The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Performance of the Secession Stage, Berlin

Wilhelm von Scholz dedicated himself to a muse similar to Maeterlinck's. There was beauty in the images that mysteriously allowed the first performance of the Secession Stage to pass us by. A poet had his say, who wants to say a lot of meaningful things, but whose wealth of feeling is not yet sufficient for his intentions. But it is uplifting to hear so much and such earnest desire. There should be no dispute that the attempt to bring this saga to the stage was justified. Martin Zickel and Paul Martin, who founded and direct the Secession Stage, deserve thanks for this attempt. In the prologue to his "Besiegten", Wilhelm von Scholz beautifully expresses what has become a dramatic problem:

"For all days serve the evening,
The sinking evening,
The rising evening,
Which with deep shadowing wing beat
Takes away what grieves the earth,
That builds the starry frames
And calls the springs to murmur,
To whom the day ascends
'Like a shining temple staircase,
That leads to the murmuring marble dawn,
Leading over in a white train
The priest to touch the harp..."

The poet seeks to dramatize transience, which is deeply related to the eternal source of all being. Becoming, which hovers in fluctuating appearance, has become a problem for him. The main character of his dramatic tale is both a knight and a monk. He reaches deep into life, for he unleashes life's deepest power, love, wherever he goes. But with the blossoming of life, he also brings death. The plot is simple. The "Knight of the Star", who is "both a monk and a singer - and pale as death", lures "all women to their doom". "He loves them, and they become quiet and rich until they die from his gaze". "He kills them sometimes in a night, in an hour that they laugh sweetly through." This is also what happens in the process on which the little drama is based. If this is not fully comprehensible from the stage, it is not because of the thoroughly genuine, true basic idea. It is one of the elements of our spiritual life that appear countless times in every human being who is capable of introspection and who knows how to observe nature in its eternal urge for value; how it repeatedly spreads death over life and conjures life out of death, how it transforms the present into memory and allows greatness to endure in the monument alone. If the poet, in addition to his ability to perceive the simply great, also had the other ability to depict it in equally simple greatness, then there could be no complaint about the incomprehensibility of his creation. If this were the case, then we would have before us in vivid figures what resonates in us as an uplifting mood when the knight-turned-monk stands by the corpse of those he has killed and extinguishes the candles that symbolically represent the circle of becoming: forgotten childhood happiness, young love, mature love, the joyful fulfillment of duty, truth, beauty, faith. But then the poet would not have needed to have his dramatic poem introduced by the personified legend with the words:

"Do not seek the word that can solve everything,
What this hour of heavy twilight dream
Will bring you. A shy spell
Stir, when a day sprays in fragrance and foam
Often wafting your soul,
Until you are alone, you in empty space! No word tells you what you feel -
It becomes clouds until it fades away cloudy."

This is the true poet's power over the word, that he knows how to shape it, so that it does not turn into clouds and fade away cloudy and shapeless, but presents to us as a form, full of content and definite, what we feel. We can learn from the poet who promises that in his work "death and life ... ... join hands", that he does not point us up to the clouds and lull our imagination with their ever-changing indeterminacies; we want to see the greatest in full wakefulness, not in a dream. It remains an incontrovertible truth that it is the poet's task to fix in permanent forms what hovers in fluctuating appearances. And we cannot forgive the dramatist if he wants to treat us like Hamlet treats Polonius. Purely atmospheric drama must contain the kind of greatness that wafts over us from Maeterlinck's creations if we are to overlook the lack of design. For Maeterlinck, who sees so much in the everyday events that pass us by, the blurred, ambiguous atmospheric tones are much better suited than the definite, closed unambiguousness of the view. Wilhelm von Scholz, however, does not have the quiet weaving of eternal elemental forces in the smallest things in mind; rather, he is faced with an eternal mystery of the world in its abstract linearity; and for this he searches for expression, for embodiment. But he cannot find it. Maeterlinck seeks the eternal in the small processes in which it undoubtedly lives, because it is all-pervading, but where it has no formative effect. Scholz simply lags behind the creative imagination with his feeling.

Why the directors of the Secession stage brought us Frank Wedekind's "Kammersänger" is beyond me. The great Wagnerian tenor Girardo, who is idolized by immature girls and mature women, and the plot of the extremely lively drama with the background of a cynical view of life are excellently suited for an evening performance on one of our usual stages. Nothing stands in the way of such a performance. The theater audience would enjoy the caricatures, and the critics would praise it, as they have done so very well. You have quite rightly sensed that Wedekind can do what he wants; Scholz can't do what he wants. Well, there are other "drama poets" who can also do what they want: Blumenthal, Schönthan and so on. And we can name a few who couldn't always do what they wanted, if of course we don't want to associate Scholz with them somehow: Hebbel, Kleist and - Goethe and Schiller.

The same. Johannes alone in meditation.

Johannes:
‘This is the hour in which he dedicates
Himself to serve the ancient holy laws
Of sacred wisdom;—in a dream perchance
I may in spirit linger at his side.’
Thus near the temple spake in ancient times
The woman whom my spirit-vision sees;
By thoughts of her I feel my strength increased.
What is this picture's purpose? Why doth it
Hold my attention spellbound? Certainly
No sympathy.from out the picture's self
Accounts for this, for, should I see the scene
In earthly life, I should consider it
Of no importance. What saith it to me?

(As if from afar the voice of ‘the Other Philia.’)

The Other Philia:
The magical web
That forms thine own self.

Johannes:
And clairvoyant dreams
Make clear unto souls
The magical web
That forms their own self.

(While Johannes is speaking these lines ‘the Other Philia’ approaches him.)

Who art thou, magic spirit-counsellor?
True counsel didst thou bring unto my soul
But didst deceive me over thine own self.

The Other Philia:
Johannes, thine own being's double form
From thyself didst thou fashion. As a shade
Must I roam round thee for so long a time
As thou thyself shalt not set free the shade
Whom thine offence doth grant a life bewitched.

Johannes:
This is the third time that thou speakest thus;
I will obey thee. Point me out the way!

The Other Philia:
Johannes, whilst thou liv'st in spirit-light,
Seek what is treasured up within thy Self.
From its own light it will shed light on thee.
Thus canst thou learn by looking in thyself
How to wipe out thy fault in later lives.

Johannes:
How shall I, while I live in spirit-light,
Seek what is treasured up within my Self?

The Other Philia:
Give me that which thou thinkest that thou art;
Lose thou thyself in me a little while,
Yet so that thou dost not another seem.

Johannes:
How can I give myself to thee before
I have beheld thee as thou really art?

The Other Philia:
I am within thee, member of thy soul;
The force of love within thee is myself;
The heart's hope, as it stirs within thy breast,
The fruits of long-past lives upon this earth
Laid up for thee and hid within thyself,
Behold them now through me;—feel what I am,
And through my power in thee behold thyself.
Search out the pictured being, which thy sight,
Without thy sympathy, did form for thee.

(Exit.)

Johannes:
O spirit-counsellor, I can indeed
Feel thee in me, yet I see thee no more.
Where livest thou for me?

(As if from afar the call of the Other Philia.)

The Other Philia:
The magical web
That forms thine own self.

Johannes:
‘The magical web
That forms their own self.’
O magical web, that forms mine own self,
Show me the pictured being which my sight
Without my sympathy did form for me.

Whereto doth this word's power conduct me now?
A spirit-star on yonder shore of souls—
It shines; it draweth nigh—as spirit-form,
Grows brighter as it nears;—now forms appear;—
They act as beings act who are alive;—
A youthful mystic—and a sacred flame,
The stern call of the highest hierophant
To tell the vision seen within the flame.

That woman doth the youthful mystic seek,
Whom my sight saw without my sympathy.

(Maria appears as a thought form of Johannes.)

Maria:
Who thought of thee before the sacred flame?
Who felt thee near initiation's shrine?

Johannes, wouldst thou tear thy spirit-shade
From out the magic kingdoms of the soul;
Live then the aims that it will show to thee;
The path on which thou seek'st will guide thy steps,
But thou must first discover it aright.
The woman near the temple shows it thee
If she lives powerfully within thy thought.
Spellbound amongst shade-spirits doth she strive
To draw nigh to that other shade who now
Through thee loth evil service to grim shades.

(The Spirit of Johannes' Youth appears.)

The Spirit of Johannes' Youth:
I will be grateful to thee evermore
If thou in love wilt cultivate the powers
Laid up for me within the womb of time
By that young mystic in that bygone age
Whom once thy soul sought at the temple gate.
But thou must first this spirit truly see
At whose side I have now appeared to thee.

Maria:
Maria, as thou wouldst behold her, lives
In other worlds than those where truth abides.
My holy earnest vow loth ray out strength
Which shall preserve for thee what thou hast gained.
In these clear fields of light me shalt thou find
Where radiant beauty life-power doth create;
Seek me in cosmic fundaments, where souls
Fight to recover their divine estate
Through love, which in the whole beholds the self.

(While Maria is speaking the last lines, Lucifer appears.)

Lucifer:
So work, compelling powers;
Act therefore, powers of might,
Ye elemental sprites,
Feel now your master's power,
And smooth for me the way
That leads from realms of Earth
That so there may draw near
To Lucifer's domain
Whate'er my wish desires,
Whate'er obeys my will.

(Enter Benedictus.)

Benedictus:
Maria's holy earnest vow doth pour
Now through his soul salvation's healing ray.
He will admire thee, but he will not fall.

Lucifer:
I mean to fight.

Benedictus:
And, fighting serve the gods.

Curtain

[ 1 ] Today I will take the opportunity of giving some further thoughts in line with my article ‘At the Dawn of the Michael Age’.

The Michael Age has taken its rise in the evolution of mankind at a time that follows on the one hand the predominance of the intellectual ‘forming of thoughts,’ and on the other hand the turning of human perception and vision to the outer world of the senses, to the physical world.

[ 2 ] Thought-forming is in its nature not essentially an evolution in the direction of materialism. That which in bygone times came to the human being as something inspired into him, namely, the world of ideas, became, in the time that preceded the Michael epoch, the property of the human soul. The soul no longer receives the ideas ‘from above’ out of the spiritual content of the Cosmos: it draws them itself actively forth out of the human being's own spiritual nature. Man has thereby become ripe for reflection upon his own spiritual being. Hitherto he did not penetrate to these depths of his own nature. He saw in himself as it were a drop out of the sea of cosmic spirituality, a drop that has separated itself off for the time of this earthly life, only to unite itself again when the earthly life is over.

[ 3 ] The thought-forming that goes on in the human being marks an advance in human self-knowledge. Viewed from the supersensible, it appears thus. The spiritual Powers that we may designate with the Michael-name held rule over the ideas in the spiritual Cosmos. The human being experienced these ideas by partaking with his soul in the life of the Michael-world. This experience has now become his own, and a temporary separation of the human being from the Michael-world has therewith come about. With the inspired thoughts of earlier times man received at the same time the content of the spiritual world. Since this inspiration has ceased and man now forms his thoughts from his own activity, he is referred to the perception of the senses to find a content for these thoughts. Thus was man obliged to fill with material content the spirituality that he had won. He fell into the materialistic outlook in the very epoch of time that brought his own spiritual being a stage higher in development.

[ 4 ] This is easily liable to misunderstanding. We may observe only the ‘fall’ into materialism and lament over it. Whilst, however, the perception and vision of this age had to be limited to the external physical world, there was unfolding within the soul, as actual experience, a purified and self-subsisting spiritually of the human being. And now in the Michael Age this spirituality must no longer remain as unconscious experience, it must become conscious of its own proper nature. This signifies the entry of the Michael Being into the human soul. For a certain length of time man has filled his own spirit with the material side of Nature; he is to fill it again with cosmic content consisting of a spirituality that is his very own.

[ 5 ] Thought-forming was lost for a time in the Matter of the Cosmos; it must be found again in the cosmic Spirit. Into the cold, abstract world of thought can enter warmth, can enter a spirit-reality that is filled with being. That represents the dawn of the Michael Age.

[ 6 ] The consciousness of freedom could develop only in the depths of the human soul through this separation from the thought-being of the world. What came from the heights had to be found again in the depths. For this reason the development of the consciousness of freedom was connected first of all with a knowledge of Nature that was directed only to the external. While man was unconsciously developing his mind in the formation of clear ideas, his senses were directed outward solely to what is material, but this did not in any way disturb the tender seed that was beginning to germinate in the soul.

[ 7 ] But the experience of the Spiritual, and together with it the vision of the Spiritual, can re-enter the vision of the outward material world in a new way. The knowledge of Nature acquired during the age of materialism can be comprehended in the soul's inner life in a spiritual way. Michael, who has spoken ‘from above,’ can be heard ‘from within,’ where he will begin to dwell. Speaking more imaginatively this may be expressed as follows: The Sun-nature which for long periods man received only from the Cosmos, will begin to shine within his soul. He will learn to speak of an ‘inner Sun.’ This will not prevent him from knowing himself to be an earthly being during his life between birth and death; but he will recognise that this his earthly being is led by the Sun. He will learn to feel as a truth, that a being places him, in his inner nature, into a light which shines indeed upon earthly existence but which is not enkindled within it. In the dawn of the Michael Age it may still seem as if all this were very far remote from humanity; but ‘in the spirit’ it is near; it only needs to be ‘seen.’ A very great deal depends upon this fact, that the ideas of man do not merely remain ‘thinking,’ but in thought develop sight.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 8 ] 85. It is in the waking day-consciousness that man experiences himself to begin with, during the present cosmic age. This experience conceals from him the fact that in this waking state the Third Hierarchy is present in his experience.

[ 9 ] 86. In the dream-consciousness man experiences, in a chaotic way, his own being unharmoniously united with the Spirit-being of the world. When the Imaginative Consciousness is realised as the other pole of the dream-consciousness, man becomes aware that the Second Hierarchy is present in his experience.

[ 10 ] 87. In dreamless sleep-consciousness man experiences, all unconsciously, his own being united with the Spirit-being of the World. When the Inspired Consciousness is realised as the other pole of the sleep-consciousness, man becomes aware that the First Hierarchy is present in his experience.

Every religion must deal with the question of the origin of evil. Where does evil, imperfection come from? This is a question that the teachers of all major religions have repeatedly dealt with and answered. It must be asked because one imagines that the divine origin must be the perfect one. If the world emerges from the divine, the question naturally arises: how can something good give rise to something evil? Why does the perfect allow something imperfect?

One must grasp the essence of evil in the right way and then pour out the necessity. A picture: piano workshops, in which there is a perfect piano maker who not only has the highest technical skill but also works with love in making the pianos. We will not find anything imperfect within the workshop. When we bring a piano to the concert hall and a virtuoso sits down at it, something perfect will come again. Each in his own place performs perfectly. But if, let us say, the piano-maker were too enthusiastic and hammered away while the virtuoso was playing, this activity, performed in the wrong place, would produce something imperfect. We shall find that this image can be applied everywhere if we go a little deeper.

Let us imagine the task on the moon as similar to, but different from, earthly development. The faculty of imagination was not present, nor were any of the mental faculties that develop in human beings. Dream consciousness was present, but its task was to build the animal organs of man. The animal body was formed and developed into semen. But they were predisposed on the moon and developed as they must be if they are not the bearers of a spinal cord and a brain. Therein lay the difference in the formation of the organs. A bone structure can be different if it does not need to taper to a spinal cord and skull capsule. In order for all this to be developed in seven rounds, each with seven globes, the dream consciousness had to be the regulator of all animal organs. If it was to fulfill its task completely, it had to take special care to carry out the formation that lay below the sphere of brain formation. Great wisdom was needed, but no bright consciousness, generic wisdom. This tremendous wisdom had to take great care with the plastic formation of each organ. Everything that had been achieved at that time had been achieved and also overcome. But how differently was the Pitris formed?

Let us imagine a retarded Pitri now transferred to the earthly career. He has the tendency to catch up on what was neglected at that time and would take great care to apply everything to the satisfaction of lower organs. Such Pitri natures are partly in the human organism, partly as seducers in the astral, they want to hold back the human organs. They have not found the right connection, they cannot slip into the earthly shell and buzz around people, seducing them, wanting to keep them in the lower service, which was higher service on the moon. This backward activity contradicts earthly activity; and evil has arisen from this perfection being placed in the wrong place.

The development proceeds in such a way that lessons must be learned, that one cannot be automatically pushed into the path; this can lead to peculiarity. Because world development proceeds in space and time, the displaced perfection gives rise to imperfection.

If we follow the great stream of the development of consciousness, it is clear and perfect; but now it must live out in space and time and is now intertwined in particularity, that is, different developmental currents push into each other and then stand next to each other at different levels of development; in this way, things interact that would be perfect in the right place, and yet, when they interact, they create an imperfection.

Therefore, no being in space and time can claim perfection, only the divine origin is perfect.

Christian esotericism calls this perfect origin of all beings the “Father”. “Call me not good, for no one is good except the Father.” Be perfect, as your Father is perfect, strive to seek your ideal in the Father, that is, in the spaceless and timeless.

But is it not contradictory to the concept of the Godhead to allow evil despite space and time? If we think that all other beings are there for our sake, that we have separated the realms from us, we will say: Actually, it only depends on the development of the human being, because they are there for our sake. We have to accept

Evil in the sense we know it only exists in earthly development. To what extent is it justified in the divine primordial law? Could the human world be without evil? The question arises as to how the guiding entity relates to the human being. It could give him the bound route for life, in which case the deity would be omnipotent but the creatures powerless. This is impossible if the deity wanted creatures that are its image. If the deity wanted to divest itself, it had to create mirror images, give the creatures the possibility to develop out of themselves. The freedom of their being / gap in the transcript] In the love of God lies the complete divestment of God.

First we have the guiding deity, then the mirror images and the life within them – sat; still in abundance, not yet divested; devotion – ananda – and merging with the creature – chit. This is the relationship of the divine essence to the creatures.

Without freedom, beings in God's image are not possible; but with freedom, the necessity arises that beings can also err.

In earthly development, beings are thus given one of the highest powers, that of love. A being that has a predetermined path could not do good out of itself, freely out of love. A free being does it out of love. Thus God created beings in self-sacrificing love and gave them the opportunity to return life in free love. That is why the cosmos of the earth, in contrast to all others, is called that of love. Acting out of love is its task.

On the occasion of our last lecture, I spoke to you of the three meetings which the human soul has with the regions pertaining to the Spiritual world. I shall have to say a few more things as to these, which will give me the opportunity of answering a question asked at the end of the last public lecture at the Architectural Hall, regarding the forces which bring over the karma, the external destiny, from a former incarnation. I have been told that this is very difficult to understand. In the course of these lectures I will return to this subject; but it is preferable to do so after having discussed a few points which may perhaps help to make the question better understood. Today, however, in order to make the question of the three meetings with the Spiritual world still clearer, I intend to insert, by way of episode, something that it seems to me important to discuss just at the present time.

When we consider the ideas and concepts which have found their way into the souls of people of all grades of education as the result of the Spiritual development of the last century, we observe how strongly its influence tended to cause people to consider the evolution of the world and man's place in it, solely according to the standard of Natural Science and its ideas. There are of course plenty of people still living today who do not believe their attitude of mind and soul to have been formed by the concepts of Natural Science. These people do not however observe the deeper foundations upon which their minds were formed; they do not know that the ideas of Natural Science have just slipped in a one-sided way, not only determining their thoughts but even in a certain way their feelings. A man who today reflects along the lines laid down for everyone in the ordinary educational centres, whose mind and disposition have been formed in accordance with them, and whose ideas are based upon what is taught there, cannot possibly feel the true connection between what we call the world of morality, of moral feeling, and the world of external facts. If, in accordance with the ideas of our times, we ponder on the way in which the earth and indeed the whole firmament is supposed to have developed and may come to its final end, we are thinking along the lines of purely external facts, perceptible to the senses. Just think of the deep significance to the souls of men, of the existence of the so-called Kant-Laplace theory of the creation of the world, according to which the earth and the whole heavens arose from a purely material cosmic mist (for it is represented as purely material) and were then formed in accordance with purely earthly physical and chemical laws, developed further according to these laws, and, so it is believed, will also come to an end through these same laws. A condition will some day come about in which the whole world will mechanically come to an end, just as it came into being.

Of course, as I said before, there are people today who do not allow themselves to think of it in this way. That, however, is not the point; it is not the ideas that we form that signify, but the attitude of mind which gives rise to these ideas. The conception I have just alluded to is a purely materialistic one; one of those of which Hermann Grimm says, that a piece of carrion round which circles a hungry dog is a more attractive sight than the construction of the world according to the Kant-Laplace theory. Yet it arose and developed; nay, more: to the great majority of men who study it, it even appears illuminating. Few there are who, like Hermann Grimm, ask how future generations will be able to account for the arising of this mad idea in our age; they will wonder that such a delusion could have ever seemed illuminating to so many. There are but a few people who have the soundness of mind to put the question thus, and those who do are simply considered more or less wrong-headed. But, as I said, the point is not so much the ideas in themselves, as the impulse and frame of mind which made them possible. These conceptions came as the result of certain attitudes of mind; yet, though they came from learned men and were given out by them, most people still believe that the world did not originate in any such mechanical impulse, but that Divine impulses must have played a part in its creation. Still it remains a fact that such conceptions were possible. It was possible for the attitude of men's minds, their disposition of soul, to take on such a form that a purely mechanical idea of the origin of the world was conceived. That signifies that at the bottom of men's souls there is the tendency to form conceptions of a materialistic nature. This tendency is not only to be found among the unlearned, and others who believe in this idea, it exists in the widest circles among all kinds of people, yet most people today are still rather shy of becoming followers of Haeckel, picturing everything Spiritual in a material form. They lack the necessary courage for this. They still admit of something Spiritual; but do not give the matter further thought. If the above mentioned concept holds good, there can then only be room for the Spiritual and especially for the moral, in a certain sense. For just consider:—If the world really came into being as the Kant-Laplace theory believes, and only comes to its end through physical forces, dragging all men down to the grave with it, together with all their ideas, feelings and impulses of will, what then, apart from all else, would become of the whole moral order of the world? Suppose for a moment that the condition of the burial of all things came about: what good would it have been to have ever pronounced some things good and others evil? What would it avail to say this is right, and that is wrong? These would be nothing but forgotten ethical concepts, swept away as something which, if this idea of the world-order were correct, would not perhaps survive even in one single soul. In fact, the matter would stand thus: from purely mechanical causes, by physical and possibly chemical forces, the world came into being and by like means it will come to an end. By means of these forces phenomena appear like bubbles, produced by men. Among men themselves arise the moral ideas of right and wrong, of good and evil; but the whole world passes over into the stillness of the grave. All right and wrong, good and evil, is merely an illusion of man, and is forgotten and vanishes away when the world becomes ‘the grave.’ Thus the only thing that stands for the moral world-order is the feeling one has as long as the episode lasts, which extends from the first state to the last, that man requires such ideas for his common life; that man must form these moral ideals, though they can never take root in a purely mechanical world-order. The forces of nature—heat, electricity, and so on—intervene in the plan of nature, they make themselves felt therein; but the force of morality would, if the mechanical plan of the world were correct, only exist in the mind of man; it would not intervene in the natural order. It would not be like heat which expands bodies, or like light which illuminates them and makes them visible and permeates the world of space. For this moral force is present and soars as a great illusion over the mechanical world-order, and vanishes, dissolves away, when the world is transformed into the grave. People do not sufficiently carry these thoughts to their logical conclusion. Hence they are not on their guard against a mechanical world-order, but allow it to remain—not from kindness of heart, but rather from laziness. If they have a certain want in their hearts, they simply say: ‘Science does not demand that we should think deeply about this mechanical world-order, faith demands something else of us; so we put our faith side by side with science and just believe in something more than mechanical nature, we just believe what a certain inner demand of our hearts compels.’ That is very convenient! There is thus no need to rebel against what Herman Grimm, for instance, felt to be a mad idea of modern science. There need be no rebellion. But this attitude cannot be justified by one who really wishes to think his thoughts out to their conclusion.

It may be asked: What is the reason that people today live thus blindly in an impossible position, in which it is impossible to think logically? Why do they accept such a position? The reason is, strange as this may sound if one is not familiar with the thought and hears it for the first time,—the reason is that people have more or less forgotten, in the course of the last century, how to think truly of the Christ Mystery which must take its place in the very centre of the life of the age; they have forgotten how to think of it in its real, true sense. The way in which man thinks of the Christ Mystery in the newer age should be such that it rays into his whole thinking and feeling. The position which man has assumed to the Christ since the Mystery of Golgotha represents the standard of his whole collective ideas and sentiments. (I may perhaps have more to say on this subject in the near future). If he cannot look upon the Mystery of Christ as a true reality, he is unable to develop ideas and conceptions by which to gauge the views of the world held by others, ideas permeated by reality, and really capable of penetrating the truth.

That is what I wanted above all to make clear to you today. If a man really thinks in the way I have just illustrated, as most people of the present day do, whether consciously or not, the world is then divided on the one hand into the mechanical natural order, and on the other into the moral world order. Now to timid souls, who often believe themselves to be very courageous, the Christ-Mystery forms part of the purely moral world-order. This applies chiefly to those who see nothing more in the Christ-Mystery than the fact that at a particular time, a great, perhaps even the greatest Teacher of the Earth-world appeared, and that His teaching is the thing of greatest importance. Now, if Christ is only considered as the greatest Teacher of humanity, this view is in a sense quite compatible with the twofold division of the world into a natural order and a moral order. For, of course, even if the earth had formed itself as the mechanical world order represented, and is eventually to become the common grave of all things, it might still be possible for a great Teacher to arise who might accomplish much to make men better and to convert them. His teachings might have been sublime, but they would avail nothing when, at the end of all things, everything would be a grave; when even the teachings of Christ Himself would have disappeared, and there would not even be a remembrance of Him remaining in any living being. People do not like to think that; but their dislike would not alter the fact. If it be desired to believe absolutely in a merely mechanical world-order it would be impossible to avoid such thoughts as these.

Everything depends upon the fact being realised that in the Mystery of Golgotha something was accomplished which does not merely belong to the moral world-order, but to the whole collective cosmic order; something which belongs, not merely to the moral reality—which according to the mechanical world-order must be non-existent—but to the whole intensive reality. We shall be able to grasp what is really in question if we turn our thoughts once more to the Three Meetings which I mentioned in the last lecture, taking them in a different sense from that to which I then referred.

I told you that every time a person sleeps, in the intermediate state between his going to sleep and waking he meets Beings belonging to the Spiritual world, Beings of a like nature to his Spirit Self as we are accustomed to call it, Beings of the same substance and kind. This means that when a man wakes from sleep, he has had a meeting with a Spiritual being, and though he may be quite unconscious of having had this experience, yet he carries the after-effects into his outer physical life. Now what takes place in our soul during this daily meeting is in a certain way connected with the future of man. A man of today, unless he busies himself with Spiritual Science, knows very little as yet of what goes on in the depth of his soul during sleep. Dreams, which in ordinary life betray something of this, do indeed reveal something, but reveal it in such a way that the truth does not easily come to light. When a man wakes in a dream or out of a dream, or remembers a dream, this is mostly connected with ideas he had already acquired in his life, with reminiscences. These are however only the garments of what really lives in the dream or during sleep. When our dreams clothe themselves in pictures taken from our daily life, these are but the garments; for in dreams is revealed what actually takes place in the soul during sleep, and that is neither related to the past nor to the present, it is related to the future. In sleep are found the forces which in a human being can be compared to the germinal forces which develop in the plant for the production of a new one. As the plant grows it always develops the germinal forces for the new plant in the following year. These forces reach their height in forming the seed, in which they become visible. But as the plant grows, while it is growing, the germinal forces for the next plant are already there. In the same way the germinal forces;—whether for the next incarnation or even for the Jupiter-period -are present in man, and he chiefly forms these during his sleeping state. The forces then formed, my dear friends, are not immediately related to individual experiences, but rather to the basic forces of the next incarnation: they relate to the forces of the next incarnation. In sleep, a man works upon his germs for his next incarnation into the future. So that while he is asleep, he already lives in the future.

I do not wish to leave a too hazy impression in your minds in respect to this, so will at once say that in the sleeping state, the next incarnation is as the knowledge of the next day. We know from experience that when tomorrow comes the sun will rise and we know more or less how it will run its course, although we may not know what the weather will be or what separate events may affect our lives. In like way the soul is a prophet during our sleep, but a prophet who only knows of what is great and cosmic; not of the weather. If one were to suppose that the soul during sleep becomes aware of the details of the next incarnation, one would be falling into the same error as one who thought that because he knew that next Sunday the sun will surely rise and set, and knew certain universal facts as well, he could therefore predict the weather. This does not alter the fact that while we are asleep we do have to concern ourselves with the future. The forces which are of like nature with our Spirit-Self and that work on the forming of our future, meet us during our time of sleep.

Another, a further meeting—if I leave out the second—is the third meeting, of which I said in the last lecture that it only takes place once in the whole course of a man's life—in the middle of it. I said that when a man is in his thirties he meets with what may be called the Father-Principle, while he meets the Spirit-Principle every night. This meeting with the Father-Principle is of very great significance, for it must occur. You will remember I explained that even those who die before the age of thirty have this experience, only, if they live through the thirties it comes in the course of life, while when death is premature it occurs sooner. You know that, as the result of that meeting, man is enabled to impress the experiences of the present life so deeply into himself that they are able to work over into the next incarnation. Thus, that which is the meeting with the Father-Principle is connected with the earth-life of the next incarnation, whilst our meeting with the Spirit-Principle is for the whole future; it radiates over the whole of our future life, as well as over the life experienced between birth and a new birth.

Now the laws with which this meeting, that we experience only once in a life, are interwoven, they do not pertain to the earth: they are laws which have remained in the earth-evolution just as they were at the time of the moon-evolution. On the physical side they are connected with our physical descent, and with everything which physical heredity signifies. This physical heredity is indeed only one side of the matter; there are Spiritual laws behind, as I have already explained. So that everything that comes to pass regarding the meeting with the Father Principle, points back to the past; it is the legacy of the past; it points back to the moon-evolution, to earlier incarnations, while that which takes place during sleep points to the future. Just as what takes place during sleep forms the germ for the future, so that which comes about as a result of men being born as the descendants of their ancestors, carrying over from former incarnations what is necessary should be brought over; all that has remained over from the past. Both these—what relates to the future and to the past—are in a sense striving outside the natural order. The peasant still goes to sleep at sunset and rises at dawn; but as man progresses in so-called civilisation, he tears himself free from the order of nature. One meets persons in cities—though they may not be very numerous—who go to bed in the morning and arise at night. Man is freeing himself from the mere order of nature, the development of his free will makes it possible for him to do so. Thus in a sense, because he is preparing for a future which is not yet here, he is torn away from the order of nature. When he carries the past into the present, especially the past connected with the moon, he is also torn loose from the order of nature. Nobody can prove the necessity according to the universal laws of nature, that John Smith should be born in 1914; such an event is not ruled by necessity as is the rising of the sun or other natural occurrences, but by the natural order of the moon. During the moon-period everything was like the order of our birth on earth.

Man is however entirely subject to the order of nature as regards what is of immediate significance to the present, to his earth existence. Whereas, as regards the Father-Principle he bears the past within him, and as regards the Spirit-Principle the future—with respect to that meeting of which I have said that it occurs in the course of the year and which is now connected with the meeting with Christ—man is connected with the order of nature. If he were not, the consequence would be that Christmas might by one person be celebrated in December and by another in March, and so on; but although different nations have different designations for the Festival of Christmas, there is everywhere some kind of festivity in the latter days of December which always bears some relation to the meeting I referred to. Thus with respect to this meeting which is inserted into the course of the year, man, for the very reason that this is his present, is in direct connection with the order of nature; while with respect to the past and the future he has become free from it, and has indeed been free from it for thousands of years.

In the olden times man joined in the order of nature both as regards the past and the future. In the Germanic countries, for instance, birth was regulated in olden times in accordance with the order of nature. Birth, which was then regulated by the Mysteries, might only take place at a stated time of the year. Thus it was inserted into the order of nature. In olden times, long before the Christian Era, conception and birth were regulated in the Germanic countries by that of which only a faint echo has been preserved in the Myth of the worship of Hertha. In those days her worship comprised no less than the following. When Hertha descended in her chariot and drew near to men, that was the time of conception; after she had withdrawn, this might no longer take place. This was so strictly adhered to that anyone not born within the appointed season was considered lacking in honour, because his human existence was not in harmony with the order of nature. Birth and conception were just as much adapted to the course of nature in olden times as sleeping and waking, for in those days people slept when the sun had set and woke at dawn. These things have now become displaced; but the central event which is adapted to the course of the year cannot be displaced. By means of this, through its harmony with the order of nature, something is retained and must be so retained in the human soul.

What then is the whole purpose of man's earthly evolution? That man should adapt himself to the earth and take the earth-conditions into himself; that he should carry into his future evolution what the earth has been able to give him, not in any one incarnation alone, but in the whole sum of his incarnations on earth. That then is the purpose of the earth evolution. This purpose can however only be fulfilled through man's to some extent forgetting during his sojourn on earth, his connection with the cosmic and heavenly powers. This he has learnt to do. We know indeed that in olden times man possessed an atavistic clairvoyance, and into that the heavenly powers could work; man was still connected with them; the kingdom of heaven in a sense extended into the human heart. This had to become different so that man might develop his free will. In order that he might become related to the earth he had to have nothing more of the kingdom of heaven in his vision, in his direct perception. This however is the reason that at the time of his closest relation to the earth, in the fifth epoch in which we are living now man became materialistic. Materialism is only the most complete, the most extreme expression of man's relation to the earth, and if nothing else had happened this would have brought about his complete and utter subjection to the earth. He would have had to become related to it and gradually share in its destiny; he would have had to follow the same path as the earth is herself pursuing; he would have been entirely dovetailed into the earth's evolution,—unless something else had occurred. He would have been obliged to tear himself away, as it were, from the cosmos together with the earth, and to unite his destiny completely with that of the earth. That however was not planned for mankind, something else was intended. On the one hand man was to unite himself in the proper way with the earth; on the other, although through his nature he was to become related to the earth, yet messages were to come down to him from the Spiritual world which would raise him once again above the earth. This bringing down of the Heavenly Message came about through the Mystery of Golgotha. Therefore the Being Who went through the Mystery of Golgotha had to take on human nature as well as that of a Heavenly Being. This means that we must think of Christ Jesus not merely as One, who although the Highest, entered human evolution and developed therein; but as One Who possessed a heavenly nature, Who not only taught and propagated doctrine but brought into the earth that which came from Heaven. That is why it is important to understand what the Baptism in Jordan really is; it is not merely a moral action—I do not say it is not a moral action, but it is not that alone. It is also a real action. Something took place then which is just as much a reality as the happenings of nature. If I warm a thing by some warmth-giving means, the warmth passes over into that which is warmed. In like manner did the Christ-Being pass into Jesus of Nazareth at the Baptism by John. That is most certainly in the highest degree a moral action; but it is also a reality in the course of nature, just as real as the phenomena of nature. The important thing is that it should be understood that this is nothing originating in rationalistic conceptions, which always accord merely with the mechanical, physical or chemical course of nature; but something which as idea, is just as much an actual fact as the laws of nature, or indeed the forces of nature.

Once this has been grasped, other ideas will become more real than they are at present. We will not now enter into a discussion on alchemy, but remember that what the old alchemist had in view was that his conceptions should not remain mere ideas, but that they should result in something. (Whether he was justified or not is a not the point for the moment, that may perhaps be the subject of another lecture.) When he burnt incense while holding his conception in mind or giving voice to it, he tried to put sufficient force into it to compel the smoke of the incense to take on form. He sought for such ideas as have the power of affecting the external realities of nature, ideas that do not merely remain within the egoistic part of man but can intervene in the realities of nature. Why did he do this? Because he still had the idea that something occurred at the Mystery of Golgotha which intervened in the course of nature: that was just as real a fact to him as a fact of nature. You see upon this rests a very significant difference which began in the second half of the Middle Ages, towards our own fifth age which followed the Graeco-Latin epoch. At the time of the crusades, in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth, and indeed in the sixteenth century, there were some special natures, principally women, who devoted themselves so deeply to mysticism, that the inner experience resulting therefrom was felt by them as a spiritual marriage, whether with Christ or another. Many ascetic nuns celebrated mystical marriages. I will not enter into the nature of these inner mystic unions today; but something took place in their inner being which could afterwards only be expressed in words. In a sense it was something that subsisted in the ideas, feelings and also the words in which these were clothed. In contrast to this, Valentine Andrea, as the result of certain conceptions and Spiritual connections, wrote his Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreuz. This chymical—or, as we should say today, chemical-marriage is also a human experience, but when you go into the matter you find that this does not only apply to a soul-experience but to something not merely expressed in words, but which grips the whole man; it is not merely put into the world as a soul experience, for it was a real occurrence, an event of nature, in which a man accomplishes something like a natural process. Valentine Andrea in The Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreuz, meant to express something that was more permeated with reality than the merely mystical marriage of Mechthild of Magdeburg, who was a mystic. The mystical marriage of the nuns only accomplished something for the subjective nature of man; by the chymical marriage a man gave himself to the world. Through this, something was accomplished for the whole world; just as something is accomplished for the whole world by the processes of nature. This is again to be taken in a truly Christian sense. Those who thought more real thoughts, longed for concepts through which they could better lay hold of reality, even if only in the one-sided way of the old alchemists—concepts through which they could better grasp reality, ideas in fact which were really connected with reality. The age of materialism has at present thrown a veil over such concepts; and those who today believe they think aright about reality are living in greater illusion than these despised men at the time of the old alchemists, who strove for concepts which should help them to master it.

For what can men accomplish today with their concepts? In our age in particular we have some experience of what they can attain through these empty illusions; the husks of ideas are idols worshipped today, they have nothing to do with reality. For reality is only reached by man plunging down into it, not by forming any sort of ideas at will; yet the difference between unreal concepts and those which are permeated with reality, can be perceived in the ordinary things of the day, but most people do not recognise this. They are so absolutely satisfied with the mere shadow of ideas, having no reality. Suppose, for instance, someone today gets up and makes a speech in which perhaps he may say that a new age must come which is already manifesting, a completely new age in which every man will be measured according to his own worth alone, when he will be valued according to what he can do! Anyone today would admit that such words are in complete understanding with the times! But, my dear friends, as long as ideas are nothing but husks, however beautiful they may be, they are not permeated with reality. For it is not the point that one who is convinced that his own nephew happens to be the best man for the job should admit the principle that every man should be put in the place to which his powers are best adapted. It is not the ideas and concepts one may have that signify: what is required is that with those ideas one should penetrate the reality, and recognise it! It is very pleasant to have ideals and fine principles and often still pleasanter to give expression to them. But what is needed is that we should really plunge down into the reality, recognise it, and penetrate it. We are plunging more and more deeply into that which has brought about these sad times, if we continue to carry on this worshipping of the idols of the husks and shadows of ideas, if we do not learn to see that it is not of the slightest value to have ‘such beautiful ideas and conceptions,’ and to talk about them unless there is the will to get right down to the realities and recognise them. If we do that, we shall not only find the substance, but also the Spirit therein. It is the worshipping of idols, of the mere shadows and husks of ideas, which lead us away from the Spirit. It is the great misfortune of our age, that people are intoxicated with fine words. It is unchristian too; for the true basic principle of Christianity is that the Christ did not pour His teaching into Jesus of Nazareth but poured Himself in; which means that He so united Himself with earthly reality, was so drawn into the reality of the earth, that He thereby became the Living Message from the Cosmos.

The New Testament, my dear friends, if read aright, is the most wonderful means of education concerning reality; only the New Testament must little by little be put into our own language. The present translations do not now completely give the original meaning; but when the old meaning is put into the direct language of our day, the gospels will then be the very best means of bringing man ‘that power of thinking that is permeated with reality.’ For nowhere can thought-forms be found in them that could lead to the husks and shadows of ideas. We need but to grasp these things today in their deeper reality. It may sound almost trivial to speak of the intoxication of ideas, but this is so enormously prevalent today that the ideas and concepts themselves, however beautiful they may sound, are no longer the real point at issue: what is important is that the man who utters them should take his stand on reality. People find that difficult to understand today. Everything that comes out into the open is judged today by its content, and indeed by what is understood of that content. If this were not so, such documents, for instance, as the so-called Peace-Programme of President Wilson—which is entirely void of ideas, a husk, a mere conglomeration of the shadows of ideas—would never be taken as based on reality. Anyone having the power of discerning the reflections of ideas would know that this combination could at most only work by means of a certain absurdity, which might become a sort of reality. What is really needed is that people should try to find ideas and concepts really permeated with reality; this however pre-supposes in the seekers that they themselves should be profoundly imbued with reality and be selfless enough to connect themselves with that which lives and moves in reality. There is a great deal in the present day well calculated to lead people entirely away from the search for reality, but these things are not observed.

He who knows sees many sad things going on. For instance, that it should be possible at the present day for people to be impressed simply by a combination of words, by a number of speeches, which indeed are printed, but which, to one who does not go by mere words but by realities, are absolutely appalling. Speeches have been delivered by a highly honoured person of our day, who in his very first speech immediately takes up the attitude that man on one side of his nature, is absolutely related to the order of nature, and that the theologians are not acting aright if they do not leave the order of nature to the scientists who investigate it. The speeches go on to say that as regards the order of nature, man is simply a piece of machinery; but on this machinery depend the functions of the soul; what are then specified as functions include practically all the functions belonging to the soul. All these are then to be left to the Nature investigators! Nothing is left to comfort theology but the thought that all this has now been given over to Natural Science, and all we have to do is to make speeches—to talk! After that, of course one can only live on husks of words. Furthermore, the speeches are so composed that they lack continuity. (I shall come back to this subject in the coming lectures and go into it more fully.) If you look closely into the thought that is supposed to be connected with the one immediately preceding it, you will find that it cannot possibly be thought of as connected. The whole thing sounds very well, however! In the preface to certain lectures “On the Moulding of Life,” it is stated that they have been lately attended by thousands of people, and that certainly many thousands more feel the need to comfort their souls at this serious time by perusing them. These lectures were given by the celebrated theologian Hunzinger, and I believe are in the ‘Quelle-Meyer’ Library, under the name of Knowledge and Education. They are among the most dangerous literature of the day, because, although they sound enchanting, one's thought-life becomes simply confused, for the thoughts are disconnected and, if one strips off the fascinating words, are nothing but nonsense. Yet these lectures were very much praised, and no one noticed the confused thoughts in them or stopped to test them; everyone was charmed by the shadow-words.

Yes, the external reality entirely hangs together with that which man is ever developing. If he develops concepts void of reality, the reality itself becomes confused and then follow conditions such as we have today. It is no longer possible to judge things by what meets us today externally; we must form our opinions by studying what has been developing in the minds of men for years, or decades, perhaps even longer still. That is what must be gone into. The whole thing depends upon our not accepting the Christ from His teaching alone, but that we should look at the Mystery of Golgotha in its actuality, in its reality; that we should see that it was a Fact that Something super-earthly united itself with the earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We shall then come to realise that morality is not merely something which fades and dies away, when the earth, and even the fabric of the heavens, shall become a grave; but that even though the present earth and the present heavens become a grave, yet, just as the present plants will become mere dust while in the present plant there is the germ of the next one, so there is the germ of the next world in this world of ours, and man is connected with this germ. Only this germ requires the connection with Christ that it may not fall into the grave with the earth, as a plant germ that has not been fructified falls into dust with the plant. The most real thought it is possible to hold, is that the present moral order of the world is the germinal force for the future order of nature. Morality is no mere worked-out thought; if permeated with reality it exists in the present as a germ for later external realities. But a conception of the world such as that of Kant-Laplace, of which Hermann Grimm says that a piece of carrion which attracts a hungry dog is a more appetising aspect, does not belong to that order of thought. The mechanical plan of the world can never penetrate to the thought that morality contains within it a force which is the germ of the natural, of the nature of the future. Why can it not do this? Because it must live in illusion. For just imagine, my dear friends: if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, all would have been as in the Kant-Laplace theory. If you think away the Mystery of Golgotha from the earth, that theory would be correct. The earth had to reach such a condition that, left to itself, it must inevitably lead the human race into the desolation of the grave. Things had to take place as they have, that man might attain freedom through his relation to the earth. He will not sink into the grave, because at the critical moment the earth was fructified by Christ, because Christ descended, and because in Christ lies the opposing force to that which leads to the grave, namely, the germinal force whereby man can be borne up once more into the Spiritual world. That means that when the earth becomes a grave, when it fulfils its destiny according to the Kant-Laplace theory, the germ which is concealed within it must not be allowed to fall into decay, but must be carried on into the future. So that the Christian-moral plan of the world presupposes what Goethe calls ‘the higher nature in nature.’ We might say: A man who is able to think in the right way of the Mystery of Golgotha, as a reality, is also able to think thoughts and form concepts permeated with reality. This is necessary, this is what people must learn before all else. For in this fifth Post-Atlantean age they have either desired to form concepts which intoxicate them, or such as create blindness in them. The concepts which intoxicate are chiefly formed in the realms of religion; those which cause blindness chiefly in the domain of Natural Science. A conception like that of Kant, which, while admitting the purely natural ordering, placing the two worlds of knowledge and of faith side by side, has yet only the moral in view,—must result in intoxication. Concepts based on moral grounds are able to intoxicate, and the intoxication prevents one from seeing that one thus simply succumbs to the stillness of the grave, into which all the moral plans of the world have fallen, and perished. Or, again, such concepts as those of present-day Natural Science, National Economy, and—forgive the expression, which may be rather hard to swallow—even the political concepts of the day, may create blindness; for they are not formed in connection with a Spiritual conception of the world, but from the shreds of what are called actual (that is, actual in the physical sense), actual reality. Thus each man sees only as far as the end of his own nose, and blindly forms opinions upon what he can see with his eyes and grasp with mechanically acquired ideas, between birth and death; without having formed any concepts permeated with reality through being permeated by the Spiritual, by a grasp of Spiritual reality.

It is necessary over and over again to point out what it is that our age so desperately needs. For even history itself in our age is often no more than the mere shadow of ideas. How frequently what Fichte said to the German people is proclaimed abroad today! What he really said, however, can only be understood if one studies his whole life, that life so profoundly rooted in reality! That is why I tried in my book, The Riddle of Man, to represent the personality of Fichte, as he afterwards became, showing how closely from his childhood up he was connected with reality. I should indeed be glad if such words as these—as to the need for our thoughts and concepts to be permeated with reality—were not only listened to superficially but profoundly grasped, taken in, and really absorbed. Then only will a free and open vision, a psychic vision, be acquired for what our age so badly needs. Everyone of us should have this open soul-vision. If we do not each make it a duty to think over the facts touched upon here, we are not paying sufficient attention to the traffic going on today in the shadows and husks of words, nor to the fact that everything tends to lead people either into intoxicating concepts or to such as make them blind.

I hope you will not take what has been said today as propagandism of any sort, but look upon it as expressing existing facts. A man certainly must and ought to live with his times and when anything is described, he should not look upon it as all that is to be said on the subject; he should learn to strike the balance. It is quite natural that the world today should be confronted with impulses leading entirely to materialism. That cannot be prevented, it is connected with the deep needs of the age. But a counterbalance must be established. One very prominent means of driving man into materialism is the cinematograph. It has not been observed from this standpoint; but there is no better school for materialism than the cinema. For what one sees there is not reality as men see it. Only an age which has so little idea of reality as this age of ours, which worships reality as an idol in a material sense, could believe that the cinema represents reality. Any other age would consider whether men really walk along the street as seen at the cinema; people would ask themselves whether what they saw at such a performance really corresponded to reality. Ask yourselves frankly and honourably, what is really most like what you see in the street: a picture painted by an artist, an immobile picture, or the dreadful sparkling pictures of the cinematograph. If you put the question to yourselves quite honourably, you will admit that what the artist reproduces in a state of rest is much more like what you see. Hence, while people are sitting at the cinema, what they see there does not make its way into the ordinary faculty of perception, it enters a deeper, more material stratum than we usually employ for our perception. A man becomes etherically goggle-eyed at the cinema; he develops eyes like those of a seal, only much larger, I mean larger etherically. This works in a materialising way, not only upon what he has in his consciousness, but upon his deepest sub-consciousness. Do not think I am abusing the cinematograph; I should like to say once more that it is quite natural it should exist, and it will attain far greater perfection as time goes on. That will be the road leading to materialism. But a counterbalance must be established, and that can only be created in the following way. With the search for reality which is being developed in the cinema, with this descent below sense-perception, man must at the same time develop an ascent above it, an ascent into Spiritual reality. Then the cinema will do him no harm, and he can see it as often as he likes. But unless the counterbalance is there, people will be led by such things as these, not to have their proper relation to the earth, but to become more and more closely related to it, until at last, they are entirely shut off from the Spiritual world.

Dear friends, as on other occasions when I have been able to speak to you since the serious events of the present time took their beginning, let our thoughts go out at this moment to those who are at the front offering their souls and their bodies in sacrifice for the tremendous demands made in our time and having to take up, with the whole of their physical existence, the challenge of the time:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha, the spirit we have long been seeking in our movement, may he be with You and guide you to the goals that you have to seek.

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

My particular intention with the words I spoke here on the last occasion was to let a truth flow into your minds, a truth to be found through spiritual science, that the great and serious events in life really enable us to see how outward appearances have to be regarded in the light that comes to us from spiritual science. It is only then that they will no longer appear to us as Maya, the great illusion, but in their profound truth. This is not to say that these outward appearances in themselves are Maya or illusion—that is an erroneous view people often pick up from a philosophy with a more oriental orientation—but that our senses and our intellect err in the interpretation, in their comprehension, of outer events unless we illumine those external events with the light that comes to us from an understanding of the spiritual world.

Today I want to take certain individual facts that have already been touched on during the years of our anthroposophical work and present them in a perspective that is somehow in accord with our time.

We are fully conversant with the thought that since the Mystery of Golgotha intervened in events on earth, the impulses, the forces and entities that have gone through this Mystery of Golgotha have played an active role, as living forces, in all that happened in human evolution on earth. In other words, and to put it more concretely, I want to say: In all major events, in all the important and essential things that have happened, the Christ impulse has been active through those who are his servants, his spiritual helpers. At the present time the term Christianity is generally understood to cover only what men have been able to comprehend. But, as I stressed on many occasions, what has come into the world through Christianity is so great, so tremendous, that human reason, the human intellect, is in no position, or has not been in a position to the present moment, really to grasp even the most elementary aspects of the powers of the Christ impulse. If Christ had worked only on the basis of what men have been able to grasp of him, he would have been able to achieve little. But what matters is not what has entered into mankind through human reason and understanding, what concept men have been able to form of the Christ, but rather the fact that he has been present since the Mystery of Golgotha, active right among men and in their ways of doing things. It is not a question of how far men have understood him but that he has been present as a living entity and has entered wholly into all significant events in evolution.

Of course, our spiritual science enables us to grasp only a little of the profundity of the Christ impulse even today. Future times will come to understand and see more and more. There is no reason to feel pride in such understanding of the Christ impulse as we have so far achieved. Spiritual science will grasp a little more today than it has been possible to grasp of the Christ in the past. In past times people were able only to reflect on the Christ by using the means available through external intellect, external reason, external research. Now we have spiritual science as well, and with this we see into the supersensible worlds, and out of the supersensible worlds we are able to provide many answers concerning the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. Immediate comprehension of what the Christ is, and what the spiritual powers are that serve him as folk souls and the like, has been least possible for the peoples living in regions where the Christ still had to enter, as it were. Yet the Christ impulse had to come in, for instance in the Roman world. And there is one particular example which we have already considered in another context that will be the best way of demonstrating how the Christ is at work as a living power, directing his spiritual servants when events have to be brought about that are essential in evolution, to bring real progress for mankind.

The event I mean is one I should like to mention again. It happened in AD 312 that the man through whom Christianity became the official state religion, Constantine,¹⁶ son of Constantinus Chlorus, entered the field with his army against Maxentius, then the ruler of Rome. Of course, if one considers those two armies facing each other one would have to say that the situation was the worst possible for Constantine, his army being five times smaller than that of Maxentius. It is possible to imagine, however, that considering the state of the art of war at the time, both armies had a number of outstanding generals. Yet what mattered particularly at that time was not the the skill of men but that opportunity was given for the ongoing Christ impulse to influence mankind in a way commensurate with the needs of the time.

It is possible to see how much of the Christ impulse could be understood at the time, how much of that Christ impulse human hearts had been able to absorb in the state of consciousness then prevailing if we consider what happened a few decades later around Rome and out of Rome. Julian the Apostate¹⁷ fought Christianity out of honest conviction, on the basis of what could be gleaned from human knowledge in those times. Anyone considering the way Julian and his followers fought Christianity can say to himself: ‘There is no doubt that as far as human knowledge was concerned, Julian and his followers were very advanced for their time; they were much more enlightened in this respect than the Christians of their day, although they had reverted to worship of the old gods.’ They stood for what might be considered to represent human knowledge at that time. Yet in AD 312 it was not the stand of human knowledge that determined the issue; it was rather that the potential had to be there for the Christ and his servants to intervene in the historical evolution of mankind. However much Maxentius and his army were able to rely on the skills of their generals and on anything else human knowledge and human wisdom may have achieved at that time, if nothing else had happened, then, undoubtedly, something destined to emerge at that time would not have emerged. And what did happen?

What happened was the following. The continuing Christ impulse flowed into soul activities that were not within men's consciousness, into activities men were not aware of. And it did indeed guide men in such a way that what had to come about did come about. The battle between Constantine and Maxentius was fought by the Red Rock, the Saxa Rubra, on 28 October 312. It was decided not by human skill, but—and enlightened minds may refuse to accept this as much as they like—by dreams; that is by what is generally called ‘dreams’, though they are not just dreams to us. For through their dreams there entered into the souls of the two army leaders what could not enter into them out of human reason. Maxentius had a dream before the battle that he would have to leave his city. He consulted the Sibylline Oracle and was told that he would achieve what was to happen if he dared to join battle outside the city and not within it. It was the most unwise thing he could have done, particularly as his army was so much more powerful than Constantine's. He should have known that anything received from the higher worlds first had to be interpreted and that the oracle would mislead him. Constantine in his turn was told in a dream that he would win if he led his troops into battle under the sign of Christ. He acted accordingly. What had entered into the souls of these men by the roundabout route of a dream became deed, and as a result the world was greatly changed at that time. We need only reflect a little to be able to say: What would have become of the Western world if supersensible powers had not taken a hand in events in a way that is indeed perfectly apparent.

Let us now look at those events in more details. At the time souls had incarnated in the West and South of Europe who were destined to be bearers of Christianity. Even the most enlightened souls were unable to become bearers of the Christ impulse at the time by using their minds, their intellect, because the time for this had not come. They had to find the way to Christianity through what had been created around them, externally. We may say they assumed Christianity like a garment. Their deeper nature was not greatly affected by it. They became serving members rather than receiving the Christ impulse into their innermost being. Fundamentally speaking, that was to hold true for the best souls in the western parts of Europe for a long time to come, into the 8th and 9th centuries and beyond. They needed to assume Christianity as a garment, to wear this garment of Christianity in such a way that they wore it in their ether bodies and not in their astral bodies. You can judge what it means when I say they bore Christianity in the ether body. It means they assumed it in such a way that they were Christians when awake but were unable to take their Christianity with them when outside their physical and ether bodies. The way they went through the gate of death also was such that we can say: they were able to look down from the realm through which man has to pass between death and rebirth, look down at what they had been in their last earth life. But one thing that was not immediately possible for them at the time was to take the Christian impulses arising from their former life into their future life. They wore Christianity more as a garment.

Because of something I will come to shortly, let us hold on to this way in which the souls accepted Christianity in their outward lives and the way Christianity was not part of what souls were able to take with them through the spiritual world, when passing through the gate of death, to prepare for a new life on earth. Let us remember that these souls were only able to enter into a new earth life having forgotten Christianity. For we do not in a later earth life remember what we merely wore as a garment in our former life. If it were otherwise our children would not have to learn Greek again at grammar school, for many of them did once incarnate in Greece. They have no memory of their Greek incarnation, however, and therefore have to learn Greek again. Those souls who had incarnated in the West of Europe were unable to carry their Christianity through the life they had to go through between death and rebirth because they had not integrated these impulses inwardly with their ego and astral body. That was the particular way in which those souls lived on into later incarnations. Let us remember this and now move on to another fact, one I have also mentioned before.

We know that the time we live in now, the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, began mainly around the 15th-16th centuries. That was the time when preparation was to be made for the European world for elements that were predominantly to lead to the development of the spiritual soul. That is really what our fifth epoch of civilization is about. Whatever had to be achieved there had to be achieved with regard to the fact that in the external aspect of earth life, too, conditions were arising on earth that were particularly favourable for the evolution of the spiritual soul—the soul able to develop by directing itself towards material earth life, the external facts of physical existence. That had to take its beginning and it did take its beginning. We merely need to recall how horizons expanded in Europe as the great discoveries were made and with everything they brought with them. The spiritual soul, therefore, had to develop primarily under the influence of the material world. We merely need to think of one thing, and again reference has already been made to this: the evolution and development of the spiritual soul is the special mission, the one-sided mission, of that which belongs to the sphere Of the British folk soul. Considering all the details, one could hardly imagine anything proceeding more according to plan than the way the British folk soul was directed towards these material roles in life. This was definitely predestined in the evolution of mankind.

Let us imagine, for instance, that during the 15th century England had been deflected from its propensity for those regions of the earth towards which it had been directed as the vast lands outside Europe were discovered, and that the British folk soul had instead experienced large territorial gains on the Continent of Europe. Let us imagine that the map of Europe had been changed to this effect. Then it would have been impossible in the first place to achieve what had to be achieved in the sphere of material civilization and, secondly, to achieve what had to be achieved in Europe by developing the inner life. This inner development proceeded specifically from that point onwards, overcoming all kinds of obstacles, with a role played also by Protestantism which in turn was influenced in many ways by German mysticism. Intervening in the process of evolution the Christ impulse had to ensure that the British Isles were kept away from the region where souls still had to be prepared to become outward, external bearers of the Christ impulse.

The Christ impulse had to flow into the deeds done on the Continent of Europe. It had to act in such a way that it achieved a great deal more than could come about through mankind, through the arts and skills of man. And what happened?

The marvellous thing happened that a poor shepherd girl from Orleans, Joan of Arc, [16 January 1412–30 May 1431] did everything those who were very advanced for their time had not been able to do. At that time it was indeed the Christ impulse acting in Joan of Arc, through its Michaelic servants, that prevented a possible merging of France and England, causing England to be forced back onto its island. And this achieved two things: first, France continued to have a free hand in Europe. This can be seen if we study the history of France over the following centuries—the essential element of the French spirit was able to influence European culture entirely without hindrance. The second thing which was achieved was that England was given its domain outside the continent of Europe. This deed, brought in through Joan of Arc, was a blessing not only for the French but also for the English, compelling them to take up their domain.

If we consider this in connection with what is implied by the advance of the Christ impulse on earth, the deed of Joan of Arc achieved something about which the following may be said: The degree to which she understood those things in a genuine human intellectual way was as good as zero compared to the deed which has given the map of Europe its present form. Events had to take that course so that the Christ impulse could spread in the right way. There we see the living Christ erupting into historical events out of the subterranean depths of human nature. That is not the Christ men think they know, for the Christ impulse may be seen in two ways. On the one hand we may ask ourselves: What did the people of that time understand of the Christ impulse? If we open our history books and study the history of mankind we find that over the centuries theologians were in dispute, defending or contending all kinds of theories, attempting to show how human freedom, the Holy Trinity and other things should be understood. So we see countless theologians fighting each other, acknowledging each other as orthodox theologians or else accusing each other of heresy. We observe how Christian doctrine spread entirely in accord with the situation as it was at the time. That is one side of it. But it is not the thing that matters, just as now it does not matter what people are able to do with their ordinary intellect. What matters is that the Christ lives among men, unseen but a living entity, and is able to stream up from depths beyond our perception and enter into the deeds of men. And he has done so at a point where there was indeed simply no need for him to come in through the human intellect, through a reasoning mind, but where he was able to come in through the soul of a girl of simple mind, through the soul of the Maid of Orleans. And when he came in like this, what was the attitude of those who were able to grasp Christianity in form of the orthodox doctrine? Well, they found they had to burn the girl who bore the Christ impulse at the stake. It has taken some time for official doctrine to take a different view. There may have been a point to it where official doctrine is concerned, but canonizing Joan of Arc is not exactly the right response to the events of that time.

This is a real example of how the Christ intervened in human evolution through his servants. As I said, he acted through his Michaelic spirit in the case of the Maid of Orleans. He intervened as a living entity, not merely through whatever men were able to understand of him. This particular example also shows something else, however. Christianity did exist. The people who were there around the Maid of Orleans, as it were, did call themselves Christians. Their Christianity did mean something to them. But all we can say about their understanding is: He whom you seek is not here,¹⁹ and the one who is here is not the one you seek, for you do not know him.

It must be clearly understood, however, that it was essential for Christ evolution to proceed within the evolution of Europe also in the form of an external garment. Souls were part of this development that were able to assume Christianity exactly as such an outer garment, who were able to wear it on the outside as it were. They were souls trailing behind, souls that had been incarnated there earlier and still did not take the Christ into their ego, merely into the ether body. The great difference between Joan of Arc and the others was that she had taken the Christ impulse into the very depths of her astral body and was acting for the Christ impulse out of the deepest forces of her astral body. This is one of the points where we can gain a clear understanding of something that really must become clear to us: the difference between the progressive evolution of nations and the progressive evolution of individual human personalities.

If we consider the French as they are today, for example, it is of course true that a number of individual human personalities exist within the French nation. These individual personalities were not, of course, part of the nation in their previous incarnation, part of a nation that had assumed the outer garment of Christianity there in the West of Europe. It was because a number of people had to assume Christianity as an outer garment in the West of Europe that they were in a condition on passing through the gate of death that necessitated their being united with Christianity in their astral body and ego in their next life, under different conditions. It was because they had been incarnated in the West of Europe that the necessity arose for them to have their next incarnation somewhere else. It is indeed very uncommon—note that I am saying uncommon, though it does not always have to be so—that a soul belongs to the same community on earth through a number of consecutive incarnations. Souls pass from one earthly community to another.

We have one example, however—and I am saying this without wishing to rouse sympathies or antipathies, and with no intention of flattering anyone—we have one example of souls actually assuming the same nationality a number of times. That is the case with the people of Central Europe. These Central European people include many souls that are incarnated among them today and have also been incarnated in the Germanic tribes in the past. This is a fact we are able to trace. It cannot always be fully explained with the means now available in occult science, but it exists nevertheless. A fact like that presented in last Thursday's public lecture on The Ancient Germanic Soul and the German Spirit,²⁰ for example, is illumined when we know that souls make repeated appearances within the Central European community. The fact is that cultural epochs were cut short within this particular community.

We only have to realize what it means that there was an epoch at the dawn of Germanic culture when the writers of the German poem the Nibelungenlied lived, or Walther von der Vogelweide (German lyric poet, minnesinger, c. 1170–12301 and others. And we need to realize that later there was a' time when a new flowering of German culture began and the first had been completely forgotten. For when Goethe was young nothing was known, as it were, of the first flowering of Germanic culture. It is because the souls return to the same community that it was necessary to forget what had gone before, so that the souls would find something new on their return and could not pick up the threads of what remained from earlier times. It has not happened with any other people that a metamorphosis was gone through, as it were, the way it happened in the case of the Central European people: from the height that had been reached in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries to that later height that came about the time between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries and which we may hope will continue. There is no continuous line from the first to the second of these periods, and this can only be explained once we know that souls do return particularly in this culture. It is possible that another deeply moving fact I have already mentioned to you is also connected with this, the fact that it was noted how the Central European fighters of the present continue the struggle once they have gone through the gate of death, that soon after they have passed through the gate of death it is possible to see how they continue to join the struggle. This fact can raise wonderful hopes for the future, because one can see how not only the living, in the physical sense living, but also the dead, those who have died, are making their contribution to events.

Let us now pose the question: What is the situation with souls that were incarnated in Western Europe at the time when Christianity was assumed like an outer garment, that is in the 6th, 7th 8th and 9th centuries, and accepted Christianity there, or also under the Romans, though they were not yet able to unite it with their astral body and their ego? What is the situation with those souls?

Grotesque as it may seem to modern man with his materialistic thinking, the things spiritual science can teach achieve real meaning for life if the concrete facts are considered. People still think reference to repeated earth lives is a matter of mere fantasies produced by a handful of foolish dreamers. The idea is one that is not accepted, though it is once again considered excusable to make reference to it in view of the fact that in an hour of weakness even the great Lessing accepted the idea of repeated earth lives.²¹ Yet if we take the findings made in occult research seriously we cease to be fools begging the forgiveness of greatly enlightened folk. It will be necessary for us to consider some of the things arising from occult research in detail, for that will be the only way of throwing light on something which otherwise has to remain a great illusion.

It is a strange thing that a great many souls that lived to the west of us towards the end of the Roman epoch, when Christianity was slowly gaining influence, finally becoming the established church, now come from the East, as souls growing up in the East, souls now among Russia's fighters. I said we must remember the fact I referred to earlier. For among the people killed in the East, those who are fighting there and being taken prisoners, are souls who towards the end of the Roman epoch lived in the western part of Europe. They now come towards us from the East, people who in those past times allowed the Christian faith to flow into their ether bodies and now, in a civilization that is relatively speaking at a lower level, take Christianity into their souls in a waking state and do so in such a way, due to the peculiarities of life in the East, that they have an emotional, instinctive bond with it. They are thus linking themselves to the Christ impulse in their astral bodies, doing now what they had been unable to achieve in their previous incarnations. This is a very strange fact brought to light by occult research in the present day. Many facts that deeply move the soul may come within the occult horizon triggered by the events of our time and this is one among them. What, then, can we learn from these facts?

We have to be clear about the following. We have to remember that is it part of the direct progress of the life of the spirit in Central Europe that the soul life of the German peoples is very consciously linked with the Christian faith, that it is taken upwards to the heights of a straight Christian culture. The streams, the paths, leading to this have been most marvelously laid out in advance over centuries. We see it all taking shape. It is specifically when we look at our own age with all its errors and mistakes that we see how the seed is there in Central European culture, how preparations have been made and no effort spared in the German folk spirit, the folk soul of the German-speaking peoples, so that now the Christ impulse may be taken hold of in conscious awareness.

That is a fact of infinitely greater importance than the 15th century event when Joan of Arc had to save France because that country had an important mission at that time. We therefore have before us the significant fact that the German spirit is called upon to take in the Christ impulse more and more consciously in future, take it in with the elements that have come into the life of the spirit in German countries and do so in a state of full waking consciousness. This Christ impulse had to announce itself in what went on at subconscious level over the centuries, as we have consistently shown. In the future it will have to unite with souls in such a way that there will be people—and in Central Europe there will have to be such souls—who in full awareness unite also their ego and astral body with the Christ impulse, exerting the powers of their conscious mind and not only the powers inherent in their physical and ether bodies. We can see efforts being made among the best. Let us take the best of them all: Goethe. We may quote Goethe as an outstanding example, but all souls have the potential within them, so long as they strive for it, however darkly.

Goethe showed Faust, the representative of mankind, to be striving for the highest.²² In Part 2 of the play he transports him to Greek civilization to share the experience of nations, guiding him into this in such a way that Faust has a significant experience of the future when he desires to wrest land from the sea and establish something that to him lies in the far distant future. And where does Goethe take Faust in the end? Goethe himself once expressed it like this in conversation with Eckermann: he had to make use of the vivid images of Christianity²³ to show Faust ascending into the spiritual world. And if you consider the profoundly beautiful picture of Faust's soul being received by the Mater gloriosa. you see it as the opposite image to that which led Raphael [1483–1520] to paint his famous Sistine Madonna, where the virgin mother is bringing the soul down. In the last scene of Faust we see the virgin mother upwards. That is the birth of the soul in death. And so we see a deeply inward striving arising from the human spirit in full conscious awareness. It is striving always to gain all that can be gained from Christianity in such a way that it may be borne through the gate of death and into the life man is going to live through in the new earth life that will follow preparation between death and rebirth. What we see there in Goethe himself is a character trait of the German people. It can give an indication as to the mission given to human beings. The mission is, and we can present this very clearly to our souls, that true benefit for the progress of mankind will arise only if within a certain group of people a harmonious relationship is established between Central Europe and Eastern Europe.

It is possible to visualize Eastern Europe expanding westwards, across Central Europe, by brute force. It is possible to visualize this happening. That, however, would be equivalent to a situation where Joan of Arc had not done her deed in the 15th century and England had annexed France in those days. If it had come to that, and I state this emphatically, something would have come about that would not only have brought calamity to France but would have meant calamity also for England. And if German culture were now to suffer through what may come from the East, this would be to the detriment not only of German culture but also of the East. The worst that can happen to the East is that it might expand for a time and have an adverse effect on German culture. For as I said, the souls formerly incarnated in Western Europe or on the Italian peninsula and now growing up in the East unite with the Christ impulse as though instinctively, in the unconscious depths of the astral body. Yet the Christ impulse that is to grow within them can never arise through linear progression of the instinctive element that lives in their souls under the name of orthodox catholicism which, on the whole, is Byzantine of course, for this is a name not an impulse. It is just as impossible for this to evolve into what it is predestined to become as it is impossible for a woman without a man to have a child. What is preparing in the East can only come to something if Central Europe strongly and consciously—that is in a state of full awareness—unites the force of the human ego and human powers of insight with the Christ impulse' out of what souls are striving for out of egoic nature.

What has to come about for the civilization and culture of the future will only come about if the German folk spirit finds souls that transplant the Christ impulse into their astral body and ego the way it can indeed be implanted there in a state of full conscious awareness' It has to come about through harmony being established, by uniting with that which is consciously achieved in Central Europe—more and more consciously.

This will need not just one or two centuries, but a very long time. The time needed will be so long that we may reckon on about two thousand years, I would say, counting from the year 1400. Adding two thousand years to 1400 we get the approximate time when something will emerge in the evolution of the earth that has had its seeds in the German life of the spirit, ever since there has been such a life of the spirit. We therefore realize that we have to consider a future lying not just centuries ahead but more than a thousand years. And the mission of the Central European, the German folk spirit, a mission already before us, is that there will have to be more and more of that nurturing of the life in the spirit through which men take op in conscious awareness—right into the astral body and ego—a comprehension of the Christ impulse that in earlier times moved through the peoples of Europe as a living but unconscious impulse. Once evolution takes this course then the East, too, will gradually, by twining upwards, reach the level reached in Central Europe because of what is already inherent there. That is the intention of the cosmic intelligence. We only interpret the intention of the cosmic intelligence rightly when we say to ourselves: It would be the greatest misfortune also for the East of Europe to harm the very spiritual power it needs to use as a support in twining upwards, a power the East should indeed revere, revere in friendship, foster and cherish. It will have to come to this. For the moment the East is very far indeed from achieving this. The very best of them still fall far short. Short-sightedly. they still refuse to accept what Central European culture in particular is able to give.

I went into this already in my first public lecture here in Berlin.⁵ Tonight you can see the deeper occult reasons behind what in the public lecture I was able only to put exoterically. in an extraneous way. This is of course something one always has to be careful about, to speak in terms close to the understanding of one's listeners in public lectures. The real impulses to say one thing and omit another, looking for the one context or the other, always have their occult reasons. At all events it is possible to see from what has been discussed today that when we look at things in an external way they present to us the great illusion, Maya. It is not that the outside world in itself is Maya. It is not. But we only gain understanding for it if we illumine it with the truths derived from the spiritual world. In the present case, the truths streaming from the spiritual world show that it is essential for Central Europe not to be overcome by Eastern Europe today, just as in 1429–1430 it was essential for France not to be overcome by England. It will of course be obvious, from what has been said, that for those in the East of Europe it is quite impossible to understand the crux of the matter and that, fundamentally speaking, this can be understood only in Central Europe. Surely this is understandable. In all humility, therefore, without any feeling of superiority, we must take on this mission, and we shall have to accept that it will be possible to misunderstand us. We must find that perfectly understandable. For what is preparing in the East will only be rightly understood in the East itself in time to come.

That is the one thing arising from what I have to say. The other is that we consider the great transition occurring in human evolution in our time exactly on a basis such as this. On previous occasions we have considered it from many different aspects. Now we consider it in such a way that we are able to see how the element which entered into man's evolution on earth through the Mystery of Golgotha needs to be understood in increasingly greater conscious awareness in our day, by those who are able to do so after this incarnation. In the days of Constantine or of Joan of Arc, for instance, it would have been impossible for the Christ impulse to bring about at a conscious level what it had to bring about at an unconscious level. But the time will have to come when it will be able to act at a fully conscious level. That is why we receive out of spiritual science what we are able to take into our soul in increasingly greater conscious awareness. Again it is possible to point to a particular fact—honestly, without getting worried about any sympathies or antipathies that may arise and with no intention of flattering anyone. After all, it is always better to base one's views on facts rather than on what they are so often based on today. For if we look out into the world a little bit we shall see that opinions really and truly are not always based on facts but on passion, on strong national feelings. Yet it is also possible to base the views that determine the attitude of the human mind on facts.

Anatole France²⁴ was a man who considered Joan of Arc from the rationalistic and materialistic point of view now current. In the cultural sphere of Germany it has been quite natural to understand Joan of Arc out of a supernatural context since Schiller's great deed.²⁵ There are people even in Germany today who think Schiller made a big mistake; but those are the literary historians and in their case that is understandable. After all, it is their function to 'understand' art and literature—which is why they are unable to understand it. No, the essential thing is for us to let arise before our eyes, from the depths of spiritual life as though glorified, the figure of which Schiller said: ‘The world indeed loves to blacken all that is radiant and drag down into the dust all that is sublime.’

And so it is indeed that acknowledgement of the fact that the Christ impulse intervened in a human individual in a situation not affecting our own nation can bring us the confidence to accept what I have put forward in my public lecture: that it is possible to perceive in the life of the spirit in Germany how it tends towards spirituality the way it has evolved, tends towards spiritual science. We can see that it is its special—though not exclusive—mission to take all that has been achieved and aimed for the life of the spirit in Germany and carry it upwards to perception and understanding of the spirit in the spirit. That is the mission of the German people. The other missions, being the same soul mission expressed in bodily form, as it were, have to serve it. What has to come to pass, out of cosmic wisdom, will come to pass. But, as I have said before, it will be necessary for the twilight we live in today to evolve into a true Sun-age for the future. To make this possible, there will have to be people in the future who have a connection with the spiritual worlds in order that the soil now being prepared with the blood and suffering of so many will not have been prepared in vain. The existence of souls capable of bearing within them their connection with the spiritual worlds justifies everything that happens, even the most horrific, terrible and fearsome, events, so that the Central European mission in spiritual life may be achieved. This, however, will depend on individual souls being able to get in touch with this spiritual life through their karma, and taking it wholly into themselves. Then, when the sun of peace is once again shining over the fields of Central Europe, they shall bear perception of things spiritual, a feeling for things spiritual, within them. Then the inclination developed in a few souls that are capable of this in their present incarnation will make it possible for that to happen which I want to condense in the following words. These words sum up all I wanted to put to you, so that we write the device into our souls under which souls will be able to grow in the right way towards the potential for the future that may arise out of these difficult times:

Out of courage shown in battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.

• 16. Heraclitus (c. 540–480 BC), Greek philosopher of Ephesus: Fragment B53 in H. Diels Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Vol. I.
• 17. Constantine I (the Great) (274 –337), Roman emperor 306-337 (sole ruler from 323). Victory over Maxentius at Pons Milvius, a bridge crossing the Tiber to the north of Rome, in 312. See also the lecture given by Rudolf Steiner at Dornach on 30 January 1915 in Wege der geistigen Erkenntnis und der Erneuerung künstlerischer Weltanschauung (GA 161).
• 19. See Matthew 28:6; Mark 16:6; Luke 24:5,6.
• 20. Lecture given on 14 January 1915 ‘Die germanische Seele und der deutsche Geist vom Gesichtspunkte der Geisteswissenschaft’ (GA 64).
• 21. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlecthtes (1780) paragraph 98:
  
  ‘Why should I not return as often as I am sent to gain new knowledge, new skills? Do I carry off so much at one go that it is not worth the effort to return?’
• 22. See Rudolf Steiner, Geisteswissenschafiliche Erläuterringen zu Goethes ‘Faust’ (Vol. I ‘Faust, der strebende Mensch’; Vol. 2 ‘Das Faust-Problem’ (GA 272 and 273). Engl. GA 272 in part translated and published in different books and journals: GA 273. The Problem of Faust in R Series of typescript lecture courses at Rudolf Steiner Library, London.
• 23. See J. P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 6 June 1831:
  
  ‘And of course you'll admit that the conclusion, where the soul which has been saved is taken upwards, was very difficult to do. With something so noumenal, scarely to be intuited, I could so easily have ended up in vagueness, but I used the sharply defined figures and concepts of the Christian church to give my poetic intentions the much needed form and consistency.’
• 5. Lecture given on 29 October 1914 entitled ‘Goethes Geistesart in unsern schicksalsschweren Tagen und die deutsche Kultur’ in Aus schicksaltragender Zeit (GA 64). In The Dramatic Art of the Goethenaum I (tr. L. Dreher) London: Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1936.
• 24. Anatole France, Vie de la Jeanne d 'Arc (49th edn, 2 Vols.) Paris 1927.
• 25. Friedrich Schiller, 3rd verse of the poem Das Mädchen von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans).

I

In the ninth edition of his "Natural History of Creation", Ernst Haeckel speaks of the new paths and broad perspectives that open up to art from the point of view of the scientific world view. Among the works filled with the spirit of this world view, he mentions "the many interesting poems of the brilliant Viennese poet Eugenie delle Grazie, especially the modern epic "Robespierre". It is now more than fifteen years since the name Marie Eugenie delle Grazie first appeared in a circle within the German intellectual life in Austria. A small collection of poems, a story "The Gypsy Woman", an epic "Hermann" and a drama "Saul" were published by her in quick succession. These were the creations of a lady not yet twenty years old. The intellectual, distinguished Austrian philosopher B. Carneri was not alone in his feelings about the poet, which he summarized in 1894 in the following sentences: "Given the magnificence of the subject matter and its happy mastery (Hermann) is a huge achievement for such a young age. Much of the praiseworthy can also be emphasized in 'Saul', but we would only like to speak of actual genius in the 'Gypsy'. Through her descriptions of nature, vivid sculpture and the passion that breaks through in full, this short story offers us a masterpiece whose melodious prose proves that Fräulein delle Grazie is also naturally gifted with what Friedrich Nietzsche calls 'the third ear'."

A great, unique personality announced itself in these poems. A life, young in years, rich in content, rich above all in those sufferings that lead to the gates of knowledge with a demanding mind, spoke out. There was no doubt that delle Grazie had the great passion that leads from the personal lot into the comprehensive mysteries of the fate of the world and that perceives the questions of the world as problems of one's own heart. Ten years passed before the poetess published any more. Then a collection of poems "Italische Vignetten", "Rebell" and "Bozi", two short stories, the great epic "Robespierre" and a third volume of poetry appeared in quick succession. The basic mood of delle Grazie's first creations is once again expressed; her viewpoint has become that of the modern world view in the highest sense of the word. There is probably no other personality who has experienced the pain of the collapse of an old ideal world and a new world of knowledge so deeply, so shatteringly as Marie Eugenie delle Grazie. Her feelings go in two directions, and in both directions they are great. What Schiller consoled himself with at all times: that man could flee from the common reality into the noble realm of ideals, this consolation was not granted to delle Grazie. The new natural science has directed its gaze to the real, which appears to it as the only thing that exists. The poet cannot believe in an eternal divine order that only uses nature to realize an ideal realm and goal; she is completely filled with the knowledge that the eternal mother, nature, indiscriminately conjures up creatures from her dark womb to satisfy the infinite lust that she has in creating and is unconcerned about the fate of her children. Whatever beautiful, great and sublime things arise in the world: they did not arise for the sake of beauty, greatness and sublimity, they arose because nature has the lustful urge to create. And they were all enthusiasts, the idealists who dreamed of the great goals of life. They owe their existence to the cunning of voluptuous nature. What would people's existence be if a Buddha, a Socrates, a Christ did not come from time to time and tell people that they were born for higher things. But no ideal can deceive those who look deeper. Mankind should only be incited from time to time by its idealists to believe something other than what the omnipotence of nature really accomplishes. Nature is voluptuous and demonic at the same time: it wants to satisfy itself by giving birth to people, and it tricks the poor creatures into believing in the dream and foam of ideals so that they are distracted from the true content of existence.

What a proud, profoundly comfortable nature has to suffer from such sentiments can be seen in delle Grazie's poetry. Anyone who is unable to empathize with the greatness of these poems must lack one of the feelings that have cut so deeply into the heart of contemporary man. Either he has never felt the great longing within himself as a personal destiny, which the mighty ideals of mankind, the urge to go beyond and the belief in the gods have brought forth and kept alive again and again, or the modern world view, which has broken over our intellectual life like a mighty earthquake, must have passed him by more or less without a trace. I have no doubt that this modern view of the world contains within it germs of higher spiritual spheres, more beautiful, more sublime than all the old ideals; but I do not believe that joys will ever fully triumph over suffering; I do not believe that hope will ever conquer renunciation. It seems to me as certain as that light is born of darkness: that the bright satisfaction of knowledge must arise from the deepest pain of existence. And the great pain of existence, that is the lifeblood of delle Grazie's existence, that is the lifeblood of delle Grazie's art. We have this element in our lives as an opponent of the worst thing that can consume us: superficiality. The regions in which delle Grazie walks are those through which anyone who wants to reach the heights of life must pass. Only the dearly bought knowledge, only that which has risen from the abyss, has value. Delle Grazie's poems show the price that every recognizer must pay. No matter where we end up. Delle Grazie's path is rooted in the depths of the human soul. It is true: her poems exude a weariness of the present and a hopelessness for the future. But I don't want to be one of those in whom none of this resonates.

II

There was a point in Rome's development where human greatness coincided most closely with human nothingness. Caesaric power was combined with weakness, artistic height with ethical rottenness. The mouth that commanded nations greedily craved the kiss of the most wretched woman; a master's mind became a slave's mind when the embraces of high-ranking prostitutes subdued it. These "Vignettes" by Marie Eugenie delle Grazie (Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel [1892]) reveal how this is still fossilized in the remnants of the old days, but still clearly visible to the clairvoyant eye:

Divine dignity and divine rights
Have you boldly arrogated to yourselves,
Spirit and virtue became servants,
Where the arbitrariness splashed great.

She sings of the Roman Caesars. She expresses the mood that took hold of her in the Eternal City with the words:

With elegiac whispers
Looks from the barren Palatine
A single pine tree gloomily
Towards the silent forum.

A number of poems have sprung from the impressions that Tasso's traces have left in the poetess:

At your tomb all vain imaginings die,
Here your glory sits enthroned in majestic peace,
But where man suffered, I found tears,
And I was allowed to sob and dream here like you!

Under the title "Images and Figures", delle Grazie shares her feelings at the sight of great Italian works of art, such as Guercino's Sant' Agnese, Maderna's St. Cecilia, Belvedere's Apollo, Otricoli's Zeus and Michelangelo's Moses. The poem "Two Madmen" from the cycle "Sorrento" juxtaposes Tasso and Nietzsche, who both walked on this ground:

Two great men walked these paths
And often both stand suddenly before my mind:
Tasso, the prince of poets by the grace of God,
And Friedrich Nietzsche ... equal was their gain,
And folly was his name ...

Delle Grazie has seen all the glory that is to be seen in Italy:

Like all of them, you drew me to you,
Enchanted, enraptured and beguiled,
On ruins you lied to me of a happiness,
That you destroyed hard in the sun's glare

Your worldview also speaks clearly from this book:

But I am not resentful ... I am going home again,
Even if with a crudely broken walking stick-
I bring back with him the old torments
And here as there I lay him on a grave! -

Lajos describes the feelings that seized him at the moment when his opponent's life was in his power with the words: "He turned pale to the lips, his knees trembled as if he had caught the Danube fever, and suddenly he pulled down his hat and saluted me deeply ... and smiled like a fool ... Then I felt so well, so well, I tell you, for now I knew that one could do worse to one's enemy than murder him, and that my torment was at an end, because I could no longer hate the one standing before me; it came into my throat like disgust - I spat out against him, threw the shotgun back into the reeds, took my fiddle and left ..." And then he says of the man he has humiliated: "Wherever he can, he rants at me to the people, and would love to set the pandurs and the magistrate on my neck, but he can't say anything right against me, and he won't even say that he was too bad to kill me! But he's like air to me; even if I have to breathe it in, I can always give it back - there! That's how indifferent he is to me!" The experience with the nobleman became a source of great insight for Lajos. He realized how to look at the world without hate and love. "What happened to my love, what happened to my hatred?" he says. "It's all over, and back then I thought I would die from it! Anyone who has experienced something like this in himself becomes calm and cannot do wrong even to his enemy!" "If I have bad eyesight and bump my head on a post - is it the post's fault or mine? The post is there and has its right, and I am there and would also have my right if my eyes weren't bad - I could avoid it, couldn't I? And if I could like a good-for-nothing and hate a scoundrel, wasn't I just so blind? They weren't, and that's why I had to bang my heart and skull against them like the post! But who am I to believe when I can deceive myself like that, when every man is twice: as he was born and as I think he is? And do I know what I am like? Many people avoid me - they do me no harm, but they want to do me even less good! Why is that? Have I done something wrong? Well, they're right too! I think to myself, because everyone who lives only wants himself, even if he thinks he likes someone else so much!" These are words of wisdom that only a life to which existence has revealed itself without veil can give birth to. People call Lajos a "rebel elf" because he despises them. And the nobleman says of him: "He is capable of anything." But these words mean nothing more than that the nobleman is incapable of recognizing how the poor gypsy's independent soul can express itself. To him it is an element that is moved by elemental forces, effective from depths of which the average brain has no idea. The unknown, the dark forces in the gypsy's head and heart fill the nobleman with a sense of dread. He only feels safe with people who, like himself, have inherited their character from their forefathers, or those who have been beaten into slavery by the knout.

Two other "rebels" stand opposite the gypsy, the rebel of thought and feeling, in delle Grazie's story: Istvän, the former political rebel and hero of freedom, who, at the side of his "practical" Susi, has risen to the much-admired heights of the "real politician", and Bändi, whose rebel soul unleashes itself in the wildest curses, but without the revolutionary fire in his chest preventing him for the time being from serving as a coachman for the nobleman, whom he would like to sic all the devils on. The last two "rebels" are put up with by the society of comfort-seekers, for the Istväns are harmless if their Susis have the opportunity to put on fat comfortably, and the Bändis may grumble, but they make useful beasts of burden. These rebels are not feared, as they integrate themselves into society, albeit reluctantly; but the rebels of the Lajos type are regarded like a mountain that has once acted as a volcano and then closed up again. A new eruption is feared at any moment. The average people have no idea that the fire materials pushing outwards have turned into noble substances on the inside.

The second story, "Bozi", is satirical. The subject matter is taken from that part of Hungary where people, buffaloes, pigs and chair judges live so close to each other, are eternally in each other's way and yet cannot leave each other behind; this milieu, which unites the fatalism of half-Asia with Christian beliefs and Turkish legal practice with the theories of the corpus juris and the tripartium so peacefully and unchallenged! "Bozi" is a buffalo. But a very special kind of buffalo. Not a herd buffalo, but a master buffalo. He does not conform to the rules that God and the people in his habitat have given the buffalo; he leaves his home when he pleases in order to spread fear and terror among the people. He particularly likes it when he can appear among a large crowd of people on festive occasions and wreak havoc. However, he had to pay for such an undertaking with his freedom. He was kept behind strictly locked doors and was only allowed outside at night when people were asleep. But this made things even worse. For if he had previously filled people with horror as a buffalo, now he was a ... Devil. Because anyone who encountered the animal at night thought it was the prince of hell incarnate. The "enlightened" village doctor, who owns Meyer's Dictionary of Conversations and can look everything up in it, was no more protected from this by his scientific education than Mr. du Prel was protected from spiritualism by his philosophical education. The good doctor believes that it was a "supernatural" being that attacked him at night until he is brought his coat, which he lost while fleeing from the ghost, and is told that the buffalo has brought home the protective covering wrapped around his horns. Another time, part of the village community, led by the mayor and with the sacristan and holy water at their side, go out because the "devil" has appeared again and has even taken one of the village residents. The devil is to be fought. The whole village community can't do anything because they tremble with terror when they arrive at the place where the "evil one" is raging. Only one foolish man, who is also there and believes in neither God nor the devil, sees what is really there - the buffalo, strikes at it and wounds it. The others go away with long noses.

The story is written with the kind of humor that testifies not only to a complete mastery of the art medium, but also to a firm world view. Hypocritical religiosity, undigested enlightenment, the modern superstition of the "clever people" is hit and exposed in this short story.

The epic "Robespierre" was published in 1894. More than in any other work of poetry of our time, one should have seen in this epic a profound expression of contemporary feeling. But the harsh critics of "modernism" passed it by rather carelessly. They do not do much better than the much-maligned professors of aesthetics and literary history, who rarely have a feeling for the truly great of their own time. One of the most lauded literary judges of the present day, Hermann Bahr, found it not beneath his dignity to begin a short review of "Robespierre" with the words: "Otherwise blameless and nice people, who have nothing at all of the artist, are suddenly compelled to ape the gestures of the poets." Anyone who speaks like this knows the airs and graces of "modernism", but not its deeper forces. M. E. delle Grazie's poetry is the reflection of the modern world view from a deep, strongly feeling, clear-sighted soul endowed with great artistic creative power. Just as the image of the French Revolution presents itself to a deep and proud nature, so has delle Grazie portrayed it. Just as Agamemnon, Achilles, Ulysses and the other heroes of the Trojan War appear before our imagination in vivid figures when we let Homer's "Iliad" work its magic on us, so do Danton, Marat, Robespierre when we read delle Grazie's epic. Only those who are blind to the spirit of our time or only understand its pose can fail to recognize the significance of this poetry. There is nothing petty in the painful tones struck here. When delle Grazie describes suffering and pain, she does not do so because she wants to point out the misery of everyday life, but because she sees disharmony in the great development of humanity. Robespierre is the hero in whose soul lives everything that humanity has always called idealism. He ends tragically because the great dream of the ideals of humanity that he dreams must necessarily ally itself with the mean aspirations of lower natures. Rarely has a poet looked so deeply into a human soul as delle Grazie did into Robespierre's.

A personality who climbs to the heights of humanity in order to come to the terrible realization that life's ideals are illusions, deluded by nature, drunk on existence, to the poor victim man - Robespierre stands before us as such a personality. In the place of the genius of death, he, who wants to lead humanity to the light, hears the words:

"How deceptive is your blind zeal! ... Do you not realize that all around us
The poisonous seed of life grows thick and disgusting?
It is a graveyard on which we stand - yet ourselves,
How pure and happy, because unconsciously and without torment
Germs the young green here from the rot! How unearthly cheerfulness it weaves around
The rotten little crosses all around and almost ashamed
They crumble - what should be the sign
Of the misery of existence in this blessed place?
No, know: here I wander to be happy
And quietly dream of my paradise:
The paradise of unmoved peace.
But a few steps further I dwell,
And, as you see, not lonely: hut after hut
Surrounds the cemetery, and in each one throbs-
What did you call it? -, the warm pulse
Of being: sickness and vice,
Poverty and suffering, the hollow-cheeked skeleton of misery,
And everything, everything that damns, consciously
And feeling to decay! Itself, there is
The cross's own place, there rises
The brazen colossus of pain, there groans
Despair, on the blood-washed torture
Of being strained in vain and unheard
Her gruesome: "My God, why have you left me
Forsaken me?! There I look when the deception
Of being to beguile my mind anew
And want to blind - and that huge cross,
That grows out of the earth, longing for heaven
Ascends and yet finally fearful and shrill
With this call turns from hope:
It then says to me anew, full of majesty:
"Be desireless, and you have redeemed yourself"

If one is to go to the poet's country in the sense of the well-known saying, in order to understand the poet, one must decide, in order to recognize Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, to wander over realms that lie in the regions of the highest spiritual interests of mankind. There one is led over rich worlds of life, full of life and vitality, filled with ardent desire; but in this life pulsate poisonous substances, flowers sprout that bear decay as their innermost destiny - beauty is resplendent, but it is resplendent like mockery and impotent splendor - sublimity glistens, but it is irony in itself. To the veil-covered eye, the greatest appears; remove the veil, and the "greatest" dissolves into haze and mist, into empty, stale nothingness.

The poet devoted ten years, the best of her life, to her work. During this time, her immersion in the history of the great French liberation movement went hand in hand with the study of modern science. She rose to the heights of human existence, where one sees through the deep irony that lies in every human life, where one can smile even at the nothingness of existence because one has ceased to desire it.

In the book of poems that delle Grazie followed "Robespierre", we read the confession of painful renunciation that the poet brought to the contemplation of the world and life. Of "Nature" she says:

.... Pulling her triumphal chariot
We all: panting, sweaty and yet
Blissful too: for as a mirage swings
Hope before us and happiness and every illusion,
That they have created for our scorn,
And we, the addiction-poisoned army of slaves,
Call ideals. - And so we rush in a lustful hurry
And madly we chase along, until treacherously
The strength leaves us, the breath fades and farther
For ever our goal floats on golden clouds,
Until helpless and panting we
Collapse - then she cheers demonically,
Then she shouts her cruel "Evo&!" and directs
Crushing over a thousand victims
The chern spokes of her biga!

In her "Robespierre", Marie Eugenie delle Grazie has admirably mastered the immense material that was available to her in the French liberation movement, with its wealth of ideas, characters, destinies and actions. She is as much a master in the characterization of people as she is a brilliant portrayer of events. The whole gamut of the human heart and mind, from the devoted instincts of goodness to the most hideous instincts of the animal in man, from the impulses of the demon-driven fanatic that rise deep from the undercurrents of the soul to the abstract theorist living in sophisticated conceptual worlds: the poet exposes everything, in the same way the deep motifs, the hidden sources of human characters and temperaments as the small traits in which nature so often hints at the great. Conditions in which the guilt and aberrations of long ages and generations are symbolically expressed, dramatic situations in which tremendous doom is preparing or dramatically rushing towards catastrophe, are depicted in vivid vividness, in deeply penetrating painting. The court of Louis XVI, with its rotten splendor, with its loudly speaking dialectic of guilt and doom, is presented to us in succinct outlines, as is the dull air of the dive in which the hunted human creature, the starved poverty, the thirst for freedom that turns into hatred are discharged. The poet's ability to cope with the diversity of human nature becomes clear when one compares her characterization of Louis XVIL, Marie Antoinette, Necker and the courtiers at Versailles with that of Marat, Danton, Mirabeau, Saint-Just and Robespierre. A dying court milieu, the convulsive convulsions of the popular soul: everything comes into its own artistically. Wherever the storm of feelings of freedom expresses itself in bloody deeds, wherever the spirit announces itself in words, which either age the traditions of the centuries or allow the mysterious fermentations of the human soul to burst forth as if from a dark night: delle Grazie's art of depiction is at home everywhere. The dull dwellings of the cultural slaves, where the enslaved humanity expresses itself in the darkest images, is just as perfectly depicted as the surging turmoil of world-shaking logic and rhetoric in the National Assembly, as is the terrible storm that erupts in the Bastille Storm, as is the hollow splendor, the glistening prejudice, the blind weakness and vain grandeur of the Versailles court. The "mysteries of humanity", which reflect the eternal pondering of world logic, appear no less clearly before our eyes than the arguments of the day and the motives born in haste of man, who in other times lived an animalistic, dull life, but within this movement becomes the driving motor of far-reaching, luminous developments.

See how Danton enters the turmoil in "Saint-Antoine" in the "desolate neighborhood of hunger", where "the bitter misery looks out of half-loose eyes", all-round clear, with all the peculiarities of his personality.

... massive, deeply bowed head,
As if he fears to carry away deck and walls here,
A new spirit enters the smoky room.
Towards him, grinning and devoted
The dirty innkeeper of the tavern; and through
The surprised guests long rows
It travels like a flash of lightning and sweeps them upwards.
"Danton!" "He himself!" "Welcome!" Not a greeting,
It is a single sigh of fainting,
As if he brought air and manhood to their hatred.
A broad laugh around the fleshy lips,
The pining open ones, Danton stands
Motionless there first. The small eye
Only flashes from its deep-set sockets,
Puffing up, breathing in an instant, wide
And greedily the leaf-scarred nostrils open.
'Tis like a smell of sweat of brutal power
Around him, like an alien atmosphere,
Which is pregnant with energy, like lightning
A summer sky. What the crowd loves
And respects - to this it was! Trains, loud
And open like the road, a roadway
Of life and stained by it like them;
Their cynical laughter, their bitter rumbling
And undignified forgiveness, from the crown to
To the sole of the rabble's rough lines,
And no law but that of their own strength!

In this way, the poet knows how to place the personality in the situation in an atmospheric and deeply true way. In this way, she is able to let the unspoken characters that live in the shapeless spirit of the people grow together with the spirit of the individual, the generality with the individuality.

In this way, delle Grazie is also able to find the transition, the harmony between the silent, lifeless nature and the wanderings of the human heart. The poet's depictions of nature carry a rare artistic life, a peculiar grandeur and truth.

If you want to recognize delle Grazie's personality in its full depth, you have to read the volume "Gedichte", which was published by Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig in 1897. The passion and depth of the most direct personal feeling is revealed here in the highest, most general thoughts of humanity, a world view that wrestles with cosmic riddles speaks to us as the pulse of daily life. A hymn may reflect the tone and view of this poetry:

In the circle of the living walks
And walks from mouth to mouth
A terrible whispered word
Its brazen sound, it makes
The rosy cheeks blanch,
The most jubilant dithyrambos
of madness, and the most dazzling fairy tales
Of existence are torn apart by it, and
Fade away with him for eternity.

The crown of thorns of sorrow,
The rosaries of happiness
And diadems of glory
They all, all entwine,
Entangled and overgrown
The pale asphodel of death! Whose wings rustle,
He trembles, and to whom his hollow voice resounds,
He has lied for the last time ...

Decay and rot are fermenting
In our veins, decay guides us
According to its law, and what lives and breathes,
decay has created it,
Decay destroys it too! A filthy vortex
Full of mystery and madness circles
Life, and our pygmy race, it circles
With it: in blind weakness, droll dignity and powerlessness ...

All victorious and free only reigns
The giant Death: with flashing sword he mows
The glistening lie of existence away
And speaks, for eternity
Pointing to dust and decay,
The one, eternal truth: "It is nothing!"

Rarely will one be able to admire the creations of delle Grazies even where one does not share the feelings and views of a poet. Because even where you have to say "no", you are aware that you are saying "no" to greatness.

• 1. "The Rebel", "Bozi". Two stories by M. E. delle Grazie. Leipzig. Breitkopf & Härtel.

Today the essential thing for which I would like to use our time is to develop some things that will provide the basis for tomorrow's discussion. These things are an expansion of what was described yesterday.

Consider how birth or, say, conception, is the entry into the life a person leads between birth and death. Think of what we have said in the course of the past years about how a human being enters the physical body. We know that in a certain sense the three lower realms of nature—the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—flow together in man, and that he rises above these three realms that are joined together symbiotically in him. But as a being of soul and spirit he also grows into these realms. Man becomes human by descending to the physical plane and growing into the mineral, plant and animal realms. After death, he ascends again. Then something similar happens from a spiritual point of view: in the spiritual world something happens that resembles the growing into the three kingdoms of physical existence on earth. With all such descriptions you must be clear that everything that has already been said in earlier presentations still holds true. Everything we have previously said about how a human being grows into the spiritual world after passing through the gates of death still holds good—the further details that arise are only to be taken as additions to that. Thus we can say: as a human being grows into the spiritual worlds he is received into the realm of morality, the aesthetic realm and the realm of wisdom, or truth. Now, in this life when we speak of the moral realm, the realm of the good, the aesthetic realm, the realm of the beautiful, and the realm of truth, of wisdom, naturally we are speaking more or less abstractly. But the forces in the spiritual world into which a human being grows and which are left behind when physical existence is once more taken up, are absolutely concrete forces. They are real, spiritual modes of existence. We use names like these just to summarise. Here on earth, a person's aura carries a kind of remnant of the things he received when he had ascended to the spiritual world. Having left behind the realms of wisdom, of beauty, of truth, mankind must enter the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. But the three spiritual realms continue to shine into the human aura, so that if we include his spiritual parts, then the whole man is a being who lives most directly in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and lives more at a distance from that which, so to speak, comes down from the three spiritual realms, hovers before him, and shines and weaves through him. The light from the three spiritual realms shines over a human being. A schematic kind of a drawing will help us see how these things are connected with human nature, but please note that it is just a schematic drawing. All that I am going to show you is just schematic, but it will clarify much for you if studied carefully. For the sake of clarity, I will draw everything to do with the I like this (green). Everything to do with the astral body will be yellow; everything to do with the etheric human being, lilac, and everything to do with the physical human being, red.

Now we will take a schematic look at mankind. We will observe how mankind stands in the cosmos, in so far as a human being is a moral being, that is, through his participation in the moral forces of the cosmos. Then we will observe mankind in so far as a human being participates, in the way we described yesterday, in the aesthetic impulses of the cosmos. And then we will observe mankind's participation in the impulses of wisdom. Thus we are going to outline a kind of psychic physiology—forgive the slightly nonsensical form of the expression, but you will understand what I mean. Naturally, this outline is meant imaginatively.

When we observe the human being who stands in the moral sphere, you will be especially reminded of what we said yesterday—that the Greeks felt and experienced the relationship between the physical and the soul-spiritual more strongly than is the case today. Hence Plato, for example, was able to give a clear account of how man is taken hold of, gripped, by moral impulses coming from the spiritual universe. Plato says that there exist four virtues. The whole of morality takes hold of the whole human being. But all that is naturally to be taken with the well-known grain of salt. Naturally, even though it grips the whole person, the human being is subsequently divided up into the particular virtues. The first virtue Plato mentions is wisdom—wisdom now understood as a virtue, not as science. Since wisdom as a virtue is related to the way truth is experienced, it takes hold of those forces that flow from the moral sphere to the head. Therefore it can be pictured like this. (See drawing.) And therefore Plato says: The head of the moral man is gripped by wisdom; the breast is gripped by the virtue of strength of heart (Starkmut)—I cannot find a better word—strength of mind, or industriousness, but a kind of industriousness that includes the forces of the heart: an industriousness of the soul.

The person who does not give in to his animal instincts is not necessarily wise. The wise human being—wise in the sense implied by strength of heart—is the one who possesses moral ideas, ideas he can grasp and according to which he is able to direct his life. But even though the moral impulse is grasped in the form of moral ideas, it nevertheless streams into the physical person, into the body. Therefore we can picture morality as flowing into a human being here (green); here it flows into the I. That is where the Platonic moral sphere of wisdom would be located.

Whenever strength of heart—strength of mind, industriousness of the soul—streams down out of the moral sphere, it streams into the area of the chest, which encloses the heart. We can say: When morality radiates down, it is here, in the area of the chest and heart, where it particularly takes hold of the astral. So we will show this next in-pouring (yellow). Thus we now have wisdom as virtue in the head (green), strength of heart as virtue in the area of the chest (yellow).

Plato calls the third virtue temperance, sophrosyne, and he quite rightly assigns it to the abdomen. Human desires are aroused in the abdomen, and the temperate person is the one who is able to rule over his desires by thinking about them, feeling his way into them and consciously experiencing them. It is no virtue to live a life that simply chases after desires. Animals can also live like that. Temperance first arises when the desires are made as conscious as it is possible for them to be made. This happens in the etheric body; for, to the extent that thought, temperance and courage are human, they must be taken hold of by the etheric body. Therefore we must put this (violet) into our drawing. Thus, as I said yesterday, the moral sphere takes hold of the whole physical human being. And the head is included, as I explicitly stated yesterday.

And then Plato refers to a fourth, comprehensive virtue that flows into the whole physical body, which is actually invisible, as I showed you yesterday. He calls this virtue dikaiosyne. We have to translate this as justice, although the modern sense of the word does not entirely match Plato's meaning. Plato's word, ‘justice’, is not meant abstractly. It refers to the ability to give our lives direction, the ability to know ourselves and to orient ourselves in life. So we can say that here (red) the moral sphere, as justice, as uprightness, streams into the whole physical body. This gives us a schematic indication of how, in the human aura, morality streams into the human being.

Now we want to indicate how aesthetic impulses stream into man. Here there is a slight displacement. Things are simply displaced upward by one stage. What we previously pictured as within the head must now be pictured higher (green), so that it is hovering around the head. In aesthetic experience, the etheric stream circumvents the I and flows directly into the astral body, giving one the impression that the I hovers in the etheric that surrounds the head. A person who feels and responds a little to beauty does not need to be very clairvoyant to experience how he seems to live in the space that surrounds his head while he is contemplating a work of art. Within the head, however, the person is gripped directly; there the astral body is taken hold of, which we will draw in with these (yellow) rays.

On the other hand, beauty works in the area of the breast in such a way as to allow that surging back and forth I described yesterday.

One could say that the aesthetic glows through the region of the breast. And beauty actually affects nothing beyond what belongs to the aura of the head, the head itself, and the breast. In other words, in the case of beauty, not all of the area wherein sophrosyne lives comes into consideration. But our materialistic age is distinguished by the way it so thoroughly involves the sphere of sexuality in artistic considerations—a piece of mischief for which our age is responsible, for it is precisely in the contemplation of beauty that such things are absolutely irrelevant and should be absolutely out of the question. Thus, only the lowest kind of aesthetic considerations, those that no longer have anything to do with art, are to be located in the physical body (red).

Now we want to use the same schema for picturing the man who is striving for truth. Once more, there is a displacement, a kind of outward displacement. Yesterday I mentioned that the striving for truth circumvents both the I and the astral body and flows directly into the etheric portion of the head where thoughts are generated. So here, directly into the head, is where I must draw the ether streaming into the etheric body, here where thoughts are generated. On the other hand, when we strive for truth—and this is something one only notices after initiation—it only affects the I and the astral body outside us, in the aura; then it streams into the etheric portion of the head; then into the breast, where its life already affects the physical body (red). If we are to feel truth—and we must feel truth—it has to work into us; it must stream down into the region of the breast. Spirituality has to be experienced in the way we experience the moral.

All of the preceding lives in the aura of the physical plane and therefore applies to the physical plane. In this instance, that into which we enter after death participates in the aura on the physical plane. Just as our physical organism connects us to the forces of the mineral, plant and animal realms, so the moral sphere, the aesthetic sphere and the sphere of wisdom connect us to the forces of the spiritual world.

Even though some of the things I have said have come out very badly—perhaps they will come out better later—I want to present something further to you, something that belongs in the context of the whole. One can say: Whereas it is our physical body that connects us with the realm of physical becoming, our brain connects us with certain elemental beings, namely those elemental beings that belong to the sphere of wisdom. In the third drawing, that which we indicated with yellow was still outside; in the second drawing, it is internal. The green that here (drawing 2) is hovering around the head is even further outside. To etheric observation, this green hovers in the immediate vicinity of our head. The I lives in it, and alongside the I are found the elemental beings of the myths and sagas. There they are called elves, fairies, and so on. When we enjoy something aesthetically, all that is hovering around our heads.

But here (drawing 3), it is spiritual beings from the astral sphere that are hovering around us. It is possible to picture how perception and truth take hold of a person as he wakes from sleep. Although it is not physically visible, the way a person is taken hold of and received on awakening can be expressed in words. Today I would like to put into concrete words how man comes alive in the sphere of truth and wisdom when he awakens. The words are not so bad in their present form, and perhaps they will be improved later. A person should speak to the spirits that surround and take hold of him when he awakens in the following manner:

O, Ye!, from spheres of light stream through this head,

—spoken to the spirits!—

Stream through it—

—the head—

Move there in ways which spirits pure are led,
Damp well down his brain's insane confusion;

with the ordered processes of thought that dissipate madness—

Damp well down his—man's—brain's insane confusion,
From his striving untangle all doubt's fire and fear,

—just feel the words! They scatter doubts, banish them as wisdom pours in!—

To guide him within from the paths of illusion.

he would be following a path of illusion if he only followed—the path of dreams; in so far as he enters the sphere of truth, the surrounding spiritual world frees his inner being from false paths.—

In daily experience four goals are clear;

we still have to discuss this; everything here divides into fours—

In daily experience four goals are clear,
Now lead him on untouched by apprehension.

—lead man toward his goals—

First strive for countenance that fills with light,
Then spirit's quest for power hold fast.
Once lame-wingd senses move again in flight,
His day in freedom can unfold.

—It will be freed from everything dreamlike and arbitrary that would otherwise rule it with the force of necessity—

Thus truest spirit duty it fulfils:
Through holy light to lead him where he wills.

—So might man address the spirits that take hold of him when he awakens to the life of truth.

When a person awakens to the life of beauty, other spirits surround him. This is already something that is easier to convey to you. These are spirits that live in the sphere of the I:

O Ye!, surround this head with airy circling,
Your paths in noble elfin fashion tracing,
And soften in the heart its harvest grim,

—for this reaches into the heart—

Remove reproach's bitter, glowing arrows,

—the reproaches are reproaches of conscience, but also of pleasure and displeasure, which have to do with the surging world of the soul.—

Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.

—Earlier the brain was involved, now it is the inner world.—

Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.
Four in number are the nightly hollows,
Now, friendly, fill them up without a seam.
First lower head down on the pillow cool,

—That corresponds to the words of the earlier verse: First strive for countenance that fills with light,—

Bathe it then in dews from Lethe's flood released;

—In the case of wisdom, the words go: To spirit's quest for power hold fast,—

Soon limbs, cramp-stiffened, will again grow supple,

—Corresponding to: Once lame-winged senses move again in flight,—

In rest, against the day his strength's increased.

—Corresponding to: His day in freedom can unfold.—

Fulfil most comely duty of the elf,

—These are elemental beings. There (drawing 3) it was spirits who live in the etheric, so the verse said: Thus truest spirit duly it fulfils, Through holy light to lead him where he wills.—

Return to holy light man's self.

Here (drawing 1), we are concerned with the influence of the entire cosmic sphere: morality. As I said, the whole of the universe influences the entire human being. That calls for the following words:

O Ye!, stream through this head with strength to move,

—Morality, and will, is revealed when man is moved to deeds.—

O Ye!, stream through this head with strength to move,
And in good earthly deeds yourselves soon prove.

—For the right employment of the will in the world follows from these, and also temperance.—

So boldly stamp out torment of absurdity,

—which emanates from the body in the guise of desires. Yesterday I described how what rules in the bodily passions is related to moral impulses.—

So boldly stamp out torments contradictory,
Ennoble desire's power, wherein dark forces surge,
Abduct his soul, away from spirit-fatality.

—This spirit-fatality is nothing but the consequence of animal passions.—

In human obsession, pathways four do merge,

—In earlier times, one called drives that originate in the body ‘obsessions’—

Tear them away from embrace of infirmity.
Conquer the fires in which the senses groan,
Illumine that which dies in pleasure,
And hear how speak in ensouled tone
The powers that match eternal measure.

—For deeds of karma work in eternity.—

Attempt to strive in world-willed action,
Awaken him to life-benediction.

And there you have a description of the threefold manner in which the surrounding cosmos takes hold of the human aura.

How do the spirits that grip him take hold of the man of wisdom?

O Ye!, from spheres of light stream through this head,
Move there in ways which spirits pure are led,
Damp well down his brain's insane confusion;
From his striving untangle all doubt's fire and fear,
To guide him within from pathways of illusion.

In daily experience four goals are clear;
Now lead him on untouched by apprehension.

First strive for countenance that fills with light,
Then spirit's quest for power hold fast.
Once lame-winged senses move again in flight,
His day in freedom can unfold.
Thus truest spirit duty it fulfils:
Through holy light to lead him where he wills.

The aesthetic sphere comes especially to the fore in the third act of the second part of Faust, when Faust is united with Helen, who personifies beauty:

O Ye!, surround this head with airy circling,
Your paths in noble elfin fashion tracing,
And soften in the heart its harvest grim,
Remove reproach's bitter, glowing arrows,
Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.

Four in number are the nightly hollows,
Now, friendly, fill them up without a seam.

First lower head down on the pillow cool,
Bathe it then in dews from Lethe's flood released,
Soon limbs, cramp-stiffened, will again grow supple,
In rest, against the day his strength's increased.
Fulfil most comely duty of the elf,
Return to holy light man's self.

And then the moral sphere:

O Ye!, stream through this head with strength to move,
And in good earthly deeds yourselves soon prove.
So boldly stamp out torment of absurdity,
Ennoble desire's power, wherein dark forces surge,
Abduct his soul, away from spirit-fatality.

In human obsession, pathways four do merge,
Tear them away from embrace of infirmity.

Conquer the fires in which the senses groan,
Illumine that which dies in pleasure,
And hear how speak in ensouled tone
The powers that match eternal measure.
Attempt to strive in world-willed action,
Awaken him to life-benediction.

You see, the more profound elements are only revealed when one approaches these things spiritually and really takes hold of their spiritual content. Now, in a single stroke, the Faust of Part Two appears before us—the Faust around whom Goethe placed a hovering circle of elves. He represents the human being who stands within the spiritual-aesthetic sphere. And there are parallel occurrences when he stands within the sphere of wisdom and truth, or within the moral sphere.

One really has to call on the assistance of the feelings if one is to grasp these things. In pursuing them, one is somehow reminded of Nietzsche's remark, ‘The world is deep, deeper than the day has thought!’ The day represents physical life, physical perception, physical experience. ‘The world is deep, deeper than the day has thought!’ And that it is, especially when the entire human being is included as part of it—this being who is following a path of cosmic evolution, and who, for us in our present stage, is beyond our powers to grasp. That means that in our present state of being we do not understand much about ourselves. So much, so inconceivably much, has gone into our becoming what we are. And there is so inconceivably much contained in the Earth evolution that is still to come, and in our passage through the spheres of Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan! Only little by little does one disentangle oneself from the implications of current thought and approach that which, because it is more spiritual, is more difficult to conceive and is rarely touched on by the habitual thinking of people of today. Observing man as he presently is on Earth, we see that the seeds, so to speak, of what will develop during Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan already are hidden within him. But the human being is also the result of the Saturn, Sun and Moon spheres. Yesterday I said that wisdom and everything concerned with truth was established on Old Sun and will be completed on Jupiter. Let us picture that graphically once more.

The seed that was planted on Old Sun will more or less complete its development on Jupiter. Thus we can say: The period within which truth develops stretches from Sun to Jupiter. On Jupiter truth will have become thoroughly inward, and so will have become wisdom: Truth becomes wisdom!

Everything that belongs to the aesthetic sphere began on Old Moon. It will be completed on Venus. We could draw it in like this: From here, Moon, to completion here, Venus. This is where beauty develops. You see how it overlaps.

Everything contained within these two streams—and the third stream, also—is actually resting unconsciously in the depths of our being. And now, on Earth, the sphere we can call the sphere of morality is beginning. It will be completed on Vulcan. So we have a third, overlapping stream, the stream of morality. To these must be added a fourth stream that will be completed when the goals of the Earth sphere are achieved. Morality begins on Earth; but Earth also marks the completion of a higher order, one that was already beginning on Saturn. So we have another stream, another order, that flows from Saturn to Earth, and we will now call that the stream of justice—justice in the sense that was explained earlier. As you know, the senses had their beginnings on Saturn. These senses have the tendency to scatter a human being in all directions. You know that we distinguish twelve senses. The development of the twelve senses through Sun, Moon and Earth leads mankind to justice, to a rightness and uprightness that also includes moral justice and moral uprightness once it has been taken hold of by the moral nature of the Earth. Moral justice first makes its appearance on Earth. And justice works inwardly to counter the peripheral tendency of the senses; the sphere—or stream—of justice works toward the centre.

Everything pictured here is contained within the human being, but, as you know, the prevailing awareness includes only the smallest part of what is actively living and weaving in man. Nevertheless, this all continues to live in the depths of his being, working and weaving. And yet one can ask oneself: Are things as they appear? Is it really true that men grasp so little of how humanity is carried by this broad stream of being out of which it emerges?

Such an awareness is not just restricted to circles of the initiated. It is developing in humanity. There really are people who experience what lives and works in the streams which are carrying mankind along. Thanks to what could be called their natural gifts they feel it surge up during especially privileged moments. This is manifested in the most various ways. There are men who feel the depths of humanity in a higher sense than is often the case with external, philistine notions of religion. People often speak of guilt, and there are some pastors who try to deepen their flock's sense of things by leading them to experience guilt. But that is a superficial way of looking at things. This superficiality also has its justification, but one can go deeper. And those who have a deeper experience feel how morality connects with that glowing, resounding force that is streaming up from the powers that rule in the human depths. Self-knowledge would be much more common if people were not so timid and so afraid of getting to know themselves. But the awareness of what rules in the depths is already suppressed in the unconscious levels of the soul because people have such unconscious fear and inhibition and anxiety about confronting themselves in all their manifoldness and complexity. And when it does surge up, what comes glowing and gleaming from out of the depths really does make a sphinx-like impression. The experiences of others who have really felt such things in their own soul can be deeply moving.

The following literary passage expresses beautifully how the human depths can appear to a man from out the surging dreams of his soul life. One must imagine someone who has laid himself down to rest after the toils and the burdens of the day. But as he rests, out of the darkness and shadow, the human depths rise up before his soul in powerful dreams. Here is how a Polish poet once described it:

And in the secret magic of the night,
There, before my palace,
My dreams took hold of the ghostly mists and built
Unimaginable blossoms with dead eyes
That formed a balefully grinning Medusa
In the moonlight drenched with dew,
And she waxed monstrous.—
As the moon streamed into my chamber
And lay across the bed of my exhaustion—
I was roused from sleep by lecherous,
Monstrous desires
Which shuddered on my stammering lips
And sent hot fires of fever streaming from my eyes
Towards creatures that were yours!
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
—My guilt, my most great guilt!

These words of Jan Kasprowicz⁹ are a beautiful, lyrical expression of a quite wonderful experience, an experience that is at once questioning and also touches on the answers. The question is contained in the way this literary work makes the transition from memories of the day, through the aesthetic sphere, into the moral sphere—mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! One should not shrink from the questions that rise up out of the surging depths of life. These things are not there to rouse fear, but to kindle questions. The ‘unimaginable blossoms with dead eyes that formed a balefully grinning Medusa’ are questions, questions that have taken on the shapes of the plant kingdom. And as for how that is connected with the moon, we only have to remind ourselves of the stream that begins on Moon to understand how the silent floods of moonlight connect outer physical reality with spiritual experience. One has here a wonderful description of a spiritual experience:

And in the secret magic of the night.
There, before my palace,
My dreams took hold of the ghostly mists and built
Unimaginable blossoms with dead eyes
That formed a balefully grinning Medusa
In the moonlight drenched with dew,
And she waxed monstrous.—
As the moon streamed into my chamber
And lay across the bed of my exhaustion—
I was roused from sleep by lecherous,
Monstrous desires

—just think of the third speech, to the spirits of the moral sphere—

I was roused from sleep by lecherous,
Monstrous desires
Which shuddered on my stammering lips
And sent hot fires of fever streaming from my eyes
Towards creatures that were yours!
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
—My guilt, my most great guilt!

Then think of how the moral sphere shines into the stupefying fires of the senses, conquering them and illuminating that which dies in pleasure—and of how it is greeted by the resounding of ensouled powers that match eternal measure.

Yes, if one wants to delve deeply into everything that relates to humanity, one must certainly call on the help of the feelings. That is the only way one ever will arrive at a picture of how, when a human being steps onto the physical plane, he can live his way into the spiritual realms—the realms of morality, of aesthetics, and of that which has to do with conceptions and with truth. For a human being does not just enter into the mineral, plant and animal realms. Man remains human as he passes through all these realms. Mankind descends through the realms of mineral, plant, animal and human; and mankind ascends through the moral, the aesthetic, and through the realm of truth and wisdom. In this way, humanity participates in that wonderful stream of being that develops as it flows through Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth and on towards Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. There are lesser streams that overlap and unite in man, creating the separate forces he needs in the course of his development. These are granted to humanity from out of the deep impulses that rule the cosmos.

• 9. Jan Kasprowicz (1860 – 1926): The source of the cited text has not yet been discovered.

We have already seen that teaching history is beneficial only for developing children at about the age of twelve. Considering history is a kind of preparation for the period of life that begins with sexual maturity, that is, at about the age of fourteen or fifteen. Only at that time can human beings gain the capacity for independent reasoning. A capacity for reasoning, not simply intellectual reasoning, but a comprehensive reasoning in all directions, can only develop after puberty. With the passing of puberty, the supersensible aspect of human nature that carries the capacity of reason is born out of the remainder of human nature. You can call this what you like. In my books I have called it the astral body,but the name is unimportant. As I have said, it is not through intellectual judgment that this becomes noticeable, but through judgment in its broadest sense. You will perhaps be surprised that what I will now describe I also include in the realm of judgment. If we were to do a thorough study of psychology here, you would also see that what I have to say can also be proven psychologically.

When we attempt to have a child who is not yet past puberty recite something according to his or her own taste, we are harming the developmental forces within human nature. These forces will be harmed if an attempt is made to use them before the completion of puberty; they should only be used later. Independent judgments of taste are only possible after puberty. If a child before the age of fourteen or fifteen is to recite something, she should do so on the basis of what an accepted authority standing next to her has provided. This means she should find the way in which the authority has spoken pleasing. She should not be led astray to emphasize or not emphasize certain words, to form the rhythm out of what she thinks is pleasing, but instead she should be guided by the taste of the accepted authority. We should not attempt to guide that intimate area of the child’s life away from accepted authority before the completion of puberty. Notice that I always say “accepted authority” because I certainly do not mean a forced or blind authority. What I am saying is based upon the objective observation that from the change of teeth until puberty, a child has a desire to have an authority standing alongside her. The child demands this, longs for it, and we need to support this longing, which arises out of her individuality.

When you look at such things in a comprehensive way, you will see that in my outline of education here I have always taken the entire development of the human being into account. For this reason I have said that between the ages of seven and fourteen, we should only teach children what can be used in a fruitful way throughout life. We need to see how one stage of life affects another. In a moment I will give an example that speaks to this point. When a child is long past school age, has perhaps long since reached adulthood, this is when we can see what school has made of the child and what it has not. This is visible not only in a general abstract way but also in a very concrete way.

Let us look at children’s play from this perspective, particularly the kind of play that occurs in the youngest children from birth until the change of teeth. Of course, the play of such children is in one respect based upon their desire to imitate. Children do what they see adults doing, only they do it differently. They play in such a way that their activities lie far from the goals and utility that adults connect with certain activities. Children’s play only imitates the form of adult activities, not the material content. The usefulness in and connection to everyday life are left out. Children perceive a kind of satisfaction in activities that are closely related to those of adults. We can look into this further and ask what is occurring here. If we want to study what is represented by play activities and through that study recognize true human nature so that we can have a practical effect upon it, then we must continuously review the individual activities of the child, including those that are transferred to the physical organs and, in a certain sense, form them. That is not so easy. Nevertheless the study of children’s play in the widest sense is extraordinarily important for education.

We need only recall what a person who set the tone for culture once said: “A human being is only a human being so long as he or she plays; and a human being plays so long as he or she is a whole human being.” Schiller1 wrote these words in a letter after he had read some sections of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. To Schiller, free play and the forces of the soul as they are artistically developed in Wilhelm Meister appeared to be something that could only be compared with an adult form of children’s play. This formed the basis of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. He wrote them from the perspective that adults are never fully human when carrying out the activities of normal life. He believed that either we follow the necessities of what our senses require of us, in which case we are subject to a certain compulsion, or we follow logical necessity, in which case we are no longer free. Schiller thought that we are free only when we are artistically creative. This is certainly understandable from an artist such as Schiller; however, it is one-sided since in regard to freedom of the soul there is certainly much which occurs inwardly,in much the same way that Schiller understood freedom. Nevertheless the kind of life that Schiller imagined for the artist is arranged so that the human being experiences the spiritual as though it were natural and necessary, and the sense-perceptible as though it were spiritual. This is certainly the case when perceiving something artistic and in the creation of art.

When creating art, we create with the material world, but we do not create something that is useful. We create in the way the idea demands of us, if I may state it that way, but we do not create abstract ideas according to logical necessity. In the creation of art, we are in the same situation as we are when we are hungry or thirsty. We are subject to a very personal necessity. Schiller found that it is possible for people to achieve something of that sort in life, but children have this naturally through play. Here in a certain sense they live in the world of adults, through only to the extent that world satisfies the child’s own individuality. The child lives in creation, but what is created serves nothing.

Schiller’s perspective, from the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, can be used as a basis for further development. The psychological significance of play is not so easy to find. We need to ask if the particular kind of play that children engage in before the change of teeth has some significance for the entirety of human life. We can, as I said, analyze it in the way that Schiller tried to do under the influence of Goethe’s adult childishness. We could also, however, compare this kind of play with other human activities. We could, for example, compare children’s play before the change of teeth with dreaming, where we most certainly will find some important analogies. However, those analogies are simply related to the course of the child’s play, to the connection of the activities to one another in play. In just the same way that children put things together in play—whatever those might be—not with external things but with thoughts, we put pictures together in dreams. This may not be true of all dreams, but it is certainly so in a very large class of them. In dreaming, we remain in a certain sense children throughout our entire lives.

Nevertheless we can only achieve a genuine understanding if we do not simply dwell upon this comparison of play with dreams. Instead we should also ask when in the life of the human being something occurs that allows those forces that are developed in early children’s play until the change of teeth, which can be fruitful for the entirety of external human life. In other words, when do we actually reap the fruits of children’s play? Usually people think we need to seek the fruits of young children’s play in the period of life that immediately follows, but spiritual science shows how life passes in a rhythmical series of repetitions. In a plant, leaves develop from a seed; from the leaves, the bud and flower petals emerge, and so forth. Only afterwards do we have a seed again; that is, the repetition occurs only after an intervening development. It is the same in human life.

From many points of view we could understand human life as though each period were affected only by the one preceding, but this is not the case. If we observe without prejudice, we will find that the actual fruits of those activities that occur in early childhood play become apparent only at the age of twenty. What we gain in play from birth until the change of teeth, what children experience in a dreamy way, are forces of the still-unborn spirituality of the human being, which is still not yet absorbed into, or perhaps more properly said, reabsorbed into the human body.

We can state this differently. I have already discussed how the same forces that act organically upon the human being until the change of teeth become, when the teeth are born, an independent imaginative or thinking capacity, so that in a certain sense something is removed from the physical body. On the other hand, what is active within a child through play and has no connection with life and contains no usefulness is something that is not yet fully connected with the human body. Thus a child has an activity of the soul that is active within the body until the change of teeth and then becomes apparent as a capacity for forming concepts that can be remembered.

The child also has a spiritual-soul activity that in a certain sense still hovers in an etheric way over the child. It is active in play in much the same way that dreams are active throughout the child’s entire life. In children, however, this activity occurs not simply in dreams, it occurs also in play, which develops in external reality. What thus develops in external reality subsides in a certain sense. In just the same way that the seed-forming forces of a plant subside in the leaf and flower petal and only reappear in the fruit, what a child uses in play also only reappears at about the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, as independent reasoning gathering experiences in life.

I would like to ask you to try to genuinely seek this connection. Look at children and try to understand what is individual in their play: try to understand the individuality of children playing freely until the change of teeth, and then form pictures of their individualities. Assume that what you notice in their play will become apparent in their independent reasoning after the age of twenty. This means the various kinds of human beings differ in their independent reasoning after the age of twenty in the just the same way that children differ in their play before the change of teeth.

If you recognize the full truth of this thought, you will be overcome by an unbounded feeling of responsibility in regard to teaching. You will realize that what you do with a child forms the human being beyond the age of twenty. You will see that you will need to understand the entirety of life, not simply the life of children, if you want to create a proper education.

Playing activity from the change of teeth until puberty is something else again. (Of course, things are not so rigidly separated, but if we want to understand something for use in practical life, we must separate things.) Those who observe without prejudice will find that the play activity of a child until the age of seven has an individual character. As a player, the child is, in a certain sense, a kind of hermit. The child plays for itself alone. Certainly children want some help, but they are terribly egotistical and want the help only for themselves. With the change of teeth, play takes on a more social aspect. With some individual exceptions, children now want to play more with one another. The child ceases to be a hermit in his play; he wants to play with other children and tobe something in play. I am not sure if Switzerland can be included in this, but in more military countries the boys particularly like to play soldier. Mostly they want to be at least a general, and thus a social element is introduced to the children’s play.

What occurs as the social element in play from the change of teeth until puberty is a preparation for the next period of life. In this next period, with the completion of puberty, independent reasoning arises. At that time human beings no longer subject themselves to authority; they form their own judgments and confront others as individuals. This same element appears in the previous period of life in play; it appears in something that is not connected with external social life, but in play. What occurs in the previous period of life, namely, social play, is the prelude to tearing yourself away from authority. We can therefore conclude that children’s play until the age of seven actually enters the body only at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, when we gain an independence in our understanding and ability to judge experiences. On the other hand, what is prepared through play between the ages of seven and puberty appears at an earlier developmental stage in life, namely, during the period from puberty until about the age of twenty-one. This is a direct continuation. It is very interesting to notice that we have properly guided play during our first childhood years to thank for the capacities that we later have for understanding and experiencing life. In contrast, for what appears during our lazy or rebellious years we can thank the period from the change of teeth until puberty. Thus the connections in the course of human life overlap.

These overlapping connections have a fundamental significance of which psychology is unaware. What we today call psychology has existed only since the eighteenth century. Previously, quite different concepts existed about human beings and the human soul. Psychology developed during the period in which materialistic spirit and thought arose. Thus in spite of all significant beginnings, psychology was unable to develop a proper science of the soul, a science that was in accord with reality and took into account the whole of human life. Although I have tried hard, I have to admit that I have been able to find some of these insights only in Herbart’s psychology. Herbart’s psychology is very penetrating; it attempts to discover a certain form of the soul by beginning with the basic elements of the soul’s life. There are many beautiful things in Herbart’s psychology. Nevertheless we need to look at the rather unusual views it has produced in his followers. I once knew a very good follower of Herbart, Robert Zimmermann, an aesthete who also wrote a kind of educational philosophy in his book on psychology for high-school students. Herbart once referred to him as a Kantian from 1828. In his description of psychology as a student of Herbart, he discusses the following problem:

If I am hungry, I do not actually attempt to obtain the food that would satisfy my hunger. Instead, my goal is that the idea of hunger will cease and be replaced by the idea of being full. My concern is actually with ideas. There exists an idea that must arise contrary to inhibitions, and which must work against those inhibitions. Food is actually only a means of moving from the idea of hunger to the idea of being full.

Those who look at the reality of human nature, not simply in a materialistic sense, but also with an eye toward the spiritual, will see that this kind of view is somewhat one-sidedly rationalistic and intellectual. It is necessary to move beyond this one-sided intellectualism and comprehend the entire human being psychologically. In so doing, education can gain much from psychology that otherwise would not be apparent. We should consider what we do in teaching not simply to be the right thing for the child, but rather to be something living that can transform itself. As we have seen, there are many connections of the sort I have presented. We need to assume that what we teach children in elementary school until puberty will reappear in a quite different form from the age of fifteen until twenty-one or twenty-two.

The elementary-school teacher is extremely important for the high-school teacher or the university teacher—in a sense even more important, since the university teacher can achieve nothing if the elementary-school teacher has not sent the child forth with properly formed strengths. It is very important to work with these connected periods of life. If we do, we will see that real beginning points can be found only through spiritual science.

For instance, people define things too much. As far as possible, we should avoid giving children any definitions. Definitions take a firm grasp of the soul and remain static throughout life, thus making life into something dead. We should teach in such a way that what we provide to the child’s soul remains alive. Suppose someone as a child of around nine or ten years of age learns a concept, for instance, at the age of nine, the concept of a lion, or, at the age of eleven or twelve, that of Greek culture. Very good; the child learns it. But these concepts should not remain as they are. A person at the age of thirty should not be able to say she has such-and-such a concept of lions and that is what she learned in school, or that she has such-and-such a concept of Greek culture and that was what she learned in school. This is something we need to overcome. Just as other parts of ourselves grow, the things we receive from the teacher should also grow; they should be something living. We should learn concepts about lions or Greek culture that will not be the same when we are in our thirties or forties as they were when we were in school.

We should learn concepts that are so living that they are transformed throughout our lives. To do so, we need to characterize rather than define. In connection with the formation of concepts, we need to imitate what we can do with painting or even photography. In such cases, we can place ourselves to one side and give one aspect, or we can move to another side and give a different aspect, and so forth. Only after we have photographed a tree from many sides do we have a proper picture of it. Through definitions, we gain too strong an idea that we have something.

We should attempt to work with thoughts and concepts as we would with a camera. We should bring forth the feeling within the child that we are only characterizing something from various perspectives; we are not defining it. Definitions exist only so that we can, in a sense, begin with them and so that the child can communicate understandably with the teacher. That is the basic reason for definitions. That may sound somewhat radical, but it is so. Life does not love definitions. In private, human beings should always have the feeling that, through incorrect definitions, they have arrived at dogmas. It is very important for teachers to know that. Instead of saying, for instance, that two objects cannot be in the same place at the same time, and that is what we call impermeable, the way we consciously define impermeability and then seek things to illustrate this concept, we should instead say that objects are impermeable because they cannot be at the same place at the same time. We should not make hypotheses into dogmas. We only have the right to say that we call objects impermeable when they cannot be at the same place at the same time. We need to remain conscious of the formative forces of our souls and should not awaken the concept of a triangle in the external world before the child has recognized a triangle inwardly.

That we should characterize and not define is connected with recognizing that the fruits of those things that occur during one period of human life will be recognized perhaps only very much later. Thus we should give children living concepts and feelings rather than dead ones. We should try to present geometry, for example, in as lively a way as possible. A few days ago I spoke about arithmetic. I want to speak before the end of the course tomorrow about working with fractions and so forth, but now I would like to add a few remarks about geometry. These remarks are connected with a question I was asked and also with what I have just presented.

Geometry can be seen as something that can slowly be brought from a static state into a living one. In actuality, we are speaking of something quite general when we say that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180°. That is true for all triangles, but can we imagine a triangle? In our modern way of educating, we do not always attempt to teach children a flexible concept of a triangle. It would be good, however, if we teach our children a flexible concept of a triangle, not simply a dead concept. We should not have them simply draw a triangle, which is always a special case. Instead we could say that here I have a line. I can divide the angle of 180° into three parts. That can be done in an endless number of ways. Each time I have divided the angle, I can go on to form a triangle, so that I show the child how an angle that occurs here then occurs here in the triangle. When I transfer the angles in this way, I will have such a triangle. Thus in moving from three fan-shaped angles lying next to one another, I can form numerous triangles and those triangles thus become flexible in the imagination. Clearly these triangles have the characteristic that the sum of their angles is 180° since they arose by dividing a 180° angle. It is good to awaken the idea of a triangle of a child in this way, so that an inner flexibility remains and so that they do not gain the idea of a static triangle, but rather that of a flexible shape, one that could just as well be acute as obtuse, or it could be a right triangle (see diagram).

Imagine how transparent the whole concept of triangles would be if I began with such inwardly flexible concepts, then developed triangles from them. We can use the same method to develop a genuine and concrete feeling for space in children. If in this way we have taught children the concept of flexibility in figures on a plane, the entire mental configuration of the child will achieve such flexibility that it is then easy to go on to three-dimensional elements—for instance, how one object moves past another behind it, forward or backward. By presenting how an object moves forward or backward past another object, we present the first element that can be used in developing a feeling for space. If we, for example, present how it is in real life—namely how one person ceases to be visible when he or she moves behind an object or how the object becomes no longer visible when the person moves in front of it—we can go on to develop a feeling for space that has an inner liveliness to it. The feeling for three-dimensional space remains abstract and dead when it is presented only as perspectives. The children can gain that lively feeling for space if, for instance, we tell a short story.

This morning at nine o’clock I came across two people. They were sitting someplace on a bench. This afternoon at three, I came by again and the same two people were sitting on the same bench. Nothing had changed.

Certainly as long as I only consider the situation at nine in the morning and three in the afternoon, nothing had changed. However, if I go into it more and speak with these people, then perhaps I would discover that after I had left in the morning, one person remained, but the other stood up and went away. Though he was gone for three hours,he then returned and sat down again alongside the other. He had done something and was perhaps tired after six hours. I cannot recognize the actual situation only in connection with space, that is, if I think only of the external situation and do not look further into the inner, to the more important situation.

We cannot make judgments even about the spatial relationships between beings if we do not go into inner relationships. We can avoid bitter illusions in regard to cause and effect only if we go into those inner relationships. The following might occur: A man is walking along the bank of a river and comes across a stone. He stumbles over the stone and falls into the river. After a time he is pulled out. Suppose that nothing more is done than to report the objective facts: Mr. So-and-So has drowned. But perhaps that is not even true. Perhaps the man did not drown, but instead stumbled because at that point he had a heart attack and was already dead before he fell into the water. He fell into the water because he was dead. This is an actual case that was once looked into and shows how necessary it is to proceed from external circumstances into the more inner aspects.

In the same way if we are to make judgments about the spatial relationship of one being to another, we need to go into the inner aspects of those beings. When properly grasped in a living way, it enables us to develop a spatial feeling in children so that we can use movements for the development of a feeling for space. We can do that by having the children run in different figures, or having them observe how people move in front or behind when passing one another.

It is particularly important to make sure that what is observed in this way is also retained. This is especially significant for the development of a feeling for space. If I cast a shadow from different objects upon the surface of other objects, I can show how the shadow changes. If children are capable of understanding why, under specific circumstances, the shadow of a sphere has the shape of an ellipse—and this is certainly something that can be understood by a child at the age of nine—this capacity to place themselves in such spatial relationships has a tremendously important effect upon their capacity to imagine and upon the flexibility of their imaginations.

For that reason we should certainly see that it is necessary to develop a feeling for space in school. If we ask ourselves what children do when they are drawing up until the change of teeth, we will discover that they are in fact developing experience that then becomes mature understanding around the age of twenty. That understanding develops out of the changing forms, so the child plays by drawing; at the same time, however, that drawing tells something. We can understand children’s drawings if we recognize that they reflect what the child wants to express.

Let us look at children’s drawings. Before the ages of seven or eight or sometimes even nine, children do not have a proper feeling for space. That comes only later when other forces slowly begin to affect the child’s development. Until the age of seven, what affects the child’s functioning later becomes imagination. Until puberty, it is the will that mostly affects the child and which, as I mentioned earlier, is dammed up and becomes apparent through boys’ change of voice. The will is capable of developing spatial feeling. Through everything that I have just said, that is, through the development of a spatial feeling through movement games and by observing what occurs when shadows are formed—namely, through what arises through movement and is then held fast—all such things that develop the will give people a much better understanding than simply through an intellectual presentation, even though that understanding may be somewhat playful, an understanding with a desire to tell a story.

Now, at the end of this lecture, I would like to show you the drawings of a six-year-old boy whose father, I should mention, is a painter so that you can see them in connection with what I just said. Please notice how extraordinarily talkative this six-year-old boy is through what he creates. I might even say that he has in fact created a very specific language here, a language that expresses just what he wants to tell. Many of these pictures,which we could refer to as expressionist, are simply his way of telling stories that were read to him, or which he heard in some other way. Many of the pictures are, as you can see, wonderfully expressive. Take a look at this king and queen. These are things that show how children at this age tell stories. If we understand how children speak at this age—something that is so wonderfully represented here because the boy is already drawing with colored pencils—and if we look at all the details, we will find that these drawings represent the child’s being in much the way that I described to you earlier. We need to take the change that occurred with the change of teeth into consideration if we are to understand how we can develop a feeling for space.

Your task is to gain an insight into what the human being really is. Up to now in our survey of general pedagogy we have endeavoured to comprehend this nature of man first of all from the point of view of the soul and then from that of the spirit. To-day we will continue from the latter point of view. We shall of course continually have to refer to the conceptions of pedagogy, psychology and the life of the soul, which are current in the world to-day; for in course of time you will have to read and digest the books which are published on pedagogy and psychology, as far as you have time and leisure to do so.

If we consider the human being from the point of view of the soul, we lay chief stress on discovering antipathies and sympathies within the laws which govern the world; but if we consider the human being from the spiritual point of view, we must lay the chief stress on discovering the conditions of consciousness. Now yesterday we concerned ourselves with the three conditions of consciousness which hold sway in the human being: namely, the full waking consciousness, dreaming and sleeping: and we showed how the full waking consciousness is really only present in thinking-cognition; dreaming in feeling; and sleeping in willing.

All comprehension is really a question of relating one thing to another: the only way we can comprehend things in the world is by relating them to each other. I wish to make this statement concerning method at the outset. When we place ourselves into a knowing relationship with the world, we are first of all observing. Either we observe with our senses, as we do in ordinary life, or we develop ourselves somewhat further and observe with soul and spirit, as we can do in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. But spiritual observation too is “observation,” and all observation requires to be completed by our comprehension or conception. But we can only comprehend if we relate one thing to another in the universe and in our environment. You can form good conceptions of body, soul and spirit if you have the whole course of human life clearly before you. Only you must take into account that in this relating of things to each other, as I shall now explain, you have only the rudiments of comprehension. You will need to develop further the conceptions you arrive at in this manner.

For instance if you consider the child as he first comes into the world, if you observe his physical form, his movements, his expressions, his crying, his baby talk and so on—you will get a picture which is chiefly of the human body. But this picture will only be complete if you relate it to the middle age, and old age of the human being. In the middle age the human being is more predominantly soul, and in old age he is most spiritual. This last statement can easily be contended. People will certainly come and say: “But a great many old people become quite feeble-minded.” A favourite objection of materialism to those who speak of the soul and the spirit is that people get feeble-minded in old age, and, with true consistency, the materialists argue that even such a great man as Kant became feeble-minded in his old age. The statement of the materialists and the fact are quite right. Only they do not prove what they set out to prove. For even Kant, when he stood before the gate of death, was wiser than in his childhood; only in childhood his body was capable of receiving all that came out of his wisdom, and thereby it could become conscious in his physical life. But in old age the body became incapable of receiving what the spirit was giving it. The body was no longer a proper instrument for the spirit. Therefore on the physical plane Kant could no longer come to a consciousness of what lived in his spirit. In spite of the apparent force of the above-mentioned argument, then, we must be quite clear that in old age men become wise and spiritual and that they come near to the Spirits. Therefore in the case of people who, right into their old age, can preserve elasticity and life power for their spirit, we must recognise the beginnings of spiritual qualities. For there are such possibilities.

In Berlin there were once two professors. One was Michelet the disciple of Hegel, who was over ninety years old. And as he was considerably gifted he only got as far as being Honorary Professor, but although he was so old he still gave lectures Then there was another called Zeller, the historian of Greek philosophy. Compared with Michelet he was a mere boy, for he was only seventy. But everybody said how he was feeling the burden of age, how he could no longer give lectures, or, in any case, was always wishing to have them reduced. To this Michelet always said: “I can't understand Zeller; I could give lectures all day long, but Zeller, though still in his youth, is always saying that it is getting too much of a strain for him!” So you see one may find isolated examples only of what I have stated about the spirit in old age; yet it really is so.

If, on the other hand, we observe the characteristics of the human being in middle age, we shall get a first basis for our observations of the soul. For this reason, too, a man in middle life is more able, as it were, to belie the soul element. He can appear to be either soulless or very much imbued with soul. For the soul element lies within the freedom of man, even in education. The fact that many people are very soulless in middle life does not prove that middle age is not the age of the soul. If you compare the bodily nature of the child—kicking and sprawling and performing unconscious actions—with the quiet contemplative bodily nature of old age, you have on the one hand a body that shows its bodily side predominantly, in the child, and on the other hand you have a body that as it were withdraws its bodily side in old age, a body that to a certain degree belies its own bodily nature.

Now if we turn our attention more to the soul life we shall say: the human being bears within him thinking-cognition feeling and willing. When we observe a child the impression we get of the child's soul shows a close connection between willing and feeling. We might say that willing and feeling have grown together in the child. When the child kicks and tumbles about he is making movements which precisely correspond to his feelings at the moment; he is not capable of keeping his movements and his feelings separate.

With an old man the opposite is the case: thinking-cognition and feeling have grown together within him, and willing stands apart, independently. Thus human life runs its course in such a way that feeling, which is at first bound up with willing, gradually frees itself from it. And a good deal of education is concerned with this, with this freeing of the feeling from the will. Then the feeling which has been freed from willing unites itself with thinking-cognition. And this is the concern of later life. We can only prepare the child rightly for his later life if we bring about the proper release of feeling from willing; then in a later period of life as a grown man or woman he will be able to unite this released feeling with thinking-cognition, and thus be fitted for his life. Why is it that we listen to an old man, even when he is relating his life history? It is because in the course of his life he has united his personal feeling with his concepts and ideas. He is not telling us theories: he is really telling us about the feelings which he personally has been able to unite with his ideas and concepts. With the old man, who has really united his feelings with thinking-cognition, the concepts and ideas ring true; they are filled with warmth, and permeated with reality; they sound concrete and personal. Whilst with those who have ceased to develop beyond the stage of middle-aged manhood or womanhood the concepts and ideas sound theoretical, abstract, scientific. It is an essential factor of human life that the evolution of soul powers runs a certain course; for the feeling-willing of the child develops into the feeling-thinking of the old man. Human life lies between the two, and we can only give an education befitting this human life when our study of the soul includes this knowledge.

Now we must take notice that something arises straight-away whenever we begin to observe the world—indeed in all psychologies it is described as the first thing that occurs in observation of the external world; and that is sensation. When any one of our senses comes into touch with the environment, it has a sensation. We have sensations of colour, tones, warmth and cold. Thus sensation enters into our contact with our environment.

But you cannot get a true conception of sensation from the way it is described in current books on psychology. When the psychologists speak of sensation they say: in the external world a certain physical process is going on, vibrations in the light ether or waves in the air; this streams on to our sense organ and stimulates it. People speak of stimulus, and they hold to the expression they form, but will not make it comprehensible. For through the sense organ the stimulus releases sensation in our souls, the wholly qualitative sensation which is caused by the physical process (for example by the vibration of air waves in hearing). But how this comes about neither psychology nor present-day science can tell us. This is what we generally find in psychological books.

You will be brought nearer to an understanding of these things than you will by these psychological ideas, if, having insight into the nature of sensations themselves, you can yourself answer the question: to which of the soul forces is sensation really most closely related? Psychologists make light of it; they glibly connect sensation with cognition, without more ado, and say: first we have a sensation, then we perceive, then we make mental pictures, form concepts and so on. This indeed is what the process appears at first to be. But this explanation leaves out of account what the nature of sensation really is.

If we consider it with a sufficient amount of self-observation we shall recognise that sensation is really of a will nature with some element of feeling nature woven into it. It is not really related to thinking-cognition, but rather to feeling-willing or willing-feeling. It is of course impossible to be acquainted with all the countless psychologies there are in the world to-day, and I do not know how many of them have grasped anything of the relationship between sensation and willing-feeling or feeling-willing. It would not be quite exact to say that sensation is related to willing; rather it is related to willing-feeling or feeling-willing. But there is at least one psychologist, Moritz Benedikt of Vienna, who especially distinguished himself by his power of observation, and who recognised in his psychology that sensation is related to feeling.

Other psychologists certainly set very little store by this psychology of Moritz Benedikt, and it is true that there is something rather peculiar about it. Firstly, Moritz Benedikt is by vocation a criminal-anthropologist; and he proceeds to write a book on psychology. Secondly, he is a naturalist—and writes about the importance of poetic works of art in education, in fact he analyses poetic works of art to show how they can be used in education. What a dreadful thing! The man sets up to be a scientist, and actually imagines that psychologists have something to learn from the poets! And thirdly, this man is a Jewish naturalist, a scientific Jew, and he writes a book on Psychology and deliberately dedicates it to Laurenz Mullner, a priest, the Catholic philosopher of the theological faculty in the University of Vienna (for he still held this post at that time). Three frightful things, which make it quite impossible for the professional psychologists to take the man seriously. But if you were to read his books on psychology, you would find so many single apt ideas, that you would get much from them, although you would have to repudiate the structure of his psychology as a whole, his whole materialistic way of thought—for such it is indeed. You would get nothing at all from the book as a whole, but a great deal from single observations within it. Thus you must seek the best in the world wherever it is to be found. If you are a good observer of details, but are put off by the general tendency of Moritz Benedikt's work, you need therefore not necessarily repudiate the wise observations that he makes.

Thus sensation, as it appears within the human being, is willing-feeling or feeling-willing. Therefore we must say that where man's sense sphere spreads itself externally—for we bear our senses on the periphery of our body, if I may express it rather crudely—there some form of feeling-willing and willing-feeling is to be found. If we draw a diagram of the human being (and please note it is only a diagram) we have here on the outer surface, in the sphere of the senses, willing-feeling and feeling-willing. (see drawing further on) What then do we do on this surface when feeling-willing and willing-feeling is present, in so far as this surface of the body is the sphere of the senses? We perform an activity which is half-sleeping, half dreaming; we might even call it a dreaming-sleeping, a sleeping-dreaming. For we do not only sleep in the night, we are continually asleep on the periphery, on the external surface of our body, and the reason why we as human beings do not entirely comprehend our sensations, is because in these regions where the sensations are to be found we are only dreaming in sleep, or sleeping in dreams. The psychologists have no notion that what prevents them from understanding the sensations is the same thing as prevents us from bringing our dreams into clear consciousness when we wake in the morning. You see, the concepts of sleeping and dreaming have a meaning which differs entirely from that we would give them in ordinary life. All we know about sleeping in ordinary life is that when we are in bed at night we go to sleep. We have no idea that this sleeping extends much further, and that we are always sleeping on the surface of the body, although this sleeping is constantly being penetrated by dreams. These “dreams” are the sensations of the senses, before they are taken hold of by the intellect and by thinking-cognition.

You must seek out the sphere of willing and feeling in the child's senses also. This is why we insist so strongly in these lectures that while educating intellect we must also work continually on the will. For in all that the child looks at and perceives we must also cultivate will and feeling; otherwise we shall really be contradicting the child's sensations. It is only when we address an old man, a man in the evening of his life, that we can think of the sensations as having already been transformed. In the case of the old man sensation has already passed over from feeling-willing to feeling-thinking or thinking-feeling. Sensations have been somewhat changed within him. They have more of the nature of thought and have lost the restless nature of will—they have become more calm. Only in old age can we say that sensations approach the realm of concepts and ideas.

Most psychologists do not make this fine distinction in sensations. For them the sensations of old age are the same as those of the child, for sensations for them are simply sensations. That is about as logical as to say: the razor (Rasermesser) is a knife (Messer), so let us cut our meat with it, for a knife is a knife. This is taking the concept from the verbal explanation. This we should never do, but rather take the concept from the facts. We should then discover that sensation has life, that it develops, and in the child it has more of a will nature, in the old man more of an intellectual nature. Of course it is much easier to deduce everything from words; it is for this reason that we have so many people who can make definitions, some of which can have a terrible effect on you.

On one occasion I met a schoolfellow of mine, after we had for some time been separated and had gone our several ways. We had been at the same primary school together; I then went to the Grammar School (Realschule) and he to the Teachers' Training College, and what is more to a Hungarian College—and that meant something in the seventies. After some years we met and had a conversation about light. I had already learnt what could be learnt in ordinary physics, that light has something to do with ether waves, and so on. This could at least be regarded as a cause of light. My former schoolfellow then added: “We have also learnt what light is. Light is the cause of sight!” A hotchpotch of words! It is thus that concepts become mere verbal explanations. And we can imagine what sort of things the pupils were told when we learn that the gentleman in question had later to teach a large number of pupils, until at last he was pensioned off. We must get away from the words and come to the spirit of things. If we want to understand something we must not immediately think of the word each time, but we must seek the real connections. If we look up the derivation of the word Geist (spirit) in Fritz Mauthner's History of Language to discover what its original form was, we shall find it is related to Gischt (“froth” or “effervescence”) and to “gas.” These relationships do exist, but we should not get very far by simply building on them. But unfortunately this method is covertly applied to the Bible and therefore with most people, and especially present-day theologies, the Bible is less understood than any other book.

The essential thing is that we should always proceed according to facts, and not endeavour to get a conception of spirit from the derivation of the word, but by comparing the life in the body of a child with the life in the body of an old person. By means of this connecting of one fact with another we get true conception.

And thus we can only get a true conception of sensation if we know that it is able to arise as willing-feeling or feeling-willing in the bodily periphery of the child, because compared with the more human inward side of the child's being this bodily periphery is asleep and dreaming in its sleep. Thus you are not only fully awake in thinking-cognition, but you are also only awake in the inner sphere of your body. At the periphery or surface of the body you are perpetually asleep. And further: that which takes place in the environment, or rather on the surface of the body, takes place in a similar way in the head, and increases in intensity the further we go into the human being into the blood and muscle elements. Here, too, man is asleep and also dreaming. On the surface man is asleep and dreaming, and again towards the inner part of his body he is asleep and dreaming. Therefore what is more of a soul nature, willing-feeling, feeling-willing, our life of desires and so on, remain in the inner part of our body in a dreaming sleep.

Where then are we fully awake? In the intervening zone, when we are entirely wakeful. Now you see that we are proceeding from a spiritual point of view, by applying the facts of waking and sleeping to man even in a spatial way, and by relating this to his physical form so that we can say: from a spiritual point of view the human being is so constituted that at the surface of the body and in his central organs he is asleep and can only be really awake in the intervening zone, during his life between birth and death. Now what are the organs that are specially developed in this intervening region?

Those organs, especially in the head, that we call nerves, the nerve apparatus. This nerve apparatus sends its shoots into the zone of the outer surface and also into the inner region where they again disperse as they do on the surface: and between the two there are middle zones such as the brain, the spinal cord and the solar plexus. Here we have the opportunity of being really awake. Where the nerves are most developed, there we are most awake. But the nervous system has a peculiar relationship to the spirit. It is a system of organs which through the functions of the body continually has the tendency to decay and finally to become mineral. If in a living human being you could liberate his nerve system from the rest of the gland-muscle-blood nature and bony nature—you could even leave the bony system with the nerves—then this nerve system in the living human being would already be a corpse, perpetually a corpse. In the nerve system the dying element in man is always at work. The nerve system is the only system that has no connection whatever with soul and spirit. Blood, muscles, and so on always have a direct connection with soul and spirit. The nerve system has no direct connection with these: the only way in which it has such a connection at all is by constantly leaving the human organisation, by not being present within it, because it is continually decaying. The other members are alive, and can therefore form direct connections with the soul and spirit; the nerve system is continually dying out, and is continually saying to the human being: “You can evolve because I am setting up no obstacle, because I see to it that I with my life am not there at all.” That is the peculiar thing about it. In psychology and physiology you find the following put forward; the organ that acts as a medium for sensation, thinking and the whole soul and spirit element, is the nerve system. But how does it come to be this medium? Only by continually expelling itself from life, so that it does not offer any obstacles to thinking and sensation, forms no connections with thinking and sensation, and in that place where it is it leaves the human being “empty” in favour of the soul and spirit, Actually there are hollow spaces for the spirit and soul where the nerves are. Therefore spirit and soul can enter in where these hollow spaces are. We must be grateful to the nerve system that it does not trouble about soul and spirit, and does not do all that is ascribed to it by the physiologists and psychologists. For if it did this, if for five minutes only the nerves did what the physiologists and psychologists describe them as doing, then in these five minutes we should know nothing about the world nor about ourselves; in fact we should be asleep. For the nerves would then act like those organs which bring about sleeping, which bring about feeling-willing, willing-feeling.

Indeed it is no easy matter to state the truth about physiology and psychology to-day, for people always say: “You are standing the world on its head.” The truth is that the world is already standing on its head, and we have to set it on its legs again by means of spiritual science. The physiologists say that the organs of thinking are the nerves, and especially the brain. The truth is that the brain and nerve system can only have anything to do with thinking-cognition through the fact that they are constantly shutting themselves off from the human organisation and thereby allowing thinking-cognition to develop.

Now you must attend very carefully to what I am going to say, and please bring all your powers of understanding to bear upon it. In the environment of man, where the sphere of the senses is, there are real processes at work which play their part unceasingly in the life of the world. Let us suppose that light is working upon the human being through the eye. In the eye, that is, in the sphere of the senses, a real process is at work, a physical-chemical process is taking place. This continues into the inner part of the human body, and finally indeed into that inner part where, once again, physical-chemical processes take place (the dark shading in the drawing). Now imagine that you are standing opposite an illumined surface and that rays of light are falling from this surface into your eye. There again physical-chemical processes arise, which are continued into the muscle and blood nature within the human being. In between there remains a vacant zone. In this vacant zone, which has been left empty by the nerve organ, no independent processes are developed such as that in the eye or in the inner nature of the human being; but there enters what is outside: the nature of light, the nature of colour. Thus, at the surface of our bodies where the senses are, we have material processes which are dependent on the eye, the ear, the organs which can receive warmth and so on: similar processes also take place in the inner sphere of the human being. But not in between, where the nerves spread themselves out: they leave the space free, there we can live with what is outside us. Your eye changes the light and colour. But where your nerves are, where as regards life there is only hollow space, there light and colour do not change, and you yourself are experiencing light and colour. It is only with regard to the sphere of the senses that you are separated from the external world: within, as in a shell, you yourself live with the external processes. Here you yourself become light, you become sound, the processes have free play because the nerves form no obstacle as blood and muscle do.

Now we get some feeling of how significant this is: we are awake in a part of our being which in contrast to other living parts may be described as a hollow space, whilst at the external surface and in the inner sphere we are dreaming in sleep, and sleeping in dreams. We are only fully awake in a zone which lies between the outer and inner spheres. This is true in respect to space.

But in considering the human being from a spiritual point of view we must also bring the time element of his life into relationship with waking, sleeping and dreaming. You learn something, you take it in and it passes into your full waking consciousness. Whilst you are occupying yourself with this thing and thinking about it, it is in your full waking consciousness. Then you return to your ordinary life. Other things claim your interest and attention. Now what happens to what you have just learnt, to what was occupying your attention? It begins to fall asleep; and when you remember it again, it awakens again. You will only get the right point of view about all these things when you substitute real conceptions for all the rigmarole's you read in psychology books about remembering and forgetting. What is remembering? It is the awakening of a complex of mental pictures. And what is forgetting? It is the falling asleep of the complex of mental pictures. Here you can compare real things with real experiences, here you have no mere verbal definitions. If you ponder over waking and sleeping, if you look at your own experience or another's on falling asleep, you have a real process before you. You relate forgetting, this inner soul activity, to this real process—not to any word—and you compare the two and say: forgetting is only falling asleep in another sphere, and remembering is only waking up in another sphere.

Only so can you come to a spiritual understanding of the world, by comparing realities with realities. Just as you have to compare childhood with old age to find the real relationship between body and soul, at least the elements of it, so in the same way you can compare remembering and forgetting by relating it to something real, to falling asleep and waking up.

It is this that will be so infinitely necessary to the future of mankind; that men accustom themselves to enter into reality. People think almost exclusively in words today; they do not think in real terms. How could a present-day man get at this conception of awakening which is the reality about memory? In the sphere of mere words he can hear of all kinds of ways of defining memory; but it will not occur to him to find out these things from the reality, from the thing itself.

Therefore you will understand that when people hear of something like the Threefold Organism of the State, which springs entirely out of reality and not out of abstract conceptions, they find it incomprehensible at first because they are quite unaccustomed to produce things out of reality. They do not connect any of their conceptions with getting things out of reality. And the people who do this least are the Socialist leaders in their theories; they represent the last word, the last stage of decadence in the realm of verbal explanations. These are the people who most of all believe that they understand something of reality, but when they begin to talk they make use of the veriest husks of words.

This was only an interpolation with reference to the current trend of our times. But the teacher must understand also the times in which he lives, for he has to understand the children who out of these very times are entrusted to him for their education.