The Rudolf Steiner Archive

For the purposes of research and reflection in the physical world, it is above all, one might say, a matter close to the human heart to find one's way in the relationships of the physical world - in which one spends one's existence between birth and death - to the higher worlds to which one actually belongs. We are quite clear about the fact that, even if a person's thinking is still very vague, there is still an eminently clear feeling, a distinct sensation, that he must know something about these relationships in some form. No matter how vaguely man may think about the higher worlds, no matter how much despair he may feel for various reasons about the possibility of knowing anything about them, it is natural and appropriate for the human feeling and perception to relate to a higher world.

Of course, it can be objected that, especially in our present materialistic times, there are many people who either deny in some form or other that there is any spiritual world at all, or at least deny that man can know anything about it. But one can also say that one must first learn to have a “negative” attitude towards the spiritual world, so to speak, because it is not “natural” for a person to deny a spiritual, a supersensible world. One must first arrive at this position through all kinds of theories; one must first, one might say, be taught to deny a spiritual world with any degree of seriousness. So that when one speaks of the natural man, one can still speak in a way that is appropriate to his perception, turning the gaze of the soul in some way upwards to the spiritual worlds.

But now, if there is even the slightest possibility that there are people who want nothing whatsoever to do with the spiritual world, there must be something about human nature that makes it difficult to determine our relationship with the spiritual world. And this relationship does indeed seem difficult to grasp. For we see that in the course of history, which we can follow, a great number of all kinds of philosophies and world views have emerged that seemingly contradict each other. But I have often explained that it is only seemingly, because if it were easy for man to determine his relationship to the supersensible world, then the history of world views would not be full of seemingly contradictory world views. From this alone it is clear that it is, to a certain extent, difficult to determine the relationship to the spiritual world. And that is why the question can also be raised as to the origin of this difficulty, what it is that actually exists in the soul of man, that he has a hard time relating to the spiritual world.

Now, if we examine all the attempts that are made outside of a spiritual-scientific world view, say in mere philosophy or in external science, and ask ourselves what these attempts are actually based on, what they are based on, then we have to say: when we look at these attempts, when we see what kind of soul power men chiefly employ to fathom the relation of the physical to the spiritual world, one finds that, again and again, I might say except in isolated cases, men see in thinking above all that soul faculty, that soul activity which, rightly employed, could lead to the discovery of something, to a determination about the relation of man to the supersensible worlds. It is therefore necessary, so to speak, to consider the thinking, the thinking work of the soul, and to ask oneself: What about thinking, about making oneself thoughts, in relation to the human being who lives in the physical world and the spiritual worlds? What about this relationship of thinking to the spiritual worlds?

So the question is: what is the value of thinking for a form of knowledge that satisfies people? — I would like to consider this question today as a preliminary, and then discuss other questions in front of you afterwards. I would like us to prepare ourselves, so to speak, for a worthy discussion by considering the question of the value of thinking for knowledge.

Now, we can, as it were, get behind thinking if we proceed in the following way. In the course of the last lectures we have already indicated that certain peculiarities of thinking, or, even better, of thoughts, are to be considered. I have pointed out how there are many people who see it as a mistake of all scientific thinking when this scientific thinking is not just a mere copy, so to speak, a mental photograph of an external reality. For these people say: if thinking is to have any relationship at all to the real, to reality, then it must not bring anything to this reality from itself; for in the moment when thinking brings something to reality, one is not dealing with a copy, with a photograph of a reality, but with a fantasy, with a fantasy image. And in order to avoid dealing with such a fantasy, one must strictly ensure that no one includes in their thoughts anything that is not a mere photograph of external reality.

Now, with a slight effort of thought, you will immediately come to say to yourself: Yes, for the external physical world, for what we call the physical plane, this seems to be quite right. It seems to correspond to a quite correct perception that one must not add anything to reality through thinking if one does not want to have fantasy images instead of a reflection of reality. For the physical plane, it can truly be said that it is absolutely right to refrain from adding any ingredient of thought to what one receives from outside through perception.

Now I would like to draw your attention to the views of two philosophers regarding the view expressed in what has just been said: Aristotle and Leibniz.

Aristotle, who can be seen as the summarizer of the Greek world view, is a philosopher who was no longer initiated into the secrets of the spiritual world, but who lived in the very first period after, I would say, the “age of initiation”. Whereas before all philosophers were still somehow touched by the initiation when they expressed philosophically what they knew as initiates - P/ato, for example, who was a kind of initiate to the highest degree, but expressed himself philosophically - with Aristotle one must say that he also had no trace of an initiation, but still all kinds of after-effects of an initiation were there. So this is a philosopher who only speaks philosophically, without initiation, without any kind of initiatory impulse, but who, in his philosophy, gives in a rationalized way what the initiates who were before him gave in a spiritualized way. That is Aristotle.

The sentence we now want to consider comes from Aristotle. [It was written on the board:

There is nothing in the mind that is not in the senses.

So let us take note of this sentence: there is nothing in — we can add — 'human' intelligence that is not in the senses.

This sentence of Aristotle's must not be interpreted in any kind of materialistic way, because Aristotle is far removed from any kind of materialistic worldview. This sentence is not to be taken in a worldview sense, but rather epistemologically. That is to say, Aristotle rejects the idea that one can gain knowledge about the world from within, but asserts that one can only gain knowledge by directing one's senses to the outside world, by receiving sensory impressions and then using reason to form concepts from these sensory impressions; but of course he does not deny that one receives spiritual things with the sensory impressions. He thinks of nature as permeated by the spirit; only, he thinks, one cannot arrive at the spiritual if one does not look out into nature.

Here you can see the difference to the materialist. The materialist concludes: there is only material outside, and one only forms concepts of the material. Aristotle thinks that all of nature is permeated by spirit, but the path of the human soul to reach the spirit is such that one must start from the sensory perception and process the sensory impressions into concepts. If Aristotle himself had been touched by an initiatory impulse, he would not have said that; for then he would have known that if one frees oneself from sensory perception in the way we have described, one can attain knowledge of the spiritual world from within. So he did not want to deny the spiritual world, but only to show the path that human knowledge must take.

This sentence then played a major role in the Middle Ages and has been reinterpreted in a materialistic way in the materialistic age. You only need to change a small thing in this sentence of Aristotle's - there is nothing in the world for the intellect that is not in the senses - and we have immediately formed materialism from it. Isn't it true, you just need to make what, in the sense of Aristotle, is the human path of knowledge, the principle of a world view, and then you have materialism.

Leibniz came up with a similar sentence, and we also want to look at this sentence. Leibniz is not that far behind us; in the 17th century. Let us now also take this sentence of Leibniz to heart. So Leibniz says: There is nothing in, we can say again, “human” intelligence - I just add “human” - that is not in the senses, except for intelligence itself, except for the intellect itself.

[It was written on the board]:

There is nothing in human intelligence that is not in the senses, except for intelligence itself, except for intellect itself.

Thus the intellect that man has within him, working, is not in the senses. In these two sentences you can see a real school example of how one can completely agree with the formulation of a sentence, and yet how the sentence can be incomplete.

Now I do not want to dwell on the extent to which this sentence of Leibniz's is also philosophically incomplete. Let us just note for the moment that Leibniz was of the view that the intellect itself is not somehow already grounded in the senses, but that man must bring the work of the intellect to what the senses give him. So that one can say: the intellect itself is an inner activity that has not yet passed through the senses.

If you have followed the last lectures, you know that this inner work is already free of the senses and takes place in the etheric body of the human being. In our language, we can say: There is nothing in the intelligence working in the etheric body that is not in the senses, except for the intelligence itself working in the etheric body; what works in there does not come in from the senses.

But thinking as such is in reality, when it is properly considered in true self-knowledge, this working in the etheric body, and that is what philosophers call the intellect. This thinking is therefore a kind of work, a working, we could say. And because, for our spiritual scientific understanding, Leibniz, even if he is not absolutely right, is still more right than Aristotle, we can say: this thinking - or, better expressed, this thinking activity, this thinking work in man, which is a performance of the etheric body - that is not in the outer reality of the physical plane. For the physical plane is exhausted in what it allows us to perceive through the senses. So, by placing ourselves as human beings in the physical plane, we bring intellect into it, but this intellect itself is not in the physical world.

And here we now come to the difficulty of those philosophers who want to get behind the world riddle through the intellect. People have to say to themselves: Yes, if I think about it properly, the intellect does not belong to the sense world; but I am now in a peculiar situation. I know of no other spiritual world than just the intellect; it is a spiritual world behind sensuality. So what do I get from the intellect? It cannot receive anything, no content, if it does not inform itself through the senses from the external physical world. It only stands there for itself. — But then the philosopher stands before a rather peculiar thing. He must indeed reflect: I have an activity within me, the activity of the intellect. Through this activity of the intellect I want to get to the bottom of the secrets of the sense world. But I can only think about what is out there in the sense world; but these thoughts arise through something that does not itself belong to the sense world. So what do these thoughts have to do with the sense world? Even if I now also know that the intellect is a spiritual thing, I must still despair of being able to approach anything that is reality through the spiritual thing that I have.

Now I will try to approach the matter by way of comparison. In the last lectures we expressed the same thing in a different way. We expressed it by leading ourselves to recognize that in what we achieve through our thinking we have mirror images of reality, that these mirror images actually come in addition to reality and are not realities themselves.

You see, it is the same truth, only expressed differently here in a philosophical way. We had to say: the intellect forms mirror images. These mirror images, as an image of the reality that is being mirrored, are indifferent to reality, because the reality that is being mirrored does not need these mirror images. So that one might come to doubt reality altogether, the whole reality value of thinking, of intelligence, and ask oneself: Does thinking have any real significance? Does it not actually add something to external reality through what it is? Does any single thought have any real value if, in relation to reality, it is nothing more than a mirror image?

Let us now endeavor to properly examine the reality of thought. In other words, we want to answer the question: Is thought really just something imagined that has no real value at all? Or, we can approach the question from a different angle: Where does thought have a reality? — Now, as I said, I will try to illustrate this through a comparison. Here is a watch; I pick up the watch, now I have the watch in my hand. Everything about the watch is outside the muscles and nerves of my hand. My hand and the watch are two different things. But suppose it were dark here, I had never seen the watch and would perceive the watch only through feeling, then I would perceive something of the watch by stretching out my hand and grasping the watch. If you direct your attention to the watch, you will say to yourself, I can learn something about the reality of the watch by holding it in my hand, by grasping it. But if we hypothetically assume for a moment that I only have one hand and not two, I would not be able to grasp the first hand with the second hand as I can actually do now. I could grasp the watch with my one hand, but I could not grasp the hand itself with another hand; at most I could touch it with my nose, but let us not consider that for the moment, shall we? Yet the hand is just as real as the watch. How do I convince myself of the reality of the watch? By taking it in my hand and touching it. How do I convince myself of the reality of the hand? I could not convince myself by touching it if I did not have a second hand; but I do know with inner certainty that I have a hand, that I have what I have on me to grasp the watch just as realistically as I can guarantee the reality of the watch by touching it. Do you notice the difference between the real hand and the real watch? I have to experience the reality of the hand in a different way than the reality of the clock.

You can transfer this comparison entirely to human thinking, to the intellect. You can never grasp that which the intellect comprehends so directly through the intellect itself; just as little as you can grasp the hand itself with a hand. The intellect cannot perceive itself as it perceives the other things; but it is nevertheless convinced of its reality through inner certainty. It is an inner certainty that convinces the intellect of its reality. But then one must understand this intellect, this working of the intellect, as an activity of the human subject; one must realize that the intellect, spiritually speaking, is only a hand that is stretched out to grasp something. All this is figuratively speaking, but they are very real images. And just as, on the one hand, my hand is able to convince me of the reality of the watch – namely, by being able, for example, to feel the weight of the watch, the smoothness of the watch, that is, by being able to experience through the nature of my hand everything that is real about the clock – on the other hand, through the real of the intellect, I am able to experience other things about things than what the senses experience. The intellect is therefore a grasping organ in the spiritual sense, which we must perceive in #»s, not in the outside world.

And you see, here lies the difficulty for philosophers. They believe that if they have thoughts about the world, then these thoughts must come from outside, and then they realize that they do not come from outside at all, but that the intellect produces these thoughts. And since they regard the intellect as alien to external reality, they must actually regard all thoughts as fantasy images. But one must ascribe a subjective reality to the intellect, a reality that is experienced internally. Then one has the realm of reality in which the intellect is perceived. Thus, by examining the actual nature of the intellect, we come to be able to say: Yes, everything that the intellect accomplishes may or need only be a reflection of external reality, but this reflection has been created by the work of real intellect. This is a human activity. Its reality consists in the fact that man works by acquiring knowledge of the reality of the intellect through the intellect. So we can say that man's intellectual activity, which works in man, but it works in such a way that it is quite justified to say that what this intellect works out has no significance for the world in which it works - just as the hand has no significance for the clock; for the clock it is of no importance whether it is grasped by the hand or not – it is something that exists for and in man, that he forms images of things through the intellect. But with regard to the things of the physical plane, everything that this intellect works out is unreal, a mirror image, dead, nothing alive. We can say that the images of the physical world that are worked out in the intellect are lifeless, dead images.

[It was written on the board]:

Intellectual activity - dead images.

Thus, the images that man forms of the physical world are also dead images. One misunderstands the actual nature of this content of the intellect if one ascribes to it something other than the fact that it can be a copy of the physical world.

But the matter becomes quite different when man comes to live with the experiences of his existence in time. When we face the things of the external world and form images of them through the intellect, we get dead concepts; but if we allow these concepts to be present in our soul, then after some time, when the experience of which we have formed an image is long gone, we can, through memory, as we say, bring up the image of that experience from memory. We can say: Yes, now I know nothing of the experience; but when I remember, it comes up. It was not in my consciousness before I remembered, but it is there, somewhere in the depths of my soul, unconsciously, I just have to bring it up from the unconscious.

So the image of a past experience that I have seen in the past is down there in the unconscious. Fine, there it is, I'll bring it up. But down there it is not so meaningless. You just need to take the very ordinary difference between an idea that we receive from an experience in such a way that it gives us joy, lifts us up, and an idea of some experience that has not given us joy. We can now push an idea that has given us joy down into the unconscious, and can push an idea that has not given us joy into the unconscious. Few people reflect on what is to be said about the difference between an idea that gives pleasure and one that causes grief or pain. But there is an enormous difference. And this difference becomes particularly apparent when one tries to ascertain the reality value of such ideas, which have actually already faded from normal memory.

So let us consider an idea that a person may have enjoyed but had no reason to think back to in later life, or an idea that caused him pain and to which he also had little reason to think back. They do not come to his consciousness, but they play a role in the unconscious soul life. If only people would recognize from spiritual science what ideas stored up in the soul mean, even if they are completely forgotten. We are actually always the result of our experiences. The expression on our face, especially in more intimate gestures, is really a reflection of what we have experienced in our present incarnation. You can see this in the faces of people who experienced something sad in their childhood. So what goes on down there, in other words, is involved in the processes of human life. What is repressed into oblivion, into the unconscious, in the form of inhibiting, sad images, consumes us, it cuts off our life force. What we have experienced that is joyful and uplifting revives us. And when you study the fate of our imaginative life in the unconscious, you find how tremendously dependent the present mood, the whole constitution of a person, is on what lies in his subconscious.

Now compare the memories, the images that have already entered the unconscious soul life, with the images that we currently have in our consciousness. Then you will say to yourself: the images that we currently have in our consciousness are dead. Dead images do not participate in our life process. Only when they descend into the unconscious do they begin to participate in the process of life and then become life-promoting or life-inhibiting ideas. So that the ideas, by being pushed down into the deeper layers of the soul, only really begin to live. I have always pointed this out in the lectures I have given in various places on the hidden foundations of the soul's life. Thus, the ideas, which are initially dead ideas, begin to live when they are implanted in our soul life; but they live all the more the more unconscious we become.

If you now follow the process with spiritual scientific knowledge, something very peculiar happens, which I can only describe as [a drawing is begun]:

Let us assume that this is the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious; that this line, this stroke, is the boundary between “conscious”, which is above, and “unconscious”, which is below. And now we have formed all kinds of ideas in our consciousness. I will denote them schematically with all kinds of figures. We have formed these ideas; let us assume that these ideas go down into the unconscious. They go down there [the arrows were drawn].

Yes, you see, when these images that go down there are followed with spiritual-scientific knowledge, then they transform themselves. Outwardly we have recognized that they become life-promoting or life-inhibiting; inwardly it shows through spiritual-scientific knowledge that they become imaginations by sliding down below the surface, as it were. In the unconscious or subconscious, everything that goes down becomes imagination, everything becomes an image. You can have the most abstract ideas in your ordinary day-to-day consciousness: when you go below the threshold of ordinary day-to-day consciousness, everything becomes imagination. That is to say, there is a process in man, a sum of processes, which is always endeavoring — through the dead ideas of the earthly, ordinary, materialistic consciousness passing into the subconscious — to transform all the ideas of consciousness in the subconscious into images, into imaginations, before man comes to imaginative knowledge.

If we want to describe what we have in our unconscious of our imaginative life, if we want to get to know it, then we must actually say: all this consists of unconscious imaginations, and all the ideas that we can in turn raise from the unconscious into the conscious, we must bring them up through an activity that also remains unconscious to us. We must bring them back into consciousness, but we must strip them of their pictorial character, transform them back into abstract, non-pictorial ideas. And when you are in the process of reflecting, “Oh, I experienced something; what was it? and you make an effort – you all know the process – to remember something, then it is the effort that you have to devote to stripping the image that is sitting there of its pictorial character and transforming it back into the imaginative form of consciousness.

From this, however, you will see that the ideas become more spiritual when we push them down into the unconscious. We must therefore say: When we take what the intellect offers us and absorb it into the unconscious, then we must characterize the world of ideas that is there in us and that we have pushed down as a higher, more spiritual world. We must therefore say: the world of possible memories – please note that I say the world of possible memories; not all the images that go down there need to be remembered again, but they are all there below in the unconscious soul life – the world of possible memories actually consists of imaginations, of unconscious imaginations.

[It was written on the board:

World of possible memories – imaginations.

Now, there are times when it is possible for a person's normal consciousness – and perhaps we will be able to talk about other such possibilities in the next few days – to conjure up these images, which would otherwise never pass from the realm of possible memories into the realm of actual memories, into consciousness. Take the experiences sometimes had by people who are drowning! And if you could compare them with the experiences of those who have passed through the gate of death, you would find that even there, some images, where the effort in ordinary physical life is not enough to bring them up again, then arise as if by themselves. But episodes, parts of them, also arise in the ordinary dream world. Even the dream as it presents itself to us is a complicated reality, because what is actually experienced is in many ways hidden behind it. But the ideas that we cover up are taken from memory. So the dream, the experiences of those struggling with death, like drowning people and the like, and experiences that occur immediately after passing through the gate of death, show this world of imagination, which is a more spiritual world than the world of ordinary human intelligence on the physical plane.

But if you take what I have just described, that these ideas, which have passed into the region of memory, work to promote or inhibit life, you will say to yourself: There is some life in it. While the ideas of the ordinary intellect are dead, there is some life in them, but it is not particularly strong. But even here ordinary experience can offer something that can show you that what happens to these images as they descend into the subconscious region can signify an even stronger life.

I have already emphasized the very common fact that people who have to learn something by heart in order to recite it, learn and sleep on it, and that this sleep is necessary to make the memory more capable. This is, however, only a slight hint at something that spiritual science shows much more clearly, indeed completely clearly, namely that our entire world of ideas, as we develop it and push it down into the subconscious, becomes more and more alive in the subconscious, while in consciousness it is dead.

Now, the ideas that come up again are not even those that are most involved in promoting or inhibiting life, but rather those that connect with us much more intimately. Ideas that we often absorb only incidentally, without even paying much attention to them in life, connect with our life-promoting or life-inhibiting powers to a much greater extent. Let us assume that someone is involved in spiritual science. He first takes in this spiritual science as it is worked out by the physical intellect. He has to start from there. We have to tie in with what the physical intellect perceives through the senses. Otherwise I could not speak about the spiritual world at all, because language is for the physical world. But there is a difference in how we, let me say, clothed in life, take in such a world of ideas.

Suppose a person takes the truths of spiritual science seriously and with dignity, so to speak, so that he feels: there is seriousness, deep seriousness. Another person takes in the ideas of spiritual science in such a way that he actually only listens to them theoretically and does not take them very seriously. The one takes them, as it were, in an atmosphere of superficiality, the other in an atmosphere of seriousness. We do not need to be very aware of how we take them in; it has more to do with how we go through life without always thinking about it. Those who are predisposed or accustomed to taking things seriously, and not frivolously or cynically, do not always think about how to take them; they behave seriously and naturally. In the same way, those who are only superficially predisposed take them in superficially; they cannot help it. Thus we accompany our life of imagination with something that we do not imagine, that really is something that goes along with what we are aware of. But what goes along with what we are aware of goes much deeper into the unconscious than what we consciously think. The way we form our ideas goes much deeper into the unconscious than what we consciously think. And when a person is asleep and his astral body and I am out of the physical and etheric body, then this way of forming ideas plays an infinitely important role in the astral body and I. One can say: Anyone who takes on any ideas with the necessary seriousness has these ideas in his astral body and in his I in such a way that they are there like invigorating solar power for the plant. They are truly the most invigorating of forces. And he incorporates into these ideas that which is invigorating, invigorating and going beyond the present incarnation, and creating the preconditions for the next incarnation. It is already evident from the creative soul that you have something in the subconscious that is more spiritual than what can be brought up through the dream.

There we have a world of unconscious mental life, connected with the whole core of the human being. This way of taking life, as it were, penetrates into our spiritual life forces, and it is quite the same as unconscious inspiration.

[It was written on the board]:

World of the unconscious life of imagination – inspirations.

I will then explain to you – today is no longer the time for this – how even ordinary life shows that these unconscious inspirations unconsciously have an effect in the person already in the incarnation in which they are formed, but unconsciously. Then I will show you further that there is still a higher world for the human being. But you can see from what has been presented today that the human soul life has an inner movement, that what is experienced on the physical plane through physical intelligence is experienced further down, that it then ascends into more spiritual regions, into even more spiritual regions at last than we experience on the physical plane. [The arrows were drawn.] So the life of imagination is in inner movement, in ascending movement. And now you remember what I drew for you yesterday: how certain processes in man were shown in a descending movement. So that you can say to yourself: When I have the human being in front of me, there is a descending current and an ascending current in the human being, and they work together. We will discuss tomorrow how they work together.

[Diagram on the board]:

World of unconscious mental life: inspirations
World of memory: imaginations
Intellectual activity: dead images

I will try to answer your prepared questions during the course of this lecture. Except that I would like to answer some of them in a special session with the arch-rulers even if they were asked by others. This could be done in the next few days, and the answers could then be passed on.

I would especially like to draw your attention to a seal in the Apocalypse which is an Imagination of the Apocalypticer and which has often been depicted by artists in connection with the Apocalypse. One cannot always say that these pictorial renderings of what is in the Apocalypse are very felicitous. However, one can hardly fail to recognize the individual parts of the seal that is involved here and which will be realized in our time, as we saw yesterday, for they come to meet one in the Apocalypse in a quite characteristic way. However, in order to understand this seal, we will have to discuss something which goes parallel with it, which is very important for our time, and has already been touched upon in an Anthroposophical connection and which we find illuminated in a particular way at this point in the Apocalyptic discussion.

If one looks at the development of man and notices how he becomes a being who is split into three parts, as his consciousness makes the transition from the physical, sensory world to a perception of the spiritual world, as I described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?,—if one looks at this one will say to oneself, a triad and a monad are united in men through the integration of these into the form of a physical being. This union is really quite obvious. One can see it if one studies the opinion about the division of the human being that is expressed in Anthroposophy.

Let's look at man and his spirit, soul and body. The way this division is related to the others that are given in Anthroposophy should be clear without further ado. Now, thoughts live in the spirit which man has today. These thoughts are like I the ones which I refer to in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for instance, where one has pure thoughts that are freely created in man's consciousness, and not the kind that are permeated by sense perceptions. Here, thoughts are almost completely illusory from a qualitative viewpoint; they are a full reality to such a small extent that we don't have quite enough inner force because we don't have a mirror image, and so we can't quite, compare them with mirror images, and yet in a certain sense we can. The image that appears in a mirror doesn't unfold any forces along the directions of its lines, it is completely passive. Human thoughts have some force when they are developed, so that we can catch this force and we can permeate it with will—as I said yesterday in the esoteric class. But the ordinary thoughts that man has during his lifetime are really like mirror images in comparison with the universe's existence and its full content. So that although we hear spirit in our human being, it's a mirror image of the spirit.

What we bear within us there comes from a world which I called spiritland in my Theosophy. So when we think on earth we're really bringing the ingredients of the spiritland down to the earth as an illusory reflection. When we think we carry what Theosophy calls devachan down into the earth sphere, even though this is only a faint reflection of it. We bear these contents in us on earth; we bear a faint reflection of heavenly splendors in us.

If we pass on to the soul element we mainly find feeling there. It exists as feeling during the waking state, and as pictorial dreams while we're asleep. The only difference between dreams and feelings is that one is the content of the soul during the waking state and the other is its content during sleep. What we experience in our feelings as men on earth between birth and death comes from another world that I described from a certain viewpoint in my Theosophy. It comes from the soul world which we experience in its real form after death. Our feeling life is not a mirror image of this real form but an image of it which is maintained in our soul by creative elemental powers. We only dream of this soul world in our feelings and there is no reality in our image of it.

What constitutes men's bodies on earth today does not develop any consciousness of archetypes, but it contains the strongest realities of existence. We are real in our body, but we are only active in the physical, terrestrial world in it. Thus the three members of man's being belong to different worlds.

You must develop a correct view about these things, since you want to work upon the being of man, and therefore you must have something in your feelings that points to what exists in man's being. Quite good philosophers have failed to understand my division of man's being altogether. They have expressed one misunderstanding after another about it, which shows how difficult it is even for good thinkers of the present time to really get into Anthroposophy.

One philosopher spoke about this division of man as if it were an arbitrary one that had been made with the intellect and which amounted to a formal schematism. Of course one can also divide a table into legs, top, etc., even though the whole thing is made of wood. One could also divide it from left to right, but the division of the human being has nothing to do with such an arbitrary classification. One could put it like this: if one has real hydrogen and real oxygen and one combines them one gets water. They are realities and not just artificial schemata. Likewise, man's members are not separated in an arbitrary way; they are integrated into the reality of human nature, so that one can say that the spirit comes from spirit land, the soul from the soul world and the physical body from the physical world. These members of the human being come from three different worlds and they are integrated in man. And when man leaves the physical world with his consciousness, his inner elements split up, and the one becomes three. However, what happens in individual men in this way takes place in the whole of humanity throughout its various racial and national evolutions, although not everyone has to participate in it. One can say that the evolving humanity which is present in the sub-consciousness of every single human being and which doesn't become noticeable to ordinary consciousness, goes through stages of development that are similar to the ones individual men go through.

Something like a splitting into three and a crossing of the threshold by mankind is taking place in our time. In our consciousness age individual men have to acquire something which constitutes a going past' the Guardian of the Threshold, if they want to do it. However, mankind is going past the Guardian of the Threshold in our time, although, individual men are unaware of this. The whole of humanity is crossing the threshold. Whereas the physical body still gave something to men on earth up to the end of the 18th century because of the elemental beings which are living in it, men must now get their virtues and everything productive that they will find inwardly from the spiritual world; this is mankind as a whole, not individual human beings. So that a crossing of the threshold is occurring in the evolution of mankind as a whole, which appears to the Apocalypticer before he has his vision of the sun-illuminated woman with the dragon under her feet, because it actually precedes it in time. Here the Apocalypticer has another vision that clearly reflects what he wants to say: The time is coming when the whole of humanity, or at least its civilized parts will have to cross the threshold. And a triad appears which is the cosmic Imagination of what mankind is going through. There will be ever more men who will have the feeling: My thoughts want to run away from me, and my feet are being pulled down by the earth's gravity; this is in addition to other feelings that men can develop when these things become more pathological. Many people today have the strong feeling that their thoughts are running away from them and that their feet are being pulled down to the earth too much. Except that our present-day civilization talks people out of something like this, just as children are talked out of visions they have which are nevertheless based on a real foundation.

However, what lives strongly in our time appears before the clairvoyant eye of the Apocalypticer as a figure that forms out of the clouds, has a face like a sun, goes over into a rainbow, and has fiery feet, of which one is planted on the ocean and the other on the earth. One could say that this is really the most significant vision that the present-day human soul should look at. For the thoughts that belong to spirit land are in the face which is born out of the clouds above. The rainbow is the feeling world in man's soul which belongs to the soul world. What is contained in the bodies of men who belong to the physical world is in the fiery feet that get their strength from the power of the earth Which is covered by the ocean.

One could say that this points to a real cultural secret of the present, which is that there are three kinds of men, and not that each man is split into three parts. One can see this very clearly today. We have cloud men who can only think, whereas the two other parts—rainbow and fiery feet—remain stunted. We have rainbow men where the main development is in the feelings. They can only grasp Anthroposophy with their feelings and not with their minds. However, this type is also present in the outside world and not just in the Anthroposophical Society. They can only grasp the world with their feelings. These people's feelings are well developed but their thinking and will are stunted. Then there are people today who act as if they only had a hypertrophically developed will; their thinking and feeling are stunted; they charge like bulls and act in accordance with direct, outer impulses,—they're the fiery footed men.

The vision of John the Apocalypticer depicts these three kinds of men which we meet in life. We should become aware of this secret of our present-day civilization so that we can look at human beings in the right way. One can also discover them if one looks at larger world events.

Just look at what is, happening in Russia. We have the influence of the cloud man, of the man who mainly thinks, in whom feeling and will are neglected. They would like to surrender their will to a social mechanism, and their feelings are used by Ahrimanic powers because they don't have any control over them. They are thinkers, but since man on earth is organized in an Ahrimanic and Luciferic way, their thinking is like - - I will use an analogy that will seem like a perfectly natural one to anyone who knows spiritual science; it will only scare such people away who haven't worked their way into this kind of thing yet. If one takes the thoughts of Lenin and the others and one looks at these thoughts, that is, if one tries to imagine what the combined thoughts of Lenin, Trotsky, Lunacharski, etc., looks like, if one imagines what is growling and raging in the heads of leading Russians today, one gets what one calls a system of forces in physics. If one was a gigantic elemental spirit one could form clouds and arouse thunder and lightning up in the sky over a large territory with these forces. But they don't belong on earth. This image might surprise you, but anyone who can look into the occult depths of existence must say that the same forces that weave and live in the heads of leading Russians are also in the lightning that is formed in the clouds over our heads and that they flash the lightning down to the earth and roll the thunders. This is where these forces belong. Their action in leading Bolsheviks is out of place.

So you see that the Apocalypticer clearly foresaw many things that are present in our time. And he knew that such an epochal period of time can be indicated with a number. I myself have indicated the approximate number of years which the development of the consciousness soul, intellectual or mind soul, etc., covers. I said that such a period lasts one twelfth of 25.920 years.

Now the place in the Apocalypse to which I'm referring gave me quite a bit of trouble for a while. For the Apocalypticer supposedly prophesies about things that will take one thousand two hundred and threescore days. They used to speak of days when they meant years. Anyway, the Apocalypticer mentions the number 1260. It took a lot of intensive research to discover that the 1260 days is really a printing error, as it were, in the Apocalypse that was handed down. It should say 2160 days. Then it agrees with what one can see today. It's quite possible that an un-clarity arose in some school where the things were handed down, because many numbers look like their mirror images to seers. However, this is something that is not too important when one feels one's way into the Apocalypse.

Now the people who stand within their race in such a way that they're really cloud men are confronted by others who are rainbow men. Their thinking is relatively inactive, they mainly like to use traditional thoughts and they are rather timid about approaching the spiritual world with their thoughts. One meets a large number of such rainbow men in central European regions.

Thinking and feeling get increasingly stunted the further we go west, where we find a pathological development of fiery footed men. One finds large numbers of such fiery footed human beings in the western part of Europe and presumably in America. So that we can divide the earth along these lines: In the east there are many cloud men, in the center many rainbow men, and in the west many fiery footed men.

If we take racial developments into account, one could say that something like a picture of the figure which we encounter here in the Apocalypticer is spread out over the earth, if one looks at it, spiritually from outside. One can't do this in a balloon or airplane, but if one would raise oneself up spiritually into the heights from a point in Westphalen and would look down at the earth, Asia would have a kind of a cloud form face with solar shapes, and one would see rainbow colors spread out over Europe, and further over would be the fiery feet, with one planted on the Andes in South America and the other in the Pacific Ocean. And then one has the earth underneath this image.

This is one of the most incisive prophecies that the Apocalypticer has for our time. This is something that is very important for priestly activities, for the great riddle of our time that developed with Napoleon consists of this. This striving of men into races and nations that has come to expression so incomprehensibly throúgh Wilsonianism today really only arose in a distinct way under the influence of Napoleonism, of the first Napoleon. The way that men are striving towards races and nations and the way that they basically want to bury all cosmopolitanism today is really quite terrible. But the reason for this is that this passage through the threshold, place is occurring.

Just as a human being splits up in the spiritual world when he develops further, so men on earth split up into regions that individual human beings remain unaware of, namely, into cloud men, rainbow men and fiery footed men. This splitting of men into three parts—which I described for individuals in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, has occurred for humanity on earth; it's here. The powerful sign which the Apocalypticer sketches is there in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. People cannot find the harmony between the three parts at first, and so they look for things in the split rather than in the union; which sometimes leads to rather strange results.

For instance, through this whole external way of thinking that takes hold of people, one can see that people don't find their way together with inner understanding, that is, they often unite for superficial reasons. For instance, we can see that the Czechs whose land is between the Krusnehory and Fichtel mountains, the Bohemian Forest and down to the Morave River and over to Bratislava (formerly Pressburg), and up to the Ceskyles and Sumava Mountains as the southern boundary,—that these Czechs are cloud people in the most eminent sense of the word, who have only developed their thinking. They were welded together with the Slovaks in a way that shows a lack of inner understanding, for the Slovaks are definitely a rainbow people who are not the thinking type at all. On the other hand, we see that another quite external relationship which had been formed shortly before is dissolved. All of these human, earthly activities are not very sensible, because they want to exclude the spirit.

We see that the whole of Slovakia was recently separated from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, which is the territory which I just indicated. We see that all of this Slovakia was previously united with Magyar country and with real Magyars. You must distinguish the real Magyars from the immigrated ones, and you can do this just by looking at their names. A real Magyar has a name one can't even pronounce in the west, especially if he's an older type. But he's called Hirschfeld, if he's one of those agitative and screaming Magyars of today. One has to go back to the genuine Magyars who are all fiery-footed men, and they were briefly welded together with the rainbow Slovaks. The non-spirit in the world today throws the dice in such a way that the Slovaks are first thrown together with the Magyars and then with the Czechs.

That is the way the dice are being thrown in general today. This comes to expression in deeper symptoms, such as the fact that a really significant person like Masaryk who is standing at the helm in the Czechoslovakian Republic, is a Slovak, and not a Czech. Anyone who knows Masaryk knows that he is a rainbow man who can't think at all. If you read his books you will see that our age is speaking in them. He is a rainbow man, a real Slovak.

One has to be able to look at contemporary human beings in accordance with these categories in order to see the kind of crap game that is being played, although of course this is based on world karma. Here we must look at the age—which is really ours—which can say of itself that it is entering ever more into men's consciousness and into the consciousness soul. People previously saw the starry script written outside; they saw the contents of old traditions and old wisdom written outside. There is a kind of a memory of this man who is split into three in ancient books. Everything which the wise men proclaimed about the world in the mystery centers in Macedonia, Greece, Ephesus, Samothrace, Delphi and in other places in Asia Minor and elsewhere is the book which is preserved from ancient times, which is in the hand of the angel whose face is fashioned out of clouds, his chest out of a rainbow, and his feet out of fire, and he stands firmly in America with the rest of his body spread out over Europe and Asia. However, as consciousness men we can only keep this active and alive for ourselves if we have to look within ourselves for the source which enables us to learn how to see spiritual things. We must devour the book, which could previously only be brought from outside, and bring it into ourselves. This book which contains the world's secrets is sweet in the mouths of some people at first. People like to come to things which can give them spiritual views; so that they taste like honey to them. But as soon as one has to fulfill the exacting conditions in life which are connected with a spiritual comprehension of the world then what the Apocalypticer says is sweet as honey becomes a stomach ache, especially to the people who have become so materialistic today. These people find that the digestion of the spiritual nourishment that is so necessary for them is painful.

If we look at this, we have to admit that all of this dice throwing and confusion indicates that a force which can measure everything in a new way must come from the spiritual power that can be seen in threefold man. A reed, or really a measuring rod, is sent down from heaven, with which everything is to be measured in a new way. Just look at our time. Doesn't everything have to be measured anew? Shouldn't we add something like a cloud shape to that abstract Asian shape that we find on our maps, rainbow colors to Europe and fiery feet to the Americas? Don't we have to measure everything anew from the viewpoint of the spiritual life? After all, we're right m the midst of what the Apocalypse is showing us here.

If we grasp what we must stand in in a fully conscious way, we will get away from the layman's attitude that is often present in the depths of our sub-consciousness today and we will acquire a non-rationalistic grasp of the tasks of our time through what is to be a new priesthood. This is something that should be said in connection with this particular chapter of the Apocalypse. The things agree in every detail. Vie will have more to say about racial and individual evolution tomorrow.

Let us consider to-day the transformation of the ancient Moon into the present Earth. But first of all we must draw attention to an important phenomenon of the Moon development. When this development drew towards its close, when. everything, which I have already described to you had more or less taken, place, the ancient Moon and the Sun were reunited. The ancient Moon found its way back, as it were, to the Sun, and as a result a uniform body arose. These two celestial bodies which were reunited then passed over into a kind of latent planetary existence. Out of this came forth the fourth metamorphosis, which did not immediately resemble our present Earth, for the present condition of our Earth was prepared gradually and slowly. A study of the Earth in particular can give us a clear conception of the cosmic law that later conditions of development must in a certain way repeat conditions which have already existed. Before the Earth became our present planet—after awaking from its latent planetary condition—it had to repeat briefly the Saturn, Sun and Moon conditions. Of course, this development took a somewhat different course than in the case of the three planets themselves.

Upon Saturn we found the first foundation of the sensory apparatus which we now possess; During the first repetition of the Saturn Condition these sensory forms had progressed so far that a kind of human shape could develop; but during this metamorphosis the automatic sense-apparatus did not as yet possess an etheric body. The etheric body was embodied during the repetition of the Sun condition, and the astral body was added during the third transformation, the repetition of the moon condition. During the third phase we once more have Sun and Moon as separate bodies in the cosmic space. But the beings who lived upon them had in the meantime developed further; they had gradually prepared themselves for the experiences which awaited them upon the Earth. There, a fourth member was added to the three bodies which the animal-like human race possessed upon the ancient Moon, and this fourth member was the Ego.

But this course of development did not take place so quickly. While the earth was passing through its Saturn epoch, the automatic sense-apparatus of man had to mould a form enabling it to absorb the Ego. During the Sun repetition the etheric body also transformed itself, so as to be able to become the bearer of an Ego, and during the Moon repetition the astral body underwent a change enabling it to take in the Ego. These members waited, as it were, for the moment when they could take in the Ego.

What we were able to pursue thus far, was the separation of the Sun from the Moon. Then comes a stage which more closely approaches our present development, namely the separation of the Moon from the Earth. Two bodies emerge from the ancient Moon: one which consisted of the worst material in regard to its beings and substances, was thrown out into the cosmic space, and the other formed the present Earth. It was necessary to eliminate that which would have hindered the beings from their further development and this part which was cast out became the present Moon. After the elimination the Earth existed as an independent cosmic body. This entailed powerful cosmic events: first the separation of the Earth plus Moon from the Sun, and then the separation of the Earth from the Moon. These two events prepared our present development.

I have led you as far as the point where our Earth became an independent sphere. Let me now lead you to this point by following another direction, so that you may have a clear idea as to the exact position of this point in regard to our Earth. Let us go back from the immediate present into the past; let us go back from the present form of the Earth which you all know, to a past condition. Even natural science draws attention to the great differences between the present and the past aspect of our Earth. All this, to be sure, is based on hypotheses, but in this field natural science meets spiritual science to some extent. Natural science says: Huge virgin forests once existed in the regions which we now inhabit, their climate was one which we now encounter in Equatorial zones and gigantic animals lived in those forests.

According to the statements of modern natural science the face of our Earth once presented quite a different aspect from the present one. The ice-age followed the tropical climate and preceded the present temperate one. Every book on geology contains these facts. I am only telling you this in order to show you that the face of our Earth underwent great transformations in the course of certain epochs of time and that now it presents an entirely different aspect from that of the past.

As far as the external aspect of the Earth is concerned, natural science, which only disposes of the combining intellectual power, of apparatuses, etc., can only look back upon a few thousands of years. The descriptions of a clairvoyant looking back upon the past development of our Earth must, however, differ from those of natural science though a kind of harmony ,will one day be established between natural science and spiritual science. Natural science draws attention to a fact which a clairvoyant can ascertain without any doubt namely that the face of our Earth has not only changed in regard to plants, but that continents and oceans once existed in regions of our Earth where they no longer exist. Huxley, for instance, pointed out that a whole part of Great Britain has already been submerged by the ocean four times. Thus the face of our Earth constantly undergoes a transformation. In volume 12 of “Kosmos” you may, for instance, find an article on the so-called old continent of Atlantis, where a scientist who completely adopts the standpoint of natural science proves, through the configuration of the flora and fauna in Europe and in America, that the present Atlantic Ocean must once have been a continent, and that great parts of Africa must in those times have been covered by the ocean. On the other hand, the continent of Atlantis existed, in the West, stretching between the present Europe and America. This scientist only speaks of the fauna and of the flora of Atlantis, which is of course natural. But even if remnants of the ancient human beings, who were our ancestors could be found (they must exist at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean), it is not possible to-day to investigate to such an extent the bottom of the ocean. The clairvoyant, however, can look back as far as the time of Atlantis, and he knows that this ancient Atlantean continent, which Plato describes, really existed. Essentially speaking, the whole surface now covered by the Atlantic Ocean was once Atlantis, and this continent was inhabited by the physical predecessors of the present human race. Of course they had a rather different aspect from the one imagined by modern natural science.

We should not in any way compare them with the present apes; though psychically and physically the Atlanteans greatly differed from modern men, they were not apes. Apes did not exist at that time, for this animal species, only arose much later; simply through the fact that certain human shapes of that time remained behind at the stage of development which had then been reached, and afterwards degenerated, sinking down to a lower stage. Darwinism consequently makes a great mistake, which is, however, easy to detect. If we have before us two men, one upon an imperfect stage of development and the other a man who applied his faculties in order to perfect himself, and if we are told that these two men are relatives, we shall not say: They are relatives, and consequently the more perfect man descends from the less perfect one. Yet Darwinism comes to such a conclusion: The perfect and imperfect specimens stand side by side; one developed upwards by applying his faculties in the right way, while the other led them down and thus became decadent. That is how apes the descendants of human beings, confront man. An ape is a caricature of man, but he is not like a human being.

At the time of Atlantis there existed an entirely different human race, which gradually developed towards a higher stage. But certain men remained behind in there development, and because the Earth itself underwent changes, these beings also changed; they degenerated and became a caricature of man—they became apes. These lower beings, the apes, are consequently degenerated specimens of higher beings who had become decadent.

If we study the Atlantean man, an observation of his psychic qualities will give us the best idea of his way of living.

All that modern men are able to do—to think logically, to calculate, etc.—all this arose much later. Logic, power of judgment, etc. were unknown to the Atlanteans. But on the other hand, they had a soul-quality which has now become decadent; they had an almost inconceivable power of memory. They could not calculate twice two is four, nor make this calculation over and over again through intellectual power, but they could bear in mind the result obtained by multiplying two by two, and they were always able to remember this result. This is connected with an entirely different constitution which existed on that ancient continent. If you wish to have an idea of the physical aspect of that continent, imagine a mountain valley filled with thick fogs and mists: The Atlanteans never saw an atmosphere which was free from moisture. The air was always filled with water. When the ancient Atlanteans came over into Europe,they preserved the memory of this condition and they called the land of their ancestors.“Niflheim”, which mans the land of fogs.

When the last third of the Atlantean epoch drew towards its close, the Atlanteans began to notice that they were Egos. The Ego foundation had indeed existed for some time, and the Atlantean even had a certain feeling for the Ego, but only during the last third of the Atlantean epoch he learned to say clearly: “I am an Ego.” This is connected with the relationship of the etheric body with the physical body.

If you observe these two bodies, you will notice that they more or less coincide, but the etheric body slightly protrudes above the physical body. Between the eyebrows there is a point which constitutes a centre for certain forces and streams of the etheric body, and this corresponds to a definite point in the physical brain. These two points must coincide; on this depends the capacity of being able to experience oneself as an Ego, to calculate, combine, etc. In the case of idiots, f0r instance, these points in the head do not coincide, and when this is the case, man's power of judgment no longer functions properly. In the case of the Atlanteans these points did not coincide, and this is still the case to-day with animals. If you observe the head of a horse you will find that these two points are far apart. In the Atlantean, the etheric head protruded and his physical head had a retreating brow.

But the Atlantean had something which man lost when the etheric body and the physical body began to coincide. The Atlantean still possessed dull clairvoyance, but he was, for instance, unable to count up to five. All his judgments were based on his capacity of remembering incredibly distant times. And that old clairvoyance appeared as the enhancement of our present dream-life. Imagine the highest enhancement of this dream-life: this would lead you to the conceptual capacity, to the ancient, dull, dream-like clairvoyance of the Atlantean. When the Atlantean walked over the earth; he could indeed see the human beings in their physical involucres more or less as we see them to-day, but this perception had in a certain way a misty and foggy outline. The Atlantean could, however, perceive something which we cannot perceive. When we meet someone today, we do not see anything special of his inner being, we can only see what his features reveal to us; a gloomy expression will tell us that he is sad and will enable us to guess something of his state of mind. But when an Atlantean encountered someone who had evil intentions towards him, a brown-red vision rose up before him, and if that person loved him he saw a blue-red vision. A kind of colour vision harmonized with the psychological state of the other person; the Atlantean could still perceive something of what took place in the inner being of other men. An Atlantean walking along, who saw a terrible red-brown fog rising up before him, ran away, for he knew that a dangerous animal was approaching (perhaps it was still far away), one that would surely devour him.

The ancient Atlantean clairvoyance even had a physical foundation. For the Atlantean considered that only his close relatives belonged to him (to a far greater extent than was the case later on). Small communities existed which did not extend beyond the family circle. It was of greatest importance to marry only within this restricted family circle. These marriages between closely connected relatives produced a blood mixture which preserved the etheric body's capacity to receive spiritual influences. Had the Atlantean attempted to marry outside his family circle, he would have suppressed his clairvoyant faculty and, astrally speaking, would have become an idiot. It was a moral, ethical law to remain within the blood-ties of one s family. Before the Atlantean was able, to have a definite experience of his Ego,he said “that am I” to his whole blood-brotherhood. He considered himself as a part of the whole blood-brotherhood, even as the finger is a part of the hand.

But something else is based on this fact. The Atlantean could not only remember his own experiences, but also the experiences of his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, etc., reaching far down the line of the generations, as far as the founder of his family. Everything which came from there, everything which streamed through the line of the generations was experienced as a unity. This can show you how greatly developed was the memory of the Atlanteans! Everything was based upon memory. Later on we shall see how man lost this powerful memory because he broke through the circle of close marriages.

An Atlantean soul necessarily required quite a different physical nature and environment than is the case to-day. He needed an environment described, for instance, in the legendary “Niflheim” of the ancient Germans. Legends and myths are not in any way based upon so-called popular fancy or poetic invention. The origin of such legends can be clearly traced. The Atlanteans still possessed an ancient, dull clairvoyance, and the events which were later on related and preserved (though frequently in a distorted form) in the legends and myths of various nations really occurred.

The transmigration of the Atlanteans to the East has been preserved wonderfully in a cycle of European legends. Man could not say “I” to his individual personality, when he still lived on the ancient Atlantean continent. Consequently egoism, which later on constituted the foundation of social life, did not exist among the Atlanteans. The inhabitant of Atlantis considered as his possession everything which belonged to all his blood-relatives and he felt that he was a member of this blood relationship. Then came the transmigration to the East. Man's Ego-consciousness emerged more and more, and with it, human egoism. Man once lived far more in the external world than within his own being; Nature still formed part of his being. He felt as if he were embedded in Nature, as if he were a part of Nature. With the acquisition of his Ego-consciousness, the world around him became narrower and narrower; he separated himself from his environment little by little and the Ego emerged more and more.

This was at the same time connected with a process of Nature. When the old Atlantean looked up to the sky, he could not see the sun as we see it to-day; thick masses of fog filled the air, and when he looked at the sun and at the moon he saw an immense circle of rainbow colours. Then came the time when the Atlantean could perceive the sun and the moon as such. But there was one phenomenon which was unknown to the Atlantean—the rainbow. When the waters of Atlantis began to leave the atmosphere, when rain alternated with sunshine as is the case to-day, then the Atlantean learned to know the rainbow, for there no rainbows in the moisture-filled atmosphere of ancient Atlantis. Now bear in mind that great stretches of land were laid bear by the great Atlantean flood, and this has been wonderfully preserved in many legends, particularly in the Bible. Consider the deep truth contained in the Bible words: “And when the waters had departed, Noah saw the rainbow”. Only when the atmosphere became freed from the fogs and mists of Atlantis, could the sun appear to man in its present form. This process accompanied the narrowing of man' s being, so that he became confined within his own self, within his Ego.

For reasons which have a profound meaning, spiritual wisdom defines the light flooding through space as the etheric gold, and gold is looked upon as the condensed light of the sun. The ancient Atlanteans were taught by their teachers that there is a connection between the light of the sun and gold, and they took in the following image: “The light of the Sun, the gold of the sun, shines forth! It envelops us with a ring which frees the Ego, bringing about the fact that we no longer experience ourselves selflessly as a part of Nature”. Among the Atlanteans the Ego was still dispersed within clouds of mist, but now it began to enfold him like a ring.

The mists of Atlantis left the atmosphere, they were pressed down and appeared in the West as rivers. For the descendants of the Atlanteans, the Rhine was nothing but mist which descended from the air and then flew along as a river. In the Rhine they perceived the masses of water still permeated by light; in the Rhine they felt the presence of the sun's gold, which exercised such a pure and selfless influence upon the inhabitants of ancient Atlantis. They saw this gold in the Nibelung treasure of the Rhine, and anyone who strove to gain possession of this treasure, was their enemy.

Richard Wagner, who describes this in music, was not clearly conscious of this truth, but nevertheless he was inspired by this powerful, encompassing fact. Remember the Prologue to “Rhine Gold”: Is the wonderful organ-theme in E sharp not the point where the Ego enters humanity? But even as the plant does not know the laws according to which it grows, so the poet does not require the full knowledge of what he writes. We must think of the creative artist as one who is inspired by forces which stand behind him. In this case, a conspicuous artist has felt something which must again enter mankind. We can therefore see that even in art the same spirit which lies at the foundation of spiritual science streams into human culture. We can see it flowing into it from two directions. This is how we should consider life as a whole.

We have traced human evolution as far back as Atlantis. Let us now consider a few more details. At that time men did not build houses such as they exist to-day, for they could utilize to a far greater extent the forces which existed in Nature. Masses of rock were moulded together with that which existed in the environment, and constituted dwelling places which resembled natural houses. The further back we go, the more we come across men endowed with clairvoyance and possessing an image-consciousness. In a visionary form, in pictures which rose up before their souls, they could see the feelings of those who lived round about them. In the early Atlantean epoch, even the human will presented quite a different aspect. To-day you can stretch out the finger of your hand through your will, and this action is connected with your thinking. But in the early Atlantean age the body was a far more supple mass. The Atlantean could not only stretch out his finger, but he could even make it longer or shorter; he could easily make his hand grow when he saw a small plant, he could make it grow through an effort of his will. He disposed of a kind of magic. He also had a strange connection with the animal world; he still perceived something which later on could no longer be perceived and he exercised a fascinating power over animals through his gaze.

If we go back still further, we reach an age in which even Atlantis did not exists; people then lived upon a continent designated as “Lemuria”. It stretched south of our present Asia, as far as Africa and Australia; this was the continent inhabited by our ancestors when they were Lemurians. Their body was far softer than that of the Atlanteans and their will, far more powerful. But the ground under their feet was most unsteady; fire eruptions, vulcan ic powers continually upheaved it; ancient Lemuria was a kind of fire-country.

If we go back still further, we reach a time in which the osseous system began to develop out of a boneless mass, and then comes a time in which the earth had not yet developed the present mineral kingdom; everything was in a constant state of flux and reflux.

The further back we go into the evolution of the earth, the greater is the degree of heat which we encounter. We reach an age in which the forms now constituting our solid earth were in a liquid state, like mercury or molten lead. The solid state only developed in Lemuria. Thicker and thicker grow the messes of mist. This was not a sea of fog, but a thick ocean of hot steam, containing, all kinds of molten substances whirling within it. Man's predecessor could already live in certain parts of this steam, but he of course possessed quite a different constitution from the present human being. We thus reach a time in which man lived in a kind of primordial ocean, in a warm, fiery-watery element. The earth's kernel was enveloped by a kind of primordial ocean, containing the germs of everything which developed later on.

This was the aspect of the Earth immediately after the Moon's exit from it as a separate body.

We have now gained insight into a course of development reaching to the time in which the Sun first severed itself from the Earth and from the Moon; and when the Moon severed itself from the Earth, leaving it in the condition described above.

To-morrow we shall once more consider this process which I have set forth just now from two aspects, and then we shall consider the further development of man and of the earth, reaching as far as the present time.

Today I want to discuss some elementary aspects of the idea of multidimensional space [among other things, in connection with the] spirited Hinton.

You will recall how we arrived at the concept of multi-dimensional space, having considered the zeroth dimension [last time]. I would like to briefly repeat the ideas of how we can move from two- to three-dimensional space.

What do we mean by a symmetrical behavior? How do I align a red and a blue [flat figure, which are mirror images of each other]?

With two halves of a circle, I can do this relatively easily by sliding the red [half] circle into the blue one (Figure 10).

This is not so easy in the following [mirror]symmetrical figure (Figure 11). I cannot make the red and blue parts coincide [in the plane], no matter how I try to slide the red into the blue.

But there is a way [to achieve this anyway]: if you step out of the board, that is, out of the second dimension [and use the third dimension, in other words, if you] place the blue figure on the red one [by rotating it through the space around the mirror axis].

The same applies to a pair of gloves: I cannot match one with the other without stepping out of [three-dimensional] space. You have to go through the fourth dimension.

Last time I said that in order to develop an understanding of the fourth dimension, you have to make [the relationships in] space fluid, thereby creating conditions similar to those you have when moving from the second to the third dimension. In the last lesson, we created spatial structures out of paper strips that intertwined. Such interweaving causes certain complications. This is not a game, but such interweavings occur in nature all the time. Anyone who reflects on natural processes knows that such interweavings really do occur in nature. Material bodies move in such intertwined spatial structures. These movements are endowed with forces, so that the forces also intertwine. Take the movement of the earth around the sun and then the movement of the moon around the earth. The moon moves in an orbit that is itself wound around the earth's orbit around the sun. It thus describes a spiral around a circular line. Because of the movement of the sun, the moon describes another spiral around this. The result is very complicated lines of force that extend through the whole space.

The heavenly bodies behave in relation to each other like the intertwined strips of paper [by Simony, which we looked at last time]. We have to keep in mind that we are dealing with complicated spatial concepts that we can only understand if we do not let them become rigid. If we want to grasp space [in its essence], [we must first conceive it as rigid, but then] make it completely fluid again. [You have to go as far as zero]; the [living] point can be found in it.

Let us once again visualize the structure of the dimensions]. The point is zero-dimensional, the line is one-dimensional, the surface is two-dimensional and the body is three-dimensional. The cube has the three dimensions: height, width and depth. How do the spatial structures [of different dimensions] relate to each other? Imagine that you are a straight line, that you have only one dimension, that you can only move along a straight line. If such beings existed, what would their concept of space be like? Such beings would not perceive one-dimensionality in themselves, but would only be able to imagine points wherever they went. Because in a straight line, if we want to draw something in it, there are only points. A two-dimensional being would only encounter lines, so it would only perceive one-dimensional beings. [A three-dimensional being like] the cube would perceive two-dimensional beings, but could not perceive its [own] three dimensions.

Now, humans can perceive their three dimensions. If we reason correctly, we must say to ourselves: Just as a one-dimensional being can only perceive points, a two-dimensional being only straight lines, and a three-dimensional being only surfaces, so a being that perceives three dimensions must itself be a four-dimensional being. The fact that humans can define external beings in terms of three dimensions, can [deal with] spaces of three dimensions, means that they must be four-dimensional. And just as a cube can perceive only two dimensions and not its third, so it is clear that man cannot perceive the fourth dimension in which he lives. Thus we have shown [that man must be a four-dimensional being]. We swim in the sea [of the fourth dimension, like ice in water].

Let us return once more to the consideration of mirror images (Figure 11). This vertical line represents the cross-section of a mirror. The mirror reflects an image [of the figure on the left]. The process of reflection points beyond the two dimensions into the third dimension. [To understand the direct and continuous connection between the mirror image and the original, we have to add a third dimension to the two.

[Now let us consider the relationship between external space and internal representation.] The cube here apart from me [appears as] an idea in me (Figure 12). The idea [of the cube] is related to the cube like a' mirror image to the original. Our sensory apparatus [creates an imagined image of the cube. If you want to align this with the original cube, you have to go through the fourth dimension. Just as the third dimension has to be transitioned to (during the continuous execution of the two-dimensional) mirroring process, our sensory apparatus has to be four-dimensional if it is to be able to establish a [direct] connection [between the imagined image and the external object].

If you only imagined [two-dimensionally], you would [only] have a dream image in front of you, but you would have no idea that there is an object outside. Our imagination is a direct inversion of our ability to imagine [external objects by means of] four-dimensional space.

The human being in the astral state [during earlier stages of human evolution] was only a dreamer, he had only such ascending dream images.” He then passed from the astral realm to physical space. Thus we have mathematically defined the transition from the astral to the [physical-] material being. Before this transition occurred, the astral human being was a three-dimensional being and therefore could not extend his [two-dimensional] ideas to the objective [three-dimensional physical-material] world. But when he [himself] became physical-material, he still acquired the fourth dimension [and could therefore also experience three-dimensionally].

Due to the peculiar design of our sensory apparatus, we are able to align our perceptions with external objects. By relating our perceptions to external things, we pass through four-dimensional space, imposing the perception on the external object.

How would things appear if we could see from the other side, if we could enter into things and see them from there? To do that, we would have to pass through the fourth dimension.

The astral world itself is not a world of four dimensions. But the astral world together with its reflection in the physical world is four-dimensional. Anyone who is able to see the astral world and the physical world at the same time lives in four-dimensional space. The relationship of our physical world to the astral world is a four-dimensional one.

One must learn to understand the difference between a point and a sphere. In reality, this point would not be passive, but a point radiating light in all directions (Figure 13).

What would be the opposite of such a point? Just as there is an opposite to a line that goes from left to right, namely a line that goes from right to left, there is also an opposite to the point. We imagine an enormous sphere, in reality of infinite size, that radiates darkness from all sides, but now inwards (Figure 14). This sphere is the opposite of the point.

These are two real opposites: the point radiating light and infinite space, which is not a neutral dark entity, but one that floods space with darkness from all sides. [As a contrast, this results in] a source of darkness and a source of light. We know that a straight line that extends to infinity returns to the same point from the other side. Likewise, it is with a point that radiates light in all directions. This light comes back [from infinity] as its opposite, as darkness.

Now let us consider the opposite case. Take the point as the source of darkness. The opposite is a space that radiates light from all sides.

As was recently demonstrated [in the previous lecture], the point behaves in this way; it does not disappear [into infinity, it returns from the other side] (Figure 15).

[Similarly, when a point expands or radiates out, it does not lose itself in infinity; it returns from infinity as a sphere.] The sphere, the spherical, is the opposite of the point. Space lives in the point. The point is the opposite of space.

What is the opposite of a cube? Nothing other than the whole of infinite space, except for the piece that is cut out here [by the cube]. So we have to imagine the [total] cube as infinite space plus its opposite. We cannot do without polarities if we want to imagine the world as powerfully dynamic. [Only in this way] do we have things in their life.

If the occultist were to imagine the cube as red, the space around it would be green, because red is the complementary color of green. The occultist not only has simple ideas for himself, he has vivid ideas, not abstract, dead ideas. The occultist must enter into things from within himself. Our ideas are dead, while the things in the world are alive. We do not live with our abstract ideas in the things themselves. So we have to imagine the infinite space in the corresponding complementary color to the radiating star. By doing such exercises, you can train your thinking and gain confidence in how to imagine dimensions.

You know that the square is a two-dimensional spatial quantity. A square composed of four red- and blue-shaded sub-squares is a surface that radiates differently in different directions (Figure 16). The ability to radiate differently in different directions is a three-dimensional ability. So here we have the three dimensions of length, width and radiance.

What we did here with the surface, we also think of as being done for the cube. Just as the square above was made up of four sub-squares, we can imagine the cube as being made up of eight sub-cubes (Figure 17). This initially gives us the three dimensions of height, width and depth. Within each sub-cube, we can then distinguish a specific light-emitting capacity, which results in a further dimension in addition to height, width and depth: the radiation capacity.

You can imagine a square made up of four sub-squares, a cube made up of eight different sub-cubes. And now imagine a body that is not a cube, but has a fourth dimension. We have created the possibility of understanding this through radiative capacity. If each [of the eight partial cubes] has a different radiating power, then if I have only the one cube that radiates only in one direction, if I want to obtain the cube that radiates in all directions, I have to add another one on the left, doubling it with an opposite one, I have to put it together out of 16 cubes.

Next lesson we will have the opportunity to consider how we can think of a multidimensional space.

The Temple, of the Sun; hidden site of the Mysteries of the Hierophants; Lucifer, Ahriman, the three Soul-Figures, Strader, Benedictus, Theodosius, Romanus, Maria.

(Enter first Lucifer and Ahriman.)

Lucifer:
The Lord of Wishes stands as victor here—
He hath been able to o'erpower the soul
Which even in the light of spirit-sun
Still had to feel akin to this our realm.
I seized th' auspicious hour in which to cast
A glamour o'er its vision of the light
To which in dreams alone it had bowed down.
Yet all my hopes must forthwith disappear
That victory is ours in spirit-realms,
Since thou art worsted, comrade of my fight.
Thou wast unable to o'erpower the soul
Which was to bring our labours to their goal.
The human soul that gave itself to me
I can possess and in our kingdom hold
For short earth-lives alone, but all in vain;
For then I must restore it to our foes.
To win outright we need the other, too,
That hath withdrawn itself from thy domain.

Ahriman:
The time is not well suited to my arts,
I find no means of access to men's souls.
See, here comes one whom I did sorely plague.
Though ignorant in spirit he draws nigh;
For reason doth compel him to push on.
So I withdraw from him and from this place
Which he can only tread unconsciously.

(The three Soul-Figures with Strader.)

Philia:
I will myself imbue
With power of Faith's clear light,
I will breathe deep within
The living force of Trust
From soul's aspiring joy;
That thus the light may rouse
The spirit slumberer.

Astrid:
With humble joy of soul
I will inweave forthwith
Sure revelation's word.
I will make dense and thick
The shining rays of Hope;
That light in dark may shine
And twilight in the light,
So powers may bear aloft
The spirit slumberer.

Luna:
Soul light will I make warm
Love's power will harden too:
That thus they may grow bold
And thus may raise themselves
And mounting up on high
Endow themselves with weight
And free from cosmic loads
The spirit slumberer;
That his soul's love of light
At last may set him free.

Benedictus:
My comrades, I have hither summoned you
Who with me seek to find the spirit-light
That should flow streaming to the souls of men.
Ye know the nature of the sun of soul
Oft doth it shine with fullest noontide glare,
And then again like feeble twilight steal
Powerless through mists of visionary dream.
And often doth the darkness drive it out.
The temple-servants' spirit-gaze must pierce
To soul depths where there shines with powerful ray,
The spirit-light that comes from cosmic heights.
Then too it must disclose mysterious aims
That lurk unnoticed in the soul's dark fairs
Intent on shaping man's development.
Those spirit-beings who from cosmic powers
Bestow the spirit-food on human souls
Are present now within the sacred fane
To guide this man's soul from the spirit-night
Into the kingdom of the light on high.
The sleep of knowledge still envelops him;
But spirit-calls already have been heard
In his soul's depths of which he never knew,
That which they spoke deep in his inmost soul
Will shortly find its way to spirit-ears.

Theodosius:
This soul hath not been able hitherto
To recognize himself in spirit-light
That through sense-revelation is outpoured,
To show the meaning of all earthly growth.
He saw God's spirit stripped of nature's guise,
And Nature's self estranged from deity.
And so through many lives he had to pass
And stay a stranger to the sense of life;
He could but find such carnal tenements
To carry out his individual work
As barred him from the cosmos and from man.
Now, in the temple he will gain the power
Himself in other beings to behold,
And so at length he will attain the force
That leads from out the labyrinths of thought
And points the way unto the springs of life.

Benedictus:
Another man strives to the temple's light;
Though not at once will he approach its doors
And seek for entrance to this hallowed spot.
Throughout a life of studious research
He planted germs of thought in his soul-depths.
And so perforce the spirit-light went forth
To ripen them outside our temple's doors.
'Twas given him to know his present life
To be the product of a former one
Lived in a time that now hath long gone by.
Now he can see the errors of that life
And realize what their result will be,
But lacketh power, those duties to fulfil,
Which through self-knowledge he can recognize.

Romanus:
Capesius shall, through the temple's power,
Learn how a man must, in a single life,
Take up a load. of duties which demand
For their entire accomplishment the space
Of many lives of eartly pilgrimage.
So casting fear aside he will admit
That ancient errors with their consequence
Pursue the soul e'en past the gate of death.
Nor shall he then be vanquished in the fight
By which the spirit-portals are flung wide
If eye to eye, undaunted, he shall brave
The Guardian of the Threshold of that realm.
To him shall by that guardian be revealed
That none may climb up to the heights of life
Who fears to look on destiny's decrees.
His insight will admit with courage then
That of self-knowledge suffering is the fruit
For which she knows no words of comforting.
Will shall become his comrade on the way
Which faceth boldly all that may befall,
And, heartened by a draught from hope's clear spring
Endures the pain of widening consciousness.

Benedictus:
Ye have, my brothers, at this present hour,—
True servants of the temple that ye are,—
Set forth the ways in Wisdom's outlines drawn
By which these two who seek the spirit-truth
Shall have their souls brought to their goal by you.
Yet other work the temple-service claims.
Here by our side the Lord of Wishes stands;
He can be present in this holy place
Because Johannes' soul unbarred for him.
The gates which he would otherwise find barred.
The brother who is our initiate
Lacks for the moment courage to withstand
With power the words that from the darkness rise.
The powers of good can only strengthen him.
When on their opposite they test themselves.
'Twill not be long ere he again appears
Here in this temple, compassed by our love:
Yet must his spirit-treasure guarded be
Now that he must descend into the dark.

(Turning to Lucifer.)

Thee must I now address who not for long
Canst occupy the ground where thou dost stand.
The temple's power can at the present time.
Not yet release Johannes from thy grasp.
In times to come he will be ours again,
When those fruits of our sister shall be ripe.
Whose blossoms we already see unfold.

(Maria appears.)

She could behold in bygone earthly lives
How closely linked Johannes was to her.
He followed after her so long ago
As in those far-off days when she opposed
The light whose humble handmaid now she is.
When soul-links prove themselves so staunchly true
As to outlast the spirit's wanderings
Then shall the Lord of Wishes find his power
Unable to effect a severance.

Lucifer:
But Benedictus' will itself compelled
Johannes' and Maria's souls to part.
And wheresoe'er men from each other part
There is the field made ready for my power.
I ever work for separateness of soul,
To set the earth-life free, and for all time
To break its servitude to cosmic chains.
Maria's being, in monastic garb,
Turned from its father yonder soul away
That now is dweller in Johannes' form.
This too hath caused some seeds of mine to grow
Which I shall surely bring to ripening.

Maria (turning to Lucifer):
In human nature there are springs of love
To which thy power can never penetrate.
They are unsealed when faults of former lives—
A load unwittingly assumed by man,—
Are in a later life by spirit seen,
And by the free-will of self-sacrifice
Transformed to earthly action, which shall tend
To bear fruit for the real good of man.
The powers of destiny have granted me
The vision which can penetrate the past;
Already too have I received the signs
So to direct my, free-will sacrifice
That good may pour therefrom for every soul
Whose thread of life shall have to twine with mine
Throughout the evolution of this earth.
I saw how in its earthly frame of yore
Johannes' soul turned from his sire away,
And saw the forces that compelled myself
To make the son repel the father's heart.
Thus is the father now opposed to me
To bring to mind my own offence of old.
Plainly he speaks in cosmic language clear
Whose symbols are the actions of man's life.
That which I set between the sire and son
Must reappear, though in another form
In this my life in which Johannes' soul
Math once again been closely knit to mine.
The suffering which I had to undergo
In severing Johannes from myself
Was but my own act's fated consequence.
If now my soul is faithful to the light
Which from the spirit-forces comes to it,
It will be strengthened by the services
Which it may render to Capesius
In this sore stress of his life-pilgrimage;
And with such forces, similarly won,
Will also learn to see Johannes' star
When he, by fetters of desire misled
Treads not the way illumined by the light.
The spirit-vision which hath led me back
To distant days on earth will teach me now
How I must deal with soul-links at this time
So that life-powers unconsciously prepared
Shall henceforth work awakened for man's weal.

Benedictus:
In olden days on earth was formed a knot
Of threads which Karma spins world-fashioning.
Three human lives are interwoven there,
And now upon this fateful knot there shines
This holy temple's lofty spirit-light.
'Tis thee, Maria, I must now address
Of these three souls at this time thou alone
Art present at the place of sacrifice.
May this light operate within thyself
And turn to welfare those creative powers
Which once upon a time thy life-threads wove
Fast in a life-knot with those other two.
The father could not in his former life
His son's heart find; but now in other scenes
The spirit-seeker will accompany
Thy friend's self on its way to spirit-land.
And thine is now the duty to maintain
Johannes' soul in light by thine own force.
Once didst thou hold it in so fast a bond
That it could only blindly follow thee.
Thou didst then give it back its liberty,
When still it clung to thee in fancy fond.
But thou shalt once more find it, when, self-willed,
It wins its individuality.
If thy soul to that light holds ever true
Which powers from spirit-realms bestow on thee,
Johannes' soul will thirst to drink of thine
E'en where the Lord of all Desire holds sway;
And through the love which holds it bound to thee
It will regain the path to light on high.
For ever must a living being strive
Through light or darkness, which hath once beheld
And known the heights of spirit in its soul,
It hath drawn breath from cosmic distances
Of air that pulseth with immortal life,
And living raiseth all our human kind
From founts of soul to spirit-sun sublime.

Curtain

Automated Translation

It may remain undecided how many hearts in Western Europe today still feel so much connection between the spiritual and soul and the divine and natural that on this day, on this feast of hope for the future, in this year, the thought passes through the soul, how we are living in a year in which this festival of springtime hope may enter as early as possible into the time when the fresh shoots of the year sprout from the womb of our mother earth, when what we call spring enters into human life. In such years as this one is, three days that are otherwise far apart from each other are crowded together in a row. Easter Sunday, after all, is the Sunday that follows the full moon, which in turn follows the beginning of spring on March 21. Three days that can be relatively far apart follow each other this year: the beginning of spring the day before yesterday, the full moon of spring yesterday, Easter Sunday today. In such years, a very special writing is inscribed in the universe for those who are entering into the spiritual knowledge of the world, and especially on this day of such a year, it behoves the soul, which strives to learn to understand the spiritual secrets of the universe and the becoming of time, also to learn to understand what should be written into our human development on earth with this spring festival.

The person who knows the connection between the sun and the moon, as can be known by beholding the interaction of the sun and the moon with the Earth in the secret-scientific writing, also knows the deep secret that reigns between the Earth Spirit, Christ, and the Spirit whom we express with the words Jahve, Jehovah. And anyone who knows the connection between the sun and the moon hears with an understanding-awakening sound the legend of the Fall of Man and their seduction by Lucifer, of the words of God resounding in divine justice. Those who try to understand some of the things contained between the lines of my “Occult Science in Outline” can sense the connection between the sun-moon mystery and the mystery that is usually characterized as the temptation of Lucifer and the influence of Yahweh-Jehovah.

Today, however, we want to focus more on the fact that the sun and moon, as they follow each other in their effect on the earth, from this Good Friday to this Holy Saturday, appear to the occultist in their writing in the cosmos appear as a question mark, written in a deeply mysterious way into the spiritual universe, and the answer is given to us this year, as soon as possible, by the immediate sequence of Easter Sunday following the Saturday of the spring full moon: Easter Sunday, the day of remembrance and the day of hope, the day that symbolically expresses the mystery of Golgotha. Many secrets are hidden behind what surrounds us in the outer physical-sensual nature, and the unveiling of such secrets always brings us in a certain way close to the strict guardian of the threshold. The Easter Mystery is also one of these, which, in a certain sense, requires the maturing of the human soul in order to be understood, although in the instinctive feeling everyone can always perform the inner devotional sacrifice that our soul may fulfill when the day of earthly confidence, the day of redemption and resurrection, Easter Sunday, is joined to the beginning of spring. When spring begins, when the sun moves into such a position in relation to the earth that the plant germs can sprout from the womb of the earth mother through its power, then the human soul begins to rejoice inwardly as if in the brightness of paradise, because it knows that forces are at work through through the cosmos, which in a cyclic sequence with each new year conjure forth out of the bosom of the earth what is necessary for the outer life and also for the life of the soul, so that man in his development on earth can go his course from the beginning to the end of this development on earth. And when the impressions of winter, when the earth mother covers the ground with its icy blanket, when all this evokes the thought of all that will one day bring the earth to decay in the universe, what will one day will transform the earth into a state of world-wide solidification, which will make it incapable of being a further dwelling place for man, when winter evokes these thoughts, then every new spring evokes the other thought into the human soul: Yes, Earth, since the beginning of time you have been endowed with ever new youthful vigor, ever renewing life. You are given the task of calling forth the soul again to inward rejoicing, but also to inward devotion. And even when the cold blanket of ice has spread over the earthly realm, the hopeful images in the human soul combine with the intuitive feeling of how the earth will be able to sustain people through its spring and summer forces for a long time to come, so that they will find the opportunity to develop all the abilities, all the inner powers that lie within them. This is the soul's inner, reverent exultation at the spring equinox. It comes from the soul feeling full of hope that the earth can endure and that the earth can provide the opportunity for human forces to fully develop.

But the human soul may also wonder: Will all the forces of the sun be able to overcome all the forces of winter, or at least to counterbalance them? Will the winter forces not perhaps be able to exert such a strong influence on the earth that the earth must sooner go into a state of torpor before the human soul has fulfilled its full mission on earth? Will summer counterbalance winter? Will spring always have the strength it needs? This thought may not come easily to human souls that observe only the outer nature, but it must come more and more to those souls that can delve into the true spiritual content of the universe. These souls seek to decipher the great, powerful writing with which the secrets of the world are written into the cosmos. Then, in contrast to the writing just mentioned, the struggle of winter with summer, another writing of the soul becomes audible, the writing that is written into our universe when we follow the moon in its mysterious course, as it invisibly and visibly completes its cycle. Oh, this moonlight, like an enigmatic letter of the world's writing, it inscribes itself into the eternal word of creation of earth life. When the occultist seeks to fathom this moonlight, it reminds him first of the punishing voice of Yahweh in Paradise after the temptation of Lucifer, then it reminds him, of course, also of the wonderful, mysterious fact that the Buddha expired his spirit into the cosmic universe on a night of the silver moon. What does the moonlight tell us, which is there in the darkness of the night like a dream in a person's sleep? — The occultist learns that of the forces of the active sun, of the sun's forces that repeatedly and repeatedly renew the evolution of the earth, as much is taken away as the light of the sun is reflected by the full moon. The human soul may dream itself into the moonlit magic nights, the occultist knows that as much of the power of sunlight and solar heat is taken as the full moon reflects back to Earth from that sunlight.

Thus, the full moon is the constant symbol of what is taken from the sun. And when the Sun, with all its powers, once more penetrates into earthly life with each new spring, the occultist knows that, even if this is hardly perceptible to external observation, with each new spring the Sun has weaker powers than it had in the old, previous spring, and that just as much of its powers has been taken from it as full moonlight has shone over the earth. Thus the full moon that appears after the beginning of spring, however mysterious and soul-stirring it may appear to people, is at the same time a serious, stern admonisher of the earthly-cosmic fact that the sun's powers have diminished with each new spring, and that man could never achieve in his earthly mission what he would achieve if these powers were not taken from the sun. To sense this fact puts a huge question mark in the cosmos. Sensing this question mark, the old occultists behaved in their hearts.

So the old occultists said to themselves: We look up to the sun, whose secrets Zarathustra once proclaimed to men. We look up to the moon, whose secret has found its most significant expression in the religion of Yahweh. When we behold these two heavenly signs, we know that the interaction of Sun and Moon signifies the decline of the Earth. Then these ancient occultists looked at a point in the evolution of the Earth itself, at the point where the spirit of the Sun arose from the Earth itself in the fullness of time in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. At that time, when Christ died on the cross of Golgotha and the spirit of Christ united with the earth, a cosmic event occurred in earthly life that created a countervailing force against all that the moon takes away from the forces of the sun, while this sun works from the cosmos upon the earth. By the Christ-Spirit having taken up His abode in a human soul and from there spreading throughout all earthly existence in the course of future earthly evolution, compensation is made for what the lunar forces continually withdraw from the sun's penetrating solar forces. Thus the human soul understands its relationship to the cosmos when, morally and spiritually, it adds to the days dictated by the cosmos the third day, the day of death and resurrection of Golgotha. And when the progressive cosmic powers of the sun, which in their infinite kindness always want to give the earth new life, and the strict lunar spirit, which, because of the nature of Lucifer and his forces, must take away from the sun, insofar as it is only the natural sun, its powers, so can add to the two as a third day, morally and spiritually, as the answer to the great cosmic question, the human soul this Easter day. Wonderfully they stand side by side in such years as this one is.

Good Friday! This year in particular, it may remind us in cosmic-occult writing that the sun is constantly losing its strength with each new spring, and that the earth could die sooner than the human soul has developed all its powers. The full moon on Easter Saturday, a wonderful mystery! Above in the cosmos, the wonderful sign, the symbol of the stern Yahweh, who lets his thundering voice resound through Paradise, in which human sin radiates as the result of temptation; down on earth, the symbol of the newly resurrected power of the earth, Christ resting in the grave! It goes deep into the soul that can feel occultistically when the silver, solemn and strict full moon light spreads just above the Easter grave, the symbol of the penetration of the Christ impulse into the earthly body. Following this, the symbol of the resurrected sun, the sun that has risen again from the human soul, Easter Sunday! If we feel this trinity in our soul, we feel the cosmic sun, followed by the cosmic moon, followed by the moral-spiritual sun. If we feel in this trinity in our soul the symbol of how the spirit overcomes matter, how life overcomes death, if we feel something of what can fill us when we are occultists in the true sense of the word in our time, how the power which we call the Christ Impulse will dawn ever more clearly upon man, so that in the ever more and more revealing Christ Impulse, people will learn to feel what must be in them, so that they as human beings will find the way out of the dying earth to the higher stages of development of the immortal human soul, which lives on in eternities!

We understand karma to be something that began in the middle of the Lemurian period and will end at the close of the sixth root race. Individual karma comes into being through birth and death. A being that does not extend into the phenomenal form with a part has no individual karma. A world body passes from one form of appearance into another. But we call that which expresses itself through good and evil karma; only what lies between birth and death belongs to the chain that we call individual karma. How did karma come into the world?

Let us visualize the situation in the middle of the Lemurian period. The formative design was present to such an extent that a human body was there into which thought could enter. But before that, what we call the human soul had connected with this body; it had come over from the moon man, and bodies had been created according to his pattern. Initially, they were endowed with two sexes. Built up, but not perfect. We still have to treat these bodies as perfect animals; they only become human after Manas has moved in. So, just as with animals, we cannot speak of karma in humans either.

The bodies were gradually perfect; likewise, the souls that had come across were shaped according to different degrees of perfection: Solars, Pitris, seven low Pitris; there were also normal ones and those who always remained at one level. So there were seven degrees of development. The most perfect could already use power to control the bodies. The others had not yet reached that stage; people were like a machine that they did not have the power to control. Such Pitris became people of all the most perfect kinds: the first Arhats. They had perfect bodies, perfect kamic creativity, perfect Manas, but few and exquisite: teachers, rulers, rulers. Through pronounced high Arhats, Kamisches was achieved. They had superhuman abilities and perfect insight into what creativity is, almost at the level of earlier stages. As matter, man was much finer and therefore easier to create. They were initiated into nature. The spark of Manas did not help the others quickly, because that can only be when Kama sets the physical particles of the brain in motion. The thoughts are as if in a bed. It was a dream-like thinking that took hold here: dreamers, highly developed animals, dull humans.

They would have continued to exist on earth if a third group had not intervened. Arhats could not build up karma because they surveyed everything and chose good; these because they were unable to recognize.

There were three groups of Pitris who refused to take possession of these bodies and who wanted to wait until they themselves took possession of the bodies, until they could fully control them on their own. The bodies at that time could only move manas automatically. They waited, and from this the third group arose; they waited until they had been prepared by the second, i.e., the iyanic entities, to such an extent that they themselves could control them. So the bodies were there, but were not occupied. They were seized by much lower kamic entities. The consequence was that they descended, that they regressed, becoming like animals, and these are the amanasic entities. This is the original sin, which consists in the fact that manas has not taken possession of the bodies, and therefore something different has arisen than was foreseen in the normal plan of the world. It was an act of freedom.

The Arhats, of course, only inherited perfect qualities, the dream beings inherited human qualities in ever-increasing potency. These inherited a deteriorated human form, and that is original sin. Through this step of freedom, man is a self-determining conscious being. Only these Pitris, whom we call the luciferic ones, have been able to achieve freedom.

It would have been in the will of the Elohim for all to incarnate. These beings came under the influence of those who had remained at an earlier level of dhyan; these refused to incarnate. Now the possibility of illness also arose. These bodies, left to themselves, were subject to elemental influences. When the Pitris had matured, they found their bodies had already deteriorated. The shock of going down into the physical nature must be improved, and that is karma; original sin, one's own sinful body.

The Bible first presents this as the influence of the serpent. Further on, in magnificent images. First, those who had become arhats under the influence of the Elohim; they were absolutely under the guidance of the Elohim. They could use the natural forces that were already there, not learn. The others, who came later and who later inhabited the bodies, had to create according to their own immediate view. They were now further removed from their own creative beings, and this is very beautifully depicted in Cain and Abel.

Without sin there would be no freedom, no possibility for self-conscious man. This is how what we have called the Luciferic principle is linked to the development of man. Man owes the fact that he could use the seed power during the Atlantean period to the Luciferic principle.

Only through the people created in this way could science and art come into the world. What the Arhats taught was unearthly knowledge, the ancient wisdom that our theosophy brings. Earthly knowledge was created by these beings subject to karma.

The mixing of humans with animals: Because the bodies deteriorated, the ape-like creatures emerged, and these mixed with the bodies inhabited by lower Pitris. The most highly developed apes are those people who have lost themselves in a cul-de-sac and missed the connection. They sometimes have more developed astral bodies than lower people because they have guilt-free kama.

The animal species are destined to become human, not the individual animals; pets become faster, monkeys slower. The human generic soul is dhyanic; the generic souls of those Pitris refused and these were Lucifers.

The Arhats are not to be confused with the Buddhas and Boddhisatvas.

From the Q&A

If man had kept what he had rejected, he would not have developed so finely. His high development thanks to / gap in the transcript]

In the folk, ancient facts live, which are not based on arbitrariness but on deep connections. They all know the wooden horse. Odysseus is the clever, cunning representative of the mind, and thus the main characteristic of our fifth root race. At that time, the saga was developed in such a way that Odysseus came up with a wooden horse.

We also find the horse as a representative of the fifth root race. Pegasus; often in the Bible; in Indian legends, in which Vishnu rides on the horse Kalki. All before Christ. In the Apocalypse, when the seals are opened to us, the horse also appears to us, only then /gap in the transcript] then yellow. The horse is depicted as something special, as in connection with the fifth root race. Even with ancient Germans, who received it from Druid priests. There is hardly a nation of the fifth root race that does not honor the horse in a special way. Occult facts.

Certain animals had to be stripped so that certain characteristics could develop. In the past, it was only memory, but now intellectual mental activity was developing. He would not have been able to develop this activity if he had not given the characteristics that prevented him from doing so to odd-toed ungulates. We have to go back to even older times than the Lemurian era. At that time, what was to become odd-toed ungulates was peeled out. At that time, it was designed differently. Every being can only develop as its environment allows. Back then, there were watery air masses, thin water. Everything was fog. Niflheim.

They had to work their way through the states of condensation and thus became what they are today. Their form developed from completely different shapes, and this form arose at the time when the Atlanteans developed their intellect. These were therefore coherent for them. They said to themselves [gap in the transcript]

We must therefore relate to the horse in a very special way. If we had this organization within us, we would never have been able to ascend to our intellectual activity. It is, as it were, the flip side. Thus, in the horse, the human being of the fifth root race worships that to which he owes his intellectual activity. This is the reason for the solution of the seals in the Apocalypse.

Natural science should also be able to recognize this, or prove it, if the occult experience is correct. We would have to find the ancestors of our horse in the debris of Atlantis.

The uppermost layer of the earth is alluvium, under it diluvium, further tertiary layers. Then Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene, formations in the rock. There we also find human-like skeletons. If we dig deeper, we come to the chalk, Jurassic formation. Now we find fossilized horse bones in the Eocene layers, and this is the layer of the Atlantic race. Intellectual knowledge is characterized by the fact that it has the object outside of itself and forms concepts about it. This was different with the original Atlanteans and Lemurians. They had an instinctive knowledge that was attached to the brain. This feeling has been lost, only present in pure sexuality, instinctive sense of belonging that man used to have in spirit. They had also perceived the relationship of their minds to horses. Thus man owes his higher qualities to what he has left behind in nature.

If we go back to the time of the Hyperborean race, we find that very specific human characteristics were acquired when very specific animal groups split off. The ancient peoples have always had a vivid awareness of their original kinship with very specific animal forms. The totemism of certain peoples is based on this feeling. They kill everything except certain animals; these are taboo for them. The tribe names itself after this animal and declares the animal to be taboo, not killable. Totemism thus leads occultly back to the splitting off of certain animal entities.

In the latest cultural studies, it has been noticed time and again that certain peoples had Darwinism within them as a feeling. This is not a game of imagination, but rather they have had animal splitting as the content of their memory from a primal consciousness. It is a splitting of forces. In some tribes there is an institution that cannot be explained to modern people, but which can be traced back to the fact that there are interactions that arise from perceptions other than external perceptions: psychic forces. Hence the custom of the man-child bed among some primitive peoples. That original influence of man upon man, which has been completely lost in the fifth root race. Customs are preserved which have lost their meaning. In just this way, an influence went from the whole of nature to man, he felt an original kinship with the animal: totem bear, bear-taboo, inviolable. Naivety does not invent symbols, they are based on facts. This was very clearly demonstrated in the centaurs. Man has withdrawn from the horse and has retained this memory. Odysseus has the cunning within him and he represents it externally, in that which conquers Troy.

Now there is something else underlying the love of the horse. In the next rounds, what had been rejected will be absorbed again. The generic souls will be redeemed again. What the human being develops in the fifth round will again be what will redeem him to the horse. So that the human being now develops his intellect at the expense of the generic soul of the horses. In the sixth round, he creates into the manasical-animalistic. He will give life himself, the qualities he owes to the horse will become activity and world karma in him. The horse carries him over, and it is thanks to the horse that he later becomes manasically creative. This is why Plato uses the image of the two horses that pull the soul; this is why there is Pegasus and the steeds of the sun chariot.

The medieval mystics speak of a so-called deification of man. It is an extraordinarily apt expression for an inner process, for certain spiritual experiences. It is based on the fact that man can develop more and more through his inner core, can let the spiritual man shine through the outer shell more and more.

That is the essence of divinization. Those who speak of it have in mind that the human being also originated from the spiritual. As it were, descending from the spiritual to the physical existence, in order to move up again to its starting point. Why did it have to take the path away from divinity, if the path back must be taken again? A prominent mystic of the present day has said that those who have gained even a little experience no longer ask this question so easily, and basically Greek mysticism has given the answer by calling the soul a bee. Just as the bee leaves the beehive, flies out into the fields and collects honey, the extract, the noblest, from the plant and brings it back – the soul does the same in the world, sets out into the fields, collects wisdom treasures for examination, which can only be experienced here for the souls, in order to enrich the dwelling place of God again. We could learn more from such simple images than the sober mind is able to grasp.

Yesterday I was able to speak about the three arts and their development by presenting them as a reflection of those worlds that preceded our present one. The three elemental realms are reflected in architecture, sculpture and painting. Everything in the three elemental realms is, in some respect, the still uncompacted starting point of our world, slumbering as if buried, and which man brings out again. That is why they have been compared to a slumbering place of God, where they rest in order to be resurrected again through man. We can no longer see the realm of fluctuating images with our outer eyes. Man seeks to revive it within himself through the three arts, to resurrect it.

The great task of art is that through its creation, our being is a release of the God that sleeps in nature, that in our soul, God awakens again and flows into our creations, so that in the designs of human works, divinity can live.

And by doing this, man deifies himself and thereby becomes the being who has to bring the honey of the world back to the altar of God.

Let us let our eyes wander over the works of the great painters. What Raphael and Michelangelo conjure up on the canvas, what elevates thousands of souls, is a creation of the spirit, great and powerful, but it will pass away, the works of the great geniuses will scatter into tiny atoms. But connected with this human creation is something that is imperishable, that which the human soul has worked for. They have acquired something that is everlasting; they will carry into eternity what they have brought into their spirit, what they have worked into it. When the globe is blown apart, the beings will take with them what the souls have learned and experienced here. They bring this back to the altar of God as the bees of life. This is what mysticism called deification. Time and again, humanity redeems the hidden God. Then it becomes clear what so few understand today: that what man ultimately creates as the divine world was already there in the beginning. So that the highest that man ultimately comes to is the lowest. So that in knowledge we ultimately have what God has put into the world. Hellscherische insight is communion with the divine world.

We have spoken of a special training of the dream-filled sleep consciousness, which leads to the knowledge of the three elemental realms, to the world of floating images, the formations of formless forces, and that of the world-forming clay. Now there are other experiences. It is the dream that has surrounded us with symbolic representations that can rise to a perception of the formative forces. Now there is the awakened consciousness during dreamless sleep.

When the continuity of consciousness occurs, the human being perceives the sounding world: the spiritual world begins to resound. What Pythagoras described as the music of the spheres is real truth. The inner essence of the world is expressed in sound: “The sun resounds in the ancient way.” This would be a complete phrase, for the sun does not resound in physical life, but it does when we recognize it as the body of a spiritual being. Out of the chaos of the world, we hear it ordering itself, chaos as sound, as spiritual harmony: “Sounds arise for new ears... Unheard-of things do not resound.”

But the spiritual hears. Spirits who have theosophical wisdom have therefore spoken of sound as the form of the world. In Schopenhauer's spirit lived the presentiment of an enormously significant fact. For the clairvoyant, the essential being of the world is a world of sounds. If we penetrate into the inner being of things, it is through the musical essence, through the world of sounds, and that is true.

Formations push outwards, and even the formative forces penetrate into space, and their mirror images are external announcements of inner beings. What we perceive in the three arts is the most spiritualized form. With music, we do not penetrate through the surface, but directly into the essence of things. When the bell rings, its innermost being floods into the world. The sound is the outward-reaching beauty of the innermost being. That is why it is also an external reflection of that in which the Hellseher immerses himself in his innermost being.

We also speak of three realms in the inner realm. When we speak of the innermost being of the world spirit, we will have to perceive it as a feeling of the trinity. Just as the human being has emerged from the mineral that pulsates in the physical body, so life pulsates in the physical in the highest being. Will, wisdom, activity. In this, the will emerges again, of which Schopenhauer speaks as the essence that rises from the abyss. It lives in us, constitutes our being.

The idea becomes an image, and then the connection with the outside world takes place; most of all where there is action and activity. In them we embody ourselves and are present as the Godhead is in its kingdom. Thus we have abysmal will in wisdom, which establishes connection with the world, and we have activity, in which it is hidden. If will is the deepest thing in us, then it is also in nature. When will awakens in the soul of man, God celebrates his resurrection – likewise in wisdom and in the actions of man. As music leads us into the essence of things, so it is the deepest essence of things themselves that lives in the tones of music. Tone is the spiritual body of will. The most original essence of the spirit is in the will of the musical. A beautiful thought of Schopenhauer's philosophy is that the riddle of the world is solved in music.

Nietzsche, who wanted to search for such connections of thoughts with an unparalleled yearning spirit, came to a confused inkling of the most beautiful kind: in the “Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music”. What did he want to achieve in this book? Nietzsche tried to describe the path of the spirit to its inner life. He sought to penetrate to the point where man feels the world will pulsating within him. In music, man transforms will into a spiritual body. Man is most intensely united with his God when music resounds from his soul. Thus, for Nietzsche, too, music is placed in the universe.

From a higher perspective, Goethe allows Faust to advance to “In the beginning was the deed.” 'Deed' is the outflow of will, and if man wants to create an image of the deed in a work of art, he must give birth to it out of the musical. And then we shall find the cosmic position of the speaking arts in the spirit of the world.

Wisdom is the power of the spirit, half of which penetrates outwards and allows the other half to be provided by the world: the penetration of the spirit with the essence from outside. The harmony of inside and outside - that is wisdom. It is true wisdom when man finds the harmonization of his inner being with the outside. And true wisdom includes the good. It is a wisdom of feeling.

Just as the will finds expression in sound, so too does the soul find its way to the word through meaning. Like wisdom, the word has a part that comes from outside and a part that comes from within. In its meaning, it announces something external to us. Just as the original will is expressed in the art of pure sound, so too is the wisdom of the soul expressed to the soul in the rhythm of the word.

Lyric poetry – sound steeped in meaning.

Song – wisdom poured out and embodied.

The third is where the spirit withdraws and embodies itself in action. Man's action is his creation; the third realm of the spiritual draws the dramatic arts. The drama is the image of the third realm, of activity.

Thus man leaves behind the phases of his being in what he creates as an image. Music, lyric poetry, drama.

As long as the beings around us announce themselves through sound, we remain outside of them to a certain extent. They express their meaning through the inner word, when they not only sound but also speak. This is something that is envisioned as an ideal in the very distant future, but it is also something that stands at the starting point of the world. And the artist presents it as prophecy.

The musician, the lyricist and the playwright are the prophets of what is to come. The other three arts represent the past; these three represent the future. In this way, the artist creates a paradise for us, whereby past, present and future are connected. This is what Goethe is talking about:

But you, the true sons of the gods,
Rejoice in the living, rich beauties!
That which is becoming, that which is eternally working and living,
Embrace with the sweet barriers of love,
And what floats in a wavering appearance,
Strengthen with lasting thoughts! [Faust I, verses 344-349]

[Thus speaks the Lord to the three archangels Gabriel, Michael and Raphael in the prologue to Heaven in Goethe's “Faust” I.] What lives in fluctuating appearance, thought affixes.

There is no more beautiful way to describe the cosmic mission of art. The eternal itself is in this world. And if we are able to look at beauty with devotion, to embrace it with our love, to feel the eternal in the image, then we are strengthening beauty with lasting thoughts. When the entire globe has disintegrated into millions of atoms, the eternal will be carried over into new worlds. Art certainly has a part in this. In a work of art, man can create a limited reflection of the beauty of the world, a limited reflection of divine perfection is art.

In the arts, we also get a taste of that blissful freedom that flows from knowledge. Art appears to be the surest guarantee of our ability to achieve freedom. Thus, the beautiful appearance becomes the great educator to the highest, to freedom. The German who does not know Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education does not know an important piece of German spirit. They are full of theosophical sentiment; the experience of the divine essence is what theosophy wants; that is why enjoying art elevates one to a state of selflessness, because it creates disinterested pleasure in the highest spirituality. One must penetrate through matter to the spiritual, then the highest is achieved through the spiritualization of the material; then beauty becomes education to the spiritual, and through the aesthetic perception of beauty, man penetrates to wisdom.

This lecture is also known as Spiritual Science and Language. It appears as lecture 2 of 9 in the lecture series: Metamorphoses of the Soul, Paths of Experience – 2. The original German is included in: Metamorphosen des Seelenlebens. Pfade der Seelen Erlebnisse. Zweiter Teil (#59 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961.)

It is fascinating to study from the point of view of Spiritual Science the different ways in which the being of man expresses itself,—that is to say Spiritual Science in our sense of the term. We can obtain a general survey of human life in its different phases and aspects by studying them as we have done in the course of these lectures.

To-day we shall consider the expression of the spirit of man in speech, and in the next lecture, under the title of ‘Laughter and Weeping,’ an aspect of man’s power of expression which is indeed bound up with speech and yet fundamentally different from it.

The whole being of man, his whole significance and dignity, is bound up with speech. Our innermost life, all our feelings and will-impulses flow out from us, linking us to our fellow-men through speech which enables us to expand and radiate into our environment. On the other hand, those who dare to penetrate into the inner life of some great individuality may feel that human speech is a kind of tyrant that exercises its power over the inner life. We are indeed aware, if we are only willing to admit it, that word and speech can only inadequately express the feelings, the thoughts, and all the intimate and individual colouring of everything that passes through the soul. We also realise that our own native language compels us to a definite kind of thinking. Do we not all realise how dependent our thinking is upon our speech? In more senses than one our concepts attach themselves to words, and an imperfectly developed man may easily mistake the word, or what the word infuses into him, for the concept. This is why so many people are incapable of building up a conceptual world of their own transcending what is imparted by the words current around them. We must surely realise that the character of a whole people speaking a common language is in a certain sense dependent on that language. Anyone who studies the more intimate connections between the characteristics of race and speech knows to what an extent the way a man is able to express the content of his soul in sound reacts upon the strength and weakness of his character, upon his temperament, indeed upon his whole outlook on life. Those who have knowledge will be able to learn a great deal about the character of a people from the configuration of their particular speech or language. Since, however, a language is common to a whole people, the individual is dependent on the community and on its average level. The individual is subject, as it were, to the tyranny and power of the community. But when we realise how our individual spiritual life on the one hand, and the common spiritual life on the other, are expressed in speech, the so-called ‘Mystery of Speech’ assumes great significance.

It is certainly possible to understand something of the life of the soul by observing how a man expresses himself in words. The mystery of speech and its origin and development through the different epochs has always been a problem in certain domains of Science, but it cannot be said that specialists in our age have been very successful in fathoming this mystery. To-day, therefore, we shall try in a somewhat aphoristic manner, to throw light on the development of speech and its connection with the human being, from the point of view of Spiritual Science.

What at first seems so mysterious when we designate an object or a process by a word, is how the particular sound-combination in the word or sentence is related to what comes forth from us, and how it expresses the phenomenon as a word. External Science has made many attempts to bring the most varied experiences together in different combinations, but this mode of observation has been felt to be unsatisfactory. There is one question which is really so simple, and yet so difficult to answer: how was it that man, confronted with something in the external world, produced, as from out of himself, an echo of the particular object or process in a definite sound?

Some people thought this question quite simple. They imagined, for instance, that speech-formation took its start from the fact that man heard some external sound, either produced by animals, or caused by the impact of one object against another, and that he then imitated the sound through the inner faculty of speech, like a child, who, hearing the ‘bow-wow’ of a dog, imitates this sound and calls the dog ‘bow-wow.’ Word-formation of this kind may be called ‘onomatopoeia,’ an imitation of the sound. This kind of imitation was the basis of the original sound and word formation,—at least so it was stated by those who regarded the matter from this particular point of view. The question is of course still unanswered as to how man comes to give names to dumb entities from which no sound proceeds. How does he ascend from the sound uttered by an animal or caused by an occurrence which can be heard, to one which cannot? Max Müller, the famous Philologist, ridiculed this, calling it the ‘bow-wow’ theory, because he realised what an unsatisfactory piece of speculation it was. He advanced another theory in its place which his opponents in turn called ‘mystical,’ though they used the word in an unjustifiable sense. Max Müller really means that every single thing contains something of the nature of sound within itself; everything has sound in a certain sense, not only a glass we let fall, or a bell we strike, but every single thing. Man’s capacity to set up a relationship between his soul and the inner sound-essence of the object calls forth in the soul the power to express this inner sound-essence; the inner essence of the bell is expressed in some way when we ‘feel again’ its tone in the ‘ding-dong.’ Max Müller's opponents ridiculed him in return by calling his the ‘ding-dong’ theory. However many more combinations of this kind we might care to enumerate,—and they have been evolved with great diligence,—we should find that the attempts to characterise in this external way what man causes to resound like an echo from his soul to meet the essence of things, must always be unsatisfactory. We must, in effect, penetrate more deeply into the whole inner being of man.

According to Spiritual Science man is a highly complex being. As he stands before us he has in the first place his physical body, which contains substances which are also found in the mineral world. As a second, higher member he has the etheric, or life body. Then he has the member which is the vehicle of joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, instinct, desire and passion,—the astral body. This astral body is, to Spiritual Science, as real a part of man's constitution as anything the eyes can see and the hands touch. The fourth member of the human being has been spoken of as the bearer of the Ego, and man's evolution, at its present stage, consists in working, from his Ego outwards, as it were, at the transformation of the other three members of his being. It has also been indicated that in a far-off future the human Ego will have transformed these three members to such an extent that nothing will remain of what Nature, or the spiritual powers existing in Nature, have made of them.

The astral body, the vehicle of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, of all ebbing and flowing ideas, feelings and perceptions, came into existence in the first place without our co-operation,—that is to say, without the activity of our Ego. The Ego works upon the astral body, purifying and refining it, gaining mastery over its qualities and activities. If the Ego has worked but little on the astral body, man is the slave of his instincts and desires. If, however, the Ego has refined the instincts and desires into virtues, has co-ordinated phantasmal thinking by the guiding threads of logic, a portion of the astral body is transformed. Whereas formerly it was not worked upon by the Ego, it has become a product of the Ego. When the Ego carries out this work consciously,—as it is beginning to do in human evolution to-day,—we call the part of the astral body which has been consciously transformed from out of the Ego, ‘Spirit Self,’ or ‘Manas,’ to use a term of Oriental Philosophy. When the Ego works in a different and more intense way, not only upon the astral body, but also upon the etheric body, we call the part of the etheric body which has been thus transmuted the ‘Life Spirit’ or ‘Budhi’ in Eastern terminology. And finally, although this belongs to the far-off future, when the Ego has become so strong that it transmutes the physical body and regulates its laws,—in such a way that the Ego is everywhere controlling all that lives in the physical body,—we give the name of ‘Spirit Man’ to that part of the physical body thus under the rulership of the Ego; and since this work begins with a regulation of the breathing process, the oriental term is ‘Atman,’ from which the German ‘atmen’ (to breathe) is derived.

In the first place, then, we have man as a fourfold being, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. And just as we may speak of three of the members of our being as being products of the past, so may we speak of three other members which as a result of the work of the Ego will gradually unfold in the future. Thus we speak of a sevenfold nature of the human being, adding Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man to physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. But although we regard these three higher principles as belonging to a far-off future of human evolution, it must be said that in a certain sense man is preparing for them even to-day. Man will only begin consciously to transform the physical, etheric and astral bodies by means of the Ego in a distant future, but unconsciously, that is to say, without full consciousness, the dim activity of the Ego has already transformed these three members. A certain result has indeed already been achieved.

Those inner members of man's being mentioned in previous lectures could only have come into existence because the work of the Ego upon the astral body has resulted in the development of the sentient soul as a kind of inner reflection of the sentient body. The sentient body conveys what we call ‘enjoyment’ (Genuss) and this is reflected in the inner soul-being as the desires we ascribe to the soul. (Sentient body and astral body are the same thing so far as man is concerned; without the sentient body there could be no ‘enjoyment.’) Thus astral body, and transformed astral body, or sentient soul, belong together in the same sense as enjoyment and desires. The Ego has also worked on the etheric body in the past. What it has unfolded there has brought about the fact that in his inner being man bears the intellectual, or mind-soul. The intellectual soul, which is also the bearer of the memory, is connected with a subconscious process of transformation of the etheric body proceeding from the Ego. And finally, the Ego has in past ages already worked at the transformation of the physical body in order that man may exist in his present form. The product of this is called the consciousness soul, through which man acquires knowledge of the things of the outer world. In this sense too, therefore, we may speak of the sevenfold human being: the three soul members, sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul have arisen as the result of a preparatory, subconscious. Ego activity. But here the Ego has worked unconsciously or subconsciously, upon its sheaths.

Now we must ask: are not these three members, physical body, etheric body and astral body complicated entities? It is a most marvellous structure, this physical body of man! Closer examination would show that it contains far more than the mere portion which has been elaborated by the Ego into the consciousness soul, and which may be called the physical vehicle of the consciousness soul. Again, the etheric body is much more complicated than the vehicle of the intellectual or mind soul, and the astral body more complicated than the vehicle of the sentient soul. These elements are poor in comparison with what was already in existence before man possessed an Ego. Therefore Spiritual Science teaches us that in a primordial past the first germ of man's physical body was brought into existence by Spiritual Beings. To this was added the etheric body, then the astral body, and finally the Ego. The physical body of man has thus passed through four evolutionary stages. First of all the physical body existed in direct correspondence with the spiritual world, then it was elaborated, permeated and interwoven with the etheric body, and grew more complicated. Then it was permeated by the astral body and grew more complicated still. Then the Ego was added, and only when the Ego had worked on the physical body was a portion transformed into the vehicle of so-called ‘human consciousness,’ the faculty by which man acquires a knowledge of the external world. But this physical body has to do a great deal more than create a knowledge of the external world through the senses and brain. It has to carry out a number of activities lying at the basis of consciousness but taking their course entirely outside the region of the brain. And so it is with the etheric and astral bodies.

When we realise that all around us in the external world is Spirit, that Spirit is at the basis of everything material, etheric, astral, we must say: just as the Ego itself, as a spiritual being works from within outwards while man's evolution proceeds in the three members of his being, so must Spiritual Beings, or spiritual activities, if you will, have worked upon his physical, etheric and astral bodies before the Ego asserted itself and elaborated a further fragment of what had already been prepared. Here we look back to past ages when an activity proceeding from without inwards was exercised upon the astral, etheric and physical bodies, just as now the Ego works from within outwards upon these three members. Thus it must be said that spiritual creation, spiritual activity has been at work on our sheaths, imparting form, movement, shape and so on before the Ego was able to take root therein. We must speak of the existence of spiritual activities in human beings preceding the activity of the Ego. We bear within us spiritual activities which are necessary preliminaries to those of the Ego and which were in operation before the Ego could intervene. Let us then for the moment eliminate all that has been elaborated by the Ego from the three members of our being (sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul) and consider the structure, inner movement and activity of the sheaths of the human being. Before the activity of the Ego, a spiritual activity was exercised upon us. Therefore in Spiritual Science we say that in man as he is to-day we have to do with an individual soul, with a soul permeated by an Ego which makes each single human being into an individuality complete in itself. We say that before man became this complete Ego-being, he was the product of a ‘Group-Soul,’ of a soul essence, just as we speak of Group-Souls to-day in the animal world. The individual soul in the human being is, in the animal kingdom, at the basis of a whole family or species. A whole animal species has one common animal Group-Soul. In man, the Soul is individualised.

Thus before man became an individual soul, another soul worked in the three members of his being. This other soul—which we can only learn to know to-day through Spiritual Science—is the predecessor of our own Ego. This predecessor of the Ego, man's Group- or Species-Soul which gave over to the Ego the three members it had already elaborated, physical body, etheric body, astral body, in order that the Ego might further work upon them,—this Group-Soul similarly transformed, developed and regulated the three bodies from its inner centre. And the last activity which worked upon the human being before the bestowal of the Ego, the last influences immediately preceding the birth of the Ego, are to-day expressed in human speech. If, therefore, we take our start from our life of consciousness, intelligence and feeling, and look back to what has preceded this inner life, we are led to a soul activity as yet unpermeated by the Ego, the result of which is to-day expressed in speech.

Now let us consider this fourfold being of ours, and what lies at its foundation. How is it expressed outwardly in the physical body? The physical body of a plant has a different appearance from that of a man. Why is this so? It is because the plant possesses only physical body and etheric body, whereas in the physical body of man astral body and Ego are working as well. And what is inwardly working there correspondingly forms and transforms the physical. What is it, then, that has worked in man's physical body in such a way that it has become permeated by an etheric or life body?

The system of veins and glands is, in the human being and also in the animal, the outer physical expression of the etheric or life body; that is to say, the etheric body is the architect or moulder of the system of veins and glands. The astral body, again, moulds the nervous system. Therefore it is only correct to speak of a nervous system in the case of beings possessing an astral body.

And what is the expression of the Ego in man? It is the blood system, and, in the human being, the blood which is under the influence of the inner, vital warmth. Everything that the Ego brings about in man, if it is to be moulded into the physical body, proceeds by way of the blood. Therefore it is that blood is such ‘a very peculiar fluid.’ When the Ego has elaborated the sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul, all that it is able to shape and fashion can only penetrate to the physical body by way of the blood. The blood is the medium for all the activities of astral body and Ego.

Nobody will doubt, even if he only observes human life superficially, that as man works from his Ego in the consciousness soul, intellectual soul and sentient soul, he is also transforming and changing the physical body. The facial expression is surely an elaboration of what is working and living in the inner being. And is there anyone who would not admit that the inner activity of thought, if it lays hold of the whole soul, has a transforming effect on the brain, throughout the course of human life? Our brain adapts itself to our thinking; it is an instrument that moulds itself according to the requirements of our thinking. But, if we observe to what extent man is to-day able to mould his external being artistically from out of his Ego, we shall see that it is indeed very little. We can accomplish very little through the blood by setting it in movement from the “inner warmth.” The Spiritual Beings, whose activity preceded the activity of the Ego could do much more. They had a more effective medium at their disposal, and under their influence, man's form was so moulded that it has become, on the whole, an expression of what these Spiritual Beings made of him. What was the medium in which they worked? It was the air. Just as we work in the inner warmth, making our blood pulsate and thus bringing it to activity within our own form,—so did these Spiritual Beings work with regard to the air. Our true human form is the result of the work of these Beings upon us through the medium of the air.

It may appear strange to say that spiritual activities worked upon man through the air in a far-off past. I have already said that we should not understand our own inner life of soul and spirit if we were to conceive of it merely as so many concepts and ideas, if we did not know that it has been bestowed by the whole external world. Anyone who stated that concepts and ideas arise within man, even though there may be no ideas in the external world, might just as well say that he can obtain water from an empty glass. Our concepts would be so much froth if they were anything else than what is living in the objects outside us and the laws within them. The elements brought to life in the soul are drawn from the world around us. We may say, therefore, that everything around us in the material world is permeated and woven through by Spiritual Beings. However strange it may appear, the air around us is not merely the substance revealed by Chemistry; spiritual beings, spiritual activities are working within it. Through the blood warmth proceeding from the Ego (for that is the essential point), we can to a very small extent mould our physical body. The spiritual beings preceding the Ego performed mighty things in the outer form of our physical body through the medium of the air. That is the important thing.

It is the form of the larynx, and all that is connected with it, that makes us man. This marvellous organ and its relation to the other instruments of speech has been elaborated artistically out of the spiritual element of the air. Goethe said so beautifully in speaking of the eye: “The eye has formed itself from the light, for the light.” To say in the sense of Schopenhauer that “without an eye sensitive to the light, the impression of the light would not exist for us,” is only half a truth. The other half is that we should have no eyes if the light, in a primordial past, had not plastically elaborated the eye from undifferentiated organs. In the light, therefore, we must not merely see the abstract essence described to-day by Physical Science as light; we have to seek in the light the hidden essence that is able to create an eye.

In another sphere, it is the same thing as if we were to say that the air is permeated and ensouled by a Being who at a certain epoch was able to mould in man the highly artistic organ of the larynx and all that is related to it. All the rest of the human form,—down to the smallest details,—has been so formed and plastically moulded that at the present stage man is, so to speak, a further elaboration of his organs of speech. The organs of speech are fundamental to the human form. Hence, it is speech that raises man above the animal. The Spiritual Being whom we call the “Spirit of the Air,” has indeed worked in and moulded the animal nature, but the activity did not reach the point of development of a speech organism such as is possessed by man. With the exception, for example, of what has been elaborated unconsciously by the Ego in the brain and in the perfecting of the senses,—everything, that is, except the products of Ego activity,—has proceeded from a higher activity preceding that of the human Ego, whose purpose it was to create man's body out of a further elaboration of his organs of speech. There is no time now to explain why the birds, for instance, in spite of their perfection of song, have remained at a stage where their form cannot, be an expression of the organs of speech.

So far, then, as the instruments of speech are concerned, man was already inwardly organised before he arrived at the stage of thinking, feeling and willing as he does to-day. These latter processes are connected with the Ego. We can now understand that the higher Spiritual activities, having created the astral, etheric and physical bodies through the influences of the air, could only so mould the physical body that it ultimately became a kind of appendage of man's instruments of speech. When man had been thus presented with an organ responding to the so-called “Spirit of the Air” (in the same sense as the eye responds to the spiritual essence of the light), his Ego could project into this organ its own functions of intelligence, consciousness and feeling. A threefold subconscious activity,—an activity in the physical, etheric and astral bodies precedes the activity of the Ego. A keystone for the understanding of this is our knowledge that it was due to the “Group-soul,” which has, of course, worked upon the animal also, but imperfectly. This must be taken into consideration in our study of the spiritual activity in the astral body preceding that of the Ego. In such a study, we must eliminate any conception of the Ego itself, but bear in mind all that has been brought about by the Group-Ego from mysterious depths of being. Desire and enjoyment, in an imperfect, chaotic condition, confront each other in the astral body. Desire could become a soul-quality, could be transformed into an inner faculty, because it already had a precursor in the astral body of man.

Similarly, the capacity for the formation of pictures, a symbol-creating faculty, inheres, in the etheric body, confronting outer stimuli. A distinction must be made between this pre-Ego activity of the etheric body and the Ego activity itself. When the Ego is functioning as intellectual soul, it seeks, at the present stage of human development, to present as Truth what is the most faithful image of external objects. Anything that does not correspond to outer objects is said to be ‘untrue.’ The spiritual activities preceding the operations of the Ego did not function in this way; they were more symbolical, picture-like, more or less like a dream. We may dream, for instance, that a shot is fired, and on waking find that a chair beside the bed has fallen down. The outer event and impression (the falling chair) are transformed in the dream into a sense image, the shot. The spiritual beings preceding the Ego “symbolised,” and this is what we ourselves do when we rise to higher spiritual activity through Initiation. At that stage, we try, but with full consciousness, to work our way from the merely abstract outer world into a symbolising, imaginative activity.

These spiritual beings worked yet further on the human physical body, making man into an expression of the correspondence between outer happenings or facts, and imitation. In the child, for instance, we find imitation when the other members of the soul are as yet but little developed. Imitation is a process belonging to the subconscious essence of man's nature. Therefore, early education should be based on imitation, for it exists as a natural impulse in the human being before the Ego begins to regulate the inner activities of soul. The impulse to imitate in presence of outer activities, in the physical body, the symbolising process in the etheric body in response to outer stimuli, and the so-called correspondence between desire and enjoyment in the astral body,—all these things must be thought of as elaborated through the agency of the air. Their plastic, artistic impression has been worked into the larynx and the whole apparatus of speech. The Beings who preceded the Ego, then, formed and moulded man in this threefold sense, and thus the air can come to expression in the human being.

When we study the faculty of speech in the true sense we must ask: is speech the “tone” that we produce? No, it is not. Our Ego sets in movement, and gives form to what has been moulded and incorporated in us through the air. Just as we set the eye in movement in order to receive the light that is working externally (the eye itself is there for the reception of light), so, within ourselves, from out of the Ego, those organs which have been elaborated from the spiritual essence of the air are set in movement; and then we must wait until the spirit of the air itself sounds back to us as the echo of our own “air activity,”—the tone. We do not produce the tone any more than the single parts of a flute produce the tone. We produce from our own being, the activity which the Ego is able to develop by using the organs which have been elaborated from out the spirit of the air. Then it must be left to the spirit of the air to set the air in movement again, by means of the same activity which has produced the organs. Thus the word sounds forth.

Human speech is founded on the threefold correspondence, of which I have spoken. But what is it that must correspond? Upon what has imitation to be based in the physical body? Imitation in the physical body must be based upon the fact that, in the movements of our vocal organs, we imitate the outer activities and objects which we perceive and which make an impression upon us; that we produce the echo of what we have in the first place heard echoing as tone, imitating through the physical body the thing that has made an external impression upon us. The painter imitates a scene which is made up of quite other elements than colour and canvas, light and shade. Just as the painter imitates by manipulating light and shade, so do we imitate what comes to us from outside, by setting our organs in movement, imitatively,—organs which have been elaborated out of the element of the air. What we bring forth in the sound, is therefore an actual imitation of the essential being of things. Our consonants and vowels are nothing but reflections and imitations of impressions from outside.

In the etheric body, we have a picture-forming, symbolising activity. Hence we can understand that although the earliest beginnings of our speech arose through imitation, a development took place in that the process tore itself loose, as it were, from the external impressions, and was then further elaborated. In symbolism,—as in the dream,—the etheric body elaborates something that no longer resembles the outer impressions, and the continued operation of the sound, consists in this. First of all, the etheric body works upon something that is mere imitation; this mere imitation is transformed by it, and becomes an independent process. So that what we have inwardly elaborated, corresponds only in a symbolical sense, as sense-imagery, to the outer impressions. Our activity is no longer merely imitative.

Finally, there is a third element,—desire, emotion, everything that lives inwardly. This expresses itself in the astral body, and works in such a way, that it gives further form to the tone. These inner experiences stream from within outwards into the tone. Sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain, desire, wish,—all these things flow into it, and impart to it a subjective element. First there is the process of mere imitation. This is further developed as speech symbolism in the tone- or word-picture that has become an independent entity, and this is now again transformed by being permeated with man's inner experiences of sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain, horror, fright and so forth. It must always be an outer correspondence that first wrests itself from the soul, in the tone. But when the soul expresses its experiences, and allows them to sound forth, as it were, it has first to seek for the corresponding outer experience. The third element, then, where pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, horror and so on, express themselves inwardly, psychically, in the tone, has first to seek for its correspondence. In imitation there is an after-copy of the external impression; the inner tone-picture, the symbol that has arisen, is the next development; but what man allows to sound forth, merely from inner joy, pain, and so on, would only be a radiation or emanation to which nothing could correspond.

When children learn to speak, we can continually observe the correspondence between outer being and inner experience. The child begins to translate something it feels into sound. When it cries “Mamma,” “Papa,” this is nothing but an inner transfusion of emotion into sound, the externalisation of an inward element. When the child expresses itself thus, its mother comes to it and the child notices that an outer occurrence corresponds to the expression of joy poured into the sound “Mamma.” Naturally, the child does not ask how it happens that in this case its mother comes to it. The inner experience of joy, or pain, associates itself with the outer impression. This is the third way in which speech operates.

It may therefore be said that speech has arisen just as much from without, inwards, through imitation, as through the association of external reality with the expression of the inner being. What has led to the formation of the words “Mamma,” “Papa,” from the expression of the inner being, which feels satisfaction when the mother comes, occurs in innumerable cases. Wherever the human being perceives that something happens as the result of an inner utterance, the expression of the inner being unites itself with the external fact.

All this takes place without the co-operation of the Ego. The Ego only later takes over this activity. Thus we can see how an activity, preceding that of the Ego, worked at the configuration which lies at the basis of man's faculty of expression in speech. And because the Ego makes its entrance after the foundations for speech have already been created, speech, in turn, accommodates itself to the nature of the Ego. As a result, utterances corresponding to the sentient body are permeated with the sentient soul; the pictures and symbols corresponding to the etheric body are permeated with the intellectual soul. Man pours into the sound what he experiences in the intellectual soul, and this was at first, mere imitation. Thus, do those elements of our speech, which are reproductions of inner experiences of the soul, come gradually into existence.

In order, therefore, to understand the essential nature of speech, we must realise that there lives within us, something that was active before the Ego, and any of its activities were there; into this, the Ego afterwards poured what it is able to elaborate. We must not demand that speech shall exactly correspond to what originates in the Ego, to all the spirituality and intimacies of our individual being. Speech can never be the direct expression of the Ego. The activity of the spirit of speech, is of a symbolical nature in the etheric body, imitative in the physical body. All this in conjunction with what is elaborated by the spirit of speech, from out the sentient soul,—for it projects the inner experiences from that domain, in such a way that we have in the sound an emanation of the inner life,—justifies us in saying that speech has not been elaborated by the methods of the conscious Ego, as we know it to-day. The development of speech, is indeed, only comparable to artistic activity. We cannot demand that speech shall be an exact copy of what it intends to present, any more than we can demand that the artist's imitation shall correspond to reality. Speech only reproduces the external, in the sense in which the artist's picture reproduces it. Before man was a self-conscious spirit, in the modern sense, an artist, working as the spirit of speech, was active. This is a somewhat figurative way of speaking, but it expresses the truth. It is a subconscious activity that has produced the speaking human being, as a work of art. By analogy, speech must be conceived of as a work of art, but we must not forget, that each work of art can only be understood within the scope of that particular art. Speech itself, therefore, must necessarily impose certain limits upon us. If this were taken into consideration, a pedantic effort, like Fritz Mauthner's ‘Critique of Speech,’ would have been impossible from the very outset. In that work, the critique of speech is built upon entirely false premises. When we examine human languages, says Mauthner, we find that they by no means, correctly reproduce the objective reality of things. Yes, but are they intended to do so? Is there any possibility of their doing so? No; no more than it is possible for the picture to reproduce external reality by the colours, lights and shades, on the canvas. The spirit of speech underlying this activity of man, must be conceived in an artistic sense.

It has only been possible to speak of these things in bare outline. But when we know that an Artist, who moulds speech, is at work in humanity, we shall understand that however different the single languages may be, artistic power has been at work in them all. When this ‘spirit of speech,’ as we will now call the being working through the air, has manifested at a comparatively low stage in man, its action has been like that of the atomistic spirit, which would build up everything out of the single particles. It is then possible to build up a language where a whole sentence is composed of single sound-pictures.

When in the Chinese language, for instance, we find the sounds ‘Shi’ and ‘King,’ we have two ‘atoms’ of speech formation, the one syllable ‘Shi,’ or song, and ‘King,’ book. Putting the two sound-pictures together—‘Shi-King,’ we should have the German ‘Liederbuch’ (English, Song-Book). This ‘atomising’ process results in something that is conceived of as one whole, ‘Song-Book.’ That is a small example of how the Chinese language gives form to concepts and ideas.

If we elaborate what has been said to-day, we can understand how to study the spirit of so marvelously constructed a language as the Semitic, for instance. The foundation of the Semitic language lies in certain tone-pictures, consisting really, only of consonants. Into these tone-pictures, vowels are inserted. If, for the mere sake of example we take the consonants q—t—l, and insert an ‘ a ’ and again ‘ a ’, we obtain the word ‘qatal’ (German, töten, to kill), whereas the word consisting of consonants only is the mere imitation of an external sound impression.

This is a remarkable permeation, for ‘qatal,’ to kill, has come into existence as a sound picture, through the fact that the outer happening or event has been imitated by the organs of speech; that is the original sound picture. The soul elaborates this, by adding something that can only be an inner experience. The sound picture is further developed and the killing referred to a subject. Fundamentally speaking, the whole Semitic language has been built up in this way. The working together of the different elements of speech-formation is expressed in the whole construction of the Semitic language, in the symbolising element that is pre-eminently active. The activity of the spirit of speech in the etheric body is revealed in the characteristics of the Semitic language, where all the single, imitated sound-pictures are elaborated and transformed into sense images by the insertion of vowels. All words in the Semitic language are fundamentally so formed, that they are related to the external world, as sense images.

In contrast to this, the elements in the Indo-Germanic languages are stimulated more by the inner expression of the astral body, of the inner being. The astral body is already bound up with consciousness. When man confronts the outer world, he distinguishes himself from it. When he confronts the outer world, from the point of view of the etheric body, he mingles, and is one with it. Only when objects are reflected in the consciousness, does he distinguish himself from them. This activity of the astral body, with its wholly inward experience, is wonderfully expressed in the Indo-Germanic languages—in contrast to the Semitic—in that they include the verb ‘to be,’—the affirmation of what is there without our co-operation. This is possible because man distinguishes himself from what causes the outer impression. If, therefore, a Semitic language wants to express ‘God is good,’ it is not directly possible. The word ‘is’, which expresses existence, cannot be rendered, because it is derived from the antithesis of astral body, and external world. The etheric body, simply presents things. Therefore, in the Semitic language, we should have to say ‘God the Good.’ The confronting of subject and object is not expressed. In these Indo-Germanic languages there is differentiation from the outer world; they contain the element of a tapestry of perceptions spread out over the external world. These in turn, react on the human being, strengthening and giving support to the quality of ‘inwardness,’ that is to say, all that may be spoken of as the predisposition to build up strong individuality, a strong Ego.

It may seem to many of you that I have only been able to give unsatisfactory indications, but it would be necessary to speak for a fortnight if a detailed exposition of speech were to be given. Only those who have heard many such lectures, and have entered into the spirit of them, will realise that a stimulus such as has been given to-day is not without justification.

The only intention has been to show that it is possible to acquire a conception of speech and language in the sense of Spiritual Science, and this leads us to realise that speech can only be understood with the artistic sense which must first have been developed. All learning will be shipwrecked if it is not willing to recreate what the ‘artist of speech’ has moulded in man before the Ego was able to work within him. Only the artistic sense can understand the mysteries of speech; the artistic sense alone can recreate. Learned abstractions can never make a work of art intelligible. Only those ideas which are able fruitfully to recreate what the artist has expressed with other media,—colour, tone, and so on,—can shed light on a work of art. Artistic feeling alone can understand the artist; artists of speech alone can understand the creative Spiritual element in the origin of speech. This is one thing that Spiritual Science has to accomplish with regard to the domain of speech.

The other thing has its bearing in practical life itself. When we understand how speech has proceeded from an inner, prehuman artist, we shall also realise that when we want to speak or express through speech, something that claims to be authoritative, this artistic sense must be allowed to come into play. There is not much realisation of this in our modern age, when there is so little living feeling for speech. To-day, if a man can speak at all, he imagines that he is at liberty to express everything. What should be realised is that we must recreate in the soul a direct connection between what we wish to express in speech, and how we express it. The artist of speech, ‘in all domains’ must be reawakened within us. To-day, people are satisfied with any form that is given to what they want to say. How many people realise that the artistic feeling for speech and language is necessary in every description or thesis? This, however, is absolutely essential in the domain of Spiritual Science. Examine any genuine writings in the sphere of Spiritual Science and you will find that a true Spiritual Scientist has tried to mould each sentence artistically; he does not place a verb arbitrarily at the beginning or end. You will find that every sentence is a ‘birth ‘ because it must be experienced, not merely as thought, but inwardly in the soul, as actual form. If you follow the coherence of what is written, you will find that in three consecutive sentences, the middle one is not merely an appendage of the first, and the third of the second. The third sentence is already there in germ, before the second is built up, because the force of the middle sentence must depend on what has remained of the force in the first, and this must in turn pass over to the third. In Spiritual Science, one cannot create without the artistic feeling for language. Nothing else is of any use. The essential point is to free ourselves from being slavishly chained to the words, and this cannot happen if we imagine that any word can express a thought, for our speech formation is then already at fault. Words which are coined wholly for the world of sense, can never adequately express super-sensible facts. Those who ask, ‘how can one describe the etheric or astral body concretely by a word,’ have understood nothing at all of these things. Only that man has understood who says to himself, ‘I will experience what the etheric body really is from the one aspect before I allow myself to write a single page about it, and I will realise that it is a question of artistic imagery. Then I will describe it from the other three aspects.’ In such a case, we have the matter presented from four different aspects, so that the presentations given through language are really artistic imagery. If this is not realised, we shall have nothing but abstractions and an emaciated repetition of what is already known. Hence, development in Spiritual Science will always be bound up with a development of an inner understanding of the plastic forces of speech. In this sense Spiritual Science will work fruitfully upon our present atrocious style of speech which reveals no indication of the nature of artistic power. If it were otherwise, so many people who can really hardly speak or write, would not rush into literary activity. People have long ago lost the realisation that prose writing, for instance, is a much higher activity than writing verse, only, of course, the prose that is written to-day is of a much lower order.

Spiritual Science is there to impart, in every domain, the stimulus connected with the deepest spheres of human life. In this sense, Spiritual Science will fulfil the dreams of the greatest men. It will be able to conquer the super-sensible worlds through thought, and so to pour out the thoughts into sound pictures that speech can again become an instrument for communicating the vision of the soul in super-sensible worlds. Then Spiritual Science will fulfil, in ever-increasing measure, a saying relating to this important region of man's inner being: ‘Immeasurably deep is thought, and its winged instrument is the word.’