The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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!

The point of view from which I am to speak this evening at the request of some local friends of the theosophical or spiritual scientific world view is by no means a popular one in the world and recognized in wider circles. With the exception of a few, relatively few of our contemporaries, who, from a deep knowledge and long study of the subject, have gained an intensely effective conviction in the direction of the world view under consideration, with the exception of these, this point of view is everywhere met with opposition, doubt and misunderstanding. And anyone who speaks about such a subject for the first time in a particular place does not, of course, harbor any illusions that a mere suggestion of a few remarks that can be made in a short lecture can somehow lead to conviction. This evening, I find myself in the somewhat dubious position of having to cite a variety of things from the theosophical worldview, for which there is sufficient evidence for those who delve deeper into the subject, but which cannot be cited this evening with all the necessary proof.

In accordance with the wishes of our local friends of our world view, we will start with a figure in the spiritual development of humanity who must, to a certain extent, be of interest to this part of the world in which we find ourselves, because he lived here in this city for a long time. We will then move on to a personality who, as everyone must recognize, has had a profound impact on the intellectual life of our time – Goethe. Not that it is to be shown that one could only find confirmation in the world view of Paracelsus and Goethe of what can arise from spiritual science, but it is to be shown that figures are already given in them which, precisely in their struggle and striving, show that what spiritual science or Theosophy wants has been longed for and striven for by those who, with the approach of modern spiritual development and our present time, tried in their own way to interpret the signs of the times and the needs of the human soul.

But before we can tie in with the spiritual significance of Paracelsus and Goethe and the path that development has taken from Paracelsus to Goethe, we must first characterize the point of view of Theosophy as it presents itself to us in the world today. Theosophy or spiritual science is by no means to be confused with any religious It has no intention of interfering with outward religious observances, nor of forming a religion or sect of its own. Such a thing is far from its mind, for its sources are such that it cannot in any wise impair religious beliefs or convictions.

On the other hand, the subject characterized finds its opponents namely among those who believe that they stand firmly on the ground of natural science, which is also appreciated by spiritual researchers. The greatness of the spiritual-scientific view is that, in terms of its way of thinking, it stands entirely on the ground of scientific thinking; but, starting from this scientific thinking, it wants to lead up to the highest regions of existence, which the human soul longs to know. It longs for this because man needs views of higher worlds if he wants to be secure in his work within the outer visible world in which he has to work. It is into the world of the spiritual, into that world which can also be called the supersensible world, that theosophy or spiritual science should lead. At the same time, this indicates, my dear ladies and gentlemen, what must create an enormous number of opponents for you at the present time, because even today, quietly thinking first scientists admit that what is achieved by the means of ordinary science cannot provide any information at all about the highest powers and entities that permeate and permeate this world. So it is often admitted that a spiritual world underlies our sensual one. But even if such level-headed people of the present do not want to put themselves on the level of those people who, out of materialistic thinking, want to say: Man knows that nothing is real but what surrounds us, they still often stand on the ground that they say: May a supersensible world exist behind our sensual world — but the powers of human knowledge are so limited that one has to stop before this spiritual world.

That there is a spiritual world to which man belongs with his soul and with what lives spiritually in him, just as man belongs to the outer world with his physical powers, is something that is to be made known to the world again through spiritual science. The second is that one can penetrate into this world with the same means as in natural science. It will be good, since our time is limited, to now draw attention to how man, in the way of natural science and its thinking, can look up into the spiritual world. Natural science penetrates into what it wants to explore through observation, but it also penetrates through experiment. Exploration through observation, but also through experiment, are also the means of spiritual science. Here too, it must be emphasized that spiritual science must place itself quite honestly and sincerely on the ground of a Goethean saying that anticipated the method of our science:

Mysterious in the bright day
Nature cannot be robbed of the veil,
And what it may not reveal to your mind,
You cannot force it with levers and screws.

What does such a saying mean in essence? It means that we can penetrate into the outer world of things and into the forces on which they are based with all the tools that are made in the world. And if we disregard the new instruments of natural science, we already know that in the elementary realm, the world of the infinitely small has been explored through the microscope, and the infinitely large world, the macrocosm, through the telescope. In this way, one penetrates into the world of things, but one cannot penetrate into the world of the spirit. Only the spirit of man can penetrate into the world of the spirit, and there can only be one tool: the spirit of man himself.

Now it is the case that what this spirit is in man has certain limits, that only certain things can be grasped that are bound to the intellect. You can read about what can only be touched on here, and what means more than all power and all riches, that man can be led further, that he can penetrate into completely different worlds, in my writing: “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”.

Just as one does it in the laboratory, as in the clinic, so one cannot make the human soul suitable to penetrate into the supersensible world. Only through purely spiritual processes can one do that. One understands the whole meaning of this spiritual process when one realizes the following example, which shows that one can be very clever in thinking, in the way it is done in the methods of natural science.

If you have water, you know that this water can be understood if you break it down into its two parts: hydrogen and oxygen. You know that. But to examine what hydrogen is and what oxygen is, you have to separate it, the oxygen or the hydrogen, and then you can look at it on its own.

The mind and soul are now in the human being, as he stands in the world, connected with the whole body, like oxygen and hydrogen with water. Our soul and spirit perceive only the external world through the senses, through the mind, in colors, sounds, smells and tastes. One forms a picture by discovering the laws of nature. Everything that reaches the spiritual and soul reaches it in the same way as oxygen, when it is combined with hydrogen in water. But if we want to examine it, we have to separate it from the physical just as we have to separate the oxygen from the hydrogen when we want to examine it. Now there are means to secrete this spiritual-mental: meditation, concentration. All these are means by which something is achieved in the soul that is similar to what the chemist achieves when he breaks down water into oxygen and hydrogen.

To characterize this, we will see what fills people between waking and sleeping in terms of volitional impulses, hopes and worries. All that which fills us so, if we look more closely, we will find [and we will see] that it is not there without external cause. We know that when we see the red roses, we then hold on to the image, as one has not created the image itself in the soul. This is also how we find the laws of nature through our mind. When we look at our hopes, as well as our desires and passions, we find them stimulated by external factors. How can we say that we have acquired this through our own will? We know how it happens through external influences, through unknown depths of our soul life. Our pain, our joy, our suffering and our desire are prepared by the outer world without our intervention. We have not placed the experiences in the soul at the center of the soul. That is what the spiritual researcher must undertake. When the spiritual researcher brings such ideas, which he has made himself, into his soul through pure inner will, we say “symbols”. For example, let us imagine the light emanating from some cosmic body. But we imagine this light as the body of a spiritual being, which also has a body of light, just as we have a body of flesh. If you tell me that this is a mistake, I would like to point out that when we use such images as spiritual instruments, we do not in any way succumb to the illusion that we are thereby gaining an idea of the external world. When such images are given, they are not intended to be true in the sense that our usual images of the external world are true; they have the function of serving as facts of the soul. The person needs infinite patience and energy to arrive at such images, because he must reject all thoughts that relate to the external sense world. He must become as a person is in sleep. When all external impressions are silent and the mind is also silent, while the person is surrounded by darkness and unconscious, the person who devotes years and years to inner exercises – as soon as we have our own idea of the moral content – will come to be in relation to the outside world and the rest of the soul life as he is in sleep. Only that the unconsciousness is not there. Powers arise there. Now we know that the soul is a spiritual being that can give itself content. The soul does not arrive there in platitudes, as in mysticism. Through the same kind of efforts at contemplation as a person makes externally with the help of physical tools, the soul comes to experience itself inwardly. There it comes to an experience that is as free of corporeality, of materiality, as oxygen is free of hydrogen when they are chemically separated.

It is difficult to believe in it from the outset. But it is no more difficult than believing in a new scientific finding, to believe that a person comes to know that he has spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. An initial finding that can be gained through this path is that a person becomes aware of what actually happens when we fall asleep at night. Spiritual science tells us that what remains in bed is what man has in common with the plant world, an external corporeality, but that an inner spiritual-soul core of being emerges from this corporeality. This spiritual-soul core of being is not in the physical being of man from the time of falling asleep to the time of waking up, but in his own world. Man is just not able to perceive this. But it is perceived when the human being has acquired spiritual eyes and ears. Then the person knows that he is in a world in which spiritual facts take place just as they do in our sensual world. Every night, nature separates what the spiritual researcher has obtained as consciousness, only the person does not know it. Now an important result of spiritual science comes to light: that by means of spiritual science one can give proof of something that great minds have always suspected, which is, however, regarded as a dream in the widest circles, but which will make a way through world culture, like many other things that have lived through many a contradiction in the world. I would like to draw attention to something similar. Not so long ago, mankind believed that lower animals, small lower animals, can develop from mere inanimate matter, lifeless matter. It was even believed that worms could develop from river mud. And until a few centuries ago, it could be found in books that were considered scholarly how animals developed here.

It was a great deed of the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi to have pointed out to people that nothing can develop from non-living matter, but that only living things can develop from living things. In truth, there was a living germ in this river mud, originating from living beings. The man who recognized this and first expressed it barely escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

Modern spiritual science must apply this sentence: “Living things come only from living things” to man, but must then also come to proofs that stand just as high above the sentence “Living things come only from living things” as man stands above all living things, because with man we are dealing with an individual, while all other living things present themselves in groups and species. In our time, it is quite natural that we have to speak in terms of the spiritual and soul-related in the same way that Francesco Redi does in terms of the living; that we have to say: If a person is born with certain aptitudes and abilities, and even with a certain destiny, and people then think that this is based merely on heredity, this is based merely on inaccurate observation, just as it was based on inaccurate observation that people believed that worms can develop from river mud.

Spiritual research shows, as Lessing demonstrated, that as a human being grows up, the features become more and more distinct, the abilities become more and more distinct, and the soul and spiritual express themselves more and more. Then we may say that it is not only inherited from father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, but we must trace it back to the spiritual and soul, which is laughed at in the present, but which will become established in the same way as the sentence: 'Living things can only arise from living things'. What is born with us, what shapes us from birth or from conception, comes from a previous life on earth, and what we now carry within us as our spiritual and soul essence is something that will continue to live in the spiritual world when we pass through the gate of death, to form a body again in a later life on earth. In line with the natural sciences of our time, spiritual research comes to the view of different earth lives, to that doctrine of reincarnation decried as madness and to that doctrine of karma, which says that what we experience, what we are and how we face the world can be an effect of what we have done, experienced and felt in previous earth lives. That what we do, experience and feel now will be a cause for what we will do, experience and feel in a later life on earth.

Thus the spiritual researcher divides his life between what is between birth and death and a new birth, and in this he is a spiritual being. One only attains independence, the distinctiveness of the human being, through spiritual science, when one separates the spirit. Just as little as one can recognize oxygen as long as it is connected to hydrogen in water, so little can one recognize the spirit as long as it is connected to the body. When it is separated from the body, it can be recognized. Then one also recognizes that it cannot be destroyed by the body, that it characterizes it as something lasting, as something eternal.

When we see this spiritual science or theosophy emerging in modern times, it should not be something that ties in with the old, that can be picked up here or there. For example, some people say: Yes, this spiritual research with its doctrine of reincarnation and karma is only bringing something that we find in Buddhism. But we can find that it differs in its most important and essential aspects from the doctrine that Buddhism teaches as the doctrine of reincarnation, something that it recognizes from within through the spirit. It is a mistake to think that it is based on Buddhism; no, it stands on its own ground. It comes to what it wants to recognize through the investigations of those who make their own soul into an instrument that can penetrate the spiritual world.

We can see how the best of our minds, with all their yearning, have tended towards what spiritual science today wants to pick as a ripe fruit from the tree of knowledge. And so we come to direct our gaze to a mind that we understand when we have spent a long time in the area, as I was able to do near Maria-Einsiedeln, and we know that this spirit saw the light of day, that this is the birthplace of this spirit, that Paracelsus was born there in 1493 and lived there until the age of fourteen. We find a remarkable spirit in this Paracelsus. It is so very special in the soul when you are in this nature of Maria-Einsiedeln. What surrounds us in nature reminds us of how the boy grew up in wonderful surroundings into what later confronts us so greatly in his spirit. And this awakens the wish in us: May those who will be our successors be fairer to us than we were to our ancestors. We say so lightly: Yes, actually Paracelsus had a very commendable aspiration, but what he brought to light, no one can take seriously today, we have gone beyond that. In short, in a more or less veiled sense, one says nothing other than that such a person is a drip. If only posterity would be fairer to us, because what the botanist now knows will be able to be characterized in the same way after a few centuries, because only a short-sighted person will be able to say that this will last for all eternity.

But Paracelsus is an individuality who presents himself as strange to those who want to penetrate into the higher world because he was a wiser and more characteristic expression of his time, a time that seems strange precisely in a time when it presents itself as such. Paracelsus appears to us as if from his earliest youth he was intimately connected with everything that works and lives in nature. One cannot but apply the words spoken by Goethe to Paracelsus:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by you – unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall out of her arms. She is forever creating new forms; what is there has never been, what was does not return – everything is new and yet always the same.

In a wonderful way, Goethe honors this interweaving of people with nature there. With Paracelsus, it was present only in the sense that he saw in his spirit, not just with his eyes and mind. And it was still the case that he did not need the kind of soul training that has been described today. Rather, it was his nature to perceive the spiritual forces of nature when he heard the trees rustling and felt the wind playing through the room; he never perceived in isolation what is found in nature. He said, “A soul is expressing itself, as in a human being who is not just made of papier-mâché.” Thus, Paracelsus saw in nature not only the outer appearance, but gestures for the spiritual entities that are present in a supersensible world and are active in nature. Therefore, wherever he encountered a natural fact or a natural being, he sought the spiritual and soul-like. He was predestined for this by the way he had grown up. He therefore always said later that he was proud of the way he had remained a primitive man: I did not grow up with wheat bread and figs like the Sugar Fairies, I grew up with rye porridge and coarse rye bread. From this close relationship with nature, an inner certainty arose in Paracelsus, a connection with the spiritual world. It is also a wonderful life, how the boy walked through nature at his father's hand in Maria-Einsiedeln, and how much he had already learned in the earliest days of childhood about the secrets of nature.

And how differently it touches us when we saw the man grow up, feeling so strongly this coexistence with nature that he dared to oppose what was around him. We just have to put ourselves in the shoes of the science of the time. The focus was not on the facts of nature, but rather on ancient traditions, traditions preserved in books, which were passed down. People listened to what people said, what Aristotle and Galen had taught. What I am telling you now is by no means a mere legend, to show how things were at that time. It was believed and taught by Aristotle that the nerves of the human being do not originate in the head but in the heart. Galileo had a friend who was a scholar. He pointed out to him that it could easily be demonstrated on a corpse, but his friend did not want to believe it. So Galilei took him there and showed him on the corpse that the nerves emanate from the brain, and then the learned gentleman said to him: “That may be right, you may be right, but when I see nature and ask Aristotle, I am more inclined to believe Aristotle.”

It is clear to see how enormous the efforts had to be to lead back to the source of nature. Paracelsus did not want to learn from books. Therefore, we see him traveling through all neighboring countries: England, France, Hungary, Poland, Turkey. Those who want to know about the world must not let it come to them, but go there. The world is like a large organism: it makes humanity healthy and sick. But health in France is one thing, health in Germany is another. Paracelsus wanted to read in the great book of nature. Therefore, he did not hesitate to hear what the farmers and the shepherds said, and even what the knackers said. He knew that with their elementary observation they could find something for true knowledge.

It was not surprising, therefore, that this Paracelsus, after he had, so to speak, put all the learned works behind him, according to which the others were taught, that he wanted to express what he had learned in word forms that were deeply related to what nature spoke to him. He expressed what nature allowed to shine into his soul from its spirit: he wanted to shape it, not in Latin, as was customary at the time, but in his mother tongue. That was what brought him into such stark contradiction with the scholarship of the time. When he was called to Basel, he not only taught what he had observed himself, but also dared to teach it in German. And when he went against other customs of the time, he was no longer tolerated. His wonderful teaching, so to speak, broke his neck. He had performed cures that were appreciated by the respected people of the time, esteemed by Erasmus and other great minds, but never had he confronted his patients in such a way that he would have seen a fee. It was the spiritual and mental state of the people that he was referring to. He never just saw what was on the outside. He said, “My main remedy is love. I immerse myself in my patients with love and feeling; and that which was in the body came to life in the soul of Paracelsus. When the image of the inner illness of a person met with the own soul of Paracelsus, then the image of the plant or mineral that he had to process arose in his soul as if by itself. This is why he had his great and significant successes. Even if, in a certain sense, he could be seen by people as a tramp, he was a great benefactor of humanity.

But that did not prevent something like the following from happening. A great gentleman went to Paracelsus to be cured by him. A fee of one hundred thalers had been agreed upon. Paracelsus prescribed a remedy. After taking it three times, the gentleman recovered. But then he said: “Yes, if I have recovered so quickly, it is not worth a hundred thalers.” And although Paracelsus did not usually attach particular importance to payment, Paracelsus flew into a rage and had “evil notes” printed, as it was said at the time, or as they say today: pamphlets. He had them passed around. A friend then advised him to flee, and he lost his job.

But that was how he usually felt about life. On the surface, the story of his death may be a legend, but the doctors had hated him so much that it does not seem incredible that an individual in Salzburg pushed him down a slope and killed him – in 1541. Since Paracelsus was a very temperamental person and represented with all his enthusiasm what he experienced, it can be said that this has an inner truth, especially when we look at the last picture of Paracelsus with his furrowed face, then we have the feeling: He met a tragic end because what lived in greatness in his soul was not compatible with the smallness of his time.

When we consider how he viewed the times, we can say: He has not yet been able to penetrate to the teaching of repeated earthly lives, but he knows that the human being standing before me is not a being that exhausts itself with its physical existence, but a being that has an inner nature, is connected to inner invisible forces of a supersensible world. Yes, he said: Man can only be recognized if he is seen as a threefold being. First of all, there is the human being who can be known with the physical mind. But above this physical world there is another world that can only be seen with the eyes of the spirit. This human being is taken from the astral or sidereal world, as Paracelsus also called it. He then further distinguishes the highest human being, who belongs to the purely spiritual world. There Paracelsus saw two others interwoven into our sensory world, and the human being interwoven with these two others, and knew that the human being belongs in the spiritual-soul world.

And then Paracelsus said again: When we look at this human being, the way he thinks and ponders must indeed present himself as a spiritual-soul being. When he saw how a choice was made within his organism regarding food, for Paracelsus this was a sign that between the person who thinks and researches and the one who presents himself in the body, there is still another one present. He speaks of a spiritual body that is taken along when a person passes through the gate of death.

Paracelsus calls this inner man the inner alchemist because he transforms the substances of nature so that they can become a builder of the human being. And Paracelsus is aware that he must not only use external means if he wants to heal people, but that the supernatural powers are at work when a person is healthy or sick. Therefore, he not only says: “The person must have passed a nature test, but he is also a pious man.” He knows that if he wants to heal people, he must penetrate to the deepest hidden causes of the illnesses. Therefore, when I am standing in front of a sick person, I know that I have a preparation, but more than anything else, if I can let something overflow in my soul, that is my hope. That in the spiritual course of events, what I have gained as a spiritual experience can also flow in, that the power of my hope, which completely permeates me, can flow out.

There is still much to be said, but one can divert one's gaze from Paracelsus in order to get to know him in yet another way, in a later, even more awakened spirit, in Goethe. And here, the figure of Paracelsus stands quite remarkably beside the contemplation of Goethe, as if Paracelsus were looking over Goethe's shoulder, and especially when one devotes oneself to the contemplation of Goethe's life's work, “Faust”. It is remarkable that in terms of external characteristics, Faust bears some similarity to Paracelsus. But this is understandable. Besides the sixteenth-century Faust, Goethe always had the figure of Paracelsus before his soul. And just as Paracelsus once placed the ancient Galen to one side, so we read of this Faust: He put the Bible behind the bench for a while and became a man who lives in the world. Paracelsus did not put the Bible behind the bench, but he turned away from the old medical books and wanted to gain independent knowledge. And when we follow Faust, in everything as Goethe describes him, how he goes out with the country people and how he is remembered by them, how his father taught him as a boy, the image of this boy Paracelsus, holding his father's hand, comes to mind. And one has the same image as Goethe gave in the walk before the gate.

But one thing is still very strange. Paracelsus lived to be 48 years old. He passed through the gate of death after a life of rich inwardness, and if he had had good health, not affected by the smallness of his time, he would also have had to say: There you stand alone; which is the ideal of “Faust.” Can we not imagine Faust as being as old as Paracelsus when he died? There is nothing to prevent us. But while Paracelsus would have stood there through his rich, precious, appreciative inner life, through the harmonious balance with all the longings of the world, Faust stands before us – at about the same age at which Paracelsus stands at the height of eminent satisfaction and knowledge, Faust stands before us in despair. Paracelsus could not have stood there with the words:

“I have now, alas! studied philosophy,
jurisprudence and medicine,
and unfortunately also theology
with great endeavor.

Paracelsus would have said: Thank God that I soon ran away when I was supposed to study all these things, and went to nature. Therefore, he had a different relationship to the great things of nature than Faust. No one would have said of him:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me!

Rather, he was akin to the spirit that

In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth!

and from which Faust turns away in horror:

terrible face.

And so Faust stands, despairing of what science can give us, yet unable to find what he seeks, having surrendered to magic. We can, of course, only touch on this, as time is of the essence.

Goethe lets his Faust go through everything that man can achieve through his aberration, he lets him go through all the aberrations that man goes through when he does not enter the spiritual world in the right way, and he presents this particularly in the witches' kitchen. The one depicted in Faust does not arrive in a harmonious way at what Goethe particularly desired in his “Faust”. Only Goethe penetrates more and more, especially through his Italian travels, more and more into what nature gives him.

Eminent Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything
I asked for. You did not turn
your face to me in the fire for nothing.
You gave me the magnificent nature for my kingdom,
the strength to feel and enjoy it. You do not
allow only cold, astonished visitors,
grant me to look into their deep chests,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
before me, and teach me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.

This interweaving with the spirit of nature is something that Faust possesses: but he has not yet reached the point where he can recognize the spirit in a mature form. Therefore, Goethe must depict the recognition of the higher world in the characterized form of the witches' kitchen. But we move on and see how he — Faust — arrives at the imperial court and how he has to amuse the emperor in all sorts of ways, and finally has to bring him Helen from the underworld. We see how Goethe lets him descend into the realm of the mothers, that is, into the world of the soul and spirit. But at first he only brings up the image of Helen. But in the course of time he must bring up not only the image that resembles the spiritual Helen, but also what she really is in the spiritual world. What is needed for this? That he gets to know the right connection between body, soul and spirit, namely the physical body, the etheric and the astral body in the spiritual-scientific sense. Just as Faust initially fails to hold on to Helena, but first has to connect body, soul and spirit, so this soul must first be presented in such a way that the body can penetrate into it from one side and the spirit - homunculus - from the other. Goethe uses a strange image here, which people have studied a lot about:

He is not lacking in spiritual qualities,
but all too much in the tangible and practical.

And Thales advises him:

Give in to the praiseworthy desire
to start creation from the beginning!
Be ready for rapid action!
You move according to eternal norms,
through a thousand and one forms,
and you have time until the human being.

That he - the homunculus - is to become human is clearly stated. Furthermore:

Come with me spiritually into the moist expanse,
There you live equally in length and breadth,
You can move about here as you like;
Just do not strive for higher orders.

The comments come entirely from the text because the emphasis is on the word “order” as if he had been striving to receive an order. But it is a very simple matter. As so often, Goethe was speaking his Frankfurt German, and people also printed it that way, but it should simply be written Orten: “But do not strive for higher places”. When he arrives at the classical Walpurgis Night, the Homunculus, who is not lacking in spiritual qualities, is advised that he must pass through such realms of nature, through what natural science teaches, that man develops through the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms to human corporeality.

You have to start at the very bottom. The passage through the greenness of the plant world is depicted to characterize what a person experiences when they reach the plant stage, and Homunculus says:

It grunelt so.

And now to come to what is brought about in man through love, we experience the end of the second act, where Homunculus, who has progressed so far that he has the powers of the three kingdoms of nature within him – this is shown to us by the allusion to the elements – is dashed against the shell of Galathea. Then, when the spiritual has become so embodied through the three realms, this appears to us as the image of Helen.

Then Goethe shows further how Faust develops. It is wonderful how he demonstrates how Faust comes to ever deeper realization, which Goethe shows as complete only at the moment when the eyes go blind. Darkness outside, but inside the light shines. Through experiencing the spiritual world, he can become free from the external world. He shows us this by the fact that Faust only experiences inner vision when the outer light goes out. And yet, Goethe should not present Faust as Paracelsus. Faust falls into misfortune: He can only come to the realization of the spiritual light by dying to the external, by becoming a completely different person. Paracelsus was able to lead his enemies to their deaths.

Why did such a transformation of human research and forms of knowledge occur on the path from Paracelsus to Goethe? The answer is provided by an event that occurred a few years after Paracelsus passed through the gates of death, and which was experienced as a major event on the path from Paracelsus to Goethe. The world was introduced to the Copernican system of the world. It has not yet been realized what this means. Until then, the earth had been regarded as the center around which the firmament moves. Now, through Nicolaus Copernicus, the ground was taken from under people's feet, so to speak. There has been no greater upheaval in the world view. What was the fruit of such a change? That from now on such a path of the soul could lead to direct knowledge of the spiritual world. Until now, a supreme being had provided a worldview that recognizes that which is in physical space as the only thing, and presents it as if the senses recognize it. A sensual process was presented as the decisive one, and the solution to the riddles of the world was sought in external facts.

Paracelsus now faced the world unperturbed by such a materialistic solution to the world's riddles and acquired what he could recognize through direct observation of nature. But in his time, the solution of the world's riddles was otherwise sought in external facts and sensory processes. But this meant that the power to direct oneself to the spiritual in the innermost part of the soul was suppressed for a while in the innermost part of the soul.

Faust cannot gain any satisfaction from his yearning for the spiritual world. The human soul had been taught different ways of thinking. Faust faced spiritual science with despair, because the first thing that reveals itself as spirit to him is: “Don't talk to me like that!” – which is how Goethe made Faust a person of the eighteenth century. Goethe had to experience in Faust what he was to attain in the spiritual world. In this way, Goethe also characterized our immediate present, our time.

Goethe made his Faust character a tragic one, saying: In our time, man has not yet reached the point where he can penetrate into the spiritual world without losing the context of the world of sense. Faust had to lose his eye.

Spiritual science or theosophy, however, has a kind of fulfillment of what Goethe characterized as the task of modern times, because spiritual science wants to be a balance between what modern science has brought about as facts and what the spirit can be as a fact of the spiritual world. Man needs this, and we need nothing more as proof of this than the correctly understood Faust figure. Man needs not only his theory of the development of external facts, but he needs a knowledge of what is the bearer, the creator of the external world. And so, in addition to the law of Francesco Redi, that living things can only arise from living things, there is another: spiritual and soul forces in present earthly life arise out of spiritual and soul forces in earlier earthly lives.

Thus, spiritual-mental aspects will appear as the very legitimate continuation of natural science, as it were a re-embodiment of a Faust. A Faust who does not need to go blind, and yet has spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, so that it will be as we can read in Goethe:

Hark! Listen to the storm of the hours!
The new day is already born for the ears of the spirit.
Rock gates creak and rattle,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter.

What a roar brings the light!
It drums, it trumpets,
the eye blinks and the ear is amazed,
unheard-of things are not heard.

Thus Paracelsus appears as a personality that we still find in ancient times, where people still had an old heritage, where the spiritual powers of vision could draw from the spiritual world. But the time came when the spiritual powers of the soul were obscured by external materialism. Now we are at a time when they will develop again, and science will be warmed and enlightened by the assurance, hope and fulfillment of all that we strive for in our thoughts and meditations. Thus science will become much more useful, but spiritual science or theosophy will teach that man, with his innermost core of being, belongs to the spiritual world.

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.

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.

Today I would like to return to much of that which I said in previous lectures and I would like to amplify, in the first place, certain ideas about the inner being of man, about the soul spiritual nature of man. You know that we speak in the first place of that particular member of the inner human being which we designate with an abstract expression as the ether body. Whereas the physical body of man is perceptible for the external senses to external science which is bound to the intellect and its observation, we know that the ether body is something of a super-sensible nature. Furthermore, we speak of the next member of human nature as the so-called astral body. We remember how often we have emphasized the fact that one cannot say that the inner being of man is completely unknown to us. Indeed, man perceives within his bodily existence in the physical world, he perceives his thinking, his feeling and his willing. He experiences it inwardly and he experiences this thinking, feeling and willing as being radiated through by his “I”. One can say that man inwardly perceives this thinking, feeling and willing. However one cannot say that you can actually perceive your astral body. Also one cannot say that you really perceive your “I”, because this “I”—and we have brought this to your attention in the course of these lectures—this “I” of which man speaks falls back into unconsciousness with every sleep and is actually only a reflection of the real “I”. Therefore, in a certain sense, it can he concluded also that this “I” with this thinking, feeling and willing, is in a similar way only an expression, a manifestation of the actual inner being of man, just as with the physical body what you have is a manifestation, an expression of the spiritual nature of that which we designate as the etheric body.

Now, man is obviously happy when, in reference to any given domain of knowledge, he has such a very tightly fit division which he can neatly preserve. Therefore people are so happy when they know that man consists of physical body, ether body, astral body and ego. However, in the man—and I want to emphasize this—all you have with these four expressions are just four words, nothing more than four expressions. And when you advance to real contemplation, then you must, in a certain sense, always pass beyond the borders which are so easily established by these expressions. you speak in a general way, to be sure you may say: Thinking, feeling and willing proceed in the astral body. However that is really only a one-sided abstract way in which the fact of thinking exhausts itself. Just as we as human beings stand in the first place within the physical world, so, to be sure, the impulse to the thinking which exist in the astral body is that impulse which proceeds from the “I”. However, the thinking develops itself as a thought only through the fact that we have the mobile ether body. Our whole thinking would remain unconscious to us as physical human beings if the astral body did not send its impulses into the ether body and the ether body in its mobility would be unable to take up the thought impulses of the astral body. And every thought again would simply just pass over in a transitory way without having the possibility of a memory if we did not have a physical body. You cannot say the physical body is the carrier of the memory. No. The carrier of the memory is the ether body. However, for us human beings, if our thinking were to merely flow along just as dreams flow along and if it were not possible to have it engraved in the physical materiality of the physical body, then our thoughts here in the physical body can assert themselves through the fact that we have this physical body. Thus you see how this thinking is actually a very complicated process. It has its impulses in the astral body, actually already in the “I”. These impulses continue themselves as forces in the ether body, call forth the thoughts, and the thoughts in their turn engrave their tracks into the physical body. And through the fact that they are imprinted, you can always fetch them out of the memory again during the physical life.

Now, just consider—and we have often spoken about this situation—what the memory actually represents for man here in the physical body. As you know, man has experiences. He works these experiences over; then he goes away from these experiences. There comes a time when such experiences relate themselves to the human being as if we knew nothing about them, as if we no longer stood in relationship to them. However, there again comes the time when we are able to fetch the thought experiences out of our inner being. That which we have already experienced is present for us again in in the form of memory. Now, in the first place, man must believe the following. This process of memory belongs to him; it belongs to his soul. When we as human beings walk through the streets and associate in society, someone outside of us with external physical sense organs cannot really know what is hidden within us as our memories, that is, he cannot know what sort of experiences we have had. We carry these in our soul. I might say the sheaths of the physical body are so arranged that they cover over our soul for us. It is as if true physical body is a mantle which hides our soul and in which we can preserve these memories. They belong to us and they work in us through our whole life. We make the outside world into our own inner world. Then we carry this external world in the form of memories with us through existence. We carry these memories as our own possession.

Now, it would be a great mistake if one were to believe that this carrying of the memories through life really comprises the whole process. This is not the case. Darwin, for example, had the correct idea when he investigated to see if rain worms had a special task, and he discovered that rain worms are not there just to merely enjoy their existence but have the very important task of making the soil fruitful as they crawl through it. These are things which natural science certainly admits and this is a ground upon which natural science believes itself secure. Now, natural science, in so far as it does that, should not be criticized because it is really good when they enter into certain single details. However, the problem is that one builds world views upon such details. Obviously you must consider the saying about a man who digs for treasure and is happy when he finds rain worms. However, from the spiritual point of view one can ask the following: Was this activity through which man forms thoughts during his whole life and preserves them in his memory, has that any significance for the whole cosmos? Is this process of memorization only a process which occurs in ourselves? Now, the materialist says that obviously that is a process which only occurs in us. With death we put our physical body in the grave and then that which we have preserved in us as memory is obviously something which is rarely an extinguished thing. We are not going to enter into such a materialistic reply. We want to ask the question: Is our thinking process and memory process something quite different from that which occurs in our memory?

So it is. While we think, while we form thoughts and out of our experiences preserve these memories, during this time we occupy ourselves not only with our thoughts, but the whole world of the Third Hierarchy occupies themselves with our thoughts, the Hierarchies of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. When we think, we think not only for ourselves, we think and we preserve our thoughts in our inner being in order that a field of activity should be created for Angels, Archangels and Archai. Whereas we believe that our thoughts live only in us, actually the three spiritual Hierarchies occupy themselves with our thoughts. The very smallest of that which we propose with our thoughts is something which concerns us. Even when we have forgotten the thoughts, they are in us and we again call these thoughts out of our memory. Just as we as human beings occupy ourselves on earth with our machines or with eating and drinking, so do the Angels, Archangels and Archai occupy themselves with a web which is formed from our thoughts; they work continuously on our thoughts. It is thus only the side of the activity of the thoughts which is turned toward us that we know about. There is in addition another side and this other side of our thoughts so appears for spiritual perception that we can say the following. While our thoughts which we have in our inner being occupy themselves from outside, the above mentioned spiritual beings weave these thoughts so that we, when we achieve this knowledge, can say the following of ourselves. Our thought process is acutely not something unnecessary for the world. Our thought process is something not only for ourselves, but it stands within the whole world development and contributes to it so that something new can continuously be woven into the world development. If we were not born as single individuals, if we had no thoughts, if we had not preserved memories in us, then at our death, that portion which would have been able to be woven out of our thoughts, that which we ourselves do not weave, that would be lost for world development. And when we pass through the portal of death—the elementary process I have often described—we put aside our physical body and this is given over to the elements of the earth in various ways. Our ether body remains with for a short time. It represents itself to our inner being as a great life tableau which is in front of us. Everything of that which we otherwise remember, that which has gone on in a time continuum becomes as a mighty panorama all at once, a mighty life tableau placed around us. Then, however, our etheric being is separated from us. It is, as it were, drawn out of us.

Now, who does that? Indeed, that is done by the beings of the three Hierarchies we mentioned and they weave it gradually into the cosmic ether so that after our death this web of the cosmic ether consists of that which we during our life between birth and death have added to it, also that which was worked over by the beings of these next three Hierarchies. The new webbing is taken away from us and is interwoven with the whole cosmic all. Every human being has a knowledge of this when he passes through the portal of death, since, for the human being after he has passed the portal of death, something enters which can be described in no other way than as follows. Now, you must see that the ether body is separated from him; his etheric web has been interwoven into the universal cosmic ether. That which he has carried in himself all through his life is now outside, it is external. And that is important. That person who knows these things indicates it with a short phrase which one should call forth before the soul in a meditative way. It can be described through a very essential process by saying the following. The inner being becomes the external, which means that which we always have felt as our thought life becomes external world. Just as here we are surrounded by rivers, mountains, trees, clouds, stones and stars, so after our death something occurs which one can characterize in following way. That which during our physical life has lived in in us now has become a portion of the external world so that it can now be perceived by us.

In addition to this ether body, we have the world of our astral body. This world of our astral body comes to our consciousness, in the first place, so that we feel it as thinking; we feel the world of the astral body as thinking. However, the thinking I have precisely characterized, indeed, sends its impulses down into the ether body so that the thinking itself cannot be conscious in the astral body. You can only become aware of feeling and willing in your astral body. You cannot be conscious of your thinking there, but you become aware of your thoughts in the ether body. It is very important that feeling and willing can become conscious for us, it has to go down into the ether body. Throughout our whole life we feel and we will, we foster feelings about certain experiences. These are processes in our astral body. That again is a very characteristic weaving, but now not just a web in thoughts as I have formerly described it but a web of perception, feeling and impulses toward willing. Higher beings also work in that which we have throughout our whole life as feeling and will impulses. Just as in our thinking beings of the Third Hierarchy work, so there work in our feeling and our will impulses the beings of the Second Hierarchy including the Thrones.

Just imagine how we stand in the world when we know these things how we feel ourselves inserted into the spiritual world. On the one side we say to ourselves: Man, you go through the world thinking, but your thinking in so far as it is turned to its inner side is only the one side of thinking. That which you think is substance for the work of the Angels, the Archangels, the Archai. In so far as we feel and will, we create substance for the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Wisdom, the Thrones, or the Spirits of Will. Just as the human being cultivates the earth and works it over, he does not know that while he is working over the earth that it is only one side which is worked over, but on the other side actual processes are occurring which he does not know of with his normal consciousness. In a similar way, man believes that his feelings and his will impulses merely belong to him, but they are a field for the work of the indicated beings of the hierarchies.We are truly not merely physical body that only stands in connection with our environment, but we are also there as soul spiritual beings so this soul spiritual man can stand in connection with the environment. Normally one does not think about how our physical body belongs to our whole environment. But this is easy to work out.

In any given moment when you visualize yourself in a bodily way, you possess not only bones, blood, muscles and so on, but you also have a certain stream of air in yourself which you have breathed in and which you will soon breathe out. This belongs to you while you have breathed in; that was out of you in the previous moment, in the next moment it is again outside you. Just think of yourself without this stream of air. It is impossible to think in this way without realizing that you have this stream of air within you. It belongs to us, it is nonsense to think of the physical body as if it were only enclosed within the skin; whereas you are pointed to the fact that you live with the whole atmosphere environment. However, just as we through our physical body live with the atmosphere environment, with the warmth environment, so do we live with the environment of the Hierarchy of the Third Order through our thoughts and we live through our feelings and will impulses with the Beings of the Hierarchies of the Second Order and with the Spirits of Will. This is how we stand within the cosmic all.

Let us now turn our attention to passing through of the portal of death. We can then say the following. When man passes through the portal of death, we know that when his ether body is taken away from him, when the interweaving into the universal cosmic ether begins, then he has to live backwards three times as fast as he experienced during physical life between birth and death, in so far as during that period he perceives the effects of his experiences between birth and death. Thus, that which we have experienced in us during our physical life we do not perceive them just because we have perceived it here in physical life. We will perceive the feeling out of which we have executed an injury to someone else, not our feeling but that of the other person, that which we have lived through here in the physical life stands as a causative factor there and carries in itself the karma. We have not experienced the impression that our injury has made upon the other person's soul. We experience here, in the main, not that which our deeds, our actions, our thoughts have resulted in effects in the external world, we do not experience that here in the physical life, but we do experience that when we go through our backward vision in the time between death and a new birth. There we live through everything that is outside, not in the way it was experienced by us but in the way in which it was experienced by the external world with which we were in contact. Really everything which other human beings have perceived, have felt through our thoughts, through our words, we live through and because of this the external must become the inner in our new state of post mortem. Through this experience the effects of our thoughts, the effects of our deeds in life, the external effects now become inner which means something which we inwardly experience, something which is experienced by the spirit human being after death, because now he must live himself into that world in which he lived unconsciously during the time of his life.

In so far as he has an astral body, and the Spirits of the Second Hierarchy have worked upon his astral body, he must now live into that world in which his astral body gradually dissolves itself into the external, but now he experiences the external in an inward way, he really lives through it inwardly. He must learn between death and a new birth to work in that sphere in which the Spirits of the Second Hierarchy work, in which they prepare that which again can lead into a new incarnation. And, indeed, then we know that after the astral body has dissolved into the external world and man lives on further with his actual inner being in the time between death and a new birth.

When we want to understand something of this life between death and a new birth, we must make many points of view valid for ourselves. Our goal is not to be one-sided but to make various viewpoints valid so that gradually a comprehensive understanding of these processes can open themselves to us. Thus you must keep the following in view. Just as man through birth enters natural processes which around him in the mineral world, in the plant world, in the animal world, so he enters into a world where things are happening around him with the beings of the Hierarchies which we have mentioned. He is, as it were, enfolded into their activities and that which he has brought with him for them, they weave together so that it can become the foundation for his next incarnation.

You must realize that in this it is, I might say, very difficult to give our present age the correct concepts and ideas for reasons which I have often presented. The present age works precisely with the most reversed concepts in this realm. When a human being enters through birth into physical existence, he enters with certain characteristics. The present time speaks purely of heredity, and means physical heredity, and one speaks of this physical heredity in the following way. A man shows this or that characteristic. Therefore to find out where those characteristics come from, you must look for its ancestors. For example, there is a very industriously worked over book about Goethe, in which Goethe's characteristics are so presented that it has looked for one thing in this ancestor, another in that, one characteristic from a great-great grandmother, another from a great-great grandfather, and so on, as if everything that Goethe had had came to him through heredity. I have often said the following: When you say that the child has the qualities of his parents, it is just as wise a saying as a human being is wet when he falls into water and is then drawn out of it. Naturally he is wet from the water when he is taken out. In the same way he has the properties of his ancestors in him, because they have been led through his soul. There is no greater wisdom there either. Therefore to go back to causes is, for the logical aspect ultimately the most logical, because one can say the following: One wants to prove that the soul-spiritual properties come through heredity in so far as one shows that a genius like Goethe has the same characteristics which his ancestors had, but as we have said, it is no cleverer than the assertion that the man is wet after he has fallen into water.

Now, if you really want to prove that the properties of genius are concerned with heredity, then you would have to show how the descendents of a genius show the properties of the genius. In other words, if you have to prove that genius can be transmitted by heredity, that would be a proof. Look at Goethe's son. See if he has Goethe's genius. Now, behind all this there is a much deeper process. Just imagine this hypothesis, for example, just imagine that there are beings who are not able to see human beings and just imagine that one of these beings who cannot see the activity of man goes to Berlin and sees how watches are being produced everywhere. This being obviously has to say to himself: These watches produce themselves. And that is no wiser than people who say that you do not need any additional explanations about how human beings come into the world; that that occurs quite of itself in the course of propagation in the generations. These ideas can only be held by people who cannot see human beings, who cannot see that that which occurs here in the physical world is only the external expression of an activity which continuously flows down out of the spiritual world just as the activity of the watchmakers flow into the watches. Therefore that which precisely occurs here upon the earth, of which human beings in their foolishness believe that they occur completely for themselves, that is only an external physical process which is directed just as the activity of making watches is a directing activity, so the moment which I have called the Midnight Hour of Existence in my mystery dramas, from that moment on which lies within the middle between death and a new birth, there already begins that activity of the spiritual world, as it were, of inclining itself into the physical in order after centuries to lead the human being into physical existence. When man goes through the portal of death, there is the activity of a working over of that which the human being experienced in his last life which is exercised in the spiritual world. All this occurs in the first half of the life between death and a new birth. However, in the second half of the life between death and a new birth,
the preparation for the next incarnation begins. And now the following can be said about the situation.

That person who is born has ancestors; ancestors again have ancestors; these ancestors have ancestors. Just see how far this goes when you go through 30 generations. However, if you go through 30 generations, you will find that in many people, as it were, there already is the tendency which ultimately leads to the fact that man A is brought together with woman B and then they bring another human being into existence. And if the whole thing did not so occur through 30 generations, if the people had not married, A not coming together with B, therefore that human being who descends into a physical incarnation would not have ultimately been produced. From the whole working together of many people which finally peaks into two, the single individuality of the human being has been a participation in the spiritual world. Thus when we see that the son has the characteristic of his father, of his mother and then again the father's and mother's characteristics are led back to grandfathers and grandmothers and great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers and so on, that is because there has previously been an influence exerted on these great-great-grandparents through 30 generations by that individuality who then later on after many centuries wants to be born and this has all been determined according to the plan to find himself as a human being through the generations. All that is a participating activity and the fact that you have similar inherited characteristics emanates from the fact that through the generations that power works down through the spiritual world which finally comes to appearance in a certain human being. This individuality already works in a father, a mother, a grandfather, a grandmother, a great-grandfather, a great-grandmother, and ultimately one gets the qualities which come to expression. It is not the physical stream which makes the inheritance, but the physical stream is inserted in this way through inheritance. Therefore, precisely the reverse of that which the so-called natural scientific view maintains, is true. In order that Goethe ultimately comes to appearance through Johann Casper Goethe and his Frau Eiya, Beings of the Second Hierarchy have worked through 30 generations in such a way that Goethe could ultimately be produced. Naturally this applies not only for genius but for eveiy single human being.

Now, you can say that this is difficult to imagine, and you could also ask yourself how is this compatable with human freedom when we have already been determined 30 generations before we descend. I know it is very complicated, but you must remember that this is complicated for the normal consciousness which has been apportioned to you during your earth existence. You will remember that what we are dealing with is not only the individual himself, but the individual in community with the Spirits of Form, with the Spirits of Motion, and so on, and so it is worked out in such a way that freedom is not influenced. Naturally this works in such a way that it corresponds to the working of these Higher Hierarchies. The situation is just like that.

There is worked together that which we are able to give over as thoughts to the cosmic ether with that which we express during our earth existence in our feeling life and in our will life. Therefore Spiritual Science is not supposed to be a totality of knowledge, but above all it should be capable of bringing forth a certain soul mood. I have attempted to indicate this soul mood in the first part of my second mystery play, in the meeting between Capaius and Benedictus, when the goal is that man as a complete human being lives here upon the earth. In order that that can happen, Gods and Gods, Spirits and Spirits work together so that the human being is a goal for Gods and Gods, Spirits and Spirits. This feeling, I might say, the thankfulness, the gratitude to the spiritual universe, this feeling to know ourselves in the spiritual universe must flow into our souls through spiritual science. This must become as natural for us as it is natural for us to know about the connections with the physical world.

Science today has advanced so far that everyone is aware of the fact that man cannot just live on his own resources but needs the atmosphere, that he is a menber of the whole environment. When he is hungry or thirsty, then he notices that the external world is necessary in a physical way for his existence, that he stands within the external world, within a universal process. However, man also stands in a universal process in the spiritual world. When he thinks he stands within Angels, Archangels, Archai, and in so far as he feels and he wills, he then stands in a spiritual connection with the next higher Hierarchy. Just as the air stretches itself into man's physical body in so far as his physical nature is concerned, so the spiritual aspect of the activity of the so-called Hierarchies works in his soul.

Quite often you get a materialist raising the objection: Indeed, it may be true that a spiritual world does exist, but it does not help us to know anything about this spiritual world even when you tell us that thinking, feeling and willing stand in connection with the Higher Hierarchies. It does not matter, because in order to think we do not need to know about these Higher Hierarchies. We already think in the world without knowing anything about them. Man believes, thank God. If he had to wait until he knew about the breathing process in a theoretical way before breathing, then he also would not be able to think unless he knew about the breathing process. You think without knowing anything about these Higher Hierarchies. However, let us present a counter question. Can you really think without one having that? At the present time you see that people work with the inheritance of the ancient times; they work with that which they have inherited and they are still inventing machines from that. All this is an inheritance of an earlier age. Much of what we accomplish today is a result of what we have inherited in the past.

Recently we were in Hamburg and saw a picture done in the 13th, 14th century by Master Bertram and I want to tell you something about this picture. Let us go back to the biblical story of the fall into sin which we in spiritual science call Luciferic temptation. When a painter in our modern age paints the fall into sin, so he would paint Adam and Eve on either side of the tree and then, naturally, a serpent on the tree. According to whether he is an Impressionist, Cubist, Expressionist or any other ‘ist’, he would more or less paint this; he would paint it beautifully. But he will paint a serpent looking like any serpent which crawls in the grass; that is realism. But is it realism? Is it actually not realism? I cannot imagine any simple woman being deceived by such a serpent. We know from spiritual science that Lucifer is a being who had remained behind at the Moon development. Lucifer, during the Moon evolution, could not be seen with physical eyes such as we have upon earth, so the serpent could not be something which could be seen with the physical eye, not the serpent referred to in the Garden of Eden. Lucifer had to be seen inwardly. When you study the human being more accurately, you can see in every skeleton that it consists of two portions. You have the skull and the spinal column attached to it with the brain inside the skull and the spinal fluid in the spinal column, and the rest of the human being is attached to it. You can consider the human being only as being attached to it. You have the head like a small cosmic sphere attached to the whole thing. You can also say: Thank God that man through his own wisdom cannot contribute to this head coming into existence through his birth. It would look very strange if the anatomists and physiologists could contribute anything to produce this wonderful structure of the human head. This human head comes into existence between death and a new birth as in a large sphere which we could compare with our blue heavenly sphere, that in which our karma is woven and is an organization which as it goes towards incarnation, becomes smaller and smaller and then unites itself with the mother. That which then becomes our head is woven through by countless beings of the Hierarchies out of the whole cosmic all. It is a wisdom of the most immense magnitude, a wisdom which has embodied in it all the experiences. Our head is an inheritance of the Saturn, Sun and Moon incarnations. The earth with all its forces could not have been able to produce this head. It is only possible to bring into existence that which is added to the head, not the head with all its forces. The other part of the human being, not the head with the spinal column, but that which is attached to it actually is earth man. Now, how would a person with inner vision try to represent Lucifer actually as a Moon being? One would represent a human head and would attach something like a boned up spinal column to it, something like a serpent; and that is how Master Bertram in the 13th, 14th century presents Lucifer there on the tree between Adam and Even. In the Hamburg Museum you can see the picture represented just like that. So you see that the painter who painted this picture has the living knowledge
of the configuration of Lucifer within him. You can also see that it was not so very long ago that we still had the ancient atavistic clairvoyance which has now been lost.

I would like to present the situation from another side in order that you will see the assertion of the materialist who says that you do not need to know anything that comes out of the spiritual world, that all you need to do is use your thinking and feeling just as we breathe in the atmosphere and take in food for our hunger and thirst. I have often talked about the very significant criminal anthropologist, Benedict. He was the first to investigate the brains of criminals, naturally, after their death. He analyzed these brains in order to see if he could find some connections between the structure of the brain and criminal qualities. Benedict found that they all have a common characteristic, namely, their rear head lobes were too short and did not completely cover up the small brain. Just imagine this: the common qulaities of the criminal brain is to have a too short rear head lobe just as the apes also have it, something which does not cover the small brain. Obviously this actually is a property of the physical body and so from that you can conclude that there are two types of people being born, those having a correct rear head lobe and those with too short lobes. Those who have a correct rear head lobe do not become criminals and those with too short rear head lobes must become criminals. From the standpoint of the materialistic world conception you cannot raise any objection against this knowledge, but then all talk about morality is nonsense. Can we really punish people when we have to say that they have to be criminals because they have too short rear head lobes. You can see how materialism and all that can come about from it can gradually degenerate. You must extinguish all sorts of spiritual aspects from the social, ethical and juristic life, otherwise we are living in a complete lie, because there can be no objection against the facts which have just been presented.

Now, let us see how we approach the situation. To be sure, there are those who have correct rear head lobes and those with too short rear head lobes. However, there is an ether body there which can be developed in a quite different way and is much more mobile than the physical body. Behind the rear head lobes of the physical body there are the rear head lobes of the ether body and the human beings of the future will have to learn to distinguish between children who have too short rear head lobes and those who have longer rear head lobes. The educators will have to know in what characteristics a short hind head lobe manifests itself in the earliest years of childhood. These children will have to be educated in such a way that the ether lobes can be correspondingly developed and so form a counter weight. Then through the fact that you have developed the ether lobes strongly, they will prevent the damage which the physical lobes can produce when they are too short. So we can see that if spiritual science does not enter into our civilization, then as a result of materialism, all morality, all ethics, all justice would be meaningless. The spiritual would be extinguished from mankind's experience.

Recently in my public lectues I spoke about a forgotten thinker, Karl Christian Plunk. I do not intend to defend everything which Karl Christian Plunk has written in a dogmatic way. However, I have showed you how he worked out of a very deep spiritual consciousness and that he had a certain spiritual world conception. He died in 1880. Very few people bothered about his books. In 1912 the book entitled A TESTAMENT OF A GERMAN by Karl Christian Plunk appeared,a wonderful book. Since he died in 1880, this book had to be written before that. In the first edition of my RIDDLES OF PHILOSOPHY which was entitled WORLD AND LIFE VIEW OF THE 19TH CENTURY, I had already pointed in the year 1900 to Karl Christian Plunk. Plunk actually was an Idealist; he really was a man who lived in the spiritual world and wanted to bring into existence that which inserts itself in the world from the spiritual. I could mention many other examples, however, I am just pointing to Karl Christian Plunk. (An extract from Plunk's book TESTAMENT OF A GERMAN written in 1880 is given in which he spoke of the present war ‘1914–1918’) In this book he refers to the fact that in the future war, Germany will have to defend herself in the West and the South; how on all sides the enemy has national jealousy against the Center. The people will be jealous of the success and growth of the culture of Germany. How many people who had a materialistic concept could have thought like that? Very few of them. Yet, these are the very people who call the people who have a spiritual feeling, idealists.

When a spiritual researcher says: Today people are alright, they can still continue to think, because they have an inheritance of the ancient type of thinking and are able to invent machines. However, human beings will come to a standstill before 50 years is over. They will not be able to discover anything more unless they decide to take spiritual influences up into their thinking. They will reach a dead end. They will have to go to the next stage which will be a development of a spiritual scientific point of view, then they will be able to have new discoveries. Today we have machines only because we have inherited the ancient thinking in our consciousness. We see that the time demands that we allow ourselves to become fructified from the spiritual world. And only this fructification will make it possible to be able to understand the spiritual facts as anthroposophical spiritual science gives us. And unless this happens, the great world tasks will not be solved. I have often mentioned the fact that we are living in a time when the second appearance of Christ will occur shortly, the Etheric Christ Being, that second appearance of Christ upon earth. However, it is necessary to have a preparation in order that this event does not go by unnoticed.

Just recently when I gave a lecture, two people came to me after the lecture and said that they are very surprised about what I was saying and they thought that they would not expect a Theosophist to speak the same way that I spoke. They thought Theosophists would speak differently, because they were pacifists. They forgot the fact that ever since pacifism arose, we have had the bloodiest wars. We talked about illnesses and I tried to explain that illness is the reaction of nature in order to make man healthy, that before the appearance of illness there are unnatural relationships and illness is an attempt to compensate for these unnatural relationships. The illness is necessary, because the unnatural relationships were there. You must see that in all circles of materialism, it leads to the unfruitfulness of thinking.

Spiritual scientific truths must work in our feeling, in our soul mood in a fructifying way and there must be a number of people in our age who can hold them true out of an inner conviction to that which is a necessity for world evolution, that which comes out of spiritual science. Then there will be what should be, then the Christ when He appears in His new form will find those people whom He needs; and that must be. When he appears in His etheric figure, and when someone says that he has experienced the Etheric Christ, then he must not be grasped as being an idiot. It is very necessary today to give mankind a strong push forward, a push which is able to overcome the materialism and its consequences, and this century needs it, needs it in order to take up a new form. And we have as the signs of fire for this goal of mankind today the significant bloody events all around us. We take up spiritual science so that the sacrifice of all those people who have died as a result of this will not have died in vain. If we take up spiritual science, then all that which has gone an around us as a sacrifice of these souls in this war, will be some sort of compensation for it and that will contribute towards the elevation of mankind. that must be, that is why we have to express this invocation again and again.

From the Courage of the fighters,
From the blood on fields of battle,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the people's sacrifice:
There will ripen fruit of Spirit,
If souls will turn in consciousness
Towards the realm of Spirit.

In connection with what I said yesterday about our Appeal, I should like to emphasise again that in man's present conditions of life everything depends upon arousing, in as many people as possible, a right social understanding. You must not forget that the way the relations in life have recently developed has brought a great part of the civilised world into a state of chaos such as is only occasioned by what arises out of human souls. As the situation is at present, external means cannot greatly help mankind, whether this is in the form of laws or in the form of outward administration of the economic life. In individual States it is possible, of course, that for a time things may go on, but it would be a mistake to think conditions in these individual States can permanently remain as they are in the midst of the developing social upheavals encompassing all mankind. Help can come only when an understanding of the social relations is cultivated in men's souls.

What I have put in rather a complicated form can also be said more simply. We may say that what is now a striving for disorder will first take an orderly direction when men show themselves capable of producing order. They will be so only when they arrive at a real social understanding from which man today—of whatever party—stands very far removed. It is the most imperative task to spread this understanding. It is a fact of the utmost importance that what is agitating the souls of many millions of the proletariat is something very different from what lives in the souls of their leaders. The leaders have for the greater part inherited the bourgeois attitude to life, which they try to apply to the conditions of proletarian life adorned with a few flourishes of the agitator. This is an essential fact with which we act in accordance only when deciding to work above all for social understanding. Even when external conditions of life have to be recognised as being in still greater confusion and error than formerly, nevertheless the assumption that something can be attained by muddling through would be false. What modern man lacks is social understanding. And this lack is due to the whole of human thinking, feeling and willing having developed in recent times without being applied to this understanding. It is remarkably limited even in the many people today whose social impulses are strong.

Do not think that this social understanding needs some specially comprehensive and far-reaching knowledge for its development. That is not of any consequence; the point is that in contemporary mankind there is lacking even the elementary basis for such an understanding. People's thoughts are very different from those needed for grasping the most primitive social questions.—It is quite right today that attention should be given above all to finding a way to avoid the abstract sentimental concepts at present pacifying so many. It is widely believed that it is possible today to deal with the social problem from some kind of ethical or religious standpoint. This possibility does not exist. Today one cannot just preach religion or ethics, however excellent. This may just warm the feelings and, in an egoistic sense, have some effect. Concepts, however, must be made capable of gripping hold of the everyday affairs of human beings.

Infinitely much depends today on acquiring this understanding. I have said that men today in whom social impulses are flashing up have very often only primitive concepts. Many in leading circles as well as among the proletariat imagine that a simple reassortment of social levels can bring about real change;—for example, if those who were at the top, ministers and secretaries of State were to fall and those who were formerly proletarians were to rise, in effect, if there were a re-levelling. It would be quite a mistake to fancy that things could be changed thus. Many have this idea however much they may protest. Befogged by the outlook of some party or another they are unconscious of holding these views. It is a question, however, of coming quite simply to a clear understanding of the threefold social organism, often dealt with here and also in many public lectures. It is a question of every detail in social measures being so developed that they comply with the necessity inherent in the threefold order. Whether measures have to be taken to build a railway, either under a private company or the State, or a decision is to be made about the ways and means for paying an undertaking on some occasion (I am not speaking of labour-power but of undertakings) it is always a matter of carrying out the measures in the threefold direction, in accordance with the independence of the spiritual life, of the political life of rights and of the economic life. You can of course ask how this or the other should happen. But at the stage where the matter now stands those are for the most part the wrong kind of questions. The spirit living in the threefold order can perhaps be described like this, to take an example: What is the best system of taxation? Now today the important thing is not to think out a system of taxation but to work towards the threefold order. When this threefold membering of the social organism becomes more and more an actuality the best system of taxation will arise through this threefold activity. It is a matter of establishing the conditions under which the best social organisation can originate. Someone or other ruminating over what would be best is not of importance and is not in accordance with reality. But imagine that one of you were a genius, such a genius as has never before been seen in human evolution, and were therefore in a position to think out the best possible system of taxation. But what if you were to stand alone with your magnificently thought-out system and the others refused it, wanting perhaps something less good but anyhow not yours? You see it is not a matter of thinking out the best, but of finding what men as a whole would accept as a basis on which to do their best.

It is true that you may say here: One must begin somewhere. The threefold State must be set up even though men appear unwilling to accept it. That is something different, for there it is not a matter of what men can wish for or not, such as a system of taxation, but of what fundamentally all men would want were they to understand it. If you find the right way you can make it intelligible to them, for subconsciously men want it to be realised during the coming decades throughout the civilised world. That is not merely thought-out, but seen to be what men are wanting. And it is not because they lack the desire that countless men reject it, but because being still full of prejudices, they work in opposition to this matter, which in future will be fully realised. The essential thing is to pay heed to what is primary. The primary is that for which, in a longer or shorter period, understanding can be awakened when once the hindrances to this understanding have been removed. Naturally there are always leading personalities who stand in the way. These personalities are not to be convinced; they must first break their heads against the obstacles they meet. And there will be many such obstacles. On this account if at first the affair does not go as one had imagined, it need not be labeled a failure. Things of this sort must be prepared for. Something must be there when what is now brought about in a mistaken way will have led to an absurd situation, when much that now appears in the world is no longer there—just as the German princes are no longer there, who in 1913 never dreamed they would have disappeared by 1919—when what so many people now applaud is gone, then something on which they can fall back must at least be there in people is heads and hearts. Preparation must be made, the ground must be ready. When once you have penetrated long and deeply enough into this threefold membering of the spiritual life, the economic life and the political life, then the need will arise in you to have a more fundamental understanding of all this. This understanding is absolutely essential, otherwise even when spoken with all possible goodwill what is said will have no connection with reality. The social organism is subject to definite laws in the same way as the natural human organism. You gain nothing by acting against these laws even on grounds of principle. You can at best lead men into a blind alley.

Now do not say: Where is human freedom when man finds himself in a social organism with fixed laws? You might as well ask whether a man can be free when daily he has to eat. It does not make him free to refrain from eating. Things subject to certain laws—even men themselves—have nothing at all to do with the problem of freedom, just as little as our not being able to grasp the moon has to do with our freedom.

To gain a social understanding it is advisable for us to be in the position to go back to fundamentals, to primaries, rather than let our understanding remain bogged in secondaries or tertiaries, which are subsequent phenomena. We may give this example from a certain condition of life—a man needs a definite minimum, let us say in money—since we have converted our values into money—in order to support life. This subsistence minimum can be spoken of as referring to some special condition of life. But we can so speak of it that we say something apparently extremely obvious on the one hand, on the other, what is complete nonsense. I will try to make this clear to you by an example. Taking given conditions of life in any part of the world you may perhaps say with feeling that a manual worker needs so and so much as a subsistence minimum, otherwise he would be unable to live in the particular community. This can seem quite an obvious idea. But how is it then, in accordance with what has been assumed here, when this is not realisable within a certain social organism? The question that must first of all be answered is: What then if the realisation of this is impossible?

To reflect upon the matter thus is not the primary thinking I have represented. Thought out in the abstract, the subsistence minimum demanded does not lead us to fundamentals but ties us down to what is secondary, what appears as a mere consequence. To attain social understanding we have to be in a position to enter into fundamental things. It is fundamental to cultivate a practical view as to how there can be a subsistence minimum in accordance with conditions of life in the social organism. In this case I mean by ‘practical’ such a view that would result in humanly possible social conditions and social community life. This is the primary.

And now one comes to certain conceptions very unpopular with a great part of present-day mankind, because the basic teaching that should work towards such things, and really guide them in this direction, has been neglected. Men need to realise that even to be half-educated one should not merely know that three times nine is twenty-seven; one should also know, for example, what it is that we call ground-rent. I ask you, how many people today have any clear idea of what ground-rent is? But without considering the social organism in connection with such things, no human progress can be made.

The wrong-headed conceptions men hold today are due to confusion in this sphere. Ground-rent, which can be reckoned according to the productivity of a piece of land in a certain district, yields a certain sum for a State-bounded area. The land tapes its value according to its productivity, that is, in accordance with the way or the degree in which it is put to rational use in relation to the whole economy. It is very difficult today for anyone to gain a clear concept of this simple land value, since in the modern capitalistic economic life interest on capital, or capital in any form, has confused the whole picture of ground-rent, and the true concept of its economic value for the people has been blurred by phantoms in the form of mortgage law and the system of stocks and shares. Strictly speaking, everything has been forced into conceptions that are impossible and false. Naturally a true conception of ground-rent cannot be acquired in the twinkling of an eye. But think of it simply as the economic value of the land in some territory, with regard to its productivity. Now there exists a necessary relation between this ground-rent and subsistence what I have referred to as a subsistence minimum. There are many social reformers and social revolutionaries today who dream of the wholesale abolition of ground-rent, who believe, for example, that ground-rent will be done away with by all land being nationalised or communalised. Essentials, however, are never changed by a mere change of form. Whether a whole community owns the land or it is owned by a number of individuals makes no difference to the existence of ground-rent. It is simply obscured and takes on other forms. Ground-rent as I have defined it is always there. Take the ground-rent of a certain district and divide it up among the individual inhabitants, then you will get as quotient the only possible subsistence minimum. This is a law as definite and unalterable as a law of Physics. It is a primary fact, something fundamental, that in a social organism in reality no one deserves more than is yielded by the ground-rent being divided among the total population. What can be earned further arises through coalitions and associations in which conditions are established where one individual can acquire more value than another. But not a whit more can pass into the movable property of an individual man than what I have here indicated. From this minimum, which really exists everywhere even though the real conditions are obscured, arises all economic life in so for as it applies to an individual's movable property. It must have arisen from this basic fact. Hence it is that one starts not from something secondary but from this primary fact. This primary fact may be compared to any other, for example to a primary fact also valid for the economic life, that on a certain territory there is only a certain amount of raw product. Naturally you may think it desirable to have more of this raw product and to be able just to reckon how much more might be had from this land. But the raw product does not allow of any arbitrary increase; that is a primary fact. And it is a primary fact in the same way that, in a social organism, in reality nothing more can be earned through work—however hard this work may be—than can be yielded by the quotient I mentioned. As I said, all surplus is acquired through human coalition.

The social and political administration can be in contradiction to these facts. Therefore it is necessary to bring all organising thought into the direction that facts take. Man can find satisfaction only when these things are thoroughly understood. Then the organising factor, the thinking that has taken on reality, is brought into line with what the nature of the social organism demands, and other thinking adjusts itself to it, so that it cannot happen that one thinking considers itself prejudiced by the other. That is what lies as a law at the basis of the true life of the social organism. Right thinking, realistic concepts on such matters can be gained—as I showed by the example of the relation of a subsistence minimum to ground-rent—only when you make your start on the basic principles of the threefold order. For only under its influence is it possible for men to create measures by which human life in common on any given territory can be developed really productively. Life will develop most productively when it goes in a direction that accords with law and not in the opposite direction. Thus it is a matter of living in time with the social organism.

It is necessary to be quite clear about this—that you will never gain insight into the fundamentals of the Threefold Order by observing life externally, any more than observation of any number of right-angled triangles will give you the Pythagorean theorem. But once known it can be applied to any real right-angled triangle. It is the same with these fundamental laws. Once grasped correctly in accordance with reality, they can be of universal application. And in addition you have from the basis of Spiritual Science the opportunity to grasp the necessity of the Threefold Order. Consider what can be given through it—the life of earthly spirituality, if I may so call it, art, science, religion and also, as already mentioned, civil and criminal law; that is one sphere. The second is the political association of men and is concerned with man's relation to his fellows. And the third is the economic life, concerned with man's relation to the lower man, what man needs in order to raise himself to his true manhood. The Threefold Order has to do with these three spheres. Man should be established in the social organism in accordance with these three members; he must be so established. For the three members have each a quite distinct origin in regard to the human being as such. All life of the spirit on earth—and what I now say counts for our own age—is a kind of echo of what man lived through in the life before his descent through birth into physical existence. In that life the human being lived as a spiritual individual in a spiritual relation to the higher hierarchies, with those disembodied souls who were in the spiritual world and not at the time incarnated on earth. What man develops here as spiritual life, be it in devotion to religious practice or life in a religious community, be it in activity in the arts, or as a judge passing sentence on those of his fellowmen found guilty, everything lived out in this spiritual life has its origin in the forces acquired by man when, before he entered physical existence through birth, he lived with the higher hierarchies in the spiritual worlds. Here you must distinguish between life lived in common with other men in accordance with individual destiny, and that lived with others in accordance with what I have just described. In earthly existence we come into individual relations with one or other of our fellow-men. These relations depend upon our individual karma, and either trace back to earlier lives on earth or point to those coming later. But among these individual relations between human beings you must distinguish those, for example, that arise from belonging to a certain religious community. For in a religious community you think or feel as a number of other men do. Or suppose a book is published. Men read the book, take up thoughts from the book, and thus enter into a community. Spiritual life on earth, whether having to do with the bringing-up of children, education, or anything else of the kind, consists in our coming into relation with people and developing a life in common with them, in order thereby oneself to make spiritual progress. All that, however, is experiencing relationships in which, before descending into spiritual life on earth, we were in a quite different form. It has nothing to do with individual karma but with what was prepared during life in the spiritual world in the time lived through between death and a new birth. Thus, one has to seek the source of what I have called the spiritual sphere, in the life passed through by man before he prepared to descend. through birth into earthly existence.

Then there comes what is experienced simply by living on earth between birth and death. We grow into this life by degrees. When as an infant we enter into this existence through birth, we still bear—if I may make a foolish comparison—much of the egg-shell of the spiritual world around us, though it is not hard. The child is very spiritual in spite of its main task being the development of its physical body. In its aura there is much of the spiritual; what it brings with it is very nearly akin to the spiritual life on earth. Gradually, however, it enters more and more deeply into the life that belongs entirely to the time between birth and death.

Now the sources of the life of the political state are found in this life not chiefly concerned with the spiritual. The political state has to do only with what man experiences between birth and death. Therefore nothing should be involved in it save what concerns us as beings between birth and death in our mutual relations as man to man. If the state involved itself in anything other than what concerns the public life of rights between birth and death, if it spread its wings over Church and School, for example, well—in the places where there were people with a faculty for judging such things it used to be said: “There the Prince of this world holds his unjust sway!” Nothing belongs to all that is the object of state-organisation except what has to do with the life between birth and death.

The third member is the economic. This economic life, which we are obliged to lead because we eat and drink, clothe ourselves and so on, forces us as human beings to descend into the subhuman. It chains us to something beneath the level of our full humanity. By having to concern ourselves with life economically, by having to dive down into economic life, we experience something which, when observed socially, has more in it than is usually thought. In so far as we stand in the economic life we cannot live in the spiritual nor in the life of rights, but must plunge below the human level. But just by this plunging into the subhuman we take into ourselves something that thus has an opportunity to develop. Whereas in the economic life we are active and higher thoughts must be silent and even the human mutual relations play in only from another sphere, there is worked in our subconscious then what we then carry with us into the spiritual world through the gate of death. Whereas in the spiritual life on earth we experience the echo of what we lived through before our descent to earth, and in the life of rights of the political state experience only what lies between birth and death, in the economic life, into which we cannot enter with our higher self, something is being prepared that is also spiritual and carried by us through the gate of death. People would like the economic life to exist only for the earth. But this is not so. Just through our plunging down into the economic life something is prepared for us as human beings that is again connected with the supersensible world. Therefore no one should think of holding the economic life too lightly. However strange and paradoxical it may seem, this external materialistic life has a certain connection with the life after death. So that in actual fact, for anyone who knows man, the three spheres fall asunder—the purely spiritual sphere points to life before birth; the political sphere of the State points to life between birth and death; the economic life points to life after death. It is not in vain that we cultivate fraternity in the economic life. In all that we develop as brotherliness in the economic sphere lie the foundations and preliminary conditions of life after death. I am giving you only a first brief indication of how the threefold membering of the nature of the human being gives the spiritual scientist in these three distinct spheres the differentiation necessary for social life.

It is a particular characteristic of Spiritual Science that, when we come to deal with it, we find it directly practical. It sheds light on the life around us, and at the present time men have no other possibility of getting light on the real relationships of life than by in some way accepting spiritual knowledge. Thus it is desirable that those who are interested in the Anthroposophical Movement should let the light of their understanding ray out to others; for the Anthroposophist it is relatively easier to penetrate these things with insight. He knows something of life both before and after birth, for example, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, and this shows him the necessity for the threefoldness in life from this point of view. This necessity can indeed be seen today. But we shall gain a deeper, more comprehensive insight if we have the anthroposophical basis of which I have been speaking here.

In the course of the last centuries how much has been spoken in a sentimental way, when men have held forth, for instance, about universal moral teaching and the like, and religion has been kept as far as possible apart from external daily life. We are now at a point of time when we have to develop concepts that can penetrate right into daily life and do not just extend to the promise of salvation or to the demand “Children love one another”. They do not do it in any case when they do not have to or when other business is on hand. The concepts we develop must have sufficient driving force to enable us really to understand our present-day complicated economic life. Thus, simply through knowledge of the nature of man we are shown the necessity for the sound social organism to be threefold.

It must become clear to as many people as possible today that this is the very foundation-stone of a new structure. just to prate about the spirit is, as I was saying yesterday, perhaps more harmful just now than the materialism which, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, has up to now continued to spread. For mere talk of the spirit, mere sighing after the spirit, mere worship of the spirit, no longer meet the needs of our epoch. In our epoch it is fitting that we realise the spirit, that we give the spirit the possibility of living in our midst. Today it does not suffice just to believe in the Christ; it is essential that men should now manifest the Christ in their deeds, in their work. This is the important thing. If man develops sound thinking and perceiving in this sphere, these sound thoughts and perceptions will flow into another sphere as well. Consider how a great many of the present official representatives of one or other of the Christian faiths speak today of Christ. But if asked: Why is He whom you call Christ, the Christ? they can give only a fictitious answer, what is indeed an inner lie. Many modern theologians talk of Christ, but were you to ask them: How does your concept of the Christ-being differ from your concept of the Jahve-God, the one God, weaving and creating throughout the universe? they would have no answer to give.

The great theologian Harnack, in Berlin, has written a book on The Being of Christianity. What he describes as the Being of Christianity is the Jehovah of the Old Testament, with all Jehovah's characteristics. It is inwardly a lie to describe Jehovah as Christ, And it is thus with hundreds, nay thousands, of those preaching Christianity today; they are simply preaching God in general, the God of Whom we can say ex Deo nascimur. Christ is discovered only when one has experienced a kind of new birth. We need only be healthy human beings to have to recognise the God of Whom we say ex Deo nascimur; for to be an atheist is in reality to be ill. But one can speak of the Christ only when in the life of soul one has experienced a kind of re-birth, in the way this happens in the present cycle of human evolution. For this, it is not enough that man is simply born as a human being.

Man as he is born today is necessarily full of prejudices; that is the nature of present-day man. And if we remain as we are born we carry these prejudices with us through life; we live in one-sidedness. We can save ourselves only by having inner tolerance, by being able to enter into the opinions of others even when we think them wrong. If we can bring a deep understanding for the opinions of other souls even when considering them mistaken, if we can take what the other thinks and feels in the same way as we take what we think and feel ourself, if we adopt this faculty of inner tolerance, we may overcome these prejudices due to the human cycle in which we were born. We then learn to say: What you have understood in this the least of my brethren, you have understood of me. For Christ did not speak to men in this way only at the time when Christianity began, but has made good His word “Lo, I am with you always even unto the end of earthly time”. He still continues to reveal Himself. Once Be said: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto Me”. Today He tells men: What you understand with inward tolerance in the least of your brothers, even when he is mistaken, you have understood of Me, and I will let you overcome your prejudices when you convert those prejudices into tolerant reception of what others think and feel.—That is one thing; that, in regard to thinking, is the way to come to Christ. Then Christ can so permeate us that we not only have thoughts about Him but Christ can live in our thoughts. This, however, is only achieved in the way I have just described.

And secondly, in regard to the will. In youth the human being is sometimes idealistic. This is an inherent idealism and we have it simply by being born as human beings. Today, in this era, this idealism belonging to mankind is not enough. We now need a quite different kind—an idealism to which we educate ourselves; we do not have it simply by becoming human beings but by making an effort. It is this kind of idealism we need. We need the idealism we have ourselves acquired. It then becomes the idealism that will not vanish with youth, it will keep us young and idealistic throughout our life. If through training we make an idealism our own, then, on the basis not of logical law but of the law of reality, we bring to bear the driving force to place ourselves actively into the social organism in accordance with the very purport of this organism, instead of acting egoistically as an individual man. No one today who does not train himself to this self-acquired idealism will gain a true social understanding. The ex Deo nascimur is innate. The way to Christ is found on the one hand through supersensible thought, on the other hand through the will. It comes through the thought by our being convinced beforehand that nowadays we are born as men full of prejudice and must overcame our prejudice by tolerantly listening to the opinions of others, thus gaining right judgment. Where the way of the will is concerned, this will only be fired socially in the right way today when we have this self-acquired idealism, the idealism we drive into ourselves through our own activity. That is re-birth. And what we have found when we as men have gained it for ourselves leads us to the Christ. Not the God of Whom we say Ex Deo nascimur may we describe as Christ, for that is inwardly untrue. That God was known in the Old Testament. When we as men shall have transformed ourselves in life in the two directions mentioned, we shall clearly see the distinction between the God Who is pure Father and the God Who will then speak to us. For this God is the Christ.

Modern Theology actually speaks very little about this Christ. This Christ must eater men as a social impulse. What many people say today of Christ is intrinsically untrue. Now such things are not to be looked into as people today subtly present them, taking them logically, point by point. As I once told you recently, there is an understanding in accordance with reality different from one that is merely external and logical. But when man has developed in himself what I have called a re-birth, then human thinking will be brought near Christ, and we shall learn to think and feel as we must think and feel if, for the benefit and salvation of man, we are to place ourselves into human society. We shall also learn to think and feel rightly in other matters by thinking and feeling rightly on these fundamental things. From this, however, the spiritual life of modern mankind has travelled terribly far. And the reason is that this spiritual life has been absorbed by the political State. Man's spiritual life must be freed from the political State to become fruitful and full of impulse for human evolution. Otherwise all thinking will be dislocated and from this dislocation false realities will be created.

I have already referred to Wilson's definition of freedom. For anyone who has some understanding of philosophy it is not very important how a statesman of the day defines freedom. It is important, however, as symptom of what lives in a men when he has thoughts about freedom. Now Wilson says: We call free what adapts itself to certain conditions so that it can still move freely. Thus we say when in a machine the piston can move freely, when it does not knock against anything but can move without impediment—we say the piston runs free. Or a ship moves forward freely which is so built that it runs before the wind. If it run against the wind it is hampered and not free. So man is free when he fits in with the conditions of the social mechanism. There, then one can only speak of the social mechanism.

It is not very important that thoughts such as these live in a head and are realised; the importance lies in what is realised being experienced in such thoughts. Then one knows whether this is sound or the opposite of sound. The thinking is quite dislocated; and why? Now you need only reflect on the following with the experience you have gained from Spiritual Science: when you fit into the external conditions of your life, when your life is running according to this adapting oneself to conditions without impediment, then you are free, free as a ship is free when running with the wind. But man does not stand thus in the whole world: For if indeed the ship running before the wind does run freely, it must, however, sometimes also be able to stop. And that is just what is very important for man—that he can sometimes turn round and take his stand against the wind, so that he not only fits in with circumstances but can also adapt himself to what is within him. One cannot think of anything more foolish, more absurd, than Wilson's definition of freedom, for it is opposed to human nature and the very reverse of what lies at the basis of true freedom. If we compare a man with a ship running freely before the wind, we must also compare him with a ship that having run in a certain direction and not needing to go further, can turn to face the wind. For if a man has to proceed only in accordance with external conditions, he is naturally free in them but not in himself. We have completely lost sight of the human being today in our observation of the world and of life. He has dropped out of our considerations concerning life and the world. But he must once more be given a place in the world. [ Note 01 ]

This has its exceedingly serious side; here it is seen only as a symptom but it has a most serious side. For today the human being is placed into the social organism in such a way that really he is only running with the wind, and the capitalist ordering of economy has particularly destined the proletariat only to run with the wind, never to be able, as a rest, to stop and face the wind. In a public lecture in Basle I said that within the capitalist. economic system the capitalist uses only the labour of the workers; in a healthy social organism the capitalist must use the workers' leisure also. Abstract capitalistic capital needs only labour-power. Capital that, under the threefold order, will give back to men their purely human driving force will also use the leisure of the workers, the leisure indeed of all mankind. For that, capital must be placed into the social organism, it will know how it is to be sustained by the social organism and how it must in return sustain the organism.

It is a question of the proletariat being able to save their labour-power so as to be capable of taking part in the spiritual life; and it is a question of the will being there to allow the worker sufficient leisure, to leave him sufficient labour-power, that of himself he can join in this spiritual life. The bourgeois economic order has allowed a deep cleft gradually to arise. What it produces spiritually is valid only for this bourgeois order and is out of touch with proletarian life.

Capitalism has brought things to the point where only labour-power is considered and not the leisure of the proletariat. Today these matters still seem abstract. It should be so no longer, for upon understanding these things rightly depends the sound human evolution both of the present and the future.

Now I have once again given a few indications as to the relation to social life of some of the fundamental tenets of Anthroposophy. It would be very desirable if such a spiritual movement as ours should, as a little social organism in itself, cease this unhealthy separation—developed to man's hurt by appalling bourgeois concepts—of the economic life from the spiritual, and should seek health by permeating the concepts of practical life with the concepts of Spiritual Science. The social organism must so organise its different members that there will no longer be men who cut off coupons and in this coupon-cutting become nothing less than slave-drivers, since for the coupons they cut off, a number of people, with whom they have no connection, have to perform hard work. Afterwards the coupon-cutters go to Church and pray God to be saved, or they go to a meeting and talk theoretically about all sorts of beautiful things; but they have no conception of the foolishness of living such an abstract spiritual life that they can seek, on the one hand, a connection with a God, and on the other hand share in slave ownership and the exploitation of labour by this coupon-cutting. They separate these things in a way that is not salutary by not attempting to discover the salutary. This is what is in question, what has been neglected and what must be changed: this separation between the religion and ethics that float in a cloud-cuckoo-land, and the external life thoughtlessly pursued in the form given it today by an unsound social organism. Above all it must be recognised that the misfortunes of the present-day have come about through this separation by the bourgeoisie of the abstract from the concrete. If efforts are made to drive out all that shows itself in an unsound and sectarian form, it is in just such a movement as ours that there can be a first setting-up of a kind of small social organism that is sound. In our Anthroposophical Movement there is nothing from which we have had to suffer more than the repeated appearance of a tendency towards sectarianism. Without noticing it people strive towards some kind of separation. But Anthroposophy must be the reverse of sectarian. It will then meet the subconscious and unconscious contemporary demands which truly do not run to creating sects, but cultivate something that develops out of the whole man for all men and out of all men for the whole man.

Just consider how you, in your own souls, can get away from sectarianism. In countless souls today sectarianism lives like something atavistic, an unhealthy inheritance, because the will does not exist to carry the true life of the spirit into the conditions of external life. Only through such sectarian sentimentality could it happen that the Appeal of which I spoke yesterday should meet with the reproach that it was just from this direction that mention of the spiritual had been expected! But I have never been able to refer to the spiritual in the sense of these enthusiasts. When, in the beginning of the nineties, there spread in America the Adler-Unold Ethical Movement, I opposed it with all my might, because a movement for ethical culture was to be founded based on nothing, and connected with nothing in life, but a desire to give out ethical maxims. The understanding of life, life in its fundamentals, is what contemporary men need, not the fashioning of phrases as to how things should be done. In regard to the social organism, the threefold order is above all something to be studied fundamentally, investigated and given consideration, something to be taken deeply to heart, so that it may be mastered in the same way as the multiplication table is mastered.

Notes:

1. See lecture 13.1.23 (Anthr.Qtly VI.1.)

Also known as The Present Crisis in Man's Development and The Science of the Spirit, Education, and the Practical Life. From: Lectures on Spiritual Essence and Its Working. Lecture 13 of 18 from the volume: Man's Responsibility for World Evolution through His Spiritual Connection with the Planet Earth and with the Stars Above.

The times in which we live are so earnest that at present it is not in any way appropriate to think of personal matters. Allow me, first of all, to express briefly my heartfelt thanks to your esteemed president for her kind words and then to pass on to what I believe I must tell you, for it is a long time since we saw one another in Holland.

The times in which we live and its conditions are much more earnest than most people of the present are consciously aware of.

Here we can speak of these conditions of our times from those standpoints which result from a long study of the spiritual science of Anthroposophy. We know that we live in an epoch whose characteristic peculiarity began to be evident in the 15th century. It was then that it slowly began to develop its peculiarities. Those who are initiated into the spiritual conditions of human evolution and can therefore have an insight into this course of development, know that the second half of the 19th century indicates a specially low point of human evolution in the modern and particularly in European culture. This low point may be characterised as the rise of a particular inthrust of egoism in all branches of civilised humanity, an egoism of a kind that was never there before. This wave of a special course of development then sent its ramifications into the 20th century, and now these ramifications undoubtedly continue to hold mankind under their spell.

In saying that a wave of egoism came over the whole modern civilisation, I do not speak trivially of what one generally defines as egoism, but I speak of egoism in a special sense, into which we shall penetrate a little in the course of this morning's considerations, and in a way that will be evident to those who are initiated in the true mysteries of more recent human evolution.

We already know the members constituting human nature. We know that the soul-members of human nature have been engaged for a long time in a special process of transformation, in a special course of development. We know that when we go back to very ancient times of human evolution we have to do with a particular forming of man's etheric body, during a very old time of development in India; a particular forming of the astral body then began, and a certain intermediate course of development took place during that epoch of European development which began about the year 747 in the south of Europe and which closed in the first thirty years of the 15th century. That time was the beginning of that epoch of human evolution in which we are still living. In the year 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha, began that phase of human evolution in which the so-called intellectual and understanding soul (Verstandes und Gemütsseele) unfolded. Everything that humanity still prizes to-day as Greek culture; developed through the fact that at that very time the intellectual or understanding soul was in an ascending line of development. However, while the wonderful Greek culture was unfolding, that which we call intellectual or understanding soul was in an ascending line of development. It had not yet reached its climax. For such points are always in a certain way times of probation for the evolution of humanity. For the sake of their development, the Greeks had to pass through what one might call the youthful freshness of the intellectual or understanding soul. The Greek culture, so much admired by posterity, came into being out of this youthful freshness of an intellect that was not yet permeated by egoism, out of this youthful freshness of the human understanding. Of the characteristics pertaining to the intellectual soul, the Latin and Roman culture then took over something that was in a descending line of development and decadent. Those who have a deeper comprehension for that which lived in Roman culture know: There the intellect already reaches its culmination; there the intellect rises to a high point. On that account the Romans developed such abstract ideas; on that account the Romans developed something that did not as yet exist in the whole ancient East, that did not even exist, in the sense known in Europe, in the Greek culture: The Romans developed the ideas of jurisprudence, the juridical concepts.

To-day we consider the world very superficially and we translate our thoughts on “Jus”, on jurisprudence, which, in reality are the outcome only of the Roman intellectual soul, into something which we assume to have already existed in the ancient East, for instance in Hammurabi, and so forth. But that is not the case. The Decalogue, the Ten Commandments as well as the contents of other documents of that time, were, after all, something quite different from that which constitutes our modern juridical concepts. These are something abstract, something that is no longer so close to the human soul. Everything that thus constitutes the development of the intellectual soul reached its climax during a period in the civilisation of Europe which has really been studied very little from an external historical standpoint, although it is extraordinarily important and significant for those who wish to study human evolution in the meaning of spiritual science.

That striking year to which we can draw attention as being specially significant for European development is the year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha. The year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha is the middle of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. It is that point of time when a fluctuating knowledge of the universe lived in Europe simultaneously with a fluctuating knowledge of humanity. These had nothing of the penetrating character of the knowledge of the universe that the Greeks still possessed and no proper comprehension of man's inner world.

We find instead that man sways either towards the longing for an extensive knowledge of the universe, or towards the longing for self-knowledge, knowledge of his own self. The human soul of the European peoples indeed passed through a great deal during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Roman life was then entering into its decay; it bequeathed to European humanity nothing but its language; it left behind its more or less fundamental material of culture. The life of humanity thus entered the second half of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, lasting up to the 15^th century, when our present epoch began.

From the preceding epoch, in which most of us in some way passed through one or more earthly lives, we brought over—partly through physical heredity, but particularly through the fact that we ourselves formerly were those incarnated souls—into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch the inheritance of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and we took over this inheritance. This inheritance of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch lives in everything that constitutes our present civilisation.

We worked the intellect, the thinking, into our consciousness soul. That means a great deal. At the beginning of the fifth epoch, the consciousness soul enabling man to really permeate, really grasp his ego, first took hold of his thinking, his life of representations and his intellect. Humanity thus became intelligent and clever, but clever within the consciousness soul; within the evolution of humanity, this implies the finest possible elaboration of EGOISM.

We should not only rebuke this epoch of egoism, we should not only fall upon it with criticism, but in spite of the fact that it brings with it so many temptations and leads man into great soul-dangers and even into external danger, we should recognise this age of egoism as the one in which ego-consciousness comes to the fore with special incisiveness.

Man can thus take into himself a real feeling of freedom. This feeling of freedom is something that none of us possessed in our previous incarnations, in the earlier epochs of human evolution. We had to pass through egoism, that presents so many temptations, in order to reach that longing for freedom which is the prerogative of modern humanity. One of the most important things in Anthroposophy is the knowledge that we had to take in something in order to climb over an important stage in human evolution: the stage leading to the DEVELOPMENT OF FREEDOM. For this very reason we should be aware that this crossing over is connected, with many temptations, with many dangers of humanity, both soul-spiritually and bodily. A knowledge going in the direction of Anthroposophy must enable us to take in fully the feeling of freedom, but at the same time to ennoble it, to permeate it again with a spiritual knowledge of the universe, which—in spite of the now existing mature ego-feeling, mature ego-consciousness—induces mankind to solve tasks that are not only egoistic tasks, but tasks pertaining to the whole evolution of humanity, indeed to the evolution of the whole earth, to the evolution of the whole universe.

In this connection we are now facing a great turning point in the whole civilisation of more recent times. The time of probation has indeed come! Great tasks confront mankind. But the recognition of these tasks is extremely difficult and is rendered still more difficult through the fact that we have just passed through the age of the great egoism.

We say that we sleep from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. That is right. We are then in a state of dulled consciousness. Most of you know sleep only in its negative aspect, that it dulls consciousness. Yet we do not judge the waking state in the same way. The time of being awake, the time from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, was really quite different in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. To-day people believe that they are awake in the same way in which, for instance, the people living about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha were awake. That is not the case. Their whole soul-constitution was different. Man was then awake in a different way. He was much more strongly conscious of his body.

You see, modern man really knows very little indeed of his bodily processes. The Greeks, not the Greeks of a later time, but the Greeks of the pre-Socratic and pre-Platonic times, still knew a great deal of the processes of their own body. For example, the really cultured Greek looked up to the sun. From the sun he received the light. He received at the same time a feeling that he was drawing in something etheric, that the light was being led on into his inner being. And when he was thinking, he said: The light, the sun thinks within me. The Greek of pre-Socratic times still felt this in a living way. He did not think so abstractly about thinking as we do to-day. He thought: The sun thinks within me: it allows its light to be drawn in by me. The light that shines upon the things outside, that makes the things outside visible, is active within me, by reflecting itself, as it were, within its own being, so that thoughts spring up in me. For the Greek, the thoughts within him were the light of the sun. At the same time, they were for him that element which lived in the macrocosm thanks to the influence of divine-spiritual beings. At the same time, they were for him that which really raised him to the Divine, above his ordinary dignity as a human being. He felt himself lifted above the earthly, when he thus experienced the sun's light within him as thinking. And when a particularly cultured Greek ate, he indeed considered his food, in which he took in something that he did not receive directly from the sun, but that came from the earth, as a necessity of life, yet at the same time he felt himself changing into the food, that became he himself, as it passed through his mouth, his oesophagus and digestive organs. He felt that he was one with the food, in the same way in which he felt that he was one with the sunlight. While he was digesting, he felt the earth's gravity. He felt, as it were, similar to the serpent, that he did not as yet highly appreciate, but that he still observed rather timidly—the serpent that twists away from the earth and digests in a particularly visible way, after having swallowed its food. That is how the Greek experienced what went on in his body: whether he experienced what was thinking within him as the sun's bright light, or whether he experienced within himself what chained him to the earth; i.e. the taking in of food. Through the intimate way in which his understanding was connected with his body the Greek felt with particular energy that which also lived within him as physical human being. You may also deduce this from the following:

When we paint human beings to-day in the ordinary way, as numerous painters of the present generation have done year after year, decade after decade in painting portraits, we really lie. We look at people outwardly and believe that then we bring forth something of what we experience. It is not true at all that we can experience something in that way! We could experience it only if we were able to conjure up within us the whole way of identifying ourselves feelingly with the whole of Nature as human beings, as it was the case with the Greeks. First of all, we must learn this anew, along an entirely different path than that of the Greeks.

Since the middle of the 15th century, we have acquired in an abstract-theoretical way a soul-constitution that no longer allows us to really penetrate livingly into our body, but that lives instead in concepts that do not stand visibly before us, because we have conquered thinking for the egoity, for the ego. We should realise this. And we should realise that we must once more take in spirituality from an anthroposophical spiritual science, so that the ego may once more be filled with something, and so that that which really lives within us may once more—but now in a different way—enter our life: that which the Greeks experienced in an immediate, elemental way; but that could not continue.

When the Greek walked, he walked as if led by a necessity of Nature, like the lightning flashing through the clouds, or the rolling thunder! He knew nothing whatever of freedom, but he knew man! Indeed, he knew more about man than we think he did. For instance, he knew how to coin words clearly indicating that man still knew something of the connection between the soul-spiritual and the bodily-physical. The Greek words, or those derived from the Greek, indicate even to-day far more than those based on our therapeutic or pathological conceptions, that are no longer able to understand anything. Hypochondria for instance, means cartilaginosity of the abdomen. It is a name that the Greeks found through their full knowledge of the fact that in hypochondric people the activity of the soul-spiritual gives rise to cartilaginous formations in certain parts of the body. These names mean far more than modern men suppose, and more than can in any way be grasped through modern medicine, with its abstract way of thinking, even though it experiments, dissects, etc. We must first take up again everything that is real, that once more enables us to have an insight into the world! It is the task of a spiritual scientific deepening to reach once more real facts, realities.

You see, during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, in which the human beings passed through what constitutes, as it were, a physical self-knowledge, an insight into the human body, during that time—one might say approximately, during the first third of that time, occurs the greatest event of the earth's evolution: the Mystery of Golgotha.

What is the condition of the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha occurred?—The further we go back, the more we find in ancient times—in the Greek epoch, the Egyptian-Chaldean, the Persian and the ancient Indian epoch—this immediate knowledge of the whole human being. Then, this knowledge of the whole human being disappears. The last remains of that knowledge may be found at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared. Something of that instinctive, ancient knowledge of man still existed at that time. For instance, the personalities described in the Gospels as the Apostles, or the Disciples of the Lord, still possessed something of that old instinctive knowledge, which lived in their souls altogether instinctively, not clearly. Others too possessed such a knowledge. At that time it was to a great extent decadent, but at any rate it still existed. It was dying away, burning out, but enough remained of that ancient knowledge to enable a great number of men of that time to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha accordingly. This is particularly evident when the apostle Paul entered the evolution of the times, the apostle Paul who was initiated by divine powers and to whom the spiritual world became visible.

All this gave rise to conditions of time which still enabled man to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in a certain naive, instinctive way. Many people had already entered a later phase of development. Particularly the cultured Greeks and the cultured Romans had concepts that were already far too abstract in order [to] grasp the Mystery of Golgotha in a really living way. Yet certain people had preserved the last remains of an old clairvoyant knowledge, particularly clairvoyant traditions, and they were still able to grasp that a super-earthly power, the Christ, had connected Himself with an earthly man, Jesus of Nazareth.

The year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha, was, as it were, the year in which last stragglers of those who were still able to have a real understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha could be found in Europe. But these stragglers could not understand it, for instance, through our anthroposophical spiritual science, for this did not, of course, exist at that time. They grasped it through an old knowledge that had remained from the Gnosis, and such like. A certain spiritual knowledge still existed. An ancient human inheritance lived in the human soul and this enabled man to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha.

What has remained of the Mystery of Golgotha? Intellectual traditions!—The Gnosis became theology, a mere logical way of grasping the divine. Theo-Logy: a mere logical way of grasping the divine, no longer a contemplation of the divine!

Since the year 333, the capacity of contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha in a direct way became more and more decadent, until the fateful time of the 9th century, when, in the year 869, the Eighth General Oecumenic Council at Constantinople gave out the dogma that man does not consist of body, soul and spirit, but that it is instead a Christian's duty to acknowledge that man consists only of body and soul, and that the soul possesses a few spiritual qualities. At that time, the trichotomy, as it was called, the only possible knowledge of the human being, according to which man consists of body, soul and spirit, was done away with dogmatically, and a dogma was enforced, according to which a Christian who truly believes must acknowledge that man only consists of body and soul.

Modern philosophers frequently state that their philosophy is based on an unprejudiced knowledge, and they speak on the one hand of the body, and on the other of the soul. They speak of the spirit in a very phraseological manner at the most, for they do not know the spirit. They would only know it, if they recognised the spiritual science of Anthroposophy. The “impartial philosophy” that is now being taught to such an extent—what is it, in reality?—It is the result of the dogma pronounced by the Eighth Oecumenic Council in the year 869.

We must see through this. We must be quite clear that when the modern civilisation arose, and even in the second half of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, it was considered as dangerous to speak of the spirit and to draw attention to it. But at the present time it is necessary that we should draw mankind's attention to the spirit,—the spirit that has been declared to be the devil for a long, long time, within the civilisation of Europe! After the year 333, nothing but traditions remained of the old Christological knowledge—nothing but traditions!

Everything that constitutes art shows us even more clearly that it has remained tradition! Observe, for instance, Cimabue's paintings; there you will see a world that took on a completely different aspect in Giotto's paintings. In Cimabue's paintings lived something that may also be seen in Dante, something that could no longer be experienced by the human beings of a later time! Later on, this living within a spiritual world, that may still be seen in Cimabue, ceased. Later on, it was a hypocrisy to paint a golden background, but for a Cimabue this was quite natural. And now observe a Russian icon; it is not in any way painted after a model, for it is something in which the old traditions are still alive, traditions that come from a clairvoyance still existing at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and enabling man to understand the Mystery of Golgotha.

Then came the time in which the traditions were maintained by using external instruments of power. And then came the 19th century, in which the ordinary soul-activity that brought forth such significant results in natural science and technology, was also applied to theology. But what became of theology through this? Christ-Jesus, the incarnation of a Being that does not belong to the earthly became “the simple man of Nazareth,” looked upon indeed as the most perfect man, but not as the bearer of a super-earthly Being. Theology became naturalistic. The more our modern theologians look upon Jesus of Nazareth as a human being, the less they feel induced to pursue Christological ideas, and the happier they are! Even in theology they do not wish to rise beyond the description of the man, Jesus of Nazareth, they do not wish to rise to an understanding of Christ as a super-earthly Being that dwelt in the man, Jesus of Nazareth.

To-day, those who have an insight into world-events from a spiritual standpoint, must see many things differently from the way in which they are judged by people who only see them outwardly. Central Europe, that is now passing through such a tragic destiny, was able—among other things which cannot be discussed here—to accept Adolf Harnack as a great scientist; the very man who reached the point of saying that God the Son should not be included in the Gospels! They should be read, he says, in such a way as to find in them only the man, Jesus of Nazareth, and this man's teachings concerning God the Father. Harnack's theology was intended to do away with our feelings of reverence for the spirituality of Christ. The theology which Harnack established in Central Europe really signifies the negation of Christianity, the denial of Christianity; it signifies the setting up of a world-conception clearly stating that we do not wish to have anything to do with the spirituality of Christ. It is significant to observe what has thus swept over modern humanity, with the result that the most distorted views now exist concerning the most important ideas of human life.

To-day we know what sleep is, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. Yet we do not, as a rule, observe the other kind of sleep, in which we live from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, when we walk about in our everyday life, steeped in illusions and dreams in regard to its most important facts. Indeed, in these modern times, we do not only sleep when we lie in our bed at night (this is actually the better kind of sleep), but we are also asleep in the sphere of egoism, when we lock ourselves up in our inner being, unwilling to know our human body and, at the same time, unwilling to progress to a spiritual self-knowledge. We sleep another kind of sleep during the time from falling asleep to waking up.

In order to understand this, we must indeed observe the nature of sleep from the moment of falling asleep to that of waking up. What does then take place with the human being? Why does the modern intellect believe that as far as the human constitution is concerned sleep is the same for modern man as it was for the ancient Greeks?—The Greeks were not awake in the same way as we, and the Egyptians even less so, nor did they sleep as we do. This soul-constitution in particular should be studied for every epoch of time.

When, during sleep, the human soul, that is to say, the ego and the astral body, loosens itself from the physical and etheric bodies that remain lying on the bed—where does the soul, that is the ego and the astral body, really dwell while we are asleep?

Superficial explanations that a cloud may be seen hovering over the physical body (which is quite true, as far as an altogether external form of clairvoyance is concerned), do not suffice. This is not sufficient, for we must observe what takes place inwardly. We must observe what the soul really experiences from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. In these modern times, the human soul then passes through experiences that are also lived through by the souls that are not as yet incarnated on the earth. Consider the following: Take a case that came to my notice just now, before I began my lecture: A daughter was born to an anthroposophist; one year ago, this little girl lived in the spiritual world as body and soul, and has since then made the endeavour to descend to the physical world. All those decades, that make us so much older than this little newly born girl, during all those years it lived in the spiritual world. And while we were asleep, we lived from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, in the world in which the little girl dwelt before conception, or birth. That is the world in which we dwell, when we are asleep, and there, the souls that are not yet incarnated pass through many experiences. While we are asleep, we pass with them through the fifth post-Atlantean age and through events resembling their own experiences.

From the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, we live, on the other hand, in a world that we sleep away during our waking life; we live in everything that we inherited from our past earthly existences. We live together with what has remained behind from ancient India, Persia, or Egypt; we live with what we have experienced spiritually here on earth, and this is cramped together egoistically in our inner being. We bring it along with us into our present incarnation. During the day, we live with all these things, and sleep away the present. Indeed, the present contains many things that can only be grasped spiritually. We cramp ourselves egoistically in ideas that come from the past and adhere to them obstinately even in our language, in our speech. Languages contain a great store of ancient crystallized wisdom. Yet we rebel against any kind of influence that may be exercised upon our souls by this ancient store of wisdom. For instance, to-day we use the words “Messer”, knife, or “Schere”, scissors. When we use the word “Schere”, scissors, we do not as a rule think that it comes from a kind of “Scheren”, or shearing, that is announced in every barber's shop! And when we use the word “Messer”, knife, we do not think that it is really based on a moral idea, for it is connected with “Maass”, measure, and “Zumessen”, to mete out, or cut to measure. When a knife was used in ancient times, it was really used to “mete out” a gift for someone. A store of wisdom lies crystallized in the words we use, and this ancient spiritual life that is contained in the words now uttered so thoughtlessly, lives in the depths of our being. Whenever we speak, we really experience the life of ancient epochs.

Spiritually, we pass through ancient epochs of the earth, from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, but we pass through them in a sleeping condition. And from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, we pass through events that are connected with the descent of human souls to their life on earth.

You see, these are realities, these are truths. These realities should be well impressed upon us, if we do not only wish to become acquainted with the forces of decay, but also with the forces of growth and progress. It would be so much better if, before going to sleep in the evening, a greater number of people were to do other things than those which they are accustomed to do! Consider what many people generally do, as last thing, before they go to bed! Yet a modern man should say to himself: I wish to enter the world that contains the forces of growth and progress, it is the world in which I can experience those forces that lead the human souls down to the earth, a world in which I can experience those forces spiritually.

From the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up we experience the forces pertaining to the future. For that reason, we should have a kind of craving for the teachings that speak of a spiritual world and that enable us to be conscious of the experiences of souls that are in a condition (but consciously) resembling that of souls who are asleep here on earth. The impulses for the progress of civilisation, for the healing of civilisation, must come from that world! The spiritual, political and economic impulses that should unfold as healing powers for our civilisation must come from that world! It is necessary, at the present time, that we should once more acquire the possibility of grasping the Mystery of Golgotha, of grasping it in a spiritual way.

What is the essential, or let us say, one of the essential things (for there are, of course, many essential things in it), in the Mystery of Golgotha?—That a God, a super-earthly Being, took up His abode in the man, Jesus of Nazareth. Beings of His kind have one characteristic quality: they cannot die. All those Beings of the higher Hierarchies, described in my “OCCULT SCIENCE”, the Angels, Archangels, etc. up to the highest Beings, the Cherubim, Seraphim, etc. do not die (read the description of their life's course in my books), they do not die as men die. What did Christ take upon Himself, Christ Who came from the higher Hierarchies?—He died within a human body. You see, here we have significant forces that pass over into the evolution of humanity upon the earth, Christ died in a human body; he passed through the experience of death, an experience unknown to the other gods who are connected with the earth. Up to the year 333, it was still possible to grasp this truth to a certain extent. Now we must learn to grasp it anew! We should grasp anew that a super-earthly Being shared with us the experience of death, thus passing over into the development of the earth. Yet at the same time we should have the great modesty of recognising that the experiences of this Being highly surpass what can be experienced through the soul-constitution of a human being.

The Christ descended from worlds where death is unknown. What Beings serve the Christ?—Among those who serve Him, there is not one who could make the same sacrifice, not one who could have come down to the earth, in order to pass through death. Beings that belong to the hierarchy of the Angeloi, right up to the higher Hierarchies, Beings connected with the evolution of the earth, are Christ's servants. We cannot perceive them, if we do not rise to a super-earthly knowledge of the higher Hierarchies. Through a knowledge of the spiritual worlds we should seek that which leads us to Christ. Spiritual science is needed above all in order to attain a new knowledge of Christ. For Christ is here, upon the earth, and He is surrounded by the world of the higher Hierarchies. Man's great temptation in modern times is the modern natural science with its great triumphs and its admission of purely external forces of Nature. Yet behind all these forces of Nature live the spiritual Beings! The assertions of natural science are certainly right, nevertheless the spiritual Beings that serve Christ live behind the forces of Nature, thinking and directing them. Christ lives in everything that constitutes the development of the earth. Super-earthly Beings serve Him—but these super-earthly Beings can only be recognised through spiritual science. Consequently an extremely important task evolves upon spiritual science: the renewal of Christianity.

All this shows you that to-day we cannot pursue spiritual science merely as a personal concern. To-day spiritual science concerns civilised humanity as a whole. Through an inner necessity, spiritual science was from the very beginning pursued in the circle that afterwards obtained the name of “Anthroposophical Society”, in a different way than in the Theosophical Society. The whole constitution of the Theosophical Society had, from the very outset, a sectarian character, something that reckoned with the egoism of modern times. Anthroposophy therefore had the task of taking into account the consciousness of modern times, that which constitutes the external culture of humanity, and of pouring into it the results of a spiritual manner of contemplation. Little differences and strifes are of no importance whatever in the face of such a task. It was essential for me to maintain the purity of a spiritual movement that reckons with the whole science of modern times. Whether this or that person may or may not accept one or the other truth, is of no importance to me. Even though the whole world may abuse spiritual science and criticize it, I do not consider this as essential, for the essential thing is that the spiritual science that I advance should really harmonize fully, with the modern, scientific mentality, with the moral conscience of modern times. For this reason, I had to publish my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” before revealing the truths of Karma. I have often listened with great pain to theosophists who said: If this or that man suffers, if he suffers socially and belongs to a lower class or caste, it is his Karma and he has deserved it. This interpretation of the idea of Karma corresponded to the egoistical requirements of men who lived in the 19th and 20th century. Yet they did not think that we do not only live through our present life on earth, but that we shall also live through a future life. To-day we should not always look back on what we once possessed in past lives on earth, but we should also consider that in future lives on earth we shall be looking back on what we are passing through now—and this will then be an entirely new experience. Freedom fully harmonizes with the idea of Karma ... Everything that appears in the account-book of life is karmically connected.

You see, if I reckon up the debit and credit sides of destiny and strike the balance, I obtain life's balance; but this does not entail that the single items are subjected to the necessity of Nature. Just as the single items of a commercial account book do not depend on diligence, and so forth, and finally enable us to strike a balance, so freedom can very well be connected with the idea of Karma. We should not adopt an easy fatalistic idea when advancing the view of Karma as a fully justified idea. Spiritual science should therefore be in full harmony also with the conscience and the moral attitude of modern humanity. For that reason it was necessary to work more extensively with spiritual science, also during the time in which the catastrophe broke out in regard to everything that has been caused by the egoism of modern humanity, both soul-spiritually and physically.

Would it have been honest and straightforward to continue preaching that spiritual science can help mankind, and yet advance no social ideas at a time when social requirements became as urgent as they are to-day? Would human love not have progressed in the direction of a social knowledge? Shall we content ourselves with declamations on human love? Or should we not rather progress to real social impulses?

The fact that we can only see Christ's ministering spirits, clearly when we look into the spiritual world, is a result and a fundamental knowledge of spiritual science, a result of what I have told you to-day concerning waking and sleeping, concerning sleeping wakefulness and the awakening from sleep through spiritual science. Spiritual science will also enable us to grasp once more the Mystery of Golgotha, in accordance with a modern mentality. And as a result, spiritual science must not restrict itself to some sectarian group, but if must be brought out into the world in the best possible way, according to our capacities and to our place in life! The centre at Dornach was not intended to be a sectarian centre, but one that renders fruitful every branch of science and life, social life and artistic life. Anthroposophy and its spiritual science must become a concern of the great masses of humanity, although its most important things and that which penetrates into the innermost depths of our heart, awakening our inner forces, are pursued within the narrower circles of our Groups. There, in those Groups, we gather forces, in order to develop a certain higher knowledge, which we must first take in there. It is a knowledge that must be developed, for to-day we live in a time in which mankind really does not know what it is seeking; it sleeps away the most important things of life. Nevertheless it is a time in which mankind seeks after a new knowledge of the spirit! Let us feel this deeply, as pioneers, I might say, of a spiritual renewal—as Anthroposophists.

For that reason I so warmly wish that also the Groups in Holland might pursue an earnest, diligent and untiring study of the knowledge that can be obtained in our movement, from out the spiritual worlds. I warmly wish that our Groups should study diligently. These studies should constitute the point of departure for bringing out Anthroposophy into the world—and each one must do this in his own way—so that mankind's longings may be satisfied through a spiritual contemplation directed towards Anthroposophy. For that reason, let us grasp the nature of the longings of modern man. Let us not think that we become materialistic, when we spiritualize matter! And let us clearly realise that mankind would face a great misfortune, if it fails to obtain the true knowledge that is able to avert that misfortune.

The Eighth Oecumenic Council of the year 869 drove away from human knowledge the contemplation of the spirit. Those who have an entirely materialistic mentality seek to prepare the next stage: they also wish to eliminate the soul and to establish the general dogmatic knowledge that man only consists of the body. Certain devilish initiates are now excogitating means of educating the human being materialistically, of preparing him materialistically as a body; they seek to attain their end not by means of psychic influences, but by means of ingredients and substances taken from Nature. They plan an experimental psychology and seek to adopt principles that are not those of the Waldorf School (for the Waldorf School principles are spiritual protests against modern materialism), and they already undertake all manner of experiments in order to test man's capacities. This is but a preliminary stage of what they really aim at. The child is no longer to be educated psychically, but with the aid of external, material means, so that its capacities may develop in a bodily way. Thus man would gradually become an automaton, unless we bear in mind at the right moment that the path that led to the elimination of the spirit must not be continued in the direction of the elimination of the soul as well. We must instead follow the opposite direction of the Eighth Oecumenic Council; we must once more follow the path enabling us to find the spirit anew, and to cultivate in human life, in every sphere of practical human life, only what we can discover through the spirit.

This is what I wish to implant into your souls, what I wish to implant into your hearts, my dear friends, after our long absence. Cultivate spiritual science first of all as a concern of the heart, in the way in which it should be cultivated individually, so that we may progress. Cultivate what you have thus taken in, and then bring it out to humanity in every sphere of life, bring out what you have thus taken in! You will then gradually find the path enabling you, in the present difficult and earnest time of probation, to do the right thing for humanity, according to your place in life.

To-day we will go rather further in outlining the connections we have tried to understand in the course of our recent studies.

The present time, with its many diverse currents, spiritual and material, is extremely difficult to understand; and the effort ends only in perplexity unless we make up our minds to recognise the causes as lying far, far back in the womb of history. Let us look back, as students of Spiritual Science, at the so-called fourth post-Atlantean period.

This begins, as we know, somewhere about the year 747 before the Mystery of Golotha, and closes with the beginning of the fifteenth century, about 1413 A.D. (The figures are of course to be taken approximately, as always in matters of this kind.) Within this period, as we observe it, we can perceive certain forces, connected with and related to each other, but differing fundamentally from all others working in previous and subsequent epochs. This period, in which the development of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul in man's being took place, can be divided into three smaller ones: the first, between the year 747 B.C. (which is the real date of the founding of Rome), ends about 27 B.C.; the second runs from 27 B.C. until about the end of the 7th century; (693 A.D.); the third and last from 693 to 1413 A.D. Since this date, since about 1413, we have the time which brings forth, in its own characteristic way, soul-forces already known to you to some extent. Just as this fourth Post-Atlantean epoch can be clearly distinguished from the three preceding ones (the ancient Indian, Persian, and Egypto-Chaldean) and must also be sharply distinguished from what followed it and what is still to come, so within it the growth is marked by noticeable moments, if we consider its progress through these three shorter periods.

From 747 to 27 B.C. the peoples inhabiting the countries around the Mediterranean come chiefly into prominence. We see a distinct form of soul-life developing among them. History hardly mentions it, because history has no neans of creating the ideas and conceptions which would fit it to deal with the really characteristic features. This epoch, which I have marked off, can be characterised by saying that it is the time when, for inner reasons of human evolution as a whole, the souls of men emancipate themselves from their connection with the universal Spiritual world. If we look back into Egyptian and Chaldean times, during the epoch of the Sentient-soul, we find in human consciousness a decided sense of kinship of the soul with the Cosmos. The Sentient-Soul in man's nature was then able to perceive that man is a member of the whole cosnos. We cannot rightly estimate what is characteristic of the Egyptian, Chaldean or Babylonian stages, unless we take into account the fact that man at that time actually experienced a feeling of kinship with the spiritual Cosmos. Just as the fingers on our hand feel themselves part of us, as it were, so the Egyptian or Chaldean felt himself to be a member of the spiritual Cosmos. A crisis, a veritable catastrophe, overtook mankind in the 8th century before Christ, and in respect of this feeling of kinship with the Cosmos human souls had owed their former feeling of belonging to the Cosmos to the atavistic, dream-like clairvoyance. They did not perceive as we do to-day. In the act of sense-perception they also perceived what profane science ignorantly calls “Animism”—the spiritual, the divine; and through this they felt themselves as belonging to the Spirit of the universe.

This relationship disappeared. The consequences were, on the one hand, numerous phenomena of decadence, but on the other, the whole marvellous culture of Greece, whose civilisation was founded on what man experiences when, as man, he begins to stand alone in the universe. We owe this civilisation to the fact that man no longer felt himself a member of the cosmos, but a totality as man, a being complete in himself. He had in a sense taken his own place in the cosmos, had begun to live a life of his own. If Greek civilisation had retained the soul-constitution for instance, of the Ancient Indian period, with its feeling of connection with the cosmos, it is impossible to imagine that this beautiful Greek civilisation could ever have arisen. All the splendour and glory displayed by Greek civilisation, unequalled elsewhere, developed in the time between the eighth and the first centuries before Christ. Humanity had withdrawn into the citadel of the soul, of the human soul in the true sense. This was the time when humanity began to move towards the Mystery of Golgotha. We must not forget that there is always something in the Mystery of Golgotha which cannot entirely dawn on human understending, even super-sensible understanding. There will always be something unconprehended. It is beyond the power of human conceptions, human feelings, human experiences, fully to grasp what was achieved by the entrance of the Christ into earthly evolution. Therefore the Mystery had, in a sense, so to take place that while it was in progress, human civilisation was not ready fully to share in it; it had to tale its course separately, side by side with ordinary human experience. That is fairly evident, even from history. How much did human civilisation around the Mediterranean notice of what happened in the far-off Jewish province of Palestine, with regard to Christ Jesus? How little did it enter into the consciousness of civilised humanity, even that of Tacitus, who was writing only a century after the Mystery of Golgotha!

On the one hand we have the current of human civilisation, and on the other the stream which brought with it the Mystery of Golgotha: the two run their course side by side. This could happen only because man, civilised man, at the time of the Divine Event, was severed from the Divine, was living a life which had no direct connection with the Spiritual. Thus on the earth itself there took place a spiritual event, which went its way side by side with human civilisation. Such a juxtaposition of outer civilisation with a Mystery-Event is unthinkable in any earlier period. It never had happened before, because in earlier times human civilisation knew and recognised itself as being in connection with happenings in the realm of the Divine-Spiritual. It is very distinctive, very rremarkable, that the secular culture which ran parallel with the Mystery of Golotha was remote from it; man had severed himself from it.

In the second period, which lasted from about 27 B.C. to 693 A.D., mid-European civilisation was not of a kind to enable secular culture to come to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This may sound very strange, considering that Christianity had made itself at home in this secular culture and had spread over the civilisation of mid-Europe; but its expansion took place in the way I have described. The Mystery of Golgotha was isolated, was alone. Certainly, it was accepted as outer dogma to this extent: Christ had come, had called Apostles, had accomplished this or that for humanity, had said this or that about man's relation to the Divine. All this was readily accepted in its outer application by secular culture, but this outer recognition does not alter the fact that in reality all those who accepted Christianity in these early centuries were far removed from an inner understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. With the help of the Gnosis, or of all that had been carried over as treasures of wisdom from the ancient pagan world, they might have come near to facing the question: “What really happened in the Mystery of Golgotha?” They did not do so. They declared everything heresy which might have led to an understanding of it, and tried to accomplish the impossible, to put into trivial forms what never could be confined within such forms, what could be the object only of wisdom's highest aspiration—the Mystery of Golgotha.

Hence the organisations fostered during the early centuries of Christianity were not such as to help people to unite theyeselves with the Mystery; their effect was to encourage in the human soul something very remote from a genuine inner feeling of understanding and partaking in it. The “Church” was an organization rather for the non-understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Anyone who follows up what the various councils, and more especially the intrigues of the Church, strove to accomplish, will find that all thse efforts went towards getting certain dogmatic ideas accepted, and towards inducing people co think of everything connected with the Mystery of Golgotha as law in no real relationship to the life of the human soul. All this led up to a certain point, which can be described, somewhat radically, in the following way. Men tried to accommodate themselves, here on earth, to certain ideas concerning the Mystery of Golgotha and its effects; but the most important thing was not the extent to which they could come to know about it and to absorb it into their souls. It was that they should be able to adopt this belief: “We grasp the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished on its own account, independently of us, and Christ will take care that we are saved!” This tendency gained ground until the reality of spiritual events was relegated to a region quite outside the soul; sacred, spiritual events were not to be thought of as connected with what took place in any human breast; the two were to be as widely separated as possible. Within, this tendency lay the germ of a purpose—unexpressed of course, but active subconsciously—which emerged clearly for the first time at the Council of Constantinople in 869. The aim was to keep the human spirit away from any individual, personal concern with the spiritual, (which was restricted to the Mystery of Golgotha), and therefore from any inclination to understand the Mystery in terms of personal experience. It was to remain incomprehensible. So the Church was able to include more and more people of a purely secular frame of mind, who came to believe that the super-sensible was beyond the range of the human soul, and that human thinking should confine itself to the objects and activities of the physical world. No forces were to be developed out of the human soul which could lead to an independent understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. In certain decrees of this eighth Council of Constantinople it is clearly stated that European humanity might not—because the forces of the human soul were not equal to it—reflect on the realm wherein the life appertaining to the Mystery of Golgotha had taken its course.

In this middle period of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, lasting from 27 B.C. until 693 A.D. something was accomplished which may be described as the confirming of humanity in the belief that all human knowledge and experience is adapted, only for the palpable “this life”; the impalpable, supersensible realm the “beyond” as it is called, must be always withdrawn from their ken, inaccessible to direct perception. The entire history of those centuries can be understood only by keeping this cardinal fact in mind: The whole policy of the Catholic Church was directed to bringing men to the belief: “The soul can know only the things of this life; as regards the super-sensible, thou must approach this in a way which has nothing to do with thy intelligence or personal knowledge”. The effect of this was that after the close of this epoch, in the eighth and ninth centuries, a sort of obscurity descended on European humanity as regards the connection of the human soul with the super-sensible. And certain later phenomena, among which that of Bernard of Clairvaux is typical, can be explained only by the fact that such men remained in a sense beyond the physical, in “the other world”, their souls absorbed in what is inaccessible to rational human understanding. This enthusiasm for something which undoubtedly lies beyond all human comprehension must be seen in the entire disposition of soul in a Bernard of Clairvaux, if he is to be understood. In his personality we find many traits which are great and powerful in the it effects, for what is capable of a more or less distorted activity is equally capable of a beautiful, great and glorious one. Bernard had characteristics which clearly show him to be a product of that disposition of soul which developed in Western civilisation in the way I have described, during these particular centuries. Many other men resembled him; he is just a typical figure—as, for instance, when he spoke to his followers (who were very numerous) of all that would be bestowed on humanity by the “Crusade” he contemplated. Then came the failure of the whole attempt. How did this devout man speak of the failure? Somewhat this way: If everything, everything goes wrong, may the blame be on me alone, not on the Divine, which must be always right. Even when such a man was convinced of his connection with what he conceived of as the Divine-Spiritual power behind events, he separated the one from the other and said: “Lay the sin at my door: Providence is something that takes its own course in a realm beyond and apart from that of the human soul.

So, at the beginning of the third period of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation, something akin to a darkening descended on humanity—best expressed by saying; that man's horizon no longer extended to the idea of a connection with spiritual currents and impulses. In philosophy of the centuries between the eighth and 15th one finds always the same aim—to prove that human ideas and concept should in no case attempt to grasp the course of spiritual reality, that spiritual reality can only be, and must be, a matter of Revelation, left to the teaching office of the church.—this was reduced to a convenient formula!

Thus had the power of the Church been built up. This power of the Church did not derive purely from theological impulse, but from the fact that man was banished to the physical life of the senses as regards the use of his own forces of knowledge and mental powers, and was not allowed to think of a knowledge of the super-sensible. Hence arose a conception of belief which was not in existence in the early centuries (although it is sometimes antedated), but developed later. It took this form: “Concerning the Divine-Spiritual only faith is possible—not knowledge.” This division between the “truth of Faith” and the “truth of knowledge” was actually made against certain significant historical backgrounds, which should be studied in connection with the things I have indicated.

We have been living since the 15th century, approximately since 1413 A.D., during a period (this will become evident in the third millennium), in which we are concerned in part with the heritage of all that has happened under such influence as I have described. On the one hand stand of the legacies from those days; on the other we have to deal with something coming to view in this, the fifth post-Atlantean period—something entirely new. In the fourth period, when we look back at it, we see that there was then a kind of severance of the human soul from the Divine-Spiritual, a banishment to purely external physical sense-transactions. That was the new thing in the fourth period. It did not exist in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, as I have already pointed out. We now have to deal with an analogous novelty in our own epoch, and humanity's task,—having entered on an age in which self-consciousness must play an ever greater and greater part—is to distinguish between what is a legacy from time past, and what is newly added to it from our own time. Let us first look at the inheritance, legacy.

We have seen that it consists in man having been constrained to develop his soul-life apart from the super-sensible. Moreover there is another result of this, the more clearly to be seen the closer the events of history are surveyed; indeed, a searching review shows the facts to be unquestionable, admitting of no doubt whatsoever. This fact is that man, confining his soul-force to the sense-perceptible, was willing to be severed from the super-sensible, and finally—since the 15th century—arrived at rejecting the super-sensible altogether. The eighth Council of Constantinople in 869, is characterized by the wish to keep man and a super sensible apart; and from this separation, sponsored deliberately by the Church, spraying the rejection of the super-sensible—the believe arose that the super-sensible might be only a matter of imagination and have no reality. If one investigates the Genesis of modern materialism from an historical, psychological point of view, the Church must be held responsible for it. Of course the Church is only the outer expression of deeper forces working in man's evolution, but to notice how one thing arises from another enables one to understand the course of events. In the fourth post-Atlantean age, the orthodox man would say: “The human faculty of knowledge is adapted only for understanding what is connected with the realm of the senses. The super-sensible must be left to revelation, which may not be contested; to speak against revelation is heresy and can lead only to delusion.”

The modern Marxist, a modern Social Democrat, true scion of this view—which is nothing but the consequence of the Catholicism of earlier centuries—says: “All knowledge worthy of the name is concerned only with sense-perceptible, physical events; there is no ‘Spiritual Science’ because there is no such thing as spirit. ‘Spiritual’ Science is, at best, Social Science, the science of human communities”. Of course this tendency has come to fruition differently in various parts of the civilized world, but the differences are no more than nuances.

Hence, from the ninth century onwards, in the central and western countries of Europe, it becomes necessary to ensure that human soul-life should occupy itself with the super-sensible by “believing” in it, but should know of it only through revelation. The races and peoples of Central Europe were such that they had to be handled carefully; they could not be treated in the same simple way. To say to people: “Your human capacities are limited to eating and drinking and things of the outer world; the super-sensible is beyond you”—that could not be done in Western Europe; but it was done in Eastern Europe, and that is the reason for the cleavage between the Eastern and Western Churches. In Eastern Europe, people really were confined to the sense-world; that was where their capacities had to unfold. That which finally led to the Orthodox religion was to be developed in the Heights of Mystery-experience, quite untouched by anything to do with the senses. What man brought forth out of his human nature was set sharply apart from the true spiritual world, which lived only in the ritual that hovered loftily above mankind.

What was it that had to develop there? In varying shades, the point of view, the perception, better reality belonged only to the physical world of the senses. One might say that forces towards which man adopts an attitude of repression, do not develop, but atrophy. If, then, humanity was restrained for centuries from spiritually grasping the super-sensible, the power of doing so was bound in the end to disappear completely. It is what we find in the modern socialistic views of life, whose misfortune consists—not in their Socialism!—but in the fact that they entirely reject the spiritual-super-sensible, and are therefore obliged to confine themselves to a social structure which takes account only of the animal side of man's nature. This was prepared for by the paralyzing of man's super-sensible forces; hence it follows that men are driven into saying: “Care for our salvation shall not in any way make us unite our soul's knowledge experience with the stream that lives a life on its own—The stream which includes the Mystery of Golgotha”.—With what is this connected?

With the fact that in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch the Luciferic forces were especially active. They severed man from the cosmos, because their aim is invariably to isolate man in selfishness, to cut him off from the whole spiritual universe, as well as from the knowledge of his connection to the physical one. Hence, when this severance was at its height, there were no natural sciences. This was Lucifer's doing. The activity which separated sense-knowledge from dogma regarding the super-sensible, was therefore a Luciferic one. Over against it stands the Ahrimanic influence; and these two are the great adversaries of the human soul. The fact that the super-sensible forces of humanity have been allowed to atrophy—leading to a purely animal form of Socialism, now due to break over humanity in a devastating and destructive way—is to be traced to Luciferic forces. The new influence, developing in our age, is of a different nature, more Ahrimanic. The Luciferic element would isolate man, cut him off from the spiritual-super-sensible, and lead him to experience the illusion of being a totality in himself. On the other hand, the Ahrimanic element inspires man with fear of the spiritual, keeps him away from it, fosters in him the illusion that the spiritual cannot be attained by mankind. The Luciferic keeping away of man from the super-sensible might be described as of a more educational, cultured kind, whereas the Ahrimanic, founded on fear of the spiritual, is more ‘natural,’ arising in the age which began with 15th century. And as the Luciferic severance from the spiritual came especially to expression under the cover of Orthodox Christianity of the East, so the Ahrimanic fear, the holding back from the spiritual, makes itself felt especially in the culture of the West, and particularly in the element of American civilization.

Such truths may be unpalatable today, but they are truths nevertheless, and we get very little farther by generalizing—however mystically or theosophically—about the connection of the human with the Divine, or whatever it may be called. We can progress only by recognizing the reality as it is. We can reduce our chaos to order only if we recognize the true characteristics of the different currents running side-by-side. These various currents, springing from their several assumptions, spread out locally, and so everything is confused in the hodgepodge called “modern civilization”. What I am now speaking of as “Americanism” (as collective concept, not applying to individual Americans), is fear of the spiritual, the longing to live only on the physical plane, or at most in what improves into that plane as coarse Spiritualism and such-like, which is not in the real sense, spiritual at all. The mark of Americanism is fear of the spiritual; it is by no means confined to America, but there it lives as a social characteristic, not simply a human one. Above all it is predominant in all science. Science has increasingly been founded on “fear of the spiritual”. Nothing in science is called “objective” unless it excludes as far as possible living conceptions engendered in the inwardness of the soul. No idea, no conception, engendered in the inwardness of the soul, is permitted to intrude into the observation of nature. This is allowed to embrace only what is dead, not the living that is spirit-inwoven. If, in the manner of Hegel, Shelling or Goethe—those genuine representatives of Mid-European thought—anyone introduces the “concept” into observation of nature, he is at once thought to be on the road to uncertainty, for no objective reality is ever expected to be attained through spiritual comprehension or experience. It is assumed that this means bringing in personal bias; that an experiment ceases to be objective directly anytime anything subjective enters into it. That is Ahrimanic. Science is universally “American” in so far as it clings to the fundamental axiom, “Everything subjective must be banished from an observation of Nature” . This is the fundamental result of the earlier severance from the spiritual in the fourth post-Atlantean period.

Thus a new element is added to this legacy—a new element which will make itself felt more and more as a destructive force alongside all that has to develop fruitfully—and consciously—in the future. It is essentially of an Ahrimanic nature; it is fear of the spiritual, and it brings havoc and disintegration into human civilization.

At the transition from the fourth to fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and during the fifth epoch, these impulses became more and more noticeable. With the discovery of America, and the transplantation into America of European ways, fear of this spiritual life appeared there, too; but on the other hand there arose what might be called a tension in human souls, for the native forces of the people in Europe were such that they could not fail to some extent to trace their own connection with the spirituality of the universe. A tension arose at the passing of the forth into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of civilization, during the centuries in which what is known as “modern history” takes shape. Then came this tension caused by the suppressed spiritual element in the breast of man. Certain people decided that a barrier had to be put up against it, partly because they understood very well what was left of the old inheritance, and partly because they had a very pertinent grasp of the newly approaching Ahrimanic element. This was the genesis of that spiritual current—a much more influential one than most people think, as I mentioned from a different point of view in my last lecture—which tries to perpetuate this keeping of the human soul at a distance from the super-sensible: in other words Jesuitism. Its inner principle is to do everything possible in human evolution to keep man at a distance from any real, conscious connection with the super-sensible. Naturally, this was facilitated by presenting the super-sensible dogmatically as a realm into which human knowledge could not penetrate. But the Jesuit movement knows very well how to reckon with the other side; it wants no such inner relation between modern science and Americanism. In that respect Jesuitism is great: it recognizes the importance of physical science and makes a deep study of it. Jesuits are great spirits in the round of physical, material science, for Jesuitism reckons with the elemental tendency of mankind to fear the spiritual, a fear which must be overcome by leading human nature towards the spiritual world; and accounts on being able to impose this fear on society by saying to people, in so many words: “You cannot and shall not approach the spiritual; we are trustees of the spiritual and we will purvey it to you in the proper way.”

These two currents of thought, Americanism and Jesuitism, play into one another, as it were. This is not something to take casually; and all such matters we must look for the deeper impulses which are active in human evolution. If we try to identify the forces which have brought about the present catastrophe, we shall find it remarkable cooperation between Americanism—in a sense here given—and Jesuitism. And from a wider point of view we see, on the one hand, how the inheritance from earlier times still influences our mental life, and on the other, the advent of something new. If we specify these two impulses as the Luciferic and Ahrimanic, we describe precisely the opposition towards that which must be introduced into the development of mankind for its salvation as true spiritual life. Anyone who approaches with inner sympathy such a figure as Bernard of Clairvaux, who in a certain sense inclines towards the Luciferic, will take account of the following attitude: “Human knowledge is after all directed only towards the physical-material; therefore we direct the soul to seek the divine-spiritual in the fervor of elemental experience.” This is what kindles enthusiasm in a temperament of that kind. We might say that what lives in human souls as a tendency towards this virtual side, lives on in our own time, but there is also the other tendency—towards the dark and somber side. The 12th century had its Bernard of Clairvaux: ours have such figures as Lenin and Trotsky; as in the former century there was an active inclination towards the super-sensible, so now we find hatred for it, although expressed in different words and substance. That is the dark reverse side of those times: there the pouring of the human soul into the Divine mould, here the pouring of man's being into an animal mould, on which alone the social structure is to be built.

These matters can be understood only if one has a clear grasp of one fact, which is far away from present-day comprehension. Our time is credulous in respect of theories, taking the content of ideas and programms as gospel, as I have often remarked. It is reality that counts, not theories and programms. The modern follower of Marx, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, before the world-war, would of course have said: “This is what Marx teaches, Engels teaches, Lassalle teaches, and that is all one needs for salvation.” He was concerned only with the “content” of ideas and programms. In reality it is never a question of that, for ideas are never carried into life in accordance with their content, but by means of forces which are quite distinct from it. No one knows the truth unless he knows that ideas often have so little to do with reality that may arise independently of their content. A splendid programme can be devised, established on a sound scientific basis, fervently longed for as the Marxists longed for theirs, but all to no purpose. For an age as unspiritual as ours, this is playing with fire. Men believe that they are working to realize the content of their ideas, but anyone who knows how things happen in life knows that the reality is quite different. If ideas are not derived from spiritual knowledge they may enter into cultural life as sheer monstrosities—and this applies to the ideas of Marx, which are intended to banish the spirit. However find they may be, they become abortions. It is no use asking in the morning: “Why has it grown light through what has happened on the earth?” One has to turn away from abstract ideas and say: “Daylight has come because the sun is shining”. In going out beyond the Earth one sees the reason for the daylight. Similarly, if we want to understand “to-day”, we must look away from what is happening in the immediate present to what took place in a time long past. Bolshevism cannot be understood except by recognizing it as an after-the fact of the Eighth Ecumenical Council of 869 A.D. You cannot understand it except as a result of the atrophy of the forces which man once had for apprehending the super-sensible world. In order really to understand the happenings of the outer world, in order to confront them, we must perceive this inner connection. For anyone observing the relations of events in history it is the most fearful thing to see how movements which set out to reform the world are concerned only with the “subject-matter” of ideas, and refuse to reckon with their reality, which exists quite independently of whether there content is beautiful or not. Suppose a child is born, a beautiful child; his mother may be charmed. Mothers are sometimes charmed, even when their children are not beautiful! He becomes a good for nothing, a ne'er-do-well, perhaps even a criminal. Is it therefore untrue to say that he was a beautiful child? Have people no right to say that he was? Does his childish beauty contradict the unforeseen things in his life? Just so there have been in many circles men with admirable ideas through which they wanted to reform the world, and these men were admired; yet the ideas became abortions! For ideas themselves are but dead things; they must be animated by being received into the vigorous life of the Spirit.

In reading modern socialistic publications one finds—if certain differences are left out of account—a great similarity between them and writings which express the standpoint of the Catholic Church, although the latter are differently expressed and deal with different realms. For instance, I recently read to you out of a certain brochure. Notice the kind of thought it expresses, it's thought-forms; compare what is said there with the rabid tendencies, whether cultured or not, which led gradually to Bolshevism; compared with the beginning of a publication byKautsky or Lenin; you'll find the same thoughts. One is the development of the other. Nowhere does one get a stronger feeling of Catholicism than in reading certain dogmatic socialist utterances. But something which Catholicism forbids—philosophizing about certain things—has become a passion, a principle: the principle of declaring that all learning comes from the bourgeoisie, and all spiritual development from class-warfare. This principle is the effect of the Catholic principle. Bolshevism may perhaps, in the form of its inception, have only a short existence: but all mankind will have to reckon long enough with what stands behind. Anyone who knows how it all hangs together would not be surprised that Bolshevism should have donned in the place where this way of thinking, in the bestial course it is followed, proceeded under cover of the Orthodox religion, so that the two streams were entirely separate.

We must fathom all these things if we want to be conscious of the necessity for approaching the spiritual life in the right way. Mystical talk about it is out of place to-day. What is needed to-day is to apply spiritual knowledge so as to look into reality and to discover the connections belonging to it; because from such knowledge alone in the correct grasp of the world's events arise; never from a past inheritance, or from fear, or from this elementary new thing I have described, which can but lead deeply into chaos. In this animalised Socialism we see displayed one result of what developed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. It has a Luciferic element in it; the Luciferic “Original Sin” is within it. But what is now developing is the penalty for that general incapacity of human faculties for turning to the super-sensible. These faculties have become truly impotent, and hatred and rejection of the super-sensible arise in their place. There is not merely hatred and original sin, but punishment for the forsaking of the super sensible. (This applies to much that is happening today).

The impulses active in human evolution take on various nuances, and events can be understood only in this light. The peoples of the Italian and Spanish peninsulas have come under the sway of Christianity, in the course of its expansion, as well as the peoples of modern France and the British Isles. We know something of what has been unfolded amongst them. We know that on the Spanish and Italian peninsulas the Sentient-Soul has blossomed forth, on French soil the Intellectual or Mind-Soul; here in Mid-Europe the Ego; and in Eastern Europe in the same way a civilization of the Spirit-is to be looked for, to be active only in the future and at present existing in germs which are now entirely hidden. Good mankind but look at Western Europe and understand its riddles through Spiritual Science. For instance, the characteristics of Italian regions (not those of single individuals, which of course grow out everywhere beyond the common norm) develop differently from those of French or British humanity. This last is so constituted that the nature of the people has a special connection with the Consciousness-Soul. Through living in the Consciousness-Soul man is banished to the physical plane, although not so strongly in the British Isles as in America. The result is that man, caught off first from the super-sensible by ecclesiastical developments, will be led back to union with the Cosmos; but it is only to the outer Cosmos that he is led by the Consciousness-Soul. Therefore the British people, as Britons, find their union with the cosmos only through economic principles. British thought is essentially economic, framed on economic lines. Anyone who grasps the connection of the Consciousness-Soul with the physical world will see this necessity; also that the French national character (not that of individuals), having an affinity with the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, develops chiefly political thinking and feeling; while the Italian and Spanish in the same way have the sensuous side of the mind developed, because the Sentient-Soul is directly connected with the nature of the people. I can only outline this, but it gives an idea of what lies in the characters of the peoples themselves.

If we look on the German essence, developing as it has in the midst of such a tragedy, we see that the Ego dwells within it. The whole of German history becomes clear if we consider this fact, which is disclosed from the super-sensible world. The Ego of man is the principle that is least externally developed; it has remained a man's most spiritual member. Thereby the German, inasmuch as he is connected through the Ego with the spiritual world, is linked with it in the most spiritual way. He cannot achieve any connection with the cosmos economically, politically, or sensuously; he can achieve it only in so far as it manifests in the soul-life of single individuals—as the Ego invariably does—and is then poured out over the people. It comes to expression most characteristically in what may be discerned as the essence of Goethe's genius, of Herder's and Lessing's, as something detached, a state higher than the physical-sensible. Hence comes a certain estrangement from the latter realm, a feeling of not really belonging to matter, when the physical-sensible alone is in question; hence the great amount of “Americanism”, and of the elements which I prefer not to particularise, poured out over Germany during the last decades, have alienated it from the original activity destined for its national Soul.

In a yet higher way Eastern Europe will be connected with the spiritual through its national characteristics—and will develop a still higher civilization and a spiritual sense, as a reaction from what is now taking shape there. But that is a matter of the future; it is not yet in evidence and must first evolve out of the animal character in which it is still confined.

The Western countries of Europe are directly connected by a lawful inheritance, so to speak, with the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Something more recent, but opposed to “Americanism”, lies hidden in the German nature; a certain relation to the spiritual world, sought inwardly in the spiritual itself. The German Soul following its own peculiar nature, has no fear of the spiritual; rather an inclination towards it, such as is to be found, albeit in a higher form, in Goetheanism.—This is plain speaking, of course; but you know that these things are brought forward from knowledge—not from Chauvinism, nor said to please anyone here. You saw in the last lecture that I understand how not to speak flatteringly. One thing, however, must be said: within the German soul—though this is often forgotten in Middle Europe, there is a dormant relation of the human spirit to the super-sensible world which must be cultivated, and which is the exact opposite of everything else now manifesting on the earth. Could we but have recognized this, if only, alas, the last decades had not brought Americanism and Russian thoughts into this realm, how differently the impulse of science in Middle-Europe would have developed! You know for my other lectures that a science of soul and spirit might have flowed from Goetheanism—but it remained a disregarded impulse! Has it really been grasped at all? Not yet—although within its depths lies the true being of Germany, which is, as you will have gathered, a stranger to the others, for they are still to a great extent animated by the legacy of the old, as well as by the new. In Middle-Europe alone has something developed which has more or less emerged from the old and the new.

By many indications we see that Goetheanism is untouched by materialistic science. (Goethe is praised, of course, but an ex-finance Minister—Kreuzwendedich—is made President of the Goethe Society!) What exists in the true, inner element of the German nature will be experienced in other realms as a continual reproach. The easiest way to protect oneself against what by nature one cannot acknowledge, is to slander it. We must look frankly at this. Such a living reproach can be invasively described as “delinquency”. This is a subjective way of escaping from the reproach. Here we touch upon an important psychological fact. The slander will spread further and further, rooted in the uncomfortable feeling that the special relationship of this Ego to the Spiritual does exist. It is necessary, however, to see clearly in these domains, not to shun a clear view of them, as is done to-day. Had we not so much conventionalism and Americanism amongst us, we should discern that German Goetheanism and Americanism are two opposite poles, and we should know that to regard these two currents of the present day with an unprejudiced mind is the only correct attitude to maintain. We should reject all exaggerated patriotism and look facts fully in the face.

Then we should abjure the apotheosis of Americanism in which we have so long and old son, and perceive that this particular element will become more and more active is a real, deep-seeded evil, because fear of the Spiritual is its main characteristic. Those who say otherwise are short-sighted, not judging things in their real setting. Everything arising from the political attitude of the French, from the economic rigidity natural to the British, or from the elemental sensationalism—the so-called “sacred egoism”of the Italian people—all this, in view of the great events now playing their part, is but trivial compared to the especially evil element arising from Americanism.

There are three currents which through their inward relationship had the greatest power of destruction in human evolution, due to their having absorbed the inherited and the new, in different ways. First among them is what I call Americanism, which tends to produce greater and greater fear of the spirit, making the world a mere opportunity for living in the physical. It is quite different when Britain wants to make the world into a kind of commercial mart. Americanism would make it a physical dwelling equipped with all possible comfort, in which man can lead an agreeable and wealthy life. That is the political creed of Americanism, and whoever does not detect it is blind to the facts and merely shuts his eyes and ears. Man's connection with the Spiritual is bound to die out under such an influence. In these forces of Americanism lies what must actually bring the earth to an end, destruction dooming it at last to death , because the Spirit will be shut out from it.

The second destructive element is not only that of Catholicism, but all Jesuitism, which in essence is virtually allied to Americanism. If the latter is the cultivation of the impulse to build up fear of the spirit, so the former seeks to awaken the belief that one should not seek contact with the spirit, which it deems impossible; it wishes Spiritual blessings to be dispensed by those who are called into the teaching office of the Catholic Church. This influence seeks to atrophy forces in human nature which incline to the super-sensible.

The particular indications of the third stream can be seen arising in a terrible form in the East: a social state based on a purely animal, physical socialism. Without plastering it with dogmas, we call it “Bolshevism”, and it will not easily be overcome by mankind.

These are the three distinctive elements in the modern development of humanity. To bring knowledge to bear upon them, so that the events of the present day may be met in the right way, it is possible only through Spiritual Science.

You will have seen in the last lecture that efforts were directed towards presenting certain conceptions (which we can make our own out of Spiritual Science), in such a way that they can be of service to us in grasping what surrounds us, daily and hourly, in present-day civilisation. If We want to add yet another to these considerations, as a final one, it can be summed up only thus: significant characteristics of our present time have been selected and brought into connection in various ways with what has sounded forth as the keynote of these studies.

If we determine to keep in mind what seems to stand out particularly in our time, we shall find that of all the limiting and hindering factors to-day, the worst is that the mode of thought and comprehension evolved during the recent centuries leads men to have little foresight of coming events. This is shown by the fact that most events come as a surprise, in the most curious way, and it is quite impossible to gain credence for anything that is foreseen. It is considered inevitable that remarkable events should take people by surprise. Speak of what is to come, and people are astonished , or they make ironical remarks about the apparent longing for some sort of prophecy. Suppose that anyone wished to call attention to conclusions such as may result from hypotheses like those we have lately brought forward here—for instance, what now looms over the world from the Far East—he would at present encounter little understanding or belief, although the fact already throws its shadow all too clearly before it. Far too little need is felt for a clear view into things. Connected with this is man's disinclination to admit the truths which, within the only circles open to them, point to future events.

Of course there is no question here of any kind of “soothsaying”; or of any sort of prophecy in the bad sense, but always an earnest, scientific method of thought and conviction derived from Spiritual Science. If we wish to ruminate upon the causes of this trend of the present day characteristic just mentioned, we may perhaps have to go far afield for them. Man as a rule is absolutely unconscious how far the causes of the thing lie from what appears as its effects . He generally looks for the causes much too near at hand.

If we are to look for causes of what has just been described, they must be sought in a tendency deeply ingrained in the human soul at the present time—a tendency towards dead conceptions and ideas devoid of life and vigor. It should be comprehensible that to think of the future, the imminent, with the same ideas as on the past, the determined, is impossible; but at the present time, value is attached only to what, in the current phrase can be “proved” and this question of proof is tied down to the special kind of proof which is popular today. Anyone who rightly understands this kind of proof knows that it applies only to truths connected with things in the universe which are in the process of dying. Therefore the only science or knowledge desired in the present age is concerned with what is dying and perishing—especially so in the case of those who claim to be the most enlightened. They welcome only a will bent in that direction. If we are not conscious of this, we are really preferring—in the widest sense of the words—to deal only with what is passing away. We lack the courage to think in terms of growing, becoming, for what is growing refuses to be grasped with the narrow, limited conceptions capable of being “proved”, which are suitable for what is passing away. So people protect themselves against the reproaches which are really implicit in what I have just pointed out.

To speak against these things, as one must do, involves the danger of incurring the reproach of frightful fantasy, dilettantism, or perhaps even worse. Conceptions are sought which protect people from the obligation of thinking about anything fruitful, or endowed with seeds of life for the future. One idea, according to this view, must be received by those who hold themselves to be among the really intelligent leaders of thought: the idea of “the conservation of matter and energy” as understood at the present time. Quite comprehensibly, everyone is adjudged to be a duffer who does not admit this indestructibility of force and matter to be a truth underlying the whole of science. Yet it is a fact that if we sound the depths of a real view of the universe, what we call matter and force are perishable and transitory; and all science, all knowledge attainable on the subject, our investigations into the transitory. Because it is insisted that science has to be concerned with that, and that only, it is dogmatically asserted that something solid, something permanent and there must be: either matter—In spite of its being transitory—or energy. This law of the permanence of matter and energy plays a great part even for those who are not concerned to analyze it scientifically; such a part that is clothes everything with mystery. Our scientific education is such that the dregs of opinion on the subject of the conservation of matter and energy penetrate our popular literature and are treated by the ordinary reader as something obvious.

Now we know, through a cold science, of the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth-developments. Nothing of what is now called matter and energy will pass beyond the Venus evolution. Hence the most lasting kind of matter, that which reaches Venus, will then come to an end. We have just passed the middle of our world-evolution, as we view it, and are in the fifth period of the earth-evolution, beyond the middle of that; and we are already living in the setting.: that is, in the time of devolution, in which the vanishing of matter and energy comes to pass. The right you take as we studied physics and chemistry would be this—that the knowledge acquired through these sciences bears only upon the transitory, which at latest will disappear from the universe with the Venus-stage. In the whole purview the present-day science there is nothing which deals with the permanent; because by means of the ideas and concepts that can be “proved” in a manner favored today, it is impossible to discover only what in this sense is transitory. Man moves only in the transitory.

An essential reform is necessary in our ideas concerning this most essential sphere, and those who consider themselves particularly scientific have the most to learn before they can replace their current notions with correct ones.—Now why am I saying this, seeing that the matter in its general bearing may not perhaps seem particularly important?

It really is important, because according to the concepts which men assimilate in the way I have described, other concepts are formed in conformity with which they will; they direct their will-power. From the mode of thought thus acquired are begotten social and political concepts. These latter shape themselves in accordance with the characteristic use made of such forces—a use consisting in this, that only the transitory is dealt with in such conceptions, and this habit spreads into ideas concerned with the living. This crops up in a particularly striking way as we look at the main points of the programms put forth by many who confidently regard themselves as the very last word in advanced thought. For instance, the schemes of many Socialists, very much in the public eye nowadays, all more or less adopt the theory of Karl Marx as a starting-point. This theory is the calamity of Russia two-day, because—for reasons I explained last time—what happens there according to historical premises can ensue elsewhere from Marxism. This way of looking at things is an extreme form of the determination to deal only with transitory. Anyone who familiarizes himself with the ideas of this school knows that the fanatical adherents of Marxism imagine themselves to be possessed of the ideas of the future, whereas they have only such as are directed to the transitory. This stands out naïvely in the so-called socialist view of life, for throughout it refuses admittance to ideas with a fruitful bearing on the future. It preaches the blessing of having none! The formula is repeated in many different ways:—Get rid of everything at present existing; then, of itself, without any reflection on the matter, something will result from the welter. This is unequivocally stated. But although it comes from the looks of those who have been brought up in Church doctrines for centuries and who do nothing but trace the events of the last centuries according to the Church, they must nevertheless say the following.—In truth this view refuses to entertain ideas with any germ of life in them: the only ones it admits are concerned with what is passing away; and the only effect of these ideas is to complete the process of destruction. Men believe they possess productive thoughts; that is all to no purpose unless the concepts are rooted in reality. These ideas are useless for establishing anything new; all they can accomplish is to turn destruction into an institution. This Socialism seems to me like a lady (a bygone person to-day) who cannot endure a crinoline. She hates the wide skirt and wants to alter it. But what does she do? She pads it out; so that it looks just as before, but is a stuffed out with wadding inside. Just so these Socialists: they never think of fertilizing what history has achieved with new concepts; they leave it alone—and themselves take the place of the former administrators. They hang on to the crinoline, but stuff it out. Look even at extremist views—they are simply a longing to administer what is perishing and dying out! To what is this due?

It is due to the fact that with the concepts of present-day science, concerned merely with things of the senses, based on the intellect, taking account only of material perception, all that one can encounter is the transitory, not the living. Only what is already dying can be grasped; nothing that is seed-bearing, growing. For the germinating, growing element must be grasped at least through Imagination, the first stage of higher knowledge; as described, for instance, in the book, “Knowledge of Higher Worlds.” And to attain to still higher knowledge of the “becoming”—Inspiration and Intuition must be applied. Those who approach such things with the outfit of ideas held hitherto may talk as much as they wish—they are only talking of laws which apply to what is on the way to destruction, unless they let themselves admit what super-sensible knowledge alone can reveal as the “becoming”. Things too-they are on a razor's edge. It is impossible to know anything on certain subjects, and civilization must fall into chaos if we are satisfied to live in it without admitting any vision of the spiritual.

What we need, and what is striven for through Spiritual Science, is a sort of revival of the Mysteries, in a form adapted to the modern mind. Unless we understand the meaning of the ancient mysteries, we shall not fathom the meaning of the epoch which is intermediate between them and what must come as the new form of the Mysteries. Comprehension of all this is necessary. The most startling experience for the pupils of the old Mysteries was to be shown clearly how the old atavistic, clairvoyant, hidden knowledge was doomed to extinction. This could not be grasped by observation, it had to be revealed in the Mysteries, where people were shown that something different from the old clairvoyant vision into the Spiritual World's was destined to become man's possession. There it was disclosed to the pupils of the Mysteries that this old capacity of the human soul, this vision of cosmic expanses in Imaginations, was dedicated to death. This was made them somewhat in the following way.—What can be perceived by physical senses on earth is not the content of the genuine Mysteries of the earth-existence; this is revealed only when the human soul ascends in the clairvoyant contemplation to Mysteries of the cosmos, of the super-earthly, and the cosmic events beyond the sphere of earth, unfold before it.—The ancient seers grasped all that, but not what happened on earth. The pupils of the tapestries were shown depth knowledge of that type, ascending into the Cosmos, would no longer be possible; and still more was disclosed to those who were to penetrate into the Christ-Mystery.

Something like this conception came to them: “Although the old seers did not speak of ‘the Christ,’ their inspirations came from the world in which Christ always was, for He is a Cosmic Being. He dwells in everything Cosmic and universal, in the whole content of man's old atavistic clairvoyant vision; but from the time when the Mystery of Golgotha is due to be enacted, all this will be no longer accessible to mankind in the old way.”

What happened? The Christ descended from the world of the cosmos to the earth. Because the cosmos was no longer accessible to men as in ancient times, because Christ was no longer to be found in the old way, because the kind of knowledge and state of soul with which men had formerly looked at the world was dying out, but Christ had to come down to them. He came to the earth. Everything, therefore, which enlightened spirits had ever known of the spiritual world in ancient times through the pagan tapestries and through pagan Mystery-knowledge, was summed up in the Christ, and could be beheld in Him. The one all-important thing was to recognize the Cosmic Being, Who in Christ descended to the earth from the cosmos. That was one point.

The other was this. Remember that through the intellect and of the senses only the transitory can be observed in all the array of systems, whether of nature, of social structures or of civilizations, and that transitory knowledge will endure no farther than the Venus-existence. But learned men, believing that their ideas point to the future, are very often immersed in what is passing away. And what the senses perceive and the intellect grasps there is no seed of the future; all of it is doomed to perish. If the only knowledge were concerned with that, there would be nothing but knowledge of death; because the actuality which surrounds us is itself doomed to death. Where shall we find the “enduring”? Where is the imperishable which shall outlast this existence, apparently permanent but doomed to die? While Adamson forces, to which materialistic superstition attributes permanence, betray their impermanence and fall to ruin, where is the imperishable to be found?

In man alone! Amongst all the beings, animals, plants, minerals, air, water, and everything that perishes, there is but one thing which will outlast the Earth-evolution and the evolution to follow it—that which lives in man himself. Man alone on earth bears within him an enduring element. One cannot speak of the permanence of atoms, matter, force, but only of the permanence of something in Man. This, however, can be seen only through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. All else, perceived by our vision, is fleeting. The material, the physical, is entirely transient; the super-sensible, which outlives it, can be perceived only by super-sensible vision. In man, as he treads the earth, lies all that will be saved out of the entire Earth-existence. If we asked: “Where is the germ of something which will continue to grow on after the Earth, Jupiter, and Venus developments—from the present civilization into the future?” The answer must be: “In nothing external on earth; only in man”. In the part of his being accessible only to super-sensible knowledge, man is the cradle of the seed for the future. Only someone who is willing to include the super-sensible in his view is able to speak correctly of the future; otherwise he must err. Thus the Christ, dissenting from worlds becoming more and more inaccessible to human knowledge, had to unite Himself with Mankind—to take up His abode in Jesus of Nazareth and become Christ-Jesus, so that in a human body there might dwell that which bears within it the future of the Earth-development. So we have in Christ the Cosmic Being, that Cosmic Being whom ancient knowledge alone could grasp directly; and in the Jesus to whom the Christ came, we have what henceforth bears within it, in human will alone, the seed for the future. He cannot be comprehended purely as “Christ”, nor as “Jesus”. To speak of the “Christ” only, is not to comprehend Him; for the “Christ” of—for example—the old Docetics (a certain sect of Gnostics) belongs to the old atavistic clairvoyance and can no longer be laid hold of. And “Jesus” cannot be understood without taking into account the Christ Who drew into him. Unless we give due weight to this fact of the Christ in Jesus, we cannot grasp that only through the human seed on earth can the cosmic be saved for the future.

To understand how far Christ-Jesus is this double Being is a great task; but at the same time many have taken pains to create obstacles to such an understanding. In modern times it has been a question of inducing forgetfulness of indwelling of Christ in Jesus by all sorts of means. On one hand there is the extreme theological teaching which only and always speaks of “the simple man of Nazareth”, the man of physical nature, not of that Man who has in himself the seed for the future. Further, there is the Society founded to combat the Christ, and with that came to set up a false picture of Jesus: the Jesuit Society, which virtually aims at testing out the Christ-concept from the Christ-Jesus concept, and to install Jesus alone as an absolute ruler of developing humanity. We must see the connection of all this, for the different impulses here pointed out work and present-day life more than is supposed, and very intensely. Without open eyes and a longing to understand the concrete events around one, it is impossible not to be taken by surprise by what happens; a clearer view of such things as I have mentioned will be lacking. Our own time is in many respects too indolent to wish to achieve clarity; the concepts of Spiritual Science are too hard to compass, and are stigmatized status dilettante, unscientific, fantastic and the like. They are condemned for the reason, I have mentioned, because of the determination to take no account of what is really significant for the future.

Thus we see around us to-day this dreary waste in the midst of the chaos into which the old religious creeds and currents of thought have led. Within this chaos, which people with curious supposed to call “war” (a work which has ceased to be applicable for a long time now), we see an array of lifeless, barren thoughts and ideas, because fertile ones can come only from comprehension of the super-sensible, the spiritual. Man two-day has to choose between cultivating the vanishing, the dying, ending by becoming a pupil of Lenin—it's taking into account the super-sensible, wherein abides what has to come in the future. I am not referring simply to the London works his mischief now in Eastern Europe—I taken more as a symbol, for we have many such Lenins around us and the whole environment of our daily life, in one domain or another. Yet the world refuses to take in hand anything except what is dying.

Remember something I once pointed out here, ‘the plant lives,’ I said; it can be described as a living being. But what does ordinary science describe as the plant? Not what lives in it, for that of super-sensible; but the dead, literal part of it, which “fills out” the living element. We find nothing else described by modern science but the mineral filling of the living being, which brings death to it. Genuinely fruitful concepts regarding nature are consequently unattainable to-day. The concepts of present-day botany have no life. All that they describe as something filled out with a stony mineral substance, which circulates inside. That can be described equally well in the animal and in man. All three kingdoms become entirely different as soon as one gets away from this circulating mineral substance.

For instance, a certain Herr Uexküll has written an article on “The Controversy about the Animal Soul”. He is possessed by masochistic savagery as regards all knowledge of the soul, or anything that suggests it. I said “masochistic savagery” because in this article he writes: “It is impossible to decide whether a soul exists or not: all that can be decided is that science can settle nothing on the subject”—an ordinary savage kills; but anyone who is masochistically savage, like this Herr von Uexküll, only “probes” the dead and makes sneering remarks. That is thoroughly typical of modern science; but it is not noticed, because nobody wants to admit it. People refuse to breakthrough the dividing wall between themselves and their environment; hence they cannot reach the ideas they really need in order to learn once more how to understand their environment.

We know from spiritual science that the essential being of man, the kernel of his life, descends from the spiritual worlds, and unites itself with what surrounds him as a bodily-material chief between birth and death, or rather between conception and death. The problems of conception, of birth, of embryology, are investigated to-day; but they cannot be truly investigated, because the research is directed only to the dead part of man, which is embedded in the living. This path will never lead to a grasp of what alone can make the human being understandable. When Man the Suns in this way from the spiritual world, he is “received” by father and mother, and goes through all the stages of his embryonic development. Science two-day assumes that the parents give the child existence; and since father and mother are the center of the family, and the family is the foundation of the community, therefore the communities, which are extended families, consider men as their own property. Thus a galling idea is brought into modern life—but it is not really true.

What, then, does the act of conception bestow upon man? What does he gain? A Spiritual Science shows, what he receives is the possibility of becoming a mortal being—of dying. You will see, if you think of what is to be found in my various books, that it is the necessary consequence. With conception there is implanted in man what makes his death possible here on earth. The whole of life from birth is a development towards death, and the seed of death is implanted at conception. What man is as “man”, as a living being, is not by any means engendered at conception; but the possibility of death is thereby grafted onto what would otherwise be immortal. Parents are called to give death of a child! That is the paradox—they give it a opportunity of bearing a mortal body on earth. What lives in that body comes from the spiritual world. This is what makes the organism—the whole mechanism with which man is clothed and which was received by him with seed of death at conception—capable of life. We must learn to recognize man in his most concrete embodiment as a part of spiritual world-development. Then we shall learn not to stand before the loftiest problems with cowardly fear, past present-day science does, but to grasp them positively. If we shrink back from them, we shall fail to understand even our immediate environment.

Round about us to-day, live the most varied peoples. Just think of the incorrect ideas, for example, created by Woodrow Wilson out of his conception of nations and the peoples—a theme with which you are familiar. We must be quite clear that we cannot understand this conception of the people unless we take in the whole of earth-evolution. Whence comes, then, a division of humanity into “peoples”? We know from Spiritual Science of evolution proceeded through a Saturn-embodiment of the Earth, then the Sun-embodiment, with the ancient Moon following that, and then the present Earth-condition; afterwards will come a Jupiter-embodiment, and so forth. The course of evolution, however, was not so straightforward that the old Saturn-body simply changed into Sun, Moon, Earth; at one time a severance of the present Sun from the Earth took place, then a severance of the present Moon, so that we have a continuous evolution, and something which was cut off reunited, and once again severed. A connection with what I have just called “Cosmic Evolution” this severance plates part in the old clairvoyance. And for the old clairvoyance the human seed the future remained “chthonic”, as it was called in the old clairvoyance is, quite unconscious. For what comes from the universe was destined to decay; it was maintained only because it had come under the grip of the Luciferic power. In this way, out of the cosmos reform the many variations in the nations and peoples, but the cosmic forces were impregnated with Luciferic forces. Over against these diverse peoples stand something which was understood in a better time than this—universal humanity. It has a totally different origin. It may be discussed in the abstract, but can be truly spoken of only as one genuinely understands what the seed of the future in humanity is . It has no taint of Nation or peoples; for it is that which did not come down from the Cosmos but which the Christ came to find, and with which He indicted Himself. Christ, unlike the Jehovah-Deity, United Himself with no nation but with universal humanity. He was in the confraternity of those Gods from whom the nations took their rise, but He left that realm when it was ready to pass away; He came to earth and took up His abode in humanity at large. When we say, “Not I but Christ in us”, it is the greatest blasphemy against Christ-Jesus to invoke Him for any need other than that of universal humanity.

A grasp of this fact belongs to the most momentous concepts for the future. We must perceive the connection of Christ Jesus with humanity, and also how everything purely national lies outside the realm of Christ-Jesus, for it is the ancient remains of what was right for extinction at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet, as we see withered fruit in the orchards, so do all things linger on after their right time. So we were bound to get the science which is concerned only with knowledge of what is on the way to extinction, and which—whether it be natural science or social science—deals and ideas that apply only to the transient, in nature or in cultural life. Often in the history of civilization one can see the conflict between the tendency to cling to what is passing away, and to present as important the dead, abstract ideas connected with it, and the wish to grasp that germinal essence of humanity which alone is pregnant of the future. I have often referred to the significant conversation between Goethe and Schiller when both were in Jena for a conference of a natural history society, at which Batsch the botanist had lectured on plants. As they left, Schiller said to Goethe, “The botanist's outlook dismembers everything; it ignores the connecting links”. Goethe, in a few descriptive sentences, put before Schiller his “Metamorphosis” of plants, but the latter said, “That is not an experience more observation—it is an idea.” To which Goethe answered “Then I see my ideas with my very eyes.” What he had been describing was visible to him, as real as a thing perceptible by physical senses. They confronted one another—Schiller, representative of the mind unable to look up to the spiritual, bemused by dead, abstract ideas; and Goethe, who wished to derive from knowledge of nature what is imperishable, vital for the future, the imperishable in humanity, of which all that is transient is merely an image. He wanted to unite the transient with its archetype, the real. He was not understood, for he looked on the super-sensible, the imperishable, as though it were perceptible to the senses. Thus the urgent need of our time is that Goethe's teaching should be more widely developed and further elaborated in its own sphere. Then things will become clearer, and we shall see that the particular creeds, whether Jewish, or more particularly the Catholic, are only the presuppositions of what is old and outworn, standing out in evolution as parched remnants, supported only from outside; and that side-by-side with these, interpenetrating them, stands Americanism, which wishes to carry the transient into the future. Therein lies the kinship between Americanism and Jesuitism, of which I spoke last time.

Standing in opposition to all this is Goetheanism. By this I do not mean anything dogmatically fixed, for we have to use names for things which far transcend them. By “Goetheanism” I do not mean what Goethe brought up to 1832, but what will perhaps be thought in the next millennium in the spirit of Goethe; which may develop out of Goethe's views, concepts and sentiments. It may be concluded, therefore, that in everything connected with Goetheanism, outworn beliefs sees its particular any. The most extreme paradoxes are to be found in this sphere. It really is a paradox to find that the cleverest book about Goethe whatever may be said to the contrary—has been written by Jesuit, Father Baumgarten. No details concerning him is neglected. The usual distinguishing mark of Jesuit work on the subject is hostility to Goethe: but this is a highly intelligent, painstaking book, not superficially written. Yet it has happened to Goethe to be portrayed as an ordinary citizen of the 18th century, born in 1749 at Frankfort-on-the-Main, who studied at Leipzig, was given a post in Weimar, traveled in Italy, live to be old, was incorrectly called it on both came good to “Johann Wolfgang Goethe;” this was how he was described in the work of a distinguished English Gentleman, Lewes—which was much admired. A book headed “Johann Wolfgang Goethe,” describing him as an ordinary 18th-century citizen, is no real book. A cultural paradox lies in the Jesuit's book on Goethe for the trend of opposing forces in modern times can be seen in it, and where the real ones are to be found.

A small way it shows itself amongst us. So long as we were reckoned a “hidden sect”, Anthroposophy was seldom attacked; but when it began to spread a little, virulent attacks began, especially from the Jesuits; and the Journal, “Voices from Maria Leach”, now called “Voices of the Time”, is not content with one article, but contains a whole series about what I've called Anthroposophy. I must warn you, again and again, attacks come from this side, not to believe that from the point of view of these writers, it is for our good when they say that we “speak of the Christ”, or that we “promote understanding of Christ”. They forbid that everything; it is exactly what must not be done; outside the doctrines of the Church, there must be no assertion about the Christ! No-one in our circles need be so naïve as to believe that by being a good Christian, he can propitiate the Church. Just because he is a good Christian, and does all in his power to advance Christianity, he arrays Catholicism against him as a supreme enemy. It becomes more and more necessary to take care that naïveté in these contemporary matters should disappear from amongst us. We must more and more firmly determined to realize what is active in the forces around us, whether they be in the ascendant or are declining. We must get beyond the longing, present among us in so many forms, simply to penetrate a little way into an imaginative world. I have often said that we must above all be able to place our Spiritual Science alongside modern concepts, and bring keen observation to bear on life as it is in the present age; because to gain true insight into this is possible only from the standpoint of Spiritual Science.

How many people come to me and say, “I have seen this or that”. Well they may well have done so. Imaginations are not so very distant. “Was that the Guardian of the Threshold?” many then ask. A simple yes and no does not answer questions on such matters, because the answers involve the whole of human development. But the answers are given. I am now correcting my Occult Science, for a new edition. I see that in it may be found everything necessary for the answering of such questions. Every precaution, every limitation to be observed is exactly described; the feelings to be developed, the experiences to be undergone, are all set forth. To elaborate the whole content of Spiritual Science would have required 30 volumes. This one must be read carefully, drawing the necessary conclusions—and it can be done. I do not like writing thick books. But read attentively and it will be found that this book indicates clearly that he endeavors to enter the super-sensible world strides towards meeting the Guardian of the Threshold; but the meeting is not so simple a matter as to have a dreamlike imagination. The latter, of course, is the easiest method of entering that world. The meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold is fraught with tragedy; it is a vital conflict as regards all intellectual concepts and laws, all man's connections with this virtual world and with Ahriman and Lucifer. This life-and-death struggle must be endured by him who would meet the Guardian of the Threshold. Should this experience come to a man merely as a dreamlike imagination, it means that, he wants to slip through comfortably, so as to have a dream out of the Guardian of the Threshold as a substitute—nowadays people are fond of substitutes the commission!—for the real thing.

We must think healthily on the subjects; and it will then become evident that healthy thinking can alone provide the basis of a remedy against all superstition, and against all the charges made by superficial opponents of Spiritual Science. Moreover, in this kind of thinking, in this raising oneself to experience on the spiritual, lie all the necessary seeds for finding the real way out of the present world-catastrophe.

The layout must be grasped—not in the realm of the earth and senses, not in institutions which are mismanaged and sucking the life out of what exists. The thing to be grasped does not exist! We must be stirred with burning zeal for the top attention of what does not yet exist!

This non-existent thing can be grasped only according to the pattern given by super-sensible knowledge. It cannot be grasped by looking into the past. Such men as Kautsky prefer to look back into the past, finding and “Anthropology” the ground-plan of mankind. They tried to study conditions at a time when man was hardly yet created in order to understand the social connections of to-day. These two sons of a misconceived Catholicism, such as Kautsky, want to have it so. But one cannot look back to the past, because in the past, those things which have extended into the very latest present, were created by means of atavistic forces, instinctively. In the future, nothing more will be achieved “instinctively”, and if man holds only to the products of ages of instinct, he will never attain to what bears the future within it, and can lead out of this catastrophe. An active, earnest understanding of the present depends entirely upon a right attitude to the spiritual world.

I should have to say much if, continuing in this strain, I were to speak to you about many things closely related to this present time. Yet if, in the weeks while we are separated, you will bring rightly be for your souls what has been said in these lectures, and which should culminate in realizing the necessity for knowledge of the twofold figure of Christ Jesus, you will go far this summer in meditative comprehension of the cosmic Christ and the earthly Jesus; remembering that the cosmic Christ descended from the spiritual worlds because these worlds were henceforth to be closed to man's view, and that man must apprehend what lies within him as the seed of the future. In the cosmic Christ and the earthly human Jesus and their union, lies much of the solution of the riddle of the world—at least of the riddle of humanity. In man lies the seed of future; but it must be fructified by Jesus. If it is not so fructified, it will assume an Ahrimanic form, and the earth will end in chaos. In short, in connection with the Mystery of Christ-Jesus we can find a solution of many, many questions to-day; that we must endeavor so to seek these solutions as not to be lightly contented with what is so often taken for “Theosophy” or “Mysticism”or the like—a “Union with a spiritual”, and “entire absorption in the all”—We must really visualize the true conditions surrounding us, and try to permit them with what we gain from Spiritual Science. We shall then say to ourselves over and over again, with regard to the answers to many questions: truly man today is seeking for something very practical, not merely theoretical; he will find himself in a blind alley in which he can go no further, if he does not go with the spirit. Everything which does not go forward with the spirit will wither away.

This is a weighty question for the future of mankind. Has man the will to journey with the spirit? I would fain impress this on your hearts today as the feeling which can arise from the reflections we have pursued.

Probably we are meeting to-day for the last time in this room, which we used so gladly for years as a place for our studies. It was one of the first to be arranged in keeping with our own taste, and one can only work according to the opportunities that exist. We fitted it up as we did because we were always convinced that endeavors on behalf of spiritual Science ought not to be mere theory but should be expressed in everything wherein we meet as human beings. The room is now to be taken from us and we must look for another. Obviously, under present conditions, we shall not be able to fit it up as we did this room, but we must be content with it. This room has become dear to us, for we have come to regard it as impossible to speak elsewhere of our relations with the spiritual as we can in this place, where in many ways we have tried to do the same things that are being attempted in Dornach on a larger scale. In times gone by we had to try all sorts of arrangements. Perhaps there are still a few here who were present when we had to speak in a beer-shop; I stood there, facing the audience, while behind me the landlord or landlady filled beer-mugs. Another time we were in a room like a stable: we had booked another, but that was all they gave us. In other towns I have lectured in places with no boards on the floor, and that too had to be put up with; it is not exactly what could be wished for as an outcome of our movement, and it would be a misunderstanding if it were said that we would just as soon speak of spiritual things in any surroundings. The spirit's task is to penetrate into matter, and to permeate it completely. That is the sense in which I have been speaking of social and scientific life to-day.

For all these reasons it will certainly be very hard part in a few weeks from this room, which was fitted up so devotedly with the help of our anthroposophical friends; but we must look upon such a parting in the right way, as a symbol. People will be obliged to part from much in the course of the next few decades. They will be taken by surprise, although they do not believe it. One thing will be deeply rooted in those who have grasped the deepest impulse of Spiritual Science. Whatever may be spoken, this cannot be shaken, and that is what we have grasped in the spirit, and what we have determined to do and accomplish in the spirit. No matter how chaotic everything looks, that will show itself to be the right thing.

So many leaving this place is symbol for us. We must move into another, but we carried away with us something of which we know that it is not simply our own deepest inner being, at the deepest inner being of the world, of which man must build if he would build a right. He who stands within Virtual Science is convinced that no one can take away, either from us or from humanity, what we have accomplished through it, and that it must lead to human affairs to a healthy condition ; this he knows, to this he clings. We may not as yet be able to say how we shall accomplish many things; but we may be sure that we shall accomplish them rightfully if we steep ourselves in the knowledge of what Goetheanism signifies for Spiritual Science, and if on the other hand we accept what has recently been mentioned here—that's the world stigmatizes and defames all that is connected with Mid-European civilization of the 18th and early 19th centuries, and that we, bringing all this before our souls, can nevertheless take our stand on our sure convictions: whatever happens, this Mid-European culture will be fruitful for the future of mankind, which indeed depends upon it. To save their own faces, because they have no wish for this feature of mankind, the opponents of this particular culture defame it; but let us grasp it in the spirit, recognize its inner spiritual content, knowing that we can build upon it. Then we shall be sure that though all devilish powers vow its destruction, yet it will not be destroyed! But only that can escape destruction which is united with the genuine spirit!