The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Man perceives in himself and in nature both what we call growth and what we call destruction, or perhaps dissolution. And he instinctively forms his ideas in such a way that he is permeated with a certain belief in reality when, whether in himself or in nature, he perceives building up—growth: He forms ideas about what in a sense goes outside reality, loses reality, by directing his glance to destruction, to dissolution; so that it seems quite natural to him to describe what thus goes outside reality, when he perceives it being dissolved, as gradually passing over into the so-called nothingness of the physical world.

I have often said that if we want really to arrive at ideas concerning the spiritual world, we must modify in many respects those ideas acquired in the physical world. We must have different ideas from those acquired in the physical world if we wish to enter at all with our thinking into the spiritual world. It is especially important that we should form a concept which is actually found everywhere in our study of spiritual science, but which we cannot too often bring before our souls—the concept of a connection during physical life between our consciousness and the corresponding processes in our physical organism, We shall never grasp the working of consciousness in the physical world unless we can connect it with the concept of destruction or dissolution. Were there only growth, only development in us as physical beings, we could never be conscious beings in the physical world. In this physical world what is represented in growth, in budding and sprouting, never leads to consciousness. Consciousness can begin only where the processes of growth are invaded by destruction, by processes of dissolution. On this basis we should make ourselves familiar with the ideas which initiation gives us concerning man's so-called evolution

We know that at first the child grows into the world as in a kind of dream. This dream-life of the child is, however, closely united with his growth, with all the sprouting and budding processes; and the younger the child whom we consider, the more do these budding and sprouting processes meet our eye. Only when the individuality in the human organism gains sufficient power to oppose the sprouting and budding, and can bring into them processes of dissolution, does fuller and more complete consciousness appear. We become conscious to the extent to which we are capable of pulling down in us what inner Nature builds up.

When anyone who has gone through initiation observes how consciousness arises in man, he finds that every conscious thought that is grasped, and every conscious feeling that asserts itself, are bound up with the fact that processes of destruction are contending with the building-up processes in the organism. When we look at conscious life we look at destruction; and we must accustom ourselves to have not merely a positive feeling for reality wherever we see a process of sprouting, budding, a process of growth, but we must rise to a feeling for the conscious life of the spirit by observing what part this conscious life of spirit plays in the physical world, by observing, that is, the processes of death and destruction. It is for this reason that we have to alternate the conscious processes with the unconscious processes of sleep, so that what we have destroyed during our waking life of thought may be built up again by the unconscious forces of nature in our organism. That is the swing of life's pendulum—that the soul force when it wakes to consciousness wears out and destroys what mere nature creates in the human organism; and that from the moment the soul, in sleep, forsakes the natural life of the body, from that moment the processes, activities, of sprouting and budding go forward. Hence it is not correct to believe that man's waking life is to be compared with life in summertime, when the earth is budding and sprouting. No! the earth itself as spiritual being wakes when towards autumn the dying processes begin, and it is during the winter that the earth is fully awake. During summer, during the budding and sprouting processes, we have the sleeping life of the earth. The Earth-Spirit sleeps during the summer and during the winter it wakes.

I have previously pointed out that it is due to spiritual initiation that the moment of time when man is destined to unite himself with what in earth-evolution should call up the fullest waking life—with the Christ Impulse—that this moment has been placed in the middle of winter, not in the summer, namely, the Christmas festival. On the other handy I have also called attention to how in more ancient times, when manes knowledge proceeded more from his participation in the sleeping condition of the earth, when his soul had to sink into the sleeping Earth-soul in order to have Imagination, the. dream-like Imagination of the old spiritual vision, then the corresponding festival, the John festival, had to be held during the heat of summer. This festival might be said to signify union in dream and ecstasy with the sleeping, dreaming spirit of the earth. The Christmas festival signifies a conscious union with the waking Earth-spirit. It is just through conceptions such as these, my dear friends, that we come to feel man's renewed connection with the cosmos We enter into this connection concretely, not by merely enthusing in a general way about man being a microcosm of the macrocosm, but by gaining accurate knowledge of how the mighty Earth-being sleeps and wakes, taking the whole year for this alternation, whereas man sleeps and wakes in the course of twenty-four hours.

And now we must turn our gaze with more precision to what we experience in the physical world as consciousness. Let us sketch diagrammatically the sprouting, budding life of our nervous system (see diagram). Clairvoyance actually sees the sprouting, budding life, for example, of the nervous system, especially of the brain, in this form of a fiery wave. Now the human life of soul is in truth outside this sprouting, budding life, Were I to draw the human soul-life as it is in the night, in sleep, I should have to draw it completely outside this figure; in waking life, however, we must picture the soul-life as permeating itself with this budding, sprouting, let us say, fiery life. Thus were the soul-life to permeate the physical organic life only, no consciousness would arise, flow does consciousness arise? For that, the soul must work upon the physical. In the physical to begin with are budding, sprouting processes of growth which are as it were distributed over the life of the nerves. It is these processes of growth that are now broken down and destroyed. A process arises similar to what takes place when the budding and sprouting plant gradually withers and decays; thus the soul life induces processes of destruction in this budding, sprouting life. The destructive processes I indicate here by holes in the shading.

When we are awake, therefore, our soul-life destroys the physical processes of growths breaks them down. Man as a rule knows nothing of this destruction. Clairvoyant vision alone perceives it and makes it possible to say: “Now that you have put yourself into relation with the spiritual world (I say expressly with the spiritual not the physical world) if you wish to have ideas you must destroy something in you.” What makes initiation such a shattering experience is that we perceive this destruction, that we know that If we bring ourselves into relation, let us say, with an Angel or an Archangel being of the spiritual world and want to gain some ideas concerning that being, that is, if we want to perceive the being truly, we must first destroy something in ourselves.

Not that anything is actually destroyed by initiation, but through initiation we become conscious of what is all the time being destroyed in the everyday process of perception. It is just the same when we put ourselves in relation with a flower or an animal, only in the usual course of life we are not aware of it. We begin to know of it only when these processes of destruction work back as reflection into the life of the soul. That is the change. Suppose, for examples you see a red flower. What you experience in the red flower causes you to call forth in yourself a process of destruction, You are, however, unaware of this. But what is destroyed is reflected into your soul and brings about that you have the red flower as an idea, as a perception. Thus you must first create in yourself a copy of the red flower by destroying the sprouting and budding processes, and while you destroy these you create what you then see. Conscious life consists in such processes of destruction, which again are followed by building-up processes It is an inner working at one's own organism and, strictly speaking, lies at the root of all works of human culture. When we instigate cultural work we also destroy something in nature. We cannot build a house if we do not go outside to get wood for it by a process of destruction, and what is thus the product of destruction, torn away from nature, we build up into our artistic creations. Strictly speaking, we do this in all works of art. We do just the same as the destroying, demolishing processes do to the budding, sprouting, which arrest processes of growth. What is embedded into the living organism as an inserted element of death forms the content of conscious being. Every time we display consciousness we are planting what is dead into what is alive, and the more conscious we become the more do we insert a dead man into our living man. Then sleep has the task of dissolving away these dead elements, all but certain remains which, persisting as processes throughout the whole of physical life, lie at the foundation of memory, Were everything to be dissolved by sleep, we should have no memory, no recollection. Thus you see if we want to acquire consciousness we have to recognise in our life a real winter. Consciousness means spreading the destroying, withering life of.nter over the budding, sprouting summer life, We have to make winter within us if we wish to become conscious. Thus we must in a sense learn to value the winter, because were it always summer in our life the spirit could not experience the physical consciously but would remain for ever unconscious.

Something more may arise out of these considerations, my dear friends. A materialistic observer of the world may easily say: It is not possible to look into the way in which consciousness works in the physical body. But when through spiritual science we learn that a parallel exists, in the way referred to, between the individual life of man and the life of the Earth-spirit, then we come to the following conclusion - that if we wish to have a concept of sleeping man and what he really is, all we need do is to imagine ourselves in the budding; sprouting life of summer where everything buds and blossoms. What goes on outside in the earth goes on in miniature and imperceptibly in manes physical nature. We should simply experience summer in man when we look at him asleep, and winter when we look at him awake. If we wish to know what happens to consciousness when it makes use of the physical body as instrument, we must observe how in autumn everything begins to dry up and wither, everything begins to die away, In the external picture we can make of winter we have a true idea of what the waking consciousness brings about in man's physical organism by using it as an instrument. That is why when the soul is outside the body and clairvoyant consciousness looks at the body out of which the soul has departed, it perceives the body as a budding, sprouting world. It is childish to believe that the clairvoyant, when outside the body with his soul, sees the body in the same way as in physical life we see another human being. We are wrong in thinking that the man lies there with his soul hovering above and that the soul looks back on the body and sees the man lying there beneath. That is not so. The moment the soul goes forth, the body becomes the world, a summer world; and if the soul remains clairvoyant on returning to the body, it experiences in itself the personal, individual winter.

We can thus discover an inner connection between the life of man and the life of the earth. When we consider the life of the earth and look first at summer time, outside us we see in this summer time what works and weaves in us in the same way but works and weaves during our sleeping condition. If we now seek to express in a few words the feeling of this working and weaving in sleep, we can do so as follows. All this is the world of coming to birth, of arising, And when we feel ourselves in this world, we can say, “OUT OF THE DIVINE WE ARE BORN”. For in so far as with our own forces we belong to this world, this budding and sprouting world, we must say: EX DEO NASCIMUR, Out of the Divine we are born. Man has been able to say EX DEO NASCIMUR at every stage of earth evolution and will be able to say it also in each future evolutionary stages

On the other hand it is essential for our own cycle of time, which follows the Mystery of Golgotha, that we should now understand that the forces of dying life work in us; melting forces, dissolving life, and that with this melting away, this dissolution of life, consciousness is connected. We find the consciousness of the earth, the waking earth-life, in the winter time. In order in winter to live with the earth in the physical world, we must dive down into what is dying, But since the Mystery of Golgotha, we do this by taking the Christ Impulse with us into what is dying: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR. We make this into a guiding motto through the other half of the year, when the earth is awake, awake in the dying life: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

Thus the earth's year is divided for us into two halves, into the half which has its culminating point at Midsummer, for which the saying holds good: EX DEO NASCIMUR, and the other half which has its culminating point at Christmas time, for which we have the saying: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

We should not think that the correct conception of man as the microcosm of the macrocosm is merely an abstraction, Nor should we think that we can do very much if we hold to abstract ideas about it. Rather should we be clear that we shall meet this conception more and more on really coming to the true life of the Spirit of the Earth. You see, when we observe the earth in winter with its dying, freezing life, this dying, freezing life is the expression of the thinking, feeling and perception of the waking Earth-spirit. But we must think of the Earth-spirit in connection with what surrounds us as our immediate world. We should picture the world, as it were, as a great spiritual being having the earth as physical instrument. And we get this idea of what the earth is thinking, especially of what it is thinking during winter, when we consider the whole manner in which the surroundings of the earth work into the earth. Imagine yourself on a night in winter, with your gaze directed to the stars, with perhaps the moon among the stars, and you have to say that the whole constellation of this starry world is an outward expression, a picture, of what is thought consciously on the earth, and we live in it because the cosmos enters into relation with the earth. You then see how we are standing in a living way within the thinking of the earth, in all that weaves and waves around the earth as earthly thinking, just as in summer, livingly with our own soul, we are within the earth-sleep;

Nevertheless, in summer we should take our place consciously in the life of the earth. We should call on. our astral forces so as not to succumb to the earth-sleep, Many people very easily fall asleep in the heat of summer, because during the universal sleep of the earth their astral forces are not strong enough to keep them awake. If we ourselves sleep during the summer time our activity is only equal in value to that of the earths In winter we should develop in the subconscious the forces for sleep which withstand the universal earth-life, whereas for the waking life during winter we need the forces lying more in the direction of the waking life of the Earth-spirit. So we might say we swing with our own life, with the lesser oscillations of our own life, within the yearly oscillations of the Earth-being, of the conscious Earth-being. And this conscious Earth-being is completely dependent on the star constellations There you have a living impression of the way in which our own soul-life is interwoven indirectly with the life of the stars in the sleeping and waking of the earth This gives us a living picture of what astrology is really meant to be, if it is at all to be taken seriously. Therefore, as I have often said Astrology is either the purest dilettantism, or it can only be striven for as an essential part in the deep study and knowledge of spiritual science.

Recently I have often emphasised, my dear Friends, how necessary it is that those who are drawn to spiritual science should acquire conceptions that will lead them from what is merely the content of thought into living reality, Think what entirely new sides of life open to us when we know that consciousness is based on a breaking-up, destruction, and that there has to be destruction for consciousness to have its physical instruments. For in very truth just as we cannot work in the physical world without destroying nature, so we cannot become conscious without the destruction in us of our processes of growth. Clairvoyance has to look upon these continuous processes of destruction, it has without bias to see how our whole life through, a gradual death is taking place for consciousness to be able to exist. Initiation consists in our receiving as it were a concentrated picture of this process of destruction spread out over the whole time between birth and death. This process is concentrated in actual physical death; were not physical death to come about, in the spiritual world after death we should never be able to develop consciousness. Death, the destruction of the physical and etheric bodies, is the primary condition for the development of consciousness in the time between death and a new birth. As a plant cannot be there if the root is not, so the consciousness between death and a new birth cannot exist if it is not rooted in the process of death. As in the first years of physical existence we have to strive for the possibility of destroying from the standpoint of the soul the early processes of budding and growth, consciousness only awaking to the extent to which we can embed the processes of destruction into the processes of growth—as only when the force of the destructive process has reached a certain stage a consciousness develops—so we have to destroy and discard the whole body. And the act we thus perform, this shedding first of the physical and then of the etheric body, is the starting point for the consciousness between death and a new birth. We acquire the faculty of consciousness between death and a new birth by being able to kill ourselves—we may be allowed to say this, for it corresponds with the truth—by being able, that is, to undergo the processes that take place in death. As life here between birth and death has its starting point in the merely plant-like life of the child, so the life between death and a new birth has its starting point in the process of death. We are here looking at strictly destructive processes, and it is important that we should adapt ourselves to the possibility of sharing in the life of the whole course of nature and that of the entire spiritual cosmos.

If you examine the modern life of spirit, my dear friends, you will find that in reality—I have pointed to this before—the development of man is gradually withdrawing more and more from the inner process of existence, and only the external world is considered. There is a growing disinclination to look at the whole of nature, the tendency being more and more to consider only half of her—the growing, budding and sprouting forces. Where annihilation begins, there existence is thought to cease. The materialist cannot think otherwise, since he can never form ideas about spiritual life in the physical world, because these ideas about spiritual life in the physical world begin just where the processes of destruction begin. He wants to investigate only the growing processes for to him they are the sole reality. When anything begins to wither he sets out to investigate what grows up over it, or he seeks in the dying process the chemical remains, that iso the material, the physical. The important point is that man has no wish to direct his attention to the other half, to the dying. Yet it is only from what passes away that men can acquire an insight into the existence of the conscious soul-life. This is a vastly important truth—that the modern world-outlook, because it has developed in the way indicated because it always directs attention to what is budding and sprouting, has deprived itself of the power to see the spiritual, the spiritual only betraying its presence in things when they begin to disintegrate. As long as there is budding and sprouting, the spiritual works within the beings, not appearing as spirit but manifesting externally through material processes. If the spiritual is to appear in the beings, processes of destruction must take place. The spirits of the blossoms, the elementary spirits of the plants, may not remain when the blossoms open and the flowers are developed, when the sun with its sounding waves charms forth the budding, sprouting life. “If it strikes you, you are deaf.” Read these words at the beginning of Part II in Goethe's “Faust” with understanding, The spirits must dive down, They can emerge only when the budding and sprouting life withdraws.

You see, the poetic perception of Goethe was so living that he thoroughly realised how the budding and sprouting that comes forth with the rising of the sun makes it necessary for the elves to recede. But this will become clear to us, my dear friends, that at the sight of the physically dying world there arises first the misty realm of the spirit and then the whole true spirit realm. It is not without meaning when in folklore we hear that to become spiritual the trees must first decay, that only when they are decaying do they let us see the spirit. If we go out into the country and see a decaying, dried-up tree-trunk, it is really showing for the first time its spiritual appearance. There must everywhere first be destruction before the spiritual is to appear.

Modern spiritual life, it is true, consists just in this—that souls have withdrawn from such an intimate living together with nature that they are able to feel the decaying forces and in them all that is spiritually alive. Hence it is that today when we speak of the spiritual, people can form no conception of it at all, for they only consider the world in so far as it buds and sprouts. When it ceases to do this, when decay sets in, for them it leaves the field of reality. If you speak to them of the realm of true life, if you say that the spiritual rises out of the dying, if you tell them all this, you will find that they are listening to something that has absolutely no meaning for them. It may actually happen that if you are speaking today to a gathering of people who have had no previous preparation through spiritual science and you talk of the spiritual living in the world, they have no notion of what is in question. To such people world-conceptions are a matter of complete indifference, They take no interest in discovering; what may be found at the basis of things:. One can have the same kind of experience that we once had at a lecture. You know that we try as far as possible to keep away those who are generally the least cultured of those attending our lectures, those who write for the newspapers. As a rule they understand the minimum of what is spoken about, But sometimes it happens that these very clever people of the present day cannot be kept away. One cannot always act in such a drastic way as was done recently at a certain place in Austria when a reporter came to the lecture and our chairman said to him: “You will certainly not understand anything and had better stay away.” The man had actually bought a ticket. It can't always happen like that, It happened on another occasion that a reporter wrote: “What is this spiritual science meant to be? It is obvious that one person pictures the world in one way and another somehow else, Everyone has a right to his opinion.” Thus in our time you find all over the place complete lack of interest mixed with utter frivolity whenever a world-conception is in question. And this was once written about a lecture: “One person sees the world as a box of bricks, another makes a brew of toads gall with tiger's intestines, a third is a monist, a fourth stares at the confusion without thinking at all, a fifth looks through two pairs of spectacles at the forces of the soul and so (says the writer) we could go on indefinitely.” He is completely indifferent to all these points of view.

This lack of interest towards a spiritual comprehension of the world is not diminishing, it is increasing, and will go on doing so unless a deepening comes about in the world through spiritual science, Deepening through spiritual science will prove of the greatest value, my dear friends, because it does not merely call upon man's faculty for forming concepts and ideas, but seizes upon his whole soul and permeates it so that he actually feels himself as microcosm in the macrocosm, and really experiences individually what has first to build itself up on the processes of destruction. We can attain an actual living-together-with-the-dead only when we can see in the destructive process of death a process that makes a foundation upon which the spiritual being of man rises after death—a process continuing to work up to the time of a new birth.

Thus spiritual science must mean both familiarizing ourselves with the truth of things and letting the truth of things take hold of our very being. Modern spiritual life is a withdrawal from the truth, a becoming apathetic It is becoming a matter of indifference whether there is real clairvoyant vision or whether “toads' gall is brewed with tiger's intestines”. In its culture and ethics modern spiritual life is on the way to the most frivolous and cynical indifference towards all existence that has to do with the depths of being, On the other hand, spiritual science is developing and can develop in a natural way, since the human soul, simply by interesting itself in the results of spiritual investigation, is taken hold of by the cosmic process, carried into it, interwoven with it. It is not necessary to be clairvoyant, but only to enter honestly into the experiences resulting from clairvoyance, getting to know spiritual science; then one will be laid hold of and carried along by what is received through anthroposophical concepts into a living mutual experience and mutual feeling with the cosmos, For this it is certainly necessary that spiritual science should not be looked upon as something adding to the enjoyment of life, but again and again we must penetrate further with our thought into what spiritual science gives. We need not be clairvoyant at first but must accustom ourselves to consider the things of life from many aspects, in the sense of spiritual science. Hence among us things are described from the most varied aspects. Then the experiences take hold of one and carry the soul in feeling if not with knowledge right into the life of the spiritual world, into the spiritual manifesting in the material.

But now my dear friends, in what spiritual science wishes to bring about in knowledge, in art, in religious feeling, and in ethical will—spiritual science takes its place in our spiritual life as something of which we have to be conscious that it is a new element in modern culture. Any anthroposophist must become conscious of this new thing. Yesterday I pointed this out in another connection—namely, that it is necessary for us to give a new form to the Christ Impulse, that our figure of the Christ is essentially different in form from that of Michelangelo's . Our thinking and feeling have to be thoroughly transformed in face of the new standpoint. Then men will begin to have an inkling of what life is as a whole—intensive, living life, For this has ceased. Wherever we look in our environment there is no longer the feeling Goethe expressed when he said: “Art must be the expression, the true expression, of living cosmic laws.” Art has to be an interpretation of the mysterious laws of nature. Today there is no longer any understanding for that. Hence one sees that in all spheres there is a gradual falling away from the real inner life of truth, in what appears as knowledge on the one hand, and on the other as art. In art today we are fond of speaking of compositions, of juxtapositions of individual parts. What art was in olden times, what it must again become—a creating out of the truth of the things themselves—has vanished. In the fullest sense there is an ahrimanic conspiracy against truth, which is spread abroad in the world, and this appears today in the sphere of art as well as in that of science. In the sphere of science we see everywhere a clinging to what is merely perceived by the senses.

In art, too, we see what resembles this. We see, in man, the possibility of feeling and perceiving the inner truth of things gradually dying out. Thus works of art can be produced and admired throughout the civilised world like “Jean Christophe”, the novel by Romain Rolland.

Anyone who creates out of true art, who feels inner truth, inner ruling truth, will never jumble together such a “work of art” as “Jean Christophe”; he would know that the individuality of a Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Strauss, Gustav Mahler, has its inner truth for each one of them. If we jumble them all together, we produce a vexatious chaos of decadent art like this tiresome “Jean Christophe”, which, however, to the regret of all concerned with real art, is admired throughout the civilised world. It is admired, let me say, because today there is a secret conspiracy against the real, essential truth. Indeed, people are no longer aware that they are sinning against the real, essential truth in admiring this so-called literary work and in letting pass as valid not the living individualities built up from a unity that is alive, but a chaotic, foolish work that is all patched together.

We must, my dear friends, be alive to the various sources of perversion out of which the soul willingly creates at the present time; we must calmly and courageously acknowledge what is thus perverted so as to bring to consciousness the significance of the impulse of spiritual science and its intervention in man's living world of truth. Then we shall understand. that we live in an age in which we must be clear that what confronts us as summer-life, budding, sprouting life, is EX DEO NASCIMUR; diminishing life, the destroying of the soul-life, but spirit issuing forth from this destruction in our life since the Mystery of Golgotha—IN CHRISTO MORIMUR. But in the future men must not remain standing on this ground; when this budding, sprouting life of summer when comes, when the Earth-spirit sleeps, we must find the strength to develop and carry into the sleep of the Earth-spirit a higher force arising from the life of soul resulting from clairvoyant knowledge. Then we have to say: As the world in summer is EX DEO NASCIMUR, so the world in winter; and since the Mystery of Golgotha, is IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

But as we go to meet the sleep, the summer life, the sleep of the external organism of the earth, let us be conscious that we can carry into this time what we now experience out of this actual living together with the spiritual world, what the spirit carries into this time of the earth's sleep—the mood of Whitsuntide. If we have felt: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR aright, we shall bear the Whitsun mood into this sleep-condition of the earth by receiving the impulse spiritual science is able to give.

We are born out of the Divine; the summer life of budding, sprouting nature is witness to this We live with the Christ, and feel that we do, by living ourselves into the winter; when the earth wakes we take the Christ Impulse with us into the life of dying Nature: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR, But by going forward again to meet the summer with the Mystery of Golgotha, we carry the Whitsun mood into life so that it may awake in the darkness of summer, in the budding and sprouting and that amidst the sleeping Earth-spirits we ourselves awake in spirit: PER SPIRITUM SANCTUM REVIVISCIMUS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[It was written on the board]:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[It was written on the board]:

Intellectual activity - dead images.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[It was written on the board:

World of possible memories – imaginations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[It was written on the board]:

World of the unconscious life of imagination – inspirations.

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

[Diagram on the board]:

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

I have spoken of Franz Brentano at some length because the fact is immediately apparent that the first work of this important philosopher, published by his students from his estate, was a work about the life of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus. That provided the external point of contact. But I wanted something more profound with the presentation of this philosopher's life. I wanted to show, through a person who was not just a thinker, not just a scientist, but who was truly a seeker of truth as a whole human being, how a personality of this kind had to position itself in the spiritual life of the second half of the 19th century.

Franz Brentano was born in 1838, so he was a student at the very time when the scientific mentality was emerging within modern civilization. He was a student who, as you have seen, was a devout Catholic who, as a devout Catholic, held firmly to the spiritual world, but only in the way that was possible from Catholic religious practice and Catholic “theology.” This man, who had thus grown into a certain self-evident grasp of the spiritual world, of the immortality of the soul, of the existence of God and so on, did so as a scientist, and indeed as the most conscientious scientist imaginable, in the era when scientific thinking meant everything. So that, more than with any other personality, when one is familiar with Franz Brentano, one has the feeling that here is a person of deep spirituality who, however, in the face of the scientific attitude of the 19th century, did not rise to it, could not penetrate it to a real grasp of spiritual life. I do not actually know of any personality in modern times in whom the necessity for the anthroposophical world view emerges so characteristically. In the case of Franz Brentano, one would like to say: he actually only needed to take one or two steps further and he was with anthroposophy. He did not come to it because he wanted to keep to what was scientifically common practice. Franz Brentano, precisely because of what I described yesterday as the characteristic of his personality, even in his outward appearance, through the dignity of his demeanor, through the seriousness that was present in everything he uttered, already gives the impression that he could have become a kind of leading personality in the second half of the 19th century.

You may now rightly ask: But how is it that this personality has remained quite unknown in the broadest circles? Franz Brentano actually became known only to a narrow circle of students. All these students are people who received the most profound inspiration from him. This can still be seen in the work of those who are in turn the students of those students, for it is they who are actually still around today. Franz Brentano made a significant impression on a narrow circle. And most of the students in this circle are certainly so minded towards him that they perceive him as one of the most stimulating and significant people for centuries.

But the fact that Brentano has remained unknown in the widest circles is characteristic of the entire development of civilization in the 19th century. One could, of course, cite many personalities who, in one direction or another, are also representatives of intellectual life in the 19th century. But you could not find a personality as significant and as characteristic as Franz Brentano, no matter how hard you looked. Therefore, I would like to say: Franz Brentano shows that although natural science, in the form it took in the 19th century, can acquire great authority, it cannot exercise spiritual leadership within the whole of culture despite this great authority. For that, natural science must first be developed into spiritual science; then it has everything in it that can truly, together with spiritual science, assume a certain leadership in the spiritual life of humanity.

To understand this, we must today take a broader view. If we look back to the earliest times of humanity, we know that a kind of dream-like clairvoyance was present everywhere as a general human faculty. To this dream-like clairvoyance, the initiates, the initiates of the mysteries, added higher supersensible knowledge, but also knowledge about the sensory world.

If we were to go back to the very early days of human development, we would find no difference in the way the physical and the supersensible are treated. All spiritual life has proceeded from the mystery schools, which were basically churches and art institutions at the same time. But in the deepest sense, this spiritual life influenced all human life in the old days, including state and economic life. Those who were active in state life sought the advice of the mystery priests, but so did those who wanted to provide impetus in economic life. There was actually no separation between the religious and scientific elements in those ancient times. The leaders of religious life were the leaders of intellectual life in general and were also the people who set the tone in the sciences. But more and more, the development of humanity has taken shape in such a way that those currents of human life that originally formed a unity have separated. Religion has become separate from science, from art.

This happened only slowly and gradually. If we look back to Greece, we find that there was no natural science in our sense, and alongside it, for example, philosophy; rather, Greek philosophy also discussed natural science, and there was no separate natural science. But as philosophy in Greece emerged as something independent, the religious element had already separated from this philosophy. Although the mysteries were still the source of the deepest truths, in Greece, especially in later Greece, what the mysteries gave was already being criticized from the standpoint of philosophical reason. But religious revelation continued, and when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared, it was essentially religious revelation that set out to understand this mystery. Whatever understanding of theology still existed within European civilization during the first few centuries is no longer properly understood by people today; they refer to it disparagingly as 'gnosis' and the like. But there was a great deal of spiritual understanding in this gnosis, and there was a clear awareness that One must understand spiritual matters in the same way as one understands today, for example, gravity or the phenomena of light or anything else in the physical sense. They did not have the awareness that there is a science separate from religious life. Even on Christian soil, the first church fathers, the first great teachers of Christianity, were absolutely convinced that they were treating knowledge as something unified. Of course, the Greek separation of religious life was already there, but they included both the contemplation of the religious and the rational contemplation of the merely physical in the treatment of all spiritual matters. It was only in the Middle Ages that this changed. In the Middle Ages, scholasticism arose, which now made a strict separation - as I already pointed out yesterday - between human science and what is actual knowledge of the spiritual. This could not be attained through the application of independent human powers of knowledge; it could only be attained through revelation, through the acceptance of revelations. And more and more it had come to be that one said: Man cannot penetrate the highest truths through his own powers of knowledge; he must accept them as they are delivered by the church as revelation. Human science can only spread over what the senses give and draw some conclusions from what the senses give as truths, as I said yesterday.

Thus, a strict distinction was made between a science that spread over the sensory world and that which was the content of revelation. Now, for the development of modern humanity, the last three to five centuries have become extraordinarily significant in many respects. If you had told a person from those older times, when religion and science were one, that religion was not based on human knowledge, he would have considered it nonsense; for all religions originally came from human knowledge. Only it was said: If man confines himself to his consciousness, as it is given to him for everyday life, then he does not attain to the highest truths; this consciousness must first be raised to a higher level. From the old point of view, it was said just as one is forced to say today, for example, according to what I have presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science in Outline”: that man must ascend through special treatment of his soul abilities in order to gain higher knowledge. This was also said in ancient times. People were aware that with ordinary consciousness one can only recognize what is spread around man; but one can further develop this consciousness and thus arrive at supersensible truths. Thus in those ancient times one would not have spoken of a revelation reaching man somewhere without his own activity. That would have been felt to be nonsense. And so all the dogmas contained in the various church teachings originally come from such initiation truths. Today, people easily say: dogmas such as the Trinity or the Incarnation must have been revealed, they cannot be approached through human cognitive abilities. But originally they did arise out of human cognitive abilities.

And in the Middle Ages, people had progressed to a greater use of their intellect. This is characteristic, for example, of scholasticism, in that the intellect was used in a grand sense, but only applied to the sensual world, and that at this stage of human development one no longer felt capable of developing higher powers of cognition, at least not in the circles in which the old dogmas had been handed down as doctrines of revelation. Then they refused to pave the way for man to the supersensible world through higher powers of knowledge. So they took over what had been achieved in ancient times through real human knowledge, through tradition, through historical tradition, and said that one should not examine it with human science.

People gradually came to accept this attitude towards knowledge. They gradually got used to calling belief that which was once knowledge, but which they no longer dared to attain; and they only called knowledge that which is actually gained through human cognitive abilities for the sensual world. This doctrine had become more and more pronounced, especially within Catholicism. But as I already told you yesterday: basically, all modern scientific attitudes are also nothing more than a child of this scholasticism. People just stopped at saying that the human intellect could only gain knowledge about nature, and did not care about the supersensible knowledge. They said that man could not gain this through his abilities. But then it was left to faith to accept the old knowledge as handed-down dogmas or not.

After the 18th century had already proclaimed mere sensual knowledge and what can be gained from it through rational conclusions, the tendency emerged in the 19th century in particular to only accept as science what can be gained in this way by applying human abilities to the sensual world. And in this respect, the 19th century has achieved an enormous amount, and great things are still being achieved in the field of scientific research through the application of scientific methods.

I would like to say that the last public attempt to ascend into the spiritual world was made at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century by the movement known as German idealism. This German idealism was preceded by a philosopher like Cart, who now also wanted to express the separation between knowledge and belief philosophically. Then came those energetic thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Flegel, and these stand there, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, like last mighty pillars, because they wanted to go further with the human capacity for knowledge than mere sensory knowledge and what can be deduced from it.

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are very different from one another. Fichte started from the human ego, developed an enormous power precisely in grasping the human ego, and sought to conquer the world cognitively from the human ego. Schelling developed a kind of imaginative construction of a world view. This impetus in the imaginative construction of thoughts even brought him close to an understanding of the mysteries. Hegel believed in the thought itself, and he believed that in the thought that man can grasp, the eternal lives directly. It is a beautiful thought when Hegel said that he wanted to recognize the spirit and conquer it from the point of view of thought. But only those who grasp Hegel's general striving, this striving towards the spirit, can really taste him. For when one reads Hegel — most people soon stop reading, after all — he is, despite his belief in the spirituality of thought, a terribly abstract thinker when he expounds his ideas. And it is true that, although the impulse that lived in Hegel in terms of the spirit was an immensely strong one, Hegel gave mankind nothing but an inventory of abstract concepts.

Why was that so? It is indeed a tremendous tragedy that these robust, powerful thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, did not actually penetrate to spirituality.

This is because, in the general civilization of that time, humanity was not yet mature enough to really open the gates to the spiritual world. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel only got as far as thought. But what is the thought that lives in man in ordinary consciousness?

Do you remember what I said some time ago? When we follow a person's life from birth to death, we have the person before us as a living being; soul and spirit warm and illuminate what stands before us as a physical being. When the person has died for the physical world, then we have the corpse in the physical world. We bury or cremate this corpse. Just think what a tremendous difference there is for an unprejudiced human observer of life between a fully living human being and a corpse. If you can only grasp this difference with your heart, then you will be able to understand what the spiritual scientist has to say about another phase of life, when man is considered between death and a new birth, as he is as a soul-spiritual being in a spiritual world, how he develops there, how he, while growing old here on earth, becomes younger and younger in the spiritual world until the moment when he finds his way down to a physical embodiment. What lives in man can be grasped just as much with the higher spiritual powers as one can grasp what lives in a physical human being. And then one can ask oneself: What remains of it when the human being has been born, what presented itself to our view in the spiritual world above, before the soul-spiritual descended? What remains in the human being, perceptibly, are his thoughts. But these thoughts, which the human being then carries within himself here on earth through the physical body, are the corpse of the thoughts that belong to the human being when he lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual and soul world. The abstract thoughts we have here are quite a corpse compared to the living being that is in man between death and a new birth, just as the corpse is in the physical compared to the living person before he has died for the physical world.

Those who do not want to take the step of enlivening abstract thoughts allow nothing more to live in them than the corpse of what was in them before they descended to earth. And only this corpse of thoughts lived in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, however magnificent these thoughts are. One would like to say: In ancient times, when religion, science and art were still one, something of the life that belongs to man in the spiritual world still lived on in earthly thoughts. Even in Plaio, one can perceive in the sweep of his ideas how something supermundane lived on in him. This is becoming less and less. People keep the knowledge of the supermundane as revelation. But otherwise the human being would not have been able to become free, he would not have been able to develop freedom. The human being comes more and more to have nothing but the corpse of his prenatal inner life in his thinking. And just as one sometimes finds in certain people, when they have died, an enormous freshness in the corpse for a few days, so it was with the corpse-thoughts of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: they were fresh, but they were nevertheless just those corpses of the supersensible, of which a real spiritual science must speak.

But I ask you now: Do you believe that we could ever encounter a human corpse in the world if there were no living people? Anyone who encounters a human corpse knows that this corpse was once alive. And so someone who really looks at our thinking, our abstract, our dead, our corpse thinking, will come to the conclusion that this too once lived, namely before man descended into a physical body.

But this realization had also been lost to man, and so people were experiencing dead thinking, and they revered everything that came to them from living thinking as a revelation, if they still placed any value on it at all. This was particularly confirmed by the great advances in natural science that came in the period I have already mentioned, when Franz Brentano was young.

To the many peculiarities of Franz Brentano, I must add two more today. Yesterday I wanted to characterize the personality more, today I want to point out the development over time. Therefore, today's consideration must be somewhat more general.

In addition to all the qualities that I mentioned yesterday about this Franz Brentano, who grew out of Catholicism but then became a general philosopher, he had an immense antipathy towards Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. He did not rail against them as Schopenhauer did, because he had a better education; but he did use harsh words, only more delicately expressed, not in the same truly abominable tone as Schopenhauer's. But one must realize that a man who grows out of Catholicism into a new outlook cannot, after all, have any other attitude toward Fichte, Schelling and Hegel than Franz Brentano had. When one has outgrown scholasticism, one wants to apply to the sense world what for Hegel, for example, is the highest human power of cognition, thinking, and in the sense world, thinking is only an auxiliary means.

Just think: with this thinking-corpse one approaches the sense world, one grasps inanimate nature first. You cannot grasp living nature with this thinking anyway. This thinking corpse is just right for inanimate nature. But Hegel wanted to embrace the whole world with all its secrets with this thinking corpse. Therefore, you will not find any teaching about immortality or God in Hegel, but what you do find will seem quite strange to you.

Hegel divides his system into three parts:

logic, natural philosophy, and the doctrine of the spirit = art, religion, science

Logic is an inventory of all the concepts that man can develop, but only of those concepts that are abstract. This logic begins with being, goes to nothingness, to becoming. I know that if I were to give you the whole list, you would go crazy because you would not find anything in all these things that you are actually looking for. And yet Hegel says: That which emerges again in man when he develops being, nothingness, becoming, existence and so on as abstract concepts, that is God before the creation of the world.

Take Hegel's logic, it is full of abstract concepts from beginning to end, because the last concept is that of purpose. You can't do much with that either. There is nothing at all about any kind of soul immortality, about a God in the sense that you recognize it as justified, but rather an inventory of nothing but abstract concepts. But now imagine these abstract concepts as existing before there is nature, before there were people, and so on. This is God before the creation of the world, says Hegel. Logic is God before the creation of the world. And this logic then created nature and came to self-awareness in nature.

So first there is logic, which, according to Hegel, is the god before the creation of the world. Then it passes into its otherness and comes to itself, to its self-awareness; it becomes the human spirit. And the whole system then concludes with art, religion and science as the highest. These are the three highest expressions of the spirit. So in religion, art and science, God continues to live within the earth. Hegel registers nothing other than what is experienced on earth in everyday life. He actually only proclaims the spirit that has died, not the living spirit.

This must be rejected by those people who seek science in the modern sense, based on a scientific education. It must be rejected because, when one penetrates into nature with dead concepts, the matter does not go so that one remains with the abstractions. Even if you are so poorly educated in botany that you transform all the beautiful flowers into the number of stamens, into the description of the seed, the ovary and so on, even if you have such abstract concepts in your head, and then go out with a botany drum and bring back nothing but abstract concepts, at least the withered flowers are still there, and they are still more concrete than the most abstract concepts. And when you, as a chemist, stand in the laboratory, no matter how much you fantasize about all kinds of atomic processes and the like, you cannot help but also describe what happens in the retort when you have a certain substance inside and below it the lamp that causes this substance to evaporate, melt and so on. You still have to describe something that is a thing. And finally, when physicists in optics also draw for you how light rays refract and describe everything that light rays still do according to the physicists, you will still be reminded of colors again and again when that beautiful drawing is made that shows how light rays pass through a prism, are deflected in different ways. And even if all color has long since evaporated in the physical explanation of color, you will still be reminded of the colors. But if you want to grasp the spiritual with a completely abstract system of concepts and with completely abstract logic, then you have no choice but to use abstract logic. A person like Franz Brentano could not accept this as a real description of the spirit, nor could the other scholastics, because at least they still have tradition as revelation. Therefore, as a student in the mid-19th century, Brentano was faced with a truly irrepressible thirst for truth and knowledge, with an inner scientific conscientiousness that was unparalleled in his time, so that he could not receive anything from those who were still the last great philosophers of modern civilization. He could only accept the strict method of natural science. In his heart he carried what Catholicism with its theology had given him. But he could not bring all this together into a new spiritual understanding.

But what is particularly appealing is how infinitely truthful this human being was. Because – and this brings me to the other thing I mentioned – when we look at the human being as he is born into the physical world, as he makes his first fumbling movements as a child, as we first fumbling movements as a child, we see in an unskillful way the unfolding of what was tremendously wise before it descended into the physical world. If we understand spiritual science correctly, we say to ourselves: We see how the childlike head organism is born. In it we have an image of the cosmos. Only at the base of the skull do the earthly forces, as it were, brace themselves. If the base of the skull were rounded, as the top of the head is rounded, the head would truly be a reflection of the cosmos. This is something that human beings bring with them. We can certainly regard the head, when we consider it as a physical body, as a reflection of the cosmos. This is truly the case.

I was criticized for mentioning an important fact in public, but without mentioning such facts, one cannot actually get to the world's interrelations: I have publicly stated that there is a certain arrangement of furrows in the human brain, certain centers are and so on. Even in these smallest details, this human brain is a reflection of the starry sky at the time when the person is born. In the head we see an image of the cosmos, which we also see externally with our senses, even though most people do not perceive its spiritual aspect. In the chest organism, in what mainly underlies the rhythmic system, we see how the roundness of the cosmos has already been somewhat overcome by adapting to the earth. But if you follow the chest organism with its peculiar formation of the spine with the ribs and sees how this thoracic organism is connected to the cosmos through breathing, then, even if only in a very altered form, something like an image of the cosmos can still be seen in the thoracic, in the rhythmic organism. But no longer in the metabolic-limb organism. There you cannot possibly see anything that is modeled on the cosmos. Now, the formation of the head is connected with thinking, the thoracic organism, the rhythmic organism with feeling, and the metabolic-limb organism with will.

Why is it precisely the metabolism-limb organism, which is actually the most earthly part of the human being, that is the seat of the will? This is how it is connected: in the human head we have a very faithful image of the cosmos. The soul-spiritual has flowed into the head, into the formative forces. One could say that the human being learned from the cosmic forces before descending to earth and formed his head accordingly. He still forms the thoracic organism a little, but no longer the limb organism at all. The will is in the latter. So that when one looks at the human external organism, thinking must be assigned to the head, feeling to the middle man and willing to the metabolic-limb organism. But in what is really the lowest, the metabolism and the limbs, the spiritual also maintains itself best, so that in our thinking we have only a corpse of what we were before we descended. In our feelings we have a little more, but feeling, as you know, remains in a dream-like state, and the will, one no longer even notices with the ordinary consciousness. The will remains entirely in the unconscious, but in it there is still most of the life of what we were before we descended to earth. When we are developed as a child, most of our immortal soul is in our will. Now, most people do not have many scruples; they say: Man has the three soul powers within him, thinking, feeling and willing. You know, these three soul activities are listed as if they were present for ordinary consciousness, whereas in anthroposophy we first have to point out that actually only thinking is fully awake. Feeling is already like dreams in people, and people know nothing at all about willing. I must emphasize again and again: Even if we only want to raise an arm, the thought, “I am raising my arm,” flows into the organism and becomes will, so that the arm is actually raised. Man knows nothing of this, he sleeps through it in the waking state, just as he otherwise sleeps through things from falling asleep to waking up. So instead of saying: we have in us the waking thinking, the dreaming feeling, the sleeping willing, they say: we have thinking, feeling and willing, which are supposed to be on a par with one another.

Now imagine a person who has an infinite sense of truth and who works with modern science, that is, who only uses thinking. The modern natural scientist, whether he is using a microscope, looking at the cosmos through a telescope, or doing astrophysics with a spectral analyzer, always turns only to conscious thinking. Therefore, it became an axiom for Franz Brentano that all unconsciousness had to be rejected. He wanted to stick only to ordinary conscious thinking, and for this he did not want to develop higher cognitive abilities. What could we actually expect from such a person when he speaks of the soul, when he wants to speak as a psychologist? One might expect that he would not speak of the will at all in psychology if he sticks only to the conscious. One might expect that he would cross out the will entirely, be quite uncertain about feeling, and really treat only thinking correctly.

Other, more superficial minds have not come to this. Franz Brentano's psychology does not divide the soul faculties into thinking, feeling and willing, but into imagining, judging and into the phenomena of love and hate, that is, into the phenomena of sympathy and antipathy, that is, of feeling. You will not find any will in him at all. The right active will is absent from Brentano's psychology because he was a thoroughly honest seeker of truth, and he really had to admit: I just can't find the will.

On the other hand, there is something tremendously moving in seeing how infinitely sincere and honest this personality actually is. Will is absent from Brentano's psychology, for he separates judgment and imagination so that he now has three parts to the life of the soul; but judgment and imagination coincide in terms of the capacity of the soul, so that he actually has only two.

Now consider the consequence of what appears in Brentano. What does he have in reality i. in man? By becoming a modern natural scientist and not giving anything a value that does not present itself to conscious thinking according to the natural scientific method, he excludes volition from the human soul. And what does he thereby eliminate? Precisely that which we bring with us as living beings from our state before we descend into a physical body.

Brentano was confronted with a science that eliminated precisely the eternal in the soul for him. The other psychologists did not feel this. He felt it, and therefore there arose for him the tremendous abyss between what was once a doctrine of revelation that spoke to him of the eternal in the human soul, and what he could find alone according to his scientific method, which even cut away the volition and thus the eternal from the human soul.

Thus Brentano is a personality who is characteristic of everything that the 19th century was unable to give to humanity. The gates to the spiritual world had to be opened. And that is the reason why I have spoken to you about Franz Brentano, who died in Zurich in 1917, because in him I see the most characteristic of all those philosophers of the 19th century who already had a serious striving for truth But they were held fast by the fetters of the natural-scientific spirit, which did not want to rise to a spiritual comprehension of the world, and in this way show everywhere that the time has come when this spiritual conception is needed. What, after all, is the difference between what spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense really wants and the tragic striving of a man like Franz Brentano? That Franz Brentano, with tremendous acumen, has brought in the concepts that can be obtained from ordinary consciousness, and said: That is where you have to stop. But the knowledge is not complete; one strives in vain for real knowledge. But he was never satisfied with that; he always wanted to get out. He just could not get out of his natural science. And that remained so until his death. One might say that spiritual science had to begin where Brentano left off, had to take the step from ordinary consciousness into higher consciousness. That is why he is so extraordinarily interesting, indeed the most interesting philosopher of the second half of the 19th century, because in him the striving for truth was truly something personal. It must be said: if you want to study one symptom of what a person had to experience in the development of science and in the spiritual development of modern times, you can consider this nephew of Clemens Brentano, the philosopher Franz Brentano. He is characteristic of everything that a person has to seek and cannot find with the usual scientific method. He is characteristic of this because one must go beyond what he strove for with such an honest sense of truth. The more closely one looks at him, right down into the structures of his psychology, the more this becomes apparent. He is precisely one of those minds that show: humanity needs a spiritual life again that can intervene in everything. It cannot come from natural science. But this natural science is the fate of modern times in general, as it has become the fate of Brentano. For like the true modern Faust of the nineteenth century, Brentano sits first in Würzburg, then in Vienna, then in Florence, then in Zurich, wrestling with the greatest problems of humanity. He does not admit to himself that “we cannot know”, but he would have to if he were fully aware of his own method. He would actually have to say to himself: natural science is what prevents me from undertaking the path into the spiritual world.

But this natural science speaks a strong, authoritative language. And so it is also in public life today. Science itself cannot offer people what they need for their soul. The greatest achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries could not give people a kind of guiding spirit. And this scientific attitude is a strong obstacle due to its powerful authority, because wherever anthroposophy appears, science initially opposes it, and although science itself cannot give people anything, when it comes to anthroposophy, the question is: does science agree with it? — For even those who know little about science have the overriding feeling today that science is right, and if science says that anthroposophy is nonsense, then it must be right. As I said, people do not need to know much about science, because after all, what do the monistic speakers know about science? As a rule, they have in mind the general things that applied three decades ago! But they act as if they were speaking from the full spirit of contemporary science. That is why many people see it as an authority.

One can also see from Brentano's inner destiny the outer destiny, not the inner destiny of the anthroposophical world view, but its outer destiny.

We are going to continue on the same theme, as this will provide a background for the evaluation of the significant events which now present themselves to the human mind, events in which humanity is now caught up and which are more significant than is often realized today. I have sought to show that momentous occurrences in the spiritual world form the background to these events. I have also spoken of the profoundly significant battle which took place in the spiritual regions of the world between the early 1840s and the autumn of 1879. This was one of the battles which occur repeatedly in world and human evolution and are customarily represented by the image of Michael or St George fighting the dragon. Michael won one such victory over the dragon on behalf of the spiritual worlds in 1879. At that time the spirits of darkness who worked against the Michaelic impulses were cast down from the spiritual realm into the human realms. As I said, from that time onwards they have been active in the feeling, will and mind impulses of human beings. Present-day events can therefore only be understood if one turns the inner eye to the spiritual powers which are now moving among us.

Inevitably the question must arise as to the actual nature of the battle which raged in the spiritual regions between the 1840s and the 1870s, and of the activity of the spirits of darkness since November 1879.

The story of what was behind this significant battle, or we might say behind the scenes of world history, can only unfold slowly and gradually. Today we shall first of all consider some ways in which a reflection of the battle was cast on human regions. I have often drawn attention to the great turning-point in the evolution of modern cultural spheres which came in the early 1840s. This was the turning-point which brought the full impulse for the development of materialism. Materialism could only develop in consequence of major occurrences in the spiritual world which then continued in a downward direction and gradually caused materialistic impulses to be instilled into humanity. If we consider how events in spiritual regions were reflected here on earth, two things are particularly evident.

The first is that the purely physical intellect and a culture based on this showed a tremendous upsurge in the 1840s, 50s, 60s and 70s, much more so than people imagine today—future observers will see this more clearly. It is reasonable to say that anyone who studies the evolution of humanity and has an eye for more subtle elements in human life will note that there has never been such an upsurge in subtlety of conception, acumen and critical faculties for the adherents of materialism as during those decades. All the thinking I have characterized, thinking that leads to technical inventions, to criticism and to brilliant definitions, is physical thinking and is bound to the brain. A materialist who wanted to describe human evolution would have reason to say: ‘Humanity has never been as clever as during those decades.’ It really was clever. If you study the literature—here I mean not only fine literature—you will find that at no other time were ideas so well defined and critical thinking so well developed as in those years, and this was in all kinds of areas. We see a mirror-reflection develop in human souls of the aims certain spirits of darkness were seeking to achieve in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s of the last century, always hoping for victory.

They sought to get possession of an ancient inheritance of humanity. This was something we referred to yesterday: Through millennia, the progressive spirits of light guided humanity by means of blood bonds. They brought people together in families, tribes, nations and races, uniting those who belonged together on the basis of truly ancient human and world karma. With their feeling for those blood bonds people then also had a feeling for missions which went a very long way back in the world, missions designed to make the blood bonds—which, of course, came from the earth—part of the general human karma. If one turns one's attention to the spiritual world during the 1820s and 1830s, when the souls which were later to enter into human bodies were still in that world, one finds that the souls which were about to descend had certain impulses which, among other things, were due to the fact that for millennia they had been bound to particular families, tribes, nations and races each time they were on earth. From the 1840s onwards these souls were meant to make the decision to enter into particular bodies. For the spirits of light who sent their impulses into human souls were, of course, guiding human evolution according to the old blood bonds. And so the human souls in the spiritual worlds had certain impulses to follow the ancient human karma on entering into bodies which were to be the population in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The spirits of light were using the old measures of controlling and guiding those souls.

The spirits of darkness wanted to gain control over this. They wanted to drive the impulses of the spirits of light from those human souls and bring in their own impulses. If the spirits of darkness had won the battle in 1879, the relationship between human bodies and souls would have been utterly different from what it actually has become in people born after 1879. Different souls would have been in different bodies, and the plan according to which human affairs on earth were ordered would have been according to the ideal of the spirits of darkness. But it is not. Thanks to the victory that Michael won over the dragon in the autumn of 1879, this could not happen.

During the 1840s, 50s, 60s and 70s, the battle was reflected on earth in the particular acumen, critical faculty and so on, which I have described. As I have said before, mere speculation does not get us anywhere; it needs genuine spiritual observation. Speculation could never show that the very qualities of the physical intellect which I have mentioned are a reflection here on earth of the battle over reproduction, over the way in which generation follows generation. These things have to be observed. Anyone who thinks that the right connections between the physical and the spiritual worlds can be found by using the physical intellect is very much in error. This approach will normally give the wrong result, because the rules of logic used are those of the physical sciences. These apply only to the physical world, however; they do not apply to the relationship between the physical and the spiritual worlds. This, then, was one way in which the battle for the blood was reflected.

The other way—this again is something I have mentioned before—was the emergence of spiritualism in the 1840s and later. Certain groups, and they were far from small, sought to explore the connections with the spiritual world by using mediums, that is essentially by physical means. If this had succeeded, if the spirits of darkness had been strong enough to gain the victory over Michael's adherents in 1879, spiritualism would have spread enormously. For spiritualism gets its impulses not only from the earth, but is also governed by influences coming from the other world. It is important to be very clear that this is not a matter of choice; it is not possible to be easygoing and say: ‘Either we accept such things or we refuse to accept them.’ It certainly is not like this. The things that happened in spiritualistic circles partly represented a significant intrusion of the spiritual world; they certainly arose from impulses which came from the spiritual world and were often closely bound up with human destinies. They were nevertheless a mirror-reflection of the battle which had been lost in the spiritual region. This is also why spiritualism lost momentum and became so strangely corrupted after that point in time. It would have been the means by which people's attention would have been drawn to the spiritual world, and it would have been the only means if the spirits of darkness had gained the victory in 1879. If they had won, we would live in a world of indescribable acumen which would apply to all kinds of different spheres in life. Speculations on the Stock Exchange, which are sometimes quite dimwitted nowadays, would have been made with incredible acumen. This is one aspect. On the other hand, people far and wide would have sought to satisfy their spiritual needs by using mediums. So there you have what the spirits of darkness intended: physical acumen on the one hand, and a way of seeking connection with the spiritual world based on reduced consciousness on the other. Above all else, the spirits of darkness wanted to prevent spiritual experiences, living experience of the spirit, from coming down into human souls; this was bound to come about gradually after their fall in 1879.

The kind of spiritual experience which is utilized in the spiritual science of anthroposophy would have been impossible if the spirits of darkness had been victorious, for they would then have kept this life and activity in the spiritual regions. It is only because of their fall that instead of merely critical, physical intelligence and the mediumistic approach, it has been and will increasingly be possible to gain direct experiences in the spiritual world. It is not for nothing that I recently told you how the present age is dependent on spiritual influences to a far greater extent than people believe. Our age may be materialistic and want to become even more materialistic, but the spiritual worlds reveal themselves to human beings in many more places than one would think. Spiritual influences can be felt everywhere, though at the present time they are not always good ones.

People often find it embarrassing to admit to others their knowledge of spiritual influences, but many things they do, or initiate, are done because something appeared to them in a dream which was a genuine spiritual influence. Ask poets why they have become poets. Speaking of the time when they first began to be poets they will tell you that they had spiritual experiences which came as in a dream, and this gave them the impulse to be creative. Ask people who have started journals why they did so—I am giving you facts—and they will speak of what they call dreams, though this was actually the transmission of impulses from the spiritual to the physical world. And there is much more of this, also in other areas, but people will not admit to it, for they think if they tell someone: ‘I've done something or other because some spirit or other appeared to me in a dream,’ the other person will call them idiots. This, of course, is not a nice thing to hear. It is the reason why we know so little about what really goes on among people today. The things which now happen sporadically in one place or another are merely the vanguard of what will happen more and more: spirituality will come to human beings because Michael won his victory in 1879. The fact that we have a science of the spirit is also entirely due to this. Otherwise the truths concerned would have remained in the spiritual worlds; they could not have come to dwell in human brains and would not exist for the physical world.

You have been given images which may serve to demonstrate the intentions of the spirits of darkness in the 1840s, 50s, 60s and 70s when they fought the followers of Michael. These spirits have been down here among human beings from the autumn of 1879. They have failed to achieve their aims: spiritualism will not become the general human persuasion; people will not grow so clever from the materialistic point of view that they fall over themselves with their cleverness. The spiritual truths will take root among human beings.

On the other hand, the spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present. For it makes no difference to their reality whether they are recognized or unrecognized.

It will be the main concern of these spirits of darkness to bring confusion into the rightful elements which are now spreading on earth, and need to spread in such a way that the spirits of light can continue to be active in them. They will seek to push these in the wrong direction. I have already spoken of one such wrong direction, which is about as paradoxical as is possible.¹ I have pointed out that while human bodies will develop in such a way that certain spiritualities can find room in them, the materialistic bent, which will spread more and more under the guidance of the spirits of darkness, will work against this and combat it by physical means. I have told you that the spirits of darkness are going to inspire their human hosts, in whom they will be dwelling, to find a vaccine that will drive all inclination towards spirituality out of people's souls when they are still very young, and this will happen in a roundabout way through the living body. Today, bodies are vaccinated against one thing and another; in future, children will be vaccinated with a substance which it will certainly be possible to produce, and this will make them immune, so that they do not develop foolish inclinations connected with spiritual life—‘foolish’ here, of course, in the eyes of materialists.

A beginning has already been made, though only in the literary field where it is less harmful. As I have mentioned,² learned medical experts have published books on the abnormalities of certain men of genius. As you know, attempts have been made to understand the genius of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Viktor Scheffel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Goethe, by showing them to suffer from certain abnormalities. And the most astounding thing in this field is that people have also sought to understand Jesus Christ and the Gospels from this point of view. Two publications are now in existence in which the origins of Christianity are said to be due to the fact that at the beginning of our era there lived an individual who was mentally and psychologically abnormal; this individual went about in Palestine as Jesus Christ and infected people with Christianity.

These, as I said, are the beginnings in the field of literature. The whole trend goes in a direction where a way will finally be found to vaccinate bodies so that these bodies will not allow the inclination towards spiritual ideas to develop and all their lives people will believe only in the physical world they perceive with the senses. Out of impulses which the medical profession gained from presumption—oh, I beg your pardon, from the consumption they themselves suffered—people are now vaccinated against consumption, and in the same way they will be vaccinated against any inclination towards spirituality. This is merely to give you a particularly striking example of many things which will come in the near and more distant future in this field—the aim being to bring confusion into the impulses which want to stream down to earth after the victory of the spirits of light.

The first step must be to throw people's views into confusion, turning their concepts and ideas inside out. This is a serious thing and must be watched with care, for it is part of some highly important elements which will be the background to events now in preparation.

I am choosing my words with great care. I am saying ‘in preparation’ because I am fully aware that to say ‘in preparation’, after the events which have taken place in the last three years, is something significant. Anyone who is able to see more deeply into these matters knows them to be preparations. Only superficial people can believe that this war, which is not a war of the old kind, will tomorrow or the day after be followed by a peace of the old kind. You have to be very superficial to believe this. Many will believe it, of course, if outer events appear to be in accord with the notions some people have; they will fail to realize what actually lies dormant beneath the surface.

It is interesting to consider the decades from the 1840s onwards, both in general and in detail. We have had a general characterization of them in these last weeks, and I have to some extent gone over this again today. A study of representative figures—the spiritual impulses which power evolution come to expression in such figures—will show that the general insights gained also prove true in individual instances. Let me give you an example which may seem to be a minor one. It is something I also mentioned last year.³

Numerous commentaries have been written on Goethe's Faust. Oswald Marbach's⁴ commentaries do not lack depth; they are in some respect profound. It is fair to say that the people who have been least profound are the literary historians, for it is their academic duty to understand such matters, which, of course, tends to be an obstacle to real understanding. Oswald Marbach wrote well about Faust because he was not really a literary historian. He lectured on Goethe's Faust, mathematics, mechanics and technology at Leipzig University, and at the present time the mysteries of the cosmos are easier to penetrate by studying Marbach's mechanics and technology than by applying the ‘modern science’ of historians and literary historians. However, we do find something quite peculiar in the case of Oswald Marbach. He spoke on Goethe's Faust during the 1840s but had ceased to do so by the end of the 1840s, nor did he speak about it in the 50s, 60s and 70s. He only started to lecture on Goethe's Faust again in the late 70s. In between he spoke only on mathematics, mechanics and technology, that is he devoted himself to the sciences which offered the best opportunity, especially at the time, to foster one's acumen and critical faculties. It is most interesting to see how he refers to this in his preface: “Thirty or forty years ago, I used to lecture on Goethe's Faust at Leipzig University—the book was published in 1881—but I have only taken the subject up again in recent years (1875). Why such a long interval? Many factors were involved, outer and inner ones, both subjective and objective. I grew older and finally old and so did my students: semester by semester they grew more and more morose. (People were getting more clever, but for anyone who looked more deeply also more morose!) Open interest of the spirit in the spirit was getting less and less and we lived in an age when usefulness counted more than beauty. For thirty years I yielded to necessity rather than to my own inclination and put philosophy and poetry aside, teaching the exact sciences of mathematics, physics and mechanics instead.”

This was the time of materialistic acumen. One sentence in the preface is tremendously interesting, for it points directly to what mattered at this time. Marbach states that in his conscious mind he always thought he was doing exactly what he wanted to do in the past, whether interpreting Faust or lecturing on technology. However, when he took up Faust again to interpret the work, he had to confess he had been under an illusion, for he had merely obeyed the spirit of the time. It would be good if many people could realize the extent to which they are under illusions. For it was the ideal of the spirits of darkness before 1879, and has been even more so since they walk among us in the human realms since 1879, to spin a web of illusion over human beings and into human brains and let illusions stream through human hearts.

Something else is of interest when one considers such an individual who is representative, as it were, of the influences which heaven brought to bear on earth. He says—and this is in accord with history—that in the 1840s he would mostly speak about Faust, Part 1 at the university, for there was no interest in Part 2. When he started to lecture on Faust again—and we can now say this was after Michael's victory over the dragon—his exposition would mostly be on Part 2. The age of acumen and critical faculties was indeed a time when access to Part 2 of Goethe's Faust was difficult. Even today this work, which is one of the greatest affirmations of Goetheanism, is relatively little understood. Efforts at understanding are, of course, liable to make us feel ill at ease, for nowhere else is the atmosphere in which people live today treated with such humour, such irony, as in Part 2 of Goethe's Faust. People live in a social atmosphere today which has been gradually evolving since the sixteenth century. They hail everything which has been achieved from the sixteenth century onwards as great and glorious achievements of our time and positively wallow in those achievements. Goethe was not only a man of his time; he was inwardly able to look ahead to the twentieth century and wrote Part 2 of Faust for the twentieth, twenty-first and later centuries. This will be only understood in the future. Hidden below the surface is a humorous and ironical look at developments since the sixteenth century, written in grand style. Consider the way Goethe lets the much admired advances on which civilizations live today be presented to Faust as a contrivance of Mephistopheles. Thus not only the paper spectre of the golden florin,⁵ but all the glorious developments from the sixteenth century onwards were the creation of Mephistopheles. In time to come, humanity will see the magnificent irony with which the creations of that time are treated in Part 2 of Faust. On the one hand, we have Faust in his quest for the spirit, and on the other, Mephistopheles, representative of the spirits of darkness, who invents everything humanity has come to depend on and will depend on more and more, especially in the twentieth century.

Much which will help us to be on our guard may be found hidden in Part 2 of Faust. It is a profoundly significant symptom that someone who had used physics, mechanics, mathematics and technology to learn the secrets of the age felt drawn to speak about Part 2 exactly when the victory had been won over the dragon. For decades before this he would speak only of Part 1, which alone could be understood at the time.

We have seen, especially also in the course of last year, that anthroposophy is gradually helping us to bring life into things which Goethe was only able to present in images, and to discover their deeper meaning in Part 2 of Faust.⁶ Anthroposophy clearly cannot be derived from a study of Faust, but it is certainly true that anthroposophy throws a new and much clearer light on the impressive images Goethe has given in Part 2, and in his magnificent discourses in Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years.

Here we touch on a trend which will have to gain ground under the influence of the progressive spirits of light as time goes on, to counter the efforts of the spirits of darkness; and it will gain ground if human beings are on their guard against the spirits of darkness. These last three years have been a challenge to be watchful and on our guard, though the numbers of souls able to perceive the call are as yet far from adequate. We have been able to see the opposite trend at work here, there and everywhere. It is particularly when spiritual life is beginning to be possible that the spirits of hindrance are very much to the fore. We have seen characteristic things and we shall see more of them. Even just to hint at such things is liable to create continuous misunderstanding. The spiritual atmosphere in which people live today is impregnated with the will to misunderstand to such an extent that one's words are immediately interpreted as something different from what they actually mean to convey. One has to use human words, and these have all kinds of associations.

Today, so many people base their judgement on national passions that if one has in some way to characterize someone who belongs to a particular nation, simply as a human individual who is here on earth, this is taken amiss by people who also belong to that nation, despite the fact that something said about individuals who are involved in current events, for example, has nothing to do with one's views of some nation or other. The belief that the tempest now raging is caused by the things that everybody is talking about today is especially harmful because it is especially senseless. The causes are much more deeply hidden and initially have really nothing to do with national aspirations in some respects—please note I am saying in some respects. National aspirations are merely made use of by certain powers, but the majority of people are so superficial that they do not want to know about this. It will be some time before an objective view is taken in this area.

Large sections of humanity find it easiest to ascribe greatness and far-sightedness to ideas which have arisen in a brain as limited as that of someone just out of teacher training college who is let loose not just on a class of school children, but in this case on the whole of humanity. As I said on a number of occasions, it did not need this terrible time which has come upon us to form an objective opinion on Woodrow Wilson from the point of view of spiritual science. I spoke of this in the lectures I gave in Helsingfors in 1913; you can read it up in The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita.⁷ There I spoke of the world schoolmastery of Woodrow Wilson and the shallow superficiality of the man. In those days, however, you were outside the Spirit of the time when you spoke about Woodrow Wilson like this, for his grammar-schoolboy essays on independence, culture and literature were then still being translated into European languages. It will be a long time yet before people will feel embarrassed at taking seriously the grammar school level policies of Woodrow Wilson.

Spirits of darkness are at work everywhere to befog human minds. One day people will waken from the mists and vapours in which they are now asleep and they will find it hard to understand how people could have allowed themselves to be kept on leading-reins by Woodrow Wilson and his wisdom in the early twentieth century without feeling embarrassed. A moment of waking will only come when people begin to feel embarrassed at policies which are possible today.

It is difficult to say truth-inspired things today because they sound too much in opposition to the ideas which have been inculcated into people's heads. And it is difficult to form an independent judgement in the atmosphere which has been produced not only during the last three years, but also through everything I have called a social carcinoma in the lectures I gave in Vienna.⁸ It is necessary to take these things with profound seriousness and not apply to them the concepts and ideas which people have been in the habit of using as their criteria. It will be necessary to realize that the present time demonstrates the inadequacy and indeed the utter uselessness of the ideas humanity has come to accept, and that in terms of world history it is indecent for people to base their judgement on the very ideas which have led to present events when those events clearly show them to have been wrong. Do people think they can cure the ills of the present time by applying the same principles which have brought them about? If so, they are utterly deceiving themselves.

Humanity has a certain sum total of cultural achievements which come from older times. These are now being used up. Every day brings evidence of their being used up without anything new taking their place. People are so little prepared today to understand and see through such things in their full seriousness. Many are still thinking exactly the as they did in 1913, in the belief that the understanding they had in 1913 will also be adequate for 1917; they do not have enough sense of reality to see that this kind of thinking has a great deal to do with the events of the year 1917, having brought them about, and that it cannot cure the ills we experience now, in 1917.

The need of the present time is that we go deeply into the events which have occurred since the fall of the spirits of darkness; we must gain as much insight as possible into the events of the 1880s, 1890s, and the first two decades of the twentieth century. People are utterly confused in their judgement with regard to them.

Neither do they have a real idea of the radical difference in the way people felt and reacted after 1879 compared to the way they did before 1879. Going into something like Part 2 of Goethe's Faust will also help us to progress; this work could not be understood in Goethe's time because it is a critique of what Goethe perceived to be the content of the twentieth century. Characteristically, someone like Oswald Marbach only found access to Part 2 after the fall of the spirits of darkness.

These are the insights and impulses which will help us to grow inwardly so that we may meet the needs of our time. Many of the needs sown before 1879 have not come to fruition, and in connection with this there is a significant question which should really cast its shadow on every human soul. Today I want to put it merely as a question.

The events in which we are caught up today indicate where humanity stands now. What matters now is not merely to understand them, but to find a way out of them. Yet while there is so little will to penetrate the deeper, real impulses which have led to the present age, practical minds will not be able to understand these matters. It is wrong to think that no one has sufficient insight into the current situation. People simply do not want to listen to them, just as they do not want to know about such a thing as Goetheanism, which is also like the voice of the twentieth century. Yet this voice will only be rightly understood if people seek to understand, seriously and in all dignity, the profound significance of the fall of the spirits of darkness in the autumn of 1879. To understand the present time, it will be necessary to understand the spiritual evolution of humanity. That is why I spoke of Oswald Marbach, whose poem I gave you last year to let you see how he looks at the past and ahead to the future. He wrote the poem to mark the anniversary when Goethe found entry into communities then called Masonic or the like, though in the eighteenth century this meant something different from what it means today. Goethe's viewpoint allowed him insight into many of the mysterious impulses which go through the world, things that people are too superficial to want to see. Oswald Marbach wrote these verses to mark the anniversary of Goethe finding his way to the world of the spirit:

With you, my brother, father, sublime master,
We now join hands across a hundred years
To mark the steadfast love which does unite
And closely bind all independent minds;
Greatest of spirits, mind most independent,
All our endeavour is to reach your heights;
We dedicate ourselves to you! We dedicate our sons,
So that one day achievement be the crown.
You strove as we now strive; yet the soul of your endeavour
To gain self-knowledge that will lead to wisdom
Was always life itself with vigour lived,
Was power creative, actively progressing
To works which rise into the light,
In glorious beauty for eternity:
Like Israel you struggled against God
Until you won the victory o'er yourself!
The mystery which now for ever binds us
Will not be told to unenlightened souls;
Yet make it known to all the world
In deeds of purest love that never tire,
In the clear light which spirit gives to spirit,
In life eternal which shall never fade.
Lead on then, Master! Where you went before
We're drawn to follow in most ardent longing.

Such is the mood that must unlock the ‘gates of fulfilment’.

• 1. See fourth to last paragraph of lecture 5.
• 2. See lecture 5.
• 3. Geisteswissenschaftliche Erlaeuterungen zu Goethes “Faust”. Band I. GA 272. Not available in English.
• 4. Oswald Marbach (1810–1890), Professor of Technology in Leipzig, poet and writer; head of ‘Balduin zur Linde’ Freemasons' Lodge. Goethes Faust, Teil I and II erklaert, 1881.
• 5. Faust 2, Act 1, Scene 2: in the imperial palace, Mephistopheles tells the emperor and his advisers that paper money will solve the financial crisis. Scene 4 describes the rapid spread of paper money.
• 6. During 1916, the work on stage productions with eurythmy of scenes from Part 2 of Goethe's Faust which had started in 1915, culminated in a number of performances. See the lecture of 4 November 1916 (GA 172) in The Karma of Vocation, tr. by 0. D. Wannamaker, rev. by G. Church. Anthroposophic Press, Hudson NY, 1984.
• 7. Steiner, R. The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita. Tr. by G. M. Adams, rev. by D. M. Bugbey. Anthroposophic Press, Hudson NY, 1984.
• 8. See Note 2 of lecture 1.

We only learn to know the beings of the sense-world when we observe them in the way they live and act, and it is the same with those beings about which I have been speaking and shall continue to speak in these lectures, the elemental beings of nature. Invisibly and super-sensibly present behind what is physical and sense-perceptible, they participate in all the happenings of the world just as, or rather in a higher sense than do the physical, sense-perceptible beings.

Now you will readily be able to imagine that to these beings the world appears somewhat other than to the beings of the sense-world, for they do not possess a physical body such as is possessed by these latter. Everything which they grasp or perceive in the world must be different from what enters the human eye. This is indeed the case. The human being experiences the earth, for instance, as the cosmic body upon which he moves about. He even finds it slightly unpleasant when through some atmospheric condition or other, as occasionally occurs, this cosmic body becomes softened and he sinks into it even in a slight degree. He likes to feel the earth as something hard, as something into which he does not sink.

This whole way of experiencing things, this whole attitude towards the earth, is, however, completely alien to the gnomes; they sink down everywhere, because for them the whole earth-body is primarily a hollow space through which they can pass. They can penetrate everywhere; the rocks, the metals, present no hindrance to their—shall I say swimming around. There are no words in our language which really express this wandering about of the gnomes inside the body of the earth. It is just that they have an inner experience, an inner perception, of the different ingredients of the earth; when they wander along a vein of metal they have a different experience from when they take their way along a layer of chalk. All this, however, the gnomes feel inwardly, for through all such things they penetrate unhindered. They have not the least idea that the earth exists. Their idea is that there is a space within which they perceive certain experiences; the experience of gold, the experience of mercury, of tin, of silica, and so on. This is to express it in human language, not in the language of the gnomes. Their language is far more perceptive; and it is just because their whole life is spent in journeying along all the veins and seams—ever and again journeying along them—that they acquire the very pronounced intellectuality about which I have spoken to you. Through this they acquire their all-comprehensive knowledge, for in the metals and in the earth everything outside in the universe is revealed to them; as though in a mirror they experience everything which is outside in the universe. But for the earth itself the gnomes have no perception, only for its different constituents, and for the different kinds of inner experience which they offer.

Because of this the gnomes have a quite particular gift for receiving the impressions which come from the moon. It is towards the moon that they continually direct their attentive listening, and in this respect they are—I cannot say the born—it is so difficult to find the appropriate words—but the inherent neurasthenics. Of course, what for us is an illness is for these gnome-beings their actual life-element. For them this is no illness; it is simply a matter of course. It is what gives them that inner sensibility towards all those things of which I have spoken. But it also gives them their inner sensitivity towards the phenomena connected with the phases of the moon.

They follow the changes in the moon-phenomena with such close attention—I have already described their power of attention to you—that it actually alters their form. When, therefore, one follows the existence of a gnome, one receives quite a different impression at full moon from that one receives at new moon, and again at the intermediate phases.

At full moon the gnomes are ill at ease. Physical moonlight does not suit them, and at that time they thrust the whole feeling of their being outwards. They circumscribe themselves, as it were, with a spiritual skin. At full moon they press the feeling of their existence towards the boundary of their body. And in full moonlight, if one has imaginative perception for such things, they really appear like little shining, mail-clad knights. They are clad in a kind of spiritual armour and this it is which presses outwards in their skin to arm them against the moonlight which so displeases them. But when the time of new moon approaches the gnome becomes transparent, wonderful to see, inwardly irradiated with a glittering play of colours. One sees within him, as it were, the processes of a whole world. It is as though one were to look into the human brain, not as an anatomist investigating the fabric of the cells, but as one who perceives inside the brain the shimmering and sparkling of the thoughts. That is how these transparent little folk, the gnomes, appear to one, its though the play of thoughts is revealed within them. It is just at new moon that the gnomes are so particularly interesting, for each of them bears a whole world within himself; and one can say that within this world there actually lies the mystery of the moon.

If one unveils it, this moon-mystery, one comes upon truly remarkable discoveries, for one reaches the conclusion that at the present time the moon is continually approaching nearer—naturally you must not take this in a crude way, as though the moon would collide with the earth—but each year it does in fact come somewhat nearer. Each year the moon is actually nearer the earth. One recognises this from the ever more vigorous play of the moon-forces in the gnome-world during the time of the new moon. And to this coming nearer of the moon the attentiveness of these goblins is quite specially directed; for it is in producing results from the way in which the moon affects them that they see their chief mission in the universe. They await with intense expectation the epoch when the moon will again unite with the earth; and they assemble all their forces in order to be armed in readiness for the epoch when the moon will have united with the earth, for they will then use the moon substance gradually to disperse the earth, as far as its outer substance is concerned, into the universe. Its substance must pass away.

Because they hold this task in view these kobolds or gnomes feel themselves to be of quite special importance, for they gather together the most varied experiences from the whole of earth-existence, and they hold themselves in readiness, when all earthly substance will have been dispersed into the universe,—after the transition to the Jupiter-evolution—to preserve what is good in the structure of the earth in order to incorporate this in Jupiter as a kind of bony support.

You see, when one looks at this process from the aspect of the gnomes, one gains a first stimulus, a first capacity, to picture how our earth would appear if all the water were taken away from it. Just consider how, in the western hemisphere, everything is orientated from north to south, and how, in the eastern hemisphere, everything is orientated from east to west. Thus, if you were to do away with all the water, you would get in America, with its mountains and what lies under the sea, something which proceeds from north to south; and looking at Europe you would correspondingly find that, in the eastern hemisphere, the chain of the Alps, the Carpathians and so on, runs in the east-west direction. You would get something like the structure of the cross in the earth.

When one gains insight into this, one receives the impression that this is really the united gnome-world of the old Moon. The predecessors of our Earth-gnomes, the Moon-gnomes, gathered together their Moon-experiences and from them fashioned this structure, this firm structure of the solid fabric of the Earth, so that our solid Earth-structure actually arose from the experiences of the gnomes of the old Moon.

These are the things which reveal themselves in regard to the gnome-world. Through them the gnomes acquire an interesting, an extraordinarily interesting relationship to the whole evolution of the universe. They always carry over the firm element of a preceding stage into the stage which follows. They are the preservers in evolution of the continuity of the firm structure, and thus they preserve the firm structure from one world-body to another. It belongs to the most interesting of studies to approach the super-sensible world from the aspect of these spiritual beings and to observe their special task, for it is through this that one first gains an impression of how every kind of being existing in the world shares in the task of working upon the whole formation of the world.

Now let us pass over from the gnomes to the undines, the water-beings. Here a very remarkable picture presents itself. These beings have not the need for life that human beings have, neither have they the need for life that the animals have even though instinctively, but one could almost say that the undines, as also the sylphs, have rather a need for death. In a cosmic way they are really like the flying creature which casts itself into the flame. They only feel their life to be truly theirs when they die. This is extraordinarily interesting. Here on the physical earth everything desires to live, for all that has life-force in it is prized. It is the living, sprouting life that is valued. But once we have crossed the threshold, all these beings say to us that it is death which is really the true beginning of life. This can be felt by these beings. Let us take the undines. You know, perhaps, that sailors who travel a great deal on the sea find that in July, August and September—further to the west this is already the case in June—the Baltic Sea makes a peculiar impression, and they say that the sea is beginning to blossom. It becomes, as it were, productive; but it produces just those things which decay in the sea. The process of decay in the sea makes itself felt; it imparts to the sea a peculiar putrefactive smell.

All this, however, is different for the undines. It causes them no unpleasant sensations; but when the millions and millions of water-creatures which perish in the sea enter into the state of decomposition the sea becomes for the undines the most wonderful phosphorescent play of colours. It shines and glitters with every possible colour. Especially does the sea glitter for them, inwardly and outwardly, in every shade of blue, violet and green. The whole process of decomposition in the sea becomes a glimmering and gleaming of the darker colours up to the green. But these colours are realities for the undines, and one can see how, in this play of colours in the sea, they absorb the colours into themselves. They draw these colours into their own bodily nature. They become like them, they themselves become phosphorescent. And as they absorb the play of colours, as they themselves become phosphorescent, there arises in the undines something like a longing, an immense longing to rise upwards, to soar upwards. Upwards they soar, led by this longing, and with this longing they offer themselves to the beings of the higher hierarchies—to the angels, archangels and so on—as earthly sustenance; and in this sacrifice they find their bliss. Then within the higher hierarchies they live on further.

And thus we see the remarkable fact that each year with the return of early spring these beings evolve upwards from unfathomable depths. There they take part in the life of the earth by working on the plant-kingdom in the way I have described. Then, however, they pour themselves, as it were, into the water, and take up by means of their own bodily nature the phosphorescence of the water, the element of decomposition, and bear it upwards with an intensity of longing. Then in a vast, in a magnificent cosmic picture, one sees how, emanating from earthly water, the colours which are carried upwards by the undines and which have spiritual substantiality, provide the higher hierarchies with their sustenance, how the earth becomes the source of nourishment in that the very essence of the undines' longing is to let themselves be consumed by the higher beings. There they live on further; there they enter into their eternity. Thus every year there is a continual upstreaming of these undines, whose inner nature is formed out of the earthly sphere, and who radiate upwards, filled with the longing to offer themselves as nourishment to the higher beings.

And now let us proceed to the sylphs. In the course of the year we find the dying birds. I described to you how these dying birds possess spiritualized substance, and how they desire to give this spiritualized substance over to the higher worlds in order to release it from the earth. But here an intermediary is needed. And these intermediaries are the sylphs. It is a fact that through the dying bird-world the air is continually being filled with astrality. This astrality is of a lower order, but it is nevertheless astrality; it is astral substance. In this astrality flutter—or hover might be a better word—in this astrality hover the sylphs. They take up what comes from the dying bird-world, and carry it, again with a feeling of longing, up into the heights, only desiring to be inhaled by the beings of the higher hierarchies. They offer themselves as that which supplies breathing-existence to the higher hierarchies. Again a magnificent spectacle. With the dying bird-world, this astral, inwardly radiant substance is seen to pass over into the air. The sylphs flash like blue lightning through the air, and into their blue lightning, which assumes first greener, then redder tones, they absorb this astrality which comes from the bird-world, and dart upwards like upward-flashing lightning. And if one follows this beyond the boundaries of space, it becomes what is inhaled by the beings of the higher hierarchies.

Thus one can say: The gnomes carry one world over into another in regard to its structure. They progress, as it were in a direction—the expression is only used as a comparison—which is horizontal with evolution. The other beings—the undines, the sylphs—carry upwards what they experience as bliss in yielding themselves up to death, in being consumed, in being inhaled. There they continue to live within the higher hierarchies; within them they experience their eternity.

And when we pass over to the fire-beings, only think how the dust on the butterfly's wings seems to dissolve into nothing with the death of the butterfly. But it does not really dissolve into nothing. What is shed as dust from the butterfly's wings is the most highly spiritualized matter. And all this passes over like microscopic comets into the warmth-ether which surrounds the earth, each single particle of dust passes like a microscopic comet into the warmth-ether of the earth. When in the course of the year the butterfly-world approaches its end, all this becomes glittering and shimmering, an inner glittering and shimmering. And into this glittering and shimmering the fire-beings pour themselves; they absorb it. There it continues to glitter and shimmer, and they, too, get a feeling of longing. They bear what they have thus absorbed up into the heights. And now one sees—I have already described this to you from another aspect—how what the fire-beings carry outwards from the butterfly's wings shines forth into world-space. But it does not only shine forth; it streams forth. And it is this which provides the particular view of the earth, which is perceived by the higher hierarchies. The beings of the higher hierarchies gaze upon the earth, and what they principally see is this butterfly-and-insect-existence which has been carried outwards by the fire-beings; and the fire-beings find their highest ecstasy in the realization that it is they who present themselves before the spiritual eyes of the higher hierarchies. They find their highest bliss in being beheld by the gaze, by the spiritual eyes, of the higher hierarchies, in being absorbed into them. They strive upwards towards these beings and carry to them the knowledge of the earth.

Thus we see how these elemental beings are the intermediaries between the earth and the spirit-cosmos. We see this drama of the phosphorescent uprising of the undines, which pass away in the sea of light and flame of the higher hierarchies as their sustenance; we see the up-flashing of the greenish-reddish lightning, which is in-breathed there where the earth continually passes over into the eternal, the eternal survival of the fire-beings, whose activity never ceases. For whereas, here on earth, it is particularly at a certain time of the year that butterflies die, the fire-beings see to it that what it is their task to look to is poured out into the universe throughout the entire year. Thus the earth is as though cloaked in a mantle of fire. Seen from outside the earth appears fiery. But everything is brought about by beings who see the things of the earth quite differently from how man sees them. As already mentioned, man's experience of the earth is of a hard substance upon which he walks about and stands. For the gnomes it is a transparent globe, a hollow body. For the undines water is something in which they perceive the phosphorizing process, which they can take into themselves and feel as their life-element. Sylphs see in the astrality of the air, which emanates from dying birds, that which makes their lightning flashes more vivid than they would otherwise be, for in itself the lightning of these sylphs is dull and bluish. And then again the disintegration of butterfly existence is something which continually envelops the earth as though with a sheath of fire. When this is beheld it is as though the earth were surrounded by a wonderful fiery painting; and, on the other side, when one looks upwards from the earth, one beholds these lightning flashes, these phosphorescent and evanescent undines. All this makes us say: Here on earth the elemental nature-spirits live and weave; they strive upwards and pass away in the fire-mantle of the earth. In reality, however, they do not pass away, but there they find their eternal existence by passing over into the beings of the higher hierarchies.

All this, however, which at first appears like a wonderful world-picture is the expression of what happens on earth, for initially it is all played out upon the earth. We human beings are always present in what is there taking place; and the fact is—even if in his ordinary consciousness man is at first incapable of grasping what surrounds him—that every night we are involved in the weaving and working of these beings, that we ourselves take part as ego and as astral body in what these beings are carrying out.

But it is the gnomes especially which really find it quite an entertainment to observe a person who is asleep, not the physical body in bed, but the person who is outside his physical body in his astral body and ego, for what the gnome sees is someone who thinks in the spirit but does not know it. He does not know that his thoughts live in the spiritual. And again for the undines it is inexplicable that man knows himself so little; likewise with the sylphs, and likewise with the fire-beings.

On the physical plane, you see, it is certainly often unpleasant to have gnats and the like buzzing around one at night. But the spiritual man, the ego and astral body—at night these are surrounded and woven about by elemental beings; and this being surrounded and woven about is a constant admonition to man to give an impetus to his consciousness in order to know more about the world.

Now, therefore, I can try to give you an idea of what these beings—gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-beings—mean with their buzzing about, of what happens when we begin to hear what amuses them in us, and of what they would have us do when they admonish us to give a forward impetus to our consciousness. Yes, you see, here come the gnomes and speak somewhat as follows:

You dream your self,
And shun awakening.

The gnomes know that man possesses his ego as though in a dream, that he must first awaken in order to arrive at his true ego. They see this quite clearly, and call to him in his sleep:

You dream your self

—they mean during the day—

And shun awakening.

Then there sounds forth from the undines:

You think the deeds of angels

Man does not know that his thoughts are really with the angels

You think the deeds of Angels
And know it not.

And from the sylphs there sounds to sleeping man:

Creative Might shines to you,
You divine it not.
You feel its strength

—the strength of Creative Might—

And live it not.

Such approximately are the words of the sylphs, the words of the undines, the words of the gnomes.

The words of the fire-beings:

Divine Will offers you strength,
You accept it not.
With its strength you will,

—with the strength of Divine Will—

Yet thrust it from you.

The aim of all these admonitions is to give man a forward impetus in regard to his consciousness. These beings, which do not enter into physical existence, wish man to make a move onward with his consciousness, so that he, too, may participate in their world.

And when one has thus entered into what these beings have to say to man, one also gradually understands how they give expression to their own nature, somewhat in this way:

The gnomes:

I maintain the life-force in the root,
It creates for me my body's form.

The undines:

I bestir the water's power of growth,
It forms for me substance of life.

The sylphs:

I quaff the airy force of life,
It fills me with the power of being.

And the fire-beings—there it is very difficult to find any kind of earthly words for what they do, because their sphere is far removed from earthly life and earthly activity.

Fire-beings:

I consume¹ the striving power of fire,
Into soul-spirit it releases me.

You see, I have endeavoured to the best of my ability to give you an idea of how these beings of the elemental kingdom characterize themselves; and of the admonitions which they impart to man. But they are not so unfriendly to man as only to suggest to him what is negative in its nature, but pithy and positive sayings also proceed from them. And man experiences these sayings as being of immense, of gigantic import. In such matters as these you must acquire a sense for whether a saying is uttered merely in human words, however beautiful they may be, or whether it sounds forth as though cosmically from the whole mighty chorus of the gnomes. It is the whole manner of its arising which brings about the difference. And when man hearkens to the gnomes after the admonitions which I have written down have been imparted to him, then there sounds towards him from the massed chorus of the gnomes:

Strive to awaken.

Here the significance is the mighty moral impression created by such words when they stream through the universe, arising from the massed chorus of infinitely many single voices.

And from the undine chorus resounds:

Think in the spirit.

With the chorus of sylphs things are not so simple. When the gnomes appear like shining armoured knights in full moonlight there resounds from them as though from earth-depths:

Strive to awaken.

When the undines soar upwards filled with the longing to be consumed, then in this upsoaring there sounds back to the earth:

Think in the Spirit.

But for the sylphs, in that, up above, they allow themselves to be inhaled, disappearing in bluish-reddish-greenish lightning into the world-light, then, as they flash into the light and therein disappear, from the heights there sounds down from them:

Live creatively breathing existence.

And as in fiery anger—but anger which is not felt to be annihilating, but rather as something which man must receive from the cosmos—as in fiery but at the same time enthusiastic anger, the fire-beings carry what is theirs into the fire-mantle of the earth, their words resound. Here the sound is not like that of single voices massed together, but from the whole circumference there resounds as with a mighty voice of thunder:

Receive in love the Will-Force of the Gods.

Naturally, one can turn one's attention away from all this; then one does not perceive it. Whether or no man does perceive such things depends upon his own free decision. But when man does perceive them he knows that they are an integral part of cosmic existence, that something actually occurs in that gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-beings unfold their evolution in the way described. And the gnomes are not only present for man in the way I have already portrayed, but they are there to let their world-words sound forth from the earth, the undines to let their world-words soar upwards, the sylphs theirs from above, the fire-beings theirs like a chorus, like the massing of a mighty uplifting of voices.

Yes, this is how it could appear when transposed into words. But these words belong to the Word of worlds, and even though we do not hear them with ordinary consciousness, these words are yet not without significance for mankind. For the primeval idea which had its source in instinctive clairvoyance, that the world was born out of the Word, is indeed a profound truth, but the world-word is not some collection of syllables gathered from here or there; the world-word is what sounds forth from countless, countless beings. Countless, countless beings have something to say in the totality of the world, and the world-word sounds forth from the concordance of these countless beings. It is not the general abstract truth that the world is born out of the Word that can bring this to us in its fullness. One thing alone can do this, namely that we gradually arrive at a concrete understanding of how the world-word in all its different nuances is composed of the voices of individual beings, so that these different nuances contribute their sound, their utterance, to the great world-harmony, the mighty world-melody, in the Word's act of creation.

When the gnome-chorus allows its “Strive to awaken” to sound forth, this—only transformed into gnome-language—is the force which is active in bringing about the human bony system, the system of movement in general.

When the undines utter “Think in the spirit”, they utter—transposed into the undine-sphere—what pours itself as world-word into man in order to give form to the organs of digestion.

When the sylphs, as they are breathed in, allow their “Live creatively breathing existence” to stream downwards, there penetrates into man, weaving and pulsating through him, the force which endows him with the organs of the rhythmic system.

And if one attends to what sounds inwardly—in the manner of the fire-beings—from the fire-mantle of the world, then one finds that this sounding manifests as image or reflection. It streams in from the fire-mantle—this sounding force of the word. And every nerve system of every man, every head I would add, is a miniature image of what-translated into the language of the fire-beings—rings out as: “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”. This saying, “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”, this is what is active in the highest substance of the world. And when man is experiencing his development in the life between death and a new birth, this it is which transforms what he brought with him through the gate of death into what will later become the human organs of the nerves and senses. So we have:

System of movement

Chorus of gnomes: Strive to awaken

Metabolic organization

Undines: Think in the Spirit

Rhythmic system

Sylphs: Live creatively breathing existence.

Nerve-senses system

Fire-beings: Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods.

Thus you see that what lies beyond the threshold is akin to our own nature, you see how it leads us into the creative divine forces, into what lives and works in all forms of existence. And when one calls to mind what an earlier epoch divined, and is expressed in the words:

The power of life, the seeds behold;
Turn thee away from words' cramped mould.²

—one is impelled to say that all this must become actuality in the further course of the development of mankind. We cramp all knowledge into words if we have no insight into the germinating forces which build up the human being in the most varied ways.

We can therefore say that the system of movement, the metabolic system, the rhythmic system, the system of nerves and senses merge into a unity in that they resound in harmony. For there sounds upwards from below: “Strive to awaken”; “Think in the Spirit”—and from above downwards, mingling with the upward-striving words, “Live creatively breathing existence”; “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”.

This “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods” is the calm creative element in the head. Then what strives from below upwards in “Think in the Spirit”, from above downwards in “Live creatively breathing existence”, in their combined activity is what so works and weaves that it creates an image of the way in which human breathing passes over in a rhythmical way into the activity of the blood. And what implants into us the instruments of the senses, this is what streams from above downwards in “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”. But what works in our walking, in our standing, in our moving of the arms and hands, everything in fact which brings man into the manifestation of his element of will, this sounds forth in “Strive to awaken”.

Thus you see how man is a symphony of that world-word which can be interpreted on its lowest level in the way I have presented it to you. Then this world-word ascends to the higher hierarchies, whose task it is to unfold other aspects of this world-word in order that the cosmos may arise and develop. But that which has, as it were, been uttered as a call into the world by these elemental beings is the final reverberation of that creative, upbuilding, form-giving world-word which lies at the base of all activity and all existence.

Gnomes:

You dream your Self,
And shun awakening.

I maintain the life-force in the root,
It creates for me my body's form.

Undines:

You think the deeds of Angels
And know it not.

I bestir the water's power of growth,
It forms for me substance of life.

Sylphs:

Creative might shines to you,
You divine it not;
You feel its strength
And live it not.

I quaff the airy force of life,
It fills me with the power of being.

Fire-beings:

Divine Will offers you strength,
You accept it not.
With its strength you will,
Yet thrust it off from you.

I consume the striving power of fire,
Into soul-spirit it releases me.

Chorus of gnomes: Strive to awaken!
Undines: Think in the Spirit!
Sylphs: Live creatively breathing existence!
Fire-beings: Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods!

GNOMEN

Du träumst dich selbst,
Und meidest das Erwachen.

Ich halte die Wurzelwesenkraft,
Sie schaffet mir den Formenleib.

UNDINEN

Du denkst die Engelwerke
Und weisst es nicht.

Ich bewege die Wasserwachtumskraft,
Sie bildet mir den Lebensstoff.

SYLPHEN

Dir leuchtet die Schöpfermacht,
Du ahnst es nicht;
Du fühlest ihre Kraft
Und lebst sie nicht.

Ich schlürfe die luft'ge Lebekraft,
Sie füllet mich mit Seinsgewalt.

FEUERWESEN

Dir krafter Götterwille,
Du empfangst ihn nicht.
Du willst mit seiner Kraft,
Und stosset ihn von dir.

Ich däue die Feuer strebekraft,
Sie erlöst mich in Seelengeistigkeit.

GNOMENCHOR: Erstrebe zu wachen
UNDINEN: Denke in Geiste
SYLPHEN: Lebe schaffend atmendes Dasein
FEUERWESEN: Empfange liebend Götterwillenskraft.

• 1. Here Rudolf Steiner coins a word from verdauen, to digest: däuen—ich däue, to express, not ordinary digestion, but a fiery consuming process.
• 2. Goethe: Faust, Part I, Scene I.

Karma is best understood by contrasting it with that other impulse in man—the impulse which we indicate by the word freedom. Let us first, in a very crude way, I should say, place the question of karma before us. What does it signify?

In human life we have to record the fact of successive earth lives. By feeling ourselves within a given earth life, we can look back—in thought at least, to begin with—and see how this present earth life is a repetition of a number of previous earth lives. It was preceded by another, and that in turn by yet another life on earth, and so on until we get back into the ages where it is impossible to speak of repeated earth lives as we do in the present epoch of the earth, for in going farther backward, we reach a time when the life between birth and death and the life between death and a new birth become so similar that the immense difference which exists be- l ween them today is no longer present. Today we live in our earthly body bet ween birth and death in such a way that in every-day consciousness we feel cut off from the spiritual world. Out of this every-day consciousness, men speak of the spiritual world as a “beyond.” They even speak of it as though they might doubt its existence, as though they might deny it altogether, and so forth.

This is because man's life within earthly existence restricts him to the outer world of the senses, and to the intellect; the latter does not look far enough to perceive what really is connected with this earthly existence. Out of this, countless arguments arise, all of which actually are rooted in something unknown. No doubt, you will have often stood among people and experienced how they argued about monism, dualism, and so forth. It is, of course, quite absurd to argue about these catch-words. When people argue in this way, we are reminded of some primitive man, let us say, who has never heard that there is such a substance as air. It will not occur to anyone who knows that air exists, and what its functions are, to speak of it as something belonging to the beyond. Nor will he think of declaring: “I am a monist; air, water, and earth arc one, and you arc a dualist, because you regard air as something that extends beyond the earthly and watery elements.”

All these things are pure nonsense, as, indeed, are mostly all arguments about concepts. There can, therefore, be no question of our entering into such matters, but it can only be a question of drawing attention to them. For just as the air is not present for the one who knows nothing about it, but for him is something belonging to the “beyond,” so for those who do not yet know the spiritual world, which also exists everywhere just as the air, this spiritual world is something belonging to the “beyond;” but for those who take the matter into consideration, the spiritual world is something that belongs very much to this side. Thus, it is simply a question of our acknowledging the fact that at the present earth period the human being between birth and death lives in his physical body, in his whole organism, in such a way that this organism gives him a consciousness whereby he is cut off from a certain world of causes which, none the less, affects this physical earth existence.

Then, between death and a new birth he lives in another world, which we may call a spiritual world in contrast to our physical world; in this spiritual world he does not have a physical body which can be made visible to human senses, but he lives in a spiritual nature. And in this life between death and a new birth the world through which he passes between birth and death is just as alien, in turn, as the spirit world is now alien to every-day consciousness.

The dead look down onto the physical world just as the living that is the physically living—look upward into the spiritual world, and only the feelings are, so to speak, reversed. While the human being here in the physical world between birth and death has a certain aspiration toward another world which grants him fulfilment of much of which there is too little in this world, or of which this world affords him no satisfaction, he must between death and a new birth on account of the multitude of events, and because too much happens in proportion to what a human being can bear, feel a constant longing to return to earth life, to what is then the life in the beyond; hence, during the second half of the life between death and a new birth, he awaits with great longing the passage through birth into a new earth existence. Just as in earth existence the human being is afraid of death, because an uncertainty prevails about what happens thereafter—for in earth life a great uncertainty prevails for ordinary consciousness about what happens after death—so in the life between death and a new birth the condition is just the reverse, there prevails an excessive certainty about earth life. It is a certainty that stuns the human being, that makes him literally faint, so that he is in a state resembling a fainting dream, a state which fills him with the longing to descend again to earth.

These are only a few indications of the great difference prevailing between the earthly life and the life between death and a new birth. If, however, we now go back, let us say, even only as far as the Egyptian period, from the third on up into the first millennium before the founding of Christianity—and, after all, if we go back into this epoch, we go back to those human beings who were none other than ourselves, in a former earth life—indeed, then, at that time during earth existence, life was quite different from our so brutally clear consciousness of the present day. At present human beings have, indeed, a brutally clear consciousness; they are all so clever—I do not at all intend to be ironical—the people of today are, indeed, all very clever. In contrast to this brutally clear consciousness of today, the consciousness of the human being of the ancient Egyptian period was much more dream-like, a consciousness that did not, like ours, strike against outer objects. It passed through the world, as it were, without striking against objects. Instead, it was filled with pictures which, at the same time, revealed something of the spiritual existing in our environment. The spiritual still penetrated into physical earth existence.

Do not ask: How could a man with this more dream-like consciousness, not the brutally clear consciousness of today, have performed the tremendous tasks which were actually achieved, for instance, in the ancient Egyptian or Chaldean epochs? You need merely call to mind the fact that mad people at times, in certain states of mania, possess an immense increase of their physical forces; they begin to carry things which they could not carry when in a completely clear state of consciousness. It was, indeed, a fact that the physical strength of the human beings of that time was correspondingly greater, although they were perhaps of slighter build than men of today. For, as you know, it does not always follow that a stout man is strong and a thin man weak. But they did not spend their earthly life in observing every detail of their physical actions; their physical deeds went parallel with experiences into which the spiritual world still extended.

And again, when the people of that time were in the life between death and a new birth, then far more of this earthly life extended upward into the life beyond—if I may be allowed to use the expression “upward.” Nowadays it is exceedingly difficult to communicate with those who are present in the life between death and a new birth, for languages have gradually assumed a form no longer understood by the dead. Our nouns, for instance, soon after death are absolute gaps in the dead's comprehension of the earthly world. They understand nothing but the verbs, i.e. the words of motion, of action. And while we here on earth have our attention constantly drawn by materialistically minded people to the fact that everything should be defined in an orderly manner, and every concept be limited and sharply defined, the dead no longer know anything of definitions; they only know what is in motion, not what has contours and is limited.

But in more ancient times that which lived on earth as speech, that which lived as usage and habit of thought, was still of such a nature that it extended up into the life between death and a new birth, and the dead still heard an echo of this long after their death, and also an echo of what occurred on earth even after their death.

And if we go still farther back into the time following the catastrophe of Atlantis—the eighth and ninth millennium before the Christian era t lit* difference between the life on earth and the life in the beyond, if I may so describe it, becomes even more insignificant. And then, as we go backward, we gradually reach the ages when the two lives are similar. We can then no longer speak of repeated earth lives.

Thus, repeated earth lives have their limit as we look backward, just as they will have their limit when we look forward into the future. For what begins quite consciously with Anthroposophy—the extension of the spiritual world into the ordinary consciousness of man—will have the consequence that this earth world will extend, in turn, into the world through which we live between death and a new birth; but, in spite of this, our consciousness will not grow dream-like, but clearer and ever clearer. The difference will once again grow less. So that this living in repeated earth lives is limited by outermost boundaries, which then lead into quite another sort of human existence, where it is meaningless to speak of repeated earth lives, because the difference between the earthly and the spiritual life is not so great as it is today.

If we now assume, however, for the long stretch of the present period of the earth age that behind this earth life there lie others—we must not say countless others, for they can even be counted by exact spiritual- scientific research—if we say: behind our present earth life there lie many others, then we have had certain experiences in these previous earth lives which represented certain relationships between human beings. And the effects of these relationships between human beings, which at that time lived themselves out in what we then underwent, extend into this present earth life in the same way as the effects of what we do in this present earth life extend into our next lives on earth. Thus, we have to seek in the former earth life the causes of much that now enters into our present life. Then it is easy for the human being to say: “Thus, what I experience now is conditioned, caused. How can I, then, be a free human being?”

Now, this question is, indeed, a rather significant one, if we consider it in this way. For all spiritual observation shows that in this way the subsequent earth life is conditioned by the earlier ones. On the other hand, the consciousness of freedom absolutely exists. And, when you read my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, you will see that we cannot understand the human being at all, if we are not clear about the fact that his whole soul life tends, is directed, is oriented toward freedom, but a freedom which we have to understand correctly.

Now, it is precisely in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity that you will find an idea of freedom which it is very important to grasp correctly. The point is that we have developed freedom, to begin with, in thought. The fountainhead of freedom is in thought. Man has an immediate consciousness of the fact that he is a free being in his thought. You may rejoin: “But there are many people today who doubt the fact of freedom.” Yes, but this only proves that the theoretical fanaticism of people today is often stronger than their direct experience in reality. Because he is so crammed full of theoretical concepts the human being no longer believes in his own experiences. Out of his observations of the processes of nature, he arrives at the idea that everything is conditioned by necessity, every effect has a cause, all that exists has its cause; thus, if I conceive a thought, this has also a cause. He does not at once think of repeated earth lives in this connection, but he imagines that what wells forth from human thinking is caused in the same way as that which comes out of a machine.

As a result of this theory of universal causation, as it is called, the human being blinds himself frequently to the fact that he bears very clearly within himself the consciousness of freedom. Freedom is a fact which we experience, as soon as we really reflect upon ourselves.

Now, there are also those who are of the opinion that the nervous system is just a nature system, conjuring thoughts out of itself. According to this, then, the thoughts would—let us say—be necessary results, just like the flame which burns under the influence of a fuel, and there could be no question of freedom.

These people, however, contradict themselves in talking at all. As I have often related here, I had a friend in my youth, who had a fanatical inclination, at a certain period, to think materialistically. Thus, he said: “When I walk, for example, then it is the nerves of the brain, infiltrated by certain causes, which bring my walking into effect.” This led, at times, to quite a long debate with him. I finally said to him on one occasion: “Now, look here, you always say: ‘I walk.’ Why do you not say: ‘My brain walks?’ If you really believe in your theory, you ought never to say: ‘I walk, I take hold of things,’ but: ‘My brain walks, my brain takes hold of things.’ Why do you tell a lie?”

These are the theorists, but there are also the practical men. If they observe any nonsense in themselves which they do not wish to stop, they say: “O, I cannot get rid of that; it is just a part of my nature. It is there of its own accord, and I am powerless against it.” There are many such people; they refer to the immutable causation of their own nature. But, as a rule, they do not remain consistent. If they happen to be showing off something they rather like about themselves for which they need no excuse, but on the contrary are glad to receive a little flattery, they then abandon the aforesaid view.

The fundamental fact of the free human being—a self-evident fact can be directly experienced. Now, even in the ordinary, everyday earth life it is a fact that we do many things in complete freedom which, nevertheless, are of such a kind that we cannot easily leave them undone. And yet we do not feel our freedom in the least impaired through this fact.

Let us suppose, for a moment, that you now resolve to build yourself a house. It will take about a year to build it. In a year you will live in it. Will you feel that your freedom has been curtailed through the fact that you then have to say to yourself: “The house is now there, and I must move in, I must live in it; it is a case of compulsion?” No, you will surely not feel your freedom impaired through the fact of your having built a house for yourself. You see, therefore, even in ordinary life these two things stand side by side: You have committed yourself to something. It has thereby become a fact in life, a fact with which you have to reckon.

Now think of all that stems from former lives on earth, with which you have to reckon, because it is due to your own deeds—just as the building of the house is caused by you. Seen in this light, you will not feel your freedom impaired through the fact that your present life on earth is determined by former ones.

Perhaps you will say: “Very well. I will build me a house, but I still wish to remain a free man. I will not let myself be compelled. If I do not like it, I shall, in a year, not move into the new house; I shall sell it.” All right! We might also have our opinion about such a procedure; we might, perhaps, have the opinion that, if you do this, you are a person who does not know his own mind. Indeed, we might well have this opinion; but let us disregard this. Let us disregard the fact that a man is such a fanatical upholder of freedom that he constantly makes up his mind to do things, and afterwards out of sheer “freedom” leaves them undone. We then might well say: “That man has not even the freedom to enter upon the things he himself resolves upon. He constantly feels the goad of the will to be free and is positively persecuted by his fanatical worship of freedom.”

It is really important that these things not be taken in a rigid, theoretical manner, but be grasped in fullness of life. Let us now pass over to a more complicated concept. If we ascribe freedom to man, surely we must also ascribe it to the higher beings who are not hampered in their freedom by the limitations of human nature. If we rise to the beings of the higher Hierarchies, who certainly are not hampered by the limitations of human nature, we must, indeed, seek a higher degree of freedom with them. Now someone might propose a rather strange theological theory to the effect that God must surely be free; He has arranged the world in a certain way;

He has, however, thereby committed Himself; He certainly cannot change the world-order every day; thus, after all, He would in that case be unfree.

You see, if in this way you place in antithesis inner karmic necessity and freedom, which is a fact of our consciousness, which is simply a result of self-observation, you cannot then escape a continuous circle. In this way you cannot escape from a circle. For the matter is as follows: Let us take once more the illustration of the building of a house. I do not wish to press this example too far, but at this point it can still help us along the way. Someone builds himself a house. I will not say: I build myself a house—I shall probably never build one for myself—but, let us say, someone builds himself a house. Well, by this resolve he does, in a certain respect, determine his future. Now, when the house is finished, and he takes his former resolve into account, no freedom apparently remains for him, so far as the living in the house is concerned. He himself has certainly set this limitation to his freedom; nevertheless, apparently no freedom remains for him.

But just think, how many things still remain for you to do in freedom within this house, Indeed, within it you are even free to be stupid or wise, you are free to be horrid or lovable to your fellow men. In the house you are free to get up early or late. Perhaps, you may be under other obligations in this respect; but so far as the house is concerned, you are free to get up early or late. You are free to be an anthroposophist or a materialist within this house. In short, there are innumerable things still at your free disposal.

Likewise, in an individual human life, in spite of the presence of karmic necessity, there are countless things at your free disposal, far more than in a house, countless things fully and really in the domain of freedom.

Here you may, perhaps, be able to rejoin: “Very well, we do then have a certain domain of freedom in our life.” Indeed, that is so: a certain enclosed domain of freedom surrounded by the karmic necessity (see Figure III). Now, looking at this, you may assert the following. You may say: “Well, I am free in a certain domain; but I now reach the limits of my freedom. I then feel the karmic necessity everywhere. I walk around in my room of freedom, but everywhere at the boundaries I come up against my karmic necessity and sense this necessity.”

Indeed, my dear friends, if a fish thought likewise, it would be extremely unhappy in the water, for as it swims in the water it reaches the water's boundary. Outside of the water it can no longer live. Hence it refrains from going outside of the water. It does not go at all outside of the water; it remains in the water, it swims around in the water, and it just lets alone the other element which lies beyond, be it air or something else. And because the fish does this, I can in assure you that it is not at all unhappy over the fact that it cannot breathe with lung«. It does not occur to it to be unhappy. But, if ever it did occur to the fish to be unhappy because it breathes only with gills and not with lungs, then it would have to have lungs in reserve, then it would have to compare the difference between living down below in it lie water, and up in the air. Then the fish's whole way of feeling itself inwardly would be different. It would all be quite different.

If we apply this comparison to human life with respect to freedom and karmic necessity, then it is a fact, in the first place, that the human being in the present earth period has the ordinary consciousness. With this ordinary consciousness he lives in the sphere of freedom, just as the fish lives in the water, and with this consciousness he does not enter at all the realm of karmic necessity. Only when he begins really to perceive the spiritual world—this would be similar to the fish having lungs in reserve—only when he really finds his way into the spiritual world, does he acquire a perception of the impulses living in him as karmic necessity.

He then looks back into his former lives on earth and does not feel, does not say, on finding the causes of his present experiences in a previous earth life: “I am now under the compulsion of an iron necessity, and my freedom is impaired,” but he looks back and sees how he himself has fashioned what now confronts him, just as someone who has built himself a house looks back on the resolve which led him to build it. And we generally find it more reasonable to ask: “Was it, at that time, a sensible or foolish resolve to build this house?” Well, naturally, we can come later on to all sorts of opinions on the matter, if the things turn out in a certain way; but, if we find that it was an enormous stupidity to build the house, we can, at best, say that we were foolish.

Now, in earth life it is an awkward matter in regard to anything which one has inaugurated to have to say that it was stupid. We do not like this. We do not like to suffer from our own follies. We wish we had not made the foolish decision. But this really applies only to the one earth life, because between the foolishness of the resolve and the punishment we suffer in having to experience its consequences there lies the same earth life. It always remains thus.

But this is not so between the individual earth lives. For between them always lie the lives between death and a new birth; and these lives between death and a new birth change many things which would not change if earth life were to continue uniformly. Just suppose that you look back into a former earth life. There you did something good or ill to another human being. The life between death and a new birth took place between this previous earth life and the present earth life. In this life, in this spiritual life, you cannot think otherwise than that you have become imperfect by having done something evil to another human being. This takes away from your value as a human being. It cripples you in soul. You must repair the crippling, and you resolve to achieve in a new earth life what will make good the fault. Thus, between death and a new birth you absorb by your own will that which will compensate for the fault. If you have done good to another human being, you then know that the whole of human life is there for the whole of mankind. You see this most clearly in the life between death and a new birth. You then realize that when you have helped another human being, he has thereby achieved certain things which, without you, he would not have achieved in a former earth life; but, as a result, you feel again united with him in the life between death and a new birth, in order now to live and to develop further what you have achieved together with him in regard to human perfection. You seek him out again in a new earth life in order, in this new earth life, to work further with him through the way you have already helped him perfect himself.

The fact is not at all that we might abhor such necessity, when we, through a real insight into the spirit world, now perceive the scope of this karmic necessity all around us, but the fact is that we look back upon this necessity and see how the things were which we ourselves had done, and then behold them in such a way that we say: “What occurs out of inner necessity has to happen—out of complete freedom also it would have, to happen.”

We shall never have the experience of possessing a real insight into karma without being in agreement with it. If things result in the course of karma which do not please us, then we ought to consider them from the point of view of the general laws and principles of the universe. And we shall then realize more and more that, after all, what is karmically conditioned is better than our having to begin anew, better than our being a book of blank pages with every new earth life. For, as a matter of fact, we are ourselves our karma. We are ourselves that which comes over from previous earth lives. And it has no sense at all to say that something in our karma—alongside of which there exists definitely the realm of freedom—that something in our karma ought to be different from what it is, because it is not at all possible to criticize the single detail in an organically connected totality. Someone may not like his nose; but it is senseless to criticize merely the nose, as such, for the nose a man has must actually be as it is, if the whole man is as he is. The one who says: “I should like to have a different nose,” actually says that he would like to be an utterly different man. But in so doing he really eliminates himself in thought. This we cannot do. Thus, we cannot wipe out our karma, for we are ourselves our karma. Nor does it at all confound us, for it runs its course alongside the deeds of our freedom, and in no wise interferes with the deeds of our freedom.

I should like to use still another comparison to make the point clear. As human beings, we walk; but the ground on which we walk is also there. No one feels interfered with in walking by having the ground underneath his feet. Indeed, he ought even to know that, were the ground not there, he could not walk at all; he would fall through everywhere. It is thus with our freedom; it needs the “ground” of necessity. It must rise out of a foundation. And this foundation—we ourselves are.

As soon as we grasp in the right way the concept of freedom and the concept of karma, we shall be able to find them compatible, and we then need no longer shrink from a detailed study of the karmic laws. Indeed, in some instances we may even come to the following conclusion:

I now assume that someone, by means of the insight of initiation, is able to look back into former earth lives. He knows quite well, when he looks back into former earth lives that this and that has happened to him which has come with him into his present earth life. Had he not attained to initiation science, objective necessity would impel him to do certain things. He would do them quite inevitably. He would not feel his freedom hampered by it; for his freedom lies in his ordinary consciousness with which he never penetrates into the realm where this necessity acts, just as the fish never penetrates into the outer air. But when he has initiation science within him, he then looks back and he sees how things were in a former earth life, and he regards what now confronts him as a task which is consciously allotted to him for this present earth life. This is, indeed, a fact.

What I shall now say may sound paradoxical to you, yet it is true. In reality, a man who possesses no initiation science practically always knows through a kind of inner urge, through an instinct, what he is to do. O, indeed, people always know what they ought to do, feel themselves always impelled to this thing or that. For the one who begins with initiation science, matters become somewhat different in the world. As he faces life, quite strange questions arise in regard to the individual experiences. If he feels impelled to do something, he immediately feels also impelled not to do it. The obscure urge which drives most human beings to this or that is eliminated. And, actually, at a certain stage of initiate-insight, if nothing else were to intervene, a man could really come to the point of saying to himself: “After having reached this insight, I now prefer to spend the entire remainder of my life—I am now 40 years old, which is a matter of indifference to me—sitting on a chair doing nothing. For such pronounced urges to do this or that are no longer present.”

Do not believe, my dear friends, that initiation does not have a reality. It is strange, in this connection, how people sometimes think. In regard to a roast chicken, everyone who eats it believes that it has reality. In regard to initiate science, most people believe that it has only theoretical effects. No, it has effects on life. And such a life effect is the one I have just indicated. Before a man has attained to initiation, under the influence of an obscure urge, one thing is always important to him and another unimportant. The initiate would prefer to sit in a chair and let the world run its course, for it really does not matter—so it might appear to him whether this is done and that is left undone, and so forth. It will, however, not remain so, for initiation science also offers something else besides. The only corrective for the initiate's sitting on a chair, letting the world run its course, and saying: “everything is a matter of indifference to me,” is to look back into former earth lives. He then reads there from his karma the tasks for his present earth life, and he does consciously what his former earth lives impose upon him. He does not abstain from doing it because he believes that thereby his freedom is encroached on, but he does it. He does it, because by his discovery of what he had experienced in previous earth lives he becomes aware, at the same time, of what his life between death and a new birth has been, how he then realized the performance of the corresponding consequential actions as something reasonable. He would feel himself unfree if he could not come into the position of fulfilling the task which is allotted to him by his former earth life.

Thus, neither before nor after the entry into initiation science is there a contradiction between karmic necessity and freedom. Before the entry into initiation science, there is none, because with every-day consciousness the human being remains within the realm of freedom, while karmic necessity takes place outside, like a process of nature. He has nothing that feels different from what his own nature inspires in him. Nor is there any contradiction after the entry into initiation science, because he is then quite in agreement with his karma and simply considers it reasonable to act in harmony with karma. Just as you do not say, if you have built yourself a house: “the fact that I must now move in is hampering my freedom,” but just as you will probably say: “well, on the whole it was quite sensible to build myself a house in this neighborhood and on this site; now, let me be free in this house!” so likewise the one who looks back with initiate knowledge into former earth lives knows that he becomes free by fulfilling his karmic task, by moving into the house which he built for himself in former earth lives.

Thus, my dear friends, I wanted to explain to you the true compatibility of freedom and karmic necessity in human life. Tomorrow we shall continue, going more into the details of karma.

Karma is best understood by contrasting it with the other impulse in man—that impulse which we describe with the word Freedom. Let us first place the question of karma before us, quite crudely, if I may say so. What does it signify? In human life we have to record the fact of reincarnation, successive earthly lives. Feeling ourselves within a given earthly life, we can look back—in thought, at least, to begin with—and see how this present life is a repetition of a number of former earthly lives. It was preceded by another, and that in turn by yet another life on earth, and so on until we get back into the ages where it is impossible to speak of repeated earthly lives as we do in the present epoch of the earth. For as we go farther backward, there begins a time when the life between birth and death and the life between death and a new birth become so similar to one another that the immense difference which exists today between them is no longer there at all. Today we live in our earthly body between birth and death in such a way that in everyday consciousness we feel ourselves quite cut off from the spiritual world. Out of this everyday consciousness men speak of the spiritual world as a “beyond.” They will even speak of it as though they could doubt its existence or deny it altogether.

This is because man's life in earthly existence restricts him to the outer world of the senses, and to the intellect; and intellect does not look far enough to perceive what is, after all, connected with this earthly existence. Hence there arise countless disputations, all of which ultimately have their source in the “unknown.” No doubt you will often have stood between, when people were arguing about Monism, Dualism and the rest ... It is, of course, absurd to argue around these catch-words. When people wrangle in this way, it often seems as though there were some primitive man who had never heard that there is such substance as “air.” To one who knows that air exists, and what its functions are, it will not occur to speak of it as something that is “beyond.” Nor will he think of declaiming: “I am a Monist; I declare that air, water and earth are one. You are a Dualist, because you persist in regarding air as something that goes beyond the earthly and watery elements.”

These things, in fact, are pure nonsense, as indeed all disputes about concepts generally are. Therefore there can be no question of our entering into these arguments. I only wish to point out the significance. For a primitive man who does not yet know of its existence, the air as such is simply absent; it is “beyond,” beyond his ken. Likewise for those who do not yet know it, the spiritual world is a “beyond,” in spite of the fact that it is everywhere present just as the air is. For a man who enters into these things, it is no longer “beyond” or “on the other side,” but “here,” “on this side.”

Thus it is simply a question of our recognising the fact: In the present earthly era, man between birth and death lives in his physical body, in his whole organisation, so that this very organisation gives him a consciousness through which he is cut off from a certain world of causes. But the world of causes, none the less, is working as such into this physical and earthly life. Then, between death and a new birth he lives in another world, which we may call a spiritual world by contrast with this physical. There he has not a physical body, such as could be made visible to human senses; he lives in a spiritual form of being. Moreover, in that life between death and a new birth the world through which he lives between birth and death is in its turn as remote as the spiritual world is remote and foreign for everyday consciousness on earth.

The dead look down on to the physical world just as the living (that is, the physically living) look upward into the spiritual world. But their feelings are reversed, so to speak. In the physical world between birth and death, man has a way of gazing upward, as to another world which grants him fulfilment for very many things which are either deficient or altogether lacking in contentment in this world. It is quite different between death and a new birth. There, there is an untold abundance, a fulness of events. There is always far too much happening compared with what man can bear; therefore he feels a constant longing to return again into the earthly life, which is a “life in the beyond” for him there. In the second half of the life between death and a new birth, he awaits with great longing the passage through birth into a new earth-existence. In earthly existence man is afraid of death because he lives in uncertainty about it, for in the life on earth a great uncertainty prevails for the ordinary consciousness about the after-death. In the life between death and a new birth, on the other hand, man is excessively certain about the earthly life. It is a certainty that stuns him, that makes him actually weak and faint—so that he passes through conditions, like a fainting dream, conditions which imbue him with the longing to come down again to earth.

These are but scant indications of the great difference now prevailing between the earthly life and the life between death and a new birth. Suppose, however, that we now go back, say, no farther back than the Egyptian time—the third to the first millennium before the founding of Christianity. (After all, the men to whom we there go back are but ourselves, in former lives on earth.) In yonder time, the consciousness of man during his earthly life was quite different from ours today, which is so brutally clear, if you will allow me to say so. Truly, the consciousness of the men of today is brutally clear-cut, they are all so clever—I am not speaking ironically—the people of today are clever, all of them. Compared to this terribly clear-cut consciousness, the consciousness of the men of the ancient Egyptian time was far more dream-like. It did not impinge, like ours does, upon outer objects. It rather went its way through the world without “knocking up against” objects. On the other hand, it was filled with pictures which conveyed something of the Spiritual that is there in our environment. The Spiritual, then, still penetrated into man's physical life on earth.

Do not object: “How could a man with this more dream like, and not the clear-cut consciousness of today, have achieved the tremendous tasks which were actually achieved, for instance, in ancient Egypt?” You need not make this objection. You may remember how mad people sometimes reveal, in states of mania, an immense increase of physical strength; they will begin to carry objects which they could never lift when in their full, clear consciousness. Indeed, the physical strength of the men of that time was correspondingly greater; though outwardly they were perhaps slighter in build than the people of today—for, as you know, it does not always follow that a fat man is strong and a thin man physically weak. But they did not spend their earthly life in observing every detail of their physical actions; their physical deeds went parallel with experiences in consciousness into which the spiritual world still entered.

And when the people of that time were in the life between death and a new birth, far more of this earthly life reached upward into yonder life—if I may use the term “upward.” Nowadays it is exceedingly difficult to communicate with those who are in the life between death and a new birth, for the languages themselves have gradually assumed a form such as the dead no longer understand. Our nouns, for instance, soon after death, are absolute gaps in the dead man's perception of the earthly world. He only understands the verbs, the “words of time” as they are called in German—the acting, moving principle. Whereas on earth, materialistically minded people are constantly pulling us up, saying that everything should be defined and every concept well outlined and fixed by clear-cut definition, the dead no longer know of definitions; they only know of what is in movement, they do not know that which has contours and boundaries.

Here again, it was different in ancient times. What lives on earth as speech, and as custom and habit of thought, was of such a kind that it reached up into the life between death and a new birth, and the dead had it echoing in him still, long after his death. Moreover, he also received an echo of what he had experienced on earth and also of the things that were taking place on earth after his death.

And if we go still farther back, into the time following the catastrophe of Atlantis—the 8th or 9th millennium B.C.—the difference becomes even smaller between the life on earth and life in the Beyond, if we may still describe it so. And thence, as we go backward, we gradually get into the times when the two lives were similar. Thereafter, we can no longer speak of repeated earthly lives.

Thus, our repeated lives on earth have their limit when we go backward, just as they have their limit when we look into the future. What we are beginning quite consciously with Anthroposophy today—the penetration of the spiritual world into the normal consciousness of man—will indeed entail this consequence. Into the world which man lives through between death and a new birth, the earthly world will also penetrate increasingly; and yet man's consciousness will not grow dream-like, but clearer and ever clearer. The difference will again grow less. Thus, in effect, our life in repeated incarnations is contained between two outermost limits, past and future. Across these limits we come into quite another kind of human existence, where it is meaningless to speak of repeated earthly lives, because there is not the great difference between the earthly and the spiritual life, which there is today. Now let us concentrate on present earthly time—in the wide sense of the word. Behind our present earthly life, we may assume that there are many others—we must not say countless others, for they can even be counted by exact spiritual scientific investigation. Behind our present earthly life there are, therefore, many others. When we say this, we shall recognise that in those earthly lives we had certain experiences—relationships as between man and man. These relationships as between man and man worked themselves out in the experiences we then underwent; and their effects are with us in our present earthly life, just as the effects of what we do in this life will extend into our coming lives on earth. So then we have to seek in former earthly lives the causes of many things that enter into our life today.

At this point, many people are prone to retort: “If then the things I experience are caused, how can I be free?” It is a really significant question when we consider it in this way. For spiritual observation always shows that our succeeding earthly life is thus conditioned by our former lives. Yet, on the other hand, the consciousness of freedom is absolutely there. Read my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and you will see: the human being cannot be understood at all unless we realise that the whole life of his soul is oriented towards freedom—filled with the tendency to freedom.

Only, this freedom must be rightly understood. Precisely in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you will find a concept of freedom which it is very important to grasp in its true meaning. The point is that we have freedom developed, to begin with, in thought. The fountain-head of freedom is in thought. Man has an immediate consciousness of the fact that he is a free being in his thought. You may rejoin: “Surely there are many people nowadays who doubt the fact of freedom?” Yes, but it only proves that the theoretical fanaticism of people nowadays is often stronger than their direct and real experience. Man is so crammed with theoretical ideas, that he no longer believes in his own experiences. Out of his observations of Nature, he arrives at the idea that everything is conditioned by necessity, every effect has a cause, all that exists has a cause. He does not think of repeated earthly lives in this connection. He imagines that what wells forth in human Thinking is causally determined in the same way as that which proceeds from any machine.

Man makes himself blind by this theory of universal causality, as it is called. He blinds himself to the fact that he has very clearly within him a consciousness of freedom. Freedom is simply a fact which we experience, the moment we reflect upon ourselves at all.

There are those who believe that it is simply the nervous system; the nervous system is there, once and for all, with its property of conjuring thoughts out of itself. According to this, the thoughts would be like the flame whose burning is conditioned by the materials of the fuel. Our thoughts would be necessary results, and there could be no question of freedom.

These people, however, contradict themselves. As I have often related, I had a friend in my youth, who, at a certain period had quite a fanatical tendency to think in a “sound,” materialistic way. “When I walk,” he said, “it is the nerves of' the brain; they contain certain causes to which the effect of my walking is due.” Now and then it led to quite a long debate between us, till at last I said to him on one occasion: “Look now. You also say: ‘I walk.’ Why do you not say, ‘My brain walks?’ If you believe in your theory, you ought never to say: ‘I walk; I take hold of things,’ and so on, but ‘My brain walks; my brain takes hold of them,’ and so on. Why do you go on lying?”

These are the theorists, but there also those who put it into practice. If they observe some failing in themselves which they are not very anxious to throw off, they say, “I cannot throw it off; it is my nature. It is there of its own accord, and I am powerless against it.” There are many like that; they appeal to the inevitable causality of their own nature. But its a rule, they do not remain consistent. If they happen to be showing off something that they rather like about themselves, for which they need no excuse, but on the contrary are glad to receive a little flattery, then they depart from their theory.

The free being of man is a fundamental fact—one of those facts which can be directly experienced. In this respect, however, even in ordinary earthly life it is so: there are many things we do in complete freedom which are nevertheless of such a kind that we cannot easily leave them undone. And yet we do not feel our freedom in the least impaired.

Suppose, for a moment, that you now resolve to build yourself a house. It will take a year to build, let us say. After a year you will begin to live in it. Will you feel it as an encroachment on your freedom that you then have to say to yourself: The house is ready now, and I must move in ... I must live in it; it is a case of compulsion. No. You will surely not feel your freedom impaired by the mere fact that you have built yourself a house. You see, therefore, even in ordinary life the two things stand side by side. You have committed yourself to something. It has thereby become a fact in life—a fact with which you have to reckon.

Now think of all that has originated in former lives on earth, with which you have to reckon because it is due to yourself—just as the building of the house is due to you. Seen in this light, you will not feel your freedom impaired because your present life on earth is determined by former ones.

Perhaps you will say: “Very well. I will build myself a house, but I still wish to remain a free man. I shall not let myself be compelled. If I do not choose to move into the new house after a year, I shall sell it.” Certainly—though I must say, one might also have one's views about such a way of behaving. One might perhaps conclude that you are a person who does not know his own mind. Undoubtedly, one might well take this view of the matter; but let us leave it. Let us not suppose a man is such a fanatical upholder of freedom that he constantly makes up his mind to do things, and afterwards out of sheer “freedom” leaves them undone. Then one might well say: “This man has not even the freedom to go in for the things which he himself resolves upon. He constantly feels the sting of his would-be freedom; he is positively harassed, thrown hither and thither by his fanatical idea of freedom.”

Observe how important it is, not to take these questions in a rigid, theoretic way, but livingly. Now let us pass to a rather more intricate concept. If we ascribe freedom to man, surely we must also ascribe it to the other Beings, whose freedom is unimpaired by human limitations. For, as we rise to the Beings of the Hierarchies, they certainly are not impaired by limitations of human nature. For them indeed we must expect a higher degree of freedom. Now someone might propound a rather strange theological theory—to this effect: God must surely be free. He has arranged the world in a certain way; yet he has thereby committed Himself, He cannot change the World-Order every day. Thus, after all, He is un-free.

You see, you will never escape from a vicious circle if you thus contrast the inner necessity of karma and the freedom which is still an absolute fact of our consciousness, a simple outcome of self-observation. Take once more the illustration of the building of the house. I do not wish to run it to death, but at this point it can still help us along the way. Suppose some person builds himself a house. I will not say suppose I build myself a house, for I shall probably never do so!—But, let us say, some one builds himself a house. By this resolve, he does, in a certain respect, determine his future. Now that the house is finished, and if he takes his former resolve into account, no freedom apparently remains to him, as far as the living in the house is concerned. And though he himself has set this limitation on his freedom, nevertheless, apparently, no freedom is left to him ... But now, I beg you, think how many things there are that you would still be free to do in the house that you had built yourself. Why, you are even free to be stupid or wise in the house, and to be disagreeable or nice to your fellow-men. You are free to get up in the house early or late. There may be other necessities in this respect; but as far as the house is concerned, you are free to get up early or late. You are free to be an anthroposophist or a materialist in the house. In short, there are untold things still at your free disposal.

Likewise in a single human life, in spite of karmic necessity, there are countless things at your free disposal, far more than in a house—countless things fully and really in the domain of your freedom.

Even here you may still feel able to rejoin: Well and good. We have a certain domain of freedom in our life. Yes, there is a certain enclosed domain of freedom, and all around it, karmic necessity. Looking at this, you might argue: Well, I am free in a certain domain, but I soon get to the limits of my freedom. I feel the karmic necessity on every hand. I go round and round in the room of my freedom, but at the boundaries on every hand I come up against limitations.

Well, my dear friends, if the fish thought likewise, it would be highly unhappy in the water, for as it swims it comes up against the limits of the water. Outside the water, it can no longer live. Hence it refrains from going outside the water. It does not go outside; it stays in the water. It swims around in the water, and whatever is outside the water, it lets it alone; it just lets it be what it is—air, or whatever else. And inasmuch as it does so, I can assure you the fish is not at all unhappy to think that it cannot breathe with lungs. It does not occur to it to be unhappy. But if ever it did occur to the fish to be unhappy because it only breathes with gills and not with lungs, then it would have to have lungs in reserve, so as to compare what it is like to live down in the water, or in the air. Then the whole way the fish feels itself inside, would be quite different. It would all be different.

Let us apply this comparison to human life with respect to freedom and karmic necessity. To begin with, man in the present earthly time has what we call the ordinary consciousness. With this consciousness he lives in the province of his freedom, just as the fish lives in the water. He does not come into the realm of karmic necessity at all, with everyday consciousness. Only when he begins to see the spiritual world (which is as though the fish were to have lungs in reserve)—only when he really lives into the spiritual world—then he begins to perceive the impulses living in him as karmic necessity. Then he looks back into his former lives on earth, and, finding in them the causes of his present experiences, he does not feel: “I am now under compulsion of an iron necessity: my freedom is impaired,” but he looks back and sees how he himself built up what now confronts him. Just as a man who has built himself a house looks back on the resolve which led him to build it ... He generally finds it wiser to ask, was it a sensible or a foolish resolve, to build this house? No doubt, in the event, you may arrive at many different conclusions on this question; but if you conclude that it was a dreadful mistake, you can say at most that you were foolish.

In earthly life this is not a pleasant experience, for when we stand face to face with a thing we have inaugurated, we do not like having to admit that it was foolish. We do not like to suffer from our own foolish mistakes. We wish we had not made the foolish decision. But this really only applies to the one earthly life; because in effect, between the foolishness of the resolve and the punishment we suffer in experiencing its consequences, only the self-same earthly life is intervening. It all remains continuous.

But between one earthly life and another it is not so. For the lives between death and a new birth are always intervening, and they change many things which would not change if earthly life continued uniformly. Suppose that you look back into a former life on earth. You did something good or ill to another man. Between that earthly life and this one, there was the life between death and new birth. In that life, you cannot help realising that you have become imperfect by doing wrong to another human being. It takes away from your own human value. It cripples you in soul. You must make good again this maiming of your soul and you resolve to achieve in a new earthly life what will make good the fault. Thus between death and new birth you take up, by your own will, that which will balance and make good the fault. Or if you did good to another man, you know now that all of man's earthly life is there for mankind as a whole. You see it clearly in the life between death and new birth. If therefore you have helped another man, you realise that he has thereby attained certain things which, without you, he could not have attained in a former life on earth. And you then feel all the more united with him in the life between death and new birth—united with him, to live and develop further what you and he together have attained in human perfection. You seek him again in a new life on earth, to work on thus in a new life precisely by virtue of the way you helped in his perfection.

When therefore, with real spiritual insight, you begin to perceive this encompassing domain, there is no question of your despising or seeking to avoid its necessity. Quite the contrary; for as you now look back on it, you see the nature of the things which you yourself did in the past, so much so that you say to yourself: That which takes place, must take place, out of an inner necessity; and out of the fullest freedom it would have to take place just the same.

In fact it will never happen, under any circumstances, that a real insight into your karma will lead you to be dissatisfied with it. When things arise in the karmic course which you do not like, you need but consider them in relation to the laws and principles of the universe; you will perceive increasingly that after all, what is karmically conditioned is far better—better than if we had to begin anew, like unwritten pages, with every new life on earth. For, in the last resort, we ourselves are our karma. What is it that comes over, karmically, from our former lives on earth? It is actually we ourselves. And it is meaningless to suggest that anything in our karma (adjoining which, remember, the realm of freedom is always there), ought to be different from what it is. In an organic totality you cannot criticise the single details. A person may not like his nose, but it is senseless to criticise the nose as such, for the nose a man has, must be as it is, if the whole man is as he is. A man who says: “I should like to have a different nose,” implies that he would like to be an utterly different man; and in so doing he really wipes himself out in thought—which is surely impossible. Likewise we cannot wipe out our karma, for we are ourselves what our karma is. Nor does it really embarrass us, for it runs alongside the deeds of our freedom it nowhere impairs the deeds of our freedom.

I may here use another comparison to make the point clear. As human beings, we walk. But the ground on which we walk is also there. No man feels embarrassed in walking because the ground is there beneath him. He must know that if the ground were not there, he could not walk at all; he would fall through at every step. So it is with our freedom; it needs the ground of necessity. It must rise out of a given foundation. And this foundation—it is really we ourselves!

Therefore, if you grasp the true concept of freedom and the true concept of karma, you will find them thoroughly compatible, and you need no longer shrink from a detailed study of the karmic laws. In fact, in some instances you will even come to the following conclusion:

Suppose that some one is really able to look back with the insight of Initiation, into former lives on earth. He knows quite well, when he looks back into his former lives, that this and that has happened to him as a consequence. It has come with him into his present life on earth. If he had not attained Initiation Science, objective necessity would impel him to do certain things. He would do them quite inevitably. He would not feel his freedom impaired, for his freedom is in the ordinary consciousness, with which he never penetrates into the realm where the necessity is working—just as the fish never penetrates into the outer air. But when he has attained to Initiation Science, then he looks back; he sees how things were in a former life on earth, and he regards what now confronts him as a task quite consciously allotted for his present life. And so indeed it is.

What I shall now say may sound paradoxical to you, yet it is true. In reality, a man who has no Initiation Science practically always knows, by a kind of inner urge or impulse, what he is to do. Yes, people always know what they must do; they are always feeling impelled to this thing or that. For one who really begins to tread the path of Initiation Science it becomes very different. With regard to the various experiences of life as they confront him, strange questions will arise in him. When he feels impelled to do this or that, immediately again he feels impelled not to do it. There is no more of that dim urge which drives most human beings to this or that line of action. Indeed, at a certain stage of Initiate-insight, if nothing else came instead, a man might easily say to himself: Now that I have reached this insight—being 40 years old, let us say, I had best spend the rest of my life quite indifferently. What do I care? I'll sit down and do nothing, for I have no definite impulses to do anything particular.

You must not suppose, my dear friends, that Initiation is not a reality. It is remarkable how people sometimes think of these things. Of a roast chicken, every one who eats it, well believes that it is a reality. Of Initiation Science, most people believe that its effects are merely theoretical. No, its effects are realities in life, and among them is the one I have just indicated. Before a man has acquired Initiation Science, out of a dark urge within him one thing is always important to him and another unimportant. But now he would prefer to sit down in a chair and let the world run its course, for it really does not matter whether this is done or that is left undone ...

This attitude might easily occur, and there is only one corrective. (For it will not remain so; Initiation Science, needless to say, brings about other effects as well.) The only corrective which will prevent our Initiate from sitting down quiescently, letting the world run its course, and saying: “It is all indifferent to me,” is to look back into his former lives on earth. For he then reads in his karma the tasks for his present earthly life, and does what is consciously imposed upon him by his former lives. He does not leave it undone, with the idea that it encroaches on his freedom, but he does it. Quite on the contrary, he would feel himself unfree if he could not fulfil the task which is allotted to him by his former lives. For in beholding what he experienced in former lives on earth, at the same time he becomes aware of his life between death and a new birth, where he perceived that it was right and reasonable to do the corresponding, consequential actions. (At this point let me say briefly, in parenthesis, that the word “Karma” has come to Europe by way of the English language, and because of its spelling people very often say “Karma” (with broad “ah” sound.) This is incorrect. It should be pronounced “Kärma” (with modified vowel sound.) I have always pronounced the word in this way and I regret that as a result many people have become accustomed to using the dreadful word “Kirma”. For some time now you will have heard even very sincere students saying “Kirma.” It is dreadful).

Thus, neither before nor after Initiation Science is there a contradiction between karmic necessity and freedom.

Once more, then: neither before nor after the entry of Initiation Science is there a contradiction between necessity—karmic necessity—and freedom. Before it there is none, because with everyday consciousness man remains within the realm of freedom, while karmic necessity goes on outside this realm, like any process of Nature. There is nothing in him to feel differently from what his own nature impels. Nor is there any contradiction after the entry of Initiation Science, for he is then quite in agreement with his karma, he thinks it only sensible to act according to it. Just as when you have built yourself a house and it is ready after a year, you do not say: the fact that you must now move in is an encroachment on your freedom. You will more probably say: Yes, on the whole it was quite sensible to build yourself a house in this neighbourhood and on this site. Now see to it that you are free in the house! Likewise he who looks back with Initiate-knowledge into his former lives on, earth: he knows that he will become free precisely by the fulfilling of his karmic task-moving into the house which he built for himself in former lives on earth.

Thus, my dear friends, I wanted to explain to you the true compatibility of freedom and karmic necessity in human life. Tomorrow we shall continue, entering more into the details of karma.

A great deal of course could still be added to all that I have touched upon in these lectures, but we shall endeavour today to conclude them with a summary of the whole subject.

The approach we have taken throughout these lectures raises an important issue: What is the attitude to Anthroposophy, to spiritual investigation as presented by Anthroposophy? What is the position in regard to the understanding of anthroposophical teachings seeing that few today can have immediate access to spiritual exercises and practices which enable them to perceive and test thoroughly for themselves the anthroposophical descriptions of other worlds? This is a question that lies close to the hearts of those who feel an urge and even a longing to take up Anthroposophy. But this question is always seen in a false light, and is the more likely to be misinterpreted precisely because they are unable to grasp the right procedures such as I have advocated in these lectures.

People may ask: what is the use of all these descriptions of the spiritual world if I cannot look into that world myself? I should like, therefore, to touch upon this question in my cursory analysis today.

It is not true to say that one cannot acquire an insight into anthroposophical teachings and an understanding of them unless one can investigate the spiritual world oneself. I t is essential to distinguish, especially at the present time, between the actual discovery of facts relating to the different worlds and the comprehension of those facts. This distinction will be clear to you when you recall that man, as we know him today, belongs in fact to different worlds and that his experiences are derived from different worlds. Man as he is constituted today acquires his stock of knowledge and his consciousness of everyday existence in the course of his day to day experiences. During his waking life this consciousness which was the starting-point of our enquiry gives him a certain perspective over a limited field, over that aspect of the world that is accessible to sense-observation, and which can be grasped and interpreted by means of the intellect which he has developed in the course of evolution.

With his understanding man penetrates in his dreams into this world concealed behind the phenomenal world, in a vague, indefinite way as I have already pointed out. In his psychic life man contacts the world through which he passes between death and rebirth only in dreamless sleep, where he is surrounded by spiritual darkness and where he lives out a life which normally he cannot recall.

Man knows three states of consciousness—waking, dreaming and deep sleep. But he does not live only in the worlds to which this threefold consciousness gives access, for he is a being whose kingdom has many mansions. His physical body lives in a different world from his etheric body, his etheric body again in a different world from his astral body and both live in different worlds from the Ego.

And this threefold consciousness—clear waking consciousness, dream consciousness and sleep consciousness (one would like to say absence of consciousness but one can only describe it as diminished consciousness)—belong to the Ego as it is today. And this Ego when it looks inwards has also three states of consciousness. When it looks outwards, it knows waking (day) consciousness, dream consciousness and sleep consciousness. When it looks inwards, it knows clear intellectual consciousness; a sentient consciousness, a sentient life, though this is far more opaque and dreamlike than one usually imagines; it knows als1˃ a sentient life and finally the dim, twilight will-consciousness that resembles the state of deep sleep. Normal consciousness can no more explain the origin of willing than it can explain the origin of sleep. When a man performs an act of will it is accompanied by a thought which is clear and lucid. He then shrouds this thought in feeling which is more indefinite. The thought that is imbued with feeling passes down into the limbs; the process cannot be experienced by normal consciousness. To the kind of investigation of which I spoke yesterday and the day before, willing presents the following picture: whilst a thought wills something in the head and is then transmitted to the whole body through feeling, so that a man wills in the whole of his body, something akin to a delicate, subtle and intimate process of combustion sets in meanwhile.

When man develops Initiate-consciousness he is able to experience this life of will which is subject to the influence of warmth, but it remains wholly subliminal to ordinary consciousness. This is merely one instance which shows how what lies in the subliminal consciousness can be raised to the level of Initiate-consciousness.

When the information in the book I mentioned yesterday is made progressively more accessible to the public, people will realize that when we contemplate with Initiate-consciousness an act of will performed by man, we have the impression that we are watching the lighting of a candle or even the kindling of a warmth-giving light. Just as we have in this instance a clear picture of the external phenomenon, so we shall be able to see the thought as it is precipitated into the will. We then say: the thought develops feeling and from feeling—it follows a downward direction in man—proceeds a sensation of warmth, a flame in man. And this flame wills; it is kindled by degrees. We can represent schematical1y this normal consciousness in the following way:

Now although, in order to investigate the spiritual world, we must of necessity direct our consciousness to that world which we seek to apprehend cognitively, none the less, if the fruits of our investigations are to be communicated honestly, the ideas communicated verbally must be expressed in the language of other forms of consciousness.

You can now understand, perhaps, that this is a twofold process. In the first place, for example, we investigate the world of the human organs as I explained yesterday. We investigate the phenomena in question by utilizing the emergent forces in man as he draws near to the spiritual world during the course of his life. We then discover the relevant facts as they are revealed to the understanding. And there are men in the world who are aware of these facts and who communicate them to the world. When they are imparted to the world by such men they can be comprehended by normal consciousness if we look at them with the necessary objectivity. In the course of human evolution there has always been a minority who devoted themselves to investigation of the facts relating to the spiritual world and who then communicated to others the fruits of their investigations.

Now one factor today militates against the acceptance of such knowledge, namely, that as a rule people grow up in a social environment and under an educational system that conditions their habitual responses to such an extent that they can believe only in the world of fact, in the sensory world, and the rational information derived from the world of the senses. This habit is so strongly ingrained that people are inclined to say: At the university there are graduate members of the teaching faculty who, in addition to teaching, investigate certain factual aspects of the phenomenal world or confirm the findings of other research workers in this field. Everyone accepts their findings. Even though one does not investigate the facts oneself, one still believes in them. This boundless credulity is reserved especially for modern science. People believe things which, to those who have insight, are not only problematical, but definitely untrue. This situation stems from centuries of education. I would like to point out that this form of education was unknown to men of earlier centuries. They were far more inclined to believe those who made researches into spiritual facts since they still preserved something of the old insight into, and participation in the spiritual world that was consistent with their will and feeling. Today people are strangers to such knowledge. They are accustomed to an outlook which on the Continent is more theoretical and in England and America more practical, and which has now become firmly established.

On the Continent there exist detailed theories about these matters whilst in England and America there is an instinctive feeling for them which is by no means easy to overcome. During the course of centuries mankind has become inured to a scientific outlook that is related to the phenomenal world and has come to accept the findings of astronomy, botany, zoology and medicine, for example, in the form in which they are presented in recognized schools or centres of learning. A chemist, for example, undertakes a piece of research in his laboratory. People have not the slightest understanding of the technique involved. The work is acclaimed and they unhesitatingly declare: “Here is truth, here is knowledge that makes no appeal to faith.” But what they call knowledge is, in effect, an act of faith.

And amongst the methods adopted for investigating the phenomenal world, for ascertaining the laws of the phenomenal world through the instrument of reason, not a single one gives the slightest information about the spiritual world. But there are few who can afford to dispense wholly with the spiritual world. Those who do so, are not honest with themselves, they persuade themselves into it. Mankind feels an imperious need to know something about the spiritual world. As yet men ignore those who can tell them something about the spiritual world as it is known today, but they are prepared to listen to historical traditions, to the teachings of the Bible and sacred scriptures of the East. They are interested in these traditional writings, because otherwise they cannot satisfy their need for some sort of relationship to a spiritual world. And in spite of the fact that both the Bible and the Eastern scriptures have been investigated only by individual Initiates, people claim that they reflect a different kind of outlook, which bears no relationship to the knowledge of the phenomenal world, scientific knowledge, and depends upon faith and appeals to faith. And so a rigid line of demarcation is set up between science and belief. Men refer science to the phenomenal world and belief to the spiritual world.

Amongst the theologians of the Evangelical Church on the Continent—not amongst the theologians of the Roman Catholic Church who have retained the old traditions, and who do not accept the dichotomy of the Evangelicals or the natural scientists—there exist innumerable theories showing that there are definite boundaries to knowledge and thereafter faith steps in. They are convinced there can be no other possibility.

England is less hag-ridden because theorizing is unpopular. Here the traditional attitude is, on the one hand, to listen to what science has to say, and, on the other hand, to live reverently—I will not go so far as to say sanctimoniously—in faith and to keep the two spheres rigidly apart.

For some time past, laymen and scholars have adopted this point of view. Newton laid the foundations of a theory of gravitation, i.e. of a conception of space which, by its very nature, excludes any possibility of a spiritual outlook. If the world were as Newton depicted it, it would be devoid of spirit. But no-one has the courage to admit it. One cannot imagine a divine-spiritual Presence that lives and moves and has its being in the Newtonian world.

But not only the devotees of these ideas ultimately accept a conception of space and time that excludes the spiritual, but also those who undertake independent research work. Newton offers an excellent example of the latter, for he not only laid the foundation of a world-outlook which excluded the spiritual, but at the same time in his interpretation of the Apocalypse he fully accepted the spiritual.

The links between knowledge of the phenomenal world and knowledge of the spiritual world have been severed. Today the theorists set out to give solid proof of this dichotomy and every effort is made to inoculate the thoughts and feelings of those who distrust theory with this idea, so that ultimately they become conditioned.

On the other hand, man's intelligence, power of comprehension and ideation, his capacity for ideas, have today reached a point where, if he keeps them under conscious control, he can grasp by reason, though he cannot investigate by reason, the teachings of Initiation Science.

It is essential that the following point of view should find wider acceptance: that investigations into the spiritual world must be undertaken by those who, in their present life on Earth are able to call upon forces from earlier incarnations, for it is these forces which release the necessary powers for spiritual investigation; and further, that the results of these investigations shall be accepted by increasing numbers of men and incorporated into ideas which are comprehensible; and that, when the results of spiritual research are accepted by healthy understanding, a way is prepared for these other men, by virtue of this understanding, to have real experience of the spiritual world. For I have often said that the healthiest way to enter the spiritual world is first of all to read about it or to assimilate what we are told about it.

If we accept these ideas, they become inwardly quickened and we attain not only to understanding, but also to clairvoyant vision in accordance with our karmic development. In this respect we must give serious thought to the idea of karma. Today man is not concerned with karma; he believes that just as we analyse sulphur in the laboratory, so we can analyse by laboratory techniques the origin of so-called trans-normal phenomena; and that, as with sulphur, we must subject the individual who manifests abnormal forms of knowledge to experimental tests.

But mineral sulphur has no karma. Only the sulphur associated with the human body has karma, for only human beings are subject to karma. We cannot assume that it is part of man's karma to be experimented upon in a laboratory which would be a necessary prerequisite if the investigations were to have any value.

For this reason we have need of Spiritual Science. It would first of all be necessary to enquire into the karmic conditions which enable us to gain knowledge of the spiritual world through the agency of another. I have explained this clearly at the end of the later editions of my book Theosophy. But mankind today is not yet ready to accept this idea, not from incapacity, but from conservatism; but it is of immense significance.

It is essential to realize that we must not immediately undertake investigations into the spiritual world; but on the other hand if we do not adopt undesirable practices, such as experimenting with karma when there is no karmic necessity, or with mediums whose procedure we do not understand; and if we rely upon the everyday consciousness, which is the right condition of consciousness for this world, then we will attain to a perfect understanding of the communications of Initiation Science. We are greatly mistaken if we imagine that we cannot have such an understanding without first being able to experience the spiritual world for ourselves. To say, “what avails the spiritual world, if I cannot experience it for myself?” is to encourage yet another of the errors commonly committed today. This is to commit one of the greatest, most dangerous and most obvious of errors and must be clearly recognized by those who are associated with a Movement such as the Anthroposophical Society.

Man's existence here on the physical plane is bound up with existence in other worlds. To the unprejudiced mind this can be explained by the fact that man's experiences, as seen in the light of total human experience, are such that, in relation to the most vital questions in life they meet with incomprehension on the part of the ordinary daily consciousness because they appear unrelated, whereas in certain instances they are in effect closely associated.

In this brief account, therefore, I should like first to speak of man's entrance into the physical world and his exit, of birth and death.

Birth and death, the two most momentous events of our life on Earth, appear to ordinary consciousness to be isolated phenomena. We associate all that precedes birth, all that is related to human incarnation, with the beginning of our life on Earth, and death with its end. They appear to be dissociated. But the spiritual investigator sees them drawing ever more closely together. For if we take the path leading to the Moon mysteries and woo the night into the day in the manner described yesterday, then we perceive how, during the processes of birth, the physical body and etheric body progressively grow and flourish: how they develop out of the germ, gradually assume human form, and how during earthly life their vitality progressively increases up to the age of thirty-five, when it gradually decreases and a decline sets in. This process, of course, can be observed externally. But he who follows the lunar path, which I described yesterday, perceives that whilst the cellular life of the physical and etheric bodies grows, develops and assumes embryonic form, another form of life, which in Anthroposophy we call the astral body and Ego, is subject to the forces of decay and death.

When we uncover the hidden recesses of life—I gave a concrete description of this yesterday—we become aware of the birth of the physical and etheric and the death of the astral and Ego. We perceive death interwoven with life, the winter of life allied to its springtime.

And again, when we observe man with Initiate-consciousness, we are aware that, as his body declines, there is a burgeoning of the Ego and the astral from the thirty-fifth year onwards. This burgeoning life is retarded by the presence of dying forces in the physical and etheric being. Nevertheless a definite renewal does take place. And so by means of spiritual investigation we come to recognize the presence of death in life and life in death. Thus we prepare ourselves to trace back that which is seen to be dying at the time of birth to its pre-earthly life where it is revealed in its full significance and greatness.

And because we perceive the gradual burgeoning of the astral and Ego within the declining etheric and physical (for they are imprisoned within the etheric and physical), we prepare ourselves to follow them into the spiritual world after their release from the physical and etheric bodies at the moment of death. Thus we see that birth and death are interrelated, whilst to ordinary consciousness they appear to be isolated events.

All this information which is revealed by spiritual investigation can be grasped by ordinary consciousness as I indicated in the first part of today's lecture. At the same time one must be prepared to abandon the demands of ordinary consciousness for factual or scientific proof.

I once knew a man who maintained that, just as a stone falls to the ground, so if I pick up a chair and let go, it also falls to the ground since everything is subject to gravitation. Wherefore if the Earth is not supported, as it is claimed, it must of necessity fall. But he failed to realize that objects must fall to the ground because they are subject to the gravitational pull of the Earth, that the Earth itself however moves freely in space like the stars which mutually support and attract one another.

Those who, like the modern scientist, demand that proof must be supported by the evidence of the senses resemble this man who believed that the Earth must fall unless it is firmly underpinned. Anthroposophical truths are like the stars which mutually support each other. People must be prepared to see the whole picture. And if they can do this by means of their normal understanding they will begin really to grasp anthroposophical ideas such as the interrelationship of birth and death.

Let us go a little further and take the case of the man who is well grounded in the principles of modern science, but whilst alert and receptive to anthroposophical ideas has not yet learned to take the whole man into consideration, but only the separate organs in the manner described yesterday.

Through this knowledge of the organs acquired in the course of Initiation we are not only aware of birth and death, but of something quite different. In the light of this knowledge of the organs, birth and death have lost their usual significance, for it is only the whole human being who dies, not his separate organs. The lungs, for example, cannot die. Science today dimly realizes that when the whole human being has died, his single organs can be animated to a certain extent. Irrespective of whether a man is buried or cremated, his separate organs do not die. The individual organs take their path into that sphere of the Cosmos to which each is related. Even if man is buried beneath the earth, every organ finds its way into the Cosmos through water, air or warmth, as the case may be. In reality they are dissolved, but they do not perish; only the whole human being perishes.

Death, then, can only have meaning in relation to the whole human being. In the animal the organs die, whereas in man they are dissolved into the Cosmos. They dissolve rapidly. Burial is the slower process, cremation the faster. We can follow the individual organs as they take their path towards the infinite, each towards its own sphere. They are not lost in infinity, but return in the form of the mighty cosmic being whom I described to you yesterday. Thus, as we observe the organs with Initiate-consciousness, we see what really befalls the organs at death, namely, this streaming out of the organs into those regions of the Cosmos to which they are severally related. The heart takes a different path from the lungs; the liver from lungs and heart. They are dispersed throughout the Cosmos. Then the Cosmic Man appears; we see him as he really is, integrated in the Cosmos. And in the vision of this Cosmic Man we become aware of what is the source of successive incarnations, for example. We need this vision which has its origin, not in the whole man, but in the perception of the several organs, in order to be able to recognize once more, clearly and distinctly, the karmic return of former Earth lives in the present life.

It is for this reason that those who approached the spiritual world through the Moon path, mystics, theosophists, and so on, perceived the strangest phenomena—human souls as they had lived on Earth, gods and spirits—but could neither recognize nor decide what they were, nor give any definite assurance whether they were in the presence of Alanus ab Insulis, Dante or Brunetto Latini. Sometimes the entities were given the most grotesque appellations. And they were unable to determine whether the incarnations they contacted were their own or other people's, or what they were.

Thus the spiritual world is associated with the realm of Moon consciousness that has been wooed into the day; then, under the influx of the Venus impulses, this vision is lost and we now behold the spiritual world in its totality, but without that clear definition which it should possess. It is in this realm that we first begin to realize man's situation in the world as a whole and his position as a cosmic being.

In this connection, however, we cannot escape a tragic realization. For if man were simply the complete physical man he appears to be here on Earth, what a virtuous, docile and noble being he would be! Just as little as we can investigate death with normal consciousness—we can always understand death in the sense already suggested—just as little can we discover by means of the ordinary consciousness why human beings, with their candid faces—and there is no denying they have candid faces—have a capacity for evil. It is not the whole man who can become evil. His outer tegument, the skin, as such is noble and good; but man becomes evil through his individual organs; in his organs lies the potentiality for evil.

And thus we come to recognize the relationship of the organs to their respective cosmic spheres and also from what spheres obsession with evil originates; for fundamentally, obsession is inherent in the slightest manifestation of evil.

Thus our knowledge of the total man reveals first, birth and death; secondly, a knowledge of his organization reveals his relationship to the Cosmos in health and disease, namely, evil.

And so we can only perceive spiritually that Figure who experienced the Mystery of Golgotha when we are able to behold Cosmic Man through human organology. For it was as Cosmic Man that Christ came from the Sun. Until that moment He was not earthly man. He approached the Earth in cosmic form. How can we expect to recognize Cosmic Man if we have not first prepared ourselves to understand Cosmic Man as he really is! It is precisely out of this understanding of the Cosmic Man that Christology can grow.

Thus you see how true paths lead into the spiritual world, to a knowledge of birth and death and of the relationship of the human organism to the Cosmos, to the recognition of evil and to knowledge of Christ, the Cosmic Man. All this can be understood, when it is presented in such a way that the various aspects are shown to support each other. And the best means of finding one's own way into the spiritual world is through understanding and by meditating upon what is understood. Other rules for meditation then serve as additional supports. This is the right path into the spiritual worlds for human beings today. On the other hand, all experimenting with other paths which fail to use and maintain the normal channels of consciousness, all experimenting with trance conditions such as mediumism, somnambulism, hypnotism and so on, all investigation into world-events that cannot be apprehended by a consciousness that is a travesty of modern natural science—all these are false paths, for they do not lead into the true spiritual world.

When man is sensitively aware of the findings of spiritual investigation, namely, that through knowledge of the organs the Cosmic Man returns, that this “return” can to some extent lead to an understanding of Christ when all that is disclosed to occult investigation and insight is admitted into the Initiate-consciousness and becomes an integral part of his sentient life, then, through feeling, the Divine manifests in the terrestrial. And this is the province of art.

Through feeling, art embodies half consciously that which man receives from the spiritual world along those paths of return of which I have spoken. In all ages, therefore, it was those who were predestined to do so by their karma, who clothed the spiritual in material form.

Our naturalistic art has abandoned the spiritual approach. Every high point in the history of art depicts the spiritual in sensuous form, or rather raises the material into the realm of the spiritual. Raphael is valued so highly because, to a greater degree than any other painter, he was able to clothe the spiritual in sensuous representation.

Now in the course of the history of art there existed a general movement which tended more to the plastic or graphic arts. Today we must once again inject new life into the plastic arts, for the immediacy of the original impulse was lost years ago.

For centuries the impulse towards music has been growing and expanding. Therefore the plastic arts have assumed a musical character to a greater or lesser extent. Music, which includes also the musical element in the arts of speech, is destined to be the art of the future.

The first Goetheanum at Dornach was conceived musically and for this reason its architecture, sculpture and painting met with so little understanding. And for the same reason, the second Goetheanum will also meet with little understanding because the element of music must be introduced into painting, sculpture and architecture, in accordance with man's future evolution.

The coming of the figure of Christ, the spiritually-living figure, which I referred to as the culminating point in human evolution, has been magnificently portrayed in Renaissance and pre-Renaissance painting, but in future will have to be expressed through music.

The urge to give a musical expression of the Christ Impulse already existed. It was anticipated in Richard Wagner and was ultimately responsible for the creation of Parsifal. But in Parsifal the introduction of the Christ Impulse into the phenomenal world where it seeks to give expression to the purest Christian spirit, has been given a mere symbolic indication, such as the appearance of the Dove and so on. The Communion has also been portrayed symbolically. The music of Parsifal fails to portray the real significance of the Christ Impulse in the Cosmos and the Earth.

Music is able to portray this Christ Impulse musically, in tones that are inwardly permeated with spirit. If music allows itself to be inspired by Spiritual Science, it will find ways of expressing the Christ Impulse, for it will reveal purely artistically and intuitively how the Christ Impulse in the Cosmos and the Earth can be awakened symphonically in tones.

To this end we only need to be able to deepen our experience of the sphere of the major third by an inner enrichment of musical experience that penetrates into the hidden depths of feeling. If we experience the sphere of the major third as something wholly enclosed within the inner being of man and if we then feel the sphere of the major fifth to have the characteristic of “enveloping,” so that, as we grow into the configuration of the fifth, we reach the boundary of the human and the cosmic, where the cosmic resounds into the sphere of the human and the human, consumed with longing, yearns to rush forth into the Cosmos, then, in the mystery enacted between the spheres of the major third and major fifth, we can experience musically something of the inner being of man that reaches out into the Cosmos.

And if we then succeed in setting free the dissonances of the seventh to echo cosmic life, where the dissonances express man's sentient experiences in the Cosmos as he journeys towards the various spiritual realms; and if we succeed in allowing the dissonances of the seventh to die away, so that through their dying fall they acquire a certain definition, then in their dying strains they are ultimately resolved in something which, to the musical ear, resembles a musical firmament.

If, then, having already given a subtle indication of the experience of the ‘minor’ with the ‘major,’ if, in the dying strains of the dissonances of the seventh, in this spontaneous re-creation of the dissonances into a totality, we find here a means of passing in an intensely minor mood from the dissonances of the seventh, from the near consonance of these diminishing dissonances to the sphere of the fifth in a minor mood, and from that point blend the sphere of the fifth with that of the minor third, then we shall have evoked in this way the musical experience of the Incarnation, and what is more, of the Incarnation of the Christ.

In feeling our way outwards into the sphere of the seventh, which to cosmic feeling is only apparently dissonant and that we fashion into a ‘firmament,’ in that it is seemingly supported by the octave, if we have grasped this with our feelings and retrace our steps in the manner already indicated and find how, in the embryonic form of the consonances of the minor third, there is a possibility of giving a musical representation of the Incarnation, then, when we retrace our steps to the major third in this sphere, the “Hallelujah” of the Christ can ring out from this musical configuration as pure music.

Then, within the configuration of the tones man will be able to conjure forth an immediate realization of the super-sensible and express it musically.

The Christ Impulse can be found in music. And the dissolution of the symphonic into near dissonance, as in Beethoven, can be redeemed by a return to the dominion of the cosmic in music. Bruckner attempted this within the narrow limits of a traditional framework. But his posthumous Symphony shows that he could not escape these limitations. On one hand we admire its greatness, but on the other hand we find a hesitant approach to the true elements of music, and a failure to achieve a full realization of these elements which can only be experienced in the way I have described, i.e. when we have made strides in the realm of pure music and discover therein the essence, the fundamental spirit which can conjure forth a world through tones.

Without doubt the musical development I have described will one day be achieved through anthroposophical inspiration if mankind does not sink into decadence; and ultimately—and this will depend entirely upon mankind—the true nature of the Christ Impulse will be revealed externally.

I wish to draw your attention to this because you will then realize that Anthroposophy seeks to permeate all aspects of life. This can be accomplished if man, for his part, finds the true path to anthroposophical experience and investigation. It will even come to ~ass that one day the realm of music shall echo the teachings of Anthroposophy and the Christian enigma shall be solved through music.

With these words I hope to have concluded what I could only indicate in these lectures, to indicate the purposes I had in view.

I should like to add, however, that I hope to have succeeded in awakening in your souls some recognition of anthroposophical truths; and that these truths will grow and multiply and fertilize ever wider fields of human life.

May this cycle of lectures be a small contribution to the far-reaching aim which Anthroposophy sets out to achieve.

As we go further into that special realm where pathology is to meet therapeutics and where, in a certain sense, we build a bridge between the two, we shall need to mention many things that can only remain a sort of ideal for treatment and cannot be everywhere fully applied. Nevertheless, if we had a comprehensive picture of all that matters in the treatment of disease, we should be able to select one or other particular point, and at least we should know how a fragmentary diagnosis of a given disease can be utilised.

First and foremost, we must consider the importance, even in the most special cases, of knowing the whole personality before us. This should include all the main data of the patient's life. Some medical practitioners have given me their confidence, and discussed various topics with me, and I have often been amazed. My first question was: “How old is the patient?” and the practitioner could give no definite answer. He had himself formed no opinion on the patient's age. As we shall see in the next few lectures, it is one of the essentials to know this, for therapeutics depend very much on the age of the person treated. The day before yesterday we heard it said of certain remedies, that while in some cases they were of extraordinary efficacy in others they failed.¹ Here arises the question whether there was any connection between the failure and the age of the patient under treatment We must collect and collate very exact records concerning the influence of age upon the effect of remedies.

Then there is the factor of stature. We should always pay special attention to the stature and build of the patient—whether he is short and compact or tall and lanky. It is important to be able to judge, from differences in build, the forces inherent in what we term the etheric body of man. I have given much consideration to the possibility of avoiding these terms, which belong to the reality of man's being; but it is impossible to do so, and presumably you would not wish to do so. Of course we could replace them by other terms that find more approval among those who are not Anthroposophists. Perhaps of this course. Here and now, however, we shall retain this vocabulary for the sake of better understanding.

We can judge what I might term the intensity of the etheric body's activity by the build and physique of the individual. One should wherever possible find out—(I will mention every factor, although often they cannot be considered for lack of the necessary data) whether in his youth the patient grew slowly or rapidly. All such facts are symptomatic of what we might term the action of the etheric body, or let us say, of the functional manifestations of the man in relation to his physical body. This must be taken into account, if we want to perceive a connection between the man and his medical remedies.

Then we must find out the relationship of both physical and etheric bodies to the higher members of the human organisation, to what we call the astral body, (the soul proper) and the ego (the spiritual proper). So for instance we should ask the patient about his dream-life: does he dream much or little? An extensive dream-life is an extremely important constitutional peculiarity, for it testifies to a tendency of the astral body and Ego to unfold an activity of their own, and not to concern themselves very closely with the physical body, so that the formative forces of the soul do not flow down into the organic system.

Another question that should be put—although it may be “uncomfortable”—is whether the individual patient is fond of movement and exertion, or inclined to inertia. For personalities with the latter tendency have a powerful internal agility of their astral bodies and egos. This may appear paradoxical, but the activity referred to does not reach our consciousness. And for this very reason the individual is not consciously industrious, but, on the whole, lazy. For what I here define as the opposite of inertia is the organic capacity to grip the lower human sphere by means of the higher members, i.e., to transmit activity from the astral body and from the ego, into the physical and etheric bodies. Lazy people have very slight capacity of this kind. The lazy man is really, from the point of view of spiritual science, a man asleep.

Then we should inform ourselves about the patient's eyesight: is he short-sighted or long-sighted? Short-sighted individuals have a certain reluctance of the astral body and ego to permeate the physical body, and short-sight is one of the chief symptoms of this reluctance.

I would offer a further suggestion which might some day be feasible. It would be most important in the treatment of disease, and, as I believe, could become valuable in practice if the various professions were to develop more social feeling. My suggestion is this: it would be most useful if dentists and dental surgeons were to use their knowledge of the dental system and all that is connected with it, that is, of the digestive system as well, so as to be able to offer a sort of diagram to their patients on each occasion of treatment or consultation. Of course the patients themselves must be persuaded to co-operate, but, with some social sense, this would perhaps be possible. On such a diagram the dentist would note the efficiency of all factors related to dentition, whether there was any early tendency to dental caries;, whether the teeth have kept in good condition in later life, and so forth. As we shall see during the next lectures, these matters are crucial for the correct judgment of the total human organisation. And if the physician who has to treat an isolated case of illness could obtain a summary of the patient's state of health from the state of his teeth in this way, the document would be an extremely important basis for the treatment.

Further, you should learn from the patients themselves their chief physical sympathies and antipathies. It is particularly important to know whether any person you propose to treat, has a keen appetite for salt, for instance. His most pronounced tastes in food should be ascertained. If he has a strong appetite for all saline flavours, we have to deal with a person in whom there is too close a connection between the ego and astral body on the one hand, and the physical and etheric bodies on the other. The affinity between his soul and spirit and his bodily organism is, so to speak too complete. The same conclusion may be drawn from liability to vertigo—fits of dizziness following external mechanical movements, such as rapidly turning round. It should be noted whether a patient becomes dizzy easily following certain bodily movements.

Moreover, one ought to acquaint oneself—though this is very generally known—with every disturbance of elimination, with the whole glandular activity of the patient. Where there are irregularities of elimination there are also always disturbances in the interaction of ego and astral body with the etheric and physical bodies. These are a few indications of what must be ascertained in the first consultation with any patient. They are chosen as examples, but you will perceive their general trend, in so far as the individual bodily constitution is concerned. Later on we shall discuss also the indications of habits of life, the access to good air, etc. These are rather matters for consideration under the special headings. But you have had an outline of the way to obtain a view of the sort of person you have to treat. For only when this is known in detail, will it be possible to judge how to administer or compose any remedy.

I should like to remind you of the general fact mentioned before that there is an inherent relationship between man and the whole non-human world. In Spiritual Science this relationship is often formulated in this, admittedly abstract, manner in the course of evolution mankind has discarded and released the other natural kingdoms out of his own entity, and therefore external things retain a relationship to him. But in place of this abstract formulation, we shall have to point to repeated specific and concrete instances of the relationship in organo-therapy. Let us be clear, first of all, as to the actual basis of this remedial reaction of man to non-human nature.

You know that there is much controversy on this theme. As we shall explain more fully later, different methods of treatment are arranged against one another. One of these disputes is all too well known to the public; that waged by the advocates of homeopathy and of allopathy respectively. It might interest you to hear about the part Spiritual Science should take here. But its intervention is somewhat peculiar. I shall give a general statement regarding it now, but reserve the details for later addresses. Strictly speaking, in the light of the results of Spiritual Science, there are no allopaths. There are in reality no allopaths because even what is described as an allopathic remedy is subjected within the organism to a homeopathic process and heals only through and by virtue of this process, so that, in actual fact, every allopath is supported and helped in his characteristic methods, by the homeopathic processes of the organism under treatment. This carries out what the allopath forgets, the dispersion of the particles of the remedial substances. But, of course, there is a considerable difference, according to whether we relieve the organism of this homeopathic function, or not. This is simply because the curative processes within us are associated with the condition of these remedies after they have been gradually homeopathised, whereas the organism has no curative interaction with the substances of the external world in their usual state. When these are taken into the body, they are “foreign bodies,” causing really awful disturbances and overloading if the body is burdened with the forces contained in allopathic dosages. We shall give special consideration to the cases in which it is impossible to relieve the organism of this homeopathic effort.

Homeopathic dosage has really up to a point been very carefully copied from Nature herself, although fanatics have often gone too far and jumped to conclusions. How can we find a way to the relationship between man and his non-human environment? As I pointed out yesterday, in another context, we cannot merely repeat what the physicians of old time have laid down, although an intelligent study of their works can be helpful. But we have also to investigate this interaction between the human and extra-human world with all the resources of modern science. And we must hold steadfastly to the knowledge that we cannot get much further by means of chemical research into various substances, that is, by consideration of the results of laboratory tests on such substances. This is a kind of microscopy; I have already suggested that this should be replaced by macroscopic observation of the Cosmos itself.

Today I have to put some significant facts before you which may to some extent show in what way the extra-human world corresponds in a sort of threefold division to the threefold nature of man. First of all, consider all soluble substances. Solubility is the last and latest attribute of special importance in the evolution of our planet, What has been deposited as the solid element is mainly derived from a cosmic process of solution which has been overcome and has deadened and thrown off the solid particles. But it is a purely external view to consider the planetary process as a merely mechanical deposit of sediment, and to construct geognosy and geology on this premise. Rather may we maintain that in the process of solution something is manifested that man has liberated from his own being, in so far as it occurs externally in the extra-human nature. Something that man has set free is at work. So we must inquire what are the relationships between external processes of solution and the internal functions of our organism.

It is of fundamental significance, that certain individuals in whom the spirit and soul principle is too closely linked with the etheric and physical bodies, have an organic hunger or thirst for salt; that means that they tend to reverse the process of depositing salt. They want to cancel the process of earth-formation within their own bodies, and restore salt to an earlier, more primitive, state than that in which the earth has solidified. It is very important to include these connections in our view. They afford real insight into the connections between the human organism and external nature. We may conclude that our human nature has inherent in it an organic need to reverse certain processes that take place in the external world, to fight against them. As I pointed out yesterday, there is even a resistance to the force of gravitation, shown by the buoyancy that lifts and suspends the human brain. This resistance is a general tendency.

And what does this opposition to earth-solidifying forces mean? It means nothing less, in essence, than the liberation of the lower man from the soul and spirit principle, the expulsion of this principle from the lower sphere into the upper in the first instance. Thus in all cases where there is a pronounced appetite for salt, the lower organic sphere is striving somehow for liberation from the too potent activity of the soul and spirit within it, and trying, so to speak, to cause this activity to flow towards the upper organic sphere.

Let us assume disturbances of function in the lower sphere, disturbances that have been recognised as such. Later on we shall see how one can recognise the particular methods of finding out the diseases that result. What can we do about them?

Here I must interpolate a comment which may be of use to those who tend to be one-sided towards the use of mineral remedies. This antipathy is not justifiable. As we shall see, purely plant remedies can only be efficacious within very definite limits, and mineral remedies are of great service, particularly in more serious cases. So I ask you not to take offense, if I start from mineral remedies, from the efficacy of mineral remedies, however, which are incorporated within the realm of organic life.

You can throw a strong light on certain treatments of the human pelvis and abdomen, in relation to the upper organs, by studying the oyster: there is great significance in the oyster and the formative process of its shell. The oyster is encased in a covering of carbonate of lime, Calcarea Carbonica, and it expels this substance from its body, to form the shell. You must accept a little help from Spiritual Science here; but if you study the oyster with this help, you will become aware that although this mollusk occupies a very low position in the animal world, its position in the Cosmos is relatively high. For this reason: the force that man carries within him which manifests itself as his power of thought, is extruded from the oyster to form the shell. If the oyster could link up the formative forces that are conducted outwards with its actual organic growth, it would become a highly intelligent creature and be put on a very high level in the animal kingdom.

The forces which pass outwards from the interior, show the path by which this potentiality is canalised, drained to the exterior. And you can see clearly, and, so to speak, tangibly, in the origin of the oyster shell, the operation of carbonate of lime. It operates to draw the excess activity of the soul and spirit from the organism.

Suppose you find a case of superfluous and excessive activity of soul and spirit manifesting within the lower bodily sphere, as happens in certain forms of disease, which we shall describe in due course. You must have recourse to the remedy we owe to the shells of oysters or similar substances, which, through the mysterious forces of carbonate of lime work outwards from within. Something quite crucial in the treatment will therefore depend on comprehending that certain healing forces are active in this centrifugal tendency. All that is associated with the therapeutic properties of Calcarea Carbonica and similar substances can only be rationally understood, if viewed in this context.

All the forces inherent in phosphorus, e.g., are polar opposites to those in carbonate of lime. (The expressions I use in this connection are at least no less scientific, in their true significance, than much that today passes for science.) If all “saline substances” behave in such a way as to give themselves up to the environment, the reason is that all salts arise through deprivation and liberation of the corresponding substances from the inner workings of light and other imponderable elements. I might say that all that is saline has so repelled the imponderable elements through its very origin that they are alien to it.

Of phosphorus the exact contrary is true. Ancient atavistic knowledge was indeed not without justification in calling phosphorus the Light-bearer. Men saw that phosphorus does carry and contain that imponderable light. What salt repels and holds at bay, phosphorus carries within it. Thus the substances at the opposite pole from salt, are those that appropriate, so to speak, the imponderable entities—principally light, but also others, for instance, warmth—and interiorise them, making them their inner properties. This is the basis of the remedial efficacy of all the qualities of phosphorus, and of all that is allied to phosphorus in its healing effect. Therefore phosphorus, in which the imponderable are internally stored, is especially conducive to bringing the astral body and the ego into closer relationship with the physical organism.

Let us suppose that you are consulted by a person suffering from some disease (we shall deal with particular diseases later) in which there are particularly vivid and frequent dreams. This means that the astral body likes to separate from the physical, does so with ease, and goes about its own business. Moreover the patient tells you that he has a constitutional tendency to inflammations affecting the periphery of the organism. This is a further symptom showing that the astral body and ego are not settled properly in the physical. If these symptoms are found, you will be able to employ the force where with phosphorus grips its imponderables to make the astral body and ego occupy themselves more with the physical body. In persons who have restless and disturbed sleep, even in very different cases of disease, one can beneficially employ phosphorus, for it tends to restore and re-unite the astral body and ego to the physical and etheric bodies.

Thus we find phosphoric and saline substances, polar opposites in some measure. And I would ask you to bear in mind the cosmic roles played by these two groups, as of far more significance than—if I may say so—the individual names applied in modern chemistry to all the separate substances. In the course of our discussions we shall see how phosphorus can be used for healing purposes, in the form of related substances.

Here then you have, in external nature, two states which are polar to one another; that which acts in a saline manner and that which acts in a phosphoric manner. And between them, there is a third group: that which acts Mercurially. Just as man is a threefold being, a creature with nerves and senses, with a circulatory system, and with metabolism; and as circulation is the bridge linking nerves and senses to the metabolic functions: so also there is a mediatory function in external nature. It comprises everything that possesses, to a great degree, neither the saline character nor the character of interiorising the imponderables, but—so to speak—holds the equipoise between these two, by manifesting in the form of drops. For mercurial substances are essentially those which tend to assume the form of drops, by virtue of their inner combination of forces. This is the point which matters in all mercury substances, not whether they are known today under the name of quicksilver. The test of what is mercurial is the combination of forces whereby a substance is poised midway between the liquefying tendency of the saline, and the concentrating tendency in which imponderables are held together. So we must give special heed to the state of the forces that are the most evident in all mercurial substances. You will find accordingly, that these mercurial substances are mainly linked up with all that is calculated to bring about a balance between the activities for which phosphorous and saline substances are best qualified. We shall find that their effects upon the organism are not contradictory to the indications just given, when we deal specially with syphilitic and similar diseases.

In this sketch of the three groups: Saline. Mercurial. Phosphoric. I have presented to you the most conspicuous mineral types. But in dealing with the saline group, we have already had to refer to an organic activity, as manifested in the formation of the oyster's shell, which works behind the saline nature. Such an organic process is in a certain sense at work also when imponderables become concentrated in phosphorus. But as in that case, all depends on interiorisation, the process becomes less obvious externally. Now let us turn from the contemplation of these typical forms manifested in the external world, to other processes that have been segregated at a different epoch from man—viz., plant life.

As we have already recognised from a somewhat different point of view, the character of the plant represents the opposite of the activity proper to the human organism. But in the plant itself we can clearly differentiate between three kinds of manifestation. This threefold diversity strikes you very plainly, as you observe that which unfolds earthward to form the root and that which springs upward to send forth blossom, fruit and seed. The external direction in space as such indicates the contrast between the plant nature and Man (the animal must be left aside for the moment). This contrast in direction contains something of great significance and value. The plant sinks itself deep into the earth with its roots and stretches its blossom, its reproductive organs, upwards. Man is the direct opposite in his relation to the Cosmos. He sends his roots, so to speak, upwards, with his head, and he strives earthwards with his organs of reproduction. Thus it is not in the least unreasonable to picture our human frame as containing a plant, with its root sent upwards and its blossom opening downwards in the reproductive organs. For in a special way the plant nature is fitted, as it were, into the human. And again, there is a remarkable difference in Man and animal in that the plant hidden in the animal lies horizontally, that is at right angles to the direction of the growing plants, while Man has completely turned round and has executed a semicircle of 180 degrees when compared with the plant. This is one of the most instructive facts for the study [of] man's relationship to the external world.

If our students of medicine would investigate such macrocosmic matters more closely, they would learn more of the forces operative, even, for instance, in the living cells, than through the methods of microscopy. For the most important forces that work even in the cells—and quite differently in plant, animal or man—can be observed and studied macroscopically. The human soul can be studied to much better effect, by observing the co-operation of that which extends vertically upwards and downwards, and that which lies in the balance of the horizontal. These forces can be observed in the macrocosm and are operative even down into the cellular tissues. And what is active within the cells, is in fact nothing less than the image of this macrocosmic working.

Let us consider the vegetation of the Earth; but not in the usual fashion, by wandering on the Earth's surface to contemplate one plant beside another, examine it minutely in all its parts, invent a title of two or three separate names, and then list the plant in a system of classification. No: you must bear in mind that the whole earth is one single entity, and that the whole vegetable world pertains to the Earth's organism just as your hair belongs to yours—(although with this difference, that hairs resemble each other closely whereas plants are various and differ one from another). You can no more regard the single plant as an independent organism than you can so regard the single hair. The cause of the variety among plants is simply this; the Earth in its interaction with the rest of the Cosmos develops different forces towards the most diverse directions, and in this way gives a different organisation to the plants. But there is a certain basic unity in the constitution of the earth, from which all plant growth derives. The following consideration is therefore important. To give an example; suppose you are studying mushrooms and fungi: for these the earth itself is, so to speak, the support and matrix. Pass higher up the scale to herbs; here, too, the earth supports and nourishes, but forces from outside the earth have also influence in shaping their leaves and flowers: the force of light, for instance. And most interesting of all vegetable forms are the trees. Turn your attention to trees and you will recognise that the formation of their stems or trunks (by virtue of which trees become perennial) represents a continuation of what the whole earth is for the plant that nestles upon it. Please visualise this relationship of earth and plant. The herbal plant springs up out of the earth. This means that we must search in the earth itself for the forces fundamental to growth, which interact with the forces streaming on to our earth out of the Cosmos. But when a tree grows, do not, please, be too much shocked by what I say, for this is really the case—the earth rises up and grows, so to speak to cover over that which formally flowed directly out of the earth into the herb-like plant. That shoots up into the trunk—and all tree trunks are really outgrowths of the earth. If we have forgotten this, it is because of that gruesome materialistic concept of today, that the earth is merely composed of minerals. People do not realise how impossible is the concept of a mineral earth! The earth has other forces as well as those which segregate into the mineral kingdom; it has the forces that sprout into vegetation.

These forces rise up out of the soil and become trunks. And all that grows upon the trunks is in a relationship to them comparable with that of the lower plant forms and herbs to the earth itself.

Indeed I would say that the soil of earth is itself the trunk, or main stem, of those lesser vegetable growths, and that the trees formed an extra trunk to carry their essential organs—blossoms and seeds. Thus you will observe that there is a certain difference as to whether I take a blossom from a tree or from a herb-like plant. Consider further the formation of parasitic plants, more especially the mistletoe. In it you find the blossoms and seed organs which are normally united to the supporting plant, separated and stuck upon a stem like a process apart. Thus the formative process of the mistletoe represents an intensification of what is active in blossom and seed formation, and at the same time, in some sort, a separation from the terrestrial forces. What is non-terrestrial in the plant emancipates itself in the formation of the mistletoe. We see that upward urge away from the earth, which interacts with extra-terrestrial forces, gradually liberate and separate itself in the efflorescence of blossom and fruit, and arrive at a remarkable individualisation and emancipation, in the mistletoe.

Bearing this in mind, together with the varied forms of plants; you will admit that there must be considerable organic difference according as a plant tends most to root-development, its growth forces manifesting principally in the root, but its blossoms small or even atrophied. Such plants tend more towards the earth forces. Those plants which liberate themselves from the earth forces are those that give themselves up to the formation of blossom and seed, or, most of all, those that live as parasites upon others of the vegetable kingdom.

All plants tend to make some one organ particularly predominant. Take the pineapple, which tends to make its stem predominant, or indeed any other plant. Every principal organ of the plant, roots, stems, leaves, blossoms, fruit, becomes the chief and most conspicuous organ of this or that plant kind. Take for instance, Equisetum (the horse-tail), and observe the trend to become all stem. Other species, again, tend to become all leaves,

There is a certain parallelism between these divergent tendencies in the vegetable growth and those three types of mineral activity in the external world that I have enumerated today. Let us consider the emancipatory tendency in plants—that urge which culminates in the activity of the parasitic species; here is something which tends to the interiorisation of imponderables. That which streams earthward out of the cosmos as imponderables is as definitely collected and conserved in blossoms and fruit, if blossoms and fruit prevail, as in the phosphor substance. So we may maintain that, in a certain sense, blossoms, seeds and all that tends towards mistletoe and other parasite development in plants are “phosphoric.” And on the opposite pole we find that the root process which the plant develops by regarding the earth as its mother-ground is closely related to salt-formation.

Thus both these polarities face us in the world of the plant. And further: in the visible linkage between the blossom and fruit process that extends upwards and the downwards anchorage in the earth we have the mediating activity of the mercurial process.

Now, take into account the opposite placing of organs, in man and in the plant respectively. You must conclude that all substances tending inwardly towards the formation of flowers and fruit must be closely related to the organs of the hypogastrium and all those organs directed and orientated by them. All phosphoric substance must therefore have close interaction with these lower human organs. We shall presently confirm this. On the other hand, all that tends towards root development will be intimately connected with all organs of the upper organisation. But of course you must bear in mind that we cannot make a simple and external threefold division of man's body. On the contrary, for instance, much that appertains to the lowest organic region, the digestive system, strives for its continuation as it were in the direction of the head. It is a complete, one might say a foolish error to suppose that the substrate substance of thought is mainly given in the grey matter of the brain. This is not so. The grey matter serves principally to conduct nourishment to the brain. It is essentially a colony of the digestive tract, surrounding the brain in order to feed it, whereas the white matter of the brain is of a great importance as substrate substance of thought. You will find something in the anatomical structure of the grey matter which is much more linked with a more general function of the whole body, than with the function usually attributed to it. As you see dealing with digestion, we cannot restrict ourselves to the lower abdominal regions. Nevertheless, in considering what is derived from or connected with roots, we shall find a definite affinity with what can be applied to the upper organic sphere in man. And all those portions of plants that achieve the equipoise between the blossom and fruit process, and the root process, and manifest in the common herbs through the leaves, will as a decoction have special influence on circulatory disturbances, that is on the rhythmic balance between the upper and lower spheres. Here then is the parallel between minerals that absorb and concentrate the imponderables, minerals that repel the imponderables, and the intermediate group, and the whole configuration of the plant.

This furnishes you with the first rational method (as indicated by the plant itself, in the respective development of this or that organ) of establishing a mutual relationship with the human organism. We shall see how this basic principle works in detail.

We have pointed out these mutual relationships between the vegetable, the mineral and the human. In recent times, there has been a very hopeful addition, in the suggested relationship and interaction between human and animal substances. But not only were the initial ventures in serotherapy carried out by curious methods; there are also objections to customary serotherapy, in principle.

For when serotherapy was first introduced, Behring proceeded in a somewhat strange way. Those who merely followed the many speeches that were delivered, and publications that were issued, dealing with the mere fringe of the problem and with the results that were expected to come from the serum, received the impression that a thorough reform of all medical practice was impending. But after careful reading of the description of the actual experiments given in the fundamental scientific papers, they learned—without exaggeration, as some amongst my audience can probably confirm—that this treatment based on tests with guinea pigs (as laboratory material), which it was proposed to extend to human subjects, had proved “successful” with a “remarkably large” number of guinea pigs. Actually, only one amongst the legions of these creatures treated with the serum showed a favourable result. I repeat, one single guinea pig in such a dressed-up test treatment, at a time when the big drum had already begun to beat in the cause of serotherapy. I cite this one fact, and I think some of you already know it well. And if I may so call it, this extraordinary intellectual slovenliness in scientific publicity deserves to be definitely recorded in the history of Science. To state in principle today what will be outlined in detail during the following lectures:—it is not the processes of the extra-human world that are superficially most apparent, that work most effectively in mankind, but those that must be discovered and extracted from the deeper levels of being.

Mankind is actually related, in a certain way, to all that he has shed from his being: to the phosphoric process, and saline process, the blossom process, the fruit processes, the root process, the process of leaf formation; but in a reversed sense, bearing within him the tendency to cancel and change into its opposite that which manifests in external nature.

It is not the same with animals. For the animal has already gone half the way towards mankind; man is not opposed in the same sense to the animal, but stands rather at right angles to the animal. He has reached an angle of 180 degrees from the plant. This is significant, and demands serious consideration when the question arises of the use of serum and similar remedies of animal origin.

• 1. In a lecture given by one of those attending the course.

Well, gentlemen, we still have the last questions left over from the Jewish Sephiroth tree. In this Sephiroth tree, the Jews of antiquity actually enclosed their highest wisdom. And one could say: they enclosed in it the wisdom of the relationship between man and the world. We have often emphasized that the human being does not only consist of the visible parts that can be seen with the eye, but that the human being also consists of invisible, supersensible members. We have called these supersensible members the etheric body, the astral body, the ego or the ego organization. Now, all these things were known in ancient times, not in the way we have today, but people knew about them instinctively. This ancient knowledge has been completely lost. And today we believe that something like this Jewish Tree of Life, the Sephiroth Tree, is actually a fantasy. But it is not.

Now let us try to understand what the ancient Jews actually meant by this Sephiroth tree. They thought of it like this: Man stands there in the world, but the forces of the world act on him from all sides. If you look at man as he stands in the world (it is drawn), we can imagine him schematically drawn. This is how we imagine a material human being standing in the world. The ancient Jews imagined that the forces of the world were acting on him from all sides. Here I draw an arrow that goes into the heart: Thus the forces of the world act on man; here below the power of the earth,

Now the Jews have said: First of all, three forces act on the human head – I have indicated these in the drawing with these arrows: 1, 2, 3 – three forces on the human center, on the chest, on breathing and blood circulation mainly (arrows 4, 5, 6 of the drawing). Then three more forces act on the limbs of the human being (arrows 7, 8, 9), and a tenth force, which acts on the human being from the earth (arrow 10, from below). So ten forces, the ancient Jews imagined, act on the human being from the outside.

Let us first consider the three forces that come, so to speak, from the farthest parts of the universe and act on the human head, actually making the human head round, like an image of the whole round universe. These three forces, 1, 2, 3, are the noblest; they come, so to speak, if you want to use a later expression, with a Greek expression, for example, from the highest heavens. They shape the human head by making it a round image of the whole round universe.

Now, however, we must develop a concept at the same time, which could disturb you if I simply tell you. You see, in these ten concepts that the Jews have placed at the pinnacle of their wisdom, the first one at the top (1) has been terribly misused; for later, those people who succeeded in seizing power dragged the symbols of that power and the words for that power down into the outer realm of power. And so certain people who have appropriated the power of the nations and transferred it to their descendants have appropriated what is called a crown. In ancient times, a crown was a word for the highest spiritual gift that could be bestowed on a person. And the crown could only be worn by someone who, as I have explained to you, had gone through initiation, that is, someone who had attained the highest wisdom. It was a sign of the highest wisdom. I have already explained to you how the orders originally all meant something, but how they were later created out of vanity and no longer meant anything. In particular, however, we must consider this in relation to the term 'crown'. For the ancients, the crown was the epitome of all that superhumanity from the spiritual world has to bestow upon humanity. No wonder that the kings placed the crown on their heads. They were, as you know, not always wise and did not always have the highest gifts of heaven united in them, but they placed the sign on their heads. And when something like this is spoken according to ancient customs, it must not be confused with what has become of it through misuse. So the highest, the highest gifts of the world, the highest gifts of the spirit, which can descend upon man, which he can unite with his head when he knows much, that was called Kether, the crown, in ancient Judaism. Now, you see, that was the highest. That was what spiritually formed the head from the universe.

And then this human head still needed two other forces. These two other forces came to it from the right and from the left. It was thought: the highest comes down from above; from the right and left come the two other forces, the two world forces, which are spread throughout the universe. Now, the one that goes in through the right ear was called Chokmah = wisdom. Today, if we wanted to translate the word, we would say: wisdom. And on the other side, from the world, came in: Binah. Today we would say: intelligence (2 and 3 of the drawing). The ancient Jews distinguished between wisdom and intelligence. Today, every person who is intelligent is also considered to be wise. But that is not the case. One can be intelligent and think the greatest stupidity. The greatest stupidities are thought up very intelligently. In particular, when one looks at much of today's science, one has to say that this science is actually intelligent in all fields, but it is certainly not wise. The ancient Jews distinguished Chokmah and Binah, the ancient wisdom, from the ancient intelligence at an early stage. So the human head, everything that actually belongs to the sensory system in the human being, and also the nerves that are spread out in the sensory system, all this was designated by the three terms Kether, Chokmah, Binah - crown, wisdom, intelligence.

Thus, according to the view of the ancient Jews, the human head is constructed from the universe. There was therefore a strong awareness - otherwise such a doctrine would not have been developed - that man is a member of the whole universe. We can ask, for example, about the human body: What about the liver? Well, the liver gets its veins from the blood circulation; it gets its strength from the human environment. The ancient Jews said: Man receives the forces from the environment, which then, first in the mother's womb and later, cause his head to develop.

Now, there are three other forces (4, 5, 6 in the drawing); these have more of an effect on the middle person, on the person in whom the heart is, in whom the lungs are. So they have an effect on the middle person; they come down less from above, they live more in the environment. They live in the sunshine that moves around on the earth, they live in wind and weather. The three forces that the ancient Jews mentioned come into consideration here: chesed, geburah, tiphereth. If we want to express this in today's terms, we could say: chesed = freedom; geburah = strength; tiphereth = beauty.

Let us start here with the middle power, with Geburah. I have told you that I want to draw the arrow in such a way that it goes into the heart! The power that man has, this heartiness, soul power and physical power at the same time, is indicated by the human heart. This is how the Jews imagined it: When the breath enters a person, when the breath enters the heart, not only the physical breathing forces enter from the outside, but also the spiritual power, Geburah, which is connected with the breath. We would therefore say, if we wanted to express it more precisely: the life force, the force through which he can also do something = Geburah. But on the one side of Geburah is what was called Chesed, human freedom. And on the other side is Tiphereth, beauty. Man is indeed the most beautiful thing on earth in his form! The old Jew imagined: “When I hear the heartbeat, I hear the life force that comes into man. When I stretch out my right hand, I feel that I am a free man; when the muscles stretch, the power of freedom comes. The left hand, which moves more gently and can grasp more gently, brings what a person does in beauty.

So these three forces: Chesed = freedom, Geburah = vitality, Tiphereth = beauty, correspond to that in man which is connected with breathing and blood circulation, with everything that is in motion and always repeats itself. The movement of sleeping, the change between day and night, also belongs to this. This also belongs to the movement; man also belongs to this.

But then, humans are also beings that can change their position in space, that can walk around, that do not have to stay in one place like plants. The animal can also walk around. Man has this in common with the animal. The animal has no Chokmah, no Tiphereth, nor Chesed, but it does have Geburah = life force. And the three that I have described, man has in common with the animal only in that he has the others.

This, that one can go around, that one is not bound to one place, the Jews called: Netsah, and that means that one overcomes the firmness of the earth, that one moves (arrow 7 of the drawing). Netsah is overcoming. Now, the one that has more effect on the center of the human being, where his center of gravity is - it is interesting, you know: that is the point, which is located here; it is slightly higher in the waking state and lowers in the sleeping state, which also testifies that there is something outside when we are sleeping - that which works in the center of the body, which also brings about reproduction in humans, which is therefore connected with sexuality, the ancient Jews called Hod. Today we would describe it with a word that would express something like compassion. You see, the expressions are already becoming more human. So Netsah refers to the outer movement - we go out into space - and Hod refers to the inner feeling, the inner movement, the inner compassion with the outer world, that is all Hod (arrow 8). Then under 9: Jesod; this is now the one on which the human being actually stands, the foundation. The human being thus feels bound to the earth; the fact that he can stand on the earth is the foundation, is Jesod. That he has such a foundation also comes from the forces that approach him from outside.

And then the forces of the earth itself work on him (Arrow 10), not only the surrounding forces, but the forces of the earth itself work on him. This was then called Malkuth. We would translate it today as: the field in which the human being works, the earthly outside world; Malkuth - the field. It is difficult to find the right expression for this Malkuth. One could say: realm, field; but all things have actually been misused, and today's names no longer describe what the old Jew felt: that the earth actually has an effect on him.

We need only imagine that we have the center of the human being here; a thigh bone begins on each side of the human being – this goes up to the knee, where the kneecaps would be. All these forces also act on these bones; but the fact that it is actually pierced like this, that it is actually a tube, is due to the penetration of the earthly forces. So everything where the earthly forces penetrate, that is what the old Jew called Malkuth, the field.

So you see, you have to get close to people if you want to talk about this Sephiroth tree! The Jews called the ten Sephiroth together: Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tiphereth, Netsah, Hod, Jesod, Malkuth. These ten forces are what actually connects man with the higher, with the spiritual world. Only the tenth power, Malkuth, is sunk into the earth. So basically, this is the physical human being (pointing to the drawing), and the spiritual human being surrounds this physical human being, first as the earth forces below, but then as the forces that are already closer to the earth, but still work in from the surroundings: Netsah, Hod, Jesod. So all of this belongs spiritually to man, as these forces take effect. Then there are the forces that affect his blood circulation and breathing: Chesed, Geburah, Tiphereth. And then the noblest forces that affect man, that affect his brain system: Kether, Chokmah, Binah. So that the Jews actually thought of man as connected with the world on all sides, as I have colorfully depicted for you here. Man is indeed such that he also contains a supersensible element within him. And they imagined this supersensible element in this way.

But now we can raise the question: What else did the Jews actually want to achieve with the ten sephirot, that they used to explain man's relationship to the world? Every Jewish pupil had to learn the ten sephirot, but not just so that he could list them; you would have a completely false idea if you thought that the teaching in the old Jewish schools was such that the main thing I have drawn on the board was the most striking thing. If one only wants to answer the question, “What is the Sephiroth tree?” one could quickly have finished it; you would have known it in a flash. People today are satisfied with asking, “What is the Sephiroth tree?” This and that is in it, what I have told you now. But that is not in relation to man! Instead, they just give you ten words and all kinds of fanciful explanations for them! But in relation to the human being, what I have told you is the right thing. But that was not the end of it in schools; rather, the Jewish pupil who was to learn science in the sense of the time had to learn much more about it.

Just imagine, gentlemen, you had only learned what the alphabet is and you would know if someone asked you: What is A, B, C, D and so on? - so the letters A, B, C, D and so on. You would have been able to list the twenty-two or twenty-three letters in a row. You wouldn't be able to do much with that! If any man could only enumerate the twenty-three letters, he could not do much with them, could he? But an ancient Jew who could only say: Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tiphereth, Netsah, Hod, Jesod, Malkuth, so these ten Sephiroth could have enumerated, would have been regarded just the same. Anyone who had only answered in this way would have seemed to the Jews like someone who could say: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and so on. You have to learn more than just the alphabet, don't you; you have to learn to use the alphabet to read, you have to learn how to use the letters to read. Now, gentlemen, just think about how few letters there are and how much you have already read in your life! You just have to consider that. Take any book, take, I mean, for example, Karl Marx's “Capital” and look at it when you have the book in front of you: there is nothing on the pages but the twenty-two letters, nothing else! There are only the letters in it in the book. But what is inside is a lot, and it is all produced by the fact that the twenty-two letters are jumbled up: sometimes the A is before the B, sometimes before the M, sometimes the M before the A, the L before the I and so on, and that's how the whole complicated thing in the book comes about. If someone only knows the alphabet, he picks up the book and perhaps says: I understand everything in the book: there is A, B, C, only arranged differently; I know everything in the book. But he cannot read everything that is really written there inwardly, according to the meaning. You see, one must learn to read with what the letters are; one must really be able to jumble the letters in one's head and mind in such a way that meaning arises from them. And so the ancient Jews had to learn the ten sephiroth; for them, they were letters. You will say: Yes, they are words. But in the beginning, letters were also designated by words! This was only lost by the people when the letters came to Europe, in Greece.

It was not until the transition from Greek to Roman culture that something very significant happened. The Greeks called their A not A, but Alpha, and Alpha actually means: the spiritual man; and they called their B not B, but Beta, that is something like a house. And so every letter had a name. And the Greek could not have imagined that the letter is something else than what is called by a name. It was only when the transition from Greek culture to Roman culture took place that people no longer said Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and so on. They no longer referred to the letters by their names, where each name indicated what such a letter meant. Instead, they said: A, B, C, D and so on, and the whole thing became abstract. Just as Greek culture was dying out and merging with Roman culture, the great cultural diarrhea began in Europe. In the midst of this huge diarrhea, the spiritual aspect of the path from Greek to Roman culture was lost.

And you see, Judaism was particularly great then. When they wrote down their Aleph, their first letter, they meant the human being. Aleph is that. They knew: wherever they placed this letter for the sensual world, what they expressed with this letter must apply to the human being. And so each letter that represented the expressions of the material world also had a name. And the names: Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tiphereth, Netsah, Hod, Jesod, Malkuth, were the names for the spiritual letters, for that which one had to learn in order to read in the spiritual world. And so the Jews had one alphabet: Aleph, Beth, Gimel and so on - an alphabet with which they grasped the outer world, the physical world. But they also had the other alphabet, where they had only ten letters, ten Sephiroth, and with that they grasped the spiritual world.

You see, gentlemen, when I list the names for you, Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed and so on, well, that's like A, B, C, D and so on. But then such an old Jew would have known how to say, as we jumble the letters, Kether, Chesed, Binah. And if he had said: Kether, Chesed, Binah, if he had rolled the dice like that, he would have said: In the spiritual world, the highest spiritual power brings about intelligence through freedom. - And with that he would have designated the higher beings who do not have a physical body, in whom the highest power of heaven brings about intelligence through freedom.

Or he would have said: Chokmah, Geburah, Malkuth - that would have meant: Through wisdom, the spirits bring forth the life force through which they work on earth. - He knew how to jumble all these things together like we jumble letters. So these disciples of the ancient Jews understood spiritual science in their own way through these ten spiritual letters. This tree, the Sephiroth tree, was therefore the same for them as the tree of the alphabet with its twenty-three letters is for us. These things have developed in a very strange way, you see: in the first two centuries after the emergence of Christianity, people knew about all these things. But when the Jews were scattered throughout the world, this way of knowing through the ten Sephiroth was also scattered. Individual Jewish students, who, as you may know, were then called Chachamim when they became students of the rabbi, these Chachamim still learned these things; but even there it was no longer really known how to read through these ten Sephiroth. For example, in the 12th century, a great dispute arose over two sentences; the first sentence was called: Hod, Chesed, Binah. Maimonides held on to this sentence. His opponent, on the other hand, claimed: Chesed, Kether, Binah. So people were already arguing about these sentences. You have to know: These sentences are derived from the Sephiroth tree; one person read it this way, another that, and put the elements together in different ways. But this art of reading had actually been forgotten since the Middle Ages. And the interesting thing is that later, in the middle of the Middle Ages, a man appeared, Raimundus Lullus – a very interesting person, this Raimundus Lullus!

You see, gentlemen, getting to know a person like that is actually extremely interesting. Imagine there was someone among you who was quite curious. He would say to himself: Now that I've heard about Raimund Lullus, I want to read up on him! First, take the encyclopedia, but then take any books that mention Raimund Lullus: Yes, if you read what is written about Raimund Lullus in today's books, you will split your sides laughing, because he would have been the most ridiculous person you could ever imagine! People say: This Raimundus Lullus, he wrote ten words on pieces of paper, and then he took something like you have in a game of hazard, a kind of roulette, where you spin, where you jumble up the story, and he would have always jumbled up these ten pieces of paper, and what would have come out, he would have written down, and that would have been his world wisdom. Well, when you read something like that, that words were simply written on ten pieces of paper and mixed up, and the man wanted to find something special by doing that, you have to hold your sides laughing, because it's a ridiculous person who would do something like that.

But that was not the case with Raimundus Lullus. He actually said the following: You can still go as far as you like with all that your earthly alphabet gives you, but you still cannot find the truth. And now he said: Your ordinary head is not good enough to find the truth. This ordinary head is like a roulette wheel that you spin, but there is nothing in it, so nothing can be found to win. Lullus told his fellow human beings: You have actually all become empty-headed, your head is nothing more, there is nothing more in it. And you must put such concepts as these ten sephiroth into your heads one day; you must learn to turn your heads from one of the sephiroth to the other until you learn to use the letters. That is what Raimundus Lullus told them. It is also written in his writings. He only used a picture for it, and the philosophers took the picture seriously and believed that he really meant a kind of roulette where you turn around to mix the tickets, while this roulette that he meant is supposed to be the supersensible recognition in the mind!

This Tree of Life, this Sephiroth Tree, is therefore the spiritual alphabet. People who lived in the West, in Greece, had a spiritual alphabet even in ancient times. And in the time of Alexander the Great and Aristotle, ten concepts were also given there in the Greek way. You can still find them today in all school logics: Being, property, relationship, and so on, and also ten such names, only that they are different because they are suitable for the West. But in the West these ten Greek letters of the spiritual alphabet have been understood just as little as the ones mentioned before.

But you see, it is actually quite an interesting story that is taking place in humanity. Over in Asia, those who still knew something learned to read in the spiritual world through this Sephiroth tree. And in the first centuries of Christianity, people who still knew something about the spiritual world learned to read according to the Aristotelian Tree of Life - over in Greece, in Rome and so on. But gradually everyone – those of the Sephiroth Tree and those of the Aristotle Tree – forgot what these things actually are, and could only list the ten terms. And now we simply have to use these things in such a way that we learn to read in the spiritual world, otherwise little by little people will be forgotten. You see, the following is a very interesting sentence. When a Jewish sage wrote or said: Geburah, Netsah, Hod, one would have to translate today as follows in German: the life-force hatches the dreams in the kidneys. But when one says today: the life-force hatches the dreams in the kidneys, one means physical forces, physical effects. But when the ancient Jew said Geburah, Netsah, Hod, he meant that what is in man as a spiritual being brings about what appears in dreams. Everywhere it was a spiritual assertion that was expressed by what arose from the random throwing together of the letters.

It is indeed only through spiritual science that it is possible today to get any information about these things. Because no one will tell you today that these ten sephiroth were such letters for the spiritual world. You won't hear it anywhere else, no one really knows it today! So you can say that the situation is such that today's science no longer knows most of the things that were once known in humanity, and they must first be regained.

Take this letter that I have drawn for you here: Aleph 8. What does this Aleph mean for the sensory world? Well, it represents a person. This is how he stands, sending out his power. That is this line (drawing). He raises his right hand: that is this line; he stretches out the other hand: that is this line. So this first letter Aleph expresses man. And every letter expressed something – even in Greek – just as the first letter expresses “man”.

You see, gentlemen, today people no longer have any sense of how things are connected. The first letter for man was called Aleph by the Hebrews, Alpha by the Greeks, and by this they meant what moves spiritually in man, what is spiritual behind the physical man. But now you also have an old German word. First of all, it is used when a person has special dreams. When a spiritual person presses him, then this is called the nightmare, the nightmare. One says that something comes over the person that possesses him. But then, from nightmare, emerged elf, and then elf, the elf - these spiritual beings, the elves; the human being is only a condensed elf. The word Elf, which goes back to Alp, may still remind you of Alpha in Greek. You only have to omit the A to get Alph – ph is the same as our F – a spiritual being. Because the F has been added, we say: the Aleph in man, the Alp in man. If you omit the vowels everywhere, as is customary in Jewish, you get directly Alph = EIf for the first letter. People pronounce: Elf for this spiritual being. One speaks of elves. Of course, today one says: These are beings that the ancients invented out of their imagination. We no longer believe in it. But the ancients said: You only need to look at the human being itself to see the alph. The alph is just inside the body, and it is not a fine, ethereal being, but a dense physical being inside the human being. But people have long since forgotten how to understand the human being.

And so you experience the most droll thing, gentlemen. Just imagine that in the second half of the 19th century the following came about - I don't want to say anything against it, such things can happen -: a table was taken, people sat around it, let's say eight people; they place their hands, which then touch at the outermost ends, on the table top, and then the table starts to dance! Then they count the dance steps of the table, and form words out of them, also out of letters. These are spiritualistic sessions. What do people believe? They believe: Well, when we think, then nothing comes out of real knowledge; real knowledge must fall to us from somewhere. Now, in truth, it is so that the people who say that could certainly say it about themselves, because they are mostly those who are thoughtless and do not want to reflect, who would like the truth to come to them from somewhere without their own work. So eight of them sit around a table, then they have the table turned over, the first time A, the second time B, then C and so on, and from that they then form words – and those are then spiritualist revelations. Isn't that so, the wisdom came to them; they did not achieve it themselves!

But look, what should one actually say to such people? Such people want to recognize the spiritual world; that is their honest intention, to recognize the spiritual world. You cannot see the spirits; you cannot see or hear them because they have no body. So people think: they can use the table as a body, and in this way they can make themselves a little understood. Incidentally, it usually comes out as very general things that can be interpreted in different ways! But in any case, you have to say to these people: There you are, eight people sitting around the table; you want a spirit to come that makes itself heard. But aren't you spirits yourselves? You are spirits yourselves, sitting around there! Look at yourselves and seek the spirit within yourselves. There you will be able to find a much greater spirit. You will not assume that you will only be seen when you strike through a table, but when you use your limbs, your voices, and above all your powers of thought in a human way! Therefore it is indeed the case, and there is no need to doubt it, that when eight people sit around a table the table will begin to dance because the subconscious forces are acting on it. That is how it is, but it does not come out as something that would not come out in a much higher sense if a person were to exert his own Alpha or Aleph within himself.

But in the transition from Greek to Roman culture, people have forgotten Aleph. The first letter means A yes, only believe, the first letter means only A, that is, keep your mouth shut! But nothing comes of it. Once a wife got so fed up with her husband constantly lecturing from science. He had learned a lot and always lectured. She found it terribly annoying. And so one day she said to him: “You always want to lecture!” - “If you want to lecture, then shut up!” - Yes, actually the content has been completely lost. The Greeks did not think of one A, one Alpha, without thinking of the human being. They were immediately reminded of the human being. And they did not have a beta without remembering a house in which man lives. The alpha is always man. They imagined something similar to man. And at beta, they imagined something that is around man. Then the Jewish Beth and the Greek beta became the envelope around the alpha, which is still inside as a spiritual being. In the same way, the body would be the Beth, the Beta, and the Alpha would be the spirit within. And now we speak of the “alphabet” - but for the Greeks this means: “man in his house”, or also: “man in his body”, in his covering.

Well, gentlemen, it is actually terribly funny. Take a dictionary in your hand today, then look up all the wisdom that mankind has in the alphabet. If someone - you won't do it - starts at A and stops at Z, then he would have all the wisdom in himself. Yes, but according to what can this wisdom be arranged in man? According to the alphabet, according to what can be known about the human being. It is very interesting: people have spread all wisdom because they no longer knew that it actually points to what comes from the alphabet. If you translate alphabet, it comes out, if you put it a little differently: human wisdom, human knowledge - again expressed with a Greek word: anthroposophy, human wisdom. And that is what every encyclopedia says. Actually, every encyclopedia should include anthroposophy, because it is only arranged according to the alphabet, according to human wisdom, “the human being in his body.” It is terribly funny: actually every encyclopedia represents a skeleton, where in the alphabetically arranged science the old wisdom has disappeared. All flesh and blood has gone, all the muscles and nerves have fallen away. Now go to the encyclopedia; it contains only the dead skeleton of the old science. Now a new science must arise that does not just have the dead skeleton, like the encyclopedia, but really has everything about the human being again, flesh and blood and so on: that is anthroposophy! Therefore, one would like to throw all these encyclopedias to the devil, although they are needed today, because they are the dead skeleton of an old science. A new science must be founded!

You see, gentlemen, that is what you can learn from the Sephiroth tree if you understand it in the right way. It was very useful of Mr. Dollinger to ask this question, because it has taken us a little deeper into anthroposophy.

Next time on Wednesday at nine o'clock.