul life, is able to think so powerfully that, although he perceives nothing externally, his thinking nevertheless sees the truth of the past life with the same vividness with which he otherwise looks at flowers and plants, their color and their growth, that is staggering.

A property of this clairvoyant insight, this seeing insight, is precisely the following. They have seen that a kind of insight must be developed that does not appeal to the ability to remember. Once the spiritual researcher has such an experience, he cannot remember in the ordinary sense. It is a present experience, the memory ceases. The exercises lead the spiritual researcher to the point where the memory is not appealed to even when his ideas arise; nor can he ever rely on the ordinary memory through which he looks into the spiritual world. If we want to have a second corresponding view of the spiritual world, we must not remember the view itself, but the path we took to it. This is what is terribly disappointing for beginners. They first come to spiritual experiences through exercises as set forth in my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. They then believe they have it as a lasting possession, but one cannot remember it and repetition is always difficult because one has to make greater efforts to have the spiritual vision again.

I have described certain exercises to you, through which the soul comes into a completely different state, through which a different kind of knowledge is developed, through which one becomes able to look into the eternal of the human soul. Something else is connected with these exercises. When one has really gone through the preparatory paths, experienced the limitations of natural knowledge and mysticism, when one has really gone through all this in one's soul, one comes to the point where one gradually says to oneself: You still have to make more efforts to come to a completely different kind of soul organization. You then have to progress further by developing the exercises into something that, in a sense, enlightens you about certain things, an inner experience that is connected to other experiences you have in nature knowledge and mysticism. One feels separated from what is inwardly pure in the body – in mysticism – the basis of thinking, feeling, willing, and imagining. That is the peculiar thing. When one does such exercises, one is also brought closer to material life, and by seeing through it, one's spiritual life is clarified.

We have certain concepts of what imagination is, of how we form ideas. But how many conscientious investigations have been made to discover how this thinking, which has perceptions, is connected to the body? Through the exercises I have described, one comes to be, so to speak, closer to one's soul, mind and physical body.

Imagination is experienced in a different way, dear audience. By developing ideas and thoughts, the brain experiences a hunger, and then you experience that it was truly too simplistic a conception of how popular Darwinism views the human organization. It is not so; man is a complicated being, and there are certain states of equilibrium and disequilibrium between his individual organs. If they are capable of thought, our brain will certainly come into such a state that it is in retrograde motion, that it hungers, and without the brain, while the other body is in normal nutrition, is less nourished, is in greater hunger, no alert thought life can develop.

This is also connected with something that can always be verified. Certain people who seek mystical experiences in the wrong way begin to starve themselves. They want to starve the whole body and also starve the brain, which is already hungrier than the other limbs. Through purely spiritual exercises one comes to the realization that the feeling of hunger is necessary in the human brain organization. This leads to the realization that the soul and spiritual life can truly live and exist in its independence through our brain nerves, because we do not develop the life of the organ for thinking and imagining; we degrade it and interrupt the life of the organ. What constitutes animal physical life, we must degrade, not develop, in order to have thoughts and ideas. In the nervous system, space must be made for independent, spiritual, and soul life. Science will come to this very soon. The beginnings are already there that the physical organization of man itself is such that one must admit the independent spiritual soul life. The brain undermines the sprouting life, making room for the development of the spiritual.

The other thing is to get to know the other pole of the human organization. Just as brain life is one pole – see the last chapter on the “Soul Mysteries” – the other pole is the life that is connected with its ability to move as physical life with its will. Man is not organized as simply as ordinary natural science believes. While the brain is atrophied in waking life, another pole of its organization is overdeveloped. The sprouting, burgeoning life beyond the normal limit is what is connected with the extremity of things, with arm, hand, foot, leg. But not only with the outer feet, legs, but also with the continuation into the inner being.

What is connected with this other pole of human organization is not felt in the same way as in the feeling of hunger, but is felt in oversaturation, in survival. It is felt in such a way that, while the human being, in his bodily and nervous life, as it were, returns to the normal organization of his trunk life, he has waking visions and perceptions as a result. The outer organs are overgrown. One need only see the anatomical and physiological connection between the extremities and the other human organs to recognize the physical connection with human reproductive capacity. This corresponds to a spiritual-soul element. The nerve organ is experienced as normal malnutrition.

In the will organ lives as spiritual-soul that which, if it is to be developed, is developed in such a way that one does different exercises. They consist of subjecting the emotional and will life to rules, as was done earlier with the life of perception and imagination. If one looks at something that is not usually looked at in everyday life, then the goal is achieved. One can remember with full clarity what one has experienced; in one's memory, one perceives what one has experienced, including other thoughts that one has had; one does not remember moods or states of mind in the same way.

But this must be trained. Man must train not only those soul abilities that otherwise lead to memory, but also the overview of such things, such as saying to oneself: I was once 17 years old and must be able to visualize the soul conditions that I had at that time. The moods of the soul come up again; one finds how one can follow such moods between birth and present life, one overlooks one's moods. Something develops – one can compare it to inner soul music. Just as in music the preceding tone blends with the following tone, so earlier soul moods resonate in a peculiar way into later ones, and later ones also resonate back into the earlier ones. One recognizes how one develops, how the earlier parts of one's soul life bear fruit later. One must look at oneself in that way in which one otherwise does not look at oneself, what lives in man like the germ that lives in future years, will live in this year's plant. What lives in man goes beyond his individuality, the other link of immortality that goes beyond death. One must recognize immortality as one recognizes the second side. Just as one recognizes the first side through imagination and perception, so one can only see what one becomes in the afterlife by developing one's emotional and will life. This is how one develops other will abilities.

The ability to remember must be suppressed while one is a spiritual researcher. While we have to suppress it in spiritual science, only looking at the present, suppressing memory, the ability to love, the emotional and volitional life will increase inwardly; in the moments where the human being wants to penetrate into the spiritual world after death, his greater capacity for love will also be developed, and it must be developed, otherwise the human being would look into the spiritual world as a guest, and that would be evil. The capacity for love is increased, the capacity for memory recedes.

Twenty-five years ago, I began to philosophically explore the ability to love in connection with the problem of human freedom. At the time, in “The Philosophy of Freedom”, I had to break, so to speak, with the popular sayings regarding love. It is always said that “love makes people blind”; I believe I can rightly assert that true love ability makes people clairvoyant, leads people right into the depths of the loved one. However, ordinary love is very often only connected with a certain selfishness. We love another, foreign being, but we often want to have it differently, find fault with it, we want to make of the being what we wanted to see. That is not yet love, which is actually worthy of the highest sense of the name. It is only truly present when one forgets oneself.

The spiritual researcher must take self-forgetfulness so far that self-awareness is developed outside the body. This increases the ability to love, and we come to not only really see through the other human being in selfless love with clairvoyance, but also to perform actions that do not come from our urges, instincts, or what we desire, but rather come from pure love for the action, from the insightful love that an action must happen, that we completely exclude ourselves when we want to. If we act only out of love for the action, then we approach such an ability of love, which still has to be increased by practice – [see my] “Knowledge of Higher Worlds”. One arrives at developing a soul ability that is capable of truly seeing. Man also has something in him spiritually, soulfully, that also goes beyond the physical, that which passes through the death of man.

One can only understand human immortality by really understanding the other state of consciousness, by experiencing in a certain way every day, the consciousness that is not dependent on the physical organization, that becomes independent of the physical experience. It looks at conditions before birth, after death, because it knows itself in an elevated self-awareness outside the body. In this way, the eternal essence of the human being is seen together with insight into the pre-birth and after-death.

The soul must be explored in two directions if the human being wants to see immortality. Immortality cannot be seen scientifically by expanding and broadening one's knowledge, but by acquiring a new way of knowing. It should be noted that this only applies to those times when a person wants to engage in spiritual research. One cannot be a spiritual researcher from awakening to falling asleep; one devotes oneself to it intermittently, for moments that one creates in full consciousness. Then one finds those times when one is in the spiritual world in such contrast to one's ordinary consciousness, as one's daytime consciousness is in contrast to one's sleep consciousness.

It must be emphasized that this is never the right way to spiritual research, when a person, in a self-satisfied, egotistical way, tries to bring into their ordinary life, into the life of their duties, of healthy thinking and healthy coexistence with people, what should only apply in moments when they are devoting themselves to spiritual research. Just as we need to sleep well so that we can live during the day and develop a healthy, conscious life, so we need to live responsibly, fully consciously, mindful of our obligations in ordinary life, not in a false abstraction from life, not in fantasies, in frippery with which one might adorn oneself. A healthy life in the world of the senses is just as necessary for a healthy contemplation of the spiritual world as healthy sleep is necessary for a healthy day life.

It is not necessary for everyone to become a spiritual researcher, although it can be seen in the books mentioned that everyone can convince themselves of the truth of what I have stated today, that everyone can quickly acquire spiritual research skills today. One can, but does not have to. If you put aside all prejudices and want to do for this matter what humanity had to do to accept Copernicanism, you will also develop thinking habits that are quite natural to people and through which common sense can understand what the spiritual researcher has to say, although you cannot prove whether an astronomer is right. You can't do that here either.

This spiritual research, as described here, is something that the present must truly assimilate in the near future. This spiritual development could learn from the unspeakably bitter experiences of the last three or four years, where we can go with our old familiar ideas. Today, far too many people are still too lazy to ask themselves how much part our ideas, which are no longer suited to contemporary life, play in our catastrophic times. In the knowledge of nature, man has such ideas: spiritual, ethical, social and political ideas. If we want to apply the model of knowledge gained from nature to social, ethical and political life, man can only do so if he rises in spirit to grasp the laws that prevail in the spiritual world. For the most important questions in life, for that which the most severe and most deeply invasive events demand, thoughts are necessary that delve into reality, but not just into sensual reality, which is one that is imbued with spirit everywhere. Those who deny that another spiritual world lives within our world, as one looks at it, make the same mistake as those who say that a horseshoe is a horseshoe, and it is in reality a magnet.

Thus spiritual research discovers spiritual reality in the world that is available to us, and through this we learn to intervene in the full reality. But this has become most necessary in our time. We must consciously experience, and allow people to experience, that impulses from our ethical and social history are also interventions. Therefore, spiritual research emphasizes that humanity has struggled to achieve what it calls logical thinking. Today, many people can think logically. But thinking in accordance with reality is what will have as great an impact on human spiritual development as Copernicanism once did. Even if what the spiritual sciences have to say has, in a sense, lasting significance, the spiritual researcher may also, especially in today's world, say what he has to bring out of the deeper reality as a result of the times, which has always been between the lines. We must look to the past, especially to the very recent past. It stands before us questioningly, telling us images, thoughts, ideas, impulses of will; it shows us through events that it has outlived itself. We must look to the future, which we can only master by standing in a different way in the place where we stand through destiny. We must look into the future by looking at the full reality, so that by seizing it we may seek to penetrate the historical, ethical life of mankind as it must be penetrated, as man must intervene. The spiritual researcher may say that he wants to serve human knowledge, human life in time, where such difficulties are being experienced as now, and still he adds hope, he believes that he can serve our difficult time and the difficult future of humanity in particular.

Dear attendees! Today's lecture makes no other claim than to be merely an introduction to the considerations that I will be discussing in the next few days, considerations about the relationship between anthroposophy and the various fields of science and life.

One of the most significant facts of recent intellectual life is undoubtedly the coexistence, collaboration and thinking together of Goethe and Schiller, especially in the very early days of their friendship in the last decade of the eighteenth century. And it is extraordinarily significant that during this time, when two of the greatest geniuses of humanity found each other intimately, a burning intellectual question between these personalities was, so to speak, discussed and considered on all sides. Both Goethe and Schiller were artists at heart. But during the period in question, they were deeply concerned with the relationship between art and knowledge, as revealed in scientific observation, on the one hand, and, although somewhat less clearly, the relationship between art and religious feeling and perception in humans, on the other. And if one lets the keynote sink in, which resounds through all Goethe's and Schiller's discussions of the mutual relationship between knowledge, art and religion, then one comes to say: Above all, for these two minds, this question was one of the following: How do the powers of knowledge, art and religion work together in the human being to lead the human being to live out and express his full, harmonious human nature for himself and for the world?

Anyone who enters into this lively treatment of the question will no doubt be most deeply impressed by what has come to light in Schiller's examination of this question in his, unfortunately far too little appreciated, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” and by what Goethe added to Schiller's reflection in his “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, which forms the conclusion of the “Conversations of the German People”.

On the one hand, Schiller saw the scientific consideration, to which he was led in a certain sense by what his external position had to become at the time, by his professorship in Jena, and also by the fact that he wanted to enlighten himself about the philosophical foundations of art from Kantian philosophy. But every such question took on a character that led to the general human, to the more comprehensive question: What is the actual essence of man, what contributes most to this essence of man within the development of culture and the mind? And so the question became: How does man attain the possibility of coming onto the path of his destiny, out of knowledge, out of science, out of artistic striving? This question became a burning one for Schiller. He posed this question in the essay he wrote on the aesthetic education of the human race. At this time, Schiller often said to himself that there was something unsatisfactory about scientific observation when one wants to strive for the highest, purest development of the human being. Schiller made some remarkable statements in this regard. For example, when he received a piece of Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister” and read it with the utmost interest, he wrote to Goethe about his feelings about the artistic treatment on Goethe's part in this work, beginning with the sentence: “The artist is, after all, the only true human being, and the best philosopher is, after all, only a caricature next to him.”

What did Schiller mean by such a radical statement? He meant that by engaging in artistic creation or immersing himself in works of art in an appreciative, artistic way, man feels his full humanity to be inwardly active and inwardly alive, and that what he experiences in true works of art is something quite unsatisfactory compared to what he can experience in scientific knowledge. It was out of such feelings that Schiller arrived at the peculiar solution which he gives to this question in his Letters on Aesthetics. He said to himself something like the following: When we, as human beings, are most closely in touch with the highest things here on earth, when we are devoted to the contemplation of the world of ideas, which after all is the goal of all scientific endeavor, then we feel the necessity to be logical; we dare not deviate from the laws of reason, which, as it were, takes possession of our spirit and our soul and prescribes the paths for us. We are not truly free inwardly when we engage in this kind of cognitive activity, and in our inner freedom we can only truly live out our humanity.

In this cognitive activity, Schiller sees, as it were, the one pole of human activity; he sees the other pole in man's surrender to the natural necessity of his own being, to his instincts, his drives, to his capacity for desire, which in ordinary life emerges from his lower organism and his drives. It is out of these impulses that man acts, it is on these that he initially bases his life. But one is surrendered to the natural necessity of one's own being when one is surrendered to one's drives and instincts; one follows, so to speak, one's drives and instincts as much as outer nature follows its natural conditions; one is not free. Between these two states, surrender to the necessity of reason and surrender to the necessity of nature, Schiller seeks that “middle state” in which the human being can find himself, and which he calls the aesthetic state, that state in which man is as an artist or as an artistic enjoyer. How does Schiller now describe this middle state from his experience of art?

He says: When we enjoy a work of art as human beings, we do not feel the rigid, strict rational necessity that must guide us in our understanding, but nor do we feel the mere desire that lives in our urges and instincts; for when we work our way up to the free enjoyment of the beautiful, we must not get stuck in what only our sensual urges give us. The spiritless sensual impulses can never rise to the real understanding of the work of art. But in giving ourselves to the artistic, we do not live in an abstract, spiritually withdrawn, unsensual way, as is the case with scientific knowledge when it advances to the level of ideas; we live, because what appears sensually is also is the artistic, in that middle state of devotion to a sensual thing, but we live in devotion to a sensual thing in such a way that at the same time our own sensual nature is laid aside, that we are not devoted to its necessity, that we have spiritualized it, ensouled it. We have descended from the rigid necessity of reason into sensuality, which is appropriate and congenial to us in the artistic; we have torn ourselves away from the rigid necessity of reason; but on the other hand we have also torn ourselves away from the oppressive necessity of nature. In this intermediate state, we are truly free human beings. When we create art, for example, we do not follow methodical rules like those we have to observe in science; we surrender to the free play of what rules in our own soul. The inner free lawfulness, which at the same time appeals to our sympathy and antipathy, guides us as we create art. We are in a free state of mind.

It is from this background that Schiller dares to speak out so radically in these aesthetic letters. In this activity, which is governed by the senses and yet is spiritual, as spiritual as the necessity of reason without surrendering to this necessity of reason, and as sensual as only life in sensuality can be without losing itself to the necessity of nature, Schiller's gaze is drawn to the free play of the child, who does not yet know a necessity of knowledge, but who has also not yet immersed himself so deeply in his sensuality, as he indulges in his free play, unfolding from his sympathy and antipathy. It was in this mood that Schiller coined the radical sentence: Man is only fully human when he plays, and he only plays in the true sense of the word when he is fully human.

What Schiller expressed here belongs to a higher level of spiritual development. Here the German spirit was trying, so to speak, to enlighten itself about humanity from an extraordinarily high point of view. The German spirit was trying to grasp the whole inner essence of the artistic by asking: What can art be in order to bring man as high as possible in his development through the artistic essence?

Schiller was faced with this question. It was no less pressing for Goethe. Goethe followed with interest all the thoughts and ideas that Schiller developed, as it were, through the question: How is man made free through the content of his spiritual life? But Goethe, by nature, could not get used to the more abstract trains of thought in Schiller's aesthetic letters. For Goethe, who was an artist in a completely different, in a broader sense, than Schiller, the question was not as simple as it was for Schiller. Goethe said to himself: Schiller sees three forces at work in man: the necessity of reason, the necessity of nature, and in between the aesthetic state; from their mutual relationship, he wants to recognize the free human soul in a spiritual way. But it's not that simple, Goethe said to himself. Because this human soul is something endlessly complicated; you can't see through it by just piling up three such abstract forces, no matter how ingeniously you philosophize about it. Goethe couldn't just follow Schiller's philosophy. For him, the answer to the same question took the form of an image, that powerful image with the most diverse sub-images that we encounter in his “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. I will now pass over all the other figures contained in this fairy tale and describe the actual situation, how the soul wants to reach its goals, its freedom, its experience of its true nature, by different paths.

The paths that the individual characters – there are about twenty of them – take in Goethe's fairy tale are all paths of the soul, not intended allegorically or symbolically, but in the way that Goethe had to speak of these paths of the soul. Anyone who sees allegories or symbols in something like this “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” has not yet penetrated into the real, genuine spiritual life, as it prevails in Goethe, for example. If someone says: In these figures I see only allegorical or symbolic representations of states of mind or the like, then he has no idea how rich Goethe's experiences were on the individual soul paths, and how Goethe could not express what he wanted to reveal about the paths of the soul in any other way than in images that are ambiguous but also promising. But I would just like to point out the target figures: all the different personalities in this fairy tale ultimately move towards the temple of the four kings, towards the temple of the golden king, the silver king, the bronze king and the king who is composed of these three substances in an irregular manner. And we see how Goethe wants to lead the entire plot towards the goal of a certain relationship emerging with the golden king, the silver king and the bronze king, who, in a sense, by acting on another person in the fairy tale – on the beautiful lily – the essence of the world onto the deepest human; and as these three mighty personalities radiate the innermost essence of the world onto humanity, we see how the fourth king, who is chaotically mixed from the substances of the other three, collapses into himself.

If one tries to express in somewhat abstract words what Goethe felt at this encounter between the fair lily and the four kings, one must say: He wanted to show how the human soul, if it wants to come to true humanity, must ultimately arrive at a certain relationship to what the golden king represents: the cognitive, that which leads man to wisdom; how he must arrive at the silver king, who gives man that which is beauty, that which is artistic; and how he must arrive at that which is represented in the brazen king, at the good, at real pious deeds. Thus, for Goethe, man ultimately arrives at knowledge as it lives in science, at the beautiful as it lives in art, and at the good as it exists in the religious. But in that Goethe portrays how, separately, each of the three kings radiates this threefold world-being of wisdom, beauty, and goodness upon man, while at the same time man comes to comes to his true humanity, as that which previously influenced him – the mixed king, who is chaotically mixed together from the three substances – collapses and no longer has any existence. Goethe wants to show how true humanity can only be achieved through a very specific relationship between wisdom, beauty and goodness, or – as one could also say – between science, art and religion, in that these three revelations of the world have an effect on man.

What Goethe means by this should not really be expressed in abstract sentences, because it represents, one might say, the whole sum of Goethean experience in relation to wisdom or science, to art or beauty, to religion as it manifests itself in the kindness of human beings. Goethe had to attempt to depict in individual images what Schiller presented more in abstract, philosophical ideas. That alone is significant. It is significant for the reason that, out of his entire epoch with its characteristic intellectual life, Goethe – like Schiller – came to the question: How must science, art and religion fit into human life? And he found no way to express this other than in a fairy-tale-like way at first. Nevertheless, one can see that for him it was a burning question, just as it was for Schiller. Schiller saw in the merely cognizant a caricature of the true human being. But ever since he had come to a real, awakened consciousness of humanity, Goethe actually always strove to seek the foundations of the artistic essence and artistic creation and the significance of this artistic essence and creation for humanity in the nature of the world itself. And one arrives, I would say, at extraordinarily intense ideas and feelings in the indicated area when one follows how Goethe intensively studies Spinoza's philosophy with Herder, how he reads Spinoza's “Ethics” with Herder, how he wants to gain ideas from this ethics about how divine necessity, in its conformity to law, rules and weaves through the world. In a sense, God in the workings of the world – that is what Goethe wants to bring to life in himself by studying Spinoza. But basically he remains unsatisfied. And how he remains unsatisfied can be seen from the extraordinarily characteristic statements to his friends in the letters he wrote to his Weimar friends from his Italian journey. There, in Italy, he felt that he was in an element that suddenly began to satisfy him when confronted with works of art that gave him an idea of the artistic nature of the Greeks. We read in the letters that he wrote back to Weimar the words: Now, in the face of these Italian works of art, I am getting a feeling for Greek art; I have the suspicion that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am on the trail of. Goethe believed he recognized: the eternal, iron laws of nature that he wanted to feel from Spinoza's philosophy, but could not find there, but which he felt from his own studies of nature and which he was then able to trace into his art in order to feel science and art in a unity. He could only feel this unity where he believed he was looking at the essence of Greek art. He believed that the Greeks had come to understand the essence of natural necessity, and that they had elevated this understanding and essence in their works of art, but in such a way that the same thing lives in these works of art – but in a transformed form – that otherwise only lives within nature. By feeling this, by feeling the necessity of artistic creation in what he now imagined to be Greek art, Goethe came to the shattering utterance, which he now wrote to his Weimar friends, standing before the works of art that he was able to see at the time: “There is necessity, there is God!”

We can see the path that Goethe took: he sought out necessity, divine conformity to law in the nature of the world, from the philosophy of Spinoza in order to gain knowledge; he stood in front of the works of art that he regarded as the most perfect, and he sensed from them what he strove for with all the fibres of his soul. It was in the presence of these works of art that he experienced what he felt to be a sense of the divine. But we also see from this that Goethe could not simply understand art as a mere optional addition to life, but that he strove to recognize how art is deeply rooted in the roots of the world in its forms. And perhaps a particularly characteristic saying of Goethe's, which, I would like to say, leads very deeply into what Goethe experienced and felt in this area. He once objected to speaking of the “idea of truth”, the “idea of good”, the “idea of beauty”. You can read about this in his “Sayings in Prose”. He said: There is only one idea, and it lives in nothing other than in the perceived all-embracing spirituality, as the form in which it can appear to man. He says of this idea that it can express itself as truth, as beauty, as goodness. In a sense, Goethe wanted to have established in the roots of the world, in the nature of the world, that which he shaped artistically; he wanted what the artist created to have its source not only in free human arbitrariness, but at the same time, as a free artist, the human being should stand within the nature of the world. And so it was that not only the question of true humanity developed for him through the question of art, but also the other question: How does the essence of the world prevail in man when he is truly an artist? How do the laws of the world continue to work in the creative, free artistic human being?

I have only mentioned this because it shows how, in the case of Goethe and Schiller, the full depth of the question of the harmonization of science, art and religion in the nature of man himself emerges in the spiritual life of modern times. I believe that anyone who approaches the minds of Goethe and Schiller with both an open mind and heartfelt devotion must feel this question, the question of the harmonization of science, art and religion. For these two outstanding geniuses of humanity considered it one of the most important questions in their lives to fathom how the world essence is a unified one, what relationship man gains to this world essence when he is cognitively active, when he is artistically active and when he is religiously active. Now, I would like to say that the deepest inspiration for a correct, intensely deep approach to this question can be drawn from Goethe and Schiller. But it cannot be denied that we, in an epoch that is so long after Goethe and Schiller, must also freely confront what they raised as a significant human question. And so it was precisely from a deeper, from a truly — I may say it without being immodest — devoted study of Goethe and Schiller that the human question appeared to me as the question of freedom at the time when I set about writing my 'Philosophy of Freedom'. It could not make sense to me that man is a truly free being only by living in the artistic. What Schiller asserted is certainly the case: that in the cognitive observation of the world of rational necessity, one must, so to speak, follow a spiritual compulsion. But something else is at hand: when one follows this rational necessity, when one devotes oneself to scientific observation in this sense, then one lives in what one experiences of nature, of the world in general, and even if it is the ideas of the laws of nature, in ideas.

One lives with it in images, and one feels that one cannot really fathom anything in nature unless one allows free inner human activity to prevail, and that even if the necessity of nature forces us, it cannot force us to act, but that we must freely take up the activity. One feels the pictorial nature of what nature and the world always are, and then, in knowing, one feels one's own free human nature in a very special way. This is what I wanted to present in my Philosophy of Freedom. When one advances to the real impulses of moral action, and when these impulses of moral action become pure thinking, then man lives again, prompted to action by images. We feel the pictorial nature in our cognition, and when we bring our morality to the same pictorial nature, then we feel ourselves in freedom. This is also what actually made man free in the age in which science emerged in the modern sense.

Only life in that which does not actually immerse itself in nature, and therefore also has its limits in relation to nature, only life in the realm of thought, in the realm of images, frees the human being from the necessities into which he is placed as a natural being, and only then could scientific activity have the possibility of full inner freedom when it really brought people to inner pictorial experience. One cannot be unfree in the face of images. One can be pushed or shoved into action by some other force, physically, emotionally or intellectually. Imagine whether you can be prompted to do anything by a mere image — compare mental images with linguistic images — they are powerless and impotent. And so our images are powerless and impotent in a moral sense. But if we start from mere images, then we are free human beings in moral action. It must therefore be said that man is a truly free being not only in the aesthetic state, but also when he elevates his morality to such heights that he can rule, when he devotes himself to a truly free cognitive activity.

Thus it becomes necessary to seek the inner harmonization of knowledge, art and religion in a new way in the post-Goethean age. And anthroposophy, which does not want to be just any old theoretical, abstracted world view, but which wants to be a spiritual content that has an effect on the whole, on the full human being, because it and flows from the whole, complete human being, anthroposophy must, above all, seek to relate what it can give to knowledge, to artistic creation, and to religious experience. I would like to say that this does not lead to some kind of artificiality of the anthroposophical path, but rather that this anthroposophical path naturally leads to it, and by standing on anthroposophical ground, one can be fully in harmony with the particular way of posing questions in this field, as it arose with Schiller and oethe.

Dear attendees, I have to draw on something that is indeed one of the elements of anthroposophical research, but which I would like to sketch at least in a few lines to show how anthroposophy comes to a harmonization of knowledge, art and religion in a very natural way, and not through some contrived invention.

If one wants to characterize how anthroposophy proceeds, it is of course always necessary to point out how the forces of knowledge that lie dormant in the soul, and are not active in the ordinary life of man and in ordinary science, must be developed through certain intimate soul exercises. And the importance of such soul exercises for human life must also be spoken of in the most varied ways. At this point I would merely like to suggest that these soul exercises consist of meditation and concentration, but in a completely different way than they were once practiced in the Orient. In such meditations and concentrations, where the cultivation of thoughts is undertaken in a very special way, thoughts become more alive and more intense. Through through special exercises, one comes to live, not in mere shadowy thoughts, as in ordinary science, but in such strengthened thoughts, to live as one otherwise only lives in outer sense experience, where one is given over to sense experiences with one's eyes and ears. The essence of meditation is that one is given over to the life of ideas in an intense way, as one never otherwise lives in mere thinking. In this way thoughts come to life. One feels how one gradually frees oneself from the physical conditions of thinking and, as it were, learns to think free of the body. Thinking becomes, without becoming pathological, inwardly fuller, more intense. One arrives at images. What I have called in my writings imaginative cognition occurs. Through this one arrives at the first significant results of the anthroposophical world view.

When one has strengthened one's thinking in this way for a while, so that it has become more intense and alive and no longer needs the body for support, then one no longer experiences one's thoughts as a mere tableau of memories, but rather as an overview of the workings of forces within us that are in us because we are human beings on earth. In our contemplation, we have a tableau before us in which we see how our thought life has become intense and has become related to what works in us as growth forces, what itself works in us as forces of metabolism. We learn to recognize that, in addition to our physical body, which is already in space, there is a time body, a body of formative forces within us, which permeates our physical body and is in perpetual motion. We see through this body of formative forces in a single tableau. And by so elevating ourselves to get to know the first supersensible aspect of the human being in this body of formative forces, we get to know a thinking that is much more alive than ordinary, abstract thinking, so that we also come to experience all those realities where the thoughts of time overflow into organic growth. One sees into the workings of a spiritual body that has permeated us since our birth. By rising up to it, one comes to look very particularly clearly at that epoch in our human development which otherwise always lies outside our consciousness. In ordinary life we remember our earlier childhood back to a certain point. Before this point, up to birth, there is a time that is about as dark to us as the experiences of the soul in the state of sleep.

A kind of sleep state manifests itself to us, looking backwards from the point from which we remember, to birth, in this period of our life. This epoch of our earthly life begins to shine forth in its essence before imaginative knowledge, before this looking into the spiritual world. I would like to say that, alongside what is experienced as knowledge, a spiritual body, a body of formative forces, rules in us. Alongside this, one gets the great, powerful, moving impression of what has ruled in us since we entered the physical world at birth. At that time, the forces that shape our brain so plastically out of the wisdom of the world, so that it can become a tool of wisdom, were most intensely at work; the brain's formative forces shaped the rest of the organism. By elevating ourselves to an understanding of the body of formative forces, we experience what has ruled and woven in the very earliest years of childhood, and how everything that once works in human life, even if it weakens for other epochs, will appear again later. Thus, what is effective in the first years of childhood is most particularly, most intensely effective in shaping the human being during these years; it is also effective later, but then only quietly, while in the first years of childhood it is powerfully, mightily effective. And we learn to look at the forces that prevail in the first years of childhood, when the human being has just overcome infancy and still particularly needs the care of the outer world; we learn to look at how he, emerging from the first earthly dreaming, forming the physical human organism; we learn to look at something that now makes the impression on us that it is artistically greater, more sublime than anything we can develop in the world in terms of art. And by looking at it, we learn to recognize what the essence of artistic imagination and artistic enjoyment actually consists of. Only now do we begin to understand the real connection between later human life and earlier life, to recognize it in artistic creation and artistic enjoyment.

When we look directly at a work by a creative genius, we see that this genius has absorbed more from this first childhood period into later life than any non-artistic person. Likewise, a person who is particularly good at artistic enjoyment has more of these powers radiating into his life than an abstract person, a dullard. Without wishing to be in any way sophisticated, we learn to apply a biblical saying in the following way: Unless you learn to recognize the importance of the first childlike state, you cannot enter the realm of artistic experience. — It simply pours itself into artistic life with its special organic powers. That is why art is felt to be such an invigorating element in the whole human being, because art brings to life in us what was the strongest life at the starting point of our earthly existence.

So I would like to say: the primal forces of artistic activity in man arise quite naturally when we in anthroposophy — purely cognitively — ascend to the first supersensible, to the formative forces body of the human being, to imaginative knowledge. And if we then want to ascend to the next level of knowledge, we must indeed develop it in the following way. We develop the first, imaginative stage by repeatedly placing certain ideas at the center of our thinking in a meditative state of concentration, thereby awakening our powers of thought. However, we must also develop the opposite activity. We must learn to withdraw from our consciousness those images to which we have first directed all our attention, so that they become fixed in our consciousness to a certain extent, and then to create a completely empty consciousness. This creation of an empty consciousness is the second important step on the way to supersensible knowledge.

When we have developed this empty consciousness to such an extent that we know while awake: we have nothing in our consciousness now, neither of external impressions nor of internal memories, we have made the consciousness completely empty, then a spiritual world, hitherto unknown to us, penetrates into this consciousness; we thus make acquaintance with a spiritual world, as we make acquaintance with the ordinary world through our outer senses and through ordinary consciousness. Inspired knowledge then enters and with it the second result of anthroposophical research. We can now also suppress the whole formative forces body, everything that particularly organizes that from which we can ultimately gain an artistic sense, we can suppress it and create an empty consciousness in relation to the formative forces body. But then we have the essence of our spiritual soul before our soul eye, as it was before we descended from a spiritual-soul world into the earthly world through birth or, let us say, through conception with this spiritual soul from a spiritual-soul world, before we took on flesh and blood through our parents. We are now learning to recognize the eternity of the human soul – on the one hand, on the side of the unborn.

But we also learn, when we turn our feelings and perceptions to what arises for us as an insight into the spiritual and eternal being, to recognize now how this human soul lived in a purely spiritual and divine environment before its earthly existence, how, as it were, divine powers radiated through it in its existence, like natural forces in earthly existence. Just as the substances and forces that we absorb in our earthly existence give rise to those forces that in turn live in our organism, so the divine-spiritual rays of light live in our spiritual-soul existence before we penetrate into earthly life. There we are permeated by divine forces, just as we are permeated by natural forces here in physical earthly life.

We can certainly stop at mere anthroposophical spiritual science; then we come to the body of formative forces. But we can also turn our feelings, our heart life, to what the knowledge of this body of formative forces gives us; then we encounter the liveliness of the full human scope of what permeates us in the first years of our existence like a dream-like, like a sleeping life, but what works in the formation of our physical body. Likewise, we can remain purely cognitively and scientifically in the contemplation of the spiritual soul within us, as it was permeated by divine spiritual forces before our earthly existence. But we can turn to this being itself and turn our feelings to it; then we learn to recognize what this soul experienced inwardly at that time. It experienced the urge to embrace earthly existence with the divine spiritual forces that surrounded it.

The reason why the soul has immersed itself in the earthly body is to connect with the physical through the divine spiritual. This reason is none other than that which lives in the shadowy afterimage of earthly existence in religious feeling and religious piety. If we have religious piety, we may not concern ourselves with what this soul-like nature is before it has descended into earthly life. These are the powers of feeling and perception towards which the soul soul strove to live the soul-life into earthly existence, that is, when it strove for physical embodiment; but when we think of these powers in the lingering image of the earth, they live themselves out in religious life. Just as art is a radiance of the forces of the first child life into later life, so religious life is an echo of what the soul went through before descending into physical life.

And so we find that if we stop at the level of knowledge and rise to the idea there, as long as we dwell in mere earthly life, where we have to use our organism for knowledge, we find only knowledge, alongside which stands art, which can at most be considered aesthetically, and alongside which stands religion, which can be considered theologically. But with physical science we do not arrive at a living transition into artistic feeling or religious experience. When we rise to anthroposophical knowledge, we have thoroughly true scientific knowledge, but this rises to imagination. Imagination can remain thoroughly scientific. By remaining so, it does not become artistic. Therefore, no one needs to fear that by creating art they will fall back into allegory and symbolism if they are imbued with anthroposophy; they would do so if they merely stopped at ideas.

But anthroposophy is not like other sciences in that it stops at mere ideas; it continues to penetrate, feeling its way from the contemplation of the body of formative forces to the experience of the laws of that which first shaped us in our earliest childhood and continues to influence our lives, and through which we feel so stimulated in our imagination. This is not to say anything against the elementary nature of imaginative creation; but imagination can be stimulated by advancing in the manner described to epochs of life that would otherwise elude external observation. And by advancing further to the experience of the soul before its descent into earthly existence, one comes to sense what lives here on earth in the afterimage of religious life and experience, when we live in such a way that our life through what God is in us is at the same time something willed by God, so that the mood of doing what is willed by God is the echo of what was an important deed willed by God when God Himself still worked in the soul as a spiritual deed before the soul descended into earthly life.

If we consider the whole of human life with the eternal nature of the human soul, we find that there is a natural transition from science to art, to religion. For that which appears in knowledge appears in art and in religion if we follow it only to the corresponding human spheres. I would like to say that Anthroposophy cannot help but stimulate the human being artistically when it takes hold of him in his capacity for feeling and emotion. And Anthroposophy cannot help but, when it takes hold of the human being in his or her life of will, allow that person to feel an echo of how, in some way, they have committed themselves to the divine world-shaper in their earthly existence, and to do what is willed by God. Then the will is stimulated to religious experience.

Dear attendees! In the ancient mysteries, what later divided into three for the sake of humanity's enrichment, emanated from a unity. In the ancient mysteries, in the wisdom schools of gray antiquity, which are hardly known to external history but which anthroposophy is getting to know, science was so imbued with spirit that, in relation to the human soul, this spirit-imbued striving was also beauty. What a person recognized, he incorporated into matter; he made his wisdom creative and artistic. And by feeling what he learned in his liveliness as the world-ruling divine-wise, the mystery school student offered his act of worship to the divine, so to speak, having re-created sacred art into a cult. Science, art and religion were one. Man could not remain in this unity. For the sake of human wealth, the threefold division into art, science and religion had to arise: into scientific certainty, artistic taste and religious belief.

Today, however, we have once again reached a point where the inner harmonization of science, art and religion has become a question for the most outstanding minds. We have seen this in Goethe and Schiller. Today we must again strive to bring together that which has come to us in outward differentiation. Anthroposophy does not want to contribute to the chaotic mixing of religion, science and art, after they have historically differentiated – and this has its justification; it would thereby fall prey to the fourth king in Goethe's fairy tale. It seeks to develop wisdom, the gift of the golden king, beauty, the gift of the silver king, virtue and religion, the gift of the brazen king, in an ideal separation; then they can radiate together into the human being. When the human being directs his attention to the whole human being, then what lives in him as the whole of life, and which is particularly expressed in the first years of childhood, becomes the source of nourishment and also of the fertilization of art. But what the soul has experienced before descending to earth becomes the source of fertilization of religious life.

Without any chaotic mixing of these three areas, anthroposophy in particular can lead people in a completely natural way to science, art and religion, to truth, beauty and goodness, by allowing each to exist in its own nature, but still allowing it to have an effect on people in such a way that in human experience, what is found as truth may encounter the beautiful, the artistic – and respond to it as directly related, as another expression of the nature of the world – and in turn encounter the good, the religious, and also respond to it as another expression of the nature of the world. Goethe, although not yet standing on the standpoint of Anthroposophy, felt this very strongly. “He who possesses science and art also has religion; he who possesses neither, let him have religion!” — thus spoke Goethe; and thus, in essence, must Anthroposophical spiritual science speak again today, in the world being, forming three interlocking organized links: religion, art and science. And man finds his true humanity only by allowing the essence of each of these world revelations to permeate his soul, while maintaining his full individuality. But in him they find each other in full inner harmonization when he becomes a whole human being through it. And in this harmonization of science, art and religion, man can find his full humanity, his development worthy of a human being through all levels of existence of his being.

In the present, one does not speak about something popular and accepted if one speaks about spiritual science in the sense as it is meant here, and this is comprehensible. As a representative of spiritual science, one would be more surprised if this spiritual science met with universal approval than if it evokes opposition of most people everywhere. This is comprehensible because the strength of our time and of everything that has led to this strength is based by no means on the reasons on which spiritual science has to be based.

The triumphs of humanity are in that area which arises from natural sciences and their knowledge. As the single human being if he should completely devote himself to an activity has often to divert his attention from everything else and has to concentrate upon that which he should do, it is also with the genius of humanity. This genius of humanity had to devote himself, because of a historical necessity, to the outer sensory knowledge that is bound to the reason that depends on the brain. He had to devote himself completely to that worldview; he had to turn his attention completely to that. Therefore, it happened that from it habitual ways of thinking have gradually developed which are hostile to research results from the area of spiritual life.

One cannot only criticise this fact disparagingly; one has to understand it. One has to understand that it is comprehensible if considerations as those of today only cause disparaging remarks of those who are not closer to the thing, no matter from which side these remarks come. Spiritual science does not concern those areas with which the scientific knowledge deals in our time at first. Spiritual science differs from this scientific way of thinking not only by that which is considered, but it also differs especially by the whole way in which one considers. Just this way is quite unpleasant, actually, to our contemporaries.

Spiritual science completely acknowledges natural sciences. They have to deal with that which approaches the human being from without, and they have to look at his outside. They cannot penetrate into the inside of the things just because of their strength—for reasons which we get to know this evening. However, this is the task of spiritual science, because of its nature, to penetrate into the inside of the things. Once again, I would like to remember a Goethean word about knowledge which goes back again to the word of the great naturalist Haller (Albrecht von H., 1708-1777), one could say that, actually, with this Goethean word he leads from the outer view of nature to the inner one, the Goethean way of consideration. The naturalist Haller had said:

No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.
Blissful is that to whom she shows
Her appearance only!

and Goethe who was completely pervaded by the spiritual said against it:

I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,
I grumble about it, but covertly,
I say to myself thousand and thousand times:
She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;
Nature has neither kernel nor shell,
She is everything at the same time.
Examine yourself above all,
Whether you are kernel or shell.

Indeed, Goethe had the right to speak this way. However, one must say, at the same time he led from the outer view of nature to the view of spirit. If he says in this poem:

everywhere we are inside,

we can still say, we are only inside of nature if we can recognise the creative spirit behind the physical that she has in her core. Then we stand inside of nature. Then the question is only: how has one to imagine this penetration into the inside of nature in the spiritual-scientific sense?

With the cognitive way with which one looks at the things in the usual life and which one takes as a basis of the usual actions which are also valid in science one cannot penetrate into the spiritual inside of the things. Therefore, one has to say, this way of knowledge belongs to the outer view of nature.

For the consideration of the spirit self-education of the soul is inevitable to get another way of knowledge and a quite different state of soul or consciousness The soul has to make something different of itself than it is in the usual life and in the usual science if it wants to investigate the spiritual depths. Which development, which self-education has the soul to go through if it wants to appropriate those forces which do not exist in the usual life and with which one penetrates into the inside of the things?

To get to an understanding with each other I have to ask you to do a comparative consideration with me which is meant, however, by no means as a comparison, but which leads us really into the inside of our whole point of view, as it should be developed. We take a big change in nature as starting point that faces us yearly, the development of the plant in the course of the year, in the seasons. We know that without sunlight, without forces that flow from the outside towards the plants the earth could not produce them. We see the relationship of the earth to these cosmic world surroundings if we see the plant sprouting in the spring. In autumn, those forces withdraw which elicit the plants. We see these world forces kept away as it were from that part of the earth where winter is; then we see the earth left to its own resources.

Let us now assume that a human being is organised in such a way that at the beginning of the spring he is stunned with something and experiences a kind of sleeping state during the spring and the summer that he wakes up then in autumn and gets to know that only which autumn and winter offer. Let us assume that this may happen anyhow. Let us also assume that the earth is inhabited by such beings only that see the earth only in its lifeless state; they would only see the earth if it held the seeds of the plants; and that which is outside would remind at most in the perennial plants of the fact that there is also a spring, a summer. Such beings would believe that the earth is something else for the human being than it is. They would see its winter side only and would regard the earth as that which produces lifeless things. Imagine once how the view of the earth would be for such beings.

If we extended the view even further, we could say, such beings would walk around the earth to experience the winter on one half of the earth and then on the other half of the earth, so that they would never experience the summer. Then they did not need sleep. Then they would always look away from life. They would get to know the earth only in the state of death. We turn the view at that which would be hidden to such beings. Everything that reveals itself to the human being at summertime that makes the earth a source of living existence would be a concealed world to such beings.

Not concerning the earth, but concerning something else this phenomenon exists on earth about which I have here spoken, namely this phenomenon appears in the human being himself. However, the field of observation is not the earth but the human being. Self-knowledge of the human being for the usual life is in a way as the earth knowledge would be to a being as I have brought in now. Why?

If we consider the human being in his everyday life, this everyday life changes between a sleeping state and a waking one. We want to look at the human being how he represents himself in sleep. All his experiences that surge up and down in him from awakening to falling asleep, all desires, passions, ideals, feelings, and the like are quiet. We consider what is outwardly visible at the sleeping human being. What do we face there? A being that we can probably compare to a plant. We face a being that completely has the value of a plant. About such a being, we must say that it has its living in a similar way as the plant cover of the earth has it. As we can only understand the plant cover of the earth if it sprouts under the impression of the cosmic forces, we can also understand this sleeping human body only if we imagine it as the plant. If one wants to imagine that in the human being life sprouts, one normally takes a quite wrong viewpoint: one normally compares the wake life of the human being from morning up to the evening to the sprouting plant life from spring until autumn. However, this does not correspond to reality if one assumes that the human being merges into a kind of plant state when he falls asleep. That means that the spring comes when he falls asleep and that he goes into the summer, the longer he sleeps at night. If awakening is approaching, it is autumn in the human being, and from awakening up to falling asleep, so in the wake day life, we have wintertime in the human being.

Even natural sciences have got on to verify this. We have wintertime in the wake human being because the day life works destroying - as well as the winter must be restored for the earth—, and must be restored at night by everything that is sprouting life. As well as the winter works destructively across the earth, the wake day life works destructively in life, and at the soul summertime when the human being is in the plant state that is caused in him which is like the sprouting life of the plants on earth at summertime.

Hence, we can say, that which the human being unfolds in his wake state relates to his whole being in such a way as that which the cosmic world forces work on the earth during wintertime. From it, we can only understand our wake imagining life. It is as the life on earth at wintertime. It is the wake life of the soul wintertime. This is the real consideration of the human being.

Now we return to our first mental picture. The human being goes through a soul summertime, and when he enters into this time, he becomes unconscious—as well as a being that falls asleep in the spring would never see the plant growth and would face a concealed world in the summertime. As the cosmic forces do not intervene in the life on earth at winter, as they are not suitable in winter to draw what reveals itself in the plant growth, the winter forces of the human being, his thoughts, his sensations, and his conscious life are not able to make summertime in the human being.

The following question must be associated with this: is in this soul summertime of the human being anything concealed that one can compare with that which remains concealed to our hypothetical beings that cannot perceive the plant growth of the earth because of their sleeping state? This question can be answered only if it is possible to change that unconsciousness in which the human being lives in his soul summertime into consciousness. That means if it is possible to cause a state in him by which he can perceive in such a way that before him the soul summertime spreads out with all its beings. Is it able to do this?—Another question is: have we to assume rightly that if the human being makes himself aware of the soul summertime something reveals that can be compared not only with the plant cover, but also with that which can be rightly called a higher world? From the following consideration arises that we are allowed to assume such a thing.

If we consider the world, we find that the human being is placed in the different realms of nature. It is not at all haughty if the human being assumes that to his creation certain higher forces are necessary which one does not find in the other realms of nature. These creative or formative forces restore the human being at night after we have worn our forces during our day life. Indeed, we cannot realise from that which happens at night immediately what the formative forces of the human being are like. However, while we destroy human vitality during the day and restore it at night, nevertheless, we find the productive forces that only escape from our observation. Thus, we can suppose that these formative forces of the human being reveal themselves if we can consciously invade into the soul summertime. Someone has to invade into the soul summertime consciously who wants to become a spiritual researcher.

What are the mental pictures, ideas, and concepts to the spiritual researcher that he has in the wake state?—They are those inner beings of the human being that exist towards the soul summertime. It is no special comparison but reality: he has something in his soul summertime, when in him everything is blossoming, that relates in his being as the seed which rests in the bowels of the earth in winter to the fully developed plants of the summer. If we can call the developing winter seeds into life in ourselves, we do the same in reality what happens with the earth when it develops the seeds towards springtime.

That who consciously wants to penetrate into the soul summertime would have to unfold that which is like the earth lying fallow in the winter in the human being—thoughts, sensations, and feelings—, to a vivid existence, as in the spring and in summer the seeds of the plant cover of the earth develop. What appears as a demand can really happen. We can really consider, so to speak, our thoughts, as we experience them consciously, as the seeds outliving the soul winter, and we can do something to call these seeds into life. This happens by concentration, contemplation, and meditation.

At first the spiritual researcher takes the feelings and sensations as starting point which he has experienced in the usual life, so at the soul wintertime, and which show nothing of that into which they can evolve. The human being who wants to become a spiritual researcher must arouse this winter seeds of his soul to a more vigorous existence than they have in the usual life. This happens by meditation, concentration, and contemplation. One makes the particular discovery if one does not use concepts, sensations, and feelings so that they depict an outer existence only but that they live in our soul so that we live with our souls in them and are taken up in them completely.

We take a simple mental picture to develop the full power. It does not depend on the contents of this mental picture. While our thoughts wander from mental picture to mental picture in the usual everyday life, the spiritual researcher fully concentrates on one mental picture, on one sensation. He rests on it by a will impulse for some time. It is necessary for it to abstain from outer sensory impressions, also from that which we think, imagine, or remember, for example, worries and the like. With a strong will development, the human being has to advance so far to cause a state that is very similar to falling asleep, and, nevertheless, is quite different from it. In this condition, he does no longer use his limbs, allows the body to rest like in sleep, does not perceive with the senses, allows the mind to sleep, and manages with his own will to dedicate himself to this mental picture and to rest on it for a while, to experience it completely. Without asking what it signifies, one has to pay attention only to that which it causes in the soul, which it gives as power; one has to concentrate only upon this mental picture.

What I have here described forms the contents of a science in principle. About that, you find additional details in my books How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and Occult Science. An Outline. Here I can indicate the things only in principle. It is important that the soul dedicates itself to a single mental picture some time. One has to delve deeply into the mental picture; it does not need to take much time. One must grow together with the mental picture. However, it is not enough to do such a thing few times, but one has to continue such exercises for years, according to the talent of the person concerned. If the soul repeatedly dedicates itself to such exercises, one makes the discovery that the feelings and mental pictures of the usual life are as seeds that can develop that can produce something new, something special. One gets around by such a strong self-education to forming his images and feelings gradually in such a way that one can realise a world internally which is not bound to the outer senses, but is conjured up as seeds that outlive the soul wintertime. Then we experience the rising of the soul spring, the soul summertime. The spiritual researcher has to experience this consciously. He has to experience how he wakes up a soul springtime, a soul summertime in himself, how he places another world in the world that he has, otherwise, in the soul wintertime. Then he realises a new world, indeed, a world that he has not known before.

Only one thing is necessary: that he learns to behave towards this world that he realises now as he behaves, otherwise, towards the world of the soul wintertime.

I said, this inner world rises at the soul summertime. However, at first this world resembles another world which meets us to our sorrow and which is due to pathological soul states. The resemblance is only an outer one because that which I have just described is quite different from that which arises from pathological states like hallucinations, delusions and the like because it can arise only from a healthy soul life. They are only externally similar to each other because both ascend from the soul.

However, the phenomena that arise from pathological states are a quality, which we have often to deplore. They work overpowering on the human life, even beguiling. Since the soul does not regard a hallucination as a reflection of its being, but it regards it as an objective-real world. This is a big error! We know how strongly this error can work. Somebody who lives with such persons knows that one can never persuade them from their hallucinations. This is in such a way because—if the human being exceeds the normal soul life—something appears from it that exists, otherwise, also in him. We return to our comparison, which is, however, more than a comparison.

When the human being feels spring and summer approaching, and if he is gifted for the manifestations of nature, his heart would like to shout out, then his heart is attached to this sprouting life; he is given away to it. The devotion to that which faces us increases if we go from the snowy earth to the sprouting life of the spring and the summer. However, that also happens if we face that which ascends in the soul as a world that is not the usual world of the soul wintertime. If at the horizon of the pathological soul life visions, hallucinations emerge which do not exist in the usual life in the soul winter life, then the soul feels at first attracted and given away to that which arises there like a new world. However, this is nothing but the outflow of the soul itself. If the human being likes the outer activities towards the spring and the summer, he loves himself in that which emerges from his own soul. This is the secret. From this life, which emerges from the inside, his concealed own life faces him. Therefore, he is attached to these phenomena, cannot break free from them.

One notices only in this area how strongly the human being loves himself. One can understand this if one knows that the human being faces himself [in his visions]. He would have to extinguish himself, so to speak, if he did not believe in his visions. The increased self-love works like a power of nature that makes the visionary believing in his visions.

It does not matter that that who becomes a spiritual researcher produces new feelings from those feelings, which outlive the soul winter, but that he cultivates his will. Since the spiritual researcher has immediately to say to himself that which the ill soul never says to itself, which only the soul says to itself if it is healthy if the world, which I have just described, appears before him. He has to defeat the increased self-love. He has to extinguish this not only in thoughts, but also with a strong will, which the spiritual researcher develops by training. Not before he is successful, he is correctly prepared for spiritual science.

How would a human being be who could not extinguish as a spiritual researcher arbitrarily what spreads out there? Such a human being would be in the area of the spirit like a person who faces an object in the sensory world, looks at it, but could then never look away from it as if he were tied up to this object. Thus, a spiritual researcher would be who would leave that standing which emerges from his soul summertime. He has to be able to extinguish all pictures that ascend there. The right instruction just leads to that which can arise only in a completely healthy soul to extinguish everything that ascends there. As we would never face the plant world properly if we could not freely turn our eyes from one point to the other, we would never approach a spiritual world if we could not turn away from that which I have just described. This is a necessary quality of the real spiritual researcher that he must have defeated the selfishness to such degree by self-education that he is able any time to extinguish the world which he has conjured up with strong inner power. That means to extinguish himself because it is his own soul world.

Defeating oneself is the first stage on the way into the spiritual world.

If this great experience has taken place, the spiritual researcher experiences an objective spiritual world. Then the objective spiritual world appears after the spiritual field has been cleared by extinguishing. Here is the abyss that the soul must cross if it enters into the spiritual world. If the soul has crossed this abyss if it has defeated self-love, then the world that it faces can also give it something.

One can say if one has only materialist ideas and ignores what spiritual research can offer, how do you differentiate what ascends there in the soul from the outer reality?

Only life decides such things, as well as in the outer life only life itself decides whether anything is percept or mental picture. One can distinguish this. I have always appreciated Schopenhauer completely. I myself wrote an introduction to his works. However, if Schopenhauer says that the world is only our idea or mental picture, one can easily disprove that. If one has a piece of red-hot iron, one may say, this is only my mental picture. If, however, one touches it, one perceives very well whether it is only a mental picture or reality. There is not a logical proof of the just said; there only life decides this. Spiritual research induces us in spiritual field to distinguish percept and mental picture that is to distinguish reality and imagination correctly.

We realise by which spiritual research differs from natural sciences. Natural sciences stop at the cognitive forces that the human being brings with him into life and develops in life. Spiritual science only attains something while the human being goes through the described stage; that is he develops his soul so far that you can compare it with the soul condition of the child in the third, fourth years if it awakes to self-consciousness. Everybody knows this awakening where the consciousness of the child becomes self-consciousness. On a higher level, something similar happens with the spiritual researcher: he awakes to such higher spiritual life, compared with which the usual wake day consciousness is a kind of sleeping state.

The soul has to experience a second awakening to penetrate into a new world. The human being is—if he really does research in the spiritual—in the same state in which the sleeping human being is, nevertheless, he is in a contrary condition. The sleeping lets his body rest completely. He does not let any sensory impression get into himself. The spiritual researcher is in the same state, save that that which is unconscious with the sleeping is conscious in him and perceives the spiritual world.

If the human being perceives the spiritual world this way, he does not get to know the spiritual in general only, but he also gets to know single facts and single beings. People forgive in the least today that one speaks not only of soul and spirit, but also of single beings. Today materialism is declining, and people already concede that one speaks of spirit and soul. One already permits that one speaks of single phenomena in nature and says not only, nature, nature, and nature. However, concerning the spiritual, one does not permit even today that spiritual science speaks of single beings and says not only, spirit, spirit and soul, soul. The spiritual researcher penetrates into a spiritual world full of beings that is added to the outer sensory world as a new world. There he beholds the forces that shape the outer world, he realises what forms the basis of the outer world as a spiritual. He really penetrates into the inside of nature at first, however, in his own inside. He is immediately in his own inside.

I have pointed out how the spiritual researcher has to extinguish what he has conjured up in his soul summer at first. He can extinguish this, or more precisely, he can extinguish himself in the world that appeared as a new one to him. However, he cannot extinguish something of it. A rest always remains. If the spiritual researcher settles in this rest, he gets to know his inner being. This is his real essence. If he goes through the described processes and attains real self-knowledge, he gets to know his core as someone who finds the zygote of a lower animal in a mud pool. If then the lower animal originates, the person concerned knows that from the zygote the lower animal has originated. The animal embryo must only have been there; it has attracted the matter, but the lower animal would never have originated unless a zygote had existed.

Thus, the human being beholds into the objective world with his spiritual-mental. He probably beholds how a human being develops in mysterious way from the first hour of his existence on and on. The features of the child, which are uncertain at first, become more and more certain. Science knows that the brain takes shape more and more plastically. From year to year, the human body develops more. Then the human being looks at father and mother, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on, and he says to himself, I find these qualities with my ancestors, however, that which forms the basis of these qualities is the spiritual-mental core that has been discovered on the way of spiritual research. Here spiritual research is at a point where it has to perform something similar as natural sciences had to perform for the present in the seventeenth century when Francesco Redi, a great naturalist, said, life cannot originate from anything lifeless - life can only originate from something living.—Redi was pursued as a heretic. Spiritual science is today in a similar situation. The spiritual researcher is today compelled to say, the knowledge of the human spiritual-mental essence shows that the human being comes from a spiritual existence which he experienced before birth, and that he experienced former lives on earth before this spiritual existence. People do no longer say, this is heresy, but they say, it is humbug. One tries also today to silence those people who pronounce such things. One does not burn them, indeed—the customs have become somewhat milder, one also speaks of tolerance—, but today strictly speaking only another method is applied to the same. It was heresy of Redi in the seventeenth century what one acknowledges today as a scientific fact. Even today, one regards it as a pipe dream if spiritual science speaks of the fact that the spiritual-mental essence of the human being is not rooted in the line of physical heredity, but is rooted in a spiritual-mental experience in former lives on earth. This life on earth in which we live now is the beginning and the embryo of a new life on earth.

What the spiritual researcher recognises as spiritual-mental essence that he cannot extinguish is completely different from that which you experience in the wake day life. This spiritual-mental essence is as the developed plant compared with the seed. It is the true mental-spiritual reality which creates in the human being which receives what is given by father and mother and unveils itself to get to a physical existence, as the seed which was left from a preceding plant and now develops again to a spiritual-mental being. This spiritual-mental core exceeds birth and death.

Here spiritual research is at a similar point as the naturalists Copernicus and Giordano Bruno were during former centuries. They could look out into the cosmic space and say, what the human being has believed up to now that the sky ends with that which human eyes see, that is not true. Giordano Bruno saw the world enlarged, and he recognised that these borders exist only because the human cognition is weak. He expanded the horizon of human cognition of the physical world. The spiritual researcher has to perform the same today again. He has to bring the knowledge to the present humanity that the human being comes from a former life on earth and that he has to live through other lives on earth. Spiritual science expands the view to spiritual-mental infinity. As Giordano Bruno postulated countless worlds in space, the spiritual researcher has to extend time, which belongs to the human being in which he unfolds his spiritual-mental core in many lives back and forth.

Thus, spiritual science places itself beside natural sciences without contradicting them but acknowledging them completely. Yes, just from the same attitude, as natural sciences have it compared with nature, spiritual research would like to come to a science of the spirit. It would like to penetrate into the inner forces of existence as natural sciences penetrate into the outer forces of existence. It will become obvious if once spiritual science will be accepted in the intellectual life of our time that one can only grasp the complete reality, while one approaches this reality from two sides, scientifically and spiritual-scientifically. Thus, one finds the true reality, while one co-operates from nature and from spirit in oppose directions until both directions meet.

Natural sciences had their aurora, when Copernicus sent his significant worldview into the world. Now spiritual science is at the same point and faces the spirit with the same attitude. If one investigates the outer life scientifically, and if one investigates the mathematical laws, one comes to a certain point, which one names with the word life. If the naturalist investigates the plant, he wants to approach life more and more. Life is like the big goal that one heads in natural sciences. It is the big ideal of natural sciences to investigate life. They dig in the tunnel this way.

The world of the spiritual researcher also has such a certain point up to which one comes which one sees in the distance as it were. This point that one approaches, as the naturalist approaches life, is death for the spiritual researcher.

The spiritual researcher has to reach a certain level where he says to himself, I figure the spiritual world out to a certain degree, which spreads out there before me. Then something stands there that one is not allowed to touch with this inner experience to which one must rather hand over the inner experience.—One recognises all possible beings and facts of the supersensible world, and one realises that death stands at the end. One realises that our spiritual-mental essence must go through death, as it has to go through the spiritual world after death to live in this spiritual world. Then it has to return to a new life. One realises how life after life develops. The whole existence is composed of the life in the spiritual world between death and a new birth and the life in the physical world between birth and death.

One copes with death just as little in the spiritual research as one copes with life in natural sciences. The scientific cognition approaches life, spiritual research approaches death vividly recognising in spirit; it is the big goal of spiritual research. Thus, spiritual research relates to death. This is the other direction, it bores [the tunnel] from the other side, and both certainly meet because they must meet. Death can only be there because it originates from life—and vice versa. One strives for the same goal from two sides. This is something that has to place itself as attitude in the modern spiritual life with which natural sciences and spiritual science come to their own in the same way.

As well as natural sciences strive for recognising the outer world, spiritual science has to strive for recognising destiny, and it can recognise destiny only in such a way that it sees the cause prepared of the next life on earth in this life on earth. The causes of destiny, good luck, and misfortune become clear to us thereby. Life faces us as a transformation of death. Immortality faces us in such a way that we know: while we go through death, we bring our spiritual-mental essence to the spiritual world to be active again in a new life.

No empty infinity faces us, but an infinity in which links are strung together, so that we know, why the human being must be immortal. He must be immortal because life carries the forces from birth to death in its spiritual-mental core to produce new lives because we see the seed of the following life laid in one life.

Thus, the big riddles of life are answered, while natural sciences and spiritual science co-operate. Somebody who believes there to have to stop on the ground of natural sciences and wants to establish a worldview from this ground resembles someone in a way who says, the ores down there in a mine appear to me in the true light if I bore a hole and let the sun shine on them. Indeed, everything is lighted up, but the sun produces that only which is on the surface. The sun can light up that only which rests there down in the earth, but it cannot produce it.

Thus, that which unveils the human core may be taken away from the merely outer science. Then it may come to light up it; then the outer science can also understand that which the spiritual researcher investigates.

Here we get to a point where I have to eliminate an objection. Someone may say, what you tell to us there shows that spiritual science is significant only for the spiritual researcher himself. I must point there to my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. You find closer explained in it that one is allowed to say, every human being has advanced so far today that he can become a spiritual researcher to a certain degree. However, it is laborious; one can attain it only with much concentration. However, as the ores arise from the earth and are lighted up then by the sun, one can light up with the usual understanding what the spiritual researcher has found. Then it can give the soul what it needs compared with the riddles of life what it needs for its security. The spiritual researcher also does not have more than that which someone can have who listens to him and reads his writings.

The spiritual researcher beholds the spiritual world. However, it is a science of the soul only if it is conceptualised so that our common sense can understand it. Hence, it is also a prejudice if one says, one cannot understand what spiritual research produces. One can understand it very well and can verify its results with the unbiased common sense. If people are of the opinion that natural sciences disprove spiritual research, they put a spoke in their own wheel.

If people point to heredity, the spiritual researcher will completely agree with them. They are fully right. However, by a comparison I would like to bring to mind how, indeed, spiritual research can stand beside natural sciences. It is like with two persons who say something different; one does not refute the other, the one is as true as the other is. If natural sciences say, the human being has these and those qualities from his ancestors, spiritual science agrees. However, as true it is that the human being has these qualities because he has laid the causes of them in a former life. The world will convince itself that natural sciences must see their strength just in the fact that they confine themselves to their fields and that they can exist beside spiritual science which is concerned with the spiritual in which we are interwoven with soul and body. In physics, one can show with spectral analysis that one can find the same substances here on earth as in the universe. As there the view was extended materially to the immeasurable outer space, we discern that in the wide world of the spirit the spiritual beings and spiritual facts exist to which the spiritual-mental nature of the human being is similar from which it is created. As well as the human being knows that he lives in the material substances which fulfil the whole universe, he can feel secure in the universal spiritual which spiritual science makes him understand. However, this will cause that as well as natural sciences have changed our outer existence, spiritual science will give humanity soul goods, which it needs more and more.

If once spiritual science seizes education deeply, it will educate the human being in such a way that he will know not only in the abstract that in him a mental core is, which goes through death, but he will transform this knowledge of the spirit into inner strength. He will feel this strength in himself vividly. He will feel if his hair turns grey if his skin wrinkles up if the limbs slacken that in him his spiritual-mental essence develops more and more. As in the growing plant the seed concentrates to become a new plant, the spiritual-mental essence concentrates in the human being more and more, the more we approach death. We feel it more and more distinctly; we recognise how we develop as human beings, although our limbs wither away as the foliage drops from a tree. This knowledge will give the human being security in good luck and misfortune. It will fulfil him internally with that which he needs, so that he has strength for his work, so that the whole outer life can prosper. Spiritual science is not mere science; it takes the experienced as starting point and it stops at the experience.

I can today report these things about the contribution of spiritual science and that of natural sciences only sketchily. It has become obvious at the today's representation that the kind of research in the spiritual is different from the kind of research in the outer sensory area. However, if one considers that certain habitual ways of thinking have developed under the long-standing influence of natural sciences, then one is not surprised that spiritual science cannot count on big acceptance and that one can argue against that which it has to say. One would be staggered of the contrary. It is true that Schopenhauer's sentence is right concerning truth:

“During all centuries the poor truth had to blush about the fact that she was paradoxical, and, nevertheless, it is not her guilt. She cannot accept the figure of the sitting enthroned general error. There she looks up sighing to her tutelary deity, the time, that shows victory and fame to her, but her wing beats are so big and slow that the individual dies away in the meantime.”

However, time and its development are in such a way that truth will be victorious. One regarded as truth later what was paradoxical once. That will also apply to spiritual science. Even if today opposition appears, one has to remind of Goethe's sentence that expresses the relationship of the human being to truth so nicely:

“You cannot disprove a wrong doctrine because it is based on the conviction that the wrong is true. However, the opposite can, must and should be pronounced again and again.”

It has to be with the truth of spiritual research this way. You cannot disprove the wrong teaching that spirit is only an appendage of the material existence, because it is based on the conviction that the wrong, the mere material existence, is true. However, the opposite of it is—that the spiritual forms the basis of the material existence and that the human essence is a part of this spiritual. This is the teaching that is not only more comprehensive than the one-sided teaching of the mere material truth, but also this teaching shows the truth, the true knowledge compared with this one-sided knowledge. Thus, it will happen that those who have recognised this truth can and must pronounce it in the spiritual-scientific sense against any contradiction. Then the genius of truth—the time—shows his power. Even if his wing beats are slow ever so much, finally, truth will be victorious. The genius of time will spread his wings over the spiritually recognised truth, over the primordial grounds and over the riddles of life.

Somebody who speaks about spiritual science today cannot count on general approval. Since all habitual ways of thinking of our time have grown out of a ground which is different from that of spiritual science.

Since the aurora of modern natural sciences, the essential progress of human mind is based on the observation of the outer world and on the application of the reason to this outer world. Spiritual science has completely to acknowledge natural sciences and their results. However, today we live again in a time in which mind and soul of the human being long more and more for an answer of those questions that exceed the sensory view and rise to the creative powers of existence, and look for them in the spiritual.

Spiritual science is based not only on quite different requirements but also on another way of research than natural sciences apply. However, one must not believe that spiritual science contradicts natural sciences in any sense. On the contrary. Even if it takes its starting point from quite different requirements and research methods, spiritual science—understood properly—completely complies with the scientific results.

Natural sciences are based on the outer view. They have achieved great things also with the development of those tools that enable us to look into the physically smallest things. However, if natural sciences want to do their task, they have to limit themselves to that which approaches the human being from without which one can grasp with the senses and understand with the reason. Knowledge of spirit can establish only on an inner deepening of the human soul by which the soul discovers cognitive abilities and forces in itself that exist neither in the usual day life nor in the outer science. Yes, if this usual science were intermingled in ambiguous way with spiritual-scientific methods, it would get only to unjustified results in its area. Still one will find if one deeper invades into the matter that the same kind of thinking, the same logic that our natural sciences apply one also applies in spiritual science. However, we have to realise that the human soul itself is the only instrument to invade into the supersensible world. It is not allowed to stop at the everyday life, but requires that it can deeper invade into the things from the point of view of the everyday life. So that this can happen, so that the human being can become a spiritual researcher, it is necessary that the soul behaves in its whole inner life different than it was accustomed before it entered the way to spiritual research.

Our soul life proceeds in such a way that we think and feel certain things, that we have mental pictures in our soul. Which sense and purpose do we connect with this soul life? We mostly connect the purpose with it to get to know the outer world and to orient ourselves in this sensory world. The spiritual researcher is concerned with something else. He has to select single mental pictures, sensations, ideas, or impressions that can be useful for him. I would like to take a comparison.

Let us assume that we compare the whole soul life that proceeds in manifold mental pictures, which change at every moment, with many corns that exist in ears on a field. The owner of the field selects some of the corns. While he lets the other corns achieve their goal to serve as food, he selects single ones that should serve as seeds and have to produce new fruits.

In a quite similar way, the spiritual researcher has to behave with his soul life. While, otherwise, the mental pictures proceed without surveying them, he has to select single mental pictures that he does not use for the outer cognition of the world. One calls that concentration, meditation, and contemplation. Which sense does one connect with these words? We want to figure out the process that the spiritual researcher carries out.

At certain times, the spiritual researcher must try to turn away his attention completely from the outside world. Then he also suppresses all worries of life, all desires, affects, and passions. He has to empty the soul, to cause a kind of empty consciousness. He selects single mental pictures of his soul life or of spiritual science whose contents do not matter and is engrossed in these mental pictures—not in their contents, they do not matter. However, the spiritual researcher behaves in such a way that he moves a mental picture arbitrarily in the centre of his consciousness, and calls all soul forces and retains this one mental picture in his consciousness, namely for longer time and with all inner strain. It only matters that the soul makes an effort that everything is concentrated upon one point. If you have to do any work where you have always to strain your arm and if this work has a purpose, you must exert yourself constantly to fulfil the purpose of this work. However, if you want to strengthen your muscles, it may just mattes not to reach this or that purpose, but to evoke the forces that exert the muscles, so that they develop. That also applies to the soul forces with meditation and concentration, namely with forces which are different from those which one applies in the usual everyday life. We never exert our souls, so to speak, concerning the forces that we consider here if we live in the everyday life. We have to evoke deeper soul forces to concentrate on a mental picture. That is the point that we strain the soul in such a way that we also have the inner will for it.

If we get a mental picture because we can be stimulated from without, then the mental picture is caused in our soul without our assistance. It is there—we have not produced it. The mental pictures that are attached to worries, to desires, and passions originate without any effort. They are to no avail to us if we want to make our soul the instrument of the higher world. Not that is the point that we have a mental picture, but that we exert ourselves to move the mental picture in the centre [of our consciousness]. If the human being calls his deepest soul forces in patience and perseverance this way, something new happens for the soul. You can find the details about that in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. This is something that today many people do not want to believe that for the soul something new can happen. We can compare this new to a moment which takes place in the human soul life [at a certain time]. The little child lives up to the second, third years consciously, but not self-consciously. One may say in a way that the consciousness of the child sleeps, before in the child the moment comes where it knows: I am an ego. This is a kind of awakening. It is a kind of awakening also if in the described way the soul is raised to another level of existence if it is made an instrument to behold into the spiritual world.

What you experience in your soul if you carry out such exercises can be compared with something with which it is similar on the one hand and from which it is, on the other hand, quite different: with falling asleep. How does this usual sleeping state approach the human being? I do not go into the details of the scientific hypotheses of sleep. Without special scientificity, I talk only about that which the human being experiences in the everyday life falling asleep.

We know that at the moment of falling asleep the senses no longer deliver impressions. The mind starts darkening. The human being transitions into a state in which his body is not active. At first spiritual science has to say—what logic already confirms—that the whole human being does not exist in the sleeping human being, but that the real human being leaves the body in sleep and is free from the body, that the human being is beyond his body. Now this is a hypothesis at first, but spiritual science verifies this hypothesis as a reasonable truth. Natural sciences more and more approach that which spiritual science has to say at this point. Du Bois-Reymond states that natural sciences can understand the sleeping but never the conscious-wake human being.

If one does not want to be so illogical to state that every evening all desires and passions disappear and originate anew in the morning from nothing, one has to suppose that they are still there. However, within the physical body they do not exist. This means that the human being is with his inner being beyond his body. However, this inner being is of supersensible nature, hence, one cannot see it.

There may be people who say that just certain things take place in the human being and cause other processes so that the soul life takes place.—Someone who speaks that way is in the same position as someone who believes that one can understand the nature of the air investigating the lung and its activity. One can understand the air if one investigates it beyond the body. Then it penetrates into the human body; the lung is there to use the air. Natural sciences will just discover more and more that one can compare the inner activities of the human body during sleep with the inner activities of lung and heart. It is an inner bodily work. However, just as little as the lung produces the air, just as little is that which penetrates as soul life the organism more and more a product of the body; rather it penetrates into the body, and it is beyond the body from falling asleep up to awakening.

One can still argue many things against that. One can understand these things only really, if one can prove by facts that that is something essential which leaves the body in sleep as one supposes it.

This just happens with the spiritual researcher if he does those soul exercises that I have discussed just now. Thereby he causes that soul condition which is free of the body. While the spiritual researcher refrains from that which his body provides for him, he causes that—completely awake—he leaves the body unexploited. During the soul activity, the body must not be active like in sleep. The senses must be quiet; the worries and passions that the outer life stimulate must be quiet as they are quiet, otherwise, only in sleep. The spiritual researcher causes a completely empty consciousness. Then, however, he puts one single mental picture in the centre of his soul life. For it, he needs forces that slumber, otherwise, in the depths of the soul and that he strengthens now by exercises so that he can perceive them.

What the spiritual researcher experiences he has just to experience if it should be conceded as fact. It resembles the sleep under the mentioned circumstances: it is connected neither with the movements of the body nor with the outer senses and the reason. While such state is caused, otherwise, only in sleep, the spiritual researcher gets around to getting to know his soul from a new side with his exercises. He knows, there is an inner life of the soul, even if the soul renounces everything that comes from the body. One may prove ever so much with some outer reasons that the human soul cannot live free of the body—the insight that, nevertheless, it is able to do it originates only if the body-free state is caused. Then one knows that one has a soul life that is completely different from the former soul life that the body has caused. One would like to say, this is a basic experience which the spiritual researcher attains if he has done such exercises long enough if he has already conjured up strong forces from his soul. In my book How Does One Attains Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, you can read up further details about that. I would like to describe the typical of this experience.

If one has carried out the exercises long enough, a particular inner experience appears. Either one awakes from the depth of sleep, or, one feels tempted to pause in the middle of the day life. What happens then is a kind of pictorial experience. Then you have the feeling that something goes forward, as if a lightning has struck you. What goes forward?

The human being thinks possibly that way: now you feel what you have always felt as your body, filled with physical elements, and is taken away from you.—Indeed, you realise now that strong forces are necessary to keep upright compared with such an experience. One feels that which one has always called approaching the gate of death. One is vividly acquainted with that which appears at death. Indeed, now changed feelings and mental pictures appear in the soul. Now you know what it means to stand no longer by yourself as it was the case before. Now you feel the soul transformed so that you know, it is not dark and quiet, but is internally active if you renounce any co-operation of the physical body.

This experience is very significant. It is a dramatic experience for the soul. It is something about which the soul says, whatever I have experienced up to now in life, I cannot compare the significance of this experience that sometimes shakes the soul. A lot of that which I have felt up to now only as slumbering in the backgrounds of existence of which I believe that I can only anticipate it, takes place before my eyes. Hence, I know now: yes, the human being is connected in his innermost core with that world which is behind the sensory world and which, actually, the sensory world veils only.

However, you know something else. You know that it was necessary to do such exercises, to strengthen the soul. You know this, because you realise that to the experience of the described a certain faculty of judgement is necessary and a kind of moral courage to maintain yourself. The soul forces that you have taken out of its depths give this courage and faculty of judgement. You find the further details of this way again described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. If you have arrived at this point, you just know: unless you have prepared yourself, you would approach this event with two qualities which are doubtful to the highest degree if they appear in the context with these experiences and which you get to know only at this point of soul development: self-love, or more precisely, self-sense, and a certain fear and insecurity of those regions which are behind the sensory world. Self-sense or self-love plays a big role in the usual life, but the soul can always master them. Bad habits appear in our souls, and we can change them. Unless we want to change them, we can at least feel that we could change them. Compared with a force of nature, flash and thunder, we do not have the feeling that we can change it. If we entered without preparation into the state that I have just described, you would realise that you have strengthened, indeed, your soul forces, but that you have also brought out something else, namely reinforced self-love. Only if you have also strengthened the other soul force, you are able to decrease this self-sense. Just as little as you are able to resist flash and thunder, just as little you are able to resist self-sense, to snatch it away from the soul life.

However, if you have made the soul an instrument for the spiritual world in the right way, then the survey of the picture enables you to recognise this self-sense in its true form. Since this picture shows something else than one could describe it with few words. It shows everything that we have called our ego, our soul up to now as put beyond ourselves. It shows what we have wanted up to now from which you suffer, with which you are pleased. Now you know: I have to place down all that from myself if I want to develop that out of myself, which can lead me into the supersensible world.

You get to know yourself as soul at this point of existence only. You know now what it means to face yourself with true self-knowledge; you know that you retain nothing of that for a higher knowledge which you have called your ego up to now—you have to cast off it and retain it as something external. Facing yourself objectively, considering yourself as another person or as an object is a preparation for penetrating into the spiritual world. However, this requires that you have also developed the strong forces to defeat the reinforced self-sense. Someone who has not done this would experience infinite pain if he realised that he has to cast off and renounce everything that he has suffered in order to behold into the spiritual world.—Nothing of that which serves to you in the world seems suitable to lead you into a higher world.

Hence, it is necessary that you defeat self-sense. Something else yet appears. If the human being does this experience, he notices that his whole security of life was contained in that which you have to set aside from yourself, which you ignore now. There fear seizes you, because you must leave behind for a while what gave you security up to now. Now it is as if you lose ground. Only if you have attained other forces, you do not have fear but courage to penetrate into the unknown land of spirit. What lives there in the soul as fear appears quite different to you. The soul life is something very complex. Only a part of it is aware; another part rests always down in the depths of the soul that the spiritual researcher brings out with his power. The human being only knows a part of his soul life; other parts work into the usual soul life. However, the human being knows nothing about them. Yes, the usual soul life often is there to blanket what rests in the concealed depths of the soul. The human being helps himself to get over them, while he deceives himself. For that who knows the soul a phenomenon is very interesting which appears to the human being of the present paradoxical, but it is true.

In the present, we see people, materialists, who do not want to search the spirit in its true figure on the way of spiritual life. Why does one become a materialist? If you understand, why this is the case, you become tolerant on one side towards the materialist because you realise that under certain conditions the soul cannot be different if it does not receive the suggestion to come out of materialism. Since that who investigates the soul of the materialist notices that in its depths nothing but the fear of the spiritual world prevails.

It is that way. Even if the materialists resent that, it is in such a way. They are afraid in the depths of their souls without knowing it; they are afraid of the spiritual world because they have a dark feeling of the fact that they lose ground if they leave the sure ground of reason. They are afraid of it, and, therefore, they blanket this fear with materialist theories, as one dazes himself against fear. The materialist monism is nothing but dazing fear in the depths of the soul. The true psychologist will be able to recognise this always. In the materialist-monistic theories is not only that which the materialists say, but always fear is visible between the lines. The reinforced soul power must overcome this fear, and then the human being dares to jump over the abyss and to penetrate into the spiritual area.

Then the human being becomes aware that, indeed, his soul life splits for the experience of the spiritual world in a way. What does this splitting mean? Expressly I would like to emphasise that the true spiritual researcher should not be a dreamer or romanticist who wants now to leave the sensory world completely and to live in the spiritual world. He has to attract that again about which he knows that he must cast off it for the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher must manage to move about freely between beholding the spiritual world and living in the sensory world, otherwise he is no spiritual researcher but a daydreamer for the outer world. He reaches this if he takes a healthy soul life as starting point.

Hence, you can convince yourselves that the real spiritual researchers are sober in the everyday life because they have realised objectively, not only subjectively that it is necessary to consider everything soberly to be no romanticists. They position themselves in the usual life as practical people. They know how to keep the balance between the usual life praxis and the life in the spiritual world. It is very important just to stress this point because the soul life must split, as well as a big number of corns are separated from a few which are not consumed, but are used as seeds.

Thus, the human being realises that his soul life is not completely separated from himself. He sees as it were a part of this usual soul life beside himself; he feels it as something that cannot place him in the spiritual world: the corns that serve as food. However, the other part bridges the abyss. This is that part which develops from concentration; it is that part which is used as seeds for the soul life that goes to the spiritual world. So that it develops healthily, it is necessary that the spiritual researcher is able at this point to behave different from that who—with a pathological soul life—has reached this special point which he learns to feel as very painful.

That which approaches the spiritual researcher if he has fulfilled all preconditions is that he does no longer need from a certain time on to concentrate upon certain mental pictures, but they appear spontaneously from his empty consciousness which show a new world. A new world fills his consciousness. For the outer viewer this world becomes very similar to the pathological hallucinations. However, they are only externally similar. A pathological soul life leads to hallucinations. The healthiest soul life of the spiritual researcher leads to the world of pictures or Imaginations. We realise with that who sees an imagery emerging with an unhealthy soul life that he believes with an inner force in their reality that he believes that his delusions are true. Many of us know that one can dissuade a person who is ill this way often from that which he sees with the eyes but not from the “reality” of his hallucinations. Why is this the case? Because just in such pathological soul life which appears with such strong force also the self-sense increases. The person concerned is one with his mental pictures; he produces them from his soul; they are the silhouettes of the soul life, they are compressed imagination. Because he himself is that, he believes so firmly in them. Since the human being must believe absolutely in himself if he wants to stand firmly in the world—and then he believes in his visions like in an objective world.

The spiritual researcher has to attain defeating the self-sense that he has now to remove that imagery arbitrarily again which can work so blissfully on him. If anybody does the exercises in the right way about which I have spoken, he attains the ability to extinguish this imagery—which appears really as a spiritual world as in the morning the sun appears on the horizon. The exercise has to consist of the special will training that one not only gets around to evoking this imagery but also to extinguishing it again—any knowledge is based on it in the higher world. This is the difference compared to the pictures of the pathological soul life. If the exercises are done, the human being attains the peculiar force to make his will gradually stronger and then to diminish it again. One does not have this ability in the usual life. One can make efforts and refrain from them. One has to learn this only by training that one makes the will as strong as I have described it. If the whole imagery has emerged, one must consciously weaken the will more and more which has conjured up this world and must be able to let sink this whole world. However, one is able to do this only after defeating the self-sense.

Think only what you demand from your soul. You demand that you assert yourself at first to evoke such a world; then, however, you must extinguish it again. You cannot enjoy it. You must see the whole world, which we have developed by external strains, sinking in the depths of your consciousness as mental pictures that you have forgotten. If you have attained this, you enter only into the true spiritual world, the world of spiritual beings and facts. The spiritual researcher knows by the preceding exercises that he lives now in the spiritual world. If he did not have acquired this ability to let disappear all that again, he could not be a free observer of the spiritual world. You can compare that with a situation where you look at a thing and cannot turn away from it. Turning your attention to and away from something corresponds in the area of spiritual observation to attaining the impressions and removing them. If the human being has come to this point, not only the splitting takes place which I have already described but he faces two separate areas as it were. From one area he experiences that he has to set aside it from himself; he feels, it is that which he has estimated up to now as his only possession about which he also recognises that he casts off it at death. A certain courage is necessary to grasp this in real knowledge. Since the human being recognises that he must learn to deprive himself of something willingly to which he is attached and which is snatched away from him usually only at death.

Then he gets to know that as it were the fruit that is chosen as seed is the human essence which is not taken up in the physical body, but which is only the basis of it. The essence is due not to the ancestors, but originates from the spiritual world; it uses what the parents give to the external-bodily existence.

Spiritual science points out that in the human being probably the qualities of the ancestors live that, however, it is an inexact consideration if one says that the human being is only composed of that which he inherited from the parents. Physically the human being bears the characteristics of his physical heredity, but something spiritual-mental can come only from something spiritual-mental. You can get to know the spiritual-mental core this way. Because the human being is an internally closed individuality, you are not concerned with something generic. That is, the spiritual-mental core is rooted in the individual of the human being. However, with it we realise that teaching of repeated lives on earth.

This spiritual-mental that we bear in ourselves and through the gate of death is rooted in a former life on earth and further ones, until there comes a time when it lived for the first time. What rests in this part of our being walks through the gate of death and lives then in a supersensible existence. From this, the human being enters into a new earthly life while he proceeds towards the line of heredity.

You realise, the logic is completely the same as in natural sciences. He who wants to fight against it does only not know about which he talks, actually. Since if that who stands on scientific ground wanted to say: nevertheless, one can prove that the qualities are inherited from the parents—, one must answer to him: as far as natural sciences can prove it, one can only say: it is true!—If, however, the materialist monist says, because one has inherited these qualities from the ancestors, they could not be due to that which the human being has acquired in a former life as forces which appear in his current life again, then one has to answer, one can say just as well, the human being is wet because he has fallen into water.—The one is true because the other is true. It is true that the human being has inherited certain qualities from his ancestors—it is true, however, also that he was attracted by these parents because he has to appropriate the forces which he can get just from these parents. Something spiritual causes something spiritual only.

Someone who wants to look properly at this matter admits that today spiritual science has to go forward as Francesco Redi did who had to establish the sentence as a scientific truth: life can only originate from life.—Spiritual science will experience the same destiny with reference to the acceptance of this truth. People did not accept this sentence with pleasure. Only by the skin of the teeth, Francesco Redi escaped from the destiny of Giordano Bruno. Today one does no longer talk of heresy, but today one calls the persons daydreamers who have to announce something new. Today one has milder methods than burning at the stake to prevent what must come into our civilisation. However, it will happen in such a way as it always happened in such cases. What one called pipe dream at first becomes self-evident afterwards.

I have already said, one is not surprised about opposition. The thing is in such a way that not only those who deal a little with these things, but also those who want to enter into the spiritual world with good will do not yet want to understand the teaching of the repeated lives on earth.

With the teaching of reincarnation, we face the question of immortality quite unlike if one judges it concerning an infinite time. Then you face immortality in such a way that you see it establishing link about link. One speaks of the fact that the soul lives on because one realises that in one life on earth the seed of another life is enclosed

We see a human being growing up from his earliest childhood in affectionate surroundings, and we see another human being growing up in surroundings that can work only badly on him. Why is it that way? There we must consider the one and the other life caused by a former life on earth. Even if it sounds hopeless, on the one hand, that every misfortune is self-inflicted, one has to say, and nevertheless that good luck and misfortune concern something else if one considers good luck and misfortune from the only entitled viewpoint.

What I mean with it, I would like to show by an example. An eighteen-year-old young man whose father was very rich led a loose life. He wanted to learn nothing, enjoyed life only, and was on the way to become a scapegrace. Then his father died, and at the same time, his property got lost. The young man was thereby forced to learn something, to work, and he became a capable person. There he had to say to himself, what seemed to be misfortune was good luck for me.

Thus, we have to say to ourselves in a misfortune, we have determined ourselves for this misfortune from a former life; we have led ourselves to this destiny. Then it is unjustified to judge a misfortune, while we experience it. One has to consider it as the result of a former imperfection. We have to say to ourselves, the soul would not be able to develop completely if it did not experience this misfortune. The misfortune can be a school of perfection.

If anybody has already here attained a knowledge that he has gained in life, and we ask him, you have experienced grief and pain, joy, and bliss—which experience would you rather give away?—If the human being contemplated about the true issue, he would answer: I accept joy and bliss gratefully; but from the sufferings, I have just received my knowledge: I would never have become that who I am.—One judges suffering different from the viewpoint of the usual sensations. Thus, one must not call the teaching of repeated lives on earth hopeless. What is given to us with this teaching? The question of immortality and the question of destiny. The question of immortality is solved because we know that this life carries the seed of the following life in itself. Thus, the whole life combines to an immortal one quite scientifically. The question of destiny is solved because destiny is necessary for development. Trying to understand death and pain means strictly speaking that you develop interest for the big riddles of life.

In 1909, a great scholar, Charles W. Eliot, held a lecture about the future of religion. He admitted that the human being has to get from the natural processes to assuming spirit and soul; however, he also demanded that the future worldview must not take death and pain as starting point. He said, the worldviews of the past talked about pain and grief. The sufferings are reduced with joy. A worldview should talk only about joys and overcome pains.—One would like to agree with him, because, indeed, it would be desirable that the human being could speak also about a joyful material life. However, if the human being wants to refrain from death and pain and says, I do not want to build up a worldview on grief and pain, I want to accept a joyful life only, then one must answer to him, even if you accept a joyful life, death and grief come automatically, they approach you, they enter into your life. Only such a worldview can really cope with the riddles, which, like spiritual science, encompasses suffering and joy because both are means of perfection. A worldview can only cope with death if it understands that the spiritual-mental core has to cast off the cover that it has around itself as the plant seed has to cast off the withering leaves and blossoms. To enter into the next life we have to develop the spiritual-mental core that has to cast off the body, has to go through death.

There one copes with death because one recognises that one can get to a new life with it. One recognises death as the root of the immortal life. Not because one copes with the world riddles grief and death that one closes the eyes before them as Charles Eliot means, but that one recognises them as necessary like luck and life. I have just said that in the present many preconditions are not yet there to penetrate into these things. I would like to quote a man who tried to settle deeply in spiritual problems who delivered some wonderful, however, also often mystically-blurred things, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949, Belgian author). He approached the question of immortality in the last time. He got to know the teaching of reincarnation and karma. You can literally read in the translation of his newest work (La mort, On Death, 1913) about that which he regards as “faith.” He regards spiritual science as faith. He says: “Since there never was a faith, which is nicer, fairer, purer, more moral, more fertile, more comforting and more probable in a certain sense than this.”—He means the “faith” of theosophy.—

“With its teaching of gradual atonement and purification it only gives a meaning to all physical and spiritual dissimilarities, to any social injustice, to any outrageous injustice of destiny. However, the goodness of a faith is no proof of its truth, although 600 million people follow this religion. Although it is closest to the origins wrapped in darkness, although it is the only religion that is not spiteful and not vulgar, it would have had to do what the others did not do: to give us unquestionable proofs. Since what it gave us up to now is only the first shade of the beginning of a proof.”

There you see such a person who has approached spiritual science who finds, however, no possibility to provide a proof—what he calls a proof.

One has to say to that first: if he does not regard anything as proof, it does not mean that this view cannot be proved, but it means that this view has not penetrated him. It is typical for the present that it is so hard for people to find their way to something that once will be a matter of course.

Secondly, one has to say, if you just find such a statement like that of the brilliant Maeterlinck and you figure it out deeper, the thought suggests itself automatically: should this view of repeated lives on earth be proven? As well as I have today discussed that—even if sketchily—I have given what you can call a rationale. However, it may be that anybody demands something of a proof that one cannot demand at all from a proof.

I would like to remind of something else. There were always people who dealt with squaring the circle. Those persons who invented proofs over and over again have gradually become a real scourge of mathematical societies. Since they received a number of such proofs every year, which all were nonsense. However, one always believed that the proof would be found once. Finally, the Paris academy did not know how to escape and cast them into the wastebasket. Nevertheless, it was not allowed to suppose that the proof could not be found. Once one could reflect on squaring the circle, now no longer, because meanwhile one proved that this proof could not at all exist. The squaring the circle is not possible. Nevertheless, there are very simple means to transform the circle into a square. One takes a paper, cuts a circle out, carves it into small pieces; and puts them into a square. Then one has not done it with calculation but with an action. One cannot calculate it, but one can go forward this way. Nevertheless, the thing is true and reasonable, but one has searched the proofs in the wrong way. Maeterlinck does it that way. He demands something that requires a wrong way of thinking.

We realise from it which difficulties even today exist to acknowledge spiritual science. We realise just in this newest work of Maeterlinck that also such a man manages hard [with these thoughts]; we realise that it is difficult to introduce spiritual science into humanity.

One cannot say, well, if the thing is in such a way as you have told, then only the spiritual researchers can enter into the spiritual world. That is not the case. To be a spiritual researcher is only necessary to search the things in the spiritual world. If one has found them, however, one has to transform them into a thought-image as I tried it in my book Occult Science. An Outline. If then this thought-image is properly created, the common sense can understand it, and then one does not need to prove it in such a way, as Maeterlinck believes it. Everybody can understand spiritual science who considers that unbiasedly which the spiritual researcher has transformed into thought-images. As you do not need to be a painter to understand a picture, you do not need to be a spiritual researcher to understand the spiritual facts that the spiritual researcher has received from the spiritual world. The common sense is able to do this if it is not bound to prejudices. The soul needs that which the spiritual researcher has transformed into a picture for its security and strength. The spiritual researcher has still nothing of the spiritual world if he only walks around there; he has something only if he transforms that which he beholds into thought-images and ideas.

Although in our time everybody can become a spiritual researcher to a certain degree as I described it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, so that he can convince himself directly of that which I have said today, it is not necessary that everybody is a spiritual researcher. It is as with a riddle that you have to solve; you have not to prove the solution if you find it out for yourself. If you face spiritual science properly, you combine with it from understanding, as well as one can find the solution of a riddle.

He who delves into spiritual science settles in it. Because the soul is destined for truth and not for error, we know if we have penetrated into the spiritual world by the messages of the spiritual researcher: we have understood it.—If the solution of a riddle is told to us, we believe not only that it is in such a way, but we also know it. This is the case with the understanding of spiritual science. It cannot be accepted only on authority, but as soon as it has been informed to us, our soul adjusts itself so that we also understand it. The spiritual researcher has a little bit more of this understanding if he has transformed the spiritual facts and truths into thought-images. Every human being who approaches spiritual science has the same for his soul; he has a new relationship to the riddles of life, to the question of death. This understanding is not only theoretic, but can serve as an elixir of life. If a human being is so educated that the spiritual-scientific concepts live in him, he will also feel towards age in such a way that he can probably understand the Goethean word “one becomes a mystic in old age.” Then he says to himself, if my limbs start withering if my body pines away, I am like the plant seed whose leaves wither. The spiritual-mental core arises in me. One will not only know about this essence, one will feel it as a force that goes through the gate of death and through a spiritual world to prepare a new life again. This solution of the question of immortality is practical for life. The human being will experience the immortal in himself.

Spiritual science will become an elixir of life this way; it will be able to give the human being strength and security. We know that today life is more complex because of the triumphs of natural sciences than it was once. We also realise that the soul sometimes needs a support that it cannot have from that which you can get spiritually from the past. Natural sciences continue to lead humanity from triumph to triumph. However, with it the human being will be torn more and more. Strong inner forces have to be there. Only spiritual science is able to strengthen the human beings enough not to get nervous by the effects of modern life. If, however, anybody really penetrates into spiritual science, he rises more and more to those viewpoints to which the true spiritual researcher rises already today.