The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

I think that it is good right now to become familiar with the most varied areas of life and the laws of existence which I have been referring to during these lectures. I want to say these laws of existence take on an importance in their realm of the spiritual life, an importance of being, which up to now has frequently not been taken into account in world opinion. Particularly in our present time it is imperative to totally understand the current 5th post-Atlantean epoch in which we stand, with all its peculiarities, in order for us to become ever more and more conscious of how affective we are within it. You know of course that we consider the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch beginning at the start of the 15th Century, from about 1413 onward. The beginning of the 15th Century was a significant, profound, incisive point for western humanity. The creation of such an about-turn which came about didn't happen all at once, it was preparatory. In the first moments of this epoch one only sees a gradual expansion. Old patterns from the earlier epochs transform into the new one and so on. Preparations were being made for a long time which were only really being experienced as a mighty reversal at the start of the 15th Century.

If we want to consider another strong western historical impact in the centre of the Middle Ages, we may look at the rule of Charlemagne from 768 to 814. If you wish to visualize everything which happened in the West to the furthest boundaries up to the time of Charlemagne, you will have difficulties with this self-visualization. For many observers of history today such difficulties do not exist because they all shear it under the same comb. Only for those who want to look at reality, will such deep differences exist. It becomes quite difficult for people in today's world of experiences and impressions to reach a concept about the completely different condition of life in Europe up to the time of Charlemagne and beyond. We may however say that after Charlemagne, in the 10th, 11th and 12th Centuries a time began in preparation of our own epoch, the 5th post-Atlantean epoch. Up to the time of Charlemagne old relationships actually flowed which in our present day, as we have already said, we can't have a true imagination. Then again preparations were beginning for a new epoch, and in these three centuries, the 10th, 11th and 12th—it started in the 9th already—events took place in Europe in all areas of life producing forces which were expressed later, particularly in the 15th century.

One can say these centuries just mentioned was a time for preparation but people today are hardly inclined to refer to this just as little as they will say Rome is in control of European affairs. The papacy in the time from the 9th century, before the middle of the 9th century where the ruling of Europe was so vigorously taken under control, where all relationships effectively extended, must not be imagined as the same effective papacy in a later century or even today. It can rather be said that in those times the papacy knew instinctively what the most important areas of life needed, in west, central or southern Europe. I already pointed out last time that the oriental culture was gradually pushed back; it had to wait in eastern Europe, in Byzantianism, in Russianness. There it waited indeed, waited right up to our present time.

General observations can develop particular clarity in those areas which, in the broadest sense, one can refer to as artistic. If you want an idea about what had been pushed back at the time to the East, what the west, central and southern Europe should not acquire, if you want to reach an understanding about it, then compare it with a Russian icon:

In the picture of the Virgin Mary of the East is an echo of what had been pushed back into the East at the time. In such a picture quite another spirit holds sway than can ever be found reigning in western, southern and central art; it is something quite different. Such an icon picture still today presents an image which has been born directly out of the spiritual world. If you imagine it in a lively manner you can't imagine a physical space behind the Russian Madonna image. You can imagine that behind the picture is the spiritual world and out of the spiritual world this image has appeared: just so are the lines, so is everything in it. When you take the basic character of this image as it is born out of the spiritual world then you have exactly that which had been held at a distance in the 9th Century from western, southern and central Europe:

Why? Such things should be thoroughly and objectively considered historically. Why did this have to be held back? Simply on the grounds that the nations of Europe—central, western and southern Europe—had completely different soul impulses which were not in the position to understand humanity out of original elementary nature, this was being pushed back, stopped in the East. The nature of the western European soul was quite differently focussed.

When this which was being pushed back to the East was transplanted into central, western and southern Europe, it could only remain external, outside the east of Europe; it could never grow together with the central, western or southern European soul distinctions. An area had to be created in western, southern and central Europe, an area for what gradually wanted to come out of the depths of the very folk soul itself.

I would like to say Rome, in actual fact, understood this with genial instinct. With disputes regarding dogmatism showing quite a different character, the content of dogma disputes is not the real story; the content of these disputes is merely the final spiritual expression. It goes much further. Among other things it was about what I have just been characterising for you. So we see that from the 9th Century and into the next centuries Rome worked ever more strongly for a space in Europe where the real striving of the folk souls could unfold. The striving of the folk souls also appeared in greater clarity.

You see, when you focus on what could have been brought to the fore if the eastern influence had not been pushed back but could stretch over Europe—Charlemagne made a large contribution - if it had stretched over Europe then Europe, as I've already mentioned, would have made available certain observations of representations which speak directly out of the spiritual world. This did not happen, firstly because Europe had to prepare itself for the materialistic 5th post-Atlantean period which was prepared most intensely in central Europe. Interest centred mainly on everything other than what came directly out of the spiritual world like line, form and colouring. Humanity was interested in something different. Above all there was an interest in Europe for contemporary events, for reporting and for results. By studying individuals, singled out in humanity, you realize they have positioned themselves in the course of historic, relatable events. The 10th, 11th, 12th Centuries can also be called the Germanic Roman Empire because from Rome the capacity was created, a capacity which spread for an interest in relating stories, an interest in the working of time and for conceptualising a particular form set in time.

You see, this is again a different viewpoint from the viewpoint I indicated in similar lectures in previous years. This cooperation of the central European empire with the Roman church and its spread is an inner image of the way the 5th post-Atlantic epoch prepared central Europe at the time. From this it is clear that central Europe prepared itself in this period with very little interest for spatial educational art. Constituted informative art became borrowed - just remember the presentation which I gave you in previous years—borrowed from what came over from the East, spread, one might say, through to the very joints of principal interest. What shot up out of the folklore itself was being told. The content which was to be told had to be taken out of national character, intimately connected with nationality.

You can encounter amazing images of central European life, life in the areas of the Rhine, the Donau and the northern coastline in the depiction of the songs of the Nibelungen, the Walthari and `Gudrun'. The manner and way in which these writings are presented indicate their obvious interest in events of the time. Look how in the time of Charles the Great when the poem `Heiland' originated, the stories of the Gospels are woven into the poem with central European characters, characters extracted from biblical events and placed directly into the central European interests of the `Heiland'. It had to be born out of the life of the European folk soul. Through this the eastern tradition, which cares little for the temporal and historical, was pushed back. For this reason, it was pushed back. If we observe how these concerns of the European nations rise from deep underground and reach the surface, then it is often only possible, and with difficulty, to really penetrate into the depth of feeling, into the deep soul experience which the European human spirit connected to in its own deepening encounter with the essential spiritual events. One might say, that which was pushed back to the East from spatial infinity and its manifestation out of space, which had to appear superficially in central Europe should reappear directly out of the human souls themselves, out of the depths of the soul, not out of the widths of space—but out of the depth of souls.

The mysterious prevailing of soul depths under the surface of direct observation was already something living at that time in human souls. During the centuries we've been talking about, people were instinctively permeated with the knowledge that their souls had in the depths of their being secret impulses, appearing only sometimes at celebratory moments in their soul experiences. Life seemed deeper than what the eyes could see, the ears could hear and so on; something unfathomable rose from soul depths as a profound experience. I could say we experience an echo of this kind of thing when we hear something as beautiful as the poetry of Walthers von der Vogelweide, who to some extend created an ending to a purely linguistic age, an age when the ability to depict formless manifestations in soul depths in a pictorial manner had not yet developed. In these soul depths we are stirred when we allow Walthers von der Vogelweide's small poem to work on us, where he speaks about his own life in retrospect. Maturing as a man when knowledge grew in his soul and light fell on his soul depths from which knowledge had previously appeared as mysterious waves in a dream, now appeared in a mood, he expressed as follows:

“Oh, whereto did all my years disappear!
I dreaming my life or is it real?
What appears for real, was it illusion's face?
I've slept so long and didn't even know it.
I've been woken and all is as unfamiliar
once was familiar, like my own hand.”

Thus speaks Walther von der Vogelweide at the end of the three long centuries, the 10, 11, 12th centuries, the epoch in which the Holy Roman Empire blossomed at the close of this time period. It was the period of time in which the interest for current events developed. Art demanded expression, images were to express events happening and going to happen in central, western and southern Europe. A glance to the East gives the impression of existence and peace, of a quiet contemplation out of the spiritual world. Events directly taking place here, born in the human soul, binding the soul with the greatest of all, the most mysterious, all this was eager to be represented in a pictorial manner. Fertilization from the South was needed anyway, where echoes of all the traditions having come from the East were still maintained. Bringing events to expression was the primary goal.

In this way striving in art was contained in the West, one might say, in two opposing streams, for certainly the representation of existence was pushed back East, but only pushed back—many things remained. Above all, something remained which can be observed in the East where strict rules determined the depiction of the icons, and old rules were being adhered to, where no violation was allowed through lines, expression, and so on. All this was transplanted into the West and alongside this was the requirement for everything experienced in the surroundings, united with traditions coming into central Europe from the South. Naturally depictions with this requirement firstly appeared in primitive, simplistic images according to biblical narratives, Bible stories. Only at the beginning of the next three centuries, the 13th, 14th and 15th did a power, one could call it, rise up out of Central Europe which could depict image-rich pictures. This power is thanks to specific facts; facts which during these centuries, the 13th, 14th and 15th, expanded and matured over the whole Central and Southern Europe as something one could call city domination, the blossoming of rural development. The cities, so proud at the time of their powerful autonomy, developed the particular powers of their folk in their midst. Such cities were not uniform, either as the old Germanic Roman Empire which was in decline, nor uniform as in the later state communities, because these cities were autonomous and could develop their individual strength according to the needs of the specific land, lifestyle and place. One doesn't understand the times of the 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries if one does not again and again glance at the blossoming of city freedom at the time.

Let us visualize this flowering of city freedom—by roughly taking the 11th to 15th centuries—and consider what this freedom in the cities discovered in relation to art impulses. Some traditions originating from Rome remained. The main issue had been pushed to the East; yet some traditions remained behind, traditions of alignment, colour application and, in relation to facial expression, the eyes and nose had to be done in a certain way. Yet all of that counteracted with the aim to represent facts. These battles had two sides, we can see it here where the artistic element first only dares to appear, turns from within itself outward, where, I might say, the trained monk from Rome allows himself to be inundated with the influence from central Europe, the impulse to not merely depict biblical events but that the imagery appearing in the Bible, which are glimpses from the spiritual worlds, are depicted in such a manner that the Bible itself becomes the very expression of how people live in daily life. This was now imposed on the monk in his solitary work. When he paints his miniatures and represents biblical scenes in a small manner, he must be accountable on the one side for the remains of tradition and on the other side, what wants to manifest as life under the surface.

Today I have two such miniatures to show you from which you will see, how during the 11th, 12th and also in the 13th Centuries the battle between traditional painting and history was still visible in small paintings.

Look at such a painting from an evangelist representing the “Birth of Christ”—we considered this image in previous years.

See how much you are reminded of the tradition of mere existence. Consider how still here, I might say, these figures are shown in such a way which does not reflect how people in an outer naturalistic reality live but observe how the figures are born out of the imagination people made up of what the spiritual worlds were for them. From there the saints, the Christ figure himself appears; all this came out of another world. Behind the surface of the painting we can only imagine the spiritual world—of course pictorially and radically spoken.

Above all there is no trace of naturalism. Observe how there is no trace of perspective, no trace or an attempt in this painting to somehow represent space—everything is on the surface, all but intellectual representation. Despite all this, when you look at the single figures, you experience the urge of something wanting to be expressed. You will notice there are two things fighting with one another. Look at the face on the right and the one on the left and you will see how the eyes, maintaining something from tradition by the person in his monk cell had a thought from his teaching that somehow or other eyes had to be done, this and that way the expression had to be done—but he battled with it, he adjusted to a certain extent the view of the situation to the events.

Even in these tiny paintings made in the gospels, in books of the bible, this battle of the two elements can be seen in a struggle. Besides this you see again, for example in Cimabue even more, how existence was expressed in the oriental form. How we are absolutely reminded of the angel figures above - which already appear when it comes to Cimabue as an oriental echo of the conception of the pictorial—as a proclamation out of the spiritual world itself, as an experience of being, not of historical events!

Another test is the second picture, which I have prepared, which comes from the Trier Gospels:

Here we see the proclamation to the shepherds, above is Christ's birth. When you take this shepherds' proclamation of the angel announcing “Glory in the Heights and peace on earth to men of goodwill”, when you take this you discover a mixing of these two impulses.

In all three of the men's faces we find the endeavour: represent the facts! On the other side however everything at a distance is about natural observation; how traditions play into this! I would like to say, feel how the wings of the angels are in the book: wings should be depicted in such a manner that they are at an angle to the main scene, pointing to both sides, and so on. You sense the requirement and at the same time sense such a depiction impinges on the endeavour which can't be achieved according to the observation of historical events. Sense this and observe in all of them how little nature observation is apparent, how there is no trace of spatial application, no trace of perspective in this image, that everything is, I want to say, or implied in the place where they are depicted due to requirements of how something like this was to be done, teach, while still substantially in control.

Now we see how at the end of the three centuries of the Germanic Roman Empire the impulse from the establishment of cities to depict history and unite it with the requirements of experiential representation, how this urge in Central Europe came to a sudden and most beautiful flowering. Cologne is one of those cities where the city's freedom flowered the most intensively and at the same time had the possibility, through intensive expansion of the Roman Catholic dominance, to take up traditional design art coming over from the East. No wonder as a result that just in Cologne the possibility encounters us in how, in the most wonderful way this comes together, weaving the two impulses into one another: the one most ancient and revered tradition depicted—what a Madonna looks like—and the urge to represent history. How a Madonna had to look like—in the East was petrified spiritually, majestic, serene, but still, solidified. It had to wait. Movement was brought in from the West. The revelation brought in from above, from heaven, revealed in the Madonna figure, is to be experienced in the Russian Madonna as magnificently elevated and permeated with something one can see directly: the greatest beauty possibly revealed in a human face, the loveliest direct expression of the ability to love, human friendliness, human goodwill, everything living in the surroundings lived in an inner relationship with the revealed figure of the Madonna.

Consider this and then look at the painting done by Master Wilhelm:

Here you can see what I actually want to point out: you can see how an attempt is made to bring life, that means events, into being in the Virgin Mary depiction. Here individual observation merges with tradition right into the details, one might say: old prescriptions were only applicable to attitude, nobility of form, serenity but not much further than in the expression of line, thus tradition was already being experienced from individual observation. This is what we can admire so much in these masters.

Another painting by the same master:

Another painting by the same master ... to indicate what I have just mentioned, shown in another representation. Consider just how much has come through the traditional heavenly figure, the revealed form of the Redeemer's face, of Veronica's face, in which we can see something revealed directly out of soul depths. See for yourself how those angel faces looking up are already individualized! Consider how with this image, as a result of the individualizing of figures it is no longer possible to actually imagine heaven behind it. However, something else is possible. At the back of the image, which came out of the Eastern inclination (245) we can actually imagine the spiritual world, something in addition to what the image presents. Here (237) we can also imagine something else; we must feel something different from what the image depicts. We feel much of what has gone before due to knowledge from the Bible; we feel much of what has resulted, events have been experienced and what is depicted are scenes from before and after. Thus there is not something like a spiritual realm behind it; the experience is of something before and something afterwards. When the singular is represented—visual art does this after all—then a single element is lifted out of the events. This is what we find towards the conclusion of every time period, towards which Rome out of such a deep understanding through the three to four centuries created in the European realm, which wanted to rise out of folklore. The conclusion appears to us and how this works in Cologne, by such genial Masters being capable of creating something like this.

These two intertwining impulses which I have characterised flow together most remarkably here. Now I would like to indicate their power which had worked everywhere by showing you a couple of paintings, starting with Constance who probably learnt from this and many countries through which he travelled, to arrive in Cologne and gradually became the follower of so-called Master Wilhelm, Stephan Lochner. The first is the image of the Virgin Mary—we know it already:

In this image—you need only compare the single heads—you already notice the individualizing impulse which is fully expressed by the figures. This aspiration you can observe. You hardly see a tendency to use space; everything is on one plane, you see no possibility of somehow applying perspective, but you see the yearning, the desire and instinct which can be declared as events, fixed in the imagery, you see the desire characterized; you see the past and what will follow established in the imagery as a scene.

Now I ask you to look at the two preceding demonstrated paintings (237,238) by the Cologne masters which appeared when these masters were blossoming, somewhat around the years 1370 to 1410, therefore directly during the time the fourth post-Atlantean epoch was coming to a close. This painting by Stephan Lochner (239) already falls into the fifth post-Atlantean time. I have shown you images in consecutive order between the boundaries of the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean time.

What are the particular characteristics? Don't we see particular characteristics playing into representations in the 5th post-Atlantean time? Don't we see in the lowering gaze of Mary, the blessing little hand of the child, the differences in the right and left figures' expression, in the individual depiction of the additional figures—do we not see the characteristics of the 5th post-Atlantean time—how the character's act in the pictorial representation? Do we not see how the impact of personality arrives? Above all, don't we already here see the desire to express the element of the 5th post-Atlantean time within the imagery, the most important element for Central Europe: light-and-dark or chiaroscuro?—How little meaning the distribution of light and dark had in the old tradition! People lived in light and shadows but were not observing it, yet were feeling it - because they experienced light bringing joy, sensing life in light while darkness sank into rest, in darkness they withdrew into mysterious soul depths. This inner living in the world in the souls of single individuals which particularly comes to the fore in the 5th post-Atlantean time, as well as the application of chiaroscuro, indicate a distribution of light masses: in the middle the light is above the Child, we see this light dividing itself right and left in single masses, becoming lighter upwards, no longer completed as in earlier version only in a golden ground, but in a brightness. Thus the encroachment of individual characters is what we see here; nobody can actually look at these consecutive elements which I have demonstrated to you, without becoming aware that something, albeit quietly, but something new was coming into the 5th post-Atlantean time while the 4th post-Atlantean epoch faded.

Let us look once more at the previous Madonnas:

Memorise this child's face well and try to feel how much tradition still lives in it. Now consider once again another one:

Look at the Madonna and the Child and note how a really new impulse has entered just like a new impulse does enter with each individual. Considering the following paintings of Stephan Lochner. I want to stress that Stephan Lochner originated from a region where most people were incapable of absorbing tradition because most of them had the impulse to develop individualism. It is the region around the Bodensee in the region of Bavaria, the area of western Austria. Here the tribes strived out of their folk nature towards individualism, mostly rejecting tradition. Stephan Lochner was lucky, one might say, to aim for the Bavarian anticipation of individual expression, where, despite the striving for the individual, there still lived the great sublime sacred tradition of olden times. As a result, his individual impulse, much more pronounced than Master Wilhelm with his radical individual urge, he connected to his revolutionary individuation impulse with the smooth, typically Cologne imaging tradition to produce this image.

For an artist like Stephan Lochner depicting space within art had not yet been invented; to depict space could simply not be done at that time in Cologne, but his soul tried to introduce this into the images.

Fully within the historical events, completely within development this can be ascertained by a comparison between the Virgin Mary image of the West compared to that of the East:

Look at the next image:

... which you also know already; look at it particularly in the way the specific fits into the general, so typical in Stephan Lochner's work, how the dark and light come to the fore even if there is no continual intention of capturing space, to indicate perspective, but in the chiaroscuro we see another kind of spatial capture than that of perspective. The perspective is more to the South, one could say: invented by Brunellesco—I have explained this to you in previous years.

And now …

... in which you see there is no trace yet of composition and how here also, where the depiction would have insisted on a study of space, there is nothing about space, and how on the other side an attempt is made to depict each of the six accompanying figures as individuals, with an attempt to individualise the Redeemer Himself. Please recall the paintings of the Cologne Masters (237, 238) and compare these with the paintings of Stephan Lochner (239-242) which we have seen. It can't be overlooked how deeply this incision imprints on us what lies between the two: because this incision lies between the 4th and 5th post-Atlantean epochs. Stephan Lochner attempted to depict soul qualities, but he looked for representation in nature to find forms which express the soul. Master Wilhelm still hovered in a supersensible experience of the soul and his impressions came out of his inner feelings. He didn't depict them by looking at a model. Here (237) we still see a reference to the model in order for the soul itself to identify with it. Master Wilhelm still expresses his own feelings. Stephan Lochner is already a copier of nature. This is in fact realism: realism rising. We can clearly draw the boundaries between these two so divergent painters, during hardly decades.

So you see how the laws which we search for in spiritual science really come to expression in single spheres of life when these spheres are not taken as unimportant, but with their importance are led before the soul.

Now I would like to place this fact once again before your souls, by introducing two painters who worked more in the South. This took place in Cologne. Let us look more towards the South, to Bavaria, Ulm or the Rhine area and we will see the how conditions appear before and after the incision of the 5th into the 4th post-Atlantean epoch. I want to present two paintings to you by Lukas Moser, who lived in the beginning of the 15th Century, who can certainly be counted as being from the 4th post-Atlantean time.

Look at these paintings:

Try to sense how everything painted in it is done in such a way that one notices how the painter went through schooling which insisted: when you place figures beside one another you must place the one facing you, the other in profile; when you paint waves, you must paint them like this.

Thus you see the entire play of the sea's waves, not as they are observed, but “according to the rules”; you see the figures as prescribed “according to the rules”; nothing observed, everything composed. This image from the Tiefenbronn altar thus depicts the ocean voyage of the saints.

The following image shows the time of repose, the night time rest of the same saints:

... A medieval house built on to a church, strongly suggestive that nothing was observed but everything was painted out of the head. Look at the sleeping Saint Zedonius: he still wears the mitre as well as his gloves. It had to be painted according to the rules where the main interest is located. Consider this as an ongoing journey, because the saints are taking a trip, they sail on the sea, they rest at night, it tells a story. Yet it is presented as set out in an existed image remaining within tradition. Lazarus resting in the bosom of this mother!

We can look back to representations of earlier times when we have such an image in front of us. This is at the point where the 4th post-Atlantean time came to a close. In the West there were still prescriptions regarding how church imagery should be painted. Painting was done according to particular traditional rules. The painters obtained their method out of tradition: this is what the Saint Zedonius looked like, what Saint Lazarus looked like, Saint Magdalene and so on; they had to be painted according to prescriptions, not quite as strictly as in the East, but still according to the laws. However, he still had to depict desires, instincts and reveal a story! In this way the elements swim in and around and battle with the end of the epoch.

Let us also look back to the 13th, 12th and 11th centuries. In all the churches strict rules were set. Each picture had to look the same as another right through the whole of Christendom, only with a slight variation in the way the things were ordered. If Saint Zedonius was ordered, then he was to be painted according to prescription - that was the tradition.

Let us now think of the incision of the beginning of the 15th Century and go from Lukas Moser, the last latecomer of the 4th post-Atlantean epoch, over to Hans Multscher and see how these painters really already stood in the beginning of the initial blossoming of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch. Look at these paintings:

... and you observe how in these paintings the individual-personal appear, characterising the personality. Moser does not have any desire to look at nature. Here, (399) you find an artist who strives to work out of the soul—yet who does not have the slightest inkling of spatial treatment and above all mixes up multi-coloured things in relation to space and perspective - yet who strives to characterise it out of the soul, in such a manner as if nature itself is characterised in the soul. He already tries to depict individual figures.

It will become even clearer for you, what I've just been speaking about, particularly when you look at the three sleeping figures below. There is already an attempt, first of all, to express the soul element, but there is also an attempt to depict the nature of those sleeping. Compare this with what you can remember about the sleeping saints on their sea voyage (335) the resting time (336) and then you will realise what a mighty incision lies between these developments. See how the light-dark depiction is consciously brought in. Solely characterized this way and not by working with perspective does the painter reveal spatial relationships. Perspective is in fact incorrect because an actual cohesive vanishing point can't be found in any area of the painting; nowhere can a central point be found from where the layout is arranged; yet still a spatial relationship of a certain beauty exists through the chiaroscuro.

Look at this “burial” scene. You find everything, even in the depiction of the landscape itself, as characterised by the individual's penetration of tradition: interest in events without any indication coming out of the spiritual world.

You see here how particular individualizing elements enter the entire painting, an attempt is made in a corresponding manner to represent the guardians, the twist of their bodies enhancing the individualisation. I ask you to look up, to the left, how an attempt was made to represent the figure's particular situation, his unique experience, portraying his peculiar individual inattentiveness. Try and imagine how the painter tried to show the front view of the head, how on the right he characterises the skull of the other guardian, from behind. One can see how the attempt is made to show individual forms and also how the chiaroscuro comes in. One can see how through individualising, depiction of spatial element enters while perspective is not at all yet clear. You can imagine the point from which the individual lines go from the characters, but now you need to think apparently quite far towards the front, where the coffin is placed and you have to think again about another reference point—regarding the trees! These are painted in full frontal positions.

I wanted to show you how the legitimate developmental impulses I spoke about already last time in the Italian paintings have a profound effect and what rises as characteristic in our time, originating from the 15th Century, can only now be understood if you clearly take the entire, deep meaning of every time period, from the beginning of the 15th Century, which built the boundary between the 4th and the 5th post-Atlantean epochs.

What transformed itself here had already been living in all the events and becoming of Europe, but it was pushed back from the 9th Century because Europe was made incapable at that time; Europe first had to allow something else to take form out of the depths of its being. Those in the East waited in the meantime. We should promote an awareness today for what waited there and what wanted to rise to the surface in the East because these forces are available, these forces weave into present day events, still wanting to be active. A clear understanding of what pulsates through the world, what works in the world, we need to take possession of, this which is an urgent requirement for the present time epoch. This I am now and have repeatedly stressed in the past. Through the development of the middle age art in its characteristic time period I wanted to make this clear for you. You see, here we approach two incisive waves in history: one swell is everything which came easterly from the south, the other is, I would like to call it, coming from the depths itself. In these centuries - 13th, 14th and 15th, in the centuries of freedom in cities, what wanted to rise from soul depths to the surface was most strongly applicable. Then again from the 16th Century another setback came - development rose and fell, oscillated—and then, obviously not simultaneously, the continuation of what had been started in of the 15th Century became outwardly visible as I've indicated to you, on the one side living in van Eyck, on the other side Dürer, Holbein and so on.

We see in the lower lands, towards Burgundy on the one side and Nürnberg on the other, Augsburg, Basel, the results of what wanted to come as a wave rising from soul depths to introduce the 5th post-Atlantean period.

I wanted to introduce only one of the impulses of this 5th post-Atlantean epoch to you. About other impulses I have various opportunities to speak at the moment.

[ 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.

[ 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.

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.

[ 1 ] The views on the value and fruitfulness of philosophy have undergone a profound change within our nation in recent times. Whereas at the beginning of the century Fichte, Schelling and Hegel worked with bold intellectual courage to solve the riddles of the world and considered the human faculty of knowledge capable of penetrating into the deepest mysteries of existence, today we avoid entering into the central problems of the sciences because we are convinced that it is impossible for the human mind to answer the ultimate and highest questions. We have lost confidence in thinking. The despondency in the philosophical field is becoming more and more general. We can see this in the transformation that an important and meritorious contemporary philosopher has undergone since his first appearance in the mid-seventies. I am referring to Johannes Volkelt. In 1875, in the introduction to his book on "The Dream-Fantasy", this scholar sharply criticized the half-heartedness and feebleness of the thinking of his contemporaries, which did not want to penetrate the depths of objects, but tentatively and uncertainly groped around on their surface. And when he gave his inaugural speech in 1883 on taking up the professorship of philosophy in Basel, this timidity had affected him to such an extent that he proclaimed it a necessary requirement of philosophical thinking to dispense with clear, universally satisfactory solutions to the ultimate questions and to be content with finding the various possible solutions and the ways and means that could lead to the goal. However, this means declaring uncertainty to be a characteristic feature of all in-depth research. A clear proof of the discouragement in the philosophical field is the emergence of a myriad of writings on epistemology. No one today dares to apply his cognitive faculty to the study of world events until he has anxiously examined whether the instrument is suitable for such a beginning. The philosopher Lotze mocked this scientific activity with the words: the eternal sharpening of knives has already become boring. - However, epistemology does not deserve this mockery, as it is responsible for solving the big question: To what extent is man capable of taking possession of the secrets of the world through his knowledge? - Once we have found an answer to this question, we have solved an important part of the great problem of life: What is our relationship to the world? - It is impossible for us to avoid the task of testing and sharpening our tools for such important work. It is not the operation of epistemological research that is lamentable, but the results of this research in recent decades present us with a depressing picture. The "sharpening of the knives" has been to no avail, they have remained blunt. Almost without exception, epistemologists have come to the conclusion that the tentativeness in the field of philosophy necessarily follows from the nature of our cognitive faculty; they believe that the latter cannot penetrate to the bottom of things at all because of the insurmountable limits set for it. A number of philosophers maintain that the critique of knowledge leads to the conviction that there can be no philosophy apart from the individual empirical sciences and that all philosophical thought has only the task of providing a methodological foundation for individual empirical research. We have academic teachers of philosophy who see their real mission in destroying the prejudice that there is a philosophy.

[ 2 ] This view is damaging the entire scientific life of the present. Philosophers, who themselves lack any stability within their field, are no longer able to exert the kind of influence on the individual specialized sciences that would be desirable to deepen research. We have recently seen in a characteristic example that the representatives of individual research have lost all contact with philosophy. They drew the false conclusion from the Kantian approach, which they rightly describe as unfruitful for true science, that philosophy as such is superfluous. Hence they no longer regard the study of it as a necessary need of the scholar. The consequence of this is that they lose all understanding for a deeper conception of the world and do not even suspect that a truly philosophical view overlooks it and knows how to grasp its problems much more thoroughly than they themselves can. Eduard von Hartmann's "Philosophy of the Unconscious" was published in 1869. In one chapter of the book, the author attempted to deal philosophically with Darwinism. He found that the prevailing view of Darwinism at the time could not stand up to logical thinking and sought to deepen it. As a result, he was accused of dilettantism by natural scientists and condemned in the harshest possible terms. In numerous essays and writings he was accused of lacking insight into scientific matters. Among the opposing writings was one by an anonymous author. What it said was described by respected natural scientists as the best and most pertinent thing that could be said against Hartmann's views. The experts considered the philosopher to be completely refuted. The famous zoologist Dr. Oskar Schmidt said that Anonymus' writing had "completely confirmed the conviction of all those who are not sworn to the unconscious that Darwinism" - and Schmidt means the view of Darwinism held by natural scientists - "is right". And Ernst Haeckel, whom I also admire as the greatest German natural scientist of the present day, wrote: "This excellent paper says essentially everything that I myself could have said about the philosophy of the unconscious to the readers of the history of creation..."

[ 3 ] When a second edition of the work was later published, the author's name on the title page was Eduard von Hartmann. The philosopher had wanted to show that it was not at all impossible for him to familiarize himself with scientific thought and to speak in the language of natural scientists if he wanted to. Hartmann thus provided proof that it is not the philosophers who lack an understanding of natural science, but conversely the representatives of the latter who lack insight into philosophy.

[ 4 ] The situation is no better with literary history. The followers of Scherer, who currently dominate this field, show in their writings that they lack any philosophical education. Scherer himself was alien and hostile to philosophy. With such an attitude, however, it is impossible to understand the German classics, because their creations are completely imbued with the philosophical spirit of their time and can only be understood from this.

[ 5 ] If we want to summarize these facts in a few words, we must say: the belief in philosophy has experienced a deep shake-up in the widest circles.

[ 6 ] According to my conviction, for which I will provide some evidence in a moment, the current characterized here is one of the saddest scientific aberrations. But before expressing my own opinion, allow me to indicate where the reason for the error lies.

[ 7 ] Our philosophical science is under the powerful influence of Kantianism. This influence is more significant today than it has been at any time. In 1865, Otto Liebmann demanded in his essay "Kant and the Epigones" that we must return to Kant in philosophy. - He saw the salvation of his science in the fulfillment of this demand. He was merely expressing the view of the vast majority of philosophers of our time. And natural scientists, insofar as they are still concerned with philosophical concepts, also see Kant's doctrine as the only possible form of central science. Starting from philosophers and naturalists, this opinion has also penetrated the wider circles of educated people who have an interest in philosophy. Kant's view has thus become a driving force in our scientific thinking. Without ever having read a line by Kant or heard a sentence from his teachings, most of our contemporaries view world events in his way, for a century the proud-sounding word has been uttered again and again: Kant had liberated thinking humanity from the shackles of philosophical dogmatism, which made empty assertions about the essence of things without undertaking a critical investigation into whether the human mind was also capable of making out something absolutely valid about this essence. - For many who utter this word, however, the old dogma has been replaced by a new one, namely that of the irrefutable truth of Kant's fundamental views. These can be summarized in the following sentences: A thing can only be perceived by us if it makes an impression on us, exerts an effect. But then it is always only this effect that we perceive, never the "thing in itself". We cannot form any concept of the latter. The effects of things on us are now our perceptions. What we know of the world is therefore not the things, but our ideas of the things. The world given to us is not a world of being, but a world of imagination or appearance. The laws according to which the details of this imaginary world are linked can of course not be the laws of the "things in themselves", but those of our subjective organism. What is to become an appearance for us must obey the laws of our subject. Things can only appear to us in a way that corresponds to our nature. We ourselves prescribe the laws of the world that appears to us - and this alone we know.

[ 8 ] What Kant thought he had gained for philosophy with these views becomes clear if we take a look at the scientific currents from which he grew and which he confronted. Before the Kantian reform, the teachings of the Leibniz-Wolff school were the only dominant ones in Germany. The followers of this school wanted to arrive at the fundamental truths about the nature of things by means of purely conceptual thinking. The knowledge gained in this way was regarded as clear and necessary as opposed to that gained through sensory experience, which was seen as confused and random. Only through pure concepts was it believed that scientific insights into the deeper context of world events, the nature of the soul and God, i.e. the so-called absolute truths, could be gained. Kant was also a follower of this school in his pre-critical period. His first writings are entirely in its spirit. A change in his views occurred when he became acquainted with the explanations of the English philosopher Hume. The latter sought to prove that there is no such thing as knowledge other than experience. We perceive the sunbeam, and then we notice that the stone on which it falls has warmed up. We perceive this again and again and get used to it. We therefore assume that the connection between the sun's rays and the warming of the stone will continue to apply in the same way in the future. However, this is by no means a certain and necessary knowledge. Nothing guarantees us that an event which we are accustomed to seeing in a certain way will not take place quite differently on the next occasion. All propositions in our sciences are only expressions established by habit for frequently noticed connections between things. Therefore, there can be no knowledge about those objects which philosophers strive for. Here we lack experience, which is the only source of our knowledge. Man must be content with mere belief about these things. If science wants to deal with them, it degenerates into an empty game with concepts without content. - These propositions apply, in the sense of Hume, not only to the last psychological and theological insights, but also to the simplest laws of nature, for example the proposition that every effect must have a cause. This judgment, too, is derived only from experience and established by habit. Hume only accepts as unconditionally valid and necessary those propositions in which the predicate is basically already included in the subject, as is the case, in his view, with mathematical judgments.

[ 9 ] Kant's previous conviction was shaken by his acquaintance with Hume's view. He soon no longer doubted that all our knowledge is really gained with the help of experience. But certain scientific doctrines seemed to him to have such a character of necessity that he did not want to believe in a merely habitual adherence to them. Kant could neither decide to go along with Hume's radicalism nor could he remain with the advocates of Leibniz-Wolffian science. The latter seemed to him to destroy all knowledge, in the latter he found no real content. Viewed correctly, Kantian criticism turns out to be a compromise between Leibniz-Wolff on the one hand and Hume on the other. And with this in mind, Kant's fundamental question is: How can we arrive at judgments that are necessarily valid in the sense of Leibniz and Wolff if we admit at the same time that we can only arrive at a real content of our knowledge through experience? The shape of Kant's philosophy can be understood from the tendency inherent in this question. Once Kant had admitted that we gain our knowledge from experience, he had to give the latter such a form that it did not exclude the possibility of generally and necessarily valid judgments. He achieved this by elevating our perceptual and intellectual organism to a power that co-creates experience. On this premise, he was able to say: Whatever is received by us from experience must conform to the laws according to which our sensuality and our intellect alone can comprehend. What does not conform to these laws can never become an object of perception for us. What appears to us therefore depends on the things outside us, how the latter appear to us is determined by the nature of our organism. The laws under which it can imagine something are therefore the most general laws of nature. In these also lies the necessary and universal nature of the course of the world. In Kant's sense, we do not see objects in a spatial arrangement because spatiality is a property that belongs to them, but because space is a form under which our sense is able to perceive things; we do not connect two events according to the concept of causality because this has a reason in their essence, but because our understanding is organized in such a way that it must connect two processes perceived in successive moments of time according to this concept. Thus our sensuality and our intellect prescribe the laws of the world of experience. And of these laws, which we ourselves place in the phenomena, we can of course also form necessarily valid concepts.

[ 10 ] But it is also clear that these concepts can only receive their content from the outside, from experience. In themselves they are empty and meaningless. We do know through them how an object must appear to us if it is given to us at all. But the fact that it is given to us, that it enters our field of vision, depends on experience. How things are in themselves, apart from our experience, is therefore not something we can determine through our concepts.

[ 11 ] In this way Kant has saved an area in which there are concepts of necessary validity; but at the same time he has cut off the possibility of using these concepts to make something out about the actual, absolute essence of things. In order to save the necessity of our concepts, Kant sacrificed their absolute applicability. For the sake of the latter, however, the former was valued in pre-Kantian philosophy. Kant's predecessors wanted to expose a central core from the totality of our knowledge, which by its nature is applicable to everything, including the absolute essences of things, to the "interior of nature". The result of Kant's philosophy, however, is that this inner being, this "in itself of objects" can never enter the realm of our knowledge, can never become an object of our knowledge. We must be content with the subjective world of appearances that arises within us when the outside world acts upon us. Kant thus sets insurmountable limits to our cognitive faculty. We cannot know anything about the "in itself of things". A renowned contemporary philosopher has given this view the following precise expression: "As long as the trick of looking around the corner, that is, of imagining without imagination, has not been invented, Kant's proud self-determination will remain that of the existing its that, but never its what is recognizable" - that is: we know that there is something that causes the subjective appearance of the thing in us, but what is actually behind the latter remains hidden from us.

[ 12 ] We have seen that Kant adopted this view in order to save as much as possible of each of the two opposing philosophical doctrines from which he proceeded. This tendency gave rise to a contrived view of our cognition, which we need only compare with what direct and unbiased observation reveals in order to see the entire untenability of Kant's thought structure. Kant thinks of our experiential knowledge as having arisen from two factors: from the impressions that things outside us make on our sensibility, and from the forms in which our sensibility and our understanding arrange these impressions. The former are subjective, for I do not perceive the thing, but only the way in which my sensuality is affected by it. My organism undergoes a change when something acts from the outside. This change, i.e. a state of my self, my sensation, is what is given to me. In the act of grasping, our sensuality organizes these sensations spatially and temporally, the mind again organizes the spatial and temporal according to concepts. This organization of sensations, the second factor of our cognition, is thus also entirely subjective. - This theory is nothing more than an arbitrary construction of thought that cannot stand up to observation. Let us first ask ourselves the question: Does a single sensation occur anywhere for us, separately and apart from other elements of experience? - Let us look at the content of the world given to us. It is a continuous whole. If we direct our attention to any point in our field of experience, we find that there is something else all around. There is nowhere here that exists in isolation. One sensation is connected to another. We can only artificially single it out from our experience; in truth, it is connected with the whole of the reality given to us. This is where Kant made a mistake. He had a completely wrong idea of the nature of our experience. The latter does not, as he believed, consist of an infinite number of little mosaic pieces from which we make a whole through purely subjective processes, but it is given to us as a unity: one perception merges into another without a definite boundary. If we want to consider an individuality separately, we must first artificially lift it out of the context in which it is located. Nowhere, for example, is the individual sensation of red given to us as such; it is surrounded on all sides by other qualities to which it belongs and without which it could not exist. We must disregard everything else and focus our attention on the one perception if we want to consider it in its isolation. This lifting of a thing out of its context is a necessity for us if we want to look at the world at all. We are organized in such a way that we cannot perceive the world as a whole, as a single perception. The right and left, the top and bottom, the red next to the green in my field of vision are in reality in uninterrupted connection and mutual togetherness. However, we can only look in one direction and only perceive what is connected in nature separately. Our eye can only ever perceive individual colors from a multi-membered color whole, our mind individual conceptual elements from a coherent system of ideas. The separation of an individual sensation from the world context is therefore a subjective act, conditioned by the peculiar arrangement of our mind. We must dissolve the unified world into individual perceptions if we want to observe it.

[ 13 ] But we must be clear about the fact that this infinite multiplicity and isolation does not really exist, that it is without any objective meaning for reality itself. We create an image of it that initially deviates from reality because we lack the organs to grasp it in its very own form in one act. But separating is only one part of our cognitive process. We are constantly busy incorporating every individual perception that comes to us into an overall conception that we form of the world.

[ 14 ] The question that necessarily follows here is this: According to what laws do we link what is separated in the act of perception? - The separation is a consequence of our organization; it has nothing to do with the thing itself. Therefore, the content of an individual perception cannot be changed by the fact that it initially appears to us to be torn from the context in which it belongs. But since this content is conditioned by the context, it initially appears quite incomprehensible in its separation. The fact that the perception of red occurs at a certain point in space is caused by the most varied circumstances. If I now perceive the red without at the same time directing my attention to these circumstances, it remains incomprehensible to me where the red comes from. Only when I have made other perceptions, namely those of the circumstances to which the perception of the red is necessarily connected, do I understand the matter. Every perception therefore points me beyond myself, because it cannot be explained by itself. I therefore combine the details separated from the whole of the world by my organization into a whole according to their own nature. In this second act, therefore, that which was destroyed in the first is restored; the unity of the objective regains its rightful place in relation to the subjectively conditioned multiplicity.

[ 15 ] The reason why we can only take possession of the objective form of the world in the detour described above lies in the dual nature of man. As a rational being, he is very well able to imagine the cosmos as a unity in which each individual appears as a member of the whole; as a sensual being, however, he is bound to place and time, he can only perceive individual of the infinitely many members of the cosmos. Experience can therefore only provide a form of reality conditioned by the limitations of our individuality, from which reason must first gain the objective. Sensual perception thus distances us from reality, while rational contemplation leads us back to it. A being whose sensuality could view the world in one act would not need reason. A single perception would provide it with what we can only achieve by combining an infinite number of them.

[ 16 ] The examination of our cognitive faculty that we have just undertaken leads us to the view that reason is the organ of objectivity or that it provides us with the actual form of reality. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the fact that reason appears to lie entirely within our subjectivity. We have seen that, in truth, its activity is intended precisely to abolish the subjective character that our experience receives through sensory perception. Through this activity, the contents of perception themselves re-establish in our minds the objective context from which our senses have torn them.

[ 17 ] We are now at the point where we can see through the fallacy of Kant's view. What is a consequence of our organization: the appearance of reality as an infinite number of separate particulars, Kant conceives as an objective fact; and the connection that is re-established, because it corresponds to objective truth, is for him a consequence of our subjective organization. Precisely the reverse of what Kant asserted is true. Cause and effect, for example, are a coherent whole. I perceive them separately and connect them in the way they themselves strive towards each other. Kant allowed himself to be led into error by Hume. The latter says: If we perceive two events over and over again in such a way that one follows the other, we become accustomed to this togetherness, expect it in future cases as well, and designate one as cause and the other as effect. - This contradicts the facts. We only bring two events into a causal connection if such a connection follows from their content. This connection is no less given than the content of the events themselves.

[ 18 ] From this point of view, the most commonplace as well as the highest scientific thought finds its explanation. If we could encompass the whole world with one glance, then this work would not be necessary. Explaining a thing, making it comprehensible, means nothing other than putting it back into the context from which our organization has torn it out. There is no such thing as a thing that is separated from the world as a whole. All separation has only a subjective validity for us: for us, the world as a whole is divided into: Above and below, before and after, cause and effect, object and idea, substance and force, object and subject and so on. However, all these opposites are only possible if the whole in which they occur confronts us as reality. Where this is not the case, we cannot speak of opposites. An impossible opposition is that which Kant calls "appearance" and "thing-in-itself". This latter term is completely meaningless. We have not the slightest reason to form it. It would only be justified for a consciousness that knows a second world in addition to the one that is given to us and that can observe how this world affects our organism and results in what Kant calls an appearance. Such a consciousness could then say: The world of human beings is only a subjective appearance of that second world known to me. But people themselves can only recognize opposites within the world given to them. Contrasting the sum of everything given with something else is pointless. The Kantian "thing in itself" does not follow from the character of the world given to us. It is invented.

[ 19 ] Unless we break with such arbitrary assumptions as the "thing in itself" is, we can never arrive at a satisfactory worldview. Something is only inexplicable to us as long as we do not know what is necessarily connected with it. But we have to look for this within our world, not outside it.

[ 20 ] The mysteriousness of a thing only exists as long as we consider it in its particularity. But this is created by us and can also be removed by us. A science that understands the nature of the human cognitive process can only proceed in such a way that it seeks everything it needs to explain a phenomenon within the world given to us. Such a science can be described as monism or a unified view of nature. It is opposed by dualism or the two-world theory, which assumes two absolutely different worlds and believes that the explanatory principles for one are contained in the other.

[ 21 ] This latter doctrine is based on a false interpretation of the facts of our cognitive process. The dualist separates the sum of all being into two areas, each of which has its own laws and which are externally opposed to each other. He forgets that every separation, every segregation of the individual realms of being has only subjective validity. What is a consequence of his organization, he considers to be an objective fact of nature that lies outside him.

[ 22 ] Such a dualism is also Kantianism. Appearance and the "as-itself" of things are not opposites within the given world, but one side, the "as-itself", lies outside the given. - As long as we separate the latter into parts - however small these may be in relation to the universe - we are simply following a law of our personality; but if we consider everything given, all phenomena, as one part and then oppose it with a second, then we are philosophizing into the blue. We are then merely playing with concepts. We construct a contrast, but cannot gain any content for the second element, because such a content can only be drawn from the given. Any kind of being that is assumed to exist outside the latter is to be relegated to the realm of unjustified hypotheses. Kant's "thing-in-itself" belongs in this category, and no less the idea that a large proportion of modern physicists have of matter and its atomistic composition. If I am given any sensory perception, for example the perception of color or heat, then I can make qualitative and quantitative distinctions within this perception; I can encompass the spatial structure and the temporal progression that I perceive with mathematical formulas, I can regard the phenomena as cause and effect according to their nature, and so on: but with this process of thinking I must remain within what is given to me. If we practise a careful self-criticism of ourselves, we also find that all our abstract views and concepts are only one-sided images of the given reality and only have sense and meaning as such. We can imagine a space closed on all sides, in which a number of elastic spheres move in all directions, bumping into each other, bouncing against and off the walls; but we must be clear that this is a one-sided idea that only gains meaning when we think of the purely mathematical image as being filled with a sensuously real content. But if we believe that we can explain a perceived content causally through an imperceptible process of being that corresponds to the mathematical structure described and that takes place outside our given world, then we lack any self-criticism. Modern mechanical heat theory makes the mistake described above. The same can be said of modern color theory. It, too, places something that is only a one-sided image of the sensory world behind it as its cause. The whole wave theory of light is only a mathematical image that represents the spatio-temporal relationships of this particular field of appearance in a one-sided way. The undulation theory turns this image into a real reality that can no longer be perceived, but is rather the cause of what we perceive.

[ 23 ] It is not at all surprising that the dualistic thinker does not succeed in making the connection between the two world principles he assumes comprehensible. One is given to him experientially, the other is added by him. Consequently, he can only gain everything that is contained in the one through experience, and everything that is contained in the other only through thinking. But since all experiential content is only an effect of the added true being, the cause itself can never be found in the world accessible to our observation. Nor is the reverse possible: to derive the experientially given reality from the imagined cause. This latter is not possible because, according to our previous arguments, all such imagined causes are only one-sided images of the full reality. If we survey such a picture, we can never find in it, by means of a mere thought process, what is connected with it only in the observed reality. For these reasons, he who assumes two worlds that are separated by themselves will never be able to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of their interrelation.

[ 24 ] And herein lies the reason for the assumption of limits to knowledge. The adherent of the monistic worldview knows that the causes of the effects given to him must lie in the realm of his world. No matter how far removed the former may be from the latter in space or time, they must be found in the realm of experience. The fact that of two things which explain each other, only one is given to him at the moment, appears to him only as a consequence of his individuality, not as something founded in the object itself. The adherent of a dualistic view believes that he must assume the explanation of a known thing in an arbitrarily added unknown thing. Since he unjustifiably endows the latter with such properties that it cannot be found in our entire world, he establishes a limit of cognition here. Our arguments have provided the proof that all things that our cognitive faculty supposedly cannot reach must first be artificially added to reality. We only fail to recognize that which we have first made unrecognizable. Kant commands our cognition to stop at the creature of his imagination, at the "thing-in-itself", and Du Bois-Reymond states that the imperceptible atoms of matter produce sensation and feeling through their position and movement, only to conclude that we can never arrive at a satisfactory explanation of how matter and movement produce sensation and feeling, for "it is quite and forever incomprehensible that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. atoms should not be indifferent to each other. atoms should not be indifferent to how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and move. It is in no way comprehensible how consciousness could arise from their interaction". - This whole conclusion collapses into nothing if one considers that the atoms moving and lying in a certain way are an abstraction to which an absolute existence separate from the perceptible event cannot be ascribed.

[ 25 ] A scientific dissection of our cognitive activity leads, as we have seen, to the conviction that the questions we have to ask of nature are a consequence of the peculiar relationship in which we stand to the world. We are limited individualities and can therefore only perceive the world piecemeal. Each piece, considered in and of itself, is a riddle or, to put it another way, a question for our cognition. However, the more details we get to know, the clearer the world becomes. One perception explains another. There are no questions that the world poses to us that cannot be answered with the means it offers us. For monism, therefore, there are no fundamental limits to knowledge. This or that can be unresolved at any given time because we were not yet in a position in terms of time or space to find the things that are involved. But what has not yet been found today may be found tomorrow. The limits caused by this are only accidental ones that disappear with the progress of experience and thought. In such cases, the formation of hypotheses comes into its own. Hypotheses may not be formed about something that is supposed to be inaccessible to our knowledge in principle. The atomistic hypothesis is a completely unfounded one. A hypothesis can only be an assumption about a fact that is not accessible to us for accidental reasons, but which by its nature belongs to the world given to us. For example, a hypothesis about a certain state of our earth in a long-gone period is justified. Admittedly, this state can never become an object of experience because completely different conditions have arisen in the meantime. However, if a perceiving individual had been there at the assumed time, then he would have perceived the state. In contrast, the hypothesis that all sensorygualities owe their origin only to quantitative processes is unjustified, because processes without quality cannot be perceived.

[ 26 ] Monism or the unified explanation of nature emerges from a critical self-examination of man. This observation leads us to reject all explanatory causes outside the world. However, we can also extend this view to man's practical relationship to the world. Human action is, after all, only a special case of general world events. Its explanatory principles can therefore likewise only be sought within the world given to us. Dualism, which seeks the basic forces of the reality available to us in a realm inaccessible to us, also places the commandments and norms of our actions there. Kant is also caught up in this error. He regards the moral law as a commandment imposed on man by a world that is alien to us, as a categorical imperative that he must obey, even when his own nature develops inclinations that oppose such a voice sounding from the hereafter into our here and now. One need only recall Kant's well-known apostrophe to duty to find this reinforced: "Duty! thou great and sublime name, who dost not hold in thyself anything that is pleasing and ingratiating, but dost demand submission", who dost "lay down a law... before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly work against it." Monism opposes such an imperative imposed on human nature from the outside with the moral motives born of the human soul itself. It is a delusion to believe that man can act according to other than self-made imperatives. The respective inclinations and cultural needs generate certain maxims that we call our moral principles. Since certain ages or peoples have similar inclinations and aspirations, the people who belong to them will also establish similar principles to satisfy them. In any case, however, such principles, which then act as ethical motives, are by no means implanted from outside, but are born out of needs, i.e. generated within the reality in which we live. The moral code of an age or people is simply the expression of how one believes it is best to approach the prevailing cultural goals within it. Just as the effects of nature arise from causes that lie within the given nature, so our moral actions are the results of motives that lie within our cultural process. Monism thus seeks the reason for our actions within human nature in the strictest sense of the word. However, it also makes man his own lawgiver. Dualism demands submission to moral commandments taken from somewhere; monism points man to himself, to his autonomous being. It makes him the master of himself. Only from the standpoint of monism can we understand man as a truly free being in the ethical sense. Duties are not imposed on him by another being, but his actions are simply guided by the principles that everyone finds lead him to the goals that he considers worth striving for. A moral view based on monism is the enemy of all blind faith in authority. The autonomous man does not follow a guideline which he is merely supposed to believe will lead him to his goal, but he must realize that it will lead him there, and the goal itself must appear to him individually as a desirable one. This is also the basic idea of the modern state, which is based on the representation of the people. The autonomous individual wants to be governed according to laws that he has given himself. If the moral maxims were determined once and for all, they would simply have to be codified and the government would have to enforce them. Knowledge of the general human moral code would be sufficient for government. If the wisest person, who knows the contents of this holy book best, were always at the head of the state, the ideal of a human constitution would be achieved. This is roughly how Plato conceived the matter. The wisest would command and the others would obey. The representation of the people only makes sense on the condition that the laws are the expression of the cultural needs of an age, and these latter are again rooted in the aspirations and wishes of the individual. Through the representation of the people it is to be achieved that the individual is governed according to laws which he can say correspond to his own inclinations and aims. In this way the will of the state is to be brought into the greatest possible congruence with the will of the individual. With the help of popular representation, the autonomous individual makes his own laws. Through the modern constitution of the state, then, that which alone has reality in the realm of morality, namely individuality, is to be brought to bear, in contrast to the state, which is based on authority and obedience, and which has no meaning unless one wishes to attribute an objective reality to abstract moral norms. I do not wish to assert that we may at the present time present the ideal state I have characterized as desirable everywhere. The inclinations of the people who belong to our national communities are too unequal for that. A large part of the people is dominated by needs too base for us to wish that the will of the state should be the expression of such needs. But mankind is in a state of continuous development, and a sensible popular education will try to raise the general level of education so that every man can be capable of being his own master. Our cultural development must move in this direction. We do not promote culture through paternalistic laws that prevent people from becoming the plaything of their blind instincts, but by encouraging people to seek a goal worth striving for only in their higher inclinations. Then we can let them become their own legislators without danger. The task of culture therefore lies solely in the expansion of knowledge. If, on the other hand, associations are formed in our time that want to declare morality to be independent of knowledge, such as the "German Society for Ethical Culture", this is a fatal error. This society wants to induce people to live according to general human moral standards. Indeed, it also wants to make a code of such standards an integral part of our teaching. This brings me to an area that has so far been least touched by the teachings of monism. I am referring to pedagogy. What is most incumbent upon it: the free development of individuality, the only reality in the field of culture, is what has been most neglected up to now, and the budding human being has instead been locked into a network of norms and commandments which he is to follow in his future life. The fact that everyone, even the least of us, has something within himself, an individual fund that enables him to achieve things that only he alone can achieve in a very specific way: this is forgotten. Instead, they are put through the torture of general conceptual systems, tied to conventional prejudices and their individuality is undermined. For the true educator, there are no general educational norms, such as those that the Herbartian school wants to establish. For the true educator, every person is something new and unprecedented, an object of study from whose nature he draws the very individual principles according to which he should educate in this case. The demand of monism is that, instead of implanting general methodological principles in prospective educators, they should train them to become psychologists who are capable of understanding the individualities they are to educate. Monism is thus suited to serve our greatest goal in all areas of knowledge and life: the development of the human being towards freedom, which is synonymous with the cultivation of the individual in human nature. That our time is receptive to such teachings, I believe I can infer from the fact that a young generation enthusiastically acclaimed the man who for the first time transferred the monistic teachings to the field of ethics in a popular manner, albeit reflected from a sick soul: I mean Friedrich Nietzsche. The enthusiasm he found is proof that there are not a few among our contemporaries who are tired of chasing after moral chimeras and who seek morality where alone it really lives: in the human soul. Monism as a science is the basis for truly free action, and our development can only take the course: through monism to the philosophy of freedom!

[ 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.

It is hardly possible this year, to give a Whitsuntide lecture in the true sense of the word. Let us consider the essential character of Whitsuntide as depicted in that document of Christianity, the New Testament. We shall find that the outstanding feature of that Whitsun Festival was the pouring forth of the Spirit upon certain men called the Apostles. As a result of this outpouring of the Spirit, (so we learn from the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles), men assembled together at that Whitsuntide, ten days after the so-called Ascension, all speaking the most varied languages, and understanding each one for himself the news proclaimed to him so thoroughly, that the language sounded quite familiar to him, although it is expressly stated that each man could only speak his mother tongue. Thus the pouring forth of the Spirit at Whitsuntide appears as the outpouring of the Spirit of Love, Concord and Harmony upon all those who, assembled together from every comer of the earth, all spoke different languages. Or perhaps in order to catch the exact purport of the Bible words it would be better to express it thus: The message of the Whitsuntide revelation was so in tune with the human heart that each man could understand it, although he knew no other language than his own.

But this year, in nearly every case, the exact opposite of this is taking place in the world around us at this Whitsuntide. If only an interpretation might be vouchsafed, that we might know the meaning of this Whitsun revelation! We only need to reflect, that the world nineteen centuries after this Whitsun revelation has understood this Whitsun revelation in such a way, that this present Whitsuntide sees thirty-four nations speaking different languages, at war with one another, and therefore, in a sense, in complete contradiction to the spirit of the Whitsuntide Feast. Perhaps this question of language shows, at least to a certain extent, how the spirit of understanding has passed away from mankind, how that first Whitsun revelation has not as yet spread over the whole earth in a sufficiently penetrating and convincing manner, how it has not yet seized upon the souls of men. Perhaps that is the reason why it is now necessary that that revelation should speak to the souls of men under a new form, should speak more clearly, more urgently than it has done as yet, so that for the future its true meaning may be understood aright.

So then this year in the light of our Whitsuntide considerations, let us take up a more universal standpoint, a point of view which from a certain side will bring us nearer to the new Whitsuntide revelation, by this I mean Spiritual Science. For we must regard what we have learnt during those lectures as a "Whitsuntide revelation to humanity; we must accept Spiritual Science as a Whitsuntide revelation.

Let us consider now what wo know of the Mystery of Golgotha and allow this knowledge to sink deeply into our souls. What is the essential part of the Mystery of Golgotha? It is this. That a Spiritual Being who, as we know, belonged to the cosmic spheres, descended and underwent earthly fate and earthly life in a physical human body; that the Christ Being lived for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. By that three years’ experience in tho body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ Being has, since the Mystery of Golgotha, been united with what we call the Earth-Spirit, with what we term the Earth- Aura. Thus the whole of our earthly evolution is divided into two epochs of evolution. There was the period before the Mystery of Golgotha, during which the Christ Spirit could only be faintly perceived when man through initiation rose above the earthly sphere so that he no longer perceived what lies within the earthly sphere alone, but also that in which the Earth did not as yet participate, though predestined for a distant future. The other period is the time after the Mystery of Golgotha.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha we know that man with his spiritual nature does not need to leave the Earth, but that he can remain within the earthly sphere and participate within the earthly sphere in the Impulse of the Christ Being.

We must clear the ground a little here. It is true that through the ages up to our own time, a portion of humanity has always been aware that the Christ-Impulse had united itself to the Earth-existence. A great change has taken place in the universal human consciousness, especially of those people who have felt something of the Christ-Impulse. The soul was filled with the belief that Christ is with man and that the human soul can unite itself with Christ, that the human mind can participate during its Earth-existence with that which is impregnated with the living Christ-Impulse. But a comprehension of what the Christ-Impulse means in the universal Earth-existence in the evolution of humanity can only be brought home to the human soul by Spiritual Science. For this the knowledge is necessary of how this Christ-Impulse works in the human soul, so that two spiritual impulses may in a sense be made to balance one another.

This is represented by the group which will be placed at the east end of tho Goetheanum. There you will see the Representative of humanity, the Representative of man, in so far as he is capable of experiencing the profoundest, that which a man does experience when the Christ-Impulse is a living reality in his soul. The principal figure in the group at the east of the building may be called the Christ, yet it may also be called the Representative of the innermost soul of man in general. This Spirit, Who speaks through a human body, is seen in connection with two other spiritual Beings, Lucifer and Ahriman. In a standing position, the Representative of humanity expresses His connection with Lucifer and Ahriman. Everything about this figure must be characteristic. Above all, when this figure is erected later on, you will be able to notice that the gesture of the left hand which is raised, and the gesture of the right hand which is lowered, are very noteworthy. You will understand these gestures when you see that Lucifer is falling from the rocks above, towards the summit of which the Representative of humanity raises his left arm—Lucifer falls, because he has broken his wings.¹

Now it is easy to believe that his wings are broken by the force which flows from the arm of the Representative of man. It seems as though this force streamed out towards Lucifer and broke his wings. That, however, would be a false interpretation. And I hope we shall succeed in making such a false interpretation of the plastic representation impossible. For the point is, not that Lucifer’s wings are broken by something that streams forth from the Christ-permeated man, but that Lucifer experienced something within himself when he felt the presence of the Christ, which led to his breaking his wings. Because he cannot bear the Christ-Impulse, the Christ-strength, he breaks his own wings. This is an incident which has been caused not by a conflict between Christ and Lucifer, but it is an incident in the inner life of Lucifer himself, something which Lucifer himself must experience; and there must not be a moment’s doubt as to the fact that it would be impossible for Christ to feel either hatred or animosity against Lucifer—Christ is the Christ. He only fills the world-existence with equanimity, He joins battle with no might in the world; but when the might of Lucifer comes near His Presence, might must join battle with itself. Therefore, the raised left hand does not work aggressively, neither does the left side of the countenance with its strange expression, but it is a token that in the cosmic connections Christ has something to do with Lucifer. It has, however, nothing of the nature of a battle about it. The battle only originates in the soul of Lucifer himself, he breaks his own wings, they are not broken by Christ.

It is the same thing with Ahriman, who cowers in a hole in the rocks beneath the Christ-Man on the right, where the earth is driven upwards, where the material, is, as it were, driven into man, but cannot gain further strength and is crippled because the Christ-power is near.

Again, the Christ-strength which pulses and flows through the arm into the hand, betrays no hatred towards Ahriman, rather does Ahriman cripple himself and by means of what is passing, that which lies hidden in his soul—the gold in the veins of the earth—draws round him like chains so that he makes himself fetters of the earth-gold and forges them on to himself. He is not fettered by Christ; he forges fetters for himself, as soon as he experiences the nearness of Christ.

These are the original relations between the Beings, given in brief outline, and these must be realised before the Christ-Impulse can be truly comprehended by the human soul.

A very simple comparison will make the Christ-Impulse clear in an abstract way. Take a pendulum. The pendulum swings to one side and swings back again as far as it can of its own weight, and then again swings back towards the opposite side as far as it can, till it meets a point which we may designate as a balancing point. This point would be a dead point, a resting point, if the pendulum did not swing towards the opposite side. Life is a pendulum, because it swings backwards and forwards towards both sides and has a resting place in the middle.

It is thus that we must think of the earthly evolution since Golgotha. The pendulum swings out towards one side, the Luciferic side. Then again towards the other side—the Ahrimanic side. And the balancing point in the middle is Christ.

That the importance of this fact must be grasped, can be proved from a notable historical event. We all admire the picture painted by Michelangelo, called ‘The Last Judgment.’ You know it from reproductions of the original, which is preserved in the Sistine Chapel. In this picture we see the Christ, painted with consummate master-skill, Christ triumphant, judging men; sending some to hell to meet the wicked spirits,—others, the righteous, to heaven. If we study the face of this Christ, we see anger there—earthly anger—and if we have assimilated Spiritual Science, if we have really welded its contents with love into our own souls, we are forced to exclaim today—notwithstanding our admiration of the marvellous creation of Michelangelo—‘That is no Christ, for Christ does not judge men! They pass judgment upon themselves,—as in the case of Lucifer and Ahriman—they experience the results of their own deeds, not the result of any conflict carried on against them by Christ.’

In the days when Michelangelo created his Christ, the time had not arrived for the recognition of Christ in His full perfection. Men were still groping in the twilight, so to speak. They attributed to Christ qualities which we today know must be assigned to Lucifer or Ahriman. Thus, we today can understand why people have found something Luciferic or Ahrimanic in the Christ of Michelangelo. For Christ as there represented is not free from these attributes, whereas the true Christ is entirely without them.

At the stage of advancement in spiritual knowledge to which mankind had attained in those days, it was not possible to produce a picture of Christ which should portray a true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. For, in the time of Michelangelo, the relationship existing between the Christ and Lucifer and Ahriman was not yet made known. Let us pause here and let this fact sink into our minds. Let us try and realise its full significance.

How often in our meetings have I emphasised the point that it shews a false perception to turn to Lucifer and say ‘I must fly from him,’ or to turn to Ahriman and say ‘I must fly from him.’ This attitude only means making terms with weakness. It would be forbidding the pendulum to swing backwards and forwards, wishing it to remain at rest for ever. We cannot escape the cosmic forces—by which I mean Lucifer and Ahriman—but we can adjust our position with regard to them. This we shall only be able to do when we understand the Christ-Impulse aright, when we recognise in the Christ Being the guide who will adjust our position with regard to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, which must some day be world-powers.

Now let us consider what it is that Lucifer brings into the life of man. Lucifer brings sensation, passion. and everything connected with the life of the feelings and of the heart. How dry, insipid and abstract life would be without the pulsation of keen sensation and intense feeling. Let us glance at the evolution of history. What a power passion, ‘noble passion,’ as it is often termed (and rightly so), has been in history. What influence feeling and sensation have had. Nevertheless, we cannot foster feeling or sensation without entering the sphere of Lucifer. Therefore, we must never enter this sphere without the guidance of the Christ-Impulse.

On the other hand we see how necessary it is, especially in these modern times, to understand more and more about the world, to cultivate science, to obtain the mastery over the external forces of nature and of all that exists within them. In these domains Ahriman is ruler. We should indeed remain stupid and dull if we could escape from the Ahrimanic element. There should be no question of avoiding the Ahrimanic element, but on the contrary, of entering the sphere over which Ahriman reigns, under the guidance of the Christ-Impulse. We must not endeavour slothfully to find the resting-place, but must strive to share in the living movement of the world’s pendulum; only we must be careful while moving with it that we take no step without the guidance of the Christ-Impulse. Knowledge of Christ is not possible until the relationship which exists between the Christ-Impulse and the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces is clearly understood by the human soul. This revelation of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influence in the world is one of the tasks which the Spiritual Scientific movement must undertake, for it is aware that the Christ-Impulse is the foundation upon which it must take its stand. That is why you find nothing about the Ahrimanic and Luciferic elements in the non-Christian theosophical teaching; but they were bound to appear as soon as the Spiritual Scientific Movement began seriously and earnestly to reckon with the Christ-Impulse.

I think that it is, indeed, extraordinarily important for the human soul to feel that Spiritual Science has the task laid upon it of bringing something really new into the human consciousness; something so new that by means of it we are able to compare it with such a great human creation as that of the Christ in ‘The Last Judgment’ of Michelangelo. The knowledge which is coming to us from Spiritual Science must appear as the new Whitsuntide revelation, in the true sense of the words.

At Easter we saw how one of the greatest masters of modern times, Goethe, endeavoured to bring his Faust, the representative of humanity, into relationship with the Christ-Impulse. And we saw that Goethe in his youth was not able to do this; that only in his mature old age did he succeed. Thus, as we study the spiritual life through all its multifarious stages up to the present day, it appears to us as a struggle, an unceasing struggle. It really makes one extremely humble when one considers how the master minds of humanity have striven to gain some idea, some conception of the true significance of the Christ-Impulse. It is borne in upon us how very humble we should be in our human endeavour to obtain a knowledge of the Christ-Impulse.

As we have seen, Goethe made a great point of bringing the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements, which are always working around man, into contact with Faust, his representative of humanity. And we have also seen that Goethe confused the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements with one another in his figure of Mephistopheles, so that it is difficult to distinguish the one from the other therein. As we showed in the Easter Lectures, the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements are confused and intermingled with one another in Mephistopheles, because at that time true understanding was as yet impossible for Goethe. Goethe had, in fact, during the whole of his life, been aware of the struggle going on within him to arrive at some understanding of the relationship of man to Lucifer and Ahriman. When Schiller asked him, at the end of the eighteenth century, to continue his Faust, Goethe reconsidered what he had written in his youth from the standpoint of his maturity and pronounced this work which he had put together at different times to be a hybrid—half-animal, half-man—thus it was that Faust appeared to him. He called his Faust, ‘a barbaric composition,’ in order to indicate the difficulty in going on with it. Here we have Goethe’s opinion of his own work! Goethe, who must have certainly known, better than his critics, said the Faust was a hybrid—half an animal, half a man—a barbaric composition 1

What I endeavoured to convey to you at Easter, which might very easily have been misunderstood, only leads back to the opinion of Goethe himself about his own work. Nevertheless, many learned men consider Faust to be a finished work of art, one which cannot be surpassed. This was not Goethe’s own opinion, neither can we accept it. Although we recognise in Faust a work of the very highest order, we must not evade the truth that the drama of Faust fails in its fundamental conception owing to Goethe’s mistake in confusing the personalities of Lucifer and Ahriman and blending them together into his figure of Mephistopheles.

But in spite of all this confusion Goethe was dimly aware that both Lucifer and Ahriman must appear. Only he mixed the two together and called the result Mephistopheles. Thus, in some of the scenes in Faust, Lucifer appears as Lucifer, whilst in others he appears as Mephistopheles or Ahriman. But Goethe was quite clear about one thing, viz:—that there is something that takes place in man under the influence of both Lucifer and Ahriman, of both Lucifer and Mephistopheles.

Let us consider the end of the first part of Goethe’s Faust. How does it end? Faust has loaded his soul with the blackest guilt imaginable; he has the life of a fellow-being upon his conscience. He has betrayed a fellow-creature. Here is sin indeed against himself and against a fellow-being!... The first part of Faust ends with the words, ‘Hither to me,’ pronounced by Mephistopheles, while at the same time a voice, appearing to come from heaven, cries faintly ‘Henry! Henry 1’ This ending to the first part of Faust tells us where Faust has arrived. He has fallen into the power of Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles has secured him. About that there is no possible doubt.

And now we come to the second part of Faust. The second part opens with a pleasing scene. ‘Faust is discovered lying on flowery turf, weary, restless, seeking sleep.’ Spirits appear; and from their songs we gather that it is spring time. Nature is in her most beautiful mood, even as she is today. To understand this mood we only need to go out of doors at this time of year. Nature at Whitsuntide! The Whitsuntide atmosphere I This Whitsuntide atmosphere works its effect upon Faust. And after a while he rises and continues his life-journey.

A certain scholar has drawn a conclusion from this incident, for which there is certainly something to be said, although it is philistine and pedantic. The scholar puts it thus: ‘If you have a heavy load of guilt upon your soul, as was the case with Faust after his treatment of Gretchen, retire to a pleasant spot, lie down on the flowery turf, make some mountain excursions, and your soul vail then be healed and ready for fresh deeds.’ Speaking from the realistic, Ahrimanic point of view, there is certainly something to be said for this conclusion drawn by this scholar—Rieger—for, really, to all those who hold the purely materialistic view so popular at the present day, the second part of Faust must be unendurable after the first part in which Faust is depicted as having loaded his soul with such a terrible burden of sin. Unfortunately this, the greatest epic of humanity, is not taken literally enough, for Faust is the greatest epic of humanity in so far as it concerns the human personality. If it were only taken literally people would know that ‘Hither to me,’ is true... Mephistopheles has got hold of Faust. Because of this, Faust is lying on flowery turf, restless, seeking sleep. We must not imagine that Faust is freed from the powers of hell at the beginning of Part II. But Goethe strove after true spiritual knowledge. How very near Goethe was to spiritual knowledge we gather from a sentence in a letter written by him to his friend, the musician, Zelter. A most remarkable sentence! Goethe wrote, ‘Consider that with each breath that we draw, an etheric stream of life permeates our whole being, so that for very joy we can scarcely remember our sorrow.’

With each breath that we draw, an etheric stream of life does indeed permeate our inner being—that means nothing less than that Goethe knew all about man’s etheric body. But in his day he naturally only spoke about this to his own circle of friends.

First let us be quite clear as to Goethe’s position with regard to human nature in general. He studied this human nature and said: this human nature is capable of sin, for something exists within it which is subject to Mephistophelian influence, something appertaining to Mephistopheles. When Goethe studied the human beings who belonged to this sphere, he also became aware that something exists in human nature which can never fall under this influence, something which will be protected from the Ahrimanic and Luciferic influence. This it is with which the second part of Faust deals; this something in human nature, which can be protected from the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. The man Faust, who was capable of sin, who had allowed himself to be led by Mephistopheles into the most trivial and commonplace pleasures of life, the man Faust who had betrayed Gretchen—had become a sinner. In our language we should say: this Faust would have to wait for the next reincarnation.

But there is a something in human nature which is a man’s higher self, and remains in communication with the spiritual powers of the world. The spiritual world-powers draw near to this eternal part in Faust. We must not think in a realistic way of Faust, as we see him at the beginning of Part II, simply as Faust become an older man. He really represents the higher self in Faust. His outward form is unchanged. But this outward form is now representative of that ‘something’ in Faust which could not fall into sin. This ‘something’ in Faust which could not fall into sin, now enters into relationship with the servants of the Earth-spirit.

From his youth upwards Goethe had been intensely anxious to be able to form some conception of human sin, of the evil in the world, and of what it is that floats over all, holding the balance against sin and evil. Thus Goethe, as he was to a certain extent forced to deliver up the one nature in Faust into the power of Mephistopheles (‘Hither to me’ ), ventured to turn to the other nature in Faust. We must be careful to make no mistake at this point. In the beginning of Part II the Faust who speaks is not the Faust whom wo met in Part I. It is another Faust, a second nature, who only outwardly bears the form of Faust, and who can participate in the spiritual which permeates our external world. Into that form, however, something must enter which has no immediate connection with the outward physical body of Faust, for the physical body retains, of course, so long as we remain in the same incarnation, all signs of the sins into which we have fallen. Perfect communion with the higher self can only be obtained by that within us which can make itself free of the physical body. Thus Faust has to undergo that transformation which we may term, ‘the transmutation of sin into higher knowledge.’ His sins he will have to carry with him into his next incarnation. In this earthly incarnation his guilt is the source of a higher knowledge which is opened to him, a more exact knowledge of life. Thus, the possibility of his higher self entering into connection with the spiritual forces which weave and interweave and permeate the world, opens out before Faust, notwithstanding that he bears on his soul a terrible load of guilt.

The higher self of Faust gets into communication with a spirit of the Earth-Aura. Goethe wished to convey at the same time, that the highest in man can never be seized by Mephistopheles (or, as we should say, by Lucifer-Ahriman). The highest is protected; it must be able to enter other spheres. Goethe meant it to be taken literally that this higher self in Faust could now communicate with the spiritual beings in the elemental world. We shall see to-morrow or the next day how this coincides with what I said in my Easter lectures. Now let us consider what relationship exists between these spiritual beings, which are under the leadership of the Air-spirit (for such is Ariel) and may thus be designated in general as Air-spirits—and the external events of nature. Let us see how they reveal themselves as a different order of spiritual beings from that of the self which in the super-earthly nature is not exposed to the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman.

‘When the spring-tide shower of blossom
Flutters down all men upon;
When on mortals from earth’s bosom
Smiles the fields’ green benison.’

Thus, when nature buds and blossoms in the Whitsuntide springtime, the elemental spirits come forth. Seen externally they are small; but as spirits they are great, for they are higher than that part of the human heart which may turn to the good or to the bad.

‘Elves great-souled though small of stature
Haste to help where help they can;
Good or evil be his nature...’

This is left for the next reincarnation, it does not concern the spirits.

‘Good or evil be his nature
Pity they the luckless man.’

They are only concerned with the higher self which is aloof from what takes place in karma or incarnation. But these spirits can only act in their own element, in which the being of man dwells only when his soul and spirit have left the external covering of the body. And now Goethe describes the duties of these elves in their spiritual greatness.

‘Ye round this head in airy wheel that hover,
In noble elfin-guise yourselves discover.
Soothe ye the bosom’s unrelenting strife,
Withdraw the bitter darts of self-upbraiding,
Purge ye his soul from horror of past life.’

This cannot happen to the Faust who is under the sway of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic influence. This purgation means, ‘Bring forth the higher self of Faust. Let it be there alone.’ And now it would seem as if Faust who is out of the body goes through something like an Initiation.

‘Four watches night hath’

From six o’clock in the evening till six o’clock in the morning the elves perform their task, bringing the soul, during the time between falling asleep and waiting. into communication with the spiritual forces which weave and interweave throughout the earthly existence.

‘Pause not—let each with kindly deeds be rife.’

each, that is, of the four watches which the soul experiences from the time of falling asleep till the time of awakening.

‘And first, lay ye his head on the cool pillow,
Bathe him in dew from Lethe’s waters drawn.
Soon will the cramp-racked limbs be lithe as willow
If new refreshed he sleep to meet the dawn.’

When he has accepted what the World-Spirit offers to him, when this spirit has penetrated to that part of Faust’s being where the higher self remains intact:

‘Fulfil the fairest elfin-rite
Give him again to the holy light.’

What occurs externally between his falling asleep and his awakening are real events, similar to an Initiation. And now we sec what takes place in the three periods: from six to nine; from nine to twelve; from twelve to three; from three to six. First we have the watch from six to nine o’clock.

‘When soft breezes swell, and vagrant
Haunt the green-embosomed lawn,
Twilight sheds its spices fragrant,
Sinks its mist like curtains drawn,
Breathes sweet peace, his heart composes
Like a child’s that rests from play,
On his eyes so weary, closes
Soft the portals of the day.’

The soul has gone. It is separated from the body. The second watch.

‘Now the Night more deeply darkles,
Linketh holy star to star.
Mighty torches, tiny sparkles
Glimmer near and gleam afar.
Glassed within the lake they glimmer
Gleam in Night’s unclouded round;
Throned aloft the Moon’s full shimmer
Seals the bliss of peace profound.’

Here we have a survey of the Harmony of the Spheres, the wisdom of the spheres, the great lights, the tiny sparks of light and the secrets of the Moon. All that we study in Spiritual Science about the secrets of the spheres is welded into the higher soul of Faust.

The third watch of sleep:

‘Now the hours are spent and over,
Weal and woe are swept away.
Dream of health! Thou wilt recover!
Trust the gleam of new-born day!
Vales grow green, and swell like pillows
Hill to shady rest to woo,
And in swaying silver billows
Waves the com the harvest to.’

This, as we have already said, is inwardly connected with the manifestations of Nature. Read my course of lectures on The Effect of Occult Development on the Bodies and Self of Man, given at the Hague, wherein it is shown that the human soul, when it rises out of the body, becomes one with the life and movement of outer existence. But this also points to the growth going on in the soul of Faust:

‘And in swaying silver billows
Waves the com [the soul of Faust] the harvest to.’

You will remember I have already told you that during sleep, man has the desire to return to the body.

Then comes the last watch of the night:
‘Wish on wish wouldst compass crowded,
Lift thine eyes to yon bright steep!’
The Sun can now be faintly perceived.
‘Only softly art thou shrouded
Cast away the shell of sleep!’

This is a very important line! A great poet does not make use of empty phraseology. What does ‘Cast away the shell of sleep’ mean? To the ordinary sleeper, sleep is not a shell; but it is a shell to those to whom the time between falling asleep and awakening is a time for the reception of the secrets of the universe.

‘Falter not! Thine heart embolden,
When the throng faint-hearted flees;
Nought is from the brave with-holden
Who is wise and swift to seize.’

And now the tremendous tumult which heralds the approach of the Sun reminds us of what Goethe wrote about this music of the Sun in the ‘Prologue in Heaven,’ in the first part of Faust.

‘The Sun with many a sister-sphere
Still sings the rival psalm of wonder,
And still his fore-ordained career
Accomplishes with sound of thunder.
The sight sustains the angels’ prime,
Though none may spell the mystic story:
Thy Works unspeakably sublime,
Live on, in all their primal glory.’

When the Sun rises and its light floods the physical plane, the soul, when it is out of the body, hears the approach of the Sun as the music of the spheres, as a special element in the music of the spheres. The spirits hear it, of course. Man cannot hear it, because he must hear through his physical ears. He is embodied in the physical plane and when the Sun reaches the physical plane the time has come for man to be awake. Then the spirits must retire. The words spoken by Ariel, the spirit of the air, to his servants, indicate the approach of the music of the spheres. The spirits can hear it. The man who is outside his body can hear it. Faust therefore hears this approach of the music of the spheres. After that he returns into his body. Then Ariel has to disappear. Ariel instructs his servants what they have to do: they have to disappear from the physical plane. For if the Sun, which they only know as the Sun of sound, were to strike them with his light, they would become deaf. The light would make them deaf, whereas they can hear the Sun of sound—in whoso tones, indeed, they live—without injury.

‘Hark! The Hours in storm are winging,
And, to spirit-ears loud-ringing,
Now the new-born day is springing;
Rocky portals clang asunder,
Phoebus’ wheels roll forth in thunder,
What a tumult brings the light!
Loud the trump of dawn hath sounded,
Eye is dazzled, ear astounded,
The Unheard no ear may smite.
Slip ye to your silent palace,
Deep within the flow’ret's chalice,
In the cliffs and 'neath the leaf!
If it reach you, ye are deaf!’

So the elves disappear. Faust returns to his body. But the guilty Faust has now become unconscious. He stands before us no longer. He has sunk down into the depths of Faust’s subconsciousness, where he will be preserved till the next incarnation. The Faust who had just passed through the experience of being in touch with the whole spiritual cosmos, must now make clear to himself the connection between his experience during the four watches of his sleep-life and his present perception of the world. He now lives in his body as the higher self.

Now, a man who, after sleeping all night without going through Faust’s experience, were to exclaim on awakening in the morning, ‘Thou Earth, through this night too hast stood unshaken!’ would be a fool; for no man expects the Earth to be anything else but ‘unshaken’ during the night. But if a man experiences what Faust experienced as his Initiation with the Earth-Spirits, then he has indeed experienced something which, as one can well believe, will have changed the whole earth for him. He will have become a new man. Or rather a new man will have been unveiled in him. ‘Oh I Earth! Thou wert unchanging throughout this night—in spite of what I have experienced’. To him the world appears quite new, because it is now revealed to a new man.

‘Life’s pulses newly quickened now awaken,
Softly to greet the ethereal twilight leaping;
Thou Earth through this night too hast stood unshaken,
And at my feet fresh breathest from thy sleeping.
Thou guides! me about with gladness, priming
My soul with stem resolve and strenuous keeping,
Onward to strive, to highest life still climbing.’

Now too, when the spirit has freed itself from that which must wait for the next incarnation!

‘Unfolded lies the world in twilight shimmer;
With thousand-throated song the woods are chiming;
The dales, wherethrough the mist-wreaths wind, lie dimmer,
Yet heavenly radiance plumbs the deeps unnumbered,
And bough and twig, new-quickened, bud and glimmer
Forth from the fragrant depths where sunk they slumbered;
Whilst hue on hue against the gloom still heightens,
Where bloom and blade with quivering pearls are cumbered
A very Paradise about me lightens !’

Here we have the man who I do not say has gone through Initiation, but in whom Initiation lives, and he has cause to see the world in a new light. He could not speak as he does if there were only left in him the man who was guilty and who during this incarnation must remain under this load of guilt.

‘Look up! The giant peaks that rise supernal
Herald the solemn hour; for them first brightens
The early radiance of the light eternal
Upon us valley-dwellers later showered. Now are the green-sunk Alpine meadows vernal
With radiance new, and new distinctness dowered,
And step-wise downward hath the splendour thriven.
He sallies forth [the sun, that is] and I mine overpowered
And aching eyes to turn away am driven.’

The higher self cannot now endure what the senses were able to endure. Faust cannot look at the Sun, for he has learnt so much that the Sun has now become something essentially different for him. Something connected with his earthly experiences now awakens within him.

‘Thus when a yearning hope, from fear and wonder
Up to the highest wish in trust hath striven,
The portals of fulfilment yawn asunder.’

What are these ‘portals of fulfilment?’ Those through which he passed during his recent sleep. But even the ordinary world seems to him now like a sea of flame, breaking forth from the eternal foundations:

‘Then burst from yonder depths where days ne’er dwindle
Excess of flame—we stand as smit with thunder.
The torch of life it was we sought to kindle,
A sea of fire, and what a fire! hath penned us.
Is't Love? Is't Hate?’

Love and hate we know already, but this experience is more than love or hate.

‘Is't Love? Is't Hate? That yonder glowing sparkle
In bliss and bale alternating tremendous
About us twines, till we the dazed beholders,
To veil our gaze in Earth’s fresh mantle wend us.’

He can no longer look at the Sun, he looks towards the waterfall which gives forth the colours of the rainbow and in which the Sun is reflected. He turns away from the Sun. He becomes a student of the world, as it appears to him like a reflection of the spiritual life. This world of which it is said, ‘All that is transient is but a parable.’

‘Nay then, the sun shall hide behind my shoulders.’

Before he had been looking towards it. He now turns to the waterfall.

‘The cataract that through the gorge does thunder
I’ll watch with growing rapture,’mid the boulders
From plunge to plunge down-rolling, rent asunder
In thousand, thousand streams, aloft that shower
Foam upon hissing foam, the depths from under.
Yet blossoms from this storm a radiant flower;
The painted rainbow bends its changeful being,

for what is united in the Sun, is here divided into seven colours.

‘Now lost in air, now limned with clearest power,
Shedding this fragrant coolness round us fleeing.
Its rays an image of man’s efforts render;
Think, and more clearly wilt thou grasp it, seeing
Life in the many-hued, reflected splendour!’

How greatly has Faust advanced during this night’s experience! He has advanced so far that he no longer wishes, like the Faust of Part I, to plunge into that life which flung him into sin and evil, but turns to its coloured reflection. This which appears to him as the ‘many-hued, reflected splendour’ is what we call Spiritual Science, and by means of it we shall wind gradually upward along the spiral way to reality.

The continuation of the Second Part is ‘Life in the many-hued, reflected splendour.’ It is folly to interpret this Second Part in a purely materialistic sense. We have here Faust whose higher self studies the many-hued reflections of life by means of the physical body, which he now bears with him on his journey through life, as something to be preserved in order that the higher self in him may be further developed; for that higher self alone can protect him from that which will reappear in a later incarnation.

Goethe found it very difficult to continue his Faust, after the words spoken by Mephistopheles toned forth, ‘Hither to me!’ But we see how Goethe strove to penetrate those mysteries which we today recognise as the Mysteries of Spiritual Science. We see how he approached them. And we can see in this Second Part of Faust, how, at first, Mephistopheles really has Faust in his toils, how Mephistopheles is behind all that happens at the Emperor’s Court, and how Faust, by the after-effects of Initiation working in him, gradually unloosens himself from the toils of Mephistopheles.

But there are other mysteries in this Second Part of Faust. Goethe himself said that he had introduced many secret things into the Second Part! These words of his have not been taken seriously enough. But we shall learn by degrees through Spiritual Science to take such words more seriously.

We must at least take one thing away with us from today’s lectures. Goethe endeavoured to advance beyond the First Part, to express in his Faust something of the atmosphere which is symbolically depicted there under the imagery of the Course of the Seasons.

As Whitsuntide approaches and the Spirits of the elemental world draw so near to man that it can be said of them:

‘When the Spring-tide shower of blossom
Flutters down all men upon;
When on mortals from earth’s bosom
Smiles the field’s green benison:
Elves great-souled, though small of stature,
Haste to help, where help they can.
Good or evil be his nature
Pity they the luckless man.’

That is the Whitsuntide atmosphere. The outpouring of the Spirit in the following lines, spoken by the choir, during the four watches of the sleep, from the time of falling asleep to the time of awakening.

Thus by means of Faust, we are able to demonstrate how urgent is the necessity for conveying to humanity the new Whitsuntide message which Spiritual Science has to deliver. This conception of Faust brings home to us vividly how complex are the threads which go to form the fundamental basis of human nature. In the depths of human nature something exists which is eternally opposed to the Ahrimanic and Luciferic world-powers and, in those depths, that something can be found by man, if he will place himself under the guidance of the Christ-Impulse.

Why do we speak of a ‘Threshold’? Why do we speak of a ‘Guardian of the Threshold’? Because actually, owing to the grace and wisdom of the guidance of the universe, all that works and wars and battles in our daily life was at first removed from the human soul. It is now, as it were, on the surface, beneath which elements are seething and warring and working. Even our daily experiences constitute a perpetual victory. But the victory has always to be won anew; and in the future it will only be won anew when man really knows that through which the good, wise direction of the universe has guided him; until now he has been unconscious of this. That something, which cannot be recognised in the ordinary life of the senses, but which can be experienced spiritually, must be found in the depths of the soul. It must be sought for in those depths of human consciousness where man’s essence is in touch with those world-forces which, in their spiritual greatness, transcend Good and Evil.

I have endeavoured to express this in a Whitsuntide apothegm which I have pieced together to show how man, in the secret recesses of his inmost being, possesses certain elementary powers, antagonistic to each other, and how that which exists in his consciousness is the victory over the warring elements in the depths of his soul-life.

The way in which these elements react in relation to the daily life of mankind I will speak of to-morrow or the following day. today I will close with this Whitsuntide apothegm which embodies that which is ever the vital principle of our Spiritual Science and which we have been considering today.

There, where knowledge gain'd by sense alone
Is no longer of avail,
Stands the Portal leading to life’s realities;
There do they become accessible to the soul.
The key whereby this door can be unlock'd
Is smelted by the soul that gains her strength in battle,
Battle waged in her own depths by cosmic Powers
Fighting against the powers of man,
If only that same soul herself can chase away the sleep
Which, at the very boundaries of the senses,
Enwraps the powers of knowledge in spiritual night.

• 1. Editorial Note. This group, designed and carved by Dr. Steiner, had not been placed in the Goetheanum when the fire broke out which destroyed the building.

What I especially tried to stress yesterday was that in that spiritual development of the West which found its expression in scholasticism not only that happens which one can grasp in abstractions and which took place in a development of abstractions, but that behind it a real development of the impulses of western humanity exists. I think that one can look at that at first, as one does mostly in the history of philosophy, which one finds with the single philosophers. One can pursue, how the ideas, which one finds with a personality of the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth centuries, are continued by personalities of the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth centuries, and one can get the impression by such a consideration that one thinker took over certain ideas from the other and that a certain evolution of ideas is there.

One has to leave this historical consideration of the spiritual life gradually. Since that which manifests from the single human souls are only symptoms of deeper events which are behind the scene of the outer processes. These events which happened already a few centuries before Christianity was founded until the time of scholasticism is a quite organic process in the development of western humanity. Without looking at this process, it is equally impossible to get information about that development, we say from the twelfth until the twentieth years of a human being unless one considers the important impact in this age that is associated with sexual maturity and all forces that work their way up from the subsoil of the human being. Thus, something works its way up from the depths of this big organism of European humanity that one can just characterise saying: those old poets spoke very honestly and sincerely who began their epic poems as Homer did: sing to me, goddess, on the rage of the Peleid Achilles—, or: sing to me, muse, on the actions of the widely wandered man.—These men wanted to say no commonplace phrase, they felt as inner fact of their consciousness that not a single individual ego wants to express itself there but a higher spiritual-mental that intervenes in the usual state of human consciousness.

Again—I said it already yesterday—Klopstock was sincere and figured this fact out in a way, even if maybe only instinctively, when he began his Messiah; now not: sing, muse, or: sing, goddess, on the redemption of the human beings -, but he said: sing, immortal soul -, that means: sing, individual being that lives in the single person as an individuality.—When Klopstock wrote his Messiah, this individual feeling had already advanced far in the single souls. However, this inner desire to stress individuality originated especially in the age of the foundation of Christianity until High Scholasticism. In that which the philosophers thought one can notice the uppermost, which goes up to the extreme surface of that which takes place in the depths of humanity: the individualisation of the European consciousness. An essential moment of the propagation of Christianity in these centuries is the fact that the missionaries had to speak to people who more and more strove for feeling the inner individuality.

Only from this viewpoint, you can understand the conflicts that took place in the souls of such human beings who wanted to deal with Christianity on one side and with philosophy on the other side as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas did. Today the common histories of philosophy describe the soul conflicts too little, which found their end in Albert and Thomas. There many things intervened in the soul life of Albert and Thomas.

Seen from without it seems, as if Albert the Great who lived from the twelfth to the thirteenth century and Thomas who lived in the thirteenth century wanted to combine Augustinism and Aristotelianism only dialectically on one side. The one of them was the bearer of the ecclesiastical ideas; the other was the bearer of the cultivated philosophical ideas. You can pursue their searching for the harmony of both views everywhere in their writings. Nevertheless, in everything that is fixed there in thoughts endlessly much lives that did not pass to that age which extends from the middle of the fifteenth century until our days, and from which we take our common ideas for all sciences and also for the whole public life.

It appears to the modern human, actually, only as something paradox: the fact that Augustine really thought that a part of the human beings is destined from the start to receive the divine grace without merit—for they all would have to perish because of the original sin—and to be saved mental-spiritually. The other part of humanity must perish mental-spiritually, whatever it undertakes.—For the modern human being this seems paradox, maybe even pointless. Someone who can empathise in the age of Augustine in which he received those ideas and sensations that I have characterised yesterday will feel different. He will feel that one can understand that Augustine wanted still to adhere to the ideas that not yet cared about the single person that just cared about the general-human influenced by such ideas as those of Plotinism. However, on the other side, the drive for individuality stirred in the soul of Augustine. Hence, these ideas get such a succinct form, hence, they are fulfilled with human experience, and thereby just Augustine makes such a deep impression if we look back at the centuries, which preceded scholasticism.

Beyond Augustine that remained for many human beings what the single human being of the West as a Christian held together with his church—but only in the ideas of Augustine. However, these ideas were just not suitable for the western humanity that did not endure the idea to take the whole humanity as a whole and to feel in it like a member, which probably belongs to that part of humanity, which is doomed. Hence, the church needed a way out.

Augustine still combated Pelagius (~360-418) intensely, that man who was completely penetrated with the impulse of individuality. He was a contemporary of Augustine; individualism appears in him as usually only the human beings of the later centuries had it. Hence, he could not but say, it can be no talk that the human being must remain quite passive in his destiny in the sensory world. From the human individuality even the power has to originate by which the soul finds the connection to that which raises it from the chains of sensuousness to the pure spiritual regions where it can find its redemption and return to freedom and immortality.—The opponents of Augustine asserted that the single human being must find the power to overcome the original sin.

The church stood between both opponents, and it looked for a way out. This way out was often discussed. One talked as it were back and forth, and one decided for the middle. I would like to leave it to you whether it is the golden mean. This middle was the Semipelagianism. One found a formula which announced: indeed, it is in such a way as Augustine said, but, nevertheless, it is not completely in such a way as Augustine said; it is also not completely in such a way as Pelagius said, but it is in a certain sense in such a way as he said. Thus, one can say that, indeed, not by God's everlasting wise decision the ones are destined to sin, the others to grace; but the matter would be in such a way that, indeed, there is no divine predetermination but a divine foreknowledge. God knows in advance whether the one is a sinner or the other is someone who is filled with grace.

Besides, we do not take into account when this dogma was spread that it did not at all concern foreknowledge, but that it concerned taking plainly position whether now the single individual human being can combine with the forces in his individual soul life which can cancel his separation from the divine-spiritual being. Thus, the question remains unsolved for dogmatism, and I would like to say, Albert and Thomas were on one side forced to look at the contents of the dogmas of the church, on the other side, however, they were fulfilled with the deepest admiration of the greatness of Augustine. They faced that what was western spiritual development within the Christian current. Nevertheless, still something played a role from former times. It lived on in such a way that one sees it being active on the bottom of their souls, but one also realises that they are not quite aware of it that it has impact in their thoughts that they cannot bring it, however, to an exact version.

One must consider this more for this time of High Scholasticism of Albert and Thomas than one would have to consider a similar phenomenon, for example, in our time. I have already emphasised the why and wherefore in my Worldviews and Approaches to Life in the Nineteenth Century. I would only like to note that this book was extended to The Riddles of Philosophy where the concerning passage could not return because the task of the book had changed. We experience that from this struggle of individuality the thinkers who developed this struggle of individuality philosophically reach the zenith of the logical faculty of judgement.

One may rail against scholasticism from this or that party viewpoint—all this railing is fulfilled with little expertise as a rule. Since someone who has sense for the way in which the astuteness of thoughts comes about with something that is explained scientifically or different, who has sense to recognise how connections are intellectually combined which must be combined intellectually if life should get sense—who has sense for all that and for some other things already recognises that so exactly, so conscientiously logically one never thought before and after High Scholasticism. Just these are the essentials that the pure thinking proceeds with mathematical security from idea to idea, from judgement to judgement, from conclusion to conclusion in such a way that these thinkers always account to themselves for the smallest step.

One has only to mind that this thinking took place in a silent monastic cell or far from the activities of the world. This thinking could still develop the pure technique of thinking by other circumstances. Today it is difficult to develop this pure thinking. Since if one tries anyhow to present such activity to the general public which wants nothing but to string together thoughts, then the biased people, the illogical people come who take up all sorts of things and allege their crude biased opinions. Because one is just a human being among human beings, one has to deal with these things that often are not at all concerned with that which it concerns, actually. One loses that inner quietness very soon to which thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries could dedicate themselves who did not think much of the contradiction of unprepared people in their social life.

This and still some other things caused that wonderful sculptural, on one side, but also in fine contours proceeding activity of thinking which is characteristic for scholasticism and at which Albert and Thomas aimed exceptionally consciously.

However, please remember that there are demands of life, on one side, which appear as dogmas which were similarly ambiguous in numerous cases as the characterised Semipelagianism, and that one wanted to maintain the dogmas of the church with the most astute thinking. Imagine only what it means to consider Augustinism just with the most astute thinking. One has to look into the inside of the scholastic striving and not only to characterise the course from the Fathers of the Church to the scholastics along the concepts that one has picked up.

Just many semi-conscious things had impact on these spirits of High Scholasticism. You cope with it only if you look beyond that what I have characterised already yesterday and if you still envisage such a figure that entered mysteriously under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite into the European spiritual life from the sixth century on. Today I cannot defer to all disputes about whether his writings were written in the sixth century or whether the other view is right that at least leads back the traditional of these writings to much earlier periods. All that does not matter, but that is the point that the thinkers of the seventh, eighth centuries and still those like Thomas Aquinas studied the views of Dionysius the Areopagite, and that these writings contained that in a special form which I have characterised yesterday as Plotinism, but absolutely with a Christian nuance. That became significant for the Christian thinkers up to High Scholasticism how the writer of Dionysius' writings related to the ascent of the human soul to a view of the divine.

One asserts normally that Dionysius had two ways to the divine. Yes, he did have two. One way is that he asks, if the human being wants to ascend from the outside things to the divine, he must find out the essentials of all things which are there, he has to try to go back to the most perfect ones, he must be able to name the most perfect so that he has contents for this most perfect divine which can now pour itself out again as it were and create the single things of the world from itself by individuation and differentiation.—Hence, one would like to say, God is that being to Dionysius that one has to call with many names that one has to give as most distinguishing predicates which one can find out of all perfections of the world. Take any perfection that strikes you in the things of the world, and then call God with it, then you get an idea of God.—This is one way that Dionysius suggests.

He says about the other way, you never reach God if you even give him one single name because your endeavour to find the perfections in the things, the essentials of the things, to summarise them to characterise God with. You have to free yourself from everything that you have recognised in the things. You have to purify your consciousness completely from everything that you have found out in the things. You must know nothing of that which the world says to you. You must forget all names that you have given the things and you have to put yourself in a soul condition where you know nothing of the whole world. If you can experience this, you experience the unnamed one who is misjudged immediately if you give him any name; then you recognise God, the super-God in his super-beautifulness. However, already these names would interfere. They can serve only to make you aware of that which you have to experience as unnamed.

How does one cope with a personality who gives not one theology but two theologies, a positive one and a negative one, a rationalistic and a mystic theology? Someone who can just project his thoughts in the spirituality of the periods from which Christianity is born can cope with it quite well. If one describes, however, the course of human development during the first Christian centuries in such a way as modern materialists do, then the writings of the Areopagite appear more or less folly. Then one simply rejects them as a rule. If you can project your thoughts, however, in that which one experienced and felt at that time, then you understand what a person like the Areopagite only wanted to express, actually, at which countless human beings aimed. For them God was a being that one could not recognise at all if one took one way to Him only. For the Areopagite God was a being that one had to approach on rational way by naming and name finding. However, if you go this way only, you lose the path, and then you lose yourself in cosmic space void of God. Then you do not find your way to God. Nevertheless, one must take this way, for without taking this way you cannot reach God. However, one has still to take a second way. This is just that which aims at the unnamed. However, if you take one way only, you find God just as little; if you take both, they cross, and you find God at the crossing point. It is not enough to argue whether one way or the other way is right. Both together are right; but every single one leads to nothing. One has to take both ways and the human soul finds that at the crossing point at which it aimed.

I can understand that some people of the present shrink from that what the Areopagite demands here. However, this lived with the persons who were the spiritual leaders during the first Christian centuries, then it lived on traditionally in the Christian-philosophical current of the West, and it lived up to Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. It lived, for example, in that personality whose name I have called already yesterday, in Scotus Eriugena. As I have told yesterday, Vinzenz Knauer and Franz Brentano who were usually meek flew into a rage if Plotinus came up for discussion. Those who are more or less, even if astute and witty, rationalists will already rail if they come in contact with that which originated from the Areopagite, and whose last significant manifestation Eriugena was.

A legend tells that Eriugena was a Benedictine prior in England in his last years. However, his own monks stabbed him repeatedly with their styluses—I do not say that it is literally true, but if it is not quite true, it is approximately true—until he was dead because he had still brought Plotinism into the ninth century.

However, his ideas that further developed at the same time survived him. His writings had disappeared more or less; nevertheless, they were delivered to posterity. In the twelfth century, one considered Scotus Eriugena as a heretic. However, this did yet not have such a meaning as later and today. Nevertheless, the ideas of Scotus Erigena deeply influenced Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.

We realise this heritage of former times on the bottom of the souls, if we want to speak of the nature of Thomism. Something else is considered. In Plotinism, you can realise a very significant feature that arose from a sensory-extrasensory vision of the human being. One gets great respect for these things, actually, when one finds them spiritual-scientifically again. There one would like to confess the following. There one says, if one reads anything unpreparedly like Plotinus or that which is delivered from him, then it appears quite chaotic. However, if one discovers the corresponding truths again, these views take on a different complexion even if they were pronounced different at that time. Thus, you can find a view with Plotinus that I would like to characterise possibly in the following way.

Plotinus looks at the human being with his bodily-mental-spiritual peculiarities from two viewpoints at first. He looks at them first from the viewpoint of the work of the soul on the body. If I wanted to speak in modern way, I would have to say the following. Plotinus says to himself at first, if one looks at a child growing up, then one realises that that still is developed which develops from spiritual-mental as a human body.

For Plotinus is everything that appears material in particular in the human being—please be not irked by the expression—an exudate of the spiritual-mental, a crust of the spiritual-mental as it were. We can interpret everything bodily as a crust of the spiritual-mental. However, when the human being has grown up to a certain degree, the spiritual-mental forces stop working on the bodily.

One could say, at first, we have to deal with such an activity of the spiritual-mental in the bodily that this bodily is organised from the spiritual-mental. The spiritual-mental works out the human organisation. If anything in the organic activity attains a certain level of maturity, we say, for example, for that activity to which the forces are used which appear later as the forces of memory, just these forces which have once worked on the body appear in a spiritual-mental metamorphosis. What has worked first materially from the spiritual-mental, gets free from it if it is ready with its work, and appears as an independent being, as a soul mirror if one wants to speak in the sense of Plotinus.

It is exceptionally difficult to characterise these things with our concepts. One comes close to them if one imagines the following. The human being can remember from a certain level of maturity of his memory. He is not able to do this as a little child. Where are the forces with which he remembers? They develop the organism at first. After they have worked on the organism, they emancipate themselves and still work on the organism as something spiritual-mental. Then only the real core, the ego lives again in this soul mirror. In an exceptionally pictorial way this double work of the soul, this division of the soul into an active part which builds up, actually, the body and into a passive part is portrayed by that ancient worldview. It found its last expression in Plotinus and devolved then upon Augustine and his successors.

We find this view in a rationalised form, in more physical concepts with Aristotle. However, Aristotle had this view from Plato and from that on which Plato rested. If you read Aristotle, it is in such a way, as if you have to say, Aristotle himself strives for conceptualising all old views abstractly. Thus, we recognise in the Aristotelian system that also continued the rationalistic form of that which Plotinus gave in another form, we recognise a rationalised mysticism in Aristotelianism continued until Albert and Thomas Aquinas, a rationalistic portrayal of the spiritual secret of the human being.

Albert and Thomas knew that Aristotle had brought down that by abstractions what the others had in visions. Therefore, they do not at all face Aristotle in such a way as modern philosophers and philologists do who quarrel over two concepts that come from Aristotle. However, because the Aristotelian writings have not come completely to posterity, one finds these concepts or ideas without being related to each other. Aristotle considered the human being as a unity that encloses the vegetative, lower principle and the higher principle, the nous,—the scholastics call it intellectus agens. However, Aristotle distinguishes the nous poietikos and the nous pathetikos, an active and a passive human mind. What does he mean with them?

You do not understand what he means if you do not go back to the origin of these concepts. Even like the other soul forces these two kinds of mind are active in the construction of the human soul: the mind, in so far as it is still active in the construction of the human being which does not stop, however, like the memory once and emancipates itself as memory but is active the whole life through. It is the nous poietikos. This builds up and individualises the body from the universe for itself in the sense of Aristotle. It is the same as the soul constructing the human body of Plotinus. That what emancipates itself then what is destined only to take up the outer world and to process the impressions of the outer world dialectically is the nous pathetikos, the intellectus possibilis. What faces us as astute dialectic, as exact logic in scholasticism goes back to these old traditions. You do not cope with that what happened in the souls of the scholastics if you do not take into consideration this impact of ancient traditions.

Because all that had an impact on the scholastics, the big question arose to them that one normally regards as the real problem of scholasticism. In that time when humanity had still a vision that produced such things like Platonism or its rationalistic filtrate, Aristotelianism, in which, however, still the individual feeling had not reached the climax, the scholastic problems were not yet there. Since that which we call intellect and which has its origin in the scholastic terminology on one side is just an outflow of the individual human being. If we all think in the same way, it is only because we all are organised equally individually and that the mind is attached to the individual that is the same in all human beings. They think different, as far as they are differentiated. However, these nuances have nothing to do with real logic. However, the real logical and dialectic thinking is an outflow of the general human but individually differentiated organisation.

Thus, the human being stands there as an individuality and says to himself, in me the thoughts emerge by which the outside world is represented internally; there the thoughts which should give a picture of the world are arranged from the inside. There, on one side, work mental pictures inside of the human being that are attached to single individual things, like to a single wolf or to a single human being, we say to Augustine. Then, however, the human being gets to other inner experiences, like to his dreams for which he does not find such an outer representative at first. There he gets to those experiences, which he forms for himself, which are chimaeras as already the centaur was a chimaera to scholasticism.

Then, however, are on the other side those concepts and ideas that shimmer, actually, to both sides: the humanity, the type or genus of lion, the type or genus of wolf, and so on. The scholastics called these general concepts universals (universalia). When the human beings still rose to these universals in such a way as I have described it yesterday, they felt them as the lowest border of the spiritual world. To experience in such a way, it was not yet necessary to have that individual feeling which prevailed then during the later centuries. With individualised feeling, one said to himself, you rise from the sensory things up to that border where the more or less abstract, but experienced things are, the universals humanity, lion, wolf and so on.

Scholasticism understood this very well that one could not say just like that, these are only summaries of the outer world, but this became a problem for it with which it struggled. We have to develop such general concepts, such universal concepts from our individuality. If we look out, however, at the world, we do not have the humanity, but single human beings, not the type wolf, but single wolves. However, on the other side, we cannot regard that what we study as the wolf type or the lamb type, the material that is contained in these summaries as the only real. We cannot accept this just like that, because then we would have to suppose that a wolf becomes a lamb if one feeds it with lambs only long enough. Matter does not do it; the wolf remains wolf. Nevertheless, the wolf type is something that one cannot only equate with the material just like that.

Today it is often a problem, which people do not at all take seriously. Scholasticism struggled intensely with this problem, just in its period of bloom. This problem was directly connected with the ecclesiastical interests. We can get an idea of it if we take into consideration the following.

Before Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas appeared with their special elaboration of philosophy, already some people had appeared like Roscelin (R. of Compiègne, ~1050-1120, French theologian and philosopher), for example, who asserted and were absolutely of the opinion that these general concepts, these universalia were nothing but that what we summarise from the outer individual things. They are, actually, mere words, mere names.—This nominalism regarded the general things, the universalia, only as words. However, Roscelin was dogmatically serious about nominalism, applied it to the Trinity, and said, if—what he considered right—this summary is only a word, the Trinity is only a word, and the individuals are the only real: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Then the human mind summarises this three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with a name only.—Medieval spirits expanded such things to the last consequences. The church was compelled to declare this view of Roscelin a partial polytheism and the doctrine heretic on the synod of Soissons (1092). So one was in a certain calamity compared with nominalism. A dogmatic interest united with a philosophical one.

In contrast to today, one felt it as something very real in that time, and just with the relationship of the universalia to the individual things Thomas and Albertus struggled spiritually; it is the most important problem for them. Everything else is only a result as far as everything else got a certain nuance by the way how they positioned themselves to this problem. However, just in how Albertus and Thomas positioned themselves to this problem, all forces are involved which had remained as tradition of the Areopagite, of Plotinus, Augustine, Eriugena and many others. One still knew that there were human beings who beheld beyond the concepts into the spiritual world, into the intellectual world, in that world about which also Thomas speaks as about a reality in which he realises the intellectual beings free of matter that he calls angels. These are not mere abstractions but real beings that have no bodies only. Thomas placed these beings into the tenth sphere. While he imagines the earth circled by the sphere of the moon, then of Mercury, Venus, and sun and so on, he comes via the eighth and the ninth spheres to the Empyrean, to the tenth sphere. He imagines all that absolutely interspersed with intelligences, and the intelligences to which he refers back at first send down what they have as their lowest border as it were in such a way that the human soul can experience it. However, in such a way as I have pronounced it now, in this form which is more based on Plotinism it does not appear from the mere individual feeling to which just scholasticism had brought itself, but it remained belief for Albert and Thomas that there is the manifestation of these abstractions above these abstractions. For them, the question originated, which reality do these abstractions have?

Albert and Thomas still had an idea of the work of the mental-spiritual on the bodily and its subsequent mirroring if it has worked enough on the bodily. They had images of all that. They had images also of that which the human being becomes in his single individual life what he takes up as impressions of the outside world and processes it with them. Thus, the idea developed that we have the world round ourselves, but this world is a manifestation of the spiritual. While we look at the world, while we see the single minerals, plants, and animals, we suspect that that is behind them, which manifests from higher spiritual worlds.

If we consider the realms of nature with logical decomposition and with the greatest possible mental capacity, we get to that which the spiritual world has put into the realms of nature. Then, however, we have to understand the fact that we are in contact with the world by our senses. Then we turn away from the world. We keep that as memory, which we have taken up from the world. We look back remembering. There only the universal like “humanity” appears to us in its inner conceptual figure. So that Albert and Thomas say, if you look back if your soul reflects that to you, which it has experienced in the outside world, then the universalia live in your soul. Then you have universalia. You develop from all human beings whom you have met the concept of humanity. You could live generally only in earthly names if you remembered individual things only. While you do not at all live only in earthly names, you must experience universalia. There you have universalia post res, universals that live after the things in the soul. While the human being turns his soul to the things, he does not have the same in his soul what he has after if he remembers it, but he is related to the things. He experiences the spiritual in the things; he translates it to himself only into the form of the universalia post res.

While Albert and Thomas suppose that the human being is related to something real when he is related to his surroundings by his intellectual capacity, so not only to that what the wolf is because the eye sees it, the ear hears it and so on, but because the human being can think about it, the type “wolf” develops. He experiences something that he grasps intellectually abstractly in the things that is also not completely absorbed in the sensory entities. He experiences the universalia in rebus, the universals in the things.

One cannot distinguish this easily because one normally thinks that that which one has in his soul at last as a reflection is also the same in the things. No, it is not the same in the sense of Thomas Aquinas. What the human being experiences as an idea in his soul and explains with his mind to himself is that by which he experiences the real, the universal. So that the form of the universals after the things is different from that of the universals in the things, which then remain in the soul; but internally they are the same.

There you have one of the scholastic concepts whose clearness one normally does not consider. The universals in the things and the universals after the things in the soul are as regards content the same, different only after their form.

Then, however, something else is added. That which lives in the things individualised points to the intellectual world again. The contents are the same, which are in the things and after the things in the human soul, but they have different form. Again in other form, but with the same contents: are the universalia ante res, the universals before the things. These are the universals as they are included in the divine mind and in the mind of the divine servants, the angels.

Thus, the immediate spiritual-sensory-extrasensory view of ancient time changes into the views which were illustrated only just with sensory pictures because one cannot even name that which one beholds in extrasensory way after the Areopagite if one wants to deal with it in its true figure. One can only point to it and say, it is not all that which the outer things are. - Thus, that which presented itself as reality in the spiritual world to the ancient people becomes something for scholasticism about which just that astuteness of thinking has to decide. One had brought down the problem that was once solved by beholding into the sphere of thinking, of the ratio. This is the nature of the view of Thomas and Albert, of High Scholasticism. It realises above all that in its time the feeling of the human individuality culminates. It realises all problems in their rational logical figure.

The scholastic thinking struggles with this figure of the world problems. With this struggle and thinking, scholasticism stands in the middle of the ecclesiastical life. On the one side, is that of which one could believe in the thirteenth, in the twelfth centuries that one has to gain it with the thinking, with the astute logic; on the other side were the traditional ecclesiastical dogmas, the religious contents.

Let us take an example how Thomas Aquinas bears a relation to both things. There he asks, can anyone prove the existence of God by logic? Yes, one can do it.—He gives a range of proofs. One of them is, for example, that he says, we can only gain knowledge at first, while we approach the universalia in rebus and look into the things. We cannot penetrate by beholding—this is a simply personal experience of this age—into the spiritual world. We can thereby only penetrate with human forces into the spiritual world that we become engrossed in the things, get out the universalia in rebus. Then one is able to conclude what is about these universalia ante res before, he says. We see the world moved; a thing always moves the other because it itself is moved. Thus, we come from one moved thing to another moved thing, from this to another moved thing. This cannot go on endlessly, but we must come to the prime mover. If he were moved, however, we would have to look for another prime mover. We must come to an unmoved prime mover.—With it, Thomas just reached—and Albert concluded in the same way—the Aristotelian unmoved mover, the first cause. The logic thinking is able to acknowledge God as an inevitably first being as the inevitably unmoved prime mover.

No such line of thought leads to Trinity. However, it is traditional. One can reach with the human thinking only so far that one tries whether the Trinity is preposterous. There one finds: It is not preposterous, but one cannot prove It, one must believe It, one must accept It as contents up to which human intellectuality cannot rise.

Thus, scholasticism faces the so important question at that time, how far can one reach with the human intellect? However, by the development of time it was placed still in quite special way in this problem, because other thinkers preceded. They had accepted something apparently quite absurd. They had said, something could be theologically true and philosophically wrong. One can say flatly, it can absolutely be that things were handed down dogmatically, as for example the Trinity; if one contemplates then about the same question, one comes to the contrary result. It is possible that the intellect leads to other results than the religious contents.—This the other problem that the scholastics faced: the doctrine of double truth. Both thinkers Albert and Thomas made a point harmonising the religious contents and the intellectual contents, searching no contradiction between that what the intellect can think, indeed, only up to a certain limit, and the religious contents. However, what the intellect can think must not be contradictory to the religious contents; the religious contents must not be contradictory to the intellect.

This was radical in those days because the majority of the leading church authorities adhered to the doctrine of double truth: that—on one side—the human being must simply think something reasonable, as regards content in one figure, and the religious contents can give him it in another figure. He has to live with these two figures of truth.—I believe that one could get a feeling for historical development if one thought that people were with all their soul forces in such problems few centuries ago. Since these things still echo in our times. We still live in these problems. Tomorrow we want to discuss how we live in these problems. Today I wanted to characterise the nature of Thomism generally in such a way as it lived at that time.

The main problem to Albert and Thomas was how do the intellectual contents of the human being relate to the religious contents? First, how can one understand what the church specifies as faith, secondly how can one defend it against that which is opposite to it? Albert and Thomas were very much concerned with it. Since in Europe that did not live exclusively which I have characterised, but there were still other views. With the propagation of Islam, other views still asserted themselves in Europe. Something of Manichaean views had remained in Europe.

However, there was also the doctrine of Averroes (Ibn Rushed, 1126-1198, Andalusian polymath) who said there, what the human being thinks with his pure intellect does not belong to him especially; it belongs to the whole humanity.—Averroes says, we do not have the intellect for ourselves; we have a body for ourselves, but not everybody has an intellect for himself. The person A has an own body, but his intellect is the same as that of person B and again as that of person C.—One could say, to Averroes a uniform intelligence of humanity exists, in which all individuals submerge. They live with their heads in it as it were. When they die, the body withdraws from this universal intelligence. Immortality does not exist in the sense of an everlasting individual existence after death. What lasts there is only the universal intelligence, is only that which is common to all human beings.

Thomas had to count on this universality of the intellect. However, he had to position himself on the viewpoint that the universal intellect not only combines intimately with the individual memory in the single human being, but that that which during life combines also with the bodily forces form a whole that all formative, vegetative and animal forces, as the forces of memory are attracted by the universal intellect. Thomas imagines that the human being attracts the universal and then draws that into the spiritual world, which his universal has attracted so that he brings it into the spiritual world. Hence, to Thomas and Albert not pre-existence but post-existence can be as Aristotle had assumed. In this respect, these thinkers continue Aristotelianism, too.

Thus, the big logical questions of the universals combine with the questions that concern the world destiny of the single human beings. In the end, the general logic nature of Thomism had an impact on all that—even if I wanted to characterise the cosmology of Thomas and the enormous natural history of Albert. This logical nature consisted of the following: we can penetrate everything with keen logic and dialectic up to a certain border, and then we must penetrate into the religious contents. Thus, both thinkers faced these two things without being contradictory: what we grasp with our intellect and what is revealed by the religious contents can exist side by side.

What was, actually, the nature of Thomism in history? For Thomas it is typical and important to prove God, while he strains the intellect and at the same time, he has to concede that one comes to an idea of God as one had it as Jahveh rightly in the Old Testament.—That is, he gets to that uniform God whom the Old Testament called the Jahveh God. If one wants to get to Christ, one has to pass over to the religious contents; one cannot get to it with that which the human soul experiences as its own spiritual.

Something deeper was in the views of double truth against which High Scholasticism simply had to oppose out of the spirit of time, that one could not survey, however, in the age in which one was surrounded everywhere by the pursuit of rationalism, of logic. The following fact was behind it: those who spoke of double truth did not take the view that that which theology reveals and that which the intellect can reach are two different things, but are two truths provisionally, and that the human being gets to them because he took part in the Fall of Man to the core of his soul.

This question lives as it were in the depths of the souls until Albert and Thomas: did we not take up the original sin also in our thinking? Does the intellect lead us to believe other truth contents than the real truth because the intellect has defected from spirituality?—If we take up Christ in our intellect, if we take up something in our intellect that transforms this intellect, then only it consorts with the truth, with the religious contents. The thinkers before Thomas wanted to take the doctrine of the original sin and the doctrine of the redemption seriously. They did not yet have the power of thought, the logicality for that, but they wanted to make this seriously. They presented the question to themselves: how does Christ redeem the truth of the intellect that is contradictory to the spiritually revealed truth in us? How do we become Christians to the core? Since the original sin lives in our intellect, hence, the intellect is contradictory to the pure religious truth.

Then Albert and Thomas appeared and supposed that it is wrong that we indulge in sinfulness of the world if we delve purely logically into the universalia in rebus if we take up that which is real in the things. The usual intellect must not be sinful. The question of Christology is contained in this question of High Scholasticism. High Scholasticism could not solve the problem: how can the human thinking be Christianised? How does Christ lead the human thinking to the sphere where it can grow together with the spiritual religious contents?

This question shook the souls of the scholastics. Hence, it is,—although the most perfect logical technique prevails in scholasticism—above all important that one does not take the results of scholasticism, but that one looks through the answer at the big questions which were put at that time. One had not yet advanced so far with Christology that one could pursue the redemption from the original sin up to the human thinking. Hence, Albert and Thomas had to deny the intellect the right to cross the steps over which it can enter into the spiritual world. High Scholasticism left behind the question: how does the human thinking evolve into a view of the spiritual world?

Even the most important result of High Scholasticism is a question: how does one bring Christology into thinking? How is thinking Christianised?—Up to his death in 1274, Thomas Aquinas could bring himself to this question. One could answer it only suggestively in such a way that one said, the human being penetrates into the spiritual nature of the things to a certain degree. However, then the religious contents have to come. Both must not be contradictory to each other; they must be in concordance with each other. However, the usual intellect cannot understand the contents of the highest things on its own accord, as for example, Trinity, the incarnation of Christ in the person Jesus and so on. The intellect can understand only so far that it can say, the world may have originated in time, but it may also exist from eternity. However, the revelation says, it originated in time. If you ask the intellect once again, you find the reasons, why the origin in time is more reasonable.

More than one believes, that lives still in modern science, in the whole public life, which was left of scholasticism, indeed, in a special figure. Tomorrow we want to speak about how alive scholasticism is still in us and which view the modern human being has to take of that which has survived as scholasticism.

Dear attendees! When spiritual science sets itself the task of penetrating into the spiritual world that lies behind our sensual world – the world that we perceive with our senses and can understand with the mind that is connected to our brain – then this spiritual science seeks to gain strength and confidence for human life from the spiritual world in which the origin of man itself lies. And in doing so, it seeks to benefit the individual through the knowledge of what lies in the very foundations of things.

We face the spiritual world in a completely different way when we do not seek the sources of spiritual life in general, not only for our knowledge, but when we are, so to speak, dealing with the redemption of the spirit, the real spirit behind material existence, and when it can become the task of this real spirit to help it, so to speak, to break through the physical-material. How often do we not stand before the developing human being, the human being whom we see as having to work the spirit out of the hidden depths of his being, so to speak, from early childhood, the spirit that takes more and more possession of the physical limbs and the spiritual-soul abilities that are bound to the outer instrument of the body. When we as educators are dealing with this real spirit, which rests in the mystery of the human being itself and which is to be brought out, we are dealing with a still higher sense of seeking the spirit than with mere knowledge, which we seek, so to speak, as a satisfaction for the longing of our soul.

Now today the spiritual researcher is in a special position when he wants to observe the developing human being – this developing human being who gradually reveals his talents and abilities and demands that we devote ourselves to him educationally. The spiritual researcher is in a special position when faced with the developing human being because he must immediately point out one of the great facts of spiritual science with regard to this real life of the spirit, which today by no means enjoys the special favor of the educated world. This fact should be apparent to the attentive observer of life when he sees how, from the first moment of human existence, the spiritual rests, as it were, in the deep layers of the human being, how it then, from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, that he must literally see this working out in the ever-more-detailed physiognomy, gestures, movements of the individual limbs and abilities that lie deeper within the human being. We see what is working its way from hidden depths to the surface in the growing human being, and we must ask ourselves: where do we find the origin of these predispositions, these abilities that are slowly emerging? And in regard to this search, the man of today is by no means inclined to approach the facts to which spiritual research must point. We have referred to this fact in various ways. Today it is to be used only as a basis for our actual consideration. On a higher level, this fact is a repetition of another fact that has not been known for very long in the development of mankind.

I have often pointed out – oh, human memory is generally very short in this regard – that in the 17th century not only laymen but also learned naturalists were convinced that matter, mud for example, could develop animals, fish and the like out of itself, without a germ of life having been placed in this mud – out of itself. It was a tremendous turning point for science when in the 17th century – just think, only in the 17th century! – the great naturalist Francesco Redi first put forward the proposition that opened up new, worldwide vistas for scientific knowledge: Living things can only come from living things. If you believe, he said, that living creatures can arise from river mud, then you have not examined it closely enough, otherwise you would have found that the source of life lies in the germ and that this germ only draws matter to itself in order to emerge. It is often the case with truths, as it was with Francesco Redi. He only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno, because he too was considered a heretic. Today we can go from the most radical Haeckelians to Haeckel's opponents: within certain limits, the sentence “Living things can only come from living things” is recognized everywhere. It is taken for granted. That is the fate of great truths. First they are considered heresies, then, after some time, taken for granted. People then cannot understand how anyone could ever have believed otherwise.

The task of spiritual science today is to advocate this principle at a higher level. It is an inaccurate observation to say that what struggles into existence in the developing human being as something mysterious and expresses itself more and more distinctly in gestures and facial features comes merely from the inherited traits of the father and mother and so on. If one proceeds scientifically, this cannot be explained from these inherited traits any more than the emergence of the earthworm from the matter of the river mud can be assumed without an earthworm germ. Today, spiritual science shows that for human life, what comes into existence as the core of a human being through birth must be traced back to another, a completely soul-like existence, in which its spiritual and soul germ lies. And just as the earthworm germ draws upon external physical substance to increase in size, so too, in the human being, this spiritual-soul germ draws upon the qualities and powers of the parents and ancestors to develop with their help.

We must trace back the spiritual-soul to the spiritual-soul. We must trace the soul that exists in man back to a soul germ, just as we must trace the spiritual that develops in man back to a spiritual germ. And by accepting this, it leads us to the fact of repeated earthly lives, which today not only annoys so many people, but is felt by many people as a dream or a fantasy, as something quite abominable. The doctrine of repeated earthly lives tells us that the life we are now living, in which our abilities and qualities unfold, is a repetition of earlier earthly lives and the basis of later lives. The stages of life in which we are enveloped in the physical body are interchanged with other forms of existence, in order to bring into the spiritual life what we have taken in during the present life, what we have gone through in the school of life life, and then, after this has happened, to enter again into a new physical existence, in which a germ of life again draws from the substance what it needs in terms of qualities and abilities in order to live itself into a body.

We can therefore say: We look spiritually when we see the human being emerging from the mysterious foundations of his existence, to a spiritual-soul core of being that unfolds according to his previous life and develops in the present existence by drawing on the inherited characteristics of father and mother and their ancestors. This is another truth that will slowly become part of human education. Today, of course, they no longer burn heretics, but people still say that those who claim such things know nothing about exact science, whereas spiritual science is based on the most exact science of all. They are branded as heretics in the way that heretics are branded today. But the truth of reincarnation will become established and accepted, and will no longer be questioned by people capable of judgment, but will be taken for granted.

Thus, we must look back from what appears in a child as developing abilities to what a person has acquired in previous lives on earth and expresses in this life. If we consider present-day science, we must say that a certain lack of clarity prevails everywhere, in all fields. Science believes it need only point to what comes from the father and mother, from grandparents and so on, and is happy if it can show that the qualities that are expressed here or there were also present in this or that way in the father or grandfather.

Let us look at the whole situation of what crystallizes out of the center of the human being, brought over from a previous existence; let us look at the relationship of this core to the inherited traits. When we consider everything that the human being brings into existence in terms of qualities and talents, we can see two factually related facts in the human soul. The first is what occurs in a person in terms of both mental qualities and abilities – the majority of mental qualities and abilities are independent of each other in some respect, so that one does not depend on the other. This is shown by the simple fact that someone can be very musical and yet have no aptitude for mathematics or any other field of science. An ability can shine in our soul without our being able to say that other abilities are present with it. In this respect, the individual abilities are independent of each other. But the same is also the case with regard to the [mental] qualities. A person can have a certain pride alongside other quite pleasant qualities of the soul. And again, pride is not dependent on the other qualities. That is one thing when we want to take a look at the human soul.

The second fact is that the abilities and qualities that a person has in his soul are held together by a certain center that we call the ego and that they are either in harmony or disharmony with each other. All the abilities and qualities that work together through the ego are, to a certain extent, independent of each other and work together through the fact that each person has a special core of being. If we keep to these two facts, we can, with healthy observation of life, get a clear view of how the qualities and abilities of parents and ancestors are inherited by children and descendants. The individual qualities and abilities really do appear to come from the ancestors to the descendants. On the one hand, it shows us that if a boy is haughty, he has inherited this haughtiness from his mother; another is musical, we find the same disposition in his father or in his mother. But the way in which he processes the qualities, how he relates them, we see clearly depends on his own core of being. And the more closely we examine this human life, the more the nature of this dependence becomes apparent. We can best understand this if we say: the individual qualities – pride, humility, compassionate heart and so on – are inherited by the human being from his ancestors, including the talents, but the way in which he combines them in his soul leads back to his earlier existence, to his spiritual and soul essence with all that has been achieved by his soul in his earlier existence. We can then see much more clearly how the conditions are when we observe this peculiar way of working with the inherited traits. I should also mention that the laws of heredity are laws that cannot be investigated by spiritual science in the same way as physical and chemical laws can. Therefore, I ask you to bear in mind that it is not an objection to a law of spiritual science if it is said: Yes, if you look into life, it shows that heredity does not happen in the way it has been said here. But we must take the laws as physical laws are taken. For example, physics teaches that the path traversed by a thrown stone represents a parabola; the stone falls in a parabola. But the resistance of the air causes the path of the thrown stone not to be an exact parabola. If someone comes and says that the path of the thrown stone does not form a parabola, that is not correct. The physical law is valid, and we only have the possibility of arriving at an understanding of the stone's trajectory by accepting a general law. And if someone says, “Yes, but the stone flies to the side, a gust of wind has blown it away,” the presence of the wind does not contradict the physical law as such. In this sense, the laws of spiritual science are to be taken; they can be modified by the circumstances, but they still apply in such a way that we can only understand the processes through these laws if we know them. Let us now consider the human being in terms of his characteristics, by dividing the human soul itself into two areas, which can clearly be distinguished from one another in human life. Wherever you look in human life, you will find clear distinctions everywhere. One area can be described as the area of interests that a person has, where their attention, sympathy and antipathy, their affects, drives and passions are directed. This area of the nature of will and affect is one area. The other is the area that can be called the intellectual, the rational, that is, the way in which a person forms ideas, whether he is rich or poor in concepts and images, whether these are flexible, whether a person can form symbols or whether he is unimaginative, whether he has the intellectual elements for one area or the other. These two areas should initially be distinguished in the developing human being. With the same precision with which we gain physical laws through healthy observation of life, we can find laws for these two areas that reveal the connection between the ancestors and the descendants.

We see that everything concerning the sphere of interests, affections, sympathy and antipathy, passions, that is, the instinctive direction of man, can always be traced back only to paternal inheritance, whereas that which concerns the formation of the elements of intellect, of the rational, can be traced back to maternal inheritance. Such laws result from a faithful observation of life. Of course, it is not possible to go into the hundreds of cases that could easily be cited from a healthy observation of life. It can only be pointed out that life everywhere confirms that we get the intellectual and imaginative side from our mother's side, and the spirited element, the interest in whether we are lively or casual or apathetic, comes more from our father's side.

I cannot go into general confirmatory considerations at this point, but can only illustrate what has been said with examples. One great example needs to be mentioned: Goethe, who characterized himself so beautifully in the words:

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

We can find this in hundreds of cases when we observe world history or life. And because a faithful observation of life confirms these words everywhere, they make life appear so full of light.

But we still approach the subject far too abstractly when we look at life only in general terms. I said that in general the intellectual element can be traced back to inheritance from the mother's side. But it is not that simple. Instead, the qualities that are inherited undergo a transformation by metamorphosing. Spiritual science is still not fully recognized today, otherwise people would already be able to see how much it can benefit the natural sciences. It is instructive enough to observe how one natural force is transformed into another, for example heat into electricity, but spiritual science transfers this way of observing to other areas as well, and it will say that, for example, in the field of inheritance, one can only get to the bottom of it if one considers the transformation of characteristics.

And here it can be seen how maternal and paternal qualities enter into relationships when they are passed on to the children. We see how maternal qualities, when they are passed on, tend to pass over to the sons. If we look at the soul qualities in the mother, we can say: These soul qualities tend to pass over to the sons, but they tend to change in the process. What is basic [in soul terms] in the mother, she may not be able to develop into particular abilities because she lacks the organs. After all, you need the appropriate predispositions to do so. While the mother has to remain within the narrowest circle with her soul stirrings, we see how, in the sons, the mother's predispositions, as it were, shoot into the physical realm one step further, so that the same predispositions arise again in the son. And the son then shows us in his abilities, through which he can work in the world, what was predisposed in the soul of the mother. The mother has it as a soul disposition; the son has it in such a way that he can let it flow into the physical organs in order to carry it out into the world, in order to bring it to the world in the form of achievements. We see the soul qualities of the mother transformed in the sons right down to the physical level.

So we have the sentence: the soul qualities of the mother have the tendency to move into the physical organs of the sons and to confront us in turn in the soul forces bound to these organs. It only takes a healthy look at life and at the general development of humanity to find this confirmed. We can look to Goethe again, or to other personalities, for example, Hebbel. This peculiar natural dramatist Hebbel, who was never able to communicate with his father, had a great poetic gift; he shows us this gift in such a way that he had the simple primitive ability for it from his mother, who was just a simple bricklayer's wife. We can follow this in his diary entries. And this gift is manifested in him in such a way that the spiritual nature of the mother has been transformed into an organ system, descended into the physical system of the son, where it manifests itself in this way.

The remarkable thing, however, is that faithful observation of life reveals the opposite tendency in the paternal qualities, which have become more integrated into the physical, which rest more in the whole personality, including the physical predispositions. The qualities of the father tend to ascend by one degree in the daughter and to appear in the soul of the daughter as transformed into spiritual-soul qualities. Thus, something that is sober and pedantic in the father appears lovable in the daughter's soul.

I would like to give a brief example of how this relationship manifested itself in Goethe. One can point out that in fact the old Frau Rat Goethe had the art of storytelling in her soul; she had all the mobility, the imaginative gift, and we see how this particular type of gift was expressed in her circle of friends. We see how this type of gift was highly developed in the son, to the point of becoming a basic predisposition, so that it led to world-shaking facts. On the other hand, we see the father, the old Goethe. Anyone who, like me, has spent more than thirty years studying Goethe and everything related to him will not be misunderstood in a superficial way when he characterizes him as saying: “From my father I have the stature, the serious conduct of life.” The son takes over this character foundation from his father without transformation.

The old Goethe is a thoroughly sober, alert, honest man, even great within certain limits, but a man who, I might say, by the very way he comes across as a personality, cannot get along in life, cannot achieve anything worthwhile; he cannot get a proper position in the Frankfurt Council, he stops halfway. His character affects even his physical abilities. Let us now imagine this translated into the soul: how would it confront us in the soul - this stopping halfway, this never-ending? It would be possible for it to appear in the soul in such a way that it has the need on the one hand to join others, but never wants to make up its mind and repeatedly shies away from a decision. Here we have, as soul qualities, what we encounter as intellectual sobriety in the character of Goethe. But we can also have sobriety before us in its sentimental, soul-like transformation. It is easy to find where the outer qualities of the old Goethe live on in the soul: in Goethe's sister Cornelia, who, however, died young. In her, we see the entire soul qualities as a transformation of the qualities of the old Goethe. And now we also understand why Goethe, who received the external qualities from his father but what really mattered to him, what his greatness was based on, from his mother, could not really get along with his father, how the two repelled each other. In his sister, however, these qualities – transformed into kindness, passion and slight vanity – had such an effect that she became a dear companion for him, in whom the [qualities of the father], transformed into the soul, stood beside him. The whole way in which Goethe's life in his parents' house presents itself to us shows how precisely the abilities tied to active organ systems pass from father to daughter.

One could also point out that not only the father, but the entire paternal ancestry comes into consideration, and likewise on the other side the maternal. We see how Goethe repeats the sunny imagination and mystical character of his maternal ancestors – transformed into higher gifts. And in the nature of his sister, whom Goethe esteemed so highly and of whom he had to say that she lacked faith, hope and love, for she was a problematic nature who also withered away early, we see the paternal ancestry. But here we must think of these qualities, which were active in the sister, as having been transformed from the physical into the soul. We know, of course, that one of Goethe's uncles turned out to be a good-for-nothing. He was such a person that one must say of him that he had no head for anything and therefore could achieve nothing. We see the entire dilettantishness of this ancestry, which only in Goethe's father attained a certain greatness, transposed into the soul in the problematic nature of Goethe's sister.

If one wanted to, one could find mothers throughout history who transfer what they have in their souls into the physical traits of their sons. That is why mothers are so often depicted, so that we may understand the sons. Thus, in the fourth book of Maccabees, the mother of the seven sons who were killed is depicted precisely in her peculiar state of mind, which in the sons manifests itself as a stage-lowered, physical predisposition. In order to appreciate this fact, one must proceed according to laws, just as one would when investigating the dynamic force of a gust of wind. And here it can often be shown that the aptitude of a son, with all its intimacy, can be traced back to the nature of the soul struggles of the mother. Perhaps there are few cases as interesting as the relationship that the soul of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's mother had - through her character, through her sad fate - to the whole way of her son's poetry. And when we consider how closely Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was bound to his mother's personality, we see in the wonderfully noble, unassuming religiosity, in the delicate way of facing life, and in the full comprehension of tragic situations, what remained of the mother's soul.

In this way one could cite hundreds of great minds in history and intellectual life and of people we know in our ordinary daily lives and everywhere one would find this law confirmed. One can therefore say that what one is as a father tends to appear in the soul of the daughter and what one is as a mother in the disposition of the sons. A light spreads over numerous life circumstances when we survey this law; and much becomes understandable to us about the connection and the motives of different people.

What does spiritual research tell us about inheritance? It tells us that it would be a mistake to look only for inherited traits in a person. Rather, we have to go back, alongside all inherited characteristics, to the central spiritual-soul core of the human being, which comes from previous lives and integrates and incorporates the characteristics it finds, just as the earthworm germ integrates the external substance, absorbs this substance and enlarges itself according to its own nature. Thus we see in the human core of being that which is drawn in, as if by magnetic forces, into a family where the qualities in the father and other ancestors are suitable for this soul core, so that through the appropriate blending of these qualities and their transformation, the soul can express what its own inner being is. A soul that has acquired the ability in past lives, let us say, to achieve something poetic, for which it needs the gift of imagination, is attracted to a mother who has the gift of storytelling - the gift of thinking in images and, with a slight mobility of soul, transforming these images. But when this ability is passed down from mother to son, there is a tendency to carry these qualities down into the physical, and the spiritual and soul core must blend what it finds in the way of predispositions. The father's character traits are carried up into the soul, into the souls of the daughters, where they are transformed, but when they appear directly in the sons, they are not transformed.

We have to look at more complicated relationships if we want to explain the connection between how the actual human core being is attracted to the qualities of certain persons who then become its parents, and how this core being then mixes and harmonizes these qualities so that it can live out its own essence in them. Spiritual science, however, not only sees what is mixed and transformed from the qualities and dispositions of the ancestors, but it also directs our attention to the spiritual essence that we see coming into existence and must trace back to earlier forms of existence in which it has acquired what enables it to mix the qualities and dispositions that it can receive in the line of inheritance.

Now one could say that spiritual science is extremely easy to refute; one need only apply the most trivial concepts and it can be refuted with the greatest of ease. In an afterword to the small pamphlet “Theosophy and Christianity”, I myself pointed out how easy it is to refute certain presentations of Theosophy if one is determined to start from the prejudices of the present day. The examples given there could easily be multiplied. Regarding what are regarded as hereditary traits, Theosophy must point out the human individuality. It must say: The healthy human mind has the same interest in each individual human individuality, in each spiritual-soul essence of the human being, as it has in the animal in the species, in an animal species. We show the same interest in every single human being as we do, for example, in the lion species. We are as interested in human individuality as we are in animal species. You only have to misunderstand this sentence, or, if it is written, not read it properly, to refute it with tremendous ease.

Someone may object: But what do these spiritual researchers claim? They seem to be unaware that you can just as easily write the biography of a dog or a cat with all their individual characteristics as you can of a human being; you can also list all the differences between the individual animals. It is extremely easy to cite such a thing against spiritual science. But it has never been claimed that this is not possible with spiritual science. I myself was in a school class where a teacher tried to write the biography of a steel spring. You can transfer everything. But one thing can be said: the interest we show for an individual cat and so on is not the same interest as the one we show for a fellow human being. The interest we take in an individual of a species of animal can even be greater than the interest we have for an individual human being. But it is a different interest, not the same; it arises from different psychological roots. Spiritual science requires that the concepts be clearly defined. If someone does not do this, then they can put forward the kind of refutations that can be found on the street. We are dealing with a spiritual-soul core in the human being, and spiritual science does not merely trace this back to the parents and their ancestors, but says: He draws the qualities of these parents to himself, just as the earthworm germ draws the substance it needs for its growth. Now one can ask of spiritual science: Is there something that proves, and that from the human course of life, that such a spiritual-soul core of being actually exists? From the observation of the individual human life, it will be difficult to distinguish between what is nature of the cover and what is the core of the being. Regarding the individual human being, we take the view that the interaction of the covers and the core of the being unfolds gradually. We cannot easily distinguish this in the individual human being, but if we look at a larger, broader basis, at the human being in general, we see that people are very different from one another in terms of their development. Let us assume that this information from spiritual science is correct. Then, for example, there is a core of being in a person that goes back to a life in which this person acquired a strong individuality. Such an essential core will have a lot of trouble overcoming the resistance that the inherited traits present to it. It will have a lot of trouble developing these traits in such a way that they correspond to its spiritual abilities. It takes a long time for a strong essential core to integrate and develop the abilities that come from heredity. On the other hand, a spiritual core that has not yet acquired many abilities of its own will easily blend in with the characteristics of heredity.

This means that people who are stronger individuals, who have a strong inner core and who come from a previous life with a wealth of inner substance, are only slowly able to overcome the resistance that comes from heredity. And here we recall the fact that great minds are not so-called child prodigies, but that teachers often mistake them for the opposite. We only have to think of Alexander von Humboldt, who was considered stupid in his youth. His essential core simply took a long time to bring out the abilities resting within him. A rich core of being had come over to him, and it had a long time to do before it had reworked the characteristics of heredity according to the content of his soul. But through this soul content, which has long worked on the characteristics of heredity, something is also achieved that can achieve great things in humanity. On the other hand, we see souls that, so to speak, bring little with them from previous lives. They will quickly find their way into their new shells and will easily develop the characteristics of heredity. These are the prodigies who seem to be the most talented in the first years of life, but then very soon cease to be so.

Let us assume that the spiritual core of the being has to work its way through what is offered to it from the outside. It only takes a clear, correct observation of life to recognize that physical characteristics in particular are based on heredity. We can see the form of inheritance in the fingerprints. On the other hand, that which is seated as a germ in the soul will be all the less explainable by overcoming the inherited traits through external means, the more the qualities in question have their seat in the interior of the soul. This is why that which belongs to the subjective realm of the soul, the talents for music, mathematics, and so on, appear in the earliest years, as the numerous cases of child prodigies prove. On the other hand, talents that require more inheritance to be overcome will emerge later. In short, everything that comes to us in the course of a proper observation of life proves that a core essence of the human being emerges from all that seeks to envelop us as inherited traits. If we observe people carefully, we can see how the greatest individualities very slowly overcome the resistance of the outer human will. We do not want to focus on these facts today, but they can be seen among the greatest individuals.

I would like to remind you once again of Goethe. If we really understand his greatness, we can see in him how he stands before us as an old Goethe at the full height of life, at the height of art and wisdom; we can see that he has used his whole life to carve out his individuality against the opposing forces. And only the short-sighted could say [about Goethe's late works] that Goethe has grown old. Today, when judging great personalities, we can observe the tendency to exaggerate them in relation to their youth and to belittle them in relation to old age. We can even hear it said that the works of old age are old, dull things, and that those of youth are fresh. A book is being published today in which the true poets, the true individualities, are presented to readers from their youthful works.

People do not really consider that it is perhaps only through their own peculiarity that they are able to understand youth better. They would do better to go along with the individuality in question and not assume that the individuality has become duller in old age. This has already happened to Goethe during his lifetime. People have read the first part of his “Faust” and said: There is bubbling youthfulness in it; but what Goethe wrote in his old age is such that one must be lenient with the aging. But anyone who looks at what Goethe presents with this understanding will say: There, in the first part of “Faust,” Goethe's full individuality has not yet emerged; we see how he is still working his way through, and we see how this strong individuality, which educates itself throughout its entire life, works its way through the resistance of its covers. This is why Goethe says of the critics of his “Faust”:

There they praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars,
In their favor;
The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
The scum thinks,
One would no longer be!

Anyone who is familiar with the development of human nature knows that the stronger the individuality is, the longer it takes to work through.

We can already see a difference between what is the innermost core of our being, the origin of which we have to look for somewhere else, and what is the outer shell that joins this core of our being. We see this difference particularly when we look at the relationship between parents and children. Throughout life, the human being is in a kind of development. This development is an ascending and a descending one. The former includes the time up to the thirtieth, fortieth, fiftieth year, when the core of our being works from within, so that what we go through in pain and suffering becomes life experience and expresses itself in our physicality, in our expressions and gestures. In these stages of life we always see the inner core of the being working on the outer shells and finally shaping them plastically, so that we can speak of the fact that, in an ascending line, the human being becomes more and more similar to his inner core. If we look at a person in their fortieth year and consider the physiognomy that they have been working on for forty years, we can say that the outer appearance is more similar to the inner being than it was in the twentieth year, when it was still inside, still a mere ability, and striving out from the inside out. Thus, in the physical body, a person is more similar to himself in later life than in earlier life. He is more similar to himself in the fortieth year than in the twentieth. This explains an important fact of life, which in turn appears important for many external facts. What is this fact, and why is there such a difference [between the different ages]?

For the observer of life, there is a difference between children of younger parents and those born later in marriage. Only those who are not observers of life do not notice this difference. The core of a child's being, who has moved into a young couple, will find little resistance in its shells because the parents have not yet worked much into their physicality. The individuality will be able to work more into their shells; they do not yet find such a plastic expression of the qualities in them that reproduce themselves in the line of inheritance. Therefore, we can say that children conceived by young parents are better able to shape the whole person from their own individuality. Children born later in a marriage are those whose own core of being is weaker and are therefore drawn to very specific traits that father or mother have imprinted. Thus we see that children born later generally bear more of their father and mother than those born earlier, because the qualities that go into inheritance have already become pronounced in the parents' bodies. We see how the work of the parents on themselves shows in different ways in the children. Strong individualities, which are less similar to the parents, are the children born of the dawn of a young marriage. Less strong individualities, which are more similar to the parents, are those born to older couples.

Spiritual science throws light on such facts in the same way that natural science throws light on natural facts. And if we have this law, we have the means to educate people in a way that is practical for life. Then we acquire a very specific attitude. Anyone who, as a teacher of children, acquires this attitude flowing from spiritual science always says to himself: You must look at what has come into existence through birth and is working its way out more and more like a sacred puzzle to be solved; it is something that comes from previous lives. To do this, you have to look at the ancestry, where the characteristics come from. From this there arises for the educational eye that harmony of will and ability, that sense of responsibility towards the developing human being as a sacred riddle to be solved. When we absorb such wisdom, which places us in this way with the pupil, then that seriousness is imprinted in us, which - without theorizing - finds the educational tact to really solve the riddle in each particular case. In each individual case, we have to act in accordance with this sense of tact in order to properly inspire the mind. We then take leave of the popular phrases of pedagogy.

Which phrase can be heard more often today than that: You have to educate the individuality of the human being. You must educate individually, not in a stereotyped way, and you must not do anything that would contradict the individuality. But anyone who truly observes life wonders: what exactly is individual education? This word remains a mere phrase as long as one does not know how the core of a being relates to what surrounds it. That is why what is said about individual education is just empty words. In most cases, we are unable to do much with them. We have to educate in the way that the demands of practical life arise. We have to realize that we cannot get by with these empty words, but that we have to say: we have to educate from what is assessed. Above all, we are called upon to give the human being what makes him a useful member of human society. He must be able to do what is demanded within certain circles of people, what his time and circumstances demand of him. The phrase of individuality must not shake this demand. Those who see how spiritual science understands the connection between the human being and the whole world are not at all powerless in the face of life's demands. It may be necessary, for example, that a son who has this or that quality takes this or that position in life; family circumstances demand it. Anyone who really looks into the laws of things knows that people are not so one-sided that it can be said that they are only useful for this or that. They can be made useful if not only one side is developed. People are more versatile than is usually assumed. And anyone who really looks through the combination of inherited traits to the spiritual and psychological core of the being is able to connect the various extraordinarily instructive processes with what presents itself as a real process to the spiritual researcher. If one seeks what the individuality of the pupil is, then the practical demands of life make it necessary to look at individuality differently than it is usually viewed in a stereotyped way. It must be said that anyone who allows themselves to be inspired by spiritual-scientific knowledge will, as if flowing into their entire attitude, acquire a fine sense of tact and not only a sense of responsibility, but also all the skills they need to do the right thing at the appropriate moment. It is quite remarkable that whenever you make such assumptions, you always know what to do at the right moment. To give an example: A child [was given to me to educate] who was denied all talents because he had developed in a strange way up to the age of eleven, so that one could say: “Nothing will come of this rascal; he has not even learned to read and write properly!” When this child was entrusted to me and I began to have a certain influence over him, I could say: “All this is only deceptive appearance.” The only difficulty was to break through the outer shell in order to reveal the inner core of the child's being. The core of the being had to be uncovered. Twenty years have passed since that time, and it has been shown that it was as I said. In a short time it was possible to help the spiritual core of the being to break through and to prove what has been said here.

Thus, the study of the developing human being shows how necessary it is not to remain with the outer, physical body alone, but to look through to the spiritual, which is everywhere behind the sensual and which we can see if we acquire the ability to do so. It is important for our knowledge in this direction as well if we can acquire concepts and ideas such as those found in spiritual science.

It is important for our practical lives that we believe in the spirit and seek it behind physical matter; this becomes clear to us when we stand before the developing human being and have to solve the real puzzle in education of how the spirit pours into physical matter. Spiritual science is there not only to talk about the three concepts of body, soul and spirit in a theoretical way, but to fertilize practical life in such a way that a direct result can be achieved through proper education.

When we look at the human being in this way, then, by participating in his development through education, the human soul is imbued with the high truth of the human being's mission in his earthly existence. Then we feel something of the fact that, although we human beings are fully immersed in the physical-sensual world, we are called upon to bring into this physical-sensual world that which we can draw from the spirit. From this realization, we can say: We are surrounded by physical and sensory phenomena; but behind them stands the active spirit. In the developing human being, we encounter the physical human being in indeterminate talents and indeterminate physiognomy, but at the same time we encounter the spirit, which has to struggle through physical matter and which we have to help to come into existence in the physical world from an enigmatic state. Wherever we look at our practical life's work, man is called upon to impress spirit on matter. The words in which we may summarize today's reflection are true everywhere. The spirit struggling for existence also shows us the truth that can be said with these words:

It presses to the human sense
From the depths of the world, full of mystery
The material abundance.
It flows into human souls
From the heights of the world, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They meet in the human heart
To a wisdom-filled reality.