The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The American science writer Carl Snyder (1869-1946) who has written a book (New Conceptions in Science, 1903) about the present scientific worldview speaks in almost mocking way about a talk, which Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) held once. Wallace stated, although he was a naturalist, that after his view the human immortal soul has not only that significance which one can observe here in the life between birth and death, but that it extends with its hidden supersensible effect about the whole universe. Of course, a man like Carl Snyder can express himself from his more materialistic thinking about such a quotation only almost mockingly. Now one has to point out if one wants to envisage the cultural-historically interesting of this fact that Wallace got to those epoch-making ideas of evolution, even somewhat before Darwin, which Darwin popularised then. However, Wallace belongs to those who finally worked their way up to a view that just appears in such a quotation.

Indeed, Wallace tried to get a confirmation of his conviction by the experimental method of spiritism. You may say that this pursuit to find a confirmation of a truth that refers to the spiritual world with such experimental art is a fallacy, because in this case one has to ask: could the outer experimental method, the spiritistic one, offer anything to Wallace for his conviction of the everlasting, universal significance of the human soul?—Today I would like to note about this question only so much: someone who has a spiritual insight of a physical process, and knows which results an experiment can deliver, is clear in his mind that such an outer experiment—even if various things may happen which remind you of spiritual manifestations—cannot deliver more about the everlasting significance of a being than any other magnetic, electric or other experiment. What appears in the sensory world can only give some indication of the sensory world. With this attempt, Wallace was indeed in error. However, his conviction could not be generated or confirmed with such an outer observation. Someone who knows the human soul knows that such a conviction must rise from below from the depths of the human soul that the process that leads it to such a conviction must be spiritual and has nothing to do with outer experiments. That is why one has also to suppose that Wallace, although he stood firmly on scientific ground, pronounced a knowledge emerging from the unconscious, from the depths of his soul, which referred to this everlasting significance of the human soul.

Here I would like to remark the following only: somebody who tries to bring the will into his imagining so that it really proceeds under the influence of his will discovers something spiritual in the imagining. You have to say, the right method of meditation leads to the spirit in the usual imagining which is, otherwise, only a soul activity, as well as the naturalist finds in the sensation of hunger that expressed what forms the basis of hunger in the body as chemical or physical processes. Meditating means to let rest a very clear mental picture in the soul in which nothing subconscious, no memory is involved, so that you develop the power of imagining, of thinking as the contents of the mental picture. If you remain in such an activity over and over again, and feel the soul as it were in this activity of meditation, then something objective reveals itself gradually which does not depend on the own will. The own will can withdraw as it were from the activity of imagining, and you have lifted this activity as far into the consciousness as it is not lifted otherwise. You have thereby to begin the way to the spirit. You thereby get around to discovering that the spirit is involved in the imagining, while you tear the imagining away from the bodily more and more.

This is only one of the ways at first, which the spiritual researcher has to go; others are similar to it. The point is that the activity of the human soul becomes so strong that it really tears itself away from the bodily. If you practise the appropriate exercises, you become gradually able to say what is the spiritually active, actually, in the human soul. You do the important, internally stupefying discovery that you get with your thinking to a point where you notice: now I cannot come through with my habitual way of thinking. It is with the thinking just in such a way, as if you see a weight lying there and think wrongly at first that you can lift it, and notice after that hands and arms are too weak to lift it. Here in the outer life it is obvious that the physical organs are too weak. The spiritual researcher can meet something quite similar, transferred into the spiritual-mental, if he has brought the thinking by meditating to the point that it is spirit-filled. Then he feels that he cannot advance, he feels that the brain is not ready to grasp a spirit-filled thought that he wants to grasp now.

You must have experienced once how the brain or the body resists to properly appreciate the dependence of the usual consciousness on this body on one side, and to find out once on the other side that the body can be too weak to maintain a thought which is grasped in spirit. If you do such an experience that the body can be too weak, that the thought can be too strong, you know that there is something immediately experienceable spiritual that is independent of the body. Indeed, you get gradually to the immediate view of a spiritual world because you are with your soul activity beyond the physical body. You learn to recognise what it means to be fulfilled with the spirit in such a way as you are fulfilled, otherwise, in the usual imagining with bodily activity. You learn distinguish the soul life that is supported on the body and the soul life that is supported on the spirit.

Then you can realise how the human being can become addicted to materialism by scientific views. Since one has to say this: on the way to the spirit the spiritual researcher can absolutely stop at materialism because he experiences that he is dependent with the usual consciousness on the body. If he is not able then to get to the real beholding of a supersensible consciousness being, then just the way to the spiritual puts him at the risk to become addicted to materialism. Someone who has never experienced this tremendous temptation to become addicted to materialism also does not stand with full energy in the spiritual world. Since you have to know on one side that this consciousness which accompanies us between birth and death is a soul activity, indeed, in its original force that it requires, however, the outer physical body in any smallest part of its activity, and that one can be detached from this connection with the physical body only for the purpose of spiritual research. Then there you discover that in this human being who lives between birth and death really a higher, spiritual-mental human being lives who goes through births and deaths. You get to know this spiritual-mental human being how he lives in an objective web of thoughts if he himself develops consciousness.

Certain mental pictures that natural sciences can approach only hypothetically gain a real significance. Certain riddles of nature approach the human soul in a new form. I will point here at first only to one riddle in nature that has prepared so much brainwork for the naturalists because they approach it only from the outside. I mean the ether that the naturalists search as a subtler element of physical existence. It is strange how just in such areas the naturalists to be taken seriously come close to spiritual science from the other side. For you could hear from a very significant physicist recently: if one wants to ascribe qualities to the ether, these may be, in any case, no material ones. Today a physicist already says this; that means he moves the ether into that world in which non-material existence is to be found. However, to the physicist like to the naturalist generally this ether must remain a hypothesis. He can conclude it from the other physical processes. However, if the human being as spiritual researcher treats his soul as I have indicated it, he gets around to perceiving the being of the ether in himself at first and to noticing that an etheric body, a supersensible body forms the basis of his physical body. To this supersensible body that is immediately related which arises by true introspection. The mental experience is substantially an interaction of that human being with the ether who pulls himself out of the body and who can live in the sea of thoughts. Only via the etheric, while the etheric works again on the physical body, the soul works on the physical body, too.

On one side, you discover this way that this etheric body that I have also called the body of formative forces in the magazine Das Reich forms the basis of the physical body and is an essential element of the higher human being.

On the other side: while you have strengthened your soul capacity that you can clearly perceive this etheric body, you get to know the subtle figure of the human being in the etheric and find out also that the human soul is richer than that what he experiences in his everyday self-consciousness. This everyday consciousness is bound to the body; hence, it shows only a part of the general spirituality. In this general spirituality, you submerge like in a sea of thoughts, and thus you experience what forms the spiritual basis of the human body at first. However, because you have left this human body, you also get to know the spiritual bases of the physical-sensory surroundings.

If you have advanced to this knowledge, something like an empirical fact appears that you cannot find any right sense in the search of the concealed beings of nature that you have to search another sense of this research. If you consider scientific research, you always find out, actually, that you do research in such a way, as if you had spread out that like a net before yourself which the observation of nature delivers, and then want to find something behind this net that is the essential basis of the externally observed, may it be in philosophical sense the “thing in itself” or the world of atoms. One always requires if one exceeds the only sensory facts that one can penetrate as it were this web of sensory facts. To the spiritual researcher who has got to know the spirit by immediate beholding seems such an aspiration to find a thing in itself or a world of atoms behind the sensory observation in such a way, as if anybody looks into a mirror, sees his picture and that of the surrounding objects in it and then breaks through the mirror to find out where from this picture comes.

He will convince himself that behind the mirror nothing is that causes anyhow what he sees in the mirror. If you get to know the spirit really, you discover that you get to nothing by the penetration behind the sensory world. If you want to search the cause of that which appears there in the mirror, you have to look before the mirror, you have to search it in the living together with the world. You have to penetrate vividly into the world with which you live together before the mirror. It is with the riddles of the nature this way. If you get to know in the described way in what way you stand in the spiritual world, you know: what you recognise as the spirit in which you live is also the cause of the natural phenomena. Only the outer human organisation is responsible that we see these natural phenomena like a reflection spread round ourselves. Thus, the spiritual research gets around to speaking about the spirit if it generally wants to speak about something essential behind the natural phenomena that it gets to know as that into which the soul enters if it frees itself from the body and gets to know its own everlasting nature in the spiritual world.

It is of big significance not to be held by scientific prejudices from looking at the relation that arises to the observer of the spirit. It is that what arises in such a way only brought up from the soul, while the soul submerges in the spiritual world. What can be brought up from the soul itself can be also rejected if this soul has prejudices. What should become a soul property can be taken away from the soul, while prejudices cloud the free view of the spiritual environment. The fact that somebody gets around to admitting such a thing depends on whether he does not develop opposite scientific prejudices in his soul. He who thinks in such a way that our physical-sensory world is the producer of the usual consciousness—that is true and spiritual research also confirms it—, and who possibly leads back this physical-sensory world in Kant-Laplace way to a mere primeval nebula, for him this speculative scientific worldview can become such a suggestion that it takes away the possibility from him completely to progress to the spirit.

Maybe just because the scientific worldview has worked in the course of the last centuries so suggestively on humanity, humanity is less inclined to want any spiritual view. Indeed, from that what I have shown you see that you can advance to the being of nature only if you advance to the spirit. Since you find it then also as the essential in nature. However, you find not only generally that the spirit forms the basis of the natural phenomena, but you find this also in detail. That is why spiritual research cannot be represented in a readily comprehensible worldview, but it is to be represented gradually and slowly like any other science.

If you learn to look at this etheric part of the human being that is integrated in the physical-sensory body, then this etheric human being is of quite different nature. Indeed, it is supersensible, it is similar to the mental, it is between the material and the mental, but it is not as differentiated as the physical body is. The physical body has the senses separated out of itself. The etheric body is not divided in this way, but while it faces the etheric world, it forms, stimulated by that which it faces, in such a way that the spiritual eyes, the spiritual ears are generated only if anything should be perceived in the spiritual world. Thus, one discovers another inner agility of this body of formative forces. One discovers above all that the body of formative forces is not dependent on the immediate physical surroundings. One finds out gradually that this etheric body is dependent from the whole universe, so that for it the vertical or horizontal directions mean something. It means something for it whether it is within the light mass that goes out from the sun or under the influence of the earth mass if it is in darkness, and so on.

One notices that this etheric body is on a level where it is even more dependent on the whole universe, while the physical human body has this developmental state already behind itself and is now immediately dependent from the earth. It is a more ideal dependence on a more enclosing whole which this body of formative forces has than that of the physical-sensory body. Thus, one discovers the strange truth that the inner human being is a supersensible, spiritual being that creates its image here in the physical body that, however, this supersensible is on a higher level in certain respect than the physical-sensory, is still on a former developmental level.

It arises immediately that the human being as a spiritual researcher says to himself, in you something lives that outranks, indeed, the whole outer nature because it is just spiritual-mental. However, as something spiritual-mental it is more imperfect than the outer physical, as something spiritual-mental it will be differentiated only in a later developmental state as the sensory-physical of the human being already is.

Hence, if you want to find the spiritual-mental in an image in the physical life, you have to search it in the world of the lower organisms. The lower forms of the organisms appear in such a way that you say to yourself, they develop that materially what the human being develops mental-spiritually on a higher level. You see, the things are not as simple as the scientific view regards them. This inner agility and firmness of the formative forces of the etheric body by which it follows the vertical or the horizontal directions and directs his organs, or follows the light, or the gravity, and directs his organs correspondingly, this inner characteristic of the etheric body has to do nothing with the speculation about the outer physical existence. Now one would have to state, after one has convinced himself that this supersensible body has the qualities which I have just described, that just with the lower living beings something similarly undifferentiated would have to be found. It would have to turn out that they are mental-spiritually lower, indeed, than the mental-spiritual of the human being, that they are similar, however, in their physical configuration not to the physical body of the human being, but to his etheric body. Now it is strange that the further natural sciences progress with their quite different methods, they can give the best evidence of that which spiritual science has to require. That is the course that spiritual science says first that one has to find the material image of that in nature which is discovered in the supersensible world.

Now you can just find a tip to very interesting scientific investigations in such a research context as it corresponds to the more materialist disposition of a man like Snyder, as Jacques Loeb (1859-1924, American physiologist) did, for example, who played a big role in all kinds of monistic unions in Europe once.

There you find a quite strange experiment cited—I do not talk of whether it is humane or inhuman whether it is moral or immoral to carry out such experiments; this comes less into question for “science.” The researcher Loeb took the substance of lower organisms, of hydroids, and cut out cubes of their substance arbitrarily. What happened? Upwards “feelers” grew in the head; downwards “feet” grew in such a way as the hydroids have them. No matter which form one cut out: upwards head and feelers grew, downwards feet. Now Loeb turned the substance, so that the feet were on top. There grew out a new head and feelers and downwards feet. There you have the quite undifferentiated; there you have that materially developed in the lower animal, in this case with the hydroids, what the spiritual researcher discovers on a higher level of existence for the human-mental in the body of formative forces. It is similar with another genus. One cuts with the razor at a certain place into the lower animal being; then there forms even a mouth with tentacles. There you still have the undifferentiated substance as an image of that what lives spiritual-mentally in the human being on a higher level. There you find the connection between that which was discovered in the spirit whose participant the human being is on a higher, supersensible level, and that which expresses itself on a lower level in the matter.

You see that the lower organic world is based on the fact that it retains that in the matter what the human being develops spiritual-mentally on a higher level because his higher developed organism can serve him as basis. You realise just there how spiritual science acts towards that what comes from natural sciences from the other side so that the spiritual and the natural meet in the middle. While you penetrate into such things, you get to know thoroughly that the usual consciousness does not hinder you from appreciating the everlasting, the immortal human soul.

Since you get to know the possibility that the human being lives not only in this form of consciousness but also in other forms of consciousness. If one does not know other forms of consciousness, one can also not attain any idea of the constitution of the human being when he passes the gate of death. However, if you learn to recognise by spiritual research that the usual consciousness is only one of various forms of consciousness, you also learn to recognise that already the sleep is another form of consciousness.

Then you open the way for yourself to penetrate into the spiritual-mental, while you take account of the eligible requirements of material research. Then you say to yourself, the further natural sciences advance, the more riddles they reveal, the more they urge to acknowledge the spirit and its science. They will acknowledge more and more that the usual consciousness needs something material of a lower level as basis, and that spirit and soul of the human being penetrate this lower element in supersensible way. Someone who does not figure this relation of spirit and nature out will be horrified about the unsubtle materialism if today a naturalist, namely with a certain right, says the following: what is, actually, the human cerebral mass? It is an organic matter, and the stimulation which appears in the usual consciousness with the help of this organic nervous substance is real nothing but a tendency of this organic matter to coagulate; and this coagulation of a phosphorous, fat-like substance which appears in our cerebral nervous system if we think, imagine, or perceive, can be compared with that which proceeds if, for example, a jelly prepared by the housewife becomes concrete by cooling.

There the naturalist gets gradually around to thinking rather vividly materially, to saying rather clearly to himself—and the scientific view heads to this rightly: while in the soul the most different processes happen, the natural basis of which is the tendency of the nervous mass to coagulate.

The spiritual researcher does not need to oppose this scientific approach what would be dilettantish because the legitimate scientific method must lead to such knowledge. However, while one recognises which simple material processes happen, while the spiritual-mental is active, one just thereby explains the independence of this spiritual-mental. You gradually find out for yourself not to think about the manifestations of nature as today, unfortunately, most people still think that they explain the essentiality of nature with some material bases, but one will recognise that the essential of nature is to be searched in the spiritual. While one figures this relation of the spiritual to the natural out, one recognises that the spiritual is active in nature everywhere, and that one has to look as it were at the physical facts like at the characters of a writing. If one describes them as characters, one does something right, but does not have something complete. You have to be able to read that what is expressed by the characters which are joined to words; you have to learn to read in nature, so that you understand the facts of nature gradually in such a way that you say to yourself: what the naturalists recognise leads rather to questions than to answers.

The answers can be given only if one figures the spiritual bases out. Today one expects just if a natural philosopher writes about things and processes of nature that he gives answers. You will be right if you say to yourself, what one observes in nature induces the human being to put questions; the answers must come from that what can be grasped only spiritually. Thus, we could point to the most common processes that the spiritual must give the human being the instinct to treat the physical facts in the right way as questions. An everyday fact is the succession of sleeping and waking. Very interesting scientific theories on the nature of sleep exist by Johann Crüger (biographical data not available, Outline of Psychology, 1887), Ludwig Strümpell (1812-1899, philosopher, psychologist, On the Nature and Origin of Dreams, 1877), Preyer (William Thierry P., 1841-1897, physiologist, On the Causes of Sleep, 1877) and many others whom I would like to ignore now.

All these investigations are very interesting, but they suffer above all from the fact that one does not know how to consider the basic facts that one can find only spiritual-scientifically that the alternating states of waking and sleeping really belong to the human life as the pendulum deflection. If you recognise that the human being is a natural being and spiritual being, you also recognise that he swings back and forth with his real self between the physical existence and the spiritual existence. In his awake life, he uses the physical body for the performances that he carries out with the usual consciousness. His physical body is more perfect because it has a longer development behind itself than his spiritual-mental being has which is on a higher level, but is more imperfect. Then he sleeps over with his spiritual-mental in another state of consciousness in which he is not yet able to perceive between birth and death in which he will only perceive when he has crossed the gate of death because he is different connected with the spiritual world without his physical body. This swinging back and forth is a fact that you have to regard as an inner necessity of life. Also in this respect, quite interesting scientific investigations are available. If you are able to go, for example, into some interesting explanations of memory and feelings which the Hungarian researcher Palágyi (Menihért P., 1859-1924, philosopher, physicist) did in his Lectures on Natural Philosophy: On the Basic Problems of Consciousness and Life (1908), you realise that also their natural sciences already approach that from the other side, what spiritual-science recognises. Indeed, I have to say that just the facts brought forward with reference to sleep research that are in the outer nature are not treated correctly as questions.

How does one treat them? A much-respected naturalist of Haeckel's school (Preyer) wrote in a popular writing also about sleep. He states like other naturalists, too, that sleep happens, because the human being is tired, sleep follows tiredness. This is quite right; we will further immediately go into the matter. However, to indicate that the human being can no longer activate his senses, this naturalist points to what must happen, actually, that the human being falls asleep. This respected naturalist states that the tiredness of the senses causes that the human being discontinues because the sensory life stops, until the sensory life has rejuvenated by self-controlling. One considers the human being as a wholly physical being. Therefore, he states the following: what do we do if we fall asleep? We try to lock out the sensory stimuli possibly. We cover the windows of our bedrooms with curtains, so that it is very dark, we lock out the auditory stimuli, so that it is noiseless around us.—He even points out that also the temperature does not let us fall asleep if it is too warm or too cold in the bedroom, and so on, briefly, he wants to show that, indeed, the causes of falling asleep are not to be found in swinging forth and back of life between body and spirit, but in the outer surroundings.

May one put this question correctly this way? Does one regard the outer scientific facts correctly? Then something would not happen, for example, that I have observed numerous cases in my life where people do not at all produce noiseless surroundings or the most possible darkness covering the windows with curtains and so on, but where they fell asleep in bright halls after five minutes, even if the speaker spoke loud. There are not the conditions that the naturalist demands, and sleep still happens, of course only with single persons.

It is just not the point that one has only right conditions complying with the facts, but that one can put these facts into the whole coherence to which they belong. If you know that the alternating states of waking and sleeping are based on the fact that the human being is thereby embedded in the spirit, and that he enjoys this body from without as long as he is not connected with the physical body, then you can also understand that you can exaggerate this enjoyment too. One gets to know the sleep as an independent, in itself founded demand on life, as another state of consciousness as it is which one has in the physical body. Now this state of consciousness has a certain significance for the physical body. You bring that in the physical body also which you experience enjoying from falling asleep up to awakening. Tiredness is thereby removed. This is quite right, but this is something different if anybody says, tiredness is the cause of sleep. It is something else to say, sleep removes tiredness, rather than, tiredness causes sleep. Indeed, if one considers the sleep spiritual-mentally, it may seem comprehensible that the human being longs for sleep if he is tired. There it is necessary to go over in the spiritual. However, tiredness does not cause sleep there but the desire to remove tiredness causes sleep.

You see that that is trend setting for the solution of the riddles of nature what you can find in the spiritual. I would like to bring in an example that I have already presented in the appendix of my last book The Riddles of the Soul. The point is that normally if one speaks about the connection of the soul life with the bodily life today one says almost generally that this soul life is connected only with the nervous life. Those listeners who have listened to me many a time know that I pass personal remarks only reluctantly.

However, here the personal is connected with the objective. Hence, I may say, just this problem to fix the relations of the spiritual-scientific with the scientific also externally has occupied me for thirty to thirty-five years for which I am able only now to find the right words; since spiritual research is not easier than the scientific one. What has arisen to me from spiritual research in the course of this time while perpetually considering and comparing the relevant scientific facts, has confirmed everywhere that one has to characterise the relations of mind and soul with the body unlike it often happens. Indeed rudiments are everywhere, so that I would not like to say that that what I have to pronounce here is original. However, today in this context natural sciences do not yet figure it out. It is the point that one can think soul and mind not only in a relation to a part of the body, to the nervous system, but that one has to imagine the whole spiritual-mental that enters the human body from the spiritual world at birth being connected with the whole body in the following way:

We can divide the spiritual-mental first into perceiving and imagining, secondly into feeling and thirdly into will impulses that materialise then in actions, so that the spiritual-mental as it appears in the usual consciousness consists of this tripartism. The spiritual-scientific facts cause not to relate the imagining, perceiving life to something else in the body than to the nervous system. It is interesting that Theodor Ziehen because he relates the emotions only to the nervous system has the expression “feeling tone” for the emotional life only, as if the emotions were not anything independent in the soul, as if they were only tones of imagining. He denies an independent will life all the more.

All these investigations are right if they relate only this part of the spiritual-mental, imagining and thinking, directly to the nervous system, to the brain. Indeed, natural sciences do not yet have concepts of these nervous processes generally because they do not consider them properly. I will speak about that in the talk on the Revelations of the Unconscious more thoroughly. Then, however, the emotional life is the second member of the spiritual-mental life. This emotional life is only indirectly related to the nervous system. It is directly related to the rhythmic life of blood circulation and respiration. If we pursue the nervous processes in ourselves, we have the bodily counter-image of perceiving and imagining. If we want to have a bodily counter-image of the emotional life, one has to envisage the rhythmical life as it happens in the interplay of respiration and blood circulation. Only because this rhythm approaches the nervous system it is generally possible that we also imagine our feelings. While we imagine our feelings, a direct relation of the emotional life with the imagining life comes about. However, there also a direct relation of that what forms the basis of the emotional life in the body as rhythm to the nervous system comes about.

I know very well that now because there is an experimental psychology this relation of life rhythm to the emotional life is already indicated. However, it is not indicated correctly because that direct relation of the emotional life to the rhythms of life is not searched as one searches, otherwise, the direct relation of imagining to the nervous system. I know well that one can argue much against that what I have stated. I would need a lot of time to refute these objections. They all can be refuted. I want to point only to one thing. Anybody could say, look at the musical-aesthetic feeling, it comes about just by perceiving, imagining. - Thus, one could put many rebuttals forward. These things are just very subtle, and of course, they may be apparently refuted very easily if one looks at them as one often does it today. The true process of the musical-aesthetic feeling is that that which happens in the rhythmic life approaches that—the psychologist knows how this happens—which happens in the brain, while the tones are heard, and that only while the tone settles in the rhythm of the whole body the musical sensation, the aesthetic enjoyment is caused.

A third element is the life in will impulses that materialise in actions. Just in such a way as imagining is connected with the nervous system, the emotional life is connected with the rhythms of respiration and blood circulation, the whole will life is attached to the metabolism. A metabolic process forms the basis of every will process. The things are confused only because everything in the human being interacts in a way, that, for example, the will is involved in the imagining, and thereby the metabolism is involved in the nervous system. However, one is allowed to relate that what happens there as metabolism to the imagining; quite different nervous processes form the basis of that, but one has always to relate it to the will.

Thus, one has related the whole spiritual-mental—thinking, feeling and willing—to the three life processes in the human organism. Since if one goes into the human organism, its whole life exhausts itself to nothing but nervous processes, rhythmical processes and metabolic processes. The whole body is directly connected with the whole spiritual-mental. One can confirm this connection with many facts that are already recognised scientifically that are not put correctly as questions and, hence, one does not find the way to spiritual beholding with them that can only bring order in the scientific riddles. If you familiarise yourself with that in current physiological books what is known in natural sciences and disregard the prejudices which are brought in theoretically, then that is highly confirmed scientifically everywhere what spiritual science has to say. However, natural sciences do not apply their methods comprehensively. They specialise. That is why one does not transfer that which one properly applies to one field to another field.

Does, for example, science understand the position of the magnetic needle physically in such a way that the directional forces work in the magnetic needle only? Rather science says rightly, the earth itself is a big magnet, the magnetic North Pole of the earth attracts one end of the magnet needle, the magnetic South Pole the other end. One puts the magnetic needle with its directional force in the whole universe. Imagine once if one transferred this on the organic science! In the organic science, one goes forward in such a way, as somebody would do who would look for the directional forces of the magnetic needle only in the magnetic needle. There one does embryology and observes how the egg of the chicken develops, one looks for its origin only in the chicken, or at most at its ancestors. If one transferred the physical method on embryology, one would recognise the developmental forces of the egg, of an embryo in the whole universe just like that. Spiritual science has to point to that.

It will show more and more that the scientific facts already confirm today what spiritual science has to say. How can somebody like Loeb cut the substance of hydroids, observe how there on one side head and feelers form, on the other side the feet and so on and completely disregard the fact that there a similar inner relation of the formative forces to the universe exists, as it exists with the magnetic needle to geomagnetism? How can one overlook that miraculous confirmation of the fact which is found spiritually in the spiritual-scientific area that that which lives in the human being in supersensible way as a body of formative forces is integrated in a similar way in the whole universe that thereby cosmic forces are led into the human nature, so that the human being lives, indeed, in the imperishable everlasting universe at the same time? However, it should be talk of it in the next talks where I speak about the everlasting nature of the human being and about the destiny of the soul after death.

It was my task today to show that spiritual science, while it leads to the spirit, also leads to the being of nature that it can really grasp the riddles of nature. Then one does not look back at a Kant-Laplace primeval nebula, but says to himself out of real spiritual knowledge: now you know what is connected in the human being with the whole universe what the higher being is in his wholly outer natural existence what forms the basis of the sensory body.

Now you have to trace back this body how it was in primeval times on that level on which today the spiritual-mental is to advance then to other developmental levels. I can only indicate this. However, it becomes obvious from the whole sense of the today's explanations that one gets around not to imagining the primeval Kant-Laplace nebula as the initial state of the earth, but something spiritual-mental, so that you recognise the transition of the earth and of the human being from the spiritual to the material. Thus, you do not get to the lifeless primeval Kant-Laplace nebula but to the spiritual-mental origin and to the spiritual-mental final state of the earth. You really combine with the outer existence, not hypothetically. You have to grasp thoughts in such a way that they are realistic.

I would like to point here to a very interesting lecture which Professor Dewar (Sir James D., 1842-1923, physicist and chemist) held at the beginning of this century. He calculates that after millions of years the state of the earth will be as follows: there at least a temperature of below 200 degrees centigrade would be; however, at this temperature quite different conditions prevail. Then the atmosphere of the earth will be liquefied. Then the current lighter gases form an air circulation, certain substances that are liquid today become solid as for example the milk. It becomes not only solid, but if it is exposed to light for a while, it will become luminescent. Hence, if one coats the walls with this lacto protein, one can read newspapers with this light! He also describes that one can no longer take photos because at this temperature the chemical forces of the beams of light will have got lost. Briefly, you could continue the picture completely after scientific methods rather well. The spiritual scientist who has learnt to think realistically knows where he has to stop with his thinking. Such research is just in such a way, as if you take any human organ, for example, the heart: you observe its changes for six to seven years and then you infer quite scientifically how the heart will have changed after 300 years. There you have the same method that Professor Dewar applies. While he extends the slow changes of our earth during a reasonable time to millions of years, he gets to the final state of the earth as one would get to a state of the human being after 300 years if one takes the change of an organ or of the total organism as basis during some years for the calculation without regarding the fact that the human being is dead then long since. Thus, the earth does no longer exist at the time, which Professor Dewar has calculated. One would like to ask who yet reads newspapers then at temperatures below 200 degrees centigrade, with these luminescent walls lacquered with lacto protein, which cows will give the solid milk and so on! Already a superficial consideration could point out if one has connected his thinking with reality that, as soon as one stops thinking with those thoughts that the physical reality gives, one has to proceed to the spiritual.

Thus, spiritual science really delivers the ground from which a realistic approach emerges which is coming up to meet a healthy human thinking. It is still noteworthy how a healthy thinking is so designed which does not stand, indeed, on spiritual-scientific ground which faces, however, reality in healthy way, and how it relates to such thinking which is quite scientific which does not notice, however, that this scientificity stops at a certain point being in reality. As a sound feeling cannot defer to such scientific thinking, I would like to point to the explanations that Herman Grimm did about the Kant-Laplace theory, in his Goethe book, about the relation of this theory to Goethe's sound view. He says there:

“The great Laplace-Kant imagination of the origin and future fall of the globe had already gained ground in his youth. From the rotating primeval nebula, the central gas drop forms from which the earth originates that experiences all phases, as a solidifying ball, for unfathomable periods, included the episode of the habitation by human beings, to fall finally as a burnt-out slag into the sun. It is a long, but for the public comprehensible process for whose realisation no other outer intervention is required than the effort of any outer force to maintain the hot temperature of the sun.

One cannot imagine any more futile perspective for the future than that which should be forced upon us in this expectation as scientifically necessary today. A bone of a carrion around which a hungry dog creeps would be a refreshing appetising piece compared with this last excrement of creation as which our earth would become subject, in the end, to the sun again. It is the thirst for knowledge and a sign of ill imagination with which our generation accepts such things and believes them. Future scholars have to use a lot of astuteness to explain it as historical phenomenon.”

If anybody says such a thing to us, it is a given if it is a usual human being, a fool, if it is Herman Grimm, a witty person who was misled, however, just by his imagination and could not penetrate because of his imaginative idealism just into the strict, exact method of natural sciences. Well! However, in the end, someone who applies correct scientific methods still needs the possibility to recognise where he leaves reality with his thinking, which is taken from the completely physical processes, and where he has to enter into the spirit to remain in reality. Then he convinces himself that the biggest riddles of nature, the initial and final states of earth lead to the spiritual that one does not have to regard the Kant-Laplace primeval nebula, Dewar's state of congelation, but the spiritual-mental origin and goal are the opposite ends of the earthly development. This spiritual-mental-physical earth corresponds to the spiritual-mental-physical life of the human being at the same time.

Careful, serious naturalists already feel what spiritual science wants. However, there one is little inclined even today to deal with the things seriously. At Darwin's centenary a significant naturalist of the present, Julius Wiesner (1838-1916, Austrian botanist), wrote about the negative and positive aspects of Darwin's theory. Among the rest, you find a place in it about aberrations and the negative aspects of Darwin's theory that has evoked so much materialistic nuances in issues of worldview. Wiesner says the following: approximately the true naturalist is well aware of the borders of his scientific approach and knows that natural sciences can deliver, indeed, the stones of a worldview, however, never more than the stones. The picture is almost appropriate because one can explain it even further. Natural sciences really deliver stones only. If one takes stones, one cannot build a house with them. One has to take the laws of building a house from the outside, from the relation to gravity, from the relation to pressure, from everything that is not in the stones, the stones must comply with other laws. Indeed, then you realise that, while you have built the house according to the laws which are not in the stones themselves you have expressed something in the relations of pressure and gravity, of harmony of the house that can lead back you again to similar relations in nature from which the stones are quarried out. However, the house can only be built if you subject the stones to laws different from those, which are in themselves. Wiesner is completely right, natural sciences can deliver stones, but they must be subjected to laws different from those, which can be found in the sphere of physical existence. Where from the laws are taken with which spiritual science builds while it uses the scientific results investigating the spiritual life? Just in such a way as the architect has carried out the plan of the house and the house itself, just the spiritual scientist builds the worldview of natural sciences with that what refers to the spiritual in nature according to the laws which he has observed spiritually. As you can find something in the structure of the house that leads back to the structure of nature from which the stones are quarried out, we are again led back to nature by spiritual science. Spiritual science can lighten the physical life, but it must not believe, and natural sciences must also not believe that with the stones and their laws, with the immediate scientific results, a worldview can be developed for natural sciences.

The today's considerations might justify it that I summarise them at the end with the short quotation: it becomes obvious just if one observes and considers the riddles of nature correctly that natural sciences themselves lead to the spirit, and that in the consideration of the spirit also the elements are given to solve the riddles of nature. Thus, you can formulate as a mnemonic:

Nature cannot clarify itself but only the light that you attain in the spiritual world can lighten the processes and beings of nature. If you want to recognise nature, you have to take the way through the spirit. The spirit is the light that lights up its own being and can light up the riddles of nature on its own accord.

Hermann Grimm, the eminent thinker on Art, has tried to follow Raphael's influence and fame through the ages down to the present day. Grimm has been able to show that Raphael's creations went on working after the painter's death as a living element, and that a uniform stream of spiritual development has flowed onwards from the life of Raphael to our own time. Grimm has shown how the evolution of humanity has proceeded since the creations of Raphael, and on the other side of the spiritual conception of history it may be said that preceding ages too give the impression as if they were themselves pointing to the Raphael who was later to appear in world evolution like a limb inset in a whole organism. We may here recall an utterance once made by Goethe and from the world of Space apply it to the world of Time. Goethe once wrote these significant words: “What would all the starry world and all that is spread out in Space amount to if it were not at some time reflected in a human soul, celebrating its own higher existence for the first time in the experiences of this human soul?” Applying these words to the evolution of the ages, we may say that in a certain sense, when we cast our eyes back into antiquity, the Homeric gods who were described so gloriously by Homer nearly 1000 years before the founding of Christianity, would seem less to us if they had not risen again in the soul of Raphael, finding their consummation in the sublime figures of his pictures. What Homer created long ages before the appearance of Christianity unites in this sense into an organic whole with what was born from the soul of Raphael in the 16th century. Again, we turn our gaze to the figures of the New Testament, and in the face of Raphael's pictures we feel that something would be lacking if the creative, formative power in the Madonnas and other pictures which have sprung from Biblical tradition and legend, had not been added to the Biblical description. Therefore we may say: not only does Raphael live on through the following centuries but his creations form one organic whole with all preceding ages. Most ages indeed already pointed to one in whom they should find their consummation, although this, it is true, could only be discovered in later history.

The words of Lessing when he speaks of “the Education of the Human Race” assume great significance when we thus see how a uniform spiritual essence flows through the evolution of humanity, flashing up in figures like Raphael. The truth of repeated earthly lives that has so often been emphasized from the spiritual-scientific standpoint in connection with the spiritual evolution of humanity is perceived with special vividness when we bear in mind what has just been said. We realize then for the first time what it means that the being of man should appear again and again in repeated earthly lives through the epochs, bearing from one life to the other what is destined to be implanted in the spiritual evolution of humanity. Spiritual Science is seeking the meaning and purpose in the evolution of mankind. It does not merely seek to portray the consecutive events of human evolution in one straight, continuous line, but to interpret the various epochs in such a way that the human soul, appearing again and again over the course of the ages, must have ever new experiences. Then we can truly speak of an “Education” which the human soul undergoes as the result of its different earthly lives,—an education proceeding from all that is created and born from out of the common spirit of humanity.

What will here be said from the standpoint of Spiritual Science in regard to Raphael's relationship to human evolution as a whole during the last few centuries, is not intended to be a philosophical or historical study, but the result of many-sided study of Raphael's creative activity. There is no question of giving a philosophical survey of the spiritual life of humanity for the sake of bringing Raphael into it. Everything that I myself have experienced after study and contemplation of his different works has crystallized quite naturally into what I propose to say tonight.

It will be impossible, of course, to enter in details into single creations of Raphael. That could only be if one were able by some means to place his pictures before the audience. A general impression of the creative power of Raphael arises in the soul and then the question arises: what place has this in the evolution of humanity? The gaze falls upon a significant epoch,—an epoch to which Raphael stands in inner relationship when we allow him to work upon us—I refer to the Greek epoch and its development. All that the Greeks not only created but experienced as the outcome of their whole nature and constitution appears as a kind of middle epoch when we study human evolution during the last few thousand years. Greek culture coincides in a certain sense with the founding of Christianity and all that preceded it seems to bear a different character from following ages. Studying humanity in the Pre-Grecian age of civilization we find that the soul and spirit of man are much more intimately bound up with the corporeal, with the outer corporeality than is the case in later times. What we speak of today as the “inwardness” of the human soul,—the inward withdrawal of the soul when applying itself to the spiritual or the spiritual becoming conscious of the Spiritual underlying the universe,—this inwardness did not exist to the same degree in Grecian times. When man made use of his bodily organs in those days, the spiritual mysteries of existence simultaneously lit up in his soul. Observation of the sense-world was not so detached and aloof as is ordinary Science to-day. Man beheld the objects with his senses, and with his sense impressions he simultaneously perceived the spirit and soul-elements weaving and living within the objects. The Spiritual was there with the objects as they were perceived. To press forward to the Spirituality of the universe in ancient times it was not necessary for man to withdraw from sense impressions or to give himself up wholly to the inner being of the soul. Indeed in very ancient times of evolution “clairvoyant perception of things”—in the very best sense of the word—was a common possession of man. This clairvoyant perception was not attained as the result of certain given conditions, but was as natural as sense perception.

Then came Greek culture with the world peculiar to it,—a world where we may place the beginning of the inward deepening of spiritual life, but where the inner experiences of the spirit are still connected with the outer, with processes in the world of sense. In Greek culture the balance is between the Sensible and the Psychic-Spiritual. The Spiritual was not so immediately present in sense perception as was the case in Pre-Grecian times. It lit up in the soul of the Greek as something inwardly apart, but that it was perceived when the senses were directed to the outer world. The Greek beheld the Spirit not in the objects, but with the objects. In Pre-Grecian times the soul of man was poured out, as it were, into corporeality. In Greek culture the soul had freed itself to some extent from the corporeality, but the balance between the Psychic-Spiritual and the bodily element was still held. This is why the creations of the Greeks seem to be as fully permeated with the spirituality as that which their senses perceived.

In Post-Grecian ages the human spirit undergoes an inward deepening and is no longer able to receive, simultaneously with the sense impression the, Spiritual living and weaving in all things. These are the ages when the human soul was destined to withdraw into itself and experience its struggles and conquests in an inner life before pressing forward to the Spiritual. Spiritual contemplation and the sense perception of things became two worlds which the human soul must experience. How clearly evident this is in a spirit like Augustine, for instance, who in the Post-Christian epoch is really not so far removed from the founding of Christianity as we are from the Reformation. The experiences and writings of Augustine as compared with the traditions of Greek culture are highly characteristic of the progress of humanity. The struggles of the inward turned soul, the scene of action existing in the inner being of the soul apart from the external world that we see in Augustine,—how impossible all this appears in the Greek spirits who everywhere reveal how deeply their soul-content is united with the processes of the external world.

The evolutionary history of humanity shows evidence of a division, a mighty incision. Into this evolutionary picture there enters on the one side Greek culture, where man holds the balance between the Psychic-Spiritual and outer corporeality; on the other side there is the founding of Christianity. All the experiences of the human soul were thereafter to become inward, to take their course in inner struggles and conquests. The mission of the founding of Christianity was not to direct man's gaze to the world of sense in order that he might become conscious of the riddles of existence, but to all that the spirit might intuitively behold when giving itself up wholly to the powers of the spirit and soul. How utterly different,—divided by a deep, deep cleft, are those beautiful, majestic Gods of Greece, Zeus or Apollo, from the figure dying on the Cross,—a figure, it is true, full of inner profundity and power, but not beautiful in the external sense. Already here we find the outer symbol of the deep incision made by Christianity and Greek culture in the evolution of humanity. And in the spirits of the Post-Grecian ages we see the effects of this incision as an ever more intense inward deepening of the soul.

Thence forward this inner deepening has been characteristic of the onward progress of evolution. And if we would understand human evolution in the sense of Spiritual Science we must realize that we are living in an age which represents a still greater inward deepening, the more we observe it in relation to the immediate past and the prospect of the future in which a cleft, still deeper than that which the contemplation of the past reveals, will appear between all that is proceeding in the world in a more or less mechanical, technical life of the outer world, and the goal ahead of the human soul as it endeavors to scale the heights of spiritual being,—heights which open up only in our inner being as we attempt to ascend to the Spiritual. More and more we are advancing into an age of inner deepening.

A mighty incision in the progress of humanity in Post-Grecian times toward an energy being is what has remained to us in the creations of Raphael. Raphael stands there as a mighty spirit at a parting of the ways in human evolution. All that preceded him marks the beginning of the process of this inner deepening; what follows him represents a new chapter. Although much that I have to say in this lecture may have the appearance of symbology, it should not be taken merely as a symbolical mode of expression, but as an attempt to create as broad a conception and idea as possible, that which can be clothed only in the “trivial concepts of man” on account of Raphael's towering greatness.

When we try to penetrate into the soul of Raphael we are struck, above all, by the way in which the soul appears in the year 1483 in a “spring-like” birth, as it were, passing through an inner development radiating forth its glory from the most marvellous creations. Raphael dies at an early age, at 37. In order so to deepen ourselves in this soul so that we can follow all its stages, let us turn our attention for the moment away from all that was going on in world history and concentrate wholly on the inner nature of this soul.

Hermann Grimm has pointed out certain regular cycles in the inner development of Raphael's soul. And indeed it may be said that Spiritual Science today has no need to be ashamed of directing the attention of modern skeptical mankind to the existence of cyclic laws holding sway along the path to the spirit, in all evolution andalso in that of individual human beings, if so eminent a mind as Hermann Grimm was led, without Spiritual Science, to the perception of this regular inner cyclic development in the soul of Raphael. Grimm speaks of the picture called “The Marriage of the Virgin” as being a new phenomena in the whole evolution of Art, saying that it cannot be compared with anything that had gone before. From infinite depths of the human soul, Raphael created something entirely new in the whole of spiritual evolution. If we thus gain a conception of the gifts lying in Raphael's soul from birth onwards, we can readily agree with the following passage of Hermann Grimm: “We now see Raphael's soul developing onwards in regular cycles of four years duration. It is wonderful to observe how this soul advances onwards thus, and studying one such period we find that at the end of it, Raphael stands at a higher stage of his soul's development. Four years after the picture The Marriage of the Virgin comes The Entombment; four years later again the frescoes in the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican,—and so on, by four year stages up to The Transfiguration which stood unfinished by his death bed.”

We feel the desire to study this soul for its own sake because its development is so harmonious. Then however we get the impression that in the Art of Painting itself an inwardness had to develop,—an inwardness such as that expressed in figures which only Raphael could create. It is an inwardness borne out of the depths of the soul experience although it appears in pictures of the world of sense, and it then becomes part of history itself.

Having thus contemplated the inner nature of the soul of Raphael, let us allow the age in which he lived and all that was around him, to work upon us. While Raphael was growing up more or less as a child in Urbino, his environment was of a kind that could stimulate and awaken any decisive talents. The whole of Italy was excited at that time about a certain palace that had been built in Urbino. This was something that imbued the early talents of Raphael with an element of harmony with their nature. After that, however,we find him transplanted to Perugia, thence to Florence, thence to Rome. Fundamentally speaking, his life ran its course within narrow circles. These towns seem so near when we study his life. His world was enclosed within these circles so far as the world of sense was concerned. It was only in the spirit that he rose to “other spheres.” In Perugia, however, which was the scene of his youthful soul development, fierce quarrels were the order of the day. The town is populated by a passionate, tumultuous people. Noble families whose lives were spent in wrangling and quarreling fought bitterly against each other. The one drove the other out-of-town, then after a short banishment the other family would try again to take possession of it. More than once the streets of Perugia flowed with blood and were strewn with corpses. One historian describes a remarkable scene, and indeed all the descriptions of that epoch are typical. A nobleman of the town enters it as a warrior in order to avenge his relatives. He is described to us as he rides through the streets on horseback like the spirit of War incarnate, beating down everything that crosses his path. The historian evidently has the impression that the revenge was justifiable and there arises before his soul the picture of St. George bringing the enemy to his feet. Later on, in a work by Raphael, we feel the scene as described by the historian rise up before us in picture form and our immediate impression is that Raphael must surely have allowed this to affect him; and then what seemed so terrible in the outward sense is deepened and rises again from out of his soul in the subject of one of the most wonderful pictures.

Thus Raphael saw around him a quarreling humanity; disorder upon disorder, battle upon battle, surrounded him in the town where he was studying under his master Pietro Perugino. One gets the impression of two worlds in the town,—one, the scene of cruelty and terror, and another, living inwardly in Raphael's soul, which had really little to do with what was going on around him in the physical world.

Then, later again we find Raphael transplanted to Florence in the year 1504. What was the state of Florence then? In the first place the inhabitants give the impression of being a wearied people who had passed through inner and outer tumults and were living in a certain ennui and fatigue. What had been the fate of Florence? Struggles, just as in the case of the other town, bitter persecutions among different patrician families, and of course, quarrels with the outer world. And on the other hand the stirring event that had thrown every soul in the town into a state of upheaval when Savonarola, a short time previoulsy, had been martyred. This extraordinary figure of Savanarola appears before us uttering words of fire against the current misdeeds, the cruelty, materiality and heathendom of the Church. The words of Savonarola seem to resound again in our ears, words by which he dominated the whole of Florence and to such an extent that the people not only hung upon his lips but revered him as deeply as if a spirit from a higher world were standing before them in that ascetic body. The words of Savonarola transformed Florence as if the direct radiations of the Reformer of Religions Himself had permeated not only the religious conceptions, but the very social life of the town. It was as though a citadel of the Gods had been founded. Such was Florence under the influence of Savonarola. He fell a victim to those Powers whom he had opposed, morally and religiously. There rises before our soul the moving picture of Savonarola as he was led to the fire of martyrdom with his companions, and how from the gallows whence he was to fall onto the burning pyre, he turned his eyes—it was in May 1498—down to the people who had once hung upon his words, but who had now deserted him and were looking with apparent disloyalty at the figure who had for so long inspired them. Only in a very few,—and they were artists,—did the words of Savonarola still resound. There were painters at that time who themselves donned the monk's robe after Savonarola's martyrdom in order to work on in his Order under the influence of his spirit.

One can visualize the weary atmosphere lying over Florence, Raphael was transplanted into this atmosphere in the year 1504. And he brought with him in his creations the very Spirit's breath of Spring, although in a different way from Savonarola. When they contemplate the soul of Raphael in all its isolation,—a soul so different from the mood surrounding it in this town, visualizing him in the company of artists and painters working at his creations in lonely workshops in Florence or elsewhere, another picture rises up, showing us visibly in history how Raphael's soul stands out inwardly aloof from the outer life around it. And there arises before us the figures of the Roman Popes, Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X, in fact the whole Papal system against which Savonarola directed his words of scorn, the Reformers their attacks. Yet this Papacy was the Patron of Raphael who entered its service, although inwardly his soul had little in common with what we find in his Patron Pope Julius II for instance. It was said of Julius II that he gave the impression of a man with a devil in his body, who always likes to show his teeth to his enemies.

How was this possible? We see the contrast between outer life and Raphael's inner being in the early student days in Perugia, but we see it's still more intensely in Rome where his all-conquering works were created in the midst of an officialdom of Cardinals and Priests which had been intolerable to Savonarola. True, the two men were different, but we must nevertheless contrast Raphael with his environment in this way if we are to obtain a true picture of what was living in his soul.

Let us allow the picture of Raphael to work upon us. This cannot be done in detail in a lecture, but we can at least call up before the mind's eye one of the more widely known works for the purpose of contemplating the peculiar qualities living in Raphael's soul,—I mean the Sistine Madonna which is familiar to everybody in the innumerable copies existing all over the world. The Sistine Madonna is one of the greatest and noblest works of Art in human evolution. The “Mother with the Child” hover towards us on clouds which cover the Earth globe,—hover from the shadowy world of spirit and soul, surrounded in clouds which seem naturally to form themselves into human figures, one being the Child Himself. Feelings arise which, when we permeate them with soul, seem to make us forget all those legendary conceptions which culminate in the picture of the Madonna. We forget all that Christian traditions has to tell of her. I say this not for the sake of giving any dry description, but in order to characterize as fully as may be the feelings that arise within us at the site of the Madonna.

Spiritual Science raises us above all materialistic conception of human evolution. Although it is difficult to understand in the sense of Natural Science according to which the development of lower organisms proceeded until finally it reached the stage of the human being,—nevertheless it is the fact that man is a being whose life transcends everything below him in the kingdom of Nature. Spiritual Science knows that man contains a something within him much more ancient than all the beings who stand in greater or lesser proximity to him in the kingdom of Nature.

Man existed before the beings of the animal, plant and even of the mineral kingdom. In a wider perspective we look back to ages when that which now constitutes our inner being was already in existence andwhich only later was incorporated into the kingdoms which now stand below man. We see the being of man proceeding from a super-earthly world and realize that we can only truly understand it when we rise above all that the Earth can produce out of herself to something super-terrestrial and pre-terrestrial. Spiritual Science teaches that even if we allow all the forces, all the living substances connected with the Earth herself to work upon us, none of this can give a true picture of the whole essence and being of man. The gaze must rise beyond the Earthly to the Supersensible whence the being of man proceeds. Speaking figuratively we cannot but feel how something wafts towards the Earthly when, for instance, we gaze at the golden gleaming morning sunrise,—and especially is this the case in a region like that in which Raphael lived. Forces which work down into the Earth seem here to flow into the Earthly elements,—forces which inhere in the being of the Sun. And then out of the golden radiance there rises before our soul the sense image of what it is that is wafting hither in order to unite itself with the Earthly.

Above all in Perugia we may feel that the eye is beholding the very same sunrise once seen by Raphael, who in these phenomena was able to sense the nature of the Super-Earthly element in man. And gazing at the Sun-illuminated clouds there may dawn on us a realization that the picture of the Madonna and Child is a sense picture of the eternal Super-Earthly element in man that is wafted to Earth from super-earthly realms themselves and meets, in the clouds, those elements that can only proceed from the Earthly. Our perception may feel itself raised to the loftiest spiritual heights if we can give ourselves up—not theoretically, or in an abstract sense, but with the whole soul—to what works upon us in Raphael's Madonnas. This perfectly natural feeling may arise before the world-famous picture in Dresden. And to prove to you that it has indeed had this effect upon many people I should like to quote words written about the Sistine Madonna by Karl August, Duke of Weimar, the friend of Goethe, after a visit to Dresden: He says:

“In regard to the Raphael picture that adorns the collection, I felt as if the whole day long I had roamed over the heights of the Gotthard, through the Urner cleft and looked down from thence to the green, blossoming valley. As I looked at the picture and again away from it, it always seemed to me a revelation of the soul. Even the most beautiful Correggios were pictures only of the human; the memory of them tangible like beautiful forms. Raphael, however, remained with me as a breath, as one of those revelations sent to one in women's form by the Gods to bring us happiness or sorrow, like a figure that arises before one again and again in waking or dream life, whose gaze, once experienced, is with one forever, day and night, moving the innermost being.” (Karl August to his friend Knebel, 14th October, 1763)

Another remarkable thing is that if we study the literature of those who speak of the experiences of deep emotion at the site of this Sistine Madonna and also of other pictures of Raphael, we shall always find that they use the analogy of the Sun, all that is radiant and spring-like.

This gives us a glimpse into Raphael's soul and we realize how from amid the environment already described, it held converse with the eternal mysteries of the genesis of man. And then we feel the uniqueness of this soul of Raphael, realizing that it is not a “product” of its environment, but points to a hoary antiquity. There is no longer any need for speculation. A soul like this, looking out into the wide universe,—a soul which does not express the mystery of existence in ideas, but senses and gives it form in a picture like the Sistine Madonna, stands there in its inner perfection quite naturally as mature in the highest degree. Truly, the gifts inherent in this soul represents something that must have passed through other epochs of human evolution, not many such epochs which poured into it a power able to reemerge in what we call the “life of Raphael”. But from what it re-merges?

We see the living content of Christian legends and traditions appearing again in Raphael's pictures in the midst of an age when Christendom had, as it were, become heathenised and was given up to outer pomp and show, just as Greek paganism was represented in the figures of its gods and honoured above all else by the Greeks in their intoxication with beauty. We see Raphael giving form to the figures of Christian tradition in an age when treasures of Greek culture which had for long centuries been buried under ruins and debris on Roman soil were unearthed, Raphael himself assisting. It is a remarkable spectacle, the Rome where Raphael found himself at this time. Let us consider what had gone before.

First there are the centuriesof the Rise of Rome,—a Rome built upon the Egoism of individual men whose aim it was above all to establish a human society in the external physical world on the foundation of what man, as the citizen of a State, was meant to signify. Then during the age of the Emperors, when Rome had reached a certain eminence, it absorbs the Greek culture which streams into Roman spiritual life. Rome subdues Greece in the political sense, but in the spiritual sense Greece conquers Rome. Greek culture lives on within Roman culture; Greek art, to the extent to which it has been imbibed by Rome, lives on there; Rome is permeated through and through by the essence of Greek culture.

But why is it that this does not remain through the following centuries as a characteristic quality of the development of Italy? Why was it that something entirely different made its appearance? It was because soon after Greek culture had streamed into the life of Rome there came the influx of that other element which impressed its signature strongly into the spiritual life that was developing on the soil of Italy, I mean, Christendom. The mission of this inward deepening of Christendom was not that of the external sense element in the Greek State, Greek sculpture, or Greek philosophy. A formless element was now to draw into the souls of men and to be laid hold of by dint of inner effort and struggle. Figures like Augustine appear,—men whose whole being is inward turned. But then,—since everything in evolution proceeds in cycles, we see arising in men who have passed through this inward deepening and whose souls have long lived apart from the beauties of external life, a yearning for beauty. Once again they behold the inner in the outer. It is significant to see the inwardly deepened life of Francis of Assisi in Giotto's pictures for those pictures express the inner experiences called forth in the soul by Christianity. And even if the inner being of the human soul speaks somewhat haltingly and imperfectly from Giotto's pictures, we do nevertheless see a direct ascent to the point where the most inward elements, the very loftiest and noblest in external form confronts us in Raphael and his contemporaries. Here we are directed once again to a characteristic quality of this soul of Raphael.

If we try to penetrate into the kind of feelings and perceptions which Raphael himself must have had, we cannot help saying to ourselves: “Yes, indeed, in the contemplation of pictures like the Madonna della Sedia, for instance, the whole way in which the Madonna with the Child, and the Child John in the foreground are here represented, makes us forget the rest of the world, forget above all that this Child in the arms of the Madonna is connected with the experiences of Golgotha. Gazing at Raphael's pictures we forget everything that afterwards proceeds as the “life of Jesus”; we live entirely in the moment here portrayed. We are gazing simply at a Mother with a Child, which in the words of Hermann Grimm, is the great Mystery to be met with in the outer world. Peace surrounds this moment; it seems as though nothing could connect with it, before or afterwards; we live wholly in the relationship of the Madonna to her Child and separate it off from everything else. Thus do the creations of Raphael appear to us,—perfect and complete in themselves, revealing the Eternal in one moment of Time.

How shall we describe the feelings of a soul able to create like this? We cannot compare them to the feelings of a Savonarola, who when he uttered his words of scorn or was speaking those uplifting, godly words to Christian devotees, was seized with inner fire and passed through the whole tragedy of the Christ. We cannot conceive that Raphael's soul burst forth suddenly like the genius of a Savonarola, or others like him; nor can we conceive that it was swayed by the so-called “fire of Christendom.” Raphael could not however have portrayed the Christian conceptions in such inner perfection if his soul had been as foreign to this “Christian fire” as may appear to have been the case.

On the other hand, the forms in all their objectivity and roundness could not have been created by a soul permeated with Savonarola's fire and winged by the experience of the whole tragedy of the Christ. Quite a different peace, quite a different Christian feeling must have flowed into the soul. And yet no soul could have created these pictures if the very essence of Christian inwardness were not living within it. Surely it is almost natural to say: here indeed is a soul which brought with it into the physical existence of the artist Raphael, the fire that pours forth from Savonarola. When we realize how Raphael brings this fire with him through birth from earlier experiences, we understand why it is so illuminating and inwardly perfect; it does not come forth as a consuming and shattering element but as the reliance of plastic creation. In Raphael's innate gifts one already feels the existence of something that in an earlier life might have been able to speak with the same fire that is later found in Savonarola. It need not astonish us to find in Raphael a soul reincarnated from an age when Christianity was not yet expressed in picture form or in Art, but from the age of its founding, the starting point of the whole mighty impulse which then worked on through the centuries.

In the attempt to understand the soul like Raphael's, it is perhaps not too bold to say something of this kind, for those who have steeped themselves again and again in the works of Raphael and have thus learnt to reverence this soul in all its depth, cannot but realize what it is that speaks from those wonder-works into which the artist poured his soul. Thus the mission of Raphael only appears in the right light when,—to use an expression of Goethe,—we seek in a life already past for the Christian fire that is revealed in the radiance of the Raphael life. Then we understand why his soul was necessarily so isolated in the world and why it was that having possessed to an intense degree in an earlier existence something of the nature of a Savonarola. It was able to refresh and renew all that had arisen in the spiritual evolution of Italy in the 16th century.

I have already described how in the age of the Rise of the Empire, the influence of Greek culture has entered into Roman development and how an inward deepening of the soul had set in. Later on, in the age of Raphael,—the Renaissance,—we see on the one side the reappearance of this old Greek culture that had long been buried under ruins and debris. We see in Rome with the remnants of this Greek culture, the reappearance of the Greek spirit that had once adorned and beautified the city; the eyes of the Roman people turn once again to the forms that had been created by this Greek spirit. On the other side, however, we see how the spirit of Plato, of Aristotle, of the Greek Tragedians, penetrates Roman life in the epoch. Once again the victory of Greek culture over the Roman world! The Greek culture which was emerging from ruins and debris and spreading over the Italian peninsula could not help having a refreshing and renewing effect on a spirit like Raphael's, who in an earlier existence was imbued, to the exclusion of everything else, with the moral-religious conception of Christendom.

If we see the moral-religious impulse of Christendom born in the gifts of Raphael, we also see that element which these gifts did not at first contain rising before his eyes in the resurrected culture of Greece. And just as the city, rising out of ruins and debris, influenced this soul more deeply than all others, so also did the spiritual yields of Greek culture that were unearthed in the hidden manuscripts. Raphael's inborn gifts, united with his “super-spiritual” devotion to everything of a cosmic nature, worked hand-in-hand with the Greek spirit that was emerging again in his age. These were the two elements that united in Raphael's soul; this is why his works express the inwardness proceeding from the post-Grecian age,—the inwardness poured by Christianity into the evolution of humanity which was expressed in outward manifestation in a world of artistic forms permeated with the purest Greek spirit.

We are faced, then, with the remarkable phenomenon of the resurrection of Greek culture within Christendom through Raphael. In him we see the resurrection of a Christendom in an age which in a certain respect represents the “Anti-Christian” element around him. In Raphael there lives a Christianity far transcending what had gone before him and rose to a much loftier conception of the world as it was at that time. Yet it was a Christianity that did not dimly and vaguely direct the attention to the infinite spheres of the Spiritual, but was concentrated into forms that delight the senses too, just as in earlier times the Greeks expressed in artistic forms their ideas of the gods united with the formless element living and weaving in the universe.

This is what we find when we try to form a general picture of Raphael, allowing one or another of his creations in all their sublime perfection yet marvellous superfluity of youth,—for Raphael died at the age of 37,—to work upon us. Not for the sake of any colorless theory, or for the purpose of building any kind of philosophical history, but as the result of a conception born out of Raphael's works themselves, it must be said that the law holding sway in the course of human spiritual life finds its true revelation in a mighty spirit such as his.

It is not correct to think of this course of spiritual life as a straight line where effect follows cause as a natural matter of fact. It is only too easy in this connection to quote one of the so-called “golden sayings” of humanity to the effect that the life and nature does not advance by leaps and bounds. Well and good, but the fact is that in a certain respect both life and nature do continually do so, as can be seen in the development of the plant from the green leaf to the blossom, from the blossom to the fruit. Here everything does indeed “develop” but sudden leaps are quite obvious.

So too is it in the spiritual life of humanity, and this, moreover, is bound up with many mysteries, one of them being that a later epoch must always have its support in an earlier. Just as the male and female must work in conjunction, so may it be said that the different “Spirits of the Age” must mutually fertilize and work together in order that evolution may proceed. Roman culture, already at the time of the empire, had to be fertilized by Greek culture in order that a new “Spirit of the Age” might arise. This new Spirit of the Age had in its turn to be fertilized by the Christ Impulse before the inwardness which we then find in Augustine and others was possible. This human soul that had been so inwardly deepened, had once again to be fertilized by the spirit of the Greek culture which, although it was doubly buried, doubly hidden, was made visible again to the eyes of man in the works of Art resting beneath the soil of Italy, and to their souls in the rediscovered literary manuscripts.

The first Christian centuries in Italy were extraordinarily uninfluenced by what lived in Greek Philosophy and Poetry. Greek culture was buried in a double grave and waited in a realm beyond as it were, for an epoch when it could once again fertilized human soul that had meantime passed through a new phase. It was buried, this Greek culture, hidden from the eyes of men and from souls who did not know that it would live and flow onwards like a river that sometimes takes a track under a mountain and is not seen until it once again comes to the surface. Hidden, outwardly from the senses, inwardly from the depths of the soul was this Greek culture and now it appeared once again. For sense perception it was brought to the light of day from out of the soil of Italy and flowed into the works of art; for spiritual perception it was not only unearthed from the ancient manuscripts; men began once again to feel in the Greek sense how the material is the manifestation of the Spiritual. They began to feel all that Plato and Aristotle had once thought.

It was Raphael in whom this Greek culture could bring forth its fairest flower because the Christ Impulse had reached a greater ripeness in his soul than in any other. This twice buried and twice resurrected Greek culture worked in him in such a way that he was able to impress into forms the whole evolution of humanity. How marvellously was he able to accomplish this in the pictures in the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican! The ancient spiritual contests rise again before our eyes,—the struggles and activities of those Spirits who developed onwards during the epoch of inward deepening, who were not there in the Greek culture as it reappeared in the time of Raphael. The whole period of inward deepening was necessary before Greek culture could become visible in this particular form, and then it is painted on the walls of the Papal Chambers.

What the Greeks had conceived of in forms only, has now become inward; we see the inner struggles and conflicts of humanity itself charmed onto the walls of the Vatican in the spirit of Greece, of Greek Art and beauty. The Greeks poured into their statues their conception of the way in which the Gods worked upon the world. How this working of the Gods is experienced by man, so that he presses onwards to the foundations and causes of things,—this is what is expressed in the picture so often called “The School of Athens”. The conceptions which the human soul had learned to form of the Greek Gods is expressed in the Parnassus, with its new and significant interpretation of the Homeric gods. These are not the gods of the Iliad and Odyssey; they are the gods as perceived by a soul that had passed through the period of inward deepening.

On the other wall there is a picture that must remain indelibly in the memory of everyone, whatever their religious creed,—I refer to the fresco of the “Dispute about the Mass” which portrays the deepest inner truths. Whereas the other pictures,—in a Greek beauty of form it is true,—express the goal to be attained as the result of a certain philosophical striving, we have in the “Dispute about the Mass”, the fairest thing that the soul of man may experience. Here we find “Brahma”, “Vishnu”, “Shiva” portrayed in quite a different sense,—a proof to us that there is no need to adhere rigidly to a narrow Christian dogmatism. What can be inwardly experienced by every human soul, irrespective of creed or confession, as the “Trinity”, faces us in the symbolism,—though the portrayal is not merely “symbolical”, in the upper part of the picture. We see it again in the countenances of the Church Fathers, in their every gesture, in the whole grouping of the figures, in the wonderful coloring, indeed in the picture as a whole which portrays the inwardness of the human soul in a beauty of form permeated by the spirit of Greece.

And so the inward deepening experienced by the soul man in the course of 1500 years rises again in outer revelation. Christianity, not as the heathendom of the Roman popes and cardinals, but as the wonderful paganism of Greece with its mighty Gods, is resurrected in the works of Raphael.

Thus the soul of Raphael stands at the turning point of ages, pointing back to days of yore, containing within itself all that had developed up to the time of Christendom in the beauty of external revelation, and yet at the same time permeated by what had been brought about by the so-called “education of the human race”, namely an inward deepeningin the reincarnated soul. These wonderworks of so rare and art stand before us like a fusion of two ages, each clearly different from the other,—the pre-Grecian and the post-Grecian epochs, the one of external, the other of inner life. But the pictures also open up a glimpse into the future. Those who realize what the fusion of external beauty and the inner wisdom-filled urge of the human soul may signify, cannot but feel security and hope that this inward deepening—despite all the materiality that must develop more and more as humanity progresses,—must increase in the course of evolution and that the soul of man through successive lives will enter into greater and greater depths of inwardness.

If we now turn to literature and study not as “Art critics” or mere readers, the works of a spirit like Hermann Grimm, who tried with his whole soul to portray the workings of human fantasy, we can understand the depths of inner sympathy with which he contemplated the creations of Raphael. If we ourselves study a spirit like Hermann Grimm with this same inner sympathy, we can understand the significance of certain words of his which express what was passing through his soul when he makes a somewhat tentative utterance at the beginning of his books, in a passage dealing with the way in which Raphael is a product of all the ages. Grimm's formal descriptions of the various works of Raphael do not show us whence this particular thought has sprung. In the middle of other wider historical considerations into which Raphael is introduced, Hermann Grimm is struck by a thought which he records somewhat tentatively in these words: “When we contemplate the spiritual creations of humanity and see how they have passed over from days of yore into our own time, we may well be aware of a longing to tread this Earth once more in order to see what has been their fate as they have lived on.”

This desire for “reincarnation” expressed by Hermann Grimm in the introduction to his book on Raphael is remarkable, and moreover, deeply characteristic of the feeling living in the soul of a man of our own time,—I mean of course one who tried to penetrate into the very soul of Raphael and his connection with other epochs. Surely this makes us feel that works like those of Raphael are not merely a “natural product”; they do not only induce a sense of gratitude for all that the past has hitherto bestowed. They rather give birth to a feeling of hope, because they strengthen our belief in an advancing humanity. We feel that these works could not be what they are if progress were not the very essence of humanity. A feeling of security and hope arises when we allow Raphael to work upon us in the true sense and we are able to say: Raphael has spoken to humanity itself in his artistic creations.

In front of the Stanzas in the Camera della Segnatura we do indeed feel the transitoriness of the outer work and that those ofttimes repaired frescoes can no longer give any conception of what Raphael's magic once charmed on those walls. We realize that at some future time men will no longer be able to gaze at the original works, but we know too that humanity will never cease progressing. Raphael's works began their march of triumph when out of sheer love of them the innumerable reproductions now in existence were made. The influence of the originals live on, even in the reproductions. We can so well understand Hermann Grimm when he says that he once hung a photograph of the Sistine Madonna in his room but always felt that he had no right to go into that room; it seemed to him to be a sanctuary of the Madonna in the picture. Many will have realized that the soul is changed after they have entered livingly into some picture of Raphael, even though it is only a reproduction. True one day the originals will disappear, but may it not be said that they exist nonetheless in other worlds?

The words of Hermann Grimm in his book on Homer are quite true: “Neither can the original works of Homer truly delight us in these days for when we read the Iliad and Odyssey in ordinary life without higher spiritual faculties, we are no longer able to enter fully into all the subtleties, beauty and power of the Greek language. The originals exist no longer; yet in spite of this Homer speaks to us through his poems.” What Raphael has given to the outer world however will always remain as a living witness of the fact that there was once an age in the evolution of humanity when the mysteries of existence were indeed revealed through mighty creations, although at that time men could not penetrate into these mysteries through printed writing. In the age of Raphael men read less, but they beheld a great deal more.

Raphael's eternal message to humanity will bear witness to this epoch,—an epoch differently constituted but that will nevertheless work on through all the ages to come, because humanity is one complete organism. Thus Raphael's creations will live on in the outer course of human evolution and inwardly in the successive lives of the spirit of man, bestowing ever mightier and more deeply inward treasures.

Spiritual Science points to a twofold continuation of life, one aspect of which has been described in previous lectures here, and will be still further described, and to another spiritual life towards which we are ever striving. This spiritual life becomes our guide as we pass through the epochs of earthly existence. Hermann Grimm spoke words of truth when he expressed what his study of Raphael imparted to his feeling and perception. He says: “A time must come when Raphael's work will have long since faded and passed away. Nonetheless he will still be living in mankind, for in him humanity blossomed forth into something that has its very roots in man and will forever germinate and bear fruit.” Every human soul who can penetrate deeply enough into Raphael's soul will realize this. Indeed we can only truly understand Raphael when we can sublimate and deepen in the sense of Spiritual Science a feeling which permeated Hermann Grimm when he turned again and again to the contemplation of the painter. (In the last lecture we saw how near Hermann Grimm stood to Spiritual Science.) It will help us to understand our own relation to Raphael and the sense in which thoughts such as have been given today may grow into seeds. If we conclude with a passage from Grimm which expresses what I have really wished to say: “Men will always long to understand Raphael, the fair young painter who surpassed all others, who was fated to die early and whose death was mourned by all Rome. When Raphael's works are lost his name will nevertheless remain engraven in the memory of man.”

Thus wrote Hermann Grimm went in his own particular way he began to describe Raphael. We can understand these words and also those with which he concludes his book: “All the world will long to know of the life work of such a man for Raphael has become one of the basic elements in the higher development of the human spirit. We would fain draw nearer to him nay, we need him for our healing.”

When the words “health issues” are spoken, many of our contemporaries may reflect on how our views, our opinions of everyday life, of life in general, of all its blessings and woe; when the words “health issues” are spoken, however, it is particularly a feeling that may be evoked here that slumbers more or less consciously or unconsciously in every human soul: that man rightly regards health as a precious possession in this physical life.

Not only those who are completely absorbed in this physical life, with all their thoughts and interests, regard health as a precious thing, but also those who focus their minds on the highest ideals of humanity, who focus their minds on the spiritual, must also recognize what a precious thing health is, and even if he says to himself: Above all, this health is valuable to me because it enables me to fulfill my tasks in the world when I have it, because it prevents me from fulfilling these duties, these tasks in life when it is in any way damaged.

What the word “health” encompasses is directly or indirectly related to our highest destiny, to our human goals. Therefore, it may well depress some who reflect on how health and illness are always viewed differently in a certain way, depending on how human views and opinions change; and those who are attentive observers of life in its depths may well have seen many changes in this regard, especially in recent decades.

But what underlies all striving in relation to health and illness, in relation to the healing of the human being, is in turn only that which we must call the science of life, the knowledge of life. What transformations have taken place in relation to the knowledge of life in these last decades, much greater ones than one would usually assume! It could tell the observer of life a great deal if he observed the way in which currents arise from the scientific foundation, from the scientific knowledge of the world, and lead to this or that view health, if he compares these currents and this foundation [with that] of 20, 30, 40 years ago, how it was then and how it presents itself to us today.

What has often been emphasized here in relation to many other areas, namely that our age has taken a significant step towards materialism, can be observed particularly in the area to which our present consideration is devoted.

Those who are able to look back on the scientific knowledge that underlies today's discussion, as it was formed 20, 30, 40 years ago, may come across a venerable personality when they happen to encounter this phenomenon. I myself once encountered this honorable personality, and I may well refer to the character of this personality because it seems symptomatic to me of what has changed over the past few decades.

Those who were lucky enough to study in Vienna quite a long time ago were able to get to know the scientific basis of our current field of study at the medical faculty in Vienna. They got to know the then famous and widely significant anatomist Hyrtl, the man who provided the basis for hundreds and hundreds of young doctors at the time, the basis that every doctor needs, the anatomical foundations... When he stood before his audience and built up the human being from the components of the human organism, which seemingly can only be expressed in the driest of terms for scientific observation, when he built the human being out of anatomical parts, then, listening to him, you had the feeling that behind this description, this explanation of the structure of the human organism, something else was still alive, something lived from a deep understanding of the spiritual, which builds the wonderful structure of the human organism... there was just something... something... there was something in Hyrtl's presentation that can only be expressed as follows: just as the creative power of nature itself, as the spirit of nature, allows the individual structures to sprout and grow into the entire structure of the human organism, so this human organism was anatomically built up before the audience.

Those of you who have often attended these lectures here know that spiritual science tells us that what we call the outer physical body, what the eyes see, what the hands touch and what the ears and the lower senses of the human being can perceive, that this is only part of the human being, only the outer sensual part, that everything that external science can only deal with this outer limb. They also know that the first higher limb in human nature, which truly and really lives for those who can observe human beings with higher abilities, is what we call the etheric or life body in spiritual science: the mysterious master builder who is there and builds up this human organism.

This etheric or life body is something that cannot be seen by the physical eye, but what the open “spiritual eye” of the seer can see as a fact just as much as the external sensual facts can be seen by the physical eye.

One would like to say: Hyrtl stood there as a chaste scientist, as a chaste physician; he said nothing about this etheric or life body, but how he spoke of it,

how the one developed from the other, it was as if that principle of the life body lived in his words; and that was enough, it had an enormous stimulating effect, he influenced his listeners so that something of the mysterious depths of the whole of human nature was awakened in them, that something of that striving was kindled in them, which wants to take hold of man ever more deeply and which does not remain on the surface...

Soon afterwards, one could see that these times were passing, in which this scientific foundation was considered in this way...

Let me make this clear from the outset: it was not just because Hyrtl was a particularly great genius, but because he had grown out of a time that, if not precisely cognizant of the spiritual world, at least had a feeling for it. Anyone who observes life knows that today everything is pieced together, that such a representation no longer exists in broad circles of science... therefore, we must emphasize all the more that it is precisely spiritual science that goes back to the whole, to the spiritual-living behind the sensual, that it has the task of fertilizing and illuminating that which can be offered in the external, sensory realm for the horizons that interest us today, for it is in the external, sensory realm that our admirable science has achieved the most extraordinary things... for there is no lack of individual research, no lack of methods by which one can gain insight into the individual external facts of natural existence and its interrelationships...

But what spiritual science will have to bring to this individual research... that is the overarching spirit of the matter...

Now, the very same Hyrtl made a remarkable statement, a statement that may be our guiding principle today and from which we can start today. It may sound strange to many today, and yet it was made by a brilliant anatomist and physician:

Only a physician can recognize illnesses, but anyone who knows what help is can heal them.

A seemingly rather strange saying; now, let us see how spiritual science can relate to this...

Above all, we must be clear about one thing, because of the brevity that must characterize today's lecture – its subject could take up 20 to 40 lectures without exhausting everything – with this brevity, it is necessary that what is said is understood in such a way that one recognizes the attitude from which it is said. This attitude is basically the same as that on which all spiritual science is based; it can be briefly characterized by saying that spiritual science does not have the vocation of proving one or the other party line right, it has to stand on a higher vantage point and, precisely because it looks into the depths of existence, of life, has to gain a point of view that can have a unifying effect... Those who look around at life know that the shades of opinion that fight each other on the... are not usually so that one can say that one is absolutely right and the other wrong...

As a rule, one must say: Those who fight with slogans, who carry a flag, have gained their views and opinions in very specific areas of life; these areas of life have, so to speak, had a suggestive effect on them, and they actually only say what can be naturally gained as a one-sided view of life from their area of life...

But theosophy is not supposed to agitate for this or that direction, not even in the area that interests us today, in the area of illness and health and healing... Perhaps the humanities scholar in particular might feel tempted to advocate for one or the other... because in how many party divisions do we see today the very area in which the human heart would perhaps most like to sense unity.

Theosophy has the task of saying what is, how things are in life... and then the theosophist has the confidence that man, when he knows through his knowledge what is, will then come to realize through himself what he should. The point of view has not yet become theosophical, which appears and says: I also want to persuade that this or that should be done, and not...

Theosophy or spiritual science should never have anything to do with “should” or demands. It should objectively tell what is and have confidence in the human being that if he knows what is, he will find the guiding principle for his “should” in his own soul...

Now, who could deny that the most diverse, the most varied, the seemingly most opposing party lines confront us precisely in the area of health issues... and with what conviction and sharpness is fought for one's own conviction and with what bitterness is the other conviction fought against! And it should also be mentioned at the outset that Theosophy in particular never wants to do anything against the sciences, against the true scientific work. To put it bluntly: spiritual science or Theosophy must not go along with dilettantism in this field; it would prefer to work in harmony with those who at least have the opportunity to be experts in this field...

Of course, it is impossible to list all the shades of parties in this field here, but even if that is not possible, at least some of them should be roughly characterized. First of all, there is the allopathic healing method, the one that is so heavily opposed by so-called natural healing and what is called homeopathy... Much more could be said, but we have to draw in broad strokes... Not so much should be said for the time being about what the concepts of spiritual science could achieve, but rather what is said, so to speak, in a popular or scientific way as a characteristic of the individual shades of the parties. There we hear that the medical healing method is based on the fact that there are illnesses, damage to health, and that there are specific remedies from certain realms of nature that counteract certain damage that we call illnesses in a certain way . For each disease, this or that remedy is indicated, and science works in a careful and conscientious manner to find the specific remedies for this or that form of disease through experience in the sensory realm...

Naturally, we cannot go into detail here; as I said, we should only point out the characteristic features. But now we hear from many others, who take the same so-called natural healing approach, that everything the so-called allopathic healing approach says is fundamentally based on error... Because it takes too little account of the deeper causes of the disease; it looks at the way the disease manifests itself, but one must go deeper, assume that the causes lie deeper, that where a form of disease occurs, there are deeper disturbances in the organism that can only be remedied by intervening in this organism in the way that nature itself would intervene if it were to direct and guide the organism in a completely normal way.

We hear that, above all, it is not so much a matter of combating the individual diseases, but of investigating those activities in the organism, those functions that have been undermined and as a result of which the disease occurs, and which in turn are to be put back on the right track through appropriate measures, and now various healing methods are indicated, various physical and other remedies...

Above all, the specific remedy is opposed here, which, as experience has shown, is there to combat this or that disease. With bitterness, one side fights against the other.

Now, regardless of how one or the other or I myself think about it, let us briefly characterize how, for example, the homeopathic healing method thinks in turn in its main features; it says: In what we initially encounter in the disease, we do not have what appears to be the primary damage, what appears to be the primary unhealthiness, but we have before us in the phenomena that present themselves to us a kind of force that is called upon in the organism to fight the actual damage that lies deeper. Thus, in what presents itself to us as the symptom of the disease, we have something that the organism brings into the field in order to bring out the actual, deeper damage. We must therefore pay attention to what causes the very symptoms that appear in the disease. We must investigate which remedy we can find in the natural kingdom that causes exactly the same symptoms in a healthy person as we see in the sick person. We then support what nature has initiated...

What appears to us as illness has been initiated by nature, and we should help it by applying the means that cause the same symptoms in a healthy person, in order to support the fight against the actual damage.

One would like to say that with all these party shades, as far as the theories are concerned, on what is given as a logical basis, one would like to say that one can go along a long, long way everywhere and one soon recognizes , after a little insight into the matter, how little the objections of the respective opponents actually apply. And we can actually say that in all these fields, the supporters put forward weighty arguments in favor of their convictions. Or is it not true when today scientific medicine points out, by means of easily compiled statistics, the great successes, especially in external health care, and the improvement in the health situation in cities under the influence of precisely this medical healing method... and how then it is pointed out how much good has been done in this very respect by the research of many a specific remedy in recent decades... Great successes can be pointed out; those who would compare the health conditions in cities about a century ago with today's would be unjust if they did not recognize what medical science has achieved here. On the other hand, however, we hear, and we certainly have to admit it, that even if these conditions have improved, on the other hand it cannot be denied that certain types of disease, heart disease, nervous disorders and the like are increasing at an alarming rate... and that must also be admitted...

And should not the layman sometimes use this or that word, saying that, even if it is correct in a certain respect, that many conditions have improved, many worrying social consequences are emerging...

One need only think, for example, of the fact that in the case of a disease that was only discovered in the last few decades, namely tetanus, attention is drawn to a germ that is rightly said to be carried by people who remain healthy and others then become ill from it...

... Where would it end...

It is, for example, quite possible and a fact that entire schools have been infected with this or that communicable disease and it has been found that teachers who remained healthy were the carriers of the germs; they themselves were not infected by it. What tyranny would result if one were to build dogmatic legislation on such cases?

... How does that grow, what one could call the fear of illness, the fear of the mysterious sources of illness, through a way of thinking that can be very easily based on such attempts that cannot be doubted at all...

You really have to be a party man if you want to fight this or that with certain buzzwords...

Some of the watchwords of natural healing, for example, are as if all specific remedies had to be eradicated, as if one could only go back to the basics of the disease through physical or other methods, and support the functions... one hears the same watchword over and over again: poison; all specific remedies are poisons, but a poison could never be anything useful under any circumstances. And you can see how the word “poison” can have an enormous suggestive effect on entire gatherings. You only have to let these suggestions work and thereby create convictions that are extraordinarily effective. But anyone who knows what poison really is knows that those who use such buzzwords are the ones who are least accountable for what poison is. What is poison? The phenomena, the facts of nature, especially those in human life, are so tremendously complicated that answering this question is not so easy. What is poison in nature?

Belladonna, for example, is a poison for humans; the rabbit can eat it quite well.

Hemlock... Socrates had to drink from the hemlock cup to carry out his death sentence, but for the goat, hemlock is not a poison at all.

Hydrogen sulfide is certainly very toxic to the organism in certain respects; but there are small organisms, so-called sulfur bacteria, a type of split algae, that live almost exclusively on this substance: they build their organism in a very strange way from the sulfur... and if you deprive them of the hydrogen sulfide, they die. This fact provides an example of how the material can be incorporated into the phenomena of life...

So the keyword “poison” should not be the only one that tells us what we are actually fighting...

We will only make progress if we try to approach the whole consideration more and more from the perspective of spiritual science...

What is the actual difference between medical healing methods and naturopathy... in principle? We see a big difference that the spiritual scientist can characterize quite accurately from his point of view without taking sides for one or the other direction...

For those who know the facts, it is simply nonsense to say that there are no specific remedies for this or that disease. But what is healing with such remedies based on?

The fact that there is damage in the disease and the remedy combats this damage, that this can happen, is not disputed. To dispute the positive, that which is gained from experience, is narrow-minded and would not be spiritual science. But what are we dealing with in the human being when we heal by combating some kind of health disorder with external means? We are dealing with the physical human body, the external aspect of human nature. Since the human being has this physical human body, there is no doubt that it can also be treated with such an external remedy.

Natural healing has a certain idea that there is something mysterious and supernatural behind the physical human body, that what makes up the physical body is governed by the etheric or life body... The doctor does not need to believe it, but he does take the view that there is something that lives and moves behind the physical apparatus. The naturopath has an inkling of this etheric or life body and tries, so to speak, not to give so much to what can only be externally determined by physical means, but goes back to what lies behind the physical, what can be determined. This is very important, but the pressure of the materialistic way of thinking is far too strong for him to be able to move towards real spiritual knowledge of human nature. It would be horrifying if anyone who claimed to be a scientist were to speak of the visible having its basis in the invisible, the sensual in the supersensible.

Therefore, one can at most suspect that there is such a thing, but one cannot speak of it as a reality. If one speaks of it and has gained conviction from spiritual science, if one has recognized the inner reasons that lead to this supersensible link of human nature, then one cannot stop there, then one also proceeds to other links of human nature... then one enters with purest spiritual science into the secrets of the invisible, but which is nevertheless very real and real for that reason.

Then you go further and learn that in this physical human body there is not only an ether or life body that distinguishes humans from everything that surrounds us as seemingly inanimate... This ether or life body is a constant fighter against the physical body following its physical substances and chemical forces during life. Because when this life body withdraws from the physical body, then the physical body of the person follows the physical substances and forces, but then it is a corpse. During life, however, the etheric or life body is a constant fighter against the decay of the physical body...

Thus, in the etheric body, we have the creator, the builder of the physical body of man or any living being, who stands behind this physical body.

Then we proceed to what we call the astral body. This is the carrier of lust and suffering, joy and pain, of all the surging feelings and ideas, of everything that is instinct, desire and passion, that is, the instincts. But beyond that, we then also come to a fourth link, the carrier of the actual self-awareness, the carrier of the ego.

These four members make up the whole human being, and if we want to consider the whole human being, we must consider that the higher, the supersensible members are the actual creators of the lower, the more sensual members. Everything that happens in the lower members arises from what happens in the upper members...

Therefore, one should not only proceed to the idea of an etheric or life body, but one must consider that deeper causes, much deeper causes must lie precisely in the astral body and in the soul-spiritual of the human being, if one wants to come to an understanding of illness and health. Here the causes of the illnesses are not so easy to find. This vehicle of pleasure and suffering, instinct, desire and passions, expresses that which is within it in the etheric body and in the physical body. If something unhealthy lives in the astral body, consisting of wrong passions, drives and instincts, then this must have an effect on the etheric body and the physical body:

But, someone might say, let us look at a person; what contradictions can prevail between their healthy perceptions and healthy urges and the illnesses they nevertheless have! In this case, we must fully embrace spiritual science and be clear that what we call the innermost essence of man, the actual individuality of man, is something that is only just enveloped by the physical shell, and that it takes completely different paths in its development than this physical shell. When we look at the core of a person, we say: this person consists of two currents...

The person who comes to us in life, let us look at him. He is first a result of heredity, a result of what comes from father, mother and the ancestors before them...

But in all that continues through the generations, in all that lives something completely different, something that now has to do with the astral body and I. And when we meet a person, we see not only what we have inherited from previous generations, but also what has descended from the spiritual world as the spiritual core of our being. We look at what is called re-embodiment or reincarnation, at the innermost core of our being, which carries over from life to life. This unites with what lies in the line of inheritance, permeating and energizing what is inherited from father and mother. And even if we do not see today how the instincts and drives of individuality affect the physical body in a way that makes us ill or healthy, we would see this if we looked at what the person has been in his or her previous life.

If we recognize this, we can learn to see the passions and instincts and desires in the present life that originate from what we brought with us from these previous lives and that act as causes of illness in this present life, even if they were not acquired in this life.

And this is where the knowledge of the essence of the human being begins, as a proper basis for assessing the healing method.

Can we somehow see how the astral body indicates what it has to say in relation to what makes the physical body healthy or sick?

For example, someone has to raise a child... according to the child's nature, this or that is good, one has the stereotyped view. Instead of strict individualization, also with regard to health, one has the opinion: there are many illnesses, but only one health. But in truth, there are as many healths as there are people. Every person has their own health, their own conditions of being healthy. But with stereotyped concepts, you can ruin everything possible with the child. For example, the child does not want to eat this or that food. This is, of course, naughtiness, one thinks. But it would be much more correct to say: This is proof that sympathy and antipathy is nothing more than the astral body feeling: I must have this if I am to work in the right way on my physical body, and what the child rejects, it cannot use.

What the child's palate rejects or craves expresses what is healthy for it. It is therefore right to observe carefully what the child demands, what it is keen on. When does the astral body perceive something as pleasure, especially in childhood? When what it enjoys has in itself, as it were, the potential to be incorporated into the organism in a beneficial way. Only when something is already corrupted in the order of healthy human nature, then enjoyment is no longer a true guide... That what is healthy for him, he also likes, and what makes him sick, he does not like, that is the only measure of health, that there is an appropriate sense for everything we take into our organism. So it is a matter of making the consciousness of what is good for us as alive as possible within us, of making our astral body, the carrier of pleasure and desire, lively for what is healthy for our organism...

There are now means to achieve a great deal in this regard... Human nature differs from person to person because a different individuality permeates and energizes the exterior.

A case that occurred: there was a person who, from early childhood, had a terrible aversion to all meat; he could not smell meat, so to speak. He could not smell it, so he did not eat it. At first he was in a tolerant environment. But there were aunts and uncles who thought that not eating meat was completely perverse... And so the good man allowed himself to be persuaded to at least start with a little broth, then move on to veal and so on... But he also came to mutton... and he soon ended up with

severe encephalitis because it was absolutely impossible for this person's body to do what was necessary to digest meat using the powers within it. He was so constituted that he knew very well what was healthy for him from an early age...

But if the same food, which was the only right food for this person, were given to another, the latter could suffer the greatest harm from it...

All people must be considered as individuals. And there are countless people who, if they want to continue living as they are living, can no longer possibly become vegetarians without further ado.

It has been said that human nature is not capable of doing the work necessary to convert what we take in from plants into what the human organism needs. With plant-based nutrition, a kind of work must be done internally by the human being that he is unable to muster. The work that has to be done there is partly taken off his hands by the fact that he takes his nourishment from the animal kingdom, where some of this work has already been done and he now has less work to do. However, this does not apply to everyone, only to many people. For many, it would be unhealthy if they could not apply the strong forces of digestion and processing that are necessary to digest plant food...

To understand this, one has to embrace the radical difference between the plant and human kingdoms... the animal kingdom lies in the middle.

It is a contrast between humans and plants... we can characterize this contrast first by saying that something that is purely present in physical nature...

A human being breathes, he inhales the oxygen in the air and exhales carbon dioxide. The plant absorbs the carbon dioxide, breaks down the compound, takes the carbon it contains and uses it to build its organism out of inanimate, purely physical carbon and releases the oxygen again. This is the interaction between humans and plants. This expresses a spiritual interaction in an external parable. Behind the plant stands its spiritual, behind the human being his spiritual. You know that a plant cannot flourish when it is deprived of light. Look at it, how it withers away. That which the plant builds up from inanimate substances, it builds up under the influence of light... Light! How much we owe to it... we take from it as much as we need...

But we must not only see, also in the light, not only pay attention to the physical. In that which is physical in the light, there is also a spiritual element. Behind physical light there is also a spiritual element. This spiritual element, which flows towards us from the sun to the earth in the rays of light, is the same as that which lives in our astral body, that inner light that works and creates in us — in the spiritual light, the spiritual aura. They are nothing other than the spirit of the physical body, the invisible light that works in us as the astral body. And that is what is at work in us! Outside, the physical light of the sun is at work on the plants. And that is the peculiar relationship between the physical light outside, which works on the plants, causing them to grow and flourish... and the spiritual light that is in us as our astral body. That is the relationship, that they are opposed to each other...

That which builds up the plants is removed, decomposed, destroyed by the process that the spiritual light ignites in us. And our life in the physical body as a spiritual being could not exist if we did not, so to speak, set up processes of destruction in everything we take in. We remove what the plants have built up. We continue in the opposite way to what the plants have begun... Thus we are spiritually opposed to the plant. And what is given to us as food from the plant kingdom, that we in truth destroy...

Our thinking is in its physical expression a process of destruction. What we take in must be worn away again, must be shattered again. This is how we maintain an inner life...

What is given to us from the plant kingdom as food is given to us in a virgin state. What is given to us from the animal kingdom is not given to us in such a virgin state... Because the animal stands in between the plant and the human, the animal fulfills that which the human has to fulfill to a certain extent... ... already accomplishes to a certain extent what man would otherwise have to accomplish within himself... and man can only begin his own activity where that which he has received is located. He only gets what the animal has already made out of it...

Let us look at man; he is truly a microcosm, a summary of everything that is going on outside...

His nutritional process is what the expansive plant kingdom elevates and transforms so that this human body can become an instrument of consciousness. In this respect, it is a totality. For the spiritual scientist, the animal is nothing more than a one-sided development of human characteristics. Each animal, each animal species represents certain characteristics for the spiritual scientist, developed in a particular way...

All these characteristics, combined in harmony – the one diminished by the other, the one balanced by the other – give us the human being...

The animal performs the natural process to a certain one-sidedness... We acquire this one-sidedness when we take the no longer virgin food from the animal kingdom...

Now let's assume that we are really organized in such a way that we can muster the necessary strength to process plant food. We have this strong reservoir of strength within us, which is only used when we take plant food. What happens if we don't do it, if we don't carry out this transformation from the vegetable to the human level? Then the unused forces seek other outlets in our organism.

The French abbé I told you about had precisely such forces within him. They are there and they have to work, and if they cannot find a healthy outlet, they will eventually throw themselves at another field of activity. The abbé then died from the effects of the large forces that arose in this improper way.

Let us take, on the other hand, a different person, such as a bank manager, who knows nothing but his profession. If we were to expect him to eat a vegetarian diet, he would not be able to do so. He will not be able to sustain it. He cannot process the plant substances to the point where they can serve him for the functioning of his organism; he must let some of the work be done for him.

We can therefore also see an important difference and contrast between the way plant food and animal food affect people. What does a person who wants to digest plant food have to develop in themselves? What do they do when they eat plant food? They have to muster certain forces that work from below, from the plant. These are forces that are more at the center of his being than those he needs to process animal food. These are forces within him that no one can do for him. By accomplishing this internally, he also has an inner source of independence and strength. His inner life becomes more active and intense as a result. What he consumes from the plant kingdom does indeed make his inner life more active. However, this requires a more comprehensive spiritual life, one that is directed towards contemplation, towards an understanding of the great interrelationships of life... If a person then takes his nourishment from the animal kingdom, then this is only right if he does not have these independent powers. For the nourishment that a person takes from the animal kingdom, he will use inner powers that make him less independent, since he has some of the work done for him...

In spiritual terms, what comes from the animal kingdom stimulates what makes man strong and vigorous without his intervention.

For those who cannot draw strength and energy for life from within themselves, a plant-based diet will be of no use; they will only be weakened by it. They need to have their strength and powers given to them, so to speak, prepared by animal food.

From such contexts, we can easily understand how it comes about that peoples who live on a plant-based diet lead a life more devoted to contemplation... while those who eat animal products show more warlike qualities.

Thus, what must be considered a health issue and a nutritional issue at the same time is definitely linked to the individuality of the person, to what the person can muster internally. And we see in the person whether the person does not partly acquire strong powers of independence in his inner being through a plant-based diet...

Through plant nutrition, we see him acquiring all the forces he needs to become, so to speak, a comprehensive human being, to become a human being who can see the big picture of life. Through what he acquires from animal nutrition, we see him being led to the specialties...

Thus we see from the interaction... through what... the great questions of existence for all details of life are regulated... There we see, so to speak, man's inner nature expressing itself in such a way that there are strong forces within him... or that he must have these strong forces given to him... We see, so to speak, the astral body at work in him... and how this work must be if the balance in the human organism is to be restored...

And once we have understood this, we will no longer doubt that much, much depends on how we are able to act on the astral body... but not only on this, but also how we can act physically on the physical body and ethereally on the ethereal body...

A materialistic view will only want to have an effect on the physical... Let us take the case of a sick person. The materialistically thinking person will look at these symptoms of illness and he will count on this: in this or that area, there is this or that air, there are these or those conditions, which, like one physical on another physical, affect the sick organism...

Those who are grounded in spiritual science will know that in many cases this is a very erroneous conclusion. They will know that it must work more radically and thoroughly if the human being is placed where his inner experiences can be stimulated in the appropriate way, where he can be truly happy, can become truly harmonious within himself. In particular, with certain forms of illness, namely nervous disorders, it will be most important that we work directly on the astral body and through that which can stimulate strong forces in the astral body...

Thus, if someone develops those strong forces within themselves that are developed through plant nutrition, it can be a good remedy for even severe damage to the organism. What works internally, when the inner forces that... must process the virgin plant food, can eliminate serious damage.

You can see from a person whether he also takes the trouble to convert the plant nutrients, in which there is little fat, into fat through his own inner powers, or whether he prefers to have it taken from him by enjoying animal fat... to develop those strong powers within him that make him independent... in other words, whether the person is not too lazy to contribute a little to his own fattening... this looks out of the eye whether it happens or not...

The one who does not overfeed himself with animal fat will also find within himself the possibility of developing the strong forces within him, and these are more and more inclined towards the spiritual...

And now there is a great, comprehensive law... that says: Everything that a person enjoys and looks at only as sensuality, that affects the withering, dying forces within him... and everything that he looks at as spiritual, that affects the invigorating, healing powers of a person... And vice versa, anyone who wants to help themselves in this direction can do so by eating enough plant-based food in addition to meat, and this can help in terms of awakening interest in the supernatural world...

Anyone who is willing to do something to prepare his own fat from low-fat plant foods will be able to become much more spiritual than someone who gets all his fat from animals...

A grotesque confirmation arises from the following incident. There is a so-called nudist culture in Berlin. Someone went there initially out of purely artistic interest, wanted to see what it was like and let the audience and what was presented there take effect on them. Then this person quickly ran away. It was a strange audience, almost all old men...

Where one actually assumes that the sensual has an effect on the sensual, there is an attraction to what is dying in life. And those who merely seek the sensual as sensual will be able to see that the dying parts of their being are particularly affected... whereas the spiritual interest... will particularly affect the germinating, growing parts of the human being.

Spiritual research begins to give people something that is certainly not as comfortable as just describing something... and also not as comfortable as listening to a lecture where images are projected onto a screen. You don't need to do much inwardly.

Spiritual science speaks of the supernatural, and that cannot be taken in as comfortably. It appeals to something in human nature, to which he must work, to which he must put the most active forces within him into cooperation... This spiritual science thus goes directly to the spiritual... to the paths of the soul... It is not there for the eyes... And no one claims that the concepts and ideas of spiritual science are real in the sense that they are tangible. In this sense, they are not supposed to be true. But what is hardly known today in wide circles, these so-called unreal ideas, what are they? These are precisely the healthy, the strong ideas, which, if they only work sufficiently in human nature, are at the same time the strong, the vigorous and effective ideas that make us healthy right into the etheric body.

When spiritual science guides us... it evokes ideas in us that have a healing effect from within in the most eminent sense... organic substance in such a way that it has already left its origins, so to speak, and cannot be repaired by itself again... The higher we ascend in the hierarchy of organisms...

Where internal forces are to be developed for recovery, the strongest force is that which flows out of the spirit of the human being, which is directed towards rejuvenation and growth, and the one who appeals to these forces also has a good foundation in the sense of health... the strong forces within are unleashed up to the higher realms of the health issue... Hardly a beginning has been made though...

We understand little more than a physical effect on the person... Here spiritual science is called upon to address the issue of health in such a way that remedies are found and are available that do not just work on the physical level but directly on the spiritual, that is, on the astral; and that work to restore physical health indirectly through the astral. Here indeed Theosophy has a great task. It will be able to solve it, because it can penetrate deeply into the life that surrounds us daily, into the life of the healthy and the sick person.

And here it is truly to be welcomed with great satisfaction that a good start has been made on the basis of the theosophical research, in that Dr. Peipers in Munich is applying a kind of color therapy that is thoroughly based on the theosophical view, on spiritual science... the secrets of color, its deeper spiritual foundations, have been divined.

Here one does not think of the physical effects... not the light works in these things, the color must first become an idea, must first shine and light up in the astral body... as a color idea, via the detour of the astral body, they work out into the periphery... Even if this can initially only be used for certain forms of illness, a start has been made...

And this theosophical current will, in these and many other things, by penetrating into the depths of things, still create many things of which today's materialistic mind has no dreams. Whatever one may say... the truth, the truth of the spiritual, will prevail. So... few points of view that are connected with this subject. It will have been shown to you how, on the one hand, spiritual science can never be one-sided...

Let us assume that someone has a migraine. What does he take? Migränin, for example. That is nothing! Or some other remedy is prescribed for him. But perhaps he does not have time to do everything that is prescribed for him... It is quite possible for a person to be so strong that he can bear it well if his physical organism is treated physically in certain areas.

But the problem can only be solved on an individual basis. Through a deeper knowledge of human nature, we will come to realize that there is a basis in spiritual science itself for evoking healthy urges and healthy instincts... that spiritual life is what...

Behind all matter lies spirit... and that which shows itself as content... in matter is only an expression of spiritual processes... The same applies to food: it should taste good, because the fact that it tastes good is an expression of the fact that it fits into the organism in a healthy and harmonious way.

In this way, spiritual science will enable you to stimulate feelings and instincts in a healthy way, and the result will be that those who study the spiritual wisdom will become healthy...

Just as the animals graze outside in the meadow and find the right thing in their instincts... so will spirituality and spiritual science, on a higher level, once again implant in man that which shows him, in full consciousness, what serves him, what is healthy for him... so that spiritual science itself is a great healing agent, a great healing agent... because it brings him the right knowledge for what is individually necessary for him in one case or another.

Recognizing illness in its relationship to the human being as a whole will help to bring about knowledge in this field too, and so Hyrtl, who... something very beautiful when he said from his experience:... Only the doctor can recognize illnesses... and he meant: The other is more difficult, he meant: You can't always help if you can recognize illnesses, only the one who knows what helps can heal... Only the one who is able to look deeply, very deeply into the foundations of human nature, can know what helps.

Answering questions [excerpts]

Question: [Not reported.]

Answer: It is important to distinguish between the irregularities that have arisen from external damage and against which he has at most the means to correct through the inner powers within the person, and between internal diseases... an external damage, a broken leg for example... But it is the same if, for example, any harm is done inside the stomach by unsuitable food.... just as little as with a broken leg can such external damage be treated from the astral body... It is nevertheless important that more is said about recovery from within the person than about forms of illness... more about the ways to recovery than about diseases.

Question: [Not handed down.]

Answer: [...] Feuerbach said: Man is what he eats. This is true if he uses the means to get higher by the nature of his food ... He should eat so that he is not what he eats.

Dear attendees,

Of the many visitors to the Goetheanum in Dornach, which can be reached from Basel by conventional means of transport in less than an hour, many ask: What are the tasks of this Goetheanum? What goals does it want to serve? Well, ladies and gentlemen, if one had to speak of these goals and tasks of the Goetheanum without any connection to the great, serious tasks of our time, it would hardly be worthwhile to speak about them in public. But this Goetheanum in Dornach does want to be connected in its tasks with the great tasks of humanity in the present day. And it is this connection that I would like to speak about today, at least in a few words.

Those who not only see the Goetheanum from the outside, but get to know the way of life there a little, will be able to notice that two human activities, which otherwise occur quite separately in life, are thoroughly connected there, and perhaps the external signature of this Goetheanum initially experiences its characteristics through this.

We organized courses for the School of Spiritual Science last fall. I already mentioned them in my previous lecture. During these courses, representatives of the most diverse specialized sciences expressed themselves about the ways in which their individual specialized sciences could be enriched by what could be brought into them from the spiritual science cultivated at the Goetheanum. So science has been cultivated there, but science in the sense of spiritual science. Besides that, however, one can see how artistic natures and artistic people have been working on this Goetheanum for years, and the whole building has come about in its present, not yet completed forms through these artistic people. And one could see how this fall, the individual scientists and also personalities from practical life spoke from one spirit, which was absolutely the same as that from which the artistic people have given this building its forms, its images and so on for years. That is what makes this building, the Goetheanum in Dornach, so unique: everything that has been artistically worked on is inspired by the same spirit as everything that is to be scientifically achieved there. This unified spirit of science and art is what characterizes the Goetheanum in the first place.

But there is a third element, too, that unites with this. All those who have spoken there about the most diverse scientific questions, as well as about the most diverse branches of practical life, and all those who have been working artistically for years and now, they are deeply imbued in their minds with the fact that what they speak, what they work, what they somehow accomplish is in some way connected with the great tasks of the human being. Everything that is to be thought on a large scale, and everything that is to be achieved in detail, may well be said to have a kind of religious spirit. Not some obscure sectarian movement, as the detractors of the Dornach building say, is what drives its essence, but what is being driven, it is driven out of a serious scientific spirit, but in such a way that this serious scientific spirit can become so alive at the same time that it can express itself artistically. And that which expresses itself scientifically and artistically from two completely different sides carries, at the same time, not in a sectarian sense, not even in some limited confessional sense, but in the very general human sense, a kind of religious devotion, a kind of religious veneration for the thing to which one devotes oneself.

But we can go even deeper, my dear audience, and we can hear this unity of work in Dornach. We can see how, admittedly, in other forms, in other ways, science is spoken in a way that is different from that which is otherwise the case in our educational institutions. And the scientific language is spoken in such a way that, for example, the individual sciences enter into a dialogue with each other, mutually illuminating and clarifying each other, so that the narrow-minded spirit of specialization and of specialized science recedes before what is to be striven for by all the individual sciences together as the general human. Speaking scientifically, I would like to say it is spoken from a different tone.

And if you then walk around the building, if you look at the building inside, at the painting and the sculpture, and ask yourself: in what style was this building erected? Then you won't get the usual answer. When you usually walk into an educational institution, you hear this or that science presented from its particular, specialized point of view. You then look at the building. You ask: in which style was it built? You get the answer: in the Renaissance style, in the antique style, in the Gothic style and the like. You cannot get such an answer in relation to the architectural style of the Goetheanum in Dornach. The only answer that can be given is that the Goetheanum in Dornach was built in the same style in all its individual forms, and that this is reflected in the work being done there in the various sciences. The same spirit from which scientific life springs is the same spirit that is embodied in the forms. Dornach has its own architectural style, and everything that meets the visitor when he enters the building through the portal on one side, looks around at the forms that surround him, and then listens to the word that is to reveal to him what science is being practised here, is one.

This unity – esteemed attendees – is what characterizes Dornach. And with that, this Goetheanum in Dornach certainly presents itself as a contradiction, but I believe that the world will gradually realize that it is a beneficial contradiction to the disunity of our present life, this life, from which the individual activities and the individual ways of thinking and looking at things come from the most diverse angles, mutually feuding and certainly not growing together into a harmonious unity. For it is precisely this that is so disastrous in our time, that the individual activities that arise from the most diverse [specialized areas] of our lives cannot somehow come together to form a harmonious whole. When you look at things this way, it may initially seem as if this Goetheanum in Dornach should, so to speak, be a kind of model for the way in which the individual activities of life should work together harmoniously. However, my dear audience, it does not want to be just a kind of model, it wants to be a place, this Goetheanum, in which and from which work is done in such a way that this harmony can also enter into the tasks of our time and that a rising life can arise from the declining life that threatens us.

To understand this, however, we need to take a closer look at the way in which modern civilization has developed over the last three to four centuries. The two most significant characteristics of this civilization – I have often emphasized them in lectures that I have been privileged to give here at the same place, and today I want to emphasize them again from a certain point of view – these two most significant characteristics are that, for three to four hundred years, a scientific life, especially a natural scientific life, has emerged in the development of humanity, which has become dominant for the broadest circles in relation to feeling, willing, and in relation to way of thinking. One should not deceive oneself about this! Of course, many people today are firmly attached to old confessional traditions or the like with their views and also act out of impulses that arise from these traditional confessions. But more and more has spread, especially in the course of the nineteenth century and in the first two decades of this twentieth century, that which has flowed from the authority of modern scientific life.

What man thinks today about the structure of the world, about what lives and moves in the various kingdoms of nature, and finally about himself, is expressed by what he regards as the authoritative science. And within certain denominations, they have endeavored to strictly separate so-called belief from science because they wanted to save something for the soul that goes beyond the acceptance of this science. But because they did not dare to extract anything from this science itself that could also say something about the eternal in the soul, about the higher meaning, about the supersensible meaning of human life, they wanted to found, so to speak, a place in the soul to which science has no access, from which they did not want to elicit that which speaks about the highest matters of the soul. They wanted to secure the place of faith so that they could at least assume something about this eternal aspect of the soul, this supersensible aspect of the human being, which science is not allowed to assume or which science describes as something beyond its limits.

But this is not intended to say the slightest thing against the tremendous progress of this science in recent centuries. For — my dear audience — spiritual science, as it is represented here, does not dare to use any kind of superstitious grounds to bring anything against science as such, but it recognizes in the fullest sense of the word what this scientific development of the last centuries has brought. It appreciates what has been achieved by science through observation of the external world in connection with experimentation and in connection with the combining intellect. And the spiritual science meant here should not be confused with all the dilettantism that arises from mystical or other backgrounds, which also want to satisfy human souls, which only oppose science because they have never come into any kind of contact with it. The spiritual science represented here fully takes into account — even if it miscalculates in some respects — it fully takes into account the progress of modern science, and it absolutely wants to follow a path that yields to nothing in terms of the strictness of the method, the conscientiousness of the way of thinking of modern science.

But, my dear attendees, anyone who engages with this modern science in all its various fields, and with all that it has brought, will ultimately come to a very specific conclusion – a conclusion that is no less significant because it, in a sense, justifies skepticism.

You see, esteemed attendees, I myself have been met with much hostility for the reason that, before I turned to what I had to say on the basis of anthroposophical knowledge, I tried to express myself in purely scientific works in a wide variety of fields. I did this because I believe that today a higher world view should not offer itself to the world at all without first justifying itself by having looked around in the most diverse scientific fields. But when one delves into these various scientific fields, one says to oneself: Nevertheless, we have not only developed the external methods of observation in a conscientious way, not only advanced the combining mind and the art of experimentation, but have also come to everything that the armed senses provide us through the telescope, through the microscope, through the X-ray apparatus, through the spectral apparatus and so on, and so on – even though we have developed all this, indeed precisely because we have developed all this, the riddles of life and the world have not diminished for us, but increased. And anyone who approaches this scientific development of recent times with an open mind knows that, basically, with every glance through the telescope, through the microscope, with every result of the X-ray apparatus or the spectroscope, it is not actually solutions to what we call the riddles of life and humanity, but new questions and ever new riddles, and that with each such result, the human soul must increasingly ask for something that can at least to some extent provide the solution to such riddles. Thus, it is not really solutions that have presented themselves to the triumphs of modern science, but new life puzzles and new questions have arisen, and those who engage in the scientific life of the present with an open mind are particularly confronted with these to a greater extent. This is on the one hand, in terms of the stream of knowledge; the development on this side has brought us a sum of new riddles, new questions. But we can also look around us on the other side and find what the last centuries have brought, if we look at it impartially, in a special light. It is fair to say that what science has given us has also shown us practical results. It has brought us our modern technology, and we may say: Most of what surrounds us today at every turn in life, all that technology has brought us in such significant advances, all of it is a result of the last few centuries and it is basically derived from the results of modern science. Technology has become part of life, and life has become highly dependent on technology. In a sense, can we not also say that, just as scientific development has presented us with puzzles and questions on the other side, so too does modern technological progress present us with puzzles and questions in relation to technology?

We are basically in the middle of these puzzles and questions, because when we look at the great advances in technology, we have to say to ourselves: Yes, they are there, and people also live in a life that is dominated by this technology. But this technology has not yet found its way to the people, otherwise we would not have today, among us, something that is so burning — my dear audience —, which in the broadest sense is called the social question. People have learned to adjust their machines. But what has been brought to us by the machines is not the solution to the questions of life in the fullest sense of the word. Instead, the greatest question of life flows out of it: How should this human life be shaped in social terms so that people, who have to work – as they once worked without machines – now have to work with modern technology, so that these people come together in full understanding in social life? Just as questions and puzzles of knowledge have been posed for us by the development of modern science, so modern technology, which has emerged from this scientific development, has posed the great question for us: How should life be organized so that people can find the possibility of a dignified existence within a life permeated by technology? So one could say: Both the theoretical and practical questions of life have actually emerged from modern civilization. And today we are not in the position of having fully developed solutions, neither theoretical and intuitive solutions nor practical solutions, but we are faced everywhere with questions, with puzzles that pile up, that make demands on people that can no longer be ignored.

This, ladies and gentlemen, must be felt in all its vibrancy if we are to do justice to the tasks that the Goetheanum in Dornach presents. For one can say: Those who are connected with the founding and expansion of this Goetheanum are precisely those people who feel this burning on the one hand of knowledge, on the other hand of the life questions in modern times, and who want to contribute what is possible for people to such life tasks as they present themselves can be tackled.

On the one hand, we see how people offer simplistic solutions: a person like Haeckel, in his “World Riddles”, offered simplistic solutions, while all he had to offer was a pile of new riddles. And people who believe that they are grounded in practical life also believe that, for example, the relations of production bring forth human life relationships. We keep hearing it emphasized from the Social Democratic program that it is the relations of production that have created life, that have created the form of life.

Now, my dear attendees, precisely when we look at the issue of modern technology, we can see that the production conditions that have been created by this modern technology have not brought about the form of life that goes with them. If they had brought it about, we would not have a social question.

In view of this, we must ask: what then actually characterizes this modern life? After all, it depends on the human being finding a way to relate to life that is informed by what he or she can understand, feel, want, and do as a human being. It is easy to say that today it is a matter of economic issues, that people must rise above the question of bread above all.

Now, my dear audience, there is no way to get beyond this bread issue other than by utilizing what the earth offers man in the right way for humanity and putting it into circulation. But what has to be done to achieve this cannot be done otherwise than through what man can feel, do and want, and with which man can place himself in the world. Basically, it is the world view, it is the inner spiritual ability of the human being that alone can provide a remedy even in the very most extreme economic questions. Therefore, we must look to that which can inwardly spiritualize the soul of the human being, which can drive the human being to a fruitful will, to that which can underlie a human understanding if we want to take a proper look at the great questions of the present, at the tasks of our time. Here one must say: that which is striven for at the Goetheanum in Dornach, and which to a certain extent is visible in the work being done outside, may perhaps inspire some people to reflect on the position of the human being in the course of human development.

I said earlier – esteemed attendees – that in Dornach one can see how scientific questions are discussed in a spirit that is at the same time the same spirit in which artistic natures have worked at the Goetheanum itself in terms of its external architecture, sculpture, and pictorial art. And I said that there is not only a certain unity between what is being done scientifically out there and what is being created artistically, but that there is also a certain religious mood that runs through both the scientific and the artistic work. Those who really immerse themselves in this Goetheanum in Dornach will find that there is a certain unity between three human modes of revelation of the inner being of this human being - between science, religion and art. Of course, I am not talking about — and I would like to emphasize this — the founding of a new religion in Dornach. That is not at all what it is about. Rather, it is solely about the fact that what is created in science and art is at the same time imbued with a religious spirit.

My dear attendees! This modern civilization, which I have just characterized in other ways, is characterized by the fact that science, religion and art have increasingly fallen apart in it. It is the peculiarity of the modern mind that it wants to cultivate science for a completely different reason than that which is the content of religious life, and in turn, it wants nothing to do with the unity of science and art. Those views have basically faded away, of which Goethe still had some – the Goetheanum takes its name from him, perhaps for precisely the reasons I have just mentioned – faded away is that was still in Goethe's views, that science should be cultivated on the one hand by pursuing that which lies in the current of truth, but that art should also be created out of the same spirit.

It is well known that Goethe was also interested in science throughout his life. He studied in detail how plants develop their various forms and how animals are organically created through metamorphosis; he was involved in other sciences. In all of this, he had an artistic eye. He conceived of the artistic in such a way that, by grasping with the soul that which he can also penetrate scientifically, he then shapes it inwardly, so that that which he, on the one hand, makes his own without form, scientifically, takes shape within him, so that he can create the work of art from it. Goethe thought [of an intimate relationship] between the truth that should prevail in science and the truth that should prevail in art. These things have almost completely faded away today, and that is precisely because modern civilization is absolutely intent on regarding science, religion and art as three different fields that arise from different foundations of human life and that actually have nothing to do with each other.

This was not the case at the starting point of human development. From what we have today, it is extremely difficult for us to recognize this starting point. At the starting point of human development, it was the case that people had a special, different kind of knowledge — not the kind of knowledge that is particularly valued today, which only applies to external natural things and observes these external natural things with the armed human senses — that they combined with the ordinary human mind. No, at the starting point of human knowledge was the ability to combine everything that the eyes observe and that can be combined by the mind with a certain spiritual vision of things, a seeing through of the external world, so that, along with what the senses perceive and what the mind can combine, the inner spiritual entities, the inner essence of things, can also be revealed to the mind's eye.

And [in] that which man at the starting point of his development, and still for centuries to come – to which we can look back as not really that far back – into that knowledge which man acquired, was so imbued with spiritual substance that he perceived this spiritual substance, which came to him from science itself, at the same time as the divine-spiritual in nature, in everything, everything. He did not know a science for itself and something that was to be given to him spiritually through faith, but he knew a science that at the same time provided the observation of external nature and also that which underlies his natural things and his whole life as a spiritual being. In what science gave him, he knew the divine at the same time, so that science for him became at the same time the revealer of that which he could worship from the innermost part of his mind. That which his reason grasped appeared to his soul in such a way that he could worship it religiously at the same time. If we go back to those places that were both places of learning and places of worship in ancient times – to the mystery schools – we find that what was revealed there through science was at the same time the message of what permeates the world divinely. So that what the word of science expressed gave at the same time what human worship of the gods recalled.

And one can go further. That which was offered in this regard, on the one hand, as knowledge, and, on the other hand, as something that also engaged the human emotional life, so that man could satisfy his need to worship his divine through what he was allowed to know, was given to him in such a way that it was not abstract and passive, giving him mere head knowledge, so to speak, only allowing himself to be thought of, but it was given in such a way that it was full of life, that it intervened in his life in the same way as, say, external circumstances intervene in his life, some friendship, some other circumstances that permeate the whole person. Our present knowledge can leave us so cold that we go to laboratories to do research; when we are outside, we no longer occupy ourselves. Life is something separate from this research. Or we sit down at the table and pursue some kind of science. We pursue it as long as we sit at the table. Then life takes place outside.

But this life takes up the whole person. This life demands more than just mental effort. We have to throw ourselves into it with our whole personality. Concepts that can only be experienced in the laboratory today, that can only be experienced at the reading table and so on, concepts that only occupy the head, that only occupy reason and understanding, did not exist in the old places of learning. There were concepts that, like living forces, took hold of the whole person, like life itself, so that everything that was technology, and above all art, emerged from these ideas at the same time. One had acquired ideas through knowledge, through which one satisfied one's need for knowledge. At the same time, there was something in these ideas to which the mind and the feelings could surrender in adoration. The will was permeated by that which came to one, so that the will could pour it into external matter, that it could create technique in ordinary life, art in the elevated life. And in the cultic acts, there was nothing else to be done at the places of worship except to create something artistic and technical, full of life, out of that which was the content of knowledge and religion. Human knowledge, human feeling of reverence for the divine in the world, human creativity, they were one. Humanity could not have developed further into the forms of civilization into which it necessarily had to develop if life had remained uncomprehended. It is an enrichment of life that what was, so to speak, an undifferentiated unity at the starting point of humanity - and even in times like those that underlay older Greek civilization - has developed. It was absolutely necessary for humanity to go beyond these uncomprehended contents of civilization, to particularly develop a scientific field, a religious field, and an artistic field. But what has emerged as a result, ladies and gentlemen?

We have gradually acquired a religious field that we, as I said, want to save from the onslaughts of modern science, which are accepted by all people and are being accepted more and more by those who have not yet accepted them today. More and more, the longing has arisen to establish, alongside these demands and onslaughts of modern science, a field of faith in which science should not have a say, in which one should enlighten oneself about the most intimate, innermost, and most sacred matters of the human soul. And suddenly we have science, which does not want to say anything because it claims that it cannot say anything about the eternal, about the supersensible of the human soul, and faith, which certainly wants to say something, wants to reveal something reveal about this eternal, about this supersensible of the human soul, but which shrinks from giving that which it accepts any such significance as external science gives to its statements. One can define, one can somehow characterize such a separation. But in the long run one cannot live under such a separation, for the believing mind must feel constrained in the long run when science appears on the one hand and expounds its judgment with its claim to certainty over a certain field, and when the truth of faith wants to assert itself as a special way to the truth, which is precisely to provide information about the most important thing for the human soul.

Today we still do not see clearly in this area, and that is why we keep trying to justify this separation of science and faith. But humanity suffers from it. And what it suffers from this side often takes place in the subconscious. But it does not emerge in its original form into human life. As a result, the human being's own intellectual development is also restricted; he is driven to make judgments that are not sufficiently secure in life; he becomes jaded in his judgment. And if we ask today: Why do we so often find mere routine in practical life where clear insight and a realistic sense are needed? Why have we brought ourselves into such terrible, catastrophic times in practical life, in economic life? Then we have to say: Yes, that is where something comes into play that human judgment is unable to do. We just don't see the connection with something else.

For those who see the big picture, the fact that we have not developed such foresight in our external economic and practical lives, that our judgments in other words have become so short-sighted in this practical life that they have brought us social chaos, stems from the fact that we have by limiting our scientific judgment to that which can only be observed externally and combined with the intellect, and blunting this judgment when it comes to the most important matters of the soul, to the supersensible, the eternal part of the soul. The fact that we are brought up in school in such a way that we are not allowed to apply what we have been scientifically educated in to the understanding of the soul forms such a judgment in us that we then also have short-circuited thoughts when we are supposed to think economically, and this results in catastrophes.

And so we live today in the terrible tragedy that theorists, that representatives of religious denominations repeatedly and repeatedly declaim that the truths of faith must be kept separate from scientific truths, that this plays into our pedagogy, into our didactics. It must be recognized – and I address this to those present – that this is breeding the human shortsightedness that, I would say, subconsciously impacts practical judgment, the same shortsightedness that then also led us into the chaos of economic life. We must recognize these inner connections, for it is man himself who is decisive for life, not external economic conditions, not external institutions, but man alone is decisive for the external life. If a person is educated in the wrong direction in one area of practical life, it is the same in other areas. And if, on the one hand, a person is driven to a dullness of judgment, this dullness of judgment will be especially evident in practical areas where he is supposed to be insightful, where he is supposed to see through the world.

And again, my dear audience, the artistic at the starting point of humanity, I have just tried to characterize it, it was the case that man grasped the supersensible with the sensual at the same time, and that he gave the sensual forms from his grasp of the supersensible in art their character. Thus art revealed itself from the same source from which science and religion originated. Goethe sensed something of this connection when he spoke his remarkable, meaningful words:

He who possesses science and art, also has religion.
He who possesses neither, may have religion.

But such views and feelings have actually completely disappeared today, and that is why we have arrived at a situation in art where, on the one hand, we have fallen into pure naturalism, making imitation of nature the only thing we strive for. And since in more recent times people have grown tired of this imitation, since they finally realized that with this imitation of nature, with this mere naturalism, basically nothing can be offered that in any way surpasses nature - because after all when someone is merely naturalistic, one must say that one still prefers to look at nature rather than at what he merely wants to imitate, because as far as nature goes, one cannot go in art if one merely wants to imitate. Once this had been recognized, people now sought - and this is quite understandable and even justified from a certain point of view - people now sought from within, in expressionism and in all kinds of other currents, they sought to capture in color and form that which is not in nature but which the human being can experience in his or her inner being, somehow in color and form. This is a quest that is, once again, something that represents a task for our time, also in the artistic fields.

So we see that, to a certain extent, art, too, has gone astray by separating itself from the other areas of human spiritual striving. But this differentiation had to occur – I said it before – otherwise human civilization would not have been able to progress. But today we are again living in a time when that which has separated from each other is having such an effect in the separation that, as man lets it affect him, this man begins to tear himself apart. We gradually came to live as a human race in a science that teaches us about the outer world in a wonderful way, but which, as we penetrate into it, alienates us from precisely that which we need if we want to be enlightened about our own soul. And we have come to a religious life that, I would say, had to create its own realm of truth because it did not dare to summon science itself to penetrate the transcendental through the same means it uses to penetrate the sensual. And art turned to nature or turns to all kinds of random human experiences in Impressionism, Expressionism, Naturalism and so on, and so on, in order to have its independent position. But then one surrenders to this art.

One must, so to speak, split and cleave that which is a unity in man: thinking, feeling and willing. That which lives externally, by acting on man, divides man. Today we have definitely reached a point in human development where man has lost himself in such a way that the various most important, essential branches of knowledge of his activity - the scientific, the religious and the artistic branches - have diverged to such an extent that he is no longer able to hold them together.

Do you see, dear attendees, this is what someone must feel who, on the one hand, has an unbiased mind to see through the right tendencies of the civilization of our time, and on the other hand, has a heart and an understanding for what is missing in our time in practical, economic, spiritual, educational and training terms, and what has brought us to the brink of disaster. Anyone who has a real heart for the hardship and misery of our time, and on the other hand can look impartially at how human souls are divided, will see a connection between the two, because they see that what has taken on catastrophic forms in life today stems from the fact that people are divided within and do not know how to place themselves in life.

Spiritual science, as one of the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach, faces this. This spiritual science speaks of it - and I have often presented the details in these lectures here. Today I would like to refer to these lectures and only point them out, but you can also find them in my writings “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science” and so on, explained in detail. This spiritual science, as it is to be cultivated in Dornach, as it is to be gradually incorporated into civilization through the Goetheanum, it speaks of the fact that there is not only such knowledge as that which adheres to external sensory observation, to the arming of the external senses - telescope, microscope and so on, and to the combining mind, but that man bears within himself abilities which are latent, hidden, in ordinary life, in ordinary science, which can be brought down by the means which I have indicated in the writings mentioned and presented here in the earlier [lectures]. This spiritual science speaks of how ordinary, objective, external knowledge can work its way through to a higher knowledge: imagination, inspiration, intuition in the deeper sense. This spiritual science speaks of various levels of knowledge that in turn lead into the supersensible, that carry knowledge itself up into the supersensible realm.

And if one develops such methods of knowledge in this way, my dear audience, then one acquires a special position in relation to modern science. Above all, this modern scientific approach has truly come a long way in the most diverse fields! Let us just think – we could also examine another field here, but let us just think of what has emerged in more recent times as the theory of evolution. We need not think of extreme materialistic Darwinism, only of the theory of development as it has been established in recent times, and how it has been conscientiously and methodically developed for the most diverse spheres. We will say: in relation to all that could be achieved, great things have been achieved. In relation to form and essence, we can indeed survey the ever more perfect from the less perfect, and we can say: at the top of this series stands the human being. We can see a connection between the human being and the other beings. We can, by surveying something like this, remain entirely in the realm of external, objective knowledge.

But, dear ladies and gentlemen, in this way the human being is not understood. This is, I would say, only one particular aspect of what I said earlier. The human being is not understood by applying the methods of modern science to nature and to the human being, as we have been accustomed to doing until today. Something else is needed for that. But if we work our way up from this ordinary knowledge, as it is cultivated today, to what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science calls the imagination, where what is otherwise only grasped in the abstract is transformed into a pictorial concept, but a pictorial concept that is neither a dream nor a fantasy, but which carries within it the certainty that one is dealing with the image of a spiritual, not a physical reality - if one has developed oneself to this imagination, to this conception of the image through the supersensible powers of knowledge, as I have described them in my book ” How to Know Higher Worlds?», then one sees, while standing cognizantly before the human being, already presented in his form: one cannot comprehend him with the means of today's science; one must let thinking pass over into quite different inner soul experiences if one wants to comprehend the human being.

One can say that a human being has so-and-so many bones, and can compare these with the number of bones of higher animals; one can count the muscles, can look at the shape of the heart, can do all this with the means of ordinary science; but then there comes a point where this ordinary science leads nowhere, where it is transformed merely inwardly in the soul life , where one must try to grasp that in the human being which can only be grasped through imagination, where one must look at the human being – even just at his form when he stands before us – and say to oneself: Yes, the human being has just as many bones as the higher animals, but these bones are raised out of certain forms, they are given other forms. One can examine the metabolism of the higher animals, and one can then look at the metabolism of the human being. If you look at it with imaginative knowledge, you will find it to be set apart, you will find that the human being has been placed in the world differently if you look at the whole thing spiritually from the point of view of imaginative knowledge.

But what happens there? What happens there is nothing less than that what is otherwise abstract intellectual and observational knowledge gradually transforms into artistic perception. Now, my dear audience, no matter how much you rail against this artistic understanding of the human being when you have gone through the whole series of animals with the means of ordinary science, you can say: Art is not something that science understands. Certainly, someone can find the most beautiful logical reasons to prove that art has nothing to do with science. Let him do so, and he will be proved right with regard to everything that he logically invents and arrives at. All those who say: 'Science, as we understand it, must not be influenced by any artistic grasp of reality' will be proved right.

But there is something else to consider, dear attendees. If reality is such that it does not yield to this kind of knowledge, if reality is such that it can only be approached through artistic comprehension, through the transition of abstract concepts into imaginative-artistic forms, then no matter how long man may debate that art has nothing to do with science, then he must admit that with his science he remains outside of reality and that if he wants to enter into this reality, he must transform this science into an artistic understanding of reality. But that is where anthroposophically oriented spiritual science leads to. Reality does not arise from those abstractions and scientific methods, not even from those who work with telescopes and microscopes, who work with X-ray machines and with spectral analysis; reality does not arise from this external nature, but only when the concepts that have been acquired in science are transformed into art at the highest level. Then one also sees the human form artistically. And it is this artistic understanding, this artistic comprehension that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science leads to.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, this is one of the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach. We do not negate what is achieved in the laboratories, in the physics institutes, in the clinic, or in the astronomical observatory. On the contrary, we want to establish such institutions, permeated by our spiritual science, so that the methods of spiritual science can be brought into them. That is what is available in the form of the Goetheanum, the central building, in Dornach. Such institutions must be affiliated to it, precisely in order that the methodology which allows spirit to be recognized from the experiments and from observation may be carried into the laboratory, into the physics institute; at the same time, that which, for example, bridges the gap between pathology and therapy in the field of medicine, where in therapy we have to take the remedies from the greater world, the macrocosm, and apply them to the human being, the microcosm.

That is what makes the Dornach method, through its strict scientific nature, lead to the artistic, by showing that when we develop the develops the powers of his soul, rises from ordinary knowledge and the science of ordinary life to imagination, one rises at the same time to where science, by remaining strictly scientific, enters into artistic comprehension. In turn, we return to what Goethe sensed in the past. In a modern sense, what was at the starting point of human development, and what had to differentiate and separate for a while in human development so that civilization could advance, but which would now shatter the human being if he did not find union again, is developed.

But we do not have to somehow glue the artistic to the scientific on the outside; symbolism or allegory is quite foreign to us, but we want to shape reality itself. We want to be scientific, much stricter than one is accustomed to in our educational institutions today. But precisely because we have the scientific method and not only want to conceive of its end, but also want to experience it, what scientific life is flows into an artistic grasp so that full reality can be grasped. And that is why we can also grasp from the spirit itself in what we outwardly present in artistic forms.

This is the aspect of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that creates the bridge between science and art, the bridge that once existed, the bridge that must be found again and that will be fruitful for all individual scientific fields, but which at the same time will lead to our soul being so stimulated by what we work on from the most diverse scientific fields soul will be so stimulated that our ideas will not remain dry, empty, abstract, pedantic, philistine ideas, but will become life in our soul, both science and art, not as an allegorical, straw-like art, but as an art that brings into this outer, sensual reality a sensual image of the supersensible, of the spiritual world.

And, dear attendees, that is how it is with inspiration. It is the next stage after imagination, as you can follow in the books mentioned. There, the spiritual that permeates the world reveals itself in the human being, not only that the images fill him as in imagination, but the spiritual itself penetrates.

He who wants to deny this spiritual aspect stands in relation to the world in a higher sense than he who wanted to claim that man does not live on the inhaled air, which he in turn wanted to release into the outside world. In this moment, man is inwardly that which was just outside of him. He processes this air inwardly; he releases it again. Just as one cannot claim that this air comes from an organism, but it is that which connects him with the whole great world, so it is with the spiritual. Man experiences something spiritual within himself. But this spiritual is such that it is related to all the rest of the world's spirituality. There is a continuous inhaling and exhaling of the spiritual in man. I can only hint at this here. It is that which becomes conscious in man when he rises to the method of knowledge of inspiration. He then experiences within himself that which is otherwise experienced as the spiritual spread throughout the whole world; it is that which he experiences in the air that is in him and is processed in him [and] the air that is outside of him. But by experiencing this inspiration, he experiences the spirituality of the world. He permeates himself within with that which, as divine-spiritual, permeates the world. What the soul is can only be grasped if it is understood as part of the spirituality of the whole world. Therefore, only inspiration can reveal to us the essence of the human soul. Just as we rise from mere outer knowledge, from mere knowledge to the artistic grasp of full reality through imagination, so we can only rise to grasp the soul through inspiration. And this inspiration is at the same time that which imbues the soul with the living knowledge it contains of its eternal character, of its eternal essence, of its supersensible essence. We do not need a special field of truth for this belief, but rather the elevation of the field of knowledge itself to inspired knowledge, which reflects the essence of our soul.

In tomorrow's lecture, I will have to speak in more detail about this relationship between the soul-spiritual, the immortal in the soul, in connection with the so-called inner nature of nature, following on from what we have discussed today. For now, I will only say that what the soul must experience as its most important thing must be taken precisely from what, in earlier times, was also a matter of religious conviction. But because today humanity has educated itself in such a way that it can only believe in a certain amount of scientific knowledge, this scientific knowledge itself must be elevated to the religious.

Thus, arising from inner knowledge itself, we have an artistic element and a religious element at the same time. This is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is intended to make clear to humanity. The building of the Goetheanum in Dornach is intended to be a living testimony to this, because this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to convey the living spirit, not the dead, abstract spirit. That is why he gives artists the opportunity to create artistic forms out of the same spirit in their own building, and that is why, because he conveys the living spirit, not an abstract spirit, he gives the whole work a religious mood. He gives that which existed at the starting point of human development as a unity, as a scientific-religious-artistic unity.

This is what the human mind needs today if it is to play an active and active role in social life. From what one acquires for one's activity, for the inner mood of the human soul, there can then arise that which also provides an external, practical judgment. Therefore, one does not shy away from basing it on what lives in Dornach — which initially could not live naturally other than by forming the Dornach Goetheanum itself into a unity — that this that carries this out, founds something like the 'Futurum', which wants to bring the same way of judging, the same way of thinking, into practical life, in order to bring this realistic way of thinking into practical life.

Dear attendees! This Goetheanum is not just a single structure, erected to serve a quirk, to have something that is the same in its external style as what is thought, practiced and researched within, but this Goetheanum is a unified concept the reason that what underlies its origin is oriented towards that unity, towards which humanity must strive today out of its tasks of the time, because it strives towards what humanity needs in the broadest sphere of life for the recovery of social reality. The Goetheanum in Dornach is designed in this way because the way of thinking on which it is based is intended to reach into that which, through its fissures, through its lack of unity, has led to the catastrophes of the present. The Goetheanum does not want to be just a model; the Goetheanum wants to be the place where one can acquire, cognitively, artistically, creatively, religiously, emotionally, that which one needs today in order to engage with the great tasks of the time, including social tasks.

Once again it must be said: social life demands of man not only that other institutions be created. We can create as many other institutions as we like that seem paradisiacal to us; if man remains an anti-social being, if the social does not well up from the depths of his soul, then no possible social order can arise. It is man himself who is to become a social being. Then the institutions will also find each other when the human being is inwardly inspired by social impulses in the right way.

This is what we want to live in Dornach, this is what we want to give to the Goetheanum in Dornach as its tasks, not what the detractors say or what those claim who say that some obscure sect has founded some kind of home on the Dornach hill. Dornach is not based on that, but on honest observation and heartfelt compassion for the great tasks of the time, living into the great tasks of the time, both in those that are given to human knowledge, in that precisely with the great progress of science, new puzzles are given to us, that with the progress of technology, new tasks for life are given to us. Therefore, my dear audience, because one has a heart and mind for this task of knowledge, for these riddles of knowledge, for these tasks of life, riddles of life, one is connected if one really understands what is to be done with the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach. For if one looks at the matter in the right light, then one should at least strive to be able to answer the question: What are the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach? They are the tasks that are the tasks, the great tasks of modern knowledge and modern life.

Dear attendees,

Anyone who speaks on a topic such as this evening's topic and the one I will be speaking on the 27th of this month must be aware, especially with regard to the spiritual life of the present day, that there are numerous souls today who long for a new impetus, for a renewal and metamorphosis of of important parts of our entire civilizational life, out of many things that today clearly bear the hallmark that, if continued, would lead humanity into the decline of civilization, out of many things that have been the civilizing current for a century or two or more. We find this especially in those souls who are trying to look most deeply into their own inner being in the present. We can say that whatever needs to be said about the supersensible worlds can be spoken to every human soul at any time. It can be spoken, one might say, to the hermit who has withdrawn completely from the world and is only interested in his immediate surroundings; it can also be spoken to personalities who are fully involved in life. For what is at issue here is, after all, a thoroughly human matter.

But it is not from these points of view alone, dear ladies and gentlemen, that I would like to speak to you today and on the 27th, but rather from the point of view that arises when one allows the most important civilizational issues of the present to take effect on one's soul. And there, especially leading souls find much that shakes them to the core, that drives them in their innermost being to long for a renewal of certain parts of spiritual life.

If we survey the situation in which we find ourselves in the spiritual life of the present, I would say we can trace it back to two main questions. One of these questions is illuminated by the scientific life, by the form of scientific life that has been observed within the civilized world for three to four centuries. The other of these questions is illuminated directly by practical life, but also by that practical life that has experienced the deepest influences from modern science.

Let us first look at what modern science has brought forth. I would like to say, precisely in order to avoid being misunderstood, that what I am representing here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should by no means be opposed to the spirit of modern science. The great triumphs and significant results of this modern scientific spirit are to be fully recognized by the spiritual science meant here. But precisely because this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to penetrate with an unbiased soul into the spirit of this science, it must go beyond what has become the object of a general human education from this scientific spirit. In its specific disciplines, this science provides precise and conscientious information about many aspects of the human environment. But when the human soul asks about its highest concerns, about its deepest, its eternal destiny, it cannot receive any information within the spirit of science, especially not when it consults with itself quite honestly and quite impartially. And so today we find numerous souls who, out of more or less religious needs, long for a renewal of old worldviews.

What is external science, in particular anthropological science, is already drawing attention to the fact that our ancestors centuries ago did not know what is dividing and fragmenting human souls today: a certain disharmony between scientific knowledge and religious feeling, religious longing. If we look back to ancient times, it was the same human beings who cultivated a science that seems childlike to us today, but only seems childlike, and who, from this science, at the same time kindled the religious spirit in humanity. There was no discord between these two currents of thought.

Many souls today long for something like this. But one cannot say that a renewal of ancient Chaldean, ancient Egyptian, ancient Indian or other wisdom teachings would bring a special blessing to the present age. Those who believe this do not understand the true spirit of human development. Human development is such that each age has a special character, that in each age human souls want to be satisfied by something different. And what our souls need, simply by virtue of the fact that we live in the 20th century and have received our education from the 20th century, must be something different from what people of a distant past needed for their souls. Therefore, a renewal of old worldviews cannot serve the present. But one can orient oneself to what those old worldviews were. We will then see what actually gave rise to the satisfaction that human souls experienced within those old worldviews. We have to admit that the satisfaction for human souls in those days arose from the fact that they basically had a completely different relationship to scientific knowledge than we have today.

I would like to draw your attention to a phenomenon, my dear audience. If you point it out today, you are very easily accused of paradox or fantasy. But there is much that needs to be said that, just a few years ago, would have been considered highly dangerous for general education. After all, the last catastrophic years have at least brought about a change in the way we think and feel. And today, souls are better prepared than they were even ten years ago for the fact that the deepest truths may nevertheless initially appear paradoxical and fantastic to our habitual ways of thinking and feeling.

In ancient times, people spoke of something that, in view of scientific knowledge, is hardly questioned today, but which people will speak of again, probably also in the context of general education, in a relatively short time: of the Guardian of the Threshold, of the from the ordinary world in which we live in everyday life, in which we live with ordinary science, to that higher world in which man can recognize how he himself, with his supersensible, inner being, belongs to a supersensible world. Between these two worlds, the world that man perceives with his senses, the facts of which he can combine with his mind into natural laws, and the world to which man belongs with his actual being, one saw an abyss in those ancient times. One first had to cross this abyss. Within the old civilizations, only those who had been intensively prepared by the directors of the educational institutions of those days, which we now call 'mysteries', were allowed to cross this abyss. Today, we have different views on how to prepare for science and for a life of scientific research. In those ancient times, it was said that an unprepared person should not be allowed to receive higher knowledge about the nature of man at all. Why did they say this?

The reason for this can only be understood by someone who, going beyond ordinary historical knowledge, gains an insight into what the human soul has gone through in the course of human development. Today, we only have a knowledge of the externalities of human development. No attention is paid to the state of the soul. For example, no attention is paid to the state of the soul of people who have stood in the ancient oriental wisdom, of which only decadent forms still live in the Orient today. Basically, people have no idea how different the souls were in the world in those days. People in those days, just like us, saw the nature around them with their senses; they also combined in a certain way what they saw of nature with their minds. But they did not feel as separate from the nature around them as people today feel. They felt a spiritual soul within themselves. They felt that the human physical organization was filled with a spiritual soul. But they also felt a spiritual soul in lightning and thunder, in the passing clouds, in minerals, in plants, and in animals. They felt that which they suspected within themselves also outside in nature, in the whole universe. The whole universe was permeated by spiritual soul for them.

But they lacked something that we humans have today within our state of mind: they did not have such a pronounced, intense self-awareness as we do. Their self-awareness was duller, more dreamy than ours today. This was still the case even in Greek times. One can only understand later Greek culture if one imagines the souls of people in the Greek era as being in the same state as our souls. In earlier Greek culture, there can be no question of a state of soul such as ours. There was still a vague sense within nature. I would say: just as if my finger had a consciousness and then felt itself as one with my entire organism, as it could not conceive of itself as being separated from my organism, without which it would die, so man felt himself within the whole of nature, [unseparated] from it.

And those ancient sages who were the leaders of those schools of which I have spoken, they said to themselves: This is the moral in human self-awareness. But this self-awareness must not look at the world in such a way that it appears to be spiritless, soulless. If this state of mind were to face a world that is more spiritually empty – a world, I might add, that we perceive in our science, in our everyday life – then the souls of human beings would be overcome by a spiritual powerlessness.

This mental fainting was recognized by the ancient wisdom teachers in those people who were to arrive at such a world view as we have. Yes, can it be said at all that these ancient wisdom teachers said to themselves that souls should not arrive at such a world view as we say we have today? Yes, that can be said. And I would like to give you an example of this. Many examples could be cited, but I will highlight just one.

Dear participants, today we are justifiably satisfied that we no longer view the external and spatial structure of the world in a medieval way, based only on outward appearances. We stand on the standpoint of the Copernican world view, which is a heliocentric one. The medieval man believed that the Earth was at the center of the planetary system, and indeed of the entire star system, and that the sun and the other stars moved around the Earth. The heliocentric solar system brought about a complete reversal of all relationships, and today we hold fast to this reversal as something that we already absorb in our ordinary school education, in which we are immersed with all our education. We look back at the people of the Middle Ages, we look back at the people of ancient times, who in their Ptolemaic world system saw that which I have just characterized, the geocentric. But by no means did all people in those ancient times accept only the geocentric world system. We need only read Plutarch's account of the world system of an ancient Greek wise man of the pre-Christian era, Aristarchus of Samos. Aristarchus of Samos already places the sun at the center of our planetary system; he has the earth revolve around the sun. And if we take, not in the details, about which recent natural science has brought so much, but in the main features, the heliocentric system of Aristarchus of Samos, then it basically completely agrees with the one that is ours today.

What do we actually have here? Well, the world system that Aristarchus of Samos merely revealed was the one taught in the ancient schools of wisdom. Outwardly, people were left with the world system of appearances. Why was that so? Why were they allowed to keep this world picture of appearances? Well, it was said: Before a person can advance to this heliocentric world system, he must first cross the threshold to a different world than the one in which he lives. In his ordinary life, he is protected by the invisible Guardian of the Threshold, under whom these ancients imagined a very real, albeit supersensible being. He is protected from suddenly opening his eyes as if he were seeing the world, dead, de-spirited. For it is in a dead and spiritless way that we see the world today. We look at it and form our view of nature through the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and we see it as dead and spiritless. When we form ideas about the path and movements of the heavenly bodies at the observatory with the help of a telescope and calculations, we see the world as dead and spiritless. The ancient wisdom teachers of the mysteries knew that the world could also be seen in this way. They conveyed these insights after the preparation, after they had led their students past the Guardian of the Threshold, but they prepared the students through strict training of the will. How was this willpower given to the students? By leading the students through privations, but also by encouraging them for many years to strictly obey the pure morals prescribed to them by the wisdom teachers. The will had to be strictly disciplined, and this willpower was to strengthen self-awareness. And when the disciples had progressed from a dreamy, dull self-awareness to a more intense self-awareness, only then were they shown what lay beyond the threshold for them: the world that, in the heliocentric system, represents outer space. But they were also shown many other things that we now recognize as the content of our everyday worldview.

So it was that the pupils of those ancient times were first prepared, carefully prepared, before they were taught what, so to speak, every schoolboy and schoolgirl today absorbs. So times change, so do civilizations. One simply gets a false idea of the development of humanity if one only knows the outer history, not this history of the human soul.

What had the students of the old wisdom schools brought with them to the threshold of the supersensible world? They had brought with them an instinctive knowledge of the world, which arose, as it were, from the instincts, from the drives of their bodies. Through these, they saw — today we call this animism — everything outside as ensouled and spiritualized. They felt the kinship of man with the world. They felt their spirit within the spirit of the world. But to see the world here as we learn to see it today, already in elementary school, these ancients had to be prepared.

Dearly beloved attendees, in all the various types of literature that amateurishly tackle mysticism, even if they sometimes give the impression of being scholarly, there is a lot of talk about the Guardian of the Threshold, about the threshold into the spiritual world. And they are often believed all the more, the more nebulous mysticism one pours out about these things.

What I have presented to you now is what arises for the unbiased spiritual researcher precisely through what the ancients called the threshold into the spiritual world. Not those nebulous things, of which some orders and some sects and the like speak today, were sought beyond the threshold, but precisely that which is general education with us today. But at the same time we see from this that we face the world with a different self-awareness. The old wisdom teachers feared that their students, if they had not first strengthened their self-confidence through self-discipline, would have become mentally impotent if, for example, they had adopted the idea: The earth does not stand still, but circles around the sun at great speed; one circles around the sun with the earth. This loss of ground under their feet would have been unbearable for the ancients, it would have dampened their self-confidence to the point of unconsciousness. We learn to endure this from childhood on. We live, as it were, in the world as our world of education, into which the ancients had to penetrate only after careful preparation.

Nevertheless, we should not long for the conditions of ancient civilizations. They no longer fit with what nourishes our souls today. What I am presenting to you today as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is neither a renewal of old Gnostic teachings nor an ancient oriental wisdom, which could only be brought to human souls today as something decadent. It is something that can be found today through elementary creative power from this human soul, in the ways that I will explain in a moment. But first, I would like to point out that in a sense we can also speak of a threshold into the supersensible world, or in any case into a world other than that of ordinary life and ordinary science.

The ancients suspected a different world from the one presented to them in their everyday life beyond the threshold. But what do we hear from our conscientious natural scientists, from those who are most right in terms of their methods? We hear that natural science presents us with limits to knowledge. We hear about “ignorabimus” and the like, and, it must be emphasized, within natural science with full justification. If the ancients lacked the intense self-awareness that we have today, then we lack something else.

Where did we get this intense self-awareness in the first place? We got it from the fact that the way of thinking and the way of looking at things that began with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Giordano Bruno and so on came into humanity. As a result, we have not only gained a sum of knowledge, but modern humanity has also undergone a certain education of its soul life. Everything that we have developed under the influence of the way of thinking of these minds in modern times tends to cultivate the intellect, the powers of reason. Of course, today we experiment in science, we observe carefully and conscientiously. We observe the phenomena around us with our instruments, with the telescope, the microscope, with X-rays, with the spectroscope, and we use our intellect, so to speak, only to extract the laws of nature from the phenomena. But despite all this, what are we doing when we observe, when we experiment? We are doing it in such a way that within this work of knowledge we only let the intellect speak in formulating the laws of nature. And it is also the case that, in the course of the last three, four, five hundred years, it is primarily the intellect that has been emphasized in human development. But the mind has the peculiarity of strengthening, hardening and intensifying human self-awareness.

Therefore, today we can endure what even the ancient Greeks could not have endured: the awareness that we move with the earth in the bottomless, as it were, around the sun. But on the other hand, precisely because of this strengthened self-awareness, which shows us the world as soulless and spiritless, we are led to lack a realization that souls must nevertheless long for: We see the world in its material phenomena, its material facts, as they have never been seen by ancient people without a preparation of the mysteries. But we do not see - and that is why conscientious naturalists speak of ignorabimus and of the limits of knowledge - we do not see the world of a spiritual around us.

We stand as human beings in this world. When we reflect on ourselves, we have to say to ourselves: it is the spirit that is active in us simply by thinking about things, by summarizing the experiments, by summarizing the observations. But is this spirit the same as the hermit who stands in a world of material appearances? Is this spirit only present in our body? Is the world spiritless and soulless, as we have to understand it from the point of view of the physical and biological sciences, and rightly so? Today we stand before our environment. We are standing on the threshold of a new era. This has certainly not yet dawned on the broadest sections of humanity. But what humanity does not fully realize is not completely extinguished in the soul. One does not think about things, but inwardly these things sit as feelings of the soul. We have an unconscious soul life. For most people it remains unconscious. But out of this unconsciousness arises the longing to cross a threshold again, to gain spiritual knowledge of the world through self-awareness.

Now, whatever else one may call these things, which one usually feels only unclearly, they are in truth, from one side, the deepest riddle of civilization; they are such that people feel that a spiritual world around them must be found again. The world of ordinary science, devoid of spirit and soul, cannot be the one with which the human soul also forms a unity in its deepest essence. This is the first great civilizational question of the present: How do we again find knowledge that at the same time deepens our religious feeling? How do we find knowledge that at the same time satisfies the deepest needs for a sense of the eternal in the human soul?

It can be said that this modern science has brought great and powerful things, but for the unbiased person it has not actually brought solutions, but rather, one might say, the opposite of solutions. And we should be satisfied and glad about that too. What can we do with modern science? Can we solve the questions of the soul? No, but we can ask them in greater depth! Through this modern science, we have before us the world of material facts in their purity, free from what the human being brings into the world of soulfulness and spirituality from his or her subjectivity. We see, so to speak, the pure phenomena of the external material world. Through this, we get to know the questions of the soul more intensely. This is precisely the achievement of the modern spirit of science: it has brought us new riddles, deeper riddles. This is the first great question of civilization in the present time: How do we face these deeper riddles? One cannot solve the great soul questions in the Haeckelian, Huxleyan, Spencerian spirit, but one can, in this spirit, feel the great riddle questions for the existence of humanity today more intensely than ever before.

This is where spiritual science comes in. Its aim is to guide humanity today, in accordance with its nature, over the renewed threshold into a spiritual world. And the way by which modern man can cross the threshold differently from the ancient man, it is to be described here today in outline. I can only do this in brief strokes. What I only want to explain in principle can be found in more detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” and in other writings.

I would first like to draw attention to the starting point that a person who wants to become a spiritual researcher must take today. He must start from a point that, due to the whole of our time, people today are least willing to accept. It is the point in the soul's makeup that I would like to call intellectual modesty. Although we have developed intellectually to a height never before seen in human development as humanity to a particular height in the last three to four centuries, as a spiritual researcher one must rise precisely to intellectual modesty.

I would like to illustrate what I mean by comparing it. Let us take a five-year-old child and give him a volume of Shakespeare. What would he do with it? He will play with it, leaf through it, tear it up; he will not do what is appropriate with it. But when the child has lived for another ten or fifteen years, he will relate to the volume of Shakespeare quite differently. What has happened? Well, abilities that were inherent in the child have been developed in the child through external intervention by people, through education and teaching. It has become a different being in the course of ten to fifteen years. Intellectual modesty allows the person to say, even when he is an adult, when he has absorbed the current education in science intellectually: you could face nature and the environment in such a way that your approach could be compared to that of a five-year-old child facing Shakespeare's works. There could still be potential in you that can be further developed, so that you become a different being in terms of soul and spirit.

People today are not very keen on adopting the point of view of such intellectual modesty. Our habits of thinking and feeling towards the life of education are different. Those who have received the usual education today are then accepted into our higher educational institutions. There, one no longer has to deal with the development of knowledge, willpower, and the abilities of the soul. Basically, one remains within the scientific research at the point of view that inheritance and ordinary education give. Certainly, observation was broadened in an incredible way through experiment and science, but the same powers of cognition were applied that one has once in so-called modern intellectual life. One did not aim at developing one's human being to bring these powers of cognition further. One did not say to oneself: the person who has these powers of knowledge of life or science could stand opposite nature as a five-year-old child stands opposite Shakespeare's works, and he could develop powers and abilities of knowledge within himself that would lead him to a completely different behavior towards nature. But this is said by someone who, in the sense of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here, wants to become a researcher in the supersensible worlds. This is really about the development of human abilities that initially only exist in the Anlagen, albeit in every human being, but in order for them to be developed, a great deal has to be gone through.

I am not talking, dear listeners, about some kind of miraculous or even superstitious measures for the human soul, but rather about the development of abilities that every person is well acquainted with, that play a major role in everyday life and in ordinary science; they are just not developed to their full potential for the human being between birth and death.

There are many such abilities, but today I would like to characterize only two in their further development. You can find more details about this in the books mentioned. First of all, there is the ability to remember. This ability to remember is absolutely necessary for everyday life. We know, and those who are particularly interested in such things will know from the psycho-pathological literature, what it means for a healthy mental life that the memory is intact up to a point in childhood that lies quite early; that there is no period in life from which memory images do not emerge, bringing to mind the experiences we have gone through. If that which memory is extinguishes, then the human ego is destroyed; a severe mental illness has come over him. Now, what memory gives us is a re-emergence in pale or vivid images. It is precisely this ability, this power, that can be further developed. What is its peculiarity? Well, otherwise the experiences flit past us. The images we form of these experiences also flit past our soul. Memory retains them. I can only speak about this memory in sketchy terms; in my literature you will find a developed science precisely about this ability to remember.

What memory does with the otherwise fleeting images is that it gives them duration. This is what one first takes up and develops in the spiritual scientific method; one develops it through what I call meditation and concentration in the books mentioned. This consists of either seeking advice from someone who has experience in these matters or gleaning the advice oneself from the relevant literature, and of taking easily comprehensible complexes of images such as are geometric or mathematical figures, which one completely overlooks, knowing that these are not reminiscences from life emerging from the subconscious, but everything one has in consciousness is there through one's own arbitrariness in consciousness. One is not subject to auto-suggestion or reverie; one surveys that which one brings into the center of consciousness. Then one remains in consciousness for a long time with complete inner calm on this idea. Just as muscles develop when they perform a particular kind of work, so certain soul powers develop when the soul devotes itself to this unusual activity of remaining on such ideas. It looks easy, and not only do some believe that the spiritual scientist draws what he has to say from some kind of influence, but some also believe that what I am describing here as methods that take place in the inner, intimate life of the soul itself is easy. No, what I am telling you now also requires a long time; some people can do it more easily, others more difficultly. The depth of the performance is much more important than the length of time spent in such meditation.

But one must do such exercises for years. And what one has to accomplish within the soul is truly no easier than what one accomplishes in the laboratory, in the physics room, or at the observatory. Outward research is no more difficult to acquire than that which is carefully and conscientiously cultivated in the soul over many years. But then certain inner soul powers, which we otherwise only know as powers of remembrance, become stronger, and thus something arises in us as soul power that we have not known at all before. This enables us to clearly recognize what materialism says about the power of memory and remembrance. Materialism tells us that the human being's power of remembrance is bound to the material body; if something in the nervous system is not properly constituted, then the power of remembrance also declines, and it declines with age. In any case, mental powers depend on physical development. Spiritual science does not deny this for the life between birth and death. For someone who is developing his memory as I have just described it knows from direct experience how the ordinary memory, which conjures up images of our experiences before our soul, is dependent on the human body. But what he is now developing becomes completely independent of the human body. And the human being experiences how one can live in a soul realm, so that one has supersensible experiences in this soul realm, just as one has sensory experiences in the physical body. I would like to explain to you how these supersensible experiences are in the following way.

You know that human life alternates rhythmically between waking and sleeping. The moments of falling asleep and waking up and the intervening period of sleep occur in our waking life. What happens then? The following is present for the ordinary consciousness: when we fall asleep, our consciousness is dulled, and in most people it reaches absolute zero. Dreams sometimes bubble up out of this half-dulled consciousness. In this state, the person is indeed alive; otherwise he would have to pass away and be reborn, in a soul-spiritual sense, but his consciousness is paralyzed. This is because from falling asleep until waking up, the human being does not use his senses, does not use the impulses that represent his organic will impulses.

But the one who has developed the higher ability out of the ability to remember, which I have just mentioned, can switch off precisely the same. Such a spiritual researcher comes to the point where he no longer needs to see with his eyes, as one does not see with one's eyes when asleep; nor to hear with his ears, as one also does not hear with one's ears when asleep; nor to feel the warmth in the surroundings, nor to use the will impulses that work through the muscles, or through the human organization in general. He can shut out all physical things. And yet his consciousness is not dulled as it is when asleep, but he is able to devote himself to states in which otherwise a person is only in sleep, but unconscious; the spiritual researcher is fully conscious. Just as the sleeping person is surrounded by a dark world that contains nothing for him, so the spiritual researcher is surrounded by a world that has nothing to do with our sensual world, but which is just as full and intense as our sensual world. We face our sensory world through our senses; the spiritual researcher faces the supersensible world when he can consciously free himself from the body, when he is in a state that is otherwise experienced by a person between falling asleep and waking up; but he is fully aware in this state.

In this way, one learns to recognize that a supersensible world constantly surrounds us, just as a sensual world otherwise surrounds us. However, there is one significant difference: in the sensual world, we perceive facts through our senses, and within the facts, we also perceive entities. Facts predominate, and entities arise in the course of these facts. In the supersensible world that we open up for ourselves in this way, we first encounter entities. When we open our spiritual eyes to see the supersensible world, we are surrounded by real entities. And at first it is a world of very concrete, real, supersensible entities in which we are, not yet a world of facts; we still have to conquer that through something else.

So this is the achievement of modern anthroposophically oriented spiritual science: that the human being crosses a threshold again and learns to enter a different world from the one that otherwise surrounds him. And when a person learns to recognize how he is independent of the body, then he finally comes to say to himself: Not only when the soul falls asleep does it, as it were, separate itself from the body and then return to the body when it wakes up; through the desire for the body lying in bed, it returns. Through such supersensible knowledge one also comes to really get to know the essence of the soul, how it returns to the body through this desire when waking up. But if you acquire such real concepts of falling asleep and waking up, these concepts will eventually expand to include learning to recognize the human soul in its essence, as it was before it descended from the spiritual worlds through birth or conception into a physical body that is given to it through inheritance.

Once you have grasped and learned to follow the soul outside the body between falling asleep and waking up, just as you learn to recognize the lesser forces that draw the soul to the body in bed, you learn to recognize the soul as it lives when it is freed from the body after passing through the gate of death. In particular, the following ideas are recorded: One learns to recognize why the human soul has only a duller consciousness during sleep. It has this because the desire for the body lives in it. This desire for the body dulls consciousness between falling asleep and waking up to the point of unconsciousness. When a person passes through the gate of death, this desire no longer exists. And by getting to know the soul through the developed ability to remember, one gets to know it precisely in the state in which it develops after passing through the gateway of death; how it can then have consciousness because it is not bound to a physical body, because it no longer has any desire for one. This freedom from desire makes consciousness possible.

When a person passes through the gateway of death, he acquires a different consciousness from the one he had through the instrumentality of the body. In this way one also learns to recognize what forces were in the soul that attracted it to a physical body when it was in a spiritual world, but to a physical body that only generally shone before it as a physical body, which was not a specific one. One learns to recognize the soul as it absorbs the desire to come down again into physical life on earth. In other words, one first gets to know the eternal part of the human soul in its true meaning.

And that, dear listeners, is one thing that one gets to know in this way. But one also gets to know something else through it. By learning to recognize the eternal in the human soul that passes through births and deaths in images, I call them imaginations in my books, one learns to recognize that this human soul belongs to a supersensible world; that the soul belongs to a supersensible world just as the body belongs to the sensual world. And just as one can describe this sensual world through the body, so one can describe the supersensible world in its spirituality. One learns to recognize a supersensible world in addition to the sensual world.

However, one must be willing to develop a second soul quality, beyond that which is present in ordinary life. Today's scientist recoils at the mere mention of this quality as an intellectual capacity. One can fully appreciate the reasons why he does this; but nevertheless, what I have to tell you about the further development of this human soul ability is true.

The first power that had to be developed was the ability to remember, which becomes an independent force. The second power is the power of human love. In ordinary life between birth and death, love works through the physical organism; it is intimately connected with the instincts and drives of human nature. And only in the most sublime moments does some of this love detach itself from the physical. Then man has that uplifting moment when he becomes free from himself, which is the state of true freedom, where man does not give himself over to his instincts, but forgets himself, where he bases his actions on external facts, on the necessity of those facts. Because love is inwardly connected with freedom, I dared to say as early as 1893 in my Philosophy of Freedom, by which I wanted to found a philosophy of sociology for the present day, that true love does not make man blind, but rather seeing, that is, free. It leads him beyond that which otherwise blinds him when he is dependent on what is within him. Love allows us to be devoted to the outside world, and in so doing frees us from that which we must be freed from if we are to act freely.

But this love, which only shines into our ordinary life in truly free actions, must be cultivated by the modern spiritual researcher. Love must gradually spiritualize in the same way as the faculty of memory must spiritualize; it must become a power that is purely soul-life, and which makes him, as a soul-being, independent of the body, so that he can love without the body, through its blood, through its entire organization, providing the basis for this love. This is how immersion in the external world, in people, comes about; this is how you become one with the external world.

This developed power of love now brings us a second thing; it puts us into the spiritual world in a substantial way, which we enter through the developed ability to remember. And we now get to know spiritual facts and learn to describe the world in such a way that we do not merely say how our present planetary system once emerged from some old nebulous world, which will then in turn either disperse or fall into the sun. We do not look at such a world, which is alien to the spirit, and which is confronted by something else. And if a person is honest, they must feel that this world, as viewed scientifically, is confronted by the most valuable thing in the human being. In modern spiritual life, we have been able to get to know the besieged souls who tell us again and again: Science tells us about a world of pure natural necessity, that our world comes from worlds that were fog worlds, that clumped together into the four natural kingdoms, the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, up to man. But now, in the depths of his being, something arises in man to which he must attach the greatest value: his moral, his religious world. This stands before his soul, and it is what actually makes him human in the first place. But he must say to himself, if he is honest with regard to the purely scientific world view: This earth, on which you stand like a hermit of the universe with your moral ideals, will disintegrate, will fall back into the sun, will become a slag. There will be a large churchyard, the ideals will be buried.

This is where spiritual science comes in. It does not approach this situation from the standpoint of faith and hope, but from real knowledge, which is developed in the way I have indicated, and says: No, the mere scientific world view offers an abstraction of the world. This world is permeated with spirit, this world is permeated with supersensible entities. And if we look back to prehistoric times, what is material on earth has emerged from the spiritual; and what is material now will become spiritual in the future. Just as man discards his body and enters a spiritual world spiritually with consciousness, so that which is material on earth will fall away like a corpse, and that which is spiritual-soul on earth, that which is spiritual-soul in man, will arise in the future, even when the earth has perished. One could say that the Christian saying “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” proves true here with a certain variation. Man can say: Everything my eyes see will perish, just as the human body perishes in the face of human individuality. But what lives in man as morality rises from what is perishing. Man senses a spiritual world around him; he lives into a spiritual world.

In this way, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science deepens our knowledge of the spiritual, and in doing so, it takes on a different form from that of external science in relation to the civilizational needs of the present. External science can in turn deepen knowledge and insight to religious fervor and higher consciousness. It gives the human being a spiritual self-awareness.

This is basically the first great civilizational question of the present day. If a person does not have the right inner support, if he feels like he is floating in the void as a mere material being, he cannot develop a strong inner being, nor can he appear as a strong being in social life. Man must create what external institutions are, man must create what external social conditions are. There is something significant about external institutions and external social conditions in terms of the great civilizational questions of the present and the future, and these civilizational questions lead us back to the search for the great, true consciousness of humanity. For only people who have such inner support, which can give them peace of mind, will be able to integrate themselves properly into social life. That is the first question: how can a person with inner support, with a secure hold on life, integrate themselves into our social conditions? The second is what we might call the encounter between people, human interaction. And here we enter a field where, no less than in the field of knowledge, modern civilization has brought man not new solutions but new riddles. Consider only the breadth of technology, of technical life, that the achievements of modern natural science have brought. Technical life, commercial life, life of intercourse, as they surround us from hour to hour today, they are the achievements of this magnificent, modern view of nature. But what we have not found within modern technology, what is posed as a new vital question, is: How should people live in this complicated technical, commercial and transport life?

This question is posed by modern civilization itself. That it has not yet been solved is shown by those terrible movements that present themselves all the worse the further east we go, into Asia, where human instincts are not used to create something upward, but, because the great civilizing questions have not been solved, are used to create something destructive. Undoubtedly, the whole of modern civilization would have to perish through what is emerging in the East. Much more terrible than people in the West imagine is what is lurking there to lead to the decline

of modern civilization. But it also testifies to how necessary it is to find something else to solve the civilizational issues of the present.

We must not only work in modern technology, which has emerged from the modern view of nature, but we must also gain another possibility: Man has become estranged from nature; he has been placed, practically speaking, with his actions and his whole occupation in a soulless, mechanistic way; he has been led from dealing with nature to dealing with the spiritless machine, with the spiritless mechanism of traffic; and we must find ways to give man something again that he can feel as something given by nature. It must be a world view that speaks to his soul with great power and tells him that man is something more than what he experiences here; that he belongs to a spiritual-soul, a supersensible world that surrounds him and can be explored in an exact science, just as the outer science is that leads to technology. But only such a science will also be able to establish the right relationship between people. Such a science will enable us to encounter a being in man that not only appears to us as it comes to us, as it appears between birth and death, but in such a way that we learn to respect the eternal, the immortal, the connection with a supersensible world forever. Through such a deepened knowledge, the feeling must change from person to person.

And a third thing is also important. It is important that the human being learns again that his life is not exhausted with the life between birth and death, as the modern proletarian believes from his ideology called ideology, but that what we do here in every moment has not only an earthly but also a cosmic significance. For indeed, when the earth has perished, what we bring out of our souls into our daily work, out of moral, spiritual and soul foundations, will arise in another world; it will take part in spiritualization in the metamorphosis.

Thus, spiritual science as anthroposophically oriented approaches the questions of the present in three ways. It brings people to a spiritual self-awareness. It brings people to see in their fellow human beings, in their neighbor, a spiritual being in turn. It brings people to give their work, their earthly activities, a cosmic, universal, spiritual meaning, however material they may be.

Spiritual science today not only has theoretical views about what can be worked out in this way, but has already begun to apply it in practice in life. In Stuttgart, we have the Waldorf School, which was founded by Emil Molt and which I am in charge of, and where a pedagogy, a didactics, is being developed through the knowledge of human nature that can be obtained through spiritual science, as it is meant here. Furthermore, in Dornach near Basel, we have the Goetheanum, a Free University for Spiritual Science, the construction of which I will show you in a few days with the help of slides. This Goetheanum in Dornach is not yet finished, but we were able to hold a large number of courses in the unfinished building last fall. I have also been able to speak here in Holland about spiritual science in the past. At that time I could only speak of spiritual science as a form of research, a research tendency, as something that lives in individual human beings.

Since then, this spiritual science has taken on a different form. It has begun to establish its own School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. Last spring I myself showed how what I have only outlined for you today in its beginning as spiritual scientific research can be applied to all fields of science in its execution. I showed physicians and medical students how what can be gained from this spiritual science in a strictly exact method can have an effect on medicine and therapy. Those questions in medicine that become borderline questions are juxtaposed with the health issues of humanity. Every conscientious doctor will perceive those practical questions of medicine as cultural issues. These questions are the ones that remain unanswered today because today's science does not want to rise from the sensory to the spiritual and supersensory.

How medicine can be fertilized, how all sciences can be fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, experts from all fields, from jurisprudence, mathematics, history, sociology, biology, physics, chemistry, pedagogy, tried to show it. Then there were also personalities who belong to the arts, to artistic creation, who showed how artistic creation can be fertilized by spiritual science. There were representatives of practical life, of commercial and industrial life, who showed how their lives, guided by spiritual science, are no longer merely caught up in the old routine that led us into the catastrophes, but how, through it, the human being is brought into life practice in a higher sense. This is precisely what these courses should show: how spiritual science does not want to cultivate some kind of dilettantism, some nebulous mysticism, but how it can fruitfully intervene in the individual sciences. But in doing so, it simultaneously elevates what is in these sciences to an overall spiritual and supersensible conception of the human being.

I will have more to say about the practical side here; then I will speak about teaching and educational issues and about the social question. Then you will see how the spiritual science meant here, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, does not seek some nebulous mysticism in a sphere that is alien to life, but how it wants to grasp the spirit for other reasons: firstly, because the human being must become aware of his connection with the true spiritual origin; secondly, however, because the spirit wants to intervene precisely in the material, in the practical life, as it makes a distinction between the spiritless practical life and a spirit conceived in terms of a lack of life, which certainly does not grasp the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, nor that which is most necessary for the present.

Dear attendees, we have found people who have an understanding of what is to be achieved in the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach for the development of humanity, and how necessary it is in the face of the great civilizational issues of the present day that this be achieved. The difficult circumstances have slowed down the construction very much. We are not yet finished, and completion will depend to a large extent on whether people who have a heart and mind for all the human progress that is needed today will continue to come to our aid. In its unfinished state, we gathered more than a thousand people at the opening of our courses. Those who come to this Dornach after this — as will also be shown in the next lecture — will see that at the same time this spiritual science wants to work out of the full humanity: that it does not just want to speak to the human head, that it not only wants to gain that which can be presented through experimentation and observation, but that at the same time it strives for truly artistic expression, without falling back on straw-like symbolism or abstract, pedantic allegories. Therefore, not just any architectural style could be applied in Dornach – as the slide lecture will show – but the architectural style had to be drawn from the same sources from which this spiritual science itself flows. It is not a one-sided science such as today's experimental and observational sciences, but seeks to draw from the full human being. It wants to speak to the full, whole human being, despite the fact that it is as exact as any science can be.

I will still have to talk about the practical implementation, but today I had to present the results of the spiritual research on these matters, in order to then show in the practical areas how necessary this is for our time, which is based on the observation of the history of this period by this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It aims to add to the conscientious and methodical study of the material world, which it recognizes more than any other spiritual direction, the science of the spirit, which in turn can lead to religious deepening and to artistic creativity, just as the old instinctive science, which we can no longer renew, led to art and religion in the mysteries.

That this spiritual science is not opposed to religion and Christianity, I will have to show in the further explanation of the practical side. It strives for that which every true, religious deepening has to strive for, it strives for the spirit. Hence we have hope: all those people who today still resist this spiritual science will come round to it in the end, because this spiritual science strives for something universally human: it strives for the spirit, and for humanity, it needs the spirit.

What I have to present this evening will be only a modest introduction to what I will endeavor to discuss here in the next few evenings in individual chapters about Anthroposophy.

Anthroposophy did not come about as a result of asking: What are the needs, what is the quest of our present age, what interests and longings does this present age have with regard to its spiritual life? That would be an abstract question. And just as in ordinary life, as a rule, one does not find what one is looking for without having a proper mental image of it, so one will probably not be able to satisfy the search in the spiritual life of an age if one does not already start from a very definite, concrete mental image of what this age is seeking. But although anthroposophy did not start from these abstract questions, it will be possible to speak afterwards about whether, now that it is here, it can in some sense spiritually satisfy the most important questions and needs of our age.

Anthroposophy actually started out from the needs of science itself, as it has developed in our age, after it has completed its, one may say, great and powerful triumphal march through the last three to four centuries. Anthroposophy has emerged from this scientific endeavor by simultaneously attempting to address the ways in which the Goethean worldview can provide fertile ground for the scientific spirit of the present. So that one can say – allow me this personal remark – when the necessity of an anthroposophical spiritual science became apparent to me, on the one hand it was the opinion that the present scientific spirit in particular must develop to a scientific understanding of the supersensible life, and secondly, what could be gained from a living understanding of Goethe's worldview, which was connected to this scientific endeavor itself. I have been seeking this development for Anthroposophy since the 1880s. When one hears views about anthroposophy today that are more superficial, they often sound as if anthroposophy had emerged from the chaos that has arisen for the spiritual life of the entire civilized world during and after the catastrophe of war, as if it were a dark, mystical force. This is simply not the case. This anthroposophy has been working in earnest for decades, and has emerged from very different conditions.

But as I said, once it is there, we can ask whether it meets a need, a longing in the spiritual life of our time. To answer this question, we must look at the special character, at the deeper peculiarities of the spiritual life of our age. There we shall find, I believe, a trait that is particularly characteristic. Of course, if you say something like that, someone can point out numerous exceptions. They are not to be denied at all. But what I want to characterize is the general trend in the lives of people of this age.

Do we not have to say to ourselves in the present, when we have grown a little older, that we mostly approach today without joy, without enthusiastic devotion to the tasks of life? This seems to be a pessimistic view, but it does not want to be. It simply wants to look with open eyes at what is, after all, a pervasive trait in the lives of contemporary people. We grow up, are educated, and are also brought forward by life. When we then face our own professional tasks, when we face the sufferings and even the joys of life, we do not know how to find our way into the situation of the world with our full humanity today. And from this trend, a most important area of observation will arise for our age in particular, which immediately points characteristically to the deepest peculiarities of our time. When we stand as human beings in later life today, we can no longer look back, in memory of our youth, of our childhood, as once the human being looked back on this youth, on this childhood. Those who have done a certain amount of inner historical research can say this unequivocally. When we look back at our childhood and youth, what rises up from that childhood and youth is not what fills us with joy, enthusiasm, and initiative, what gives us strength from a time that we have lost externally but that could be within us, inspiring us and strengthening us internally. It may be a radical statement, but in a sense it is true: we, as adults of our time, have largely lost our youth, our childhood. And this is particularly evident from the fact that, if we now turn our gaze more to social life, we, as adults, find it so difficult to communicate with young people. It is a general trait of our age, again, that there is a fermenting striving in youth, but that in the wide field this youth comes to the view that age can no longer be what their heart, what their soul longs for. A deep gulf has emerged in our age – some do not admit it, but it is nevertheless the case – between youth and the adult generation. But this very gulf indicates that the human being, who, one might say, brings with him into the world today, out of his full, childlike humanity, that which, whatever his origin, he brings with him through birth into this physical existence - that the human being does not find what he demands of life by virtue of the eternal that is born with him. It is precisely because the young person does not find this in the spiritual life, in life in general, that what our present time so strongly lacks is revealed. The word 'youth movement' has become a familiar one today. And the youth movement is particularly evident among young people who are growing into the spiritual professions; who are growing into a life through which a person is to become a leader in the spiritual, social, moral, artistic and religious needs of their age.

And if we now ask ourselves why so little of the spiritual life that exists satisfies the growing human being, then this question will perhaps be answered, if not fully, then at least illuminated, by looking at the various branches of our spiritual life today: Within the horizon that presents itself to us in the scientific, artistic, moral, social and religious fields, we find that, if I may express it this way, these individual branches of life, which man needs if he is to become a full personality, no longer understand each other, and that they therefore conflict with each other in man, in the human personality.

Anyone who today wants to rebel against what the scientific spirit of the last few centuries, especially since the middle of the 15th century, has brought about in the overall development of humanity, would be a fool. And anthroposophy must not be understood as if it wanted to take up an opposing position to this scientific spirit of our age. This spirit has brought forth in scientific research itself an enormous conscientiousness and exactness of method. I would like to say that the first question for this scientific spirit has become: How can one achieve certainty in the search for truth? — This scientific spirit of the present is striving for certainty in the search for truth. And tremendous achievements have been made, not only in the field of knowledge, but also in practical life, especially in the technical fields of our age. And yet, when we ask ourselves: Does this spirit of science satisfy the pressing sense of youth, does today's youth grow into this spirit of science in such a way that they feel there is something that flows towards them for their full humanity? We cannot answer this question in the affirmative. If we do so, it is because we are indulging in empty illusions or because we want to spread a fog before our spiritual eyes. For this spirit of science is in strange conflict with other areas of life.

First of all, there is the artistic field. Having developed the spirit of science with its exact methods and rigorously trained thinking, artists, those who want to pursue life artistically, who want to enjoy life artistically, feel that they must actually keep the artistic at a distance from this spirit of science. We hear it everywhere today that what art wants to create, what art wants to educate, must come from completely different human sources than what science fathoms in a certain, intellectualistic way of observing. And when someone wants to bring the spirit of today's science into artistic creation, one has the feeling that they are corrupting artistic creation, that the spirit of science has no place in art, that science investigates truth in a way that must not be transferred to the artistic.

Now, the Greeks were familiar with such a strict separation of what man allows to be revealed to him by the world through the artistic sense on the one hand and through the scientific spirit on the other; the Greeks were familiar with such a strict separation within themselves, within which, on the one hand, a brilliant scientific spirit had already emerged and, on the other hand, an ideal art. And even in more recent times, Goethe did not want such a separation, having immersed himself completely in the Greek worldview. Goethe, for example, did not want to speak of a separate idea of truth, of beauty, of religion or piety. Goethe wanted to know the idea as one, and in religion and art and science he wanted to see only different revelations of the one spiritual truth. Goethe spoke of art as a revelation of the secret laws of nature, which would never be revealed without art. For Goethe, science was something that he placed on one side, which has a different language than art; on the other hand, art was something that had yet another language. But only when both work together in man can man, in the Goethean sense, fathom the full truth. Today, we think about how the scientific spirit, which proceeds exactly from conclusion to conclusion, from observation to observation, from experiment to experiment, must undermine the context of artistic imagination; how there is no justification for wanting to fathom anything of the truth of the world through art itself. How, in other words, a strict separation must be made between art and science. Do we not have to say that science, on the one hand, strives for certainty, for a conscientious method, that above all it wants to have certainty, that it wants to present things, if I may put it this way, in such a way that they can be retained and must be recognized by every unbiased human mind? But in striving for this great certainty, one does not have the confidence in what one is fathoming about nature and man through this science that it could somehow have significance for something that also belongs to the satisfaction of the whole human being: for artistic creation or artistic enjoyment. A rigid science is established, but there is no trust that it may have a say where it is concerned with even more human needs, or at least more inward human needs than those of science itself: artistic needs. Of course, a clear distinction can be made between science and art. I can understand anyone who says: Oh, that's just a phrase, a figure of speech, when someone speaks disparagingly of this distinction between science and art. It has to be there, after all. As I said, I can understand it. In the depths of the human soul, there is something that strives for unity, for harmony of the individual soul activities. And while on the one hand logic carries out the separation between science and art, something in us demands balance, the harmonization of scientific truths on the one hand, and artistic truths on the other. Something in us, very deep in our soul, demands that what we extract from nature and man as scientific truth should also have the power to generate artistic initiative in us, without our lapsing into straw allegories or abstract symbolism. There is a definite need in the depths of the soul not to leave the knowledge that science fathoms lifeless, but to enliven it in such a way that something of this scientific knowledge can truly flow over into art, as Goethe was aware of, that for him the ripest fruits of his artistic creativity flowed over from his conception of science.

The great question, not precisely formulated but deeply felt, resounds to us from the longings of our age: the profound question of how we can gain such trust in science, which above all has sought certainty, that we may penetrate through it into the realms of truth that confront us in artistic creation, in artistic formation? And that is one of the most profound questions for present-day humanity.

One could debate and discuss at length the fact that there must be a clear distinction between the logical-observational, scientific method and artistic creation, artistic design. But suppose that in the realm of reality the matter were so that when we come up to man from the realm of the lower nature kingdoms and now wanted to apply the laws of nature to man, as we get to know them in the sense of today's certain science, then we simply could not get to know man. Indeed, it could even be that nature itself creates artistically, that in the various realms of nature there is not only such creation as lies within the meaning of the present natural laws, and that this is particularly not the case in the human realm, but that nature itself, as Goethe assumed, is a great artist, and that we, no matter how critically we approach the subject and say to ourselves, “We must not introduce fantasy into science,” it could be that, by logically setting this before us, we simply limit our knowledge, kill it, because nature is artistic and only yields to artistic observation.

Of course, if one expresses this initially in the hypothetical form in which I am doing so now, it can be contested in many ways. But anyone who is sufficiently of a psychologist to look into the depths of the soul of modern man knows that there is a particular anxiety in the mind today regarding the question: Should we not, if we strive scientifically, have the same in our state of mind as that which forms and shapes artistically? But what if we cannot get into nature any other way? What if nature wants to be grasped artistically? What if human nature in particular wants to be grasped artistically, even in its physical organs? What are we to do then, even if we have a science that is as rigorous as possible and nature, the world, demands of us an artistically shaped knowledge? I know that even present-day scientists consider such a sentence to be an absurdity. But I also know that although it may be considered an absurdity in the consciousness of science, human hearts and human souls today do not consider it an absurdity, but rather they feel its truth dimly and would like to see it in the light.

And it is no different when we move into another area, the area of morality, morals, the area of social work and labor, and the area of religious immersion. Everything that falls within the scope of these three areas has been, so to speak, banned from science for a long time, ever since the scientific spirit has so decisively taken hold of modern humanity. As regards sociology and social work, attempts have been made in recent times, especially in the popular field, to think socially and sociologically from the scientific spirit and to give impulses to social life from this science. The results do not exactly suggest that this is the right approach. For the things that are currently shaking the world in terms of the social question, and that are to be satisfied by all sorts of illusions based on the spirit of science of modern times, are leading to those terrible disharmonies, to those terrible destructive elements that are at work in the social life of humanity today, and which show clearly that a recovery is only possible if a spiritual turnaround can take place in some direction. But after all, social life cannot be guided towards a healthy solution without taking the moral and religious foundations into account. And so, in regard to the social, we must first look at the moral and religious foundations of human life. And here we find it stated quite clearly, even more clearly than in relation to artistic experience, especially in the most recent phenomena, that on the one hand there is science with its strong certainty and conscientiousness, but that, on the other hand, there is an even greater lack of trust in introducing the spirit of this scientific attitude into moral thinking and religious consciousness. And today more than ever, it is emphasized by the seemingly progressive minds that science must remain in its place. But it must be banished from everything that man has to strive for as impulses for his moral action, for his religiosity. That is not where science belongs; that is where faith belongs. Just as there is a strict distinction between science and art, there is also a strict distinction between science and morality, between science and religiosity. One would like to appeal to a special ability, to a special impulsivity of the human soul for this morality, for this religious life. One would like to strictly separate the truth of faith from the scientific truth, just as one would like to strictly separate the artistic truth from it.

Now, this has certainly not prevented the spirit of science from spreading to all circles in the present day, from taking on the most popular form; that today not only the scientists are occupied with this spirit of science, but the whole broad mass of today's civilized humanity. Today, one can be a religious and pious person in the old, traditional sense, but thanks to public literature, from newspapers to books, and through other public life, one still lives entirely in the modern spirit of science. Therefore it could not be avoided that, however strongly the demand arises to separate faith from scientific knowledge, this scientific knowledge appears in all possible fields as a critique of faith, that it is already having and will continue to have a subversive and disintegrating effect on this faith in numerous human minds, unless there is also a complete spiritual reversal in these fields.

Belief and knowledge, which today we want to keep strictly separate, did not originate from different sources. To recognize this, we have to go back further than we do for art, where we only have to go back to the Greeks to see that the Greeks saw artistic truth and scientific truth as one and the same. We must go back to much earlier times in the development of humanity. But there we will find times when religion is simply everything; when man, in a certain way, through the powers of his soul, becomes so absorbed in the depths of the universe that religious life wells up out of this absorption. But as this religious life wells up in him, there stands before his soul that which can make him religiously pious, to which he can sacrifice, that has an effect on him by revealing itself in beauty, and that can therefore be enjoyed artistically, and that, when his thinking and understanding delve into it, meets him as the truth of the world. Science, art and religion, they all arise from one root. But that is not all that comes into consideration. It is true that if we go back to the earliest times of human development, we find that science, art and religion are one, that they emerge from a common source, that later religious life became independent - this was already the case in Greek and Roman times - but that artistic life still remained united with scientific life. And only when we penetrate into the most recent times do we find that these three branches of the revelation of human personality are becoming separate.

Today, these three branches are again striving mightily in the unconscious and subconscious depths of man towards unity, towards harmonization. Why is that? Well, today one can only stand in awe before science, and opposition to that which is truth in science would, as I said, be folly. But science has only been creative in the field of thought and in the field of observation, or regulated observation, of experiment. Science has only been creative with regard to that which can be attained by logical judgment and through observation by the human mind. In these fields, science has achieved great and original things in recent centuries.

If we look at the other fields, the artistic field, the field of moral and religious life, then we have to say to ourselves – and again it is something that not all people say to themselves today, but which basically all civilized humanity feels in the depths of their souls – artistic sense and artistic spirit are not really creative today. We often delude ourselves, of course, when we are recreating, but the present age is not style-generating or motif-generating in the artistic field. Earlier times were style-generating and motif-generating. For example, the Greeks, who gave birth to their buildings from the same womb of the soul from which the poets created their works of art. They gave birth to them from the same womb of the soul that much so that the belief arose that Homer and Hesiod, being artists, had given the Greeks their gods. We live off artistic traditions. We build in the Gothic style, we build in the antique style, we build in the baroque style, and so on, but we do not build in the present. Nor are we able to be fully present in other areas in an artistic sense. One must express these things somewhat radically if one wants to touch what is nevertheless present as reality in the deepest forces of our age.

In the religious and moral sphere, traditions are even older. In the religious and moral sphere, our age is not creative. Hence the conservatism of religions, the urge to preserve the old at all costs. Hence the fear that arises when something new appears in the religious sphere. We have artistic styles from ancient times; we have religious content from even older times. And the young people, as they grow up today, carry a longing for creativity in all areas of life, through something mysterious that I cannot discuss today, through secrets that are born with them. They find this creativity in the scientific field. But that is not enough for her. She longs for something deeply creative in the artistic realm, and she also longs for something deeply creative in the moral-religious realm. That is why today's youth does not understand the older generation, and the older generation does not understand the youth. That is why there is a gulf between the two.

All this basically characterizes our present age, but it does not yet show the deep discord in man himself, which has actually led to all that I have just described. And to find this deep conflict in human nature itself, we must look at the peculiarity of this human nature, as it has developed in the scientific age, that is, since the middle of the 15th century. If we look at today's man without prejudice, we see two opposing poles in his nature. These two poles basically dominate our entire intellectual life. But they do not satisfy our human needs. And these two poles are, on the one hand, the strong, inward, intense self-confidence that modern man has developed over the past centuries, and, on the other hand, the special way in which man has come to understand the world through his modern abilities.

Let us take a closer look at these polar opposites. When I speak of the self-awareness, the sense of self, of modern man, I do not mean only that which arises, so to speak, in the solitude of the philosopher's study. From the self-awareness of man, that is, from the self-comprehension of the idea, of the concept, Hegel developed a worldview in a grandiose way. In Hegelian philosophy, we see only an infinitely ingenious elaboration of what self-consciousness can experience within itself when it becomes fully aware of itself. And on the other hand, we see in the anti-Hegelians, at least when they are philosophers, that they also start from self-consciousness. They despise the Hegelians, and the broad development of the ideal and spiritual that Hegel achieved on the basis of human consciousness. They want to stick to one point, which they keep looking at: their self-consciousness. It does not expand as it does with Hegel, but they also start from self-consciousness. But by characterizing in this way, even if one descends more into the concrete-scientific and philosophical realm, one cannot characterize too much of the nature of the present age from this philosophical grasp of self-consciousness, for the reason that once became particularly clear to me in a conversation with Eduard von Hartmann. We were talking about what can be achieved epistemologically through a critique, an analysis of self-consciousness, and Eduard von Hartmann said: Nowadays, books about such things should not be printed at all, but only hectographed, so that they are only available in a few copies, perhaps sixty copies, because only that many people in Germany, out of sixty million, have an interest in such things. This is also true when it comes to the most intimate philosophical matters. Therefore, you cannot expect me to bother you with how self-awareness is being lived out in the German philosophical consciousness in this day and age. But this self-awareness has been evident since the last century, not only to the inquiring philosopher, but in all human fields, and it is to these that I am referring. The way in which people today think about themselves, how they strongly sense their own being, their I, is certainly not taken into account by external historical research, but the inner historical research knows this. Before the 15th century, people simply did not think about themselves, did not recognize or know anything. There, inwardly, everything was more dull. There one did not say “I” with the same intensity as one can say it in civilized humanity since then.

Thus there has been a general intensification of inner experience. This intensification of inner experience is evident in the field of science in the complete rejection of belief in authority, in the desire to accept only that which can be justified before one's own self-awareness. In the realm of art, it is manifested by the fact that man everywhere seeks to infuse into the work of art, to shape into it, that which he can experience in his deepest self-awareness. In the religious sphere, it is shown by the fact that man can only experience a divine being fully when it sinks into his innermost self, which he experiences strongly, which he wants to experience strongly together with the divine being, if it is to have any validity or significance for him at all. In the moral sphere, man strives - as I already showed in my “Philosophy of Freedom” in the nineties of the last century - for impulses, for ethical motives, for ethical regulation of life, which arise from this root of his strong self-awareness. And in social life we have this peculiar phenomenon today, that social demands are arising everywhere, that people are saying everywhere: we need a social organization of life – but that basically human feeling is very far removed from social feeling, from social empathy. And precisely because we lack social empathy, we demand the social organization of life. We want what we actually lack within ourselves to come from outside. We say, “We must become social beings,” because in modern times, precisely as the spirit of science has grown, we have basically only become strong in our ego, in our antisocial nature, and today we are seeking a balance between this strong ego and social demands.

And so we encounter this self-awareness in all areas of human life. Anyone who studies the social question today from the perspective of the organization of human labor, anyone who has an interest in what has become of the social question under the influence of modern technology, which has removed people from direct contact with their work, which has the indifferent machine - knows how, in this area too, social will cannot emerge from awakened self-awareness, because this awakened self-awareness is confronted with something, with the machine, in the face of which this self-awareness can feel fully satisfied at the very least.

Now, on the one hand, there is the self-confidence of modern man. But how did this self-confidence come about, given that it is a fact of life? How did this modern humanity awaken to this strong self-confidence? Initially, one can only arrive at this self-confidence through a particular development of the life of thought, of the life of ideas. Thought did not play the same role in earlier epochs of humanity as it has in more recent times. But it was precisely by becoming capable of thinking more and more abstractly and abstractly, more and more intellectually and intellectually, that self-awareness became strong. Self-awareness became strong precisely under the power of thought. And so man has come to develop thinking to its highest peak, whereas in the past he lived more in feeling, in beholding, in intuition and imagination and inspiration, even if these were dream-like and unconscious. Man has developed thinking, and with thinking it was possible for him to achieve his strong self-awareness in thought.

But with this, man has arrived at a one-sidedness in our spiritual life. Thought is moving away from reality. Who would not have the feeling that thought can never achieve full-bodied reality, that thought remains only an image of reality! With an image of reality, we have cultivated our strong self-confidence as modern humanity. Therefore, even if people are not yet fully aware of it, even if they cannot yet express it, they feel it, they sense it, and today's youth feel it with particular intensity: that man stands there with thoughts that are alien to reality. He stands, on the one hand, in the face of reality with his self-awareness, the self-awareness that has been grasped through thinking. It cannot approach life, it remains an image. It is powerless in the face of life. We are completely with ourselves in our self-awareness, place ourselves inwardly as strongly as possible on our own, but we are powerless, we do not penetrate with our thoughts into reality. This is the one pole of our modern spiritual life: the powerlessness of self-conscious thinking.

This feeling of the powerlessness of one's own ego permeates modern humanity. This makes modern humanity approach life without joy, without inner devotion, even without understanding, because the strongly developed ego, the strong self-awareness, must always feel powerless even in the face of that life in which one has to work oneself. That is the one pole.

And the other pole, as it presents itself to modern humanity, is that whereas in the past man grasped all kinds of things from the depths of his soul, or, as people like to say today, , modern man only has confidence when he observes the external world in a way that is not mixed with anything from within; when he observes the external world in a so-called objective way, in an experiment. One's own inner being should be completely silent when observing or experimenting. Only the external world should speak. What has been achieved as a result? We have come to investigate this external world in faithful observation and in exact experiment, but we cannot get further with this research than the mechanism. For astronomy, the universe has become a mechanism. For geology, the developing earth has become a mechanism. Even the human organism has become a mechanism, and the modern neo-vitalistic attempts are only attempts with inadequate means to achieve something that cannot be achieved with the scientific method, which is now recognized, and which only leads to understanding the mechanism – to put it radically: the machine – in the experiment, in the observation. By coming to understand the machine, we believe that we can see through what is in front of us, because we do not mix anything into the context of physical and mechanical laws that we form into a fabric in the machine. In a sense, we do see through it, we see through how the individual parts of a mechanism interact and interlock. We initially feel satisfied because we have been educated from the newer school of thought, by understanding the machine, by understanding the universe, the cosmos, as a machine, with interlocking wheels and so on. We believe we are satisfied, but inwardly we are not. Something remains that repels us, precisely in terms of our full humanity, from this understanding of the machine. An understanding of the machine is what has actually contributed to the greatness, to the triumphs of the modern spirit of science. Why? The machine becomes transparent, not to the eye but to the mind, to the intellect. When we look into the organism, things remain dark to such external observation. In the machine, everything is transparent. But we should ask ourselves: do we understand the diamond better because it is transparent? It is simply not true that something becomes more transparent and therefore more comprehensible to us. For what is at work in the machine, we feel in the long run, when we stand face to face with it, more and more as alien to our own nature. And that is the unconscious feeling that asserts itself: there stands the machine, it becomes transparent to the mind, but it has nothing that you can find within yourself, it is completely alien to you. And so we feel cast out of the world that we comprehend, that we comprehend mechanically. We feel repelled by the other pole of our spiritual life. Just as the one pole cannot enter into reality, is powerless in the face of reality, so the reality that we comprehend repels us. This is the profound conflict in the modern human being. He has developed his self-awareness through thinking, but he cannot enter the world with this thinking. He takes the machine from the world; but in comprehending it, it repels him, for it has nothing in common with man. Thinking makes us out of touch with reality; the reality of observation repels us. However one may otherwise describe the dichotomy of modern intellectual life, these are its two roots, these two poles of modern intellectual life: the powerlessness of self-conscious thinking, with its mere pictorial character, which is unable to penetrate into fully fleshed reality, and the mechanistically conceived contents of observation and experiment, which repel one as alien to our own being. It seems as if one is only talking about the field of science when one talks about these things. But what one is discussing in this way permeates our entire modern life.

So, on the one hand, there is this modern intellectual life with the two poles just described. On the other hand, there is anthroposophy. Anthroposophy, which does not attempt to remain at the level of thinking self-awareness, but progresses in inner development through inner soul exercises, which I will have to describe later; which progresses from what we have in a self-evident way in thinking. From this thinking, through exercises, one advances to a descriptive, to a pictorial, to an imaginative thinking; to a thinking that then becomes so strong that it becomes a seeing; that becomes as strong as otherwise only the sense impressions are. Today I can only hint at these things, but in the next few days I will have to describe how one can actually achieve clairvoyant vision of a supersensible world by developing thinking.

But then, when one progresses from the training of thinking to the imagination, then one no longer stands alone with this imagination, which is nothing other than a developed thinking, in the self-awareness that has become alien to reality. Then one stands in a new spiritual reality, in the reality in which one stood before descending from the spiritual-soul world into physical embodiment. For one gets to know one's prenatal life when one really trains in a systematic way that which, in thinking self-awareness, leads to human loneliness in relation to the world. It is thinking that has been developed into imagination that leads to a new reality, to the reality that has taken possession of our own self as our physicality. Our I expands beyond our birth or conception. We enter into a spiritual world.

On the other hand, if we consider observation and experimentation from the perspective of modern science, we become aware of something that many people fail to recognize: that in the experiment itself, thinking is completely silent. Anyone who really follows the experimental process and scientific research in experimentation will find that thinking only notifies, that it actually only perceives the cases statistically and forms laws, but that it does not delve into reality. What connects with reality in the experiment is human will. A deeper psychology will recognize this more and more. Anthroposophy conducts research in such a way that, on the one hand, it develops thinking into imagination, and on the other hand, it develops the will into intuition and inspiration. As I said, I will discuss the details in the next few days. Today I would just like to state the principles.

When the human being comes to exercise this will, which otherwise remains as dark to him as the states of sleep are to his own consciousness, to exercise it in the same way that one exercises thinking for imagination, he comes to make his own organism, his own physicality spiritually and soulfully transparent – not physically, of course. This means that the human being comes to develop for his own being that which he had previously developed for the outside world, for the mechanism, for the machine. But this own being then reveals itself in a completely different way. We are not repelled by it. We grasp what has flowed out of the whole cosmos into our humanity with a transparency that we otherwise only grasp the machine with. But it is we ourselves that we grasp. We are not pushed back. We grasp ourselves in ourselves. And we grasp, initially in our minds, what the moment of death is. We get to know the eternity of the human soul on the other side. We learn through the strengthening of our will how the body becomes transparent, and we learn to understand by looking at how we pass through the gateway of death, how we leave the body to enter a spiritual-soul world.

Through the further development of thinking, we learn to recognize the prenatal. Through culture, through the development of the will, we learn to recognize the afterlife, that which lies beyond our death. We learn to recognize ourselves in a reality, learn to place ourselves in this reality. We do not remain lonely with our self. We learn a thinking, a developed thinking, that penetrates into life, namely into the spiritual life. And we learn to observe something, first in ourselves, then in the world, which does not repel us, but connects with the developed thinking. We bridge the abyss that lies between the two poles, self-conscious thinking and mechanistic observation. We acquire, through anthroposophical research, a thinking that is not powerless in the face of reality, but that submerges into reality; we get to know a reality that reaches up to the inner soul life, to the developed will, which in turn reaches up to thinking. We expand thinking so that it can submerge into reality; we expand the will to such an extent that it can reach up to thinking. Thus, with the spiritual life, we grasp a full reality in which the human being now stands.

This comes about in three stages of knowledge. It comes about in imaginative knowledge, through which thinking is first intensified to the point of pictorialness, inwardly strengthened, where one first sees the supersensible, the spiritual world in images. Then comes inspired knowledge. You can find more about this in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” In the next few days I will also have much to characterize. Through inspired knowledge, the spiritual world enters into our soul. Then comes intuitive knowledge, through which we place ourselves in the spiritual essence of the world. But without becoming a spiritual researcher oneself, one can, simply through common sense, grasp that which the spiritual researcher draws from the supersensible world through imagination, inspiration, intuition. If one appropriates these truths, for example the truths that are attained through imaginative knowledge, then one enriches one's inner soul life. How does one enrich one's inner soul life?

Well, with that which is so magnificently described, our scientific life, our scientific spirit, with which we actually live in a state of mind that is only appropriate for us as human beings as an intellectual state of mind when we are fully grown, when we have reached our twenties. If we look only at the human age that immediately precedes it, at the age, say, from the fourteenth to the twentieth, twenty-first year. There we live a life - the one who can really focus on such things, who has a deeper psychology in his soul, he knows it and can explore it - there we live in such a way that intense soul experiences arise from our inner being. These are not abstract thoughts. They are the ideals of youth, full of inner sap, with inner intensity and strength, which one experiences not just as pale, dull thoughts. Man is under the impression of an inner impulsiveness.

What is it that is effective here? Well, what is effective in man actually lives half-dreamily in him. He does not become aware of it at this age. Nor can it be brought to consciousness through ordinary science. Ordinary science will never fathom what goes on in human minds, or what goes on in the human body, say, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. Only imaginative knowledge can recognize this. It brings it to consciousness. What works subconsciously in us during our teenage years can only come to consciousness through imaginative knowledge. A young person who has passed the age of fourteen — anyone who is familiar with real pedagogy knows this — longs for knowledge that is imaginative, because only through this can he understand himself. Otherwise he must wait until he is over twenty years old before the intellectual life fully enters him. And then he can only come to the thinking consciousness with which he is alone. He drifts away, if I may express it this way, until this point in human life. He longs for a revelation from the elders, which these elders could only give him – if they are his teachers, his educators, his guides – if they had imaginative insights. Then they would be able to tell him what he is.

And between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, we live an inner life of body, soul and spirit in such a way that what happens unconsciously, what is reality, can only be grasped by inspired knowledge. Not external, intellectual, experimental knowledge can know what is actually working itself out in the human being during the childhood years. Everything wants to form itself now, not according to natural laws, but according to artistic impulses. Inspirations from the universe are at work in us. And the older generation will only be able to tell the children between the ages of seven and fourteen, approximately speaking, what these children long for, what their whole feeling and will is striving for, if they know anything about inspired knowledge. We shall only be able to talk to children in a teaching and educating way when we have some knowledge of inspired world knowledge.

And even with the very youngest children - “Unless you become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”. There is a deep truth in these words of Christ. At this age of life, during infancy, the age up to the change of teeth, the child lives in such a way that one can only understand the settling of his soul-spiritual into the physical-bodily, this forcing-into, this plastic shaping of the body out of the soul-spiritual, only with intuitive knowledge. Therefore, children will only understand us - feelingly, instinctively - and can be influenced by us in the right way if we can receive religiously shaped truths from an education in intuitive knowledge.

Thus, in our present spiritual age, young people do not understand the old, because as human beings we basically lose our youth. We would only not lose it if what we experience in childhood and adolescence could be remembered by us in later, more mature years through the insights that come from imagination, inspiration and intuition. With these insights we can delve into our childhood and youth. With these insights we can speak as teachers, educators, and leaders of humanity to children and young people in such a way that they understand us instinctively and emotionally, and that young people learn to understand us. The gap between youth and old age can only be bridged in this way. It will not be possible to fill it in any other way. And if the will is not present to bridge or fill the gap in this way, our age will show to an ever greater extent what it is already showing: that youth does not understand age, that age does not understand youth.

And the consequence of this is that people do not understand each other, that a social life becomes more and more impossible. Only by introducing a spiritual-scientific insight into our scientific spirit, by expanding our scientific spirit to include such a spiritual-scientific insight, will man be able to understand himself fully, man will come to the point where he no longer has his self so impotently that it does not reach reality, but is able to observe reality in such a way that it does not strike him back. Only in this way will he be able to bring the two poles, the pole of thought and the pole of reality, which are so alien to each other in modern man, into a living balance.

Thus anthroposophy, even though it did not arise in some abstract way from the observation of the search of the time, from the observation of the longings of our time, anthroposophy, having has arisen out of scientific foundations, it may nevertheless point out how it can achieve, or at least will be able to achieve, in the most important fields of the age, what this age desires in the deepest sense of the word.

I wanted to present this as an introduction, as a preface, so to speak, to the reflections of the next few days, characterizing how this anthroposophy would like to be understood. It would like to be understood not as dead, abstract knowledge, not as knowledge in the form of mere theories, but as knowledge that has been grasped through living in life and is itself living knowledge; as knowledge that flows into the human being not just as thoughts or as the results of observation, but as the life blood of the soul; as knowledge that is present in the human being as life itself.

Anthroposophy would be the height of arrogance if it tried to inspire faith by claiming that so-and-so many of the world's mysteries exist or can be solved. That is not the point. Life is full of riddles, and only as long as there are riddles will there be life. For we must experience the riddles, and it is only by experiencing the riddles that we can continue to live in a truly human way. A world in which there were no questions would be an inanimate world. Anthroposophy does not claim to promise a solution to all the riddles of life. But it seeks to be that which is capable of serving life through its own character, through knowledge and through the power to give the whole human being, the full human being, the artistic, the religious, the moral, the social human being, the real foundation. Anthroposophy seeks to serve life. It would like to serve life by being living knowledge itself, and not just dead knowledge, and by developing its own life force. It would like to serve life, and nothing but life itself can serve life. That is why anthroposophy wants to become life itself in order to serve the life of humanity.

Yesterday, we tried to characterize the forces that permeated Greece and Rome in order to obtain an idea of the influences that have been carried over from the fourth into the fifth post-Atlantean age, and we gave some indication of where we have to look today for signs of continued activity of the forces of the fourth post-Atlantean age. I want to ask you now to turn your attention once again to our description of the civilizations of Greece and Rome.

In the way it developed, the civilization of Greece was a source of great disappointment to the luciferic powers. One can, of course, only say these things out of imaginative cognition, and this will also be true of what is to be presented to you today. The development of Greek civilization was a great disappointment to the luciferic powers because they expected something quite different from it. Think what this means. They had expected the civilization of Greece, the fourth epoch of post-Atlantean times, to bring into being for them all they had striven for during Atlantean times. On Atlantis they had developed certain activities, certain influences and forces and they had expected to see the fruits of their labors appear in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. What was it they were really looking for?

To speak of such a matter lets us look right into the luciferic soul. We come to know this luciferic life that continually strives, hoping that certain results may ensue, but that continually meets with fresh disappointment. A logician would naturally ask, “Why do not these luciferic powers stop trying? Why do they not see that they must be forever and repeatedly disappointed?” Such a conclusion would be human, not luciferic, wisdom. At any rate, the luciferic powers have yet to come to this conclusion. On the contrary, it is their practice to redouble their efforts whenever they experience disappointment.

What was it, then, that the luciferic powers expected from this fourth post-Atlantean age? They wanted to obtain mastery of all the soul forces of the Greek people, those soul forces that were, as we have seen, directed to carrying over the ancient imaginations of the Chaldean-Egyptian period, and to incorporate them into the creations of their own fantasy. The luciferic powers made it their endeavor to work so strongly on the human beings of the Greek civilization that their imaginations, refined and distilled to fantasy, should fill their whole being. The Greeks would then have lost themselves in a soul world, in an everyday thinking, feeling and willing that would have consisted entirely of those subtle imaginations that had become complete fantasy.

If the Greeks had developed nothing in their souls but these imaginations refined to fantasy, if these enticing imaginations had come to fill their souls completely, the luciferic powers would have been able to lift the Greeks and a great part of humanity out of human evolution to place them in their own luciferic world. This was the intention of the luciferic powers. From the Atlantean epoch on, it had been their hope to achieve in the fourth post-Atlantean age what they had failed to do in Atlantis. Humanity, at the stage it had then reached, would have been incorporated into the cosmos. They wanted nothing less than to create for themselves a separate world where earthly gravity did not exist, but where human beings would dwell with absolute super-sensible lightness, entirely given up to a life of fantasy. It was the hope of the luciferic beings to create a planetary body, which would contain those members of humanity who had reached this highest development of the fantasy life. They made every endeavor to lead the souls of the Greeks away from the earth. Had they succeeded, these souls would gradually have forsaken the earth. The bodies that still came to birth would have been degenerate. Egoless beings would have been born, the earth would have fallen into decadence and a special luciferic kingdom would have begun. This did not come to pass. Why?

This condition did not come about because, mingled with the “self-deifying madness” of Greek poetry, to quote Plato, was the genius and greatness of Greek philosophy and wisdom. The Greek philosophers—Heraclitus, Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle—saved Greek civilization from being completely spiritualized in a life of fantasy. They kept the Greeks on earth, providing the strongest forces that kept Greece within earthly evolution. In considering the course of history, we must always take into account the forces that lie behind physical reality and are the true causes of all that happens. It was, then, in this way that Greece was preserved for earthly evolution.

Now, the luciferic beings would have been unable to achieve anything at all without the help of the ahrimanic beings. In all their intentions and hope they reckoned on their support. Indeed, it must always be that two forces strive together in this kind of working. Just as the luciferic beings were disappointed in Greece, so were the ahrimanic beings disappointed in Rome and the way it developed. The luciferic beings wanted to lead Grecian souls away from the earth-planet and the ahrimanic beings wanted to contribute their efforts to the end that the Roman civilization would assume a particular form. The ahrimanic beings exerted their strongest efforts in Rome, just as the luciferic beings did in Greece. They calculated that a certain hardening would arise on earth brought about by an entirely blind obedience and subjection to Rome. What did the ahrimanic powers want to accomplish in Rome? They wanted to establish a Roman Empire that would extend over the whole of the then known world, embracing within it every human activity. It would be directed entirely from Rome with the strictest centralization and the utmost development of the rule of might. They sought to establish a widely flung state machinery that would include and make subject to it all religious and artistic life. Its goal would be to stamp out all individuality. Every people and human being would comprise merely some small part of this mighty state machine.

Thanks to the clarity of its philosophers, however, Greece was not lulled into the luciferic dream, nor could Rome be hardened as these ahrimanic powers desired, because in Rome, too, something was working against them. This was described in the last lecture as Roman ideals, but the legal, political and military ideals that were then developing could not have withstood Ahriman alone. Within the Roman civilization the ahrimanic powers gathered for a stupendous onslaught. That attempt was like a repetition of their attempt made in Atlantean times, and it developed infinitely strong powers and forces. It was only from another side that Ahriman's intention was hindered. It was, at first, prevented by something that, at first sight, might be regarded as a lower trait in the Roman character, but that was not the case. As a matter of fact, the Romans had need of what I may have seemed to describe in the last lecture with some antipathy. They needed their ruthlessness, stubborn egoism, that continuous stirring up of emotions, to be able to march against the ahrimanic powers. Roman history—I beg you expressly to note this—is not a revelation of the ahrimanic powers. Although they stand in the background, it is a fight against them. If it is all confused and self-seeking, seeming to tend more and more toward a politicalization of the whole world, it is because only in this way could Ahriman's mechanizing be resisted.

All this alone, however, would not have been of much avail. Rome had also received Christianity, which in Rome would have assumed a form that would have given Ahriman a splendid opportunity to achieve his aim since, through the spiritual decline of a Roman rule that had been transformed into a papacy, the mechanizing of culture could have been accomplished. So another external power had to be brought against Ahriman, who works with much more external means than Lucifer. Ahriman, as we have seen, diverted the forces of Christianity to his own service. Another power had to be brought against him. This was the onslaught of the Germanic tribes caused by the migration of peoples in Europe. Through this onslaught on Rome, the mechanizing of the world under a single, all-embracing Roman Empire was hindered. If you will study all that took place in the migration of these peoples, you will find that you can get a true insight into it when you see it from this point of view. Whenever the migration of peoples occurs in the Roman world, Roman history is not thereby brought to an end, but the ahrimanic powers, combated throughout their history by the Romans, are repelled.

Thus did Ahriman meet with his disappointment, as Lucifer had met with his. But they will take up their tasks again in the fifth post-Atlantean age with all the more determination. Here is the point at which we must gain an understanding of the forces that are operative in our age, insofar as such an understanding is possible today.

The fourth post-Atlantean age extends both backwards and forwards from its central point in 333 A.D. It ended about 1413 A.D. and it began about 747 B.C. These are of course, approximate dates. I have just told you that the disappointment of Lucifer and Ahriman in the forms the Greek and Roman civilizations had assumed, has led them to make still stronger efforts in our fifth post-Atlantean age. Their efforts are already at work in the human forces that have been active from the fifteenth century. It does not matter whether something occurs a few decades earlier or later. In outer physical reality, which takes on the form of the “great illusion,” things are sometimes misplaced.

The fact that the Roman civilization could be retained in the evolution of humanity as it was due to the events brought about by the migrations of the peoples. If Rome had developed in such a way that a great all-embracing mechanized empire had arisen, it would only have been habitable for egoless human beings who would have remained on earth after Lucifer had drawn out their souls on the path of Greek culture and art. You see how Ahriman and Lucifer work together. Lucifer wants to take men's souls away and found a planet with them of his own. Ahriman has to help him. While Lucifer sucks the juice out of the lemon, as it were, Ahriman presses it out, thereby hardening what remains. This is what he tried to do to the civilization of Rome. Here we have an important cosmic process going on—all due to the intention and resolve of luciferic and ahrimanic powers. As I have said, they were disappointed. They have continued their efforts, however, and our fifth post-Atlantean age has yet to learn how strong these attacks are. They are now only beginning but they will become stronger and stronger. This age must learn, too, that the necessity to understand these attacks will become ever greater. At the beginning of an age the backward beings cannot work strongly. As yet, we are only in the beginning, and even though it became manifest only later, the luciferic and ahrimanic powers began to exert their forces before the expiration of the fourth post-Atlantean age.

To understand how these powers work in the fifth post-Atlantean age, we must turn our attention for a moment to what is intended for man in the right and normal course of his evolution. It is rightfully intended that he shall take a further step forward. The step taken by humanity in the fourth post-Atlantean age is revealed in the culture of the Greeks and in the political development of the Romans, and it was through the battle with Lucifer and Ahriman that what was intended actually came about. These opposing forces are always such that they fit into the progressive plan of the world. They belong to it and are needed there as opposing forces. But what special qualities are the men of the fifth post-Atlantean age, our own, to develop?

We know that this is the age of the development of the consciousness soul and that, to accomplish this, a number of forces—soul and bodily forces—must be active. First, a clear perception of the sense world is necessary. This did not exist in earlier times because, as you know, a visionary, imaginative element continuously played into the human soul. The Greeks still possessed fantasy but, as we have seen, after fantasy and imagination had taken possession of humanity, as it did of the Greeks, it then became necessary for men to develop the faculty to see the world of external nature without the illumination of a vision standing behind it. We need not imagine that such a vision has to be a materialistic one. That point of view is itself an ahrimanically perverted perception of sense reality. As indicated before, observation of sense reality is one task incumbent upon the human soul in our fifth post-Atlantean age.

The other task is to unfold free imaginations side by side with the clear view of reality—in a way, a kind of repetition of the Egypto-Chaldean age. To date, humanity has not progressed too far in this task. Free imaginations as sought through spiritual science means imaginations not as they were in the third post-Atlantean age, but unfettered and undistilled into fantasy. It means imaginations in which man moves as freely as he does only in his intellect. That, then, is the other task of the fifth post-Atlantean age. The unfoldment of these two faculties will lead to a right development of the consciousness soul in our present epoch.

Goethe had a beautiful understanding of this clear perception, which, contrary to the materialistic point of view, he described as his “primal phenomenon” (Urphänomen). You will find that this has been dealt with at length in Goethe's writings, and I have spoken of it in my explanation of the primal phenomenon. His is a clear, pure perception of reality and of his primal phenomenon. Goethe not only gave the first impulse for perceptions free of any visions but also for free imaginations.¹ What he has given us in his Faust, even though it has not yet gone far in the direction of spiritual science, and in comparison with spiritual science is still more or less instinctive, is nevertheless the first impulse to a free imaginative life. It is no mere world of fantasy, yet we have seen how deep this world of fantasy really is that develops in free imaginations in the wonderful drama, Faust.

So, over against this primal phenomenon, we have what Goethe calls typical intellectual perception. You will find it described in detail in my book, The Riddle of Man. This mode of thought must continue to develop. The men of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, however, must not merely behold reality. They must be able to live with reality. They must get busy, like Goethe, and, working in quite a different way from that of the materialistic physicists, really make such use of their laboratory apparatus that it produces the primal phenomenon for them. They will then have to devise some way of getting the primal phenomenon into practical life. As you know, it is at home in, and holds sway throughout, nature. The intentions of humanity that come from free imaginations will have to be included in this primal phenomenon of nature. On the one hand, men will have to direct their gaze quite selflessly to the outer world to work in it and to gain knowledge of it. On the other, by powerful application of their personalities, they will have to bring it all into inner movement in order to find the imaginations for outer activity and outer knowledge. Gradually, the consciousness soul and its culture will achieve this transformation.

There will certainly be one-sidedness in this cultural epoch. That goes without saying. Our cognition will direct its efforts only outwards, as in Bacon, or only inwards, as in Berkeley. We have already spoken of this. The imaginative life welling up from within will not unfold without all manner of disturbing influences. But even now we can point to moments in this development when someone feels this free imaginative life springing up in his soul. In these beginnings it is still in great measure unfree, but we may see how so significant a man as Jacob Boehme, quite soon after the fifth post-Atlantean age began, felt how it was trying to develop in his soul. He brought this to expression in his Aurora, and we can feel as we read it how imaginative life was working within him. It must become free; Boehme still feels it to be a little unfree. Nevertheless, he knew it was a divine creative thing that was working in him. So Boehme was, in a sense, at the opposite pole to Bacon, whose endeavor always directed his attention to the external world. Jacob Boehme, however, was entirely engrossed in the world within, and described this world beautifully in the Aurora:

“I declare before God,” he says because he is speaking of his inner soul, “that I do not know how it comes to pass in me.” He means by this how the imaginations arise in him. “Without feeling the impulse of the will, I also don't know what I have to write.”

This is how Boehme speaks of the uprising of imaginations in himself. He detects the beginning of forces that must grow continually stronger in the men of the fifth post-Atlantean age.

“I declare before God that I do not know how it comes to pass in me. Without feeling the impulse of the will, I also don't know what I have to write. The spirit dictates to me in a great and marvelous knowledge what I write, so that often I do not know whether I am in this world with my spirit, and I rejoice exceedingly that sure and continuous knowledge is thus vouchsafed to me.”

Boehme describes the instreaming of the imaginative world. We can see that he feels harmony and rest in his soul, and he describes how men's souls shall, in the normal and right progress of their evolution, let themselves be taken hold of by these inner forces, which are to grow stronger in them in the fifth post-Atlantean age. But one must take possession of them in the pure inner being of the spirit and thereby avoid devious paths. In the seventeenth century one had to speak of these forces much in the way that Boehme, who spoke as a man completely and utterly devoted to divine righteousness, did.

The entire aim in the work of the luciferic and ahrimanic powers in the fifth post-Atlantean age, concerning both the perception of the primal phenomenon and the development of free imaginations, is to hinder these forces from arising in man. The luciferic and ahrimanic powers are working in this fifth post-Atlantean age to disturb these forces in the human soul, to employ them to a wrong end, thus bringing men's souls out of the earth sphere to establish a new sphere of their own. Many things must work together to disturb the right, quiet and slow unfolding of these forces. Note well that I say the quiet and slow unfolding because the entire period of 2,160 years, starting in 1413 A.D., should be used for the gradual unfoldment of the forces I have named, that is, free imaginations and the gradual development of working with primal phenomena. At intervals—by fits and starts, as it were—the luciferic and ahrimanic powers throw the whole weight of their opposition against this right evolution. When we bear in mind that everything is prepared for by the world beyond the earth long before it happens, we shall then not be surprised to find preparations being made to bring the strongest possible forces of opposition against the normal evolution of humanity.

We have already seen how the luciferic and ahrimanic powers poured what they had developed in Atlantean times into Greece and Rome. Now, in an altered form, they have tried to repeat these efforts before the arrival of the fifth post-Atlantean age. You will not be surprised when I say that for this fifth post-Atlantean age, too, a powerful impetus had to be present bearing along with it the after workings, in a luciferic and ahrimanic sense, from Atlantis. We know that the Atlantean influences spread out from a region that was called Atlantis even by Plato. Let us make a diagram and imagine Atlantis here, then over here on the right would be Europe and Asia, and here on the left would be America. The old Atlantean forces, including the old luciferic and ahrimanic forces, spread out from Atlantis. Some part of these Atlantean forces, however, was held

back, and it came to work in our fifth post-Atlantean age as luciferic and ahrimanic forces. That is, some part of the good forces, which were good and right in Atlantean times, have been carried over to our time to become luciferic and ahrimanic forces. Only the center was transferred to another region.

Atlantis, as we know, is gone and the center transposed to Asia. You must imagine it on the reverse side of my drawing and the effects of the old Atlantean culture spreading out from it as a preparation for the fifth post-Atlantean age.

Its intent was to lucifericize and ahrimanicize it. It was actually the descendants of the old Atlantean teachers who were now working from a place in Asia. A priest there had been educated to behold—to have a belated vision, as it were, of what the Atlanteans called the “Great Spirit,” and to receive his commands. These the priest communicated to a young man of remarkable energy and strength who, by virtue of this authority, received the name “The Great Ruler of the Earth” from his community. This was Genghis Khan. The Great Spirit, through his follower and through that priest, gave to Genghis Khan the command to summon all the powers of Asia to spread the influence that would lead the fifth post-Atlantean age back into a luciferic form. These forces—and they were far more powerful than the forces established in Greek culture—were all employed to this end. Free imaginations were to be changed into old, visionary imaginations. Every effort was to be made to lull the soul of man to sleep in a dim and dreamy experience of imaginations instead of a free experience filled through and through with clear understanding.

With the help of the special forces that had been preserved from Atlantis, it was the intended purpose to carry an influence into the West that would make its culture visionary. Then it would have become possible to separate the souls of men from the earth and to form a new continent, a new planetary body with them. All the unrest and disturbance that came into the evolution of modern man through the Mongolian invasions, everything connected with them that has gone on working into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—all this unrest, which was prepared long ago, is nothing more than the great attempt that is being made from Asia to bring about a visionary European culture. It would cut it off from the conditions of its further evolution and lead it altogether away from the earth, just as the East has experienced again and again this feeling of being filled with vision and of wanting to be estranged from the earth.

Something was needed to counterbalance this tendency. An opposite trend had to be created as a counterforce that moves in the direction of the normal evolution of mankind. The influence of Genghis Khan's priest was intended to bring about a kind of buoyancy and lightness in the human race that would draw man away from the earth. Over against this, a corresponding heaviness had to come to man from the weight of the earth; this was provided through the discovery of the western world. America, with all that it holds, was discovered and thereby earth heaviness, the desire to remain on earth, was given to man. The discovery of America and everything connected with it, and the way man carried his life into the many new places of the earth, all this, when seen in wider connections, shows itself as a counterbalancing force to the activity of Genghis Khan. America had to be discovered so that man might be brought to grow closer to the earth, to grow more and more materialistic. Man needed weight and heaviness to counterbalance the spiritualization that was the aim of the descendants of the “Great Spirit.”

Along with this normal process whereby the scene of action of man's life was extended to America, we find the other forces, the ahrimanic powers of the “Great Spirit,” intervening again. An influence came from America to Europe, and another came to permeate America from Asia. Thus, normal forces developed through the discovery of America and also powerful ahrimanic onslaughts. They worked less strongly at first, but will continue to work in our time and on into the future. We must learn to recognize these ahrimanic forces.

What Rome had achieved in the Church and in the ecclesiastical state was grasped by the ahrimanic influence. While it is comparatively easy to see how the luciferic influence worked on Genghis Khan—we have exact knowledge of the fact that a priest was initiated by the follower of the “Great Spirit”—it is much more difficult to say how the ahrimanic spirit worked. This is because the ahrimanic influence is dispersed and scattered. But you need only study how Spain, strictly Roman Catholic as it was, was fascinated by all the treasures of gold that were discovered in America. What a hold it had upon her! You can observe how strong the specter-like working of the old Romanism still was in such a ruler as Ferdinand of Castile or Charles V, the ruler of the kingdom over which the “sun never set.” Study the reaction of Europe to the gradual discovery and opening up of America and you will see what temptations came from that direction. Taken all in all, it is a history of temptation woven in with a history that runs a normal course.

Please do not go about saying that I have presented the discovery of America as an ahrimanic deed. In reality, I have said the very opposite. I have said that America had to be discovered and that the entire event was necessary to the progress of the world. Ahrimanic forces entered, however, and set themselves in violent opposition to what was happening quite rightly in the normal course of progress. Things are not so simple that we can say, “There is Lucifer, and there is Ahriman; they act and behave in such and such a way, and divide the world between them.” Things are by no means so simple as that.

We find, therefore, many forces working together when we set out to listen to them in their field of action behind the physical plane. These forces take possession of other forces. They try to seize the forces in man that have continued on from the fourth post-Atlantean epoch in order to distort them and make them serve their ends. Look at a man like Machiavelli. You will find in him the symbol for the politicizing of thought that begins in the Renaissance. He is a veritable revelation of the whole process. He was a great and powerful spirit but one who, under the onslaught of the forces of which I have told you, brings to a new life again the complete attitude of thought and mind that has its source in the heathen Rome of ancient times. You have a true picture of Machiavelli when you study the history of his time and see him, not as a single personality, but as the outstanding expression of many who think in the same way. In him you can observe these forces trying to charge forward with all speed, bringing to their assistance the atavistic—and thus luciferic—forces that have been left behind. Had things gone as Machiavelli intended, all of Europe would have become nothing but a political machine. Opposing the violent onslaught of such forces are the forces that work in the normal direction. Over against a figure like Machiavelli, who was purely political and turned all man's thought into political thinking, we can place another great figure, Thomas à Kempis, who was also Machiavelli's contemporary. He stands entirely within the slow and gradual evolution, working slowly and gradually. He was anything but a man of politics.

So we can follow the several streams in history. We shall find normal streams, and we shall also find currents that flow from earlier times and are made use of by the forces of which I have told you. Many forces work together in history and it is important to observe and study their connections. A man like Jacob Boehme felt free imaginations rising within him. We can say of such a man that he fortified himself against the attacks of Lucifer and Ahriman through the whole character of his life of soul and succeeded in going undisturbed along the straight path of evolution.

East of Europe, however, in all the culture of the East, we find an untold number of people who suffer greatly under the disturbing influence of Lucifer. His influence is, as we know, to draw man again and again away from the earth, to draw him right out of his physical body so that he shall perpetually fall into a state where he becomes no more than a vision of himself and is completely soul. That is the tendency that has been grafted onto Eastern Europe.

The feeling of being drawn in the other direction was given to the West. The world of imagination was pulled down into the heavy physical body so that what should rightly be free imagination working merely in the soul becomes instead something that rams the soul down into the organism, thereby causing the organism also to live on imaginations. You can hardly find a more telling description of what I mean than in the words of Alfred de Musset in which he attempts to give us a picture of the condition of his soul. De Musset is one who feels the presence of the imaginative life in himself, but he also feels the onslaught upon this life of imagination that seeks to thrust it right down into the bodily nature. This life of imagination, which does not belong in the bodily nature but should develop freely, hovering in and existing purely as a thing of the soul, is there taken hold of by earthly gravity and by what belongs to the body. In his book, Elle et Lui, which he was led to write from his relation with Georges Sand, you will find a fine description of his soul life. I would like to quote here a passage that will serve to show how he feels himself to be placed within an imaginative life that is the scene of conflict and dispute. He says:

Creation disturbs and bewilders me; it sets me trembling. Execution, always too slow for my desire, starts my heart beating wildly. Weeping, and restraining myself with difficulty from crying out, I give birth to an idea. In the moment of its birth it intoxicates me, but next morning it fills me with loathing. If I try to modify and change it, it only gets worse and escapes me altogether. It would be better for me to forget it and wait for another. But now this other comes upon me in such bewilderment and in such boundless dimensions that my poor being cannot grasp it. It oppress me, tortures me, until it can be realized. Then come the other sufferings, the birth throes, really physical pains that I am quite unable to define. Such is my life when I let myself be ruled by this giant artist who is in me.

Note the contrast with Boehme, who feels the God in him. With de Musset it is a giant artist.

It were better that I live as I have resolved, committing excesses of every kind in order to kill this gnawing worm, which others modestly call inspiration and I quite often openly call illness.

Almost every single sentence of this quote can be matched with a sentence in our quotation from Boehme. How singularly typical! Remember what I said just now, that normal evolution seeks to progress slowly. We shall have more to say about this tomorrow. Here, as described by de Musset, it is a Wild charge; it cannot be fast enough. The picture he gives us as he surveys himself is marvelous. “Creation disturbs and bewilders me; it sets me atremble,” he says, because this to will go faster and faster and comes storming in upon him from the ahrimanic side, disturbing what is still trying to progress slowly.

“Execution, always too slow for my desire, starts my heart beating wildly.” Here you have the whole psychology of the man who wants to live in free imaginations and is distressed and vexed by the onslaught of ahrimanic forces.

“Weeping and restraining myself with difficult from crying out...” Think of it! The imaginations work so physically in him that he feels like crying out when they find expression in him.

“I give birth to an idea. In the moment of its birth it intoxicates me, but next morning it fills me with loathing.” This because it comes from his organism and not from his soul!

“If I try to modify and change it, it only gets worse and escapes me altogether. Better I forget it and wait for another.” Here he wants perpetually to go faster, faster than normal evolution can go.

“But now this other comes upon me in such bewilderment and in such boundless dimensions that my poor being cannot grasp it. It oppresses me, tortures me, until it can be realized. Then come the other sufferings, the birth throes, actual physical pains that I am quite unable to define.” Then, when he beholds this giant artist that works within him, he says he would rather follow the life he has marked out for himself; that is, have nothing to do with this whole imaginative world, because he calls it an illness.

Now take by way of contrast, the saying of Jacob Boehme, “I declare before God, I myself do not know how it comes to pass in me.” Here you have an expression of joy and bliss. Confusion and bewilderment, on the other hand, can be heard in the words of de Musset, “Creation disturbs and bewilders me; it sets me trembling. Execution, always too slow for my desire, starts my heart beating wildly.”

With Boehme all is of the soul and, when he wants to write, he does not feel as though a giant artist, who makes him unhappy, were dictating to him, but a spirit. He feels that he is transported into the world where the spirit dictates to him. He is in this world and he is supremely happy to be there because a continuous stream of knowledge is given him that flows slowly and steadily on. Boehme is inclined to receive this slow stream of knowledge. He does not find it too slow because he is not overwhelmed by the swift attacking force I have described to you. On the contrary, he is protected from it.

If time permitted, we could present many more instances of ways in which individual human beings are situated in the world process. The examples I have selected are from those whose names have been preserved in history but, in a sense, all of mankind is subject to these same conditions in one way or another. I have only chosen these particular examples in order to express what is really widespread, and by taking special cases I have been able to give you a description of it in words. If you will try to make a survey of what we have been saying, you will then be able to understand much of what has come about in the course of evolution.

It would be quite possible in this connection to study many other phenomena of life. If, however, we confine ourselves today to the spiritual life, and moreover to that special region of the spiritual life comprising knowledge and cognition, we shall be able to find in it qualities that are characteristic of modern man, the recognition of which will make many things in life comprehensible. Since it is not possible to say much about the external life of today, owing to the existing prejudices and because men's souls are so deeply bound up with the conditions of the times in which they live, you will readily understand that it is only in a limited way that I can speak of the things that are carrying their influence right into the immediate present. It cannot be otherwise, as I have frequently made clear to you. I would like, however, to indicate certain phenomena of our time that are less calculated to arouse passions and emotions. Let me describe some phenomena that I will select from the life of cognition and feeling. I think you will find them underlying all I have been saying about the forces at work in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. We will first consider these phenomena in a purely historical way in order afterward to see their relation to these forces.

Let us take first a phenomenon in which we all necessarily feel the deepest interest. The kind of understanding men have of the nature and being of Christ is of great significance, and so we will select examples of various kinds of understanding of His nature and being that lie near at hand. We have first of all a modern instance in Ernest Renan's The Life of Jesus, which appeared in the 19th century and went rapidly through many editions. I believe the twentieth appeared in 1900 after his death. Then we have The Life of Jesus, which is really no life of Jesus at all, by David Friedrich Strauss. Then we have—we cannot say, a life of Jesus, but coming from the east of Europe it is a view and conception of Christ that is of deep significance. It is not a life of Jesus but an understanding of Christ that culminates in what Soloviev wrote about Him and His part in the evolution of the earth. How significant are these three expressions of the spiritual life of the nineteenth century: The Life of Jesus by Renan, The Life of Jesus by Strauss, which is no life of Jesus at all and we shall presently hear why, and Soloviev's conception of the meaning of the Christ event in the evolution of the earth, for it is true, at any rate, to say that all of his work culminates in the Christ idea.

What is the fundamental premise of Renan's description of Jesus' life? If you want to appreciate rightly Renan's book, to understand it as a document of the times, then you must compare it with the earlier presentations of Jesus' life. Nor do you need to read only the literary accounts of His life; you can also look at the paintings of artists. You will find that the representation of the life of Jesus always takes the same path. In the early centuries of Roman Christianity, it was not only Christianity that was taken over from the East but also the manner in which Jesus was presented. The Greek art of pictorial representation was there in the West, as we know, but the ability to portray the Christ remained with the East. The Jesus countenance that is characteristic of Byzantine art was found repeatedly in the West until, in the thirteenth century, national impulses and ideas began to arise—those national ideas and impulses that later work themselves out in the way I have indicated in these last lectures.

Owing to the national impulse, a gradual change came about in the traditional stereotyped Jesus countenance that had been portrayed so long. Each of several nations appropriated the Jesus type and represented Him in its own way, and so we must recognize many different impulses at work in the different representations. Study, for example, the head of Jesus as painted by Guido Reni, Murillo, and LeBrun, and you will see how strikingly the national point of view steals in. These are only three instances that one could select. In each case there is a strong desire to represent Jesus in a national way. One has the impression that in Guido Reni's, paintings, to a far greater degree than was the case with his predecessors, we can detect the Italian type in the countenance of Jesus; similarly, in Murillo's representations, the Spanish; in LeBrun's, the French. All three painters show evidence as well of the working of church tradition; behind every one of their paintings stands the power of the Church.

Contrarily, you will find a resistance to this far reaching power of the Church, which we recognize in the art of Murillo, Lebrun, and Reni, in the works of Rubens, van Dyck, and Rembrandt—a resistance to it and a working in freedom out of their own pure humanity. Considering art in respect of its representations of the Jesus countenance, you have here direct artistic rebellion. You will now see that there is no standing still in this progression in the representation of Jesus because the forces that are at work in the world work also right into this domain. We can see how the breath of Romanism hovers over the paintings of the nationally minded LeBrun, Murillo, and Reni, and how in Rubens, van Dyck, and especially Rembrandt, the opposition to Romanism comes to such clear expression in their paintings of faces, not of Jesus alone but also of other Biblical characters. So we see how all the spiritual activities of man gradually take form among the various impulses that make themselves felt in human evolution.

Similarly, you would find that in the times when painting and representative art have given place to the word, for since the sixteenth century the word has had the same significance in such matters as pictorial representation had in earlier times, you will find that the figure of Jesus, of the Christ, is again continually changing. It is never fixed and constant but is always conceived according to how the various forces flow together in writers. Standing there before us as the latest products, let us say, we have the Jesus of Renan, the Jesus of Strauss, who is no Jesus, and the Christ of Soloviev. These are the latest products and how vastly different they are!

The Jesus of Renan is entirely a Jesus who, as a man, lives in the land of Palestine as a human historical figure. Palestine itself is marvelously depicted. With the aid of the best of modern scholarship it is described in such a way that one has before one the complete Palestinian landscape with its people. Wandering about this realistically rendered landscape and among its people is the figure of Jesus. The attempt is made to explain this Jesus figure on the basis of this landscape and its inhabitants; to explain how he grows up and becomes a man, and to explain how it was possible for such a man to arise in this land. The outstanding character of Renan's description will only be revealed when we compare it with earlier accounts and representations. These take the inner course of the events described in the Gospels and place them in a landscape that is really nowhere in particular. The facts as they are described in the Gospels are simply related over and over again and the landscape in which they occurred is totally disregarded. It is depicted in such a way that it might be anywhere.

Renan, however, goes to work to portray the Holy Land in a realistic, detailed way so that Jesus becomes a true Palestinian in this Holy Land. Christ Jesus, who should belong to all of mankind, becomes a Jesus who lives and walks in Palestine as an historical figure who is to be understood in relation to the Palestine of the years 1 to 33 A.D., that is, understood from the customs, views, opinions and landscape of the country—a right proper, realistic description. For once, Jesus was to be shown as an historical person and was to be described as any other in history. For Renan, it would have been meaningless to portray an abstract Socrates who might have lived anywhere, anytime, and it would have been equally meaningless for him to portray an abstract Jesus who might have lived anywhere on earth. In complete accord with the science of the nineteenth century, he sets out to depict Jesus as an historical figure living between the years 1 and 33 A.D., and made absolutely comprehensible by the conditions prevailing in Palestine at that time. Jesus lived from the year 1 to 33 A.D. He died in 33 A.D., just as any other man might have died in this or that year. If He continues to work in the world, it is in the same way any other dead person might have continued to work. Fitted completely into the modern point of view, Jesus was an historical personality accounted for by the milieu in which He lived. That is what Ernest Renan gives us in his Life of Jesus.

Now let us turn to the Life of Jesus that is in reality no life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss. I have said it is no life of Jesus. Strauss also works as a highly cultured and learned man. When he sets out to investigate anything, he does so with thoroughness akin to that of Renan in his domain. Strauss, however, does not turn his attention to the historical Jesus. He is, for him, only the figure to which he attaches something quite different. Thus, Strauss investigates all that was said of Jesus insofar as He was the Christ. He examines what is said about His miraculous entry into the world, His wonderful and miraculous development, His expression of great and special teachings, and how He undergoes suffering, death and resurrection. These are the accounts in the Gospels that Strauss selects for investigation.

Naturally, Renan, too, used the Gospels but he reduced them to what he, from his detailed and exact knowledge of Palestine, could conceive of the life of Jesus. This approach has no interest at all for Strauss. He tells himself that the Gospels relate this or that concerning Christ, who lived in Jesus. Then he sets out to investigate the extent to which what is related of the Christ has also been living as myth in other parts of the world, for instance, how the story that is told of a miraculous birth and the development of Jesus Christ is to be found in various other folk myths, as is also the Mystery of Golgotha, which is referred now the one god and then to another. Thus, Strauss sees in the figure of the historical Jesus only the opportunity for concentrating the myth forming activity of mankind into one personality. Jesus does not concern him at all. The only value He has for Strauss is that the myths, which are distributed all over the world, are concentrated in this single man Jesus. They are all hung on Him, as it were. These myths, however, all spring from a common impulse. All of them bear witness to the myth forming power that lives in mankind. Where does this myth forming power arise?

As Strauss sees it, in the course of mankind's earthly development, from the times of the first beginnings of the earth to its final end, mankind has and always will have a higher power in it than the merely external power that develops on the physical plane. A power runs right through mankind that will forever address itself to the super-earthly; this super-earthly finds expression in myths. We know that man bears something super-sensible within him that seeks to find expression in myth since it cannot be expressed in external physical science. Thus, Strauss does not see Jesus in the single individual, but rather the Christ in all men—the Christ who has lived in and through all men since their beginning, and who has brought it about that myths are told of Him. In the case of Jesus it is only that His personality gives occasion for the myth forming power to develop with extreme force and strength. In Him it is concentrated. Strauss, therefore, speaks of a Jesus that is in reality no Jesus, but he fastens upon Him the spiritual Christ force that lives in all humanity. For Strauss, mankind itself is the Christ, and He works always before and after Jesus. The true incarnation of the Christ is not the single Jesus, but the whole of humanity. Jesus is only the supreme representative for the representation of the Christ in mankind.

The main thing in all this is not Jesus as an historical figure, but an abstract mankind. Christ has become an idea, which incarnates in and through all mankind. That is the kind of highly distilled thought that a man of the nineteenth century is able to conceive! The element of life in the idea has become the Christ. He is conceived entirely as an idea and Jesus is passed by. This is a life of Jesus that is no more than a record of the fact that the idea, the divine, incarnates continually in all humanity. Christ is diluted down to an idea, is thought of merely as an idea.

So much for the second life of Jesus, The life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss. So we have Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus. which sets forth the historical figure of Jesus amidst the individuals around Him as well as by Himself. Then we have in Strauss's book the “idea of Christ,” which runs through all mankind. In this highly distilled form, however, it remains a mere abstraction.

When we come to Soloviev, behold, Jesus is no more, but only the Christ. Nevertheless, it is the Christ conceived as living. Not working in men as an idea, with the consequence that its power is transformed in him into a myth, but rather working as a living Being who has no body, is always and ever present among men, and is, in effect, positively responsible for the external organization of human life, the founder of the social order. Christ, who is forever present; a living Being who would never have needed a Jesus in order to come among men. Naturally, you will not find this so radically expressed in Soloviev, but that is of no account. It is the Christ as such Who stands always in the foreground—the Christ, moreover, as the living One who can only be comprehended in imagination, but by this means can be truly understood as a real and actual super-sensible Being working on earth.

There you have the three figures. The same Being meets us in the nineteenth century in a threefold description. The Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan, completely realistic; realistic history a fortiori; Jesus as an historical figure; a book that is written with all the learning of the nineteenth century. Then came David Friedrich Strauss with this idea of mankind, working on, running through all mankind, but remaining an idea, never awakening to life. Lastly, Soloviev's Christ; living power, living wisdom, altogether spiritual.

A realistic life of Jesus by Renan; an idealistic life of Jesus by Strauss that is also an idealistic presentation of the Christ impulse; a spiritual presentation of the Christ impulse by Soloviev.

Today, I want to place before you, side by side as three expressions of modern life, these three ways of cognizing the figure of Jesus Christ. Tomorrow we shall see how they take their place among the various impulses that we have recognized as working in mankind.

• 1. This distinction between pure perception free of memory pictures and visions on the one hand and an objective imagination which begins with brain-free thinking on the other is developed in Boundaries of Natural Science, Anthroposophic Press, 1983

In order to reach the goal of our discussions, we shall have to endeavour to comprehend the whole nature of the fifth post-Atlantean period in all its deepest significance. It is impossible to come to an understanding of events as deeply important as those of the present day by refusing to enter into concrete matters, and by insisting on considering only general aspects of the universe and man in the way that can be done when one is not concerned with specific circumstances. Unfortunately, I have to stress that an understanding for the deeply important nature of these events is largely lacking today.

For certain quite definite reasons which will become apparent, I yesterday spoke to you about two matters. First of all I told you how the book by Brooks Adams had been launched on mankind, a kite flown to gauge the scale on which such things are understood, at least by a few individuals. This book describes how a nation should be seen as a living organism which comes into being and passes through phases of childhood, youth, maturity and decline in a similar way to a human being, though of course only similar, not identical. Furthermore it is pointed out that at certain stages of their development nations evolve two characteristics which belong together, namely, at one stage those of an imaginative and a warlike nature, and at another those of a scientific and an industrial or commercial nature. So it is assumed that nations which are imaginative and warlike by nature, and others which are scientific and industrial or commercial, live side by side and that in the mutual interplay of such nations the universal development of mankind proceeds.

I told you that this was a one-sided view. How do such views surface in the first place? What does it signify that they are launched on the public?

Views of this kind have made an impression on individuals of a certain standing and therefore have become part of the impulses working today. In such matters it is always a question of disconnecting portions of the overall spiritual knowledge of man's evolution and planting them in the world when needed or wanted. By taking a portion of the total occult picture of mankind's development it is possible to achieve definite things in the service of a particular group and its particular egoism. Knowledge of the whole picture always serves the whole of mankind. Portions taken out of context always serve the egoism of individual groups. It is significant and important to take into account that much that is launched on the public from occult sources is not untrue, but half true, a quarter true, an eighth true, and just because it bears within it a part of the truth it can be used to achieve one aim or another in a one-sided way. That is why those who see through these things gain a significant impression from the fact that, on the part of America, the twentieth century is introduced by the launching of certain ideas in the world via some channels of the bookselling trade serving certain movements which make use of occult means.

The second matter about which I spoke was the remarkable treatise by the noble Thomas More on the best form of public adminstration in the state and on the island of Utopia. Out of this treatise by Thomas More I quoted to you yesterday the passage in which More says through the mouth of a stranger what he wants to say about Utopia. This stranger is presented as a fictitious person; perhaps we shall get to know him better today, but he is not fictitious, as you will see. Out of a certain mood of his time, which I described yesterday, he develops the theme of his feelings and then describes Utopia itself.

This description of Utopia by Thomas More, who flings these particular ideas into the midst of human development at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, is indeed quite remarkable. I have found a number of people who have read Utopia, but not a single one who has read it carefully enough to become even partly aware of all the extraordinary ins and outs and unlikely details the book describes. People simply take the description of the island of Utopia as that of an imaginary island and just read on, page after page. This is understandable in the present age, which is void of all spirituality. But at least one should notice either that Thomas More is describing something incomprehensible, even if it is only meant to be imaginary, or that he must have been a complete idiot, an absolute fool. But such logical conclusions are not drawn in our time; people far prefer to pass over things by means of superficial judgements. I shall now call up before our souls an outline of the content of this work. If you want all the details, you must read Utopia yourselves.

It is significant that Utopia is described as having reached a certain maturity in its institutions. It is expressly stated that the situation being described did not exist in the beginning but has taken 1,760 years to achieve, so that we are now presented with a kind of finished product of some maturity.

The first point to be particularly stressed is that property is common, nobody owns anything. The state is divided into certain families who, if we can put it like this, elect elders, and from among the elders a prince is elected. From time to time a council is called at which public matters are discussed in accordance with the instructions of the different sections of the population. Here we immediately come to an extraordinary arrangement: Public affairs may only be discussed in the prescribed manner. Anybody who privately discusses public affairs is liable to be condemned to death. Further, we discover a highly sensible arrangement: When a suggestion is made during the council meeting it may never be discussed immediately; people must first go home and think about it and it is then brought up again on a subsequent occasion. The one who is telling us the story says that in this way people have an opportunity to think about things, and do not make hasty judgements which they would naturally defend with stubbornness and egoism, just because they have become attached to their own judgement instead of thinking carefully and coming to the right conclusion.

In Utopia everyone has to learn farming while still a child. Later they also learn a trade, usually that pursued by their parents, though they may choose another if they have the skill for it. Work is strictly regulated and nobody need labour for more than six hours a day.

Everything else is also arranged in the best way; there are three hours of work in the morning but, before this, at sunrise, those who wish may gather to learn about spiritual and similar things. Games such as those we know outside Utopia do not exist there. They have, however, a competitive game something like chess, a kind of arithmetical battle, and also another competitive game, again similar to chess, in which the vices and the virtues compete with one another.

Under the supervision of the elected representatives those who are suitable are declared scholars. From among their number the ambassadors and the priests are elected. The dirtiest work is performed by slaves who are either recruited from amongst conquered peoples or else are criminals. Every true Utopian is free. There is another arrangement in Utopia which we, who are not from Utopia, have only just come to enjoy: no journey may be made without permission from the appropriate authority. A passport is necessary for even the shortest journey. Money does not exist. Anything available for consumption is taken to the markets where anybody can help himself. Since this is so well arranged that no one takes more than he needs, there is no necessity to pay anything, for everyone receives what he requires. Money or anything like it is simply not necessary.

The only metal of any value is iron. Please take note of this, for it is very significant. Silver is valued less and gold least of all. Gold is not fashioned into the articles non-Utopians would use it for, but mainly into chains for criminals, and for similar objects. Gold is forged into chains for criminals; they have to wear them as a symbol of their shame. Certain receptacles which one does not mention in polite company are also made of gold, and so on. This had a curious consequence once, when some foreign diplomats visited Utopia and sought to impress the Utopians by festooning themselves in gold chains and jewellery. The Utopians thought them to be of very lowly origin, since such things were only used as toys for children, who discarded them as they grew older. When the diplomats came, the children watched them pass by in the street and said: Look at those old fogeys still wearing children's playthings!

No value is attached in Utopia to the wearing of fine clothes, for they say: How can anyone fancy it matters whether his clothes are made from this wool or that wool? The sheep were the first to wear them. How can you fancy there is anything special in wearing what the sheep first wore naturally!

In Utopia there is also another peculiarity; good and evil, virtue and vice are only judged in connection with religious ideas. A goal to be striven for in life is a kind of epicureanism in the pleasures one enjoys. The more fun one has in life, the more virtuous one is considered to be. The Utopians believe in the immortal soul of man and have a kind of religion of reason. They consider that everybody may use his common sense to see that God rules the world like an overseer, that man has an immortal soul and that after death this will enter into a spiritual world where there will be reward and punishment for virtue and vice.

The Utopians think nothing of jewels for they say: When somebody buys a jewel he has to seek the assurance of the seller that it is genuine; why on earth should something be valuable if you cannot see with your own eyes whether it is a genuine or a counterfeit jewel? This could only happen in Utopia. Hunting is also scorned as something undignified. Only butchers are allowed to hunt, and theirs is not an esteemed profession.

The man who tells all these things explains that he himself introduced the Utopians to Greek literature and art and that they proved to be extraordinarily intelligent. Indeed their language seems to have affinities with Greek, and their culture is unusual in that it seems to remind one of that of Greece mingled with something of Persia. The manner in which husband and wife are selected I shall not describe for reasons which you will understand if you read the book. There are no lawyers in Utopia; they are considered to be the most harmful people. Contracts are not entered into because the Utopians believe that if someone wants to keep an agreement he can do so without a contract, whereas if he does not, he can break it even if he has a contract.

In war, they avoid bloodletting if at all possible; it is considered the most shameful thing. They say: If one spills blood in war, one is no better than wolves and tigers. Other methods must be sought, for man has intelligence. Only in absolute extremity, if there is no other hope, will they spill blood. They set about the matter of making war on another nation by sending out scouts whose task it is either to bring about confusion among the enemy so that they start to quarrel among themselves, or to murder one or another member of the enemy force, or something similar. In other words they seek to use ‘love and good sense’ to bring about discord and dissension as well as mutual irritation among those on whom they wish to make war, and only if this fails will they decide to shed blood. And even then they use quite special methods which show that they intend to cease the bloodletting at the first possible opportunity.

Another point is that religious tolerance is a fundamental characteristic of the Utopians. So long as he does not break the law, anybody may belong to any sect or represent any religious view he likes. This was instituted by the founder of Utopia, Utopus himself. However, all must believe in a highest being, whom they call Mythra. The one who tells us this has himself attempted to introduce Christianity there. The A-94-Utopians proved to be most open to it and recognized it as being indeed the best religion. The utmost religious tolerance prevails, and all may believe whatever they will, except that someone who is a materialist or who does not believe in the immortality of the soul forfeits all civil and other rights, indeed is declared to be without rights.

There is a sect which holds animals to be creatures who have souls like people. There are priests who teach in special mystery churches and perform cultic rites. Festivals are celebrated at the end and the beginning of each year. Musical instruments differ somewhat from those in other countries, for they are particularly suited to expressing in music what the human soul feels in its various moods. And so on.

I have told you all this just as it is described in the book. You will have noticed I said on the one hand that the Utopians have a religion of good sense, in which each individual believes what his good sense tells him is right; and yet, on the other hand, we are told that Christianity has been introduced and that all believe in a kind of Mythra. Further, it is said that tolerance prevails, and yet those who are materialists forfeit their rights as citizens. In short, you will find in the book one contradiction after another.

So what is this book really about? What is it describing? We can indeed only understand it on the basis of spiritual science. We must understand that Thomas More, like Pico della Mirandola and others, is a man who stands with part of his being in the fourth post-Atlantean period while another part already projects into the fifth. But he is also a man who knows that this is so and develops it in full consciousness because he possesses a certain spiritual life.

Thomas More spent many hours every day in meditation, and with his meditations he achieved certain quite definite results. But these results came about because, as I said, part of his being still lived in the fourth post-Atlantean period, so that atavistic elements joined in him with a conscious raising of his soul into the life of the spiritual world. Yet he lived a whole century after the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period and in his soul everything lived which was characteristic of that fifth period: intellectuality and reasoning as we know them today—which did not yet exist during the fourth period, contrary to the opinion of those whose view of history is utterly fantastic. All this worked and mingled in his soul. You can discover what must have gone on in such a soul if you study Pico della Mirandola and also the relationship of Pico della Mirandola to Savonarola.

We have, then, a man into whose soul we must penetrate a little if we are to understand what he meant with his description of Utopia. Such a man as this knew that occult impulses work and weave in the evolution of mankind, and also that at the turn of the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period it was necessary to provide the right impulse for many people. Whether they then make use of it is another question. What did such people know? We have often discussed that things are different nowadays, but this is what it was like then; so what did such people know? They knew that mankind must grow decadent if only those things were developed which were, let me say, unspiritual, thought-out, merely reasoned. Such people know that human beings must become desiccated even down to their physical bodies—of course not during the course of a few centuries but over a long period—if only dry reasoning, if only that spiritual element is developed on which materialistic views are founded. Such people have quite a different concept of the truth from that which gradually evolved during the fifth post-Atlantean period. They know that thoughts must be thought which do not relate to the physical plane, because, quite apart from the truth of such matters, human beings, if they do not wish to wither, must think thoughts which do not relate to the physical plane. These are the thoughts which bring life, which make life possible and help it to make progress. This is why what is spiritual is so important, quite apart from the aspect of truth.

Through his meditations Thomas More had come to experience pictures of the higher worlds in a partly atavistic and partly conscious way, but these were mingled with the material aspect of the dream worlds. Out of these actual experiences arose what he relates in Utopia. It is not something he has thought out, it is not fantasy, but something he really experienced as the fruit of his meditation. He placed it before us just as he experienced it, in order to say: Behold! A man who lives in England under King Henry VIII, a man who is even a servant of Henry's state, a man who bears in his soul the feelings, the desires, the intimate goals of England at this time—when his visions stir up his inner being, he experiences what is here described to be a kind of ideal state. He wanted to express what are the wishes, the goals, the ideas lurking in the subconscious of those who are dissatisfied with the external world. This is what he wanted to express.

So it can be said: this is the astral self-knowledge of a man of that time. A wise man such as Thomas More does not simply set before his contemporaries a fantastic ideal for the future. He sets before them what he himself experiences because, through this, in his own way and in keeping with his own time, he wants to present them with the great truth that the external world perceived by the senses is maya and that this external world of the senses must be seen in conjunction with the super-sensible world. But if one sees them in conjunction in this way—so that all the desires, all the wishes which belong to a particular age and are in keeping with that age, are allowed to play their part—then the outcome is something which, if looked at closely, is by no means a proposition that could be considered ideal. For I must admit, if I were to be born in Utopia I would probably see it as my primary task to overcome the prevailing conditions as quickly as possible and replace them with others. I might even consider the conditions prevailing here or there on our earth—apart from those of the immediate present—to be more ideal than those in Utopia. But it was not Thomas More's aim to describe ideal conditions. His intention was to show what he really experienced under the conditions as I have described them. He wanted to say to people: If you could see your wishes, if you could see before your eyes what you imagine to be ideal conditions, you would find that you were not in agreement with them at all.

Now we have made the acquaintance of the stranger who describes Utopia: he is the astral self of Thomas More. These things must be seen as being much more real than is usually supposed. At certain points of human evolution the fundamental facts must be sought out if one wants to understand this human evolution. A judgement cannot be made simply by taking the few facts closest to hand. A valid judgement cannot be based on these, for it would merely relate to sympathies and antipathies. These are valid, of course, but they take us no further, and mankind cannot be served by them.

My purpose here—and we shall return to these things later—has been to place before you a man who is particularly typical of the turning point between two ages, namely, between the fourth and the fifth post-Atlantean ages: one who is able to bring to the surface what is characteristic of his deeper soul life in such a way that he has an experience of self. Let me just leave this as a fact for the moment.

In order to gain an understanding of the kind for which a number of our friends here have expressed a wish, we must now also work on achieving a comprehension of the concrete reality of a folk soul. For our materialistic age and way of feeling tends to make us confuse the folk soul with the individual soul. I mean, when we speak of a people, a nation, we believe that this has something to do with the individuals who constitute this nation. To use a rather rough-and-ready, though graphic comparison: To say that an Englishman or a German can be identified with the folk soul of his nation is, for the spiritual scientist, as nonsensical as saying that a son or daughter can be identified with father or mother.

This is a rough-and-ready comparison, as I said, because on the one hand we are dealing with two physical people, whereas on the other we mean one physical and one non-physical being, which differ totally from one another when examined concretely. Not until there is an understanding of the mysteries of repeated earth lives and of the karma which these involve will there really be a comprehension of what underlies all this, which it is highly necessary to understand if one wants to speak on a firm basis about these things. An immensely important truth lies in the fact that one lives within a certain folk spirit only for a single incarnation, whereas one bears within one's own individual being something quite different, something immeasurably greater and yet also immeasurably smaller than that which lives within a folk soul. To identify oneself with a folk soul is, in reality, totally devoid of meaning once one goes beyond what is described by such words as love of the fatherland, love of the homeland, patriotism and so on. We shall only understand these things properly, once we can look earnestly and deeply at the truths of reincarnation and karma.

I have spoken recently in various places about the connection between the human soul between death and rebirth and what comes into being when man enters a new existence through birth. I pointed out that between death and rebirth man is linked with the forces which bring people together over many generations. Through the ever-repeated union of different pairs of parents and all that leads to descendants, as well as other aspects of the succession of generations, it comes about that the human being between death and rebirth finds himself within a whole stream which, in the end, leads him to the parents through whom he can incarnate. Just as in physical life one is linked with one's physical body, so between death and rebirth is one linked with the conditions which prepare for birth through a particular pair of parents. One is immersed in the forces which bring one to particular parents, and which brought father and mother to their parents, and so on back through the generations, in all their offshoots and ramifications, and whatever works together here in the most varied ways—in all this one is immersed for centuries!

Consider the imposing number of centuries one would remain within all this in order to pass through a mere thirty generations. The period from Charlemagne to the present day encompasses approximately thirty generations, and over all that time, in all that has taken place in the way of meeting, falling in love and begetting descendants which at last led to our own parents—in all this we have ourselves been involved, all this we have ourselves prepared.

I am repeating this because in connection with those personalities one calls leaders, those who can be recognized as leading personalities in some respects, it is important to understand that what makes them significant for mankind comes about through all that I have just described. I shall draw your attention now to a leading personality, and the climax of what I have to say about him will be expressed in the words of another. You will see in a moment why this is so.

We see in Dante a most eminent personality who lived at the end of the fourth post-Atlantean period. We may juxtapose such an eminent personality with those personalities who gained a certain eminence after the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, such as, for instance, Thomas More. Let us look closely at what may be recognized in general in a personality such as Dante. A personality such as Dante is of far-reaching significance, gives far-reaching impulses. It is therefore interesting to consider, or at least to guess, how such a soul before entering through birth into a physical existence that is to be significant for mankind, puts together—excuse this rather peculiar expression—what he is to become, in order to be born in the right way through the right parents. Obviously these conditions are brought about out of the spiritual world, but they are realized with the help of the physical tools. In a certain sense the spiritual world guides this blood to that blood, and so on.

As a rule, a personality like Dante cannot be born of homogeneous blood. To belong to a single nation is impossible for such a soul. It needs a mysterious alchemy; various blood streams must flow together. Whatever those over-patriotic people might say who claim great personalities for a single people, there is no great reality behind it!

As regards Dante, so that you do not think I am taking sides I shall now let another, who knows him intimately, describe what is clearly apparent in his being. It would be easy to imagine that I might be carrying on politically, which is actually furthest from my intentions. So for this reason I have made enquiries of Carducci, the great Italian poet of today, who is an expert on Dante. Behind Carducci—and this is why I am quoting him—stand what are called ‘Massonieri’ in Italy, and what is connected with all those secret brotherhoods to whom I have drawn your attention. Because of this, Carducci's theoretical arguments about the actualities of life are, to a certain extent, based on some deeper knowledge. I would not maintain that he has flaunted this deeper knowlege all over the market place or that he is in any way an occultist. But what he says does contain a certain amount of what has come to him via all kinds of secret channels.

Carducci says: Three elements work in Dante, and it is only because these three elements work together that Dante's being was able to become what it was. First, through certain branches of his lineage, there was an ancient Etruscan element. This gave Dante whatever it was that opened the super-sensible worlds to him; because of this he was able to speak so profoundly about the super-sensible worlds. Secondly, there was in him a Roman element which gave him a proper relationship to the life of his time and a basis of certain legal concepts from which to proceed. And thirdly, says Carducci, there was a Germanic element in Dante. From this he gained the boldness and freshness of his views, a certain candour, and the courage of his convictions in what he had set himself. These three elements, says Carducci, made up the soul life of Dante.

The first element points to the ancient Celtic influence which pulses through him like blood in a certain way, leading him back to the third post-Atlantean period; for the Celtic element in the North leads back to what we have come to know as the third post-Atlantean period. After this we find the fourth post-Atlantean period in the Roman, and the fifth in the Germanic element. Carducci maintains that the elements in Dante's soul are composed of these three periods and their impulses, so that we really have three layers lying side by side—or rather one above the other—the third, fourth and fifth post-Atlantean periods: Celtic, Roman, Germanic. Dante experts of some stature have gone to great pains to discover how, from the spiritual world, Dante managed to mingle his blood in such a way as to obtain the final composition with which he was born. Of course, they did not express this in these words, but they went to great pains and came to believe that much may be put down to the fact that a great many of Dante's ancestors are to be found in the Grisons area of present-day Switzerland. This is borne out to some extent by history. The chain of Dante's predecessors points in every direction of the compass, including this district, where so much mixing of blood streams took place.

We now see how, in a single personality, the remarkable working together of the three layers of European human evolution is revealed. We also see how a man like Carducci, whose judgement is based on a certain objectivity and not on present-day nationalistic madness, points to the foundation on which Dante stands.

Herewith we touch on conditions which are well-known in circles familiar with the realities of life, conditions which may be reckoned with and which may be used as forces if one wants to do certain things. These conditions are by no means unknown to the secret brotherhoods, neither in their rightful use, nor in that other direction which uses secret knowledge in one way or another in the service of some group egoism. For the secret of how the three consecutive layers—which are exceedingly meaningful, mainly for Europe—work together, is discussed most carefully in all secret brotherhoods worthy of the name, though naturally in some cases in a manner which deflects from what might be termed the good direction.

Please be sure not to forget that knowledge about such things exists, and that it is taught—even though, in the external, clever world no one wants to know much about it—very systematically and with great care, especially in the western and American secret brotherhoods.

Having now prepared the way and brought to your attention the teaching about what is, in a certain way, a mystery of evolution and which is taught, albeit with the most varying aims, I shall now point to some further teachings simply by describing them to you. These teachings formed the content of the instruction given in certain occult schools, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century. They continued into the twentieth century, but it was particularly in the nineteenth century that they were taken up, at which time they gained a considerable degree of influence. Efforts were made to bring them into all kinds of situations in which it was felt necessary to use them for certain ends. So to start with I shall simply report, quite uncritically, on certain teachings from the secret brotherhoods of England, whereby I shall be alluding to what I have prepared.

The following was taught and is still taught: The evolution of Europe can be comprehended if, to start with, one looks at the transition from the Roman, the fourth post-Atlantean period, to the fifth post-Atlantean period. The teaching was—please remember that I am merely reporting—that the mystery of the transition from the fourth to the fifth period or, as was said in these brotherhoods, from the fourth to the fifth sub-race, must be understood. You know that we cannot use the term ‘sub-race’ for the reasons I have frequently expressed, for to use this term means to pursue one-sided group aims, whereas group aims can never be our concern, but solely the general aims of mankind. So the teaching was that the fourth sub-race is represented mainly by the Roman, the Latin peoples. Throughout human evolution it is the case that when things develop in sequence it is not a question of what comes after taking its place behind what came before. What came before remains and takes its place side by side with what comes afterwards, so that they remain side by side in space. Thus, the stragglers of the fourth sub-race, consisting chiefly of the Roman and Latin elements, have remained during the period of the fifth sub-race.

The fifth sub-race, which began at the start of the fifteenth century, is composed of those peoples who are called upon to speak English in the world. The English-speaking peoples represent the fifth sub-race, and the whole task of the fifth post-Atlantean period consists in conquering the world for the English-speaking peoples. It will be evident that the stragglers of the fourth sub-race, the peoples touched by the Latin element, will fall more and more into a certain materialism. They bear within themselves the element of their own inner dissolution, and even in the physical sense bear their own decadence within them. As I said, I am merely reporting and not saying anything which I myself maintain to be true. Further, it is said that the fifth sub-race bears within it a germ of spirituality, of a capacity to comprehend the spiritual world. It is necessary, it is said, to understand how the fourth sub-race affected the fifth, and for this purpose one must look back to where the Nordic peoples, who later became the Britons, the Gauls, the Germans, came towards the Roman Empire. The question was asked: What were these peoples at the time when the Roman Empire was making war on them; in other words, when the conflict between the fourth and the fifth sub-race began? As peoples they were at the stage of infancy! The important point is that the Romans, the Roman element, the fourth sub-race, came in order to be their wet-nurse. These expressions are needed to enable us to draw the analogy between the folk element and the element of the individual human being. So the Romans became wet-nurses and they remained so for approximately as long as they maintained their dominance over the peoples of the North who were going through their infancy.

Infants grow to be children. This is the age in which the Papacy is founded in Rome and in which the Pope in his reign becomes the guardian of the child, just as the Roman Empire was the wet-nurse of the infant. Again, I am merely reporting, and not maintaining that this is the case. So now we have the interplay between the Papacy and what is going on in the North, what developed through Central Europe right out as far as Britain. This is the education of these people under the guardianship of the Papacy, out of which the Roman element from the fourth post-Atlantean period is still working. Round about the twelfth century, when the Papacy began to be no longer what it had been, the youth of these various people commenced, this being characterized by the awakening of their own intelligence. The guardian now withdraws. The youth of these peoples continues until roughly the end of the eighteenth century. As a rule, when such things are taught the present is omitted, because for certain reasons this is thought to be a good thing to do. People must not be told too clearly what one thinks about the present time; they learn about this more through suggestion.

Thus, in the course of time in the North, under the rule of the wet-nurse, the guardian, and so on, the present mature condition grew. This bears within it the germ of rendering Britain the ruling nation of the fifth post-Atlantean period, in the same way as were not only the Romans but also the Roman element in the form of the Papacy, which was derived from them. So, according to this doctrine, while the remains of the Latin element crumble away from the human race, a new fruitful element expands from the factor in which lives the British element. Now it is hinted that all external actions and measures which are to serve any purpose and be fruitful, must be made under the sign of these views. Anything that is undertaken without these views, anything that does not take into account that the Latin element is in decline and the British element ascending, is doomed to wither. Of course such things may be undertaken, say these people, but they are condemned to remain meaningless, they will not grow. It is like sowing seeds in the wrong soil.

In the doctrine I have sketched for you we have a foundation which seeped into all the brotherhoods, even the more esoteric ones—those who worked in the West as so-called high grade Freemasons and suchlike. These things were insinuated into public affairs by people who had either close or loose connections with these brotherhoods, often in such a veiled way that those concerned had no idea how they had come by their knowledge. Particularly since the sixteenth century these things have been carried from the West into much that can be experienced in human evolution.

Other things are also taught. It is said: Just as those people in the North during the time of the Roman element were preparing themselves to be the fifth sub-race, so today, in a similar way, the Slav people are coming towards the West as the developing sixth sub-race; in the same way the Germanic peoples came out of the North to meet the Roman element. Thus it is said that living in the East, under a despotic rule that is doomed to destruction, are a number of individual peoples who, like the Germanic peoples when the Roman Empire started to spread northwards, are not yet nations as such but still tribal peoples. These tribal peoples constitute the separate elements of the so-called Slav people, which for the moment is only held together in an external way by a despotic government which is to be swept away. I am using the terms which are customary within these secret brotherhoods.

After saying so many positive things about the Slavs, let me just add in parentheses: It is true that these peoples are still tribal in a certain way. This became evident at the Slav Congress in Prague in 1848. Each group wanted to speak in their own language, but this proved impossible because they were then incomprehensible to the others; so they were forced to use standard German instead. I do not say this to amuse you but in order to show that what is taught in the West about the Slavs does have a certain basis of truth.

It is said further in the English brotherhoods that the Poles have evolved ahead of the other Slavs, for they have developed a homogeneous cultural and religious life of a relatively high calibre. The destinies of the Poles are described to some extent, but it is then maintained that they really belong to the Russian Empire. Then the Balkan Slavs are discussed. Of them it is said that they have thrown off the yoke of Turkish oppression and formed themselves into individual Slav states which, however—and this is repeated over and over again—are destined to remain as they are only until the next great European war. In the nineties particularly, these brotherhoods held this great European war to be imminent, and it was linked especially to evolutionary impulses which were to emanate from the Balkan Slavs, born of the fact that these states, which had come into being as a result of their disengagement from the Turkish Empire, had to undergo a transition to new forms. Only until the next great European war, it was said, would these Balkan Slavs be able to maintain their independence. After that they would meet with quite other destinies.

These peoples are at present, so it is taught, in their infancy. So it is hinted that since they are the future sixth sub-race, while the Britons are the present fifth sub-race, the Britons will have to play a role towards them similar to that played by the Romans towards the northern Germanic peoples, namely that of wet-nurse; to be a wet-nurse to these peoples is their primary task. This role of wet-nurse will cease to be necessary, it is said, at the moment when these peoples will have reached a point when the Russian Empire no longer exists and they have succeeded in creating their own forms out of their own dawning intelligence. But gradually the wet-nurse must be replaced by the guardian. This means that in the West a kind of papacy must develop out of those who form the fifth sub-race. For this, a strong spirituality must develop and, just as the Papacy stood in relation to Central Europe, so a configuration will have to come about which works comprehensively from the West over towards the East. This must result in the East being used as a place where certain institutions can be created in a manner similar to that in which the Papacy created its institutions in Europe.

Of course we have now progressed by one sub-race. The Papacy created churches and religious communities of all sorts. But now the western ‘papacy’, which is to develop out of the British element, will have the task of carrying out certain quite definite economic experiments, that is, of instituting a certain form of economic society of a socialist nature which, it is assumed, cannot be founded in the West because there the fifth and not the sixth sub-race has its being. The East, experimentally at first, must be used for such experiments for the future. Political, cultural and economic experiments must be carried out.

Of course these people are not so stupid as to maintain that the dominance of the West will last forever, for no serious student of spiritual matters would believe that. But they are quite clear about the fact that just as at first the services of the wet-nurse were offered, so must these be metamorphosed into the role of the guardian—in other words a kind of future ‘papacy’ on the part of western culture.

I have been reporting, my dear friends! These things are buried deeply in the teachings of western Freemasonry and it is a matter of recognizing whether the ones I have mentioned, which are very influential, are really justified as being for the good of mankind in general in its evolution, or whether it is necessary to think of them as needing correction in some way. This is what we are concerned with. We shall return to all this again.

Now I want to point out that certain stages of evolution are really not mere fantasy, but that the more deeply one enters into the real facts, the more does it become possible to prove in the external world what was found at first by spiritual means. External science, even today, is occupied with the search for theories which prove that evolution takes place in stages which follow one another. That there is really something correct in what the spiritual scientist says can today be confirmed in some of the symptoms of ordinary science, if only one has the good will to search for them.

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Let me mention in this connection something of which I have repeatedly spoken already. Although external culture cannot comprehend these things there is, in spiritual development, something which is expressed in laws which are as definite as the laws of nature. I once drew your attention to a linguistic law. Human evolution from the fourth post-Atlantean period up to the present shows that Greek and Latin represent a particular stage of linguistic development; the next stage was then Gothic, and the one after that New High German. Evolution takes place here in a perfectly regular manner. I can only sketch this for you, but these things follow laws which are every bit as absolute as those of nature, and exceptions merely seem to be so.

The sound D in Greek or Latin is transmuted into T and this again into Th which, because of certain language laws, can also be Z. A Greek Th or Z becomes a Gothic D, and this becomes T in New High German. A Gothic Th or Z becomes a New High German T, and so the circle continues. Similarly, a Graeco-Roman B becomes a Gothic P, and this in turn a New High German F or Pf. A Greek F or Pf would be a Gothic B and a New High German P. There is another circle which goes from G to K to Ch. Take for example treis, three, drei: T / Greek; Th / Gothic; D / New High German. This is so in every case and exceptions can be explained by special laws which complement the main laws.

We have three stages, one above the other: Greek-Latin, Gothic—which corresponds to the time when the Roman Empire was coming up against the Germanic tribes—and the further stage of New High German. The strange thing is, as I have said before, that English has remained behind at the Gothic stage. So if you want to find the English for a New High German word, you have to go back a stage. Take ‘Tag’; to find the English for this you have to go, not forwards, but backwards: ‘day’. Take ‘tief’; again you have to go backwards to ‘deep’; take New High German ‘zehn’; if you want the English you have to go backwards: ‘ten’. Take ‘Zahn’; you have to go backwards if you want the English: ‘tooth’; take ‘Dieb’, here too you have to go backwards: ‘thief’. New High German ‘dick’, if you go backwards, becomes ‘thick’. So, to go from New High German to English, the direction is opposite to the normal.

So we can say quite objectively: If we seek to find the evolution of language as a folk element in respect of English, we have to go back to the Gothic stage. New High German has risen in evolution to become a special element. This is not said out of any patriotic or nationalistic feeling but simply because it is true, just as there is no need to say the polar bear is white out of any sympathy or antipathy for him. The law I have demonstrated to you is a well-known linguistic law, Grimm's law. I have only demonstrated it with regard to some voiced and unvoiced plosives and some aspirated sounds, but it can be done for the whole system of sounds. The evolution of language proceeds in accordance with strict laws and it corresponds to the impulses that rule in human evolution. Little by little natural science discovers these things, though sometimes only sporadically. In spiritual science you may find the deeper foundations for all these things.

We shall come to other aspects of spiritual and cultural life which will show that what applies to the realm of language holds sway in other fields as well. Something unconscious, when it is brought to light, bears witness to objective laws. This cannot be turned and twisted according to sympathy or antipathy!

Do not imagine that this Grimm's law on sound-shifts is unknown to those secret brotherhoods of whom we have spoken. Tomorrow we shall see how they come to terms with such matters and how they have relevant things to say about them too. What they have to say is not foolish but perfectly in keeping with a certain kind of occultism. It will be up to you to decide, when you know more about it, how you want to judge it and whether it is something legitimate or not. Through the karma of human evolution it will come about that certain things are made more easily accessible to the public at large, in particular as a result of the circumstance that a certain amount of confusion has entered into the Masonic orders. Because of these circumstances a variety of things are coming to light for the outside world. We, however, want to understand, above all, the deeper foundations of all this.

Some quite bizarre symptoms are indeed coming to light. For instance there exists today an interesting dissertation by a man who met his death—this too is a remarkable karmic circumstance—on the battlefield of the present war. It is about the parallelism that exists between French politics and French secret societies, and it shows how the two run entirely parallel, how the same forces live in both. Much more intimate and concealed are the circumstances of English politics which are totally under the influence of what lies hidden behind them in this way. Here the main concern is to find ways of placing suitable people in the right places. The people in the background who are involved in occult manipulations are often like a number one; they do not amount to much on their own. They need something else: a nought. Noughts are not ones, but the two together make ten. If more noughts are added, so long as there is a one somewhere as well, a great deal can result—for instance a thousand—though every nought remains a nought. And if the one remains hidden, then only the noughts are visible. So the aim is to combine the noughts in a suitable way with the ones, whereby the noughts have no need to know much about the way in which they are combined with the ones.

There is, for instance, a certain man who is a perfectly honest fellow. I have often said that I in no way look on him as the wicked ogre—for which many in Central Europe want to take him. I think he is an honest, nice man who, in his own way, longs to speak the truth. Yet this does not prevent him from being a nought. This man's education began at Winchester public school, whence he proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford. Then he won something very important, the Marlylebone Cricket Prize, followed by the Queen Anne Tennis Prize. At the age of twenty-three he became a member of parliament. At that age one is susceptible to all kinds of influences. At thirty he became Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He had long been Foreign Minister when he set foot outside England for the first time in order to accompany the King of England on a journey to Africa. He also wrote a little book on angling entitled Fly Fishing. Sir Edward Grey then ascended the social ladder before sinking into obscurity. A fellow student at Oxford, ten years his senior, was Asquith, with whom he spent his years there.

This is how those appear who are the visible accomplices. We shall proceed thus far today and carry on tomorrow.

What I have said during these evenings has been directed to showing, from the most various points of view, that that aspect of events which is generally accepted as the history of mankind is, in many respects, a superficial one. How, for an understanding of the present condition of affairs, it is peculiarly necessary that we should not be led into any illusions as to this superficial way of regarding mankind's historic evolution in these latter days. We must not on any account assume that what holds good, and what I am about to say, of the more or less final phase of the historic evolution covered by the Fifth post-Atlantean age,—that that holds good for the whole course of human history. We must have no such ideas. For this final phase, however, what I am about to say holds good

From the socialist side, it is always being pointed out that the whole course of human history is, in actual reality, to be traced in economic processes alone,—in the processes of industrial life, in the class-warfare that has resulted from the processes of economic life. And on the foundation of this economic matter-of-fact world, as a sort of superstructure upon it, are supposed to have grown up all those developments that we see in the way of Law, Moral Conventions, and especially spiritual life, including, of course, Art, Religion, Science, etc. As applied to the whole course of human history that is, of course, nonsense. One cannot but ask oneself: What has led to this nonsensical idea? V/hat has led to such a nonsensical idea is that, as a matter of fact, and in respect of this particular last phase of human evolution in our own modern times, the thing has a basis of truth in it. Amongst the events which ushered in this modern age we have to note those changes in our earthly evolution that I mentioned yesterday, which were brought about by the discovery of America, by the discovery of the sea-route to the East Indies. But, besides this, the latest phase of mankind's evolution must be marked by us as that of the great spiritual upheaval which was accomplished at the beginning of the modern age, and which we call The Reformation.

The time has come, my dear friends, when this Reformation, too, must be recognised for what it really was. And when one goes further into all that we were leading up to yesterday, and acquires a deeper view of history, not a merely superficial one, then, indeed, one finds that what is in appearance a spiritual transition at the beginning of the modern age—the Reformation—really rests, rests solidly, upon something that Is, after all, at bottom, economic in character. And it is just from a perception of this economic basis lying at the root of the Reformation, and from seeing nothing else, that the socialist view arose, that all historic evolution has been simply the outcome of class-warfare and of economic conditions.

If we examine, not by the light of illusion, but by the light of truth, what took place and the things that underwent a metamorphosis through the Reformation at the beginning of the modern period of historical development, we can but say: A tremendous shifting of status undoubtedly took place with considerable rapidity at this time, when the modern age was beginning. The way in which the shifting of the population took place was this; that the land and soil in Western Europe, particularly, were, before the Reformation set in, possessed by different peoples from those who possessed it afterwards. For those people who before the Reformation were the leaders, and on whom the social structure more or less depended, lost their position through the Reformation. All landed property before the Reformation was, to a much greater extent than is commonly supposed, dependent on the lordship of the priesthood, and in all manner of ways. Before the Reformation, the lordship of the priests was remarkably powerful in determining the character, for instance, of economic conditions. Those who possessed landed estates possessed them to a very large extent as a sort of agents and under an obligation of some sort or another in connection with the offices of the Church.

Now, if one examines the actual course of history from a perhaps not very idealistic but therefore all the more truthful point of view, one finds that, with the Reformation, the old estates of the Church and Spiritual Orders were torn from those who held them, and transferred to the temporal lords. This was very largely the case in England. It was also very largely the case in Germany,—in what later on was Germany. In what later was Germany, many of the territorial Princes went over to the Reformation. But this was not Invariably,—not to put it too aggressively,—this was by no means invariably out of zeal for Luther or the other Reformers; it was a hungering for the estates of the Church, a craving to secularise the estates of the Church. Any number of estates that belonged to the spiritual power in the Middle Ages passed actually over to the temporal, the territorial princes. In England, it happened that a large number of those who had possessed land and holdings were dispossessed, evicted, and they emigrated to America. A large number of the American settlers—the point was alluded to yesterday in a different connection—were the evicted holders of landed property.

Economic conditions, then, played a leading part in the metamorphosis which went on under modern historic evolution, and which is commonly called the Reformation. On the face of it, the thing was like this:—Openly, people say that a new spirit must find Its way into men's hearts, that under the old church administration the temporal and spiritual have become too closely combined, that a more spiritual road to Christ must be sought, etc, etc. Whilst deeper down, less obviously on the surface, a shifting of economic strata is taking place through the transference of estates from spiritual to worldly owners.

Now this is connected with a fact whose roots stretch wide into the history of general evolution; and we can only understand these particular isolated facts of modern history when we glance back over a somewhat wider range of human evolution. We have only to glance back at that phase of human evolution which we term the Egypto-Chaldean age, which, as you know, ended in the middle of the 8th century before Christ, from which point the Graeco-Latin age began, lasting down to about the middle of the 15th century.

If we go back to the ancient Egyptian, the ancient Chaldean civilisation,—well there, we have as ruling powers quite a different type from what became the ruling powers later on. People nowadays take little account of the great upheavals that have come about in the course of historic growth. The powers that were peculiarly the ruling ones in that early age—the age that ended about the middle of the 8th century before Christ—were the sort of people who, in the traditional language of Spiritual Science, one would call “Initiates.” The Egyptian Pharaohs were, down to a certain date, invariably persons who were initiated. They were initiated into the secrets of cosmology, and regarded what they had to do on earth in the light of this cosmology When one says a thing of this sort to the modern man, he finds a certain difficulty in understanding it, for the simple reason that the modern man, from his own special mode of consciousness, thinks to himself: “It is all very well, but, after all, those Pharaohs, and the Chaldean initiates, too,—or so-called initiates—did a great many things that were highly reprehensible.” Well, one might, of course, argue that modern rulers, who are not initiates, also do a great many things that are hardly in accordance with the highest moral standards,—but that, here, would be obviously away from the point. One must, however, point out that in the world that lies beyond the senses the gods are not all good ones, but that there are also gods whose action is in every way contrary to men's interests, as commonly understood. So, one is by no means entitled to believe that anyone who is a real initiate must necessarily act from virtuous motives. And in speaking, as I am doing now, of the Pharaohs as Initiates, all that it must be understood to mean is that they acted on impulses inspired from the spiritual world. That these impulse's might often be very bad ones will be contested by nobody who has become in our sense acquainted with all the many divine, spiritual powers that lie behind the world of sense,—powers of a supersensible nature. But the true initiate,—he who could receive into his will, not merely receive into his consciousness, but into his will, what divine spiritual powers bestowed upon him,—he was in truth the ruler, down to the middle of the 8th century before Christ. Then began the age when, if one actually divests it of all the various illusions that pervade popular history,—when one may say that the real ruler was the Priest. The temporal ruler,—even when he was a Charlemagne—was always more or less dependent on the priesthood. Priest-rule was, to a much greater extent than is commonly supposed, even in the middle-ages of European civilisation, the really determining element. It entered into everything, it made itself felt everywhere, and was for the social structure also the element which, above all others, was the determining one. And the people who possessed land and estates held them to a very large extent of the Priesthood. Such regular soldiers as there were in old days, before the middle of the 8th century B.C., were troops in the service of the Initiates. Such regular soldiers as there were in the 4th post-Atlantean age, in the Graeco-Latin age down to the middle of the 15th century, were, taken as a whole, mercenaries of the priest-lords. And all enterprises, too, such as the Crusades, were, as a whole essentially military expeditions undertaken, if I may so express it, on behalf of the ruling priesthood. In one way and another, everything that was done had some connection with the rule of the priesthood.

We may say, then, that in the Egypto-Chaldean age, the Rulers were of the Initiate type; from the middle of the 8th pre-Christian century down to the middle of the 15th century the rulers were of the Priest type. From this time on, the type that was really the ruling one for actual historic developments was the Economic man. The economic man was the one who ruled. It does not really matter by what name he was called. The farther on one goes in the history of mankind, the less do names matter. The thing that gave a man a sort of basis for domination was that he was in a position to play a part in the world of finance and industry. Just as the essential feature about the Priest and the Initiate of old days was that these respective types of ruler could intervene in economic affairs,—only they did so from higher motives,—so now the man of the economic type of modern times was able to intervene in practically every detail of the social fabric.

Yes, but along with that, there goes something else besides, something that I have already indicated in connection with the Initiate type of ruler. The Initiate type of ruler works through his will, receiving into his will the motive-forces of the higher worlds. With the Priest type, this is no longer the case. It was not, at bottom, the spiritual life that was realised in the priest type, but the intellectual life. And accordingly, in that civilisation where the priest type were markedly predominant, the markedly predominant, the essential element is the intellectual one.

In Asia, in the East, it is not the intellectual which is the essential thing, but the spiritual life. For even what we still have as civilisation there to-day, fallen as it is very greatly into decay, yet it is still the relics of what once was the civilisation of Initiate of what was a spiritual civilisation. When the religious impulse of the East was transplanted to Europe, it became merged in the intellectualist conception of the priesthood. From the initiation into the real facts, into the spiritual world, they produced—Theology, an intellectual extract of the facts of the spiritual world. But this priest type, which intellectually boiled down the facts of the spiritual world and made them known in an intellectual form, so all that the people really got was an intellectualised religious element, they were in their turn again replaced in the strict meaning of that term, at the beginning of the modern age, by the economic type of man. One can show in detail in many cases exactly how this economic type of man came to be top. I shall come to that presently. Now the question naturally arises: How does it come about that the course of historic evolution undergoes such considerable changes? How does it really happen? Well, at the bottom of that, again, there is something which makes it necessary for one not to rest content with a surface view of historic life, but to go deeper down. If one studies history at all,—what passes as history,—one sees at once that the historians are writing on the assumption, as I said before, that the psychic evolution of man has undergone no very great fundamental change whatever in the course of history. In the view of the materialist thinkers, there was once a time when the ape, or a creature like an ape, wandered about the earth; and then, through all sorts of accidents, though of course very slowly,—science relies a great deal on length of time nowadays,—this ape-like creature developed into—Man. But, once there, man has remained practically unaltered, according to them, in all that relates to his state of consciousness, to the condition of his soul. A modern man thinks of the ancient Egyptian as being perhaps rather more of a child, because he was not yet so “clever,” he did not know so much as the man of to-day; but in the general constitution of his soul, the modern man pictures the ancient Egyptian as being pretty much the same as himself. And yet, if we go back to the time before the 8th century B.C., the constitution of man's soul then was quite, quite different from what it was later on, after the middle of the 8th century B.C. If one takes the soul of the man of to-day, in its present conformation, and knows no other, one can really form no picture to oneself of what went on in the soul of the sort of man who lived actually before the 8th century B.C.

The people of that time were of such a kind as still to be in living connection with their previous incarnation. These people were so constituted,—unless, indeed, they belonged to one of the Hebraic tongues, when it was different,—but if they belonged to any of the wide-spread heathen nations, so-called “heathen nations,” then, for them, everything that went on in their souls was the outcome of previous incarnations, of previous lives upon earth. And they were distinctly conscious that what was going on in their souls was the spiritual fruits of the spiritual worlds. For people such as this, no doubt whatever existed that what was the principal part of themselves was not inherited from their father and mother, but had come down out of spiritual worlds and united itself with the part which came to them from their father and mother. The constitution of these peoples souls was one which rested entirely on a spiritual form of civilisation. Hence it was possible for social life, as it existed amongst them, to be guided and directed by their Initiates, by those who were to a certain degree initiated into spiritual things in a real, actual way, not intellectually through their thoughts. In those days, when one talked to anyone and spoke of spiritual facts, one was speaking of things with which he was quite familiar. Everybody, in fact, pictured himself as a centaur. His physical body he looked upon as having undoubtedly come about through transmission in the flesh; but, on top of all that, was what had come down out of the spiritual world. Everybody knew that. Everybody looked on himself as a sort of centaur.

Then came the age that began with the 8th century before Christ,—roughly speaking, with the foundation of Rome. In that age,—it Is a fact that we have already considered from other points of view,—in that age the spiritual contact of the real actual kind was lost. People, however, still retained through their Intelligence a kind of spiritual touch with the world of spirit. Man, indeed, no longer pictured himself actually as a centaur, as though a higher spiritual being came down from above and settled upon something else that was inherited through the blood; still, he was clearly conscious that his intelligence, his world of thought, was not dependent on his blood, not dependent on his physical body, but that it had a spiritual origin.

One cannot, for instance, properly understand that great philosopher, Aristotle, unless one knows that Aristotle, in calling the highest part of the human soul “Diagnosticon,” was clearly conscious that this, the highest part of the human soul, which is an intellectual part, has been rained down from the worlds of soul and spirit. Aristotle knew that quite well; indeed, everybody, even down into the early times of Christianity, knew this quite well. This consciousness, that the human intelligence is of a divine spiritual origin, this consciousness was not lost until the 4th century after Christ. It was in the 4th century after Christ that men first really ceased to believe that the power of thought they bear within them comes from above, and is rained down upon them at their birth out of the worlds of soul and spirit. It was a great change, that, in men's souls. If we look back at the first, second and third Christian centuries, we find the men of that time able to say to themselves: Of course, I was born of father and mother, but I know,—not merely, I have puzzled it out, but I know, just as I know that my eye sees the light, so I know that my intelligence comes from the gods. It was an immediate consciousness that people then possessed, just like the consciousness aroused by a direct perception.

It was only after the fourth century that the feeling entered more and more into men's souls that up here, in this bony empty cavity,—for an empty cavity it is, as I have often had occasion to explain to you,—here, up here are seated the organs of intelligence, and this intelligence Is somehow connected with heredity, with blood-relation- ship. It was only during this period, when the transition was finally effected from a belief in the divine nature of the intelligence to a belief in its transmission along physical paths,—it was only then that what I may call the intellectualising of the religious impulse through the rule of the priesthood could be finally effected. And when the intellectualising process was very far advanced, and people had come to regard the intelligence as bound up solely with a man's bodily constitution, then it was all up with the rule of the priest, too. Priest-rule could only hold its ground so long as people could be made to understand the old traditions of the divinity of the intelligence. The economic type of man emerged at the moment, the epoch-making moment, when the belief in the divinity of the intelligence had vanished, and when man's feelings were leading him ever more and more to the belief that it was the physical man which is the actual vehicle, the organ for the evolution of thought. You should only know what a fight, priest-rule fought, and how it is still fighting even to-day. Anyone, for instance, who is acquainted with catholic theological literature, knows how priest- rule is still fighting—fighting with every conceivable philosophic argument—to maintain that the intelligence which has its seat in man is something additional that comes to him from without. Read any sort of catholic theological literature that you happen to come across, and you will find them no longer denying what, indeed, for the present- day man no longer admits of denial, that all the rest of his attributes are bound up with his bodily frame, but they cling fast to the intelligence as an exception, as something that is of a divine spiritual nature and has nothing to do with man's bodily frame. And yet, in the general consciousness of mankind it is not so. In respect of the general consciousness of mankind, a feeling has grown up ever more and more among men, a sense that it is our body, too, which enables us to think, which Is the basis of the intelligence as of other things. And so ever more and more man has arrived at a consciousness that he is really only a physical being. And it was only under the sort of spirituality which proceeds from regarding oneself as a merely physical being that it was possible for the economic type of man to make his way to the top.

And so there exist, you see, spiritual reasons deeper down for the economic type of man having come to the top. He has, however, come to the top, and in socialistic theories this fact has been handled and exploited to the disregard of all others. The business-man has been the ruling type ever since the Reformation; and from this you can see, too, what kind of spirit really is the ruling one in the various religious denominations that have come up since the Reformation Recognise quite clearly, without any illusions, what that spirit is, my dear friends: Temporal science is to permeate with its technique the whole of our external everyday life, and we do not mean to have the complete chain of this external science interrupted by all sorts of religious matter. Faith is to be kept very nicely in a special little box all to itself, and as far away from the external affairs of life as possible. Science, one thing,—a separate banking- account; Faith, another thing,—a separate banking-account, and they must never on any account be amalgamated. We want our faith; indeed, we want to be religious people, says the business type of man,—the more religious, the better, according to many of them; and one sees them going off very ostentatiously to church with their prayer-book under their arm. Oh, certainly! But then, that banking book,—religion must not intrude there, with that religion has nothing to do, except, perhaps, on the first page, where one always sees written in banking-books, “By the Grace of God,” but then that is only a little bit of blasphemy, of course. The complete chain must not be broken. Otherside [Otherwise?] people might perhaps find out that the Reformation was, in many respects, only a roundabout way of arriving at the secularisation and confiscation of Church estates and of claiming them for the temporal lord. Of course, if one were a German princeling, for instance, or an English lord, one could very well say: We are going to create a new historic epoch by taking away the land and estates from those who have hitherto held them. That is what the modern socialist says: We are going to expropriate the owners of landed property. But naturally people did not say that at the beginning of the new modern age; they did it, and threw a haze over it all with: We are founding a new religious faith. So people do not know their real reason for being religious; but it makes them feel comfortable to spread this illusion over the real grounds for their being so religious. That is how the economic type of man came up.

The consciousness that one is living out a spiritual life within one has gradually disappeared. That is the deeper-seated, spiritual root of the matter. If we go further hack still, before the third post-Atlantean age, which ended about the middle of the 8th pre-Christian century,—beginning in the 3rd to the 4th millennium B.C., we come again to a quite different conformation. Paradoxical as it may seem to the men of to-day, in the 4th or, 5th millennium B.C. there was not a man on earth who believed that what was transmitted from his father and mother was the essential part of him. At that time men were absolutely convinced that they were wholly, in respect of all essentials, descended from heaven, If I may so express it. That was men's rooted belief. They did not look on themselves as being of earthly origin; they looked on themselves as spiritual beings, sprung from a spiritual origin. And the period when men first began to feel themselves to be physical human beings in the body was designated by the Jews, “The Fall,” at the beginning of things, when Original Sin first overtook man. As a matter of fact, however, Original Sin has overtaken man more than once. It overtook him first at the beginning of the 3rd post-Atlantean age, when he ascribed one part of himself to his father and mother, to his blood, and merely believed that a spiritual something had come down on top of that. It overtook him for the second time when he began to regard his Intellectual part as more or less hereditary. That second “Fall” came about in the 4th century after Christ; for from that time on, intellectual capacity was regarded as something hereditary, as something bound up with the bodily nature. And there will be other “Falls” in the time to come.

Our task to-day is to return to spirituality by a different route. And, to do this, we must have the possibility, before anything else, of getting back to a spiritual form of intellectual life. We must have the possibility of attaching a sense to this existence on earth such that this sense itself is once more the revelation of a spiritual reality. Take, for instance, the things in my “Occult Science.” It cannot be said that the kind of intellectuality with which these are apprehended has a bodily origin; for it is not with the physical understanding that one arrives at what is there said about the universe and about man. It is a re-education of man back to that conception of his intellectual nature which is a spiritual one. And for this, modern mankind must first of all be willing to regain the faculty of looking on their Intellectual nature as something divinely spiritual. Then, Indeed, will it be possible to start on the road back to spiritualisation. It is a task upon which mankind must enter with full consciousness,—to return again to spiritualisation, and, first of all, to a thorough spiritualising of the intelligence. People must learn once more to think in such a way that their thought is permeated with spirituality. The best way to begin is by considering ethical concepts, and bringing them back to the moral imagination, to the moral intuitions, as I did in my “Philosophy of Freedom.” If in the moral sense one sees something which, as I expressed it in the “Philosophy of Freedom,” derives its impulses directly from the spiritual world, then that is a first beginning towards the spiritualisation of the intellect. I did this in my “Philosophy of Freedom” very cautiously and gently, for in the 19th century there was truly not much to be looked for as regards the spiritualising of anything. But this Is the road that will have to be taken.

The Economic type of man, who came up at the Reformation, regarded it as his special mission to make all intellectuality a matter merely of the body. What this business type of man really did during the Reformation period was to tear himself violently loose from the spiritual foundation of man's life on earth. One can see it illustrated in individual cases. At the beginning and during the first half of the 15th century, there was a man in England, Thomas Cromwell,—not Oliver Cromwell, but Thomas Cromwell, quite a different person,—who played a very important part in introducing the principles of the Reformation into England. There was one person, James I, who still made an effort to save the old dominion of the priesthood; and one best understands James I if one looks on him as a Conservator,—a man who was trying to conserve the rule of the priesthood. Only, his plans were thwarted by others. And amongst the people who came to the top at that time, and who were, so to speak, the earliest type of economic man, was Thomas Cromwell. It is impossible to understand Thomas Cromwell unless one recognises that he was one of those people who have a very short life between death and rebirth, before taking on a body here on earth again. And it is just those people who are unusually numerous among the ruling types coming to the top in modern times, who have had but a short life in the spiritual world before their present life here on earth.

As you know, I have often said here that one of the most significant phenomena in latter-day history is that for the ruling types it is the selection of the worst that takes place. You know that for years past I have taken occasion to tell you so repeatedly. Those who are, in reality, the rulers, the governors, are a selection of not the best. It has come about with the times that those who are really the best in this modern age have remained below, and those who have been selected for the top, for the leading positions, that is, are not infrequently anything but the best. Very often it has been a selection of the least fitted. And this selection of the least fitted has been founded, in so far as relates to their human nature, in the fact that they were fulfilling an earth-life which had only a very short space of time between the last life on earth and this one. It is a fact which one finds stamped upon many of the leading personages of modern times, that they have had a quick return to earth after a brief life in the spirit. In their preceding life between death and new birth they have received into them but little of spiritual impulse; but they are all the more impregnated with that which this earth alone can give. The Economic type, especially, have been men whose preceding spiritual life was a short one, who were permeated through and through with what the earth, as such, alone can give. I do not mean to say that there have not also In modern times been people who have passed a fairly long stage of time between death and birth and who are notable in modern times; but they have been thrust into the background. So the course of man's historic evolution fated it to be; such was the common karma of mankind.

And man's modern life was played out under these conditions. It is really pitiful, how frequently a phenomenon it is in modern times to see men who in their inward natures are far superior, looking up to men who are far, far worse than themselves, as special authorities. It is a common phenomenon. And these revered authorities are truly not people who in any way represent picked men of the best type. The time has indeed come when people must stop so naively chanting the praises of modern civilisation, and examine the plain, unadorned facts. Men must acquire the habit of considering life not in its more superficial aspect, but of considering it according to the inner configuration of men's souls. And this is just one of the facts that has to be considered, that one has to distinguish between the kind of men whose life in the spirit, between birth and deaths is a comparatively long one, and those whose life in the spirit has been comparatively short. One must consider people from their spiritual aspect. It is only by thus considering people from their spiritual aspect, that it becomes possible with clear consciousness to bring order into the social structure. Any really deep understanding of what is socially requisite to-day will only be acquired when such an understanding is sought for in a groundwork of spiritual knowledge.

In the last three days, I have made it my task to show you in what way the civilisation of our times must be regarded in respect of the possibility for mankind's further evolution. Our earth, as an earth with all that is upon It, has already entered on its downward stage, on the stage of its decline. I have often told you that keen-sighted geologists themselves have already noted this fact. It is even now possible to demonstrate by purely external physical science, and according to the most exact geology, that the earth has already begun to crumble away, that the ascending phase of its evolution is at an end, and that the solid ground we tread on is actually breaking up beneath us. But it is not only the mineral kingdom of the earth that Is breaking up; all organic life that moves upon the earth is more or less in a state of decomposition, of falling away. The bodies of plants, of animals, of men, these, too, are no longer in their ascending stage of evolution, but are going downhill. Our physical organisation is not now what it was, for instance, before the fourth century after Christ, or what it was in the times of ancient Greece. Our organisation is a perishable one, and along with us the earth is in its decadence. V/hat Is physical about the earth is in its decadence. I called attention to this phenomenon for the first time some years ago in a lecture at Bonn; but as a rule, not sufficient importance is attached to these things. The bodies we live in are crumbling away. But, as a set-off against this, we must reflect:

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Our bodies are crumbling away; but it is just out of these crumbling bodies of ours that what is spiritual can best develop, if only we give ourselves up to it. In the old bodies, you see, it was like this, supposing I make a diagram: Here is the body (Diagram I black) and, all through, the body is permeated with its spiritual element; here is the spiritual element, all over It like this (red).

Now to-day it is like this (diagram II): our body, if we draw it diagrammatically, Is crumbling away in many places. It is crumbling, it is falling away; and everywhere the spiritual element is spurting out of it, escaping from the body. If we only set ourselves to do so, we can inwardly within our souls lay hold everywhere of the spiritual element, because of this crumbling away of our bodies. But it is absolutely necessary that we should not rely upon the physical. It is, on the contrary, absolutely necessary for us, because of this, our crumbling condition, to turn to the spiritual. Everything physical is breaking up; everything physical on earth has begun to go to ruin, and one dare not rely any longer on the physical nature. The only thing we have to look to Is just what, to use a homely phrase, is spurting out from the spiritual soul-element,—spurting out because the physical element is in ruin.

There is one thing to be learnt from this, my dear friends. We are connected through our bodies with the physical conditions of the earth; and the earth's conditions express themselves socially in economic conditions. Now, as everything is crumbling away, as everything is in decadence, so also, in a certain respect, economic conditions are in a state of decadence; and only a fool could believe that It Is possible to-day to regenerate economic conditions simply by means o economic conditions alone. Anyone to-day who dreams of bringing about an economic paradise on earth by purely economic measures, is much the same as someone who has a corpse in front of him and believes that he can galvanise it back into life, wake it up again. So you can take all the theories that are based on pure economics to-day, listen to people telling you how the economic life can be adjusted so as to work by itself according to its own laws, listen to them telling you about the conditions under which production Is to be carried on, how the transition is to be effected from private ownership to communal ownership, etc.,—it is all founded on the false belief that one can, regenerate the economic life out of the resources of the economic life itself. Whereas the truth is that in the economic life, as elsewhere, everything physical is of itself going to ruin.

When anything is going to ruin of itself, then all one can do is to keep putting it right from time to time. That means that we want a remedy from this economic life, which of Itself is in a constant state of break-down, if the economic life were left to itself; if one did what Lenin and Trotsky want to do with it, it would be continually breaking down, continually falling sick. And therefore, one must have the remedy constantly at hand, too, as a counteractant to the economic life. That is, one must have, beside it, the independent spiritual life. If you have a sick man, or someone who is continually liable to fall sick, then, alongside, you must continually have the doctor. If you have an economic life which, owing to the earth's evolution, is constantly ripe for its fall, when left to itself, then you need to counteract it with the continually healing power of the spiritual life. That is the inward connection. It is part of a sound cosmogony that we should acquire an independent spiritual life. Without this independent spiritual life, to act as a perpetual source of healing wisdom, alongside an economic life that is constantly liable to break down,—without this, mankind will never get further. To attempt to regenerate the economic life out of its own resources is sheer folly. We must establish a healing source in the form of an independent spiritual life beside this economic life, and bridge them both over with the neutral Life of Rights. We shall never arrive at any adequate understanding of what is necessary in the present day, unless we have learnt to perceive that the earth's physical life is already sinking to ruin. It is because this is not perceived that there are so many people to-day who believe that the economic life can be regenerated by all sorts of remedies conjured up out of the life of economics itself. They do not exist. The only possibility that does exist is continuously and unceasingly to keep the economic life going by means of the independent spiritual life established alongside it. And only those can trace all the mysterious interweaving of these threads in our life who have learnt to read it by the light of a really modern cosmogony.

Just reflect how serious the whole situation is, how one must look on and see men rushing to destruction, if they still persist in believing that the economic life can be regenerated out of itself,—if they will not acknowledge and turn to that which is spurting forth from the crumbling physical world, which is able to stand alone and to be a continual source of healing. People ask: What is the remedy for revolutions? Well, when the downward forces have accumulated in cries in quantity sufficient to make a revolution, then the revolution comes. The only way to counteract revolution is continuously and unceasingly to apply the counteracting force. And unless a spiritual life is established as a continual healing force to withstand the economic life, then the economic life comes to a head and breaks out in revolutions.

It is high time, indeed, my dear friends, that the things we are here dealing with should be taken In all their gravity, in their full weight, and that people should not have the idea that Spiritual Science is a thing to play with. It will not be played with. You cannot dish up real Spiritual Science as a Sunday afternoon sermon. What people are used to making out of the old religious creeds,—taking all sorts of teachings about reincarnation and karma to regale themselves with in the privacy of their own souls,—that cannot be got out of this teaching, not if it is taken seriously. This teaching means to lay hold upon actual life. This teaching is bent upon becoming deeds, by the very force of what it is. And so it is not in accordance with some private personal whim that what is living within our Spiritual Science must now find expression in all manner of social ideas as well. It is really a matter of course. It is all part of the same thing. Naturally, anyone who talks of development and evolution in the modern natural-science sense, and has not a glimmering notion that Evolution is first an ascent and then a descent, will not be ready either to understand that we are living in a downward stage with respect to the earth's evolution; and such a person will take what is on its downward path, and try to wring from it forces for a regeneration,—That is no longer possible.

What I have, above all, had at heart in the course of these three lectures, my dear friends, is that you might see in all its extent and reality the deep seriousness of Spiritual Science and all that is connected with it. With the things of Spiritual Science there can be no playing. it can only be played with when it is watered down to all sorts of mystical, eclectic stuff,—then you can play with the things of Spiritual Science. Those people do very wrong who go and think that they can play with it, for all that. The things of Spiritual Science cannot be played with,

There is a great deal of opposition from various quarters to whit this Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy stands for. it will meet with opposition from almost all those people who want to play, to “mysticise,” I should like to call it,—who want to mysticise with the life of Spiritual Science,—“mysticism,” “mysticise”. Those people who want to mysticise will not, in the long run, get on very well with Spiritual Science, because they do not like to be reminded of the seriousness of life. That is why Spiritual Science has so many opponents. To-day, especially, there are numbers of opponents; and to-day, especially, there are numbers of opponents, turning out to oppose it from every sort of mysticising hole and corner. There is now to be a renewed attack made on this Spiritual Science on the ground that it is scientific in character, and that all genuine experiences of the spirit-worlds must come through direct spiritual communication,—that nothing of a scientific nature, no sort of scientific concept, must enter into it, and so forth; there is a fresh attack on foot from the corner where we have done a good bit of work, but which still keeps on pouring out a succession of slimy stuff,—mysticising stuff, in this very direction. Another book has appeared from the Munich quarter,—though possibly from different publishers,—which is at bottom intended as an attack of this sort,—mystical book, called “The Living God.”

When one sees these things in the present day, in an age when the social situation is so critical, it shows how spiritual frivolity and cynicism of a spiritual kind have taken possession of men's lives. All that must be got rid of.

This is, indeed, the time when we must set ourselves in all seriousness to examine the most important question in life, and ask ourselves: What can we do, what can we do with all our might and main, to lay hold of those forces which are actually in accordance with the age?

My dear friends, here stands this Building of ours, here it stands, waiting for the world to take it seriously, with such seriousness as really to perceive that it has been built in the consciousness of a perishing age, and in order to receive and take up the spiritual essence out of this age as it falls. Here we must be swayed by no belief that it is possible to preserve what is old what is ripe to perish and fall away. The faith that must inspire us here is that out of the on-rushing ruin it is possible to save and bring forth the spiritual essence,—one which must be quite unlike the old. A little transformation of our civilisation cannot do it. We have to recognise, and boldly face the recognition, that it is only with the great impulses of civilisation that we can accomplish what will take mankind the necessary step forward towards the future. And we must take counsel with our own selves, how to find strength really to take up these new impulses. We must have courage to make plain to people, as well as we can, what is meant by the earth being in decadence, and that what has lasted on down into our days as civilisation, and which we have grown up with and become used to,—that this, too, is passing away in the ruin; but that out of this ruin we must rescue and bring forth a new spirituality, a spirituality that can be carried on with us into other worlds, when this earth has finally sunk and passed away.

To work with clear consciousness towards a regeneration of Art, of Science, of Freedom, that is a work that should centre round this Building. In erecting this Building an attempt has been made to bid in a sort of way, defiance to the Past, in the shapes and lines of it, and so forth. And in the same way, practically, we must have the courage to grasp all that can be got from the fact that the Building actually stands here. We shall never get right, my dear friends, if we go on clinging to little remedies. We shall only get right by resolutely and consciously keeping before men's eyes the necessity for a new form of spiritual civilisation, for that alone can be the true starting-point for a new form of social civilisation. For the social order cannot any longer be evolved out of the economic order, but only out of a spiritual element that shall have sunk into the economic one. And we must clearly realise that the Economic type of man is played out, and that another type must come to the top,—the type of man who is a World-man, one who is conscious that there lives within him not only what he has inherited through earthly descent, but who is conscious that there live within him, also, forces of the sun and the heaven of stars, forces of the world above the senses. In such forms as people can understand, we must bring this to their consciousness; and then alone shall we be doing something towards the real progress of mankind. By merely transmitting all sorts of mystical teachings we can do no good whatever. Our mysticism must be actual spiritual life—active spiritual life.

That is what I wanted to make you realise to-day. This Building at Dornach ought to be regarded as being, without undue pretensions, the actual starting-point for a great world—movement, a world-movement which Is altogether international, a world-movement which embraces every kind of branch of spiritual life. This Building at Dornach should be the starting-point from which -to cast off all fondness for what is perishing and to receive the impulse of that force which is making for an actual renewal of man's consciousness. If we could establish something of this sort in the world, which should form a starting-point from whence to take up the spiritual essence out of the ruin of the physical earth,—if we could say: We put up the Building at Dornach to be the monument of this starting-point, to attract people's eyes to our purpose there,—if only we could create something of this kind, then we should be fulfilling what lies in the very impulse of the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy. But we need to summon up our energies and create what shall speak to mankind in actual facts,—speak by facts in such a way as to make them see: “Look! We are aiming here at something that lies in the direction of actual progressive evolution in human consciousness, in science and art as well as in religion.” If we are in a position to speak from positive facts in this way, then we shall accomplish far more than by trying to throw ourselves into all sorts of things at which other people are aiming. We should realise that what we have to aim at is a new thing. If we are able to do this, then we shall be accomplishing a worthy task. But there we must commune with our souls, my dear friends, and try to set our hands in this way to the task of Anthroposophy.

More on this subject, then, next Friday at 7 o'clock.

It seems that at this present moment the question should arise in every soul: Where is humanity heading? Where is the path of humanity within the so-called civilized world going? It is the events of the present that undoubtedly lead to this question arising in every soul. Therefore, today, in the first part of our reflections, we will speak about this question: Where is humanity heading?

We have often spoken of purely human differentiations, of the differences that exist between the soul dispositions of people in the West and those in the East. And I have already indicated in a public lecture at the Siegle House how the present-day armed struggle, which is by no means over yet, will be followed by the great battle of spiritual life between the West and the East, and how this battle will be one of the greatest, most significant battles that humanity will have to fight out in the course of its earthly existence.

A truth that has often been spoken here and within our anthroposophical movement in general should be awakened again and again in the soul for the realization of the human being and his tasks, and that is the truth that in the fifteenth century a radical change took place within European humanity , a radical change which at first was little noticed by people, but which is very clear, both for the spiritual life and for the life of the soul, as well as for the outer physical, for the human body, for the prevailing laws of economic life. In all three areas, the emergence of human independence, the emergence of the human consciousness soul, is clearly noticeable around the middle of the fifteenth century. Since that time, man has had to gradually work his way out of the earlier patriarchal conditions of humanity in order to fully grasp his humanity, to rely on his own judgment, his own feelings, and on the will born of his own judgment and his own feelings. But since that time, human development has also, in essence, forked, if I may use the term. This means that humanity stands at a crossroads. While up until the middle of the fifteenth century humanity went more or less straight ahead, as guided by its instincts, from that point in time in the fifteenth century humanity could go either right or left, the path is forked. Such developments do not take place overnight; such developments allow old legacies to flourish in particular. And there are certainly old legacies left over from the stages of human development that were gone through before the fifteenth century. But those qualities of humanity have also developed alongside, which are precisely characteristics of nature, that have actually only moved into the development of humanity since the fifteenth century.

But we can describe in a very specific way what this turning point in the fifteenth century actually consists of. As you know, I have often emphasized that the history taught in schools is only a fable convenante, something that has terribly little to do with the inner development of humanity. One must go to what has truly happened if one wants to understand the development of humanity. If we now want to describe what actually happened in the middle of the fifteenth century, we have to say that until the middle of the fifteenth century, human beings lived more or less instinctively, carrying all kinds of ancient, atavistic abilities from the primeval times of humanity in their blood. This instinctive life must be replaced by a life of soul and spiritual consciousness. And this life of soul and spirit consciousness should actually become the characteristic life of modern humanity. The purely animal instincts that arise from the body should be transformed into soul and spiritual instincts. There are many forces that want to work against this development of the human being towards the soul and spirit. I have often emphasized that, for example, the Catholic Church, at the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869, by establishing a dogma, forbade people who were Catholics from meditating on the spirit at all. In those days, the spirit was forbidden for European humanity, insofar as it belonged to the Catholic Church. That was, so to speak, the first resistance against what is most necessary for humanity, against the dawning of spirituality for civilized humanity. That is why it has also come about that this civilized humanity must work its way to the spirit, must work its way against all those powers that oppose the spirit, which, so to speak, would like to hold humanity back in the dullness of the old, instinctive life. What will happen to humanity if it continues to live only from the heritage of the old, the actually overcome, manifests itself in the most diverse ways. It manifests itself differently in the West, in the middle of Europe and in the East.

We must, however, first ask ourselves: What actually awaits humanity if it does not want to turn to a spiritual life, to an understanding of the spiritual life? And I have already mentioned in earlier lectures that something particularly characteristic in the development of humanity is that in ancient times, for example still in the time of pre-Christian cultures, people remained capable of development up to a much higher age than they are today. Today, as I have often indicated, a person is only capable of development up to about the age of twenty-seven. That is the furthest limit of his ability to develop. He then retains the forces that he has developed up to the age of twenty-seven, and lets them continue to flourish in his physical body. Just consider how capable of development man is in the first years of life. He goes through everything that leads him to the important epoch of the change of teeth, around the age of seven. People just become dull to what is going on inside them; they don't pay attention to it. But inner revolutions take place in a person as he approaches the change of teeth around the age of seven. Inner revolutions take place in a person again as he approaches sexual maturity around the age of fourteen or fifteen. The external history does not speak of such an inner revolution of man. The completely Catholicized external history of Europe does not speak of it, and it knows why. Such revolutions took place in ancient humanity, in pre-Christian humanity, up to a much higher age. Man was capable of development for a long time, and so he was able to use the developed powers of his age to penetrate into regions of the world, where he cannot penetrate today if he wants to remain in the ordinary method of education, in the ordinary outer life, because he is only capable of development up to the age of twenty-seven, and then lets that which has developed in him become distorted and ossified. So that actually people become old in their inner soul earlier and continue to vegetate. What has been taken from man by natural forces, clearly taken since the middle of the fifteenth century, must be replaced by conscious work on his soul. And if it is not replaced, man can only rush towards a state that ossifies, mechanizes and so on his later life again and again. These are inner laws of development exactly the same as the laws of development in outer nature, only today man is afraid to develop such strong thinking and cognition that he penetrates to these inner laws of human development. But he must penetrate, if certain things are not to occur in the development of humanity, which will otherwise certainly occur.

Through this law of development, humanity, if it remains as it has developed, faces continuous catastrophes, such continuous catastrophes for which the present catastrophe that has been unfolding since 1914 is only the beginning. These catastrophes cannot be averted by the means that humanity has developed as an old heritage. For man is approaching a development that would, in the future, make his entire soul useless for the later years of his life. Gradually, people would come over the civilized world who, in their youth, show all kinds of spiritual and soul enthusiasm, but who then fade away, and who would vegetate into old age, without soul. Mankind would become soulless, mechanized.

Anyone who has embarked on observing life, especially in our time, could also make observations in this direction in the outer life. I can tell you, especially in the decades of the last third of the nineteenth century, I was always able to observe the emerging talents and even geniuses as they developed. No phenomenon was more common than that people developed as poets, as artists, and also as scientists in their younger years, only to fade away in their twenties and then produce nothing of note. You don't observe such things, but they are there; you just don't train yourself to make such observations. But such observations show what threatens humanity in our time if it does not grasp what can only come from spiritual and soul development itself. And this is evident in the most diverse ways across the geographical territories inhabited today by civilized humanity.

The peoples of the West, in a sense, have strong instincts. These strong instincts of the peoples of the West will protect them from this withering away of the soul and spirit for a long time to come. I would like to say that instincts still arise from the animality of the peoples of the West that protect them from soullessness and ossification. Therefore, these peoples of the West need to cultivate spiritual-mental life less than the peoples of Central Europe and the East. These peoples of Central Europe and the East can do nothing worse than imitate Western culture in any field. Because when they want to imitate, they imitate something for which they have no instincts, something that can never flourish in them. And it was basically our misfortune, our self-inflicted misfortune, that we got so involved in imitating the West in the most diverse areas of life. And in certain circles of the West, which are privy to these things, they know all that I have told you now very well. Therefore, they attach great importance to forcibly de-animating and de-spiritualizing the East, which naturally, through its spiritual qualities, strongly resists de-animation and de-spiritualization. Hence England's efforts in India to work towards the greatest possible de-animation and de-spiritualization.

You see, this is the course of civilization if humanity does not take itself spiritually and mentally into its own hands. Then we will experience that certain democratic-social ideals will instinctively flourish in the West, while in the East that which has already begun will continue. This development in the East must indeed inspire us to special thoughts. We, who for decades have always emphasized that the future of Europe has its source in the Russian national spirit, in the national spirit of the East - we, who have always pointed to all the fruitful forces that must arise in the East of Europe, we must today take special care to consider this East. We can only look at it correctly if we look at ourselves correctly.

We in Central Europe have emerged from the developments that took place during the Thirty Years' War into a certain idealism of spirit, which flourished in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, in the German philosophers, and which also had its reflection in German music. With that, what is usually called German idealism flourished. This German idealism reached its zenith in the philosophy of Flegel. What, then, is this philosophy of Hegel, which developed out of Goetheanism in Central Europe as the most inwardly sound system of thought? Well, this philosophy of Hegel only carries to its highest point what already lived in Lessing, Herder, but especially in Goethe. And this must be clearly recognized, especially today, in this time of crisis. What lived in this German idealism? Yes, it lived for the last time, in a magnificent way it lived for the last time, what in the form in which it lived at that time must not remain in humanity. German idealism must be regarded in a certain respect as a very beautiful, magnificent, mighty afterglow. And anyone who regards it as anything but a magnificent and mighty sunset regards it wrongly and commits an offense against the spirit of human progress. This is especially evident in Hegel.

It is difficult for people to delve into Hegel's thought-structure, which has been driven to the highest level of abstraction. But anyone who does so as a human being – not as a university professor, but as a human being – can form an opinion of where the human spirit has actually been driven by developing Hegelianism out of Goetheanism. Hegel explains human reason, which reigns in phenomena, as the actual divine-spiritual out of Goetheanism. Hegel places human reason on the highest throne; the reason that reigns in reality places Hegel on the highest throne. Basically, he only carries out what Goethe has already done. Now the peculiar thing is – if you really immerse yourself in Goethe and Hegel as a human being, you notice this – now the peculiar thing is that spirit reigns in Lessing, in Herder, in Schiller and Goethe, in Hegel, but that this spirit that reigns in them knows nothing of the spirit. This is something that people will have to understand, that today still sounds so familiar to people that they understand absolutely nothing of it. It is spirit that prevailed in this German idealism, it is spirit, but it knows nothing of the spirit, it does not deal with the spirit, it does not speak of the spirit.

Hegelian reason is first developed in logic, that is, in ordinary human thinking, which becomes world thinking; it is developed in natural philosophy, where all natural phenomena are administered according to reason; it is developed in the human soul, in human historical characteristics, in what man has produced as religion, as art, as science - but then it is over. This philosophy does not speak of the spirit as spirit. It is spirit itself, it speaks of everything that is not spirit in a spiritual way; but it speaks nothing of the spirit. It is the last sunset, the last beautiful, glorious sunset of that which actually set as the sunshine for all mankind in the middle of the fifteenth century. Therefore, it is necessary to take up a very special position precisely towards German Idealism. He who wants to conserve it, who simply wants to take up what Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller thought, or what Hegel then brought into magnificent abstract world formulas - whoever wants to do that merely in reflection, whoever wants to be a disciple in the ordinary sense of the word in this time, that person sins against the progress of humanity. We cannot take over into the culture of the present day, into the development of the newer times, that which has shone forth as the evening light of humanity, that which still contains within itself the last elements of the light of Greek and Roman antiquity, we cannot do this without it having a killing effect, simply as knowledge, as something absorbed and digested. This was already on my mind as a very young person. That is why, in the 1980s, I did not pursue Goetheanism as much as the others, that I wrote about Goethe, that I historically processed what Goethe researchers, for example, historically processed, but I tried to merely absorb Goetheanism and develop it further. I wrote my theory of cognition of Goethe's world view with the aim of showing how one can think and feel about the world in the spirit of Goethe. Yes, it is based on everything I have just said. It is based on the fact that we can learn from the dawn of German idealism how we can develop further, but that we do not have to continue this dawn in the form in which it has been handed down historically. We have to develop something different spiritually and mentally from this German idealism than it directly presents to us. We must learn from it, gather strength to move forward. Therefore, today Goetheanism is not a cult of Goethe, not a worship of what Goethe directly created, but Goetheanism is the transformed, the converted continuation of what one can develop inwardly, by studying Goethe, by penetrating oneself.

To an even greater degree, this is the case with Hegel. Whoever today would be a Hegelian, whoever would bring Hegelianism to humanity in this or that form, would appear as a withering influence on the progress of our culture. But whoever makes the nature of Hegel's subtle thought-formation his innermost soul-property and from there takes the step that Hegel could not take: into the spirit, he does the right thing, he does what lies in the sense of human progress. You see, our difficult position in the world is that we are least of all Goetheanists when we parrot Goethe, and we are most of all Goetheanists when we can rise to the challenge of saying we must do everything differently from the way Goethe did it if we want to work in Goethe's spirit; we must do everything differently from the way Hegel did and said it if we want to work best in Hegel's spirit. History already shows us the way in a certain sense. For Hegel, the Prussian state was the most reasonable institution in the world, because reason is sought in all things. “The real is the reasonable.” Therefore, the state in which he himself had found a place as a person was the most reasonable of all. All universities were good for him, the Central European universities the centers of the world, and the Berlin University the center of the center. These things are in fact mysteriously connected with those forces in the evolution of humanity, which I have often described as such that one cannot devote oneself to them if one wants to live comfortably in soul, because these forces lead one inwardly to all kinds of pitfalls and abysses, to transitions and inner upheavals. Those who today measure the right by the wrong kind of Hegelianism and false kind of Goetheanism are ignorant of this. And there are truly not a few such people today. And we must realize how these people hinder real human progress.

A book has been published that is truly written in the spirit of the present, written by an inwardly astute and artistically sensitive person, Ernst Michel. The book is called “The Way to Myth.” There is even goodwill to return to a spiritual and psychological understanding of life. But how does Ernst Michel judge the path of Goetheanism? You see, there is one passage I must show you because it is inwardly connected with our present consideration. He says on page 38: “The highest knowledge that, according to Goethe, is granted to man is the intuitive penetration to the archetypal phenomena, i.e., to the seeing comprehension of the created, the appeared as a moving, flooding effect of divine powers. But these themselves remain hidden from us in their metaphysical essence. Man can add nothing and take away nothing; he cannot influence the spiritual, he can only enter its sphere of activity by beholding it or not. Not even the greatest man can transcend this fundamental law of human existence. Theosophy, even in its form as anthroposophy, would have been unreservedly rejected by him (Goethe). “

So you see, this is how a person views Goethe's way of thinking. He points out the instinctive element, the penetration into the archetypal phenomena, and then says: Theosophy, even in its form as anthroposophy, would have been unreservedly rejected by Goethe. What thoughts does one have in the present about something like this, if one really thinks in terms of progress? One has to say: certainly, Theosophy, also in its form as Anthroposophy, would have been rejected by Goethe. But to present it to humanity in the way it is presented here in this book is to sin against the progress of humanity. For it is not a matter of what Goethe would have rejected in his time and until his death in 1832, but of what must have an effect today and what Goethe, in his living spirituality, wants to make of himself. Those, then, who only look back in this way sin against the real progress of humanity.

This is the fear and hatred of today for the living spiritual life into which we must enter if we really want to strive for the development of humanity. It is therefore no wonder that people who look at world development in this way fall into error after error. This is how this author views today's expressionist art, and he finds something about this expressionist art – he speaks very unclearly – but he does not find out how this expressionist art, in all its awkwardness, is nevertheless a beginning of something new, a beginning above all of something that Ernst Michel could not even dream of. That is why Ernst Michel says: “Expressionism followed Symbolism as the second movement, consciously wanting to lead artistic creation back to its highest task: to be shaped confession, expression of a spiritual world view.”

Expressionism is very difficult to understand today, sometimes anti-artistic, not just inartistic, but it is the clumsy way to seek artistic embodiment of the inner spiritual. In this context, Ernst Michel considers the following judgment to be justified: 'Transcendentalism, as the new world view is emerging, does not, however, refer to a new religious revelation, but to the philosophical teachings of Henri Bergson and the new gnosis of Rudolf Steiner, which proclaim intuition as a latent spiritual power in man that is called to replace religious revelation. In the power of intuition, of the seeing consciousness, man is said to be able to overcome the intellect and its illusory knowledge and to penetrate directly to the spiritual essence of things.

At such a point, one must, so to speak, immediately catch the person who is growing out of the present in an oblique way. For here that which is our anthroposophy is thrown together with that which is a phraseology of Henri Bergson brought into the last phases of a development, which stirs up everything that is a world view and which seems to be the well-known personality who always revolves around himself to catch his own braid, who points everywhere to intuitions but never arrives at an intuition, who always talks about how one should penetrate to the soul, but never takes a step to penetrate to a real spiritual knowledge. It is becoming so difficult for people of the present time to distinguish the fruitful from the unfruitful. We in Central Europe have the possibility of making this distinction if we adhere to the great distinction: Goethe as he was until 1832, and Goethe as he must work in us. And the same applies to Hegel. For when they work in us in a transformed form, their spirituality is fruitful for us, helping us to find our way into the spiritual world.

What I have now explained to you is at the same time the key to understanding a very, very important phenomenon of the nineteenth century, which has not caused people to reflect more thoroughly because people in the present are averse to thorough reflection. But is it not strange that the dialectician Hegel, who only spoke from the air of the spirit, should have as his most brilliant disciple the completely materialistic Karl Marx, who only thought of the material and economic? In the mid-nineteenth century, extreme idealism suddenly turns into the most mindless materialism, and not Hegel, but Karl Marx becomes the spirit to which the most forward-looking people of the present adhere. We have not yet been able to really examine this underlying fact in its foundations because we have slept the sleep of Scelenz in the center of Europe. It can only be examined by asking: If the spirit of Karl Marx were to spread throughout Europe, what would become of Europe?

We must begin in the East. From there, the real inspiration of modern civilization would emerge from the national soul, and this East would face a fate that can be described as follows: The mechanization of the spirit, in an economic papacy the complete mechanization of the spirit, the killing of all productivity and freedom of the spirit in a large, extensive accounting over a large territory. Furthermore, the vegetarianization of the human soul. In particular, this vegetarianization of the soul would assert itself in the field of legal opinion and state life. Oh, it is interesting how in our age the unclear but genuinely Russian doctrine of 7o/stoi, the penetration of Dostoyevsky's soul, but also what was less observed in Central Europe and what I would like to call the Russian heroism of the legal idea, has emerged from the spirit of the East, which wants to move forward. This Russian heroism of the legal idea was widespread among many people before this world war catastrophe broke out. These Russian heroes no longer thought of the individual person, they only thought of the human being as such, of what should be right from person to person. And they would have gone not only through fire but also through physical death for the realization, and to a large extent they also died for the realization of the legal idea. And so, in other areas of this Russian life, too, before the outbreak of the world war catastrophe, weighed down by the terrible things the world has experienced through tsarism and imperialism, one finds a certain heroism of the Russian soul. And now it is flooded by that which wants to mechanize the spirit, which wants to vegetate the soul; so that if it continues like this, the Russian East would live through the development of humanity with a sleeping, numbed soul for centuries to come. It would also oversleep what it could have given to the world itself. Furthermore, in this European East, the animalization of the body and the birth of animal instincts in the body are being hastened. |

The old spirit of humanity would be imposed on this unhappy Europe, first in the East, if one did not agree to steer into the spirit of progress. For it is not progress that is now to be carried to the East, it is the most reactionary current, which is born entirely out of what was already destined for humanity to perish around the middle of the fifteenth century. What lives today in Russian Leninism is the continuation of the spirit that dogmatically abolished the spirit at the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in the year 869. This must be seen through. And what rises up against it out of a truly democratic-social spirit is what counts on the real progress of humanity. For this most reactionary thing wants, even if it is not aware of it, the mechanization of the spirit, the vegetarianization of the soul, the animalization of the bodily instincts, which would express themselves more and more in the views of blood. It is no use closing one's eyes to these things. He who wishes to speak out of the spirit of truth must look facts in the face, whatever the consequences may be; and he must also look unsparingly in the face those facts in which a great number of people are foolishly seeking their salvation. And I would say: only in the most extreme case does this Russian East show where humanity wants to rush. It wants to steer with the old spirit into the mechanization of the spiritual life by absorbing the school completely into the state. It wants to rush into the deadening, into the vegetarianization of the soul, by dulling the real sense of right and wanting to replace it with the bookkeeping of a seemingly, but not really socialized state. And it thinks it is leading people to a natural human life by unleashing the most savage animalistic, bodily instincts that man carries within himself.

This is the task that we, born out of the deepest distress in Central Europe, should see clearly in this respect as well. We must clearly see how we have to absorb the great age of German idealism, how we have to transform and reshape it, so that people will not, as would happen in Russia, go around like living corpses when they reach a certain age. In the future, individual abilities would flare up in people at a young age, and all the old people would walk around like living corpses. And culture would die out, because the earth has not been able to give man anything in the way it did since the fifteenth century; he must seek it for himself if he wants to thrive on earth. We in Central Europe have the task of showing humanity how to develop through body, soul and spirit. We have to rebuild that kingdom of the spirit that was undermined by dogmatic Catholicism in 869 at the eighth ecumenical council in Constantinople. Otherwise, along with the spirit of humanity, the soul will also be lost, and it will become a living corpse on this earth, since the earth will no longer be able to give any more vitality. Hence the constant search for the spirit, hence the necessity for a real world view of freedom. Not of that freedom which can be connected with the blackest reactionaryism, but of that freedom which is born out of the spirit of modern man.

In the extreme rarity of its occurrence, Central European humanity was predisposed to bestow on Hegel and Goethe just enough spirit to enable it to function as spirit, but no longer able to grasp spirit , at most, could only hint at it symbolically in Goethe's Fairy Tale and in the second part of Faust. In Hegel's case, he described the world spiritually, but in such a way that this spiritual description of the world remained spiritless. If we see Hegel as a person who can speak about the world entirely from the standpoint of the spirit, but at the same time as the most spiritless person who has ever been born, then we see Hegel correctly. But this legacy of spiritlessness is precisely what is inherent in the Central European development. That is why we have come to the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in an absolutely spiritless way. We have come to a reign that no longer reflects on life at all. And from not reflecting on life, from the fact that one has unlearned all thoughts about life, it then followed in 1914, which one could express like this: in July 1914, at the end of the month, it was the case that in demonic spirits had confiscated all thoughts in Central Europe, so that these confiscated thoughts would not work in the souls of people, and out of the chaotic subconscious could arise that which then arose. For Central Europe, with its two empires, really gave the impression in July 1914 of people who act in such a way that all thoughts have been confiscated from them. Today, it is not enough to be naive about these things. Today, these things must be seen in the Spirit of Truth, and this Spirit of Truth must at the same time be allowed to be fertilized by what is necessary for the further development of humanity.

Therefore, one must also realize what kind of attitude would bring about humanity, which only comes from the scientific world view, from that scientific world view that wants to understand the whole world and which has then produced its idiotic, feeble-minded blossoms in the monistic associations, where only phrases and phrases were spoken because otherwise nothing could be spoken. Let us assume that this scientific world view, which has crept into all social thinking and feeling, would take hold of humanity. What would be the result? Yes, one must know what the peculiarity of the scientific world view is. You see, Flaeckel was a splendid man, really full of life, a brilliant fellow. I may have already told you the story I experienced myself: We were once sitting in Weimar, I with the old publisher Hertz von Berlin at one end of the table and Haeckel at the other. Now, Hertz, who was a man of the old school, said something like this in the conversation: Yes, what Haeckel teaches leads humanity to its downfall, it is a misfortune for humanity. — Haeckel was sitting, as I said, at the other end of the table. Hertz continued speaking, then this so pleasant, beautiful apparition of Haeckel caught his eye, and he asked: Who is that down there? No, he exclaimed, that cannot be, bad people cannot laugh like that! - You see, in such symptoms those things that came from the old were confronted with those that wanted to go towards the new. But a peculiar phenomenon must be observed: those people who first study natural science in the cabinet or with the nets in the sea, examining Medusa, as Haeckel has done so frequently, who do the research first hand in the laboratory, they can be inwardly active people, they can be there with their soul and even with their spirit. But the pupils, and this is already the third generation, show themselves to be absolutely spiritless and soulless. That is the peculiarity of the scientific world view: it drains people of their spirit and soul, and numbs them. But because it cannot yet drive the emaciation so far in those who do the research at first hand, that is why the original naturalists are often highly likeable guys. The next student, who still has the teacher's image before him, is not entirely without spirit; the third, who is the student's student, is usually already a spiritless and soulless fellow, a monist.

But there is something else connected with this monism. If you become imbued in soul with this monism, if you become imbued in soul with the spirit of modern natural science, then you become alien to man as man, and antisocial instincts develop in you. Sympathies between people fade, while antipathies increase more and more. That is why I have often had to say it here: however great the triumphs of natural science on the ground of nature, human nature, the human essence, is ruined by them from the foundations up, for they produce antisocial instincts and create abysses between human beings. Today we are already standing at such abysses between man and man, which is shown by the fact that only to the slightest degree can man understand man today, can man really empathize with man.

What must take the place of what has just been described? It must be replaced by the development of the soul, which makes its way by absorbing what you, perhaps with weak powers, will find described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. This is at the same time a book on the education of humanity. This is what should be begun with at the beginning of the twentieth century: to speak to people about how they should rely on themselves, on their own strength. Such a thing must also be made fruitful pedagogically. Such a thing is the foundation for Central European pedagogy.

Now, it is impossible for the forces that are to be revealed in “How to Know Higher Worlds” to be cultivated in any state school.

Establish state schools in any form, and people are driven away from what is to be developed in their souls and minds. This can only flourish if spiritual life is placed on its very own free basis, if spiritual life is placed in self-government. Therefore, this shift of spiritual life into self-government is the fundamental question of humanity in the present time. For through this movement of spiritual life into self-government, that which has been most lost under the scientific education of mankind will in turn be generated: the rule of an artistic understanding of the world, from which the imaginative understanding of the world will then arise. For the development of mankind has reached a certain point: when man encounters man today, they can no longer recognize each other at all, because the physicality for this has already been too much dried up. They can only recognize people if they can form a picture, an imagination of them. And more and more, direct personal contact, and everything that should be there for people, will have to be based on images, on imaginations that people can form of each other, on looking at the soul and spirit in people. The actual developmental impulses of people must be thoroughly changed. And there too, it must already be stated: suppose the way of thinking that dominates all of humanity today, the materialistic way of thinking, were to triumph – now we are at the fork in the road of culture – this materialistic view were to triumph: then, starting from Russia, all of humanity would mechanize in spirit, vegetarize in soul, animalize in body, because the evolution of the earth itself is pushing for it. The evolution of the earth gave off the invigorating forces of man, you can follow this into the fifteenth century, where even the prices in Central Europe were the normal prices of the individual economic goods. This is only obscured by history, which is a fable convenante. The earth could only give man what he could find within himself without consciousness until the fifteenth century; only until then could it be the unfolding of man. Since then, man has had to work his way into grasping a pictorial, spiritual view of the world and of other people, in order to come to a right relationship from person to person. If the materialistic world view were to prevail, what I have just characterized would happen, then desolation would flood the earth and the war of all against all would be accelerated.

There is only one way out of this situation: if people turn to spirituality, that is, to pictorial vision, to the imaginative; if they are able to replace that which comes from Greek culture and was beautiful about it, the birth of the spirit, with the realization of the spirit in the world ; if they replace what was alive in Romanism and what, proceeding from Romanism, wreaked havoc in Europe, the officialdom, if they know how to replace that with free legal intercourse, and if they know how to replace that which has particularly flourished in the West through instincts with an organized economic life.

But for this it is necessary that what is recognized scientifically on the one hand is also recognized spiritually. The world could not progress if there were no free spiritual workers in it. Imagine how the world would progress if nothing spiritual were produced. Things must be invented, people must live in art, in a free world view, otherwise humanity would become ossified. Humanity would become ossified under the mechanization of the spirit. But what is the basis of free spiritual creativity? Free spiritual creativity is based on the fact that we preserve for life certain qualities that we otherwise only develop normally in childhood. When someone is as old as Goethe was when he completed Faust, he does so with the soul forces that he acquired in the first third of his life; they must remain, they must be preserved. In the normal course of development, they die out today. In Goethe and in German Idealism, they were still there as inheritance, as the red afterglow of the day, a last stroke of luck in the development of humanity. Now it must be cultivated, cultivated in a spiritual life that really looks at people's individual abilities and develops them appropriately through spiritual pedagogy.

And what, then, is the spiritual and psychological basis of all economic life? This may still sound strange today, but all economic life is based only on economic experience and on having been immersed in economic life, and it is therefore best developed by those soul forces that have been immersed in life for the longest time, namely by the soul forces of the last third of life. Just as one develops a true art only through the very first soul forces, so one develops a true economic life through the last soul forces. If people cannot plunge into an age through the so-called normal development, in which we all break down and can no longer be young, we will not be able to manage, no matter how socialist a state or socialization is. For this it is necessary that we consciously immerse ourselves in the cultivation of the characteristics of old age in human beings; so that we do not grow old ourselves with them, but that we can put them on like a garment. To do this, we must grasp them in our imagination, we must grasp them in pictures. We are instructed to grasp the forces of youth in pictures, in our imagination, on the one hand, and to grasp the forces of old age in pictures, on the other. Humanity is compelled to educate itself towards such a goal. And it cannot educate itself if it does not take the whole of life seriously. Today people take this life so much for granted, as if it were basically already over when a person reaches their late twenties. By this time they are terribly clever, they can no longer become cleverer, they can do everything, can judge everything, and they could not judge better. That later life also has possibilities and absorbs forces is something that humanity knows nothing about because it does not want to develop these forces, because it renounces them. But we will all have to know how to manage our youthful energies, how to manage the energies of middle age, of old age. But we shall only learn this in the threefold social organism, when we lay the things apart, and not when we mix and melt everything together, as the most reactionary development of modern times has done, and as it is often intended to do to the detriment of humanity, to the sin against the spirit of human progress. Our education must arise entirely from a true understanding of the soul's life. For example, we must come to completely eliminate snap judgment, especially in relation to life. Quick-wittedness is nice, it can be there, but it should only be there so that we can make jokes, be amusing. One must be aware that the purpose and goal of quick-wittedness is to live out the phrase. Irony and humor can be beautiful, but they must be phrases, of course. We do not want to disparage the phrase in the place where it is justified. We should appreciate artistically designed phrases, but they must not appear in the wrong place, they must not appear where the word should be imbued with life. We can only get used to this if, for example, we look seriously at the following: there is a person who says something to me that does not suit me or that suits me. A certain revelation occurs from person to person. We quickly judge it. If people could get into the habit of doing it again the next day, after twenty-four hours, when they have slept in the meantime, when their spiritual and mental state has changed completely, then people could get into the habit of visualizing the whole situation again: The person said this and that, you are facing him - and then judging, then something important would happen. In the first place it is not the judging that is valuable, but the power of the soul, which always allows that to be involved which happens to the human being between falling asleep and waking up. This power is cultivated, and it is the gradual development of this power that is particularly necessary for the formation of the imagination. This conscious work of working one's way into an unconscious life will develop the imaginative world and the world that can actually underlie a social life in humanity.

It is equally necessary to understand certain things that have to be understood at some point. You see, as strange as it may sound today, one does not usually see what is for the good or ill of humanity when it occurs in humanity. If I tell someone today the law of corresponding boiling temperatures in physics, he believes me because he is used to it, not because it is logical, but because he has been used to believing in scientific laws for a few centuries. But if I speak today of a spiritual law that is just as well founded as a scientific law, he does not believe it, because it must first be known for a few centuries. But we do not have time to wait that long. People must consciously familiarize themselves with the upheavals of living life. 'People need discoveries and inventions, that is a natural law. When such discoveries, but especially inventions, especially technical inventions, are made by people who are not yet in their forties, then these inventions have a retarding effect on the overall context of humanity, actually holding something back in humanity, especially against the moral progress of humanity. The most beautiful inventions can be made by young people: it is not for the progress of humanity. If a person reaches their forties and retains their inventive spirit for what is to be done for the physical world, then they also give moral content to their invention, and this has a moral effect in the progress of humanity. When something like this is expressed, it is madness for humanity, since humanity does not recognize spiritual laws at all. But it is a spiritual law that man only reaches the point, through his inventive talent, of being able to work for the progress of humanity in the spiritual and especially in the technical field when he is forty years old. We have to take this into account in the laws of human development. Only when humanity decides not just to think: How do you set up these or those economic offices? but when it decides to think: What must be cultivated spiritually and emotionally among people? What must be considered? — then salvation for humanity can be expected.

The church has worked long enough for the sake of human selfishness. They have worked together quietly, this church and this state. I have already said recently that a person can only truly develop freely when he is a very young child, because he is still too unclean for the state. But as soon as he is clean, he is accepted by the state and prepared, not for a human being, but for a state official. But the human being is consoled by playing with his egoism to the highest degree. He is guaranteed a pension until death if he is no longer able to work. This is a very strong incentive for the souls of civil servants. And then, when the state no longer provides, the church takes care of the person by making his soul immortal without his intervention. First of all, the person is insured during retirement, and then, after death, the soul is insured. All of this is built on selfishness. In the future, it will not be built on selfishness. Why did Aristotelian Catholicism keep secret from people that their spiritual self is also there before it enters into existence through birth? Aristotelian Catholicism only wanted to take into account people's egoism, their fear of death and their desire for assurance of an immortal soul after death. But people find it too difficult to accept the idea that I have descended from the spiritual world and that I have to carry out here on earth what I have received as a spirit. This is the most radical thought that must strike present-day humanity: that man must not regard his physical life merely as a preparation for life after death, but that he must also regard it as a continuation of a spiritual life before birth. Then he will change from being a lazy person who does not want to do anything to a person who is aware that he has something to accomplish on earth, that he has a mission. Until this thought can penetrate people, there is no way to avoid their sinking into materialism.

With these considerations, I ask you to consider what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should actually be for people today, what it should give them, and how it should work as an ingredient in the present soul for the whole of human cultural development. In the first part of my talk today, I wanted to present to you the picture that would arise if humanity were to continue to live in the traditional way: the picture of the mechanized mind, the vegetarized soul, the animalized body. This was the picture I wanted to present first. And in the second part, I wanted to present to you what must happen in order to achieve a spiritual life that the old earth can no longer provide, that man must seek out of inner freedom. Those who consider this path of our spiritual life will have the basis for reflecting on the important and essential aspects of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.