The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we want to look at something that I would like to call the relationship that can develop between the individual human soul and what we mean by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Today, wherever one hears about this spiritual science, one often does not yet look hard enough at how different this relationship of the human soul to spiritual science is supposed to be from the relationship of any other knowledge, any other insight, to this human soul. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, is indeed such that it speaks to the human soul in a completely different way than any other knowledge. Through any other knowledge, one gets to know this or that; one learns something about one or the other in the world; one then knows more than one knew before. Spiritual science does not relate to the human soul in such a way that it would only convey something that one knows afterwards. Spiritual science appeals to much deeper impulses of the human soul than mere knowledge, than mere thinking. Spiritual science seizes, or at least wants to seize, the deepest being in us, which, coming from spiritual worlds, moves into our human earthly being at birth and which this human earthly being then leaves in death to pass over into the spiritual worlds to other tasks. Only when we have a true intuitive grasp of this relationship between spiritual science and the outer world, and between the spiritual science and human life, shall we be able to comprehend the full significance of spiritual science for the human soul.

We do not understand the human being fully if we do not realize: that which lives in me as a human being, that which develops in me as a human being through the fact that I have taken on a physical body through birth, that which accompanies me in the course of my life, first as an inexperienced child, then more experienced, more skillful, what takes place in me as fate, everything that is present in my body and in my life, it is actually the transformation of a spiritual-soul being that lived in the spiritual-soul before the human being was conceived or born. And it is this spiritual-soul element that dwells in the body that is actually addressed by what is meant as spiritual science.

Now one might perhaps believe that it is not necessary for a person to occupy himself with this spiritual-soul element within him, because this spiritual-soul element will already find its way in the world. But that is not the case. That which is spiritual and soul in us takes hold of us and is in us, and is to some extent wrapped in our body, in part in our abilities, in part in our destiny. And one could say: It is precisely in the present developmental cycle of humanity, in which humanity has now arrived and in whose sense it will continue to develop towards the future, precisely in the sense of this present and the future, that the human being, as a spiritual principle of his body, as a spiritual principle of his life and his abilities, as a spiritual principle of his destiny, redeems what has become incarnate in him. We cannot escape the spirit. The spirit lives in us. We can leave it out of consideration, but it still lives in us. We can look at the laziest, most comfortable, most casual person who has never made an effort in his life to bring something that lies as a religious or spiritual disposition in his mind to independent development, who has remained quite dull, so to speak. We can look at him: he is not spiritless. To speak of people as spiritless is just an incorrect word. There are no spiritless people; nor is it possible to be spiritless in life. For the spiritual and the soul are our endowment when we enter the physical world from the spiritual worlds; they are allotted to us according to what we have gone through before we descended to this present life on earth. We cannot be without spirit, but we can disregard the spirit within us. We can, as it were, sin against it, we can refuse to want to redeem it. We can want it to merely slip into us, to shroud itself within us: then it is present in us, but we have not liberated it within us, we have not redeemed it.

In this way, too, we must gradually learn to look at people's lives. And our view of life will become quite different, and in the course of time it must become quite different. We can find people in life who have become dull and unfeeling. We will not say that they are spiritless, but we will say that they have committed the sin of burying their spirit during their lifetime, of leaving the spirit in its enchantment, of letting the spirit slip into the flesh, into the merely outward course of life, of letting the spirit degenerate in fate. When we are born, we can only become human beings if the spiritual-soul individuality descends from spiritual-soul worlds. And when the child appears in its first organization, it is still an imperfect image of the spiritual individuality. This lies within him. It can be ignored, or it can be disenchanted, or it can gradually be brought out of the flesh, out of the course of life, out of fate. But it is man's task, and in the future it will increasingly become man's task, not to let the spirit degenerate. We cannot kill the spirit, but we can let it go to rack and ruin by forcing it to take a different path than the one it takes when we bring it out.

If we endeavor from one day on to learn something about the spiritual worlds, to feel something about the spiritual worlds: we actually bring it out of ourselves. The other is just a suggestion. We get it out of ourselves. Whatever you have ever said to yourself about spiritual science, you have drawn from within yourself, because it is within your deepest inner being and wants to come out. And it is meant to come out, and it is a sin against the order of the world to leave the spirit within mere flesh, because there it goes astray; there we abandon it to a fate that it should not take. We liberate the spirit by bringing it out of the flesh. And by consciously permeating ourselves with the spirit, we release that which wants to be released from the underground of existence. One will understand this more and more. It will be increasingly recognized that materialism does not simply prevent the emergence of a [different] theory or allow a false theory to emerge, but that materialism consists in allowing that which wants to enter into the knowledge and perception of the human soul to flow down into coarse matter and to proliferate in coarse matter. This is the question that humanity must decide in the near future: whether it wants to let the spirit proliferate in matter – in which case the spirit becomes a deformity, it leads to diabolical, devilish, Ahriman delusion, or whether humanity will want to transform the spirit into thoughts, into feelings, into impulses of will: then the spirit will live among people and achieve what it wants to achieve by entering into the life of the earth through people. For that is what the spirit wants: to enter into the life of the earth through man. We should not hold it back. And every time we resist becoming acquainted with the spirit, we hold it back: it must, as it were, plunge down into matter, must make matter worse than it is. For the spirit has its allotted task: it is to enter into earthly life through the development of the human soul; there it has a beneficial effect. If it is pushed back into matter, then it has a devastating effect in matter, then it has a bad effect.

If you take this as the essence of spiritual science, you will see that it has a lot to do with our human life. Spiritual science does not want to be a theory like other theories, but wants to give people the opportunity to release and liberate the spirit that is enchanted in human nature, to work in the world what wants to be worked by the spiritual worlds. That is certainly also the reason why many people still very energetically reject spiritual science today. People gladly accept other science because this other science flatters the pride, the vanity of people, but it does not make the claim to be something real, but it merely makes the claim to give thoughts, to to educate the intellect, perhaps also to teach people some useful moral concepts; it does not claim to get to the core of the human being, to be brought from worlds in which a task is assigned to the spirit. I would like to say: only through spiritual science does human knowledge become serious, and people shy away from that. They would also like to have spiritual science only as something that splashes along at the surface of existence. People are afraid that it will get to the core and essence of man. That is why they do not want to accept spiritual science. If they would accept spiritual science, then many things in social life, in historical life, would have to change in the very near future, then people would have to think differently in the most everyday life. And that is what matters. That is why it is also the case that one can take in the other science, but one remains the same throughout one's life, one only becomes richer in knowledge. One should not take in spiritual science without it transforming one, and one cannot take it in without it transforming one. It slowly and gradually makes one into a different person. One must have patience, but it makes one into a different person, because it appeals to completely different human tasks, and it appeals to something completely different in human nature.

Let us take a look at human nature and see how diverse this human life is. The human being devotes himself to three currents: as a conceiving human being, as a feeling human being and as a willing human being. In imagining, feeling and wanting, what we can experience is actually exhausted. Now, all three impulses of the human soul, imagining, feeling and wanting, stand in a very specific relationship to what spiritual science actually wants to address in the human soul, in the core of the human soul.

Let us first take imagining. Imagining is certainly shaped by ordinary science and by what is increasingly being taken from this ordinary science and applied to child-rearing and is therefore so important for the whole development of human destiny, including for practical life, because it is intended to permeate the child. Imagining is not shaped by ordinary science. It is not so very long ago, a few centuries, that this has been the case in the most eminent way, which is why people do not notice it today. But it will not be long before what I am saying now can be observed in an almost comprehensive way. Scientific concepts, as they are taught today to the youngest people, to children, can be absorbed throughout one's entire life without becoming different in terms of one's imagination through absorbing so many concepts in the sense of today's science. One remains the same. Not only that, but it cannot be denied that one becomes more and more limited, even in intellectual terms, through the ordinary scientific concepts that are increasingly becoming part of general education. The mind, in so far as it is a thinking one, loses the flexibility to adapt to living conditions that are much more complicated than what a person can absorb through ordinary knowledge.

You see, it goes deep into the heart when you have some opportunities to see into life today. Those who have become completely accustomed to the concepts that science can provide today are increasingly unable to grasp the vital social interrelations and social demands. They are virtually pushed aside by real life. And that is why I have said here and elsewhere in recent days: Make parliaments and state assemblies out of people who are educated in the sense of today's world view. You will see what these scholars decide, who think scientifically! This is quite certainly suited to corrupting people in terms of social institutions, because in this area of social life, only unfruitful thinking can be done from a scientific point of view. It is the same in many, many respects. One loses a certain flexibility of mind through this merely intellectual knowledge. This will change as soon as you engage with the concepts of spiritual science. Try to realize how differently you have to tune your mind if you want to grasp what is offered in spiritual science and if you want to grasp what is offered in the education of the outer world today. Certainly, spiritual science encounters so much resistance because it requires more agility, more fluidity of mind, to find one's way into it. In what is available today in popular literature - or even its offshoots, which flow through the channels into journalism, where people then absorb information in their Sunday papers - people can move around with extraordinary ease. And if they go to today's lectures, where people are spoon-fed information in words and pictures, so that they don't even have to think, don't even have to set their minds in motion, you will find nothing in all of this that frees the mind to think, to imagine. It loses its freedom. The mind becomes narrow and limited. Our intellectual education is the path to spiritual limitation. Certainly, our intellectual education has made great strides in the fields of science and technology, but it is the path to limitation; it narrows thinking, imagination. And one must appeal to something quite different in the imagination if one wants to understand spiritual science. Therefore, when people approach spiritual science today, they are afraid to take the first step! When they have read only a few pages, some say: I lose myself there, I do not get any further, it goes into fantasy! - It does not go into fantasy at all, but the person in question has only lost the opportunity to really free his thoughts, to plunge into reality with his thoughts, when they are not leading the external sense world by the hand.

That is one thing: spiritual science appeals to the power in human nature that frees us from narrow-mindedness and enables our thinking and imaginative life to grasp not only a little but a great deal. I meant it very seriously when I said in a public lecture in Stuttgart these days: For the spiritual researcher, it makes no difference whether one is a materialist or a spiritualist; that is not the point, that is irrelevant. What is important is to develop sufficient spiritual strength to make real progress. Those who have this strength, this spiritual power, may be materialists, they find the spirit in matter and its processes if they are only consistent. And those who are spiritualists do not stop at saying: spirit and spirit and spirit...! but they delve into material life, into practical life as well, they allow their thinking to bear fruit even in their actions. Versatility, as demanded by today's life - and the life of the future will demand it even more - versatility is what will become of spiritual science in the near future. And that is what humanity needs as it works towards the future. Anyone who is familiar with life today and looks at the catastrophic events that are happening around us knows that one of the deeper causes of today's catastrophe is that people have become one-sided, despite all their high scientific education, that they lack the opportunity to penetrate things in a versatile way. They lack the flexibility of mind to immerse themselves in reality. Versatility is what is gained through spiritual science for the imagination.

Something is also gained for feeling through spiritual science. For the one who wants to think as spiritual science makes necessary, who must become accustomed to this much more mobile world, releases something that otherwise only lives [hidden] in the human being, so that it unfolds out of the human being. In our feeling, as we brought it with us at our birth, the rhythm of the world lives. More than we realize, the entire rhythm of the world lives in us. This can even be proven mathematically, but very few people know about these secrets of existence. Do not be afraid to join me in considering how the entire rhythm of the world lives in our own organism, in what goes on within us. You know that the sunrise moves a little further each year. If we go back in time, the so-called vernal point of the sun was in Taurus; then it came into Aries, but in Aries it moved further every year; now it is in Pisces. The sun does not rise at the same point every year on March 21; that's how it comes around the whole circle. And after about 25,920 years, the sun goes all the way around, apparently, of course, describing the whole ellipse. If it rises today at a certain point in Pisces, it will return there in 25,920 years. The strange thing is: if you consider these approximately 25,920 years as the great cosmic year, as the ancient Greeks did, and you now look for one day of this cosmic year, you have to divide by 365. What is one day of this great cosmic year? That is approximately 70 to 71 years. That is, on average, a human life when a person grows old. If you think of a human life as it is spent here on earth as one day, and take the whole Platonic year, it is 365 times as much. That is how long it takes the sun to make one revolution around the world: 365 days, of which a person lives through one in an earthly life. It is a beautiful rhythm, but this rhythm goes much further. Consider that we take about 18 breaths in one minute. These 18 breaths multiplied by 60 give the number of breaths in one hour; this multiplied by 24 gives the number of breaths in one day and one night. If you calculate 18 times 60 times 24, you get: 25,920. That means you take as many breaths in one day as the sun takes [Earth years] to go through its own year. The same rhythm is in your breathing inside that is in the course of the sun outside. And again, the strange thing is: you spend a day breathing 25,920 times in one day. Take a day and treat it as if it were a breath: in a sense, a day is a breath, because in the morning our body and our etheric body breathe in our ego and the astral body, and in the evening, when we fall asleep, we breathe out our ego and the astral body; it is one inhalation and one exhalation. How often do we do this in a single day, in about 70 to 71 years? We do this breathing, which means that we live – calculate it in a day – almost exactly 25,920 times. That is how many days we live in 71 years. The individual breath is therefore related to the breaths of the whole twenty-four-hour day like the advance of the vernal point in one year to the advance of the sun through 25,920 years. In relation to the great solar year of 25,920, a single human life on earth is like a day, a day of our life, a twenty-four-hour day occurs as many times in our 71-year life as there are years in the solar cycle. Imagine what it actually means that we are part of the wonderful rhythm of the sunlit cosmos, that our life, insofar as it is inner human life, is purely mathematically expressed in the great music of the spheres of the cosmos!

When a person begins to immerse himself in these things emotionally, only then does he feel like a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm. Only then does he feel how this whole great and infinite world of God has created its image in his human nature. But this is something to be sensed, to be felt. This sensing, this feeling, this feeling of oneself in the universe, this feeling of oneself in the whole spirituality of the world, that is something that ultimately comes to us from spiritual science! We open ourselves up to the world, whereas otherwise we close ourselves off in our narrowly limited ego. We are an image of God, but otherwise we know nothing; we begin to feel ourselves as the image of the divine world, as the microcosm in the macrocosm. We learn to know ourselves through feeling. This happens bit by bit, slowly. I would like to say: just as we go through this slow sequence of days through our lives, so does feeling with spiritual science bring forth this sense of the world. But man must acquire this sense of the world. For this feeling for the world will in turn inspire him to the great tasks that lie before humanity in the future. However strange it may still sound today, in less than fifty years people will no longer be able to build factories or cultivate the soil according to the requirements that will be placed on humanity if they do not have this feeling! The catastrophe we are currently facing is only an expression of the impasse into which humanity has entered. The world has moved on, but people have not yet come far enough with their thoughts and feelings; therefore, their thoughts and feelings are not sufficient to truly penetrate this world and make the work of humanity harmoniously concordant. Humanity will be condemned to develop more and more disharmony in social coexistence and to sow more and more seeds of war across the world if it does not find its way into harmony with the cosmos in feeling, in order to carry this into everything it does, even into the most mundane. Therefore spiritual science is already connected with that which must intervene directly in the course of the most extreme culture, or humanity will not come out of the impasse. In the future, factories and schools will not be maintained if concepts from the great tasks of the universe are not developed. These were already tasks today, but people have not taken them into account; that is why this catastrophe has come. The deeper causes already lie in what has just been said. These signs of God, which express themselves in these catastrophic events, must be taken into account by humanity. People must learn to develop a conscious relationship with the cosmos, because otherwise it will no longer be possible.

Let me give you an example that many people today will still consider foolish, some will denounce as insane: we have certainly made great progress, say in the field of chemistry, but we have done so without such a sense of the world as I have just expressed. In the future, this sense of the world will have to be developed as well: the laboratory bench will have to become an altar. The service to nature that is being developed, even in chemical experimentation, must be conscious of the fact that the great cosmic law is present over the laboratory table whenever one dissolves any substance with another in order to obtain a precipitate or the like. One must feel at home in the whole universe, then one will go about it differently, and then something quite different will be found from what people have found today, which is great but will not be able to bear the right fruit because it is found without reverence, without the feeling that permeates the harmony of the universe. How many people have abstracted what was called the music of the spheres in Pythagoras! Here you have a sense of the music of the spheres in the experience of the rhythm that runs through the universe. You don't have to imagine anything abstract, but something that goes into the living feeling (see note).

Do you know what would happen if this broad-mindedness of the soul did not enter into the feeling? We have just said: flexibility of thinking, versatility of thinking and imagination, that is one thing that helps thinking and imagining. For feeling, broad-mindedness, an open mind towards the world, should prevail. The opposite – you can already see it approaching if you just look at the world with a little courage – is philistinism. What has the great, for many materialistically thinking people 'blessed' culture of modern times brought to people? At the bottom of the soul lies philistinism. Philistinism and banality will only be overcome by that open-mindedness, that broad-heartedness of soul, which feels itself as a microcosm within the macrocosm, which can have reverence for everything that, as divine-spiritual, permeates and pulses through the world. Just as narrow-mindedness, intellectual narrow-mindedness in the life of the intellect must be conquered by spiritual science, so philistinism and vulgarity in the sphere of feeling must be conquered by spiritual science. And a third aspect presents itself to us when we look at the will. In many cases, things are in their initial stages as far as the will is concerned. Only the psychologist, the expert on the soul, can see what is being prepared, but it will come! Of course, many people today believe otherwise, but anyone who is able to see through the deeper course of human development already notices that nothing is as widespread in general human life in the realm of will — much more so in modern times than in older times — as clumsiness. Clumsiness is something that threatens to develop into a terrible evil for the development of humanity in the future. I think that today we can already see it quite clearly: people are taught to do this or that in a one-sided way. If they are to prepare to do something that they have not learned by rote, they will not be able to manage it. How few people today are capable - if you will allow me to mention such things - of sewing on a trouser button if necessary in special situations. Few people are able to do anything else that is not directly related to what they have learned in the narrowest sense. This is something that must not befall humanity. People would allow what was in them as spiritual heritage to wither away when they descended from the spiritual world through birth to existence if they became as one-sided as the “blessed” culture demands in many ways. Those who only look at things theoretically do not see the connections. But anyone who truly embraces spiritual science with a sense of life is an enemy of one-sidedness, for spiritual science gives rise to a mood in the human soul that also tends towards versatility. If you do not merely take up spiritual science with your head, but if you put yourself in a position to absorb spiritual science so that this spiritual science pulsates in your soul like blood in the body, you will certainly also gain a certain versatility in adapting to your surroundings. You will gain the ability to do things that you would otherwise not be skilled at doing. The skill in the will develops, and the person becomes adaptable to the environment. Of course, you can say, if you want to say this: We certainly do not notice that the anthroposophists, who are united in the society, have become terribly more skilled or more able to cope with life. Many say that. Not I say it, but it is said. Yes, that stems from something else. The anthroposophical life in the soul does not yet pulsate in people as blood pulsates in the body, but the bad habit of taking everything only into the mind, into the intellect, has been brought in from outside. Spiritual science, too, becomes only a theory for many; it becomes only something that they think, but that is not their nature. If you only think spiritual science, it does not matter whether you read a spiritual science book or a cookbook. Perhaps a cookbook will be more useful. Spiritual science must become so serious that it really seizes the whole person in his whole soul. Then it goes out to the limbs, then the limbs become agile, the person becomes more capable of living. Then it is a matter of gaining an inner power of conviction, of not being satisfied with the outer conviction, but of gaining an inner conviction.

Those who are familiar with the inner value of spiritual science know that it is indeed capable of extending the physical life of a person, provided it is taken up with freshness and vitality. Of course people may come and say: Well, there is someone who only reached the age of forty-five, or even twenty-seven! Yes, but just ask the counter-question: How old would the person who reached the age of forty-five through spiritual science have become if he had not taken it up in the twenties? Just ask the counter-question! The external forms of proof do not apply to these internal things. Statistics and the like have no value if you want to take the inner being into account. Statistics are of great value in external life, but even there they are limited to the external and do not grasp what is the principle of life. You can see this quite simply: it is completely justified to set up insurance companies according to statistics and arithmetic; they base themselves on how long a person is expected to live and then they insure people accordingly. But it would not occur to you to then have to die when, according to the probability calculation, your year of death for the insurance company arrives! So for reality, you do not consider what is decisive for the external life to be decisive. All that statistics and probability calculations possess of value for the outer life ceases to have significance when the value of conviction for the spiritual begins. But you will only gain this if you take spiritual science itself as a living elixir of life. But then it becomes such an elixir of life that the human being fits into the circumstances.

Then the opposite will take place. I was once extremely saddened - you can say: that's a strange person to be saddened by it! - when I once lived in a house and the master of the house always had to weigh himself on a scale to determine exactly how much meat and how much vegetables he had to eat. He had to weigh every single meal! Imagine the loss of instinct that would ensue for humanity if everyone wanted to weigh their rice and cabbage at every meal. This uncertainty of instinct would come from purely intellectual science, because it can only show the external statistically. But it is not a matter of losing our instinct - and through intellectual education we do lose it - but of spiritualizing it; of becoming as sure as instinct usually is, but spiritually.

This is what I have to characterize as particularly significant, taking into account the will. Spiritual science creeps into the will, prepares it, so that the human being is prepared for his surroundings, without even noticing how he actually grows into what is around him. By growing together with the spirit, he grows into the environment.

You see, you have to learn to experience the spirit. But you do that through spiritual science. And humanity will need it more and more in the future to experience the spirit.

For how does man experience what is given to him through conception or birth? Imagine: a cannon is fired at some distance from you. You hear the bang. You see the light a little earlier. But now imagine the following: You are standing next to the cannon and, due to some event, you are shot out as fast as the sound. You would fly through the air at the speed of sound: you would not hear the sound; you would stop hearing the sound the moment you move at the speed of sound. That is why man does not notice the spirit, because he moves from birth to death at the same speed as the spirit works. The moment you absorb spiritual truths, you put yourself at a different speed than the body. Therefore, you begin to perceive the world in a different light. Just as you perceive sound because you do not have the same speed, so you perceive the spirit in the course of your life by bringing yourself to a different pace, creating inner peace, as you can read in my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. Not living with the body, but creating a different pace! But this is something that humanity must acquire in the first place, something that is of tremendous importance.

People today take no account of how it actually was in earlier times. History is really a kind of fable convenante, but that is not what concerns us today. People were educated differently in earlier times. In earlier education, much more consideration was given to the life of the mind. This purely intellectual life has only really emerged in the last four or five centuries. In this, no consideration is given to the fact that the human being is a multi-part entity. The intellect is very capable of being educated in humans; it can develop, but unfortunately it is not capable of development throughout the whole of a person's life, and especially not in our present time cycle. It is bound to the human head, and the head remains capable of development only up to the age of twenty-eight at the most. A person needs to live three times as long as their head is capable of developing. Of course, we are intellectually capable of development in our youth, but we only remain so until around the age of twenty-eight. The rest of our organism remains capable of development throughout the rest of our lives; it also demands something from us throughout our lives. What is given to people today is only head knowledge, not heart knowledge. I call heart knowledge that which speaks to the whole organism, head knowledge that which is only intellectual and speaks only to the head. Now the head must stand in a continuous interrelationship with the heart, morally and spiritually as well. This cannot take place today because we give our children so little for the heart, so to speak, for the whole of the rest of the organism, and only give them something for the head. A person reaches the age of thirty-five. At most, he now has head knowledge; if he is lucky, he has the memory of the head knowledge he absorbs. He remembers purely intellectually what he has acquired. But ask whether today's teaching is able to achieve that later in life one not only remembers by heart what one has learned, but that one lovingly transfers oneself back to what one took in during one's youth with feeling; that one really still has something of what one was taught there, so that one can refresh it anew. But this must become the ideal of spiritual science in education, so that one does not just remember back. Now, today, people do not even do that. They take their exams and then forget what they have studied. But let us assume that people do remember back: is what people had at school a paradise to which one likes to be transported? Do you go back so far that you can say: As I think back, the morning of life shines in for me, and as I have now grown older, becoming older transforms it within me into something new; I have been taught in such a way that I can transform it, I not only remember it, I transform it, it becomes new to me.

The soul content of human beings will become full of life when the principles of spiritual science renew our entire education and our entire spiritual culture. And then the effects of early aging in humanity will become increasingly rare. Anyone who follows the development of humanity knows that before the 15th century, the oldest people were not as old as the youngest people today. The prevalence of old age is increasing to a devastating extent. This old age can only be controlled by creating the right mood, by giving us in our youth what can be transformed in old age, what can become new to us; what we not only remember but transform because we think back to a paradise. As a real elixir of life, spiritual science will also bring this into our immediate lives. The school will become something completely different. The school will become a place where people are aware that they have to take care of the whole of human life. Because what is offered to the child comes out in a completely different way in old age. Certain things are offered to the child in the form, let us say, of learning to look up with admiration and reverence. This comes to expression in later life. In middle age it remains more withdrawn, but in old age it comes to expression in that it gives us the power to have a beneficial effect on children. Or as I once said in a public lecture: Those who have not learned to fold their hands in childhood cannot bless in old age. The inner feeling that is connected with folding the hands reappears in us, as if transformed, in later life in the ability to bless. Today, if we only follow today's education, we have no idea what we are giving the child for later life, in the age from seven to fourteen and even earlier, and especially beyond the age of fourteen, with what is offered to today's youth. This is terribly serious, because it lays the foundation for all the megalomania that is being instilled in young people today, for all the arrogance and prejudice, as if one could somehow already have a “point of view”! Today, even the youngest people say, “That is not my point of view.” Everyone has a point of view. Of course, it is not possible for someone to have a point of view at the age of twenty. This awareness is not encouraged today.

All these things can be summarized by saying that what lives in the human being will in turn be brought to reality. Reality is placed in a healthy relationship to the human soul. This is what the ideal of spiritual science must become in relation to the human soul and reality. Especially on the big plan of life, people today speak without any relationship to reality. Those who understand the relationship that must live in the human soul in relation to reality can sometimes suffer torments purely because of the form that today's thinking has. The child then, when the teacher thinks like that, endures these torments unconsciously. An example: a very famous professor of literature gave a lecture on taking up his post, at which I was present. He began: We can ask this, we can ask that. He listed a series of questions that were all to be answered during the semester, and then he said, “Gentlemen!” I have led you into a forest of question marks. I had to imagine a forest of question marks! Imagine what it is like for a person to stand before a forest of question marks without being able to visualize it! This is something that is often underestimated. What must be aimed at is a vital relationship to reality.

Recently a statesman said the words: Our relationship with the neighboring monarchy is the point that must become our political direction in our entire future life. - So imagine: the relationship of one country to another country is a point, and the point becomes a direction. One cannot think more unrealistically! But imagine what a configuration the entire inner life has, which is so far removed from reality as to turn out such empty phrases! But such an inner life is also just as far removed from the outer social life; it does not merge into the social life. What it dreams up does not become real. In spiritual science it is impossible to think as unrealistically as the conceptual shells that have been gradually developed in recent times. The present time is so conceited that it imagines itself to have become particularly practical. But it has only become schoolmasterly, out of touch with life. And a future age will characterize our age by the fact that, strangely enough, the world schoolmaster had a highly impressive effect on so many people: Woodrow Wilson, who is not connected to reality by a thin thread in his thinking either, but for whom all words correspond to unreality. But they are admired by those who are only a little hindered by the fact that they are at war with him. But there are many members of the Central Powers today who admire Woodrow Wilson! In the future it will be especially difficult to understand how political programs, without any relation to reality, can be found in which the crazy ideas of world treaties and peace treaties between nations and so on are laid down. If only it could have been done so easily! The abstract thinkers since the Stoics have been thinking about these things! What today emerge as Wilsonian ideas were there for those who know the subject, ever since there have been human beings. A healthy mind says, of course: because it was always there and could not be realized, it is unhealthy! Today's thinking has become alien to reality, which is why it takes no pleasure in such unreal thoughts.

Things are connected with the deepest principles and impulses of life. And the fact that there is so much confusion and chaos today stems from the fact that humanity has arrived at a way of thinking that it believes can master the practice of life, but which is basically very far removed from true reality. A union with true reality in a vigorous thinking, which develops such strong powers that it can penetrate into reality, that is what must come to mankind from spiritual science as an ideal. But to do this we must begin with the small. We must develop in the child not only an understanding of the abstract concept, but also of the real, the conceivable. We ourselves must first have the connection with it. He who wants to teach the child the idea of immortality in the image of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, but who does not himself believe in this immortality, teaches the child nothing. But anyone who is familiar with the field of spiritual science knows that the butterfly is the real image of immortality created by the spirit of the world. We ourselves believe in this image, and we choose nothing other than that in which we ourselves believe because we know it or strive to know it. In this way we seek to submerge ourselves in reality, to overcome the egoism that still wants to have something abstract in thinking. We seek to penetrate the spirit of reality, and in doing so we will find the paths that are necessary for newer humanity, and are all the more necessary because they have been most abandoned by those who call themselves practical people. They are not the practical people, but those who have become impoverished and who impose their impoverishment on humanity through brutality. Help in this difficult situation will only come if humanity seeks the spirit and through the spirit, reality.

This is what I wanted to share with you today as something that we must appropriate as a feeling for the relationship of the human soul to the world, as it arises from spiritual science as the fundamental mood of the soul. And more important than the individual spiritual-scientific truths is this fundamental mood with which we then go through life when it has been kindled in us through spiritual science.

It will be necessary for me to begin this evening with a sort of introductory lecture, and deal with the actual subject itself in the two following lectures. I must do this because there are so many people in the audience to whom Anthroposophy is still but little known; and lectures dealing with a special subject would remain rather in the air if I did not begin with some introductory remarks treating of Anthroposophy in general before coming to definite observations in the domain of medicine.

Anthroposophy is indeed not as is so often said of it, some kind of craze, or a sect; it stands for a serious and scientifically-considered conception of the world; but a conception of the world which is applied just as seriously to the spiritual domain as we are accustomed to apply our modern scientific methods to the material domain. Now it might appear to begin with to many people that any suggestion of the spiritual at once introduces something unscientific, for the reason that people are generally inclined to the idea that only those things can be grasped scientifically which can be experienced by the senses, and carried further by means of the reason and intellect. It is the opinion of many people that directly we step over into the spiritual it implies renunciation of Science. It is said that decisions with regard to spiritual questions rest upon subjective opinion, upon a kind of mystical feeling, which everyone must manufacture for himself; “faith” must take the place of scientific knowledge. The task of this introductory lecture shall be to show that this is not the case.

Above all, Anthroposophy does not set out to be “Science” in the generally-accepted sense of the word as something that lies apart from ordinary life and is practised by single individuals who are preparing for some specialised scientific career; on the contrary, it is a conception of the world which can be of value for the mind of every human being who has a longing to find the answers to questions regarding the meaning of life, the duties of life, the operation of the spiritual and material forces of life, and how to turn this knowledge to account. Hitherto in the Anthroposophical field there has been unfailing success in achieving entirely practical methods of applying Anthroposophical principles, more especially in the sphere of education. We have founded schools, which are organised on the basis of these conceptions. And in many well-recognized ways we have succeeded in a similar manner with regard to the art of healing. Anthroposophy does not wish to create obstacles in any sphere, or to appear in opposition to anything that is in the nature of “recognized science;” it will have nothing to do with dilettantism. It is above all anxious that those who wish earnestly to work out what has been given as Anthroposophical knowledge, shall prize and admire all the great achievements that have resulted—with such fullness in recent times—from every kind of scientific endeavour. Therefore there can be no question (in the medical sphere or any other) of anything like dilettantism, nor of any opposition to modern science. On the contrary, it will be shown how by following certain spiritual methods one is in a position to add something to that which is already accepted, and which can only be added when the work of serious investigation is extended into the spiritual world itself.

Anthroposophy can do this because it strives after other kinds of knowledge which do not prevail in ordinary life or in ordinary science. In ordinary life, as in our customary scientific methods, we make use of such knowledge which we attain when in the course of our development we add to our inherited tendencies and capabilities what we can gain through the usual lower or higher grades of schooling, and which together make us into ripe human beings in the sense in which that is understood to-day. But Anthroposophy goes further than this; it desires to start from what I may call intellectual modesty. And this intellectual modesty (which must be there to begin with if we are to develop a feeling for Anthroposophy) I should like to characterise in the following manner.

Let us consider the development of a human being from earliest childhood onwards. The child first appears in the world showing outwardly in its life and inwardly in its soul nothing of that by which a fully- developed human being finds his orientation in the world through actions and knowledge. There must be education and up-bringing in order to draw out of the childlike soul and bodily organism those capacities which have been brought into the world in a dormant or “unripe” state. And we all admit that we cannot in the true sense of the word become active inhabitants of the world if we do not add to our inherited tendencies all those things which can only come by a process of unfolding and drawing them out. Then sooner or later, according to whether we have completed a higher or lower grade of education, we step out into life, having a particular relation to life, having the possibility of unfolding a certain consciousness with regard to our surroundings. Now anyone who approaches the intentions of Anthroposophy with true understanding, will say: Why should it not be possible—seeing that it is possible for a child to become something entirely different when its soul- qualities are developed—for such a thing to take place also in a man who is “ripe” according to the standard of to-day? Why should not a man who enters the world fully equipped with the best modern education, also contain hidden capacities in his soul which can be developed further, so that he can progress by means of this development to still further knowledge, and to a practical conduct of life which to some extent can be a continuation of that which has brought him as far as the ordinary state of consciousness?

Therefore in Anthroposophy we undertake a kind of “self-development”—which is to lead out beyond the ordinary condition of consciousness.

There are three faculties in the human soul which are developed normally in life up to a certain point, but which we can unfold further; and Anthroposophy provides the only means in this our modern age of culture and civilisation which will create the necessary stimulus for the further development of these faculties. All three faculties can be so transformed as to become the faculties of a higher kind of knowledge.

First there is the Thinking. In the culture that we have acquired we use our thinking in such a way that we give ourselves over quite passively to the world. Indeed, Science itself demands that we should employ the least possible inner activity in our thinking, and that that which exists in the outer world should only speak to us through the observation of our senses; in fact that we must simply give ourselves over altogether to our sense-perceptions. We maintain that whenever we go beyond this passivity we are only led into dreams and fantastic notions. But where Anthroposophy is concerned, there is no question of fantasy or dreaminess, but of the exact opposite; we are guided to an inner activity which is as clear as any method leading maybe to the attainment of mathematics or geometry. In fact we comport ourselves with regard to Anthroposophy precisely in the same way as we do with regard to mathematics or geometry, only in Anthroposophy we are not developing any special attribute, but on the contrary, every faculty that is connected with human hearts and minds—the whole sum of what is human. And the first thing that has to be done is something which, if people are only sufficiently free from prejudice, can be readily comprehended by everyone. It is simply that the capacity and the force of Thinking should be directed for a time not in order to grasp or understand some external thing, but just in order to allow a thought to remain present in the soul—such a thought as may be easily observed in its totality—and to give oneself up entirely to this thought for a certain length of time.

I will describe it more exactly. Anyone having the necessary feeling of confidence might turn to someone who was experienced in these matters and ask what would be the best kind of thought to which he might devote himself in this way. This person would then suggest some thought which could be surveyed with ease but which would at the same time be as new to him as possible. If we use an old familiar thought, it is very easy for all kinds of memories and feelings and subjective impressions to arise out of the soul, so that only a dreamy condition would be induced. But if the enquirer is directed to a thought which is quite certainly a new one, which will arouse no memories, then he will be able to give himself up to it in such a way that the thought-forces of the soul will become stronger and stronger. In my own writings, and especially in my books—“Knowledge of the higher Worlds” and “An Outline of Occult Science,” I call this kind of thinking, which can be inwardly cultivated, Meditation. That is an old word: but to-day we will only use it in the particular connection which I will now describe. Meditation consists in turning the attention away from everything that has been either an inner or an external experience, and in thinking of nothing except that one thought, which must be placed in the very centre of the soul's life. By thus directing all the strength that the soul possesses upon this single thought something takes place with regard to the forces of the soul which can only be compared to the constant repetitions of some movement of the hand. What is it that takes place when one does that? The muscles become stronger. It is exactly similar in the case of the soul's powers. When they are directed again and again to one thought they gain force and strength. And if this goes on for a long time—(though to spend a long time at it on each occasion is certainly not necessary, because it is rather a question of entering into a state of soul produced by concentration on a single thought)—and the length of time depends also on predisposition, for with one person it might take a week, and with another three years, and so on—so, if we go on for a long period doing such exercises again and again perhaps for five minutes or fifteen minutes every day, then we begin at last to have an inner sense that our being is becoming enfilled with a new content of force.

Previously, the forces of the nerves have been felt in the process of ordinary thinking and feeling, as we feel the forces of the muscles active in the grasping of objects or in whatever we perform. Just as we have been feeling these things gradually more and more in growing up from childhood, so in the same way we gradually begin to learn how to feel that something new is permeating us when we apply ourselves to such thought-exercises—of which I can now only indicate the general principles. (You will find them described in greater detail in my books.) Finally there comes a day when we are aware that we can no longer think about outer things in the same way as we used to think about them; but that now we have attained an entirely new soul-power; that we have something in us that is like an intensified, a stronger quality of thinking. And at last we feel that this kind of thinking enables us actually to take hold of what previously was only known to us in quite a shadowy way.

What we are then enabled to grasp is the essential reality of our own life. In what manner do we thus recognize our own earthly life—the life we have lived since birth? We know it through our memory, which reaches back as far as a certain point in our childhood. Rising out of undefined depths of the soul appears the remembrance of our past experiences. They are like shadows. Think how shadowy those emerging memory pictures of our life are in comparison with the intense full- blooded experiences we have from day to day! If we now take hold of our thinking in the way that I have described, the shadowy quality of these memories ceases. We go back into our own actual earth-life; we experience again what we experienced ten or twenty years ago with the same inner forces and strength with which we originally experienced these events. Only the experience is not the same as formerly, inasmuch as we do not again come into direct contact with the external objects or beings, but we experience instead a kind of “extract” of it all. And that which we experience can, paradoxical as it may sound, be described as having definite significance. All at once, as in a mighty panorama, we have the whole of our life up to the time of birth before us. Not that we see the single events simply in a time- sequence, but we see them as a complete life-tableau. Time turns into Space. Our experiences are there before us, not as ordinary memories, but so that we know that we stand before the deeper being of our own humanity—like a second man within the man we know with our ordinary consciousness.

And then we arrive at the following: This physical human being that we confront in our ordinary consciousness is built up out of the matter which we take out of the Earth which is round about us. We continually discard this matter, and take in fresh matter, and we can definitely say that all the material substances which have been discarded by our body are replaced by new substances within periods of time of from seven to eight years. The material in us is something that is in constant flux. And so, learning to know our own life through our intensified thinking, we come to know that which remains—which endures throughout the whole of our earth-life. It is, at the same time, that which builds up our organism out of outer material substance; and this latter is itself at the same time that which we survey as the tableau of our life.

Now what we see in this manner is distinguished in yet another way from ordinary memory. In ordinary memory the events of our life appear before the soul as though approaching us from outside. We remember what such and such a person has done to us, or what has accrued to us from this or that event. But in the tableau which arises from our intensified thinking, we learn to know ourselves as we really are ourselves—what we have done to other human beings, how we have stood in relation to any occurrence. We learn to know ourselves. That is the important point. For in learning to know ourselves, we also learn to know ourselves intensively, and in such a way that we know how we are placed within the forces of our growth, yes, even within the forces of our nourishment; and how it is we ourselves who build up and again disintegrate our own bodies. Thus we learn to know our own inner being.

Now the important thing is that when we come to this self-knowledge, we immediately experience something which can never be experienced by means of any ordinary science or through the ordinary consciousness. I must admit that nowadays it is really very difficult to express what is now arrived at, because in face of what is considered authoritative to-day, it sounds so strange. But so it is. At this point we experience something through our intensified thinking, of which we must say the following:—There are the laws of Nature which we study assiduously in the sciences; we even learn about them in the elementary schools. We are proud of this; and prosaic humanity is justly proud of what has been learnt of these laws of Nature in physics, chemistry and so on. Here I must emphatically declare that Anthroposophy does not set itself in any amateurish opposition to Science. But because of our grasp of inner intensive thinking we say that the natural laws which are learnt in connection with physics and chemistry are only present in the matter of the Earth, and they cease to be of any account so soon as we pass out into universal space.

Here I must state something which will not seem so very implausible to anyone who thinks over it without prejudice: suppose we have somewhere a source of light, we know that the more widely the light is distributed from its source the more it loses in intensity; and the further we go out into space the weaker it becomes, so that we are tempted to speak of it no longer as “light” but as “twilight,” and finally when we have gone far enough it cannot be accounted as light any more. It is the same with the laws of Nature. They have a value for the region of the Earth, but the further we go out into the Cosmos they become less and less of value, until at length they cease to be of any account at all as laws of Nature. On the other hand, those laws which we come to apprehend through intensified thinking, which are already active in our own life, these show us that as human beings, we have not grown out of the natural laws of the Earth, but out of higher, cosmic laws. We have brought them with us in coming into earthly existence. And so we learn to recognize that the moment we have grasped our intensified thinking we can only apply natural law to the mineral kingdom. We cannot say—and this is a very reasonable error made by the newer physics—that natural laws can be applied to the Sun or the Stars. That cannot be done; for to wish to apply natural laws to the Universe would be just as artless as to wish to illumine the worlds of space with the light of a candle. Directly we ascend from the mineral, which as mineral is only apparent to us on this Earth, up to what is living, then we can no longer speak of the natural laws of the earthly realm, but we must speak of laws which worked down into the earthly realm from out of the Cosmos—from universal space. That is already the case with regard to the vegetable kingdom.

We can only use the laws of the Earth to explain the mineral—laws, for example, such as the law of gravity and so on, which work from the centre of the Earth towards the circumference. When we come to the vegetable kingdom, then we must say that the entire globe is the central point, and that the laws of life, are working towards it from every side of the Cosmos—the same laws of life which we have first discovered in ourselves with our intensified thinking, and of which we have learnt to know that we build ourselves up between birth and death by their means.

To these laws, then, which work from the centre of the Earth outward, we add knowledge of the laws which work inwards towards the centre of the Earth from every direction, and which are already active in the vegetable kingdom. We look at the plants springing up out of the Earth and tell ourselves that they contain mineral matter. Chemistry to-day has gone very far in its knowledge of the respective activity of these mineral substances. That is all quite justifiable and quite right. And chemistry will go yet further. That will also be quite right. But if we want to explain the nature of plants we must explain their growth, and that cannot be done through the forces that work upwards from the Earth, but only through those forces that work inwards from the surroundings, from the Cosmos, into the Earth- existence. Hence we have to admit that our knowledge must ascend from an earthly conception to a cosmic conception; and moreover in this cosmic conception is contained the real human Self-knowledge.

Now we can go further than this and transform our Feeling. To have “Feeling” in ordinary life is a personal affair, not actually a source of knowledge. But we can transform that which is ordinarily only experienced subjectively as feeling, into a real objective source of knowledge.

In Meditation we concentrate upon one particular thought; we arrive at intensified or “substantial” thinking and thereby are able to grasp something that works from the periphery of the Universe towards the centre of the Earth, in contradistinction to the ordinary laws of Nature, which work from the centre of the Earth outwards in all directions. So when we have reached this intensified thinking, and have perceived that our own life and also the life of the plants is spread out before our souls like a mighty panorama, then we go further. We come to a point, after having grasped something through this forceful thinking, when we can cast these strong thoughts aside. Anyone who knows how difficult it is, in ordinary life, to throw aside some thought which has taken hold of one, will understand that special exercises are necessary to enable this to be done. But it can be done. It is not only possible to cast out with the whole strength of our soul this thought that we have concentrated upon, but it is also possible to cast out the whole memory-tableau, and therewith our own life, and entirely to withdraw our attention from it.

Something then begins to occur by which we clearly see that we are descending further into the depths of the soul, into those regions which are usually only accessible to our feeling. As a rule in ordinary life, if all impressions received by sight or hearing are shut off, we fall asleep. But if we have developed intensified thinking, we do not fall asleep even when we have thrown aside every thought—even the substantially intense ones. A condition arises in which no sense-perceptions and no thoughts are active, a condition we can only describe by saying that such a person is simply “awake;” he does not fall asleep; but he has nevertheless at first nothing in his consciousness. He is awake, with a consciousness that is empty. That is a condition revealed through Spiritual Science to which a person can attain who can be quite systematically and methodically developed—namely to have an empty consciousness in complete waking awareness.

In the usual way, if our consciousness is empty we are asleep. For from falling asleep to waking up we do have an empty consciousness—only—we are asleep in it. To have an empty consciousness and yet be awake, is the second stage of knowledge for which we strive. For this consciousness does not remain empty for long. It fills itself. As the ordinary consciousness can fill itself with colour through the perceptions of sight, or by the ear fill itself with sounds, so this empty consciousness fills itself with a spiritual world which is just as much in our surroundings “there” as the ordinary physical world is in our surroundings here. The empty consciousness is the first to reveal the spiritual world—that spiritual world which is neither here on the Earth, nor in the Cosmos in Space, but which is outside Space and Time, and which nevertheless constitutes our deepest human nature. For if at first we have learnt to look back with the intense consciousness of thinking upon our whole earth-life as a script—now, with a consciousness that was empty and has become filled, we gaze into that world where we passed a life of soul and spirit before we came down into our earthly existence. We now learn to know ourselves as Beings who were spiritually present before birth and conception, who lived a pre-earthly existence before the one wherein we now are. We learn to recognize ourselves as beings of spirit and soul, and that the body that we bear we have received in that it was handed on to us by parents and grandparents. We have had it delivered to us in such a way that, as I have said, we can change it every seven years; but that which we are in our individual being has brought itself to Earth out of a pre-natal existence. But none of this is learnt by means of theorising, or by subtle cogitation; it can only be learnt when the suitable capacities are first of all unfolded in intellectual modesty.

Thus we have now learnt to know our inner humanity, our own individual being of spirit and soul. It comes to meet us when we descend into the region of feeling and not merely with feeling, but also with knowledge. But first we must mark how the struggle for knowledge is bound up with strong inner experiences which can be indicated as follows: If you have bound up one of your limbs tightly, so that you cannot move it—even if someone perhaps only bandages two of your fingers together—you feel discomfort, possibly even pain. Now when you are in a condition where you experience what is soul and spirit without a body, you do not possess the whole of your physical being, for you are living in an empty consciousness. The passing-over into this state is connected with a profound feeling of pain. Beyond the feeling of pain, beyond the privation, we wrestle for the entrance into that which is our deepest spiritual and soul-being. And here many people are arrested by terror. But it is impossible to gain any explanation of our real human nature by any other means; and if we can learn it in this way, then we can go still further.

But now we have to develop a strength of knowledge which in ordinary life is not recognised as such at all; we have to develop Love as a force of knowledge—a selfless out-going into the things and processes of the world. And if we perfect this love ever more and more, so that we can actually lift ourselves out into the condition I have described, where we are body-free—and in this liberation from the body gaze at the world—then we learn to realise ourselves wholly as spiritual beings in the spiritual world. Then we know what man is as Spirit; but then we also know what dying is; for in Death man lays his physical body altogether aside. In this knowledge, which as a third form, is experienced through the deepening of Love, we learn to know ourselves outside our body; we accomplish separation from it by the constructive quality of knowledge.

From this moment we know what it will mean when we lay aside our body in this Earth-existence and go through the Gate of Death. We learn to know death. But we also learn to know the life of the soul and spirit on the other side of death. Now we know the spiritual- soul-being of man as it will be after death. As at first we had learnt to recognize our being as it is before the descent into earthly life, so now we know the continuation of the life of this being in the world of soul and spirit after death.

Then something else occurs which causes us to mark clearly how imperfect is the consciousness of to-day; for it speaks of “immortality,” out of its hope and faith. But immortality—deathlessness—is only one half of Eternity—namely the everlasting continuation of the present point of time. We have to-day no word such as was to be found in the degrees of knowledge of an older time, which points to an immortality in the ether half of Eternity—“unborn-ness.”

Because just as man is deathless, so is he also unborn; that is to say, with birth he steps out of the spiritual world into physical existence, just as at death he passes from the physical world into a spiritual existence. Therefore in this manner we learn of the true being of man, which is spiritual, and which goes through birth and death; and only then are we in a position to comprehend our whole being.

The principles which I have briefly outlined have already formed the content of a wealth of literature, which has imbibed a conscientiousness and a responsibility towards its knowledge out of the realm of exact Science, on which alone this sense of responsibility can rest to-day. So we attain to a Spiritual Science, which has grown out of ordinary Science.

And just on account of this, we learn something else—namely how life consists of two tendencies or streams. People speak in a general way to-day about development; they say the child is small—it develops—it grows; it is full of energy—strong—it blossoms with life. They say that a lower form of life has evolved to a higher;—-quickening, blooming life—growing ever more and more complicated! And that is right. But this stream of “life” is there, however, in opposition to another stream, which is present in every sentient living being—namely, a destructive tendency. Just as we have a budding and sprouting life in us, integrating life—so we have also the life of disintegration. Through knowledge such as this we perceive that we cannot merely say that our life streams up into the brain and nervous system, and that this matter organises itself so that the nervous system can become the bearer of the life of the soul. No—it is not like that. The life is germinating and sprouting, but at the same time there is continual destruction incorporated into it.

Our life is incessantly going to pieces ... the blossoming life is always giving place to the decaying life. We are actually dying by degrees and at every moment something falls to ruin in us, and every time we build it up again. But, whereas matter is being destroyed, it leaves room wherein what is of the soul and spirit can enter and become active in us. And here we touch upon the great error made by materialism, for materialism believes that the sprouting and budding life evolves up to the nervous system in man so that the nerves are built up in the same way as the muscles are built up out of the blood. It is true they are. But no thinking is developed by means of building up the nerves; neither is feeling. On the contrary, in that the nerves decay to a certain extent the psychic-spiritual incorporates itself into what is decaying. We must first disintegrate matter in order that the psychic-spiritual can appear in us and enable us to experience it for ourselves.

That will be the great moment in the development of a rightly-understood Natural Science, when the opposite to evolution will be recognized as carrying evolution forward at the corresponding point; when it will recognize not only integration, but also disintegration—thus admitting not only evolution but devolution. And thus it will be understood how the spiritual in the animal and in man—but in the latter in a self-conscious way—takes hold of the material. The spiritual does not take hold of the material because the latter is developing itself against it, but because matter, by a contrary process, is destroying itself; and the spiritual comes into evidence, the spiritual reveals itself, in this process. Therefore we are filled with the spirit; for it is everywhere present in devolution but not in evolution, which is Earth-development. Then we learn to observe that man as he stands before us in his entirety, is as though contained within a polar antithesis. Everywhere, in every single organ, wherever there is an upbuilding process there is also a destructive process going on. If we look at any one of the organs, it may be the liver, or the lungs, or the heart, we see that it is in a constant stream which consists of integration—disintegration, integration—disintegration. Is it not really rather an extraordinary expression that we use when we say for example “Here flows the Rhine?” What is “the Rhine?” When we say “Here flows the Rhine,” we do not as a rule mean that “there is the river-bed `Rhine,'“ but we mean the flowing water which we look at. Yet it is different every moment. The Rhine has been there a hundred years, a thousand years. But what is it which is there every moment? It is what is realised as being in alteration every moment in the flowing stream. In the same way everything that we contain is held within a stream of change, in integration and disintegration, and in its disintegration it becomes the bearer of the spiritual. And so in every normal human being there exists a state of balance between anabolism and catabolism, and in this balance he develops the right capacity for the soul and spirit. Nevertheless, this balance can be disturbed, and can be disturbed to such an extent that some organ or other may have its correct degree of anabolism in relation to too slight a degree of catabolism, and then its growth becomes rampant. Or contrariwise, some organ may have a normal process of disintegration against too slight an anabolism, in which case the organ becomes disturbed, or atrophies; and thus we pass out of the physiological sphere into the pathological.

Only when we can discern what this condition of balance signifies, can we also discern how it may be disturbed by an excess of either integrating or disintegrating forces. But when we recognize this, then we can turn our gaze to the great outer world, and can find there what, under certain conditions, will act so as to equalise these two processes.

Suppose we take for example a human organ that is disturbed by reason of too strong a destructive process, and then look with sight made clear by spiritual-scientific knowledge at something outside in Nature, say at a plant; we shall know that in a particular plant there are anabolic—building-up—properties. Now it becomes apparent that in the habit of certain plants there are always anabolic properties and that these correspond precisely to the anabolic forces of human organs. Thus, we can discover—when we make use of these conceptions which have now been developed by me—that there are anabolic forces in the kidneys. Let us suppose the kidneys are too weak, that their destructive forces are excessive. We turn to the plants, and we find in the common marestail, Equisetum Arvensae, anabolic forces which exactly correspond to those which belong to the kidneys. If we make a preparation from equisetum and administer it through the digestive process into the blood-circulation and thus conduct it in the right way to the region in the body where it can work, we strengthen the debilitated anabolic forces of the kidneys. And so we can proceed with all the organs. Once we have grasped this knowledge we have the possibility of bringing back into a condition of balance the unbalanced processes of integration and disintegration by using the forces which can be found in the outside world. If on the other hand we have to deal with forces of anabolism either in the kidneys or elsewhere which have become over- strong, then it will be necessary to reinforce the destructive processes. In this case we must have recourse to the lower type of plants, let us say the fern species, which have this property.

In this way we pass beyond the point of mere experiment and test in order to discover whether a preparation will be beneficial or not. We can look into the human organism in respect of the relative balance of the organs themselves; we can penetratingly survey Nature for the discovery of the anabolic and catabolic forces, and thus we make the Art of Healing into something wherein we can really see that a remedy is not administered just because statistics confirm that in such and such cases it is useful—but because by a really penetrating survey both of the human being and Nature we know with exactitude in every case the natural process in a Nature-product that can be transformed into a healing factor—that is, for the human organs in respect of the anabolic and catabolic forces.

I do not mean to say that in recent times Medicine has not made immense progress. Anthroposophy recognises this progress in Medicine to the full. Neither have we any wish to exclude what modern medical science has accomplished; on the contrary we honour it. But when we examine what has been brought out in the way of remedies in recent times we find that they have only been arrived at by way of lengthy experimentation. Anthroposophy supplies a penetrating knowledge which by its survey of human nature has fully proved itself in those spheres where Medicine has already been so happily successful. But in addition to this, Anthroposophy offers a whole series of new remedies also, a fact which is made possible by the same insight applied to both Nature and Man.

Therefore if we learn to look into the human being spiritually in this way—(and I will later show how the Art of Healing can be made fruitful in every single sphere through a true knowledge of the spirit)—we also learn to look into the spiritual life together with the material life, and then we arrive—and this no longer in the old dreamlike way which had its overflow in Mythology, but in an exact way—then we can arrive at a bringing together of perfectly rational knowledge with a “message” of Healing.

Man learns to heal by means of a real and artistic conception of an art that has grown out of the world itself. Therewith we come again into touch with what existed in ancient times—though it was not then to be found in the way in which we to-day must aspire to find it now that we have the great wealth of Science behind us;—for what existed in ancient times through a kind of dreamlike knowledge, can lead us to-day to the application of forces and spiritual forces in connection with human health and sickness.

In ancient times there were the Mystery Centres in which a knowledge was cultivated which could solve humanity's religious problems and satisfy the longings of the soul; and in connection with the Mysteries there were Centres of Healing. To-day, quite rightly, we regard the things that were cultivated there as somewhat childish. But there was nevertheless a sound kernel in them;—it was known that the knowledge of the so-called normal world must go forward into knowledge of the abnormal world. Is it not strange that we, on the other hand, say that in his healthy state man comes forth out of Nature, and that then we have to explain the unhealthy man also by the laws of Nature? For every illness can be explained by these laws. Does Nature then contradict herself? We shall see that she does not do so with regard to disease. But our knowledge must be a continuation from the normal physical into the pathological. Knowledge can attain value for life only in so far as that side by side with those places where the normal aspects of life are cultivated, there must also be found those that are concerned with the illnesses of life.

There was to have been a centre of knowledge at the Goetheanum at Dornach in Switzerland, in the building which most unfortunately was burnt down, but which we hope will soon be rebuilt. It was to be a centre of knowledge where mankind would have been able to satisfy those longings of the soul which seek to penetrate into the sources of life. And out of what I might call a natural sequence it came to be regarded as a matter of course that there should be added to the Goetheanum a centre of Healing. True, this could only be, at first, of a modest kind. Such a thing must be there wherever there is to be a real knowledge of humanity. And we have it in the Clinical-Therapeutical Institute at Arlesheim which is the result of the efforts of Frau Dr. Wegman, and which has been followed by the founding of a similar Institute under Dr. Zeylmans van Emmichoven at The Hague. And so at Dornach there is established once again, side by side with the centre of Knowledge, a centre of Healing. And whereas courage must always be a part of everything that pertains to knowledge of the Spirit, so courage belongs above all things, to the way of Healing. This vital element lives in that Institute at Arlesheim—the courage to heal; in order that all which comes forth out of the whole human being as the possibility to control the forces of healing, may be used as a blessing for humanity. Therefore, such a centre of Knowledge, which once more strives towards the Mysteries—albeit in the modern sense—and where the great questions of existence are dealt with, must have beside it, even though it may be only in a modest way, a centre of Healing where knowledge of the smallest details of life is cultivated and where the effort is made to deepen the Art of Healing in a spiritual sense.

In the external nearness of Knowledge-Centre and Healing-Centre to one another we have the outer image of how close a connection should exist between Anthroposophical knowledge and the practical work of Healing, and that this should exist as such a spiritual Art that out of a conception of conditions of illness in the human being, there should grow a conception of Therapeutics, of Healing, so that the two may not fall asunder, but that the diagnostic process may be carried on into the healing process. The aim of Anthroposophy herein is that while one makes a diagnosis in the knowledge one has of what is happening in a person when he is ill, at the same moment one sees that such and such a thing is taking place, or something is happening in the anabolic processes. One then recognizes Nature for example in occurrences brought about by destructive forces; one knows where the destructive forces are to be found, and in administering these as a healing agent one is thus able to act so that these destructive forces can work against the upbuilding forces in the human being. And vice versa. So one is able to perceive clearly in what is going on in the human being, an unhealthy condition; but even in perceiving this unhealthy condition one immediately perceives also the nature of the working of the healing agent.

To-day I wished only to demonstrate the nature of a spiritual way of knowledge, and point out that the effect of this spiritual knowledge is such that man does not merely approach natural and spiritual forces in a theoretical way, but that he also learns to handle them, and out of his spiritual learning to mould life.

With advancing civilisation, life becomes continually more and more complicated. At the present time a longing is dominating the subconscious life of many souls—a longing to find what may be the source out of which this more and more complicated life has grown. Anthroposophy tries above all to assuage these longings. And we shall see that against much that is destructive in the life of to-day it honestly desires to co-operate in all that is constructive, that is advancing, that tends to prosperity in our civilisation—not with helpless phrases but actively, in all the practical questions of life.

The Anthroposophical Society here has invited me to give a course of lectures on Education and has expressed the wish that I should also give one or two Public Lectures dealing with anthroposophical Spiritual Science in relation to the Art of Healing.

It will be necessary for me to begin this evening with a sort of introductory lecture, and deal with the actual subject itself in the two following lectures. I must do this because there are so many people in the audience to whom Anthroposophy is still but little known; and lectures dealing with a special subject would remain rather in the air if I did not begin with some introductory remarks treating of Anthroposophy in general before coming to definite observations in the domain of medicine.

Anthroposophy is indeed not as is so often said of it, some kind of craze, or a sect; it stands for a serious and scientifically-considered conception of the world; but a conception of the world which is applied just as seriously to the spiritual domain as we are accustomed to apply our modern scientific methods to the material domain. Now it might appear to begin with to many people that any suggestion of the spiritual at once introduces something unscientific, for the reason that people are generally inclined to the idea that only those things can be grasped scientifically which can be experienced by the senses, and carried further by means of the reason and intellect. It is the opinion of many people that directly we step over into the spiritual it implies renunciation of Science. It is said that decisions with regard to spiritual questions rest upon subjective opinion, upon a kind of mystical feeling, which everyone must manufacture for himself; “faith” must take the place of scientific knowledge. The task of this introductory lecture shall be to show that this is not the case.

Above all, Anthroposophy does not set out to be “Science” in the generally-accepted sense of the word as something that lies apart from ordinary life and is practised by single individuals who are preparing for some specialised scientific career; on the contrary, it is a conception of the world which can be of value for the mind of every human being who has a longing to find the answers to questions regarding the meaning of life, the duties of life, the operation of the spiritual and material forces of life, and how to turn this knowledge to account. Hitherto in the Anthroposophical field there has been unfailing success in achieving entirely practical methods of applying Anthroposophical principles, more especially in the sphere of education. We have founded schools, which are organised on the basis of these conceptions. And in many well-recognized ways we have succeeded in a similar manner with regard to the art of healing. Anthroposophy does not wish to create obstacles in any sphere, or to appear in opposition to anything that is in the nature of “recognized science;” it will have nothing to do with dilettantism. It is above all anxious that those who wish earnestly to work out what has been given as Anthroposophical knowledge, shall prize and admire all the great achievements that have resulted—with such fullness in recent times—from every kind of scientific endeavour. Therefore there can be no question (in the medical sphere or any other) of anything like dilettantism, nor of any opposition to modern science. On the contrary, it will be shown how by following certain spiritual methods one is in a position to add something to that which is already accepted, and which can only be added when the work of serious investigation is extended into the spiritual world itself.

Anthroposophy can do this because it strives after other kinds of knowledge which, do not prevail in ordinary life or in ordinary science. In ordinary life, as in our customary scientific methods, we make use of such knowledge which we attain when in the course of our development we add to our inherited tendencies and capabilities what we can gain through the usual lower or higher grades of schooling, and which together make us into ripe human beings in the sense in which that is understood to-day. But Anthroposophy goes further than this; it desires to start from what I may call intellectual modesty. And this intellectual modesty (which must be there to begin with if we are to develop a feeling for Anthroposophy) I should like to characterise in the following manner.

Let us consider the development of a human being from earliest childhood onwards. The child first appears in the world showing outwardly in its life and inwardly in its soul nothing of that by which a fully-developed human being finds his orientation in the world through actions and knowledge. There must be education and upbringing in order to draw out of the childlike soul and bodily organism those capacities which have been brought into the world in a dormant or “unripe” state. And we all admit that we cannot in the true sense of the word become active inhabitants of the world if we do not add to our inherited tendencies all those things which can only come by a process of unfolding and drawing them out. Then sooner or later, according to whether we have completed a higher or lower grade of education, we step out into life, having a particular relation to life, having the possibility of unfolding a certain consciousness with regard to our surroundings. Now any one who approaches the intentions of Anthroposophy with true understanding, will say: Why should it not be possible—seeing that it is possible for a child to become something entirely different when its soul-qualities are developed—for such a thing to take place also in a man who is “ripe” according to the standard of to-day? Why should not a man who enters the world fully equipped with the best modern education, also contain hidden capacities in his soul which can be developed further, so that he can progress by means of this development to still further knowledge, and to a practical conduct of life which to some extent can be a continuation of that which has brought him as far as the ordinary state of consciousness?

Therefore in Anthroposophy we undertake a kind of “self-development”—which is to lead out beyond the ordinary condition of consciousness.

There are three faculties in the human soul which are developed normally in life up to a certain point, but which we can unfold further; and Anthroposophy provides the only means in this our modern age of culture and civilisation which will create the necessary stimulus for the further development of these faculties. All three faculties can be so transformed as to become the faculties of a higher kind of knowledge.

First there is the Thinking. In the culture that we have acquired we use our thinking in such a way that we give ourselves over quite passively to the world. Indeed, Science itself demands that we should employ the least possible inner activity in our thinking, and that that which exists in the outer world should only speak to us through the observation of our senses; in fact that we must simply give ourselves over altogether to our sense-perceptions. We maintain that whenever we go beyond this passivity we are only led into dreams and fantastic notions. But where Anthroposophy is concerned, there is no question of fantasy or dreaminess, but of the exact opposite; we are guided to an inner activity which is as clear as any method leading maybe to the attainment of mathematics or geometry. In fact we comport ourselves with regard to Anthroposophy precisely in the same way as we do with regard to mathematics or geometry, only in Anthroposophy we are not developing any special attribute, but on the contrary, every faculty that is connected with human hearts and minds—the whole sum of what is human. And the first thing that has to be done is something which, if people are only sufficiently free from prejudice, can be readily comprehended by everyone. It is simply that the capacity and the force of Thinking should be directed for a time not in order to grasp or understand some external thing, but just in order to allow a thought to remain present in the soul—such a thought as may be easily observed in its totality—and to give oneself up entirely to this thought for a certain length of time.

I will describe it more exactly. Anyone having the necessary feeling of confidence might turn to someone who was experienced in these matters and ask what would be the best kind of thought to which he might devote himself in this way. This person would then suggest some thought which could be surveyed with ease but which would at the same time be as new to him as possible. If we use an old familiar thought, it is very easy for all kinds of memories and feelings and subjective impressions to arise out of the soul, so that only a dreamy condition would be induced. But if the enquirer is directed to a thought which is quite certainly a new one, which will arouse no memories, then he will be able to give himself up to it in such a way that the thought-forces of the soul will become stronger and stronger. In my own writings, and especially in my books—Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and An Outline Of Occult Science, I call this kind of thinking, which can be inwardly cultivated, Meditation. That is an old word: but to-day we will only use it in the particular connection which I will now describe. Meditation consists in turning the attention away from everything that has been either an inner or an external experience, and in thinking of nothing except that one thought, which must be placed in the very centre of the soul's life. By thus directing all the strength that the soul possesses upon this single thought something takes place with regard to the forces of the soul which can only be compared to the constant repetitions of some movement of the hand. What is it that takes place there? The muscles become stronger. It is exactly similar in the case of the soul's powers. When they are directed again and again to one thought they gain force and strength. And if this goes on for a long time—(though to spend a long time at it on each occasion is certainly not necessary, because it is rather a question of entering into a state of soul produced by concentration on a single thought)—and the length of time depends also on predisposition, for with one person it might take a week, and with another three years, and so on—so, if we go on for a long period doing such exercises again and again perhaps for five minutes or fifteen minutes every day, then we begin at last to have an inner sense that our being is becoming enfilled with a new content of force.

Previously, the forces of the nerves have been felt in the process of ordinary thinking and feeling as we feel the forces of the muscles active in the grasping of objects or in whatever we perform. Just as we have been feeling these things gradually more and more in growing up from childhood, so in the same way we gradually begin to learn how to feel that something new is permeating us when we apply ourselves to such thought-exercises—of which I can now only indicate the general principles. (You will find them described in greater detail in my books). Finally there comes a day when we are aware that we can no longer think about outer things in the same way as we used to think about them; but that now we have attained an entirely new soul-power; that we have something in us that is like an intensified, a stronger quality of thinking. And at last we feel that this kind of thinking enables us actually to take hold of what previously was only known to us in quite a shadowy way.

What we are then enabled to grasp is the essential reality of our own life. In what manner do we thus recognize our own earthly life—the life we have lived since birth? We know it through our memory, which reaches back as far as a certain point in our childhood. Rising out of undefined depths of the soul appears the remembrance of our past experiences. They are like shadows. Think how shadowy those emerging memory pictures of our life are in comparison with the intense, full-blooded experiences we have from day to day! If we now take hold of our thinking in the way that I have described, the shadowy quality of these memories ceases. We go back into our own actual earth-life; we experience again what we experienced ten or twenty years ago with the same inner forces and strength with which we originally experienced these events. Only the experience is not the same as formerly, inasmuch as we do not again come into direct contact with the external objects or beings, but we experience instead a kind of “extract” of it all. And that which we experience can, paradoxical as it may sound, be described as having definite significance. All at once, as in a mighty panorama, we have the whole of our life up to the time of birth before us. Not that we see the single events simply in a time-sequence, but we see them as a complete life-tableau. Time turns into Space. Our experiences are there before us, not as ordinary memories, but so that we know that we stand before the deeper being of our own humanity—like a second man within the man we know with our ordinary consciousness.

And then we arrive at the following: This physical human being that we confront in our ordinary consciousness is built up out of the matter which we take out of the Earth which is round about us. We continually discard this matter, and take in fresh matter, and we can definitely say that all the material substances which have been discarded by our body are replaced by new substances within periods of time of from seven to eight years. The material in us is something that is in constant flux. And so, learning to know our own life through our intensified thinking, we come to know that which remains—which endures throughout the whole of our earth-life. It is, at the same time, that which builds up our organism out of outer material substance; and this latter is itself at the same time that which we survey as the tableau of our life.

Now what we see in this manner is distinguished in yet another way from ordinary memory. In ordinary memory the events of our life appear before the soul as though approaching us from outside. We remember what such and such a person has done to us, or what has accrued to us from this or that event. But in the tableau which arises from our intensified thinking, we learn to know ourselves as we really are ourselves—what we have done to other human beings, how we have stood in relation to any occurrence. We learn to know ourselves. That is the important point. For in learning to know ourselves, we also learn to know ourselves intensively, and in such a way that we know how we are placed within the forces of our growth, yes, even within the forces of our nourishment; and how it is we ourselves who build up and again disintegrate our own bodies. Thus we learn to know our own inner being.

Now the important thing is that when we come to this self-knowledge, we immediately experience something which can never be experienced by means of any ordinary science or through the ordinary consciousness. I must admit that nowadays it is really very difficult to express what is now arrived at, because in face of what is considered authoritative to-day, it sounds so strange. But so it is. At this point we experience something through our intensified thinking, of which we must say the following:—There are the laws of Nature which we study assiduously in the sciences; we even learn about them in the elementary schools. We are proud of this; and prosaic humanity is justly proud of what has been learnt of these laws of Nature in physics, chemistry and so on. Here I must emphatically declare that Anthroposophy does not set itself in any amateurish opposition to Science. But because of our grasp of inner, intensive thinking we say that the natural laws which are learnt in connection with physics and chemistry are only present in the matter of the Earth, and they cease to be of any account so soon as we pass out into universal space.

Here I must state something which will not seem so very unplausible to anyone who thinks over it without prejudice: suppose we have somewhere a source of light, we know that the more widely the light is distributed from its source the more it loses in intensity; and the further we go out into space the weaker it becomes, so that we are tempted to speak of it no longer as ‘light’ but as ‘twilight,’ and finally when we have gone far enough it cannot be accounted as light any more. It is the same with the laws of Nature. They have a value for the region of the Earth, but the further we go out into the Cosmos they become less and less of value, until at length they cease to be of any account at all as laws of Nature. On the other hand, those laws which we come to apprehend through intensified thinking, which are already active in our own life, these show us that as human beings, we have not grown out of the natural laws of the Earth, but out of higher, cosmic laws. We have brought them with us in coming into earthly existence. And so we learn to recognize that the moment we have grasped our intensified thinking we can only apply natural law to the mineral kingdom. We cannot say—and this is a very reasonable error made by the newer physics—that natural laws can be applied to the Sun or the Stars. That cannot be done; for to wish to apply natural laws to the Universe would be just as artless as to wish to illumine the world of space with the light of a candle. Directly we ascend from the mineral, which as mineral is only apparent to us on this Earth, up to what is living, then we can no longer speak of the natural laws of the earthly realm, but we must speak of laws which worked down into the earthly realm from out of the Cosmos—from universal space. That is already the case with regard to the vegetable kingdom.

We can only use the laws of the Earth to explain the mineral-laws, for example, such as the law of gravity and so on, which work from the centre of the Earth towards the circumference. When we come to the vegetable kingdom, then we must say that the entire globe is the central point, and that the laws of life are working towards it from every side of the Cosmos—the same laws of life which we have first discovered in ourselves with our intensified thinking, and of which we have learnt to know that we build ourselves up between birth and death by their means.

To these laws, then, which work from the centre of the Earth outward, we add knowledge of the laws which work inwards towards the centre of the Earth from every direction, and which are already active in the vegetable kingdom. We look at the plants springing up out of the Earth and tell ourselves that they contain mineral matter. Chemistry to-day has gone very far in its knowledge of the respective activity of these mineral substances. That is all quite justifiable and quite right. And chemistry will go yet further. That will also be quite right. But if we want to explain the nature of plants we must explain their growth and that cannot be done through the forces that work upwards from the Earth, but only through those forces that work inwards from the surroundings, from the Cosmos, into the Earth-existence. Hence we have to admit that our knowledge must ascend from an earthly conception to a cosmic conception; and moreover in this cosmic conception is contained the real human Self-knowledge.

Now we can go further than this and transform our Feeling. To have ‘Feeling’ in ordinary life is a personal affair, not actually a source of knowledge. But we can transform that which is ordinarily only experienced subjectively as feeling, into a real objective source of knowledge.

In Meditation we concentrate upon one particular thought; we arrive at intensified or ‘substantial’ thinking and thereby are able to grasp something that works from the periphery of the Universe towards the centre of the Earth, in contradistinction to the ordinary laws of Nature, which work from the centre of the Earth outwards in all directions. So when we have reached this intensified thinking, and have perceived that our own life and also the life of the plants is spread out before our souls like a mighty panorama, then we go further. We come to a point, after having grasped something through this forceful thinking, when we can cast these strong thoughts aside. Anyone who knows how difficult it is, in ordinary life, to throw aside some thought which has taken hold of one, will understand that special exercises are necessary to enable this to be done. But it can be done. It is not only possible to cast out with the whole strength of our soul this thought that we have concentrated upon, but it is also possible to cast out the whole memory-tableau, and therewith our own life, and entirely to withdraw our attention from it.

Something then begins to occur by which we clearly see that we are descending further into the depths of the soul, into those regions which are usually only accessible to our feeling. As a rule in ordinary life, if all impressions received by sight or hearing are shut off, we fall asleep. But if we have developed intensified thinking, we do not fall asleep even when we have thrown aside every thought—even the substantially intense ones. A condition arises in which no sense-perceptions and no thoughts are active, a condition we can only describe by saying that such a person is simply ‘awake;’ he does not fall asleep; but he has nevertheless at first nothing in his consciousness. He is awake, with a consciousness that is empty. That is a condition revealed through Spiritual Science to which a person can attain who can be quite systematically and methodically developed—namely to have an empty consciousness in complete waking awareness.

In the usual way, if our consciousness is empty we are asleep. For from falling asleep to waking up we do have an empty consciousness—only—we are asleep in it. To have an empty consciousness and yet be awake, is the second stage of knowledge for which we strive. For this consciousness does not remain empty for long. It fills itself. As the ordinary consciousness can fill itself with colour through the perceptions of sight, or by the ear fill itself with sounds, so this empty consciousness fills itself with a spiritual world which is just as much in our surroundings ‘there’ as the ordinary physical world is in our surroundings here. The empty consciousness is the first to reveal the spiritual world—that spiritual world which is neither here on the Earth, nor in the Cosmos in Space, but which is outside Space and Time, and which nevertheless constitutes our deepest human nature. For if at first we have learnt to look back with the intense consciousness of thinking upon our whole earth-life as a script—now, with a consciousness that was empty and has become filled, we gaze into that world where we passed a life of soul-and-spirit before we came down into our earthly existence. We now learn to know ourselves as Beings who were spiritually present before birth and conception, who lived a pre-earthly existence before the one wherein we now are. We learn to recognize ourselves as beings of spirit-and-soul, and that the body that we bear we have received in that it was handed on to us by parents and grandparents. We have had it delivered to us in such a way that, as I have said, we can change it every seven years; but that which we are in our individual being has brought itself to Earth out of a pre-natal existence. But none of this is learnt by means of theorising, or by subtle cogitation; it can only be learnt when the suitable capacities are first of all unfolded in intellectual modesty.

Thus we have now learnt to know our inner humanity, our own individual being of spirit-and-soul. It comes to meet us when we descend into the region of feeling and not merely with feeling, but also with knowledge. But first we must mark how the struggle for knowledge is bound up with strong inner experiences which can be indicated as follows: If you have bound up one of your limbs tightly, so that you cannot move it—even if someone perhaps only bandages two of your fingers together—you feel discomfort, possibly even pain. Now when you are in a condition where you experience what is soul-and-spirit without a body, you do not possess the whole of your physical being, for you are living in an empty consciousness. The passing-over into this state is connected with a profound feeling of pain. Beyond the feeling of pain, beyond the privation, we wrestle for the entrance into that which is our deepest spiritual and soul-being. And here many people are arrested by terror. But it is impossible to gain any explanation of our real human nature by any other means; and if we can learn it in this way, then we can go still further.

But now we have to develop a strength of knowledge which in ordinary life is not recognised as such at all; we have to develop Love as a force of knowledge—a selfless out-going into the things and processes of the world. And if we perfect this Love ever more and more, so that we can actually lift ourselves out into the condition I have described, where we are body-free—and in this liberation from the body gaze at the world—then we learn to realise ourselves wholly as spiritual beings in the spiritual world. Then we know what man is as Spirit; but then we also know what dying is; for in Death man lays his physical body altogether aside. In this knowledge, which as a third form, is experienced through the deepening of Love, we learn to know ourselves outside our body; we accomplish separation from it by the constructive quality of knowledge.

From this moment we know what it will mean when we lay aside our body in this Earth-existence and go through the Gate of Death. We learn to know death. But we also learn to know the life of the soul-and-spirit on the other side of death. Now we know the spiritual-soul-being of man as it will be after death. As at first we had learnt to recognize our being as it is before the descent into earthly life, so now we know the continuation of the life of this being in the world of soul-and-spirit after death.

Then something else occurs which causes us to mark clearly how imperfect is the consciousness of to-day; for it speaks of ‘immortality,’ out of its hope and faith. But immortality—deathlessness—is only one half of Eternity—namely the everlasting continuation of the present point of time. We have to-day no word such as was to be found in the degrees of knowledge of an older time, which points to an immortality in the other half of Eternity—‘unborn-ness.’

Because just as man is deathless, so is he also unborn; that is to say, with birth he steps out of the spiritual world into physical existence, just as at death he passes from the physical world into a spiritual existence. Therefore in this manner we learn of the true being of man, which is spiritual, and which goes through birth and death; and only then are we in a position to comprehend our whole being.

The principles which I have briefly outlined have already formed the content of a wealth of literature, which has imbibed a conscientiousness and a responsibility towards its knowledge out of the realm of exact Science, on which alone this sense of responsibility can rest to-day. So we attain to a Spiritual Science, which has grown out of ordinary Science.

And just on account of this, we learn something else—namely how life consists of two tendencies or streams. People speak in a general way to-day about development; they say the child is small—it develops—it grows; it is full of energy—strong—it blossoms with life. They say that a lower form of life has evolved to a higher;—quickening, blooming life—growing ever more and more complicated! And that is right. But this stream of life is there, however, in opposition to another stream, which is present in every sentient living being—namely, a destructive tendency. Just as we have a budding and sprouting life in us, integrating life—so we have also the life of disintegration. Through knowledge such as this we perceive that we cannot merely say that our life streams up into the brain and nervous system and that this matter organises itself so that the nervous system can become the bearer of the life of the soul. No—it is not like that. The life is germinating and sprouting, but at the same time there is continual destruction incorporated into it.

Our life is incessantly going to pieces ... the blossoming life is always giving place to the decaying life. We are actually dying by degrees and at every moment something falls to ruin in us, and every time we build it up again. But, whereas matter is being destroyed, it leaves room wherein what is of the soul-and-spirit can enter and become active in us. And here we touch upon the great error made by materialism, for materialism believes that the sprouting and budding life evolves up to the nervous system in man so that the nerves are built up in the same way as the muscles are built up out of the blood. It is true they are. But no thinking is developed by means of building up the nerves; neither is feeling. On the contrary, in that the nerves decay to a certain extent, the psychic-spiritual incorporates itself into what is decaying. We must first disintegrate matter in order that the psychic-spiritual can appear in us and enable us to experience it for ourselves.

That will be the great moment in the development of a rightly-understood Natural Science, when the opposite to evolution will be recognized as carrying evolution forward at the corresponding point; when it will recognize not only integration, but also disintegration—thus admitting not only evolution but devolution. And thus it will be understood how the spiritual in the animal and in man—but in the latter in a self-conscious way—takes hold of the material. The spiritual does not take hold of the material because the latter is developing itself against it, but because matter, by a contrary process, is destroying itself; and the spiritual comes into evidence, the spiritual reveals itself, in this process. Therefore we are filled with the spirit; for it is everywhere present in devolution but not in evolution, which is Earth-development. Then we learn to observe that man as he stands before us in his entirety, is as though contained within a polar antithesis, Everywhere, in every single organ, wherever there is an upbuilding process there is also a destructive process going on. If we look at any one of the organs, it may be the liver, or the lungs, or the heart, we see that it is in a constant stream which consists of integration—disintegration, integration—disintegration. Is it not really rather an extraordinary expression that we use when we say for example ‘Here flows the Rhine?’ What is ‘the Rhine?’ When we say ‘Here flows the Rhine,’ we do not as a rule mean that there is the river bed ‘Rhine,’ but we mean the flowing water which we look at. Yet it is different every moment. The Rhine has been there a hundred years, a thousand years. But what is it which is there every moment? It is what is realised as being in alteration every moment in the flowing stream. In the same way, everything that we contain is held within a stream of change, in integration and disintegration, and in its disintegration it becomes the bearer of the spiritual. And so in every normal human being there exists a state of balance between anabolism and catabolism, and in this balance he develops the right capacity for the soul-and-spirit. Nevertheless, this balance can be disturbed, and can be disturbed to such an extent that some organ or other may have its correct degree of anabolism in relation to too slight a degree of catabolism, and then its growth becomes rampant. Or contrariwise, some organ may have a normal process of disintegration against too slight an anabolism, in which case the organ becomes disturbed, or atrophies; and thus we pass out of the physiological sphere into the pathological.

Only when we can discern what this condition of balance signifies, can we also discern how it may be disturbed by an excess of either integrating or disintegrating forces. But when we recognize this, then we can turn our gaze to the great outer world, and can find there what, under certain conditions, will act so as to equalise these two processes.

Suppose we take for example a human organ that is disturbed by reason of too strong a destructive process, and then look with sight made clear by spiritual-scientific knowledge at something outside in Nature, say at a plant; we shall know that in a particular plant there are anabolic—building-up—properties. Now it becomes apparent that in the habit of certain plants there are always anabolic properties and that these correspond precisely to the anabolic forces of human organs. Thus, we can discover—when we make use of these conceptions which have now been developed by me—that there are anabolic forces in the kidneys. Let us suppose the kidneys are too weak, that their destructive forces are excessive. We turn to the plants, and we find in the common horsetail, Equisetum arvense, anabolic forces which exactly correspond to those which belong to the kidneys. If we make a preparation from equisetum and administer it through the digestive process into the blood-circulation and thus conduct it in the right way to the region in the body where it can work, we strengthen the debilitated anabolic forces of the kidneys. And so we can proceed with all the organs. Once we have grasped this knowledge we have the possibility of bringing back into a condition of balance the unbalanced processes of integration and disintegration by using the forces which can be found in the outside world. If on the other hand we have to deal with forces of anabolism either in the kidneys or elsewhere which have become over-strong, then it will be necessary to reinforce the destructive processes. In this case we must have recourse to the lower type of plants, let us say the fern species, which have this property.

In this way we pass beyond the point of mere experiment and test in order to discover whether a preparation will be beneficial or not. We can look into the human organism in respect of the relative balance of the organs themselves; we can penetratingly survey Nature for the discovery of the anabolic and catabolic forces, and thus we make the Art of Healing into something wherein we can really see that a remedy is not administered just because statistics confirm that in such and such cases it is useful—but because by a really penetrating survey both of the human being and Nature we know with exactitude in every case the natural process in a Nature-product that can be transformed into a healing factor—that is, for the human organs in respect of the anabolic and catabolic forces.

I do not mean to say that in recent times Medicine has not made immense progress. Anthroposophy recognises this progress in Medicine to the full. Neither have we any wish to exclude what modern medical science has accomplished; on the contrary we honour it. But when we examine what has been brought out in the way of remedies in recent times we find that they have only been arrived at by way of lengthy experimentation. Anthroposophy supplies a penetrating knowledge which by its survey of human nature has fully proved itself in those spheres where Medicine has already been so happily successful. But in addition to this, Anthroposophy offers a whole series of new remedies also, a fact which is made possible by the same insight applied to both Nature and Man.

Therefore if we learn to look into the human being spiritually in this way—(and I will later show how the Art of Healing can be made fruitful in every single sphere through a true knowledge of the spirit)—we also learn to look into the spiritual life together with the material life, and then we arrive—and this no longer in the old dreamlike way which had its overflow in Mythology, but in an exact way—then we can arrive at a bringing together of perfectly rational knowledge with a ‘message’ of Healing.

Man learns to heal by means of a real and artistic conception of an art that has grown out of the world itself. Therewith we come again into touch with what existed in ancient times—though it was not then to be found in the way in which we to-day must aspire to find it now that we have the great wealth of Science behind us;—for what existed in ancient times through a kind of dreamlike knowledge, can lead us to-day to the application of forces and spiritual forces in connection with human health and sickness.

In ancient times there were the Mystery Centres in which a knowledge was cultivated which could solve humanity's religious problems and satisfy the longings of the soul; and in connection with the Mysteries there were places of Healing. To-day, quite rightly, we regard the things that were cultivated there as somewhat childish. But there was nevertheless a sound kernel in them;—it was known that the knowledge of the so-called normal world must go forward into knowledge of the abnormal world. Is it not strange that we, on the other hand, say that in his healthy state man comes forth out of Nature, and that then we have to explain the unhealthy man also by the laws of Nature? For every illness can be explained by these laws. Does Nature then contradict herself? We shall see that she does not do so with regard to disease. But our knowledge must be a continuation from the normal physical into the pathological. Knowledge can attain value for life only in so far as that side by side with those places where the normal aspects of life are cultivated, there must also be found those that are concerned with the illnesses of life.

There was to have been a centre of knowledge at the Goetheanum at Dornach in Switzerland, in the building which most unfortunately was burnt down, but which we hope will soon be rebuilt. It was to be a centre of knowledge where mankind would have been able to satisfy those longings of the soul which seek to penetrate into the sources of life. And out of what I might call a natural sequence it came to be regarded as a matter of course that there should be added to the Goetheanum a centre of Healing. True, this could only be, at first, of a modest kind. Such a thing must be there wherever there is to be a real knowledge of humanity. And we have it in the Clinical-Therapeutical Institute at Arlesheim which is the result of the efforts of Frau Dr. Wegman, and which has been followed by the founding of a similar Institute under Dr. Zeylmans van Emmichoven at The Hague. And so at Dornach there is established once again, side by side with the centre of Knowledge, a centre of Healing. And whereas courage must always be a part of everything that pertains to knowledge of the Spirit, so courage belongs above all things, to the way of Healing. This vital element lives in that Institute at Arlesheim—the courage to heal; in order that all which comes forth out of the whole human being as the possibility to control the forces of healing, may be used as a blessing for humanity. Therefore, such a centre of Knowledge, which once more strives towards the Mysteries—albeit in the modern sense—and where the great questions of existence are dealt with, must have beside it, even though it may be only in a modest way, a centre of Healing where knowledge of the smallest details of life is cultivated and where the effort is made to deepen the Art of Healing in a spiritual sense.

In the external nearness of Knowledge-Centre and Healing-Centre to one another we have the outer image of how close a connection should exist between Anthroposophical knowledge and the practical work of Healing, and that this should exist as such a spiritual Art that out of a conception of conditions of illness in the human being, there should grow a conception of Therapeutics, of Healing, so that the two may not fall asunder, but that the diagnostic process may be carried on into the healing process. The aim of Anthroposophy herein is that while one makes a diagnosis in the knowledge one has of what is happening in a person when he is ill, at the same moment one sees that such and such a thing is taking place, or something is happening in the anabolic processes. One then recognizes Nature for example in occurrences brought about by destructive forces; one knows where the destructive forces are to be found, and in administering these as a healing agent one is thus able to act so that these destructive forces can work against the upbuilding forces in the human being. And vice versa. So one is able to perceive clearly in what is going on in the human being, an unhealthy condition; but even in perceiving this unhealthy condition one immediately perceives also the nature of the working of the healing agent.

To-day I wished only to demonstrate the nature of a spiritual way of knowledge, and point out that the effect of this spiritual knowledge is such that man does not merely approach natural and spiritual forces in a theoretical way, but that he also learns to handle them, and out of his spiritual learning to mould life.

With advancing civilisation, life becomes continually more and more complicated. At the present time a longing is dominating the subconscious life of many souls—a longing to find what may be the source out of which this more and more complicated life has grown. Anthroposophy tries above all to assuage these longings. And we shall see that against much that is destructive in the life of to-day it honestly desires to co-operate in all that is constructive, that is advancing, that tends to prosperity in our civilisation—not with helpless phrases but actively, in all the practical questions of life. Anthroposophy wishes knowledge everywhere to flow into life, to give knowledge in a form which can help wherever help is needed in the affairs of life.

To-day I would like to bring our recent studies to a certain conclusion. To begin with, as I may remind you, you are already aware what awaits the human being immediately after death. His physical body being laid aside, he is in a condition in which he can never be, in the prevailing consciousness of our time, during earthly life. Within and about him he has his I, his astral body and his ether-body. From birth till death, as you know, the ether-body remains united with the physical. Even in sleep it is only with the I and astral body that the human being is outside the physical,—and thus outside the etheric body too. Now, however, then for a short while after death (only a matter of days, you will remember), man still inhabits his etheric body—his body of formative forces—and he is thereby enabled to look back on the whole course of his past earthly life, which is in fact always contained in the etheric body. As I have mentioned in the recent public lectures, this can happen in Initiation too; when man is able to set the etheric body free, he beholds the entire vista of his earthly life.

Yet it is not for long that we can retain the etheric body after death. Belonging as it does to the entire Cosmos, the ether-body is always wanting to expand. Even during life, if we lost hold of our physical body for a single instant, our ether-body would at once be tending—drawing as it were by an elastic power—to dissolve into the whole Cosmos. Only the physical body, in which it stays throughout our life, holds it together. And then when the physical body’s coherent power, is no longer ours, straightway the ether-body begins to expand, so much so that in a few days' time it is there for us no longer. It is as when you take a little drop of water; the drop is there before you; warm it and it evaporates and expands in all directions; then it is there no more—you can no longer see it. So does the ether-body expand into the Cosmos after death; after a very few days it is there no more.

Initiation-wisdom shows that this can last only for few days. For by Initiation we are able—as it were, artificially—to make use of the ether-body even during earthly life. Though it remains in the physical body, we become able to disregard the latter, using the ether-body as such. At once we have the panorama of our earthly life until the given moment. Yet at the same time we see glistening and shining forth in our etheric body a reflection of the great Universe. The entire starry Heavens are there in the etheric body. Indeed you cannot ever see the ether-body apart from the physical without its showing you at once the starry world on every hand—the planets and the fixed stars too. It is the planets and the fixed stars which at long last receive our etheric body. Initiation-science shows that we can hold the pictures in our etheric body only for three or four days at the most; then they vanish, and to avoid being disconnected altogether we must return into our physical body before this happens, otherwise the ether-body will no longer hold together. And thus indeed, a few days after death the ether-body vanishes, we have it no longer. Yet we ourselves are thereby progressively received into the world of stars.

At first, when divested of our ether-body, we feel like strangers amid the world of stars. Only the Moon, only the Lunar forces seem as it were familiar to us there. The Moon emerges on the one hand as in an after-image of its physical appearance. Yet at the same time we now begin to discover what kind of spiritual forces are connected with it. We realise how with the Moon the Jahve-power of the Universe is connected, as was explained in our last lecture. For the soul who has passed through the Gate of Death, the Moon is transformed, as it were, into a colony of spiritual Beings, and Jahve is their Leader. Now after death, we really learn to know what Initiation Science tells of, for pictures of these spiritual truths can be received by Initiation Science even into earthly life. We learn to know what it signifies that man on Earth must die. Yes, it is through the Moon—through the Jahve Powers—that we learn the significance of death.

Looking at death from the earthly standpoint, we see the physical body of a human being rendered lifeless, while all the soul and spirit and the etheric life that filled it hitherto have disappeared. The physical body is received by the forces of the Earth, that is to say, the Elements,—earth and water if it is buried, or air and fire if cremated. The human physical body, laid aside by the human being who indwelt it, is now received by the forces of the Earth. Yet we must ask: What does it mean for the physical body to be thus laid aside by man and given over to destruction? Truth is: When man is born and has in him the force of childlike growth—nay, even before his birth, when, as an embryo in his mother's womb, as to the body he belongs already to the Earth—it is these very forces, made manifest as destroying forces when man dies, which help to build his body. The self-same forces which take leave of the human physical body at death, made manifest in death in that the physical body is disintegrated, play an essential part in building up this very body. Through his ethereal and subsequent astral experiences the man himself goes on into the Spiritual World, yet something of importance happens also here on Earth. From the physical body a spiritual apparition is released, emerging, as it were, out of the human body. While the real human being goes upon his way, here on the other hand, we might say, another being issues from the human body. Truly it is so when a human being dies. There lies his physical body the man himself is departing from it, and simultaneously another being leaves it. What is this other being? It is the forces of the Moon, living as they do also here on Earth. Concentrated though they be in the cosmic entity we call the Moon, the range of these forces extends far and wide, and on the Earth they are made manifest in the powers of Death. Moreover the powers of Death are at the same time those of Birth. They lead the human being into earthly life and are made manifest when he leaves it. We thus begin to realize the deep connection between birth and death. Take all the human beings who die in successive times. From each of them in turn the apparition of death, as it were, comes forth and joins a spiritual atmosphere which is there around the Earth no less than is the air we breathe. This spiritual atmosphere contains what death gives up and birth receives. From the very forces that soar upward, as it were, from human corpses, human beings in their turn, are born. Spiritually, our powers of growth are intimately connected with this sphere of death-force—or forces made manifest in death—which surrounds the Earth.

Now, my dear friends, think of the following: These spiritual forces—at once of death and birth, as we have seen—are forces of the Moon, and into them is mingled all that the dead human being, all along the way from birth till death, accumulated by way of moral powers, moral values. Have you been good in any way,—in the sphere of these death-Moon-forces you will find, as it were, a specific being, imbued with inner force deriving from your goodness. Yet the same being is imbued with all that derives from your badness. It is a being we ourselves engender, all the time, while living on the Earth. Unaware of it as we are in our normal consciousness, we bear it in us. We leave it every night when we are sleeping, for in effect this entity remains in the physical body when we but go out of it in sleep. I told you, did I not, that our moral and religious feelings are left behind in sleep in the physical and ether-body? There too is left behind this real being which we ourselves give birth to during earthly life—the bearer of our Karma.

This being now remains with us after death so long as we are in the realm of the Moon forces. Indeed, just because this being keeps us amid the Moon-forces, that is, in the near neighbourhood of Earth, during the first time after death we are obliged to remain connected with these Lunar forces and with our own Karma, so much so that we live again through all the deeds we did on Earth from birth till death. We have to live them through again in a spiritual form of being, three times as fast as we did on Earth. We live them through again in backward order. So do we spend a period of time after death, obliged to do things intimately connected with our earthly deeds. We are united, it is true, no longer through the physical body with the Moon-forces of death (for we have laid the physical body aside), and yet as beings of soul and spirit we are obliged to carry out deeds intimately connected with our deeds on Earth. And as we thus go through our life again in backward order, our Karma is ever more convincingly brought home to us.

Yet with all this, my dear friends, you must remember to mostly judge spiritual matters in a spiritual way. If you were fond of a human being on the Earth, you may now be feeling: Today, alas, after his death, he will be living again through all that was bad or faulty in his actions! From your physical and earthly standpoint you are sorry for him. But if you asked the soul himself who has gone through the gate of death, whether he too judges it thus, he would answer: “No. I should not want to be undergoing this after-death life in any other way than with the judgment which is mine here and now, as a being of pure soul and spirit experiencing all things again, so to impress them ever more deeply into the true being of my soul. If I have been responsible for any deed which makes me appear a morally imperfect man, and if I were not to go through it all again deeply and inwardly as I am doing now, I should not feel the strong impulsion to make it good. I should not want to free myself from this my failing. Precisely by experiencing the deed all over again in soul and spirit, the urge is born in me to overcome it by a better action.” Not for anything in the world would the dead forgo this opportunity to make good again, for this alone will give him power to achieve his full humanity,—will give him strength to be made whole. In this respect you may be sure, even as a landscape looks very different seen from the valley or from a mountain-top, so life itself looks different seen from this physical world where we are now and from yonder side. Only too often the relationships of earthly life to the life after death, which after all transcends the physical, are misjudged for this reason. Think of another example, my dear friends. Maybe you are a really good anthroposophist, very keen on spiritual science, but you are living in the same house and in very close connection with someone else who detests it, who regards Anthroposophy as his greatest enemy. Now you may say, you are extremely sorry to be causing him so much pain by your attachment to what he detests. From the aspect of earthly life this may be rightly judged. Seen from the other side however, very often it turns out in such a case that it lay in the other person's Karma not to be able to come near to Anthroposophy owing to hindrances brought from a former life, making him in his head a very hater of it. As to his head, he simply cannot bear it. He becomes vexed and excited every time he hears tell of anthroposophical truths. Yet all the time, in his inmost heart he may not be averse to them at all, and when he dies it may well be that he has after death a very deep longing for Anthroposophy. Often therefore you will be doing just what is needed for one who hated it during earthly life, if after his death, you turn to him with thoughts derived from Anthroposophy, so as to bring them to him. Paradoxical as it may sound, not a few relatives who raged and stormed when another member of the family became [an] anthroposophist have become deeply attached to it after death. In this respect once more, you must take seriously what I said during my last sojourn here: we judge life very differently from yonder side than we do from this side.

Yes, man becomes very different after his death. For you should also think of this: In physical and earthly life there is your brain inside the cavity of your skull; a little farther down there is the lung, and then the other organs. More outwardly, towards the surface of the body, there are your senses. Through all that is thus contained within the limits of your skin, you are enabled to perceive the outer world. Now after death you yourself go out into the world. At first the stars are only shining into your etheric body, but when the etheric body too has been laid aside, you will actually identify yourself with the stars. Before, you had in you a brain; now you will have in you the Spiritual essences of Venus, Mercury, the Sun, and so on. You can truly say: Even as on the Earth I had in me my lung, my heart, my kidneys and so forth, so Moon and Mercury and Sun are in me now. You in your inner being are at one with the great Universe. Do you imagine that the Universe will provide you with the same kind of perception and understanding as your brain does? The world will look very different to you now! The Earth itself looks different when we behold it from the Sun than when we ourselves are on Earth and looking upwards to the Sun.

So then we undergo in all reality this backward recapitulation of our life, during which time we still remain in close connection with Moon and Mercury and Venus, while our relation to the more distant stars—to Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, and to the Fixed Stars above all—is as yet feebly developed.

When we have thus retraced our actions all the way backward until birth, then do we judge them from the standpoint of the stars; and in our judgment of ourselves we are no longer merely looking backward now, but forward. We have the kind of judgment which tells us: You must do thus to balance out this action, and thus to balance out another action, and so on.

We are immersed in the recapitulation of our life during the first twenty or thirty years after death, according to the age we reached,—it takes a third as long as earthly life. (Children who have died go through it quickly: while for very little children, you will easily conclude, it scarcely comes into question.) Connected still in soul and spirit with your past earthly life, you live it through again in backward sequence. And when at last you have arrived at birth, only the “memory” of it will remain with you. It is as though at this moment you were to lay aside yet another body. We are accustomed to say, we lay aside the astral body. What happens in reality is that the living action in which you were hitherto immersed is now transformed for you into a thought-picture,—only it is a consciousness pertaining to the stars that thinks it, whilst here on Earth an earthly consciousness was thinking.

As you set forth now on your further way within the spiritual world you will be living with the Beings of whom the physical refulgence are the Sun and Moon and Stars. With the spiritual Beings of the Stars you will now live on. Moreover into this life amid the Stars you bear with you the memory of the Karmic entity you had to lay aside with your astral body. Once more, the “laying aside” means nothing else than that the life we were immersed and actively engaged in is but a memory to us now—a memory which we as cosmic Man take with us. Weighted with this memory—the legacy of our earthly life—we step forth into a purely spiritual world.

*

While undergoing the aforesaid recapitulation of his past earthly life, man is essentially within the planetary sphere. Advancing from the spiritual forces of the Moon to those of Venus, Mercury, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and at last Saturn,—living therefore between the spheres of Moon and Saturn, feeling within himself the Planetary Cosmos—throughout this time man is still undergoing the backward recapitulation of his recent Earth-life. A few days ago I was telling you of how the Moon- and Saturn-forces counteract each other. Whereas the Moon harbours the forces which bring man down into the earthly realm, seeking ever and again to hold him fast on Earth, Saturn on the other hand seeks to bear him out into the Universe of Stars. Yet we must understand this truly, for when man goes into the Universe of Stars between death and new birth, he is no longer seeing the physical reflection of the Stars; he is living now with the Beings, to whom the several Stars belong.

When after death we have passed the sphere of Saturn, we become ripe to experience the pure spiritual world. In the book Theosophy this moment is described as the passage from the soul-world into Spirit-land. Trammeled however as he is by the memory of his past earthly life, man is unable to achieve the crossing by himself. He needs a helper in the spiritual world,—and of this too, you will recall, I was telling in recent lectures. In the age before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Initiates in the Mysteries could say to their disciples: If you have duly sent your religious offerings up into the spiritual world, you will be able to find the sublime Being of the Sun who goes with you from the time when you with yourself take leave of the Sun-sphere. He in His spiritual Being will accompany you to the other side, where, so to speak, the Sun shines spiritually outward into cosmic space, even as He himself shines physically down on to the Earth. The sublime Being of the Sun will then go with you; He will escort you to the Saturn sphere and farther out from thence into the sphere of Stars. The spiritual Sun will, as it were, be shining for you; thus and thus only will you win your passage from the soul-world into Spirit-land.

Now through the Mystery of Golgotha it has grown different. The Being of the Sun came down to Earth,—took on a body in the Man, Jesus of Nazareth. By turning now in heart and mind and feeling to the Christ and to the Mystery of Golgotha, already here upon the Earth, man receives power that will enable him to get beyond the spheres of Sun and Saturn, so to gain entry into Spirit-land,—in other words, into the world of Stars.

Then comes the state in which man undergoes his further life between death and new birth. If I am now to tell you more about this state, in the way man of present time—after the Mystery of Golgotha—can undergo it by virtue of the power of Christ which he has received, I must insert the following. In the first place I must point out what it really means, when we are out yonder in the world of Stars, in Spirit-land, for us to have the “memory” of our earthly life. The following will help you understand it.

Getting beyond the Saturn sphere, we enter into what was named the Zodiac, in ancient world-conceptions. Though it was meant to typify the fixed-star-heavens as a whole—the Spirit-land, in other words—in the sum-total of the stars which constitute the Zodiac we have a comprehensive picture of the path which Man must undergo, to build from the entire Cosmos, with the help of the Beings of the Hierarchies, the Spirit-seed of his physical body for the next incarnation. If you should say: “Here upon Earth we have such interesting work to do, building up civilisation, working for our fellowmen and so on; how meagre it must be to be engaged only in forming a body for ourselves,” you would be making a great mistake. Nothing that you can ever do on Earth can be as great and manifold as what you have to do when from the starry worlds you build this temple of the Gods, the human body. This is by far the greater task and the more manifold. Nor do you merely make your own body for yourself. As we shall see in a moment, you really make it so that it belongs to mankind as a whole. Associated as you are by Karma with one human being or another, while building your new body you imbue it with the tendency to bring you together again in a beneficial way, so that you and they together can make good. You are working for mankind in a far higher degree out there than you are able to do while here on Earth. Now as to how you work amid the Stars, let me describe it in more detail, only remember please what I said before. Telling of yonder worlds sublime, I can speak only in pictures; the human concepts of our time are not so formed as to enable one to express it otherwise.

In its entirety, once more, you have to build the spiritual seed of your next physical body. From the ingredients of the whole Universe you built it. When for example you are living in and with those spiritual Beings who have their physical reflection in the constellation of Aries, the Ram, you will work with the Hierarchies of Aries in forming your future head, which is indeed a Universe in itself. No matter how contracted here in the physical body, in your head you carry the entire Cosmos—the Cosmos seen from the aspect of Aries. And while, upon the scene of Aries, you are at work with the Hierarchy of that constellation, meanwhile the planets are shining; as they shine physically down on to the Earth, so do they shine spiritually to the other side. Say for example that you have worked your way from Aries to the next constellation—Taurus, the Bull. While working with the Hierarchies in Taurus, you elaborate the region of your larynx in its connection with the lungs. Mars in the meantime, from the planetary spheres, shines up into the sphere of Taurus, and in the movements of Mars there is expressed all that you did with your organs of speech, rightly or wrongly, while you were on the Earth. Every untruth which a man uttered shines at him spiritually from the planet Mars while he is working through the Taurus sphere. You may imagine therefore, what is the nature of the “memory” we there retain of our own deeds. We find it after death, written into the Universe—nay, as the very Logos, speaking from the Universe towards that other side of world-existence.

Thus for the region of the speech-organs we have to work at our future body, hindered or helped according as we lied or told the truth. And so it is, to take another example, when we are going through the constellation of Leo. It is the Sun now that sheds spiritual light on all the imperfections of our heart—more or less deep or superficial as we have been in our feelings and in our sympathies and antipathies, belonging as these do to our temperament and blood-circulation while on Earth. So while we work and build at our future body, the language of the Planets, sounding into the cosmic spaces, utters forth the whole of our preceding life. It is so in deed and truth, strange as it may seem from an earthly standpoint. We watch the planetary movements from yonder side, even from without,—Mars for example moving in the face of Taurus. The movements form themselves into a cosmic writing, but the writing is not mute, it actually sounds into the Universe. Such is the writing of the Stars, by our own deeds inscribed into the cosmic spaces. Small wonder if on our return we prepare what will then be ours—the measure of our Karma. For we can only build the physical body for our future life under the ceaseless influence of this speaking of the Stars.

So then we work our way through the spiritual realm. We spend the longer time upon this spiritual journey, the greater the proportion of our full consciousness in the past earthly life to the dim consciousness we had as a little child. For we are now in a state of consciousness transcending the consciousness we had on Earth, even as our earthly consciousness as grown-up men and women transcends the dreamy state of childhood. There are distinctly these three stages. If a man lived to the age of thirty and spent the first five years in the dream-consciousness of childhood, he will have lived in fuller consciousness six times as long. So now again he lives six times longer than his entire Earth-life in the still fuller consciousness which pertains to him out there amid the Stars. We understand it therefore quite simply: a child who dies will live only for a short time between death and new birth. The older a man grows, the longer must he spend there. For by his longer life on Earth his higher consciousness was darkened for a longer time,—I mean the higher-than-earthly consciousness which he underwent in the spiritual world after his former death. The longer this was darkened, the longer must he work to make it light again. For we must enter right fully into the light.

When we are fully in the light, then comes the time between death and new birth which you will find described in one of the Mystery Plays as the midnight hour in the spiritual life of man. It is about the middle of the time between death and new birth. This is the time when our consciousness, amid the Beings of the Hierarchies in the spiritual world, is most steeped in Spiritual light. Yet at this very time we also experience most deeply: Down yonder in the planetary sphere is the abiding record of all that you, man, did. You may not abandon it, you cannot leave it thus,—so say we to ourselves—nor can you ever alter it while you are here; you can change it only by going down to Earth. And so the urge arises, to descend again to Earth,—to resolve, as it were, between Moon and Saturn. The forces of the Moon are drawing for us once again and we resolve to follow them, so to set forth on our returning journey. If a man grew to adult life in his last incarnation, it will be centuries later.

The nearer we now come to the planetary sphere and notably to the spheres of Mercury, Venus and Moon, the more we lose the consciousness of community with the Beings of the Hierarchies. To tell it more precisely: the consciousness we enter into now contains only the revelations of these spiritual Beings, whereas we felt ourselves till lately living among them and within them. While preparing the human head of our next incarnation for example, we felt ourselves working, very intimately with them. Now they appear to us as if in pictures. Meanwhile the forces of the Moon arise within us. We feel once more: we are a being destined to live a life of our own. Although not yet in a physical body, we have a premonition of living in and by ourselves, a stranger to the Cosmos. No longer do we see the spiritual Beings as they really are; all that we now possess are the pictures of them.

Whilst we are going through these pictures, the spiritual seed of the physical body which we were preparing falls ever farther from us and disappears. We are obliged to witness this: the spiritual seed has fallen from us; it has gone down into a physical mother and father, entering into the forces of generation, into the stream of generation upon the physical Earth. So it is in all reality. The physical body we also were preparing shrinks and contracts and falls into the streams of generation,—into a physical father and mother upon Earth,—while we ourselves as soul and spiritual being are left behind, feeling that we belong to what has fallen from us, yet cannot unite with it directly. In this condition—it is our only means of re-uniting with it—we now begin to draw to ourselves the forces of the Ether that are there throughout the Cosmos; we begin to form our ether-body. We do this when the spirit-seed of our physical body has already fallen from us and is down there on Earth, preparing the physical body in the mother's womb, while we are gathering the forces with which we form our ether-body. With this etheric body we then unite ourselves, when the human seed has already been for a time in the mother's womb.

Such is the process of return to earthly life. We have been living with the pictures—no more than the pictures—of the spiritual Beings; now we incorporate what we can take into ourselves only through the forces of the Moon. What until now was but the “memory” of our own Karmic entity, we now take in as real effective forces, right into our ether-body. Therefore we afterwards appear on Earth in such a way that we of ourselves bring about the unfoldment of our destiny, our Karma. It is while passing through the Lunar forces that we conceive the longing thus to live and fulfil our Karma upon Earth.

Such, my dear friends, is the cycle through which man lives from death till birth. First he experiences the ascent to independent consciousness within the spirit-sphere. Thereafter, this consciousness is gradually steeped again in twilight; the Spirit-sphere remains with him in pictures only, and he receives into himself the will to Karma. He comes back to Earth, to work once more in a physical body. So he goes on, till through a sequence of such Earth-lives he shall become capable of yet another metamorphosis, another mode of being.

In present earthly time it is as I have been relating. In his descent from the starry spheres, man has the memory of his former Earth-existence and from this memory he now takes his start. Having prepared it for himself within the starry spheres, at his descent he now unites with his own physical body. But we are living now in a very important period of Earth-existence, the significance of which we can understand only if we first know what has just been related—how in the starry spheres we prepare and work and win for ourselves the physical body which we eventually put on when we come down again to Earth. For at this very point something of great significance is about to happen in our epoch. I will say more of it in the third part of the lecture.

*

I have often drawn attention to the fact that in the last third of the 19th century changes whose origin is in the spiritual world began to affect the whole course of human earthly life. The gates of knowledge were in a way opened to the spiritual world. If man is duly active on his own part he can now reach into the spiritual world with true cognition, whereas for many centuries before, while material knowledge was developing, this possibility had not been given.

The change took place to begin with in the spiritual world, in that the Beings who had been leading hitherto were replaced by that spiritual Being who for his likeness in character to what is traditionally known by this name may be described as the Being of Michael. Michael, we may truly say, has taken over the Spiritual guidance of mankind. The fact that Michael is now entering the soul-life and spiritual life of mankind has its visible counterpart on Earth. An ever growing number of people begin to realize that man is livingly and constantly connected, not only through his physical body with the Earth, but through his soul and spirit with the spiritual world.

Man is thus growing into conscious spiritual knowledge. This is the one aspect of the leadership of Michael, but there is also another. To be sincerely filled with spiritual knowledge also affects the human heart, the human soul. The more the light of Spiritual Science spreads, the less will it remain a mere theory; it will pour out into human feeling,—it will be present in the form of true human love, in ever widening circles.

What, in effect, is the relation to the human being of all the learning and information accumulated in the last few centuries? It lives as knowledge in the human head; it does not reach the entire man,—it fails to flow from the head into the human being as a whole. Knowledge of this sort then becomes a kind of tumour in the soul. Failing to receive the proper forces from the rest of the human being, it gradually hardens. This is what happens when we merely grow more clever in our head, and the appropriate feelings, springing from the rest of our human being, no longer permeate our increasing cleverness. A kind of cancerous growth becomes established in our soul and spiritual life. The head itself cannot truly thrive if the whole human being is not living in the world with heartfelt love, and also willing what he loves.

Yet man will never understand what the leadership of Michael intends unless he goes out to meet it with his own active contribution—unless he opens out his mind to spiritual enlightenment and becomes filled with the human love which springs from such enlightenment. When he does this, then also will he realize with ever growing comprehension the significance of Michael's leadership and guidance.

The people of the Old Testament,—they too spoke of a leadership of Michael, and in so speaking they conceived Michael to be the servant of Jahve. Michael therefore, in the Old Testament times, worked with those spiritual forces which are the forces of Jahve. He was the minister of Jahve. He helped in the inexorable fight of which I spoke before—the fight with the Ahrimanic powers. In our age, on the other hand, Michael's leadership now begins to help regulate the historic destinies of mankind, it also is signifying that the word shall presently come true: the leadership of Christ will spread over the Earth. It is as though Michael goes before, bearing the light of spiritual knowledge, while after Him there comes the Christ, calling man to universal, all-embracing love. Now this entails a change not only for the Earth; it involves changes also for the life man undergoes between death and a new birth.

Since ancient times of earthly evolution it has been as I today described it. The human being prepares the spiritual seed of his own physical body, which he takes over when he steps forth into his new life on Earth. Now however, since the Christ-Michael-leadership has begun, men will be able ever increasingly to make another important decision before they come down to Earth. Today as yet only a few will do so; a growing number will as time goes on. For spiritual knowledge sheds its light not only on the Earth, but out into the higher realms as well. Through the present leadership of Michael man will now learn to make a very significant decision at the moment when he has already taken on his Karma—taken it into his new ether-body—but is still only setting out upon the way into the physical. With the increasing spread of spiritual knowledge on the Earth and with man’s growing experience within himself of universal human love, the following possibility will arise for mankind in coming time. When at the point of descending into a next earthly life, man will be able to say to himself: ‘This is the body I have been preparing; yet, having sent it down to Earth and having now received my Karma into the ether-body which I have drawn together from the Cosmos, I see how it is with this Karma. Through something that I did in former lives I see that I have gravely hurt some other human being.’ For we are always in the danger of hurting others through the things we do. The light of judgment as to what we have done to another man will be particularly vivid at this moment when we are still living only in our ether-body, having not yet put on the physical. Here too in future time the light of Michael will be working, and the love of Christ. And we shall then be enabled to bring about a change in our decision,—namely to give to the other man the body we have been preparing, while we ourselves take on the body he prepared, whom we have injured.

Such is the mighty transition which will be taking place from now onward in the spiritual life of men. It will be possible for us of our own decision to enter into the body prepared perforce by another human soul to whom we once did grievous harm; he on the other hand will be enabled to enter into the body we prepared. What we are able to achieve on Earth will thus bring about Karmic compensation in quite another way than heretofore. We human beings shall be able even to exchange our physical bodies. Indeed, the Earth could never reach her goal if this did not take place; mankind would never grow into a single whole. In preparation for future planetary embodiments of the Earth, a time must come in earthly evolution when it will be impossible for one individual to enjoy things on the Earth at the expense of another. As in a plant the single leaf or petal feels itself a member of the whole and shares—pictorially speaking—in the weal and woe of the whole plant, so must a future come for the planet Earth when one human being will not want to enjoy happiness at the expense of the whole, but man will feel a member of mankind. And it will be the true spiritual counterpart of this when we shall learn to prepare the physical body even for one another.

We are in fact emerging from the epoch when each of us had so to speak, his own continuation to himself as to the physical body. In the new epoch that is now beginning—brought on by the present leadership of Michael—we shall work at the spirit-seeds of the physical bodies of men in such a way that one works for another. Moreover, as our incarnations of the Earth go on, this will lead even further. For in thus working for one another in the spirit, we shall prepare for a yet later time, to tell the character of which will sound completely strange and paradoxical, yet it is true. For in that more distant future, human souls even while on Earth will be able to go across into the bodies of those to whom they have done some special hurt and to receive the other soul into their own body. That will be when the Earth herself will have passed into quite new conditions. Yet it is also being prepared for by the actual and impending change of which I have been telling, and which is coming about in the spiritual world through the leadership of Michael.

From this example you can see most vividly the essence of “ideal magic”. If while on Earth you are receptive to the illumination that comes from Spiritual Science, then you are truly helping on the leadership of Michael. Then you are helping on those spiritual forces which will enable men so to live for one another, that even in deciding upon the physical body they are to take, they will consider what is best for all mankind. When we are choosing our physical body, this will determine our decision. If you prepare for this event even now on Earth—prepare for it by the Wisdom-of-Man and by the Love-of-Man—what you are doing will have reality in the spiritual world. And this is true “ideal magic”. It is the true “white magic” as it was called in olden times, and into it mankind is now about to enter.

I wanted to tell you of this most vital factor which has now come into the evolutionary pathway of mankind. We must not shrink for want of courage when it is needful to unveil facts of the spiritual world entering deep into the life of man. For the whole future of mankind depends on man's learning really to live with the spiritual world as naturally as on the Earth he lives with the physical. Mankind must learn to be at home again in the spiritual world as it was in the beginning, in primeval time. Only by doing so shall we be helping mankind's future. In the true sense we must understand the word of Christ: “My Kingdom is not of this world”. How then shall we understand it? Did He not after all come down to Earth? Should He not therefore have said: "My kingdom is of this world?" No, He did not say that, for He intended gradually to transform the Earth into a Kingdom that should not be utterly absorbed in earthly things, but should pass over, ever more and more, into a spiritual state. Christ's Kingdom is not as the Earth was until the Mystery of Golgotha, nor as it still continued, running on in the old lines as if by dint of inertia. The Spirit shall prevail upon the Earth,—such is His Kingdom! And this will come to pass when mankind truly comprehends the leadership of Michael. Nor is true comprehension proved in any other way than by the quest I have now indicated—the quest of spiritual illumination and of human, Christ-filled love.

Good morning, gentlemen! Have you thought of a question?

Questioner: Doctor was kind enough to tell us what it is like when the spirit has left the body. The last lecture was very clear to me and my colleagues. But in “Theosophy” there is a sentence that says that when the spirit is separated from the body, the soul still retains desires. That is still a very hard nut for us to crack.

I have another question, something completely different.

Dr. Steiner: Very well, tell me the second question too.

Questioner: By chance I came across a brochure by a Dr. Heuer. I assume that Dr. Steiner has read the brochure, so that we already know that. This Mr. Hauer presents Dr. Steiner as if he were saying nothing new, as if we already know everything that he says about anthroposophy, that we already know all of this. And then, among other things, he says that the most incredible thing about anthroposophy for him is the story of the two Jesus children.

The questioner must also say, however, that this is also incomprehensible to him about the two Jesus children, how the one Jesus child comes from another world.

Dr. Steiner: I also have the brochure, I just haven't cut it open yet.

The questioner continues: If it is not immodest, he would like to ask the doctor to say something about the Jesus family.

Further question: I have been asked by my colleagues in the last few days about the Christ-being. It would be very dear to me if the doctor could say something about the Christ-being.

Dr. Steiner: Is there perhaps another question to be asked so that we can deal with it in context?

Now, I would first like to address the first question about desires. The fact of the matter is this: if you look at what a person experiences differently from how a plant or a stone experiences things, then you will find that a person experiences their world of thoughts. A plant does not show that it has a world of thoughts. Thoughts are there, living in the plant. But to look for conscious thoughts in a plant would be nonsense.

However, something remarkable has come about in the external way in which science partly proceeds today. Today there are all kinds of scholars, and since there are also those who cannot quite believe that there are only physical processes everywhere, that there are only mineral, inanimate processes, they at least assume that there is something spiritual. But since they know nothing about the spiritual itself, they say: the spiritual expresses itself in the fact that some being performs this or that.

There are plants that behave in the strangest ways. For example, there is a plant called the “Venus flytrap” because of the way it behaves. This Venus flytrap has rosette leaves that bear a leaf blade at their broadened stem. It consists of two parts. There are three bristle-shaped outgrowths on both sides of the blade. When an insect alights on the leaf and touches these outgrowths, the two wings of the leaf fold together so quickly that the small insect is trapped. So that is how it is.

Those who only talk about the soul in an external way and know nothing about it, they say: just as there is a soul in a human being, there is also a soul in a plant. I always have only one thing to say to these people: I know a little instrument into which you put a little bacon that has been browned a little: a mousetrap, and when the mouse sips the bacon, the mousetrap closes by itself. So anyone who draws conclusions from such things, as with the Venus flytrap, must assume that there is a soul, and should also say: the mousetrap has a soul because it also closes by itself. It always depends on the reasons for assuming the matter.

You see, that is precisely the characteristic of anthroposophy: it starts from reasons in everything, whereas the others, if they do assume a soul, know nothing about the soul and ascribe a soul to a plant like this, when something similar happens to it as to a mousetrap when an insect comes near it. But in anthroposophy there is nothing of outward appearances that lead to it, but there is the real realization of the soul. Part of this realization of the soul is that man develops desires. It is desire when, for example, he is thirsty. When I am thirsty, I have the desire to drink water or something else. Now, fine; the thirst is satisfied by the water. All of this is desire, where you wish for something from within your organism, want something; that is always desire.

You see, there is something people never think about. They do not think about the mental state that underlies when a person wakes up. Not true, when a person wakes up, now examine the people, how much more carbon dioxide in the blood and so on, that is, they examine only the physical conditions. But the truth is that man wakes up because he has desire for his physical body. When you fall asleep at night, you no longer have any desire for your physical body. It is completely filled with fatigue substances. There is no longer any good in there. The soul, that is, the ego and the astral body, want to recover outside of the physical body. In the morning, when the physical body has recovered, which the soul, which is outside the physical body, notices from the condition of the skin, because it is close to it, the soul goes back into the physical body because it desires to be inside the physical body as long as the physical body is able to live at all. So the soul has the desire throughout life to live inside the body.

Take something else: you cut your finger and it hurts you. There is the finger (drawing $. 202). Now you cut into it, and it hurts you. What has happened? Yes, the physical body is torn a little bit apart. You can cut into the physical body, but not into the astral body. I will now draw the astral body into the physical body. If I draw it large, there is a gap where the astral body is. But it wants to be able to enter the place where the physical body is torn apart as well. It has the desire to be inside the body and cannot do so because the body is torn open. That is what the pain is all about.

Now imagine that if the soul has this desire for the physical body throughout life, then something must happen after death.

If as a child you develop the craving to eat as much sugar as possible, then you develop the craving to get sugar. And if at a certain stage in your life someone finds it useful for you to eat less sugar, you still have the craving for sugar. Let's say you have developed diabetes, and you are therefore no longer supposed to do it – yes, it takes a long time to get rid of that habit! You always have the craving for sugar and have to slowly get rid of it. You know, if someone drinks a lot, he develops a craving for it; he has to slowly wean himself off it. If someone eats opium, as I told you the other day, and they are weaned off it, they will go crazy with desire for the opium.

Now, throughout life, there is a craving for the body in the ego and astral body. After death, the soul always wants to wake up back into the body. First it has to get out of this habit. This process takes about a third of the whole life. In fact, sleep takes a third of the whole life. On the first day after one has died, one wants to go back. You want to do what you did on the last day of your life; on the second day you want to do what you did on the day before that, and so it goes on. So you have to get rid of the desire for this third of your life. So after death you don't have any thirst or hunger cravings, but you do have a constant craving for everything you experienced through your physical body. After death, it is like this: you have grown fond of the area around your hometown all your life. You have always seen that. Yes, you have seen it through your physical body. Only a Turk believes that he has something much more beautiful in terms of meadows and flowers and so on after death than he has here on earth. So you have to get out of the habit of all that. And it is precisely this getting out of the habit that makes it necessary to say that the desires still remain. Is that not understandable? (Answer: Yes!)

So after death, the desires for the physical body and for life in general remain, but not hunger and thirst, because for that you need a stomach; you no longer have that, you put it in the coffin. But after death, you still have the desire to see everything that you saw during your life.

But now something else is added: after death, one can see just as little in the spiritual world, into which one has now entered, as a child here in the physical world can immediately see. One must first acquire this. One must first grow into the spiritual world. So that the first state after death, one third of life, consists of being still blind and deaf to the spiritual world, but still longing for the physical world. That occurs after two or three days, during which, as I have related, the dead person looks back. And only when he has given up that, does he grow into the spiritual world and can then perceive in a spiritual way. Then he no longer has any desire for the physical world. So anyone who can judge the soul's life can also judge what remains of the physical life. And of course it is not only pleasant things that remain. If someone had the desire to constantly beat people, the desire to beat people remains, and then he must slowly get out of the habit of doing so. These are the things that one can see.

Anthroposophy is concerned with recognizing what can actually be seen of the soul, that is, what is actually visible. That is what it is all about.

As for the other question, the question of Christ Jesus, we will deal with it today, so that nothing remains unsatisfied in you. However, I must first say something about history.

I have told you about various conditions on Earth in very ancient times. Now it is like this: we have conditions on earth that are actually no older than about six to eight or nine thousand years, according to scientific observations, so let's say six to nine thousand years. I have already drawn your attention to this. Before that time, you could not go very far from here, because you would enter the so-called glacial region. Switzerland was where you can walk around today, all the way down, covered by glaciers. The glaciers flowed in valleys where the rivers are now; the Aare, the Reuss and so on are only the thin, diluted glacier streams that remain from the distant, distant past.

But this period, in which a large part of Europe was covered by these glaciers, was preceded by a very different time. Because the earth is constantly – you just have to consider large periods of time – rising and falling, rising and falling. If, for example, there is sea here (he draws) and land up there, then this land is floating in the sea. All land floats in the sea. Can you imagine that? It is not that it goes down to the bottom, but that the land, all the lands, float in the sea. There is also sea under the lands.

Now you will say: Why doesn't it float back and forth like a ship? I will tell you something else first. In fact, the countries are floating in the sea, but suppose it were Great Britain, England (it is drawn). England is an island. It actually floats in the sea, but it floats near Europe, and the distance does not change. But even according to scientific views, it was not always the same as it is now, but there were also times when the water went up over it. Then England was under the sea. If you crossed this bit of sea, you naturally came to the ground. So the thing is that there were times when England was under the sea.

Yes, it's even like this: if you examine the soil of England, you will find certain fossilized animals in this soil. But they are not all the same. If you examine a piece of soil from England here and further up, you will find very different fossilized animals, and even further up there are yet again very different fossilized animals and even further up yet again very different fossilized animals. Four successive layers of fossilized animals can be found in the soil of England!

Where do these fossilized animals come from? When the sea floods a land, the animals die. Their shells sink, and the animals are fossilized. If I find four successive layers in a soil, the land in question must have been flooded by the sea four times. A layer was always deposited there. And so it is found that the land of England has been four times above water and four times below. Four times England was above water, it rose again and again.

Now you may ask: Why does such an island, which is actually floating in the water, not go back and forth like a ship? Yes, because it is not held by the earth. If it were only a matter of the earth, it is impossible to imagine how everything would be shaken up! England would soon be dashed against the coast of Norway, then it would be dashed against America and so on, and all the countries would be dashed against each other, if it only depended on the earth. But it does not depend only on the earth, but the constellation of stars in the sky sends out the forces that hold a country in a certain place. So it is not the fault of the earth. It is the star constellation. And you can always prove: when the situation has changed, the star constellation has changed – not the planets, of course, but the fixed stars. Those who do not want to know about this world do the same as people who say that the powers of thought come from the brain alone. If I have the soft ground and just make my footprints, and someone comes down from Mars for my sake and thinks that the footprints come from the earth, the earth sometimes throws up the sand, sometimes pulls it down – it is not at all the case, I pushed in from outside. And so the convolutions of my brain have also come from outside, from mental thinking. It is the same with countries that have come over the earth: they are held by the star constellations. So we must not only see spirit in people on earth, and on earth in general, but in the whole universe.

Such things, gentlemen, just imagine, older people knew them, but in a completely different way than we do today. I will give you a proof. There is a great Greek philosopher who lived several centuries before the birth of Christ, his name was Plato. He knew a great deal. He tells us that one of the wisest of his countrymen, Solon, the lawgiver of Greece, was once a guest at the home of an Egyptian. The Egyptians were the more advanced people at that time; only the Greeks behaved more cleverly than we do. The Greeks revered the Egyptians, as we shall see, but they did not learn Egyptian, the ancient language of the Egyptians. The Greeks did not learn Egyptian! Our scholars must all learn Greek! The Greeks were much cleverer. We do not imitate what they did with it; but we do imitate their language. Our scholars become narrow-minded precisely because they do not grow into what is original to them on earth, but are distracted from what is peculiar to human beings by having to find their way into a very old language. Now, in Switzerland they are fighting against this; but it took a long time. Our boys, if they wanted to become doctors, first had their heads turned by having to learn Greek. I'm not saying this because I also had to learn it, I love the Greek language very much. But that's what some people should learn who want to get something out of it, but not those who want to become doctors or lawyers, and forget it again later in life.

Plato recounts that Solon visited an Egyptian, who told him: “You Greeks may be an advanced people, but you are still children, for you know nothing of the fact that the lands are constantly being pulled out over the sea and submerging again, that upheavals are always taking place.

The ancient Egyptians still knew it; the Greeks no longer knew it. Only Plato still knew it. He knew that there was land out there in the Atlantic Ocean, where ships now sail from Europe to America, that the west coast of Europe was connected to the east coast of America by land. But the old truths have been forgotten. And that was because people had even more unconscious knowledge. We have acquired abstract knowledge. We need that for our freedom. For people in those days were not free; but they knew more. And Lessing, I told you, gave something to the fact that these ancient people knew more than the later.

So we come to say to ourselves: It is the case that there were ancient times when people, through their own nature, knew that there is a spiritual reality everywhere. People have known this for quite a long time.

There is, for example, a Roman emperor, Julian, in the 4th century AD. This Julian was taught by people who still had some knowledge of Asian wisdom. And this Julian said: There is not one, but there are three suns. The first sun is the physical sun, the second is a soul sun, and the third sun is a spiritual sun. The first is visible to us, the other two are invisible. That is what Julian said.

Now something very strange happened. Julianus was vilified throughout history because he did not believe in Christianity. But he believed in what people knew before Christianity. And when Julian once had to lead an Asian campaign, he was suddenly murdered. It was a kind of assassination attempt. But this assassination was carried out by those who hated him because he had appropriated the old knowledge.

You must remember that even in ancient times, things were handled quite differently than they are today. The Egyptians were terribly clever people, as I have already mentioned. But they did not have a writing system like ours, they had a pictographic writing system. The word was always similar to what it meant. And the people who were scribes in Egypt were taught: Writing is something sacred; you must imitate things very faithfully. And do you know what happened to anyone who made a mistake in copying pictographs out of negligence? They were sentenced to death! Well, today people would look on in amazement if someone who made a spelling mistake were sentenced to death because of it. But human history does not go as one dreams it would. Indeed, the ancient Egyptians were wise and cruel in some respects. Of course there is progress in humanity. But just because writing was something so sacred to them, we must not deny that they were wise in other respects and knew things that are only now gradually emerging in anthroposophy, in a completely different way. They dreamt it, and we know it; it was a completely different way.

Well, you see, Julianus was right. It is actually the case that just as you have soul and spirit in your body, so the sun has soul and spirit. That is precisely what the one who knows the soul says. He is not saying that the Venus flytrap has a soul, because it is nonsense to say that everything that moves in some purposeful way has a soul. But he knows that when the light shines, it has a soul, it moves soulfully; because he perceives that. And so it was known: the sun contains a living being.

Now you know that it is said: In Palestine, at a certain time, Jesus of Nazareth was born. You see, gentlemen, Jesus of Nazareth grew up - you can actually verify today what is in the Gospels, so it is true - as a fairly simple boy. He was the son of a carpenter, a joiner. That's right. He grew up as a fairly simple boy. Now he still had a great deal of ancient wisdom. Therefore, it is based on truth that at the age of twelve he was able to answer the scholars very cleverly. It still happens today that a twelve-year-old boy gives more sensible answers than a “disinstructed” scholar! But from this it was clear that he was a very gifted boy. Now he grew up, and when he was thirty years old, something suddenly changed in him. That is a fact; something changed in him all of a sudden.

What changed in him when Jesus was thirty years old? When Jesus was thirty years old, he suddenly realized, prepared by his earlier great knowledge, what was no longer known at the time, which only a few hidden scholars had from an ancient wisdom, of which Julian later found it. He realized through an older knowledge: The whole universe and the sun contain soul and spirit. He was imbued with what lived in the universe by knowing this. If you know it, you have it.

Now in those days, in those times, people had to be taught things in pictures. What I am telling you today can only be expressed in this way from the 15th century onwards. Before that, we did not have these concepts. So it was expressed in such a way that it was said: a dove descended, and he received the Holy Spirit within him. Of course, those who were able to perceive it knew that something had happened to him. That is how they expressed it, and in one gospel it says: “Then a voice from heaven was heard: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’.” Translated correctly: “This is my beloved Son, today I have given birth to him.” That means that what happened at the age of thirty was correctly understood as a second birth. With Jesus' birth, only Jesus was born, who was more talented than the others, but who did not yet have this feeling within him. This was felt to be something extraordinarily important. And that is the baptism of John in the Jordan.

There was something that caused me great concern at the time. In science, there are such concerns, gentlemen! You had, as you know, the four Gospels, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Don't you think everyone knows today that these four Gospels contradict each other? If you start reading in the Gospel of Matthew and read about the family tree of Jesus, and compare it with the family tree of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, they contradict each other. People say: they contradict each other. But they don't think any further about why it contradicts itself. At most, they say: one invented it, the other invented it; one just invented something different from the other, that's why things can contradict each other.

But that is not the case. It is like this: Goethe, for example, says of himself: “I have the stature of my father” — that is, he looked a lot like his father.

From my father I have the stature,
The serious way of life,
From my mother, a cheerful disposition
And the desire to tell stories.

Now, maybe at the age of three, Goethe was not yet able to tell stories; but maybe at the age of nine he could. Then he had to say: “Beautiful, from my mother I have the desire to tell stories, it has been passed on to me from my mother, it has come into me from my mother.

I tell you this because it will help you understand how my concern about the contradictions in the gospels has been resolved.

Now I have taken these two gospels, the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Unless someone carelessly says that it is invented, no one can understand why these two things contradict each other. And I have now examined the spiritual science behind it and found that not just one boy was born, but two Jesus boys were born. Both boys had the name Jesus. There is no need to be surprised about that; for example, if a boy in Austria is named Joseph, then there is no surprise if another boy born at the same time is also named Joseph. There is no need to be surprised if two boys are named Seppl or Franz. So there was no reason to be surprised if two boys were named Jesus at the time. And both lived together until they were twelve years old. And then something strange happened: because they lived together, the gifts that one of them had suddenly appeared in the other. Just as a son can inherit from his mother, so one of the Jesus boys inherited gifts from the other. And the one Jesus boy, from whom the other had inherited the gift, did not live on, he died at twelve years of age, he died soon after. So the one was left and, through the shock that the other perished, had the wisdom of the other shine within him. This is precisely how he was able to shine before the scholars.

His parents could say: Where did he get all that? — If you ascribe it to psychic influences, then that is also explainable. And such psychic influences simply exist. One of the Jesus boys did not have the wisdom until he was twelve; the other died, and the wisdom was transferred to the one Jesus boy, partly because of the shock of his death, partly because they were friendly with each other. And he went through the baptism in the Jordan. Two Jesus boys were born, not one. In the twelfth year, one of them died, and the other was suddenly awakened by this shocking event and gained the wisdom of the other.

And then you find out: the one evangelist, Matthew, described the one Jesus boy for the childhood of Jesus, and the other, Luke, described the other Jesus boy. And so the two agree with each other. I didn't make that up. It was the result of my research. And that's why I'm talking about the two Jesus boys, precisely because of a certain science that the others don't have.

And from this you can see that the same principles that are followed in natural science, that when the causes are there, the effects occur, are also followed in spiritual science. You don't just assume that you say: Well, yes, two people have invented something, the one Jesus child of Matthew is invented, the other Jesus child of Luke is invented. At the time when the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written, there was no question of such an invention at all. People spoke figuratively; but they did not invent anything, because the things were taken so seriously that a few centuries earlier in Egypt, anyone who wrote down something that was not true was sentenced to death. We cannot be so reckless as to say that people in earlier times invented anything. They expressed things in pictures, but it would never have occurred to them to invent anything. He who says that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke could have been invented is speaking as one who knows nothing. But that is what today's scholars and theologians say. Since they cannot explain the contradictions otherwise, they have to admit that they are contradictory. But the fact that we know there are two Jesus children, one the Jesus child of the Gospel of Matthew and the other the Jesus child of the Gospel of Luke, clarifies the story in the best possible way.

Now Mr. Hauer, who is a private lecturer in Tübingen and also a traveling teacher, has come forward – speaking for anthroposophy does not bring in any money today, but speaking against anthroposophy does – and has come forward against anthroposophy, this Mr. Hauer now comes and finds: That is something strange. — Yes, gentlemen, it is of course something strange because no one has thought of it! It is of course something strange if I claim that there were not one but two Jesus children; one of whom died at the age of twelve. That is of course something strange, of course. There is no need to be surprised that it is something strange. But it is precisely because not everyone said it that it is strange. That is why Hauer finds it strange. This can be found on one page of Hauer's book.

On the other page, you will find: Yes, Steiner says nothing that was not already known. Yes, gentlemen, what Mr. Hauer did not know, he finds strange. He complains about that. On the basis of what he has gleaned from somewhere — because the old wisdom has been had, and today it is of course recorded everywhere — I do not glean it, but he does! — he comes to the conclusion: Yes, Steiner says nothing that others have not already said. So you are at the mercy of these people. Whenever something needs to be said, they say: He says nothing new. If I write a geometry book, I naturally have to include the Pythagorean theorem; it was discovered by Pythagoras 600 years before the birth of Christ. Of course, if I have a number of new things in it, I must also have the Pythagorean theorem in it; today I will prove it somewhat differently, but it is in it. One cannot be reproached for that, that what was already there is rediscovered after it has been forgotten! And so it is that many of the things that spiritual science claims today, in a different way, because it is not the case in the same way, can be found in a different way in the writings of the ancient Gnostics, who are the writers of an ancient time. At the time when Christ was around, there were still such Gnostics, and even later. They wrote down such ancient wisdom, but not out of science, but out of ancient knowledge, not like anthroposophy. Now people compare what anthroposophy says and what the Gnostics say. This is a little bit like what happens with the Gnostics again, because it is true. And then they say: Well, he is saying nothing different from what the others have said! But with the two Jesus children, Mr. Hauer cannot say: Steiner came upon something that the others already knew! Because he has no idea that anyone has ever known that.

I have not yet cut open the whole book, but what I have seen of it is full of such contradictions. It does not make sense at all when you compare one page with another. But that is how today's scholars do it. On the one hand they say: Others have said that many times before. - And on the other hand they say: He is not saying anything new, we already knew all that! Yes, but if they already knew all that, why are they grumbling about it? And on the other hand, when something comes that they didn't know, they find it incredible.

But you see, after I had found this, really found it through spiritual research, of the two Jesus children who lived side by side until the twelfth year, I knew nothing but this, that it is a fact. Then we once saw a picture in Turin. The picture is very strange. It shows the mother of Jesus and two boys, one of whom is not John, because John is known from all the pictures where Jesus and John are together, but there are two boys in it who look quite similar, but still cannot be brothers, because they look alike, and yet not alike. It is quite clear that they are two little friends. Whoever first found that there were two Jesus children would then have to consider what this picture means. This picture was created relatively late in the centuries; but when it was still known that there were two Jesus children, an Italian painter painted the two Jesus children in one picture.

If Hauer had known today that this was still the case from ancient knowledge, he would now say: Steiner simply saw the picture in Turin! He would say that he already knew that anyway. Then he would say at the same point: Steiner is not claiming anything new, he is only claiming the things that have been known anyway. - Such are people!

It is actually quite dreadful when you look into these apparently stupid contradictions with which people today fight anthroposophy. On the one hand, what I say is supposed to be pure invention, invented by me. Now, let us assume that it is invented by me; but then the same person cannot say in the same book: He is not saying anything new! — Because he himself claims that I invented the things I say, and reproaches me for it. And then he says that others have known this all along. It is, in fact, sheer madness what is being done. Whereas if one really approaches the Christ event and investigates it as one otherwise investigates facts, then it becomes clear: this tremendous gift, which the boy Jesus already had, came about through the interaction between the two boys.

I will prove to you that such an exchange can take place, unbeknownst to other people. Let me tell you about such a case. There was once a little girl who already had older siblings; these other siblings learned to speak quite well. This girl did not learn to speak properly at first; but a little later, when the other children learned to talk, she began to talk. But she spoke a language that none of the adults understood. She invented a language for herself. For example, she said “Papazzo,” and when she said “Papazzo,” she meant the dog. And in a similar way, she invented names for all the animals. These are scientific facts. These names are not found anywhere.

Now this girl had a little brother after some time. And the little brother learned this language very quickly from his sister. And they spoke to each other in this language. The little brother died when he was twelve or so, and the sister stopped using this language and also learned the language of the others. She then married later and became a completely ordinary woman who told people that this was the case. She went through it herself. It is so. The two children communicated with each other in this language, talked to each other in this language; no one else understood it. Gentlemen, that can be the greatest wisdom! Only the two of them understood and agreed with each other.

From this you can see how one is influenced by the other. Why should not the one Jesus boy, who died at the age of twelve, have known something that no one understood at all! You still experience that when you know the facts.

So, nothing else is being claimed than what, in the most eminent sense, can also be truly scientific. Now, people who do not accept this as scientific are simply unable to piece together the facts. The person who knows that something like this exists, that two children speak this language that no adult understands and share spiritual things with each other in which the adults do not participate, he who understands this, he understands everything I say about the two Jesus children up to the twelfth year. And that this was an extraordinary event is not surprising. It does not happen every day. And in the form in which it happened, it has only happened once in the history of the earth, that this tremendous enlightenment comes to this man at the age of thirty.

Now, you see, here the story of Christ is transformed into real science, into real knowledge. And you can't help it; it transforms itself through knowledge.

Now you can say: All right, so at the age of twelve, Jesus was already enlightened to a certain extent by the other one who died. But at the age of thirty, yes, he suddenly became a different person again, which the evangelist expresses by saying: A dove flew down and settled on him.

Yes, gentlemen, the fact is that he has become another. What has happened then? I have already explained to you: when a child is born, the germ is there. The spirit of the universe must act on the germ. It is no wonder that the spirit of the universe is at work there when it has even worked on the island of England, as we have seen. What happened to Jesus in his thirtieth year could not be explained from the earth. Just as a human being is created through fertilization, in that one thing influences the other, so at that time the whole universe had an influence on the thirty-year-old Jesus, fertilizing him with soul and spirit, and through this he became Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus, to put it better. For what does it mean? Christ means he who is enlightened. And Jesus is an ordinary name, as it was common in Palestine, just as today in Austria one is called Sepperl, Joseph, or in Switzerland so and so, where one also finds similar names in every house. So Jesus was the name of many, and he was called the Christ because this enlightenment occurred.

Yes, gentlemen, when you read my book “Christianity as Mystical Fact,” you will find it demonstrated there: This enlightenment has been artificially produced in certain people before, only to a lesser extent. These were then called mystery ways. The difference between those who were educated in the highest wisdom in ancient times and the difference between them and Jesus Christ was that these mystery wise men were taught by others in the schools that were called mysteries in those days. With Jesus, it happened by itself. Therefore, it was a different process.

In the ancient mysteries, those who ascended to the highest knowledge simply became “Christ”; just as today you need not be surprised if someone has studied until the age of twenty-five - before that he was the very ordinary Joseph Müller, but now he is suddenly a doctor. That is how one became a “Christ” in the old mysteries, although not in such an innocent, that is, simple way; because of course you can be the biggest idiot and still become a doctor at the age of twenty-five! That was not possible in the old mysteries; there it was a deep, deep wisdom. There you became the 'Christ'. It was a title given to the highest sages, as the title 'doctor' is given today after a certain course of study; only in those days, when it was done properly, it was real wisdom. And with the Christ it just came naturally. But that means that what was otherwise given by the earth, by people, was given from the farthest reaches of the universe. This only happened once. As a result, world history took a different turn. And no one can deny this secret, not even those who are not Christians, that world history has taken a different turn.

The Romans did not take this into account, they did not know it. Christianity was founded in Asia Minor by Jesus Christ. At the same time, the Romans advanced from the old republican state to the empire, and they persecuted the Christians. The Christians had to make themselves catacombs underground. There they reflected on what their Christianity was. What was done above ground? The circuses were built, and people, the slaves, were tied to the pillars and burned as a spectacle for those sitting in the circus. That was above ground. And down in the catacombs, the Christians practiced their religion, which at that time was just for enslaved people. Religion just means connection - religere = to connect -; down there, the Christians practiced their religion.

And what about a few centuries later? The Romans are no longer there in the old way. What they used to watch in the circuses for their own pleasure, the burning people, was gone, because the Christians had taken its place. That is how it is in the world.

And so it will come to pass: those people who today speak as Dr. Hauer, whom you mentioned earlier, will be swept away. And that which today, though not physically but spiritually, must work in the catacombs, will indeed work! But one must only realize how it is a matter of real science; and how those who do not study much today are annoyed that something like this comes out!

When I come back, I will be able to continue with that. But essentially, you will already have understood which path this is taking.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! I agree with Licentiate Bock who suggested it would be best to take up yesterday's reflections plus those of the afternoon and orientate ourselves toward questions that had arisen.

[ 2 ] Yesterday I tried to present a kind of overview of the seven sacraments. I tried to show how the sacraments either determine a kind of value of involution to an evolution value, or the reverse. In the questions which have been asked, there is a wish for something to be said about the sacrament of priest ordination. We have looked at how five sacraments essentially are arranged along the developmental line of each individual human being, how this line connects from birth up to death. We have seen how both the sacraments of priest ordination and marriage in the Christian sense fall away from the other (five) sacraments, and how the priest ordination ceremony points out the evolutionary element which is present in each human being as an involutionary process, namely the mysterious connection each individual human being has with the Divine.

[ 3 ] Now let us first of all try to place the concept of this sacrament of ordination in front of us according to its development, how its Christian content has gone over into Christian ceremonies and gradually crystallized life in Catholicism as the culmination of all ceremonies.

[ 4 ] We must very clearly understand that the connection of human beings with the Divine in the sense of the epoch in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, was such that it certainly existed way back, behind the consciousness of modern man today. If we go back far into the cultural development of humanity, we discover another kind of selection for the priesthood than what was later the case, and of the kind we actually want to talk about here. You must clearly understand that ceremonies, rituals and sacraments only become comprehensible within the entire relationship of human evolution, because the Christian sacraments are a kind of transformation of older sacraments. So, regarding priesthood, the relationship is different compared to olden times. In earlier times the one who was taken up into the mysteries by leaders of the mysteries was elected according to his soul characteristics; his entire human development was regarded as being worthy—if today we could select an apt term we would say: 'to be chosen'. This is a concept which has so much more meaning, the further we look back in human evolution. The point of view that people are equal is a modern-day opinion; it is actually essentially something that only emerged from the consciousness of the epoch around the Mystery of Golgotha. By contrast they believed that in fact, in olden times, one person was more worthy of being chosen than another, so that those who were worthy to be inducted into the Mysteries—or to be initiated, as one can clearly impress the imagination with other expressions—was to be discovered within the masses of people. When these individuals were in this or that way discovered, which was believed as predestination for a priestly calling, he had to go through with the initiation. This process of initiation meant that the person was brought into a situation where he had to manage another state of consciousness other than merely the one he experienced in the outer world. In olden times another state of consciousness prevailed, quite different from what it is today. Today quite a different state of consciousness is needed to be able to manage Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. So when I take today's second kind of consciousness as a start, perhaps it can lead to greater understanding, in such a way that the usual daily consciousness still remains complete. A person should not for a moment—without falling sick—be somehow impaired by exercises or the like, as I have described in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds"; a person should not be impaired in the management of his daily consciousness, it must be present. The other consciousness which lacks real freedom which consist in managing Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition must be there as something which can always change quickly, in an instant change to ordinary daily consciousness, like sleep can be changed into the waking state, only that this changing between seeing consciousness and ordinary day consciousness would be completely situated within human capriciousness. This is certainly something which can only be attained after practice and needs to be examined in all its being, in order to talk about this at all.

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[ 5 ] It is precisely this other consciousness which presents a completely different world compared with the world developed out of the senses and understood with the mind, aspects which feed back into the being of the human I, to stick to the human ego. The human I is present in the other consciousness with great power, one doesn't have something which is merely permeated with a single imagination or feeling, but one has an image. One has the possibility of looking at it and knows, this I is something in which one not merely lives, but it is present as an objectivity. The other thing about this higher consciousness is that one doesn't gain any insight into the mineral kingdom—the mineral kingdom belongs only to ordinary human daily consciousness—by contrast it is fully aware towards anything plant-like, animal-like and the human self. One really lives in another world. What is between these two worlds is called the threshold; it must be crossed over but can only be crossed over after preparations have been achieved, after one has really faithfully practiced the exercises which I have presented in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment." If one has not really prepared for this crossing, one could, through the acquisition of this new consciousness, slip down into physicality. (During the following presentation a central drawing is made on the blackboard.)

I would like to sketch it in the following way. Let's accept that this daily consciousness is connected to human physicality. This higher consciousness is now lifted from it and one sees a completely new world. However, now one has to retain this higher consciousness; it must be purely soul-spiritual. It can't happen however, if one has not previously developed the strength through exercises—it can't happen if not accomplished in a lively way; what I'm implying is more of a hypothesis—so, when one has not acquired the strength through exercises, it can all collapse into physicality. This means one is not living in a free soul-spiritual consciousness but the processes in human organs will reveal what this consciousness observes; then one has to do with dreams, one does not really have actual objective imaginations full of content. The objective, content-filled imagination exists as a result of, what one experiences, not being impregnated with bodily processes, but processes of the supersensible world. This must be achieved through exercises and by having achieved this, being able to step over the boundary between the sensual and supersensible which is designated as the threshold. This is the case today. Today our ordinary consciousness contains content known to everyone, but we have another content—which of course can be described as I have done now again from a certain point of view - which is certainly described as the content of a higher world as opposed to that of the ordinary world.

If we now go back to the times of human earthly development which I want to speak to you about here, in which the chosen ones were inaugurated, then we find they also sought another condition of consciousness but it was different to that of today in as far as the condition of consciousness which we regard as the normal human consciousness, was most extraordinary in each mystery pupil, and a certain image-rich imagination, observing the Divine in all the individual things, was the norm. So, what at that time in the old Mysteries was indicated as the threshold lay in quite a different place to where the threshold is situated for us today. We can even see this in outer things. [ 6 ] You see, today there is something which a child already learns at school, and that is the heliocentric world system. The heliocentric world system—you can find this actually historically handed down—has passed into literature through a kind of betrayal. The heliocentric world system already existed in Greek times, it was already clearly present earlier; it was taught in the Mysteries. What an ordinary child learns today at school, which forms their attitude towards the view of the world, this was taught in olden times only in the Mysteries. In outer normal consciousness people of that time had an image-rich consciousness. We can really say: in comparison to olden times, today every human being who has gone through school, has gone beyond the threshold. Those in the old Mysteries would regard it quite dangerous for people who have not gone through a regular initiation but through some or other elementary experience, to have gone over the threshold, for example by not adhering to the geocentric system—that the earth remains stationary and the sun and stars move—but believe in the immobility of the sun as the initiated students believed in olden times. People said you had to be prepared to tolerate what lies, for example, in the heliocentric world system or what lies, for example, in our current biology or psychology, and so on. This seems like a paradox to people today, yet it was so. One can say that historically human kind as such in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha crossed over the threshold which in earlier epochs in the Mysteries had to be artificially crossed in order to reach initiation. At that time those to be initiated learnt what every child learns today. Today we again learn to gain insight into Higher Worlds which later would be the norm. So it is with the evolution of humanity. It is not recognised through examples from olden writings that it was a given—for human consciousness was image-rich—in such a way that things were not seen outwardly but that all things were perceived for their inner spirituality. One must be aware that the words of these ancient writers are to be read in a different way to the way today's ancient language researchers or cultural historians or anthropologists and their equivalents read, because the consciousness at that time was image-rich. We could therefore say, in olden times the initiate was led towards the world we know today.

[ 7 ] I would like to still add one more detail. When we go back to olden Greek times, we find people couldn't clearly perceive the colour blue as we can today. They had no sensual experience of the colour blue, they had much more of a sense developed towards the other side, towards vital colours, red and so on, so that for the Greeks blue appeared more green than it is for us today. From this point of view, one must understand everything as the ancients did. We must clearly understand that active thinking is connected to humankind's development towards an experience of blue. If blue is mentioned in ancient scriptures it is always in error, because those people didn't have the experience of blue as we have in today's active experience of understanding. Those people, upon looking at blue, didn't have the ability to be objective, for the out-flowing of the I as an objective, they had far more the experience of what stirred in red, which goes from the objective towards the subjective, which is outwardly active and touches and is sensed, where the awareness of the Divine lay in the objects.

[ 8 ] So this initiation was already something quite definite, it involved the initiation being carried out in these olden times by the fact that man himself had to do things which he had to endure physically which to a certain extent formed a kind of inner sacrament. The sacraments in olden times were more inward. Take for instance some outer events which throw a person into a state of fear, caused by these external actions. For example, in Greece there existed Mysteries in which one of the most important processes consisted in a person being placed in total darkness, where he has to live into this darkness, and then suddenly the room was lit up completely—this is the perception he would have been given. What it meant at that time was the transformation of the state of consciousness from being in the darkness, in the blackness, to going into the light. Something happened in a person, fine processes took place inside. These fine processes which were happening in people, I can describe in the following manner.

When a human being, after he has for some time experienced this transformation out of the darkness into the light, salt is separated in him—depending on his individual nature - which is deposited. Salt deposits actually took place as a result of the transfer of going from a dark state to a light state, taking place during the change. These processes became something of which a person became completely aware as being accompanied by the feeling very similar to fear. These salt deposits were observed by a person; he was inwardly observing an interrelation taking place inside himself. At that moment when it happened in him through an external action, man had gone through an initiation process because in olden times initiation consisted in a person experiencing such processes out of himself. What is important now however, was what accompanied such a process of salt deposits within him. Such a salt depositing process within was accompanied by the person's consciousness being impregnated by the process of light perception, not merely of the light perception but from the inner light containing spirituality; he was thus taking in the light which contained spirituality. By the salt coagulating in his inner being, a person felt this coagulation of salts as a penetration of the Divine. To make these conditions conscious was the art of initiation in ancient times. A person could speak quite differently, in them the life of light was not a mere observation by the senses but it was a penetration of light, so that he could say: 'By me living in the light, matter coagulates in me'. With that which is contained in ordinary matter, in a certain sense he directly perceived the effect of that which lies above the substance of ordinary matter.

[ 9 ] Now we will not understand these things, my dear friends, if we don't know that the entire constitution of people in older times was different to what it became later. Such a process, which I have sketched for you, you can observe today when waking up or going to sleep. When physical development reaches puberty, the conditions are such that you won't be able to do these things any longer. The influence on the human being is no longer possible in this intense way; people have hardened more in themselves. Today it doesn't happen for these fine spiritual processes which are taking place there, to be observed just like that. In this respect it will even change the human race. As a result, it has happened that what had taken place within, during earlier times, now is to be looked for outwardly. To a certain extent the opposite of the inner process is performed as a ceremony.

The old process of initiation, the process through which a person allows the spirit to reign, this process is now performed outwardly. The priest ordination was in olden times not at all the weakened process of today, but a process, despite it being performed outwardly, still making a deep impression on people. In later times, still in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and afterwards, the act of baptism, for example, was at least performed as a deed which still accomplished something in people themselves. Those being baptised were immersed in water and thus brought in the same situation as someone being drowned, who sees the retrograde perspective of their life processes flash through them in a spiritual vision. This was part of baptism in earlier times; a person's past life was brought before his soul, so that he learned to see spiritually in a certain way. Later on the sacrament of baptism was temporarily postponed and so it could not be performed in this way, but only symbolically. It is the same with the priest ordination.

The priest ordination in itself is to a certain extent an outer process for that which earlier was evoked inwardly in those going through initiation, through the inversion of outer processes; it is what in fact places the human being in another world. A person is then made aware—I can depict this even more precisely—of certain interrelationships in the cosmos, which can't be studied in the outer world. A person is made aware that physical processes are taking place which do not coincide with the usual outer sensually perceptible processes and he becomes attentive to what is actually sacramental. He learns to see for instance, in dissolving salt in water, that something is happening which isn't created in a physical-chemical process of dissolution, but what happens in salt dissolving in water is actually something inward, I could call it, something radiant. He learns to recognise how processes happen which are only conceivable through the spirit in man. This becoming transported into the world of such revelations which can't be seen with the outer senses or understood with ordinary minds, essentially belongs to the priest consecration. Therefore, through the priest ordination the person will as much be penetrated by this world of the Divine, as the person in olden times was initiated through not merely sensing the penetration of his physicality with light, but that he feels permeated also with the soul-spiritual of the light.

[ 10 ] So, I can put it like this: through priest ordination human consciousness is brought into such a condition that a person can with total inner conviction say: the world around us is actually only a fragment of the world; it is there to hide many things from us, namely hiding spiritual processes, from us. We see spiritually in the processes when we are prepared in the appropriate way to do so. Priest ordination involves such preparation which would allow for spiritual perception, to see, everywhere, the sense perceptible as well as the spiritual processes. Let's take a concrete example.

We can look at the development of leaves on a plant, the development of the flowers, the ovary, the stamens and see the ovary mature. (He draws on the blackboard, left.) We then observe how the pollen flies around, how it fertilises the flowers. If you only observe outwardly then you will evaluate according to the sense perceptible outer processes which you then combine in your mind. Someone who has become mature in spiritual seeing, must see a supersensible weaving which expands as a kind of wavering transmission over plant growth and all that is involved in plant fertilization. Through this however, the earth in which the plants have their roots, is brought into a reciprocal relationship with the spiritual environment of the earth.

[ 11 ] A renewed way of looking must be introduced through priest ordination. Only then, when you have been introduced to this spiritual observing through the priest ordination, will you learn to recognise how the human word evolves in the world, how the human word is not a mere material movement of air but that the word carries spirit on physical air movement, how this spirit permeates certain substances which are fleeting, like for instance the smoke. So being a priest means: seeing how the expressed word grip the smoke, how the smoke weaves the matter, the words, and how through this, that it penetrates the words, how the words tinged with smoke envelops the matter in the words, changing the words themselves, just like in fact evolution continues, how a real, a spiritual reality is there in what happens in the outer world, in phenomena of the world. So being consecrated also means: to be able to perform actions which, besides their physical meaning, also have a spiritual meaning.

[ 12 ] This is of course something—I always must stress this—which lies extraordinarily far from modern consciousness, but unbelievably close to that consciousness which was available at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. During that time people stood in the middle, between the old and the new, they still knew about seeing the Divine-spiritual in everything natural, either through tradition or through atavistic vision, and they lived in fear of the conditions which would arrive when what is natural would no longer be regarded as natural and as a result the Divine-spiritual would be only be understood as a derived abstraction. At that time people still understood the weaving of the spiritual with the sense perceptible. The disciples of Christ Jesus simply knew that this being-in-his-presence meant something different than being in the presence of one another. They knew that he was the carrier of a supersensible being, they felt moved by this supersensible being, and this togetherness with him was for them without doubt the glow of supersensible consciousness.

[ 13 ] Let's think about this. We see a number of people around Christ Jesus in a world, who say: When one is in his presence, one is brought into a world where one can see the Divine-spiritual.—Now, in connection with this, I want to call your attention to important concepts necessary for the understanding of the earliest Christian times. Those individuals who could still call themselves the apostles of the Lord, who, for the affirmation of their mission, did not only refer to the fact that they had heard his words. Having heard his words didn't really carry as much weight as we would experience today when we listen to some or other speech, or a teaching. The teaching of Christ Jesus was something that was felt to be completely charitable in his environment, but it wasn't the first thing you would consider as the most important. It was far more important for them to stress the results: we have lain our hands in his wounds, we have participated in looking at his Being.—The direct togetherness with Christ Jesus is something in particular which I ask you to please consider seriously.

[ 14 ] You see, you will reach a conclusion of what actually is at a soul foundation when I say to you: you need to first sense the difference between what you experience when you place your one hand on an outer object, or on your own hand, or when you place it on some part of your body. You must come to the conclusion that you sense a difference, that there is a difference. You must also be able to feel something else; you must be able to feel you possess two eyes with two lines of vision which meet and cross. (He draws on the blackboard, right.) These two lines of sight which cross at what we are looking at—it is quite like when I hug myself with my two arms encircling myself. Just think about the difference between man and animal. An animal has, to a much reduced degree, the possibility to experience what we for instance experience when our one hand touches the other. Just look at the position of particular animal eyes; you can clearly distinguish how strong the egoism of an animal is, according to its eye positions. Animals which have eye positions with eye axes which can't cross are unable to develop egoism, because the experience, the sense of having an I, depends on a person being able to "grasp" his I, and that the right gaze of the eye can meet the left gaze by crossing. On this the sense of the I is dependant.

[ 15 ] The disciples knew themselves to be so connected to the Christ that in a certain sense it was as similar as feeling their own hands, when they touched his wounds. So this direct connection with the Christ was something which gave them the awareness that they lived with him in a higher world. This was actually what the disciples felt, it was as if a spiritual island surrounded them and their Lord, and when they felt that their Lord had gone away and they had now become the teachers, they called themselves teachers, training for this how-to-be-together-with-him.

Then again, the disciples of the Apostles in turn depended on the imagery which they had experienced; you can even read this in individual letters. When some or other apostolic disciple, Polycarp of Smyrna for instance, could describe what some or other person who had taught him, looked like, the description was unbelievably more important than the communication of mere words. What is most essential here, was recalling the feeling of being-together-with everything in connection with the Christ, so that one can say the Apostles sensed the succession, but they could no longer inwardly experience every transformation which had been experienced in the old initiation mysteries. Don't misunderstand me, I don't suggest that the apostles or apostle disciples have made such deliberations, but their soul constitution was so that they could make such deliberations and it was characteristic of their soul constitution to formulate such deliberations. When they were asked to formulate their soul constitution, they would have said: Yes, we couldn't go through with it in the same way as was still possible in the earlier Mysteries, for instance experiencing the transformation of light to darkness; we can no longer experience how one is anointed with oil and so on, and we can no longer experience the inner pain through recalling; but here a God has incarnated in the form of Jesus who was here, and with whom we have relations and when we really in our consciousness take it up, not merely with intellectual grasping but when in all concreteness we live in it, then something lifts us up into the supersensible world.

[ 16 ] With the apostles it was the direct living-in-community with the Christ, with the apostle disciples it was the community living-with-him, being carried over to them, who had laid their hands on those who had still been touched by the Lord, and transmitted to those in the third generation who had again laid their hands on someone who had had the Lord touch them. They would get a sense of apostolic succession when they would recall what I've just said, and they would also get a feeling for what it meant to stand inside a world which is spiritually, as it were, like standing in a physical line of ancestors. The physical line of ancestors flows through from birth. The spiritual ancestral line however, must go up to the spiritual father ancestor, the Christ Jesus, it flows through the ongoing, continuous fulfilment of consecrated ceremonies, which lead to the Christ, which certainly must always become more and more outward, because it must ever more make an intensive impression on people. As a result, besides the laying on of hands, other ceremonies were recorded in the next centuries, to make the outer impressions even stronger. A process of internalisation existed with those surrounding Christ Jesus: here Christ Jesus was performing a ritual himself. My dear friends, why was this necessary?

The life of Christ Jesus was the ritual for that which was around him, that which was accomplished in reality, that was the ritual/cult: the great offering of mass was fulfilled on Golgotha. Here we are led back to the first fulfilment of the ritual: at least this is what lives in Christian consciousness. This was followed by outward signs: it required the necessity for an outward imprint of activity, like remembrance, to show the eyes and to impress it on the soul in prayer, which could not be as alive as it had been with the apostles and the apostle disciples.

[ 17 ] I know that many people who hear such things with today's consciousness say: Why don't you simply express it in a short and sweet answer, shaped in sharply outlined terms, this or that is apostolic succession?—If someone wants such sharply outlined concepts, his argument is inwardly untruthful. One only speaks truth when it introduces the view of something that has been experienced. Such a thing can't be understood in sharply outlined concepts.

[ 18 ] Apostolic succession is something experienced first and then one knows that actually something is being experienced in a spiritual line of ancestors leading back to Christ, just like the ancestral line flowing through the blood links to the natural ancestral line, to any of the ancestors. This spiritual blood lies in the continuous fulfilment of the priestly ordination ceremony. It forms therefore the direct connection, for those who become priests, to the spiritual world. It is consecrated by someone who have themselves received such a consecration, and these, to those, and so on, up to the point where the supersensible descended into a human body and in this way for the first time brought a new, substantial fructification in the earth, which had become old.

[ 19 ] We will want to develop the particular format of the priest ordination, into a ritual form. I would like, still today, to point out that you could eventually find something which remains incomprehensible in the priest ordination. Now, by me saying something like this you will understand, also in connection with the regular previous lectures up to this morning, that in fact a complete break had to take place regarding the understanding of such things, when the changed consciousness appeared from the middle of the 15th century. In me expressing these things, I'm using words, which actually for the general consciousness could only have been fully understood before the middle of the 15th century. Then people actually stopped having a real sense for the meaning of these words. It is basically only through the trust you have been able to put in me, that you can hear something here in the manner and way it happened in former times when the soul constitution experienced things in quite a different way. Then came the time when less importance was attached to a concrete connection, when people who still knew how to attach importance to this concrete connection, became rare. Now, the most importance was attributed to the comprehensible content of the Gospels, to the comprehensible content of religion as such. Thus, gradually it took on particular importance to discuss the content of the Gospels, to discuss the content of the sacraments and to a certain extent particularly look into the teaching material, at the teaching content. The teaching content gradually became the most important. Not actually the concrete, but the abstract, became the most important, that is the essential thing. While for the catholic consciousness—I don't mean merely the roman catholic, but the catholic Christian consciousness—the priest ordination placed the chosen one in a spiritual ancestry up to Christ, which actually for the modern person made everything quite comprehensible, from definitions to declarations which places nothing into a reality. However, we must be very clear about it, that we live again in a time where we need deepening again in that direction.

[ 20 ] Well, the catholic consciousness has basically always acted quite consistently according to these prerequisites; quite consistently. In order not to be misunderstood regarding what follows, I would like to introduce it like this. When today we want to prepare someone—in fact, I mean for something which we see as a new ritual—when we, today, want to prepare someone to perform ceremonial actions, then we would for those who stand outside Catholicism in the world, no longer with full inner devotion be able to integrate a person into the apostolic succession. As I've mentioned to you, there have been remarkable Theosophists like Leadbeater and similar ones, who have likewise tried to place themselves in the apostolic succession, but that's going to resist any man who's honest with the world, if he is not imbued with Catholic consciousness.

[ 21 ] We need to look for something else. We need to fully understand that a reality is not something which is spoken about, something abstract. We must also learn to understand the sacramental. We must learn to understand, throughout, that the content of the teaching does not contain the essential but that something must be added from real processes and in such a way that these actual processes are carried on the waves of reality as the weaving of the Divine. There have only been single individuals, like Novalis, who understood this—do read his Aphorisms, then you'll see. He spoke about magical idealism; he knew this wasn't alive in outer sensory worlds, but within people, there lived the soul—spiritual. Then there was Schelling—in his old age, that's why he was hardly understood—for whom it was quite absurd to believe that the essence of Christianity consisted in the acceptance of what Christ taught; rather, Schelling recognised the essential much more according to the account of Jesus going through the process of the entire Golgotha drama, in the description of actions which took place around Golgotha. However, there are individuals who tend towards the reality, who in turn want to enter into actual experiences connected to the spiritual. In totality one could say that the way Catholicism experiences it, is something quite antiquated which can't be introduced into modern consciousness any longer. For this reason we mustn't only search for a renewal of old rituals but we must search for a ritual which we can create out of ourselves, but created in such a way that it creates the Divine in us in the sense we have spoken about, so that the words of Paul become the truth—in Gospel interpretation, and in all religious activities: Not I, but Christ in me.

[ 22 ] Catholicism, as Roman Catholicism, has actually always known how to act consistently. To a certain extent it has turned out, lifted out, from general humanity, all those who were descendants of Christ Jesus himself and so a sharp awareness has come about, separating the priestly spiritual generation, meaning those people connected to consecration, from all other people who had not attended consecration. Like a member of the nobility who for instance connects his bloodline back to the 18th ancestor and knows who carry this blood in their veins, their ancestral connection differs from that of the rest of humanity, in the same way there's a difference from those consecrated into the apostolic succession up to Christ himself, who have continuously and consistently received consecration, right down to those who had not received it. They felt themselves placed in this connection and felt others were different; that's why it was quite necessary during a certain time period that certain things were presented to people. A person gradually absorbed what had more or less consciously existed in his awareness and allowed this to be expressed in his actions. After this, because of the ever-increasing sharper awareness related to the Christ developed, came the necessity for greater withdrawal for the uninitiated: celibacy. The celibate already had his inner foundation and there where the celibate was dogmatised it was found throughout that the priest had to withdraw from connecting to all others, was a human personality who found it far more important to practice the priest consecration as a conscious inheritance of the father of his ancestors and because he was placed in this ancestral blood of a spiritual ancestry, he could not be in contact with that world from which he was taken out by the consecration ceremony. The moment a person strongly experienced this particular situation of priesthood in relation to the world, the necessity for celibacy was added, and of course there's no denying that one could also feel the political usefulness for Rome, and so on. However, you can be quite certain that during the time when celibacy was introduced—it was a time when the celibate person came from the monk priesthood—in the unconscious impulses was the urge for a certain honesty and truthfulness. It was certainly the case that the creation of celibacy was understood in the way I have presented it now. Just as in the 19th century, in a kind of natural way—as I said—the consequential process living in the Catholic consciousness resulted in the dogma of immaculate conception and how this resulted in the infallibility dogma, so at a certain time causes led to the consequences of celibacy.

[ 23 ] Well, if you take all of this in then we already come to what is of particular importance today. Of particular importance today for us is to again return to the ritual, to ceremonies. You are experiencing, at least many of you have said you experience it like this: you are actually experiencing necessities based on what has come out of, and is given by, this time. Of course we can't undo events, we can't go back to untruths for instance, we can't reverse an untruth, such as taking something which no longer feels alive were to be changed externally, like being ordained by an olden-time Catholic priest. That would be contradictory to those who have already ignited the Protestant consciousness too strongly in themselves because for the Protestant consciousness this possibility doesn't exist; in their experience one can't oppose something which has been created out of quite other circumstances.

[ 24 ] What you need to arrive at, if reality is at all part of your striving, is what can flow out of the spiritual world itself, which can be seen as flowing directly from Christ Jesus. We must strengthen ourselves in the words of Jesus: I am with you until the end of earthly days.—

These words out of the Gospels also announce such a process of the Christ impulse will be found on the earth for so long, that it will last until the end of the earth comes about. For this reason, one must firstly announce this as a postulate to a certain extent, that it must be possible—as a reality—to come to Christ, like with the Catholic consciousness, through the apostolic succession historically the spiritual family tree is searched for, reaching right to Christ. It must be able to find Him again, in a moment in the present; a connection to the Divine, a connection to the Christianized Divine as it was historically found by the Catholics in the apostolic succession right up to the Christian ancestors of this apostolic succession. That is why it must take place this way, that we find the spiritual again, not only in words about the Christian aspect, but so that we actually connect with what is real in the Christian aspect. Then we can create the ritual out of this, like the ritual was created within the apostolic succession. However, we need to penetrate it with an understanding which goes far beyond the understanding of the time.

[ 25 ] We must indeed move towards an understanding that can be expressed—I want to first formulate it as follows: In the world and in ordinary human thinking we experience the phenomenal: we however want to experience the nominal, we want to try and enter into the essential and out of this essence find the ritual. If you really want to find the ritual, then it must finally be so that this ritual is discovered as it had been during the second century, where gradually, what used to exist in simpler forms—only a few of which have been recorded—has now been transferred to the forms of later rituals. [ 26 ] How was the ritual experienced? A person was caught up in it, just like a person who smokes knows what he is doing by smoking; he knows he can express what he wants to, only by smoking. So you must again learn to feel that you, when you perform some or other ceremony, know for yourself: the ceremony must be performed in this way. A person knows what he has to say today when he turns to other people, he knows how to clothe his inner life with words. My dear friends, there is a moment in life, where one inwardly experiences that it is impossible to continue using words, where what you want to say no longer translates into words, where you have to stop with words or at most continue with words by carrying out the sacred act by starting to not merely letting the word sound out but where, for instance, the development of smoke must take place, where in particular one of the other actions must be carried out imaginatively. Where the words connect with a particular action, by coming into the original consciousness, where also, like your soul content, being enlivened by the Divine, pours into the words, now your soul content will no longer be merely a phenomenal one but a nominal one, then you will be lifted out of what the outer world comprises, there you will gradually enter into the sacramental.

[ 27 ] Somewhat in this way, I've tried to clarify how one must enter into the sacramental. It actually makes no sense, let's say, in simply transforming holy water as is often done today by subordinate clerics. There is simply no point in performing the transubstantiation in this way, as is done by many subordinate clerics today, who are left in the dark in relation to the esoteric consecration of the Catholic Church. Regarding the old soul constitutions, it had made sense to be fully aware of one's actions when a certain word was spoken over the salt substance, and that they knew the salt substance had changed as a result.

Today experiments have already been done to make the gentle sensitivity of a flame visible, by placing a flame somewhere and a person speaking rhythmically at a distance from it, to see the flame copy the rhythm. Here a rhythm is being copied by something inorganic. If I know the right words in the right word correlation over the salt substance, then the salt substance will change. If I now allow this salt substance which has been permeated, to enter into water, then I have kindled a process, which, if I understand it, when I have performed it in spirit, is a sacramental act. We must be able, once again, to look at the nominal as such. This we will address tomorrow. [ 28 ] I think, in any case, my dear friends, that many questions could be conjured out of the soul by me speaking about these things, and I would love it if the questions, while you are all here, not in general, could also be formulated concretely so that no doubt remains. I completely understand that with earnestness your small circle has turned to me with the clear intention to really work toward a renewal of the religious life. It is not possible to do so by merely changing the teaching content; it is only possible when you enter with a changed soul constitution. We are now entering more deeply into things and, triggered through your questions we will become ever more acquainted with these things so that you're actually going to understand what I mean to convey.

A view of the world, as it is intended to be in spiritual science, must prove itself by giving people support for what they need in life. The support for life must be what we can call moral strength. But the support for life must also include, among other things, what we can call the inner soul-condition that can arise in a person from feeling that he is a member of the great cosmic whole, from feeling so incorporated into the cosmic whole that it corresponds to what one can call one's religious need. As for man's inner moral strength, Schopenhauer spoke an excellent word, even if the further remarks he made on these words in his own way seem quite disputable. He said: It is easy to preach morals, but to found morals is difficult. This is indeed a true saying of life. For in general, to recognize what is good, what the moral life demands of us, is relatively easy as a matter of intellect. But to draw from the primal forces of the soul those impulses that are necessary in man to place himself in the fabric of life as a morally powerful being, that is difficult. But that is what it means to found morality. To found morality is not merely to say what is good, what is moral. To found morality is to bring to man such impulses, which, by absorbing them into his soul life, become a real strength, a real efficiency in him.

Now, at the present stage of civilization, man's moral consciousness is embedded in the world in a very unique way, in a way that is not always fully consciously observed, but which is the reason for many uncertainties and insecurities that prevail in people's lives. On the one hand, we have our intellectually oriented knowledge, our insight, which makes it possible for us to penetrate into natural phenomena, which makes it possible for us to absorb the whole world into our imagination to a certain extent, which makes it possible for us, in an admittedly very limited way, as we have seen in the last two reflections here, to also make ideas about the nature of man.

Alongside what flashes up in us as our cognitive faculty, as everything that is, I would say, directed by our human logic, alongside all this, another element of our being asserts itself, the one from which our moral duty, our moral love, in short, the impulses for moral action, arise. And it must be said that modern man lives, on the one hand, in his cognitive abilities and their results, and on the other hand, in his moral impulses. Both are soul contents. But for this modern man, there is basically little mediation between the two, so little mediation that, for example, Kant could say: There are two things that are most precious to him in the world: the starry heavens above him, the moral law within him. But precisely this Kantian way of thinking, which lies dormant in the modern human being, knows of no bridge between what leads to knowledge of the world on the one hand and what moral impulses are on the other. Kant regards the life of knowledge in his Critique of Pure Reason and the moral life in his Critique of Practical Reason as if by chance.

And if we are completely honest with our sense of the times, we must actually say that there is an abyss here between two ways of experiencing human nature. Today's science, in forming ideas about the course of world evolution in the most diverse fields of knowledge, regards the workings of nature from the simplest living creatures, indeed from inorganic nature, right up to the human being. It forms ideas about how this world, which is directly before us, came into being. It also forms ideas about the processes by which the former end of this world, which is immediately before us, could take place. But now, from within man, who is nevertheless interwoven with this natural order, there wells up what he calls his moral ideals. And man perceives these moral ideals in such a way that he can only feel himself valuable if he follows these ideals, if there is agreement between him and these ideals. Man makes his value dependent on these moral ideals. But if we imagine that the forces of nature, which become accessible to man through his knowledge, are once upon a time approaching their end, where does today's sense of time leave what man creates out of his moral ideals, out of his moral impulses? Anyone who is honest, who does not shroud today's consciousness in nebulousness, must admit that, in the face of present-day scientific knowledge, these moral ideals are something by which man must guide himself in life, but by which nothing is created that could once triumph when the earth, together with man, comes to an end.

It is, for today's consciousness, one must only admit it, no bridge between the cognitive abilities that lead to natural knowledge and the abilities that govern us by being moral beings. Man is not aware of everything that goes on in the depths of his soul. Much remains unconscious. But what rumbles unconsciously down there asserts itself in life through disharmony, through mental or even physical illness. And anyone who just wants to see what is going on today without prejudice will have to say: our life is surging, and there are people in this life with all kinds of mental and physical contradictions. And that which surges up wells up from a depth in which something is indeed active that is like those weak human powers that cannot build a bridge between the moral life and the knowledge of nature. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science addresses these questions in the following way. It must abandon everything that is, on the one hand, only a theoretical view of external reality. It must therefore recognize everything that, as I explained in the last two lectures here, would like to exclude the human being from this view of nature, so that a true objectivity can arise.

What I characterized as the path to the spiritual world is presented, to summarize what I said earlier, in the following way: First of all, anyone who wants to enter the spiritual world must devote themselves to a certain inner soul-spiritual work. In my books, I have summarized this inner practice, this inner spiritual-soul work, as meditation and concentration work. This work enables people to relate to their imaginative life differently than they do in ordinary life when we observe natural phenomena or even social life. It is a complete being-with-the-ideas, which otherwise only accompany our outer impressions like shadows. Just as I said, we usually face people or nature or anything else in physical life with our feelings, with our sympathies and antipathies, and we face facts with our will emotions. How these ideas arise, that disturbs us, that challenges our sympathy and antipathy, that stimulates our entire life force. This becomes our destiny. While we are outwardly quite calm, inwardly we are going through something that is by no means weaker than what we otherwise go through as life's destiny in the outer world. We are, so to speak, doubling our lives. While we usually get excited, develop sympathy and antipathy, and assert volitional impulses only in the outer life, in relation to outer events, we carry what otherwise only occupies us in this outer material world into our inner life of thought. If we can do this — and everyone can do it if they practise as I have described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in my 'Occult Science' —, if we can really carry this out, then there comes a moment for us when in which he not only has images of the world when he opens his senses, when he hears or sees, but where he has images purely from the life of imagination, so full of content images, if I may use the expression, so full of sap, as they otherwise only come to us through sensory perception. They come through this thus intensified and sharpened life of imagination. Without sensory perception, we live in a world of images, as they otherwise only come to us through sensory perception.

But another significant experience is linked to this – these things can only be understood as experiences; abstract logic, so-called reasoning does not lead to them. Another experience is connected to this: We learn through such practice what it means to develop a spiritual-soul activity independently of the physical activity. The moment comes for the human being when he can rightly admit to himself, if I may put it this way, that he is a materialist, however strange and paradoxical that may sound. At this moment he can say: yes, in ordinary life we are completely dependent on the tools of our body. We think through the instrument of our nervous system. But that is precisely what characterizes this outer life, that we traverse it only by developing the soul and spiritual when it avails itself of the bodily instruments. But the soul and spiritual is not dependent on merely availing itself of the bodily instruments. Through the efforts described, it can free itself from the physical tool, can become free of the body. No matter how much speculation and philosophizing one does with materialism, if one only brings against it what can be known from ordinary life, one will never refute it, because for ordinary life, materialism is right. Materialism can only be refuted through spiritual practice, by detaching the soul-spiritual from the bodily in direct experience. One visualizes – I called it imaginative visualization in the books mentioned – one visualizes, but outside of the body, whereby the “outside” is of course not to be imagined spatially, but independently of the body. This is one side of what one must get to know within anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in order to really build the bridge that cannot be built in the way we have described. What one attains in this way as the content of imaginative knowledge is not in the human body, but outside of it. This provides the practical explanation that our innermost being was in the spiritual-soul world before it clothed itself with this body. For one is not only outside of the body, one is outside of time, in which one lives with the body. In this way, one really experiences the prenatal, or let us say, the pre-physical conception in man. Just as a light from outside shines into the room, so our prenatal life shines into our present life in this imagination.

What shines in is not just thoughts, it has a living content. This living content reveals itself as something very special. It reveals itself as a certain, I might say, intellectual content. So, as we cultivate, sharpen and strengthen our imaginative life in the way I have described, we come out of ourselves into a will content that has something living about it at the same time. It is the will content that creates in us what clothes itself in the physical body, what we do not have through heredity, what we do not have at all from the physical world.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not arrive at the realization of immortality through speculative processing of ordinary life, but rather through the cultivation of a cognitive faculty that is initially not present in ordinary life. What is particularly important for us today, however, is that in this way we reach beyond our physical body, even beyond the time in which our physical body lives. There one arrives at ideas that are still difficult for most people today to imagine, but which must become an important link in the evolution of humanity towards the future.

And now something very strange comes to light when one not only exercises on one side, that of the life of imagination, but also when one exercises on the side of the life of will. We human beings live, I would say, as Faust goes through life, saying, “I have only run through the world.” We run through the world. Of course, we undergo a development between birth and death, from month to month, from year to year, from decade to decade; but we undergo this development by, as it were, abandoning ourselves to external objectivity. Hand on heart, how many people do it differently than letting themselves be carried by life, be it by childhood, where adults educate them, or by later life and its fate? They become more perfect because the world makes them more perfect. But what do most people do differently, other than just abandon themselves to the stream of life? However, by abandoning oneself to the stream of life, one does not come to the spiritual path meant here. It is necessary that one takes self-discipline into one's own hands, that one actually works on oneself in such a way that one not only develops through the life that fate brings one, but that one develops further by making up one's mind: you want to implant this or that attitude. Now one works on implanting this attitude. One can undertake something on a small scale, one can do something on a large scale. But there is a big difference between just carrying out something in yourself, in the training of your own nature, by abandoning yourself to life, or taking this training of your own self into your own hands. By taking it into your own hands, you get to know the will in its effectiveness; because you learn to recognize what kind of resistance stands in the way of this will when you want to cultivate it in self-discipline. Oh, one gets to know all kinds of things in this way, one strengthens above all one's own powers of the spiritual-soul, and one will very soon notice when one exercises such exercises in self-discipline – but one must practice them for years – that one then acquires inner powers. These inner powers are of such a nature that we do not find them in outer nature. They are of such a nature that we do not find them in the ordinary life of the soul that we have carried within us before our exercises. We discover these forces only when we engage in such an inner exercise with ourselves. These forces are capable of something very definite: they are capable of absorbing into our own self, in a much more conscious way, the moral impulses that otherwise arise in the soul as if they were instinctive, as if they were indefinite and separate from the cognitive faculties. But understand me correctly, not into the self that we develop in our body, but into the self that we develop when we step out of our body with our imagination in the way described earlier. We cannot get the true form of the moral impulses into our sensual body, into our sensual perception; but we get what stands there so isolated that Kant presented it quite isolated as the categorical imperative, we get that into our self that has separated from the body.

And then what I have described earlier as imagination, as pictorial representations, becomes imbued with what one can call the objective power of moral impulses; it becomes imbued with moral inspiration. We now recognize that what wells up in us as moral imperatives, as moral ideals, is not rooted only in us, but in the whole of the world. We learn, by being outside of our physical being, to recognize that which does not appear in its true form within the physical organization, but in this true form, we recognize it through imaginative beholding, as objective forces of the world.

Such a vision can open up to a person who, with his or her healthy common sense, properly takes in what the spiritual researcher is able to say from his vision of the spiritual world. Anyone who imbues themselves with such a vision feels something very special about what today's popular public lectures are. It may sound strange when I say it, but I would like to say: anyone who unreservedly absorbs this inspiration in their imagination, which coincides with the moral forces that are present in human life, and imagines how can see through something like this in the present through spiritual knowledge, would like to think: if only such knowledge could take hold of people, at least as strongly as they are seized when they hear that X-rays or wireless telegraphy have been found! In view of what is taking place in the soul of a spiritual scientist, one would like to say: it is very necessary for present-day civilization that people should come to appreciate the spiritual forces for human strengthening that can be found in this way, just as much as what can be useful and beneficial in the outer life.

I believe that we have touched on an important challenge of civilization in the present day. The spiritual-scientific insights are, I repeat, not speculation, they are experiences. And the fact that so few people today accept them is because most people allow themselves to be blinded by materialistic scientific views, let their own prejudices stand in their way, do not apply their common sense, and therefore cannot properly

examine what the spiritual scientist says. They always say: we cannot see for ourselves what the spiritual researcher says. I would like to know how many people who believe in the Venus transits have ever seen a Venus transit! I would like to know how many people who say that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen have ever observed in a laboratory how to determine that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen and so on. There is a logic of common sense. Through it one can check what the spiritual researcher says. I certainly cannot paint illusions before those who use their common sense, nor can I talk fantasies to them, because they can use their common sense to see whether I speak like a dreamer or whether I speak in logical contexts, whether I speak like someone who puts forward one idea after another, as one does even in the most exact science. Anyone who acquires such a healthy knowledge and understanding of human nature will be able to distinguish whether he has a fantasist in front of him or a person who, by knowing how to clothe his view in healthy logical forms and not giving the impression of a dreamer in other ways, is to be taken seriously. We have to decide many things in life in this way; why should we not decide in this way the most important thing: insight into the order of the world? There is no other way for someone who cannot become a spiritual researcher themselves – but everyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent, as I have explained in the books mentioned – to determine this; because spiritual science is something that is experienced, something that must be experienced, not something that is only achieved through logical conclusions.

So if you study worldviews, I would say the combination of imagination and inspired morality, you get to know something else, you learn to recognize what the contradiction is between so-called natural causality, natural necessity, and the element in which man lives as in his freedom. For it is only in the element of freedom that we can live with our moral impulses. We look out into the outer nature. Overwhelming for the view of nature that has developed over the last three to four centuries is what is called the necessary connection of the following with the preceding, what is called general causality. Thus, nature, including the human condition, presents itself as if everything were seized by a natural necessity. But then our freedom would be in a sorry state; then we could not act differently than the natural necessity in us compels us to act. Freedom would be an impossibility if the world were as the scientific view that has become popular in the last three to four centuries wants it to be.

But once we have gained the point of view that I have just described, the point of view of observation outside the human body, then everything that is permeated by necessity is, so to speak, presented as a kind of natural body. And this natural body produces a natural soul and a natural spirit in all possible places. The natural body is, as it were, that which has cast and thrown off the nascent world; the natural spirit, the natural soul, is that which grows into the future.

Just as, when I see a corpse before me, this corpse no longer has the possibility of following anything other than the necessities that have been determined by the soul and spirit that dwelled in it, so too that which is corpse-like in external nature has nothing in it of impulses as necessities. But in every place, what grows into the future springs forth. Our natural science has only been accustomed to observing the natural corpse, and therefore sees only necessity everywhere. Spiritual science must be added to this. It will see the life that is sprouting and has sprouted everywhere.

Thus man is placed, on the one hand, in the realm of natural causality and, on the other, in that which is also there but contains no causality. This contains something that is the same as the element of freedom we experience inwardly. We experience this element of freedom as I have described it in my Philosophy of Freedom when we rise to inwardly transparent, pure thinking, which is actually an outflow of our will activity. You can find more details in my Philosophy of Freedom.

Thus, what we gain by creating a possibility of knowledge for ourselves outside the human body carries us into a world where the contrast between natural necessity and freedom becomes explicable. We get to know freedom itself in the world. We learn to feel ourselves in a world in which freedom resides.

When I describe something like this to you, I do not do it just to show you the content of what I am describing, but I want to present it to you show you how man can enter into a certain frame of mind by absorbing knowledge drawn from such regions, by invigorating himself with such knowledge.

Just as we are imbued with joy when we experience an extraordinarily joyful event, as some people, when they have drunk so and so much Moselle wine, are completely imbued with the mood that comes from the Moselle wine, so too can a person's entire state of mind be seized by something so truly spiritual that it permeates the person. When has a person's state of mind been gripped by something, at first only in the outer life, but then in a shadowy way? When the categorical imperative or conscience moves in the face of moral obligations. But the content of this conscience now becomes clear and it will also take on a different emotional nuance. For what has actually happened – whether a person is a spiritual researcher himself, or whether he absorbs what the spiritual researcher brings through his common sense and incorporates it into his soul as insights – what has happened to the person? He has merged with something, has united with something, with which one only comes together when one goes out of oneself, when one alienates oneself from oneself. You will find no better, more realistic definition of love and the feeling of love than that which can be described as the state of mind that overcomes one when one penetrates, free of the body, into the entity of the outer world. If moral imperatives otherwise appear as a constraint, they can be cast in such a form that they appear imbued with the same mood that must permeate spiritual scientific knowledge. These moral impulses, these moral imperatives, can learn from the soul-attitude that comes to us through the assimilation of spiritual science; they can be warmed through by what must live in spiritual science in the highest sense: by love.

I tried to show this again in my Philosophy of Freedom, that love is the most dignified impulse for moral action in man. Within the modern development of the spirit, these things have already been spoken of more instinctively than can be the case today, when we can, if we want, have progressed in spiritual science. Kant once spoke of the compelling duty, of the, I would say, humanly restraining categorical imperative, which allows no interference of any sympathy. What one does out of moral duty, one does because one must. Kant therefore says: Duty, you exalted, great name, you carry nothing with you that means ingratiation or the like, but only the strictest submission. Schiller did not consider this slavish submission to duty to be humane. And he countered this Kantian argument with what he expressed so beautifully and so magnificently in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”.

But we need only take a small epigram that Schiller coined in opposition to this rigorist, rigid concept of duty as propounded by Kant, and we have an important humanistic contrast with regard to the moral life: “I gladly serve my friends,” says Schiller, “but unfortunately I do it reluctantly. And so it often rankles me that I am not virtuous.” He believes that in the Kantian sense, one should not gladly serve one's friends, but rather submit to one's duty in obedience. But that which can make human life truly human is when we fulfill what Goethe says in a few monumental words: Duty, where we love what we command ourselves. But the mood to love what one commands oneself can only be kindled from that state of the human soul that comes about in the acquisition of spiritual science.

So when one delves into spiritual science, it is not something that runs alongside life, like preaching morals, but there is a development of strength within it that directly takes hold of the moral will. It is a grounding of morality. It is there that which pours into the human being the moral love. Spiritual science does not merely preach morals; spiritual science, when taken in its full seriousness, in its full power, grounds morality, but by not giving words of morality, but giving strength for virtuous love, for loving virtue.

Spiritual science is not just theory, it is life. And when one acquires spiritual science, it is not just a matter of reflection, it is something like absorbing life, like breathing. This is what spiritual science can offer modern civilization in the moral sphere, what it must offer. For in ancient times, as I indicated the day before yesterday, people also had a spiritual science, but it was instinctive. Where did the spiritual science of the ancient, millennia-old developing Oriental wisdom come from? It was a dull, dream-like visualization of the world. It came from human instincts, from human drives. This spiritual science was instinctive. People saw into nature through a kind of clairvoyance. And this clairvoyance was connected with their blood, was connected with their outer physicality. But the moral impulses of that time were also connected with this blood, with this outer physicality. Both came from one source. Humanity is undergoing a development and believes that we can be like people thousands of years ago; this is the same as believing that an adult man can be like a child. We can no longer stand on the standpoint of the primitive clairvoyant arts of the ancient Orient or ancient Egypt. We have advanced to Galileism, to Copernicanism. We have advanced to the point of observation that arises in the intellect. In those ancient oriental ways of looking at things, the intellect had not yet developed. But for that, we must also get the impulses for our moral action from the spirit, not from instinct. That is the worst thing today, that people, when they talk about ideals or impulses for life, always make everything absolute. When some party member or enthusiastic theorist appears on the scene today, dreaming of a thousand-year Reich, they say: I want this or that for humanity and they think to themselves that what they are saying is good for humanity in all times to come and for the whole earth. That it is good in the most absolute sense. Anyone who really looks into the life of developing humanity knows that what is good, what is valid for the world view, is always only appropriate for a certain age, that one must know the nature of this age. I have often said in earlier lectures here: spiritual science, anthroposophically oriented, as I express it here, does not imagine that it is something absolute. But it does believe that it speaks from the heart of the present and the near future, that it says for human souls what these human souls need in the present and in the near future. But she knows full well that this spiritual science: if in five hundred years someone will again speak of the great riddles of the world and of the affairs of humanity, he will speak in different tones, in a different way, because there is nothing absolute in this sense, nothing that lasts forever.

We are effective in life precisely because we are able to grasp it in its liveliness, in its metamorphosis, even where we stand in it. It is easier to set up absolute ideals in abstractions than to first get to know one's age and then, from the essence of this age, to speak what is appropriate for it. Then, when, through the assimilation of spiritual-scientific impulses, man, as has been said, permeates himself with what comes to him from the spirit, then he will know that he is spirit as man, is soul, then he will know that he lives through the world as spirit and soul. And then he will address every other human being as spirit and soul. One would be inclined to say that something tremendous will come about when this becomes spiritual science in human life, when it becomes an attitude that permeates human life to such an extent that one consciously encounters another human being as a riddle to be solved, because with each person one looks into infinity, into spiritual depths and abysses.

What emerges from this real observation of our fellow human beings as spirit and soul will give rise to social and moral forces that must form the basis for a real treatment of the burning social question of our time. I cannot imagine that those who see through the whole essence of the social question and at the same time let today's human condition take effect on them do not suffer certain mental anguish. We live in a time when the social question needs to be resolved in a certain way. We also live in a time when the promoters of the social order are inspired by the most anti-social instincts, when the demand for social organization of life seems to be in opposition to what lives in human souls as anti-social instincts. No matter how beautiful the programs may be that are drawn up, no matter how beautiful the ideas that are entertained as to what should be done to solve the social problem, a way to solve it can only be found when the spirit is seen, felt and sensed among people, when people treat each other with respect, protection, honor and love, and not just the physical part of their fellow human beings.

That is why I have called in my book “The Essentials of the Social Question” for the separation of spiritual life from the rest of social life, so that this spiritual life can be placed only on its own foundations, independent of the state and independent of economic impulses, purely of human nature. Only such a free spiritual life will truly spread social instincts, social views and attitudes among people. Social morality also depends on people taking in their spiritual state what can become them in the pursuit of what can be said from the research of spiritual science.

And that in which man must rest as a whole, worthy and dignified, so that he does not feel as a mere lonely wanderer, but as a member of the world, the religious element, can, in the sense that modern man needs it, only be kindled and fanned by that which is attained as an inner mood in the pursuit of spiritual science.

The events of the world order or of human development that religious feelings point to stand there as fact. The Mystery of Golgotha, for example, stands there as fact. What took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era, when the Christ came into the flesh in Jesus, is a fact. One must distinguish this fact, this objective fact, from the way in which man approaches the understanding and contemplation of such a fact. In the times when Christianity first spread, it was able to flow within the human attitudes that still came from the ancient Orient. What happened in Palestine as the event of Golgotha was understood with the ideas that in a certain way came from ancient times, from primitive human attitudes. For centuries, those who were able to do so were honest and sincere in their understanding of the event of Golgotha through such ideas. But then came the time when Galilean science arose, when Giordano Bruno overcame space in such a remarkable way for the human conception by showing that what is up there the blue firmament is only that which lives in ourselves, the boundaries that we ourselves set, while in a far-flung sea of space the stars are in infinity. All that Copernicus brought, all that has been brought to the newer world-picture of externals by the spirits who have lived up to the present day, has come. In this time men have inwardly become accustomed to a different way of looking at the world than that through which Christianity was first comprehended. In this time a new relation must also be won to the religious foundations of the evolution of mankind. The point is not to shake the facts on which the religious development of humanity is based. But the point is to appeal to modern human conscience in such a way that the man of today, out of his state of soul, can understand the Christ event as he must.

Those who say that a new path must also be sought to the old facts on religious ground mean it most honestly and reverently with regard to religion. Spiritual science, oriented towards anthroposophy, will be the best preparation for understanding Christianity or other religious content in a modern way. Those who do not honestly mean it with religious life do not admit this, because they want to preserve ways to the foundations of religious life to which man today, when he otherwise pays homage to the views of his time, cannot pay homage.

We have come to materialism in modern times. Certainly, different types of people have become the instigators of materialism; but among these people there are also those who have retained certain old habits of life in the development of humanity, habits of life that have led to a monopoly being given to the denominations for everything that can be said about the spirit and soul. Because the confessions alone had the right to decide what should be believed about the spirit and soul, natural science was left without a spirit to guide its research. Today, natural science believes that it has taken on this form because it had to, when researching nature, one must exclude the spirit. Oh no, natural science has become so because in earlier times it was forbidden to research nature with spirit, because the church had to decide about spirit and soul. And today, people continue the habits and even trumpet them as unprejudiced scientific judgment.

One only has to look at such researchers, who in the sense of materialistic research must be highly praised, as for example at the Jesuit priest and ant researcher Wasmann, the excellent materialistic researcher in the field of natural science, a researcher who, however, does not allow a grain of spirit to flow into what dogma is. Spirit and soul must be excluded. Therefore: external science is materialistic. The founders of the religions of the book are not in the least the originators of modern materialism. However paradoxical it may sound today, it is true: because the church did not allow the spirit to be brought into the contemplation of nature, natural science has become spiritless. The others have only adopted this as a habit. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must bring the spirit back into the study of nature. Let me say once more: this spiritual science is not based on the idea that spirit only makes occasional or brief visits, as in materialism, so that man can convince himself that there is a spirit. No, this spiritual science wants to show that in the small and large, in all material things, there is always and everywhere spirit, that one can always and everywhere follow the spirit. But because spiritual science oriented to anthroposophy always and everywhere investigates spirit in the most material form, it shows that there is no such thing as a material substance that is independent of spirit, just as there is no ice that is independent of water. Ice is transformed water, water that has cooled down; matter is spirit that has solidified. One must only explain it in the right way in each individual case. By showing, as everywhere, where there is matter, where there is outer life, there is spirit, and by leading man to connect with the ruling spirit, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science also provides the impetus for a real religious deepening today.

But one experiences many things in this field. You see, an experience of a man who is even well-intentioned is the following. Someone says: I cannot examine spiritual science as Steiner presents it; it may contain truths, but it should be kept very far from all religious life, because religious life must represent a direct relationship, a direct unity of man with God, far from all knowledge. And now the person in question says, very strangely: in our time we have too much of religious interest, of religious experience; people just always want to experience something religious. They want to have religious interest. You don't need any of that in religion. In religion, you only need direct unity with God. Away, says the churchman in question, with all religious interest, with all religious experience.

Now, an unprejudiced person must say today that even if people still long for an unclear religious experience, even if they still awaken an unclear religious interest in themselves, that is precisely the beginning of the yearning to really find a way into the religious element, as I have described it to you now. Whoever is honest and sincere about religious life should take hold of that urge for religious interest and religious experience. Instead, the clergyman condemns religious experience and religious interest. The question today is whether real religious understanding is to be found in those who speak as they do or in those who try to speak as I have spoken to you today. However, you also have to recognize people by their fruits.

In a recent lecture, a man who is also a churchman, but also a university professor, tried to refute anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Two young friends of mine were in this lecture, and they were able to speak afterwards in the discussion. Because of the context, these two young people, who had absorbed the impulses of spiritual science well, brought forward words from the Bible to prove how what is written in the Bible, if properly understood, agrees with what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to say in this area. And at one point the chairman, who was a real churchman, didn't know what else to do but say, “Here Christ errs!” It could be retorted, “So you believe in a God who errs!” A fine religious sentiment. It produces strange blossoms today. Religious sentiment is only genuine when it enters into real moral life. There one certainly has strange experiences. I now find it pretty much the most disgusting thing that can be said about what appears as a social consequence in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, from beginning to end, and that it has been lied about by a whole series of German newspapers. But people today find it compatible with morality to say that the following can happen as a moral consequence of religious practice. Recently, a canon, that is, a churchman of the Catholic kind, gave a lecture in a city about the spiritual science presented here, and at the end he said: find out from the opposing writings what kind of worldview the man represents, because you are not allowed to read his own writings and those of his followers. The Pope has forbidden Catholics to read them.

The recommendation to get to know something from the evil-intentioned, from the most malevolent opposing writings, is the moral consequence of some religious practices of the present day. No wonder that what we have experienced in the last five years has poured out over the world from such underground life. Or was it not a surfacing of lies and hatred of humanity and much more that was rooted and still is rooted in the depths of human souls? Should not the fact that one has experienced give cause to seriously consider whether a thorough re-education is not necessary? Has not something like world-historical immorality come to the surface of world history in the present? Or is it religious sentiment that has been acted out in the world in the last five years? Those attitudes that have not had centuries, but millennia, to work on improving humanity, are now seeing their fruits! Nineteenth-century theology no longer recognizes anything of the spirituality of the event of Golgotha. This spirituality, this divine Christ in the man Jesus, will be rediscovered through the path of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. From there, he will again enter into human souls, to prompt them not merely to preach morality, but to establish within themselves the right instinctive motivation for moral action and work in the world. Is there not an obvious need for renewal and reconstruction? Does this necessity not emerge when one looks at the events of the last five to six years? Do we not see the fruits of that which has been living under the surface for centuries and has now come to the surface? Should this not be proof that thorough religious and moral work is necessary?

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to collaborate on this work, the necessity of which any unbiased person must admit today if they are not asleep in their soul within the great events of the time. And anyone who wants to criticize it, who wants to condemn it, should first raise the fundamental question: does it honestly want to collaborate on the real progress of humanity? And only when he has conscientiously informed himself about it so that he can form an opinion about it, will it become clear to what extent this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has the right to participate. Because it wants to honestly and sincerely participate in the necessary progress, in the necessary rethinking and relearning of humanity.

In the lectures given during this week there lies much which can lead us to understand the nature of man in its connection with the historical evolution of humanity in such a way as to enable us to gradually form a conception of necessity and free will. Such questions can be less easily decided by means of definitions and combinations of words than by bringing together the relevant truths from the spiritual world. In our age humanity must accustom itself more and more to acquire a different form of understanding for reality from the one so prevalent today, which, after all, holds to very secondary and nebulous concepts bound up with the definitions of words. If we consider what certain persons who think themselves especially clever write and say, we have the feeling that they speak in concepts and ideas which are only apparently clear; in reality however, they are as lacking in clarity as if someone were to speak of a certain object which is made, for example, out of a gourd, so that the gourd is transformed into a flask and used as such. We can then speak about this object as if we were speaking of a gourd, for it is a gourd in reality; but we can also speak of it as if it were a flask, for it is used as a flask. Indeed, the things of which we speak are first determined by the connections we are dealing with; as soon as we no longer rely upon words when we are speaking, but upon a certain perception, then everyone will know whether we mean a flask or a gourd. But then we may not confine ourselves to a description or a definition of the object. For as long as we confine ourselves to a description or definition of this object it can just as well be a gourd as a flask. In a similar way, that which is spoken of today by many philologists—persons who consider themselves very clever—may be the human soul, but it may also be the human body—it may be gourd or it may be flask. I include in this remark a great deal of what is taken seriously at the present time (partly to the detriment of humanity). For this reason it is necessary that a striving should proceed from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for which clear, precise thinking is above all a necessity, a striving to perceive the world not in the way in which it is customary today (not by confusing the gourd and the flask) but to see everywhere what is real, be it outer physical reality, or spiritual reality.

We cannot in any case arrive at a real concept of what comes into consideration for the human being when we hold only to definitions and the like; we can do so only when we bear in mind the relationships of life in their reality. And just where such important concepts as freedom (free will) and necessity in social and moral life are concerned, we attain clarity only when we place side by side such spiritual facts as those brought out in these lectures, and always strive to balance one against the other in order to reach a judgment as to reality.

Bear in mind that over and over again—even in public lectures and also here—I have brought out with a certain intensity, from the most varied points of view, the fact that we can only rightly grasp what we call concepts when we bring them into relation with our bodily organism, in such a way that the basis of concepts in the body is not seen in something growing and flourishing, but just the opposite—something dying, something in partial decay in the body. I have expressed this in public lectures by saying that the human being really dies continually in his nervous system. The nerve-process is such that it must limit itself to the nervous system. For if it were to spread itself over the rest of the organism, if in the rest of the organism the same thing were to go on that goes on in the nerves, this would signify the death of man at every moment. We may say that concepts arise where the organism destroys itself. We die continuously in our nervous system. For this reason spiritual science is placed under the necessity of pursuing other processes besides the ascending processes which natural science of today considers authentic. These ascending processes are the processes of growth; they reach their summit within the unconscious. Only when the organism begins to develop the processes of decline does the activity of the soul appear which we designate as conceptual or indeed as perceptive activity of the senses. This process of destruction, this slow process of death, must exist if anything at all is to be conceived. I have shown that the free actions of human beings rest upon just this fact, that the human being is in a position to seek the impulses for his actions out of pure thoughts. These pure thoughts have [the] most influence upon the processes of disintegration in the human organism. What happens in reality when man enacts a free deed? Let us realize what happens in the case of an ordinary person when he performs an act out of moral fantasy—you know now what I mean by this—out of moral fantasy, this means out of a thinking which is not ruled by sense-impulses, sense-desires and passions—what really takes place here in man? The following takes place: He gives himself up to pure thoughts; these form his impulses. They cannot impel him through what they are; the impulses must come from man himself. Thoughts are mere mirror-pictures, they belong to Maya. Mirror-pictures cannot compel. Man must compel himself under the influence of clear concepts.

Upon what do clear concepts work? They work most strongly upon the process of disintegration in the human organism; they bring this about. So we may say that on the one side the process of disintegration arises out of the organism, and on the other, the pure deed-thought (Tat-Gedanke) comes to meet this disintegrating process out of the spiritual world. I mean by this the thought that lies at the basis of deed. Free actions arise by uniting these two through the interaction of the process of disintegration and willed thinking.

I have said that the process of disintegration is not caused by pure thinking; it is there in any case, in fact it is always there. If man does not oppose these processes of disintegration with something coming out of pure thinking, then the disintegrating process is not transformed into an up-building process, then a part that is slowly dying remains within the human being. If you think this through, you will see that the possibility exists that just through the failure to perform free actions man fails to arrest a death process within him. Herein lies one of the subtlest thoughts which man must accept. He who understands this thought can no longer have any doubt in life about the existence of human freedom. An action that is performed in freedom does not occur through something that is caused within the organism but occurs where the cause ceases, in other words, out of a process of disintegration. There must be something in the organism where the causes cease; only then can the pure thought, as motive of the action, set in. But such disintegrating processes are always there, they only remain unused to a certain extent when man does not perform free deeds.

But this also shows the characteristics of an age that will have nothing to do with an understanding of the idea of freedom in its widest extent. The age running from the second half of the 19th century to the present has set itself the particular task of dimming down more and more the idea of freedom in all spheres of life, as far as knowledge is concerned, and of excluding it entirely from practical life. People did not wish to understand freedom, they would not have freedom. Philosophers have made every effort to prove that everything arises out of human nature through a certain necessity. Certainly, a necessity underlies man's nature; but this necessity ceases as disintegrating processes begin, as the sequence of causes comes to an end. When freedom has set in at the point where the necessity in the organism ceases, one cannot say that man's actions arise out of an inner necessity, for they arise only when this necessity ceases. The whole mistake consists in the fact that people have been unwilling to understand not only the up-building forces in the organism, but also the disintegrating processes. However, in order to understand what really underlies man's nature it will be necessary to develop a greater capacity to do this than in our age. Yesterday we saw how necessary it is to be able to look with the eye of the soul upon what we call the human Ego. But just in our times human beings are not very gifted in comprehending this reality of the Ego. I will give an illustration.

I have often referred to the remarkable scientific achievement of Theodor Ziehen “Die physiologische Psychologie”—“Physiological Psychology.” On page 205 the Ego is also spoken of; but Ziehen is never in a position even to indicate the real Ego, he merely speaks of the Ego-concept. We know that this is only a mirror-picture of the real Ego. But it is particularly interesting to hear how a distinguished thinker of today—but one who believes that he can exhaust everything with natural scientific ideas—speaks about the Ego. Ziehen says:

It will perhaps occur to you that the Ego-concept which is expressed in the small word “I,” is a very complex threefold entity containing thousands and thousands of partial concepts. But I beg you to ponder this, the word is indeed short, but its conceptual content must be complex, as shown by the fact that each one of you would be at a loss if he were asked to render in thoughts the content of his so-called Ego-concept.

And now Ziehen attempts to say something about the thought-content of the Ego-concept. Let us now see what the distinguished scholar has to say concerning what we must really think when we think about our Ego.

You will immediately think of your body, [you notice that he says—you will think of your body] of your relationships to the outer world, [connection with the outer world] your family and personal relationships, [in other words you will soon begin to think of your bank account and to count your money!] of your name and title.

Now the distinguished scholar emphatically points out that we must also think of our name and of our title if we are to grasp or to encompass our Ego in the form of concept.

..... Your principal inclinations, predominating ideas and finally your past, and thus prove to yourself how extremely complex this Ego-concept is. Indeed, the reflective human being reduces this complexity of the Ego-concept to a relative simplicity by placing his own Ego as the subject of his feelings, thoughts and movements, against the outer objects and other Egos. Of course, this contrast and this sharpening of the Ego-concept has also its deeper scientific and philosophical basis, but considered purely psychologically this simple Ego is only a theoretical fiction.

Thus “this simple Ego” is only a “theoretical fiction” that means a mere fantasy-concept, which constructs itself when we put together our name, title, or let us assume our rank and other such things also, which make us important! By means of such points we can see the whole weakness of the present way of thinking. And this weakness must be held in mind the more firmly because of the fact that what proves itself to be a decided weakness for the knowledge of the life of the soul is a strength for the knowledge of outer natural scientific facts. What is inadequate for a knowledge of the life of the soul, just this is adequate for penetrating the obvious facts in their immediate outer necessity.

We must not deceive ourselves in regard to the fact that it is one of the characteristics of our times, that people who may be great in one field are exponents of the greatest nonsense in another. Only when we hold this fact clearly in mind—which is so well adapted to throw sand in the eyes of humanity—can we in any way follow with active thought what is required in order to raise again that power which man needs in order to acquire concepts that can penetrate fruitfully and healingly into life. For only those concepts can take firm hold of life as it is today, which are drawn out of the depths of true reality—where we are not afraid to enter deeply into true reality. But it is just this that many people shun today.

At present people are very often inclined to reform the spiritual reality, without first having perceived the true reality out of which they should draw their impulses.

Who today does not go about reforming everything in the world—or at least, believing he can reform it? What do people not draw up from the soul out of sheer nothingness! But at a time such as this only those things can be fruitful which are drawn up from the depths of spiritual reality itself. For this the Will must be active.

The vanity that wishes to take up every possible idea of reform on the basis of emptiness of soul is just as harmful for the development of our present time as materialism itself. At the conclusion of a previous lecture I called your attention to how the true Ego of man, the Ego which indeed belongs to the will-nature and which for this reason is immersed in sleep for the ordinary consciousness, must be fructified through the fact that already through public instruction man is led to a concrete grasp of the great interests of the times, by realizing what

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struction man is led to a concrete grasp of the great interests of the times, by realizing what spiritual forces and activities enter into our events and have an influence upon them. This cannot be accomplished with generalized, nebulous speeches about the spirit, but with knowledge of the concrete spiritual events, as we have described them in these lectures, where we have indicated, according to dates, how here and there certain of these powers and forces from the spiritual world have intervened here in the physical.

This brought about what I was able to describe to you as the joint work of the so-called dead and of the so-called living in the whole development of humanity. For the reality of our life of feeling and of will is in the realm where the dead also are. We can say that the reality of our Ego and of our astral body is in the same realm where the dead can also be found. The same thing is meant in both cases. This, however, indicates a common realm in which we are embedded, in which the dead and the living work together upon the tapestry which we may call the social, moral, and historical life of man in its totality; the periods of existence which are lived through between death and a new birth also belong to this realm. We have indicated in these lectures how between death and a new birth the so-called departed one has the animal kingdom as his lowest kingdom, just as the mineral kingdom is our lowest kingdom. We have also pointed out in a certain way, how the departed one has to work within the being of the animal kingdom, and has to build up out of the laws of the animalic the organization that again forms the basis for his next incarnation. We have shown how as second kingdom the departed one experiences all those connections which have their karmic foundation here in the physical world and which, correspondingly transformed, continue within the spiritual world. A second kingdom thus arises for the departed one, which is woven together of all the karmic connections that he has established at any time in an earthly incarnation. Through this, however, everything that the human being has developed between death and a new birth gradually spreads itself out, one might say, quite concretely over the whole of humanity.

The third kingdom through which the human being then passes can be conceived as the kingdom of the Angels. In a certain sense we have already pointed out the role of the Angels during the life between death and a new birth. They carry as it were the thoughts from one human soul to another and back again; they are the messengers of the common life of thought. Fundamentally speaking, the Angels are those Beings among the higher Hierarchies of whom the departed one has the clearest living experience—he has a clear living experience of the relationships with animals and human beings, established through his karma; but among the Beings of the higher Hierarchies he has the clearest conception of those belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angels, who are really the bearers of thoughts, indeed of the soul-content from one being to another, and who also help the dead to transform the animal world. When we speak of the concerns of the dead as personal concerns, we might say that the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angels must strive above all to look after the personal concerns of the dead. The more universal affairs of the dead that are not personal are looked after more by the Beings of the Kingdom of the Archangeloi and Archai.

If you recall the lectures in which I have spoken about the life between death and a new birth, you will remember that part of the life of the so-called dead consists in spreading out his being over the world and in drawing it together again within himself I have already described and substantiated this more deeply. The life of the dead takes its course in such a way that a kind of alternation takes place between day and night, but so that active life arises from within the departed. He knows that this active life which thus arises is only the reappearance of what he has experienced in that other state which alternates with this one, when his being is spread out over the world and is united with the outer world. Thus when we come into contact with one who is dead we meet alternating conditions, a condition, for instance, where his being is spread out over the world, where he grows, as it were, with his own being into the real existence of his surroundings, into the events of his surroundings. The time when he knows least of all is when his own being that is in a kind of sleeping state grows into the spiritual world around him. When this again rises up within him it constitutes a kind of waking state and he is aware of everything, for his life takes its course within Time and not in space. Just as with our waking day-consciousness we have outside in space that which we take up in our consciousness, and then again withdraw from it in sleep—so from a certain moment onward the departed one takes over into the next period of time the experiences which he has passed through in a former one; these then fill his consciousness. It is a life entirely within Time. And we must become familiar with this.

Through this rhythmic life within Time, the departed enters into a very definite relationship with the Beings of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi and of the Archai. He has not as clear a conception of these Archangeloi and Archai Beings as of the Angels, of man, and of the animal; above all he always has this conception that these Beings, the Archai and Archangeloi, work together with him in this awaking and falling asleep, awaking and falling asleep, in this rhythm which takes place within the course of time. The departed one, when he is able to do so, must always bring to consciousness what he experienced unknowingly in the preceding period of time; then he always has the consciousness that a Being of the Hierarchy of the Archai has awakened him; he is always conscious that he works together with the Archai and Archangeloi in all that concerns this rhythmic life.

Let us firmly grasp the fact that just as in a waking state we realize that we perceive the outer world of which we know nothing during sleep, just as we realize that this outer world sinks into darkness when we fall asleep, so in the soul of the so-called dead lives this consciousness—Archai, Archangeloi, these are the Beings with whom I am united in a common work in order that I may pass through this life of falling asleep and awaking, falling asleep and awaking, and so forth. We might say that the departed one associates with the Archangeloi and Archai just as in waking consciousness we associate with the plant and mineral world of our physical surroundings. Man cannot however look back upon this interplay of forces in which he is interwoven between death and a new birth. Why not? We may indeed say, why not, but just this looking back is something which man must learn; yet it is difficult for him to learn this owing to the materialistic mentality of today. I would like to show you in a diagram why man does not look back upon this.

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Let us suppose that you are facing the world with all your organs of perception and understanding. This will give you a conceptual and perceptive content of a varied kind. I will designate the consciousness of a single moment by drawing different rings or small circles. These indicate what exists in the consciousness during the space of a moment. You know that a memory-process takes place when you look back over events—but in a different manner than modern psychologists imagine this. The time into which you can look back, to which your memory extends, is indicated by this line; it really indicates the space which here reaches a blind alley. This would be the point in your third, fourth or fifth year that is as far back as you can remember in life. Thus all the thoughts which arise when you look back upon your past experiences lie within this space of time. Let us suppose that you think of something in your thirtieth year for instance, and while you are thinking of this you remember something that you experienced ten years ago. If you picture very vividly what is actually taking place in the soul you will be able to form the following thought. You will say, if I look back to the point of time in my childhood which is as far back as I can remember, this constitutes a “sack” in the soul, which has its limits; its blunt end is the point which lies as far back in my childhood as I am able to remember. This is a sort of “sack” in the soul; it is the space of time which we can grasp in memory. Imagine such a “soul-sack” into which you can look while you are looking back in memory; these are the extreme limits of the sack which correspond in reality to the limit between the etheric body and the physical. This boundary must exist, otherwise ... well, to picture it roughly, the events that call forth memory would then always fall through at this point. You would be able to remember nothing, the soul would be a sack without a bottom, everything would fall through it. Thus, a boundary must be there. An actual “soul-sack” must be there. But at the same time this “soul-sack” prevents you from perceiving what you have lived through outside it. You yourself are non-transparent in the life of your soul because you have memories; you are non-transparent because you have the faculty of memory.

You see therefore—that which causes us to have a proper consciousness for the physical plane is at the same time the cause of our being unable to look with our ordinary consciousness into the region that lies behind memory. For it does really lie behind memory. But we can make the effort to gradually transform our memories to some extent. However we must do this carefully. We can begin by trying to keep before us in meditation with more and more accuracy something which we can remember, until we feel that it is not merely something which we take hold of in memory, but something which really remains there. One who develops an intensive, active life of the spirit will gradually have the feeling that memory is not something that comes and goes, comes and goes—but that memory contains something permanent. Indeed, work in this direction can only lead to the conviction that what rises within memory is of a lasting nature and really remains present as Akashic Record, for it does not disappear. What we remember remains in the world, it is there in reality. But we do not progress any further with this method; for merely to remember accurately our personal experiences, and the knowledge that memory remains—this method is in a higher sense too egotistical to lead farther than just to this conviction. On the contrary, if you were to develop beyond a certain point just this capacity of looking upon the permanency of your own experiences, you would obstruct all the more your outlook into the free world of spirit. Instead of the sack of memories, your own life stands there all the more compactly and prevents you from looking through.

Another method may be used in contrast to this; through it, the impressions in the Akashic Record become remarkably transparent, if I may use this expression. When we are once able to look through the stationary memories, we look with a sure eye into the spiritual world with which we are connected between death and a new birth. But to attain this we must not use merely the stationary memories of our own life; these become more and more compact, and we can see through them less and less. They must become transparent. And they become transparent if we make an ever stronger attempt to remember not so much what we have experienced from our own point of view, but more what has come to us from outside. Instead of remembering for instance what we have learned, we should remember the teacher, his manner of speech, what effect he had upon us and what he did with us. We should try to remember how the book arose out of which we learned this or that. We should remember above all what has worked upon us from the outer world. A beautiful and really wonderful beginning, indeed an introduction to such a memory, is Goethe's Wahrheit and Dichtung (his autobiography) where he shows how Time has formed him, how various forces have worked upon him. Because Goethe was able to achieve this in his life, and looked back on his life not from the standpoint of his own experiences, but from the standpoint of others and of the events of the times that worked upon him, he was able to have such deep insight into the spiritual world.

But this is at the same time the way that enables us to come into deeper touch with the time which has taken its course between our last death and our present birth.

Thus you see that today I am referring you, from another point of view, to the same thing to which I have already referred—to extend our interests beyond the personal, to turn our interests and attention not upon ourselves, but upon that that has formed us, that out of which we have arisen. It is an ideal to be able to look back upon time, upon a remote antiquity, and to investigate all the forces that have formed these “fine fellows”—the human beings.

Indeed, when we describe it thus, this offers few difficulties; it is no simple task, but it bears rich fruit because it requires great selflessness. It is just this method that awakens the forces which enable us to enter with our Ego the sphere which the dead have in common with the living. To know ourselves, is less important than to know our time; the task of public instruction in a not too distant future will be to know our time in its concrete reality, not as it now stands in history books ... but time such as it has evolved out of spiritual impulses.

Thus we are also led to extend out interest to a characteristic of our age and its rise from the universal world process. Why did Goethe strive so intense to know Greek art, to understand his age, through and through, to weigh it against earlier ages? Why did he make his Faust go back as far as the Greek age, as far as the age of Helen of Troy, and seek Chiron and the Sphinxes? Because he wished to know his own age and how it had worked upon him, as he could know it only by measuring it against an earlier age. But Goethe does not let his Faust sit still and decipher old state-records, but he leads him back along paths of the soul to the impulses by which he himself has been formed. Within him lies much of that which leads the human being on the one hand to a meeting with the dead, and on the other hand with the Spirits of Time, with the Archangels (this is now evident through the connection of the dead with the Archangels). Through the fact that man comes together with the dead, he also comes in touch with the Archangels and with the Spirits of Time.

Just the impulses that Goethe indicated in his Faust contain that through which the human being extends his interest to the Time Spirit, and that which is preeminently necessary for our times. It is indeed necessary for our times to look in a different way for instance upon Faust. Most of those who study Faust hardly find the real problems contained in it. A few are able to formulate these problems, but the answers are most curious.

Take for example the passage where Goethe really indicates to us that we should reflect. Do people always reflect at this point? Yet Goethe spares no effort to make it clearly understood that people should reflect upon certain things. For instance you know that Erichtho speaks about the site of the Classical Walpurgis-night; she withdraws and the air-traveler Homunculus appears with Faust and Mephistopheles. You will recall the first speeches of Homunculus, Mephistopheles and Faust. After Faust has touched the ground and called out. “Where is she?”—Homunculus says:—

It's more than we can tell
But to enquire would here be well.
Thou 'rt free to hasten, ere the day,
From flame to flame, and seek her so:
Who to the Mothers found his way,
Has nothing more to undergo.

Homunculus says:—

Who to the Mothers found his way,
Has nothing more to undergo.

How does he know that Faust has been with the Mothers? This is a question which necessarily arises; for if you will look back through the book you will find that there is nowhere any indication that Homunculus, a distinct and separate being from Faust, could have known that Faust had been with the Mothers. Now suddenly Homunculus pipes out that, “Who to the Mothers found his way, has nothing more to undergo.” You see, Goethe propounds riddles. With clear-cut necessity it ensues that Homunculus, if he is anything at all, is something within the sphere of consciousness of Faust himself, for he can know what is contained in the sphere of Faust's consciousness only if he himself belongs to this same sphere of consciousness.

Call to mind the various expositions we have given of Faust:—how Homunculus is really nothing else than what must be prepared as astral body, in order that Helen may appear. But for this reason he is in another state of consciousness; his consciousness is spread out over the astral body. When we know that Homunculus comes within the sphere of Faust's consciousness we can understand his knowledge. Goethe makes Homunculus come into existence because, through the creation of Homunculus, Faust's consciousness finds the possibility of transcending itself as it were, not merely of remaining within itself, but of being outside. He, too, is where Homunculus is to be found; Homunculus is a part of Faust's consciousness. Goethe as you see takes alchemy very seriously. There are many such riddles in Faust which are directly connected with the secrets of the spiritual world. We must allow Faust to work upon us so that we become aware of the depths of spiritual reality which are really contained in it. We can only understand a man like Goethe when we realize on the one hand, that he had studied what had formed him really as if he had viewed it from outside, as can be seen in his autobiography (Wahrheit and Dichtung)—and that on the other hand, he knew that this must lead back to distant perspectives, to distant connections with the dead. Faust enters the life of very ancient civilizations of humanity, the life of spiritual Beings lying far back in the past.

[But if one wants to see clearly what is necessary in a positive sense for the present, then one must also have an eye and a feeling for the negative in many respects, one must develop the right feeling for the negative. One must have an eye for everything that prevents the necessary coming together of living people in a common plan with the work of the dead. You can discover these obstacles everywhere today. You find them at every turn. You find them precisely where education — forgive me for using this ugly word — is spread today.¹

How can a person today feel truly intelligent, deeply intelligent, enlightened, when he can write something like this: “Swedenborg, whose dark and enigmatic personality even Goethe explored with reverent hesitation, communicated with angels beyond the earth. He said that these supernatural beings, armed with thoughts, even walk around dressed in robes. The struggle for knowledge and enlightenment is not foreign to them, for they have set up a printing press from which they sometimes send a few sheets to particularly fortunate people. The newspapers of the hereafter are then covered with Hebrew letters. A peculiar feature of the venerable biblical symbols is that every line, every edge, every curve conceals a mysterious spiritual value. Man only has to learn to read the angelic squiggles correctly in order to be initiated into the truth of the hereafter, into the reversed, eternally sunlit life, into the blissful festivity and exhilarating paradise of the hereafter. Swedenborg, who sometimes managed to die to earthly life while still alive and to make the transition to the afterlife before physical death, asked the angels many questions and reported on them. Centuries before him, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Jews practiced the same craft of exploration. Generations after him, even to this day, it is done by those beings on earth who are dissatisfied, who want to seek counsel from God about their future, who do not want to renounce the company of their dead, and who finally believe that the bridge built from their dream-filled beds to the realms of the incomprehensible is a solid, seraphic path, cemented and supported by spirits.

And so the person in question, who considers himself very clever, continues his reflections, indulging in cheap mockery of those who try to build a bridge to the hereafter; for this very clever man has read the book of another person who considers himself very clever and writes about it: “This beyond of the senses, inhabited by the soul, is what the weighty book by Max Dessoir wants to describe anew, after thousands of thinkers have already entered this path to the afterlife. This time, therefore, it is a philosopher who speaks, who has strived more for knowledge of human nature than for the separation of orphaned schools of thought, an art lover who has not shied away from interpreting the enigmatic moment of an artist's birth, a man who has occasionally searched the bones and nerves of human beings with a knife in his hand in order to find his way through the numerous earthly hiding places of the soul.”

Because Dessoir is so multifaceted in his protection against the rashness of fanatics and the coldness of arrogant rationalists, his judgment on matters of the hereafter, which he has been preparing for more than thirty years, deserves respect and attention even from those who cannot follow him on his path,” and so on.

I had to discuss this individual, Max Dessoir, in the second chapter of my book, “Von Seelenrätseln” (On the Riddles of the Soul), because this university professor had the audacity to discuss anthroposophy as such. I had to undertake the task of proving that the whole way Max Dessoir works is the most unscrupulous, superficial way imaginable. This man has the audacity to pass a disparaging judgment based almost exclusively on nonsensical quotations that he extracts from a few of my books and always quotes in such a way that they are distorted in the most absurd manner. One must state the facts in this way if one wants to see the scandal that is possible within what is today often called science. I have only seen Dessoir once in my life; it was in the early 1990s. At that time, he made a very clever remark to me. My “Philosophy of Freedom” had not yet been written. Max Dessoir said at the time—it was at a Goethe dinner in Weimar: “Yes, you do have one fault, you concern yourself with too many sciences.” That was the great mistake, trying not to be one-sided!

Among the other absurdities that Max Dessoir commits in his book is, for example, that he now refers to my Philosophy of Freedom as my “first work.” It was written about ten years after my actual first work; I had been a writer for ten years before Philosophy of Freedom. All this and much more is equally false in Dessoir's book. How many people will read the necessary, factual refutations in my book Von Seelenrätseln (On the Riddles of the Soul), which show what hot air Dessoir's scholarship is! But how much journalistic rabble of the sort found in Max Hochdorf in Zurich is gathering to trumpet Max Dessoir's nonsensical book Vom Jenseits der Seele (Beyond the Soul) in such a way that one says, “This beyond the senses, which is inhabited by the soul, is what Max Dessoir's weighty book wants to 'Vom Jenseits der Seele' (Beyond the Soul), after thousands of thinkers have already entered this path into the hereafter,” and so on.

It is necessary to focus on such things. It is well known that what is attempted on the basis of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is distorted in the most unprecedented ways here and there, sometimes by people who know very well that the opposite of what they say is true. But these are mostly poor wretches who have been unable to satisfy their personal interests within society, who believed they could satisfy them, and whom one can pity, but about whom there is no need to talk further. And they themselves know best how it stands with the objective truth of what they say. But poison such as that spread by Max Dessoir must be taken more seriously, and I had to do my part to clarify, sentence by sentence, so to speak, the entire philosophical worthlessness of Dessoir's arguments. Until a healthy judgment prevails in the widest circles about such alleged science as that of Max Dessoir—and there are many such Max Dessoirs—and until a healthy judgment prevails about such followers of Max Dessoir, such as the author of this article, who of course cannot resist concluding his article with the words: “Because the path to the afterlife is so completely blocked” — of course, for the blocked mind of this Mr. Max Dessoir, the path to the afterlife is blocked! — ‘people have tried again and again over the millennia to break down the barriers.’ Dessoir calls these fighters for the desperately fixed yet intangible spirit realm ”magical idealists.” He lists them all, these faith healers, apostles of numbers, Egyptian magicians, Negro saints, anthroposophists, neo-Buddhists, Kabbalists, and Hasidim. He is a highly captivating chronicler of all those generations who have submitted to miracles and yet rebelled against them. A peculiar society forms when one lists all the men, wise and foolish, who wanted to gather around the pure spirit. Cagliostro and Kant, Hegel and even the modern sorcerer Svengali meet there as they wander aimlessly on their way to the afterlife.

It is, of course, impossible to prevent people from writing in this way, but in the widest circles a healthy judgment must prevail which prevents what comes into the public domain in this way from being accepted as authoritative. For it goes without saying that thought forms of this kind, spraying around in our social organism, prevent any possibility of beneficial progress for humanity. For oneself, when one has had to attack scientific rubbish such as that of Max Dessoir, one can wash one's hands and declare oneself satisfied. But this scientific rubbish flows and flows, and today there are far too many channels through which this rubbish can flow. Sometimes one has to nail down an example. In this case, it had to be done again, because you can imagine how many people's minds will once again be filled with a judgment about anthroposophy when a feature article such as the one that appeared on December 14, 1917, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung is written by someone who is considered quite clever and who bases his views on someone else who is considered just as clever, namely Max Dessoir!

These things must be regarded as cultural-historical facts, and their cultural-historical significance must be taken into account. Certainly, there is unfortunately only a slight possibility today of bringing something like this chapter I have written, “Max Dessoir on Anthroposophy,” to the attention of the general public. For even in the Anthroposophical Society there is only a small circle that truly understands its task: the task of enlightening humanity about the way science is often practiced today, of enlightening it in the right and proper way. And what is practiced today as science is only a symptom of general thinking. For just as things are in science — of which Max Dessoir, with all his followers, is a glaring example — so they are in other fields. And if you ask the question: What deeper forces have led to today's catastrophe? — you will always remain on the surface if you do not go into these deeper reasons, into what lies in the contortion, in the deliberate contortion and in the deliberate superficiality, charlatanism, a charlatanism that seeks to maintain itself by attributing serious intellectuality precisely to charlatanism. This must be seen in its true form in a healthy sense. I cite the example of Max Dessoir only because it is so obvious. But it is an example of much that exists as negative in our time. If anyone in humanity wants to have a heart for the positive aspects of growing together with the spiritual world, then they must also have a heart for rejection, for strong, heartfelt rejection wherever possible, of the inauthentic, the superficial, the useless.

We are experiencing this very much in our own day, that often those who are portrayed in the worst light in public life are precisely the most decent people. There is no need to view these things with pessimism, but there is a need to seek forces within one's own soul that will produce and nurture a healthy judgment about these things in that soul.]

• 1. The section in brackets was not available in the original translation.

[ 1 ] The Austrian thinker, Bartholomaeus Carneri (1871–1909) attempted to open wide perspectives of world conception and ethics on the ground of Darwinism. Eleven years after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species, he published his work, Morality and Darwinism (1871), in which he used the new world of ideas as the basis of an ethical world conception in a comprehensive way. (Compare his books, Foundation of Ethics, 1881, Man as His Own Purpose, 1878, and Modern Man, Essays on Life Conduct, 1891.) Carneri tries to find in the picture of nature the elements through which self-conscious ego is conceivable within this picture. He would like to think this world picture so wide and so comprehensive as to contain the human soul within its scope. He aims at the reunion of the ego with the mother ground of nature, from which it has become separated. He represents in his world conception the opposite tendency to the philosophy for which the world becomes an illusion of the imagination and which, for that reason, renounces all connection with the reality of the world so far as knowledge is concerned.

Carneri rejects all moral philosophy that intends to proclaim for man other moral commandments than those that result from his own nature. We must remember that man is not to be understood as a special being beside all other things of nature but that he is a being that has gradually developed from lower entities according to purely natural laws. Carneri is convinced that all life is like a chemical process. “The digestion in man is such a process as well as the nutrition of the plant.” At the same time, he emphasizes that the chemical process must be raised to a higher form of evolution if it is to become plant or animal.

Life is a chemical process of a special kind; it is the individualized chemical process, for the chemical process can reach a point where it can maintain itself without certain conditions . . . that it formerly needed.

It is apparent that Carneri observes that lower processes are transformed into higher ones, that matter takes on higher forms of existence through the perfection of its functions.

As matter, we conceive the substance insofar as the properties that result from its divisibility and its motion effect our senses physically, that is to say, as mass. If this division or differentiation goes so far as to produce phenomena that are no longer sensually perceptible but only perceptible to our thinking, we say the effect of the substance is spiritual.

Also, morality does not exist as a special form of reality; it is a process of nature on a higher level. Therefore, the question cannot be raised: What is man to do to comply with some special moral commandment that is valid for him? We can only ask: What appears as morality when the lower processes develop into the higher spiritual ones?

While moral philosophy proclaims certain moral laws and commands that they are to be kept so that man may be what he ought to be, our ethics develops man as he is. It wants to do no more than to show him what he may at some time become. While the former moralizing philosophy knows of duties to be enforced by punishments, our ethics uphold an ideal from which any compulsion would merely distract because it can be approached only on the path of knowledge and of freedom.

As the chemical process individualizes itself into a living being on a higher level, so on a still higher level life is transformed into self-consciousness. The entity that has become self-conscious no longer merely looks out into nature; it looks back into itself.

The awakened self-consciousness constituted, if conceived dualistically, a break with nature, and man felt himself separated from nature. This breach existed only for him, but for him it was complete. It had not developed as suddenly as it is taught in Genesis, just as the days of creation must not be taken literally as days. But with the completion of self-consciousness, the breach was a fact and with the feeling of boundless lonesomeness that overcame man in this state, his ethical development began.

Up to a certain point nature leads life. At this point, self-consciousness arises, man comes into existence. “His further development is his own work and what keeps him on the course of progress is the power and the gradual clarification of his wishes.” Nature takes care of a11 other beings, but it endows man with desires and expects him to take care of their fulfillment. Man has within himself the impulse to arrange his existence in agreement with his wishes. This impulse is his desire for happiness:

This impulse is unknown to the animal. It knows only the instinct for self-preservation; to develop that instinct into the desire for happiness, the human self-consciousness is necessary as a fundamental condition.

The striving for happiness is the basis of all action:

The martyr who sacrifices his life, be it for his scientific conviction or for his belief in God, aims for nothing but his happiness. He finds it in the first case in his loyalty of conviction, and in the second case he expects it in a better world. To everyone happiness is the last aim and no matter how different the picture may be that the individual has of this happiness, it is to every sentient living being the beginning and the end of all his thinking and feeling.

As nature gives man only the need for happiness, this image of happiness must have its origin within man himself. Man creates for himself the pictures of his happiness. They spring from his ethical fantasy. Carneri finds in this fantasy the new concept that prescribes the ideals of our action to our thinking. The “good” is, for Carneri, “identical with progressive evolution, and since evolution is pleasure . . . happiness not merely constituted the aim but also the moving element that drives toward that aim.”

[ 2 ] Carneri attempted to find the way that leads from the natural order to the sources of morality. He believed he had found the ideal power that propels the ethical world order as spontaneously from one moral event to the next as the material forces on the physical level develop formation after formation and fact after fact.

[ 3 ] Carneri's mode of conception is entirely in agreement with the idea of evolution that does not permit the notion that a later phase of development is already pre-formed in an earlier one, but considers it as a really new formation. The chemical process does not contain implicitly animal life, and happiness develops as an entirely new element on the ground of the animal's instinct for self-preservation. The difficulty that lies in this thought caused a penetrating thinker, W. H. Rolph, to develop the line of reasoning that he set down in his book, Biological Problems, an Attempt at the Development of a Rational Ethics (1884). Rolph asks himself, “What is the reason that a form of life does not remain at a given stage but develops progressively and becomes more perfect?” This problem presents no difficulty for a thinker who maintains that the later form is already implicitly contained in the earlier one. For him, it is quite clear that what is at first implicit will become explicit at a certain time. But Rolph was not willing to accept this answer. On the other hand, however, he was also not satisfied with the “struggle for existence” as a solution of the problem. If a living being fights only for the satisfaction of its necessary needs, it will, to be sure, overpower its weaker competitors, but it will itself remain what it is. If one does not want to attribute a mysterious, mystical tendency toward perfection to this being, one must seek the cause of this perfection in external, natural circumstances. Rolph tries to give an explanation by stating that, whenever possible, every being satisfies its needs to a greater extent than is necessary.

Only by introducing the idea of insatiability does the Darwinian principle of perfection in the struggle for life become acceptable, for it is only thus that we have an explanation for the fact that the creature acquires, whenever it can do so, more than it needs for maintaining its status quo, and that it grows excessively whenever the occasion is given for it. (Biological Problems)

What takes place in this realm of living beings is, in Rolph's opinion, not a struggle for acquisition of the necessary means of life but a “struggle for surplus acquisition.” “While the Darwinist knows of no life struggle as long as the existence of the creature is not threatened, I consider this struggle as ever present. It is simply primarily a struggle for life, a struggle for the increase of life, not a struggle for existence.” Rolph draws from these natural scientific presuppositions the conclusions for his ethics:

Expansion of life, not its mere preservation, struggle for advantage, not for existence, is the rallying cry. The mere acquisition of life's necessities and sustenance is not sufficient; what must also be gained is comfort, if not wealth, power and influence. The search and striving for continuous improvement of the condition of life is the characteristic impulse of animal and man. (Biological Problems)

[ 4 ] Rolph's thoughts stimulated Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) to produce his own ideas of evolution after having gone through other phases of his soul life. At the beginning of his career as an author, the idea of evolution and natural science in general had been far from his thoughts. He was at first deeply impressed by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and from him he adopted the conception of pain as lying at the bottom of all existence. Unlike Schopenhauer and Eduard van Hartmann, Nietzsche did not seek the redemption from this pain in the fulfillment of moral tasks. It was his belief rather that the transformation of life into a work of art that leads beyond the pain of existence. Thus, the Greeks created a world of beauty and appearance in order to make this painful existence bearable. In Richard Wagner's musical drama he believed he found a world in which beauty lifts man beyond pain. It was in a certain sense a world of illusion that was quite consciously sought by Nietzsche in order to overcome the misery of the world. He was of the opinion that, at the root of the oldest Greek culture, there had been the will of man to forget the real world through a state of intoxication.

Singing and dancing man manifests himself as a member of a higher community. He has forgotten to walk and to speak and, in his dance, he is about to fly up into the air. (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872)

With these words Nietzsche describes and explains the cult of the ancient worshippers of Dionysos, in which he saw the root of all art. Nietzsche maintained of Socrates that he had overpowered this Dionysian impulse by placing reason as judge over them. The statement, “Virtue is teachable,” meant, according to Nietzsche, the end of a comprehensive, impulsive culture and the beginning of a much feebler phase dominated by thinking. Such an idea arose in Nietzsche under the influence of Schopenhauer, who placed the untamed, restless will higher than the systematizing thought life, and under the influence of Richard Wagner who, both as a man and as an artist, followed Schopenhauer. But Nietzsche was, by his own inclination, also a contemplative nature. After having surrendered for awhile to the idea of the redemption of the world through beauty as mere appearance, he felt this conception as a foreign element to his own nature, something that had been implanted in him through the influence of Richard Wagner, with whom he had been connected by friendship. Nietzsche tried to free himself from this trend of ideas and to come to terms with a conception of reality that was more in agreement with his own nature. The fundamental trait of his character compelled him to experience the ideas and impulses of the development of a modern world conception as a direct personal fate. Other thinkers formed pictures of a world conception and the process of this formative description constituted their philosophic activity. Nietzsche is confronted with the world conceptions of the second half of the nineteenth century, and it becomes his destiny to experience personally all the delight but also all the sorrows that these world conceptions can cause if they affect the very substance of the human soul. Not only theoretically but with his entire individuality at stake, Nietzsche's philosophical life developed in such a way that representative world conceptions of modern times would completely take hold of him, forcing him to work himself through to his own solutions in the most personal experiences of life.

How can one live if one must think that the world is as Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner imagine it to be? This became the disturbing riddle for him. It was not, however, a riddle for which he sought a solution by means of thinking and knowledge. He had to experience the solution of this problem with every fibre of his nature. Others think philosophy; Nietzsche had to live philosophy. The modern life of world conception becomes completely personal in Nietzsche. When an observer meets the philosophies of other thinkers, he feels inclined to judge; this is one-sided, that is incorrect, etc. With Nietzsche such an observer finds himself confronted with a ,world conception within the life of a human being, and he sees that one idea makes this human being healthy while another makes him ill. For this reason, Nietzsche becomes more and more a poet as he presents his picture of world and life. It is also for this reason that a reader who cannot agree with Nietzsche's presentation insofar as his philosophy is concerned, can still admire it because of its poetic power.

What an entirely different tone comes into the modern history of philosophy through Nietzsche as compared to Hamerling, Wundt and even Schopenhauer! These thinkers search contemplatively for the ground of existence and they arrive at the will, which they find in the depths of the human soul. In Nietzsche this will is alive. He absorbs the philosophical ideas, sets them aglow with his ardent will-nature and then makes something entirely new out of them: A life through which will-inspired ideas and idea-illumined will pulsate. This happens in Nietzsche's first creative period, which began with his Birth of Tragedy (1870), and had its full expression in his four Untimely Meditations: David Strauss Confessor and Author; On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life; Schopenhauer as Educator; Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. In the second phase of his life, it was Nietzsche's destiny to experience deeply what a life and world conception based exclusively on the thought habits of natural science can be to the human soul. This period is expressed in his works, Human, All Too Human (1878), The Dawn of Day (1881), and Gay Science (1882).

Now the ideals that inspired Nietzsche in his first period have cooled; they appear to him as bubbles of thought. His soul now wants to gain strength, to be invigorated in its feeling by the “reality” of the content that can be derived from the mode of conception of natural science. But Nietzsche's soul is full of life; the vigor of this inner life strives beyond anything that it could owe to the contemplative observation of nature. The contemplation of nature shows that the animal becomes man. As the soul feels its inner power of life, the conception arises: The animal bore man in itself; must not man bear within himself a higher being, the superman? Nietzsche's soul experiences in itself the superman wresting himself free from man. His soul revels in lifting the modern idea of evolution that was based on the world of the senses to the realm that the senses do not perceive, a realm that is felt when the soul experiences the meaning of evolution within itself. “The mere acquisition of life's necessities and sustenance is not sufficient; what must also be gained is comfort, if not wealth, power and influence. The search and striving for a continuous improvement of the condition of life is the characteristic impulse of animal and man.” This conviction, which in Rolph was the result of contemplative observation, becomes in Nietzsche an inner experience, expressed in a grandiose hymn of philosophic vision. The knowledge that represents the external world is insufficient to him; it must become inwardly increasingly fruitful. Self-observation is poverty. A creation of a new inner life that outshines everything so far in existence, everything man is already, arises in Nietzsche's soul. In man, the superman is born for the first time as the meaning of existence. Knowledge itself grows beyond what it formerly had been; it becomes a creative power. As man creates, he takes his stand in the midst of the meaning of life. With lyrical ardor Nietzsche expresses in his Zarathustra (1884) the bliss that his soul experiences in creating “superman” out of man. A knowledge that feels itself as creative perceives more in the ego of man than can be lived through in a single course of life; it contains more than can be exhausted in such a single life. It will again and again return to a new life. In this way the idea of “eternal recurrence” of the human soul thrusts itself on Nietzsche to join his idea of “superman.”

[ 5 ] Rolph's idea of the “enhancement of life” grows in Nietzsche into the conception of the “Will to Power,” which he attributes to all being and life in the world of animal and of man. This “Will to Power” sees in life “an appropriation, violation, overpowering of the alien and weaker being, its annexation or at least, in the mildest case, its exploitation.” In his book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche sang his hymn of praise to his faith in the reality and the development of man into “superman.” In his unfinished work, Will to Power, Attempt at a Revaluation of all Values, he wanted to reshape all conceptions from the viewpoint that no other will in man held higher sway than the will for power.

[ 6 ] The striving for knowledge becomes in Nietzsche a real force that comes to life in the soul of man. As Nietzsche feels this animation within himself, life assumes in him such an importance that he places it above all knowledge and truth that has not been stirred into life. This again led him to renounce all truth and to seek in the will for power a substitute for the will for truth. He no longer asks, “Is what we know true?” but rather, “Is it sustaining and furthering life?”

“What matters in all philosophizing is never ‘the truth’ but something entirely different, let us call it health, the future, power, life . . .” What man really strives for is always power; he only indulged himself in the illusion that he wanted “truth.” He confused the means with the end. Truth is merely a means for the purpose. “The fact that a judgment is wrong is no objection to it.” What is important is not whether a judgment is true or not, but “the question to what degree it advances and preserves life, preserves a race, perhaps even breeds a race.” “Most thinking of a philosopher is done secretly by his instincts and thus forced into certain channels.” Nietzsche's world conception is the expression of a personal feeling as an individual experience and destiny.

In Goethe the deep impulse of modern philosophical life became apparent; he felt the idea come to life within the self-conscious ego so that with this enlivened idea this ego can know itself in the core of the world. In Nietzsche the desire exists to let man develop his life beyond himself; he feels that then the meaning of life must be revealed in what is inwardly self-created being, but he does not penetrate essentially to what man creates beyond himself as the meaning of life. He sings a grandiose hymn of praise to the superman, but he does not form his picture; he feels his growing reality but he does not see him. Nietzsche speaks of an “eternal recurrence,” but he does not describe what it is that recurs. He speaks of raising the form of life through the will to power, but where is the description of the heightened form of life? Nietzsche speaks of something that must be there in the realm of the unknown, but he does not succeed in going further than pointing at the unknown. The forces that are unfolded in the self-conscious ego are also not sufficiently strong in Nietzsche to outline distinctly a reality that he knows as weaving and breathing in human nature.

[ 7 ] We have a contrast to Nietzsche's world conception in the materialistic conception of history and life that was given its most pregnant expression by Karl Marx (1818–83). Marx denied that the idea had any share in historical evolution. For him, the real factors of life constituted the actual basis of this evolution, and from them are derived opinions concerning the world that men have been able to form according to the various situations of life in which they find themselves. The man who is working physically and under the power of somebody else has a world conception that differs from that of the intellectual worker. An age that replaces an older economic form with a new one brings also different conceptions of life to the surface of history. If one wants to understand a historical age, one must, for its explanation, go back to its social conditions and its economic processes. All political and cultural currents are only surface-reflectings of these deeper processes. They are essentially ideal effects of real facts, but they have no share in those facts. A world conception, therefore, that is caused by ideal factors can have no share in the progressive evolution of our present conduct of life. It is rather our task to take up the real conflicts of life at the point at which they have arrived, and to continue their development in the same direction.

This conception evolved from a materialistic reversal of Hegelianism. In Hegel, the ideas are in a continuous progress of evolution and the results of this evolution are the actual events of life. What Auguste Comte derived from natural scientific conceptions as a conception of society based on the actual events of life, Karl Marx wants to attain from the direct observation of the economic evolution. Marxism is the boldest form of an intellectual current that starts from the historical phenomena as they appear to external observation, in order to understand the spiritual life and the entire cultural development of man. This is modern “sociology.” It in no way accepts man as an individual but rather as a member of social evolution. Man's conceptions, knowledge, action and feeling are all considered to be the result of social powers under the influence of which the individual stands.

Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) calls the sum total of the forces determining every cultural event the “milieu.” Every work of art, every institution, every action is to be explained from preceding and simultaneous circumstances. If we know the race, the milieu and the moment through and in which a human achievement comes into being, we have explained this work. Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–65), in his System of Acquired Rights (1861), showed how conditions of rights and laws, such as property, contract, family, inheritance, etc., arise and develop. The mode of conception of the Romans created a kind of law that differed from that of the Germans. In none of these thoughts is the question raised as to what arises in the human individual, what does he produce through his own inner nature? The question that is always asked is: What are the causes in the general social conditions for the life of the individual? One can observe in this thought tendency an opposite inclination to the one prevailing at the beginning of the nineteenth century with regard to the question of man's relation to the world. It was then customary to ask: What rights can man claim through his own nature (natural rights), or in what way does man obtain knowledge in accordance with his own power of reason as an individual? The sociological trend of thought, however, asks: What are the legal and intellectual concepts that the various social groupings cause to arise in the individual?

The fact that I form certain conceptions concerning things does not depend on my power of reasoning but is the result of the historical development that produced me. In Marxism the self-conscious ego is entirely deprived of its own nature; it finds itself drifting in the ocean of facts. These facts develop according to the laws of natural science and of social conditions. In this world conception the impotence of modern philosophy with regard to the human soul approaches a maximum. The “ego,” the self-conscious human soul, wants to find in itself the entity through which it can assert its own significance within the existence of the world, but it is unwilling to dive into its own depths. It is afraid it will not find in its own depths the support of its own existence and essence. It wants to derive its own being from an entity that lies outside its own domain. To do this, the ego follows the thought habits developed in modern times under the influence of natural science, and turns either to the world of material events or to that of social evolution. It believes it understands its own nature in the totality of life if it can say to itself, “I am, in a certain way, conditioned by these events, by this evolution.”

Such philosophical tendencies show that there are forces at work in the souls of which they are dimly aware, but which cannot at first be satisfied by the modern habits of thought and research. Concealed from consciousness, spiritual life works in human souls. It drives these souls to go so deep into the self-conscious ego that this ego can find in its depths what leads to the source of world existence. In this source the human soul feels its kinship with a world entity that is not manifested in the mere phenomena and entities of nature. With respect to these phenomena and entities modern times have arrived at an ideal of research with which the scientist feels secure in his endeavor. One would now also like to feel this security in the investigation of the nature of the human soul. It has been shown above that, in leading thinkers, the striving for such security resulted in world pictures that no longer contain any elements from which satisfactory conceptions of the human soul could be derived. The attempt is made to treat philosophy according to the method of natural science, but in the process of this treatment the meaning of the philosophical question itself is lost. The task with which the human soul is charged from the very depth of its nature goes far beyond anything that the thinkers are willing to recognize as safe methods of investigation according to the modern habits of thought.

In appraising the situation of the development of modern world conception thus characterized, one finds as the most outstanding feature the pressure that the mode of thought of natural science has exerted on the minds of people ever since it attained its full stature. One recognizes as the reason for this pressure the fruitfulness, the efficiency of this mode of thinking. An affirmation of this is to be found in the work of a natural scientist like T. H. Huxley (1825–95). He does not believe that one could find anything in the knowledge of natural science that would answer the last questions concerning the human soul. But he is convinced that our search for knowledge must confine itself to the limits of the mode of conception of natural science and we must admit that man simply has no means by which to acquire a knowledge of what lies behind nature. The result of this opinion is that natural science contains no insight concerning man's highest hopes for knowledge, but it allows him to feel that in this mode of conception the investigation is placed on secure ground. One should, therefore, abandon all concern for everything that does not lie within the realm of natural science, or one should consider it as a matter of belief.

[ 8 ] The effect of this pressure caused by the method of natural science is clearly expressed in a thought current called pragmatism that appeared at the turn of the century and intended to place all striving for truth on a secure basis. The name “pragmatism” goes back to an essay that Charles Pierce published in the American journal, Popular Science, in 1878. The most influential representatives of this mode of conception are William James (1842–1910) in America and F. C. Schiller (1864–1937) in England, who uses the word “humanism.” Pragmatism can be called disbelief in the power of thought. It denies that thinking that would remain within its own domain is capable of producing anything that can be proved as truth and knowledge justifiable by itself. Man is confronted with processes of the world and must act. To accomplish this, thinking serves him in an auxiliary function. It sums up the facts of the external world into ideas and combines them. The best ideas are those that help him to achieve the right kind of action so that he can attain his purpose in accordance with the facts of the world. These ideas man recognizes as his truth. Will is the ruler of man's relation to the world, not thinking. James deals with this matter in his book, The Will to Believe. The will determines life; this is its undeniable right. Therefore, will is also justified in influencing thought. It is, to be sure, not to exert its influence in determining what the facts are in a particular case; here the intellect is to follow the facts themselves. But it will influence the understanding and interpretation of reality as a whole. “If our scientific knowledge extended as far as to the end of things, we might be able to live by science alone. But since it only dimly lights up the edges of the dark continent that we call the universe, and since we must form, at our own risk, some sort of thought of this universe to which we belong with our lives, we shall be justified if we form such thoughts as agree with our nature—thoughts that enable us to act, hope and live.”

According to this conception, our thought has no life that could possibly concentrate and deepen in itself and, in Hegel's sense, for example, penetrate to the source of existence. It merely emerges in the human soul to serve the ego when it takes an active part in the world with its will and life. Pragmatism deprives thought of the power it possessed from the rise of the Greek world conception. Knowledge is thus made into a product of the human will. In the last analysis, it can no longer be the element into which man plunges in order to find himself in his true nature. The self-conscious ego no longer penetrates into its own entity with the power of thinking. It loses itself in the dark recesses of the will in which thought sheds no light on anything except the aims of life. But these, as such, do not spring from thought. The power exerted by external facts on man has become excessively strong. The conscious ability to find a light in the inner life of thought that could illumine the last questions of existence has reached the zero point. In pragmatism, the development of modern philosophy falls shortest of what the spirit of this development really demands: that man may find himself as a thinking and self-conscious ego in the depths of the world in which this ego feels itself as deeply connected with the wellspring of existence, as the Greek truth-seeker did through his perceived thought. That the spirit of modern times demands this becomes especially clear through pragmatism. It places man in the focal point of his world picture. In man, it was to be seen how reality rules in existence. Thus, the chief question was directed toward the element in which the self-conscious ego rests. But the power of thought was not sufficient to carry light into this element. Thought remained behind in the upper layers of the soul when the ego wanted to take the path into its own depth.

[ 9 ] In Germany Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933) developed his Philosophy of As-If (1911) along the same lines as pragmatism. This philosopher regards the leading ideas that man forms about the phenomena of the world not as thought images through which, in the cognitive process, the soul places itself into a spiritual reality, but as fictions that lead him to find his way in the world. The “atom,” for instance, is imperceptible. Man forms the thought of the “atom.” He cannot form it in order to know something of a reality, but merely “as if' the external phenomena of nature had come to pass through compound actions of atoms. If one imagines that there are atoms, there will be order in the chaos of perceived natural phenomena. It is the same with all leading ideas. They are assumed, not in order to depict facts that are given solely by perception. They are invented, and reality is then interpreted “as if” the content of these imagined concepts really were the basis of reality. The impotence of thought is thus consciously made the center of this philosophy. The power of the external facts impresses the mind of the thinker so overwhelmingly that he does not dare to penetrate with his “mere thought” into those regions from which the external reality springs. But as we can only hope to gain an insight into the nature of man if we have spiritual means to penetrate into the characterized regions, there can be no possibility of approaching the highest riddles of the universe through the “As-If Philosophy.”

[ 10 ] We must now realize that both “pragmatism” and the “As-If Philosophy” have grown out of the thought practice of the age that is dominated by the method of natural science. Natural science can only be concerned with the investigation of the connection of external facts, of facts that can be observed in the field of sense perception. In natural science it cannot be a question of making the connections themselves, at which its investigation aims, sensually perceptible, but merely of establishing these connections in the indicated field. By following this basic principle, modern natural science became the model for all scientific cognition and, in approaching the present time, it has gradually been drawn into a thought practice that operates in the sense of “pragmatism” and the “As-If Philosophy.” Darwinism, for instance, was at first driven to proclaim a line of evolution of living beings from the most imperfect to the most perfect and thus to conceive man as a higher form in the evolution of the anthropoid apes. But the anatomist, Carl Gegenbaur, pointed out as early as 1870 that it is the method of investigation applied to such an idea of evolution that constitutes the fruitful part of it. The use of this method of investigation has continued to more recent times, and one is quite justified in saying that, while it remained faithful to its original principle, it has led beyond the views with which it was originally connected. The investigation proceeded “as if” man had to be sought within the line of descent of the anthropoid apes. At the present time, one is not far from recognizing that this cannot be so, but that there must have been a being in earlier times whose true descendants are to be found in man, while the anthropoid apes developed away from this being into a less perfect species. In this way the original modern idea of evolution has proved to be only an auxiliary step in the process of investigation.

[ 11 ] While such a thought practice holds sway in natural science, it seems quite justified for natural science to deny that, in order to solve world riddles, there is any scientific cognitive value in an investigation of pure thought carried out by means of a thought contemplation in the self-conscious ego. The natural scientist feels that he stands on secure ground when he considers thinking only as a means to secure his orientation in the world of external facts. The great accomplishments to which natural science can point at the turn of the twentieth century agree well with such a thought practice. In the method of investigation of natural science, “pragmatism” and the “As-If Philosophy” are actually at work. If these modes of conception now appear to be special philosophical thought tendencies also, we see in this fact that modern philosophy has basically taken on the form of natural science.

[ 12 ] For this reason, thinkers who instinctively feel how the demand of the spirit of modern world conception is secretly at work will quite understandably be confronted with the question: How can we uphold a conception of the self-conscious ego in the face of the perfection of the natural scientific method? It may be said that natural science is about to produce a world picture in which the self-conscious ego does not find a place, for what natural science can give as a picture of the external man contains the self-conscious soul only in the manner in which the magnet contains its energy. There are now two possibilities. We either delude ourselves into believing that we produce a serious statement when we say, “Our brain thinks,” and then accept the verdict that “the spiritual man” is merely the surface expression of material reality, or we recognize in this “spiritual man” a self-dependent essential reality and are thus driven out of the field of natural science with our knowledge of man. The French philosophers, Emile Boutroux (1845–1921) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941), are thinkers who accept the latter possibility.

[ 13 ] Boutroux proceeds from a criticism of the modern mode of conception that intends to reduce all world processes to the laws of natural science. We understand the course of his thought if we consider that a plant, for example, contains processes that, to be sure, are regulated by laws effective also in the mineral world, but that it is quite impossible to imagine that these mineral laws themselves cause this plant life through their own content. If we want to recognize that plant life develops on the basis of mineral activity, we must presuppose that it is a matter of perfect indifference to the mineral forces if plant life develops from this basis. There must be a spontaneously creative element added to the mineral agencies if plant life is to be produced. There is, therefore, a creative element everywhere in nature. The mineral realm is there but a creative element stands behind it. The latter produces the plant life based on the ground of the mineral world. So it is in all the spheres of natural order up to the conscious human soul, indeed, including all sociological processes. The human soul does not spring from mere biological laws, but directly from the fundamental creative element and it assimilates the biological processes and laws to its own entity. The fundamental creative element is also at work in the sociological realm. This brings human souls into the appropriate connections and interdependence. Thus, in Boutroux's book, On the Concept of Natural Laws in the Science and Philosophy of Today (1895), we find:

Science shows us a hierarchy of laws, which we can, to be sure, bring closer and closer together but which we cannot blend into a single law. It shows us, furthermore, besides this relative dissimilarity of the laws, a mutual influence of these laws on each other. The physical laws affect the living being, but the biological laws are at work at the same time.

Boutroux turns his attention from the natural laws represented in the thinking of natural science to the creative process behind these laws. Emerging directly from this process are the entities that fill the world. The behavior of these entities to one another, their mutual effect on each other, can be expressed in laws that are conceivable in thought. What is thus conceived becomes, as it were, a basis of the natural laws for this mode of conception. The entities are real and manifest their natures according to laws. The sum total of these laws, which in the final analysis constitute the unreal and are attached to an intellectually conceived existence, constitutes matter. Thus, Boutroux can say:

Motion (what he means is the totality of everything that happens between entities according to natural laws) is, in itself, obviously as much an abstraction as thinking in itself. Actually, there are only living entities, their nature being halfway between the pure concepts of thinking and motion. These living entities form a hierarchy and activity circulates in them from above to below and from below to above. The spirit moves matter neither directly nor indirectly, for there is no raw matter and what constitutes the nature of matter is closely connected with what constitutes the nature of the spirit.

But if natural laws are only the sum total of the interrelation of the entities, then the human soul also does not stand in the world as a whole in such a way that it could be explained from natural laws; from its own nature it adds its manifestations to the other laws. With this step, freedom, the spontaneous self-revelation, is secured for the soul. One can see in this philosophical mode of thinking the attempt to gain clarity concerning the true essence of nature in order to acquire an insight into the relation of the human soul to it. Boutroux arrives at a conception of the human soul that can only spring from its self-manifestation. In former times, according to Boutroux, one saw in the mutual influences of the entities, the manifestation of the “capriciousness and arbitrariness” of spiritual beings. Modern thinking has been freed from this belief by the knowledge of natural laws. As these laws exist only in the cooperative processes of the entities, they cannot contain anything that might determine the entities.

The mechanical natural laws that have been discovered by modern science are, in fact, the bond that connects the external world with the inner realm. Far from constituting a necessity, they are our liberators; they allow us to add to the contemplation in which the ancients were locked up, a science of action.

These words point to the demand of the spirit of modern world conception that has repeatedly been mentioned in this book. The ancients were limited to contemplation. To them, the soul was in the element of its true nature when it was in thought contemplation. The modern development demands a “science of action.” This science, however, could only come into being if the soul could, in thinking, lay hold of its own nature in the self-conscious ego, and if it could arrive, through a spiritual experience, at inner activities of the self with which it could see itself as being grounded in its own entity.

[ 14 ] Henri Bergson tries to penetrate to the nature of the self-conscious ego in a different way so that the mode of conception of natural science does not become an obstacle in this process. The nature of thinking itself has become a world riddle through the development of the world conceptions from the time of the Greeks to the present age. Thought has lifted the human soul out of the world as a whole. Thus, the soul lives with the thought element and must direct the question to thought: How will you lead me again to an element in which I can feel myself really sheltered in the world as whole? Bergson considers the scientific mode of thinking. He does not find in it the power through which it could swing itself into a true reality. The thinking soul is confronted with reality and gains thought images from it. It combines these images, but what the soul acquires in this manner is not rooted within reality; it stands outside reality. Bergson speaks of thinking as follows:

It is understood that fixed concepts can be extracted by our thoughts from the mobile reality, but there is no means whatever of reconstituting the mobility of the real with the fixity of concepts. (Introduction to Metaphysics)

Proceeding from thoughts of this kind, Bergson finds that all attempts to penetrate reality by means of thinking had to fail because they undertook something of which thinking, as it occurs in life and science, is quite incapable to enter into true reality. If, in this way, Bergson believes he recognizes the impotence of thinking, he does not mean to say that there is no way by means of which the right kind of experience in the self-conscious ego may reach true reality. For the ego, there is a way outside of thinking—the way of immediate experience, of intuition.

To philosophize means to reverse the normal direction of the workings of thought . . . Symbolic knowledge is relative through preexisting concepts, which goes from the fixed to the moving, but not so intuitive knowledge, which establishes itself in the moving reality and adopts the life itself of things. (Introduction to Metaphysics)

[ 15 ] Bergson believes that a transformation of our usual mode of thinking is possible so that the soul, through this transformation, will experience itself in an activity, in an intuitive perception, in which it unites with a reality that is deeper than the one that is perceived in ordinary knowledge. In such an intuitive perception the soul experiences itself as an entity that is not conditioned by the physical processes, which produce sensation and movement. When man perceives through his senses, and when he moves his limbs, a corporeal entity is at work in him, but as soon as he remembers something a purely psychic-spiritual process takes place that is not conditioned by corresponding physical processes. Thus, the whole inner life of the soul is a specific life of a psychic-spiritual nature that takes place in the body and in connection with it, but not through the body. Bergson investigated in detail those results of natural science that seemed to oppose his view. The thought indeed seems justified that our physical functions are rooted in bodily processes when one remembers how, for instance, the disease of a part of the brain causes an impediment of speech. A great many facts of this kind can be enumerated. Bergson discusses them in his book, Matter and Memory, and he decides that all these facts do not constitute any proof against the view of an independent spiritual-psychical life.

In this way, modern philosophy seems through Bergson to take up its task that is demanded by the time, the task of a concentration of the experience of the self-conscious ego, but it accomplishes this step by declaring thought as impotent. Where the ego is to experience itself in its own nature, it cannot make use of the power of thinking. The same holds for Bergson insofar as the investigation of life is concerned. What must be considered as the driving element in the evolution of the living being, what places these beings in the world in a series from the imperfect to the perfect, we cannot know through a thoughtful contemplation of the various forms of the living beings. But if man experiences himself in himself as psychical life, he stands in the element of life that lives in those beings and knows itself in him. This element of life first had to pour itself out in innumerable forms to prepare itself for what it later becomes in man. The effusion of life (elan vital), which arouses itself into a thinking being in man, is there already manifested in the simple living entity. In the creation of all living beings it has so spent itself that it retains only a part of its entire nature, the part, to be sure, that reveals itself as the fruit of all previous creations of life. In this way, the entity of man exists before all other living beings, but it can live its life as man only after having ejected all other forms of life, which man then can observe from without as one form among all others. Through his intuitive knowledge Bergson wants to vitalize the results of natural science so that he can say:

It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive and above the accidents of evolution. (Creative Evolution)

[ 16 ] From lightly woven and easily attainable thoughts like this, Bergson produces an idea of evolution that had been expressed previously in a profound mode of thought by W. H. Preuss in his book, Spirit and Matter (1882). Preuss also held that man has not developed from the other natural beings but is, from the beginning the fundamental entity, which had first to eject his preliminary stages into the other living beings before he could give himself the form appropriate for him on earth. We read in the above-mentioned book:

The time should have come . . . to establish a theory of origin of organic species that is not based solely on one-sidedly proclaimed theorems from descriptive natural science, but is also in agreement with the other natural laws that are at the same time the laws of human thinking. What is necessary is a theory that is free from all hypothesizing and that rests solely on strict conclusions from natural scientific observations in the widest sense of the word; a theory that saves the concept of the species according to the actual possibility, but at the same time adapts Darwin's concept of evolution to its own field and tries to make it fruitful. The center of this new theory is man, the species unique on our planet: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the older observers began with the objects of nature and then went astray to such an extent that they did not find the way that leads to the human being. This aim had been attained by Darwin only in an insufficient and unsatisfactory way as he sought the ancestor of the lord of creation among the animals, while the naturalist should begin with himself as a human being in order to proceed through the entire realm of existence and of thinking and to return finally to humanity. . . . It was not by accident that the human nature resulted from the entire terrestrial evolution, but by necessity. Man is the aim of all telluric processes and every other form that occurs beside him has borrowed its traits from him. Man is the first-born being of the entire cosmos. . . . When his germinating state (man in his potentiality) had come into being, the remaining organic substance no longer had the power to produce further human possibilities. What developed thereafter became animal or plan. . . .

[ 17 ] Such a view attempts to recognize man as placed on his ground by the development of modern world conception, that is to say, outside nature, in order to find something in such a knowledge of man that throws light on the world surrounding him. In the little known thinker from Elsfleth, W. H. Preuss, the ardent wish arises to gain a knowledge of the world at once through an insight into man. His forceful and significant ideas are immediately directed to the human being. He sees how this being struggles its way into existence. What it must leave behind on its way, what it must slough off, remains as nature with its entities on a lower stage of evolution surrounding man as his environment. The way toward the riddles of the world in modern philosophy must go through an investigation of the human entity manifested in the self-conscious ego. This becomes apparent through the development of this philosophy. The more one tries to enter into its striving and its search, the more one becomes aware of the fact that this search aims at such experiences in the human soul that do not only produce an insight into the human soul itself, but also kindles a light by means of which a certain knowledge concerning the world outside man can be secured. In looking at the views of Hegel and related thinkers, more recent philosophers came to doubt that there could be the power in the life of thought to spread its light beyond the realm of the soul itself. The element of thought seemed not strong enough to engender an activity that could explain the being and the meaning of the world. By contrast, the natural scientific mode of conception demanded a penetration into the core of the soul that rested on a firmer ground than thought can supply.

[ 18 ] Within this search and striving the attempts of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) take a significant position. In writings like his Introduction to the Cultural Sciences, and his Berlin Academy treatise, Contributions to the Solution of the Problem of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Right (1890), he offered expositions that are filled with all the philosophical riddles that weigh on the modern development of world conception. To be sure, the form of his presentation, which is given in the modern terminology used by scholars, prevents a more general impression being created by what he has to say. It is Dilthey's view that through the thoughts and imaginations that appear in his soul man cannot even arrive at the certainty that the perceptions of the senses correspond to a reality independent of man. Everything that is of the nature of thought, ideation and sense perception is picture. The world that surrounds man could be a dream without a reality independent of him if he were exclusively dependent on such pictures in his awareness of the real world. But not only these pictures present themselves in the soul. In the process of life the soul is filled with will, activity and feeling, all of which stream forth from it and are recognized as an immediate experience rather than intellectually. In willing and feeling the soul experiences itself as reality, but if it experienced itself only in this manner, it would have to believe that its own reality were the only one in the world. This assumption could be justified only if the will could radiate in all directions without finding any resistance. But that is not the case. The intentions of the will cannot unfold their life in that way. There is something obtruding itself in their path that they have not produced but that must nevertheless be accepted by them.

To “common sense” such a thought development of a philosopher can appear as hairsplitting. The historical account must not be deflected by such judgment. It is important to gain an insight into the difficulty that modern philosophy had to create for itself in regard to a question that seems so simple and in fact superfluous to “common sense,” that is, if the world man sees, hears, etc., may rightly be called real. The “ego” that had, as shown above in our historical account of the development of philosophical world riddles, separated itself from the world, strives to find its way back into the world from what appears in its own consciousness as a state of loneliness. It is Dilthey's opinion that this way cannot be found back into the world by saying that the soul experiences pictures (thoughts, ideas, sensations), and since these pictures appear in our consciousness they must have their causes in a real external world. A conclusion of this kind would not, according to Dilthey, give us the right to speak of a real external world, for such a conclusion is drawn within the soul according to the needs of this soul, and there is no guarantee that there really is in the external world what the soul believes in following its own needs. Therefore, the soul cannot infer an external world; it would expose itself to the danger that its conclusion might have a life only within the soul but without any significance for an external world. Certainty concerning an outer world can be gained by the soul only if this external world penetrates into the inner life of the “ego,” so that within this “ego” not only the “ego” but also the external world itself unfolds its life. This happens, according to Dilthey, when the soul experiences in its will and its feeling something that does not spring from within. Dilthey attempts to decide from the most self-evident facts a question that is for him a fundamental problem of all world conception. A passage like the following may illustrate this:

As a child presses his hand against a chair in order to move it, he measures his power against the resistance; his own life and the object are experienced together. But now let the child be locked up. It is in vain that he rattles against the door; now his entire excited will becomes aware of the compulsion of an overwhelming powerful external world that hinders and restricts, and compresses, as it were, his own self-willed life. The desire to escape from the displeasure and to gratify his impulses is followed by the consciousness of obstruction, displeasure and dissatisfaction. What the child thus experiences follows him through his entire adult life. The resistance becomes pressure. We seem to be everywhere surrounded by walls of actual facts through which we cannot break. The impressions remain, no matter how much we would like to change them; they vanish although we strive to cling to them; impulses of motion directed by the idea of avoiding something that causes pain are, under certain circumstances always followed by emotions that hold us within the realm of pain. Thus, the reality of the external world grows, so to speak, progressively more dense around us.

Why is such a reflection, which seems unimportant for many people, developed in connection with the highest problems of philosophy? It seems hopeless to gain an insight into man's position in the world as a whole from such points of departure. What is essential, however, is the fact that philosophy arrived at reflections of this kind on its way, to use Brentano's words once more, to “gain certainty for the hopes of Plato and Aristotle concerning the continued life of our better part after the dissolution of our body.” To attain sure knowledge of this kind seems to become more difficult the more the intellectual development advances. The “self-conscious ego” feels itself more and more ejected from the world; it seems to find in itself less and less the elements that connect it with the world in a way different from that of our “body,” which is subject to “dissolution.” While this “self-conscious ego” searched for a certain knowledge concerning its connection with an eternal world of the spirit, it lost the certainty of an insight in its connection with the world as revealed through the perception of the senses. In our discussion of Goethe's world conception, it was shown how Goethe searched for such experiences of the soul that carry it into a reality lying behind sense perception as a spiritual world. In this world conception the attempt is made to experience something within the soul through which it no longer lives exclusively within its own confines in spite of the fact that it feels the experienced content as its own. The soul searches for world experiences in itself through which it participates with its experience in an element that it cannot reach through the mediation of the mere physical organs. Although Dilthey's mode of reflection may appear to be quite unnecessary, his efforts must be considered as belonging to the same current of the philosophical development. He is intent on finding an element within the soul that does not spring from the soul but belongs to an independent realm. He would like to prove that the world enters the experience of the soul. Dilthey does not believe that such an entrance can be accomplished by the thought element. For him, the soul can assimilate in its entire life content, in will, striving and feeling, something that is not only soul but part of the real external world. We recognize a human being in our soul as real not by forming a representative thought picture of the person we see before us, but by allowing his will and his feeling to enter into our own will and sentiment. Thus, a human soul, in Dilthey's opinion, acknowledges a real external world not because this outer world conveys its reality through the thought element, but because the soul as a self-conscious ego, experiences inwardly in itself the external world. In this manner he is led to acknowledge the spiritual life as something of a higher significance than the mere natural existence. He produces a counterbalance to the natural scientific mode of conception with his view, and he even thinks that nature as a real external world can be acknowledged only because it can be experienced by the spiritual part of our soul. The experience of the natural is a subdivision of our general soul experience, which is of a spiritual nature, and spiritually our soul is part of a general spiritual development on earth. A great spiritual organism develops and unfolds in cultural systems in the spiritual experience and creative achievement of the various peoples and ages. What develops its forces in this spiritual organism permeates the individual human souls. They are embedded in the spiritual organism. What they experience, accomplish and produce receives its impulses not from the stimulation's of nature, but from the comprehensive spiritual life. Dilthey's mode of conception is full of understanding for that of natural science. He often speaks in his discussions of the results of the natural scientists, but, as a counterbalance to his recognition of natural development, he insists on the independent existence of a spiritual world. Dilthey finds the content of a science of the spiritual in the contemplation of the cultures of different peoples and ages.

[ 19 ] Rudolf Eucken (1864–1926) arrives at a similar recognition of an independent spiritual world. He finds that the natural scientific mode of thought becomes self-contradictory if it intends to be more than a one-sided approach to reality, if it wants to proclaim what it finds within the possible grasp of its own knowledge as the only reality. If one only observed nature as it offers itself to the senses, one could never obtain a comprehensive conception of it. In order to explain nature, one must draw on what the spirit can experience only through itself, what it can never derive from external observation. Eucken proceeds from the vivid feeling that the soul has of its own spontaneous work and creation when it is occupied in the contemplation of external nature. He does not fail to recognize in which way the soul is dependent on what it perceives through its sense organs and how it is determined through everything that has its natural basis in the body. But he directs his attention to the autonomous regulating and life-inspiring activity of the soul that is independent of the body. The soul gives direction and conclusive connection to the world of sensations and perceptions. It is not only determined by stimuli that are derived from the physical world but it experiences purely spiritual impulses in itself. Through these impulses the soul is aware that it has its being in a real spiritual world. Into its experiences and creations flow the forces from a spiritual world to which it belongs. This spiritual world is directly experienced as real in the soul that knows itself as one with that world. In this way, the soul sees itself, according to Eucken, supported by a living and creative spiritual world. It is his opinion that the thought element, the intellectual forces, are not powerful enough to fathom the depths of this spiritual world. What streams from the spiritual world into man pours itself into his entire comprehensive soul life, not only into his intellect. This world of the spirit is endowed with the character of personality of a substantial nature. It also impregnates the thought element but it is not confined to it. The entire soul may feel itself in a substantial spiritual connection.

Eucken, in his numerous writings, knows how to describe in a lofty and emphatic way this spiritual world as it weaves and has its being: The Struggle for a Spiritual Content of Life (1896), Truth Content of Religion (1901), Basic Outlines of a New Life Conception, Spiritual Currents of the Present Time, Life Conceptions of the Great Thinkers, and Knowledge and Life. In these books he tries to show from different points of view how the human soul, as it experiences itself and as it understands itself in this experience, is aware of being permeated and animated by a creative, living spiritual substance of which it is a part and a member. Like Dilthey, Eucken describes, as the content of the independent spiritual life, what unfolds in the civilizations of humanity in the moral, technical, social and artistic creations of the various peoples and ages.

[ 19 ] In a historical presentation as is herein attempted, there is no place for criticism of the described world conceptions. But it is not criticism to point out how a world conception develops new questions through its own character, for it is thus that it becomes a part of the historical development. Dilthey and Eucken speak of an independent spiritual world in which the individual human soul is embedded. Their theory of this spiritual world, however, leaves the following questions open: What is this spiritual world and in what way does the human soul belong to it? Does the individual soul vanish with the dissolution of the body after it participated within that body in the development of the spiritual life manifested in the cultural creations of the different peoples and ages? One can, to be sure, answer these questions from Dilthey's and Eucken's point of view by saying that what the human soul can know in its own life does not lead to results with respect to these questions. But this is precisely what can be said to characterize such world conceptions that they lead, through their mode of conception, to no means of cognition that could guide the soul or the self-conscious ego beyond what can be experienced in connection with the body. In spite of the intensity with which Eucken stresses the independence and reality of the spiritual world, what the soul experiences according to his world conception of this spiritual world, and in connection with it, is experienced through the body. The hopes of Plato and Aristotle, so often referred to in this book, with regard to the nature of the soul and its independent relation to the spiritual world are not touched by such a world conception. No more is shown than that the soul, as long as it appears within the body, participates in a spiritual world that is quite rightly called real. What it is in the spiritual world as an independent spiritual entity cannot be discussed within this philosophy. It is characteristic of these modes of conception that they do, to be sure, arrive at a recognition of a spiritual world and also of the spiritual nature of the human soul. But no knowledge results from this recognition concerning the position of the soul, the self-conscious ego, in the reality of the world, apart from the fact that it acquires a consciousness of the spiritual world through the life of the body.

The historical position of these modes of conception in the development of philosophy appears in its right light if one recognizes that they produce questions that they cannot answer with their own means. They maintain emphatically that the soul becomes in itself conscious of a spiritual world that is independent of itself. But how is this consciousness acquired? Only through the means of cognition that the soul has in and through its existence in the body. Within this form of existence a certainty of a real spiritual world arises. But the soul finds no way to experience its own self-contained entity in the spirit outside the body. What the spirit manifests, stimulates and creates within the soul is perceived by it as far as the physical existence enables it to do so. What it is as a spirit in the spiritual world and, in fact, whether or not it is a separate entity within that world, is a question that cannot be answered by the mere recognition of the fact that the soul within the body can be conscious of its connection with a living and creative spiritual world. To obtain an answer of this kind it would be necessary for the self-conscious human soul, while it advances to a knowledge of the spiritual world, to become aware of its own mode of life in the world of the spirit, independent of the conditions of its bodily existence. The spiritual world would not only have to enable the soul entity to recognize its reality but it would have to convey something of its own nature to the soul. It would have to reveal to the soul in what way it is different from the world of the senses and in what manner it allows the soul entity to participate in this different mode of existence.

[ 20 ] A feeling for this question lives in those philosophers who want to contemplate the spiritual world by directing their attention toward something that cannot, according to their opinion, be found within the mere observation of nature. If it could be shown that there is something with regard to which the natural scientific mode of conception would prove to be powerless, then this could be considered to guarantee the justification of assuming a spiritual world. A mode of thought of this kind had already been indicated by Lotze (compare in Part II Chapter VI of this volume). It found forceful representatives later in Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936) and others. These thinkers are of the opinion that there is an element entering into the world conception that is inaccessible to the natural scientific mode of thought. They consider this element to be the “values” that are of decisive importance in human life. The world is no dream but a reality if it can be shown that certain experiences of the soul contain something that is independent of this soul. The actions, endeavors and will impulses of the soul are no longer sparks that light up and vanish in the ocean of existence, if one must recognize that there is something that endows them with values independent of the soul. Such values, however, the soul must acknowledge for its will impulses and its actions just as much as it must recognize that its perceptions are not merely produced by its own effort. Action and will impulses of man do not simply occur like facts of nature; they must be considered from the point of view of a legal, moral, social, esthetic or scientific value. It is quite right to insist that during the evolution of civilizations in different ages and of different peoples, man's views concerning the values of right, morality, beauty and truth have undergone changes. If Nietzsche could speak of a “revaluation of all values,” it must be acknowledged that the value of actions, thoughts and will intentions is determined from without in a similar way to the way perceptual ideation receives the character of reality from without. In the sense of the “philosophy of values” one can say: As the pressure or resistance of the natural external world make the difference between an idea that is a mere picture of fantasy or one that represents reality, so the light and approbation that fall on the soul life from an external spiritual world decide whether or not an impulse of the will, an action and a thought endeavor have a value in the world as a whole or are only arbitrary products of the soul. As a stream of values, the spiritual world flows through the lives of men in the course of history. While the human soul feels itself as living in a world determined by values, it experiences itself in a spiritual element. If this mode of conception were seriously carried out, all statements that man could make concerning the spiritual would have to take on the form of value judgments. The only thing one could then say about anything not revealed in nature and therefore not to be known through the natural scientific mode of conception, would be in which way and in what respect it possessed an independent value in the whole of the world. The question would then arise: [ 21 ] If one disregards everything in the human soul that natural science has to say about it, is it then valuable as a member of the spiritual world, and does it have a significant independent value? Can the riddles of philosophy concerning the soul be solved if one cannot speak of its existence but only of its value? Will not the philosophy of values always be forced to adopt a language similar to that of Lotze when he speaks of the continuation of the soul?

Since we consider every being only as a creature of God, there is no fundamentally valid right on which the individual soul, for instance as a “substance,” could base its claim in order to demand an eternal, individual, continued existence. Perhaps we can only maintain that every being will be preserved by God as long as its existence is of a valuable significance for the whole of His world plan. . . . (Compare page in Part II Chapter VI). of this volume.)

Here the “value” of the soul is spoken of as its decisive character. Some attention, however, is also paid to the question of how this value may be connected with the preservation of existence. One can understand the position of the philosophy of value in the course of the development of philosophy if one considers that the natural scientific mode of conception is inclined to claim all knowledge of existence for itself. If that is granted, philosophy can do nothing but resign itself to the investigation of something else, and such a “something else” is seen in these “values.” The following question, as an unsolved problem, can be found in Lotze's statement: Is it at all possible to go no further than to define and characterize values and to renounce all knowledge concerning the form of existence of the values?

[ 22 ] Many of the most recent schools of thought prove to be attempts to search within the self-conscious ego, which in the course of the philosophical development feels itself more and more separated from the world, for an element that leads back to a reunion with the world. The conceptions of Dilthey, Eucken, Windelband, Rickert and others are such attempts. They want to do justice both to the demands of natural science and to the contemplation of the experience of the soul so that a science of the spirit appears as a possibility beside the science of nature. The same aims are followed by the thought tendencies of Herman Cohen (1842–1918) (compare in Part II Chapter IV of this volume), Paul Natorp (1854–1924), August Stadler (1850–1910), Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), Walter Kinkel (born 1871) and others who share their philosophical convictions. In directing their attention to the processes of thinking itself, they believe that in this highest activity of the self-conscious ego the soul gains hold on an inner possession that allows it to penetrate into reality. They turn their attention to what appears to them as the highest fruit of thinking. A simple example of this would be the thinking of a circle in which specific representative thought pictures of any circle are disregarded entirely. As much can be embraced in this way by pure thinking as can be encompassed by the power of our soul through which we can penetrate into reality. For what we can think in this way manifests its own nature through thinking in the consciousness of man. The sciences strive to arrive, by means of their observations, experiments and methods, at such results concerning the world as can be seized in pure thinking. They will have to leave the fulfillment of this aim to a far distant future, but one can nevertheless say that insofar as they endeavor to have pure thought, they also strive to convey the true essence of things to the possession of the self-conscious ego. When man makes an observation in the sensual external world, or in the course of historical life, he has, according to this conception, no true reality before him. What the observation of the senses offers is merely the challenge to search for a reality, not a reality in itself. Only when, through the activity of the soul, a thought appears, so to speak, to reveal itself at the very place where the observation has been made, is the living reality of the observed object integrated into real knowledge. The progressively developing knowledge replaces with thought what has been observed in the world. What the observation showed in the beginning was there only because man with his senses, with his everyday imagination, realizes at first for himself the nature of things in his own limited way. What he has at his disposal in this way has significance only for himself. What he substitutes as thought for the observation is no longer troubled by his own limitation. It is as it is thought, for thought determines its own nature and reveals itself according to its own character in the self-conscious ego. Thought does not allow the ego to determine its character in any way.

[ 23 ] There lives in this world conception a subtle feeling for the development of thought life since its first philosophical flowering within Greek intellectual life. It was the thought experience that gave to the self-conscious ego the power to be vigorously conscious of its own self-dependent entity. In the present age this power of thought can be experienced in the soul as the impulse that, seized within the self-conscious ego, endows this ego with the awareness that it is not a mere external observer of things but that it lives essentially in an intimate connection with their reality. It is in thought itself that the soul can feel it contains a true and self-dependent reality. As the soul thus feels itself interwoven with thought as a content of life that breathes reality, it can again experience the supporting power of the thought element as this was experienced in Greek philosophy. It can be experienced again as strongly as it was felt in the philosophy that took thought as a perception. It is true that in the world conception of Cohen and kindred spirits, thought cannot be considered as a perception in the sense of Greek philosophy. But in this conception the inner permeation of the ego with the thought world, which the ego acquired through its own work, is such that this experience includes, at the same time, the awareness of its reality.

The connection with Greek philosophy is emphasized by these thinkers. Cohen expresses himself on this point as follows. “The relation that Parmenides forged as the identity of thinking and being must persist.” Another thinker who also accepts this conception, Walter Kinkel, is convinced that “only thinking can know being, for both thinking and being are, fundamentally understood, one and the same.” It is through this doctrine that Parmenides became the real creator of scientific idealism (Idealism and Realism).

It is also apparent from the presentations of these thinkers how the formulation of their thoughts presupposes the century-long effect of the thought evolution since the Greek civilization. In spite of the fact that these thinkers start from Kant, which could have fostered in them the opinion that thought lives only within the soul, outside true reality, the supporting power of thought exerts itself in them. This thought has gone beyond the Kantian limitation and it forces these thinkers who contemplate its nature to become convinced that thought itself is reality, and that it also leads the soul into reality if it acquires this element rightly in inner work and, equipped with it, seeks the way into the external world. In this philosophical mode of thinking thought proves intimately connected with the world contemplation of the self-conscious ego. The fundamental impulse of this thought tendency appears like a discovery of the possible service that the thought element can accomplish for the ego. We find in the followers of this philosophy views like these: “Only thinking itself can produce what may be accepted as being.” “Being is the being of thinking” (Cohen).

Now the question arises: Can these philosophers expect of their thought experience, which is produced through the conscious work in the self-conscious ego, what the Greek philosopher expected of it when he accepted thought as a perception? If one believes to perceive thought, one can be of the opinion that it is the real world that reveals it. As the soul feels itself connected with thought as a perception, it can consider itself as belonging to the element of the world that is thought, indestructible thought, while the sense perception reveals only destructible entities. The part of the human being that is perceptible to the senses can then be supposed to be perishable, but what emerges in the human soul as thought makes it appear as a member of the spiritual, the true reality. Through such a view the soul can conceive that it belongs to a truly real world. This could be achieved by a modern world conception only if it could show that the thought experience not only leads knowledge into a true reality, but also develops the power to free the soul from the world of the senses and to place it into true reality. The doubts that arise in regard to this question cannot be counteracted by the insight into the reality of the thought element if the latter is considered as acquired by perception actively produced through the work of the soul. For, from what could the certainty be derived that what the soul produces actively in the world of the senses, can also give it a real significance in a world that is not perceived by senses? It could be that the soul, to be sure, could procure a knowledge of reality through its actively produced thoughts, but that nevertheless the soul itself was not rooted in this reality. Also, this world conception merely points to a spiritual life, but it cannot prevent the unbiased observer from finding philosophical riddles at its end that demand answers and call for soul experiences for which this philosophy does not supply the foundations. It can arrive at the conviction that thought is real, but it cannot find through thought a guarantee for the reality of the soul.

[ 24 ] The philosophical thinking at which A. v. Leclaire (born 1848), Wilhelm Schuppe (1836–1913), Johannes Rehmke (1848 – 1930), von Schubert-Soldern (born 1852), and others arrived, shows how philosophical inquiry can remain confined to the narrow circle of the self-conscious ego without finding a possibility to make the transition from this region into the world where this ego could link its own existence to a world reality. There are certain differences among these philosophies, but what is characteristic of all of them is that they all stress that everything man can count as belonging to his world must manifest itself within the realm of his consciousness. On the ground of their philosophy the thought cannot be conceived that would even presuppose anything about a territory of the world if the soul wanted to transcend with its conceptions beyond the realm of consciousness. Because the “ego” must comprise everything to which its knowledge extends within the folds of its consciousness, because it holds it within the consciousness, it therefore appears necessary to this view that the entire world is within the limits of this awareness. That the soul should ask itself: How do I stand with the possession of my consciousness in a world that is independent of this consciousness, is an impossibility for this philosophy. From its point of view, one would have to decide to give up all questions of this kind. One would have to become blind to the fact that there are inducements within the realm of the conscious soul life to look beyond that realm, just as in reading one does not look for the meaning in the forms that are visible on the paper, but to the significance that is expressed by them. As in reading, it is a question not of studying the forms of the letters as it is of no importance for the conveyed meaning to consider the nature of these forms themselves, so it could be irrelevant for an insight into true reality that within the sphere of the “ego” everything capable of being known has the character of consciousness.

[ 25 ] The philosophy of Carl du Prel (1839–99) stands as an opposite pole to this philosophical opinion. He is one of the spirits who have deeply felt the insufficiency of the opinion that considers the natural scientific mode of conception to which so many people have grown accustomed to be the only possible form of world explanation. He points out that this mode of conception unconsciously sins against its own statements, for natural science must admit on the basis of its own results

that we never perceive the objective processes of nature but rather their effect on us, not vibrations of the ether but light, not air vibrations but sounds. We have then, so to speak, a subjectively falsified world picture, but this does not interfere with our practical orientation because this falsification shows no individual differences and proceeds in a constant manner and according to law. . . . Materialism itself has proved through natural science that the world transcends beyond our senses. It has undermined its own foundation and it has sawed off the branch on which it had been sitting. As a philosophy, however, it still continues to sit on that branch. Materialism, therefore, has no right at all to call itself a philosophy … . It has only the justification of a branch of knowledge; furthermore, the world, the object of its study, is a world of mere appearance. To try to build a world conception on this foundation is an obvious self-contradiction. The real world is entirely different, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, from the one that is known to materialism, and only the real world can be the object of a philosophy. (Carl du Prel, The Riddle of Man.)

Such objections are necessarily caused by the materialistically colored mode of thought of natural science. Its weakness is noticed by many people who share the point of view of du Prel. The latter can be considered as a representative of a pronounced trend of modern philosophy. What is characteristic of this trend is the way in which it tries to penetrate into the realm of the real world. This way still shows the aftereffect of the natural scientific mode of conception, although the latter is at the same time most violently criticized. Natural science starts from the facts that are accessible to the sensory consciousness. It finds itself forced to refer to a supersensible element, for only the light is sensually perceptible, not the vibrations of the ether. The vibrations then belong to a realm that is, at least, extrasensory in its nature. But has natural science the right to speak of an extrasensory element? It means to limit its investigations to the realm of sense perceptions. Is anyone justified to speak of supersensible elements who restricts his scientific endeavors to the results of the consciousness that is bound to the senses and therefore to the body?

Du Prel wants to grant this right of investigating the supersensible only to a thinker who seeks the nature of the human soul outside the realm of the senses. What he considers as the chief demand in this direction is the necessity to demonstrate manifestations of the soul that prove the soul is also active when it is not bound to the body. Through the body the soul develops its sensual consciousness. In the phenomena of hypnotism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism, it becomes apparent that the soul is active when the sensual consciousness is eliminated. The soul life, therefore, extends further than the realm of consciousness. It is here that du Prel arrives at the diametrically opposite position to those of the characterized philosophers of the all-embracing consciousness who believe that the limits of consciousness define at the same time the entire realm of philosophy. For du Prel, the nature of the soul is to be sought outside the circle of this consciousness. If, according to him, we observe the soul when it is active without the usual means of the senses, we have the proof that it is of a supersensible nature.

Among the means through which this can be done, du Prel and many others count, besides the observation of the above-mentioned “abnormal” psychic phenomena, also the phenomena of spiritualism. It is not necessary to dwell here on du Prel's opinion concerning this field, for what constitutes the mainspring of his view becomes apparent also if one considers only his attitude toward hypnotism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism. Whoever wants to prove the spiritual nature of the human soul cannot limit himself to showing that the soul has to refer to a supersensible world in its cognitive process. For natural science could answer that it does not follow that the soul is itself rooted in the supersensible realm because it has a knowledge of a supersensible world. It could very well be that knowledge of the supersensible could also be dependent on the activity of the body and thus be of significance only for a soul that is bound to a body. It is for this reason that du Prel feels it necessary to show that the soul not only knows the supersensible while it is itself bound to the body, but that it experiences the supersensible while it is outside the body. With this view, he also arms himself against objections that can be raised from the viewpoint of the natural scientific mode of thinking against the conceptions of Eucken, Dilthey, Cohen, Kinkel and other defenders of a knowledge of a spiritual world. He is, however, not protected against the doubts that must be raised against his own procedure.

Although it is true that the soul can find an access to the supersensible only if it can show how it is itself active outside the sensual realm, the emancipation of the soul from the sensual world is not assured by the phenomena of hypnotism, somnambulism and hypnotic suggestion, nor by all other processes to which du Prel refers for this purpose. In regard to all these phenomena it can be said that the philosopher who wants to explain them still proceeds only with the means of his ordinary consciousness. If this consciousness is to be useless for a real explanation of the world, how can its explanations, which are applied to the phenomena according to the conditions of this consciousness, be of any decisive significance for these phenomena? What is peculiar in du Prel is the fact that he directs his attention to certain facts that point to a supersensible element, but that he, nevertheless, wants to remain entirely on the ground of the natural scientific mode of thought when he explains those facts. But should it not be necessary for the soul to enter the supersensible in its mode of thinking when the supersensible becomes the object of its interest? Du Prel looks at the supersensible, but as an observer he remains within the realm of the sensual world. If he did not want to do this, he would have to demand that only a hypnotized person can say the right things concerning his experiences under hypnosis, that only in the state of somnambulism could knowledge concerning the supersensible be acquired and that what the not-hypnotized, the non-somnambulist must think concerning these phenomena is of no validity. If we follow this thought consistently, we arrive at an impossibility. If one speaks of a transposition of the soul outside the realm of the senses into another form of existence, one must intend to acquire the knowledge of this existence within that other region. Du Prel points at a path that must be taken in order to gain access to the supersensible. But he leaves the question open regarding the means that are to be used on this path.

[ 26 ] A new thought current has been stimulated through the transformation of fundamental physical concepts that has been attempted by Albert Einstein (1879–1955). The attempt is of significance also for the development of philosophy. Physics previously followed its given phenomena by thinking of them as being spread out in empty three dimensional space and in one dimensional time. Space and time were supposed to exist outside things and events. They were, so to speak, self-dependent, rigid quantities. For things, distances were measured in space. For events, duration was determined in time. Distance and duration belong, according to this conception, to space and time, not to things and events. This conception is opposed by the theory of relativity introduced by Einstein. For this theory, the distance between two things is something that belongs to those things themselves. As a thing has other properties it has also the property of being at a certain distance from a second thing. Besides these relations that are given by the nature of things there is no such thing as space. The assumption of space makes a geometry that is thought for this space, but this same geometry can be applied to the world of things. It arises in a mere thought world. Things have to obey the laws of this geometry. One can say that the events and situations of the world must follow the laws that are established before the observation of things. This geometry now is dethroned by the theory of relativity. What exists are only things and they stand in relations to one another that present themselves geometrically. Geometry thus becomes a part of physics, but then one can no longer maintain that their laws can be established before the observation of the things. No thing has any place in space but only distances relative to other things.

[ 27 ] The same is assumed for time. No process takes place at a definite time; it happens in a time-distance relative to another event. In this way, temporal distances in the relation of things and spatial intervals become homogenous and flow together. Time becomes a fourth dimension that is of the same nature as the three dimensions of space. A process in a thing can be determined only as something that takes place in a temporal and spatial distance relative to other events. The motion of a thing becomes something that can be thought only in relation to other things.

[ 28 ] It is now expected that only this conception will produce unobjectionable explanations of certain physical processes while such processes lead to contradictory thoughts if one assumes the existence of an independent space and independent time.

[ 29 ] If one considers that for many thinkers a science of nature was previously considered to be something that can be mathematically demonstrated, one finds in the theory of relativity nothing less than an attempt to declare any real science of nature null and void. For just this was regarded as the scientific nature of mathematics that it could determine the laws of space and time without reference to the observation of nature. Contrary to this view, it is now maintained that the things and processes of nature themselves determine the relations of space and time. They are to supply the mathematical element. The only certain element is surrendered to the uncertainty of space and time observations.

[ 30 ] According to this view, every thought of an essential reality that manifests its nature in existence is precluded. Everything is only in relation to something else.

[ 31 ] Insofar as man considers himself within the world of natural things and events, he will find it impossible to escape the conclusions of this theory of relativity. But if he does not want to lose himself in mere relativities, in what may be called an impotence of his inner life, if he wants to experience his own entity, he must not seek what is “substantial in itself' in the realm of nature but in transcending nature, in the realm of the spirit.

[ 32 ] It will not be possible to evade the theory of relativity for the physical world, but precisely this fact will drive us to a knowledge of the spirit. What is significant about the theory of relativity is the fact that it proves the necessity of a science of the spirit that is to be sought in spiritual ways, independent of the observation of nature. That the theory of relativity forces us to think in this way constitutes its value within the development of world conception.

[ 33 ] It was the intention of this book to describe the development of what may be called philosophical activity in the proper sense of the word. The endeavor of such spirits as Richard Wagner, Leo Tolstoi and others had for this reason to be left unconsidered, significant as discussion of their contribution must appear when it is a question of following the currents that lead from philosophy into our general spiritual culture.

To-day, the 8th May, the Theosophical Society celebrates the Day of the White Lotus, which to the outer world is known, in the usual terminology of the day, as the death-day of the instigator of that Spiritual stream in which we now stand. To us it would seem more appropriate to select a different designation for to-day's festival, one taken from our knowledge of the Spiritual world and which should run more like this: ‘The day of transition from an activity on the physical plane to one in the Spiritual worlds’. For to us it is not only an inner conviction in the ordinary sense of the words but an ever-increasing knowledge, that what the outer world calls death is but the passing from one form of work, from an activity stimulated by the impressions of the outer physical world, to one entirely stimulated by the Spiritual world. When to-day we remember the great instigator, H. P. Blavatsky, and the leading persons of her movement who have also now passed over into the Spiritual realm, let us in particular try to form a clear idea of what we ourselves must make of our Spiritual movement so that it may represent a continuation of that activity which she exercised on the physical plane as long as she remained on it; so that on the one hand it may be a continuation of that activity and at the same time be possible for the Foundress herself to continue her work from the Spiritual world, both now and in the future. On such a day as this it is seemly that we should in a sense break away from our usual study of theosophical matters, and theosophical life, and should instead go through a sort of conscientious retrospect, a retrospect concerning what the tasks and duties the theosophical movement sets before us, and which may also lead us to a sort of prevision of what this movement should become in the future, and what we should do, and avoid doing.

What we are carrying on as the Theosophical movement came into the world as the result of certain quite special circumstances and certain historical necessities. You know that there was here no question, as in other Spiritual movements or unions of any sort,—of one or more persons determining to follow certain ideals according as the quality of their hearts and minds leads them to feel enthusiasm for these ideals, trying to enthuse other people and to induce them to form societies or unions for carrying these into practice. Not in this way should we view the Theosophical movement if we understand it aright. We only do this if we look upon it as an historical necessity of our present life: something which, regardless of what people feel or would like to feel about it, was bound to come, for it already lay in the womb of time, so to speak, and had to be brought to birth. In what way then may we regard the Theosophical movement? It may be considered as a descent, a new descent of Spiritual life, of Spiritual wisdom and Spiritual forces, into the sensible physical world from the super-sensible ones. Such a descent had to take place for the further development of man, and must repeatedly take place in the future. It cannot of course be our task to-day to point out all the different great impulses through which Spiritual life has flowed down from the super-sensible worlds in order that the soul-life of man should be renewed when it had, so to speak, grown old; but in the course of time this has frequently occurred. One thing, however, must be borne in mind.

In the primeval past, not long after the great Atlantean catastrophe which the traditions of the various countries record as the story of the Flood, came that impulse that we may describe as the inflow of Spiritual life that poured into the development of mankind through the Holy Rishis. Then came that other stream of Spiritual life that flowed down into man's evolution through Zarathustra or Zoroaster, and we find another stream of like nature in that which came to the old Israelites through the revelations of Moses.