| 204. Materialism and the Task of Anthroposophy: Lecture IX
24 Apr 1921, Dornach Tr. Maria St. Goar Rudolf Steiner |
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| Then, when their ego was alone with its astral body, these experiences arose powerfully in the form of true dreams. Then, in the form of true dreams, these people experienced after the fact what they had only dimly experienced during the day. |
| The fact that it takes along nothing is the reason that at most reminiscences, dream images of an unrealistic kind, can arise in the human being, and that this ego can in no way be permeated by anything from the cosmos. |
| 204. Materialism and the Task of Anthroposophy: Lecture IX
24 Apr 1921, Dornach Tr. Maria St. Goar Rudolf Steiner |
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In the course of the last week we reflected on a number of considerations suited to throw light on the spiritual condition of the present and the immediate future. Recently, we have referred in particular to the decisive turning point of humanity's development in Europe in the fourth century. Earlier, at least in the south of Europe, people understood the Mystery of Golgotha to some extent on the basis of Oriental wisdom. They still grasped with a certain comprehension something that is viewed today with such antipathy by some circles, namely, the Gnosis. The Gnosis was indeed the final remnant of Oriental primeval wisdom, that primeval wisdom which, though proceeding from instinctive forces of human cognition, did penetrate deeply into the nature of the world's configuration. With the aid of the conceptions and feelings acquired through Gnostic knowledge, people were able to have insight into what had taken place in the Mystery of Golgotha. But the Christian stream that increasingly flowed into the Roman political system and took on its form was actively involved in destroying this Gnostic world outlook. Except for a few quite insignificant remainders from which little can be gained, this Christian stream eradicated everything that once existed as Gnosis. And, as we have seen, nothing was left behind of ancient Oriental wisdom in the consciousness of mankind in Europe except for the simple narrations, clothed in material events, about what took place in Palestine at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. To begin with, these narrations were clothed in the form that originated in ancient paganism, as you can see in the Heliand. They were adopted by European civilization. But there was less and less of a feeling that these stories should be penetrated with a certain cognitive force. People increasingly lost the feeling that a profound world riddle and secret should be sought for in the Mystery of Golgotha. For concerning the one who had been united with Jesus as Christ dogmas determined by council decisions had been established. The demand had been raised that people believe in these established dogmas; thus, gradually all living knowledge that had still existed up until the time of the fourth Christian century passed over into the solidly structured system of doctrines of the Roman State Church. Then, if we have an overview of this whole system of the Occidental Christian church stream, we see that the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha was enveloped in certain firm, rigid, and more and more incomprehensible doctrines, and that any living spiritual knowledge was in fact eradicated. We are faced with a strange factor in European evolution. One might say that the fertile, living Oriental wisdom flowed into the doctrines adopted by the Roman Church and became rigid. In dogma, it continued on through the ensuing centuries. This dogma existed. One must remember that there were some people who to some extent knew what to make of these dogmas, but it had become impossible for the general consciousness of humanity to receive anything but a dead form. Certainly, we encounter a number of splendid minds. We need only to recall some of those who came from the Irish centers of knowledge; we need only recall Scotus Erigena who lived at the court of Charles the Bald.1 In individuals like him, we have people who received the doctrines and still sensed the spirit in them, or discovered it more or less. Then we have scholasticism, often mentioned here in a certain connection, which attempted in a more abstract form to penetrate the doctrines with its thinking. We face the fact that an extensive system of religious content was present in rigidified doctrines and was handed down from generation to generation; it survived as a system of dogmas. On the one hand, there were the theological dogmas, on the other, the narrations concerning the events of Palestine clothed in materialistic pictures. Now, if we wish to comprehend our modern age, we must not forget what these Roman-Catholic dogmas couched in Roman political concepts are fundamentally all about. Among them are doctrines of great significance, splendid doctrines. There is, above all, the doctrine of the Trinity, which, in other terminology of later times, points to the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. An ancient and profound primordial wisdom was frozen into this doctrine, something great and mighty that human perception once possessed instinctively. Yet, only the brilliant, inspired insight of a few could fathom what is contained in such a doctrine. Running through the various council resolutions, there was what finally rigidified into the dogma of the two persons of Christ and Jesus in one man. There were dogmas concerning the birth, the nature of Christ Jesus, the death, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. Finally, there were dogmas establishing the various festivals; and all this was basically the skeleton, the silhouette of a wondrous, ancient wisdom. Now this shadowy image, this skeleton, continued on through the centuries. One particular reason why it was able to go on was that it assumed a certain form of ancient cults. The content of what was thus expressed in dogmas, in the most sublime dogmas, such as the dogma of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, could spread because it was clothed in the form of an ancient, sacred cult, namely, the Sacrifice of the Mass. The ancient cult was just altered a bit but as such continued on. The various metamorphoses of the Christian festivals lived on through the whole ecclesiastical year. Those aspects lived on that you know as the sacraments. They were intended to lift the human being out of the ordinary material life through the agency of the Church, so to speak, into a higher, spiritual sphere. Because of all this and because of its link with the impulse of Christianity, this content lived on throughout the centuries of historical development in Europe. Side by side with this, as I have said, existed the humble narration of the events in Palestine, but garbed in materialistic formulas. Because of its significant content and because people basically had nothing else with which to establish a relationship to the super-sensible worlds, all these doctrines together were something that affected minds striving for such higher knowledge. Due to the ritual and the simple narration of the Gospel, however, these doctrines could also unfold that form of activity that gained influence over the broad masses of Europe's population. In addition to this, another separate and different cult system spread, one that counted less on Christianity as such but frequently accepted it. It was basically not organically connected with Christianity but proceeded more from older cults. This other system culminated in the dogma of present day Freemasonry, which, indeed, had and still has only a superficial relationship to Christianity. As you know, the element that clothed itself in the form of Roman-Catholic dogmatism and the element that in Masonic tradition is linked to other cults and symbolism fight each other tooth and nail to this day. This development can be traced more or less if only we focus our soul on the historical facts with some sense. But what presents itself can be fully comprehended only when we look to that turning point of European evolution in the fourth Christian century that, in a sense, sank all the ancient spiritual wisdom and its aftereffects into a sort of abyss. Due to that, people in Europe knew little of Oriental primeval wisdom throughout the ensuing centuries. As I pointed out yesterday, the inner faculties that enabled human beings in ancient times to experience weight, number, and measure in their own being had gradually disappeared. Measure, numbers, and weight then turned into abstractions. With these abstractions, people then established in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch what has today become our natural scientific world view, something that could not include human beings in its sphere and stopped short of them, unable in any way to comprehend them. By means of the abstractions of weight, number, and measure, it did, however, grasp the external natural phenomena with a certain excellence and arrived at a kind of culmination point in the nineteenth century. People today do not yet have enough distance from these matters; they do not yet realize that a quite special point in time was actually reached in European development in the middle of the nineteenth century. Intellectual striving, pure rational effort, attained to its fullest and greatest unfolding at that time. It was the trend that resulted from those same sources from which the modern natural scientific views have been flowing since the first third of the fifteenth century. Yet, at the same time, this was the trend that ultimately could no longer make anything of the cult that had spread; indeed, this trend basically had been unable for a long time to do anything with the ritual and dogmatic formulas established by the Church councils. Merely a few vestiges had survived, a few remnants; for example, the vestige of the Council of 869,2 where it had been resolved that the human being consists not of body, soul, and spirit, but merely of body and soul, with the latter possessing a few spiritual qualities. This vestige remained and lived on in the modern philosophical views that believed themselves to be objective but actually only reiterated what had originated in this Catholic dogmatism. The modern mood of European civilization, which tended increasingly to a purely intellectual, rational view of the universe, formed out of all these directions. Having been prepared for centuries, this mood reached its culmination in the middle of the nineteenth century. How can we understand this culmination if we observe the human being from a soul-spiritual standpoint? We have to focus on human nature, as it was in ancient times and as it has gradually changed. We have done this already from a number of different viewpoints and shall do so again today from yet a certain other standpoint. Let us place the human being schematically before us. Take, first of all, man's physical body (red). As I said, I am making a schematic drawing.  This is man's etheric body (blue); that is the human astral body (yellow); here we have man's ego. Let us first consider the human being as he was in ancient times, those ancient times when instinctive clairvoyance still existed, which then faded, withered, and gradually disappeared. The ego is basically a product of the earth and we need to give it less consideration. But we must be clear about the fact that the whole world actually dwells in man's physical, etheric, and astral bodies. We can say, in this physical body lives the element that represents the whole world. The corporeality is born out of it and continues to reconstruct itself through the intake of nourishment. In the etheric body, the whole world lives as well; in the most diverse ways, influences enter constantly into it and send their effects into the human being in a superphysical manner, effects that express themselves in the forces of growth, for example in the circulation of the blood, in the breath, and so on. They are by no means identical with the forces that are present in the intake of food and in digestion. In addition, there are all the influences living in our astral body that receive impressions from the world through the senses, and so forth. It is like this to this day and was like this in the days when the human being still lived with his ancient instinctive clairvoyance, but in that age, he was more intimately connected with his physical body, his etheric, and astral bodies than he is today. When he woke up in the morning, he submerged with his ego and astral body into his physical and etheric bodies. A close connection developed between his ego and astral body and his etheric body and physical corporeality. And he not only dwelled in his physical body, he also lived in the forces that worked within the latter. Let me give you a vivid description of this. Imagine that a person possessing ancient clairvoyance ate a plum. It seems almost grotesque to a human being of today when something like this is described, but it is profoundly true. Assume that such an ancient clairvoyant ate a plum; this plum contains etheric forces. If a person eats a plum today, he is not aware of what goes on within this plum. The ancient clairvoyant ate a plum; it was then in his stomach, was digested, and he experienced how the etheric forces in the plum passed over into his body. He cosmically participated in this experience. When he inwardly made comparisons between the various things he ingested into his stomach, he saw that all the relationships in the outside world continued inside the human being, and he perceived them inwardly. From waking in the morning to going to sleep at night, such a person was filled with the vivid inner perception of the life lived outside by the plums, by the apples, and by much else that he ate. Inwardly, through the breathing process, he was aware of the essential, spiritual being of the air. Through the warmth that coursed through his circulation process, he was familiar with the warmth forces of the cosmos in his surroundings. He did not stop short at merely sensing the light in his eyes. He felt how the light rays streamed in through the nerves of his eyes; how, in his own etheric body, they encountered the physical limbs and dwelled within them. Such a person experienced himself quite concretely within the cosmic element. While it was a dim consciousness, it was present. During the day, it was muted by what a person perceived outwardly even in those days. But even in the early times of Greek civilization, it was true that human beings still retained an aftereffect of what is possessed today only by creatures other than man. I have already mentioned several times that it is most interesting to look with spiritual sight upon a meadow where cows are lying down and digesting. This whole activity of digestion is a cosmic experience for the cows. It is even more so the case with snakes; they lie down and digest and do indeed experience cosmic events. Out of their organism, something blossoms and sprouts that is “world” to their perception. Something arises out of their inner being that is much more beautiful than anything we are ever able to see with our eyes from outside. Something like this was present as an underlying mood in human beings who still possessed ancient, instinctive clairvoyance. While it was muted throughout most of the day by external perceptions, when these people fell asleep, they carried with them what they had thus experienced and received into their astral body and ego. Then, when their ego was alone with its astral body, these experiences arose powerfully in the form of true dreams. Then, in the form of true dreams, these people experienced after the fact what they had only dimly experienced during the day. You see, I am referring you to the inner soul-bodily manner of experiencing on the part of human beings of ancient times; because they were able to experience in this way, they had cosmic experiences. It was in this that they found their cosmic, super-sensible perception. Then, when people in the Orient drank the Soma drink,3 they knew the nature of the Spirit of the Heights. This Soma drink permeated, surged, and wove through their inner being, enlivening their blood. When these people subsequently fell asleep and the ego and astral body, which had been active in the blood, took along the forms that had come into being through the digestion of the Soma drink, then their being widened out in the widths of space and, in their nocturnal experience, they felt the spiritual beings of the cosmos. Such an experience was still present in those among whom the ancient Zarathustra found willing listeners in the ancient Persian epoch. If one is unaware of these things, one does not understand what finally came down to us from the Oriental scriptures that have survived. This living cosmic perception gradually became extinguished. Already in the historical Egyptian age, little of it can be found, only its aftereffects are still present. And except for final vestiges that have always been retained among primitive human beings, it then disappeared in the fourth Christian century. From then on, the intellect, the rational element, increasingly struggled to come to the fore in the human being, the element that is completely tied to the mere physical body in its isolation from the world. If you have a pictorial imagination and enter into your body, you cannot help but experience something cosmic. If you have retained something of the inner quality of numbers and enter into your body with it, you cannot help but experience the number element of the cosmos. The same is true for the ratios of weight. However, if you enter into the human organism with the power of the ego, which is active as a purely rational, intellectual element, then you immerse yourself only in the isolated human body, in what the human body is by virtue of its own nature, without its relationship to the cosmos. You enter into the earthly human body in its total isolation. Thus, if I would try to sketch this from the point of view of the intellect, I would have to do it like this:  The etheric body, the astral body, and the ego (see above, blue, yellow, and shape in the middle) are present there too. But the ego no longer experiences anything of the cosmic element here within the human being. It only has a dim experience of its own existence, of its own immersion in the isolated human organism. Therefore, when this purely intellectual ego goes into its surroundings in sleep, it takes nothing along. The fact that it takes along nothing is the reason that at most reminiscences, dream images of an unrealistic kind, can arise in the human being, and that this ego can in no way be permeated by anything from the cosmos. Basically, from the moment of falling asleep until awakening, the human being experiences nothing of significance, because his whole manner of experiencing is calculated for the isolated human organism, which in turn affects the ego with those forces that have nothing to do with the cosmos. This is why the ego is dulled from the moment of falling asleep until waking up. Indeed, it must be so, for though instinctively clairvoyant ancient human beings possessed cosmic vision and dwelled in instinctive Imaginations, Inspirations, and Intuitions, they possessed no independent rational thinking. If this independent rational thinking, this actual intellectual thinking, is to develop, it has to make use of the instrument of the isolated human body. It has to be dull during sleep and therefore brings nothing along when it awakens. The ancient human being, on the other hand, having carried his experiences in the body out into the cosmos, brought with him what he had experienced in the encounter of the cosmic aftereffects with the actual spiritual-cosmic occurrences out there. Again, he brought back aftereffects of what he had experienced there and thus enjoyed a lively relationship with the cosmos. What is attained by the human being through intellectual thinking is acquired in the period from waking up until falling asleep and dims down after sleep begins. Human beings now have to depend on the time when they are awake. We come across the strange phenomenon that in ancient times the human being was bound more to his body than he is today, but that he experienced in this body the spiritual aspect of the cosmos. Modern man has lost this experience in the body. The human being today is more spiritual but he has the most rarefied spirit; he lives in the intellect and can dwell in the spirit only from the time he awakens until he falls asleep. When he enters the spiritual world with his completely rarefied intellectual spirit, his consciousness is dimmed. Why have we developed materialism? And why did ancient humanity not have materialism? The ancients did not have it because they dwelled within the matter of the body; modern men have materialism because they dwell only in the spirit, because they are completely free of a cosmic connection to their body. Materialism actually comes about because the human being became spiritual, but spiritual in a rarefied manner. People were most spiritual during the mid-nineteenth century. But they lied to themselves in an ahrimanic way inasmuch as they did not recognize that it was the rarefied spirit in which they dwelled. Into the most spiritual element possible for the human being, he only absorbed the concept of materiality. The human being had turned into a completely spiritual vessel, but into this vessel he only let flow the thoughts of material existence. It is the secret of materialism that human beings turned to matter because of their spirituality. This is modern man's negation of his own spirituality. The culmination point of this spiritual condition was in the middle of the nineteenth century, but human beings did not grasp this condition of spirituality. As I said, this developed slowly through the centuries. The ancient instinctive spirituality had slowly died down in the fourth Christian century; beginning in the first third of the fifteenth century, the new spirituality dawned; the time between is in a sense an episode of purely human experience. Now, however, after this point in time in the first third of the fifteenth century and after that century as a whole this dependence of man on his isolated physical body made itself felt. Now he no longer developed any relationship to what was frozen into dogmatic council doctrines and what, although rigidified, still possessed a grandiose content. Now, too, human beings basically could no longer find any relationship to the humble narrations of Palestine. For a while yet, they forced themselves to connect some meaning with them. However, meaning can be connected with them only when they are penetrated by knowledge. In particular, modern human beings no longer could connect any meaning with the cults, the ritual itself. The Sacrifice of the Mass, a religious act of the greatest cosmic significance, turned into an external, symbolic act because it was no longer understood. The sacrament of the Transubstantiation, which had survived through the Middle Ages and which has profound cosmic significance, became part of purely intellectual disputes. Certainly it goes without saying that when people began to question with their isolated intellect how the Christ could be contained in the sacraments of the altar, they could not comprehend it, for these matters are not suited for comprehension by the intellect. But now human beings began to try to understand them by means of the intellect. This then led to the emergence of debates of great importance in world history known as the “Eucharist-Dispute,”4 and linked to names like Hus5 and others. The most progressive individuals in Europe, those most advanced in the rational comprehension of the world, then arrived at the various forms of Protestantism. It is the intellect's reaction against something that had emerged from a much broader, much more intense power of cognition than is the intellect itself. The powers that had developed in the modern soul as intellectual faculties and what dwelled in the rigid dogmas yet containing something great and mighty, these two confronted each other as two alien views! Protestant confessions of the greatest variety arose as compromises between the intellect and the ancient traditions. The sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries passed, and in the middle of the nineteenth century the human being reached the culmination of his intellectual development. He became a spiritual being through and through. With this spirituality, he could comprehend what exists in the outer, sensory world, but he did not comprehend himself as spirit. People hardly had an inkling any longer of the meaning of a sentence such as the one by Leibnitz that states, “Nothing dwells in the intellect that did not dwell earlier in the senses, except for the intellect itself.”6 Modern people completely omitted the phrase at the end and acknowledged only the sentence, “Nothing dwells in the intellect that did not dwell earlier in the senses,” whereas Leibnitz clearly discerned that the intellect is something totally spiritual at work in the human being quite independently of all aspects of the physical corporeality. As I have said, the intellect was active but did not recognize itself. Thus, it has been our experience that human beings are now in the transition to another phase of development in their life, and, so to speak, they carry nothing out with them into the night. For what is intellectually acquired is attained through the body and has no relationship to what is outside the body. People now have to work their way anew into the spiritual world. The possibility distinctly exists for them to look into this spiritual world. What people earlier had attained from their physical and etheric bodies as well as from their astral body in regard to an instinctive view of the cosmos can be attained again today. We can come to Imaginations and by means of them we can describe the world evolution from Saturn, Sun, Moon, to earth, and so on. We can behold what dwells in the nature of numbers, namely, the being of numbers. Through Inspirations, we can receive insight into how the world is shaped out of cosmic spirituality according to the laws of numbers. It is entirely possible that we can have insight into the world in this way through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. Most people will say: If we have not ourselves become clairvoyant, we can at most study these matters. Good and well, but one can study them, and it has been said again and again that the ordinary intellect can grasp them. Today, I shall add the reason why the ordinary intellect is able to grasp these matters. Assume that you are reading something like An Outline of Occult Science. Imagine that you try to place yourself into these descriptions with your ordinary intellect. You take it in with the intellect, which is only linked to the isolated human body. But you do take something in that you could not receive through this intellect, since throughout the past few centuries this intellect did not comprehend itself. Now you take something in that is incomprehensible on the basis of those concepts that the intellect derives from the external sense world. It does become comprehensible, however, when the intellect on its own makes the effort to understand it, initially neither agreeing nor disagreeing but only comprehending. After all, the emphasis is on understanding these things. Initially, you need simply understand them. If you do, then you create something with the insight the ego has gained that extends into the night. Then, during the night, you no longer remain dull as is the case with the merely intellectual attitude towards the world; then, from the time of falling asleep until waking up, you dwell in a different content in the delicately filtered spirituality. Then, you awaken and find that the possibility has been added—small though it is each time—of inwardly acquiring what you have struggled to understand intellectually. With each passing night, every time we sleep, something of an inner relationship is added, we acquire an inward connection. Each time, upon falling asleep, we bear the aftereffect of our daytime comprehension with us into the world beyond corporeality. In this way, we acquire a relationship to the spiritual world, a relationship acquired completely out of reality. This, however, is the case only if the human being does not ruin this relationship by means of something with which he so frequently ruins it today. I have mentioned these means for ruining spirituality quite often. As you know, many people are intent on acquiring a certain state of sleepiness prior to going to sleep; they consume as many glasses of beer as it takes to have the necessary degree of sleepiness. This is a quite common practice, especially among “intelligent” people. In that case, the faculties I just mentioned certainly cannot develop. Spirituality can be researched, however, and this spirituality can indeed be experienced as well in the manner just described. The human being has grown away from spirituality. He is capable of growing into it again. Today, we are only at the beginning of this process of growing into spirituality. In the past few centuries, from the fifteenth century into the nineteenth century when the intellect had reached its highest level, a certain spirituality has developed, in particular among the most progressive people in Europe, albeit a spirituality that has as yet no content. For it is only when we turn to Imagination that this spirituality receives its first content. This spirituality, which is filtered to the extreme, must first receive its content. At this point in time, this content is being rejected by the majority of the people. The world wishes to remain with the filtered spirituality; it wishes to produce a content derived from the outer material world. People do not wish to struggle with their intellect to comprehend the results of insight into the spiritual world offered. The confessions that follow the Gospel are, after all, compromises between the intellect and ancient traditions; they have lost the connecting link. Ritual means nothing to them. This is why the latter has gradually disappeared within these confessions. People arrived at abstract concepts instead of a living comprehension of, for example, the Transubstantiation. At most, the simple stories can be told, but no meaning other than the one that is compatible with a materialistic theology can be connected with them, namely, that one is dealing with occurrences that can be linked to the humble man from Nazareth, and so forth. All this can no longer lead to a content; it is something that loses all connection with spirituality. Thus, the situation in the world today is such that there is, first of all a faith that has rejected the intellect and did not strike any compromise. Due to this, in vast segments of the population a relationship has been retained, albeit an instinctive one, to the doctrines and dogmas, the content of which is no longer accessible to human beings but did flow out into these dogmas. This segment of the populace also has retained its living relationship to the cult, to the ceremonial ritual; it has retained its link to the sacraments. As depleted as all this is, the ancient spirituality—the spirituality to which there is still a connection through dogmas—did once dwell in what has become a skeleton, a shadow. Among the more recent Protestant confessions, where a compromise is being tried out, such a connection is no longer alive. And then we have those who call themselves quite enlightened and dwell only in the intellect, which is spiritual but does not wish to grasp the spirit. These are the three streams we confront. In regard to the future, we cannot count on the fruitfulness of those streams that only tried to make an external compromise; we cannot count on mere intellectuality that cannot arrive at any content and therefore can only lose itself since it does not want to understand itself. We can only count on the direction in which these streams are gradually heading, and they are more and more clearly heading there, namely, we can count on what has been poured into ancient doctrines and is represented in the surviving Roman-Catholic Church. We can count on the attitude that takes the new intellectuality seriously and deepens it Imaginatively, Inspiratively, and Intuitively, thus arriving at a new spirituality. The modern world is becoming divided and estranged in these two contrasting directions. On the one hand stand people with their intellect. They are inwardly lazy and do not wish to utilize this intellect, but they need a content. So they refer to the dead dogmas. Particularly among intelligent people, who are, however, mentally indolent, who are in a certain respect intellectual and Dadaistic, a neo-Catholic movement is making itself felt that is trying to take hold of the old traditions that have rigidified in dogmas and that is trying to receive a content from outside, through historical phenomena but that rigidifies in historical forms. Based on the intellect, this trend tries desperately to make some sense of the ancient content; thus we have intellectual battles that, by means of the old content, try to prepare their rigidified doctrines in a new way for the use of human beings. To cite an example, on many pages in the newest edition of the magazine Tat,7 we can observe an intellectual, cramped tendency towards rigidified doctrines. After all, the publisher, Diederichs, does everything; he puts everything into categories and on paper. Thus, he has now dedicated a whole edition of Tat to the neo-Catholic movement. It allows us to discern how cramped people's thoughts are today, how people are developing inwardly cramped thinking so that they can avoid having to rouse themselves and can remain mentally lazy in order to grasp with the intellect whatever moves forward most indolently. People experiment with all this in order to be able to reject this life-filled striving out of modern intellectuality towards spirituality, a striving that can and must be grasped. More and more, things will come to a head in such a way that a powerful movement with a fascinating, suggestive, hypnotic effect on all those wishing to remain lazy within the intellect permeates the world. A Catholic wave is even pervading the world of intelligent people who wish, however, to remain lazy within their intelligence. The drowsy souls just do not realize it. But it must remain unfruitful to strive for what Oswald Spengler described so vividly in his Decline of the West.8 One can turn the Occident Catholic, but one will thereby slay its civilization. This Occident has to concern itself with waking up, with becoming inwardly active. Its intelligence must not remain lazy, for this intelligence can rouse itself; it can fill itself inwardly with an understanding for the new view of the spirit. This battle is in preparation; in fact, it is here—and it is the main point. In the future, everything else concerning world views will become crushed between these two streams. We must turn our attention to this, for what is coming to expression conceals itself in any number of formulas and forms. Nobody is living fully in the present who believes that he can make progress with something that people were perhaps still dreaming about at the beginning of this century. He alone lives fully in the present who develops an eye for what dwells in the two streams described above. We have to be aware of this. For everything I have discussed a week ago when I said that nowadays a great number of people love evil and, purely due to their tendency towards evil, indulge in slander in the way I described—all this is what must come before our souls. We must bear in mind that inner untruthfulness, which expresses itself in the facts—as I told you—that people, who are supposed to be strengthened in their Catholic faith, are sent to the Catholic church in Stuttgart to attend a lecture by General von Gleich, and that this Catholic general concludes with a hymn by Luther! There, the two tendencies come together that care nothing about the confessions but only try to stream together in the proliferation of lies. These things must be noticed today. If this is not done, then one is asleep and does not participate in what alone can make the human being today truly human.
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| 207. Cosmosophy Vol. I: Lecture VI
07 Oct 1921, Dornach Tr. Alice Wuslin, Michael Klein Rudolf Steiner |
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| We can also say that in life between birth and death man is nearest to the angel being when he is living in the condition out of which dreams arise, which certainly also have something to do with his individual being, and which on the one hand deny and on the other hand hold fast to this mineral-thought being. Man would be unable to find even the subconscious relationship to the hierarchy of the angels were not this mineral consciousness colored by the conditions that in a certain sense he sleeps through but that reach up out of the sleeping condition and live out their life in the world of dreams. The dream itself, though in its outlines it does not adhere to outer sense reality and often actually denies contact with it, is nevertheless woven out of the same substance as the world of thoughts is woven between birth and death. |
| 207. Cosmosophy Vol. I: Lecture VI
07 Oct 1921, Dornach Tr. Alice Wuslin, Michael Klein Rudolf Steiner |
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We have seen how the study of the conditions of soul of the human being leads us into the spaces, as it were, between physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I; the study of the spiritual conditions in the human being, however, leads us beyond the phenomenon of the human being as he is here in his life between birth and death out into the vast spiritual universe. One might say that insofar as the human being is spirit he stands absolutely in relation to the whole spiritual universe. Hence it is only in this connection with the entire universe that we can study what takes place in the human being as spiritual events. The soul element is, so to speak, man's intimate inner life, taking its course in a threefold form in such a way that the thinking aspect is situated between physical body and etheric body, the feeling aspect between etheric body and astral body, and the aspect of willing between astral body and the I. We therefore remain in our study of the soul element entirely within the human being. As soon as we approach the actual spiritual events, however, we must leave the human being as he usually confronts us as a self-contained being in the world between birth and death. Now we know—and eight days ago we were speaking of this from another viewpoint—that when we first ascend into the spiritual we come to beings who are arranged above the human being in the same way as the human being has his place above the animal, plant, and mineral realms. As we ascend we therefore have—names add nothing to the matter—the angeloi or angelic beings, the archangeloi or arch-angelic beings, and the archai or primal beings, time spirits. We have already characterized from various points of view these beings who constitute the realm we encounter when we perceive the position of human beings in regard to the spiritual. The beings whom we designate as angeloi or angels are those who have the strongest relationship to the individual, to the single human being. The individual human being actually has a relationship to the hierarchy immediately above him such that he in a way—this is not expressed very exactly, but it can be said in the way that it is commonly expressed—develops a certain relationship to such an angelic being. Those that then make up the second hierarchy above him are the archangels. We can say of them that among their functions is that which works as folk spirit, that which therefore embraces groups of those belonging together as a people, although here there are all possible gradations. When finally we ascend higher, to the archai, we have the guiding beings throughout certain epochs of time, beyond the differentiations among peoples. These are certainly not the only functions, let us say, of these beings, but to begin with we receive certain conceptions if we keep to these particular functions that they perform. Just as we can make man's physical life on earth comprehensible by asking ourselves what kind of relationship the human being has to the animal organization, to the plant organization, and to the mineral organization, so we must also ask ourselves, in order to learn what man is as a spiritual being, what kind of relationship he has to these ascending stages of beings in the spiritual. For this we must proceed in the following way. Let us picture from certain viewpoints the way in which the human being goes through the portal of death. We know that in this age of earthly evolution that encompasses many years we live as human beings in such a way that there are present in the ordinary consciousness the laws underlying the mineral realm. From birth to death man fills himself, we might say, with everything that makes the mineral realm in a certain sense comprehensible, and he has a feeling that with the concepts and ideas at his disposal he is able to understand the mineral realm. It is not the same where the plant realm is concerned. You know that science stops short on coming to the plant realm; at best it holds to the ideal that the complicated combination of the plant cells, of living cells generally, will one day be explicable in their structure. As I have explained to you, this is beginning completely at the wrong end, because the structure of the plant, or of living cells generally, is not distinguished by being a particularly complicated structure but by the chemical structure passing into chaos. Man, however, does not get beyond the concepts of the mineral realm. With his mineral concepts he comes still less—if I may venture to say so—to what concerns the animal realm or even to self-knowledge. All this must be given by spiritual-scientific investigations. The human being thus adopts a mineral consciousness, let us call it, that is, a consciousness adapted to the mineral realm. The human being carries the outcome of this consciousness, the weaving of which takes place between birth and death, with him through death. When he therefore goes through the portal of death and lives in the spiritual realm itself, he can journey through his further existence-with what became of this consciousness. There is essentially something else, however, that pushes up into this consciousness. What penetrates up into this mineral consciousness, in spite of not belonging to it, what colors it, is the moral consciousness. This is what arises out of all the processes of consciousness connected to our will impulses, to our conduct. What we feel as satisfaction about this or that, what we feel as remorse, as reproach and the like, all this gives color, as it were, to our mineral consciousness and is something that the human being takes with him through the portal of death. One can therefore say that the human being goes through the portal of death with a mineral consciousness colored by moral experience; with what becomes of this consciousness, he then lives further in the spiritual realm. Man not only understands the mineral world through this mineral consciousness, but through this mineral consciousness he develops his relationship to the being from the hierarchy of the angels, therefore to that being to whom he wishes to turn as the nearest to his individual development. When the human being has gone through the portal of death, it is a question of how far, through the consequences of his mineral consciousness, he can preserve intact his relationship to this angel being. He can do this only in accordance with what from the moral side has colored this mineral consciousness, for after death this mineral consciousness strives, as it were, to spread itself out in the world. It strives to become cosmic, to adapt itself to the whole universe; it strives to get beyond what is individual. We can also say that in life between birth and death man is nearest to the angel being when he is living in the condition out of which dreams arise, which certainly also have something to do with his individual being, and which on the one hand deny and on the other hand hold fast to this mineral-thought being. Man would be unable to find even the subconscious relationship to the hierarchy of the angels were not this mineral consciousness colored by the conditions that in a certain sense he sleeps through but that reach up out of the sleeping condition and live out their life in the world of dreams. The dream itself, though in its outlines it does not adhere to outer sense reality and often actually denies contact with it, is nevertheless woven out of the same substance as the world of thoughts is woven between birth and death. In going through the portal of death, therefore, in order to maintain the relationship to his angel being, the human being takes with him what he has developed in himself within his mineral consciousness. Now in the way we live today in humanity's present epoch man—especially when he reckons himself to be among the most enlightened—penetrates but little with his moral experience into what he possesses as mineral consciousness. On the contrary, he makes every possible effort to hold this mineral consciousness quite apart from the moral sphere. He would like at least to set up these two worlds; on the one hand he would like to study what ultimately may be comprehended in the realm of mineral nature, and the mineral nature in the plant, animal, and human realms, and would then like to study the moral element as something surging up from his inner being. It is not harmonious with the spirit of the time to think of what lives in nature as being at the same time permeated with moral impulses. There yawns an abyss between what is of a moral and what is of a mineral nature. The human being does not easily find the bridge to incorporate the moral into the mineral nature. I have often drawn attention to how man pictures the evolution of the earth to be a purely mineral affair, from the content of the Kant-Laplace theory up to the mineral nature of modern thinking, and how man eliminates everything in the way of moral feeling. It thus comes about that the human being is able to develop only an extremely slight relationship to the being of the angeloi; in our present age he cannot unite himself intimately with his angel being, to use an ordinary expression. If the mineral consciousness were completely separated from moral coloring, then at what I call the Midnight Hour of Existence man would face the danger of entirely losing the necessary connection with his angel being. I say he would face the danger. Today only a small number of people face this danger, but if a spiritual deepening of the whole evolution of humanity on earth does not come about, a deepening of human thinking, human feeling, and human willing, then what lives as a danger may be realized. Then there would be countless human beings who, on approaching the Midnight Hour of Existence between death and a new birth, would have to sever the relationship to their angel beings. It is true that the angel being would always keep the relationship on his part, but it would remain one-sided, from his side to the human being. The human being between death and a new birth would not be able to reciprocate adequately. We must be perfectly clear that in our modern civilization, hastening as it is toward materialism, the human being injures his relationship to his angel being, so that this relationship becomes ever looser. Just when the human being is approaching the Midnight Hour of Existence, however, he must enter into relationship to the archangelic beings through the angel being. Should this relationship be of such a nature—as it may well be when man is living in the spiritual world—that it not only comes from the side of the angel being to humanity but can be reciprocated by the human being, then man must absorb a spiritual content, which means that he must color his moral impulses religiously. If the present trend of evolution persists, the human being of today faces the danger of his connection with the angel being becoming so slight that he cannot form any inner relationship to the archangelic being. The archangel, however, participates in bringing man back into physical life. This archangelic being is particularly involved in building up the forces that bring man back into the community of a certain people. When human beings live inwardly unspiritually—as has been the case for centuries—the relationship of the archangel to the human beings develops one-sidedly, and then man does not grow into his people with the inner soul being, but he is inscribed from outside, as it were, by means of the world order, into the people that the archangel is assigned to guide. One does not arrive at an understanding of our present age, which may be characterized by the one-sided way in which the peoples are cultivated, until one knows that this actually may be attributed to the souls who have recently come down to earthly existence having a loose relationship to their angel beings and by reason of this having no inner relationship to the archangelic being—thus growing into their people only from without. The people thus remains in them as an impulse from outside, and it is only through outer impulses that human beings take their place within a people, through all sorts of impulses inclining toward chauvinism. He who stands within his people with soul—and this is the case with very few people today—will be unable to develop in the direction of chauvinism, of one-sided nationalism; he takes up the fruitful forces within the people and develops these, makes these individual. He will not boast of his people in a one-sided way. He will let his people flow into his being as color, as it were, flow into his human manifestations, but will not parade this outwardly, and particularly not in an outwardly hostile attitude toward others. The fact that today it is exactly this that provides the keynote for world politics—that all relations built on peoples create such difficulties today for human evolution—all this rests entirely on what I have been indicating. If the bond that begins in the-Midnight Hour of Existence—before and after this, throughout long periods—cannot be ensouled by one's taking the appropriate religious inwardness through the portal of death—a religious feeling that is spiritual and not merely a matter of lip service—then the archangel is able to work only on what is plant-like in the cosmos and what as plant-like nature is imparted to the human being. Through very subconscious forces connected with his plant nature, which means with that which is placed in him by his breathing condition and is modified by all that has to do with conditions of language, by everything, therefore, that in language pushes in a plant-like way into the human organism, through all this man can be guided only by his archangel. It then happens that when the human being is born, when he grows as a child, he grows into his language in a more-or-less outer way. Had he been able to find the relationship, the inner relationship of soul, to his archangel through his angel, he would then have grown with his soul into all that had to do with his language, he would have understood the genius of the language, not merely what constitutes the outer mechanical aspect of it. Today, however, we can see how strongly it is the case that in many respects the human being is an imprint of the mechanical in his language, so that actually he does not bear the element of language as a keynote in his entire being but receives an exact imprint of it. One can see quite clearly how the facial expression itself is an expression of the element of language. What confronts us in the people, what confronts us as their unique, national physiognomy, comes to man from the archangels in a completely outer way. What takes place outwardly in humanity, insofar as it works into the spiritual of the human being, actually can be explained only through the kind of study we pursue in an anthroposophical spiritual science. All modern anthropology and things of that kind are actually what might be called a mere playing with terminology. In what is written today by anthropologists or their kind about the configuration of humanity on the earth, about the differentiation of humanity, we really in many respects have nothing to orient us, no guiding viewpoint, because what is there understood as concept is merely the classification of outer characteristics. One could just as well redistribute the whole picture. A real content streams into the matter only if it is studied spiritually. Then, however, one must not shrink back if in this study real, concrete spiritual beings arise. One sees from this that only spiritual deepening can heal the damages of our modern age. The damages of today, insofar as they confront us in public life, are founded on the loose relationship of the human being to his angel and the consequent loose bond with the archangel, who is thus able to have an influence only from outside. When a human being between death and a new birth undergoes his further evolution, which after the Midnight Hour of Existence leads him once more into physical, earthly life, he enters especially the realm of the archai, of the primal spirits. These archai, these primal spirits, in the present cosmic evolution have to do with leading the human being back into the earthly limits of his being. When the human being passes through the portal of death his further life takes its course in such a way that he experiences to begin with the consequences of his mineral consciousness with its moral coloring—thereby expanding himself, as it were, over the world. Then, after the Midnight Hour of Existence, he draws himself together again. First he is led over into the plant element, which is incorporated into him. The more nearly he approaches earthly life, the more he draws himself together, so that he is able to be born once more as a being enclosed in his skin. What must happen to a human being when he enters the realm of the archai is an incorporating, a densification, of the plant element into the animal element. In passing through the Midnight Hour of Existence, a man acquires first the forces—naturally not the organs but first the forces—which determine his breathing and also the differentiated breathing. The concentration of these forces into the actual forces of the organs comes about only after the Midnight Hour of Existence, comes about only in the realm of the archai. Man becomes, so to speak, ever more and more human. The fact is, however, that this cosmic activity exercised upon the human being as forces coming from the archai actually organizes him in such a way that the organs tend toward the animal structure. If we perceive the human being in his relationship to the cosmos we find that while the human being is striving away from the Midnight Hour of Existence toward a new life on earth he is subject to cosmic laws, just as here on earth he is subject to earthly laws. We may say the following: the human being is defined from the immeasurable expanses of the universe, in that he draws himself together more and more. Up to the Midnight Hour of Existence there is, as it were, an expansion of man, by means of his mineral consciousness, into the breadths of the universe (see drawing, arrows), into the immeasurable breadth of the universe. When the Midnight Hour of Existence arrives (see drawing, blue) those forces incorporate themselves into the human being that work in him as plantlike forces. Man returns from this Midnight Hour of Existence in order to confine himself within the appropriate limits for earthly life (arrows going in). This Midnight Hour of Existence is altogether a tremendously significant moment in human evolution. While after his death a human being lives on into the cosmos, he becomes increasingly one with the world. He hardly distinguishes himself from the world. Expressing myself figuratively—naturally out in the cosmos we cannot speak of physical organs, but you will understand me if I present this to you in images taken from physical existence—I might say: man learns, as it were, how the eye grows together with the light and then no longer distinguishes the eye from the light, or the sound from the ear. By expanding himself out into the cosmic breadths he grows together with the universe.  Having passed the Midnight Hour of Existence, where he begins to draw himself together in order to become once more a being with limits, there dawns in him a kind of objective conception: this is not the world, this is the human being. A consciousness grows more and more intense in the human being—a consciousness that is most intense when the human being returns into earthly life. As here on earth, however, the content of our consciousness is the minerals, the plants, the animals, the mountains, rivers, clouds, the stars, sun, and moon, so on our way back to the earth the being of man is the main conception. It is really so that if we take the seemingly quite complicated world that lies outside our skin, with all that is within it, if we take the world with its soul and spiritual elements, it is indeed most complicated; what lies within our skin, however, is just as complicated and is different from the world outside only in size, but the size is not important. Between birth and death our world is what lies outside our skin; what is within we cannot really observe except in what during life man certainly is not, namely, the corpse. From the Midnight Hour of Existence, however, until the next life on earth, the human world, the inner being of man, is his body, soul, and spirit (see drawing, right, blue). There man is, as it were, the world. Up to the Midnight Hour of Existence we gradually lose the world as we know it through the mineral consciousness; we lose it by living into the world as though it were our self, our whole, all-embracing self, so that we no longer distinguish between our self and the world. In returning, our world becomes the human being. We do not behold the stars, we behold the membering of the human limbs; we do not behold all that is contained in the universe, let us say, between stars and earth, we behold what is within the human organization, insofar as it is formed out of spirit and soul. We behold the human being, and what we thus behold is what leads us to our renewed existence on earth. We behold the human being receiving his form.  In the time of the Midnight Hour of Existence we live in the human being who is forming himself in accordance with the plant-like. When we come into the region of the archai we live in what forms the organs of the human being, in the sense of animal forces. I have said that just as between birth and death we are dependent on what works on us from the earth, so we are dependent, in that we are outside in the universe, on what is beyond the earthly—it is no longer a question of space, but naturally we can only present this in spatial terms. The moment we pass through the archai, we can express the laws that work in us in the sense of the universe—in the same way, as during our life here in an earthly community we test the laws of the earth by the laws of modern physics—we can express these laws by relating ourselves to Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, and so on. By relating the positions of the sun to these stars, to the heaven of the fixed stars in general, in the constellations of the sun with this heaven of fixed stars we have the laws that prevail in the realm of the will of the archai. The will that prevails there, which permeates these laws, is the will of the archai.  If we were to look outside for natural laws corresponding to our natural laws, as natural laws correspond to us here on earth during earthly existence, we would have to look to these constellations of the stars. We remain a long time in the kingdom where we are dependent on the star constellations—though not more dependent than we are dependent here on earth on natural laws where our will works also, which is something higher than the laws of nature. There too we may not speak of the cosmos in the sense of a cosmic law that works with mechanical necessity. What we find in the constellations of the stars, however, is the expression, as it were, the image, of these laws that work upon us there. As formerly, when we were in the kingdom of the archangeloi, the laws of the plant-like worked upon us, so now there work upon us the laws holding good in the animal realms. When these things are found again through spiritual science, one comes upon the tremendously significant fact that the people in ancient times who used to acquire knowledge from certain dreamlike visions of the universe, which were then lost, that these people really showed a touch of atavistic genius, one could say, in naming this picture circle, which represented for them the heaven of the fixed stars, the Zodiac (Tierkreis, “animal circle”). I can only think that our new science of the spirit, which shows us these things again, is led from a completely different basis to an understanding of what was once grasped in a dimly sensed knowledge. It is tremendously moving when one finds the teaching about the Zodiac and its influence on the human being preserved from ancient times and when one then—quite apart from what has been preserved—with the means at the disposal of present-day spiritual science, comes once more to connect knowledge with the constellations of the sun, with the zodiacal signs, in other words, with the heaven of the fixed stars. It is this that links the more recent science of the spirit so closely to the wisdom of the ancients. Between our time, when we wish to make spiritual science our quest, and this period when the wisdom of the ancients held sway, we have an age that was indeed necessary for the striving after human freedom; this age basically, however, was an age of darkness. We thus come into the realm of the archai and receive and incorporate into us that which is our animal nature. What is our animal nature? Our animal nature is above all what gives us our organs, which even in number are very similar to the organs of the higher animals. Before we approach birth, however, we are stripped—if I may so express it—of the realm of the Zodiac and enter the realm of the planets—Saturn, Jupiter, and so on. In entering the realm of the planets, and thus in coming nearer to the earth, nearer the point of time when we take on the boundaries of our human form, what is incorporated into us out of cosmic law as the animal nature is given its direction, if I may express it in this way. Before we sink down into the planetary system, and therefore into the forces of the planetary system, our vertebral column, for example, has not taken on a direction away from the earth, which would raise the head aloft. We are more subject to the directional forces governing the posture of the animal. Everything, for example, that designs the hands as the organ of our soul element, not only as an organ for grasping or for walking—what makes of them organs that can act freely out of the impulses of the soul element, all this we owe to this planetary influence. All that helps us to be truly human, right into the lowest stages of our animal organization, we have by virtue of the constellations of the moon with the rest of the planets. We are made human, therefore, as we return through the planetary system. I told you that man himself, man as he forms himself, is the world that is living in our consciousness during our return journey from the Midnight Hour of Existence. We also see how at first everything is present in him that ultimately pulsates in rhythm with the animal forces. We live through this in such a way that we actually experience a kind of decline, a kind of icy process. All this, however, is loosened on our entering the planetary realm, and this first forms the cosmic world, which we see as the human world, the world represented by the earthly human being who Wrests himself away from the animal element, who grows out of the animal element. All this now fills us; it becomes the content of our consciousness. We carry in us as a system of forces that which the cosmos has given us. Thus we descend soul-spiritually from the spiritual worlds. We have lived through the worlds in which we were in direct touch, stood in connection with, angels, archangels, archai. We descend as man. It is true, however, that if, in the way characterized, we have failed to establish an intimate relationship to our angel being, we have difficulties when penetrating into the planetary region, because we have been unable to make any divine-spiritual connection with the world of the archai. Outwardly we become incorporated into a people. The archai are then obliged to work into us, as it were, only from outside. Through this we are given a definite place on the earth, for all the forces of the archai tend toward that end. The archangels give us our place among a people and our particular place within this people is then determined by the archai. Not imbued with soul and spirit, however, we grow in an outer, mechanical way into this environment. This is a characterization of our modern age—that the human being no longer has that inner relationship, that intimate inner relationship, that he had to his environment in more ancient times, when he grew into this immediate environment also with his soul. This is still maintained at best in a caricaturish way—as a caricature, I repeat—when today, even if it is already coming to an end, children perhaps grow up in some particular castle after previously having been attracted to their ancestors. Here we will have a relationship that in earlier ages had to do with the soul element. Today a human being is pressed into his environment in such a way that he basically has little inner relationship to the place in which he finds himself, to which his karma takes him in an entirely outer way, so that he feels his whole placement into physical existence as something external to him. When man's being is formed through education and life in such a way that he is filled with soul, filled with spirit, and comes to a spiritual conception of the world, he will then carry this through life between death and a new birth so that he does not lose the inner connection with his angel, so that through his archangel his soul is carried into his particular people, and so that he is not placed in a merely outer way into his immediate existence by the world of the archai. He should rather be able to absorb once again into his animal organization something that he experiences in such a way that he says: there is a deep significance in the fact that just from this place where my consciousness first gradually awakens, where my education is carried on—that just from this place I am to unfold my activity in the world. This is certainly something that should lead us to bring about reform in education, so that the human being once more feels that from the place where he is educated he takes something with him that gives him his mission in the world. When this is so, a human being grows beyond the merely outer realm of the archai. He will experience the forces directing human beings in a way that is permeated by soul and spirit, and he will grow into his new life in a way different from what is frequently the case today. What happens, then, when the human being enters a new earthly life? His consciousness is filled with the way in which he is building himself up from within as a human being. He is filled with a world that he beholds, a world of activity, not a mere world of thought. As I have already mentioned, after the Midnight Hour of Existence this world gradually takes on the tendency of the will toward being human, and the human being immerses himself into what is offered him through heredity in the generations, through the substance he receives from his ancestors. Into this he immerses himself. He envelops himself with the physical sheath; he enters the physical world. On observing the human being spiritually, we can actually find out about the content of the soul element when he is immersing himself in a new life in physical existence. Of all the realms lived through by the human being between death and a new birth it is natural that a human being comes into the closest relationship to the angeloi, archangeloi, archai, but these things stand in further relationship to the higher hierarchies. Between death and a new birth a human being thus pursues his course through a realm in which his relationship to that realm depends on what he carries through the portal of death. The extent to which he has succeeded in permeating with his mineral consciousness that which as spirit wishes to rise out of the depths of his being determines to what extent he can become intimate with his angel being. By being able to be intimate in this way with his angel being, however, he grows into the world of the archangeloi, so that knowing, as it were, experiencing their forces out of himself, he can consciously reciprocate and proceed further, so as to become the individualized being he must gradually become if the world is to move toward its ascent and not its decline. It is perfectly possible to give from the most varied points of view a deeply significant description of this life between death and a new birth. One point of view is to be found in the lecture course I held in 1914 at Vienna;7 today I have been developing another point of view for you. All these points of view are intended to lead to increasing knowledge of the human being from his spiritual aspect. Those who are unwilling to explore a whole spiritual world in this way will never be able to grasp the spiritual in man himself. Just as we must go into the spaces between physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I in order to penetrate the soul element in its objective nature, so we must proceed out of the human being into the spiritual world to study his relationship to this spiritual world. Then we discover what actually weaves and lives in the human being as the spiritual. It is only the love of comfort today that makes man speak of the spirit in general terms. We must become capable of speaking about the spirit in all its particulars, just as we do of nature. Then there will arise a real human knowledge; as man needs it, the primeval saying of truth will be fulfilled, the saying that sheds its light from ancient Greece, the fulfillment of which must continue to be striven for by the human being—the truthful saying, “Know thyself.” Self-knowledge is knowledge of the world, and world knowledge is knowledge of self, for if we are living between birth and death, the stars, the sun, the moon, mountains, valleys, rivers, and the plants, animals, and minerals are our world, and what lives within our human boundaries is what we are. If we are living between death and a new birth, then we are what is concealed as the spiritual behind sun, moon, and stars, behind mountains and rivers, and our outer world is then the inner being of man. World and man alternate rhythmically, the human being living both physically and spiritually. For the human being here on earth the world is what is outside. For the human being between death and a new birth the world is what is within. Hence it is a question only of alternating through the times for man to be able to say that, in the most real sense, knowledge of man is knowledge of the world; knowledge of the world is knowledge of man.
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| 347. The Human Being as Body, Soul and Spirit: Adam Kadmon in Lemuria
30 Sep 1922, Dornach Tr. Automated Rudolf Steiner |
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| So the ancient Germans here in Europe – it was figurative, as if they had dreamt, but the dream was much more correct than later, when the Old Testament was misunderstood and instead of speaking of the whole earth, of the Adam Kadmon, one spoke of the little Adam – still had an old, albeit merely dream-like, figurative science. Yes, you get a huge respect for what has been eradicated, old, but only dream-like pictorial science. But it was there, and it has been eradicated. It does not need to be surprised. |
| 347. The Human Being as Body, Soul and Spirit: Adam Kadmon in Lemuria
30 Sep 1922, Dornach Tr. Automated Rudolf Steiner |
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Question: I was very surprised by the idea that the sun was inside the earth; I have never heard of anything like that before. As I understood the last lectures, the earth was nothing more than the human being, and that animals actually descended from all this. How do you explain this in contrast to the idea that humans descend from apes? Dr. Steiner: I am very pleased that you asked this question, because we can make a lot of progress by answering it. If you take today's human head as it is, what do you find about this human head? First of all, from the outside inwards, you will find this human head covered from top to bottom by a fairly hard, bony shell. Yes, gentlemen, if you take this bony shell, which is thin in relation to the whole head, and compare it with what you find, for example, when you go into the Jura mountains, you will find a very remarkable similarity. You see, the bony skullcap is essentially made of very similar components to the calcium deposits, the calcium crust that you find when you go into the Jura Mountains. Now, you generally find such deposits on the earth's surface. Of course, in these limestone deposits, you couldn't exactly grow fruit very well. But that can be done in a layer that doesn't consist of limestone, but rather of arable soil, and that is laid over the limestone soil. Now, gentlemen, you will have already realized: When one speaks of nature, one must touch on everything. And you know, of course, that the human head, at least on the outside, is also covered with a skin that even sheds scales, so that the skin lies over the calcareous skullcap, over the external skull. If one studies this skin in turn, it bears a great similarity to what field soil is. The hair grows in the scalp. The hair, in turn, bears a great similarity to what grows as plants out of the soil. If you draw it schematically, pictorially, we can actually say: at certain points on the earth, there is a lime deposit on top; above that is the soil, and plants grow out of the soil. In humans, we have this calcareous shell on the outside, with skin over it, and hair grows out of the skin.  Now you remember something else. So, curiously enough, I can draw something similar when I draw the earth or the human head. But now you remember that I told you something else. I told you that if you go deeper into the earth and study what is there deeper in the earth, you will find remains of ancient creatures, of ancient animals and plants in the earth. I have told you what these animals and plants used to look like. Ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and so on, were quite large creatures. But if we now go into the inside of the human head, what did I tell you? I told you: the white blood corpuscles swim in the blood, and these are actually also small animals. Inside the human head, these small animals are constantly dying, are, so to speak, half dead, and are only brought back to life at night, but they are on the way to dying. And the further you get into the head, the more the head dies. Under the skullcap, between the brain and the outer bone, is a kind of dead skin. So that when you go into the head, you also find something that is dying. So we can say: When a person dies, and you take his head apart afterward – which is what science does, of course, since it doesn't like to deal with living people, but rather with dead people on the dissection table – yes, gentlemen, there you have these dead brain cells, which are actually fossilized blood cells, and on the outside the hard shell. In this respect, the story is very similar to the earth. So we cannot say anything other than: when we enter the actual brain through this hard cerebral membrane - it is even called the 'hard cerebral membrane' because it is already completely dead - we see petrification all the time. On earth, these petrifications can be found everywhere. If we look at the earth today, we can see that it resembles a dead human head. It is, of course, only smaller. The earth is larger, so everything looks different. The earth resembles a dead human head. So anyone who studies the earth today must actually say to themselves: the earth is an enormous human skull, and one that has died. Now, gentlemen, you will never be able to imagine that something can have died if it has not previously lived. That is not true. Only science claims that. But I think you would consider yourself stupid if you found a dead human head somewhere and said: It just formed out of matter. You will never say that, but you will say: This thing that looks like this must once have belonged to a living person, it must once have been alive; because what is dead must once have been alive. So that if someone reflects on it rationally, if he studies the earth today and finds a dead human head, he must naturally imagine – otherwise he would simply be, I would say, stupid – that it once lived, that the earth was once a living human head, that it lived in the universe, as man lives on earth today. Now, the human head, it could not live, could not possibly live if it did not get its blood from the human body. The human head alone, it can only be shown for fun. When I was a little boy and lived in the village, sometimes such wandering troupes would set up and put up a booth. When you walked by, someone would always come out: Ladies and gentlemen, please enter, the show is about to begin! Here you can see a living, talking human head!” They showed a living, talking human head. You know, that's done with all kinds of mirrors so that you don't see the body, only the head. But otherwise, of course, there is not only the head, but it must receive its blood and everything that nourishes it from the human body. So the earth must once have been such that it could have nourished itself from outer space. Yes, could one also give reasons for the earth really having once been something like a human being and being able to nourish itself from outer space? Much thought has been given to how it actually came about that the sun - I showed this recently - was once connected to the earth. But that was a long time ago. Since that time, the sun has been outside the earth and gives the earth light and warmth. Even the warmth that is inside the earth itself comes from the sun, it just remains stored in the winter. Now we can calculate exactly how much heat the sun gives off each year. It is a great deal, and physicists have done just such calculations. There are millions and millions of calories. But, gentlemen, when doing this calculation, the physicists were really frightened, because although they found out how much heat the sun emits each year, they also found out that if this were correct, the sun would have cooled down long ago and we would all have frozen to death. So the calculation is done correctly, but it is still wrong. That happens. You can calculate, something can be calculated in the most beautiful way, but the calculation is still wrong, precisely because it is so beautiful. Now there was a physicist, a Swabian, named Julius Robert Mayer, who actually had some very interesting ideas in the mid-19th century. This Julius Robert Mayer, who lived in Heilbronn in Württemberg, was a doctor and made his discoveries in a similar way to Darwin on his trip around the world, namely by making very interesting observations during a trip to southern Asia, on the islands there, how human blood looks different due to the influence of heat than in somewhat colder areas, and he came to interesting facts through these observations. He then summarized these observations and wrote them down in a very short essay. He sent it to the most important German scientific journal of the time. That was in 1841. And this scientific journal sent the essay back to him because the people said: This is all insignificant stuff, amateurish, stupid. Today, the same people, that is, their successors, of course, see it as one of the greatest discoveries of the 19th century! But the editors of the “Annalen für Physik und Chemie” (Poggendorff's “Annals of Physics and Chemistry”), which was the most famous German scientific journal at the time, not only sent this essay back to Julius Robert Mayer, but they also locked him up in an insane asylum! Because he was really very enthusiastic about his science - it's not quite right, but he was very enthusiastic about his science - he behaved a little differently than other people - after all, they didn't exactly know the same things as he did - and his fellow doctors and other doctors noticed this, and that's why he was put in an insane asylum! So you come up with a scientific discovery that comes from a person who was locked up in an insane asylum for it. If you come to Heilbronn in Swabia today, you will find a monument to Julius Robert Mayer on the most important square there. But that was done afterwards! It's just an example of how people deal with people who have such thoughts in their heads. Now, you see, this Julius Robert Mayer, who thought about this influence that he knew from heat on the blood, also thought about how the sun can produce heat. The others just calculate how much it gives off. But Julius Robert Mayer also asked himself: Yes, where does it all come from? — What does physics do? One would like to say that physics calculates in the same way as one would calculate with a human being: he once ate and now he is full, but in addition, something is stored in his own fat and muscles. If he can't eat anymore, he takes it from his fat and muscles. And he can live like that for forty or sixty days, but afterwards he dies if he doesn't get anything to eat. The physicists have also calculated what the sun produces every day after it has miraculously generated this heat. How it ate at that time was not considered, but in any case, it was calculated how much it produces. But where it gets that from, that was asked by Julius Robert Mayer. And he found out that every year so many celestial bodies fly into the sun that are like comets. You see, that is the food of the sun. But if we look up at the sun today, we can see that it has a good stomach, it eats an enormous number of comets every year. Just as we consume our Mitrag's meal and thereby develop our warmth, so the sun develops warmth by eating comets into its good stomach. Now, gentlemen, that means: When the comets have already been completely fragmented and are falling down, they are indeed hard iron cores, but only the iron falls down. Man also has iron in his blood. If a man were to dissolve somewhere and only the iron were to fall down, people would probably say: There is something up there that has been glowing, and it is made of iron. Because the meteorites into which comets disintegrate consist of iron, it is said that comets are made of iron. But that is nonsense, just as it would be nonsense to believe that a person is made of iron because they have iron in their blood and you would find a very small lump of iron there. That is just how meteorites are found; they are disintegrated comets. Comets are something quite different; comets are alive! And the sun is alive too, it has a stomach, and not only eats comets but feeds itself just as we do. There is iron in our stomachs too. When you eat spinach, you don't realize that it contains a lot of iron, in general, of course. Nevertheless, it is good to advise people with anemia to eat a lot of spinach, because it helps their blood absorb iron much better than if you simply put iron into their stomachs, which usually passes through the intestines. If the comets were only made of iron and fell into the sun, you should just see how it all comes out again! You would see a completely different process. You would probably have to build a giant toilet in space if that were the case! Of course, the situation is quite different. Comets are only made up of a small percentage of iron; but the sun eats them. Now think back to the time when the Earth itself once had the Sun inside it. Then the Sun did the same as it does now, alone; then it also devoured comets. And now you have the reason why this giant head, which is the Earth, was able to live: because the Sun provided its nourishment. As long as the Sun was with the Earth, the Earth fed from the Universe through the Sun, just as we now feed from the Earth through our nourishment system. So it was already taken care of that the earth, when the sun was still with her, could feed herself. Of course, you have to imagine that the sun is much bigger than the earth, and that therefore the sun, while it was inside the earth, was actually not inside the earth, but the earth was inside the sun. So you have to imagine it like this (see diagram $. 176), that at that time the sun was here, the earth was inside it and inside the earth, in turn, was the moon. So: sun, in the sun the earth and in the earth the moon. In a sense, it was the other way around than with humans. But with humans it only appears that they have a small stomach; the small stomach alone could not do much. The small stomach that man has – we will talk about this later – is related to the outside world everywhere. Actually, man is inside the earth, just as the earth was once inside the sun. And the actual earth's stomach was then the center of the sun. If that is the sun (see drawing), that is the earth, then the stomach was here (in the middle), and the sun just pulled these comets in from everywhere and then handed them over to the stomach, so that the digestion of the earth did happen inside the earth after all.  Now you can say again: This is contradicted by the fact that the human head does not digest itself. — That is quite right. But history has also changed. The human head does digest a little, after all. You see, I have described to you: When we eat food, it first comes to the tongue, to the palate. There they are first mixed with saliva containing ptyalin, and then they go down the gullet. But not all food goes down the gullet, for basically the human being is a column of water — everything is soft, only the solid parts are stored away — so that some of the food is absorbed in the mouth in the head. Direct nourishment goes from the palate into the head. That is how it is. You can see that things are not as crude as one usually believes, you can see that simply by comparing. You cannot expose a human egg to the air to hatch it externally. You can do that with a bird's egg. It is exposed to the air and first hatched on the outside. It is the same, of course, with the human head, in a similar way. The human head today could not nourish itself from the little nourishment it gets from the palate. But the earth was organized differently. It had a stomach within it, which was also a mouth, and it nourished itself entirely from this mouth. So we can say: As long as the sun was connected to the earth, this huge being had the possibility to nourish itself from the universe. But now I have told you: if you study the earth today, it is like a dead human head. Yes, a dead human head, but it must have lived once. So the earth must have lived once. It nourished itself through the sun.  Now, gentlemen, I will tell you something else. You see, if you look at the human germ in the womb at a certain time, that is, after fertilization, I mean two, three, four weeks after fertilization, this human germ looks extraordinarily interesting. First of all, in the mother's body, all around the mother's body, which is called the uterus, there is a membrane that has many blood vessels. And the blood vessels that are inside the mother's body are not there, of course, when a child is not being carried. These blood vessels are connected to the other blood vessels that the mother has. They go into the blood vessels everywhere. So the mother has connected this sphere to her own blood system (see drawing) and while the blood usually circulates in the body, the blood also flows into this sphere, only into the outer sphere. Now, gentlemen, inside this sphere you will find all the organs. For example, there is an organ that looks like a sack, and next to it there is another one that is a smaller sack. These blood vessels also continue into these sacks, which are not there at all when the mother is not carrying a child, because the whole sphere is then missing; these veins also continue into it. So we can say: These veins go in everywhere and everything I have drawn for you so far is there when the child develops in the first few weeks; it is there and the child hangs on to it very small, tiny, here. It hangs on to it very tiny! And strangely enough, if I were to draw you a large picture of the child now, as it is in the near future, I would have to draw it like this: the child is almost just a head, with the rest of it tiny. You can see that I have drawn two little stumps like that, which will later become the arms. The legs are almost non-existent. But instead, these two pockets that I have drawn sit on the child, and the blood vessels go into these two pockets. And these blood vessels bring nourishment, and the head is nourished. A stomach is not there yet, and neither is a heart. The child does not have its own blood circulation in the first few weeks. The child is just a head. And that grows and grows gradually so that it becomes human-like in the second or third month, that the other organs are added. But the child is still nourished from the outside, from that which is there as pockets. And then food is stored all around (it is drawn). But blood is supplied. The child cannot breathe yet, it only gets air indirectly through the mother. The child is actually a human head, and the other organs are not yet of much use to it. It cannot do anything with the lungs. It cannot do anything with the stomach. It cannot eat yet; so it must get all its nourishment only in such a way that its head is nourished. It cannot breathe yet. It does not yet have a nose either. The organs are developing, but it cannot use them yet. So the child in the mother's womb is a head; only everything is soft. The later brain is terribly soft in here, very soft and terribly alive, very much alive. And if you could take a giant microscope and look straight at a child's head, which for all I care is from the second or third week after fertilization, it would look quite similar to what I told you about the earth as it once was, when the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs and so on waddled around. It would look very similar, only different in size. So that one can say: Where can we find a picture of the Earth as it once was, today? In the human head, when the human head is still unborn and exists as a germ. This human head is namely a clear image of the Earth. And everything that needs to be there, these pockets on the body, what is around it, is thrown off as the so-called afterbirth after it has become very brittle, and the person remains, is born. So from what is thrown off as the afterbirth, you actually get the nourishment as a child in the womb – the afterbirth consists of the shredded blood vessels. These so-called allantois and amnion – these shredded organs – are extremely important to us while we are in our mother's womb, because they replace the stomach and respiratory organs. But when we no longer need them, when we are born, can breathe and eat for ourselves, they are thrown off as afterbirth. Now, gentlemen, when you look at something like the one I have drawn for you, all you have to do is imagine: There would be the universe, here would be the Earth, and in there the human head and all around, very fine, the sun (see drawing $. 177). And now comes birth, that is, what was once there ceases. The sun and the moon fly out, and the birth of the Earth is there. The Earth must help itself. There are two things that can be described. First of all, I could describe to you the earth as it once looked like – there were ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and so on. But now I could just as easily describe the human germ. Everything is smaller, but I would have to say the same thing. So today you could say: the earth was once the germ of a giant human. It is extremely interesting that in earlier times people knew more than later people in a remarkable way - we will talk about that later. The later people have mostly learned from the misunderstood Hebrew document, from the misunderstood Old Testament, and they imagined, not true: there was the earth and somewhere the paradise, and there is the finished Adam in the paradise as a little nipper. This idea that people have formed from the misunderstood Old Testament is about as accurate as if someone today were to imagine: Man does not come from the little thing that is there from the allantois and amnion sacs, from this skin and so on - man does not come from that, but all that is a thing in itself; but in the mother's womb there is a tiny flea, and from this little flea comes man. That's about it when you imagine: The Earth was there, Adam and Eve lived on it like fleas, and afterwards the human race. This is precisely what has arisen from a misunderstanding of the Old Testament, whereas those who knew something in ancient times did not speak of Adam, but of Adam Kadmon. And Adam Kadmon is something other than Adam. He is this giant head that the Earth once was. And that is a natural conception. This Adam Kadmon only became an earth flea when people could no longer imagine that a human head could become as large as the earth, when they no longer believed in it, and so they formed the abnormal conception, as if it were there for fun, that the whole nine months in the mother's body go by, and that the human being is born from this motherly sphere. In reality, we have to imagine that man was once the whole earth – the whole earth. And the Earth was much more alive. But, gentlemen, it is no different; you see, if I draw you the Earth today, it is a dead being, just as the human head is dying, and if we go back to this human head, which is in the mother's womb, it is alive through and through. It is as the Earth once was. And the Earth died today. But once it was alive through and through. You see, if people could hold everything that science provides together, they would come up with many things. Science is all right, but the people who administer today's science cannot do much with science. If someone looks at the earth's surface today, they have to say: It's like a dead human head. We are actually walking on a dead body that must have lived once. I have told you that; but I will also tell you everything that follows from it. Now, during my youth in Vienna, there was a very famous geologist, that is, a student of the earth. He wrote a great book: “The Face of the Earth.” It says that today, when we walk over the soil of Bohemia or Westphalia, we walk over dead things. That was once alive. - Science already suspects the details, but it cannot put the things together. What I am telling you does not contradict science anywhere. You can find confirmation of it everywhere if you follow the scientific evidence. But the scientists themselves cannot get out of it, which follows from the facts. So we really come to say: the Earth was once a giant human. That's what it was. And it died, and today we walk around on the dead Earth. Now, you see, there are important questions left over, two important questions raised by Mr. Burle's question. One is this: if we go back, we see that the Earth was a giant. Where did the animals come from? And the second question is: the Earth was a giant. How did it come about that man is now such a small flea on the Earth? How did it come about that he became so small? These two questions are indeed important questions. The first one is actually not that difficult to answer; you just have to answer it not out of all kinds of fantastic gimmicks, but you have to answer it out of the facts. Gentlemen, what do you think would happen if a woman died during pregnancy, while the story inside still looks like I have drawn it on the board, and you dissect out the ball that contains the things that fall away with the afterbirth and the embryo that would later become a human being is inside, let us assume that we take all of this out and do not put it in alcohol, in which it would be preserved, but instead we leave it lying around somewhere, especially where it is damp, and we go back to it after some time. What do you think we would see? Yes, gentlemen, if we were to go there again after some time and then start cutting it up, all sorts of creatures would run out; all sorts of little critters would run out. The entire human head, which was alive in the mother's womb, dies. And as it dies - we only need to cut it open to see it - all sorts of creatures run out.Yes, gentlemen, just imagine that the Earth was once a human head like this in outer space and died. Are you surprised that all kinds of creatures came out of it? They still do today. If you take that into consideration, you have the origin of animals. You can still observe that today. That is the one question. We will talk more about how the individual animal forms came about. But in principle, you have to assume that the animals must be there. I can only touch on this question today; I will answer it in detail later. Now the other question remains: Why is man such a little shrimp today? Well, there you have to take everything you can know. First, you can ask: Yes, but once a human being lived in space, who died and is now Earth. Did he not give birth? Did he not reproduce? — There is no need to go into this question any further; if it did multiply, then the others in space were called to do so at that time. So we need not be interested until a certain point of multiplication occurs.  Yes, gentlemen, if you still follow how a small cell multiplies today, it is like this at first (see drawing), then it is like this, then two come from it. Then each becomes two; that's already four. And so the whole human body is built up, so that in the end it consists of nothing but small individual critters living in the blood and dead in the head, all coming from a single cell. Thus, from a part of the original earth, just as today man is not only born out of a whole human being, but out of a part of a human being - today's earth came into being. The only question is: why can't they get out anymore? Because the Earth is no longer connected to the universe in the same way as it was when the Sun was inside it. Now all these beings remain inside. They were illuminated from the outside by the Sun when the Sun went out, whereas before it was inside. — You have to take everything you can know. Gentlemen, but perhaps you know that dogs, which generally speaking are a certain size, below which they do not go, but can be bred to be so small that they are sometimes almost no larger than large rats. If you give the dogs alcohol to drink, for example, they stay small – it depends on what affects the being and how big it becomes –; however, these dogs become terribly nervous. It was really the case – even if the whole world was not full of alcohol – that the effects of the substances had become quite different when the sun had left the earth. When it was still in the earth, there was a completely different effect than later, when the sun was out. And while man was at first as big as the earth itself, he became small through this huge effect. But that was fortunate for him, because when he was still as big as the earth, all the others who were born had to fly out into space. We will hear later what happened to them. Now they could stay inside the earth because they can walk around on the earth together. And now, instead of one person, the human race came into being because people remained small. Yes, gentlemen, it is true: we all descend from one man! That is, after all, understandable, isn't it. But this one man was not a little earth flea, as people are now, but he was the earth itself. When the sun came out, the earth died on one side, and the animals crept out, as they still do when something dies. And on the other side, the forces remained. Only now they were not stimulated from within by the sun, but from without, and man became small and could become many people.  So the fact that the sun works from the outside makes people small. You can easily understand that. Just imagine that the Earth is this small (I will draw the Earth very small now) and in the past the Sun was where the Earth was inside, so all the forces radiated out from there, and when the Earth moved, the Sun always moved with it; they were one and the same (see illustration on the left). Now that the sun is outside, the story is like this: there is the sun and there is the earth, which goes around the sun. When the earth is there, it receives these rays; when it is there, it receives those rays (drawing on the right). They only ever see a small section of rays on plate 9. When the sun is outside, the earth receives only a few rays. When the sun was still inside the earth, the whole effect of the sun still came from within. No wonder that when the sun orbits in this way, it can illuminate a person at every single point on the earth, whereas before, when it was inside and had to radiate from the center, it could only illuminate one person. When the sun began to work from the periphery, it reduced the size of the human being. It is really interesting that not only the Asian scholars, when the Old Testament had long been misunderstood and interpreted as it was later interpreted, still spoke of the Adam Kadmon, who is actually a human being who is the whole earth, but the ancestors of the present-day Central European people, who are everywhere, in Switzerland, in Germany, they had a legend that said: The Earth was once a giant human, the giant Ymir. And the Earth was fertilized. So they talked about the earth in the same way that we have to talk about a human being today. And of course this was no longer understood later on, because the place of these indeed pictorial, correct images from legends – they are terribly true – because the place of these true images was taken by the false Latin interpretation of the Old Testament. So the ancient Germans here in Europe – it was figurative, as if they had dreamt, but the dream was much more correct than later, when the Old Testament was misunderstood and instead of speaking of the whole earth, of the Adam Kadmon, one spoke of the little Adam – still had an old, albeit merely dream-like, figurative science. Yes, you get a huge respect for what has been eradicated, old, but only dream-like pictorial science. But it was there, and it has been eradicated. It does not need to be surprised. In a certain time this general extermination just came. And if I were to tell you what once existed, for example, in Asia Minor, in the Near East, in North Africa, in Southern Europe, in Greece, Italy – yes, gentlemen, in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd century, when Christianity already existed, you could find strange statues everywhere in Asia or Africa when you walked in the fields; they were everywhere. And in these statues, people who could not yet read or write expressed what it once was like on Earth. From these statues one could have studied what it once was like on Earth. It was in the form, as expressed in the sculpture, that the Earth was once a living being. And then people just got this rage, this anger, and in a short time everything that was present in such statues was simply taken away. A huge amount was destroyed, from which a huge amount could have been taken. What is still found today of ancient monuments is the least important, because in the first centuries, people knew well which was the more important. That was shaved off. So it is true that humanity once had wonderful knowledge; but they just dreamt it, these people. And you see, it is an extraordinarily interesting fact that people once actually dreamt on Earth instead of reflecting, as they have to do today. They actually did it more at night than during the day. Because everything you learn from the older wisdom of people is interspersed with the fact that you can see that these people observed a lot at night. The shepherds in the fields observed a lot at night. And this old wisdom was present among the Germans, among the Germanic peoples, in that they spoke of a giant human. And later there was still a giant human. Man really did not suddenly become smaller. And in the end he became just as people are now. From this point, gentlemen, we will continue our discussion when I am able to visit you again. Such a question always provides the stimulus to talk about a great deal. I must now travel to Germany again, to Stuttgart. After that, we can continue our discussion. In the meantime, prepare some very nice questions. I will then tell you when the next hour will be.  |
| 213. Human Questions and World Answers: Thirteenth Lecture
22 Jul 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| Even if this ancient knowledge was not the fully conscious knowledge that we are striving for today through anthroposophy, for example, there was still a kind of dream-like but clairvoyant knowledge in those ancient times, at least up to the Mystery of Golgotha. And those people who were recognized as knowing something about the world had no doubt at all that when they looked at a plant blossom, they had to relate it to some configurations in the starry sky. |
| If you do not believe this, then study the geography of moles or earthworms from a spiritual scientific point of view. This is a dream-like geography, but it is magnificent; it is just not suited to man. And if you were to study the geography of plants! The plant does not even dream in its etheric body, but what can be discovered in the etheric body is truly more magnificent than what can be learned at a faculty today. |
| 213. Human Questions and World Answers: Thirteenth Lecture
22 Jul 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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Today I would like to add a somewhat more extensive consideration about cosmic observation to our reflections. We, as human beings, must be thoroughly aware that we live on earth in the time that passes between birth and death, and that we consider everything that makes an impression on us, in the narrower and broader sense, with our senses and also with our intellect, but only from the point of view of our earthly residence. We often become aware of how much we are bound to this earthly abode by our external physical body. We learn already in school that a human being can only live if he breathes the air that surrounds him and that consists of a certain mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. Man is completely dependent on this air for his vital functions. We only need to consider how different our physical life would be if, for example, there were more oxygen in the air around us than there actually is. Let us assume that there were more oxygen in the air, then we would live faster, that is, we would have a much shorter lifespan on earth calculated by years. Time would be compressed, so to speak, and our lifespan would have to be shorter. This is basically just a very rough approximation. We can imagine that our entire human organism would be different if every single thing in our environment that has an influence on us were to be changed just a little. Such a consideration is indeed often made today. People are becoming aware of their physical dependence on their environment. However, at most one is only very clearly aware in the abstract that man also has a soul-spiritual being, and basically one never has such precise ideas about this spiritual-soul being as one has about the physical-bodily being. The physical-corporal aspect of our organization is so well known that one can say how differently abundant oxygen in the air would affect a person. Regarding the spiritual-soul being, one does not think so much, thoughts that would go something like this: If this spiritual-soul being were different from what it is, could it then be on earth between birth and death? Just as our body is adapted to the amount of oxygen in the air, and how many other things in our body are adapted to the conditions that are just near the earth's surface, so too is our soul and spirit perfectly adapted between birth and death to what is immediately at the earth's surface. And when one becomes fully aware of this, then one will also be able to say: Just as the human being could not live as an earthly human being out there, just a few miles from the earth's surface, so too would the human soul, with its thinking, feeling and willing, not be able to live in a different way in other than earthly conditions, just as it lives in the earth's environment. Elsewhere, in a different position to the earth, it would have to be organized differently again as a spiritual-mental being. Just as the human body would derive no benefit from its lungs, once they were organized, if they were miles away from the earth's surface, so the human soul, with its thinking, feeling and willing, as it develops in earthly life, would be unable to function under other than earthly conditions. One could not get any clear idea of these things at all if it were not possible for those people who seek an inner soul development to come to different soul experiences than are the case in ordinary thinking, feeling and willing. You all know from the descriptions in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' that one can arrive at quite different soul moods and dispositions, that one can arrive at a quite different soul content. One can arrive at a soul content that not only has ordinary thinking but also imagination, that lives in pictures instead of thoughts. One can go further and arrive at inspiration. Just as our lungs, with the air, perform their inhalation in relation to the physicality of the air, so too can one, so to speak, inspire and breathe in the spiritual and soul substance of the spiritual and soul substance spread throughout the world. And just as the lungs, when they inhale oxygen, draw their life from this oxygen, as the whole human body draws its life from this oxygen, so too the human soul draws its life from the inspirations that take place when such higher knowledge is acquired. And it is the same with the further level of knowledge, with intuition. Then the soul rises to a completely different inner content. Then it experiences something essentially different. But this different experience is connected, as you know, with what can be called a soul-like going out of the body. We no longer feel so within our body when we ascend to imagination, inspiration and intuition as we feel when we are in ordinary earthly life. It is then with the spiritual-soul being just as if, for example, the lungs were transformed into an organ that breathes light instead of air. Then it could indeed live a few miles outside the earthly with the organism to which the lungs belong. Now, in the physical that is not possible at first, at least not for a human being, but it is possible for the spiritual and soul in us when we leave our body and then experience imagination, inspiration and intuition in our soul, we actually leave the earthly point of view, we already come to the point of view that we had before we descended into a physical body. We come through the fact that we ascend to imagination, inspiration and intuition, actually from an earthly view of the world to a cosmic view of the world. We are just simply no longer on earth, but we look at the earthly from a different point of view.  This is not of great significance when it comes to observing human souls. However, it is of great significance when it comes to getting to know the spiritual in the cosmos itself. I will make this clear to you in a schematic drawing. Imagine that here is the earth, the human being on earth. Man sees the elements in his earthly surroundings. We can call them solid, liquid and gaseous. He perceives the fiery, the warm. But then what immediately belongs to the earth's surface ceases. By perceiving the fiery, the warm, man already rises to the perception of the earth's surroundings. He enters the light-filled realm, into that which we call the light ether. It is indeed our special characteristic that we can perceive the light ether through our looking, our seeing. But when imaginative perception occurs in a person, then he does not feel standing here on earth and letting his gaze wander out into the light ether, but then he actually feels as if he were perceiving and looking at the whole from the outside (drawing, red). Particularly in relation to what I am discussing here, it is possible to speak quite definitely about how this happens. If you are standing on the earth and let your gaze wander freely into the cosmos, then by day you are looking into the light everywhere. By night you look up at the starry sky. There you make use, if I may say so, of the perceiving power of your eye. But the power of will is also constantly directed at this perceiving power of your eye. You actually use this power of will in earthly seeing only for the adjustment of the eye. But when you ascend to imaginative cognition, this willpower is trained more and more, especially for the individual senses. You feel how you, as it were, step out into space through your eyes and increasingly come to look at the cosmos from the outside.  You do not have to believe that what I am describing here consists of your eye becoming huge, and then growing all the way over, and that you then look at the cosmos from the outside as you now look at the cosmos from the inside. You do not achieve this through the power of perception, but precisely through the will becoming clairvoyant. It is an experience in which the will expands, but in which you yourself are present. In this case you also look at the stars from the outside, as a person, when he is in the spiritual world as a soul, also looks at the stars from the outside, from where there are no more stars, not from the etheric region, but from the astral region, from which one can say that there is still space, and from which one can also say that there is no more space. It does not make much sense to speak of what I have just indicated as if there were still space. But one feels as if one had space within oneself. But then you do not see any stars. You know you are looking at the stars, but you do not see any stars, you see images. You actually see images everywhere within the stellar space. It suddenly becomes clear to you why in the old days, when people depicted spheres, they didn't just paint stars, but pictures.  But now imagine looking through these pictures. Then you become aware that forces radiate down to Earth from all these pictures; only that these forces radiate together. If you look at a radiant star from here, from the Earth, you have the feeling that the rays diverge. If you look at it from outside, you have the feeling that the rays, the light effects that emanate from the pictures, are not only light effects but also power effects, and that they go together. These power effects go as far as the earth. And what do they do there? Yes, you see, they form the shape of the plants, for example. And the one who looks imaginatively says: the lily is a plant form on earth that was created in this form and shape by this group of stars. Another, a tulip shape, was created by another group of stars.  And so you see what is on earth as plant cover (green), as if it were really painted by the starry sky. It is actually the case that the form of the plant body is determined, created, by the cosmos. And now you can easily understand: if you look further in, if you see the fixed stars out there, then closer to the earth you see the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and so on. They are moving. The fixed stars show you the constellations at rest, which give the plants their shape. But the moving planets send down forces of movement. It is these that the plants first draw out of the root, then make them grow higher and higher, and so on. Just as the shape of the plants is formed from the fixed starry sky, so the movement is formed from the movement of the celestial bodies closer to the earth. Only what takes place in the plant itself, this metabolism, that, for example, the plant absorbs carbonic acid, assimilates it, as they say, and secretes the carbon, so that it forms its carbon body, that is from the forces of the earth itself. We can therefore say: When we look at the plant in its entirety, its form is from the starry sky, its growth is from the planetary movement, and its metabolism is from the earth. These are things that are regarded as foolishness by those who call themselves true scientific minds today, but they are the very reality. For he who regards the plant in its growth and form as it is done today, resembles one — I must here use a simile that I have often applied — who looks at a magnetic needle that points with one side to the north, with the other side to the south, and who now says: This is due to the magnetic needle, that one point points to the north, the other to the south. It is not due to the magnetic needle, but natural science naturally assumes that the whole earth is a great magnet, that it attracts the one point to the north and the other to the south. In natural science, the whole earth is used to explain the direction of the magnetic needle. But in the same way, if you want to explain the whole form of the plant, you have to use the whole universe. The plant is formed out of the whole universe. It is simply an awful absurdity that the same people who, for example, use the whole earth to explain the direction of the magnetic needle, want to explain the plant only in terms of its cells and their forces. Just as the magnet needle can only be understood when it is placed in the whole magnetic context of the earth, so can plants only be understood when they are placed in the whole cosmic context, when one comes to say: Here I am walking across a region, let us say, of central Europe; for this central Europe, during the time of flower growth, these constellations have a particular significance; hence the plants of this area grow here, because the heavens cause certain plants to grow on the earth in a particular area. If we wish to observe plants from this point of view, if we go as far as the form, then we must actually take the whole Cosmos to help us. With the animals we need go only as far as the constellations of the zodiac. I have already spoken about this. The stars outside the zodiac have no influence on animals. The animal has thus already become more independent, no longer depends in its organic formation on the whole cosmos, but only on what is in and under the zodiac. Man has become even more independent, because only the planets influence him, not in so far as he is a soul, but in so far as he is a physical organism. Only where it passes over into the moral, into the soul, must we go beyond the planetary influence, as was done in the older, really good views of astrology, not in today's lay and amateurish ones, which are still behind. But from all this you can see that one must say, in a certain way, but always only to the extent that one takes the external into account: this applies to the plant. For the animal, the form is connected with the zodiac, the growth with the planetary movement and the metabolism with the earth. If we go up to the human being, then we can no longer ascribe his form to any constellation, but only to the whole universe as such; we can only say: the sphere; not to the individual constellations, but to the whole sphere. I have therefore said on one occasion – and it has already been printed – that in a certain sense the human brain is a reflection of the whole starry sky, not of a single group of stars. Thus, the sphere for form. For growth, in a certain sense, planetary motion too, but now the entire planetary motion, not individual planets, as it is for the plant, for the animal; and for metabolism, again, the earth.
What was the progress in the development of knowledge? Basically, until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, no one who came into consideration with regard to knowledge doubted the things I have just discussed. Even if this ancient knowledge was not the fully conscious knowledge that we are striving for today through anthroposophy, for example, there was still a kind of dream-like but clairvoyant knowledge in those ancient times, at least up to the Mystery of Golgotha. And those people who were recognized as knowing something about the world had no doubt at all that when they looked at a plant blossom, they had to relate it to some configurations in the starry sky. And so with other things. Then this knowledge increasingly disappeared during the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha. After the great eradication of ancient knowledge - I have often described this eradication - only those insights remained that were handed down into the Middle Ages, were often distorted, and are now recorded in old books and are still enjoyed by some people who do not want to take refuge in the new knowledge but always want to look back to the old. The realization that we are now consciously embracing, the cosmic realization of everything that appears here on our earth as a form, this cosmic realization that we are striving for today, was not present in conscious clairvoyance, but it was present in a certain way. It dawned on people more and more. And then, after man had devoted himself for some time to the artistic shaping of the word in drama, to the thought in dialectics, to the sound and word connection in rhetoric, to the contemplation of number in arithmetic, to the contemplation of form in geometry, after man had devoted himself to this artistic training of the human soul forces for several centuries, the world view emerged that no longer searches out there in the universe, that no longer asks: What is out there that a lily blossom or a tulip blossom can arise on earth? Instead, a worldview emerged that only calculates the present position of the stars, the size of the stars, which only mathematics can explain, which at most accepts mechanics and physics as astrophysics when the stellar world, when the extraterrestrial comes into consideration. If there is the earth here and a mole in the earth here, the mole has a certain view of the world. But there is not much of the sun in this world view. In more recent times, people have lost the opportunity to look up from the lily blossom, from the tulip blossom into the starry sky, just as the mole does not have the opportunity to look up beyond the darkness of the earth. And there, human beings are stuck in the earth, water, air and fire. At most, they look out into the light like an earthworm does when it comes out during a rain shower and perhaps perceives something of the scant light out there. With regard to the spiritual world, humanity has gradually become entangled in a kind of mole existence. For only what man can find in his own inner being, the mathematical connections, he seeks outside in the cosmos; but he does not seek the concrete and spiritually real outside in the cosmos. One could say that the experience of freedom could only come to man through leading this mole-like existence for a while, through looking at the lily and no longer knowing that a picture of heaven is reflected in the lily; through looking at the tulip and no longer knowing that a picture of heaven is reflected in the tulip. In this way he has turned his powers more inward, and has attained the experience of freedom. But today we have reached the point where we must again grasp the spiritual universe in the eye of our soul. That which for centuries appeared only as the mathematical, mechanical structure of space must again appear to the soul's eye as a spiritualized cosmos. One can truly say: For centuries, humanity in the civilized world has led a spiritual life of privation, albeit for the purpose of cultivating human freedom; for everything that is experienced in the progress of humanity has meaning. But one must see through this meaning, one must not stop at one stage of development, but one must go along with the development and must be clear today: Now that humanity has developed the experience of freedom in its earthly mole-like existence, it must turn again to the contemplation of the spiritual, the spiritual world, not only the mathematical world. But try to imagine vividly what I am dealing with now. It is really as if it had become dark in the soul in relation to the first four centuries after Christ, as if people had previously looked out and seen the light of the Spirit in the cosmos, figuratively speaking. There was just enough time, because this vision of the soul lasted for another four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, even if it became increasingly duller and duller, for the event of Golgotha, the Christ event, to still be viewed spiritually in the first centuries. Only the literature that refers to this spiritual view of the Christ event has also been eradicated. After all, there is nothing of this literature left except what the opponents wrote. Man faces the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that, apart from the simple, seemingly simple accounts of the Gospels, he does not have the great accounts that the spiritualists of the first four centuries still gave. He has only the accounts of the opponents. We have about as much of the greatest portrayals of the mystery of Golgotha as posterity would have of anthroposophy if it only read the writings of Kal/ly. I think one would not get a very adequate picture. You always have to bear in mind how these first four centuries worked to eradicate precisely the most intense insights that were still available when one looked out into the cosmos and knew that the Christ came to earth from a spiritual cosmos. One had to understand the spiritual cosmos in order to be able to understand how the Christ came to earth from the spiritual world and embodied himself in a human being. Then nothing remained, because humanity immersed itself only in the earthly, as the memories of the Mystery of Golgotha. The memories were passed down from generation to generation. And what was passed down as a memory was called a revelation, and it was sought to comprehend it with the intellectualism that was emerging more and more. What is it then that is our task today in the face of these things? It is our task to learn to look out into the universe again and to be able to see spirit everywhere, not just by immersing ourselves in ourselves and wanting to experience the spiritual there, but by being able to experience the spirit in all the forms of the cosmos outside of us. That is our right, that must happen again. We must again penetrate into the luminous spirit of the whole cosmos, then we will also see the Mystery of Golgotha in a new light. I have shown you how, in the last third of the nineteenth century, this merely confessional adherence to the Mystery of Golgotha was actually no longer present. I have told you that a spirit like Kar} Julius Schröer said as early as the beginning of the seventies: The religious issues are actually an anachronism. He believed that people are already striving for something completely different, for a different kind of piety, for a different kind of connection with the spiritual world. But it has essentially taken these last fifty years for only weak attempts to be made, such as the one I mentioned in Werfel's “Mirror Man.” But now one sees that individual people are drawn to rediscover their connection with the spiritual world. But do not think that this connection with the spiritual world can be easily found. It cannot be easily found for the reason that today what is called science has acquired terrible authority, and is practised everywhere as official science. But it has emerged from these secret activities. I do not mean this in a derogatory sense. Please do not think that I am criticizing the times by speaking of 'moles'. I am just trying to characterize. I really do not want to say anything derogatory, because basically, since the 15th century, great things have been achieved by these cosmic moles, who are called human beings. If you do not believe this, then study the geography of moles or earthworms from a spiritual scientific point of view. This is a dream-like geography, but it is magnificent; it is just not suited to man. And if you were to study the geography of plants! The plant does not even dream in its etheric body, but what can be discovered in the etheric body is truly more magnificent than what can be learned at a faculty today. So, I do not mean any disrespect when I say: a mole existence, because I value it highly. But the world is evolving, and now is the time for us to reconnect with spiritual perception, with spiritual insight. People cannot continue to live without immersing themselves in this spiritual insight. And now one must become quite clear how these things have actually worked in the last fifty years. And here I would again like to present a characteristic personality. Sometimes one can study personalities much more precisely than one can describe more impersonal and abstract, in terms of how things develop in relation to human cultures and their progress. In these past reflections, I have referred you to Brentano and Nietzsche in order to show you, by way of what human souls have gone through, how evolution actually was. Today I would like to show you something more from the other side, how a person has been understood by his fellow human beings. In the 1820s, on July 22, 1822, a certain Gregor Mendel was born (we are celebrating his 100th birthday today). I mentioned him the other day when I said that, while we were in Vienna, articles about Gregor Mendel appeared everywhere because his 100th birthday is approaching. This Gregor Mendel was born the son of a farmer in a Silesian village, studied with great difficulty and very good progress, and was ordained a priest in Moravia at the age of twenty-four. He thus became a Catholic priest. Gregor Mendel was an exceptionally good student, as they say, both as a grammar school student and even at the seminary. It was common practice in Austria at the time – it was in the forties or fifties of the last century – for particularly well-behaved, hard-working students to be given scholarships by their convents. They were then sent to university to be trained as secondary school teachers, because almost all positions in the grammar and secondary modern schools - I also mentioned this recently when I described our trip to Vienna - were filled by monks or priests. In Austria, priests taught at the schools that are called secondary schools here, up to and including university. He was sent to Vienna to study mathematics and the exact natural sciences. After three years of study, you then had to take the teaching examination at that time. Mendel registered for the teaching examination, apparently thinking that because he had always received such excellent grades, it would be just as easy to pass the examination. He failed the teacher training examination, had to repeat it, and failed again, so that he could not repeat it a third time; because if you fail twice in such an important matter, you cannot continue. Through all kinds of circumstances, as it once was in old Austria, a school principal somewhere in Moravia once said: Well, we don't have anyone else who has come through and gotten a good report card; but we need a teacher, so we'll just hire Gregor Mendel. And so he became a secondary school teacher for fifteen years. There is no denying that he nevertheless became one of those secondary school teachers who were sent to these higher schools as priests. But then he particularly indulged his love of science, conducting a large number of experiments on the way inheritance occurs, especially in plants. He collected plants, planted plants, those, let's say, that have a reddish flower, and those that have whitish flowers. Then he allowed those that had reddish flowers to fertilize those that had whitish flowers, and then he got plants with nothing but reddish flowers, which were daughter plants. But in the second generation it was different. There was a certain number of reddish flowers, whitish flowers, mottled flowers, and so on. In short, Gregor Mendel said to himself: I must seek the atoms, the actual atomistic in the plant world, in the organic world in general. Those who are familiar with the development of intellectual life know how much thought was given to inheritance in those days. There are an enormous number of inheritance theories. But Gregor Mendel did not pay much attention to these inheritance theories. Instead, he planted his pea plants and observed how inheritance takes place when he allows a white pea to be fertilized by a reddish one. He to see if he got a red, white or mottled pea, and in this way he determined over generations how, for example, the color is formed, how inheritance is formed at all under different conditions, proportions and the like in peas. Yesterday I described the time – it was in the 1960s – when all of this came about, which I have described, which worked in Herman Grimm's “Unüberwindlichen Mächten”, in Paul Heyses “Kinder der Welt”, in Du Bois-Reymonds “Grenzen des Naturerkennens” and so on from the most diverse sides. In Mendel's case, it worked in such a way that he established the conditions of inheritance. The examiners at the two teaching exams were at least concerned enough about Gregor Mendel to fail him twice, and to give him the certificate: Completely unsuitable to teach any science to high school or secondary school students! — The other people, the later ones, were no longer concerned about Gregor Mendel at all. The books he wrote about the laws of inheritance are pretty much gathering dust in the libraries. Nobody cared about them anymore. But for about twenty or twenty-five years, you can find that people cared more and more about Gregor Mendel. They dug up his laws of inheritance. Because now we are facing a very special phase of science. In the epoch in which Herman Grimm wanted to show how human intellect cannot overcome class prejudices because it is not powerful, in the epoch in which Du Bois-Reymond pronounced his “Ignorabimus”, in which Paul Heyse wrote his “Children of the World”, thus in the epoch in which reason, intellect, has become increasingly powerless and sapless, but where there was nevertheless a tendency towards a new piety among non-denominational people, which has now lasted for fifty years. At the same time, efforts were being made everywhere to develop atomism to de-soul science, and Gregor Mendel also endeavored to discover botanical and zoological atomism. He tried to compose each plant according to its inheritance from red and white flowers, from large and small, from thick and thin flowers, to see how thick and thin, red and white flowers, once they are there, remain as unchanging as atoms remain unchanging. Back then, people said, for example: in carbonic acid we have coal and in hydrocarbon we have coal. Hydrocarbon is something completely different from carbonic acid, but in both there is coal. The atoms that are there as coal are the same in carbonic acid and in hydrocarbon. Mendel said: I have a red pea flower, and I have a white pea flower. Now the children that are born may be red. But now the children in turn have children, some of whom are red, some of whom are white, and some are mottled, speckled with red and white. And now it continues again: they have children, and among these there are again red, white and mottled ones, and so on. - Now we have the atomistic approach in relation to plants. If we look only at the color, red and white, then where the peas are red, only the white is hidden; it is also inside, only hidden. But with the further children, there it comes out again, just as the carbon is in the carbonic acid and in the hydrocarbon, in substances that are quite different from each other. That is the essential thing in the atoms, the carbon is here and is there; that is the same everywhere, the solid, the eternal atoms. The eternal atoms in plants, which are passed on by inheritance, are the colors, but also, for example, whether the plant is thick or thin, large or small; but the white is preserved, it is only sometimes hidden. Just as oxygen is present in water, so here the white is hidden in the red children and comes to light again when it has the opportunity. Gregor Mendel was truly a great man, because he sought out what was then considered appropriate for the time, atomism for the inanimate world, in the right place, for the plant world, in line with the thinking of his time. He also made very interesting observations about the animal world, although he failed his teaching exams twice. He did all that, but at the time, no one paid any attention. Then came the time when the discovery of radium and so on blew apart the atomism in the inanimate world. Recently, a rectorate speech was given in Berlin that seems to have dealt with this very nicely: you can't stick to the old atomism anymore. But people can't catch their breath quickly. Now they are losing their breath when they no longer have atomism. It no longer works in physics, and it doesn't really work in chemistry either. So, after Gregor Mendel had been gathering dust for a long time, his laws of inheritance were excavated, and today you can find everywhere that people are talking about Mendelism, that Mendelism is mentioned as something of the very first rank in the theory of inheritance, one hundred years after his birthday. The centenary of Gregor Mendel is now being celebrated in learned academies everywhere. It is an interesting life: the priest, who remained unnoticed during his lifetime and who failed his teaching exams twice, has nevertheless achieved something that a large number of academies around the world are celebrating as a very first intellectual accomplishment. In the case of Brentano, I have shown you the man from within, how he viewed the world, how he felt about the Vatican Council and the dogma of infallibility. In the case of Nietzsche, I have tried to show you something similar. In the case of Gregor Mendel, I wanted to show you more how others viewed him. Because it is, after all, interesting that the learned body twice failed him in his teaching exams, that he then remained completely unnoticed and now rules the world in terms of the so-called laws of inheritance. What is that? Basically, it is nothing more than the emergence of the last phase of intellectualism and, indeed, something else, which I would like to talk about tomorrow. But the emergence of intellectualism, the last gasps of intellectualism, which is so closely linked to atomism, can be seen in the relationship between the world and Gregor Mendel and also the world and Mendel today. I truly have no desire to take anything away from Gregor Mendel's fame. On the contrary, I have taken this opportunity today to introduce you to a truly great man, so that you will think of this great man here too. He is a great man. But it is precisely by studying the inner and outer destinies of great men that we can study the further development of humanity. It is not the small men, but the great ones, with whom one must study this, and Gregor Mendel is a great man, and you can be assured that I am more pleased that he is being celebrated today in all kinds of scientific academies than that I am pleased that he failed twice. You can believe that. But the fate of Gregor Mendel is extremely interesting. And I would like to say: this current clinging to atomism in the organic world is extremely characteristic of our time and actually belongs to all the phenomena that I wanted to describe to you in these days, which I examined yesterday from a different point of view and which I presented to you today from the point of view of Mendelism, for the centenary of Johann Gregor Mendel. |