The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! Since I have repeatedly been allowed to speak in this city about topics of spiritual research, it will not be inappropriate to address the important question of where the truths of this spiritual research come from and where the sources of error lie. This must be recognized as something important, especially with regard to supersensible research, since orientation regarding truths and errors in every field of human life is of undeniable importance, and since, as is easy to see, in a field that takes us into such uncertain and error-prone regions, this orientation is of particular necessity. Spiritual research leads us to those areas from which the most important questions and riddles of life arise, initially less those questions and riddles of life that arise from the various fields of science - these are actually, insofar as we are dealing with science in the ordinary sense of the word, much more remote than the questions and riddles of spiritual research, which we encounter, so to speak, at every step we can take in life. In a sense, these riddles and questions of life can beset us at every moment of our existence. If we look at what spiritual research can give to life, albeit from a broad perspective, it initially comes down to two important questions. The first question is contained in the significant word 'man's fate'; the other is contained in the word that is so closely connected with all man's longings, with all his doubts, with all his hopes: the word 'immortality'. It is not as if spiritual research were exhausted by answering the two questions or riddles indicated, but the wide field of this research interests wide circles above all because its results are summarized in an appropriate answer to these questions.

Human destiny! What questions and what riddles lie in these words. We see a human being born into existence. We can predict from the little caring environment he has around him that hardship and misery will accompany his existence. And when we see him growing up with only limited mental abilities and emotional traits, we can say that he will perhaps become a rather unhelpful member of human society and that in many respects he will perhaps be a burden to himself and a torment to his soul. On the other hand, we see a person come into life surrounded by caring hands from the very beginning. We may see certain special gifts and abilities emerging in him early on, and we can predict that he may spend his life in happiness, that he can become a useful member of human society, that he may experience his life in enthusiasm and inner bliss, and all this suggests the question of why, which external science can answer so little.

The other question is that of immortality. It comes to us from life, but at first it confronts us in an egotistical way: that man desires survival after this life from his hopes, his longings, from a satisfied or unsatisfied life. Frequently, this question is raised out of selfish desires; but it need not be so. It can approach us as objectively as any other scientific question. We see this particularly when we consider how, in the course of the nineteenth century, more and more people had to break with the old traditions and beliefs, who not only doubted the survival of human activity after death, but who even believed that they had certainty that with death, consciousness of the human being closes forever, that the soul life, so to speak, gives itself up in it. Such people often belonged to spiritually highly striving beings. They said to themselves: I do not claim an egoistic survival after death; I can resign myself to the thought that what I have worked for will be handed down to humanity after my death. Selfless devotion of their acquired knowledge and the happiness they had experienced was their endeavor when the gate of death closed before them.

It is precisely in the face of such a world view that the question of immortality approaches us in a truly scientific way, for we can indeed say: Is it compatible with all that we otherwise know as the laws of existence, that the human being really is approaching a conclusion in his work and striving when the gate of death closes? Perhaps one could agree with such devotion for ethical reasons, but from the point of view of the laws of world economy it is different. We need only have a little feeling for what is achieved in the world by human souls, and we will say to ourselves: In the course of human life, the powers of the souls themselves create substantial facts, facts that, since the souls are individual, take on an individual character. We cannot readily see such individual creations, as they arise from the human soul, incorporated into the general stream of human development without having to admit that the world economy has a break, for we must feel that the best, the noblest, the most important thing our soul can work for is individual, in the sense that only the one soul can work for it within itself. We may give much to the general public, but our best would completely disappear from the world when the human being ceased to exist, when the gates of death closed. Without taking into account our desires, our hopes and longings, we are faced with the necessity of contemplating the immortal in human nature in the face of all that is mortal.

So the question arises before our soul, but if this question is to be answered, a science is needed that goes beyond the sensual, beyond the outer, physical nature. For nothing can give us an answer as to why these or those facts present themselves to us when we enter life. The question of destiny is not answered by physics and natural science. These must remain indifferent when they consider their facts, how these facts approach human hearts and souls. The why cannot fall within the scope of external science, nor can the question of immortality, since science depends on concepts of the mind that are bound to the instrument of the brain. What it can observe arises with death, disappears with death; if it cannot penetrate into the [gap in the transcript], we have no hope of seeing the question of immortality answered by it.

The way in which attempts are now being made to find answers to such questions in the present day (through spiritual science) is, however, not at all popular in the present day. Prejudice after prejudice favors a spiritual research activity; and perhaps the reasons will emerge from the lectures themselves, why there is so much resistance in the wider circles of the present, one may say, not only theoretical resistance, but even hatred, against what is emerging in a scientific way as spiritual research, in order to solve the characterized riddles of life and to find many other things that are connected with them.

Today we will talk about how man can truly look into the worlds from which the answers to such questions arise. We cannot get by in this world with the ordinary powers by which we know the outer world; and if man were not able to develop other powers than the ordinary powers of knowledge, there would be no possibility for him to penetrate into such worlds. All questions converge in the one: Is there a possibility for man to develop other powers of knowledge than those which [outer] science uses, which are thus exhausted in the observation of the senses and the mind bound to the brain? If man were only a being of the senses, it would be impossible for such powers to exist. Only someone who admits that the sense body of man, that which one can see with the eyes or grasp with the hands, is permeated by another entity, a supersensible entity, can come to the assumption of such powers. And basically, a logical certainty that it is so is provided by a very everyday observation, the kind of observation that is only rarely made because man does not consider what he experiences all the time to be worthy of special observation.

The mystery of death remains interesting for people because it comes unexpectedly, suddenly, and frighteningly; but what happens every day in the same way, the state of transition between waking and sleeping, is paid less attention to; nothing comes up to people that awakens uncertainty in them, because the same thing happens to them again and again in this state of transition. But for those who want to undergo a deeper observation of life, it is precisely the state of change [between waking and sleeping] that becomes particularly significant. We can say: Would it not be logically absurd to think that what takes place in the soul in terms of passions, drives and desires, longings and hopes, images and ideas from morning till evening, that all this sinks into nothingness when we fall asleep and is recreated from nothingness when we wake up? That would be absurd; nevertheless, no external sensory observation, no mind bound to the brain, will ever find in the sleeping human body that which surges up and down in the soul during wakefulness.

So at least initially the hypothesis can be put forward that there is a spiritual element in human nature that leaves it during sleep and moves back into it when we wake up, when the human body is then left by the soul, this inner truth moves into spiritual worlds during sleep. When sleep is over, the spiritual element comes back from the spiritual world into the physical body. This cannot be observed with the mind, but it will become clear if one only thinks logically. Now, of course, such an assumption can only be valid, only then convincing, if one can grasp that which is invisible and leaves the human body during sleep, if one can prove its real reality. How this happens is what we will now deal with.

Let us observe how a person presents themselves when they are asleep. We become unable to move our external limbs. All the senses die away, the body is overcome by a heaviness, the powers that it has in the waking state are withdrawn from it. We see, so to speak, our body falling away from us as we fall asleep. But we also perceive how consciousness dies with this loss of physicality, how it slowly fades and is then surrounded by complete darkness. But if the soul-spiritual, which permeates the body during the day, is present, then we have to say that it is not capable of developing inner forces during sleep, not even the kind of forces that could give it inner knowledge of itself. It is so weak in the normal human being that it cannot become aware of itself if it does not have the instrument of the body. If such a spiritual-soul element is present, for the real, that it feels that it is losing its body, then we must say: this is of such a nature that it needs the tool of the body to develop consciousness, to evoke forces. And when it is left to itself, it is not strong enough to develop an inner life; it can only do so if it opposes the resistance of the body.

But this does not mean that proof of its existence has been provided. This proof will only be provided if man can succeed in making this inner life, which otherwise makes use of the body, so strong that it can develop inner life and consciousness even without the bodily. Even for the proof of the spiritual and soul life, everything depends on whether the human being can develop a spiritual life without the help of this outer corporeality, of sensory perceptions. What would such a spiritual life be like? It would be something similar to sleep and yet different from it. When we fall asleep, we feel our inner life cease, our consciousness fade away. It fades away because the external sensory impressions are silent. We would have to be able to artificially induce this moment through arbitrariness, that is, be able to silence the external sensory impressions and still evoke a state that is not unconsciousness but is consciousness. This state is or would be similar to sleep in that we command all external senses and the brain to stand still and yet consciousness does not occur. The spiritual researcher must bring about this state in himself.

We will understand this best if we compare it to another state that is similar and yet quite different. When man is able to develop spiritual-soul forces outside of his body, to perceive in a spiritual world, then he penetrates into a world that lies beyond the mind bound to the brain, beyond the senses; then a supersensible world speaks to him in his being, as the senses speak to his being when he makes use of the senses. In this way man would become a spiritual researcher; and if such a world could be experienced in this way, then man would penetrate into the spiritual world, then proof would be supplied that everything outwardly visible is based on a spiritual substance. If this is the case, then this spiritual must always be there, then the visible world that surrounds us must be based on a spiritual. The only reason for this is that it does not show itself because we cannot perceive it. We experience the invisible spiritual world like a blind person experiences colors.

Now there is a state that is not considered in spiritual science, that is not applied by it, but that can serve us in our understanding of the actual spiritual state in the present, that is the state that is usually referred to by the term 'mediumship'. Please do not misunderstand me; the human being as a medium is not, as the spiritual researcher wishes, to come to a conclusion. How does human nature become a medium? Mediumistic experiences are brought about by the fact that the ordinary expressions of the soul, the life of will, the life of feeling, are suppressed by some process or other, so that the person is as if put into a kind of sleep. Under certain conditions, however, human nature can be induced to make statements, even to speak and write, without the person knowing about it and without consciously observing the processes. Thus, spiritual expressions can occur that can only be attributed to an entity whose intelligence has descended. Nor should one be advised to do what is called the development of mediumistic qualities. They are present in some personalities even without special training.

Let us consider again: What happens to a person who, in this way, comes to spiritual expressions as a medium? His own soul life is tuned down, completely extinguished, that is, his conscious soul life; he knows nothing of his revelations. We find something there that can otherwise only come from the conscious soul. We can say that we see there what is the everyday expression, how it spreads like a veil over the subconscious soul activity, which in turn is connected with the physical body and expresses itself when the conscious soul activity is suppressed. Thus, soul activity rests in the depths of human nature; we can bring it out when we make conscious soul activity completely passive.

This is not the way of spiritual science; but it shows us not only that there is soul activity where there is consciousness, but also that spiritual-soul activity is in human nature and shows itself when we suppress consciousness. This process, which produces the medium, is exactly the opposite of what should happen for the spiritual researcher. While the soul activity, the consciousness, is being reduced for the medium, it must be strengthened for the spiritual researcher, and this is done by the person evoking intense soul processes, soul processes that are usually referred to as 'concentration of thought', 'meditation' or 'contemplation'. These processes, which we shall endeavor to explain more fully, take place in an inwardly active spiritual life and ultimately lead to certain states of mind that represent three stages, three stages that one ascends to fully enter the spiritual worlds.

I ask you not to be put off by the words. The words used here are not used in the sense in which they are not liked to be heard in ordinary life. So you must not understand anything by them other than what I will explain afterwards.

We can describe the three stages as imagination, inspiration and intuition. All three stages are achieved by an increase in the life of the soul, by an inward strengthening. When a person lives in the ordinary, everyday life with nature and other people, he gets his impressions through the senses and then processes them with the mind. In this way, a person is concerned above all that what he imagines, senses and feels corresponds to external things; he forms such ideas to which he can attach the hallmark of truth through agreement with the outside world. As long as he remains in this state, an inner, spiritual life cannot develop. A certain concentration, meditation, that is, contemplation, must occur.

In order to avoid abstractions, we shall give a brief and precise description of how such an inward arousal of higher spiritual powers is achieved. (Please refer to my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds?”). What is described in this book will be hinted at here. Concentrated thinking proceeds in such a way that one first tries to free oneself from all external sensory impressions, to develop strong powers to keep one's eyes from colors and light. All sensory impressions must be suppressed so that one becomes completely inattentive and uninterested in the outside world. Then, through special training of the will, one silences all the memories that have accumulated in the course of one's life. One tries to become free of all worries and suffering; in a word, one tries to be within oneself. What kind of exercise of the will is needed to find such a state can also be seen in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds?”.

It is possible to make the will so strong that the outer senses and the mind are silent. Just as one can learn in ordinary life to turn one's attention away from objects, so one can arbitrarily suppress all impressions from outside by strengthening one's willpower. On the one hand, this brings about a moment similar to falling asleep; however, it must not come to unconsciousness. This is achieved by taking, through the power of the soul, into one's own soul, images that one has prepared for oneself. Such images are best when they do not correspond to any external events or things.

We will now place such a particular image before our souls, an image that is one of many thousands that the spiritual researcher uses for himself, but which can show the principle: that a person imagines he has two glasses in front of him, one filled with water and the other empty. He pours, so we want to imagine, from the filled glass into the empty some water, but this would not make the filled glass emptier and emptier, but always fuller and fuller, and the more we pour out, the fuller it becomes. It is an absurd notion, but it can be an allegorical notion for something that confronts us enigmatically in life. What is meant here is what we call love. Does the loving soul, which lovingly gives to the needy, which, so to speak, gives from itself what is contained within it, does it become emptier because of this? No, what is given out of love always makes us fuller and richer. That is the quality of love, that we give our own being and yet become richer and richer.

If we imagine this property of love through the symbol of the water glasses just characterized, then we have done something similar to what we did in geometry. If we look at a circular medal, we can put it down and then imagine a circular shape. So you can be completely unaware of the intrinsic nature of a thing, but you can visualize and draw the circular shape and completely disregard what you have in front of you. In the circle, everything that relates to the circular nature becomes clear. Figuratively, you have extracted something that is in this thing. This is how one visualizes things in geometry, and one also does this in spiritual research in a higher sense.

You extract from a process the nature of love, which encompasses such mystery and unfathomability that no human being can exhaust it, you take out the quality of becoming ever richer and you focus the soul on the symbol. You can also form other symbols. Such images are better for the meditative life than representations taken from the external world; in them, the soul still clings to the external world. But if we choose such images that have nothing to do with the external world, then we can live with distraction from everything external in our inner life. We live there when we direct all our soul powers for a while towards the one image. We can also use other symbols for such inner work, and the spiritual researcher has to do such an exercise a thousand times. Wisdom as such is not luminous, but we can imagine it under the image of a luminous sun and surrender to the symbol that expresses the idea of inner warmth. We can experience something in the process that we also feel when we imagine wisdom inwardly. We can also imagine love for the warmth spreading throughout the world.

Many, many examples of such images could be given. Someone could easily come along and say: So the spiritual researcher wants to indulge in ideas that are not true! But they are also not there to depict something external; they do not want that, but they want to bring the soul life within them to activity. While in our everyday life, or when we are occupied with scientific matters, we may have content in our soul that we cannot see, while our soul life is spread over many things, in meditation we draw together all our soul forces and focus them on this one idea; this makes it particularly strong when we make an effort to hold on to this idea and do not let anything else into our soul for a long time.

For the actual accomplishment of the matter, comprehensive inner measures are necessary, which you can also find in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” Especially effective are moral intuitions, impulses of the will, which the soul symbolically visualizes and to which it surrenders with the same love and enthusiasm that are otherwise awakened by things that stimulate us from the outside and make an impression on us. All training for true spiritual research is based on this kind of strengthening of the inner life, [in a] gathering of all the soul into a single idea; at times one works on this idea. This is meditation. And this meditation rises to contemplation when we are able to dwell vitally in such an inner soul content for a longer period of time, as we are otherwise in a comfortable space with our physicality. When we come to bring ourselves equally consciously into such a voluntarily induced state of soul, then we live in inner contemplation. Through this, that which in human nature is not dependent on the tool of corporeality is inwardly activated.

This provides real proof that there is such an inner spiritual realm, and it brings us closer to proving that it is something real that withdraws during sleep, that it is only too weak in ordinary life, but shows itself inwardly animated when we bring it to inner activity through such exercises as those described.

When a person has practiced this for a while, the point is reached when he finds that even when he does not artificially conjure up such images, does not artificially conjure up the symbols, his inner life is prepared in such a way that it generates such images from the subconscious, so to speak. This is the important moment, it is like a rebirth of the soul's life when, without our artificially inducing it, we see image after image emerging from the depths of our soul, emerging before us like a second world, a world outside the world.

But now the important thing begins, so that man may be led to the truths and not to the errors of spiritual research. A world of images rises from the depths of the soul, a world of images that someone who is not familiar with these things, but is familiar with today's view of such conditions, will take as visions, hallucinations, delusions. Today's world view believes that in such things, which go beyond ordinary life, it can only perceive the pathological. But the path to the truth of spiritual research consists in the fact that it can only emerge from a practiced life of the soul that knows how to distinguish between delusions and realities, including those in the realm of the soul. Therefore, every genuine schooling in spiritual research must lead to the moment when the described occurs, a strong inner will can be made in the person who wants to become a spiritual researcher, a decision that will not be present if the condition occurs pathologically.

This can be seen by observing ordinary life. Many of you will have noticed how people with a morbid mental life, when they have delusions, are far more convinced of the truth, of the reality of their own ideas, than of the reality of the outside world. It is often easy to dissuade people from a conviction, but with someone whose mental life is a morbid one, it would be a wasted effort. What happens then? What happens is that what a person has created through the power of his own soul life, he loves out of a strong feeling; in his imagination he also brings with him the longing for it to be reality, and so a world is built up before him, but one that he has only created himself. As soon as a person takes such a world as truth, he cannot be a spiritual researcher. Such a strong willpower is necessary when, through meditation training, the images that we call imaginations arise; a strong resolve is needed that is precisely opposed to unhealthy ideas, that now says to itself: All that you feel rising up in you as a world of images, even without your intervention, is nothing more than a mirror image of your own soul life. What you have within you, you have brought forth through your own efforts, and it presents itself to you. They are nothing but shadowy images of your own being. And it is not only the ability that belongs to the spiritual researcher, that one can bring it to the point where imagination occurs, more important is the strong will training in the face of this world, to always hold fast to the images of enchanting beauty, that they are only shadowy images of our own self.

This mistake is repeatedly made by those who have not undergone proper training and who, for whatever reason, come to a certain inner vision of images: they mistake this world for a real world because it can be a beautiful one, because in it, the human being feels happy. A spiritual researcher must be able to dispense with such a way of thinking. What must be formed in the course of training is the strong decision, and when this decision itself is made into a kind of meditation, when one repeatedly immerses oneself in this decision and applies all the soul's powers to all as shadow images, then this determination is strengthened and one acquires the ability to erase the imaginative world again; one can erase it again through an inner strength; then one has reached an important stage of spiritual research.

What you can achieve is as follows: you can say that it can be compared to what we call forgetting our thoughts in ordinary life. You know that everything you have experienced rests in your consciousness. How could a person live if all his experiences, pain and joy, were always present in his memory? But you know that what has long been forgotten can from time to time be recalled in the soul. Just as an idea from ordinary life plunges into oblivion, so too must the whole imagination be pushed into oblivion, into the unconscious, through the strong willpower discussed. This requires a strong mastery of the human being over himself, because the human being is intimately connected with what he has produced through his power. He has achieved a strong victory over himself when he is able to erase everything he has produced on the first level of spiritual knowledge.

Only then do we live in our true self, only then have we developed stronger forces within us than before. If we cannot do this, we know that we are still too weak to truly penetrate into spiritual worlds. Experiencing truths in the spiritual world is only possible if the experiences are brought about through spiritual training. When we have succeeded in doing this, then the images come up again in a completely different way – like forgotten images come up again, but in the same way as they were – so the imaginations come up again in a changed way. Before, they were images, like visionary or fantastic images; afterwards, they come up in such a way that we know we are now dealing with a real world, with a supersensible world. Before, they were images; now they are processes that are real, like the processes of the sense world.

Now someone might say that one could indeed now indulge in self-suggestion. What gives us assurance that things are real when we have become so master of ourselves? Yes, the way we experience things - nothing else can give us assurance, but this is the same way that gives us proof of the realities of the external, sensual life. There is no other proof! This can best be appreciated by pointing out Schopenhauer's main error. One can fully acknowledge a mind like Schopenhauer's even when pointing out his main error. When he says that the world around us is only in our imagination, then he makes this mistake, because one can distinguish in the world - but only who distinguishes life - whether something is imagination or reality. Imagine glowing iron. You will not get burned by imagining it. But if you perceive and touch the real glowing iron, you will get burned by it. Nothing can prove reality to us as much as direct experience. Full experience is the only thing that gives proof of reality. It has been said: Why should not what comes before the soul be suggestion, since man so easily succumbs to suggestion? One can imagine drinking lemonade; there is no reality here, but one enjoys the taste of the lemonade as if it were reality. One can admit this, but it is not a matter of a partial experience, but of a full experience. One can experience the taste in one's imagination, but one's thirst is not quenched by it! The full experience, the quenching of thirst, presupposes reality, not imagination.

Just as man can only receive the evidence of reality through experience in the external sense world, so he only acquires the ability to distinguish between reality and deception in the spiritual world through strict spiritual training. In the manner described, the spiritual researcher comes to a stage where he is confronted with a new kind of being, of facts that lie behind the sense world. By strengthening the life of the soul, real spiritual eyes are created in one's own soul life, so that man may find a new world.

Also with regard to his own life, man can only come to reality through such imagination. If a person first forms such imaginations, as they have been described, with regard to his own life, if he imagines this or that in a symbolic way, what he has experienced, if he meditatively delves into his own past life, then this life can come to his soul in a kind of images. If he is then able to gain control over these images, if he can erase this life by conjuring it up before his soul, he has won the victory over himself. Just as he [now] sees something occurring externally that is real, but he has erased everything that is connected with his present life – when he follows this process, he comes to something that belongs to him but not to his present life. There he actually ascends to what we call his previous life on earth, and he arrives at the realization of his previous lives on earth. For this is what spiritual science leads us to: our previous earthly lives, and in so doing it provides us with proof that our entire life, in repeated earthly lives and in the intervening periods in the purely spiritual realm, is a continuous process. This idea may be unappealing to the mind, but it is something that will become part of our culture in the future.

But then the question of fate dissolves in a strangely strange way, in that we know: this is not the first time we have lived this life and we still have many more lives on earth ahead of us. Back then, [in earlier lives on earth], we prepared ourselves for what now determines our destiny. And the question of immortality gains its proper illumination when we look at the gate of death in such a way that we pass through it, then live in a purely spiritual world, in order to enter a new life on earth with all that we have acquired, which yields the fruits of earlier lives. Then we are not talking in general terms about immortality, which is composed limb by limb. We gain from the certainty that we see our own lives, certain abilities that teach us to see that another and yet another life must follow. Thus genuine spiritual scientific research leads us to the truth, but the right path must be taken in the sense indicated.

All such knowledge then leads further to that stage where we not only see what arose in images, but also acquire the ability to experience in a non-pictorial way, so to speak: inspiration. Through inspiration, we penetrate into the meaning of things and entities, and through intuition, the next level of inner life, we become one with things, we experience what lies invisibly in things as spirit.

One can say in response to such an argument: Yes, when the spiritual researcher enters into a spiritual world and can say from this spiritual world how the riddle of fate is to be solved, can say: Yes, an immortal lives in you – this applies only to the spiritual researcher. That is not the case. The truth about the nature of spiritual research must also become clear if it is to become a factor in our culture.

What does the spiritual researcher gain when he enters higher worlds? He comes to recognize his essential soul core, to be able to say to himself: When the hair turns pale, when the body gradually withers, then a soul core weaves within me, which I feel becoming stronger and stronger, acquiring strength in life, then living in an intermediate life [between death and a new birth], and then coming to life again in a new earthly life. One could say: Only the spiritual researcher can experience this certainty. What then do other people have to gain from it, who can only use their intellect? If we want to recognize this, we have to realize that everything that the spiritual researcher brings is nothing other than the experience of the spiritual world. But an urge and an impulse asserts itself in him immediately; it is the urge to bring down everything one experiences in the spiritual world into the concepts of the real world. The true spiritual researcher is not satisfied with his journey into the spiritual worlds until he can clothe in logical forms what he knows from the spiritual worlds — so that his experiences are understandable to all people. And the spiritual researcher has no certainty about immortality, no certainty about destiny, until he can express his experiences in general ideas and concepts.

How does he relate to his ideas then? He relates to them as a painter who is learning to paint, who is learning how to handle colors, who is learning everything that belongs to the art of painting, relates to the picture that he brings onto the canvas. What the painter learns is all his own business at first. But then the picture is before us. Two people can stand before this picture. One may be inclined to spiritualize everything, then he will understand the secrets that the person has placed in the picture. The other would only look at the color combinations in the picture. Just as the painter relates to his picture and is not satisfied until his skill is reflected in it, so the spiritual researcher relates to his experience when he has conveyed it to other people in an understandable way. This picture, when it is painted by the true spiritual researcher, is such that every understanding observer who stands before it can understand it - explanations would only disturb, because the picture must be grasped inwardly. If a person has only enough impartiality and free power of judgment, he can accept it as a mental image, which he can absorb; he then has everything that the spiritual researcher was able to fathom in the spiritual world. One must be clear about the fact that in what the spiritual researcher puts into his picture, there is nothing that cannot be grasped with the mind, with the means of healthy thinking.

Everything we need for the strength of life, everything we need at all, cannot come to us through the research of science, but through spiritual science - through what we absorb when the spiritual researcher presents his perceptions in ideas. The strange thing is that the spiritual researcher does not receive what he needs for his life through his research, but through what he can have in common with ordinary people: Only when the spiritual researcher has made the seen comprehensible to other people does he gain security in life, orientation in relation to fate and satisfaction. Through spiritual research, one gains insights into the entire world; but what the research can be, the spiritual researcher cannot gain from it if it cannot be presented in comprehensible forms. And the spiritual researcher cannot be served by anything other than what he can make useful to the non-spiritual researcher. There must be spiritual researchers; and you will see from my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” that every person can come to a certain level of this knowledge. In order to acquire what the soul needs for the security of life, for the joy of living, for the security of its roots in the immortal, what the soul needs so that man can look forward to old age with peace of mind, can be recognized through the results of spiritual research, and in this the spiritual researcher attains nothing more than the other; and only then does the spiritual researcher have something of his ideas when he has presented them in the forms of common sense.

That is the truth about spiritual research; that is the truth about the relationship of spiritual research to life, and it must be firmly held that from this spiritual research itself only that has value which can be so placed in life. The spiritual researcher who can live in the spiritual world may see many things, but what he sees there has value only if he can also judge it. Some people can indeed come to visions through exercises if they do not go through everything that has been characterized as the true way today; they can come to see many things – but what value, what significance the vision has, whether it has any truth value, can be quite unknown to them personally. One must first be able to judge what one sees; one must first be able to appreciate it in its significance for life. But where does one gain this possibility? Through nothing other than the power of judgment and morality that one has already acquired in ordinary life before entering the spiritual world. He who has a moral sense will enter the spiritual world with it and be able to judge things rightly. The one who is foolish or immoral will only be able to judge what he sees wrongly. Therefore, a person's value is not increased if he is able to see the supernatural through all kinds of means. Even the spiritual researcher is only valuable through that which makes a person valuable, through sound judgment and moral strength. But the havoc that unhealthy judgment and immorality wreak when the spiritual researcher enters the spiritual worlds with them will be shown to us tomorrow when we speak of the errors of spiritual science.

The question could be raised: Yes, but what then are the truths of spiritual research? Just as it is impossible to list the truths of another science in an hour, it is equally impossible to list the truths of spiritual science in an hour. It should be shown how man comes to the truth in spiritual research and not to error, how man, through the development of the forces slumbering in him, creates spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, to use Goethe's words, in order to see into a spiritual world. Now one cannot say that this is a rule as truth, that this is a rule as error; one can only say that the soul of man will mature on this path to see truths and not errors. This path should be spoken of today. Tomorrow the sources of error will be clearly explained. Today's and tomorrow's lectures belong together. Today's lecture should show how the human soul can strengthen itself spiritually in order to perceive the spiritual world, just as the eye and the mind can perceive the sensual world. In this way, the human soul perceives everything. That it is born out of the external world of the senses and at the same time [is] in the spiritual being, a saying by Goethe tells us:

If the eye were not sunlike,
How could we behold the light?
If the power of God did not live in us,
How could we be enraptured by the divine?

It is true, in ourselves there must be an eye, with all its power, for us to behold the light; the eye must be solar. And for a person, there must be an inner activity of God's life so that he can perceive God.

But such a saying in the Goethean sense is not meant as it would be said by [Schopenhauer], for example: the world is a representation. We would be far from the meaning of Goethe's saying if we believed that we should create the whole external world only as an imitation of the inner world, as some philosophers claim. This must be said, as Goethe says: Man would have no eyes if sunlight did not permeate space. And just as it is true that we only recognize light through the eye, it is equally true that we only have an eye because light floods space, for it is light that has brought out the eye in the first place. Beings that had eyes but have lived in caves for many generations lose the organ of the eye, the eyes atrophy. The eye is a creature of light. Thus the fact that we have organs for light, through which we can have it, is at the same time proof of the existence of light. The fact that man can experience spiritual things in himself, that he can awaken supernaturality in himself, is proof that the supernatural is not only in him and that he does not dream it, but that the spiritual that interweaves all space and time has brought forth the spiritual in us in the first place, as light brings forth the eye.

Thus we can supplement Goethe's beautiful saying, which points us to our inner light and sun, to our inner divinity, with a saying that is from the inner spirituality of man for the outer reality of the spiritual. We can summarize the result of our reflection on the reality of that spiritual in which we rest, as we rest as sense beings in the material world; we can summarize it by juxtaposing Goethe's saying with the other saying:

If the world were not [endowed with the sun],
How could eyes blossom for the being?
If existence were not God's revelation,
How could people come to be filled with spirit?

From shorthand report unrevised by the lecturer. English translation first printed by Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company, 1941. Second printing Steiner Book Centre, 1986.

The original German text of this lecture can he found in the collected edition of Rudolf Steiner's works under the title: “Der Kreislauf des Menschen innerhalb des Sinnes—, Seelen—und Geisteswelt”, No. 68 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961. This English edition is presented by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.

It cannot he doubted that the influence of the Bible on Western Culture has been greater than that of any other document. It may truly be said that as a result of the influence of the Bible, the human soul has for thousands of years maintained a hold on the most inward being of man,—a hold which has extended to the life of feeling and also to the life of will. The influence in these two spheres of man's being has been stronger than in his thinking and conceptional life, although it may be said that all spiritual life, be it in the region of religion or of exact science, bears traces of the influence of the Bible. And it is evident to those who look more deeply into things, that the very arguments of men who to-day feel bound to attack the Bible—taking up in some cases the radical standpoint of downright denial—themselves show traces of its influence. There has never been any general recognition, and to-day there is practically none, of the extent of the influence of this document; but it exists nevertheless in actual fact to those who have an unbiased outlook. The attitude adopted towards the Bible by modern thought, feeling and perception, has for some time past changed very considerably from what it used formerly to be. The value of the Bible, the attitude adopted towards it by men who to-day take it seriously has altered essentially in the course of the 19th Century. We must not of course undervalue in any sense the standpoint of many modern thinking men who feel themselves bound to take a firm stand on the ground of Science. There are others who hold fast to the Bible, who derive all their deepest convictions from this most significant record, and who prefer to pay no attention when the value of the Bible is under discussion. The attitude of such people is: ‘Others may think as they like; we find in the teachings of the Bible all that our souls need and we are quite satisfied.’ Such a point of view, however justifiable it may be in individual cases, is, in a certain sense entirely egoistical and by no means without danger for spiritual evolution.

That which in a given epoch has become an universal blessing to men—or, let us say, an universal belief and conviction, has always originated with the few; and it may well be that an ever increasing stream of conviction may flow out to become universal in no very distant future from the few who to-day feel themselves compelled to attack the Bible because of their desire to build up their world-conception conformably with their Science. For this reason to ignore such spiritual and mental currents and to refuse to listen because one is oneself satisfied is not without an element of danger. Anyone who really takes the evolution of mankind seriously ought rather to regard it as a duty to take notice of the objections brought by sincere seekers for Truth, and to see what relation these objections have to the Bible.

I have said that the attitude adopted by men, and especially by leaders of intellectual and spiritual life has changed. To-day we shall do no more than point to this change. Were we to look back into the past we should find civilisations where men, especially when they stood at the summit of their spiritual life, doubted not at all that the very highest wisdom flowed from the Bible; and that those with whom it originated were not just average men who were responsible for human errors in it, but were under lofty inspiration and infused it with wisdom. This was a feeling of reverent recognition among those who stood on the heights of spiritual life. In modern times this has changed.

In the 18th Century there was a French investigator who came to the conclusion that certain contradictions exist in the Old Testament. He noticed that the two Creation stories at the very beginning of the Bible contradict one another, that one story describes the work of the six or seven days including the creation of man, and that then there is a further account with a different beginning, which ascribes quite a different origin to man. This investigator was specially disconcerted by the fact that at the beginning of the Bible two names of the God-head occur, the name of the ‘Elohim’ in the narrative of the six days' creation, and then later the name of Jehova. There is an echo of this in the German Bible. In the German Bible the name of the God-head is translated ‘Lord,’ ‘God,’ and then Jehova is translated by ‘God the Lord’ or in some such way; at all events the difference is apparent. Upon noticing this the investigator suspected that something had given rise to the untenable statement that the Bible was written by a single individual, whether Moses or someone else, and that different accounts must have been welded together. And after much deliberation he came to the conclusion that all the existing accounts corresponding to the different traditions were simply welded together; one account being amalgamated with another and all the contradictions allowed to stand.

After, and as a result of this, there appeared the kind of investigation which might well be called a mutilation of the Bible. To-day there are Bibles in which the various points of detail are traced back to different traditions. In the so-called Rainbow Bible it is stated for instance, how some portion or other that has come to be inserted into the collective statement has its origin in quite a different legendary tradition—hence it is said that the Bible must have been welded together from shreds of tradition. It became more and more general for investigators to proceed along this line in regard to the Old Testament, and then the same thing happened in the case of the New Testament. How could the fact be hidden that when the four Gospels are submitted to literal comparison they do not agree with each other? It is easy to discover contradictions in the Matthew, Luke and John Gospels. And so the investigators said: How can the single Evangelists have written their respective Gospels under lofty inspiration, when the accounts do not agree? The Gospel of St. John—that most profound writing of Christendom—was divested of all worth as an historical document in the minds of some investigators of the 19th Century. Men came more and more to be convinced of the fact that it was nothing but a kind of hymn, written down by someone on the basis of his faith and not an historical tradition at all. They said that what he had written down could in no way lay claim to being a true description of what had actually taken place in Palestine at the beginning of our era. And so the New Testament was torn into shreds. The Old and New Testaments were treated just like any other historical document; it was said that bias and error had crept into them, and that before all things it was necessary to show by purely historical investigation, how the fragments had been gradually pieced together. This is the standpoint which more and more came to be adopted by historical, theological investigation.

On the other side let us turn to those who felt compelled to stand firmly on the ground of the facts of Natural Science,—who said, quite sincerely and honestly as a result of their knowledge: ‘What we are taught by Geology, Biology and the different branches of Natural Science, flatly contradicts what the Bible relates. The Bible story of the development of the earth and living beings through the six days of creation, is of the nature of a legend or a myth of primitive peoples, whereby they tried, in their childlike fashion to make the origin of the earth intelligible to themselves.’ And such men alienated themselves from the New Testament in the same degree as from the Old Testament. Men who feel compelled to hold fast to the facts of Natural Science will have nothing to do with all the wonderful acts performed by the Christ, with the way in which this unique Personality arises at the critical point of our history, and they radically oppose the very principle on which the Bible is based. Thus we see on the one hand the Bible torn to pieces by historical-theological investigation, and on the other hand put aside, discredited by scientific research.

That may serve briefly to characterise the outlook of to-day; but if nobody troubled about this, and simply persisted in the attitude: ‘I believe what is in the Bible’—that would be Egoism. Such men would only be thinking of themselves and it would not occur to them that future generations might hold as an universal conviction that which to-day is only the conviction of a few.

We may now ask: is there perhaps yet a further standpoint other than the two we have indicated? Indeed there is, and it is just this that we want to consider to-day. It is the standpoint of Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy. We can in the first instance understand this best by means of comparison. The Anthroposophical standpoint with regard to the Bible offers to our modern age something similar to that which was accomplished three or four centuries ago by the mighty achievements of scientific research; Anthroposophy seeks to form a connecting link with what was achieved by such men as Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo.

To-day we build upon the foundations of what was achieved by such personalities as these. When we look back to the relation which in former days existed between men and nature, we find that in the old Schools or Academics, certain books carried just as much weight as the Bible does with many people to-day. Aristotle, the ancient Greek scholar, whose achievements were by no means confined to the sphere of Natural Science, was looked upon by the widest circles both in the early and later Middle Ages as a far-reaching Authority. Wherever men were taught about nature the books of Aristotle were taken as the basis. His writings were fundamental and authoritative not only in spheres where men pursued the study of Nature in a more limited, philosophical sense, but also in spheres of definitely scientific thought. It was not customary in those days to look out at Nature with one's own eyes, and it was not a question of instruments, apparatus and other things of that kind. In the time of Galileo a highly symptomatic incident occurred, and it has been handed down as a kind of anecdote. It was pointed out by a colleague to a man who was a convinced follower of Aristotle, that many of the master's utterances were not correct; for instance that the nerves proceeded from the heart, this being contrary to the real facts. A corpse was placed in front of the man and it was demonstrated to him that this utterance of Aristotle did not agree with the facts. He said: ‘Yes, when I look at that myself it seems a contradiction, but even if Nature does show it to me I still believe Aristotle.’ And there were many such men,—men who had more faith in the teachings and the authority of Aristotle than in their own eyes. To-day men's point of view about Nature and also about Aristotle has changed. In our time it would be considered ridiculous to derive from ancient books the knowledge of nature which men ought to possess. To-day the scientist confronts nature with his instruments and tries to explore her secrets in order that they may become a common good for all men. But circumstances were such that in the time of Galileo, those who were imbued with the teachings of Aristotle to the same degree as this above mentioned follower, did not understand the Greek Master in the very least, Aristotle meant something different, something very much more spiritual, than what we understand to-day by the nerves. And because of this we cannot do real justice to Aristotle—whose vision was in accordance with the age in which he lived—until we look into nature with free and impartial eyes.

That was the great change that took place three or four centuries ago—and we are experiencing such another now in reference to the Spiritual Science and those spiritual facts and processes which are the spiritual foundations of existence.

For centuries the Bible was taken by a very large number of men to be the only book able to give information about all that transcended the tangible, physical world. The Bible was the Authority so far as the spiritual world was concerned, just as Aristotle in the Middle Ages was the authority for the physical world.

How has it come about that to-day we are in a position to do greater justice to Aristotle? It is because we face the physical world from a position of greater independence. And what Anthroposophy has to give to man of modern times, is the possibility of acquiring direct cognition of the invisible world, just as centuries ago the new age began to acquire direct knowledge of the visible world. Spiritual Science states that it is possible for man to look into and perceive the spiritual world; that he need not be dependent upon tradition, but can see for himself. This is what true Spiritual Science has to achieve for modern humanity—it has to convince man that slumbering powers and faculties exist within him; that there are certain great moments in life when these spiritual faculties awaken just as when a blind man is operated upon and is able to see colour and light. To use Goethe's phrase: the spiritual ears and eyes awaken, and then the soul of man can perceive in its environment what is otherwise concealed. The awakening of the faculties slumbering in the soul is possible; it is possible for man to acquire an instrument whereby he call look into spiritual causes, just as with his physical instruments he looks into the physical world. We have all kinds of instruments for the perception of the physical world—and for perception of the spiritual world there is also an instrument—namely, man himself, transformed. From the standpoint of spiritual science the most important thing of all is that the word ‘Evolution’ should be taken in all seriousness,—‘Evolution,’ which is a kind of magic word on many lips. It is not difficult to-day to perceive how the imperfect continually develops and evolves, and this evolution is carefully followed up in external Natural Science. To this conception Anthroposophy would not set up the slightest opposition where it remains in the region of scientific facts. But Anthroposophy takes the word ‘Evolution’ in its full meaning,—and so seriously that it points to those faculties which lie in the soul of man by means of which he can become aware of the Spiritual world. Spiritual beings are the foundation and basis of the physical world, and man only needs organs to be able to perceive them. I must here again lay stress upon the fact that today only a few men are in a position to transform their souls in this way. It requires a highly developed soul whose spiritual eyes are open before investigation of the spiritual world can be undertaken and information as to the events and beings there obtained. But if facts about the higher worlds are made manifest, then all that is necessary for the understanding of what is told by the spiritual investigator is healthy discernment, free from all bias pertaining to the intellect or to human logic. There is no justification for criticising the use of spiritual investigation, because we cannot see for ourselves. How many men are able to form a clear conception of Ernst Haeckel's researches and follow them up? It is exactly the same in regard to research in the region of senselife, where what is illuminated by the understanding passes over into the consciousness, as it is in regard to what the spiritual investigator has to say about the information he has gained in the super-sensible world. That which is known as the super-sensible world through direct perception and human powers of cognition must pass over into the universal consciousness of mankind as a result of the Anthroposophical conception of the world.

On the one hand then, we have the ancient Bible bringing before us in its own way the secrets of the super-sensible worlds and their connection with the sensible worlds, and on the other we have, in Spiritual Science, the direct experiences of the investigator in regard to the super-sensible world. This is surely a point of view similar to that which one finds at the dawn of modern Natural Science.

The question now arises: ‘What has Spiritual Science to say that is able to help us to understand the biblical truths?’ We must here enter into details. We must above all point out that when as a result of the methods laid down by Spiritual Science, man awakens his soul faculties, he sees into the spiritual world and develops what in comparison to objective cognition is an Imaginative Knowledge. What is this Imaginative Knowledge? It has nothing in common with those vague fantasies readily associated with the word ‘Imagination’ nor has it anything whatever to do with somnambulism and things of that nature, but fundamental to it is a strict discipline by means of which a man has to awaken these faculties. Let us proceed from external knowledge in order to make more intelligible what is really meant by ‘Imaginative Knowledge.’ What is characteristic of external objective cognition? There is for example, the perception of a ‘table’; when the table is no longer before us there remains an idea, a concept of it, as a kind of echo. First there is the object, and then the image. Certain systems of philosophy affirm that everything is only image, conception. This is incorrect. Let us take, for example, the conception of red hot steel or iron. The conception will not burn, but when we are faced by the reality the experience is different. The characteristic of objective cognition is that first the object is there and then the image is formed within us. Exactly the opposite process must take place in a man who wishes to penetrate into the higher world. He must first be able to transform his conceptual world in such a way that the conception may precede the perception. This faculty is developed by Meditation and Concentration, that is to say by sinking the soul into the content of certain conceptions which do not correspond to any external reality. Just consider for a moment how much of what lives in the soul is dependent upon the fact of your having been born in a particular town on a particular day. Suppose that you had not been born on that day, and try to imagine what other experiences would then live within your soul, and stream through it from morning to evening. In other words, make it clear to yourself how much of the content of the soul is dependent on your environment, and then let all that has stimulated you from outside, pass away. Then try to think how much would still remain in the soul. All conceptions of the external world which flow into the soul must, day by day, be expelled from it and in their place there must live for a time the content of a conception that has not in any way been stimulated from without and that does not portray any external fact or event.

Spiritual Science—if our search is sincere—gives many such conceptions and I will mention one as an example. I want to show you how the soul may gradually be led up into the higher worlds through certain definite conceptions. Such conceptions may be considered to be like letters of the alphabet. But in Spiritual Science there are not only twenty-two to twenty-seven letters, but many hundreds, by means of which the soul learns to read in the spiritual world. Here is a simple example: suppose we take the well known Rose Cross and in its simplest form, the black cross adorned with seven red roses. Very definite effects are produced if for a quarter of an hour each day the soul gives itself wholly up to the conception of this Rose Cross, excluding everything that acts as an external stimulus. In order to be able to understand what comes to pass in the soul as a result of this, let us consider intellectually the meaning of the Rose Cross. This is not the most important element, but we shall do it to show that it is possible to explain the meaning. I shall give it in the form of an instruction given by teacher to pupil.

The teacher says to the pupil:—‘Look at the plant standing with its root in the ground and growing upwards to the blossom. Compare the greater perfection of man standing before you, organised as he is, with the lesser perfection of the plant. Man has self-consciousness, has within him what we call an Ego, an ‘ I ’. But because he has this higher principle within him he has had to accept in addition all that constitutes his lower nature, the passion of sense. The plant has no self-consciousness; it has no Ego, hence it is not yet burdened with desires, passions or instincts. Its green beauty is there, chaste and pure. Look at the circulation of the chlorophyl fluid in the plant and then in man at the pulsation of the blood. That which, in man constitutes his life of passions and instincts, comes to expression, in the plant, as the blossom. In exchange for this man has won his self-consciousness. Now consider not only present day man, but look in a spiritual sense at a man of the far distant future. He will develop, he will over come, cleanse and purify his desires and passions and will obtain a higher self-consciousness. Thus, spiritually, you can see a man who has once more attained to the purity of the plant-nature. But it is because he has reached a higher stage that his self-consciousness exists in this state of purity. His blood is as pure and chaste as the plant fluids. Take the red roses to be a prototype of what the blood will be at some future time, and in this way you have before you the prototype of higher man. In the Rose Cross you have a most beautiful paraphrase of Goethe's saying:—“The man who is without this dying and becoming is a sad stranger on this dark earth”! Dying and becoming,—what does this mean? It means that in man there exists the possibility of growing out of and beyond himself. That which dies and is overcome is represented by the black cross which is the expression of his desires of senses. The blossoms in their purity are symbolical of the blood. The red roses and the black cross together represent the inner call to grow beyond oneself.’

As I said, this intellectual explanation is not the most important element and it is only given in order that we may be able better to understand these things. In a Meditation of this kind the point is that we shall sink ourselves into the symbol, that it shall stand as a picture before us. And if it is said that a Rose Cross corresponds to nothing real, our answer must be that the whole significance lies not in the experience of something pertaining to the external world through the Rose Cross, but that the effect of this Rose Cross upon the soul and its slumbering faculties is very real. No image pertaining to the external world could have the same effect as this image in all its varied aspects and in its non-reality. If the soul allows this image to work upon it, it makes greater and greater progress, and is finally able to live in a world of conceptions that is at first really illusory; but when it has lived sufficiently long in this conceptual world with patience and energy, it has a significantly true experience. Spiritual realities, spiritual beings which otherwise are invisible emerge from the spiritual environment. And then the soul is able quite clearly to distinguish what is merely conception, illusion, from true and genuine reality.

Of course one must not be a visionary, for that is very dangerous; it is absolutely necessary to maintain reason and a sure foundation for one's experience. If a man dreams in a kind of phantasy, then it is not well with him, when the spiritual world breaks in upon his consciousness. But if he maintains a sense of absolute certainty in his perception of reality, then he knows how the spiritual events will be made manifest, and he ascends into the spiritual world.

You will perhaps have surmised from what I have said, that cognition of the spiritual world is quite different from that of the sense world. The spiritual world cannot be brought into the range of direct perception by means of conceptions having but one meaning, and anyone who thinks it possible to describe what he finds in the spiritual world in the same way as he would describe what he finds in the sense world—simply has no knowledge of the nature of the spiritual world. The spiritual world can only be represented in pictures, and in imagery, which must be regarded merely as such. When the spiritual investigator looks into the spiritual world he sees the spiritual causes behind the physical phenomena, and he sees not only what underlies the present but what underlay the past. One thing above all else is manifest to him; namely, that man as he stands before us to-day as a physical being, was not always a physical being. External Natural Science can only lead us back by way of physical phenomena to what man as a physical being once was, and the spiritual investigator has no objection to that. But what surrounds us physically, has a spiritual origin. Man existed as a spiritual being before he became physical.

When the earth was not yet physical, man existed in the bosom of divine beings. As ice condenses from water, so did physical man condense from spiritual man. Spiritual Science shows that the physical is in perpetual contact with the spiritual. But what underlies the physical can only be expressed in pictures, if one wants to approximate to physical ideas.

What happens when a man has re-attained the spiritual stage of evolution,—what comes before him? In a certain sense the spiritual investigator re-discovers the Bible imagery, as given in the six or seven days of Creation. The pictures as given there actually appear before him. These pictures are not, of course, a description of physical occurrences, but the investigator who looks into the spiritual world, sees in clairvoyant consciousness, in how wonderful a way the writer of Genesis has portrayed in these pictures the formation of man from out of the Spirit. And it is marvelous how, point by point, agreement is established between what is so perceived by the spiritual investigator and the Bible imagery. The spiritual investigator can follow in just as unbiased a way as the Natural Scientist approaches the physical world. He does not derive his wisdom directly from the Bible, but he finds emphatic agreement with Bible imagery.

I will only mention one such point of agreement. When we go back to ancient times, it is seen that behind the evolution of man stand certain spiritual beings who are different from the beings who are there from a definite and later point of time onwards. Many of you will know that man as he is to-day is a fourfold being, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body (the vehicle of joy, passions and so forth), and the Ego, the bearer of human self-consciousness. The three lower members, physical body, etheric body and astral body, were in existence long before the Ego, which was incorporated into man last of all. Spiritual beings who are designated in the Bible as the Elohim worked on these three earlier principles. And when the Ego began to be incorporated into this three-fold nature, another being from the spiritual world co-operated in the work of the Elohim. If we penetrate more deeply into the Bible we shall find that this Spiritual Being is given the name of Jehova, and rightly so. And in accordance with the inner principles of evolution itself we see that at a certain point in the narrative a new name is introduced in place of the old name of the God-head. We see too, the circumstances surrounding the origin of man which is described in a two-fold way in the Bible. For in point of fact man as a threefold being was dissolved into the universe: as a three-fold being he came into existence afresh, and then from out of the transformed three-fold man, the Ego developed. So that the cleft that would seem to lie between the first and second chapter of Genesis, and that has been the subject of so many false interpretations, is explained by spiritual investigation. It is only a question of rightly understanding the Bible and that is not very easy to-day. Spiritual Science shows that in the beginning higher Spiritual Beings were present; the descendants of these Beings are men, man has emerged from the bosom of Divine Spiritual Beings. We may speak of man as the descendant of the Gods in the same sense as we speak of the child being the descendant of his parents. From the standpoint of Spiritual Science we must look upon the human being standing before us as an Earth-man, the descendant of divine-spiritual beings.

Does the Bible tell us anything about this? Indeed it does, but we first must learn how to read it. The fourth sentence of the Second Chapter of Genesis runs: ‘These are the generations of the heavens’ ... and so on. This sentence is misleading, for it does not give what is really to be found at this place in the Bible. The text ought really to stand as follows: ‘What follow here and will now be described are the descendants of the Heavens and the Earth as they were brought forth by the divine power.’ And by the words ‘the Heavens and the Earth,’ divine spiritual beings are meant, divine spiritual beings whose descendant is man. The Bible describes exactly what the spiritual investigator rediscovers independently. Many of those who fight against the Bible to-day are directing their attacks against something of which they have no real knowledge. They are tilting against straws. The Anthroposophical view is exactly expressed in this fourth sentence. We might show verse by verse through the Old and New Testaments how man, when he ascends into the spiritual world through his own faculties, rediscovers the results of his investigation in the Bible. It would lead us too far now if we tried to describe the New Testament in a similar way. In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact the Lazarus miracle among others is given in its real form. The manner of treating such subjects to-day makes it impossible for us to get at their real meaning, for modern commentators of the Bible are naturally only able to find what accords with their own personal knowledge. Their knowledge does not transcend sense-cognition, hence the many contradictory interpretations and expositions of the individual Biblical ‘Authorities.’ The only qualified expositor of the Bible is a man who, independently of the Bible, is able to reach the same truths as are there contained. Let us take for sake of example an old book—Euclid's Geometry. Anyone who understands something of Geometry to-day will understand this book. But one would of course only place reliance on someone who had really studied Geometry to-day. When such a man comes to Euclid he will recognise his teachings to be true. In the same sense a man who approaches the Bible with philological knowledge only can never be a real ‘Authority.’ Only a man who is able to create the wisdom from out of his own being can be a real Authority on the Bible.

It may be said then, that the Bible is intelligible to a man who can penetrate into the spiritual world, who can receive its influences into himself. The Bible induces in such a man an absolute certainty that it is written by Initiates and inspired souls; a man who can to-day penetrate into the spiritual world, understands the great Scribes of the Bible. He knows them to have been true Initiates, ‘awakened souls’ who have written down their experiences from the levels of the spiritual worlds; if he knows this, he also knows what is hidden within their words.

I would like here to mention an experience of my own in reference to another matter. When I was engaged on special work in the Goethe Archives in Weimar, I tried to prove something quite externally. You all know Goethe's beautiful prose Hymn to Nature ‘Oh Nature we are encircled and embraced by thee,’ and so on. This hymn depicts in beautiful words that everything given to us by Nature is given in Love, that Love is the crown of Nature. This composition was lost sight of for a time by Goethe himself, and when he was an old man and what remained of his literary work was given over to the Duchess Amelia, it was found. Goethe was questioned about it, and said ‘Yes, I recognise the idea that came to me then.’ The composition was accepted as having been written by Goethe until certain hair-splitters refused to admit that he was the author and attributed it to someone else. My purpose was to investigate the truth about this composition. It had come to my knowledge that at an early period of his life Goethe had with him a young man called Tobler, who had an exceedingly good memory. During their walks together Goethe had elaborated his idea, Tobler had thoroughly assimilated it, and because of his marvelous memory had been able afterwards to write it down very nearly word for word. I tried to show that a great deal of what is to be found in Goethe's conceptions later on is intelligible in the light of this composition. The point is that someone other than Goethe had penned it on paper, but the idea itself in its phrasing and articulation was Goethe's—and that is what I tried to make clear. Later on, when my work was published, a celebrated Goethean scholar came to me and said: ‘We owe you a debt of gratitude for throwing light upon the subject, for now we know that this composition is by Tobler.’ You may well imagine how amused I was! This is how things present themselves to the minds of people who are at pains to prove that in the course of time some particular portion of the Bible was written by one man or another. Some people consider the most important thing to be who finally did the writing, and not which Spirit was the origin and source. But with us the essential thing is to understand how the Bible was able to come into being from the Spirits of those who looked into the Spiritual World and experienced it.

And now let us examine whether there is in the Bible itself, anything that explains this way of looking at things.

The Old Testament lends itself to a great deal of controversy, for the events there have grown dim. But it will be clear to anyone who does not want to wrangle, that the Old Testament faithfully describes the significant process of the penetration of the Ego into the entire nature and being of man. Anyone who from the point of view of Spiritual Science, reads of the call to Moses at the Burning Bush will understand that in reality Moses was then raised into the Spiritual world. When God appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush, Moses asked: ‘Who shall I say to the people hath sent me?’ God said: ‘Tell them that One Who can say “I am” hath sent thee.’ And if we follow up the whole process of the incorporation of the Ego, step by step, then the Bible illuminates what is found in Spiritual Science independently.

But something else is evident as well, namely, that from a Christian point of view the Bible should not be considered from the same point of view as other historical documents. If we consider the figure of Paul we can learn a great deal that can lead us to this realisation. When we study the earliest form in which Christianity was promulgated, from which all its later forms are derived, we shall find that none of the Gospel narratives are given by Paul at all, but that he speaks of something quite different. What gave the impulse to Paul? How did this unique Apostle acquire his understanding of the Christ? Simply and solely as a consequence of the event of Damascus, that is, not as a result of physical but of super-sensible truths. Now what is at the basis of the teaching of Paul? It is the knowledge that the Christ—although he was crucified—lives; the event of Damascus reveals Christ as a Living Being who can appear to men who ascend to him;—it reveals, moreover that there is in very truth a spiritual world. And Paul makes a parallel between Christ's appearance to him and His appearance to others. He says: ‘First He appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve, then to five hundred Brethren at once, to James and then all the Apostles, and last of all to me also as to one born out of due time.’ This reference by Paul to ‘one born out of due time’ is strange. But this very expression is evidence to experienced Initiates that Paul speaks with perfect knowledge of Spiritual Science. He says that he is ‘born out of due time.’ and from this we realise that his illumination is to be traced back to a certain fact. I will just hint at the meaning. He means to explain in these words that because he has been born out of due time he is less entangled in material existence. He traces back his illumination to his knowledge: the Christ lives and is here. He shows that he bases his Christianity upon this super-sensible truth and that it is conviction acquired as the result of direct perception.

The earliest form of Christianity as it spread abroad is based upon super-sensible facts. We could show that what is contained in the John Gospel is based upon super-sensible impressions which the writer of that Gospel gives as his own experience, and realising that originally it was possible for Christianity to win belief on the basis of super-sensible experiences of men who were able to look into the spiritual worlds, we can no longer imagine that it is right to apply to the Bible the same standard as we apply to other external documents.

Anyone who examines the Gospels with the same methods as he employs in the case of other documents, is confronted by something whose inner contents he can never fathom. But a man who penetrates into the experiences of the writers of the Gospels will be led into the spiritual world and to those personalities who have built up their knowledge and their wisdom from out of the spiritual world and have given them to us.

We should realise that those from whom the Gospels proceeded were Initiates, awakened souls, taking into consideration as well that there may be different stages of awakening. Just imagine that different people are describing a landscape from a mountain; one stands at the bottom, another in the middle and another at the summit. Each of these men will describe the landscape differently, according to his point of view. This is how the spiritual investigator looks at the four Gospels. The writers of the four Gospels were Initiates of different degrees. It is understandable that there may be external contradictions, just as there would be in the description of a landscape from a mountain. The deepest of all is the Gospel of John. The writer of the John Gospel was the most deeply initiated into the mysteries of what took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era because he wrote from the summit of the mountain.

Spiritual Science is able to elucidate the Gospels fully, and to prove that the various contradictions in Genesis at the beginning of the Old Testament disappear. Direct perception, then, of the spiritual worlds brings us again to an understanding of the Bible which is a most wonderful document. A man who engages in spiritual investigation will find that there are four standpoints to be distinguished among men who approach the study of the Bible. The first is the standpoint of the naive believer, who has faith in the Bible as it stands and pays no attention to any other consideration; the second is that of ‘clever’ people who stand neither on the ground of historical research, nor of Bible analysis, nor of Natural Science. They say: ‘We cannot recognise the Bible to be an uniform document.’ And when such men realise that Natural Science contradicts the Bible they become ‘Free Thinkers,’ so-called ‘Free Spirits.’ They are in most cases honest, sincere seekers after truth. But then we come to something that transcends the standpoint of the ‘clever’ people. Many Free Thinkers have held the point of view that the Bible is only suitable for a childlike stage of human evolution, and cannot hold its own against Science. But after a time it strikes them that much of what is given in the Bible has a figurative sense; that it is a garment woven around experiences. This is the third standpoint—that of the Symbolist. Here a pure arbitrariness reigns, and the view that the Bible is to be understood symbolically.

The fourth standpoint is that of Spiritual Science. Here there is no longer ambiguity, but in a certain sense literal interpretation of what is said in the Bible. We are brought back again to the Bible in order to understand it in a real sense. An important task of Spiritual Science is to restore the Bible to its real position. It will be a happy day when we hear in modern words what really is to be found in the Bible, different, indeed, from all that is said to-day.

We may pass from sentence to sentence and we shall see that the Bible everywhere contains a message to Initiates from Initiates; awakened souls speak to awakened souls. Spiritual investigation does not in any way alienate us from the Bible. A man who approaches the Bible by spiritual investigation experiences the fact that details become clear to him about which he formally had doubts because he could not understand them. It becomes evident that it was his fault when he was not able to understand. Now, however, he understands what once escaped him, and he gradually works through to a point of view where he says: ‘Now I understand certain things and see their deep content: others, again appear to be incredible. But just as formerly I did not understand what is now clear to me, so later I shall discover that it has a deep import.’ And then such a man will with gratitude accept what hashes up in him, leaving to the future what he cannot yet explain.

The Bible in all its depth will be revealed only in the future, when spiritual investigation, independently of any kind of tradition, penetrates into the spiritual facts, and is able to show mankind what this document really contains. Then it will no longer seem unintelligible, for we shall feel united with what streamed into spiritual culture through those who wrote it down. In our age it is possible for us, through Initiation, again to investigate the spiritual world. Looking back to the past we feel ourselves united with those who have gone before us, for we can show how step by step they communicated what they had received in the spiritual world. We can promise that the Bible will prove itself to be the most profound document of humanity, the deepest source of our civilization. Spiritual Science will be able to restore this knowledge. And, however much bigoted people may say: ‘The Bible does not need such a complicated explanation—it is the very simplicity that is right’—it will be realised some day that the Bible, even when it is not fully understood works upon every heart by virtue of its intrinsic mysteries. It will be realised too that not only is its simplicity within our grasp, but that no wisdom is really adequate for a full understanding of it. The Bible is a most profound document not only for simple folk, but also for the wisest of the wise. Wisdom, therefore, investigated spiritually and independently, will lead back to the Bible. And Spiritual Science, apart from everything else that it has to bring to humanity, will be the means of accomplishing a re-conquest of the Bible.

More than in any other form of learning, however wise, it is often in simple myths and legends that we find deep, profound wisdom and truth. It seems as if an ancient truth from the human breast were speaking to our soul when we hear a very simple but deeply moving Mongolian fairy tale. This fairy tale goes something like this: There is an old woman. This old woman has only one large eye at the top of her head, and no other eyes with which she could see. She goes all over the world, and everything she encounters along the way, she picks up: every stone, every plant, everything, everything; and then she takes what she has picked up to her only eye to look at it, and when she has looked at it, something like a tremendous horror expresses itself on her face. Then she throws the object far away from her. This story goes on to tell us: This old woman once lost her only child, and now she searches the whole world for this only child, believing she will find this child in every stone, in every object she encounters. When she has raised an object to her eye and once again realized that it is not what belongs so deeply to her, disappointment paints itself on her face and she throws the object away.

Now, if we wanted to interpret fairy tales and legends, we could find a deep wisdom in this fairy tale, which is rooted in the most primitive folk minds. We don't want that now. In such fairy tales, one can find many, many interpretations; but it seems to us that this fairy tale expresses a yearning in every human breast. Every human being, when he becomes clear and distinct about his deepest soul values, feels that he must seek something in the whole world, something that is most deeply related to the innermost part of his soul, something that he must believe can manifest itself in every stone, in every being. And every human being feels that what he is actually seeking cannot be seen with the outer eyes and perceived directly. Every human being feels within himself a higher spiritual eye with which he walks through the world, and he senses that what meets the outer senses are only the means of expression for something that lives behind them, and so he walks around in the world like that woman, looking at every object. As long as he only looks at it with his external senses, it gives him something that, when he holds it up to the eye of his longing, deeply disappoints him. And he throws it away, saying to himself: Again, again not what I feel, what must live in all external things. For it is indeed the spirit behind all sensual physical beings that man seeks unalterably and perpetually, the spirit of which he knows that it lives within him, and of which he knows that he must somehow find it behind external objects as well. It is spiritual science that points man to what is behind sensual things and what can truly satisfy his spiritual gaze.

This spiritual science, if we look at things objectively, has, despite its short life, found a fairly wide distribution among the educated of our world in recent decades. Nevertheless, the strangest prejudices are in circulation among many people who only deal with this subject superficially. We always hear: This theosophy wants nothing more than to transplant some oriental worldview into Europe. We hear that it is a sect, that it leads to the most blatant superstition.

Not a single trace of this is true. However, it is true that if a person wants to see what this spiritual science can give them, they have to delve deeper and deeper into it. If it really gives the spiritual, if it satisfies the human longing that has been characterized, then it is more than what mere curiosity can satisfy. It is something that man needs for his life. It makes it clear to man again that in the spirit is the origin, the germ, the source of everything, including the physical, and if that is the case, then with the spirit it gives man strength at the same time, the source of life in general. Those who engage with it more deeply find this to the fullest extent.

Nothing is more fundamental, more significant for this spiritual science than the proposition that the spiritual in us, our thoughts, perceptions, feelings, are facts that have a deep effect and significance for our outer life. If we apply this specifically, if we single out one of these facts, we can say: true, genuine thoughts of the spirit give a person satisfaction, inner harmony. But inner harmony and contentment mean, if the spirit is really power, health in its effect on the physical organism, while doubt, the isolation from the spiritual world, gives man inner insecurity, hopelessness, inability to work. It gnaws at his deepest being. And because thoughts are facts, doubt and hopelessness affect his health in such a way that they weaken it. This is an assertion at first. But anyone who delves deeper will gradually be convinced of its validity.

Nowadays, there are many obstacles for people who want to approach this spiritual science. Anyone who is familiar with this spiritual science is by no means inclined to underestimate the serious obstacles that stand in the way of a person's understanding of spiritual science if he looks at things impartially. Among these manifold obstacles, there is something that is directly related to the greatest advances and most significant achievements of our age: natural science. But not to the facts of natural science! To claim that the humanities, or any kind of pursuit of truth, could come into conflict with the facts of science is madness. Facts are facts. And there can be nothing that somehow comes into conflict with the facts of science.

But when we talk about science today, for most people who lean on this science, it is not just about facts, but rather about a confession, a kind of belief that has been gained from science. And in particular, it has been the last 60s and 70s of the last century that have gradually produced a kind of scientific confession for many. This confession is expressed in the fact that there are many people who say that speaking of spirit, of a divine-spiritual background, is impossible for today's man; childish-fantastic ages spoke of spirit or soul. It is impossible for today's mature humanity to speak of these things, because scientific facts force us to do otherwise. And that which is spreading today as a kind of scientific religion and gaining more and more followers captures the imaginative life of many to such an extent that it is simply true that many who are caught up in this captivity must regard what spiritual science has to say as pure nonsense, as mere reverie.

The humanities scholar must understand what is at stake here. We can certainly experience the following. The humanities scholar comes forward with what he believes he can say based on his faithful observation of the spiritual world, with manifold teachings about what lies beyond the physically perceptible. These things have often been spoken of here, spoken of what we call the higher aspects of human nature, of the fate of man between death and rebirth, of worlds other than the physical. What is said here must seem like fantasy, if not something much worse, to many who today profess some kind of scientific doctrine. And today our consideration is specifically devoted to this fact, to the fact: What must someone who, over the last sixty years, has developed out of what is not directly given by the natural sciences, but what has developed on the basis of them and professes them, what must he think of Theosophy or spiritual science, or what can he easily think of them?

Before we go into the position of these contemporaries, who believe they have a scientific creed, we must characterize the essential point of the points of spiritual science in question. The point of spiritual science is to show in everything that the spirit is the original, matter is the derivative, that is, what appears as the effect of the spirit. So, for the spiritual researcher, substance, matter, sensuality is also spirit, but like spirit in another form. Take a child, for example. It comes to you with a piece of ice. You say to the child: This is water, real water, just in a different form. The child will say: Yes, but this ice is not water! — Then you will say: If you familiarize yourself with the nature of ice, you will understand it. Thus, when someone has matter, something sensory, before them, the spiritual scientist will say: This is spirit in another form. The materialist, on the other hand, will say: But this is matter. And the spiritual researcher will say, just as you would answer the child: You must first familiarize yourself with the extent to which matter appears in another form than spirit.

And this, which has been presented to your soul in a very abstract way, is what spiritual science seeks to explain in detail, for example, to show that what you recognize as a sensual person, see with your eyes, touch with your hands, that this outer material person is nothing more than the result of a spiritual person. Just as ice is water in a different form, so is the physical person a spiritual person in a different form.

Now, of course, when we present something like this in a few strokes today, we have to remind ourselves of what has been said in other lectures. It is difficult for those who have not heard these lectures. This spiritual science shows that if you go further and further back in time from the present, you will find other forms in the course of development, ever simpler and simpler outer physical human forms. These physical bodies of man would appear to you, if you go back far enough, more and more simple, until, if you go back far enough, you would find very simple, primitive human forms. But the further you go back, the more primitive the physical forms become, the more you find an invisible human form linked to this physical form. And if you go back even further into the times when the physical human being became smaller and smaller, the physical body becomes inconspicuous, but the spiritual human being is there, and that is the creator of this physical human form. And if you go back even further, the human form disappears altogether, and you come to the original human being, out of whom the physical one has concentrated. He is a spiritual human being.

Let us visualize how the formation of man happens now, through a comparison. Take a certain amount of water. In this, let a small amount of it freeze into ice. Then there is a small amount of ice in the middle and water all around. Now let more freeze. Then you have a more complicated ice shape. If there is already less water than before, then the water is combined into ice. The more water that freezes into ice, the less water remains. More and more ice should be created until we have almost allowed all the water to freeze into ice, so that what used to be water is now expressed in the hard, tangible form of ice.

This is roughly how we have to imagine the development of man if we stick to the comparison. We can only see the water, we can no longer see the spiritual man. Out of him begins to shine the first primitive, original form of man, which stands at the lowest level of organization. All around is this spiritual man, he condenses. This is how it continues to this day. Our present human being, as he stands before us, has been formed out of the spiritual man into the physical. The spiritual form has become more and more material. Today's human being is the expression, the revelation of the invisible man who has become visible.

Now we take up another train of thought, assuming that we had not allowed just one lump of water to solidify, but a number of them. We would have allowed the first one to solidify, then we would have taken it out. It now remains as it was and shows us the stage of development that existed at a certain phase. Now, if we had allowed a second lump to solidify at a higher level, we would have taken it out. It remains as it is. A third one as well. Finally, we can now present the whole long series of developments, where more and more water freezes into ice, until finally a point is reached where there is only one lump of ice. We have bits of ice that have lost the ability to attach other bits of ice because we have separated them from the water. This is how, in the sense of spiritual science, one imagines the development of man in his relationship to the animal world.

Once upon a time there was a spiritual man; he originally formed primitive bodies for himself. The part that retained and further developed the spiritual man reached up to today's humanity. But where a stage of development broke away, it stopped. Thus, on the first stage, when the spiritual man had developed the primitive form, a small gelatinous ball broke away, remained as that piece of ice and formed today's lowest animals. They lost their spiritual foundation. At a later stage, creatures remained behind that took the form of worms. Later still, others took the form of fish, then amphibians and so on, until finally, in a time that is not long for the spiritual researcher, the ape family emerged from the spirit, so that it could no longer keep up. Man has also progressed beyond this stage.

So you can never say that man derived from any form that now exists. Rather, it is the other way around: the forms outside, which surround you everywhere, these forms present us with developmental epochs that man has overcome because he retained the original spiritual human being within himself, because he did not tear out what had become physical from the spirit. When man looks out into his surroundings, he says to himself: I am the first in our evolutionary series; I was already there at the time when the most primitive animals had not yet appeared. I have gone through all these stages; I see my stages in my surroundings.

This is how the spiritual researcher thinks about the development of man, who, as a spiritual being, descended from the bosom of the Godhead, who has progressed while the animals crumbled away and had to remain at an earlier stage because they lost the source. When we look at any physical being, we see how it is formed out of the spirit.

But the spiritual researcher goes further. He sees in everything around him, not only in living beings, in all matter he sees, as it were, solidified spirit. Atoms are nothing other than solidified spirit. For him, the spiritual is the original, the material the derivative. When we see a stone outside, how should we think of it? That even this stone is condensed spirit.

This view has nothing to do with the extreme view that wanted to deny matter. By tracing all matter back to spirit, one does not deny it, because existence does not depend on not seeing spirit, but on becoming aware of the effect. Of course, the condensed spirits in matter have different properties than the spiritual beings themselves; that much is clear. It is only necessary to think these things through to the end. The confessions that have emerged from natural science since the 1960s are now directed against this basic fact of spiritual science. They only accept the sensual as the original and do not want to recognize the spiritual.

Who does not remember the two other trains of thought that confront one in today's world when what has been said is mentioned! Who does not remember what is emerging today as a monistic theory of evolution, whereby animals related to humans are not understood to have split off, but rather as if only the lower animals had originally existed, so that humans are the composite product of the individual building blocks of animals? It is pointed out: once only simple organisms existed. So now, according to the other theory of evolution, a higher being should have developed up to man. So man would then have simply arisen from the lower animal being in terms of his entire inner meaning.

And who does not remember the other thing that is said? Let us look at an object as it appears to us. What does it consist of? Of the smallest parts of matter, molecules, atoms, they say. And these smallest particles of matter are the only truly real things. All beings have come into being only through the interaction of these [particles of matter]. These two things are so certain for many people today, they are such suggestive concepts that many people cannot associate any sense with other things. They must be given their due. These two lines of thought are connected with the most fruitful lines of development in the nineteenth century.

We do not want to go back very far, but we will recall two fundamental facts of natural science, facts that are related to each other, the two great achievements of Schleiden and Schwann. Schleiden came to the conclusion in his studies of plants that they consist of the smallest parts, the cells, that every plant body is composed of cells, the smallest living organisms, and from there the thought takes hold: one has actually studied the plant when one has studied the nature of the cell, because these are the actual reality. The plant is only a composition of them. When Schwann found the same for the animal kingdom, this view that you can recognize a being by studying the parts of which it is composed, was also decisive for the animal kingdom. The wonders that opened up to microscopic research were admirable. What has been found through it is something great and powerful. But there were other things to come. The great discoveries in the fields of chemistry, physics, and biology came.

I will mention just a few: Darwin made a great impression by showing the transformability of animal and plant life. With tremendous diligence and great scientific rigor, he compiled facts that revealed the relationship between animals and plants, all the way up to humans. We need only recall how, through spectral analysis, man was able to look out into the heavens to find that the substances of the heavenly bodies are the same as those of our earth. The discoveries of Kirchhoff and Bunsen, which revealed the composition of the universe, are rightly called great. But these were also very much facts that bound these human minds to the material.

Those who can still look back a little on the development of intellectual life know how it happened, how, before Schleiden and Schwann, attempts were made to understand the whole plant by applying intellectual powers, and how it then became clear that the primeval organism was present in the cell organism that could still be perceived by the senses. The eye has conquered such wonders that man believed there was nothing more. Through such a thing as spectral analysis, the human mind had to be bound to the material. He had looked into the material events of the universe. It was not surprising that he forgot that there is also spirit in it, so that these conquests at the end of the nineteenth century in particular gave rise to atomism, the view that one only has to go to the smallest material and ever smaller, and find the explanation in the smallest material.

If this had remained a mere theory, it would not have had such a great significance for the spiritual path of humanity. But it could not remain that. With those bold minds of the nineteenth century, who unashamedly accommodated themselves to crass materialism, we see where such material thinking must lead. There we have minds such as Büchner's, Moleschott's and so on. Today they are already much maligned, but that is a half measure, not the whole. People say they have moved beyond them. They abandon the most crass assertions, but stand on the same ground as they did. They do not see that the ground has only been more consistently developed.

Only spiritual science is called upon to overcome this. We need only recall what Carl Vogt said, that thoughts are exudates of the brain, like any other metabolic process. Just as the kidneys exude certain substances, so the movement of the brain particles exudes thoughts. Something like that cannot remain a theory if it is believed. If that is the case, if a person's thoughts and feelings are products of the material movement of the brain parts, then with death, when the materials that make up the human being dissolve, all of the innermost essence of the human being disappears, and there is not the slightest possibility of speaking of spiritual and soul entities that outlast the human being. If the smallest material parts are the essence, then Vogt's way of thinking is consistent: when a person is buried, he disintegrates, and nothing should remain of him. These thinkers drew these conclusions and were basically much more consistent than some who wanted to be idealists at the time and who actually thought materialistically in their hearts. A dispute between Vogt and a Munich scholar who held on to soul and spirit and published articles in a Munich magazine in which he opposed Vogt was characteristic of the way in which the way of thinking was eaten away by materialism at the time. Wagner was the man's name, and Vogt wrote a spirited pamphlet against him. It was easy to refute the man with the spiritual doctrine and the materialistic way of thinking. For how did this Wagner roughly imagine the transition of the soul from parents to children? As if a measure is divided into eighths. That is, to believe in a soul substance, just as if one could weigh it. Something like that was easy to refute. That is what matters; not whether you have a spiritual doctrine, but whether you can really live in the spirit. Those who believed spiritually at the time could not do that. They were so firmly held in the spell of the material achievements of that time that, little by little, everything around us became an expression of the movement of the smallest material parts for people.

In the field of living beings, people were not satisfied with cells; instead, they were made up of atoms. From then on, life was nothing more than a complicated process of movement of the smallest parts. Complicated movement was then the movement in our brain; and that, as this movement presented itself, was human thoughts and feelings. And even those who only studied physics and physiology in this field twenty or thirty years ago experienced something that has now become rarer, what is called the reduction of all experiences to processes of moving atoms. They said: Besides us, there is only matter. What do you call color? It is nothing more than a certain movement of atoms that vibrate. The vibrations reach the eye. One form of vibration, one speed appears to us as red, the other as blue, the third as green. Red, blue and green are nothing more than subjective impressions of what exists outside. And out there are only vibrational processes in the smallest ether particles. If you turn your eye so that what vibrates outside can reach you, you become aware of it as the impression of red, blue or green. If you turn away, then nothing else is present but a vibrating process.

Then the students were tormented with the mechanical theory of heat. That which burns your fingers is nothing more than a subjective impression. Objectively present are the vibrating atoms. Imagine a container with billions of the smallest globules of a gaseous body. They vibrate in confusion, moving, bumping into each other, colliding with the walls and back again. This tremendous, structured form of motion is what manifests itself as a sensation of warmth when we put our hand down. Nothing of what we experience is external to us, but only the motion of the smallest parts. There is no warmth, there is no light, only the motion of the smallest parts. There is no electricity, only the motion of atoms. For those people, atoms had become the only reality, the absolute existence. If we dissect a human being, everything we see is a subjective impression. The human being before us is nothing more than an enormously complicated process of motion. What remains are the atoms, which, when a person dies, merge into other motion processes and form new groups. The eternal, the immortal, became the atom!

Now chemistry had found a number of substances, some 70. These substances were characterized by the fact that they could not initially be broken down into simpler ones. Water can be broken down; oxygen cannot, so it is a simple substance. What was such a simple substance? In their way, they were something eternal; but how eternal? Each element represents the cohesion of the smallest parts. These were jumbled up in the most diverse ways in the universe, here simpler, there more complicated. But the world was always only the jumble of the 72 different “eternal” elements. These were the only reality. At most, the forces were still accepted. For those who think in materialistic terms, the following must apply: an eternal thing is the individual atom. It must have existed since time immemorial and must remain in existence into time immemorial, that is the eternal. The indifferent atom, the unconscious atom, that is the original building block. And if everything is only the jumbled confusion of atoms, it is only logical to regard everything else as appearance and vapor, as something insubstantial that rises like a fog. This is a concept that has great suggestive power. There have always been people who knew what an enormity it is to assert the eternity of matter as the cornerstone of all worldviews. Du Bois-Reymond's “We cannot know” caused a certain stir when it was spoken at a natural science conference. What did he mean by that? He said: Yes, suppose you had got so far as to know, when you entertain a thought, how the atoms in your brain move. Have you grasped why certain atoms move one way and others another? What you experience inwardly: I see red, I smell the scent of roses? — He had taken up a saying of Leibniz: From a certain point of view, the brain is a material composition of atoms. — Let us assume, says Du Bois-Reymond, we could see its composition, let us assume that the brain were so gigantic that you could walk around in it, that you could understand the whole mechanism of the brain. Imagine that someone tries to understand: If there is such a movement, what this person, to whom the brain belongs, actually experiences in his soul during this movement, whether, when the parts move in one way or another, he has this or that sensation! We see movements, we see mechanical processes! We can never perceive the transition from this mechanical process to the inner experiences of the soul.

Du Bois-Reymond went even further. He said: If a person is sleeping and you examine the movements of his brain, the fact is not present in the person: I see red, I smell the scent of roses. You can understand this sleeping person, he said. But as soon as he wakes up, scientific understanding of the mechanism ceases.

This was something where theosophy or spiritual science looked in through the window of the natural world. The spiritual researcher shows that when we sleep, our physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, and outside of them is the astral body with the ego, so that the spiritual and the soul-like human being are lifted out of the physical body. What remains, Du Bois-Reymond finds explainable. However, there is still an error in this: life was overlooked. You see, here you have the first outpost of theosophy, but at the same time something that expresses the desolation of such a scientific view: we will not know, says Du Bois-Reymond. Even if it is true that one cannot understand, there is never any other explanation than that which arises from the movements. This means renouncing any explanation of the mind.

There is another matter. A chemist, Ostwald, spoke at the naturalists' meeting in Lübeck about overcoming materialism from his chemical-physical point of view. He showed that there is no sense in speaking of matter. He made a rough comparison. If someone hits another person with a stick, it does not matter to the stick, because the stick is material. What you feel, he said, is the force that is acting on you. So Ostwald tried to establish the view that everything consists of individual forces. The force that we perceive is what matters.

What were atoms? In the past, they were the smallest parts. For Ostwald, they were a small combination of forces; when they crystallize, they become atoms, matter. There we have the first step away from atomism. A person like Ostwald is not capable of rising to the view that everything is spirit. He said that everything is force, the parts of matter clenched together out of force. That was speculation. But there were innumerable reasons for it. In those days one could remember something that had been said long ago. And it was precisely I who pointed out the following in the sharpest possible way: Goethe, who is as great a naturalist as he is a poet, said: If only people did not look for anything behind appearances! The phenomena themselves are the teaching.

For a view of the world that is held in the spirit of Goethe, the following applies: What we perceive is reality. What are atoms for such a view? What is an atom? Can we associate an idea with it? What we imagine are the properties of things. We perceive things through their properties. Does the atom have such properties? Does it have a color? According to the atomistic view: no. Color, after all, is only produced by motion. Do they smell, do they taste? No! Because this, too, is only produced by motion. Do they show a certain temperature? No. All the properties around us must be denied to the atom. What is the atom for healthy thinking without properties? A fantastic construction, nothing more. Every property is denied to that which lives in the environment. The atom is something imagined as a lump in space, but it is denied all the properties it would have to have. That is the characteristic of the atomistic theory, of this basic tenet of materialism, that this theory is the most fantastic thing one can think of, pure dreaming. What one has recognized as the eternal is invented; it contradicts all healthy thinking.

Materialism attempts to conjure up such a fantastic reality in space. Without realizing it, materialism has built up the most blatant superstition. There is no difference between fetishism, which worships pieces of wood, and materialism, which worships small material lumps. The “savage” at least sees his piece of wood; the materialists imagine billions of little idols that can never appear in experience. Atomism has set up the idolatry of the atom, built on pure fantastic thought. The 72 elements exist for us insofar as they have properties. If we imagine them as consisting of atoms, then this falls prey to the most blatant materialistic superstition. All those jumbled-up atoms, all those chess pieces are inventions, are the fantastic basis of a thought.

Now, as I said, a person like the chemist Ostwald had at least pointed out that it makes no sense to speak of a pure substance, that everything dissolves into energy. We perceive energy, we do not perceive substance at all.

That was the situation in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, things have changed completely. Until then, despite all the efforts to overcome materialism, one had to rely on sound thinking. Now, although this is the surest way to overcome it, it does not help much in our age. Anyone who, like the person speaking to you, has had to think through all the big formulas with which, for example, the red light rays have been calculated – movement of the ether atoms – anyone who has had to watch as everyone believed that the waves of the ether move in such and such a way, and then you perceive red; when, as in a vessel filled with gas, the molecules are thrown back and forth, then this degree of warmth arises, and so on. Anyone who has seen this knows something about the physiology of these things and knows that it can be difficult to achieve anything with healthy reason and real spiritual science. That was the case in the early 1890s. Today it is different.

A saying made by an English thinker, a physicist, and a good one at that, Minister Balfour, is extremely curious. He is an extraordinarily astute physical thinker. He said: If we want to think about what an atom is according to the newer views, what is the atom? He saw in it something that solidified out of flowing electricity, similar to how ice solidifies out of water. Balfour saw something more in the atom than Ostwald did. He saw flowing currents of electricity in which the individual particles of matter arise out of condensed electricity. So atoms are actually condensed electricity. You see, we still do not have a healthy view of the physical as condensed spirit; but we are now at the point where we can hear that the physical is something condensed. Think of the tremendous progress! What was electricity just a short time ago? Atom! The little fetishes had movement and the expression of that was electricity. Now the atom had already become condensed electricity. This is the real thing. That is an interesting turnaround. What was this turnaround based on? It was not based merely on the experience of the spiritual researcher or on sound thinking, but on specific experience. Physics itself, in its progress, had forced people to think in this way. This includes the phenomena observed in glass tubes through which electricity is conducted after they have been pumped dry – Crookes tubes. These phenomena led to the realization that what flows in such a tube is flowing electricity; that electricity flows in space at all. What was previously only a property was now something real.

Of course, it didn't all happen in one go. For the humanities scholar, heat is just as real as electricity, and light as well. Matter comes into being just as much through the solidification of light and heat as through the solidification of electricity. In twenty years, it won't be nonsense to say this. They will speak of what heat and light are, they will no longer claim that these little fetishes of atoms are the original, but solidified properties, solidified perceptions. What is around us is an emanation, a manifestation of the mind. Today this is still nonsense to the physicist, in twenty years it will be a fact.

This is the way to gradually arrive at the realization that all matter is solidified spirit. Physical thinking is moving directly in this direction, which leads to seeing spirit as condensed matter. This direction continues in this way. It then causes materialistic thinking to rack its brains. But it must be said: today, for materialistic thinkers, spirit does not so easily break away from the atomistic way of thinking. People have noticed that when chlorine and copper are mixed, something strange happens. In their view, chlorine is an element consisting of vibrating atoms; and these atoms would be something original. The copper atoms would be something original again. When the compound is formed, the atoms are pushed into each other, and then chlorine copper is formed. But now something strange happens. When chlorine and copper really combine, it happens with a fire effect. Heat occurs. This is something just as real as copper and chlorine. That it is something very real is shown when we want to separate the chlorine copper again. Then we have to reintroduce the heat, the same amount that was taken out.

Certain people who cannot get away from materialistic atomism have considered this. They came up with the following: Now, if we have chlorine on its own and copper on its own, which consists of atoms, then we have to think of these atoms as sacks that are puffed up by heat; and now, when we bring chlorine and copper together so that they combine, the heat is expelled, and now the empty sacks are pressed together in a jumbled fashion. When the bodies are put together, the sacks are squeezed out. When the elements are driven apart, the heat inflates the sacks.

You see, the atom has already disappeared, heat has become something very real. If we don't want to talk about sacks – the materialists did that themselves, we might have used the image of a balloon – then we have to say: if you separate the shells again, they will be filled.

What we see here is that what actually makes up the atom has already melted down to a very small size, to the shell. What gives the atom size is the heat it absorbs. This is extremely interesting. We are not far from a time when the skins will finally have been removed. For why should we not be able to imagine that if heat can puff itself up, it can be dispensed with altogether? Why should it not be conceivable to imagine the atom as frozen heat? We will come to that. Let us consider further. Even more interesting is the next step that science has taken. After the point where the atom had literally dissolved into flowing properties, came what begins with Becquerel's discoveries, which led to the magnificent and powerful discoveries in this very field, to the discoveries about radium. What do we have before us with this? We do not want to decide whether the ideas to which the physicists have been led are correct. It is our responsibility to establish that the physicists were forced to a crossroads by the phenomenon of radium. Radium emits various types of rays, electrical and so on, the effects of which can be seen on a photographic plate. But above all, it emits what is called emanations. These emanations have certain properties, properties that differ from radium itself, but are similar to it again, that dissipate over time, so that the emanation merges into something else. It throws parts of its own substance out of itself. These lose their properties and become something else. Physics has even had to accept that it has been proven that this emanation transforms into helium. Oh, what do we have now! Something flows out of the element radium and has different properties, something flows out and turns into an element again. This led chemists to say: the atom itself decays, decays into something completely different, so that it can turn into a completely new atom, even into a different element!

Imagine what that means! The parts of an element, which are called atoms, should be the most solid. Now, however, the experiment shows that these atoms crumble under our hands and become something completely different. This is something like the realization of the alchemists' dreams, that one substance can be transformed into another! Today, all this is still in its early stages, but already scientists are forced to say to themselves: the atom is not something original, it has come into being and will dissolve again. Long ago, atoms did not exist at all, although people spoke of them as the smallest fetishes. Gradually they came into being and will pass away again, as radium shows by the way it gradually crumbles its atom. Today, the physicist's atom disintegrates at our very hands. We shall no longer be able to speak of the atom in the old way. This is something different from what Ostwald brought. He still relied on conclusions; today the facts already speak; today the world of facts itself destroys the fantastic structure of the “atom”.

This brings us to an important point. Imagine the consequences of the atom being scattered, this firm support. It dissolves not only in thought, but in appearance, in space, in fact. The atom ceases to be before our eyes what it has been presented as. As ice melts again, so does the atom. Today, materialistic thinkers cannot go far enough; they can imagine that electricity accumulates; but the path leads to seeing that the original is the spirit. That is what the first step taken today is towards.

Thus, today, natural science, if it wants to understand itself correctly, stands at the beginning of the way of thinking that leads directly into spiritual science. It cannot help itself. When the mantle falls, the duke falls after it. What has led to the materialistic theory of evolution are thoughts that could not get away from matter. It sees human beings as a composite of animal species. Once we can grasp that what happens outside in the physical world comes from the spirit, then we will also be able to comprehend the way of thinking that was discussed at the beginning, of the spiritual primeval man who has become denser. Comprehension depends on our thinking habits. Physicists will force people to see spirit condensed in all material things. Then, when it is known that the atom is not eternal but has come into being and is changing into spiritual substance, it will also be possible to understand that man comes from spirit and goes to spirit. All this will lead to such a conclusion. What is happening today in the world of natural science must be viewed from within. Those who speak of it cannot yet renounce this tendency of development, which is afflicted by materialistic ideas.

But the facts guarantee that natural science will lead to spiritual science, that both will celebrate reconciliation. Spiritual science is something that must be presented to people in order to proclaim the spirit as the cause of the physical. Spiritual science will be needed when natural science can no longer go forward on its own; then natural science will be ready to merge into spiritual science. The latter is the outpost that establishes what people will need to know when the facts are ripe to unite with the spiritual-scientific facts. By itself, natural science would lead to the incomprehensible. At most, one would see solidified electricity in the atoms. To understand the final consequences, spiritual science is needed.

When we look back over centuries of thinking and feeling, we have to say that a hundred years ago, what we call natural science was just on the way to descending into the coarsest materiality. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the lowest level had been reached. In Vogt's saying that thought is a secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, it had reached the point of extinguishing all spirit and explaining it as subjective appearance. Natural science was on this path; it was not ripe to turn its gaze up to spirit. Where was spiritual science a hundred years ago? It was immersed in abstractions, in concepts that shine deeply into the spirit. But there was one thing it could not do: bring down the great concepts of the spiritual world to the level of direct comprehension of what appeared externally.

Today we have a natural science that has plunged into the material, where the atom itself speaks, a natural science in which the atom disintegrates at our hands. We have spiritual science in theosophy, which descends to the most concrete facts, which shows that something has emerged in the physical body that the astral body, the etheric body, the I, has formed. We have natural science that reaches up to the boundaries of spiritual science, and we have spiritual science that has descended to the boundaries of natural science. That is the course of development.

A hundred years ago, looking at two currents – a natural science that did not reach up to spiritual science, and a philosophy that did not reach down to natural science – Schiller said: Oh, you are called to go one way, but for the time being you must still go separate ways so that each one becomes strong enough to help the other. This has been quickly fulfilled. In a way, natural science is strong through its weakness, in that it overcomes itself through its own facts. It will lead upwards. And spiritual science is strong because it can embrace the material. What Schiller recognized and hoped for seems to be coming true. Hopefully there will soon be many people who, with the one spiritual eye, like the woman in the fairy tale told at the beginning, no longer have to take the external beings and hurl them away because they tell them nothing, but there will be people who take every stone in their hands, lead it to a spiritual eye and recognize it as an expression of the spiritual world, because all matter is from the spirit and proclaims it. For materialism there was only matter; nothing was found there and things were thrown away. Spiritual science united with natural science will give man a spiritual aspect in every material thing. We will grow to love everything again because everything is an expression of the spiritual world.

Natural science is at a crossroads. It must either go to one side and be lost, or to the other, where it will stand united with spiritual science as the one world view; so that the two together lead man up to a way of life in which the spirit permeates life, so that in this union - which is brought about by facts themselves - a great goal for the good of humanity is achieved. We see it before us today. Let us try to visualize more clearly what we see before us by cultivating spiritual science. Then we will see that we are not doing it to satisfy mere curiosity, but to free ourselves inwardly from all doubts and to make us strong and vigorous and healthy for life. That will be the fruit of the union of natural science and spiritual science: health and strength and security in life!

The present cultural conditions and in particular the perspective on the conditions of the next future will certainly ascribe more and more importance to the human self-education. This evening I would like to say something about that, even if only by way of a hint. Expressly I would like to stress from the start that this talk wants to speak on the usual self-education and not on the education for spiritual research. The usual self-education has to precede the education for spiritual research; it is not only of importance for the latter, but generally for every human being.

Everybody certainly feels already with the word self-education that in a certain respect, this word indicates, actually, something contradictory or at least something whose execution causes big difficulties. Why this? Simply because education requires the support of something strange, of somebody outranking the child to be educated. But if one speaks of self-education, one means, of course, that education which the human being can grant to himself, that means that education where the human being is educator and pupil at the same time. With it, a big life difficulty is certainly called.

Let us consider what one can say about the education of the child, of the young human being, from the viewpoint of spiritual science. You find it summarised in my booklet The Education of the Child from the Viewpoint of Spiritual Science. It is impossible, of course, to state even introductorily today, what I have written in that booklet. But I would like to point to the fact that if we pursue the development of the young human being we get around to accepting certain main impulses of education as it were up to a certain degree of maturity of this human being. There we realise that about up to the seventh year of the child, up to the second dentition, the education has to start from the imitative instinct of the child. I have stressed in that writing that that is more important than all rules of morality and all other instructions for the education of the child in these first years which the child sees and hears from the adults in its surroundings. If we go on, we find that important period which begins with the second dentition and lasts possibly until sexual maturity.

There we find again if we get free from all prejudices and look only at the real development of the human being, at the real conditions of this development that authority is the most significant impulse of education for these years. A healthy education for these years comes about if the child faces adults in whom he can trust, so that it can form its principles, its rules of conduct based on authority of these human beings without intervening with any pale intellectual idea or any immature criticism. The authoritative principle is the basic educational principle for these years.

If we pursue the young human being up to the twentieth, twenty-first years, we find as the essentials the maturity of reason and in particular the view up to an impersonal ideal, so to a purely spiritual educational impulse that stands over him what the human being himself can be at this age. This is just the being of the ideal for which we strive and have the feeling any time, in particular as young people, that our whole behaviour and being are not really commensurate to the ideal that we can never really reach it. Not before these periods are over, the human being arrives at that epoch of his earth existence in which he can begin self-education.

With the exception of the third educational impulse which is also for the young human being in such a way that he takes it as an ideal from the great impulses of world history, and that other human ideals are given to him that he takes over also from the outside, the other educational impulses are founded upon an ideal, upon the relation to something still strange, to something that is assumed to be more perfect. That is why the pupil faces the educational impulses as something strange, he looks up to them.

If one has really to speak of self-education, it is a given that one cannot speak as one has spoken of the educational impulses for the first years, and in that is not only contained the logical-inconsistent, but the ideal-inconsistent.

If the human being has to become his own educator, one has to assume that the impulses of that are in him. But if the human being has to become his own educator, does it not at once suggest itself that he less improves himself with this own education, or that he makes his living conditions richer than rather to restrict them? Does it not suggest itself at once that he undertakes the self-education according to certain things which are already in him which he has taken into his head or has accepted, and that he neglects the rich possibilities which may come from his inside, so that he could easily restrict himself by such a self-education instead of increasing and perfecting it? Does this contradiction not suggest itself?

Yes, we see—because of the conditions of civilisation—that necessarily self-education becomes more and more the object of consideration that everywhere the views about self-education appear. We can understand this. We do not want to go back to the ancient India or Egypt and to understand how there a certain caste classification put the human being to a certain place of life from the start and made it impossible to him to develop freely, and that the social order dictated or even dictates today how he had or has to behave.

We do not need going back to these old times. We can go to those times, which still project in ours, and we realise that the human being was or still is defined by blood relationship, by the fact that he was or is affiliated to a family, to a caste and so on. But we also realise on the other side that from this social structure just in our present something else forms that confronts the human being with the other human being, so that human being and human being face each other in the social order. Yes, we see even that not only human being and human being face each other, but that the human being is on his own more and more if he feels confronted to nature and universe.

We realise that he depends on his own judgement in the course of his life, on his convictions, on how he can think about moral, aesthetic, religious relations. It is quite natural that the human being who is more on his own must have the requirement: I have to look into myself what confronted me as a human being to the human being what puts me generally as a human being adequately in the world. We can understand that under these conditions more and more one calls for self-education. How the human being has to behave if he has to position himself in life and world according to particular conventional rules, this can be put into the education of the child. However, as our life develops and has to develop more and more, because the conditions of this development cannot be turned back, it turns out that the human being has to feel called in every situation of life in which he faces another human being, actually, to develop an unbiased judgement over and over again.

There he has to work on himself his whole life through to get a bigger and bigger perfection towards the world. The most important impulses for it are not given, actually, during our childhood, but when the human being has to gain his own position in the world, so that he is on his own according to his age. Then he has to begin becoming his own educator when he does no longer feel the urge to submit to other educators. Thus, we see our literature and our public life flooded with all possible considerations about the development of the personality, about the attempts to find the harmony of life and so forth. This is comprehensible for our time. However, someone who looks deeper into these things notices soon that within such contemporary attempts just that is often expressed which I have characterised as an impulse which limits life instead of improving and enriching it.

There we realise that one follows this or that ideal to give instructions with which the human being is able to work on his thinking. The other prefers physical instructions, prescribes for all human beings what he himself likes mostly maybe according to his palate and preference, gives all kinds of outer physical education or prescribes this or that diet, this or that daily organisation and so forth. However, I would like to stress from the start that I do not criticise these attempts completely; much good can be in them. However, a lot can also work one-sidedly, as for example the attempts which go back to the book In Tune with the Infinite (1897) by Ralph Waldo Trine (1866–1958). Somebody who dedicates himself to such attempts and makes a narrow concept of a harmonious life, develops and improves not so much his vitality, but restricts and limits it even if he may experience a feeling of well-being or inner satisfaction or maybe even bliss because of such a restriction. However, one can ignore that just with these attempts in the present the strangest peculiarities appear and give everybody the opportunity, without occupying himself very much with these matters, to recommend that as something generally human for which he has personal preferences.

One has to go deeper into the human nature if one wants to speak spiritual-scientifically about self-education. This is just the characteristic of spiritual science that it avoids the one-sidedness of the other attempts. It has as it were these other attempts as small circles around itself, and it wants to be the big circle, which wants to recognise the conditions for the single human life from the devotion to the whole nature of the human being. It is always more comfortable to dedicate yourself to one-sided directions which promise to restore health possibly in short time or to improve memory or to get practical results in life. The way of spiritual science is more difficult and more uncomfortable, but it is that which is based on the whole nature of the human being.

Speaking of self-education we maybe can get a tip thereby how self-education is to be managed favourably if we consider that already at that time when the human being has to be educated by others a certain self-education intervenes. This may appear as an even bigger contradiction than the earlier intimated one; but it is not. For spiritual science shows that the human self is different from that which is enclosed in the immediate personality. Yes, the whole spiritual-scientific consideration is based on the fact that the human being can exceed himself as it were without losing himself. Do you already find any example of that which spiritual science wants to represent in much more comprehensive way in all areas of existence, actually?

Yes, two things in the usual life already show that the human being gets beyond his personal and can stay, so to speak, with himself, does not need to lose himself. One of them is sympathy, shared joy, compassion, comprehensive love. What is this love based on? It appears not so mysterious only as it is because the human being accepts the habitual easily. As well as the savage does not ask why the sun rises and sets, but accepts the habitual, and the human being only begins thinking about rising and setting if he is cultivated, the human being does also not think about shared joy and compassion. Not before one begins recognising the sense and the purpose of life, something like shared joy and compassion become life riddles. We need only to imagine one thing, and we will realise at once that shared joy and compassion are extensions of the human self.

Joy and grief are the most intimate experiences of the human being. If we face another human being, and an impulse appears in us that reflects his grief or joy in us we do not live only in ourselves but also in the other. But any philosophical speculation that the sensory impression anyhow releases something in us cannot belie the reality that something active originates from the commiseration of joys and sufferings of the other in us. Where we feel his joy, his grief intimately, we have left ourselves and have penetrated into the sanctum of the other human being. We need only to imagine, because we cannot penetrate the consciousness of the other with our consciousness: if we experienced a faint-like state in the soul of the other when we feel compassion or shared joy in the other soul, then we would be unable to go from the one to the other personality without losing ourselves. As weird as it sounds, as significant as it is for life: we leave ourselves and penetrate into the other without becoming unconscious.

Exactly after the same pattern, any spiritual-scientific development takes place. As the human being penetrates by shared joy and compassion into a foreign being without losing himself, he penetrates spiritual-scientifically recognising into foreign beings without losing himself. In the normal life, this is not possible, because if the human being leaves himself recognising, perceiving, he just falls asleep, then he is no longer aware of himself. In the normal life, the human being does not do this what he does in the moral life just in the case of shared joy and compassion. This is why the peculiar behaviour of the human being with shared joy and compassion is the exemplary picture of any spiritual-scientific activity; it proceeds in such a way as the normal life proceeds in compassion and shared joy. This is the one where the human being exceeds his own personality and does not lose himself.

The other thing that is also for the usual life in the field of moral is the conscience. Someone who investigates the conscience knows that it already exceeds the personal sympathies and antipathies; yes, it can even correct them powerfully. Again, our moral life is so organised that we do not lose ourselves or faint if we exceed ourselves by such judgements of conscience. Spiritual science is based on the fact that the human being can enter an area which is beyond the personality which he encompasses with his everyday consciousness and in which he still does not lose himself. Is that also not based on that with which we have dealt in these talks repeatedly: the insight into the repeated lives on earth and into the principle of causes and effects from one life to the other? It is also based on it. The human being who encompasses with the usual consciousness what is between birth and death learns to recognise by spiritual science that he may regard this as his personal self. He also learns to recognise his higher self to which he ascends if he leaves his personal self with thinking. He recognises that this self builds up the body and lives not only between birth and death, but goes through many births and deaths and appears repeatedly.

If the human being cannot remember former conditions of the earth and only theoretically convince himself of the truth of reincarnation and karma, he can still assume that that which is in him which is transpersonal does not exhaust itself in his personality, but that it creates his personality first, becomes effective in it. As we exceed ourselves in our conscience, in compassion and shared joy by immediate experience, spiritual-scientific research exceeds by experience to a higher area.

But the human being can never admit if he knows spiritual science that he himself is lost in this higher area, but there something prevails that is connected with him to which he belongs and in which he does not lose himself at all if he loses himself at first with his usual normal consciousness there.

Thus, spiritual science is something that appears as an exemplary image of a being enclosing a higher self as we enclose other foreign beings in compassion and shared joy without losing ourselves. If we know our enlarged self by which we enter into foreign beings, we are allowed already to speak with the education of the child that except that with which we can comply as educators, which develops from the normal consciousness, a higher being already works on the child. If we consider this, we maybe find something in the child where already a kind of education takes place, while we can turn with our usual education only to the personal self of the child.

Where do we find the higher self of the child, which does not become conscious? It may seem weird; still it is right, that it works in the child with the rational, with the well-controlled playing. To the playing child we can only give the conditions of education. But what is done by playing is done by its self-activity, by everything that we cannot formulate as strict rules. Yes, just the essentials and the pedagogic of playing are based on the fact that we stop with our rules, with our pedagogic arts, and leave the child to its own forces. Since then the child tries playing with outer objects whether this or that works by its own activity. It puts his own will in motion, in activity. And by the way in which the outer things behave under the effect of its will, the child can educate itself in another way than by the influence of a person or his educational principle, even if only playing.

Hence, it is so important that we mingle as little intellectual as possible into the play of the child. The more the play operates in that what is not understood what is looked in its living, the better the play is. If we give, hence, the child toys which simulate the movements of human beings or things by drawing threads or in any way, may it be in a picture book with movable animals or human beings, or in other toys, we educate it by the play better than giving it the nicest boxes of building blocks. Since in this too much intellectual activity interferes already what belongs to a more personal principle than that experimenting around with the alive-movable that is not grasped intellectually but is observed in its full activity. The less defined and contrived this is what appears in the play, the better it is because something higher that cannot be forced into the human consciousness can then enter because the child relates to life trying and not intellectually. There we realise how something educates the child already that exceeds the personal.

In a way, playing remains an important educational factor for the whole life. Of course, I do not mean the card game here, because all games that are directed to the intellect claim the personal of the human being that is bound mostly to the instrument of the brain. Even if much favourable is said about chess, it can never be a factor of self-education because it depends on that which is bound mostly to the instrument of the brain that has to infer. If the human being is active with gymnastics where he has to set his muscles in motion in such a way that he can infer nothing at all that he does not strain his intellect, but directly develops with the activities and not with intellectual understanding, then we deal with a self-pedagogic play.

From it, we directly gain an important principle of any self-education. This is that the human being who has to educate himself by the education of his intellect and in particular by the education of his will depends on the care of the contact and interrelation with the outside world. The human will can be educated not by inner intellectual training, but it strengthened, so that the human being has a firm hold inside if he maintains the will while the own will and the outside world interact.

That is why the usual self-education is almost injured if the human being tries to strengthen his will for the outer life by inner means, by inner training. There we get to various things which are downright recommended for self-education today, and against which spiritual science cannot enough warn. There one recommends how you can get a confident manner how you develop the will, so that you can position yourself in life and carry out such actions which correspond to your intentions. There one recommends, for example: do such exercises to avoid fear, curiosity, or other passions and negative sensations. I know that someone who hears that will say after, today he has spoken against the control of fear, of passion and so forth.—But this is not the case, I have said that the requirements that the human being puts to himself in such a way can lead to no real will culture. Since he should get this will culture which the human being needs for the outer life by the interaction with the outer life. It is much more appropriate if the human being needs a strong will for life that he tries to get it by exerting outer strength while he has to strain his body and to pay attention with his eyes, so really leading off the fight with the immediate sensory world. This harmonises us with the outer world, with that outer world from which our whole physical organisation is formed, admittedly, formed by the spirit.

However, while we direct our self-education in such a way, we also work on those parts of our spiritual organism that harmonise us with that outside world. But if we work only inside with concentration of thought and other methods that are found in the bookstores today, we work separated from the world in this restricted soul that is not harmonised with the world, but just has its importance from the fact that it secludes itself. It is quite correct that that who exposes himself to outer dangers and tries to overcome them practices a better self-education than that who buys some books about self-education and carries out exercises to achieve fearlessness, dispassion and the like.

Indeed, such things of easy kind can give personal advantages, but always because the person concerned develops what separates him from the world, while he positions himself by the first characterised attitude unselfishly in the world. I said, now someone could state, so you speak against fearlessness, dispassion and against all things about which one can say that it leads to self-education while overcoming them.—Only in one case, this must be stressed if it concerns the development of the will for the outer physical world if the human being wants to strengthen the will in the outer world because just these things cause only an inner work and are applied wrongly to the education of the character, to the education of the will. Rightly, you apply them to the education of your knowledge.

Someone who wants to get knowledge who wants to behold into the supersensible world and has no other goal at first, can rightly do such exercises. Hence, if anything is got out of spiritual science competently, the instruction is not given: How Does One Attain Forces to Develop the Will in the Everyday World?, but there are instructions: How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds Where such instructions are given, one pays attention to such terms exactly. These things, as they are described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, also lead to a culture of the will, not directly, but indirectly, while that which aims at this development in the higher worlds waits for that which comes then. The development of the will must take place by itself, and then it works in the right sense and takes healthy ways.

So we can say that will culture, self-education of the will must be out to produce a healthy relation to the outside, whether this relation refers more to issues of the physical culture, whether that what is searched here refers more to the development of character. There it is much more important instead of brooding how one becomes intrepid, without passion and the like to face life and the human beings, and then to leave yourself to your impartial feeling which is filled more or less with sympathy or antipathy. While we go through life in such a way that we develop our interest in life everywhere, we produce that interplay with the outer world that can lead the will from step to step. This develops our will, while we face life with all sympathies and antipathies that it claims from us. To put it another way: that forms our will, which leads us beyond us to the world. Everything that leads us from the world into us develops—and there it is necessary—our knowledge, this just furthers our inner life if we want to develop own knowledge. However, own knowledge is in the field of psychic development. We have to confess that we become more harmonious in relation to the philosophy of life, to the achievement of life riddles, while we develop our cognitive faculties, while we appropriate inner forces. Against it, the will is only developed for life itself in the right way.

With it, we have shown where the teacher of self-education is to be searched, actually, who would have to be the human being himself. No, the human being must not be it in his narrow personality, and in particular, he has not to be it in relation to the self-education of will. If we assume with spiritual science that the human being can leave his personality without losing himself, then we educate if we open ourselves to life, in particular in such a way as playing works on the child—the comparison must not be misunderstood—then we educate our will. But how? The intellectual culture does not really further our development, has no self-pedagogic value. That element must play the biggest role with self-education that outreaches intellectuality, reason, while we appropriate maturity of life. Just like playing educates the child best of all that it is educated not intellectually, but while it is trying, the human being educates his will best of all with those experiences of life which he understands not with his reason but facing them with sympathy, with love, with the feeling that the things are lofty or touch humour. This furthers us. Here is the self-education of the will. Reason, intellectual culture cannot work on the will at all. Observe how the immediate experience works on the will.

A moral philosopher who does not stand on the viewpoint of reincarnation—Carneri (Bartholomäus C., 1821–1909, Austrian philosopher, poet, politician)—draws the attention to the fact that the character of the child is something steady, but forms just with those elements which emerge immediately from life. Then he asks, what can the character of a human being change in short time? He says, it can change radically, for example, by mighty love or by a friendship where the human being suddenly unfolds such a sympathy that does not examine but loses itself in the human being.—There the character can suddenly take another turn simply because in those spheres where the character is, that is where the will works, the frames of mind are involved in the immediate life. If we face a human being and recognise him as this or that excellent or bad person working directly with our reason, our character does not change; otherwise, the judges would often have to change within one week. But if these or those feelings of friendship occur, the whole configuration of the human character often changes. This is evidence of the fact that the culture of will depends on the development of the frames of mind. Because we can take charge of our life, can change our frames of mind, in a way, so to speak, we take charge of our will-education in certain respect. But it is important to pay attention to life and that we do not live chaotically and dedicate ourselves comfortably to the stream of life, but just pay attention to it. Then we realise that a human being can be more the educator of his self if he can take charge of his frames of mind but that the worst self-educator is that human being who never takes charge of his moods, but perpetually loses himself in them.

If we want to be educators of our will, we have to turn to our feelings and sensations and to investigate in wise self-knowledge how we can work on our feelings and sensations. If we have lost ourselves in sympathy or antipathy, then it is not the time to work on us. Hence, we must pick out the moments of will education where we especially are not engaged with our moods, but can think about our life and our sensations. That means that self-education must take place just when the demanded moments require it in the least from us. But then people do it in the least, because they are not concerned. Someone who resorts to his moods after again notices only later that he has omitted something. This is one of the most important principles that the will must be educated in life, while the human being wisely takes charge of the course of his moods.

Against it, the will is always developed to the selfish side when the human being wants to strengthen his will from the intellect. Such exercises are good immediately for our knowledge culture, for that what we want to get in the spiritual or later even in the psychic fields. But then we can do nothing but working on ourselves within our souls. Besides, it is particularly important that the human being pays attention above all to the big contrast which exists between the self-education of the inner life and the self-education of the outer life. In relation to both mistakes about mistake are done, and we see one-sidedness about one-sidedness working. What is not recommended for the body? It has become maybe rare, but there also are even today people who wrap themselves especially strongly and say, wrapping also protects against heat. The other is more widespread that one recommends one-sided toughening to protect against cold and the rigours of weather, against it to expose oneself to aerial and solar cures. These are not the essentials that the human being exposes himself to solar heat so and so long what may be quite useful for this or that purpose, but may not be a means of education, or that he does cures with cold water repeatedly. The essentials for the body are versatility which enables the body to expose itself also once to the cold, without catching cold, or to walk once in the boiling solar heat about a quite unshaded place. Hence, one could say that a reasonable self-education cannot agree as a rule with most things that one recommends today, but will pay attention that something of all works on us harmoniously.

Just the opposite that is good for our body is good for the mind, for the soul. While the outer body needs versatility, adaptation to the outer conditions, the soul needs concentration for the intellectual culture, the possibility to lead back the sum of thoughts, sensations and perceptions to few basic ideas. That human being who does not endeavour for his intellectual self-education to lead back his knowledge to some basic ideas that can control everything else will see his memory suffering, also his nervous system and the way, in which he has to position himself in life. Someone who can lead back certain things to main ideas will realise that he faces the outer life quietly where it demands actions from him. However, someone who goes through life only in such a way that he does not lead back that to some basic ideas which life offers will show that he hard remembers, that he faces life with a certain disharmony. Because in our time the belief in the concentration of the mind exists so little and is searched so little, also a lot of other evil appears as defects of self-education, above all nervousness. While one develops the will, while one lets his muscles interact with the outer life, one has to develop his nervous system by mental concentration. Briefly, everything that works from the inside out and develops in the nervous system is furthered by leading back our life to single ideas, by recollection. The care of the nervous system and of that, which forms its basis in the spiritual, is necessary if the human being wants to face life internally strengthened.

If we speak about these questions, a newer, materialistic view can force itself on us in this respect, even if the older one can be often disputed from the viewpoint of modern humaneness. One confuses two things normally. The human being cannot become nervous by education of his will, but by a wrong education of his will. The will education can lead to nervousness, while the human being searches it wrongly, if he wants to get around to it with some inner means that work on his mental pictures instead connecting himself with the outer world and strengthening his will with its obstacles.

Thereby his will can easily become nervous. Today this nervousness is already so understood that it has to be treated rather leniently. Carneri tells an interesting case of it. Once there was a landowner who, while he was, otherwise, a good-natured person, had such a soul state sometimes that he pummeled his people, and one called this a special case of nervousness. His people had to suffer exceptionally much, but those endlessly regretted who understand the most after the present views that he had to pummel his people repeatedly. This went well as long as he caught a Tartar once whom he also wanted to pummel. However, the other man took a stick and pummeled the landowner severely, so that he had to remain lying in the bed for one week. Now something appeared, while once the landowner was regretted because of his soul states, now one stopped not only regretting him, but he was completely changed after some time.

I do not want to recommend something with it, but such a fact is exceptionally instructive. If we check it, we can realise very well: if one had tried to persuade the landowner, his nervousness would have remained. If one had worked on his mind, he would not have interacted with the outside world, he would not have changed. However, he interacted with the outside, namely with the cane of the other. With something that he would never have understood in the very own sense he got to know the effect which he had produced from his frame of mind, from his nervousness when he faced life. Thus, the concept “will culture” must be corrected first that the will can be only toughened by the contact with the outside world even if we do not want to educate our will as in the cited drastic case.

As to the intellectual life with self-education, we have to be able to live internally in such a way that we evoke this fruitful element that is in us, indeed, but may lie idle. We develop it, while we hold together our stock of perceptions, while we peruse it repeatedly, look back at certain ideas, and survey what we have experienced in life to put it repeatedly before us. In particular, it is important that we can not only remember, think, imagine, but that we learn to forget in right way. Oblivion should not be recommended here as a special virtue, but if we face the one or the other in life, we notice very soon that we cannot carry that what we experience completely from one moment of the experience to a later one. We can do it with mental pictures sometimes, but we can do it in the least cases with sensations, feelings, pains, and sufferings. How do these working on? They grow pale, and in the hidden depths of the soul, they are working on. That which one forgets there is a healthy element, which descends in the hidden depths of our soul life. By this descending of a healthy element, we have something that works on us that can bring us again from step to step. It does not concern that we stuff ourselves as it were with all kinds of material, but it concerns to pursue the things carefully but to keep back that which we need, and to sink that which we have otherwise experienced in the depths of our soul. Thereby we maintain attention in particular. Someone who does not believe that this is something important will say, oh that does not matter.—He does not take charge of his own personality. However, somebody who knows that it matters what one forgets, says to himself, I have to take charge of my life, I must not let everything work on myself. If I go to this or that circle where one chats silly stuff only, it can be that I forget it because I am an intellectual person, but it matters whether I forget this silly stuff or something reasonable.—Thus, it matters which object you include in your oblivion. Since from this forgotten something often ascends that now is the object of our imagination, of our fancy. While the intellectual element fatigues life, everything that sets our soul forces in motion in such a way that we invent something, is a fruitful, stimulating and life-supporting element. This is something that we have to foster in a wise self-education in particular.

Thus, we have also considered some moments of self-education relating to the intellect and the inner soul element. If we foster this inner soul element in particular and appreciate it, we will realise that it flows into the will automatically, into the character, while we rather weaken it with all efforts that we undertake to influence the character directly because we do not interact with the world.

Spiritual science can support all such things that can serve for self-education with the principle of reincarnation and karma. That means, what I experience in the present life is the effect of former lives, and what I experience now causes that which I face in the following lives.

Thereby you learn if you introduce the ideas of the repeated lives on earth and of karma in your life to cause the right balance of resignation and desire of activity. Concerning both, we can commit the biggest sins with our self-education. People do just the opposite of that resignation and desire of activity that corresponds to a real wise self-education. An anthroposophist will say to himself, what occurs to me in life as my destiny, as pains or joys what brings me together with these or those human beings and so on I have to consider it under the viewpoint that I am that with my self which exceeds my narrow personality who has caused all that.

Then we get to something that could appear at first in such a way, as if it could lead to weakness, to the resignation of fate because we know that we ourselves have caused it. As well as the things occur to us, they must occur because they have originated from us in such a way. If we have this resignation, it strengthens our will because it is not caused by an inner training of the will, but by a relation to the outer destiny, to that what occurs to us. There is nothing in the self-education that can make our will stronger but resignation and the devotion to destiny, but serenity. Someone weakens his will who is liverish at any opportunity and is indignant at his destiny. Someone strengthens his will who is able to submit to his destiny in wise self-education. Those human beings have the weakest will who feel at any opportunity in such a way, as if this and that occurs to them completely undeservedly, as if they have simply to shake off it from themselves.

The present human being does seldom like this devotion. For it, he develops another devotion even more. Everywhere we see the devotion to the inside widespread, to the intellect, to the inner forces. There the human being dedicates himself straight away to his inner soul state and says, if you do not like this, it is due to you, because you are not attentive enough.—Today just those people are dedicated to the inside in the most who are indignant at the outer destiny. How complacent is the human being. The human being is especially complacent if he stresses repeatedly that nothing must be developed, actually, but that is already in him today. The today's doctrine of individuality is the purest doctrine of devotion. The fact that the individuality must be led up and that one has to let no opportunity unused for that is something that argues tremendously against the feelings of devotion of the modern active human beings.

One has to harmonise inner humility and activity properly. But we are able to do this only if we are open to life. This is a demand that we must put just to ourselves self-education. So the human being looking at the future can say to himself, that which I develop will work on me in future, will enrich my destiny.—If the human being extends his life beyond the present embodiment and can look at the effect of his present existence, the urge of activity will awake and the human being will rise beyond his present nature, and his devotion will be active in right way, if he understands that he himself has caused what he experiences in the present.

Thus, just the ideas of reincarnation and karma can deliver what we want for our destiny. The questions of self-education no sooner get right answers before spiritual science cannot merge into the inner longing of the searching human beings. Spiritual science does not want to agitate, but it wants to give that to the present, which corresponds to the inner urge of the modern human being. It was always in such a way that, indeed, truth had to serve to any age for which it was determined in appropriate form but that at the same time this age has always rejected truth. Hence, spiritual science can also not escape from the destiny, as necessary as it is, to be misjudged and faces the fact that today one says, it is an empty pipe dream, daydreaming, unless anything worse. But just if one considers such decisive questions, one sees the meaning and the range of that what spiritual science can offer as an elixir of life. Then one can also expect what it is, and what it can be as an elixir of life. One can apply a saying to it which can help somebody who realises its true depths and significance get over any opposition and misunderstanding, a saying which a man has spoken with whom one cannot agree everywhere but who hit the nail right on the head in certain respect. The saying of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860, German philosopher) is applicable to the destiny of the spiritual-scientific truth: “During all centuries, the poor truth had to blush about the fact that it was paradoxical, and, nevertheless, it is not its guilt. It cannot accept the figure of the sitting enthroned general fallacy. There it looks up sighing to its protective god, the time, which promises victory and fame, but its strokes of wing are so big and slow, that the individual dies in the meanwhile.”

Schopenhauer could not yet add what the modern spiritual science can add. May the protective god do such big strokes of wing that the individual cannot realise the truth of the time, that the individual has to die before the truth is victorious, spiritual science yet shows that in the human being an everlasting essence lives which always comes again and does not confine itself, but goes from life to life.

Hence, we can say to ourselves, even if the time's strokes of wing are so big that the single individual dies and does not experience the victory of truth,—our self, exceeding our personality, can still experience the victory of truth, this victory and all victories, because the always new life will defeat the old death.—The soul can express that which the spiritual researcher has to say about the enclosing nature of the human being as the deepest, most significant force of its life while saying to itself with Lessing: “Is not the whole eternity mine?”

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.

I would like to finish the course of these winter talks today with a consideration about the significance of the spiritual science for the human life.

I have pointed many a time to the fact that spiritual science does not want to be only a theory of the world that one accepts or refuses like other theories. No, spiritual science hopes to be able to be a real new element of life, something that can penetrate into the whole human being, and that the human being thereby gets a real treasure for life. What I have suggested in this respect already at the suitable places of the single talks I do summarise not only today, but I will also explain it somewhat more in detail.

In the course of these talks, I have pointed repeatedly to the fact that spiritual research is based on something quite different from any other research in our time. I have mentioned that with any other research it matters, above all, that the human being unfolds his faculty of judgement, his willpower, as well as he has them, and that he applies them immediately. If we face life, we are forced to appeal to our judgement immediately to make a decision in this or that sense. On the other hand, we face life in such a way that our will should be used, we can only seek to apply that willpower which we have unfolded with our normal education.

Briefly, we are forced at any moment of the usual life, but also in the usual science, to accept ourselves as we are anyway.

On the other hand, the position of spiritual science is quite different, actually. Just this fact brings it adversaries and opponents in abundance. The spiritual researcher cannot take himself in such a way as he is. With the portrayal of the life between death and a new birth, I have especially emphasised this. What we apply, otherwise, in life directly to the outer world the spiritual researchers uses it first as preparation for the level of knowledge which he should attain only after this preparation. The maturity of judgment and willpower are not applied to the outside, not in such a way that we make decisions directly or put acts of volition in scene. Nevertheless, they are applied in a spiritual process so that the spiritual researcher uses the techniques, the inner handling of the faculty of judgement to further his soul to make it riper and riper. The will is practiced in such a way that a development of the soul from another viewpoint is possible than that he has already.

That is why one could say: what one applies usually directly to the world—one applies in spiritual research for the preparation of that what one should only attain after this preparation. That is the point that the soul transforms itself into another instrument of knowledge and willing than it is at first. Hence, that mood also comes which the spiritual researcher has compared with knowledge that he has, actually, always the feeling: what you have applied usually directly to judge the things—now you must withdraw it from the outer world to further yourself; now you must wait, until your soul has become ripe to let the knowledge of truth approach you. What flows out, otherwise, from our soul is used first to the work on the soul. However, thereby the human being experiences a mood of inner activity, not that mood of simply accepting the world.

Then we have realised that all outer sense perceptions or thoughts and mental pictures, bound to the brain, cannot supply any cognitive force to spiritual research, but that it must appeal to the stimulation of forces that are slumbering, otherwise, in the soul. I draw your attention to the fact that the real clairvoyant knowledge is based on the fact that at every moment the spiritual-scientific researcher must submerge in the processes and things which he wants to recognise, and that that which he wants to perceive and recognise is extinguished at once if he does not submerge with his whole active soul. We abandon ourselves to an outer colour or an outer tone passively; they have an effect on us. We have to be active if we want to recognise anything in the spiritual world. If we faced the things and beings passively in the spiritual world, the recognised would be extinguished or would change into hallucinations or illusions if it is still there. No moment the soul is allowed to rest in the spiritual world.

If we consider that the soul can ascend to the levels of Imaginative, Inspirative, and Intuitive knowledge only, while it is internally active continuously, then we realise that the spiritual-scientific research can deliver knowledge to the human beings only, which also necessitates a particular kind of understanding. I have pointed already repeatedly to the fact that one has not to be a spiritual researcher to understand what the spiritual researcher explores in the spiritual worlds. Since there is in every soul an immediate, secret language by which it can understand, what the spiritual researcher says, even if it cannot be active spiritual-scientifically, as one can understand a picture, even if one is not a painter. However, the human being of the present has also to fight for it; since nothing is more obvious to him to say: truth must get at me; I must behave passively to it, it has to be given to me! One feels insecure if one shall do anything if one shall first develop the soul to recognise truth. Hence, one can object to the spiritual researcher very easily: you put up concepts of truth which are not in such a way, as the concepts of truth of the outer life or the outer science; and these truth concepts say: I believe what is confirmed to me by facts what can be revealed, so to speak, by facts.

Many years ago, I called this attitude concerning knowledge and life facts fanaticism, on one side. On the other side, one dedicates himself to a certain dogmatism of facts. It signifies the same like any other dogmatism for the soul. One feels, so to speak, that one has no inner power to grasp truth if one is no longer kept to the apron strings of the outer facts or the outer science. However, spiritual science necessitates—because it has to speak about matters and processes which do not belong to the field of usual life—that you bring yourself to an understanding that is not kept tied to the apron strings of the outer facts and that also does not submit to any dogmatism of facts, but feels the light of truth shining in an inner, mental experience. The modern human being must get used only to the inner conception of the living truth. One can almost say, the modern soul is not able to bring itself to develop those strong inner forces that are necessary not to let dictate the truth, but to experience it immediately. However, this feeling is necessary if the human beings should check and understand the spiritual-scientific results. If one brings himself to experience truth in such a way, spiritual science is clear for any soul immediately. Since that does not speak against spiritual science what some people argue that anywhere in the field of the natural sciences or history anything would be that could persuade anybody that the so-called spiritual-scientific truths would be errors or pipe dreams.

Not a single scientific or historical truth contradicts the knowledge of spiritual science. I have often emphasised this in these talks. Nevertheless, those who get used to the scientific thinking at first absorb prejudice with it that one only must overcome. The opposition does not arise from the judgements of science, but from the prejudice against spiritual science. Spiritual science creates cognitive forces that have to become active if the soul wants to penetrate into the spiritual world. Therefore, one understands spiritual science only if the human beings get used gradually to bringing up the active forces from their soul depths that must be animated as free inner activities in the soul.

I have almost avoided out of this attitude using illustrations or photos for these talks. The modern human being is inclined very much to look at something passively. However, one has to grasp internally what spiritual science brings to light; one has to think, to feel, and often to want with it. While spiritual science appeals to this what exists, indeed, in any soul, but slumbers in the souls, it calls forces in the soul for the spiritual life which—if they are used for it—represent a high treasure for life which the human beings need more and more.

Only somebody who is short-sighted can deny that this human life becomes more and more complex, that our development runs in such a way that inner forces of orientation will be more and more necessary to cope with life in any direction. Except various other reasons that speak for the emergence of spiritual science in the present culture, it is also valid above all that the human souls must use these stronger forces to orientate themselves in the outer life, the more we settle in the future. Life itself requires these stronger forces from the human souls.

Of course, we cannot bring everything forward in a short talk that spiritual science—I do not say spiritual research now—has to offer as treasures for life by the living understanding of that what spiritual research brings to light. We can only characterise the single categories, overall. There I would like to start from that what is connected directly with the single human being.

I have repeatedly pointed in other contexts to the rhythmical change that happens in the human life in the course of 24 hours, waking and sleeping. I have partly mentioned in the various talks what is one can say about it from the spiritual-scientific point of view. I want only to suggest today that the human being has the sleep as a means of recovery of particular kind beside that what he has for his immediate mood from sleep and can feel immediately subjectively. Today you have only to listen to the outer medical science; it is of the opinion that the healthy sleep is a remedy. Since sleep unfolds such forces in the human being which compensate a certain daily consumption of forces. Whereas the awake life weakens the body in a way, we are mainly concerned with the development of the forces of recovery. In sleep, healthy forces have an effect on the human being. One of the best remedies for some illnesses is that one causes a healthy sleep. I cannot speak, of course, in this talk how one causes a healthy sleep. I explain on a separate occasion whether spiritual science has to say anything particular about that.

Now the human being can recover by that what develops in sleep only what we have consumed. In sleep the soul withdraws from the physical body; the spiritual-mental is in its own world, in the spiritual world. This different relation of the soul to the body when it is awake is connected with the stimulation of recovering forces. Now spiritual research appeals—as we have seen—the spiritual-mental of the human being to become free from the bodily, from the physical—for one cannot investigate the spiritual-mental in another way. Everything that the spiritual researcher investigates he investigates outside of his physical body. If he expresses the investigated in concepts and words, and if the human soul attains an understanding of this what he has to say, then that makes a particular influence on this human being who is no spiritual researcher, but only faces the communications with understanding. This soul takes care to develop understanding forces for the results of spiritual research. These forces are more or less independent of the physical body. While we understand that what the senses and the reason offer, we remain dependent with this understanding on our physical body, we wear out it, let our activity run in the whole sphere from which diseases come. If we put ourselves with our lively understanding in that what spiritual science offers, we live in the sphere of the healthy forces.

One can deny this easily, saying that one knows many people who deal with the results of spiritual science and do not at all make such an impression, as if they live in the field of the recovering forces. This may be completely entitled. However, if one deals with the results of spiritual science in the same way, as one deals with other sciences or the usual life, one does not penetrate into it. What I have called “Homunculism” in the last talk, one can unfold as well as in other sciences in spiritual science.

If one wants to understand spiritual science in the same way as one wants to understand the results of the usual sciences, then one is not correctly related to it. Spiritual science comes from spiritual research, from the spiritual life of the spiritual researcher, from a perpetual activity; and the understanding, which it gets, appeals at least to tiring the physical body, that means to what the common cognitive forces of the usual life appeal.

However, truth itself must thereby become something like a living being for the spiritual researcher as well as for the supporter of spiritual science. It will also become this. While one receives the truth, otherwise, like a sum of judgements, like something that one just thinks only, one receives spiritual science like something that pulsates through the soul like spiritual blood that animates it internally. One receives the truth like a sum of spiritual living beings; one feels penetrated with living existence by spiritual science if one meets it with understanding. Then, however, it has a recovering effect up into the physical body. As sleep, during which the soul is also beyond the physical body, is a remedy against some illnesses in the true sense of the word, spiritual science can also be such a remedy. However, only those can regard it as a remedy who want to understand the following important matter. It is comprehensible that one approaches spiritual science as one approaches the outer medicine or art because one maintains the same habitual ways of thinking. If one wants to penetrate into it, one often asks, which remedy do you have for this illness, which for that? The information of remedies is often demanded from spiritual science. Indeed, spiritual science will also give real concrete remedies; but one has to understand that it wants to give not only this or that remedy, but that it presents itself, above all. Nevertheless, one does not always accept it with understanding. Spiritual science can answer if one asks for a remedial method, take me, and then you feel my curative forces! However, this is uncomfortable for some people who often look for something completely different.

Of course, it is trivial to object that spiritual science could not help somebody who dealt with spiritual science and died early or fell ill by this or that disease. Since one would have to issue a rebuttal first whether somebody who has survived with the help of spiritual science up to his forty-fifth year had become without it maybe thirty-five or forty years old only. The methods of disproof are not often so simple.

Above all, I must draw your attention to the fact that sleep can compensate only what is used in the physical body, can take forces only from the spiritual worlds as far as the borders of the spiritual predisposition reach which the human being brings by birth in his existence. Spiritual science gets its forces from that world with which the human being is connected spiritually. Therefore, one can say that sleep is a remedy in this respect that it can compensate spent forces. Spiritual science supplies forces to the human being, which he has not yet in himself, either by what it is as such, or by what it can give. It opens a higher source of recovery for the human being as the usual life can also supply to him with the best sleep. One can compare what can work recovering from the soul by lively acceptance of spiritual science with that of which usual medical art is capable. Since also the usual medical art is able only to call those healing forces for the recovery of the human being that are already in him that are only suppressed by opposing forces. Spiritual science, however, brings new forces in the human being to effectiveness, which only develop, which are not innate. It appeals not only to the human being as a microcosm but also to the connection of the human being as a microcosm with the big spiritual world.

In order to make this clearer, I would like to point to something that already is on the border of physical and spiritual. Although it is correct that spiritual science gives the human being a treasure for life by which he can prevent illnesses in a certain respect, a much more important treasure for life strikes us for the life of the soul itself; I mean the memory. Who has not to complain of decline in memory when he becomes older? The forces with which we are equipped for our memory become exhausted. One could live ever so healthily, nevertheless, they become exhausted; even if with some outer means something may be improved, the innate forces become exhausted.

However, if one grasps spiritual science internally and if one appropriates habitual ways of thinking and imagining that are quite different from the usual ones, one notes that, indeed, the retentive power decreases that it is substituted, however, with something that is a much better memory. This appears gradually from the spiritual undergrounds of the soul what one can call retrospect of events. As we look, otherwise, at the things in space, we learn gradually to look at the things in time. The forces which memory does not develop, otherwise, because it has a reserve usually in the bodily which remain hidden, until this slumbering retentiveness is brought out of the soul and becomes retrospective forces of the past. With correctly settling in spiritual science, we instil something in the course of life that continues our usual, instilled memory by which a human being, who grasps spiritual science vividly, can survey the past much longer than someone who does not want to get involved with spiritual science. These forces become also forces directing to the future. Someone who goes into such things and their subtler differentiations notes that memory becomes something different, but something that works more reliably than that memory which is innate by the bodily forces.

This shows us with a careful observation of life how refreshing and strengthening the treasures for life are which spiritual science can give beside other things. Of course, spiritual science cannot heal spiritually what is destroyed physically in the body. Spiritual science never turns in a fanatical opposition against the outer scientific medicine as it happens with similar directions in these fields sometimes; it draws attention to the fact that that what one has to cure physically one has to cure physically. What the forces of a reinforced spiritual life can pour into us gives an inexhaustible treasure for life.

How has that become gradually mere dry knowledge with the materialistic attitude what is good for health or furthers life! Not in order to prove something, but only in order to explain something, I would like to show how we can observe the remedial instincts with animals. However, we can find the tendency with the human being to leave the healthy life more and more, and thereby he would want to change everything that is good for him into outer, dry knowledge. Today one already sees people who can no longer develop their instincts completely which say to them while eating: now you have enough. Beside their plate are scales and now they weigh how much the piece of meat weighs they eat. I expressed that only somewhat radically; but he who pursues the things realises that the sensations of life change slowly more and more into abstract knowledge. This also expresses itself in the fact that people cannot act out of their feeling concerning health or illness, but like to hand over the care for it to others.

In this respect spiritual science will be an exceptionally significant treasure for life, while it strives for penetrating a world from which the human being, indeed, only seems to be descended in which he stands, however, still inside. Since in truth his mental and physical being have arisen from the spirit. While someone goes away from the life instincts with that part of his being that is bound to the brain and nervous system, he approaches the active life again by understanding settling in spiritual science. Therefore, he does not return, indeed, to the animal desires. He will penetrate them from the mind in such a way that an abstract knowledge cannot dictate what he has to eat and to drink, how long he has to walk, to do gymnastics and so on. However, it will happen that he spiritualises his desires immediately that he lets the spiritual treasure he got from spiritual science flow into his desires and thereby knows: you should do this so and so in life. One could almost say, the human being has gone away from life by that knowledge which is bound to the brain and nervous system; however, he penetrates life again with new contents by spiritual science, and thereby he knows again immediately what is good for him, what is advantageous to him, what is not good for him. He will go with certainty through life; he will firmly stand in life because he builds a bridge between the deepest grounds of life and his existence. This will apply not only to health and illness, but also to the whole life.

It is necessary if we want to be healthy to appeal to spiritual forces that are active that ascend in lively direction. If we judge, otherwise, in life, it happens in the way that we make our judgement dependent on that what we have seen; we remain quite passive with our own soul. Just the usual science is proud if it should make judgements without taking the forces of judging from the own soul. This is the one treasure for life that spiritual science enlivens the forces of truth, of judgement. The soul has to get used more and more not to accepting judgements but to judging actively, to opening an inner source of judging. Thereby it attains skill of judging, inner freedom to handle the power of judgement, presence of mind that arises directly from the soul if it has to orientate itself in the world or to deal with the world. One could foresee a treasure for life of spiritual science that one can characterise in the following way.

Let us suppose that we have to educate, and we perform the development of the young human being spiritual-scientifically. The human being thereby grows up in such a way that he is inclined more and more to appeal to the power of inner judgement, to develop presence of mind, to experience truth. The human beings who were educated in the sense of spiritual science stand up in life quite different from those who have experienced another education. They feel instinctively because their thinking will not be an abstract one, but goes into the feelings that it is good to begin this or that. How some people stand there today within our materialistic civilisation with their lives, with their thinking and judgments and do not know what they are good for and what they should do. This will happen less and less if the souls known with spiritual science come in situations where they must decide. They will feel in such a way that their spiritualised instincts give pleasure to them. This pleasure will not deceive them; it will be the right one, and they properly familiarise themselves with life.

Somebody who represents spiritual science today relates to it in another way than one relates to another spiritual current. However, thereby one does not have the right attitude to it that one is inspired by the results of spiritual science subjectively, and that one feels the urge to inform these results to his fellow. There many a man would maybe restrain with this or that today, because it does not belong to the conveniences of life to represent spiritual science, if one arrived at the aims of spiritual science in such a way as one arrives at the aims of other sciences. However, one arrives at that what induces one to talk about the knowledge of spiritual science if one recognises that a civilisation which has become materialistic penetrates into the souls and makes them more and more passive and that spiritual science is necessary for the progressive life while the human being learns more and more to orient himself in life. If one recognises that those forces must die down, which put the human beings firmly in life in natural way, then one is urged to proclaim the spiritual-scientific knowledge. Then one would like to have more than the human language—unmanageable in certain respects—offers to show how necessary the treasure for life is in the further human progress which spiritual science can only give in our time.

If one notes less what it means to be completely subject to a dogmatism of facts, to the specialisation in science caused by fact fanaticism, one maybe understands why spiritual science can only induce that human being to become internally free and to get inner mobility who can put himself in life in such a way that he understands the basic source of life, because his soul is connected with the primordial forces of existence. More and more humanity will need to develop inner elasticity of the power of judgement in subtle activity. Spiritual science has to bring this as a treasure for life to humanity. A thinking that bears the force of truth in itself that the human being needs in the more complex future is a treasure for life which spiritual science can give humanity.

One will have to get used to developing understanding for what one can grasp only internally, because one allies with the internally living truth by spiritual science that cannot be forced to judging from the outside. As the organism is invigorated with the living force of blood and breathes in the right relation to the outside world, spiritual science invigorates us with the internally living truth. It is like a spiritual-mental heart that breathes in the surroundings where one has to inhale something spiritual to make the soul healthy so that it can oppose the inner breathing air what it makes a free inner organic force.

One would like to say that one cannot believe in this spiritual breathing today. In the future one will be able to believe in the inner heart of spiritual breathing. The soul thereby develops human freedom. As the human being can develop as a living being only because he can inhale not only the breathing air vividly, but transforms it vividly and develops a separate living physical organism in a subtle way, he will spiritually develop inner mental blood more and more which enlivens him and makes him a really free being, while he is active and transforms the outer knowledge.

If we go from knowledge to will, we have to remember that spiritual science brings the human beings mental pictures,, concepts, ideas, and results of spiritual research which live as it were so freely in the soul that they are independent of the mental, of the externally bodily, also of desires and outer impressions.

How does the human being act under usual circumstances? He acts based on outer impressions or impulses. Spiritual science is not concerned with that what is connected with the outer organism. It fulfils the human being with that what only lives in the organism what comes from the spiritual world and not directly from the organism. More and more the possibility is omitted for the human being to act from outer impulses and sensations; but what comes up to him from spiritual science supplies inner forces to him, so that he comes to action from the inside. This gives a significant impact for the human life.

Which force comes up to action if the outer world does not supply the impulses? Which impulses can work then?

One will realise by a simple consideration that it must be a comprehensive impulse, so that it fulfils the soul with a comprehensively working force. This is the impulse of love which pours out of the soul directly, but only if it is driven by inner impulses. Spiritual science supplies a treasure for life to the human being that is of unlimited value: a freer and freer incline to his action what can invigorate the power of action if the impulses are spiritual and with it to the power of love.

I have pronounced in these talks more often that spiritual science is the big school of love for life. That does not mean that spiritual science wants to talk about love at every opportunity. This talking of love reminds of a saying of Schopenhauer: “preaching morality is easy, founding morality is hard,” but still of something else. If one always hears talking love, love, love, then it is similar as with the good Gothamites who wanted to catch the light in bags and to empty them in their houses. One cannot empty love in the soul that way. It is with the human soul similar as with an oven that one has not to persuade to make the room warm, because this is its task as an oven. It does it by itself if we put wood into it and kindle it. Somebody maybe could say that the wood does not look at all that it delivers warmth. Nevertheless, there is warmth! While we put the quite different looking wood into the oven and kindle it, we bring warmth in our house. While we get used to the spiritual-scientific concepts, we get used to a free judgement, to a free orientation in the world. While we thereby fertilise our memory, we bring the impulses of the human ability of love in our souls and we get used to them. As certain it is that warmth originates in a house if the wood is properly used, it is as certain that active love that can really help is kindled by those impulses, which enter with spiritual science in the souls. Spiritual-scientific concepts are the heating material of the soul for love.

Indeed, one can also object much. Above all, it one could object that some do not find enough love with those who deal with spiritual science. However, the human being has to finally manage to regard something that seems to be unloving there or there is perhaps rather loving. For example, if anybody causes this or that less nice thing from a wrong instinct or from pure egoism, and one bawls him out of a healthy instinct, that can be a better activity of love than some words which could be quite “loving” at such moment, but would aggravate the condition from which the person concerned made this or that mistake.—The right, true experience will show that nobody who penetrates himself with spiritual science remains without its influence concerning the development of love.

Spiritual science will work as a strange treasure for life just in moral fields. It will not work like outer means, which should deter from doing this or that. It will work quietly in the soul of any human being, so that he finds the right ways of the activity of love. Spiritual science works as the inner voice of conscience which does not punish outwardly but is a more certain leader of the soul. Someone who settles in the spiritual-scientific concepts experiences that where he does wrong spiritual science has put a force in him which works like a strengthening of conscience, like correcting, giving life a direction. Thus, spiritual science will not work best by programs and outer associations in moral fields; but it will work, while it incorporates itself in the civilisation, as the moral conscience developing in humanity. With the increase of moral conscientiousness, a treasure for life is given to the modern civilisation if spiritual science finds understanding.

If one considers it in such a way, one can get a concept of that what it can be for the physical and moral healthy stimulation of the human soul. One will no longer deny that it can be an unlimited treasure for life in physical and moral respect. It can be a treasure for life which one needs very much in the future which can invigorate the human being because it wants to be recognised because it does not approach the human being from without but unites internally with his soul. Internally,one realises this: spiritual science arouses hostility much less. Today one can still understand if people come with their materialistically coloured knowledge and say that one attains knowledge which invigorates the human being also if one looks at the outside world; there one attains right knowledge. This is indeed right. However, we look once, now not only in theory, but lively, and we realise that spiritual science just gives lively knowledge everywhere; and we compare that with what a materialistically coloured worldview gives the human being.

Those persons who still build up such materialistic atomistic world edifice who are still, so to speak, at its origin are still active with theirsouls. Haeckel (Ernst H., 1834-1919, German naturalist) himself, Ostwald (Wilhelm O., 1854-1932, chemist, philosopher), his next pupils and others, they are still involved actively; they can still develop inner forces, and one could still compare that what they work with their science internally with that what spiritual science attains appealing to the inner soul forces.

With those, however, who are not in the first row with the realisation of the materialistic worldviews, or where one absorbs such a worldview passively the materialistic worldview corresponds to a food that one does not digest which cannot develop the forces for what the soul really starve. One can expel hunger, without eating really. It is possible. However, what the hunger indicates cannot be expelled for the outer organism without food. Thus, one can also suppress the hunger of the soul for the spiritual treasure for life, while one ruins the appetite for the spiritual life by a materialistic worldview. Nevertheless, the human does not stand that in the long run.

I would not like to speak here about truth and error of spiritualism. Indeed, it contains some grains of truth, not only error or fraud and the like. I would only like to point out that those who stand on the ground of a materialistic worldview do not approve spiritualism apparently. If one thinks about it with a thinking that does not invigorate itself internally, one can only say that the materialistic worldview is the same far away from spiritualism as from spiritual science. However, if one really looks into the becoming of the world, one knows something quite different. Then one knows that the hunger of the soul for a spiritual treasure for life cannot be suppressed, and that the materialists themselves produce spiritualism! One fights from materialistic side against spiritual science. However, one will realise that everywhere where spiritual science does not succeed spiritualistic associations and circles form. The representatives of a materialist worldview are the fathers of spiritualism. With an abstract thinking, one does not figure this connection out. There one makes the same error in reasoning as that who says, I plan to build up a rather good son from the child that has been born now; I prepare everything for it. However, the son does not always turn out as the father has supposed; he may become possibly a rather bad brat. That has nothing to do with lively life which ideas the materialists have of the world connections. Thus, it can happen that they produce the “son,” the brat, which they do not recognise as their son. For spiritualism is the son of materialism. Why that? Because the appetite of the soul cannot satisfy the hunger for spiritual life, and it finally happens as the physicist or chemist does that the outer events of life are demonstrated where the “spirit” is presented without inner cooperation. This is more comfortable than to have to exert oneself internally at every moment when one should climb up to the spirit. Nevertheless, this is also nothing but searching for the same worldview which materialism produces.

I want to bring in this only as an example how an abstract thinking positions itself in life. Such thinking will regard it as natural that materialism cannot produce spiritualism. How should it do it! However, a thinking that has inner power in the sphere of truth will figure the world out in quite different sense, and with such thinking the human being can position himself quite different than with an abstract, dead thinking which is “Homunculism” too.

Thus, we can regard spiritual science as a sum of life goods. Indeed, someone does not regard the said as especially valuable who thinks that life consists of outer goods only. Indeed, someone who knows that even the outer goods are dependent on the inner sense of direction in the world and on the recovering forces of the soul does not regard the idea as bold—with reference to all social conditions and what is today an occasion for so many “cures”—that such conditions can be seen correctly and that one can find the right remedies only if the human beings soar up towards spiritual science. One must really say that something is included in all that what pushes the words onto the lips of someone speaking about spiritual science.

Spiritual science finds much opposition still today. I have repeatedly pointed in the course of this winter to the fact that there must be such opponents. Their reasons are apparently striking because one can find them so easily, and because they are so extremely evident. One can understand any opponent of spiritual science very well, and, besides, he does not say something wrong; he may even say something completely right. Let me mention finally that he may say something right.

Suppose that a quite clever human being says, a spiritual researcher comes here and talks about all kinds of wrong stuff that Kant disproved for a long time, because Kant proved that the faculty of the human being is not sufficient to penetrate into the spiritual world. If this spiritual researcher had studied Kant, he would soon be quiet about that.

It is not quite wrong what the clever man says. It can be quite right. If anybody said in the time when there was not yet a microscope so that one could find macroscopic things only because the human eye cannot look into smaller things, this was quite astute. Nevertheless, what does it benefit the further progress of human thinking and life? Although it is right that the human eye cannot see down into the cells of organisms because the eyesight is limited, the human beings constructed the microscope, and the telescope and see now where the eyesight of the human eye does not reach.

As it can be very astute that somebody proves that the human eye can see no cells and the like, it can be very right what those human beings argue who speak of the limitations of the human cognitive faculties. However, does it matter whether it is right or not? As it is right that the human eye can see no cells, but that civilisation led to sharpening the eye, there are spiritual methods that strengthen the soul life, so that the human being can behold into the spiritual world. One has to understand this and other things that somebody states as an opponent of spiritual.

Actually not to boast but to inform something, I would like to mention that, nevertheless, more and more human beings note the fertile impulse of spiritual science also in the present. One can prove this by the fact that we are able to build a college of spiritual science in Dornach near Basel. One does not intend to concentrate spiritual science upon one place; I would like to stress this. However, we want to prove that we can show how spiritual science can be creative in the fields of architecture, sculpture, and painting. With this building, only a model should be given that spiritual science is able to deal with life directly. The fact that friends of spiritual science were found who donated the relatively big means that were necessary to create this college building is already a proof that this spiritual science is partly rooted in the souls of the present.

Only by the way, I would like to mention that about this building for spiritual science in Dornach all possible fairy tales are put in the world. For example, in the newest fairy tale that was put to me on the table you can read that the college that should be once built, indeed, in Munich, could not be built because we would have been rejected there. In truth, we were not rejected but certain circles in Munich, which must be asked, could not cope with their expert judgement. They let us wait for ten years; however, we could not wait with the building for ten years!

Another fairy tale tells that because of the building among various cities a kind of competition had originated, and that these would have triumphed over Munich. I would not like to say anything against the artistic Munich. Even if the inhabitants of Munich regret that the college of spiritual science is built now somewhere else, nevertheless, not so many cities scrambled to get it! Besides, the concerning newspaper is not informed especially well if it writes that Basel seems to emerge as the most favourable city from this competition.

I want to mention this only because now also more opponents appear due to this building. For it can be an outer sign that spiritual science finds already understanding that the building can be started, that such an artistic landmark can show the significance of spiritual science in the world. The opponents always ask, who are these supporters of spiritual science? They must be people without judgement, people who easily listen in good faith! However, usually those who talk in such a way would prefer that one listens to their authority or to that what they regard as authority. Those people are opponents because the supporters of spiritual science do not do this and have advanced to be unbiased in a way. However, being unbiased of a materialistically coloured or any dogmatic worldview is necessary if one wants to understand spiritual science. With this understanding one calls the life goods in the soul—as I have suggested it today—with those who get involved with spiritual science more intimately.

Someone who notes and understands their lively life, realises more and more, that this spiritual science is connected with that what must give the necessary new spiritual life blood to the future of humanity. Even if that what is connected with spiritual science may cause some childhood diseases, not everything should be justified that appears where one believes that it works correctly. I allow myself to express something just today at the end. Something that could entice us from the outside that could induce us internally in the same way to present spiritual science does not exist. But it is solely the knowledge that with spiritual science the true and fertile life goods for which any soul must be hungry enter in this human soul, and that this soul, even if it does not know it today, craves these life goods if it should not become empty. This sensation forces itself on the representative of spiritual science that lives in him, while he represents it. With this confession, I would like to close these winter talks:

This science faces the representative of spiritual science as if the real of a fertile future culture demands from him that he represents it. What gives him hope and confidence for life and for the salutary of spiritual science in future crowds together in a sensation of something real. He must develop the confidence that comes from true knowledge, which also knows in a certain respect that spiritual science has to work, even if so many opponents arise; it must be victorious. As it appears to the supporter who has a real attitude, it is the real of the future development of humanity.

I finish these winter talks expressing confidence in spiritual science.

Man's striving and searching for the spirit is ancient, as old as the thinking, feeling and sensing of humanity itself. But at the most diverse times in human development, people had to give themselves the most diverse forms of answers to the great riddle questions of existence, which are also precisely the riddle questions about the spirit. In our time, what is called spiritual science or, as it has become accustomed to being called, theosophy, wants to give an answer to these great riddles of existence, and it wants to give an answer that corresponds to the feelings and needs of present-day humanity.

Contemporary humanity wants to know, wants to include in its understanding and knowledge of feelings that which is connected with the higher forms of existence. From the outset, it must be assumed that suspicions and belief in relation to the spirit or, as one can also say, in relation to the supersensible world, will lose nothing when the clarity of knowledge is poured out over what man has to say in relation to these questions.

The fact that behind everything sensual, behind everything physical, there is a supersensible, a superphysical, is basically only denied by a small number of people today. But when we approach these questions, then not only either the admission or the rejection of the spiritual, of the supersensible, mingles in what fills the human heart, but the most diverse feelings mingle in everything that comes into consideration comes into consideration, the most varied feelings mingle, not only in the answers, but already in the questions the most varied feelings mingle: above all, doubt and timidity mingle with what comes into consideration.

There are many people who say: Of course, we have to assume that behind the world that appears to our eyes, that we can perceive with our senses at all, that behind this world there is another one that makes the meaning of this sensual world understandable to us. But we humans cannot penetrate this supersensible world through our own research, through our own science. In recent times, spiritual science or theosophy has emerged as a message to man that shows not only that there is a supersensible world behind the sensory world, but also that man is capable of penetrating into this supersensible world through his own research. In doing so, we have drawn the attention of those present to the question that we shall deal with today: Where and how can we find the spirit at all?

Those who, from the outset, dogmatically doubt the possibility of human knowledge rising up into the spiritual world cannot, in principle, even raise this question properly. Theosophy or spiritual science does not want to bring anything completely new to humanity. If it were to claim to do so, it would be giving a poor account of itself, for who would want to believe that truth and wisdom have been waiting for our present time to be recognized and studied? Therefore, spiritual science or theosophy also shows that throughout all periods of human spiritual development, in the most diverse forms, the one, eternal truth and wisdom has been striven for by people and possessed to a certain degree, that only the perceptions and feelings change in the different ages – and therefore the old truth must approach humanity in ever new forms.

And so, without much preparation, let us approach the question of where and how to find the spirit in this spiritual or theosophical sense. We only need to point out that the search for the spirit depends on man finding the right tool to search for this spirit. You know, my dear audience, that in what is called external science, what is called the science of nature, there are tools, instruments, through which the external riddles of existence are gradually revealed to man. You know how man peers into the life of the smallest creatures through what is called a microscope; you know what wonders of space have been revealed to man by those instruments we call telescopes. These external instruments have indeed brought about something like external wonders in human knowledge for a long time. And you can also appreciate it when you think about the things that man is dependent on to grasp and comprehend the external mysteries of nature through such tools. In terms of the spirit, there are no such external tools; there is only one tool, the one that Goethe refers to in the well-known “Faust” poem with the words:

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

And Goethe points out in this sentence that all those tools and instruments that are composed of external, sensual things – however useful they may be for revealing the outer secrets of the world – cannot reveal the primal secret of existence, they cannot reveal the questions and riddles about the spiritual. But there is an instrument, only this instrument must be prepared. What is this instrument?

This instrument, through which man can penetrate into the spiritual world, is none other than man himself, not as man is in the average life, but as he can make himself when he applies the methods and means of secret science to himself. In this, esoteric science assumes that the magic word that moves so many minds and souls in relation to the outer world today is not taken entirely seriously and honestly. Today, there is much talk of evolution. It is said that the highest of sentient beings, the human being, has gradually developed from imperfect states to its present height. Through the study of natural science, attempts are being made to look back into the distant primeval times of humanity. It is said that in these distant primeval times, man was an imperfect being and gradually developed.

Theosophy or spiritual science in the broadest and therefore most honest sense of the word sees in man not only the powers and abilities that are in this person's normal life today, but it sees in him dormant abilities and powers that can be developed, that can be drawn out of the soul. And so it starts from the premise that this soul of man does not have to remain as it is, but that it can be shaped, and that in this way the abilities and powers that initially lie dormant in the human soul in a normal way can be called out of this soul, and then, when they are called forth, they enable the person to see something completely different in his environment, to perceive something completely different than he can recognize with his sensory eyes, with his sensory organs of perception. And so spiritual science speaks of a possible awakening of the human soul, of an awakening of the forces and abilities slumbering within it, by man applying such means to himself as we will have to cite later. Through this he comes to make such an instrument for the perception of the spiritual world out of himself.

What is an awakening? We can best imagine what an awakening, a development of the abilities lying dormant in the soul, is by first placing an image before our soul. Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, this hall by seeing the colors of the walls, the lights, by perceiving the other objects, these roses here and everything that is around you, what is perceptible, the sound that is recognizable to the ears. We bring a man born blind into this hall. The colors, the perceptions of light, which are evident to you, are hidden from this man born blind. Let us assume that we have the good fortune to operate on this man born blind here in this hall. Gradually, a whole new world would reveal itself to him around him. What he might have been able to deny before is now there for him.

Perhaps, if he had been a doubter, an unbeliever, he could have said before: You tell me about colors, you tell me about lights. There is only darkness around me. I do not believe in the fantastic stuff of light and colors you tell me about. The moment the organs are opened, the world he previously thought was a fantasy is there. It is there in the same space where there was darkness for him before.

Something similar happens to a person when they make themselves an instrument to perceive a higher world. If they apply the methods that will be mentioned below to themselves, then it is not sensory or physical organs of perception that are opened to them, but spiritual and soul ones. And that which was always around them before, which they just could not perceive, becomes perceptible to them. What Goethe called the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears develops from the soul, and a new world opens up before him [the human being]. The great moment of awakening occurs for him, that moment which is described to us in the deeper wisdom of all peoples and all different eras of the various peoples as the one through which the human being could become a messenger from another world.

There have always been people whose soul powers were awakened. In different periods they were called initiates. They were the ones who could tell what is fact in the other worlds, in the supersensible worlds, to the one who was perhaps not exactly in that place. Initiates, awakened ones have existed at all times. They were the seekers, the researchers of the spirit.

Now, one could say, and this objection will always be raised, one could say: Yes, what use is it to other people if there are a few awakened ones who can tell of higher worlds, who bring the message of the supersensible, if not all people can see into these worlds? Now, when today within the theosophical school of thought it is said that this or that is the case in the spiritual worlds, then many a person says: What use is it to me if others can see into the spiritual world but I cannot? I do not concern myself with these spiritual worlds at all, since I would only have to believe what others tell me.

This is not a valid objection. This objection would only apply, my esteemed audience, if supersensible powers of the human soul were just as necessary for understanding and insight as they are for research into the higher worlds. To penetrate into the higher world as a researcher, it is necessary that the person slowly and gradually, with patience and energy and perseverance, makes himself an instrument to look into the other world with spiritual eyes, to listen with spiritual ears. But then, when the one who has looked into the other world comes and tells the secrets of the higher worlds, then everyone is capable, with ordinary human logic, with common sense, if he is only unbiased enough, without being led astray by all kinds of prejudices, of realizing that what is said about the higher world is true. This can be recognized and understood. However, it can only be researched through the development of the human being himself into an instrument of spiritual research. For man, my honored audience, is not designed for error and doubt, but for truth. And when the initiates tell us about what is going on in the higher worlds, and the human being listens and just gives himself to his unbiased soul, then he senses, long before he can see into the spiritual world himself, that what is communicated about these worlds is true.

How can a person now reshape his inner being, his soul, so that these higher worlds become an experience for him, open to observation and direct exploration? If we want to answer this question, we have to delve a little deeper. After all, it is no less a question than this: how does a person develop the ability to see the spiritual world, how does he acquire the abilities that are also called clairvoyant? Let us start with what is an experience for the normal person: the external world of the eyes and the other external organs of perception. You know that a person perceives an object of the ordinary sensory world by directing his sensory organs towards the object, and once he has perceived it, he can retain an idea, an image of this object in his soul.

You are looking at this bouquet of roses. By fixing your eyes on this bouquet, it is a perception for you. You experience its existence, you are with it. You now turn around, and the image of this bouquet of roses remains with you as a mental image. It may be pale compared to the direct perception, but the image remains with you and you may carry this image for a long time until it disappears, so to speak, from your memory. But this is how a person relates to their experiences of the external world in general. We can say: in relation to the external sense world, a person experiences things in such a way that they actually encounter the objects first, and then the image of these external objects forms in their soul.

But precisely the opposite must occur, my dear audience, in relation to the supersensible world and everything that is connected with the great goals of supersensible development, as well as with the dangers that we will point out. All of this ultimately comes down to the fact that man must start by developing a certain kind of inner life, by first bringing about certain changes in his soul, certain experiences that he would otherwise not have in everyday life, in order to see the supersensible world. Then the great moment can come for him when – just as the outer, sensory light comes to the blind-born who have undergone an operation – the spiritual, supersensible world begins to make an impression on him.

The soul is not transformed into such an instrument of higher spiritual experience in an outward tumultuous way, not through outward events, but quietly within itself, in the course of an intimate inner life; and many a person who in life in this or that profession among people, of whom those around him knew nothing but that he had this or that position in life, has led or is leading a second life within himself. This second life consists in the fact that he has transformed his soul into such a characterized instrument of higher perception. When a person has gradually come so far, then he must develop a certain level of knowledge within himself, which external science, external experience, does not know at all. Spiritual science speaks of the fact that all external knowledge is knowledge of objects. It is precisely the kind of knowledge that arises when a person encounters the objects of the world and connects the ideas to them.

The next higher knowledge is called imaginative knowledge in spiritual science, and there is nothing fantastical, as we shall see in a moment, associated with this imaginative knowledge, not even anything that could even approximately be described by the mere word imagination. However, it must be clear that the path is the opposite of that of external experience, of external perception.

There are two means that must be applied intimately to the soul in order to advance it inwardly. These two means consist in man not abandoning himself to the mere outer life, but taking this soul life into his own hands through the inner powers of the soul, and initially directing this soul life through the inner powers of the will.

To fully understand what this is about, let us consider the following: We try to imagine how our soul life would be different if one or other of us had been born not in the year of the nineteenth century and not in the city of Europe, but a hundred years earlier and in a completely different city. We imagine how different objects around the person would affect him, how different ideas, sensations and feelings would then fill his soul. Think for a moment about how much of what fills your soul from morning till evening can be traced back to external impressions of place and time, and then imagine for a moment all the things in your soul that are not somehow connected to some external object in your environment, to some external event of your time. Ask yourself how much remains in the soul of a person, in the soul of many people, if they disregard what affects them in their immediate environment. Everything that affects the soul from the outside, everything that affects us because we were born and develop in a certain time and in a certain place, can contribute nothing, absolutely nothing, to the inner unfolding, to the inner awakening of the soul.

Completely different conceptions must enter into the life of the soul, conceptions that are independent of external impressions; and the most effective conceptions are initially those which are called imaginative or perhaps pictorial-symbolic. Such conceptions were always those which the teachers of supersensible abilities gave to their pupils, and by living in these conceptions, the pupils developed their souls upwards into the higher worlds.

We do not wish to speak in generalities, but to make ourselves understood by means of an example. Let us place before our minds, here and now, a symbol, a picture, which the pupils, under the influence of their spiritual science teachers, have long used to develop their souls higher. This is a picture, of which there are countless numbers, but we wish to make clear, by means of this one picture, how the soul is affected. The picture is simple to describe, and yet it has a magical effect on the soul.

Imagine a black cross. This black cross is adorned at the top, where the beams cross, with roses, with red roses. This is called the Rosicrucian symbol. When the disciple, as it were, becomes blind and deaf to the external environment, when he can, for a while, however short, refrain from all that can make an impression on his eyes, on his ears and on the other senses , when he is completely absorbed in himself and also erases the memory of everyday experiences and now fills himself completely with the one pictorial representation of the Rosicrucian – what happens to the soul?

Let us first answer this question. To do so, we must first understand something that can help us to understand the profound symbol of the Rosicrucian. However, what I am about to say is not what is important for the inner development to clarify this symbol or image, but rather the inner deepening and immersion of the soul. Nevertheless, we must explain the symbol to ourselves.

I will try to present this Rosicrucian symbol to you in the form of a dialogue, as the teacher would have spoken to his student in the field of spiritual science. This conversation, as I relate it, did not take place in the form in which I relate it, because what is implied in it always took place over long periods of time. Nevertheless, by retelling it in this way, we can get a sense of what happened.

Imagine that the teacher says to the student: Take a look at a plant, a plant that takes root in the ground, grows out of the ground, out of the root, with green leaves. And now compare the human being with this plant. Look at the human being in his present form, pervaded by red blood. Look at the plant and see how its life organs, its leaves, are permeated with the green sap, chlorophyll. Compare the two. You find the plant insensitive, immobile; you find the human being mobile, sensitive. You find that the human being has an inner life filled with pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. You say that the human being stands at a higher level of existence than the plant. How did the human being come to a higher level of existence, how was he able to develop within himself that which could be called self-awareness, his ego? The plant has not developed such self-awareness, such an ego, as it stands before us.

The human being was only able to develop his higher consciousness to the point of self-awareness by accepting something else. In this higher development, the human being accepted the passions, the drives, the instincts, the desires. The plant does not have these. Although the plant does not have an inner life of thoughts and feelings, it stands in a certain respect higher than man in its kind; chaste and pure, without sensual urges and desires, without instincts and passions. And by imagining how the green plant sap flows through it, we say: this green sap is for us at the same time the symbol of the pure, chaste nature of plants. And as the pure, chaste nature of plants develops upward to man, so in man a self-awareness, an inner life, is developed. But this pure chastity is transformed at the same time into the life of desire. Man has partly risen higher, partly sunk lower.

Now the teacher continues to the student: But do not just look at the person as he stands before you in the present; look at a distant, very distant human future, at a human goal! Man has the goal of striving higher and higher, step by step, and overcoming what he had to accept in his development to date: to purify and cleanse the instincts, desires and passions, so that one day, while maintaining his consciousness, his self-aware nature, he is pure and chaste within himself, like the plant being at his level, in his way. What the human being is to achieve again in the future is overcoming, purifying what he had to accept, so to speak, shedding, taking away from himself that through which he has become lower than the chaste plant being, and only in this way can he revive in himself a higher nature, a higher human being, which today slumbers in him. Once again we can refer to Goethe when we want to draw attention to the deepest meaning of this development of humanity. We can say, and we fully capture the meaning of what the spiritual teacher said to his pupil with these words of Goethe's. We can draw attention to the words in Goethe's West-Eastern Divan:

And as long as you do not have this,
this dying and becoming!
If you are only a gloomy guest
on the dark earth.

“Stirb und Werde”: What does that mean? Stirb und Werde is a deeply symbolic word. It expresses approximately that which has now been said in the symbolum, it expresses that man wants to let die that which he has taken on in order to reach a higher level, to bring it to a higher flowering, his lower nature, and a higher nature is to be driven out as a flowering of the supersensible.

If we now look at the plant, it becomes a symbol for us in a certain form, a clear symbol of this human development. We see how the rose plant develops into its red blossom. The green sap of the plant changes before our eyes, so to speak, as it shoots into the blossom, into the red sap of the blossom. If we now imagine, symbolically, that we are always in the conversation between the teacher and the disciple, we think of the human being in terms of the passions and drives that are bound to his red blood, so purified and cleansed that this red blood flows through the veins in chastity and purity, like the red sap through the rose petal. Then we have in the rose itself the symbol of the higher human nature.

This is expressed in the rose cross, the “die and become” of the lower man, the shedding and casting off of what man has taken on in the black cross. The “becoming” at a higher level of development of the innermost spiritual nature of man is also reflected in the pure, chaste plant-juice in the roses that adorn the Rosicrucian cross. Thus we have explained this picture intellectually from one side. Much more could be said about it.

Now someone could, of course, say – and it would be a very easy objection to raise – that everything that has been said about the Rose Cross does not correspond to scientific conceptions. Certainly, my dear audience, it does not correspond to external scientific conceptions, but the Rose Cross is not there to express some outer fact in accordance with truth. What matters is not such a representation of the outer world, but that the person who, precisely because the Rosicrucian cross corresponds to no outer reality, allows this cross to enter his soul, becomes completely absorbed in this Rosicrucian cross and, as if below the threshold of consciousness, feels and experiences everything we have said here. His soul becomes something other than it was before. Such symbols have this effect on the human soul, precisely because they do not correspond to any external reality. They stimulate the soul to so-called imaginative knowledge, to that knowledge which represents the first step in the ascent to the higher worlds.

I have been able to present only the Rosicrucian cross as an example. We could cite a hundred other examples. The disciple must gradually familiarize himself with these symbols, just as someone who wants to learn to read must become acquainted with letters and signs. Only in this way can he attain a higher form of existence, and then such a one, who has the patience and persistence to live himself into the pictorial representations of such symbols, has a special experience.

To get an idea of what kind of experience a person has when they are awakened, we need to gain some insight into human nature. This nature offers man the great riddles of existence, and it is precisely in what he experiences daily, so to speak, and what can present him with the deepest riddles, that he passes by indifferently. These riddles of existence are encapsulated in four words: waking and sleeping, life and death. These four words describe the greatest riddles of life.

Of course, it is not possible in a short hour to discuss in detail how one, in terms of spiritual science, should think about the nature of man in relation to these four words. But what should be mentioned is what the one who is able to explore the spirit in the way described today experiences in man and his changes in everyday life. Is not this everyday life, with its alternation of waking and sleeping, a mystery? We see how, from morning till evening, a person is filled with the impressions of the day, how all his senses are constantly taking in perceptions. We see how the person then processes his external impressions with his mind. But we see how, in the evening, when he falls asleep, the person sees all his impressions of the day and all the experiences of the soul sink away. We see how man sinks, as it were, into the sea of temporary forgetfulness of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, but also of all perceptions of everyday life, of sounds, of warmth and so on, which fill his soul from morning to evening, how he sees all his inner soul experiences fade away and, as it were, unconsciousness surrounds him.

Now it would, of course, be foolishness – an easily understandable foolishness – to say that a person ceases to exist in the evening and is reborn in the morning. What is at issue is rather that man is a complex being, a being not merely consisting of those limbs, the eyes with which we see, the hands with which we can feel, but that in addition to this physical body we have even higher, superphysical perceptual faculties. When a person falls asleep at night – and we will now only consider the transition from waking to dreamless sleep, leaving the intermediate state and the state filled with dreams to one side – when a person falls asleep, part of their being remains in bed and another part, the one that cannot be seen with any external eye, withdraws; the very vehicle of joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure and passion, the vehicle of sensory perceptions, withdraws, and during the night it is outside the physical human body.

In spiritual science, we call that which leaves the physical body when we fall asleep the astral body. Don't be put off by this word; it has nothing to do with the stars, it is simply the supersensible part of the human nature, which withdraws in the evening and leaves the physical body to itself. The human being truly exists from the evening when he falls asleep until the morning when he wakes up. He sleeps and the consciousness of which we shall now speak, which is developed here as clairvoyant consciousness at awakening, emerges like a fine but spiritual luminous form as the astral body itself when the person falls asleep. In the spiritual world, the human being is present in his spiritual essence, which is around him.

Why does man not see these facts and entities when he is in his astral body at night among spiritual facts and entities? For the same reason that a blind person does not see colors and light. Imagine your eyes being closed to your physical body! The world around you is dark and gloomy, colorless. Think away the ears! The world is mute and soundless. And if you think away all the organs, the world gradually becomes a nothing. Only that is there for man, for which he has organs, nothing else! When, let us say, the luminous cloud of the astral body withdraws from the physical body at night, the human being has no organs in his astral body with which to perceive in the spiritual world. The result of this is unconsciousness and darkness around him.

What happens when a person does not live an ordinary, normal life, but allows himself to be affected by what has just been described to you through the one symbol, when he devotes himself to such things in his soul , when he develops his soul with calmness and perseverance in such a way that, while becoming deaf and blind to his external surroundings, he is able to immerse himself completely in his inner life, which is called a life of meditation and concentration? What happens then? This is something that clairvoyant consciousness can observe. An indeterminate astral body becomes a definite one. What happens in the astral body is as if the physical body were to gradually develop eyes within it. In the manner described, spiritual eyes and ears are incorporated into the astral body; an indeterminate cloud becomes a structured astral organism. The consequence of this is that the human being now no longer experiences nothing, but that what enters spiritually for the sensual body when the eyes and ears are incorporated into it. This now occurs for the astral body.

What man achieves through patient meditation and concentration in such pictorial and other representations through the corresponding teaching of spiritual science, that was called the process of purification in circles where people knew something about spiritual science. Why purification or catharsis? For the reason that man from now on in terms of his development was no longer dependent merely on external impressions and then must remain unconscious and has no external impressions, but because he now, when he leaves out all impressions, as it is in sleep, nevertheless has a world around him. Because he can be purified and refined and still have experiences, just spiritual experiences. This is the first step, which is achieved by such means as we have described.

But there must also be a second stage in spiritual development if man is to become a real clairvoyant. We will be able to understand this stage, this higher stage, when we realize that when we fall asleep, not only a physical part remains. Even in this physical body, which remains in bed at night when we fall asleep, we have a superphysical, a supersensory. The easiest way to understand this – and today it can only be mentioned – is to go deeper and deeper into theosophy. You will see that this is being elevated to the level of proof despite all the objections of external science. The easiest way to understand this is to compare the human being as he stands before us with some external physical object.

What is the physical body of man is, has the same forces and materials as the external inanimate so-called mineral bodies. But there is a huge difference between the people and a mere mineral being. You can see a mineral being that has a certain shape. How can the form disappear? By being smashed or destroyed from the outside. From the outside, the form must be destroyed. What is the human physical body – and we are now speaking of the human being, otherwise we would have to say that it is the same for every living being – what is the human physical body, it is also made of physical forces and substances, just like the outer nature, but when these forces and substances are left to themselves, what do they do? They dissolve the form, they disintegrate.

What can be called the dissolution of the form of the physical human body occurs at death. When a person dies, what remains before our eyes, before the external senses, is a physical body; this now disintegrates into the physical and chemical substances that are within it. But it is no longer a human body, it is a corpse; and while a stone retains its form through the forces and substances at work in it, the human body will disintegrate and dissolve the moment it is left to its own physical and chemical substances. Spiritual science shows us that from the moment of its formation until the moment of death, an enduring fighter lives in our body, as it does in every living being. This fighter continually works to prevent the physical body from disintegrating during our lifetime. Just as we see the astral body floating out of what remains in bed when the person falls asleep in the evening, so we see that which remains in the physical body during sleep floating out at death. In this way, death differs from ordinary sleep. That which we find in life as a fighter against the disintegration of our body, we call the etheric or life body in relation to the physical, and the difference between sleep and death now becomes clear to us.

During sleep, not only the physical body but also the etheric or life body remains lying, and from these two the astral body rises with self-awareness. So every night. In the morning, when the person wakes up, his astral body descends again into the physical body and into the etheric or life body and uses the organs, the eyes, the ears and so on. When a person passes through the gate of death, only the physical body remains, which is now a corpse, and the etheric body lifts off with the astral body. Such is the difference between sleep and death.

The fact that the etheric body, with what this etheric body has experienced in the earthly, is raised up, enables the human being to pass over into a spiritual world after his death, in which he continues to live. But this question should not concern us, what the human being takes with him from his life into the other existence, but rather what is connected with the where and how of the spiritual researcher.

The etheric body does not emerge even during sleep, but remains with the physical human body. The astral body, on the other hand, floats out during sleep, and when the person wakes up, it re-enters the physical body. At the moment when the astral body, through the contemplation described to you, through that meditative life, when it acquires imaginative knowledge in symbolic and other representations, for example, at that moment when the astral body receives its spiritual and so forth, he brings these into the etheric body in the morning, and the result of this is that the person does not wake up in the morning with the feeling, “You were unconscious.” Instead, when he awakens, he says, I was in a spiritual world among spiritual things and beings, I was in my true home, in that world from which my soul and spirit come just as my physical body is from the physical world.

The second, higher stage of clairvoyant life contributes to the fact that the astral body, with what it develops at night under the influence of the inner life, illuminates the etheric body. This is called enlightenment. These are the first two stages of clairvoyant life.

At first, there is the realization that the person does not wake up from the sea of unconsciousness, but with the memory that he was among spiritual beings during the night. He knows that there was a spiritual world around him; and then he comes further and further so that during the day, in his physical body, he can see around him that which is around us, which fills space just as much as the physical world, that he can see the spiritual world around him between and through physical things. Thus man does not find the spirit through external perception, but he finds it by awakening his soul through precisely defined methods and means, which could only be explained by an example today. He brings the forces and abilities slumbering in him to a higher level, finds the spirit in himself, and thus can perceive the spiritual world in the spirit that he has awakened in himself.

Thus, through the development of a new consciousness, through purification and enlightenment, the human being lives his way up into the spiritual world. And again, imagination, this immersion in images, is only the preparation for the perceptions of the actual spiritual world. For here we are faced with an important fact of inner experience. Someone might raise the question: Yes, but what a person has in his inner life at first are only unreal images, only pictures, only symbols. — Of course, at first they are. But if he assimilates these symbols in the right way in his life, then the time comes when he can say to himself: Now, now I have arrived at the moment when I no longer have only my real ideas, but now, because I have made something specific out of my life, an objective world flows in on me.

Only experience itself, observation, can teach one to distinguish between how long one lives in mere ideas and when one arrives at the spiritual facts and spiritual entities that come from outside. Just as you can distinguish in the sensual life between mere conception and the perception of reality, so too there comes a moment when you can distinguish through experience the inner life of mere conception in the imagination from outer [supernatural] reality.

One could indeed say: In the physical world, the existence of real things can be proven. No, it can only be experienced; it can never be proved by experience. The mere idea in the sensual world is to be clearly distinguished from perception, and if someone wanted to claim, as a false philosophy does, that our world consists only of ideas, he may consider what a difference there is between the idea of a glowing steel and the perception of a glowing steel. He can clearly see the difference that exists. Imagine being in front of a glowing piece of steel and try to determine such clear and correct concepts from it. The philosophical prejudice that the world is our imagination cannot be proven, only the reality of things can be experienced.

Just as things are outside of us and become our ideas when we face them, so too the inner, intimate life that arises through meditation and concentration in those images and in other ideas, which of course cannot be described here due to the limited time, but can only be illustrated by the example of the Rosicrucian , then man, when he practices the inner life, can see the time approaching when he says: I no longer have a Rosicrucian before me, but I have reached the moment when spiritual beings approach me who are just as real as the external sensual things when I imagine them. This is experienced, and what he does is a preparation. This is indeed how the life of the soul unfolds during awakening.

When ascending into the spiritual world, the opposite of what happens in external reality occurs. In external reality, we first have the objects and the experience; then we form the ideas. In the higher, spiritual, supersensible world, we must first transform our imaginative life and then wait patiently until we are able to allow the truth, the spiritual, the supersensible reality to take effect on our soul. And it will depend entirely on whether the person has practised a corresponding development of character, parallel to meditation and concentration, and has maintained such certainty and stability by that time that he can distinguish between imagination, hallucination and reality at the decisive moment. Ultimately, only life can give this distinction. Just as the fool is a fool who mistakes his imagination of the rose for a real rose, so man can naturally hallucinate and have illusions in the spiritual realm, even more easily, of course, if he does not retain inner security until the decisive point. But if he retains his inner strength and certainty, so that he does not waver for a moment, and says to himself: Only when something comes to meet me in my prepared soul is reality, I speak of spiritual reality; everything else I regard only as preparation; only then will he be able to distinguish spiritual reality from deception just as surely at the decisive moment as the outer man can distinguish between imagination and reality.

So, my honored attendees, today we should deal with the question: Where and how can we find the spirit? It is not by constructing some external instrument that one can find the spirit, but by transforming oneself into an instrument for perceiving the spiritual world. And so it is true that the soul's inner powers are capable of development, that, to speak again in Goethe's sense, spiritual ears can develop out of this soul, just as sensory ears and eyes develop out of the body.

Thus man finds the higher world through his own higher development. Even if today only a few can make themselves spiritual instruments for the exploration of the spiritual world, these few can still tell of the facts of the spiritual world. Since the human soul is not designed for delusion and error, but for truth, the communication of the spiritual world can be received by unbiased thinking in such a way that man first receives a presentiment of the truth of the spiritual world. Then there is the hope that, with appropriate instruction, he can gradually make himself such an instrument of spiritual perception over the course of a long, austere life. The best preparation is to begin with, to absorb and understand, in pure, unbiased thinking, in sound mind, what the spiritual researcher can grasp in the spiritual world.

Then, through such intellectual preparation, the presentiment and hope of higher experience will arise, and the human being will have in his feelings that which solves the riddles of the higher worlds and reveals the secrets of these riddles. And he will feel, experience, the truth of Goethe's words, who stood more than is usually believed in these spiritual worlds and secrets, which Goethe also expresses in his life poem, in “Faust”, at the point where he says that the sage speaks. Yes, it is precisely by living in the facts that each of us can find for ourselves within ourselves the confirmation of the words of this wise Goethe, for spiritual science offers messages about the spiritual world and awakens the hope of one day passing through the gate that currently separates human beings from these worlds. And so it will come true, through what is today called theosophy or spiritual science, when it becomes more familiar with humanity, what Goethe has the wise man say in “Faust”:

The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, bathe, disciple, undeterred
The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

We have been occupied in showing how those spiritual forces that we call the luciferic and ahrimanic powers play their part in the historical growth of mankind. We have seen how what is to be carried over from one age into another in the course of world evolution is carried over through such powers, and we have been at pains to show how in the desires, instincts and strivings for knowledge, in the impulses, too, of man's social life, something is present that can only be grasped concretely when one recognizes those super-sensible forces that underlie world historical evolution. We have seen how what must come to expression in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch has been in preparation since the fifteenth century. We have seen what new faculties of mankind have evolved in the whole European cultural life since that time.

If we wish to find a spirit who has brought to expression in the most concentrated and clearest manner what the impulses of our time ought to be, then we can look to Goethe. We have already observed that equally in his conception of nature and in his imaginative world, Goethe has expressed something that can form the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. I must remind you today how I have often pointed out that Goethe has expressed in intimate fashion in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily what he regarded as the right impulses of culture, knowledge, feeling and will; that is, what he was obliged to look upon as necessary for the activity of man in the future. He has concealed in his fairy tale what he knew of the spiritually hidden active forces at work in mankind since the fifteenth century, and that will be at work for about two thousand years more. You know, too, how in our Mystery Dramas we have sought to bring to life in all possible detail what Goethe saw when he composed this Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The intention was to bring to expression, in the way in which it can again be brought to expression today, a hundred years later, what inspired Goethe and is to inspire the entire fifth post-Atlantean culture as the highest spiritual treasure. Such depths of soul underlying so great and powerful a work as the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, in spite of its being symbolic, and such great impulses underlying Goethe's Faust as a poem of mankind, point again and again to forces lying deep below the surface of consciousness. All this worked in such a soul out of the depths of old cultural impulses. Today I should like to speak a little about such cultural impulses in connection with yesterday's lecture, and of how they went through a kind of spiritualizing process in Goethe.

We must go back to that age in which the impulses for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch were first laid down in germ, back before the fifteenth century because things that are to develop spiritually must be prepared long beforehand. One can only recognize how in the European life of soul, as well as in the European social life, in the striving toward the True, the Beautiful and the Good, the normally progressive divine-spiritual forces intermingle in our age with luciferic-ahrimanic powers when one goes back into the time when the earliest impulses were given. We learned about these first impulses of earlier ages yesterday. Today, we will learn about a similar impetus from the middle of medieval times, and come to know how certain spiritual tendencies were born out of human evolution. In doing so, we will no more than indicate the historical background since nowadays one can read about it in any encyclopedia.

In order to describe the configuration of the cultural impulses that underwent a certain spiritualization in Goethe, I must refer to the age in which the impulse of the Crusades arose out of the European will: in fact, out of the Christian impulses of the European will. At the time when the will to visit the Holy Places originated in the civilized inhabitants of Europe there were bitter conflicts in the life there between what are called the luciferic and ahrimanic powers. That is to say, into the progressive, good, truly Christian impulses those other powers worked in, as it were, from the direction that was described yesterday. They worked in the way in which they are permitted by the wise guidance of the world. Thus, what happens in the wise guidance of the world may be duly influenced by other impulses working from the past and interpenetrating the impulses of the present in the way we have described.

When we consider it, among much that brings rejoicing to the soul, among much that originated soon after the Crusaders won their first successes, we see the founding of the Order of the Knights Templar in the year 1119 A.D. Five French knights united under the leadership of Hugo de Payens and, at the holy place where the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, they founded an order dedicated entirely to the Mystery of Golgotha. Its first important home was close to the place where Solomon's Temple once stood, so that the holy wisdom from most ancient times and the wisdom of Solomon could work together for Christianity in this spot with all the feelings and sentiments that have arisen from entire and holy devotion toward the Mystery of Golgotha and its Bearer. In addition to the religious vows of duty to their spiritual superiors usual at that time, the first Knights Templar pledged themselves to work together in the most intensive manner to bring under European control the place where the events of the Mystery of Golgotha had occurred.

The Written and unwritten rules of the Order were such that the Knights were to think of nothing except how they could completely fill themselves in heart and soul with the sacred Mystery of Golgotha, and how with every drop of their blood they could help bring the holy places within the sphere of influence of European authority. In each moment of their lives they were to think and feel dedicated with all their strength to this task alone, shunning nothing in order to realize it. Their blood was no longer to be their own but was to be devoted solely to the task we have indicated. Were they to meet a power three times as great as themselves, it was commanded that they were not to flee but were to stand firm. In each moment of their lives they were to think that the blood coursing in their veins did not belong to them but to their great spiritual mission. Whatever wealth they might acquire belonged to no one individual but to the Order alone. Should a member of the Order be killed, no booty should be available to the enemy except the hempen cord girding his loins. This cord was the sign of their work, which was freely undertaken for what was then regarded as the healing of the European spirit. A great and mighty task was set, less to thought than to deep feeling, which aimed at strengthening the soul life as individual and personal with the intention that it might be entirely absorbed in the progressive stream of Christian evolution.

This was the star, as it were, that was to shine before the Knights Templar in all that they thought, felt and understood. With this an impulse was given, which in its broader activity—on the wider extension of the Templar Order from Jerusalem over the countries of Europe—should have led to a certain penetration of European life by a Christian spirit. With respect to the immeasurable zeal that existed in the souls of these Knights, the powers who have to hold evolution back, leading the souls to become estranged from the earth and to led away from it to a special planet, leaving the earth uninhabited, those powers who desired this, set to work quite especially on souls who felt and thought as did the Knights Templar. They desired to devote themselves entirely to the spirit and could easily be attacked by those forces that wished to carry away the spiritual from the earth. These forces do not want the spiritual to be spread over the earth to permeate earth existence. Indeed, the danger is always at hand that souls may become estranged from the earth, become earth weary, and that earthly humanity may become mechanized.

There we have a powerfully aspiring spiritual life that we can assume will easily be approached by the luciferic temptation; a foothold is here given it. Then we also have, however, at the same time as the spread of the Templar Order over the various countries of Europe, the possibility of a sharp intrusion of ahrimanic powers in Western Europe. At the close of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the Templar Order—not the individual Knights but the Order—had attained great prestige and wealth through its activity and had spread over Western Europe, we have a human personality ruling the West who can actually be said to have experienced in his soul a kind of inspiration through the moral, or the immoral, power of gold. He was a man who could definitely use for his inspiration the wisdom materialized from gold. Recollect the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in which the Golden King became the representative of wisdom. Since spiritual forces also exist in the various substances, which are always only maya with spiritual forces standing behind that [which] the materialist cannot perceive, it is absolutely possible for gold to become an inspirer.

A highly gifted personality, Philip the Fair, who was equipped with and extraordinary degree of cunning and the most evil ahrimanic wisdom, had access to this inspiration through gold. Philip IV, who reigned in France from 1285 to 1314, can really be said to have had a genius for avarice. He felt the instinctive urge to recognize nothing else in the world but what can be paid for with gold, and he was willing to concede power over gold to none but himself. He wished to bring forcibly under his control all the power that can be exercised through gold. This grew in him to be the immense passion that has become famous in history. When Pope Boniface forbade the French clergy to pay taxes to the State, this fact, in itself not very important, led Philip to make a law forbidding anyone to take gold and silver out of France. All of it was to remain there, such was his will, and only he was to have control of it. One might say that this was his idiosyncrasy. He sought to keep gold and silver for himself and gave a debased currency to his subjects and others. Uproar and resentment among the people could not prevent him from carrying out this policy, so that, when he made a last attempt to mix as little gold and silver as possible in the coinage, he had to flee, on the occasion of a popular riot, to the Temple of the Knights Templar. Driven to do so by his own severe regulations, he had had his treasures deposited for safety with them. He was astounded to see how quickly the Knights calmed the popular uprising. At the same time, he was filled with fear because he had seen how great was the moral power of the knights over the people, and how little he, who was only inspired by gold, availed against them. The Knights, too, had by this time acquired rich treasure and were immensely wealthy, but according to their rules, they were obliged to place all the riches of the Order in the service of spiritual activity and creative work.

When a passion is so strong as avarice was in Philip the Fair, it presses out strong forces from the soul that have a great influence on the unfolding of the will toward other men. To the nation, Philip counted for little, but he meant much to those who were his vassals, and these constituted a great host. He also understood how to use his power. As Pope Boniface had once opposed his will to make the clergy in France pay as much as possible, Philip hatched a plot against him. Boniface was freed by his followers but he died of grief soon after. This was at the time when Philip undertook to bring the entire Church completely under his control, thereby making Church officials mere bondsmen of the kingly power in which gold ruled. He thereupon caused the removal of the Pope to Avignon, which marked the beginning of what is often known in history as the “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy. This lasted from the year 1309 to 1377.

Pope Clement V, former Bishop of Bordeaux, resided in Avignon and was a tool completely in the hands of Philip. Gradually, under the working of Philip's powerful will, he had reached the point of having no longer a will of his own, but used his ecclesiastical power only to serve Philip, carrying out all he desired. Philip was filled with a passionate desire to make himself master of all the then available wealth. After he had seen what a different significance gold could have in other hands, it was no wonder that he wished above all things to exterminate those other hands, the Knights Templar, so that he might confiscate their gold and posses their treasure himself. Now, I said that such a passion, aroused in such a materialistic way and working so intensely, creates powerful forces in the soul. At the same time, it creates knowledge, although of an ahrimanic order. So it was possible for a certain second-hand sort of knowledge to arise in the soul of Philip, of those methods that we have seen flame up in the harshest, most horrible way in the Mexican mysteries. The knowledge arose in Philip of what can be brought about by taking life in the correct way, although in a different, more indirect way from that of the Mexican initiates. As if out of deep subconscious impulses, he found the means of incorporating such impulses into humanity's evolution by putting men to death. For this, he needed victims. In a quite remarkable way this devilish instinct of Philip's harmonized with what developed of necessity in the bosom of the Knights, resulting from the dedication of their lives to the things I have indicated.

Naturally, where something great and noble arises, as it did among the Knights Templar, much that does not belong—perhaps even immorality—becomes attached to that greatness and nobleness. There were, of course, Knights who could be reproached for all sorts of things; that shall not be denied. But there was nothing of this kind in the spirit of the foundation of the Order, for what the knights had accomplished for Jerusalem stood first, and then what could be accomplished for the Christianizing of the whole of European culture. Gradually the Knights spread out in highly influential societies over England, France, Spain, part of Italy and Central Europe. They spread everywhere. In each single Knight was developed to the highest degree this complete penetration of the soul with the feeling and experience of the Mystery of Golgotha and of all that is connected with the Christian impulse. The force of this union with the Christ was strong and intensive. He was a true Knight Templar who no longer knew anything of himself, but when he felt, he let the Christ feel in him; when he thought, he let the Christ think in him; when he was filled with enthusiasm, he let the Christ in him be enthusiastic. They were perhaps few in whom this ideal had worked a complete transformation, a metamorphosis of the soul life, and who had really often brought the soul out of the body and enabled it to live in the spiritual world, but in respect of the entire Order they were, for all that, a considerable number. Something quite remarkable and powerful had thus entered into the circle of the Templar Order without their having known the rules of the Christian initiation other than through sacrificial service. At first in the Crusades, then in the spiritual work in Europe, their souls were so inspired by intense devotion to the Christian impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha that consequently many Knights experienced a Christian initiation. We have before us the following world historical event: on the world historical basis of the experience of a number of men, the Christian initiation, which is to say the perception of those spiritual worlds that are accessible to men through Christian initiation, arises from the fundamental depths of human development.

Such events always call forth opposing forces, which, indeed, in those times were abundantly at hand. What thus enters the world is not only loved; it is also excessively hated. In Philip, however, there was less hatred than the desire to rid the world of such a Society and to filch from it the treasure that had flowed abundantly to it and that was used only in the service of the spirit.

Now in such an initiation as was experienced by a number of the Knights, there is always the possibility of perceiving not only the beneficent, the divine, but also the luciferic and ahrimanic forces. All that draws men down into the ahrimanic world and up into the luciferic, appears, to him who goes through such an initiation, side by side with the insight into the normal worlds. The one thus initiated is confronted with all the sufferings, temptations and trials that come upon man through the powers hostile to good. He has moments in which the good spiritual world disappears before his spiritual gaze, the gaze of his soul, and he sees himself as though imprisoned by what tries to gain power over him. He sees himself in the hands of the ahrimanic-luciferic forces that wish to seize him to gain control of his willing, feeling, thinking and sense perception. These, indeed, are spiritual trials that are well-known from the descriptions of those who have seen into the spiritual world.

There were many in the circle of the Knights Templar who could gain a deep insight into the Mystery of Golgotha and its meaning and into Christian symbolism as it had taken shape through the development of the Last Supper. They beheld as well the deep background of this symbolism. Many a one who in consequence of his Christian initiation could look into the Christian impulses passing through the historical evolution of the European peoples, also saw something else; he experienced it in his own soul, as it were, since it always again came over him as a temptation. Recognizing the unconscious capabilities of the human soul, he repeatedly overcame the temptation that showed itself to him. The initiate thus became conscious of it and sought to overcome what otherwise remained in the subconscious. Many Knights learned to know the devilish urge that takes possession of the will and feeling to debase the Mystery of Golgotha. In the dream pictures by which many such initiates were haunted, appeared in vision the reverse, as it were, of the veneration of the symbol of the crucifix. This was possible owing to the way in which the initiation had come about, and particularly because the luciferic forces had stood close by with their temptation. He saw in vision how the human soul could become capable of dishonoring the symbol of the Cross and the holy ritual of the Consecration of the Host. He saw those human forces that urge men to return to ancient paganism, to worship what the pagans worshipped and to scorn the advance to Christianity. These men knew how the human soul could succumb to such temptation since they had to overcome it consciously.

You are looking here into a life of soul of which outer history relates but little. Philip the Fair, through his ahrimanic gold initiation, had also a correct knowledge of these facts of soul life, even if only instinctively. He knew enough of it, however, to be able to communicate it to his vassals. Now, after a cruel judicial process had been contrived involving all manner of investigation, a course of action, decided upon beforehand, was begun. Plots were made, instigated by Philip together with his vassals who had been summoned to make investigations against the Knights. Although they were innocent, they were accused of every imaginable vice. One day in France they were suddenly attacked and thrown into prison. During their confinement their treasures were seized.

Trials were now arranged in which, entirely under the influence of Philip, torture was extensively employed. Every Knight to be found was subjected to the severest torture. Here, therefore, torture was also used to take life, the significance of which you have already learned to know. The intention of Philip was to put to the rack as many persons as possible, and the torture was applied in the most cruel way so that many of the harassed Knights lost consciousness. Philip knew that the pictures of the temptations emerged when, in terrible agony on the rack, their consciousness became clouded. He knew: the images of temptation come out! Under his instigation a catechism of leading questions was so arranged that the answers were always suggested in the way the questions were put. The Knights' answers were, of course, given out of a consciousness dulled by the torture. They were asked, “Have you denied the Host and refrained from speaking the words of Consecration?” In their clouded consciousness the Knights acknowledged these things. The powers opposing the good spoke out of their vision and, whereas in their conscious life they brought the deepest reverence to the symbol of the Cross and the Crucifix, they now accused themselves of spitting upon it; they accused themselves of the most dreadful crimes, which normally lived in their subconscious as temptations. So from the admissions made by the tortured Knights, the story was fabricated that they had worshipped an idol instead of Christ, an idol of a human head with luminous eyes; that on their admittance to the Order they were subjected to repulsive sexual procedures of the vilest nature; that they did not conduct the Transubstantiation in the right way; that they committed the worst sexual offences; that even on their admittance to the Order they forswore the Mystery of Golgotha. The catechizing had been so well organized that even the Grand Master of the order had been tortured into making these subconscious avowals.

It is one of the saddest chapters of human history, but one that can only be understood if one sees clearly that behind the veil of what is related by history stand active forces, and that human life is truly a battlefield. Because of lack of time, I will omit all that might be said further on this subject, but it would be easy to show how there is every ostensible reason for condemning the Knights Templar. Many stood by their avowals, many fled; the majority were condemned and, as stated, even the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was forced under torture to speak in the way described. Thus it came about that Philip the Fair, Philip IV of France was able to succeed in convincing his vassal, Pope Clement V—it was not difficult—that the Knights had committed the most shameful crimes, that they were the most unchristian heretics. All this the Pope sanctioned with his benediction, and the Order of the Templar was dissolved. Fifty-four Knights, including Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake. Shortly afterward in other European countries—in England, Spain, then right into Central Europe and Italy—action was also taken against them.

Thus we see how the interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha and its influence penetrated into the midst of European evolution through the Order of the Templar. In a deeper sense, however, these things must be looked upon as determined by a certain necessity. Humanity was not yet ripe to receive the impulse of wisdom, beauty and strength in the way the Knights desired. Besides, it was determined on grounds we have yet to learn, grounds that lie in the whole spiritual development of Europe, that the spiritual world was not to be attained in the way in which the Templars entered it. It would have been gained too quickly, which is the luciferic way. We actually behold here a most important twofold attack of the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman: Lucifer urging the Knights on, driving them into their misfortune, and Ahriman working actively through the inspiration of Philip the Fair. We see here a significant twofold attack effected in world history.

But what lived and worked in the Knights Templar could not be eradicated. Spiritual life cannot be rooted out; it lives and works on further. With the Knights, notably with the fifty-four who had been burned at the stake through the agency of Philip, many a soul was certainly drawn up into the spiritual world who would still have done much work on the earth in the spirit of the Templar Order, and who would also have attracted pupils to work in the same spirit. But it had to turn out differently. In the spiritual world these souls lived through those experiences they had undergone in the most terrible agonies that were brought about under the influence of the visionary avowals extorted through torture. Their impulses, which now, between their death and their next birth, go out to souls who have since descended, and also to souls who are still above awaiting incarnation, must be metamorphosed from the character of the activity of the physical earthly world into spiritual activity. What now came from the souls of the Knights, who had been murdered in this pitiful way and who before their death by burning had to undergo the most frightful experience a man can suffer, was to become for many others a principle of inspiration. Powerful impulses were to flow down into humanity. We can prove this in the case of many human souls.

Today, however, we will keep more to the sphere of knowledge and intellect as we have done also in the other examples given in recent days. Inspiration from the cosmic knowledge of the Knights Templar—this was always given. The fact that ultimately people came to look on the Templars as heretics after they had been burned to death is not to be wondered at; nor is it to be wondered at that people also believed they had committed all sorts of infamous crimes. Had someone been pleased to condemn as specially heretical the Devil's act, which has just been presented here,¹ in which Mephistopheles, the Lemures and the thick and thin Devils appear, perhaps—I do not know—countless persons in the nation would also look on that as something heretical. The methods of Philip the Fair are, however, no longer employed in the present rather more lamentable times. The cosmic wisdom that these Knights possessed has entered many souls. One could cite many examples of how the inspiration of the Knights Templar had been drawn into souls. I will read you a passage from the poem “Ahasver” by Julius Mosen, which appeared in 1838. As you can read in the lecture cycles, I have often referred to Julius Mosen, the author of the profound poem “Ritter Wahn” (Knight Chimera). In the very first canto of the third section of “Ahasver”, Mosen leads his hero to those parts of the earth where, in Ceylon and the neighboring islands, the region is to be sought that we describe in the cosmology of our spiritual science as the approximate locale of Lemurian evolution. This region of the earth is distinguished in a special way. You know that the magnetic north pole is located at a different point from that of the geographic north pole. Magnetic needles everywhere point toward the magnetic north pole and one can draw magnetic meridians that meet at this point. Up in North America where the magnetic north pole lies, these magnetic meridians go round the earth in straight lines. Remarkably, however, in the Lemurian region the magnetic meridians become sinuous serpentine lines. The magnetic forces are twisted into a serpentine form in this region. People notice these things far too little today. One who sees the living earth, however, knows that magnetism is like a force vivifying the earth;

in the north it goes straight, and in the region of old Lemuria it goes in a tortuous winding line. Just think how profoundly Julius Mosen speaks as he sends his Ahasver toward this region in the first canto of the third epoch—it is divided in epochs—of the poem:

In line direct and straight from Southern Pole
Takes the Magnetic Line its chosen course,
When suddenly it twines in serpent-curve

There before India and its neighbor isles
Before the dungeon where in deepest woe
Sits the Eternal Mother ever bound.

In circle form the Line drew back its length,
And twining swift and secret on itself
With a single plunge in swirling vortex fell.

There the Great Spirit in a first embrace
Held the poor spouse, and from their ardent fire
Sprang the Earth-demons instantly to life.

When thus the first creation came to naught,
The Great, the Nameless Spirit in his wrath
Stamped down the bridal couch beneath the sea.

So it goes on. We see inspiration emerge with wonderfully intuitive knowledge. The wisdom lives on that could only enter the world amid sufferings, tortures, persecutions and the most frightful offences. Nevertheless, it lives on in spiritualized form.

When we seek the most beautiful spiritualizations of this wisdom that has entered the development of Europe, as we have described, then we find one precisely in all that would work and live in the powerful imaginations of Goethe. Goethe knew the secret of the Templars. Not without purpose has he used gold as he has done in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, in which he made the snake consume the gold and then sacrifice itself. By this deed the gold is wrested from the powers with which Goethe truly knew it must not be allowed to remain. Gold—naturally everything is also meant here of which gold is a real symbol. Read once more Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily and try to feel how Goethe knew the secret of gold, how, through the way in which he lets gold flow through the fairy tale, he is looking back into earlier times. May I perhaps add here the personal confession that when for the first time in the eighties of the last century, I faced the question of the gold in Goethe's fairy tale, the meaning of the story emerged for me through the development of the gold in it.

Through the way in which Goethe lets gold flow through this fairy tale, he shows how he looks back into the time in which wisdom—for which gold also stands, hence, “The Golden King of Wisdom”—was exposed to such persecutions as those described. Now, he sought to show past, present and future. Goethe saw instinctively into the future of eastern European civilization. He could see how unjustifiable is the way in which the problem of sin and death worked there. If we wished to designate, not quite inappropriately perhaps, the nationality of the man who is then led to the Temple and the Beautiful Lily, who appears at first as without vigor as if crippled, then, from what we have had to say recently about the culture of the East and of Russia, you will not consider it unreasonable to deem this man to be a Russian. In so doing, you will almost certainly follow the line of Goethe's instinct. The secret of European evolution in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch lies concealed within this fairy tale, just as truly as Goethe was able to conceal it in his Faust, especially in the second part, as we know from his own statement. It is clearly to be seen in Goethe—we have already shown it in various respects; later it can be shown in others—that he begins to regard the world and to feel himself in it, in accord with the fundamental demand of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

In Goethe we have a true continuation of the life of the Knights Templar but, as I have said, in a spiritualized way. This Goetheanism, however, will only be able to enter slowly and gradually into human understanding. I have already shown in certain respects how the impulse for everything of a spiritually scientific nature lies in Goetheanism. All of spiritual science can be developed from Goethe. I have shown in a public lecture (Berlin, April 15, 1916) that I gave a short time ago how the first elementary scientific foundation for the doctrine of reincarnation, of repeated earth lives, lies in Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis. He begins the teaching of metamorphosis by showing how the leaf changes into the blossom, how an organ appears in different forms. When one follows this through with penetration, there lies implicit in it what I have often explained here; that is, the head of man is the transformed body, and the rest of the body is a human head still to be transformed. Here is metamorphosis in the ultimate degree, which for science will develop into a direct knowledge of reincarnation, of repeated earthly lives. But Goethe is still but little understood; he must first become familiar in the cultural life of humanity. Not only centuries but millenniums will be needed in order to unravel what lies in Goethe. As a matter of fact, even today there is not a foundation for a study of Goethe such as a monograph or biography could provide that would be produced really in his very style.

Let us see what has been done in particular instances in modern culture toward the understanding of Goethe's personality. We can, of course, only cite single examples. Herman Grimm has, however, rightly said, “A certain Mr. Lewes has written a book, which was for some time the most famous book on Goethe; one can even say the best. It is a book treating of a personality who was supposed to have been born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1749, and to have had a Frankfurt councilor for a father. He then developed and grew up in such a way that Goethe's youth was ascribed to him, along with all sorts of other things taken from Goethe. Goethe's works were attributed to him; he also traveled to Italy in the same year as Goethe, and died the same year Goethe died. This person, however, is not Goethe but a fantasy of Mr. Lewes's”.

Then we also have a relatively good book in which Goethe's life and creative work is described with immense industry and better than many other works on Goethe. It is filled, however, from the first to the last page with hatred and aversion. This book is by the Jesuit, Baumgartner. It is an excellent but, in fact, a Jesuitical, book; but antagonistic to Goethe. At least, it is better written than the countless others on Goethe that have appeared throughout the nineteenth century and now on into the twentieth. A great number of these works are unpalatable. One continually sneezes because the dust of the library and professor gets into one's nose. They have been written by pedants who call it Goethe. Often they have been written with pedantic pride, but they are also fusty with library dust or the air one must breathe when one guesses how often the man who is writing about Faust, for example, has opened Grimm's or some other glossary in order to decipher a word or passage—and so on. One could say: Oh horrible, most horrible, what has been written in this field!

One book, however, stands out in a quite unusual way. These are Herman Grimm's lectures on Goethe given in the seventies at Berlin University. Grimm was, as we can see, a spirit who had the best will and the most wonderful traditions to aid him in familiarizing himself with Goethe. His book is an intelligent and excellent one that has developed right out of the Goethean atmosphere. Grimm grew up in the age when there were still Goethean traditions, but this book shows something quite remarkable. In fact, in a certain respect it is not at all a book that has developed from Goethean traditions; it is both Goethean and un-Goethean. For Herman Grimm does not write in a Goethean style but, strangely enough, in a style that leads one to say that the book was written by an American, a German American! One can call Grimm's lectures a book written by an American but in German. In style it is American—a style in which Grimm has educated himself. As one of the most enthusiastic followers of Emerson, he has studied him, read, digested, translated him, has quite familiarized himself with him. Now, Grimm finds his way into this American-Emerson style so that he is complete master of it; at the same time he grows enthusiastic about it. One can see at once on reading his novel, Invincible Powers, how he is able to let everything American live on in him. Enthusiasm for what is American and at the same time a wonderful feeling of internationalism is poured out in Herman Grimm's Goethe lectures.

In spite of all this, much, very much in the spiritual life of man must come about before Goethe and similar spirits will be understood! If sometimes they are rightly understood, it must be in quite another way from that of Herman Grimm. Once, in a conversation with him, I wished to make just a few references to the path by which one could gradually enter the spiritual world. The movement of his right arm will always remain unforgettable—a gesture of warding off; he wanted to push that aside. He created a Goethe who is simply delightful to see from outside, but one does not see into his heart. This Goethe of Grimm's, as he makes his way through historical development, as he stands there, as he moves about and comes into relation with people, as human relations flow into his works, as the contemporary world conception flows into his works—this Goethe goes past our mind's eye as a ghost who flits through the world unseen by the living. Goethe will only be understood when one has deepened Goetheanism to become spiritual science. Then, much will emerge from Goethe that he could not express himself. Goethe, truly understood, leads, in fact, to spiritual science, which is really developed Goetheanism.

From the beginning Goethe also understood that Christianity is a living thing. How he longed for a possible expression for the Christianizing of the modern world conception. It did not lie in his time to find it, but in the new age spiritual science is already working to attain it. Let us take his poem, “The Mysteries” (Die Geheimnisse), in which Brother Mark is guided to the Temple where the Rose Cross is on the door, and let us look at the whole picture. We shall see that the Christian mood is in this fragment, “The Mysteries,” the mood born of the feeling that the symbol of the Cross becomes a picture of life through the living roses entwining it! Then, too Goethe lets his Faust end with a Christian conception; he spoke of it to Eckermann in his old age. A time will come when in a much more active, intense sense, one will connect with Christianity the thoughts that ring through the conclusion of Faust, although Goethe, who was inwardly modest in such things, was far from doing so himself. He was, in reality, on the way that he made his Brother Mark take—to the Cross encircled with roses. In this lies ultimately all that is to flow from such wisdom as was striven for by the Knights Templar. (Their striving was too rapid and unsuitable to physical evolution.)

A longing for the full Christianizing of the treasures of wisdom concerning the cosmos and earthly evolution gradually broke through—a longing for the full Christianizing of earthly life so that suffering, pain and grief appear as the earth's Cross, which then finds its comfort, its elevation, its salvation in the Rose symbol of the Crucifix. Repeatedly in men thus inspired, in whom lived on what was thought to have been destroyed with the burning of the Templars—in these inspired men lived ever again the ideal that in the place of what brings strife and quarrels something must appear that can bring good to earth, and this good may be pictured in the symbol of the Cross in conjunction with the roses.

The book, Ruins (Shutt), by Anastasius Grün has been given to me today by one of our members. I have here again the same verses that I read to you some time ago to confirm the fact that this mystery, which this poem also expresses, is not merely something put forward by us, but that it comes to life again and again. Anastasius Grün, the Austrian poet, composed these poems; the eighth edition appeared in 1847. In his own manner he wrote of the progress of mankind, and I will read again today the passage I read years ago as proof of the role played by the image of the Rose Cross in evolving humanity; that is, among those who are incarnated in the new age. Anastasius Grün turns his gaze toward Palestine and other regions after having described how much confused fighting and quarreling has been spread over the earth. After he has seen and described much that causes fighting and strife he, who is a great seer in a certain way, turns to a region of the earth that he describes thus. I cannot read all of it as it would take too long, but one's eye is first turned to a part of the earth where the ploughshare is used.

As children once were digging in a meadow
They brought a shapeless thing of iron to light,
It seemed too straight, too heavy for a sickle,
For plough it was too slender and too slight.

With toil they dragged it home as new found treasure;
The elders see it, yet they know it not;
They call the neighbors round within the circle,
The neighbors see it, yet they know it not.

There is an ancient greybeard, wan and sallow,
Whose lifetime lingers on like tale forgot
Into the present world of busy dealing,
They show it to him, but he knows is not.

Well for them all, that they have never known it,
Else must they weep, and still must be deplored
The folly of their fathers, long since buried,
For what was known by no one was a sword!

Henceforth it shall but cleave the earth as ploughshare;
Shall point the seed-corn's path into the ground,
The sword's new hero-deeds are peaned
When sun-filled airs with song of lark resound.

Once more it came to pass, that in his ploughing
The farmer struck what seemed a piece of stone.
And as his spade unloosed the earthy covers,
A structure of a wondrous shape was shown.

He calls the neighbors round within the circle;
They look at it but still they know it not.
Thou wise and aged one, thou'lt surely tell us?
The greybeard looks at it, yet knows it not.

Thus, in ploughing, something was dug up and even the aged man does not recognize it.

Though known to none, yet with its ancient blessing
Eternal in their breast it stands upright,
Scatters its seed around in every roadway;
A Cross it was, this stranger to their sight!

They saw the fight not, and its bloodstained symbol,
They see alone the victory and the crown,
They saw the storm not, and the lashing tempest
They only see the rainbow's glistening shine.

The Cross will always be known, even in a region where it was already buried and drawn out of the earth as a cross of stone, where civilization has so withdrawn that an un-Christian culture has developed. There, Anastasius Grün wishes to say, a cross is found and men know it in their inmost breasts, even though the oldest among them fails to recognize it through tradition.

Though known to one, yet with its ancient blessing
Eternal in their breast it stands upright,
Scatters its seed around on every roadway,
A Cross it was, this stranger to their sight.

They saw the fight not and its bloodstained symbol,
They see alone the victory and the crown,
They saw the storm not and the lashing tempest
They only see the rainbow's glistening shine.

The Cross of stone they set up in the garden;
A venerable relic strange and old,
Flowers of all species lift their growth above it,
While roses climbing high the Cross enfold.

So stands the Cross weighty with solemn meaning
On Golgotha, amidst resplendent sheen;
Long since 'tis hidden by its wealth of roses;
No more, for roses, can the Cross be seen.

But it is there! There is the Cross! There are the roses! One only learns the meaning of history when one turns one's gaze to what lives in the spiritual and pervades human evolution, when, too, one will turn one's attention to what shows us under what auspices, under what insignia things enter world history. I think that one can feel the deeper connection between what we have characterized for later times and what has been characterized in the ideal of the Knights Templar and their fate in the world at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

• 1. A presentation of Faust had presumably just taken place.

Our real purpose in this lecture, as you already know from what has been said, is to lead the way to an understanding of the karma of the individual and, in a broader sense, the collective karma of our time. But even when we consider human life as it concerns single individuals, it is extraordinarily complicated, and we must follow many threads that link a man to the past and present worlds if we wish to answer questions regarding his destiny. This fact will, perhaps, explain to you the detour I am taking, although I really wish to discuss something that is close to every person. Goethe's life was important in world history, and I will associate reflections with it that are intended to light up each individual existence. His life, to be sure, is accessible to us in many details. Even though the destiny of each human life is far removed from the destined course of such an exemplary spirit in world history, it is possible for each of us to gain viewpoints from the contemplation of it. Therefore, let us not be annoyed if the connections with our special questions, which we shall gradually approach, are here somewhat expanded.

When people trace Goethe's life in the way many do who pretend to be his biographers, they fail altogether to observe how rash men are in their tendency to link cause and effect.

Scientists are constantly reminded nowadays that many blunders are due to the adoption of the principle, “After a thing, therefore because of that thing” (post hoc, ergo propter hoc); that is, because one thing follows another, it must, therefore, be an effect proceeding from its cause. This is refuted in the scientific sphere, but in the field of the observation of human life we have not yet come to reject this principle altogether. Certain uncivilized people belonging to the Kamchadales believe that the water wagtails or similar birds bring on springtime because spring follows their arrival. Such conclusions are frequently drawn when people say: A thing that follows another in time must derive from it as the effect from its cause. We learn from Goethe's own narrative, from the description of this life shining above ordinary humanity, that he had this father and that mother and that he experienced certain things in his youth. We then derive what he did later in life, which made him so important for humanity, from these youthful impressions according to the principle that, because one thing follows something else in time, it must proceed from it. That is no more intelligent than when the coming of spring is supposed to be brought on by the water wagtails.

In the scientific sphere, this superstition has been sharply reproved; in the sphere of spiritual science there is still need to do so. It is explained quite nicely, for instance, that at a rather youthful period while Goethe was still a boy and French officers were quartered in his father's house during the occupation of Frankfurt, he saw how the famous Lieutenant du roi Thoranc³⁸ directed theatrical productions and employed painters there. Goethe thus came into contact with painting and the art of the theater while scarcely more than a child. His later inclination to art is thus glibly traced to these youthful impressions. To be sure, in his case we see his foreordained karma clearly at work from his earliest youth. Is not an especially prominent trait in Goethe's life the way in which he unites his views of art, the world, and nature and has always behind his artistic fantasy the aspiration to know the truth in natural phenomena? Do we not see that a clearly prescribed karma leads the boy of six or seven to assemble minerals and geological material that he finds in his father's collections and place them on a music stand to make of them an altar to the great God of Nature? He then sets a candle on this altar made of natural objects and instead of producing a light in an ordinary, mechanical way, he lets the earliest rays of the morning sun pass through a magnifying glass to light the candle, kindling a flame to offer to the great God of Nature. How impressive and beautiful is this orientation of the mind to what lives and weaves as spirit in the phenomena of nature even in this boy of six or seven! Most certainly, this trait must have come from an original potentiality, if we choose to call it that, and not from the environment, and we see how what he brought into this incarnation worked with special force.

When we consider the time into which Goethe was born, we shall observe a remarkable harmony between his nature and contemporary events. In accordance with the present world conception, people are often inclined to say that what Goethe created—the Faust and other things that he did for the elevation and spiritual permeation of humanity—have come into existence simply because he produced them according to his talents. It is more difficult with the things he has given to humanity to prove that they cannot be bound up in this simple sense with his person. But, in reference to certain phenomena of existence, just consider how shortsighted many kinds of reflections are even though they are supposed to be fundamentally concerned with the truth. In my most recent book, The Riddle of Man,³⁹ you can find de la Mettrie's statement that Erasmus of Rotterdam and Fontenelle would have become entirely different human beings if only small particles in their brains had been different. According to this view, we must assume that nothing of all that they produced would exist if, as de la Mettrie⁴⁰ suggests, they had been fools instead of wise men because of a slightly different constitution of the brain.

Now, this does apply in a certain sense for the things Erasmus and Fontenelle produced, but consider this question in relation to another case. Can you imagine, for instance, the development of modern humanity without the discovery of America? Think of all that has entered into the life of modern humanity through the discovery of America. Could a materialistic person assert that if Columbus's brain had been a little different he would have been a different sort of man, a fool, who then would not have discovered America? Certainly, this could be asserted, just as it can be said that Goethe would not have been Goethe, nor Fontenelle have been Fontenelle, nor Erasmus have been Erasmus if, for example, their mothers had suffered accidents so that their children would have been stillborn. But we can by no means suppose that America would never have been discovered if it had not been discovered by Columbus. You will find it rather self-evident that America would have been discovered even if Columbus had suffered from a brain defect.

So you will certainly have no doubt that the course of world events is one thing and the participation of an individual in these events another. You will have no doubt that these events summon those individualities who are especially fitted through their karma for whatever is demanded of them. With reference to America we can easily think through to this conclusion. But, for those whose vision penetrates more deeply, the same truth applies to the genesis of Faust. We should have to assume utter nonsense in the evolution of the world if we had to suppose that there would have been no necessity for the creation of such a poetical composition as the Faust even if what the materialists like to emphasize so much had actually occurred and a tile had fallen on Goethe's head when he was five, making him an imbecile. Anyone who traces the course of spiritual life through the decades preceding the time of Goethe will see that the Faust was really a demand of the age. Lessing, indeed, is the typical spirit who wished to create a Faust—in fact, actually wrote a fine scene. It was not merely Goethe's subjective needs that demanded the Faust, it was demanded by the age. With respect to the course of events in world history, the truth is that a relationship similar to that between Columbus and the discovery of America exists also between Goethe's creations and Goethe himself.

I have said that, if we observe the age into which Goethe was born, we note at once a certain harmony between the individuality of Goethe and his age when taken in the broadest sense of the term. Bear in mind that, in spite of all the dissimilarities between Goethe and Schiller, there is, nevertheless, something quite similar in them—not to mention other less important contemporaries. Consider, for example, how much is resplendent in both Goethe and Herder. But we can go much further. When we look at Goethe, it does not, perhaps, appear at once—we shall come back to this later—but, when we look at Schiller, at Herder and Lessing, we shall say that their lives were different, of course, but that in their tendencies and impulses a portion of the soul's potentialities is present that, under other circumstances, might just as well have made a Mirabeau⁴¹ or Danton⁴² of them. They truly harmonize with their age. In the case of Schiller, this would by no means be so hard to prove; as the poet who composed The Robbers, Fiesko, Intrigue and Love, he will not seem to anyone to be far removed in disposition from a Mirabeau or Danton or even a Robespierre.⁴³ This same soul's blood flowed likewise in Goethe, even though we might at first consider him far from being a revolutionist. But by no means is he so remote from this. There comes about in Goethe's complex nature a special complication of karmic impulses, of destiny, that places him in the world in a most unusual way, even in earliest youth.

When we trace the life of Goethe with spiritual scientific vision and disregard all other things, we find that it falls into certain periods. The first proceeds in such a way that we can say that an impulse which we have already observed in his childhood continues to progress. Then something comes from without that changes the direction of his life; that is, his becoming acquainted with the Duke of Weimar in 1775. Then, again, we see how his soujourn in Rome⁴⁴ changes the course of his life, how he becomes an utterly different person through having been able to absorb this Roman life. If we should wish to view the matter more accurately, we might say that a third impulse, which comes as if from without—but this, as we shall see, would not be entirely accurate in a spiritual⁴⁵ after he had experienced his Roman transformation.

If we study the first part of Goethe's life up to the year 1775, observing the events more intently than we usually do, we shall discover that there lives in him a powerful revolutionary mood, a rebellion against what was in his environment. His nature, however, is spread over many things. For this reason, because the impulse toward rebellion does not appear so strongly as when concentrated in Schiller's The Robbers but is more diffuse, it does not appear so strikingly. Anyone, however, who is able to enter in a spiritual scientific way into Goethe's boyhood and youth finds in him a spiritual force of life, brought with him through birth, that could not have been present throughout his life if certain events had not occurred. What was living within him as the Goethe individuality was far greater than what could be taken up and expressed in life by his organism.

This is obvious in Schiller. His early death was due primarily to the fact that his organism was consumed by his mighty, spiritual vitality.⁴⁶ This is obvious. Indeed, it is known that after his death his heart was found to be dried up, as it were. He sustained himself as long as possible only by his powerful spiritual vitality, but this also devoured his bodily life.

With Goethe, this force of soul became even stronger, and yet he lived to an advanced age. What enabled him to live so long? You will recall that I reminded you yesterday of a fact that intervened significantly in Goethe's life. After he had spent some years in Leipzig as a student,⁴⁷ he became seriously ill and stood face to face with death. He virtually looked death in the face. This illness is, to be sure, a natural phenomenon in the organism. However, we never learn to understand a man who creates out of the elemental forces of the world—indeed, we never learn really to understand any man—unless we take into consideration such events in the course of his karma. What really happened to Goethe when he became ill in Leipzig? We may describe it as a complete loosening of the etheric body in which the life forces of the soul had been active until then. It was loosened to such an extent that, after this illness, he no longer had that closely knit connection between the etheric and the physical bodies that he had formerly possessed.

The etheric body, however, is the super-sensible member in us that really makes it possible to form concepts, to think. Abstract concepts such as we have in ordinary life, the only concepts that are approved by most persons who are materialistically disposed, come about through the fact that the etheric body is, as it were, closely united with the physical by a strong magnetic union. It is also through this fact that we possess a strong impulse to project our will into the physical world, that is, provided the astral body is strongly developed. In the case of Robespierre, Mirabeau and Danton, we have an etheric body strongly united with the physical but also a powerfully developed astral body. This works, in turn, upon the etheric body, which establishes these human individualities strongly in the physical world.

Goethe was also organized like this, but another force now worked in him and brought about a complication. The result was that the etheric body was loosened and remained so through the illness that had brought him to the point of death. When the etheric body is no longer so intimately united with the physical body, however, it no longer thrusts its forces into the physical but retains them. This explains the transformation Goethe passed through when he returned to Frankfurt. There, during his acquaintance with Fräulein von Klettenberg,⁴⁸ the mystic, and with various medical friends who were devoted to studies in alchemy, and through the writings of Swedenborg, he really developed a systematic spiritual world conception. It was still somewhat chaotic, but nevertheless a systematic spiritual world conception, and he was profoundly inclined to occupy himself with super-sensible things.

These things are, however, connected with Goethe's illness. The soul that had brought this predisposition for this illness into his earthly life also brought the impulse so to prepare his etheric body through his illness that it should not be expressed merely in the physical. It maintained the urge and the capacity to become permeated with super-sensible concepts. So long as we merely consider the external biographical facts of a person in a materialistic way, we never discover what subtle interrelationships exist in his stream of destiny. But, as soon as we obtain an insight into the harmony between the natural occurrences affecting his organism, such as the illness of Goethe, and what manifests itself ethically, morally, spiritually, it becomes possible for us to sense the profound effect of karma.

The revolutionary force would certainly have been manifest in Goethe in a way that would have consumed him at an early age. Since an external expression of the life of these revolutionary forces would certainly not have been possible in his environment, and since he could not have written dramas as Schiller did, this force would necessarily have consumed him. It was turned aside through the loosening of the connection of the magnetic union between his etheric and physical bodies.

Here we see how a natural event seems to enter with immense significance into the life of a human being. Undoubtedly, it points to a deeper interrelationship than the one the biographers generally wish to reveal. The significance of an illness to a man cannot be explained on the basis of hereditary tendencies but rather points to the connection between a man and the world in such a way that this relationship must be conceived spiritually. You will note also how Goethe's life was thus complicated; such experiences determine how we take things in and what we are ourselves.

Goethe now comes to Strassburg⁴⁹ with an etheric body that is in a sense filled with occult knowledge, and in this condition he meets Herder, whose vast conceptions had to become something quite different in Goethe because the same conditions did not exist in Herder's more subtle constitution. This event of near death appeared in Goethe at the end of the sixties in Leipzig, but its force had been prepared long before that. Anyone who undertakes to trace such an illness to external or merely physical events has not yet attained the same standpoint in the spiritual sphere as that occupied by the natural scientist who knows that what follows must not be viewed necessarily as the result of what it follows. This tendency to isolate himself from the world to some degree was a manifestation of the connection between physical and etheric bodies. It was always present in Goethe, and it really only became a crisis through his illness.

In anyone possessing a compact connection between the physical and etheric bodies, the external world exerts its influence and, as it makes impressions on the physical body, they pass over immediately into the etheric body; this is one and the same thing. Such a person simply lives in direct contact with the impressions of the external world. In Goethe's case, the impressions are, of course, made upon the physical body, but the etheric body does not immediately respond because it is loosened. As a result, such a person can be more isolated, in a sense, from his environment, and a more complicated process takes place when an impression is made on his physical body. If you establish a connection between this organic structure of Goethe and the fact that, as we learn from his biography, he lays himself open even to historic events without forcing them, you have then arrived at an understanding of the peculiar functioning of his nature. I told you that he took the autobiography of Gottfried of Berlichingen and, influenced only by the dramatic impulses received from Shakespeare, did not really alter much in it. So he did not call it a drama but The History of the Iron-handed Gottfried of Berlichingen, Dramatized. You see, this soft and almost timid handling of things, as I might call it, without taking hold of them forcefully is due to his quite unusual connection between the etheric and physical bodies.

This relationship between the etheric and physical bodies was not present in Schiller. For this reason, he creates characters that he has certainly not derived from external impressions but has formed forcefully out of his own nature; Karl Moor is an example. Goethe, however, needs the influence of life, but he does not force it; he only helps with a light touch to elevate the living into a work of art.

It was the same when he was confronted with the experiences that he later reduced to artistic form in Werther. His own life situations as well as those of his friend Jerusalem⁵⁰ are not twisted; he does not alter the form greatly but takes life and retouches it a little. Through the delicate manner in which he renders assistance by means of his etheric body, life is transformed into a work of art. But because of this organization he gains, I might say, only an indirect contact with life, and thereby he prepares his karma in this incarnation.

Goethe goes to Strassburg. In addition to the experience that advanced him on his way, he experienced also, as you know, the romantic involvement with Friederike, the daughter of the pastor in Sesenheim.⁵¹ His affections were deeply involved in this relationship, and many moral doubts may be raised against the course of it—doubts that may also be fully justified. We are not now concerned with that aspect of the matter, but rather with an understanding of it. Goethe really passed through everything that, in another, not only must, but obviously would, have led to a permanent life union. But he does not experience directly. Through what I have explained, a sort of chasm had been created between his unusual inner nature and the external world. Just as he does not alter by force what is living in the external world but only delicately modifies its form, he also does not carry his feelings and sensations, which he can experience only in his etheric body, through the physical body to such a firm contact with the external world—something that, in others, would have led to quite definite events in life. So he withdraws from Friederike Brion, but one must accept this from the viewpoint of the soul.

The last time he went to Sesenheim, he met himself; you can read of this in his autobiography.⁵² Goethe meets Goethe! Long afterward he related how he then encountered himself, Goethe meeting Goethe. He sees himself; he drives out to Sesenheim and Goethe comes to meet him, not in the same clothing he was wearing, however, but in another outfit. When he went there again many years later to visit his old acquaintances, he realized that he was unintentionally actually wearing the clothes in which he had seen himself many years before. We must believe this even took place in the same way we believe anything else he relates. Considering the love of truth with which he described his life to us, to find fault with it is not appropriate.

How does it happen, then, that Goethe, so remote that he could actually withdraw, and yet in such loose contact with the circumstances that for anyone else it would have led to something quite different—how does it come about that he meets himself? Now a man who has an experience in his etheric body finds that it easily takes objective form when the etheric body is loosened. He sees the experience as something external; it is projected outside him. This actually happened to Goethe. In a moment peculiarly appropriate, he saw the other Goethe, the etheric Goethe who lived in him, who remained united in karma with Friederike of Sesenheim, and he met himself as a ghost. But this is just the kind of event that so profoundly confirms what is to be perceived from the facts regarding his nature.

We see here how a man may stand within external events and how it is also necessary to grasp the special, individual way in which he stands among them. It is a complicated relationship that exists between the human being and the world; it is complicated also by the interrelationship between what he brings from the past into the present. Through the fact, however, that Goethe had wrenched his inner nature out of the corporeal connection, it was possible for him even in his early youth to cherish in his soul the profound truths that so astonish us in his Faust. I say astonish purposely for the simple reason that they really must astonish us. I scarcely know anything more simple-minded than when biographers of Goethe repeat over and over the statement, “Goethe is Faust and Faust is Goethe.” I have often read this in biographies of Goethe. It is, of course, an ordinary bit of nonsense. What we really have in Faust, when we permit it to work on us in the right way, so impresses us that we must sometimes say that we cannot imagine that Goethe had a direct experience of a similar kind or could even know of it. Yet there it is expressed in Faust.

Faust constantly grows beyond Goethe. This can be understood completely by one who knows the surprise experienced by a poet when he has this composition before him. That is, we do not have to suppose that the poet must always be as great as his work, anymore than a father must be as great in forces of soul and genius as his son; the truly poetic creative process is something living; just as one cannot say it is also impossible to assert that one who is spiritually creative never creates above his own level. But through the inner state of isolation that I have described in reference to Goethe, those profound insights in his soul appear that we find in reading his Faust. Such works are not poetic compositions like others. The Faust poem flows from the entire spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean culture period; it grows far beyond Goethe. Much that we experience in connection with the world and its process of becoming sounds forth to us from Faust in a strange manner. Call to mind the passage you have just heard:⁵³

To us, my friend, the ages that are passed
A book with seven seals, close fastened, are
And what the spirit of the times men call
Is merely their own spirit after all. ...⁵⁴

These words by Faust himself are passed over too lightly. One who experiences the statement in its fullest depths is reminded of much that confirms its truth. Consider the knowledge possessed by modern man of the Greeks and the spiritual life of Greece, through Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides! Suppose men steep themselves in this Greek spiritual life—let us say, in Sophocles. Is Sophocles a book with seven seals? That will not easily be admitted! More than eighty dramas were written by Sophocles,⁵⁵ who lived to be ninety-one; only seven of these dramas now survive. Do we really know a man if he has written eighty-one or more dramas and only seven of them survive? Is this not truly a book with seven seals? How can anyone assert that he knows the Greek world from what has been handed down to us, when he must simply recognize the fact that seventy-four of Sophocles' dramas, by which the Greeks were fascinated and inspired, are nonexistent? Many of the dramas of Aeschylus no longer exist. Poets lived in Greek times whose names are not even known any longer. Are not the times past truly a book with seven seals? We must admit this when we consider such external facts, and

... 'tis delightful to transport
Oneself into the spirit of the past,
To see in times before us how a wise man thought,
And what a glorious height we have achieved at last.

Wagner types believe they are able to transplant themselves quite easily into the spirit of a wise man; that is, when somebody before them has already done the exercise! It is a pity that we cannot put to the proof what the critics would have to write about Hamlet if it had been written today and were to be performed for them by some large municipal theater, or if a drama of Sophocles should be presented for them at this very moment. Perhaps no impression would be made on these gentlemen even by what Sophocles had to do to convince his relatives of his greatness in his advanced old age of ninety-one. His relatives had had to wait so long for their inheritance that they tried to prove he had become feeble-minded and could no longer manage his property. He had no other way to protect himself than by writing the Oedipus in Colonna, thus proving that he was not yet in his dotage. Whether this would work with present-day critics I do not know, but at that time it did help. Anyone who enters deeply into the tragedy of the ninety-one year old Sophocles, however, will be able to estimate how difficult it is to find the way to a human individuality and how such an individuality is bound up in the most complicated fashion with world events! Many things could be adduced to show under what deep layers we must penetrate in order to understand the world. But how much is alive, even in the earliest parts of Faust, of that wisdom that is necessary for an understanding of the world! This wisdom must be attributed to the peculiar course of Goethe's destiny which reveals to us in a real sense that nature and the work of the spirit are a unity in human development and that an illness not only has an external significance but may also possess spiritual meaning.

Thus we see a decided continuation of the karmic impulses that existed in Goethe. Then in 1775, however, his connection with the Duke of Weimar appeared as if from without. Goethe is called from Frankfurt to Weimar. What does this signify in his life? To further understand the life of a man, we must first understand what such an event means to his life. I know how little inclined the present world is really to arouse those forces of the soul that are necessary to fully sense and feel such a phenomenon—to completely feel what is already alive in the first scenes of Faust. In order to write the Monologue in the Study, Spirit of the Earth that has just been presented, a richness of soul is needed, and it will cause one who beholds it to linger long in an attitude of fervent reverence. One is often pained to the depths of one's soul to realize that the world is really still decidedly dull and cannot feel what is truly great. But, if we feel such a thing completely, we shall then also see where one who is deeply permeated with spiritual science arrives in his feeling. Such a person comes to the point of saying to himself that something lived in Goethe that consumed him; he couldn't go on in such a way.

Two things must be clear if we are to appreciate, in the proper sense and in the right light, these first scenes of Faust. We might imagine that Goethe had written them gradually between his twenty-fifth and fiftieth years, in which case they would not have strained his soul so intensely, nor been such a burden. Certainly! But this is impossible because, after his thirtieth or thirty-fifth year, the youthful force necessary to give such form to these scenes would have been lacking. In accordance with his individuality, he had to write them in those early years, but to continue to live thus was no longer possible. He needed something like a damper, a partial soul-sleep, to reduce the intensity of the fire that burned in his soul as he wrote these first scenes. Then, the Duke of Weimar called him to make him a minister in Weimar. As I have already said, Goethe was a good minister, and while he labored assiduously, he could refresh himself by partially sleeping off what burned in his soul.

There is really a tremendous difference between Goethe's mood up to 1775 and that after 1775, a difference that may be compared with a mighty wakefulness followed by a subdued life. The word “Dumpfheit,” an inner feeling of numbness, comes into his mind when he describes his life in Weimar, where he engages himself so much in events but responds to them more than at an earlier age, when he had rebelled against them. It is peculiar that after this dampening down for ten years there followed a period when events confronted him in a more gentle way. Just as the life of sleep is by no means a direct effect of the preceding daytime life, so also this sleep life of Goethe was not at all the result of what had gone before. The interrelationships are far greater than is generally supposed. I have already frequently pointed out that it is indicative of a superficial view when, to the question—Why does a man sleep?—the answer is given: Because he is tired. This is a lazy truth and one that is itself asleep since it is nonsense. Otherwise, it would not be true that individuals such as non-working persons living on their private incomes who are certainly not tired, fall comfortably asleep after a full meal when they are expected to listen to something that does not particularly interest them. Tired they certainly are not. The fact is not that we sleep because we are tired, but waking and sleeping are a rhythmic life process, and when it is time or necessary for us to sleep, we become weary. We are tired because we ought to sleep; we do not sleep because we are tired. But I will not discuss this further just now.

Just consider in what a tremendous interrelationship the rhythm of sleeping and waking stands. It is a reproduction within the nature of man of day and night in the cosmos. It is natural, of course, that a materialistic science should undertake to explain sleep as resulting from weariness caused by the day's activities, but the reverse is true. The explanation of the rhythm of sleeping and waking must be drawn from the cosmos, from vast interrelationships. They also explain that the period when Faust was fermenting in the soul of Goethe was followed by the ten-year period of dampening in Weimar. Here your attention is called directly to his karma, about which we cannot speak further at present.

The consciousness of the ordinary human generally lets him wake in the morning thinking he is unchanged from what he was when he fell asleep. In reality, such is never the case. We are never the same upon waking as we were when we fell asleep but, as a matter of fact, we are somewhat richer, though unconscious of it. However, just as the trough of a wave has followed after a crest, as it was in Goethe's Weimar years, the awakening that follows is at a higher stage; it must follow at a higher stage because the innermost forces strive toward this. In Goethe also the innermost forces strive to awaken again from the inner state of numbness in Weimar to a fullness of life in an environment that could now really bring him what he lacked. He awakened in Italy. With his special constitution he could not have awakened in Weimar. In this fact, however, we can see the profound relationship between the creative work of a real artist and his special experience.

You see, a writer who is not an artist can produce a drama gradually without difficulty, one page at a time; he can do this perfectly well. The great poet cannot; he needs to be deeply rooted in life. For this reason, Goethe could bring the most profound truths to expression in his Faust in relatively early youth, truths that ranged far above the capacities of his soul, but he had to set forth a rejuvenation of Faust. Just bear in mind that Faust had to come into an entirely different mood in spite of the fact that his nature was so deeply formed. In the end, in spite of all his depth, what he had taken into his soul up to that time had brought him near to suicide. He had to be rejuvenated. A lesser individual can describe perfectly well, and even in pretty verses, how a man is rejuvenated. Goethe could not do this so simply; he first had to experience his own rejuvenation in Rome. It is for this reason that the rejuvenation scene, The Witch's Kitchen, was written in Rome in the Villa Borghese.⁵⁷ Goethe would not have ventured to write this scene earlier.

Now, a certain condition of consciousness, even though dulled, is associated with such a rejuvenation as Goethe experienced. In his time there was not as yet a spiritual science, so this state of consciousness could not be heightened but only subdued. Furthermore, special forces are associated with such a rejuvenation as Goethe experienced. In his time there was not as yet a spiritual science, so this state of consciousness could not be heightened but only subdued. Furthermore, special forces are associated with such a rejuvenation that are projected over into the next incarnation. Here experiences are woven together that belong to the present incarnation and also much that projects its influence into the next. When we bear this in mind, we are led to consider an especially profound and significant tendency in Goethe.

You see, if I may be permitted to interject this personal comment, I have occupied myself for a number of decades with Goethe's view of nature—I may say since 1879-80, and intensively since 1885-86. During this time, I have arrived at the view that there is something in the impulse that Goethe gave to the conception of nature, which contemporary scientists and philosophers really do not understand, that can be developed, but it will take centuries to do so. It may well be, therefore, that when Goethe returns in another incarnation it will still be possible for him to work formatively on what he could not perfect in his views of nature in this incarnation. Many things that are implicit in his view of nature have not yet even been surmised. In regard to this, I have expressed myself in my book, Goethes World Conception, and in the introduction to Goethe's Natural Scientific Writings in Kürschner's Nationalliteratur. We may really say, therefore, that Goethe bears within him in his view of nature something that points toward remote horizons. It is, however, intimately related with his rebirth as this was connected with the period of life through which he was passing when he was in Rome.

You may read for yourselves how I have presented these matters, how the metamorphosis of plants and animals, the archetypal plant and animal, took form during his journey in Italy; how upon his return he tackled the problem of the theory of colors, something that is scarcely understood at all at present; how he took hold of still other things. You will then see that his living penetration into a comprehensive view of nature is intimately bound up with his rebirth. To be sure, he did relate to Faust what he had arrived at in the course of his own life, not, however, as a minor, but as a major poet would do this. Faust experiences the Gretchen tragedy. In the midst of it, we are suddenly faced with Faust's view of nature, which admittedly is closely related with Goethe's. It is expressed in the following words of Faust:

Exalted spirit, all you gave me, all
That I have asked. And it was not in vain
That amid flames you turned your face toward me.
You gave me royal nature as my own dominion,
Strength to experience her, enjoy her. Not
The cold amazement of a visit only
You granted me, but let me penetrate
Into her heart as into a close friend's.
You lead the hosts of all that is alive
Before my eyes, teach me to know my brothers
In quiet bushes and in air and water.
And when the storm roars in the wood and creaks,
The giant fir tree, falling, hits and smashes
The neighbor branches and the neighbor trunks,
And from its hollow thud the mountain thunders,
Then you lead me to this safe cave and show
Me to myself, and all the most profound
And secret wonders of my breast are opened.⁵⁸

A great world conception, ascribed by Goethe to Faust! Only during the journey to Italy had Goethe acquired it with such penetration of soul. The scene beginning, “Spirit sublime, thou gavest me, gavest me all,” was also written in Rome, not earlier. These two scenes—the rejuvenation scene in The Witch's Kitchen, and the scene, Forest and Cave, were the portions that were written in Rome.

Here you see a real rhythm in Goethe's life that reveals an inner impulse just as the rhythm of waking and sleeping reveals an inner impulse in the human being. In a life such as Goethe's we can study certain laws in an especially clear light, but we shall also learn that the laws we discover in great personalities may become important for the life of every individual human being. In the last analysis, the laws working in an eminent human being apply to all individuals. Tomorrow we will continue to speak of the relationships of life as they may be grasped from this point of view.

• 38. Francois de Théas, Comte de Thoranc (1719–94).
• 39. Vom Menschenrätsel, Bibl.-No. 20, CE (Dornach, 1957), p. 155.
• 40. Julien Offroy de la Mettrie (1709–51) was a French physician and materialist philosopher who wrote L'homme machine (1748) and who was a friend of Frederick the Great of Prussia.
• 41. Honore-Gabriel Comte de Mirabeau (1749–91) was a Jacobin revolutionary leader and a celebrated orator.
• 42. Georges Jaques Danton (1759–94) was one of the leading figures of the French Revolution.
• 43. Maximilien de Robespierre (1758–94) was the French revolutionary whose name is usually associated with the infamous Reign of Terror.
• 44. Goethe left Karlsbad on September 3, 1786, arrived in Rome on October 29, 1786, left Rome on April 23, 1788 and arrived back in Weimar on June 18, 1788.
• 45. The friendship between the two men lasted from the summer of 1794 to the death of Schiller on May 9, 1805.
• 46. Cf. Rudolf Steiner's remarks in “Der pädagogische Wert der Menschenerkenntnis und der Kulturwert der Pädogogik“ [The Pedagogical Value of the Knowledge of Human Beings and the Cultural Value of Pedagogy], Second Lecture of July 18, 1924, Bibl.- No. 310, CE (Dornach, 1965).
• 47. Goethe arrived in Leipzig on October 3, 1765 and left the city on August 28, 1768. His illness began the end of July, 1768.
• 48. Susanna von Klettenberg (1723–74), a well known Pietist, became Goethe's prototype of “die schöne Seele,“ [the beautiful soul] in his novel Wilhelm Meister.
• 49. Goethe left for Strassburg on April 1, 1770, and returned from that city to Frankfurt on August 14, 1771.
• 50. Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem (1747–72) was secretary of the Brunswick Legation in the city of Wetzlar. He committed suicide on October 30, 1772, with a pistol borrowed from J. C. Kestner, who was also a friend of Goethe. The tragedy is generally believed to have prompted Goethe to write his Werther, as if he wanted to vindicate his friend's action. Werther, too, borrowed a pistol from a friend to kill himself.
• 51. Cf. footnote 18.
• 52. Poetry and Truth, XI: “I perceived, not with the eyes of the body but of the mind, how I approached myself on horseback, yet wearing clothes -- pike-grey with a little gold -- that I had never worn before. As soon as I shook myself loose from this dream, the apparition had disappeared. The strange thing is that after eight years from this incident when I was travelling on the same road to pay a visit to Friederike, I was wearing the very same clothes I had dreamt about -- not by choice but by coincident.“ The later visit to Friederike Brion took place on September 25, 1779, during Goethe's second journey to Switzerland.
• 53. This lecture was preceded by a presentation of the scene in Faust's study (Earth Spirit, Faust, and Wagner).
• 54. Ann Swanwick's translation of Faust, Part I, lines 575–579, with Faust speaking to Wagner. Kaufmann's rendering of lines 575–585 is given in footnote 21.
• 55. Sophocles (496–406 B.C.) wrote 130 plays, seven of which are extant: Ajax, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonos, Antigone, Electra, The Trachiniae, Philoctetes. Recently, fragments of a satyr play, Ichneutae or The Trackers, were also found.
• 57. The scene was written in March, 1788.
• 58. Faust, Part I, “Wood and Cave,“ lines 3217–3234. The translation is by Walter Kaufmann.

Today's meeting provides a further opportunity for me to speak to you who are friends of the anthroposophical movement before I leave. I wish to do something which in a way is particularly close to my heart, to discuss some of the things that really need to be discussed. It is possible that most of what I have to say today is a repetition of things that have been discussed on a number of occasions from all kinds of different aspects, things now also taken into consideration in public lectures. There are reasons, however, why it is necessary for us to consider some of them once again today.

I have often stressed that it is necessary for a sufficient number of people to fully understand the following. To prevent the decline into which we have got ourselves in the civilized world from continuing into utter ruin, certain impulses must be brought into modern civilization that can only arise if spiritual science reveals the nature of the world to its fullest extent.

Materialism has come to Europe over the last three or four centuries, coming to a crest in the 19th and then tumbling over in the 20th century. It has a peculiarity that seems paradoxical, particularly if one fails to realize the true causes. The peculiar thing about materialism is that it has no possibility of recognizing the material world as it really is. I think I have already given you an example of this. The materialistic way of thinking has in more recent times given rise to an idea that is believed by a great many people, namely that the heart is a kind of pump in the human organism that pumps the blood through the organism. This idea of the human heart being a pump comes up in all kinds of variations nowadays. The facts are rather different, however, and should be seen like this: The whole of our rhythmical circulatory system is something alive. It cannot be compared with a system of channels or the like with water flowing through them, water kept circulating with the aid of a pump. Our rhythmical circulatory system, our blood system, is something alive. It is kept alive by a number of factors, the major factors being breathing, hunger, thirst and so on. These clearly function at the level of soul and spirit. Our blood system is set in motion by entirely primary causes, and the movement of the heart arises when this spiritual principle enters into the rhythm of the blood. The rhythm of the blood is the primary, living principle, and the heart is caught up in this rhythm. The facts are therefore entirely the opposite of what every professor of physiology is teaching today, with the result that it is dinned into people's heads at school and indeed from their earliest childhood.

It therefore has to be said that materialism has not even managed to get a real understanding of the physical processes relating to the heart in the human organism. The material aspect in particular is completely misunderstood. This is just one of many examples. Material things in particular have found no explanation whatsoever under the influence of materialism. The heart is not a pump. It it something we might regard more as a sense organ incorporated within the human organism to give human individuals a kind of subconscious perception of their circulation, just as the eye perceives colour in the world outside. Basically the heart is a sense organ within the circulatory system, yet exactly the opposite is taught nowadays.

This would appear to be an example of limited relevance. I can imagine some philistine saying: ‘Well, it can't do much harm if people have entirely the wrong idea about the nature of the human heart. Of course, if doctors had the wrong idea about the nature of the human heart that would be cause for general alarm. After all, it does make quite a difference in human life if doctors have the right or the wrong idea about the heart.’ But this also holds true for other things. Everything is connected with everything else in life, and because of this humankind is absolutely full of wrong ideas, completely upside-down ideas. One might well think, if one was serious about it, that being hung up on wrong ideas would cause real havoc in our thinking processes. It certainly does. Our thinking is utterly ruined because it has been dinned into us and we have become used to thinking that things are the opposite of what they really are. That is why we never acquire the habit of steady, purposeful thinking. How can our thinking grow purposeful in social life, for example, if in areas where truth should be sought above all else we are in fact going in the opposite direction?

You see, some things that are important to know are a closed book for People today. When the human organism is investigated in conventional institutes nowadays, in physiological and biological laboratories, in hospitals and similar institutions, the brain for instance is examined by analyzing it bit by bit as it presents itself to the eye. The liver is examined by the same kind of analysis. In doing so, people never consider one thing that is absolutely essential if one wishes to understand the human being: The whole of the head organization as We have it today and everything it governs is entirely different from the rest of the human organism.

Let me show you what lies behind this. You can draw it like this. I intend to lead up gradually to what I really want to say. You can say that the human being has two organs of perception, and the direction in which they perceive is approximately like this [see (a) in the diagram]. Two other directions in which we perceive show a certain relationship to these. In diagrammatic form I would draw them like this (b):

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

I deliberately did not tell you where these organs are to be found in the human organism. If I draw nothing but two arrows to indicate direction (a) here, where one stretches out, as it were, to perceive, and two others here, (b), where we perceive sideways, it makes no difference at all if these are the directions in which feeling and sensation pass through my legs and these where they pass through my arms. Here we have something that is in accord. I perceive my own gravity, as it were, I stand with my two feet on the ground. I really perceive something. And I also perceive something when I stretch out my hand, stretch out my arm, even if I do not actually touch anything. I can draw it like this (a). The same drawing can also stand for something different. Imagine this is the horizontal plane. The two arrows could represent the two visual axes; I could draw the two visual axes like this. And these arrows (b) could indicate the directions of my ears. The same diagram would serve to indicate perception by the eyes and ears. On the one occasion I have the whole organism within the head, though the plane has turned through a 90° angle, on the other within the rest of the organism. There is a higher point of view where both are the same. Our two legs are merely directions in which we perceive that have become flesh. The same directions exist in a less physical form where they extend from the brain through the eyes to perceive colour. Elsewhere we perceive gravity and everything connected with it. We see our weight and we step on colour, we could say, if we were to change the two things over, entirely in organic terms, of course. I hear the blackboard chalk, I touch a C or C sharp that is sounding. The difference is merely one of degree. In the head everything has gone through a 90° angle and is less physical; the other is in the vertical plane, and is physical. In the final instance both are the same. It is only that I am aware of the way my eyes step on colours, my ears touch sounds; I know about it, it is part of my ordinary conscious life. Everything my legs see with regard to gravity and all kinds of other things that my arms hear—all these are in the subconscious sphere. Conditions belonging to the cosmic sphere are present in the subconscious. With the whole of my subconscious I have knowledge of the cosmic sphere, knowledge of the way the earth relates to other bodies in the universe, knowledge of the universal background to gravity. I hear the music of the spheres with my arms and not with my ears.

Thus we may say that we have a lower organism, as it is called, with subconscious cosmic awareness, and we have a head with early awareness; this however is a ‘conscious’ awareness. The whole of the human being is organized on the basis of these differences. Our outer form and configuration depends entirely on these differences. You know that the head we carry today is the transformed body of our previous incarnation, our previous earth life, and that the rest of our present organism will be the head in our next life. The head, then, is the rest of the organism which has undergone a transformation. It is more perfect, more finished in a way. As a result the legs have become fine visual threads extending beyond the eye and stepping on the colours in a very lively way. The arms of our former life have become so ethereal that they now extend from our ears and touch the sounds we hear.

These are concrete facts about the human being. It does not get People anywhere to know about repeated earth lives and so on. Those after all are dogmas and it makes no difference if you have the dogmas of the Catholic or Protestant church or the dogma of repeated earth lives. Real thinking only starts when you enter into concrete events, when you come to realize that looking at the human head you are looking at the transformed body of your previous earth life, and that the head you had then was the transformed body of the preceding life—you must imagine it without the head, of course. The head you see now is the transformed organism of the last life lived on earth. The rest of the organism as you see it now will be the head in the next life. Then the arms will have metamorphosed and become ears, and the legs will have become eyes. We must look at the physical world and understand it in its transformed non-physical form, our intellect must illumine the material world in this way. Then at last we shall have what humankind is much in need of today. Once the human mind has been organized so that it no longer produces the kind of folly that has been put forward as a potential social theory, particularly in the second half of the 19th century, human beings will indeed be ready to develop social ideas that can be put into effect in this world. It is necessary to gain a thorough understanding of this today. It is a serious matter when people say today: Something else will have to take the place of the science which has evolved and is so highly respected, of all the things that are generally disseminated. There can be no other way.

It is nonsense, and I also said so recently in a public lecture,³⁰ to talk about setting up adult education thinking that the same kind of work can be done there as at ordinary universities. It is the work done at the universities that has brought us to these disastrous situations, because it has become the materialistic view of a few leading personalities. This is now to be presented to the masses; that is, millions are to head for the disasters that so far have come about because the wrong lead was given by a few. Something that proved useless for a few is now to be spread among many. It is not as easy as that, however. Popular education cannot be introduced simply by teaching outside the universities what until now has been alive inside them. It would mean teaching something that is altogether unsuitable for human beings. This may sound radical, but it is absolutely essential that it is fully understood if there is to be even the least hope of the decline being halted and something new and positive developing. These are the things one wishes one could speak of in words that truly go to the heart. These concrete truths must reach as many hearts as possible. It was therefore important to me to point out in my public lectures that something has been achieved in the Waldorf School, that anthroposophy has positively influenced the history lessons in some places. I was also able to refer to the teaching of anthropology in class 5. There, too, anthroposophy was effective. Not that one would teach anthroposophy to the children—we would never think of doing such a thing—but lessons come to life if anthroposophy is the foundation, if the inspiration of anthroposophy is there in what we teach. This brings the souls of the children to life; they are quite different when this influence is there. It would be taking the easy way simply to teach anthroposophy in our schools. No, that is not what we are about, but rather to use anthroposophy to enliven the subject matter. It will of course be necessary for anthroposophy to come alive in oneself first of all, and that is something that really comes hard, to let anthroposophy come alive in human beings. Otherwise the potential is there today for all kinds of disciplines, not only in science but all kinds of disciplines in life, to have the full benefit of what life in anthroposophy is able to give.

That is a general way of looking at it. Let me go on to something specific, so that you can see the things we are considering in their proper context.

Marxist philosophy, Marxist views are widespread today. They have their most radical expression in Leninism and Trotskyism, which are destroying the world. A view of history known as ‘historical materialism’ plays a great role in Marxist philosophy, particularly the dogma of the fundamental importance of the modes and relations of production. Millions of proletarians have accepted this dogma according to which tradition, law, science, religion and so on are like smoke, like an ideology rising from the modes and relations of Production—you will find further details in my book Towards Social Renewal³¹—and that the modes and relations of production are the Only reality on which to base one's view of history.

It was very important to me on past occasions—this has to do with the feeling I have that I was really able to achieve something and create a potential basis at the Worker's Education Institute in Berlin³²—to speak in proletarian circles about the view that the modes and relations of production are the only effective element, and to present a clear picture. My aim therefore was not to teach historical materialism but the truth. That was of course also the reason why I was thrown °in, for it offended those in charge at the time just as much as the idea of a threefold social order offends people today. Authoritarian thinking and belief in authority were and still are as great in the socialist movement as in the Catholic church.

What really matters is to gain a clear understanding of social relations in this world. Real understanding of the natural threefold order of the human organism, of the way the human organism is an organism of nerves and senses, rhythmical organism and a metabolic organism, as shown in my book Von Seelenrätseln,³³ leads to a way of thinking that can also apply to social life. People of little understanding will say: ‘You are using analogy in applying the threefold order of the human body to the social organism’. This is nonsense of course. Analogy is not the method used in Towards Social Renewal. All I said was that if people succeeded in letting their thinking escape from the strait jacket put on it by modern scholarship and particularly public opinion, they would free their thinking to the extent that it will be possible to think sensible thoughts concerning social issues. The kind of thinking that puts the human brain side by side with the liver, examining everything as though it were of the same substance, will never come to sensible conclusions.

Using external analogies we might say: The social organism is threefold by nature and so is the human organism. The head is the organ of mind and intellect; it should therefore be compared with the cultural and intellectual life in the threefold organism. The rhythmical system establishes harmony between different functions in the action of the heart, in respiration—that would be the rights sphere in the social organism. Metabolism, the most physical, material aspect—something mystics tend to look down on to some extent, though they say they also have to eat and drink--would be compared to the sphere of economics.

This is definitely not the case, however. I have repeatedly pointed out on other occasions that in reality things are very different than mere analogy would make them to be. It cannot be said, for instance, that summer is comparable to the waking state for the earth and winter to a state of sleep. The reality is different. In summer the earth is asleep, in winter it is awake. I have gone into this in detail.

The same applies if we consider the real situation in comparing the social and the human organism. The economic sphere of the social organism actually compares to the activities of the human head. As to the sphere of rights, the legal sphere, people were quite rightly comparing this, the middle realm, with rhythmical activities in the human organism. The life of mind and intellect however has to be compared with the metabolism. This means that economic life has to be compared with the organs that serve the mind and intellect, and the cultural and intellectual sphere of the social organism with the metabolic organs. There is no way round this. Economic life is the head of the social organism; cultural life is the stomach, liver and spleen of the social organism but not of the individual human being. It is of course too much of an effort for anyone whose thinking is in a strait-jacket to make distinction between social life and the life of an individual person.

Again the essential point is that spiritual science prepares us to see things as they really are and not to produce analogies and elaborate symbolism. We will then arrive at important conclusions. We shall find, for example, that we can say: But in that case economic life, if it really is the head in the social organism, will have to live on the rest of the organism, just as the head does in the human organism. In that case we cannot say morality, religious life and the search for knowledge are ideological elements arising from economic life. Quite the contrary, in fact. Economic life is dependent on cultural life, on the metabolism of the social organism, just as the human head depends on respiration, on stomach, liver and spleen. We then come to see that economic life arises out of cultural and religious life. If we did not have a stomach we could not have a head. Of course we also could not have a stomach if we did not have a head, but it is the head after all that is fed by the stomach, and in the same way economic life is fed by cultural life and not the other way round. The socialist theories that now threaten to spread through the whole of the civilized world are therefore quite erroneous, a dreadful superstition. No one has thought to look for the truth in recent centuries; on a purely emotional basis everyone has been promulgating the kind of truth their class and point of view suggested to them. Now at last it is realized that it is a total delusion to see historical evolution as the product of the modes and relations of production. The idea is now to compare the actual facts and not to talk in analogies. Now a realistic view is taken and it is realized that if the stomach is undermined in the human organism, the head will suffer. In the same way there can be no sound metabolism in the social organism and economic life must fall into decline if morality, religious life and intelligent thought are undermined in the social organism. Nothing in fact depends on economic life; primarily everything depends on the views, the ideas, the cultural life of humankind.

The head is always dying—I have spoken of this in other lectures—and we only maintain the head organism because it is constantly dying and the rest of the organism rebels against this. The same applies in the sphere of economics. Economic life is constantly bringing death and decay into the progress of history; rather than generating everything else it brings about the death of everything. This element of death constantly has to be counterbalanced by what the cultural organism is able to produce. The situation is therefore exactly the other way round. Anyone speaking in materialistic terms and saying economic life is the basis for progress is not speaking the truth. The truth is that economic life is the basis of something that is always dying in stages, and the mind and spirit have to make up for this dying process. To proceed the way people are now proceeding in Russia is to help the world to its death. The only possible outcome of proceeding in this way is to help the world to its death, for the simple reason that the laws of death are inherent in the things that are being done there.

You can see the eminent social importance of these things. We have now been working in anthroposophy for twenty years, and all the time I have tried to make it utterly clear and apparent in all kinds of lectures that what matters to us is not the cultivation of a philosophy full of inner self-gratification, a kind of spiritual snobbery, but to develop the most important impulse that is needed in the present age.

I wanted to present this to you again today in a slightly different form in connection with a number of things that can help us understand the essential nature of the human being. It is important that those who call themselves friends of the anthroposophical movement clearly perceive the connection between this anthroposophical movement and other events as we know them.

The ideas put forward by myself and other friends are often seriously distorted. It is therefore difficult to speak freely to such a large audience, even if it is anthroposophical. As there is no immediate opportunity, however, to discuss these things at a more intimate level and yet it is necessary to speak of them, let me draw your attention to a few things. We must be aware, particularly here in Stuttgart, that the anthroposophical movement we have now had for twenty Years has indeed reached a new stage. If we are serious about the movement this means we have accepted the obligation to follow this change, to adapt to this change. You must properly understand that because our friends Molt, Kühn, Unger, Leinhas³⁴ and others have attempted to take the anthroposophical approach to its practical conclusion something has happened that concerns us all. It concerns us all and we must take account of it in everything we say and do. The fact is—and let us be very clear about this—that until then the anthroposophical movement was a current in the life of the mind and spirit. Such things continue on their way, cliques and closed groups, however objectionable, that go by personal and heaven knows what other interests, may form; a spiritual movement may even proceed by the agency of privy councillors like Max Seiling.³⁵ One does of course have to approach it properly in view of what is called for, but for as long as it is a purely spiritual or cultural movement it can be ignored. Now, however, three things have grown out of this spiritual movement.

The first followed the appeal I made last year.³⁶ It now forms part of the struggling threefold movement, the Association for a Threefold Social Organism. This has not yet been able to get anywhere near the real objectives. What the appeal had to say has in a sense met with rejection, and it would be a good thing to be fully aware that there has been this rejection, that only very little of what was intended has come to fruition.

This does of course mean that I have many requests made to me. The idea has come up in Dornach, for example, of issuing a further appeal that would make it known internationally what Dornach means to the world. I had to explain to our friends that in the ordinary life outside that is now heading for a breakdown, appeal usually follows appeal, programme on programme. We cannot do this if we work out of anthroposophy. It is important to realize that, in a way, it is not at all healthy if something is undertaken that does not come off. It is important to make a careful assessment of the chances of success, and not just do what comes to mind but only the things that have a chance of success. This is why I then said—it is important and I must ask you to consider it carefully—that I would not dream of making a similar appeal again, for what has happened to the first appeal should not happen a second time. It was possible to let the appeal for a Cultural Council³⁷ go out, for that was not my work, but we must be very clear that things are getting a great deal more serious than people are inclined to think if something like the anthroposophical movement stands behind them.

Three things have now evolved out of the anthroposophical movement, in a way, each of them quite distinct. A threefold order following that appeal—we will have to work at it, for it partly meets with rejection; secondly the Waldorf School;³⁸ thirdly the financial, commercial and industrial enterprise called Der Kommende Tag (Dawn of Tomorrow).³⁹

Coming to Stuttgart in the past, when we only had the anthroPosophical movement—I am referring only to Stuttgart—I would spend three or four days here and you know how many personal interviews I managed. These things have had some effect, as is now becoming apparent. It was not without significance that whatever had happened in the meantime—people will understand what I mean if they want to—could be put to rights again in those personal interviews. Events could then proceed until the next time. Now the position is such that following those outer developments one has to attend meetings from morning till night, and indeed well into the night, and there is no question of continuing in the ways we got used to when we were only an anthroposophical movement. Now there are many people who feel that it is a nuisance that things are no longer the way they were. It is necessary, however, to look at all the changes and really say to oneself: Things have changed since the spring of last year and this will have to be taken into account.

The situation cannot remain as it is, but a united effort must be made to see that it does not remain this way. It cannot remain as it is because everything that is done—be it for the Waldorf School or the Kommende Tag—has its basis in spiritual work. Without the spiritual work that has been done and must continue to be done there is no point to it all. The spiritual work must give form, vigour and content to the whole. To continue the way we are going would mean that the institutions which have now been established would swallow up the original spiritual movement. We would be taking away the original basis. Nothing growing out of the anthroposophical movement should be allowed to swallow up the movement as such.

You see, these are serious matters we have to discuss today, and I think at least some of you will understand what I mean. Things will not be different unless we accept it as a reality that anthroposophical work has been done for many years, for decades. This work must be seen as something real.

I would ask you also to consider the following. There is much conflict in the world, but where is most of this conflict to be found? It takes a certain form and people fail to notice, but most of it takes place in the sphere of spiritual endeavour. There is no end to the conflict within the body we call the anthroposophical movement, for example. When our movement evolved out of older practices—it was necessary to start from these, you know the reasons—that is, when many people familiar with the old theosophical practices joined our movement, I had the feeling that a gentleman, who at the time was particularly vehement in his defense of the line we were following, would very soon be in conflict with various other people. Conflict is likely to be particularly bad in this sphere. In fact I always made it quite clear that the gentleman in question, a theosophist of the purest Water, would not only come in conflict with others, but that his right side and his left would be involved in a desperate struggle. People Will find that the left side of this individual will have the most dreadful quarrel with his right side.

It will of course be necessary to develop the other extreme, where the conflicts that constantly arise are overcome. Such conflicts are due to the very nature of spiritual movements, because they all aim to develop the human individuality. The other pole, the other extreme, of human understanding, must be there as well; it is the pole of human understanding where it is possible to enter into a human individual, to go deeply into the life impulses of another person, and so on. It must be possible for the Kommende Tag and the Waldorf School we are now running to be given a sound moral basis by the anthroposophical movement here in Stuttgart, the moral basis that is the work of decades, or at least should have been such. That has to be the foundation, for it is the only way in which we can go ahead and restore the balance between a life consisting of meetings and the necessary spiritual work which after all should be the basis. We cannot achieve this, of course, if things go on all the time where one is told, for instance, that dreadful things have been going on again, with someone causing trouble all the time, someone upsetting all the rest. Well, that may be so. To date—and on this visit such things have come up again countless times—I have not been able, however, to pursue such an affair to the point where the second person, when approached, told the same story as the first. When it came to the fifth or sixth person, I would hear the absolute opposite of what the first had told me. I do not want to criticize, to apportion praise or blame, really, not even the latter, but that is how it is. What is needed, particularly among anthroposophists, and I have said this on many occasions, is an absolute and unerring feeling for the truth. It is very difficult to continue working in all these areas unless there is a basis of truth, of genuine, immediate truth. If there is this basis of genuine truth, surely it must happen that when something comes up and one pursues the matter further a fifth or sixth person would still present the same facts. Yet it happens that I am told about something ‘dreadful’ and everybody I ask tells me something different. I cannot, of course, apply the things I have from other sources to external life; I have said this many times. It is not a question of whether I know about it, know who is right and who is wrong. The question is whether the first says the same as the sixth or seventh. What I know has nothing to do with it. As a rule I do not allow people to pull the wool over my eyes, and that is not why I ask people. The reasons are quite different. As a rule it does not interest me very much what people tell me. The point is that I hear what the first person says and then the seventh, only to find on many occasions that one person says one thing and the seventh says the opposite. It evidently follows that one of the two things cannot be true. It seems to me that this does follow.

In outer physical life which for this very reason is going into a decline people have always wanted to shut their eyes to the function, the crucial significance, of untruths. Even unintentional untruths are destructive in their effects. In spiritual science working towards anthroposophy it is absolutely essential to realize that an untruth in the life of mind and spirit is the same as a devastating bomb in physical life. It is a devastating force, an instrument of destruction, and this in very real terms. It would certainly be possible to do important and fruitful work in the spiritual sphere again, in spite of the many new developments, providing these things are given some attention—objective attention, however, not subjective attention.

You know I do not normally go in for tirades; it is not my habit to moralize. Just for once, however, I really must discuss the facts that have become very obvious at this time, because the situation is serious. We are looking at undertakings that must not fail, that will have to succeed, and there can be no question of any kind of failure; we have to say today that they shall succeed. They must not however swallow up the original anthroposophical movement, and this means that everybody must do his share to ensure that the moral foundation established in the work of many years really exists. Everybody must do his part. It is really necessary for everybody to to their part.

It saddens my heart that I am unable to respond to almost all the many requests that are made to me. I had to keep refusing to help my friends because time cannot be used twice, and meetings go on not only from morning till night, but even well into the night. Quite obviously I cannot use the same time to talk to individuals. The membership in the widest sense must come to its senses and get rid of the things that play a role in all aspects of life here, the kind of thing I have just been mentioning. Every single member must reflect and see that here in this very place these things have to be done away With Unless this is done—and these things are connected—it will not be possible to find the time to do real fundamental spiritual work. Everything arising out of anthroposophy will succeed. Yet unless some things change the original spiritual movement will be swallowed up. The will impulses of those who consider themselves the bearers of this spiritual movement would then lead to a new materialism, as the original spiritual movement will have been aborted. The spirit needs to be nurtured or it will die. Materialism does not arise of its own accord; you cannot create materialism, just as you cannot create a corpse. A corpse is produced when the soul leaves the organism. In the same way everything created here on a spiritual basis, out of something that has soul, will become entirely material unless there is a genuine desire to nurture the spirit. It means that above all the moral and ethical basis which we have been able to establish is given careful attention. It is necessary above all to ensure that we do not become subject to illusion, that we do not think it is enough to accept Certain views just because they are easy to accept. We must look at life without flinching.

It is really very bad for people to say things like: ‘The threefold order is a good thing; we must take it up.’ Feeling rather good about it they will say: ‘I am getting something organized and it is very much in accord with the threefold order; aren't I good! It makes me really feel good getting something organized that is a nucleus of threefoldness’. Licking your lips morally speaking, full of inner self gratification—you may feel like this when you are doing such things, but it does not mean that you have a sense of reality. The threefold idea is true to reality because it requires genuine effort to bring it to realization. Many people's ideas are however so unrealistic that the idea of threefoldness goes against the grain with them. The first and most essential thing is for this idea to be taken up by a sufficiently large number of people. We must have the necessary sense of reality and practical common sense.

Eight days ago I had to speak here in Stuttgart about the consequences the threefold order has for the management of landed property.⁴⁰ I said that the threefold order obviously aims to achieve a situation where social exchange, social conditions relating to landed property, are such that land cannot be bought and sold like other goods That is entirely based on reality; to say the opposite would be unrealistic. I had to discuss the subject on a day when I actually got here late because we had been going round the countryside all day trying to buy land. If we have a sense of reality we cannot base ourselves on the threefold order and say: ‘I must be good; I am forming a nucleus for the threefold order.’ No, it has to be accepted, and there can be no illusions, that in a certain respect the only possible way in which we can work for a threefold order is by working on the most important aspect, not basing our work on the immediate present.

It is not a question of morally licking our lips as we say that we follow a particular idea. This would make it unfruitful and abstract. It is a question of really seeing the reality, seeing what is necessary. This is the difference between people whose approach is utopian and dogmatic and those who take a practical view. The latter will take an idea as far as it can go, but they are not unworldly people living for some private pleasure; they take hold of the reality. We really only give ourselves up to illusion for our own private pleasure. This must be realized. It is also necessary to realize that many other things go in the same direction. I am sorry, it could not be helped. There were quite a number of things that I could have talked about on this last occasion before my departure. I might have drawn your attention to many things that were put to me more or less in passing, things that do have an effect on the fruitful activities. One of the main problems with those fruitful activities is that there is a constant need to have endless discussions on matters that should be dealt with in half an hour, because things are thrown into the pool that really should not be there. If you have sound thinking habits—and those are the habits we must acquire if spiritual science as it is presented here is to come about—and then find yourself—I am not speaking theoretically—right in the middle of what is nowadays called business practice, the best way of defining what goes on is that people kill as much time as possible, that time is wasted. There are practical people today who boast of being busy all day long. If they did not waste so much time, their work, which let us say takes ten hours, could be easily done in one hour. Time is killed particularly in what is called active life today. This killing of time causes thoughts to be drawn out. Entering into practical life as it goes on today one really gets the feeling that one is in a noodle factory where thoughts that ought to be concentrated are drawn out, pulled apart like strudel or noodle dough; everything is pulled well apart. It is dreadful to come across those spread-apart thoughts that are cultivated in practical life. If you wanted to use thoughts like these to get a clear understanding of the world, of the things I have spoken of today by way of an introduction, you would not get anywhere. All this ‘strudel-dough thinking’ has arisen in the process of killing time. Thoughts that ought to be concentrated, for that is the only way for them to be effective, simply come to nothing by being drawn out. Something which functions properly at a certain density will of course be useless once it has become thin and worn. Many of the things that play a large role in modern economics are quite useless when it comes to making world affairs progress. Our particular task would thus be to grow concise in our thinking also with regard to practical things, and not to kill time. However, time still has to be killed these days, unless the anthroposophical movement, which after all supports our enterprises, becomes what it ought to be: A movement based on truth in every respect, a movement where all untruth eliminates itself because we have no use for it and because it would immediately show itself to be what it is.

This is what I wanted to say to you today. It is not addressed to anyone in particular. Please do not continue to go around saying that I was aiming at one thing or another in particular. I wanted to give you a clear picture of the facts as they are in general. The world situation is serious today and the things that have been going on among us here in Stuttgart really reflect the serious situation that exists for the whole of civilization. The things that haunt us in our community here can teach us a lot about the things that haunt the world as a whole.

I do not wish to hurt anyone's feelings. Nor do I want to moralize, to preach at you. The intention has been to discuss the things that have been obvious to the eye and to the soul on so many occasions over the last two weeks.

• 30. ‘Die Erziehung und der Unterricht gegenüber der Weltlage der Gegenwart’ (Education and teaching in the light of the present world situation), Stuttgart 10 June 1920. Published in Geisteswissenschaft und die Lebensforderungen der Gegenwart 6, Dornach 1950. To be published in GA 335. No record of translation into English.
• 31. Die Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft (1919) GA 23. English translation: Towards Social Renewal. F.T. Smith tr. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.
• 32. See Rudolf Steiner's Mein Lebensgang (1923–25) GA. 28. English translation: Rudolf Steiner: An Autobiography. R. Stebbing tr. New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1977.
• 33. Von Seelenrätseln (Riddles of the soul) (1917) GA. 21. Parts translated into English in The Case for Anthroposophy. Owen Barfield tr. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1970.
• 34. Molt, Emil, see ref. 37.
  
  Kühn, Hans, writer and publisher.
  
  Unger, Carl, grad. engineer, owner of machine tool works, member of Council of the German Anthroposophical Society from 1905, lecturer and writer. Shot by a mentally sick individual in Nuremberg in 1929.
  
  Leinhas, Emil, businessman, managing director of Der Kommende Tag AG (see ref. 39), writer.
• 35. Seiling, Max, first a follower then an opponent of Rudolf Steiner. Bore the title Privy Councillor.
  
  TN. Rudolf Steiner used word-play here, calling Hofrat (Privy Councillor) Seiling an Un-Rat. The word Unrat means garbage, refuse, ordure.
• 36. An das deutsche Volk und an die Kultunvelt! (Appeal to the German nation and the civilized world), pamphlet, 1919, reprinted a.o. in Towards Social Renewal (ref. 31).
• 37. Appeal to establish a Council for Culture. Whitsun 1919, signed by many well-known figures in cultural life.
• 38. Waldorf School: intergrated primary and secondary school established by Emil Molt in 1919 for the children of workers in the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory and the general public. This was done under the guidance of Rudolf Steiner who also appointed the teachers and himself gave the preparatory teachers' seminars.
• 39. Der Konunende Tag, Aktiengesellschaft zur F6rderung wirtschaftlicher and geistiger Werte (join-stock company for the promotion of economic and cultural values), established in Stuttgart in March 1920. Rudolf Steiner was Chairman of the Board until 1923. The company became a victim of post-war inflation in Germany and had to be dissolved in 1925.
• 40. Stuttgart 16 June 1920; published in Landwirtschafi und Industrie/Neuordnung des Bodenrechtes als soziale Forderung der Gegenwart (Agriculture and industry/New proposals for land ownership as a social requirement for the present age); quoted from the writings and lectures of Rudolf Steiner, Roman Boos ed., Stuttgart 1957, S. 84 ff. (to be published in GA 335). No record of translation into English.