The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees, Last Tuesday I took the liberty of discussing here how it is possible for a person to gain knowledge about his own spiritual being, about the eternal that lies beyond birth and death. Today I would like to shed light on the same subject from a different angle and explain how it is indeed possible to gain knowledge about the spiritual essence of the world.

These insights cannot be gained by the methods currently used in scientific research. For this scientific method of investigation, which has achieved such great triumphs in recent centuries, triumphs that are fully recognized from the point of view that is asserted here, this scientific world view builds its knowledge on observation and experimentation, that is, on that which man can experience of the world through his senses. Of course, one does try — and must try — to penetrate intellectually that which the senses reveal about the world. In this way, one arrives at natural laws, that is, in a certain sense, at spiritual content, because the natural laws that one establishes in thought are, after all, a spiritual content. But the thoughts that one gains in this way, beyond observation and experiment, have no independent content; they only provide images of what the senses, either unarmed or armed, experience from the outside world. That is to say, the soul-spiritual in man reveals itself through what can be experienced by the human being through the senses, or through methodically trained sensory perception.

Everything that is experienced by man in this way is the effect of the external world on his bodily organization, on his physical organism. And what man experiences in his soul is nothing other than the experience of the sensual-physical world.

Man cannot stop at this mere experiencing of the sensual-physical world, because within this physical-sensual world there is no place for that which lives as an indelible impulse in the human soul, there is no place for the religious-moral inner experience. And the newer scientific world view achieves perfection precisely by observing the things and processes of the world in such a way that it does not mix anything of the human being as moral or religious into the world view, into the laws of the world. Man stands before a world to which he ascribes reality and existence, but which, as I said the other day, does not contain the most valuable thing by which man actually ascribes his dignity, his true value in this world: the moral, the religious essence. That is why people have always tried to penetrate beyond mere sensory experience, beyond mere experience in the physical, to a knowledge of the spiritual essence of the world.

Only the centuries in which we still live and which have become great in terms of their civilization through rigorous scientific thinking have either completely denied the possibility of supersensible, spiritual knowledge, or at least expressed serious doubts about the possibility of such knowledge. Today, however, we have reached the point, as I also hinted at last time, where man, precisely because of the certainty that knowledge of nature gives him, must seek an equal certainty with regard to the knowledge of spiritual life, that life which, in addition to the natural-physical, can also contain the moral event and the religious connection of man with the supersensible.

But if we want to visualize that path into the supersensible worlds for the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the world this evening, my dear audience, it will be good to follow a similar path to the one I took last time on Tuesday to explore the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the human being. I pointed out how, in the early days of human development, such a path to spiritual knowledge of the human being was sought, in order to illustrate how that older path was more material and how we today, based on our scientific foundation, must seek a more spiritual path to knowledge. Therefore, today I will begin by pointing out how, in the early days of human civilization, those who wanted to ascend from the contemplation of the physical-sensual world to a knowledge of the spiritual essence of the world sought it out. I do not want to be misunderstood about this either. I am not recommending that older path. It can no longer be followed today. But to explain the path that should be taken today, we can tie in with the older, more outwardly descriptive path.

This older path, which in turn leads us back to oriental spiritual contemplation, to human prehistory, this path presupposes that the one who walks it turns to someone who has already walked it, to a teacher, to a teacher of spiritual knowledge. In ancient Oriental times, anyone who wanted to ascend to the spiritual essence of the world had to seek out such a guru, a teacher of spiritual knowledge. However, you may ask, my dear audience, where did the first spiritual teachers of humanity come from according to those older times?

First of all, let us consider the view that existed in those older times regarding the most ancient teachers of humanity. These people believed that the very first teachers received their knowledge directly from divine teachers with whom they were in contact in a supersensible way at the very beginning of the earth's time. I can only point out this belief of older times here, because a discussion of the question would lead far afield from the subject today. I have only to point out that this question leads to the same regions as, for instance, the question concerning the origin of human language or the origin of human thought. In the past, people resorted to a transcendental explanation even for the transmission of the teaching of the transcendental to people, just as they sought the origin of language in the fact that divine influences themselves exerted an influence on people and humanity, and that in this way people directly acquired language from the transcendental. So it was also thought that the first teachers, the first gurus, received their knowledge through a supersensible intercourse with the first great teachers of mankind. But those who came later knew that they could only come to a true understanding of the spiritual, to a knowledge of the spiritual in the world, if they turned to such a teacher.

What did such a teacher do? The prerequisite for him to be able to do anything with his pupil at all was that, through all of civilization, the disciples sought this older teaching of mankind with an almost absolute trust in it, a trust that today's mankind, who feel and think differently in this respect, can no longer really imagine. The aura of mystery that surrounded such personalities was due to the fact that it was believed that they were in direct contact with the supersensible in their places of worship, which were also places of art and science – for religion, art and science were one in those days – in those places, in the mystery schools, as they are called today. They were looked up to in such a way that it was not merely assumed that they could be taught something theoretical, that they could be taught something that they themselves had discovered through some kind of natural experiment or the like. Rather, it was that the word they spoke, the signs they gave, that what they performed before the students was directly the external manifestation of the divine behind these teachers.

Thus one did not approach these teachers one-sidedly with the intellect, not one-sidedly with the head, but one approached them with the whole human being. One felt enlightened in one's intellect, not just intellectually and theoretically; but one felt everything that one received intellectually as enlightenment, warmly imbued with an element of feeling, and one felt it imbued with the power of a will that emanated from the depths of the world itself and poured into the will of man. You gave yourself completely by turning to the leaders of such mystery centers.

And the teaching was not theoretical in the sense that we understand teaching today, but it was linked to a deepening of feeling in all the details, it was linked to the fact that the student saw in the teacher how this teacher was aware of the fact that he was, as it were, with every word, with every hand movement, with all that he now developed in spirit-permeated experiments before the student, how he with all of this brought the divine spiritual will itself into earthly life.

What was achieved by this? The result was that the spiritual-soul nature of the pupil was actually able to separate itself from the physical organism and also from the finer, etheric organism, which leads a fleeting existence in the physical organism. And the student became aware of one thing. Before he received such instruction, he could say to himself: Perhaps my entire soul life ceases when I fall asleep at night, perhaps then I am only a physical body that performs different functions than in the waking state, and perhaps, when this physical organism has devoted itself to purely organic activities for a while, then it can in turn develop out of itself, just as a candle can develop a flame when it is lit, then it can in turn develop out of itself the conscious spiritual-soul life.

Before his instruction, the disciple could say to himself: Perhaps what takes place for me as spiritual-soul life from waking to sleeping, arises merely as an illusion, illuminated by the physical functions of the body. Through the instruction of the guru, he came to realize that he could no longer say this to himself, but he became aware that in the act of falling asleep in the evening, he actually emerged with his spiritual-soul being as a reality free of the body, a reality that emerged from his physical organism and also from the finer organism, the etheric that he is just as much with his physical organism among physical things and physical processes during waking hours, that from falling asleep to waking up he lives in a purely spiritual-soul organism that is outside the physical body, but that in the morning when he wakes up he submerges again into this physical organism. Only he said to himself through that teaching, which he received as a student: Yes, but when I fall asleep in my ordinary life, then the spiritual-soul entity that is now next to the physical organism, which remains in the physical-sensual world, is now in the spiritual-soul world and is active there, is so weak internally that it cannot become aware of what it experiences in the spiritual-soul world. But through the power that went out from the guru, what had been outside the body in the night from falling asleep to waking up in an unconscious state was transferred to a different kind of existence outside the body. And in this other existence, which at first could only take place under the influence of the guru and to which the disciple himself then became powerful, in this other existence, which was now no longer sleep, which resembled sleep only in that the spiritual soul was outside the body but which was therefore opposed to sleep, [it happened] that now within this spiritual-mental a power awakened in a spiritual-mental way, as one otherwise only has it through one's blood, through one's nerves when awake in the physical body. Through the awakening of such power, the soul and spirit came to life without the physical body and its support in a state opposite to sleep and yet so similar to it because the person was outside his body. This spiritual-soul life was inwardly enlivened. And just as the physical organism gives man the sense impressions when he is awake, so now this inwardly awakened, this inwardly strengthened spiritual-soul organism gave the disciple of the guru the impressions of a spiritual-soul external world.

Therefore, one can say: The guru brought it about that not only in the natural way that happens when a person falls asleep, the soul-spiritual realm outside the physical body of the disciple went, but the guru brought it about through his teachings, but above all through the influences borne out of trust, out of faith in action, that in a fully awakened state the soul-spiritual realm could leave the body, thereby internally strengthening it, interspersing it with waking, and experiencing in a waking state that this whole external world, which we otherwise perceive only through our senses – and which shows us only a sensual physiognomy and a lawfulness that summarizes the details of the sensual physiognomy – that this whole environment now appeared to him as a spiritual one. As I said, the prerequisite for this was not just a theoretical one, not just a student-guru relationship, but a moral relationship, as I have described it. The guru was virtually a morally sacred personality. And the disciple of such a guru not only had a religious relationship with the mysterious, supersensory powers of the world, but above all, in his guru, he had a mediator to the divine spiritual beings. He had a religious relationship with the guru himself. In this way the elderly person was able to see into the spiritual essence of the world, not in a theoretical way, but through a development of his whole being.

But you see, my dear attendees, what the prerequisite is for looking into the spiritual essence of the world. It is this prerequisite that we can step out of our physical organism with our spiritual and mental organization and knowingly unfold ourselves outside of our body in existence.

However, the way in which the older student in times of oriental civilization did this brought him into a relationship of dependency on his teacher, on his guru, which would be unbearable for people today. But all of that, dear attendees, what is traditionally present today in religious ideas, even what is present in moral impulses, did not arise from what science has taught people in recent centuries, but has been traditionally preserved from such older times, when people wanted to gain a relationship to the spiritual essence of the world in the way described.

Then came other times in the development of humanity. These other times are characterized by the fact that the possibility of one person having the same effect on another as the old guru had on his disciples ceased to exist. If this possibility had continued to exist, human civilization would never have been able to develop into what we find today gives human dignity and value to earthly existence; full self-awareness and the awareness of human freedom would never have entered into humanity.

This self-awareness did not exist in those older times, when someone who wanted to become a scholar in that way – if we may use today's word – did not have this self-awareness. Man felt an indeterminate dependence on external nature. He felt no freedom in relation to what came to him from external nature. But in the upsurge to a spiritual world, he felt even less freedom. He was primarily dependent on the guru in terms of the method of his development. And by allowing himself to be intensely stimulated by the guru to experience his spiritual and psychological life free of the body, he then felt even more dependent on those spiritual worlds into which he had entered cognitively. In this way he felt, so to speak, to be a tool of the divine spiritual powers. He felt dependent in every single volitional impulse, in every single thought, in every single nuance of feeling, on the divine spiritual currents that pulsed into his own organism from the spiritual worlds he had recognized.

It is precisely through the cessation of these old conditions that humanity has been able to achieve self-awareness and the awareness of freedom, that the human being has truly placed the highest value for a time on only that which is imparted to him through the mediation of his body. But that which comes to us through the mediation of the body gives us thought-images only for our knowledge, thought-images which initially merely depict for the external world that which reveals itself to us in nature.

Now, in the early 1990s, I had already shown in my “Philosophy of Freedom” how a person who is now completely imbued with the scientific spirit of the present can relate to the moral world. It is gradually being realized that natural science can, even more than it already has, apply all thought only to penetrating and ordering external phenomena in thought, and thus to arrive at laws that are, after all, conceived in thought. One comes to say to oneself: This view of nature cannot, by itself, gain anything supersensory; all that it can gain as an inner soul experience is an image of a sensory external world and must remain so.

Thus, precisely when we bring thinking to the perfection to which the scientific age has brought it, precisely when we are not dabbling in our scientific attitude, not as laymen, but from inner connections in the strict, exact methods of modern research, then we gradually come to an inner experience of thinking that is nevertheless now free from all physical corporeality.

This is generally rather difficult for modern humanity to grasp. Only those who have really immersed themselves in modern science ultimately find something in the life of thought that is not mediated through the body. And I called this life of thought pure thought and its activity pure thinking in my Philosophy of Freedom, written at the beginning of the 1890s, and I tried to show how precisely when man, in a thinking that has become pure from all inner instincts, from all inner arbitrariness, from all inner fantasy, when, through training in natural science, he pure thinking grasps a nature that is amoral, that no longer contains anything moral, grasps a nature to which he cannot gain a relationship, a religious relationship, when he makes himself very strong in relation to this thinking about nature, then, from deep within himself, precisely into this pure thinking that has become natural science, what now penetrates are the individual, personal moral impulses of the individual human being. We need only look uninhibitedly into nature, but then not stop at this looking, but now look back at our own personality, then we will find that the more genuinely we think scientifically and experience this scientific thinking, the more powerfully that which I then called moral intuition penetrates into our pure thinking. And then we stand before the world and say to ourselves: Of course, nature has been deified for us, has become amoral; but we human beings, as thinkers about nature, feel — as we otherwise feel the blood in our physical head, so that we have a physical tool for thinking —, so we feel our purest scientific thinking being pulsed through from within by moral intuitions.

Anyone who has felt this, anyone who has experienced this, my dear audience, knows through this experience that there is a spiritual, a purely spiritual, a body-free spiritual. And in this body-free spiritual, precisely in the power of that thinking that the Galilean, Copernican, Goethean, Darwinian age has brought us, precisely through that thinking, through we understand nature in a completely natural way, we gain an inner strength that makes it possible for us modern people not to seek out a guru in the old way and yet to penetrate the spiritual essence of the world to which we belong. For what in an outward way proceeded from the chela, from the disciple to the guru as the deepest trust that I have described, is replaced for us as modern people by what we experience when we let our gaze sweep over nature in a very exact way, with mathematical exactitude, as I mentioned last time, and then look back into ourselves and ask ourselves seriously, with genuine internalization: What have you actually done there? What is in you?

That which ruled within you while you were thinking about nature, excluding all arbitrariness and subjectivity, that which was woven in your own soul while you were completely absorbed in observing nature, in the objective observation from which you excluded everything subjective, that now gives from within that great trust that the old disciple had for his guru. I would like to say that simply by standing in the world as a human being, one acquires precisely from the scientific attitude that great trust, that great trust that tells you: if you have developed a way of thinking without anything from your imagination, from your arbitrariness, playing a role in it, which you faithfully accept in order to grasp your thinking, if you have developed such a way of thinking, then you can also develop this thinking with certainty. And you develop it further in the way I described last Tuesday, through meditation; that is, you penetrate the thinking that modern man accepts in the face of the scientific view of the world by having risen to its power, with what you will find described in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” “Occult Science” and others. For example, you will find a description of thinking as meditation within thinking. I already hinted at the principle of what this consists of last time. While otherwise one scurries along with one's thoughts about things and processes, so to speak passively scurries along, and lets one's thoughts run as the external impressions want, at most then reflecting on what the external impressions have given one, in meditation one stops this thinking, so to speak. One refrains from, one could also say one abstracts from all external impressions. One has learned to think of external impressions. One has learned to develop the power that lies in thinking. One does not hold on to external sensory impressions, but only to the inner power of the thought, pours into this inner power of the thought ideas that are easily comprehensible, rests on these ideas. But I already said last time that one thing is necessary for this. It is necessary that the meditation takes place in love for the images that you allow to be present in your consciousness in this way. However, one must be able to bring this love, because the spiritual scientific method is one that can still engage the whole person today and that, above all, must be imbued with that which is not needed for external natural science, or at most needed for its operation, but not needed to find something in it itself in order to handle its methods.

But what the spiritual scientific method needs in this direction is to start from the forces that otherwise lie dormant in the soul, from love. To meditate means to rest and to rest again and again in thoughts of love, to love purely mental life. We should not underestimate the fact that, given the way we educate and train people today, this is actually quite difficult. For when people are supposed to hold something in their thoughts, they become impatient. They say, “Oh, thoughts are sober; let's rather go where our senses get a lot of impressions.” Our present civilization, in its excesses, is set up to orient everything as much as possible to the senses. People find cold and sober and abstract and empty that which can be experienced in mere thought.

Meditating means gaining such inner warmth for these seemingly abstract thoughts in meditation as one otherwise gains in the world when one turns a loving heart to another personality or to some event or thing in the world. That warmth, which is otherwise only developed in everyday life on certain occasions, must glow and burn through that which is to be shaped in meditation by the human soul. Then this thinking is inwardly strengthened and invigorated without calling upon a guru in the old way, and one gradually comes to know: Through this meditative strengthening of the thinking, you come out of your physical body with your soul and spirit.

I say that today one does not seek out a guru in the old way. But one can indeed receive instruction from someone who is already experienced in spiritual matters on how to set up meditation, how to concentrate in one's thinking. But anyone who is a teacher of spiritual science today, if he is not a charlatan but a real teacher, will not make his student dependent on him, but will take into account the demands of contemporary civilization and in such a way that from a certain point onwards the pupil feels placed on his own personal foundation and, by virtue of his own liberated thinking, experiences living with his consciousness as reality outside of the physical body organization.

This is in fact the first thing one must experience in order to penetrate spiritually into the spiritual essence of the world, to become so empowered within oneself as a spiritual-soul being that one does that which one otherwise only does when falling asleep – leaving one's body – consciously in such states that one brings it about voluntarily.

Then, my dear attendees, one first experiences a general sense of the world, I would say. At first, one does not know more than that there is an existence of one's own spiritual soul outside of the physical body. But by continuing to meditate further and further, one reaches the point of bringing such inner liveliness into one's own thinking, into the world of thoughts, into one's own thought activity, as is otherwise only present in sensory perception. Sensory perception provides us with saturated colors, full-bodied tones. Thinking initially only provides us with abstractions. In meditation, one attains the ability to dwell in thinking in the same way as in external observation, as one otherwise dwells in external sensory perception. But in doing so, thinking is completely freed of its abstractness, and thinking now takes place in a pictorial way.

If you want, you can compare this pictorial quality that you now experience with dreaming. Except that when you dream, you always know: you are leaning on your physicality. You experience inner physical states in dreams, or you experience reminiscences, memories from earthly existence. But now you have images in front of you through the achievement of meditation, which, when viewed externally, are like weaving dreams, but you know that you are not looking at them like ordinary dreams, but like ordinary sensory perceptions. Just as you know through a sensory perception that there is a thing behind it, so now you know, when you have created the possibility for yourself in a fully awake state – not in dream consciousness, but in a fully awake state – of being in a thinking activity that is simultaneously a form-building activity, you now know: Behind what your eyes perceive and what your ears hear, which are external, sensual, physical things, there are now spiritual realities behind the images you experience in this way. You are not yet inside the spiritual world, but you know that there is a spiritual world behind these images. You only know that you are outside of your body, and you are real, you are a being, you have an existence. And you know that you are filled with a world of images.

I already said last time: this world of images initially presents you with a large tableau of your own life since birth, since you have been on earth, but not in the form of mere memories, but in the form of what created in the first years of childhood by the still unformed brain, what was created in the whole organism, what was transformed from day to day by the food we eat from outside into the substance of the body. Everything that works in us, but also everything that arises from the body as soul, all this stands before us in a great tableau, first through this world of images.

That is the first thing we perceive through this world of images. We would get nowhere if we did not continue the practice. And it is continued in such a way that one acquires the strength, having first empathized with one's soul in love. Thoughts that have become images, which one knows are rooted in a spiritual world, one must now acquire the ability to suppress these images again in order to make the consciousness completely empty. In this way, the whole human consciousness gradually strengthens. Those who always have their rather critical objections to the anthroposophical spiritual science presented here, who say: maybe it is all based on autosuggestion, is basically just like fantastically arising dreams. The person who speaks in this way does not know that the methods described here – and they consist of genuine, calm meditation – are not a matter of tuning down, muffling the consciousness, but of a much clearer, brighter consciousness. If I am to describe individual experiences of this enlightened consciousness, alongside which the other consciousness remains quite present, I could say something like the following: For the person who has developed eyes, as most people do, the light becomes perceptible when the sun rises in the morning. He sees the sensual-physical things around him through the rays of the sun, which are cast upon them and which come back to him. He sees things through the light that is outside and in which he himself is placed.

By developing a world of images in us in this way, as I have described it, using very precise methods — you will find them described in the books mentioned — that are as exact as any mathematically exact investigation, by developing such images within us , we come to the point where we are no longer dependent on an external light, for example, but we experience a light inwardly, in that we experience ourselves, in that we feel ourselves placed with our soul and spirit outside our body in a spiritual world, we feel a light connected with our being. We live and weave in the light, and the light is not just something that makes things visible to us externally, as is the case in the sense world, but we ourselves become the light, the radiance of the light. In this way we make the spiritual entities visible to ourselves. At first we experience them in images; but the images are illuminated inwardly. Therefore, it should not be spoken of in a nebulous sense – I already hinted at this on Tuesday – but in an exact sense, from which one can speak in the same way as one speaks exactly about mathematics, of what the spiritual researcher acquires: exact clairvoyance, exact clairvoyance.

Those who associate this with mediumship, with something that is often called clairvoyance in everyday life and which is practiced by all kinds of charlatans in the occult field, are simply unaware that someone who, for example, enters into autosuggestion while completely immersed in it has a tuned-down consciousness. The consciousness that is meant here as a clairvoyant one is not tuned down compared to the ordinary consciousness. The ordinary consciousness remains fully intact and the other is added to it, so that one is not less conscious, less prudent, than in ordinary life, but rather more prudent. One should first ask whether the person referred to here as a spiritual researcher cannot also speak about natural scientific matters in the same way as those who reject this exact clairvoyance! He can do that. Since he can do what the others can do, and only what is given by exact clairvoyance is added, then one can arbitrarily reject this exact clairvoyance, but one cannot say that it is something that takes away one's ordinary level-headedness or that leads one away from what, for example, as a natural scientist, firmly places one in the world. Entering into this exact clairvoyance for the purpose of gaining knowledge of the spirit of the world does not distract one from the practice of life or from calm research.

If one also manages not only to let the images come through the appropriate meditation, but also to remove them at any time, so that one has an empty consciousness, then a spiritual world penetrates in, just as otherwise the breath penetrates into our lungs; I say, as the breath penetrates into our lungs. I could also say, if I were to express the comparison less precisely, that it is as when color enters our eye or sound enters our ear; but then the comparison would be a little less precise. It is the case that when we perceive with our senses in the external physical world, these perceptions do not come to us as vividly as what we now experience in empty consciousness. We experience this penetration of the spirit of the world as strongly as we otherwise experience breathing unconsciously. But just as breathing is alive in us, not merely with the shadowy quality that colors and sounds have for us, so too is what we now experience spiritually when we have risen to the point of exact clairvoyance, as I have described it, so too is this direct experience.

But, my dear attendees, this direct experience would leave us standing halfway. We would have images. If we can make the images disappear in the manner described, we would know: there is weaving and life in the spirit outside. But we would only know about this weaving and life in the spirit in very general terms. For the remarkable thing is that we perceive what now appears as weaving and living in the spirit not in the way we perceive sensual things, that we say to ourselves: We stand there and the things are outside, but we feel ourselves now inside the whole world. We have, so to speak, poured out our own existence over the whole world. We feel at one with the world. We have moved outside of our body, have awakened our life, I would say outside of our body as a spiritual-mental being, and feel one with the whole world outside of our body, which we used to look at from the outside, but now we experience inwardly, as we otherwise experience the blood, the activity of our organs within our skin. Our consciousness has become a cosmic consciousness out of a personality consciousness.

One does not experience the spirit of the world, my dear audience, in any other way than by first experiencing it as an inner feeling. And you see, when you stand there in the ordinary physical world with what you have as ordinary consciousness, then the riddles of knowledge come to you. These riddles of knowledge usually go to the point where you want to get to know the inner workings of things. You become aware: You look at the outer surface of things, you want to get to know the inside. We know how science constructs this inner aspect as atomic action, how other people do it differently. But you want to penetrate into the inner being. Or you construct theories that it is simply impossible for the human capacity for knowledge. In any case, however, one feels outside of things, and with what one has in knowledge, one feels that one wants to approach things. Only then, one says to oneself, can one gain a picture of the existence of things when one approaches them. If one is in the spirit of the world outside of one's body, as I have described, knowledge is something completely different.

At first, one has only images. Images are there. And one would be a fool to imagine that the first form he receives would be anything other than images – images, to be sure, of a spiritual world, but images nonetheless. Once one has put these images away and the empty consciousness has set in, one feels as though in a spiritual world. But just as little as one sees the lungs, the stomach, the heart in the ordinary world, one sees just as little that which one now experiences as the spirit of the world like one's own inner being in cosmic consciousness. One does not yet see it. One knows that it is within oneself, it is within one, but one does not yet see it. And while in the physical realization one otherwise wants to approach things, now the opposite occurs, and one wants to get rid of things, one wants to separate from them and one wants to make them into images again. One has learned the creation of images that have a purely inward weaving of thoughts but with the vividness of images. One wants to bring what one experiences inwardly into such a tableau of images. One wants to grasp what one initially has in [cosmic consciousness] as a tableau of images within oneself. One wants to externalize things. Whereas in physical cognition one introduces them in the process of cognition, one now wants to externalize what one carries within oneself, so that one has the cosmos around oneself in imaginations, in images.

In physical cognition, one first has the inner thought, then one approaches the object. One takes in the object. In supersensible cognition of the spirit of the world, one first has the object within oneself and then seeks the image outside. One seeks to be able to visualize the world as a tableau of what one actually carries within oneself.

This level of knowledge, ladies and gentlemen, is not attained without progressing to exercises of will, as I also described last Tuesday, for example, to that exercise of will in which one reverses the order of what you used to always think forward, for example, the experiences of a day from the evening towards the morning, so that you tear the thinking away from the outer reality by the willful thinking. Or also to practice strict self-discipline, so that one adds new habits to one's old ones or also breaks away from old habits and imagines habits – this is not meant in a bad way – so that one really makes a different person out of oneself in the course of one's life, which otherwise only life makes out of one, that one takes one's self-education into one's own hands with all one's inner energy, so to speak.

Again, you will find exercises on this in the books mentioned. I will now only hint at the fact that, just as one trains one's thinking within meditation, so that one can live outside of the body with one's soul, one can train one's will. And through this training of the will, one comes to experience one thing in relation to one's fellow human beings, namely, that an ascent into the spiritual worlds is possible, so that they also become pictorial and objective. At a certain stage of this development of the will, my dear audience, you see your own existence completely immersed in the deepest pain, suffering, deprivation, worry and care. I use these words to describe the situation that the spirit-seer has to go through because he is a modern person and cannot rely on a guru as in the old days; I use this word to describe approximately what has to be gone through: sorrow, worry, pain, suffering. That only means the complete separation from the physical body. Man is only in a kind of well-being during his physical life because he is immersed in his physical body in his spiritual-mental, when he lives in a waking state. And in this way he is protected from feeling pain every night in his sleep and from having to endure sleep permeated by suffering, so that his consciousness actually extinguishes itself in sleep. But now we step out of our consciousness in a higher realization in a conscious way; and by bringing not only the thought but also the will outside of the body, the deepest pain awakens in the spiritual-soul. One feels that one lacks the body in one's inner experience. Not only does the sense of well-being, which only arises from the soul being permeated by the body, cease, but so does the inclination, the selfish inclination towards the body; for through the exercises one does, one becomes more and more selfless and selfless. Love must already be developed in meditation. In this way selfishness is eradicated, otherwise one does not come at all to this experience in images outside of the body. But through this one plunges into a painful experience.

It is already the case in ordinary life, my dear audience, that anyone who has come to a little not too sober, indifferent knowledge, but to such knowledge that is inwardly connected with the human being, will say, if he wants to be honest: I am grateful for my happiness in life, for my favorable destiny, but knowledge has actually only brought me what I have suffered. And so an inexpressible pain must first spread through the consciousness existing outside the body, if the external world is now to enter the emptied consciousness and the person is to gain the strength to objectively set down in complete images that which is the spirit of the world.

But then, my dear audience, then you stand before this spirit of the world, contemplate it in images, and something arises for this externally awakened consciousness that I would compare to ordinary memory, only that it is more powerful, more grandiose and just of a completely different kind. In ordinary life, we remember through thoughts the experiences we have gone through. We went through this or that experience ten years ago. Today we experience this experience in memory or from memory. It is in us in an inward, spiritual way. By having risen to the extra-corporeal consciousness and thus looking at the world as I have described it, there is something present in this looking that I would now also like to call a kind of memory, namely the memory of what we ourselves are in the physical world. We are, however, prudent; we can behave quite well as the most prudent person in the physical world; but at the same time, within this world of images, our own body becomes an image to us, and the things of the external world, minerals, plants, animals, physical human forms, they become an image to us; within the world of images, as in a cosmic memory, that world reappears in which we were when we were only sensually aware. And that is how we orient ourselves, my dear attendees, because that is the case.

We have experienced the sun here in the physical world. In the spiritual world, into which we have found our way in the manner described, we experience something else: spiritual beings, beings that now have inner life, but such a life that, unlike the human being, does not have an outer physical body. We experience spiritual and soul-like divine-spiritual beings that are not embodied in the physical world. And we experience them in such a way that we relate the new experience to an old experience. Just as we relate something in our memory to an experience from eight to ten years ago, we relate what we experience over there in the spiritual world, which we have entered, to the physical solar experience here. Like a memory, the physical solar experience is also among the images that we experience there. And we know through this: The sun is the external image of spiritual divine beings, just as our own body is the image of our own soul. We now see the forces, but the forces that are themselves spiritual beings, behind the sun. This seems grotesque and fantastic to today's man. It is no more fantastic than the results of the science of electricity or magnetism.

One must only inform oneself exactly about the way in which the spiritual researcher comes to these things, and one will no longer find it fantastic, but will find it as exact and realistic as a mathematical-scientific investigation leads to scientific results. But one also actually experiences processes within this remembering of the physical world and the beholding of the corresponding spiritual-soul, the divine-spiritual beings. Let us dwell for a moment on what is revealed to us there as spiritual-soul beings, I would say behind the sun, what is revealed to us as the spiritual-soul of the sun, as the sun spirit.

Now, my dear attendees, by having progressed so far in our realization of the spirit of the world, we also come to – I have already described another side of this realization last Tuesday – not only remembering our existence as we have lived it since our birth or sometime after, but we learn to look back into our pre-earthly existence, how we, as spiritual-soul, which has now been released from the body in its experience, were in a spiritual-soul world. Just as we are here in relation to the external physical sun, so in a pre-earthly existence we were in a purely spiritual environment, but now in connection with that which corresponds spiritually to physical sunlight. Just as the physical sun illuminates us here on earth, so in our pre-earthly existence we were in a relationship to the divine sun beings, who did not illuminate us with physical light, but who connected their own activity with our activity at that time, so that we found ourselves enveloped in the spiritual-soul in the spiritual effect of the sun, just as we feel irradiated by the physical effect of the sun here in our physical existence. And at a certain moment in our germinal life — we learn to recognize this — we descended from our pre-earthly, purely spiritual-soul existence, united with that which comes to us through father and mother as a physical human body. We united that which we have experienced under the influence of the activity of the sun beings with the physical body. We immerse ourselves in this physical body, permeate it with soul, spiritualize it. That which was solar activity in us becomes the etheric body that permeates us, which is within us as a fine body, and this stimulates our ability to now ignite the physical sunlight and to see through it the colors.

In short, we learn by getting to know the spirit of the world, we get to know ourselves as truly existing within this spiritual world, looking beyond our birth or our conception into our eternal, that is, spiritual existence, which reveals itself to us as spiritual-eternal, because we now know: By being in the spiritual counter-image of physical sunlight, we first took in that which permeates our physical body and imbues it with activity in physical life. Just as we take in physical sunlight here, we took in spiritual sunlight there and prepared our own earthly life. Our life on earth is our creation, not that what lived spiritually and soulfully in us is merely the creation of our earthly existence. In this way one gradually learns to enter into and recognize the spirit of the world.

Or let us take another example, esteemed participants. One learns to recognize — just as the spiritual essence is behind the physical sun — the lunar beings are behind the physical moon in the manner described. They reveal themselves to one precisely as that to which one has struggled through the development of the will. So that one can picture inwardly experienced events through the power of the sun. The spiritual beings, the beings of the spiritual world, which have their image in the physical moon and its activity, its effectiveness in space, enable us to do so even before our birth or conception, not only to experience what the spiritual environment is, but to consciously experience, as we know here in exact clairvoyance, by not only receive physical sunlight through our eyes, but also absorb that which works spiritually in the power of sunlight, that we thereby experience the world in an indeterminate way in the spirit; but that we can depict what we experience, like our cosmic interior, is due to the forces that are the spiritual lunar forces. And it is the spiritual lunar forces that bring us back into physical earthly existence.

So it is - my dear attendees - that man experiences the spiritual counter-images of that which shines in the sun, in the moon, and also in the stars, in an external-physical way. Through exact clairvoyance and through that education of the will, which I would like to call ideal magic - to distinguish it from all the charlatanry with which it is so readily confused today and which is so prevalent in the world today - through this , what I would call thought training on the one hand, to exact clairvoyance, which I would call on the other hand, the training of the will to the most ideal magic, through which one arrives at the recognition of the spirit of the world, initially not religiously, but thoroughly scientifically.

In this way, one comes to recognize in that in which one actually finds oneself unconsciously every night from falling asleep to waking up, the germ of that which emerges through the gate of death when one actually steps through that gate of death. And because our physical body is incorporated into the amoral nature, one learns to recognize what one is when one is outside of the body during sleep, as – I cannot say now, embodiment, but I must say: realization — as the spiritualization of what we are worth as moral beings in the world, and of what lives in us as a religious sense of the divine-spiritual that permeates the world. In the physical body, our soul and spirit are enclosed in the natural world, as if in darkness. When we become transparent to what we experience when we are outside our body as spiritual beings, from falling asleep to waking up, everything we have morally engaged in is there, our moral value is there, and it passes through the gate of death. And by getting to know the spirit of the world as I have described it, one also learns to recognize that everything we see physically – physics even says so today – will one day disappear in the heat of death, that everything external and material is transitory. But that which man acquires as a spirit-germ, which is unconscious in sleep and becomes conscious in exact clairvoyance, that is what outlasts everything we see around us in the form of minerals, plants, animals, stars, clouds and so on. That is what lays the germ for a future world.

We get to know the reality of the power of morality as it becomes real. We learn to recognize, just as the botanist recognizes the next year's plant in the germ of today's plant, so we learn to recognize the germinal nature of the present world for the future worlds by getting to know our soul and spirit in its connection with our moral quality. This means that we prepare future worlds through our moral and religious lives when the present ones have disappeared. This imposes on our soul a sense of responsibility of the greatest possible kind, for we know that what we educate morally, what we morally engage in, seems today to be subject only to an abstract human judgment; in reality, it is the germ of future worlds.

And as we learn to recognize our own immortality – that is, the ability of that which is outside the body, from falling asleep to waking up, which passes through the gate of death, to live in a spiritual world, in a spiritual environment, in the same way as it lived in a real way in its pre-earthly existence, in a post-earthly existence – as we recognize our own immortality, immortality, we get to know the eternity of the world, we know that the present world is the solidified, condensed spiritual world of the past, and we know that in the solidified world, which we see today as nature, by letting the physical human being emerge from itself, the spiritual-soul human being is formed within the physical human being, which will create new worlds.

Through all this, my dear attendees, modern man is then able to truly gain insights into the spiritual essence of the world, merely with the guidance I have already indicated, without the dependence on a guru, as was the case in ancient times. The starting point is only that, as I have indicated, and as I have already given it in my “Philosophy of Freedom” thirty years ago, the starting point is that one first recognizes the true nature of the moral in man, how this moral as the most individual in human nature, as it were, pours into pure thinking as the spiritually and soulfully awake human being himself.

If one then develops the method that I described in “Philosophy of Freedom” as the moral one, one develops it for the recognition of the universe, so this exact clairvoyance becomes idealistic magic, penetrating into the knowledge of the spirit of the world, and thus also of the eternity of the human essence. I only mention in passing that this is also connected with the consciousness of repeated lives on earth. This occurs at the time when it becomes possible to look back on the pre-earthly existence. When we look into it, how we weave and live in it, just as we create here among the natural phenomena as physical people, how we weave and live there as spiritual-soul people, we also find how we have brought this life over from previous earthly lives, how we will carry it through death into future earthly lives. So that which can be achieved through exact clairvoyance, through idealistic magic.

This, my dear attendees, is first of all a purely scientific matter, the spiritual continuation of what the modern human being has acquired precisely through the power of scientific thinking. But it rises to a religious feeling. And this religious feeling, I would like to describe it to you in a few final words, in terms of the mighty mystery that has taken place on earth at Golgotha. I would like to describe it to you in terms of the penetration of earthly human life with the Christ impulse.

If we approach the contemplation of the Mystery of Golgotha equipped with the knowledge of the spiritual nature of the world, of which I have just spoken, it becomes clear to us that, when we look at the times before the Mystery of Golgotha, all knowledge about the supersensible worlds was gained in the way I have described at the beginning of the discussions today. They were gained through the living relationship of the chela to the guru. Basically, our present-day religious beliefs are only traditional latecomers of what the old disciples learned from their guru in this way.

How did people look into the spiritual world in those days? They also looked at nature around them, but did not develop a real science of nature; if they wanted to seek knowledge, they went to the guru. The guru pointed them back to the earliest times of the earth's beginning, when the oldest gurus had learned from divine spiritual beings what the later gurus had basically appropriated for themselves to pass on to their disciples. They were now referred back to primeval times, to times when there was not yet such a separation of earthly life and spiritual life as there was later. Man felt, so to speak, as if he, by living only in nature, had fallen away from the original spiritual essence of the world, and he gradually felt that nature itself had fallen away from the spiritual essence of the world. Morality was viewed in such a way that it was said: We humans have become what we are today through natural development. Nature itself, which lives in us, has fallen away from the divine-spiritual. We must allow ourselves to be led back to what nature used to be by the holy gurus, to a time when it not only showed natural effects, but was imbued with moral impulses. If we look back to the earliest times, we find everywhere not a mere moral nature, but a spirit in nature. The religious sense turned to that, to which it can turn not in faith but in full realization.

But through that older realization, which was a dreamily developed clairvoyance, as I have described it here, through that older dreamlike art of clairvoyance, man also saw his pre-earthly existence. And precisely because in those older times, which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha — those times that immediately preceded it no longer had it, the older insights had already dawned —, but in those older times people had something within them that they experienced within themselves in a way that otherwise only humans experience nature; in this way, people experienced something arising within themselves, of which they said: 'I have this from my pre-earthly existence'. Because people had something like this, they were able to have this deep trust in the guru. And then the guru also told them: Yes, but you have been transferred to the physical-earthly world; you will enter the spiritual world again through death. You live here on earth in a world that has fallen away from the spiritual; over there you will encounter, above all, the being whose physical image is the sun. It will guide you so that you can gain strength to see the light, otherwise you will be spiritually dead on the other side.

And there was still something left of this ancient wisdom at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was unfolding on earth. And out of this ancient wisdom, in the first few centuries, the Christ Impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha were seen first. And they said: The being that used to be only in the spiritual world, that released the human being down into the physical world, that takes over his guidance again after death, this spiritual being has descended and has taken on the body of the human being Jesus of Nazareth. That to which people looked up in the times of the old mystery wisdom as the high solar being, the spiritual-divine counter-image of the physical sun, the guide of man through all deaths and all lives, of This Being, who was later called the Christ Being, was said by those who had remained old adepts, initiates from the old mysteries at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, they said that it had descended. And because man has become so earthly that he can no longer be connected with that which still lived as Divine-Spiritual at the beginning of the earth, this Divine-Spiritual Being has descended to earth itself, has taken on a body, has remained connected to the earth. And people can, in line with the words of St. Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” develop their sense of self and their sense of freedom through their mere physical body. They can permeate this sense of freedom, this sense of self, with their religious relationship to Christ, who in the body of Jesus of Nazareth went through the Mystery of Golgotha. In this way they can, through the power they absorb through their union with Christ, through their inwardly devout experience of Christ, achieve the same leadership after death that they used to achieve in the way described.

Thus, in the early days of Christianity, people pointed to the Christ-leader who descended from spiritual worlds into the physical world. This consciousness gradually ceased, as did the old wisdom of initiation, the yoga wisdom, and we humans today, as I have shown, have to gain insight into the spiritual world from a scientific point of view. We stand there with our moral consciousness. We stand there with the need for a divine world. But we can also know, as the ancients said: This world has fallen away from the divine-spiritual, it has become sinful in man, it has become amoral as nature – so we accept the world today, but we know that the moral intuition penetrates into the thinking of the individual human being in an individualistic way with the consciousness of freedom. We work our way up into the spiritual world to knowledge of the spiritual world, and we know, as the ancients knew, that they have been released by the gods onto the earth; we know that through the free power of the human being, which we develop out of the earthly, we will find our connection to the divine spiritual worlds again.

The ancients saw the past and regarded this earth as a falling away from the divine-spiritual of the past. We look at the earth and hope for the future that we will rediscover the gods through human freedom, knowing that they live as counter-images behind the sun and moon, as I have described. So we today, by looking at the Mystery of Golgotha and saying with the words of Paul: “Not I, but this Christ impulse gives us the strength to really work now,” for the de-deitified earth has become divine again through the fact that the Christ lives in it, by going through the Mystery of Golgotha. And we can know when we become certain again by looking up into the supersensible worlds of the Christ-being that this Christ-being will be our helper into the future in which we have to work through our spirit germ to form realities. Thus spiritual knowledge, which is meant here, leads again from mere knowledge of nature to moral consciousness, leading to religious consciousness.

Ladies and Gentlemen, how these things can then be lived out in external civilization, what significance they can have for practical life today, that is to be the subject of a third lecture, which I may give here tomorrow under the title: “Moral and Religious Education from the Point of View of Anthroposophy”. Here I wanted to show that what was once said in a completely different way by ancient human wisdom about the supersensible world can in turn be said by modern man, that this modern man, by meeting all the demands of modern civilization, does not become weak by placing himself in dependence on a guru, but can build precisely on the strong forces of his own individuality, and can enter precisely into those regions where knowledge of the spiritual essence of the world can be gained. Man must only have the courage to let that approach him again, which comes from the present-day spiritual researcher. For just as people today must let astrological, biological and physical knowledge approach them, so our time demands that these spiritual-scientific insights into our culture and our civilized life also be incorporated. For the means by which they have been attained is the powerful force of thinking, which not only allows man to look at the world passively, but also gives him virtues, self-discipline, self-education of the will to the point of overcoming all egoism, to the point of merging in love for the whole world, without which, as I have described, universal world knowledge in the spirit cannot be attained.

The many signs of decline that we see today – I have already pointed out what makes people today so lacking in perspective in the physical world – can only be healed from the spirit, from the soul. What we lack today, and what has brought our culture and civilization to a dead end, is the power of thought to the point of aliveness, the power of will to the point where it penetrates the darkness of the outer sense existence. If we see through this existence through the living thought so that we feel everywhere we go as comrades of the spiritual world — and we can do that through modern anthroposophical spiritual science — then we take that strong power of thinking, then we take that bright power of the will into our human consciousness, through which alone, as every unbiased person can well know, what humanity needs can be shaped. Our forces of decline in civilization show quite clearly what humanity needs in order to develop rising forces out of the present into the near future. For it seems to be obvious to everyone that these rising forces cannot be brought into our civilization through mere external institutions.

Those who recognize this should actually develop an inclination to look where they try to ignite that which cannot be ignited by external means, inwardly, from the spirit and the soul. But if it is kindled, then we will gain strength, courage and confidence to move in the right sense out of this present time of ours, with its difficult trials, into a future that will admittedly also be full of suffering, that will not just be happy for humanity , but in which people will be able to endure happiness and suffering in such a way that the human race will progress in a dignified manner through the overall development of this human race and this earth of ours into future times.

Comedy in three acts by Max Bernstein
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

A noble spirit with honest artistic aspirations has revived the fine comedy idea of Moreto, Calderon's contemporary. The girl who is called to rule a nation and who wants to establish a realm of virtue in place of the realm of evil passions forms the center of Moreto's "Donna Diana". Such a girl is also the subject of Max Bernstein's "Girl's Dream". In both plays, the natural instincts within the girl's soul triumph over the notions of virtue caused by a false education, which are conceived as coldness in the face of the passion of love. The girl wants to remain a virgin, but in the end she sails into the sea of love with fervor. With all the means of a refined dramatic technician, Moreto lays his problem bare and develops it with the compelling necessity and with all the criss-crossing and cross-curves that are characteristic of nature when it brings forth one of its creatures and allows it to grow. Max Bernstein intelligently constructs his drama with the transparent clarity of the clairvoyant, all too clairvoyant psychologist. With him, imagination always lags a few steps behind reason. Bernstein knows all the details of the girl's soul. He is a psychologist. However, he is not a completely unbiased observer of the individual being, which defies any general formula, but a dogmatist who has formed certain general concepts and gives them form. The feelings Bernstein puts into his Leonor of Aragon are abstract, general thoughts about the girl's heart. We have before us a general concept, not a living individuality. You don't understand why this individual case has to be the way it is. During the performance I could not escape the feeling that there is no compelling necessity in all these events. It is all arbitrary. And the verses are also arbitrary. Nowhere could I feel that verse is the natural way in which the poet must express himself.

What the poet lacks in the art of individualization is replaced by the leading actors in the performance of the Deutsches Theater. Agnes Sorma brings the abstract idea of the Princess of Aragon to life so perfectly that we truly believe we have an individual being before us. And Josef Kainz speaks Bernstein's verses in such a way that we forget their unnaturalness. Guido Thielscher plays a master of ceremonies as a small masterpiece of acting art.

[ 1 ] Those who struggled for clarity in the great problems of world and life conceptions at the end of the eighteenth century looked up to two men of great intellectual-spiritual power, Kant and Goethe. Another person who strove for such a clarity in the most forceful way was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. When he had become acquainted with Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, he wrote:

I am living in a new world. . . . Things I had thought could never be proven to me, for instance, the concept of absolute freedom and duty, now have been proven to me and I feel much happier because of it. It is incomprehensible what a high degree of respect for humanity, what strength this philosophy gives us; what a blessing it is for an age in which morality had been destroyed in its foundation, and in which the concept of duty had been struck from all dictionaries.

And when, on the basis of Kant's conception, he had built his own Groundwork of all Scientific Knowledge, he sent the book to Goethe with the words:

I consider you, and always have considered you, to be the representative of the purest spiritual force of feeling on the level of development that mankind has reached at the present time. To you philosophy rightly turns. Your feeling is its touchstone.

A similar attitude to both representative spirits was taken by Schiller. He writes about Kant on October 28, 1794:

I am not at all frightened by the prospect that the law of change, which shows no mercy to any human or divine work, will also destroy the form of the Kantian as well as every other philosophy. Its foundation, however, will not have to fear this destiny, for since the human race exists, and as long as there has been a reason, this philosophy has been silently acknowledged and mankind as a whole has acted in agreement with its principles.

Schiller describes Goethe's conception in a letter addressed to him on August 23, 1794:

For a long time I have, although from a considerable distance, watched the course of your spirit, and with ever increasing admiration I have observed the path you have marked out for yourself. You are seeking the necessary in nature, but you are seeking it along the most difficult road, which any spirit weaker than yours would be most careful to avoid. You take hold of nature as a whole in order to obtain light in a particular point; in the totality of nature's various types of phenomena, you seek the explanation for the individual. . . . Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and from the cradle been surrounded by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened; perhaps it would have been made entirely unnecessary. With the first perception of things you would have caught the form of the Necessary, and from your first experiences the grand style would have developed in you. But now, having been born a German, your Greek spirit having thus been cast into a northern world, you had no choice but that of becoming a northern artist yourself, or of supplying your imagination with what it is refused by reality through the help of your power of thought and thus, to produce a second Greece, as it were, from within and by means of reason.

[ 2 ] Seen from the present age, Kant and Goethe can be considered spirits in whom the evolution of world conception of modern times reveals itself as in an important moment of its development. These spirits experience intensely the enigmatic problems of existence, which have formerly, in a more preparatory stage, been latent in the substrata of the life of the soul.

[ 3 ] To illustrate the effect that Kant exerted on his age, the statements of two men who stood at the full height of their time's culture may be quoted. Jean Paul wrote to a friend in 1788:

For heaven's sake, do buy two books, Kant's Foundation for a Metaphysics of Morals and his Critique of Practical Reason. Kant is not a light of the world but a complete radiating solar system all at once.

Wilhelm von Humboldt makes the statement:

Kant undertook the greatest work that philosophical reason has perhaps ever owed to a single man. . . . Three things remain unmistakably certain if one wants to determine the fame that Kant bestowed on his nation and the benefit that he brought to speculative thinking. Some of the things he destroyed will never be raised again, some of those to which he laid the foundation will never perish; most important of all, he brought about a reform that has no equal in the whole history of human thought.

[ 4 ] This shows how Kant's contemporaries saw a revolutionary event in the development of world conception in his achievement. Kant himself considered it so important for this development that he judged its significance equal to that which Copernicus's discovery of the planetary motion holds for natural science.

[ 5 ] Various currents of philosophical development of previous times continue their effect in Kant's thinking and are transformed in his thought into questions that determine the character of his world conception. The reader who feels the characteristic traits in those of Kant's writings that are most significant for his view is aware of a special appreciation of Kant for the mathematical mode of thinking as one of these traits. Kant feels that what is known in the way mathematical thinking knows, carries the certainty of its truth in itself. The fact that man is capable of mathematics proves that he is capable of truth. Whatever else one may doubt, the truth of mathematics cannot be doubted.

[ 6 ] With this appreciation of mathematics the thought tendency of modern history of philosophy, which had put the characteristic stamp on Spinoza's realm of thoughts, appears in Kant's mind. Spinoza wants to construct his thought sequences in such a form that they develop strictly from one another as the propositions of mathematical science. Nothing but what is thought in the mode of thought of mathematics supplies the firm foundation on which, according to Spinoza, the human ego feels itself secure in the spirit of the modern age. Descartes had also thought in this way, and Spinoza had derived from him many stimulating suggestions. Out of the state of doubt he had to secure a fulcrum for a world conception for himself. In the mere passive reception of a thought into the soul, Descartes could not recognize such a support yielding force. This Greek attitude toward the world of thought is no longer possible for the man of the modern age. Within the self-conscious soul something must be found that lends its support to the thought. For Descartes, and again for Spinoza, this is supplied by the fulfillment of the postulate that the soul should deal with thought in general as it does in the mathematical mode of conception. As Descartes proceeded from his state of doubt to his conclusion, “I think, therefore I am,” and the statements connected with it, he felt secure in these operations because they seemed to him to possess the clarity that is inherent in mathematics. The same general mental conviction leads Spinoza to elaborate a world picture for himself in which everything is unfolding its effect with strict necessity like the laws of mathematics. The one divine substance, which permeates all beings of the world with the determination of mathematical law, admits the human ego only if it surrenders itself completely to this substance, if it allows its self-consciousness to be absorbed by the world consciousness of the divine substance. This mathematical disposition of mind, which is caused by a longing of the “ego” for the security it needs, leads this “ego” to a world picture in which, through its striving for security, it has lost itself, its self-dependent, firm stand on a spiritual world ground, its freedom and its hope for an eternal self-dependent existence.

[ 7 ] Leibniz's thoughts tended in the opposite direction. The human soul is, for him, the self dependent monad, strictly closed off in itself. But this monad experiences only what it contains within itself; the world order, which presents itself “from without, as it were,” is only a delusion. Behind it lies the true world, which consists only of monads, the order of which is the predetermined (pre-established) harmony that does not show itself to the outer observation. This world conception leaves its self-dependence to the human soul, the self-dependent existence in the universe, its freedom and hope for an eternal significance in the world's evolution. If, however, it means to remain consistent with its basic principle, it cannot avoid maintaining that everything known by the soul is only the soul itself, that it is incapable of going outside the self-conscious ego and that the universe cannot become revealed to the soul in its truth from without.

[ 8 ] For Descartes and for Leibniz, the convictions they had acquired in their religious education were still effective enough that they adopted them in their philosophical world pictures, thereby following motivations that were not really derived from the basic principles of their world pictures. Into Descartes's world picture there crept the conception of a spiritual world that he had obtained through religious channels. It unconsciously permeated the rigid mathematical necessity of his world order and thus he did not feel that his world picture tended to extinguish his “ego.” In Leibniz, religious impulses exerted their influence in a similar way, and it is for this reason that it escaped him that his world picture provided for no possibility to find anything except the content of the soul itself. Leibniz believed, nevertheless, that he could assume the existence of the spiritual world outside the “ego.” Spinoza, through a certain courageous trait of his personality, actually drew the consequences of his world picture. To obtain the security for this world picture on which his self-consciousness insisted, he renounced the self-dependence of this self-consciousness and found his supreme happiness in feeling himself as a part of the one divine substance.

With regard to Kant we must raise the question of how he was compelled to feel with respect to the currents of world conception, which had produced its prominent representatives in Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. For all soul impulses that had been at work in these three were also active in him, and in his soul these impulses effected each other and caused the riddles of world and mankind with which Kant found himself confronted. A glance at the life of the spirit in the Age of Kant informs us of the general trend of Kant's feeling with respect to these riddles. Significantly, Lessing's (1729–1781) attitude toward the questions of world conception is symptomatic of this intellectual life. Lessing sums up his credo in the words, “The transformation of revealed truths into truths of reason is absolutely necessary if the human race is to derive any help from them.” The eighteenth century has been called the century of the Enlightenment. The representative spirits of Germany understood enlightenment in the sense of Lessing's remark. Kant declared the enlightenment to be “man's departure from his self-caused bondage of mind,” and as its motto he chose the words, “Have courage to use your own mind.” Even thinkers as prominent as Lessing, however, at first had succeeded in no more than transforming rationally traditional doctrines of belief derived from the state of the “self-caused bondage of mind.” They did not penetrate to a pure rational view as Spinoza did. It was inevitable that Spinoza's doctrine, when it became known in Germany, should make a deep impression on such spirits.

Spinoza really had undertaken the task of using his own mind, but in the course of this process he had arrived at results that were entirely different from those of the German philosophers of the enlightenment. His influence had to be so much the more significant since the lines of his reasoning, constructed according to mathematical methods, carried a much greater convincing power than the current of Leibniz's philosophy, which effected the spirits of that age in the form “developed” by Wolff. From Goethe's autobiography, Poetry and Truth, we receive an idea of how this school of thought impressed deeper spirits as it reached them through the channels of Wolff's conceptions. Goethe tells of the impressions the lectures of Professor Winckler in Leipzig, given in the spirit of Wolff, had made on him.

At the beginning, I attended my classes industriously and faithfully, but the philosophy offered in no way succeeded in enlightening me. It seemed strange to me that in logic I was to tear apart, isolate and destroy, as it were, the intellectual operations I had been handling with the greatest ease since the days of my childhood, in order to gain an insight into their correct use. I thought I knew just about as much as the lecturer about the nature of things, the world and God, and on more than one occasion it seemed to me that there was a considerable hitch in the matter.

About his occupation with Spinoza's writings, however, the poet tells us, “I surrendered to this reading and, inspecting myself, I believed never to have seen the world so distinctly.”

There were, however, only a few people who could surrender to Spinoza's mode of thought as frankly as Goethe. Most readers were led into deep conflicts of world conception by this philosophy. Goethe's friend, F. H. Jacobi, is typical of them. He believed that he had to admit that reason, left to its own resources, would not lead to the doctrines of belief, but to the view at which Spinoza had arrived—that the world is ruled by eternal, necessary laws. Thus, Jacobi found himself confronted with an important decision: Either to trust his reason and abandon the doctrines of his creed or to deny reason the possibility to lead to the highest insights in order to be able to retain his belief. He chose the latter. He maintained that man possessed a direct certainty in his innermost soul, a secure belief by virtue of which he was capable of feeling the truth of the conception of a personal God, of the freedom of will and of immortality, so that these convictions were entirely independent of the insights of reason that were leaning on logical conclusions, and had no reference to these things but only to the external things of nature. In this way, Jacobi deposed the knowledge of reason to make room for a belief that satisfied the needs of the heart. Goethe who was not at all pleased by this dethronement of reason, wrote to his friend, “God has punished you with metaphysics and placed a thorn in your flesh; he has blessed me with physics. I cling to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God and leave everything to you that you call, and may continue to call, religion. Your trust rests in belief in God; mine in seeing.” The philosophy of the enlightenment ended by confronting the spirits with the alternative, either to supplant the revealed truths by truths of reason in the sense of Spinoza, or to declare war on the knowledge of reason itself.

[ 9 ] Kant also found himself confronted with this choice. The attitude he took and how he made his decision is apparent from the clear account in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason.

Now let us assume that morality necessarily presupposes freedom (in its strictest sense) as a property of our will, pleading practical principles inherent in our reason that would be positively impossible without the presupposition of freedom. Speculative reason, however, having proven that this is not even thinkable, the former assumption, made on behalf of morality, would have to give way to the latter, whose opposite contains an obvious self-contradiction and therefore freedom, and with it morality, would have to give way to the mechanism of nature. But since, as the case lies, for the possibility of morality nothing more is required than that the idea of freedom be not contradictory in itself, and may at least be considered as thinkable without the future necessity of being understood, such that granting the freedom of a given action would not place any obstacle into the attempt of considering the same action (see in other relation) as a mechanism of nature. In this way, the doctrine of morality maintains its place . . . which could, however, not have happened if our critical philosophy had not previously enlightened us about our inevitable ignorance with respect to things in themselves, restricting all that we can know theoretically to mere phenomena. In the same way, the positive value of the critical principles of pure reason can be brought to light with regard to the concepts of God and of the simple nature of our soul, which I do, however, leave undiscussed here for the sake of brevity. I cannot even assume God, freedom and immortality for the use of practical reason if I do not at the same time deprive speculative reason of its pretensions to excessive insight. . . . I, therefore, had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for belief. . . .

We see here how Kant stands on a similar ground as Jacobi in regard to knowledge and belief.

[ 10 ] The way in which Kant had arrived at his results had led through the thought world of Hume. In Hume he had found the view that the things and events of the world in no way reveal connections of thought to the human soul, that the human mind imagined such connections only through habit while it is perceiving the things and events of the world simultaneously in space and successively in time. Kant was impressed by Hume's opinion according to which the human mind does not receive from the world what appears to it as knowledge. For Kant, the thought emerged as a possibility: What is knowledge for the human mind does not come from the reality of the world.

[ 11 ] Through Hume's arguments, Kant was, according to his own confession, awakened out of the slumber into which he had fallen in following Wolff's train of ideas. How can reason produce judgments about God, freedom and immortality if its statement about the simplest events rests on such insecure foundation? The attack that Kant now had to undertake against the knowledge of reason was much more far-reaching than that of Jacobi. He had at least left to knowledge the possibility of comprehending nature in its necessary connection. Now Kant had produced an important accomplishment in the field of natural science with his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, which had appeared in 1755. He was satisfied to have shown that our whole planetary system could be thought to have developed out of a ball of gas, rotating around its axis. Through strictly necessary mathematically measurable physical forces, he thought the sun and planets to have consolidated, and to have assumed the motions in which they proceed according to the teachings of Copernicus and Kepler. Kant thus believed he had proven, through a great discovery of his own, the fruitfulness of Spinoza's mode of thought, according to which everything happens with strict, mathematical necessity. He was so convinced of this fruitfulness that in the above-mentioned work he went so far as to exclaim, “Give me matter, and I will build you a universe!” The absolute certainty of all mathematical truths was so firmly established for him that he maintains in his Basic Principles of Natural Science that a science in the proper sense of the word is only one in which the application of mathematics is possible. If Hume were right, it would be out of the question to assume such a certainty for the knowledge of mathematical natural science, for, in that case, this knowledge would consist of nothing but thought habits that man had developed because he had seen the course of the world along certain lines. But there would not be the slightest guarantee that these thought habits had anything to do with the law-ordered connection of the things of the world. From his presupposition Hume draws the conclusion:

The scenes of the universe are continually shifting, and one object follows another in an uninterrupted succession, but the power of force which actuates the whole machine is entirely concealed from us and never discovers itself in any of the sensible qualities of body.

(Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sec. VII, part 1.)

If we then place the world conception of Spinoza into the light of Hume's view, we must say, “In accordance with the perceived course of the processes of the world, man has formed the habit of thinking these processes in a necessary, law-ordered connection, but he is not entitled to maintain that this ‘connection’ is anything but a mere thought habit.” Now if this were the case, then it would be a mere deception of the human reason to imagine that it could, through itself, gain any insight into the nature of the world, and Hume could not be contradicted when he says about every world conception that is gained out of pure reason, “Throw it into the fire, for it is nothing but deception and illusion.”

[ 12 ] Kant could not possibly adopt this conclusion of Hume as his own. For him, the certainty of the knowledge of mathematical natural science was irrevocably established. He would not allow this certainty to be touched but was unable to deny that Hume was justified in saying that we gain all knowledge about real things only by observing them and by forming for ourselves thoughts about their connection that are based on this observation. If a law-ordered connection is inherent in things, then we must also extract this connection out of them, but what we really derive from the things is such that we know no more about it than that it has been so up to the present time. We do not know, however, whether such a connection is really so linked up with the nature of things that it cannot change in any moment. If we form for ourselves today a world conception based on our observations, events can happen tomorrow that compel us to form an entirely different one. If we received all our knowledge from things, there would be no certainty. Mathematics and natural sciences are a proof of this. That the world does not give its knowledge to the human mind was a view Kant was ready to adopt from Hume. That this knowledge does not contain certainty and truth, however, is a conclusion he was not willing to draw. Thus, Kant was confronted with the question that disturbed him deeply: How is it possible that man is in possession of true and certain knowledge and that he is, nevertheless, incapable of knowing anything of the reality of the world in itself?

Kant found an answer that saved the truth and certainty of human knowledge by sacrificing human insight into the grounds of the world. Our reason could never claim certainty about anything in a world lying spread out around us so that we would be affected by it through observation only. Therefore, our world can only be one that is constructed by ourselves: A world that lies within the limits of our minds. What is going on outside myself as a stone falls and causes a hole in the ground, I do not know. The law of this entire process is enacted within me, and it can proceed within me only in accordance with demands of my own mental organization. The nature of my mind requires that every effect should have a cause and that two times two is four. It is in accordance with this nature that the mind constructs a world for itself. No matter how the world outside ourselves might be constructed, today's world may not coincide in even a single trait with that of yesterday. This can never concern us for our mind produces its own world according to its own laws. As long as the human mind remains unchanged, it will proceed in the same way in the construction of the world. Mathematics and natural science do not contain the laws of the external world but those of our mental organization. It is, therefore, only necessary to investigate this organization if we want to know what is unconditionally true. “Reason does not derive its laws from nature but prescribes them to nature.” Kant sums up his conviction in this sentence, but the mind does not produce its inner world without an impetus or impression from without. When I perceive the color red, the perception, “red,” is, to be sure, a state, a process within me, but it is necessary for me to have an occasion to perceive “red.” There are, therefore, “things in themselves,” but we know nothing about them but the fact that they exist. Everything we observe belongs to the appearances within us. Therefore, in order to save the certainty of the mathematical and natural scientific truths, Kant has taken the whole world of observation in the human mind. In doing so, however, he has raised insurmountable barriers to the faculty of knowledge, for everything that we can know refers merely to processes within ourselves, to appearances or phenomena, not to things in themselves, as Kant expresses it. But the objects of the highest questions of reason—God, Freedom and Immortality—can never become phenomena. We see the appearances within ourselves; whether or not these have their origin in a divine being we cannot know. We can observe our own psychic conditions, but these are also only phenomena. Whether or not there is a free immortal soul behind them remains concealed to our knowledge. About the “things in themselves,” our knowledge cannot produce any statement. It cannot determine whether the ideas concerning these “things in themselves” are true or false. If they are announced to us from another direction, there is no objection to assume their existence, but a knowledge concerning them is impossible for us. There is only one access to these highest truths. This access is given in the voice of duty, which speaks within us emphatically and distinctly, “You are morally obliged to do this and that.” This “Categorical Imperative” imposes on us an obligation we are incapable of avoiding. But how could we comply with this obligation if we were not in the possession of a free will? We are, to be sure, incapable of knowledge concerning this quality of our soul, but we must believe that it is free in order to be capable of following its inner voice of duty. Concerning this freedom, we have, therefore, no certainty of knowledge as we possess it with respect to the objects of mathematics and natural science, but we have moral certainty for it instead. The observance of the categorical imperative leads to virtue. It is only through virtue that man can arrive at his destination. He becomes worthy of happiness. Without this possibility his virtue would be void of meaning and significance. In order that virtue may result from happiness, it is mandatory that a being exists who secures this happiness as an effect of virtue. This can only be an intelligent being, determining the highest value of things: God. Through the existence of virtue, its effect is guaranteed, and through this guarantee, in turn, the existence of God. Because man is a sensual being and cannot obtain perfect happiness in this imperfect world, his existence must transcend this sensual existence; that is to say, the soul must be immortal. The very thing about which we are denied possible knowledge is, therefore, magically produced by Kant out of the moral belief in the voice of duty. It was respect for the feeling of duty that restored a real world for Kant when, under the influence of Hume, the observable world withered away into a mere inner world. This respect for duty is beautifully expressed in his Critique of Practical Reason:

Duty! Thou sublime, great name that containest nothing pleasurable to bid for our favor, but demandest submission, ... proclaiming a law in the presence of which all inclinations are silenced although they may secretly offer resistance...

That the highest truths are not truths of knowledge but moral truths is what Kant considered as his discovery. Man has to renounce all insight into a supersensible world, but from his moral nature springs a compensation for this knowledge. No wonder Kant sees the highest demand on man in the unconditional surrender to duty. If it were not for duty to open a vista for him beyond the sensual world, man would be enclosed for his whole life in the world of the senses. No matter, therefore, what the sensual world demands; it has to give way before the peremptory claims of duty, and the sensual world cannot, out of its own initiative, agree with duty. Its own inclination is directed toward the agreeable, toward pleasure. These aims have to be opposed by duty in order to enable man to reach his destination. What man does for his pleasure is not virtuous; virtue is only what he does in selfless devotion to duty. Submit your desires to duty; this is the rigorous task that is taught by Kant's moral philosophy. Do not allow your will to be directed toward what satisfies you in your egotism, but so act that the principles of your action can become those of all men. In surrendering to the moral law, man attains his perfection. The belief that this moral law has its being above all other events of the world and is made real within the world by a divine being is, in Kant's opinion, true religion. It springs from the moral life. Man is to be good, not because of his belief in a God whose will demands the good; he is to be good only because of his feeling for duty. He is to believe in God, however, because duty without God would be meaningless. This is religion within the Limits of Mere Reason. It is thus that Kant entitles his book on religious world conception.

[ 13 ] The course that the development of the natural sciences took since they began to flourish has produced in many people the feeling that every element that does not carry the character of strict necessity should be eliminated from our thought picture of nature. Kant had this feeling also. In his Natural History of the Heavens, he had even outlined such a picture for a certain realm of nature that was in accordance with this feeling. In a thought picture of this kind, there is no place for the conception of the self-conscious ego that the man of the eighteenth century felt necessary. The Platonic and the Aristotelian thought could be considered as the revelation of nature in the form in which that idea was accepted in the earlier age, and as that of the human soul as well. In thought life, nature and the soul met. From the picture of nature as it seems to be demanded by modern science, nothing leads to the conception of the self-conscious soul. Kant had the feeling that the conception of nature offered nothing to him on which he could base the certainty of self-consciousness. This certainty had to be created for the modern age had presented the self-conscious ego as a fact. The possibility had to be created to acknowledge this fact, but everything that can be recognized as knowledge by our understanding is devoured by the conception of nature. Thus, Kant feels himself compelled to provide for the self-conscious ego as well as for the spiritual world connected with it, something that is not knowledge but nevertheless supplies certainty.

[ 14 ] Kant established selfless devotion to the voice of the spirit as the foundation of moral life. In the realm of virtuous action, such a devotion is not compatible with a surrender to the sensual world. There is, however, a field in which the sensual is elevated in such a way that it appears as the immediate expression of the spirit. That is the field of beauty and art. In our ordinary life we want the sensual because it excites our desire, our self-seeking interest. We desire what gives us pleasure, but it is also possible to take a selfless interest in an object. We can look at it in admiration, filled by a heavenly delight and this delight can be quite independent of the possession of the thing. Whether or not I should like to own a beautiful house that I pass has nothing to do with the “disinterested pleasure” that I may take in its beauty. If I eliminate all desire from my feeling, there may still be found as a remaining element a pleasure that is clearly and exclusively linked to the beautiful work of art. A pleasure of this kind is an “esthetic pleasure.” The beautiful is to be distinguished from the agreeable and the good. The agreeable excites my interest because it arouses my desire; the good interests me because it is to be made real by me. In confronting the beautiful I have no such interest that is connected with my person. What is it then, by means of which my selfless delight is attracted? I can be pleased by a thing only when its purpose is fulfilled, when it is so organized that it serves an end. Fitness to purpose pleases; incongruity displeases, but as I have no interest in the reality of the beautiful thing, as the mere sight of it satisfies me, it is also not necessary that the beautiful object really serves a purpose. The purpose is of no importance to me; what I demand is only the appropriateness. For this reason, Kant calls an object “beautiful” in which we perceive fitness to purpose without thinking at the same time of a definite purpose.

[ 15 ] What Kant gives in this exposition is not merely an explanation but also a justification of art. This is best seen if one remembers Kant's feeling in regard to his world conception. He expresses his feeling in profound, beautiful words:

Two things fill the heart with ever new and always increasing admiration and awe: The starred heaven above me and the moral law within me. At first, the sight of an innumerable world quantity annihilates, as it were, my importance as a living creature, which must give back to the planet that is a mere dot in the universe the matter out of which it became what it is, after having been for a short while (one does not know how) provided with the energy of life. On second consideration, however, this spectacle infinitely raises my value as an intelligent being, through my (conscious and free) personality in which the moral law reveals to me a life that is independent of the whole world of the senses, at least insofar as this can be concluded from the purpose-directed destination of my existence, which is not hemmed in by the conditions and limitations of this life but extends into the infinite.

The artist now transplants this purpose-directed destination, which, in reality, rules in the realm of the moral world, into the world of the senses. Thus, the world of art stands between the realm of the world of observation that is dominated by the eternal stern laws of necessity, which the human mind itself has previously laid into this world, and the realm of free morality in which commands of duty, as the result of a wise, divine world-order, set out direction and aim. Between both realms the artist enters with his works. Out of the realm of the real he takes his material, but he reshapes this material at the same time in such a fashion that it becomes the bearer of a purpose-directed harmony as it is found in the realm of freedom. That is to say, the human spirit feels dissatisfied both with the realms of external reality, which Kant has in mind when he speaks of the starred heaven and the innumerable things of the world, and also with the realm of moral law. Man, therefore, creates a beautiful realm of “semblance,” which combines the rigid necessity of nature with the element of a free purpose. The beautiful now is not only found in human works of art, but also in nature. There is nature-beauty as well as art-beauty. This beauty of nature is there without man's activity. It seems, therefore, as if there were observable in the world of reality, not merely the rigid law-ordered necessity, but a free wisdom-revealing activity as well. The phenomenon of the beautiful, nevertheless, does not force us to accept a conception of this kind, for what it offers is the form of a purpose-directed activity without implying also the thought of a real purpose. Furthermore, there is not only the phenomenon of integrated beauty but also that of integrated ugliness. It is, therefore, possible to assume that in the multitude of natural events, which are interconnected according to necessary laws, some happen to occur—accidentally, as it were—in which the human mind observes an analogy with man's own works of art. As it is not necessary to assume a real purpose, this element of free purpose, which appears as it were by accident, is quite sufficient for the esthetic contemplation of nature.

[ 16 ] The situation is different when we meet the entities in nature to which the purpose concept is not merely to be attributed as accidental but that carry this purpose really within themselves. There are also entities of this kind according to Kant's opinion. They are the organic beings. The necessary law-determined connections are insufficient to explain them; these, in Spinoza's world conception are considered not only necessary but sufficient, and by Kant are considered as those of the human mind itself. For an “organism is a product of nature in which everything is, at the same time, purpose, just as it is cause and also effect.” An organism, therefore, cannot be explained merely through rigid laws that operate with necessity, as is the case with inorganic nature. It is for this reason that, although Kant himself had, in his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, undertaken the attempt to “discuss the constitution and the mechanical origin of the entire world structure according to Newtonian principles,” he is of the opinion that a similar attempt, applied to the world of organic beings, would necessarily fail. In his Critique of Judgment, he advances the following statement:

It is, namely, absolutely certain that in following merely mechanical principles of nature we cannot even become sufficiently acquainted with organisms and their inner possibility, much less explain them. This is so certain that one can boldly say that it would be absurd for man to set out on any such attempt or to hope that at some future time a Newton could arise who would explain as much as the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws into which no purpose had brought order and direction. Such a knowledge must, on the contrary, be altogether denied to man.

Kant's view that it is the human mind itself that first projects the laws into nature that it then finds in it, is also irreconcilable with another opinion concerning a purpose-directed entity, for a purpose points to its originator through whom it was laid into such an entity, that is, to the rational originator of the world. If the human mind could explain a teleological being in the same way as an entity that is merely constituted according to natural necessity, it would also have to be capable of projecting laws of purpose out of itself into the things. Not merely would the human mind have to provide laws for the things that would be valid with regard to them insofar as they are appearances of his inner world, but it would have to be capable of prescribing their own destination to the things that are completely independent of the mind. The human mind would, therefore, have to be not merely a cognitive, but a creative, spirit; its reason would, like that of God, have to create the things.

[ 17 ] Whoever calls to mind the structure of the Kantian world conception as it has been outlined here will understand its strong effect on Kant's contemporaries and also on the time after him, for he leaves intact all of the conceptions that had formed and impressed themselves on the human mind in the course of the development of western culture. This world conception leaves God, freedom and immortality, to the religious spirit. It satisfies the need for knowledge in delineating a territory for it inside the limits of which it recognizes unconditionally certain truths. It even allows for the opinion that the human reason is justified to employ, not merely the eternal rigorous natural laws for the explanation of living beings, but the purpose concept that suggests a designed order in the world.

[ 18 ] But at what price did Kant obtain all this! He transferred all of nature into the human mind and transformed its laws into laws of this mind. He ejected the higher world order entirely from nature and placed this order on a purely moral foundation. He drew a sharp line of demarcation between the realm of the inorganic and that of the organic, explaining the former according to mechanical laws of natural necessity and the latter according to teleological ideas. Finally, he tore the realm of beauty and art completely out of its connection with the rest of reality, for the teleological form that is to be observed in the beautiful has nothing to do with real purposes. How a beautiful object comes into the world is of no importance; it is sufficient that it stimulates in us the conception of the purposeful and thereby produces our delight.

[ 19 ] Kant not only presents the view that man's knowledge is possible so far as the law-structure of this knowledge has its origin in the self-conscious soul, and the certainty concerning this soul comes out of a source that is different from the one out of which our knowledge of nature springs. He also points out that our human knowledge has to resign before nature, where it meets the living organism in which thought itself seems to reign in nature. In taking this position, Kant confesses by implication that he cannot imagine thoughts that are conceived as active in the entities of nature themselves. The recognition of such thoughts presupposes that the human soul not merely thinks, but in thinking shares the life of nature in its inner experience. If somebody discovered that thoughts are capable not merely of being received as perceptions, as is the case with the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, but that it is possible to experience thoughts by penetrating into the entities of nature, then this would mean that again a new element had been found that could enter the picture of nature as well as the conception of the self-conscious ego. The self-conscious ego by itself does not find a place in the nature picture of modern times. If the self-conscious ego, in filling itself with thought, is not merely aware that it forms this thought, but recognizes in thought a life of which it can know, “This life can realize itself also outside myself,” then this self-conscious ego can arrive at the insight, “I hold within myself something that can also be found without.” The evolution of modern world conception thus urges man on to the step: To find the thought in the self-conscious ego that is felt to be alive. This step Kant did not take; Goethe did.

[ 20 ] In all essential points, Goethe arrived at the opposite to Kant's conception of the world. Approximately at the same time that Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, Goethe laid down his creed in his prose hymn, Nature, in which he placed man completely into nature and in which he presented nature as bearing absolute sway, independent of man: Her own and man's lawgiver as well. Kant drew all nature into the human mind. Goethe considered everything as belonging to this nature; he fitted the human spirit into the natural world order:

Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped by her, incapable of leaving her domain, incapable of penetrating deeper into her. She draws us into the rounds of her dance, neither asking nor warning, and whirls away with us until we fall exhausted from her arms... All men are in her and she is in them... Even the most unnatural is Nature; even the clumsiest pedantry has something of her genius ... We obey her laws even when we resist them; we are working with her even when we mean to work against her... Nature is everything... She rewards and punishes, delights and tortures herself... She has placed me into life, she will also lead me out of it. I trust myself into her care. She may hold sway over me. She will not hate her work. It was not I who spoke of her. Nay, it was Nature who spoke it all, true and false. Nature is the blame for all things; hers is the merit.

This is the polar opposite to Kant's world conception. According to Kant, nature is entirely in the human spirit; according to Goethe, the human spirit is entirely in nature because nature itself is spirit. It is, therefore, easily understandable when Goethe tells us in his essay, Influence of Modern Philosophy:

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was completely outside my world. I attended many conversations concerning this book, and with some attention I could observe that the old main question of how much our own self contributed to our spiritual existence, and how much the outside world did, was renewed. I never separated them, and when I philosophized in my own way about objects, I did so with an unconscious naiveté, really believing that I saw my opinion before my very eyes.

We need not waver in this estimate of Goethe's attitude toward Kant, in spite of the fact that Goethe uttered many a favorable judgment about the philosopher of Koenigsberg. This opposition between Kant and himself would only then have become quite clear to him if he had engaged himself in a thorough study of Kant, but this he did not do. In the above-mentioned essay he says, “It was the introductory passages that I liked; into the labyrinth itself, however, I could not venture to go; I was kept from it now by my poetic imagination, now by my common sense, and nowhere did I feel myself furthered.”

Goethe has, nevertheless, expressed his opposition distinctly on one occasion in a passage that has been published only from the papers of the residuary estate in the Weimar Goethe Edition (Weimarische Ausgabe, 2; Abteilung, Band XI, page 377). The fundamental error of Kant was, as here expressed by Goethe, that he “considers the subjective faculty of knowledge as an object and discriminates the point where the subjective and the objective meet with great penetration but not quite correctly.” Goethe just happens to be convinced that it is not only the spirit as such that speaks in the subjective human faculty of cognition, but that it is the spirit of nature that has created for itself an organ in man through which it reveals its secrets. It is not man at all who speaks about nature, but it is nature who speaks in man about itself. This is Goethe's conviction. Thus, he could say that whenever the controversy concerning Kant's world view “was brought up, I liked to take the side that gave most honor to man, and I completely agreed with all those friends who maintained with Kant that, although all our knowledge begins with experience, it nevertheless does not originate from experience.” For Goethe believed that the eternal laws according to which nature proceeds are revealed in the human spirit, but for this reason, they were not merely the subjective laws of the spirit for him, but the objective laws of the order of nature itself.

It is for this reason also that Goethe could not agree when Schiller, under the influence of Kant, erected a forbidding wall of separation between the realms of natural necessity and of freedom. Goethe expressed himself on this point in his essay, First Acquaintance with Schiller:

Schiller and some friends had absorbed the Kantian philosophy, which elevates the subject to such height while apparently narrowing it. It developed the extraordinary traits that nature had laid into his character and he, in his highest feeling of freedom and self determination, tended to be ungrateful to the great mother who had certainly not treated him stingily. Instead of considering nature as self-supporting, alive and productively spreading order and law from the lowest to the highest point, Schiller took notice of it only in the shape of a few empirical human natural inclinations.

In his essay, Influence of Modern Philosophy, Goethe points to his difference with Schiller in these words. “He preached the gospel of freedom; I was unwilling to see the rights of nature infringed upon.” There was, indeed, an element of Kant's mode of conception in Schiller, but so far as Goethe is concerned, we are right in accepting what he himself said with regard to some conversations he had with the followers of Kant. “They heard what I had to say but they could not answer me or further me in any way. More than once it happened that one or the other of them admitted to me with a surprised smile that my conception was, to be sure, analogous to that of Kant, but in a curious fashion indeed.”

[ 21 ] Goethe did not consider art and beauty as a realm that was torn out of the interconnection of reality, but as a higher stage of nature's order. At the sight of artistic creations that especially interested him during his Italian journey he wrote, “Like the highest works of nature, the lofty works of art have been produced by men according to true and natural laws. Everything that is arbitrary and merely imagined fades away before them. Here is necessity; here is God.” When the artist proceeds as the Greeks did, namely, “according to the laws that Nature herself follows,” then his works contain the same godly element that is to be found in nature itself. For Goethe, art is “a manifestation of secret natural laws.” What the artist creates are works of nature on a higher level of perfection. Art is the continuation and human completion of nature, for “as man finds himself placed at the highest point of nature, he again considers himself a whole nature and as such has again to produce a peak in himself. For this purpose he raises his own existence by penetrating himself with all perfections and virtues, produces choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally lifts himself as far as to the production of the work of art.” Everything is nature, from the inorganic stone to the highest of man's works of art, and everything in this nature is ruled by the same “eternal, necessary and thereby divine laws,” such that “the godhead itself could not change anything about it” (Poetry and Truth, Book XVI).

[ 22 ] When, in 1811, Goethe read Jacobi's book, On Things Divine, it made him “uneasy.”

How could the book of a so warmly beloved friend, in which I was to see the thesis developed that nature conceals God, be welcome to me! My mode of world conception—purely felt, deeply-seated, inborn and practised daily as it was—had taught me inviolably to see God in Nature, Nature in God, and this to such an extent that this world view formed the basis of my entire existence. Under these circumstances, was not such a strange, one-sided and narrow-minded thesis to estrange me in spirit from this most noble man for whose heart I felt love and veneration? I did not, however, allow my painful vexation to linger with me but took refuge in my old asylum, finding my daily entertainment for several weeks in Spinoza's Ethics, and as my inner education had progressed in the meantime, to my astonishment I became aware of many things that revealed themselves to me in a new and different light and affected me with a peculiar freshness.

[ 23 ] The realm of necessity in Spinoza's sense is a realm of inner necessity for Kant. For Goethe, it is the universe itself, and man with all his thinking, feeling, willing and actions is a link in this chain of necessities. In this realm there is only one order of law, of which the natural and the moral represent only the two sides of its essence. “The sun sheds its light over those good and evil, and to the guilty as to the best, the moon and the stars shine brightly.” [ 24 ] Out of one root, out of the eternal springs of nature, Goethe has everything pour forth: The inorganic and the organic beings, and man with all the fruits of his spirit, his knowledge, his moral order and his art.

What God would just push the world from without,
And let it run in circles on his finger?
Him it behooves to move it in its core,
Be close to nature, hug her to her breast
So that what lives and weaves in him and is,
Will never lack his power and his spirit.

[ 25 ] In these words Goethe summed up his credo. Against Hailer, who had written the lines, “Into nature's sacred center, no created spirits enter,” Goethe turns with his sharpest words:

“Into nature's sacred center,”
O, Philistine past compare
“No created spirits enter”
Wished you never would remind
Me and all those of my kind
Of this shallow verbal banter.
We think we are everywhere
With every step in Nature's care.
“Happy he to whom she just
Shows her dry external crust.”
I hear that repeated these sixty years
Curse under my breath so no one hears,
And to myself I a thousand times tell:
Nature has neither core nor shell,
Everything yields she gladly and well.
Nature is at our beck and call
Nature herself is one and all.
Better search yourself once more
Whether you be crust or core.

[ 26 ] In following this world conception Goethe could also not recognize the difference between inorganic and organic nature, which Kant had ascertained in his Critique of Judgment. Goethe tended to explain living organisms according to the laws by which lifeless nature is explained. Concerning the various species in the plant world, the leading botanist of that time, Linné, states that there were as many species as there “have been created fundamentally different forms.” A botanist who holds such an opinion can only attempt to study the quality of the individual forms and to differentiate them carefully from one another. Goethe could not consent to such a view of nature. “What Linnaeus wanted with might and main to separate, I felt in the very roots of my being as striving into union.” Goethe searched for an entity that was common to all species of plants. On his Italian journey this general archetype in all plant forms becomes clearer to him step by step.

The many plants I have heretofore been used to see only in buckets and pots, here grow merrily and vigorously under the open sky, and while they thus fulfill their destination, they become clearer to us. At the sight of such a variety of new and renewed forms, my curious and favorite idea again occurred to me. Could I not discover in this crowd the archetypal plant (Urpflanze)? There really must be such a thing. How should I otherwise know that this or that given form is a plant if they had not all been designed after one model?

On another occasion Goethe expresses himself concerning this archetypal plant by saying, “It is going to become the strangest creature of the world for which nature herself shall envy me. With this model and the corresponding key, one is then capable of inventing plants to infinity, but they must be consistent in themselves, that is to say, plants that, even if they do not exist, at least could exist, and that are not merely shadows and schemes of a picturesque or poetic imagination, but have an inner truth and necessity.” As Kant, in his Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, exclaims, “Give me matter and I will build you a world out of it,” because he has gained insight into the law-determined interconnection of this world, so Goethe pronounces here that with the aid of the archetypal plant one could invent plants indefinitely that would be capable of existence because one would be in possession of the law of their origin and their development. What Kant was ready to acknowledge only for inorganic nature, that is, that its phenomena can be understood according to necessary laws, Goethe extends also to the world of organisms. In the letter in which he tells Herder about his discovery of the archetypal plant, he adds, “The same law will be applicable to all other living beings,” and Goethe applies it, indeed. In 1795, his persevering studies of the animal world led him to “feel free to maintain boldly that all perfect organic beings, among which we see fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and at the top of the ladder, man, were formed after one model, which in its constant parts only varies in one or another direction and still develops and transforms daily through propagation.”

In his conception of nature as well, therefore, Goethe stands in full opposition to Kant. Kant had called it a risky “adventure of reason,” should reason attempt to explain the living with regard to its origin. He considered the human faculty of cognition as unfit for such an explanation.

It is of infinite importance for reason not to eliminate the mechanism of nature in its productions, and not to pass by this idea in their explanation because without it no insight into the nature of things can be obtained. Even if it is admitted to us that the highest architect has created the forms of nature as they have been forever, or predetermined those that form according to the same model in the course of their development, our knowledge of nature would thereby nevertheless not be furthered in the slightest degree because we do not know at all the mode of action and the ideas of this being that are to contain the principles of the possibility of the natural beings and therefore cannot explain nature by means of them from above.

Against Kantian arguments of this kind, Goethe answers:

If, in the moral realm through faith in God, virtue and immortality, we are to lift ourselves into the higher region and to approach the first Being, we should be in the same situation in the intellectual field, so that we, through the contemplation of an ever creative nature, should make ourselves worthy of a spiritual participation in its productions. As I had at first unconsciously and, following an inner instinct, insisted upon and relentlessly striven toward the archetypal, the typical, as I had even succeeded in constructing an appropriate picture, there was now nothing to keep me from courageously risking the adventure of reason, as the old man from Koenigsberg himself calls it.

[ 27 ] In his archetypal plant, Goethe had seized upon an idea “with which one can ... invent plants to infinity, but they must be consistent, that is to say, even if they do not exist, nevertheless they could exist and are not merely shadows and schemes of a picturesque or poetic imagination but have an inner truth and necessity.” Thus, Goethe shows that he is about to find not merely the perceptible idea, the idea that is thought, in the self-conscious ego, but the living idea. The self-conscious ego experiences a realm in itself that manifests itself as both self-contained and at the same time appertaining to the external world, because the forms of the latter prove to be moulded after the models of the creative powers. With this step the self-conscious ego can appear as a real being. Goethe has developed a conception through which the self-conscious ego can feel itself enlivened because it feels itself in union with the creative entities of nature. The world conception of modern times attempted to master the riddle of the self-conscious ego; Goethe plants the living idea into this ego, and with this force of life pulsating in it, it proves to be a life-saturated reality. The Greek idea is akin to the picture; it is contemplated like a picture. The idea of modern times must be akin to life, to the living being; it is inwardly experienced. Goethe was aware of the fact that there is such an inward experience of the idea. In the self-conscious ego he perceived the breath of the living idea.

[ 28 ] Goethe says of Kant's Critique of Judgment that he “owed a most happy period of his life to this book.” “The great leading thoughts of this work were quite analogous to my previous creations, actions and thinking. The inner life of art and nature, the unfolding of the activity in both cases from within, was distinctly expressed in this book.” Yet, this statement of Goethe must not deceive us concerning his opposition to Kant, for in the essay in which it occurs, we also read, “Passionately stimulated, I proceeded on my own paths so much the quicker because I, myself, did not know where they led, and because I found little resonance with the Kantians for what I had conquered for myself and for the methods in which I had arrived at my results. For I expressed what had been stirred up in me and not what I had read.”

[ 29 ] A strictly unitary (monastic) world conception is peculiar to Goethe. He sets out to gain one viewpoint from which the whole universe reveals its law structure—“from the brick that falls from the roof to the brilliant flash of inspiration that dawns on you and that you convey.” For “all effects of whatever kind they may be that we observe in experience are interconnected in the most continuous fashion and flow into one another.”

A brick is loosened from a roof. We ordinarily call this accidental. It hits the shoulder of a passerby, one would say mechanically, but not completely mechanically; it follows the laws of gravity and so its effect is physical. The torn vessels of living tissue immediately cease to function; at the same moment, the fluids act chemically, their elementary qualities emerge. But the disturbed organic life resists just as quickly and tries to restore itself. In the meantime, the whole human being is more or less unconscious and psychically shattered. Upon regaining consciousness the person feels ethically deeply hurt, deploring the interrupted activity of whatever kind it might have been, for man will only reluctantly yield to patience. Religiously, however, it will be easy for him to ascribe this incident to Providence, to consider it a prevention against a greater evil, as a preparation for a good of a higher order. This may be sufficient for the patient, but the recovered man arises genially, trusts in God and in himself and feels himself saved. He may well seize upon the accidental and turn it to his own advantage, thus beginning a new and eternally fresh cycle of life.

Thus, with the example of a fallen brick Goethe illustrates the interconnection of all kinds of natural effects. It would be an explanation in Goethe's sense if one could also derive their strictly law-determined interconnection out of one root.

[ 30 ] Kant and Goethe appear as two spiritual antipodes at the most significant moment in the history of modern world conception, and the attitude of those who were interested in the highest questions was fundamentally different toward them. Kant constructed his world conception with all the technical means of a strict school philosophy; Goethe philosophized naively, depending trustfully on his healthy nature. For this reason, Fichte, as mentioned above, believed that in Goethe he could only turn “to the representative of the purest spirituality of Feeling as it appears on the stage of humanity that has been reached at the present time.” But he had the opinion of Kant “that no human mind can advance further than to the limit at which Kant had stood, especially in his Critique of Judgment.” Whoever penetrates into the world conception of Goethe, however, which is presented in the cloak of naiveté, will, nevertheless, find a firm foundation that can be expressed in the form of clear ideas. Goethe himself did not raise this foundation into the full light of consciousness. For this reason, his mode of conception finds entrance only slowly into the evolution of philosophy, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century it is Kant's position with which the spirits first attempt to come to clarity and with whom they begin to settle their account.

[ 31 ] No matter how great Kant's influence was, his contemporaries could not help feeling that their deeper need for knowledge could not become satisfied by him. Such a demand for enlightenment urgently seeks after a unitary world conception as it is given in Goethe's case. With Kant, the individual realms of existence are standing side by side without transition. For this reason, Fichte, in spite of his unconditional veneration for Kant, could not conceal from himself the fact “that Kant had only hinted at the truth, but had neither presented nor proved it.” And further:

This wonderful, unique man had either a divination for the truth without being aware of the reasons for it, or he estimated his contemporaries as insufficient to have these reasons conveyed to them, or, again, he was reluctant during his lifetime to attract the superhuman veneration that sooner or later would have been bestowed upon him. No one has understood him as yet, and nobody will succeed in doing so who does not arrive at Kant's results in following his own ways; when it does happen, the world really will be astonished.

But I know just as certainly that Kant had such a system in mind, that all statements that he actually did express are fragments and results of this system, and have meaning and consistence only under this presupposition.

For, if this were not the case, Fichte would “be more inclined to consider the Critique of Pure Reason the product of the strangest accident than as the work of a mind.”

[ 32 ] Other contemporaries also judged Kant's world of ideas to be insufficient. Lichtenberg, one of the most brilliant and at the same time most independent minds of the second half of the eighteenth century, who appreciated Kant, nevertheless could not suppress significant objections to his philosophy. On the one hand he says, “What does it mean to think in Kant's spirit? I believe it means to find the relation of our being, whatever that may be, toward the things we call external, that is to say, to define the relation of the subjective to the objective. This, to be sure, has always been the aim of all thorough natural scientists, but it is questionable if they ever proceeded so truly philosophically as did Herr Kant. What is and must be subjective was taken as objective.”

On the other hand, however, Lichtenberg observes, “Should it really be an established fact that our reason cannot know anything about the supersensible? Should it not be possible for us to weave our ideas of God and immortality to as much purpose as the spider weaves his net to catch flies? In other words, should there not be beings who admire us because of our ideas of God and immortality just as we admire the spider and silkworm?”

One could, however, raise a much more significant objection. If it is correct that the law of human reason refers only to the inner worlds of the mind, how do we then manage even to speak of things outside ourselves at all? In that case, we should have to be completely caught in the cobweb of our inner world. An objection of this kind is raised by G. E. Schulze (1761–1833) in his book, Aenesidemus, which appeared anonymously in 1792. In it he maintains that all our knowledge is nothing but mere conceptions and we could in no way go beyond the world of our inner thought pictures. Kant's moral truths are also finally refuted with this step, for if not even the possibility to go beyond the inner world is thinkable, then it is also impossible that a moral voice could lead us into such a world that is impossible to think. In this way, a new doubt with regard to all truths develops out of Kant's view, and the philosophy of criticism is turned into scepticism.

One of the most consistent followers of scepticism is S. Maimon (1753–1800), who, from 1790 on, wrote several books that were under the influence of Kant and Schulze. In them he defended with complete determination the view that, because of the very nature of our cognitive faculty, we are not permitted to speak of the existence of external objects. Another disciple of Kant, Jacob Sigismund Beck, went even so far as to maintain that Kant himself had really not assumed things outside ourselves and that it was nothing but a misunderstanding if such a conception was ascribed to him.

[ 33 ] One thing is certain; Kant offered his contemporaries innumerable points for attack and interpretations. Precisely through his unclarities and contradictions, he became the father of the classical German world conceptions of Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher. His unclarities became new questions for them. No matter how he endeavored to limit knowledge in order to make place for belief, the human spirit can confess to be satisfied in the true sense of the word only through knowledge, through cognition. So it came to pass that Kant's successors strove to restore knowledge to its full rights again, that they attempted to settle through knowledge the highest needs of man.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) seemed to be chosen by nature to continue Kant's work in this direction. Fichte confessed, “The love of knowledge and especially speculative knowledge, when it has laid hold on man, occupies him to such an extent that no other wish is left in him but that to pursue it with complete calm and concentration.” Fichte can be called an enthusiast of world conception. Through this enthusiasm he must have laid a charm on his contemporaries and especially on his students. Forberg, who was one of his disciples, tells us:

In his public addresses his speech rushes powerfully on like a thunderstorm that unloads its fire in individual strokes of lightning; he lifts the soul up; he means to produce not only good men but great men; his eye is stern; his step bold; through his philosophy he intends to lead the spirit of the age; his imagination is not flowery, but strong and powerful; his pictures are not graceful but bold and great. He penetrates into the innermost depths of his object and he moves in the realm of concepts with an ease that betrays that he not only lives in this invisible land, but rules there.

The most outstanding trait in Fichte's personality is the grand, serious style of his life conception. He measures everything by the highest standards. In describing the calling of the writer, for instance, he says:

The idea itself must speak, not the writer. All his arbitrary traits, his whole individuality, all the manner and art peculiar to himself must have died in his utterances so that the manner and art of his idea alone may live, the highest life it can obtain in this language and this age. Since he is free from the obligations of the oral teacher, he is also free to conform to the-receptivity of others without their excuses. He has not a given reader in mind but postulates the one who reads him, laying down the law as to how he must do so.

But the work of the writer is a work for eternity. Let future ages swing up to a higher level in the science he has deposited in his work. What he has laid down in his book is not only the science, but the definite and perfect character of an age in regard to this science, and this will retain its interest as long as there are human beings in this world. Independent of all vicissitude, his writing speaks in all ages to all men who are capable of bringing his letters to life and who are stirred by his message, elevated and ennobled until the end of the world.

A man speaks in these words who is aware of his call as a spiritual leader of his age, and who seriously means what he says in the preface to his Doctrine of Science: “My person is of no importance at all, but Truth is of all importance for ‘I am a priest of Truth’.” We can understand that a man who, like him, lives “in the Kingdom of Truth” does not merely mean to guide others to an understanding, but that he intended to force them to it. Thus, he could give one of his writings the title, A Radiantly Clear Report to the Larger Public Concerning the Real Essence of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Force the Readers to Understand. Fichte is a personality who believes that, in order to walk life's course, he has no need of the real world and its facts; rather, he keeps his eyes riveted on the world of idea. He holds those in low esteem who do not understand such an idealistic attitude of spirit.

While in the narrow horizon that is given through ordinary experience, people think and judge more objectively and correctly than perhaps ever before, most are, nevertheless, completely confused and dazzled as soon as they are to go even one step further. Where it is impossible to rekindle the once extinguished spark of the higher genius, one has to leave them within the circle of their horizon and, insofar as they are useful and necessary in this circle, one can grant them their value in and for it without curtailment. But when they now demand of us to bring down to their level everything they, themselves, cannot reach up to, when they, for instance, demand that everything printed should be useful as a cookbook, or as a textbook of arithmetic, or as a book of general regulations and orders, and then decry everything that cannot be used in such a fashion, then they are very wrong indeed.

We know as well, and possibly better than they, that ideals cannot be presented in the real world. What we maintain, however, is that the reality has to be judged by them, to be modified through those who feel the necessary strength for it within themselves. Suppose they could not convince themselves of this necessity. Then they would lose very little of what they are by nature anyway, and humanity would lose nothing at all. Their decision would merely make clear that they alone are not counted on in the scheme of providence for mankind's perfection. Providence will doubtless continue to pursue its course; we commend those people, however, to the care of a kind nature, to supply them in due time with rain and sunshine, with wholesome food and an undisturbed circulation of their gastric juices, at the same time endowing them with clever thoughts!

Fichte wrote these words in the preface to the publication of the lectures in which he had spoken to the students of Jena on the Destination of the Scholar. Views like those of Fichte have their origin in a great energy of the soul, giving sureness for knowledge of world and life. Fichte had blunt words for all those who did not feel the strength in themselves for such a sureness. When the philosopher, Reinhold, ventured the statement that the inner voice of man could also be in error, Fichte replied, “You say the philosopher should entertain the thought that he, as an individual, could also be mistaken and that he, therefore, could and should learn from others. Do you know whose thought mood you are describing with these words? That of a man who has never in his whole life been really convinced of something.” [ 34 ] To this vigorous personality, whose eyes were entirely directed to the inner life, it was repugnant to search anywhere else for a world conception, the highest aim man can obtain, except in his inner life. “All culture should be the exercise of all faculties toward the one purpose of complete freedom, that is to say, of the complete independence from everything that is not we, ourselves, our pure Self (reason, moral law), for only this is ours. . . .”

This is Fichte's judgment in his Contributions Toward the Corrections of the Public Judgments Concerning the French Revolution, which appeared in 1793. Should not the most valuable energy in man, his power of knowledge, be directed toward this one purpose of complete independence from everything that is not we, ourselves? Could we ever arrive at a complete independence if we were dependent in our world conception on any kind of being? If it had been predetermined by such a being outside ourselves of what nature our soul and our duties are, and that we thereby procured a knowledge afterwards out of such an accomplished fact? If we are independent, then we must be independent also with regard to the knowledge of truth. If we receive something that has come into existence without our help, then we are dependent on this something. For this reason, we cannot receive the highest truths. We must create them, they must come into being through us. Thus, Fichte can only place something at the summit of his world conception that obtains its existence through ourselves. When we say about a thing of the external world, “It is,” we are doing so because we perceive it. We know that we are recognizing the existence of another being. What this other being is does not depend on us. We can know its qualities only when we direct our faculty of perception toward it. We should never know what “red,” “warm,” “cold” is, if we did not know it through perception. We cannot add anything to these qualities of the thing, nor can we subtract anything from them. We say, “They are.” What they are is what they tell us. This is entirely different in regard to our own existence. Man does not say to himself, “It is,” but, “I am.” He says, thereby, not only that he is, but also what he is, namely, an “I.” Only another being could say concerning me, “It is.” This is, in fact, what another being would have to say, for even in the case that this other being should have created me, it could not say concerning my existence, “I am.” The statement, “I am,” loses all meaning if it is not uttered by the being itself that speaks about its own existence. There is, therefore, nothing in the world that can address me as “I” except myself. This recognition of myself as an “I,” therefore, must be my own original action. No being outside myself can have influence on this.

[ 35 ] At this point Fichte found something with respect to which he saw himself completely independent of every “foreign” entity. A God could create me, but he would have to leave it to myself to recognize myself as an “I.” I give my ego-consciousness to myself. In this way, Fichte obtained a firm point for his world conception, something in which there is certainty. How do matters stand now concerning the existence of other beings? l ascribe this existence to them, but to do so I have not the same right as with myself. They must become part of my “I” if I am to recognize an existence in them with the same right, and they do become a part of myself as I perceive them, for as soon as this is the case, they are there for me. What I can say is only, my “self” feels “red,” my “self' feels “warm.” Just as truly as I ascribe to myself an existence, I can also ascribe it to my feeling, to my sensation. Therefore, if I understand myself rightly, I can only say, I am, and I myself ascribe existence also to an external world.

[ 36 ] For Fichte, the external world lost its independent existence in this way: It has an existence that is only ascribed to it by the ego, projected by the ego's imagination. In his endeavor to give to his own “self” the highest possible independence, Fichte deprived the outer world of all self-dependence. Now, where such an independent external world is not supposed to exist, it is also quite understandable if the interest in a knowledge concerning this external world ceases. Thereby, the interest in what is properly called knowledge is altogether extinguished, for the ego learns nothing through its knowledge but what it produces for itself. In all such knowledge the human ego holds soliloquies, as it were, with itself. It does not transcend its own being. It can do so only through what can be called living action. When the ego acts, when it accomplishes something in the world, then it is no longer alone by itself, talking to itself. Then its actions flow out into the world. They obtain a self-dependent existence. I accomplish something and when I have done so, this something will continue to have its effect, even if I no longer participate in its action. What I know has being only through myself, what I do, is part and parcel of a moral world order independent of myself. But what does all certainty that we derive from our own ego mean compared to this highest truth of a moral world order, which must surely be independent of ourselves if existence is to have any significance at all? All knowledge is something only for the ego, but this world order must be something outside the ego. It must be, in spite of the fact that we cannot know anything of it. We must, therefore, believe it.

In this manner Fichte also goes beyond knowledge and arrives at a belief. Compared to this belief, all knowledge is as dream to reality. The ego itself has only such a dream existence as long as it contemplates itself. It makes itself a picture of itself, which does not have to be anything but a passing picture; it is action alone that remains. Fichte describes this dream life of the world with significant words in his Vocation of Man:

There is nowhere anything permanent, neither within myself nor outside, but there is only a never ceasing change. Nowhere do I know of any being, not even of my own being. I, myself, do not know at all, and I am not. Pictures are; they are the only thing that is, and they know of themselves after the fashion of pictures; hovering pictures that pass by, without anything that they pass: interconnected through pictures of pictures, pictures without anything that is depicted in them, without meaning and purpose. I, myself, am one of these pictures; in fact, I am not even that but only a confused picture of pictures. All reality is changed into a strange dream without a life of which to dream, without a spirit to do the dreaming; it changes into a dream, which is held together by a dream of itself. Seeing—this is the dream; thinking—the source of all beings, of all reality, which I imagine, of my being, my strength of my purposes. This is the dream of that dream.

In what a different light the moral world order, the world of belief, appears to Fichte:

My will is to exert its effect absolutely through itself, without any tool that would only weaken its expression, in a completely homogeneous sphere, as reason upon reason, as spirit upon what is also spirit; in a sphere to which, however, my will is not to give the law of life, of activity, of progression, but which contains this in itself. My will, then, is to exert itself upon self-active reason, but self-active reason is will. The law of the supersensible world accordingly would be a will. . . . This sublime will, therefore, does not pursue its course separated from the rest of the world of reason in a detached fashion. There is a spiritual bond between the sublime will and all finite rational beings, and the sublime will itself is this spiritual bond within the world of reason. . . . I hide my face before you and I lay my hands on my lips. What you are for yourself and how you appear to yourself, I can never know as surely as I can never become you. After having lived through a thousand spirit worlds a thousand times, I shall be able to understand you as little as now in this house of clay. What I understand becomes finite merely through my understanding it, and the finite can never be changed into the infinite, not even through an infinite growth and elevation. You are separated from the finite not by a difference in degree but in kind. Through that gradation they will make you into a greater and greater man, but never into God, into the infinite that is capable of no measure.

[ 37 ] Because knowledge is a dream and the moral world order is the only true reality for Fichte, he places the life through which man participates in the moral world order higher than knowledge, the contemplation of things. “Nothing,” so Fichte maintains, “has unconditional value and significance except life; everything else, for instance thinking, poetic imagination and knowledge, has value only insofar as it refers in some way to the living, insofar as it proceeds from it or means to turn back into it.”

[ 38 ] This is the fundamental ethical trait in Fichte's personality, which extinguished or reduced in significance everything in his world conception that does not directly tend toward the moral destination of man. He meant to establish the highest, the purest aims and standards for life, and for this purpose he refused to be distracted by any process of knowledge that might discover contradictions with the natural world order in these aims. Goethe made the statement, “The active person is always without conscience; no one has conscience except the onlooker.” He means to say that the contemplative man estimates everything in its true, real value, understanding and recognizing everything in its own proper place. The active man, however, is, above everything else, bent on seeing his demands fulfilled; he is not concerned with the question of whether or not he thereby encroaches upon the rights of things. Fichte was, above all, concerned with action; he was, however, unwilling to be charged by contemplation with lack of conscience. He, therefore, denied the value of contemplation.

[ 39 ] To effect life immediately—this was Fichte's continuous endeavor. He felt most satisfied when he believed that his words could become action in others. It is under the influence of this ardent desire that he composed the following works. Demand to the Princess of Europe to Return the Freedom of Thought, Which They Have Heretofore Suppressed. Heliopolis in the Last Year of the Old Darkness 1792; Contributions Toward the Correction of the Public Judgment Concerning the French Revolution 1793. This ardent desire also caused him to give his powerful speeches, Outline of the Present Age Presented in Lectures in Berlin in 1804–5; Direction Toward the Beatific Life or Doctrine of Religion, Lectures given in Berlin in 1806; finally, his Speeches to the German Nation, 1808.

[ 40 ] Unconditional surrender to the moral world order, action that springs out of the deepest core of man's nature: These are the demands through which life obtains value and meaning. This view runs through all of Fichte's speeches and writings as the basic theme. In his Outline of the Present Age, he reprimands this age with flaming words for its egotism. He claims that everybody is only following the path prescribed by his lower desires, but these desires lead him away from the great totality that comprises the human community in moral harmony. Such an age must needs lead those who live in its tendency into decline and destruction. What Fichte meant to enliven in the human soul was the sense of duty and obligation.

[ 41 ] In this fashion, Fichte attempted to exert a formative influence on the life of his time with his ideas because he saw these ideas as vigorously enlivened by the consciousness that man derives the highest content of his soul life from a world to which he can obtain access by settling his account with his “ego” all by himself. In so doing man feels himself in his true vocation. From such a conviction, Fichte coins the words, “I, myself, and my necessary purpose are the supersensible.”

[ 42 ] To be aware of himself as consciously living in the supersensible is, according to Fichte, an experience of which man is capable. When he arrives at this experience, he then knows the “I” within himself, and it is only through this act that he becomes a philosopher. This experience, to be sure, cannot be “proven” to somebody who is unwilling to undergo it himself. How little Fichte considers such a “proof” possible is documented by expressions like, “The gift of a philosopher is inborn, furthered through education and then obtained by self-education, but there is no human art to make philosophers. For this reason, philosophy expects few proselytes among those men who are already formed, polished and perfected. . . .”

[ 43 ] Fichte is intent on finding a soul constitution through which the human “ego” can experience itself. The knowledge of nature seems unsuitable to him to reveal anything of the essence of the “ego.” From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, thinkers arose who were concerned with the question: What element could be found in the picture of nature by means of which the human being could become explainable in this picture? Goethe did not see the question in this way. He felt a spiritual nature behind the externally manifested one. For him, the human soul is capable of experiences through which it lives not only in the externally manifested, but within the creative forces. Goethe was in quest of the idea, as were the Greeks, but he did not look for it as perceptible idea. He meant to find it in participating in the world processes through inner experience where these can no longer be perceived. Goethe searched in the soul for the life of nature. Fichte also searched in the soul itself, but he did not focus his search where nature lives in the soul but immediately where the soul feels its own life kindled without regard to any other world processes and world entities with which this life might be connected. With Fichte, a world conception arose that exhausted all its endeavor in the attempt to find an inner soul life that compared to the thought life of the Greeks, as did their thought life to the picture conception of the age before them. In Fichte, thought becomes an experience of the ego as the picture had become thought with the Greek thinkers. With Fichte, world conception is ready to experience self-consciousness; with Plato and Aristotle, it had arrived at the point to think soul consciousness.

[ 44 ] Just as Kant dethroned knowledge in order to make place for belief, so Fichte declared knowledge to be mere appearance in order to open the gates for living action, for moral activity. A similar attempt was also made by Schiller. Only in his case, the part that was claimed by belief in Kant's philosophy, and by action in that of Fichte, was now occupied by beauty. Schiller's significance in the development of world conception is usually underestimated. Goethe had to complain that he was not recognized as a natural scientist just because people had become accustomed to take him as a poet, and those who penetrate into Schiller's philosophical ideas must regret that he is appreciated so little by the scholars who deal with the history of world conception, because Schiller's field is considered to be limited to the realm of poetry.

[ 45 ] As a thoroughly self-dependent thinker, Schiller takes his attitude toward Kant, who had been so stimulating and thought-provoking to him. The loftiness of the moral belief to which Kant meant to lift man was highly appreciated by the poet who, in his Robbers, and Cabal and Love, had held a mirror to the corruption of his time. But he asked himself the question: Should it indeed be a necessary truth that man can be lifted to the height of “the categorical imperative” only through the struggle against his desires and urges? Kant wanted to ascribe to the sensual nature of man only the inclination toward the low, the self-seeking, the gratification of the senses, and only he who lifted himself above the sensual nature, who mortified the flesh and who alone allowed the pure spiritual voice of duty to speak within him: Only he could be virtuous. Thus, Kant debased the natural man in order to be able to elevate the moral man so much the higher. To Schiller this judgment seemed to contain something that was unworthy of man. Should it not be possible to ennoble the impulses of man to become in themselves inclined toward the life of duty and morality? They would then not have to be suppressed to become morally effective. Schiller, therefore, opposes Kant's rigorous demand of duty in the epigram:

Scruples of Conscience.

Gladly I serve my friends, but, alas, I do so with pleasure
And so I oftentimes grieve that I lack virtue indeed.

Decision.

There is no better advice; you must try to despise them
And with disgust you must do strictly as duty commands.

[ 46 ] Schiller attempted to dissolve these “scruples of conscience” in his own fashion. There are actually two impulses ruling in man: The impulses of the sensual desire and the impulse of reason. If man surrenders to the sensual impulse, he is a plaything of his desires and passions, in short, of his egoism. If he gives himself completely up to the impulses of reason, he is a slave of its rigorous commands, its inexorable logic, its categorical imperative. A man who wants to live exclusively for the sensual impulse must silence reason; a man who wants to serve reason only must mortify sensuality. If the former, nevertheless, listens to the voice of reason, he will yield to it only reluctantly against his own will; if the latter observes the call of his desires, he feels them as a burden on his path of virtue. The physical nature of man and his spiritual character then seem to live in a fateful discord. Is there no state in man in which both the impulses, the sensual and the spiritual, live in harmony? Schiller's answer to this question is positive. There is, indeed, such a state in man. It is the state in which the beautiful is created and enjoyed. He who creates a work of art follows a free impulse of nature. He follows an inclination in doing so, but it is not physical passion that drives him. It is imagination; it is the spirit. This also holds for a man who surrenders to the enjoyment of a work of art. The work of art, while it affects his sensuality, satisfies his spirit at the same time. Man can yield to his desires without observing the higher laws of the spirit; he can comply with his duties without paying attention to sensuality. A beautiful work of art affects his delight without awakening his desires, and it transports him into a world in which he abides by virtue of his own disposition. Man is comparable to a child in this state, following his inclinations in his actions without asking if they run counter to the laws of reason. “The sensual man is led through beauty . . . into thinking; through beauty, the spiritual man is led back to matter, returned to the world of the senses” (Letters on the Esthetic Education of Man; Letter 18).

The lofty freedom and equanimity of the spirit, combined with strength and vigor is the mood in which we should part from a genuine work of art; there is no surer test of its true esthetic quality. If, after an enjoyment of this kind, we find ourselves inclined to some particular sentiment or course of action, but awkward and ill at ease for another, then this can serve as infallible proof that we have not experienced a pure esthetic effect; this may be caused by the object or our mode of approach, or (as is almost always the case) by both causes simultaneously. (Letter 22.)

As man is, through beauty, neither the slave of sensuality nor of reason, but because through its mediation both factors contribute their effect in a balanced cooperation in man's soul, Schiller compares the instinct for beauty with the child's impulse who, in his play, does not submit his spirit to the laws of reason, but employs it freely according to his inclination. It is for this reason that Schiller calls the impulse for beauty, play-impulse:

In relation to the agreeable, to the good, to the perfect, man is only serious, but he plays with beauty. In this respect, to be sure, we must not think of the games that go on in real life and that ordinarily are concerned with material objects, but in real life we should also search in vain for the beauty that is meant here. The beauty existing in reality is on the same level as the play-impulse in the real world, but through the ideal of beauty, which is upheld by reason, an ideal is also demanded of the play-impulse that man is to consider wherever he plays. (Letter 15.)

In the realization of this ideal play-impulse, man finds the reality of freedom. Now, he no longer obeys reason, nor does he follow sensual inclinations any longer. He now acts from inclination as if the spring of his action were reason. “Man shall only play with beauty and it is only with beauty that he shall play. . To state it without further reserve, man plays only when he is human in the full sense of the word and he is only wholly human when he is playing.” Schiller could also have said: In play man is free; in following the command of duty, and in yielding to sensuality, he is unfree. If man wants to be human in the full meaning of the word, and also with regard to his moral actions, that is to say, if he really wants to be free, then he must live in the same relation to his virtues as he does to beauty. He must ennoble his inclinations into virtues and must be so permeated by his virtues that he feels no other inclination than that of following them. A man who has established this harmony between inclination and duty can, in every moment, count on the morality of his actions as a matter of course.

[ 47 ] From this viewpoint, one can also look at man's social life. A man who follows his sensual desires is self-seeking. He would always be bent on his own well-being if the state did not regulate the social intercourse through laws of reason. The free man accomplishes through his own impulse what the state must demand of the self-seeking. In a community of free men no compulsory laws are necessary.

In the midst of the fearful world of forces, and in the awe-demanding sanctuary of laws, the esthetic formative impulse is imperceptibly building a third delightful realm of play and appearances in which man is released from the fetters of all circumstances and freed from everything that is called compulsion, both in the physical and in the moral world. (Letter 27.)

This realm extends upward as far as the region where reason rules with unconditional necessity and where all matter ceases; it stretches below as far as the world in which the force of nature holds sway with blind compulsion.

Thus, Schiller considers a moral realm as an ideal in which the temper of virtue rules with the same ease and freedom as the esthetic taste governs in the realm of beauty. He makes life in the realm of beauty the model of a perfect moral social order in which man is liberated in every direction. Schiller closes the beautiful essay in which he proclaims this ideal with the question of whether such an order had anywhere been realized. He answers with the words:

As a need, it exists in every delicately attuned soul; as an actuality it can probably only be found, like the pure church and the pure republic, in a few select circles where, not the thoughtless imitation of heterogeneous customs, but the inherent beautiful nature guides the demeanor, where man goes with undismayed simplicity and undisturbed innocence through the most complicated situations without the need of offending the freedom of others nor of defending his own, without need of offending his dignity in order to show charm and grace.

[ 48 ] In this virtue refined into beauty, Schiller found a mediation between the world conceptions of Kant and Goethe. No matter how great the attraction that Schiller had found in Kant when the latter had defended the ideal of a pure humanity against the prevailing moral order, when Schiller became more intimately acquainted with Goethe, he became an admirer of Goethe's view of world and life. Schiller's mind, always relentlessly striving for the purest clarity of thought, was not satisfied before he had succeeded in penetrating also conceptually into this wisdom of Goethe. The high satisfaction Goethe derived from his view of beauty and art, and also for his conduct of life, attracted Schiller more and more to the mode of Goethe's conception. In the letter in which Schiller thanks Goethe for sending him his Wilhelm Meister, he says:

I cannot express to you how painfully I am impressed when I turn from a product of this kind to the bustle of philosophy. In the one world everything is so serene, so alive, so harmoniously dissolved, so truly human; in the other, everything is so rigorous, so rigid and abstract, so unnatural, because nature is always nothing but synthesis and philosophy is antithesis. I may claim, to be sure, to have in all my speculations remained as faithful to nature as is compatible with the concept of analysis; I may, indeed, have remained more faithful to her than our Kantians considered permissible and possible. I feel, nevertheless, the infinite distance between life and reflection, and in such a melancholy moment I cannot help considering as a defect in my nature what, in a more cheerful hour, I must regard as merely a trait inherent in the nature of things. In the meantime, I am certain of this at least: The poet is the only true man and, compared to him, the best philosopher is merely a caricature.

This judgment of Schiller can only refer to the Kantian philosophy with which he had had his experiences. In many respects, it estranges man from nature. It approaches nature with no confidence in it but recognizes as valid truth only what is derived from man's own mental organization. Through this trait all judgments of that philosophy seem to lack the lively content and color so characteristic of everything that has its source in the immediate experience of nature's events and things themselves. This philosophy moves in bloodless, gray and cold abstractions. It has sacrificed the warmth we derive from the immediate touch with things and beings and has exchanged the frigidity of its abstract concepts for it. In the field of morality, also, Kant's world conception presents the same antagonism to nature. The duty-concept of pure reason is regarded as its highest aims. What man loves, what his inclinations tend to, everything in man's being that is immediately rooted in man's nature, must be subordinated to this ideal of duty. Kant goes even as far as the realm of beauty to extinguish the share that man must have in it according to his original sensations and feelings. The beautiful is to produce a delight that is completely “free from interest.” Compare that with how devoted, how really interested Schiller approaches a work in which he admires the highest stage of artistic production. He says concerning Wilhelm Meister:

I can express the feeling that permeates me and takes possession of me as I read this book no better than as a sweet well-being, as a feeling of spiritual and bodily health, and I am firmly convinced that this must be the feeling with all readers in general. . . . I explain this well-being with the quiet clarity, smoothness and transparence that prevails throughout the book, leaving the reader without the slightest dissatisfaction and disturbance, and producing no more emotion than is necessary to kindle and support a cheerful life in his soul.

These are not the words of somebody who believes in delight without interest, but of a man who is convinced that the pleasure in the beautiful is capable of being so refined that a complete surrender to this pleasure does not involve degradation. Interest is not to be extinguished as we approach the work of art; rather are we to become capable of including in our interest what has its source in the spirit. The “true” man is to develop this kind of interest for the beautiful also with respect to his moral conceptions. Schiller writes in a letter to Goethe, “It is really worth observing that the slackness with regard to esthetic things appears always to be connected with moral slackness, and that a pure rigorous striving for high beauty with the highest degree of liberality concerning everything that is nature will contain in itself rigorism in moral life.”

[ 49 ] The estrangement from nature in the world conception and in all of the culture of the time in which he lived was felt so strongly by Schiller that he made it the subject of his essay, On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. He compares the life conception of his time with that of the Greeks and raises the question, “How is it that we, who are infinitely surpassed by the ancients in everything that is nature, can render homage to nature to a higher degree, cling to her with fervour and can embrace even the lifeless world with the warmest sentiments.” He answers this question by saying:

This is caused by the fact that, with us, nature has vanished out of humanity and we therefore find her in reality only outside humanity in the inanimate world. It is not our greater naturalness, but, quite to the contrary, the unnaturalness of our lives, state of affairs and customs that drives us to give satisfaction in the physical to the awakening sense for truth and simplicity, which, like the moral faculty from which it springs, lies without corruption and inextinguishably in all men's hearts because we no longer can hope to find it in the moral world. It is for this reason that the feeling with which we cling to nature is so closely related to the sentiment with which we lament the loss of the age of childhood and of the child's innocence. Our childhood is the only unspoiled nature that we still find in civilized humanity, and it is, therefore, no wonder that every footstep of nature leads us back to our own childhood.

This was entirely different with the Greeks. They lived their lives within the bounds of the natural. Everything they did sprang from their natural conception, feeling and sentiment. They were intimately bound to nature. Modern man feels himself in his own being placed in contrast to nature. As the urge toward this primeval mother of being cannot be extinguished, it transforms itself in the modern soul into a yearning for nature, into a search for it. The Greek had nature; modern man searches for nature.

As long as man is still pure nature and, to be sure, not brutal, he acts as an undivided sensual unity and as a harmonizing whole. His senses and his reason, his receptive and his self-active faculties, have not as yet separated in their function and certainly do not act in contradiction to each other. His sentiments are not the formless play of chance; his thoughts, not the empty play of his imagination. These thoughts have their origin in the law of necessity; the sentiments, in reality. As soon as man comes into the state of civilization, and as soon as art enters into his sphere of life, the sensual harmony is dissolved and he can now only act as a moral unity, that is to say, as striving for unity. The agreement between his perception and his thought, which in his former state was actual, is now merely ideal; it is no longer in him, but beyond him; as a thought whose realization is demanded, it is no longer a fact of his life.

The fundamental mood of the Greek spirit was naive, that of modern man is sentimental. The Greeks' world conception could, for this reason, be rightly realistic, for he had not yet separated the spiritual from the natural; for him, nature included the spirit. If he surrendered to nature, it was to a spirit-saturated nature. This is not so with modern man. He has detached the spirit from nature; he has lifted the spirit into the realm of gray abstractions. If he were to surrender to his nature, he would yield to a nature deprived of all spirit. Therefore, his loftiest striving must be directed toward the ideal; through the striving for this goal, spirit and nature are to be reconciled again. In Goethe's mode of spirit, however, Schiller found something that was akin to the Greek spirit. Goethe felt that he saw his ideas and thoughts with his eyes because he felt reality as an undivided unity of spirit and nature. According to Schiller, Goethe had preserved something in himself that will be attained again by the “sentimental man” when he has reached the climax of his striving. Modern man arrives at such a summit in the esthetic mood as Schiller describes it in the state of soul in which sensuality and reason are harmonized again.

[ 50 ] The nature of the development of modern world conception is significantly characterized in the observation Schiller made to Goethe in his letter of August 23, 1794:

Had you been born a Greek and been surrounded since birth by exquisite nature and idealizing art, your road would have been infinitely shortened; perhaps it would have been made entirely unnecessary. With the very first perception of things, you would have absorbed the form of the necessary, and with your first experience, the grand style would have developed within you. As it is now . . . since your Greek spirit was cast into this nordic creation, you had no other choice than either to become a nordic artist yourself or to supplement your imagination by means of thought for what reality fails to supply, and thus to give birth from within to another Greece.

Schiller, as these sentences show, is aware of the course that the development of soul life has taken from the age of the ancient Greeks until his own time, for the Greek soul life disclosed itself in the life of thought and he could accept this unveiling because thought was for him a perception like the perception of color and sounds. This kind of thought life has faded away for modern man. The powers that weave creatively through the world must be experienced by him as an inner soul experience, and in order to render this imperceptible thought life inwardly visible, it nevertheless must be filled by imagination. This imagination must be such that it is felt as one with the creative powers of nature.

[ 51 ] Because soul consciousness has been transformed into self-consciousness in modern man, the question of world conception arises: How can self-consciousness experience itself so vividly that it feels its conscious process as permeating the creative process of the living world forces? Schiller answered this question for himself in his own fashion when he claimed the life in the artistic experience as his ideal. In this experience the human self-consciousness feels its kinship with an element that transcends the mere nature picture. In it, man feels himself seized by the spirit as he surrenders as a natural and sensual being to the world. Leibniz had attempted to understand the human soul as a monad. Fichte had not proceeded from a mere idea to gain clarity of the nature of the human soul; he searched for a form of experience in which this soul lays hold on its own being. Schiller raises the question: Is there a form of experience for the human soul in which it can feel how it has its roots in spiritual reality? Goethe experiences ideas in himself that present themselves to him at the same time as ideas of nature.

In Goethe, Fichte and Schiller, the experienced idea—one could also say, the idea-experience—forces its way into the soul. Such a process had previously happened in the world of the Greeks with the perceived idea, the idea-perception.

[ 52 ] The world and life conception that lived in Goethe in a natural (naive) way, and toward which Schiller strove on all detours of his thought development, does not feel the need for the kind of universally valid truth that sees its ideal in the mathematical form. It is satisfied by another truth, which our spirit derives from the immediate intercourse with the real world. The insights Goethe derived from the contemplation of the works of art in Italy were, to be sure, not of the unconditional certainty as are the theorems of mathematics, but they also were less abstract. Goethe approached them with the feeling, “Here is necessity, here is God.” A truth that could not also be revealed in a perfect work of art did not exist for Goethe. What art makes manifest with its technical means of tone, marble, color, rhythm, etc., springs from the same source from which the philosopher also draws who does not avail himself of visual means of presentation but who uses as his means of expression only thought, the idea itself. “Poetry points at the mysteries of nature and attempts to solve them through the picture,” says Goethe. “Philosophy points at the mysteries of reason and attempts to solve them through the word.” In the final analysis, however, reason and nature are, for him, inseparably one; the same truth is the foundation of both. An endeavor for knowledge, which lives in detachment from things in an abstract world, does not seem to him to be the highest form of cognitive life. “It would be the highest attainment to understand that all factual knowledge is already theory.” The blueness of the sky reveals the fundamental law of color phenomena to us. “One should not search for anything behind the phenomena; they, themselves, are the message.”

The psychologist, Heinroth, in his Anthology, called the mode of thinking through which Goethe arrived at his insights into the natural formation of plants and animals, an “object-related thinking” (Gegenstaendliches Denken). What he means is that this mode of thinking does not detach itself from its objects, but that the objects of observation are intimately permeated with this thinking, that Goethe's mode of thinking is at the same time a form of observation, and his mode of observation a form of thinking. Schiller becomes a subtle observer as he describes this mode of spirit. He writes on this subject in a letter to Goethe:

Your observing eye, which so calmly and clearly rests on things, keeps you from being ever exposed to the danger of going astray in the direction where speculation and an arbitrary, merely introspective imagination so easily lose their way. Your correct intuition contains everything, and in a far greater completeness, for which an analytical mind searches laboriously; only because everything is at your disposal as a complete whole are you unaware of your own riches, for unfortunately we know only what we dissect. Spirits of your kind, therefore, rarely know how far advanced they are and how little cause they have to borrow from philosophy, which in turn can only learn from them.

For the world conception of Goethe and Schiller, truth is not only contained in science, but also in art. Goethe expresses his opinion as follows, “I think science could be called the knowledge of the general art. Art would be science turned into action. Science would be reason, and art its mechanism, wherefore one could also call it practical science. Thus, finally, science would be the theorem and art the problem.” Goethe describes the interdependence of scientific cognition and artistic expression of knowledge thus:

It is obvious that an. . . . artist must become greater and more erudite if he not only has his talent but is also a well-informed botanist; if he knows, starting from the root, all the influences of the various parts of a plant on its thriving and growth, their function and mutual effect; if he has an insight into the successive development of the leaves, the flowers, the fertilization, the fruit and the new germ, and if he contemplates this process. Such an artist will not merely show his taste through his power of selection from the realm of appearances, but he will also surprise us with his correct presentation of the characteristic qualities.

Thus, truth rules in the process of artistic creation for the artistic style depends, according to this view, “. . . on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things insofar as it is permissible to know it in visible and touchable forms.” The fact that creative imagination is granted a share in the process of knowledge and that the abstract intellect is no longer considered to be the only cognitive faculty is a consequence of this view concerning truth. The conceptions on which Goethe based his contemplation's on plant and animal formations were not gray and abstract thoughts but sensual-supersensual pictures, created by spontaneous imagination. Only observation combined with imagination can really lead into the essence of things, not bloodless abstraction; this is Goethe's conviction. For this reason, Goethe said about Galileo that he made his observations as a genius “for whom one case represents a thousand cases . . . when he developed the doctrine of the pendulum and the fall of bodies from swinging church lamps.” Imagination uses the one case in order to produce a content-saturated picture of what is essential in the appearances; the intellect that operates by means of abstractions can, through combination, comparison and calculation of the appearances, gain no more than a general rule of their course. This belief in the possible cognitive function of an imagination that rises into a conscious participation in the creative world process is supported by Goethe's entire world conception. Whoever, like him, sees nature's activity in everything, can also see in the spiritual content of the human imagination nothing but higher products of nature. The pictures of fantasy are products of nature and, as they represent nature, they can only contain truth, for otherwise nature would lie to herself in these afterimages that she creates of herself. Only men with imagination can attain to the highest stages of knowledge. Goethe calls these men the “comprehensive” and the “contemplative” in contrast to the merely “intellectual-inquisitive,” who have remained on a lower stage of cognitive life.

The intellectual inquisitive need a calm, unselfish power of observation, the excitement of curiosity, a clear intellect . . . ; they only digest scientifically what they find ready-made.

The contemplative are already creative in their attitude, and knowledge in them, as it reaches a higher level, demands contemplation unconsciously and changes over into that form; much as they may shun the word “imagination,” they will, nevertheless, before they are aware of it, call upon the support of creative imagination. . . The comprehensive thinkers who, with a prouder name, could be called creative thinkers, are, in their attitude, productive in the highest sense, for, as they start from ideas, they express from the outset the unity of the whole. From then on, it is the task of nature, as it were, to submit to these ideas.

It cannot occur to the believer in such a form of cognition to speak of limitations of human knowledge in a Kantian fashion, for he experiences within himself what man needs as his truth. The core of nature is in the inner life of man. The world conception of Goethe and Schiller does not demand of its truth that it should be a repetition of the world phenomena in conceptual form. It does not demand that its conception should literally correspond to something outside man. What appears in man's inner life as an ideal element, as something spiritual, is as such not to be found in any external world; it appears as the climax of the whole development. For this reason, it does not, according to this philosophy, have to appear in all human beings in the same shape. It can take on an individual form in any individual. Whoever expects to find the truth in the agreement with something external can acknowledge only one form of it, and he will look for it, with Kant, in the type of metaphysics that alone “will be able to present itself as science.” Whoever sees the element in which, as Goethe states in his essay on Winckelmann, “the universe, if it could feel itself, would rejoice as having arrived at its aim in which it could admire the climax of its own becoming and being,” such a thinker can say with Goethe, “If I know my relation to myself and to the external world, I call this truth; in this way everybody can have his own truth and it is yet the same.” For “man in himself, insofar as he uses his healthy senses, is the greatest and most exact apparatus of physics that is possible. Yet, that the experiments separated, as it were, from man, and that one wants to know nature only according to the indications of artificial instruments, even intending to limit and prove in this way what nature is capable of, is the greatest misfortune of modern physics.” Man, however, “stands so high that in him is represented what cannot be represented otherwise. What is the string and all mechanical division of it compared to the ear of the musician? One can even say, ‘What are all elementary phenomena of nature themselves compared to man who must master and modify them all in order to be able to assimilate them to himself to a tolerable degree.’ ”

[ 53 ] Concerning his world picture, Goethe speaks neither of a mere knowledge of intellectual concepts nor of belief; he speaks of a contemplative perception in the spirit. He writes to Jacobi, “You trust in belief in God; I, in seeing.” This seeing in the spirit as it is meant here thus enters into the development of world conception as the soul force that is appropriate to an age to which thought is no longer what it had been to the Greek thinkers, but in which thought had revealed itself as a product of self-consciousness, a product, however, that is arrived at through the fact that this self-consciousness is aware of itself as having its being within the spiritually creative forces of nature. Goethe is the representative of an epoch of world conception in which the need is felt to make the transition from mere thinking to spiritual seeing. Schiller strives to justify this transition against Kant's position.

[ 54 ] The close alliance that was formed by Goethe, Schiller and their contemporaries between poetic imagination and world conception has freed this conception from the lifeless expression that it must take on when it exclusively moves in the region of the abstract intellect. This alliance has resulted in the belief that there is a personal element in world conception. It is possible for man to work out an approach to the world for himself that is in accordance with his own specific nature and enter thereby into the world of reality, not merely into a world of fantastic schemes. His ideal no longer needs to be that of Kant, which is formed after the model of mathematics and arrives at a world picture that is once and for all finished and completed. Only from a spiritual atmosphere of such a conviction that has an inspiring effect on the human individuality can a conception like that of Jean Paul (1763 – 1825) arise. “The heart of a genius, to whom all other splendor and help-giving energies are subordinated, has one genuine symptom, namely, a new outlook on world and life.” How could it be the mark of the highest developed man, of genius, to create a new world and life conception if the conceived world consisted only in one form? Jean Paul is, in his own way, a defender of Goethe's view that man experiences inside his own self the ultimate existence. He writes to Jacobi:

Properly speaking, we do not merely believe in divine freedom, God and virtue, but we really see them manifested or in the process of manifestation; this very seeing is a knowing and a higher form of knowing, while the knowledge of intellect merely refers to a seeing of a lower order. One could call reason the consciousness of the only positive, for everything positive experienced by sense perception does finally dissolve into the spiritual, and understanding carries on its bustle only with the relative, which in itself is nothing, so that before God all conditions of “more or less,” and all stages of comparison cease to be.

Jean Paul will not allow anything to deprive him of the right to experience truth inwardly and to employ all forces of the soul for this purpose. He will not be restricted to the use of logical intellect.

Transcendental philosophy (Jean Paul has in mind here the world view following Kant) is not to tear the heart, man's living root, out of his breast to replace it with a pure impulse of selfhood; I shall not consent to be liberated from the dependence of Love, to be blessed by pride only.

With these words he rejects the world-estranged moral order of Kant.

I remain firmly with my conviction that there are four last, and four first things: Beauty, Truth, Morality and Salvation, and their synthesis is not only necessary but also already a fact, but only in a subtle spiritual-organic unity (and for just this reason it is a unity), without which we could not find any understanding of these four evangelists or world continents, nor any transition between them.

The critical analysis of the intellect, which proceeded with an extreme logical rigor, had, in Kant and Fichte, come to the point of reducing the self-dependent significance of the real life-saturated world to a mere shadow, to a dream picture. This view was unbearable to men gifted with spontaneous imagination, who enriched life by the creation of their imaginative power. These men felt the reality; it was there in their perception, present in their souls, and now it was attempted to prove to them its mere dreamlike quality. “The windows of the philosophical academic halls are too high to allow a view into the alleys of real life,” was the answer of Jean Paul.

[ 55 ] Fichte strove for the purest, highest experienced truth. He renounced all knowledge that does not spring from our own inner source. The counter movement to his world conception is formed by the Romantic Movement. Fichte acknowledges only the truth, and the inner life of man only insofar as it reveals the truth; the world conception of the romanticists acknowledges only the inner life, and it declares as valuable everything that springs from this inner life. The ego is not to be chained by anything external. Whatever it produces is justified.

[ 56 ] One may say about the romantic movement that it carries Schiller's statement to its extreme consequence, “Man plays only where he is human in the full sense of the word, and he is only wholly human when he is playing.” Romanticism wants to make the whole world into a realm of the artistic. The fully developed man knows no other norms than the laws he creates through his freely ruling imaginative power, in the same way as the artist creates those laws he impresses into his works. He rises above everything that determines him from without and lives entirely through the springs of his own self. The whole world is for him nothing but a material for his esthetic play. The seriousness of man in his everyday life is not rooted in truth. The soul that arrives at true knowledge cannot take seriously the things by themselves; for such a soul they are not in themselves valuable. They are endowed with value only by the soul. The mood of a spirit that is aware of his sovereignty over things is called by the romanticists, the ironical mood of spirit.

Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780–1819) gave the following explanation of the term “romantic irony”: The spirit of the artist must comprise all directions in one sweeping glance and this glance, hovering above everything, looking down on everything and annihilating it, we call “irony.” Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), one of the leading spokesmen for the romantic turn of spirit, states concerning this mood of irony that it takes everything in at a glance and rises infinitely above everything that is limited, also above some form of art, virtue or genius. Whoever lives in this mood feels bound by nothing; nothing determines the direction of his activity for him. He can “at his own pleasure tune himself to be either philosophical or philological, critical or poetical, historical or rhetorical, antique or modern.” The ironical spirit rises above an eternal moral world order, for this spirit is not told what to do by anything except himself. The ironist is to do what he pleases, for his morality can only be an esthetic morality. The romanticists are the heirs of Fichte's thought of the uniqueness of the ego. They were, however, unwilling to fill this ego with a moral belief, as Fichte did, but stood above all on the right of fantasy and of the unrestrained power of the soul. With them, thinking was entirely absorbed by poetic imagination. Novalis says, “It is quite bad that poetry has a special name and that the poet represents a special profession. It is not anything special by itself. It is the mode of activity proper to the human spirit. Are not the imaginations of man's heart at work every minute?” The ego, exclusively concerned with itself, can arrive at the highest truth: “It seems to man that he is engaged in a conversation, and some unknown spiritual being causes him to develop the most evident thoughts in a miraculous fashion.

Fundamentally, what the romanticists aimed at did not differ from what Goethe and Schiller had also made their credo: A conception of man through which he appeared as perfect and as free as possible. Novalis experiences his poems and contemplation's in a soul mood that had a relationship toward the world picture similar to that of Fichte. Fichte's spirit, however, works the sharp contours of pure concepts, while that of Novalis springs from a richness of soul, feeling where others think, living in the element of love where others aim to embrace what is and what goes on in the world with ideas. It is the tendency of this age, as can be seen in its representative thinkers, to search for the higher spirit nature in which the self-conscious soul is rooted because it cannot have its roots in the world of sense reality. Novalis feels and experiences himself as having his being within the higher spirit nature. What he expresses he feels through his innate genius as the revelations of this very spirit nature. He writes:

One man succeeded; he lifted the veil of the goddess at Saris. What did he see then? He saw—wonder of wonders—himself.

Novalis expresses his own intimate feeling of the spiritual mystery behind the world of the senses and of the human self consciousness as the organ through which this mystery reveals itself, in these words:

The spirit world is indeed already unlocked for us; it is always revealed. If we suddenly became as elastic as we should be, we should see ourselves in the midst of it.

Folksstück in three acts and a prelude by C. Karlweis
Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

During the terrible boredom that this "folk play" causes for three hours, the thought arises again and again: Someone wanted to be a Raimund and didn't even make it as far as Birch-Pfeiffer and O.F.Berg. Something that is equally obtrusive and equally meaningless in its sentimentality and clumsy buffoonery will not be easy to find within the dramatic genre to which this play wants to belong. An obnoxious fellow with all the instincts of meanness and baseness torments his whole environment because he is only capable of loving his own self. He maltreats his wife, he condemns his son to idleness, even though he would like to work as an independent employee in his father's factory. The old egotist does not want to give up the "whip" as long as he can still take a breath. He refuses to give his consent when his daughter wants to give her hand to the man she loves, because it is better for his mean nature to set her up with someone else; and when a good friend comes into need and misery, the ego-lover can't get a penny out of him. This is the first act. It is preceded by a prelude depicting a quarrel between the fairy Humanitas and the Viennese fairy. It symbolizes how the "good Viennese heart" can be abandoned by all humanity and led down the path of self-interest and unkindness. But the Viennese must rediscover his golden heart. For this journey of discovery, "God Morpheus" joins forces with Humanitas and the Viennese fairy and - in the second act - lets the evil egoist fall into a bad dream that shows the dreamer where his hard mind will lead him when God wants to punish him and make him a poor man. And when the curtain rises again for the third act, the egotist is cured: with farcical agility, the "poet" has made the sinner the best father, a philanthropist and an exemplary husband.

All this takes place with unspeakable clumsiness. Karlweis wants to be naive like Raimund, but he is only childish. There is not even a hint of the spirit in the play that immediately wins us over when Raimund raises the curtain and his fairy tales play out before our eyes.

The role of the old egotist, Florian Heindl, was played by Mr. Bonn. He did everything he could to make the character even more repulsive than the poet had made him. Fräulein Groß, who has to play the Viennese fairy in the prelude and the young Heindl's fiancée in the drama, was only a "smart Viennese" in both roles, without being able to arouse any further interest. Carl Waldow alone gave a noteworthy performance as Heindl's house servant.

There is often something tremendously important in simple expressions of the people. The language is not a random creation. In the language we can see the real spirit. Sometimes a saying points to deeper secrets of existence. We have spoken of the overturning of beings; this going over, jumping over a certain point, we find everywhere. Man, let us recall, consists of his three lower bodies. These three bodies are gradually built up and perfected by mankind. On the earth came to the appearance the real I.

During the third round on the moon, man lived in a dream-like consciousness. He did not see the colors on the objects, but the color came to life as an entity before his soul. /Gap in transcript]

On earth, the pictorial consciousness transforms into the representational consciousness. The color puts itself over the object. That one perceives something depends on the fact that we have sense organs. Now if the moon dweller perceived, he had to have senses; he had them, lotus flowers turning to the opposite side. In which body were these lunar sense organs? In the actual etheric double body. In the pralaya, these lunar sense organs disappeared, and the sensation body is formed, which has the powers that form the eyes, ears and so on. The I as such was also present during the lunar existence, but in an unconscious way. On earth the I looks through the sense organs with the help of this sensory body and perceives. Because the I is stuck in the sensory body, it has consciousness only as long as it can look out. When it cannot - in death - consciousness is interrupted. A

The next stage is that the ego works its way into the same world that it perceives from the outside. On the moon as image the object was perceived, on earth the human being threw these images over the objects. Now he slips into these objects/images and grows with them. This is called "the life in the causal body. It means a coming out over oneself. If this rushing out is done too early or incorrectly, man would lose the connection with his senses.

[Gap in transcript]

This gravitation must be especially strongly developed in the student of occultism.

Madness is nothing but losing harmony with the outside world. In every abnormal development this has happened. The soul has jumped out of the sentient body and is actually outside. It "snaps over.

Language is a powerful cultural factor in development. Great initiates imbibe into language that which is to be expressed in many centuries. In Germany, Christian mysticism should be expressed. This teaches that the Christ lives in Jesus, while the Oriental languages teach the threefold Logos. This is not mutually exclusive.

The ineffable name.

This address was given at the Second Annual Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society.

It was then edited for printing by St. George Publications in 1982.¹

Anthroposophy will only be able to fulfill its great and universal mission in modern civilization when it is able to grasp the special problems which have arisen in every land by reason of the intellectual possessions of the people. In Germany, these special problems are in part determined by the inheritance bequeathed to her intellectual life by the men of genius living at the close of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. Any one who approaches those great minds, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Novalis, Jean Paul and many others, from the point of view of Anthroposophical thought and its attitude toward life, will have two important experiences. The first being that, as a result of this profoundly spiritual attitude, a new light is thrown upon the working and works of these men of genius; the second, that through them Anthroposophy receives new life-blood, which must, in some way as yet not clear, produce a fructifying and strengthening effect in the future. It may be said without exaggeration that the German will understand Anthroposophy if only he brings his mind to bear upon the highest conceptions for which the leading spirits of his land have striven, and which they have embodied in their works.

It will be the task of future generations to reveal the Anthroposophical and spiritual-scientific basis of the great advancement in the intellectual life of Germany during the period in question. It will then be shown what an intimate knowledge and understanding of the influences at work during this period is obtainable by regarding things from an Anthroposophical point of view. It is only possible on this occasion to make a few references to one man of genius who was the leading light of this age of culture, namely, Goethe. It is possible that new life may be infused into the active principles of Anthroposophy through Goethe's thought and the creations of his mind, with the result that, in Germany, Anthroposophy may appear by degrees to be something akin to the spirit of the people. One thing will be made clear: that the source of the Anthroposophical conception is one and the same as the fount from which Germany's great poet and thinker has derived his creative power.

The most clear-sighted of those among whom Goethe lived acknowledged without any reservation that there was no branch of intellectual life which his attitude toward life and the world could not enrich. But one must not allow oneself to be deceived by the fact that the quintessence of Goethe's mind really lies concealed below the surface of his works. He who wishes to win his way to a perfect understanding of them must become intimate with their innermost spirit. This does not mean that one should become insensitive to the beauties of their style or their artistic form. Nor must one put an abstract interpretation upon his art by means of intellectual symbols and allegories. But, just as a noble countenance excites no less admiration for the beauty of its features because the beholder is able to perceive the greatness of the soul illuminating this beauty, so it is with Goethe's art; not only can it lose nothing, but rather will it gain infinitely, when the outward expression of his creative power is illuminated by that depth of conception of the universe which possesses his soul.

Goethe himself often has shown how justified we are in having such a profound conception of his creative power. On January 29, 1827, he said to his devoted secretary Eckermann concerning his Faust, “It is all scenic and, from the point of view of the theatre, it will please everyone. More than this I did not wish. If only the performance gives pleasure to the majority of the audience, the initiated will not miss the deeper meaning.” It is only necessary to bring an impartial insight to bear upon Goethe's creative power in order to recognize that it is only an esoteric conception which can lead us to a full understanding of his working. He felt within him an ardent desire to discover in all phenomena of the senses the hidden spiritual force. It was one of his principles of search that the inner secrets are expressed in outward facts and objects, and that those only can aspire to understand Nature who look upon the phenomena as mere letters which enable them to decipher the inner meaning of the workings of the spirit. The words: “All we see before us passing, Sign and symbol is alone,” in the Chorus Mysticus, at the end of Faust, are not merely to be regarded as a poetical idea, but as the outcome of his whole attitude toward the world. In Art, too, he saw only a revelation of the innermost secrets of the world; in his opinion, it was through Art that those things are to be made clear which, though having their origin in Nature and being active in her, yet with the means at her disposal, she cannot express. He sought the same spirit in the phenomena of Nature as in the works of a creative artist; only the means of expression were different in the two cases. He was constantly at work on his conception of a gradual process of evolution of all the phenomena and creatures in the world. He regarded man as a compilation of the other kingdoms. The spirit of man was to him the revelation of a universal spirit, and the other realms of Nature, with their manifestations, appeared to him as the path of evolution leading to man. All this was not merely a theory with him, but became a living element in his work, permeating all that he produced. Schiller has given us a fine description of this peculiarity of Goethe's mind, in the letter with which he inaugurates the intimate friendship which united them (August 23, 1794):

For a long time I have watched, although from some distance, the procedure of your mind, and ever with renewed wonder have observed the track that you have marked out for yourself. You seek for the necessary (the absolute) in Nature; but you seek it by the most difficult route, which every weaker spirit will take care to avoid. You grasp in your view entire Nature in order to obtain light on her parts: in the totality of her manifestations, you search for the key to lay open the individual. (Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, from 1794 to 1805.)

In his book on Winckelmann, Goethe has expressed his opinion as to the position of man in the evolution of the realms of Nature:

When the sound, healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself at one with the world as a great, beautiful, worthy whole, when this harmonious feeling of well-being gives him a pure free delight, then might the Universe, could it consciously feel, deeming itself at the goal, cry out for very joy, and be lost in admiration of the climax of its own development and organization.

It was Goethe's life-work to strive to obtain an ever clearer insight into the evolution of the living world. When, after moving to Weimar (about 1780), he embodied the result of his investigation in the beautiful prose-hymn, Nature, we find over the whole a certain abstract tinge of pantheism. He must perforce use words to define the hidden forces of being, but before long these cease to satisfy his ever-deepening conception. But it is in these very words that we first meet with the ideas which we find later in such perfect form. He says there, for instance:

Nature! we are surrounded and embraced by her ... Unasked and without warning she draws us into the circle of her dance and carries us along with her until we are weary and slip from her arms. For ever is she creating new forms; what is, never was before; what has been, never will be again; everything is new, and yet ever old ... Each one of her works has its own individuality, each of her phenomena requires individual comprehension, and yet it all makes but one whole ... She has thought, and is for ever meditating; not as man, though, but as Nature. She has her own all-embracing meaning, which no one can learn from her by observation only ... She envelops man in a mist, and is ever spurring him on toward the light ... She creates wants because she loves action ... She has neither speech nor language, but she creates tongues and hearts through which she feels and speaks ... Her crown is love, through which alone she may be approached ... She has isolated everything in order to draw everything together ... Past and future knows she not. The present is her eternity.

When Goethe (1828), having reached the summit of his insight, looked back upon this stage, he expressed himself thus concerning it:

I would call that former stage of insight the Comparative, which is impelled to express its tendency toward an, as yet, unattained Superlative ... But what is wanting for its fulfillment is the conception of the two great driving-wheels of all Nature, the comprehension of polarity and self-perfecting evolution, the former belonging to matter, insofar as we call it material, the latter opposed to it, insofar as we call it spiritual; the former is everlastingly attracting and repelling, the latter is ever striving to ascend. But, as matter cannot exist and operate without spirit, nor spirit without matter, even so matter has the power to raise itself, nor can spirit be prevented from attracting and repelling.

It was with such a conception that Goethe approached the animal, mineral and vegetable kingdoms to grasp the hidden spiritual unity in the manifest multiplicity of sense-perceptible phenomena. It is in this sense that he speaks of primeval plant, primeval animal. And it was for him Intuition which stood behind these conceptions as the active spiritual force. In his contemplation of things, his whole being strove toward what in Anthroposophy is called tolerance. And ever more and more he sought to acquire this quality by means of the strictest inward self-education. To this he frequently refers; it will suffice to quote a very characteristic example from the Campaign in France (1792):

As I was for the most part almost entirely engrossed by the business and occurrences of the moment, with which kind of life I had reason to be satisfied, of late years particularly, I had the peculiarity of never forming conceptions beforehand of persons whom I expected to meet, or places that I intended to visit, but allowed them to produce their effect upon me without being previously prepared for them.

The advantage that arises from this is very great; one does not require to come back from a previously conceived idea, to blot out a picture arbitrarily painted by ourselves, and painfully to adopt the reality in its place.

Thus he endeavored to rise higher and higher and to reach the point which divided the real from the unreal.

Only here and there do we find references to his innermost convictions. One of these occurs, for instance, in the poem The Mysteries, which contains his confession as a Rosicrucian. It was written in the middle of the 80's in the 18th century, and was regarded by those who knew him intimately as revealing his character. In 1816, he was called upon by a “fraternity of students in one of the chief towns of North Germany” to explain the hidden meaning of the poem, and the explanation which he gave might well stand as a paraphrase of the three objectives of the programme of the Anthroposophical Society.

Only when one is capable of appreciating the full significance of such points in Goethe is one in a position to recognize the higher meaning, to use his own expression, which he has introduced into his Faust for the initiated. In the second part of this dramatic poem is in fact to be found what Goethe had to say concerning the relation of man to the three worlds: the physical, the astral and the spiritual. From this point of view, the poem represents his expression of the incarnation of man. A character which, to the mind that refuses a spiritual-scientific basis, presents insuperable difficulties, is that of Homunculus. Every passage, every word, however, becomes clear as soon as one starts from this basis. Homunculus is created by the help of Mephistopheles. The latter represents the repressive and destructive forces of the Universe which manifest in the realms of man as Evil. Goethe wishes to characterize the part which Evil takes in the formation of Homunculus; and yet from such beginnings is to be produced a man. For this reason, he is led through the lower realms of Nature to the scene of the classical Walpurgis Night. Before he sets forth on these wanderings, he possesses only a part of human nature. What he himself says concerning his connection with the earthly part of human nature is striking.

Homunculus:

Hither and thither, up, down, in and out;
From place to place still hovering about,
Impatient the free air of life to breathe.
Longing to break the glass that is my sheath—
My chrysalis; but everywhere I see
Such sights! I could not venture yet to be.
Now for a secret—I am on the track
Of two Philosophers. Their tongues, clack! clack!
Went evermore, and Nature—Nature was
The word. Keep me not from them. Of the laws
Of earthly being they must somewhat know:
Between them I may learn some little; so
Pass into life by their experience wiser.

Part ii, Act ii.

The Nature of Homunculus becomes quite clear in the light of the following lines which refer to him:

Thales:

He wants your counsel—has come a long distance:
His object is to get into existence.
He is, by what he told me of his birth,
Miraculously come but half to earth:
A lively spark—has every mental quality,
But, luckless fellow, ‘twas his strange fatality
An active, naked spirit, all alone—
Without a shred of body, blood, or bone,
Into the world to be at hazard thrown—
His glass is all he has to steady him:
He wants and wishes body, life, and limb.

Part ii, Act ii.

The following words are also added, “He is, methinks, Hermaphrodite.” Goethe here intends to represent the astral body of man before his incarnation in mortal (earthly) matter. This he also makes clear by endowing Homunculus with powers of clairvoyance. He sees, for instance, the dream of Faust in the laboratory where work is going on with the help of Mephistopheles. Then in the course of the classical Walpurgis Night the embodying of Homunculus, that is, the astral man, is described. He is sent through the realms of Nature to Proteus, the spirit of transformations.

Thales:

Away to Proteus! Question the magician
As to the spark's proposed change of condition.
You thus may learn what transformations he
Must pass through to be anything—to BE.

Part ii, Act ii.

Proteus then describes the road which astral man has to take through the realms of Nature in order to arrive at an earthly incarnation and receive a physical body.

Proteus:

... In the broad sea thy being must commence;
On a small scale one there begins,
Well pleased the smallest to devour;
Till, waxing step by step, one wins
A loftier achievement, ampler power.

Part ii, Act ii.

The passage of man through the mineral kingdom is then described. Goethe makes his entrance into the vegetable kingdom particularly contemplative. Homunculus says:

A tender air is wafted here;
Dear is the greenness, and the fragrance dear.

The philosopher Thales, who is present, adds in elucidation of what is taking place:

Thales:

Obey the noble inspiration,
And at its source begin creation.
Make ready for the great emprize!
By laws eternal still ascending,
Through myriad forms of being wending,
To be a man in time thou'll rise.

The moment, too, when the asexual being has implanted within him the double sex, and therewith sexual love, is also represented:

Sirens:

And all things are gleaming by fire girt around,
Prime source of creation, let Eros be crowned.

That the investing of the astral body with the physical body, composed of earthly elements, is really meant here is expressly stated in the closing lines of the second act:

All:

Hail each softly blowing gale!
Caverns rich in marvels, hail!
Highly honored evermore,
Be the elemental four!

Goethe here makes use of the evolution of beings in the course of the fashioning of the earth in connection with the incarnation of man as a special being. The latter repeats as such the transformations which mankind has undergone in reaching its present form. In these conceptions, he was in line with the theory of evolution held by spiritual science. His explanation of the origin of the lower forms of life was that the impulse which was aspiring to a higher grade had been stopped on a certain level. In his diary of the Journey through Switzerland, of 1797, he noted a conversation with the Tübingen professor Kielmeyer, which is interesting in this connection. In it, the following words occur, “Concerning the idea that the higher organic natures in their evolution take several steps which the others behind them are unable to take.” His studies of plants, animals, and of man are entirely pervaded by these ideas, and he seeks to invest them with an artistic form in the transformation of Homunculus into a man. When he becomes acquainted with Howard's theory of the formation of clouds, “he expresses his thoughts concerning the relation of spiritual archetypes to the ever-changing forms in the following words:

When the deity Kama-Rupa, high and sublime, wanders, wavering, on the breeze, light and heavy, gathers together the folds of his veil, shakes them out again, rejoicing at the variety of forms, remains now motionless, and now disappears as a dream, we are amazed and scarce believe our eyes.

In Faust, we also find represented the relation of the imperishable spiritual man to the mortal envelope. Faust has to go to the Mothers to seek for this imperishable essence, and the explanation of this important scene is developed quite naturally in the second part of the play. Goethe conceives the real being of man as a trinity (in accord with the Anthroposophical teaching of Spirit-self, Life-spirit, Spirit-man). And Faust's visit to the Mothers may be termed in Anthroposophical phraseology the forcible entry into Devachan. There he is to find what remains of Helena. She is to be reincarnated; that is, she is to return from the realm of the Mothers to the earth and, in the third act, we really do in fact see her reincarnated. In order to accomplish this it is necessary to reunite the three natures of man: the astral, the physical, and the spiritual. At the end of the second act, the astral (Homunculus) has put on the physical envelope and this combination is now able to receive within it the higher nature. Such a conception introduces an inner dramatic unity into the poem, whereas with a non-occult forcible entry the individual events remain a mere arbitrary collection of poetical incidents. Without taking into account the spiritual-scientific foundation of the poem, Professor Veit Valentin, of Frankfort, has already drawn attention to the inner connection of Homunculus and Helena in an interesting book, Die Einheit des Ganzen Faust, 1896. But the contents of this work can only remain an intelligent hypothesis if one does not penetrate into the spiritual-scientific substratum underlying it all. Goethe has conceived Mephistopheles as a being to whom Devachan is unknown. He is only at home on the astral plane. Hence he can be of service in the creation of Homunculus, but he cannot accompany Faust into the realm of the Mothers. Indeed, that plane is to him Nothingness. He says to Faust, in speaking to him of that world:

Mephistopheles:

Naught, in the everlasting void afar,
Wilt see, nor hear thy footfall's sound,
Nor for thy tread find solid ground!

Part ii, Act i.

But Faust, with his spiritual intuition, at once divines that in that world he will find the real essence of Man.

Faust:

We'll fathom it! Come on, nor look behind!
In this thy Naught, the All I hope to find.

In the description which Mephistopheles gives of the world which he dares not enter, one understands exactly what Goethe means to express.

Mephistopheles:

Sink then! Arise! This also I might say:—
‘Tis all the same. Escaping from the real,
Seek thou the boundless realm of the ideal.
Delight thyself in forms long past away!
The train-like cloud-procession, glides along:
...

A glowing tripod teaches thee thou hast
The deep attained, the lowest deep, at last;
There by its light the Mothers thou wilt see;
Some sit, while others, as the case may be,
Or stand, or walk: formation, transformation
Of mind etern, eternal recreation!
While forms of being around them hover.

Only by means of the archetype which Faust fetches from the devachanic world of the Mothers can Homunculus, the astral being who has assumed physical form, become a spiritually-endowed entity, Helena in fact, who actually appears in the third act. Goethe has taken care that those who seek to penetrate the depths shall be able to grasp his meaning for, in his conversations with Eckermann, he has lifted the veil as far as it seemed to him practical to do so. On December 16, 1829, he said concerning Homunculus:

For such spiritual beings as Homunculus, who have not yet had their powers obscured and confined by becoming completely human, were reckoned as among the demons.

And, on the same day, he points out further how Homunculus is still wanting in Mind: “Reasoning is not his concern, he wants to act.”

The whole of the further development of the dramatic action in Faust, according to this reading, follows easily on the foregoing. Faust has become acquainted with the secrets of the three worlds. Henceforth, he looks at the world from the point of view of the mystic. One could point out scene after scene which bears this out, but it will be sufficient to draw attention here to a few passages. When, towards the end, Care approaches Faust, he becomes outwardly blind but, in the course of his development, he has acquired the faculty of inward sight.

Faust:

Deeper and deeper night is round me sinking;
Only within me shines a radiant light.

Part ii, Act v.

Goethe once, in answer to the question, “What was Faust's end?” replied definitely, “He becomes a mystic in the end,” and the significant words of the Chorus Mysticus, with which the poem closes, can only be interpreted in this sense. In the West-East Divan he also expresses himself very clearly on the subject of the spiritual development of man. It is to him the union of the human soul with the higher self. The illusion that the real man exists in his outward body must die out; then higher man comes into existence. That is why he begins his poem Blessed Longing with the words: “Tell it to none but to the wise, for the multitude hasten to deride. I will praise the living who longs for death by fire.” And, in conclusion, he adds: “And as long as thou hast not mastered this; dying and coming into existence; thou art but a sad and gloomy guest on the dark earth.”

Quite in harmony with this is the Chorus Mysticus, for its inner meaning is but this: The transient forms of the outer world have their foundation in the imperishable spiritual ones to which we attain by regarding the transient only as a symbol of the hidden spiritual:

Chorus Mysticus:

All of mere transient date
As symbol showeth.

That to which reason, appointed as it is to deal with the world of the senses and its forms, cannot attain, is revealed as an actual vision to the spiritual sight; further, that which this reason cannot describe is a fact in the regions of the spiritual.

Chorus Mysticus:

Here the inadequate
To fullness groweth.

In harmony with all mystical symbolism, Goethe represents the higher nature of man as feminine, entering into union with the Divine Spirit. For in the last lines:

The eternal feminine
Draws us upward.

Goethe only means to characterize the union of the purified soul drawing near to the Divine. All interpretations which are not made in a mystic sense fail here.

Goethe considered that the time had not yet come when it was possible to speak of certain secrets of our being in any other manner than he has done in some of his poems. And, above all, he felt it to be his own mission to furnish such a form of expression. At the beginning of his friendship with Schiller, he raised the question, “How are we to represent to ourselves the relationship between the physical and the spiritual natures of man?” Schiller had tried to answer this question in a philosophical style in his letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Man. To him, it was a question of the ennobling and purifying of man; to him, a man under the sway of nature's impulses of sensual love and desires appeared impure; but then he considered just as far removed from purity the man who looked upon the sensual impulses and desires as enemies, and was obliged to place himself under the rule of moral or abstract intellectual compulsion. Man only attained inner freedom when he had so absorbed moral law into his inner being that he desired only to obey it. Such a man has so ennobled his lower nature that it becomes by itself an expression of the higher spiritual, and he has so drawn down into the earthly human nature the spiritual that the latter possesses a direct sentient existence. The explanations which Schiller gives in these Letters form excellent rules of education, for their object is to further the evolution of man so that he may, by absorbing the higher ideal man, come to contemplate the world from a free and exalted point of view. In his way Schiller refers to the higher self of man thus:

Every individual man, one may say, harbors within him, according to his character and type, a pure, ideal man, with whose unalterable unity through all changes it is the great task of his life to harmonize himself.

All that Schiller says in this connection is of the most far-reaching significance. For he who really carries out his injunctions accomplishes within himself an education which brings him directly to that inward condition which paves the way for the inner contemplation of the spiritual. Goethe was satisfied, in the deepest sense of the word, with these ideas. He writes to Schiller:

I read the manuscript you sent me at once with the greatest delight; I swallowed it at one gulp. Just as a delicious drink, in sympathy with our nature, slips down willingly and, while still on the tongue, shows its wholesome workings in a pleasant harmony of the nervous system, so were these letters highly pleasing and beneficial to me; and how could it be otherwise, when I found set forth therein so coherently and nobly what I had long recognized as right, what I partly carried out in my life, and partly wished to carry out?

Goethe now endeavored on his part to set forth the same idea from the depths of his conception of the world—but veiled in imagery—in the problem-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. It is placed in the editions of Goethe at the end of the Conversations of German Emigrants. The Faust story has often been called Goethe's Gospel; this tale may, however, be called his Apocalypse, for in it he sets forth—as a fairy-tale—the path of man's inner development. Here again, we can only point out a few short passages, it would need a large book to show how Goethe's spiritual insight is concealed in this tale.

The three worlds are here represented as two regions separated from one another by a river. The river itself stands for the astral plane. On this side of it is the physical world, on the other side the spiritual (Devachan), where dwells the beautiful lily, the symbol of man's higher nature. In her kingdom, man must strive if he would unite his lower with his higher nature. In the abyss—that is, in the physical world—dwells the serpent which symbolizes the self of man. Here too is a temple of initiation, where reign four kings, one golden, one silver, one bronze, and a fourth of an irregular mixture of the three metals. Goethe, who was a freemason, has clothed in freemasonic terminology what he had to impart of his mystic experiences. The three kings represent the three higher forces of man: Wisdom (Gold), Beauty (Silver), and Strength (Bronze). As long as man lives in his lower nature, these three forces are in him disordered and chaotic. This period in the evolution of man is represented by the mixed king. But when man has so purified himself that the three forces work together in perfect harmony, and he can freely use them, then the way into the realm of the spiritual lies open before him. The still unpurified man is represented by a youth who, without having attained inner purity, would unite himself with the beautiful lily. Through this union he becomes paralyzed.

Goethe here wished to point out the danger to which a man exposes himself who would force an entrance into the super-sensible region before he has severed himself from his lower self. Only when love has permeated the whole man, only when the lower nature has been sacrificed, can the initiation into the higher truths and powers begin. This sacrifice is expressed by the serpent yielding of its own accord, and forming a bridge of its body across the river—that is to say, the astral plane—between the two kingdoms, of the senses and of the spirit. At first man must accept the higher truths in the form in which they have been given to him in the imagery of the various religions. This form is personified as the man with the lamp. This lamp has the peculiarity of only giving light where there is already light, meaning that the religious truths presuppose a receptive, believing disposition. Their light shines where the light of faith is present. This lamp, however, has yet another quality, “of turning all stones into gold, all wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones, and of destroying all metals,” meaning the power of faith which changes the inner nature of the individual. There are about twenty characters in this allegory, all symbolical of certain forces in man's nature and, during the course of the action, the purifying of man is described, as he rises to the heights where, in his union with his higher self, he can be initiated into the secrets of existence. This state is symbolized by the Temple, formerly hidden in the abyss, being brought to the surface, and rising above the river—the astral plane. Every passage, every sentence in the allegory is significant. The more deeply one studies the tale, the more comprehensible and clear the whole becomes, and he who set forth the esoteric quintessence of this tale at the same time has given us the substance of the Anthroposophical outlook on life.

Goethe has not left the source uncertain from whose depths he has drawn his inspiration. In another tale, The New Paris, he gives in a veiled manner the history of his own inner enlightenment. Many will remain incredulous if we say that, in this dream, Goethe represents himself just at the boundary between the third and fourth sub-race of our fifth root-race. For him, the myth of Paris and Helen is a symbolic representation of this boundary. And as he—in a dream—conjures up before his eyes in a new form the myth of Paris, he feels he is casting a searching glance into the development of humanity. What such an insight into the past means to the inner eye, he tells us in the Prophecies of Bakis, which are also full of occult references:

The past likewise will Bakis reveal to thee; for even the past oft lies, oh blind world, like a riddle before thee. Who knows the past knows also the future: both are joined in To-day in one complete whole.

Much, too, might be quoted to show the underlying elements of spiritual science in the fairy tale, The New Melusine, a Pandora-fragment, and many other writings. In his novel, Wilhelm Meister's Traveling Years, Goethe has given us quite a masterly picture of a Clairvoyante in Makarie. Makarie's power of intuition rises to the level of a complete penetration of the inner mysteries of the planetary system:

She stands with regard to our solar system in a relationship which one hardly dares to express. In the spirit, of the soul, of the imagination, she fosters it, not only gazes at it, but at the same time forms part of it; she sees herself drawn on into those heavenly circles, but in quite a peculiar way; she has wandered since her childhood round the sun, and, in fact, as has now been discovered, in a spiral, circling ever further and further from the center towards the outer regions. If one may assume that beings insofar as they are embodied strive towards the center, but insofar as they are spirits strive towards the periphery, then our friend belongs to the most spiritual; She seems to have been born only to detach herself from the earthly and to force her way into the nearest and furthest realms of existence. This quality, glorious as it is, was laid upon her from her earliest years as a difficult task. She remembers her inner self penetrated, as it were, through and through by shining beings, illuminated by a light which not even the brightest sunlight could rival. She often saw two suns, one, that is, within, and one without in the heavens, two moons, of which the outer retained its size through all its phases; the inner ever more and more decreased.

These words of Goethe's prove clearly how intimate he is with these matters, and whoever reads through the whole passage will recognize that Goethe so expresses himself, albeit with reserve, that he who looks beneath the surface may feel quite certain of the spiritual-scientific foundation in his being.

Goethe always looked upon his mission as a poet in relation to his striving toward the hidden laws of Life. He was often forced to notice how friends failed to understand this side of his nature. He describes thus, in the Campaign in France in 1792, how his contemplation of Nature was always misunderstood:

... the passionate earnestness with which I addicted myself to this (the study of natural philosophy) seemed inconceivable to all, nobody observing how it sprang from my innermost being itself; they considered this laudable pursuit as a whimsical mistake; in their opinion, I could do something better, and leave my abilities to work in their old direction. They felt the more entitled to do this as my way of thinking did not agree with theirs, expressing rather, in most points, exactly the contrary. No more isolated being can be imagined than I was then, and for a long time afterwards. The Hylozoism, or whatever it may be called, to which I was attached, and the deep foundation of which I left untouched in all its sacred dignity, made me unsusceptible, nay, intolerant, toward that way of thinking which set up as an article of belief the existence of matter as a dead thing, in whatever way it may be supposed to be stirred up and put in motion.

Goethe could only understand artistic work when based on a profound penetration of the truth. As an artist, he wished to give utterance to that which in Nature is suggested without being fully expressed. Nature appeared to him as a product of the same essence which also works through human art, only that in the case of Nature the power has remained on a lower level. For Goethe, Art is a continuation of Nature revealing that which in Nature alone is hidden:

For in that man is placed as the peak of Nature, he perceives himself in his turn as a complete nature, which, in its turn, has within himself to produce a peak. With this objective in view, he raises himself, striving to win his way by all perfections and virtues. Selection, order, harmony, and purpose he calls to his aid, until finally he rises to the production of a work of art. (Winckelmann.)

To understand the world is to Goethe to Hue in the spirit of worldly things. For this reason, he speaks of a perceptive power of judgment (intellectus archetypus), through which Man draws ever nearer to the secrets of our being:

If, then, in a moral sense, we are, through faith in God, to attain to youth and immortality in a higher region, and are to draw near to the Most High, it should surely be the same in an intellectual sense, that only by the contemplation of an ever-creating Nature, we shall become worthy of spiritual participation in her productions.

Thus did Goethe represent to himself Man as the organ of the world, through which its occult powers should be revealed. The following was one of his aphorisms:

For this has man been placed so high that what must otherwise have been unmanifest might manifest through him. Truly may we say: What are even the workings of Nature's elements in comparison with man, who, that he may in some degree assimilate, must first control and modify them?

PLEASE NOTE: Although Rudolf Steiner in giving this address, used the words theosophy, Theosophical Society and occult, we have replaced these with the words Anthroposophy, Anthroposophical Society and, except in two or three cases, Spiritual Science, since, when Rudolf Steiner gave this address, he already had written KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS and THEOSOPHY and used the words theosophy, etc., in the sense that they are used in these books and in his subsequent writings and lectures. This was done as an attempt at corrective updating and no polemic is intended.

• 1. Original Translator Unknown. In the case of the quotations in this paper, the translations of Goethe's works by Anna Swanwick and John Anster and R. Farrie have been used freely. G. Calvert's translation of Schiller's work has also been quoted.

The yearly celebration of the physical birth of the Being Who entered earth-evolution in order to give that evolution its meaning, has for many people become a matter of habit. But if, conformably with the task of our spiritual-scientific movement, we are not content with celebrating a festival of mere custom—as is so general nowadays—it will be opportune at this grave time to turn our minds to many things that are connected with the physical birth of Christ Jesus.

We have often pictured how in Christ Jesus, so far as human comprehension goes, two Beings merge as it were into one: the Christ Being and the human Jesus Being. In the evolution of Christianity there has been much conflict, much conflict of dogma, about the meaning of the union of Christ with Jesus, in the Being whose physical birth is celebrated at the Christmas Festival. We ourselves, of course, recognise in the Christ a cosmic, super-earthly Being, a Being Who descended from spiritual worlds in order, through His birth in a physical man, to impart meaning to earth-evolution. And in Jesus we recognise the one who, as man, was predestined after thirty years of preparation, to unite the Christ Being with himself, to receive the Christ Being into himself.

Not only has there been much strife, much conflict of dogma, about the nature of the union of Christ with Jesus, but the relationship of Christ to Jesus contains a hint of significant secrets of the earthly evolution of mankind. If, in the endeavour to understand something of the union of Christ with Jesus, we follow events up to the present day and reflect upon what has still to take place in the evolution of humanity before this relationship can be rightly understood, then we touch upon one of the deepest secrets of human knowledge and human life.

At the time when Christ was about to enter the evolution of humanity, it was possible, through faculties that were a heritage from the days of the old clairvoyant wisdom, to form certain conceptions of the sublimity of the Christ Being. And at that time there existed a wisdom of which people often speak nowadays in a way that is almost blasphemous, but of which they are scarcely able to form any true idea. There existed something which up to this day has been completely exterminated from human evolution, rooted out by certain currents running counter to the deeper Christian revelation: this was the Gnosis, a wisdom into which had flowed much of the ancient knowledge revealed to men in atavistic clairvoyance. Every trace of the Gnosis, whether in script or oral tradition, was exterminated root and branch by the dogmatic Christianity of the West—after this Gnosis had striven to find an answer to the question: Who is the Christ?

There can be no question to-day of reverting to the Gnosis—for the Gnosis belongs to an age that is past and over. True, its extermination was caused by malice, ignorance, enmity towards knowledge and wisdom ... but for all that it happened out of an underlying necessity. When anthroposophical spiritual science is accused of wanting to revive the ancient Gnosis, that is only one of the many expressions of ill-will directed towards it to-day. The accusation is, of course, made by people whose ignorance of the Gnosis is on a par with their ignorance of Anthroposophy. There is no question of reviving the Gnosis, but of recognising it as something great and mighty, something that endeavoured, in the time now lying nineteen hundred years behind us, to give an answer to the question: Who is the Christ?

Before the inner eye of the Gnostic lay a glorious vista of spiritual worlds, with the Hierarchies ranged in their order, one above the other. How the Christ had descended through the worlds of the spiritual Hierarchies to enter into the sheaths of a mortal man—all this stood before the soul of the Gnostic. And he tried to envisage how the Christ had come from heights of spirit, how He had been conceived on earth. The best way to get some idea of the knowledge then existing is to reflect that everything produced by the world after the extermination of the Gnosis was paltry in comparison with the grandeur of the Gnostic idea of the Christ. The Mystery-wisdom behind the Gospels is infinitely great—greater by far than anything which later theology has been able to discover from them. To realise how paltry and insignificant compared with the Gnosis is the current conception of the Christ Being, we have but to steep ourselves in the ancient Gnostic idea of Him. Picturing this, one is filled with humility by the grandeur of the conception of the Christ Being entering into a human body from cosmic heights, from far distant cosmic worlds.

This majestic, sublime concept of Christ has fallen into the background, but all the dogmatic definitions handed down to us as Arian or Athanasian principles of faith are meagre in comparison with the Gnostic conception, in which vision of the Christ Being was combined with wisdom relating to the universe.¹ Only the merest fragments of this great Gnostic conception of Christ have survived.

This, then, is one aspect of the relationship of Christ to Jesus: that Christ came into the world at a time when the wisdom capable of understanding Him, yearning to understand Him, had already been rooted out. People who speak of the ancient Gnosis as oriental phantasy that had to be exterminated for the good of Western humanity, have always believed themselves to be good Christians, but the real cause was that the mind of the age lacked the strength to unite earthly with heavenly concepts. One must have a feeling for the tragic if human evolution is to be understood.

How long after the Mystery of Golgotha was the Temple at Jerusalem, the sanctuary of peace, destroyed? The Temple of Solomon was within the precincts of the city of Jerusalem. What the Gnosis contained in the form of wisdom, Solomon's Temple contained in the form of symbolism. Cosmic secrets were presented in symbols and pictures. And it was intended that those who entered the Temple, where the pictures all around them were reflected in their souls, should receive something through which alone they became truly man. The purpose of the Temple of Solomon was to inculcate the meaning of worlds into the souls of those who were permitted to enter it. What the Temple revealed was something that the earth as such did not reveal, namely, all the cosmic secrets that ray into the earth from the cosmic expanse.

If one of the old Initiates possessing real knowledge of the Temple of Solomon had been asked: Why was the Temple of Solomon built?—the answer would have been somewhat as follows: ‘In order that here on the earth there shall be a beacon light for those Powers who accompany the souls seeking their way into earthly bodies.’ Let us try to grasp what this means, realising that these old Initiates of the Temple of Solomon knew that when men were being accompanied into earthly bodies in conformity with all the signs of the stars, then particular souls must be guided to bodies in which the great symbols of Solomon's Temple could be mirrored.

This, in the nature of things, might give rise to arrogance. If the knowledge was not received with humility, with the humility of the Essenes, it led men into Pharisaism! But at all events, this was the situation: The eye of earth looked up to the heavens, beholding the stars; the spiritual eyes of those who were guiding souls from cosmic worlds to the earth gazed downwards and beheld the Temple of Solomon with its symbols. The Temple was like a star whose light enabled them to guide the souls into bodies which would be capable of understanding its meaning. It was the central star of the earth, shining out with special brightness into the spiritual heights.

When Christ Jesus had come to the earth, when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place, the great secret that was intended to be mirrored in every single human soul was this: "My kingdom is not of this world!" It was then that the external, physical Temple of Solomon lost its significance and its destiny was tragically fulfilled. Moreover at that time there was no living person who would have been capable of apprehending the full compass of the Christ Being from the reflections of the symbols in Solomon's Temple. But the Christ Himself had now entered earth-evolution, had become part of it. That is the all-important fact. The Gnostics were the last survivors of the bearers of that ancient, atavistic earth-wisdom which was comprehensive and powerful enough to make some understanding of the Christ possible.

That, then, is one aspect of the relation of Christ to Jesus. In those days the Christ Being could have been understood through the Gnosis. But according to the world-plan it was not to be—although the Gnosis teemed with wisdom concerning the Christ. And it may truly be said that the path now taken by Christianity through the countries of the South, through Greece, Italy, Spain and so on, led more and more to the obliteration of insight into the essential nature of Christ. And Rome, sinking into decline, was destined to bring about the final extinction of understanding.

In regard to this relation of the Christ to Jesus it is strange that on the one hand we find lighting up in the Gnosis a sublime conception of the Christ which died away as Christianity passed through the Roman system, while on the other hand, when Christianity encountered the peoples from the North, the concept of Jesus came to the fore. In the South, the concept of Christ flickered out. The form in which the concept of Jesus emerged was by no means very sublime, but it gripped men's hearts and feelings in such a way that something wonderfully absorbing stirred in their souls at the thought of how the Child who receives the Christ is born in the Holy Night. Just as in the South the concept of Christ was inadequate, so in the North was man's feeling for Jesus. But for all that it was a feeling that stirred the very depths of the human heart. Yet in itself it is not quite comprehensible. For if we contrast the immeasurable significance of Christ Jesus for the evolution of humanity with all the sentimental trivialities about the ‘dear little Jesus’ contained in many poems and hymns commonly used to move the human heart—for in their egoism men believe that these trivialities kindle emotions capable of storming the heavens—then we have a direct impression that something is striving to make its home but is not fully able to do so, that one element is mingling with another in such a way that the deeper meaning, the far deeper significance, remains in the subconsciousness.

What actually is it that remains in the subconsciousness while the Jesus-thought, the Jesus-feeling, the Jesus-experience, is coming to the surface? The process takes a strange and remarkable course. The understanding for Christ sank into the subconsciousness and there, in the subconsciousness, the understanding for Jesus began to glow. In the subconsciousness—not in the consciousness, which was dim—the consciousness of Christ that was flickering out and the consciousness of Jesus that was beginning to stir were destined to meet and counter-balance each other. Why was it, then, that the peoples who came down from Scandinavia, from the North of present-day Russia, received Christianity without the Christ-idea which, to begin with, was wholly foreign to them? Why was it that they received Christianity with the Jesus-idea? Why was Christmas the festival which above all others spoke to the human heart, awakened in the human heart feelings of holy bliss? Why was it? What was present in this Europe which in truth received from the South a completely distorted Christianity? What was it that kindled in men's hearts the idea which then, in the Christmas Festival, created such a deep, deep fount of experience?

Men had been prepared—but had largely forgotten by what they had been prepared. They had been prepared by the old Northern Mysteries. But they had forgotten the import and meaning of these ancient Mysteries. And we have to go very far back into the past to discover from the source and content of the Northern Mysteries the deep secret of the penetration of the Jesus-feeling into the soul-life of the European peoples.

The principles underlying the Northern Mysteries were quite different from those underlying the Mysteries of Asia Minor and of the South. The experiences underlying the Northern Mysteries were more intimately and directly connected with the existence of the stars, with nature, with earthly fertility, than with the wisdom represented in symbols within a Temple. The Mystery-truths are not the childish trifles presented by certain mystic sects to-day; the Mystery-truths are great and potent impulses in the evolution of mankind. Present-day Anthroposophy can no more revert to the Gnosis than mankind can revert to what the ancient Mysteries of the North, for example, signified for human evolution. And to believe that such Mystery-truths are now being revealed because of some kind of hankering to go back to what was once alive in them, would be a foolish misunderstanding. It is for the sake of deepening self-recollection, self-knowledge, that mankind to-day must be made aware of the content of such Mysteries. For what linked the Northern Mysteries with the whole evolution of the universe, arose from the earth, just as the Gnostic wisdom, inspired from the cosmos, was connected with happenings in the far distances of the universe. How the secret of man, linked as it is with all the secrets of the cosmos, comes into operation when a human being enters physical existence on the earth—it was this that, with greater depth than anywhere else at a certain period of earth-evolution, lay at the root of these ancient Northern Mysteries.

But we have to go very far back—to about three thousand years before Christ, perhaps even earlier—to understand what was alive in the hearts of those in whom, later on, the feeling for Jesus arose. Somewhere in the region of the peninsula of Jutland, in present-day Denmark, was the centre from which, in those ancient times, important impulses went out from the Mysteries. And—let the modern intellect judge of this as it will—these impulses were connected with the fact that in the third millennium before Christ, in certain Northern tribes, he alone was regarded as a worthy citizen of the earth who was born in certain weeks of the winter season. The reason for this was that from those places of the Mysteries on the peninsula of Jutland, among the tribes which at that time called themselves the Ingaevones, or were so called by the Romans—by Tacitus²—the Temple Priest gave the sign for sexual union to take place at a definite time during the first quarter of the year. Any sexual union outside the period ordained by this Mystery-centre was taboo; and in this tribe of the Ingaevones a man who was not born in the period of the darkest nights, at the time of greatest cold, towards our New Year, was regarded as an inferior being. For the impulse went out from that Mystery-centre at the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Only then, among those who might believe themselves united with the spiritual world as became the dignity of man, was sexual union permissible. The characteristic virility—even in its aftermath—marvelled at by Tacitus, writing a century after the Mystery of Golgotha, was due to the fact that the forces which enter into such sexual union were preserved through the whole of the rest of the year.

And so those who belonged to the tribe of the Ingaevones (and in a lesser degree this was also true of the other Germanic tribes) experienced the process of conception with particular intensity at the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. They experienced it, not in wide-awake consciousness, but as it were heralded in dream. Yet they were aware of its significance in regard to the connection between the secret of man and the secrets of the heavens. A spiritual being appeared to the woman who was to conceive and in a kind of vision announced to her the human being who, through her, was to come to the earth. There was no clear consciousness, but only semi-consciousness, in the sphere experienced by souls when the entry of a human being into the physical world is taking place; subconsciously men knew that they were under the direction of the Gods, who then received the name of the Wanen, connected with wähnen, that is to say with what takes its course, not in clear, intellectual, waking consciousness, but in cognitive dream-consciousness.

What was once in existence and fitting for its own epoch, is often preserved in later times in symbols. Thus the fact that in those ancient times the holy mystery of the generation of a human being was wrapped in subconsciousness, and led to all births being concentrated in a particular period of the winter season, so that it was regarded as sinful for a man to be born at another time—this was preserved in fragments which passed over to a later consciousness as the Hertha or Erda or Nertus Saga. No erudition, as scholars themselves openly admit, has hitherto been able to interpret these fragments, for actually all that is known externally of the Nertus Saga, with the exception of a few brief notes, comes from Tacitus, who writes as follows about the Nertus or Hertha cult:

"The Reudigni, Aviones, Anglii, Varini, Eudoses, Saurini and Nuitones—Germanic peoples living amidst rivers and woods" (that is, roughly the several tribes who belong to the Ingaevones) " specially revere Nertus, that is, Mother Earth, and they believe that she intervenes in human affairs, makes journeys to the peoples." (Germania 40).

In the ancient cult of the Wanen it became known in dream-consciousness to every woman who was to give a citizen to the earth that the Goddess worshipped later on as Nertus would appear to her. The Divinity was, however, represented not exactly as female, but as male-female. It was not until later, through a corruption, that Nertus became an entirely feminine principle. Just as the Archangel Gabriel drew near to Mary, Nertus on her chariot drew near to the woman who was about to give a citizen to the earth. The woman concerned saw this in the spirit. Later, when the Mystery-impulse in this form had long since died out, echoes of the happening were celebrated in symbolic rites which Tacitus was still able to witness and of which he says the following:—

"On an island of the ocean is a sacred grove and in it there is a consecrated chariot covered with a veil. Only the priest may approach it."—This priest was taken to represent the ‘Initiate’ of the Hertha-Mystery—"He knows when the Goddess appears in the sacred chariot. He becomes aware of the presence of the Goddess in her holy place, and in deep reverence accompanies her chariot drawn by cows. Then there are days of joy and feasting in all the places which the Goddess honours with a visit. Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed. Only peace and quiet are at those times known or desired, until the Goddess, tired of her sojourn among mortals, is led back into her shrine by the same priest." (—This was actually the form taken by the vision—

"Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts." In such ancient records the descriptions are accurate and exact, only men do not understand them. "Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed." And so it was in very truth at the time which is now our Easter, when human beings believed in their inmost soul that the time of earthly fruitfulness had come for them too; it was then that the souls who were born at the time that is now our Christmas, were conceived. Easter was the time of conception. The experience was regarded as a holy, cosmic mystery, and it was this that was symbolised later on by the Nertus cult. The whole experience was veiled in the subconscious region of the soul, might not rise up into consciousness. This is hinted at in the description of the cult given by Tacitus: "Only peace and quiet are at those times known or desired—until the Goddess, tired of her sojourn among mortals, is led back into her shrine by the same priest. Then the chariot and the veil and even the Goddess herself are bathed in a hidden lake. Slaves perform the cult, slaves who are at once swallowed up as forfeit by the lake, so that all knowledge of these things sinks into the night of unconsciousness. A secret horror and a sacred darkness hold sway over a being who is able to behold only the sacrifice of death."

Everything that comes into the world calls forth a Luciferic and an Ahrimanic counterpart. The event which—as experienced by the Ingaevones—was part of the regular, ordained evolution of mankind was connected with the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. But owing to the precession of the equinox, what had remained from olden days as a dream-experience was transferred to a later date and therefore became Ahrimanic. When the experience that had arisen in ancient times in the true Hertha cult was advanced about four weeks, it became Ahrimanic. This meant that the union of the woman with the spiritual world was sought in an irregular way—at the wrong time. Here lies the explanation of the institution of the Walpurgis Night—between the 30th April and the 1st May. It is nothing but an Ahrimanic transposition of time. Luciferic transposition of time goes backward; Ahrimanic transposition of time runs in the opposite direction, being connected with the precession of the equinox. Thus the Ahrimanic, Mephistophelean form of the Hertha cult, the perversion into the diabolic, later became the Walpurgis Night; it is connected with the most ancient Mysteries of which only faint echoes remained.

Much of the content of the ancient Northern Mysteries lived on—if the matter is rightly understood—in the Scandinavian Mysteries. There, instead of Nertus, we find Friggo, a god who, according to the symbolism associated with him—but this can become intelligible only through spiritual science—turns into the very betrayer of what lies at the root of this Mystery.

One more thing must be mentioned in regard to these Mystery-practices. You can see that if the human seed was ripening from the time of the vernal full moon to winter time, one such human being would be the first to be born in the ‘Holy Night.’ Among the Ingaevones the first to be born in the Holy Night—the Holy Night of every third year in the most ancient times—was chosen as their leader when he reached the age of thirty, and he remained leader for three years, for three years only. What happened to him then I may perhaps be able to tell you on another occasion.

Careful investigation reveals that not only are Frigg, Frei, Freiga, merely additional designations for Nertus, as is the Scandinavian ‘Nört,’ but the name ‘Ing’ itself, whence Ingaevones, is another name for Nertus. Those who were connected with the Mystery called themselves "Men belonging to the God or the Goddess Ing"—Ingaevones. Only fragments of what really lived in this Mystery survived in the external world. One such fragment consists of the words of Tacitus already quoted. Another fragment is the well-known Anglo-Saxon rune of a few lines only. These famous lines are known to every philologist of the Germanic languages, but no one understands their meaning. They are approximately as follows:

"Ing was first seen among the East Danes. Later he went towards the East. He walked over the waves, followed by his chariot."

In this Anglo-Saxon rune there is an echo of what lay behind the old Mystery-customs of the Easter conception with a view to the Christmas birth. What happened then in the spiritual world was known best on the Danish peninsula. Hence the rune correctly says: "Ing was first seen among the East Danes."

Then came the time when this ancient knowledge fell more and more into corruption, when it was to be found only in echoes, in symbolism. This was the time in the evolution of humanity when what originated in the warm countries spread abroad. And what comes from the warm countries is something that is not connected—as is the case in the cold countries—with the intimate relation between the seasons and man's own inner experiences. From the warm countries came the impulse which resulted in the distribution of conceptions and births over the whole year; this of course had already happened in the South even in the days of the old, atavistic clairvoyance, although it was still to some extent pervaded by the old principles, the principles which prevailed in the times when in the cold regions the Women held sway and in the South the Temple Mysteries had long since superseded the old Nature-Mysteries. The Southern practice spread towards the North, although an intermixture of the old still remained at the time when the Wanen gods were superseded by the Asen gods. Just as the Wanen are connected with wähnen, so are the Asen connected with the German sein (being)—that is to say, being or existence in the material world which the mind tries to grasp externally. And when the men of the North had entered into an age when individual intelligence began to assert itself, when the Asen had supplanted the Wanen, the old Mystery-customs fell into decay. They passed over into isolated, scattered Mystery-communities of the East. And one Being only—he in whom the whole meaning of the earth was to be made new, he in whom the Christ was to dwell—he alone was destined to unite within himself what had once been the essence and content of the Northern Mysteries.

Hence the origin of the account in St. Luke's Gospel of the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary, is to be sought in the visions of spiritual realities once reflected in the Nertus-symbol of the ancient Northern Mysteries. The symbol had moved eastward. Spiritual science discloses this to-day and this alone explains the meaning of the Anglo-Saxon rune. For Nertus and Ing are the same. Of Ing it is said: "Ing was first seen among the East Danes. Later he went towards the East. He walked over the waves, followed by his chariot,"—over the waves of the clouds, that is, just as Nertus moved over the waves of the clouds.

What had once been general in the colder regions, here became singular, individual. It occurred as a single, unique event, and we find it again in the descriptions given in the Gospel of St. Luke.

But whatever has once existed in the world and has taken root, whatever is anchored in the heart's understanding, remains a possession of the soul. And when knowledge of Christianity was received in the North from the Roman South, men felt—not in clear consciousness but in the subconsciousness—it had some connection with an ancient Mystery-custom. Hence in the North, men were able to develop a particularly intense feeling for Jesus. The reality that had lived in the old Nertus Mystery had already sunk into the subconsciousness, yet in the subconsciousness it was present, it was sensed and dimly experienced.

When in those long past times in the far North, when the earth was still covered with forests that were the home of the bison and the elk, families came together in their snowcovered huts and under their lantern-lights gathered around the new-born child, they spoke of how with this new life there had been brought to them the new light announced by the heavens in the previous spring. Such was the ancient Christmas. To these people, who were one day to receive the tidings of Christendom, it was said: In the hour that is especially holy, one destined for greatness is born. It is the child who is the first to be born after midnight in the night designated as holy. And although men no longer possessed the ancient knowledge, when the tidings came that such a one had been born in far-off Asia, one in whom lived the Christ Who had come down from the world of the stars to the earth, something of the old feeling came alive in them.

It is incumbent upon the present age to understand such things more and more deeply and thereby grasp in concrete reality the meaning of the evolution of earthly humanity. Truths of mighty, awe-inspiring significance are contained in the Holy Scriptures, not just the trivialities of which we so often hear in religious teachings to-day, but sacred truths which thrill through the very fibres of our being, stirring our hearts to the depths. These are truths which flow through the whole evolution of humanity and resound in the Gospels. And as spiritual science reveals their deep, deep source, the Gospels will one day become a precious treasure, prized at their true worth. Men will know, then, why it is recounted in the Gospel of St. Luke:

"And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria).

And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David).

To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for him in the inn."

It was for Him, the first-born among men in whose souls true ego-hood was to awaken, that the holy Mystery-power of ancient days had passed over from the Danish peninsula to the distant East.

"And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid."

Nerta too, moving across the land, had announced to the old Wanen-consciousness, that is to say, in the subconsciousness of atavistic clairvoyance, the arrival of human beings on the earth.

"And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying ..."

And now the heavenly Powers proclaimed what the Nerta-Priest in the old Northern Mystery-cult had proclaimed to the woman about to conceive.

"The revelation of the Divine from the Heights takes place at the time when there is peace among men who are of good-will."

As Tacitus narrates: "Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed."

The great goal for which man must strive is the attainment of the power to gaze into the course of the evolution of humanity. For the Mystery of Golgotha, too, through which earth-evolution received its deeper meaning, will become fully comprehensible when its place in the whole evolution of humanity is understood. In future times, when, with the disappearance of materialism, man will know, not in abstract theory but as a concretely real experience, that he is of divine origin, the ancient, holy Mystery-truths will again be understood; then the intervening time will be over, a time in which the Christ, it is true, lives on earth, but can be understood only by the awakened consciousness. For the Gnostic conception of Christ faded away; understanding for Jesus developed in connection with the old Nertus cult, but in unconsciousness. In the future, however, humanity will have to bring both the unconscious streams to consciousness, and unite them. And then an ever greater understanding of the Christ will take foothold on earth, an understanding that will unite the Mystery-knowledge with a great and renewed Gnosis.

Those who take the anthroposophical view of the world seriously, and the movement associated with it, will see in what it has to say to mankind no child's play but great and earnest, soul-shaking truths. And our souls must submit to this because it is right that we should be shaken by greatness.

Not only is the earth a mighty living being; the earth is an exalted spirit-being. And just as the greatest human genius could not stand at the height he reaches in later life if he had not first developed through childhood and adolescence, so the Mystery of Golgotha could not have taken place, the Divine would not have been able to unite with earth-evolution, if at the beginning of earthly days the Divine—in a different manner but in a manner still divine—had not descended to the earth. The form taken by the revelation of the Divine from the heavenly heights was not the same in the ancient Nertus cult as it was at a later time, but for all that it was a true revelation.

The knowledge contained in this ancient wisdom was, it is true, atavistic in character, but for all that it was infinitely more exalted than the materialistic view of the world which, in the sphere of knowledge, so brutally reduces humanity to the level of the animal.

In Christianity we have to do with a Fact, not with a theory. The theory is a necessary consequence and of importance for the consciousness that has had to develop in the further course of human evolution. But the essence of Christianity as such, the Mystery of Golgotha, is an accomplished Fact. The impulse entered, to begin with, into subconscious currents, as was still possible in Asia Minor at the time when the union of Christ with the earth took place.

Shepherds, men bearing a similarity with those among whom the Nertus cult flourished, are also described in the Gospel of St. Luke. I can give only very brief indications of these things. If we were able to speak of them at greater length you would find that there are deep foundations for what I have told you to-day. The human being has descended from spiritual heights ... hence the revelation of the Divine from the heavenly heights ... The revelation had to be expressed in this form to those who out of the ancient wisdom knew the destiny of man to be united with the secrets of the stars of heaven. But what must live on earth as the result of Christ's union with a man of earth—that can be understood only very gradually. The message is twofold: ‘Revelation of the Divine from the heights’—‘Peace in the souls on earth who are of good-will.’ Without this second part, Christmas, the Festival of the birth of Christ, has no meaning!

Not only was Christ born for men; men have also crucified Him. Even behind this lies necessity. But it is none the less true that men have crucified the Christ! And it may dawn upon us that the crucifixion on the wooden Cross on Golgotha was not the only crucifixion. A time must come when the second part of the Christmas proclamation becomes reality: ‘Peace to the men on earth who are of good-will.’ For the negative side too is discernible. Men are very far indeed from a true understanding of Christ and of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Does it not cut to the very heart that we ourselves should be living at a time when men's longing for peace is shouted down?³ It seems almost a mockery to celebrate Christmas in days when voices are raised in outcry against the desire for peace. To-day, when the worst has not actually befallen, we can but fervently hope that a change will take place in the souls of men, and a Christian feeling, a will for peace supersede these demonstrations against the desire for it. Otherwise it may not be those who are struggling in Europe to-day, but those coming over from Asia, who will one day wreak vengeance on this rejection of the desire for peace; it may be they who will have to preach Christianity and the Mystery of Golgotha to humanity on the ruins of European spiritual life. And then the indelible record will remain: that at Christmas time, nineteen hundred and sixteen years after the tidings of peace on earth to men of good-will, humanity came to shout down the desire for peace.

May it not succeed! May the good Spirits who are at work in the Christmas impulses protect luckless European humanity from such a fate!

• 1. Arius: "The Son was once created out of nothing by the Divine Will, was the first creature and the creator of the Universe, hence to be called God, though subject to the Father," This was declared heretical by the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325, and replaced by the Athanasian principle of faith. "The Son of God is from eternity, not created, but begotten out of the Being of the Father, and is of like nature to the Father.
  
  Streams of blood were shed in consequence of these doctrines, impenetrable as they are by the human mind (Weber: Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte, 1875).
• 2. Mannus had three sons, after whom the people nearest the North Sea are called Ingaevones, those of the centre, Hermiones, the remainder Istae. (Germania 2).
• 3. A reference to the agitation against the German proposal in December, 1916 for peace negotiations.

In the two preceding talks I tried to explain the basic symbols in Goethe's profound fairy tale. We have seen, how Goethe, how the mystics of all times have given the truths which they counted among the deepest ones in characteristic coloured symbols.

Today you allow to me to add two other fairy tales: The New Melusine and The New Paris. It may seem that something unnatural, something worked out is in these fairy tales, but you will see, if you delve in these pictures that also here only an esoteric, mystic interpretation enables us to give an explanation.

Goethe inserted the fairy tale The New Melusine at a typical passage of Meister Wilhelm's Journeyman Years (1807, 1821, 1829). Who penetrates into Goethe's mind will never abandon himself to the superficial view that Goethe deals only with putting pictures next to each other like in a kaleidoscope, that it concerns a mere play with pictures. But he realises that Goethe expressed his most profound inside.

A man relates it who wants to develop his soul to higher capacities and, hence, “refrains from speaking as far as speech expresses something ordinary or accidental, however, another talent of speech has developed to him that has a intentionally prudent and pleasant effect.” Like this man, also Wilhelm Meister deals with secret societies, is directed by mysterious guides.

The man repeats and arranges the rich experiences of his life calmly. Imagination combines with it and gives life and movement to the events. He is a philosopher who speaks in this fairy tale to us, and at the moment when in the end of the story he gets the longing for developing his soul to a higher condition, he also understands the ideals of the philosophers.

Let now the fairy tale of The New Melusine pass our souls in its main trains which deeply lead us into Goethe's nature.

A young man gets to know a strange woman in an inn who deeply impresses him. He sees her carrying a small box and keeping it carefully. He asks whether he cannot do anything for her, to oblige her. She asks him to continue the journey with the small box instead of her because she has to stay here some days. However, he should always take a special room for the small box and close it with a special key, so that the door cannot be opened with any other key. He departs. On the way his money runs out; the lady appears and helps him. Again he spends the money; he believes that in the small box something could be that may be sold for money. He discovers a crack in the small box, looks into it, something bright gleams in it. He sees a chamber with many dwarfs, a girl among them. It exists in double figure (as lady and as dwarfish girl), outside in a big, inside in a small size. He is deeply horrified; the lady appears again, and he receives explanation about the small box. The lady says that her true figure is that of the dwarfish girl.

This race of dwarfs has been there long before the human beings, when the earth was still in the igneous state. It had not been able to hold their ground because a race of dragons waged war on them. To save the dwarfs a race of giants is created, however, these soon position themselves on the side of the dragons. Hence, for the protection of the dwarfs who withdrew into the mountains still a new race of the knights or the race of heroes as it is called in the original version had to originate. With it dragons and giants, on the one hand, dwarfs and heroes, on the other hand, face each other. However, the dwarfs become smaller and smaller, so that it became necessary that every now and then somebody of them comes to the upper world to get new force from the realm of the human beings.

The young man wants to combine with the lady, and after some other adventures she says to him that he himself must become a dwarf. She slips a ring on his finger, the young man becomes small like a dwarf and enters into the world which he has seen in the small box. Now he is united with the lady. But longing for the land of the human beings soon awakes in him, he gets a file, saws through the ring, shoots up suddenly and is a human being again.

Goethe makes an interesting remark at the end of the fairy tale when in the young man the longing awakes for being a human being again. This remark is important to understand the fairy tale. He lets the young man say: “now I understood for the first time what the philosophers might understand by their ideals by which the human beings are supposed to be tormented so strongly. I had an ideal of myself, and appeared to myself sometimes in the dream as a giant!”

We want to see now what Goethe wanted to say with this fairy tale. The race of dwarfs, created before dragons, giants and human being, leads us to the track. The people of the dwarfs “is still active and busy since time immemorial. But, in olden times, their most famous works were swords which pursued the enemy if one threw them to him, invisibly and mysteriously binding chains, and impenetrable shields. Now, however, they occupy themselves chiefly with things of comfort and finery.” There it is pointed to that which the mystics call the “sparklet” in the human soul, to the self of the human being, which God sank in the human body. This self of the human being had magic powers, secret magic forces once; now it serves to make the earth in all cultural works subject to the human being; in all that the human mind, the self works.

What is the small box? A world, a small world, indeed, but an entire world. The human being is a microcosm, a small world in a big one. The small box is nothing but a picture of the human soul. The human reason, the present consciousness, as we have got to know it in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake in the wife of the old man, designs pictures of the whole big world, pictures on the small scale. What is summarised in the human soul as the sum of the thoughts? It is the spiritual spark. If we saw into the human soul, we would discover the spiritual spark with the seeds of the future stages. This spark was enkindled in distant past in the human being who was only gifted with a vague dream consciousness. This spiritual spark which smoulders in the human soul preceded all physical states. Compared with the future size, with the perfection of the human being is that which lives today in him only seed, only something dwarfish.

There were other human races once; before our age the Atlanteans and the Lemurians lived et etcetera In the middle of the third, the Lemurian race the endowment with the spiritual spark, with the consciousness occurred. The self is in the human being the seed of the eternal which is able to rise by development of the human being to self-conscious life.

This consciousness came from another world, preceded the origin of the human being and was there earlier than the other components of the human being (kama manas). This self-consciousness is paired with passion even today. The true philosopher strives for freeing the divine in the human being from the sensuous, so that it realises its divine origin; manas is released from kama. Then this released manas develops buddhi from itself, the consciousness of being in the divine world to strive then to atma.

We know that this spiritual entity of the human being experienced the most different forms. One of these stages is called that of the dragons. Also in the Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky we hear of igneous dragons as symbols of the time in which the human being descended from his higher spirituality .

The way through the raw physical figure is shown with the giants. The human being must be refined, he rises up to finer and finer figures, he becomes the hero, the knight. These spiritual knights have always tried to form an alliance with the ideal of true humanity; they should live with the dwarfs in good harmony. “And it is found that afterwards giants and dragons, as well as the knights and dwarfs have always held together.”

Now the woman tells “that everything that has been big once must become small and decrease; thus we are also in the case that we always decrease since the creation of the world and become smaller, above all the royal family.” Hence, a princess of the royal house must be sent “every now and then to the country to get married with an honourable knight, so that the race of dwarfs would be refreshed again and saved from total expiration.” For the later-born brother has been so small, “that the attendants have lost him even from the nappies and one does not know where he has got to.”

Now a ring is brought the ring is always a symbol of the personality and by this ring the dwarf becomes a human being and combines with the spiritual knight.

In what way does the race of dwarfs develop? It goes through the physical humanity, through the different states of consciousness. In what way does the present consciousness develop? By the law of the karmic human development. We consider it at an example at first. The child learns to read and write; the efforts, the exercises which it does, all that passes; what has remained is the ability to read and to write. The human being has taken up the fruit of his efforts. What was outside at first, in the physical nature, has become a part of his.

“You are tomorrow what you think and act today” or as the Bible (Galatians 6:7) expresses it: “everyone reaps what he sows.”

We are the products of past times. Our soul would be empty if it did not collect experience from the external world. The soul would die away if it did not take up the lessons from the outside world.

If we want to make the things which we experience really our own, we must process them. This is the law of evolution and involution by which we increase our being. We have to collect force from the surroundings. We collect experiences in the outside world to make them our spiritual property. Then the mind processes the experience, which he has collected to return over and over again to the outside world, in the hours of leisure. Our concepts would atrophy if we withdrew from the outside world. It is a spiritual respiratory process, a “giving and taking.” We develop our inside world outwardly, we soak up the outside world. Goethe showed this evolution and involution process in this fairy tale in important way. The words of the young man concerning the ideals point to it. Ideals are what is not yet, what should be realised in future. What the human beings lifts out above all is the possibility that he puts ideals, is the possibility to approach a higher future. Because the human being gives reality the possibility to grow into a higher future, he cares for idealism.

Goethe also nicely expressed this truth in the fairy tale The New Paris. In this fairy tale Goethe speaks of himself. You find it in the outset of Poetry and Truth. Shortly before, in Poetry and Truth, the young child Goethe tries “to approach the great God of nature, the creator and preserver of heaven and earth” setting up an altar. “Natural products should represent the world allegorically, about these a flame should burn and signify the human soul longing for its creator.” The boy lights the flame of the little aromatic candles in the light of the rising sun. But he damages some things, and concludes that “it is generally dangerous to want to approach God on such ways.” It was a certain fact to Goethe that one can approach the divinity only if the human being awakes the abilities slumbering in him as we could show that in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Also in The New Paris he points to this way.

In the outset of the fairy tale, Goethe describes how the god Mercury appears to him as boy at Whitsun Sunday in the dream and gives him three nice apples, a red, a yellow and a green one. They change in his hand into precious stones and he sees three female figures in them for which he should select three worthy young men at Mercury's behest.

While he admires them, they disappear from him; the fourth female being appears, dances on his hand and gives him a slap on the forehead, because he wants to catch it, so that he loses consciousness.

When he awakes, he dresses himself festively to make visits and comes before the gate where he finds a strange gate in the wall. It has no key.

A man with a long beard opens from within; he resembles an Oriental, however, he crosses himself and shows in such a way that he is a Christian. He shows the marvellous garden to the boy. From the bushes the birds shout quite clearly: “Paris, Paris”, then again “Narcissus, Narcissus.”

The new Paris now sees an even more marvellous garden behind a kind of living wall. He asks whether he is allowed to enter. The old man permits it, after he has taken off hat and sword. Led by the hand of the old man, he sees even more marvellous things. He sees behind a fence of swords and partisans an even nicer garden, surrounded by a canal. Now he must put on another robe; he receives a kind of oriental costume. Three strange ropes are shown to him as warning. Now the swords and partisans put themselves over the water and form a golden bridge, and he enters. Over there the girl meets him that he has had dancing on his hand and which has escaped from him. It leads him to the three young ladies from the apples who are dressed here in suitable garments and play certain instruments.

The girl who he has recognised as belonging to him refreshes him with fruits. He delights in marvellous music. Then he and the girl begin a game with little warriors. Against the warning he and the girl gets in zeal; he destroys her fighters; they hurl themselves into the water, this foams, the bridge bursts on which the play took place, and the boy finds himself sodden and thrown out on the other side.

The old man comes, threatens with the three ropes which should punish that who betrays his trust. The boy escapes, while he says that he is chosen to find three worthy young men for the three young ladies. Now he is politely led out of the door. The old man shows him different marks to find the gate again. The significance of their positions to each other points to the medieval astrology/astronomy.

When the boy returns, the gate is no longer there, the three objects, plate, well and trees are differently positioned to each other. However, he believes to note that after some time they have changed their positions a little bit, and he hopes that once all marks will coincide. He closes typically: “Whether I can tell to you what takes place further on, or whether it is expressly forbidden to me, I cannot say.”

The fairy tale, which is written in 1811, shows in every line that we have to search something deeper in it. Not without reason Goethe tied it on the legend of Paris, changed it in such a way not without reason. The legend of Paris and Helena, of the Trojan War, is known. Paris has to pass the apple to the most beautiful one of three goddesses; in return he wins Helena. Goethe reversed the matter, three, later four young women are there for whom the new Paris should choose the young men. The boy is led into a kind of mystery that is triply enclosed, he must always meet new conditions. A kind of war game develops, an image not a real war. Let us now pursue the fairy tale step by step.

While Goethe says that the contents of the fairy tale come from the god Mercury, he points to the fact that he perceives that which he experiences in this fairy tale as a message of the divinity. Mercury says to the young man that he were sent by the gods to him with an important order.

Goethe always wants to represent the states of human consciousness by women. In this fairy tale are also four young women who meet the young man immediately in the beginning, as sent from the god Mercury. Significantly, Mercury gives him apples at first. The apples change into wonderful precious stones, namely a red, a yellow, and a green one. Then the three precious stones become three beautiful young women whose clothes have the colours of the precious stones. However, they waft away from the young man when he wants to retain them. But instead of theirs a fourth young woman appears who then becomes his guide.

Also in The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily Goethe points to four states of consciousness of the human soul using four female figures. In The New Paris these four women are characterised even more intimately by the mystic colours which they wear. If we want to understand the nature of these women closer as well as the colours which they wear, we have to look at states of consciousness which the human being has presently, and those which he can acquire to himself developing his soul forces.

Today, humanity lives on the earth in the mineral cycle; the human being is related to the mineral by means of his physical body. All substances that are found in the physical human body in chemical compounds may they be salts, sorts of lime, metals et etcetera-, are also found outside in nature. The human soul lives within this physical body. From incarnation to incarnation the human soul lives a life between birth and death again and again in a body that it receives at birth or already at conception.

In every incarnation, the human soul has to go through a plenty of experiences. It thereby becomes richer and richer. One can also say that it thereby becomes purer and purer, because the soul living originally in raw desires and impulses appears then within a cultural world in a new body again, lives differently in this cultural world than, for example, within a body that belongs to a savage tribe. The human soul lives now in kama-manas, that is in a spirituality that is still used, indeed, to satisfy the impulses and passions of the human being. But more and more the longing also arises in the human soul to ascend to a higher spirituality. This soul state is expressed in esotericism with the red colour which shines through from within no dead red colour , a bright one, illuminated from within. The red colour signifies the consciousness for the astral world in the initiatory knowledge. If the human being takes his soul contents, his inner soul-life less and less from the physical surroundings, if he kindles an internal, spiritual life in his soul, this life of the human soul is signified yellow, again a bright, beaming yellow colour.

If the human being has achieved to live no longer in his narrow stubbornness, if he feels linked in sympathy with the whole world, if he feels like merging in the universe, this state of the human soul is signified in esotericism with a nuance of green, with a bright green colour. This is the colour which shows the human soul in the aura if the single consciousness pours out itself in the whole world.

Thus these women who are also precious stones, are signs of that which the young man should make of his soul. The present consciousness that leads us to all knowledge produces the connection with these soul conditions. It is symbolised by the fourth figure, by the small figure that “steps dancing to and fro“ on the finger points of the young man. This is the usual reason. The human being penetrates to something higher with the help of his present consciousness, it is the guide in the sanctum. Only the fourth state of consciousness that is represented by the girl already exists; the other three exist only as rudiments, are to be developed. There is something that appears like remembrance in the soul; something lives in the soul that points back to former states. At especially ceremonious moments the human being penetrates into these former soul conditions. The young man has got a particular order from Mercury. Goethe points here to his mission. He remembers former initiations.

In the fairy tale it is now told how the young man is led in miraculous way to a place that he has not entered up to now nay, at which he has never looked in the surroundings well-known to him. An old man meets him, leads him in the inside of a nice garden; at first he leads him within the garden in the round of an external circle. Birds call to the young man, the chatty starlings in particular; “ Paris! Paris!” the ones call and “Narcissus! Narcissus!” the others. The young man would also like to penetrate into the inside of the garden, he asks the old man for it; this accepts his request only on condition that he takes off his hat and sword and leaves them behind.

After it the old man leads him closer to the centre of the garden. There he finds a golden lattice. Behind it he sees a gently flowing water which shows a big number of golden and silver fish in its clear depths. He wants to go further to find out the state of the centre of the garden. The old man accepts it, but only on new conditions: the young man must change. He receives an oriental garment which he likes. Besides, he notices three green little ropes, any tied in a special way, so that it seems to be a tool to just not very desired use. On his question for the meaning of the ropes the old man says that it is for those who betray his confidence which one would be ready to give them here. Now the old man leads him to the golden lattice; these are two rows of golden spits, an external one and an internal one; both fall mutually, so that a bridge originates on which the young man comes now into the centre. Music sounds from a temple, and when he enters it, he sees three female figures sitting in a triangle; the miraculous music sounds from their instruments. Also the little guide is there again and takes care of the young man.

These are three fields of existence in which the boy is gradually introduced by the old man. He enters into the first region, the astral world, coming from the world of the everyday life; there he finds the animals who call to him. But he wants to go further into the centre of existence. Something in his soul pushes him that he should develop higher and higher. He brings the disposition of this rise with him since his birth; there he has come from a world, in which he was a psychic-spiritual being, into the darkening of his psycho-spiritual being caused by the physical world. But the urge for the spirit has remained awake in his soul it points the soul to the fact that there is something that it remembers at solemn moments of life. There also the memory of former stages of existence appears and that from these a mission results for the present stage of existence. The boy feels that this mission is based on experiences of his former incarnations. “I once received the initiation,” he has brought this initiation from former stages of existence with him. The memory of a previous initiation appears in him he got in a previous life. There the master took him also with the hand and led him from stage to stage. There he also had to perform the symbolic action: taking off the hat and sword. He had to take off everything that connects him with everyday things of life in the physical world. Somebody who ascends to a chela, to a spiritual student has always to do that; in his inside he has to do it. This is why he/she is called a “homeless human being;” he has put away what the usual human being calls his home. This does not mean tearing out from life; he/she stands firmly on his/her position, but his/her own life is lifted out from the surrounding world.

When he wants to be led by the master further on, he gets to the second stage; he has to completely get changed to put away all clothes of his present existence. He is fitted with a new set of oriental clothes. This is an indication that all impulses to attain new wisdom have come from the East to humankind. (Ex Oriente lux.)

The boy in his oriental clothes is endowed with the ancient wisdom which the old man with the lamp represents in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; he is endowed with a soul capacity remembering ancient initiatory states. He is led to the river that the soul world separates from the real spiritual world. The river of passions, the astral world, does not rage and roar, it is the “gently running waters which let see a big number of golden and silvery fish in its clear depths which gently moved to and fro, partly single ones, partly shoals of them.” This is an image how the human being can find valuable knowledge instead of raging passions if he has quietened down the astral world in himself.

Swords tilt downwards across the river separating the astral world from the internal, the spiritual realm. The human being has to sacrifice what he has, otherwise, for his protection. He has to sacrifice his personal ego; it has to become the bridge to the spiritual realm. He has to experience the “dying and growing.” Two rows of swords, an internal and an external row, tilt downwards and form the bridge which the boy crosses. This is an image of the fact that a lower and a higher ego-consciousness must join with each other to make the transition into the spiritual world possible to the human being.

Now we can also see why this fairy tale bears the name: The New Paris. It is Paris about whom the Greek mythology tells that before his birth the parents were scared by the prophecy that the fire of the boy, who is born, consumes everything. Hence, he is abandoned after his birth; a bearess nurses him for five days. He grows up and after various adventures he is recompensed, he got married to Helena. However, Helena is synonymous with Selene the daughter of the light of wisdom. Selene is the symbol of the moon. Thus the Greek mythology shows the union of the human being with the consciousness which should lead him to higher and higher stages in the marriage of Paris with Helena.

Narcissus is the other word which the chatty starlings called to the boy. About Narcissus it is told that he is the son of the river god Kephissos and a nymph. So Narcissus is not of earthly, but of supernatural origin.

One tells also that he once saw his image in the mirror of a spring. This delighted him so much that he always stared at himself only. He rejected all temptations of a nymph, approaching him, and he completely sank into his own image.

Narcissus is a symbol of the human ego which wants to insist on its separate existence, on its own self. If the human being remains concluded in his ego, hardens in his ahamkara, if he is not able to get out of his own little human being, if he looks always only into himself, has fallen in love with his own ego, then he does not get beyond himself, then he loses the consciousness that his ego has its real home in a spiritual world, then he cannot ascend to his spiritual home, he remains “a dull guest on the dark earth.” Then he cannot develop the higher consciousness in himself which leads him upwards, he must pine away. Only somebody who can combine with the higher female principle in his soul will thereby ascend. Paris gets married to the daughter of the light, to Selene-Helena. However, Narcissus fell in love with his own nature and rejects the union with the spiritual being, which approaches him as a nymph.

While the birds call the boy: “Paris – Narcissus,” he finds himself faced with the choice: what do you want to bear in yourself, the Paris nature or the Narcissus nature? This question is put to everybody who wants to become a chela, a spiritual student. Everybody must choose the way himself which his soul has to go.

The boy chooses the way of Paris, according to the urge working from a former incarnation in his soul; he wants to become the “new Paris.” Hence, he must also get to know the so-called threats of initiation if he chooses the way of initiation. They are shown symbolically with three ropes. In the initiatory schools, the ropes, which lie around the neck of the neophyte, show different symbols. Among other things, they represent the threefold nature of the human being in the world. What is due to this threefold nature of the human being laces itself around his neck if he breaks the confidence which is put in him with the initiation.
Since the young man wants to become the “new Paris,” he is allowed to be led by the old man who leads him over the bridge. He comes into the second circle which is flowed around by the river, the water of the astral world. There he finds a wonderful garden which appears to him like an image of heaven on earth. In the midst of this wonderful garden, he sees the innermost centre, a temple surrounded by porticoes from which a heavenly music issues forth. He has arrived at the region of the spiritual world which manifests itself sounding: in the region of the creative world word, which sounds through the world as the sphere-harmony. Here he finds the three women again who were sent to him by the god Mercury at first.

In the image which now the boy experiences is expressed what the human being can experience if he has attained the stage of initiation. The human being is able there to receive messages from higher worlds.
The woman in red turns first to the boy; the red stone gives him the strength that he can have insight in the spiritual world. This is the first stage of initiation. The second stage is not mere imagination, but life in the spiritual world. Indeed, there the human being still feels as a special being, he feels as a spirit among spirits, but still separated. He feels, so to speak, like a sound which is not yet part of a symphony. This stage is shown in the yellow robe.

Then the human spirit learns to adapt itself in the sphere-harmony, it learns to regard itself as a member of the spiritual world, as a sound that resonates in the world symphony. Then the human being gains the green stone; this represents the woman in green pictorially. You read in the fairy tale about this woman in green: “she was that who seemed to care mostly for me and to turn her play to me; however, I was not able to figure her out ..., she could behave howsoever, she gained little from me, because my small neighbour ... had completely taken me in for herself ... and although I saw the sylphids of my dream and the colours of the apples quite clearly in those three ladies, I probably understood that I would have no cause to retain them.”

Although the boy gets insight in those lofty realms by initiation, he feels that he has hard to work for the life in them. At first he must still dispute with his small guide, the fourth woman, the human reason.

This happens by a war game. You read in the fairy tale: the little one led the boy to the golden bridge; there the war game should take place. They put up their armies. Against the warning he and the girl get into zeal, the boy overcomes the troops of the little lady, “which running forth and back disappeared toward the wall finally, I do not know how.”

The Paris of the Greek mythology is the cause of the Trojan War, in which symbolically the decline of a human race and the rise of the new race is shown in which the ego of the single human being has to show its effectiveness. “The new Paris” is victorious in a fight which is, actually, a game that is only the image of a fight, which is nothing that has external reality. This war game between the human reason and that in the human being which carries the consciousness that issues from the divine is not anything that has external reality; it is something that lives only in spirit that is in such a way that it takes place like in the mirror image of spiritual events in the human soul. Goethe should announce the higher things which he beheld not in life but in the art. He should speak in mental pictures, in images.

After the fight, the boy meets the old man again, his first guide, and now the consciousness of his own deepest nature is kindled within him with such certainty that he can call the words to the old man which should live from now on in his inside. “I am a darling of the gods!” he calls. But he still wants to live with that what he requests from the old man as reward: he wants his guide, the small creature. He wants to lead his life as a human being striving for knowledge in such a way that the good human reason becomes his guide at first.

Then he is outdoors. The old man “indicated some objects at the wall, beyond the way, at the same time pointing backward to the little gate. I understood him well; he wanted that I memorise the objects to find the little gate again which shut behind me all of a sudden. I noticed thoroughly what faced me. Above a high wall, I saw the branches of ancient walnut-trees. ... The branches reached up to a flagstone; however, I could not read the inscription on it. It rested on a corbel; a niche in which an artificially worked well poured forth water from bowl to bowl... that disappeared in the ground. The well, the inscription, and the walnut-trees stood vertically about each another.”

The young man stands outdoors; looking back he remembers the experiences of his previous incarnation, and at the same time he looks at a moment in future. A second initiation follows after this one which he remembers; once the spiritual initiation followed the initiation of wisdom.

In the image of the tree, the flagstone with the inscription, the well from which the water flows, a symbol of knowledge is dressed which found its expression in mediaeval times in old astrological mysticism. It gives the boy the view to the future: if the same constellation of the stars happens again which allowed you to find the place where the human being is initiated, if the constellation of the stars in the future recurs for you, the gate is opened to you again, and then the initiation on higher level is repeated for you.

He looks at a moment of reality where he will live through what he has experienced as a prelude with the initiation. He looks at a distant future in which he appears on the scene and explains what he has experienced in former incarnations.

A certain constellation existed at the moment when he was initiated. These signs must recur if on a higher level the initiation is possible. Then the gate is visible again, and it depends on the permission, whether one is able to tell more about the future events.

One must take into consideration this fine mood, the intimate forces which play a role there speaking about this fairy tale.

As we see, Goethe also depicts the evolution of the human soul in these both fairy tales. On the one side, he expressed his conviction of soul development in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in coloured pictures which is valid to all human beings, on the other side, he puts the initiation of the higher secrets before our souls in these both fairy tales, The New Melusine and The New Paris, a Fairy Tale of a Boy, as it was commensurate with his own nature. An individual way of his own soul development is represented by Goethe in these two fairy tales. His whole later soul striving adequate to Goethe's attitude is included in the Fairy Tale of a Boy in particular.

In a fragment, The Journey of Megaprazon's Sons it was begun in 1792, but was not continued , Goethe likewise wanted to show a developmental way of the human soul. Also this fragment indicates the greatness of what he had to say, also here he points to a constellation. “Venus” and “Mars” are the last words of it which are kept to us.

A father sends his seven sons on a far journey in foreign countries that are not discovered by others. These are the seven basic members of the human being which theosophy refers to. The father gives his sons the wish with them: “happiness and welfare, good courage and glad use of the forces.” Every son has received own talents from nature; now he should apply them and seek his happiness and perfection by means of them, every brother in his way. In this fragment, The Journey of Megaprazon's Sons, the journey to the spiritual land of ancient wisdom should be shown that the human being can attain if he develops that from the basic members of his nature which is predisposed as rudiments in them; if he attains higher states of consciousness by this development. A found piece of the plan of the spiritual journey shows how Goethe wanted to depict this voyage.

So we have done some looks only at Goethe's most intimate inside and have discovered more and more profundities which shine through his marvellous poems.

So it is comprehensible if his contemporaries looked up at him like to a signpost to unknown worlds. Schiller and some others, they have recognised or, nevertheless, have anticipated what lived in him. However, many have passed without understanding him. The German still has a lot to do to exhaust what is manifested in his great spirits. But the words can apply to them only too well, which Lessing (1729–1781 expressed about Klopstock (1724–1803, German poet):

Who does not praise Klopstock?
But does anybody read him? No.
We want to be praised less
But be read all the more.

Our great spirits want to be recognised, and then they lead to intense spiritual deepening.

They also lead to the world view which theosophy represents. Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of those who anticipated what lived in Goethe's soul welcomed the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita (1823) with the deepest understanding. “It is worthwhile”, he says “to have lived so long to take these treasures up in oneself.”

Thus those human beings who learnt from Goethe were prepared for the theosophical world view.

Oh, a lot can still be learnt from Goethe!

The scene from “Faust” just presented, which comes at the end of the second act of Part II, forms the bridge for Faust's entrance into ancient Greece. Those who have gone most deeply into Goethe's world-conception will see how, through it he has penetrated deeply into the spiritual, in both universe and the mystery of man, in so far as the latter is connected with what is spiritual in the universe. It should first be emphasised, on the one hand, that what Goethe meant by saying he had put a great deal in a veiled way into Part II of “Faust”, applies especially to this profound, most significant scene. In this second part of “Faust” there is much wisdom. On the other hand, when represented on the stage, this wisdom is able through its imagery to make a great appeal to the senses.

If we are to understand Goethe's Faust, particularly the second part, we must always keep these two aspects in mind. As Goethe says, the simple minded spectator of Faust will experience pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction in its series of pictures; the Initiate, however, is meant to find there profound secrets of life. If we start with what the pictures give us, this scene represents a festival of the seas to which Homunculus has been taken by Thales. This festival, however, contains a great deal that is veiled, and is meant actually to introduce the demonic powers dwelling in the sea,—that is, the spiritual powers.

Why does Goethe have recourse to the demonic powers of ancient Greece when wishing to lead Faust to the highest point of self-knowledge and self-understanding in human evolution? It may be stated that Goethe was perfectly clear that it is impossible for man ever to arrive at a true conception of his own nature by merely acquiring knowledge received through the senses and the understanding associated with them. True knowledge of man can only be imparted through true spiritual perception. So that all the knowledge and perception of man sought simply through the external physical world, to which the senses and the physical understanding are directed, is no real knowledge of man at all. Goethe indicates this by introducing Homunculus into his poem.

Now Homunculus is the result of the knowledge of man to which Wagner is capable of aspiring with ideally conceived physical means, such ideally conceived means as would. naturally be considered by ordinary science to be its goal, from which, however, no result can be expected either today or in the future. Goethe advances the hypothesis that it might be possible to produce a Homunculus in a retort, that is, to gain such complete knowledge of combining the forces of nature that a human being could be intellectually put together out of various ingredients. But it is no man who arises thus, even when all that can be attained in the physical world is thought out to the highest point of perfection—no man arises, no homo, but only a homunculus. Considered dramatically, this homunculus is simply the image of himself that a man can form with the help of his reason, of his ordinary earthly knowledge. How can this man-made image that is a homunculus provide a true conception of man? How can it be brought about that in this conception man does not stop short at the simple homunculus but pushes on to the homo? It is clear to Goethe that this goal can only be reached through knowledge acquired by the human soul and spirit when free of the body.

Now, by most various ways Goethe endeavours to reach the realm to which a human being must come if he wishes to acquire complete knowledge of man, that is, the knowledge acquired when free of the body. Goethe really wishes to show that it is possible too out of the body to gain knowledge, decisive knowledge, concerning the nature of man. He was by no means one of those who plunges lightheartedly into such matters. His whole life through he was striving to to make his soul more profound. For it was clear to him that when a man grows old, he does not live in vain, but that the forces of knowledge are always increasing, so that in old age it is possible for us to know more than in our youth. But he realised, also the problematic nature of the sojourn of soul and spirit outside the body. Hence he sought in the most varied ways to bring man, to his Faust, knowledge in the form of pictures, that we call Imagination. And he does this first in the Romantic Walpurgis-Night of Part I, and then again in the Classical Walpurgis-Night where he takes the Imaginations from ancient Greece, whither he would transport Faust. We might perhaps say that Goethe thinks that, when a man leaves the body in order to change Homunculus into Homo, into man, he has Imaginations appearing to different people in different forms. And, in the perception of the ancient Greeks, these Imaginations in some degree still approached spiritual reality. Setting before the soul the demonic world of ancient Greece, we can see how, in this traditional realm of myths, when outside the body with his soul and spirit, in highly developed atavistic clairvoyance, man contemplated nature from whose womb he sprang. I might therefore say that Goethe, not wanting to invent an imaginative world himself, calls in the Greek world in order to tell us that, whatever a man may contrive out of his ordinary knowledge, he still remains a Homunculus; if, however, he wishes to become a real man, he must first advance to the world of Imagination, Inspiration, and so on. That is how the nature of man should first be conceived.

Why does Goethe choose a sea-festival, or rather the dream of a sea-festival? To understand his feelings, we must take ourselves back into the conceptions of the old Greeks, to which Goethe himself went back in his representation of this gay feast. We must realise that, to the Greeks, there was a special significance in foresaking the land and sailing out to the open sea. The Greeks, like all ancient peoples, still lived in the outside world. Just as a change took place in these people when they forsook the level ground, the plain, and went up into the mountains—a change experienced by modern man in an abstract prosaic way—so the was some tremendous change in their soul on leaving dry land for the open sea. This feeling that the open sea has special power to release the soul and spirit from the body was universally experienced in olden times, and much is connected with the feeling.

I must ask you, my dear friends, to remember what an important part in the various symbols, on the path of knowledge, was played by the Pillars of Hercules in ancient myths. It was constantly said that when a man has gone through various stages of knowledge he sails, through the Pillars of Hercules. This meant that he sails out into the limitless, open sea, where he no longer feels himself within reach of any coast. For man today that has ceased to mean very much, but for the Greek it meant entering a completely different world. Once past the Pillars of Hercules, he became free of all that bound him to earth, above all through his bodily forces. In olden days, when everyday matters were still experienced by soul and spirit, sailing over the open sea wan felt as freeing one from the body.

Goethe's poetical works were not like those of lesser poets; he wrote out of his feeling for the cosmos, and when he speaks of all that he transposed into the Greek world, he transposes himself there with his whole soul. It is of this that we must constantly remind those who read Goethe as if he were any other poet—those who, whey they are reading Goethe, have no consciousness of having been carried into another world.

Now as the scene begins, we see the ‘alluring Sirens.’ Goethe presents a scene that, though externally in picture-form, might equally be one of everyday life. For the Sirens are collecting wreckage for the Nereids and Tritons. Considered from the other side, however, these alluring creatures, these voices, are not only within man but also outside him. They are the voices of different stages in the world, and on these stages, as I have often shown, inner and outer flow together. The Siren-sounds are those that entice the souls of men out of their bodies, and set them in the spiritual cosmos.

Let us sum up all this. First, Goethe shows a festival of the sea, or rather, dreams evoked during this festival. Secondly, this festival took place during the night, under the influence of the Moon. Goethe arranges everything to show that here it is a question of having to gain a conception independently of the body, a conception of the kind that would be attained consciously, outside the body, is then experienced in pictures. And now we see that, while on the one hand, Goethe wishes to satisfy those who keep to the superficial—this is not said in any belittling sense—by making the Sirens collect wreckage for the Nereids and Tritons who covet it, yet these Nereids and Tritons are on the way to Samothrace to seek the Kabiri and bring them to the festival of the sea. By introducing the Gods of the primeval Samothracian sanctuary into this scene, Goethe shows that he is touching upon the highest human and cosmic secrets. What, then, must take place when Homunculus is to become Homo, when the outlook of Homunculus is to become the outlook of Homo? What must then actually happen?

Now the idea of Homunculus, as understood within the world of the senses, must be taken out of that world and transposed into the world of soul and spirit where, between falling asleep and waking, man has his being. Homunculus must be taken into the world man experiences when, free of his body, he is united with the existence of soul and spirit. It is in this picture-world that we must now find Homunculus, he must then transfer this picture of Homunculus, he must then transfer this picture into that other world, the world of Imagination, Inspiration, and so forth. There alone can the abstract idea of Homunculus be grasped by the real forces of being, those forces that never enter human knowledge when we stop short at the understanding through the senses. When Homunculus, the idea of Homunculus, is separated from the body and transferred to the world of so and spirit, then in all earnestness everything becomes real. Then we have to come upon those forces that are the real ones behind the origin and evolution of man.

In all this Goethe is showing that he had a profound and significant comprehension of the Samothracian Kabiri, that he had a feeling how, in primeval times, these Kabiri were worshipped as guardians of the forces connected with the origin and evolution of mankind. Thus, by evoking from the age if atavistic clairvoyance, pictures of the divine forces associated with human evolution, Goethe was touching upon what is highest.

When dealing with the Samothracian Mysteries, the conception of the Greeks referred back to what was very ancient. And it may be said that the ideas about these Samothracian Mysteries about the Kabiri divinities, permeated all the various ideas the Greeks held about the Gods, all their ideas concerning the connection between these Gods and mankind. And the old Greek was convinced that his idea of human immortality was a legacy bequeathed to the Greek consciousness by the Samothracian Mysteries. It was to the influence of these Mysteries he felt he owed the idea of man's immortality, the idea of man's membership of the world of soul and spirit.

Goethe therefore wishes at the same time to suggest that, were the impulses of the Greeks, that are associated with the Kabiri of Samothrace, grasped in a state free of the body, perhaps the abstract human idea of Homunculus might be united with the true evolutionary forces of man. In the Greek consciousness there was definitely something that could live again, vividly, in Goethe when he touched on this profound mystery. To take an example, this may be seen in what the Greeks used to say of Philip of Macedonia how, by watching the Mysteries of Samothrace, he found Olympia. And the Greeks had in their consciousness how, at that time, the great Alexander decided to descend to these parents when coming to earth, when soul to soul before the divinities of Kabiri Philip of Macedon and Olympia found each other. Those things must be touched upon for the awe to be felt which the Greeks actually experienced when the Kabiri were in question, an awe shared later by Goethe.

From an external point of view they are simply ocean-deities. The Greeks knew that, in an age relatively not very ancient, Samothrace had been inundated, rent asunder, and reduced to confusion by most fearful volcanic storms. The nature-demons had shown their power here in such a terrific way that it still remained in historic memory among the Greeks. And in the woods, in the forests of Samothrace, at that time very dense, the Kabiren Mysteries were concealed. Among the many different names they bore is one Axieros; a second, Axiokersos; a third, Axiokersa; the fourth was Kadmyllos. And a vague feeling existed that there were also a fifth, sixth and seventh. But man's spiritual gaze was mainly fixed on the first three. The old ideas of the Kabiri centered round the secret of men's becoming; and the initiate it in to the holy Mysteries of Samothrace was supposed to come to the perception that what is seen spiritually in the spiritual world corresponds to what happens on earth when, for an incarnating soul a man arises, a man comes to birth. In the spiritual world the spiritual correlate of the human birth was supposed to be watched.

Through such vision, Goethe believed he could change the idea of a homunculus to that of homo. And it was to this vision the Samothracian Initiates were led. We cannot see a man in his true nature when we regard him as a being enclosed within his skin and when we are under the delusion that all we are concerned with in man stands before us in external, physical human form, visible to the external eye. Whoever wishes really to know man must go beyond what is enclosed within the skin and look upon the human being as extending over the entire universe. He must have in mind, what extends spiritually outside the skin.

Now many of the ideas about the Gods depend on this impulse of the Greeks to see the human being outside his skin. And connected with these ideas there was an exoteric and an esoteric side. The exoteric side of man's becoming related, however, to the whole of nature's becoming; the connection of man's becoming with the becoming of nature was involved when, later, the Greeks spoke of Demeter, of Ceres. The esoteric side of Ceres, of Demeter, of the world in its becoming, was the Kabiri. We must know how to look at him, if in any way we are to be able to penetrate the secret of man.

You see, to look at man simply as a figure standing on the physical earth is, really, to deceive yourself about him. For the human being has been united from a threefold stream, a trinity. And as three lights cast their beams on a point—a circle—and we see the fusion of the lights and then refuse to recognise how one, perhaps yellow, another blue, and the third of reddish colour flow together into one, refuse to see this harmony, preferring to believe that what has arisen from a mingling of lights is a unity and so deceive ourselves in believing this mixed product we see before us as man in his skin to be a unity. He is not a unity and if we take him for one we shall never read the secret of mankind. At the present time man is unconscious of not being a unity. But he was conscious of it while atavistic clairvoyance glowed warmly through human knowledge. Thus, the Initiates of Samothrace put men together out of Axieros standing in the middle, and the two extremes, Axiokersos and Axiokersa, whose forces were united with those of Axieros. We might say than that there are three—Axieros, Axiokersos, and Axiokersa. These three forces flowed together to form a unity. The higher reality is the trinity; the unity springs from the trinity. This is what comes before the eye of man.

It might also be said that the Samothracian Initiate learned to know man who stood, physically perceptible, before him. He was told: You must take away from this man the two extremes, Axiokersos and Axiokersa, that only ray into him. Then you can retain Axieros. So the matter stands thus: Of the three, Axieros represents the centre condition of the human being, and the others the two invisible ones, merely shine upon him.

Thus, in the Mysteries of Samothrace, man is shown to be a trinity. Goethe asks himself: Can the idea of the abstract Homunculus perhaps be changed into that of the complete Homo by turning to what, in the Samothracian Mysteries, was regarded as the secret of man—the human trinity? And he said: This trinity can only be arrived at as a conception when man, with his soul and spirit, leaves the body. This is what he told himself.

We must, however, always emphasise that, as regards spiritual perception, Goethe was only a beginner. What is so wonderful about all that Goethe stands for will, as I said recently, only be rightly understood when we think of it as being continually developed, being necessarily developed in order to lend to ever greater heights. In Goethe himself we have the theory of metamorphosis, from leaf to leaf, from the green leaf of the foliage to the coloured petal of the flower, or from the spinal vertebrae, perhaps, to the bones of the head—this secret, if rightly understood, leading from one incarnation to another, from one earth-life to another, as I have often shown you. Hence, from the standpoint of Goethe's own conception of the world, we may ask: How then should the Mystery of Samothrace be pictured today? The Samothracian Mystery, as such, with its Kabiri-symbolism of the secret of humanity, corresponds entirely with the atavistic clairvoyant world-conception; but the living content of knowledge at any one human period, cannot be continued on in the right way, and must be re-moulded. It is not suitable for a return to old conceptions adapted to a quite different state of human evolution; the conceptions must be transformed. The Samothracian Mystery has naturally only historical value. Today we should say: We represent how in the centre of the Representative of Man there stands Axieros, how he is encircled by Axiokersa, and how Axiokersos must be placed in connection with all that is earthly—thus giving us the Representative of Man, Lucifer and Ahriman. And here we have the re-moulding suited to the present age, and on into the future, of the holy Mystery of Samothrace.

It might be said: Were Goethe to appear among us today, wishing, in conformity with all that man has since won for himself, to tell us what is able to change Homunculus to Homo, he would point to the Representative of Man, surrounded by, and in combat with, Lucifer and Ahriman. I beg of you, however, not to make an abstraction of these things, not to apply the favorite modern method of settling these matters by a few abstract concepts, and taking them for symbols. the more you feel that a whole world, containing the secret of man, lies hidden in the figure of the Representative of Man in connection with Lucifer and Ahriman; the more you repudiate the pride, the unjustified, childish pride, of modern man in his abstract scientific concepts; the more you open your soul to a world giving you a view of this image of the mystery of man—then the nearer you come to this secret.

Spiritual Science meets with all kinds of opposition today. But one of its strongest opponents is man's desire for abstraction, his desire to label everything with a few concepts. Goethe's teaching is, in feeling, the exact opposite of this mischievous modern habit of pasting concepts everywhere. One has peculiar experiences in this regard. Men come to a movement like Spiritual Science from very different motives. There are many who wish to reduce everything to abstractions. For instance, man consists of seven principles—I once had the experience, a horrible experience, of someone explaining Hamlet by attributing to him the principle of Buddhi on one place, in another, Manes, and so on. That, my dear friends, is something much worse than all materialism. These quite abstract explanations, all this symbolising of an abstract nature is, regarded inwardly, much worse than any external materialism. Anyhow, we see that, in showing his Nereids and Tritons on the way to Samothrace to fetch the holy Kabiri, Goethe wished, above all, to raise the idea of Homunculus to a very high human plane.

And so, with regard to the Kabiri, we must experience what the ancient peoples did with regard to their deities. These deities of primeval peoples appear primitive to man today—mere idols. This is so because modern man has no understanding for idols. This is so because modern man has no understanding for all that flows out of elemental forces. Not even in art does man rise today to anything really creative. He keeps to a model, or judges what is represented for him in art by the question: Is it like?—Often indeed one hears the objection that it is not natural, because, among men today, there is very little real artistic feeling. In any case, whoever wishes to understand the sometimes grotesque looking figures of the ancient Gods, must try to form an idea of the beings belonging to the third elemental world, from which our world springs, on the one hand in its mineral, on the other, in its organic products.

You know how the scene begins. The Nereids and Tritons are on their way to Samothrace to fetch the Kabiri, amongst whom Homunculus is to be transformed into Home. In the meantime, while they are on their journey, Thales, who is to be the guide of Homunculus in becoming man, betakes himself to the old sea God, Nereus. It was Thales, the old philosopher of nature, whom first Homunculus had sought out. Now, Goethe is neither a mystic in the bad sense of the word, not a mere natural philosopher, when it is a question of finding reality. Hence Thales himself cannot be made to help Homunculus to become Home. Goethe had a deep respect for Thales conception of the world, but did not attribute to him the ability, the force, to advise Homunculus how to become man, complete man. For this, one should betake oneself outside the body to a demonic power—to old Nereus. Goethe brings the most various demonic powers to Homunculus. What kind of power is this Nereus? Now we can see this by the way the old sea-God speaks in Goethe's poem. It might be said that Nereus is the wise, prophetic, but somewhat philistine inhabitant of the spiritual world nearest man, the world man first enters on leaving the body. And, we ask, does he know at all how Homunculus is to become man? Nereus has indeed understanding, even to the point of prophetic clairvoyance; and he makes noble use of this understanding, but even so does not really succeed in reaching what is innermost in the human being. Because of this he feels men do not listen to him, do not heed his counsel. He has, as it were, no access to the human soul. On many occasions he has advised men, warned men; once he warned Paris against bringing so much misery on Troy, but to no effect. Now Nereus, since he is not hampered by a physical body, has developed on the physical plane to a very high degree human understanding that is possessed in a much less degree by man. But even with this understanding he cannot help Homunculus very far on the road to becoming Homo. What Nereus is able to say does not entirely meet the case. So by that nothing is actually gained for Homunculus' task.

Nereus says, however, that although he will not concern himself in giving Homunculus advice about becoming Homo, he is expecting his daughters, the Dorides (or Nereides). In particular, he expects Galatea, the most outstanding of them; for they are to attend the ocean-festival. Galatea! and Imagination of a mighty kind.

What the question is here, is to see how things are connected in the world. It is not very easy to speak on this point, because of the soul's desire today to reduce everything to abstractions. But anyone who looks into these matters may experience a great deal. There are, no doubt, well-intentioned people who say they believe in the spirit. Certainly, it is not a bad thing at least to believe in the spirit; but how do they answer the weighty question: What do you mean exactly by the ‘spirit’ in which you believe? What is the spirit? Spiritualists generally renounce all claim to learning anything of the spirit by doing much that is quite unspiritual. Spiritualism is the most materialistic doctrine that can exist. Certain souls more finely tuned speak indeed of the spirit, but what is it exactly that they have i mind when so speaking? That is why very modern and sceptical minds prefer to forgo the spirit—I mean, of course, only in thought—prefer to give up the spirit as against what can be known today through the senses. Read the article called “Spirit” in Fritz Mauthner's Dictionary of Philosophy; there you will probably be able to get bodily conditions but not those of the head.

Now, you see, in Spiritual Science one should rise above all this abstract talking, even if it is about the spirit. Follow what is said in Spiritual Science, and you will see how it rises progressively as we work. Everything is drawn upon that, step by step, can lead into the actual spiritual world. What is said is not merely the spoken word but derives its force from a method of comparison. Only think how, by the very way Spiritual Science is presented here, it becomes comprehensible that man is pursuing a certain path in life, in the physical body. Read, for instance, what is given comprehensively in the October number of Das Reich (1918). It is shown there how, and by means of what forces, a human being while quite a child has the closest affinity to the material world; how in middle life his soul gains in importance; how in later life he becomes spiritual. This, however, he often does not recognise because he is not prepared for it. He becomes spiritual as the body falls into decay, as the body becomes dry and sclerotic the spirit becomes free, even during the waking condition. Only, a man is very seldom conscious of what he is able to experience if he grows old with a certain gift. I mean here with a gift of the spiritual; that is to say if, not simply growing decrepit in body, he experiences the soul becoming young, becoming spirit.

This makes us realise, my dear friends, that the spirit cannot be seen in an old man or old woman; naturally it is invisible. The decrepit body can be seen but not the spirit growing young and fresh. Wrinkles may be perceived in the flesh of the cheeks, but not the growing fullness of the spirit; that is supersensible. We can, however, indicate where the spirit may be found here in the world where we are leading our everyday existence. And if we then say: The whole of nature is permeated by spirit, we reach the point when we realise that outside in nature where the minerals and plants make manifest the external world, there dwells something of the same force into which we men and women grow as we become old. There you have the visible expression of it. To say, in a pantheistic way, that outside lives the spirit, means nothing at all, because spirit then remains a mere word. But if we say, not in a direct abstract way, but with the necessary and various details: To find the force that as you grow old is always becoming stronger in you, look to the innermost and most active of the forces of nature—then we are speaking of a reality. The essential thing is to set the one force by the side of the other, and to notice the place of each. These things can be livingly realised by turning one's gaze to the force-impulses in the whole connection of a physical human being's descent to earth—from conception, throughout the embryonic life till birth. The dull, dry-as-dust scientist stops short at this force; it is true, he examines it punctiliously but only in his own way, and then comes to a standstill. When a man is able to survey the world from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, he knows, however, that this force is also present in other places. Acting more quickly, the very same force makes itself felt when you wake in the morning, when you wake out of sleep. Exactly the same force, though in a more tenuous form, is present, as the one leading from conception through the embryonic life to birth; it is the identical force. This force is not only in you, in your innermost being; it is diffused outside, throughout everything and every process in the whole wide cosmos.

This force is the daughter of cosmic intelligence. You see, if we wish to describe these things, we must touch on many matters that, today, are quite out of the ordinary. What then does the modern scientist do, when wishing to come upon the secret of physical germination? He uses the microscope; he examines the germ-cell under the microscope, before it is fertilised, after it is fertilised, and so on. He has no feeling that what he thus examines in the smallest object under the microscope is constantly before his eyes in the macrocosm. The very same process that goes on, for example, in the womb of the mother, before and during conception, and during the whole embryonic life, this same process, this very same process, goes on macrocosmically when, after the seed has sunk down into the earth, the earth sends forth the little plant. The warmth of the womb, the warmth of the pregnant mother, is exactly the same as is the sun outside for the whole vegetation of the world. It is important to be able to realise that what can be seen in the smallest object under the microscope, can be looked upon macrocosmically all around in the external world. When we wander about among he growing plants, we are actually in the womb of the world. In short, the force underlying the becoming of man is outside in the whole macrocosmic world, seething and weaving there. Imagine this force personified, imagine this same force of human becoming grasped spiritually in its spiritual counterpart outside the human body, and you have Galatea, with those akin to her, her sisters, the Dorides. In these Imaginations we are led into a mysterious but quite real world. This is one of the most profound scenes written by Goethe, who was conscious that, at the most advanced age, man may have a premonition of these secrets of nature.

There is something overwhelmingly significant in Goethe beginning Faust in his youth and then, shortly before the end of his life, writing such scenes as are now being shown. For sixty years he was striving to find the way of putting into outward form what, at the beginning of that time, he had conceived. He draws upon everything he considers relevant to raise the idea of Homunculus to the idea of Homo, and to present man's becoming outside the body, in all its mystery. He draws upon the Kabiri Mystery, and the mystery of becoming man as it appeared in the figure of Galatea. And he knows that reality is so all-embracing, so profound, that the Imaginations awakened by the Kabiri impulses, by the Galatea-impulse, can do no more than hover on its surface. The mystery is far greater than what can be contained even in such impulses.

Goethe himself tried every means of approaching the secret of life in a true and living way. Thus he evolved his theory of metamorphosis, in which he follows up the different forms in nature—how one form develops out of another. Now Goethe's theory of metamorphosis must not be regarded in and abstract way. He shows us this himself. It is perhaps because it can only be conceived and brought to man's soul in a world-outlook free of the body that, with his theory of metamorphosis Goethe approaches what was atavistically experienced in the old Proteus-myth. Perhaps Proteus, who in his own becoming takes on such different forms, perhaps through his experiences it would be possible to find how Homunculus can become Homo. (You know how, in this scene, Goethe introduces him, and we present him, as tortoise, man, dolphin, three forms appearing one after another.)

But Goethe felt that there were still limitations to his theory of metamorphosis. Surely, you may say, a man with such profound, such fundamental knowledge, as Goethe could see what follows from this theory; with it one can watch one leaf of a plant changing into another, up to the petal of the flower, the spinal vertebrae transforming themselves into the bones of the head, the skull-bones? But Goethe—anyone who has worked on Goethe's world-conception knows how he wrestled in this sphere—Goethe knew he could go no farther. Yet he felt: There is something beyond all this.—We know what that something is—the head of the present man is the metamorphosis of the body of the previous man, the man of an earlier life on earth; the rest of his body in this earth-life will, in the next life, become the head. There, for man's life, we have metamorphosis—the crown of metamorphosis. He draws on what he feels about Proteus, but that can lead only to raising the idea of Homunculus to that of Homo. Goethe felt he had made a great beginning with the Protean idea of metamorphosis, but that this had to be developed were Homunculus to become Homo. Goethe in all honesty represents poetically both what he can and what he cannot do, and we see deep into his soul. It is no doubt, easier to picture an abstract, perfect Goethe and to assure ourselves he knew everything. But No! Goethe becomes all the greater by our recognising the limitations he himself so honestly admits, as may be seen, for instance, in his not allowing Proteus—that is, the way he conceives his theory of metamorphosis—to give counsel regarding Homunculus becoming Homo.

Goethe strove, indeed, form the most varied directions to approach this becoming—this growing to true man. For him, artistic conception was not, as it is for so many, fundamentally abstract. He considered that everything expressed in works of art was part of all that is creative in the world. Into this scene he puts all that was to have led him to his heart's desire—to fathoming the mystery of becoming man. As he stood before the Greek works of art, or rather, the Italian work which made Greek art real for him, he said to himself: I am an the track of what the Greeks were doing in the creation of their works of art; they acted in accordance with the same forces as does nature, in her creations. And he had the experience that, if the artist is a true artist, he unites himself in marriage, as it were, with the forces creating in nature; he creates his forms, and all that can be created artistically, out of what is working in the arising, the growing, of plants of animals, of man. But in all this there is still no inner knowledge. That is what Goethe had to admit to himself. The creative forces present themselves to our vision, allow us to feel them, but in metamorphosis we do not go right within them.

There next appear the Telchines of Rhodes. They are such great artists that, naturally. all external human art seems small in comparison. They forged Neptune's trident. They were the first who tried to represent Gods in human form, that is, to create man out of the actual cosmic forces. This art of the Telchines comes nearer reproducing man's becoming, but does not quite reach it. This is what Goethe is wishing to tell us. He expresses it through Proteus who says finally: Even this does not lead to the real mystery of man.

Thus does Goethe wish to evoke a true feeling that there are two worlds—the waking world of day, and the world that is entered when man is free of the body, the world he would see if, during sleep he became awake to this body-free condition. Everything of the kind that he would say, is indicated by Goethe in this scene most delicately and sublimely. Take, for example, the passage where the Dorides bring in the sailor-lads; read the works in which the world is described, how the physical world is set beside the world entered when man is free of the body—how this is pictured in the Dorides set beside the physical sailor boys. They have found each other and yet not found each other. Human beings and spirits meet one another, yet do not meet; they approach each other and remain strangers. In this passage, the relation of the two worlds is wonderfully indicated. Everywhere Goethe endeavours to show how essential it is to place oneself into the spiritual world to find what makes Homunculus into Homo. At the same time he delicately indicates how physical world and spiritual world are together yet apart.

One might say that in his artistic representation, Goethe sees—or rather, makes us see—how Homunculus can become Homo if the soul approaches the intimate mystery of the Kabiri, if it approach what Nereus evoked in his daughter Galatea. All that is active in the true art that works out of the cosmos. But, alas, it is as if one were grasping after reality in a dream, and the dream immediately fades away. It is as though one wished to hold fast what welds together the physical and the spiritual worlds. The Gods will not suffer it; the worlds fall apart.

This difficulty of knowing the spirit is the fundamental experience, the fundamental impulse in the soul of one who watches this scene with true understanding. It is this that leads Goethe to his mighty finale—the shattering of Homunculus against the shell-chariot of Galatea, the shattering that is at the same time an arising, a coming into being, the ascent into the elements, which is a finding of the self in reality.

We will speak again tomorrow of this conclusion of the scene, in connection with its representation.

Reference was made in the last lecture to our proposed study of the Gospels and we explained why we had decided to begin with certain aspects of St. Matthew's Gospel. In the first place it is in this Gospel that the most human side of Christ-Jesus is presented. Secondly, there is given in it a complete survey of events which show how the coming of Christ-Jesus is related to human history. This is a direct indication that this greatest of all phenomena on earth represents the culmination of actual historical events, and it is therefore natural to assume that this particular Gospel brings us face to face with the deeper secrets of the evolution of humanity.

Once again I must emphasise that the things of which we shall now be speaking call for accurate treatment, and that great harm can easily be done to the cause of Spiritual Science by giving to the general public any incomplete or one-sided picture of matters connected with these secrets. All communications should be made with great caution; nor is it too much to expect everyone to have the patience to refrain from attempting to present to himself a complete picture of Christ-Jesus until he has become acquainted with the four aspects revealed by the four Gospels.

In the Gospel of St. Luke we are shown how the two great pre-Christian streams of spiritual life—Zoroastrianism and the stream which reached its pre-Christian culmination in Buddhism—united, in order to pour themselves into the great Christian stream of spiritual life on the earth. The Gospel of St. Matthew is concerned primarily, with a quite different theme, namely, to show how and in what respects the physical entity in which the Zarathustra-Individuality incarnated springs from the ancient Hebrew people. It attempts to set out the part played by the ancient Hebrew people in the whole evolutionary process of mankind. It might easily be imagined that if the Zarathustra-Individuality incarnated in Jesus of Bethlehem, it was simply a matter of the body being born from the Hebrew people, and that this implies nothing more than that Zarathustra was reborn in a body of Hebrew stock. Such a conception would give rise to an entirely misleading picture of the truth.

We must realise more and more clearly the fact that an Individuality as great as Zarathustra uses the body as an instrument. Even if a Being were to come down to the earth out of the highest, even the very highest, divine worlds, and were to incarnate in an unsuitable physical organism, such a Being could make use of that body only to the extent to which it was actually capable of being an instrument. It is for this reason that the mistaken line of thought just referred to would readily lead to misconceptions. That man's bodily organism is the temple of the soul has long ceased to be properly understood. We must always remember what has so often been emphasised among us, namely, that the human Ego dwells within three sheaths, each one of which is more ancient than the Ego itself. The Ego is a being of Earth, the youngest of the members of man's nature. The astral body had its beginning on the Old Moon, the etheric or life-body on the Old Sun, the physical body on Old Saturn.³ This means that the physical body is the most highly perfected, having four stages of planetary evolution behind it. The physical body has been developed through aeon after aeon until it has become what it is to-day—this perfect instrument in which the human Ego can so unfold that man can be enabled gradually to rise again to the heights of the spirit. If the physical body were as undeveloped as the astral body and the Ego, no evolution on the earth would be possible for man

If you realise the full significance of this, the thought of Zarathustra being born from the Hebrew people can no longer be clouded by any mistaken feeling. The constitution of the ancient Hebrew people had to be just what it was, if it was to provide the body for a being as great as Zarathustra. If we bear in mind that ever since the time when he had been the Teacher of the ancient Persian people, this great being had been developing to ever higher stages, we shall understand that for him a bodily instrument had to be provided from a racial stock whose greatness was commensurate with that of his own being.

An instrument had to be created, fit for Zarathustra. Through all the evolutionary periods of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, have the gods worked at the development of the human physical body. From this we may rightly infer that the more intimate preparation of one particular human body must necessarily have entailed great divine-spiritual labour, in order to produce a human body in the specially constituted form which was to be used at that time by Zarathustra.

To make this possible, the whole history of the ancient Hebrew people had to take the course it did. The Akasha Chronicle reveals that what is set down in the Old Testament conforms entirely with the historical facts. Everything that happened to the ancient Hebrew people had to be directed in such a way that it culminated in the single personality of Jesus of Bethlehem. But to achieve this, very special measures were essential.—It was necessary that from the whole of Post-Atlantean civilisation, faculties of the highest quality should be extracted, which would enable mankind to develop powers in place of the old clairvoyant gifts. It was the Hebrew people which was chosen for this task, to the end that it might provide a bodily constitution which, right into the most delicate vessels of the brain, was so organised that what we call knowledge of the world might evolve, free from the influences of the old clairvoyance.—This was to be the mission of the ancient Hebrew people. And in Abraham, the progenitor of this people, such an Individuality was chosen, that out of his bodily constitution, a suitable instrument might be fashioned for the development of reasoned thinking.⁴ All previous thinking of any significance was still subject to the influences of the old clairvoyance. But now a personality was chosen because he possessed the brain most capable of withstanding the inrush and coercion of clairvoyant Imaginations and Intuitions, and was destined to acquire knowledge of the things of the world purely by the process of reason. This required a specially constituted brain, and the personality chosen because he possessed such a brain, was Abram, or Abraham.

That the path of Abraham's journeyings led westwards from beyond the river Euphrates right up to Canaan, also tallies with what the Akasha Chronicle reveals. Abraham went forth, as the Bible tells us, from Ur in Chaldea. Whereas the aftermath of the ancient, shadowy clairvoyance was still in active operation in Egyptian, as well as in Chaldean-Babylonian civilisation, there was chosen from among the Chaldeans an individual who no longer worked by means of these faculties, but by observing the phenomena of the external world. This was to be the introduction of that form of culture whose fruits are to this very day implicit in the whole of the cultural life and civilisation of the West. Constructive reasoning and mathematical logic were both introduced through Abraham. Even until far into the Middle Ages he was regarded in a certain sense as the founder of arithmetic. The fundamental trend and character of his thinking led to observation of the world according to the relationships of measure and number. (See Appendix I, p. 72)

A personality so constituted was able, by his very nature, to enter into living relationship with that Divinity who was to reveal himself through the medium of external phenomena. All other Divinities, with the exception of Jahve or Jehovah, proclaimed themselves in the inmost depths of the human soul, and to acquire any knowledge of them man had to awaken in his soul the faculties of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. The men of ancient India gazed at the rising sun, at the different kingdoms of the earth, at the processes manifesting in air and ocean, but regarded all this as a great Illusion, as “Maya”, in which they would have found nothing of a divine nature, had they not first acquired knowledge of the divine through inner Imagination, and then, afterwards, had proceeded to relate this knowledge to the phenomena of the external world. It must be realised that even Zarathustra could not have taught as he did of the mighty Sun-Being had not Ahura Mazdao in his glory been inwardly revealed to him. This is especially apparent in the case of the Egyptian divinities, who were first experienced in the inmost depths of the soul and only afterwards related to the things of the external world. All that applies to the Divinities of pre-Hebraic times must be understood in this way.

Jahve, however, is the Divine Being who gazes down upon men from outside, who comes to men from outside, manifesting Himself in wind and weather. When man penetrates to the relationships of number, measure and weight inhering in the things of the visible world, he draws near to the God Jahve.—In earlier times the process was reversed. Brahma was recognised, first, in the inmost depths of the soul and only from that experience did man find his way into the outer world. Jahve is recognised first in the outer world and only afterwards can his reality also be confirmed in man's inmost being. This is the spiritual aspect of what is called in the Bible: Jahve's covenant with Abraham. Abraham was a man who possessed the faculty to grasp and comprehend the nature of Jahve. Abraham's bodily constitution was such that he could recognise Jahve or Jehovah as the God who lives and moves in the outer phenomena of the universe.

It was now a matter of deriving from the particular faculties possessed by the individual man Abraham, the mission of a whole people. Abraham's spiritual constitution had to be transmitted to others. But this spiritual constitution is bound up with the physical instrument; whatever is to be brought to outward expression depends upon the physical body being organised in a definite and specific way. In the ancient religions, built up as they were on the foundation of shadowy clairvoyance, the particular formation of the various parts of the brain was not of such essential importance. Understanding of Jehovah, however, was fundamentally bound up with the constitution of the physical brain. Only by way of physical heredity, within a people linked by blood-relationship, could such faculties and qualities be transmitted.

Very special measures were necessary for the achievement of this end. Abraham must have descendants who would carry to further stages of development that unique physical organism which until then had been the work of the gods and which had come to its most perfect expression in Abraham. The elaboration of the physical, bodily constitution was now to be taken in hand by man independently and that which for long ages had been the work of the gods be led by man to further stages. That this process must extend over many generations is self-evident. A brain capable of understanding Jahve had to be preserved through physical heredity. Jahve's covenant with Abraham had also to pass on to his descendants. This, however, called for the uttermost devotion to Jahve on the part of Abraham; for it is possible to develop a particular organism to further stages only if it is used in conformity with the purpose for which it was originally created. If, with a certain aim in view, it is desirable that the hands, for example, shall be made particularly skilful, this can only be achieved by developing them in accordance with their own inherent character. If the physical qualities of the brain had to be developed to the point where comprehension of Jahve was possible, then devotion to and understanding of Jahve must have reached in Abraham the highest conceivable degree of intensity.

That was exactly what happened, as the Bible relates. Self-sacrifice is supreme when a man offers up all that the future holds in store for his own self. Abraham is called upon to sacrifice his son Isaac to Jahve. Therewith he would have sacrificed the whole Hebrew people, all that he himself was, and all that had to be brought, through him, into the world. Abraham was the very first human being who truly understood Jahve, in that he knew that if he desired to give proof of the fulness of his devotion, he must surrender himself utterly to Jahve. Through offering his only son, however, Abraham renounced the propagation of his line in the world. But so complete was his devotion that with full resolve, he offered up Isaac.

Then Isaac was restored to him. What does this signify? It signifies something of supreme importance. Abraham receives Isaac back at the hand of Jahve. This brings to Abraham the realisation that the mission that is his by virtue of his own Individuality he will not pass on to posterity through his own deed, but he is to receive it in the person of his son as a gift of Jahve.⁵ Anyone who ponders this deeply will realise that here we have a fact of cosmic significance, whereby immeasurable light is shed upon the secrets of the historical evolution of humanity.

Now let us consider how events proceed.—Through Abraham's devotion to Jahve was made possible the right development of that which had hitherto been the work of the gods, namely the physical nature of humanity which had come into being out of the universe. As we know, the physical bodily constitution of man on the earth is connected, according to number, measure and weight, with all the laws governing the world of the stars. Out of the world of the stars man is born; in his very being he embodies the laws of that world. These laws had, as it were, to be inscribed into the blood flowing down from Abraham through the generations of the ancient Hebrew people. In this people everything must be so regulated as to ensure the continuance of the stream of ordered law which, flowing from the universe, has organised the human physical body according to the principles of number, measure and weight prevailing in the constellations. Again this is indicated in an utterance in the Bible, which is completely mistranslated. “I will make thy seed as the stars of heaven.”⁶ The meaning of the words is in no wise that God will make the Israelites as numerous as the stars of heaven, but that the way in which this people multiply and spread on the earth shall be governed by the laws and number-relationships prevailing in the ordering of the stars in heaven. The propagation of the Hebrew people was to be regulated in accordance with the number-harmonies of the stars.

We can see how this comes to pass. Isaac has two sons, Jacob and Esau. We see how all that was carried by the blood through the generations develops,—the blood of the line of Esau having been cut out and the main stream separated from it. Again, Jacob has twelve sons, corresponding to the twelve signs of the Zodiac through which the sun passes in the heavens, thus fulfilling the inner principle of the starry laws. Thus the number and measure prevailing in the heavens are factually portrayed to us in the life and descent, through their generations, of the Hebrew people.

Again, Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son Isaac, and thereby he received back his whole mission at the hand of Jahve. A ram or lamb is sacrificed in place of Isaac. This signifies something of the greatest profundity. The human corporality which was to propagate itself through the generations and which possessed the faculties necessary for comprehending the world according to number and measure, by mathematical logic—this human corporality was to be preserved intact and received back as the gift of Jahve. But in order that the intrinsic nature of this bodily constitution should remain pure and unalloyed, it was necessary that all old, shadowy clairvoyance, all Imaginations and Intuitions, all inflowing revelations such as had poured into the other ancient religions, including those of Chaldea and Egypt, should be renounced. Every gift from the spiritual world must be renounced. The last gift from the spiritual world, the one gift remaining after all the others have dimmed, is denoted in mystical symbolism by the Ram. The two horns of the ram symbolise the sacrifice of the two-petalled lotus-flower.⁷ The last clairvoyant gift is sacrificed, the others having already been laid aside in earlier times In order that this bodily constitution might be preserved in Isaac, the last clairvoyant gift, the gift of the ram, the two-petalled lotus-flower is sacrificed.

As the mission of the Hebrew people progresses, these Abrahamitic faculties are transmitted from generation to generation. Whenever the old clairvoyance reappears as an atavistic element, whenever any individual sees once more into the spiritual world, the immediate reaction is that he is cast out from his people, he is not tolerated within the community. Antipathy against this gift of the ram expresses itself in direct hostility. This is exemplified in the enmity meted out to Joseph. Prophetic illuminations from the spiritual world come to Joseph in his dreams. Quite naturally he is thrust out from his people, because the gift he possesses is not in keeping with their mission, because a heritage of ancient clairvoyance appears again in him. Such is the profound meaning of the story here narrated.

On the other hand we see that something essential for the development of the Hebrew people and the fulfilment of their mission is in turn provided through Joseph, that is, through the very personality in whom was preserved a heritage which the Hebrew people could only regard as belonging to the age before Abraham. In a certain sense the gate to the world, from which, through the old shadowy clairvoyance, the ancient Indian and Persian civilisations had received their religions, was closed against the Hebrew people. That gate being closed, they now looked out into the world, classified it according to measure and number, and in its all-embracing unity they beheld Jahve or Jehovah. One thing more they knew, and that was that the visible world they beheld around them and which found its unity as being entirely the creation of Jehovah, was of the same nature as the Egohood of mankind.

But within this race-community, no Imaginations, no inner, personal experiences arose regarding these things. At that time this people themselves had no such inner experiences. Therefore it was necessary that they should be taught from outside, that they should learn from a people who still had these experiences. And so Joseph forms the link between the ancient Hebrew people and the Egyptians, the people from whom could be learnt those things of which the ancient Hebrews themselves had no longer actual experience. The whole picture which a man to-day is able to form out of his own inner experiences, the knowledge and experience derived from the outer world and from inner imagination—this had to be acquired at that time by contacting a people in whom such experiences still abounded—the Egyptian people. Harmony had to be established between inner faculties of this nature and what was acquired by the ancient Hebrews through mathematical logic and reasoning. But contact with the Egyptian people could be initiated only by a personality who himself possessed in some measure this faculty of Imagination. Joseph was the appropriate link because he still possessed this faculty.

There were two reasons why he could be of help to the Egyptians.—Firstly, he was gifted with the old clairvoyance belonging to the age before Abraham, and this enabled him to understand and interpret what the ancient Egyptians obtained through their clairvoyance. But what the Egyptian people did not possess was the faculty of mathematical logic—that is to say, they were not able to apply their powers of Imagination to physical life. Hence Pharaoh was incapable of effective action when unprecedented events befell. Imaginations were accessible, but when unprecedented factors occurred, to weigh up and assess intelligently what steps were necessary and to take appropriate measures, required a different faculty, which the Egyptians did not possess. Because Joseph possessed this faculty he was able to give the right counsels at the Egyptian court and so became the appropriate personality to form the link between the Hebrew people and the Egyptians. In this way, through him the Jahve-doctrine—which until then might be described as a synthesis of outer reality in the form of a mathematical world-picture—received colour and substance from the inner faculty of Imagination possessed by the Egyptians.

The actual harmonising and unification of the ancient Egyptian clairvoyant experiences with the Hebrew experience of the outer world-order was effected by Moses.⁸ Once this had been achieved, the Hebrew people could be led back again and proceed to work out, in their own way and in accordance with their own nature, what had been acquired in Egypt—though not in the form of actual experiences. For it was essential, as we have seen, that their particular gift should not be mingled with that of any other people, that the quality inherent in their own blood should remain pure and unadulterated. At the same time, the fruits of the spiritual experience of the ancient world had also to be preserved; and so the ancient heritage which still survived in the wisdom of the Egyptians was inculcated, through Moses, into the Hebrew people with their faculties of mathematical logic. Then this people had again to be extricated from that relationship, for they were destined to inherit that new faculty which could operate only through the descendants of Abraham.

It was because in the course of their history the blood of this people was regulated in strict accordance with its initial principles, because they developed, as they did, in this direction, through their successive generations, that it became possible at a certain definite point of time that there should issue from their stock the body of the Jesus-child, (See Appendix II, p. 75) into which the personality of Zarathustra could incarnate. But in order to achieve this goal the ancient Hebrew people had to grow strong and powerful.

If in the light of St. Matthew's Gospel we study the times of the Judges and Kings and follow the destinies of the ancient Hebrews, we shall see that even the circumstances which seem to indicate that this people is going astray, were for a definite purpose. Above all was it necessary that the misfortune of being led into captivity in Babylon should befall them. We shall see that their racial qualities had developed to the point when it was necessary that they should be brought into contact with the other side of the ancient tradition, as it existed in Babylon. The Hebrew people had reached sufficient maturity to be united once again with faculties that had been abandoned.—That is one side of the picture.

The other side is that at the very time when the Hebrew people were brought into contact with the Babylonians a great Teacher from the East was working there, with the result that it was possible for some of the best among the Hebrews to receive the illumination of his teaching This was the time when Zarathustra—in the person of Nazarathos or Zaratas—was teaching in the regions whither the Hebrews were led. Some of the greatest of the Prophets came under his influence. In this way it became possible to inculcate into the Hebrew people what was needed when their blood had already reached a certain stage of development, and influences from outside were required.

We shall not go very far wrong if we compare this whole racial evolution with the gradual growth of the individual human being. When a child is born, it remains until its seventh year in the bodily care of the parents. During this period, the influences that affect it are mainly at the physical level. Then begins the phase inaugurated by the birth—in a real sense—of the etheric body. Development is based on the elaboration of the memory, on which depends the healthy growth of all the possibilities of the etheric body. The beginning of the third period may be described by saying that the human being now enters into relation with the external world through his astral body, at which stage he must acquire the faculty of individual judgment.—The ancient Hebrew people passed through these phases of development in a special way. The first period—from Abraham to the time of the early Kings—may be compared with the first period of the life of the individual human being up to the seventh year. Everything that then happened was for the purpose of establishing in them the particular qualities of their blood. Abraham's journeyings, the development of the twelve tribes, the introduction of the Mosaic laws, the perils in the desert—all these happenings can be compared with what flows into the human being on the physical plane during the first seven years of life. Then comes the second period: the inner consolidation of the race, the rulership of the Kings up to the time of the captivity in Babylon.—Then follows the third stage, when the influence of Chaldean wisdom is brought to bear upon the Hebrews. And the Leader, through whom at that time-600 to 550 B.C.—was released the inflow of this oriental influence into the Hebrew people, was none other than the Individuality who in ancient Persia had been Zarathustra. Thus already at the time of the Babylonian captivity Zarathustra was preparing the way that would lead to the finding of a suitable bodily organism. So down the generations from Abraham onwards there developed more and more the requisite conditions for the birth of the bodily organism in which Zarathustra could reincarnate.

The threefold grouping indicated in the genealogy at the beginning of St. Matthew's Gospel gives a wonderfully faithful picture of this evolutionary process. There are three times 14 generations. “From Abraham to David, 14 generations; from David to the time of the Babylonian captivity, 14 generations; from the Babylonian capitivity to Christ-Jesus, 14 generations.” (St. Matthew I. 17) There are three times 14, that is, 42 generations. This is an indication that the bodily constitution of Jesus is an embodiment of the purest extract of all that had been in preparation from Abraham downwards, through all the vicissitudes and destinies undergone by the ancient Hebrew people. Finally a human being must appear, who in his soul and in his deeds will express all the qualities matured in the race, in his individual personality. The whole development of the Hebrew people from the time of Abraham was to reach its culmination in a single man—in the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel.

Such a culmination can be reached only if the whole course of preceding development is recapitulated in a spiritual way. Zarathustra goes forthin a spiritual sense from the Mysteries—from Ur of the Chaldees, the same region whence Abraham had been called. It is there that the “Golden Star” first appears, and then goes forth, followed by the Magi of the land. What had come to pass physically through Abraham is now re-enacted spiritually. The star which the Magi follow moves in spiritual fashion along the path once travelled by Abraham. The star taking this path and coming to rest upon the birthplace is the incarnating Zarathustra himself. This is the moment when the Zarathustra-Individuality incarnates in the child Jesus of Bethlehem. The Magi knew that, in following the star, they were following their great Teacher, Zarathustra, on his way to reincarnation.

It is now a matter of perceiving how this path continues and of realising how the purest extract of the whole evolution of the Hebrew people is actually present in the personality of the Jesus described in St. Matthew's Gospel. Firstly, we see that spiritually the sacrificial offering of Isaac is repeated in the offering of gold, frankincense and myrrh brought by the three Magi from the East. We are reminded, too, of other happenings among the ancient Hebrew people. The circumstances associated with the birth of this Jesus-Child are like a reflection of the destinies of the ancient Hebrews. Among them was a Joseph who in his dreams possessed an inherited gift and was able to form the link between the Hebrew and the Egyptian peoples; now again there is a Joseph who has dreams and to whom it is shown in a dream, not only that Jesus will be born, but that he must go with Jesus to Egypt.

The path of Zarathustra—now living in the body of the Jesus-child—continues. Just as he had followed the path taken by Abraham on the physical plane from Ur in Chaldea to Canaan, so he follows it further still, to Egypt. Like the Hebrew people, the Jesus-child is brought back again from Egypt. Thus, in the appearance of the Bethlehem Jesus—only later called the Nazarene—there is a recapitulation of the whole destiny of the ancient Hebrew people up to the return from Egypt to Palestine, the Promised Land. Events in the outer history of the Hebrew people, extending over long, long centuries, are now recapitulated in the destiny of that human being who was Zarathustra incarnated in the body of the Bethlehem Jesus. This—conceived on the vast scale in which it is presented in the Gospel of St. Matthew—is the secret of human history in general. Human history cannot be understood unless it is recognised that in the destiny of every great Individuality charged with a special mission the whole process of development through centuries is recapitulated; that such Individualities represent the essence and extract of what has been achieved in history through long ages. Far, far more than this was, of course, to be embodied in Christ-Jesus, but the bodily constitution had first to be prepared, and this was possible only through the special measures that have been described.

What kind of conditions prevailed at the point of time when the whole history of the Hebrew people was to be recapitulated in the personality of Jesus?—In what way was it a turning-point of history? Let us here review the following facts of the evolutionary process of which for some years now I have been trying to give you a picture.

Humanity proceeded from a primeval stage of evolution when everything that brought human beings together in love was bound up with the blood-tie. Love was determined by this factor, and marriage took place only between human beings very closely related by blood. In those ancient times there was no other kind of love than that which was bound up with blood-relationship. From this ‘close marriage' humanity had its beginnings. But intermingling of the particular blood-ties gradually became more general in widely separated territories of the earth. Among all the peoples, however, there is evidence to show that they were taken aback when men and women belonging to one racial stock marry into a different stock, when the transition to ‘distant marriage' begins. In all the myths and sagas, in the legend of Gudrun, for example, this is described as an unwonted happening, one that causes astonishment.

Two streams were in operation during this phase of human evolution. In the process where human beings are brought together through ties of blood there was working the Divine-Spiritual principle which strives to unite humanity, to unify all mankind. Working in opposition to this was the Luciferic principle which strives to make every human being independent, to endow the single individual with the greatest possible power. Both these principles must be present in human nature, both forces must take effect in the evolution of humanity.

These two sets of powers, then, were at work in the progressive evolution of humanity: the Divine- Spiritual powers on the one hand, and on the other, the Luciferic powers, spirit-beings who had not completed their evolution on the Old Moon and who wished to prevent men from losing their identity as separate beings, and to make them entirely independent and self-sufficient. These opposing powers were always at work, and as a result, the Ego of man, a product of the earth, was perpetually being torn to this side or to that—towards human love on the one side and towards inner self-sufficiency on the other.

Now at a particular point of time the interworking of these two powers reached a kind of crisis. This crisis, this crucial condition in human affairs set in when, as the result of the deeds of the Roman Empire, widespread intermingling took place among the peoples in many territories of the earth. This was a most crucial moment in the evolution of humanity, the moment when the still undecided question of close or distant marriage came to its issue. Men were facing the danger either of not developing the Ego by remaining within the separate racial stocks, or of losing all connection with humanity as such and becoming independent, self-sufficient, egoistic individuals.

This decisive point had been reached. What must now happen? Something quite specific. The human Ego must become sufficiently mature to develop within itself what may for the first time properly be called freedom, and to unfold from within itself, in freedom, the love which, because it now belongs to the life of soul, is no longer bound up with the blood-tie. The Ego was facing this decisive issue: to meet it, it must be completely liberated, must acquire full consciousness of itself. Thus, with the exception of the oriental peoples, the whole of mankind belonging to the old world was confronting a birth of the Ego through which this Ego could know the love that springs from its own inmost being. Out of freedom the Ego was to unfold love, and out of love, freedom. Only a being who develops an Ego of this nature is in the real sense man. For a being whose love is determined solely by ties of blood is coerced into love, and merely gives expression to what, at a lower level, happens in the animal kingdom. It was at this point of history of which we have just been speaking that full manhood became, for the first time, a possibility. At this point the influence which made man truly man was to stream over the earth.

And now let us recall what I have said many times: that man is a being ensheathed in three members: the physical body which he has in common with the minerals, the etheric body which he has in common with the plants, and the astral body which up to this point of time had been the seat of the kind of love he has in common with the animals. With his fully developed Ego man is the crown of earthly creation. All other beings of the earth have names that can be given them from outside; they are objective realities. The “Ego” has a name that can be given only by itself. In the Ego, the ‘I', the Godhead speaks; earthly conditions have no longer a voice. In the ‘I' the kingdom of the Spirit speaks; the Spirit from the heavens speaks when the ‘I' has become fully self-conscious.—It might be said that until that time there were three kingdoms—mineral, plant, animal—and a kingdom which had indeed risen to a higher level than these, but had not yet reached completion, had not yet been imbued with its full super-earthly reality of being. This kingdom exists by virtue of the fact that into an Egohood there enters that which is otherwise nowhere to be found on earth, namely, the spiritual world, the kingdom of heaven.—This kingdom is called in the Bible “the kingdom—or the kingdoms—of heaven”, or, more usually “the kingdom of God.”

“The kingdom of heaven” is simply an alternative expression for “the kingdom of man.” When we speak of mineral, plant and animal kingdoms we can add in the words of the Bible a fourth, “the kingdom of man.” Men who at that time, with the insight acquired in the Mysteries, could look back into the whole course of human evolution, could speak as follows: “Look back to ancient times: humanity was then only in process of being led to the level of manhood, for the kingdom of heaven is to come to the earth.”—So spoke the forerunner of Christ-Jesus, and Christ-Jesus Himself: “The kingdom of heaven is at hand”. In these words they indicated the essential quality of that time. It was the age when the birth of Christ-Jesus had to take place. He was to bring to mankind the forces through which the Ego would be able to unfold, and develop its own inherent nature.

The whole evolution of humanity thus divides itself into two main phases: the phase when the kingdom of heaven is not yet on the earth, and the phase when the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of man in its highest sense, is actually on the earth. The ancient Hebrew people was chosen to provide the bodily constitution, the bodily sheaths, which would so develop as to become fit to receive the bearer of this kingdom of heaven.

These are the secrets revealed when the historical aspect of events is studied in the light of the deepest meaning of the Gospel of St. Matthew. To the two streams which we have seen⁹ were contributory to Christianity—the streams of Zarathustrianism and Buddhism—we must add a third, namely, the stream contributed by the ancient Hebrew people. We see how these great Leaders, Buddha and Zarathustra, desired to bring to mankind the offering of the streams of spiritual life inaugurated by them. But a temple had to be provided and this could be done only through the ancient Hebrew people, who produced the temple which was the physical body of Jesus. Into the temple the two streams of Zarathustra and Buddha could bring their offerings. The first offering was made by Zarathustra, in that he incarnated in this body; the later offering was made by the Buddha, in that he rayed forth his Nirmanakaya,¹⁰ into the other Jesus. (See Appendix II, p. 75)—In this way the two streams flow into a unity.

I have only been able to-day to give you a slight sketch of these deeper secrets and I have had to express it in a somewhat dogmatic way. We must continue our study on some other occasion, in order that we may acquire a clearer picture of the mission of the ancient Hebrew people and of the emergence of Christ-Jesus from this people. Then will become manifest to us this unique event, that out of history itself, out of the historical flow of evolution, there evolved a Being of everlasting value, imperishable and eternal. So shall we gradually come to understand how, out of a transient world, that was able to spring which will endure for eternity.

• 3. These are the recognised names in spiritual science for the p.26 earlier planetary conditions of the Earth. See An Outline of Occult Science.
• 4. “Discursive thinking” would be an alternative translation p.27 of das urteilende Denken, the expression used by Rudolf Steiner here. “Discursive as opposed to intuitive cognition, is attained by a series of inferences rather than by direct insight.” (Runes: Dictionary of Philosophy, 4th ed. New York, 1942).
• 5. This point, that the Hebrew heritage was not a matter merely p.32 of natural descent, but of divine choice and gift, is developed by St. Paul from a somewhat different view-point in >Romans IX, 8. “It is not the children of the flesh (Ishmael) that are children of God, but the children of the promise (Isaac) are reckoned for a seed.” Cp. also Romans IV, 13-21.
• 6. Genesis XXII, 17.
• 7. In his book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, p. 131 ff, Rudolf Steiner speaks of the “lotus-flowers” as organs in the astral body connected with the development of supersensible perception. He points out that the name “lotus-flower” is only a traditional metaphorical designation. These organs are also known in technical esoteric language as “wheels ” or “chakrams.”
• 8. This role of Moses is indicated in his traditional representation as having two ram's horns springing from his forehead.
• 9. See Rudolf Steiner's lecture-course: The Gospel of St. Luke.
• 10. The spiritual reality resulting from his earthly existence.