The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Theosophy and Asceticism

Enq. I have heard people say that your rules require all members to be vegetarians, celibates, and rigid ascetics; but you have not told me anything of the sort yet. Can you tell me the truth once for all about this?

Theo. The truth is that our rules require nothing of the kind. The Theosophical Society does not even expect, far less require of any of its members that they should be ascetics in any way, except — if you call that asceticism — that they should try and benefit other people and be unselfish in their own lives.

Enq. But still many of your members are strict vegetarians, and openly avow their intention of remaining unmarried. This, too, is most often the case with those who take a prominent part in connection with the work of your Society.

Theo. That is only natural, because most of our really earnest workers are members of the Inner Section of the Society, which I told you about before.

Enq. Oh! then you do require ascetic practices in that Inner Section?

Theo. No; we do not require or enjoin them even there; but I see that I had better give you an explanation of our views on the subject of asceticism in general, and then you will understand about vegetarianism and so on.

Enq. Please proceed.

Theo. As I have already told you, most people who become really earnest students of Theosophy, and active workers in our Society, wish to do more than study theoretically the truths we teach. They wish to know the truth by their own direct personal experience, and to study Occultism with the object of acquiring the wisdom and power, which they feel that they need in order to help others, effectually and judiciously, instead of blindly and at haphazard. Therefore, sooner or later, they join the Inner Section.

Enq. But you said that "ascetic practices" are not obligatory even in that Inner Section?

Theo. No more they are; but the first thing which the members learn there is a true conception of the relation of the body, or physical sheath, to the inner, the true man. The relation and mutual interaction between these two aspects of human nature are explained and demonstrated to them, so that they soon become imbued with the supreme importance of the inner man over the outer case or body. They are taught that blind unintelligent asceticism is mere folly; that such conduct as that of St. Labro which I spoke of before, or that of the Indian Fakirs and jungle ascetics, who cut, burn and macerate their bodies in the most cruel and horrible manner, is simply self-torture for selfish ends, i.e., to develop will-power, but is perfectly useless for the purpose of assisting true spiritual, or Theosophic, development.

Enq. I see, you regard only moral asceticism as necessary. It is as a means to an end, that end being the perfect equilibrium of the inner nature of man, and the attainment of complete mastery over the body with all its passions and desires?

Theo. Just so. But these means must be used intelligently and wisely, not blindly and foolishly; like an athlete who is training and preparing for a great contest, not like the miser who starves himself into illness that he may gratify his passion for gold.

Enq. I understand now your general idea; but let us see how you apply it in practice. How about vegetarianism, for instance?

Theo. One of the great German scientists has shown that every kind of animal tissue, however you may cook it, still retains certain marked characteristics of the animal which it belonged to, which characteristics can be recognised. And apart from that, every one knows by the taste what meat he is eating. We go a step farther, and prove that when the flesh of animals is assimilated by man as food, it imparts to him, physiologically, some of the characteristics of the animal it came from. Moreover, occult science teaches and proves this to its students by ocular demonstration, showing also that this "coarsening" or "animalizing" effect on man is greatest from the flesh of the larger animals, less for birds, still less for fish and other cold-blooded animals, and least of all when he eats only vegetables.

Enq. Then he had better not eat at all?

Theo. If he could live without eating, of course it would. But as the matter stands, he must eat to live, and so we advise really earnest students to eat such food as will least clog and weight their brains and bodies, and will have the smallest effect in hampering and retarding the development of their intuition, their inner faculties and powers.

Enq. Then you do not adopt all the arguments which vegetarians in general are in the habit of using?

Theo. Certainly not. Some of their arguments are very weak, and often based on assumptions which are quite false. But, on the other hand, many of the things they say are quite true. For instance, we believe that much disease, and especially the great predisposition to disease which is becoming so marked a feature in our time, is very largely due to the eating of meat, and especially of tinned meats. But it would take too long to go thoroughly into this question of vegetarianism on its merits; so please pass on to something else.

Enq. One question more. What are your members of the Inner Section to do with regard to their food when they are ill?

Theo. Follow the best practical advice they can get, of course. Don't you grasp yet that we never impose any hard-and-fast obligations in this respect? Remember once for all that in all such questions we take a rational, and never a fanatical, view of things. If from illness or long habit a man cannot go without meat, why, by all means let him eat it. It is no crime; it will only retard his progress a little; for after all is said and done, the purely bodily actions and functions are of far less importance than what a man thinks and feels, what desires he encourages in his mind, and allows to take root and grow there.

Enq. Then with regard to the use of wine and spirits, I suppose you do not advise people to drink them?

Theo. They are worse for his moral and spiritual growth than meat, for alcohol in all its forms has a direct, marked, and very deleterious influence on man's psychic condition. Wine and spirit drinking is only less destructive to the development of the inner powers, than the habitual use of hashish, opium, and similar drugs.

Theosophy and Marriage

Enq. Now to another question; must a man marry or remain a celibate?

Theo. It depends on the kind of man you mean. If you refer to one who intends to live in the world, one who, even though a good, earnest Theosophist, and an ardent worker for our cause, still has ties and wishes which bind him to the world, who, in short, does not feel that he has done for ever with what men call life, and that he desires one thing and one thing only — to know the truth, and to be able to help others — then for such a one I say there is no reason why he should not marry, if he likes to take the risks of that lottery where there are so many more blanks than prizes. Surely you cannot believe us so absurd and fanatical as to preach against marriage altogether? On the contrary, save in a few exceptional cases of practical Occultism, marriage is the only remedy against immorality.

Enq. But why cannot one acquire this knowledge and power when living a married life?

Theo. My dear sir, I cannot go into physiological questions with you; but I can give you an obvious and, I think, a sufficient answer, which will explain to you the moral reasons we give for it. Can a man serve two masters? No! Then it is equally impossible for him to divide his attention between the pursuit of Occultism and a wife. If he tries to, he will assuredly fail in doing either properly; and, let me remind you, practical Occultism is far too serious and dangerous a study for a man to take up, unless he is in the most deadly earnest, and ready to sacrifice all, himself first of all, to gain his end. But this does not apply to the members of our Inner Section. I am only referring to those who are determined to tread that path of discipleship which leads to the highest goal. Most, if not all of those who join our Inner Section, are only beginners, preparing themselves in this life to enter in reality upon that path in lives to come.

Theosophy and Education

Enq. One of your strongest arguments for the inadequacy of the existing forms of religion in the West, as also to some extent the materialistic philosophy which is now so popular, but which you seem to consider as an abomination of desolation, is the large amount of misery and wretchedness which undeniably exists, especially in our great cities. But surely you must recognise how much has been, and is being done to remedy this state of things by the spread of education and the diffusion of intelligence.

Theo. The future generations will hardly thank you for such a "diffusion of intelligence," nor will your present education do much good to the poor starving masses.

Enq. Ah! but you must give us time. It is only a few years since we began to educate the people.

Theo. And what, pray, has your Christian religion been doing ever since the fifteenth century, once you acknowledge that the education of the masses has not been attempted till now — the very work, if ever there could be one, which a Christian, i. e., a Christ-following church and people, ought to perform?

Enq. Well, you may be right; but now —

Theo. Just let us consider this question of education from a broad standpoint, and I will prove to you that you are doing harm not good, with many of your boasted improvements. The schools for the poorer children, though far less useful than they ought to be, are good in contrast with the vile surroundings to which they are doomed by your modern Society. The infusion of a little practical Theosophy would help a hundred times more in life the poor suffering masses than all this infusion of (useless) intelligence.

Enq. But, really —

Theo. Let me finish, please. You have opened a subject on which we Theosophists feel deeply, and I must have my say. I quite agree that there is a great advantage to a small child bred in the slums, having the gutter for playground, and living amid continued coarseness of gesture and word, in being placed daily in a bright, clean school-room hung with pictures, and often gay with flowers. There it is taught to be clean, gentle, orderly; there it learns to sing and to play; has toys that awaken its intelligence; learns to use its fingers deftly; is spoken to with a smile instead of a frown; is gently rebuked or coaxed instead of cursed. All this humanises the children, arouses their brains, and renders them susceptible to intellectual and moral influences. The schools are not all they might be and ought to be; but, compared with the homes, they are paradises; and they slowly are re-acting on the homes. But while this is true of many of the Board schools, your system deserves the worst one can say of it.

Enq. So be it; go on.

Theo. What is the real object of modern education? Is it to cultivate and develop the mind in the right direction; to teach the disinherited and hapless people to carry with fortitude the burden of life (allotted them by Karma); to strengthen their will; to inculcate in them the love of one's neighbour and the feeling of mutual interdependence and brotherhood; and thus to train and form the character for practical life? Not a bit of it. And yet, these are undeniably the objects of all true education. No one denies it; all your educationalists admit it, and talk very big indeed on the subject. But what is the practical result of their action? Every young man and boy, nay, every one of the younger generation of schoolmasters will answer: "The object of modern education is to pass examinations," a system not to develop right emulation, but to generate and breed jealousy, envy, hatred almost, in young people for one another, and thus train them for a life of ferocious selfishness and struggle for honours and emoluments instead of kindly feeling.

Enq. I must admit you are right there.

Theo. And what are these examinations — the terror of modern boyhood and youth? They are simply a method of classification by which the results of your school teaching are tabulated. In other words, they form the practical application of the modern science method to the genus homo, qua intellection. Now "science" teaches that intellect is a result of the mechanical interaction of the brain-stuff; therefore it is only logical that modern education should be almost entirely mechanical — a sort of automatic machine for the fabrication of intellect by the ton. Very little experience of examinations is enough to show that the education they produce is simply a training of the physical memory, and, sooner or later, all your schools will sink to this level. As to any real, sound cultivation of the thinking and reasoning power, it is simply impossible while everything has to be judged by the results as tested by competitive examinations. Again, school training is of the very greatest importance in forming character, especially in its moral bearing. Now, from first to last, your modern system is based on the so-called scientific revelations: "The struggle for existence" and the "survival of the fittest." All through his early life, every man has these driven into him by practical example and experience, as well as by direct teaching, till it is impossible to eradicate from his mind the idea that "self," the lower, personal, animal self, is the end-all, and be-all, of life. Here you get the great source of all the after-misery, crime, and heartless selfishness, which you admit as much as I do. Selfishness, as said over and over again, is the curse of humanity, and the prolific parent of all the evils and crimes in this life; and it is your schools which are the hot-beds of such selfishness.

Enq. That is all very fine as generalities, but I should like a few facts, and to learn also how this can be remedied.

Theo. Very well, I will try and satisfy you. There are three great divisions of scholastic establishments, board, middle-class and public schools, running up the scale from the most grossly commercial to the idealistic classical, with many permutations and combinations. The practical commercial begets the modern side, and the ancient and orthodox classical reflects its heavy respectability even as far as the School Board pupil teacher's establishments. Here we plainly see the scientific and material commercial supplanting the effete orthodox and classical. Neither is the reason very far to seek. The objects of this branch of education are, then, pounds, shillings, and pence, the summum bonum of the XIXth century. Thus, the energies generated by the brain molecules of its adherents are all concentrated on one point, and are, therefore, to some extent, an organized army of educated and speculative intellects of the minority of men, trained against the hosts of the ignorant, simple-minded masses doomed to be vampirised, lived and sat upon by their intellectually stronger brethren. Such training is not only untheosophical, it is simply UNCHRISTIAN. Result: The direct outcome of this branch of education is an overflooding of the market with money-making machines, with heartless selfish men — animals — who have been most carefully trained to prey on their fellows and take advantage of the ignorance of their weaker brethren!

Enq. Well, but you cannot assert that of our great public schools, at any rate?

Theo. Not exactly, it is true. But though the form is different, the animating spirit is the same: untheosophical and unchristian, whether Eton and Harrow turn out scientists or divines and theologians.

Enq. Surely you don't mean to call Eton and Harrow "commercial"?

Theo. No. Of course the Classical system is above all things respectable, and in the present day is productive of some good. It does still remain the favourite at our great public schools, where not only an intellectual, but also a social education is obtainable. It is, therefore, of prime importance that the dull boys of aristocratic and wealthy parents should go to such schools to meet the rest of the young life of the "blood" and money classes. But unfortunately there is a huge competition even for entrance; for the moneyed classes are increasing, and poor but clever boys seek to enter the public schools by the rich scholarships, both at the schools themselves and from them to the Universities.

Enq. According to this view, the wealthier "dullards" have to work even harder than their poorer fellows?

Theo. It is so. But, strange to say, the faithful of the cult of the "Survival of the fittest" do not practice their creed; for their whole exertion is to make the naturally unfit supplant the fit. Thus, by bribes of large sums of money, they allure the best teachers from their natural pupils to mechanicalise their naturally unfit progeny into professions which they uselessly overcrowd.

Enq. And you attribute all this to what?

Theo. All this is owing to the perniciousness of a system which turns out goods to order, irrespective of the natural proclivities and talents of the youth. The poor little candidate for this progressive paradise of learning, comes almost straight from the nursery to the treadmill of a preparatory school for sons of gentlemen. Here he is immediately seized upon by the workmen of the materio-intellectual factory, and crammed with Latin, French and Greek Accidence, Dates and Tables, so that if he have any natural genius it is rapidly squeezed out of him by the rollers of what Carlyle has so well called "dead vocables."

Enq. But surely he is taught something besides "dead vocables," and much of that which may lead him direct to Theosophy, if not entirely into the Theosophical Society?

Theo. Not much. For of history, he will attain only sufficient knowledge of his own particular nation to fit him with a steel armour of prejudice against all other peoples, and be steeped in the foul cess-pools of chronicled national hate and blood-thirstiness; and surely, you would not call that — Theosophy?

Enq. What are your further objections?

Theo. Added to this is a smattering of selected, so-called, Biblical facts, from the study of which all intellect is eliminated. It is simply a memory lesson, the "Why" of the teacher being a "Why" of circumstances and not of reason.

Enq. Yes; but I have heard you congratulate yourself at the ever-increasing number of the Agnostics and Atheists in our day, so that it appears that even people trained in the system you abuse so heartily do learn to think and reason for themselves.

Theo. Yes; but it is rather owing to a healthy reaction from that system than due to it. We prefer immeasurably more in our Society Agnostics, and even rank Atheists, to bigots of whatever religion. An Agnostic's mind is ever opened to the truth; whereas the latter blinds the bigot like the sun does an owl. The best — i. e., the most truth-loving, philanthropic, and honest — of our Fellows were, and are, Agnostics and Atheists (disbelievers in a personal God). But there are no free-thinking boys and girls, and generally early training will leave its mark behind in the shape of a cramped and distorted mind. A proper and sane system of education should produce the most vigorous and liberal mind, strictly trained in logical and accurate thought, and not in blind faith. How can you ever expect good results, while you pervert the reasoning faculty of your children by bidding them believe in the miracles of the Bible on Sunday, while for the six other days of the week you teach them that such things are scientifically impossible?

Enq. What would you have, then?

Theo. If we had money, we would found schools which would turn out something else than reading and writing candidates for starvation. Children should above all be taught self-reliance, love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else, to think and reason for themselves. We would reduce the purely mechanical work of the memory to an absolute minimum, and devote the time to the development and training of the inner senses, faculties and latent capacities. We would endeavour to deal with each child as a unit, and to educate it so as to produce the most harmonious and equal unfoldment of its powers, in order that its special aptitudes should find their full natural development. We should aim at creating free men and women, free intellectually, free morally, unprejudiced in all respects, and above all things, unselfish. And we believe that much if not all of this could be obtained by proper and truly theosophical education.

Why, Then, is There So Much Prejudice Against the T. S.?

Enq. If Theosophy is even half of what you say, why should there exist such a terrible ill-feeling against it? This is even more of a problem than anything else.

Theo. It is; but you must bear in mind how many powerful adversaries we have aroused ever since the formation of our Society. As I just said, if the Theosophical movement were one of those numerous modern crazes, as harmless at the end as they are evanescent, it would be simply laughed at — as it is now by those who still do not understand its real purport — and left severely alone. But it is nothing of the kind. Intrinsically, Theosophy is the most serious movement of this age; and one, moreover, which threatens the very life of most of the time-honoured humbugs, prejudices, and social evils of the day — those evils which fatten and make happy the upper ten and their imitators and sycophants, the wealthy dozens of the middle classes, while they positively crush and starve out of existence the millions of the poor. Think of this, and you will easily understand the reason of such a relentless persecution by those others who, more observant and perspicacious, do see the true nature of Theosophy, and therefore dread it.

Enq. Do you mean to tell me that it is because a few have understood what Theosophy leads to, that they try to crush the movement? But if Theosophy leads only to good, surely you cannot be prepared to utter such a terrible accusation of perfidious heartlessness and treachery even against those few?

Theo. I am so prepared, on the contrary. I do not call the enemies we have had to battle with during the first nine or ten years of the Society's existence either powerful or "dangerous"; but only those who have arisen against us in the last three or four years. And these neither speak, write nor preach against Theosophy, but work in silence and behind the backs of the foolish puppets who act as their visible marionnettes. Yet, if invisible to most of the members of our Society, they are well known to the true "Founders" and the protectors of our Society. But they must remain for certain reasons unnamed at present.

Enq. And are they known to many of you, or to yourself alone?

Theo. I never said I knew them. I may or may not know them — but I know of them, and this is sufficient; and I defy them to do their worst. They may achieve great mischief and throw confusion into our ranks, especially among the faint-hearted, and those who can judge only by appearances. They will not crush the Society, do what they may. Apart from these truly dangerous enemies — "dangerous," however, only to those Theosophists who are unworthy of the name, and whose place is rather outside than within the T. S. — the number of our opponents is more than considerable.

Enq. Can you name these, at least, if you will not speak of the others?

Theo. Of course I can. We have to contend against (1) the hatred of the Spiritualists, American, English, and French; (2) the constant opposition of the clergy of all denominations; (3) especially the relentless hatred and persecution of the missionaries in India; (4) this led to the famous and infamous attack on our Theosophical Society by the Society for Psychical Research, an attack which was stirred up by a regular conspiracy organized by the missionaries in India. Lastly, we must count the defection of various prominent (?) members, for reasons I have already explained, all of whom have contributed their utmost to increase the prejudice against us.

Enq. Cannot you give me more details about these, so that I may know what to answer when asked — a brief history of the Society, in short; and why the world believes all this?

Theo. The reason is simple. Most outsiders knew absolutely nothing of the Society itself, its motives, objects or beliefs. From its very beginning the world has seen in Theosophy nothing but certain marvellous phenomena, in which two-thirds of the non-spiritualists do not believe. Very soon the Society came to be regarded as a body pretending to the possession of "miraculous" powers. The world never realised that the Society taught absolute disbelief in miracle or even the possibility of such; that in the Society there were only a few people who possessed such psychic powers and but few who cared for them. Nor did it understand that the phenomena were never produced publicly, but only privately for friends, and merely given as an accessory, to prove by direct demonstration that such things could be produced without dark rooms, spirits, mediums, or any of the usual paraphernalia. Unfortunately, this misconception was greatly strengthened and exaggerated by the first book on the subject which excited much attention in Europe — Mr. Sinnett's "Occult World." If this work did much to bring the Society into prominence, it attracted still more obloquy, derision and misrepresentation upon the hapless heroes and heroine thereof. Of this the author was more than warned in the Occult World, but did not pay attention to the prophecy — for such it was, though half-veiled.

Enq. For what, and since when, do the Spiritualists hate you?

Theo. From the first day of the Society's existence. No sooner the fact became known that, as a body, the T. S. did not believe in communications with the spirits of the dead, but regarded the so-called "spirits" as, for the most part, astral reflections of disembodied personalities, shells, etc., than the Spiritualists conceived a violent hatred to us and especially to the Founders. This hatred found expression in every kind of slander, uncharitable personal remarks, and absurd misrepresentations of the Theosophical teachings in all the American Spiritualistic organs. For years we were persecuted, denounced and abused. This began in 1875 and continues to the present day. In 1879, the headquarters of the T. S. were transferred from New York to Bombay, India, and then permanently to Madras. When the first branch of our Society, the British T. S., was founded in London, the English Spiritualists came out in arms against us, as the Americans had done; and the French Spiritists followed suit.

Enq. But why should the clergy be hostile to you, when, after all, the main tendency of the Theosophical doctrines is opposed to Materialism, the great enemy of all forms of religion in our day?

Theo. The Clergy opposed us on the general principle that "He who is not with me is against me." Since Theosophy does not agree with any one Sect or Creed, it is considered the enemy of all alike, because it teaches that they are all, more or less, mistaken. The missionaries in India hated and tried to crush us because they saw the flower of the educated Indian youth and the Brahmins, who are almost inaccessible to them, joining the Society in large numbers. And yet, apart from this general class hatred, the T. S. counts in its ranks many clergymen, and even one or two bishops.

Enq. And what led the S. P. R. to take the field against you? You were both pursuing the same line of study, in some respects, and several of the Psychic Researchers belonged to your society.

Theo. First of all we were very good friends with the leaders of the S. P. R.; but when the attack on the phenomena appeared in the Christian College Magazine, supported by the pretended revelations of a menial, the S. P. R. found that they had compromised themselves by publishing in their "Proceedings" too many of the phenomena which had occurred in connection with the T. S. Their ambition is to pose as an authoritative and strictly scientific body; so that they had to choose between retaining that position by throwing overboard the T. S. and even trying to destroy it, and seeing themselves merged, in the opinion of the Sadducees of the grand monde, with the "credulous" Theosophists and Spiritualists. There was no way for them out of it, no two choices, and they chose to throw us overboard. It was a matter of dire necessity for them. But so hard pressed were they to find any apparently reasonable motive for the life of devotion and ceaseless labour led by the two Founders, and for the complete absence of any pecuniary profit or other advantage to them, that our enemies were obliged to resort to the thrice-absurd, eminently ridiculous, and now famous "Russian spy theory," to explain this devotion. But the old saying, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church," proved once more correct. After the first shock of this attack, the T. S. doubled and tripled its numbers, but the bad impression produced still remains. A French author was right in saying, "Calomniez, calomniez toujours et encore, il en restera toujours quelque chose." Therefore it is, that unjust prejudices are current, and that everything connected with the T. S., and especially with its Founders, is so falsely distorted, because based on malicious hearsay alone.

Enq. Yet in the 14 years during which the Society has existed, you must have had ample time and opportunity to show yourselves and your work in their true light?

Theo. How, or when, have we been given such an opportunity? Our most prominent members had an aversion to anything that looked like publicly justifying themselves. Their policy has ever been: "We must live it down;" and "What does it matter what the newspapers say, or people think?" The Society was too poor to send out public lecturers, and therefore the expositions of our views and doctrines were confined to a few Theosophical works that met with success, but which people often misunderstood, or only knew of through hearsay. Our journals were, and still are, boycotted; our literary works ignored; and to this day no one seems even to feel quite certain whether the Theosophists are a kind of Serpent-and-Devil worshippers, or simply "Esoteric Buddhists" — whatever that may mean. It was useless for us to go on denying, day after day and year after year, every kind of inconceivable cock-and-bull stories about us; for, no sooner was one disposed of, than another, a still more absurd and malicious one, was born out of the ashes of the first. Unfortunately, human nature is so constituted that any good said of a person is immediately forgotten and never repeated. But one has only to utter a calumny, or to start a story — no matter how absurd, false or incredible it may be, if only it is connected with some unpopular character — for it to be successful and forthwith accepted as a historical fact. Like Don Basilio's "CALUMNIA," the rumour springs up, at first, as a soft gentle breeze hardly stirring the grass under your feet, and arising no one knows whence; then, in the shortest space of time, it is transformed into a strong wind, begins to blow a gale, and forthwith becomes a roaring storm! A calumny among news, is what an octopus is among fishes; it sucks into one's mind, fastens upon our memory, which feeds upon it, leaving indelible marks even after the calumny has been bodily destroyed. A calumnious lie is the only masterkey that will open any and every brain. It is sure to receive welcome and hospitality in every human mind, the highest as the lowest, if only a little prejudiced, and no matter from however base a quarter and motive it has started.

Enq. Don't you think your assertion altogether too sweeping? The Englishman has never been over-ready to believe in anything said, and our nation is proverbially known for its love of fair play. A lie has no legs to stand upon for long, and —

Theo. The Englishman is as ready to believe evil as a man of any other nation; for it is human nature, and not a national feature. As to lies, if they have no legs to stand upon, according to the proverb, they have exceedingly rapid wings; and they can and do fly farther and wider than any other kind of news, in England as elsewhere. Remember lies and calumny are the only kind of literature we can always get gratis, and without paying any subscription. We can make the experiment if you like. Will you, who are so interested in Theosophical matters, and have heard so much about us, will you put me questions on as many of these rumours and "hearsays" as you can think of? I will answer you the truth, and nothing but the truth, subject to the strictest verification.

Enq. Before we change the subject, let us have the whole truth on this one. Now, some writers have called your teachings "immoral and pernicious"; others, on the ground that many so-called "authorities" and Orientalists find in the Indian religions nothing but sex-worship in its many forms, accuse you of teaching nothing better than Phallic worship. They say that since modern Theosophy is so closely allied with Eastern, and particularly Indian, thought, it cannot be free from this taint. Occasionally, even, they go so far as to accuse European Theosophists of reviving the practices connected with this cult. How about this?

Theo. I have heard and read about this before; and I answer that no more utterly baseless and lying calumny has ever been invented and circulated. "Silly people can see but silly dreams," says a Russian proverb. It makes one's blood boil to hear such vile accusations made without the slightest foundation, and on the strength of mere inferences. Ask the hundreds of honourable English men and women who have been members of the Theosophical Society for years whether an immoral precept or a pernicious doctrine was ever taught to them. Open the Secret Doctrine, and you will find page after page denouncing the Jews and other nations precisely on account of this devotion to Phallic rites, due to the dead letter interpretation of nature symbolism, and the grossly materialistic conceptions of her dualism in all the exoteric creeds. Such ceaseless and malicious misrepresentation of our teachings and beliefs is really disgraceful.

Enq. But you cannot deny that the Phallic element does exist in the religions of the East?

Theo. Nor do I deny it; only I maintain that this proves no more than does its presence in Christianity, the religion of the West. Read Hargrave Jenning's Rosicrucians, if you would assure yourself of it. In the East, the Phallic symbolism is, perhaps, more crude, because more true to nature, or, I would rather say, more naive and sincere than in the West. But it is not more licentious, nor does it suggest to the Oriental mind the same gross and coarse ideas as to the Western, with, perhaps, one or two exceptions, such as the shameful sect known as the "Maharajah," or Vallabhacharya sect.

Enq. A writer in the Agnostic journal — one of your accusers — has just hinted that the followers of this disgraceful sect are Theosophists, and "claim true Theosophic insight."

Theo. He wrote a falsehood, and that's all. There never was, nor is there at present, one single Vallabhacharya in our Society. As to their having, or claiming Theosophic insight, that is another fib, based on crass ignorance about the Indian Sects. Their "Maharajah" only claims a right to the money, wives and daughters of his foolish followers and no more. This sect is despised by all the other Hindus.

But you will find the whole subject dealt with at length in the Secret Doctrine, to which I must again refer you for detailed explanations. To conclude, the very soul of Theosophy is dead against Phallic worship; and its occult or esoteric section more so even than the exoteric teachings. There never was a more lying statement made than the above. And now ask me some other questions.

Is the Theosophical Society a Money-Making Concern?

Enq. Agreed. Well, have either of the Founders, Colonel H. S. Olcott or H. P. Blavatsky, ever made any money, profit, or derived any worldly benefit from the T. S., as some papers say?

Theo. Not one penny. The papers lie. On the contrary, they have both given all they had, and literally beggared themselves. As for "worldly benefits," think of the calumnies and vilification they have been subjected to, and then ask the question!

Enq. Yet I have read in a good many missionary organs that the entrance fees and subscriptions much more than covered all expenses; and one said that the Founders were making twenty thousand pounds a year!

Theo. This is a fib, like many others. In the published accounts of January, 1889, you will find an exact statement of all the money ever received from any source since 1879. The total received from all sources (entrance fees, donations, etc., etc.) during these ten years is under six thousand pounds, and of this a large part was contributed by the Founders themselves from the proceeds of their private resources and their literary work. All this has been openly and officially admitted, even by our enemies, the Psychic Research Society. And now both the Founders are penniless: one, too old and ill to work as she did before, unable to spare time for outside literary work to help the Society in money, can only write for the Theosophical cause; the other keeps labouring for it as before, and receives as little thanks for it.

Enq. But surely they need money to live?

Theo. Not at all. So long as they have food and lodging, even though they owe it to the devotion of a few friends, they need little more.

Enq. But could not Madame Blavatsky, especially, make more than enough to live upon by her writings?

Theo. When in India she received on the average some thousand rupees a year for articles contributed to Russian and other papers, but gave it all away to the Society.

Enq. Political articles?

Theo. Never. Everything she has written throughout the seven years of her stay in India is all there in print. It deals only with the religions, ethnology, and customs of India, and with Theosophy — never with politics, of which she knows nothing and cares less. Again, two years ago she refused several contracts amounting together to about 1,200 roubles in gold per month; for she could not accept them without abandoning her work for the Society, which needed all her time and strength. She has documents to prove it.

Enq. But why could not both she and Colonel Olcott do as others — notably many Theosophists — do: follow out their respective professions and devote the surplus of their time to the work of the Society?

Theo. Because by serving two masters, either the professional or the philanthropic work would have had to suffer. Every true Theosophist is morally bound to sacrifice the personal to the impersonal, his own present good to the future benefit of other people. If the Founders do not set the example, who will?

Enq. And are there many who follow it?

Theo. I am bound to answer you the truth. In Europe about half-a-dozen in all, out of more than that number of Branches.

Enq. Then it is not true that the Theosophical Society has a large capital or endowment of its own?

Theo. It is false, for it has none at all. Now that the entrance fee of £l and the small annual due have been abolished, it is even a doubtful question whether the staff at the head-quarters in India will not soon be starved to death.

Enq. Then why not raise subscriptions?

Theo. We are not the Salvation Army; we cannot and have never begged; nor have we ever followed the example of the Churches and sects and "taken up collections." That which is occasionally sent for the support of the Society, the small sums contributed by some devoted Fellows, are all voluntary donations.

Enq. But I have heard of large sums of money given to Mdme. Blavatsky. It was said four years ago that she got £5,000 from one rich, young "Fellow," who went out to join them in India, and £10,000 from another wealthy and well-known American gentleman, one of your members who died in Europe four years ago.

Theo. Say to those who told you this, that they either themselves utter, or repeat, a gross falsehood. Never has "Madame Blavatsky" asked or received ONE PENNY from the two above-named gentlemen, nor anything like that from anyone else, since the Theosophical Society was founded. Let any man living try to substantiate this calumny, and it will be easier for him to prove that the Bank of England is a bankrupt than that the said "Founder" has ever made any money out of Theosophy. These two calumnies have been started by two high-born ladies, belonging to the London aristocracy, and have been immediately traced and disproved. They are the dead bodies, the carcases of two inventions, which, after having been buried in the sea of oblivion, are once more raised on the surface of the stagnant waters of slander.

Enq. Then I have been told of several large legacies left to the T. S. One — some £8,000 — was left to it by some eccentric Englishman, who did not even belong to the Society. The other — £3,000 or £4,000 — were testated by an Australian F. T. S. Is this true?

Theo. I heard of the first; and I also know that, whether legally left or not, the T. S. has never profited by it, nor have the Founders ever been officially notified of it. For, as our Society was not then a chartered body, and thus had no legal existence, the Judge at the Court of Probate, as we were told, paid no attention to such legacy and turned over the sum to the heirs. So much for the first. As for the second, it is quite true. The testator was one of our devoted Fellows, and willed all he had to the T. S. But when the President, Colonel Olcott, came to look into the matter, he found that the testator had children whom he had disinherited for some family reasons. Therefore, he called a council, and it was decided that the legacy should be refused, and the moneys passed to the legal heirs. The Theosophical Society would be untrue to its name were it to profit by money to which others are entitled virtually, at any rate on Theosophical principles, if not legally.

Enq. Again, and I say this on the authority of your own journal, the Theosophist, there's a Rajah of India who donated to the Society 25,000 rupees. Have you not thanked him for his great bounty in the January Theosophist for 1888?

Theo. We have, in these words, "That the thanks of the Convention be conveyed to H. H. the Maharajah . . . for his promised munificent gift of Rupees 25,000 to the Society's Fund." The thanks were duly conveyed, but the money is still a "promise," and has never reached the Headquarters.

Enq. But surely, if the Maharajah promised and received thanks for his gift publicly and in print, he will be as good as his promise?

Theo. He may, though the promise is 18 months old. I speak of the present and not of the future.

Enq. Then how do you propose to go on?

Theo. So long as the T. S. has a few devoted members willing to work for it without reward and thanks, so long as a few good Theosophists support it with occasional donations, so long will it exist, and nothing can crush it.

Enq. I have heard many Theosophists speak of a "power behind the Society" and of certain "Mahatmas," mentioned also in Mr. Sinnett's works, that are said to have founded the Society, to watch over and protect it.

Theo. You may laugh, but it is so.

The Working Staff of The T. S

Enq. These men, I have heard, are great Adepts, Alchemists, and what not. If, then, they can change lead into gold and make as much money as they like, besides doing all kinds of miracles at will, as related in Mr. Sinnett's "Occult World," why do not they find you money, and support the Founders and the Society in comfort?

Theo. Because they did not found a "miracle club." Because the Society is intended to help men to develop the powers latent in them through their own exertions and merit. Because whatever they may or may not produce in the way of phenomena, they are not false coiners; nor would they throw an additional and very strong temptation on the path of members and candidates: Theosophy is not to be bought. Hitherto, for the past 14 years, not a single working member has ever received pay or salary from either the Masters or the Society.

Enq. Then are none of your workers paid at all?

Theo. Till now, not one. But as every one has to eat, drink, and clothe himself, all those who are without any means of their own, and devote their whole time to the work of the society, are provided with the necessaries of life at the Head-quarters at Madras, India, though these "necessaries" are humble enough, in truth! (See Rules at the end.) But now that the Society's work has increased so greatly and still goes on increasing (N. B., owing to slanders) in Europe, we need more working hands. We hope to have a few members who will henceforth be remunerated — if the word can be used in the cases in question. For every one of these Fellows, who are preparing to give all their time to the Society, are quitting good official situations with excellent prospects, to work for us at less than half their former salary.

Enq. And who will provide the funds for this?

Theo. Some of our Fellows who are just a little richer than the rest. The man who would speculate or make money on Theosophy would be unworthy to remain in our ranks.

Enq. But you must surely make money by your books, magazines, and other publications?

Theo. The Theosophist of Madras, alone among the magazines, pays a profit, and this has regularly been turned over to the Society, year by year, as the published accounts show. Lucifer is slowly but steadily ingulfing money, never yet having paid its expenses — thanks to its being boycotted by the pious booksellers and railway stalls. The Lotus, in France — started on the private and not very large means of a Theosophist, who has devoted to it his whole time and labour — has ceased to exist, owing to the same causes, alas! Nor does the New York Path pay its way, while the Revue Theosophique of Paris has only just been started, also from the private means of a lady-member. Moreover, whenever any of the works issued by the Theosophical Publishing Company in London do pay, the proceeds will be devoted to the service of the Society.

Enq. And now please tell me all you can about the Mahatmas. So many absurd and contradictory things are said about them, that one does not know what to believe, and all sorts of ridiculous stories become current.

Theo. Well may you call them "ridiculous!"

This chapter was written and published in the original German for the first time in the year 1902.

[ 1 ] It is Goethe's conviction that man can never solve the riddle of existence within the limits of a synthetic conception of the world. He shares this idea with those who, as a result of certain proofs of inner life, have acquired insight into the nature and substance of knowledge. Such men, unlike some philosophers, find it impossible to speak of a limitation of human cognition; and while realising that there are no bounds to man's search for wisdom, but that it is capable of infinite expansion, are aware that the depths of the universe are unfathomable, that in every unmasked secret lies the origin of the new; and in every solution of a riddle another lies unrevealed. Yet they also know that each new riddle will be capable of solution when the soul has risen to the requisite stage of evolution. Convinced as they are that no mysteries of the Universe are absolutely beyond the reach of man, they do not always desire to reach the contentment of a complete and finished knowledge. They strive only to reach certain vantage points in the life of the soul whence the perspectives of knowledge open out and lose themselves in the far distance.

[ 2 ] It is the same with knowledge in general as it is with knowledge acquired from great works of the spiritual life. They proceed from unfathomable depths of soul life. We may really say that the only significant spiritual creations are those in whose presence we feel this to an ever increasing degree the more often we return to them. It must be assumed that a man's soul life has itself advanced in development each time he returns to the work. Goethe's Faust must surely produce a similar feeling in all who approach it with this attitude of mind.

[ 3 ] Students who bear in mind that Goethe began Faust as a young man and finished it shortly before his death, will guard against entertaining conclusive opinions about it. In his long, varied life, the poet advanced from one stage of development to another, and he allowed his creation of Faust to participate in the fullest sense in this development. He was once asked whether the conclusion of Faust accorded with the words of the “Prologue in Heaven,” written in 1797:

A good man through obscurest aspiration,
Has still an instinct of the one true way.

He answered that this was “enlightenment” but that Faust was finished in old age and then man becomes a mystic. Goethe, as a young man, could not of course realise that in the course of his life he would rise to the conception which at the end of Faust in the “Chorus Mysticus” he was able to express in the words:

All things transitory
But as Symbols are sent.

At the end of Goethe's life the Eternal element in existence was revealed to him in a sense other than he could have dreamed in 1797, when he allows “the Lord” to speak to the Archangels of this Eternal element, in the words:

And what in wavering apparition gleams

Fix in its place with thoughts that stand for ever! [ 4 ] Goethe was fully aware that the truth he possessed had developed within him by degrees, and he would have judged his Faust from this standpoint. On 6th December, 1829, he said to Eckermann: “In old age one's view of things of the world has changed. ... I am like a man who in youth has many small silver and copper coins which in the course of life he changes into more and more valuable coin, so that he finally sees his youthful heritage in gold pieces before him.

[ 5 ] Why was it that old age brought to Goethe a different view of “things of the world?” Because in the course of his life he attained to higher and higher points of view in his soul life, from which new perspectives of truth were perpetually revealed to him. Only those who follow Goethe's inner development can hope to read aright the portions of Faust which were written in the poet's old age. But to such men new depths of this world poem will ever and again be revealed. They advance to a stage where all the events and figures take on an esoteric significance; an inner, spiritual meaning is there beside the external appearance. Those who are incapable of this, will, according to their personal artistic perception, be like the famous aesthetic Vischer, who called the second part of Faust a patched up production of old age, or they will find delight in the rich world of imagery and fable which streams from Goethe's imagination.

[ 6 ] Anyone who speaks of an esoteric meaning in Goethe's Faust will naturally arouse the opposition of those who claim that a “work of art” must be accepted and enjoyed purely “as art,” and that it is inadmissible to turn living figures of artistic imagination into dry allegory. They think that because the spiritual content is barren so far as they are concerned, it must be so for everyone else. But there are some who breathe a higher life that streams from a mighty Spirit, where others hear only words. It is difficult to meet on common ground those who have not the will to follow us into the spiritual world. We have at our disposal only the same words as they; and we cannot force anyone to sense within the words, that totally different element which is perceptible to us. We have no quarrel with such people; we admit what they say, for with us, too, Faust is primarily a work of art, a creation of the imagination. We know how great our loss would be if we were unable to appreciate the artistic value of the work. But it must never be urged that we have no perception of the beauty of the lily because we rise to the spirit which it reveals, nor that we are blind to the picture that in a higher sense is for us like “all things transitory,” which “as symbols are sent.

[ 7 ] We agree with Goethe, who said to Eckermann on 29th January, 1827: “Yet everything (in Faust) is of a sense nature, and on the stage will be quite evident to the eye. I have no other wish. If it should chance that the general audience find pleasure in the representation, that is well; the higher significance will not escape the initiate.” [ 8 ] Those who want truly to understand Goethe must not hold aloof from such initiation. It is possible to indicate the exact point in Goethe's life when he came to the realisation which he has clothed in the words:

All things transitory
But as symbols are sent.

Standing before the ancient works of art his soul was flooded with this thought: This much is certain, that the artists of antiquity possessed equally with Homer a mighty knowledge of Nature, a sure conception of what lends itself to portrayal, and of how it ought to be portrayed. Unfortunately the number of works of art of the first rank is all too small. But when we find them our only desire is to understand them in truth and approach them in peace. Supreme works of art, like the most sublime products of Nature, are created by man in conformity with true and natural Law. All that is arbitrary, all that is invented, collapses: there is Necessity, there is God.” These thoughts are inscribed in Goethe's Diary of his Italian Journey” under the date, 6th September, 1787.

[ 9 ] Man can also penetrate to the spirit of things” by other paths. Goethe's nature was that of the artist; hence for him the revelation of this spirit had to come through art. It can be shown that the scientific knowledge which enabled him to proclaim the scientific views of the nineteenth century in advance, was born from his artistic qualities. One personality will arrive at a similar perspective of knowledge and truth through religion, another through the development of philosophic understanding. (c.f. my book Goethe's World Conception.)

[ 10 ] We must seek in Goethe's Faust for the picture of an inner soul development,—a picture such as an inherently artistic personality is bound to produce. Goethe was by reason of his spiritual gifts able to look into the very depths of Nature in all her reality. We can see how in the boy Goethe there develops, out of his faith, a pro-found reverence for Nature. He describes this in Poetry and Truth: The God who stands in immediate connection with Nature and recognises and loves it as His handiwork, seemed to him the real God, who might enter into closer relationship with man, as with everything else, and who would make him His care, as well as the motion of the stars, times and seasons, plants and animals.” The boy selects the best minerals and stones from his father's collection and arranges them on a music stand. This is the altar upon which he likes to offer his sacrifice to the God of Nature. He lays tapers on the stones and by means of a burning glass lights the tapers with the intercepted rays of the rising morning sun. In this way he kindles a sacred fire through the essence of the Divine Nature forces. We may perceive here the beginning of an inner soul development that—speaking in the terms of Indian Theosophy—seeks for the Light at the centre of the Sun, and for Truth at the centre of the Light. Anyone who follows Goethe's life can trace this Path along which, in inter-mediate stages, he seeks those deeper levels of consciousness where the eternal Necessity, God, was revealed to him. He tells us in Poetry and Truth how he explored every possible region of science, including experimental Alchemy.

Wherefore from Magic I seek assistance,
That many a secret perchance I reach
Through spirit power and spirit speech.
(Faust's Monologue at the beginning of Part I.)

Later on Goethe sought for the expression of eternal law in the creations of Nature and in his Archetypal Plant” and Archetypal Animal” he discovered what the spirit of Nature proclaims to the human spirit when the soul has attained to a mode of thought and conception that is in conformity with the Idea.” Between these two turning points of Goethe's soul life lies the period of the composition of that part of the Drama in which, after Faust's despair of all external Science, he invokes the Earth Spirit. The eternal truth-bearing Light speaks in the words of this Earth Spirit.

In the tides of Life, in Action's storm,
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth and the Grave,
An eternal sea,
A weaving, flowing
Life, all-glowing,
Thus at Time's humming loom 'tis my hand prepares
The garment of Life which the Deity weaves!

[ 11 ] This is an expression of the all-embracing conception of Nature which we also find in the Prose Hymn Nature, written by Goethe somewhere about the 30th year of his age. Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her, we cannot draw back from her, nor can we penetrate more deeply into her being. She lifts us, unmasked and unwarned, into the gyrations of her dance, and whirls us away until we fall, exhausted, from her arms. She creates new forms eternally. What is, had no previous existence; what was, comes not again; all is new and yet is ever the old. She builds and destroys eternally, and her laboratory is inaccessible ... She lives in the purity of children, and the Mother, where is she? Nature is the only artist. Each of her creations is an individual Being, each of her revelations a separate concept; yet all makes up a unity. ... She transforms herself eternally and has never a moment of inactivity. ... Her step is measured, her exceptions few, her laws are unchangeable. ... All men are within her, she is within all men. ... Life is her fairest device, and Death is her artifice for acquiring greater life. ... Man obeys her laws even when he opposes them. ... She is the All. She rewards and punishes, delights and distresses herself ... She knows not past and future. The present is her Eternity. ... She has placed me within life and she will lead me out of it. I trust myself to her. ... It was not I who spoke of her. It was she who spoke it all, whether it were true or false. Her's is the blame for all things, her's the credit.

[ 12 ] In old age, looking back at this stage of his soul development, Goethe himself said that it represented an inferior conception of life and that he had acquired one more lofty. But this stage revealed to him that eternal, universal law which streams alike through Nature and the human soul. It inspired the grave conception that an eternal, iron Necessity binds all beings into unity, and taught him to consider man in his indissoluble connection with this Necessity. This attitude of mind is expressed in his Ode, The Divine, written in the year 1782.

Let man be noble, resourceful and good! For this alone distinguishes him from all other beings known to us. According to eternal, mighty Laws of iron must we complete the circle of our existence.

[ 13 ] The same conception is expressed in Faust's Monologue written about the year 1787:

Spirit sublime, thou gav'st me, gav'st me all
For which I prayed. Not unto me in vain
Hast thou thy countenance revealed in fire.
Thou gav'st me Nature as a kingdom grand,
With power to feel and to enjoy it. Thou
Not only cold, amazed acquaintance yield'st,
But grantest, that in her profoundest breast I gaze,
as in the bosom of a friend.
The ranks of living creatures thou dost lead
Before me, teaching me to know my brothers
In air and water and the silent wood.
And when the storm in forests roars and grinds,
The giant firs, in falling, neighbour boughs
And neighbour trunks with crushing weight bear down,
And falling, fill the hills with hollow thunders,—
Then to the cave secure thou leadest me,
Then show'st me mine own self, and in my breast
The deep, mysterious miracles unfold.

[ 14 ] The perspective of his soul was revealed to Goethe by the mysteries of his own breast. It is a perspective which can no longer be revealed in the external world alone, but only when a man descends into his own soul in such a way that in ever deeper regions of consciousness, sublimer secrets may come to light. The world of the senses and intellect then takes on a new significance. It becomes a symbol” of the Eternal. Man perceives that he has a more intimate connection between the external world and his own soul. He learns to know that in his inner being there is a voice destined also to solve all riddles of the outer world.

Here the inadequate
Becomes attainment²

The highest facts of life, the division into male and female becomes the key to the riddle of humanity. The process of cognition becomes that of life, of fecundation. The soul, in its depths, becomes woman, that element which, impregnated by the world Spirit, gives birth to the highest life-substance. Woman becomes a symbol” of these soul depths. We ascend to the mysteries of existence by allowing ourselves to be drawn upwards and on” by the eternal feminine,” the woman soul. Higher existence begins when we experience the action of wisdom as a process of spiritual fecundation. [ 15 ] The deeper mystics of all ages have realised this. They allowed the highest knowledge to grow out of the action of spiritual fecundation as in the case of the Egyptian Horus, the soul-man, born of Isis, who was overshadowed by the spiritual eye of Osiris,—He who was awakened from the dead.” The second part of Goethe's Faust is written from such a point of view.

[ 16 ] Faust's love for Gretchen in the first part, is of the senses. Faust's love for Helena, in the second part, is not merely a sense process, but a symbol” of the most profoundly mystical soul experience. In Helena, Faust seeks for the eternal feminine,” the woman soul; he seeks the depths of his own soul. The fact that Goethe should allow the archetypal figure of Greek feminine beauty to represent the woman in man” is connected with the essential nature of his personality. The realisation of Divine Necessity dawned in him as he contemplated the beauty of the Greek masterpieces.

[ 17 ] Faust became a mystic as the result of his union with Helena, and he speaks as a mystic at the beginning of the fourth Act of Part II. He sees the female image, the depths of his own soul, and speaks the words:

... Towering broad and formlessly,
It rests along the East like distant icy hills,
And shapes the grand significance of fleeting days.
And still there clings a light and delicate band of mist
Around my breast and brow, caressing, cheering me.
Now light, delayingly, it soars and higher soars
And folds together.—Cheats me an ecstatic form,
As early youthful, long foregone and highest bliss?
The first glad treasures of my deepest heart break forth;
Aurora's love, so light of pinion, is its type,
The swiftly-felt, the first, scarce-comprehended glance,
Out-shining every treasure, when retained and held.
Like Spiritual Beauty mounts the gracious Form,
Dissolving not, but lifts itself through ether far,
And from my inner being bears the best away.

[ 18 ] In this description of the ecstacy experienced by one who has descended into the depths of his own soul and has there felt the best within him drawn away by the eternal feminine,” it is as though we were listening to the words of the Greek Philosopher: When, free from the body, thou ascendest to the free Aether, thy soul becomes an immortal god, who knows not death.

[ 19 ] For at this stage Death becomes a symbol.” Man dies from the lower life in order to live again in a higher existence. Higher spiritual life is a new stage of the Becoming”; time becomes a symbol” of the Eternal that now lives in man. The union with the eternal feminine” allows the child in man to come into being,—the child, imperishable, immortal, because it is of the Eternal. The higher life is the surrender, the death of the lower, the birth of a higher existence. In his West-East Diva” Goethe expresses this in the words: And as long as thou art without this ‘dying and becoming’ thou art but an uneasy guest on the dark Earth.” [ 20 ] We find the same thought in his prose aphorisms: Man must give up his existence in order to exist.” Goethe is in agreement with the Mystic Herakleitos when he speaks of the Dionysian cult of the Greeks. It would have been an empty, even a dishonourable cult in his eyes if it had made sacrifices merely to the god of nature and of sense pleasure. But that was not the case. The worship was not alone directed to Dionysos, the god of the immediate sense prosperity of Life, but to Hades, the god of death as well. The Greeks prepared tumultuous fire” both for Hades and Dionysos, for in the Greek Mysteries life was honoured in company with death; this is the higher existence that passes through material death of which the Mystics speak when they say that Death is after all the root of all life.” The second part of Faust represents an awakening, the birth of the higher man” from the depths of the soul. From this point of view we can understand the meaning of Goethe's words: If it should chance that the general audience find pleasure in the representation, that is well; the higher significance will not escape the initiate.

[ 21 ] Those who have developed true mystical knowledge find it in high degree in Goethe's Faust. After the scene with the Earth Spirit in Part I., when Faust has conversed with Wagner and is alone, despairing of the insignificance of the Earth Spirit, he speaks the words:

I, God's own image, from this toil of clay
Already freed, with eager joy who hailed
The mirror of eternal Truth unveil'd,
Mid light effulgent and celestial clay:—
I, more than cherub, whose unfettered soul
With penetrative glance aspir'd to flow
Through Nature's veins, and, still creating, know
The life of Gods,—how am I punished now!³

[ 22 ] What is the Mirror of Eternal Truth”? We can read of it in the following words of Jacob Boehme, the Mystic: All that, whereof this world is an earthly mirror, and an earthly parable, is present in the Divine Kingdom in great perfection and in Spiritual Being. Not only the spirit conceived as a will or thought, but Beings, corporate Beings, full of strength and substance, though to the outer world impalpable. For from the self-same spiritual Being in whom is the pure element—and from the Being of Darkness in the Mystery of Wrath—from the origin of the eternal Being of manifestation whence all the qualities come forth, this visible world was born and created, a spoken sound proceeding from the Being of all Beings.

For the sake of those who love truisms let it be observed that it is not in any sense correct to state that Goethe had precisely this passage of Jacob Boehme in his mind when he wrote the words quoted above. What he had in his mind was the mystical knowledge which finds expression in Boehme's sentences. Goethe lived in this mystical knowledge and it grew riper and riper within him. He created from the kind of knowledge possessed by the mystics. And from this source he derived the capacity for seeing Life,—things transitory” as symbols only, as a reflection. A period of inexhaustible inner development lies between the time (Part I.) when Goethe wrote his words of despair at being so remote from the mirror of eternal truth,” and the time when he wrote the Chorus Mysticus” whose words express the fact that things transitory” are to be seen only as symbols” of the Eternal.

[ 23 ] The theme of the mystical dying and becoming” runs through the Introductory Scene of Part II.:

A pleasing landscape. Faust reclining upon flowery turf, restless, seeking sleep.” The elves, under Ariel, bring about Faust's Awakening.

Who round this head in airy circles hover,
Yourselves in guise of noble Elves discover!
The fierce convulsions of his heart compose;
Remove the burning barbs of his remorses,
And cleanse his being from the suffered woes!
Four pauses makes the Night upon her courses,
And now, delay not, let them kindly close!
First on the coolest pillow let him slumber,
Then sprinkle him with Lethe's drowsy spray!
His limbs no more shall cramps and chills encumber,
When sleep has made him strong to meet the day.
Perform, ye Elves, your fairest rite:
Restore him to the holy Light!

[ 24 ] And at sunrise Faust is restored to the holy Light:

Life's pulses now with fresher force awaken
To greet the mild ethereal twilight o'er me;
This night, thou, Earth! hast also stood unshaken,
And now thou breathest new-refreshed before me,
And now beginnest, all thy gladness granting,
A vigorous resolution to restore me,
To seek that highest life for which I'm panting.

[ 25 ] For what was Faust striving in his study (Part I.), and what had happened at the stage he has reached at the beginning of Part II.? His striving is clothed in the words of the Wise man:

The spirit world no closures fasten;
Thy sense is shut, thy heart is dead:
Disciple, up! untiring, hasten
To bathe thy breast in morning-red!

[ 26 ] As yet Faust cannot bathe his earthly breast” in the morning red.” When he has invoked the Earth Spirit he is forced to acknowledge the insignificance of this being. This he is able to do at the beginning of Part II. Ariel proclaims how it comes to be:

Hearken! Hark!—the Hours careering!
Sounding loud to spirit-hearing,
See the new-born day appearing!

[ 27 ] The new-born day” of knowledge and of life born out of the morning red” inspired Jacob Boehme's earliest work entitled Aurora or The Rise of Dawn, which was imbued with mystical knowledge. The passage in Act IV., Part II., of Faust already quoted shows how deeply Goethe lived in such conceptions. The first glad treasures” of his deepest heart” are revealed to him by Aurora's Love.” When Faust has really bathed his earthly breast in the morning red” he is ready to lead a higher life within the course of his earthly existence. He appears in the company of Mephistopheles at the imperial palace during a feast of pleasure and empty amusements and must himself help to increase them. He appears in the Mask of Hades, the God of Wealth, in a masquerade. He is desired to add to the amusements by charming Paris and Helena from the Underworld. This shows us that Faust had attained to that stage in his soul life where he under-stood the dying and becoming.” He participates joyfully in the Feast, but while it is going on he sets out on the path to the Mothers,” where alone he can find the figures of Paris and Helena which the emperor wishes to see. The eternal archetypes of all existence are preserved in the realm of the Mothers. It is a realm which man can only enter when he has given up his existence in order to exist.” There, too, Faust is able to find the part of Helena that has outlived the ages. But Mephistopheles, who has up to now been his guide, is not able to lead him into this realm. This is characteristic of his nature. He says emphatically to Faust:

Thou deem'st the thing is quickly fixed:
Here before steeper ways we're standing;
With strangest spheres would'st thou be mixed.

[ 28 ] Mephistopheles is a stranger to the realm of the Eternal. This may well appear inexplicable when we consider that Mephistopheles belongs to the kingdom of Evil, itself a kingdom of Eternity. But the difficulty is solved when we take Goethe's individuality into account. He had not experienced eternal Necessity” within the realm of Christianity where, to him, Hell and the Devil belong. This idea of the Eternal arose for Goethe in a region alien to the conceptions of Christendom. It is to be admitted of course that the ultimate origin of a figure like Mephistopheles is to be found in the conceptions of Heathen religions too. (Cp. Karl Kiesewetter's Faust in history and tradition.”) So far as Goethe was concerned, however, this figure belonged to the Northern world of Christendom, and the source of his creation was there. He could not in personal experience find his kingdom of the Eternal within the scope of this world of conceptions. To understand this, we need only be reminded of what Schiller said of Goethe in his deeply intuitive letter of 23rd August, 1794: If you had been born a Greek or even an Italian with a special kind of Nature and an idealistic Art around you from the cradle, your path would have been infinitely limited and perhaps made quite superficial. Even in the earliest conception of things you would have absorbed the Form of Necessity and you would have developed a mighty style together with your earliest experience. But being born a German with your Greek spirit thrown into the milieu of this Northern world, you had no choice but to become either an Artist of the North, or to re-establish in your Imagination by the help of the power of thought, what Reality withheld from you, and so, as it were, from within outwards, and on a rationalistic path, give birth to a Greek world.

[ 29 ] It is not our task here to embark upon a consideration of the different conceptions formed by man as to the meaning of the Mephistopheles figure. These conceptions express the endeavour to change figures of Art into barren allegories or symbols, and I have always opposed this. So far as an esoteric interpretation is concerned, Mephistopheles must be accepted, in the sense, naturally, of poetical reality, as an actual being. For an esoteric interpretation does not look for the spiritual value which certain figures in the first instance receive from the poet, but the spiritual value they already have in life. The poet can neither deprive them of this nor can he impart it; he takes it from life, as he would anything visible to the eye. It is, however, part of the nature of Mephistopheles that he lives in the material sense world. Hell, too, is nothing but incarnate materiality, The Eternal in the womb of the Mothers can only be an entirely alien realm to anyone who lives in materiality as intensely as Mephistopheles. Man must penetrate through materiality in order again to enter into the Eternal, the Divine, whence he has sprung. If he finds the way, if he gives up his existence in order to exist,” then he is a Faust being; if he cannot abandon materiality he becomes a character like Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles is only able to give to Faust the key” to the realm of the Mothers. A mystery is connected with this key.” Man must have experienced it before he can fully penetrate it. It will be most easy of attainment to those who are scientists in the true sense.

[ 30 ] It is possible for a man to accumulate much scientific learning and yet for the spirit of things,” the realm of the Mothers, to remain closed to him. Yet in scientific knowledge we have, fundamentally, the key to the spiritual world in our hands. It may become either academic erudition or wisdom. If a man of wisdom makes himself master of that dry erudition” which a man who is merely scientific has accumulated, he is led into a region which to the other is entirely foreign. Faust is able to penetrate to the Mothers with the key given him by Mephistopheles. The natures of Faust and Mephistopheles are reflected in the way in which they speak of the realm of the Mothers.

...Naught shalt thou see in endless Void afar,—
Not hear thy footstep fall, nor meet
A stable spot to rest thy feet.

... I to the Void am sent,
That art and power therein I may augment;
To use me like the cat is thy desire,
To scratch for thee the chestnuts from the fire.
Come on then! We'll explore, whate'er befall;
In this, thy Nothing, may I find my All!

[ 31 ] Goethe told Eckermann how he came to introduce the “Mothers ” scene. “I can only tell you,” he says, “that in Plutarch I found that in Greek Antiquity the Mothers were spoken of as Divinities.” This necessarily made a profound impression upon Goethe, who as the result of his mystical knowledge, realised the significance of the “eternal feminine.

[ 32 ] From the realm of the Mothers, Faust conjures up the figures of Helena and of Paris. When he sees them before him in the imperial palace he is seized by an irresistible desire for Helena. He wants to take possession of her. He sinks unconscious to the ground and is carried off by Mephistopheles. Here we come to a stage of great significance in Faust's evolution. He is ready and ripe to press forward into the spiritual world. He can rise in spirit to the eternal archetypes. He has reached the point where the spiritual world in an infinite perspective becomes visible to man.

[ 33 ] At this point it is possible for a man either to resign himself to the realisation that this perspective cannot be gauged in one bound, but must rather be traversed by numberless life stages; or he may determine to make himself master of the final aim of Divinity at one stroke. The latter was Faust's desire. He undergoes a new test. He must experience the truth that man is bound to matter and that only when he has passed through all stages of materiality is he made pure for attainment of the final aim.

[ 34 ] Only a purely spiritual being, born in a spiritual fashion, can unite himself directly with the spiritual world. The human tspirit is not a being of this kind and it must pass through the whole range of material existence. Without this life-journey the human spirit would be a soulless, lifeless entity. The very existence of the human spirit implies that the journey through materiality has been begun at some point. For man is what he is only because he has passed through a series of previous incarnations. Goethe had also to express this conception in Faust. On 16th December, 1829, he speaks of Homunculus to Eckermann: “A spiritual being like Homunculus, not yet darkened and circumscribed by a fully human evolution, is to be counted a Daemon.

[ 35 ] Homunculus, therefore, is a man but without the element of materiality that is essential to man. He is brought into existence by magical methods in the laboratory. On the date above mentioned Goethe speaks further of him to Eckermann: “Homunculus, as a being to whom actuality is absolutely clear and transparent, beholds the inner being of the sleeping Faust. But because everything is transparent to his spirit, the spirit has no point for him. He does not reason; he wants to act.” In so far as man is a knower, the impulse to will and action is awakened through knowledge. The essential thing is not the knowledge or the spirit as such, but the fact that this spirit must be led to pass through the material, through action. The more knowledge a being possesses, the greater will be the impulse to action. And a being who has been produced by purely spiritual means must be filled with the thirst for action. Homunculus is in this position. His powerful urge towards reality leads Faust with Mephistopheles to Greece, into the “Classical Walpurgis Night.” Homunculus is bound to become corporeal in the realm where Goethe found the highest reality. It then becomes possible for Faust to find the real Helena, not merely her archetype. Homunculus leads him into Greek reality. To understand fully the nature of Homunculus we need only follow his journeys through the Classical Walpurgis Night. He wants to learn from two Greek Philosophers how he can come into being, that is, to action. He says to Mephistopheles:

From place to place I flit and hover.
And in the best sense. I would fain exist.
And most impatient am. my glass to shatter;
But what till now I've witnessed, is't
Then strange if I mistrust the matter?
Yet I'll be confidential. if thou list:
I follow two Philosophers this way.
'Twas ‘Nature! Nature!’—all heard them say;
I'll cling to them and see what they are seeing,
For they must understand this earthly being,
And I shall doubtless learn, in season.
Where to betake me with the soundest reason.

[ 36 ] His wish is to gain knowledge of the natural conditions of the genesis of corporeal existence. Thales leads him to Proteus. the Lord of Change, of the “eternal Becoming.” Thales says of Homunculus:

He asks thy counsel, he desires to be.
He is, as I myself have heard him say.
(The thing's a marvell!) only born half-way.
He has no lack of qualities ideal,
But far too much of palpable and real.
Till now the glass alone has given him weight,
And he would fain be soon incorporeate.

[ 37 ] And Proteus gives utterance to the Law of Becoming:

No need to ponder here his origin;
On the broad ocean's breast must thou begin!
One starts there first within a narrow pale.
And finds, destroying, lower forms, enjoyment:
Little by little, then, one climbs the scale,
And fits himself for loftier employment.

[ 38 ] Thales gives the counsel:

Yield to the wish so wisely stated,
And at the source be thou created!
Be ready for the rapid plan!
There, by eternal canons wending,
Through thousand, myriad forms ascending,
Thou shalt attain, in time, to Man.

[ 39 ] Goethe's whole conception of the relationship of all beings, of their metamorphic evolution from the imperfect to the perfect is here expressed in a picture. At first the spirit can only exist germinally in the world. The spirit must pour itself out, must dip down into matter, and into the elements, before it can take on its sublimer form. Homunculus is shattered by Galatea's shell chariot and is dissolved• into the elements. This is described by the Sirens:

What fiery marvel the billows enlightens,
As one on the other is broken and. brightens?
It flashes and wavers, and hitherward plays!
On the path of the Night are the bodies ablaze,
And all things around are with flames overrun:
The Eros be ruler, who all things began!

[ 40 ] Homunculus as a spirit no longer exists. He is blended in the Elements and can arise from out of them. Eros, desire, will, action, must go forward to the spirit. The spirit must pass through matter, through the Fall into Sin. In Goethe's words, the spiritual essence must be.darkened and circumscribed, for this is necessary to a full human development. The second Act of Part II. presents the mystery of human development. Proteus, the Lord of corporeal metamorphosis, discloses this Mystery to Homunculus:

In spirit seek the watery distance!
Boundless shall there be thine existence,
And where to move, thy will be free.
But struggle not to higher orders!
Once Man, within the human borders,
Then all is at an end for thee.

[ 41 ] This is all that the Lord of corporeal metamorphosis can know about human development. So far as his knowledge goes evolution comes to an end when man, as such, has come into existence. What comes after that is not his province. He is only at home in the corporeal; and as a result of man's development the spiritual element separates itself from the merely corporeal. The further development of man proceeds in the spiritual world. The highest point to which the process is brought by the Eros of Nature is the separation into two sexes, male and female. Here spiritual development sets in; Eros is spiritualised. Faust enters into union with Helena, the archetype of Beauty. Goethe was well aware of all that he owed to his intimate connection with Greek beauty. The mystery of spiritualisation was for him of the nature of Art. Euphorion arises out of Faust's union with Helena. Goethe himself tells us what Euphorion is. (Eckermann quotes Goethe's words of 20th December, 1829): “Euphorion is not a human but an allegorical being. Euphorion personifies poetry that is bound neither to place nor person.” Poetry is born from the marriage experienced by Faust in the depths of his soul. This colouring of the spiritual Mystery must be traced back to Goethe's personal experience and nature. He saw in Art, in Poetry, “a manifestation of secret Laws of Nature,” which without them would never be revealed. (Compare his Prose Aphorisms.) He attained the higher stages of soul life as an artist. It was only natural that he should ascribe to poetry not only quite general qualities but those of the poetical creations of his time. Byronic qualities have passed over to Euphorion. On 5th July, 1827, Goethe said to Eckermann: “I could never choose anyone else but Byron as the representative of the most modern school of poetry, for he has unquestionably the greatest talent of the century. Byron is neither ancient nor modern, but like the present day itself. I had to have one like him. Besides this, he was typical, on account of his unsatisfied nature and that warlike temperament which led him to Missolonghi. It is neither opportune nor advisable to write a treatise on Byron, but in the future I shall not fail to pay him incidental tribute and to point to him in certain matters of detail.

The union of Faust with Helena cannot be permanent. The descent into the depths of the soul, as Goethe also knew, is only possible in “Festival moments” of life. Man descends to those regions where the highest spirituality comes to birth. But with the metamorphosis which he has there experienced he returns again to the life of action. Faust passes through a process of spiritualisation, but as a spiritualised being he has to work on in everyday life. A man who has passed through such “Festival moments” must realise how the deeper soul element in him vanishes again in everyday actuality. Goethe expressed this in a picture. Euphorion disappears again into the realm of darkness. Man cannot bring the spiritual to continuous earthly life, but the spiritual is now inwardly united with his soul. This spiritual element, his child, draws his soul into the realm of the Eternal. He has united himself with the Eternal. As a result of the loftiest spiritual activity man enters into the Eternal in his highest being, in the depths of his soul. The union into which his soul has entered enables him to ascend to the All. The words of Euphorion sound forth as this eternal call in the heart of ever-striving man:

Leave me here, in the gloomy Void,
Mother, not thus alone!

A man who has experienced the Eternal in the Temporal perpetually hears this call from the spiritual in him. His creations draw his soul to the Eternal. So will Faust live on. He will lead a dual life. He will create in life, but his spiritual child binds him on his earthly path to the higher world of the spirit. This will be the life of a mystic, but in the nature of things not a life where the days are passed in idle observation, in inner dream, but a life where deeds bear the impress of that nobility attained by man as the result of spiritual deepening.

[ 42 ] Faust's outer life, too, will now be that of a man who has surrendered his existence in order to exist. He will work absolutely selflessly in the service of humanity. But still another test awaits him. At the stage to which he has attained he cannot bring his activity in material existence into full harmony with the real needs of the spirit. He has taken land from the sea and has built a stately abode upon it. But an old hut still remains standing and in it live an aged couple. This disturbs the work of new creation. The aged couple do not want to exchange their dwelling for any nobler estate. Faust must see how Mephistopheles carries out his wish, turning it to evil. He sets the homestead on fire and the aged couple die of fright. Faust must experience once again that “perfect human evolution darkens and circumscribes,” and that it must lead to guilt. It was his material sense life that laid this blow, this test upon him. As he hears the bell sound from the aged couple's Chapel he breaks forth into the words:

Accurséd chime! As in derision
It wounds me, like a spiteful shot:
My realm is boundless to my vision,
Yet at my back this vexing blot!
The bell proclaims; with envious bluster,
My grand estate lacks full design:
The brown old hut, the linden-cluster,
The crumbling chapel are not mine.
If there I wished for recreation,
Another's shade would give no cheer:
A thorn it is, a sharp vexation,—
Would I were far away from here!

Faust's senses engender in him a fateful desire. There still remains in him some element of that existence which he must “surrender in order to exist.” The homestead is not his. In the “midnight hour” four grey women appear. Want, Blame, Care, Need. These are they who darken and circumscribe man's existence. He passes through life under their escort, and at first he cannot exist without their guidance. Life alone can bring emancipation from them. Faust has reached the point where three of these figures have no power over him. Care is the only one from whom this power has not been taken away. Care says:

Ye sisters, ye neither can enter, nor dare:
But the keyhole is free to the entrance of Care.

And Care exhorts him in a voice that lies deep in the heart of every man. No man can eradicate the last doubt as to whether he can with his life's reckoning stand steadfast in face of the Eternal. At this moment Faust has such an experience. Has he really only pure powers around him? Has he freed his “inner man” from all that is impure? He has taken Magic to his aid along his path, and acknowledges this in the words:

Not yet have I my liberty made good:
If I could banish Magic's fell creations,
And totally unlearn the incantations,
Stood I, O Nature! Man alone in thee,
Then were it worth one's while a man to be!

Faust too is unable to cast the last doubt away from him. Care may say of him also:

Though no ear should choose to hear me,
Yet the shrinking heart must fear me:
Though transformed to mortal eyes,
Grimmest power I exercise.

In the face of Care, Faust would first ask himself whether those remains of doubt as to his life's reckoning have vanished:

The sphere of Earth is known enough to me,
The view beyond is barred immutably:
A fool, who there his blinking eyes directeth,
And o'er his cloud of peers a place expecteth!
Firm let him stand, and look around him well!
This world means something to the Capable,
Why needs he through Eternity to wend?

In these very sentences Faust shows that he is about to fight his way to full freedom. Care would urge him on to the Eternal after her own fashion. She shows him how men on the earth only unite the Temporal to the Temporal. And even if they do this, believing that this world means something to the ‘Capable,’ she, nevertheless, remains with them to the last. And what she has been able to do in the case of others, Care thinks she can also do in the case of Faust. She believes in her power to enhance in him those doubts that beset a man when he asks himself whether all his deeds have indeed any significance or meaning. Care speaks of her power over men:

Shall he go, or come?—how guide him?
Prompt decision is denied him;
Midway on the trodden highway
Halting he attempts a by-way;
Such incessant rolling, spinning,
Painful quitting, hard beginning,—
Now constraint, now liberation,
Semi-sleep, poor recreation,
Firmly in his place ensnare him
And, at last, for Hell prepare him!

Faust's soul has progressed too far for him to fall into the power of Care to this extent. He is able to cry in rejoinder:

And yet, O Care, thy power, thy creeping shape,
Think not that I shall recognize it!

Care is only able to have power over his bodily nature. As she vanishes she breathes on him and he becomes blind. His bodily nature dies in order that he may attain a higher stage:

The Night seems deeper now to press around me,
But in my inmost spirit all is light.

After this it is only the soul element in Faust which comes into consideration. Mephistopheles who lives in the material world has no power here. Since the Helena Scene the better and deeper soul of Faust has lived in the Eternal. This Eternal takes full possession of him after his death. Angels incorporeate Faust's immortal essence into this Eternal:

This noble Spirit now is free,
And saved from evil scheming:
Who'er aspires unweariedly
Is not beyond redeeming.
And if with him celestial love
Hath taken part,—to meet him
Come down the angels from above;
With cordial hail they greet him.

The “Celestial Love” is in strong contrast to “Eros,” to whom Proteus refers when he says at the end of the second Act, Part II.:

All things around are with flames overrun:
Then Eros be ruler who all things began!

This Eros is the Love “from below” that leads Homunculus through the elements and through bodily metamorphosis in order that he may finally appear as man. Then begins the “Love from above” which develops the soul further.

[ 43 ] The soul of Faust is set upon the path to the Eternal, the Infinite. An unending perspective is open before it. We can dimly sense what this perspective is. To make it poetically objective is very difficult. Goethe realised this and he says to Eckermann: “You will admit that the conclusion, where the soul that has found salvation passes heavenward, was very difficult to write and that in reference to such highly supersensible and hardly conceivable matters I could have very easily fallen into vagueness if I had not, by the use of sharply defined Christian-Theological figures and concepts, given a certain form and stability to my poetical intentions.” The inexhaustible content of the soul must be indicated, and the deepest inner being expressed in symbol. Holy Anchorites “dispersed over the hill,” “stationed among the clefts” represent the highest states of the evolution of the soul. Man is led upwards into the regions of consciousness, of the soul,—wherein the world becomes to an ever increasing extent the “symbol” of the Eternal.

[ 44 ] This consciousness, the deepest region of the soul, are mystically seen in the figure of the “eternal feminine,” Mary the Virgin. Dr. Marianus in rapture prays to her:

Highest Mistress of the World!
Let me in the azure
Tent of Heaven, in light unfurled
Here thy Mystery measure!

[ 45 ] With the monumental words of the Chorus Mysticus, Faust draws to its conclusion. They are words of Wisdom eternal. They give utterance to the Mystery that “All things transitory are only a symbol.” This is what lies before man in the farthest distance; to this leads the path which man follows when he has grasped the meaning of this “dying and becoming:

Here the Inadequate
Becomes attainment.

This cannot be described because it can only be discovered in experience; this it is that the Initiates of the “Mysteries” experienced when they were led to the path of the Eternal; it is unutterable because it lies in such deep clefts of the soul that it cannot be clothed in words coined for the temporal world:

The indescribable,
Here it is done.

And to all this man is drawn by the power of his own soul, by the powers that are dimly sensed when he passes through the inner portals of the soul, when he seeks for that divine voice within calling him to the union of the “eternal masculine,”—the universe, with the “eternal feminine,”—consciousness:

The Eternal Feminine draws us
Upwards and on.

• 2. The author of this essay is in agreement with the opinion of Ad. Rudolf expressed in his Archives of Modern Languages LXX., 1883, that the writing of the word Ereignis” (event) is only due to an auditory mistake of Goethe's stenographer, and that the correct word is Erreichnis,” attainment.
• 3. Miss Swanwick's translation.

The objection might easily be raised to an address such as this to-day that symbolic and allegoric meanings are forced out of something which a poet has created in the free play of his imaginative fancy. The day before yesterday we set ourselves the task to explore the deeper meaning of Goethe's ‘Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,’ as it was then presented to our eyes. It will always happen that such an analysis or explanation of a work of fantasy will be turned down with the remark: ‘Oh, all sorts of symbols and meanings with profound applications are looked for in the figures of the work.’ Therefore I want to say at once that what I shall say to-day has nothing whatever to do with the symbolic and allegoric interpretations often made by Theosophists about legends or poetic works. And because I know that again and again the objection has been made to similar explanations which I have given: ‘We are not going to be caught by such symbolic meanings of poetic figures,’ I cannot stress the fact sufficiently that what is to be said here must be taken in no other sense than the following. We have before us a poetic work, a work of comprehensive imaginative power or fantasy, that goes to the depths of things: ‘The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.’ We may well be allowed the question, whether we may approach the work from any particular point of view, and attempt to find the basic idea, the true content of this so poetic a product.

We see the plant before us. Man goes to it and examines the laws, the inner regularity, by which the plant grows and flourishes, by which it unfolds its nature bit by bit. Has the botanist, or even someone who is no botanist, but arranges the growth of the plant in his imagination, the right to do it? Can one object: the plant knows nothing of the laws you are discovering, the laws of its growth and development! This objection against the botanist or the lyric poet who expresses the sensations derived from the plant in his poetry would have the same weight as the objection one could bring against such an explanation of Goethe's story. I do not want things to be taken as if I were to say to you: There we have a Snake, which means this or that, there we have a Golden, a Silver, and a Brazen King, who stand for this or that. I do not intend to expound the story in this symbolic, allegoric sense, but more in such a way that as the plant grows according to laws of which it is itself unconscious, and as the botanist has the right to discover these laws of its growth, one must also say to oneself that it does not follow that the poet Goethe was consciously aware of the explanations which I shall give you. For it is as true that we must consider the inevitability, and the true ideal content of the story as it is that we discover the laws of the plant's growth; that the plant grows in accordance with the same inevitability which originated it, though it is itself unconscious of it.

So I ask you to take what I shall say as if it presented the sense and the spirit of Goethe's methods of thought and idea-conception and as if he who, as it were, feels himself called upon to put before you the ideal philosophy of Goethe, were justified—that you might find a way to it—in expounding the product of Goethe's invention, in emphasizing the figures, and in pointing out their correlation—just as the botanist demonstrates that the plant grows in accordance with laws he has discovered.

Goethe's psychology or soul-philosophy, namely, what he considers determinative for the nature of the soul, is illustrated in his beautiful Fairy Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; and if we are to understand each other in what I have to say it will be a good thing if, in a preliminary study, we make the spirit of his soul-world clear. It has been already pointed out in the previous address that the world-conception represented here starts from the view that human knowledge is not to be looked upon as something stationary once for all. The view is widely held that man is as he is to-day, and being what he is he can give unequivocal judgment on all things; he observes the world with his sense-organs, takes in its phenomena, combines them with his reason, which is bound to his senses, and the result is an absolute knowledge of the world which must be valid for all. On the other side—but only in a certain way—stands the spiritual scientific world-conception which is represented here. This starts from the premise that what is to become our knowledge is continually dependent on our organs and our capacity for knowledge and that we ourselves are, as men, capable of development; that we can work on ourselves, and raise higher such capabilities as we have on a given level of existence. It holds that we can educate them, and they can be developed still further, even as man has developed himself from an imperfect state to his present position, and that we must come to a deeper penetration of things, and a more correct view of the world by rising to higher standards. To put it more clearly, if also more trivially: if we leave out altogether a development of humanity and look only at people as they are around us; and then turn our eyes on those men whom one reckons as belonging to primitive races in the history of civilization, and if we ask ourselves what they can know of the laws of the world around us and compare it with what an average European with some ideas of science can know of the world, we shall see there is a great difference between the two. Take, for instance, an African negro's picture of the world and that, let us say, of an European monist, who has a sense of reality through having absorbed a number of the scientific ideas of the present age: the two are entirely dissimilar.

But on the other hand Spiritual Science is far from depreciating the world-picture of the man who takes his stand on pure materialism, and from declaring it invalid. It is more true to say that in these things it is considered that in every case a man's world-picture corresponds to a stage in human evolution, and that man is able to increase the capabilities in him and to discover by means of the increase other new things.

It lies thus in the purview of Spiritual Science that man reaches ever higher knowledge by developing himself, and what he experiences in the process is objective world-content, which he did not see before because he was not capable of seeing it. Spiritual Science is therefore different from other one-sided world-conceptions, whether spiritualistic, or materialistic, because it does not recognize an absolute, unchangeable truth, but only a wisdom and truth belonging to a given stage of evolution. Thus it adheres to Goethe's saying: ‘Man has really always only his own truth, and it is always the same.’ It is always the same because what we instil into ourselves through our power of learning, viz., the objective, is the same.

Now how does man succeed in developing the capabilities and powers that lie in him? One may say that Spiritual Science is as old as human thought. It always took the view that man has before him the ideal of a certain knowledge-perfection, the object of his aspiration. The principle contained in this was always called the ‘principle of initiation.’ This initiation means nothing other than increasing the powers of man to ever higher stages of knowledge, and thereby attaining deeper insight into the nature of the world around him. Goethe stood completely and all his life long, one may say, on this principle of development towards knowledge, this principle of initiation; which is shown us most particularly in his Fairy Tale.

We shall understand each other most easily if we proceed from the view which is held most often and most widely to-day, and which is to a certain extent in opposition to the initiation-principle.

To-day one can hear in the widest circles those people who think about such things and believe themselves to have an opinion on them representing, more or less consciously, the point of view that in what concerns truth and objective reality only physical observation, or objects of physical observation can be decisive in formulating ideas. You will constantly hear it: that alone can be Science which is based on the objective foundation of observation, and by this one understands so frequently is meant only the observation of the senses and the application of the human reason and capacity to formulate thoughts to these sense-observations. Every one of you knows that the capacity to formulate ideas and concepts is a capacity of the human soul among other capacities and every one of you also knows that these other capacities of the soul are our feeling and our will. Thus, even with this comparative superficial review, we may say: man is not merely an ideating, but also a feeling and willing being. Now those who think they must put forward the purely scientific point of view will always repeat: in science, only the power of thought may enter, never human feeling, never what we know as will-impulses, for otherwise that which is objective would become clouded, and that which the power of thought might achieve by being kept impersonal, would only be prejudiced.

It is correct enough that when a man introduces his feeling, his sympathy or antipathy, into the object of a scientific enquiry, he finds it repulsive or attractive, sympathetic or antipathetic. And where should we be if he were to consider his desire as a source of knowledge, so that he could say about a thing, I want it or I do not want it? Whether it displeases or pleases you, whether you desire it or not, is entirely the same to the thing. As true as it is that he who believes himself able to stand on the firm ground of science can confine himself only to externals, so true it is that the thing itself compels you to say it is red, and that the impression you get concerning the nature of a stone is the correct one. But it does not lie in the nature of the thing that it appears to you ugly or beautiful, that you desire it or not. That it appears to you red has an objective reason; that you do not desire it has no objective reason.

In a certain respect modern psychology has got beyond the point of view just described. It is not my task here to speak for or against that tendency of modern psychology which says: ‘When we consider psychic phenomena and the soul-life, we must not confine ourselves only to intellectualism, we must regard man not merely in what concerns the power of conception, we must also consider the influences of the world of feeling and will.’ Perhaps some of you know that this belongs to Wundt's system of philosophy, which takes the will to be the origin of soul-activity. In a way that is in some respects fundamental, whether one agrees with it or not, the Russian psychologist Losski has pointed out the control of the will in human soul-life, in his last book called ‘Intuitivism.’ I could say much to you if I wanted to show how concerned the theory of the soul is to overcome the one-sidedness of intellectualism, and if further, I wanted to show you that the other powers also play a part in human soul-power.

If you carry the thought a step further, you will be able to say that this shows how impossible the demand is that the power of formulating ideas, limited as it is to observation, may lead to objective results in science. When science itself shows its impossibility, shows that everywhere Will plays a part, on what grounds would you then establish the purely objective observation of anything? Because you prefer to recognize only matter as objective, subject as you are to the tricks played by the will and your habits of thought, and because you have not the habit of thought and feeling to recognize also the spiritual element in things, therefore you omit the latter altogether in your theories. It is not a question, if we want to understand the world, of what kind of abstract ideals we set before us, but of what we can accomplish in our souls.

Goethe belongs to those people who reject the principle most categorically that knowledge is produced only through the thinking capacity, the one-sided capacity to form ideas. The prominent and significant principle expressed more or less clearly in Goethe's nature is that he considers that all the powers of the human soul must function if man is to unravel the riddles of the world.

Now we must not be one-sided and unjust. It is quite correct, when the objection is raised that feeling and will are qualities subjected to the personal characteristics of a man, and when it is asked where we should come to if not only what the eyes see and the microscope shows, but also what feeling and will dictate were considered as attributes of things! All the same that is just what we have to say in order to understand someone who, like Goethe, stands for the principle of initiation and development, namely, that, given the average feeling and will in man to-day, they cannot be applied to the acquirement of knowledge, that, in fact they would lead only to an absolute disharmony in their knowledge. One man wants this, the other that, according to the subjective needs of feeling and will. But the man who stands on the ground of initiation is also quite clear that of the powers of the human soul—thinking, representation, feeling, will—the capacity to construct thoughts and to think has advanced furthest, and is most inclined and adapted to exclude the personal element and to attain objectivity. For that soul-power which is expressed in intellectualism is now so advanced that when men rely upon it, they quarrel least, and agree most in what they say. Feeling and will have not had the chance of being developed to this point. We can also justifiably find differences when we examine the region of ideas and their representation. There are regions of the idea-life which give us completely objective truths, which men have recognized as such, quite apart from external experience, and these truths are the same if a million people differ in their opinions about them. If you have experienced in yourself the reasons for it, you are able to assert the truth even if a million people think otherwise. For instance, everyone can find such truths confirmed as those dealing with numbers and space dimension. Everyone can understand that 3 x 3 = 9, and it is so, even if a million people contradict it. Why is this the case? Because regarding such truths such as mathematical truths, most people have succeeded in suppressing their preference and their aversion, their sympathy and their antipathy, in short, the personal factor, and letting the matter speak for itself. This exclusion of the personal in the case of thought and the capacity to formulate ideas has always been called the ‘purification’ of the human soul, and considered the first stage on the way to initiation, or, as one might also say, on the way to higher knowledge.

The man who is versed in these things says to himself: It is not only with regard to feeling and the will that people are not yet so far that nothing personal enters into it, and that they can verify objectivity, but also with regard to thought the majority are not yet so far as to be able to give themselves up purely to what the things, the ideas of the things themselves say to him, as everyone can in mathematics. But there are methods of purifying thought to such a point that we no longer think personally, but let the thoughts in us think, as we let mathematical thought do. Thus, when we have cleansed thought from the influences of personality, we speak of purification or catharsis, as it was called in the old Eleusinian mysteries. Hence man must reach the point of purifying his thinking, which then enables him to comprehend things with objective thought.

Now, just as this is possible, so is it also possible to eliminate all the personal factor from feeling, so that the appeal of things to the feelings has no longer any say, to the Personal, or to Sympathy and Antipathy; nothing but the nature of the thing is evoked, in so far as it cannot speak to mere concept capacity. Experiences in our souls which have their roots or origin in our feelings, and which therefore lead to inner knowledge, and lead deeper into the nature of a thing, speaking however to other sides of the soul than mere intellectualism, can be purified of the personal element as well as thought, so that feeling can transmit the same objectivity as thought can. This cleansing or development of the feelings is called in all esoteric doctrine ‘enlightenment.’ Every man capable of development, and striving after it in no casual way, (that lies in intention of the personality) must take pains to be stirred only by what lies in the nature of the thing. When he has reached the point where the thing rouses in him neither sympathy nor antipathy, where he allows only the nature of things to speak, so that he says: whatever sympathies or antipathies I have are immaterial and are not to be taken into consideration, then it lies in the nature of the thing that the thought and action of the man assume this or that direction—then it is a declaration of the innermost nature of the thing. In esoteric doctrine this development of the will has been called ‘consummation.’

If a man takes his stand on the ground of spiritual science, he says to himself: ‘If I have a thing in front of me, there is in it a spiritual element, and I can so stimulate my mode of conception, that the essence of the thing is represented objectively through my concepts and ideas. Hence there is present in me the same thing that works externally, and I have recognized the essence of the thing through my mode of conception. But what I have recognized is only a part of the essence.’ There exists in things something which can speak not to thought at all, but only to feeling, and indeed only to purified feeling or to feeling which has become objective. The man who has not yet developed in himself by this cultivation of the feelings such a part of the essence, cannot recognize the essence along these lines. But for the man who says to himself that feeling as well as the capacity to think can provide a basis of knowledge (not the feeling as it is, but as it can become by means of well-founded methods of the teaching of cognition) for such a man it becomes gradually clear that there are things deeper than thought possibilities, things which speak to one's soul and the feelings. There are also things which reach even down to the will.

Now Goethe was particularly convinced that this really is the case, and that man really has in him these possibilities of development. He stood firmly on the ground of the principle of initiation, and he has shown us the initiation of man through the development of his soul and the development of the three powers of will, feeling and thought by representing them in his Fairy Tale.

The Golden King represents the initiation for the thought-capacity, the Silver King represents the initiation with knowledge capacity of objective feeling, and the Brazen King the initiation for knowledge capacity of the will. Goethe has emphasized that man must overcome certain things if he wishes to receive these three gifts. The Youth in the story represents man in his struggle for the highest. As Schiller in his Æsthetic Letters depicts man's aspiration towards complete humanity, so Goethe depicts in the Youth man's aspiration for the highest, wanting straight away to reach the Beautiful Lily, and attaining then inner human perfection, given him by the three Kings.

How that happens is pointed out in the course of the story. You remember that in the subterranean Temple, into which the Snake looks because of the earth's power of crystallization, one King was in each of the four corners. In the first was the Golden, in the second the Silver, in the third the Brazen King. In the fourth was the King who was a mixture of the other three metals, in whom, therefore, the three composite parts were so welded that one could not distinguish them. In this fourth King, Goethe depicts for us the representative of that stage of human development in which will, thought and feeling are mixed together. In other words he stands for that human soul which is governed by will, thought and feeling, because it is itself not master of these three capacities. On the other hand in the Youth, after he receives the three gifts from the three Kings separately, so that they are no longer chaotically mixed, that stage of knowledge is represented which does not allow itself to be ruled by thought, feeling and will, but which, on the contrary, rules over them. Man is ruled by them as long as they flow chaotically and intermingled in him, as long as they are not pure and independent in his soul. Until man has reached this separation, he is not capable of being effective through his three knowledge-capacities. When he has reached this point, however, he is no longer the subject of Chaos, but on the contrary himself controls his thought, his feeling and his will, when each is as pure and unalloyed as the metal of the respective Kings: his mode of Conception, pure as the Golden King (for nothing is mixed in him); his mode of Feeling, where nothing is added or mixed, but pure as the Silver King; and so too the Will, pure as the brass of the Brazen King; Concepts and Feelings no longer govern him, for he stands, in his nature, free; he is capable, in a word, of comprehension by means of thought, of feeling and will as required, making use of each separately. He can grasp according to necessity and the nature of things either by means of thinking, feeling or willing. Then he has advanced so far that the whole pure knowledge-capacity which we see in thought, feeling and will, leads him to a deeper insight, and he really steeps himself in the current of events, in the inner nature of things. Of course only experience can teach that this is possible.

Now it will not be difficult to agree, after what I said just now, that if Goethe makes the Youth represent striving mankind, we may see in the Beautiful Lily another soul-condition, namely, that soul-condition which man attains when the beings lying in things spring forth in the soul, and he thereby raises his existence by blending the things in himself with the nature of things in the external world. What man experiences in his soul by growing out of himself, by becoming master of the powers of the soul, victor over the chaos in his soul; what man then experiences, that inner blessedness, that unity with things; their awakening in him, is shown us by Goethe in his representation of the union with the Beautiful Lily. Beauty here is not merely aesthetic beauty, but a quality of man brought to a certain stage of perfection. So that we shall also now find it easy to understand why Goethe makes the Youth proceed in his effort to reach the Beautiful Lily, in such a way that all his powers at first disappear. Why is this?

We understand Goethe's presentation of such a scene if we hold fast to a thought he once expressed: ‘Everything which gives us mastery over ourselves without liberating us, leads us into error.’ Man must first be free, he must reach the point of being master of his inner soul-powers, and then he can attain union with the highest soul-condition, with the Beautiful Lily. But if he sets out to attain it unprepared, with still immature powers, they are lost and his soul is shrivelled. Hence Goethe points out that the Youth seeks this liberation which will make him captain of his soul. The moment his soul-powers are no longer chaotic, but are purified, cleansed and ordered, he is ready to reach that condition of soul which is symbolized by his union with the Beautiful Lily.

So we see that Goethe constructs these figures in free creative fantasy, and if we look upon them as representing soul-powers, we see that they permeate and work in his whole soul. If we look upon them like this, if we are as sensitive to these figures as in a way Goethe was—Goethe who unlike a second-rate didactic poet was not content to say what this or that soul-quality meant, but used it to express what he felt himself, then we shall realize what is expressed in these poetic figures. And therefore the various figures stand in the same personal relationship to each other as the soul-powers of a man stand to each other.

It cannot be clearly enough insisted upon that there is no question of the characters meaning this or that. That is certainly not the case. Rather is it that Goethe felt this or that in this or that soul-activity and transformed his feelings in connection with one or the other soul-activity into one or the other figures.

Thus he created the sequence of the story's events, which is still more important than the figures themselves. We see the Will-o'-the-Wisps and the Green Snake, and that the former cross over from the other side of the river and reveal quite peculiar qualities. They absorb the gold greedily, even lick it from the walls of the Old Man's room, and then throw it about prodigally. The same gold which in the Will-o'-the-Wisps is a sign of worthlessness, as we are also shown by the fact that the Ferryman has to refuse it—otherwise the river would surge up¹—the Ferryman may take only fruits in payment—this gold—what effect does it have in the body of the Green Snake? The Snake, after taking it, becomes internally luminous! And the plants and other things round her are also lit up because she takes into herself what in the case of the Will-o'-the-Wisps is a symbol of worthlessness.

But a certain importance is ascribed even to them. You know that the Old Man at the critical moment calls upon the Will-o'-the-Wisps to open the Temple gates, so that the whole train can enter in. Precisely the same thing which happens here in the case of the Green Snake, is to be found in the human soul, a thing we came across particularly clearly two days ago in the conversation between Goethe and Schiller. We saw that Schiller, as he spoke with Goethe about the way in which nature should be regarded, was still of the opinion that the drawing with a few strokes by Goethe of the proto-plant was an idea, an abstraction, which one receives when one omits the differentiating features and puts together the common ones. And we saw that Goethe thereupon said that if that was an idea, then he saw his ideas with his eyes. At this moment there were two quite different realities in opposition. Schiller trained himself completely to take Goethe's way of looking at things; so that it shows no lack of honour to Schiller if he is taken as an example of that human soul which moves in abstractions, and preferably in those ideas of things which are comprehended by the mere reason. That is a particular inclination of the soul, which, if a man wishes to attain a higher development, can, in certain circumstances, play a very dangerous part.

There are people whose inclination lies in the direction of the abstract. Now when they combine this abstraction with something they come across as soul-power, this is, as a rule, the concept of unproductivity. These people are sometimes very acute, they can draw fine distinctions, and connect this or that concept wonderfully. But you also often find with such a soul-condition, that the spiritual influences, inspirations, are excluded. This soul-condition, characterized by unproductivity and abstraction, is represented to us in the Will-o'-the-Wisps. They take up the gold wherever they find it; they lack any inventive faculty, are unproductive and can grasp no ‘ideas.’ These ideas are alien to them. They have not the will unselfishly to yield themselves up to things, or to stick to facts or to use concepts only as far as they are interpreters of facts. All they care about is to stuff their reasons full of concepts, and then scatter them about prodigally. They are like a man who goes to libraries, collects wisdom there, and takes it in and then gives it out again correspondingly. These Will-o'-the-Wisps are typical of that soul-capacity which is never able to grasp a single literary thought, or feeling, but which can nevertheless grasp in beautiful forms what creative spirits have produced in literature. I do not mean to say anything against this kind of soul. If a man did not have it nor cultivated it when he was insufficiently endowed with it, he would lack something which must be present when it comes to the real capacity for knowledge. In his picture of the Will-o'-the-Wisps, in the whole circumstances in which they appear and act, Goethe shows the manner in which such a soul-type functions, in relation to other soul-types, how it harms and benefits. In truth, if someone wanted to climb to higher stages of knowledge and had not this faculty of soul, there would not be the means to open the Temple for him. Goethe shows the advantages equally with the drawbacks of this soul-condition. What he gives us in the Will-o'-the-Wisps represents a soul-element. The moment it wants to lead an independent life in one direction or another, it becomes harmful. This abstraction leads to a critical faculty which makes men learn everything indeed, but incapable of further development, because the productive element is missing in them. But Goethe also clearly shows how far there is value in what the Will-o'-the-Wisps represent. What they contain can become something valuable; in the Snake the Will-o'-the-Wisps' gold turns to something valuable in so far as she illumines the objects round about her.

What lives in the Will-o'-the-Wisps, when worked out in another way, will become extremely fruitful in the human soul. When man strives so to regard his experiences of concepts and ideas and ideal creations not as something abstract in themselves, but as capable of leading to and interpreting the realities round him, so that he thinks as selflessly and willingly of his observations as of the abstract quality of the concepts, then he is as regards this soul-power in the same position as the Green Snake: then he can produce light and wisdom out of the purely abstract concepts. Then he is not brought to be in the vertical line which loses all connection and relation to the horizontal plane. The Will-o'-the-Wisps are the Snake's relatives, but of the vertical line. The gold-pieces fall through the rocks, are absorbed by the Snake which thereby becomes inwardly luminous. He who approaches the things themselves with these concepts absorbs wisdom.

Goethe gives us also an example of how one is to work on the conceptions (Begriffe). He has the conception of the proto-plant. Primarily it is an abstract conception, which, were it worked out in the abstract, would become an empty picture, killing all life, as the gold, thrown down by the Will-o'-the-Wisps, killed the Pug-dog. But just think what Goethe does with the conception of the proto-plant. If we follow him on his Italian journey, we see that this conception is only the ‘leit-motif’ going from plant to plant, from being to being. He takes the conception, goes from it over to the plant, and sees how this is made in one or another shape, taking on quite different shapes, in lower or higher places, and so on. Now he follows from step to step how the spiritual reality or form creeps into every physical form. He himself creeps about like the Snake in the crevices of the earth. Thus for Goethe the conception-world is nothing else but that which can be spun into objective reality. The Snake for him is the representative of that soul-power which does not struggle upward selfishly to higher regions of existence in an attempt to raise itself above everything, but which continually and patiently lets the conception be verified by observation, patiently goes from experience to experience. When man not merely theorizes, not merely lives in the conceptions, but applies them to life and experience, then he is as far as this soul-power is concerned, in the position of the Snake. This is so in a very wide sense. He who takes philosophy not as a theory, but as what it is meant to be, he who regards the conceptions of spiritual science as exercises for life, knows that just such conceptions, even the highest, are meant to be applied in such a way that they merge into life and are verified by daily experience. The man who has learnt a few conceptions but is incapable of applying them to life is like a man who has learned a cooking-book by heart, but cannot cook. As the gold is a means to throw light on things, so Goethe illuminates the things round him by means of his ideas.

This is the instructive and grand thing about Goethe's attitude to Science, and his every effort, that his ideas and conceptions have reality and have the effect of lighting up all objects round him. The day before yesterday special importance was laid on the universality in Goethe which gives the reason why we never have the feeling: that is Goethe's ‘meaning.’ He stands there, and when we see him, we find only that we understand things better which before were not so clear. For this reason he was capable of becoming the point of agreement between two hostile brethren, as we saw the day before yesterday.

If we wanted to discuss every feature in this fairy tale and characterize every figure in it, I should have to speak not for three hours but for three weeks on it. So I can give you only the deeper principles contained in the story. But every feature shows us something of Goethe's method of thought and his opinion of the world.

Those soul-powers which are represented in the Will-o'-the-Wisps, in the Green Snake and in the Kings, are on one side of the River. On the other side lives the Beautiful Lily, the ideal of perfect knowledge and perfect life and work. We heard from the Ferryman that he can bring the people (gestalten, forms) from the other side to this, but can take no one back again. Let us apply this to our whole soul-mood or soul-condition and our improvement.

We find ourselves on earth as beings with souls. These or the other soul-capacities work upon us as talents, as more or less developed soul-powers. They are in us; but we have also something else in us. In us human beings if we take ourselves properly there is the feeling, the knowledge that the powers of our soul, which finally interpret the nature of things to us, are closely related to the elemental spirits (grundgeister) of the world, with the Creative, Spiritual forces. The longing for these creative forces is the longing for the Beautiful Lily. Thus we know that everything derived on one hand from the Beautiful Lily, strives on the other to return to her. Unknown forces unmastered by us have brought us from the world on the other side over the river-boundary to this side. But these forces, characterized by the Ferryman, and working in the depths of unconscious nature, cannot take us back again, for otherwise man would return, without his work and co-operation, to the kingdom of the divine, precisely as he came over. The forces which as unconscious nature-forces have brought us over into the kingdom of struggling humanity, may not lead us back again. For this other forces are required; and Goethe is aware of it. But he wants to show also how man must set about being able to re-unite with the Beautiful Lily. There are two ways. One leads over the Green Snake; we can cross by it and gradually find the kingdom of the spirit. The other way goes across the Giant's shadow. We are shown that the Giant, otherwise without strength, stretches out his hand at dusk, and its shadow falls across the River. The second road leads over this shadow. Whoever wishes therefore to cross by clear daylight to the kingdom of the spirit must use the way provided by the Snake; and whoever wishes to cross at dusk can use the way leading across the Giant's shadow. Those are the two ways to reach a spiritual picture of the world. The man who aspires to the spiritual world—not with human concepts and ideas, not with those forces which are symbolized by the worthless gold (as spirits of bare sophistry) and the Will-o'-the-Wisps—but by proceeding patiently and selflessly from experience to experience, succeeds in reaching the other bank in full sunlight.

Goethe knows that real research does not stop at material things, but must lead over beyond the boundary; beyond the river which separates us from the spiritual. But there is another way, a way for undeveloped people, who do not want to take the road of knowledge, but a way represented by the Giant. He himself is powerless, only his shadow has a certain strength. Now what is powerless in a true sense? Take all the conditions possible to man when his consciousness is reduced, as in hypnotism, somnambulism and even dream-conditions; everything by which the clear consciousness of day is subdued, whereby man is subject to lower soul-power than in clear consciousness, belongs to this second way. Here the soul, by surrendering its ordinary daily functional power of the soul, is led into the real kingdom of the spirit. The soul, however, does not itself become capable of crossing into the spiritual kingdom, but remains unconscious and is carried across like the Shadow into the kingdom of spirit. Goethe includes in the forces represented by the Giant's shadow everything which functions unconsciously and from habit, without the soul-powers which are active during clear consciousness taking part. Schiller, who was initiated into Goethe's meaning, once, at the time of the great upheavals in Western Europe, wrote to Goethe: ‘I rejoice that you have not been roughly caught in the shadow of the giant.’ What did he mean? He meant that had Goethe travelled further West, he would have been caught in the revolutionary forces of the West.

Then we see that the objects of man's quest, the height of knowledge, is represented in the ‘Temple.’ The Temple represents a higher stage of man's evolution. Goethe nowadays would say that if the Temple is something hidden, it is under the narrow crevices of the earth. Such an aspiring soul-force as is represented in the Snake can feel the shape of the Temple only dimly. By absorbing the ideal, the gold, she can illumine this shape, but fundamentally the Temple can be there to-day only as a subterranean secret. But though Goethe leaves the Temple as something subterranean for external culture, he points out that to a further-developed man this secret must be unlocked. In this he indicates the current of Spiritual Science which to-day has already caught up wide masses of people, which in a comprehensive sense seeks to make popular the content of Spiritual Science, of the principle of initiation, and of the Temple's secret. The Youth is therefore to be regarded in this truly free Goethean sense as the representative of aspiring mankind. Therefore the Temple is to rise beyond the River, so that not only a few individuals who seek illumination can cross and re-cross, but so that all people can cross the River by the bridge. Goethe, in the Temple of Initiation above the earth puts before us a future state, which will have arrived when man can go from the kingdom of the senses into the kingdom of the spiritual, and from the kingdom of the spiritual into the kingdom of the senses.

How is this attained in the Fairy Tale? Because the real secret of it is fulfilled. The solution of the story is to be found in the story itself, says Schiller, but he has also pointed out that the word that solves it is inserted in a very remarkable way. You remember the Old Man with the Lamp, which illuminates only where there is already light? Now, who is this Old Man, and what is the Lamp? What is its curious light? The Old Man stands above the situation. His lamp has the peculiar quality of changing things, wood into silver, stone into gold. It has also the quality of shining only where there is already a receptivity, a definite kind of light. As the Old Man enters the subterranean Temple he is asked how many secrets he knows. ‘Three,’ he replies. To the Silver King's question, ‘Which is the most important,’ he answers: ‘The open one.’ And when the Brazen King asks whether he would tell it them also, he says: ‘As soon as I know the fourth.’ Whereupon the Snake whispers something in his ear and he says at once:

‘The Time is at Hand.’

The solution of the riddle is what the Snake whispered in the Old Man's ear, and we have to find out what that is. It would lead us too far to say at length what the three secrets mean. I shall only hint at it. There are three Kingdoms which in evolution are so to speak stationary: the mineral, the vegetable and the animal Kingdoms, which are completed, as compared with progressive man, who is still developing. The inner development of man is so vehement and important that it cannot be confused with the development of the other three nature kingdoms. What the secret of the Old Man contains is the fact that one Kingdom of nature has arrived at the present point of a full-stop, and this is what explains the laws of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. But now comes the fourth kingdom, that of man, the secret which is to be revealed in the human soul. The secret which the Old Man must first discover, is of this kind. And how must he discover it? He knows of what it consists, but the Snake has to tell him first. This indicates to ns that man has still to go through something special, if he wants to attain the goal of evolution as the three other kingdoms have done. What this is the Snake whispers to the Old Man. She tells how a certain soul-power must be developed, if a higher stage is to be reached; she says that she has the will to sacrifice herself for this, and she does in fact sacrifice herself. Hitherto she has made a bridge when here and there someone wished to cross; but now she will become a permanent bridge, by falling in pieces, so that man will have a lasting connection between this side and that, between the spiritual and the physical. That the Snake has the will to sacrifice herself must be taken as the condition of revealing the fourth secret. The moment the Old Man hears that the Snake will sacrifice herself, he can even say: ‘The time is at hand!’ It is that soul-power which adheres to the external. And the way to be trodden is not to make this soul-force and inner science the ultimate end but self-surrender. That really is a secret, even if it is called an ‘open secret,’ that is, when any who will can know it. What is regarded in a wide circle as end in itself—everything we can learn in natural science, in political science of civilization, in history, in mathematics and all other sciences can never be an absolute end. We can never come to a true insight into the depths of the world, if we consider them as ends in themselves. Only if we are at all times ready to absorb them and regard them as means, which we offer as a bridge to let us cross over, do we come to real knowledge. We bar ourselves off from the higher, true knowledge unless we are also ready to sacrifice ourselves. Man will get an idea of what initiation is only when he ceases to carve for himself a world-conception out of external-physical concepts. He must be all feeling, with all-attuned soul, such a soul as Goethe describes in his ‘Westöstlichen Divan’ as the highest acquisition of man:

‘And so long thou hast not this, Death and Birth!
Thou art but a sorry guest, on this dark Earth.’

Death and Birth! Learn to know what life can offer, go through with it, but surpass, transcend yourself. Let it become a bridge for you, and you will wake up in a higher life and be one with the essence of things, when you no longer live in the illusion that, cut off from the higher ego, you can exhaust the essence of things. When Goethe speaks of the sacrifice of the idea and the soul-material, in order to acquire new life in higher spheres, and of the deepest inner love, he likes to think of the words of the mystic Jacob Böhme, who knows from experience this self-surrender of the Snake. Perhaps Jacob Böhme has pointed out just this to him and made it so clear to him that a man can live, even in the physical body, in a world which otherwise he would tread only after death, in the world of the eternal, the spiritual. Jacob Böhme knew also that it depends on the man, whether he can, in the higher sense, slide over into the spiritual world. He shows it in the saying: ‘Who dies not before he dies, is ruined when he dies.’ A significant saying! Man, who does not die before he dies, that is, who does not develop in himself the eternal, the inner kernel of being, will not be in a position, when he dies, to find again the spiritual kernel in himself. The eternal is in us. We must develop it in the body, so that we may find it outside the body. ‘Who dies not before he dies, is ruined when he dies.’ So it is also with the other sentence: ‘And so death is the root of all life.’

Thus we see that the things of the soul can only illumine a place where light already is: the Lamp of the Old Man can only shine where there is already light. Once more our attention is directed to those special soul-powers, of devotion and religious self-surrender, which for hundreds and thousands of years have brought the message of spiritual worlds to those who could not seek the light by way of Science or otherwise. The light of the different religious revelations is represented in the Old Man, who has this light. But to him who does not bring an inner light to meet the sense of religion, the Lamp of Religion gives no light. It can shine only where light already is and meets it. It is the Lamp which has transfigured man, which has led all mortality across to a life of soul.

And then we see that the two Kingdoms are united through the Snake's sacrifice. After it goes, so to say, through incidents symbolic of what man has to go through in his higher development in an esoteric sense, we see how the Temple of Knowledge is brought by means of all the three human soul-powers across the river, how it rises and each soul-power performs its service. This is meant to show that the soul-powers must be in harmony, since we are told: the single personality can achieve nothing; but when all work together at a favourable moment, when the strong and the weak co-operate in the right relationship, then the soul can acquire the ability to reach the highest state, the union with the Beautiful Lily. Then the Temple moves out of the hidden crevices up to the surface for all who strive in truth after knowledge and wisdom. The Youth is endowed with the knowledge-powers of thought by the Golden King: ‘Know and recognize the highest.’ He is endowed with the knowledge-powers of feeling by the Silver King, which Goethe expresses beautifully with the words: ‘Tend the sheep!’

In feeling are rooted art and religion, and for Goethe both were a unity—already at the time when he wrote on his Italian journey concerning Italy's works of art: ‘There is necessity, there is God!’

But there is also the doing—when man does not apply it to the struggle for existence, but when he makes it into a weapon for gaining beauty and wisdom. This is contained in the words spoken by the Brazen King to the Youth: ‘The Sword in the left hand, the right free!’ There is a whole world in these words. The right hand free to work the self out of human nature.

And what happens with the Fourth King, in whom all three elements are mingled together? This mixed King melts into a grotesque figure. The Will-o'-the-Wisps come and lick what gold there is off him: man's soul-powers here still want to examine what sort of stages of human development, now overcome, there once were.

Let us take yet another feature: namely, when the Giant comes staggering in and then stands there like a statue, pointing to the hours: when man has brought his life into harmony, then the subordinate has a meaning for what is intended to be methodical order. It ought to express itself like a habit. The unconscious itself will then receive a valuable meaning. Hence the Giant is depicted like a clock.

The Old Man with the Lamp is married to the Old Woman. This Old Woman represents to us nothing else but the healthy, understanding human soul-power, which does not penetrate into high regions of spiritual abstractions, but which handles everything healthily and practically, as, for instance, in religion, represented by the Old Man with the Lamp. She is the one to bring the Ferryman his pay: three heads of cabbage, three onions and three artichokes. Such a stage of development has not passed beyond the contemporary. That she is so treated by the Will-o'-the-Wisps is no doubt a reflected picture of how abstract minds look down with a certain amount of scorn on people who take things in directly by instinct or intuition.

Every point, every turn of this story is of deep significance, and if we enter into one more explanation, it must be of an esoteric kind, and you will find that one can really only give the method of explanation. Bury yourselves in the story, and you will discover that a whole world is to be found there, very much more than it has been possible to indicate to-day.

I should like to show you in two examples how much Goethe's spiritual world-view runs through his whole life, how in things of spiritual knowledge he stands in agreement in extreme old age with what he had written earlier.

While Goethe wrote ‘Faust’ he adopted a certain attitude which harks back to a symbol of a deeper evolution-path of nature. When Faust speaks of his father, who was an alchemist, and had taken over the old doctrines credulously, but had misunderstood them, he says that his father also made

‘... a Lion red, a wooer daring, Within the Lily's tepid bath espoused.’

Faust I, Scene II, p. 32.

That is what Faust says, without knowing its significance. But such a saying can become a ladder leading to high stages of development. In the Fairy Tale Goethe shows in the Youth the human being striving for the highest bride, and that with which he is to be united he calls the Beautiful Lily. You notice this Lily is to be found already in the first parts of ‘Faust.’

And, again, the very nerve of Goethe's philosophy which found expression in his Fairy Tale, is to be found also in ‘Faust:’ in Part II, in the Mystic Chorus, where Faust confronts the entry into the spiritual world, where Goethe sets down his avowal of a spiritual world-conception in monumental words. He shows there how the ascent on the road of knowledge follows in three successive stages, namely, the purification of the thought, the illumination of feeling and the working out of will. What man attains through the purification of the thought leads him to recognize the spiritual behind everything. The physical becomes a symbol of the spiritual. He goes deeper still, in order to grasp what is unattainable to thought. He then reaches a state at which he no longer regards things by means of thought, but is directed into the thing itself, where the essence of it, and what one cannot describe become accomplished fact. And that which one cannot describe, that which, as you will hear in the course of the winter addresses, must be thought of in another way, that whereby one must advance to the secrets of the will, he labels simply ‘the indescribable.’ When man has completed the threefold road through thought, feeling and will, he is united with what is called ‘eternal womanhood’ in the Chorus Mysticus, the goal of the human soul's development, the ‘Beautiful Lily’ of the Fairy Tale.

Thus we see that Goethe utters his deepest conviction, his secret revelation there also, where he brings his great confessional poem to an end, after rising up through thought and feeling and will to union with the Beautiful Lily, up to that state which finds its expression in the passage of the Chorus Mysticus, which expresses the same thing as Goethe's philosophy and spiritual science, as well as the Fairy Tale:

‘All things transitory
But as symbols are sent:
Earth's insufficiency
Here grows to Event:
The Indescribable,
Here it is done:
The Woman-Soul leadeth us
Upward and on!’

• 1. and the waves rear up like horses—aufbäumen. Ed.

Who could doubt that one can look at astronomy hopefully if the talk is of the world origin? For astronomy is rightly a science for which we not only have high respect because it leads us with weighty knowledge in the vastnesses of the universe. It is also something that speaks in spite of any abstractness and roughness most intensely to our souls and minds. So one can say: one can understand that the human soul hopes to get explanation of the deepest secrets of existence looking up at the starry heaven, which speaks so deeply to our mind if we open ourselves to it at night.

We want to ask ourselves from the viewpoint of spiritual science, what has astronomy to say about the origin of the universe? Perhaps, that what results from these considerations appears to somebody in such a way, as if a flower of hope is picked to pieces in a certain way. Someone who gets this impression, nevertheless, consoles himself with the fact that astronomy has just brought such miraculous results to us in the last decades that we have enough reason to be very glad about these results as such—also intellectually. However, we are led by this deeper knowledge of the newer time in this field to the fact that just this deepening of astronomy makes us less hopeful if we try to get explanation about the big questions of origin and development of the universe directly. There we can point to the fact that just to that what the physical research experienced as an immense deepening since Copernicus by observations or by courageous speculations in the course of the nineteenth century something was added that introduces us in a before unexpected way in the material character of the universe. Whereas one had once to confine oneself to state out of the boldness of the human thinking that if we look at the stars worlds face us at which we should look similarly as at our own world, the spectral analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen enabled us to investigate the material nature of the stars directly by the physical instrument. Hence, one can venture an assertion reasonably based on immediate observation that we detect the same materials with the same qualities in the different suns, in the nebulae and in the other things that face us in space as we find them on our earth.

That is why one can say that since the middle of the nineteenth century our science was seized by the knowledge: we rest here as human beings within a material world with its laws, with its forces. From the effect which these material laws of the earth show in the so-called spectroscope, and because the same effects are sent from the most distant space to the spectroscope, one can conclude that in the whole space, as far as the material world is considered, the same materiality and the same laws of materiality have poured forth. While it was once in certain respect only a kind of geometrical calculation to investigate the movements of the stars, the brilliant connection of spectral analysis with the so-called Doppler effect enabled us to observe not only those movements which happen before us in such a way that we recognise them as on a surface drawn as the movements of the stars. But since that time we can also include the Doppler effect, a little shift of the spectral lines, in those movements of the stars because the stars come closer or go away from us; while it was only possible once to calculate really what happened in a plane which stands vertically to our line of sight. Such a principle, as it is the connection of the Doppler effect with spectral analysis, is the basis of tremendous achievements of astronomy. What now the human being could invent as a kind of worldview as it turns out if we consider the space filled with suns, planets, minor planets, with nebulae and other things and their intertwined movements and their lawful affecting each other—about this worldview we say: we can understand that such a picture appeared to the human mind that strove for knowledge as a model of clearness, of inner substantiality, if one pursues to encompass reality with the thinking.

If we visualise what it means to calculate a thing that fulfils the space: the big and the small things move in such a way, the one has an effect on the other. If we visualise, what it means to be able to think such a clear thought in the space, we visualise it comparing it to any other physical effect that we see in our surroundings, for example, with the turning green of the trees in the spring or with the blossoming of a plant. Some people who stand or stood vividly in science know how bitter it is if they are compelled at first on the ground of completely outer consideration repeatedly to reach for concepts that can be thought by no means to an end if it concerns, for example, imagining a growing, developing plant, apart from more complex phenomena like animal organisms. Even already in the phenomena of chemistry and physics of our earth evolution some rest remains to us in the effects of heat et cetera even if we want to understand things, which our eyes see, and our ears hear, with clear concepts. If we look at space and can comprise it in such a picture that expresses itself in clear changes of location, in mutual relations of movement, then it is comprehensible that this has a beatific effect on our inside. Then we say to ourselves: such explanations that we can give of the movement of the stars in space and their mutual effect are very clear in themselves so that we can generally consider them as an example of explanations. Small wonder, hence, that this thought of the fascinating clarity of the astronomical worldview seized numerous human beings. It was very instructive for someone who pursued the theoretical science of the nineteenth century that the excellent spirits of the nineteenth century used approaches that were predetermined by the just characterised fascinating sensation.

Excellent spirits of the nineteenth century thought possibly in that way, we see out in space, see the mutual relations and movements of the stars, if we transform them into thoughts, a picture of miraculous clearness originates. Now we try to see into that little world into which, however, only the speculating thought can see which one built up as hypotheses in the nineteenth century more and more: the world of atoms and molecules. One imagined that every material consists of smallest parts which no eye and no microscope can see which one has to assume, however, hypothetically. Thus, one assumed that—as one has many stars in space—here are as it were smallest stars, the atoms. Then from the mutual arrangement of the atoms, as they are grouped together, arises—indeed, only hypothetically—that what can wake the picture in us in microcosm: here you have a number of atoms, they relate to each other in a certain respect and move around each other. If the atoms relate to each other and move, this means that the material, which composes these atoms, for example, is hydrogen or oxygen. All materials can be referred to small atoms of which they consist. These small atoms are grouped again, and then certain groups form the molecules. However, if one could look into these atoms and molecules, one would have in microcosm an effigy of the clearness, which we have outdoors, where the space is filled with stars. It was attractive for some thinkers of the nineteenth century if they could say to themselves, all outer phenomena, light, sound, elasticity, electricity and so on lead back to such effects that are caused by the movements and forces of atoms that happen as the forces and movements on the large scale if we see out into space. A strange picture originated in some spirits: if we look into the human brain, it also consists of materials and forces, which we find in the world outdoors. If one were able to look into the smallest things of the human brain, in the circulating blood, one would recognise something like smallest atomic and molecular worlds that are effigies of the big universe in microcosm. One believed if one could pursue mathematically what arises from the atoms and their movements, then one would be able to recognise that a certain kind of atomic movements—working on our eye—cause the impression of light, another kind the impression of warmth. Briefly, one imagined to be able to reduce all phenomena of nature to a small, tiny astronomy, to the astronomy of the atoms and molecules. Almost the word had been stamped which played a big role in the sensational talks that during the seventies Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1815-1896, German naturalist) held about the “limits of the knowledge of nature,” the word of the “spirit of Laplace.” This had become a kind of catchword and meant nothing else than that it would have to be the ideal of a physical explanation to reduce everything that we see round us to astronomical knowledge of the movements of atoms and molecules. Laplace was that spirit who surveyed the celestial mechanics. That spirit who could bring in this overview of the stars in space in smallest molecular and atomic things would approach, so to speak, more and more the ideal to recognise our nature astronomically.

Hence, we can say that there were people who believed: if I have the impression, I hear a tone, or I see red, a movement goes forward in truth in my brain. If I could describe these movements as the astronomers describe the movements of the stars, then I would understand what it concerned understanding the natural phenomena and the human organism. Then we would have the fact in our consciousness: I hear the tone C sharp, I see red. However, in truth it would be in such a way: if we perceive red, a little atomic and molecular universe takes place in us, and if we knew how the movements are, we would have understood, why we perceive red and not yellow, because with another movement yellow would happen.

Thus, astronomical knowledge became an ideal in the course of the nineteenth century, penetrating any physical knowledge with the same clear concepts, which apply to astronomy. One can say, it is interesting largely to pursue how under the influence of such a thought the theoretical natural sciences developed. I would like to point to something that faced me many years ago. I knew a headmaster who was an excellent man, also as a headmaster. However, he occupied himself during his remaining school activity to invent such a physical system along which one can also get without the attractive or repulsive forces valid since Newton's time. Thus,, that headmaster—Heinrich Schramm—whose works are rather significant, tried in his book The General Movement of Matter as a Basic Cause of All Natural Phenomena to get rid of the gravitational force except that what already the astronomical knowledge had removed.

It was very interesting what this man tried in a certain ingenious way at first. For if we believe that light, sound and heat are nothing else than movements of the smallest mass particles, if astronomical knowledge is able to shine everywhere, why should we still assume those weird, mystic forces reaching from the sun to the earth through the empty space? Why should one not also be able to assume instead of this mystic gravitational attraction in which one had believed up to now such a force between the atoms and molecules? Why should one not be able to shake this too? Indeed, this man succeeded—without considering a special attractive force—in understanding the attraction of the heavenly bodies and the atoms. He showed: if two bodies are confronted in space, nevertheless, one does not need to suppose that they attract each other, because someone does not assume such an attraction—so Schramm meant—who does not believe in such a thing like hands shaking in space. The only thing that one is allowed to assume is that small moved mass particles which push from all sides like small balls, so that from all sides small balls push the two big balls. If one exactly calculates now and does no mistake, one finds that simply because the hits between both balls and those that are caused from without result in a difference. The forces, which one assumed, otherwise, as attractive forces from without can be substituted by hits from without, so that one would have to replace the attractive forces by pushing forces, which attract the matter.

With tremendous astuteness, you find this thought carried out in the cited writing. I could bring in later writings of the same character; however, Schramm treated the thing first. Thus, Schramm could show how completely according to the same law two molecules exercise attraction just like the biggest heavenly bodies. Thus, astronomical knowledge became something that gained ground in the biggest space and worked into the smallest, assumed particles of matter and ether. This stood as a great ideal before the thinkers of the nineteenth century. Who did his studies in this time knows that one applied this ideal to the most different phenomena that astronomical knowledge was just a radical ideal. One is allowed to say that everything was suitable—at first during the seventies—to promote this ideal, because to that all the results of the more precise investigation of the conditions of heat were added. In the sixties, one recognised more and more what Julius Robert Mayer had shown already during the forties of the nineteenth century ingeniously: the fact that heat can be transformed into other natural forces according to particular numerical ratios. The fact that this is the case, we realise if we touch a surface with the fingers intensely, for example, the pressure changes into heat. If we heat a steam engine, the heat changes into the locomotive forces of the machine. As heat changes into motion or compressive force into heat, the other natural forces, electricity et cetera change likewise into natural forces of which one thought that they are transformable. If one connected this thought with the laws of astronomical knowledge, one could say, what faces us there differs in relation to reality only because a certain form of movement within the world of the atoms and molecules changes into another. We have a certain form of movement in the molecules, a little, complex astronomical system, and the movements change into other movements, one system into another system. Heat is transformed into locomotive force et cetra that way.

One believed to be able to figure everything out this way. So big and tremendous was the impression of astronomical knowledge that it provided such an aim. We have now to say that at first still a little was gained concerning a theory of world evolution with all these thoughts. Why? There we have to look around at the ideas of those people who were in the immediate cultural life and ideals of their time. For I do not want to start immediately from that which spiritual science has to say and what can be easily contested by its opponents. We can convince ourselves the easiest how these things happened if we look a little closer at that speech About the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature that Du Bois-Reymond held on the Conference of German Naturalists and Physicians in Leipzig on 14 August 1872.

There Du Bois-Reymond spoke highly of this ideal of an astronomical knowledge and said that true natural sciences exist only where we can lead back the single natural phenomena to an astronomy of atoms and molecules, anything else is not valid as an explanation of nature. Thus, somebody would have explained the human soul life scientifically if he had succeeded in showing how after the model of astronomical movements the atoms and molecules must form a group in the human being to let appear a human brain. At the same time, however, Du Bois-Reymond drew attention to the fact that we have done still nothing for the explanation of the soul and its facts by such an astronomical explanation. For he said, assuming that the ideal is fulfilled that we can really say, the movements of the atoms happen within the brain after the model of astronomical movements: by the perception of the tone C sharp this movement complex arises, by the perception of the colour red another—then we have satisfied our need of causality scientifically. However, no one, Du Bois-Reymond emphasised, could realise, why a certain kind of movements just changes into the experience of our soul: I perceive red, I hear organ tone, and I smell rose smell or such.

For Du Bois-Reymond drew attention to something that already Leibniz had stressed and that nothing can be objected. If we imagine—if it depends only on movement—a gigantic human brain, so that we could walk in it like in a factory where we can observe all movements of the wheels and belts and could show: there is a certain movement—we draw it nicely and calculate it as we can calculate the movements of the planets around the sun. However, nobody would know if he did not know it from other things that this movement, which I observe there, corresponds in the soul to the experience: I see red. He would not be able to figure this out, but he would be able to find out only laws of movement and can say to themselves, the movement runs this or that way, this and that happens in space. However, he would not be able to find the connection between these movements thought according to the model of astronomy and the peculiar experience: I see red, I hear organ tone, and I smell rose smell. If he did not know from anywhere else where from these experiences are, he would never be able to conclude them from the movements of the atoms. Du Bois-Reymond even said rather crassly: “Which conceivable connection exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and, on the other hand, with the original, not further definable, undeniable facts: I feel pain, I feel desire, I taste sweet, smell rose smell, hear organ tone, see red, and the immediately flowing certainty from that: so I am? It is absolutely and forever incomprehensible that it should not be irrelevant to a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen etc. atoms in which way they lie and move in which way they lay and moved in which way they will lie and move.”

What Du Bois-Reymond said there did not completely comply with natural logic; for just in this crass expression we can see that it is not irrelevant to a number of molecules—to material parts—in which way they lie and move. For you know that it is not irrelevant to sulfur, saltpetre and coal in which way they lie side by side. If they lie side by side under certain conditions, they yield gunpowder. It is also not irrelevant in which relation one has brought the carbon to the hydrogen; but it concerns whether the material is led with the movement to another material with which it is used and can maybe form an explosive force. This quotation was overshot if it also had a shade of correctness. However, already Leibniz had recognised the correct thing: the fact that there no kind of transition exists between the astronomical movement of the molecules and atoms and between the qualities of our experience and our inner soul life. It is not possible to bridge this abyss with the bare astronomical science as a “movement.”

We have to get out this clearly from the various mistakes in the speech of Du Bois-Reymond. Nevertheless, this is the valuable of this speech: it was something like a reaction, like a feeling against the omnipotence and the infinite wisdom of the astronomical knowledge. If we take into consideration what we are able to make evident so clearly, we find the possibility to transfer it to the big astronomical knowledge. If we assume what is certainly justified that one cannot find the bridge to the experiences of soul and mind from the astronomical knowledge of the movement of the smallest mass particles anyhow, then, however, one cannot bridge from that what the big astronomy offers to any effects of soul and mind which fill the space! If it is true and we imagine the human brain so increased that we could walk in it and look at the movements in it like at the movements of the heavenly bodies, and if we could perceive nothing of mental counter-images in these movements of our brain, we do not need to be surprised if we stand in such an enlarged brain—namely in the universe—and cannot find the bridge between the movements of the stars in space and the possible mental-spiritual activities which cover the cosmic space. They would also relate to movements of the stars like our thoughts, sensations and soul experiences relate to movements of our own cerebral mass. When Du Bois-Reymond spoke this, everybody who could think could conclude what was never done up to now: if that is right which Du Bois-Reymond showed with some certainty, one must also say, if anything mental or spiritual fills the space, no astronomy, no astronomical knowledge can say anything against or for that spiritual or mental filling the space, because one cannot conclude anything spiritual from movements.

With it, it was necessary to say, the astronomer must restrict himself at the description of that what goes forward in the universe. He cannot at all judge about the fact that on a large scale soul experiences of cosmic kind belong to the movements of the stars as our soul experiences belong to the movements of mass particles in the brain. With it, already in the seventies of the nineteenth century astronomy was limited. However, one would have had to ask quite different from Du Bois-Reymond asked, namely, is there any possibility to penetrate in another way to find the mental and spiritual beings filling the cosmic space?—Therefore, spiritual science points in contrast to astronomy to something that we discussed repeatedly in these talks: the fact that the human being is able to develop his cognitive forces to higher levels than he has them in the normal life. If these cognitive forces have been lifted to a higher level, it is possible to find other things in space and time than that at what one looked as the ideal fulfilment of space and time in the nineteenth century: the astronomic movements of forces and atoms in space.

However, we must not think too poorly about what the external natural sciences have to say concerning the evolution of the world. For the scientific facts, which have led, indeed, to a certain radical ideal of an astronomical molecular and atomic knowledge, developed something that we have to regard almost as a model of a scientific, deeply in the secrets of existence shining fact. Even if it has a limited significance, nevertheless, it is a fact of very first rank. Today it can be indicated only because what it concerns is the answer of the question: “What has astronomy to say about the origin of the world?”

  In order to answer this question, one has to point to the fact that within the scientific thinking, research and experimentation it is clearly proved that it is right, indeed, in general that we can transform natural forces into each other that we can transform, for example, heat into work or if we have done any work this into heat. However, that is right with a quite weighty restriction. While on one side it is valid: heat can be transformed into mechanical work, into kinetic energy and kinetic energy again into heat—we must say on the other side that if one wants to transform heat back into work, in kinetic energy, this cannot happen unlimitedly. We realise this the clearest with the steam engine. We produce the movement by heat, but we cannot at all transform all heat into kinetic energy. Some heat gets always lost, so that we always have to calculate with all processes in nature where heat is transformed into movement with a loss of heat, as it is sure with a steam engine. For even with the best steam engines we can only transform about one quarter of the heat into movement, the other is emitted into the cooler, into the surroundings et cetera. We are able to do it only in such a way that we must realise that a part of the heat—as heat—is emitted in the cosmic space.

The knowledge that, indeed, kinetic energy can be completely transformed into heat but heat cannot completely retransformed into kinetic energy has also become in exterior relation one of the most fruitful knowledge for the science of the nineteenth century. Since thermodynamics is based merely on this knowledge, so that a big part of our present physics is built on it what has been characterised just here as the knowledge that heat cannot be retransformed completely into kinetic energy, but that always a rest of heat remains which is emitted. This has been shown apodictically by such investigations as for example those of the famous physicist Clausius (Rudolf C., 1822-1888, German physicist) who generalised this sentence that with all processes in the universe this sentence must be applied. Hence, we deal with all conversion processes where heat plays a role, with a transmission of heat in that work which is just considered with the facts of our nature. However, because always by the transformation a rest of heat remains, one can easily understand that the final state of our material development will be the transformation of all kinetic energy, of all other work in nature into heat. This is the last that must result: every physical process must convert itself into heat because always a rest of heat is left. Thus, all world processes run in such a way that heat will become bigger and bigger which results as a rest and at last the result must be that all movement processes will have been transformed into heat. Then we would be concerned with a big world chaos that exists only of heat, which can no longer be retransformed. Every life process that the sun causes on earth leaves rests of heat; at last, everything that shines from the sun to us tends to pass over to a general heat death.

This is the famous “Clausius's heat death” into which any material development of the universe must discharge. Here physics delivered a knowledge for that who generally understands something of knowledge that is quite apodictic against which one cannot argue. Our material universe heads the heat death in which all physical processes will once be buried.

There we have something from physics that we can transfer immediately on the entire astronomy. If we were only able to see movement changing into heat, we could say, the universe could be infinite forwards and backward, does not need to end. However, physics shows in the second law of the mechanical theory of heat that the material processes of the universe head the heat death. One can be convinced: if it were not so difficult, if one must not have such a lot of mathematical prior knowledge and go into difficult physical processes, much more people would know something of Clausius's heat death than it is really the case.

There we have brought something in our astronomical worldview that signifies development as it were. Imagine how fatal it must be for a materialistic knowledge to open itself to this apodictic result! Someone who only considers the spiritual and mental as concomitants of the material movements must suppose immediately that everything mental and spiritual is buried in the heat chaos, which our material world heads. Thus, all culture for which the human beings strives, all beauty and effectiveness of the earth would once meet their death with the general heat death at the same time.—One can now say that in particular this general heat death has become somewhat fatal for the astronomical knowledge. Not all astronomers take the easy way out like Ernst Haeckel in his Riddle of the Universe. He means, the second law of the mechanical heat theory contradicts, actually, the first one that all heat is convertible. Indeed, one cannot deny—Haeckel also knows this—that our solar system hastens to such a heat death, but he consoles himself saying: if the whole solar system is doomed to die the heat death, it will once collide with another world system, then heat originates from the collision again—and then a new world system originates!—However, he does not consider that a clash of the slags and rests is already considered in the general heat death, so that one cannot hope for consolation from that.

There are also serious people who feel urged to get the possibility from the physical-astronomical knowledge to understand the world development almost try to come beyond the general heat death. There the attempt of the Swedish researcher Arrhenius (Svante A., 1859-1927) may be mentioned who refers in his book The Becoming of the Worlds (1908) in manifold way just to such questions from the viewpoint of physical chemistry, physics, astronomy, and geology. One can say, here the attempt is already done in somewhat wittier way than Haeckel did to overcome the theory of the general heat death. However, if one regards everything that Arrhenius tries to adduce, one must say, it is persuasive in no way. Only briefly, I would like to characterise what is taught from this side about the overcoming of the general heat death. Of course, one cannot deny that our solar system heads the general heat death. However, besides it Arrhenius represents another idea that is based on certain assumptions of Maxwell (James Clerk M., 1831-1879, Scottish physicist) and his so-called pressure of radiation. This is something that is opposite to the former attraction of the world masses that perpetually radiates from the single heavenly bodies into space to the other heavenly bodies generating pressure caused by various natural forces.

This pressure which as it were the heavenly bodies send into space is able—because it is a force radiating in the cosmic space—to carry the smallest particles of matter which are pushed off by a heavenly body. Arrhenius now tries to show by all kinds of considerations that it is natural that, as long as special conditions do not take place, these phenomena caused by the radiation pressure prevent the general heat death by no means. But Arrhenius believes that such special conditions are caused by the fact that as it were this cosmic dust becomes nebulae which are in particular material states—for example, by the fact that in such nebula any star drives from anywhere, would have compressed the matter that it has taken away, and increased the temperature that way. If it were possible that such a star that meets the matter drives in such a nebula, attracts the matter and compresses it, increases the temperature, we would have something that causes an increase of temperature in the cosmic space again, and we would have something that could be transformed again into work. Arrhenius shows wittily that the cosmic dust that approaches to such a nebula is in another position—as it were, it is carried away in such a position in which it escapes from the general trend of the heat death.

I could indicate only briefly, what is also indicated too briefly in Arrhenius's writing. However, someone who goes into that which has led to the assumption of the general heat death cannot help admitting that the possibility is only virtual, that in a nebula, even if the temperature rises, the heat death could be detained. Since, nevertheless, these are only fallacies, and the law of the general heat death is such a general one that we must admit if we properly proceed: according to the physical laws the stars, which collide with a nebula, have only to bring the rest of their former existence with them. Thus, these processes, which happen in the nebula, must also be included in the trend of the universe to the general heat death.

Now it is typical that Arrhenius still goes on and includes the possibility in his idea of the radiation pressure that a heavenly body could push seeds of living beings to the other by the radiation pressure. Indeed, one can prove—with a big appearance of correctness—that the cold through which certain plant seeds and animal gametes would be carried would work preserving on them, so that one could suppose by calculation only that life was carried from one heavenly body to the other heavenly body by the radiation pressure. One could work out this, for example, for the distance from the earth to Mars. Then one spares the earth—instead of saddling the earth with it—the possibility, as one wants it, otherwise, in physics, geology et cetera, to have produced life because then one can say: the earth does not need to have produced life, because it can have flown to it from other heavenly bodies.—Besides, it does not issue a lot. For, will one attain anything special with it that one moves the question of the origin of life to other heavenly bodies? There we have the same difficulties, only that on the earth the conditions hinder us to accept the origin of life on other heavenly bodies. Generally, these matters can show how apparently materialistic prejudices influence well-intentioned enterprises of the present, which start from the eternity of life. Since the whole line of thought is materialistic, so that one does not take into account that life could have its origin here as well as in that what could be thought as radiation from one heavenly body to the other. This shows that in the present even well-intentioned thoughts suffer from placing themselves on the ground of materialism.

Thus, the same faces us everywhere: the study of physical laws, material laws, material forces is used, so that as it were everything that physics finds is transferred to the big world edifice, and one tries to imagine the origin of the universe with these forces. We have realised that such thoughts exceed the limits of the astronomical knowledge everywhere. Since the astronomer cannot at all conclude anything that deals with the forces, which cause the becoming of the world from that what he has before himself. We can realise again that our thinking and feeling are mental processes which cause material processes quite certainly, for example, in our brain, even in our blood. Someone who feels sense of shame to whom the blush rises in his face can convince himself of the fact that mental processes entail material processes. However, someone who admits that the mental-spiritual causes material processes in us has to say to himself, if I stood in the human brain and studied the outside movements, I would only see movements in the movements; there I would not at all anticipate that I include the movements that are caused by the spiritual-mental processes. I ignore the spiritual-mental causes.—May it not seem comprehensible that the astronomer studying the heavenly bodies is urged to develop the causes one or the other way that any star moves one or the other way? Are we allowed to conclude from the bare movements or from the dynamic laws: the sun must be positioned in a certain way to the earth, the moon must be positioned in a certain way to the earth, must orbit the earth in a certain way, and thereby these movements can result? Astronomy can generally decide nothing in what way they are caused in the mental-spiritual. Therefore, we can come just from the field of astronomy to the necessity to point by quite different means to the true causes also of the universe. There I can point—today just only with a few words—to the connection of earth, sun and moon.

Their mutual life and their relations of motion have developed, as these three heavenly bodies relate to each other. If we want to recognise why the sun, earth and moon relate to each other just as they relate today, we must not only move up from those forces on earth which we recognise as the physical-mechanical to the space, but we must still move up from other processes which happen on earth. Most certainly we have if we look at the human being something before us that belongs to the whole earth and its connection with the sun and moon as the blossoming of flowers or any other process—or as an electric process in the air. Certainly, the human being belongs with all that he is to the earth, and it is an abstraction if one only thinks the earth as the geologists do, as an only inorganic, inanimate thing, but one has to include the human beings in the whole processes of the earth.

At first, we have the difficulty that we must distinguish two things if we want to understand the difference between human being and animal in the right way. With the animal, the type predominates, so that an individual ego is not effective in its whole development between birth and death in so determining way, as this is the case with the human being with his individual ego, which expresses itself in education and the cultural life. This distinguishes the human being from the animal with which the type predominates. Now it is in such a way that such things go over by transitions into each other. With the animal, the type predominates, but the type goes into the human nature.

The further we to go back in time, the more we find that the human being is also a generic being, and we see the individual more and more originating from the type. On the ground of the type, the individual emerges. We have the ideal of a human future before ourselves, which says to us, the individual, the ego-nature of every human being will be victorious over the type in the course of the earth development. Nevertheless, going back we just realise the type on the ground of human development. Going back, we have also approached another condition of consciousness more and more in which the human being was connected dream-like, vividly with a spiritual world. That is why we must regard these two things as related: the type and the pictorial, dreamlike consciousness of the ancient times on the one hand and, on the other hand, the development of the individuality and our individual consciousness by that what the human being has to obtain in the course of the times. Such an emergence of the individuality from the type, the intellectual from the clairvoyant-dreamlike must be searched in its origins within the whole world development. Since, so to speak, as the stone which falls to the earth is controlled by the general world laws, this emergence of the human individuality and intellectuality from the human type and clairvoyance is also connected with the big cosmic laws which work everywhere in space. We have already done a step in this direction when we characterised the significance of geology for spiritual science.

We could show there that we can trace back the earth to a condition in which such processes are earthly, telluric, which only happen today if our thoughts and sensations work like decomposing in our organism, so that we find—if we go back to the earth origin—such epochs in which the earth was in a process of decomposition. That knowledge shows—what is shown more exactly in the Occult Science—which has been characterised in these talks that as it were the whole earth has sheltered from too extensive a decomposition process by the fact that it has separated the moon. The moon had to be separated from our earth so that that condition could be overcome which can be described as a decomposition process within the earth evolution.

We do not only have a mechanical-physical process, but we have to regard the extrusion of the moon as such a process that became necessary because the earth sheltered, while she expelled the moon, from too extensive a process of decomposition. The earth could thereby get a new relation to the sun directly. Since while it had the moon in itself, this decomposition process was so that the effect of the sun could not penetrate the terrestrial atmosphere—if we imagine the terrestrial atmosphere at that time. Therefore, only a new condition had to be caused, so that earth and sun could catch sight of each other. With it, with the cleaning of the terrestrial atmosphere—what became only possible with the extrusion of the moon—the condition of forces came into being which gradually transformed the old generic consciousness into the self-consciousness, into the intellectual consciousness. Thus, the extrusion of the moon, the cleaning of the terrestrial atmosphere and the direct relation of earth and sun are connected with the entire human development. We could now go back even further and would find such a condition of our earth development in which the earth was still connected with the sun.

We would also find that the separation of sun and earth happened in order to make the existence of conscious beings generally possible on earth. Only by the repulsion of the earth from the sun that force system came about which made it possible that beings could become conscious. Thus, the ancient clairvoyant consciousness became possible by the repulsion of the earth from the sun—and the advance to a higher consciousness, an intellectual consciousness by the extrusion of the moon from the earth. If we ascend clairvoyantly to that what external astronomy cannot give, we have to regard the cosmic forces as the reasons of the separation of the sun and the remaining planets from the earth—that is we come to spiritual causes.

I could only indicate the principle. Of course, everybody could ask, did the human being already exist, when earth and sun separated? Indeed, he existed, only under other conditions. It is a matter of course that the human being, as he lives under the current conditions, would not be possible if the sun were together with the earth. However, this would be no objection. We receive spiritual causes for the movements of the heavenly bodies. Now we do no longer stop at that to which astronomy pointed more than one century ago at the mere utilisation of physical laws saying: the earth was once connected with the sun in a big gas ball, that started rotating, and thereby the planets and also the earth were separated and later also the moon from the earth. - Now, we do no longer get around to asserting that such a thing happens only due to mechanical-physical laws, but inner, spiritual reasons must be there why the earth separated from the sun.

The earth was separated from the sun, so that the human being was raised to the conscious experience, and the moon was separated from the earth, so that he can advance to his higher consciousness. Briefly, we start bringing that in the astronomical worldview what we must bring in—namely into the astronomical worldview of the small brain that what we must bring in if we want to go over from the mere movement of the cerebral atoms to the conclusion: I see red, hear organ tone, I smell rose smell et cetera.—Thus, we must go forward if we want to find the transition from that what the popular astronomy can give us, to that what the causes of the events are in space. Hence, those who want to stop at the ground of external physics should confine themselves to investigate this only what movements or what forces are what is to be recognised astronomically. They should confess that another progress of knowledge is necessary if astronomy wants to come to an explanation of the becoming of the universe, should confess that they would have to stop as representatives of a rationalistic and empiric astronomy at the explanation of the becoming of the universe.

Considering this, it turns out that the great and significant results of modern astronomy fit in our spiritual-scientific world edifice quite wonderfully. Take the Occult Science. There is shown how our earth has gradually developed, how it goes—just like the single human being in the successive earth-lives—through developmental stages how, so to speak, a planet goes through developmental stages. There our earth is led back to a former planetary stage, this stage to an earlier one, so far, as one can trace back it, up to a stage, which is called “Old Saturn” with which, however, not our today's Saturn is meant, but a planetary predecessor of our earth.

The same cognition that is quite independent of any outer physics and any speculation, shows that a planetary predecessor of our earth, just this Old Saturn, was mere heat and that spiritual forces intervened in this condition of heat, so that spiritual forces took possession of the heat chaos. All development is thereby caused up to our earth. In addition, spiritual science shows that really the material under our feet is dying off. In the talk What Has Geology to Say About the World Origin?, we have shown that geology has advanced so far to agree with us that the earth crust is dying off. We understand everything that we know of the earth crust only well if we understand it as dying off. However, in this fact is contained that the spiritual becomes free from the material. If among us the planetary material dies off, the spirit gets free from it.

We have another possibility now! We can point to the nebula—there we have no speculations after the model of the physicists, nevertheless, do not stop at the heat death—and can say, indeed, there we have the things in which all remaining processes are transformed into heat. However, as with the beginning of the earth spiritual powers seized the heat state, spiritual powers lead the nebulae into which by the heat death the solar systems discharge from the heat death to new solar systems. There is, actually, nothing more astonishing than the accordance of one of the most admirable laws of the nineteenth century in its application to astronomy—like the application of the second law of the mechanical heat theory—with the positive, actual results of astronomical observations.

If you do not take the speculative inventions of all kinds of radiation, but if you start from that what one can obtain from the spectroscope or from the photography of the astronomical phenomena, you realise that everything complies down to the last detail with that what one can obtain as evolution of the worlds from spiritual science. For it shows how that what one sees as an astronomical spatial picture is the result - the spiritual result—of spiritual beings. We can say different from the modern astronomical physicists: the human being has no reason to fight against the heat death or to be afraid of it, because he knows that from it new life will blossom as from the old heat chaos life blossomed which we have now before ourselves. Because a real repetition and increase of life is possible this way—not only from that what Arrhenius assumes that life is winded up like in a clockwork anew and takes place in the nebula anew, but development is only possible if a spiritual element works from one heat state to the other. If our world substance is buried in the grave of heat, the spirit has advanced a step and conjures up higher things, higher life from the heat chaos. Hence, the final state of the earth embodiment—the Vulcan stage—is in the Occult Science that which points to this what looks out as a new life from the grave of the heat death. Therefore, the name “Vulcan” is used. If we challenge astronomy, we can just realise that the external science complies deeply with that what spiritual science has to give.

Indeed, people will say repeatedly, you spiritual scientists are daydreamers, because the right result of exact science absolutely contradicts what you believe to get from spiritual science.—Anybody could then say, you have seriously spoken even of Moses, but we know that all that is overtaken. Since the glorious natural sciences have taught us long since, we are way beyond the world development of Moses—natural sciences have shown this.—Those speak that way who only are present from without. However, let us ask the others who were present not from without, but more from within. There I know a very significant physicist who has considerable share of the development of optics, Biot (Jean-Baptiste B., 1774-1862), who said, either Moses was as deeply experienced in sciences as our century, or he was inspired.

A leading physicist of the nineteenth century said this. Now those who write popular books about worldviews maybe mean, indeed, a physicist thinks that way who deals only with the outside of the phenomena. Nevertheless, those who go deeper into the being of the organic show that one was chased away from the spirit in the course of the nineteenth century where one searched the natural causes. -- How did Liebig (Justus von L., 1803-1873, chemist) think, who deeply penetrated into the being of the organic, about the relations of the world, to which he had dedicated his research efforts, to the spiritual world? He says that these are the opinions of dilettantes who derive the authorisation of their walks on the border of the fields of physical research to explain to the unknowing and gullible audience how world and life originated, actually, and how far, nevertheless, the human being has come concerning the investigation of the highest things.—People may say: have you never heard that Lyell (Charles L., 1797-1875) founded a geology? Have you never heard about the big progress, which came with him, that he overcame those worldviews, which still count on spiritual forces?—I could bring writings by Lyell forward to you that make deep impression today. However, just Lyell said once, in which direction we pursue our investigations, everywhere we discover the clearest proofs of a creative intelligence, of its providence, power and wisdom.

The founder of the newer geology says this. Now the people could come and say, nevertheless, Darwin (Charles D., 1809-1882, English naturalist) has overcome the influence of any spiritual forces. Darwin showed how by purely natural processes the evolution of the organisms happens.—However, Darwin himself wrote: “I opine that all living beings that ever have been on earth are descended from a prototype into which the creator breathed life.”—So people can also not quote Darwin who says there, we are daydreamers if we speak of spiritual beings and spiritual forces. Then still people maybe come and say, do you not know the basic nerve of any scientific development of the nineteenth century, which has deeply influenced any development? Do you know nothing about the basic law of the transformation of the natural forces?—We have just spoken of it today, have realised that the transformation of the natural forces does not contradict what spiritual science has to say.

However, the people could want to refer to Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1878, German physician and physicist), to the founder of the law of the mechanical heat equivalent as well as of the transformation of the natural forces. However, Julius Robert Mayer did the strange dictum: I exclaim wholeheartedly, a right philosophy can be nothing else than propaedeutics for the Christian religion!—The things are different everywhere if one goes back to the origins and to those who created these origins who are the great pathfinders on the way of human knowledge, and not to their followers, nor to those who want to find lightweight ideas—like the newer astrophysicists—and want to encompass the whole world with it. If one goes not to the latter but to the former, one can say, spiritual science completely agrees with the great pathfinders.

Hence, spiritual science knows that it can position itself in the development of the human mind, and that it advances harmoniously with the development of humanity with everything that has promoted the human development. If a merely external, physical astronomy wants to devise the evolution of the universe, one may remind those who act in such a way of a general quotation in the Xenien by Goethe and Schiller:

To infinite heights the firmament extends,
However, the little mind also found the way to them.

We must shelter from the fact that the little mind finds its way to the firmament. For we can show that just as little as the consideration of the brain leads us to a spiritual-mental life, but that this is separated from the mere movements and this can go beyond them, just as little the consideration of the external movements and laws is able to penetrate in the spirit of the universe. Hence, there it remains true in a certain way what Schiller means speaking to the astronomers:

Do not chat to me so much about nebulae and suns!
Is nature only great, because she gives you to count them?
Your object is the most elated, admittedly, in space;
But, friends, the elated does not live in space!

Schiller means that. It is right if one regards the movable appearance in space only. It is not right if one goes into what—as a spiritual—emits the laws of space.—Thus, the words remain true: ascending with the mind to the stars always causes the notion of the spiritual-divine in every mind. If we want to ascend, however, with our cognition, our cognition has to go the way: per aspera ad astra—through severity to the stars, through the thorns to the roses

However, this is the way of spiritual knowledge. Just the spiritual-scientific way to the stars shows that it brings along the human being to say to himself: as my materials and those which are in my surroundings are spread out in the whole universe—as the spectroscope shows--, the spiritual that lives in me is spread out in the whole universe and belongs to it. My corporeality is born out of the universe—my soul and mind are born out of the universe. It remains true what should be characterised here once again with some words which I already stated on another occasion: it remains true that the human being can only come to the entire world consciousness if he gets clear about the question which astronomy cannot answer: the question of his share of the world and his destination in the world. It is true that the answer to this question can give him security of life, optimism, hope of life if he knows from the spiritual-scientific knowledge what the words mean:

The wealth of materials approaches the human sense
Mysteriously from the depths of the universe.
The spirit's word flows clarifying
In the soul's grounds from cosmic heights full of contents.
They meet in the human inside to reality full of wisdom.

Dear attendees! For quite a while now, I have been privileged to give lectures here in Vienna every year on topics from what I dare to call the spiritual-scientific worldview. The friends of our spiritual-scientific world view here in Vienna have been of the opinion that, even in these eventful and fateful times, it would not be inappropriate to hold two such lectures from this spiritual-scientific field this year, and this may well be because this spiritual-scientific field scientific field touches the deepest foundations of the human soul, those foundations in which the human soul is connected with the powers we call eternal, with those powers to which Goethe's words refer: “All that is transitory is only a parable.”

A consideration from the field of spiritual science is directed in particular to those foundations of the human soul, from which arise both life's harshest disappointments and its most difficult trials, as well as the admirable deeds that are being performed in such a significant way in our time for the salvation and progress of humanity. Spiritual science, dear attendees, is based on a view of life that is by no means one of the recognized ones in our present time, a view that is completely rejected by the most educated of our educated for a variety of reasons; rejected on the one hand because it is considered to be completely contradictory to everything that scientific world observation of our time, because, on the other hand, as we shall see, it is associated in a very misleading way with the shallows of human superstition, because, furthermore, it is erroneously regarded as a point of view that takes from many people that which gives them support and security in life, the right adherence to religious belief.

I hope, dear attendees, that all three misconceptions of the spiritual scientific point of view can at least be somewhat dispelled by what today's reflection will endeavor to offer. Nevertheless, it must be said from the outset that the opposition to spiritual science, and even the accusation that it completely contradicts what is even called common sense in the broadest circles today, that all these challenges and accusations are fully understandable to the person who stands completely on the ground of this spiritual science. And so understandable, so comprehensible are they to him that he must repeatedly remind people that in the course of human development, what appears to be self-evident to a bygone age, what alone corresponds to common sense, must be replaced by something completely opposite.

We must always be reminded of such a turnaround in human development, as it has been experienced at the present time, when the newer natural science has taken possession of the human world view. At the time when Copernicus introduced a new view of the spatial universe, people had to break with everything that for centuries, indeed one can say millennia, had been considered to be shown by the healthy five senses and understood by common sense. The human soul clings to that which it has become accustomed to in its thinking and imagining, just as there are people — although this is a grotesque example — who, after moving into a new apartment, still go home thinking about their old apartment in the evenings. Just as the people in this grotesque example show how they cling to their habits of thinking, so they also do so with regard to the great world-view questions and world-view standpoints. For centuries, humanity has been educated and has become accustomed to a world-view that is opposed to what spiritual science wants to bring to the present and the future. And so today one would be more surprised if, I would say, at the first hint, someone who has not yet heard of spiritual science in the sense in which it is meant here were to immediately agree with something, than if contradiction were to arise over contradiction at such a first encounter with this spiritual science.

In my last lecture here, I tried to illuminate the paths that lead to this spiritual science. Today, because I would like to touch on what the spiritual scientist can and may feel in our fateful time, I will only be able to briefly and sketchily hint at how spiritual science comes to its insights, to these insights that are just as contested and so difficult to understand today.

The first objection that must be raised, quite understandably, precisely in the souls of the present day, which are among the most educated, is that spiritual science seems to contradict everything that has been gained on the firm ground of natural science. It is difficult to realize that spiritual science, for our time and for the immediate future of humanity, seeks to achieve for the field of spiritual knowledge, for the knowledge of the soul, what natural science has achieved for external, spatial and temporal knowledge and its application in practical human life. It is also difficult to realize that this spiritual science, when examined thoroughly, is in complete harmony with all the remarkable advances that natural science has made in the course of the last few centuries. Indeed, spiritual science does not want to be anything other than the continuation of the natural scientific world view for the spiritual realm. Precisely because it aspires to this, the method of spiritual science must relate to all human activities, especially to the most intimate human activities of thinking, feeling and willing, quite differently than the external science recognized today.

The often-asserted claim that spiritual science is not in harmony with the religious feelings of man is also based on a complete misunderstanding. On the contrary, the opposite is true. Indeed, it can be said that while external natural science has often really alienated people from religious feeling, and has led many to believe that they are particularly enlightened when they reject everything religious, spiritual science, because it also scientifically points to the soul in the spiritual, will precisely strengthen religious life in people's minds. It will lead people back to religion in the most beautiful sense of the word, while external natural science has alienated them from it.

Above all, the path that spiritual science takes to its insights will be discussed. This path is described in detail above all in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” to which I must refer, since here I can only give a few, I might say charcoal strokes to sketch the path of spiritual science.

Human thinking and human imagination must be treated in a completely different way for the purposes of spiritual science than they are for the purposes of external science and external life. How do we behave, honored attendees, when we put thinking and imagining at the service of external science and external life? We behave in such a way that we form concepts, images and ideas about what surrounds us based on what our senses show us in our environment. And we are justifiably satisfied with this external view of the world when we come to the point where our ideas and images give us a picture of what is going on outside in nature and in human life. In the ordinary course of existence, people strive for a mental image of the life of nature and of historical life. But the power of thought, which is used in the manner indicated for ordinary science and ordinary life, must be used in a completely different way when the path of spiritual science, the path of spiritual research, is followed.

It is not a matter of the spiritual researcher thinking about what the senses externally reveal to man; it is not a matter of using thought to gain a picture of an external, perceived reality, but rather of using thought like a living force that lives in the pure inner life of the soul, I would say in a self-education applied to the soul. Thought is not used as a reflection of external reality; thought is used in such a way that it is experienced in consciousness. And it is experienced inwardly in such a way that the soul focuses on this thought, focusing in such a way that it turns its attention solely to one thought or a monotonous train of thought for a long, long time, so that what is thought , but what counts is the inner effort of the soul, the inner expenditure of the soul that one has to undergo when, through inner effort, through inner concentration, one focuses all one's attention on one inner point, on one thought, on one idea.

Where ordinary science, where the thinking of ordinary life ends, that is where the work of the spiritual scientist begins. What has to be kept in mind for ordinary science is taken up by the spiritual scientific method and is, as it were, sunk like a seed into the soil of the soul. You ask your own experience the question: What does your thought do, on which you have focused your entire soul life to the exclusion of paying attention to everything else? What does the thought do when you give yourself completely to it, when you forget everything you have ever you have perceived, what your habits, your experiences, your inclinations, your passions are, when you live solely and exclusively in this thought, when you completely immerse yourself in the life of your soul?

With this spiritual-scientific method, one comes to one's own relief when one does not even take a thought that is borrowed from the outer life. With such a thought, which reflects something from the realm of outer life, one is too tempted to look at this outer truth of the thought. But in this case it is not the external truth that matters, but what the thought brings about in us and what we experience when we allow the thought to take effect in our soul as a living essence. Therefore, it is best to fix a symbolic thought, a thought that does not depict anything external, inwardly, as it were. What I mean is this: the thought 'Wisdom shines in the light' is a simple thought; it is certainly not a truth in the sense of an external science. But that is not the point. What is important is that such a thought be placed at the center of the soul's life and that all the soul's powers, as I have just described, be directed towards this thought for a certain period of time. It is only with the experience of the thought, up to which external life and ordinary science go, that research in the spiritual realm begins. If one does not associate the word with any kind of mystical concepts in the bad sense, one calls such a life and weaving in thought, which must be continued for a long, long time with patience and perseverance and inner energy, a meditation in thought, a concentration on certain thoughts. These are, so to speak, technical expressions of the spiritual scientific method.

The spiritual researcher, esteemed attendees, when describing these things, cannot help but speak like the chemist when he briefly describes the methods he uses in his laboratory to eavesdrop on these or those natural forces and phenomena. The spiritual researcher must enter into an inner laboratory of the soul, in which he searches for everything connected with our soul's happiness, with our soul's upliftment, with all the deepest soul mysteries, soul pains and soul questions. And what he experiences in this purely inner laboratory is what he alone can speak of, the experiences of what cannot be presented in external vision, before the outer eyes, but only in the intimate inner, but objective, non-subjective inner experience. The task of spiritual science is to gradually incorporate the existence of such inner, spiritual laboratory work into the spiritual culture of humanity as a solid worldview.

Every single objection raised by the scientific worldview, honored attendees, is as well known to the spiritual researcher as what can be said against his research in general. For example, the spiritual researcher knows that it can be claimed that what the soul achieves by fixing its attention entirely on dwelling on thoughts in the intimate life of the soul is only that the soul can suggest itself, that everything the soul arrives at in this way is a kind of self-suggestion. Of course, the spiritual researcher knows this, but for someone who is not familiar with spiritual science and only knows what modern natural science has to say about the methods of suggestion, it is unknown that through the special way in which the spiritual researcher, purely inwardly, with all the soul forces that he has consciously developed, in full consciousness, directed towards some thought or other, towards some inner experience - it can also be an experience of the will -, [how] this spiritual researcher lives inwardly in that part of his soul that is put to sleep in hypnotic suggestion. It is precisely that which is put to sleep in hypnotic suggestion, while the outer physical, I might say imitates the soul functions, that is developed through the method of spiritual science. Precisely those forces are drawn from the innermost soul life, over which sleep and paralysis are spread in ordinary suggestion. All methods of spiritual research work towards making inner experience independent of outer physical experience, awakening in inner experience those strong forces through which thinking, imagining unfolds a life of its own.

And when the spiritual researcher has worked in the “laboratory of his own soul” for a sufficiently long time, then - and it is not a matter of making this happen, but of waiting for it to happen, as one must wait, as one must wait with a flowering, until its growth forces have developed through the objective world context to such an extent that it flowers - then what must appear fantastic, dreamy, absurd, and paradoxical to our present way of thinking occurs.

For what is achieved in this way, dear attendees, is a complete detachment of spiritual-mental experience from physical, bodily experience. As improbable as it may seem to someone who has never heard of chemistry that the water in front of you can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen by the forces of electricity or in some other way, that the hydrogen, which is quite different from water, can actually be extracted from water, as improbable as it must seem to anyone who has never heard of chemistry, unlikely as it must appear to anyone who has never heard of chemistry, so unlikely must it appear, of course, to someone who does not want to engage in spiritual science, that there are such inner, I might say inner-growing, thought processes through which that in man is released that is not subject to birth and death , is not subject to external life, but passes through birth and death as the eternal part of man, that this is truly detached from physical conditions and that it is scientifically grasped in its independence, in its eternal significance, of which “all that is transitory is only a parable”.

It is obvious that especially in our time, real objections arise at every turn against what is asserted in this way. It is quite natural that someone who is, so to speak, schooled in the newer, well-founded habits of thought, comes and says: Now here, here comes the spiritual researcher and talks about the fact that there are inner methods of spiritual experience by which the soul-spiritual can be released so that it appears in its original essence and independently of birth and death, just as hydrogen appears when it is released from water, from all its properties and its entire behavior.

Can we not see that this leads into the darkest depths of superstition, when science has so thoroughly demonstrated how mental and spiritual experience is dependent on physical experience, how this mental and spiritual experience grows as the human being develops through the years from childhood onwards? The soul and spiritual experience grows to the same extent that physical functions develop. We see how the spiritual life fades again in old age, when bodily functions decline or gradually become paralyzed. Furthermore, we see – and this is precisely thanks to the great advances in psychiatric research – how the mental functions are switched off with the injury of only one part of the human brain and nervous system. Do we not realize here how everything of a soul-spiritual nature is, in the most eminent sense, only an effect of the physical-corporeal? Now the spiritual researcher comes and explains that this spiritual-soul nature can be detached from the physical-corporeal.

Yes, dearest ones, if the spiritual researcher had to rebel against the well-founded assumptions of modern science, then he would have no hope of ever introducing his knowledge into the world view of mankind, because this newer science is based on good reasons, even if it still has this or that hypothetical or unfounded assertion among its assertions today. Its whole attitude, its whole inner tendency is fully justified and leads to the greatest achievements of mankind. Spiritual science will not deny this, but will admit it just as much as every natural scientist or anyone professing natural science must admit it.

But, dear attendees, spiritual science in the true sense of the word is not based on any different ground than natural science, not even with regard to everything that natural science can talk about. When we consider ordinary thinking in everyday life and ordinary science, how does it appear to the spiritual researcher? It appears to him that this ordinary thinking, that which man can muster in thinking and imagining in ordinary life and in ordinary science, is bound in the strictest sense to the life of the human body, in the narrower sense to the human nervous system. And in so far as natural science today is already beginning to show a knowledge in this direction, which promises to give much more in the future, the spiritual researcher stands completely on the ground of natural science. But for natural science it is only a matter of ordinary thinking, of the inner power of thinking that has not yet been detached from the physical. The spiritual researcher is well informed about the thoughts of everyday life, about what can be imagined in ordinary science. All this thinking of everyday life is just as bound to the physical if it is to come to consciousness in the human being as the image that is to appear to us of ourselves is bound to the mirror before which we stand.

Spiritual science in particular recognizes, through the connections it sees when it progresses along the paths that have been described, that what has now been described as a higher power in the power of thought, and to which spiritual science can arrive at, that this is actively mirrored in the organs of the bodily life and that nothing can enter into the life between birth and death in the consciousness as that which appears to the consciousness with the help of the physicality that mirrors the soul life. Just as a person stands before the image reflected back to him by the mirror and sees not himself but the image reflected back to him by the mirror, so the soul, endowed with the power that is first discovered on the path of spiritual research, stands behind the thinking that is everyday thinking; and everyday thinking is a fleeting reflection mirrored from the life of the body. All the knowledge that natural science can provide in its field is true because it deals with that which has not yet been demonstrated as the actual power that lies behind the ordinary life of consciousness and that passes through births and deaths, which belongs to a completely different world from the one we see with our senses.

Thus it can be said: spiritual science says no to nothing that science says; it only explains that one can go beyond this natural science just as one goes beyond the hand movements of ordinary life in scientific chemistry. And anyone who wants to turn against spiritual science from a scientific point of view does not turn against it because something scientific about spiritual science is doubted, but turns against spiritual science out of pure tyranny, out of the will to accept nothing but what he likes to accept. One must artificially assume the standpoint that no one is allowed to know anything other than what one knows oneself if one wants to reject spiritual science in its claim to continue the path of natural science.

But now, dear attendees, as I said, the spiritual researcher can, to a certain extent, allow the other person, who has not yet approached spiritual research, to see into his or her “soul laboratory”. For this life in the soul laboratory of the spiritual researcher brings about many things that are not known to ordinary experience and observation either. Spiritual research is not only connected with those experiences with which external science is connected, spiritual research is connected with the deepest upheavals of the soul life, with the innermost tragedy of the soul life, with the carrying of the soul to lonely, icy heights, with the falling of the soul into terrible abysses of existence.

Certainly, dear honored attendees, the first steps of spiritual research, as indicated in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,” can be taken by anyone, and anyone can thereby convince themselves of the correctness of the spiritual researcher's indications. But when one follows the path of spiritual research to its conclusion, it leads through experiences such as those just indicated. Above all, at the moment when, through the method described, one succeeds in detaching the inner power of thought from the support it has in the brain, at the moment when one's thinking in one's soul-spiritual experience rises out of one's body — I because it is literally correct — in the same moment when man's eternal powers are truly glimpsed in the soul, in this moment, a spiritual researcher feels as if, I would like to say, they could experience the growth of the plant.

Let us assume that the plant could experience, that it could experience all its own characteristics, all its own being, as it unfolds from leaf to leaf, to the flower, to the colorful flower, and then, having developed into the colorful flower, it would have to immerse itself with its entire being in the forces that form the seed, which is not at all destined for this life of the plant in the present, but is destined to carry this plant life beyond the present into the plant that will develop from this plant in the future. The plant would experience by concentrating all its powers of experience into this germ, as if, by gathering these powers together, it were developing precisely that which is like a killing, a dying off of the outer being that has developed in the leaves and in the colorful blossoms. She would experience how she would have to die herself, as what she was, so that she could live on through the seed. So the human soul must experience, if it really goes through what has just been sketched out in front of you with a few lines of charcoal.

Dear attendees, the spiritual researcher experiences how he becomes more and more absorbed in what connects his soul with what he has taken in through his thoughts. But this does not appear to him now in his soul life as if he were only experiencing something new, but as if he were now living in the forces that, through their inner peculiarity, would be killing forces for the outer life, that are connected with all that makes the outer life die, that paralyzes the outer life from day to day, from hour to hour. And so it is, as if one had stood in it in life, felt all joy, all zest in life, all justified joy, all justified zest in life, gladly applied all energy in life, and now, in order to recognize, must break out of this life, but must turn precisely to those forces that continually fight this life. One would like to say that one must leave the conviviality of life, the convivial togetherness with nature, its beauty and sublimity, and enter into solitude, where one is truly only with oneself, where one can only turn one's gaze to one's own innermost forces.

Now it might appear, esteemed attendees, that this whole process of spiritual research is highly unhealthy. But we must bear in mind that it is a cognitive process. Just as nothing in this room is changed in terms of its outward appearance by the fact that my eyes are directed towards this room and my thoughts are visualizing this room, so this knowledge changes nothing in this room. Everything that the spiritual researcher experiences is knowledge, and everything that he then beholds through his knowledge lies, unnoticed by the outer life, at the bottom of every soul life. Only through observation can the spiritual researcher be convinced of what really lives in every soul. In every soul live the powers that constantly draw on life from hour to hour, from minute to minute, from second to second, just as the plant germ draws on the present plant.

Only through this contemplation, esteemed attendees, only through this immersion in the powers that sustain life, does one become immersed in the realization of how, over and over again, that which is death is overcome. For as one sees that life is maintained by the forces being constantly active from birth to physical death, which the spiritual researcher experiences, so one also becomes convinced through spiritual research that these same forces also overcome death, which concludes physical life like a gate, and introduce man into the world of the spiritual. Spiritual science does not understand death in the way one would like to recognize it out of fear of death, out of the expectation of another life, but spiritual science recognizes it by leading the soul's spiritual powers of cognition to the of death and then sees how death works throughout a person's entire life, so that when it draws its conclusion, it can be overcome by the same forces that are always at the basis of our souls.

Yet another difficulty arises, honored attendees, for the one who thus explores the spiritual world, I would like to say again and again in an inner soul laboratory. This other difficulty is this: when thinking, when imagining, has thus detached itself from the physical, when the human being now knows: you now live in the spiritual-soul realm in such a way that you are not in your body, that you move purely in the fabric of the soul-spiritual itself, when man has developed to this degree in his inner spiritual laboratory, then he lives in soul-spiritual forces which are the least, the very least related to that which we call our memory powers. And when we consider what depends on our powers of memory, how our whole life could not exist in everyday life if we did not remember what we had experienced in the previous moment, if we did not remember in our whole life what brings coherence to our life brings coherence to our lives, when we consider what memory means, then we will be able to understand how differently those forces act on the soul that must almost stop before the power of memory, that appeal to nothing in the ordinary power of memory in everyday life.

Thus it is that at first, when the spiritual researcher reaches the point where he is truly liberated from the bodily life in his spiritual and soul life, his presentation hurries away like a dream that cannot be remembered, and only only when one continues patiently with the exercises mentioned, the exercises in meditation and concentration, does another power develop in place of the ordinary memory, which must not be involved in this. We could call this power an “inner force of habit”. We become capable of repeatedly performing, habitually, what we have thus appropriated as an inner experience. We perform the inner gesture again and again, as it were. Spiritual science cannot work on the basis of memory, but goes beyond this ordinary basic power of life, beyond memory, and imprints such habits on the spiritual-soul realm that has been freed from the physical, so that one can repeatedly carry out the inner tasks that need to be done in order to feel at one with one's free spiritual-soul realm in the spiritual world.

If I, dear attendees, may touch on something personal – just to make something clearer – then let it be this: When we talk about things that are experienced through the outer senses, then it is the case that if, for example, I have given a lecture once, I remember how I gave it, so that when I give it for the twelfth, for the thirtieth time, I present it from my inner being in a completely different way than the first, second, third time, when I have not yet fully memorized it. This is not the case when one speaks in all sincerity about matters of spiritual science, but rather, each time, through the inner gestures that have been acquired by the soul, what is the content of spiritual science must be brought forth anew. It makes no difference whether one speaks about something for the first time or for the hundredth time, because one's memory is basically more of a hindrance than a help. Of course, one can always recount from memory what one has spoken about the content of spiritual science, but the one who stands on the ground of genuine spiritual science, honestly and sincerely, feels an inner obligation to present in ever-renewed liveliness that which he himself experiences. Therefore, he must experience it again and again, for he presents it not from memory, not through knowledge, but through a skill that he has acquired.

But our entire inner soul life is changed in yet another way. When we proceed intimately in the manner described, again and again performing such inner, we can now say purely conceptual, acts of the will, through which we place simple thought-content at the center of our consciousness and become completely absorbed in it, then we also experience something through our will. But this life of the will is different from that which underlies outer actions. What underlies outer actions develops a life of the will in which the will is asleep. For the way in which the human being intervenes with his thoughts in his will – this is indeed an old riddle of philosophy, which will not be discussed further here – the connection between the thought and the outer action, is in the deep foundations of the soul life. But it is precisely into these deep layers of the soul that spiritual science must descend if it is to ascend to supersensible knowledge. And by repeatedly, repeatedly bringing to life inwardly that which is the object of meditation and concentration in thinking, by doing so again and again out of inner will, out of strong inner soul forces – repetition is important – other processes occur in the soul than those of outer action. Such activities occur in the soul that do not take place in the same way as external actions, where we always have to intervene with our thoughts, but rather those that repeat themselves with regularity, I would say internally, automatically.

This is often disturbing for those who deal with spiritual methods, that by practicing and repeatedly fixing their soul on this or that thought - but they have to do it repeatedly, patiently, patiently, energetically, persistently - it is often disturbing that the whole inner activity becomes as mechanical as breathing for the body, where we are also not aware of how the impulse of breathing intervenes. While on the one hand we lift ourselves up into the highest spiritual state of consciousness, of thought itself, which leads us to what is behind the thought, to the inner experience of the power of thought, the very tasks that we perform in perpetual repetition become as if they were mechanical, so that we gradually learn to feel how something takes place in this detached soul life, which is so peculiar to it, in rhythmic sequence, as breathing is peculiar to the body in rhythmic sequence. We experience our corporeality as external to us, and we experience our soul as being lifted out of the corporeal, but in such a way that it is as if it is in an inner action, but now faces the body with this inner action.

This, in turn, is linked, honored attendees, to what one might call: the deepest inner soul-shaking. Just as one descends into a loneliness, into a loneliness that kills all external world-witnessing, when one goes to the one side of mental power expressions, through which basically all our everyday life consists, so one descends on the other side as if to the automatic life, as to the life that takes place in us, but without our intervention. Just as we become fully active on the one hand, so active that we are not even supported by memory, on the other hand we become aware of something within us that is active by itself, which we can only look at, which we can only watch. Indeed, it is so that we feel as if bewitched, as if spellbound in such an automatism of life that goes with us through life, we feel all the faintheartedness of life, all that which shows the heaviness, the weight of life, all this can overcome us, and anyone who does not come to the stage of knowledge just mentioned with the right method and sufficient preparation can easily reach a point of complete despair in their inner life when they see what is in them.

For again, it is only through knowledge that we become aware of everything that is in us, that at the bottom of life is a life automatism, when one sees how one is placed in life and what through the human being like clockwork - but only in a spiritual way, not mechanically like clockwork - what is spread throughout the universe as the cosmic life forces. There one learns to empathize with the whole universe as one piece, as a part of this universe, but one feels in it as if one were completely alienated from oneself, as if one had become a petrification, a petrefact, in this life. Then one realizes that everything one experiences is only the realization of what is down there in the soul. And that is a perpetual struggle between what is petrified in us, as if striving for automatism, and on the other hand, as if rising into spiritual solitude for perpetual activity, an inner war, an inner life of struggle that is withdrawn from us in the sight of everyday life. What has been described is at the bottom of our soul. And from such an inner life of struggle, from a struggle that takes place in every soul, which the spiritual researcher only observes, from such a life of struggle, he draws his knowledge. And what you now find in the literature of spiritual science has been drawn from the depths of the soul, drawn from this life of struggle.

Of course, I say that anyone can go through the beginnings of spiritual research, and in this way everyone can be convinced today that what spiritual research presents is correct. But what one has to go through when one comes to decisive turning points in relation to spiritual knowledge comes from the soul's inner experiences, which are full of struggle, wild movement and tragedy. These experiences come from regions of the soul that stir up everything, everything, and one gains a respectful of life and of the wisdom that permeates life when one realizes that in everyday life, man has the grace of having a veil woven over all that is at the bottom of his soul.

But humanity is evolving, honored attendees. And the time of development in which people could only live in consciousness, deprived by a veil of that which rules and lives in the depths of the soul, these times are coming to an end, and the times are opening up in which humanity must, through the natural powers of the soul, become acquainted with that which lives and moves in the depths of the soul. Just as at a certain point in human development, people had to be disabused of the view, in line with earlier common sense, that the earth stands still and the starry sky and the sun move around it . It is within the bounds of earthly evolution that humanity must be disabused of the notion that all soul life is built upon such a foundation as that just described.

Humanity wants to recognize that the life concerns we carry with us, the life triumphs, the zest for life and suffering, the life force, the life disappointments and the life deeds we admire in our fellow human beings, that all this is achieved through a victory that takes place on the basis of subconscious soul experience. The fact that we live because forces are at work behind the world of the senses that are engaged in the most lively struggle to gain that which we rejoice in, that which gives our lives meaning, will give people invigorating soul strength in the future when they will know what must be fought for, what must be suffered, and what must be overcome in the world of the senses, through unknown powers. This will give man a living sense of his connection with the spiritual powers that stand behind the world of the senses.

And when man has an overview of the two battlefields of the life of thought, which is detached from the body, and the life of will, which is detached from the body, then he enters into that knowledge of repeated earthly lives, which today seems so fantastic to our way of thinking, although Lessing asserted it within the spiritual life of modern humanity. And he enters into the real connections of human destiny, which present us with so many riddles.

What I would like to touch on today is that when we look at life, this life appears to us with what it expresses in everyday life, as through victories and wars of unknown spiritual powers, but of recognizable spiritual powers; and so when we recognize life, we also recognize the great events of the times in a different way than usual.

We, honored attendees, are indeed standing in our fateful present in difficult events that also promise great things. The question can be raised: what effect can the things we are now experiencing – the daring deeds of courage, the daring deeds of overcoming fear of death, the noble deeds of willingness to make sacrifices – have on a soul that absorbs what spiritual research wants to give to humanity? We are not living in a small time! For months events in our surroundings have been presenting themselves to us in a way that, one might well say, has not been seen in all of human history, not in such magnitude and with such significance. If one adds up the various nationalities fighting on the side of the Central European powers, even leaving out minor tribal differences, one arrives at twenty-one different peoples from the most diverse parts of the world. And if we count the various nations fighting on the side of the Central European powers, we get, again leaving out minor tribal differences, fourteen fighting individual nations; so that we can say that over a large part of the inhabited earth, thirty-five nations, leaving out minor tribal differences, are fighting each other today. And if, from the point of view of spiritual science, we turn our eyes to that which is intervening in such a powerful historical way in our time, oh, there a very special nuance of feeling presents itself to us.

What does it actually mean that spiritual science basically only wants to be a continuation of natural science? Yes, honored attendees, what Goethe emphasized so much is that we will only arrive at a true science when we no longer look at nature, at that which visibly surrounds us, in terms of reasons of expediency, when we no longer ask, “Why does the ox have horns? So that he can gore,” but when one realizes that the ox gores because he has horns, when one regards everything in terms of cause, not in terms of expediency. If this is the peculiarity of the external world view, if the best minds have fought for this causal world view, asking about the causes everywhere, then spiritual science also stands on the ground of asking about the causes, but about the deeper causes that elude sensory perception.

In relation to what is going on around us, however, in terms of historical events, something else must develop as a counterpoint to spiritual science. If you see how the powerful play out around us, you see how humanity suffers and develops the boldest acts of heroism, then you are led by observing what human will unfolds to the feelings - you cannot prove this because it is based on a transformation of the whole life of feeling. Then one is led by the feeling to look at everything in this life in which one is placed, not in terms of how the causes prevail, but in terms of what must arise as goals, as effects, from what is fought for in hot struggle, what is achieved through great sacrifices. Just as in the life we are observing we have to look at the causes everywhere, so too in what we experience, as we experience today, we have to look at the effects everywhere. And these effects, oh, these effects, they become meaningful for us above all by enabling us to see from a spiritual-scientific point of view how what is called Central European spiritual life really forms a whole.

Oh, this Central European intellectual life, how it has basically been achieved and how it differs in its peculiarity – I do not want to make any value judgments now – from that intellectual life, from which it is now surrounded and besieged as if in a mighty fortress! For those who can grasp the spiritual connections, this peculiarity of Central European intellectual life is evident in full clarity. One can say that the blossoms reveal what is in the roots. And so let us turn our gaze, just as an example, to a flower of Central European intellectual life, to a flower that is well known to you, esteemed attendees, that you have all often let your soul dwell on, to that which, as if from all the depths of Central European intellectual life, the great spirit of modern times, Goethe, created in his “Faust”. And we shall point out only one passage in this Faust. We see Faust at the beginning of the story, having passed through life and learned everything that can be learned by ordinary thinking:

Now, alas! I have studied philosophy,
jurisprudence and medicine,
and unfortunately theology too!
very thoroughly, with great endeavor.
There I stand, poor fool that I am,
and am as wise as before.

Goethe wrote this in the 1770s, during the striving and yearning of his youth. What was achieved by people in external thinking and external research at that time affected his Central European mind. Now, let us follow the course of this Central European spiritual life after Goethe wrote this scene in Faust, which has become almost trivial today, but which, if you allow it to take effect on your soul in its elementary originality, is deeply moving. Since Goethe wrote this, has been through in his soul, there have been minds at work in Central European intellectual life that have tried to penetrate to the sources of life in a truly Faustian way, with bold intellectual courage, with bold philosophical courage.

Today, the great idealistic thinkers of Central Europe, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and the others, are misunderstood. There is no need to go into what they created in terms of content; in the strictest sense, one can even be opposed to much of what they created in terms of content. However, one need only look at the innermost, most honest and sincere urge and path to truth , out of which they strove and which they were willing to go, and one needs only to look at how such thinkers have truly made this Faustian word come true, to expand one's own self to the self of the whole world, to witness that which is in the whole cosmos.

And so, how does a thinker who is rooted in Central European culture in the most eminent sense, like a Johann Gottlieb Fichte, stand before us? From the innermost nerve of human will and thought, from the will borne by thought, from the thought permeated by will, he seeks to grasp that in man by which man can connect himself in his own self with the eternal, divine self that rules and blows through the world. And so, as he also demanded, there was one thing in him that he lived and thought and philosophically strived for, so one that, when he was in the last hours of his feverish delirium from the illness of his wife, which she had acquired while caring for the warriors, that he received from his wife's illness, he, the most Central European of philosophers, still lived in the feverish delusion in the immediate life of his time, in the life through which Central Europe wanted to free itself from the tyranny of Western Europe, with Blücher's crossing of the Rhine, the philosopher Fichte lived. This great, powerful personality, who inwardly awakened life and strengthened his people at that time with his mighty “Speeches to the German Nation,” left his mark on his feverish fantasies.

We see them passing by, these thinkers. And we could say something similar about the others, even if we do not agree with the content of their thinking, with reference to their great and powerful striving. We see the best forces of Central European culture blossoming and passing by, the same forces that we may believe are now working in a completely different way for the benefit and progress of Central Europe on battlefields in the east and west. We see them pushing up into the spiritual light in the future.

And now we ask ourselves, honored attendees, let us assume that Goethe had still lived in 1840, had still lived at that time, when Fichte's intellectual feat, Schelling's wonderful artistic construct of the universe, Hegel's magnificent logical image of the universe had been cast over Central European culture - oh these thinkers , they truly brought philosophy in a new form to humanity and, if we consider that Fichte wrote a “natural right”, Hegel wrote a “natural right”, they also renewed jurisprudence, Schelling published a medical journal, immersed himself deeply in medicine, and theologians wanted them to be, basically, all these philosophers. But what would Goethe have done if he had started his Faust in 1840 instead of 1770? What would he have put at the beginning of the Faust saga? Certainly not this, despite the fact that these great, powerful thinkers have walked the spiritual skies of Central Europe. Despite this, he would certainly not have put:

Now, thank God, I have
studied philosophy with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel,
law and now also medicine,
and I stand here now, highly satisfied, I wise man!

No, again he would have begun in 1840:

Habemun, sch! Philosophy,
Jurisprudence and Medicine,
And unfortunately also Theology!
I have studied them all, with great zeal.
And now I stand, poor fool,
And am as wise as before.

That is what characterizes Central European culture! This Central European culture will only gradually be understood in its deepest peculiarity by those who live in it. This Central European culture is truly the expression of what is also written in “Faust”: “Whoever strives, we can redeem” - eternal striving. And when one stage of striving has been achieved, striving itself leads beyond this stage. One is born as a Frenchman, one is born as an Italian, one is born as an Englishman, and one knows what one is; but one must educate oneself to become what one is as a Central European, one must strive in one's soul not only once but continually to attain that which makes us a Central European. In this way, it becomes an individual in the highest sense, in this way it becomes one in which every human being must work directly, one that must always be achieved anew.

If I may, just to make something clear, touch on something personal, I can say that, as an Austrian, I lived in my childhood, in the sixties and seventies here in Austria, in a time when there was full opposition in Austria to everything that was going on in the German Reich, when it was still difficult for Austrians, including Austrian Germans, to look with satisfaction at what was happening in the German Reich. And then we lived contrary to that which had to be overcome first, out of German individualism, so that the Reich could be forged together, which is now fighting at Austria's side against the besiegers of the great Central European fortress.

Everything must be achieved for Central European culture. One would like to say, if the word is not misunderstood: in other nationalities, in other states, one is born into what one is; in Central Europe, one has to acquire everything – again according to a Goethean saying: “What you have inherited from your fathers, acquire it to possess it.” But this gives rise to an attitude that permeates all Central European culture like a magical breath, that forges together what is Central European, even forging together all national differences, that consciously strives towards what one is. And this also guarantees that everything that has already been achieved in Central Europe must always be increased and elevated in continued striving, that the spirit of striving, I would say the Faustian mood, must be continued.

Just as Faust would have said the same thing in 1840 at the starting point of his quest as in 1770, despite so much intellectual striving having been done about Central Europe, so too is that which has already been done constantly renewed by the Central European soulfulness. And so we stand, strengthened precisely by spiritual scientific feelings, full of hope for what must develop as goal and effect from blood and death, suffering and pain, from sacrifice and offering, from our time.

Oh, honored attendees, I cannot, of course, go into all the details of our fateful time. But if that which has conquered the world in a materialistic sense in recent times could only develop out of struggle, then that which must spread out of the spiritual life of Central Europe will develop more and more over the great world, over the territories of all the peoples who today still fight against this Central Europe. It must develop out of struggle and war. And the strengthening of the soul power, it will, if we consider that we can show through spiritual science how in individual human lives that which is the substance of life develops on the basis of what is the war and struggle in the depths of the soul, as we had to describe it.

Now, in the outer life, honored attendees, people are witnesses and participants in struggles over and over again, and these struggles must be there. Just as these struggles are veiled by a beneficent veil within the soul of the individual, so we must be placed in the outer, historical life in these struggles, from which that which is the outer, historical life must develop. Just as what Greek life became for the world developed in the struggle against the mighty Persian armies, and just as what was imported from Roman and Latin culture into world civilization developed on the basis of hard struggles, so what is in Faustian striving – and this Faustian striving also goes as far as those souls that know nothing of Faust – must spread out on soil that is soaked with the blood of our noblest, in an atmosphere that is permeated with the sentiments that can only develop today in our fateful time.

It has often been emphasized, especially in Germany recently, that it is due to the developmental conditions of modern times that this war is basically only being waged for external reasons, that it is being waged so that the infinite diligence of those in external industry and external trade can be applied freely in the world. Certainly, such statements are absolutely correct and should not be opposed in any way. We are living in a materialistic age, more or less, as regards our material life, and even the most difficult sacrifices we make are for the sake of material goods. But we are sure that from this Central Europe, even if only material culture is carried out into the world, through the gates opened by the struggle in the most diverse foreign areas, if perhaps not by the fathers themselves, then by the sons of those who go out into foreign areas in industry and trade , and which is carried everywhere by those who enter into industry and commerce. Everything that grows out of that spirit, which found its flower-like expression in that Faust who wants to “stand in an open space with an open people,” and who wants to attain freedom and life only by conquering them anew every day.

And if we look at the peculiarity of this Central European intellectual life, how it has forged the nations of Central Europe, if we look at this Faustian peculiarity, then we have to say: this Central European intellectual life is called upon to give the soul to the world-earth body, to incorporate soul into the earth development of humanity. It is very remarkable that, for example, we hear from the northwest - we can hear it every day, honored attendees - that those mighty external material conquests that the inhabitants of the British Isles, for example, have made, that these - as if mocking us, insulting us in Central Europe, such words are shouted over and over again from abroad, that everything that is to be undertaken is to be undertaken in the name of freedom, of the liberation of the peoples.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it cannot be denied that the inhabitants of the British Isles have made great conquests in the fields of external and material life. But look at what these conquests were made on account of! From 1856 to 1900, England waged 34 wars of conquest, conquered four million square miles of land, and made 57 million people new British subjects – that's over the course of about 44 to 45 years, 34 wars of conquest! The material culture that the British Empire alone could spread across the world has grown out of this. Out of blood and death, out of suffering and pain, out of numerous sacrifices, there must come forth that which, in the course of history, matures as the life-substance for humanity.

And if we want to shed light on Central European intellectual life in comparison with what spiritual science shows us for the individual, we will say: If we look at its effects, if we look at the goals that are hidden in what is watering the soil with blood today, we see that the threatened area must be reclaimed as such effects. Just as a person must continually re-conquer his body after a few years so that it may be an instrument for the soul, so too in the outer historical life must the people of Central Europe re-conquer their territory so that it is all the better equipped with the soul-like qualities through which this Central European humanity will be able to carry into the future that which is rooted in the depths of its soul life.

Oh, when we look at what we can see in the outer life of our fateful time, compared with what spiritual science says for the individual human life, then it becomes understandable not only for the mind, but for the whole heart, that we know what is being prepared for the future, because it can only be prepared through struggle and war, then we learn in a certain way - however painful it is in the individual case, which must take place around us - we learn to understand it as being in the service of the great development of humanity, in that we must feel that we are part of it with every moment of our lives. And so, through a true contemplation of individual life, the human being reconciles himself with the most fateful events that take place around him.

Allow me to summarize what I have just said in a few words, in which I express, I would like to say, what I have developed as individual results of spiritual research, in a way that is intuitive to me. I would like to express in a few words what spiritual science has to take hold of the human soul in its most intimate life, so that through this taking hold a basic feeling and a basic will can arise that understand and permeate life. What I took the liberty of saying can be summarized in the following words, which the soul strengthened by spiritual science can make the basic values of its own being:

Where sense knowledge ends,
There stands the gate,
The realities of life
To the soul's being opens;
The key creates the soul,
When she strengthens in herself
In the struggle, the world powers
On their own grounds
With human powers lead;
When it drives out of itself
the sleep that envelops the powers of knowledge
at the boundaries of its senses
with spirit.

Dear attendees! I will take the liberty of giving two lectures here, which have related content in a certain respect, so that some of what is said today will be followed by a special supplement tomorrow. However, for the sake of the esteemed audience, I would like to strive to present each lecture as a self-contained whole, which can be heard on its own.

If one speaks of spiritual science in the sense in which it is to be used here, one will, for the time being, meet with the strongest resistance and the sharpest misunderstandings. In particular, this resistance and these misunderstandings will come from those who believe that they are starting from the so-called completely safe, solid ground of the only true science, natural science, with regard to all far-reaching questions of world view.

Now, on the other hand, it must be said from the outset that the spiritual science meant here is not in the slightest contradiction to the most modern demands and achievements of modern natural science; indeed, that it wants to be a necessary supplement and a necessary conclusion to this modern natural science. If you only know natural science, it is very easy to become an opponent and rejecter of this spiritual science. If you are familiar with natural science, especially in its most important and comprehensive present-day results, and at the same time you know the spiritual science that is meant here, then, dear attendees, you are by no means an opponent of natural science.

The fact that today's scientific education is so dismissive of this spiritual science is primarily due to a very strange circumstance. And such things must be mentioned in the introduction, because it is very easy for someone who is hearing such discussions as are being held here for the first time to get the idea that what is being said here is unfounded and contrary to any truly scientific requirement. If I may make this personal comment, I would like to say that I myself, wherever natural science legitimately appears, go with that natural science against all amateurish or superficial endeavors in the field of spiritual science, but that precisely for this reason I have to represent spiritual science in the form in which I have to speak of it.

One may say that what is being achieved today in the field of the scientific way of thinking, of the scientific way of research, has, especially in recent years, struggled to achieve a great lack of prejudice compared to the very superficial materialism of the middle, the last third of the nineteenth century. Today, in contrast to the natural science romanticism of the past, we have something that is so objectively and convincingly presented, for example, in the recently published great work by Oscar Hertwig, “On the Nature of Organisms. A Refutation of the Darwinian Theory of Chance”. And one could cite many, many more similar examples if one wanted to speak in praise of natural science in the immediate present.

If we look at the attitude, the way of thinking and imagining that prevails among today's level-headed natural scientists, then these attitudes and this way of imagining are similar to those of the greatest biologist from the Haeckel school, Oscar Hertwig, who says that natural science to occupy itself only with the world of the senses, to investigate only the finite, and not to concern itself with the infinite; this must be left to – says a leading natural scientist of the present day – this supersensible, this spiritual must be left to metaphysics, to epistemology and so on. Again a saying to which hundreds and hundreds of level-headed natural scientists' sayings of the present day could be added. And one might believe that such attitudes, coming from such a quarter, would certainly pave the way for an unprejudiced approach to spiritual-scientific research. And yet this is not the case. For although this is said, on the other hand it is again tried to be made understandable, precisely from this quarter, that true science, genuine science, can only be that which stands squarely on the ground of mere external sensual facts. And so, on the one hand, only this ground of sense facts is investigated, the supersensible, the spiritual, is excluded; but at the same time it is pointed out, though quite covertly, that all that which is said about the spirit , about the supersensible, cannot actually be truly scientific, because it is implied that strict, serious scientific methods can only arise on the basis of sensory observation, of the finite.

It must be said: Indeed, these statements and thoughts are found in the narrower circles of natural scientists or those who build any kind of worldview on the foundation of natural science, and one might think that this does not particularly concern the great multitude of educated people. But that is not the case today. One must only be clear about the fact that today our many-branched educational and thinking life is nourished and satisfied through thousands and thousands of channels, and that such ideas, which in their place of origin are known only to those who familiarize themselves with scientific literature, that such statements are embedded and introduced into the way of thinking of the broadest audience in the most popular way. Hence the very widespread prejudice, which is habitually present in people's minds without them being aware of it, that anyone who talks about the spiritual, the supersensible, cannot be a true scientist.

In response to this, the following must be noted: Precisely when one is a true, but reasonable admirer of the modern scientific way of thinking, then one learns to recognize the methods and ideas on the basis of which this scientific way of thinking has achieved its great successes. But then one also learns to recognize that these scientific concepts, ideas and notions are highly suitable for the study of nature, and that they must achieve their brilliant successes on the basis of science, precisely when they are completely unsuitable to say anything about truths that relate to the spiritual or the soul life of man. Gradually, precisely those types of research have emerged on the basis of natural science that cannot be applied to the spiritual. That is why it is precisely because natural science has such brilliant, such penetrating ideas, because it can achieve such brilliant successes with these ideas, that it is necessary for its sake that a spiritual science be placed alongside natural science from a completely different side.

In earlier times, by observing nature, man, in his own conviction, received all kinds of spiritual knowledge from the realm of nature itself, through the concepts of natural science. Anyone familiar with older scientific ideas knows that with the concepts that were formed earlier, it was also convincingly accepted that nature is spiritualized everywhere. Natural science has rightly eradicated such concepts on its own ground. It has developed concepts that are only suitable for considering external natural existence without any spiritual element. Therefore, the necessity arises in the present day to explore the spirit from a different angle. It follows from the character of contemporary natural science that there must be a spiritual science alongside this natural science, if man is not to lose all connection with the greatest questions that must fulfill his soul's longing, with the questions, for example, for example, about human freedom, namely with the question of the eternal nature of the human soul, about the character, the essence of the human soul; all these questions culminating in the question of immortality.

Now I have given today's lecture the specific title: “Body, Soul and Spirit of Man”. This has a certain inner justification, for the reason, dear attendees, because – I cannot go into the details here – because since the ninth century it has gradually become customary, when speaking of the human being and his essence, not to speak of body, soul and spirit, but only to speak of body and soul. Anyone who has a clear understanding of the facts in this area knows that it is precisely the neglect of the spirit that has led to the inattention to the spiritual, that basically the knowledge of the nature of man has become completely obscured in recent centuries, that it must first of all be clarified again. If I may use the comparison, it is really the case today, even if one is familiar with everything that has been written in the field of philosophy, that it is as if a chemist has a compound substance and always starts from the preconception that two components must be found in it. He does not even assume that a third must be found in it. Therefore, when he experiments, he must constantly come up with the wrong concepts.

These are more or less the considerations that are made today from a philosophical point of view about the nature of man, especially about the eternal nature of man. It is assumed that one can only speak of the body and soul of man. One starts from the prejudice that the third, the spirit, must somehow be inherent in the soul, and one must therefore go wrong. To substantiate this latter point, and in particular to show provisionally how one has to speak rightly of body, soul and spirit, let us consider the following.

Those inner soul experiences that are most intimately connected with bodily conditions do not, however, provide any real insight into what is going on in the human body. I mean such inner experiences - one does not see them at all as soul experiences, but they are experienced by the soul - such experiences as hunger and thirst or other things that we perceive. He who only wanted to observe how one becomes hungry, how one becomes satiated, would not be able to arrive at what external natural science confirms: that while we are in a state of hunger or satiety, chemical changes in the blood are taking place in our body, or something else chemical or physical is happening.

But it must be said that the ordinary consciousness of the human being knows nothing of what is going on in the body while the person is experiencing hunger and thirst. It must be determined by special scientific methods, which relate to the examination of the human body, what happens when one feels hunger, satiety, thirst or the like. What we are aware of, what we experience through our everyday consciousness, is backed by something that our everyday consciousness knows nothing about, but only physical science can shed light on.

Consider, dear reader, how much a person in ordinary daily life actually knows about his body. He knows its outer form, knows that which is outwardly inclined. If you consider the relationship between what you know of the body and what you actually know, you will see that you know very little. But this is expanded and supplemented by what external physical science, anatomy and physiology have to offer. We can say that, on the side of the body, what anatomy, physiology and biology add to what we inwardly experience and feel initially remains unconscious.

The spiritual researcher now shows, as we shall see shortly, how we have different experiences on the other side of the human soul. These other experiences, these experiences of thinking, feeling, and willing, of which we already have a superficial awareness, that they are less inclined towards the bodily side than hunger and thirst, these other experiences - the spiritual researcher is the one who first of all addresses himself to these experiences when he wants to arrive at the other side with his science, from the soul to the spirit, just as the physical researcher arrives at the other side from the soul to the body in the way just described. That is the difference between the physical researcher, who follows what the person experiences mentally from the soul side to the body side, and the spiritual researcher, who follows what the person experiences mentally from the soul to the spirit side. Just as little as one can learn something about the physical being by only observing hunger, thirst or similar general physical moods, and just as little as one can know anything about the body by these means, but must penetrate into the body itself by special scientific methods, so it is also necessary and possible to do so on the spiritual side.

It is very often believed that the spiritual can be attained through what is commonly called “inner contemplation”. All kinds of mysticism are spoken of in this field. It is believed that if a person really immerses himself in his soul life, he must also gain insight into what underlies the soul as spiritual.

Without a special spiritual science, one achieves just as little insight in this way as one would achieve insight into the bodily side if one only ever observed hunger and thirst inwardly and immersed oneself in them. Mere mysticism, mere inner contemplation, can certainly be compared with brooding over hunger and thirst and breathing needs and so on. Just as one must follow these phenomena mentally, but then expand outward toward the body with the scientific methods of physical research, so one must be able to follow in the mind what one experiences through a certain deepening of the soul life in imagining, feeling, and thinking.

Now it may well be said: about the kind of research, how one comes from the soul to the spirit, how one comes to the body on the other hand, about this kind of research, one still has very few accurate ideas today. It is very easy to believe, dear ladies and gentlemen, chemistry, physiology, physiological chemistry are serious sciences, they have developed good methods. Every spiritual researcher will of course admit this. But compared to what appears to be quite simple, such as how to research spiritual life, everything that physiology, chemistry and anatomy have developed makes it seem so much easier, because everything that is the research of physical science can be more easily acquired. For no external manipulation, nothing that has its points of reference in the external world, can lead to knowledge of the spirit. It is a matter of that which one initially, although wrongly, calls inner life, being expanded, if I may use the pedantic expression, systematically expanded, that the threads are really drawn to the spirit.

Now I can only characterize the nature of the research that is necessary in broad terms. You can find more details about it in my books “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, in the second part of “Occult Science”, “The Riddle of Man” and in the last book, which was published a few weeks ago, “The Riddle of Souls”, and so on. But what is described in detail in these books as the path to the spiritual worlds, I will characterize here at least in principle.

The point is that if one remains in ordinary consciousness, one cannot know anything at all about what underlies the human being as a spiritual being, and that if one takes a superficial approach, one is quite right to state a limit to knowledge at this point. If one wants to stop at what the ordinary consciousness gives, then one can say nothing other than that the spiritual realm is simply closed to man. But in truth it is not. Of course, for ordinary consciousness, the situation is such that what truly is soul and spirit is not known at all, that it is hidden at first and that one can only penetrate to the true soul and true spirit through very specific paths of research. What one experiences of the spirit is actually not much more than what one experiences of the body through the ordinary external way of looking at things without science. What we see of the body in everyday life is, as we said, only part of what constitutes the nature of the human body.

For ordinary consciousness, the spirit also presents itself from a certain perspective, but this ordinary consciousness knows no more about the spirit than it knows about the body when it only looks at it externally. What ordinary consciousness knows about the spirit is actually contained entirely in the simple, short word “I”. When one pronounces this little word “I” and at the same time feels and thinks through what is connected with this idea of “I”, then one has a part of that which underlies man as a spiritual being, but one has not much more than one has from the ordinary superficial way of looking at the body, without science.

The point is that when you go from the soul, from its experiences, hunger, thirst, need to breathe, to the body, you cannot help but actually kill or paralyze what the soul experiences, whether in the way you look at it or in reality. In this way you learn to recognize what underlies the soul experience. As a rule, we experience something through the body when we expel the soul from the body. In spiritual research, it is the other way around. The aim is not to paralyze what we experience in our soul, but to strengthen it, even when we undergo the much-vaunted mystical experience. And I would like to point out two inner activities that need to be strengthened.

In principle, the matter can be characterized as follows: If we look at the human will as it lives in ordinary consciousness, it is reflected in the life of ideas, but what underlies a volitional impulse is something of which we know nothing. You can find a discussion of this in an excellent book such as Physiological Psychology by Theodor Zichen, who excludes the will from the psychological point of view because, in his opinion, the will is not present in everything that can be found from an external point of view. What actually happens when a person executes any volitional decision, what happens when I just want to raise a hand, until the actual raising of the hand, remains unconscious, just as, for example, the experiences from falling asleep to waking up remain unconscious. We have ideas that underlie the motives of the will, but in our ordinary consciousness we have no idea of the process of the will itself. That is the one thing, the honored presence, that the spiritual researcher comes to, to be able to relate to the process of the will as such in the act of imagining, to be able to relate to the process of the will as one is otherwise able to relate to the external world.

I would like to give an example to illustrate what I mean. When we speak, it is a special volitional act. The fact that we produce images does not change what I have said. When we recite a poem that we have learned by heart, it is a continuous series of volitional impulses that gradually become habitual. Now everyone knows that if you try to recite a poem and at the same time make an effort to observe your own recitation of the poem as one would observe an external natural process, then you sacrifice the recitation.

This example in particular shows you, dear attendees, how impossible it is for the ordinary consciousness to observe itself. Self-observation in a higher sense than is usually meant – self-observation is what must be striven for. It is not enough for spiritual science to merely state: It is virtually impossible to recite a poem aloud or to recite it inwardly in thought and to observe oneself while doing so. Certainly, for the ordinary consciousness this is absolutely impossible; but the spiritual researcher must learn to do so. He must, just as the chemist applies his methods, also apply his methods; he must do everything possible - you will find a more detailed description in “How to Know Higher Worlds” . The spiritual researcher must do everything possible to be able to work through his will on the one hand, and on the other hand to observe at the same time what he carries out with his will, just as one observes an external natural process.

This is one of the things that can be said: It is easy to say; to actually carry it out requires a far greater effort than to acquire the methods of chemistry, physics, astronomy or a physiological science. Of course, it is not enough to observe oneself in such a case, but to learn to recognize that inner attitude of the soul, whereby one can simultaneously accomplish an act of the will and, on the other hand, face oneself while observing.

Only by coming to cultivate self-observation in this way, only by doing so, do we gradually come to distinguish between what is ordinary mental life and what is true mental life. For if one attains an inner practice in the way that has been indicated, in this self-observation, then one gradually comes to a completely different way of thinking. Thoughts such as one has in ordinary consciousness do not flourish in this way, but thoughts that have a much greater, inner, meaningful power, thoughts that have much more of what one can call a pictorial content, but which at the same time points to a reality. When one learns to observe oneself in this way, one comes to know something that is hidden in ordinary life, something that is part of this ordinary life but which, in this ordinary life, remains entirely unconscious, subconscious. Something emerges from the ordinary life of the soul that was previously unknown.

At first, one sees from the inner consequences how the matter actually stands. One learns, namely, only when one gradually learns to distinguish between the ordinary soul life and the true soul life, one learns more and more to find one's way up to the concept, which can then become a guiding concept for the contemplation of the actual human being. One learns to recognize that what we call the ordinary life of the soul is related to the true life of the soul, which one first discovers in this way, as the mirror image is to the real person standing before this mirror image. The important thing is that one acquires this great knowledge with reference to the soul life: that the outer soul life, known to ordinary consciousness, is the mirror image of the true inner soul life, which is unknown to ordinary consciousness.

The consequence of this is that we are only now beginning to gain an insight into the human body. Before seeking knowledge in this way, we cannot really know anything accurate about the human body. I will point out just one fact: The person who, in the sense of mere external natural science, fully recognizes its methods for [spiritual] science, even when they are applied in an outstanding way, as for example by Oscar Hertwig, who thus observes the external bodily life of man, he follows, among other things, for example, how the bodily life of a person leads back to the bodily life of the parents, grandparents and so on. One speaks of the inheritance of certain characteristics. Whenever we speak of heredity in the field of natural science today, we always have the view that we inherit something, but that in what we inherit as a body, the germs for the development of the I, for example, are also contained. It is said that, as the I develops into it, self-awareness, the I, arises in the course of life on the basis of the inherited characteristics. It is quite impossible for a different view of the matter to be formed while remaining on the ground of mere natural science.

But for someone who, in the manner described, learns to distinguish the true soul from its reflection, the ordinary soul life, such a view as that offered by natural science today is as if someone wanted to explain: Man stands in relation to the air through his lungs, and in the lungs is the origin of the air that man breathes out and in; the air comes from the lungs and returns to them. Such a person would be deluding themselves, as if what is air were somehow essentially connected to the lungs themselves, whereas air is in our environment and must be sought outside of the human being. If one is able to see through these circumstances correctly, then one will naturally not look for the origin of air in the lungs. But if you go through the spiritual path, you come to recognize in the soul and spiritual realm that the belief that the air comes from the child's body, as it develops according to the inherited characteristics from the parents, the I, the self, that this corresponds exactly to the belief that the air comes from the lungs.

One learns to recognize, through spiritual scientific methods, that the I is not something that can arise from the body, but one learns to recognize the independence of the I, one learns to recognize the coming of the I to that which comes from father and mother. These things must be emphasized today, for the reason that the opposite idea is so deeply rooted in the thinking and cognitive habits of the present that what must be said from the spiritual-scientific point of view seems quite absurd to some. Nevertheless, it can and must be said if one does not choose the starting point of amateurish inner observation, but rather a spiritual-scientific observation. In this way one learns to recognize that just as air enters the lungs from the outside, this I enters from a spiritual world into that which comes from the father and mother, that which is physically inherited. Just as the air does not disappear when it leaves the lungs, so this self, which has just as little to do with the life of the body as the lungs have to do with the air, passes through the gate of death.

If one then follows the path further, one comes indeed, precisely with regard to the point touched upon, via the bodily life to very definite, now truly scientific concepts, in relation to which even the fully appreciated results of natural science are amateurish. One arrives at this by learning to distinguish between what is the inner spiritual self and what is inherited. One arrives at forming a true picture of what one actually inherits from one's ancestors. These things can only be touched on today; I only want to encourage you and cannot give anything exhaustive. What we inherit is, in the deepest sense, our own bodily form. Anyone who is aware of how what we do in a certain sense in our ordinary mental life depends on the physiognomy of the body – by which I mean the inner structure of the body – will be able to imagine that the human being lives out his or her life in the inherited formations of the body, but the basis is always the inherited form. This inherited form, which in turn can shape the substance out of its structural forces from what we take in during our lives until we reach sexual maturity, so that this substance, which in turn passes on the inheritance to the offspring, now contains the form. This sentence, which spiritual science has to add to science: that only the form is inherited from the ancestors and that the form is inherited by the descendants through the substance, provides a supplement to natural science. It will be very informative with regard to a certain matter concerning the relationship to the higher aspects of the human being.

I have to progress in the consideration of the path of research into the spiritual worlds. I have first described how ideas must be added to the impulses of the will, how self-observation must occur in a higher sense. If one wants to get to know the being of the human being, the spiritual being of the human being, then not only must this self-observation be able to occur, but something else must happen: one must carry out that which, in one's soul, results in a strengthening of the soul life on another side, which, using a technical term, can be called “meditation”. You can find more details about this in the books mentioned; I can only give the principles here.

Just as we have seen that in the will and its impulses, the ideas must be led to self-observation, so on the other hand, the will must be introduced into the life of ideas. This is even more difficult. And precisely the introduction of the will into the realm of imagination, whereas otherwise we let the images run according to the sensory processes or let them run dreamily, for example in contemplation of what one has experienced. The person who wants to introduce the will into this world of imagination often needs years and years to achieve real results. The matter is by no means a simple one. Years and years are needed if one is to truly research the realm of spiritual life.

The point is to introduce the will into the life of the imagination, so that one learns, on the one hand, to direct the imagination as one directs the hands. The will must be introduced into the imagination. This is best achieved by trying to separate oneself from ordinary imaginative life and only reflecting on that which one introduces into one's consciousness through the will. Therefore, one should not introduce such ideas as are given from the external sense world or from the ordinary sensual world; but self-made ideas or ideas that have been suggested to one; these should direct the life of ideas. There it is the arbitrariness by which the life of ideas is directed. But it must not remain so, for then one would not come to spiritual research, but to dreaming. On the one hand – and this may sound paradoxical – the will, arbitrariness, must be introduced into the imaginative life; on the other hand, this will must be excluded, because otherwise one would enter into fantastic thinking, which must not be allowed.

But if you continue the meditative life with patience and energy, and keep trying to continue with the ideas you have put together yourself, whether they are symbolic or similar ideas, then you bring such content into your consciousness again and again. In doing so, you acquire an inner mastery of this imaginative life. One gets to know something that was previously impossible to get to know at all. One gradually learns that one can arrive at one mental image from another, even when nothing is taken up in these images from external sensory perception, through mere arbitrariness. Imagining at random is only the trial, only the path, but it gradually develops as a self-evident inner life process, in that one notices that just as one otherwise, when observing external ideas, does not arbitrarily place one idea after the other, one now notices that one must now follow something that flows into the ideas themselves; so that little by little, although one now follows the course of ideas inwardly, one cannot help but develop one idea from the other just as regularly, not arbitrarily, letting one idea follow the other, as one does when one follows the course of external sense observation. Just as one is subject to necessity there, so one is gradually subject to a purely spiritual, inner necessity. Just as the external sense world prevails in the external perceptions, so an inner spirituality gradually prevails in the imagination that one has thus developed.

Just as the other method I have described ascends from the outer soul to the true soul, so in this way one ascends from the imagination to the spirit, by discovering the spirit as something objective, just as the external sense world is objective. One knows very well whether one is merely stringing together dream-like images or... gaps in the transcript]. And as a spiritual researcher, you know exactly whether you... or whether you are going through the inner process that... not arbitrarily stringing one idea after another, but developing one idea from the other as the spirit demands this sequence of ideas. In this way, through meditative life, one ascends to a real observation of the spirit.

Again, if you want to carry this out in its strictness, it is a work that lasts for years and requires much more devotion and willingness to sacrifice than astronomical or chemical work, but which leads to inner observation of the spirit just as strictly as astronomical, chemical, physiological methods lead to the observation of external laws.

He who, as a spiritual researcher, has experienced in countless cases how one often begins a path of research in certain areas of spiritual life, and who has then seen how this path of research leads through a spiritual necessity just as much as through sensual necessity , the one who has experienced how what one has followed from a certain starting point turns out differently than one had actually expected, quite differently than what one had assumed, may well speak of an inner necessity of the inner spiritual path. There is no arbitrariness here. One experiences it only too clearly when one is truly a spiritual researcher, that before one begins to research, one has false ideas, that the inner necessity of the path brings one to ideas that one could not have arrived at through sensory observation. One may say: When one really progresses on the path of spiritual research, things usually turn out quite differently than one expects. And if one does not want to form arbitrary ideas in the sense of exploring the spiritual world - one expects something completely different and something completely different comes. And one is as surprised by it as one would be by an unexpected experience in the outer world.

These things are not dealt with because it is expected that everyone should go through them – although it would be desirable that as many people as possible in the present day would follow the path of spiritual research to the extent that one can follow my books, so that they can bear witness from their own experience that the spirit and man's share in the spirit is a reality. But to make spiritual science part of our culture, to assimilate what spiritual research brings to light, does not depend on one's being a spiritual researcher oneself. That which is to be researched in the spirit must be researched through those inner paths - in truth they are outer paths - which you will find described in my books; but once the things have been researched, anyone with ordinary common sense can find them confirmed.

I would like to say: Although today, to a certain extent, anyone can become a seer – you don't need to be a seer to recognize spiritual research as such, but rather, you can put what spiritual research brings to light into the service of life, just as you can put what chemistry and physics bring into the service of life, without being a chemist or a physicist yourself. I would like to use a comparison to characterize what is to be characterized: Not everyone can be a watchmaker, but most people will recognize the watch. Not everyone can be a seer; but what the seer science can research about the nature of man is of importance for the life of every human being. When someone goes into a watchmaker's workshop, he sees that the watch has not come together by chance. You can see that in the watch. When the seer shows the spiritual powers and beings from which life and its facts, its entities, flow, the life and the fact of life are present for every person. And just as one can tell, without having seen the watchmaker at work, from the way the watch is made that it was put together by the watchmaker, so after the seer says that the life has come from the spirit, one can judge whether what the shearer says is correct or incorrect. Furthermore, it is not the case that the seerical development comes before humanity without saying how it comes to its results. For everyone can observe whether what the shearer has to say is reasonable, how he comes to his results. And that which is found in the course of spiritual research will gradually have to become part of our culture, for the very reason that advanced science, in particular, does not have the methods to arrive at spiritual knowledge itself, because on the other hand, this makes it necessary to have a different way of arriving at spiritual knowledge. And even if many prejudices against spiritual science still exist today, they will be dispelled by the fact that people will increasingly recognize how life confirms what the spiritual researcher has to say.

I would like to briefly mention at least one point: recently, a well-known personality here in this city, Dr. Rittelmeyer, has pointed out the religious significance of spiritual science, as it is meant here, in a number of beautiful articles in the “Christian World”. He has also forcefully and appropriately characterized the very nature of this spiritual practice to come to the spirit. Recently objections have been raised against these statements in the “Christian World” from another side that is also highly esteemed. I do not want to touch on these objections any further, I just want to point them out. It is said that a major mistake of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is that one does not rely on mere grace, that the spirit would come to one, so to speak, that one would be graced as one is gifted with a talent, with genius, but that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would try to lead the soul into the spiritual world, the spiritual realm, through arbitrary exercises. This is characterized as a particular mistake; it shows that nothing other than that this side, which is so highly esteemed by those who rebel against Pastor Rittelmeyer, simply does not understand what is important.

If one advances from the soul to the spirit, yes, if one advances only from the ordinary soul experience to the true soul, then one comes into nothing but activity, and that would be precisely the wrong thing if one wanted to remain passive in relation to the spirit. For everything that comes to one in a passive state makes one dependent on the body. To live independently in the spirit must be a free act, an act that arises entirely from the arbitrariness of the human being. Without entering the spiritual world by free decision, one cannot enter it. Anyone who speaks of spirit as something that can be attained without this free entry into the spiritual world does not know what spirit is; they only know the soul life, which, in a more or less refined and sophisticated way, is nevertheless dependent on the body.

Thus one sees how today, even in the most influential circles, there is not the slightest conception of what the spirit really is. This real spirit is an active spirit, it is not something with which one can connect merely passively. At most, one comes out of the essence of the spirit; one denies a spirit when one only develops that which behaves passively. The difficulty in entering the spiritual realm lies precisely in the fact that one enters it arbitrarily on the one hand, but that it can only be a trial, that one comes upon other necessities, that everything turns out quite differently than one had expected. One develops the will into the life of imagination, but in the end one knows that one can only develop this will by turning one's eyes from one point to another. But the will must prevail in everything that is to truly enter the mind. That is the essential.

And when we learn to recognize through direct contemplation what the true soul is in relation to the mirror image of this true soul, then we learn to know the soul - I have shown before how to recognize the I as something that is taken up by the body - we learn to know the true soul in relation to what are only the ordinary soul experiences. Getting to know this true soul, coming to the contemplation of this true soul, leads at the same time to knowing that this true soul essence is not enclosed within the boundaries between birth and death. Above all, one learns to recognize how this true soul essence is actually extinguished by the life of the body, how it can be seen in its true form through the consciousness that has been expanded, as I have characterized it, can be seen before birth or conception and after the person has passed through the gate of death. One learns to recognize that external life on earth is not at all as one thinks in ordinary life.

In ordinary life, one has the idea: well, what one experiences between birth and death comes to one in this way. Chance brings one thing, brings another; life is merely configured from the sensual outside world. It cannot be otherwise than to have this idea in ordinary life. But this idea alone brings one into a certain calamity when one can consider the life of the soul. If you have this sense, then you know that you would actually extinguish this soul life itself if you were to extinguish external experiences. The word “soul”, the abstract concept “soul”, is not important; what is important is the real, meaningful soul life.

But ask yourself, when you turn 40, what this really concrete, true content of your soul life actually is. It is actually what your experiences are. You cannot separate experiences from your soul life. Think about what you have in your soul and how it would be different if you had gone through different experiences. It is you yourself, and these experiences have become you. When experiences come up, as is the case, then you are saying that your soul has actually come up to you, as is the case. Observation of the true soul shows that this is not the case; it leads us out into the distance, as a telescope leads us out into the distance, it leads us out beyond birth and death. We see into worlds in which we are before birth or conception, in which we will be after death. We see into these worlds and we know: What we experience here from the moment we become conscious until death, when we lose our earthly consciousness and acquire a different one, what approaches us is not random. It is because we, let us say, lived from 1872 to 1925, but because we have previously lived in a spiritual world and have united with what we have inherited as a body from the spiritual world and have been led down from the spiritual world through the inner longings of the soul in order to live through the series of experiences that can be lived through in the place and time into which we are born. What external experiences of life are, what approaches us as longing, as the will to experience that, it exists in us before this life.

These external experiences are definitely connected with what we have lived through in the spiritual realm before we proceeded to conception or birth. And what we experience as inner soul experiences: We grow inwardly, spiritually with our outer experiences, we develop certain habits, we acquire ideas that guide our lives, and so on. This inner experience between birth and death, one can truly ask: What significance does it have for the world outside of us? One can ask that. And a contemporary philosopher who is strangely obsessed with complaining about philosophy – he says: Man has no more philosophy than an animal, and differs from the animal only in that... [gap] – who is a professor of philosophy at the university, he looks at the inner life of man and says: The natural life, the life in the great world, actually runs its course without concerning itself with the inner life. And he uses the expression, this philosopher: Nature is great and admirable, and we are moping!

One could easily come up with this thought if one has no connection with the spiritual world. One could ask oneself: Why, in addition to the events that take place in the cosmos, does something else take place that resembles an image of the cosmos? The truth is this: While the outer soul experiences are longed for from our spiritual existence before birth, the inner experiences, the gradual becoming of the soul, that which grows within us as a sense of life - that is what we carry over into the spiritual world through death; that is the germ of this inner experience to that which we experience after death.

Thus we are led beyond birth and death into a spiritual world, not by speculation, but by seeking first to develop the faculty of observation, by which we can grasp the eternal in our mind's eye. It develops the perspective into that world in which we really are. Spiritual science leads us to the contemplation of the spiritual world, to the development of what, in an extended sense, can be called, with Goethe, “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears”.

And again, the destiny of man, to extract something specific from the abundance of the matter, when you consider what we ourselves are and what our destinies are – and yet, the ordinary consciousness is again of the opinion: It happens as it happens, this fate; on the one hand it is a sum of coincidences that group together into a whole, on the other hand the fact that we ourselves are this fate, if we really consider not only abstract terms. When we consider this, we again come to a disharmony between what ordinary consciousness sees in fate and what fate actually is for what we essentially are as human beings.

When a person rises by experiencing the inner necessity, as I have described it, in his or her imagination, by being able to observe the mind, he or she learns to recognize that the body is a reflection of the mind, just as the ordinary soul is a reflection of the true soul. But also what we experience as fate is in a certain respect a reflection of the spirit, only something is at work in our life that is hidden from the ordinary consciousness. It has an effect when we see our fate approaching us – spiritual observation shows this – it has an effect on our present life that radiates as forces from earlier earth lives. That is the mystery of the will, the mystery of the fact that the will, without our knowing it - because it is in the unconscious - that this will, just as hunger feels drawn to food, feels drawn to that which then bears its destiny. The reason why we know so little about this will in our present life is that what now works as the will to fashion our destiny does not work at all in ordinary life. Just as the seeds of the outer experiences of the soul lie in the prenatal life, so the will that shapes our destiny lies in past earthly lives. And the wisdom that develops within the soul, which is hidden in old age, goes with us through the gateway of death, growing from the imagination to the will for the next life on earth.

Not only can we see through the soul if we are able to extend our ideas by drawing threads from the soul life to the spiritual life, but we can see through the whole course of the human eternal through births and deaths. We first learn through the first degrees of self-observation that the I is something that connects to the inherited body. We learn that our experiences of the soul are drawn from the spiritual world, which we pass through before birth. We learn to recognize that destiny, the wisdom of life, is what leads to repeated and repeated earthly lives.

I could only give you a few hints today, you can read more in my books. I will have a few more special things to say tomorrow. The indications I have given should above all characterize the fact that spiritual science is not about dreaming or creating concepts of the world, but that spiritual science is based on genuine, true research, on a kind of research that is just as strictly inward as the external natural sciences are strict in their field - yes, even stricter. Those who have followed the spiritual path can say this. And that this spiritual science can also shed light on scientific fields, you can see from the last chapter of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln'.

It may be said, dearest attendees, that what is explored as spirit actually sheds light on what surrounds us as nature. This does not invalidate natural science, but it is as limited as the view someone has when feeling their way around a dark room compared to the view someone has when they light a lamp and illuminate the objects. Of course, when you feel for the objects in the dark, the one, the second, the third – you always feel for the same thing. It is therefore not surprising that the room merely felt for is described the same by everyone. Because natural science conducts research in spiritual darkness, the concepts are always the same by themselves, but because when you light a light, you can shine it here and there, the configuration will be different from the different points. Hence the easily found, but by no means apt objection that one usually makes, that one spiritual researcher speaks this and the other that. That is the case, but it is the case for the reason that the spiritual researcher first also ignites the light spiritually from a certain point of view.

But there is a way out. And it is precisely the direction that I myself represent that seeks this way out. People shy away from the inner drama of the soul, from the drama of knowledge that one has to go through, because they fear getting into the subjective. This is a transitional phase, but then you enter a realm where the spirit is objective, where the spirit can be described from all sides in the same way as the world of the senses can be described. If you light a light in a room, you only have a certain aspect of the room. If you turn the light around, the impressions contradict each other; the room looks different from each place, but you gradually get an objective overview of the whole room.

In particular, the spiritual scientific direction that I am striving for seeks to apply the spiritual research methods and to illuminate everything with the light of the spirit, but it tries to do so from different points of view. This results in a different misery, but that is not too bad, that while one otherwise says that a spiritual researcher who takes the different points of view contradicts himself. He contradicts himself, but he does it in order to gradually characterize. This is the basis of the recently so popularized criticisms of my world view, where contradictions are sought. These contradictions are not worth more than four photographs of four sides of a room. The spiritual researcher must contradict himself in a certain way by characterizing life from different points of view. Only unwise people may come – precisely because of the presence of different images that the spiritual researcher gives, he wants to show his objectivity.

In the ordinary physical sense world, it is indeed the case that one need not be exposed to this if one merely describes external facts. But it is different in the spiritual. The spirit is a living thing, and the living has its contradictions. In fact, anyone who is familiar with spiritual science and then carefully and conscientiously immerses themselves in the way of thinking of natural science as it is developed in the present day will find that natural science not only does not contradict spiritual science in any of its details, but is a complete confirmation of everything that spiritual science has to say.

Therefore, I would like to say: the spiritual researcher does not shy away from having his point of view checked, indeed, from having his point of view strictly checked by the most diverse spiritual schools of thought that otherwise exist. Just check what the spiritual researcher has to say against true natural science, not against superficial natural science. After 30 years, monism still represents what natural science has overcome. If you test what the spiritual researcher has to say against true natural science, you will find it confirmed. The spiritual researcher does not shy away from real scientific scrutiny. Thus I shall never advise anyone who feels drawn to what I call spiritual science to believe in the power of superstition, to refrain from testing, to give in to blind faith. No, no one should believe what is said, no one should accept something on authority. But he would understand it all the more, the more conscientiously he tests it in the natural life of the present.

It can be tested in the same way in religious life. It is clear to those who stand on the ground of spiritual science that religious life - as Dr. Rittelmeyer shows - gains a firm support, a security, through what can be experienced from spiritual science, a support that is needed today. One must not succumb to this misunderstanding: spiritual science is not opposed to religious life. It does not say: Don't go to church! No, religion is not to be replaced by spiritual science, and spiritual science is not to be a new religion, but it wants to be something that stands alongside scientific research as a scientific research, but which, for those who approach religious life from a spiritual scientific point of view, enriches and more firmly establishes this religious life. Spiritual science does not say: Go to spiritual science and do not go to church! But: Go to spiritual science and you will see what religious life has to say in a new light.

And life itself, social life, ethical life, legal life, all of life, even the immediate practice of life, can all be enriched by spiritual science in that those who do not become sceptical themselves get their ideas in such a way that they better conform to reality, so that one does not think you are a practical person but are really a dreamer, but rather ideas that are imbued with reality, a feeling that has inner certainty, a will that can find its bearings in life, that can find the paths through life, that is what people can find from spiritual research.

Spiritual research should not be understood as a theory, but as something that goes through life like an essence, that makes people useful and strong for life. So you can go to science, you can go to religion, to life itself – spiritual science will not keep anyone from doing so. It will be glad to be examined by science, by religion, by life itself. For he who is grounded in its soil knows that these tests will not refute it, but that these tests, if carried out seriously, will always confirm it.

Not that one cannot err in the field of spiritual science, but error is possible in every field. That is not the point. The spiritual researcher does not demand blind faith in authority. He says: Go and test spiritual science; it will only gain in science, in religion, in life. Go ahead and test spiritual science against Johannes Müller's world view, for that matter; and spiritual science has no fear of losing anything by doing so. I will not in any way hurl back at Johannes Müller the accusation that he hurled at me in response to Pastor Rittelmeyer's articles: that spiritual science is something tempting, that it represents a new temptation for people. That would be cowardice; then people may let themselves be tempted if the anthroposophical world view should be a temptation - they will recognize by themselves, when they are not suggested that they are being tempted, but when it is said to them: Go to science, go to religion, go to life, even go to Johannes Müller – you will find that spiritual science is not refuted by this, but confirmed by science, by religion, by life and even by Johannes Müller. For this spiritual science – as I have been able to sketch out – tomorrow I want to say something about the conditions in the spiritual world itself – this spiritual science wants real science, wants conscientiously gained knowledge. And above all, it has to be introduced into cultural life in such a way that it can withstand the impact coming from the natural sciences.

Du Bois-Reymond, a physiologist whom I hold in high esteem, has in his famous studies on animal electricity and in other brilliant speeches explained a great deal about how to characterize the newer natural science. But at the same time he said: this natural science can only extend to the world of the senses, for beyond that, science must cease. That was a dictum. And today a wide circle of humanity is under its influence. But what this dictum means – let me express it by way of a comparison: someone sees a tree growing out of the ground. How it is rooted in the ground, you cannot see inside; that bothers you. The tree grows and grows: what is in the ground has something to do with it. You now want to look at the tree with the means at your disposal, you dig it up; you put its roots in the air. It dies, it is killed because it is uprooted. In more recent times, because people did not want to move from human knowledge about the external sensory world to what is at the root of all knowledge in the spiritual world, attempts were made to uproot knowledge about nature, as one uproots a tree. Just as the tree dies, so too does knowledge die when it is torn from the soil, the spiritual soil.

In the future, spiritual science should provide more and more evidence that, when we are torn from the soil of spiritual life, we can only develop mechanical, materialistic science. Instead of Du Bois-Reymond's dictum, “We seek science, but where the supersensible life begins, science ends” – instead of this dictum, there must be the insightful saying, the attitude: When knowledge and science are wrenched out of the soil of truly spiritual life, then science dies out. Not that science must cease where the supersensible world begins, but when science is sought outside the supersensible world, then genuine science dies out, is uprooted and killed. This will be a conviction that connects people to the spiritual world in terms of their attitudes, and this conviction – which spiritual science seeks to achieve – should become the conviction of as many people as possible in the future.

Preliminary note: During the first three-week “Anthroposophical College Course” (September 26 to October 16, 1920 in Dornach), at which 30 representatives of various disciplines gave lectures in addition to Rudolf Steiner, Three evenings of conversation also took place, on October 4, 6 and 15, 1920. During these so-called “Conversations on Spiritual Science,” questions on any topic could be asked, to which Rudolf Steiner then responded in more or less detail. The stenographers did not record the conversation evenings in their entirety, and there are gaps in some of them.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I imagine that today, in a kind of conversation, we will discuss all kinds of questions and the like that arise in one or other of the honored listeners in connection with what has been developed here in recent days as anthroposophy. Although, as I have endeavored to arrange, you will be offered a hundred lectures during these three weeks, it is not possible to do more than touch on individual topics in outline. What can be given to you here can only be suggestions at first, but these suggestions may perhaps show that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here is no less well founded

Asa is more firmly grounded than that which is taken from the external life of today's strict science, yes, that it absorbs all the methodical discipline of this science and also perceives that which stands as a great demand of the time, the demand for further development. This demand for further development arises from the fact that those impulses of scientific life, in particular, which have produced great things in the past epoch, are now in the process of dying out and would have to lead to the decline of our civilization if a new impetus were not to come.

The suggestions that have now been made for such a new impact can certainly be expanded in a variety of directions in the context of a discussion such as the one taking place today, and I would now like to ask you to contribute to this expansion. Please ask questions, express your wishes and in general put forward anything you wish to say. The questions can best be put in writing, and I ask you to make good use of this opportunity.

Mr. Conrad: The question I have to ask relates to a therapeutic area. In his lectures, Dr. Steiner pointed to certain illnesses that are currently occurring very frequently. There are certain mental disorders in this regard for which I would be grateful for an answer about the deeper causes. These are mainly speech disorders. I would like to point out that I am not motivated by personal interests, but am only asking to the extent that pedagogical interests are involved. Teachers have often asked me what to do about speech disorders. However, since this question touches on the field of therapy, I do not want to encourage questions that only concern illnesses. I would be very grateful for an answer because this question seems to be very pressing at the moment.

Rudolf Steiner: Perhaps we can start by answering this question. When something specific like this comes up, we must of course bear in mind that such specific disturbances in the human organism can have the most diverse causes and that it is extremely difficult to talk about these things in general if we want to get to the real cause. In all such matters, my esteemed audience, it is actually a matter of using spiritual science to enable one to assess the individual case in the right way. And here I would like to say something that perhaps has a much more general significance than this question requires.

You see, we live in an age of abstraction, in an age when people love to reduce the manifold world, the multiform world, to a few formulas, when people love to establish abstract laws that encompass vast areas of existence. They can only do so in an abstract way, ignoring the individual. Spiritual science will have to bring about a significant change in this direction in particular. It will indulge less in simplifying the manifold existence and will bring insights about the concrete spiritual. But by approaching the concrete spiritual, one's soul is stimulated in such a way that the ability to observe and judge is strengthened and invigorated. This will become apparent in people's general social interaction. A large part of the social question today actually lies in the fact that we no longer have any inclination to really get to know the person we pass by, because our inner being does not have the kind of stimuli that enable us to properly grasp the individual, the particular. Here spiritual science will achieve something different. Spiritual science will enrich our inner life again, enabling it to grasp the particular. And so our powers of observation and discrimination and all that will be particularly developed. Therefore, we will have less desire for abstract generalizations, but more desire for the particular, the individual. In a sense, we will adhere more to the exemplary than to the abstract. And especially when dealing with something like physical disorders, with speech disorders, one must say: almost every single case is different – it is of course a slight exaggeration, but still generally valid – almost every single case is different, and at least one must distinguish typical ones.

We must be clear about the fact that some of the things that cause speech disorders are, of course, organically determined, that is, in a certain way, based on the inadequate development of this or that organ. But a whole series of such disorders in the present day are due to the fact that the human being's spiritual and soul forces are not being developed in the right way. And it may even be said that if a proper development of the spiritual and mental abilities of the human being can be achieved through education in childhood, at a time when the human organism is still pliable, then organic disorders can also be overcome to a certain extent; they can be overcome more easily than at a later age, when the body is more solidified. Our entire education system has gradually become more and more abstract. Our pedagogy does not suffer from bad principles. In general, if we look at the abstract treatment of pedagogical principles, we can see that we had great and significant achievements in the 19th century. And if you look at today's abstract way of applying how to do this or that in school, you have to say that 19th-century pedagogy really means something quite tremendous. But the art of responding to the individual child, of noticing the particular development of the individual child, is something that has been lost in modern times through the rush towards intellectuality and abstraction. To a certain extent, we are no longer able to strengthen the child's soul and spirit in the right way through abstract education. Do not think that when such a demand is made, it is only to point to a one-sided, unworldly education of soul and spirit – oh no. It may seem paradoxical today, but it is actually the case that materialism has had the tragic fate of being unable to cope with material phenomena. The best example of this is that we have such psychological theories as psycho-physical parallelism. On the one hand, we have human corporeality, which is only known from the point of view of anatomy, which only learns from the corpse; on the other hand, we have theories about the soul and spirit that are imagined up or even only live in words , and then one reflects on how this soul-spiritual, which bears no resemblance to the physical body, how this soul-spiritual is to affect the physical body. Spiritual science will lead precisely to the fact that one will be able to deal with the physical in a concrete way, that one will know such things as those which I already hinted at yesterday in the lecture and whose importance I would like to mention again here: From birth until the second set of teeth has come through, something is at work in us as human beings that we can call a sum of equilibrium forces that organize us thoroughly, and something that is mobile forces, that are life forces. This is particularly strong in our organism within this human age. What is at work in the human being is what really, I would say, pushes out the second teeth, what finds its conclusion in the pushing out of the second teeth, what, for its effectiveness in the organism, comes to a certain degree - it continues, of course - but comes to a certain degree to a conclusion with the appearance of the second teeth. It then transforms into what we can call mathematical, geometric thinking, what we can call thinking about the equilibrium conditions in space, thinking about the conditions of movement in space, what we can call finding oneself in the conditions of life in space and in time. We study what emerges from this, what passes, as it were, from a state of latency into a state of freedom, when it has just been released. There it is, as spiritual soul, as a very concrete spiritual soul, as we see it growing up in the child, when the change of teeth begins and continues into the later years of life. And now we look at this and see: what is spiritual and soul-like has an organizing effect in the body during the first seven years of life. And again, we study the connection between the spiritual and soul-like and the physical organization when we consider what the human being can then experience - albeit consciously only in inspiration - that is, what he experiences with ordinary consciousness, but still unconsciously, in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. It is more of an immersion into physical corporeality, where in its course, first of all, as the most important phenomenon – but there are others as well – it awakens the love instinct, where it marks the end, for example, with the change of voice in the male sex, and with somewhat broader effects in the female sex. What we recognize when we observe the development of the emotional world, and when we observe, for example, something like the development of the sense of music, especially at the time when the emotional world is developing, we study this again as the connection between the soul and spiritual life and the physical organization from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year.

In short, spiritual science does not ask the abstract question: How does the soul affect the body?, but rather it studies the concrete soul, it knows that one must look at the concrete soul at certain ages and how it affects the body in other ages. Thus it transforms the abstract and therefore so unsatisfactory method of treatment of today's psychology and physiology into very concrete methods. And in the further course, one then comes to the point where one can not only determine in general through spiritual science: in the first seven years of life, equilibrium, movement, and life force are at work; but one can also specialize in how this spiritual force expresses itself in the organs, how it works in the lungs, heart, liver, and so on; one has the opportunity to really look into the human body in a living way. In this way, the knowledge of the material turns out to be quite different from what materialism can [recognize]. The peculiar thing about materialism is that it devotes itself to a false, namely an abstract, a deducted spirituality. The peculiar thing about spiritual science is that it is precisely able to assess the material in the right way. Of course, it also goes in the right way to the spiritual on the other side. More and more clearly should we fight the opinion, which starts from nebulous mystics, that spiritual science is something that deals with phantasms in general talk. No, spiritual science deals precisely with the concrete and wants to provide a view of how the spiritual and soul life works down into the individual organs. For it is only by getting to know the workings of the spiritual in a concrete way in the material existence that one recognizes the material existence. But through such a concrete penetration into the human organism, one gradually acquires — through a kind of imagination, inspiration and so on — an ability, I would say a gift, to really see the individual and then to be able to judge where any particular fault lies, for example, when speech disorders are present. At a certain childlike age, it will be possible to influence the development of the speech organs through special speech exercises. The important thing is to be able to observe what physical disorders may be present at the right age. And although all kinds of obstacles are present simply due to external circumstances – after all, today only that which is officially certified in this direction is recognized and allowed to be practiced in any way – although all kinds of obstacles are present, we can still say that, for example, some beautiful results have been achieved in the case of speech disorders simply by rhythmic speech exercises were carried out, that the particular defect was recognized, and that the person with the defective speech organism was then allowed to recite things in this or that speech rhythm, always repeating them, and that he was then instructed to place himself in the rhythmic process of these or those tones, feeling them particularly. In this direction one can achieve very significant improvements or at least relief from such disorders. But something else is also possible. For example, in the case of speech disorders, one can work particularly on regulating the respiratory process, a regulation of the respiratory process that must, however, be completely individual. This regulation of the breathing process can be achieved by letting the person you are treating develop a feeling between the internal repetition, or perhaps just thinking, but broad thinking, slow thinking of certain word connections [and the breathing process]. The peculiar thing is that if you form such word connections in the right way, then, by surrendering to such a rhythm of thought or inner rhythm of words, you convey a feeling to the person being treated: With this word and its course, its slow or fast course, you notice it in your breathing, it changes in this or that way, and you follow that. In a certain way, you make him aware of what arises as a parallel phenomenon to breathing for speech. You make him aware of it. And when he can then tell you something about it, you try to help him further, so that once he has become aware of the breathing process, he gradually reaches the point where he can consciously snap into it himself, I would even say in word contexts that he forms during this breathing process, which he can now consciously follow in a certain way, in an appropriate manner.

So you have to think of it this way: by first giving rhythms, which, depending on how the matter lies, are to be thought inwardly, murmured, whispered or recited aloud, you cause the person in question to notice a change in breathing. Now he knows that the breath changes in this way. And now he is, in a sense, forbidden from using the very word or thought material that has been given to him. He is made aware that he is now forming something similar within himself, and then he comes up with the idea of consciously paralleling this entire inner process of thinking or speaking or inwardly hearing words with the breathing process, so that a certain breathing always snaps into an inner imagining or inner hearing of words. In this way, a great deal of what I would call a poor association between the processes that are more mental, more soul-like, in speaking, and those processes that take place in the organism as more material, as physical processes, is balanced out. All of this has a particularly favorable effect when applied in the right childhood period. And it can be said that if our teachers were better psychologists, if they really had a concrete knowledge of the human body from the spirit, they would be able to work with speech disorders in a completely different way, especially in a pedagogical way.

Now, what I have mentioned can also be developed into a certain therapy, and it can also be used to achieve many favorable results for later stages of life. But it seems to me to be of particular importance – and here we could already point to certain successes that have been achieved in this direction – that such things can be cured by a particularly rational application of the principle of imitation. But then one must have a much more intimate, I might say subjective-objective knowledge of the whole human organism and its parts.

You see, people speak to each other in life; but they are hardly aware of the, I would say imponderable, effects that are exerted from person to person when speaking. But these effects are there nevertheless. We have become so abstract today that we actually only listen to the other person's intellectual content. Very few people today have a sense of what is actually meant when a person with a little more psychic-organic compassion feels, after speaking to another, how he consciously carries the other person's speech to a high degree in his own speech organism. Very few people today have any sense of what is experienced in this respect when one has to speak in succession with four, five or six people, one of whom is coughing, the second hoarse, the third shouting, the fourth speaking quite unintelligibly, and so on, because one's own organism is also involved; it vibrates along with everything, it experiences it all. And if you develop this feeling of experiencing speech, you certainly acquire a strong feeling, I might say, for defense mechanisms too. The peculiar thing is that it is precisely in the case of such things, which are so closely connected with the subjectivity of the human being as speech disorders, that one then finds out how one has to speak to someone who suffers from speech disorders, how one has to speak to him so that he can achieve something through imitation. I have met stutterers; if you have been able to empathize with their stuttering and then spoken to them rhythmically by name, then you could get them to really achieve something like forgetting their stuttering, by running after what is spoken to them, so to speak. However, you then have to be able to develop human compassion to the point where it is organic. In therapy, an enormous amount depends on the ability to make the patient forget the subjective experience associated with some objective process. And in particular, for example, a real remedy for speech disorders is, if the time between the ages of seven and fourteen is used correctly, by lovingly encouraging those with speech disorders to engage in the kind of imitation just described. It is often the case that one experiences that stutterers sometimes cannot pronounce three words properly without stumbling, cannot say three words

properly one after the other. If you give them a poem to recite that they can become completely absorbed in, that they can love, and if you stand behind it as it were as an attentive listener, then they can say whole long series of verses without stuttering. Creating such opportunities for them to do something like this is something that is a particularly good therapeutic tool from a psychological point of view. It is a bad thing to point out such defects to people, no matter what the reason. I had a poet friend who always lost his temper when someone tactless pointed out his stammering. When someone tactfully asked him, “Doctor, do you always stammer like that?” he replied, “No, only when I am confronted with someone who is thoroughly unpleasant to me.” Of course, I would have had to stutter terribly now if I had really wanted to imitate the way this answer was given.

But then, little by little, one will recognize what a significant remedy can be found in eurythmy for such and similar defects in the human organism. Eurythmy can be studied from two sides, as it were. I always draw attention to this in the introductions to the performances. I show how the speech organism and its movement tendencies can be perceived through sensory and supersensory observation of the human being today, and how these are then transferred to the whole human organism. However, the reverse approach is no less important. For, as has been very well presented to you today from a different point of view by Dr. Treichler, in the development of speech, a primeval eurythmy of human beings undoubtedly and most certainly plays a very significant role. Things do not have the sound within them, as it were, in the sense that the bim-bam theory asserts, but there is a relationship between all things, between the whole macrocosm and the human organization, this microcosm, and basically everything that happens externally in the world can also be reproduced in a certain way in movement by the human organization. And so, basically, we constantly tend to recreate all phenomena through our own organism. We do this not only with the physical organism, but also with the etheric organism. The etheric organism is in a state of perpetual eurythmy. Primitive man was much more mobile than he is today. You know, this development from mobility to stillness is still reflected in the fact that in certain circles it is considered a sign of education to behave as phlegmatically as possible when speaking and to accompany one's speech with as few gestures as possible. It is “considered” a mark of certain speakers that they always keep their hands in their trouser pockets, so that they do not make any gestures with their arms, because it is considered an expression of particularly good speech delivery when one stands still like a block. But what is caricatured here only corresponds to humanity's progression from mobility to stillness. We have to recognize a transition from a gestural language, from a kind of eurythmy, to phonetic language at the very bottom of human development in primeval times. That which has come to rest in the organism has specialized in the organs of speech, and has naturally first actually developed the organs of speech. Just as the eye is formed by light, so the speech organ is formed by a language that is initially soundless. And if we are aware of all these connections, we will gradually be able to use eurythmy particularly well by introducing it properly into the didactic process, in order to counteract anything that could interfere with speech. And in this direction, if there is even a little leisure time, it will be a very appealing task to develop our current, more artistic and pedagogically trained eurythmy more and more towards the therapeutic side and to create a kind of eurythmy therapy that will then extend in particular to such therapeutic demands as the one we have been talking about here. I am not sure whether what I have said is already exhaustive, but I wanted to address it briefly. Of course, as questions accumulate, the level of detail in the answers will have to decrease.

A participant asks how the movement of eurythmy is meant in relation to the ether body, and whether, according to spiritual scientific research, it has the same form as the body. Is the ether body localized at the larynx?

Did the Hungarians, who were recently observed by Dr. Steiner playing cards in a Hungarian border town, themselves fall under the tables or only their etheric bodies? Was this a process that could only be observed in the etheric body?

Rudolf Steiner: Please understand me correctly. Eurythmy is such that it can be performed in the physical body and through the physical body, which otherwise only the etheric body of the human being can perform. The fact that a person as a eurythmist performs the movements studied in the ether body with his physical body does not mean that the person who stands there doing eurythmy when he has some horrible thought is not carrying out this horrible thought with his ether body. He can perform the most beautiful movements with his outer, physical body, and then the etheric body, following his emotions, may dance in a rather caricature-like manner. But those people I characterized the other day as being at the Hungarian border playing cards were, of course, characterized entirely on the basis of their physical behavior. I only said that one could study these passions in the soul and spirit, the passions that led them to do such things above and below the table, and that one could study these passions in the soul and spirit.

I would like to say the following. It is generally the case, when you look at a person at rest, that the etheric body is calm and only slightly larger than the physical body. But this is only because, schematically speaking, the physical body has a dilating effect on the etheric body of the human being in all directions. If the etheric body were not held in its form by the physical body, if it were not banished from the physical body, then it would be a very mobile being. The etheric body has the inherent possibility of moving in all directions, and in addition, in an awakened state, it is under the constant influence of the mobile astral, which follows everything of a spiritual nature. The etheric body in itself is therefore something thoroughly mobile. As a painter, for example, one has the difficulty when one wants to paint something ethereal, that one must paint, I would say, as if one could paint lightning. One must translate the moving into stillness. So at the moment when you step out of the physical world, at that moment the concept of distance also ceases to apply, along with all the things that actually only relate to resting space; all that ceases, and a completely different kind of imagining begins. A form of imagining begins that can actually only be characterized by saying that it relates to the ordinary imagining of spatial things as a suction effect relates to a pressure effect. One is drawn into the matter instead of touching it and so on. This is how it is with the relationship between the etheric body and the physical body.

A participant (also speaking for others): Dear attendees, prompted by discussions with many friends, I would like to ask a few questions that may express some of what has been going through many minds and hearts over the past week. We have heard that young students in particular can hear and learn many things here that need to be carried out into our people to build a new culture. Now, in the midst of all the problems that are being discussed here, the question of the fate of our German people often arises. How must our youth place themselves in the context of the fate of our German people if they want to fulfill their inner duties in the right way and of their own free will? Just as Fichte brought forth great and powerful thoughts a hundred years ago, so too are we receiving powerful thoughts today, the realization of which we long for. In wide circles, at least in those circles that are close to the threefold order, the view prevails today that this threefold order will also be realized without intensive work, that it can thus come about all by itself, so to speak, even if people contribute nothing to it.

Now I would like to raise the question: What will actually be the fate of our nation if this fatalistic attitude prevails in our circles – which is, of course, very easily explained from our overall cultural development – and if it is not replaced by the courageous will that is wanted from here? Today one often hears that it is possible that Bolshevism will spread even further, that it is possible that anarchic conditions in Germany will continue to spread. How should we position ourselves in the face of these questions, when this fatalistic element, which I have tried to describe, is confronted with the courageous, forward-storming will?

A second question: we are talking here about anthroposophy, about human wisdom. Now the question has been repeatedly asked in recent days: what would the whole world view actually look like if one did not start from the point of view of the anthroposophist, but if one started from the point of view of some other consciousness? We know from Dr. Steiner's lectures, but also from other lectures, that the three lower realms, that is, the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, are actually the brothers of man who have remained behind. How would this now present itself if we were to relate man again to the higher hierarchy, for example to the angelic beings? Is it conceivable that what is presented from a human point of view today as anthroposophy might be presented from the point of view of a higher consciousness, that is, from the point of view of an angelic consciousness - one could perhaps speak of an angeloisophy in this context - and how would the problems appear from this point of view? I ask this question because it has repeatedly come up in our conversations in recent days.

A third question: From the previous remarks by Dr. Steiner, it is clear that eurythmy is extremely important from a therapeutic point of view. Now I would like to point out that if we observe certain things today, things that appear to be trivial, we can see how absolutely necessary eurythmy is from a different point of view. Even in certain children's toys, we can see how certain forces appropriate to the present time want to come out, push towards manifestation. [There follows a reference to diabolo games and toys that were introduced by French and American soldiers in particular.] Do such toys not show certain forces that pull downwards? Is there not something in them that expresses forces that are polar to human nature, perhaps a hint of the devilish? And so I wanted to raise the question: Is it not possible that the harmful aspects of these or other materialistic games given to children today could be overcome through eurythmy? Just yesterday in children's eurythmy we had a living example of how children can respond to eurythmy in an ingenious way and then reject everything that is contained in such games.

Rudolf Steiner: I will try to answer the questions briefly, although each one would require a lecture in itself. However, I would ask you to bear in mind that if one says something in a brief answer to a question, it is of course easy for some inaccuracies or misunderstandings to arise.

First of all, the question of the fate of the German people: it is true that today an enormous sense of fatalism is emerging within broad sections of the German people. This fatalistic mood can be observed on a large scale and in detail. And this fatalistic mood was also, I might say tragically there when we began in April of last year in Stuttgart to seek understanding for the threefold social organism and for the upliftment of what lies in such a terrible way, that comes from this understanding. But on the other hand, it must be said that we have arrived at a very special point in the development of humanity. I must frankly admit that when I was invited by the Anthroposophical student group in Stuttgart to give a lecture for the students of the Technical University in their assembly hall, I was still under the impression of Spengler's book “The Decline of the West”. Yes, my dear audience, we have come to the point where today we can prove the decline in a strictly methodical way. Now, Spengler's book is by no means a talentless book. On the contrary, in many respects it is extraordinarily ingenious. What is presented there testifies to nothing other than this: if only the forces of which Spengler is aware were to be effective in the future – he is not aware of anthroposophy, but, as can be seen from some of his writing, he would probably turn red with rage just hearing about it — if only what Spengler knows remains effective, then the downfall of Western civilization would be absolutely certain well into the second millennium. Just let everything that has developed in humanity be effective — the downfall is certain. Just as a human being ages when he has reached a certain number of years and is heading towards death, so this culture is heading towards death. What people like Spengler do not know is what has developed in the successive cultural periods, which you will find described in my “Occult Science”.

In the first cultural period — I have called it the primeval Indian period — there was a primeval culture based on the wisdom of the time. Some of this has already been characterized in these lectures. From this there was an inheritance in the next age, in the ancient Persian, in the Zarathustra culture; from there, in turn, diluted into that age, what can be called the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, the third period, which closes approximately in the 8th century BC before the Mystery of Golgotha. Then very little goes into the fourth period, where Plato still lets his teaching and his writings be steeped in ancient mystery wisdom, but where naturalism and intellectualism already begin with Aristotle. During this period, in which human original wisdom is already beginning to decline, Christianity is founded. The Mystery of Golgotha is still understood with the last original wisdom. But as this ancient wisdom itself fades, it finally becomes modern theology, which either degenerates into a material dogmatism and church belief or into a description of Jesus as a simple man from Nazareth, in whom the Christ, the Christ-being, has been completely lost. But of course a new understanding of Christianity itself must come. The origin of Christianity extends into this fourth period, and from the point of view of Primordial Wisdom, it extends a little into our fifth period. The fifth period is the one in which Primordial Wisdom disappears, is paralyzed, and in which man must find a new spirituality from within himself. All talk about this spirituality coming from outside is in vain for the future. In the future, the gods must speak through the human soul. Today, the question is not addressed to any other power of the soul than to our will alone. That is to say, today it is a matter for all mankind to thoroughly overcome fatalism and consciously absorb spirituality into the will. This mission has already fallen to the German people to a very considerable extent. Anyone who studies this in more detail, by looking at the great figures of the German people, will notice how this people in particular has the mission to reshape its world, I would say its social world, out of its will, despite all the hardship and all the terrible things that are now unfolding within this people. Only for the time being there is no awareness of the actual facts and the great world-historical context.

I would like to do as I sometimes like to do, not just give my own opinion, but refer to the opinion of someone else, Herman Grimm, who certainly cannot be said to have been a Bolshevik or anything of the sort. As early as the 1880s, Herman Grimm wrote that the greatness of the German people is not based on its princes or its governments, but on its intellectual giants. But it may also be said that this is precisely what has been most misunderstood and most forgotten. Today there is a significant fact that one must only properly observe. Take the general intellectual life, untouched by a real spiritual upsurge. Study it as it lives itself out in popular literature, be it in Berlin, Vienna or elsewhere – I am not just talking about after the war here, but long before the war. study how it is lived out in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen and so on, study it in popular literature, especially in newspaper literature, which can be said to represent the opinions of a very large number of people. Yes, especially during the war, it turned out that sometimes people also remembered that there was a Goethe, that there was a Schiller, that there was a Fichte – yes, even Fichte's sayings were quoted. But the fact of the matter is this: anyone today who has a feeling, a real receptivity for the inner structure, for the direction, for the whole signature of intellectual life, knows that what was written in the 20th century in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig was more similar to what was written in Paris, Chicago, New York, and London than to what a Herder, a Goethe, or a Fichte felt vibrating through their souls.

This fact is widely misunderstood. What Central Europe's greatness is actually based on has been forgotten. Once we describe figures like Frederick the Great according to the truth, not according to legend, then some of it will melt away in the face of the real intellectual greatness in Central Europe. And this must come. We must learn again, not just to quote the words of Fichte, not just to quote the words of Goethe, but to be able to live again in what lived at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. And we must become aware that only through the individual shaping of the peoples differentiated across the earth can something of what is to be achieved be achieved – not, however, by some unified culture emanating from some side, which is a Western culture, and one that is justified only for the West, has flooded Central Europe, not through the fault of the West alone, but above all because Central Europe allowed itself to be flooded and accepted everything. And this awareness of what is at stake is what must be spread today by those who mean well.

Dear attendees, I knew an Austrian poet; I met him when he was already very old: his name is Fercher von Steinwand. He wrote many important works that unfortunately have remained unknown.

I will just add what I wrote in my booklet [1895] about Nietzsche, a fighter against his time. Right at the beginning, I quoted a saying of Nietzsche that actually deserves to be better known: the saying that Nietzsche wrote down when he served in the Franco-Prussian War, albeit as a military hospital attendant. There he wrote [about the terrible, dangerous consequences of the victorious war and called it a delusion that German culture had also triumphed; this delusion posed the danger of transforming victory into complete defeat,] yes, into the extirpation of the German spirit in favor of the German Reich. In recent decades, when people spoke of the extirpation of the spirit, they understood little of this, if they spoke of the will to let this spirit flow in again.

And when all this is taken into account, it is necessary to recall what Fichte felt and what he expressed so magnificently in his “Addresses to the German Nation”: that the gods serve the will of men, that they work through the will of self-aware men.

And after Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and others, it is precisely this German nation that should be aware that the will must arise, but that will must be imbued with spirituality. What strange mental wanderings this German nation has gone through. There are many things that can be recalled that are only rarely presented in external history.

I advise everyone to buy the Reclam booklet by Wilhelm von Humboldt: “Ideas for an Attempt to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State”. You will see how much of it is already contained in the middle part of the threefold social organism, the legal, state part. Of course, the threefolded social organism is not in it, but what can be said about the state itself is there. In this writing, Wilhelm von Humboldt attempts to protect the individual against the state, against the increasing power of the state in the intellectual and economic realms. Wilhelm von Humboldt was Prussian Minister of Education from 1809 to 1819 – one almost dare not say this in view of what happened afterwards.

And so many more examples could be given. What is necessary, above all, is that those who feel this question before their soul really let history come to life in them. My dear audience, as an Austrian, one has a very special feeling for this when one gets to know the school history books of northern Central Europe. In 1889, I came from Vienna to Weimar to work on the publication of Goethe's works at the Weimar Goethe-Schiller Archive. And since I had previously been involved in education and teaching, I was also given the friendly task of guiding the director of the Goethe-Schiller Archive's boys a little. They were then in high school, and it was only then that I got to know their history books a little – I hadn't taken that into account before – starting with the creation of the world and going up to the development of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and only then the actual world history. Several textbooks presented it this way, one being roughly the same as the other. But is it not always a mere radicalism when speaking in this way, but sometimes it is also the right love for the German nation. And the right love, if it can really come through spiritual-scientific stimulation, will in turn give rise to a culture of the will from mere fatalism, and that is what matters. Unless we grasp this either/or, either destruction or ascent through our own will, we will not escape destruction. Of course, ascent will not come, but something quite different. Well, I could say a lot more about this topic, but perhaps that's enough for now. We'll see each other more often.

Regarding the question: What would our world view look like from the standpoint of a different consciousness, for example, an angelic consciousness?

Well, in a certain sense, spiritual science describes completely different forms of consciousness, such forms of consciousness that people had in the earlier stages of development, or such forms of consciousness that one can ascend to through inspiration or imagination. So, in a certain sense, one learns through spiritual science to recognize what the world view of another consciousness is. But as far as the question of an angelic consciousness is concerned, ladies and gentlemen, it is very important that we do not choose more abstract questions than are necessary for a certain, I would say elasticity, of our conceptual ability. Because, you see, we do not have our consciousness to satisfy ourselves with all kinds of sensational news from the most diverse worlds, but so that we can go through our overall human development through its development. And the angels have their consciousness precisely so that they can undergo angelic development. And if someone were to ask what the world would look like with a different consciousness, it would be like someone asking me how a person would eat if they had a beak instead of a mouth. It is a textbook example of moving out of concreteness and into abstraction. Anthroposophy is supposed to achieve precisely that, to remain within the realm of experience and to extend it only

extended only to the spiritual world, that one is always ready to broaden one's experience, but not that one constructs all kinds of questions out of pure abstractness. It is not at all necessary for us to speculate in any way about angelic consciousness or mammalian consciousness or the like, but it is necessary for us to simply abandon ourselves to experience. It gives us the input into our consciousness that we need for our orientation and for our further development in the world. And that is what we have to learn from anthroposophy: to remain within the sphere that concerns us as human beings, because that is where we make appropriate progress.

This is connected with the question I heard here just now, which is asked incredibly often: what is the ultimate goal of human development in the first place?

What is the ultimate purpose of human life, or rather of life?

You see, it is precisely in relation to such questions that spiritual science must be approached not in an abstract but in a concrete way. If you had no possibility of getting a timetable for the journey to Rome here in Dornach, but only as far as Lugano, and you knew that you could get a further timetable in Lugano to go on to Florence, and from there on to Rome, one would do well not to refrain from the journey or to speculate about how I have to organize the journey from here to Rome, but to travel first to Lugano, and then see how things go from there. It is the same with human life, especially if one knows that there are repeated earthly lives. If I now tell you something about the goal of all human life here with the abilities that one can have in this one earth life, then it could indeed be something more perfect next time and then one could answer more completely how one gets the timetable to Rome. So one has to take into account what is immediately given in the concrete, and one must know that human life is in a state of perpetual development. So one cannot ask about its ultimate purpose, but only about the direction of development in which one is moving. If you really look into it, there is truly a lot to be done for the physical, soul and spiritual life. And this path to Lugano is not quite close – I now mean the path in the development of humanity – and how that will continue, we want to leave that to the more fully developed abilities of the future. In short, it is a matter of remaining in the concrete, bit by bit, and of getting rid of the abstractness that also gives birth to such questions. Now, something else is needed here about eurythmy:

Can eurythmy, when used correctly, bring important achievements for our folk culture to light?

Yes, dear readers. From some of the comments I have already made about eurythmy, you will be able to see that eurythmy can have a great pedagogical-didactic significance. If you are convinced of this, and if you are not not only believe it but also recognize that it can even help to alleviate disturbances in life through appropriate eurythmic didactics, then there is much more that can be brought into the right channels in social life through healthy eurythmy. But of course one thing needs to be noted in this regard. You see, we should be able to take this eurythmy into children's play. The esteemed questioner spoke of children's toys and asked whether eurythmy could not be used for a lot of things. And it was also asked whether eurythmy can have a healing effect on children aged five to seven who suffer from epilepsy.

It can certainly do so if it is applied in the right way. Admittedly, we are only just beginning with eurythmy. But the continuation of this beginning does not always depend only on the intellectual momentum. For example, we had intended to build a kind of eurythmeum in Stuttgart to begin with, because of course the Waldorf School is there, and later here in the building itself. You really need opportunities if these things are to be developed bit by bit. You cannot pursue these things without practising them, without having the necessary premises and also the necessary connection with the rest of human culture; you cannot pursue these things out of the blue. It would have been terribly expensive to build a eurythmy in Stuttgart and we only had a small sum of money together. Perhaps I may say the following about this. In the first year, through the dedicated work of our Waldorf teachers, which cannot be sufficiently recognized, we really achieved everything possible for the Waldorf School in the first year. Although, in spiritual and psychological terms, everything that could be expected has been achieved – it is fair to say this without being immodest – this year began with extraordinary worries for those who were sincere about the Waldorf School. It is a fact that the Waldorf School had to be enlarged because a large number of children came from outside; the number of children has more than doubled compared to the previous year. We were facing a very considerable deficit, and the fund that we had for a eurythmy school was first eaten up by the Waldorf School. It is only natural that the Waldorf School should take this on, but it means that we cannot build a eurythmy school. What lets us down is people's lack of understanding. Nowadays people are willing to understand anything, except for work that comes out of the truly concrete soul and spiritual life. I do not want to be polemical here, but I could tell you many things that would show you the dilettantism and the philosophical emptiness that is added to it today, as it performs a few somersaults before all possible reactionary powers in the world. We do not easily find the understanding of those who could do something on the material side to help things move forward. And anyone who wants the didactic, pedagogical, and especially the folk-pedagogical side of eurythmy and other aspects of a spiritual-scientific art of education to be further developed must ensure that understanding of what is actually intended is drawn into as many minds and as many souls as possible, with what is asserted here as anthroposophical spiritual science.

Question: It is often mentioned in spiritual science that those or those of the higher hierarchies have gone through their stage of humanity in these or other circumstances. What does stage of humanity mean in this sense, that is, the goal of human development? Is the goal set as the development of the I, of freedom, which freedom is denied to the higher hierarchies? So what is the stage of humanity?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, I don't know who has denied the higher hierarchies the freedom in its special form of education. What is meant when I speak, for example, in 'Occult Science' or in the other writings of the human stage of other beings, is essentially characterized by degrees, by the different states of consciousness. In spiritual science, the term “stage of human development” is to be understood as follows:

Today, within human development in the broadest sense, we live in a state of consciousness when we are awake, which we can call object consciousness. This state of consciousness can be described as Dr. Stein described it to you in his lectures, according to his activity in imagination, concept, judgment. One can also add perception and the special kind of emotional effect, the volitional emotion, volitional impulses and so on. Then present-day humanity also still knows, but only in reminiscences, in chaotic images, the dream state, but this points back, it is an atavistic remnant of an earlier state of consciousness, of an ego-less image consciousness; this is therefore an underhuman consciousness. And it is preceded by two other states of consciousness, so that we can say: the present state of consciousness is the fourth in the series. It will be followed by a fifth, which we can anticipate today through imagination, inspiration and so on. We can also characterize this progression as future states of the sixth and seventh states of consciousness. The fourth, however, the one we have today, is in the narrower sense the state of consciousness of humanity as it is today. So when we speak of the human stage, we mean beings with object consciousness. Beings who do not perceive through such senses as human beings do, who have a special education, perhaps through very different senses, but who, in their inner being, depend on imagining and grasping and then, in a more or less subconscious activity, connecting perception with ideas and concepts. The higher, fifth state of consciousness would thus be one in which one consciously differentiates between the inner, spiritual realm, which one first grasps in pure thinking, as has been attempted in the Philosophy of Freedom, and then has perception as such as a phenomenon of development in its own right, into which one no longer mixes concepts and ideas, so that, as in the process of inhalation, in inhaling and exhaling, an inner interaction between perception and concept consciously takes place. That would be the next higher state of consciousness.

When we speak of other beings and say that they were at the human stage of development at different times, we mean that they had a perception of the external world in the past – regardless of which senses were involved – which they connected in a more or less conscious way with the inner soul life, so that at that time they were not yet at a stage that humanity will reach in the future, the stage of a separate experience of perception, of the spiritual soul realm, and a conscious synthesis. That is what needs to be said about this question.

Dear attendees, it is now 10 a.m., I think I will collect the questions that have yet to be asked and save them, and we can meet again in the next few days. I think we will be able to discuss the matters on the other notes better and with more focus if we don't rush through it in a few minutes, but instead come together again to answer these questions. I also think you will agree to this, after we have spent two hours having this conversation. So we will conclude today and continue in some way soon.

The point I tried yesterday particularly to emphasize was that in the spiritual development of the West, which found its expression ultimately in the Schoolmen, not only is a part played by what we can grasp in abstract concepts, and what happened, as it were, in abstract concepts, and in a development of abstract thoughts, but rather that behind it all, there stands a real development of the impulses of Western mankind. What I mean is this: we can first of all, as happens mostly in the history of philosophy, direct our eyes on to what we find in each philosopher; we can follow how the ideas, which we find in a philosopher of the sixth, seventh, eighth or ninth century are further developed by philosophers of the tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and from such a review we can get the impression that one thinker has taken over the ideas from another, and that we are in the presence of a certain evolution of ideas. This is an historical review of spiritual life which had gradually to be abandoned. For what takes place there, what so to speak is revealed by the individual human souls, is merely a symptom of something deeper which lies behind the scenes of the outer events; and this something which was going on already a few centuries before Christianity was founded, and continued in the first centuries a.d. up to the time of the Schoolmen, is an entirely organic process in the development of Western humanity. And unless we take this organic process into account, it is as impossible to get an explanation of it, as we could of the period of human development between the ages of twelve to twenty, if we do not consider the important influence of those forces which are connected with adolescence, and which at this time rise to the surface from the deeps of human nature. In the same way out of the depth of the whole great organism of European humanity there surges up something which can be defined—there are other ways of definition,—but which I will define by saying: Those ancient poets spoke honestly and sincerely, who, like Homer, for instance, began their epic poems: “Sing to me, Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles,” or “Sing to me, O Muse, of the much-travelled man.” These people did not wish to make a phrase, they found as an inner fact of their consciousness, that it was not a single, individual Ego that wanted to express itself, but what in fact they felt to be a higher spiritual-psychic force which plays a part in the ordinary conscious condition of man. And again—I mentioned it yesterday—Klopstock was right and saw this fact to a certain extent, even if only unconsciously, when he began his “Messiah Poem” not “Sing, O Muse,” or “Sing, O Goddess, of man's redemption,” but when he said “Sing, immortal Soul. ...” In other words, “Sing, thou individual being, that livest in each man as an individuality.” When Klopstock wrote his “Messiah,” this feeling of individuality in each soul was, it is true, fairly widespread. But this inner urge, to bring out the individuality, to shape an individual life, grew up most pronouncedly in the age between the foundation of Christianity and the higher Scholasticism. We can see only the merest surface-reflection in the thoughts of the philosophers of what was taking place in the depths of all human beings—the individualization of the consciousness of European people. And an important thing in the spread of Christianity throughout these centuries is the fact that the leaders of its propagation had to address themselves to a humanity which strove more and more, from the depth of its being, towards an inner feeling of human individuality.

We can understand the separate events that occurred in this epoch only by keeping this point of view before us. And only thus can we understand what battles took place in the souls of such people who, in the profundity of the human soul, wanted to dispute with Christianity on the one side and philosophy on the other, like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. The authors of the usual histories of philosophy to-day have understood so little of the true form of these soul-battles which had their culmination in Albertus and Thomas, that this epoch is only approximately clearly depicted in their histories. There are many things to consider in the soul-life of Albertus and Thomas.

Superficially it looks as if Albertus Magnus, who lived from the twelfth into the thirteenth century, and Thomas, who lived in the thirteenth, had wished only to harmonize dialectically Augustinism, of which we spoke yesterday, on the one hand, and Aristotelianism on the other. One was the bearer of the church ideas, the other of the modified philosophical ideas. The attempt to find assonance between them runs, it is true, like a thread through everything either wrote. But there was in everything which thus became fixed in thoughts as in a flowering of Western feeling and will, a great deal which did not survive into the period which stretches from the fifteenth century into our own day, a period from which we have drawn our customary ideas for all sciences and for the whole of our daily life.

The man of to-day finds it really paradoxical when he hears what we heard yesterday of Augustine's beliefs; that Augustine actually believed that a part of mankind was from the beginning destined to receive God's grace without earning it—for really after original sin all must perish—to receive God's grace and be spiritually saved; and that another part of mankind must be spiritually lost—no matter what it does. To a modern man this paradox appears perhaps meaningless. But if you can get the feeling of that age in which Augustine lived, in which he absorbed all those ideas and influences I described yesterday, you will think differently. You will feel that it is possible to understand that Augustine wanted to hold on to the thoughts which, as contained in the ancient philosophies, did not take the individual man into consideration; for they, under the influence of such ideas as those of Plotinus, which I outlined yesterday, had in their minds nothing but the idea of universal mankind. And you must remember that Augustine was a man who stood in the midst of the battle between the thought which regarded mankind as a unity, and the thought which was trying to crystallize the individuality of man out of this unified mankind. But in Augustine's soul there also surged the impulse towards individuality. For this reason, these ideas take on such significant aspects—significant of soul and heart; for this reason they are so full of human experience, and Augustine becomes the intensely sympathetic figure which makes so great an impression if we turn our eyes back to the centuries which preceded Scholasticism.

After Augustine, therefore, there survived for many—but only in his ideas—those links which held together the individual man as Christian with his Church. But these ideas, as I explained them to you yesterday, could not be accepted by those Western people who rejected the idea of taking the whole of humanity as one unity, and feeling themselves as it were only a member in it, moreover a member which belongs to that part of humanity whose lot is destruction and annihilation.

And so the Church saw itself compelled to snatch at a way out. Augustine still conducted his gigantic fight against Pelagius, the man who was already filled with the individuality-impulse of the West. This was the person in whom, as a contemporary of Augustine, we can see how the sense of individuality such as later centuries had it, appears in advance. So he can only say: There is no question but that man must remain entirely without participation in his destiny in the material-spiritual world. The power by which the soul finds the connection with that which raises it from the entanglements of the flesh to the serene spiritual regions, where it can find its release and return to freedom and immortality—this power must be born of man's individuality itself. This was the point which Augustine's opponents stressed, that each man must find for himself the power to overcome inherited sin. The Church stood half-way between the two opponents, and sought a solution. There was much discussion concerning this solution—all the pros and cons, as it were—and then they took the middle way—and I can leave it to you to judge if in this case it was the golden or the copper mean—at any rate they took the middle way: semi-Pelagianism. A formula was found which was really neither black nor white, to this effect: It is as Augustine has said, but not quite as Augustine has said; nor is it quite as Pelagius has said, though in a certain sense, it is as he has said. And so one might say, that it is not through a wise divine judgment, that some are condemned to sin and others to grace, but that the matter is this, that it is a case not of a divine pre-judgment, but of a divine prescience. The divine being knows beforehand if one man is to be a sinner or the other filled with grace. At the same time no further attention was paid, when this dogma was agreed, to the fact that at bottom it is in no way a question of prescience but rather a question of taking a definite stand, whether individual man is able to join with those powers in his individual soul-life which raise him up out of his separation from the divine-spiritual being of the world and which can lead him back to it.

In this way the question really remains unsolved. And I might say that, compelled on one side to recognize the dogmas of the Church but on the other filled from deepest sensibility with profound respect for the greatness of Augustine, Albertus and Thomas stood face to face with what came to be the Western development of the spirit within the Christian movement. And yet several things from earlier times left their influence. One can see them, for instance, when one looks carefully at the souls of Albertus and of Thomas, but one realizes also that they themselves were not quite conscious of it; that they enter into their thoughts, but that they themselves cannot bring them to a precise expression. We must consider this, ladies and gentlemen, more in respect of this time of the high Scholasticism of Albertus and Thomas, we must consider it more than we would have to consider a similar phenomenon, for instance, in our day. I have permitted myself to stress the “Why?” in my Welt-und Lebensanschauung des 19 Jahrhundert,—and it was further developed in my book Die Rätzee der Philosophie, where the proposition was put in another way so that the particular passage was not repeated, if I may be allowed to say so. This means—and it will occupy us in detail tomorrow, I will only mention it now—this means that from this upward-striving of individuality among the thinkers who studied philosophically that in these thinkers we get the highest flowering of logical judgment; we might say the highest flowering of logical technique.

Ladies and gentlemen, one can quarrel as one will about this or that party-standpoint on the question of Scholasticism—all this quarrelling is as a rule grounded on very little real understanding of the matter. For whoever has a sense of the manner quite apart from the subjective content in which the accuracy of the thought is revealed in the course of a scientific explanation—or anything else; whoever has a sense of appreciating how things that hang together are thought out together, which must be thought out together if life is to have any meaning; whoever has a sense of all this, and of several other things, realizes that thought was never so exact, so logically scientific, either before or afterwards as in the age of high Scholasticism. This is just the important thing, that pure thought so runs with mathematical certainty from idea to idea, from judgment to judgment, from conclusion to conclusion, that these thinkers account to themselves for the smallest, even the tiniest, step. We have only to remember in what surroundings this thinking took place. It was not a thinking that took place as it now takes place in the noisy world; rather its place was in the quiet cloister cell or otherwise far from the busy world. It was a thinking that absorbed a thought-life, and which could also, through other circumstances, formulate a pure thought-technique. It is to-day as a matter of fact difficult to do this; for scarcely do we seek to give publicity to such a thought-activity which has no other object than to array thought upon thought according to their content, than the stupid people come, and the illogical people raise all sorts of questions, interject their violent partisanship, and, seeing that one is after all a human being among human beings, we have to make the best of these things which are, in fact, no other than brutal interruptions, which often have nothing whatever to do with the subject in question. In these circumstances that inner quiet is very soon lost to which the thinkers of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries could devote themselves, who did not have to yield so much to the opposition of the uneducated in their social life.

This and other things called forth in this epoch that wonderfully plastic but also finely-outlined thought-activity which distinguishes Scholasticism and for which people like Augustine and Thomas consciously strove.

But now think of this: on the one side are demands of life which appear as if one had to do with dogmas that have not been made clear, which in a great number of cases resembled the semi-Pelagianism already described; and as if one fought in order to uphold what one believed ought to be upheld, because the Church justifiably had set it up; and as if one wanted to maintain this with the most subtle thought. Just imagine what it means to light up with the most subtle thought something of the nature of what I have described to you as Augustinism. One must look closely into the inside of scholastic effort and not only attempt to characterize this continuity from the Patristic age to the age of the Schoolmen from the threads of concepts which one has picked up. These spirits of High Scholasticism did a great deal half unconsciously and we can really only understand it, if we consider, looking beyond what I already described yesterday, such a figure as that which entered half mysteriously from the sixth century into European spiritual life and which became known under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. To-day, because time is too short I cannot enter into all the disputes on the question of whether there is any truth in the view that these writings were first made in the sixth century, or whether the other view is right which ascribes at any rate the traditional element of these writings to a much earlier time. All that is after all not important, but the important thing is, that the philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite was available for the thinkers of the seventh and eighth centuries right up to the time of Thomas Aquinas, and that these writings throughout have a Christian tinge and contain in a special form that which I yesterday defined as Plotinism, as the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. And it had become particularly important for the Christian thinkers of the outgoing old world and the beginning of the Middle Ages up to the time of High Scholasticism, what attitude the author of the Dionysius writings took to the uprising of the human soul till it achieved a view of the divine. This Dionysius is generally described as if he had two paths to the divine; and as a matter of fact there are two. One path requires the following: if man wishes to raise himself from the external things which surround him in the world to the divine, he must attempt to extract from all those things their perfections, their nature; he must attempt to go back to absolute perfection, and must be able to give a name to absolute perfection in such a way that he has a content for this divine perfection which in its turn can reveal itself and can bring forth the separate things of the world by means of individualization and differentiation. So I would say, for Dionysius divinity is that being which must be given names to the greatest extent, which must be labelled with the most superlative terms which one can possibly find amongst all the perfections of the world; take all those, give them names and then apply them to the divinity and then you reach some idea of the divinity. That is one path which Dionysius recommends.

The other path is different. Here he says: you will never attain the divinity if you give it only a single name, for the whole soul-process which you employ to find perfections in things and to seek their essences, to combine them in order to apply the whole to divinity, all this never leads to what one can call knowledge of a divinity. You must reach a state in which you are free from all that you have known of things. You must purify your consciousness completely of all that you have experienced through things. You must no longer know anything of what the world says to you. You must forget all the names which you are accustomed to give to things and translate yourself into a condition of soul in which you know nothing of the whole world. If you can experience this in your soul-condition, then you experience the nameless which is immediately misunderstood if one attaches any name to it. Then you will know God, the Super-God in His super-beauty. But the names Super-God and super-beauty are already disturbing. They can only serve to point towards something which you must experience as nameless, and how can one deal with a character who gives us not one theology but two theologies, one positive, one negative, one rationalistic and one mystic? A man who can put himself into the spirituality of the time out of which Christianity was born can understand it quite well. If one pictures the course of human evolution even in the first Christian centuries as the materialists of to-day do, anything like the writings of the Areopagite appears more or less foolishness or madness. In this case they are usually simply rejected. If, however, one can put oneself into the experience and feeling of that time, then one realizes what a man like the Areopagite really wanted—at bottom only to express what countless people were striving for. Because for them the divinity was an unknowable being if one took only one path to it. For him the divinity was a being which had to be approached by a rational path through the finding and giving of names. But if one takes this one way one loses the path. One loses oneself in what is as it were universal space void of God. And then one does not attain to God. But one must take this way, for otherwise one can also not reach God. Moreover, one must take yet another way, namely, the one that strives towards the nameless one. By either road alone the divinity cannot be found, but by taking both one finds the divinity at the point where they cross. It is not enough to dispute which of the roads is the right one. Both are right, but each taken alone leads to nothing. Both roads when the human soul finds itself at the crossing lead to the goal. I can understand how some people of to-day who are accustomed to what is called polemics recoil from what is here advanced concerning the Areopagite. But what I am advancing here was alive in those men who were the leading spiritual personalities in the first Christian centuries, and continued traditionally in the Christian-philosophical movement of the West to the time of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. For instance, it was kept alive through that individual whose name I mentioned yesterday, Scotus Erigena, who lived at the court of Charles the Bald. This Scotus Erigena reminds one forcibly of what I said yesterday. I told you: I have never known such a meek man as Vincenz Knauer, the historian of philosophy. Vincenz Knauer was always meek, but he began to lose his temper when there was mention of Plotinus or anything connected with him; and Franz Brentano, the able philosopher, who was always conventional became quite unconventional and abusive in his book Philosophies that Create a Stir—referring to Plotinus. Those who, with all their discernment and ability, lean more or less towards rationalism, will be angry when they are faced with what so to speak poured forth from the Areopagite to find a final significant revelation in this Scotus Erigena. In the last years of his life he was a Benedictine Prior, but his own monks, as the legend goes—I do not say it is literally true, but it is near enough—tortured him with pins till he died, because he introduced Plotinism even in the ninth century. But his ideas survived him and they were at the same time the continuation of the ideas of the Areopagite. His writings more or less disappeared till later days; then ultimately they reappeared. In the twelfth century Scotus Erigena was declared a heretic. But that did not mean as much then as it did later or does to-day. All the same, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were deeply influenced by the ideas of Scotus Erigena. That is the one thing which we must recognize as a heritage from former times when we wish to speak of the essence of Thomism.

But there is another thing. In Plotinism, which I tried to describe to you yesterday with regard to its Cosmology, there is a very important presentation of human nature which is derived from a material/super-material view. One really regains respect for these things if one discovers them again on a background of spiritual science. Then one admits at once the following: one says, if one reads something like Plotinus or what has come down to us of him, unprepared, it looks rather chaotic and intricate. But if one discovers the corresponding truths oneself, his views take on a quite special appearance, even if the method of their expression in those times was different from what it would have to be to-day. Thus, one can find in Plotinus a general view which I should describe as follows:

Plotinus considers human nature with its physical and psychic and spiritual characteristics. Then he considers it from two points of view, first from that of the soul's work on the body. If I spoke in modern terms, I should have to say: Plotinus says first of all to himself; if one considers a child that grows up in the world, one sees how that which is formed as human body out of the spiritual-psychic attains maturity. For Plotinus everything material in man is, if I may use an expression to which I trust you will not object, a “sweating out” of the spiritual-physic, a “crustation” as it were of the spiritual-psychic. But then, when a human being has grown to a certain point, the spiritual-psychic forces cease to have any influence on the body. We could, therefore, say: at first we are concerned with such a spiritual-psychic activity that the bodily form is created or organized out of it. The human organization is the product of the spiritual-psychic. When a certain condition of maturity has been reached by some part of the organic activity, let us say, for example, the activity on which the forces are employed which later appear as the forces of the memory, then these forces which formerly have worked on the body, make their appearance in a spiritual-psychic metamorphosis. In other words, that part of the spiritual-psychic element which had functioned materially, now liberates itself, when its work is finished, and appears as an independent entity: a mirror of the soul, one would have to call it if one were to speak in Plotinus' sense. It is extraordinarily difficult with our modern conceptions to describe these things. You get near it, if you think as follows: you realize that a human being, after his memory has attained a certain stage of maturity, has the power of remembering. As a small child he has not. Where is this power of remembering? First it is at work in the organism, and forms it. After that it is liberated as purely spiritual-psychic power, and continues still, though always spiritual-psychically, to work on the organism. Then inside this soul-mirror inhabits the real vessel, the Ego. In characteristics, in an idea-content which is extraordinarily pictorial, these views are worked out from that which is spiritually active, and from that which then remains over, and becomes, as it were, passive towards the outer world—so that it takes up, like the memory, the impressions of the outer world and retains them. This two-fold work of the soul, this division of the soul into an active part, which practically builds up the body, and a passive part, derived from an older stratum of human growth and human attitude to the world, which found in Plotinus its best expression and then was taken up by Augustine and his successors, was described in an extraordinarily pictorial manner.

We find this view in Aristotelianism, but rationalized and translated into more physical conceptions. And Aristotle had it in his turn from Plato and again from the same sources as Plato. But when we read Aristotle we must say: Aristotle strives to put into abstract conceptions what he found in the old philosophies. And so we see in the Aristotelian system which continued to flourish, and which was the rationalistic form of what Plotinus had said in the other form, we see in this Aristotelianism which continued as far as Albertus and Thomas a rationalized mysticism, as it were, a rationalized description of the spiritual secret of the human being. And Albertus and Thomas are conscious of the fact that Aristotle has brought down to abstract conceptions something which the others had had in visions. And therefore they do not stand in the same relation to Aristotle as the present day philosopher-philologists, who have developed strange controversies over two conceptions which originate with Aristotle; but as the writings of Aristotle have not survived complete, we find both these conceptions in them without having their connection—which is after all a fact which affords ground for different opinions in many learned disputes. We find two ideas in Aristotle. Aristotle sees in human nature something which brings together into a unity the vegetative principle, the animal principle, the lower human principle, then the higher human principle, that Aristotle calls the nous, and the Scholiasts call the intellect. But Aristotle differentiates between the nous poieticos, and the nous patheticos, between the active and the passive spirit of man. The expressions are no longer as descriptive as the Greek; but one can say that Aristotle differentiates between the active understanding, the active spirit of man, and the passive. What does he mean? We do not understand what he means unless we revert to the origin of these concepts. Just like the other forces of the soul the two points of understanding are active in another metamorphosis in building up the human soul:—the understanding, in so far as it is actively engaged in building up the man, but still the understanding, not like the memory which comes to an end at a certain point and then liberates itself as memory—but working throughout life as understanding. That is the nous poieticos; the factor which in Aristotle's sense, becoming individualized out of the universe, builds up the body. It is no other than the active, bodybuilding soul of Plotinus. On the other hand, that which liberates itself, existing only in order to receive the outer world, and to form the impressions of the outer world dialectically, is the nous patheticos—the passive intellect—the intellectus possibilis. These things, presented to us in Scholasticism in keen dialectics and in precise logic, refer back to the old heritage. And we cannot properly understand the working of the Schoolmen's souls without taking into consideration this intermixture of age-old traditions.

Because all this had such an influence on the souls of the Scholiasts, they were faced with the great question which one usually feels to be the real problem of Scholasticism. At a time when men still had a vision which produced such a thing as Platonism or a rationalized version of it such as Aristotelianism, at a time when the sense of individuality had not yet reached its highest, these problems could not have existed; for what we to-day call understanding, what we call intellect, which had its origin in the terminology of Scholasticism, is the product of the individual man. If we all think alike, it is only because we are all individually constituted alike, and because the understanding is bound up with the individual which is constituted alike in all men. It is true that in so far as we are different beings we think differently; but that is a shade of difference with which logic as such is not concerned. Logical and dialectical thought is the product of the general human, but individually differentiated organization.

So man, feeling that he is an individual says to himself: in man arise the thoughts through which the outer world is inwardly represented; and here the thoughts are put together which in turn are to give a picture of the world; there, inside man, emerge on the one hand representations which are connected with individual things, with a particular book, let us say, or a particular man, for instance, Augustine. But then man arrives at the inner experiences, such as dreams, for which he cannot straightway find such an objective representation. The next step is the experience of pure chimaeras, which he creates for himself, just as here the centaur and similar things were chimaeras for Scholasticism. But, on the other hand, are the concepts and ideas which as a matter of fact reflect on to both sides: humanity, the lion-type, the wolf-type, etc.; these are general concepts which the Schoolmen according to ancient usage called the universals. Yes, as the situation for mankind was such as I described to you yesterday, as one rose, as it were, to these universals and perceived them to be the lowest border of the spiritual world which was being revealed through vision to mankind, these universals, humanity, animality, lion-hood, etc., were simply the means whereby the spiritual world, the intelligible world, revealed itself, and simply the soul's experience of an emanation from the supernatural world.

In order to have this experience it was essential not to have acquired that feeling of individuality which afterward developed in the centuries I have named. This sense of individuality led one to say: we rise from the things of the senses up to that border where are the more or less abstract things, which are, however, still within our experience—the universals such as humanity, lion-hood, etc. “Scholasticism” realized perfectly that one cannot simply say: these are pure conceptions, pure comprehensions of the external world:—rather, it became a problem for Scholasticism, with which it grappled. We have to create such general and universal conceptions out of our individuality. But when we look out upon the world, we do not have “humanity,” we have individual man, not “wolf-hood” but individual wolves. But, on the other hand, we cannot only see what we formulate as “wolf-hood” and “lamb-hood” as it were in such a way as if at one time we have formulated the matter as “agnine” and at another as “lupine,” and as if “lamb-hood” and “wolf-hood” were only a kind of composition and the material which is in these connected ideas were the only reality: we cannot simply assume this; for if we did we should have to assume this also:—If we caged a wolf and saw to it that for a certain period he ate nothing but lambs he is filled with nothing but lamb-matter; but he doesn't become a lamb; the matter doesn't affect it, he remains a wolf. “Wolf-hood” therefore is after all not something which is thus merely brought into contact with the material, for materially the whole wolf is lamb, but he remains a wolf.

There is to-day everywhere a problem which people do not take seriously enough. It was a problem with which the soul in its greatest development grappled with all its fibre. And this problem stood in direct connection with the Church's interests. How this was we can picture to ourselves if we consider the following:—

Before Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas appeared with their special exposition of philosophy, there had already been people, like Roscelin, for example, who had put forward the theory, and believed it implicitly, that these general concepts, these universals are really nothing else but the comprehension of external individual objects; they are really only words and names. And a Nominalism grew up which saw only words in general things, in universals. But Roscelin took Nominalism with dogmatic earnestness and applied it to the Trinity, saying: if something which is an association of ideas is only a word, then the Trinity is only a word, and the individuals are the sole reality—the Father, Son and Holy Ghost; then only the human understanding grasps these Three through a name. Mediaeval Churchmen stretched such points to the ultimate conclusions; the Church was compelled, at the Synod of Soissons, to declare this view of Roscelin partial polytheism and its teaching heretical. Thus one was in a certain difficult position towards Nominalism; it was a dogmatic interest which was linked with a philosophic one.

To-day we no longer take, of course, such a situation as something vital. But in those days it was regarded as most vital, and Thomas and Albertus grappled with just this question of the relationship of the universals to individual things; for them it was the supreme problem. Fundamentally, everything else is only a consequence, that is, a consequence in so far as everything else has taken its colour from the attitude they adopted towards this problem. But this attitude was influenced by all the forces which I have described to you, all the forces which remained as tradition from the Areopagite, which remained from Plotinus, which had passed through the soul of Augustine, through Scotus Erigena and many others—all this influenced the manner of thought which was now first revealed in Albertus and then, on a wide-reaching philosophic basis, in Thomas. And one knew also that there were people then who looked up beyond concepts to the spiritual world, to the intellectual world, to that world of which Thomism speaks as of a reality, in which he sees the immaterial intellectual beings which he calls angels. These are not just abstractions, they are real beings, but without bodies. It is these beings which Thomas puts in the tenth sphere. He looks upon the earth as encircled by the sphere of the Moon, of Mercury, of Venus, of the Sun, and so on, and so comes through the eighth and ninth spheres to the tenth, which was the Empyreum. He imagines all this pervaded by intelligences and the intelligences nearest are those which, as it were, let their lowest margins shine down upon the earth so that the human soul can get into touch with them.

But in this form in which I have just now expressed it, a form more inclined to Plotinism, this idea is not the result of pure individual feeling to which Scholasticism had just fought its way, but for Albertus and Thomas a belief remained that above abstract concepts there was up there a revelation of those abstract concepts. And the question faced them: What reality have, then, these abstract concepts? Now Albertus as well as Thomas had an idea of the influence of the psychic-spiritual on the physical body and the subsequent self-reflection of the psychic-spiritual when its work on the physical body was sufficiently performed: they had an idea of all this. Also they had an idea of what man becomes in his own individual life, how he develops from year to year, from decade to decade precisely through the impressions he receives and digests from the external world. Thus the thought came that though, of course, we have the external world all round us, this world is a revelation of something super-worldly, something spiritual. And while we look at the world and turn our attention to the separate minerals, plants, and animals, we surmise all the same that there lies behind them a revelation from higher spiritual worlds. And if we look at the natural world with logical analysis, with everything of which our soul makes us capable, with all the power of thought we possess, we arrive at those things which the spiritual world has implanted in the natural world. But then we must get clear on this point: we turn our eyes and all the other senses on to this world, and so are in definite relationship with the world. We then go away from it and retain, as it were, as a memory what we have absorbed from it. We look back once more into memory; and then there first appears to us really the universal, the generality of things, such as humanity, and so on; that appears to us first in the inner conceptual form. So that Albertus and Thomas say: if you look back, and if your soul reflects its experiences of the external world, then you have the universals preserved in it. Then you have universals. From all the human beings whom you have met, you form the concept of humanity. If you remembered only individual things you could, in any case, live only in earthly names. But as you do not live only in earthly names, you must experience the universals. There you have the universalia post res—the universals which live in the soul after the things have been experienced. While a man's soul concentrates on things, its contents are not the same as afterwards when it remembers them, when they are, as it were, reflected from inside, but rather he stands in a real relationship to the things. He experiences true spirituality of the things and translates them only into the form of universals post rem.

Albertus and Thomas assume that at the moment when man through his power of thought stands in real relationship with his surroundings, that is, not only with what is “wolf” because the eye sees and the ear hears it, but because he can meditate on it and formulate the type “wolf,” at this moment he experiences something which, though invisible, in the objects, is comprehended in thought independently of the senses. He experiences the universalia in rebus—the universals in things.

Now the difference is not quite easy to define, because we usually think that what we have in the soul as a reflection is the same in the things. But it is not the same in the sense of Thomas Aquinas. That which man experiences as an idea in his soul and explains with his understanding, is the same thing with which he experiences the real, and the universal. So that according to their form, the universals in the things are different from those after them, which remain then in the soul: but inwardly they are the same. There you have one of the scholastic concepts which one does not generally put to the soul in all its subtlety. The universals in things and the universals after things are, as far as content is concerned the same, and differ only in form. But then we must not forget that that which is distributed and individualized in things points in its turn to what I described yesterday as being inherent in Plotinism, and called the actually intelligible world: there again the same contents which are in things and in the human soul after things are, as far as content goes, alike, but different in form; they are contained in another form, but of similar content. These are the universalia ante res, before things. These are the universals as contained in the divine mind, and in the mind of the divine servants—the angelic beings. Thus what was for a former age a direct spiritual-sensory/super-sensory vision becomes a vision which was represented only in sense-images, because what one sees with the super-senses cannot, according to the Areopagite, be even given a name, if one wished to deal with it in its true form: one can only point to it and say: it is not anything such as external things are. Thus what was for the ancient's vision and appeared as a reality of the spiritual world, became for Scholasticism something to be decided by all that acuteness of thought, all that suppleness and nice logic of which I have spoken to you to-day. The problem which formerly was solved by vision, is brought down into the sphere of thought and of reason. That is the essence of Thomism, the essence of Albertinism, the essence of Scholasticism. It realized, above all, that in its epoch, the sense of human individuality has reached its culmination. It sees, above all, all problems in their rational and logical form, in the form, in fact, in which the thinker must comprehend them. Scholasticism grapples chiefly with this form of world-problems, this form of thinking, and thus stands in the midst of the life of the Church, which I illumined for you yesterday and to-day in many ways, if only with a few rays of light. There is the belief of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries; it is to be attained with thinking, with the most subtle logic; on the other side, are the traditional Church dogmas, the content of Faith.

Let us take an example of how a thinker like Thomas Aquinas stands to both. Thomas Aquinas asks: Can one prove the existence of God by logic? Yes, one can. He gives a whole series of proofs. One, for instance, is when he says: We can at first gain knowledge only by approaching the universalia in rebus, by looking into things. We cannot—it is the personal experience of this age—we cannot enter into the spiritual world through vision. We can only enter the spiritual world by using our human powers if we saturate ourselves in things, and get out of them what we can call the universalia in rebus. Then we can draw our conclusions concerning the universalia ante res. So he says: We see the world in movement; one thing always gives motion to another, because it is itself in motion. So we go from one thing in motion to another, and from this to a third thing in motion. This cannot be continued indefinitely, for we must get to a prime mover. But if this were itself in motion, we should have to proceed to another mover. We must, therefore, in the end reach a stationary mover.

And here Thomas—and Albertus comes after all to the same conclusion—reaches the Aristotelian stationary mover, the First Cause. It is inherent in logical thinking to recognize God as a necessary First Being, as a necessary first stationary mover. For the Trinity there is no such path of thought which leads to it. It is handed down. With human thought we can only reach the point of testing if the Trinity is contrary to sense. We find it is not, but we cannot prove it, we must believe it, we must accept it as a content, to which the unaided human intellect cannot rise.

This is the attitude of Scholasticism to the question which was then so important: How far can the unaided human intellect go? And in the course of time it became involved in quite a special way with this deep problem. For, you see, other thinkers had gone before. They had assumed something apparently quite absurd, they had said: it is possible for something to be true theologically and false philosophically. One could say straight out: it is possible for things to be handed down as dogma, as, for instance, the Trinity; yet if one ponders over the same question, one arrives at a contrary result. It is certainly possible for the reason to lead to other consequences than those to which the faith-content leads. And that was so, that was the other thing which faced Scholasticism—the doctrine of the double truth, and it is on this that the two thinkers Albertus and Thomas laid special stress, to bring faith and reason into harmony, to seek no contradiction between rational thought—at any rate, up to a certain point—and faith. In those days that was radicalism, for the majority of the leading Church authorities clung to the doctrine of the double truth, namely, that man must on one side think rationally, the content of his thought must be in one form, and faith could give it him in another form, and these two forms he had to keep.

I believe we can get a feeling of historical development if we consider the fact that people of so few centuries ago, as these are of whom we speak to-day, are wrapped up in such problems with their whole soul. For these things still reverberate in our time. We still live with these problems. How we do it, we shall discuss tomorrow. To-day I wanted to describe the essence of Thomism as it was in those days.

So it was, you perceive, that the main problem in front of Albertus and Thomas was this: What is the relation of the content of human reason to that of human faith? How can that which the Church ordains for belief be, first, understood, and secondly, upheld against what contradicts it? With this, people like Albertus and Thomas had much to do, for the movement I have described was not the only one in Europe; there were all sorts of others. With the spread of Islam and the Arabs other creeds made themselves felt in Europe, and something of that creed which I yesterday called the Manichaean had remained all over the continent. But there was also, for instance, what we know as “Representation” through the doctrine of Averroës from the twelfth century, who said: The product of a man's pure intellect belongs, not specially to him, but to all humanity. Averroës says: We have not each a mind; we each have a body, but not each a mind. A has his own body, but his mind is the same as B has and C has. We might say: Averroës sees mankind as with a single intellect, a single mind; all individuals are merged in it. There they live, as it were, with the head. When they die, the body is withdrawn from this universal mind. There is no immortality in the sense of individual continuation after death. What continues, is the universal mind, that which is common to all men.

For Thomas the problem was that he had to reckon with the universality of mind, but he had to take the point of view that the universal mind is not so closely united with the universal memory in separate beings, but rather during life with the active forces of the bodily organization; and so united, forming such a unity, that everything working in man as the formative vegetable, and animal powers, as the power of memory, is attracted, as it were, during life by the universal mind and disposition. Thus Thomas imagines it, that man attracts the individual through the universal, and then draws into the spiritual world what his universal had attracted; so that he takes it there with him. You perceive, there can be no pre-existence for Albertus Magnus and Thomas, though there can be an after-existence. This was, after all, the same for Aristotle, and in this respect Aristotelianism is also continued in these thinkers.

In this way the great logical questions of the universals join up with the questions which concern the world-destiny of each individual. And even if I were to describe to you the Cosmology of Thomas Aquinas and the natural history of Albertus, which is extraordinarily wide-reaching, over almost all provinces and in countless volumes, you would see everywhere the influence of what I called the general logical nature of Albertinism and Thomism. And this logical nature consisted in this: with our reason—what was then called the Intellect—we cannot attain all heights; up to a certain point we can reach everything through logical acumen and dialectic, but then we have to enter into the region of faith. Thus as I have described it, these two things stand face to face, without contradicting each other: What we understand with our reason, and what is revealed through faith can exist side by side.

What does this really entail? I believe we can tackle this question from very different sides. What have we here before us historically as the essence of Albertinism and of Thomism? It is really characteristic of Thomas, and important, that while he is straining reason to prove the existence of God, he has to add at the same time that one arrives at a picture of God as it was rightly represented in the Old Testament as Jahve. That is, when Thomas departs from the paths of reason open to the individual human soul, he arrives at that unified God whom the Old Testament calls the Jahve-God. If one wants to arrive at the Christ, one has to pass over to faith; the individual spiritual experience of the human soul is not sufficient to attain to Him.

Now in the arguments which Scholasticism had to face (the spirit of the age demanded it), in these theories of the double truth—that a thing could be theologically true and philosophically false—there still lay something deeper; something which perhaps could not be seen in an age in which everywhere rationalism and logic were the pursuit of mankind. And it was the following: that those who spoke of this double truth were not of the opinion that what is theologically revealed and what is to be reached by reason are ultimately two things, but for the time being they are two truths, and that man arrives at these two truths because he has to the innermost part of his soul, shared in the faith. In the background of the soul up to the time of Albertus and Thomas flows, as it were, this question: Have we not assumed original sin in our thought, in what we see as reason in ourselves? Is it not just because reason has fallen from its spirituality that it deceives us with counterfeit truth for the real truth? If Christ enters our reason, or something else which it transforms and develops further, then only is it brought into harmony with that truth which is the content of faith.

The sinfulness of the reason was, in a way, responsible for the thinkers before Albertus and Thomas speaking of two truths. They wanted to take the doctrine of original sin and redemption through Christ seriously. But they had not the thinking power and the logic for it, though they were serious about it. They put the question to themselves: How does Christ redeem in us the truth of the reason which contradicts revealed spiritual truth? How do we become Christians through and through? For our reason is already vitiated through original sin, and therefore it contradicts the pure truth of faith.

And now appeared Albertus and Thomas, and to them it appeared first of all wrong that if we steep ourselves purely logically in the universalia in rebus, and if we take to ourselves the reality in things, we should launch forth in sinfulness over the world. It is impossible that the ordinary reason should be sinful. In this scholastic question lies really the question of Christology. And the question Scholasticism could not answer was: How does Christ enter into human thought? How is human thought permeated with Christ? How does Christ lead human thought up into those spheres where it can coalesce with spiritual faith-content? These things were the real driving force in the souls of the Schoolmen. Therefore, it is before all things important, although Scholasticism possessed the most perfect logical technique not to take the results, but to look through the answer to the question; that we ignore the achievements of the men of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and look at the large problems which were then propounded. They were not yet far enough to be able to apply the redemption of man from original sin to human thought. Therefore, Albertus and Thomas had to deny reason the right to mount the steps which would have enabled them to enter into the spiritual world itself. And Scholasticism left behind it the question: How can human thought develop itself upward to a view of the spiritual world? The most important outcome of Scholasticism is even a question, and is not its existing content. It is the question: How does one carry Christology into thought? How is thought made Christ-like? At the moment when Thomas Aquinas died in 1274 this question, historically speaking, confronted the world. Up to that moment he had been able to get only as far as this question. What is to become of it, one can for the time being only indicate by saying: man penetrates up to a certain point into the spiritual nature of things, but after that point comes faith. And the two must not contradict each other; they must be in harmony. But the ordinary reason cannot of its own accord comprehend the content of the highest things, as, for example, the Trinity, the incarnation of the Christ in the man Jesus, etc. Reason can comprehend only as much as to say: the world could have been created in Time, but it could also have existed from eternity. But revelation says it has been created in Time, and if you ask Reason again you find the grounds for thinking that the creation in Time is the rational and the wiser answer.

Thus the Scholiast takes his place for all the ages. More than one thinks, there survives to-day in Science, in the whole public life of the present what Scholasticism has left to us, although it is in a particular form. How alive Scholasticism really is still in our souls, and what attitude man to-day must adopt towards it, of this we shall speak tomorrow.

Had I not spoken to you yesterday, I could not give you to-day's lecture in the form in which I intend to give it. This is not only because this lecture is to be a continuation of yesterday's lecture, but because the facts concerning man's true being which are accessible to anthroposophical research at first appear so paradoxical that it is necessary to know the sure foundation upon which such truths are based. I think that I explained to you sufficiently clearly that both in the direction of a critical attitude and in that of a conscientious form of investigation, Anthroposophy is well able to compete with everything which modern people are accustomed to consider as a scientific method and a scientific mentality.

The subject of to-day's lecture is man's true being which, lying at the foundation of his external physical being, forms and guides it. Spiritual science above all can show that man's physical being belongs more than one generally thinks to the development of the world as such, and this connection with the whole evolution of the world will form the subject of my next lecture. Earnest-minded people, and also earnest scientists have now a different view of man's true being than a few decades ago, at the height of materialism.

But the anthroposophical facts which will now be set forth will perhaps be rejected most strongly of all by those who seek to approach the element of soul and spirit in man by adhering, as it were, to the more materialistic aspect of science.

We can see that people now begin to take an interest in the causes which produce certain abnormal soul-conditions in man which subject him to hallucinations and delusions, to suggestion and auto-suggestion. People are now specially interested in these abnormal psychic phenomena, because they can be investigated in the same way in which physical experiments are carried on, without the unfolding of the soul's dormant forces, concerning which I spoke in my last lecture. People with an abnormal spiritual life are simply approached experimentally, and the phenomena are investigated in the same way in which one makes experiments in a laboratory.

Such people, and many who are not a prey of abnormal soul-conditions, frequently believe that unusual psychic conditions, visions or hallucinations, constitute some means of penetrating more deeply into man's true being; they even think that in these abnormal conditions a kind of revelation from the real spiritual worlds can be received.

Now that man's true being can be investigated in the light of Anthroposophy, it is possible to throw light upon the real meaning of these abnormal psychic conditions. Yesterday's critical examination of certain facts may have convinced you from the very outset that anthroposophical spiritual research can confront even such abnormal phenomena with a strictly critical attitude.

Another kind of phenomenon confronts us when it is possible to perceive certain thoughts of certain people under conditions of time and of space which must undoubtedly be designated as abnormal. These cases are now being discussed quite seriously by modern scientists. Telepathy is a phenomenon of this kind. During certain psychic conditions, thoughts can be perceived through telepathy without the ordinary instrument of the senses; indeed these thoughts can even be perceived at a distance. One also speaks of telekinesis, or of certain forces proceeding from the human being which manifest themselves simply through influences at a distance, without the physical intermediary of the human being, so that it appears as if it were possible to unfold will-power and to transmit it into space without the medium of the body. In scientific circles experiments have already been made with the application of scientific methods, experiments falling under the category of teleplastic, in which phantoms and apparently physical forms appear in connection with a person, or in his close proximity. It is clearly evident that these forms consist of a fine substance, of an etheric substance, and' that plastically they are permeated by something rooted as plastic force in human thinking, by something existing inhuman thought.

We therefore speak of telepathy, telekinesis and teleplastic. When anthroposophical spiritual science confronts these phenomena, it must again raise the critical question: Do these phenomena proceed from that part of the human being which, as explained yesterday, abandons the physical and the etheric body of man, at the moment of falling asleep, that sentient and volitional being which remains outside the body from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up? Are the phenomena known as telepathy, telekinesis and teleplastic an activity of man's eternal soul-spiritual essence, of that part which we learned to know as his feeling and volitional being, or are they perhaps simply an activity of that part which remains behind on the bed during sleep, consisting solely of the physical and of the etheric body, or the body of formative forces?

If these phenomena are merely activities of the latter, they belong to that part which vanishes when we die, no matter how wonderful and extraordinary they may appear to us. For when we die, the part which remains behind on the bed during sleep, vanishes. What constitutes man's immortal, eternal being, that which abandons the physical and etheric body during sleep, as a rule also abandons the physical body when we are under some hypnotic influence, in the phenomena of telepathy, telekinesis and teleplastic. We must therefore say: These so-called wonderful phenomena cannot point to anything connected with man's eternal being; no matter how abnormal they are, they are connected with that part of his being which separates from him when he dies and which connects itself with the element of the earth. In that case they are only able to indicate a world which vanishes when the human being passes through the portal of death.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy must therefore raise this critical objection in regard to certain phenomena which are widely recognised to-day, in the same way in which such objections had to be raised in regard to the phenomena described yesterday. It will be essential to know what Anthroposophy has to say concerning such phenomena, on the foundation of its investigations connected with man's true immortal essence.

Perhaps I may once more draw attention to the fact that through the exercises of meditation, through the exercises of thought and of the will mentioned yesterday and in other lectures which were given here, a condition can be created, particularly in regard to man's feeling and volitional part, which resembles the sleeping state, although it is radically different from sleep.

Yesterday I described to you how the sentient and volitional being in man, which is ordinarily unconscious and as it were lifeless, can be filled with inner life, with light and power, so that it is possible to create a condition in which man's feeling and volitional parts are outside the physical body as is the case during sleep, and in which these independent soul-spiritual parts can be used for anthroposophical research. In that case we no longer live in a dark world which renders us unconscious, but we are instead surrounded by a spiritual world, where the first object upon which we can look back is our physical body and our body of formative forces. This body of formative forces supplies to the inner soul-spiritual being, which has abandoned the physical and etheric body, a mirrored reflection of the world, in the form of thoughts which are now perceived as forces. Our thought-world, which was formerly connected with us, is now thrown back to us as mirrored reflections by the physical body which we left behind, so that we obtain an image of the world not because we obtain pictures of the external world through our sensory organs, for instance through the eye, which transmits us conscious experiences of the physical world, but because we now gain an image of the world's spiritual foundation through the fact that the human organism becomes as it were a sensory organ, which is now outside the human being, like any other object.

Through gradual progress in anthroposophical research, and by growing inwardly stronger and stronger, we can learn to know this being which is outside. I already explained to you that this condition in which an anthroposophical investigator lives, differs from everything which people experience in a visionary form, through hallucinations or through other psychic conditions. A spiritual investigator is always able to maintain a controlled, sound state of consciousness while investigating the higher world. He is in a condition which can really be designated as swinging to and fro from the perception of the spiritual world to that of the physical world. In other words, he can alternately live outside his physical body and his sensory perceptions, as already described, and return to his full consciousness, to his ordinary capacity of thinking, feeling and willing, so that he can judge his super-sensible experiences with his everyday thinking, feeling and willing, with his normal, cool-headed common sense, with the capacities with which he ordinarily judges life in general. The results of spiritual-scientific investigations can therefore be judged quite critically; a strictly critical attitude can be adopted towards the higher experiences which confront the soul of a spiritual-scientific investigator.

In abnormal soul-conditions we do not have this alternating from one state of consciousness to another. People who have visions or hallucinations cannot return at will, when they consider it best, to their ordinary, calm state of mind, through an effort of the will; that is to say, they cannot return at will into their physical body. They are led into such abnormal conditions by an involuntary sub-conscious element which produces hallucinations and visions, and the total absence of criticism in regard to their abnormal conditions is a fact which must be indicated over and over again, whenever the results of anthroposophical, spiritual-scientific research are brought into connection with things which have a visionary or hallucinatory character.

By swinging to and fro from a higher state of consciousness to the ordinary way of seeing things and to ordinary consciousness, we more and more attain the capacity to look back upon our physical and etheric bodies, which now exist objectively outside our soul-spiritual kernel; we look back upon the physical and etheric bodies with forces developed in the sentient and volitional part of our being. By ascending to the imaginative state of consciousness, we now really learn to know what we have before us as a picture of another world. The important point to be borne in mind is that through the imaginative and inspirational knowledge described in my last lectures, we really learn to form a judgment upon the physical body and the body of formative forces, which we now see from outside.

To use a comparison, it is as if we first had before us a picture and were to learn the corresponding reality which it represents by gaining a knowledge of the laws of perspective. But the reality which we gather from an ordinary picture is, after all, only an inner soul-experience, whereas the larger perspective in which we objectively look upon the physical body and the body of formative forces, is a real experience of facts. For we learn to know that the physical body and the body of formative forces contain, in an image, what we ourselves were, before descending into the physical world through birth or conception.

In this perspective, something frees itself from what we thus see before us and leads us back into the spiritual world through which we passed before we united ourselves through birth or conception with the physical substance given to us by our parents and ancestors, and transmitted by the physical stream of heredity here on earth. We can survey the soul-spiritual world which surrounds us before we came down into an earthly existence; it is the world which contains the forces that became united with our physical form, transmitted by our parents and forefathers.

We now learn to know ourselves in our pre-existence, in our pre-natal condition, and the characteristic fact which rises up before us is that in this picture representing man's pre-existent being we actually see the world reversed, in comparison with a physical perspective. In a physical perspective we see the nearest objects most clearly of all, and the further off they lie, the more they grow indistinct; this characterises the perspective of the spatial world.

But matters appear reversed in the perspective which now rises up out of the human being that remained behind. The things most closely related with our physical life on earth are those which are most familiar to our present experience; in reality we do not know our own inner being during our physical life on earth. Our physical life on earth is something which darkens our eternal being, our innermost kernel. But when we look into the pre-existent world, the things which we perceive spiritually first of all are not those which are most familiar to us in earthly life, not the closest, nearest things, but we first perceive the more distant things. If we have ascended through the three stages which can be developed through exercises as higher stages of knowledge, in accordance with descriptions contained in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, then Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition really enable us to obtain a complete soul-spiritual picture of the universe, leading us back to a past life on earth.

Even as a physical perspective is limited in the distance, so the image which we obtain of a world in which we lived in a pre-existent condition is limited by a past earthly life which opens out to us through intuition. The spiritual science of Anthroposophy does not speak of anything fantastic nor of some logical inference when it speaks of the repeated lives on earth, for this knowledge is gained through cognition, it is a fact which presents itself to the real spiritual vision. But this spiritual vision, this spiritual perception, must first be drawn out of the depths of the soul. We then obtain a positive knowledge of the fact that man's physical body, man's etheric body or the body of formative forces, plastically contain those essential forces which lived in the human being during the time between death and a new birth.

This also explains that we have developed out of a spiritual world into the physical world. Within the physical body, which man carries not merely as a covering but as a kind of instrument, and within the etheric body, containing the living forces which lie at the foundation of the organs, of metabolism and growth, within these bodies which appear objectively before us in spiritual vision, lives the soul's inner kernel, which is plastically moulded into them, the soul's essential being, as it has developed in a soul-spiritual world since the last death until the last birth. When we abandon the physical and etheric body with our sentient-volitional being, we learn to know what we thus leave behind us, as the last thing, as it were, to which we longingly turned on growing old, so to speak, in the spiritual world; the last thing to which we turned in our existence between death and a new birth before “dying” in the spiritual world. Even as we perceive that our physical body begins to fade at a certain age, on approaching death through old age, so we perceive that our soul-spiritual being begins to fade in the spiritual world in which we then live.

This fading away of our soul-spiritual being reveals itself in our longing for the physical world, for a corporeal physical incarnation. Consequently that part which lives in our physical and etheric body constitutes, as it were, the last phase of our existence above in the spiritual world. During our sleep, when we go out of our physical body as sentient-volitional beings, we leave behind our past.

What do we then take with us? If we realise the fact that we leave behind our past, we can also realise the fact that what is ordinarily an unconscious experience from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, is that part of man's being which passes through the portal of death and re-enters a soul-spiritual world. That part of man's being which could not dive down into the physical and etheric body, which remained behind, as it were, that part goes out every night when we fall asleep, and it also passes again as a being of feeling and will, through the portal of death. Thus eternity becomes guaranteed to man through this real perception.

And if we now look back to what is striven for without any understanding by a certain modern scientific direction which clings to external, superficial facts in order to investigate phenomena such as telepathy, teleplastic and telekinesis, we see that these phenomena are really connected with man's past, with the part which perishes when he dies, with something which cannot constitute anything pertaining to the real super-sensible world, but only to forces which are connected with the human being in the physical realm of the earth.

If we vividly imagine that part of our pre-existent being which descends into a physical embodiment through conception and birth, we can understand that in its development it absorbs the forces and substances transmitted by the hereditary stream; it also takes in forces during the course of earthly existence which are absorbed through the process of nutrition and breathing and through everything which the human being receives from the external world. The human being only exists as a full reality in that being that descends into physical embodiment from a pre-existent, pre-natal life. Within the mother's body it already enters into and envelops itself with physical matter and later on draws in substance through breathing, nutrition, and so forth.

Only when the human being is awake, only during this normal condition of life, the part which man thus incorporates into himself enters into connection with his true being, with his sentient and volitional being, through the physical and etheric bodies. When the human being is awake, there exists a normal connection between his sentient-volitional being and his thinking capacity, which is bound up, as we already have seen, with the etheric body and with the physical body.

Let us now suppose that in a hypnotic condition man's sentient and volitional being is drawn out of the physical and the etheric body. The hypnotised man whom we then have before us, consists merely of the body of formative forces and of the physical body, with all the physical substances and forces which he has absorbed from the external physical world. There are many reciprocal relationships between these substances and forces and the environing world, and all this enters the human being. When the sentient, volitional part of man is outside the physical and etheric body, it is possible to observe the influence of these physical substances. Through anthroposophical investigation, we discover that this does not pertain to man's immortal essence, to man's inner kernel, but that it is something which pertains to the external world and which unites with his immortal part, something which became incorporated into it in the past.

The same thing can appear if the person succumbs to some kind of illness. In a normal condition, a diseased organ can be felt through pain, sickness, and so forth. This is the case when the volitional-sentient being is rightly connected with the physical and etheric body. But if the physical or even the etheric body is somehow deformed by illness, then through the disease of some organ, some inner member of the soul and spirit, the sentient-volitional being in man dives down more deeply into his animal-physical nature than is the case in a normal state of consciousness, when the memories are only thrown back like mirrored reflections. When the physical organs are sound, the human being dives down into his physical body only to a certain degree; but if the organs are diseased, if only one organ is diseased, the soul-spiritual being not only dives down as far as the point where pain arises in the normal course of an illness, but it dives down deeper still. The soul-spiritual being unites with the physical organism. Whereas in the ordinary course of life man's sentient-volitional being is normally connected only with the sensory and with the nervous system, it now becomes connected with the lower animalic organs and with the vegetative organs, so that the involuntary conditions of hallucination and of visionary experience arise. One sees that hallucinations and visionary experiences, as well as other similar conditions, are entirely united with man's physical and etheric bodies, and that therefore, they can only be experiences which vanish when the human being dies and can throw no light whatever upon the super-sensible world in which we live between death and a new birth. There is, however, one phenomenon attested by sound scientific research, namely that in a mediumistic condition it is possible to perceive thoughts of a certain importance, and sometimes one can be amazed at the very clever thoughts voiced by a medium in trance, i.e. by a person who is in a kind of hypnotic state, thoughts which would not be possible to him in a normal state of consciousness.

Does this fact contradict the explanations given above? It does not contradict them, because not only the physical body, but also the etheric body can exercise an influence in space, without the medium of the physical body. Even quite normal people, particularly those who have a spark of genius in them, may produce thoughts and phantasies which are not limited to the body of formative forces, and because these transcend normal life and even the human being himself, they go out, as it were, into the universal cosmic ether, which we shall learn to know in our next lecture.

We can really say that the artistic thoughts which transcend normal life continue to swing in the universal cosmic ether, thoughts which appear—if I may use this expression—in superhuman artistic creations and experiences. These thoughts whirr about in the cosmic ether.

People who prepare themselves through exercises of the will and meditation described yesterday, know that man does not only produce things physically, by physical deeds. They know that thoughts which are not required for the maintenance of individual life (individual life requires thinking forces which change into forces of growth) are imparted to the universal cosmic ether. When the etheric body is in some pathological condition, when it is deformed or when it becomes mediumistic through trance, then the thoughts which whirr about in the cosmic ether and which do not enter our normal consciousness, can penetrate into a person deprived of his soul-spiritual part and manifesting as a medium. And when, for instance, the thoughts of a dead person imparted to the universal ether manifest themselves through a medium, it is possible to believe that one is really perceiving the thoughts, the present thoughts of the departed soul, whereas in reality one only perceives the echo of thoughts rayed out before death, when that person was still living on the earth.

This is what should always be borne in mind, through a sound, critical, spiritual-scientific attitude. We should be aware whether we merely confront thought-echoes, or whether the development of super-sensible forces really enables us to penetrate into the super-sensible world to which we belong after death and before birth. Telepathy is merely an etheric transmission of thoughts with the exclusion of the senses. In telekinesis certain forces producing changes in the physical body through nutrition or through other physical substances, are stimulated to action in space without a physical intermediary. The human being only consists of about 10 per cent of solid substance; he is a liquid column in regard to the remaining 90 per cent. But he also consists of finer materials, extending to the etheric. In a pathological condition, when an organ is diseased, so that the soul-spiritual part dives down too deeply into the animalic part, it is possible to impart thoughts with the aid of these finer substances which are rayed out in a certain way. Teleplastic also arises in this way. In teleplastic the fine substantiality which is rayed out can be given form, and these forms moulded by thought may even be filled with light and radiance. Plastic forms arise, such as those described in the books of Schrenk-Notzing and of others. These works are always on a scientific level, and preclude any idea of swindle or fraud.

But in all these cases we simply have to do with activities proceeding from that part of man's being which perishes when he dies. They do not supply us with anything which can lead us into the real super-sensible world.

We penetrate into the real super-sensible world when we are able to observe things outside the body with the aid of our sentient-volitional being, through a systematic training and intensification of our normal soul-capacities and by maintaining our normal state of consciousness. In that case we can survey the past which appears in the physical and in the etheric body, the past which we rayed out from a spiritual world and which plastically moulded our physical and etheric substances.

And since we first perceive most clearly of all, so to speak, the things which lie further off, and only gradually the things in closer proximity, we are able to see as far as the point of our death in a preceding life. As described in my Theosophy this perception of our pre-existent, pre-natal life, enables us to give a description of man's experiences after death. We then describe things, as it were, from a reversed perspective. And thus all the descriptions which I have given you on man's conditions and experiences after death, are based upon that spiritual perception which can be attained in the manner I described yesterday and again to-day.

One can say that it is impossible to gain any direct experience of the higher worlds unless we first acquire it through an earnest striving after knowledge. Through the strengthening of thought, as described yesterday, we must create the possibility of being outside the body in a fully conscious state and of looking back upon it. This can only be attained by intensifying our thinking power. But we must also learn to make distinctions. Everything which comes from a preceding life lies open to our perception, but everything which pertains to the future is only accessible to inner experience.

These inner experiences are meagre in comparison with the mighty super-sensible tableau of pre-existent life which confronts us, for our prenatal existence can really form the content of a fully developed science. But anything which we can gather concerning the future will very much depend upon the inner strengthening of our sentient-volitional being, when it is outside the body. This sentient-volitional being can also be observed in its course of development during the physical life on earth, as it gradually matures for a higher state of existence after death. Differences become evident, if we first observe that part of man which ordinarily abandons him unconsciously during sleep, in a more youthful stage of life and then observe it in a maturer stage. The sentient-volitional being which abandons the body of a younger person during sleep, is more filled with a reflective, thoughtful element. We observe that it unconsciously reverberates the thoughts which the human being harbours. When a person grows older, he no longer carries out of his physical body so many thoughts when crossing the portal of sleep, but he takes out with his sentient-volitional being into the external world, forces of character, forces contained in his developed impulses of the will.

We can therefore say: During our earthly life, we gradually change from a being in whom thoughts are the predominant element, into a being who manifests in his soul-spiritual part more the echo of forces which constitute his character. Essentially speaking, we do not pass through the portal of sleep with our thoughts, for we leave them behind when we fall asleep and they shine forth through the physical body. We leave behind the thoughts which animated us during our earthly life from birth to death. We learn to look upon them as external thought-forces of the world; later on, after death, we learn to know them as an external world. We pass through the portal of sleep with these forces which have formed our character, which constitute our inner moral development. If we wish to interpret rightly every phase in the perspective which appears to us in the world of our pre-existent life, we must first gain this capacity through the development of our normal soul-forces.

In the previous lecture, I have already described to you that when a person intensifies his life of thought through meditation and concentration, so that he can live in thoughts in the same way in which he ordinarily lives in sensory impressions, in an inner life of thoughts as powerful, living and intensive as the life of the soul when it surrenders to sensory impressions, then he attains to imaginative knowledge. This inner thought-life intensified to the stage of imaginative consciousness, now enables him to confront not only the memory tableau of his past earthly life up to the present moment, but he surveys everything pertaining to his physical earthly organism, shaped and moulded by the body of formative forces. His first super-sensible experience is to look back from the present moment upon his whole earthly life, as far as childhood, in the form of a mighty tableau.

I already mentioned in my last lectures that the tableau which can thus be experienced, resembles in some points a fact which even serious scientists discuss to-day, for it is sufficiently attested that such a picture arises when a person is in mortal danger, with hardly any hope of escape. A drowning person, for instance, may experience in a great tableau that which constitutes the etheric time-body of formative forces; he looks upon this body.

Supersensible knowledge enables us to obtain this same survey, which constitutes the first experience after death through the right interpretation of the perspective described to you of our pre-existent, pre-natal life.

Then we recognise the fact that when the human being passes through the portal of death, he perceives for a short time, lasting only a few days (approximately as long as a person is able, in accordance with his organisation, to do without sleep for a few days) a kind of tableau, giving him a survey of his past earthly life in a kind of thought-web, but consisting of pictures. We obtain, for a short time, this survey of our earthly life, when we pass through the portal of death. I might say, that we face our earthly life without the participation of our feelings and of our will, purely in a kind of passive survey; after death, we learn to know this first condition as I have described it.

We must first gain this experience through super-sensible knowledge, through meditation and concentration, etc. But we require another kind of training if we wish to interpret rightly in this tableau the connection between our past earthly life and the life after death.

In our earthly life, and even in ordinary science, we generally surrender ourselves passively to the external world with our thoughts, feelings and will-impulses. We keep pace with the external world. We experience the Yesterday, then in connection with it the To-day, and a little later, the To-morrow. And the inner reflections of our thoughts, feelings and will-impulses, developed within the soul, are connected with the external course of time, as a continued natural experience. This, as it were, gives our ordinary thinking and feeling a kind of support, but man's thinking cannot reach the required degree of intensification, enabling it to make super-sensible investigations, if it passively submits to the external course of time. Other exercises are now needed; we must try—if I may use this expression—to think backwards. When the day is over, we should pass in review all that we have seen during the day, but we should not do this in the form of thoughts, nor critically, but in the form of pictures; we should, as it were, see everything once more, in the same way in which we see things through our phantasy but from evening to morning in reversed sequence. We should acquire a certain practice in this thinking backwards in the form of pictures. It is relatively easy to think backwards larger portions of the day, but in order to have a reversed picture of the day's course, atomistically small portions must also be surveyed backwards, and this must be practised for a long time.

We can then advance to other exercises; for instance, we can seek help by trying to experience a drama backwards, from the Fifth Act back to the First, try experiencing melodies inwardly, by hearing, as it were, soul-spiritually. We can thus attain the capacity of looking upon our life's memories (this is something different from the life-tableau described above) by conjuring them up before our soul backwards, in the form of imaginative pictures, so that our whole life stands before us, from the present moment back into the past. By making such exercises, we emancipate our thinking from the external course of time. The deeply rooted habit of following the course of time with our thinking and feeling must be overcome. By forcefully thinking backwards we are gradually enabled to make use of a far greater and stronger capacity of thinking than that employed for a merely passive thinking. Our thinking power can be essentially strengthened just by this way of thinking backwards.

And we then discover something which undoubtedly seems paradoxical to the normal consciousness and to the ordinary understanding. But in the same way in which one looks upon the physical world with conceptions flowing in the stream of time, so one gradually comes to look upon the spiritual world, when one's thinking has been emancipated from its connection with the external course of time.

This produces a further capacity which enables one to observe the new experiences and to interpret rightly, from the perspective already described, the things connected with the life-tableau which one sees for a few days after death.

After this life-tableau, we can see how man once more passes through his life, by living through it backwards in very real and vivid pictures. Man experiences, as it were, the soul-world before experiencing the spirit world. He lives backwards through life, from his death to his birth, but more quickly than during his earthly existence from birth to death. He lives through this life backwards.

The capacity to perceive this is acquired by the already mentioned exercises of thinking backwards. And now we gain a conception of how after death man experiences in this reversed course of soul-life everything that he experienced here on earth in his physical body. But he now experiences all these things with his soul, and he can see everything that harmed his progress morally. By this very living backwards through time, he can now survey from a higher standpoint what he would like to change in life. For he can see how certain moral defects handicapped his development towards perfection. But since he now experiences all this in a living way, it does not remain in the realm of thought. In this reversed course of soul-life—I might say, in this soul-life which he develops backwards, thought does not remain abstract, for abstract thoughts were left behind with death; thought now develops as a thinking force. It becomes an impulse which leads the human being to make amends during his next earthly life, in some way to experience facts which are opposite to those which now come before his soul. In the soul there develops something which in the next life appears in the form of subconscious longings to approach this or that experience in life. In this living backwards through our past life, we develop the desire to experience in our next earthly life events or facts which counterbalance those which we have gone through in the past. And so this reversed course of development contains the seed of something which we unconsciously bring with us when we are born again, something which can be described somewhat in the following way.

This is generally not accessible to the ordinary consciousness; nevertheless it lives in man. But observe merely with your plain common sense something which super-sensible research establishes as a fact—namely, how we approach some decisive fact in life.

Let us suppose that during one of our earthly lives we meet another human being in our 30th or 35th year (I will take a decisive event) and that he becomes our life-companion with whom we wish to share our further destiny in life, that we discover that our souls harmonise. An ordinary materialistic person will say that this was pure chance. Deeper minds—there are many, and they can be traced in history—have however reflected a little over this problem: If we now look back in life from this decisive event, if we survey what preceded it, what came before that, and still further back ... we find that the course of our life tending towards this event followed a definite plan. Sometimes we discover that an event which we thus experience in our life, a fact having such an incisive influence upon our life, appears like the organic conclusion of a well defined plan.

If we have first constructed such a plan hypothetically and lead it back as far as our birth, and if we then survey it with the aid of cognitive forces developed through meditation, retrospective thinking, will-exercises, we must really say to ourselves: This hypothetical plan which you constructed, may sometimes appear like a mere phantasy, but it is not always so. Precisely for decisive facts in life, it often reveals itself as of greatest importance that the human being carries within him from his birth a subconscious longing, and that guided by this longing, which he perhaps interprets quite differently in the various epochs of his life, he makes the first step, the second step and all the steps which finally lead him to the event which he formed as a seed during his retrospective experience after death and which carries him through his new earthly life as an undefined longing. We thus shape our destiny ourselves in an unconscious way. This enables us to recognise what we encounter during our earthly existence, this destiny or Karma, as it was designated in the ancient, instinctive, clairvoyant wisdom of the Orient. This destiny, on which our happiness and unhappiness, our joy and pain in life depends, we can learn to recognise by looking upon the sequence of our earthly lives.

A man will naturally very soon be inclined to say: How do matters then stand in regard to freedom,?—For if man is guided by destiny, how do matters stand in regard to human freedom?—Indeed, a solution of the question of destiny can only be gained by striving earnestly with the problem of freedom. At this point allow me to insert something personal, for it undoubtedly has an objective significance. In the early nineties of the past century I wrote my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The task of this book was to establish the experience, the fact of freedom. From man's own inner experiences I sought to characterise the consciousness of freedom as an absolute certainty. And the subsequent explanations which I have tried to give as a partial solution of the problem of destiny, such as the sketch which I gave you now, I consider to be in entire harmony with the descriptions of human freedom. Those who study my book Philosophy of Spiritual Activity will find however I was obliged to renounce speaking of freedom of the human will at first, and to speak instead of a freedom experienced in thought, in pure thinking emancipated from the senses. In thoughts which consciously arise in the human soul as an ethical, moral ideal, in thoughts which have the strength to influence the human will and to lead it to action, in such thoughts there is freedom. We can speak of human freedom when we speak of human actions shaped by man's own free thinking, when he reaches the point, through a moral self-training, of not allowing his actions to be influenced by instincts, passions, emotions or by his temperament, but only by the devoted love for an action. In this devoted love for an action, can develop something which proceeds from the ideal strength of pure ethical thinking. This is a really free action.

Spiritual science now enables us to discover that during sleep thinking as such, the thinking which lies at the foundation of free ethical actions, remains behind in the mirroring physical body. It is thus something that man experiences between birth and death. Even if human life were not of immense value also from other aspects, the inclusion of the impulse of freedom in our experiences between birth and death renders our life on earth valuable in itself. In our physical existence on earth we attain freedom by developing thought as such, when thought loses the plastic force which it still has within the etheric body and is developed as pure thinking in the consciousness which we have in ordinary life.

In the early nineties of the past century I was therefore obliged to set forth a very daring thought in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. I had to speak of moral impulses in the form of ethical ideas and had to explain that these do not come to us from Nature, but through intuition. At that time I spoke of “moral phantasy.” Why?—In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I explained that these ethical motives stream into man from the spiritual world, but at first in the form of pictures. He receives them from the spiritual world as intuition.

But we thus come, as it were, to the other pole of what we experience here, in the physical world. Everywhere in the realm of Nature we discover necessity, if we look out into it with our sound common sense and with a scientific mentality. If we look into the world of moral impulses, then we discover freedom, but to begin with, freedom in the form of mere thought, of pure thinking, in the intuition that lives in the thinking activity. At first we do not know how these moral forces enter the will, for we perceive ethical intuitions unconsciously. So we have on the one hand Nature, to which we belong through our actions, and on the other hand our ethical experience. Through natural science alone, we should lose the possibility to ascribe reality and world-creative forces to these ethical intuitions. We experience Nature as it were, in its whole dense grossness, in its necessity. And then we experience freedom, but we experience it in the finely-woven impulses of thinking which reach the imaginative stage, and since these do not form part of Nature and can be experienced in free activity, we know that they come from the spiritual world, as I have indicated in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

But something must now be inserted between these intuitions which are entirely of a picture-nature and unreal and which only acquire reality through ethical life, between these intuitions and the objective cognition of Nature and its laws. It is imagination and inspiration, which arise in the way I have described, that now insert themselves. In that case intuition too undergoes a change. The impulse which first appeared only in pure thinking, becomes as it were condensed into a spiritual reality.

In this newly acquired intuition, gained through imagination and inspiration, we do not learn to know our present Ego, but the Ego that passes through repeated lives on earth and that carries our destiny through these repeated earthly lives. In passing through these repeated earthly lives which moulded our destiny, we are not free. Yet we can always insert free actions into this web of destiny during our different lives on earth. Just because the imaginative intuition enables us to experience ethical impulses (not as realities, but as something which we can freely accept), we can weave freedom into the web of destiny during a definite earthly life. The fact that destiny bears us from one earthly life into another, does not render us less free than the fact that a steamer can carry us from Europe to America. Our future is determined by the decision to travel arrived at in Europe; yet within certain limits we are always free, and we can move about freely while we are in America. This is how destiny is borne from one earthly life into another. But to the world of facts which we thus experience during our repeated lives on earth, we can insert what wells up out of freedom during a definite life.

And so we see that those who struggle with the problem of freedom and see the solution in the contemplation of ethical ideas which can at first only be grasped through moral phantasy, but which penetrate from the spiritual world into the physical world of man,—we see that those who in this way acquire an understanding for the problem of freedom, have prepared themselves thereby for the comprehension of destiny, which enters human life almost like a necessity.

If we attain this intuition and understand the interweaving of destiny and freedom and thus intensify still further the forces acquired through meditation, concentration, retrospective thought, etc., we are able to contemplate, that is to interpret further the facts which appear to us in the spiritual perspective.

What now is attached to this retrospective experience is a life which takes its course in a purely spiritual sphere in which we now live towards a subsequent life on earth. In this spiritual sphere our experience is just the reverse of our experience during our earthly life. Here on earth, our inner experiences can, to begin with, only be perceived inwardly, as pictures. We do not experience our inner being with our ordinary consciousness, for our waking consciousness makes us experience the external world. We look out, as it were, from our own centre into the environing spatial world, into the spatial sphere, the external world. We are within ourselves and the external world is outside.

During our existence between death and a new birth this conception is just reversed: We are now centred in a world which constituted our external world here on earth, and the external world on earth now becomes a kind of inner world.

The inner world of human nature, which was not accessible to us during our earthly life, can now be experienced as an external world. And during our life between death and a new birth, our inner being becomes the world! And the world becomes our Ego.

And inasmuch as we experience something which is now higher than the world which surrounds us here on earth (for man is the crown of creation, he bears within himself a sphere which is higher than the surrounding world), we have within us a more valuable world during our existence between death and a new birth. The world which we thus experience as our own environment, but which is actually the mysterious world of man's inner being, is experienced creatively. In the spiritual world we experience these forces creatively, in common with higher spiritual Beings that surround our soul-spiritual being, in the same way in which the kingdoms of Nature, the plants, the animals and the minerals, surround our physical being on earth.

In communion with these spiritual Beings, we experience the forces out of which we gradually mould not only our destiny, the seed of our destiny, but also our prototype in the soul-spiritual world. This is the real prototype, that soul-spiritual being, which after a certain time is filled with the longing to incorporate again, to send down the prototype into a physical body, the prototype which it first shaped in living thoughts in the spiritual world. And since it must become united with a physical body, since it can only reach perfection in a physical body, this soul-spiritual being is filled with the impulse and longing to reincarnate here on earth. Out of the spirit comes that being from an existence lying before birth, or before conception, and unites with the physical body.

A true conception of the way in which man develops here on earth as a physical being (more exact details will be given the day after tomorrow) can only be gained if we can grasp the fact that what develops in the mother's body is only something which receives from a higher world the real being of man.

Natural science has a certain ambition and dream, consisting in the hope to discover one day the complicated chemical structure of cells, indeed of the most perfect cells, the reproductive cells, the germ cells of the human embryo. The spiritual science of Anthroposophy approaches this same problem, but with quite different means and from entirely different points of view. And Anthroposophy is able, in a certain way, to point out the direction in which to seek that which develops in the mother's body as germinative cell of the human embryo. Here we do not come across complicated chemical combinations, but in reality with a chaotic state of matter. We do not have before us a highly complicated chemical combination or some molecular structure, but a chaotic condition, a chaotic vortex of the ordered structure which exists in a crystal and in a chemical molecule. In the germinative cell matter is not developed to a further organisation, but it is pushed down into chaos, and from the corresponding substance, from the substance which becomes chaotic, then develops something which can now receive what comes down to it from above; the super-sensible man coming from the spiritual worlds.

The development of physical man will only be grasped if physical research is brought to the point of being able to see how the physical human germ by leading matter back to chaos, becomes capable of receiving the soul-spiritual germ which comes down from pre-existence. Only in this way it is possible to understand how the soul-spiritual part descending from the soul-spiritual world becomes united through conception and up to birth with what has de-materialised itself in the germ, in the early embryonic stage. All who carefully study the form and development of the embryo can find, even in its physical development, the confirmation of to-day's description, whereas this embryonic development will always remain a riddle to those who cannot consider it in this way.

To be sure, if we really wish to know man's true being we must receive from super-sensible research what also belongs to man. On earlier occasions, I have, for instance, pointed out that in the science dealing with the lower kingdoms, people would everywhere consider foolish things which are looked upon as wisdom in the investigation of the human being.

I already gave you the example of a magnet-needle, with one of its ends pointing North and the other one South. Now it would certainly not enter anyone's mind to say that the forces which it manifests are only contained in the magnet needle, in the space occupied by that needle. One looks upon the earth itself as a great magnet which exercises its influence upon the magnet-needle and which determines its direction. The magnet-needle is included in the structure of the whole earth-organism.

In this case one transcends the single thing, in order to recognise the great comprehensive whole and its inter-relation with the single object. Yet in the case of man one seeks to recognise everything pertaining to man by studying the development of the germ cell through the microscope and by contemplating only what is enclosed within the human skin! Just as little as the forces of the magnet can be explained through the magnet, just as little is it possible to know what develops in the human being if one does not bring him in relation with the whole world, not only with the spatial world, but also with the world of time; it is not possible to understand the' human being unless one goes back to his pre-existent, pre-natal being, revealing itself, as described, to super-sensible vision. We learn to know this pre-existent being when man lays aside his physical body here on earth, when we see his etheric body dissolving in the cosmic ether—we see this pre-existent being passing once more through the portal of death in order to begin a new cycle leading to a further adjustment of life's facts and to a higher perfection.

This is how man stands within the evolution of the world, if we look upon his essence as such. What we now receive, inasmuch as we bear our soul-spiritual being down to earth, pertains to the evolution of the world and must be included in the cosmic development, as we shall see in the next lecture. The human being will only be understood if what has been explained to-day is at the same time inserted into the being and becoming, that is, into the whole cosmic development. For man can only recognise the world by recognising himself. And what constitutes the universe is reflected in earthly life, and the human being lives through it after death and before birth. From this sphere he takes the forces which he himself incorporates with his physical body at birth or conception. The universe and man belong together not only outwardly, but also inwardly. Man bears the world within himself; the world as a totality forms man's being. The question which we have raised is therefore partially answered to-day; it will be fully answered, to the extent allowed to-day by science, in my next lecture.

In conclusion let me say a few more words. I want it to be really understood that the facts explained by the spiritual-scientific investigator are based upon the development of forces which ordinarily remain unconscious to the soul, but that from the anthroposophical standpoint, the spiritual-scientific investigator proceeds in such a way that he clothes the facts obtained through super-sensible vision in the thoughts which are ordinarily used in science. Everywhere he takes his thoughts with him. For his research-work must always be accompanied by that pendulum swinging from the super-sensible to the physical world. He must always stand as his own critic by the side of his higher being endowed with super-sensible vision. Consequently even those who have not made such exercises can really examine and test with their own thinking all the facts brought forward by the spiritual investigator; they can test them with their own thinking, if only they follow in an unprejudiced way their own sound common sense. It is really not true that only a spiritual investigator could test the facts brought forward by spiritual research. In the present time, we have grown too accustomed to the manner of thinking connected with external matter, with the external sequence of natural facts, and we find that a spiritual investigator cannot supply proofs valid for this' way of thinking. But those who penetrate into all the circumstances, understand the connection existing between the ordinary sound common sense and the methodically developed understanding of science, of external science. And those who think critically, and with sufficient lack of prejudice test all the facts advanced by the spiritual investigator, will be able to do this, even though they themselves are not endowed with super-sensible vision. The spiritual investigator brings forward everything in such a way that it can be tested. Those who say that a spiritual investigator merely relates what he sees through his own super-sensible vision without supplying any proofs, resembles a person who is accustomed to think that everything which he finds on earth stands upon a firm ground, and when someone explains to him a solar system immediately asks: What then does that rest upon?

Perhaps he does not perceive that it rests upon itself, that it is freely borne by its own forces. A person who asks for proofs resembles one who asks: On what foundation does a solar system stand then? He resembles such a person if he asks for ordinary proofs and means such proofs as can only be asked for the external sensory world, where it is possible to discover, without any proof, the things which the senses perceive, the existence of which can be proved through the senses.

But human thinking does not only exist for this purpose; human thinking can also rise to things which are demonstrable not only through sound common sense upon the foundation of sensory experience, but to things which are carried by their own inner forces, like a spiritual planetary system. Try to examine in this way, by applying it to anthroposophical spiritual investigation, the results obtained by such a self-supporting, self-demonstrating thinking; you will then find that the facts advanced by a spiritual investigator are inwardly just as surely founded—even without the so-called external supports—as a planetary system supports itself freely in cosmic space, and that a supporting foundation is only needed by what is terrestrial and heavy. This however must be remembered: that thinking must also become really free, it must become something which can carry itself inwardly, if sound human intelligence is to find a proof for the facts which spiritual research advances in connection with the being of man and the evolution of the world. That from this standpoint it is possible to prove everything, I shall hope to develop in my next lecture on the nature of world evolution, following the explanations now given on the nature of man.

The thoughts which I have been putting before you, will show you that the acquisition of real super-sensible knowledge entails above all, with the aid of the exercises already described, that the two sides of human nature which are usually inexactly designated as man's inner and outer being should be distinctly separated. Perhaps it may be pointed out that in ordinary consciousness one does not make an exact distinction between man's inner and outer being, when speaking of these. The way in which I characterised the going out of man's sentient and volitional being during sleep and the becoming conscious in super-sensible knowledge outside the physical body, shows us that just this super-sensible knowledge enables us to separate distinctly those parts which are usually described vaguely in ordinary consciousness as man's outer and inner being.

I might say that by this separation man's inner world becomes his outer world, and what we usually consider as his outer world becomes his inner world.

What takes place in that case? During sleep, man's sentient and volitional being abandons what we have called his physical body and etheric body, or the body of formative forces, and then this sentient-volitional being looks back upon the physical body and the etheric body as if they were objects. We showed that in this retrospection the whole web of thought appears outside man's inner being. The world of thought which fills our ordinary consciousness and which reflects the external world, does not go out with man's true inner being in falling asleep, but remains behind with the physical body, as the true forces of the etheric body. In this way we were able to grasp that during our waking state of consciousness we cannot grow conscious of that part which goes out during sleep and which remains unconscious for the ordinary consciousness. (Self-observation can easily convince us that during our ordinary waking consciousness the world of thoughts produces this waking state of consciousness).

In that part of the human being which goes out of the physical and the etheric bodies during sleep, there is a dull twilight-life, and we only learn to know this inner being of man when super-sensible knowledge fills it, as it were, with light and with warmth, when we are just as conscious within this inner being as we are ordinarily conscious within our physical body. But we also learn to know why we have an unconscious life during our ordinary sleeping condition. Consciousness arises when we dive down into our physical and etheric bodies at the moment of waking up. And by diving down into the physical body, we make use of the senses which connect us with the external world. As a result, the sensory world awakes and we thus grow conscious in it.

In the same way we dive down into our etheric or life-body, that is to say, into our world of thoughts, and we grow conscious within our thoughts. Ordinary consciousness is therefore based upon the fact that we use the instruments of our physical body, and that we make use, so to speak, of the etheric body's web of formative forces. In ordinary life, man's true inner being, woven out of feeling and will, is not in a position to attain consciousness, because it has no organs. By making the thought- and will-exercises of which I have spoken, we endow the soul itself with organs. This soul-element, which is at first indistinct in our ordinary consciousness, acquires plastic form, even as our physical body and our etheric body acquire plastic form in the senses and in the organs of thought. Man's real soul-spiritual being therefore obtains a plastic form.

In the same measure in which it is moulded plastically and acquires (if I may use this paradoxical expression) soul-spiritual sense-organs, the world of soul and spirit rises up round our inner being. That part of our being which ordinarily lives in a dull twilight existence and which can only perceive an environing world, namely the physical world, when it uses the physical and etheric organs of perception, thus acquires plastic form and enters into connection with a world which always surrounds us, even in our ordinary life, though we are not aware of it, a world in which we lived before descending into our physical being through birth or conception, as described the day before yesterday; a world in which we shall live again when we pass through the portal of death, for then we shall recognise it as a world which belongs to us and which is not limited by birth and death. But there is one thing which rises up before us when we enter the spiritual world. We cannot enter this world in the same abstract theoretic manner with which we can live in the physical world and in the world of thoughts or of the intellect. In the physical world and in the world of thoughts we use ideas and thoughts, which as such, leave us cold. With a little self-observation anyone can discover that when he ascends to the sphere of pure thinking, when he surrenders to the external sensory world without any special interest or a close connection with it, the external physical world, as well as the world of ideas, really leaves him cold. We must learn to know this in detail from particular examples in life. We should note, for instance, how different are the inner feelings with which we consider our home, from those with which we look upon any other strange country which is indifferent to us. This will show us that in order to have a living interest for the environing world, our feeling and our will must first be drawn in through special circumstances. Feeling will indeed always dive down into the physical world when we awake, obtaining from this physical world a connection with the senses and the understanding. The fact that love or perhaps hate are kindled in us when we encounter certain people in the physical world, the fact that we feel induced to do certain things for them out of compassion, all this demands the inclusion of our feelings and of everything which constitutes our inner being, when we come across such things in the external physical world. How conscious we are of the fact that our inner life grows cold, when we rise up to spheres which are generally called the spheres of pale, dry thought and of theoretic study!

The being which lives in a dull twilight state from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, must, as it were, connect itself during the waking daytime condition with thoughts and with sensory experiences through an inner participation in these processes, thus giving rise to the whole wealth of interest in the external world.

And so we recognise that in life itself feeling and will must first be drawn into the sense world and into the world of thoughts. But we perceive this in the fullest meaning of the word only when through super-sensible knowledge, we become free from the physical and etheric bodies, and have experiences outside them within our sentient-volitional being.

And hence it is evident that we must begin to speak of the world in a different way from how we speak in ordinary life, in ordinary consciousness. The dry ideas, the laws of Nature which we are accustomed to find in science and which interest us theoretically, though they leave us inwardly cold, these should be permeated with certain nuances and expressions which characterise the external world differently from the way in which we usually characterize it.

Our inner life acquires greater intensity through super-sensible knowledge. We penetrate more intensively into the life of the external world. When we try to gain knowledge, we are then no longer able to submit coldly to inner ideas. No doubt one is then exposed to the reproach that the objectivity may suffer through a certain inner warmth, through the awakening of feeling and of a subjective sense. But this objection is only raised by those who are not acquainted with the circumstances.

The things perceived through super-sensible knowledge make us speak differently of the super-sensible objects of knowledge. These do not change, they do not become less objective, for in fact they are objective. When I look upon a wonderfully painted picture, it does not change through the fact that I look upon it with fire and enthusiasm; I should be a cold prosaic person if I were to face one of Raphael's Madonnas or one of Leonardo's paintings with a purely analytical artistic understanding, quite coldly and without any enthusiasm. It is the same when the spiritual worlds rise up in super-sensible knowledge. Their content does not change through the fact that we connect ourselves with these worlds with inner feelings, far stronger than those which usually connect us with the external world and its objects.

When speaking from a knowledge of the higher worlds, many things will therefore have to be said differently, the descriptions will have to be different from those which we are accustomed to hear in ordinary life. But this does not render these worlds less objective. On the contrary, one could say: The subjective element which now breaks forth from the physical and etheric bodies becomes more objective, more selfless in its whole experience. And so the first experience which we have when going out of the physical body and experiencing our inner being consciously (whereas otherwise we always experience it unconsciously) is a feeling of absolute loneliness.

In our ordinary consciousness we never have the feeling that by dwelling only within our inner self, independently of anything in the world pertaining to us, complete loneliness fills our soul, that we ourselves, with everything which now constitutes our soul-spiritual content, must rely entirely upon ourselves.

The feeling of loneliness which sometimes arises in the physical world, but only as a reflection of the real feeling, though it is painful enough for many people, becomes immeasurably intensified when we thus penetrate into the super-sensible world. But we then look back upon that which reflects itself as the spiritual environment in the mirror of the physical and etheric body which we left behind. We grow aware, on the one hand, of a complete feeling of loneliness, which alone enables us to maintain our Ego in this world ... for we should melt away in this world of the spirit, if loneliness would not give us this Ego-feeling in the spiritual world, in the same way in which our body, our bodily sensation, gives us our Ego-feeling here on earth. To this loneliness we owe the maintenance of the Ego in the spiritual world. We then learn to know this spiritual world as our environment. But we know that we can only learn to know it through the inner soul-spiritual eye, even as we see the physical world through our physical eyes.

It is the same when the human being abandons his physical and etheric bodies by passing through the portal of death, and in this connection I shall enlarge the explanations already given yesterday. It is true that in this case the physical body is given over to the elements of the earth and that the etheric body dissolves, as I described, in the universal cosmic ether. But what we learned to know as our physical world, through our feeling and will, the world in which we experienced ourselves through the ordinary consciousness between birth and death, this world remains to man. The physical body filled with substance and the body of formative forces permeated by etheric forces, are laid aside with death, but what we experienced within them remains as a mirroring element.

From the spiritual world we look back through death, through which we have passed, into our last earthly life. Just because we have before us this last earthly life as a firm resistance which mirrors everything, just because of this, everything which surrounds us as we pass through the soul-spiritual world between death and a new birth, can also reflect itself. Through these experiences we perceive everything rising up in a far more intensive life than the one which we learned to know here in the physical world. And we first perceive as a soul-spiritual being everything with which we were in some way connected through our destiny, through our Karma. The people we loved, stand before us as souls. In our super-sensible vision we see all that we experienced together with them.

Those who acquire spiritual, super-sensible knowledge, already acquire imaginative vision here in the physical world, through everything which I described to you. Those who pass through the portal of death in the ordinary way, acquire this faculty, though it is somewhat different from spiritual vision on earth, they acquire it after having passed through the portal of death. From the sheaths of the physical and etheric bodies which were laid aside, emerges everything with which we were connected by destiny, or otherwise, in this earthly life—it undoubtedly arises in a different way when those whom we left behind still live on the earth, where the connection with them is more difficult, but when they follow us through death, this connection exists in the free, soul-spiritual life. Everything in our environment with which we were connected as human beings rises up before us. To super-sensible knowledge, the fact that people (if I may now express myself in words of the ordinary consciousness) who belonged together here in the physical world find each other again in the soul-spiritual world, after having passed through the portal of death, is not a belief to be accepted as a vague premonition, but it is a certainty, a fact just as certain as the results of physics or chemistry. And this is in fact something which the spiritual science of Anthroposophy can add to the acquisitions of modern culture.

People have grown accustomed to a certain feeling of certainty through the gradual popularisation of a scientific consciousness. They strive to gain some knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, but no longer in the form of the old presentiments handed down traditionally in the religious beliefs, for they have been trained to accept that certainty which the external world can offer. In regard to that which lies beyond birth and death the spiritual science of Anthroposophy seeks to pave the way to this same kind of certainty. It can really do this. Only those who tread the path already described, the path leading into the spiritual worlds, can carry the knowledge acquired in physics or chemistry further, out into the worlds which we enter when we pass through the portal of death.

Not everything of course, appears to us in this way when we look back upon our physical body through super-sensible knowledge outside the body. There is one thing which then appears to us very enigmatic, and this enigma can show us best of all that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy does not translate the truths which it includes in its spheres of knowledge into a prosaic, dry rationalism. It leads us to spiritual vision, or by communicating its truth it speaks of things which can be perceived through spiritual vision. But in being led to spiritual vision, we do not lose full reverence towards the mysteries contained in the universe, towards everything in the universe which inspires reverence and which can now be clearly perceived, whereas otherwise they are at the most felt darkly. This enigmatic something which I mean and which appears to us, is that we now learn to know man's relationship with the earth, particularly his relationship with the physical mineral earth.

I have already explained to you from many different aspects how our web of thoughts, which is connected with the physical body, remains behind, and in addition to what has been described to you, in addition to what reflects itself and leads us to a knowledge of man's eternal being, we can also recognise the nature of this mirror itself which we have before us.

One might say: Even as in the physical world we face a mirror and in this mirror the environing world appears simultaneously with our own self, so in super-sensible knowledge the spiritual world appears through this mirror. But just as we can touch the material mirror with its foil and investigate its composition, so we can also investigate this mirror of the super-sensible—namely, our physical body and our etheric body—when we are outside with our real soul-spiritual being.

And there one can see that during his earthly life man constantly takes in substances from the external world, in order to grow and to sustain his whole life. We certainly absorb substances from the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but all these substances which we absorb from the animal and vegetable kingdoms also contain mineral substances. Plants contain mineral substances, for the plant builds itself up from mineral substances. By taking in vegetable nourishment we therefore build up our own body out of mineral substances.

By looking back upon our physical body from outside, we can now perceive the true significance of the mineral substances which we absorb. For now spiritual vision reveals something of which our ordinary consciousness has not the faintest inkling, namely the activity of thinking. We have, as you know, left behind our thinking. Our thoughts continue, as it were, to glimmer and to shine within the physical body. Thus we can now observe the effects of thoughts in the physical body from outside, as something objective. And we perceive that the effect of thoughts upon man's physical body is a dissolution of its physical substances, which fall asunder, as it were, into nothing.

I know that this apparently contradicts the law of the conservation of energy, but there is no time now to explain more fully its full harmony with this law. The nature of my subject obliges me to express myself in somewhat popular terms. But it is possible to understand that the purely mineral in man, what he bears within him as purely mineral substances, must be within him because it must be dissolved by his thoughts. For otherwise his thoughts could not exist—this is the condition for their existence—his thoughts could not exist if they did not dissolve mineral, earthly substances, a fact also revealed by the spiritual sciences of earlier times, based more on intuitive feeling. This dissolution, this destruction of physical substances constitutes the physical instrumentality of thinking.

When our sentient-volitional part, our true inner being, lives within the physical body and within the etheric body and is filled by the activity of thinking, we now learn to recognise that this activity takes its course through the fact that physical substance is continually destroyed. We now learn to recognise how our ordinary consciousness really arises. We are not conscious because forces of growth hold sway in us, forces which develop in the rest of the organism through nutrition. For in the same measure in which the forces of growth are active within us, thinking is dulled. When we wake up, thinking must, so to speak, have a free hand to dissolve physical substances, to eliminate them from the physical body. To the spiritual science of Anthroposophy, the nervous system appears as that organ which mediates this secretion of mineral-physical substances throughout the whole body. And in this secretion of the mineral-physical develops just that thought-activity which we ordinarily carry with us through the world.

You therefore see that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy not only enables us to recognise the eternal in man, but also to know of the way in which this eternal works within the physical body; that, for instance, thought can only exist through the fact that man continually develops within himself the mineral substances, that is, something dead.

And so we can say: If we learn to know man from this aspect, we also learn to know death from another aspect. Ordinarily death confronts us as the end of life, as a moment in life, as an experience in itself. But when we throw light upon man's physical and etheric body in this way we learn to know the gradual course of death, or the separation of physical-mineral substance,—for death in fact, is nothing but the complete liberator of man's mineral-physical substance—we learn to know the continuous secretion of a dead, corpse-like element within us.

We recognise that from birth onwards, we are really always dying and only when with the whole body we accomplish that which we ordinarily accomplish through the nervous system, in a small part of the body, only then do we die.

We therefore learn to contemplate the moment of death by seeing it on a small scale in the activity of thinking in the human organism. And throughout the whole time that we pass through after death, we can only look back upon our physical body because the following fact exists: Whenever a thought lights up within you during your ordinary life, this is always accompanied by the fact that physical matter is secreted in the physical body, in the same way in which, for instance, physical substance separates from a precipitated salt-solution. This lighting up of thought you owe as it were, to this opaqueness, to this separating off of physical mineral substances. Inasmuch as you abandon the physical body, there is summed up in a comparatively brief space of time what lives in the continual stream of your thoughts. You confront the fact that in death you see lighting up as if all at once that which slowly glimmered and shone throughout your whole earthly life, from birth to death.

And through this powerful impression, in which the life of thoughts illuminates the soul like a mighty flash of lightning, man acquires the memory of his physical lives on earth. The physical body may be cast off, the etheric body may dissolve completely in the universal ether, but through the fact that we obtain in one experience this powerful thought-impression (to mathematicians I might say: this thought-integral in comparison with thought-differentials, from birth to death), we always have before us, throughout the time after death, as a mirroring element, our physical life on earth, even though we have laid aside our physical and etheric parts. And this mirroring element reveals everything which we experience when the human beings with whom we were connected by destiny in love or in hate, gradually come up, when the spiritual Beings who live in the spiritual world and do not descend to the earth, whose company we also now share, rise up before us.

The spiritual investigator may state this with a calm conscience, for he knows that he does not speak on the foundation of illusionary pictures; he knows instead that to super-sensible vision, when super-sensible vision arises through the organ of the physical and etheric bodies which are now outside, these things are just as real, can be seen just as really as physical colours are ordinarily perceived through physical eyes, or physical sounds through physical ears.

This is how the evolution of humanity forms part of the evolution of the world. If we study the development of the world, for instance, the mineral life on earth, we understand why there should be mineral, earthly laws. They exist so that they might also exist within us, and thinking is therefore bound up with the earth. But in perceiving how the Beings who have bound their thinking with the earth emerge from that which produces their thought, we also learn to recognise how man in his true being lifts himself above the merely earthly. This is what connects the development of the world with the development of humanity and unites them.

We learn to know the human being and at the same time we learn to know the universe. If we learn to know man's physical body and its mineralization through thinking, we also learn to know through man's physical body the lifeless mineralised earth. This created a foundation for a knowledge of the evolution of the world from its spiritual aspect also.

When we thus learn to know man's inner being, we can consider the development of the world in the light of the ordinary earthly experiences through which we have passed since our birth.

If you draw out of your memory-store an experience which you had ten years ago, a past event which you have gone through rises up before your soul as an image. You know exactly from the circumstances of life that it rises up as a picture. Yet this picture conveys a knowledge of something which really existed ten years ago.

How does this arise? Through the fact that in your organism certain processes remained behind which now summon up the picture. Certain processes have remained behind in your organism and these summon up in you the picture enabling you to re-construct what you experienced ten years ago. But super-sensible knowledge leads us deeper into man's inner nature. We can perceive, for instance, that the physical body becomes mineralised during the thinking process; we perceive this in the same way in which we learn to know some past experience of our earthly life through the traces which it left behind within us.

In the same way the development of the earth can be understood from the development of man; through the activity of the mineral in man we learn to know the task of the mineral kingdom within the development of the earth. And if, as already set forth, we learn similarly to know (I can only mention this, for a detailed description would lead us too far) how the vegetable kingdom is connected with man, and how the animal kingdom is connected with him (for this too can be recognised), then the development of the world can be grasped by setting out from the human being.

And within the development of the world we can then see something which is again of the same importance to those who are interested in modern civilisation, as are the facts which I explained in connection with a knowledge of the human being, of the eternal inner kernel of man.

We know that modern civilisation has succeeded, at least up to a certain point, in so regarding man's relationship to the development of the world as to attach him to the evolution of the animals,—even though the corresponding theories, or the hypotheses, as some people say, still contain much that is unclear, requiring completion and modification. We follow the development of the simplest organic beings up to the higher animals, and if we continue this line of observation we come indeed to the point of placing man at the summit of animal development. One person does it in this way, and the other in that way, one more idealistically, and the other more materialistically in accordance with Darwin's theory of evolutionary descent, but methodically, it can hardly be denied that if we wish to study man's physical nature according to natural-scientific methods, we must rank him with the animal kingdom,—as has been done for some time.

We must investigate how his head has changed in comparison with the heads of the different animal-species; we must investigate his limbs, etc., and we thus obtain what is known as comparative anatomy, comparative morphology, comparative physiology, and we then also form concepts as to how man's physical form has gradually developed out of lower beings in the course of the world's evolution. But in so doing we always remain in the physical sphere. On the one hand people take it amiss to-day if the anthroposophical spiritual investigator speaks of the spiritual world as I have taken upon myself to do in this lecture; from many sides this is viewed as pure fantasy, and although many people believe that it is well-meant ... they nevertheless look upon it as something visionary and fanciful.

Those who become acquainted to some extent with what I have described, those who at least try to understand it, will see that the preparations and preliminary conditions for it are just as serious as, for instance, the preparations for the study of mathematics, so that it is out of the question to speak of sailing into some sort of fanciful domain. But just as on the one hand people take it amiss if one describes the spiritual world as a real visible world, so they take it amiss on the other hand if in regard to man's physical development one fully accepts those who follow man's development Darwinistically, with a natural-scientific discipline, along the animal line of descent, as far as man. No speculations should enter the observations made in the physical sphere and all sorts of things sought for there, as is done for instance, to-day in Neo-vitalism. This is full of speculations; the old vitalism was also full of speculative elements. But whenever we consider the physical world, we must keep to the physical facts.

For this reason, the anthroposophical spiritual investigator who on the one hand ventures to speak in a certain way of the conditions after death and before birth, as I have done, does not consider it as a reproach (i.e. he is not affected by it) when people tell him that his description of the physical world is completely that of a modern natural scientist. He does not bring any dreams into the sphere which constitutes the physical world. Even though people may call him a materialist when he describes the physical world, this reproach does not touch him, because he strictly separates the spiritual world, which can only be observed with the aid of a spiritual method, from the physical-sensory world, which has to be observed with the orderly disciplined methods of modern natural science.

A serious spiritual-scientific investigator must therefore feel particularly hurt and pained at reproaches made to him with regard to certain followers of spiritual science who sometimes rebuke natural science out of a certain pride in their spiritual-scientific knowledge and out of their undoubtedly shallow knowledge of natural science. They think that they have the right to speak negatively of science and of scientific achievements but the spiritual investigator can only feel deeply hurt at their amateurish, dilettantish behaviour. This is however not in keeping with spiritual science. The spiritual science of Anthroposophy is characterised by the fact that it deals just as strictly and scientifically with the external physical world, as with the spiritual world, and vice versa.

With this preliminary condition, the anthroposophical spiritual investigator stands entirely upon the ground of strictest natural-scientific observation in regard to the study of the world's development, but at the same time he turns his gaze towards the soul-spiritual world. And even as he knows that not only a physical process is connected with man's individual embryonic origin in the physical world, but that a soul-spiritual element unites with the human embryo, with the human germ, so he also knows that in the whole development of the world—though to the physical body it appears as a tapestry of sensory objects, and though it manifests itself to the web of thoughts, i.e. to the etheric body, in laws of Nature—he also knows that the physical world is permeated and guided in its whole development by spiritual forces, under the sway of spiritual Beings, that can be known through the methods I have described.

The anthroposophical investigator therefore knows that when he contemplates the external physical world in the sense of genuine science, he comes to the right boundary, where he may then begin with his spiritual investigation.

If we have conscientiously traced evolutionary development through the animal kingdom up to man, as Darwin or other Darwinians or Haeckel did, and if we have gone into its scientific justification we can then continue this in a spiritual-scientific direction, after having reached the boundary to which we are led by natural science.

We now discover that contemplation of the form into which we penetrate through super-sensible knowledge, shows us the whole significance of forms, as they appear in the kingdom of man on the one hand, and in the animal-kingdom on the other; we discover the whole significance of these forms.

Equipped with the knowledge supplied by super-sensible research, we see how the animal (this is at least the case with most animals, and exceptions can be easily explained) stands upon the ground with its four limbs, how its spine is horizontal, parallel with the surface of the earth, and how in regard to the spine, the head develops in an entirely different position from that of man. We learn to know the animal's whole form, as it were, from within, as a complex of forces, and also in relationship with the whole universe. And we thus learn to make a comparison: We perceive the transformation, the metamorphosis in the human form, in the human being whom we see standing upon his two legs, at right angles, so to speak, with the animal's spine, with his own spine set vertically to the surface of the earth and his head developing in accordance with this position of the spine.

By penetrating into the inner art of Nature's creative process, we learn to distinguish the human form from the animal form; we recognise this by entering into the artistic creative process of the cosmos. And we penetrate into the development of the world by rising from otherwise abstract constructive thoughts to thoughts which are inwardly filled with life, which form themselves artistically in the spirit.

The important thing to be borne in mind is that when it seeks to know the development of the world, anthroposophical spiritual research changes from the abstract understanding ordinarily described—and justly so—as dry, prosaic, systematic thought, or combining thought, into more concrete, real thought. Not for the higher spiritual world, in which concepts must penetrate by the methods described, but for the physical world, the forms in world-development should first be grasped through a kind of artistic comprehension, which in addition develops upon the foundation of super-sensible knowledge.

By thus indicating how science should change into art, we must of course encounter the objection raised by those who are accustomed to think in accordance with modern ideas: “But science must not become an art!” Now this can always be said, as a human requirement. People can say: Now I forbid the logic of the universe to become an art, for we only learn to know reality by linking up thought with thought and by thus approaching reality. Yes, if the world were as people imagine it to be, one could refuse to ascend to art, to an artistic comprehension of forms; but if the world is formed in such a way that it can only be comprehended through an artistic comprehension, it is necessary to advance to such an artistic comprehension. This is how matters stand. That is why those people who were earnestly seeking to grasp the organic in the world-development really came to an inner development of the thinking ordinarily looked upon as scientific thinking, they came to an artistic comprehension of the world. And as soon as we observe with an artistic-intuitive eye the development of the world, beginning with the point where the ordinary Darwinistic theory comes to a standstill, we perceive that man, grasped as a whole, cannot simply be looked upon by saying that once there were lower animals in the world, from which higher animals developed, that then still higher animals developed out of these, and so forth, until finally man arose.

If we study embryology in an unprejudiced way, it really contradicts this conception. Although modern scientists set up the fundamental law of biogenetics and compare embryology with phylogeny, they do not interpret rightly what appears outwardly even in human embryology, because they do not rise to this artistic comprehension of the world's development. If we observe in a human embryo how the limbs develop out of organs which at first have a stunted aspect, how everything is at first actually head, we already obtain the first elements of what is revealed by the artistic comprehension of the human form as I meant it. It is not possible to range the whole human being with the animals. One cannot say: The human being, such as he stands before us to-day, is a descendant of the whole animal species. No, this is not the case. Just those who penetrate with genuine scientific conscientiousness into scientific Darwinism and its modern description of the development of the world, will discover that through a higher understanding it is simply impossible to place man at the end, or at the summit of the animal-chain of development; they must instead study the human head as such, the head of the human beings. This human head alone descends from the whole animal kingdom. Though it may sound strange and paradoxical, the part which is generally considered as man's most perfect part, is a transformation from the animal kingdom.

Let us approach the human head with this idea and let us study it carefully. Observe with a certain morphological-artistic sense how the lower maxillary bones are transformed limbs, how also the upper maxillary bones are transformed limbs, how everything in the head is an enhanced development of the animal form; you will then recognise in the human head that upon a higher stage it reveals everything which has been developed in the animal under so many different forms. You will then also understand why it is so.

When you observe the animal, you can see that its head hangs upon one extremity of the spine and that in the typical animal it is entirely subjected to the law of gravity. Observe instead the human head, observe how the human being stands within the cosmos. The human head is set upon a spine which has a vertical direction. It rests upon the remaining body in such a way that the rest of man protects the head, as it were, against being subjected to the force of gravity alone. The human head is really something which rests upon the remaining organism with comparative independence. And we come to understand that through the fact that the human head is carried by the remaining body, it really travels along like a person using a coach; for it is the rest of the body which carries the human head through the world. The human head has its transformed limbs which have become shrivelled, as it were, and it is set upon the rest of the organism. This remaining organism is related to the human head in the same way in which the whole earth with its force of gravity is related to the animal. In regard to the head, the human being is “membered” into his whole remaining body in the same way in which the whole animal is “membered” into the earth.

We now begin to understand the human being through the development of the world. And if we proceed in this knowledge of the human form with an artistic sense and understanding, we finally comprehend how the human head is the continuation of the animal-series and how the remaining body of man developed later, out of the earth, and was attached to the human head. Only in this way we gradually learn to understand man's development.

If we go back into earlier times of the past, we can only transfer into these primordial epochs that part of man which lies at the foundation of his present head-development. We must not seek the development of his limbs or of his thorax in those early ages, for these developed later. But if we observe the development of the world by setting out, as I described, from the human being, if we observe it in the same way in which we look upon some past experience through memory, we find that the human being had already begun his development in the world at a time when our higher animals, for instance, did not as yet exist. There were however other animal forms present at that time from which the human head has developed, but the higher animals of to-day were not in existence.

We can therefore say: (let us now take a later epoch of the earth) In the further course of his development, man developed his head out of earlier animal-beings through the fact that his spiritual essence animated him. That is why he could bring his head to a higher stage of development. He then added his limbs, which developed out of the regular forces of the earth. The animals which followed, could only develop to the extent to which man had developed with the exclusion of his head. They began their development later, so that they have not come as far as the human development of the head; they remain connected with the earth, while the human being separates himself from it.

This proves that it has a real meaning to say: Man is organised into the development of the universe in such a way that while he is connected with the animal kingdom, he rises above it through his spiritual development. The animals which followed man in their development could only develop as much as man had developed in his limbs and thorax ... the head remained stunted, because a longer time of development should have preceded it, such as that of man, in order that the real head might develop.

Through an artistic contemplation of the forms in the world's development, the conscientiously accepted Darwinistic theory is transformed, in so far as it is scientifically justified to-day. And we recognise that in the development of the world the human being has behind him a longer time of development than the animals,—that the animals develop as their chief form that part which man merely adds to his head. In this way man reaches the point of lifting one part of his being out of the force of gravity, whereas the animals are entirely subjected to it. Everything which constituted our head with its sense-organs, is raised above the force of gravity, so that it does not turn towards heavy ponderable matter, but towards the ether, which fills the sensory world. This is the case above all with the senses; we should see this, if we were to study them more closely. In this way, for instance, the human organ of hearing depends upon an etheric structure, not only upon the air structure.

Through all this, the human being forms part not only of the material world, of the ponderable physical world, but he forms part of the etheric outer world. Through the etheric world he perceives, for instance, what the light conjures up before him in the world of colours, etc., etc. Even through his external form he rises above heavy matter, up to the free ether, and for this reason we see the development of the world in a different way when we ascend from natural science to spiritual science.

But when we rise up to an artistic conception, we also perceive the activity of the soul-spiritual in man, and we must rise up to such a conception if we wish to understand the human being. We should, for instance, be able to say: In regard to his soul-spiritual, sentient-volitional being, we must speak of loneliness and of a life in common with others, as if these were theoretical concepts, as I described to-day; we must rise up to the moral world and finally we come to the religious world. These worlds are interwoven and form a whole.

If we study the human being in accordance with a natural-scientific mentality and in the sense of modern civilisation, we find on the one hand the rigid scientific necessity of Nature into which the human being is also inserted, and on the other hand, we find that man can only be conscious of his dignity and can only say: I am truly man, if he can feel within him the moral-religious impulses. But if we honestly stand upon the foundation of natural science, we have pure hypotheses as to the beginning and the end of the earth, hypotheses which speak of the Kant-Laplace nebula for the beginning of the earth and of a heat-death for the end of the earth.

If in the face of the natural-scientific demands we now consider, in the sense of modern civilisation, the moral-religious world which reveals itself intuitively (I have shown this in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity), if we consider this world we must say: We really delude ourselves, we conjure up before us a fog. Is it possible to believe that when the earth passes through the death by heat, that there should still exist anything else in the sense of natural science than the death too of all ideals?

At this point spiritual science, or Anthroposophy steps in, and shows that the soul-spiritual is a reality, that it is working upon the physical and that it has placed man in the human form, into the evolution of the world. It shows that we should look back upon animal-beings which are entirely different from the present animals, that it is possible to adhere to the methods of modern science, but that other results are obtained. Anthroposophy thus inserts the moral element into the science of religion, and Anthroposophy thus becomes moral-religious knowledge.

Now we no longer merely look towards the Kant-Laplace nebula, but we look at the same time to an original spiritual element, out of which the soul-spiritual world described in Anthroposophy has just as much developed as the physical world has developed out of a physical-earthly origin. And we also look towards the end of the earth and since the laws of entropy are fully justified, we can show that the earth will end through a kind of death by heat. But we look towards the end just as from the anthroposophical standpoint we can view the end of the single human being: his corpse is handed over to the elements, the human being himself passes over into a spiritual world. This is how we envisage the end of the earth. The scientific results do not disturb us, for we know that everything of a soul-spiritual nature which men have developed will pass through the earth's portal of death when the earth no longer exists; it will pass over into a new world-development, even as the human being passes over into a new world-development when he passes through death.

By surveying the development of the earth in this way, we perceive in the middle of its development the event of Golgotha. We see how this event of Golgotha is placed in the middle of the earth's development, because formerly, there only existed forces which would have led man to a kind of paralysis of his forces. We really learn to recognise (I can only allude to this at the end of my lecture) that in the same way in which through the vegetable and animal fertilization a special element enters the fertilised organism, so the Mystery of Golgotha brought something into the evolution of the world from spiritual worlds outside the earth, and this continues to live, it accompanies the souls, until at the end of the earth, they pass on to new metamorphoses of earthly life. I should have to describe whole volumes were I to show the path leading in a strictly conscientious scientific way from what I have described to you to-day in connection with the evolution of humanity and of the universe, to the mystery of Golgotha, to the appearance of the Christ-Being within earthly existence.

But through a spiritual-scientific deepening many passages in the Gospel will appear in an entirely new light, in a different way from what it has hitherto been possible for Western consciousness. Let us consider only the following fact: If we take our stand fully upon a natural-scientific foundation, we must envisage the physical end of the earth. And those who continue to stand upon this scientific foundation, will also find that finally the starry world surrounding the earth will fall away; they will look upon a future in which this earth below will no longer exist and the stars above will no longer exist. But spiritual science gives us the certainty that just as an eternal being goes out of the physical and etheric body every evening and returns into them every morning, so an eternal being will continue to live on when its individual body falls away. When the whole earth falls away from all the human soul-spiritual beings, this eternal part will continue to live and it will pass over to new planetary phases of world evolution.

Now Christ's words in the Gospels resound to us in a new and wonderful way: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away, and connected with these words are those of St. Paul: Not I, but Christ in me. If a Christian really grasps these words, if one who really understands Christianity inwardly and who says, “Not I, but Christ in me,” understands Christ's words, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away,” that is, what lives within my everlasting Being shall not pass away,—these words will shine forth from the Gospel in a remarkable way, with a magic that calls forth reverence, but if one is really honest they cannot be directly understood without further effort.

If we approach such words and others, with the aid of spiritual science and in the anthroposophical sense, if we approach many other sayings which come to us out of the spiritual darkness of the world-development, of the development of the earth and of humanity, a light will ray on to them. Indeed, it is as if light were to fall upon such words as “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away”—light falls upon them, if we hear them resounding from that region where the Mystery of Golgotha took place, that event through which the whole development of the earth first acquires its true meaning.

Thus we see that spiritual science in the sense of Anthroposophy strives above all after a conscientious observation of the strict methods of the physical world, but at the same time it seeks to continue these strict scientific methods into regions where our true eternal being shines out towards us, regions where also the spiritual being of the world-development rays out its light towards us, a light in which the world-development itself with its spiritual forces and Beings appears in its spiritual-divine character.

At the conclusion of my lecture let me express the following fact: Spiritual-scientific Anthroposophy can fully understand that modern humanity, particularly conscientious, scientifically-minded men, have grown accustomed to consider as real and certain the results of causal natural-scientific knowledge, the results of external sense-observation, intellectual combinations of these sensory observations, and experiments. And by acquiring this certainty, they acquired a certain feeling in general towards that which can be “certain.” Up to now no attempt has been made to study super-sensible things in the same way in which physical things are studied. This certainty could therefore not be carried into super-sensible regions. To-day people still believe that they must halt with a mere faith at the thresh-hold of the super-sensible worlds, that feelings full of reverence suffice, because otherwise they would lose the mystery, and the super-sensible world would be rationalised. But spiritual science does not seek to rationalise the mystery, to dispel the reverent feeling which one has towards the mystery: it leads man to these mysteries through sight. Anthroposophy leaves the mystery its mystery-character, but it sets it into the evolution of the world in the same way in which sensory things exist in the sphere of world-evolution.

And it must be true that men also need certainty for the spheres transcending mere Nature. To the extent in which they will feel that through spiritual science in the sense of Anthroposophy they do not hear some vague amateurish and indistinct talk about the spiritual worlds, but something which is filled by the same spirit which comes to expression in modern science, to this same extent humanity will also feel that the certainty which it acquired, the certainty which it is accustomed to have through the physical world, can also be led over into the spiritual worlds. People will feel: If certainty exists only in regard to the physical world, of what use is this certainty, since the physical world passes away? Man needs an eternal element, for he himself wants to be rooted in an eternal element. He cannot admit that this certainty should only be valid for the transient, perishable world. Certainty, the certainty of knowledge, must also be gained in regard to the imperishable world.

This is the aim pursued in greatest modesty (those who follow the spiritual science of Anthroposophy know this) by Anthroposophy. Its aim is that through his natural certainty man should not lose his knowledge of the imperishable; through his certainty in regard to perishable things he should not lose the certainty in regard to imperishable things. Certainty in regard to the imperishable, that is to say, certainty in regard to the riddle of birth and death, the riddle of immortality, the riddle of the spiritual world-evolutions, this is what Anthroposophy seeks to bring into our civilisation.

Anthroposophy believes that this can be its contribution to modern civilisation. For in the same measure in which people courageously recognise that certainty must be gained also in regard to imperishable things, and not only in regard to perishable things, in the same measure they will grow accustomed to look upon Anthroposophy no longer as something fantastic and as an idle individual hobby, but as something which must enter our whole spiritual culture, like all the other branches of science, and thereby our civilisation in general.