The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Our Fifth Root-Race, the present Post-Atlantean humanity, was preceded by that of Atlantis, on the now submerged continent between Europe and America. The Atlanteans can in no way be compared with the human beings who today inhabit our Earth Globe. For even the remnants of that old race have learnt a variety of things from the later inhabitants of the Fifth Continent and we are therefore unable to reconstruct from them the conditions of that civilisation. At the beginning of the Atlantean civilisation there were no tools. By means of clairvoyant forces it was possible for the Atlantean to make the earth serve his needs. The preparation of metals for such uses only appeared towards the end of the Atlantean Epoch.

A small group was separated off from the population of Atlantis, just as now in the Theosophical Society a separation should once again take place. It was their task to carry over a new civilisation into the Fifth Root-Race. You would find the place where those who were chosen lived, a small colony, in present England and Ireland. At that time this was where the original Semites lived. They were the first people who were in a position to think with their intellect. All the ideas of the Atlanteans were still of the nature of pictures. The rounded shape of the front of the brow, the formation of the part of the brain on which thought depends, first appears with the population of the original Semites, who were in no way similar to the present Semitic race. This original Semitic people who, one can say, discovered thinking, journeyed through Europe into Asia and there founded a civilisation. They formed the Fifth Sub-Race of the Atlanteans. The seven Sub-races of the Atlantean RootRace were as follows: Firstly the Rmoahals, secondly the Tlavatlis, thirdly the original Toltecs, fourthly the original Turanians, fifthly the original Semites, sixthly the original Accadians, seventhly the original Mongolians.

The Fifth Root-Race therefore arose from the Fifth Sub-Race of the Atlanteans. When we look towards Asia we find there as, the First Sub-Race of the Fifth Root-Race, the Ancient Indian race, that people who later journeyed in a more Southern direction and there became the ancestors of the later Indians. The most essential characteristic of this ancestral race, who had travelled towards the north of India, was that it developed no real sense for material culture. It possessed spiritual vision of the highest order combined with a completely undeveloped sense for the material. The ancient Indians were turned away from the world; their souls were completely similar to the Atlanteans, in that they were able to develop a superlative, glorious picture world. Through the practise of Yoga, working from within outwards, they later evolved what today seems to us a learned conception of the world. Of this, what has been handed down as external tradition, only fragments remain. The Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita no longer give any real picture of the mighty conceptions of the Indians, but only echoes. In the Vedanta philosophy also there is only an abstract remainder of the original teaching of the Indians, which was handed down by word of mouth.

Think of the faculty which appeared in the later Kabbalistic teaching in a form which elaborated matters in minute detail with subtle intricacy, think of this faculty applied to lofty cosmic thoughts. When later the Jew was able to apply thought to such things in the Kabbalistic teachings, it followed that the later Jewish occult teaching was only a decadent reflection, an echo of that finely articulated thought system of the primeval Indians. And what the teaching of the Brahmans became is by no means only religion in the sense of later systems, but knowledge, poetry and religion in a single great whole. All this was, as it were the finest flower, the extracted essence of what had developed in the old Atlantean civilisation.

The Europeans also came over from Atlantis to Western and Central Europe and here there developed a quite different teaching. Groups of people settled who were not yet advanced enough to be chosen to found new civilisations, but yet possessed in germinal form what in India came to expression in so magnificent a way, but which here remained at a much earlier stage. What had its start in Europe moved ever further and further towards Asia. A common teaching formed its foundation, but in Europe this remained at a somewhat primitive level.

The Indian teaching was expressed in the Vedas. ‘Veda’ means the same as ‘Edda’, only the content of the Vedas is more finely developed than that which remained here in Europe in a more primitive form as the Edda, which was only written down at the end of the Middle Ages. We must realise that this great primal spiritual teaching underwent a certain modification brought about by the migrating peoples. Its original greatness consisted in grasping the mighty divine unity which was recognised by the spiritual vision of the (ancient) Indians. This was no longer so with the next, the (ancient) Persian Race. In the wisdom arising from this primeval Indian vision the concept of time was almost entirely absent. It was with the Second Sub-Race, the ancient Persian, that the concept of time made its appearance. Time, it is true, was recognised by the Indian but was more uniform; the concept of history, the progression from the imperfect to what is more perfected, was lacking. Thinking was governed by the idea that everything has emanated from divine perfection.

Persian thinking was governed by the concept of time. Zervan Akarana is one of the most important Divinities of the Persians and this is in fact Time. How did one arrive at the concept of time? Whoever seeks above all the primal unity of the Godhead, as in the case of the ancient Indians, must conceive it as the absolute Good. Evil, the imperfect in the world, was for the ancient Indian nothing but illusion; ‘illusion’ was a very important concept. These ancient people said: Nothing whatever exists in the world that is imperfect and evil. If you believe that something evil exists, you have not looked at the world in a way sufficiently free from illusion. Rust, for instance, which eats into iron, is elsewhere very beneficial: you must only consider where it is. When you look at a criminal through the veil of illusion, he will appear to you as such; if however you turn away from illusion you will realise that there is no such thing as evil.—This teaching is inwardly connected with a turning away from the world.

It was otherwise with the Second Sub-Race. There, with the earliest of the Persian peoples, the Good was given a particular place in the World-process, was regarded as the goal. It was said: The Good must be sought for. The world is good and evil, Ormuzd and Ahriman; and what conquers the evil is Zervan Akarana, Time. This is how good and evil came into the early Persian world-conception as the principle of evolution. The Zarathustran teaching rests on the placing of evil in the world, and on the time-concept. Man is placed into life in order to conquer evil. This conception is connected with the fact that the Second Sub-Race was not one that was estranged from the world, but worked within it. Active, productive in various branches of human work, attention directed to the outer world, concerned as to how someone could himself create good out of the world: this was the Second Sub-Race. With the Persians therefore a whole company of Gods makes it appearance; not characteristics of one God, but a plurality of Gods; because the world, if not regarded as illusion, but as reality, presents a plurality, a multiplicity. The Gods which were venerated there were more or less personal-spiritual Divinities.

The earliest initiates, who founded the ancient Indian teaching, were also the teachers of the Second Sub-Race, the ancient Persian Race. Here they adapted the whole teaching to a working people. They created that religion which was brought to fruition by the various Zarathustras.⁸²

A further initiation advanced towards the Near East: to Egypt, to the Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, these forefathers of the Arabs. There the Third Sub-Race was developed. This Third Sub-Race was such that it now sought to bring both directions—the inner nature of man and the outer world—into harmony with each other. Whether you look for the fundamental conception of this Third Sub-Race in Chaldea or Egypt, everywhere you will find a pronounced awareness of the connection between human work and the forces of Nature. This is an essential difference when compared with the Persian Race. In Persia you have two powers, the good and the evil, which do battle with one another. Now man tries to bring the different nature forces or beings into his service. What developed as Persian religion was mainly built up on human morality and industry. Now in the Third Sub-Race the consciousness developed that one does not master nature only by means of bodily strength and moral behaviour, but best of all through knowledge. In those lands where a skillful agriculture was pursued as in Egypt and Chaldea, there developed a co-ordination of heavenly-spiritual powers with what was carried out by human work. Knowledge of the meteorological environment and the heavenly bodies evolved there. Strength for work was sought for in the knowledge of Nature. So it came about that man directed his gaze to the stars, and astronomy was brought into connection with humanity on the Earth. Man's origin was sought for in the stars. Thus, in this sense we have for the first time to do with science. Now in the Third Sub-Race, instead of inner perception, we have practical knowledge. So we hear of great initiates who taught geometry, the practice of surveying, technical skills. The fructification of human activity with cosmic wisdom brought down from the spiritual world makes its appearance in the Third Sub-Race. With this, something was given which translated the whole conception of human life into a kind of heavenly science. With the different peoples this found expression in various ways. In the case of the Egyptians, Osiris, Isis and Horus were conceived of as representatives of astronomical phenomena.

Three different Sub-Races developed in Asia. Taking their start from Atlantis, a colony led by initiates traveled over to Asia. A special result of this was the ancient Indian civilisation, a second, the ancient Persian; the third result was the Egyptian-Chaldean civilisation: they all had a common initiation-source. In Europe however groups always remained behind which fell away from what culminated with such magnificence in the three great civilisations. These separate cultural streams were distributed in Europe in the most varied way. In Europe too there were initiates who formed Mystery Schools towards the end of the period of which we are speaking: they were called Druids: Drys means Oak. The strong oak was the symbol of the early European priest-teachers, for what dominated the peoples in the North was the thought that their old form of culture would necessarily have to decline. There the Twilight of the Gods was taught and the future of Christianity came to magnificent expression through these Northern prophets in what later became the Siegfried Saga.^83a This may be compared with the Achilles Saga.^83b

Achilles is invulnerable in his whole body with the exception of the heel, Siegfried with the exception of the spot between the shoulders. To be invulnerable in such a way signifies to have been initiated. In Achilles you have the initiate of the Fourth Sub-Race which lies on the ascending curve of man's cultural development: therefore all the upper parts of Achilles are invulnerable; only the heel the lower nature is vulnerable, just as Hephaistos is lame. The German Siegfried was also an initiate of the Fourth Sub-Race, but vulnerable between the shoulder blades. This is his vulnerable spot, first made invulnerable by the One who bore the cross. With Siegfried the Gods reach their downfall, the Northern Gods approach their end (Twilight of the Gods). This gives the Northern saga its tragic note, for it not only points to the past, but to the Twilight of the Gods, to the time which is to come. The Druids gave to man the teaching of the declining Northern Gods. Thus in what was still symbolic form, the battle of St. Boniface⁸⁴ with the Oak represents the battle of the Druids with the old Priesthood.

Everywhere in the North one can point to the traces of what came to expression over in Asia. For instance Muspelheim and Niflheim are a counterpart of Ormuzd and Ahriman. The giant Ymir, out of whom the whole world is made, corresponds to the cutting into pieces of Osiris. In the most detailed way one can follow the connection between the European peoples of the North and the other civilisations. When in the South of Europe the Fourth Sub-Race was developing, the Northern tribes had also made the transition into the Fourth Stage so that in the Germanic peoples Tacitus⁸⁵ found much that was related to the Southern culture. Irmin⁸⁶ for example is the same figure as Hercules. Tacitus also tells us of a kind of Isis worship there in the North. So the older stages of civilisations progressed towards what was to come as Christianity.

So think of Europe, Central Asia and Egypt as sown with the seed of what had developed under the influence of the Initiation Schools. These Initiation Schools sent out from their midst the founder of the Fifth [Fourth] Sub-Race, who had long been prepared in the shelter of the Mysteries. This is the personality who in the Bible is called Abraham. He came from Ur in Chaldaea and developed as an extract of the three older civilisations. The task which was represented in Abraham was to carry into the human realm all that had been held in veneration in the outside world; to create initiates who laid great value on what was human, in order to found the cult of the personality. This brought about personal attributes in the Jewish patriarchs. Here we have to do with duplicity and cunning. Jacob gains his inheritance by employing ruse and cunning in order to take what he wants from his brother. This is the reality out of which our present-day civilisation developed: it is founded on intelligence and possessiveness. In the stories of the Old Testament this is magnificently expressed as a kind of dawning of the new. It would be impossible to present this origin in a more powerful way. Esau is still a hairy man, that means he represents the human type which is still more enmeshed in the physical; Jacob represents one who relies on his intelligence and guile and thereby achieves what is now actually developing in human nature. The overcoming of physical force through intelligence is here inaugurated. The initiators do not always introduce something great into the world, but what must of necessity come about. ‘Israel’ means: He who leads man to the invisible God, who dwells within. Isra-el: El means the goal; Isra = the invisible God. Until then God was visible, whether it was the one who gave the urge towards Good and Evil as with the Persians, whether the God who had his body in the stars, in the Universe: This God was experienced as something visible.

And now we have the Jewish initiation portrayed in Joseph and his twelve brethren. It is a beautiful and powerful allegory. The allegorical now makes its appearance: the intellect, when it wishes to be effective, becomes the recounter of allegories.

How Joseph was initiated was first recounted. He was removed from his normal surroundings, sold for twenty pieces of silver and cast into a pit, where he remained for three days. This indicates an initiation. Then he comes to Egypt where his activities bring new life. And now we have finally indicated the transition which began at that time from the knowledge of God in the stars to the knowledge of man. Joseph was rejected because he had dreams. He had the following dream: Sun, Moon and eleven stars bowed down before him. The eleven stars are the eleven signs of the Zodiac. He felt himself to be the twelfth. The symbolism of the Star-Religion was now led over into the human. In the twelve brothers, the starting point of the twelve tribes' the knowledge of God in the stars was led over into the personal. “Now you surely do not wish to assert,” said his father—“that your brothers will bow down to you.” Here the change is given us. The divine knowledge of the stars is replaced by a knowledge attached to the personal human. This finds its form in the Mosaic law.

Out of the three Ancient Civilisations, through the initiation of the Jewish Patriarchs, this Fourth Civilisation, the primal Jewish, was derived. This we have as the Fourth Sub-Race, for there belong to it also the civilisations of Ancient Greece and Rome. The civilisations of Greece and Rome (Roman law) both become great just through this personal element, until eventually this thought incarnated, reaching its culmination in Christianity. So it is in this lesser racial branch that the actual stream of the Fourth Sub-Race makes its appearance. The Graeco-Latin stream is a higher form of the Judaic; here the cult of the personal is intensified. There is no contradiction between this descent to the deepest point and then the ascent.

Everywhere [within the Fourth Sub-Race] we can observe this. The personal had actually to come to expression in the way described in the Esau and Jacob Saga in order to find its purification in the beauty of the human culture of the Greeks and the greatness of the human culture of the Romans. In the Odysseus Saga the ancient civilisation of the priests was conquered by cunning. It was out of the civilisations that arose from this that Christianity could first develop, which in truth contains all the ancient cultures in itself and can therefore also absorb them. In accordance with his parentage Jesus Christ was a native of Galilee ... ‘Galilean’ means: ‘The Stranger’, someone who does not really belong; ‘Galilee’ means a small isolated territory where someone could be brought up who, in his native milieu had to take into himself, not only the Jewish, but also all the ancient forms of culture.

Out of the impact between the Romans and the Northern peoples there now developed the Fifth Sub-Race in which we ourselves live. It has still kept an impulse from the old Initiation Schools in the Moorish, and Arabian influence which came over from Asia. It is always the same influence, the same Initiation School. We can trace how the Irish monks, as also those who work in scientific fields, are essentially inspired by the Moorish-Arabian science. This gives the same fundamental character in a new-form, in a way in which it could now be received. It is here that Christianity first finds its real expression. It has merely passed through the ancient Greek civilisation for as long as the Fifth Period of Culture was being prepared; and then finds here firm ground, embodying itself in a whole range of nations. Everything at that time was permeated and inspired by Christianity. Our present time with its materialistic culture is the last radical expression of what was then inaugurated. The birth of this new culture is symbolically presented in the Lohengrin Saga. Lohengrin is the initiator of the ‘city-state’, and the city life which leads up to a new cultural stage is symbolised by Elsa of Brabant.

Into all these streams others penetrate, for instance the Mongolian tribes. What originally came over from the West was related to what came with the Huns from the East. So from East and West something came together that was related: the Mongolian and Germanic tribes. Those who originated from the West were left-behind descendants of the Atlanteans, as were also the Mongolians from the East. Fundamentally both streams were related. It is always one stream which crosses another. Both, however, have a common native ground since they both originated from Atlantis.

Now here in the North, everything that has remained from earlier times took on a more established form. At the same time as the epoch of the Jewish Prophets, in the centuries before Christ, we find here indications of a great, primeval, Atlantean initiate. Wod-Wodha-Odin.⁸⁷ This is a modernised Atlantis, in a new form, an atavism, a throwback into the Atlantean Age. And this happens everywhere, over in Asia also. In Asia W, the sound V, becomes B, Wodha = Bodha = Buddha. Buddhism appears as a throwback into the Atlantean Age. This is why we find Buddhism most widespread with what has remained over from the Atlanteans in the Mongolian peoples. And where the very pillars of its greatness make their appearance in Tibet, there we have a modern, monumental expression of Atlantean culture.

One must get to know such relationships between peoples, then one will also understand history. When Attila,⁸⁸ the fighter for monotheism, appears in Europe, it was Christianity which first halted him, because there he was confronted with something greater than anything the Huns possessed. The monotheism of the Huns was, as the outcome of an Atlantean civilisation, of a magnitude which they found in no other peoples that they encountered on their way. Christianity alone made a forceful impression on them. Many things in historical development are to be understood in the light of these great considerations.

The well-known traveler, Peters,⁸⁹ certainly feels that the old Bodhism and the Wotanism can flow together, but he does not know that we in Europe have not only to be representatives of what comes from the ancient past, but something new, a new spiral. Into the old part of the spiral there strikes the very newest, the wisdom pointing to the future. This is related to the old wisdom as clear day consciousness is related to trance consciousness. With completely clear day consciousness future peoples will develop a spiritual culture which will be different from the old. For this reason Theosophy must not be only what is carried over from the old, from Buddhism and Hinduism; this would certainly collapse. Something new must arise out of the seeds which slumber in the East of Europe, coming together with everything that is being worked out there.

The inherent culture of the future lies in the unfolding of what is now in a seed condition in the Folk-elements of Eastern Europe. We ourselves in Central Europe are the advance post. Eastern Europe must provide the means, the human material for what is here being founded in advance.

The Rosicrucian Schools always taught that Central and Western Europe are only advance posts of what will develop in the European East, what will proceed from the fructification of the Folk element and European knowledge. With Tolstoi everything is fructified through the West European culture, but in a way different from that of others before him. With powerful simplicity he utters what no Kant and no Spencer could have expressed. What there appears over-ripe appears in him as something still unfulfilled. But it is always so with what is in a seed condition. Not out of the fine perfected plant, but out of the seedling does the new, future plant grow.

Whatever one may experience, one can look with complete trust towards the future. For just as the crystal first develops out of an alkaline solution only after it has been vigorously stirred, so also something new can only develop after great upheavals.

• 82. Re the original Zarathustra see note 65. The historical Zarathustra lived in the 6th century BC and according to Alexander Polyhistor and Plutarch, was the teacher of Pythagoras. On the tradition in mystery schools of transmitting the name of the teacher with the teaching, compare Rudolf Steiner on Dionysius the Areopagite in lecture 13.
• 83a. see lecture 22.3.1906, Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods (Typescript).
• 83b. Invulnerability denoted initiation. (See lecture 7 in the cycle on The Gospel of St Mark.)
• 84. In the 8th century St Boniface (actually Wynfrith) emissary from Rome, known as the apostle of the Germans, spread Christianity in Thuringia, Friesland and Hesse and was murdered in 754 by heathen Friesians.
• 85. ... His descriptions are to be found in Germany and its Tribes.
• 86. divine ancestor of the Germanic tribes.
• 87. Rudolf Steiner has spoken in greater detail of this connection, for instance in Universe, Earth and Man lecture 10
• 88. Rudolf Steiner here refers to Attila's penetration into Italy in the year 452 when Aquileia was destroyed and the Roman bishop Leo I went out with his followers against Attila and was able to force him to retreat.
• 89. Traveled especially in Africa where he founded the East African German colonies and the German East African Company. Wrote among other things Das Goldene Ophir Salomos (1895) and Im Goldland des Altertums (1902).

The objection is frequently made that theosophy does not really work its way into the realm of morality. In fact it is said that through certain of its teachings it in some respects not only does not counter egotism but furthers it. Those who are of this opinion share the following thoughts. They say that theosophy demonstrates how the human being develops his existence from life to life and that the main point is that even if he suffers defeats he has the possibility of striving ever higher, employing in a subsequent life the results of what he has learned in a given life as in a kind of “school.” He who immerses himself completely in this belief in human perfectibility will strive to render his “I” ever more pure, to make it as rich as possible, so that he may ascend ever higher and higher. This, so these people say, is after all really an egotistic striving. For we theosophists, they say, seek to attract teachings and forces from the spiritual world in order to elevate our “I” to ever greater heights. This is therefore an egotistic basis for human action. These people maintain further that we theosophists are convinced that we prepare a bad karma for ourselves through imperfect actions. Thus in order not to do so the theosophist will avoid doing this or that which he would otherwise have done. He therefore refrains from the action for fear of karma. For the same reason he would probably also do this or that which he otherwise would not have done, and this too would be but one more quite egotistic motivation for an action. There are a number of people who say that the teachings of karma and reincarnation as well as the rest of the striving for perfection which originates in theosophy leads people to work spiritually for a refined form of higher egotism. It would actually be a severe reproach if one were able to maintain that theosophy prompts people to develop moral action not out of sympathy and compassion but out of fear of punishment. Let us now ask ourselves whether such a reproach is really justified. We must reach very deeply into occult research if we wish to refute such a reproach to theosophy in a really fundamental way.

Let us assume that someone were to say that if a person does not already possess this striving for perfection, theosophy will certainly never prompt him to moral actions. A deeper understanding of what theosophy has to say can teach us that the individual is related to the whole of humanity in such a way that by acting immorally he not only does something that may earn him a punishment. It is rather the case that through an immoral thought, an immoral action or attitude he brings about something really absurd, something that cannot be reconciled with truly healthy thinking.

The statement has many implications. An immoral action not only implies a subsequent karmic punishment; it is rather in the most fundamental respect an action that one definitely ought not to do. Let us assume that a person commits a theft. In so doing the person incurs a karmic punishment. If one wishes to avoid this punishment one simply does not steal. But the matter is still more complicated. Let us ask ourselves what really motivates the person who lies or steals. The liar or thief seeks personal advantage—the liar perhaps wishing to wiggle out of an unpleasant situation. Such an action is only meaningful if one actually does gain an advantage through lying or stealing. If the person were now to realize that he simply cannot have that advantage, that he is wrong, that on the contrary he will bring about a disadvantage, he would then say to himself that it is nonsense even to think about such an action. As theosophy penetrates ever deeper into human civilization, people will know that it is absurd, indeed that it is ridiculous, to believe that through lying or stealing one can acquire what one seeks to acquire. For one thing will become increasingly clear for all people as theosophy enters their consciousness: that in the sense of higher causes we have to do not at all with totally separate human individualities, but that along with the separate individualities the whole of humanity forms a unity. One will realize more and more that in the sense of a true view of the world the finger is more intelligent than the whole man, for it does not presume to be something on its own, independent of the entire human organism to which it belongs. In its dull consciousness it knows that it cannot exist without the whole organism.

But people continually embrace illusions. They fancy themselves separate by virtue of what is enclosed within their skins. This they are, however, just as little as is the finger without the whole organism. The source of the illusion is the fact that the human being can wander about and the finger cannot. We are in the same situation on earth as is the finger on our organism. The science that believes our earth is a glowing hot, fluid sphere surrounded by a hard shell upon which we humans walk about, and that this explains the earth, stands at the same level as a science that would believe that in all essential respects the human being consists of nothing more, nothing else than his skeleton, for what one perceives of the earth is the same as the skeleton in man. The rest of what belongs to the earth is of a super-sensible nature. The earth is a real organism, a real living being. When one pictures to oneself the human being as a living creature, one can think of his blood with its red and white corpuscles. These can only develop in the entire human organism and thereby be what they are. What these red and white blood corpuscles are for the human being we human beings are for the organism of the earth. We definitely belong to this earth organism. We form a part of the whole living being that is the earth, and only then do we view ourselves correctly when we say, “As single individuals we are nothing. We are only complete when we think our way into the ‘body’ of the earth, the body of which we perceive only the skeleton, the mineral shell, as long as we do not acknowledge the spiritual members of this earth organism.”

When a process of infection arises in the human organism, the entire organism is seized by fever, by illness. If we translate this into terms applicable to the earth organism we can say that what occultism maintains is true: When something immoral is done anywhere on earth it amounts to the same thing for the whole earth organism as a little festering boil on the human body, which makes the whole organism sick. So that if a theft is committed on the earth the result is that the entire earth develops a kind of fever. This is not meant merely in a metaphorical sense. It is well-founded. The whole organism of the earth suffers from everything immoral and as individuals we can do nothing immoral without affecting the whole earth.

It is really a simple thought, yet people have a difficult time grasping it. But let those people who do not want to believe it just wait. Let one try to impress such thoughts upon our culture; let one try with these thoughts to appeal to the human heart, the human conscience. Whenever people anywhere act immorally their actions are a kind of infected boil for the whole earth and make the earth organism ill, and experience would show that tremendous moral impulses inhere in such knowledge.

One can preach morality as much as one likes; it will not help people one bit. But knowledge such as we have developed here would not seize hold of people merely as knowledge. If it found its way into the developing culture, if it streamed into the soul already in childhood, it would provide a tremendous moral impulse, for in the end no moral preachments have any real power to overwhelm, to convince the human soul. Schopenhauer is quite right when he says that to preach morality is easy but to establish it is difficult. People have a certain antipathy toward moral preachments. They say, “What is being preached to me is the will of someone else and I am supposed simply to acquiesce to it.” This belief will become more and more dominant to the degree that materialistic consciousness becomes dominant.

One says today that there is a morality of class, of social standing, and what such a class morality considers to be right is then applied to the other class. Such an attitude has found its way into human souls and in the future it will become worse and worse. People will come increasingly to feel that they themselves want to find everything that is to be acknowledged as correct in this sphere. They will feel that it should originate in their own inclination toward objective knowledge. The human individuality wants to be taken ever more seriously. But at the moment in which the heart, for instance, were to realize that it too would be sick if the whole organism became sick, man would do what is necessary in order not to fall ill. At the moment in which man realizes that he is embedded within the total organism of the earth and has no business being a festering boil on the earth's body—at that moment there exists an objective basis for morality. And man will say, “If I steal I am seeking my own personal advantage. I refrain from stealing because if I do steal I shall make sick the entire organism without which I cannot live. I do the opposite and thereby bring about something advantageous not only for the organism but also for myself.”

In the future the moral awareness of human beings will form itself in this general way. He who, through theosophy, finds an impetus to moral action will say to himself that it is an illusion to seek personal advantage through an immoral action. If you do that, you are like an octopus that ejects a dark fluid: you eject a dark aura of immoral impulses. Lying and stealing are the seeds of an aura into which you place yourself and through which you make the whole world unhappy.

People say, “All that surrounds us is maya.” But such truths must become truths for life itself. Let us suppose that one can demonstrate that through theosophy humanity's moral development in the future will enable man to see how he wraps himself in an aura of illusions when he seeks his own advantage. If one can demonstrate this, it will become a practical truth to say that the world is a maya or illusion. The finger believes this in its dull, half sleeping, half dreaming consciousness. It is bright enough to know that without the hand and the rest of the body it is no longer a finger. The human being today is not yet bright enough to know that without the body of the earth he is actually nothing. But he must become bright enough to know this. The finger therefore enjoys a certain advantage over man. It does not cut itself off. It does not say, “I want to keep my blood for myself or cut off a portion of myself.” It is in harmony with the whole organism. Man must, to be sure, develop a higher consciousness in order to come into harmony with the whole organism of the earth. In his present moral consciousness man does not yet know this. He could say to himself, “I inhale the air. It was just outside, and now it is inside the human body. Something external becomes something internal. And when I exhale, something internal again becomes something external. And so it is with the whole man.” The human being is not even aware of the simple fact that separated from the surrounding air he is nothing. He must undertake to develop an awareness of how he is locked into the entire organism of the earth.

How can the human being know: “You are a member of the whole organism of the earth?” Theosophy enables him to know this. It shows man that first there existed a Saturn condition, then a Sun condition, then a Moon condition. Man was present through all these conditions, although in a quite different way from today. Then the earth proceeded from the old Moon condition. Gradually the human being arose as earthly man. He has a long development behind him and in the future he is to advance to other stages of development. Man in his present form has arisen with the earth in its present form. When through the study of theosophy one traces how man and the earth have arisen it becomes clear in what way man is a part of the whole organism of the earth. Then it becomes clear how earth and man gradually have emerged from a spiritual life, how the beings of the hierarchies have fashioned earth and man, how man belongs to the hierarchies, even though he stands at the lowest stage. Then theosophy points to the central Being of the entire earthly evolution, to the Christ as the great archetype of the human being. And from all these teachings of theosophy the awareness shall spring forth for man, “Thus ought you to act.”

The science of the spirit shows us how we can feel ourselves to be a part of the whole life of the earth. The science of the spirit shows us that Christ is the Spirit of the earth. Our fingers, our toes, our nose, all our members dream that the heart provides them with blood. They dream that without a central organ they would be nothing, for without a heart they are not possible. Theosophy shows man that in the future of earthly evolution it would be folly not to take up the idea of Christ, for what the heart is for the organism Christ is for the body of the earth. Just as through the heart the blood provides the whole organism with life and strength, so must the Being of Christ have moved through all single souls on earth, and the words of St. Paul must become truth for them: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” The Christ must have flowed into all human hearts. Whoever wanted to say, “One can continue to exist without Christ,” would be as foolish as eyes and ears if they wanted to say that they could continue to exist without the heart. In the case of the single human body the heart must of course be present from the beginning, whereas the heart entered the organism of the earth only with the Christ. For the following ages, however, this heart's blood of Christ must have entered all human hearts. He who does not unite himself with it in his soul, will wither away. The earth will not wait with its development; it will come to the point to which it must come. Human beings alone can remain behind, that is, they would balk at receiving Christ in their souls. A number of human beings would stand there in their last incarnation on earth and not have reached the goal: they have not recognized Christ, have not received Christ-feeling, Christ-knowing into their souls. They are not mature. They do not take their places in the development to higher stages. They separate themselves off.

Such people do not immediately have the opportunity to collapse completely as would the nose and ears if they detached themselves from the whole human organism. But occult research shows that the following would happen to those who do not want to permeate themselves with the Christ element, the life of Christ, as this can be attained only through theosophy. Instead of living on upwards with the earth to new levels of existence they would have assimilated substances of decay, of disintegration, and would first have to enter upon other paths. If in the sequence of incarnations human souls take up the Christ into their knowledge, their feelings, their whole soul, the earth will fall away from these human souls just as a corpse falls away at a person's death. The corpse of the earth will fall away and that which, permeated with Christ, is present in a state of spirit and soul will proceed to form itself into new existence and will reincarnate itself on Jupiter.

What will happen now with those people who have not taken the Christ into themselves? Through theosophy they will have abundant opportunities to be able to recognize the Christ, to be able to take the Christ into themselves. Today people still resist doing so. They will resist less and less. But let us assume that at the end of the development there were those who even then continued to resist. There would then exist a number of people who could not join the rest in advancing to the next planet. They would not have reached the actual goal of the earth. These people would constitute a veritable cross on that planet upon which human beings will then develop further. For while this group will be incapable of sharing in the experience of the actual and proper Jupiter condition and what develops there, they will nevertheless be present on Jupiter. Everything that is subsequently material is first present in a spiritual state. Thus everything that people now, during the period of the earth develop spiritually in the way of immorality, of a refusal to take the Christ into themselves, is first present in a soul-spiritual state. But this will become material. It will surround and penetrate Jupiter as a neighboring element. This will be made up of the successors of those persons who did not take the Christ into themselves during the earth condition. What the soul develops in the nature of immorality, of resistance to the Christ will then be present materially, in an actually physical state. While the physical part of those people who have taken the Christ into themselves will exist in a finer form on Jupiter, the physical part of these other people will be fundamentally coarser. Occult research paints before the eye of the soul an image of what will be the future of the people who will not have reached earthly maturity.

We now breathe air. On Jupiter there will in essence be no air. Instead, Jupiter will be surrounded by a substance that, in comparison to our air, will be something refined, something etheric. In this substance those human beings will live who have reached the goal of the earth. Those others who have remained behind, however, will have to breathe something like a repulsively warm, boiling, fiery air infused with a dank stuffiness full of fetid odors. Thus the people who did not attain the maturity appropriate to the earth will be a cross for the other Jupiter people, for they will have a pestilent effect in the environment, in the swamps and other land masses of Jupiter. The fluid-physical components of the bodies of these people will be comparable to a liquid which constantly seeks to solidify, freezes up, coagulates. Consequently these beings will not only have this horrendous air to breathe but also a bodily state in which the blood would seem continually to congeal, to cease to remain fluid. The actual physical body of these beings will consist of a kind of slimy substance more revolting than the bodily substance of our present snails and fully equipped to secrete something like a kind of crust surrounding them. This crust will be softer than the skin of our present snakes, like a kind of soft scaly armor. Thus will these beings live in a rather less than appealing manner in the elements of Jupiter.

Such a picture as that contemplated in advance by the occult researcher is ghastly to behold. But woe to those who, like the ostrich, do not want to look at the danger and wish to shut their eyes before the truth. For it is just this that lulls us into error and illusion, while a bold look at the truth imparts the greatest moral impulses. If human beings listen to what truth says to them they will feel, “You are lying.” Then there will arise in them an image of the effect of this lie upon human nature in the Jupiter condition, the image that shows that the lie creates a slimy, pestilent breath for the future. This image, arising again and again, will be a reason to direct the impulses of the soul to what is healthy, for no one who really knows the consequences of immorality can in truth be immoral, for one is called upon to teach the true consequences that result from the causes. One should in fact direct people's attention to them while they are still children. Immorality exists only because people have no knowledge. Only the darkness of untruth makes immoral actions possible.

To be sure, what can thus be said concerning the connection between immorality and ignorance should not be intellectual knowledge but wisdom. Knowledge by itself participates in immorality and if it turns into sophisticated cleverness it can even be roguery, while wisdom will affect the human soul in such a way that the soul rays forth truth, innermost morality.

My dear friends, it is true that to establish morality is difficult; to preach morality is easy. To establish morality means to establish it out of wisdom, and one must first have this wisdom. Here we see that it was after all a rather intelligent utterance on the part of Schopenhauer when he said that to establish morality is difficult.

Thus we see how unfounded it is when people who do not really know theosophy come and say that it contains no moral incentives. Theosophy shows us what we accomplish in the world when we do not act morally. It provides wisdom, and from this very wisdom morality streams forth. There is no greater arrogance than to say that one need only be a good person and all will be in order. The trouble is that one must first know how one goes about really being a good person. Our contemporary consciousness is very arrogant when it wishes to reject all wisdom. True knowledge of the good requires that we penetrate deeply into the mysteries of wisdom, and this is inconvenient, for it requires that we learn a great deal.

So when people come and tell us that reincarnation and karma lay the foundation for an egotistical morality we can thus reply, “No! True theosophy shows man that when he does something immoral it is roughly the same as if he were to say, ‘I'm taking a sheet of paper to write a letter,’ and then takes a match and sets fire to the sheet of paper. That would be grotesque nonsense. A person finds himself in the same situation with respect to a wrong action or an immoral attitude.”

To steal means the same thing for the real, deeper human essence as when one lies. If one steals, one plants into the essential human being the seed that will cause one to develop a slimy, repulsive substance and to surround oneself with pestilent odors in the future. Only if one lives in the illusion that the truth is in the present moment can one do such a deed. In stealing, man places into himself something that amounts to the same thing as a flaying of the human being. If man knows this he will no longer be able to do an immoral deed; he will not be able to steal. Just as the plant seed sends forth blossoms in the future so too will theosophy, if it is planted in the human soul, send forth human blossoms, human morality. Theosophy is the seed, the soul is the nourishing ground and morality is the blossom and fruit on the plant of the developing human being.

In the lecture yesterday which dealt with Spengler's Decline of the West, I tried to bring home to you the significance of anthroposophical Spiritual Science by emphasising the difference between merely abstract concepts and that which also arises in the soul in the form of ideas and concepts but is, nevertheless, reality. Let us realise once for all that with his materialistic frame of mind, and his tendency to reject spiritual conceptions and occupy himself only with ideas concerning the natural world, man is making himself more and more akin to the material, is descending so deeply into the material world that he is no longer speaking falsely when he declares that it is the material substance of his body which thinks, that his brain actually does the thinking. Man is becoming a kind of automaton in the universe, and as the result of his denial of the soul and Spirit he is losing the soul and Spirit. I said before that this thought is by no means popular; people will not accept it because they cherish the belief that the soul-and-spirit will be saved to man for all eternity without any action being necessary an his part. By no means is it so. A man may give himself up to material life to such an extent that he severs himself from the soul-and-spirit altogether, sinks into the realm of the Ahrimanic Powers and passes with them into a cosmic stream which does not belong to our world. But thereby he loses his own Ego, for the Ego does not belong to the world of Ahriman and can only find its true path of development when a human being pursues the normal course of progressive evolution; that is to say, when he unites with the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha and when he realises that in the pr sent age he must find a link with all that spiritual research can contribute to the civilised life of mankind. Since the middle of the fifteenth century man has been living through the phase of evolution in which, as he looks out into his environment, he sees nothing but the material world. And as he looks into his own being he intellectualizes the inner experiences of his life of soul; these become abstract and shadowy. This has been the tendency since the middle of the fifteenth century.

The thoughts and concepts with which we build up our picture of the world to-day, drawn as they are from the dicta of orthodox science, have no connection with existence as it actually is. Neither can they lead to the heart of reality. It is merely a convention to imagine that man's life of soul is fundamentally involved in the forming of abstract thought. These abstract thoughts are quite remote from reality; they are nothing but a series of pictures. We may say, therefore, that externally man perceives the material world and inwardly a world of pictures having no essential connection with existence. This has been the lot of mankind since the middle of the fifteenth century and we shall presently see what effect it has upon a conception of the universe to see, externally, nothing but the material world and, inwardly, to have experiences that have become a mere series of pictures. We may ask: Why is it that since the middle of the fifteenth century man's life of soul has gradually come to the point of having no more reality than a picture? The reason is that only in this way is it possible for man to attain his real freedom.

In order to understand this let us consider the world as it lies before us to-day and our own place in the world. To begin with we will think of the world, leaving aside the human being altogether. Looking at clouds, mountains, rivers, at the minerals, plants and animals, we ask: What is there, in reality, in the whole wide world, when we leave the human being out of the picture? In other words, we think of all that surrounds us in the mineral and plant kingdoms, and to a certain extent also, in the animal kingdom, but apart altogether from man. In reality, of course, this is quite impossible, but we will assume hypothetically a Nature divested of the human being. In this Nature that is divested of the human being, there are no Gods. That is what we must bring home to ourselves. In this Nature that is divested of the human being there are no Gods, any more than an oyster is there within an empty oyster-shell or a snail in an empty snail-shell. This whole world which we assume hypothetically, a world without the human being, is something which the Gods have separated off from themselves in the course of evolution, just as the oyster sheds its shell. But the Gods—the spiritual Beings—are no longer within it. The world that surrounds us, is a world of the Past. When we look at Nature we are looking at something which represents the spiritual Past, we are looking at a residue of the Spiritual. And that is why religious consciousness in the real sense can never arise from contemplation of the external world alone. Let us not imagine for a moment that any element of the life of the divine-spiritual Beings who work creatively in mankind, is contained in this external world. Elementary beings, spiritual beings of a lower order, are there, of course; but the creative spiritual Beings who should live in our religious consciousness belong to this external world only inasmuch as represents their shell, being a residue of spiritual evolution in the Past.

Certain outstanding personalities have felt the truth of these things. In the spiritual life of the nineteenth century the man who felt most deeply of all that the Nature surrounding man is a residue of divine-spiritual evolution was Philip Mainländer whose philosophy of self-destruction was born from the gravity of this knowledge and who finally put an end to his own life. It is often the destiny of human beings to steep themselves in one-sided truths of this kind and the inevitable consequence is that this destiny itself becomes one-sided and difficult to bear. Philip Mainländer, the unfortunate German Philosopher, is an outstanding example of this.

Having realised what has been put forward hypothetically in connection with external Nature, you may ask: Where then, are the Gods; where are the creative spiritual Beings? If I were to make a drawing, I should have to draw the Gods within the human being. The truly creative Gods have their habitat in the realm that is bounded by the human skin, within the organs—if I may use this expression. The being of man is now the bearer of the Divine-Spiritual. The Divine-Spiritual, the truly creative principles is within the human being. Try to picture to ourselves external Nature as it is to-day, and then a future lying thousands of years ahead—in this future there will be no clouds, no minerals, no plants, even no animals. There will be nothing left of all that now lives in external Nature outside the bounds of the human skin. What will continue its evolution is the soul and Spirit permeating the inner organisation of man. This will constitute the future. The Nature by which man is now surrounded will pass away, and the Human-Divine principle now within his being will become his outer environment.

Insight into the truth that the Divine-Spiritual—the only truly creative principle in our time—lives inside the bounds of the human skin, must be taken in deepest seriousness, for it lays upon man a responsibility in regard to the whole universe. It enables him to understand the words of Christ: “Heaven and Earth”—the world of external Nature—“will pass away but my words will not pass away.” And when in the individual human being the saying of St. Paul, “Not I but Christ in me,” is fulfilled, then the words of Christ will live in the individual human being. “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away” or My words in the individual human being, namely all that lies inside the human skin and is received into Christ, this will not pass away.

All this is an indication of the fact that since the middle of the fifteenth century, through his abstract, intellectual concepts, man has been making his inner being empty and void. And to what end has he been making himself empty? It is in order to receive the Christ Impulse, the Divine Spiritual, into his inner being. I said that as we look into the external world, we see only the material. It is the divine Past. (In this residue of a divine Past there are, of course, the Elemental Spirits who have remained at lower stages of evolution.) As we look into our inner being, we see, to begin with, nothing but abstract concepts which can only become concrete and real when we receive the impulse of the Spirit into our being through Spiritual Science and unite the impulse of the Spirit with our inner life. Man has the choice—a choice which has become a matter of greater and greater seriousness since the middle of the fifteenth century—either to remain at a standstill with his abstract intellectual concepts or to receive into himself the living substance of Spiritual Science. Abstract intellectuality enables him to evolve a brilliant science of Nature, for intellectual concepts are dead and by their means he can unfold an admirable understanding of dead Nature. But all this mummifies him, makes him akin to matter, and leads him ultimately into the clutches of the Ahrimanic world. To further the Progress of earthly existence and the whole evolution of the earth, he must receive the Spiritual into his being, and in our time the Spiritual does not draw near to man by way of atavistic instinct. It must be reached by his own efforts. The assimilation of Spiritual Science is not, therefore, the assimilation of a theory but the development of something absolutely real, an impulse that will fill the otherwise empty recesses of the soul with spiritual substance.

In the mass to-day, men prefer to have this emptiness inwardly and the Past outwardly manifest before them. They will only admit the validity of thought when it has been proved by experiment and they resist the quickening impulses of spiritual life. The danger confronting the world to-day is not so much the spread of false theories but the loss of the very Mission of the Earth.

Only those who have really thought through and perceived the task of the human race will realise how much depends upon the assimilation of Spiritual Science. These souls will never lose sight of the importance of knowledge of the being of man, but in modern natural science and in the ancient religious tradition this knowledge simply does not exist. What is the trend of ancient religious tradition? It directs the minds of men to unworldly abstractions and is silent an the subject of the Gods indwelling the being of man, indwelling his very organism. This thought would he condemned by religious tradition as out-and out heresy. If any attempt were made to bring home to the traditional religions in Europe and America to-day the truth of the ancient saying that “the Body of man is the Temple of the Gods,” they would indignantly refuse to countenance such heresy.

And an the other hand we have a materialistic natural science which precisely because it is materialistic has no real understanding of matter. What does science really know about the functioning of the human brain, of the human heart? I have often told you, and I have also said in public, that one of the views held by modern science is that the human heart is a kind of pump which drives the blood through the body. This dictum of academic science is universally accepted but it is simply a piece of nonsense—pure nonsense. We shall never understand the essential nature of the heart we imagine that it pumps the blood in every direction and then lets it flow back again. The circulating blood itself is the living force. The driving force in the human organisation is contained in the blood, in the circulating blood, and the heart is the outward expression of this; the movement reveals itself in the heart. To say in accordance with modern science that the heart drives the blood into the Body, is rather like saying: “At ten minutes to nine one hand of the clock pointed to nine, and the other a little past ten, and these hands, in conjunction with the mechanism of the clock, drove me to the speaker's desk and left a great many still outside (because in the Anthroposophical Society people have a habit of unpunctuality). In reality, it is not so at all. Obviously the clock is simply an expression of what is happening—it is the expression and nothing more. The heart is not the pumping machine by means of which the blood is driven through the body; the heart is inserted into and is the expression of this whole system of movement.

Natural Science, as it is to-day, never leads into the inner being of man. All that science does is to make the inner into the outer by the dissection of dead bodies. But dissection of the dead body merely takes the inner and transfers it to the outer world. I mention this in order to bring home to you that in the spiritual life of to-day there is no inclination whatever to penetrate into the inner being and inner nature of man, and it devolves upon Spiritual Science to bring that real knowledge of man's being which scares the great majority of our contemporaries. Why are they scared? It is because religious traditions through the centuries have utterly hood-winked mankind so far as striving for real knowledge is concerned. Just think of the way in which the traditional creeds mystify human beings with apocryphal utterances culminating in a warning that it is not meant for man to know the Supersensible, that he may only have faith in it and feel its existence darkly. This is all done with the object of playing upon man's pride and self-conceit and also upon his inherent laziness. He must be led to believe that it is not necessary for him to think about the Divine, that his conception of the Divine must be a matter of instinct and dim feeling. But ideas that arise from this region of man's being are merely emanations from the organs—emanations which become illusions, and these illusions are distorted into all kinds of nebulous ideas by theologians and others who know quite well how much they can count an man's inherent love of ease.

The instinct for knowledge which alone can promote the earthly evolution of man and also lead him to the path of spiritual development, has been stifled and suppressed for many long centuries. People to-day are frightened at the very thought of developing knowledgE of realities or of experiencing the spiritual world. But to the extent to which they are frightened—to that extent do they sever themselves from the Spirit and soul and make themselves akin to the material.

It is so indeed; people are scared when the gravity of these things dawns upon them, because everything to-day is regarded from the external point of view. And here, in parenthesis, let me repeat certain remarks made a short time ago. In Stuttgart we have the Waldorf School. The Waldorf School was founded out of the very spirit of anthroposophical Spiritual Science; that is to say, fundamental principles of education and of teaching were laid before those who were specially Chosen to work in the School. Everything is a question of the Spirit in this art of education. Yet we are finding to-day, a sensation, that people visit the school and actually think that in a couple of hours or so they can inform themselves about the essentials of education there given. But it is of course only through Spiritual Science that one can gain insight into the spirit of the Waldorf School; it cannot be done by short brief visits which only disturb the teaching.

To assimilate anthroposophical Spiritual Science, however, is much more difficult and much less sensational than visiting the School as an outsider. As I have often said, the education at the Waldorf School takes account of the existence of the spiritual world, and, above all, of the pre-earthly existence of the human being. What is there to be said about this pre-earthly existence? We may take the year of our birth and say that this is the time when we descended to physical life on the Earth. Children born later have been living in the spiritual world while we were already on the Earth. These children have just descended to the physical world, whereas we ourselves have been living through our earthly existence for a considerable length of time. And they bring with them something of what they were experiencing in the spiritual world while we were already living in the physical world.

One can realise this quite clearly among children who are taught according to the principles of Waldorf School education. To give this kind of education is to prepare for the application in everyday life of thoughts and ideas which are the natural outcome of Spiritual Science. But it is precisely here that people are kept back by traditional religions, for the last thing these religions want is the development of inner activity in human beings. Inner activity leads to a real knowledge of the being of man and brings home the truth that the dwelling place of the Gods is inside the bounds of the human skin.

Suppose we see a planet in the sky. There is nothing of the Divine-Spiritual in anything upon that planet except in Spiritual Beings whose nature in some way resembles the nature of man. From these Beings the Divine pours its radiance upon us. Why, then, should this radiance be any the less because it shines from the bodies of men? You will begin to feel at home with this thought if you dissociate it from earthly life and relate it to conditions as they are upon another planet. Living an the Earth as you do, you will find that there is something oppressive, something rather coercive in the thought that you and your fellow men are bearers of the Divine-Spiritual. But if you turn the gaze of your soul to one of the other planets it will be much easier for you to grasp the fact that the Beings who there constitute the highest kingdom of Nature are the point from which the Divine Spiritual shines down upon you.

In a certain respect the thought we have been considering to-day amplifies the thought which occupied our minds in the last lecture, namely that something is unfolding in the inner being of man upon which the future evolution of the Earth essentially depends, but also that it lies within the powers of the human will to hinder the Earth's evolution, to receive the stream of Ahrimanic forces only. And to-day we added the other thought, namely, that Nature around is transient and external, for it already represents nothing more than a residue of Divine Spiritual creation. The process of Divine-Spiritual creation which dominates the present and will dominate the future, lies inside the bounds of the human skin. Strange as it may seem, it is therefore quite true to say that everything our eyes can see and our ears hear will all pass away with the Earth. Only that which is contained in the regions enclosed by the human skin lives over to the Jupiter stage of evolution, bearing existence as it is an the Earth into future conditions of planetary evolution.

When it is once realised that a knowledge of the nature of man is a burning necessity, the urge to understand the connection of the human being with the universe will again make itself felt. You know that man really lives between two extremes, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic as we are accustomed to call them. We can also understand the nature of these two extremes from a more elementary point of view. Philosophers have declared again and again that Being in itself eludes the grasp of thought. This is quite true, for whence comes the sense of being, the feeling of existence which there is in man? The human being exists before he enters earthly existence through conception and birth; he exists in super-sensible worlds. From super-sensible worlds he descends into his earthly, material existence. Here he experiences something quite new, something he did not experience in the super-sensible worlds. He is encompassed by it as soon as he has descended to earthly existence. It is the attractive force of the Earth, gravity, ‘to have weight,’ as we say, but only by way of illustration. As you know, the expression ‘to have weight’ is drawn from the most palpable phenomenon of all. The fatigue of which we become aware is similar to ‘having weight,’ and what we feel in our limbs when they move is also akin to this. But because the fact of ‘having weight’ is merely the representative phenomenon, we can say: The human being places himself within gravity. And in a hidden way man always enters, a little more into this element of gravity when he approaches a thing of Earth and calls it real.

It is exactly the reverse when the human being is passing through his life between death and rebirth. Just as here on the Earth he is allied with gravity, in the life between death and rebirth he is allied with light, for ‘light’ too is used in a representative sense. Because we receive most of our higher sense-perceptions through the eye, we speak of the light. But what lives as light in the sense-perception of the eye is the same element that sounds in the sense-perception of the ear and reveals itself in different tones, just as the light reveals itself in different colours. And it is the same with the other senses. fundamentally speaking, the element we speak of in a representative sense as the light, just as we speak of gravity in a representative sense, is the ‘tincture’ of all the senses. We are received into the extreme pole of gravity when we descend to the Earth. We are received into the extreme pole of light when we are living in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. are, in reality, always in the middle condition between light and gravity; and every sense-perception, as we experience it here on Earth, is half light and half gravity. When, as the result of some pathological condition, or in dream, we experience without the element of our own gravity, we are experiencing only the Spiritual, as for instance in a dream or in delirium. Psychologically, delirium is a state in which the human being has experience, but his own gravity is no factor in them. This state of balance between gravity and light into which we are placed, is something that is intimately connected with the riddle of the world, inasmuch as it is bound up with many of the experiences we have as beings of soul and Spirit in the world.

It will surely be obvious to you from what has been said that neither the traditional creeds nor the fantasies of natural science succeed in finding their way from merely abstract concepts into the light nor from sense perception down into gravity. People have become blind and deaf to these things. Man is bound to the Earth by gravity. He experiences gravity as the element which draws him to the Earth. Think of a crystal. A crystal gives itself its form. Within the crystal there is the same force which the human being feels drawing him downwards—the force which gives the whole Earth form. And now think of the oceans and seas. Here the Earth can give form, or rather the element of gravity gives the form. This very same force also gives the crystal its form but in this case it works from within. According to science, nobody knows what is behind matter or within matter. This is said to be a world-riddle. But inasmuch as we experience our own gravity, we experience what is behind the surface of matter; for in relation to the whole Earth we are placed within the same forces which are active in small bodies (as, for instance, the crystal) and by which the various parts are held together. We must reach the point of being able to recognise the small in the great, the great in the small and not to lose ourselves in speculation as to what presumably lies behind matter.

Knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual which transcends matter must be kindled by those forces in man's inner being which enable him to understand ideas such as that of the Temple represented in ancient tradition by the human being himself.

I have said many times that the sayings of ancient atavistic wisdom contain much that is worthy of deep veneration. In the present age it is our task once again to raise these truths from the depths of our being and to make them the guiding principles of life and action.

Today we shall consider the differentiations in mankind from another viewpoint, namely that of history. With the express aim of promoting an understanding for the present time we shall look at human evolution starting at a point immediately following the catastrophe of Atlantis. If human evolution can be considered to encompass any evolution of civilization, then we shall find the first decisive period of development to be the culture epoch of ancient India. In my book Occult Science¹ you will find this culture of ancient India described from a particular viewpoint. Though the Vedas and Indian philosophy are rightly admired, they are actually only echoes of that ancient culture, of which there exist no written records. In the words of today we have to describe the culture of ancient India as a religious culture in the highest sense. To understand this properly we shall have to discuss it more thoroughly.

The religious element of ancient Indian culture included what we today would call science and art. The total spiritual life of the whole human being was encompassed by this culture for which the most pertinent description is that it was a religious culture. This religious culture generates the feeling in human beings that in the depths of their being they are linked with a divine, spiritual world. This feeling was developed so intensely that the whole of life was illumined by it. Their clearer states of consciousness, which were preparations for today's waking state, and also their dream consciousness, which became lost in our chaotic dream and sleep life as evolution progressed, were both states of consciousness filled with an instinctive awareness of the links between the human realm and the divine, spiritual realm.

But our idea of religion today is of something rather general. The concept of religion makes us think too strongly of something general, something abstract and rather detached from everyday life. For the people about whom we are speaking, however, religion and the content they associated with it gave them a knowledge expressed in pictures, a knowledge of the being of man and an extensive picture knowledge of the structure of the universe.

We have to imagine, though, that what lived in these people's view of the world, by way of a picture knowledge of the structure of the universe, in no way resembled our modern knowledge of astronomy or astrophysics. Our astronomy and astrophysics show us the mechanics of the universe. The ancient Indian people had a universe of picture images populated with divine, spiritual beings. There was as yet no question, in the present sense, of any external, merely mechanical rules governing the relationships between heavenly bodies or their relative movements. When those people looked up to the starry heavens they saw in the external constellations and movements of the stars only something perfectly familiar to them in their picture consciousness. It was something which may be described as follows.

Suppose we were to see a vivid, lively scene with bustling crowds and people going about all kinds of business, perhaps a public festival with much going on. Then we go home, and next morning the newspaper carries a report about the festival we ourselves attended. Our eyes fall on the dead letters of the printed page. We know what they mean and when we read the words they give us a weak, pale idea of all the lively bustle we experienced the day before. This can be compared with what the ancient Indian people saw in their instinctive vision and in relation to this what they saw in the constellations and movements of the stars. The constellations and movements of the stars were no more than written characters, indeed pale written characters. If they had copied down these characters on paper, they would have felt them to be no more than a written description of reality.

What these people saw behind the written characters was something which they not only came to know with their understanding but also to love with their feelings. They were unable merely to take into their ideas all that they grasped in pictures about the universe; they also developed lively feelings for these things. At the same time they developed a permanent feeling that whatever they did, even the most complicated actions, was an expression of the cosmos filled with divine spiritual weaving. They felt their limbs to be filled with this divine, spiritual cosmic weaving. They felt their understanding to be filled with this divine spiritual weaving, and likewise their courage and their will. Thus, speaking of their own deeds, they were able to say: Divine, spiritual beings are doing this. And since in those ancient times people knew very well that Lucifer and Ahriman are also to be found among those divine, spiritual beings, so were they aware that because divine, spiritual beings worked in them, they were therefore capable of committing evil as well as good deeds.

With this description I want to call up in you an idea of what this religion was like. It filled the whole human being, it brought the whole human being into a relationship with the abundance of the cosmos. It was cosmic wisdom and at the same time it was a wisdom which revealed man. But then progress in human evolution first caused the most intense religious feelings to pale. Of course, religion remained, in all later ages, but the intensity of religious life as it was in this first Indian age paled. First of all what paled was the feeling of standing within the realm of divine, spiritual beings with one's deeds and will impulses. In the ancient Persian age, the second post-Atlantean cultural epoch, people still had this feeling to some extent, but it had paled. In the first post-Atlantean epoch this feeling was a matter of course. In the second cultural blossoming, the ancient Persian time, the profoundest, most intense religious feelings paled, so human beings had to start developing something out of themselves in order to maintain their link with the cosmic, divine spiritual realm in a more active manner than had at first been the case. So we might say: The first post-Atlantean period was the most intensely religious of all. And in the second period religion faded somewhat, but human beings had to develop something by inner activity , something which would unite them once more with the cosmic beings of spirit and soul.

Of all the words we know, there is one we could use to describe this, although it was coined in a later age. It comes from an age which still possessed an awareness of what had once been a part of human evolution in ancient times. When an ancient Indian looked up to the heavens, he sensed the presence of individual beings everywhere, one divine spiritual being next to another—a whole population of divine spiritual beings. But this faded, so that what had been individualized, what had been individual, divine, spiritual beings faded into a general, homogeneous spiritual cosmos. Think of the following picture: Imagine a swarm of birds close by. You see each individual bird, but as the swarm flies further and further away it becomes a black blur, a homogeneous shape. In the same way the divine spiritual cosmos became a blurred image when human beings moved spiritually away from it.

The ancient Greeks still had an inkling of the fact that once, in the distant past, something like this had been at the foundation of what human beings saw in the spiritual world. Therefore they took into their language the word ‘sophia’. A divine, spiritual cosmos had once, as a matter of course, poured itself into human beings and had taken human beings into itself. But now man had to approach what he saw from a spiritual distance—a homogeneous cosmos—by his own inner activity. This the Greeks, who still had a feeling for these things, called by the expression: ‘I love’; that is: ‘philo’. So we can say that in the second post-Atlantean period, that of ancient Persia, the initiates had a twofold religion where earlier on religion had been onefold. Now they had philosophy and religion. Philosophy had been achieved. Religion had come down from the more ancient past, but it had paled.

Passing now to the third post-Atlantean period, we reach a further paling of religion. But we also come to a paling of philosophy. The actual, concrete process that took place must be imagined as follows. In ancient Persian times there existed this homogeneous shape made up of cosmic beings and this was felt to be the light that flooded through the universe, the primeval light, the primeval aura, Ahura Mazda. But now people retreated even further from this vision and began in a certain way to pay more attention to the movements of the stars and of the starry constellations. They now sensed less in regard to the divine, spiritual beings who existed in the background and more in regard to the written characters. From this arose something which we find in two different forms in the Chaldean wisdom and the Egyptian wisdom, something which comprised knowledge about the constellations and the movements of the stars. At the same time, the inner activity of human beings had become even more important. They not only had to unite their love with this divine Sophia who shone through the universe as the primeval light, but they had to unite their own destiny, their own position in the world, with what they saw within the universe in a cosmic script provided by the starry constellations and the starry movements. Their new achievement was thus a Cosmo-Sophia. This cosmosophy still contained an indication of the divine, spiritual beings, but what was seen tended to be merely a cosmic script expressing the deeds of these beings. Beside this there still existed philosophy and religion, which had both faded.

In order to understand this we must realize that what we today call philosophy is naturally only an extremely weak, pale shadow image of what was still felt to be more alive in the Mysteries of the third post-Atlantean period and what in an even paler form the Greeks later called philosophy. In the culture of the third post-Atlantean period we see everywhere expressions of these three aspects of the human spirit: a cosmosophy, a philosophy and a religion.² And we only gain proper pictures of these when we know we have to remind ourselves that right up to this time human beings lived in their soul life more outside the earthly realm than within it. Looking for instance at the Egyptian culture from this point of view—and it was even more pronounced in the Chaldean—we see it rightly only if we remind ourselves that those who had any part in this culture indeed took the most intimate interest in the constellations of the stars as evening approached. For example they awaited certain manifestations from Sirius, they observed the planetary constellations and applied what they saw there to the way the Nile gave them what they needed for their earthly life. But they did not speak in the first instance of the earthly realm. This earthly realm was one field of their work, but when they spoke of the field they were tilling they did so in a way which related it to the extraterrestrial realm. And they named the varying appearances of the patch of earth they inhabited in accordance with whatever the stars revealed as the seasons followed one upon another. They judged the earth in accordance with the heavens. From the soul point of view, daytime brought them darkness. Light came into this darkness when they could interpret what the day brought in terms of what the starry heavens of the night showed them.

What people in those times saw might be expressed thus: The face of the earth is dark when the sun obscures my vision with dazzling brightness; but light falls on the field of my daily work when my soul shines upon it through starry wisdom.

Writing down a sentence like this gives us a sense for what the realm of feeling in this third post-Atlantean period was like. From this in turn we sense how those who still stood in the after-echoes of such a realm of feeling could say to the Greeks, to those who belonged to the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period: Your view of the world, indeed your whole life, is childlike, for you have knowledge only of the earth. Your ancestors in ancient times knew how to illumine the earth with the light of the heavens, but you live in the darkness of earth.

The ancient Greeks experienced this darkness of earth as something light. Their inclination was gradually to overcome and transform the older cosmosophy. So, as everything that looked down from the broad heavens became paler still, they transformed the older cosmosophy into a geosophy. Cosmosophy was nothing more than a tradition for them, something they could learn about when they looked back to those who had passed it down to them from earlier times.

Pythagoras, for instance, stood at the threshold of the fourth post-Atlantean period when he journeyed to the Egyptians, to the Chaldean and even further into Asia in order to gather whatever those who lived there could give him of the wisdom of their forefathers in the Mysteries, whatever they could give him of what had been their cosmosophy, their philosophy and their religion. And what was still comprehensible for him was then just that: cosmosophy, philosophy, religion.

However, there is something we today take far too little into consideration: This geosophy of the ancient Greeks was a knowledge, a wisdom which, in relation to the earthly world, gave human beings a feeling of being truly connected with the earth, and this connection with the earth was something which had a quality of soul. The connection with the earth of a cultured Greek had a quality of soul. It was characteristic for the Greeks to populate springs with nymphs, to populate Olympus with gods. All this points, not to a geology, which envelops the earth in nothing but concepts, but to a geosophy in which spiritual beings are livingly recognized and knowingly experienced. This is something which mankind today knows only in the abstract. Yet right into the fourth century AD it was still something that was filled with life.

Right into the fourth century AD a geosophy of this kind still existed. And something of this geosophy, too, came to be preserved in tradition. For instance we can only understand what we find in the work of Scotus Erigena,³ who brought over from the island of Ireland what he later expressed in his De divisione naturae, if we take it as a tradition arising out of a geosophical view. For in the fifth post-Atlantean period, which was in preparation then and which began in the fifteenth century, geosophy, too, paled. There then began the era in which human beings lost their inner connection with, and experience of, the universe. Geosophy is transformed, we might say, into geology. This is meant in the widest possible sense and comprises not only what today's academic philosophy means by the term. Cosmosophy was transformed into cosmology. Philosophy was retained but given an abstract nature—which in reality ought to be called philology, had this term not already been taken to denote something even more atrocious than anything one might like to include in philosophy.

There remains religion, which is now totally removed from any real knowledge and basically assumed by people to be nothing more than tradition. People of a nature capable of being creatively religious are no longer a feature of civilized life in general in this fifth post Atlantean period. Look at those who have come and gone. None have been creatively religious in the true sense of the word. And this is only right and proper. In the preceding epochs, in the first, second third and fourth post-Atlantean periods, there were always those who were creatively religious, personalities who were creative in the realm of religion, for it was always possible to bring down something from the cosmos, or at least to bring something up out of the realm of the earth. So in the Greek Mysteries—those called the Chthonian Mysteries in contrast to the heavenly Mysteries—which brought up their inspiration out of the depths of the earth in various ways—in these Mysteries geosophy was chiefly brought into being.

By entering into the fifth post-Atlantean period and standing full within it, human beings were thrown back upon themselves. The now made manifest what came out of themselves, ‘-logy ‘, the lore the knowledge out of themselves. Thus knowledge of the universe becomes a world of abstractions, of logical concepts, of abstract ideas. Human beings have lived in this world of abstract ideas since the fifteenth century. And with this world of abstract ideas, which they summarize in the laws of nature, they now seek to grasp out of themselves what was revealed to human beings of earlier times. It is quite justified that this age no longer brings forth any religiously creative natures, for the Mystery of Golgotha falls in the fourth post-Atlantean period, and this Mystery of Golgotha is the final synthesis of religious life. It leads to a religion that ought to be the conclusion of earthly religious streams and strivings. With regard to religion, all subsequent ages can really only point back to this Mystery of Golgotha.

So the statement, that since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period it is no longer possible for religiously productive individuals to appear, is not a criticism or a reprimand aimed at historical development. It is a statement of something positive because it can be justified by the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha.

In this way we conjure up before our eyes the course of human evolution with regard to spiritual streams and spiritual endeavours. In this way we can see how it has come about that we stand today in the midst of something that is, basically, no longer connected with the world about us but has come out of the human being, something in which the human being is productive and must become ever more productive. By further developing all these abstract things human beings will ascend once more through Imaginations to a kind of geosophy and cosmosophy. Through Inspiration they will deepen cosmosophy and ascend to a true philosophy, and through Intuition they will deepen philosophy until they can move towards a truly religious view of the world which will once more be able to unite with knowledge.

It is necessary to say that today we are only in the very first, most elementary beginnings of this progress. Since the final third of the nineteenth century there has shone into the earthly world from the spiritual world something which we can take to be a giving-back of spiritual revelations. But even with this we stand at the very beginning, a beginning which gives us a picture with which to characterize the attitude brought by external, abstract culture towards the first concrete statements that come from the spiritual world. When the representatives of current recognized knowledge hear what we have to say about the spiritual world, the understanding they bring to bear on what we say is of a kind that it can only be called a non-understanding. For it can be compared with the following: Suppose I were to write a sentence on this piece of paper, and suppose someone were to try to understand what I had written down by analysing the ink in which it is written. When our contemporaries write about Anthroposophy it is like somebody analysing the ink of a letter he has received. Again and again we have this impression. It is a picture very close to us, considering that we took our departure from a description of how, for human beings, in early post-Atlantean times even the starry constellations and starry movements were no more than a written expression for what they experienced as the spiritual population of the universe.

Such things are said today to a certain number of people in order to give them the feeling that Anthroposophy is not drawn from some sort of fantastic underworld but from real sources of knowledge, and that it is therefore capable of understanding the human beings of the earth to the very roots of their nature. Anthroposophy is capable of throwing light on today's differentiation of human beings into those of the West, of the middle realm and of the East, in the way mentioned yesterday. It is also capable of throwing light on differentiations which have existed in human evolution during the course of time. Only by connecting everything we can know about the differentiations according to regions of the earth with what we can know about how all this has come about can we gain an understanding of what kind of human beings inhabit our globe today.

Traditions of bygone ages have always been preserved, in some regions more, in others less. And according to those traditions the peoples of this globe are distinguished from one another. Looking eastwards we find that in later ages something was written down which during the first post-Atlantean period had existed unwritten, something which shines towards us out of the Vedas and their philosophy, something which touches us with its intimacy in the genuine philosophy of yoga. Letting all this work on us in our present-day consciousness, we begin to sense: If we immerse ourselves ever more deeply in these things, then we feel that even in the written works something lives of what existed in primeval times. But we have to add: Because the eastern world still echoes of its primeval times it is unsuited to receiving new impulses.

The western world has fewer traditions. At most, certain traditions stemming from the third post-Atlantean period, the age of cosmosophy, are contained in the writings of some secret orders. But they are traditions which are, no longer understood and are only brought before human beings in the form of incomprehensible symbols. But at the same time there is in the west an elemental strength capable of unfolding new impulses for development.

We might say that originally the primeval impulses existed. They developed by becoming ever weaker and weaker until, by about the fourth post-Atlantean period, they so to speak lost themselves in themselves, in what became Greek culture as such. Out of that, pointing towards the new, developed the abstract, prosaic sober culture of the Romans. (The lecturer draws on the blackboard). But this in turn must take spirituality into itself; it must, by becoming ever stronger and stronger, be filled with inner spirituality. Here, then, we have the symbol of the spiralling movement of humanity's impulses throughout the ages.

This symbol has always stood for important matters in the universe. If we have to speak of an atomistic world, we should not imagine it in the abstract way common today. We should imagine it in the image of this spiral, and this has often indeed been done. But on the greatest scale, too, we have to see this spiralling movement. Today I consider that we have arrived at it in a perfectly elementary manner by way of a concrete consideration of the course of human spiritual evolution.

• 1 . Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science—An Outline. For the post-Atlantean cultural periods see the chapter ‘Man and the Evolution of the World’.
• 2 . See also Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1984, and Rudolf Steiner's own reports of these lectures in Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1984.
• 3 . Johannes Scotus Erigena c.810-877. Irish philosopher and theologian, one of the most notable thinkers of the Carolingian Middle Ages. His principal work De divisione naturae was burnt by Pope Honorius in Paris in 1225.

It is by pointing to all-embracing secrets of cosmic existence that anthroposophical wisdom penetrates most deeply into the foundations of human life, for man is the microcosm in which all these secrets of the Universe are concentrated. The illumination coming from this vista of the Cosmos extends not only into the days but into the very hours of man's life in that it sheds light upon his karma, upon all the things that at every moment closely concern him. And so in these lectures I shall speak from many different angles of the anthroposophical basis of those ideas and conceptions which enable karma in human life to be more clearly recognised.

In man's earthly life between birth and death, two events or moments stand out clearly and distinctly from all others. One of them—it is not, of course, a ‘moment’ in the literal sense but you will understand what is meant—is the moment when as a being of spirit-and-soul, man comes down to earthly life, into a physical body which serves as an instrument for his activity on Earth. Not only does he clothe himself in this physical body but in it transforms his whole nature in order to become active on Earth. This is the moment, the event, of birth and conception—the beginning of earthly life. The other event is that of man's departure from earthly life, when he returns through the gate of death into the spiritual world.

Thinking, to begin with, of this latter event, we know that during the first hours and days after a man's death, the physical form remains preserved to a certain extent. But the question arises: How is this physical human form related to Nature, to the existence surrounding us in earthly life in the several kingdoms of Nature? Is the relation of these kingdoms of Nature, of external Nature as a whole to these remains of the human being such that they would be capable of preserving the structure intact? No, it is not. Nature is able only to destroy the physical form that has been built up since man's entry into earthly life; at death, the form which man regards as that of his earthly existence begins to disintegrate. Anyone who thinks deeply enough about this very obvious truth will realise that in the physical human form itself lies the refutation of the materialistic view. If the materialistic view were correct, it would have to be said that the human form is built up by Nature. But it is not so! Nature cannot build the human form, but only destroy it. This thought makes a very potent impression but one that is often quite wrongly formulated. It remains in the unconscious region of the soul, making itself strongly felt in everything we experience concerning the riddle of death. Now the express aim of Anthroposophy is to bring these riddles which life itself presents to any impartial mind, to the degree of solution necessary for the right conduct of life. Hence Anthroposophy must at the outset direct attention to the event of death.

On the other side there is the event of birth. Impartial self-observation is essential here if a picture comparable to that of death is to be obtained. This self-observation must be deeply concerned with the nature of human thinking. Thinking can be applied to everything that goes on in the physical world. We form our thoughts of what goes on in the world. If we did not do so we could not be men in the true sense for the power to form thoughts distinguishes us from all other beings around us in the realm of the Earth. But impartial observation of our thoughts makes them appear widely removed from the reality of existence around us. When we are engrossed in thought we become inwardly abstract, inwardly cold, in comparison with what we are in heart and soul when we surrender ourselves to life. No impartial mind will ever doubt that thoughts, as such, have a cold, abstract, arid quality. But clear insight into the life of thought should be one of the first meditative experiences of an anthroposophist. In contemplating this life of thought he will discern in it something very similar to the spectacle presented by a corpse. What is characteristic of the sight of a human corpse? As it lies there before us, we say to ourselves: A human soul and a human spirit once lived in this structure and have now departed from it. A corpse lies there as a husk of the soul and the spirit. But at the same time it provides us with proof that the world external to man could never have produced this particular structure, that it could have proceeded only from the soul and spirit, from the innermost core of man's nature, that it is the residue of something now no longer present. In its very form a corpse discloses that it is no truth in itself but only a remains of truth, having meaning only when soul and spirit are within it. In the form that remains a great deal has been lost but a corpse nevertheless shows that it was once the dwelling-place of soul and spirit.

If the eye of the soul is directed to the life of thought, this too, although from a rather different standpoint, will appear to have something corpse-like about it. Impartial observation of our own thinking reveals that in itself it can no more have real existence than the human form can have real existence in a corpse. In apprehending external Nature, there is as little intrinsic reality in human thinking as there is in a corpse. External Nature can certainly be apprehended by thoughts but can never herself produce them. For if Nature in herself were capable of producing thoughts there could be no such thing as logic which perceives, independently of all laws of Nature, what is sound or false in thinking. When we discern what a thought in the earthly world really is, it must appear to us as a corpse of the soul, just as what remains at the death of a human being appears as a physical corpse. The form of a corpse is comprehensible only when we see it as the remains left behind at death by a living man.—Imagine for a moment that there were on the Earth only a single human being, and that at his death a being belonging to the planet Mars were to come down and look at his corpse. It would be utterly incomprehensible to such a being. Were he to study all the forms in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms he would find no explanation of how the form lying there dead could have come into existence. For this form is not only a contradiction in itself, it is a manifest contradiction of the whole extra-human, earthly world. Its very existence betrays that it has been abandoned by something; for by itself it could not exist.

So it is with our thoughts. If external Nature alone were responsible for producing them, they could never be as they are: they are a corpse of the soul, comparable with a physical corpse. The very existence of a corpse is evidence that something has died. What is it that has died in the case of thoughts? It is the kind of thinking that was ours before we came down into the earthly world. Abstract thinking is the corpse of what was once living thinking. The thinking of a soul as yet without a body is related to the form which thinking assumes in earthly existence as the human soul and spirit are related to the corpse. And we men in the physical body are the grave in which the pre-earthly, living life of the soul has been entombed. The thoughts were once alive in the soul; the soul has died to the spiritual world. We bear within us not the living thoughts but the corpse of the thoughts.

This is the picture presented by the spectacle of birth—the side of earthly life opposite to that of death. We speak more correctly than is usual in our time when we say: the spiritual in man dies through birth, the physical part of man dies through death.

If we find the approach to Anthroposophy through pondering on the phenomenon of death and so realising that our thinking is a corpse compared with pre-earthly thinking, our vista of man and of life on the Earth widens and we prepare in the right way to receive the teachings and the wisdom of Anthroposophy. The reason why it is so difficult for men to find the natural path to Anthroposophy is their erroneous conception of what is still present—although as a corpse—in earthly existence. To-day they place too high a value upon thinking but do not know what it really is: they know it only in its corpse-like character.

When we guide our thoughts in the direction I have been trying to indicate, the two sides of the eternal life of the human soul are brought into strong relief. In modern parlance there is only one word—a word fundamentally the offspring of human hopes—for the half of Eternity that begins now and has no end. We have only the word ‘Immortality,’ because the question of what happens after death is of foremost importance to the men of our time. All their interests in life are bound up with knowing what happens after death. But there were epochs in the evolution of humanity when something else was of importance too. With his more egoistic thinking to-day a man says: ‘What comes after death interests me because I should like to know whether my life will continue thereafter; what preceded birth or conception does not interest me.’ He does not think about pre-earthly life as he does about the life after death. But the Eternity of the human soul has these two sides: Immortality and ‘Unborn-ness.’ Earlier Mystery-languages of men who under the conditions prevailing in their day still had vision of the super-sensible world, had a word also for ‘Unborn-ness,’ whereas we can formulate one only with difficulty, by deliberately turning our minds to these matters. Thereby we are also led to realise the essential difference between the laws of Nature and the laws governing human, destiny.

Our human destiny seems, to begin with, to depend upon chance. Acting upon some urge or impulse, we achieve one thing or another and have to admit, in respect of ordinary life, that in innumerable cases the destiny of many a really good man brings him hard, painful and tragic experiences, whereas it will often happen that to one whose aims are far from good, life brings no hard but actually happy experiences.

With our ordinary, everyday consciousness we do not perceive the connection between what proceeds from our own soul and the destiny that befalls us. We see that the good may be followed by heavy blows of fate and that evil is not necessarily followed by anything except relatively favourable destiny. In the happenings of Nature we perceive how under the sway of necessity, effects follow causes, but in respect of the spiritual reality in which our normal life is contained this sway of necessity is not in evidence. Nevertheless an impartial survey of our life impels us to say: we ourselves have sought the stream of our destiny.

Let a man who has reached a certain age in this incarnation observe his earlier life quite objectively and impartially. He is, let us say, fifty years of age, and he surveys the course of the years back to childhood. He will then perceive how, following some inner urge, he himself made the approach to everything that befell him. It is not always a pleasant experience. But as he follows the events of his life backwards, he will be obliged to admit in respect of those that were really decisive that he made straight for those events in time, just as he may make straight for some point in space. The stream of destiny issues from ourselves. And so it is understandable when men such as Goethe's elderly friend Knebel say that observation of human life clearly reveals a plan running through it from beginning to end. True, this plan is not always such that in looking back over it a man will always insist that he would act in the same way again. But when he closely observes the details of his actions and their consequences, he will always perceive that an inner urge led from the earlier to the later. Thus are the various events in our lives explained. And this enables us to perceive that the law taking effect through our moral life of soul is entirely different from the law taking effect in the life of Nature. All this helps to create the attitude which should be adopted towards the spiritual investigator who from his vision of the spiritual world is as well able to describe the laws governing the forming of destiny as the naturalist is able to describe the laws of Nature. And to understand the working of spiritual law in the Universe is the task of Anthroposophy in our present age.

You will remember that in the book Occult Science: An Outline and elsewhere too, I have said that the Moon shining down upon us from the heavens was once united with the Earth, that at a certain point of time the physical Moon separated from the Earth and in a future age will again unite with it. Now it was not only the physical Moon that separated but with it went certain Beings who were on Earth when the physical Moon and the Earth were still one body. When we think of the spiritual treasures that have been contained in the evolution of humanity we shall be led inevitably to the conclusion that although in our present age men are exceedingly clever—and nearly all of them are—yet they are not truly wise. Treasures of wisdom, expressed not in an intellectual but in a more poetic, pictorial form, existed at the beginning of man's evolution on Earth, scattered through mankind by great Teachers, primeval Teachers who lived among men on Earth. These primeval Teachers were not incarnated in physical bodies, but only in etheric bodies and relations with them were different from relations between physical human beings. These Teachers moved about the Earth in etheric bodies and a man whose guide and leader they became felt in his soul their nearness to him. He felt something like an inspiration streaming into his soul; it was like an inner flashing up of truths, of visions too—for the teachings were imparted in a spiritual way. In that epoch of Earth evolution, beings were really of two categories: the visible and, for physical eyes, the invisible. Men did not clamour for sight of those beings who were not visible for they were able to receive their teachings without seeing them. Men heard the teachings rising up from within their souls and said to themselves: ‘One of the great primeval Teachers of humanity has now drawn near to me.’ No attempt was made to form any external pictures of these great Teachers. Men encountered them in spiritual experiences, they did not stretch out physical hands towards these Teachers, but encountered them nevertheless and felt something that was like a spiritual grasp of the hand.

It was these primeval Teachers who imparted to mankind the great treasures of wisdom of which only echoes have survived, even in creations such as the Vedas and the Vedanta philosophy. Even these great teachings of the East are no more than echoes. A primeval wisdom once spread among humanity on the Earth and then perished, in order that out of themselves, by their own volition, men might again be able to scale the heights to the spiritual world. Human freedom would not have been possible if the primeval Teachers had remained among men. Hence a comparatively short time after the Moon had separated from the Earth they followed in its wake, establishing their abode upon it. And there they have dwelt, supreme among the denizens of this Moon colony, ever since they separated from the Earth, leaving human beings to their own resources. Although we who pass from one earthly life to another no longer meet these great Teachers on Earth, we do so very shortly after passing through the gate of death. When the physical body has been laid aside at death, our etheric body expands and expands, but also becomes evanescent, and finally dissolves in the Universe. As soon as the etheric body has been laid aside a few days after death, we feel that our existence is no longer on the Earth but in the immediate environment of the Earth. When a few days have passed after death we feel that we are no longer living on the Earth; it is as though this terrestrial body has expanded as far as the sphere encircled by the orbit of the Moon. We feel that we are living on a magnified Earth; the Moon is no longer felt to be a separate body, but the whole sphere is felt as a unity, demarcated by the Moon's orbit; the Earth has expanded to become the Moon sphere, and has become spiritual. We are within the Moon sphere and there we remain for a considerable time after death. But to begin with we come together again with those spiritual Beings who at the beginning of man's existence on Earth were the great primeval Teachers. They are the first Beings whom we encounter in the Cosmos after our death; we eventually come again into their realm and there undergo a remarkable experience.

It might seem easy to picture existence after death—I shall still have to speak of its duration—as being shadowy in comparison with the life on Earth which gives the impression of being so robust. We can take hold of the things of earthly life; they, like physical men, are solid, compact; we say that something is real when we can actually take hold of it. But after death this robust earthly life seems like a dream, for entry into the Moon sphere brings us into an existence where everything seems to be much more real, much more saturated with reality than can ever be the case on Earth. This is because the great primeval Teachers of humanity who continue their existence in the Moon sphere permeate us with their own being, and enable everything to appear to us with greater reality than that which, as men of the Earth, we experience in the things of the world. And what is it that we experience in the Moon sphere?

Our experience of earthly life is, after all, fragmentary. Looking back over earthly life with ordinary consciousness, it appears to us as a single, continuous stream. But what has it been in reality? A day that has already become shadowy was followed by a night of which ordinary consciousness has no remembrance. Another day is followed by another night—and so it goes on. In memory we string together only the days but in a true retrospect the days must always be interrupted by what we have experienced during the nights. Ordinary consciousness fails here, and with a certain justification, because it is extinguished in sleep. When we are among these Moon Beings who were once the primeval Teachers of humanity, we live through precisely what we experienced during the nights here on the Earth. The length of time this form of existence in the Moon sphere lasts can therefore be computed. If a man is not an abnormally long sleeper he spends about one third of the duration of his earthly life in sleep. And life in the Moon sphere lasts for just so long, that is to say, for about one third of the duration of the life on Earth. A man who reaches the age of twenty spends about seven years in the Moon sphere; one who reaches the age of sixty, about twenty years, and so on. We live among these Beings and they permeate us with their form of existence.

But in order to understand life in this sphere we must think of what a man becomes when the physical body is laid aside. This is within the ken of an Initiate, and also of the dead. The moment a man has left the physical body behind at death, he is within the world that is outside that body. If as I stand here I were to go out of my body, I should first of all be within this table here, and then more and more deeply within everything around me in the world—only not inside my own skin. What was hitherto my inner world now becomes my outer world, and everything that was formerly my outer world becomes my inner world. My moral life too, becomes outer world. Suppose that I once gave another person a box on the ear in anger and my action made a grave moral impression upon him. Now I live backwards over my life to its fortieth year when I injured him in this way; in my life I may have laughed about the incident, but now I experience, not what I experienced at the time, but his physical pain, his moral suffering. With my whole being I am within him. In reality it was the same every night during sleep, but then it remained below the level of consciousness; it was a picture only, not an actual experience. After death, when we are permeated with the substance of the great primeval Teachers in the Moon sphere, the experience is infinitely more intense than it was on Earth. What on Earth is like a dream, is in yonder world a far stronger reality—and this is what we experience. This same intense reality is experienced, too, by one who with clairvoyant consciousness is able to follow a human being on his way after death and, through the attainment of Inspiration and super-sensible vision, to live with him as a real presence. Then we realise that the experiences through which men pass after death have far greater intensity and reality than the experiences undergone before death. And to experience what a human being is undergoing in his existence after death makes an incomparably stronger impression than earthly influences can ever make. To give you an example.—

Some of you will certainly be familiar with the figure of Strader in my Mystery Plays. The figure of Strader is drawn more or less from real life; such a personality existed and interested me profoundly. I followed the external life of this personality who is portrayed, with certain poetic modifications, in the figure of Strader. You know that I have written four Mystery Plays, in the last of which Strader dies. In 1913, when this fourth play was written, I could do no otherwise than let Strader die. And why? As long as the prototype of Strader was living in the physical world, my attention had been focused upon that prototype. But in the meantime this prototype had died. The whole man interested me so deeply that I continued to follow him, and the impressions coming from his life after death were so strong that they completely extinguished all interest in what he had been in his life on Earth. Not that the sympathy had waned, but it was simply not adequate after one had followed what he was experiencing after his physical death. In order to give these tremendously strong impressions some kind of poetic form, I was obliged to let Strader die, because his prototype had passed into the after-death existence—and the impressions coming from that were infinitely stronger than those of his earlier life on Earth.

This had practical consequences. One or two friends guessed who Strader's prototype had been in real life and with a certain noble devotedness set about investigating his literary estate. When with great delight they brought their findings to me, I was obliged, involuntarily, to be rather discourteous, because these findings did not interest me in the slightest. The strength of the impressions of the life after death effaced any interest in relics of the earthly life brought me by friends. And so indeed it is. These impressions, which are due to the fact that the Moon Beings imbue their very substance into man, drown everything that can be experienced in earthly life and infuse reality into existence. Hence, too, the compensatory deed is fraught with greater reality, since it results from experience of what a particular action signified to the one against whom it was directed. And our experience of what the other suffered is stronger than that caused in us by our own action.

Out of the experiences we undergo after death in the realm of the great primeval Teachers of humanity, the first seed of karma is formed. For there we resolve to make compensation for what we have done. Resolves, intentions, here take actual effect. On Earth the good does not always seem to be followed by good, nor evil by evil. But the resolves taken in a world of far greater reality than the earthly world, the experience that we ourselves must make compensation for what we have done—these resolves will lead in the later life to actual adjustment.

It is my intention to describe to you how karma gradually takes shape for a new life when, having lived through the time between death and rebirth, a man appears again in another incarnation. During the first period after death, through our communion with the Moon Beings, we form the resolve to fulfil our karma. I shall therefore try to give you a concrete picture of the stages by which in the life between death and a new birth, man's karma is formulated.

[ 1 ] For the form of the experience of spirit which I then desired to establish upon a firm foundation within me, music came to have a critical significance. At that time there was proceeding in the most intense fashion in the spiritual environment in which I lived the “strife over Wagner.” During my boyhood and youth I had seized every opportunity to improve my knowledge of music. The attitude I held toward thinking required this by implication. For me, thought had content in itself. It possessed this not merely through the percept which it expressed. This, however, obviously led over into the experience of pure musical tone-forms as such. The world of tone in itself was to me the revelation of an essential side of reality. That music should “express” something else besides the tone-form, as was then maintained in every possible way by the followers of Wagner, seemed to me utterly “unmusical.”

[ 2 ] I was always of a social disposition. Because of this I had even in my school-days at Wiener-Neustadt, and then again in Vienna, formed many friendships. In opinions I seldom agreed with these friends. This, however, did not mean at all that there was not an inwardness and mutual stimulus in these friendships. One of these was with a young man pre-eminently idealistic. With his blond hair and frank blue eyes he was the very type of a young German. He was then quite absorbed in Wagnerism. Music that lived in itself, that would weave itself in tones alone, was to him a cast-off world of horrible Philistines. What revealed itself in the tones as in a kind of speech – that for him gave the tone-forms their value. We attended together many concerts and many operas. We always held opposite views. My limbs grew as heavy as lead when “oppressive music” inflamed him to ecstasy; and he was horribly bored by music which did not pretend to be anything else but music.

[ 3 ] The debates with this friend stretched out endlessly. In long walks together, in long sessions over our cups of coffee, he drew out his “proofs” expressed in animated fashion, that only with Wagner had true music been born, and that everything which had gone before was only a preparation for this “discoverer of music.” This led me to assert my own opinions in drastic fashion. I spoke of the barbarism of Wagner, the graveyard of all understanding of music.

[ 4 ] On special occasions the argument grew particularly animated. At one time my friend very noticeably formed the habit of directing our almost daily walk to a narrow little street, and passing up and down it many times discussing Wagner. I was so absorbed in our argument that only gradually did it dawn upon me how he had got this bent. At the window of one of the little houses on the narrow alley there sat at the time of our walk a charming girl. There was no relationship between him and the girl except that he saw her sitting at the window almost every day, and at times was aware that a glance she let fall on the street was meant for him.

[ 5 ] At first I only noticed that his championship of Wagner – which in any case was fierce enough – was fanned to a brilliant flame in this little alley. And when I became aware of what a current flowed from that vicinity into his inspired heart, he grew confidential in this matter also, and I came to share in the tenderest, most beautiful, most passionate young love. The relation between the two never went much beyond what I have described. My friend, who came of people not blessed with worldly goods, had soon after to take a petty journalistic job in a provincial city. He could not think of any nearer tie with the girl. But neither was he strong enough to overcome the existing relationship. I kept up a correspondence with him for a long time. A melancholy note of resignation marked his letters. That from which he had been forced to cut himself off was still living and strong in his heart.

[ 6 ] Long after life had brought to an end my correspondence with this friend of my youth, I chanced to meet a person from the same city in which he had found a place as a journalist. I had always been fond of him, and I asked about him. This person said to me: “Yes, things turned out very badly for him; he could scarcely earn his bread. Finally he became a writer in my employ, and then he died of tuberculosis.” This news stabbed me to the heart, for I knew that once the idealistic, fair-haired youth, under the compulsion of circumstances, had in his own feelings severed his relation with his young love, then it made no difference to him what life might further bring to him. He considered it of no value to lay the basis for a life which could not be that one which had floated before him as an ideal during our walks in that little street.

[ 7 ] In intercourse with this friend my anti-Wagnerism of that period came to realization in even more positive form. But, apart from this, it played any way a great rôle in my mental life at that time. I strove in all directions to find my way into music which had nothing to do with Wagnerism. My love for “pure music” increased with the passage of years; my horror at the “barbarism” of “music as expression” continued to increase. And in this matter it was my lot to get into a human environment in which there were scarcely any other persons than admirers of Wagner. This all contributed much toward the fact that only much later did I grudgingly fight my way to an understanding of Wagner, the obviously human attitude toward so significant a cultural phenomenon. This struggle, however, belongs to a later period of my life. In the period I am now describing, a performance of Tristan, for example, to which I had to accompany one of my pupils, was to me “mortally boring.”

To this time belongs still another youthful friendship very significant for me. This was with a young man who was in every way the opposite of the fair-haired youth. He felt that he was a poet. With him, too, I spent a great deal of time in stimulating talk. He was very sensitive to everything poetic. At an early age he undertook important productions. When we became acquainted, he had already written a tragedy, Hannibal, and much lyric verse.

[ 8 ] I was with both these friends in the “practice in oral and written lectures” which Schröer conducted in the Hochschule. From this course we three, and many others, received the greatest inspiration. We young people could discuss what we had arrived at in our minds and Schröer talked over everything with us and elevated our souls by his dominant idealism and his noble capacity for imparting inspiration.

[ 9 ] My friend often accompanied me when I had the privilege of visiting Schröer. There he always grew animated, whereas elsewhere a note of burden was manifest in his life. Because of a certain discord he was not ready to face life. No calling was so attractive to him that he would gladly have entered upon it. He was altogether taken up with his poetic interest, and apart from this he found no satisfying relation with existence. At last he had to take a position quite unattractive to him. With him also I continued my connection by means of letters. The fact that even in his poetry he could not find real satisfaction preyed upon his spirit. Life for him was not filled with anything possessing worth. I had to observe to my sorrow, how little by little in his letters and also in his conversation the belief grew upon him that he was suffering from an incurable disease. Nothing sufficed to dispel this groundless obsession. So one day I had to receive the distressing news that the young man who was very near to me had made an end of himself.

[ 10 ] A real inward friendship I formed at this time also with a young man who had come from the German Transylvania to the Vienna Hochschule. Him also I had first met in Schröer's Seminar periods. There he had read a paper on pessimism. Everything which Schopenhauer had presented in favour of this conception of life was revived in that paper. In addition there was the personal, pessimistic temperament of the young man himself. I determined to oppose his views. I refuted pessimism with veritable words of thunder, even calling Schopenhauer narrow-minded, and wound up my exposition with the sentence: “If the gentleman who read the paper were correct in his position with respect to pessimism, then I had rather be the wooden board on which my feet now tread than be a man.” These words were for a long time repeated jestingly about me among my acquaintances. But they made of the young pessimist and me inwardly united friends. We now passed much time together. He also felt himself to be a poet, and many a time I sat for hours in his room and listened with pleasure to the reading of his poems. In my spiritual strivings of that time he also showed a warm interest, although he was moved to this less by the thing itself with which I was concerned than by his personal affection for me. He was bound up with many a delightful friendship, and also youthful love affairs. As a means of living he had to carry a truly heavy burden. At Hermannstadt he had gone through the school as a poor boy and even then had to make his living by tutoring. He then conceived the clever idea of continuing to instruct by correspondence from Vienna the pupils he had gained at Hermannstadt. The sciences in the Hochschule interested him very little. One day, however, he wished to pass an examination in chemistry. He had never attended a lecture or opened a single one of the required books. On the last night before the examination he had a friend read to him a digest of the whole subject-matter. He finally fell asleep over this. Yet he went with this friend to the examination. Both made “brilliant” failures.

[ 11 ] This young man had boundless faith in me. For a long time he treated me almost as his father-confessor. He opened up to my view an interesting, often melancholy, life sensitive to all that is beautiful. He gave to me so much friendship and love that it was really hard at times not to cause him bitter disappointment. This happened especially because he often felt that I did not show him enough attention. And yet this could not be otherwise when I had so many varieties of interests for which I found in him no real understanding. All this, however, only contributed to make the friendship a more inward relationship. He spent his summer vacation at Hermannstadt. There he sought for students in order to tutor them by correspondence the following year from Vienna. I always received long letters at these times from him. He was grieved because I seldom or never answered these. But, when he returned to Vienna in the autumn, he hurried to me like a boy, and the united life began again. I owed it to him at that time that I was able to mingle with many men. He liked to take me to meet all the people with whom he associated. And I was eager for companionship. This friend brought into my life much that gave me happiness and warmth.

[ 12 ] Our friendship remained the same till my friend died a few years ago. It stood the test of many storms of life, and I shall still have much to say of it.

[ 13 ] In retrospective consciousness much comes to mind of human and vital relationships which still continues to-day fully present in my mind, united with feelings of love and gratitude. Here I cannot relate all this in detail, but must leave quite unmentioned much which was indeed very near to me in my personal experience, and is near even now.

[ 14 ] My youthful friendships in the time of which I am here speaking had in the further course of my life a special import. They forced me into a sort of double mental life. The struggle with the riddle of cognition, which then filled my mind more than all else, aroused in my friends always, to be sure, a strong interest, but very little active participation. In the experience of this riddle I was always rather lonely. On the other hand, I myself shared completely in whatever arose in the existence of my friends. Thus there flowed along in me two parallel currents of life: one which I as a lone wanderer followed, the other which I shared in vital companionship with men bound to me by ties of affection. But this twofold life was on many occasions of profound and lasting significance for my development.

[ 15 ] In this connection I must mention especially a friend who had already been a schoolmate of mine at Wiener-Neustadt. During that time, however, we were far apart. First in Vienna, where he visited me often and where he later lived as an employee, he came very close to me. And yet even at Wiener-Neustadt, without any external relationship between us, he had already had a significance for my life. Once I was with him in a gymnasium period. While he was exercising and I had nothing to do, he left a book lying by me. It was Heine's book on the romantic school and the history of philosophy in Germany. I glanced into it. The result of this was that I read the whole book. I found many stimulating things in the book, but was vitally opposed to the manner in which Heine treated the content of life which was dear to me. In this perception of a way of thought and order of feeling which were utterly opposed to those shaping themselves in me, I received a powerful stimulus toward a self-consciousness in the orientation of the inner life which was a necessity of my very nature. [ 16 ] I then talked with my schoolmate in opposition to the book. Through this the inner life of his soul came to the fore, which later led to the establishing of a lasting friendship. He was an uncommunicative man who confided very little. Most people thought him an odd character. With those few in whom he was willing to confide he became quite expressive, especially in letters. He considered himself called by his inner nature to be a poet. He was of the opinion that he bore a great treasure in his soul. Besides, he was inclined to imagine that he was in intimate relation with other persons, especially women, rather than actually to form these ties into objective fact. At times he was close to such a relation, but he could not bring it to actual experience. In conversation with me he would then live through his fancies with the same inwardness and enthusiasm as if they were actual. Therefore it was inevitable that he experienced bitter emotions when the dreams always went amiss.

[ 17 ] This produced in him a mental life that had not the slightest relation to his outward existence. And this life again was to him the subject of tormenting reflections about himself, which were mirrored for me in many letters and conversations. Thus he once wrote me a long exposition of the way in which the least or the greatest experience became to him a symbol and how he lived in such symbols.

[ 18 ] I loved this friend, and in my love for him I entered into his dreams, although I always had the feeling when with him: “We are moving about in the clouds and have no ground under our feet!” For me, who ceaselessly busied myself to find firm support for life just there – in knowledge – this was an unique experience. I always had to slip outside of my own being and leap across into another skin, as it were, when I was in company with this friend. He liked to share his life with me; at times he even set forth extensive theoretical reflections concerning the “difference between our two natures.” He was quite unaware how little our thoughts harmonized, because his friendly sentiments led him on in all his thinking.

[ 19 ] The case was similar in my relation with another Wiener-Neustadt schoolmate. He belonged to the next lower class in the Realschule, and we first came together when he entered the Hochschule in Vienna a year after me. Then, however, we were often together. He also entered but little into that which concerned me so inwardly, the problem of cognition. He studied chemistry. The natural scientific opinions in which he was then involved prevented him from showing himself in any other light than as a sceptic concerning the spiritual conceptions with which I was filled. Later on in life I found in the case of this friend how close to my state of mind he then stood in his innermost being; but at that time he never allowed this innermost being to show itself. Thus our lively and long arguments became for me a “battle against materialism.” He always opposed to my avowal of the spiritual substance of the world all the contradictory results which seemed to him to be given by natural science. Then I always had to array everything I possessed by way of insight in order to drive from the field his arguments, drawn from the materialistic orientation of his thought, against the knowledge of a spiritual world.

[ 20 ] Once we were arguing the question with great zeal. Every day after attending the lectures in Vienna my friend went back to his home, which was still at Wiener-Neustadt. I often accompanied him through the streets of Vienna to the station of the Southern Railway. One day we reached a sort of climax in the argument over materialism after we had already arrived at the station and the train was almost due. Then I put together what I still had to say in the following words: “So, then, you maintain that, when you say ‘I think,’ this is merely the necessary effect of the occurrences in your brain-nerve system. Only these occurrences are a reality. So it is, likewise, When you say ‘I am this or that,' ‘I go,’ and so forth. But observe this. You do not say, ‘My brain thinks,’ ‘My brain sees this or that,’ ‘My brain goes.’ If, however, you have really come to the opinion that what you theoretically maintain is actually true, you must correct your form of expression. When you continue to speak of ‘I,’ you are really lying. But you cannot do otherwise than follow your sound instinct against the suggestion of your theory. Experience offers you a different group of facts from that which your theory makes up. Your consciousness calls your theory a lie.” My friend shook his head. He had no time to reply. As I went back alone, I could not but think that opposing materialism in this crude fashion did not correspond with a particularly exact philosophy. But it did not then really concern me so much to furnish, five minutes before the train left, a philosophically convincing proof as to give expression to my certitude from inner experience of the reality of the human ego. To me this ego was an inwardly observable experience of a reality present in itself. This reality seemed to me no less certain than any known to materialism. But in it there is absolutely nothing material. This thorough-going perception of the reality and the spirituality of the ego has in the succeeding years helped me to overcome every temptation to materialism. [ 21 ] I have always known “the ego is unshakable.” And it has been clear to me that no one really knows the ego who considers it as a form of phenomenon, as a result of other events. The fact that I possessed this perception inwardly and spiritually was what I wished to get my friend to understand. We fought together many times thereafter on this battlefield. But in general conceptions of life we had so many similar sentiments that the earnestness of our theoretical battling never resulted in the least disturbance of our personal relationship.

During this time I got deeper into the student life in Vienna. I became a member of the “German Reading Club” in the Hochschule. In the assembly and in smaller gatherings the political and cultural phenomena of the time were thoroughly discussed. These discussions brought out all possible – and impossible – points of view, such as young people hold. Especially when officers were to be elected, opinions clashed against one another quite violently. Very exciting and stimulating was much that there found expression among the youth in connection with the events in the public life of Austria. It was the time when national parties were becoming more and more sharply defined. Everything which led later more and more to the disruption of the Empire, which appeared in its results after the World War, could then be experienced in germ.

[ 22 ] I was first chosen librarian of the reading-room. As such I found out all possible authors who had written books that I thought would be of value to the student library. To such authors I wrote “begging letters.” I often wrote in a single week a hundred such letters. Through this “work” of mine the library was very soon much enlarged. But the thing had a secondary effect for me. Through the work it was possible for me to become acquainted in a comprehensive fashion with the scientific, artistic, culture-historical, political literature of the time. I was an eager reader of the books given.

Later I was chosen president of the Reading Club. This, however, was to me a burdensome office. For I faced a great number of the most diverse party view-points and saw in all of these their relative justification. Yet the adherents of the various parties would come to me. Each would seek to persuade me that his party alone was right. At the time when I was elected every party had favoured me. For until then they had only heard how in the assemblies I had taken the part of justice. After I had been president for a half-year, all turned against me. In that time they had found that I could not decide as positively for any party as that party wished.

[ 23 ] My craving for companionship found great satisfaction in the reading-room. And an interest was awakened in a broader field of the public life through its reflection in the occurrences in the common life of the students. In this way I came to be present at very interesting parliamentary debates, sitting in the gallery of the House of Delegates or of the Senate.

[ 24 ] Apart from the bills under discussion – which often affected life profoundly – I was especially interested in the personalities of the House of Delegates. There stood every year at the end of his bench, as the chief budget expositor, the keen philosopher, Bartolemäus Carneri. His words were a hailstorm of accusations against the Taaffe Ministry; they were a defence of Germanism in Austria. There stood Ernst von Plener, the dry speaker, the unexcelled authority in matters of finance. One was chilled while he criticized the statement of the Minister of Finance, Dunajewski, with the coldness of an accountant. There the Ruthenian Thomeszuck thundered against the politics of nationalities. One had the feeling that upon his discovery of an especially well-coined word for that moment depended the fostering of antipathy against the Minister. There argued, in peasant-theatrical fashion, always intelligently, the clerical Lienbacher. His head, bowed over a little, caused what he said to seem like the outflow of clarified perceptions. There argued in his cutting style the Young Czech Gregr. One felt in him a half-demagogue. There stood Rieger of the Old Czechs, altogether with the deeply characteristic sentiment of the organized Czechs as they had been built up during a long period and had come to self consciousness during the second half of the nineteenth century – a man seldom shut up to himself, a powerful mind and a steadfast will. There spoke on the right side of the Chamber in the midst of the Polish seats Otto Hausner – often only setting forth the results of reading spiritually rich; often sending well-aimed shafts to all sides of the House with a certain sense of satisfaction in himself. A thoroughly self-satisfied but intelligent eye sparkled behind a monocle; the other always seemed to say “Yes” to the sparkle. A speaker who, however, even then often spoke prophetic words as to the future of Austria. One ought to-day to read again what he then said; one would be amazed at the keenness of his vision. One then laughed, to be sure, over much which years later became bitter earnest.

If we look back at what we discussed yesterday and the day before, a more intimate relationship between human beings and the surrounding cosmos must reveal itself to us. And we have been able to relate the physical body of the human being to the whole cosmos according to the organization of the head, the rhythmic organization, the metabolic organization; we have also been able to relate the human being in terms of soul and spirit to the whole cosmos. What appears to you there as the relationship of the human being to the cosmos, as the human being's complete integration into the world, had to be viewed differently in ancient times than it must be viewed now and than it will have to be viewed more and more as humanity strides towards the future. We have often mentioned how in ancient times an instinctive, primeval wisdom was spread over humanity; a wisdom that man did not work out inwardly, but that he, one might say, felt rising within him as if half in a dream. It was given to him, and he actually had nothing to do but open his soul's receptive organs and accept what came to him from the cosmos as a gift from the gods.

Since the human being is a threefold creature, this instinctive, primeval wisdom must also have presented the human being's entire relationship as a threefold one. By turning his attention more to that to which he belonged before his birth and which shone into the time between birth and death as a spiritual essence, which is essentially that which appears in the expanse of the cosmos, man spoke that what presented itself to him was beauty; the cosmos in beauty, and man, in terms of his brain organization, in terms of his organization of thinking, in terms of his being awake, born out of this world of beauty. Prehistoric man sensed that it was benevolent spiritual beings that revealed themselves around him; for prehistoric man did not see natural phenomena as dryly and soberly as we see them today when we merely indulge in ordinary consciousness. Prehistoric man saw spirituality and soulfulness revealing themselves everywhere. That revealed itself to him. And this cosmos, which was the revelation of the spiritual and soul and which revealed itself to his instinctive consciousness as in mighty dream images, that is what prehistoric man called the cosmos in beauty.

Then man felt, so to speak, standing on his planet. He felt connected to his planet. From it came his food, on it he had his location. He felt, as it were, his power, which permeated him physically, which revealed itself in the soul as will, which strengthened him out of the state of sleep. He felt this power, in turn, as the gift of benevolent divine spiritual beings and called it strength. The planet in strength permeates me - that is roughly how prehistoric man felt what he could not, however, express in sharply modulated words.

Thus he felt, as it were, standing in the midst of what was taking shape in his mind, taking form in his perceptions, and revealing itself in his awakening consciousness. And he felt himself standing on the planet in relation to the power that lived in his limbs, a power that he sensed as coming to him from the planet. He said to himself: “The same thing that works as a force in the stone when it falls to the ground, making a hole when the stone falls, lives in my legs when I walk. That connects me to the earth planet through my legs as my strength. That also lives in my arms when I work, that permeates my muscle strength. And he felt as if he were standing between beauty and strength, and felt that it was his task to bring about a balance in rhythm between the above, the beauty, and the below, the strength, in wisdom. And again he felt supported by the fact that he had to bring about this balance between beauty and strength, from the spiritual beings who were the bearers of wisdom, who illuminated him with wisdom.

Thus man felt what the cosmos gave him as beauty, wisdom and strength. Beauty, wisdom and strength were the things that made primitive man feel connected to the whole universe, that made him feel strengthened by them. In a sense, he felt the external world that surrounded him, the internal world that he sensed within himself, and the balance between the two, as beauty, wisdom and strength.

In the various secret societies, what remained were the keywords wisdom, beauty, strength, whereby it sometimes becomes quite clear how only the words remained, how the deeper understanding is missing. For a time has come for humanity when this feeling and this knowledge, even if it is instinctive knowledge, has been pushed more into the darkness by our connections with the cosmos. Man lived, as it were, in subordinate perceptions and subordinate feelings. He drove the impulses of his will out of subordinate elements of his own being. He forgot what he once sensed in beauty, wisdom and strength, for he was to become a free being. A central power had to emerge, as it were, from his inner chaos, to which was not revealed what revealed itself full of light and strength to the primeval man. But the newer humanity will not progress if it does not resurrect from within what once revealed itself from the cosmos as beauty, wisdom and strength. From the outside, the cosmos will not reveal itself again in beauty to humanity, as long as it is humanity on earth. These times are the times of the instinctive primal wisdom. These times are past times. These times are not those in which the free human being has developed, but rather those in which the human being could only develop who was driven, as it were, in bondage, in instincts. These times will not return, but out of his own inner being, man must resurrect what has come to him from outside in the way of wisdom, beauty and strength.

What has been absorbed, I would say, sucked in as power of beauty from the universe, man has, so to speak, taken in during old, very old earthly lives. In the middle earth-lives that followed, which we have gone through in the Egyptian, in the Greek, in the modern time, in these earth-lives, it was absorbed, but it did not come before human consciousness. Now mankind is ripe to bring it out of consciousness, and it will be brought out. What has been absorbed as the power of beauty will arise again from the inner being of man, and spiritual science is the instruction for this, how it is to arise from the human inner being. It will arise from out of the inner being through imagination. And all that is now consciously imparted through imagination in spiritual science is nothing other than the resurrected life of beauty, as it existed within the original wisdom. And all that man has experienced within himself in feeling the power of his planet, in which, however, was contained all the power of the cosmos, only that it was centered in the planet or is centered in the planet, all that must rise again, in that man grasps it from within through the realization of intuition. Beauty, drawn from the universe, becomes imagination for the future of humanity from the present on. Strength becomes intuition, grasped through one's own free human power, and wisdom becomes inspiration.

Thus man has left an age in which beauty, wisdom and strength were bestowed upon him from the outside. I would like to say that these buzzwords of wisdom, beauty and strength have been merely parroted in certain secret societies, in freemason orders and so on, without further cultivation of inner understanding. If one would understand the matter inwardly, one would know that these are ancient traditions that must revive as imagination, as inspiration, as intuition. It is therefore a rather inferior wisdom when all kinds of members of this or that order come and find a similarity between what occurs in spiritual science and what they have as their tradition, which they mostly do not understand. In spiritual science, the connection is lifted out of the spirit-knowledge itself.

Thus, people have left an ancient age in which the secrets of the universe were revealed to them in beauty, wisdom and strength. Humanity must now approach an age in which the secrets of the universe will be revealed to them through the imagination, inspiration and intuition of those who want to or are meant to come to these powers of knowledge and who can reach them in some way. Today, everyone can understand what is brought forth from inspiration, intuition and imagination, if only they want to.

But now the old age was exposed to a certain danger. And this danger, I would say, arose most strongly in the then civilized world, in Egypt, the Near East, India and so on, towards the end of the 2nd millennium BC. The danger was this: that people did not receive in the right way what revealed itself, as if by itself, out of the universe, I would say by grace, to the human being who only had to receive it in his cognitive instinct. One could succumb to this danger in the following way.

You have to imagine what it means that not only what appears to today's sober consciousness as nature and as natural laws is revealed in the nature surrounding man, but that grandiose beauty, that is, beautiful appearance in mighty, pictorial revelations of spiritual beings, which looked out from every source, from every cloud, from everything. It was particularly during this time, towards the end of the 2nd millennium before the Christian era, not as in even older times, when of course all this was also there; but it was, I would say, more naturally there. In those days, man had to partake of this grace by doing something himself. He did not have to do it in the way that we, now in full consciousness, seek higher spiritual development, but he could — and it was even a rather doubtful ability — develop a desire for this spiritual that revealed itself in nature; he could fire up his forces of need, his driving forces; then, as it were, the spiritual revealed itself to him out of nature. And in this kindling of the driving forces, of the forces of need, lay a strong satanic gift.

Most of you know, of course, how natural it was for man in the old Atlantean time to see the appearance of elemental beings. But this appearance still resonates for the clairvoyance of the post-Atlantean time. But it gradually faded away, and then man knew how to conjure it up in a certain way from natural phenomena through his powers of perception. That was the Luciferic danger that arose. Man could, so to speak, shake himself up, fire himself, in order to unite spiritual beings with himself. But this kind of arousal was something Luciferic in him. Therefore, the world of culture and civilization at that time was strongly contaminated by Lucifer at the end of the 2nd millennium BC. We have pointed out this Luciferic contamination from other points of view on other occasions; I have traced it back to its other causes; but now let us look at it from the point of view adopted in these three lectures.

This former Luciferic infestation of the world is now facing another, an Ahrimanic one. And this Ahrimanic infestation is currently on the march with a tremendously strong force. It is quite dreadful how the civilized man of the present day sleeps in the face of what is actually developing. Just consider how mechanical and machine power has developed in recent times. I have spoken of this before from other points of view. It is not so very long ago that people had to do everything with their own muscular strength, whereas today they can leave certain things to machines, which they only have to operate. The forces that man brings out of the earth by mining the coal underlie what takes place in the machines. The coal provides the power that then works in our machines.

When man now brings it about that a machine works alongside him, it is the case that he, so to speak, hands over to the machine what he used to have to do himself. The machine does it. The machine stands beside him and does the work that he used to have to do himself. One measures what the machine produces in horsepower, and if one wants to measure on a large scale, one measures what is produced within a certain territory in the horsepower that a horse can muster in a year when it does its daily work. Now take the following: in 1870 – we can calculate this from coal production – within Germany – I am deliberately choosing the war year – a total of six and seven-tenths million horsepower-years were worked by machines. That is, in addition to what people have worked, the machines have worked six and seven-tenths million horsepower-years. This is therefore a force that has been worked out of the machines themselves. In 1912, 79 million horsepower-years were worked by machine power in Germany alone!

Since Germany has a population of almost 79 million, this means that a horse works all year long next to every human being. And consider the increase from 6.7 million horsepower-years to 79 million horsepower-years within a few decades!

And now consider these conditions in relation to the outbreak of the terrible catastrophe of war. In the same year of 1912, France, Russia, and Belgium together could muster 35 million horsepower-years; Great Britain 98 million horsepower-years. Essentially, the war in 1870 was fought by people, because there was not much in the way of mechanical forces that could be mobilized. In Germany, there were only 6.7 million horsepower years available. In the few decades that followed, things changed. You know, in this war, it was essentially the machines that worked against each other. What confronted each other at the fronts came from the machines, so that actually the horsepower years of the mechanisms were led to the front.

Now the fact of the matter was that it took Great Britain a long time to mobilize its 98 million horsepower-years. But then, in terms of the mechanical power of these empires, 133 million horsepower-years stood against 79 million horsepower-years from Germany; about 92 million horsepower-years could be mustered if Austria were added. Now, this was initially offset by the fact that, as I said, Great Britain could not convert its horsepower years so quickly from land cultivation to the front. In this terrible war catastrophe, it was not the wisdom of the generals that was at issue – they did give certain directions, but the main thing that was at issue was the mechanical forces that collided at the fronts, and these did not depend on the generals, but on the inventions that man had previously made based on his natural science.

And what, then, had to happen as a matter of fate and destiny, as it were? Let us assume that the horsepower years of the United States of America, amounting to 139 million horsepower years, were still being sent to the front.

You see, the human race had produced so much machine power in just a few decades that the fate of the world was predetermined, quite apart from the genius of the generals. Nothing could be done about this fate of the world, about this necessity, where the results of the mechanical forces on the fronts simply collided.

So what exactly are we dealing with here? Man has constructed the mechanisms based on his thinking. By constructing them, he had placed his intellect, his scientific understanding, into the mechanisms. In a sense, reason had run away from his head and become the Horsepower Years in his environment. They now worked, having run away, themselves. The frantic speed with which this creation of a world, which is inhumanly-extra-human, has occurred in recent decades through humans, is not easily imagined by the sleeping civilized man of the present.

The person I referred to at the end of the 2nd millennium BC had the luciferic contamination around him; the spiritual beings for whom he developed his needs appeared to him from nature. When that is a natural object, the spiritual being appears in it (it is drawn). Now man lets his spirit flow into matter, into mechanisms. It becomes so in there that, for example, in Germany every person has created a horse alongside him out of the human mind, which now works alongside him, which was not a horse but machine power. This is separate from man, as these elemental beings were once separate from man, only in a different sense. They were so separate that man had to turn his Luciferic power to them. Now he turns his Ahrimanic power to them. Now he mechanizes them, materializes them. We live in the age of Ahrimanic contamination. Men do not even notice that they are actually withdrawing from the world, and that they are incorporating their intellect into the world and creating a world alongside them that is becoming independent. And the great, I might say, diabolical experiment has been carried out since 1914; that the one Ahrimanic entity against the other Ahrimanic entity has basically turned out to be the decisive factor. We have been dealing with an ahrimanic struggle over almost the whole earth. Man has accepted the ahrimanic character by creating a new ahrimanic world in the mechanism that surrounds him. And it is a new ahrimanic world. If you look at the figures: From 6.7 million to 79 million horsepower-years in just a few decades, the increase in non-human mechanical power – the ratio is the same in the other countries – how quickly Ahriman has grown in recent decades!

Should we not ask ourselves whether man should lose completely what is placed in his will, what is placed in his power of initiative? The question can be asked whether man should be led more and more towards the illusion that he is doing things, while in truth the Ahrimanic forces, which can be calculated in horsepower years, are working against each other? Those who have an overview of the world are only interested in Foch and Ludendorff and Haig from a moral point of view. From the point of view of full reality, they are interested in those forces that come from the coal and that clash on the fronts, that are led from the mechanical workshops to the fronts, depending on the inventive powers of previous years, and that turn into a simple mathematical calculation what must happen.

Thus, the Ahrimanization of the world is a simple mathematical calculation to know what must happen. And what is man's place in all this? He can stand by as the stupid one whose machines ultimately run towards when he finds somewhat more complicated combinations of forces.

This Ahrimanization is the modern counterpart to the Luciferization of the world of which I spoke earlier. That is what we must look at. For is this not perhaps the most eloquent illustration of the necessity for man to create from within? We will not stop this Ahrimanization, nor should we stop it, otherwise we would stand before every new mechanization like the Nuremberg Medical Council in 1839 or like the Berlin postmaster before the construction of the railroad, who said: People want to run a railroad from Berlin to Potsdam — I run post coaches out there twice a week, and there is no one inside! — One cannot stop mechanization, because culture must go in this direction. Culture demands the Ahrimanization. But it must be placed alongside what is now working from within the human being, what draws wisdom, beauty, power, and thus strength from within the human being, in the imagination, in the intuition, in the inspiration. For the worlds that will arise will be man's worlds, they will be those that stand before us in spirit and in soul, while without the forces of Ahriman are at work. And these powers that arise from imagination, from inspiration, from intuition, will have the power to direct what would otherwise overwhelm the human being around him, out of the frantic pace of Ahrimanization. What comes from the spiritual world, from imagination, inspiration and intuition, is stronger than all the horsepower years that can still spring from the mechanization of the world. But the mechanizing forces would overwhelm man if he did not find the counterweight for them in what he can find from the revelations of the spiritual world, which he must strive for.

It is not some invention, some abstract ideal, some slogan that appears with spiritual science and strives for the realization of imagination, inspiration and intuition, but it is something that can be clearly seen in its necessity from the course of human development. And it must be pointed out that man would be overwhelmed by the non-human, which he himself has created in a world Ahrimanized in calculable horse power. When man received from without that which gave him wisdom, beauty and strength, he had not yet the Ahrimanized world around him, he could receive it in grace or through grace, and on earth he had at most what he acquired through the power of fire or through the simplest mechanical tools, which did not add much to his own strength. And only since about the second half of the nineteenth century have we a new world, I might say, a mighty new geological layer covering the earth. To all the layers, diluvium, alluvium, is added the Ahrimanic layer of mechanized forces, which forms like a crust over the earth. So what overwhelms man rises up from the depths if man does not place himself in the outer world with that world that comes to him from the spirit, that is, from imagination, intuition and inspiration.

Truly strong impulses arise out of the knowledge of the course of the world, which point to the necessity of spiritual-scientific culture and civilization. These are necessities that can already be grasped today. For is it not terrible that alongside man, this, let us say, super-geological layer is emerging with such furious haste like a new earth crust, and that many people today still think as they have been taught, as for example in Germany only 6.7 million horsepower years were produced by mechanization? Do people think about what actually drives the course of the world? Do we have a clear picture of what is really happening? We do not, otherwise we would truly recognize from the knowledge of what is happening the necessity to find a new way of imbuing people with what past ages called beauty, wisdom, strength, and what we must call imagination, inspiration, intuition after the path that the human personality must take to attain it.

We are therefore looking into a world that is riddled with Ahriman. I have said before that I do not want to use the word “transition period” carelessly, because basically every period is a transition period; but a time in which something as special as Ahrimanism has developed so rapidly as it has since the last third of the 19th century is not always there. And the Biedermeier period, which immediately preceded it for a large part of Central Europe, truly cannot be compared with what has actually happened in reality in the last few decades. One must feel the full gravity of these modern events. And one must feel the following.

When you look at an event such as the war that took place in Central Europe in 1870/71, you can reflect on it and keep thinking about it. But just look at how people still try to visualize the events of the last few years in the same way! They still think the way they did when there were only 6.7 million horsepower years in Germany! They do not understand that you have to think differently when 79 million horsepower years are working outside of humans! This requires a completely different way of thinking. Without turning to spiritual science, the riddles that arise from these events will not be solved at all. If man mechanizes the world around him through external science, then he must all the more develop an inner science from within himself, which in turn is wisdom. This will have the power to direct what would otherwise overwhelm him.

Dear Participants! It is my duty to extend the warmest greetings to you, who have gathered here for the spiritual work to be done during the next eight days here at the Goetheanum. You will believe me when I assure you of my sincere and heartfelt conviction that what is to be achieved here in this Goetheanum should not arise from the subjective arbitrariness of a single person or group of people, but that it should be the fulfillment of the demands placed on present-day humanity by the spirit of the time itself, for everyone who is able to hear it. And so I not only greet all of you here, but together with all of you who have come together for honest work, I would also like to greet this spirit of our time, this spirit of the present, which speaks so clearly of the forces of decline that most diverse areas of life and human work and what must be replaced by new forces from the mind, from the heart, from the souls of human beings, by new forces that can only be found if certain spiritual sources of the human inner being are tapped into in this present time: This spirit of the time, one would like to greet it through everything that can be achieved here in this Goetheanum, which itself has its origin in its demands. But there are many things standing in the way of the fulfillment of this demand at the present time. There is an enormous amount that comes from a certain kind of inner human laziness; there is much that comes from a very particular kind of human fear. And finally, there are many obstacles rooted in old habits of thinking that are difficult to overcome. It is hardly possible for anyone to offer the spirit of the modern age a completely honest greeting if they cannot come to terms with all the obstacles that lie in this mental laziness, in this spiritual fear, in these inherited habits of thinking. People have become so accustomed to the great, significant, genuine fruits of human development that have been brought forth by the last few centuries that they now find it quite uncomfortable to seek a transition to anything new.

At the end of the Middle Ages, humanity found a transition from belief in external authorities in spiritual matters to a certain inner freedom. But in the last three to four centuries, it has become dependent on something else, on all kinds of authorities that it believes to carry in its own heart, but which, in essence, are again only [external] authorities. It is the indeterminate, barely comprehensible authority of what one has been accustomed to calling “scientific” and there are other external authorities that lie in the social institutions to which the man of the present wants to submit and from which he can only escape if he escapes them out of his very own initiative, out of complete human freedom, if he outgrows them in activity, which he [but] finds so difficult to outgrow because he would prefer to continue comfortably in the way that the precepts of science or of external social institutions may suggest; he sinks, as it were, into what customary education, what customary general scientific belief, general culture have brought. He seeks, as they say, his place in the social world and does not find the very own initiative of the soul life, the complete freedom of the inner being. For the latter is uncomfortable: one cannot think in the worn-out ways, one must get out of them. This can only be done through inner courage, through inner initiative, and out of a complete sense of freedom. It is comfortable to move in well-trodden paths that have been laid out through the centuries. It is uncomfortable to seek out the demands of the spiritual in our present time from spiritual heights with inner courage, inner freedom, and inner initiative.

And the second thing, esteemed attendees, is, I would almost say, a mysterious fear that is present in humanity today. There is no other anxiety to be found in this present time; but it is as if the sum of all anxieties that could accumulate in the human mind were summed up in a common inner fear, the fear of the new, the fear of the still unknown rising forces in all areas of the soul and of the outer life that we need. But this fear does not appear in its true form. People today would be ashamed if this fear were to appear in its true form and they had to show it. This fear appears in a mask. It appears in a mask that does not seem so ugly, in a mask that is even very seductive. It occurs in such a way that the one who is actually merely afraid of the new, the unknown, in the face of the older, seeks all possible logical and intellectual reasons by which he can substantiate it. We experience it every day that the fear of the new, the unknown, actually sits in the souls of people. They come and say: What is being brought to us, that contradicts, as can be proved, the certain scientific results. Often such alleged proof appears in a tightly closed form, so that one can hardly escape its web of thoughts. But these thought webs are nothing more than the pleasing mask in which the fear of the new and the unknown is clothed. And because it is basically so nice to be able to say: You can prove something logically, all the individual reasons against the new are correct – you also mask the fact that you are afraid of the new, a fear that you would be ashamed of if you showed it in its true form. Much of what appears today with seemingly scientific justification, with seemingly strict logic, is nothing more than the mask of inner fear of the new, the unknown. Anthroposophical spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants nothing more than to lead these inner soul dangers for the further progress of the present time before the soul's eye in full deliberation.

And the third thing is to persist in those habits of thinking that have been brought up since the last three, four, five centuries, truly not from worthless sources; they have come up from what has really developed in strict science since the time of Galileo, which reached a certain culmination in the 19th century. Strict inner disciplines, disciplines of outer observation and experimentation, have come upon humanity; they have poured the spirit of their work and labor into even the lowest schools. But with that, those habits of thought have also emerged, which - because they are basically so easy to achieve, even though the methods are strict - also take root most intensely in the human soul, those habits of thought that we find everywhere today, wherever we hear any conversation about science and about faith, about art, about the progress of humanity, about social life. And these habits of thinking are most intimately connected with the outer life. Man has learned in a magnificent way to deal technically with the outer life, precisely through these habits of thinking. Therefore, these habits of thinking have also connected most intensely with egoism, with all that has brought it, this human being, into modern social life. And so these thought habits, which are only the product of the last four to five centuries, appear to today's human being as something that leads to thinking in all absoluteness itself. And while a person, once he has acquired certain habits, clings to these habits to such an extent that, out of an unconscious belief, he thinks that if he were to abandon these habits he would lose part of his own being, it is even much worse with thought habits, especially with those thought habits that have formed within humanity in the most recent epoch. Man regards what is only a habit of thinking as the actual essence of thinking itself. And since he rightly believes that thinking is connected with the deepest nature of man, he clings to these habits of thinking because he believes that they are the only correct thinking and thinks that he would lose his self, his human essence, with these habits of thinking. He believes that he would lose all ground of a world view, of a conception of life, if he abandoned these habits of thinking. And often he has not even an inkling of how much he has fallen prey to these habits of thinking of the last four to five centuries, habits of thinking that must be overcome just as the habits of thinking of older epochs have been overcome.

Only when we are confronted with the full magnitude of the task that arises from overcoming our inner psychological comfort, spiritual fear and thought habits, will we find the right path to the place where the spirit of the present wants to speak in a comprehensible language about the demands that are necessary so that the forces of decline do not carry away the victory over the forces of the rising sun. They have led humanity down into chaos. And this spirit of the time, it speaks quite clearly of the fact that people must seek a knowledge, a view of the supersensible, of the immortal, of the eternal, in contrast to the sensual, the transitory, the temporal. Especially that which has become so ingrained in the habits of the soul and in the habits of thought of modern times, my dear audience, is always connected with a human tendency towards the transitory, the temporal, the sensual.

This is not a criticism of the temporal and the transitory. Nor is it a cheap criticism of the temporal and the transitory. On the contrary, when one stands on the ground of anthroposophical spiritual science, one fully recognizes that humanity once had to go through what lies in having a world view that thoroughly deals with the transitory and the temporal. It is recognized, for example, that the greatness of the 19th century is based on the fact that man learned to see through, with the strictest views, the essence of the transitory, the essence of the temporal. But it would be a sad state of affairs for humanity if, in turn, the eternal, the imperishable, were not seen above the transitory and the temporal. But this eternal, this imperishable, cannot be seen with those powers of the soul that have been of great, great service to research in the transitory and in the temporal. These powers of the soul, the intellectual powers, the powers of abstract thinking and experimental research, have been developed to their highest level in the last few centuries. These last centuries have indeed developed in man everything that could lead to the feeling of freedom, to the awakening of the inner human personality values. But that which one develops in one's own human soul when one only draws near to the external transience and the temporal being does not penetrate inwardly to the full human being, and so, in a certain way, in his latest ascent, man has lost precisely that which is connected with his own human being.

It is easy to object: So the anthroposophical spiritual science, the Goetheanism, leads away from the proven, outwardly practical world, into dizzying, bottomless cloud cuckoo lands, into that which wants to rise to fantastic heights away from the strict methodology of the last centuries. One wants to forget and oversleep here – one could object – in this Goetheanum everything that the Galilei era has brought, and one wants to dream oneself back into the eternal, for example in a Platonic way. They want to enthuse about the eternal and the immortal in Plato's world of ideas because they lack the patience to engage with the achievements of the last few centuries in relation to the real external world. But if one only really got to know it without prejudice, this anthroposophy, as it is cultivated here in this Goetheanum, one would find that one does not want to flee here with a careless skipping of Galileism into a dreamt-up Platonic world, but that one wants everything here that man can achieve in truly understanding this outer, transitory sense world, in terms of the practice of outer life, that one wants to take up Galileism fully in order to carry its rigor and discipline to the heights to which Plato was allowed to ascend without this modern culture. Plato lived in his world of ideas, which was a living one for him, and he could do so because of the limitations of his epoch, before the age of Galileism. We would have to descend into the abyss, into enthusiasm, into fantasy, if we were to enter the Platonic world of heights in a dreamy state without the preliminary stages of what the times of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and Giordano Bruno brought us. Therefore, if one only gets to know what the anthroposophy meant here intends, then one will not reproach it for wanting to turn away from life in a fanciful, enthusiastic way into a Platonic world of ideas. No, it wants to draw the forces full of reality from the spirit in order to penetrate into real practical life. And just as the anthroposophy in question does not want to dream and fantasize about the outside world, it also does not want to lead to the inner life of the human being in such a way that the human being as a mystic becomes a hermit of life, that he wants to steal away like a hermit from all that is his task in real, outer, practical life.

Anthroposophy knows very well that methods such as those cultivated in India, such as the yoga method, have had their time; it knows very well that anyone who, with a complete misunderstanding of the spirit of modern times, wants to return to old mystical systems, that such a person is striving for something that should be avoided here. He strives for a certain mysticism of which nothing else can be said than the following.

My dear audience, there is a superficiality towards the outer world that never wants to go into the real facts, that does not want to follow the finer gradations of the facts, that, I might say, wants to enjoy life arbitrarily on the outside in large meshes. There is such a superficiality on the outside; but there is also a superficiality of the heart. This is the superficiality that, without thoroughly experiencing the inner human secrets, only ever speaks of withdrawing from the perception of the outside world, of cultivating the innermost. Such mystical striving, as it is making its way into many circles today, does not correspond to the demands of the spirit of the time, but rather adds to the external superficiality the superficiality of the heart. And in many circles that today think of themselves as particularly mystically exalted, nothing lives but that mysticism which is inner soul superficiality. With this soul superficiality one does not penetrate into the eternal secrets of life. One can only penetrate them if one has the patience to truly awaken the forces slumbering in the soul or at least to engage intellectually with what the forces slumbering in the soul can find from stage to stage. Only by overcoming the superficiality of the heart, by overcoming this superficial mysticism, lies the possibility of finding those powers of the soul that lead upwards in the right way, from the temporal, from the transitory to the eternal, to the everlasting. But when grasped in this way, it is truly capable of having a fruitful effect on the most diverse areas of today's life. And we need this fertilization. We have a magnificent science that has taken hold of the external course of things out of intellectualism and external observation. We need to advance from this science of the senses to a spiritual science, which is carried out in the same way as the pursuit of sensory science. Just as if it always had to give account before the strict methods and disciplines of the outer sensory science, the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here would like to fertilize today's scientific life in general.

Other branches of life sometimes show an impossibility of being fertilized by ordinary science in its present form. The intellectualism and abstract concepts that have been brought forth in more recent times are avoided by the artist; the artist believes that the more elementary power and force of his artistic experience would be taken from him if the mildew of science were to be poured into his heart, if he were to try to deepen his artistic experience with the help of today's science. And so many people say: Yes, spiritual science also wants to fertilize artistic life, but we understand how destructively scientific life affects artistic life. — People only say this until they realize how closely related artistic experience is to what the soul of a true spiritual scientist must go through to enter the realms where spirit and soul truly live. On this path one must not reflect, one must create, one must connect with that which lives and abides in the essence of things, which constitutes the secret of things. And soul-forces are released from the innermost being with the same vividness, with the same directly effective presence as they have in the artistic experience. And when one first becomes acquainted with the extraordinarily living, creative and formative side of spiritual science, then one will realize that this spiritual science does not bring abstract concepts, but directly inner impulses of life, which again to those spiritual regions from which the artist must draw if he does not want to imitate mere external nature in a superfluous way and thereby fall prey to a superfluous naturalism. What the spiritual scientist has to go through is intimately related to what the artist has to go through. And what the artist forms in his imagination, the spiritual researcher forms in supersensible intuition. These are two different paths that can lead to a good understanding, as many people in the past have understood each other. Those, for example, who, out of a deep intuitive perception of the secrets of the world, have presented something before their soul, as it then lives through Raphael in the Sistine Madonna, as it lives in Leonardo's Last Supper. Again, we have to reach into regions of spiritual life, but in the sense of the newer time, the modern time, so that we also have something in the artistic field that is not just an imitation of nature. Because imitation of nature, that is not possible for anyone. Whatever one wants to imitate in nature, nature can always do better. Only then can one find the way to art, when one finds the way to the spirit.

And if we look at another area in which the newer life has led to a real inner tragedy for many individual human personalities, we see how, in the religious sphere, the depth needed for a real religious experience has been lost. Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, is not meant to be a new foundation of religion! To say that is to defame it. For what we need is not a new religion; what we need is a deepening of the religious impulses in the human heart, in the human soul, but this can be found by man again finding the paths to the spiritual essence of the world. Just as science and art can be fertilized by the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here, so religious life can be deepened through it. And I believe I need not speak of it at all for all those who, looking beyond the immediate everyday, see how we have come into a social existence in the civilized world that is truly threatening, with every year growing larger, that is already horrifying enough today. All sorts of speculations as to how this or that institution should be set up, what should be done from state to state, from nation to nation, have certainly not been lacking in the old ways of thinking. There has been much talk about such things, but nowhere is there any prospect that social chaos might be resolved in a better light.

Does this not indicate how necessary it is for individuals to find their way to the social life, those individuals who find their way to the innermost part of the human soul, from which understanding can be found for what is necessary between human and human, between nation and nation, between race and race! Only when social life is absorbed in spiritual clarity in each individual will the age of individualism also be able to become a social age. But one does not arrive at these social impulses, these social feelings, in the human individuality by, for example, talking in fine phrases about deepening the human soul, about all kinds of social impulses that people should educate in themselves. We only arrive at this when we learn to belong to the world of the senses with our sensory organism, as we have learned to do in the last three to four centuries; when we learn to belong to a spiritual world with our spiritual organism; when we learn to belong to a spiritual world with our spiritual organism, when we are able to carry down ideas about the great destiny of humanity into the individual everyday life.

Humanity has become so proud of the practice of life developed in recent times. What has this practice of life revealed itself to be? It has withdrawn more and more into small circles in certain gestures of life, and in the end it has led to a situation where people can no longer follow the overwhelming course of world events fleeing into chaos with their thoughts. What has emerged is not real life practice, but routine in individual areas, mere life routine. What the human body would be without soul and spirit is this life routine without the fertilization of ideas, which can only come from the acknowledgment, from the realization of the spiritual regions. The most mundane, the smallest things in life become routine if they cannot be directed in the right way towards that which can pulsate in a person out of their sense of connection with the all-encompassing spiritual world. We will not arrive at such a practice, which in turn can support our social life, if we do not introduce the spirit into everyday life, going beyond all routine. For only a life of everydayness that is truly spiritualized and ensouled is truly practical.

Therefore, what wants to be spiritually worked on here in this Goetheanum does not want to become something unworldly, something fanciful, something that leads people away from the practice of life like a hermit; on the contrary, it wants to place them completely within it. We need true and genuine practical life. Every day shows us this when we are told how every day more and more humanity is drawn into decline. Therefore, in these eight days, we will speak of that which in turn leads to the rising, what the spirit of the time demands of the person of the present, what it demands in the sense that only from the insight into the eternal, into the supersensible, into the immortal, can that strength be gained which is needed to transform the forces of decline into forces of ascent. We need only recognize in the right sense how the inner obstacles of mental laziness, spiritual fear, and thought habits lie before us, and we will feel that what we need — inner initiative, activity of the soul , the courage to do something new, the fearlessness in the face of the new and the unknown – that all this can be won if we are so seized by the spirit that it is the spirit itself that lives in all our impulses. For just as the world is created by the spirit, so human activity, human endeavor, human knowledge will be true when they are permeated by the spirit. May all that is to be worked out in experiments bear witness to such spirit-filled practice and knowledge, as has been the case in previous such events during these past eight days here in this Goetheanum. And inspired by this wish that we may work together here in accordance with the great demands of the spirit of our time, I wanted to bring you today the warmest greeting from the spirit that should prevail here in this Goetheanum dedicated to anthroposophy at the beginning of these working days, and I wanted to greet the spirit itself, which should and may prevail here more and more during these eight days and always.

A dramatic epilogue by Henrik Ibsen

Now that he has shared his "Dramatic Epilogue" with us, we can see deeper into Henrik Ibsen's soul than was previously possible. He has never spoken so personally, so unreservedly. He wants to lay bare the fate of the creator, his own. It is a shattering tragedy in which he does this. He dreadfully depicts the moment when the creator realizes what a cruel game the eternal powers are playing with him. They have killed him in order to turn him into a creator. And when he has reached the heights and looks down on the path he has taken, he awakens and realizes that he has walked through life as a dead man. He has sought life as every creature seeks it. But it is not to be found on his path. When he stepped out of the state of innocence and went out to seek a higher realm in art, life became alien to him, so alien that he could no longer find the way to it. In his mind he wanted to seek a higher nature, a true reality. But poetry, dream reality remains all that he finds when he leaves the circles of life. The child who perceives the things around him with fresh, innocent senses, the naive person who wanders through woods and fields and lets what he sees take full effect on him: they have nature. The creative person who wants to get to the bottom of things, who strives upwards to the archetypes: he finally realizes that it was a noble delusion that he was pursuing. This confession from the soul of the poet, who throughout his life sought reality in all its forms and strove to embody it, is deeply moving. It is devastating for all those who are forever calling out to the creative artist: Stick to nature. Ibsen gives them the answer to this demand. Do not be creators. That is the harsh answer. If you want life, nature, reality, then seek the daily pleasures; anything beyond that kills life. In the image of the "Resurrection", the sculptor Professor Rubek wanted to create a work of divinely pure beauty. The woman he takes as his model is created by nature as the ideal of beauty. He enters into a marriage with her in the realm of the spirit. The marriage of the creator with beauty is to take place. He wants to show his beloved all the glories of the world. They seek life together. But they seek it in the spirit. And so neither of them can find it. He does not touch the woman, for at the moment when earthly things mingle with the enjoyment of heavenly beauty, he believes he has lost the latter himself. And so, in his opinion, the woman in whom he sees beauty embodied should also think. But she is created by nature as a natural being. And she becomes the hater of the creator who does not satisfy her earthly urges. She leaves him. Her soul can no longer find its way back to life. Madness finally overtakes her and she lives in the idea of being dead. The creator has taken her life. He has also taken it from himself. And now that he is looking for it again, he cannot be happy in it, nor can he make it happy. He finds a wife for the second time. He is no longer capable of marriage in the earthly sense. The woman with whom he has entered into such a marriage knows nothing of desires for a higher world. Life is her realm. And when the first best man of nature steps into her path, who does not strive for beauty but for bear hunting in the wild forest, she feels that her nature is related to his. At the same time, the artist finds again the one who has also lost her earthly nature through him, whom he has turned into a dead woman. Just as his wife throws herself into the arms of the man of nature, so he throws himself into the arms of the one who was once spiritually married to him, the dead of the dead. On the heights of the mountains, where the storm of the natural elements is unleashed, the fate of the four men is fulfilled. The living woman is snatched from the avalanche in the arms of the living man and carried into the safe valley where she will find happiness. The two dead spirit people are caught up in the avalanche. They have realized that they have both made themselves hostile to life, to nature. The moment they awake from their death, they seek nature up on the mountains; but the moment of their awakening is the moment of their downfall. Fate has spoken inexorably. The innocent, the naive, the foolish are at the right hand of nature. Life is theirs. The creative, the cognizant, the spiritual people, they are on the left. Death is theirs. Life and creation are eternally incompatible in human existence. And only the fair simplicity, which has never experienced anything, nothing of reality and nothing of the spirit: it can believe that peace is possible between creation and life. But it is this fair simplicity that has the last word in tragedy. The deaconess, who has to accompany the madwoman, hurries after the sick woman as she climbs to the dangerous height with the sculptor. And when she sees them both perish in the masses of snow, she calls out: Pax vobiscum.

Now that the poet has awakened, his audience also appears to be such simple-minded people. They have often described him as the finder of life, of nature. But he obviously says the same thing about the characters in his dramas that his professor Rubek says about his busts: "There is something suspicious, something hidden in and behind these busts - something secret that people cannot see. - Only I can see it. And that gives me such pleasure inside. - From the outside they show that "striking resemblance, as it is called, and people stand there open-mouthed and amazed - but in their deepest depths they are honorable, righteous horse faces and stubborn donkey snouts and droopy-eared, low-faced dog skulls and fattened pig heads, - and stupid, brutal ox heads are also among them." Like the simple-minded deaconess who knows neither reality nor creation, people were always talking about the peace of life and poetry when they spoke of Ibsen's creations. But the poet, who has awakened from the dead, knows that there is no such "Pax vobiscum". His tragic feelings are mixed with the mocking laughter at his audience, which stands at the level of judgment of his

deaconess. It takes full measure of "these dear animals", which "man has made a mess of in his own image, and which in turn have made a mess of man. And these deceitful works of art are now being ordered from me by the bourgeois, solvent people. And buy them in good faith - and at high prices. Weigh them up with gold, as they say."

Ibsen seems to divide people into three genders. Into the innocent children of nature, who enjoy life to the full; into the creatives, who die to life because they want to transcend it; and into the art lovers and dreamers of reality, who in their lack of judgment rave about the mingling of creation with nature. He regards the first sex with melancholy; in the second he sees the comrades of his own tragic destiny; he sneers at the third.

The life of the creator is a tragedy for him when he looks at himself, a comedy when he looks at those who accept his "dear pets" for creatures like works of eternal nature itself.

With a shrug of the shoulders, our present-day generation remembers the time when a philosophical wave swept through the whole of German intellectual life. The powerful current of the times, which seized the minds at the end of the last century and the beginning of this century and boldly set itself the highest conceivable tasks, is currently regarded as a regrettable aberration. Anyone who dares to contradict the "fantasies of Fichte" or the "insubstantial thoughts and word games" of Hegel is simply portrayed as a dilettante "who has as little idea of the spirit of modern natural science as he does of the solidity and rigor of the philosophical method". Only Kant and Schopenhauer find favor with our contemporaries. The former succeeds in seemingly deriving from his teachings the somewhat sparse philosophical chunks on which modern research is based; the latter, in addition to his strictly scientific achievements, also wrote works in a light style and about things that need not be too remote even for people with the most modest intellectual horizon. But for that striving for the highest peaks of the world of thought, for that impetus of the spirit that paralleled our classical artistic epoch in the scientific field, there is now a lack of sense and understanding. The alarming aspect of this phenomenon only becomes apparent when one considers that a permanent turning away from that intellectual direction would be for the Germans a loss of their self, a break with the spirit of the people. For that striving arose from a deep need of the German essence. It does not occur to us to want to deny the manifold errors and one-sidedness that Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Oken and others committed in their bold undertakings in the realm of idealism, but the tendency that inspired them should not be misjudged in its grandeur. It is so appropriate to the people of thinkers. Not the lively sense for the immediate reality, for the outside of nature, which enabled the Greeks to create their magnificent, imperishable creations, is characteristic of the Germans, but instead an unrelenting urge of the spirit for the basis of things, for the seemingly hidden, deeper causes of the nature that surrounds us. While the Greek spirit lived in a wonderful world of forms and shapes, the German, who withdrew into himself and had less contact with nature and more with his heart, with his own inner being, had to seek his conquests in the realm of pure thought. And that is why it was German how Fichte and his followers approached the world and life. That is why their teachings were so enthusiastically received, that is why the whole life of the nation was gripped by them for a time. But that is also why we must not break with this school of thought. Overcoming the errors, but natural development on the foundation laid at that time, must become our watchword. It is not what these minds found or thought they found, but how they faced up to the tasks of research that is of lasting value. They felt the need to penetrate into the deepest secrets of the mystery of the world, without revelation, without experience limited to chance, purely through the power inherent in their own thinking, and they were convinced that human thinking was capable of the impetus necessary for this. How different are things today? We have lost all confidence in thinking. Observation and experience are regarded as the only tools of research. What is not tangible is considered uncertain. There is no understanding for the fact that our thinking can look deeper into the workings of the world than all external observation is capable of, without hanging on the shackles of the senses, relying purely on itself. One renounces any solution to the great riddles of creation and wastes endless effort on detailed research, which is of no value without great, guiding points of view. The only thing we forget is that with this view we are approaching a point of view that we believe we have long since overcome. For the rejection of all thought and the insistence on experience is, more deeply understood, quite the same as the blind faith in revelation of the religions. For what is the latter based on? But only on the fact that truths are handed down to us ready-made, which we must accept without having to weigh up the reasons in our own thinking. We hear the message, but we are denied insight into the reasons. It is no different with blind faith in experience. According to the naturalists and the strict philologists, we should merely collect and organize the facts and so on, without going into the inner reasons. Here, too, we should simply accept the finished truths without any insight into the forces behind the phenomena. Believe what God has revealed and do not search for the reasons, says theology; register what takes place before your eyes, but do not think about the causes behind it, for that is in vain, says the latest philosophy. And only in the field of ethics, where have we got to! The common thread that runs through the thinking of all the minds of the classical period of our science is the recognition of free will as the supreme power of the human spirit. This recognition is what, properly understood, makes man alone appear to us in his dignity. The religions which demand of us submission to the commandments which an external power gives us, and which see in this submission alone the moral, diminish this dignity. It is not appropriate for a being at the highest stage of organic development to submit without volition to the paths marked out for it by another; it must prescribe for itself the direction and goal of its activity. To obey not commandments but one's own insight, to recognize no power of the world that would dictate to us what is moral, that is freedom in its true form. This view makes us the masters of our own destiny. Fichte's meaningful words are borne by this conception: "Break down all upon me, and you earth and you heaven, mingle in wild tumult, and all you elements, - foam and rage, and in wild struggle wear away the last little sun-dust of the body which I call mine: - my will alone with its firm plan shall hover bold and cold above the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my destiny, and it is more lasting than you; it is eternal, and I am eternal like it." What was the basis of German idealistic philosophy: breaking with dogma in the field of thought, breaking with commandment in the field of action, must be the unalterable goal of further development. Man must create happiness and satisfaction from within himself and not let it come to him from outside. Pessimism and other similar diseases of the times arise purely from the inability to rely on an energetic self and to work powerfully from there. One does not know how to set oneself specific tasks in life that one could cope with, one dreams oneself into vague, unclear ideals and then complains when one does not achieve what one actually has no idea about. Ask one of today's pessimists what he actually wants and what he despairs of? He does not know. Don't think that I'm referring to Eduard von Hartmann's pessimism, which has nothing in common with the usual lamentation about the misery of life. (How highly I regard Hartmann's world view can be seen from the introduction to the second volume of my edition of Goethe's scientific writings. Kürschner's German National Literature.)

In spite of all the progress we have made in the most diverse fields of culture, we cannot deny that the signature of our age leaves much, very much to be desired. Our progress is for the most part only in breadth and not in depth. But only progress in depth is decisive for the content of an age. It may be that the abundance of facts that have penetrated us from all sides makes it seem understandable that we have momentarily lost our view into the depths over the view into the breadth; we only wish that the broken thread of progressive development will soon be tied up again and that the new facts will be grasped from the spiritual height once gained.