The Rudolf Steiner Archive

There is so unendlessly much one could relate about the connection between the hygienic-therapeutic and eurythmy. Today we want to take into consideration that part of the physiological which we discover in the proximity of the spiritual when we contemplate a eurythmic exercise. Of course, all that which can he observed in this connection in artistic eurythmy will be encountered in an intensified form when one makes the transition from artistic eurythmy to the fortified eurythmy we have become acquainted with in these days. Nevertheless, the essence of that which concerns us can already be discovered purely artistically in a performance of eurythmy and the physiology corresponding to it then sought out. Let us try this by carrying out the following.

Perhaps Mrs. Baumann will be so good and perform the poem “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh” alternately in vowels and in consonants, while you (Frau Dr. Steiner) recite it.

Now let us make clear to ourselves what is taking place here, proceeding however very exactly. What is happening? A poem is recited. The person who does the eurythmy listens—he is the one who comes for us into consideration physiologically. That is the first matter of importance. He doesn't speak himself, he listens. That is essential. He listens to something which is in essence the meaningful word, a meaningful association of words. He listens to something in which the activity of thought and of mental representation are alive. What he perceives outwardly is the activity of mental representation clothed in an association of sounds. That is something which man in his waking, daytime existence often does, is it not? But what actually takes place when he does it? If you consider the process from a psychologic-physiologic point of view you will easily discover that a light, partial sleep overtakes the listener. The “I” and the astral body glide over what they are taking in, they live into it. In listening man steps out of himself slightly. He is overcome by a condition which is similar and then again dissimilar to sleep. It is similar to sleep in that the “I” and astral body are slightly disengaged, dissimilar in that they remain receptive, perceptive and self-aware. Thus the process is extraordinarily similar to imagination. It is a subtle, conscious imagining that is still strongly suppressed in the subconscious. Such is the process at hand.

To every such process is a reaction within the human being himself; we take this into account as well. Let us look at what takes place in the person who is not reciting. What does he do when he listens? He brings his etheric body into motion. The etheric body reacts. in fact the etheric body takes up those movements which it carries out—only much more weakly—when the person is asleep and has left his etheric body behind in the physical body. When the human being is asleep the etheric body is considerably more active than when he is awake. During this dampened sleep taking place in the listener the movements of the etheric body are awakened to a greater degree. These movements of the etheric body can be observed. Thus in the listener one has a person demonstrating in a heightened manner the movements which the human being carries out otherwise in a a weakened form in sleep. Thus you can study in the listener, who promptly performs them for you, ether movements of the human being in sleep. It isn't at all necessary to study the person while asleep; one can study the etheric movements of the human being when listening and has in fact here the heightened movements of the etheric body in sleep. One studies these movements and has them carried out by the physical body. That is to say one allows the physical body to glide into all those etheric movements which one has studied in the manner just described. Thus in eurythmy one does what the human being carries out with his etheric body constantly while listening. You can see what is actually taking place.

Now that we have observed what actually occurs, its effect will become apparent as well. The result is that by means of the physical movement one carries over into consciousness what otherwise occurs unconsciously. One stimulates the astral body and the ego by means of this detour through the physical body and strengthens them. But what happens as a result of this? When the astral body and the ego are strengthened in this manner their activity becomes similar to the activity in the child and still growing person as it occurs naturally. You are calling upon the forces of growth in the human being. You are working directly into the person's forces of growth. If the person is still a child and shows signs of being retarded in his growth, you can stimulate his growth in this way. If the person is no longer a child, and the forces of growth have already diminished, or if the person is actually in the second half of his life, one calls upon the youthful forces, the rejuvenating forces in him which, however, cannot contribute to his growth since the human organism is, of course, fully developed. We can expedite a child in his growth or combat his abnormal growth by having him do eurythmy. In the case of the fully-grown person the inner organism presents too great a resistance to the outer organism for us to be able to make him grow. Nevertheless, we can still introduce these forces of growth. The result is that they crash against the resistance of organism and metamorphose; that means that they activate in their metamorphosed state the plastic force of the inner organs. They stimulate the plastic force of the inner organs and these inner organs learn to breathe better and to better digest. They are encouraged to fulfil the necessary activity of the human organism in its entirety.

When artistic eurythmy is performed one should not think of it in the first instance as curative eurythmy; nevertheless, in the moment a person begins to be abnormal in any way it will have a curative effect. We have already seen the examples where when the usual eurythmy is reinforced, the reaction which follows is naturally also strengthened and we can form a mental picture of how this eurythmy affects the plastic qualities of the organization.

You can understand that the habitual practise of eurythmy activates the plasticity of the organs, their plastic force, and that as a result the human being becomes internally a better breather, a better person, if I may express myself so, in respect to his inwardly oriented digestion. He becomes a person who has his whole organism more within his own discretion. He becomes an inwardly more agile person. And to become a true artist is nothing other than to make the inner man more flexible, plastic, agile. That can be seen when one sculpts, for example. One cannot sculpt properly if in experience one cannot transpose oneself for example into the figure that one is developing plastically, if one cannot bring to life in oneself the forces that are building the figure, that express themselves in the figure. If, however, one sees the human organism itself as an implement and carries out what corresponds within, then what is the case in outward artistry is in a higher degree the case here as well for at this point one can do nothing other than to call forth internally what corresponds to the outward movement.

If you would be so good we will do the poem again now, this time with only the vowels. So that the emphasis is on the vowels alone. (Miss Wolfram and Frau. Dr. Steiner)

What I have just said about the physiology of eurythmy is specialized here. When only the vowels are carried out then that which I have characterized does not come to expression in its entirety. What I characterized is correct when someone speaks and the movements for consonants and vowels are made alternately. For what we have just done is that which I said not entirely correct: it will have to be specialized. Here very specific, differentiated movements have been performed all of which prove to be movements within the etheric body having primarily to do with what lies in the rhythmic system. Thus we must fasten our attention on that system which—as an etheric system—participates especially when vowels are spoken. When a person listens to vowels—which occurs of course in so specialized a manner only in eurythmy and to which for this reason attention must be drawn as it is here especially important therapeutically—when one recites a simple sequence of vowels for this person, or when one has him carry out such movements, in which case he would be listening to the movements which are the forms of expression for the vowel element while doing eurythmy—then, in the normal person listening to vowels those movements of the the etheric body corresponding to the rhythmic system become active in the way described earlier. And now you have the person doing eurythmy carry out in turn those movements through which he glides with his physical body into the movements which are otherwise manifest in the etheric body when vowels are heard. That is how the matter is specialized. In this way in particular those organs which belong to the rhythmic system are stimulated to respiration and inward digestion. These organs are strengthened; in them the appeal goes out to the forces of growth in the growing child or to the plastic forces which have their resistance within the organization of the fully grown adult.

This will serve as an introduction to the physiology of the vowels in eurythmy. Thus in applying to therapeutic ends everything derived from the vowel-element in eurythmy you will be able to affect the rhythmic organs in particular.

Now perhaps Mrs. Baumann will do the same poem once again consonantally. A mere glance will testify to the radical difference between the consonants and the vowels as they are carried out eurythmically. The difference is indeed thoroughly radical. If we wish to study what we have just seen we will have to make clear to ourselves how the matter would lie if in ordinary listening we were to hear only the consonants. For civilized man that is seldom so, but among less civilized peoples it is sometimes the case that they must listen to much of a consonantal nature. The consonantal world in speech is appreciably richer among less civilized peoples, and the transition from one consonant to another is stronger and unilluminated by a vowel lying between. You will find it possible to observe this up to and even within Europe. just look at words written in the Czech language and you will see just what combinations of consonants are present. To be sure when the words are spoken the vowel element sounds within these combinations of consonants, but it permeates them only as a continuous, hardly differentiated undercurrent. And if you listen to Czech you will say to yourself: to listen to this consonantal element is entirely different from listening to a language that is thoroughly permeated by vowels. Thus one has to do with quite another process here which can be characterized best in the following manner.

As an ordinary listening process this process calls forth strongly those movements of the etheric body which are otherwise actually carried out in the case of physical movements. They are retained and so, while listening to consonants, the human being lives in a certain tension. Unconsciously he would like to be imitating outwardly, physically, when he listens to consonants, but he holds back. The situation is alive with tension: a state of pacification prevails, but an artificially induced pacification, called forth by the power of one's own ego in opposition to those movements which demand to be carried out. Volition dammed up within itself is manifest when consonants are heard. Therefore you will find that listening to consonants is inwardly exceptionally invigorating. If one has an eye for it one can study how peoples such as the Czechs comport themselves inwardly—how, the human being deports himself in his interior in relation to these tensions, these aggressive forces once one knows that they are built up out of the consonantal element of the language. It is a continual curbing of what unceasingly strives to become physical movement.

Once again it is for the human being a stepping-out, a going over into the condition of sleep, and this going out, this transition into sleep is extraordinarily interesting. Consider the human being schematically: head, rhythmic system, limb-metabolic system. In listening to consonants it is primarily the limb-metabolic system that is engaged. The person wants to move his limbs, wants to break into movement, but the movement is converted into tension. He passes as it were into a state of sleep which actually does not take place in other respects, for the ego and the astral body—which go out in ordinary sleep—remain within the organism. One even tries to bring about a sort of artificial sleep for the limb-metabolic system in this case. But when one falls asleep in the limb-metabolic system to a degree, a strong reaction makes itself evident. This reaction consists of dreaming. However, at the moment one's consciousness is not so organized that one can dream. Dreams come into being that play about the human being. (orange). They affect the outer astrality and the outer ether. People who listen to consonants reinforce the aura in their proximity. This expresses itself in turn in its polarity: what remains here in the subconscious as polar content plays about the head as a volition-feeling factor and penetrates into the organism of the head. (violet). Therefore you may notice an intensification of wilfulness and caprice in people who are accustomed to living in the consonantal element. Dreams transformed into will play through the organism of the head.

What are dreams transformed into will from a physiological point of view? If one examines the etheric-physical correlative, it is essentially what is plastically at work in the organization of the head. The plastic effect on the organization of the head is pre-eminent and in this manner it will be possible to activate to a degree the organization of a head which is retarded. If one has to do with a feeble-minded person, or with someone where it can be demonstrated physically that his head organism is not in order, one should let him do consonants in eurythmy.

Then one engages oneself with those forces which otherwise work as dream-like will in the entire remaining limb-metabolic system, which stimulate there the organization and preserve its activity. One makes the heads of imbeciles and those who are otherwise retarded in their head-organization more active. Thus one can employ this sort of eurythmy to arouse curative forces for the organization of the head, particularly when one carries it out in the intensified form, with the strengthened form of the consonants of which we have heard in the last few days. It is natural that when one wishes to consider the physiology of eurythmy one should keep the active moving human being in view. In ordinary physiology one actually does not pursue physiology at all: even when an experiment is conducted on the living one proceeds from the mechanical; or one starts with the corpse and draws conclusions about physiology in actuality. One then arrives at something which one has inferred. If one wishes to attain to a physiology of these processes, what one otherwise infers must be read from inner activity of man. And it will be seen how this sort of study will quicken the whole of physiology. Consider alone the following: what is the process of digestion as observed in the living human being? It is metabolic activity which thrusts itself into the rhythmic activity, which unfolds in the direction of the rhythmic. Digestive activity is metabolic activity which is caught up to a degree by the rhythm of the circulatory organs. A continuing process, which is a combination of the metabolic activity and rhythmic activity (completed by the German editor) is taking place here. When the rhythm pulses up against it, what is metabolic activity in the lymph is caught up into the rhythm of the organs of circulation and pulled along with it. The more chaotic activity—the chaos astir in the movement of the lymph—is taken over into the rhythm of the circulatory system. Physically human volition lives there where the chaos of the lymph goes over into the regular rhythmic functioning of the circulatory system. One must distinguish this activity of will, which consists in the continual transition taking place between the chaotic vigour in the lymph and the rhythmically regular, harmonising activity present in the circulatory being, from the outer activity into which it however pours. It is, nevertheless, in this way that the inner world of man lying within the skin brings itself into harmony with the outer being of man. Through the subordination of his personal being man encorporates himself into the being of the outer world. Therefore, when one influences this activity through eurythmy—as we have seen with the consonants—one counters in fact the human being's tendency to become self-willed, to become egoistic, and his tendency to become organically egoistic as well. What does it actually mean when man becomes egoistic? Organically expressed it means that the force of plasticity in the organs is diminished and the rigidifying, crystallizing tendency takes the upper hand. The organs no longer want to be modellers, they want to become more crystalline. By means of consonantal eurythmy this tendency can be counteracted.

Here you have an insight deep into the human organism. Egoists are always people whose organs threaten to take on a proper wedge form. They want to become wedges, to become crystalline, where as in the case of people who are pathologically self-less, these organs expand. They have no crystallizing agency; they have plastic forces and become round. That is also a pathological condition. It is always the swing of the pendulum from one extreme to the other to which one must pay heed.

Consider what spiritual activity is: when man thinks and from out of his thinking feels—that is designated spiritual activity in normal life. It is carried out by the most physical part of the head organism and is for precisely this reason the sublimating spiritual activity, the individualizing on the one side, the abstractly felt on the other. When the human being carries out this activity, what happens then? He draws out of his organism the force that enables him to encorporate him-self into the outer world. He draws out of himself the force that, pathologically, entices him to expand. He makes a crystallizer of himself when he is spiritually active. Certain peoples, the more northern peoples in particular, have developed a strong instinctive consciousness of these matters. Today they have as yet no inclination to introduce eurythmy in accordance with this instinctive consciousness. They employ instead what is more outwardly physiologic, Swedish gymnastics and so on. Nevertheless they make decided use of the characteristic alternating effect, by alternating the activity which the children must carry out in scientific study in school—when they must think and so on—with what diverts them to movement. They expect every teacher to be a gymnastic teacher as well and require on the other hand that the gymnastic instructor stands at the spiritual level of the child. Such things should be taken into consideration in an advanced civilization. However if I may make a statement that may appear to be a bit nasty, but is really meant only to enlighten, one must have time if one wishes to take these matters into account instinctively. Such things must be carried out by those peoples who take less part in the process of civilization, who live a life apart, more for themselves, and who are thus able to gradually develop instinctively that which has to do with the rhythm of spiritual and physical activity. The Swedes and the Norwegians who lead a more isolated existence, for example, can put such ideas into practice instinctively particularly well. For others the practice of such matters must be more conscious since these peoples are more engaged in the world processes in general—people, for example, who must concern themselves—as was of late very much the case—with making war and so on. These peoples must see these matters much more consciously. And those nations that stand in the centre of the world's movement, who must take part in its affairs while the world turns around them so to speak, they will soon see what they will get themselves into if they do not turn to these things consciously, how they will gradually degenerate. That is something which Switzerland in particular should take to heart.

These things can be observed to play a part in the state of the world as a whole. The general conditions prevailing in the world are, of course, the result of human activity and even today they proceed more from unconscious human activity than from conscious activity. We are given the task, however, to gradually transmute the unconscious activity of man into conscious activity.

How does this spiritual activity work in man? It awakens the crystallizing forces. In people with weak egos it strengthens the “I”, it makes the ego more egoistic. In people who effuse organically because they are not sufficiently egoistic we will find it necessary to activate the forces of egoism not for the benefit of the soul, but for the body. We could stimulate them by outward means as well; it would be natural to advise people who effuse organically to consume substances containing sugar. However, they sometimes have an antipathy towards them—a fact which gives expression to the true state of affairs.

However, that is something of much less interest to us at the moment. What interests us just now is that through the vowel element in eurythmy one has the possibility of working most effectively in this direction; one can bring the human being organically to himself through the vowels. One can awaken the forces which bring him to himself organically. For certain people that will be most necessary, among them the sleepy headed people. One will find that the alternation between the two, between the vowels and the consonants in eurythmy, will work favourably as well as it enduces a living rhythm in the human being such as should exist between opening oneself to the world and retracting into oneself. That will be called forth by alternating consonantal and vowel elements in eurythmy.

It is, of course, particularly important, when one intends to apply eurythmy for therapeutic purposes, to make one's own what I would like to call this physiologic-psychologic perception of what actually takes place. One should understand that the person who does consonantal eurythmy tends to call forth around himself a sort of aura which works back on him and brings him out of an egoless mingling with the world; in the case of the person who does vowels in eurythmy, his aura is drawn together, densified in itself, which is, of course, always the case with spiritual activity as well, and that the inner organs are thus stimulated to bring the person to himself.

Pedagogically considered, alternating between the lessons one would place more in the morning hours where more mental work would be done and the lessons in which there would be more movement and where a great deal of eurythmy would be done calls forth rhythmic activity in the growing child that has an extraordinarily beneficial effect; all the detriments that are of necessity incurred through an improportionate mental exertion are balanced out again by doing eurythmy. For this reason eurythmy has an especially beneficial function within the curriculum as a whole.

That which I have to say about eurythmy particularly to the physicians I will convey in the course of my lectures to them. Thus we conclude our consideration of eurythmy as such here. Tomorrow there will be two consecutive medical lectures where the eurythmists are not present.

[ 1 ] No-one, who aims at achieving a radical relation between his own thought and contemporary philosophical ideas, can avoid the issue, raised in the first paragraph of this book, of the existential status of the psyche. This he will have to justify not only to himself, but also in the light of those ideas. Now many people do not feel this need, since they are acquainted with the authentically psychic through immediate inner experience (Erleben) and know how to distinguish that from the psychic apprehension (Erfahren) effected through the senses. It strikes them as an unnecessary, perhaps an irritating, intellectual hair-splitting. And if they are positively averse, the more philosophically minded are often unwilling for a different reason. They are unwilling to concede to inner soul experiences any other status than that of subjective apprehensions without cognitive significance. They are little disposed therefore to ransack their philosophical concepts for those elements in them that could lead on to anthroposophical ideas. These repugnances, coming from opposite sides, make the exposition extraordinarily difficult. But it is necessary. For in our time the only kind of ideas to which cognitive validity can be assigned are such as will bear the same kind of critical examination as the laws of natural science must satisfy, before they can claim to have been established.

To establish, epistemologically, the validity of anthroposophical ideas, it is first of all necessary to conceive as precisely as possible the manner in which they are experienced. This can be done in several very different ways. Let us attempt to describe two of them. The first way requires that we observe the phenomenon of memory. Rather a weak point incidentally in current philosophical theory; for the concepts we find there concerning memory throw very little light on it. I take my departure from ideas which I have, in point of fact, reached by anthroposophical methods, but which can be fully supported both philosophically and physiologically. Limitations of space will not permit of my making good this assertion in the present work. I hope to do so in a future one.¹ I am convinced, however, that anyone who succeeds in candidly surveying the findings of modern physiological and psychological science will find that they support the following observations.

Representations stimulated by sense-impressions enter the field of unconscious human experience. From there they can be brought up again, remembered. Representations themselves are a purely psychic reality; but awareness of them in normal waking life is somatically conditioned. Moreover the psyche, bound up as it is with the body, cannot by using its own forces raise representations from their unconscious to their conscious condition. For that it requires the forces of the body. To the end of normal memory the body has to function, just as the body has to function in the processes of its sense-organs, in order to bring about representations through the senses. If I am to represent a sensory event, a somatic activity must first come about within the sense organs; and, within the psyche, the representation appears as its result. In the same way, if I am to remember a representation or idea, an inner somatic activity (in refined organs), an activity polarically counter to the activity of the senses, must occur; and, as a result, the remembered representation comes forth. This representation is related to a sensory event which was presented to my soul at some time in the past. I represent that event to myself through an inner experience, to which my somatic organisation enables me.

Keep clearly in mind the character of such a memory-presentation, and with its help you approach the character of anthroposophical ideas. They are certainly not memory-presentations, but they issue in the psyche in a similar way. Many people, anxious to form ideas about the spiritual world in a less subtle way, find this disappointing. But the spiritual world cannot be experienced any more solidly than a happening in the sense world apprehended in the past but no longer present to the sight. In the case of memory we have seen that our ability to remember such a happening comes from the energy of the somatic organisation. To the experience of the existentially psychic, on the other hand, as distinct from that of memory, this energy can make no contribution. Instead, the soul must awaken in itself the ability to accomplish with certain representations what the body accomplishes with the representations of the senses, when it implements their recall. The former—elicited from the depths of the psyche solely through the energy of the psyche, as memory-presentations are elicited from the depths of human nature through its somatic organisation—are representations related to the spiritual world. They are available to every soul. What has to be won, in order to become aware of them, is the energy to elicit them from the depths of the psyche by a purely psychic activity. As the remembered representations of the senses are related to a past sense-impression, so are these others related to a nexus between the psyche and the domain of spirit, a nexus which is not via the sense-world. The human soul stands towards the spiritual world, as the whole human being stands towards a forgotten actuality. It comes to the knowledge of that world, if it brings, to the point where they awake, energies which are similar to those bodily forces that promote memory. Thus, ideas of the authentically psychic depend for their philosophical validation on the kind of inquiry into the life within us that leads us to find there an activity purely psychic, which yet resembles in some ways the activity exerted in remembering.

[ 2 ] A second way of forming a concept of the purely psychic is as follows. The attention may be directed to what anthropological observation has to say about the willing (operant) human being. An impulse of will that is to be carried into effect has as its ground the mental representation of what is to be willed. The dependence of this representation on the bodily organisation (nervous system) can be physiologically discerned. Bound up with the representation there is a nuance of feeling, an affective sympathy with the represented, which is the reason why this representation furnishes the impulse for a willed act. But from that point on psychic experience disappears into the depths; and the first thing that reappears in consciousness is the result. What is next represented, in fact, is the movement we make in order to achieve the represented goal. (Theodor Ziehen puts all this very clearly in his physiological psychology.) We can now perhaps see how, in the case of a willed act, the conscious process of mental representation is suspended in regard to the central moment of willing itself. That which is psychically experienced in the willing of an operation executed through the body, does not penetrate normal consciousness. But we do see plainly enough that that willing is realised through an act of the body. What is much harder to see is, that the psyche, when it is observing the laws of logic and seeking the truth by connecting ideas together, is also unfolding will. A will which is not to be circumscribed within physiological laws. For, if that were so, it would be impossible to distinguish an illogical—or simply an a-logical—chain of ideas from one which follows the laws of logic. (Superficial chatter around the fancy that logical consequence could be a property the mind acquires through adapting itself to the outer world, need not be taken seriously.) In this willing, which takes place entirely within the psyche, and which leads to logically grounded convictions, we can detect the permeation of the soul by an entirely spiritual activity.

Of what goes on in the will, when it is directed outwards, ordinary ideation knows as little as a man knows of himself when he is asleep. Something similar is true of his being regulated by logic in the formation of his convictions; he is less fully conscious of this than he is of the actual content of such convictions. Nevertheless anyone capable of looking inward, albeit only in the anthropological mode, will be able to form a concept of the co-presence of this being-regulated-by logic to normal consciousness. He will come to realise that the human being knows of this being-regulated, in the manner that he knows while dreaming. It is paradoxical but perfectly correct to say: normal consciousness knows the content of its convictions; but it only dreams of the regulation by logic that is extant in the pursuit of these convictions. Thus we see that, in ordinary-level consciousness, the human being sleeps through his willing, when he unfolds and exercises his will in an outward direction; he dreams his willing, when, in his thinking, he is seeking for convictions. Only it is clear that, in the latter instance, what he dreams of cannot be anything corporeal, for otherwise logical and physiological laws would coincide. The concept to be grasped is that of the willing that lives in the mental pursuit of truth. That is also the concept of an existentially psychic.

From both of these epistemological approaches, in the sense of anthroposophy, to the concept of the existentially psychic (and they are not the only possible ones), it becomes evident how sharply this concept is divorced from visions, hallucinations, mediumship or any kind of abnormal psychic activity. For the origin of all these abnormalities must be sought in the physiologically determinable. But the psychic, as anthroposophy understands it, is not only something that is experienced in the mode of normal and healthy consciousness; it is something that is experienced, even while representations are being formed, in total vigilance—and is experienced in the same way that we remember a happening undergone earlier in life, or alternatively in the same way that we experience the logically conditioned formation of our convictions. It will be seen that the cognitive experience of anthroposophy proceeds by way of representations and ideas that maintain the character of that normal consciousness with which, as well as with reality, the external world endows us; while at the same time they add to it endowments leading into the domain of the spirit. By contrast the visionary, hallucinatory, etc. type of experience subsists in a consciousness that adds nothing to the norm, but actually takes away from it by eliminating some faculties already acquired; so that there the level of consciousness falls below the level that obtains in conscious sense-perception.

For those of my readers who are acquainted with what I have written elsewhere² concerning recollection and memory I would add the following. Representations that have entered the unconscious and are subsequently remembered are to be located, so long as they remain unconscious, as representations within that component of the human body which is there identified as a life-body (etheric body). But the activity, through which representations anchored in the life-body are remembered, belongs to the physical body. I emphasise this in case some, who jump hastily to conclusions, should construe as an inconsistency what is in fact a distinction made necessary by this particular context.

• 1. I have not been able to trace where, if at all, this intention was carried out—- Editor
• 2. For example, in Occult Science: an Outline, pp. 45-8 and 336.

"There is nothing more terrible than active ignorance." This is one of Goethe's sayings in prose. If it is correct - and it seems to me that it is - then I would like to use it as a legal title when I find the way in which the gentlemen of the pen are currently "active" and "terrible" for the most part. I recently read a dramatic work by Hermann Sudermann called "Heimat", which I have also seen on the stages, which today almost only represent the half-world. The author has also written a good play, "Sodoms Ende", and a rather bad one, "Die Ehre". Although the latter is undramatic, it finally contains conflicts that are taken from deep-rooted damage to our social life. The shy leather-wearing philistine, who still realizes that Eugen Richter is not the right representative of the people after all, sees with wistful delight the made-up dolls that stand for figures of life, which his liberal nose could bump into twenty times without understanding the wretched situation of such people. That is why "The Honor" is given often and everywhere. "Sodom's End" contains a deeper, celestial conflict. That is why a man who has read a lot about protective tariffs and free trade does not understand it, and - the play is rarely performed. But "Heimat" was trumpeted as a play of epoch-making importance by the all-knowing masters of the feuilleton. All "active ignorance", perhaps better said: uneducated and therefore purely arbitrary taste. When the gentlemen say that at present it is not at all important that our plays should satisfy the educated who have educated their taste; it is rather important to offer something to the people, to those people who have never had time and opportunity to cultivate their taste, such a word may be acceptable when it comes to "Die Ehre"; but it is superficial in comparison with "Heimat". Here we are dealing with social classes to whom one must make higher demands. To present a woman like Magda as the antithesis of the old, rusty philistinism is to produce half-measures that can only mislead. The woman who really suffers under the pressure of circumstances, because the free development of her talents is made impossible, would hardly want to have anything to do with the higher circus wisdom of a Magda. This Magda is untrue from head to toe, because she wants us to believe that the standpoint of modern femininity can only be achieved through brutality.

I am surprised that so few critical eyes have noticed the untruth of this play. Because it really wouldn't have been that difficult this time. But there is an "active ignorance" that knows very little about what a human heart can and cannot experience.

More and more, our criticism is losing the great trait that comes from real knowledge of the world and a competent 'will', and the public's taste is sinking ever deeper. We must not be unclear about the fact that criticism has a great influence on the education of the public. This is much more the case in artistic matters than in those where the judgment of the intellect is more important. If someone makes a wrong intellectual judgment, I will be able to dissuade him from his error in a relatively short time by making the truth palpable to him. The same is not true of the judgment of taste. That is the product of a longer educational process. I will not easily convince anyone of the falsity of Sudermann's figures if he has been reading in his favorite newspaper for a long time that this is what the "new poet" must do. In particular, it will be difficult to put something better in the place of inveterate trivialities.

I have only said all this here to characterize the slippery slope that "active ignorance" has taken us down. We will only return to a healthy state of affairs when the critic who knows nothing and judges everything is replaced by someone who approaches the intellectual products of his contemporaries on the basis of a well-established view of life and the world. Today, instead of a competent but constantly evolving view of things, we find arbitrary art and science recipes based on nothing; journalistic recruits use their clumsy shooting sticks as critical marshal batons.

Under such conditions, it is no wonder that criticism is usually completely unfruitful for the productive spirit, and that an understanding of the value of contemporary literary products is virtually an impossibility. I am convinced that a literary product of real value is rarely judged in completely opposite ways by two people who are based on a purified view of life. Today, a book is declared by one person to be a European event, while the other considers it to be the product of the purest folly. Such judgments may well stem from subjective arbitrariness, but not from a true knowledge of the subject and a deeper understanding of the world.

In the face of such circumstances, one would not like to pin one's judgment of contemporary literary products to the letterpress printer's material. Not much comes of it. Sometimes, however, one has to say something about this or that, especially if it is of such a typical nature as the little booklet about which I now want to say a few words. I am referring to Richard Specht's little dramatic sketch "Sündentraum". I was interested in this little book. Its author had a thought:

"Everyone sins, even if only in dreams,
Sin has room in every heart,
For there is only one thing that drives life
Only one thing that remains constant in change,
To chase the happiness that always sprays out,
To fan the flame that burns out in the night."

Specht puts these words into the mouth of "sin". From her mouth we would know what we humans actually are. I know a certain Tantalus. Richard Specht seems to have no little desire to portray him as the archetype of humanity. But the author knows how to console us about our Tantalus torments:

"You are a fool, will you pine for the eternal—
I'll teach you to fully enjoy, fully despise!"

I do not agree with this at all. For it is indeed clear to me that, according to the sound, despise rhymes with languish, but not that in reality it is compatible with fully enjoy. I would not reproach the poet for these things in a schoolmasterly way if his dramatic sketch did not contain a thoroughly symbolic plot with symbolic characters, and if sin did not remain the victor in the end; it ends the play, "glaringly exultant":

"Down - down - to the swamp - to the happiness of sin! -"

If this is supposed to be symbolic for us humans, then I have to say that I reply in good Nietzschean - or should that be Goethean - fashion: no matter how many ragged marks of sin people attach to me, I cover them with the cloak of pagan pride and claim my universal human right to heaven. Why into the "swamp"? Here lies the crux of the matter. Richard Specht is a poet of great talent who can do more than just write beautiful verses. He has something that hundreds of our writing contemporaries lack: the insight that there is something in the world besides front and back houses, besides philistine generals and emancipated singers, besides ragged artists and lascivious society ladies, in short, besides flesh and senses. But he only knows it because he has read about it in other people's books. For him, everything is a concept, nothing is experience. His problems are not acquired, but learned. He can do a lot, but he has experienced little. If he had equal perfection in both, I believe that he would write better than some of the younger writers who are highly praised today. I say this even though I know that the "Sinful Dream" leaves much to be desired, for I know that a single serious experience will turn Richard Specht into an important poet. He only has to experience it deeply and thoroughly, and not after the example of his compatriot Hermann Bahr. I have just read his latest novel "Beside Love". In it I find a piece of Viennese life described. I even know some of the things in this book very well. But reading it, I was vividly reminded of Allers' Bismarck pictures. Here and there, purely external sketches, without penetrating into the center of the characters. Bahr draws the Viennese mind, like everything the genius of Bismarck. I particularly regret the former. Bahr is a brilliant personality who can be credited with anything, but who is finally consumed by the most vain vanity. I am the last person who would like to hear Hermann Bahr speak in an unctuous idealistic tone; but there are more things on earth than he can dream of with his tails and floppy hat wisdom. The Parisian artist's curl suits the French child of the world quite well, but it doesn't turn the simple Linzer into a Frenchman. Hermann Bahr proved this to us in recent weeks when he traveled from one German "authority" to another to ask the gentlemen for their opinion on the Jews. In the eyes of the suave Hermann Bahr, I am probably only a German philosopher, but I would never have committed the "unworldly" act of asking all these gentlemen, because what they all say in this matter has been "known for a long time". I found little worldliness and much philistinism in the "European" Hermann. I would no more like to ask Adolf Wagner for his opinion on the Jews than I would ask Eugen Richter for his opinion on the Social Democrats, and I have never been to Russia or Spain. Hermann Bahr knows the world. But he knows it like Count Trast-Saarberg in Sudermann's "Honor": superficially and without sympathy. Trast loves with his imagination in the Orient, with his senses in the South, with his wallet in France and with his conscience in Germany. Ultimately, this means nothing other than that he has adopted the pose of the respective countrymen everywhere. He is a comedian, not an artist of life. His love is imitation, because there is no soul in it. Trast is the type of person for whom the world can only be taken ironically. But their irony is a child of their superficiality. Their humor is cynical. They believe they have an overview of the world and can be squeezed into one of their clumsy conceptual templates by any idealistic dolt.

The fact that we currently encounter people of Trast's character so often in life best characterizes our age as one of overripe education. Looking at life with a sense of humor is part of a high level of education. A rich imaginative and rational content are the preconditions of humor. One must first know a thing above which one rises, and which one then looks at indifferently from above. But after the justified humorists come the actors of humor who, although they do not know things, play the superior who can despise them. These are the humorists of smugness. They are useful for playing Trast roles on the world stage. But those who want to deal seriously with serious things limit their dealings with them to the coffee house and drawing room.

There is much ¹ today about "new art", about the "spirit of modernism", in view of the next recital by the court actor Mr. Neuffer, who will also be reciting poems by M. E. delle Grazie.. One sometimes has the impression that the whole younger generation is already filled with this spirit. Sometimes, however, there is something that casts serious doubt on the truth of this impression. An epic "Robespierre" by M.E. delle Grazie was published a year ago. More than in any other contemporary work of poetry, one should have seen in this epic the dawn of a new age. But the harsh critics of "modernism" seem to want to pass it by carelessly. They don't 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 often 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 allow Homer's Iliad to take effect 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 to the misery of everyday life, but because she sees disharmony in the great development of mankind. 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. 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 have any desire for it. We can trace the path that led her to this height in the poems she published before "Robespierre". Fifteen years ago, she published her first volume of poems, quickly followed by the epic "Hermann", the drama "Saul" and the novella "Die Zigeunerin". The captivating rhetorical verve, the creative power and the depth of thought, which reached their temporary climax in "Robespierre", already enliven these first products. Poems from which we believe we can hear the sound of nature itself are contained in the first volume mentioned above. While the poet was working on "Robespierre", she sent another collection of poems, "Italian Vignettes", and two stories, "The Rebel" and "Bozi", out into the world. The "Italian Vignettes" grew out of the mood that overcame her when she saw, during a trip to Rome, how human greatness can go hand in hand with human nothingness, Caesar power with ethical rot, a sense of mastery with a sense of slavery. With her clairvoyant eye, she saw this in the stony remains of a great age and expressed it in her "vignettes". In "Rebel" she portrays a gypsy from the Hungarian Tisza region who, despite his gypsy life, has risen to the heights of humanity, who sees through life in its depths so that he lives as a wise man among fools and recognizes truth where others only worship hypocritical masks. To shape this character in such a way that he stands before us in convincing truth, as delle Grazie has done, requires a deep insight into the world and a consummate artistic creative power. And in the story "Bozi", she proves that she can strike a note of true humor as well as sublime seriousness. "Bozi" is a buffalo, but not an ordinary herd buffalo, but a master buffalo, a superior buffalo. He does not conform to the rules laid down for buffaloes in the "eternal world order" and thus apes the entire high society of his place of residence.

Much is to be expected from a mind that begins like this. It should be the task of those who speak of "modern education" to follow the work of this genius.

• 1. talk

Every person must be absolutely free to begin the occult development of the soul's powers. But anyone who wants to undergo higher spiritual development must also observe the necessary conditions and submit to them.

Sleep is the starting point for the consideration of the development of the spiritual senses. In sleep, the physical and etheric bodies are in the realm of consciousness, while the astral body and I are outside of them. When a person begins to develop clairvoyance during sleep, the body is deprived of the forces that previously restored the physical and etheric bodies for a certain period of time. These forces must be replaced in some other way if the physical and etheric bodies are not to be seriously endangered. If this does not happen, they will lose a great deal of their strength and amoral entities will take possession of them. Therefore it may happen that people develop astral clairvoyance but become immoral beings. How long the preliminary exercises take depends entirely on the individual. It depends entirely on the level of development the person has already reached by the time he begins his training. Therefore the teacher must first see through the inner state of soul of the pupil. The preparation time is therefore often very different.

The following sentence is important: The more rhythm one has introduced, the more one can leave an entity and a thing to its own devices. Thus, the secret disciple must also develop a certain regularity, a rhythm, into his world of thoughts. To do this, it is necessary:

Firstly, control of thoughts, that is, the disciple may only allow those thoughts to enter into himself that he himself wants. These exercises require a lot of patience and perseverance. But if you do them for only five minutes a day, they are already of importance for the inner life.

Secondly: initiative in actions. These should be things that originally come from one's own soul.

Thirdly: inner composure. This helps one to develop a much finer sense of compassion.

Fourthly: to look for and find the positive side in all things and processes. I recall the beautiful legend of Christ and the dead dog.

Fifthly: to be impartial and unprejudiced. One should always keep the possibility open to recognize new facts.

Sixthly: inner balance and inner harmony.

When a person has developed all these qualities within himself, a rhythm comes into his inner life that the astral body no longer needs to perform regeneration during sleep. Because of these exercises, such an equilibrium comes into the etheric body that it can protect and restore itself. Those who begin occult training without developing these six qualities run the risk of being exposed to the worst entities at night. But once you have practised these six qualities for a while, you may begin to develop your astral senses and then you start to sleep consciously. Your dreams are no longer random, but they gain regularity; the astral world rises before you. Now you have the ability to perceive everything of a soul nature in your surroundings in pictures. You develop a relationship to the reality of the soul. This pictorial consciousness is called imagination. At first the pupil acquires imagination in sleep, but later on he must be able to evoke this state at any time of the day. He learns to transfer the experiences of sleep into the waking consciousness. But this ability is only valuable for the occultist when he can see the auras of living beings fully consciously.

The first step is therefore imagination. The development of the so-called lotuses, the sacred wheels or chakrams, which lie at very specific points on the body, is connected with this. There are seven such astral organs. The first, the two-petalled lotus flower, is in the region of the root of the nose; the second, the sixteen-petalled, is at the level of the larynx; the third, the twelve-petalled, is at the level of the heart; the fourth, the eight- to ten-leaved, near the navel; the fifth, the six-leaved, somewhat lower down; the sixth, the four-leaved, which is connected with everything that is fertilization, is even further down; the seventh cannot be spoken of without further ado. These six organs have the same significance for the spiritual world as the physical senses for the perception of the sensory world. An image for this is the so-called swastika. Through the above-mentioned exercises, they first become brighter, then they begin to move. In today's human beings they are immobile, in the Atlanteans they were still mobile, and in the Lemurians they were still moving very actively. But in those days they turned in the opposite direction to that of those who have occult development today, where they turn in a clockwise direction. An analogy to the dream-like clairvoyant state of the Lemurians is the fact that even today, with atavistic clairvoyance, the lotus flowers still turn in the same direction as they once did in Atlantean and Lemurian times, namely in an anticlockwise direction. The clairvoyance of mediums is unconscious, without thought control, but that of the genuine clairvoyant is conscious and precisely monitored by the thoughts. Mediumship is very dangerous, but the healthy secret training is completely harmless. (See appendix.)

Our present considerations will impress us with their deeper and real meaning only if we do not take them in a merely theoretical way, since they are in the highest sense truths of life. Rather, we must draw from them certain consequences for our feelings and sentiments that may enable us to look upon life differently than is often done by those who have not been prepared to do so by an anthroposophical view. Our minds must be broadened through spiritual science to grasp the truth of life. This means that we must learn to compare the nature of truth as it meets us in life with the one-sided thinking about the truth that so easily befalls people. It is all too easy to get into the habit of forming opinions about this or that, not merely about everyday matters but also about the most important facts of life, and then fortifying our point of view with this opinion, paying no attention to the fact that the world may be viewed from the most varied standpoints. Thus, we can attain to the truth only when we feel and realize how everything, every single fact, can be viewed from many standpoints. I will relate the course of a certain life in order that I may give you an example, a kind of illustration of what I mean. We are now dealing with what we call karma, the passage of the human being through repeated earthly lives, the destiny of man, which is expressed in the course a human life takes. We can learn much through the examples of individual lives if we view them correctly in the light of repeated earthly lives.

In this example, we have to do with a person who was born in the sixteenth century. In order to consider the hereditary influences that people today like to emphasize, let us first look at his father. The father of this man who was born in the sixteenth century was a rather versatile person but also an extraordinarily obstinate one; this was characterized by a certain harshness in the expression of his life. He was well-acquainted with music, played the lute and other string instruments, was also familiar with geometry and mathematics, and his profession was that of a merchant. His harshness may be more readily understandable from the following. He had a certain music teacher who, at that time in the sixteenth century, was a highly respected man. As a pupil of this man, he wrote a book on music, but this did not please his teacher and he took issue with it in a book of his own. The pupil then became really quite angry and wrote another volume in which he included all possible contempt he could muster against the “ancient and rusty views” of his music teacher. Then he dedicated the book to him, saying expressly in the dedication, “Since you deigned to turn against me in such an obtrusive manner, I want to give you an opportunity to experience this pleasure more often. You obviously enjoy this sort of thing and that is why I dedicate this book to you.”

The son of this man is the person whose course of life I wish to tell you about in a slightly disguised way. As was the custom in those days, he at first pursued the study of Greek and Latin with a famous teacher in Italy because his father attached great importance to having him well-instructed. He studied the humanities with a monk, learned mathematics from his father and, in addition, learned drawing, perspective, and the like with other teachers. Possessing an extraordinary capacity for mathematics and mechanics, he continued to excel in these fields and became quite a versatile young man. Even as a boy he had made all sorts of models of machines that were useful at that time. Today, you know, boys make only airplanes, but then other ships were made. At eighteen, the young man went to the university, studying medicine at first—excuse this just after we have heard that passage from Faust.¹⁰⁶ But he had a somewhat different experience than the student who has just been presented to you in that scene of “Mephisto and the Student.” He did not pass through his medical studies as if he were in a dream, nor did he say, “They're not so bad.” No, he really disliked studying medicine since he found that this discipline proceeded in an unsystematic way, one fact simply following after another with no true connection. Then he turned to philosophy. In those days it was the custom of some individuals to attack Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who had hitherto been so greatly honored. Having one of these critics as his teacher, our young man fell into the same habit of criticizing and hating Aristotle. Although his father was an extraordinarily competent man, he was not well-liked because of his various characteristics. So, after his son had studied for a few years, he did not have much money and tried to secure a scholarship for him. He did not succeed, however, and was compelled to provide further instruction for him with the money he earned with sweat and blood.

After the son had struggled through his medical and philosophical studies, he had reason to feel most fortunate. He became a professor at one of the most famous universities of his country, teaching mathematics and also practicing medicine, of which he had a good deal of knowledge from his student days. On the whole, he was a quite popular teacher. But at this university things got a little hot for him. This came about through a book that was published containing a description of a public project, a mechanical project. It was written by an eminent gentleman who was not too intelligent, but who was the son of an actual princely personality of that particular state. Our professor, although still relatively young, had little difficulty in proving it would be impossible to carry out this project. Much hostility was then aroused against him and, although he had already succeeded in attracting attention to himself through his accomplishments, he no longer felt entirely comfortable in that particular city and university. The opportunity arose to go to another university in a republican state. At this university also, he soon became well-known, had many students and, what was then a mere matter of course, gave many private lessons so that he had an excellent income. He needed a good deal of money because his father had died and he had to support his mother and sisters. In order that we may see a little more clearly into the karma of this person let me mention the following authenticated fact; it was related by a contemporary to whom it was told by the man himself. Moreover, no matter with what philological finesse the endeavor is made to get at the fact, it is demonstrably true. This man with whom we are dealing, now teaching in a republican university, once had a dream in which he saw himself walking over burning coals and ashes and knew that they must have come from the burning of the cathedral in the city where he had previously been a professor. He related this dream and also wrote of it in many letters. It was later revealed that the very same night he had this dream, the cathedral had actually burned down.

Now, he was most successful; indeed, he made significant scientific discoveries, for which others claimed part of the credit as was then the custom and is still so to some extent even now, without thanking him. He became fairly prosperous but not sufficiently so in his own mind, especially since he had to drive himself so hard. He had to give many private lessons, earning a little thereby, to be sure, but it required a good deal of work. Now, his Italian contemporaries and later others tell in an interesting way how he was a man so much occupied with his brain that—I simply repeat what was related—he had little time to pay attention to the impulses of his heart. He was, therefore, quite clever but somewhat less lovable. Thus, he never officially married but lived, as his contemporaries say, in a common-law marriage with a certain Marina Gamba by whom he had two daughters, whom he sent into a convent, and a son, whom he later legitimized. Although he became the instructor of many famous people—for example, he taught Gustav Adolf, who later became the king of Sweden—things were not entirely as he wished them. So he applied to the Grand Duke of his native land where he had previously been a professor. This was in 1610. The fact was that he was striving to gain more free time to devote to inventions and discoveries. It is interesting, therefore, to observe the man somewhat more carefully since he was really a sort of child of his age. For this reason I should like to read to you, in a pretty good translation, a letter that he wrote to obtain a more fitting position at the court of the Grand Duke. He writes to a friend about his correspondence with the Grand Duke:

Your grace's letter was heartily welcome, first, because it lets me know that his most serene Highness, the Grand Duke, my Lord, remembers me, and then because it assures me of the continued goodwill of the right honorable Signor Aeneas Piccolomini, infinitely highly treasured by me, as also of the love of your Grace, which causes you to perceive my interest and induces you to write me in such friendly fashion about circumstances of great importance. For this service I remain always under obligation both to the right honorable Signor Aeneas and also to your Grace, render you endless thanks, and consider it my duty, as evidence of the value I attach to such goodness, to speak with these gentlemen concerning thoughts and those life relationships in which it would be my desire to pass the years that still remain to me. I hope that an opportunity might present itself when the right honorable Aeneas, with his keenness and versatility, might give a more definite answer to our august Lord, toward whose Highness, in addition to that reverent relationship and most obedient subjection that is due him from every one of his loyal servants, I feel myself, moreover, inclined with such special devotion and, as I may be permitted to say, so much love. Even God does not require any other feeling of us than that we should love Him, but I would set aside every other interest, and there is no position whatever for which I would not exchange my own state if I should learn that this would please His Highness. This answer might then suffice to realize any decision it might please His Highness to form in regard to my person. But if, as we may assume, His Highness, full of humanity and goodness, which renders him worthy of fame among all others and will ever render him more and more worthy, will unite together with my service to him every other satisfaction for me, I will then not refrain from speaking my mind. For twenty years now, and indeed throughout the best part of my life, I have labored even to minute detail, as it is said, upon the demand of anybody and everybody, to share any small talent that had come into my possession from God or through my own endeavors in my vocation. But now I would really wish to attain sufficient leisure and peace to be able to bring to completion before my life ends three great works I have on my hands so that I may publish these. I would hope to do this perhaps to the honor of myself and also of everyone who might support me in such undertakings, through the fact that I would perhaps bring to those studying in this special field greater, more general, and more lasting service than I could otherwise do for the rest of my life. I do not believe that I could have greater leisure elsewhere than I have here as long as I am compelled to obtain the support of my family out of my official duties as a teacher and from private lessons. Moreover, I would not willingly do such work in another city than in this one, for various reasons that it would be too cumbersome to enumerate. Yet, the freedom I have here is not sufficient, since I must sacrifice, upon the demand of one person and another, many hours of the day and often the best. No matter how brilliant and generous a republic, to retain a remuneration from it without rendering service to its general community is not customary. As long as I am able to give lectures and to render service, no one in a republic can release me from this obligation without ending my income; in short, I cannot hope to receive such a favor from anyone else than an absolute prince. Yet I should not wish, after what I have said, to appear to make unjustified claims upon your Grace, as if I were seeking for support without a corresponding service and obligation. That is not my purpose; on the contrary. As concerns a corresponding service, I have various inventions of which even a single one would suffice to provide a support for my life, if I should meet a great prince who should take pleasure in it. Experience shows me that things that are, perhaps, of far less significant value have a great advantage for their discoverer, and it had always been my thought to place these things before my Prince and natural master rather than before others. He in turn could do with these things and with the inventor as he might see it, and to receive from them, if it should please him, not only the ore, but also the metal. I find new things of this kind every day and would find many more if I had the leisure and more favorable opportunities to secure skillful persons whose help I could utilize in various investigations. So far as concerns further the daily rendering of service—that is, public and private lectures—I have only a distaste against that venal servitude in which I must offer my work in exchange for whatever remuneration pleases any purchaser; but to render service to a Prince or a great Lord, and to anyone dependent upon him, would never cause me any feeling of repugnance. On the contrary, I would earnestly desire this and strive for it, and since your Grace wanted to know from me something about my income here, I will tell you that the compensation for my service amounts to 520 gold gulden, which will be changed to an equal number of scudi within a few months when I receive my new position, of which I am just as good as certain. This money I can in great part save, since I obtain a large supplementary assistance for the support of my household through having private students and through my earnings from private lessons, although I rather discourage than seek to give many such lessons. I have a far greater longing for more free time than for money, since I know that it would be much more difficult for me to acquire a sufficient sum of money to give me any distinction than a certain amount of fame through my scientific work.

This man was then really summoned to this court. The only requirement was that he deliver lectures on the occasions when there were unusual events, brilliant occasions, festival affairs at which the Grand Duke had to appear and where it was necessary to make a good impression on foreign visitors. As for the rest, he was simply to receive his support salary and devote himself entirely to his studies. For a time things went well, indeed. Even poets, noblemen, and princes honored him and held all kinds of festivities because they considered him a great man. He himself—it was on February 3, 1613—composed the text for a masquerade in which he represented himself as Jupiter enthroned on the clouds. He could easily be recognized in his disguise and since the four moons of Jupiter had just been discovered by Galileo¹⁰⁷ and had been given the names of the four princes of the house, even these four princes appeared in the entourage. It was an altogether unusual, festive pageantry.

The kindness of the Prince, however, gradually subsided and after a certain time he actually betrayed this man of learning. The clergy found that his views did not agree with theirs. Moreover, he was impoverished at the close of his life and died in genuine disillusionment. He had thoroughly tasted the ingratitude and fickleness of fate. He had learned fully how some princes behave in the long run, and he had experienced the hatred of the clergy.

I have now given you a factual account of the life of a human being. But now I would like to relate this life story in a different way, from another perspective, as it were.

On February 18, 1564, the great Galileo was born. His father, Vincenzo Galileo, was extraordinarily well-acquainted with music, played the lute and other string instruments well, was occupied with geometry, and at first taught his son music himself. The boy pursued his studies in Latin and Greek with distinguished teachers; he learned the humanities with a monk and then went to the University of Pisa where he studied medicine without much satisfaction, then turned to philosophy, became an anti-Aristotelian under the influence of the contemporary anti-Aristotelian tendency. At that time he was already such a genius that one day as he sat in the Cathedral of Pisa watching the church lamp swing, he discovered the principle of the pendulum's isochronism, a most important discovery that has had significance ever since. This event was told by Galileo's contemporaries. I am constantly being told that this story is a myth, but I will continue to relate it because it is true.

In spite of the importance of Galileo's thoughts upon observing this swinging church lamp, his father could not obtain a stipend for him. Then, after he had pursued his geometrical studies, he became a professor at the University of Pisa. There he lectured on mathematics for sixty scudi a year and also practiced medicine. We know that he actually did practice medicine from a letter he wrote to his father in which he asked that the writings of the ancient physician Galen be sent him as a guide. He sharply criticized the writing of the highly placed but imprudent Cosimo I¹⁰⁸ that was published at that time. Then things became too hot for him in Pisa and since the Venetian Republic invited him to teach there, appreciating him more than his native state, he went to Padua in 1592. Galileo Galilei became a professor at the University of Padua and lectured with great distinction on mathematics and related subjects; he also constructed sun dials according to special principles and perfected the knowledge of mechanics. It was there that Giambattista Doni in his letters on dreams wrote that Galileo had the dream of which I have told you; this was the dream where he was walking over glowing coals and ashes. The Cathedral of Pisa burned at the time Galileo had his dream, and he wrote of this in letters to many contemporaries. About this time he invented the proportional circles and machines for raising water, made important discoveries in connection with the telescope and the thermoscope, and made observations regarding the barometer and other things, credit for which was claimed by other people, whereas in most cases it is to be attributed to him. I have already told you the story of his common-law marriage; it happened as I related it so I need not repeat it. Likewise, his letter was written in the way I have told you. Thus, he was actually transferred from Padua back to his native state and things happened to him there as I have said. It was Galileo who produced that masquerade in which he represented himself as Jupiter enthroned on the clouds, and it was he who gave the names of the Medici to the four satellites of Jupiter, which led to their representing them at this festival. The fact that he was not well-treated by the clergy, and that, in relation to it, he was betrayed by his prince, is known from history. Although all sorts of things in the story of his recantation are true, the assertion made by everybody that he said, “And yet it does move,” is certainly false. I have frequently pointed this out.

So this is the matter when it is reenacted from another point of view. You will observe that even though I did not relate false things the first time, your feelings for the man were probably not the same as when I related the story the second time. And you will also agree that your feelings the second time were definitely those that almost every person has when he or she thinks about Galileo, the astronomer. You will see from this that much knowledge is lacking in what many think. They certainly do not know much about Galileo but think and feel about him, not because of what they know, but because the name Galileo Galilei has a certain significance in history.

We must take into consideration, however, that what a man produces through his genius has meaning for the physical world. The fact that there are satellites around Jupiter was a discovery of immense importance for the evolution of the earth, but it has no significance for the concerns of the spiritual world, that is, for the beings of the higher hierarchies. So it is with the other discoveries of Galileo. They are such that they have a great significance for the earth. What, then, was the substance of what I first related? It was his personal fate. Apart from the fact that Galileo was an important man because of his earthly discoveries, it was his personal fate, the misery he experienced in his vocation, his—well, what shall I say—perhaps his loyalty toward the Prince, and so forth. In other words, I first told you what his daily affairs were, but because it concerns him personally it is also what has significance when he bears it through the portal of death and has to develop it between death and a new birth. We must go into such studies as this to educate ourselves regarding the question of human destiny, which cuts so deeply into life. It is precisely with significant, distinguished human lives that we must do this.

There is much talk about heredity nowadays and many questions are considered solely in connection with it. I first told you the story of the life of Galileo in such a way that you could observe it without any preconception. I related his life to that of his father, so that we perhaps might again have an example of right thinking about the question of heredity. It is certainly impossible to think correctly of it without taking into consideration the teaching of repeated earthly lives. In such a thought process, heredity does not prove to be without meaning, but is, on the contrary, most meaningful. There also appears, however, the connection between the inherited characteristics and what the human being brings down from the spiritual world through his own individuality as a result of his previous earthly life. When we wish to decide what is really inherited, we simply have to look at the facts of life.

On a previous occasion I called your attention to the fact that the period of puberty is not taken into consideration at all by science today, whereas it should be when heredity is discussed. Up to this period a person must carry with him all the impulses of heredity. What comes later must be referred to another point of time. I mentioned this a week ago. But what, then, really is inherited? The unprejudiced observation of the following facts is testimony for the arbitrary manner in which scientists interpret things in this field, but they are utterly incapable of understanding them. Since it is known to anybody who can observe life, it must be known to every psychiatrist that there may be two sons in a family who have the same inherited potentialities. Let us define the two sets of hereditary potentialities that may be similar. First, there is a certain tendency to think out concepts and connections and to apply them to external life; second, there is a certain—what shall we call it?—peppy or fashionable bearing such as a businessman must have. Once there were two sons who both had these traits; that is, a certain self-consciousness and from it a certain boldness in bringing to realization what occurred to them. These were simply inherited characteristics, and it is thus that they must, in general, be conceived. But the question now is: What did each of them become? What course did their karmas take? One of them became a poet whose achievements were pretty respectable. The other became a swindler. The inherited characteristics were applicable to both activities; in one individual, they could be applied to the art of poetry, and in the other, to all kinds of swindles. Whatever comes from physical life was similar in these brothers. These things must really be studied conscientiously and earnestly and not in the way contemporary science often studies them. Indeed, we often find that the people themselves register the facts quite correctly nowadays, but they cannot make anything of them because they do not possess the ability to connect them with the great law of repeated earthly lives.

Influenced by the currents of our time, people in a few regions have begun to think of how it may be possible to assist nature according to the physical line of heredity, the stream of heredity, as the materialist says—they do not say Divine Providence. The brilliant minds of many individuals are especially impelled to reflect on how offspring may be produced in our sad time. But in the minds of most people, this question is identical with that of how families may be assisted to have as many children as possible; that is, how the conditions conducive to producing the greatest number of descendants may be established scientifically. One who can see through things can readily foresee what will come about. Those who are displaying their scientific theories about the best possible conditions for producing future progeny will be completely fooled simply because they refuse to learn anything. All they would have to do would be to observe the results in instances where excellent conditions existed for the production of children. For example, there is the case of the well-known Johann Sebastian Bach,¹⁰⁹ who was cantor in the Thomas School in Leipzig some two hundred years ago, and who played a great deal of music with his ten musical sons. No one can say that this family with ten sons was unfruitful. But you can go all the way back to the great grandfather of Johann Sebastian Bach. He also had sons. There were so many sons throughout the generations that almost the entire family was as prolific as Johann Sebastian himself. That is to say that what constitutes favorable conditions for having descendants was present in this family in the most eminent sense. Nevertheless, by 1850, a hundred years after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, the entire family had died out; not a single descendant was left. There you have what needs to be studied. Thus, when people with their new method will have come up with their so-called favorable conditions, they will not be able to prevent the possible generation of ten-member families, but after fifty years such families may no longer exist.

We shall speak again tomorrow of how conditions arise under which humanity evolves and how these are quite different from those at which our natural philosophic world conception labors with its utter lack of all wisdom. But this scientific world conception is simply one of the outcroppings of materialism. I have already told you that those who are familiar with the fundamental laws of the occult conception of the world knew that in the middle of the nineteenth century we reached the lowest point—or, as the materialists might designate it, the highest point—of materialistic thinking, feeling, and willing. We have already learned to know much that is connected with this materialistic thinking, and we shall still have to learn much more. But what strikes us time and again is the fact that even well-meaning persons are by no means inclined to become acquainted with the materialistic impulses dominating the depths and heights regarding human perception and will. Here people are really astonishingly little inclined to submit to what has so often been discussed, that is, to seeing the world with open eyes. What will become of the world if the views that have spread over the entire earth in the second half of the nineteenth century continue to develop further? In the course of these lectures we shall have to speak about the deep inner reasons for these things in our time.

We must, however, confront our souls with the question of how far things have really gone in some fields. Indeed, the nineteenth century was the period in which the view was presented that a real scientist could not possibly accept the childish and absurd conceptions of the ancient religions. What has been preserved in them—and we shall later discuss how it has been preserved—was considered mere childishness. It was considered the mark of an enlightened person to have risen above the assumption of a spiritual-psychic organism in the human being and that he is to be especially distinguished from animals. Not only was the endeavor made to establish a physical connection between human beings and animals, but the endeavor was also made to prove that they are nothing but animals, that is, simply a little different from other animals just as other animals differ from one another. That is the very point these people wanted to make, and it was from this point of view that not only natural histories were written, but also psychological texts. Pick up at random what the dominant people of the nineteenth century have written, and you will find at what conceptions man has actually arrived.

I have a book here before me; it is, in a certain sense, a book representing profoundly decisive views of the nineteenth century for it deals with the human soul. Every possible effort is made in this book to prove that this soul is something simply talked about by stupid people of earlier and present times. It was written in 1865, but these views were disseminated, and though some people say today that we have passed beyond that, we have not, but are still deep within it in the life of feeling and of general culture. The book deals with the human soul, but a special effort is made to demonstrate that the animal soul is the same as that of humans. In particular, you will find in it a neat definition of women and men. The author says that women represent in their peculiar characteristics a greater tendency to spirituality, whereas men represent more the tendency to materialism. In other words, according to this statement, spirituality is a weakness of women! The author then finds that certain crazy psychologists still speak about an ego that distinguishes man from animal. But he says in a delicate way that the cat, for example, shows that it also says “I;” that it has the same kind of consciousness of the ego, so the author expresses it, as our vague and super-sensible psychologists because the ego consciousness of the cat is not in the least different from that of the human being. Then comes a passage that is quoted from another book with which, however, the author is in full agreement. I shall read this passage, and I beg you to excuse the fact that the language is a bit off-color, but this is not my fault. It is the fault of the philosophy that has developed under such influences and that proposes to project living impulses into the future, asserting that it is the only philosophy today worthy of the human being. The passage reads:

The theologians and metaphysicians of our age pretend that man is the only religious animal. This is utterly false and the error is entirely in keeping with that made by some travelers who conclude, from the absence of organized cults, that religion is absent among certain savage peoples. Among a great proportion of the entire succession of animals, including even the molluscs, indications are to be found of fetishism and star worship. [ So we find among the molluscs and other animals indications of fetishism and worship of the stars.] Those that most nearly approach the human being live in veritable polytheistic anthropolatry. Our domestic dog barks at the moon and howls in a particular way when it is at the seashore; it may also be seen on certain occasions making use of whatever lustral water is available and carrying out more or less obscure rites. Who would be able to prove that there have never been high priests among dogs? What could have degraded the poor animal to the point of causing him to lick the hand that strikes him if this was not done by religious and superstitious ideas? How is one to explain, except on the basis of a profound anthropolatry, the voluntary submission to man of so many animals stronger and more active than he? To be sure, it will be said that the animal frequently devours his god, but primus in orbo deos fecit timor (fear, first of all things on earth, created gods). ... Besides, the sectarians of most of the religions also eat theirs!

The book in which this view is approved is entitled Materialism and Spiritualism and was written by Leblais¹¹⁰ with a preface by Littré,¹¹¹ a man who produced a whole series of writings. In 1871 he was elected to the National Assembly and in the same year was made a member of the Academy. This same Littré, a man known throughout the entire world, wrote the preface to this book. It deals with the human soul and simply expresses in an emphatic way what in essence is pulsing through many souls today. It is only because people are so little inclined to observe life that they fail to see the important bearing it has upon the course of human evolution, to the sorrow and pain of anyone who sees into these things.

Thus, I wanted to present to you a by no means isolated example of the presence of materialistic views in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Now let us ask whether such views are without significance for external life. Do they not gradually penetrate into this external life? Do they not mold and form this external life? Just yesterday I was sent a book by a member, the young Swiss Albert Steffen,¹¹² in which he could observe various currents of our time, because he is, in a certain sense, permeated by those impulses that are at play in spiritual science. Young Steffen describes a little of what can be experienced by a man who permits the influences of materialism on the molding of the social world to work upon him.

In his novel, which is called The True Lover of Destiny (Der rechte Liebhaber des Schicksals), there is a character named Arthur who records a fragment of his life for a certain purpose. It is, to be sure, a section taken from a novel, but it describes much of what pulses today in life. So this Arthur describes a fragment from that part of his life when materialism takes hold of humanity and forms the social order. Arthur says:

At twenty-one, I went to a metropolis for the first time—not the city in which I now live—in order to begin my studies.

One the day of my arrival I took a look at the streets. It was raining. Everything was murky and dirty.The people all showed the same indifferent but hurried pace, one just like another. I felt myself overcome immediately by an inner barrenness. I stopped in front of a billboard to see where I might spend the evening. I read one poster that called for a meeting in favor of prohibition. A man came with a pastepot and brush and pasted a beer bottle poster over it.

The very mark of our age—a poster in favor of anti-alcoholism with a beer bottle poster pasted over it!

Then suddenly I understood the significance of the mood that had taken possession of me since I arrived in this city: it was foolish to wish to improve human beings.

Disabled people stood to the right and left on the streets, yet no one had time to consider their misfortune. Women passed by and offered themselves and nobody showed pity or indignation. Suddenly it seemed to me almost astonishing that the shopkeepers did not come out of their shops to smash everything to pieces and shout, “What does it matter?” But then I perceived that the only reason that people did not despair was because they were already too commonplace, too cunning, too thievish. They were entirely too much at home in these alleys.

And did I then despair? I must confess that I greedily sucked up the mood of this alley. With a shuddering lust for death I took in the certainty that everything was on the way to destruction. The people who met me bore the unmistakable signs of degeneration. The houses reeked of corruption. Even the gray sky seemed to drop something heavy and inevitable from its clouds.

This feeling grew stronger in me. In this state of soul I sought out almost unconsciously darker and darker alleys. I went into courtyards full of refuse. I stared into windows and witnessed dreadful crimes. I read the notices that swindlers and procuresses thrust into my hands. Finally, I climbed aboard one of the buses that roared with terrific power through the streets. I closed my eyes. The thundering noise rumbled through me like a hymn of death.

Suddenly the vehicle stopped. I stooped over and heard a few indifferent words. A child had run across the street, had been caught under a wheel and was carried away dead. We continued our way.

From this moment on something within me was paralyzed. I could now see the horrible thing that this city was, and it no longer horrified, angered, or disgusted me. It seemed to me quite natural.

More: I had to laugh at anybody who wanted to change it.

Could a person move otherwise in this fever of hunger, thirst, and passions?

My father came from a family of pastors. He studied natural science and absorbed its results with great enthusiasm. It made him clear in thought, thorough, broad-minded and, in the truest sense of the word, human. He applied all his powers to the investigation of the sensory world. The super-sensible did not interest him. At least, I learned nothing of it from him.

In my childhood I adopted his view of the world without investigating whether its theories might be one-sided, just as an admiring child receives the truth from his father. But I did not yet possess his steadfastness of character that is acquired in the course of life, nor the religiousness he inherited from his ancestors, which he denied, but which was nonetheless in his nature. I did not have such a stock to live on. No pious practices were taught me in my youth that would have enriched and deepened my soul and could have worked on further in me.

Now bear in mind how often I have said—I have brought this to your attention for years—that the first generation will still be able to live with materialism because it lives under the spiritual influence received from its forefathers, but that the succeeding generation would degenerate under materialism and would go to ruin. It is gratifying—if such a thing can be gratifying—that this truth passes over now even into literature. Steffen's narrator continues:

Perhaps this is why the effect of scientific knowledge on me was different from what it was on my father. That inner inheritance prevented him from carrying over into life what he had attained as knowledge. In my case it was quite different; this single day had the effect of reversing, so to speak, the direction of my will.

My father confessed to an intellectual satisfaction when he reflected that the human being is dissipated after death and no longer exists. The certainty of this, and it seemed certain to me, evoked in me a sort of ecstatic impulse to self-destruction and, as a result, heartlessness and lust for crime.

I recently pointed out to you that modern humanity is cruel even in its use of concepts. Now we read here:

That evening I had become empty, void of feeling, and cruel, and I did not say No to these characteristics. In the succeeding time I lived entirely without scruple. And just because my action arose not from an impulse that I was unable to master, but from a certain logic and strength of will, the effect on me was twice as disastrous. I knew this. I was absolutely wicked.

He now relates how he fell into bad company, led another into bad company, and so forth. This you can read yourselves. But there is another brief passage to which I should like to call attention because it is symptomatic. A number of Arthur's acquaintances are together, all of them persons “worthy of honor,” who intended the best within their group. But Arthur has to slip away on one occasion, and he then sits alone at an empty table. Steffan narrates the incident as follows:

After a while a gentleman sat down opposite him whose face struck him because it bore an astonishing likeness to his own. It was pale, lean, smoothly shaven, but with somewhat more witch-like lines.

A peddlar came, put his glasses on his nose, untied a bundle of picture postcards and, with a sleight-of-hand rapidity, put them first before Arthur, then before the stranger all the while looking into the face of the one under whose nose he held them as if he might see his chances there. Arthur turned away in disgust. The stranger went through them carefully and selected about ten, which he put together and tore to pieces. “These persons should not be given the opportunity to earn anything,” he said to Arthur. “Of course, he will order a double supply of those I purchased. They were the most dreadful of all. But I saw so many decent working class couples here that I was afraid he would show these cards to them.”

“How can anyone look at such pictures?” asked Arthur.

“Surrender yourself for a moment, without resistance, to the fumes in here, and you will see that figures take form in your soul whose movements are just as ugly as is depicted on the postcards. What are our places of entertainment today other than hells? You need only test your feelings after you have left them—smoke, fumes, prostitutes. You do not take anything noble away with you.”

“Why are you, then, in this dangerous place?” asked Arthur.

“Because I consider it necessary that someone should be here who is disgusted. The thought of the necessity for disgust in our time came to me a few days ago at an exhibit of Greek vases. The Greeks did not need to be disgusted in order to attain to beauty. They lived in it from the beginning. But we need this disgust if we wish to stand completely in life, in order to value the world correctly, in order to come to the spirit within us, in order to protect the God within us. It was different with the Greeks. When they surrendered themselves to life, they fulfilled also the laws of the spirit. They did not need to constantly defend and arm themselves. The work of man everywhere made the human being beautiful—the buildings, the art, the customs, the utensils, even to the smallest thing. But we become ugly through everything that surrounds us—streets, posters, movies, popular music—everything makes us barren, everything destroys us ...”

Here is a question we must study: what lives at first in the thought world, and in the world of feeling, how does it flow into the social world? It is not good simply to sleep through life, not knowing what has been working at the bottom of it before it has come to its ultimate consequence. After all, the reason such a man, who has taken into himself something from spiritual science, describes this life well is because he has an eye for it.

• 106. Prior to this lecture, a scene from Faust, Part I, had been performed: Mephisto and the freshman student.
• 107. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). The letter is quoted from Angelo de Gubernatis, “Galileo Galilei,“ Deutsche Revue (March/April, 1909).
• 108. Cosimo I de'Medici (1519–74), Duke of Florence (1537–69) and Grand Duke of Tuscany (1569–74).
• 109. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750).
• 110. Alphonse Leblais, Matérialisme et Spiritualisme (Paris, 1865).
• 111. Maximilian Lime (1801–81) was a philosopher, linguist, and follower of the positivist Auguste Comte (1798–1857).
• 112. Albert Steffen (1884–1963), Swiss poet and writer, became president of the Anthroposophical Society after the death of Rudolf Steiner.

[ 1 ] While the war of arms was raging, one could see how leading personalities in Central Europe repeatedly turned their political acumen to finding out that there was disagreement here and there among their opponents. They wanted to build on such disagreements in order to ensure the favorable progress of their own "state business". This kind of diplomatic thinking gradually made it impossible to see how almost the whole world agreed to overcome Central Europe.

[ 2 ] Like so many other things, this kind of "diplomacy" is now being perpetuated by people who do not want to learn from events. One can see how England does not want to respond to France's desire for a precisely defined military alliance treaty; one notices how London is not inclined to meet the economic and financial demands emanating from Paris without further ado, and how England does not treat France's request regarding the Rhine border with unconditional benevolence. One turns one's attention to Wilson's political behavior after the conclusion of peace and to similar things more.

[ 3 ] They now want to let these disagreements show them a way forward for what they have to do in Central Europe. You are again so wise that you cannot see how united the others will be when you yourself are preparing to follow the path that you think is marked out by their disagreement.

[ 4 ] How long will it take to see through the fruitlessness of such a way of thinking? In the depths of European humanity, forces are at work that make it impossible to continue this way of thinking. In the countries of the West, the provisional outcome of the war has created conditions that allow leading personalities there to keep their thinking on the old lines for a while longer. It will be some time before these areas are confronted with the demands of human development which are already pressing in Central Europe. It will still be possible to keep economic life linked to state life there for a short time.

[ 5 ] In Central Europe, only one thing can lead to a salutary progress: the insight into the reorganization of the entire social organization. Through their union and their victory, the Western countries have won the possibility of preserving the old social organization for a time. This preservation is tied to their victory. The countries of Central Europe are in a situation that makes such preservation impossible. Here it must be recognized that the old social formations have no institutions that can lead out of chaos.

[ 6 ] Social structures become obsolete; from the depths of human souls must come the driving forces for new forms. Without trust in what is at work in these depths, no progress can be made. We should not count on those who present this trust as an outgrowth of a fantastic idealism and preach as the practical only what they have become accustomed to thinking as the usual. If today in London the French government's request for a military alliance is not received with an open mind because of British traditions, if England does not quite willingly open its coffers to French economic needs, these are things that only the "clever" disciples or followers of the old diplomatic way of thinking look at. Those who understand the "signs of the times" should realize that there is as little to be gained from these things for the progress of Central European relations as there was to be gained before the war by the fact that it was "incompatible" with England's customs to enter into a military alliance treaty with France. The eyes of those who, according to Czernin's views, were to sit in the palaces of ambassadors of the world with a "European education" were focused on this. But this "European education" has resulted in the horrors of recent years. This "European education" has researched "moods" in salons and noticed nothing of how the world is collapsing while it is making policy. For certain people, these old mood-listeners have been dismissed, but their method should not give way to a new way of thinking. If we do not stop paying attention to such "practitioners", we will continue to dream about what Central Europe should do at the moment when a "deep gulf" opens up in the West between the need for credit on the one hand and the willingness to borrow on the other. All that will be achieved is that the dream will one day lead to the awakening that will show how we ourselves have fallen into the "deep chasm".

[ 7 ] The idea of the "threefold structure of the social organism" is addressed to people who recognize with an impartial eye how the world catastrophe has emerged from views of the kind described above. Those who hold these views believe today that the world war would have been avoidable if the relationship between Germany and England had developed according to their ideas before 1914. They only forget that this relationship could not have developed in this way in a world that was dominated by their habits of thought. The world has now listened to this kind of "practitioners" long enough; they have also been allowed long enough to decry as "utopian" and "fantastic" anything that attempted to break with their habits of thought. The time should have come to see through the fantasy that lives in such practitioners and turn to the real, which reckons with the demands of the world-historical moment.

Note to the reader:

The text of this lecture is not to be regarded as literally spoken that way. It is rather a more or less extensive summary based on two incomplete transcripts.

In this lecture, I want to give a picture of the theosophical world view that is completely free of any dogmatism, while I want to show its characteristics with the help of some phenomena of our Central European cultural life. It is not a matter of importing any foreign oriental world view but of showing that theosophy is life and must become life. It is no new Gospel, but the renewal of sensations deeply rooted in the human soul.

We have to be interested most of all how geniuses, affiliated to us, are filled with the theosophical world view. Thus Lessing believed in reincarnation. In Herder's writings, we find ideas of reincarnation. We find them with Schiller in his Philosophical Letters (1786), in the Letters from Raphael to Julius (Christian Gottfried Körner in Schiller's Thalia) and in On the Aesthetic Education of the Man in a Series of Letters (1793/94). Novalis also believed in it. In particular, we find a theosophical world view in the later works of Goethe. Indeed, this can surprise at first, but who occupies himself with the study of Goethe, especially with the profound Faust drama, immerses himself more and more into that which I try to explain. What I try to tell now has arisen very easily to me.

Goethe was a theosophist according to his whole nature, to the innermost sense of his life, because he did never accept any limit of his knowledge and work. Goethe was determined by his whole disposition to the world view we represent here. He was convinced that the human being is deeply connected with the world, and that this world is nothing material, but active, creative spirit; his world view was not an uncertain pantheism, but he believed that we can attain a living relation to God.

As a seven-year-old boy he collected the sunbeams and enkindled a little candle; he wanted to enkindle a sacrificial service by the fire of nature. In Poetry and Truth he says: if we oversee the different religions, we find a common core of truth in them. The sages of all times always showed the swing of a pendulum between the higher and lower self,

When Goethe had returned home after his Leipzig study and after a severe illness, he devoted himself to mystic studies. He decided to express what took place in him, the whole urging, in the Faust drama; in the legend in which the Middle Ages wanted to describe the fight between the old and the new world views.

The 16th century did not think that one could progress to redemption by the own soul force; it let Faust perish. However, Goethe did it. After he had represented Faust as a striving human being, in the first version of Faust, he put him on a new basis in the nineties of the 18th century. In his Faust Goethe shows the development of the human being from the lower to the higher soul forces and as we will still see also in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

His view was: only somebody who has passed the stages of development, who has felt attracted to the divine, who has passed doubts, has the full conviction, has gained the confidence and has brought himself from disharmony to harmony. His Faust is a song of human perfection. We need not to seek for the way to perfection in the Bhagavad Gita. We find the big problem also in the Faust. Goethe sets himself the task in his Faust to uncover the secret of evil.

Goethe uses the Prologue in Heaven to show the intention of his drama. The physical world is a reflection of force relations of the super-sensible world. With the words of the Prologue in Heaven Goethe describes the world of devachan, the sounding world. He represents it in the picture of the Pythagorean music of the spheres:

In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
The sun still sings its glorious song...

Who says there that it concerns a superficial picture only says something superficial.

He also says at the end of the Ariel scene:

Hearken! Hear the onrush of the Horae!
In these sounds we spirits hear
The new day already born.

Goethe always speaks of the sounding of the spiritual world.

Theosophy speaks of three worlds: of the dream world, of the astral or soul world and of the mental or spiritual world. The emergence of the spiritual eye produces immense changes in the dream life first. If the new beholding, the new world becomes accessible, it is very regular. Of course, one must not found any science on what the human being experiences there. The student or chela has to learn to take this consciousness of the astral world along with him from the dream into his day consciousness. Later then he experiences the spiritual world in the dreamless sleep.

The consciousness of the astral world expresses itself in pictures, the consciousness of the spiritual world in spiritual hearing. The Pythagoreans called it the music of the spheres.

Still an important principle of the human being appears in the Prologue: the principle of karma. Who knows that Goethe knew the mystics of the Middle Ages thoroughly, does not speak of external pictures if Goethe says:

The spirit world is not sealed off
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Go, neophyte, and boldly bathe
Your mortal breast in roseate dawn!

Dawn or “aurora” is an expression which is familiar to the mystics. Jacob Böhme's first work was called: Aurora or the Rising of Dawn.

From the start, Faust strives beyond the limits of the physical life. The portrayal of the earth spirit is completely given in technical-mystic terms, a wonderful portrayal of the astral body of the earth, of the imperishable soul cover spiritually created from the fruits of life. The earth spirit is no symbol; Goethe considers him as a real being. He supposed that in the planet planetary beings are and have their bodies, like we have our bodies of flesh. Goethe's creed was: the earth spirit taught him not only to consider but to feel and sense the uniform being of stone, plant, and animal up to the human being. He taught him the brotherliness of everything created up to the human being, the crown of creation. He also expressed his creed as 35-, 36-year-old man in The Secrets. A pilgrim walks to a cloister. He sees a rose cross at the gate. The rose cross is the symbol of the realms of nature; stone, plant, animal = cross, roses = love. Goethe himself says later that each of the twelve personalities represents a great world view or world religion in The Secrets. The aim of the pilgrim was to seek for the true core of the world religions.

In the first part, we see the young Faust being full of sensation and disharmony. With the help of the tempter Faust has to lead his lower self through all mistakes. In Mephistopheles Goethe created the picture of an ancient idea that is included in any profound wisdom. He tried to solve the problem of evil. Evil is the sum of those forces which oppose the progress of human perfection. If truth consists of the further development, any obstacle is a lie. Mephistopheles is called the spoiler, mephiz, the liar tophel in Hebrew. He leads through all kinds of experience of the lower self.

At the end of the first part, Faust stands differently before the earth spirit; he attains the insight that it is possible to really recognise the self. After he has finished the errors, he gets to the spiritual world by purification.

Faust dies at an old age, and there he becomes a mystic. In the conversations with Eckermann (Johann Peter E., 1792–1854) Goethe says: for the initiate will be soon evident that a lot of profound is to be found in this Faust.

The descent to the mothers: in any mysticism the highest psychic is female; cognition is a conception process. The fire on the tripod is the primary matter. The realm of the mothers is the primary source of all things; the spirit comes from there. A moral qualification is necessary to enter the spiritual world devachan in the language of theosophy. The aim of theosophy is to lead the human beings upward. The human being must make himself appropriate and worthy of that. When Faust leads Helena upward for the first time, he breaks out in consuming passion and, hence, Helena disperses.

Faust should fathom the profound secret of the human nature, how body, soul and spirit combine.

Spirit is the eternal; it was before birth and will be after death; soul is the connection between spirit and body; it tends more to the body first then to the spirit in the course of development, and with the latter to the everlasting. The development of the spiritual eye supports that.

In Faust you are now led into the laboratory in which Homunculus is generated; Homunculus becomes wonderfully understandable if he is understood as a soul that has not yet incarnated. Homunculus has to receive a body. Goethe shows the gradual development of the bodily in a magnificent picture at the Classical Walpurgisnight. Proteus is the sage who knows how the physical metamorphoses proceed. Homunculus has to start with the mineral, and then the realm of plants follows. For going through the plant realm Goethe uses the expression “es grünelt so.” [ Note 1 ]

Sexuality appears only on a certain stage. Eros combines with Homunculus: The human being comes into being from the connection of the male aspect of the soul and the female one.

Faust's loss of sight shows: the physical world dies for him; the internal vision rises in him. A magnificent picture of this process: “And as long you do not have this dying and becoming ...” The mystics express it in such a way: “for death is the root of all life.” And: “who does not die, before he dies perishes, before he dies.”

In the final picture of Faust the Chorus mysticus says:

All that is transitory
is only a symbol;
what seems unachievable
here is seen done;
what's indescribable,
here becomes fact:
The eternal-female
shows us the way.

In any mysticism the striving human soul is female. The connection of the soul with the world secret: the spiritual connection is expressed with the mystics as a wedding of the lamb. Goethe expressed this view even deeper in The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

Goethe himself said of the last passages of Faust in the conversations with Eckermann that he wanted to show Faust ascending the Montserrat. In the poem The Secrets it is indicated. Parzival, the traveller through the valley. When Faust lost his eyesight, he got the possibility to quickly develop. There he came to the higher regions, to the devachan, we would say. However, Goethe also needed Catholic ideas. Thus he let Doctor Marianus appear in the “neatest cell.” This indicated: the release from anything sexual, being above man and woman. That is why he also added the female name with masculine ending to him. Now asexuality takes the place of uni-sexuality. He had completely awoken in buddhi. Buddhi, the sixth member, had got the upper hand over all the other members.

Note:

Es grünelt so: the verb “grüneln” is a nonce word: being or becoming something that reminds of green; the translation of this sentence reads: “the air smells fresh and green.”

Let us take a look at the short life of Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. Novalis is more a memory of a past life than a life in itself, a fine personality, an individuality who, from the very beginning, had the most profound spirituality as an inclination within him. One is always amazed at how Novalis combines the highest intellectuality, the sharpest thinking, with a wonderful spirituality.

He was a trained mining engineer who had a complete mastery of mathematics and the physical sciences, who combined mathematical thinking with a fine, delicate, and yet fiery, ether-like spirituality, who lived this harmoniously in a way that is perhaps unparalleled in life. You have to be able to empathize with what is contained in Novalis' sayings and fragments to realize how deeply he penetrated into the inner structure of the world. You also have to be able to empathize with his enthusiasm for mathematics. For him, it is a great poem that introduces us to the secrets of the world. Man ponders the connections between space and time. If he can imbibe the harmony of the stars, which revolve around the sun according to eternal laws, with the formative forces that work within the earth in ore veins, crystal formations and so on, then he can sense the living essence of the world.

Novalis is filled with true enthusiasm for mathematics. He calls mathematics, which can show such paths of understanding, a sublime religion. It is wonderful how he is able to embrace this seemingly dry science with fervent devotion. For him, the sensory world existed only as a reflection of eternally living spiritual facts, which reveal themselves to earthly perception in natural laws.

Novalis fell deeply in love with a thirteen-year-old girl who died soon after their engagement. The shock he experienced was tremendous. It opened the gates of the spiritual world to him. Novalis speaks with the deceased as with a living person; he called his own further life a 'her-after-death'. She is always present to him. The friendship that later united him with another girl can be called a supersensible one. She is like an emblem for the spiritual being that hovers above and with whom he will completely merge.

There was a power of spirituality in him that stands unparalleled in the modern age.

In earlier lives, Novalis had undergone profound initiations. Thus, he entered this life with a predisposition for a true, real understanding of world events. He appeared in the spiritual sky like a meteor, scattering spirit everywhere in a way rarely found in the expressions of newer spirits.

The fresh, youthful nature of Novalis was characterized by two poles: a great intellectuality and a deep spirituality. The whole wealth of his manifold creative thinking converged in him into an all-embracing sense of totality, which had its source of life in a divine source. He sensed the source everywhere as spirit. Novalis called this consciousness “magic”. The creative imagination, the feeling of the soul was for him a reproduction of the great cosmic feeling; it became for him “magical idealism”. He experienced his ego as related to the ego of all other beings, and he felt that all beings were related to each other. Thus Novalis merged with the spiritual weaving and life of nature.

In the “Apprentices of Sais” you will find the story of the young man “Hyacinth”, who has an intimate relationship with the creatures of nature. He and the girl “Rosenblüte” are bound by a warm friendship. The animals of the forest and the flowers of the fields are his companions in his secrets. It is told how he meets a man with a long beard who has a book from which Hyacinth learns a great deal. Now he is driven to seek out what constitutes the innermost being of man. This, what man must seek, Novalis called “the blue flower”. It is the seeking of the higher self in man.

We also find this significant symbol in oriental mysticism as the lotus flower. It is a symbol of the higher self, of chaste, purified humanity, in which the self can unfold. It is still enclosed as if by petals – later it will bear fruit and seeds. Novalis had brought such knowledge with him from his previous incarnations.

We are now told how Hyacinth wanders to the land of secrets, always searching, until he finds a veiled figure. When he removes the veil, he sees little roses.

In Novalis's “Hymns to the Night”, his experience of cosmic-human unity is expressed lyrically. This is also the case in the “Spiritual Songs”, this harrowing document of merging with Christ.

Everything he wanted to say to the world, Novalis set out in the novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen”. But he died before he could finish it. Let us recall in our minds what he intended to accomplish.

We are transported back to the time of the Wartburg Singers' Contest when Heinrich was young. But the course of events takes us out of the world of the present and into a fairytale world. We have to transport ourselves back to the time when the area of the Atlantic Ocean was still land. There was once a lively life there, people whose activities would indeed seem like a fairytale to present-day people. It was a land where rain and sunshine were not distributed as they are now. The sun was hidden by fog, the air was watery. It is not for nothing that the Nordic sagas called Atlantis 'Niflheim', that is, Mistheim. There was no distinction between rain and sunshine, only a gradual transition from water to air. A rainbow would not have been possible there. The events of those ancient times are preserved in the legends of the flood, the ark, the rainbow, and one stands amazed at the infinitely deep truths contained in the ancient religious records. At first glance, the biblical account of the rainbow seems allegorical. But here we are faced with a fact: a rainbow would not have been possible in ancient Atlantis. It is one of those sacred moments that overwhelm the occult researcher when he is transported back in time to these older times.

Novalis's seer's eye looked into this ancient realm, which one can truly speak of as a fairytale realm. Man did not yet have his reasoning mind back then; he lived life with nature. He built his house in such a way that it grew out of the rocks and plants. There were no myths back then. What are the myths that our peoples tell each other? The gift of shaping worlds in poetry is only peculiar to our post-Atlantic race; the Atlanteans did not have it. But the Atlanteans still had the gift of transforming plants, even animals and humans. The metamorphic powers of Circe in the Odyssey point to such metamorphic powers of humans. Everything that humans bring forth from within as myth, the people of Atlantis had experienced and seen with their own eyes. The great poets of our time have preserved the images of their poetry from what they had seen on Atlantis itself.

Novalis interweaves his own memories with the story of “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” and brings the ancient Atlantis to life in his tales. He then takes us to more recent times, to the period of city foundations. This time brings with it the emergence of the bourgeoisie and material culture. The rise of the bourgeoisie is linked to external, material culture. What was previously poetry becomes something else.

The origin of our poetry points to the mysteries. We have to go back to the time when the sacred mysteries were the source of inspiration for the poetry of Homer or Aeschylus and Sophocles, when ancient culture laid the foundation for what worked as a spiritual force in Homer and Aeschylus. Only after long trials were the purified admitted to the higher mysteries, the primeval mysteries, which took place in the supersensible, in the astral world. But there was a reflection of this in later times, for example in the Eleusinian mysteries. There the so-called primal drama was enacted. It was depicted how God, the soul of the world, descended into matter and how the descending, suffering and resurrecting God shows the way of redemption. It was the choir that, as in an echo, expressed the language of cosmic events in the ancient Greek mystery drama.

In Aeschylus we experience the transition of the ancient sacred primal drama into the secular drama. It blossoms from a branch that has grown out of the mystery being. The other branch was philosophy, and the third branch was religion.

In the mystery centers, the ancients possessed the unity of religion, poetry and science. There, science was vividly demonstrated. As three branches from one root, these areas worked side by side and into each other. It was only later that they diverged. This separation of the three areas was necessary so that each could become perfect in its own way. So they had to go their separate ways for a while. Great minds seek to reunite what has had to separate in this way. Therefore, we find the striving for the unification of the arts in such phenomena as, for example, in the musical drama of Bayreuth. The aim is to create a total work of art that encompasses the three areas of intellectual life on earth.

Poetry arose out of truth. Originally, poetry was nothing other than the garment of truth. Novalis looks back to primeval times, when poets strove to express the highest truth in their works. If we turn our gaze to the primal poems of humanity, we do indeed find this expression in them. In Atlantis, man was still at one with nature, with his God, and the mysteries presented a picture of reality as it was experienced. Later, memories of these times were revived in the myths. These memories were something sacred and real for Novalis. He said to himself: In the future, what people still carry hidden within them as memories will become reality again. What we create out of our imagination as poets and thus bring into consciousness will one day become fact. The present world is growing into a new spiritual reality. As people carry the seeds of poetry into material life, something very special also grows out of material life. The guide on the way to this new world is Sophia, wisdom.

Novalis sets the events of his story in the time of the rising city culture, in that time when the outer life begins to become material, when it passes into the civil element of the physical plan. For him, the bearers of the future are the poets. The seed of poetry is placed in material culture. Novalis lets Heinrich von Ofterdingen be a kind of seer. He dreams of the blue flower, dreams that are not like other dreams, but a reflection of spiritual reality. He lets him experience different things: legends and historical events come to life, for example, the time of the Crusades shines in, the spiritual that flowed from the Orient into Europe, in the description of the prisoners in the castle.

The most important thing for Henry is his encounter with a miner who has spent almost his entire life underground. It is described what one can feel when working in the shafts under the earth. The stars of heaven shine towards him like the future. In the depths of the earth, he finds his past, as it were. The metals are wondrously related to man. What has developed down there over the millennia, the secret of the divine world order, is brought up by the miner, thrusts itself towards the miner. The selflessness in the work is brought home to us when it is described how the gold is brought to the surface. The miner is only interested in how the gold comes out of the earth: in it he recognizes the creative divinity. It is a beautiful, moral description of the selfless interest in what would otherwise inflame people's selfishness. The miner, who always works in the dark, only has the right idea of the magnificence of light.

Heinrich then meets the old hermit in the cave. The hermit has a wealth of life experience behind him and records it in a book. He talks about how only he who sees in all that is mortal a parable of the immortal is a true historian. This encounter deepens Heinrich's experiences again.

Then, in Augsburg, Heinrich meets Master Klingsor, who is a seer. In a fairy tale, we learn from him what the future will be for all of humanity: a higher world will be born out of this world. There is a poetic magic in the story of the young man's love for Mathilde, who later turns out to be Cyane again – a reference to the fact that the ephemeral is a symbol of the eternal. He knows that out of what is now a hard, stony reality, another world will grow in the future.

Then the absorption into the astral world is described: the land of Astralis symbolizes evolution, development. Poetry becomes a magical force that transforms people. Novalis believes in the magical power of the imagination, where it does not flow licentiously, but rather places itself under the guidance of Sophia and permeates the whole world with the power of creative Eros.

We may see a reincarnated Pythagorean in Novalis.

Ever and again I have to ask myself the question: what is the basis for the widespread impact of some of Shakespeare's plays? "Hamlet", "Othello", "The Merchant of Venice", "Romeo and Juliet" make an equally deep impression on the educated and the uneducated, the classical and the modern-minded, the idealist and the bon vivant. And we have the feeling that we present-day people are confronted with this poet of a relatively bygone era as if he were living among us today. One need only think of the effects of poems such as Goethe's "Iphigenia" and "Tasso" to realize the difference with perfect clarity. And as far as the changeability of the influence of dramatic works of art over time is concerned, I would like to draw attention to the decline in enthusiasm for Schiller's creations in the course of our century. Only Shakespeare's dramas seem to elicit the same appreciation from every degree and type of education, and no less from every age.

I believe that one must go into the basic causes of the effects of works of art if one wants to solve the question just touched upon.

In our time, this is not easy. For in the branch of human thought known today as aesthetics, there is an abundance of prejudices that virtually rule out an understanding among our contemporaries on certain fundamental questions of art.

In saying this, I am thinking above all of certain critics who regard anything that looks like a world view or philosophy within the view of art as a red rag to the bull. How the poet thinks about the things that provide the content for his works should be completely irrelevant. Indeed, these critics are even of the opinion that the artist is all the greater the less he thinks at all. They like to call a poet who they believe does not think at all "naïve", and are enthusiastic about his creations, whose fair "unconsciousness" is praised in every key. And one immediately becomes suspicious when one realizes that a poet has a world view which he helps to express in his works. One believes that the naivety, the unconsciousness of creation is thereby lost. Some art observers go so far as to say that the poet who does not live like a child in a dream state that obscures and hides the clarity of his thoughts is not a true poet at all. I have often heard and read that Goethe's greatness is based on the fact that he did not think about his artistic achievements, that he lived as if in dreams, and that Schiller, the more conscious one, first had to interpret his dreams for him.

I have often wondered why people turn the facts upside down for the sake of such a prejudice. For it is precisely in Goethe's case that it can be shown that the entire nature of his artistic work follows from a clear, sharply defined world view. Goethe was a man of knowledge. He could see nothing around him without forming a view of it that could be clearly formulated in concepts. When Duke Karl August summoned him to Weimar and induced him to engage in all kinds of practical activities, the things he had to deal with in practice became sources from which he constantly enriched his knowledge of the world and of people. His involvement with mining in Ilmenau led him to study the geological conditions of the earth's crust in detail and, on the basis of these studies, to form a comprehensive view of the formation of the earth. Nor could he indulge in the enjoyment of nature as a mere pleasure-seeker. The duke gave him a garden. He could not merely enjoy flowers and plants; he soon began to search for the basic laws of plant life. And this search led him to the epoch-making ideas that he set down in his morphological works. These studies, in conjunction with the observation of works of art in Italy, formed a world view in him that had sharp, conceptual contours and from which his artistic style necessarily flowed.

One must know this world view; one must have imbued his entire intellectual life with it if one wants to receive the right impression from Goethe's works of art. Goethe is, if one still wants to use the word badly abused by the present: a naturalist. He wanted to recognize nature in its purity and reproduce it in his works. Anything that resorted to things not to be found in nature itself to explain nature was contrary to his way of thinking. He rejected all forms of otherworldly, transcendent, divine powers. A God who only works from the outside, who does not move the world in its innermost being, was of no concern to him. Any kind of revelation and metaphysics was an abomination to him. Anyone who looks impartially at real, natural things must reveal their deepest secrets to them of their own accord. But he was not like our modern fanatics of facts, who can only see the surface of things and call "natural only that which can be seen with the eyes, grasped with the hands and weighed with the scales". For him, this superficial reality is only one side, the outside of nature. He wants to see deeper into the workings; he seeks the higher nature within nature. He is not satisfied with looking at the abundance of plants and putting them into a system; he wants to discover in them a primal form, the original plant, which underlies them all; which cannot be seen, but which must be grasped in the idea. He does this in all areas. He also looks at people and their mutual relationships in this way. He tries to reduce the confusion of human beings, their manifold characters, to a few typical basic forms. And it is these basic forms, these types, not the phenomena of everyday reality, that he seeks to embody in his poetry. His Iphigenia and his Tasso represent the higher human nature in nature. And the possibility of depicting higher natures came to him because he had arrived at a certain view, a clear world of ideas, through restless cognitive work. Only those who have his basic view can depict people and their coexistence in the way he did. And this view can only be understood by those who have made Goethe's world view their own. This fact shows the dependence of Goethe's poetic technique on his world view. A fanatic of facts works out his figures in such a way that they appear to us like phenomena of everyday life. To do this he must also use technical means that give the impression of low naturalness. Goethe must use other artistic means. He must draw in lines and colors that go beyond the superficiality of things, that are supra-real and yet affect us with the magic that the necessity of natural existence has.

I would like to cite other examples that illustrate the dependence of artistic technique on worldview. Schiller is a supporter of the so-called moral world view. For him, world history is a world judgment. Anyone who suffers evil in the world must have a certain guilt; he must deserve his fate. Now I do not want to claim that Schiller saw the real world as if every guilt was followed by just punishment. But he took the view that this is how it should be, and that any other way of relating things leaves us morally unsatisfied. That is why he constructs his dramas in such a way that they reflect a world context that meets this moral requirement. He has his heroes end tragically because they have brought guilt upon themselves. That there is a harmonious connection between fate and guilt: this is the basic condition of his dramatic technique. Mary Stuart, the. Maid of Orleans, Wallenstein must become guilty in order for us to be satisfied by their tragic end.

Compare this with Henrik Ibsen's dramatic technique in his last period. He no longer speaks of guilt and atonement. For him, the fact that a person perishes has entirely different causes than moral ones. His Oswald in "Ghosts" is as innocent as a child and yet he perishes. A person with a moral view of the world can only be disgusted by this course of events. Ibsen, however, does not have a moral world view. He knows only an extra-moral natural context; a cold, unfeeling necessity. Just as the stone cannot help it if it shatters when it falls to the hard earth, an Ibsenian hero cannot help it if he meets an evil fate.

We can visualize the same fact in Maeterlinck. He believes in subtle, soul-like, mysterious connections in all phenomena. When two people speak to each other, he not only hears the common content of their speeches, but also perceives deeper relationships, unspoken relationships. And he tries to work this unspoken, mysterious quality into the things and people he portrays. Indeed, he regards everything external and visible as merely a means of hinting at the deeper, hidden soul. His technique is a result of this striving and thus of his world view. Anyone who is unable to sense the deeper essences implied in the things and people he brings to the stage cannot understand Maeterlinck. Every gesture, every movement, every word on stage is an expression of the underlying world view.

Whoever keeps these truths in mind will realize that Goethe, Schiller, Ibsen, Maeterlinck can only have an effect on a certain circle of people, on those who can empathize with the world view of these poets, who can think and feel like them. This is why the impact of these artists must have limits.

Why is it different with Shakespeare? Does Shakespeare have no world view? And does he have such a general effect because the effect does not flow from one and is therefore not limited by it?

The latter cannot be admitted by anyone who considers the circumstances more thoroughly. Shakespeare, too, has a certain view of the world.

For Goethe, the world is the expression of typical basic beings; for Schiller, of a moral order; for Ibsen, of a purely natural order; for Maeterlinck, of a spiritual, mysterious connection between things. What is it for Shakespeare?

I think the most appropriate word to express Shakespeare's view of the world is to say that the world is a play to him. He looks at all things for a certain theatrical effect by virtue of their nature. He is indifferent to whether they reflect typical basic forms, whether they are morally connected, whether they express something mysterious. He asks: what is there in them that, when we look at them, satisfies our satisfaction in pure contemplation, in harmless observation? If he finds that the desire to look at a person is most satisfied when we look at what is typical about him, he directs his gaze to this typical. If he believes that harmless contemplation is most satisfied when it is offered the mysterious, he places this in the foreground. But the desire to look is the most widespread, the most general desire. Whoever meets it will have the largest audience. He who directs his gaze to one thing can only count on the approval of people whose basic feelings are likewise directed towards that one thing. Only very few people's souls are so focused on a single thing, even if these few are the best, those who are able to draw the deepest things from the world. In order to exhaust the depths of the world, one must think and feel intensely. But that means not getting attached to everything possible, but savoring one thing in every way. But Shakespeare is not aiming for depth.

An appeal to all directions of thought and feeling can be found in every human being. Even the most superficial person can feel what is typical, moral, mysterious, cruel and natural in the world. But none of this touches him intensely. He flits over it and soon wants to move on to another impression. And so he is interested in everything, but only a few things all the time. Such a person is the real onlooker. He wants to be touched by everything, but not completely absorbed by anything. Again, however, it may be said that there is something of this curiosity in everyone, even in those who generally - even fanatically - devote themselves entirely to one basic emotion. The wide impact of Shakespeare's drama is connected with this general disposition of people. Because it is not one-sided, it has an all-round effect.

I don't want these remarks of mine to be interpreted as if I were accusing Shakespeare of a certain superficiality. He penetrates all one-sidedness with an ingenious intuition; but he is not committed to any one-sidedness. He transforms himself from one character into another. He is an actor by nature. And that is why he is also the most effective playwright.

A person with a pronounced, sharp disposition, in whom all things he touches immediately take on a certain, individual color, cannot be a good playwright. A person who doesn't care about the individual characters, who transforms himself into each one with the same devotion because he loves them all equally and none in particular, is a born dramatist. A certain unkindness must be inherent in the playwright, a universal sense. And Shakespeare has this.