The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Allow me, dear assembled guests, as always before these performances, to say a few words about the nature of our eurythmy art. It is certainly not my intention to give some kind of explanation of the eurythmic art as such; that would be an unartistic endeavor, because everything artistic must not work through some kind of theoretical view, but through the immediate impression, through that which is directly revealed in art. But our eurythmic art can very easily be confused with all kinds of neighboring arts. It would be a real mistake to equate it with the art of dance, the art of gestures and the like, because what you will see presented here as eurythmy is drawn from very specific new artistic sources. And like everything that is done here, for which this building - the Goetheanum - is intended to be the representative, like everything is imbued with what one can call the Goethean world view, so too is our eurythmic art imbued with a Goethean artistic attitude and a Goethean artistic concept.

Of course, Goethe should not be taken as the Goethegelchrten take him: as the personality who died in 1832 and whose lifetime can be studied externally. Rather, Goethe must be taken as a continuing cultural factor for humanity, which is becoming different with each passing year. When we speak of Goethe, of Goetheanism, we are not speaking of the Goetheanism of 1832, but of the Goetheanism of the 20th century, of the year 1920. And here it is a matter of the fact that Goethe wanted to replace the dead orientation towards the world, which still dominates our present-day view, with a living one. This living view, namely of the workings of living beings themselves up to and including human beings, as found in Goethe, is still far from being sufficiently appreciated, far from being understood in any way. It will have to become a shot in the whole spiritual development of humanity. Those who today believe they already understand Goetheanism in its direction misunderstand precisely the most intimate, the most important.

What is presented here as eurythmy art is taken from Goethean sensual-supersensory vision, from the whole human being. Just as Goethe, in accordance with his living view of the world, sees a more intricately designed leaf in the whole plant, so too is the human being, not only in form but also in all the movements he can make, only a more complicated more complicated form of one of his organs, and in particular a more complicated form of the most outstanding, truly human organ - the larynx and its neighboring organs, when they serve as the tools for speech.

But now the question is, firstly, in order to bring forth eurythmy through sensory-supersensory observation, one must first place oneself in a position - which is a lengthy soul-spiritual task - to recognize which movements, but especially which movement systems, underlie the larynx, lungs, palate, tongue and so on when they produce speech sounds. A certain movement underlies this – we can see this from the fact that the entire air mass in the room in which I am speaking is in motion. We do not pay attention to this movement when we listen to the sound, when we listen to the speech sounds.

But this movement can be recognized separately, and then it can be transferred to the movements of the whole human being. And so you will see how the whole person in front of you here on stage becomes, so to speak, a larynx and how, through this, a mute language actually arises in eurythmy, a mute language that is not arbitrarily interpreted in some way, but that is brought forth from the human organism's organ systems just as lawfully as spoken language. But the fact that what otherwise remains invisible is made visible when speaking - partly through the moving human being, partly through the groups of people in their mutual movements and positions - means that the artistic aspect of revealing oneself through language can be particularly emphasized.

For in our language, even when poetic art expresses itself through it, there is in fact only as much real art as there is musicality in this language on the one hand, and plastic form on the other. The literal content, which is usually what unartistic observers of poetry place the greatest value on, is not actually part of the real art. The works of real art are much rarer than one might think. Before Schiller visualized the literal content of a poem in his mind, there was always a kind of wordless melodious element at the base, a rhythmic, metrical, melodious element, and only then did he string the literal words on to it. Goethe, who was more of a plastic poet, had something formative in his language. And this formative quality can be seen if one can feel real Goethean poetry.

Thus what actually underlies poetry is itself a hidden eurhythmy. It is studied and transferred to the movements of the whole human being. There is nothing arbitrary about these movements. There is something in these movements that proceeds in such a lawful sequence, as the melodious lawfulness or the lawfulness of harmony next to each other in music itself reveal themselves. But this means that in eurythmy, in particular, one can achieve something especially artistic, because in our spoken language, much that is conventional and utilitarian is interwoven. We have our language for human communication. What adheres to it from this side is precisely what is inartistic, so that the more the unconscious of language emerges, the more the artistic comes to the fore.

We must not forget that language is actually born out of the unconscious and the world of dreams in the individual human being as well. The child has not yet awakened to full consciousness of itself while it is learning to speak. Just as the images of the dream enter into human consciousness as a darkness of this consciousness, so the consciousness of the child is still dark when it learns phonetic language. On the one hand, this indicates that spoken language contains something that wells up from the unconscious of the human being. This unconscious must be taken into account in all linguistic matters. I would just ask you to consider one thing above all: grammar, that is to say, the internal logical structure of language, which then becomes artistic when language is treated artistically. This is not more complete or developed in the so-called civilized languages, but rather the more complicated grammar is usually found in uncivilized languages.

Thus, that which runs through language as its inherent law does not come from what stems from civilized consciousness. This law-abiding, subconscious element is what is drawn out of the human being. In this way, however, eurythmy becomes the opposite of dreaming. While dreaming means a lowering of consciousness, above all a lowering of the will, in eurythmy the will, as it arises in speech, is brought out; it is shaped into speech as an element; through a mute speech, a self-revelation of the human being is willed. But in this way we enter into the unconscious creative process of the human being in a conscious way, and we come to use the human being himself in his entire organic formation and range of motion as an artistic tool.

And if we consider that the human being is the most perfect being, we might say, that we know in this world, then something like an embodiment of the artistic expression that is otherwise possible must come out when one uses one's self as an artistic tool. Everything in this eurythmy is so completely derived from the laws of human nature that there is absolutely nothing arbitrary about it, no random gestures or the like. If two people or two groups of people in two completely different places were to perform the same thing in eurythmy, the performance would show no more differences than if the same sonata were performed according to a subjective interpretation. There is always a lawfulness in eurythmy, just as there is in music itself. Therefore, through this silent language of eurythmy, which has been brought forth from the same natural lawfulness as spoken language, a deep artistic experience can be achieved precisely because the mental aspect that otherwise works in language has been eliminated.

And so you will see how, on the one hand, poetry or even musical expressions are presented to you through the silent language of eurythmy. At the same time, in some cases you will see musical elements, which are only another form of expression of what eurythmy is. On the other hand, you will hear poetry recited in spoken language, and you will see that when you present the same poetry on stage in a plastic way through eurythmy , you will see that you are compelled to depart from the present-day inartistic nature of recitation, which is based on the particular emphasis of the content alone. Rather, the important thing here in recitation is to express what is already eurythmic in the poetry itself. What is the plastic form, rhythm, beat, musical element that underlies the actual poetry and what is the moving element in the poetry that lives in the beat, rhythm, what can be sensed in the form behind the words - this must be particularly developed in the recitation, which is especially intended to accompany this eurythmy. We must therefore go back to the form of the art of recitation that was practised when people still had a feeling for the art of recitation itself. Today this is very rarely the case; today one takes more the prose content, only the actually inartistic itself in the poetry and recites accordingly. So, of course, eurythmy itself will still be misunderstood today because it represents something completely new in the sources from which it has emerged, and the accompanying recitation will perhaps also be misunderstood. But that is not the point. Everything that presents itself as something original in the development of human civilization is usually viewed with suspicion. Nevertheless, I would ask you to bear in mind that we ourselves are our harshest critics and to see what we are not yet able to do today. We regard what we can already do today as nothing more than a beginning that is in great need of further development and refinement. You will see that poems which are themselves conceived as impressions, such as the 'Quellenwunder', which therefore already have eurythmy in them, can be translated into eurythmy particularly well, I would even say as a matter of course. But you will also see that where there is real inner mobility and plasticity in a poem, as in so many of Goethe's poems, eurythmy can indeed achieve a great deal.

In the humorous pieces that we will present to you today, you will see how one can follow them without resorting to pantomime and facial expressions, which are only random gestures, but how one follow these things through eurythmic-musical spatial forms, that is, through the musical element translated into space through eurythmy. This underlaying element is particularly emphasized.

I therefore ask you to take our performance with a grain of salt. Today we can only offer you the beginning, but we can still say that eurythmy – because it uses the human being, who is a real microcosm, as its instrument – perhaps allows the word with which Goethe wanted to characterize the truly artistic to be applied to it: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he regards himself as a complete nature, which must produce a summit within itself. To do so, he elevates himself by permeating himself with all perfection and virtue, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art. Or the other beautiful word: “When man's healthy nature works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort grants him a pure, free delight – then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as having attained its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

In eurythmy, a language should be spoken by the human being not as in spoken language, where the individual human being speaks from their emotions, but rather it should be spoken as if the human being were included in the whole human being and spoke through and from it.

As I said, it is all still in its infancy, but we are also convinced that – precisely because we are our own harshest critics and although we ask for lenient judgment – we are convinced that this eurythmy will continue to be developed, by us or probably by others. And if it finds interest in the broadest circles, it will one day be able to stand alongside other, older, fully-fledged art forms as an art form in its own right.

[Before the break:]

After the break, we will be able to present you, dear attendees, with a scene of gnomes and sylphs. In this scene, we will attempt to reveal the mysterious forces of nature that can reveal themselves in the coexistence of humans and nature. This will be done through that aspect of the forces of nature that cannot be accessed by engaging with nature in purely abstract thought or in so-called natural phenomena. It will perhaps take a long time before it is admitted that there is a working and ruling, a weaving and living in nature that cannot be grasped through abstraction and natural laws, but that can only be grasped when our conception of nature is enlivened by real artistic forms. Nature tells us so much and so intensely that what it tells us must be told in more comprehensive and intense forms than can be done by abstract laws of nature.

Something like this has been attempted to be extracted from those laws of nature: What we experience when we really bring the human being into a pure, I would even say intimate picture with what flows and weaves through nature, something like this has been attempted in this gnome and sylph choir. And here too, Goethe's artistic philosophy is the basis. For Goethe has brought art and knowledge into a very close relationship, and he sees in art that which at the same time imparts a higher knowledge of the mystery of man and the world than mere knowledge of nature can. That is why Goethe says: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to someone, they feel an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” And even if this is still regarded as something lay or dilettantish compared to so-called strict science, people will come to understand that the knowledge of what reigns as a secret in nature must be recognized in nature as a secret, namely, that one can recognize its secrets precisely by artistically responding to what nature reveals out of itself when one only engages with it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wilhelm von Humboldt makes the statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Against Kantian arguments of this kind, Goethe answers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scruples of Conscience.

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

Decision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From a poet who died some years ago. On one occasion, in the second half of the '80s of last century, he said to me that he was very anxious about the future of humanity. I admit that his expression of anxiety was somewhat of a paradox, but he was very much in earnest in his anxiety as to the tendency he wished to point out by his paradox; indeed, this anxiety inclined him to a certain pessimism. It seemed to him that the development of humanity in the future would be such that man would principally develop his head more and more, and that, compared with his head, all the other parts of a man would be stunted. He was very much in earnest over this idea, and he expressed this in paradox by saying that he was afraid the reasoning intellectual nature of man would get the upper hand to such an extent that the head would become like a great globe, and that men would then roll on earth as balls. The anxiety was very real to the man, for he reflected that we are living in the age of intellectualism, of the development of the intellectual powers which are expressed in the head, and that these reasoning powers would increase more and more, and that mankind was moving towards an unenviable future. Now that, of course, is a very paradoxical statement, and we might say also, in a certain sense, that even the anxiety which gave rise to his pessimism is also paradoxical. But the human intellect has a tendency to deteriorate, to draw conclusions when some or other observation has been made, and this is a case in point. This may be amply noticed in the realm of the theosophical movement as well as in the external, exoteric life. In external, exoteric life we do not have to look very far before we notice that the observations made by man at various times have always given rise to a great number of theories. How many hypotheses have been abandoned as worthless in the course of the evolution of humanity! In the theosophical-occult field it can also be observed that someone who has undergone occult training, and has thus acquired some clairvoyant power, may recount something from true clairvoyant observation, and then come the theorists who invent all sorts of schemes and theories, and so the matter develops. Very often the observation is quite an insignificant one, but the schemes and theories built upon it include whole worlds. That is always the danger; the intellect has this tendency. We have this tendency in a fairly passable sense in the well-known book, ‘Esoteric Buddhism’ by Sinnett. This book is based upon a number of genuine occult facts; these are in the middle of the book, and relate to the middle of the development of the earth. But upon these facts he built up a scheme of Rounds and Races, and this only rolls and turns, as it were, upon itself, always more or less in the same way. They are inferences, theories, made from the few genuine data to be found in the book. And this was the case also with my poet. In the background he had a sort of unconscious, instinctive imagination which told him something true; we might say, there is half an ounce of truth, and from this he made a hundred-weight, or many hundred-weight. We often find cases such as this in the world. Now, what is the truth of the matter? The truth is this, that in our age man's head is undergoing a certain evolution, the formation of the head, the whole structure of the head will undergo change in the future. If we direct our attention to a very far-distant period in the earth's evolution, we have to imagine that, for example, the formation of the human forehead, nose, and jaws will have undergone essential changes, and that, in a certain sense, all the rest which the human being bears as his earthly organism will have retrograded; but, of course, never, during the earth period, will the relation of the developing head to the rest of the body be that of a rolling globe. This must only be taken literally to a very, very limited extent. On the other hand, in ancient epochs of development on the earth, before the middle of the Atlantean epoch, the rest of the human organism was capable of change; it was engaged in a sort of development. Apart from the head, the human organism has changed comparatively little—and again I say comparatively little—since the middle of the Atlantean epoch; on the other hand, prior to that time the remainder of the human organism underwent great changes. From this you will be able to draw the inference—which will now be correct, because it is nothing but an actual observation clothed in words—that the further we go back into the Atlantean and Lemurian epochs the more essentially different man looked, even to his own observation. In the ancient Lemurian epoch, man looked quite different from what he now recognises as himself at the present day.

The appearance man would have presented to himself in the latter portion of the Lemurian epoch is apparent to him again, in a certain way, when he gradually approaches the clairvoyant impression leading to what we have described as the Paradise-Imagination. I have, indeed, told you—and it is true—that this Paradise-Imagination corresponds to a complete delineation of the human being, the physical human body, so to say, as the Paradise itself. Man separated—as it were—he divided; the present corporeal nature appeared outspread in the manner described; but at that time, the actual time to which we look back clairvoyantly, and we have the Paradise Legend before us, a mighty leap forward was made. And through this movement—which may also be observed by means of clairvoyance—what might be called the outspread human being was drawn together relatively rapidly into that which then became the starting-point of man for the development which followed. Directly after the time corresponding to the Paradise-Imagination, the form of man was, however, quite unlike what has developed out of it to-day. And, fundamentally, all that surrounded man in the kingdoms of nature was also quite unlike his present surroundings.

I have already mentioned in the previous lectures of this course that the pupil might attain to this Paradise-Imagination if he were suddenly to become clairvoyant for a moment during sleep, and to look back, as it were, at his physical body and etheric body, stimulated to this Imagination by these. On the whole, it may be said that a great deal of esoteric development is necessary before attaining to this Paradise-Imagination. The student must have gained many victories in order to transform his own personal interests into those common to humanity and the world. There then comes, when from the very deepest sleep—for there are degrees of sleep—he passes to a less deep sleep, and in this less deep sleep becomes clairvoyant—there comes what later in earthly evolution became reality: The condition of man in the ancient Lemurian epoch after he had made the great leap forward.

Thus we say that it is possible to see this primeval period of the earth through separation in the self and astral body from the physical body and etheric body, looking back at them. Now, as the order of nature comes to our aid—for in the night we are outside our physical body—we can make use of this arrangement of nature, and so regulate the training that, as if awaking out of sleep, but not returning to the physical body—as if awaking in a different state of consciousness—we see the physical body. From this you will be able to gather that the vision we have just spoken of provides the only true possibility of learning to know how man was formed in the primeval past.

In the far-distant future will come a time when we shall be able to say: How extraordinary were those people of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries! They believed themselves able to discover the origin of man by means of the external investigation of nature; they thought they could draw conclusions regarding the ancestry of man from the observation of the animals surrounding them on the physical plane. However, through the true development of human knowledge, it becomes evident that we can only arrive at a true idea of the origin of man upon the earth, and of his ancient form, by means of clairvoyant observation, and that we can never obtain insight into what man was like in the Lemurian epoch, for example, except through clairvoyant observation, through the retrospective vision stimulated by the impressions of one's own physical body and etheric body. But then it will be seen—this will be admitted in that future time—that man was never like any of the animal forms about him in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; for the forms which man had in that time, and which manifest themselves to his clairvoyant consciousness in the way we have described, are different from all the animal forms around man in the nineteenth century. And even the expressions we have made use of—bull, lion, etc.—are only used comparatively. The men of the future will say how very grotesque it is to see the way people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries traced back their ancestry to ape-like beings; for in the Lemurian epoch there were no apes at all in the form in which they later appeared upon earth; they only originated at a much later period, from degraded and degenerated human forms. Animal beings which may be compared to our present apes can only be found by clairvoyant vision about the middle of the Atlantean epoch of the earth's evolution. The further we go back in the development of humanity, the more we see that to the clairvoyant view, in the vision of our self during sleep in the night, our shape, our form in ancient times is to some extent preserved. And so it comes about that, when a student thus looks at himself, he learns to recognise his physical corporeality in an infinitely more delicate etheric body, one might say, though not in the sense of our present ether. Thus does man appear. His form appears more as a vivid dream-picture than as the form of flesh and blood he now bears. We have to become acquainted with the idea that when the self and astral body are outside the human being they can scarcely see the head; it is quite shadowy; not completely blotted out, but quite shadowy. On the other hand, the rest of the organisation of man is distinct. That is shadowy, too, but its condition is such that the human being does not appear as made of flesh and blood, but one has the distinct impression that he possesses a more powerful organisation. It may appear paradoxical, yet it is true that when a man looks at himself clairvoyantly in sleep he has at certain moments such an appearance—that is, to the self and astral body, his physical body and etheric body present such an appearance—that he is reminded of the form of the Centaur! The upper part, which appears in the Centaur as the human part, bears the human face, but in a very shadowy form; the other part, which is not exactly like any of our present animal forms, but which is reminiscent of them in certain respects, is more powerful, and the seer says to himself: ‘To the spiritual view this is stronger, even denser, than our present form of flesh and blood.’ I have already touched upon these matters in a previous course of lectures; but you must understand that all these Imaginations, except the Paradise-Imagination, are fugitive, and can be presented from different aspects. I might also present a somewhat different aspect—and you would see that this only corresponds to a different period of development—and then we should arrive at the form of the Sphinx. The consecutive order of the evolution of man is presented in various aspects, in different views. The mythological pictures, the so-called mythological symbols, contain much more truth than the fantastic intellectual combinations made by present-day science.

Thus, at night the human figure becomes very peculiar. Something else now becomes clear. When we consider with clairvoyant eye this lower part which reminds us of an animal, we become acquainted with something which makes a very definite impression upon us; as I observed in the last lecture, these impressions, these inner experiences, are really the essential thing. The pictures are important, but the inner experiences are still more so. We reach an impression so that we know afterwards: That which really drives me during the day to my personal interests alone, that which inoculates my soul with merely personal interests, is the outcome of what I observe at night as my lower animal part. During the day I do not see it; but it is within me as forces, and these are the forces which draw me down to a certain extent, and lead me astray into personal interests.

Developing this impression more and more brings us to the recognition of the place Lucifer really fills in our evolution. The further we direct our clairvoyant vision back towards the time that corresponds to the Paradise-Imagination, the more beautiful becomes the structure, which is really only reminiscent in a later time of what belongs to the animal—kingdom. And if we go back altogether into what belongs to Paradise, where the animal continuation of man appears as though separated from man himself, and multiplied into—bull, lion, and eagle, we may then say that these forms—which we know in those ancient times by these names—may also in a certain sense be for us symbols of beauty. More and more beautiful become these forms, and, going still further back, to the time of which we spoke in the last lecture, when we represented the impression of the sacrifice, we arrive at the period when Lucifer's true form appears to us in sublime beauty, just as he wished to preserve himself unchanged in the evolution from the ancient Moon to the earth.

From the account I have given in ‘Occult Science,’ you know that on ancient Moon the astral body was given to man. What we bear within us in our astral body played a great part on the ancient Moon. We have described it as personal selfhood, as egotism. This egotism had to be implanted in man on the ancient Moon, and, as man received his astral body on the ancient Moon, egotism has its seat in the astral body; and, as Lucifer has preserved his Moon-nature, he has brought egotism to the earth as the inner soul-quality of his beauty. Therefore, on the one hand he is the Spirit of Beauty, and on the other the Spirit of Egotism. And what we may call his error is only this: that he has transplanted to the earth something which, as far as man is concerned, if I may use the expression, belonged to the ancient Moon; that is, the permeating and impregnating of himself with egotism. But thereby, as has often been said, was given to man the possibility of becoming a self-contained, free being, which he never would have become if Lucifer had not carried over egotism from the Moon to the Earth.

Thus inner experience teaches us to know Lucifer as the Night Spirit, as it were. And it is part of the change that goes on in our self and our astral body that at night we feel—ourselves in the company of Lucifer.

You may perhaps at first think—if you only think superficially—that it must be disagreeable to a person, when he goes to sleep and becomes clairvoyant, to become aware that—during the night he comes into Lucifer's company. But if you reflect more deeply, you will soon come to the conclusion that it is wiser for us to learn to recognise Lucifer; it is better to know that we are in his company than to think that he is not there, and yet have him invisibly active with his forces within us, as, indeed, is the case during the day. The evil does not consist in Lucifer's being by our side, for we gradually learn to recognise him as the Spirit who brings—us freedom; the evil consists in our not recognising him. But after men had caught sight of him, as it were, when he misled them in the Lemurian epoch, they were not permitted to see him any more; for then, in addition to that original misleading in the Lemurian epoch, there would have been innumerable other smaller misleadings. Therefore, the divine-Spiritual Being who was watching over the progress of mankind had to draw a veil over the vision of the night. Thereby man lost as well all else that he would have seen during sleep. Sleep covers from man with darkness the world in which he is from the time of his going to sleep until he awakens. At the withdrawal of the veil which covers the night with darkness, we should instantly perceive Lucifer by our side. If man were strong enough, this would do no harm; but as at first he could not be strong in the sense required by our earthly development, this veil had to be drawn during his sleep at night. After the first great misleading, which left in its train the possibility of human freedom, no other misleadings, through the direct vision of Lucifer from the time of his going to sleep until reawakening, were to come to man.

Now, there is an equivalent. We cannot see Lucifer at night if during the day we do not see his comrade, Ahriman. Thus to the student who has progressed as far as this in the development of his self and his astral body, the daily experience which allows him to have the vision of outer objects becomes different from what it is to the ordinary man. He learns to recognise that he sees things in a different light from before the development of his self and his astral body. He first learns to look upon certain impressions, which ordinarily he considered in an abstract manner, as the activities of the Ahrimanic beings. Thus that which comes from outside, which awakens desire in him from outside—not that which comes from within, for that is Luciferic—but that which attracts him in the objects and beings around him, so that he follows this attraction from personal interests; in short, all that entices him to enjoyment from outside he learns to recognise as bearing the impress of Ahriman. We also learn to recognise this in all that rouses fear within us from outside. They are the two poles—enjoyment and fear. Around us are the so-called material world and the so-called Spiritual world; both these in our ordinary waking life are enveloped in illusion. The external world of the senses appears as maya, or illusion, for people do not see that whenever they are stimulated to enjoyment by outer objects and beings Ahriman peeps out and calls forth the enjoyment in the soul. But the fact that there is a true Spiritual nature everywhere in matter—which the materialists deny—that produces fear, and when the materialists notice that fear is beginning to appear from the astral depths of their soul, they then stupefy themselves, and think out materialistic theories; for what the poet says is profoundly true, ‘People never notice the devil (that is Ahriman), even when he has them by the collar.’ To what end are materialistic meetings held? In order to swear allegiance to the devil. This is literally true, only they do not know it. Whenever materialists gather together to-day, to explain in beautiful theories that nothing exists but matter, Ahriman then has them by the collar; and there is no more favourable opportunity for studying the devil to-day than by going to a gathering of materialists or monists. Thus, when a man has undergone a certain development in his astral body and self, Ahriman accompanies him at every step. When we begin to see him, then we can protect ourselves from him; we can see Ahriman spying out in the allurements of enjoyment and in the impressions of fear.

Again, on account of the immaturity of man, it was necessary that Ahriman should be hidden; that is, a veil was drawn over his nature. This was done somewhat differently from in the case of Lucifer; the outer world was plunged into maya for man, giving him the illusion that outside in the world, instead of Ahriman peeping out, there was matter everywhere. Wherever man dreams there is matter, there is, in reality, Ahriman; and the greatest illusion is the materialistic theory of physics about the material atoms, for in reality these are nothing but the forces of Ahriman.

Now, humanity as a whole is developing, evolving, and this evolution advances so that towards our future man will actually develop the powers of pure intellect more and more. This will cause his head to assume a different shape externally. In a certain respect the beginning of this development towards intellectuality was made with the dawn of modern natural science, about the sixteenth century. When intensified, this intellectual development will exercise great influence upon the self and the astral body of man. A time set in when there still remained traditions of the old clairvoyance. These came in contact with one another exactly at the dawn of our modern natural science. It was precisely in the sixteenth century; it was then known that a future would come when, through the higher development of the self and astral body, man would be able really to see Ahriman more and more clearly. Then, because in the early period of intellectual development it struggled against the perception of the Spiritual with all its might, a darkening set in; but in the figure of Mephistopheles, who is none other than Ahriman, at the side of Faust, the sixteenth century was able to point out that, fundamentally, Ahriman will become more and more dangerous in a conscious manner to the future development of humanity; that Mephistopheles will become more and more a sort of tempter of the human race. At that time this could only be demonstrated because man still had a remembrance of the ancient Spiritual figures. But this has now been forgotten by the general body of humanity, though in the future the knowledge will be forced on man that through all his waking life he is accompanied by Ahriman-Mephistopheles. Naturally, this corresponds to the complementary picture that man is living towards a future when, each time he awakes, he will have—at first like a fleeting dream, but later more clearly—the impression: ‘Thy companion during the night was Lucifer.’ You see from this that through the theosophical-occult development of the self and astral body we may have the fore-knowledge of what will come to humanity in the future, we can dimly sense the companionship of Ahriman and Lucifer. Through a definite law of evolution, Lucifer first came to man during the Lemurian epoch, then later, as the consequences of the Luciferic influence, came the Ahrimanic. In the future this will be reversed: The Ahrimanic will first be strong, and subsequently the Luciferic influence will be added. In the ever-developing clairvoyant conditions of the human soul, the Ahrimanic influence will work principally in the waking condition, the Luciferic influence principally during sleep, or in all the conditions which are indeed similar to sleep, but in which there is consciousness.

Thus, as Ahriman entered our external sensible life in our waking condition, man first needed a protection against Ahriman during this waking condition. These protective impulses are given in the development of humanity many, many centuries before the danger appears. Although the general body of humanity has not yet developed the full consciousness of Ahriman-Mephistopheles, the protective impulse came at the beginning of our era in the physical appearance of Christ in the earth-development. Christ once appeared in the physical body in the earth-development to make provision that man might be armed, through receiving the Christ-impulse, against the necessary influence which will come from Ahriman-Mephistopheles. The power through which man will be armed later on when the Luciferic influence is there, is an influence which will affect a different consciousness; man will be armed against this by the appearance of Christ in the etheric body, regarding which we have often said that it is drawing near. Just as Christ appeared once in a physical body and thence his impulse has proceeded further, so from this twentieth century onward Christ will be seen in an etheric form, at first by a small number, and then by an ever-increasing number of human beings. Thus we see that the progressive development of man is brought about by a kind of equilibrium; a kind of balancing of the different impulses. What is related in the Gospels as the story of the Temptation, the confronting of Lucifer and Ahriman by Christ, portrayed in different ways in the different Gospels—I have spoken of this on a previous occasion—is a sign that through the Christ-Impulse, through the Mystery of Golgotha, man will be able to find the right way of development in the future. It forms part of a true development of the self and the astral body of man that in this transformed self and astral body he can receive the impressions of the positions occupied by Ahriman, Lucifer, and Christ in the development of humanity, and a correct development of the self and astral body leads to this knowledge of the three impulses which condition the evolution of mankind.

A correct development, however, includes the extension of the sense of self in the astral body to interests common to humanity and the world. And it acts like poison when a man carries his personal aspirations into those regions of his clairvoyant observation which he ought only to observe when filled with interests common to humanity and the world. He cannot then perceive the truth, but has imaginations which are incorrect, untrue, which are only the reflections of his own personal interests and aspirations. It may sometimes happen that a clairvoyant who is still filled with personal aspirations and interests experiences something like the following. I received a letter in which someone wrote that he had to communicate something that I ought to know. He said that Christ was reborn in a physical body, and his address is somewhere in London, W.; that Mary is reborn in a physical body; her address is that of his niece, in such-and-such a street. Paul is reborn, and was his brother-in-law, and his address was also given. And all those mentioned in the Gospels were reborn among the relatives, and in this letter all their various addresses were given. I could show this letter to anyone: it is a document—grotesque as it may appear—which shows the effect of carrying personal interests into those heights where there should only be the interests of the world and of humanity.

But now we must clearly understand that when someone makes a mistake in abstract intellectual knowledge in general, this kind of error can easily be controlled, it is something that can be done away with comparatively quickly, although, indeed, human knowledge has the frightful origin, which was referred to in the last lecture. As the knowledge of man, which is expressed in our waking daily life, receives such diluted impulses that everyone may develop perfect freedom with respect to them, hence no one need be dazzled by the foolish things thought out by human intellect, and those who allow themselves to be dazzled by these foolish imaginings can be cured in a comparatively short time. But suppose that in this clairvoyant observation a person arrives at incorrect imaginations in the manner we have described; these incorrect imaginings then act as a poison in the soul in a certain way; they poison it by obliterating the healthy human reason and intellectual grasp. Thus they injure one much more deeply than do merely intellectual follies. If, therefore, we try to permeate everything obtained in the fields of occultism with the forms of sound human intellect, we do well. If an Imagination is simply given out, without any attempt to justify it, as we have tried to justify such in this course of lectures (and incorrect imaginations would only be cited as mere imaginations), then this will impose upon the very faculty in others which should bestir itself to reject such imaginations. And it might very well be that, while one who spreads intellectual follies may easily provoke criticism, one who spreads false imaginations by this means takes away from those who believe in him the power to criticise; that is, he blinds them to the challenge that ought to be given to the imaginations in question.

From this we may gather, my dear friends, how very necessary it is that the moment the knowledge goes beyond what is intended for man in the natural course of evolution, the moment a man uplifts himself to clairvoyant knowledge, how unconditionally necessary it is that his development should move unswervingly towards interests common to humanity and the world. This will always be recognised in true occultism. And to assert the opposite, that there can be sound entry into the Spiritual world, that is, a sound development of the astral body and the self apart from the extension of the human interests to selfless world-interests and interests common to humanity; that is, to make the opposite affirmation to the one made here, could only spring from a disposition that permeates occultism with frivolity. We must bear in mind the serious importance of these things in speaking of the changes which take place in the astral body and the Self of man during his higher Spiritual development.

As there is an opportunity for us to be together again today, I will speak of certain matters connected in one way or another with subjects we have been studying. I should like, first of all, to direct your minds to the fact that the attitude of which I spoke last time, the attitude which leads to a certain denial of the reality of the spiritual worlds, is fairly universal in the external world today. Fundamentally speaking—and indeed it is evident—willingness to approach the spiritual worlds in order to receive from them something that will enrich and invigorate life, is to be found in only a tiny handful of men. We can see that this is so.

My dear friends! The call to self-knowledge, which the soul of man can take up, when it listens impartially to all the beings and events of life, in nature and in the life of the spirit, we will once again, at the beginning of our lesson, allow to pass before our souls.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

We are in the midst, my dear brothers and sisters, of our souls finding the answer to this question, having gone quite far in its contemplation, along the way to the Guardian of the Threshold, to the abyss of existence. We were infused with the instruction of the Guardian of the Threshold along the way. What had stood there previously dark and dull, a person knowing that it nevertheless held his being, that it held the source of his existence, what had been before him dark and dull started to lighten, and then became bright, quite bright. Then in the brightness we heard the Guardian’s call.

See the ethereal iris’s
Light-abundant round.
Through your eyes’
Light-forming force
Let your “I” penetrate through the arc,
And then behold from yonder watch,
Color flooding the world’s chalice.

And the Angels, Archangels, and Archai allow their voices to resound upon this word of the Guardian of the Threshold, as they focus on human souls.

Sense our thoughts
Color breathing living
In the chalice's flood of light;
We carry the sensory-semblance
Into spirit-being-realms
And turn ourselves world-infused
To the service of higher spirits.

And so we see how there, through the flooding light of the world chalice, with which we became acquainted in the last lesson, the beings of the Third Hierarchy become irradiated and illuminated. We see droves of these high beings of Angels, Archangels, and Archai going forth in service to the higher spirits, to the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kryriotetes. And we become witness to the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes speaking to the beings serving them, implementing what these serving beings require for humanity.

And so the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes speak:

What you have taken up,
Enlivened from dead sensory-semblance,
We wake it in existence;
We add it to the rays of light,
So that the emptiness of matter
Will bear spirit nature
And manifest endowed with love.

And then, urged on by what is within us, we then must turn our gaze to the highest spirits, to the First Hierarchy, turning to them as they turn themselves in blessing to human beings. From there we hear:

In your worlds of will
Feel our world-wide impact;
Spirit shines in matter,
When we are thinking working;
Spirit works in matter,
When we are living willing;
World is I-willing spirit-word.

We bear witness to what beings of the higher worlds discuss among themselves, to what the highest beings pour into human souls as world-words, to what inundates human hearts, and so we must feel ourselves within this dominion-over-all, moving-through-all world light, within which we ourselves live and move.

And now we come upon a truth, perceived there where disembodied spirit-beings live their lives, where spirits think their truths, where spirits are adorned in their beauty, where the work of spirits takes spirited effect. And we come upon the grand, the all-encompassing, the spirit-world-interwoven truth: that spirit is all that is. For we appear, we live, we move in spirit. We embrace spiritual existence.

And now we think about how spirit, within which we now live, is all that is. And now we know that there also where we otherwise are in life, there also in the world of sensory show is simply spirit. Spirit is alone, is all that is. This stands now before our souls as unwavering, almighty truth: that spirit is all. And it is good for us to envision this truth in imagery before the soul. [It was drawn in red.] That, illustrated in the image, is spirit. It is only spirit. [While speaking the word “is” was written within the red drawing in various places.]

That which appears here, is. It is spirit. And what is outside this red area, is nothing. That stands before our souls. And the spirit-world says to us, here it is, here it is, here it is, here it is. Everywhere the spirit is, is something.

[Presently while speaking on, the word “nothing” was written at various places between the areas drawn in red, and further away the words “minerals”, “plants”, and “animals.”]

And where there is no spirit, is nothing. And we are duly impressed, that that is the truth. Everywhere spirit is, is something, and where spirit is not, is nothing. And yet we ask ourselves, how does it appear to us, all that seems to show itself in the world of sensory appearance, out of which we have gone forth over the Threshold here into the spiritual world, where we find the truth of existence, the spirit, emplaced before our souls? Back over there we saw what here is drawn in red as nothing. We are too weak over there, concerning what is drawn in red, to see. What remains over there residually? Nothingness! What we see over there is nothingness, whether it is called minerals, it is a sort of nothingness, whether called plants, a second sort of nothingness, whether called animals, a third sort of nothingness, and so forth.

We perceive nothingness because we are too weak to see what is something. And this nothingness we talk about as the realm of nature. That is the grand beguilement, or as we say, the grand illusion. There are only various sorts of nothingness around us, before our eyes, as we gaze about embodied in corporeality. And we have the deeply felt impression that we are living there, and giving names to what fundamentally is nothing, to what is a grand illusion. And what appears to us presently, what lives over there as nothing and to what we give names, it appears to us as a summation of names, names that we give to the state of nothingness. For in their true state all beings are simply in existence, here where we have entered, here in the spiritual world. Names assigned to nothingness over there are wasted on what is bereft of being. And beings not from the realms of gods, to which we belong, and to which we rightfully belong, such beings can take possession of the names we have wasted on the nothingness. And henceforth they bear these names.

When we are not clear about this, that here upon the earth we give names to what has no real existence, we lapse with our names into a stark, strong illusion. We must know that we are giving names to what is intrinsically nothing. That stands out presently before our souls, while we are living and moving here within the light, so that it can be felt deep, deep, deeply by the spirit-craft of our hearts, which has remained with us in crossing over. Now we know that we have drawn out of the realm of illusion into the realm of truth. Earnest solemnity, sacred earnest solemnity in regard to truth begins to have dominion in our souls.

And now we look back at the trustworthy Guardian of the Threshold, who stands at the abyss of existence. He is not speaking just now. He spoke out of the darkness. He spoke as we were just feeling the luminosity. He spoke while the luminosity grew into brilliance. Now as we stand in the brilliance astounded by the grand truth that there is only spirit, he presently does not speak, he now silently indicates how on high the beings of the higher hierarchies are speaking among themselves. And we think for a moment in regarding the spirit, that down there in life on earth we have been struck with the impression minerals, plants, animals, and physical human beings have made on us, at what the clouds have to say, at what the mountains say, at what the gushing springs are doing, at the power of lightning, at the rolling thunder, at the stars whispering world mysteries. That was what we met with along the way down there. That was our experience. Now all is silent on this side of the abyss of existence. Presently we are witnesses as the gods speak with one another, as the whole choir of angels begins to speak.

Still looking upward, we see this choir turning to the higher spirits, turning to the spirits of the Second Hierarchy in service. We gaze at the loving, serving behavior of the Angels, Archangels, and Archai as they turn to the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes. We have the impression of the gathering of the Third Hierarchy in service.

We have the impression of the gathering of the Second Hierarchy in world-creating, in world-dominion, in world-illumination, and we hear what these beings, inwardly spirit illuminated, godlike in willing, and willing all that is godlike, what these beings are saying one to another.

We hear the Angels, as they allow their word to resound. Out of their care in guiding human souls they allow their word to resound.

Human beings are thinking!

That is carried by the Angels. That is what they are concerned with, in how they should be guiding human souls, for they note that there is thinking going on among human beings. They turn in supplication to the Dynamis, in order to obtain the force by means of which they can properly guide human beings in thinking.

Angels:
Human Beings are thinking!
We need the light from on high,
That we may shine in thinking.

The Dynamis from the realm of illumination, dominion, and action answer full of love, full of benevolence:

Receive¹ the light from on high,
That you may shine in thinking,
When human beings think.

And the flooding light, the force of illumination in thinking, streams forth from the Dynamis to the Angels. What the Angels receive, without human beings knowing it, illuminates within human thinking. Now we are aware of what works and moves within human thinking: the illumination of Angels! But the force of light belonging to this illumination, they have received it from the Dynamis. [The first part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

I) Angels:

There is thinking going on among human beings! That is their concern. That is what they put forth as their words of concern.

Human Beings are thinking!

Now they turn in their concern to the Dynamis:

We need the light from on high,
That we may shine in thinking.

The Dynamis answer:

Dynamis: Receive the light from on high,
That you may shine in thinking,
When human beings think.

Our spiritual gaze goes further. We see the gathering of Archangels turning in service to the spirits of the Second Hierarchy. Now they turn to the Exusiai and Kyriotetes, to these two categories of spirits of the Second Hierarchy. Angels have turned to the Dynamis, and Archangels have turned to the Exusiai and Kyriotetes. And their concern is that there is feeling among human beings. They appeal to the Exusiai and Kyriotetes for what they need for the feeling-life of human beings, in order to guide them.

Archangels:
Human beings are feeling!
We need the warmth of soul,
That we may live in feeling.

They must breathe life into feeling. And with mighty voice, since two choirs are answering, the answer from the Kyriotetes and Exusiai resounds in the spiritual world-all.

Receive the warmth of soul,
That you may live in feeling,
When human beings feel.

[The second part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

II) Archangels:
Human beings are feeling!
We need the warmth of soul,
That we may live in feeling.

It is answered.

Kyriotetes and Exusiai:
Receive the warmth of soul,
That you may live in feeling,
When human beings feel.

And we turn to the third gathering of the Third Hierarchy, to the gathering of the Archai. Their concern is that there is willing among human beings, the third concern of the Third Hierarchy.

We feel the Angels turning to the Dynamis, then we felt the Dynamis in action, far up in the heights, so that the light from on high is garnered and given to the Angels in their concern for human thinking. And we felt all that is encompassed by world-warmth is garnered by Exusiai and Kyriotetes, and is handed over to the Archangels, so that they can lead in feeling in human beings. And deep below, where the spirits and gods of the deep rule, from the abysses in which rules much that is evil, from there deep forces of goodness must be obtained. There all the gods of the Second Hierarchy pull together, for in their concern for human beings willing the Archai need the strength of the depths. And so they speak:

Human beings are willing!
We need the strength of the depths,
That we may work in willing.

And in answer to this, in mighty formidable cosmic voice, the mighty voices of the mighty spirits of the Second Hierarchy ring forth together, all three together, three choirs gathering into one choir, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai, three choirs in one:

Receive the strength of the depths,
That you may work in willing,
When human beings will.

[The third part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

III.) Archai
Human beings are willing!
We need the strength of the depths,
That we may work in willing.

It is answered by Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai together:

Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai:
Receive the strength of the depths,
That you may work in willing,
When human beings will.

That is the world, the world present in the sacred creator-words, the resounding of which we become witness to in spiritual worlds, as we are witness to what goes on in mineral and plant-like realms here on the earth.

And we take it in, as it comes to us on our way, as it becomes our experience.

Human Beings are thinking!
We need the light from on high,
That we may shine in thinking.

Receive the light from on high,
That you may shine in thinking,
When human beings think.

Human beings are feeling!
We need the warmth of soul,
That we may live in feeling.

Receive the warmth of soul,
That you may live in feeling,
When human beings feel.

Human beings are willing!
We need the strength of the depths
That we may work in willing.

Receive the strength of the depths,
That you may work in willing,
When human beings will.

We grow into the spiritual world. Instead of what surrounds us here on this sensation-laden earth, surrounding us there are the choirs of the spiritual world. And we become witnesses to what the gods are saying, to what the gods are saying in their concern for the human world, in their caring works concerning the human world.

Only when our meditation undergoes this full disengagement from what we are here on the earth, and we feel engaged with a world the gods there in their divine speech allow to exist, only then do we experience true reality. And just when we have this reality, we also have what is really around us here between birth and death. For behind all that lives here between birth and death in apparency, is what comprises the true reality we live in between death and a new birth.

People of earlier times lived upon the earth, but in a dull, dream-laden clairvoyant state of existence. Their souls were filled with a sort of dream-laden pictures that spoke of the spiritual world. Imagine before us such a man of olden times. Then, when not working, even though the sun still stood in the heavens, when putting his work aside to rest awhile, then he might have paused for reflection, to bring up the pictures he was able to experience in his soul, which reminded him of what he had experienced in pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. But he did not understand the connection of his earth existence with the other existence, the one that glowed there within in his clairvoyant dreams. But the teachings of the adepts, the initiates, were there to make it clear. They brought clarity at first to their students, and through their students to all people, about what the connection is. And so one lived in the earth-world by means of memories of pre-earthly existence.

In life on earth today, the memory of the pre-earthly existence has been lost. Initiates can no longer bring clarity about the connection of life on earth with pre-earthly existence, for people have forgotten what they experienced in pre-earthly existence. Such a clarification is simply not possible. Cosmic memory does not need to be brought into clarity, for today it is simply not there.

But what must be heard through initiation science, is what the gods are saying there behind sensory existence. Then people must experience it. And increasingly the time will come in which people, having gone through the portal of death, will only be able to understand the spiritual world, into which they have entered, when they can say the following:

When the person has stepped through the portal of death into supra-earthly existence and then finds himself in the reality of the spiritual world, within the world of Angles, Archangels, Archai, Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, when he experiences all this, then what he experiences there after death should not remain incomprehensible and dark for him, for then he must remember the things that he went through by means of initiation knowledge.

And it will be important, immeasurably important to the understanding of what can be experienced there in the life between death and a new birth, to have already heard it as such, for otherwise it cannot be understood, other than through a memory of having heard, back on earth, such as what resounds over there.

Human Beings are thinking!
Receive the light from on high.

Human beings are feeling!
Receive the warmth of soul.

Human beings are willing!
Receive the strength of the depths.

Those are the words, my brothers and sisters, that properly belong in the esoteric school today. They should ring forth there, by means of the instruction through which the power of the Age of Michael is channeled through the esoteric school. It can then be as follows. In the esoteric school the first to be heard within life on earth will be the voice of the Angels:

Human beings are thinking!

The answer of the Dynamis:

Receive the light from on high.

The voice of the Archangels is heard.

Human beings are feeling!

The answer of the Kyriotetes and Exusiai:

Receive the warmth of soul.

The words of the Archai:

Human beings are willing!

All three ranks of the Second Hierarchy answer, the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes:

Receive the strength of the depths.

Having heard this in esoteric schools, and on hearing them ringing forth again after having gone through the portal of death, people will hear both together, the esoteric school here and the life between death and a new birth there. They will understand what there resounds.

Or people may remain dull and unwilling to hear what the esoteric schools have to say about preparedness through Anthroposophy in general. They may not take up what can be gently heard through initiation knowledge from the higher realms. Then they go through the portal of death. There they hear what they should have heard earlier. They will not understand the incomprehensible ringing, the simple reverberation, the noise of worlds resounding in the words of power of the gods speaking among themselves.

The gospels speak of this. Paul speaks of it, that people should attend to the guiding wisdom of Christ before death brings them into the land of the spirit. For death in spirit-land comes also, at the same time, when we go through the portal of death and do not understand what resounds there, when instead we are only able to hear incomprehensible noise, instead of the understandable words of the gods. This is because what has befallen us, instead of life of the soul, is death of the soul. That the soul might live, for this reason there is initiation knowledge. That the soul remains alive when it passes through the portal of death, for this reason there are esoteric schools. This should permeate us thoroughly

And now let us recall the path we have been walking along in the spirit. Let us recall how we approached the Guardian in order to become acquainted with how someone might cross over the abyss of existence. And let us look just now upon the impressions that from over there have worked on our souls, let us take up into our souls what can parade before our souls as the inner drama of self-awareness.

We have gone down the path. Standing there in a certain way are three tablets. Presently we stand before the third, after we have taken up into our souls all the depths of the divine call. From the first tablet, a short time after having come to the abyss of existence, there it would peal forth:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

Now the Guardian of the Threshold approaches us. The second tablet looms. On it is written:

First come to know the earnest Guardian,
Who stands before the gates of spirit-land,
Denying entry to your sensory force
And to your intellect’s might,
For in weaving of sense
And in forming of thought
Out of space’s absence of being,
Out of time’s illusory powers
The truth of your own self
You must first forcefully master.

Then when we have arrived on the other side, passing by the earnest Guardian, standing there, we would hear a dialogue such as this:

Human Beings are thinking!
Receive the light from on high.

Human beings are feeling!
Receive the warmth of soul.

Human beings are willing!

Receive the strength of the depths.

From there we gaze back over here on the sensory world. From there we feel the words concerning this sensory world:

I walked within this world of sense,
Thinking’s heritage guiding me,
A god’s power having ushered me in.
Death, it stands at journey’s end.
I will feel Christ’s presence.
In matter’s death spirit-birth wakes,
So in spirit I’ll find the world
And in world-becoming know myself.

• 1. empfanget

Everything that enters into our work eventually crystallizes around the one point: to find union with the spiritual powers that advance humanity. From this point of view, the importance of the Christ-Being in the world has been spoken of here again and again. Today I would like to speak to you a few words that are intended to shape our ideas about this Christ-Impulse and its relationship to us humans ever more important. If we want to grasp the truth of this Christ impulse, we must be willing to reflect on many things. Nowadays, one hears the idea expressed here and there that everything schoolmasterly, pedantic, and didactic should be suppressed and that one should grasp the living life in art and world view. So many minds of the present express their fatigue towards everything didactic. It is only strange that as soon as matters of world-view are brought up, one always falls back into a longing for the didactic.

We have had to hear how Christ is spoken of as a world teacher; I once used the expression: “superhuman world schoolmaster”. Many feel comfortable when they can think that someone who had taught something had come into the world with Christ. In contrast to this, we have repeatedly emphasized the life character, the power character of the Christ impulse. Through what happened at the baptism in the Jordan, an entity found its way into earthly life by sharing the destiny of humanity for three years. Then it poured out into the earth aura and has been working there ever since.

When we look at this Christ event, we have to say that the event of Golgotha is a unique experience in the evolution of the earth. This has taken place once in relation to the evolution of the earth, but the Christ event was prepared in the spiritual world.

Although it is thoroughly wrong to think of the Christ-being as present in another body, one must nevertheless point to a preparatory event in the development of the world, namely to three preparatory events, preliminary stages of the event of Golgotha. They took place in supermundane, purely spiritual worlds.

I spoke of the two Jesus Children, the Solomon and the Nathan Jesus Child. The former bore within him the ego of Zarathustra. It passed over into the other Child and lived there from the twelfth to the thirtieth year. Then the shell was filled by the Christ-being. This Nathanic Jesus, he too is, this must be expressly mentioned, as he was born at the beginning of our era, in a human body for the first time properly embodied in the world. For the preliminary stages of his existence he lived in spiritual worlds. He was never properly embodied in a human body before. The relationship with Krishna was not a true embodiment, but a representative embodiment. When we visualize the being of this later Nathanian Jesus, we must look up to the angelic beings and can say: Before the Christ appeared on earth, he was not embodied, but three times present in the spiritual world, but in each of these three stages of existence, something similar to the event of Golgotha occurred again and again. We must therefore seek the preannouncement stages of Golgotha in the spiritual worlds. Each of these events has a deep significance for the whole life of people on earth. What we experience there is influenced not only by what happens within the physical earth, but also from the spiritual worlds. What was effected by the three preliminary stages was effected from the outside.

When humanity lived in the Lemurian epoch, the luciferic influence had already descended upon it. It sent its rays of power into human nature, as it were. The effect was inherent in this. Man had to develop differently then than if no luciferic influence had come. Man was, so to speak, infected with the luciferic impulse. We can say, on the basis of spiritual science, what this Luciferic influence has brought about. If it had remained as strong as in Lemuria, something would have happened to our human nature that would have placed it in great danger. What might be characterized as follows would have happened: the twelve sensory powers of the human being (for there are twelve) would have developed in such a way that the human being would have become supersensitive. While we now look at the red of the rose in such a way that it has an objective effect on us when we look at it, the red would then penetrate our eyes as if with pricks, and blue would suck at our vision. We would be supersensitive. It would be the same with hearing and all sensory perceptions of a human being. We would not be able to perceive anything without feeling pain or lust. Humanity was heading towards this through Lucifer. The beings of the higher hierarchies saw this. The Nathanic Jesus, as he later lived, was present in the spiritual world in the Lemurian period in an angelic being, and it was set before him to permeate himself with the Christ-being. While the sheaths were later permeated with the Christ-being, at that time the soul element of this angelic being was spiritualized by the Christ impulse. At that time the Christ Impulse already descended into the soul of the later Nathanian Jesus. This happened in the spiritual world, but the rays that proceeded from it spread over the earth and calmed the overly sensitive human senses, so that the danger was removed that people could only have beheld the sensual under pain and degrading lust. Thus we look at the first harbinger of the event of Golgotha and say to ourselves: We have become so with regard to our twelve senses because the Christ descended into the soul of the later Nathanic Jesus and appeased the human being of sense.

Then in Atlantean times, a danger came into human life again through the Ahrimanic influence gradually combining with the Luciferic influence. While in Lemuria the senses were in danger, now in the early days of Atlantia it was the vital organs and the etheric body of man that were in danger. These organs of an etheric body permeated by the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman would have developed in such a way that man would have taken on a form unworthy of a human being. Everything would have had to be done in such a way that man would have greedily pursued what was useful to him and could only have looked at what was not beneficial to him with disgust. Human life would have been a constant battle between greed and disgust. All the organs would have been so formed that man would have pounced in a degrading manner, like a wild animal, on what he had to absorb, and would have felt deeply degraded by disgust at what was not beneficial to him. That this did not happen is due to the second preliminary stage of the event of Golgotha. The danger was such that even in breathing, man would have drawn in the air with greed and would have expressed every flash of something unsuitable for him in a terrible way, with terrible outbursts of disgust. So it was the second time that this angelic being was imbued with the Christ impulse and thereby rays of strength entered the earth aura and calmed man's life.

Towards the end of the Atlantean period, the third preliminary stage developed. Once again, humanity was facing a great danger. Now, thinking, feeling and willing were to be brought into conflict with each other. The soul's expressions were to be made disharmonious, so that man could not have developed thinking, feeling and willing in an orderly way, but rather that these would have been in conflict with each other as if in madness. This was averted by the third preliminary stage. Once again the entity that later became Jesus of Nazareth imbued itself with the Christ impulse, and order and harmony were brought into the harmony of thinking, feeling and willing. This was still felt long after the Atlantean period. In the times that preceded our development of thought, the harbingers of an image that extends into our time but is not yet properly understood began to take shape. At the end of the Atlantean era, this soul, which later became Jesus of Nazareth, came into existence. This soul brought about an entity that always became master of the wildly storming affects, and triumphed over thinking, feeling and willing, which became a dense entity. Mankind pictured this in the image of St. George or St. Michael, the slayer of the dragon. This is the direct imaginative expression of the third forerunner of the event of Golgotha.

The Greeks, who in their imaginations brought to life what shone through from the mysteries of Atlantis, created an image of the being that was active in Atlantis. They worshipped in Apollo the spirit of which they imagined: this is He who is imbued with the spirit of the sun. They did not call it Christ, but the name is not important. In their sun worship they revered the third preliminary stage of the event of Golgotha and expressed this outwardly by seeking advice from the priests of Apollo in the most important matters. They knew, these Greeks, that what weaves in the earth aura is also woven into the secrets of existence, and how it has brought order to thinking, feeling and willing. They felt so connected to the earth that they said: What would have brought disorder to thinking and feeling and willing, if it had not been defeated by Apollo, rose up out of the earth in dense form. But Apollo brings order into it, so that instead of disharmony and madness in thinking, feeling and willing, wisdom emerges from the earth aura.

They looked towards the area where steam was rising from the earth, which they captured and stored in their sanctuary, and placed the priestess of Apollo over the opening through which he himself spoke in such a way that his wisdom was transformed into oracles, into advice for the concerns of those seeking this wisdom. Just as George and Michael appear in the picture, so Apollo appears in his sanctuary, pouring the prophecies of those who speak through him into the soul.

Oh, Christianity is ancient! It is not the name of Christ that matters. The service of Apollo honored Christ, the spirit of the sun, so that in this worship lies the consciousness of the third preliminary stage of the event of Golgotha. Then the time came when humanity faced a fourth great danger. In Lemuria, the physical body was in danger, then in Atlantia the etheric and astral organs. Now it was the I that was to come into disorder. This is preparing itself in such a way that at the time when the I was to take hold of man in Greek thought, it shows itself in a very peculiar phenomenon, that all conditions are present to bring disorder into the I. Only gradually will one understand how that which was to bring forth this I develops in Greek philosophy and so on. I have already tried to show how the I awakens. It can be seen from the study of philosophy, which culminates in the thought of Plato and Aristotle, how the I gradually comes into being. When Thales, Pherekydes of Syros, Anaxagoras first brought great thoughts into being, there was a parallel phenomenon that spread from Greece throughout the Greek world: there was the coming of the Sibyls parallel to the coming of the I. The Sibyls asserted themselves everywhere. Sometimes they spoke great wisdom for the future, but sometimes also madness. Everything that can throw the I into confusion, as the I must be thrown into confusion without the Christ Impulse, found expression in their prophecies. Two things were in preparation: Prophets, forerunners of the Christ Impulse, who, in the purity of their soul-searching, seek to absorb the young power of the Christ, and who, in their ordered life of thought, pass through what is weaving itself through the evolution of mankind. On the other hand, there are the Sibyls, who are at the mercy of the outer influences of the earth aura. In Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in Rome, we are confronted with this contrast between sibyls and prophets. Michelangelo shows how the wind and other things work with the Sibyls, which are fundamentally connected with the earth, and shows that there was danger for the ego to become disordered with the Sibyls, and how the prophets work to calm this ego. Studying the prophets next to the sibyls in Michelangelo's paintings can lead us deep into many secrets. The forces that were at work through the Sibyls show how the human ego is inclined to fall into disorder on a fourth level. The order that the teaching of the prophets announces was established through the Mystery of Golgotha, the order of the ego forces in such a way that the human being's ego learned to feel more and more deeply: Not I, but the Christ in me. What would have contributed to the disorder of the ego in the Sibyls comes to the fore in an orderly way through the Christ impulse. Because the human ego must develop on earth, the event of Golgotha had to take place on earth; Christ had to permeate the body of Jesus, the real physical body, whereas in the preliminary stages an angel was inspired.

Thus Golgotha drew nearer to the evolution on earth. What Augustine says is deeply true: Christianity has always existed, only that now it is called Christianity. — In the time of Augustine there was a feeling that Apollo's servants were Christians, even if not in name. It was a veneration of the third, purely spiritual event. Thus Christ gradually approached the earth. In the devachan world was the first and second preliminary stage, in the astral world the third, and in the physical world the event of Golgotha.

But not as a teacher, but through his power did Christ penetrate into the earth aura. This must be emphasized again and again. If Christ had wanted to work only through what people could have understood of him, he would have been able to work little.

He entered evolution as a living entity. Human understanding must struggle to reach Him. In this way we see how the dogmatic disputes take place. Human judgment is still far from penetrating the Christ Impulse. The Christ Impulse works in the depths through the souls as a living power. We can trace this power. Let us look at an event that took place on October 28, 312. At that time, Constantine delivered a battle to Maxentius near Rome. Maxentius' army was four times as strong as Constantine's. Constantine won. Anyone who looks at history correctly says: The life of all of Europe would have been different if Constantine had not won. — It was a strange battle. It was not external strength that won, nor judgment. The battle was not fought with the help of the power of judgment. It was fought by each side according to subconscious impulses, into which the Christ impulse played. Maxentius consulted the Sibylline books. They told him: If you do not remain where you are, if you leave Rome, you will subjugate the great enemy of Rome. A dream also told him to leave Rome and fight outside the gates. He was securely entrenched in Rome. Human judgment did not decide what took place in this battle. The subconscious worked in the souls of Maxentius and Constantine. A dream revealed to Constantine that he should carry the symbol of Christianity before the army. Dreams decided the outcome of this battle, which decided the fate of Europe. Human judgment was not suited to bring about what was to be brought about, but the Christ impulse worked and confronted the four times weaker army of Constantine outside Rome with Maxentius. Through that which human beings cannot judge, the guidance of human affairs happened. This is significant for the whole guidance of human history.

The Christ Impulse worked in the subconscious of souls as a spiritual impulse. It worked in the same way later, when the map of Europe was once again given a completely different form. If at the decisive moment the Maid of Orleans had not stepped forward to the side of her king, the destiny of all Europe would have been changed. Again it was not the power of judgment, but the Christ impulse, which availed itself of a human instrument. It does not depend on our judgment whether one finds this good or bad.

I can show by another example how the Christ impulse works below the threshold of consciousness. It makes use of strange forms of revelation, strange to the materialist. When modern spiritual life approached, there was something in its development that would have caused materialism to stretch its arms much further over European life. If certain events had not occurred, it would have been possible that even in those souls that still felt spiritually, purely material conceptions would have arisen. The understanding for the Christ Impulse would have sunk so low in the preceding centuries that one would have doubted one's physical existence. Then it would have been much easier for Arthur Drews and others. It spread to the most distant regions of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, when there was a danger that people would no longer have any connection with the Christ Impulse. The mood was: Why should one believe that Christ lived? And so the same thing happened simultaneously in the most diverse places. In almost all parts of Europe, everywhere it was seen that through the most diverse human places, through villages and towns, not always the same, but always a different physical, human personality walked. The opinion spread that this human personality, which appeared in a particularly strange guise, was Ahasver, the eternal Jew, who had wandered the world since he rejected Christ. The rumor spread that there lived a man who could say from his own experience: I have seen Christ, he really lived. - In the most diverse places, this personality went through the villages, attended church services in a terrible state of mind, in very outdated clothing, and recounted the event of which he could bear witness. Bishops and abbots invited such personalities to banquets and organized festivities. These personalities always told them: We can strengthen your awareness that Christ walked the earth, because he passed me by, and because of how I treated him, I must now go through the world like this.

From what we learn in history, we have no idea how deeply what Ahasver told affected human minds a few centuries ago. There were always other personalities, but they saw, as in a retrospective of Ahasver, Christ passing by, so that they were believed. From them came the realization: Yes! He has lived, for he can

can tell about him. — Superficial people today may say: Should that have had such a great influence that it averted the danger that Christ would have been completely forgotten as an historical Christ? They do not know that such events went through the world that history has not recorded. That we are not completely mired in materialism today is a consequence of what emanated from these personalities. Today, “it could not happen.” In some places, Ahasver had thick calluses, peculiar clothing, long hair, yellowed skin, was tall and gaunt; in other places he was small, had a hump, but was always imbued with the consciousness of what the soul believed it had experienced at the moment when Christ passed before it.

This consciousness, this ability to look back into the Akashic Records and to identify with them to such an extent that they truly believed it, was instilled in numerous personalities. Today, all these Ahasueruses would end up in an asylum; at that time, they were instruments for strengthening spiritual life. Bishops and abbots were strengthened by them in the power of the Christian faith. The seed was sown in psychically inclined natures from spiritual worlds, to be able to look back to the event of Golgotha. The narrators then saw themselves in the picture through the peculiarity of their consciousness. That was a true, living contemplation of the event at Golgotha. Much more than in the human being's conscious mind, in which the power of judgment asserts itself, took place in the subconscious regions of the soul, which emanated from the Christ impulse. Today's materialistic man can easily scoff at such things. He will consider it a psychic epidemic and say: What can one give that comes from diseased souls? One would like to ask these materialists what they would say if someone became so mentally ill that psychiatrists locked him up in an asylum, but there, out of his enlightenment, he began to devise the air engine that people really have in mind as an idea? They would accept it from such a soul and not ask whether it comes from a diseased soul. Whether a soul is diseased is not a criterion, not an objection. The point is to examine the content of what comes from the soul. The worst thing about our material mind is that one appeals to secondary considerations, not to the power of truth.

If we survey the development of humanity, it will become clear to us that we have to understand the Christ impulse as a living force that works much more in the depths of the soul and makes use of physical means, more than what people understand. If it had remained limited to this, its influence would not have come far. But in our time, things are beginning to change, to the point that, little by little, what was the thought for the Greeks, with which at the same time the consciousness of the human ego was actually born, must have an effect in us. How does this thought assert itself today? One does not need to prove this with spiritual science, but with philosophy. In the centuries before the establishment of Christianity, beginning with Pherekydes and ending with Aristotle, thought begins to play a role in the evolution of the world. Thinking in images only begins in Greek life. This prepares the way for the actual consciousness of self. Then comes the Christ impulse. It works together with what has emerged as ego power. In our time, we see it in Hegelianism, which is indeed little noticed, but is a significant phenomenon of humanity, as Fege struggles with the thought that wants to grasp the whole world. Man develops in the world; he crowns development by filling the world with thought. He recognizes his environment through this. But thought can do two things: it can develop properly, which can be compared to the development of the germ into a flower, or the germ can be used for human food. Then it is torn out of its continuous flow. If it remains in its continuous flow, a new plant develops, and it is likely to give rise to life in the future. It is the same with human thought. It is said that we use it to create images of our environment. But to use it for such knowledge is as if we used germs for food. We drive the thought away from its current. But if it persists in its current, we do not use it for food, so to speak, then we let it live its own germ life, let it arise in meditation and inspiration, let it develop into a new, fruitful existence. That is the straight current for the thought. In the future, people will recognize that what has been regarded as knowledge of the world behaves like grain that does not develop into new grain but is driven out into a completely different current; but what we learn to know through knowledge of the higher world is thought that is philosophically grasped in freedom, that leads directly into spiritual life through meditation and concentration.

We have reached the point where it will be recognized that ordinary knowledge relates to supersensible knowledge in the same way that a grain of wheat used for food relates to a grain of wheat that is transformed into new grain. Inner knowledge of thoughts is what the future must bring. Philosophy in its old form has been overcome, has played out its role. It will be recognized that such knowledge must always be there, but must lead to a by-product of development. It will be recognized that the living thought, which is transformed into meditation and concentration, leads to spiritual knowledge of human nature and to knowledge of the spiritual world.

When we consider various phenomena in our spiritual life, many things may be noticed. Here we may say and discuss what would be misunderstood in the outside world. A man is regarded today as a great philosophical spirit who, in essence, limits his wisdom to repeatedly saying: Man must not stop at external knowledge, he must grasp the spirit. One could say that he repeatedly says, in different versions: Man cannot stop at mere external knowledge, he must grasp the spiritual within himself, must experience it within himself, it must not be grasped merely in concepts, it must become alive. He does not say what the spirit is, nothing is recognized. This is the hallmark of Eucken's philosophy. It does not lead to real spiritual knowledge. When thinking forms itself out of itself, it does not become an indeterminate spiritual experience, but it is rounded off in itself, and what we have come to know as the etheric body resonates with thinking. When thinking transforms itself into meditation, this thought will form and out of the human etheric body there is - the spiritual human being. Humanity is on the way out of philosophy and into a living spiritual knowledge.

We are on the right path. Those who understand this recognize their time, but real insight into these things cannot be gained without developing a holy awe of the knowledge that holds one back from applying the power of judgment one has everywhere. One must always want to prepare oneself for new knowledge, because the way the soul is, it is only good for a side current of knowledge. Only when it develops itself higher is it good for really entering the spiritual world. Only then do we understand our task within our community correctly when we feel, with all humility, how we are called to know something of this great re-evaluation of all concepts of knowledge that want to lead into the spiritual life. We want to remain very modest, but we can call some of those who are considered great minds today shallow talkers, because that is not derogatory criticism. What we need to do is to combine clear, strong and forceful judgment of what we are striving for with humility; to recognize that, in the grand scheme of things, we are only at the beginning, but our hearts can swell, our hearts can glow with joy at the thought of what we want to achieve, to which we want to devote our most intimate soul powers. I would like to appeal not only to your imagination, but also to the deepest powers of your heart, to that in your soul where your deepest feeling for the pulse of the times can be found. Then you will understand what is meant by the fact that such a speech is only intended to hint at what the leading powers of our time, the spiritual individuals, of whom we know that they are going through our time, are saying to us. We do not advance only by acquiring more and more concepts about what the spiritual world is. We must acquire them. But we only really advance by connecting something with each new idea that comes from the deepest part of our soul, so that this ever-increasing understanding can be proven to the leading powers of the time. We can feel them speaking to us from the most intimate depths of our souls. Long before we perceive this speaking as a warning, we can feel how our movement is supported by these spiritual guiding powers, of which we are the true heralds within our movement. This awareness should pour out like a true spiritual current over what we do.

Esteemed attendees! It is my responsibility today to conclude the lectures on the so-called Devachan plan or, as we have to call it in German, the spiritual realm. If you read about Devachan or the Land of the Spiritual Entities in theosophical books, you will find the description that this realm of the spiritual world is a realm of contentment, a realm of bliss. You are told that Devachan is the “land of delights,” the “land of happiness.” Well, honored attendees, it is very easy to misunderstand such a description and to imagine something quite wrong under these words. We must be clear about the fact that very many people do not know what the happiness of the spiritual realm is, that the vast majority of people seek happiness and satisfaction in things that are no longer found in Devachan. Even what people usually imagine in religious concepts as paradise, as a land of happiness and bliss, is still so closely tied to ideas of immediate sensual reality, to ideas taken from our physical environment, that we must not apply these ideas to the land of spiritual beings. What people hope for in terms of paradisiacal joys, what they call paradise, based on sensual perceptions, they already find before entering devachan, they find it in the fifth realm of Kamaloka, in the fifth realm of the fire of purification, and they find it precisely for the purpose of stripping away this tendency towards sensual pleasures and sensual desires. What the Indian, for example, imagines as paradisiacal hunting grounds, where he can indulge all his hunting desires, he finds already in the fifth realm of Kamaloka. But man must be cleansed of precisely that before he can enter the spiritual world. On the other hand, many people say that if they hear that none of what they experience here on earth as sensual reality remains in the spiritual realm, then the spiritual realm is nothing more than an illusion, a kind of dream that we dream between two incarnations. Both require a correction. The ideas that a person takes from their directly experienced reality need to be guided to completely different and higher ideas. One can gain a corresponding idea of what is actually meant by the land of delights, the land of bliss, what is meant by that deep intimacy and spiritual satisfaction that we experience between two incarnations, if one listens to what students of the great masters already know from their experience in this life.

Those who reach initiation in this life, experience something of this heavenly bliss, of this true spiritual satisfaction, through insight into the spiritual realm in this very life. You may ask: Is there or has there been something in our countries that is called initiation? Have there really been disciples in our Western culture who have been blessed with the highest vision that spiritual land has to offer? There has always been the possibility of receiving initiation in secret or occult schools. A current of occult wisdom came to Europe in the 14th century. This current, which is called the Rosicrucian current, was misunderstood by many; it must be misunderstood by all those who only get to know it from the outside. Only those who have been allowed to see through occult training should get to know it from the inside. When Christian Rosenkreutz brought the wisdom of the Orient to Europe, he founded schools in Europe where disciples were trained to reach the stages where vision in the Devachan, the vision of the higher secrets, became possible. Only those who have undergone training themselves know how to tell about it. All external research, everything that is written in books, cannot give you any information. Until 1875, the year of the founding of the Theosophical Society, these things were never spoken of at all, except in the most secret of teaching centers. It was only since 1875 that the Masters of Wisdom felt the duty to convey some of these deepest spiritual truths to mankind.

Initiations still take place today. However, they can only take place within the spiritual realm, the region I have described to you. Today, every person to be initiated must come to the Devachan plane to see these higher secrets for themselves. This forces me to give at least a small idea of how the person who receives the initiation on the Devachan plane feels and how he is transformed. What I have described to you of those highest entities that come from completely different worlds, first to enjoy their embodiment in Devachan and then to descend into the lower regions, into the three worlds, these entities can be seen by those who come for initiation in this field. When a person has attained initiation, he begins to gain a completely new faith, a completely new vision. He has truly become a different person. And what is not present at all for many people living around him, of which they never have an inkling, he sees with the spiritual eye.

Allow me to give you a brief summary of the creed that the initiate makes his own. You will recognize some of the phrases. All deeper truths have always come into the public domain and have been exoterically propagated in the public domain.

The person who is initiated gains a higher overview of what is happening here in our physical reality. He gains this higher overview by placing himself outside of this physical reality. While we live in the world of the senses, we are enclosed in the physical organization and can only see through our eyes, hear through our ears, and perceive through our other sense organs. We are dependent on what our senses convey to us. This is stopped by the higher training that the person to be initiated receives. Before the person to be initiated lies, I can only describe it, his own physical reality completely spread out. He sees himself objectively next to himself, and just as we look at any other object in the environment of our sensory reality, so we look at our own physical body when we are initiated. Our organism lies before us like our own corpse. But also our astral body, our desires, instincts, our whole sensual life of drives, lies before us, and we speak in the sense of the quoted Vedanta wisdom: “That is you”. We see ourselves completely objectively, with all our faults, with what we have achieved in life through the various incarnations. This is what is described to you as the passage through the gate of death, which every person to be initiated has to go through. He then no longer sees through the senses what he otherwise has around him in the sense world; he sees into the outer world from the spiritual plane, and not through the senses. But he also sees into the world of instincts, into the world of Kama, of passions, into the world where human drives are, into that which brings people into conflict and quarrel, what delights them and what gives them pleasure in this physical reality; there he sees into it as a pedestrian standing on a high mountain and looking into a mountain landscape.

And because he has risen above sensuality, because he has only a world of pure spirit around him, that is why he sees on the other side those entities that are spiritual in nature, and he perceives something of what is called divine wisdom. The divine essence itself is the Father-Spirit of all religions; no one can see him in his very own form. The Highest remains unrevealed, even to the opened spiritual eyes. But the initiate receives an idea of what creates and works in the world. He is led before the creating, divine powers. Then, for the first time, he utters the word out of conviction, out of direct contemplation, the word that was previously taught to him as a belief: [“I am Brahman”]. When the person to be initiated is now led through the narrow gate, where the physical and astral life is objectively shown to him, the word of the initiating priest is heard: To those who have, much will be given, and from those who have not yet, even that which they have will be taken away. — This is the initiation saying that is heard at the first gate of initiation. You will also find it in the Bible, like many a saying taken from Egyptian priestly wisdom. Those who have, are those who have already awakened to spiritual feeling and perception. But those who come to this gate without faith and without spiritual perception will also be deprived of their desire for spiritual knowledge. Woe to him who comes unworthily to this place, who has pushed his way in with curiosity; to him another voice is heard, which again has a symbolic meaning.

Man now experiences what universal spirit is, universal soul. We humans reflect on sensual things, but the spirit that lives in us, that we experience as thoughts within us, that forms the object of our reflection, is the same as the wisdom from which the world is built. We could not recognize the world with its laws if it were not built from these spiritual laws. Theosophy teaches that what lives in man as spirit, as manas, is essentially the same as what lives in the great universe, as Mahat. Man's manas draws wisdom from the manas of the universe, from Mahat. Or should a man believe that the laws we see operating in the heavens, by which the stars move, have meaning only in his mind? The Mahat of the starry sky is the element of intellect and reason out in the great world, and what you learn from it is manas, the element of intellect and reason of the small world.

Now the All-Spirit, the Universal Spirit, descends upon the initiate. The initiation priest speaks the words: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The person concerned, now an initiate, knows what the spirit of the world is. Then he can express his belief in the creative spirit of the world out of his own conviction and say: “I believe in the divine Father-Spirit, which has made the spiritual, which is also called the heavenly, and the physical, the earthly.” In the Christian creed it says: I believe in God, the almighty Father, who created heaven and earth. — And then one thing has become clear to man: that in truth and reality he himself has taken his origin from the same universal world spirit that confronts him here in the spiritual realm. He knows that he has descended into the depths of sensual-physical matter; but he also knows that he has descended from divine worlds and comes from the spirit. He knows that the spiritual essence he bears within him he has received from the very source of the divine Father-Spirit, that he is a ray from the sun of the divine Father-Spirit. He becomes aware of this as a real divine power, as something he experiences and of which he has direct certainty. He begins to gain a new faith in humanity. Humanity becomes for him the only begotten Son of God, the Son of whom he speaks in his creed: “I believe in the divine origin of humanity — in the God in man himself, as the Egyptian priestly wisdom expressed it — or in the Christ in man, who has descended from heavenly worlds. And then it becomes clear to him that before these times in the evolution of the earth had arrived, these times in which we now live, these times in which people perceive through their senses, in which their sensual urges cause them to act — it becomes clear to him that before man descended into this sphere of the senses, he was in another, in a purely spiritual sphere.

The disciple has now come to know the spiritual land, and he knows that this land was the land where man was in his time as the only begotten Son of God, he knows that man is born of virgin spiritual matter – Mary or Maya – and he knows that the spiritual man Christ descended into sensual matter, he knows that this spiritual man is contained in each of us and develops little by little through the various incarnations, he knows that this spiritual man lives surrounded by sensual corporeality, lives in the physical body. The things of the outer world impinge sensually upon our body and build up our eyes, our ears and the other sense organs. Within this bodily sensuality we live and let the world penetrate into us. Through the sense organs we look as through windows upon the outer world; we are enclosed in sensual matter and therefore limited by it.

Pure and spiritual is the Christ who enters into people; he is virgin spirit-matter. Now he has descended into the contracted, sensual matter. Those who speak esoterically call this the water or the sea. Thus it says, for example, in Genesis: “The Spirit of God hovered over the waters.” This means that the spirit hovers over matter. In Greek, this matter is also called “Pöntos Pyletös”, literally contracted sea. Man has moved into this contracted matter, which has formed his organs. Thus, the active being in the spiritual realm has become a being that passively receives impressions from outside through the sense organs: Man has become passive, a Pöntos Pyletös. This is the difference between beholding in the spiritual world and beholding in the world of the senses. If we want to have an object before us in the spiritual world, we first have the thought, and the spirit forms this thought in the spiritual world, that is, man finds the images for all creation in the spiritual world. In the sensual world, man perceives passively, having become passive. We have all become passive, as it were suffering in the contracted matter. That was the original confession of the Egyptian priesthood. This is the symbol that the Christ has descended to mankind, that he has taken on matter and become passively suffering in the contracted sea, in the Pöntos Pyletös. In the course of time this was transformed into Christianity, and because the word Pöntos Pyletös was thoroughly misunderstood, the misleading passage in the Christian creed arose, which reads: “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” which is nothing other than the quoted passage from the creed of the Egyptian priests. Man has become suffering; he is no longer active, but passive. This is the article of faith which in the Occult Symbol signifies the so-called Incarnation.

When the person to be initiated has realized what is meant by these profound truths, he then searches in the objective, sensory reality until he has become clear within himself that he can now descend into this sensuality in order to work out of duty and in devoted self-sacrifice within the sensual reality. When he has reached the point where he no longer seeks to satisfy the sensual drives, but uses them only to work within the sensual world, then he is an initiate, then he is initiated, then he has the firm certainty that he can see through the general cosmic justice. He used to live locked in the sensual world, and the riddle of birth and death, the riddle of eternal becoming, was unclear to him. Now it is clear to him that he is eternal and above birth and death. He sees that which is changeable and at the same time the eternal cosmic justice, which in theosophical language we call karma. He has become a sage in the justice of the cosmos, he can judge between life and death, or, as it is said by the Egyptian initiates, between birth and death. And now he believes in the exalted community of spirits freed from the body. We are only separated in the sensual world; in Devachan we are a community of spirits freed from the body. The Christian creed expresses this when it says: “I believe in the communion of saints.” The Christian Creed grew out of the esoteric confession of the Egyptian adepts, which speaks a very esoteric language. It is partly translated from misunderstood symbols, partly from esoteric sayings, which the candidates for initiation received as direct knowledge in the land of Devachan.

From this discussion, you will now have a somewhat clearer idea of what is meant by the land of delight and bliss. It is the delight of infinity, of eternal activity, of eternal work. Why can none of the things that oppress us in the physical world oppress us in Devachan? Devachan is a land of bliss not because we experience delights there that man desires and craves in his sensual world, but because we are free from the material, free from what craves for sensual desires, but also free from what limits us, and because it makes it possible for us to react to what would otherwise affect us from the outside. What limits us in the sensual world is removed, what can cause us pain is no longer there. For what causes pain? Because impressions are made on our astral body or on our physical body. We have discarded these bodies when we are in Devachan; the reason for the pain and the feelings of discomfort that we experience in the physical world has ceased to exist. Because no one can be selfish anymore, no one can demand selfish pleasures; because no one has an astral body anymore, one is free from anything that can oppress one's own personality. That is why devachan is known as the “land of bliss,” the “land of happiness.”

I said that in the third region of Devachan, all pain and sighing of the creature is revealed to us, that we can perceive all the pain and suffering that takes place here on earth, all the passions and desires. But we perceive it as we perceive the objects here in the sensual world – a perception that is not so strong and not so glaring that it causes us pain. It is also not like touching an object that has a high temperature, so that we burn ourselves – in short, we perceive without feeling selfish pain or personal pleasure. We see the totality of all pain and suffering, and as spiritual beings we feel that we have to help alleviate or reduce this pain. It makes no difference to us whether this pain or pleasure belongs to us or to others. Our personality has been stripped away; the pains are no longer personal. The cause for personal suffering to arise for us has ceased to exist. Because we are disembodied and thus free from everything that could oppress us, devachan is called the land of bliss. The bliss in devachan must therefore be described as being incomparable to anything that happens here in the sensual reality. Only he knows what these “delights” of Devachan mean who, as an initiate, has already had experiences here in this physical-sensual embodiment and has received knowledge and wisdom of this Devachan.

Everything we are told about the realm of Devachan comes from the experiences and direct observations and insights of such initiates who have learned to be actively engaged in spiritual existence themselves. They have also learned that it would be the greatest illusion to speak of the life in Devachan between two embodiments as an illusion. It is precisely the illusion that we regard the life in Devachan as an illusion, as a dream. And in fact, all real life comes from Devachan. And only because the task of earthly existence is to lead people in their spiritual activity down to the earthly world, the Christ must appear in man, in sensual embodiment. That is why, according to the saying of Plato, the great Greek philosopher, the soul of the world is laid out in the shape of a cross through the universe and stretched over the earthly body of the world. That is what Plato said. It is a symbol that the initiate knows in its deepest meaning.

Just as the instrument needs the tool, the workman, so our physical existence needs the spiritual world, so that the spiritual world can be the architect of the physical body. Just as a hammer would never have been invented without the influence of spiritual reflection, nor could it ever have been used by a being that had only physical powers and was incapable of reflection, so too could man not fulfill his task if he did not repeatedly ascend into the spiritual realm and draw strength from there to work in the material world. He ascends to the land where he receives knowledge of pure spirituality, where he learns how spiritual forces work without them becoming passive within the senses, where he learns to freely unfold his wings and work. Then he can in turn become embodied again, suffering in the contracted matter of earthly existence, in the Pöntos Pyletös. From incarnation to incarnation, man wanders; again and again he moves into the Pöntos Pyletös; again and again the spirit is crucified in matter.

The theosophist can never be materialistic – not even to the slightest degree – and see the whole of existence in the physical world. And especially when he is able to make his own observations in the spiritual realm, he will come to the realization that asceticism would be hostile to reality. What kind of task man has as a spiritual being becomes clear to us in the spiritual realm. The earthly world in which we live is our assigned place of residence during our present evolution. And what we bring from the spiritual realm, we should use to benefit this earthly world. So that we can work on this earth, we are provided with new assignments from the spiritual realm again and again between two incarnations. Dear audience, we have now covered the three worlds. Man lives in three worlds: the material world, the world of soul or astral world and the spiritual world or Devachan. In this existence man lives in all three worlds. Every material human being also contains a soul and a spirit. However, man is only conscious within the sensual, but the astral and spiritual man also work in him; the soul and the spirit are also effective in every human being. Man's consciousness awakens between two incarnations in Kamaloka, in the soul's country; then man becomes enlightened, he is awakened between two incarnations – according to the level of development, according to what he brings with him from this earthly incarnation — in Devachan, in the spiritual realm, in order to return to the astral world, to clothe itself with astral matter and to be incarnated again in the physical reality. That is the path, the pilgrimage of the human spirit.

The human being comes from the spiritual realm. It was originally virgin matter from which man, when he still lived in the pure spiritual realm, formed a body for himself. Long ago, another life on our earth preceded this earthly state of ours. Then men were still pure spirits, then only spiritual reality existed. Then man descended first into the astral existence, not yet to the physical reality. He was then still the Adam Kadmon, that “pure” entity in which the physical world of instincts did not yet exist.

Then came that which is so wonderfully and symbolically expressed in Genesis: “Jehovah formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life.” The spirit met with sense-proof matter and with that, at the same time, the whole existence of physical and sense reality. Until then, man had been in a kind of subconscious state. The waking consciousness that we have today, this mind through which we consider things and with which we orient ourselves in the physical world, only came to man with the descent into the sensual world; at the same time as the lower sensual reality, man received reason. This is again symbolically represented in Genesis as the snake; it bestows the earthly mind on humanity.

The lowest point in human development is that where birth and death take place, where the immortal part of man must always pass through the gate of death. This will be replaced in the next epoch, when man, similar to the preceding epoch, will only be an astral being; and then the last epoch will come, when man will only have a spiritual existence.

Thus, the contemplation of Devachan teaches us, like everything in the world, on a large and small scale, that everything is in a state of development, that all existence comes from the spirit, passes through the sensual reality, and then ascends to the spiritual again. Contemplation of this higher, spiritual realm shows us that what we call death, what we call decay, is nothing more than a temporary, almost illusory state of an epoch of the world, that it is not something that can last. The conviction, the clarity, the knowledge that man has come from higher realms and that he will go to higher realms again, that is what gives us the strength to gradually, as we progress in theosophy, feel everything that an initiate of early Christianity – Paul – felt and expressed with the words: “Death, where is thy sting?”

On the other hand, we should never disdain our earthly existence. Just as the bee carries honey into the beehive, so we have to suck the honey out of the earthly world and carry it up into the spiritual world. But we can only find our way if we know what the basic forces of our existence are. For this reason I have given the lectures on the Devachan region. There was only one thing that could have induced me to give these lectures, and I know that they can easily be misunderstood. The author of the theosophical textbook “Light on the Path” wrote:

And once you have recognized the truth, you must not keep it to yourself. — Anyone who has recognized the truth must not keep it to themselves. And anyone who feels called to speak it must speak it, regardless of how it is received. Higher than everything else is the call from the spiritual world, once we have heard it. This call awakens in us a consciousness that is completely different from all consciousness that we know from our sensual existence. And then, from the perspective of the spiritual realm, we can make a saying of Solomon our motto:

Therefore I begged for insight, and it was given to me.
I called upon the Most High, and wisdom was given to my spirit.
I value truth more than anything that
lives in the sensual world around me.

The wise man values wisdom more than all the sensual realms around him. That is why he tries to proclaim this wisdom. This is to justify what has moved me to speak about this subtle area of existence, although I know how these things can be misunderstood and how difficult it is to talk about them in a reasonably understandable language. But if we have felt this call, then, in the spirit of Solomon's wisdom, let us express it in the words:

Propter hoc optavi et datus est mihi sensus
et invocavi et venit in me spiritus sapientiae
et praeposui illam regnis et sedibus et divitias nihil esse duxi
in comparatione illius.

My dear venerated guests! The organisers of this university course have asked me to introduce the reflections of the day through some remarks and so I will introduce today's work in a certain aphoristic manner to open our discussion. I am aware that this is no easy task at present. Once in Stuttgart I gave a short course to a smaller circle regarding the items I want to talk about today and it became clear to me that one really needs a lot of time to discuss such controversial things as we would like to talk about today. So I'm only going to suggest a few things about the spirit of our reflection which is required by Anthroposophy in relation to observing human speech.

When speech is the subject and when one sets the goal to treat speech scientifically, then one must be clear that it is not as easy to have speech as an object for scientific treatment as it is for instance about human beings relating to nature or to the physical nature of the human being. In these cases, one has at least a clear outline for the observation of the object. Certainly one can discuss to what a degree observation lies at its foundation, or if it is merely a process being grasped through human research capabilities of an unknown origin. However, this is then a discussion which happens purely within the course of thought. What is presented as an object of observation is a closed object, a given.

This is not the case in spoken language. A large part of speech means that through a person speaking, something is unfolding which was already in the subconscious regions of the human soul life. Something strikes upward from these subconscious regions and what rises, connects to conscious elements which gradually, like harmonics, move with it in an unconscious or subconscious stream. That which is momentarily present in the consciousness, what is present as we speak, that is only partially the actual object essential for our observation. One can, if one remains within the current speech habits of people, acquire a certain possibility of bringing language as an object into consciousness, also when one is speaking. I would like to present in a modest way an example which could perhaps illustrate this.

During Christmas in Dornach I held a lecture cycle at the Goetheanum regarding pedagogical didactic themes. This lecture cycle came about as a request which resulted in a row of English teachers coming to the lectures which they had asked for. When it became known that this course was going to take place, people from other countries in western and middle Europe, namely Switzerland, also gathered to listen to the lectures. Because this course couldn't contain the 900 visitors in the large auditorium of the Goetheanum, but could only be held in a smaller hall, I was notified to give the lectures twice, one after the other. Already before this I believed that to a certain degree it would be necessary to separate the English speakers from those who belonged to other nationalities—not out of political grounds; I stressed this clearly. The lecture cycle was given throughout also for the English speakers; because when people want to hear something about Anthroposophy, wherever it is presented, I always speak German to them. I thought this was something through which its “Germanic” nature could be documented, whereby the German character and German language can be served.

In one of these lectures I had to discuss ethical and moral education. I tried in the course of the lectures to show how the child can be guided in these steps inwardly in its earthly life, which could bring about a certain ethical and moral attitude in the child.

If I would today again speak in front of individuals who listen in the same way as some had listened yesterday, then one could again construe that I spoke out of direct experience, as it happened yesterday, when I spoke about the Trinity. However, Dr Rittelmeyer responded so clearly with a comparison between the book and the mind, which understandably I didn't wish to do.

In this lecture I want to indicate the ethical, moral education towards which the child needs to be orientated so that it is done in the right way: feelings of gratitude, interest in the world, love for the world and his or her own activity and action; and I would like to show how, through love imbuing their activity and actions they are steered to something which can be called human duty. It would be necessary for this trinity to be taken directly out of life's experience and express them in three words—we're talking about language here. I arrived at the first two steps, Gratitude and Love, then the third step: Duty. Despite having to give the lecture twice, once from 10 to 11 o'clock for the English audience, and a second time from 11 to 12 for other nationalities, the latter with their frame of mind being that of central Europeans, I actually had to do these lectures which should simply have been parallel, in quite a different way for the English than for the Germans because I needed to make an effort to live into the mood of my audience. Something similar applied to the other days but on this day, it was particularly necessary.

Why was this so? Yes, while I spoke about duty during the hour from 11 to 12, my entire audience experienced it through words of the German language; I had spoken in the first hour from 10 to 11 what I had to say about their experience of the “Pflicht”-impulse, which they call “duty.” Now it is quite a different experience when one expresses the word “Pflicht” to the word “duty” and in the 11 to 12 o'clock lecture I had to allow nuances of experience to flow into what happens when one says “Pflicht.” When one says “Pflicht” one touches an impulse through these words which comes out of the emotional life, which flows directly into experience as something—which I want to say verbatim—is related to “pflegen” (to care for). Out of this activity flows the feeling, as to what belongs to this activity. This is the impulse which one designates to the word “Pflicht.” Something quite different lives in the soul when this impulse is designated by the word “duty,” because just as much as the word “Pflicht” points to the feelings, so the word “duty” points to the intellect, to the mind, to what is directed from within, like how thoughts are being conducted when one goes over into activity. One could say “Pflicht” is fulfilled through inner love and devotion, duty is fulfilled from the basis of a human being, when sensing his human dignity, must say to himself: you must obey a law which penetrates you, you must devote yourself to the law which you have grasped intellectually. This is roughly characterised. However, with this I want to bring into expression how inner complexes of experience are quite different between one word and another, and yet despite this the dictionary says the German word “Pflicht” translates to the English word of “duty”. This is however transmitted by the spirit of the folk, in the folk soul and in the speech, you have nuances of the entire folk soul. You are going to see that in the soul of central Europeans, in relation to this, it looks quite different compared with souls of other nationalities; that the soul life is experienced quite differently in speech by central Europeans compared with the English nation.

A person who has no sense for the unconscious depths of soul where speech comes from, which lies deeper than what is experienced consciously, will actually be unable to obtain a sober objectivity for scientific observation of speech. One should be clear about one thing. With nature observation the objects present themselves, or one can clean them up through outer handling in order to have the object outside oneself and thus able to research it. To consider speech it is necessary to first examine the process of consciousness in order to come to what the object essentially is which one wants to examine. So one can, where speech is the subject, not merely consider what lives in human consciousness, but in considering speech one needs to have the entire living person before you who expresses himself in speaking and speech.

This preparation for the scientific speech observation is very rarely done. If such preparation would be undertaken then one would, if one takes linguistic history or comparative linguistics, move towards having a deep need to first contemplate the inner unconscious content of that language, the unconscious substance which in speaking only partly comes to expression.

Now we arrive at something else, namely, during the various stages of human development this degree of consciousness associated with language was quite varied. It was quite different for example during the times in which Sanskrit had its origins; different again during the time the Greek language developed, another time than we had here in Germany—but here nuances became gradually less recognisable—and in another time, it happened for instance in England. There are already great variations in the inner experience of the conduct in the English language when used by an Englishman or American, if I observe only the larger differences. Whoever takes up the study of dialects will enter into how the different dialects in the language is experienced by the people who use it, and take note of all the complicated soul impulses streaming through it which comes into expression as speech in the vocal organism. It is for instance not pointless that when the Greek speakers say “speech” (Sprache) or when they say “reason” (Vernunft), they consider both these words as essentially the same and can condense them into one word, because the experience within the words and the experience within thoughts, within mental images, flow together, undifferentiated, in the Greek application of speech, while in our current epoch differentiations show themselves in this regard. The Greek always felt words themselves rolled around in his mind when he spoke; for him thoughts were the “soul” and words streaming in formed the “body”, the outer garments one could call it, the word-soul streaming in thought. Today we feel, when we clearly bring this process into consciousness, as if on the one side we would say a word—the word streams towards what we express—and on the other side the thoughts swim in the stream of words; it is however soon clearly differentiated from the stream of words.

If we return for instance to Sanskrit then it is necessary to undergo essential psychological processes first, to experience psychic processes, in order to reach the possibility to live inwardly with what at the time of Sanskrit's origin was living in the words. We may not at any stage confront Sanskrit with the same feelings when regarding its expression, when regarding its language, as we would do with a language today.

Let's take for example a familiar word: “manas”. If you now open the dictionary you would find a multitude of words for “manas”: spirit, mind, mindset, sometimes also anger, zeal and so on. Basically, with such a translation one arrives at an experience of a word which once upon a time existed when it was quite clearly and inwardly experienced, not nearly. Within the epoch when Sanskrit lived at the height of its vitality, with a different soul constitution as it has today, it was essentially something different. We must clearly understand that human evolution already existed as a deep transformation of the human soul constitution. I have repetitively characterized this transformation as having taken place somewhere in the 15th Century. There are however ever and again such boundaries of the epochs when going through human evolution, and only when one can follow history as the inner soul life of the people can one discover what really existed and how the life of speech played its part.

It was during such a time when the word “manas” could still be grasped inwardly in a vital way, when something existed which I would like to call the experience of the meaning of sound. In an unbelievable intense way one experienced what lived inwardly in the sounds, which we designate today as m, as a, as n and as s. The life of soul rose to a higher level—still dreamily, yet in a conscious dream—with its inward living within the organism when the vocals and consonants were pronounced. Whoever uses such scientific tools for researching how speech lives within people, will find that everything resembling consonants depends upon people placing themselves into external processes, into things, and that the inner life of things with their own inner, but restrained gestures, want to copy it. Consonants are restrained gestures, gestures not becoming visible but which through their content certainly capture that which can outwardly be experienced in the role of thunder, lightning flashes, in the rolling wind and so on. An inner inclusion of oneself in outer things is available when consonants are experienced.

We actually want to, if I might express myself like this, imitate through gestures all that lives and weaves outside of us; but we restrain our gestures and they transform themselves within us and this transformation appears as consonants.

By contrast, by opposing external nature, mankind has living within itself a number of sympathies and antipathies. These sympathies and antipathies within their most inner existence form gestures out of the collective vowel system, so that the human being, through experiencing speech, lives in such a way that he, within the nature of the consonants, imitate the outer world—but in a transformed way—so that in contrast, through the vowels, he forms his own inner relationship to the outer world.

This is something which can certainly be understood and examined through today's soul life if one enters into the concrete facts of the speech experience. It deals with what is illustrated as imagination, not as some or other fantasy, but that for example the inner process of the speech experience can really be looked at.

Now in ancient times, in which Sanskrit had its original source, there was still something like a dreamlike imagination living within the human soul. Not a clearly delineated mental picture like we have today was part of man, but a life in pictures, in imaginations—certainly not the kind of imaginations we talk about in Anthroposophy today, which are fully conscious with our sharply outlined concepts, but dreamlike instinctive imaginations. Still, these dreamlike imaginations worked as a power. If we go back up to the time we are talking about, one can say these imaginations lived as a vital power in people: they sensed it, like they sensed hunger and thirst, only in a gentler manner. One painted in an internal manner, which is not painting as in today's sense, but in such a way as to experience the inward application of vocalisation, like we apply colour to a surface. Then one lives into the consonants through the vocalization, just as when, by placing one colour beside another, one brings about boundaries and contours. It is an inner re-experience of imaginations, which presents an objective re-living of outer nature. It is the re-living of dreamlike imaginations. One surrenders oneself to these imaginations and inverts the inner processed imaginations through the speech organs into words.

Only in this way does one imagine the inner process of the life of speech in the way it was once experienced in human evolution. If one becomes serious about such an observation, for example through the experience of tones, which we call ‘m’ today, we notice that with the experience of this sound, we stand at once on the boundary between what is consonant and what is vowel. Just like we paint a picture and then the colours, which have their inner boundaries and outer limitations and do not continue over the surface, just so something is expressed in the word “manas”. With ‘a’ something resembling human inwardness is sensed. If one wishes to describe the word “manas” I have to say: In olden times people lived in their dream-like imaginations in the language, just as we experience speech consciously now. We no longer live in relation to speech in dream pictures, but our consciousness lies over speech. Old dreamlike imaginations flowed continuously in the language. So when they said the word “manas” they felt as if in some kind of shell, they felt their physical human body in as far as it is liquid aqueous, like a kind of shell, and the rest of the body as if carried in a kind of air body. All of this was experienced in a dreamlike manner in olden times when the word “manas” was spoken out. People didn't feel like we do today in our soul life, because people felt themselves to be the bearers of the soul life—and the soul itself one experienced as having been born out of the supersensible and super-human forces of the shell.

You must first make this experience lively if you want to understand the content of older words. We must realise that when we experience our “I” today it is quite different from what it was when the word “ego” was for instance come across in humanity in earlier times, when the word “aham” was experienced in the Sanskrit language. We sense our “I” today as something which is completely drawn to a single point, a central point to which our inner being and all our soul forces relate.

This experience does not underlie the older revelations of the I-concept. In these olden times a person felt his own I as something which had to be carried; one didn't feel as if you were within it. One then experienced the I to some extent as a surging of soul life swimming independently. What one felt was not indicated by the linguistic context—what lay in the Sanskrit word “aham” shows it is something around the I, which carries the I . While we feel the I inwardly as will impulses—we really experience it this way today—which permeates our inner being, we say that as its central point it is a spring of warmth, which streams with warmth—to make a comparison—streaming out on all sides, this is how the Greek or even the Latin experienced the I like a sphere of water, with air permeating this sphere completely. It is something quite different to feel yourself living in a sphere of water within extended air, or to experience the inward streaming towards a central point of warmth and to stream out warmth to the periphery of the sphere and then—if I might use this comparison more precisely—to be grasped as a sphere of light.

These are all symbols. Yet the words of a language are in this sense also symbols, and if you deny the ability of words to indicate symbols, you would be totally unable to be impressed by such a consideration. It is necessary in the research of linguistics that one first lives into what actually has to become the object of linguistics. Now, one finds that in ancient times, the language had a considerably different character than what exists in civilisation's current language; further, one finds that the physical, the bodily, played a far greater part in the establishment of phonetics, in the establishment of word configuration. The human being gave much more of his inner life in speech. That is why you have ‘m’ at the start of “manas” because this enclosed the human being, formed a contour around him or her.

When you have Sanskrit terms in front of yourself, you soon notice you can experience the nature of the consonants and vowels within it. You notice how in this activity an inner experience in the external events and external things are present and how this results in the consonants being imitated, so vocal sympathies and antipathies are discovered where the word process and the speech process merge. In ancient times a much more bodily nuance came about. One had a far greater experience in the ancient life of speech. This one can still experience. If today you hear someone speaking in Sanskrit or the language of an oriental civilisation, how it sounds out of their bodily nature, and how speech absorbs the musical characteristics, it is because such an experience rises out of the musical element. Only in a later phase of human evolution the musical elements in speech split away from the logical, thus also away from the soul life, into mere conceptions.

This is still noticeable today. When for instance you compare the inner experience in the German and in the English language, you notice that in the English language the process of abstract-imagery-life have made greater progress. If we want to live in the German language today we must live into those forms of the speech which came about in New High German.¹ The dialects still lets our soul become immersed in a far more intensive and vital experience. The actual spiritual experience of the language is primarily only possible in High German. Thus, a figure such as Hegel who was born out of this spirit, for whom the mental images are particular to him and yet it is also quite connected to a particular element within the language, out of these causes it has come about that Hegel is in reality not translatable into a western language, because here one experiences the literal fluency (Sprachliche) even more directly.

When you go towards the west you notice throughout within the observation how the soul unfolds when it is given over to the use of language: the soul experiences it intensively, however the literal fluency (Sprachliche) is thrown out of the direct soul experience throughout; it flows away in the stream of speech and continuously, to some degree, out of the flowing water something is created like ice floes, like when something more solid is rolling over the waves—as for instance in English. When, by contrast, we speak High German, we can observe how a person in the stream of speech is in any case within the fluidity of it but in which there are not yet any ice blocks which have already fallen out of the literal fluency, which are connected with the soul-spiritual of the human being.

Now when we come towards the east, one finds this process in a stage which is even further back. Now you don't see ice floes which are thrown out of the stream of speech, and which are not firmly connected with it; here also, as not in High German, the entire adequacy of thoughts are experienced with the word but the word is experienced in such a way that a person retains it in his organism, while thoughts in their turn flow into the words, which one runs after but which actually goes before you.

These are the things which one has to live through when one wants to really understand literal fluency. One can't experience this if one doesn't at least to a certain degree take on the contemplation which Goethe developed for the observation of the living plant world and which, when in one's inner life, these are followed with inner consequential exercises, leading towards mental pictures about what is meant in Anthroposophy. Anyway, if you want to look at the language, you must observe it in such a way that you live within the inner metamorphosis of the organising of the language, experience in its inner concreteness, because only then will you have in front of you, what the speech process is. As long as you are unable to rise up to such inner observations of speech, you are only looking at speech in an outer way, and you will be unable to penetrate the actual living object of language. As a result, all kinds of theories of speech have appeared. Ideas about language have in many cases become thought-related regarding the origins of language; a number of theories have resulted from this. Wilhelm Wundt enumerated them in his theory of language and picked them apart critically.

This is the way things are today in many areas and how it was observed yesterday. When the bearers of some scientific angle today raises into full contemplation regarding what he has observed within the science and he represents it thus, then talk starts to develop about “decline”. This is actually not really what Anthroposophy wants to tell you. Basically, for example, yesterday very little was said about decline; but very much not so in the case of those who stand within theology, for they are experiencing a decline.

Similarly, there is also talk regarding the philosophy of language, of declining theories, for instance with the “theory of creative synthesis/invention” (Erfindungstheorie). Wundt lists his different theories. Following on the theory of invention the language developed in such a way that humanity, to some extent, fixed the designations of things; however, this is no longer appropriate for current humanity because today the question they ask is how could the dumb have fixed forms of language while still so primitive?

As his second, Wundt presents his “theory of wonder” (Wundertheorie) which assumes that at a certain stage of evolution human speech/language arrived as a gift from the Creator. Dr Geyer already dealt with this yesterday; currently it is no longer valid for a decent scientist to believe in wonder; it is prohibited, and so the theory of wonder is no longer acceptable. Further down his list is the “theory of imitation” (Nachahmungstheorie) which already contains elements which have a partial authorisation because it is based on elements of consonants in speech being far more on an inner process than what is usually imagined. Then the “natural sound theory” (Naturlauttheorie) followed which claimed that out of inner experience the human being aspired towards phonetically relating what he perceived out in nature, into the form of speech, according to his sympathies or antipathies. These theories could be defined differently. Today it is quite possible to show that on the basis of those who criticise these theories, it becomes apparent that these theories can't determine the actual object of language.

Dear friends, the thing is actually like this: Anthroposophy—even when people say they don't need to wait for her—can still show in a certain relationship, what can be useful in this case, through which—even in such areas as linguistics—firstly the sober, pure object is to be found, on which the observation can be based.

Obviously anything possible can be discussed, also regarding language, even when one actually doesn't approach it as a really pure object. Anthroposophy bears within it a profound scientific character which assumes that first of all one must be clear what kind of reality there is to be found in specific areas, in order for the relationships we have regarding truth and wisdom to penetrate these areas, so that these areas of reality can actually become inward experiences. As we saw happening here yesterday, then in relation to such earnest work which is not more easily phrased in other sciences, it is said that these Anthroposophists stick their noses into everything possible, then it must be answered: Certainly it is apparent that Anthroposophy in the course of its evolution must stick its nose into everything. When this remark doesn't remain in superficiality, this ‘Anthroposophy sticks her nose into everything possible’—but if one wants to make progress to really behold and earnestly study the results, when it comes down to Anthroposophy sticking its nose into everything, only then, when this second stage in the relationships to Anthroposophy is accomplished, will it show how fruitful Anthroposophy is and in how far its legitimacy goes against the condemnation that it merely originates from superficial observation!

• 1. Hochdeutch or High German is the pure German language without the influence of dialects, which is also understood by most Germans. New High German differs from Old High German as the latter refers to more historic times. Schriftliche Deutch is the German most widely used in school instruction, standardization, etc.—translator

In recent weeks we have been considering the human being from all kinds of different points of view, with the aim of getting a better idea of complex human nature and the relationship of the human being to the world.

Let us begin by recalling something very simple, something we know about the elemental aspects: the fact that in the present world cycle, the human being has four effective aspects—physical body, ether body, astral body and I. Let us also consider how these four essentially manifest. We have to say that the I mainly comes to revelation in all expressions of the human will. When we sleep, the will is essentially at rest. In other words: the will principle does not then come to expression through the physical organization. The I is outside the physical body when we sleep. The fact that the will principle does not come to expression reveals to us that the I is then not present in the physical body.

The activity of the astral body essentially can be observed in the whole sphere of feelings. The astral body is also outside the human being in sleep, when the sphere of feelings moves to the dim, dark part of the conscious mind. Consciousness is altogether silent in sleep, and we may thus be in some doubt as to what really comes to revelation through the physical body and the ether body. Let us leave this aside for the moment. The physical body is the most obvious part of the human being. Even someone not able to have imaginative vision can perceive the reality of the ether body in a number of ways. For the moment, however, let us leave aside the physical and the etheric from the point of view we have just taken of the I as the will aspect and the astral as the feeling aspect.

If we follow a person’s life from morning to evening, in the waking state, the I and astral body are at work in the physical and ether bodies with regard to will and feelings. Taking all the inner experiences arising in the waking state, we have first of all the world of sensory perceptions, which are bound to the physical body. We also have the world of thoughts and ideas as the consequence of sensory perception. We know very well that our world of ideas in the waking state has elements of will and feeling in it.

We have often stressed that in the sphere of the soul it is easy to make the abstract distinction between ideas, feelings and will elements. But in reality these three inner activities blend into each other. We can sense the will element in the linking or separating of ideas. We can also perceive that the idea is imbued with feeling. We can feel ourselves in sympathy with one idea and perhaps in antipathy with another. Let us now turn to the I and the astral body as they leave the living body on going to sleep. They leave something behind in the physical world which, while it does not appear at first sight to be the same as plant life, essentially is nevertheless like it, for it has a physical and an ether body just like a plant. In our astral principle we have something which comes to outward revelation in the animal world, and in our I we have something which emerges in the specifically human form, thus also coming to outward revelation. Since, however, I and astral body are outside the physical and ether bodies from when we go to sleep until we wake up again, we cannot say that this human form or animal nature is part of the inner nature of I and astral body. We have to realize that I and astral body do not come to revelation in that case; when I and astral body are on their own, during sleep, they cannot reveal themselves to the physical world in a way perceptible to the senses or to the rational mind.

I and astral body are therefore entirely beyond sensory perception. Now we also know that when we look at something in the plant world, we are not at all inclined to see it the way we see a human being. Looking at a human being we are interested in the moral element, for instance, whether the individual is good or bad. This means that there is no point in thinking in terms of good or evil with reference to the physical and ether body, the principles which remain in the physical world when we have gone to sleep. The whole human moral element is brought back when we wake up and I and astral body return to the physical and ether bodies.

Even people who do not have higher vision may take this as a sign that I and astral body have to do with what we call “the moral world order”. Our physical and ether bodies soak this up, as it were, as we wake up. And it is in no way absurd for those who do not have higher vision to say: Essentially, I and astral body belong to a completely different world, for the physical and ether bodies are neutral when it comes to being good or evil, just as plants are. I and astral body take moral responsibility into them.

Even those who do not achieve higher vision through the science of the spirit which takes its orientation from anthroposophy, but whose thinking relates to everyday life, will be able to realize that we are dealing with polar opposites here: physical body and ether body inclined to nature-given form, and I and astral body inclined to moral form. To take this further, however, we will need to draw on observations made through higher vision. When we use this to study the I and the astral body in the world to which they belong between going to sleep and waking up, they are seen to have the world of the spirit as their environment just as the natural world is the environment of the physical body. I and astral body bring the inner mortality to human beings from the world of the spirit. As the physical and ether bodies are morally neutral, they cannot possibly draw on them for moral impulses. They do in truth gain the moral impulses from the world in which they are between going to sleep and waking up.

In the science of the spirit, the following is said with regard to this: When human beings leave their physical and ether bodies on going to sleep, they meet, without being aware of it, the spiritual entities of the world, presenting to them all the inner morality they developed when conscious in their physical and ether bodies. They are compelled to let the world of soul and spirit work on the moral elements they have brought. This brings us to a different aspect of something we have often considered in our efforts to build a bridge between etheric and physical worlds on one hand and moral and spiritual worlds on the other.

The I has will quality. It develops its whole structure and constitution between waking up and falling asleep in the physical and ether bodies. When we go to sleep, the I meets the entities of the spiritual world. Here, as people walking around in the physical world, we perceive solid bodies with our organs of touch; we see colours, we use sensory perception. We relate to the physical forces of the world in a specific way The I also enters into a specific relationship to the powers of the world where it lives between going to sleep and waking up. Let me present this in graphic form It can only be schematic, of course. Let us say this is the physical man being in the process of going to sleep (Fig. 40, yellow).

This, which I am drawing here, is the ether body which fills the human being. If I were to draw the human being in the waking state, I’d have to draw in the astral body and the I. I am not going to do so, because I want to characterize the condition of going to sleep. The will element, that is, the I, meets the entities of the spiritual world.

It relates to them in the way we relate to physical entities with our physical body when awake. The relationship between the will-related I and the entities of the spiritual world is, however, much more real than the maya-like relationship which the physical body has with its environment. The relationship in sleep comes to expression above all in the following way, more or less, I can only put these things into images for you): When the I is in touch with the powers of the spiritual entities between going to sleep and waking up, everything evil in our state of soul makes the I waste away; everything good allows the will-related I to develop in freedom.

Showing this in graphic form we arrive at a specific form of the spiritual, will-related I form as it leaves the body (remember, these are only images). With regard to the human being of limbs, the I is quite intensely inside the human being even during sleep. Let me show it like this: These furrowed lines (light-coloured) have evolved from counter activities of the spiritual entities, their form depending entirely on the moral constitution. We may indeed say that the 1 assumes a spiritual form based on its moral constitution as it enters the world of the spirit.

When we go to sleep, the astral body also goes into the world outside us which is a world of soul quality. The will-related I meets the entities of the spiritual world, the feeling-related astral body enters into the soul sphere outside us.

The constitution of our will, with reference to good and evil, also has elements, or powers, of feeling in it. We merely have to recall the different feeling mood we have after doing a good deed compared to after doing something bad. 1 need only mention the whole sphere of self-reproach and inner satisfaction and you can see how our moral constitution is imbued with feeling. The feeling element as a whole enters the soul sphere when we fall asleep, and this enters into a relationship with the soul world outside. When we are awake we relate to the physical world around us through our ideas and in doing so develop the inner life of feelings—though the life of feeling merely connects with the life of ideas inside us. When we are asleep, our feeling-related astral principle makes direct contact with the astral world.

It is not given form, however. The will-related I is given form (I have shown this by drawing furrowed lines). Interaction between the astral body and the soul environment results in something I cannot draw as furrowing. I have to call it colouring, imbuing the astral body. To draw it I would, according to whether we are full of self-reproach or inner satisfaction, feelings of sympathy and antipathy, show the astral coloured by something with schematically may be shown as a particular colour (Fig. 41, reddish, blue).

Through the I, therefore, our higher nature is given form, and the astral is coloured through and through. This is of course a schematic way of putting it. It is perfectly justifiable to express these processes in colour images, but it has to be said that only part of the process can be expressed in this way. Instead of colouring the image I might just as well have all kinds of musical instruments at hand, for instance, and give expression to the above in combinations of sounds. One might even bring in qualities of taste. All this whirls and swirls together in the astral body when it is outside the physical body between going to sleep and waking up.

The situation is such, however, that the direction of the effective powers which bring about everything I have drawn, really derive, seen in schematic form, from the human being of limbs and metabolism. The spiritual entities and the soul world giving form and colour are working from below upwards, as it were.

If we try to discover the true nature of that which is given form and colour outside the human being between going to sleep and waking up, we finally arrive at the following. Between waking up and going to sleep the human form is complete, with I, astral body, ether body and physical body forming an interrelated whole. This goes hand in hand with a specific intensity of conscious awareness which is intellectual and has qualities of feeling and will. Compared to it, the element which is outside during sleep has an infantile quality. We think of a child’s dimmed-down state of consciousness, something we can only come close to when our consciousness is filled with dreams. Now imagine the child’s dimmed-down consciousness becoming even less developed—this would be closer to the nature of what is outside us during sleep. We might say: The element which is outside the human being during sleep is more infantile than the mind and spirit of a child.

What is the real nature of the element of human soul and spirit which lives outside during sleep? In the light of spiritual science, the determining factor is characteristically seen to come from the human being of limbs and metabolism. Studying what can be observed through higher vision one has the feeling—which gradually grows into the definite realization—that by taking this whole aspect here to be a photographic negative and visualizing the positive, we actually get the structure of the human brain. The scale is not the same, but if you see it as a negative and visualize the positive you get the human brain.

Think back to the various aspects I have presented. I have said that the structure of the human head in one particular life inwardly, in the structure of its powers, represents the individual from the previous life on earth, minus the head. What you are today contains the powers your head will have in your next life on earth. We see the same thing in what a human being puts into the outside world between going to sleep and waking up, except that it is infantile, childlike in form and, of course, converted into a negative.

Between going to sleep and waking up human beings in fact put an image into the world of what will incarnate into a physical form in their next life on earth. This is extraordinarily significant. If we now recall that it is the moral constitution of the soul which determines this form and coloration (Fig. 41), we must consider the powers inherent in the human head in the next life on earth to be the embodiment of the moral constitution of the soul in the present life. Since the powers of the human being come to expression in our ability to think and form ideas, this ability will therefore be the outcome of our moral constitution of soul in the present life. All of this exists as an image in what human beings put into the outside world on going to sleep.

In the light of the science of the spirit it would thus be fair to say: During the night, when we are asleep, we put a quite specific question to another world, the world of the spirit. We do not do this consciously but with a part of us that moves out of the physical and ether bodies at that time. The question we put is: How does my moral constitution of soul appear to the entities in the world of the spirit?

And we are given an answer which consists in the shaping of the furrows and the colouring we are given, both in accord with our moral constitution of soul. Every morning we enter into our physical and etheric bodies on waking up with an answer gained in the world of soul and spirit. Going to sleep, we always unconsciously ask a question; waking up, the answer is given at the unconscious level from the world of the spirit. At that level, we are all the time in dialogue with the world of the spirit, gathering there the answers which tell us the true state of our inner nature.

This allows you to see something which otherwise is always extraordinarily abstract. You see, when we speak of our conscience, this is something very real to us; yet when we are asked to speak of the specific nature of our conscience we immediately become rather vague. With reference to our moral impulses, conscience is something of which we have a real inner experience. Yet if we use the methods of ordinary science to reflect on conscience, we fall into chaos and are unable to arrive at anything definite. Here you are given something definite, which is, that your moral constitution of soul wins a continuous response from the world of the spirit. You bring the forms developed by the world of the spirit into your physical and etheric reality, and with this you bring the voice of conscience to it. In waking life, the answer given in form and colour is transformed into the voice of conscience. In fact we depend on the sleep state for everything we have by way of inner moral attitude.

Many examples have been given of the greater wisdom inherent in the instinctive perception of earlier times and the instinctive perception, which are not intellectual; it is greater than our modern science, though it takes the form of images. The moral principles of instinctive perception contain much of what comes back to us again through the true science of the spirit, though it is now clearer, more transparent and defined. One of the principles which is part of popular belief is that if someone has offended you, do not take your inner reaction to this through sleep but if at all possible settle the matter before you go to sleep. Do not take your anger through sleep, therefore, but try to calm it before you go to sleep.

When you know that going to sleep means you are putting a question to the world of the spirit and that waking up is the answer to your question, you will be able to say to yourself: The answer you receive from the world of the spirit and take into your physical body as you wake up will be different if you moderated your anger the night before, or reduced the offence you felt, than if you take the feelings of offence into sleep and put your question out of injured feelings or in such anger that the fire of your anger fills the whole question. If you take an angry mood into the world of the spirit it is as if a stream of volcanic fire were to pour into that world. The soul world outside then has to colour this stream of volcanic fire (Fig. 41, reddish). This is very different from the situation where you have let your anger go down before going to sleep.

The effects of much of what I have said here can be seen not only in the human heart and mind but also in the way physical life and the life of the internal organs, is tuned. The causes of many diseases lie in the questions we receive to the answers we unconsciously put to the spiritual world as we go to sleep. In the waking state, our physical and etheric organs have to deal fully with everything the will-related I and the feeling-related astral body bring with them from the world of the spirit as we wake up.

It is quite wrong to think we have lots of experiences when awake but none in our sleep. When awake we experience processes that mostly take place between ourselves and the physical outside world. Satisfaction feit about these processes accompanies our clear perception of our relationship to the world rather like an inner dream in heart and mind—you will remember that the feeling element only has dream-level intensity of consciousness. When we are between going to sleep and waking up, however, considerable inner activity goes an in the I and astral body: The will-related I is given form, the feeling-imbued astral body is imbued with the powers of the outside world of soul and spirit. These real, factual processes penetrate and stream through the physical and ether bodies, and the way we behave in the physical world is determined by this. We do more for our inner life during sleep than we do in our waking hours. 011 the other hand, what we do when asleep depends an those waking hours. I'd say that the whole significance of sleep essentially lies not only in physical experience but in the moral structure of our inner nature.

I have shown on a number of occasions that superficial ideas about the way in which the human physical and ether bodies relate to the process of going to sleep are wrong. It is usually said that human beings grow tired because they use their limbs, because they work, and they need to sleep to make up for this. Merely to remember that we do not always go to sleep because we are tired will put us on the right track. Think of the well-rested retired gentleman who may go to a lecture, for instance, because it is the done thing; he’ll usually be fast asleep after the first five minutes, which is hardly due to his being tired.

Considering the superficial experiences to be gained in this field, we come to realize that people generally confuse cause and effect in this instance. We are in fact tired because we want to go to sleep. The impulse to go to sleep is a much more inward one than the physical tiredness which is its counterpart. When the outside world offers nothing of interest, the longing arises to withdraw from it. Soul and spirit then leave the living physical body, which grows tired. We grow tired because we want to go to sleep, not the other way round. Anyone can see this, if they have the will to do so. It is of course extraordinarily difficult to accept the truth of things that are so closely bound up with people’s self-satisfied life interest. But if we are prepared to accept truth, we will reach the point where we do not merely see going to sleep as a physical and physiological process, but consider it in relation to the whole cosmos which, as I have shown from many different points of view, also contains the moral impulses as real impulses, not just mere words. The alternation between sleeping and waking thus shows us how a bridge can be built between the physical and the moral elements in our world order.

Du Bois-Reymond,⁴⁰ the physiologist who gave that famous lecture on the limits of natural science, once said: “It is utterly beyond us to grasp the human being as he is in waking life.” Well, we know what to think of such a statement. Du Bois-Reymond believes, however, that it is possible for us to grasp the sleeping human being. According to him, the laws and relationship of the physical world outside, which we are able to grasp, also pertain to the sleeping human being, only in a more complex fashion. We know this to be incorrect, but let us merely consider the statement, which is, that we can have scientific understanding of the sleeping human being, but not of the waking human being.

So here a scientist is admitting that we cannot use the tools of science to discover what pervades the whole human being in the waking sate, and that the sleeping individual as a physical entity looks very different from an individual who is awake even in the eyes of scientists.

Scientists know nothing, of course, of the will-related I and feeling-related astral body which leave the human being for the non-physical world. But this “nothing”, what is it in the light of our present study? It is something which belongs to the moral world order. The activity of the moral principle is a real world which begins at the very point where people taking the scientific approach cease their observations. After waking up, the real effects of the moral principle show themselves only in the inner constitution of the human being. To enter into the sphere where moral reality is to be found we must therefore consider the world in which human beings live between waking up and going to sleep. It is not surprising, therefore, that people who take the scientific view and do not enter into this world only know a real world which does not contain the moral impulses and therefore relegate moral impulses to the realm of pure belief.

Such belief, however, becomes insight as real as that achieved by the followers of the scientific approach once we turn our attention to the other sphere. Our discussion will, of course, have to be based on completely different premises if we want to consider this sphere of spirit and soul imbued with moral principles.

If my drawing represented something from the physical world, I would have to base myself on the physical. My drawing would be an image of this, and we would progress from external reality to something which is merely image. We have to take the opposite route if we want to represent the non-physical. We have to experience it inwardly and then go outside and represent inward experience in an image. This kind of inward experience is extremely mobile and I should really show this colouring as glittering and gleaming, shifting and changing, growing luminous and fading away again, which is exactly what the spiritual scientist observes when considering the human being as a whole.

If one gains a vision of the astral body and I during sleep—I am trying to be extremely accurate here—the form given to the I and the colouring given to the astral body is bright and distinct. When I and astral body return to the physical and ether bodies, this bright, glittering and gleaming principle grows dark and dull. Outside the body the I aspect has definite contours; inside the body it grows indefinite. You get quite a specific feeling when you watch the I and astral body becoming submerged in the physical and ether bodies on waking. To use abstract words to describe this, means expressing oneself rather clumsily as a rule. It is however possible to define it relatively clearly. Observing the process you have a feeling which is rather like being aware of the coming of autumn and winter and letting this influence your soul. To consider the waking-up process in terms of the whole human being is to enter into a mood like that experienced with the coming of winter. Going to sleep, with the spirit and soul principles going outside the human being, you experience an inner mood similar to the one experienced with the coming of spring and summer. It is indeed the case that you enter into something very special here.

Dear friends, for several weeks I have tried to show how by taking the approach of spiritual science we come to see the human in relationship to the whole cosmos. I have shown you the human form in its relationship to the world of the fixed stars, and the levels of human life in relation to the world of the planets. Considering the human being in the light of spiritual science, we are always taken outside the human being. Today we have considered the alternating states of waking and sleeping; entering into them with inner feeling, we are again taken outside the human being, this time not into the world of the stars but into the world of time. So we said to ourselves: We understand the waking-up process if we understand the coming of autumn and winter; we understand the process of going to sleep if we understand the coming of spring and summer. From the progress of time in the human being we are taken into the progress of time in the cosmos, into the changing seasons. The human being is seen to be an image also of what happens in time. In the preceding weeks we endeavoured to see the human being as an image of the macrocosm more in terms of space.

We thus relate the human being to the world, and understand him in terms of the world. And then the moral world order also becomes reality for us and not a world of empty words. If we enter into everything we are able to feel in considering our relationship to the world, religious impulses enter into our ethical and moral world. The ethical will then comes to express the divine will which reigns in the human being, and the ethical and moral sphere is lifted up into the ethical and religious sphere. This is how anthroposophy as science of the spirit seeks to find the way to the ethical and religious. We shall continue with this tomorrow.

• 40. Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), German physiologist born in Berlin of French parentage, professor of physics at Berlin. The lecture referred to was published in Leipzig in 1916.

Yesterday I was speaking to you of how man is subject to what natural science generally calls heredity, and also of how he is subject to the influences of the external world and adaptation to it. I also said that everything relating to heredity is connected with the Ahrimanic forces, and adaptation, in the widest sense, with the Luciferic forces. But I also told you how in the realm of the spiritual Beings belonging to the Cosmos, provision has been made to enable the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces to play a lawful part in human life. Something shall now be added to what has been said, recalling the content of the lecture given the day before yesterday.

We turned our minds then to how memory and everything akin to it give man his configuration as a being of soul. To a far greater extent than we imagine our configuration as beings of soul originates from our memories. Our soul has been shaped by the process whereby our experiences have become memories; we are the product of our life of memories to a greater extent than we think. Anyone who is capable of exercising even enough self-observation to enable him to penetrate into the store of memories, will realise how particularly important a part is played throughout earthly life by the impressions of childhood. The kind of life we spent in childhood—which really does not loom large in our consciousness—the period during which we learned to speak or walk, or got our first, inherited, teeth, the impressions made on us during these periods of development—all these play an important part in the fife of soul throughout our existence on Earth. All freely arising thoughts in which impressions from outside have played no part are connected with memories and are usually accompanied by faint nuances of joy or sadness—all this constitutes our memory and is carried with it by the astral body when we pass into the state of sleep. If with Imaginative vision we are able to observe man as a being of soul-and-spirit during sleep, the following picture presents itself. During sleep the etheric body and the physical body are still enclosed within the skin and the astral body is outside—I will speak of the Ego later on. This astral body is seen virtually to consist of the man’s memories. But these memories in the astral body now outside the physical body are seen to be swirling in and through one another in a kind of eddy. Experiences that were widely separated in time and space are now in juxtaposition; parts of the content of certain experiences are eliminated, so that the whole life of memory during sleep is transformed. Hence when a person dreams it is this transformed life of memory that is presented to his consciousness. And in the character and make-up of the dream he can be inwardly aware of the swirling eddy of memories which Imaginative clairvoyance can perceive from outside.

But there is another aspect as well. These memories, which from the time of going to sleep until waking form the main content of man’s astral life, unite during sleep with the forces behind the phenomena of Nature. It may therefore be said that the astral element in the memories enters into a connection with the forces which lie behind, or rather lie within, the minerals, within the plants, behind the clouds, and so on.

Those who can recognise this to be truth will be horrified to hear it said that material atoms are behind the phenomena of Nature. The fact is that our memories during sleep do not unite with material atoms but with the spiritual forces behind the phenomena of Nature. This is where our memories reside during sleep. We can therefore say with truth that during sleep our soul dips down with its memories into the inner being of Nature, and we say nothing untrue or unreal when we assert; When I go to sleep I give over my memories to the Powers that are spiritually active in the crystal, in the plants, in all the phenomena of Nature.

During a walk you may see by the wayside blue or yellow flowers, green grass, gleaming ears of corn, and say to them: When I pass by you during the day I see you only from outside. But while I sleep, I shall sink my memories into your own spiritual core of being. While I sleep you receive and harbour the memories into which I have transformed the experiences I had in life.—There is perhaps no more beautiful feeling for Nature than to have to a rose-tree not merely an external relation but to realise that you love it because a rose-tree harbours the first memories of childhood. Space plays no part at all. However far away the rose-tree may be, during sleep we find the way to it. The reason why people love roses—only they do not know it—is that roses receive and harbour the very first memories of childhood.

When we were children, the love shown us by other human beings made us happy. We may have forgotten all about it, but it remains within our soul, and during our sleep at night the rose-tree receives into and harbours within itself the memory we have ourselves forgotten. We are more closely united than we realise with the world of outer Nature, that is to say with the spirit reigning there. Memory of our earliest childhood is particularly remarkable in connection with sleep because up to the time of the change of teeth, up to about the seventh year, it is only the element of soul that is received and harboured during sleep. It is a fact in our life as human beings that the inner, spiritual core of Nature harbours the element of soul belonging to our childhood. There is, of course, another aspect: the element of soul we developed in childhood when, for example, we may have been cruel, that too remains in us; the thistles harbour it! All this is said by way of analogy but it points to a significant reality. The following will make it clear what it is that is not taken from childhood into the innermost core of Nature.

In the first seven years of life the child’s whole bodily make-up is inherited, including, therefore, the first teeth; all the material substance we have within us during this period is, in essence, inherited. But after approximately seven years all the material substance has been thrust out, has fallen away and is renewed. The human being himself remains as a spirit-form. His material components are thrown out and after seven or eight years everything that was previously there, has gone. And so when we have reached the age of nine our whole bodily make-up has been renewed. We then shape it in accordance with external impressions.

It is very important indeed that in the early epochs of life the child should be in a position to build his new body—not the inherited body, but the one developed from within himself—in accordance with good impressions from the environment and by a healthy process of adaptation. Whereas the body the child has when he comes into the world depends upon whether the forces of heredity are good or not so good, the later body he bears is very dependent indeed upon the impressions he receives from his environment. Invariably, however, after seven years the body is renewed.

Now it is the ‘I’, the Ego, that is responsible for this. Although it is true the Ego is not yet born in the seven-yearold child as far as the external world is concerned—for it is born at a later age—nevertheless it is at work, since it is naturally connected with the body and is responsible for its formation. It is the Ego that is responsible for the development of what then appears as physiognomy and gesture, as the outer, material manifestation of man’s soul-and-spirit. It is a fact that someone who takes an active share in affairs of the world, who has wide interests and assimilates their substance and content will reveal this in his gestures and his very facial expression. In the later life of such a man, every wrinkle on his face will be indicative of his inner activity and it will be possible to read a great deal here, because the Ego comes to expression in a man’s gestures and physiognomy. The countenance of someone whose attitude to the world is one of boredom and lack of interest will retain the same facial expression all through life. There have been no intimate experiences which might have imprinted themselves in his physiognomy and gestures. In many a countenance you can read a whole biography; in another there is not much more to read than that the individual was once a child—and that is of little account.

It is extremely significant that through the change of bodily substance after every seven or eight years, a man shapes his own outer appearance. And the result of this work on his outward appearance as revealed in physiognomy and gesture, is again something that is carried, while he sleeps, into the innermost being of Nature.

If, then, you look at a man with Imaginative clairvoyance, and observe the Ego as it appears while he is asleep, you will find that the Ego is fully expressed by physiognomy and gesture. Hence those human beings who are able to convey a great deal of their inner nature to their facial expression or to their gestures, have gleaming, radiant Egos. This activity in the shaping of gestures and physiognomy again unites with certain forces in Nature. If we had many opportunities in life of showing friendliness and kindness, Nature is inclined, as soon as this kindliness has been expressed in the countenance, to receive it into her own essential being. Nature takes our memories into her forces, our gestures into her very being. Man is so intimately connected with external Nature that there is immense significance for the latter in the memories he experiences in his soul and also in the way in which he expresses his inner life of soul in physiognomy and gesture.

As you know, I have often quoted words of Goethe which were really a criticism of a saying by Haller: ‘Into the inner being of Nature no created Spirit can enter. Happy he to whom she reveals only her outer shell.’ Goethe retorted: ‘O you Philistine! We are everywhere within her being: nothing is within, nothing without; what is within is without, what is without is within. Ask yourself first of all whether you are kernel or husk.’ Goethe said he had heard the remark in the sixties and had secretly cursed it. He felt—naturally he could not then know anything of Spiritual Science—that if a man whom he could only regard as a philistine, says: ‘Into the inner being of Nature no created Spirit can enter,’ he knows nothing of the fact that man, simply because he is a being of memories, a being of physiognomy and gestures, continually penetrates into the inmost essence of Nature. We are not creatures who stand at the door of Nature and knock in vain. Through our own core of being we are connected by intimate ties with the inmost essence of Nature. But because the child until his seventh year has a body that is wholly inherited, nothing of his Ego, nothing of his physiognomy and gestures, pass over into Nature. It is only at the time of the change of teeth that we begin to approach these realities. Hence it is only then—after the change of teeth— that we are mature enough gradually to begin to reflect about any phenomenon of Nature. Until that time it is only arbitrary thoughts that arise in a child, thoughts which really have not very much to do with Nature, and for that very reason are so full of charm. The best way to make contact with a child is to be poetical when we are talking to him, calling the stars the eyes of heaven and so on, when the things of which we speak are as remote as possible from the outer physical reality.

It is only after the change of teeth that the child gradually ‘grows into’ Nature in such a way that his thoughts can gradually comprehend thoughts of Nature. Fundamentally speaking, the child’s life from the seventh to the fourteenth year is a period during which he ‘grows into Nature’. During this period, in addition to his memories he also carries into the realm of Nature his gestures and physiognomy. And this then continues through the whole of life. It is not until the change of teeth that we have any relationship with the inner core of Nature as single human individuals.

For this reason the beings I have called Elementals— Gnomes and Undines—listen so eagerly when a man narrates something about childhood as it was before the age of seven. It is only at the time of the change of teeth that a man is really born as far as these elemental beings are concerned. This is an extremely interesting fact. Before that time man is to the Gnomes and Undines a being ‘on the other side’; it is for them something of an enigma that man should appear at this age almost as a completed being. It would be immensely stimulating for pedagogical imagination if, through imbibing spiritual knowledge, an individual could really participate in a dialogue with the Nature Spirits, if he could transport himself into the soul of the Nature Spirits in order to ascertain their views about what he can tell them about children. In this way the most beautiful fairy-tale imagination takes shape. And if in olden times fairy-tales were so wonderfully vivid and rich in content it was because the narrators could actually converse with Gnomes and Undines and not merely hear something from them. These Nature Spirits are sometimes very egoistic. They become silent if they are not told things about which they are curious. Their favourite stories are those which tell about the doings of babies. Then one learns from them many things that can create the atmosphere of a fairy story. What seems utterly fantastic to people today can be very important for the practical application of spiritual life. It is an actual fact that because of the circumstances of which I have told you, these dialogues with the Nature Spirits may be extremely instructive for both sides.

On the other hand, what I have said may give rise to a certain anxiety, for during sleep man is continually creating pictures of his inmost being. Behind the phenomena of Nature, behind the flowers of the field, and extending into the etheric world, there are reproductions of our memories, good and futile alike. The Earth teems with what is contained in human souls. Human life is intimately connected with these things.

First of all, then, we encounter Nature Spirits as beings into whom we can penetrate through our gestures. But we also find the world of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. We penetrate into those Beings too. Our memories carry us into the activities of the world of the Angeloi; our physiognomy and gestures—for which we ourselves are responsible—carry us into the Beings themselves of that world. This following sketch will give some indication of what happens when, during sleep, we penetrate into Nature. Let this (lowest) curve represent our skin; as we move outwards in the radial direction, we pass from the regions of the Angeloi into those of the Archangeloi and Archai. We are now in the sphere of the Third Hierarchy. And when, during sleep, we sink down with our memories and gestures into the flowing sea of Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, weaving and intertwining, then from one side there comes another stream of spiritual Beings. This is the Second Hierarchy: Exousiai, Kyriotetes and Dynamis. If we want to find something in the physical world to which this can be related, we can say that the daily course of the Sun from East to West expresses how the Second Hierarchy crosses the realm of the Third Hierarchy. The Third Hierarchy, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, glide upwards and downwards, handing to each other the ‘golden vessels’. According to this picture we think of the Second Hierarchy following the path taken by the Sun from East to West—not the apparent but the actual daily path of the Sun, for the Copernican theory does not hold good here. Provided a man has the necessary vision, he sees how during sleep he passes into the world of the Third Hierarchy. But this world of the Third Hierarchy is permeated ceaselessly by the Second Hierarchy. The Second Hierarchy also makes its influence felt in our life of soul.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

In the lecture the day before yesterday I pointed out to you the significance of vividly re-living experiences of youth. You may be deeply impressed if you turn again to the Mystery Plays and now, perhaps with greater understanding than before, read the passages about the appearance of the Spirit of Johannes’ Youth.¹ It is an indubitable fact that a man’s own inner being can become vividly perceptible to him if with an active effort of will he relives his younger days. I told you that you may, for instance, pick up old school textbooks and steep yourself in what you either learnt or failed to learn from them. It does not matter whether you learnt anything or not; what matters is that you should re-live what happened at the time. In my own case it was vitally important for me a year or two ago, when I needed to strengthen my powers of spiritual understanding, to re-live a situation of my youth. I was eleven years old at the time and had just been given a new school-book. The first thing that happened was that through carelessness, the ink pot upset and blotted two pages of the book so badly that they were illegible. A few years ago I relived the event many times—the textbook with the ruined pages and what I had to suffer in consequence. For the book had to be replaced by a family with very little money. One suffered dreadfully on account of this book with its enormous inkblot! As I said, it is not a matter of having behaved well in circumstances recalled in later years but of experiencing them with real intensity. If you recall such happenings as vividly as you possibly can, you will experience something else as well. More clearly than in a dream, in actual perception, you will experience a situation while you rest in bed, shut off from the day’s impressions. If during the day you have vividly recalled a scene once inwardly experienced, when everything around you is dark and you are all by yourself at night you will see, as though displayed in space, a scene in which you once participated. Suppose you have recalled a scene at which you were once present, let us say at eleven o’clock. Afterwards you went somewhere else and found yourself sitting among a number of people. You have now summoned up something you experienced inwardly. What was around you outwardly at that time was entirely a spatial spectacle. If attention is paid to circumstances such as this, very significant discoveries can be made. Let us suppose that as a youngster of seventeen, you were accustomed to have your midday meal at a Pension where the guests were continually changing. Now you recall some such scene which you had inwardly experienced; you recall it vividly. Then, in the night, you have this experience: you are sitting at a table with other people whom you saw only seldom because the guests in a Pension were perpetually changing. The face of one of these people makes you realise: that is something I actually lived through all those years ago. The external spatial element is added to the inner soul-experience when you activate memories in this way.

This means that you are actually living in the stream which flows from East to West (see diagram). More and more the feeling grows in you that you are not wholly absorbed by the spiritual world into which you pass in sleep, but that in this spiritual world something is happening that is reflected outwardly in the moment when again you see the people sitting around the table in the Pension. You had forgotten about the episode long ago but it is still there. You see it as things can often be seen inscribed in the Akasha Chronicle. The moment you have this before you, you have made contact with the stream that flows from East to West: the stream of the Second Hierarchy. In this stream of the Second Hierarchy there is contained something that is reflected outwardly as the day.

Now the day varies in length throughout the year. In spring it gets longer, in autumn, shorter; it is longest in summer, shortest in winter. During the course of the year the day undergoes metamorphosis. This is caused by a stream running from West to East, countering the East-West stream (diagram). It is the stream of the First Hierarchy, of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Hence if you follow how the day changes in the course of the year, if you pass from the day to the year, you come into contact with the stream which flows in the opposite direction and meets you in sleep.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

It is really the case that in sleep we grow into the spiritual world, radially from West to East and from East to West. And when we recall some experience vividly the picture before our souls must be of Winter in the world of space.

And it is the same when we become conscious of our will. It is the effect of this that passes into the gestures and physiognomy. What I am now going to say will have a certain significance for Eurythmists, although naturally it is not the purpose of Eurythmy to vindicate what I am saying. It is a fact that when a man becomes increasingly able to shape his external form too from within himself, so that his Ego is expressed with greater and greater definition in his physiognomy and gestures, he does not receive an impression only of the day. An impression of the day results from passing over from a vivid, inner experience of memory to a perception of things in the external world of space. To take the example already given. Suppose you re-experience what happened to you at the age of seventeen, and see the human beings who sat at table with you in the Pension, in pictures, as in the Akasha Chronicle—that is the Day-experience.

But the Year can also be experienced. This is possible if we pay attention to the working of the will, if we notice that it is comparatively easy to assert the will when one is warm, whereas it is difficult to let the will stream through the body when one is very cold. Those who can inwardly experience a connection between the will and being warm or cold, will gradually be able, when this faculty develops, to speak of a Winter Will and a Summer Will in themselves.

We find that the best way to define this will is to relate it to the seasons. Let us observe, for example, the kind of will which seems to carry our thoughts out into the Cosmos and makes it easy to manipulate the body so that in its whole bearing and in its gestures the thoughts seem to be borne out into the Universe; they seem to glide away through the finger-tips. We feel that it is easy to activate the will. We may be standing in front of a tree and something at the top of it gladdens our eye. If our will is warm within us, our thoughts are carried to the treetop—indeed sometimes to the very stars of heaven when in summer nights we feel endowed with this warmth of will.

On the other hand, if the will is inwardly cold, it is as if all thoughts were being carried only in our head and could not make their way into our arms or legs. Everything goes to the head. The head endures the coldness of the will, and if the cold is not so overwhelming as to give rise to a feeling of iciness, the head will become warm as a result of its own inner reaction, and then it unfolds thoughts.

Hence we can say that Summer Will leads us out into the wide expanse of the Cosmos. Summer Will, Warm Will, carries our thoughts here, there and everywhere. Winter Will carries thoughts into our head. The will can indeed be differentiated in this way. And then we shall feel that the will which carried us out into the Cosmos is related to the course of the Summer and the Will which carries thoughts into the head, to the Winter. Through the will we experience the Year.

It is possible to experience as a reality what I am now going to write on the blackboard for you. Your experience of Winter through the medium of the will can be expressed in these words:

World-All pictures!
From widths of Space
Ye are alighting,
Tending towards me,
Entering bounteously
Into my Head,
Into its thinking powers.

These words have no merely abstract meaning. If you can feel your own will united with Nature you will also feel, when Winter comes, as though your own experiences, handed over to Nature, were being brought to you from the expanse of Space. You can be aware of your own experiences which had already been taken into Nature. This is the feeling of Winter Will.

But you can also feel the Summer Will which bears your thoughts out into the Cosmos:

Ye, of my Head
The formative forces, forming in soul,
Filling my inner life!

which means that the thoughts which are at first experienced in the head, pass over into and fill the whole body, but then stream forth from it:

Now reaching outward
Into World-distances,
Weld my own being
With World-creative powers.

These words express the nature of the Summer Will, the will in us which is related to Summer. And when we feel that we have called up from within the active memory of something experienced long ago, then the day with its following night bears it back to us again, supplemented by the spatial picture. This is connected with the stream flowing from East to West. Thus we may say: Winter Will changes in us into Summer Will, Summer Will into Winter Will. We find ourselves no longer related to the Day with its alternating light and darkness, but through our will we are related to the Year, and therewith to the stream flowing from West to East, the stream of the First Hierarchy: the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

As we proceed we shall see how man may be hindered or helped through heredity or adaptation to the external world through this association with the inmost life of Nature. What I have just been telling you refers to the fact that man, when hindered as little as possible by Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces, grows by means of ideation (Vorstellung) and will into the inmost life of Nature and is received by the Time-forces, the Day-forces and the Year-forces; Third Hierarchy, Second Hierarchy, First Hierarchy. But the Ahrimanic forces as they manifest themselves in heredity, and the Luciferic forces as they manifest themselves in adaptation, exert very deep influences. These great problems will occupy our minds in the next lecture.

Winter Will
World-All pictures,
From widths of Space
Ye are alighting,
Tending towards me,
Entering bounteously
Into my Head,
Into its thinking powers.

Summer Will
Ye, of my Head
The formative forces, forming in soul,
Filling my inner life.
Now reaching outward
Into World-distances,
Weld my own being With World-creative powers.

• 1. The Soul’s Awakening. Scene 2.