The Rudolf Steiner Archive

A translation of the profound Indian poem "Bhagavad-Gita" by Franz Hartmann has recently been published. The poem reveals the deepest experiences that the chosen ones, the priestly natures of a sensible people, had in special states. As if in a dream, the solutions to those questions of life which, according to their disposition, they needed to answer, were revealed to these priestly natures. It was not through abstract thinking, which we Westerners have to rely on, but through mystical vision and intuition that these Oriental seekers of truth sought to achieve their goals. It would be in vain if we Westerners wanted to imitate them. Our nature is different from theirs; and therefore the way must be different by which we reach the summit of knowledge and the height of a free way of life. Theosophists do not think this way. They shrug their shoulders at the whole of European science; they smile at its intellectuality and rationality and worship the Oriental way of seeking truth as the only one. Oh, it is delightful to observe the superior expression when one enters into a conversation with a Theosophist about the value of occidental knowledge. "That is all external work"; the "rationalists only walk around a thing and look at its surface"; "we, on the other hand, live inside the thing; we even live inside God himself; we experience the Godhead within us". These are some of the phrases we hear. And you will hardly get away without being labeled a "limited intellectual" if you reveal in just a few words that you cannot think of the inferiority of Western science in the same way. But it is not a good idea to make such a confession so soon. Rather, I advise everyone who meets with a Theosophist to first of all place himself in complete faith and try to hear something of the revelations that such an enlightened person, full of oriental wisdom, experiences in "his inner being". For one hears nothing; nothing but phrases borrowed from Oriental writings, without a trace of content. The inner experiences are nothing but hypocrisy. It is cheap to take phrases from a literature that is, after all, profound and use them to declare the whole of Western cognitive work worthless. Theosophists have no idea of the depth, the inwardness of the science of the West, which supposedly belongs to the superficial mind, to external concepts. But the way in which they speak of the highest knowledge, which they do not have, the mystical way in which they present incomprehensible foreign wisdom, has a seductive effect on quite a few of their contemporaries. And the Theosophical Society is spread all over Europe, has its followers in all major cities; and the number of those who prefer to turn to the dark talk of experiencing the deity within rather than the clear, bright, conceptual knowledge of the Occident is not small. Theosophists benefit from the fact that they are able to maintain good relations with spiritualists and similar strange spirits. They also say of the spiritualists that they treat the phenomena of the spirit world externally, while they themselves only want to experience them inwardly, completely spiritually. But they do not refuse to go hand in hand with the spiritualists when it comes to combating the free science of modern times, which is based solely on reason and observation.

Dr. Steiner distinguishes three degrees or levels of higher knowledge that the ordinary person can attain through a certain kind of development: firstly, imaginative knowledge; secondly, inspirative knowledge; and thirdly, intuitive knowledge.

We attain imaginative knowledge when we see the things around us in symbols. The human race of the Lemurian period was familiar with this state of consciousness, albeit in an imperfect way. They did not perceive things as we do now, but saw floating images of certain colors and shapes in space, which appeared to them as either pleasant or unpleasant. Gradually, our normal day-consciousness developed from this Lemurian consciousness, and only remnants of the former remained. (Compare our dream state, in which an event in the material realm, for example a chair falling over, is symbolized by one or other complicated drama.) Through what is called the esoteric life, one can regain higher knowledge in a more perfect way. The conditions for this cannot be discussed in this lecture; the speaker only noted that a great deal of patience and renunciation of all lower human inclinations is absolutely necessary, and that it is not without danger to enter the higher worlds consciously, in accordance with higher degrees of knowledge, without an authorized teacher.

If you now fulfill the conditions, after some time you will see light images when you concentrate your attention on one or the other material object, which together form the so-called imaginative (astral) image that belongs to that object. Thus, when observing a plant from which new life blossoms, one will notice violet images that gradually change to a light red; when the plant dies, on the other hand, orange images appear, which after some time become brownish and dirty in color. Besides these astral images, one will also get to know beings that are unknown in the material realm, including the group souls of animals, which present themselves in the astral world as independent beings with whom one can make contact. As the impressions of the material world fade away, the new world of light, color and sound opens up for the person, but not before he has gone through a period of complete silence and without any light.

As one progresses in one's inner development, one experiences at a certain stage that one no longer perceives only imaginative images, but at the same time begins to grasp them. At this stage, so-called inspirative knowledge begins, and one becomes aware in the lower Devachan world. One gets to know one's fellow creatures through a certain sound: the “music of the spheres” is revealed to man, as are the group souls of plants, which in this world are certain beings and, so to speak, parts of the great spiritual being, the planetary soul, of which the earth is the material body. The material earth shows itself in the lower world of Devachan as a transparent crystal.

The third degree of higher knowledge, intuitive knowledge, comes to a person when, after long practice, they have developed the ability to live in all things themselves. Then one can empathize with plant and mineral souls and, for example, share the pleasant feeling of these souls when the flower is picked, the grain is mowed or the stone is pounded into gravel. Then one shares the life of all fellow creatures, and true compassion is developed. And one sees that of all forms in the nature kingdoms, beings are the ensouling life.

Translated by Alice Wulsin

Anyone who follows the evolution of the human spirit over the course of centuries, or perhaps millennia, will come to feel that this human spirit moves on to ever new achievements in the realm of knowing and in the realm of doing. There is no need to place too much emphasis on the word progress, for in the dismal time that has now befallen humanity this might call forth bitter doubt in many. If we observe this evolution of the human spirit, however, something else makes a clear impression on us, namely, that the forms and configurations taken by man's striving spirit vary essentially from century to century. And since today in our studies we are chiefly concerned with a striving for knowledge that wishes to penetrate humanity's evolution in a new way, we need only bear in mind, by way of example, how such conceptions, which are to some extent in conflict with the old ones, have difficulty gaining access to evolving humanity.

We should continually recall, for example, how difficult it was to bring the Copernican world view into people's habits of thought, habits of feeling—indeed, in certain realms this took centuries. This Copernican world view had broken with what people for a long time believed necessary to maintain as the truth about the structure of the universe on the basis of their sense perception. Then came the time when a person could no longer rely on what the eye saw as the rising and setting of the sun, as the sun's movement. He had to accept that, contrary to the visual appearance, the sun in a certain way, at least in its relation to the earth, stands still. Human habits of thought and feeling did not easily accommodate themselves to such sudden reversals of knowledge.

In the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to which our considerations this evening are devoted, we have to do with an even greater reversal of this kind. Those who believe themselves convinced on firm scientific grounds of the content of this spiritual science also believe it necessary for it to have a decisive influence now and in the further evolution of human thinking, sensing, and feeling. It could also be said, if you will allow me these few introductory words, that the introduction of something like the Copernican world view was a matter of dealing with countless prejudices, with traditional opinions. People believed that if anything else were to supersede these it would upset all kinds of religious conceptions and things of that kind.

Many other objections concerning what we are to discuss this evening get in the way. Here the problem is not simply the prejudices such as those that confronted the Copernican theory, for example. In this case there is also the problem that in our time many people, indeed the majority of those considering themselves enlightened and cultured, not only bring with them their prejudices and preconceptions; they are actually ashamed of having to take seriously the realm about which anthroposophy has to speak. Such an individual feels he has to apologize not only to the world in general but to himself if he admits that it is possible to know about the things that are to be spoken of today in as thoroughly scientific a way as about the outer structure of nature. He believes that he has to regard himself as foolish or childish.

These things must be considered if we are to speak today about an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Anyone speaking out of knowledge of this science knows the objections that must arise today by the hundreds and thousands. He already knows these objections, because doubt is felt today not only concerning the specific truths and results of this spiritual science; there is also doubt that knowledge of any kind can be acquired concerning the realm with which anthroposophy occupies itself. The possibility of developing conceptual beliefs in the soul, general conceptual beliefs about the realm of the eternal, is certainly still acknowledged as justified by many today; but it is generally considered something dreamy or sentimental to believe that a really factual knowledge can be developed about the facts that can be drawn from the sense world concerning the immortal and eternal in the nature of the human being. This is particularly the case among those who believe themselves to be forming their judgments out of the presently recognized mode of scientific conception.

This evening we will have nothing to do with the dreamy and sentimental. We will rather be dealing with a realm in which you could say that the student, particularly the scientific student, shrinks from its first conditions. I would like to touch very briefly on the fact that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has no wish to be sectarian. It is completely misunderstood by anyone who believes that it wishes to arise in the way some new kind of religious faith is founded. It has no such wish. It wishes to arise today as a necessary result of the world view brought by natural scientific development, a general, publicly accepted conception among the widest circles of humanity. This natural scientific development today supplies so many concepts, which are in their turn the source of feelings and sensations. It provides the concepts for the most widely held world view. This natural scientific mode of observation sets itself the task of examining and explaining what is yielded to the outer senses, of examining what is accessible to human understanding by way of the natural laws about facts given to the outer senses.

If only one takes a quick look at what is living, it is possible to see how everywhere today natural science must consider origins, going back to what the construction of the seed reveals concerning growing, becoming, flourishing. (Though this is more prevalent in other realms, it is most clearly apparent in the realm of the living.) If the natural scientist wishes to explain animal life or human life in this sense, he goes back to birth, he studies embryology, he studies that from which growing and becoming evolve. The natural scientist returns to birth, to the beginning of what unfolds before the senses. And when natural science seeks an explanation for the world, it goes back with various hypotheses—with the foundations laid by geology, paleontology, with what the individual branches of natural science can reveal—forming conceptions out of this about the birth of the universe's structure, you could say. Even if one or another may have doubts about the justification for such a way of thinking, it is always being striven for.

The thoughts are well known that people have presented in order to fathom, if not the beginning of earthly evolution, at least far distant epochs (those epochs, for example, before the human being walked the earth) in order to explain in some way out of what went before, out of what lay in a germinal state, what follows, the consequences that the human being takes in of his surroundings through his senses. The whole Darwinian theory, or, if one wishes to leave that aside, the theory of evolution, is based on the search for origins, looking for the emergence of something out of something else, I would say that everywhere we find this thought of going back to youth and birth for explanations.

Spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense finds itself in another position. And by its point of departure it calls forth a vague opposition. Opposition without people being conscious of it; one could say that it calls forth an unconscious opposition, an instinctive opposition. Such opposition is often much more effective than the opposition that is clearly recognized, clearly thought through. In order to arrive at conceptions at all, an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must not begin now with general, hazy concepts of spirit; to arrive at spiritual facts, it must make death its starting point. It thereby stands from the outset, you could say, in fundamental opposition to what is preferred today, namely to proceeding from birth, youth, growth, and the progress of development. Death encroaches upon life. And if you keep in touch with contemporary scientific literature, you can find everywhere that the conscientious scientist holds the view that death as such cannot be inserted in the series of natural scientific concepts in the same sense as other concepts.

The spiritual scientist must make death his actual starting point, death, the cessation, actually the opposite of birth. How death and all that is related to it encroaches upon life in the widest sense is the basic question. Death terminates what is perceptible to the senses; death dissolves what is becoming, what is developing before the senses. By the way that death encroaches on life, it can be conceived of as having no part in what is working and flourishing here in the sense world, springing forth and producing life. This is what yields the opinion that nothing can be known about what is concealed by death, as it were, cloaked by death. (Within certain limits this opinion is perfectly comprehensible, though totally unjustifiable.) And it is actually from this corner of human feeling that the objections rear up their heads, objections that obviously can be brought up against things that are the results of a science still in its youth today. For spiritual science is young, and for precisely these reasons just referred to, the spiritual scientist is in quite a different position from that of the natural scientist, even when speaking about things in the sphere of his own research. The spiritual scientist cannot proceed in exactly the same way as the natural scientist, who poses some fact and then proves it on grounds by which everyone is convinced: that it can be seen. The spiritual scientist, however, speaks about what cannot be perceived by the senses. Hence, in speaking about the results of his research, he is always obliged to indicate how such results can be reached.

There is a rich literature concerning the realm about which I will be speaking with you this evening. Believing themselves called upon to do so, critics constantly raise the objection when reading my writings, for example, that the spiritual scientist maintains such and such a thing but gives no proof, although this actually shows only how superficially things are read! He does offer proof, but in a different way. To begin with, he tells how he arrived at his results; he must first indicate the path into the realm of facts. This path is generally unknown, because it is not the customary one for today's habits of thinking and feeling. It must first be said that the spiritual investigator is forced by his investigation to conclude that with the methods and procedures by which the ordinary scientist comes to his brilliant results (not rejected by the spiritual scientist but admired) we do not arrive at the super-sensible. It is precisely this experience, namely, the very limitations of the methods of natural scientific thinking, from which the spiritual scientist makes his start. This is not done, however, in the way so prevalent today, which is to declare that certain things, beyond which the ordinary scientist does not go, are the limits of human cognition. No, it is done in such a way that an attempt is made to come to definite experiences that can be attained only at these limits. I have spoken about these boundaries to human cognition particularly in my most recent written work, Riddles of the Soul.

Those people who have not taken knowledge as something that falls into their laps from outside, those who have wrestled with knowledge, wrestled with truth, have always at least certain experiences at these limits of human cognition. Here it must be noted that times change, that the evolution of humanity undergoes changes. Not so very long ago, the most outstanding thinkers and those struggling for knowledge, when they stood before boundaries of this kind, thought that one cannot go beyond these boundaries, that one must remain there. Those of you in the audience who have often heard me speak here know how little it is my habit to touch on personal matters. When the personal has a connection in any way with the question under consideration, however, one may venture to refer to it briefly. I may say that what I have to say about experiences of this sort at the boundaries of cognition is the result of more than thirty years of spiritual research. And it was more than thirty years ago that these very problems, these tasks, these riddles that arise at the boundaries of cognition, made a significant impression on me.

From the many examples that can be cited about such boundaries, I would like to take one that has been referred to by a real wrestler with knowledge, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the famous aesthetician who was also a philosopher of distinction, though perhaps little known during his lifetime and soon forgotten. A decade or so ago Friedrich Theodor Vischer wrote a very interesting treatise about a book, also very interesting, written by Volkelt concerning dream fantasies. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, in the course of this treatise, touched on a variety of subjects of no further interest to us here. But I would like to quote one sentence, a sentence that may perhaps be passed over in reading but a sentence that can pierce like lightning into the human heart and soul when these are permeated by a striving for knowledge, a true inner striving for knowledge. It is the sentence that burst upon Vischer when he was reflecting, meditating upon the nature of the human soul. Out of what he had gleaned about the human being from contemporary natural science, he deduced that the human soul cannot be merely in the body; this much is clear; but it is just as clear that it cannot be outside the body.

Here we have a complete contradiction, a contradiction that cannot easily be resolved. It is a contradiction that poses itself with immutable necessity if an individual is wrestling for knowledge in all earnest. Vischer was not yet able for the time was not sufficiently ripe—to press on from what we might call his position in knowledge, at these boundaries of knowledge, to press on from cognition in the ordinary sense of the word to inward experience of a contradiction of this kind. Yet from all directions today, from the most knowledgeable people, we hear a particular conclusion when they come up against such a contradiction. (There are indeed hundreds and hundreds of such contradictions du Bois-Reymond a physiologist of great intelligence, has spoken about only seven world riddles, but these seven can be multiplied by hundreds.) Our contemporary man of knowledge says that from this point on human cognition is able to go no further. He says this for the simple reason that at the boundaries of human cognition he cannot determine to go on from mere thinking, from mere mental activity, to experience.

It is necessary to begin at a place where such a contradiction obstructs the way, a contradiction not ingeniously thought out but one that is revealed by the riddle of the world; we must seek to live with such a contradiction again and again, to wrestle with it in everyday life, to immerse the soul in it entirely. We must have no fear while immersing ourselves in this contradiction (and a certain inner courage of thought is part of this), we must have no fear that this contradiction will be able to split asunder the conceptual powers of the soul, or that the soul will not be able to penetrate through it, and so on. I have described this very struggle at such boundaries in detail in my book, Riddles of the Soul.

When an individual comes to such a boundary with his whole soul, instead of with mere mental images, with mere clever thinking and mental strategies, he progresses further. He does not go further on a purely logical path, however, but on the path of living knowledge. I would like to describe what he experiences by means of a comparison, for the paths of the spiritual investigator are really experiences of knowledge, facts of knowledge. Language today has not yet acquired many words for these things, because words have been coined for what is acquired by outer sense perception. Hence what stands clearly before the eye of the spirit can often be expressed only by means of comparison. When we live into such contradictions, we feel as if we were at the border where the spiritual world breaks in; this is not to be found in sense-perceptible reality, where indeed it breaks in but does so from outside, as it were.

Now, whether or not this image is well-founded from a natural scientific point of view is not important here, for it can still be used by way of comparison. It is as if one of the lower forms of life had not yet developed the sense of touch but experienced only inwardly, experienced itself inwardly in constant stirrings of movement, in this way experiencing the borders of the physical world, the surfaces of single objects. A being that has not yet developed the sense of touch and experiences only the surfaces of sense-perceptible objects remains entirely shut within itself, unable as yet to feel, to touch, what is there outside it by way of sense impressions.

In the same way, a person struggling with knowledge feels himself purely soul-spiritually (we should not think here of anything material) when he comes to the kind of place I have just described. In the case of our rudimentary animal, the organism breaks through to the outer, sense-perceptible world by its impact with it, differentiating itself through the sense of touch, by which surfaces are touched and knowledge gained as to their roughness or smoothness, their warmth or cold. In the same way, when what has lived only inwardly opens itself to what is outside, the possibility is acquired to break through, as it were, just at the places we have described and to acquire a spiritual sense of touch. Only when a person has wrestled perhaps for years at these boundaries of cognition, struggling to break through into the spiritual world, can he first acquire real spiritual organs. I am speaking only in an elementary way of how this sense of touch is developed. To use these terms in a more definite way, however, we can say that by ever greater application of inner work, working away from being enclosed within oneself, spiritual eyes, spiritual ears develop. To many people today it still seems absurd to say that at first the soul is just as undifferentiated an organ as the organism of a lower animal, forming its senses out of its own substance and out of this substance developing soul concepts, spiritual organs differentiated as to their soul qualities, which then bring an individual face to face with the spiritual world.

It may be said that a systematically presented spiritual science, which is fully entitled to be called scientific, is something new in the progress of knowledge in human evolution. It is not new, however, in every respect. The struggle for it, the striving after it, is to be seen in the outstanding individuals of knowledge from the past. I have referred to one of these when I mentioned Friedrich Theodor Vischer. I would like to show from his own comments how he stood at such a border of knowledge, how he remained there, never making the transition from being inwardly stirred to actually breaking through the boundary to the spiritual sense of touch. Here I would simply like to read you a passage from Friedrich Theodor Vischer's works, in which he describes how he came to such a boundary where the spirit breaks through into the human soul in the course of his wrestling with natural scientific knowledge. This was at the time in which materialistically directed natural science posed many riddles for those struggling for knowledge in real earnest. Countless people claimed that the soul cannot be said to be anything but a product of material activity.

Here are his words: “No spirit where there is no nerve center, where there is no brain—so say our opponents. We reply: There would be no nerve center, no brain had they not been prepared for by countless stages from below upward; it is easy to speak mockingly of those who say that there is an echo of the spirit in granite and limestone. This is no harder than it would be for us to ask sarcastically how the protein in the brain rises to the level of ideas. Human knowledge cannot discriminate between stages. It will remain a mystery how it comes about that nature, beneath which the spirit must be slumbering, stands there as such a perfect counter-blow of the spirit that we bruise ourselves against it.”

Please take note of how this wrestler for knowledge describes how we bruise ourselves! Here you have the inner experience of bumping against something by one who wrestles for knowledge: “It is a forcible separation with the appearance of such absoluteness that with Hegel's ‘differentiation’ and ‘non-differentiation’ (ingenious as this formula is, though it says as good as nothing) the steepness of the apparent dividing wall is concealed. One finds the right appreciation of the cutting edge and the impact of this counter-blow in Fichte, but no explanation for it,”

Here we have a man's description of his struggle for knowledge in the time before there could be a decision, a spiritual scientific decision, not merely to come to this blow and counter-blow but to break through the dividing wall into the spiritual world. I can speak about these things only in principle here; you will find them described in detail in my books. Particularly in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science, you will find all the details concerning what the soul must take upon itself in the way of inner activity and inner exercise (if I may use the expression) in order really to transform what is undifferentiated in the soul into spiritual organs able to behold the spiritual world.

A great deal is necessary, however, if an individual really wishes to make investigations on this path. So much is necessary just because in our age, due to the habits cultivated in the natural scientific sphere, in the sphere of the natural scientific world view, habits that are perfectly justified in their own field, a particular way of thinking has taken root in human life, a way that is opposed to the one leading to the spiritual world. Thus it goes without saying that from the side of natural science things are heard that demonstrate an utter lack of desire to know the actual facts about the spiritual world.

I will give just one example (as I have said, you can find more exact information in the books I have mentioned) of how the human being has to make every effort to acquire a totally different way of conceiving things. In ordinary life people are satisfied with concepts, with mental images of which it may be said that these concepts, these mental images are such that they offer a likeness to some external fact or object. This cannot satisfy the spiritual investigator. Even mental images, concepts, become something totally different in his soul from what they are due to modern habits of thinking. If I may use another comparison, I would like to show how the spiritual investigator stands today in relation to the world. Those who are materialists, spiritualists, pantheists, individualists, or monadists, and so on, all believe that in some way they can penetrate the world riddle. They try with definite mental images, concepts, to reach a picture of world processes. The spiritual investigator is totally unable to look on concepts in this way; his attitude toward them must be such that he is always clearly conscious of how, in a concept, in a mental image, he has nothing beyond what can be had in the outer sense world when, for example, one particular side of a tree or some other object is photographed and then another picture is taken from another side, from a third side, a fourth side, and so on. The pictures are different from one another. If combined mentally, they together present the tree as a formed mental image. But it can easily be said that one picture contradicts another.

Just consider how completely different an object looks when photographed from one side or another. The spiritual I investigator looks at the conceptions of pantheism, monadism, and so on as if they were simply different ways of looking at reality. Spiritual reality does not actually reveal itself at all to the life of mental images, the life of concepts, in such a way that it is possible to say that any one concept is a faithful image. We must always go all around the matter, forming manifold concepts from various sides. By this means we become capable of developing a much more flexible inner soul life than we are accustomed to when regarding the outer sense world. By doing this it becomes necessary to make our concepts far more alive. They are no longer simply images, but by being experienced they become much more alive than they are in ordinary life and for the things of ordinary life.

Perhaps you will understand me better if I describe it in the following way. Suppose you have a rose cut from the rose bush; you form your mental image of it. You are able to form this mental image yourself. You will often have the feeling about this mental image that it expresses something real for you, that the rose is something real. The spiritual investigator can never make any progress if he is satisfied with the mental image that the rose is something real. Pictured as a blossom on a short stalk, the rose is not real in itself. It can be real only when on the rose bush. The rose bush is something real. And the spiritual investigator must accustom himself to regarding every individual thing, to remaining conscious in what limited sense an issue is something real. People form mental images of these things, believing them to be something real. When the rose is in front of him on its stalk, the spiritual investigator must feel that it is not real; he must have a feeling for, an experience of, the degree of unreality contained in this rose as mere blossom.

By extending this to our observation of the whole world, however, the conceptual life itself is renewed, and we do not thereby get the crippled, dead mental images with which the modern natural scientific world view is satisfied; we get mental images that are living with the objects. It is true that in proceeding from the present habits of thinking, we at first experience a great deal of disappointment, disappointment that arises because what is experienced in this way differs a great deal from present habits of thinking. When speaking out of knowledge acquired in the spiritual world, much has to be said that seems paradoxical when compared with what is generally said and believed today.

A person today may be very learned in the sphere of physics, let us say; he may be an exceptionally learned person who quite rightly excites admiration by his erudition; but such an individual may work with clear concepts that have not been produced nor worked upon in accordance with what I have described, that is, without endowing the conceptual world with life. I have said something quite elementary, but this elementary statement must in the case of the spiritual investigator be extended over the whole observation of the world. I will offer an example. At the beginning of the century, Professor Dewar delivered a very important lecture in London. This lecture could be said to show in every sentence the great modern scholar who was as well acquainted with the conceptions of physics as a modern physicist can be. From his modern conceptions of physics, this scholar seeks to speak about the final condition of the Earth and about some future condition in which much of what is present with us today will have died away. He describes this correctly, because he bases his lecture on really well-founded hypotheses: he describes how one day after millions of years a condition of the earth will have to arise in which a great drop in temperature will occur; this can be well calculated, and this drop in temperature will bring about changes in certain substances. This can be calculated, and he describes how milk, for example, will not be able to maintain its fluid condition but will become solid; how the white of an egg smeared on a wall will become so luminous that people will be able to read a newspaper by its light alone, since so much light will come from the white of an egg; and many other such details are described. The consistency of things that can sustain hardly any weight today will be materially strengthened so that hundreds of pounds will be able to be supported by them. In short, Professor Dewar gives an imposing picture of the future condition of the earth. From the standpoint of physics there is nothing at all to be said against it, but for anyone who has taken living thinking into his soul, the matter has another aspect. When he turns to the conceptual forms of the kind given by the Professor, an example enters his mind that in its methods and manner of approach is very similar to the Professor's deductions and way of thinking.

Suppose, for example, we were to take a man of twenty-five and observe exactly how certain organs, the stomach for example, change from year to year in the course of two, three, four, five years (today such an observation can be managed; I need only remind you of X-rays). They take on different configurations. We can describe this in the same way that the physicist does when he compares successive conditions of the earth and then calculates what the earth will look like after millions of years. This can also be done in the case of the human being. The changes in the stomach or heart, for example, are observed, and a calculation then made of how this man will look after perhaps 200 years according to these alterations. We get just as well-founded a result if it is calculated what this man will look like after 200 years by taking into account all the individual perceptions. The only thing is that the man will have died long before this! He will no longer be there.

You see what I mean. What is important here is that in a particular case we know from direct experience that calculations of this kind do not correspond with reality, because, when 200 years have passed, the human body with its transformations will no longer be there; yet this same kind of calculation is made in connection with the earth. No heed is paid to the fact that after two million years the earth as a physical being will have been dead for a long time, will no longer be there. Thus the whole learned calculation about this condition has no value at all as a reality, because the reality it is applied to will no longer be there.

These matters are very far-reaching. In the case of the human being you can just as well calculate backward as forward; you might, in accordance with the small changes taking place in two years, calculate how a man looked 200 years ago, but he was not there then either! With this same method, however, the Kant-LaPlace theory was formulated. This theory assumes that there was once a condition of fog, a calculation that was based on our present condition. The calculation is entirely correct, the perceptions are good enough; it is just that the spiritual investigator becomes aware that at the time this primeval fog was supposed to be there, the earth was not yet born. The entire solar system did not yet exist.

I wanted to bring these calculations to your notice to show you how the entire inner life of soul must be raised out of abstractions, how it must immerse itself in a living reality, how mental images themselves must be living. In my book, The Riddle of Human Being, I have made a distinction between conceptions corresponding to reality and those corresponding to unreality. To put the matter briefly, the spiritual investigator must point out that his path is such that the means of knowledge that he uses must first be awakened, that he must transform his soul before being able to look into the spiritual world. Then the results take on a form enabling one to see that the spiritual investigator is not speculating as to the immortality of the soul or whether the soul goes through birth and death. His path of investigation leads him to the eternal in the human soul, to what goes through birth and death; the path shows him what lives as the eternal in the human being. He therefore seeks out the object, the thing, the being itself. If we reach the being, we can recognize its characteristics just as we recognize the color of a rose.

Hence it often appears as if the spiritual investigator were asserting that such-and-such is so. For when he presents evidence he must always indicate by what path he arrived at these things. He has to begin where the other science ends. Then, however, a real penetration is possible into spheres that may be said to take death as their starting point, just as natural scientific spheres take their start from birth and youth. We must simply be clear that this death is in no way merely the final event, as it is ordinarily regarded from the viewpoint of outer sense perception. It is rather something that has its part in existence in the same way that the forces called into life with birth have their part in existence. We do not meet death only through its taking hold of us as a one-time event; we carry the forces of death in us—destructive forces, forces that are continually destroying—just as we carry in us the forces of birth, the constructive forces that are given to us at birth.

To have real insight into this we have to be able to pursue research at a boundary between natural science and spiritual science. Today I am only able to cite the results of such research, of course; I only wish to arouse your interest. Were I to go into all the details of what I am suggesting, I would have to offer many lectures. If an individual is to pursue what has been suggested here, he must approach a boundary between natural science and spiritual science. It is widely believed today, and has been believed for some time, that the human nervous system, the human nerve apparatus, is simply an instrument of thinking, feeling, and willing, in short, an instrument for soul experiences, (Science today has for the most part gone beyond this belief, but the world view of the general public usually remains at the standpoint abandoned by science some decades before.) An individual who develops the soul organs—the eyes of the spirit, the ears of the spirit—as I have described at least in principle, comes to recognize the life of the soul.

Whoever really discovers this soul life knows that to call the brain an instrument of our thinking is much the same as to maintain the following. Let us say that I am walking over ground that has become sodden, and in it I leave my footprints. These footprints are found by someone else, who then wishes to explain them. How does he do this? He assumes that underneath in the earth all kinds of forces are surging up and down, and because they surge in this way they produce these footprints. Of course the forces in the earth have nothing to do with the fact that these footprints have been produced, for I myself left them there, but the traces I left can now be reflected upon. This is the way that physiologists today explain what goes on in the brain, what originates in the brain, because all thinking, all mental activity and feeling correspond to something in the nervous system. Just as my tracks correspond with my footsteps, so something actually in the brain corresponds with the impressions of the soul; but the soul has first to leave its imprint there. The earth is just as little an organ for my walking or footprints as the brain is the organ for processes of thinking or mental activity. And just as I cannot walk around without firm ground (I cannot walk on air, I need ground if I want to walk) so the brain is necessary; this is not, however, because it calls forth the soul element but because the soul element needs ground and footing upon which it expresses itself during the time that the human being is living in the body between birth and death. It therefore has nothing to do with all that.

The brilliantly intellectual natural science of today will come to full clarity when this revolution in thinking comes about to which I have referred here. This revolution is more radical than the transition to the Copernican world view from the world view held previously. In face of the real world view, however, it is as justifiable as the Copernican world view was in relation to what preceded it. When we have pressed forward on the path of investigation of the soul, we will find that the processes in the brain, in the nervous system, that correspond to the soul life are not constructive. They are not there so that the productive, growing, flourishing activity is present in the nervous system as it is in the rest of the organism. No! What the soul brings about in the nervous system is a destructive activity. During our waking consciousness outside sleep it is a destructive activity.

Only by virtue of the fact that our nervous system is inserted within us in such a way that it receives constant refreshment from the rest of the organism can there be constant compensation for the destructive, dissolving, disintegrating activity introduced into our nervous system by thinking. Destructive activity is there, activity qualitatively of the same nature as what the human being goes through when he dies, when the organism is completely dissolved. In our mental activity death is living in us continually. You might say that death lives in us continually, distributed atomistically, and that the one-time death that lays hold of us at the end of life is only the summation of what is continually working in us destructively. It is true that this is compensated for, but the compensation is such that in the end spontaneous death is evoked.

We must understand death as a force working in the organism, just as we understand the life forces. Look today at natural science, so thoroughly justified in its own sphere, and you will find that it looks only for the constructive forces; what is destructive eludes it. Hence external natural science is unable to observe what arises anew out of the destruction, not in this case of the body, for the bodily nature is destroyed, but of a soul and spiritual nature, now constructive. This aspect is always lost to observation, being accessible only to the kind of observation I have previously described. Then it becomes evident that, having meanwhile brought our life to this point, the whole activity of our soul does not work only in conjunction with the ground on which it has to develop and which, indeed, it acts upon destructively (in so far as the soul forms mental images, in so far as it is active); instead, the whole of our soul activity is attuned to a spiritual world always around us, in which we stand with our soul-spiritual element just as we stand in the physical, sense-perceptible world with our physical body. Spiritual science is thus striving for a real connection of the human being to the spiritual world that permeates everything physical to the actual, concrete, real spiritual world.

Then the possibility truly arises for a more far-reaching observation of how what is working and weaving within us as soul, working destructively within the limits I described, is a homogeneous whole. What I have called the development of the soul presses on from ordinary consciousness to clairvoyant consciousness. I have spoken about this in my book, The Riddle of Human Being. This clairvoyant consciousness creates the possibility of possessing Imaginative knowledge. This Imaginative knowledge does not yield what belongs to the outwardly perceptible; it yields to the human being himself (I would like to look away from the other world for the moment) what is not perceptible to his senses. To avoid misunderstanding I recently called what can be perceived at first by an awakened knowledge of this kind the body of formative forces. This is the super-sensible body of the human being, which is active throughout the whole course of our life, from birth, or let us say, conception, until our physical death. It also bears our memories, yet it stands in connection with a super-sensible entity, with a super-sensible outer world.

Thus, our sense life with the rest of its consciousness is there as a mere island, but around this island and even permeating it we have the relationship of the human body of formative forces to the super-sensible outer world. Here, it is true, we reach the point of bringing the whole conceptual world (not any different now from the way I have described it) into connection with the physical brain that provides the ground for all this; but we arrive at the insight that the body of formative forces is the carrier of human thoughts, that thoughts develop in this body of formative forces and that in thinking the human being lives in this body of formative forces.

It is different if we go on to another experience of the soul, namely to feeling. Our feeling, our emotions, our passions, stand in a different relationship to our life of soul from that of our thinking. The spiritual investigator finds that the thoughts we usually have are bound up with the body of formative forces. This does not apply, however, to our feelings, our emotions. Feelings and emotions live in us in a much more subconscious way. Thus they are connected with something far more all-encompassing than our life between birth and death. It is not as though the human being is without thoughts in the part of his life about which I am now speaking; all feelings are permeated by thoughts. But the thoughts by which feelings are permeated do not, as a rule, enter man's ordinary consciousness. They remain beneath the threshold of this consciousness. What surges up as feeling is penetrated by thoughts, but these thoughts are more far-reaching, for they are found only when an individual progresses in clairvoyant cognition, when he progresses to what I call the Inspired consciousness (I am not thinking of superstitious conceptions here). You may study the particulars of this in my books.

If we go deeply into what is actually sleeping in regard to ordinary Consciousness (in the same way that from going to sleep to awaking a person sleeps in regard to the ordinary images of the senses) we see that it surges up just as dreams surge up into our sleep. Feelings actually surge up from the innermost depths of the soul; it sounds strange, but it is so. But this deeper region of the soul that is accessible to Inspired knowledge is what lives between death and a new birth. It is what enters into connection with the physical through our being conceived or born, what goes through the portal of death and has a spiritual existence among other conditions until the human being is reborn. Whoever really looks into what is living in the world of feeling with Inspired knowledge sees the human being not only between birth and death but also during the time the soul undergoes between death and a new birth.

The matter is not quite so simple as this, however; it is indeed like this, but it is also shown how forces arise in the soul that make it possible to look upon the feelings, emotions, passions, that make it possible to live in them. Just as in the plant we see what has arisen through the forces of the seed, so we see something that has not arisen with our birth or conception but that has emerged from a spiritual world.

I know very well how many objections can be made to a conception of this kind by those who accept the natural scientific world view. Those who are familiar with this world view will find it easy to say, “Here he comes and like a dilettante describes how the aspects of the soul he wishes to encompass come from a spiritual world; he even describes their special configurations, the colors of the feelings and so on, as if, on the one hand, there were hints in these feelings concerning our life before birth and, on the other hand, something in these feelings that is like the seed of the plant, which will become the plant of the next year. Doesn't this man know,” people will say, “about the wonderful laws of heredity presented by natural science? Is he ignorant of everything that those who created the science of hereditary characteristics have brought about?”

Even if the facts indicated by natural science are entirely correct, it is nevertheless the case that concealed in the emergence of heredity are the forces through which we have been preparing ourselves for centuries and which we ourselves send down. From grandparents and parents, constellations are built up that finally lead to the material result with which we then sheathe ourselves when we leave the spiritual world to descend into the physical. Whoever really keeps in mind the wonderful results of modern research into heredity will find that what spiritual science finds out about the soul (yet in a quite different way, it might be said, in the entirely opposite way) will be fully confirmed by natural science, whereas what natural science itself says is definitely not confirmed in the least by natural science. I can only suggest this here. When we then enter the sphere referred to as that of the will, this totally eludes the contents of man's ordinary consciousness. What does a person know about the processes going on in him when the thought, I want something, shapes itself into a movement of the hand? The actual process of willing is asleep in the human being. Regarding the feelings and emotions it could at least be said that the human being dreams within the human being. This is the reason that the question of freedom is so difficult, because the will is sleeping in relation to the higher consciousness. We come to knowledge about what is going on in the will in clairvoyant consciousness only by reaching the stage of actual Intuitive consciousness. By this I do not mean the vague, everyday consciousness called intuitive, but rather what I refer to in my writings as one of the three stages: Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive cognition.

Here we come into the sphere of the will, into the realm that is supposed to live and work within us. This must first be drawn out of the deep regions of the soul. Then we find, however, that this element of the will is also permeated by thoughts, by the spiritual (in addition, the ordinary thought stands by itself). But in bearing the will within us, there works into this will something in addition to what we have experienced in the spiritual world in our feelings, working between death and a new birth. Something is active there that we have experienced in the preceding life on earth. The impulses of earlier earthly lives work into the will nature of the human being. In what we develop or what we cultivate in our present willing live the impulses for our lives on earth to come. For real spiritual science, then, the whole of human life separates into the lives lying between birth and death and those which, because all physical existence has to be built up out of the world, are experienced in far longer periods in the spiritual world. Out of such lives, out of repeated earthly lives, repeated spiritual lives, the complete human life is composed. This is not some fantasy, it is not a capricious thought, but rather something we find when we learn to turn the eye of the spirit to the eternal, the imperishable, in the human soul.

These things do not preclude human freedom. If I build a house this year in which I will live for the next two years, I will be a free man in this house despite having built it for myself. Human freedom is not precluded by this. One earthly life determines the other that follows. Only through a lack of understanding could this be represented as an infringement on the idea of human freedom.

Thus, in spiritual investigation by making death our point of departure, we gradually arrive at the spiritual facts. If in spiritual investigation one makes death the foundation, just as physical investigation is based on birth and embryonic life, this observation reveals the most varied things in individual detail. I will point to something specific here, because I would not like to remain with the indefinite but rather to quote concrete results of anthroposophical research. In the ordinary life of the spirit we are able to differentiate between the forcible entry of death due to an external cause and death that comes from within through illness or by reason of old age. We are therefore able to distinguish two different kinds of death.

Spiritual investigation that goes concretely into the nature of death discovers the following. Let us take as an example the entrance into life of violent death, be it through accident or some other cause. The entrance of such an event brings about an end to life in this earthly existence. The development of spirit consciousness for the spiritual world after death depends on this one-time entrance of death, just as the consciousness we are able to develop in life depends on the forces given us at birth (in the way that I have described). The Consciousness we develop after death is of a different kind. The consciousness developed here on earth stands on the ground of the nervous system, just as when I walk around on the ground my foundation is the ground. In the spiritual world the consciousness after death has different foundations, but it is definitely a consciousness. If a man dies a violent death this is not something that merely lays hold of his mental images. The mental activity of ordinary consciousness ceases with death, and another Consciousness begins, but this lays hold of his will which, as we have seen, passes over into the next earthly life. The spiritual investigator possesses the means to investigate what can arise in an earthly life if, in a previous earthly life, there has been a violent death.

Now when we speak of such things today, people will obviously condemn this way of speaking as foolish, childish, fantastic. Yet the results are attained just as scientifically (and it is only such results that I present) as the results of natural science. If a violent death intervenes in a life, it shows itself in the following life on earth, where its effect produces some kind of change of direction at a definite period in that life. Research is now being done concerning the soul life, but as a rule only the most external things are taken into consideration. In many human lives, at a particular moment, something enters that changes a person's whole destiny, bringing him into a different path in life in response to inner demands. In America they call these things “conversions,” wanting to have a name for such events, but we do not always need to think in terms of religion. A person on another path of life may be forced into a permanent change of the direction of his will. Such a radical change of the direction of his will has its origin in the violent death of his previous life. Concrete investigation reveals the tremendous importance of what happens at death for the middle of the next life. If death comes spontaneously from within through illness or old age, then it has more significance for the life between death and a new birth than for the next earthly life.

I would like to offer the following example so that you may see that I am not speaking about anything vague here. In fact, I am speaking about details arising in life's conditions that can be gained by definite perceptions. Spiritual investigation, which is something new even for those convinced of the immortality of the human soul, makes us aware that we must not speak in merely a general way about immortality. Instead, by grasping the eternal in the human soul, human life as such becomes comprehensible. All the strange processes that are observable if we have a sense for the course taken by the soul life, for the course of the soul life in the human being, all the wonderful events find their place if we know we are dealing with repeated earthly lives and repeated spiritual lives. In the spiritual world (I say this merely parenthetically) the human being lives with spiritual beings—not only other human beings who are closely connected with him by destiny and have also passed through the portal of death, but with other spiritual beings to whom he is related in the same way that on earth the human being is related to three kingdoms: the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. The spiritual investigator speaks of particular individual spirits, particular individual spiritual beings, belonging to a concrete, individualized spiritual world, just as here we speak of individualized plant beings, animal beings, and human beings, in so far as they are physical beings between birth and death. It can be shattering to people when knowledge itself approaches the human soul in a totally different way. It is difficult to speak about these things so that they arise out of the dim depths of the spirit in a new way.

From what I have said you will have seen that knowledge about the spiritual world can be acquired. This knowledge has profound significance for the human soul; it makes the soul something different, as it were. It lays hold of the life of the soul, regardless of whether one is a spiritual investigator or has merely heard and understood the results of spiritual investigation and has absorbed them. It is of no importance whether or not one does the research oneself; the result can be comprehensible just the same. Everything can be understood if we penetrate it with sufficient depth. We only need to have absorbed it. Then, however, when we have grasped it in its full essence, it enters the human soul life in such a way that one day it becomes more significant than all the other events of life.

A person may have difficulties, sorrows, that have shattered him, or joy that has elevated him, or some truly sublime experience. It is not necessary to be indifferent to such experiences to be a spiritual investigator, someone who knows the spirit; one can participate as fully with the feelings as other people do who are not investigators of the spirit. But when someone penetrates with his essential being into what is given the soul by spirit knowledge, and when he becomes capable of answering the question, “What are the effects upon the soul of these spiritual results?”—when a full answer is given to the question of what the soul has become through this spiritual knowledge, then this event becomes more important than anything else in destiny, more important than any of the other experiences of destiny that approach the human being. Not that the others become less significant, but this one becomes greater than the others. Knowledge itself then enters through the human soul life in accordance with destiny. If knowledge thus enters through the human soul life, he begins to understand human destiny as such. From this knowledge comes the light that illumines human destiny.

From this moment on, an individual can say this: that if one has this experience of destiny so purely in the spiritual in this way, it becomes clear how one is placed into life in accordance with destiny, how our destiny hangs on threads spun out of previous lives, previous earthly lives and lives between death and a new birth, which again spin themselves out of this life and into a following life. Such an individual goes on to say that ordinary consciousness only dreams through its destiny; ordinary consciousness endures its destiny without understanding it, just as one endures a dream. Clairvoyant consciousness to which one awakes, just as we awake from a dream to ordinary consciousness, acquires a new relationship to destiny. Destiny is recognized as taking part in all that our life embraces, in the life that goes through all our births and deaths.

This matter should not be grasped in a trivial way, as if the spiritual investigator were to say, “You yourself are the cause of your own misfortune.” That would simply betray a misunderstanding and would even be a slander of spiritual investigation. A misfortune may not have its source at all in the previous life. It may arise spontaneously and have its consequences only in the life to follow and also in the life between earthly lives. We can see again and again that out of misfortune, out of pain and suffering, emerges a consciousness of a very different form in the spiritual world, Meaning enters the whole of our life, however, when we learn to understand our destiny, which otherwise we only dream our way through.

One thing particularly stands out when we bear in mind this knowledge of the spirit. We can no longer say, “If, after death, the soul enters another life, we can wait until this happens. Here we take life as it is offered us in the physical body; we can wait for what comes after death.” The matter is a question of consciousness. We may be sure that what happens after death is connected with the life we undergo in the body. Just as in a certain sense we have the Consciousness of our ordinary waking condition by means of our body, so after death we have a Consciousness that is no longer spatial, no longer built up out of the nervous system, but built up out of what has to do with time, built up out of looking backward.

Just as our nervous system in a way is the buttress and counterpart to our ordinary consciousness between birth and death, so our consciousness in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is founded on what takes place here in our consciousness. Just as here we have the world around us, so when we are dead we have before us our life as the significant organ. Hence, a great deal depends upon our consciousness in the physical body, which is able to extend into the consciousness we have after death. An individual may be occupied exclusively with physical conceptions grasped by the senses, as often happens in the habitual thinking of the present time; he may take into his consciousness and also in his capacity of memory, in everything playing itself out in his soul, concerns exclusively having to do with ordinary life. Such an individual, however, is also building up a world for himself after death! The environment there is built out of what a person is inwardly. A person born physically in Europe cannot see America around him, and just as he receives what he is born into physically as his environment, so to a certain extent he determines the environment, the place of his existence, through what he has built up in his body.

Let us take an extreme case, though one unlikely to happen. Let us take the case of someone who fights against all super-sensible conceptions, who has become an atheist, someone who doesn't even have any inclination to occupy himself with religion. Now I know that I am saying something paradoxical here, but it is based on good foundations anthroposophically: such an individual condemns himself to remaining in the earthly sphere with his consciousness, whereas another individual who has absorbed spiritual conceptions is transposed to a spiritual environment. The one who has absorbed only sense-perceptible conceptions condemns himself to remaining in the sense-perceptible environment.

Now we can work properly in the physical body because our physical body is, as it were, a sheath protecting us against the environment. And though we can thus work properly in the physical body when we are present in the physical world, we cannot do so if we hold to the physical world after death. We become destructive if we have physical conceptions in our consciousness after death. In speaking of the problem of heredity, I intimated how, when the human being is in the spiritual world, his forces lay hold of the physical world. Whoever condemns himself, by reason of his merely physical consciousness, to hold to the physical world becomes the center of destructive forces that lay hold of what is happening in human life and in the rest of universal life. As long as we are in the body, we are only able to have thoughts based on the sense-perceptible, we are able to have only materialistic thoughts: the body is a defense.

But how much greater a defense than we imagine! It seems strange, but to anyone who perceives the spiritual world in all its connections, one thing is clear: if an individual were not shut off from the surrounding world by his senses, if the senses were not curbed so that in ordinary consciousness he is incapable of taking up living concepts but takes up only those that are lifeless and designed to prevent him from penetrating into the spiritual environment, if an individual were able to make his conceptions active directly and did not have them merely within him after things have already passed through the senses, then even here in the physical world, if he were to develop his conceptual life, his conceptions would have crippling, deadening effects. For these conceptions are in a certain way destructive of everything they lay hold of. Only because they are held back in us are those conceptions kept from being destructive. They destroy only when they come to expression in machines, in tools, which are also something dead taken from living nature. This indeed is only a picture, but one corresponding with a reality. If an individual enters the spiritual world with merely physical conceptions, he becomes a center of destruction.

Thus I have to bring a conception to your attention as an example of many others: we should not say that we can wait until after death, because it depends on a person's nature whether he develops conceptions of the sense world or of the super-sensible world, whether he prepares for his next life in this way or that. The next life is indeed a very different one, but it is evolved from our life here. This is the essential thing that has to be comprehended. In spiritual science, we encounter something different from what is surmised. For this reason I must still make a few remarks in closing.

The belief might easily arise that anyone now entering the spiritual world must unconditionally become a spiritual investigator himself. This is not necessarily so, although in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have described much of how the soul must transform itself in order really to be able to enter. And to a certain degree, everyone is able to do this today, but it need not be everyone. What a person develops regarding the soul element is a purely intimate concern; what arises from it, however, is the formation of concepts of the investigated truths. What the spiritual investigator can give is clothed in conceptions such as I have developed today. Then it can be shared. For what a person needs, it is quite immaterial whether things are investigated by himself or whether he accepts them from some other credible source. I am speaking here from a law of spiritual investigation. It is not important to investigate the things oneself. What is important is for us to have them within us, for us to have developed them within. Hence, we are in error if we believe that everyone has to become a spiritual investigator.

Today, however, the spiritual investigator has the obligation (as I myself have had the obligation) to render an account, as it were, of his path of research. This is due not only to the fact that everyone today can, to a certain extent, follow the path I have described without harm, but it is also because everyone is justified in asking, “How have you arrived at these results?” This is why I have described these things. I believe that even those who have no wish to become spiritual investigators will at least want to be convinced of how spiritual investigators arrive at the results that everyone needs today, the results of those who wish to lay the foundation for the life which must develop in human souls for human evolution today.

The time is now over during which, in ancient times, so much was held back regarding spiritual research that brought about the evolution of the soul. In those ancient times, to impart what was hidden was strictly forbidden. Even today, those who know of these mysteries of life (of which there are not just a few) still hold these things back. Whoever has learned about these things merely as a student from another teacher does not under any circumstances do well to pass them on. Today it is advisable to pass on only what an individual himself has discovered, the results only of his own investigations. These, however, can and must be put at the service of the rest of humanity.

Already from the few brief indications I was able to give today it can become evident what spiritual investigation can mean for the individual human being, but it is not only significant for the individual. And in order to address this other aspect in closing with at least a few words I would like to point to something that is taken into consideration only a little today. There is a curious phenomenon to which I would like to direct your attention in the following way. In the second half of the nineteenth century we have seen the rise of a certain natural scientific orientation: the explanation of living beings connected with the name Darwin. Enthusiastic scholarly investigators, enthusiastic students have carried these things through the second half of the nineteenth century. Maybe I have already remarked upon the occurrence of a curious fact. Already in the 1860's, under the guidance of Haeckel, there developed a powerful movement based on a world view. This movement wanted to overthrow everything old and to restructure the entire world view in accordance with Darwinistic concepts. Today there are still numerous people who emphasize how great and significant it would be if there were no longer a wisdom-filled world-guidance but instead if the evolution of everything could be explained out of mechanical forces in the sense of Darwinism.

In 1867 Eduard von Hartmann published his Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten) and turned against the purely external view of the world represented by Darwinism. He pointed to the necessity of inner forces, although he did so in an inadequate way, in a philosophical way (he did not yet have spiritual science). Naturally those who were enthusiastic about the rise of Darwinism were ready to say, “That philosopher is simply a dilettante; we don't need to pay any attention to him.” Counterattacks appeared in which the “dilettante” Eduard von Hartmann was ridiculed and which asserted that the true, educated natural scientist need not pay any attention to such things.

Then there appeared a publication by Anonymous, which brilliantly argued against the publication of Eduard von Hartmann. The natural scientists who all thought as they did were in full agreement with this publication because Eduard von Hartmann was completely contradicted in it. Everything that could possibly be gathered from the basis of natural science was there used by the anonymous author against Eduard von Hartmann just as today so much is brought up against spiritual science. This publication was received very favorably. Haeckel said, “For once a real natural scientist has written against this dilettante, Eduard von Hartmann; here one can see what a natural scientist is able to do. I myself could write no better. Let him identify himself and we will consider him as one of us.” To state it briefly, the natural scientists spread a lot of propaganda in relation to this publication, which they welcomed highly because it solidified their position. The publication was very soon sold out, and a second edition became necessary. There the author revealed himself: it was Eduard von Hartmann!

In that instance someone taught the world a necessary lesson. Whoever writes about spiritual science today and reads what is written against it could without much effort invent everything that is brought against spiritual science. Eduard von Hartmann was able himself to make all the objections that the natural scientists made against him—and he did so.

But I mention this only in introduction to my main point. Oskar Hertwig is one of the most important students of Haeckel who entered upon the industrious, reliable, and great path of natural scientific investigation. Last year Hertwig published a very beautiful book, The Evolution of the Organism. A Rebuttal to Darwin's Theory of Chance (Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufallstheorie). In this book he points to issues that were already raised by Eduard von Hartmann. Such a matter is pretty much without precedent: already the generation immediately following, which still grew up under the master, had to get away from something that had been believed could build a whole world view; it had even been believed that it could provide elucidation of the spiritual world. A good Darwinist contradicts Darwinism! But he does still more, and that is what is actually important to me.

Oskar Hertwig writes at the conclusion of his superb and beautiful book that the kind of world view that Darwinism represented does not stand there merely as a theoretical edifice; rather it intervenes in the totality of life, encompassing also what people do, will, feel, and think. He says, “The interpretation of Darwin's teaching, which because of its vagueness can have such varied meanings, permitted also a very varied application to other realms of economic, social, and political life. It was possible, just as it was from the Delphic Oracles, to use what was said as desired for specific applications to social, political, health-related, medical, and other questions and to support one's own assertions by basing them on the Darwinistically restructured biology with its immutable natural laws. If these supposed laws are not actually laws, however, could there not exist social dangers—because of their many-sided application in other realms? We had better not believe that human society can for centuries use expressions like, ‘a struggle for existence,’ ‘survival of the fittest,’ ‘the most suitable,’ ‘the most useful,’ ‘perfection by selection,’ etc., applying them to the most varied realms of life, using these expressions like daily bread, without influencing in a deep and lasting way the entire direction of idea formation! The proof for this assertion could easily be demonstrated in many contemporary phenomena. For this very reason the decision concerning the truth or error of Darwinism reaches far beyond the confines of the biological sciences.”

What arises in such a theory shows itself everywhere in life. Then a question arises from the realm of spiritual science that also intervenes in life. We live today in a sad time, in a tragic time for humanity. It is a time that has developed out of human conceptions, out of human ideas. Whoever studies interrelationships with the help of spiritual science knows about the connection of what we encounter externally today with what humanity is now tragically experiencing. A great deal is being experienced; people believe that they can encompass reality with their concepts, but they do not encompass it. And because they do not encompass it, because with natural scientific concepts reality can never be encompassed, reality grows over their head and shows them that human beings can take part in such events but that the result is the chaos by which we are surrounded today.

Spiritual science does not arise only through an inner necessity, though this is also true. It would have arisen through this inner necessity even if the outer events did not stand there as a mighty, powerful sign. Such signs are there, however, from the other side: that the old world views are great in the natural sciences but can never intervene formatively in the social, legislative, political spheres in the world, that reality grows beyond human beings, if that is what they want. These mighty signs point to the need for spiritual science, which seeks concepts that correspond with reality, concepts derived from reality and that are therefore also capable of carrying the world in the social and political realms. No matter how much one believes that the concepts customary outside spiritual science today will enable us to emerge out of the chaos, it will not happen; for within the reality the spirit prevails. And because the human being himself intervenes with his actions in this reality, in the social, in the political life, he requires the conceptions, the feelings, the will impulses that are drawn from the spirit in order to come to fruitful concepts in these realms. In the future politics and social science will need something for which only spiritual science can provide the foundation. This is what is particularly important for contemporary history.

In this lecture, which has already been long enough, I can only hope to offer a few impulses. I only wish to point out that what appears today as spiritual science in a systematic order is wanted by the best. If it were only up to me, I would not give a special name to this spiritual science. For more than thirty years I have been working on the greater and greater elaboration of the conceptions regarding reality that Goethe acquired in his magnificent theory of metamorphosis, in which he had already attempted to make the concept living as opposed to dead. At that time this was only possible in an elementary way. If one does not consider Goethe simply as a historical figure, however, if one considers him still as a contemporary, then today the Goethean teaching of metamorphosis transforms itself into what I call living concepts, which then find their way into spiritual science. Goetheanism is the term I would most like to use for what I mean by spiritual scientific investigation, because it is based on sound foundations of a grasp of reality as Goethe wanted it.

And the building in Dornach that is to be dedicated to this spiritual investigation, and through which this spiritual investigation has become more well known than it would have without the building, I would like most to call the Goetheanum, so that one would see that what arises as spiritual investigation today stands fully in the midst of the healthy process of the evolution of humanity. Certainly many today who wish to acknowledge the Goethean way of looking at the world will still say that Goethe was one who recognized nature as the highest above all and who also permitted the spirit to emerge out of nature. Already as a very young man, Goethe said, “Gedacht hat sie und sinnt beständig” (“She did think and ponders incessantly”), ponders incessantly although not as man but as nature. Even if one is a spiritual investigator one can agree with the kind of naturalism that, like Goethe, thinks of nature as permeated by spirit. And those who always believe that one must stop at the boundaries of knowledge, that one can't get any further there, can be repudiated with Goethe's words. Permit me, therefore, as I conclude here, to add the words that Goethe used concerning another accomplished investigator who represented the later Kantian view:

Into the inner being of nature—
No created spirit penetrates.
Blissful those to whom she only
Reveals the outer shell!

Ins Innere der Natur—
Dringt kein erschaffner Geist
Glueckselig, wem sie nur
Die aeussere Schale weist!

Next to these words Goethe placed others that show how well Goethe knew that when the human being awakes the spirit within himself, he also finds the spirit in the world and himself as spirit:

Into the inner being of nature—
No created spirit penetrates.
Blissful those to whom she only
Reveals the outer shell!
This I hear repeated for sixty years
And damn it but secretly—
Nature has neither core nor shell,
She is everything at once.
Above all simply examine yourself
To see whether you yourself are core or shell!

Ins Innere der Natur—
Dringt kein erschaffner Geist.
Glueckselig, wem sie nur
Die aeussere Schale weist!—
So hoer ich schon an die sechzig Jahre wiederholen
Und fluche darauf—aber verstojileri,—
Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale,
A lies ist sie mit einemmale,
Dich pruefe du nur zu allermeist,
Ob du selbst Kern oder Schale seist!

Spiritual science wishes to work toward the human being learning to examine himself as to whether he is core or shell. And he is core if he grasps himself in his full reality. If he grasps himself as core, then he also penetrates to the spirit of nature. Then in the evolution of humanity in relation to spiritual science something occurs that is similar to when Copernicus pointed from the visible to the invisible, even of this visible itself.

For the super-sensible, however, humanity will have to stir itself to grasp this super-sensible within itself. To do this one does not need to become a spiritual investigator. One needs, however, to remove all prejudices that place themselves before the soul if one wishes to understand what spiritual science intends to say out of such a Goethean attitude.

I wished to offer today only a few impulses to stimulate you further. From this point of view it is always possible at least to stimulate something, but if one wanted to go into all the details, many lectures would be needed. But I believe these few comments will have sufficed to show that something needs to be drawn out of the evolutionary process of humanity, something that will first awaken the soul to full life. No one needs to believe that this will shrivel the soul, that it will kill off anything, not even the religious life. As Goethe said:

Whoever possesses Science and Art,
Has also Religion,
Whoever possesses neither of the two,
Had better have Religion!

Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt
Hat auch Religion,
Werjene beiden nicht besitzt,
Der habe Religion!

So one can say, as the modern way of thinking is evolving, whoever finds spiritual scientific paths will also find the way to true religious life; whoever does not find the spiritual scientific path will be in danger of losing also the religious path so necessary for the future of humanity!

Comedy in four acts by Ludwig Fulda
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

The few hisses that made themselves felt on Saturday after each performance of Fulda's play "Jugendfreunde" seem to me to stand on a position of judgment that the critic must not take towards the amusing, amiable work. Nothing makes the critic more boring, superfluous and ridiculous than applying standards which are excluded by the nature of a work and by the author's intentions with it. Certainly there is a point of view from which one can criticize the drawing of the characters and the course of the plot in "Jugendfreunde". I believe, however, that the best refutation of such criticism is the fact that the critic, if he indulges in unbiased and naïve enjoyment, must smile and laugh heartily for two hours at these "friends of youth" and that the contradictions in which they become entangled through the contrast between their views and their real lives are quite true to nature and wittily portrayed by the author.

Four companions stick together faithfully and spend their lives as they please. Three of them get engaged in the first elevator. They believe that their wives will fall into each other's arms just as the men did when they were bachelors. Instead, the women quarrel at the first opportunity that brings them together and say the worst things to each other. The friends soon convince themselves that they must continue their merry life without the women. This seems easy enough, as the fourth man behaves for three acts as a vigorous opponent of marriage. Why shouldn't the three friends meet twice a week in his "bachelor pad" for cozy get-togethers without their wives? The three married men are already in agreement when the fourth surprises them by deciding to marry his stenographer. And since he has obviously made a luckier catch than the three companions, he is not at all inclined to grant his companions, blessed by fate with troublesome marital halves, a rendezvous through which they can happily dream themselves back to their bachelor days again and again.

Fulda lets the opposites collide in an amusing way. It is not his style to use situational jokes to create entanglements and solutions. Everything emerges from the characters with a certain necessity. This necessity, however, is not one that is drawn from the deep, psychological depths of the soul, but it seems to me that Fulda is not at all wrong in the easy way he takes people and things. In life, we are no more interested in people like those in Fulda's play than the author shows us. Fulda tells us just as much about them as we wish to know about them. A greater deepening of the characters and intricacies would, in my opinion, give the impression of ponderousness. I consider the witty, light way of playing with the characters and plots to be an excellent quality of the author of "The Friends of Youth".

However, I believe that only such an excellent performance can help the play to achieve the effect I have described, as the German Theater did on Saturday. In Mr. Nissen, Mr. Rittner, Mr. Sauer and Mr. Thielscher, the four youthful friends found four actors who expressed the author's intentions magnificently. And the female troublemakers were well characterized by the ladies Trenner, Schneider and Eberty. If Miss Lehmann had been able to portray the stenographer so gracefully that one could have believed in the conversion of Martens, the opponent of the marriage, there would not have been the slightest objection to the performance.

When one wants to meditate, one must order oneself to exclude all thoughts and to only have the soul content of the mediation in one's soul. After that, soul quiet must set in, emptiness must begin, and then wait to see whether something flows in from the spiritual world, wait with patience and perseverance. Then one may have an experience that's like a dream that flits by. Then one has the feeling: “Something is thinking in me,” “An angel touched me,” “I raise myself into his kingdom.”

Our relation to our thoughts is like that of an angel to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit doesn't think like we do—he lets his angels rush through the world as his messengers.

Such an experience is the first step into the spiritual world, and one should watch for it.

One should feel and experience: It thinks me with piety.

One can now raise oneself further to the divine principle that vitalizes and weaves through the world and to which we owe our existence. Then one has an experience such as: It weaves me.

Thereby, we touch the hem of the clothes of beings whom we call Spirits of Movement.

Even in ordinary life, we must dive down or bump into something in order to develop consciousness. We bump into our physical body and wake up. We also bump into something after death, into Christ-substance. We must wake up in it, dive down in it to become aware of the spiritual world, so that we're not asleep there.

But having consciousness doesn't mean that one has ego-consciousness yet. We also have consciousness in the experience that something thought in us, but it's only when we remember that something has thought in us that we connect the experience with our ego.

So we lose our ego at death, and we dive down dead as a soul to find ourselves and to gradually become conscious in the Christ-substance.

Then we come to sublime beings whom we feel we should call Thrones or Spirits of Will, and the mantra for this is: It works me. Here one should feel reverence and devotion.

If we have a luminous moment in the spiritual world we see our body down below, but it takes a high stage of vision to see it as in a mirror. At the beginning of such experiences we see an image of a coffin with a man in it, or a bathtub filled with hot water, or we stand before a door that doesn't open. All of these images are in the physical body that doesn't let us in.

When we experience the image that we're looking at our physical body down there, and that we're born out of the divine-spiritual world, then we express this in the words:

Ex Deo nascimur.

When we imagine how we dive down into the Christ-substance to die, then this is:

In Christo morimur.

And how we reemerge from the trickling water in a fine body and move up into the spiritual world:

Per Spiritum Santum reviviscimus.

Notes from memory of 120 [123] esoteric lessons that Rudolf Steiner gave in 1904-1912 and meditation texts and exercises he wrote down in Aus den Inhalten der esoterischen Stunden, bibl. No. 266, vols. 1 and 2.

We were able to close our lecture on the Mission of Anger (illustrated in Prometheus Bound) with the saying of Heraclitus: “Never will you find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search for them; so all-embracing is the soul's being.” We came to know this depth in the working and interplay of the powers of the soul; and the truth of the saying came home to us especially when we turned our attention to the most deeply inward part of man's being. Man is most spiritual in his Ego, and that was our starting-point.

The Ego complements those other elements of man's being which he has in common with minerals, plants and animals. He has his physical body in common with minerals, plants and animals; his etheric body in common with animals and plants; his astral body in common with animals. Through his Ego he first becomes man in the true sense and is able to progress from stage to stage. It is the Ego that works upon the other members of his being; it cleanses and purifies the instincts, inclinations, desires and passions of the astral body, and will lead the etheric and physical bodies on to ever-higher stages. But if we look at the Ego, we find that this high member of man's being is imprisoned, as it were, between two extremes.

Through his Ego, man is intended to become increasingly a being who has a firm centre in himself. His thoughts, feelings and will-impulses should spring from this centre. The more he has a firm and well-endowed centre in himself, the more will he have to give to the world; the stronger and richer will be his activities and everything that goes out from him. If he is unable to find this central point in himself, he will be in danger of losing himself through a misconceived activity of his Ego. He would lose himself in the world and go ineffectually through life. Or he may lapse into the other extreme. Just as he may lose himself if he fails to strengthen and enrich his Ego, so, if he thinks of nothing but developing his Ego, he may fall into the other extreme of selfish isolation from all human community. Here, on this other side, we find egoism, with its hardening and secluding influence, which can divert the Ego from its proper path. The Ego is confined within these two extremes.

In considering the human soul, we called three of its members the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul. We also came to recognise—surprisingly, perhaps, for many people—that anger acts as a kind of educator of the Sentient Soul. A one-sided view of the lecture on the mission of anger could give scope for many objections. But if we go into the underlying significance of this view of anger, we shall find in it an answer to many important riddles of life.

In what sense is anger an educator of the soul—especially the Sentient Soul—and a forerunner of love? Is it not true that anger tends to make a man lose control of himself and engage in wild, immoral and loveless behaviour? If we are thinking only of wild, unjustified outbursts of anger, we shall get a false idea of what the mission of anger is. It is not through unjustified outbreaks of anger that anger educates the soul, but through its inward action on the soul.

Let us again imagine two teachers faced with children who have done something wrong. One teacher will burst into anger and hastily impose a penalty. The other teacher, though unable to break out into anger, is also incapable of acting rightly, with perfect tranquility, out of his Ego, in the sense described yesterday. How will the behaviour of two such teachers differ? An outburst of anger by one of them involves more than the penalty imposed on the child. Anger agitates the soul and works upon it in such a way as to destroy selfishness. Anger acts like a poison on selfishness, and we find that in time it gradually transforms the powers of the soul and makes it capable of love. On the other hand, if a teacher has not yet attained inner tranquility and yet inflicts a coldly calculated penalty, he will—since anger will not work in him as a counteracting poison—become increasingly a cold egoist.

Anger works inwardly and can be regarded as a regulator for unjustified outbursts of selfishness. Anger must be there or it could not be fought against. In overcoming anger the soul continually improves itself. If a man insists on getting something done that he considers right and loses his temper over it, his anger will dampen the egoistic forces in his soul; it reduces their effective power. Just because anger is overcome and a man frees himself from it and rises above it, his selflessness will be enhanced and the selflessness of his Ego continually strengthened. The scene of this interplay between anger and the Ego is the Sentient Soul. A different interplay between the soul and other experiences takes its course in the Intellectual Soul.

Although the soul has attributes which it must overcome in order to rise above them, it must also develop inwardly certain forces which it should love and cherish, however spontaneously they may arise. They are forces to which the soul may initially yield, so that, when it finally asserts itself, it is not weakened, but strengthened, by the experience. If a man were incapable of anger when called upon to assert himself in action, he would be the weaker for it.

It is just when a man lovingly immerses himself in his own soul that his soul is strengthened and an ascent to higher stages of the Ego comes within reach. The outstanding element that the soul may love within itself, leading not to egoism but to selflessness, is truth. Truth educates the Intellectual Soul. While anger is an attribute of the soul that must be overcome if a man is to rise to higher stages, truth should be loved and valued from the start. An inward cultivation of truth is essential for the progress of the soul.

How is it that devotion to truth leads man upwards from stage to stage? The opposites of truth are falsehood and error. We shall see how man progresses in so far as he overcomes falsehood and error and pursues truth as his great ideal.

A higher truth must be the aim of man's endeavour, while he treats anger as an enemy to be increasingly abolished. He must love truth and feel himself most intimately united with it. Nevertheless, eminent poets and thinkers have rightly claimed that full possession of truth is beyond human reach. Lessing,²¹ for example, says that pure truth is not for men, but only a perpetual striving towards it. He speaks of truth as a distant goddess whom men may approach but never reach. When the nature of truth stirs the soul to strive for it, the soul can be impelled to rise from stage to stage. Since there is this everlasting search for truth, and since truth is so manifold in meaning, all we can reasonably say is that man must set out to grasp truth and to kindle in himself a genuine sense of truth. Hence we cannot speak of a single, all-embracing truth.

In this lecture we will consider the idea of truth in its right sense, and it will become clear that by cultivating a sense of truth in his inner life man will be imbued with a progressive power that leads him to selflessness.

Man strives towards truth; but when people try to form views concerning one thing or another, we find that in the most varied realms of life conflicting opinions are advanced. When we see what different people take for truth, we might think that the striving for truth leads inevitably to the most contradictory views and standpoints. However, if we look impartially at the facts, we shall find guidelines which show how it is that men who are all seeking truth, arrive at such a diversity of opinions.

Let us take an example. The American multimillionaire, Harriman,²² who died recently, was a rarity among millionaires in concerning himself with thoughts of general human interest. His aphorisms, found after his death, include a remarkable statement. He wrote: No man in this world is indispensable. When one goes, another is there to take his place. When I lay down my work, another will come and take it up. The railways will continue running, dividends will be paid; and so, strictly speaking, it is with all men.

This millionaire, accordingly, rose to the point of declaring as a generally valid truth—no man is indispensable!

Let us compare this statement with a remark by a man who worked for many years in Berlin and gained great distinction through his lecture courses on the lives of Michelangelo, Raphael and Goethe—I mean the art-historian Herman Grimm.²³ When Treitschke²⁴ died, Herman Grimm wrote of him roughly as follows: Now Treitschke is gone, and people only now realise what he accomplished. No-one can take his place and continue his work in the same way. A feeling prevails that in the circle where he taught, everything is changed. Note that Herman Grimm did not add the words, so it is with all men.

Here we have two men, the American millionaire and Herman Grimm, who arrive at exactly opposite truths. How does this come about? If we carefully compare the two statements, we shall find a clue. Bear in mind that Harriman says pointedly: When I lay down my work, someone else will continue it. He does not get away from himself. The other thinker, Herman Grimm, leaves himself entirely out of account. He does not speak about himself, or ask what sort of opinions or truths others might gain from him. He merges himself in his subject. Anyone with a feeling for the matter will have no doubt as to which of the two spoke truth. We need only ask—who carried on Goethe's work when he laid it down? We can feel that Harriman's reflections suffer from the fact that he fails to get away from himself. Up to a point we may conclude that it is prejudicial to truth if someone in search of truth cannot get away from himself. Truth is best served when the seeker leaves himself out of the reckoning. Would it be true to say, then, that truth is already something that gives us a view (Ansicht) of things?

A view, in the sense of an opinion, is a thought which reflects the outer world. When we form a thought or reach a decision about something, does it follow that we have a true picture of it?

Suppose you take a photograph of a remarkable tree. Does the photograph give a true picture of the tree? It shows the tree from one side only, not the whole reality of the tree. No-one could form a true image of the tree from this one photograph. How could anyone who has not seen the tree be brought nearer to the truth of it? If the tree were photographed from four sides, he could collate the photographs and arrive finally at a true picture of the tree, not dependent on a particular standpoint.

Now let us apply this example to human beings. A man who leaves himself out of account when forming a view of something is doing much the same as the photographer who goes all round the tree. He eliminates himself by conscious action. When we form an opinion or take a certain view, we must realise that all such opinions depend on our personal standpoint, our habits of mind and our individuality. If we then try to eliminate these influences from our search for truth, we shall be acting as the photographer did in our example. The first condition for acquiring a genuine sense of truth is that we should get away from ourselves and see clearly how much depends on our personal point of view. If the American multimillionaire had got away from himself he would have known that there was a difference between him and other men.

An example from everyday life has shown us, that if a man fails to realise how much his personal standpoint or point of departure influences his views, he will arrive at narrow opinions, not at the truth. This is apparent also on a wider scale. Anyone who looks at the true spiritual evolution of mankind, and compares all the various “truths” that have arisen in the course of time, will find—if he looks deeply enough—that when people pronounce a “truth” they ought first of all to get away from their individual outlooks. It will then become clear that the most varied opinions concerning truth are advanced because men have not recognised to what extent their views are restricted by their personal standpoints.

A less familiar example may lead to a deeper understanding of this matter. If we want to learn more about beauty, we turn to aesthetics, which deals with the forms of beauty. Beauty is something we encounter in the outer world. How can we learn the truth about it? Here again we must free ourselves from the restrictions imposed by our personal characteristics.

Take for example the 19th century German thinker, Solger.²⁵ He wished to investigate the nature of beauty in accordance with his idea of truth. He could not deny that we meet with beauty in the external world; but he was a man with a one-sided theosophical outlook, and this was reflected in his theory of aesthetics. His interest in a beautiful picture was confined to the shining through it of the only kind of spirituality he recognised. For him, an object was beautiful only in so far as the spiritual was manifest through it. Solger was a one-sided theosophist; he sought to explain sense-perceptible phenomena in terms of the super-sensible; but he forgot that sense-perceptible reality has a justified existence on its own account. Unable to escape from his preconceptions, he sought to attain to the spiritual by way of a misconceived theosophy.

Another writer on aesthetics, Robert Zimmermann,²⁶ came to an exactly opposite conclusion. As against Solger's misconceived theosophical aesthetics, Zimmermann based his aesthetics on a misconceived anti-theosophical outlook. His sole concern was with symmetry and anti-symmetry, harmony and discord. He had no interest in going beyond the beautiful to that which manifests through it. So his aesthetics were as one-sided as Solger’s. Every striving for truth can be vitiated if the seeker fails to recognise that he must first endeavour to get away from himself. This can be achieved only gradually; but the primary, inexorable demand is, that if we are to advance towards truth we must leave ourselves out of account and quite forget ourselves. Truth has a unique characteristic: a man can strive for it while remaining entirely within himself and yet—while living in his Ego—he can acquire something which, fundamentally speaking, has nothing to do with the egoistic ego.

Whenever a man tries in life to get his own way in some matter, this is an expression of his egoism. Whenever he wants to force on others something he thinks right and loses his temper over it, that is an expression of his self-seeking. This self-seeking must be subdued before he can attain to truth. Truth is something we experience in our most inward being—and yet it liberates us increasingly from ourselves. Of course, it is essential that nothing save the love of truth should enter into our striving for it. If passions, instincts and desires, from which the Sentient Soul must be cleansed before the Intellectual Soul can strive for truth, come into it, they will prevent a man from getting away from himself and will keep his Ego tied to a fixed viewpoint. In the search for truth, the only passion that must not be discarded is love.

Truth is a lofty goal. This is shown by the fact that truth, in the sense intended here, is recognised today in one limited realm only. It is only in the realm of mathematics that humanity in general has reached the goal of truth, for here men have curbed their passions and desires and kept them out of the way. Why are all men agreed that three times three makes nine and not ten? Because no emotion comes into it, Men would agree on the highest truths if they had gone as far with them as they have with mathematics. The truths of mathematics are grasped in the inmost soul, and because they are grasped in this way, we possess them. We would still possess them if a hundred or a thousand people were to contradict us; we would still know that three times three makes nine because we have grasped this fact inwardly. If the hundred or thousand people who take a different view were to get away from themselves, they would come to the same truth.

What, then, is the way to mutual understanding and unity for mankind? We understand one another in the field of reckoning and counting because here we have met the conditions required. Peace, concord and harmony will prevail among men to the extent that they find truth. That is the essential thing: that we should seek for truth as something to be found only in our own deepest being; and should know that truth ever and again draws men together, because from the innermost depth of every human soul its light shines forth.

So is truth the leader of mankind towards unity and mutual understanding, and also the precursor of justice and love. Truth is a precursor we must cherish, while the other precursor, anger, that we came to know yesterday, must be overcome if we are to be led by it away from selfishness. That is the mission of truth: to become the object of increasing love and care and devotion on our part. Inasmuch as we devote ourselves inwardly to truth, our true self gains in strength and will enable us to cast off self-interest. Anger weakens us; truth strengthens us.

Truth is a stern goddess; she demands to be at the centre of a unique love in our souls. If man fails to get away from himself and his desires and prefers something else to her, she takes immediate revenge. The English poet Coleridge has rightly indicated how a man should stand towards truth. If, he says, a man loves Christianity more than truth, he will soon find that he loves his own Christian sect more than Christianity, and then he will find that he loves himself more than his sect.

Very much is implicit in these words. Above all, they signify that to strive against truth leads to humanly degrading egoism. Love of truth is the only love that sets the Ego free. And directly man gives priority to anything else, he falls inevitably into self-seeking. Herein lies the great and most serious importance of truth for the education of the human soul. Truth conforms to no man, and only by devotion to truth can truth be found. Directly man prefers himself and his own opinions to the truth, he becomes anti-social and alienates himself from the human community. Look at people who make no attempt to love truth for its own sake but parade their own opinions as the truth: they care for nothing but the content of their own souls and are the most intolerant. Those who love truth in terms of their own views and opinions will not suffer anyone to reach truth along a quite different path. They put every obstacle in the way of anyone with different abilities, who comes to opinions unlike their own. Hence the conflicts that so often arise in life. An honest striving for truth leads to human understanding, but the love of truth for the sake of one's own personality leads to intolerance and the destruction of other people's freedom.

Truth is experienced in the Intellectual Soul. It can be sought for and attained through personal effort only by beings capable of thought. Inasmuch as truth is acquired by thinking, we must realise very clearly that there are two kinds of truth. First we have the truth that comes from observing the world of Nature around us and investigating it bit by bit in order to discover its truths, laws and wisdom. When we contemplate the whole range of our experience of the world in this way, we come to the kind of truth that can be called the truth derived from “reflective” thinking—we first observe the world and then think about our findings.

We saw yesterday that the entire realm of Nature is permeated with wisdom, and that wisdom lives in all natural things. In a plant there lives the idea of the plant, and this we can arrive at by reflective thought. Similarly, we can discern the wisdom that lives in the plant. By thus looking out on the world we can infer that the world is born of wisdom, and that through the activity of our thinking we can rediscover the element that enters into the creation of the world. That is the kind of truth to be gained by reflective thought.

There are also other truths. These cannot be gained by reflective thought, but only by going beyond everything that can be learnt from the outer world. In ordinary life we can see at once that when a man constructs a tool or some other instrument, he has to formulate laws that are not part of the outer world. For example, no-one could learn from the outer world how to construct a clock, for the laws of Nature are not so arranged as to provide for the appearance of clocks as a natural product. That is a second kind of truth: we come to it by thinking out something not given to us by observation or experience of the outer world. Hence there are these two kinds of truth, and they must be kept strictly apart, one derived from reflective thought and the other from “creative” thought.

How can a truth of this second kind be verified? The inventor of a clock can easily prove that he had thought it out correctly. He has to show that the clock does what he expects. Anything we think out in advance must prove itself in practice: it must yield results that can be recognised in the external world. The truths of Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy are of this kind. They cannot be found by observing external experience.

For example, no findings in the realm of outer Nature can establish the truth we have often dwelt on in connection with the immortal kernel of man's being: the truth that the human Ego appears again and again on earth in successive incarnations. Anyone who wishes to acquire this truth must raise himself above ordinary experience. He must grasp in his soul a truth that has then to be made real in outer life. A truth of this kind cannot be proved in the same way as truths of the first kind, gained by what we have called reflective thought. It can be proven only by showing how it applies to life and is reflected there. If we look at life with the knowledge that the soul repeatedly returns and ever and again goes through a series of events and experiences between birth and death, we shall find how much satisfaction, how much strength and fruitfulness, these thoughts can bring. Or again, if we ask how the soul of a child can be helped to develop and grow stronger, if we presuppose that an eternally existent soul is here working its way into a new life, then this truth will shine in on us and give proof of its fruitfulness in daily experience. Any other proofs are false. The only way in which a truth of this kind can be confirmed is by giving proof of its validity in daily life. Hence there is a vast difference between these two kinds of truth. Those of the second kind are grasped in the spirit and then verified by observing their influence on outer life.

What then is the educational effect of these two kinds of truth on the human soul? It makes a great difference whether a man devotes himself to truths that come from reflective thought or to those that come from creative thought. If we steep ourselves in the wisdom of Nature and create in ourselves a true reflection of it, we can rightly say that we have in ourselves something of the creative activity from which the life of Nature springs. But here a distinction must be made. The wisdom of Nature is directly creative and gives rise to the reality of Nature in all its fullness, but the truth we derive from thinking about Nature is only a passive image; in our thinking it has lost its power. We may indeed acquire a wide, open-minded picture of natural truth, but the creative, productive element is absent from it. Hence the immediate effect of this picture of truth on the development of the human Ego is desolating. The creative power of the Ego is crippled and devitalised; the Self loses strength and can no longer stand up to the world, if it is concerned only with reflective thoughts. Nothing else does so much to isolate the Ego, to make it withdraw into itself and look with hostility on the world. A man can become a cold egoist if he is intent only on investigating the outer world. Why does he want this knowledge? Does he mean to place it at the service of the Gods?

If a man desires only this kind of truth, he wants it for himself, and he will be on the way to becoming a cold egoist and misogynist in later life. He will become a recluse or will sever himself from mankind in some other way, for he wants to possess the content of the world as his own truth. All forms of seclusion and hostility towards humanity can be found on this path. The soul becomes increasingly dried up and loses its sense of human fellowship. It becomes ever more impoverished, although the truth should enrich it. Whether a man turns into a recluse or a one-sided eccentric makes no difference; in both cases a hardening process will overtake his soul. Hence we see that the more a man confines himself to this kind of reflective thought, the less fruitful his soul will be. Let us try to understand why this is so.

Consider the realms of nature and suppose that we have before us an array of plants. They have been formed by the living wisdom which calls forth their inherent productive power. Now an artist comes along. His soul receives the picture that Nature sets before him. He does not merely think about it; he opens himself to Nature's productive power and lets it work upon him. He creates a work of art which does not embody merely an act of thinking; it is imbued with productive power. Then comes someone who tries to get behind the picture and to extract a thought from it. He ponders over it. In this way its reality is filtered and impoverished. Now try to carry this process further. Once the soul has extracted a thought from the picture, it has finished with it. Nothing more can be done except to formulate thoughts about the thought—an absurd procedure which soon dries up.

It is quite different with creative thinking. Here a man is himself productive. His thoughts take form as realities in outer life; here he is working after the example of Nature herself. That is how it is with a man who goes beyond mere observation and reflective thinking and allows something not to be gained from observation to arise in his soul. All spiritual-scientific truths require a productive disposition in the soul. In the case of these truths all mere reflective thinking is bad and leads to deception. But the truths attainable by creative thought are limited, for man is weak in the face of the creative wisdom of the world. There is no end to the things from which we can derive truths by reflective thought; but creative thought, although the field open to it is restricted, brings about a heightening of productive power; the soul is refreshed and its scope extended. Indeed, the soul becomes more and more inwardly divine, in so far as it reflects in itself an essential element of the divine creative activity in the world.

So we have these two distinct kinds of truth, one reached by creative thought, the other by reflective thought. This latter kind, derived from the investigation of existent things or current experience, will always lead to abstractions; under its influence the soul is deprived of nourishment and tends to dry up. The truth that is not gained from immediate experience is creative; its strength helps man to find a place in the world where he can co-operate in shaping the future.

The past can be approached only by reflective thought, while creative thought opens a way into the future. Man thus becomes a responsible creator of the future. He extends the power of his Ego into the future, in so far as he comes to possess not merely the truths derived from the past by reflective thinking, but also those that are gained by creative thinking and point towards the future.

Herein lies the liberating influence of creative thinking. Anyone who is active in the striving for truth will soon find how he is impoverished by mere reflective thinking. He will come to understand how the devotee of reflective thinking fills his mind with phantom ideas and bloodless abstractions. Such a man may feel like an outcast, condemned to a mere savouring of truth and may come to doubt whether his spirit can play any part in shaping the world. On the other hand, a man who experiences a truth gained by creative thinking will find that it nourishes and warms his soul and gives it new strength for every stage in life. It fills him with joy when he is able to grasp truths of this kind and discovers that in bringing them to bear on the phenomena of life he can say to himself: Now I not only understand what is going on there, but I can explain it in the light of having known something of it previously.

With the aid of spiritual-scientific truths we can now approach man himself. He cannot be understood merely by reflective thinking, but now we can comprehend him better and better, while our feeling of unity with the world and our interest in it are continually enhanced. We experience joy and satisfaction at every confirmation of spiritual-scientific truths that we encounter. This is what makes these truths so satisfying: we have first to grasp them before we can find them corroborated in actual life, and all the while they enrich us inwardly. We are drawn gradually into unity with the phenomena we experience. We get away more and more from ourselves, whereas reflective thinking leads to subtle forms of egoism. In order to find confirmation of truths gained by creative thinking we have to go out from ourselves and look for their application in all realms of life. It is these truths that liberate us from ourselves and imbue us in the highest degree with a sense of truth and a feeling for it.

Feelings of this kind have been alive in every genuine seeker after truth. They were deeply present in the soul of Goethe when he declared: “Only that which is fruitful is true”—a magnificent, luminous saying of far—reaching import. But Goethe was also well aware that men must be closely united with truth if they are to understand one another. Nothing does more to estrange men from one another than a lack of concern for truth and the search for truth. Goethe also said: “A false doctrine cannot be refuted, for it rests on a conviction that the false is true.”²⁷ Obviously there are falsities that can be logically disproved, but that is not what Goethe means. He is convinced that a false viewpoint cannot be refuted by logical conclusions, and that the fruitful application of truth in practical life should be our sole guide-line in our search for truth.

It was because Goethe was so wonderfully united with truth that he was able to sketch the beautiful poetic drama, Pandora, which he began to write in 1807. Though only a fragment, Pandora is a ripe product of his creative genius—so powerful in every line, that anyone who responds to it must feel it to be an example of the purest, grandest art. We see in it how Goethe was able to make a start towards the greatest truths—but then lacked the strength to go further. The task was too arduous for him to carry through; but we have enough of it to get some idea of how deeply he had penetrated into the problems of spiritual education. He had a clear vision of everything that the soul has to overcome in order to rise higher; he understood everything we learnt yesterday about anger and the fettered Prometheus, and have learnt today about that other educator of the soul, the sense of truth.

How closely related these two things are in their effects on the soul can be seen also in the facial expressions they call forth. Let us picture a man under the influence of anger, and another man upon whom truth is acting as an inward light. The first man is frowning—why? In such cases the brow is knitted because an excessive force is working inwardly, like a poison, to hold down a surplus of egoism which would like to destroy everything that exists alongside and separate from the man himself. In the clenched fist of anger we see the wrathful self closed up in itself and refusing to go forth into the outer world. Now compare this with the facial expression of someone who is discovering truth. When he perceives the light of truth, he too may frown, but in his case the wrinkled brow is a means whereby the soul expands, as though it would like to grasp and absorb the whole world with devoted love. Observe, too, the eyes of a man who is trying to overhear the world's secrets. His eyes are shining, as though to encompass everything around him in the outer world. He is released from himself; his hand is not clenched, but held out with a gesture that seeks to absorb the being of the world.

The whole difference between anger and truth is thus expressed in human physiognomy and gesture. Anger thrusts the human being deeper into himself. If he strives for truth, his being expands into the outer world; and the more united he becomes with the outer world, the more he turns away from the truths gained by reflective thinking to those gained by creative thinking. Therefore, Goethe in his Pandora brings into opposition with each other certain characters who can be taken to represent forces at work in the human soul. They are intended to express symbolically the relationships between the characteristics and capacities of the soul.

When you open Pandora, you come upon something remarkable and highly significant at the very start. On the side of Prometheus, the stage is loaded with tools and implements constructed by man. In all these, human energies have been at work, but in a certain sense it is all rough and ready. On the side of Epimetheus, the other Titan, there is a complete contrast. Here everything is perfectly finished; we see not so much what man creates, but a bringing together of what Nature has already produced. It is all the result of reflective thinking. Here we have combination and shaping, a symmetrical ordering of Nature's work. On the side of Prometheus, unsymmetry and roughness; on the side of Epimetheus, elegant and harmonious products of Nature, culminating in a view of a wonderful landscape. What does all this signify? We need only consider the two contrasted characters: Prometheus the creative thinker, Epimetheus the reflective thinker. With Prometheus we find the products mainly of creative thinking. Here, although man's powers are limited and clumsy, he is productive. He cannot yet shape his creations as perfectly as Nature shapes her own; but they are all the outcome of his own powers and tools. He is also deficient in feeling for scenes of natural beauty.

On the side of Epimetheus, the reflective thinker, we see the heritage of the past, brought into symmetrical order by himself. And because he is a reflective thinker, we see in the background a beautiful landscape which gives its own special pleasure to the human eye. Epimetheus now comes forward and discloses his individual character. He explains that he is there to experience the past, and to reflect upon past occurrences and the visible world. But in his speech he reveals the dissatisfaction that this kind of attitude can at times call forth in the soul. He feels hardly any difference between day and night. In brief, the figure of Epimetheus shows us reflective thinking in its most extreme form. Then Prometheus comes forward carrying a torch and emerging from the darkness of night. Among his followers are smiths; they set to work on the man-made objects that are lying around, while Prometheus makes a remarkable statement that will not be misunderstood if we are alive to Goethe's meaning. The smiths extol productivity and welcome the fact that in the course of production many things have to be destroyed. In a one-sided way they extol fire. A man who is an all-round reflective thinker will not praise one thing at the expense of another. He casts his eye over the whole. Prometheus, however, says at once:

In partiality let the active man
Find his pleasure

He extols precisely the fact that to be active entails the acceptance of limitations. In Nature, the right is established when the wrong destroys itself. But to the smiths Prometheus says: Carry on doing whatever can be done. He is the creative man; he emerges with his torch from the darkness of night in order to show how from the depths of his soul the truth gained by his creative thinking comes forth. Unlike Epimetheus, he is far from a dreamlike feeling that night and day are all one. Nor does he experience the world as a dream. For his soul has been at work, and in its own dark night it has grasped the thoughts which now emerge from it. They are no dreams, but truths for which the soul has bled. By this means the soul advances into the world and gains release from itself; but at the same time it incurs the danger of losing itself. This does not yet apply to Prometheus himself, but when a man introduces one-sidedness into the world, the danger appears among his descendants.

Phileros, the son of Prometheus, is already inclined to love and cherish and enjoy the products of creative work, while his father Prometheus is still immersed in the stream of life's creative power. In Phileros we are shown the power of creative thinking developed in a one-sided way. He rushes out into life, not knowing where to search for enjoyment. Prometheus cannot pass on to his son his own fruitfully creative strength, and so Phileros appears incomprehensible to Epimetheus, who out of his own rich experience would like to counsel him on his headlong career.

We are then magnificently shown what mere reflective thinking involves. This is connected with the myth that Zeus, having fettered Prometheus to the rock, imposes Pandora, the all-gifted, on mankind.

Most beautiful and gifted she approached
The amazed watcher, moving with noble grace,
Her gracious look inquiring whether I,
Like to my sterner brother, would repel her,
But all too strongly were my heart-beats stirred,
With sense bemused my charming bride I welcomed.
Towards the mysterious dowry then I turned,
The earthen vessel, tall and shapely, stood
Close-sealed ...

Prometheus had warned his brother against this gift from the gods. But Epimetheus, with his different character, accepts the gift, and when the earthen vessel is opened, all the afflictions that can befall mankind come pouring out. Only one thing is left in the vessel—Hope.

Who, then, is Pandora and what does she signify? Truly a mystery of the soul is concealed in her. The fruits of reflective thinking are dead products, an abstract reflection of the mechanical thoughts forged by Hephaestus. This wisdom is powerless in the face of the universally creative wisdom from which the world has been born. What can this abstract reflection give to mankind?

We have seen how this kind of truth can be sterile and can lay waste the soul, and we can understand how all the afflictions that fall on mankind come pouring out of Pandora's vessel. In Pandora we have to see truth without the powers of creativity, the truth of reflective thinking, a truth which builds up a mechanised thought-picture in the midst of the world's creative life. For the mere reflective thinker only one thing remains. While the creative thinker unites his Ego with the future and gets free from himself, the reflective thinker can look to the future only with hope, for he has no part in shaping it. He can only hope that things will happen. Goethe shows his deep comprehension of the myth by endowing the marriage of Epimetheus and Pandora with two children: Elpore (Hope) and Epimeleia (Care), who safeguards existing things. In fact, man has in his soul two offspring of dead, abstract, mechanically conceived truth. This kind of truth is unfruitful and cannot influence the future; it can only reflect what is already there. It leaves a man with nothing but the hope that what is true will duly come to pass. This is represented by Goethe with splendid realism in the figure of Elpore, who, if someone asks her whether this or that is going to happen, always gives the same answer, yes, yes. If a Promethean man were to stand before the world and speak of the future, he would say: “I hope for nothing. With my own forces I will shape the future.” But a reflective thinker can only reflect on the past and hope for the future; thus Elpore, when asked whether this or that will happen, replies always, yes, yes. We hear it again and again. In this way a daughter of reflective thinking is admirably characterised and her sterility is indicated.

The other daughter of this reflective thinking, Epimeleia, is she who cares for existing things. She sets them all in symmetrical order and can add nothing from her own resources. But all things which fail to develop are increasingly liable to destruction; hence we see how anxiety about them continually mounts, and how through mere reflective thinking a destructive element finds its way into the world. This is wonderfully well indicated by Goethe when he makes Phileros fall in love with Epimeleia. We see him, burnt up with jealousy, pursuing Epimeleia, until she takes refuge from him with the Titan brothers. Strife and dissension come simultaneously on to the scene. Epimeleia complains that the person she loves is the very one to seek her life.

Everything that Goethe goes on to say shows how deeply he had penetrated into the effects of creative thinking and reflective thinking on the soul. The creative thinking of the smiths is set in wonderful contrast to the outlook of the shepherds; whilst the latter take what Nature offers, the former work on the products of Nature and transform them. Therefore Prometheus says of the shepherds: they are seeking peace, but they will not find a peace that satisfies their souls:

Go your ways in peace; but peace
You will not find.

For a wish merely to preserve things as they are leads only to the unproductive side of Nature.

The truths which belong to creative thinking and reflective thinking respectively are thus set before us in the figures of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and in all the characters connected with them. They represent those soul-forces which can spring from an excessive, one-sided predilection for one or other way of striving after truth. And after we have seen how disastrous are the consequences of these extremes, we are shown finally the one and only remedy—the co-operation of the Titan brothers. The drama leads on to an outbreak of fire in a property owned by Epimetheus. Prometheus, who is prepared to demolish a building if it no longer serves its purpose, advises his brother to make all speed to the spot and do all he can to halt the destruction. But Epimetheus no longer cares for that; he is thinking about Pandora and is lost in his recollection of her. Interesting also is a dialogue between the brothers about her:

Prometheus:

Her form sublime, from ancient dark emerging,
Came near me also. To make another like her,
Even Hephaestus would have failed in that.

Epimetheus:

Art thou, too, prating of this fabled birth?
From ancient gods, a mighty race, she springs:
Uranione, Hera's peer, and sister
Of Zeus himself.

Prometheus:

And yet Hephaestus, for her rich adornment,
Made for her head a net of shining gold,
Weaving with subtle hand the finest threads.

In every sentence spoken by Prometheus we see how mechanised, abstract limitations obsess his mind. Then Eos, the Dawn, appears. She is an unlit being who precedes and heralds the sun, but also contains its light within herself already. She does not simply emerge from the darkness of night; she represents a transition to something which has overcome night. Prometheus appears with his torch because he has just come out of the night. The artificial light he carries indicates how his creative work proceeds from the night's darkness. Epimetheus can indeed admire the sunlight and its gifts, but he experiences everything as in a dream. He is an example of pure reflective thinking. The way in which light can escape the attention of a soul absorbed in creative activity is shown by what Prometheus says in the light of day. His people, he says, are called upon not merely to observe the sun and the light, but to be themselves a source of illumination. Now Eos, Aurora, comes forward. She calls upon men to be active everywhere in doing right. Phileros, already having sought death, should unite with the forces which will make it possible for him to rescue himself. The smiths, who are working within the limits of their creative thinking, and the shepherds, who accept things as they are, are now joined by the fishermen. And we see how Eos gives them advice:

Morning of youth, dawning of day,
More beautiful than ever,
From the unfathomed ocean
I bring you now.
Awake, shake off your sleep,
You dwellers in the bay
By cliffs encircled,
You fishermen, arise,
And ply your craft.
With speed spread out your nets
Around the well-known waters,
A splendid catch is certain
When my voice cheers you on.
Swim, you swimmers! Dive, you divers!
Watch, you watchers on the heights!
May the shores and seas together
Swarm with swift abounding life!

Then we are shown in a wonderful way how Phileros is rescued on the surging flood and unites his own strength with the strength of the waves. The active creative power in him is thus united with the creative power in Nature. So the elements of Prometheus and Epimetheus are reconciled.

Thus Goethe offers a solution rich in promise, by showing how knowledge gained from nature by reflective thinking can be fired with productive energy by the creative thinking element. This latter acquires its rightful strength by receiving, in loyalty to truth, what the gods “up there” bestow:

Take note of this:
What is desirable, you feel down here;
What is to be given, they know up there.
You Titans make a great beginning,
But the way to the eternal good, the forever beautiful,
That is the work of the gods; they ensure it.

The union of Prometheus and Epimetheus in the human soul will bring salvation for them and for mankind. The whole drama is intended to indicate that through an all-round grasping of truth the entire human race, and not only individuals, will find satisfaction. Goethe wished to show that an understanding of the real nature of truth will unite humanity and foster love and peace among men. Then Hope, also, is transformed in the soul—Hope who says yes to everything but is powerless to bring anything about. The poem was to have ended with the transformed Elpore, Elpore thraseia, coming forward to tell us that she is no longer a prophetess but is to be incorporated into the human soul, so that human beings would not merely cherish hopes for the future but would have the strength to co-operate in bringing about whatever their own productive power could create. To believe in the transformation wrought by truth upon the soul—that is the whole perfected truth which reconciles Prometheus and Epimetheus.

Naturally, these sketchy indications can bring out only a little of all that can be drawn from the poem. The deep wisdom that called forth this fragment from Goethe will disclose itself first to those who approach it with the support of a spiritual-scientific way of thinking. They can experience a satisfying, redeeming power which flows out from the poem and quickens them.

We must not fail to mention a remarkably beautiful phrase that Goethe included in his Pandora. He says that the divine wisdom which flows into the world must work in harmony with all that we are able to achieve through our own Promethean power of creative thinking. The element that comes to meet us in the world and teaches us what wisdom is, Goethe called the Word. That, which lives in the soul and must unite itself with the reflective thinking of Epimetheus, is the Deed of Prometheus. So the union of the Logos or Word with the Deed gives rise to the ideal that Goethe wished to set before us in his Pandora as the fruit of a life rich in experiences. Towards the end of the poem, Prometheus makes a remarkable statement: “A real man truly celebrates the deed.” This is the truth that remains hidden from the reflective thinking element in the soul.

If we open ourselves to this whole poem, we can come to realise the heroic yearning for development felt by men such as Goethe, and the great modesty which prevents them from supposing that by reaching a certain stage they have done enough and need not try to go further. Goethe was an apprentice of life up to his last day, and always recognised that when a man has been enriched by an experience he must overcome what he has previously held to be true.

When as a young man, Goethe was beginning to work on Faust, and had occasion to introduce some translations from the Bible, he decided that the words “In the beginning was the Word”, should be rendered as “in the beginning was the Deed”. At this same time he wrote a fragment on Prometheus.²⁸ There we see the young Goethe as altogether active and Promethean, confident that simply by developing his own forces, not fructified by cosmic wisdom, he could progress. In his maturity, with a long experience of life behind him, he realised that it was wrong to underestimate the Word, and that Word and Deed must be united. In fact, Goethe revised parts of his Faust while he was writing his Pandora. We can understand how Goethe came by degrees to maturity only if we realise the nature of truth in all its forms.

It will always be good for man if he wrestles his way to realising that truth can be apprehended only by degrees. Or take a genuine, honest, all-round seeker after truth who is called upon to bring forcibly before the world some truth he has discovered. It will be very good if he reminds himself that he has no grounds for pluming himself on this one account. There are no grounds at any time for remaining content with something already known. On the contrary, such knowledge as we have gained from our considerations yesterday and today should lead us to feel that, although the human being must stand firmly on the ground of the truth he has acquired and must be ready to defend it, he must from time to time withdraw into himself, as Goethe did. When he does this, the forces arising from the consciousness of the truth he has gained will endow him with a feeling for the right standards and for the standpoint he should make his own. From the enhanced consciousness of truth we should ever and again withdraw into ourselves and say, with Goethe: Much that we once discovered and took for truth is now only a dream, a dreamlike memory; and what we think today, will not survive when we put it to a deeper test. The words often spoken by Goethe to himself in relation to his own honest search for truth may well be echoed by every man in his solitary hours:

A poor wight am I
Through and through.
My thoughts miss the mark,
My dreams, they are not true.²⁹

If we can feel this, we shall be in the right relationship to our high ideal, Truth.

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• 21. Cf. for example the polemic “Eine Duplik” (1778), part 1.
• 22. Edward Henry Harriman, 1848–1909. North American railway magnate.
• 23. Herman Grimm, 1828–1901, in his essay “Ernst Curtius, Heinrich von Treitschke, Leopold von Ranke”, in: Fragmente, vol 1, Berlin & Stuttgart, 1900, p.246.
• 24. Heinrich von Treitschke, 1834–96. German historian.
• 25. Karl Friedrich Solger, 1780–1819, from 1811 Professor of Philosophy in Berlin. Cf. Erwin. Vier Gespräche über das Schöne und die Kunst, 1815, and Vorlesungen uber Asthetik, ed. Heyse, 1829.
• 26. Robert Zimmermann, 1824–98. Professor in Vienna. Member of the school of Herbart. Cf. his Asthetik, 1858–65.
• 27. The first quotation is from the poem “Vermächtnis”, 1829; the second is from the “Sprüche in Prosa” in vol V, p.402 of Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited with a commentary by Rudolf Steiner, 5 vols, Dornach, 1975.
• 28. Faust 1, 11.1224 and “Prometheus”, a dramatic fragment, 1773.
• 29. From the poem “Sprichtwörtlich”.

My dear Friends,

It was by no mere chance that after I had given you a description of the meeting with death and with Lucifer that takes place for man when he crosses the Threshold to the super-sensible worlds, I passed on to deal with another matter that you may perhaps have found hard to understand. I began by endeavouring to explain to you the true significance of the Christ Being; and in the course of the explanation—which had found its way quite naturally into the subject we were considering—I had to speak of how Christ vanquished Lucifer, as you can find it related in the Gospels in the story of the Temptation in the wilderness. And then, after we had carried our study a little further, we passed on to a communication concerning the Buddha.

Let us briefly call to mind once more this meeting with death and Lucifer. Lucifer appears to the pupil of occultism as in very fact the archetype of human greatness—yes, and even of superhuman, divine greatness—when, at this point, separated as it were from his deeds and actions, he draws near to man. He appears as a Being who tempts man. And it is only when the pupil looks back at what he himself has become through the influence of Lucifer, only when he beholds the frightful animal-like picture of what man has become in the course of his incarnations through the enticements and temptations of Lucifer, that he is as it were healed a little from the seductive power of the figure before him. I then told you of the help that can come to the pupil of the present day from Christ. Christ brings a kind of deep consolation and hope, to counteract the terrible impression made upon the pupil by the meeting with death and Lucifer, and moreover the meeting with the picture of himself,—which is in a certain sense the Guardian of the Threshold. In place of death, in place of the destroyed human body, something else appears.

That of which I am now speaking can be actually experienced, and when it is experienced, it is exactly as I describe it. In the place of death appears Christ Himself, giving us to understand that this I of ours can after all be retained. In other words, we have in our consciousness an inner picture that is entirely independent of the memory that remains with us from our life in the senses. To suggest that we have here to do with an illusion or hallucination would be nonsense; for one could be blind, deaf, without sense of smell or any other sense, and yet have the experience when one came to this point on the path of initiation,—the experience of Christ appearing in the place of death. What is it man then has before him? Try to picture it! You have before you Christ, Who appears in the place of death, and Lucifer. That is to say, you have the very picture described by the Evangelists in the scene of the Temptation in the wilderness. There would be no need to remember the accounts of the Temptation given in the Gospels; you would have it there before you, through having received into your soul the impulse of the whole Christ Event,—that He walked the Earth, was crucified and overcame death. It would suffice for you that you had the Christianity of St. Paul; you would not need to have come under the influence of the Christianity of the Gospels. It is quite possible to experience, independently of the Gospels, independently of any external impression, something that is described in the Gospels. Such a thing is perfectly possible. Think of what happens in ordinary life. In ordinary life you have conscious experience when impressions are made on your consciousness from without and concepts and ideas are called forth in your consciousness by these impressions. Now, however, you have before you a picture that no impression from without can possibly evoke. For you cannot find Lucifer anywhere in the world of the senses; it is utterly impossible for Lucifer to be an external impression in the physical world of the senses. Neither is the picture of death to be found in the world of the senses. And when finally death changes into the Christ, you have before you a picture which you could certainly in the last resort discover as a remembered fact in the external world, but which nevertheless shows itself to you now, at your entry into the super-sensible world, as a picture that is attainable without any help from the external world. For no external impression is needed to call forth the picture of the Temptation of Christ and the conquest of death, the overcoming of all that Lucifer began to make of man. To what kind of a consciousness then have we come? To a consciousness without external object. I have endeavoured to lead you to the Unmanifest Light and to the Unspoken Word. And now you have acquired a conception of a Consciousness without external object, a consciousness that receives its content from its own being.

Our considerations then led us to an astonishing, yet none the less true, communication concerning the Buddha. This again was no mere chance. I had to begin the lecture yesterday by telling you about the man of inner movement, in order to explain to you how man can take a still further step in initiation into the higher worlds; and in that connection I gave expression to a truth which was perhaps at first hearing difficult to grasp (we shall return to it again presently)—the truth, namely, that Lucifer shows himself in a completely changed form when we advance to this second stage of initiation, appearing before us as the ruler in the realm of Venus. I told you also how the Sun, which hitherto we have thought of as being supreme in power and might, now appears as a planet among the seven planets, and Christ as the Spirit of the planet of the Sun. Christ himself manifests in this connection as a planetary Spirit, brother to the Spirit of Venus. In other words, Christ appears as a brother of Lucifer. This opened the way for a consideration of the post-Earthly destiny of the Buddha. For the later destiny of the Buddha cannot be livingly experienced in its pure and original truth, without attaining to this second stage of initiation; it is impossible to arrive at the truth which we expounded yesterday concerning the Buddha, unless one goes beyond the first meeting with death and with Lucifer where one beholds the scene of the Temptation, and passes on to the next stage of initiation where the seven Spirits of the Planets become manifest. This had, therefore, first to be described. Should you still ask whether the truth concerning the life of the Buddha after he left the Earth is not in some way attainable by external consciousness—the consciousness, that is, which is directed to impressions from without—then the reply must be that it is not possible for the consciousness of Earth to make such research into the conditions of life and culture on Mars as could reveal what the Buddha accomplishes there. The moment, however, initiation penetrates as far as to the stage we described yesterday, it becomes possible for the consciousness without external object to have this experience by virtue of its own nature. Therefore in relation also to this truth about Buddha it is a question of acquiring the consciousness without external object, The conditions and circumstances of the facts here revealed to us are of course external. For the Buddha lives—quite really—on Mars. Nevertheless the consciousness does not go out of itself; in the recognition of such a truth it is not yielding to the influence of an external impression, it is still a consciousness without external object. I have thus led you to the third of the three things we placed before us at the beginning of these lectures,—the consciousness without external object.

Looking back over our study, we see that we have found three stages or conditions of human consciousness. We have first the ordinary physical consciousness. Then we have the consciousness that is attained at the first stage of initiation,—and I gave you as an example of what is experienced in this consciousness the picture “Death and Lucifer” or “Christ and Lucifer, in the Story of the Temptation.” Finally, the third stage of consciousness is the one where the seven planetary Spirits manifest themselves to man. And we illustrated this third stage by reference to Buddha. At the third stage you experience the destiny of Buddha after he has become Buddha and returns no more to physical existence on Earth. We have thus considered three conditions of human consciousness: physical consciousness; consciousness of higher worlds at the first stage as we described it yesterday, illustrating it by the story of the Temptation; finally a still higher consciousness, the second consciousness of a super-sensible nature. Many of you would perhaps like it very much if we could go further and describe still higher stages of consciousness, but time does not allow. I will, however, just hint at one other stage.

What is it we are able to experience by means of physical consciousness? Everything in our surroundings that is present to our senses, all the objects of Earth existence. What can we experience by means of the second consciousness? Leaving on one side for the moment the example we brought forward, the story of the Temptation, we find that by means of the first stage of a higher kind of consciousness, something further than the objects of the senses can be discovered. You will find it described in outline in my Occult Science in the part where the Moon is spoken of, that condition of Earth which preceded our present Earth. This old Moon condition is no longer in existence, it has to be described by means of a consciousness that can function without an object present to hand. The Moon condition of our Earth is in the higher worlds. It is present in the higher worlds, preserved, as you have often heard me tell, in the Akashic Record. So that for the first consciousness of a higher kind we have, besides the Story of the Temptation, all the processes that can be said to have relation to the old Moon. Everything connected with the old Moon is capable of being described by this consciousness. And now I want to draw your attention to something else. There is deep significance in the fact that from among the many kinds of experience man acquires through the first higher consciousness, I chose the story of the Temptation. For when we direct the same consciousness to the ancient Moon, we find there a repetition of the story of the Temptation. (I say a repetition, but naturally it took place long before!) It is really so. We learn how Christ already on the old Moon overcame Lucifer, and in the scene that is given us in the Gospels we have to see, as it were, a recurrence of the fact that Christ attained to victory over Lucifer. On Earth Christ repels Lucifer from the outset. This is because on the Moon, when He was Himself less highly evolved—for Christ also undergoes evolution—He had repelled, through the uttermost devotion of His Being to Highest Powers, all the attacks of Lucifer which at that time still meant something to Him. Already on old Moon Lucifer approached Christ. On Earth he was no longer dangerous to Him: on Earth Christ repels Lucifer at once. On the Moon, however, Christ had to exert all the forces at His disposal in order to repel Lucifer. This is then the added experience that comes to us when we cast back the gaze of higher consciousness into the remote time of Moon. If we go still further and attain to the second consciousness of a higher kind, then as well as learning about facts that have meaning for Earth, such as the history of Buddha, we learn also what has again been described in outline in my Occult Science, we learn of the still earlier incarnation of our Earth,—the Sun. In that far-off time the conditions were quite essentially different, and the difficulty you have in understanding this particular section in Occult Science can itself be an indication of how difficult it was to describe the state of old Sun. I took pains to describe more especially scenes that are less remote from man and can even remind us of the scenery of Nature. One would have found little understanding, in the time when Occult Science was written, for the things of a more moral nature which are experienced in a study of the Sun incarnation.

When we go back to the time of the old Sun, we do not find there any story of the Temptation! We find the Sun still as a planet among the seven planets, we find Venus with Lucifer as her ruler; and these two, the Sun Spirit and the Venus Spirit—in other words, Christ and Lucifer—appear at first sight like brothers. Only by straining to the utmost our powers of perception are we able to remark the difference between them. For the difference between Lucifer and Christ, in the time of old Sun is not apparent to an observation of their external being, it requires a more inward observation and study. It is indeed extraordinarily difficult to find outward means of demonstrating wherein the difference lies. Please, therefore, take what I am now going to say as no more than an attempt to characterise, as well as may be, the difference that clairvoyant consciousness can perceive between Christ and Lucifer in the time of the ancient Sun.

When we direct our gaze now to Christ, now again to Lucifer, a new perception begins to dawn upon us. Lucifer, the ruler of Venus, appears in a form that is extraordinarily full of light,—I mean, of course, spiritual light. We have the feeling that all the glow and brilliance we can ever experience on Earth in looking upon a manifestation of light is weak and dim in comparison with the majesty of Lucifer in the old Sun time. But then we notice, when we begin to perceive his intentions—and we are able to see through these—, that Lucifer is a Spirit endowed in his very nature with infinite pride, so great a pride that it can prove a temptation to man. For, as is well-known, there are things which up to a point are not temptations for man but become so when they grow majestic in their proportions, and pride is one of them. When pride is majestically great it tempts man. Lucifer's proud greatness, Lucifer's pride in his majestic figure of light—these contain a seductive element. “Unmanifest light,” light that does not shine outwardly but has immense, strong power in itself—that Lucifer has in full measure. And how does the Christ figure look beside Lucifer? The Christ figure in the time of old Sun—the Lord and Ruler of the Sun planet—is a picture of utmost devotion, entire devotion to all that is around Him in the world. Whereas Lucifer looks like one who thinks only of himself—we are obliged to clothe it all in human words, notwithstanding the fact that these are quite inadequate—Christ appears as wholly given up, in devotion, to all that is around Him in the great wide world.

The great wide world was not then as it is now. If we were to transport ourselves in these days to the present Sun, then, looking outwards in all directions as from the centre of a circle, we should perceive in the first place the twelve Signs of the Zodiac. These were not then externally visible; but instead, twelve great Forms, twelve Beings were present who let their words ring forth from the depths of the darkness,—outer space being of course not then filled with light. What kind of words were these? They were words—the word “word” is again only a makeshift, to indicate what is here meant—they were words that told of primeval times, of times that even then were in a remote and ancient past. The twelve were twelve World-Initiators. Today we behold standing in the directions of these twelve World-Initiators the twelve Signs of the Zodiac, but from them resounds, for the soul that is open to the whole world, the original being of the Unspoken Word of Worlds, that could take form in the twelve Voices. And whilst Lucifer alone—I must now begin to speak more in pictures; human words do not in the least suffice—whilst Lucifer had the impulse to let stream out upon all things the light that was present in him and therewith come to a knowledge of all things, the Christ on the other hand, gave Himself up to the Impression of this Word of the Worlds, received It in its fulness and entirety into Himself, so that this Christ Soul was now the Being that united in Himself all the great Secrets of the World that sounded into Him through the inexpressible Word. Such is the contrast that presents itself,—the Christ Who receives the Word of the Worlds, and the proud Lucifer, the Spirit of Venus, who rejects the Word of the Worlds and wants to found and establish everything with his own light.

All subsequent evolution is a direct outcome of what Lucifer and Christ were at that time. The Christ Being, as we saw, received into Himself the great and all-embracing secrets of the Worlds. The Lucifer Being, having what I can only describe as a “proud figure of Light,” lost thereby his kingdom, lost his Venus kingdom. On other grounds, to enter into which would take us too far afield, the other Spirits of the Planets lost also their kingdoms, or rather changed their natures. But they need not concern us here. What is important for us here is the contrast between Christ and Lucifer. It came about that Lucifer lost more and more of his rulership; the kingdom of Venus gradually fell away from him. Lucifer with his light became a dethroned ruler, and the planet Venus had thenceforward to do without a proper ruler and was consequently obliged to undergo a backward evolution. The Christ, however, had during the old Sun time received the Word of the Worlds, and this Word of the Worlds has the quality of kindling itself to new light in the soul by which It is received; so that from that time forward the Word of the Worlds became in the Christ Light, and the planet of which the Christ was ruler, the Sun, became the centre of the whole planetary system, the other planets being brought into subjection to It. The same is true also of their spiritual Rulers.

We must let these scenes live before us, we must learn to see the divergence that came about during the old Sun time between the path of Lucifer and the path of Christ. Lucifer went downward, he had to remain behind in his evolution, and he remained behind also during the Moon time. Christ went forward. The Christ Spirit, the Sun Spirit, became a Spirit evolving ever forward until at length He was able to appear on Earth in the Form we have often described. Through His devotion to the World All, through His having received and identified Himself with the Divinely Creative, Inexpressible Word, through His having rejected every sort of pride and put always in its place devotion to the Word of the Worlds,—Christ, from being Ruler of a single planet, as He was in the ancient Sun time, became Ruler from the Sun over all the planets, the other planets being reckoned as part of the realm of the Sun. When you know this—I am speaking here more particularly to those who heard my lectures in Helsingfors¹—knowing this, you will not feel it as a contradiction that Christ is spoken of in those lectures as a Sun Spirit of a higher kind than the Spirits of the planets. For there of course we were speaking of the present day. Christ is far above the other planetary Spirits. He is the Spirit of the Sun. Here, however, where we are not merely describing how the individual planetary bodies are quickened to life by their Spirits, but where our task is above all to describe the several states of consciousness, we have to show how Christ through His own special character and nature has, during the course of the evolution that has taken place between old Sun and the present time, passed through an upward evolution, and from having been a Spirit who was of like nature with the planetary Spirits has become the Ruler or Regent of the whole solar system.

As I have said, time will not allow us to enter on a description of the third consciousness of a higher kind. I will only mention that the condition of ancient Saturn, the first that can ordinarily be described of the successive incarnations of our Earth, can be experienced with this third higher consciousness. As you see, it is therefore possible to speak of a higher, a third consciousness of a super-sensible character. If we really wanted to follow initiation in its completeness, we would have to lead on to giddy heights of consciousness. To do so would from the outset seem a kind of presumption, and as a matter of fact we should be taken into regions where it becomes well-nigh impossible to employ human words. Therefore, in my Occult Science I have forborne to describe anything that belongs to still higher states of consciousness, for it is really out of the question to describe the higher things in human words. In the Mysteries it was done by forming special symbolic signs and then speaking in a language of symbol. By this means it was possible to lead man up to higher states of consciousness. Such higher states do indeed exist; we can speak of a fourth and a fifth consciousness of super-sensible nature. It goes on, indeed, without limit. All that we can do is to say that for super-sensible consciousness evolution takes its course in a certain direction.

Bearing all this in mind, you will at any rate be able to conceive the possibility that by means of the various super-sensible consciousnesses man beholds other worlds than the physical; and when you remember that the first rudiments of physical man began, as is shown in Occult Science, during the condition of ancient Saturn, you will also see that there is in man himself a certain connection with the world of the third super-sensible consciousness. But besides this, man is, as you know, guided and led by Beings higher than himself. He can come to a knowledge of these higher Beings, they have their influence upon him. It will therefore not be difficult to see that not only has man, as he stands before us, been created out of worlds that go as far as the third super-sensible consciousness, but he has connection also with yet higher worlds. The knowledge and experience that we have described as attainable by means of the various states of consciousness can be described to the ordinary human being. He can comprehend that such states of consciousness exist. He does not have direct experience as man on Earth of these further states of consciousness, but he does experience their external manifestations. The physical consciousness,—that, of course, he experiences directly. The first super-sensible consciousness,—of this he experiences an indication in the heightened dream consciousness that does not merely afford arbitrary dream pictures but leads on to a perception of realities belonging to a higher world. A systematic higher development of the dream consciousness is all that is required for man to come to the first consciousness of a super-sensible nature. This first super-sensible consciousness can give information concerning the conditions that prevailed on the old Moon, the past incarnation of our Earth. Hence you will find that in occult communications most of the descriptions, apart from those concerned with the Earth itself, refer to the old Moon; very often they stop there and do not go back to the old Sun. This will be the case, whenever such communications are based on the first super-sensible consciousness, which is the one that occurs most frequently and is the easiest to attain. It is in this consciousness that by far the greater part of what H. P. Blavatsky gave in the Secret Doctrine has its source. Occultists who have real knowledge are quite aware of this fact. Consequently if you read through the whole of the Secret Doctrine, then in all the great and comprehensive communications given there in reference to primeval times you will find but scanty reference to a past farther back than old Moon.

The condition of dream consciousness may thus be regarded as a first beginning—so to say, a substitute man has on Earth—for the first super-sensible consciousness. When man is in deep sleep, his consciousness is darkened; but we cannot say that no consciousness exists. If the deep sleep consciousness awakens, that is to say, if it is awake outside the body, then it is the second super-sensible consciousness. It goes higher than the first, and leads one who can experience it to the old Sun condition.

A little reflection will make plain to you the following. In your day consciousness you go about making external movements. Such movements are connected with your day consciousness, your Earth consciousness. The movements that take place inside you on the other hand—the movements, I mean, of the middle man that continue even when you are asleep—are regulated by the consciousness we may call the consciousness of deep sleep. The movements of the heart and of the breathing are movements connected with this second consciousness and can only be understood in their whole connection with the higher worlds when man awakens outside his body, that is, in the deep sleep condition of the body.

You see, therefore, it is quite possible to perceive with ordinary intelligence that there are these three styles of consciousness. It would take us too far now to investigate the indications that undoubtedly exist in man of still higher consciousnesses. We have, however, shown that whenever man sets out to reflect on his life as Earth man, he discovers manifestations of higher consciousnesses. It is, therefore, possible to speak to Earth man of these higher states of consciousness. One can point out first how man experiences the ordinary processes of life on Earth by means of his everyday consciousness. One can then go on to show how, if his dream consciousness were to undergo a tremendous enhancement, he would experience all that belongs to the laws that have been brought over to Earth, so to speak, as a legacy from old Moon; and finally how, were he to become awake in deep sleep, independently of the body, he would experience the old Sun conditions in that form in which they too extend over into the conditions of Earth. It is therefore possible to communicate these things to man at the present time, and to describe to him how they manifest; we are justified in doing so, since an understanding can be awakened for what the occultist investigates. The occultist speaks of different states of consciousness. In reality they are different worlds: and it has become customary, as you know, to call these different states of consciousness different planes. That which can be surveyed with the physical consciousness is called the physical plane; that which is perceptible to the first consciousness of a super-sensible nature, the astral plane; to the second, the lower Devachan or mental plane; and to the third, the higher mental, or higher Devachan plane. Still farther on, we have the Budhi plane and the Nirvana plane. All we are doing here is simply to give other names to the results reached on the occult path. Both roads lead to a picture of man. For it is always man who in his varying conditions or states is active as member of the different planes or worlds. What we have done is to lead over the knowledge of man from the standpoint of occultism, where we speak of different conditions of consciousness and different conditions of evolution, to the knowledge of man from the standpoint of theosophy. For where the occultist speaks of conditions of consciousness, the theosophist speaks of successive planes. Occultism can in this manner be communicated openly as theosophy.

We must now go back a little. In the course of our considerations some new points of view have emerged, and it behoves us to go into these a little more fully. Take for example the perception we arrived at that man is, in his external form, a three times seven-membered human being. We have not time in these lectures to explain the matter in detail, but I will ask you to call to mind what stands written in Occult Science, namely, that before this Earth condition of existence man passed through three other conditions, Moon, Sun, Saturn, and that the very first foundation for the external physical human form was already present during ancient Saturn and subsequently underwent continual development and change. So that the marvellous and wonderful body of man we have before us today is the result of a long evolution. Its evolution has continued throughout three great phases of existence,—Saturn, Sun, Moon. Each one of these can be divided into seven, and each single sub-division of these great phases of existence has left its mark on the human form. Three times seven formative forces have worked upon the form and figure of man. What man has added during Earth time,—that alone is not to be found! It is, as we have seen, just the part of man that is subject to destruction. It is the completion of the human form, the gathering up of all the parts into a complete whole; and this has been destroyed by Lucifer. So that when we divide the human being into three times seven members, we have the expression of physical man on the Earth as he comes before us with all the changes wrought upon him by each successive previous condition of existence. It is the physical human being with which we are here concerned. The occultist must consider him in the way we have done in this lecture, in such measure as time has allowed. The theosophist, on the other hand, can only have his attention directed to what is present there before him. We can say to him: In man, there is the physical body. When we set out to study the human being, we come first of all to his physical body, that highly complicated form which has passed through so many conditions of existence and is today perpetually unfolding and manifesting the traces left behind from these earlier conditions. Then, as you will remember, we went on to consider something else. We made a study of man in his inner movements; and let me remind you of the conclusion to which we were led yesterday. The form of man we can see, but the movements as such we do not see, and I pointed out yesterday how difficult it is to discriminate between the movements and arrive at a conclusion as to which are the essential movements in man. One fact, however, emerged quite naturally from our study, namely, that this faculty of movement takes us back to the old Sun. It will accordingly not surprise you when I go on to say that all the inner movements in man are connected with the experiences he underwent during the time of old Sun. Whereas man as physical man bears in him the impress of Saturn, Sun and Moon, man as the man of inner movement has carried in him the forces for this inner movement since the time of Sun. The man of inner movement has passed through Sun and Moon, and also Earth as far as it has gone today. Thus we distinguished in the human being something that is not form but is the inner ground of movement, and this we must designate as the first invisible man. We do not see this man, we can, however, see the external results of his activity—the movements; and we call him the etheric body, the ether body. The ether body can only be perceived by means of a higher consciousness. The workings of the ether body in the physical world are the inner movements that the human being performs. In so far, therefore, as man has had to undergo all three conditions of existence that preceded our own, he has become physical man; in so far as he has had to undergo Sun and Moon time only, he has become etheric man. And we can ascend a stage further and say that in so far as man has undergone Moon time alone, he has become astral man,—that is to say, there has flowed into his movements all that leads to thinking, feeling and willing. When we pass beyond the external and bodily, beyond also that which is within man (in inner movement), we come then to astral man, which is also not to be seen as such, but manifests and comes to expression in thinking, feeling and willing. Finally, we come to that element in man which Earth has begun to prepare in him and which it will be her task in the future to complete. For Earth is called upon to bring to perfect development and form the I of man, which has already shown itself in the course of the evolution of the Earth and will in the future develop to higher stages,—Spirit Self, Life Spirit, Spirit Man (Manas, Budhi, Atman). And now we have before us—Man in his several members.

It transpires therefore that in seeking to understand man in his relation to the whole world, not only do we come upon different conditions of consciousness that we then identify with different worlds, but we are also led to a division of the human being into his several members,—physical body, ether body, and so on. Moreover by means of an intelligent external observation of man we can come to perceive that, while the ether body is not visible to us, we can yet discern manifestations of it here in the physical world. The manifestations of the ether body are the movements within man. The manifestations of the astral body are thinking; feeling and willing. The “ I ” manifests itself,—is its own manifestation. When once man is intelligent enough to comprehend that the movements he makes within him do not proceed from his form, cannot indeed proceed from anything physical, when once he can rise to the only intelligent way of regarding them, namely, as having their source in the super-sensible, then the possibility is opened for him—not simply of believing in, but of grasping with his understanding, the existence of an ether body. To clothe occult knowledge in forms that appeal to ordinary consciousness,—this is to bring occultism into theosophy, to clothe it, as it were, in the garment of theosophy. Just as we found that in theosophy we speak of planes, so again are we clothing the truth in the garb of theosophy when we speak of the various members of man's nature. Everything that can be said concerning man has first to be found on an occult path. We must traverse the whole wide world, we must attain, as students in occultism, to the various conditions of consciousness; and we shall discover that these various conditions of consciousness can afford us an explanation of man, can indeed show us what he really is. Through occultism alone can man be understood in his true nature and being. Theosophy is no more than an attempt to clothe the occult knowledge in intelligently stated truths, so that men may have insight into occult knowledge. The facts of which I have been telling you—if you will test them intelligently, you will find them to harmonise one with another in countless ways, harmonise too with the whole world. Intelligent testing is the one and only way to find confirmation of the results obtained in occultism.

A second point emerged that also requires to be explained a little further,—for we must make it clear that although theosophy and occultism seem at first to lead to contradictions (we heard in the first lecture of this course what is to be our attitude to such contradictions), further study will always lead to the solution of these. You will have seen this happen already in many instances in these lectures. Perhaps, however, new contradictions will now present themselves when what we have just been saying is taken in connection with what was said in earlier lectures of the course. It is out of the question to deal today with all the possible contradictions, but there is one that I would like to endeavour to solve with the aid of the occult knowledge attainable in the second consciousness of a super-sensible kind. Many of you will remember that I—and others too—have repeatedly pointed to the cosmic character of the Christ, and have shown how He surpasses in His very nature all other founders of religions. It is only to be expected that this unique character of the Christ Being should more readily meet with recognition in the West, since it is in the West that the historical sense is specially developed. In order for the evolution of the Earth to take place in such a manner as to allow of men going through many different incarnations, the West will naturally look for a “centre of gravity” for this evolution. It can, therefore, only astonish one that Westerners are still to be found who are not prepared to admit this centre of gravity of evolution,—which is, in effect, the Christ Impulse. To speak of re-incarnation of the Christ would be to make the same mistake as to imagine that a pair of scales could be held in balance at more than one point. Seen from this aspect, the matter is really exceedingly simple.

There is, however, another, a moral ground of which we must take account in its effect on the relationship of the human being to the Christ, who is to be regarded as being Himself the Impulse of Earth evolution. It is as follows. Christ entered the evolution of the Earth at a particular moment. The men who are living at the present day were incarnated before the coming of Christ and are now incarnated again. Thus they have lived not only during the time of Earth evolution when Christ was not yet present, but they live also now when Christ has been present; and the objection frequently made from a materialistic standpoint, that if Christ were so important, then a one and only appearance on Earth would signify an injustice to mankind, falls to the ground. Nevertheless one still hears people ask; “How could such an injustice be allowed to happen, that all the men who lived before Christ have not had the benefit of His deed, while those who live after Him have this benefit?” But they are the very same human beings! Such an objection should most assuredly not be raised in theosophical quarters! And yet, this objection opens up a matter of very great significance. For there are a few instances, where the objection is in a certain sense justified; and one of these instances, as you will see if you stop to reflect, is the case of the Buddha.

Whilst human beings all over the Earth are born again and again and can thus always come to an experience of the Christ Impulse in their incarnations after the time of Christ, the Buddha attained in pre-Christian times the stage of evolution which removed from him the necessity of returning any more into an Earthly body. This means that the Buddha belongs therefore to the very small number of human beings who lived on the Earth and then left it, before Christ came. And you may want to know, what is the relation of the Christ to Buddha? Apart from what I mentioned yesterday, that Buddha shone down from higher worlds into the astral body of the Luke Jesus Child, how do the Christ and Buddha stand to one another? Is it actually so, that Buddha left the Earth before Christ was on the Earth? that he took his way to Mars, so that the Buddha and Christ so to speak passed one another? Only with the help of deep occult knowledge can we hope to solve this problem. Recall in thought all that I have been telling you. I explained to you how the Christ was united with the Sun. In point of fact it was only through the baptism by John, or rather through the Mystery of Golgotha itself, that the Christ came into union with the Earth. The Christ is therefore a Sun Spirit and we have to look for Him, before the Mystery of Golgotha took place on Earth, in close connection with His Kingdom, the Sun. Zarathustra sought Him there. And it is during the time when Christ is working as Ruler in the kingdom of the Sun, when He has not yet extended His rulership to the Earth—at all events, not yet by means of His Impulse—that the life of Buddha takes its course on Earth. And now we must turn back to the earlier incarnations of Buddha, if we would arrive at the truth in this matter. We know that Buddha was before a Bodhisattva; he worked on Earth through long periods of time as Bodhisattva. These Bodhisattvas had in them no ordinary human soul. Their case was quite a special one. You must here call to mind the description in Occult Science of the beginning of Earth evolution,—how, after the interval between Moon and Earth, the Sun was re-united with Earth and the other planets, and how they all then separated again, being shed, as it were, like a husk or shell one after the other. (See also my lecture cycle on the Spiritual Hierarchies.) There was, therefore, at one time the condition in which the Earth was united with the Sun. Then Earth and Sun separated, and you know that after that came the separation also of the Moon, and the strengthening of the Earth through souls coming from other planets. Let us now fix our attention on the point of time when the Sun has just separated from the Earth. When this separation took place, the two planets Venus and Mercury—I am giving them their astronomical names—were still within the Sun. The Earth alone separated off, Venus and Mercury remaining within the Sun. We have therefore now Sun and Earth. On Earth, evolution continues. Only a small number of human beings remain behind; others go up to the planets, to return again later on. With the Sun went also Beings; for the world does not consist just of external matter, but of Beings. Beings went with the Sun when it separated from the Earth. And their Leader is the Christ. For at the time in Earth evolution when the Sun separated from the Earth, What one may call the taking precedence by the Christ over Lucifer and the other planetary Spirits had already come to fulfilment. Then later on, Venus separated, and Mercury. Let us consider for a moment the exit of Venus from the Sun. Together with Venus are Beings who had also at first gone with the Sun but were not able to remain there. These break away and inhabit Venus. Among them is the Being who stands behind the later Buddha. He went as a messenger from the Christ to the dwellers on Venus. The Christ sent him to Venus, and here on Venus Buddha passed through all manner of stages of evolution. Later on, souls came back from Venus to Earth. The ordinary human souls were of course but little developed. Buddha, however, who also descended to Earth with the Venus souls, was a highly evolved Being,—so highly evolved that he could at once become a Bodhisattva and afterwards early a Buddha. Thus we have in Buddha one who had long ago been sent out by Christ and had the task of preparing the work of Christ on Earth. For his mission to the Venus men had this meaning,—that he should go to Earth beforehand, as a forerunner of the Sun. And now you will be able to understand that Buddha, having been with Christ for a longer time than the other Earth men—for the Earth separated off earlier—needed only that portion of the Christ Impulse which he still had in him from the Sun, to enable him to follow the Christ Event from the spiritual world. For Buddha that sufficed. Other human beings had to await the Christ Event on Earth. But because Buddha had this special relationship to the Christ, because he had been sent out by the Christ as a forerunner, he did not need to await on Earth the Christ Event. He took with him from Earth the capacity of remembering—even without the help of the Christ, which other men need—what the I means on Earth. Hence he was able also to look down and behold the Christ Event from higher worlds. Thus was preparation made long beforehand in the World All for the remarkable mission that Buddha had undertaken at the behest of Christ. For he was first sent to the Venus men—and compare what I am now telling you with the lectures I gave at Helsingfors¹—and afterwards to the Earth; then he made his way back to the Mars men, and there has to continue working, carrying out on Mars the mission for which he had so long been preparing. On Mars it is so, that the men who have remained there stand in great peril, even as the Earth men were in peril, from which Christ set them free. The danger for the Mars men is, that their astral body—they have, as you know, not an I to develop as we—their astral body, and thereby indirectly also their ether body, may suffer a very serious diminution of force and become dried up. The whole nature of the Mars men has proved to be of a kind that leads to terrible wars. The men of Mars tend to settle permanently on a certain spot. Men on the Earth are cosmopolitanly inclined; Mars men are wedded to the soil, there are very few cosmopolitans among them. And there is, or rather was, on Mars constant war and strife, due to the astral bodies that are very strong and not tempered and made gentle by an I. If you will think it over you will understand that among men who develop in this way there must inevitably be a terrible amount of strife and conflict. Mars is nothing else than a kind of re-incarnated Moon; what the astral body holds is not tempered with the softening influence of the I, with the result that the men of Mars have quite an exceptional lust for war. The Greeks acted on a true knowledge when they made Mars the God of War. One is indeed filled with wonder and amazement when one finds in the world of legend these echoes of the truth. Unforgettable is the impression one receives when, having discovered that terrible wars took place there, one finds that this occult knowledge is present in the names that were given out of the knowledge contained in the ancient Mysteries.

Think of the continuation of the life of Buddha, this Master of Compassion and Love, this Master in the overcoming of caste-distinctions, and you will understand the mission that Buddha had on Mars,—to introduce something to which the Mars men could never come unaided, something which would seem to them like an exaggerated piety, a kind of monastic attitude to life. For it was the mission of Buddha by means of a conspicuous example of exceeding humility and poverty to quicken the Mars men to life in this direction. I can only just begin to draw for you the picture of Buddha's influence upon Mars. The meaning of his work there for the Mars men who live without the I, is in point of fact entirely similar to the influence of a redeemer and a saviour, one who liberates men to a higher world-conception. And whilst upon Earth universal brotherhood and love of one's neighbour are connected in their deepest impulse with the Christ, cosmopolitanism in its essential character is connected with the Deed of Salvation which Buddha has to fulfil on Mars.

There is yet another point in our study that might present a difficulty, and I would like to dispose of it before we separate. It is the fact that the various religions on Earth, which as every theosophist knows have a common single source, are differently related to occult communications. Every religion has to be referred back to a founder who through this religion made known to a group of people, in a manner suited to their capacity, some experience belonging to a particular stage of initiation. You have for instance the religion which is not able to rise to the Christ, the Spirit of the Sun, but is peculiarly adapted to rise to the great and far-reaching soul that lived in the being who was many times incarnated as a Bodhisattva—a religion that looks up in worship to him who is the great Initiator, the great Inspirer, of the Buddha. This religion is not able to ascend to a vision of how the Christ is the Sun Spirit and has descended to Earth. It sees only as far as to the one who is sent as a messenger; it gathers together, as it were, for its content that which goes forth from the Sun and becomes a planetary spirit. And we can well understand that Buddha is regarded as a planetary spirit.

Such a religion, that lifts men's thoughts to the Spirit who guides the evolution of the Buddha, could only grasp a figure like the figure of Vishnu in the Indian Trimurti. Moreover, since a religion of this kind has not yet come through to the knowledge of the universal victory of Christ over Lucifer, neither is it able to place the figure of Lucifer in such relation to the Christ as we can today. To the followers of such a religion Lucifer seems to be standing beside the Christ as an independent figure,—His equal, unsubdued. We have seen how Lucifer is given the place of a kind of brother. This is what you have when Shiva confronts Vishnu. Look into the religion of Shiva, study it carefully; and you will follow me when I say that the Shiva religion of India can be understood when one has knowledge of the Lucifer Being. For Shiva is in reality Lucifer in the form in which he is not yet overcome. All its cult and ritual, the whole of the religion of Shiva with its 60 million adherents—viewed from this standpoint, it shows itself to be an eminently Luciferic kind of religion. From these examples, you will readily understand how all forms of occult knowledge have been able to impress their influence on different religions at different stages, according to the character and disposition of the peoples concerned.

And now I want to ask you to follow me in a further consideration. We have spoken of the Unmanifest Light, and of the Inexpressible Word; and we have succeeded also in arriving by many detours at the Consciousness, without Object. Let us now pause a moment at this trinity, and ask: Do these three things come to expression at all in our world, do they reveal themselves there?

The answer is, that by taking together all that has been given in the course of these lectures, we can without difficulty arrive at a knowledge of how these three things express themselves in our world. Take Light! When we gave a description of the proud Lucifer, it was all Light! Light is essentially an attribute of the spiritual; and when he is on the physical plane, man only has light—and then in its very weakest expression—in his thoughts. And where has man the Inexpressible Word, when he is here on the physical plane? That which in the great world is Inexpressible Word is expressible word here on the physical plane, and you will not take long to discover what must be the origin and source of the word. It is what we call the soul in man. Whilst therefore the Light gradually becomes what is spiritual in man, the Word becomes gradually revealed in man in his soul nature. And Consciousness—how does it manifest in physical man? Through the fact that external matter impinges upon him. For physical consciousness needs an external object, it must, as it were, have something to bite! Up above, we found: Consciousness without Object, Inexpressible Word, Unmanifest Light. Down below, we find as their last manifestation on the physical plane: human consciousness that chews at matter; the soul that reveals, although in obscured form, the word; and finally the light that is present in exceedingly feeble manner in man's thinking. In the human aura alone can the clairvoyant see thinking as light. All that comes from light he can see only as aura. Nevertheless in thinking—in that which on the physical plane is already spiritual—we may recognise the last reflection of the Unmanifest Light. So, you see, man can after all bring to expression these three highest things that we found. We discover them when we regard man as spirit, soul and matter. And in spirit and soul together man finds the picture of his I as a unity. Yes, even this triad which we find on the physical plane—matter, soul, spirit,—is a revelation of the highest trinity. Men lost these primal revelations of the occultism of olden times, and occultism gradually took on a new form that met with but little outward understanding. In our time occultism must again find understanding, in our time it must become theosophy. There has been an intervening time when men did not look up to the occult truths that had been communicated to them earlier, when they did not understand what we today clothe in the words of theosophy. And in this intervening time they held by the last manifestation, the latest product as it were of the working of the higher trinity,—they held to matter, soul and spirit. This stage gave birth to what we may call philosophy, which in reality first made its appearance about six centuries before Christ and has continued on into our own time. You will always find that philosophy starts from the last external manifestation of the great trinity which remains ever deeply hidden. Philosophy sees spread out before her the material life, and the material life alone,—the food as it were for human consciousness. Philosophy does not comprehend the Inexpressible Word, but it can nevertheless still have a feeling for the soul element in the world when it reveals itself in the soul of man as the expressed word. Philosophy does not find the Unmanifest Light, but can sense it from afar, inasmuch as it appears, in its last activity, in human thinking,—that is to say, in that portion of the human spirit which is turned, to begin with, to the external world. Body, soul and spirit—the mind of the Greek sees them as threefold man, and they play their part right through the age of philosophy. Mankind has been passing through an epoch in his evolution when the occultisms were hidden. Hidden too, were the theosophies. All that was left for man to hold on to was the most external of all revelations, was what we call body, soul and spirit. And this epoch has lasted until now. But the time of philosophy is fulfilled. The philosophers have had their day. The one thing that remains for philosophy to do is to save for man that which the clairvoyant must remember at the first stage of his evolution,—the I, the self-consciousness. And it is important that philosophy should not fail of this task. Try to understand my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity from this point of view. The book is written in such a way as to lead over the philosophical consciousness into the new age that is coming, when that which can give a more exact and accurate picture of the higher trinity must enter once again into the evolution of mankind,—when theosophy must find its way into human evolution.

The age of philosophy has come to an end. Older than philosophy is theosophy, and theosophy will take the place of philosophy, notwithstanding all opposition. It has, so to speak, the longer life, it exceeds in duration the age of philosophy. Only for a certain limited time can the human being be studied from the philosophical standpoint. Further into the past, and further too into the future, extends the age when man can be considered from the standpoint of theosophy. Transcending both, and probing man's being to the uttermost, is occultism. For behind all human knowledge whatsoever stands occultism. Occultism is the oldest of all; it has the longest age of time. Before theosophy was, was occultism; after theosophy, occultism will still be. Before philosophy was, was theosophy; after philosophy, theosophy will still be.

And now, my dear friends, try among other ideals to apprehend this one,—that you are called upon to understand how in our time the philosophical ideal (which has necessarily only been held by a few) has to flow into a new ideal, the theosophical ideal, which will be comprehensible to many, because theosophy is able to speak to man from far greater depths than philosophy, which can never be anything but abstract, since it is only a last feeble copy of the original being of man in his threefoldedness. If we study the matter in the way we have done, then we are seeing it all on the background of world-history as historic necessity; we feel what theosophy must be for modern man, and we recognise how the three points of view—philosophy, theosophy, occultism—are in very truth ways of understanding man that must unfold one after the other. Let this thought not remain just a thought in the head, but let it sink deep into your hearts, and you will learn to appreciate how important, as well as how holy theosophy must be for us.

• 1. Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies an in the Kingdoms of Nature
• 1. Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies an in the Kingdoms of Nature

The science of spirit, about which I have had the honor to lecture for many years now, here in Stuttgart, as well as in other places, is, I believe, based upon a need arising out of the cultural and spiritual life of the present time. It does not arise simply because someone may feel it to be a good idea. In order to realize that it is just at the present time that this science has to make a start, it is perhaps necessary to see how particular spiritual impulses arise at certain moments during the whole evolution of human spiritual and cultural life. It is not so difficult to see that the science of spirit has a connection with the present time similar to the connection that the Copernican outlook had with its time. Just as the latter could not have existed at an earlier period, so, too, with the science of spirit. We only have to compare, on the basis of true knowledge, the way the scientific outlook obtains its results—and has obtained them for some time—with the way this outlook is taken up by the widest circles of humanity in order to provide a basis for questions concerning the soul and the spirit. We need only to look at the method of research and the way it has spread and to compare it with the scientific outlook of centuries ago, which had prevailed for thousands of years of human evolution. In those earlier times people looked at nature and its phenomena in quite a different way from today and the last two, three, four hundred years. In earlier times when people looked at nature and its processes they took something spiritual, something of a soul nature, into their own soul and spirit life. It was not like today when the phenomena of nature are investigated purely as phenomena, as far as possible eliminating everything of a spirit-soul nature.

This is not a criticism of the modern scientific outlook—on the contrary. The success of the scientific outlook, which certainly has a significant purpose both for the present and the future, is due to its efforts to eliminate everything of a spirit-soul nature from the observation of natural phenomena. It concentrates solely on observing processes in nature without bringing into these processes anything of a spirit- soul nature. On the other hand it has become absolutely necessary to satisfy the unquenchable need of the human soul to approach the great riddles of existence scientifically from a different viewpoint. It is just because natural science has to keep to its serious and conscientious method and is obliged to eliminate spirit-soul nature that a science of spirit, based on the example and ideal of natural science, must take its place alongside natural science, working in the same way as natural science, but from different sources.

It cannot be said that the present time has got very far in formulating a view about the relationship of natural science to any endeavors of a more spiritually scientific kind. It is just the most serious questions about the life of the soul and the spirit, about the eternal nature of the being of man, about human freedom and all that is connected with it, that are excluded and have been banned from the outlook based on natural science since the middle of the 19th century. And it is a fact that great and outstanding scientists of the present time find themselves in a strange position. We have already seen how it is only recently that outstanding scientists have shaken off the scientific romanticism of Darwinism prevalent in the second half of the 19th century.

We could take hundreds of scientists and thinkers to illustrate our point, but we shall take one as an example. We have seen how a scientist like Oskar Hertwig has managed to bring the fantastic tendencies of naturalism, which have threatened to run wild, back on to a saner basis. And a book such as Oskar Hertwig's Das Werden der Organismen, Eine Darwinische Zufallstheorie, a book by an eminent pupil of Haeckel,—such a book, even from a scientific viewpoint, has great significance. Much could be added in this respect that is equally significant or nearly so. We can see from such achievements, which cannot be sufficiently recognized in their own sphere, what predicament serious scientists are in regarding questions of the soul and spirit. In reading Oskar Hertwig's influential book we have just referred to, we cannot help being aware of a certain feeling or attitude toward questions of spiritual life. We find that a scientist like Oskar Hertwig makes quite clear that he cannot approach questions of the soul or spirit with the means at his disposal, the means of a stringent science. On one page he says this clearly and definitely: Science can only concern itself with the transitory sense world; science cannot approach the eternal in human nature.

So far, so good—and one would think that the way is now open for a science of spirit, for the scientist himself points out that a science of spirit should exist alongside natural science. But, unfortunately, there is something else to be found among scientists, which is not said explicitly, but which can be read quite clearly between the lines. The opinion is spread abroad—albeit unconsciously—that the method employed by the scientist is the only exact one, and that it is possible to be scientific only so long as one keeps to the outer sense world.—People then believe that a departure from the sense world is bound to lead into a world of fantasy and dreams.—What is so dangerous in this is that it is not clearly expressed, but arises as a kind of feeling out of what is achieved and spreads into the widest circles of people. It is to be found in those who believe they understand a lot about the scientific outlook and wish to draw conclusions affecting spiritual life from the scientific outlook, and also in those who think themselves enlightened because they read the supplement of their local paper every Sunday which breathes this kind of feeling I have described as spreading into the widest circles.

Thus, on the one hand, the scientific outlook points with great emphasis to the need for the coming into being of a science of spirit, but on the other it takes the ground away from under its feet. This was crystallized in a famous speech by Dubois-Reymond, the great physiologist, which I have referred to here in Stuttgart, and which he gave before an obviously enlightened meeting of scientists in Leipzig in the 70's. It was crystallized in his lecture, The Limits of Natural Knowledge, where he stated that natural knowledge is not able to give any information about even the simplest phenomena of the life of the soul, and that science comes to an end where the super-sensible begins.—With this it is admitted on the one hand that natural science is not able to say anything about the super-sensible, but on the other it emphatically takes away the ground for all super-sensible investigation. The science of spirit has to struggle against these aims and efforts today. For it sets out to face and treat scientifically the questions which the human soul turns to in great longing—the question of the eternal nature of the human soul, of the freedom of human action and the countless other questions which are connected to these two main questions.

But now from another viewpoint we come to much the same result. If in trying to inform ourselves about such matters we turn, not to science, but to the work of philosophers, we find just as little satisfaction there. What is offered is, on the whole,—for someone really seeking spiritual substance in cultural life—nothing more than a collection of abstract concepts, which do not offer anything pertaining to the pressing questions about the life of the human soul and spirit. But it is perhaps just in this subject that we can ascertain why it is not possible at the present time to find out anything substantial about these questions outside the actual sphere of the science of spirit. And it is just the work of philosophers which reveals something rather odd, which is also the reason why I have called today's lecture a study of man as a being of spirit and soul.

In looking into a modern textbook on psychology or into anything philosophical in order to inform ourselves about the questions we are considering, we come across a way of regarding things which, even if we go beyond purely materialistic thinking, is completely tied up with the idea that man is a being of body and soul. This idea of man as a being of body and soul governs the enlightened and impressive philosophers of today. It is therefore imperative to show that this outlook leads us astray when it comes to investigating the complete being of man. If in investigating the human being we start with the premise that everything that arises in connection with the soul and body should be divided into body and soul, we are doing the same as a chemist who assumes from the start that a substance he is investigating can have only two constituent parts. Therefore when he makes his chemical analysis, he finds he cannot get very far. Another person discovers that a result was not possible because the substance the chemist took was composed of three elements, and not of two as the chemist had imagined. It is just the same with the way people look at the being of man. It is imagined that we have to find two elements, body and soul. In fact, we can make progress only by dividing the being of man into three parts: body, soul and spirit. Otherwise, we always arrive at an impossible mix-up between spirit and soul, which is no more use for acquiring enlightenment concerning the human being than a mix-up of the bodily life and soul life which comes about through not differentiating them .properly. What is really meant by dividing man not only into a being with a soul and a body on the one hand, but into a being with a soul and a spirit on the other, becomes clear in looking at the way the physical sciences of man, biology, physiology, anatomy, and so on, arise out of purely human experience, out of the experience of physical life of the human being. Let us take a particular case. The human being experiences hunger, satisfaction, need to breathe, and so on, in life. These are immediate, I would like to say, inner experiences. In the first place they are really dependent on material substances, but hunger, satisfaction, the need to breathe, are also experienced in the soul. The scientist investigates the bodily basis of hunger, satisfaction, the need to breathe, and the like. If we want to found a physical science, a science of the human body, we cannot stop at the fact that hunger is experienced in different ways. If we wanted to experience being very hungry or not very hungry, very thirsty or not very thirsty, or different kinds of hunger or thirst, we would not be able to found a science of the physical body. We have to go beyond the purely inner experience and investigate the body with scientific methods. We then discover that hunger, thirst, the need to breathe, evolve certain chemical, physical processes in the physical body and we arrive at a physiological and biological science of man. We have to go beyond what we experience purely inwardly, and subject the body by itself to scientific investigation.

Just as on the one hand we have to go beyond our immediate experience to lay the basis for a physical science, just as the body provides the physical basis for our soul experience, so on the other we have to go beyond our soul experience to find the spiritual reality that underlies it.

In examining our physical nature the ordinary scientist discovers certain physical processes in the digestive system which correspond to the inner experiences of hunger, thirst and the need to breathe. The question is bound to arise: Is there something—if I may use what is naturally a paradoxical expression—that corresponds to the soul experience from the other direction, which could be called a kind of “spiritual digestion” as compared to physical digestion? Of course it sounds like a paradox, speaking on the one hand about ordinary digestion, which is perfectly acceptable because it belongs to the province of a recognized science, and on the other hand about a spiritual digestion, a change which takes place in the spirit. Nevertheless we shall attempt to show today that this paradoxical expression does in fact correspond to a real situation.

It is no more possible to arrive at a science of spirit by investigating inwardly the nature of the soul, which surges to and fro in our thinking, feeling and willing as our inner experience, than it is to found a physical science only on the basis of an inward observation of hunger, thirst, and the need for breath. We have to appreciate that as far as our normal, everyday consciousness is concerned, our physical nature only reveals its outer surface. What does the human being in his everyday life know about all the complicated processes, the physical, chemical processes, which physical science brings to the light of day as the basis of what we experience as hunger, thirst and the need to breathe? Just compare what we see of the body in everyday life, which is more or less its outward form, its capacity for movement, its physiognomy, just compare this, which is something everyone can know about without bothering about science, with the picture of the human being as shown in anatomy, physiology or biology, and you will see how our ordinary experience of our bodies is related to the investigation of science.

But now on the other hand it is also a fact that the spirit reveals itself no more to the human being than does the body reveal itself beyond its outward form, and that from the sphere of the spirit just as little or just as much is hidden to the human being as is hidden to him in ordinary life of those processes which have first to be investigated by science.

What is it then that belongs to the spirit which is actually orientated toward our inner experience? We shall see today that the part of his spiritual life that is orientated toward the human being, but which he does not always even recognize as such, is nothing other than what is encompassed in the simple, unequivocal but significant word “I.” This “I” we shall see belongs to the spirit, but it is related to the whole spirit in the same way that our outward form, our physiognomy, the movement of our limbs which is all orientated toward the ordinary body, are related to physiology, biology, to the science of the body. We can never arrive at a science of the body by feeling a little or very hungry, or by comparing one state of hunger with another, or by immersing ourselves in our hunger; neither can we arrive at a science of the spirit of the human being by immersing ourselves in our experience of feeling, thinking and imagination. We have to realize that so-called mysticism, which is supposed to be an immersion in one's own inner being, and which seeks to experience this inner being in a somewhat different way from our normal experience, that mysticism, this kind of inward immersion, cannot lead to a science of spirit any more than a differentiated experience of hunger, thirst and the need to breathe can lead to a science of the body. We have to start with our purely inner experience of hunger and thirst and proceed from there to the body, to the things that are arrived at through scientific method. Likewise we have to start with our purely mystical soul life and proceed from there to what lies spiritually outside this soul life. And this spiritual nature has naturally to be investigated according to scientific method in the strictest possible way, just as the life of the human body is investigated.

Now it is true that the methods of investigating spiritual life are in fact spiritual, and therefore are quite different from the means employed by natural science. And so my first task is to indicate the purpose and significance of the methods used by the science of spirit. It is not possible to embark upon the investigation of spiritual life without first having arrived at certain things in ordinary, everyday soul life. Without having reached a certain point in our ordinary soul life, in which we follow the course of our own inner being, we are not able to train ourselves to be a scientist of spirit. As long as we are satisfied with our ordinary, everyday soul life, as long as we derive full satisfaction from mystical experience and revel in it in order to immerse ourselves in our soul life, we shall never be able to train ourselves as real scientists of spirit. The preliminary qualification for the science of spirit is that in a particular respect we feel the insufficiency of our ordinary soul life as a result of our own experience of it.

I have pointed out in earlier lectures that it is particularly a study of the so-called border areas of science that can help us to acquire this feeling. In dealing with this subject I am fond of citing a really significant question which arises in connection with these border areas, and which the eminent scientist, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, came upon as he was struggling to clarify his own outlook. He came to ask—and you can find this in his beautiful treatise, Die Traumphantasie—what is the real connection between the soul and the bodily nature? And here he lighted upon a real question relating to the border-area of human knowledge. Vischer says: it is quite certain that the soul nature cannot be in the bodily nature, but it is also just as certain that it cannot be sought outside the body.—Hence he arrives at a complete contradiction. Such contradictions often arise where we do not simply consider knowledge as concerning outward, tangible facts alone, but where we really have to struggle inwardly to acquire our knowledge. Those who know what it is to have to struggle for knowledge speak of hundreds of such border-points occurring in knowledge. It is only a superficial mind which, when faced with such questions, is content to say that human cognition can go only a certain distance and no further. In contenting ourselves with this information, we are blocking our own way to a real science of spirit. For here we are not concerned with evolving all sorts of logical thoughts about such questions, but with steeping our wrestling souls in them and really experiencing them, and this means giving up the logical approach where it can no longer be applied. We have to get to the heart of what for normal human cognition is a contradiction in such a border-area, and feel the full weight of it on our souls.

If we do not simply regard these questions as comfortable cushions upon which to rest and proceed no further, but if on the contrary we really seek to experience them, then we find that it is just what lives and moves in such a living contradiction that kindles our inner soul life in a way that does not happen in normal life, that it is at just such a point as this that our inner soul life can reach a stage beyond its normal experience. In order not to become lost when we reach such a point in the experience of a border-area, we have to be able to grasp inwardly how in certain moments of his life the human being is unable to get beyond himself, but yet is able to point to something beyond himself. What is needed is that a particular inner feeling is developed which can be the result of living at such border-points of knowledge. This feeling can be characterized in the following words. It can be characterized very easily, for the experience which this feeling brings is something that cuts deep down into the soul. If we experience the questions of the border-areas properly, we do not say that there are limits to human knowledge, but we say that we are unable to cross the threshold with all the things we have acquired through our thinking and research into the outer sense world. We can impose a certain resignation, a certain renunciation upon ourselves, we can learn at such points not to want to judge the super-sensible with what we have learned and experienced in the sense world.

It is here that the main obstacles lie for most people in entering upon the science of spirit. They see the limits of knowledge but they do not then have the courage to renounce or resign. They do not say that they cannot try to enter into the spiritual world with what they have learned and experienced in the sense world, but they try to penetrate beyond these limits, even if only in a negative sense, by using the kind of concepts and ideas acquired in studying the sense world. The one person does it by constructing all sorts of hypotheses about what could exist in the super-sensible, the other by rejecting the super-sensible completely on the basis of his study of the sense world; in other words, taking upon himself the capacity to make judgments about the super-sensible with the concepts he has acquired from the sense world. Those also have not understood the experience of the border-areas of knowledge who, like materialists, monists and the like, begin to decide that nothing exists beyond the sense world on the basis of the ideas and concepts acquired through the life of the senses.

This is the point where something quite special must arise within human soul life, where what I have just characterized, this renunciation of the concepts acquired through living in the sense-world, where we do not just wish to make a statement or bring something intellectual and logical to expression, but that this renunciation becomes an inner intellectual virtue, something that—if I may be excused the phrase—cuts into human soul life, so that at certain points we really acquire a subtle feeling that we should not proceed further with what we have learned in the sense-world. For if this renunciation is not just a logical admission or an intellectual conclusion, but an inner virtue, then this virtue arising out of the renunciation radiates toward the inner life of the soul, and then what we have renounced outwardly is taken up into the inner life of the soul. The renunciation makes us fit for undertaking in course of time the two spiritual functions necessary to penetrate from the sphere of the soul in human experience into the spiritual world. For this two inner functions are necessary, but which, as you can see from my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, involve many individual functions and exercises, which are contained in these two main aims, for which there are two main functions. The first is that we achieve real self observation; the second consists in striving to experience the soul-spirit sphere that is no longer dependent on the bodily nature, but proceeds purely in the spirit. However paradoxical it may appear to present-day humanity, it must nevertheless be said that this second function consists in the human being forming his soul-spirit life in such a way that when he investigates the spirit, his soul-spirit experience is no longer in the body, but outside it. This is no doubt something that appears quite ridiculous to those who think they keep firmly within the province of the scientific outlook. But the science of spirit will bring home to people that many of our ideas will have to be changed, even into the opposite of what we are accustomed to, just as the Copernican outlook meant a complete reversal in the way people thought about the relationship of the planets to the sun.

What is normally called self-observation, an introversion of the soul, is not what is meant by true self-observation by the science of spirit. It is true that one can start from this brooding in oneself in order to find the way one has to go toward true self-observation, but real self-observation has to be taken in hand much more seriously and much more energetically. For it includes something which even earnest psychologists maintain is impossible. I have already pointed out in earlier lectures that when philosophers speak about the human soul they find it characteristic that in certain respects the life of the soul is not able to observe itself. They point out that if we have learned a poem by heart and then wish to recite it, but at the same time observing ourselves as we recite, we begin to falter and interrupt ourselves. It is not possible to carry out something and at the same time stand by and observe ourselves. This is cited as being something characteristic of the human soul, that it cannot do this. Now it must be said that those who find that this is in fact so, that it is impossible, will not get anywhere with the science of spirit, because this “impossibility” is just what the scientist of spirit has to achieve. The ability or capacity which is brought to our notice in normal life when we observe ourselves reciting and make ourselves falter, this ability has to be acquired by the scientist of spirit. We have to be able to split our soul-life wide open so that we can observe scientifically what we ourselves do. It is not all that important to learn a poem to achieve this, although this is one way of doing it, providing we do the necessary practice, and it is also good preparation for the real exercise of self- observation if we do it. It is a form of preparation to achieve reciting a poem with all its shades of feeling sufficiently automatically—if I may use such a crude expression—that we do not interrupt ourselves when we observe ourselves while reciting. The important thing, however, is not to concentrate on the outer aspects, but to apply such activity to the life of the soul itself. This means that we have to observe how one thought follows another, our thinking and imaginative life, so that at the same time we can allow the thought processes to proceed while on the other hand we can observe them in full consciousness. It would lead too far now to describe how this is done, but you can read about it in my books, Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment, in Riddles of Man, and similar books. It is absolutely possible to achieve real self-observation in this way. It is not then a mere intellectual process, but it is something real, for it is a first beginning of the emergence of the spirit- nature out of the soul-nature. The experience of the soul is observed by the spirit which has really tried to separate itself from the soul-nature. But this is only one aspect of what can be observed.

Now it is necessary to add that renouncing entering the super-sensible with the concepts and according to the laws taken from the sense world becomes a virtue and permeates the entire life of the soul, and when this has happened it not only produces the kind of modesty we are used to from normal life, but it produces an inward, intellectual modesty and humility which make us suited in the first place to exercising self-observation of the kind I have just been speaking about. We are not intimately organized enough, as it were, to be able to carry out such self-observation until we have radiated this intellectual virtue over our own souls.

But, on the other hand, something else is necessary. What then is attained when we achieve such self-observation? What is achieved when self-observation is practiced is that what normally disturbs the human being when he carries out a soul function is taken in hand, and our will is strengthened and driven out of the sphere of the soul into the sphere of the spirit. Then there is something further that has to be striven for: the will itself has to take on a new direction, has to acquire a new mode of activity in the soul. This can happen only if the human being does not employ the will as he normally does in ordinary life in carrying out outward functions, but if he employs it in carrying out inner functions. In living in his sense perception and in the ideas and images derived from these perceptions, the human being is accustomed in the way and sequence in which his thoughts are constructed to being led by the sense world. He allows one thought to follow another because he first experiences one event in the sense world, then a second one, and so on.

The human being allows his thoughts to follow the sequence of outer events and in ordinary life he hardly ever gets used to leading his will into his thought life, into the inner processes of his soul, which are to be perceived just by this true self-observation. But this he has to do if he is to become a scientist of spirit. He has to try—for a long time, energetically and patiently—to lead his will into his thinking and power of imagination. Again and again he has to try to carry out a process of the soul which in an objective and genuine sense can be called meditating, an inner reflection, though not a dreamy, mystical reflection, but one which represents a real process in the inner life, so that the will is really led into the thinking. Whereas we are normally accustomed to arranging our ideas according to outer events, we endeavor in moments set aside for the purpose, to formulate ideas whose sequence is determined solely by the inner will working according to a much greater view of life. We guide the will into our life of images and ideas. In this way we come to recognize what sort of relationship can exist between the inner will of man and his life of images and ideas. We do not become acquainted with this at all in our normal consciousness. In order to make this point perfectly clear, I would like to give the following illustration. Imagine a person living in a semi-sleeping state in dreams. He knows full well that these dreams are pictures passing before his soul according to certain laws. These pictures surge to and fro. Because they appear, so far as normal life is concerned, as dream pictures, the human being cannot control them with his will. If in his semi-sleeping state he were able to pull himself together to such an extent that he could control the sequence of dream pictures, he would then more or less be in the position I have been talking about, where our own will controls the ideas and images we ourselves make.

But this is not the point that matters ultimately. Everything we have discussed so far is only a preparatory exercise. For we naturally do not arrive at anything real only by the inner will controlling the sequence of ideas, which we know are not remembered, but arise out of the body. We do not arrive at anything special by piecing together ideas we have made, and can survey. But we do attain something when we set to work on the exercises with the mood which makes the renunciation into an intellectual virtue. Then we gradually notice something quite special in the life of the soul. And I may be allowed to say that what I have to say here about the science of spirit, by means of which we can really penetrate into spiritual spheres and which should be imagined as already having attained a certain development, and which also empowers one to say something about the spiritual world, that it should not be thought that it is like maintaining that natural science has its strict method which takes years to learn, and now the science of spirit comes along and talks about such inner ideas and images. This is not the case. Those who have acquainted themselves with biology and physiology, and know about their scientific methods and have then taken up the science of spirit know that however difficult it may be and that however much patience is demanded over the years by scientific method, significant results can be experienced in the science of spirit only if even more patience and even more work, even when this work is purely spiritual, are employed. Years of inner work are necessary to achieve anything of any consequence that can penetrate into the spiritual world, work which has been characterized as the leading of the will into our thought life by means of the inner functions or exercises which you can find in the above-mentioned books. We only have to know the one and the other to realize that the seriousness of the one is not inferior to the seriousness of the other. But what is important is not that we do the exercises, but that we achieve what we are able to achieve by means of the mood of renunciation. And we gradually notice that it is not our will alone, not the will which we have led into our thinking and imagination, that lives in what happens in our souls, but something else lives in them.

In our observation of the outer world we see how one event follows another, how one object is related to another, and how the sequence of our ideas follows what we see, follows the thread of outer events. Now we discover what it is that permits one idea to arise out of another, what it is that ensures that we do not add just any soul experience to another, but order such experiences according to an inner process. We discover a continual current in the life of the soul. Just as outer sense-nature is inner physical nature, so spiritual nature lives in the life of the soul. Whoever believes that we can still act arbitrarily or out of prejudice does not know this inner necessity. It is just as much a necessity as is necessity in ordinary life, and it fashions an inner, spiritual experience just as our ordinary experience comes to us by necessity according to the course of events in the physical world.

One who has had to do with the science of spirit for decades may well be allowed to speak of his experience, and this is, that this experience reveals what it is like through its own nature, its own character; arbitrariness ceases, and it is the spirit that orders the sequence of soul experiences. This comes to light when we set out to penetrate a particular sphere of the spiritual world with assumptions, acquired according to our images of the sense world, that spiritual beings or processes have to behave in a particular way. In countless cases—and this is so significant, so incisive for a true scientist of spirit—we experience that things turn out to be quite different from what we had expected, having formed a judgment according to the standards of the outer sense world. It transpires that on this path once we have grasped the inward spiritual necessity, we achieve results that cannot in any way be imagined on the basis of what we know from the sense world, because as far as the sense world is concerned they are quite contradictory. In experiencing this, which can in no way be compared to anything in the sense world, we know what it means to say that the spirit, which we have discovered, orders the sequence of our soul experiences just as our ideas which we formulate about the outer sense world are ordered according to the physical sequence of events.

And these two things come together: what we have acquired in inner strength by means of true self-observation, and what we have acquired of the objective course of the spirit, which is like the course of the outer sense-world. These come together and lead the human soul into a region of the spirit to which it belongs with its spiritual organs, just as the ordinary scientist is led into the bodily organization when he proceeds from hunger to non-physical processes in the body. When we use the soul as the starting point for investigating the spirit, certain phenomena of human soul life take on a new aspect. When the scientist of spirit is touched in this way by the real form, the real character, of the spirit, certain phenomena of human soul life become quite different. This happens, above all, when, by means of the spiritual nature he has acquired through self-observation, the human being has come to recognize the spiritual which gives direction to the soul life. It is only then that he is able to formulate a true idea, a true concept, of what we call the ego of the human being, which bestows as much of the spirit on the human soul as is bestowed of the body on normal human consciousness by the visible form and physiognomy. We cannot investigate the ego by philosophizing about it, but only by making the will into thinking and the thinking into an act of will. By means of self-observation the will becomes an instrument of thinking and the thinking an instrument of will. This is a 'change of spirit' rather like the change of matter which is sought and found in the physical world in our digestion. We then approach the ego not by philosophizing, speculation or hypotheses, but we first acquire a real spiritual observation of the ego and are only then in a position to formulate a correct view of it. This correct view of it proves to us that it is impossible to achieve such a view of the ego in ordinary life, in our ordinary consciousness. The picture which this ordinary consciousness (which is also prevalent in natural science) has of the ego, is that the latter gradually evolves as the body grows. A child does not appear to have an ego. As the body develops and gradually acquires its proper configuration the ego appears to wrestle its way out of the body. This view is held as a matter of course, and with the normal outlook of today it is not possible to arrive at any other view. And this is just what one has to achieve as a scientist of spirit—that one has to give the ordinary outlook its due in its own sphere and not become intolerant because one realizes that only one view is possible in the sphere in which materialism can operate.

In achieving spiritual observation and observation of the ego it is possible to see where the error of the ordinary outlook lies. It can be characterized in the following way. If we reflect about the relationship of the lungs to the air, we know that lungs and air belong together. But because in this case ordinary observation suffices to ascertain the true relationship, no one knowing things only from a superficial viewpoint would come to any other view than that air comes from outside, penetrates into the lungs, is then breathed out of the lungs and returns to the atmosphere outside. Because this kind of observation suffices, no one could maintain that the lung itself creates the air, that the air which is breathed out somehow has its origin in the lung itself, that the lung produces air. Our ordinary observation gives us insight into the relationship of the lungs to the air. Likewise our higher, spiritual observation gives us insight into the human ego. When we can use this observation which I have described, we know that the human ego is no more connected to the bodily nature, that is, to everything we have inherited from our father and mother, than the air which comes from outside has to do with the lungs. We get to know the ego as it really is and we know that in taking over what is inherited at birth or conception, in a sense it inhales out of the spiritual world. As a mass of air that at a particular moment is in our lungs, has flowed in from outside, so the ego flows out of the spiritual world into the bodily nature, out of the world in which it existed before the body could even be thought of in terms of conception and birth. Likewise, when the human being goes through the gate of death it flows out again, just as air which has been used up by the body flows out again from the lungs. We get to know the connection of the ego to a spiritual world that is independent of the world of the human body, just as in physics we learn about the connection of air to a greater mass of air which is independent of the human lung. This is how we rise to real knowledge of the ego, and it is the first thing we come to know about the nature of the ego. From this point we learn more and more by intensifying our spiritual observation by means of the methods described in the above-mentioned books. We learn about the ego as something independent of the life of the body in the same way that we learn about the body by using hunger and thirst as our starting points for investigating the chemical and physical processes of the body with physical methods. Only we discover the spiritual, which gives us our first view of the ego, as a state where the ego is embedded in spiritual beings. In order to know the physical body in all its aspects, we divide it into its various members. In a similar way we have to link the ego to other spiritual beings, which can be observed by spiritual observation with the methods I have described. The ego is linked to them and we find a complete ego-organism. This then extends beyond the individual life of the body.

Starting from the ego, from the part of our soul life that is directed toward the ego, we find that it is embedded in a spiritual life that exists before birth and continues after the gate of death is passed through. In the spiritual world we find a soul-spirit world that in the first instance is independent of the physical world. The ego belongs to this soul- spirit world. The first entities that we find there are spirit- soul beings with whom the ego of man is connected, beings that are human souls before or after death, with whom the human being is himself connected, and also other beings. When we observe the sense world we find a kingdom below man, the animal kingdom. In the soul-spirit world we find first of all a sphere to which the human ego belongs, which it fits into organically, where it performs its transformation of spirit, its spiritual digestion—a spirit-soul sphere which in the first instance is of a purely spirit-soul nature. Then we find a sphere ranking above this one, just as the animal kingdom ranks above the plant kingdom, and it ranks higher because in these higher spheres beings are to be found which are not only connected to us in our soul and spirit nature, in our inner life, but which are still more powerful because they bring about the harmony existing between the spirit-soul and the physical-bodily nature. For our spirit- soul nature has to be brought into relationship with our physical-bodily nature. This relationship is brought about by higher spiritual beings than we first meet.

Having made a start with spiritual investigation, we should not hesitate to speak about these real, concrete, spirit- soul beings that we really discover. The spiritual regions are discovered in which the ego performs its transformation of spirit, just as the physical kingdoms are discovered when we direct our attention to the animals, plants and minerals. And we discover further where lies the mystery of the soul entering and leaving the body. For we come to know how the relationship of the ego to the body of the human being works.

Here, it is true, we are entering a sphere which is quite remote from the present-day outlook, but which in future will have to become more and more a part of this outlook. If we observe the ego in this way we find it is related with the spirit-soul beings of the higher spiritual spheres, which range above the purely natural spheres. But in the transformation of spirit, which is analogous to the transformation of matter in digestion, the ego undergoes a certain process. To begin with, it can only be associated with spirit- soul beings. This is the case before birth and after death, where it has a purely spiritual being for its organization and this is linked to the rest of the spirit world. As the ego proceeds through the spirit world, as it develops in the spirit world, it increasingly acquires a self-orientation and becomes gradually separated from the spirit world. The picture we have of the ego from the science of spirit is that long before birth or after death it has a special connection to many, many spiritual beings. Then as its development proceeds, it separates itself off and becomes in a sense dependent upon itself. It is in undergoing this separation and limitation that it evolves the power of attraction toward the bodily nature. This power of attraction impels it to unite itself—as the air unites itself to the lungs—with the bodily nature that arises in the course of human generations as a result of heredity. The ego enters into this when it comes from the spirit world.

Thus we gain a true view of the eternal working within the bodily nature of man, within the human being as a whole, not by philosophical speculation, but by laying bare this eternal, by entering into the eternal ourselves with our souls. This is the way spiritual observation works. We must be quite sure to realize that everything I have described—the striving for self-observation, the striving to guide the will into our thought and imaginative life, the striving to attain the transformation of spirit—that all this is really only a preparation. Everything else has to be waited for. Just as we have to wait for what the sense world speaks to us when it approaches the soul from outside, so we have to wait for what the spirit-world speaks to us. Self-observation, the guidance of the will into the thought and imaginative life, these have to be striven for in order to prepare the soul to experience the spirit. Spiritual life then begins, but it has to penetrate toward the sphere of the soul and of the spirit.

Thus I have outlined the ways which lead us to see our real soul life in thinking, feeling and willing as an expression of the spiritual, just as hunger, thirst and the need to breathe are an expression in the soul of what lives in the body. This then leads to the differentiation of the eternal-spiritual from the soul nature.

Tomorrow we shall have to describe how something of the eternal in the human being finds its way into ordinary consciousness as a revelation of the unconscious. My intention today was to show how we rise from the sphere of the soul to the spirit. This description, which is a description of knowledge gained by the science of spirit, appears, it is true, to be paradoxical to the normally accepted concepts of today. But you will perhaps have seen that the science of spirit takes its science just as seriously as does natural science. Natural science leads to the perishable and transitory, the science of spirit leads to the eternal, to the imperishable, without which the perishable can[not], in fact, be explained. Thus we can say that from the vantage point of the science of spirit we are able to have an overall view of what is portrayed in natural science. It is only then that we can really appreciate the value of natural science, and are then in a position to judge it. If we get no further than natural science we arrive at the judgment or belief that a stringent science is only possible within the sense world, that it cannot rise to the eternal. If we take up the science of spirit, we know why the natural scientist has to say this if he does not get beyond the position of natural science. But by developing our normal consciousness, by laying bare the spiritual forces slumbering in the soul, we recognize that man can penetrate into the eternal of his own being, into what is really immortal in himself, for this immortal part of him, in fact, makes its own existence known itself. The red color of the rose does not have to be proved. The spirit in us that goes through birth and death also testifies to its own existence when we are able to observe it.

Anyone basing his observation on the science of spirit has an overall view of natural science as well, and he also gives the latter its due. He does not do what those who follow only natural science do, who—consciously or unconsciously—undo what the science of spirit does and wish to take the ground away from under its feet. We may well say that the scientist of spirit has nothing to be afraid of. He need not fear the objections which come from various quarters, for he knows what these objections are worth, and can also recognize why they have to be made. He is quite justified in thinking that he does not need to try to prevent someone from recognizing the methods and progress of natural science. On the contrary. The scientist of spirit is able to say to someone wishing to go into natural science: Go your way to natural science and if you do not only look at it with the eyes of the natural scientific outlook, but with the eyes of the spiritual way of investigation, you will not only find no contradiction between natural science and the science of spirit, but you will also find everywhere in natural science the confirmation and revelation of what the science of spirit says. And we should not believe that the scientist of spirit has any wish to prevent those whom he addresses from following any particular religious confession. It is the greatest misunderstanding of all to believe that we wish to set up any sort of religious gulf between a religious approach and the science of spirit. Dr. Rittelmeyer has shown quite clearly in an admirable article in Christliche Welt how in a quite objective way the science of spirit can be a foundation for religious life, that it does not take anyone away from true religious life, but, on the contrary, leads them toward it.

The science of spirit does not need to keep people away from religious life. Just as it can say: go to natural science in order to realize what the science of spirit is, so it can also say: go to religion, come to know religion, experience religion, and you will find that what the science of spirit is able to give to the soul gives religious life its foundation and strengthens it.

Go out into life itself and you will find that the concepts given in the science of spirit do not deaden you to life or make you unfit for life, but that they make the spirit mobile, agile, and place the human being into life, ready for action. Practical life, too, will be a confirmation and proof of what the science of spirit is able to give to the human being.

Because natural science has to keep to its own course, has to direct its attention solely to nature and may not mix nature with anything of soul and spirit, it is imperative for the science of spirit to find its place alongside it as equally justified. The science of spirit must penetrate from the soul to the spirit, just as natural science has to penetrate from the soul to the physical body. The time will then come when the real essence, the real basic concept of the science of spirit, will be understood, when the intentions of the scientists—to take the ground away from the science of spirit—will be seen in their true light. Forty or fifty years ago Dubois-Reymond was able to say: “Science ends where the super-sensible begins.” In the future this saying will be confronted by another arising out of the spiritual scientific view: What was really happening when natural science wanted to formulate a system of thought, a view of the world that is super-sensible, when it restricted itself to nature above? In a sense one could see that there is something that surrounds the human being in his existence and in which he has his roots, that comes from a particular origin. One saw it rooted in the spirit, but could not penetrate into this spirit.

The science of spirit shows how we can penetrate into spiritual life. The kind of position which natural science has occupied regarding the spirit—if I may use the comparison—is rather as if one were to see a tree which has its roots in the ground. The tree cannot be seen entirely, for the roots are in the ground. The tree is then dug up in order to see it in its entirety, for nothing of the tree may remain hidden. The tree will dry up and will no longer be able to flourish.—This is what has been done by the scientific outlook. It has dug up the being of man out of its foundations in order to acquire an overall view. The resulting view is then like the tree that has been taken out of the ground. The tree has to wither away, and the life that arises out of this view of the world has to wither away. Once this is realized, the way to the science of spirit will be found.

In order to acquire an overall view, the being of man has been deprived of its roots. For the sake of life, for the sake of real life, the human being will once again be immersed in what is popularly called the unconscious, but which, when it is revealed in the sphere of consciousness, can be raised into the sphere of real knowledge of the super-sensible. Then the time will come when the view will be firmly implanted in the human mind that the eternal core of man's being is rooted in the spirit and that if we want to get to know the human being in his entirety we have to penetrate to the spirit. Then it will no longer be said, as Dubois-Reymond did, that science cannot find the super-sensible, not even in its simplest form of manifestation, that this is where science stops, but the science of the future will say that all science that is not rooted in the super-sensible will not be in a position to explain existence, will not be able to lead us into the life of existence, but will only be able to kill existence. It will not be said that science ends where supra-naturalism, the super-sensible, begins, but, the life of science ends where the human being no longer takes his stand in the super-sensible, and the death of science enters where the super-sensible is abandoned.

Dear attendees! The theme of this evening's lecture was not chosen with the intention of linking the observations of spiritual science to a well-known historical phenomenon – as it is done in many other fields – and thus to have the opportunity to speak about spiritual science with regard to a well-known phenomenon. Rather, this theme has arisen from the fact that, in the light of spiritual observation of our time, certain aspects of the artistic phenomenon of Raphael can indeed present themselves to the modern spiritual researcher, and these aspects virtually demand a spiritual-scientific way of looking at things, especially in the case of this subject. This can happen to you, as it has to me, when you observe a phenomenon such as that which can be observed in the literary and artistic activity of Herman Grimm. Herman Grimm, the brilliant art historian, is known to have written a “Life of Michelangelo,” which, however much it may be outdated in details today, makes a great impression on every receptive soul through the breadth of its points of view and the coherence of its approach.

Herman Grimm then also made an attempt – he himself characterizes it only as an attempt – to write a 'Life of Raphael'. With this 'Life of Raphael', Herman Grimm has now experienced something quite peculiar, and what happened to him, so to speak, will be able to make a great impression on those who, through an ever-deepening immersion in Herman Grimm's way of presenting and looking at things, recognizes that, despite some justified criticism that can be made of him, he has precisely what one can call a sense of shared experience with his observed subject in all its particulars, a struggle to gain the insights and opinions to which he advances. Well, he made the attempt – in the 1860s – to write about the life of Raphael; and at the end of his life, he admits that the attempt was not enough for him and that he repeatedly started to approach this task in a different way. We have an interesting fragment from Grimm's estate, “Raphael as a World Power,” in which he once again approached this task shortly before his death and in which he confesses that nothing he has written before can satisfy him. He died while working on the final version of his views on Raphael. But it is still interesting to observe how such an important mind repeatedly approaches this task, how he undertakes the matter again in the twilight of his life and how he struggles to understand Raphael. You can see that from the fragment.

His struggle to understand Raphael is particularly interesting, because he describes the world-famous painting 'The Marriage of the Virgin', which is in Milan, in an attempt to understand it. He needs a significant, longer introduction, and this longer introduction is actually a piece of world history. It is a reflection on the nature and essence of Roman culture, a reflection on the impact of the Christ impulse on this Roman culture, a reflection on the further development of this Christ impulse within European spiritual culture, and then follows a further reflection on the renewed impact of Greek culture on the Roman spiritual culture of Raphael's time. And in this, Herman Grimm maintains that it is necessary to consider all this in order to understand this painting by Raphael, 'The Marriage of the Virgin', because what is expressed in this painting appears to him so comprehensive, so arising out of the entire development of the human spirit, so that everything that has been felt, thought and seen within the European spiritual life since the impact of the Christ impulse until the creation of this picture appears to him as mysteriously embedded in Raphael's creation. The title of this Raphael fragment, as given by Herman Grimm, was also derived from feelings that arise from such an opinion. It means – one might be tempted to find it strange – “Raphael as world power”, because Herman Grimm actually feels inclined to place Raphael in all the causes, effects, and connections of all modern spiritual life in order to understand him. Anyone who has an intuitive sense of how certain all-embracing ideas arise in a human soul when contemplating any object or any entity will be able to understand what took place in Herman Grimm's soul when he wrote the words in this, his last Raphael fragment:

Raphael is a citizen of world history. Like one of the four rivers, he is, who, according to the beliefs of the ancient world, came from paradise.

There may be many scholarly discussions about the significance of Raphael, but one would like to say: Compared to all of them, it seems to be something tremendously significant that a contemplative human soul has been moved to make such statements about this spirit.

If you let something like this sink in, so to speak purely from the intellectual life of our time, which in Herman Grimm is not yet strongly influenced by what we today call [in our circles] spiritual science, you have to recognize the urge to a deeper contemplation of Raphael – the urge to look at him in such a way that what he has created for the intellectual eye grows out of the continuous stream of human development. And indeed, to anyone who delves into Raphael's soul with an open mind, it appears – especially in view of a certain kind of isolation from everything around him – as a kind of revelation, because, try as one might, one cannot succeed in immediately in the environment in which Raphael lived, as reasons for explaining how it comes about that this extraordinary phenomenon enters into the spiritual path of humanity and presents to humanity precisely that which has had such a profound and powerful effect on the individual devoted spirits. I would like to note from the outset that, naturally, it is not possible to go into details in the course of this lecture, because individual pictures can only be fruitfully discussed if one is able to show reproductions. [Rather, the aim is to use such presuppositions, as they have just been given and which arise from our present spiritual life, to lead in a very natural way to a consideration of Raphael from the point of view of spiritual science.]

In a sense, Raphael seems comprehensible to us only if we take him as a very young child, somehow out of his environment. He was born, as is well known, in Urbino in 1483. The first impressions of his soul come from the palace building of Urbino, which was an extraordinary event for that time and through which the soul of the very young Raphael was able to absorb what was expressed not only in architectural forms, but also in all artistic decoration and the work associated with this palace building. These were impressions that can be said to be capable of shaping the soul through themselves. But then we see Raphael transferred to Perugia, and when we look at life in Perugia at the time when Raphael was an apprentice painter there, the peculiar, isolated nature of Raphael's soul immediately becomes apparent to us. We see, when we follow life in Perugia, how it is filled with events that are in part repulsive to our modern consciousness. Strife between the individual classes rages among the passionate people of Perugia, and there is no doubt that Raphael was able to see there what was taking place in the way of stirring hatred and antagonism in human nature.

If we start from there and take a look at what Raphael's art gave in its serenity, which already meets us in the “Marriage of the Virgin”, created in the twenty-first year of his life, then we find that it is justified to say: this Raphael appears to us as a personality as if he were only externally present in this whole life of touched it with the hem of his garment, and actually only looked at it in reference to something which I would not describe in the abstract, but rather in the concrete, by directing the thoughts to a historian of the time, who quite vividly describes a scene that took place in Perugia in the nineties of the fifteenth century. There we really become witnesses, through the vividness of the description, of how the leader of an exiled family from the neighborhood invades Perugia; we are told how this leader of an exiled family, Astorre Baglione, enters the city on horseback and acts like a Saint George, but at the same time slaughters everything that comes his way. We feel from the description of the chronicler Matarazzo how something grand, powerful, but uncomfortably cruel lay in the scene. When we let Raphael's painting, “Saint George,” take effect on us in its entire composition, it seems as if Raphael had known this scene from reality, but as if all of the cruel background of reality had not existed for his eyes, as if he had lifted the flower from this cruel background and elevated it to a creation of pure spiritual beauty and greatness. It is precisely in the way in which it enters into the whole way of creating Raphael, the way in which it flows into his soul, that one sees how peculiarly isolated this soul is from its surroundings, and how these surroundings only touch it, but how he can only produce what he takes from them from his own soul. Thus this soul appears [to the observer] as a revelation, as something that is placed in this environment and cannot be explained from within it. When we take a look at the pictures of Raphael's teacher in Perugia, the Perugino, we see how, despite the greatness of the Perugino, these pictures show us that something is being presented to us in the individual holy persons of the Christian view that is a reproduction of what a person can absorb when Christianity lives all around him. We see the individual figures of Christian legend juxtaposed as only someone who, though a great painter, only knows things from the outside can do. As these paintings appear to us, we feel the path from Christian tradition, from what was alive in the Christianity of the time, to Perugino's canvas everywhere. Then we follow the creations of his student Raphael. There the matter appears different to us: we look at a soul that brings everything that the other, Perugino, presents to life from within. Everywhere we see Raphael's soul itself, a spirit that has not absorbed Christianity as it lived in its environment at the time, but we see a spirit to which all the origins of Christian impulses are linked. It is perhaps no exaggeration to use the following expression: it is as if Christianity itself conjured up its soul on a canvas painted by Raphael.

And then we follow him further as he arrives in Florence in 1504 and in Rome in 1508. In Florence, he arrives at a time when the momentous wave of spiritual renewal, I might say, had just passed over Florence, which is linked to the name of Savonarola. We encounter an atmosphere that is tired of [these struggles] - the drama of Savonarola has taken place, and many of its repercussions are still present. It is interesting to juxtapose these two figures: Savonarola and Raphael. Both present the impulses of Christianity to their contemporaries [in their own way]; they present them in such a way that we perceive the fire of an inner enthusiasm everywhere, but [in Savonarola's case] also an enormous fanaticism that leads to the impossibility of living out the impulses in the face of one's contemporaries. When we look at Savonarola, it is as if a person were standing before us who, in all phases of his soul, in the best that his soul can feel and sense, was seized by the greatness and power of Christianity, a person who now radiates what has had a very elementary and direct effect on his soul, and who then stands up for what has become so great in his soul itself. And now to Raphael: He presents himself in very strange contrast to a figure like Savonarola. We see, when we look at Raphael's paintings, that Christian impulses are expressed in a, one might say, superhuman greatness. We see these Christian impulses brought to soulful life in many details. We really see Christianity shining through in these paintings. But at the same time, we feel and sense that a soul that had only just been directly touched by the Christianity in the world around it could not have attained the same calmness, naturalness, and serenity as Raphael's soul.

While with Savonarola one has the feeling everywhere that his soul is only appropriating the greatness of Christianity during his lifetime, with Raphael one has the feeling that his soul is already born as if it were entering the world with the — with such impulses that, by passing from early childhood into the whole human being, take hold of the whole human being and, through this development, can reach heights that these ideas and forms never reach in a human being when they first appear in an elementary, direct way. And if we are not pedantic, if we have a certain feeling for the real life of a human soul, we will no longer be able to doubt that a soul like Raphael's soul, as a soul, as a spiritual being, brings with it from the supersensible worlds from the outset everything that could never live itself out if it had to first flow through the whole of personal education and development. Of course, such things cannot be proven in one evening; the supersensible truths cannot be proven - as I discussed the day before yesterday - in the same way as the external truths of natural science; but they can be proven nonetheless, because they show themselves in their effects. One must first find the way to recognize from the effects what is present as the cause behind them. Then we follow Raphael back to Rome, where he encounters an atmosphere that is strangely related to Christianity. Pope Julius II becomes his patron. Raphael paints the greatest pictures on his behalf, which many people believe are among the greatest pictures in human painting; they capture the human soul and spirit in the very depths. And he paints them in such a way that the entire spirit of Christianity lives in them, and lives in them in a completely natural way. He paints – it could not be any different – to the satisfaction of the Pope. But what kind of Pope was this Julius? He was a Pope who, according to today's somewhat different concepts, perhaps cannot really be called a Christian at all. Machiavelli, who was not particularly moral, said that he was a devilish character, a man who was primarily concerned with power and external position – with fame, perhaps not for himself personally, but for the greatness and power of the church. He was a personality who was not choosy about the means he used to achieve his ends, who was not at all Christian when it came to acquiring power, fame and greatness. That is Raphael's patron. And in other respects, too, if we consider the Rome of Raphael's time, it stands in quite a remarkable contrast to him. But it is precisely from this contrast that something as powerful as what is presented to our eyes even today in the two pictures “The School of Athens” and “Disputa” arises, even though these pictures have often been painted over. In them, a magnificent pictorial representation of the course of human development presents itself to us, a pictorial representation that is steeped in the spirit of Christian impulses.

If we look at the one painting, the so-called “School of Athens” – it is not my view that this designation is justified, but it is the easiest way to communicate – and let it take effect on us, we see, perhaps without being fully lived in Raphael's consciousness, that it represents what the human soul can recognize when it turns its gaze to the external, sensual reality and makes use of the intellect that is tied to the human brain, to the human personality. This is presented to us in a wonderful way in all its details. If we turn our gaze to the right group in the picture, we see how all kinds of things are determined and calculated astronomically, and then we feel: not only the usual calculations are being done, but great events in world history are being deduced from the movement of the stars – science is being unfolded in a cosmic sense. And if we then turn our gaze to the left, we see in the expressions of [the figures] connecting the right with the left, how what is read on the right from the star constellations is written down on the left, and if we could really get the books in front of our eyes, we could see how the secrets of the world are written on the left, which are then determined by sensory observation [on the right]. We see this, but Raphael need not have been aware of it; the tradition of the time lay in this, as in the deep mystery that constitutes the essence of [the rise of Christianity over Greece]. And whether we take the view of those who see Plato and Aristotle in the central figures, or whether we see an evangelist on the left-hand side, in both cases what is being discussed is perfectly understandable.

Then we turn to the other side of the “Camera della Segnatura” and find that magic has been poured over the whole picture, illustrating how the development has progressed from the contemplation of the sensual world by the human spirit to a deepening into the supernatural, the invisible. This immersion of the human soul in the supernatural reigns and weaves in the picture of the so-called “Disputa”. The symbolic arrangement of the stars, in connection with the scenes below, must show that something significant has happened in the course of human development, in that man has become inwardly focused through the impact of the Christian impulse on the spiritual development of humanity, which on the one hand signifies a deepening of the human soul, and on the other hand, through this inward deepening, leads to the realization, to the intuition of supersensible worlds. These can only be reached when the human soul educates itself and thereby acquires those powers through which it can sense or see the worlds that lie behind the [sensory] worlds.

It is not my intention to explain such images pedantically, for example by means of theories, but one must use words that are not just comments on images, but that are intended to suggest what one feels naturally. Otherwise, it could be as unappealing as the comments in travel guides, and one would not be interested at all in what the individual figures mean, but what is interesting is ] the artistic, the sensation that moves through the soul, and we are not placed directly on the horizon of human spiritual development by abstract reflection, not by abstract reason, but by sensation. We feel the impulse that lives and moves through the history of human development. And again, If we now disregard these images and look into Raphael's soul, we have to say that she lived in the midst of an environment that showed nothing of the intimacy and soulfulness that lies in these images, and [despite this] Raphael managed to conjure up the innermost impulses and the innermost forces of Christianity in the course of world history into these images.

This is the case with many of the other works we see, and if we then go on to what can still make the deepest impression on the viewer today, when we go on to that which is the culmination of Raphael's to the “Sistine Madonna”, if one lets this remarkable picture in Dresden take effect on oneself, then one comes to a very special understanding of this so self-evident Raphael soul, then one comes to the active spiritual Christ impulse. If, on the other hand, one stands purely intuitively before this “Sistine Madonna”, then one has the impression that something lifts one above the ordinary human. That is the first impression, but it is one that becomes ever stronger and more powerful; it lifts one up above ordinary human feeling. One becomes a participant in another world through one's soul, and if one then asks oneself, “Why is that so?” perhaps it is best to let the feelings of spiritual science enlighten one. How can these feelings of spiritual science arise?

Let us turn our gaze away from the point of view of spiritual science and look at the whole development of humanity. This puts us on the ground of a serious, comprehensive theory of development, but one that is very different from the materialistic one, which is today considered by so many to be an absolute gospel. This theory does follow phenomena back to a certain origin - tracing them back to these origins is justified for sensory perception. One arrives at material origins that show very simple forms and that, through slow perfection and development, have resulted in today's point of view. This theory of evolution is particularly proud of the fact that it understands man as a being that gradually rises from other beginnings of primitive living beings, to his present size, as he appears to us today as a physical human being. Some materialists see this as the very essence of the human being. Spiritual science also takes us back into the past, but when we turn our spiritual gaze back using methods described the day before yesterday, we do not arrive at other material life forms from which humans are thought to have developed, but we ultimately arrive at a spiritual beginning of development. We arrive at origins that are purely spiritual. And on the one hand we see matter itself emerging from the spirit, and on the other hand we see the spiritual developing into later spiritual forms in accordance with its original spiritual purpose.

If we look at the human being himself, at the whole human being, at the spiritual and soul aspects within the human being, and trace the development back, we come to an ancient and distant past in which the human being already appears; he is already present before the other beings that surround him today in the three kingdoms of nature have come into being. These prove to be a kind of descending side currents, so to speak, flowing away from the great line of development: man is the original, he is there first, but as a spiritual being, and as he develops further, he repels the other kingdoms of nature from his undercurrent, as it were. We can choose an image for this development. Let us assume that we have a liquid in a glass, mixed with something that can maintain itself purely. The finer part of the liquid remains at the top, the coarser part settles at the bottom. So we have the fine part at the top and the solid part at the bottom.

In spiritual science, we return to the origin in which man exists as a spiritual-soul being; he develops in his spiritual life into purer forms, which lie precisely in his later mission and which [compared to] the original form signify a finer development of his soul nature. In order for this abstract soul to emerge purely, he must separate the other natural kingdoms: These are there, as it were, to provide the basis for man's higher development. If we allow this thought to take effect in us, not in its conceptual form but as a feeling, if we transform it into feeling, then, when we turn our gaze to all that surrounds us in the physical realm of nature, we have the present us; but if we turn our gaze to what emerges from the human soul, we perceive something that we cannot understand - if we merely let our gaze wander over the external earthly nature and do not direct it upwards to something supermundane. We feel that the present humanity could only come into being within its earthly mission because it is the result of something that comes to us from other spheres, which is a higher humanity that has, as it were, descended to fill the earth with the present nature kingdoms. We feel that human nature tells us of its origin in spiritual heights. We feel how humanity is elevated when we, in our feelings, rise to what spiritual science can speak of.

If you disregard all theory and now stir within yourself the feeling that can arise when we sense the human being in his supersensible approach to his sensual mission, then we have - one must compare the feelings - the same feeling as when we visualize Raphael's “Madonna Sixtina”, in which we also encounter the image of Isis with Horus. And anyone who can really get into the unearthly origin of man can have similar feelings when he sees the “Sistine Madonna” floating in from the etheric spheres with the child Jesus, the exalted humanity, and when he can see the clouds as the foundation, the etheric foundation from which comes that which is the true, spiritual, supermaterial origin of man. It must be said, however, that such considerations need not have been present in Raphael's soul, but we have repeatedly emphasized that this human soul had a twofold nature, that something was going on in the upper regions of consciousness that the [lower] human did not need to know about, but which was no less real; and the impulses, the impulses of feeling and emotion, which worked as just described, alone make it possible to understand how precisely this image could have arisen from Raphael's soul.

I have tried to make all these observations for the reason that I would like to make understandable what appears to me to be in harmony with spiritual science in Raphael: we have before us in his soul, isolated from its surroundings, something that is predetermined from the outset, that is called to realize the spiritual impulses in their Christian nuances in a pictorial way. In the “Sistine Madonna,” Raphael rises in a certain way to a super-Christian point of view, to the point of view that goes beyond the historical, beyond the traditional Christian, in that he feels and artistically represents the spiritual-cosmic origin of the human being. Seen in this light, the soul of Raphael does not allow itself to be equated with that of another soul, such as that of Savonarola.

With Savonarola, we can show, so to speak, at every point in his development, how he connects with Christian ideas, how everything becomes and gushes forth; with Raphael, it seems self-evident that the Christian view is already given to him at his birth. We feel that the Christian impulses are connected with Raphael, but we do not feel anything else: we do not feel that which is connected with the soul of Raphael and which it particularly needed from its surroundings, and that was Greek culture. This Greek element is embedded in the spiritual development of humanity in a very special way. I have often pointed out that we spiritual scientists have to look at human development in such a way that, as we go further and further back into ancient times, we find human souls with different states of consciousness than they have today; everything is in development – the human soul especially! and when spiritual science is recognized in its true value, people will see how one-sided it is to look at evolution in a purely materialistic way, going back to human forms in which the soul would develop its consciousness in a more animal state. If you go back in spiritual science, you will find a completely different state of development, and today you may already be able to find truth in what spiritual research has to say about older states of the human soul from older spiritual products, myths and legends.

We are coming to understand that in primeval times, human souls were endowed with an original clairvoyance, a dream-like clairvoyance. What we today call our clear sensory perception, our sharply defined intellectual concepts, our self-awareness, was not present in the human soul in primeval times. For this to come about, the original clairvoyance had to fade away, to be subdued. This state cannot be compared to ordinary dreaming today, but rather to a dream-like life, which is organized in images in the manner of dream images, but which are nevertheless images of spiritual realities. In primeval times, the human soul was endowed with such a dream-like clairvoyance. This clairvoyance diminished, and now we stand in development where the old clairvoyance had to fade away in order to develop self-awareness and sharply contoured concepts of the mind.

When something is to develop to perfection, other things must recede. This law of balance governs all of nature, so that when we ascend to full self-awareness – in the distant future, humanity will once again associate a certain clairvoyance with it – we have, as it were, a descending line of human development from the original clairvoyance and now an ascent of sorts through [the development of] self-awareness, intellectual concepts and external scientific observation to clairvoyance. And what do we feel in the middle? We feel the Greek element – this Greek element, which is so remarkable precisely because on the one hand it signifies the conclusion of the ancient dream-like consciousness of clairvoyance and on the other hand the beginning of the consciousness of external objects. Therefore, we see this Greekness with its very special characteristics, which consist in the fact that the Greek experienced the spiritual much more directly, but not in the way that man in prehistoric times experienced it, seeing it, so to speak, externally, but in the way that the Greek felt his own personality interwoven with all external existence. He still felt himself in the cosmos, standing inside the outer world, and felt the laws that weave and live through the outer world in his own being.

It may seem hypothetical, but anyone who engages in spiritual science will find what I am saying to be true: when the Greeks created their sculptures, which have only come down to us in an imperfect form, they did not need models in our sense. When they depicted anything, especially the human form, they did not depict it in imitation of the external model, but from inner consciousness. He knew what forces are at work in space, and his consciousness of these forces was formed in such a way that he had an awareness of the inner forces from the form of space. And so he imprinted what he saw inwardly in the external material as a form from the inside out. Just as prehistoric man felt that images of space arose and was so connected in his soul to the entire cosmos that these images reflected reality, so the Greek was connected to the laws of the world, which he felt permeated the body. He created what he experienced, and in turn he created this in a sculptural work. If he wanted to depict Zeus, then he knew how Zeus's physiognomy was connected to those experiences that express themselves in external forms. He created what he experienced inwardly in the external material. We can look at Greek culture in this way; it is still a worldview in which a feeling is bound to an immediate human consciousness.

It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the genuine Greek and his relationship to nature and to the whole of existence, and a personality who, in essence, is separated from the impact of the Christ Impulse on humanity by only three or four hundred years, a personality such as, say, St. Augustine. Read any work by this Father of the Christian Church, who was also a great philosopher, and try to compare what Augustine gives through his innermost experience of the soul, through his inner feeling for the nature of the human soul, with everything that was given in Greece, be it philosophically or poetically. In the Greek spirit, we feel how it cannot detach itself from the external, how it is one with the external world, perceiving the course of the external world flowing into itself and experiencing itself as belonging to the external world. In Augustine, we see the gaze directed inward to the inner, soul world. This makes this inner creation appear in a form that is unthinkable for any creation of ancient Greece. It could not internalize itself because its greatness was still connected with the consciousness of the outside world. It was an enormous impact on the whole spiritual development of mankind, and one does not need to be on the ground of positive Christianity to see this enormous impact. One could even go so far as to say, paradoxically, that even someone who had never heard of Christ, when considering the Greeks and Augustine in their peculiarity, would have to say to themselves: something has happened in the ongoing development that has turned the external into the internal; and this internalization is the fundamental impulse of Christianity, growing out of the external and growing into the internal.

If we look at it this way and then look back at Raphael, we can say: What appears to be the basic nerve of Christianity lives in Raphael's soul as this soul passes into existence through birth. We see this in its development, if you approach the work without prejudice and do not want to read everything into this Raphael soul with a materialistic-historical sense. If we look at it impartially, it appears as if it has already brought with it, through birth, the Christian impulses that we have to describe as its very own. But now Raphael is born at that turning point of the whole spiritual development of mankind, placed in that time when that which was memory was to be reborn, reborn in a certain outer sense. And here we see a great law of development that can only be penetrated with the help of spiritual science. Usually, we imagine development as a simple succession of cause and effect. But things do not happen that way, because a close examination shows us that such a linear development is a fantasy. The real development proceeds in such a way that a certain current progresses from one point to another, and when it has arrived at a certain point, an old one is taken up again. The later connects with the earlier, which has not passed through a developmental current, but has been preserved in its original form. We have a falling back upon and a taking up of something that has remained at an original stage and that connects with something later.

Thus, in Raphael's work, we see that what, in his time, seemed to be a character of mere inwardness has once again become an external revelation. Just imagine how St. Francis of Assisi is depicted in the works of Giotto. We see how, even in painting, everything remains inward; it does not transition into form and color. We must go back to the inner event everywhere, and when we transition to the inner event in Giotto's work, the outer representation is the less interesting part. This is not the case with Raphael. Here, we never feel the need to look beyond what he reveals to us directly, beyond what is there, what stands before us in color and form; rather, in Raphael's work, everything interior has flowed into the exterior. For this, Raphael's soul, though born with the internalized impulse of Christianity, needed the assimilation of Greek culture. In Raphael, we now see how this earlier state of development is being revisited, even though it was fundamentally new to him. It is remarkable how, on the one hand, this Greek style rested in the bosom of the earth until Raphael's time, so that Raphael's contemporaries were the first to see again what came to the surface at that time [through the excavations], and how, on the other hand, Greek style was awakened again in Raphael, only now transformed into the inward, which had created Greek style in the external sculptural form. What the Greeks had achieved in the form of sculpture was not immediately suitable for Raphael; but what was incumbent on him was to bring the inner life to external expression. To do this, painting, which, unlike sculpture, can make the inner into the outer, had to adopt Greek forms again. It adopted them in particular from Raphael. It is well known to me that one could list many other names, but nowhere else does this phenomenon occur as characteristically as in Raphael. Thus, in Raphael, we see how he acquires Greek influence through the Christian impulse. If we consider his soul from this broader point of view, it appears to us as if it had brought with it all Christian impulses at birth, but not the Greek ones – these play in from the environment. From picture to picture, one can follow how Raphael, translated into painting, appropriates more and more Greek art.

Now, anyone who delves deeper into spiritual science – let it be a mere hypothesis for my sake – will see how such a hypothesis gradually offers certainty, though not in a convenient way. When we look at Raphael's soul from this perspective, we see that it already contains the Christian impulses at birth. It therefore appears as if Raphael's soul had already made a pact with these before birth. While we can see the direct impact of the Christian impulses in Savonarola [through his environment], it seems to us that Raphael's soul already contains these Christian impulses. Just as Savonarola appropriated the Christian impulses directly through the effect of his environment in his Savonarola existence, so Raphael's soul developed them in an earlier earthly existence in such a way that it could not appropriate the Greek impulses at the same time in this earlier existence. It comes from an existence in which it has appropriated the Christian impulses so that, after the soul has gone through a life between death and a new birth, these have become a matter of course for it, as we then encounter in Raphael's paintings. And what Greek culture has achieved is only acquired by this soul, which in its previous life on earth may have been “Greek-like”, in this later Raphael life. In the soul of a Raphael, we see how what we can intuitively place in an earlier life on earth and what in later lives on earth merges with what we already bring with us at birth. Whenever I have studied this, just as Herman Grimm repeatedly made a fresh start [to write about Raphael's life], the spiritual-scientific view was really drawn to this fact by itself. It is to be assumed that Herman Grimm would not have agreed with his last presentation either, even if he had completed it, because, you see, certain things that are connected with the spiritual life of humanity only begin to become clear when one takes into account the fact of repeated lives on earth. Such a merging of the Christian impulses with the Greek ones, as was the case with Raphael, can only be understood if one is able to call the explanation from repeated earthly lives to help. It may still be foreign to our contemporaries today, but I have often used the comparison [with what] Francesco Redi said. He said that it is wrong that animals can arise from river mud; living things can only come from living things. — And in the same way, spiritual and psychological things can only come from spiritual and psychological things. ]

[Today, you would be branded a heretic if you tried to point out that a human life cannot be explained only in terms of its immediate environment. If one examines these things more closely, one will realize that when something flashes up in a human soul that cannot be explained by its environment, this leads back to a previous earthly existence, to something that this soul acquired in a previous earthly existence and that, when the soul has passed through death and a new birth, takes on the form of the self-evident in its new earthly existence, as something connected with the being, as something belonging to it. Thus, the Christian impulses are naturally connected with Raphael's being, so connected that Raphael cannot be thought of without them.

[If one presupposes the spiritual-scientific realization that the human soul goes through repeated earthly lives, then it becomes understandable that what a person has acquired in an earlier earthly life becomes forces in a later earthly life. One experiences and observes how they enter the soul and go through the stages that a person goes through between death and rebirth, and there they become one with the soul. And when the person then enters a new existence, he works with these forces on his entire inner physical form and makes his body in such a way that what he creates in the next life on earth seems to emerge naturally from his being. It seems to me that there will certainly come a time in the development of humanity when people will realize, precisely through unbiased observation of the facts, that only the great phenomena can be understood from the law of repeated lives on earth. Then it will also be clear that it is not only necessary to look at the greatest phenomena, but that every single human life can be understood if one takes the view of repeated lives on earth.

But when one directs one's human gaze to these great phenomena, which are so intimately connected with human development, with all that is the innermost impulses of the progressing human spirit, then something emerges from this contemplation that strengthens the human soul, giving it inner support, inner confidence, inner strength for work, as has often been discussed here. It leads the human soul not only to know but also to feel the germ of a following earthly existence, just as we feel how the plant has gathered its strength and summarized it in the germ and thus becomes aware that a new plant will emerge from this germ in summer. The soul can have this awareness, this feeling of having incorporated everything, as a guarantee for a future earthly life. What is already in the germ in this earthly life is transformed by the mere knowledge of immortality into a feeling of the immortal human germ, into a feeling for what builds up the future life.

Once again, it was very strange to me that it was precisely Herman Grimm's approach to such things, which were just being discussed, that compelled me to read a certain passage at the beginning of his book about Raphael. He who regards Raphael from the standpoint of spiritual science will naturally come to regard repeated earthly lives as necessary if he wants to understand Raphael quite concretely. And from the realization of repeated earthly lives we draw that strength which gives us the insight for what we will encounter in the future. Truly, it is surprising when one feels this as the effect of science: When someone approaches a phenomenon like Raphael and never comes to terms with it, but nevertheless, in the face of Raphael's greatness, receives a feeling, not yet of the reality of coming earth lives, but that in the face of this fulfilled human life, he feels a kind of desire for a coming earth life. The certainty of repeated earthly lives can only arise through spiritual science, but when contemplating Raphael's life, Herman Grimm felt a sense of security in the face of eternity, which he expresses with the strange word:

I see developments in humanity that I will be denied the opportunity to partake in, but which appear to me to be so brilliantly beautiful that it would be well worth starting human existence all over again for their sake.

It is now highly remarkable that we can translate the desire that arises in Herman Grimm through the contemplation of Raphael's life into the contemplation of a reality.

And so we can summarize what was the subject of today's contemplation in an overview of our feelings: It seems natural that in the face of a personality like Raphael's, where one feels so certain that a single life on earth is not enough to understand it, that for someone who allows this personality to have a complete effect on them, the desire that spiritual science describes as reality arises – the vision of repeated lives on earth. And so, an unbiased spiritual-scientific consideration of such great human beings as Raphael may lead to people being led more and more to develop such habits of thought through the contemplation of these great human beings. These habits of thought may still be very much opposed to today's opinions, but they will most certainly become part of people's spiritual life. As surely as the contemplation has become established – living things can only come from living things – so surely will the contemplation become established: spiritual and soul things can only come from spiritual and soul things. And it is precisely the contemplation of human greatness that can sink into our soul that which leads to such [new] habits of thinking. Wanting to try to understand human greatness also brings forth in us the opinion, indeed the certainty, that the truths of which we convince ourselves through an ever-deepening immersion in things and in the spirit of things, even if they initially meet resistance after resistance, will ultimately find their way into human hearts. No matter how narrow the chinks through which the truth must squeeze to reach the hearts of men, truth will find the way even through the narrowest chink. Those who can only see the germ of spiritual science today can be inspired by this sentence, which has been so deeply confirmed by the spiritual development of mankind, for it is only a germ. But he can also, by looking at this germ, develop confidence in his soul so that this germ will surely rise, blossom and bear fruit for the human soul. Answering

No question: I request that this lecture be printed.

Rudolf Steiner: In view of the number of lectures that have already been printed, I would prefer if nothing more were printed. What has been printed has not yet penetrated everywhere as far [into people's consciousness] as it could have.

Question: What do you do with the [standstill in development]? Is there [any] progress at all, [so that] the direction changes?

Rudolf Steiner: Anyone who has really listened will not easily be able to ask such a question. It is like this: [first there is] change, then [a] standstill. We see this in every house, [which was first built and then remains as a result for years].

Question: Is it possible for a person who can consciously leave their body to consciously remain in other spheres and no longer return to their body? And is the body then asleep or dead?

Rudolf Steiner: It is dead, of course. It is not about the real impossibility of returning, but about the moral one. Morally, one is obliged not to thwart one's karma. Natural laws and moral order are becoming more and more aligned. The natural law is increasingly becoming a moral natural necessity, and then such questions are no longer asked. [These are just as nonsensical as the question:] Could someone who has just made a watch pick up a hammer and smash the watch right away? Of course he could, but it wouldn't be reasonable.

Question: Is color blindness a hindrance to occult self-development?

Rudolf Steiner: Read my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds” - it is, however, out of print: Gazing [into the spiritual world] does not depend on our sense organs, we are, after all, becoming free of them. It is in no way disturbing if any sense organ is imperfectly developed, not even blindness [is an obstacle]. It is a mistake to confuse what appears in spiritual science with ordinary clairvoyance. Ordinary clairvoyance is not clairvoyance that really takes place in supersensible worlds. Ordinary clairvoyance is based on a certain mood in the sense organs or at least comes about with their active participation. Two clairvoyants, one blind and the other not, have the same experience when they encounter the same thing. When one says of such an experience, “It is the same as what one experiences with the color blue (or red),” one means that the same thing is experienced as one experiences with the color blue (or red). That is why it is called that, but it is not the same as the external experience of color. Because most people have a normal development [of the senses], one can proceed from this point of view; but it may be necessary to choose different starting points for those born blind; but one arrives at the same [spiritual experience].

Question: Can one get an impression of spiritual science by reading Tolstoy's books?

Rudolf Steiner: From reading Tolstoy, one cannot come to the idea that there is a spiritual science.

Question: Is it permissible to anesthetize a dying person with opium, [or] if not, [then] as with operations?

Rudolf Steiner: In the ideal case, one should act according to the appropriate knowledge that applies [also to] one, which appears to be humanly possible. One should not resist [applying that which] can provide relief to a person; [otherwise] it would lead to impossibilities.

Question: Can devout prayer grant wishes?

Rudolf Steiner: Prayer should actually be a bowing of the soul to the divine spirituality that lives and permeates the world, so that prayer actually loses its meaning when it is selfish. And only that prayer is justified which ends in the words of the original prayer: “But not my will, but yours be done.” This postscript gives prayer the right mood. Then it is a right prayer, when it is not selfish, otherwise practical contradictions arise immediately. For what should the granter of wishes do when one farmer wants something to sprout and asks for rain, but the other in the same area asks for dryness, or when of two armies, each of which certainly wishes to win, one asks for victory, but the other also asks for victory? So one should not be selfish in prayer. Therefore, the question of whether wishes are granted or not has no real meaning, because a proper prayer cannot expect wishes to be granted. I know that this is offensive to many souls, but one should only look at the nature of things and one will find that things really are like that.

Question: What about vegetarianism [in the light of the Bible? There are] the words of Christ: “My oxen are slaughtered,” or the paschal lamb, or even the banquets. And what about alcohol at the wedding at Cana or at the Last Supper, [when] the bread is dipped in wine?

Rudolf Steiner: It would be going too far if the corresponding words of the Gospels were explained [now]. But it would be shown that many of the things one reads in the Gospels today are only translation errors. Apart from that, it can be said that the development of spiritual views can be facilitated by a vegetarian lifestyle. But it is nothing more than stating the fact that he [the vegetarian] can make his path easier, just as one makes many other things easier by abstaining from meat. But it is not the task of spiritual science to promote vegetarianism in a one-sided way. Spiritual science does not subscribe to one-sided propaganda. For spiritual science, precise thinking is necessary, not only for comprehension and understanding, but also for [better] engagement with the finer webs of thought. Many a person believes they have to object to this or that, but these objections only stem from thinking that has stopped halfway. These things are not based on the consistency of scientific thinking, but on habits of thinking, on a lack of logic. Spiritual science is based on the fact that only what is known is believed: this is the view of every science. But to penetrate [into spiritual science] in such a way that one can really participate, it is necessary to relieve one's thinking of its burdens, to make it finer, so that one is able to follow paths along which one would otherwise not be able to follow – and the vegetarian way of life contributes to this.

One should also consider the relationship to the other kingdoms of nature. Today, humanity cannot even think of making vegetarianism a general diet, because it is very personal whether a person wants to do that or not. One can thoroughly spoil oneself if one wants to live in an abstract vegetarian way. This applies not only to today, but to all periods of time. Of course, today we can claim things that made no sense 2000 years ago; what is true today does not have to be true for all time. This only applies to materialistic truths. When we talk about modern man and man at the time of Christ, we are not talking about the same thing; we are only obliged to use the same word. Many things change over time. The Easter lamb does not have to mean a slaughtered lamb. Even if what is written on the note is correct, it was a different time. It cannot be deduced from this that [vegetarianism] cannot apply to today, when the finer structures of human nature have become quite different from what they were then, and that it is not a means of helping spiritual science if one becomes accustomed to vegetarianism. Now, one should not believe that one can “eat one's way up” into the higher worlds, [because it is] irrelevant whether one eats or refrains from eating. [Vegetarianism is] only a means of facilitating, not a means of comfort.

Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond and Owen Barfield

Many years ago, when I was working in Berlin, the news filtered into a theatre during the performance that the Empress of Austria had been assassinated at Geneva by one of the “Propagandists by Action”—so they were being called at that time. [1] During one of the intervals I happened to be standing near a man who was then a literary critic in Berlin and has since written philosophical books which have gained a certain reputation. This man voiced his astonishment at the news in a way that still lingers in my memory. He said: “One can understand many things that happen in the world without in the least justifying or approving of them ... one can understand many things that happen ... but that a revolutionary movement should instigate the murder of a sick woman whose continued existence could have made no real difference, whose death anyhow can have no clear connection with any political idea, this”—said the man—“is incomprehensible; it just doesn't make sense.”

I am sure this man was expressing what must be the opinion of every right-minded, educated person in the modern world. We are reminded that in the life of men and the course of history, things do happen which seem senseless and purposeless not only when judged by the normal standards but even when they are attributed to some form of aberration.

But events of this very nature—and many, many others might be cited—show that what appears outwardly incomprehensible must inevitably do so because behind the scenes of world affairs—if I may use this expression—spiritual forces and spiritual deeds are playing to and fro [a phrase meaning back and forth – e.Ed], both in the good and in the bad sense. These spiritual deeds and happenings are only to be understood when the light of Spiritual Science can be shed into those regions that lie behind the scenes of life in the ordinary world of the senses. Things happen which become intelligible only when they can be illumined by ideas derived from the spiritual world and which, if viewed merely in their connection with the world of the senses, inevitably seem devoid of meaning and purpose—either good or bad. And if by what may be called chance but may also possibly have been a matter of karma in symbolic garb, one has an experience of this kind in a theatre, then it prompts the reaction that what is going on “behind the scenes” looks very different from what is happening on the stage.

I have made these preliminary remarks because I propose today to speak about matters which will be further elaborated when we are next together—matters which it is important for men at the present time to know about and which are connected with events behind the scenes of the physical plane. These things cannot be understood if we give way to the easy-going modern habit of merely generalising about the facts of the spiritual world and their connection with human affairs on the Earth; they become intelligible only when we penetrate as deeply as possible into the concrete realities of the spiritual world.

You know from many passages in the Lecture-Courses that the evolution of mankind is to be divided into certain periods: the vast periods of the Saturn-, Sun-, Moon-evolutions; the shorter periods of the Lemurian, Atlantean and our own Post-Atlantean epochs; and again within these shorter periods which, however, extend over long stretches of time, we speak of certain epochs of culture within the Post-Atlantean period: the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, the Greco-Latin and our own Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch.

The reason for speaking of these periods is that the faculties of humanity as a whole—in this case more particularly the faculties of soul—change fundamentally from one period to another; they change because a very real evolution takes place in every such period—I am speaking now of the shortest. Every such period contains something which mankind is obliged to undergo, something which may cause either happiness or unhappiness, which has to be realised and understood, which is the source of impulses of will leading to deeds, and so forth. The tasks devolving upon the Egypto-Chaldean epoch of civilisation differed from those of the Greco-Latin epoch—and our own age, too, faces its own specific tasks.

A really true idea of the distinct tasks of the several epochs in regard to the development of certain qualities—especially those of which we shall speak today—cannot be formed without taking into account the experiences contributed by human life as a whole to the external development of which history speaks and to which the materialistic thought of today prefers to confine itself. No really adequate characterisation of the successive epochs can, however, be drawn from these experiences on the physical plane, for they, after all, constitute only one part of that cycle of human life which stretches from birth to death and from death onwards to a new birth. For in what actually happens, there is a constant interplay and interaction between the forces that come down from the world in which man lives between death and a new birth and those which are unfolded in his life here, on the physical plane. There is an unceasing interplay between the forces unfolded by human beings after death and those operating on the physical plane.

Conditions throughout the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch were such that certain things might safely be withheld from the consciousness of man. Many things in respect of which men of the Greco-Latin epoch might without harm be kept unconscious must, however, enter more and more into the consciousness of those living in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch. During this Fifth epoch, human beings must become conscious of much that in earlier times could remain in the unconscious.

These things unfold according to certain spiritual laws, under a kind of spiritual necessity. It is part of the destiny of the human race that certain faculties of comprehension and also certain forces of will, shall unfold in a particular epoch. In this Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch humanity becomes ripe for the knowledge of certain things, just as in earlier epochs men became ripe in other respects. One thing in respect of which humanity has become sufficiently mature in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch seems highly paradoxical to the modern mind, because public opinion moves for the most part in exactly the opposite direction, would prefer, as it were, to lead men in the opposite direction. But this will be of no avail. The spiritual forces with which men are, if I may put it so, inoculated, in the course of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, will be stronger than the wishes of certain people, stronger than the dictates of public opinion.

One of these things—and it will assert itself most powerfully—is the guiding or directing of men more deeply in line with occult principles than has ever before been possible. It lies in the general character of evolution that during this Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, certain conditions connected with the exercise of power, of influence, must pass into the hands of small groups who will wield great power over other, large masses of people.

A certain section of public opinion vehemently resists this trend; nevertheless it will assert itself and for the following reason. During the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, simply because of inner maturity and evolutionary necessity, a large portion of humanity will unfold certain spiritual faculties, a certain natural capacity to see into the spiritual world. This portion of humanity, which will indeed provide the best foundation for the future Sixth Post-Atlantean epoch—this portion of humanity, while in process of preparation during the Fifth epoch, will show little inclination to be actively concerned with the affairs of the physical plane. Such men will have little interest in physical affairs and will be engrossed in ennobling the life of soul, in regulating certain matters connected with the spiritual life. And because of this, others less spiritually inclined will be able to seize for themselves certain factors connected with the exercise of power—to get them into their own hands.

This is something that arises with a kind of necessity. Among men who were cognisant of these things it was the subject of much discussion throughout the last third of the nineteenth century, and they always stressed the vital necessity that this potential should be directed - not into evil but into good channels. During the last third of the nineteenth century, especially just before its turn, one could hear occultists on every hand insisting that precautions must be taken to ensure that such means of power come into the hands of worthy men. Naturally, with the exception of a very few groups, opinions differed as to who were really worthy; each group championed the claims of those with whom the world had brought it into contact. But the whole matter was the subject of almost day-to-day conversation among occultists and, in a certain sense, has remained so to this day.

Simply because man attains the requisite degree of maturity, other things, too, will emerge in the course of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, will become known to men and also pass into the sphere of the will. These are things which lead still further, so far indeed that they cannot but cause grave anxiety to everybody who is cognisant of them.

This Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch confronts the fact that the physical apparatus of human thinking becomes capable of understanding certain factors relating to illness and processes of healing, connections of Nature-processes with illnesses. This causes anxiety to those possessing real knowledge of these matters because their aim now must be to ensure that those who will be chosen to bring the relevant teachings and impulses to men will do so in the right and worthy way. For two possibilities exist: information about these things will either be conveyed to men in a form which does harm, or it may be imparted in a way which is for the good of the world. These things are connected with the most intimate depths of certain conditions relating to human propagation, with circumstances connected with illnesses and with the onset of death, and when knowledge concerning them spreads among mankind they give rise to thoughts and impulses of deep import and significance. And the purpose of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is that men shall become free enough to be enlightened about certain truths hitherto kept in the more unconscious region of the human soul, and to master them.

Those who knew, concerned themselves deeply with all the implications of these things and with the steps that could be taken in one direction or the other. For everything that can arise in this way bestows a certain power, enables a hand to be taken to a very far-reaching extent in the shaping of human affairs. All these considerations, as I said, occupied an important place in spiritual-scientific movements during the nineteenth century, and still do so, to this day, in connection with the evolution of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch.

Another fact must here be considered, a fact that to anyone cognisant of it, is very significant, and must therefore be brought into relation with many others. I have mentioned it here and there in the Lecture-Courses. When, having crossed the threshold of the spiritual world, a man begins to make observations there, peculiar facts, essentially individual facts come before his soul's eye. And then a deeper scrutiny of things which at first sight seem to have nothing to do with each other, reveals that they are indeed connected, that they mutually illumine and explain each other and in doing so greatly facilitate penetration into the nature of the spiritual world.

The other fact, of which I am now going to speak, will, at first, certainly not give you the impression of being connected with what I have just said, yet the very contrary proves to be the case. This other fact is the following: When one turns to the souls of human beings who have died in our present age and learns the circumstances of their existence, one perceives souls among them who feel grave apprehension at the prospect of coming into contact with those human souls who, here on Earth, met their death as did the Empress of Austria at that time in Geneva. One discovers that human beings sent through the Gate of Death by, let us say, the “Propagandists by Action,” are a cause of grave anxiety to certain human beings who passed through death in a normal way and then have further experiences in the spiritual world. One notices, as it were, that those who died in the normal way and who may have occasion to contact these other souls, are fearful of such contact after death, and shrink from it.

I beg you, in such a case, to ignore the emotional paradox. Such innumerable possibilities of association and contact are open to souls that it would be out of place to allow oneself here to be swayed by feelings of compassion, however natural and justifiable they may be. A case like this must be viewed quite objectively. It is a fact that souls who have passed through the Gate of Death normally, feel a certain dread of those whose death was brought about by violent means resembling those adopted by anarchist propaganda.

Now there is a certain very strange connection between this last fact and the other of which I spoke previously. Closer scrutiny reveals that these souls who met their death by violent means come into possession of certain knowledge in the spiritual world after death, which the other souls do not wish to receive from them prematurely, before it is right and healthy to do so. For the very reason that here, on the physical plane, they were deprived of life in this way and sent with such violence through the Gate of Death, these souls retain a certain possibility of turning to account the powers and forces they possessed on Earth, for example, the power of intellect. From the other side, from the spiritual world, such souls can make use of the powers which were bound up with the physical body here on Earth and achieve with them something quite other than it is possible to achieve during life in the physical body. Thereby these souls are able to acquire knowledge of certain things earlier than is really conducive to the progress of human evolution.

It is very remarkable that both meaning and purpose are revealed in this way in a number of deeds hitherto seeming to lack all rhyme or reason. These deeds assume a strange aspect to one who sees things as they really are. In the physical world, all kinds of nonsense is talked; it may sound plausible but is, well just nonsense to closer observation. Here, in the physical world, it is said: people like these “Propagandists by Action” who murder others, are simply out to draw attention to misery in the world; it is a means of active agitation, etc., etc.. But one who analyses the matter and tries to bring it into line with the laws of social life will realise at once that, although such deeds appear to be senseless, their meaning suddenly becomes clear in the light of the knowledge that souls sent into the spiritual world in this violent way, acquire knowledge which they really ought not yet to possess and of which souls who died a normal death have a positive dread.

To investigate the causes underlying assassinations committed at various times, like that of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, to discover the position of these souls who come into the spiritual world with certain secrets in their keeping—with consequences of which we shall speak—to investigate these things occultly was of course the important thing. A merely external view of the series of such assassinations may ascribe them all to chance; but if one analyses the matter, if one considers who the individuals thus sent to their death really are, it becomes clear that they have been selected, as it were—not, of course from the standpoint of the physical world but from that of the spiritual world. Investigation of this aspect of many of the well-known assassinations reveals something very remarkable. In the cases of Carnot, [2] the Empress Elizabeth of Austria and certain others, the remarkable fact is revealed that although the possibility of achieving something by their assassinations certainly existed, it was, as a matter of fact, not achieved at all. It would have been achieved if souls had been found to be their “customers,” if I may put it so. If that had happened, both sides would have incurred transcendental, super-sensible guilt: those who had passed through death in the normal way would have had experiences which would have driven them into blameworthy paths, and those whose deaths had been caused by violence, by assassination, would have been guilty of divulging knowledge before the proper time.

Higher Spiritual Beings, Higher Hierarchies, prevented this from happening because of certain consequences which would have ensued and which it was necessary to frustrate for the sake of the well-being of a certain part of mankind. By the intervention of higher Spiritual Beings, the harm that might have resulted was prevented. And so there was evidence here of an attempt made with ineffective means, or rather, with means that had been deprived of their effectiveness. It was an attempt made in the spiritual world, behind the scenes of the physical world.

Probing into the deeper foundations of such matters, we discover the source of the impulses underlying them. And in the case of many of the assassinations which were news in Europe and will be known to you, the impulses—they were spiritual impulses, remember—were not really primary and original but were derivatives; they were “defence measures,” if this rather trivial expression is permissible. The purpose of these deeds was to put a stop to something else, to frustrate other deeds, or, better said, to prevent the consequences of other deeds tending in the same direction.

This is a very mysterious matter and can only be understood by scrutinising what, exactly, it was proposed to prevent, against what, exactly, these defence measures were taken. Spiritual Science penetrates here into things deeply connected with the impulses of human life in the present and in the future and of which it is extremely difficult to speak because they everywhere run counter to certain naive and even justifiable interests of men. The matter becomes comprehensible only when we take into consideration the fact that all these attempts by means of assassinations of which I have spoken up to now, were amateurishly directed, were not under “expert” guidance. They were attempts made without thorough knowledge of the occult connections; they were defence measures born of fear, and they were not under united leadership. They become intelligible only when we study the plan which they were actually intended to avert, and which was itself being pursued and staged with much greater insight. In the nineteenth century, a remarkable Order was still in existence over in the East: the Order of the “Thugs.” This Order, which flourished in a certain region of Asia, did not arise out of mere desire—the desire, I mean, of its members—to gain their ends. The members of this Order were charged with the task of murdering certain persons named by very secret and unknown superiors. It was an Order of murderers, so to speak, with the task of putting certain individuals to death. Evidence of its activity filtered through from time to time in news announcing the murder of such and such a person. The murder was committed on the orders of unknown superiors who had charged some member of this Order of the Thugs to carry it out.

In the places where this was undertaken, the aim was well understood. By arranging circumstances of the physical plane in such a way that the establishment of this Order of the Thugs was possible, and then by directing its activities as required, the plan was to bring about the violent death of such persons as would be equipped after their death with the faculty for learning certain secrets. The individuals who managed all this also organised corresponding conditions here, on the physical plane, to act as “mirrors”—“mirror events” as they are called in occultism. Such was the intention: to organise the appropriate “mirror events.” Certain events of this kind—if only a few—have actually been organised on the physical plane. It is done in this way: certain suitable personalities are trained to be mediums, put into a mediumistic condition and by certain machinations the currents from the spiritual world are directed to the medium. The medium then divulges certain secrets which can only be disclosed by this means, namely, that in yonder world a person killed by a deed of violence, turns to account here, on the Earth, those forces which owing to his violent death can still be made use of; as souls, they fathom certain secrets and then instill them into the medium. And it is possible for those interested in such research here, on the Earth, to investigate what these souls are instilling by such means.

What is investigated in this way is a sort of “premature spiritual birth”—if I may use this expression. The souls who passed through the Gate of Death in the normal way and are concerned with such things, know that they must be preparing themselves now—and they make it plain that they are engaged in this preparation—in order, later on, when humanity has sufficiently matured, to bring down many things to the Earth and inject them into the Earth by rightful means. This, indeed, is an important task devolving upon a number of human beings now passing through the Gate of Death. Having attained the requisite maturity for certain secrets at the right time—not prematurely, as is the case when forces generated by violent deaths are put into operation—the task of these souls is to use and apply the normal forces. It is actually the task of these human beings to acquire control of these forces and then to inspire them into men living on the Earth who are not mediums at all but who should experience them in the normal, legitimate way—through genuine Inspiration.

In normal life this would be a matter of waiting. But because, as the result of occult crime, these things which ought to come much later are sent as premature spiritual births along the path indicated—because of this, individuals intending evil to humanity and who in this sense are “black” or “grey” magicians, capture such secrets for their own ends.

Behind the scenes of outer happenings, such things have been proceeding during our own decades. The intention was this: to place in the hands of a certain group of men, firstly, the secret of the control of masses—I spoke of this to begin with. It is the secret of how to gain extensive control over those masses who concern themselves little with external affairs, yet possess spiritual capacities and are especially qualified to assist in the preparation of the Sixth Post-Atlantean epoch—it is the secret, too, of how the art of controlling these masses can be placed in the hands of a few individuals.

That was the one aim. The other is something that will play an important role in the future: it is a matter of acquiring the secret means whereby factors connected with processes of disease, with the process of propagation, may be given a particular turn.

Among a few friends, I have already spoken of these things. The age of materialism is striving, through the work of certain circles, to paralyse, to eliminate all spiritual development in mankind, to bring human beings to a point where simply by temperament and character they reject everything that is spiritual and regard it as folly.

This trend—and it is already perceptible in some individuals today—will intensify. People will actually long for the time when the Spiritual is universally deemed to be insanity, craziness! Attempts will be made to achieve this end by inoculations; just as viruses ¹ have been discovered as means of protection against illnesses, so certain inoculations will be used to influence the human body in such a way that it provides no place for the spiritual proclivities of the soul. Human beings will be immunised against any predisposition for spiritual ideas ... such, at least, will be the endeavour. They will try by inoculation to bring it about that even in childhood, human beings lose the urge towards the spiritual life. This is only one of the aspects of that more intimate knowledge, relating to the connection of Nature-processes and Nature-specifics with the human organism, which must arise during the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch. These things will certainly find their way into the life of mankind when the time comes. The only question is whether success will have attended those previous attempts—by means of such premature spiritual births as I have mentioned—to put knowledge into the hands of individuals who will use it for their own ends ... or whether the knowledge of these things will come in the right way, at the right time, and thus promote the well-being of humanity.

There was nothing amateurish about the methods of the organisation designed for promoting these premature spiritual births; with the help of the Order of murderers known as the Thugs, it worked very systematically, albeit in a way which horrifies anyone who has the good of humanity at heart. It worked systematically, not amateurishly, with full knowledge of the means required.

Because the effort was being made through instruments acquired prematurely from the spiritual world to place part of mankind in the egotistical possession of knowledge which, as humanity matures will be acquired in any case during the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch ... because this was being striven for, there arose in other groups of men the uneasiness and anxiety which staged this “Propaganda by Action” as a counter-blast, so to speak; it was intended to be a help but, being the child of fear, it was an amateurish attempt, a provisional attempt made with ineffective means.

These things that proceed behind the scenes of external happenings, are of deep import. Nor would they be mentioned here if it were not a necessity and a duty to bring them to the attention of people trained to some extent in Spiritual Science. It is a necessity for such things to pass into the consciousness of humanity in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch. Only so can the goal of earthly evolution be attained.

Human beings must embark upon the unpleasant task of abandoning the mode of thinking which the universities produce in the so-called educated classes today; a time must come when a number of human beings declare themselves ready to accept this uncomfortable world-conception which takes its direction, its concepts, its ideas, from the spiritual world. For men must not, dare not, linger in the condition of sleep that is so congenial to those abstract concepts for which the age of materialism strives and then calls “noble.”

Thinking over what I have thus indicated, you will realise that a whole number of possibilities exist for making use of currents emanating from the spiritual world in order to bring evil things to pass on the Earth during this Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch. There are many, many such possibilities—today I have told you of one. And the obligation to stress the necessity that such knowledge should reach the consciousness of a certain number of souls—this is bound up with the fundamental character of our age. The second half of the nineteenth century was an extremely important period. I have often indicated to circles of friends here and there that the year 1841 was a critical time, a year of decision and crisis. This, of course, is not discovered by looking merely at the events that happened in the physical world, but only by studying these events in connection with what was going on in the spiritual world. The year 1841 was, in truth, the critical year in respect of the onset of the age of materialism, for at that time a very definite battle began in the spiritual worlds—a battle waged by certain Spirits, Spirits of Darkness as we may call them, belonging to the hierarchical rank of the Angeloi. In the spiritual worlds they fought out this battle until the autumn of 1879. They were striving for many and definite aims, only one of which shall be mentioned today. Between the years 1841 and 1879, decision was to be taken as to whether a certain store of spiritual wisdom could be made sufficiently mature to trickle gradually down to the Earth from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards, that is to say, to enter into the souls of men as a stimulus to spiritual knowledge, to the knowledge described today as that of Spiritual Science, which has only been possible since that time.

The aim of these Angeloi-Spirits between the years 1841 and 1879 was to prevent what was thus to flow down to the Earth, from coming to maturity in the spiritual world. But these Spirits of Darkness were defeated in the war they waged against the Spirits of Light during this period. In the year 1879, on a smaller scale, an event came to pass of the kind that has several times come to pass in the course of evolution, and has always been pictured symbolically as the victory of Michael, or St. George, over the Dragon. In the year 1879, too, the Dragon was overcome in a certain realm. This time the “Dragon” was the Angeloi-Spirits who were striving for but could not achieve the aim I have indicated. In 1879, therefore, they were cast out of the spiritual world into the world of men—and here, in this world, they wander among humanity. They are present here, sending their forces into men's thoughts, feelings and impulses of will, egging them on to this undertaking or another. They have not been able to prevent the onset of the age when the spiritual knowledge flows down—their defeat in the battle lies precisely in this—for the spiritual knowledge is here and will unfold increasingly; human beings will be able to acquire the faculty of seeing into the spiritual world.

But having been cast down to the Earth, these Angeloi-Spirits are intent upon doing harm with the down-flowing knowledge; they want to guide it into wrongful channels, to rob it of its power for good and lead it into paths of evil. In short, having been cast down since the year 1879, their aim is to achieve here, with the help of men, what they were unable to achieve with the help of the Spirits in yonder world. Their aim is to bring ruin to that part of the good plan for world-evolution which consists in causing the knowledge of the control of masses, the knowledge concerning birth, illness and death, among other things, to spread among men when the time is ripe. These Spirits of Darkness want to spread such knowledge too soon, by means of the premature spiritual births. Among their other objects and activities, these Spirits operate in the manner I have just indicated.

The only way to combat the influence of these Ahrimanic Beings is to realise that against certain aims of Ahriman nothing avails except to see through him, to know that he is there. I have indicated this repeatedly in the Mystery Plays; think only of the end of the last Play. The Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch must evolve to the stage where many human beings address the Ahrimanic Powers and Beings as Faust addresses Mephistopheles: “In thy Nothingness I hope to find the All.” Men must be resolved to look into that realm where materialism sees the “Nothingness” and there see ... the spiritual world! Ahriman-Mephistopheles is then obliged to speak to such men as he speaks to Faust when sending him to the “Mothers”:

“I will not grudge my praise before thou goest, For well I see that thou the Devil knowest.”

The other day, I said, jokingly, in Dornach: “Mephistopheles would not have made such a remark to Woodrow Wilson! To Woodrow Wilson he would have said: ‘The little fellows never notice the Devil, even when he has them by the collar!’” Truly, it is of the greatest importance that men shall learn to see into the realities of the spiritual world. And, believe me, it is simply the fact, that when, on the one side, there is some special necessity, the opposing forces are also especially strong—and so, today, men put up strong resistance to these things, struggle against them.

I beg you here in Zurich, in your laudable and welcome efforts to bring Spiritual Science to certain still very hostile circles, to be under no illusions! Many disappointments—and at first, nothing but disappointments—await all efforts to direct things that must come to pass, into the right paths. This, of course, should never deter us. We must be so imbued with the impulse needed for the present age, that we do what has to be done without regard to results—whether they fall out one way or the other.

This attitude alone makes achievement possible—and then it is often reached by an entirely unexpected route. I beg you to remember, too, that a great deal must often be done that yields no gratifying results. For the propaganda of Spiritual Science is a different matter from other current forms of propaganda. In these other domains, people are for the most part told things with which they are as familiar as devout ladies sitting in church are familiar with what the clergyman says from the pulpit. The programmes of most leagues and societies contain subject matter that can be imbibed very light-heartedly and superficially—it usually is, and remains, pure abstraction. Fine programmes are made—but these programmes are unrelated to and incapable of penetrating into reality. If it is our desire to cultivate spiritual strivings in this Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, we must regard them as we regard the Living. What is the nature of the Living? The Living, the Life, in the realm of Spirit has its image in the realm of the Living in Nature. I ask you: is a fish in the sea afraid of laying a number of eggs that come to nothing? Ask yourselves how many of the eggs that are actually laid, turn into fish? How many come to nothing? As it is in life, so, too, it is in the spiritual life. You may speak for long years, on countless occasions, to vast numbers of people ... and you must be satisfied if interest, at most, is awakened in a few among them—for that inheres in the nature of the Living. Achievement in any degree is only possible when one proceeds as Nature proceeds—Nature being the image of the Spirit. What would happen if Nature hesitated to allow living beings to lay the eggs that come to nothing, because a number obviously perish in the course of a year? The Nature-process continues and, moreover, achieves evolution. Considerations as to whether any particular thing can be achieved, whether it is in line with this or with that—are of no moment. What is of moment is that in the thing itself we see the impulse and that we simply cannot do otherwise than carry this impulse into the world.

And looking at the reasons—a few of which have been indicated today—why this impulse must be carried out into the world during the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch ... truly they are serious enough! Where necessity is greatest, remember, there the opposition is strongest. Men will have to learn to view all these things that come to pass here, on the physical plane, and in our time present a truly terrible aspect, in their connection with happenings behind the scenes. Only then do they become intelligible. But the historians, the sociologists, the economists, the politicians of today, who derive their rules and laws exclusively from the physical plane well, as far as the actual necessities are concerned, they act like persons who begin some important task by stretching themselves on a chaise lounge and going to sleep, believing they can achieve it in the world of dream. The majority of those who belong to the world of culture, to the several branches of science today, really do set to work like this; in their state of dream they let reality pass them by. How do men write treatises on history, on sociology? They write without a single inkling of the real forces at play behind the subject of their dreamings. The realities underlying such deeply decisive events as we are witnessing nowadays, lie around modern men of science like the walls of a room into which they have been carried during sleep, have never seen and in which they go on sleeping. This is how materialistic science acquaints itself with the world.

In my book Vom Menschenratsel (The Riddle of Man) I have described a mode of consciousness that is at the same time a “seeing” (Schauendes Bewusstsein). This must, to a certain degree, become a faculty in humanity of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch for the following reason. Certain secrets must come into the open because otherwise they would be spread among humanity by unlawful means such as those of which I have told you today. As I said, it is not easy to speak of these things, but in duty bound it is necessary to do so. Men must acquire for many things a gift of observation very different from the clumsy faculty of observation in vogue today.

In connection with what has been said, I want to add the following. Firstly, men can acquire something, even today, by trying to take things normally ascribed to chance seriously and regard them as hints for deepening the life of soul. Suppose you read that at one place or another, on this or that date, a certain man died. A great deal may light up if one asks oneself: “How would it have been if that man had died three months earlier or three months later?” reckoning, of course, merely with possibilities. But you may be sure that if such a question is put, forces are released whereby you will discern other things. Or again, while traveling in a train you may have a conversation that means a great deal to you. A materialist, naturally, would regard such a thing as a lucky stroke of chance. But those who are trying to penetrate behind the scenes of outer existence will be alert to such incidents; without forcing ideas too far but feeling that there is something in these “accidents”, they pay attention, because these things point to forces playing into and between the events—forces whose origin is neither mechanical nor mathematical. That is one of the things I wanted to say.

The other is this, and I want to reiterate it with emphasis. In spite of the materialism of our time, much that is spiritual is revealing itself to men. But it goes against the grain to speak about these spiritual experiences. When someone becomes communicative, because he trusts you, he will often speak of what he, or some other person, has done ... If he tells you honestly and genuinely why, for example, he founded some newspaper, why he did this or that, he relates a dream, or what seemed to be a dream; he tells you of an impulse from the spiritual world. Such things happen at every turn nowadays—far more often than people think. Far more deeds are prompted by spiritual impulses than is usually imagined. But people hesitate to admit such things because they are as a rule not taken seriously.

It is well to deepen contemplation in both these directions, to be alert, in these days, to any sign or experience which strikes one's attention; and also to observe—for the opportunities are there—how in the good and in the bad sense, things are revealed from the spiritual world, which impel men to act. Nowadays, above all, this is more often the case than people think.

That is what I wanted to put before you today. Next Tuesday we will continue the subject.

[1] Note by Translator: The date of the assassination was 10^th September, 1898. “Propagandisten der Tat” seems to have been a phrase in current use at that time. In modern books of reference, this assassination and that of Carnot, of which mention is made later, are attributed to revolutionary anarchists.

[2] Carnot was the fourth President of the Third French Republic. He was assassinated at Lyons on 24^th June, 1894.

• 1. This word translated as ‘viruses’ is Impfmittel, the same word which was translated in the previous and following sentences as 'innoculations'. —rsarchive.org