The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the lectures I have given here this winter, I have tried to give some indications of the essential character of the development of the Germans and its relation to the development of other nations of Europe. Today I would like to take the liberty of giving some aphorisms about the psychological and spiritual development of the Germanic-German character, all with a view to our fateful and difficult times. Tomorrow I will then try to show what the insights of spiritual science can be for people in happy, but also in serious, painful and also sorrowful hours of life, especially with regard to our time.

The considerations that are to be given here will start from the point of view of spiritual science – a point of view that has been mentioned here several times, and which is still not very well recognized or even approved in public. But those who are close to this spiritual science feel from their insights how it can not only enrich and uplift life, but how it can provide enlightenment about intimate, important connections in life - and not only in the life of the individual person, but also in the life of nations, in human relationships, in human coexistence.

However, right at the starting point of a consideration of the life of nations, reference must be made to insights of spiritual science that have been mentioned here several times in past lecture cycles, but which must be drawn upon for an understanding of today's consideration. Attention must be drawn to spiritual-scientific findings that are among the least recognized and approved: to findings that tell us that at the starting point of every people's development, the soul life takes a very special form, that the origins of people on earth showed a very different soul life than our present. In our time, with its materialistically colored world view, this cannot yet be recognized. One imagines that the starting points of human beings on earth lie in very primitive soul states, in soul states that one currently, one might say, endeavors to think of as animal-like as possible. Spiritual science shows us something essentially different. It shows us that at the starting point of human development on earth — and reaching even into the starting points of the development of each nation — there is a clairvoyant behavior of the souls. This means that at the beginning of this human development and also of the development of nations, human souls not only live in states through which they see external material reality with their senses and form ideas, concepts and images from it with their minds , but that the souls are capable of living in other states, in states of consciousness that are not those of our ordinary daily life, but which are also not those of our chaotic dream life and even less those of unconscious sleep. In the beginning of the development of nations, people lived in states of consciousness in which the souls were able to develop imaginative clairvoyance, that is, to come into contact with the spiritual reality around us, with that reality which no eye can see, which no ear can hear, which cannot be grasped with the mind that is bound to the senses and to the brain, and whose perceptions do not penetrate from the outside into our soul like the sensory impressions, but arise in images in the soul, but in images that are not dream images, but that reflect realities of the spiritual world, those realities that lie behind the sensory world in terms of cause and effect. Thus, in the original human being, there are states of consciousness in which he knows himself to be connected with a spiritual world, in which this spiritual world arises in him in images.

However, in these earlier primitive human states, this clairvoyant insight into the spiritual worlds can only be achieved by the fact that what we call human “self-awareness” is still underdeveloped, the awareness of life in the personality. The times of ancient clairvoyance correspond to a state of soul in which the soul could not yet say “I” to itself with full understanding, as it can now, in which the soul did not yet feel itself as an individuality, as a personality, but as a part of a great spiritual world organism, like a member of the cosmos as a whole. Thus, in those ancient times, personality consciousness was clouded, dim. But in certain periods a tableau of pictures spread out before the soul, which were shades of the spiritual world thrown into the soul. And if we look at the starting points of the individual national developments, we can only understand these national developments if we are able to go back to the point in the development of a nation when the human souls within that nation still have at least some of this clairvoyant knowledge; when we go back to times when there was imaginative knowledge of the spiritual world. We get to know the individual nations, we get to know the souls of the nations, the spirits of the nations, when we consider the different ways in which nations develop from these original clairvoyant states to those that then signify higher, more advanced levels of culture. For this development from the state of primitive clairvoyance to the higher stages of culture, which are attained when man is fully conscious of his personality, this development is different for each individual people, and the nature of the people depends on how the people develop from the primitive stage of culture indicated above to a higher one.

The ancient Greeks are a characteristic example of this, and most Oriental peoples are similar to them, as are, to some extent, the peoples of the ancient Italian peninsula. Such a people as the Greeks can only be fully understood if it is clear that this people passes from the original pictorial impressions of a spiritual world to the formation of the world view given to us in their mythology, in their religious ideas. This is still little recognized today, but the beginnings are already given in external science, which lead to the view as it has just been indicated here. In his beautiful book, “The Riddle of the Sphinx”, Ludwig Laistner attempts to show how all ancient myths, all ancient conceptions of the gods, especially those of the Greeks, are, as it were, already transformations of earlier clairvoyant conceptions that have passed into fantasy. And when we look at the ancient Greek world of gods, we can understand it only if we grasp it as transformed images of the supersensible world, gained in the state of ancient clairvoyance. But this people, the Greeks, experienced the transformation of the perceptions of ancient clairvoyance into the mythical world view and even the transformation of the mythical world view into the philosophical world view in such a way that they went through this transformation as a people in a youthful manner, so to speak. In ancient Greece, the transition from the old clairvoyant through the mythical to the philosophical world view was experienced at a youthful stage of national development. At the same time, the human consciousness, which presents man as a personality, as an individuality, develops in the people of such a nation. Everything that is the emotional, the personal, the hearty element of man develops. This develops alongside in the ordinary state of consciousness, and the human being is then only able to apply the emotional, the hearty element to the everyday circumstances of life. By living in the ordinary state of consciousness in the everyday circumstances of life, he can turn to spiritual matters — in a different state of mind. Thus two worlds enter his consciousness: one in which he lives with his feelings in everyday circumstances, and one that lifts him up with his spirit into the spiritual world; and he then confronts himself as an individuality with his emotional feelings, which he has inherited from what has passed from his clairvoyance into mythical and philosophical ideas. What constitutes the philosophical conceptions then appears to him as something given to him as a revelation, to which he looks up, but with which he is not so connected that every fiber of his soul and will is also directly connected with this world view in the creation of the world view.

This is how it is with the soul development of a people like the Greeks, a people who, as it were in their youth, went through what can be called the transition of clairvoyant knowledge into a worldview, through which one recognizes the soul's belonging to those powers that are exalted above life and death.

The development was quite different for those peoples, the Germanic peoples, who stormed from the east and north to the borders of the Greek and Roman empires around the beginning of our era. Of course, we also find clairvoyant knowledge at the starting point of their development among these peoples; there were also times when the soul was inclined towards the spiritual world through the images of clairvoyant imaginations. But the soul lost these clairvoyant imaginations, as it loses them with all peoples, so also with the Germanic peoples; because all of humanity must go through a state of development that is only intended for the physical world, that can only be intended for the reception of ideas about the physical world. At a certain point in time — and this coincides fairly exactly with the onslaught on the Roman Empire — the individual Germanic peoples not only lost the ability to see into the spiritual world in the original dream-like clairvoyance, but they also gradually lost their understanding of what the soul can get from such knowledge from the old clairvoyance during the migration of the peoples, during their onslaught against the Roman Empire. And it can be said that this is connected with the fact that these peoples all went through the state of their clairvoyant knowledge during their youth, but that they could not make a transition from their original clairvoyant knowledge to their later worldviews in their later years, so to speak, in their vigorous manhood. Thus, in these peoples, the development of the world view passes directly from the childlike state to the — I would say — “more mature” state of the people. In the childlike state, when consciousness is dulled, what was clairvoyant knowledge is present; there is also the dulled full receptivity of the peoples for the myths that have developed from ancient clairvoyance. These myths have been preserved at most as traditions for external understanding. Instead, a consciousness of personality has developed in these peoples, a firm foundation on the individuality of life. They have solidified what the qualities of the mind are, what the immediate character traits are, and through which traits of mind and character the human being stands in everyday life. And because the old clairvoyant ideas do not extend into this ordinary, everyday life, the mind, the impulses of will, and even the impulses of character must develop the longing to find the strength within themselves to feel, to experience, to learn the connection with the spiritual world. Out of the, as it were, dull forces of the mind, the longing for the divine spiritual worlds develops in these peoples. And unlike the Greeks, they cannot look back to anything that shines in their souls as the product of the development of ancient clairvoyant ideas; but they develop a deep soul, a soul that is indeed deep for grasping the ordinary circumstances of everyday life, but which at the same time feels the deepest longing for the spiritual foundations of life. In the mature manhood of these Germanic peoples, at the time we have indicated, their minds strive for a religious deepening of their world view, but no longer the old ideas of earlier clairvoyance resound in their minds.

Thus, while the Germanic peoples . stormed the peoples of the south, in the early days of the Germanic world, independently of the ideas of the world view, the personal character traits, the strong, courageous qualities of the will, of the mind, developed. We find a reflection of this state of mind above all in that wonderful poem, which stands worthily alongside the greatest poems of all times, alongside the Homeric epics, alongside the Kalewala of the Finns: the “Nibelungenlied”. As the Song of the Nibelungs has come down to us, it shows us people who no longer have a clear view of what holds them together with the old clairvoyant ideas. Instead, we see in them a deep insight into the struggles and overcoming that the soul undergoes in order to find its way in life. But if we look closely at the way the Nibelungenlied is presented, we become aware of how remnants of the old clairvoyant imagination still extend into the lives of these people, but how these remnants are shaped in such a way that they are, as it were, tailored to serve the everyday life of people and, further, the historical life of people. We become aware of this, for example, when we hear how the woman who is to become the wife of Siegfried of the Horn foresaw the entire misfortune that was to befall the man who was to become her husband by seeing in a dream a white falcon on which two eagles swoop down and kill it with their claws. And then again, when Siegfried has become her husband and Hagen is about to murder Siegfried, she sees two mighty mountains collapse over her husband Siegfried. — What remains of the old clairvoyant visions is no longer sufficient to lead man beyond the ordinary powers of imagination; but it is so integrated into his life that man can learn from it what is in store for him, on a large or small scale. These ancient images also make themselves felt in another way, for example, when we take what connects to the older traditions via the Nibelungenlied: when we see how Siegfried kills the dragon, bathes in the dragon's blood and thereby acquires a callosity that makes him invulnerable — except for the spot between his shoulders where a linden leaf has fallen, and which is then the spot where Hagen later murders him. Thus we have the penetration of the old connection with the spiritual world into the life of the Germanic peoples; but this penetration serves the way in which man places himself in the life of the physical world.

Thus we see how these Germanic peoples are initially called upon, I would say, to develop the qualities of the mind and character, and also the qualities of a strong individuality, while making sacrifices in the process, under the self-experienced connection with the spiritual world, as well as to develop those qualities that bind soul to soul, soul to soul, in the physical life. The impulses of gratitude, loyalty and everything that radiates from the mind of man, we see so excellently described for the soul of the ancient Germanic people in the Song of the Nibelungs, that those who helped to write the Song of the Nibelungs were involved in the composition of the Nibelungenlied had a dark awareness of how man is taken out of his connections with the spiritual world and, with all the qualities of his soul, is firmly placed in the physical world.

In this way we have outlined a fundamental characteristic of the Germanic soul, a soul that everywhere shows a peculiar kind of personal depth, a characterological depth, and at the same time that deep, deep longing for the spiritual worlds, which wants satisfaction, but initially feels this satisfaction like a tragically sorrowful yearning and hope, because the old ideas born of clairvoyance have lost their strong power over the human mind.

Now it is highly remarkable in what way the peoples of the south – and in what other way the Germanic peoples of the north – to the gift of the world: Christianity, by virtue of this state of mind, had to behave. Let us be clear that the peoples of the South, with their worldviews born out of the old clairvoyant ideas, had to receive this Christianity. They had to compare it in what it revealed to them with what they knew, or at least what they could have the definite conviction that one had once known through direct experience. A longing such as is taken for granted today, and as it developed among the Germanic peoples: a longing for the spiritual worlds, a — I would say — tragic longing to penetrate the veil that separates man from the spiritual worlds. Such a longing could not, in fact, arise among those peoples who had direct knowledge that a spiritual world existed, because they were in contact with these worlds in special states of consciousness. What a longing for a worldview makes possible, how it moves the soul inwardly, and how it can affect the whole person, can be seen particularly in the peoples of the North. Therefore, the peoples of the South could only receive the incoming Christianity by comparing it to the character that their old ideas, born of the earlier Hellsehen, had; that they regarded it as something given to man from outside, to which the human mind surrenders. Everywhere we see a twofold world coming to life among these peoples as well: a world to which the mind is devoted for the everyday relationship, for the historical relationship – and the world of the earlier given ideas, born out of the old clairvoyance, which is now illuminated and illuminated by the revelations of Christianity.

But Christianity had a different, quite different effect on the souls of the Germanic peoples, on those souls in whose innermost depths there lived a longing, a tragic longing for the spiritual worlds. To these souls now came what Christianity is able to give to souls; all that was of infinite warmth, all that moved the heart and mind, all that could flow into the souls from Christianity, came to them. And when one looked at the suffering of the Redeemer, when one looked at the Mystery of Golgotha, it was felt that it was intimately related to what the deepest impulses were in the foundations of the soul, with which man lives in the everyday. And so these souls felt as if what was revealed to them from the outer world was something that was born out of the soul itself, something that the soul had only not known, but which it had experienced in its depths long, long before. The Germanic peoples took up Christianity as an inner element, as an intimate matter of the soul itself, not as an external revelation. And the great difference that resulted for an emotional, for a sentimental understanding of the world can be particularly appreciated by looking at the relationship of man to nature and to the environment, by looking at the southern peoples who received Christianity, and then at the Germanic peoples. This Christianity directed souls – all souls – towards the eternal, towards that which has descended from the sphere of the cosmic and entered into the development of human history. It was something different from what was revealed in nature, in the outer life, and could be felt and experienced. Therefore, a peculiar view of nature developed among the southern peoples, something that has often been mentioned, a certain contempt for nature; a view of nature arose as if it were of less value for life, a descent from the divine-spiritual worlds. And a belief developed as if one must now turn away from life, become estranged from nature and life around. To put it radically, one could say: a kind of contempt for natural existence and human life in the physical world developed.

How different the attitude of the Germanic peoples towards nature was! Something lived in them that must have come from the characterized development of their souls. When the connection with the old clairvoyant ideas had dawned, they were dependent on living together with nature and with people. Thus they developed the character traits, the emotional traits, that could ignite in nature and human life in the most intense way. They looked into nature, they saw and felt everything that one can feel in joy at nature, and also how one can grieve over nature – over nature, how one sees it develop gloriously every spring, or when one sees the bright dawn, and how one sees it sink again when we see the sun sinking into the evening glow, or when autumn and winter set in. But they also felt a special connection between human life and their state of mind. This human life presented itself to them in such a way that what held this human life together with the forces that pulsate and wave out of the spiritual worlds through this human life was no longer alive for them, as it were. A certain tragic, one might say, “mournful mood” developed in these peoples from this view of nature and human life; and we see this mood of mourning, this lamentation poured out over the view of the gods of the old Germanic souls. The poet of the Nibelungenlied himself says that he wants to show his listeners how sorrow follows joy. After all, the Nibelungenlied ends in sorrow, in destruction, in hardship and murder and death! The poet of this song wanted to show how sorrow comes from joy. And if we survey the Germanic pantheon, we see how the ancient Germans looked upon their gods as those who would one day experience the 'twilight of the gods', who would one day no longer experience their rule as usual, but would lie in battle with one another, so that each would kill the other. The ancient Germans looked upon the world of the gods as the basis of nature and human life with a mood of sorrow and tragedy. This is a different mood from what, to put it radically, one might call disparaging and contemptuous of nature. It is a life intimately connected with nature, a life together with nature, but a life that mourns over existence, that reveals itself through the fate of nature and man, that loves the fate of nature and man, but believes that through this love it must experience impulses of suffering and lamentation.

That is the great, enormous difference in the conception of nature in the south and the north. And so we can empathize with the Germanic state of mind, and can initially look to those who, among the Germanic peoples, were, so to speak, the outposts of the European mission of the Germanic peoples, that is, to those Germanic tribes that first, in greater or lesser numbers, came into contact with the peoples of the south: the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Vandals, the Lombards. We look at them; and however barbaric the external appearance of these peoples may appear to us, if we only want to see, we see at the bottom of their minds, at the bottom of their conception of nature and life, the character traits that have just been characterized. And with these character traits, with this view of nature and life, they moved into the peoples of southern Europe and into what became of these peoples of the south and West. And we know that these peoples, who have just been named, merged with the peoples of the South and West. The Romanesque culture emerged.

But if we take a closer look at this Romance culture, what do we find in it? We find in it that which still lived on dimly from the old world-view born out of clairvoyance, and we find this permeated and interwoven and pulsating with what the individual Germanic tribes, who have disappeared in the world have disappeared except in name, have incorporated; and everything that developed in the west and south of Europe as Romance culture has at its core the Germanic soul, even if it was then drowned out by the continuation of ancient Roman culture. And only then can the Romanic element be understood when one knows that it draws its life from the perished Germanic soul world. One understands the creative spirits of Italian culture, one understands the wonderful Italian music, even spirits like Augustine and John Scotus Erigena, as well as the great artists of the great Italian Renaissance and the Quattrocento, one understands even Dante can only be understood if one realizes that the substantiality of the soul of these ancient Germanic peoples has been absorbed into what was then drowned out in the outer works by the continuous flow of ancient Roman culture. — Thus we have the first outposts of the Germanic soul world in these peoples, who, as it were, sacrificed themselves in the progress of external history. And it is only from the blending of the old Roman soul-life with the soul-life of the Germanic peoples that the cultures of the South and the West essentially arose and were then able to develop further. What was absorbed into these cultures can be called precisely the “Germanic soul-life,” which developed as indicated.

Now this Germanic soul-life was particularly opposed to Christian Revelation in such a way that it received it as a finished product, something that had been shaped into fixed forms in comparison with the traditional world views of antiquity. From this developed a juxtaposition, a duality of that which is spiritual, religious revelation, and that which is ideological; and as a different, as it were, second inner world, the emotional and the soul-like, which had come over from Germanic paganism, developed. Either this latter took up the Christian revelations like an exterior, or it developed later within the Romance-Germanic element from the soul-like – which still stood in contrast with inwardness to what Christianity had to give – the critical. The purely rational arose, which then reached its particular peak in Voltaire.

One might say that it was predetermined in world history that a part of the Germanic soul had to be sacrificed for the south and west of Europe; it flowed into those peoples. But another part remained behind in the center of Europe, and this had the special task of allowing the soul-like aspect of these peoples to progress through the further development of the soul into the spiritual. For we have so far basically only described the Germanic soul-life. But while the others, the advance troops of Germanic culture, spread out as soul-substantiality to the south and west of Europe, we see a core of Germanic soul-life remaining in the center of Europe. And how does this core develop? It develops that which has emerged as character traits, as emotionality in the peoples of Germania, and which has been illuminated and warmed by Christianity, upwards into the spiritual; for the spiritual is the higher development of the soul. And as the soul develops into the spiritual, the spiritual, because Christianity is the ruling power, must develop in the periods up to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in such a way that a still more intimate relationship is formed with that which the soul itself experiences intimately and which is revealed in Christianity.

As early as the ninth century, we see the first glimmering of the spiritual from the Germanic soul in that wonderful poem that originated in the Saxon lands: in “Heliand”. In Heliand we see the life of Christ Jesus related; but we see it related as if Christ Jesus were one of the Teutonic kings who went forth conquering through the world, having assumed a wholly Teutonic nature; and those who follow him, his disciples, appear in this poem as Teutonic vassals. Christianity is completely absorbed into the Germanic folk element; resurrected, reborn is the Christian legend from the souls of the people of Central Europe in the Heliand. And we feel that at this particular point, something arises that was already evident in ancient paganism but then passed away: the Germanic soul of the people relies not on receiving Christianity from the outside, as did the Romance world, but on generating from within itself that which can be experienced in Christianity, in the Christian impulses. Therefore, in the Heliand, the story that took place in the life of Christ Jesus is told as if it had taken place in Central Europe, at the center of Germanic culture. The author recounts the story as if he wanted to describe events in his homeland, not only in form but also in the way the locations are described and so on.

Then we see how the upward progression of the soul into the spiritual continues to confront us in that wonderful flowering of German intellectual life that we refer to as medieval German mysticism, which begins with Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, reaches a particular expression in Paracelsus, then progresses in Valentin Weigel and Jacob Böhme, and finally in the wonderful sayings of Angelus Silesius, who lived in Silesia in the seventeenth century, from 1624 to 1677. Here in this German mysticism we see, first with Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler and then with the others who became their disciples, how the soul-life passes directly over into the spiritual perception.

What is the relationship of these minds to what they call their “God”? Their relationship to what they call their God is that they want to overcome, to strip away from themselves everything that feels and wills and thinks in the individual personality, in the individual individuality, that they want to feel only as an instrument through which God Himself speaks and feels and thinks and wills. This feeling is expressed in every word, in every beautiful word: they want to become empty, that is, they want to cast off what one can call: 'I feel in this way through my personality, I think this and that through my personality, I want out of my impulses'. No! these spirits would not want that. What they call their God, what they also feel as the God who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha, they want Him to fill their minds, all their inner powers completely, to spiritualize them completely, to fill the soul completely with Him, so that nothing of their own lives in them, but that they are completely filled by the Divine, and that the Divine wills in them, and they are only a vessel for this Divine. They want to place themselves in the spiritual order of the world so that they can say: When my hand moves, I know that it is the God in me who unfolds the power to move my hand; when I think – it is the God in me who thinks; when I feel and will – it is the God in me who feels and wills; I want to reject everything that is my own life in me, and I want to let only the God rule in me! And they expected everything from the grace that can radiate over them when they empty their soul and let themselves be radiated over by the grace of God that can flow into them. They expected the perfection of their souls from this.

What do we experience in these personalities? We experience that what appears to be a natural quality of the human soul, the old Germanic emotional life, the old Germanic emotional life, which was once filled with hope and longing for the spiritual world, permeates the Christian impulses with the same impulsiveness with which it once permeated the outer physical experience. What a person is in the outer physical world, that merges in these masters with the inner experience of God and the divine world order. It merges to such an extent that, for example, in a beautiful saying that I will read out, Master Eckhart was able to characterize this mood of the soul, where we see the soul-like merging into the spirit-grasping, with the words “If you love God, then you can do whatever you will, for then you will will only the Eternal and the One, and whatever you do, you do in God, and God does it in you.” This self-knowledge with God is what we encounter when the Germanic soul gives birth to the German spirit. And this inner experience of the spirit, this active presence of the spirit in the soul — oh, it shines out to us so wonderfully, in such a glorious — I say — in such a wonderfully glorious way from the beautiful poetic sayings of Angelus Silesius of the seventeenth century, in his “Cherubinischer Wandersmann”. We stand there as if at a high point of the development of the soul, steering towards the spirit. I cannot refrain from reading to you some of the sayings of this German mystic who lived in Silesia and was involved in the birth of the German spirit out of the Germanic soul:

That God is so blissful
and lives without desire,
He has received from me,
as I have from him.

How united a soul knows itself with its God, which can speak in such a way that it understands how to say: God is so blissful and without desire because he can experience bliss in me, because he receives it from me just as I do from him. Of course, in this, one must no longer think of the ego that is bound to the self-will of life, but of the ego that knows itself to be completely pulsed and warmed by what God wills - as I have just read from Meister Eckhart. Another saying

I myself am eternity,
when I leave time,
And in God and God
in me, combine.

What intimate interpenetration of the human ego with the divine is here generated by the feeling that the ego lives in the feeling that it itself grasps God in eternity! And

now the question: What is my God's form?
Go, look at yourself,
He who beholds himself in God, beholds truly God.

Unity of the human being with the divine. And so completely — I would say — intoxicated by the connection of the human soul with what lives in the mystery of Golgotha, with what lives in the impulses of Christianity, is the next saying:

The cross at Golgotha
cannot deliver you from evil
unless it is also erected within you.

That means that man must experience within himself everything that he can experience when he feels and relives everything that can arise before his spiritual eye in the process of sharing in and experiencing the sufferings and triumphs of the Redeemer. And this eternal consciousness comes to us most particularly in two sayings of Angelus Silesius, sayings of which one would like to say that it is one of the greatest good fortunes of life that these sayings were ever spoken in the German language. The first:

I neither die nor live:
God himself dies in me:
And what I should live, he also lives for and for.

Looking at death, beholding death – and knowing: “It is not I who die, but God dies in me” – that means nothing other than knowing that the human being passes through the gate of death alive. For if he knows that God lives in him, then he also knows that death is then overcome for knowledge; for to know that God dies in me is to know that I do not die; for God does not die. Thus once upon a time one of the German mystics knew how to put the greatest riddles of life into the most concise words. And just as profound is another saying of Angelus Silesius:

The love that proves
yours to God within you,
Is God's own power,
His fire and holy spirit.

It is not I who speaks – so says Angelus Silesius – it is not I who loves; God's language, God's love in me, that is what I can “become” for. That means that divine life descends into my soul and fills my soul when I try to become more and more empty, to be only a vessel for what can enter the soul as divine spiritual life.

And the forces that had thus entered into the development of the German spirit continued to work, and we see them emerging again where the German spirit has given its people the deepest impulses to date. In the period which we call the German classical period, we see the longing arising for the deepest experience of one's own human spirit, for the seeking out of everything that man can experience in spirit, and for the shaping of what the human spirit can experience into a world view. We see it dawning on minds like those of Lessing and Herder; we see it rising to great heights in Goethe and Schiller and in the German philosophers Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. And what do we see as the deepest strength of the German people, as it seeks to look at what has been handed down historically, but also at what can only be given through the outer physical contemplation of the world? She seeks the truth to which the human soul is predisposed, for which she searches in her depths; and she comes to it, out of the spirit, to recognize and give birth again in a new form everything that has been and continues to be through the whole of world history. And in this sense, Lessing provides an abstract of all human striving and research in the writing that also marks the conclusion of his life: “The Education of the Human Race”. In it he shows how divine spiritual forces run through historical development, how all history is an educational work on the part of divine spiritual powers, and how the Christian impulse presents itself as the greatest impulse in the progress of the development of the earth. But there is also something dawning in German spiritual life that can only gradually find its full expression in the future, that must first be grasped again in spiritual science in the present – the realization that how earlier historical epochs interact with later ones, how what man has conquered in earlier historical epochs can be carried over into later epochs. And Lessing, in explicitly saying that he is not afraid to recognize that a greater truth need not be considered inferior because it first appeared in the course of development and in times when humanity was not yet darkened by the prejudices of school, comes to the recognition that the human soul lives in repeated earthly lives, that the complete life of the human soul proceeds in such a way that it returns in ever new earthly lives, and that between two earthly lives an existence in a purely spiritual world passes, where the soul transforms the powers it has acquired in the last earthly life, in order to return and carry over into later epochs what it has acquired in earlier ones. In this way a continuous process of development is created, in which human beings themselves participate.

Then we see how, through Herder, the spirit that grasps itself, that seeks to flourish into such religious fervor in German mystics, how this spirit, illuminated and clarified, seeks to permeate all of nature and human life. A great and magnificent work is that which Herder created in his “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity”, where he describes how spirit lives in everything, spirit that he finds when he looks into the depths of his soul, but which at the same time guarantees man's eternal serenity, man's eternal “engagement” and eternal resting in eternal-divine existence.

And we then see how in Goethe — to mention the work again, which has also played a role in earlier lectures — how this work becomes a “person” by creating “Faust”: the striving to connect the soul life of the human being with what rests and creates and works in the spiritual worlds through one's own power. And in addition to this, Goethe contrasted Faust with all the obstacles that can prevent man from this striving in the figure of Mephistopheles. Ultimately, however, man must win freedom for himself, where the word can resound to him from the other world: “We can redeem anyone who strives.”

Furthermore, we see the great attempt of the German national philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who in Germany's most difficult times found those heartfelt tones that he expressed in his “Discourses to the German Nation”. We see Fichte standing before us with his ideas, which create an entire spiritual world out of the human ego, which, however, knows itself to be imbued from the outset with all divine and spiritual impulses. We see one of the boldest philosophical-spiritual attempts in Fichte's philosophy. It is a philosophy that is convinced from the outset that man not only has his five senses and his ordinary mind, but that he also has a higher sense, a sense through which a spiritual world is directly experienced, whereby man knows himself to be one with the divine-spiritual life, and in the external reality only creates material for himself in order to be able to work in it. One would like to say: what still confronts us in a vague soul-like striving in the works of Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and even Jacob Böhme and Angelus Silesius, becomes clear light in the philosophy of Fichte. It becomes clear light because here, although the soul element of the soul is the dominant one, it clarifies into ideas full of light that embrace and profess a spiritual world: The entire spiritual world lives in the self. Just as Angelus Silesius wanted to know himself in his I as one with his God, with the whole of divine activity and life, so for Fichte it was clear from the outset: when I really get to the place in my I where this I grasps itself in its deepest reason, then I am with God, then I create not just any old world view, but one that the God in me creates. And one of the boldest, most courageous thoughts is a Fichtean thought. Fichte does not express it as I am about to express it, but everything Fichte said can be summarized in the words: If the human ego, with its powers, with what it is, is to be dependent on anything, be it the external world, be it the brain, be it the body or whatever, then it is bound to something else; then it is not that which the divine-spiritual being can experience in itself. This ego must not be another being in itself, but must create itself again and again; and creating itself must be the most important activity of the ego. This is how Fichte feels. For Fichte, wanting to recognize the deepest essence of the ego means knowing in every moment that one is creating this ego. If it were to lose itself for a moment, it would have the strength to create itself again and again. Fichte conceives of this ego as creative. In this way, it is an immediate image, a real likeness of the spiritual divinity.

What Fichte wanted to find as the innermost core of the soul substance in the human being, the self united with its God, Hegel lays out in—albeit abstract—ideas, which in turn were supposed to span a world and at the same time represent the inner creative power of the world. Hegel reasoned: if the human spirit really comes to allow the pure, light-filled ideas to live in it, then it is not just the individual human spirit that is bound to the brain that then thinks; but then it is the higher power living in man, the divine power permeating the world; then God thinks in man. For Hegel it is only a matter of purifying and condensing his thinking to such an extent that he rises above everything that is bound to an outer world and arrives at the pure thought that God thinks in the soul. This striving is Hegel's philosophical striving.

In this way, the development of German thought had, for the time being, grasped the level of the “spirit” in the highest possible way. It is peculiar that here, at the highest tension of the development of thought, a point was reached that could not be held on to, from which one later fell back, so that in relation to everything that followed, what Hegel once said is truly valid: Only one person understood me, and even he misunderstood me. It was a height that few could reach and even fewer could hold on to.

What had been achieved with Hegel's philosophy – and what had not yet been achieved?

What had been achieved was that consciousness had been developed in the soul, that the Germanic development of the soul had progressed so far in German intellectual life that it had been recognized that man can only relive the spiritual world within himself if he seeks development, if he seeks to ascend into spiritual worlds from which nations once emerged when they still had ancient clairvoyance. But Hegel stopped at concept and idea. For he could not say to himself: Concepts and ideas are still bound to the human body; I must advance to what exists as experience outside the human body. How it is possible for the human soul to achieve such experiences outside of the body has been discussed here several times; it will be discussed further tomorrow, when it will be shown how such experiences and insights can help a person in the serious and happy hours of life. But in Hegel, consciousness has already been attained, as in the outer existence of man the spirit lives, even if he could only show it in the dry, sober ideas. And even if Hegel could only paint a picture of the world that is realized in dry, sober ideas, because it does not rise from inspiration to the grasp of real life in the spirit, the line is nevertheless given, the real direction for grasping the spirit in Hegelian philosophy within German intellectual life. And when we look at the impulses that are present in the Germanic soul, experiencing the spirit in this way, and when we are asked, “Is this the end of the way things have presented themselves?” then we can say: no! This is not an end; one might say that this is only a stage of the beginning. With Hegel's philosophy, something is achieved, of which one must say: if one can immerse oneself in it and make one's soul an inward tool of the ideas, then the soul develops further. So the German soul must have been entrusted with the world mission of rising from the abstract idea, from the comprehension of thoughts and ideas that pervade nature and human nature in nature, to the direct, living comprehension and experience in the spirit and in the spiritual world. We see the German spirit at one stage of its development, and we understand why it must be at such a stage of its development: because it has developed in such a way that, starting from the self-contained mind, it must first grasp within itself that which must unravel the riddles of the world. That is why this German spirit is so difficult to understand. It is curious, for example, to hear that the brilliant Pole Adam Mickiewicz gave a lecture in Paris in 1843 in which he said: “The German students had no idea about Hegel: does Hegel believe in an immortal human being? Does he believe in the true Christian God?” Mickiewicz said that Hegel's philosophy does not address these questions of life, so that one cannot even tell whether it wants to talk about these things at all. And he says: the Polish and French journalists understood Hegel much better than Hegel's students; for, he says, these Polish and French journalists knew that Hegel knew nothing of the immortal human being and the true Christian God. — How foolishly the otherwise bright Mickiewicz speaks about Hegel! Why could the French and Polish journalists so easily “understand” Hegel? Precisely because the journalists are navigating in shallow waters and do not realize that with Hegel one must descend deep, deep down, that the questions are posed there, that they must then be asked deeper and deeper, and that the mind, which is otherwise available, cannot reach the point of intuiting from the given concepts in Hegel the perspectives from which the great riddles of the immortal God must be solved. Mickiewicz meant nothing more than what has just been stated, than what can be characterized by a saying of the old satirist Lichtenberg, which I will quote, bringing it together with Mickiewicz's remarks: “When books and heads collide, and it sounds hollow, it is not necessarily the book's fault.”

That is the point: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, German intellectual life had learned to make a beginning in true intellectual science, a beginning in living spiritual knowledge, a beginning that carries within itself the power of progress, the power of completion. What follows from this consideration – and from this last consequence of the consideration for the essence of the German spirit? What follows for us from it – so that we can take it into our feelings, into the feelings that we can harbor in these fateful, difficult days, when so much precious blood and so much strength is being consumed for German spiritual life, for the German spirit in East and West? What follows from it?

We see the continuous development of the Germanic soul into the German spirit; we see the German spirit in an initial stage, we see the germs that are there and the promise that it must still ascend to heights that are already implicit in it and that must not be killed, but must develop because they belong to its essence. Individuals can die before they have lived their lives to the full. People can die in the early years of their existence because they return in other earthly lives, and because others can take their place in earthly cultural life. Unfinished human lives can take place in the outer physical existence. Unfinished national lives cannot! For if a nation, before it has fulfilled its mission, were to be wiped out or its existence curtailed, then another national individuality would not take its place. Nations must live out their lives! Nations must go through the cycle of their existence – not only childhood and manhood, but also their existence to the highest perfection. The German spirit, the German intellectual life is not at an end, not before a completion; but it is at a beginning. Much is still allotted to it. When the wishes of the enemies, who strive for the opposite, are raised from all sides against the possibilities of existence of the German people, of the Central European world, then this must be what gives the Central European world, what gives the German people the strength to resist, the strength to keep alive the germs that we find in its soul, especially when we consider this soul in all its living development. And the belief in the triumph of German life need not be a mere blind faith; it can arise out of a living realization of the German character, out of that living realization which comes to the view that German life must live on because the German soul must fulfill its mission in the evolution of the world, because nothing else exists that can lift the purely external materialistic world view to that most ideal spiritual height, the intention of which lies in the German soul. Truly, in this German spiritual life lies that which will one day lead the purely materialistic world view to the contemplation of the spiritual world. And that the best minds have sensed that there is a beginning and not an end to German intellectual life, we see in all great minds as they have expressed the impulses of this intellectual life. Herman Grimm, who is often mentioned in these lectures, once looked — this passage is in his Goethe lectures — at what the materialistic world view has made of the world in the present. He looks at the Kant-Laplace theory, which posits a great cosmic nebula as the starting point of our world development; this nebula condenses into a large ball of gas, which somehow begins to rotate, and in this way the other planets, our Earth also comes into being; over time, in some way that is not known, spirit and life develop on Earth, and later, according to this theory, when the Earth has died, all life and all spirit will fall back into the sun. For Herman Grimm, such a materialistic view of world development is incompatible with what can come from the sources of German intellectual life. That is why he is so drastic in his Goethe lectures about such a representation:

"No less fruitless a perspective for the future can be imagined than the one that is to be imposed on us today in the guise of being scientifically necessary. A carrion bone that a hungry dog would give a wide berth to would be a refreshingly appetizing prospect compared to this excrement of creation, as which our Earth will eventually fall back to the Sun. It is the our generation absorbs and believes such things, a sign of a sick imagination, which the scholars of future epochs will one day spend a lot of ingenuity explaining as a historical phenomenon of the times.

What hope can we derive from such a consideration of the German spirit, as it has been presented to us today? We have seen how the Germanic soul-life has developed out of the old Hellsehen; we have seen this soul-life develop further into the German spirit, the first glimmering of which is shown in German mysticism; we have seen this German spirit develop further into the appearance of appearance of Faust, to the spirit of Goethe, Schiller and the others, and today we can see how it will develop further in a permeation of the world, up to the sources of the spiritual, in which the human soul, if it grasps itself deeply enough, can truly participate. Looking at the German spirit in this way gives us confidence that German strength must be invincible; it gives us a confidence that is not based on mere blind faith, but that must be our consolation and our hope in these fateful and difficult days.

At the end of this reflection, let me summarize what follows as a consequence of it:

The German spirit has not yet completed
What it must accomplish in the world's evolution.
It lives in hope, in the future's cares;
It hopes for future deeds, full of life;
In the depths of its being, it feels mightily
Hidden things that must still mature and work.
How can a wish for his death arise in the power of the enemy,

In our discussion of the Wrangell brochure, we have reached the chapter beginning on page 37, entitled “Materialism”. I will read this chapter first:

Materialism

As stated earlier, the materialistic view recognizes only that knowledge which can be gained through sense perceptions and logical conclusions based on them, and denies the reality of occult perceptions. The sense perceptions of most people do not provide direct evidence of the reality of spiritual forces and phenomena that are not bound to material bodies. From this the materialist concludes that the assumption of such forces and beings independent of matter is not justified, and declares the conclusions to be drawn from it to be worthless. According to him, world events are the necessary consequence of the forces and conditions present in matter from the very beginning, which only allow development, and according to the law of the dispersion of energy, must ultimately lead to a state of equilibrium, and consequently to eternal death. The intellectual task of man is to investigate the laws according to which the process of this world development takes place, in order to endure the least possible suffering and waste of energy by adapting to these laws.

If one fundamentally rejects the occult evidence for the existence of spiritual entities, then logically nothing can be said against the materialistic view.

We see here, in a few concise sentences, the essence of the materialistic train of thought. But in order to arrive at a clear understanding of the full significance of the materialistic world view in our time, we actually have to take various things into account.

It must be clear that those who have become honest materialists in our time have a hard time coming to a spiritualistic worldview. And when speaking of “honest” opponents of spiritualism, it is actually the theoretical materialists who should be considered first and foremost, because those people who from the outset, I would say “professionally”, believe they have to represent this or that world view, do not always need to be described as “honest” representatives of a world view. But Ludwig Büchner, for example, was an honest representative of materialism in the second half of the 19th century, more honest than many who, from what they consider a religious point of view, feel they have to make themselves opponents of a spiritual world view in the sense of spiritual science.

Now, I said that it is difficult for materialists to arrive at a spiritual conception of the world. For materialism, as it presents itself to us today in those who say: Yes, man has his senses and perceives the world through his senses, he observes the processes that the senses can follow and cannot, on the basis of what the senses present to him to the assumption of a spiritual being that is independent of the sense world – this materialism has emerged with a certain inevitability from the development of modern humanity, because it is based on something that had to emerge in the development of modern humanity.

Anyone who takes the trouble to study the older spiritual life of humanity will find that it reached an end with the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries among the actual civilized peoples. Today, one need only really deal with what the present can give to the consciousness of man and then pick up a book that, in terms of its conception, is still fully immersed in the way the world was viewed scientifically in the 13th, 14th, 15th century , 14th, 15th century, and one will find that the present man, if he takes things seriously and worthily, no longer has and can have a proper understanding of what is really said in the older literature up to the marked turning point.

Of course it does happen, but only with those who are dilettantes, or even those who have not yet become dilettantes, that they repeatedly dig out all kinds of tomes from this older literature that deal with natural science and then come to all kinds of conclusions about what is said in them in a profound way. But anyone who values true relationships with what they acquire will have to find that the modern human being cannot really have true relationships with this older way of looking at nature. It is different with the philosophical view. But today's man cannot really do anything with the view of nature of the older time, because all the concepts that he can form about nature are only a few centuries old, and with these one must approach nature today. Our physical concepts basically all go back to the Galilean world view and nothing earlier. One must already unfold a broad historical-scientific study when engaging with earlier scientific works, because the exact exploration of the material world, the external sense world, in whose current we find ourselves today, has actually only begun in the last few centuries.

Do you remember that we were just talking about measuring in reference to Wrangell's booklet? Weighing is also part of measuring, as we have seen. However, the introduction of weighing as an instrument into the methods of the natural sciences has only been common practice since Lzvozszer, so it is not yet 150 years old, and all the basic ideas of today's chemistry, for example, are based on this weighing.

On the other hand, if we want to form ideas today about the workings of electrical forces, for example, or even just thermal forces, then they must be based on the research from the last half of the 19th century. People today can no longer cope with the older ideas. The same could be said with regard to biological science. However, anyone who needs to know the development of science would also need to get to know the older literature; but we, who want to take spiritual science seriously, must get rid of what we so often encounter in so-called theosophists. I have often spoken of the fact that I got to know a theosophical community in Vienna in the 1880s, for example. There it was almost a kind of custom to pick out all kinds of old tomes and to read in them things that one really did not understand very well, because basically it takes a lot to read a scientific work, for example, from the 14th century. But people formed judgments. These judgments were always pretty much the same. Namely, when someone pretended to have read such a book – although they had only flicked through it – they said “abysmally deep”. These were the judgments that were made. At the end of the 1980s, I heard the word “abysmally deep” – relatively naturally – more often than any other. Of course, I also heard the word “shallows” often.

What must be borne in mind is the great importance of the views, concepts and ideas that have been gained under the influence of the views of recent centuries. When we consider the explanations of the basic concepts of mechanics, the wealth of physical, chemical and biological concepts, and also some of the things that have been brought together to see how the soul expresses itself in the external physical body, we have the result of the last few centuries, and especially of the second half of the last century, an enormously expanded research result before us. And this research result must necessarily be gained, not only because all external, technical, economic, material life is based on it, which humanity had to achieve at some point, but because a large part of our world view is also based on it. And one is actually - even if it does no harm in a certain limited field, but it is true - one is actually in such a field of world view as that of today's science a hay rabbit if one knows nothing of today's physics, biology and so on, as they have developed.

Of course, it must be emphasized again and again that the research results of spiritual science are obtained on the basis of those perceptual abilities that have often been mentioned. They cannot be obtained in the same way, although with the same certainty, as the scientific-materialistic results. And of course - if one surrenders to what was indicated yesterday - this spiritual science is a reality. But for our time today, for our present, much more is needed than just somehow having a spiritual relationship to the spiritual-scientific results, which can be fully grasped by common sense. It is much more necessary than somehow catching scraps of the spiritual world to familiarize oneself with the materialistic world view, at least with a section of it, in order to be able to really represent to the outside world today what spiritual science wants. For one cannot go before the world and truly represent spiritual science if one has no idea of the way in which the scientist researches today, how he must think and how he must handle research alongside clarification. And if one repeatedly refuses to pick up a book on natural science in order to familiarize oneself with modern natural science, then one will never be able to avoid committing gaffes when representing the spiritual-scientific worldview in the face of what is the dregs of the external worldview. Today it is also much less important to listen to the traditional religious systems than to the honestly gained venerable results of materialistic research. One must only be able to relate to these materialistic research results in the right way.

Let us take, just to show what is at stake at the present moment, any field; let us take the field of human anatomy and physiology. If you take any common book today – and I have always recommended such books over the course of the many cycles – you will get a picture of how today's physiologist builds his ideas about the structure of the human body, based on the bone system, the cartilage, tendon, muscle system, the nervous, blood, sensory, main system, and so on. And a picture will emerge of how people today, living in materialistic thought, imagine the interaction, say, of the heart and lungs, and again of the heart with the other vascular systems of the body. And then an answer can present itself to the question: How does a person who has acquired his concepts from materialistic research actually relate to these things? What ideas does he actually have in him? And here one must say: Significant ideas have indeed been gained; ideas that had to be gained in such a way that one really had to turn away from everything spiritual, from carrying spiritual thoughts into research. One had to enter into the material realm as it presents itself to the five senses, as they say in popular terms, and into the context that arises from the five senses. One had to see through the world in this way, and much remains to be done in this area, in all possible fields of scientific research.

But now suppose you have acquired a picture of the structure of the human body such as the anatomist and physiologist have today. Then you will find that the anatomist and physiologist say: Well, the human being is made up of various organs and organ systems, and these work together in a certain way.

You see, when an anatomist or a physiologist speaks today and summarizes his ideas into an overall picture of the human being, then, within this picture, the same thing remains based on sensory observation. From this, very specific ideas arise that can be taken up. But one must relate to them in the right way. Perhaps I can make this clear by means of a comparison. For example, someone might say: I want to get to know Raphael, how do I do that? - I would tell him: If you want to get to know Raphael, then try to immerse yourself in Raphael's paintings; study the Marriage of Joseph and Mary, one of the paintings in Milan, and then the various paintings up to the Sistine Madonna and the Ascension, and get an concept of how Raphael tried to distribute the figures in space, how he tried to distribute light and shadow, to enliven one place in the picture at the expense of the other, to emphasize one and withdraw the other, and so on, then you will know something about Raphael. Then you will have the preparation to get to know Raphael even better, then you will gradually get a picture of the configuration of Raphael's soul, of what he wanted, from which sources of his mind his creations emerged. One could imagine that someone comes and says: Oh, looking at the pictures does not suit me, I am a clairvoyant and look directly into Raphael's soul, see how Raphael created and then talk about Raphael. I can imagine someone coming and saying: I don't need to see anything of Raphael at all, but delve directly into the soul of Raphael. Of course, in Raphael research this would be considered nonsense, but in the field of spiritual science it is practiced a great deal, despite the many admonitions over the years in which we have been doing spiritual science. One could see how few felt compelled to use the literature mentioned in the course of the lecture cycles and to use it in such a way as to obtain images from what materialistic research has produced.

But just as one would err if one were to stop at the image and not want to progress to the soul that is expressed through the image, so the materialist stops. What one could say to the materialist is, for example, this: Yes, you are looking at an image, but you do not notice that you should consider what you are looking at as the outer revelation of a spiritual inner reality. But it is true that materialistic research has brought together an enormous amount of material. If one regards this as the external manifestation of a spiritual reality, then one is on the right path. The materialist only makes the mistake of having the material and not wanting to accept that it is the expression of a spiritual reality. But on the other hand, one must always be in the wrong when one asserts something spiritual and a materialist says things about which one has no idea. Of course one can have an overview of the rich field of research and still have no idea about a great deal; but one must have some idea about the way in which things are acquired. And if our School of Spiritual Science is to serve as a place where a number of people who have studied one field or another interpret the materialistic basic premises that one must have according to the present-day development, then our School of Spiritual Science will achieve a great deal.

We could do it today, saying that what is set out in our cycles of material could suffice; we could conclude with it and use the next time to show our friends the material basis of the conditions that must be there. One will then see, when one looks at today's physics, chemistry and biology in the appropriate way, that what is in our cycles will arise. Then one would have taken the right approach to materialism.

My dear friends, you are quite mistaken when you say that materialism is wrong. What nonsense! To say that materialism is wrong is just as if you wanted to say: the Sistine Madonna is blue here and red there, that's wrong, that's just matter. Materialism is right in its own field; and if you take what it has contributed to human knowledge, it is something tremendous. We do not need to fight materialism, but only to show by its development how materialism, if it understands itself, leads beyond itself, just as I have shown how anatomy and physiology lead beyond themselves and necessarily into the spiritual realm.

One can only ask: Why are there so many people who, instead of accepting materialism as a mere research method, stop at it as a world view? - The right thing would be to say that today it would indeed be something completely complicated and foolish to practice alchemy instead of chemistry; today one must practice chemistry and not alchemy as in the 12th century. That goes without saying. But it is necessary to rise up out of today's research into the spiritual life. If our friends would only take the trouble to study the little book Haeckel and His Opponents, they would find that all the thoughts on which it is based are governed by the biogenetic law. It is significant that we have not yet managed to get a second edition of this little book 'Haeckel and his Opponents'. And yet it is extremely important to be informed, if not about the latest research results - one does not necessarily need to know these in detail - then at least about the way the researcher proceeds and how he or she goes about their research. This is of the utmost importance.

If someone says: I don't need to study the book, why should I, the spiritual world is clear to me from the outset; I don't need to climb the whole ladder – if someone says that, then today he is an egoist who only considers himself and does not pay attention to what the times demand of us. But we must pay attention to this if we want to serve the spirit of the time. It is extremely important that we keep this in mind. Of course, one has the right to say, why do I need a scientific basis, the spiritual world is clear to me. That may be true. But if you want to learn something in the field of the spiritual world – you can of course do it in such a way that you interpret what is there – but if you want to learn something, you have to familiarize yourself with what is available in materialistic science.

On the other hand, one must ask: How is it that there are many anatomists, physiologists, physicists, chemists and so on today as natural scientists, and even those who call themselves experimental psychologists, that they do not want to hold materialism as a research method, but as a worldview? Here one must honestly have the courage to answer: To conduct research in a materialistic way, all that is required is to stare at the world with the five senses and to use external methods. One need only surrender to the world passively, then one stands firm. Plucking any old plant, counting the stamens, taking the microscope, staining a cross-section in order to study the structure, and so on – I could, of course, list many more things – that is what people do. You just have to stand there, be passive and let nature take effect on you. You let yourself be led by nature.

In the very first writings I published, I called this the dogmatism of experience. People hold on to the dogmatism of experience. You can read about it in my book “Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung” (Basic Principles of an Epistemology of the Goethean World View). I also later called it “fact fanaticism”. But to enter the spiritual world, one must work inwardly, and for that one needs inner activity. And that is where people run out of strength. One can see in our time that this strength has been exhausted. If you make comparisons in the field of anatomy, for example, you will find that one can almost point the finger to the point where the strength has been exhausted.

Take the anatomist Ayrt/, who was replaced on his chair by the anatomist Langer. Compare the writings of the two scientifically, and you will see how, in the succession of the two scholars, one is absolutely clear that there is something spiritual behind the external, and the other no longer cares. Why is that? Because, however meritorious materialism is as a research method and however much it has achieved, without which people could not live today, people were too lazy to bring what they had grasped into active life. Laziness, real indolence of mind, has made people persist in materialism. Because materialism became so dominant and presented itself as reality, people did not rise to the spiritual. It is laziness and inertia, and one must have the courage to recognize this reason.

Immerse yourself in the fields of scientific research and you will see that this scientific research is magnificent and admirable. Delve into everything that is fabricated by the monists and other associations as “world views” and you will see that they are based on laziness and inertia, on an ossification of thought. This is what we must clearly face, that we must distinguish - if we stand on the ground of true spiritual science - between the entirely justified materialistic research methods and research results and the so-called materialistic world view.

Most of the time, those who do materialistic research cannot even think, because it is easier to do materialistic research than to think spiritually. I will give you an example to illustrate that materialists simply stumble when they want to move from materialistic research methods to a worldview. So let us assume that I have tried to gain an atomistic world view. I will therefore say: bodies consist of atoms. These must be thought of in motion, so that when you have a material object in front of you, it consists of atoms. There are spaces between the atoms. The atoms are in motion, and according to the materialistic world view, heat is generated by this motion. If one were to say that heat is based on the movement of atoms, then one would be right, then one would only be stating a fact. However, one comes to the realization that it is impossible to speak of atoms as something that actually exists. Atoms are imagined – and they have to be imagined if they are to make sense – but what is perceived should first be brought about by the atoms. So you can't see an atom. You see that the so-called atomistic world view is composed of nothing visible, of nothing that can be perceived by the senses.

Now, however, you can reflect and say: the world consists of atoms and these are in motion. One wants to investigate the kind of movement that underlies heat, light, magnetism, electricity, and so on, and one comes to assume that certain atomic movements are the cause of sensory perception. So one comes to atoms. One divides what is given, and if one divides again and again, one must finally come to the indivisible, and that is the atom. Divisible atoms are meaningless. The last parts, that is, the atoms, must be indivisible. Now, however, people also want to explain movement from the atoms – I can only hint at this, but you can follow it up in the philosophical-scientific literature of recent times – they also want to explain movement from the nature of the atoms. But if you think about how one atom must push the other for motion to arise, which we see in heat, electricity and so on, then you cannot think of atoms as rigid; you have to think of them as elastic. It is necessary to think of them elastically, because rigid atoms would not give the movement that must come out during a collision if heat, electricity or magnetism is to come out.

So these atoms must be elastic. But what does that mean? It means that the atom can be compressed and then springs back to its former state. It must therefore be compressible and spring back again, otherwise one cannot even think of the pushing of the atoms. Now we have gained two things: first, the atom must be indivisible; second, it must be elastic. These two facts confront modern thinking, which pays homage to atomism. The atom must be conceived as indivisible, otherwise it is no longer an atom, and it must be conceived as elastic, because it would be a senseless idea to trace the movement of the atom back to rigid atoms. English thinkers in particular have emphasized these two sentences very sharply: firstly, the atom is indivisible, and secondly, the atom must be conceived as elastic. If I allow a body to be elastic, it is inconceivable that the parts push together and then spring back into the original position to create the elastic body. This is inconceivable without it being divisible and movable. But the atom must be indivisible on the one hand, and on the other hand it must be divisible, because otherwise it cannot be elastic. But what does that mean?

It means that if we want to imagine atoms, we come up with two contradictory basic assumptions. There is no way around this. There is an enormous amount of interesting literature about thinking the world picture together out of non-rigid atoms. But then the atom is no longer an atom, because it has to be thought of as divisible. That is to say, one comes to the conclusion that the idea of the atom is impossible as long as one assumes that the atom is material. In the moment when you do not think of the atom materially, when you think that the atom is not something material but something else, one can think of the atom as indivisible, just as the human ego is also thought of as indivisible. Suppose the atom is force, then you can also think of it as being put together. If you do not think in materialistic terms, you do not need to think that there are spaces in between. The two things are therefore perfectly compatible if we do not think of atoms materially. If we carefully consider what optics, the science of electricity, and so on, offers us, and draw the final consequences as to how the atom must be, then we come to the conclusion that the atom cannot be material. You are bound to touch on spiritual matters. But this step has to be taken. It makes no difference whether the atom is elastic or rigid; we are not concerned with such details. Materialism should not be fought, but understood. The great amount of work and good results should not be despised by spiritual science.

Let us now turn to the next chapter of the Wrangell treatise:

Doubts about the materialistic world view

But many people harbor doubts: could it really be that the whole world is not based on any rational, moral thought, and that the concepts of what is expedient and moral arise only in the human breast, but have no validity outside of it?

We feel within us the striving for good, and the concept of good is inseparable from the concept of freedom, because where absolute necessity reigns, there is no evil and no good. A stone must fall in a certain direction with a certain speed, and it would be senseless to call this fall evil or good.

Should that which we feel in our innermost being to be the true measure of life be only deception and delusion, and is this idea of good, that is, of morality chosen in freedom, not to be found in the whole of the world, of which man is only a tiny fraction? Should the small part, man, endowed with lofty feelings and thoughts, stand in this respect higher than the whole, which proceeds unconsciously, without purpose, like a dead wheelwork, to end in eternal death? Most people's minds resist such a solution and seek another.

It is all right to say that the intellect objects to this, but it is much more important in our time to say that thinking objects to it. If one wishes to stand only on the ground of materialism, then one must go to the atom and grasp it as matter. But one can also call it force, and then one arrives at the fact that where one finds matter, there is the cosmic world of thought. There then the moral world order has its full place in it.

Now, some have found it more convenient to say: Yes, if you rethink the world like that, scruples and doubts arise for sense knowledge everywhere and it is not right to accept this sense knowledge as the only valid knowledge; but man is so constituted that he cannot penetrate deeper. This results in the following situation: there stands the man, who is perhaps a very good researcher in the field of the external sense world and who, as a materialistic researcher, can produce something lasting, beautiful and magnificent, but he is not inclined to go further. And so he says: there must be all sorts of things behind matter; but we are not able to penetrate there with the human capacity for knowledge. He calls himself an agnostic. He does not realize that this talk, that man does not have the ability and so on, is inspired by Ahriman and he does not listen to what good spirits tell him; he does not listen to that. In truth, he is just a slacker. Slacker is what you call it when you say it honestly, agnosticism is what you call it in science.

The next chapter in Wrangell's book is now entitled:

Agnosticism

The answer to the question of the origin and purpose of the universe and the destiny of man, which presents the least difficulties to the mind, but leaves the demands of the heart completely unsatisfied, is the point of view of the agnostic (” “not-knowing"), when he says: these questions transcend the limits of human knowledge, and therefore, by their very nature, must remain unanswered, and it is more reasonable to devote one's time and energy to tasks where there is a prospect of overcoming them.

— One cannot object to saying, I will devote myself to a task that I can accomplish. That is within a person's freedom. But it is not within a person's freedom to say: What I do not know, no one else may know. All philosophizing about what man cannot know is actually, at bottom, a scientific infamy, and, furthermore, it is a scientific megalomania without parallel, because man sets himself up as the arbiter of what may and may not be researched, because he presents what he himself wants to accept as decisive for all other people. What impotence lies in the sentence: “There are limits to knowledge”! What arrogance and conceit lies in it, but should also be made clear. This should not be whispered in the ears, but blared. —

Without denying the existence of spiritual beings, the agnostic maintains that this area is not accessible to everyone, while everything based on sensory experience is within the realm of knowledge of the normal person, and he should be content with that. Those people in whom the intellect, trained to be critical, predominates, can remain at this point of view without being paralyzed in their actions; but for most people, this answer is no answer. If one takes the standpoint of a person without personal occult experiences and without knowledge of other people's reports of such perceptions that appear credible to him, then, logically speaking, he is free to speak out in favor of or against the existence of spiritual worlds. —

But one is not entitled to deny the scientific nature of the opposing view.

The degree of credibility of the reports of others cannot be measured with objective, i.e. universally valid rigor, and the judgment about it is inevitably influenced by subjective motives in each individual case.

- Yes, you can show that.

If the facts can be verified by any normal person, then in most cases there is no need to go to the trouble of verifying them personally, because the current organization of scientific research ensures that an erroneous observation or report is soon discovered, and this compels every observer and reporter, if only for the sake of his reputation, to be as careful and truthful as possible, and in any case an observation error does not remain undetected for long.

— Basically, that doesn't say much more than if someone were to say the following: With the way scientific work is organized today, if you go to Basel and buy a chemistry book, you can believe what's in it, because it contains chemical results, and it wouldn't occur to a chemist to lie. — But that would only legitimize the belief in authority. And if people would only admit this to themselves, they would realize how much they accept on trust today. I have often emphasized that spiritual science, although in its infancy, can be tested. Spiritual science is still young; when it is older, the spiritual scientist will be in the same position as the chemist is today: it will then be clear that one does not lie in spiritual science.

Occult perception, however, is different, and this essential difference has long led the men of exact science, who are accustomed to controllable facts, to treat occult communications not only critically, i.e. with scrutiny, but skeptically, i.e. with outright rejection.

- The real reason is that they are too lazy.

Now, however, this no longer seems possible, because the evidence for the immaterial existence of spiritual beings is so compelling that men of undoubted scientific training consider this question to be proven. It is enough to mention names such as Zöllner, Wallace, du Prel, Crookes, Butlerow, Rochas, Oliver Lodge, Flammarion, Morselli, Schiaparelli, Ochorowicz, James, among others.

— There Mr. von Wrangell relies on those who tie in with atavistic abilities, while we assume that every person can acquire the abilities that make it possible to test the spiritual as one tests the scientific.

These men not only find no contradiction between occult facts and established results of exact sensory research, but their habit of unprejudiced criticism leads them to reject the skepticism of the materialist and to devote themselves to the study of occult phenomena.

— But they do not do it in the right way. They drag everything down to the same field of experimentation as chemistry, even that which can only be attained through the free activity of thought. Instead of constructing inwardly, they go around, as it were, with a yardstick, measuring. —

These authorities may err in their judgment, but their point of view can serve as proof that we are justified in assuming the existence of spiritual entities without exposing ourselves to the accusation of scientific ignorance. Assuming that one has no occult abilities oneself, one is dependent on the reports of others and must examine them for their credibility.

— It would be better to try to engage with what is said in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. It is much easier than many assume. Most people just don't recognize it, but all sorts of complications are recognized. It would actually be relatively easy to experience at least enough of the spiritual world in a few years to recognize it in general. But people say: That is nothing; because they strive for what I have called gut-level clairvoyance. And if it does not come to gut-level clairvoyance, then none of it means anything to them.

The sources of error in occult perceptions lie both in the subject and in the object. Even a superficial knowledge of the perceptual material accumulated by spiritists and other occultists shows us that here, admittedly, the sources of error flow abundantly...

— They really do not. It is no different than saying: nature never lies! But it lies all the time. Take a glass of water and stick a stick in it, it will appear broken to you; but it is not. Take the path of the sun in the sky, compare the size in the morning and the size at noon: nature lies to you all day long. The spiritual world lies just as much and just as little. It is extraordinarily interesting, for example, to visualize the processes in the etheric body of a person when they have an intestinal disorder, or to observe what the etheric body does when the digestive processes take place. It is just as interesting as when one usually studies anatomy or physiology, even more interesting. But it is unjustified to regard what is nothing more than a process in the etheric body during digestion as a magnificent process of the cosmic world. The spiritual world itself does not lie; it must only be interpreted in the right way. There is no need to disdain what happens in our etheric body during digestion. It should not be misunderstood. The senses, too, do not deceive in reality. When you reach into the water, you find with the sense of touch... [gap in the transcription]. In the course of time, natural science has acquired good rules through study, while it is believed in the humanities that the less study one has undergone, the more suitable one is for it.

Thus: “Even a superficial acquaintance with the material of perception accumulated by spiritualists and other occultists shows us that here, admittedly, the sources of error flow abundantly... .”

because they not only lie, as in the material world, in the subject, but also in the object, in that numerous malicious entities are supposed to make it their business to mislead the person doing the research. If one could rightly say of ordinary sensory perceptions: nature never lies, only man sometimes misunderstands them - it is, according to the secret researchers, different in the spiritual world. Therefore, if the reality of spiritual phenomena that are independent of matter is admitted, it is a great and difficult task to separate the wheat from the chaff there. This is the task of spiritual science, which, if one wants to pursue it seriously, requires a person's full time and energy, as is the case with every other branch of knowledge, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent. For the majority of people, however, such study is neither possible nor necessary. Just as one can be a Christian and find consolation and uplift in the teachings of Jesus, and see in his person the realization of the moral ideal, without being a theologian, so one can recognize in the basic teachings of Theosophy an interpretation of the actual meaning and purpose of one's own life without being familiar with the comprehensive structure of esoteric science.

— This is a claim that cannot be readily accepted, for even if people are not chemists or biologists, they can still live today. But man must gradually come to know that which belongs to the world to which the human soul itself belongs. It is a kind of unjustified denial when people say that to be a Theosophist one needs no more familiarity with esoteric science than one needs to be a theologian to be a Christian.

The world view that best furthers a person's actions and feelings is the one that most satisfies both his intellect and his feelings.

The next chapter is entitled:

The Soul's Survival After Death

If we assume that the spiritual principle in man, that which is designated by the word soul, is an entity that continues to exist after the death of the body, then various ideas about its further fate are possible. Of these, we will only consider the Christian view and the doctrine of re-embodiment here, as they are currently in the foreground for us. The teachings of Christ have been a source of comfort and moral strength for millions, and will probably continue to be so in the future. However, it cannot be denied that for the scientifically educated European, the difficulties of an intellectual nature have increased and do not allow the conflict between faith and knowledge based on Christian teachings to be resolved. The existing contradiction demands a sacrifice, either of the intellect or of the mind. In addition to these intellectual difficulties, many people have serious moral reservations about the usual Christian view. All Christian denominations teach that after death, the soul of man endures a fate that is eternal in duration: eternal bliss or eternal damnation. Every person feels that this belief contradicts the demand for justice. The basis of all morality is justice.

- If only one knew a little more! Of course Wrangell is right when he says that one cannot speak of eternal bliss and eternal damnation in this way, since these contradict justice. For “eternal” is an absurdity if one believes that it is something infinite. “Eternal” is only an age, a world age, and actually one should not speak of “eternal” in the Christian sense either, but only of an age, and that roughly corresponds to the time between death and a new birth.

Deep within every human breast lies the unshakable desire for each person to receive what is deserved. The concept of merit may change, as may the value placed on what is experienced and felt. But there can be no doubt that people would be happier, better, more satisfied if they were convinced that the way the world works meets the demand for justice in every detail. In what we experience in the course of our physical life, we do not see justice prevailing in ourselves and others, regardless of whether we consider mental, spiritual or physical suffering and joy as a measure of the value of what we experience. According to the teachings of the Christian churches, this apparent injustice of earthly life is to be compensated for in the hereafter; but it is basically infinitely intensified by the eternal consequences of temporal transgressions or merits.

— It is self-evident that Wrangell only speaks of what the Christian churches say, which arose after Justinian had closed the Greek schools of philosophy. But he overlooks the fact that we have the task of making the blocked wisdom accessible to humanity again. One must look for the right reasons. One could also show that those who teach Christianity today do not teach true Christianity, but rather a form of it that has been adapted.

The next chapter is called:

Reincarnation and Karma

The doctrine of reincarnation and karma, on the other hand, offers us the possibility of resolving the visible injustice of a life's destiny by the fact that it was self-imposed in previous lives, and that there is the possibility of improving it for subsequent reincarnations.

Such a belief, when it has become an inner certainty, gives one the strength to bear one's fate, even the hardest, without inner revolt, and spurs one on to improve it for the future by following the voice we call “conscience”.

The sense of responsibility in our consciousness is strengthened, and the danger that humanity, in a frenzy and selfishness, seeks to exploit the short span of temporal life, would be eliminated. The doctrine of rebirth and karma makes man free, because it puts him on his own.

Of course, the great mystery of the “what for” of it all remains unsolved, but the purpose and task of the individual life are clear and certain.

The next chapter is the conclusion of Lessing's “Education of the Human Race”:

Lessing's view of the doctrine of reincarnation.

“Is this hypothesis (of reincarnation) so ridiculous because it is the oldest? Because the human mind, before it was dispersed and weakened by sophistry and school, immediately fell for it? Why should I not come back as often as I am able to gain new knowledge, new skills? Do I get so much out of it at once that it is not worth the effort to come back?”

According to the doctrine of reincarnation, it is our fate to live on this earth until we have reached our destiny: knowledge of God, which is knowledge of self. Death is not annihilation; our sense of self, our true nature, merely enters into another body. Even the suicide does not escape; he only cuts the thread of life, which, according to inexorable laws, must be reattached.

- So Lessing. These were strong words. But they were also the words of a man who had the education of his time within him and who was necessarily led to this doctrine of reincarnation by what this and Christianity could give him. At this point, one sees the eminent education, one sees the historical critic. But now people say, of course Lessing is a great man; he wrote Nathan and so on, that's good, but when he grew old he devoted himself to such fantastic dreams as the doctrine of reincarnation; you can't go along with that. Well, in that respect the court master has become much cleverer than Lessing was in his old age. Many a person believes that he is much cleverer than Lessing, who is otherwise even recognized as a great man. One should at least recognize the ridiculousness of such an acknowledgment; recognize that one must strive toward what Lessing had finally worked his way to. They should realize how ridiculous it is if they do not want to go along with this, the ripest fruit of Lessing's thinking, not to mention what has followed in the newer intellectual life. These people speak without going into the actual core, which was already at the basis of the new intellectual life, but which for many who interpret it is a closed book. Now Wrangell continues:

That Goethe also believed in reincarnation is known to us from Eckermann and Boisserau's notes. Kant says in his “Lectures on Psychology”: “The beginning of life is birth; but this is not the beginning of the life of the soul, but of the human being. Birth, life and death are therefore only states of the soul... Consequently, the substance remains, even though the body perishes, and so the substance must also have existed when the body came into being.

Now follows the last chapter:

A brief summary of the train of thought

Let us try to briefly summarize the train of thought set out above.

The concept of the law-governed, the necessary chain of cause and effect in events, is not an original insight. On the contrary, direct consciousness gives us the idea of conditional freedom.

The concept of lawfulness, on which all science is based, probably first came to man from observation of the temporally regular course of celestial phenomena. Then this concept was applied with ever-increasing success to the phenomena of the inanimate (physics, chemistry), then to the animate, and finally also to the spiritual. The concept of lawfulness can only be tested and irrevocably proven on the basis of phenomena that can be quantitatively determined, that can be measured. The extension of the idea of the necessity of the material to the spiritual is an assumption that, according to analogy with what happens in the material, can indeed be given a certain probability, but which cannot be proven because the touchstone of measurability is lacking here. Numerous facts, examined by discerning men of science, do not allow any truth-seeking person to deny the existence of spiritual beings without providing proof, which is why he rejects the facts in question and their probative value.

The basic tenets of Theosophy – reincarnation and karma – do not contradict any scientific fact, satisfy the intellect and, better than other teachings, meet the basic requirement of all morality – the demand for justice.

Belief in these basic assumptions must strengthen people to endure unwanted life destinies and promote the striving for good in them.

And so, my dear friends, this brochure stands before us as a document of our time, as the expression of a person who, after thoroughly studying scientific methods, stands firmly within them and wants to bear witness to the fact that one can be a good, fully conscious scientist and precisely because of this, not in spite of it, must arrive at a world view that honors the spirit.

You will have gathered from the last chapters of Mr. von Wrangell's brochure that he has not yet delved very deeply into spiritual science, that he has not approached the difference between what spiritual science wants and amateurish theosophy. And so it is all the more important to see how someone who is scientifically trained longs for what can only be truly given through spiritual science, so that one can say: through such a brochure one has come to know how an unprejudiced scientist can relate to a spiritual-acknowledging view.

We can pull other strings and we will do so occasionally. We will delve further into the matter in order not only to cultivate spiritual science in an egoistic way, but to really see it as a cultural ferment and to work through it on the developmental path of humanity. It is extremely important that we get into the habit of really going along with everything.

Sometimes, our ranks offer a particular experience. Please don't be offended when I talk about this experience, but it really can be had. You see, there are certain members in our ranks who say, “Public lectures aren't important to us,” and they say it in a way that shows they're not really involved. They say that the public lectures are not the most important thing; the branch lectures, yes, those are for us, but we have progressed beyond what the public lectures provide. And yet it is precisely the case that the public lectures are designed for those who have a connection to the outside world. And much more reference is made to contemporary science in the public lectures than in the private lectures, which show how often delicate consideration has to be given to the fact that one does not love to base strictly scientific questions. And this delicate consideration is often interpreted to mean that one says: the public lectures are not so important.

The truth of the matter is somewhat different. There is only one kind of selfishness at the root of these matters. I do not want to break a lance for the public lectures, I just want to challenge the unfounded opinions of many people. It may be easier to miss this or that intermediate link in the branch lectures here or there; but the public lectures must be shaped link by link. This is not popular with many people whose work is not part of the overall cultural process of our time. But it is precisely this process of engaging with the cultural process of the time, this not shutting ourselves off, that is important.

Of course, it is easier to talk about angels, Lucifer and Ahriman than about electrons, ions and so on. But it is true that we must also bring ourselves to the realization that we must pull the strings towards the present culture. But I ask you not to take the matter one-sidedly again, as if I wanted to urge you to buy the entire scientific collection of Göschen tomorrow and sit down to gradually concoct everything, as the students would say. I do not mean that at all. I only mean that where one wants to speak authoritatively about the position of spiritual science in our culture, one must also have an awareness of it and should not fall into the trap of saying: this outer science is a pipe dream. As an individual, one can say that one has no time to deal with it; but the whole institution, the whole enterprise, should be given a certain direction through what I have said. And it should not be surprising that the School of Spiritual Science aims to pursue individual branches of science in such a way that they will gradually lead to spiritual science. We still need the materialistic culture out there. And those anthroposophists are wrong who say: What do I care about materialistic culture, it is none of my business, it is for coarse materialists; I cultivate what one experiences when one dreams, when one is not quite right while being fully conscious; the rest is none of my business, I have the teachings of reincarnation and karma and so on. On the other hand, there is the world out there that says: We have real science, serious and dignified methods, and now the anthroposophists are coming along with their spiritual science; they are the purest fools.

This antagonism cannot remain unresolved, and we cannot expect mediation from the outside. It must come from within. We must understand and not lie back on the sickbed and say: if we first have to climb up into the spiritual world through science, that is far too arduous for us.

I wanted to speak about the significance of materialistic culture and draw your attention to it, because I have often emphasized that materialism comes from Ahriman, but Ahriman must be known, just as Lucifer must be known and reckoned with. And the Trinity, which we were able to see in the model yesterday, is the one with which humanity will have to become familiar.

I would like to repeat once more: try not to annoy the outside world by talking about a new religion. If we were to talk about the group as a “Christ statue,” it would be a big mistake. It is enough to say: there stands the representative of humanity. Everyone can see what is meant there. It is important that we always find the right words, that is, that we consider how we want to place ourselves in the whole cultural world and come to describe the matter with the right words. That is what must be said again and again. We do not want to speak to others: We have only just presented the real Christ. - We may know that and keep it to ourselves. For us it is important to understand the full blessing of materialistic culture, otherwise we make the same mistake as those who do not examine.

Let us ask ourselves whether we are not doing the same with others. We do not need to withhold the true judgment, but we must understand what is going on outside. Then we will also be able to counter what is going on outside in the right words. But, my dear friends, we will have a lot to do in this direction, because the laziness I have spoken of today is very, very widespread and we must find the courage to tell people: You are too lazy to engage in the activity of thinking.

If we understand what is going on outside, then we can also use strong words and take up an energetic fight. But we must familiarize ourselves with it and pull the strings of the outer culture. That is why I wanted to give an example of the very commendable Wrangell brochure, which shows how someone is strong as a scientist, but has not sufficiently studied the spiritual scientific world view, but through the whole direction of his soul tends towards spiritual science.

We have often shown the drawing of threads, mostly in relation to specific personalities, and I advise you, where there are branches, to do the same in collaboration. Of course, this cannot be the work of just one person; it would never be finished. Rather, there must be someone who takes on a brochure about Eucken's world view for my sake, and someone else takes a brochure that deals with the blood, muscle and nervous system and so on, and works through it with the others. This can be branch work. It can be arranged so that on one branch evening, work is done purely in terms of spiritual science, and then the next evening, a subject like this is covered. When one person has done it on one day, another can do it the next time. Everyone can take up something that is somehow close to them. And why should someone who has no scientific education not be able to take up this or that? There are questions of life that can also be linked to such things. It is much more useful to use the time for such studies than to extract all kinds of occult intricacies and material from dreams and tell people about them. This is not meant to be one-sided either. It is not meant to say that one can never speak of occult experiences; but it is a matter of drawing the right line of connection. It is not a matter of despising the science of the senses, but of mastering it. The science of the senses is not to be trampled or destroyed, but mastered.

In our literature, we already have a rich and extensive body of material from which we can educate ourselves about the various facts that spiritual science is now able to bring down from the supersensible worlds, and our branches are able to work with the help of this material. Therefore, it will be advisable if, when we meet in person, we also talk about how this material may relate to our soul life, how we introduce it into life, how we ourselves can find refreshment, enlivenment and invigoration, in short, it will be advisable if, on such occasions, we focus more on the affairs of our spiritual movement, because, by the nature of things, we can only meet in person less often.

Many of you will notice that even today, when you immerse yourself in spiritual science or anthroposophy, you still face many difficulties. Isn't it true that you first find your way into spiritual science through the needs of your soul, in that the soul must ask questions about the most important riddles of life? One finds one's way into spiritual science in particular when one looks at today's life with all that it can give, and sees how little the various spiritual directions, be they religious or scientific, can really provide satisfying answers in the deeper sense to the great riddles of life. And then, when one has found one's way into this spiritual-scientific movement through one's urge for knowledge, through one's longing for knowledge, when one has immersed oneself for a while in what has been extracted from the spiritual worlds to date, then difficulties often arise, difficulties of the most diverse kinds. They are different for everyone, so it is not easy to describe them in a few words. Our friends often say: By finding my way into spiritual science I have indeed gained something extraordinarily valuable, something meaningful for life; but it has also isolated me in a certain way, torn me away from the views, from the community of other people, it has also made life difficult for me, so to speak. Those who, by the very nature of their spiritual striving, are dependent on the opinions of the outside world feel this particularly strongly. This really gives rise to the most diverse difficulties.

With other friends, after they have immersed themselves in spiritual science for a while, something arises that one might say is like timidity, something that causes anxiety, fear of all kinds of questions: how to cope with life and so on. Many of you have no doubt had similar questions arise in you. Such questions are often questions of feeling and perception. I would like to take such difficulties in our inner soul life as my starting point for today's reflection.

The right context of these manifold feelings, which can be different for everyone, the real connections, are sometimes difficult to see. We must always bear in mind that we, as people who feel drawn to anthroposophical truths, are still a very small group. We are in the midst of a life struggle that is being waged outside our circles with means that are sharply different from ours. And anyone who reflects a little on what Anthroposophy seeks to achieve in life will be able to see how fundamentally different the goals of thinking, feeling and willing become under the influence of Anthroposophical ideas from the goals that the vast majority of humanity sets itself today. And since thoughts and feelings are real facts, we must realize that our small group, that is, each one of us, is in a mass of energy that is still relatively small compared to the, one might almost say, in most cases completely opposite thoughts, perceptions and feelings of the rest of humanity. Even if the difficulties of life that arise for us take the most diverse forms and do not immediately show that they are connected with what I have just described, they are nevertheless connected with it; and we must try to how we can cope with such difficulties, with the difficulties that arise from the fact that we remain true to the cause of anthroposophy, but as a result come into conflict with the rest of the world.

As I said, things obscure themselves, and they do not always show the right face. What we have to introduce into our souls, as it were, as a remedy, in order to find more and more inner harmony despite the contradictions of the outer world, thereby strengthening the soul so that it can withstand the often arises in the form of disharmony, that is: a clear, correct view of the relationship between those who profess or are interested in anthroposophy and the rest of humanity. To think clearly and sharply about this matter purifies our soul so that we can also be strong when external powers that are full of contradictions beset us. If you think about it from a narrow perspective, you might say: Yes, but what does it help me if I am now clear about what separates Anthroposophy from the rest of the world? After all, it doesn't change my circumstances! It would be a mistake to think so; for our life circumstances may not change overnight through clear thoughts, insightful thoughts, but the strength we gain through such clear thoughts in the direction just indicated, these clear thoughts, they strengthen us little by little in such a way that they do change our life circumstances. Sometimes, however, we do not yet find the possibility to develop really clear, sharp and therefore sufficiently strong thoughts in this direction.

With regard to what we want to achieve through spiritual science or anthroposophy and what we want to achieve not only for ourselves but for the world - and we must once bring this before our soul as one of these clear thoughts before our soul, today's civilized humanity lives in a terrible, more or less conscious or unconscious lie, and the effect of this lie within civilized humanity is tremendous. This is actually saying something very significant, and let us try to clarify this point a little more.

It is hardly possible for a truly thinking person with a completely healthy mind to regard what exists today as general culture in the so-called civilized world without realizing that this culture lacks much, that above all this culture has no impulses for life that are sufficient for itself. Yet there is much in this culture that is far-reaching in its ideals. What a wealth of ideals there are in our time, as people call them, the reasons for founding associations and clubs that set themselves programs through which these or those ideals are to be expressed! All of this is extremely well-intentioned, so well-intentioned that one can say: Those people who, under the influence of these or those ideals, join together in smaller or larger associations from all walks of life, want to do good from their point of view, and these people's attitude is to be fully respected. But these people mostly live under the inhibiting influence of a certain constraint, arising from unconscious timidity, from unconscious spiritual cowardice, precisely in the face of what is most important for humanity today. We say: the most important! What humanity needs today is spiritual knowledge and the introduction of certain spiritual insights into our lives.

This was indeed a big question in the course of the 19th century. You know that there are spiritual laws, laws about the spiritual worlds. At all times certain people knew about this, and of course even in the course of the 19th century, when spiritual science had not yet appeared in the form in which it is now appearing, there were so-called occult societies, which were more or less worthy of the name, which wanted to cultivate occult truths, spiritual truths, in the most diverse ways, and which also had a certain insight into what spiritual truths mean for the world. Now, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a crisis occurred in relation to the deepest impulses of modern human development. This crisis consisted in a particular rise of materialism in all areas, in the area of knowledge, in the area of life. Materialism reached a high tide. We know, of course, that numerous people emerged who wanted to establish a comprehensive world view based on scientific materialism. But this theoretical materialism would not have been the most pernicious aspect; rather, it is the practical materialism, the materialism that is particularly involved in ethical and social life and in the religious feelings of people, that has led humanity to a crisis in the course of the 19th century. And those who still knew something, precisely from the more or less reputable occult societies mentioned, directed their attention, especially from the middle of the 19th century onwards, to how one could remedy the rampant materialism. In certain circles, those who had spiritual-scientific insight - only not yet the kind that alone can be effective and that is striven for in the form that we humbly attempt to strive for - those, that is, who had an ancient traditional or otherwise somehow outdated spiritual insight into the development of humanity, they asked themselves: How do we help from the point of view of what, like a disaster, dawns on modern humanity through materialism? And they said to themselves: We can help by providing people with proof that just as there are sensual facts in our environment, so too are there spiritual facts and spiritual beings in our environment. But, I would like to say, people were only accustomed to experimental thinking and to external experience and perception. And so these people with spiritual insights, who had concerns like those mentioned, knew of no other solution than to prove the spiritual world in the same way that one proves the natural processes of the external sensory world. And so then all kinds of things were tried. And we see movements emerging in the course of the 19th century that are aimed at convincing people of the existence of a spiritual world. The crudest of these movements, I might say, is the spiritualist movement. While scholars today find it difficult to get to grips with the relatively transparent methods of our spiritual science, truly brilliant scholars of the 19th century seriously studied spiritualism.

Now, spiritism has the peculiarity that it should work in an external way, through something that can be presented to the external senses like a chemical or physical experiment. To a large extent, this method, which seeks to emulate the spiritual science of natural science, is already bankrupt today – to a large extent, I say – and it will become more and more apparent that it is bound to fail, because, of course, you cannot let people see the spirit with their own hands, figuratively speaking. Therefore much of what has been done by certain so-called occult societies in the course of the nineteenth century and up to our day, through all kinds of mysterious machinations, has done more to discredit spiritual scientific research than to support it. And so we see that especially among the best-intentioned people, who have insight, especially in social matters, but also in other areas relating to the practical conduct of life, there is much that has to happen from the present on into the future. We see that people who understand this are almost shocked when it is said that the most important impulses needed in our time and in the near future must come from true spiritual insight, from the realization that real spiritual forces and spiritual beings are in our human environment just as there are sensory facts and sensory beings. People who are well-meaning about the progress of humanity are truly shocked. Let me give you an example first. We can learn a lot from examples like these that deal with comprehensive life phenomena. When we turn our gaze to a great movement, it also shows us clearly what we, each and every one of us, actually encounter every day in small ways.

A truly important man who was truly sincere about the social progress of humanity was murdered in Paris the day before the outbreak of this unfortunate world war: Jaurès. Jaurès was certainly one of the most honest personalities of the present day in the field of social endeavor, and he was also one of those who, with all human insight, sought to gain insight into the present conditions of life and into the reasons why they are increasingly leading to absurdity, increasingly and increasingly to impoverishment and immiseration in the spiritual and material spheres of humanity. And he strove with all his might to find ideas and thoughts that he could convey to people, so that, in a joint effort, the great issues of the present day could be resolved to some extent. We can learn much from personalities such as Jaurès, for we learn most when we see the great defects of our own time from the spiritual-scientific point of view, when we realize the necessity of thinking clearly about them, and when we see these defects embodied, not in small but in great personalities, in whom we can be convinced, above all, of their pure intentions and honest striving for knowledge, and also of a certain ability to understand the times. We have much more to gain by testing the damage of our time on people whom we respect and esteem than by testing it on people whom we respect less because we cannot ascribe to them a benevolent and good attitude in the highest sense. Now such people, who have devoted all their thoughts, feelings and willpower to the service of humanity, to the service that must be performed in raising humanity to a higher social level, such people as Jaurès find it extraordinarily difficult – and he is truly no exception, but we see the best people of our time in this difficulty – such people find it truly difficult to talk about things like our spiritual science. And it is precisely these very gifted people who would only be able to achieve what they want to achieve for humanity if they could say: Everything that I can achieve with my ordinary means of thinking and scientific means only provides me with impulses that are too weak to really take hold of life; I have to realize that all these impulses that I want to provide to humanity on my way have no foundation. First I must create a foundation for myself; I must penetrate and suffuse what I have believed up to now with the deeper foundations of spiritual science. I must recognize spiritual facts, real spiritual facts.

You see, the person who does not recognize such spiritual facts and who forms all kinds of thoughts and ideals about how human progress can be promoted today is like the person who has a garden in front of him with many plants that are beginning to show signs of dying, and he does this, that, and much more, and strives all the time - but he achieves nothing. Yes, one plant is a little better, the other a little worse, but overall the plants are not getting better. Why does it not get better? Because some disease may have seized the roots, which he does not check. It is the same with the social endeavors of people like Jaurès. They put an enormous amount of effort into it, and they also achieve an enormous amount with regard to the surface, but they do not penetrate to the roots, because in the roots of our present human life, there is a lack of recognition of a real spiritual world. And no matter how many seemingly well-founded social insights are established, they will not bear fruit for humanity in reality if they are not based on those insights that can only come from spiritual science. Therefore, real progress for present-day humanity will only be possible when spiritual science can be recognized to the extent that the most important part of spiritual science for our time – the recognition of real spiritual entities and spiritual forces – no longer encounters any difficulties among people, especially among the best people. Let us just realize that the best people, those of good will, have difficulties precisely with regard to the most important thing in our cause: the recognition of the spiritual world as such.

I called attention to a point over there in Zurich that makes this particularly clear. There is a person who has spoken very favorably about our spiritual science and has even had what he said printed. This man has also taken courage before a very educated audience and no longer regards what lives within our spiritual movement as mere folly. But this man cannot help but stop precisely at the most important thing, at the recognition of the spiritual world. What does he say? “We must seek to understand it [this spiritual movement], at least in the circle gathered around Steiner, rather as a religious movement among our contemporaries, if not of an original but only of a syncretic kind, but still directed to the bottom of all life; we may judge it as a movement to satisfy the , and thus as a movement beyond realism, which clings to the sensual; we may recognize in it, above all, a movement that points people to self-reflection on the moral problems that face them, and that aims at a work of inner rebirth, ing out of a scrupulous attention to self-education; one need only read Steiner's book An Introduction to Theosophy to notice the earnestness with which man is pointed to the work of his moral purification and self-perfection."

I am not reading these words to you out of some kind of silliness, but because we really want to see clearly how the outside world relates to our aspirations. We see that he is a well-meaning person who, however, regards our movement as a syncretic one because, above all, he does not know it. He does not know how it is a thoroughly new movement simply because it is also based on something that is new in the world: on the new direction of natural science, which is, after all, its foundation. He cannot give any information about this because he does not understand it; but he is well disposed towards our movement. And if you now let this whole lecture, which he has given - “The Thought World of the Educated” - sink in, you can see that the man reflects that a spiritual education of the human being is necessary in our time, and he finds one of the attempts to promote this spiritual movement of humanity in our movement. But then he says, and this is the characteristic thing: “In its speculation directed to the supersensible, it is further a reaction against materialism; in doing so, however, it easily loses the ground of reality and gets carried away in hypotheses” — he believes that real spiritual knowledge is hypotheses, not knowledge - “in clairvoyant fantasies, in a realm of dreams, so that it no longer has sufficient strength for the reality of individual and social life.”

You see, despite his benevolent judgment, he says afterwards: “But after all, we want and must register Theosophy as a corrective phenomenon in the course of education in the present day.” He feels compelled to stop short of all that, without which our movement cannot be conceived without, and what we bring right at the start: supersensible facts; because without man gaining connection with supersensible facts, humanity cannot be brought out of the impasse into which it is now mired. But even well-meaning people believe that – while our movement is seeking firm ground under its feet, without which all other social ideals are left hanging in the air – this movement leads to the realm of dreams, that it no longer has “sufficient strength left” in terms of shaping social life. As I said, this is not due to ill will or mistrust, but rather to a mistrust that arises from unconscious timidity, unconscious discouragement in the face of the recognition of spiritual facts. It is the clear lack of insight, or rather, it is clear that it is the lack of insight into what spiritual science can contribute to the foundation of social striving.

And so, of course, people like Jaurès find themselves in life today without any possibility of recognizing, from the thoughts they have absorbed from their education and from their entire contemporaneity, that everything that happens physically is dependent on spiritual worlds, and that man, in the sphere in which he is called upon to intervene in life, for example also with regard to social life, can only intervene correctly if it is made possible for him by knowing the spiritual laws by which the spiritual world can be introduced into the physical. And the fact that such men are confronted with this impossibility, that this is really a widespread modern-day phenomenon among the best people of the present time, is due to the significant, albeit unconscious, but no less significant life-lies in our age. These life-lies can be found almost everywhere.

Let us consider the case of Jaurès, as a typical example. He was a man who stood before the rest of humanity and sought by every means of social knowledge to improve what he rightly recognized as leading people only to a dead end. There stands a man before the rest of humanity who, in order to gain the necessary insights in this field, really familiarizes himself with all historical facts, who studies the history of past times and wants to learn from the facts of earlier times what can happen in the present, so that mistakes that have clearly shown themselves to be mistakes in earlier social experiments by humanity can be avoided. In all his endeavors, Jaurès, like others, is confronted with the impossibility of truly recognizing a spiritual world, of truly recognizing that through human beings, continuous streams of spiritual life flow down from the spiritual world into this world. One of the fine essays that Jaurès wrote is about the relationship between socialism and patriotism in the Jaurès sense. There Jaurès tries to show how historical events intervene in the development of humanity and have an effect on it. After he has brought various things before his mind that had an effect in the Roman Empire, in order to learn from them how to act in the present, what had an effect in the Greek world, in order to learn from it how to act at other times, after he has really brought various things before his mind with an extraordinarily thorough urge for knowledge, he also brings a chapter from more recent times before his mind. A remarkable chapter is in this book Jaurès, which deals with the proletariat and patriotism, and it is interesting to present this little chapter to oneself in order to see what is actually going on in the souls of the best people around us today.

In this chapter, Jaurès's aim is to show that in recent social progress, it is not land that is the main thing, but industry and so on, but we will not go into these things; the important thing is that here he is forced to refer to the personality of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans. Now imagine, a man who lives entirely in the ideas of the present points to the Virgin of Orleans, a personality whom everyone who knows modern history knows – anyone who objectively recognizes the fact will have to admit – that the map of Europe today would simply be completely different if she had not intervened. Of course, Jaurès also sees this. He says:

Here we see a man who is condemned because he, steeped in the materialistic thinking of the present, can only think on the basis of materialistic principles, so to speak, but who, because he also wants to be historically honest, is forced to point to this remarkable phenomenon of Joan of Arc and to take it as seriously as we can see from his words. So Jaurès is confronted with the full historical significance of Joan of Arc. But now we ask ourselves: what, after all – and this may be taken too far, even for Jaurès personally, when we assert it – but for many others who act in Jaurès' spirit it is certainly not taken too far – what, for a person like that, who lives in such a social view of society as Jaurès did, be other than someone who, through a certain religious ecstasy, which one should not aspire to if one wants to remain a reasonable person, has arrived at the impulses that she has now arrived at? These people will certainly not recognize what must be clear to us from spiritual science: that at a time when the modern developed spirit knowledge that we have today could not yet be attained, streams of spiritual life flowed from the spiritual worlds through such more or less consciously active personalities such as the Maid of Orleans, that she was a medium, not for people, of whom mediums are so often misused in modern times, but for divine spiritual worlds that wanted to have an effect on the physical world. It had to be recognized that what came from the Maid of Orleans was of more value than what the others could and wanted to communicate from their human insights. That the spiritual world spoke through this Joan of Arc, of course, such people could not recognize. And yet, if they speak of the real facts, they must speak of such people as the Maid of Orleans, they must even recognize them. They must therefore attribute what is happening - just consider that: what is happening - to personalities whose spiritual life they do not recognize, whose spiritual life they certainly would not want to emulate.

Even if people do not want to admit it today – one can also numb oneself to this fact – this is nothing but the deepest lie of life. This is a real lie, and I am characterizing for you only one case of the lie that pulsates everywhere today through our social life, and which is due to the fact that people do not recognize what really is, what is most real, but must regard it as a fact through what the newer development of the spirit brings forth. Lies are now also facts, and they work accordingly. And even if they are well-meaning, earnestly striving, significant people, like Jaurès – since they are bound by the conditions of the times in such a lie of life, what comes from them cannot, nevertheless, have a liberating effect on humanity.

Yes, we are faced with this in a present-day fact of life, which we must allow to have a clear and distinct, a profound effect on our souls. We must have the courage to look at such life-lies with clear insight, and we must find the strength from this clear looking to sustain ourselves against all that comes from all sides, and which sometimes comes from one or the other side very masked and concealed from this life-lie. What real inner insight into the interrelationships of human life can people who live in such a lie actually gain? They must think: Oh, there are such strange characters who want to have a relationship with the spiritual worlds like the Maid of Orleans, and one must even ascribe historical significance to them; but one really does not have to present this as an example to follow, so that one can somehow introduce spiritual powers into the physical world! Much water will flow down the Rhine before wider circles of people understand and recognize the full gravity of the fact we have been talking about. Today, even the natural scientists have adopted the airs and graces that theologians once adopted towards Joan of Arc. For what Jaurès draws attention to at the end is part of the deep tragedy of the phenomenon of Joan of Arc at the time. The theologians of the day said: What she brings forth as her spiritual knowledge of the world does not correspond to what we recognize through our theology! In those days, the theologians spoke from the same attitude; and today, after a relatively shorter time than was the case with theology, the natural scientists are speaking from the same attitude. The Maid of Orleans of old replied to those who judged her from the standpoint of theology and said that she must justify her miracles and her mission from the Holy Books: There is more written in the Book of God than in all your books! These are historic words. But they are also words that are still valid today. From the standpoint of spiritual science, they can be used to counter all objections, theological and scientific: More is written in the Book of the spiritual worlds than all that the adversaries could dream up. And Jaurès adds to these words: “A wonderful word, which in a certain respect stands in contrast to the soul of the peasant, whose faith is rooted above all in tradition. How far removed is all this from the dull, narrow-minded patriotism of the landowner! But Jeanne hears the divine voices of her heart by looking up to the radiant and gentle heights of heaven.”

Yes, such an acknowledgment may sound good in the mouths of our contemporaries, but what is it in the mouths of even the best of our contemporaries? An acknowledgment of something that they more or less consider a work of fiction, a work of fiction that can make life more or less beautiful, but which they do not admit is real. And that is what the living lie does!

We can see, then, that we need clarity about the existence of this life-denying delusion. We encounter its effects everywhere, and it is preventing spiritual science from gaining the influence it should have. But more and more people will not only have to gain a theoretical insight into spiritual science, they will also have to find the strong inner strength to introduce spiritual science into the various branches of life. This could be demonstrated in the most diverse areas of life. And again, one can say that the true facts are masked here. For apparently one can object to everything that is said about spiritual science. Let us take an area of life that is most likely to be appreciated by humanity, for the simple reason that it is very close to external healing. You see, spiritual science could have an enormously beneficial effect if people would only bring themselves to allow the medical faculties, medicine and pharmacology to be influenced by this spiritual science. For modern scientific development has led more and more to medicine itself taking on a materialistic character. Of course, through this materialistic character it has also brought about many beneficial effects, and one need only point to the extraordinarily great progress that has been made in the field of surgery to find some justification for saying again and again what I also say: that one must admire the more recent advances in natural science. But there are other, no less important aspects of medical knowledge and skill that suffer tremendously under the materialistic approach and that can only approach a beneficial future by introducing spiritual-scientific knowledge into the relevant investigations.

Through such spiritual scientific knowledge, connections in the human organism are recognized for which today's medical science only knows the details. Of course, such things are often instinctively suspected by more insightful researchers; but progress cannot happen fast enough as a result, and one can say: if such a fantastic rejection of everything spiritual did not prevail in the medical field and medicine did not strive to be monopolized as a power by the corresponding authorities and governments, then, for the benefit of humanity, tremendous achievements would be made in the field of medicine on the basis of spiritual science. You may say: Well, nothing prevents a spiritual researcher from bringing about such progress! - That is precisely why things are masked, because it is simply not true. The materialistic practice of medicine as it prevails today does indeed prevent spiritual research from intervening. For it is a completely false belief that the spiritual researcher, who sees through things today, can help an individual person in all cases. He is prevented from doing so by the external materialistic practice of medicine, and will be prevented more and more if the materialistic practice of medicine continues for a long time. One cannot say to the spiritual researcher in the field of medicine: “Here is a problem, now solve it,” because his legs are not freed to dance. Certainly, there are many commendable efforts being made to counter the prevailing materialism in medicine; but these efforts are all insufficient because, above all, there is a lack of insight that one must not only must oppose materialistic medicine, but that above all it is necessary to work with what modern medicine has acquired: namely, the external aids that are needed in this particular field. But humanity would be amazed at the results if spiritual-scientific views were to be introduced into clinics and dissecting rooms today, and if spiritual-scientific views were to be applied to all the other resources and remedies of the medical profession. But efforts must also be made in this direction. The aim must not be to disregard materialistic medicine, but to bring spiritual science into this materialistic practice. And until that is done, it is not possible to help in individual cases. The reasons why this cannot be, cannot be discussed in such a short lecture; but it is so. Thus, in a field that is so closely related to the outward well-being of man, an enormous amount could be achieved if only there were a little unprejudiced thinking.

And with regard to the burning social questions, it would become evident that although many attempts are still being made to improve this or that in the social field, to improve these or those conditions of life, all these attempts will fail. Only when we come to base social knowledge on spiritual-scientific axioms, just as mathematics or geometry are based on axioms, only then will we find truly effective means.

And so we live in a world that, above all, our own soul, when we are seized by spiritual science or anthroposophy, must encounter with radically different thoughts and feelings. We live, as it were, in an atmosphere that demands of us a strong display of strength, a strong sense of self-preservation. And these are the deeper reasons why we can often become disheartened, feel lonely, and why perhaps one or the other cannot cope easily with life because of their commitment to spiritual science. But if we have a clear insight into the magnitude of that in which we are placing ourselves in the context of humanity as a whole, and how it appears only as something small today because we are still at the beginning, we can also find this strength, can then really find it. Everything great in the development of humanity must take a small beginning.

I would also like to point out here, as I have done in Zurich these days, how limited, illogical and incoherent our present-day thinking is. This is because, in the more recent development, natural science has had a blinding effect on this newer humanity. This natural science has produced magnificent, admirable results with regard to the external world of the senses, and those people who used to administer the spiritual wealth of humanity felt, I might say, pushed aside, pushed aside more and more. In particular, certain theologians have not fared well. It is wrong to simply reject out of hand what people have brought forth as theology through the development of humanity. This “theology” contains profound, significant basic truths about the human soul; even if they first have to be examined more closely by spiritual science in many respects, there are basic truths in it. Just because they are not advocated in a way that meets the needs of today's humanity, today in the thinking man and in the feeling soul the longing for an answer to the question of spiritual science must arise. But the theologians, who did not want to go along with such a spiritual-scientific endeavor, ended up in a strange state: they had truths, but these truths could not be applied to anything because the other sciences had taken away the objects for these truths. The theologians had truths about the soul – but the soul was taken away from them by natural science. And now theology perhaps expresses truths in words, but it does not concern itself with the objects; it even wants to let natural science examine the objects, because theologians are in many respects too idle to really take on natural science. And that is what we must see as significant in spiritual science: that this spiritual science completely takes on the natural sciences, gets involved in everything that natural science has acquired, and has its say by adding the spiritual scientific principles to the natural scientific endeavor. The theologians did not want to do this; they are sometimes there when it matters to participate, to hold the objects, inspired by a very strange attitude.

One who is considered an extraordinary theologian in certain circles, both as a professor, who he used to be, and as a pastor, has written a little book in which he reproduces religious lectures; and in this little book he expresses thoughts that one might find strange coming from him. One sees into the soul of an important man of the present time. Yes, I cannot say otherwise, one is sometimes overwhelmed by the thoughts that an important man can bring to light today! For example, in the very first lecture, this famous, important man says that one must approach natural science and give up the natural man; only the man of freedom may be retained as a theologian. But in this sense, freedom itself becomes a mere word! Does he not say that he leaves the soul's entire content to natural science? He retains nothing but a wisdom of words, and he even gives a rather cute reason for his attitude, saying quite dryly that this is his attitude. So here is a theologian who, in these lectures, wanted to describe to his audience the most modern form of Christianity, and he says right in the first lecture: “Man, as we encounter him in zoology, the two-legged, upright walking homo sapiens, equipped with the finely developed backbone and brain, is just as much a part of nature as any other organic or inorganic organic or inorganic formation, is part of nature, is composed of the same mass, the same energies, the same atoms, interwoven and governed by the same power; in any case, the whole physical life of man, however complicated it may be, is scientifically determined in its entirety, ordered according to law like everything else in nature, living and non-living. In this respect, there is no difference between a human being and a jellyfish, a drop of water or a grain of sand.

Theological lectures, lectures by a theologian, a pastor! But this theologian does not only speak in this way with regard to the physical; he continues: “The mental functions that are accessible to the scientific approach are subject to just as strict a lawfulness as the physical processes; and the sensations we have, as well as the ideas we form, are just as much forced on us by nature” – please note: the sensations and ideas! - “as the nervous processes that lead to sensations of pleasure and pain. They are just as much mechanical ideas as those of a steam engine.”

You see, the soul slips away from the natural scientists, and the theologian retains only the old theological phrase, for which he comes up with empty phrases; because the last pages, the last lectures now consist only of empty phrases, in order to wrap what has been discussed in theological phrases. But he does reveal the attitude that lies behind his present liberal attitude in the surrender of the objects. And here one is caught out by a quite remarkable attitude: think, he says, theologians must act as he does, one must go even further, he says: 'This determination of man by natural law concerns not only his bodily but also his mental functions. That is what theologians have always refused to admit,” — only he has gone further, he has risen higher, he now admits it - ‘because we confused the scientific concept of the soul with the theological one and feared unpleasant consequences for the faith.’

But now he has come so far that he no longer fears unpleasant consequences for the faith that he admits! Then he says: “But these arise precisely when one does not allow science to reach its full result;”. So now he says: Let us give in to this science, otherwise it will have unpleasant consequences! Otherwise it will have nasty consequences, this science. – And then we see him in a truly remarkable light: “because then you lose the trust of thinking people.”

There you have what the great theologian strives for today! People have come to those feelings in all these ways that I have described to you today - the best ones - with which they turn their trust to us when we speak of the spiritual; one should not lose that, and therefore not apply the real inner soul power, which could stand on the ground of spiritual insight! We see that if we catch people in what we might call their innermost being, if we do not thoughtlessly pass by such things, then people today turn out to be strange. We must have clear insights into this. On the basis of these clear insights, we should not be surprised that when such thoughts are cultivated by those who are officially called upon to provide the religious and spiritual education of humanity today, we have a difficult time placing ourselves in the world with something that is radically opposed to it.

We must always remind ourselves of the cause we are actually serving in the context of humanity by countering the seductive thoughts that come to humanity today from such quarters with those that alone can be fruitful. And such a thought can always lift us up again and make us strong again, even in the deepest depression. Such a thought is absolutely important in every second of our life, and it is important that we practise spiritual science in such a way that we show it as little as possible in our outer life, but absorb it so strongly and intensely within us that we ourselves have the strength to say to the tests it imposes on us: they must be there! Since our karma has led us to it, we also want to accept what it can impose on us as a test. For the opposing forces in the world of spiritual science are today tremendously difficult, and basically people do not know. For of course, this man has no idea of what the nature of thinking and feeling actually is and what can only be revealed by gaining a clear view from the spiritual science into the whole corruption and destruction of such thinking. Therefore, no blame can be attributed to him, he cannot be disregarded, but such a fact must be accepted quite objectively like an earthquake, like a volcanic eruption, which also has a destructive effect on humanity - albeit in a small area - with external physical means. But the man really cannot think. And in this he is only one example of the most important people of the present time who cannot think. He cannot think! Imagine him saying: 'Of course we hand the human body over to natural science, there is no other way; after all, what should we theologians do with it? We cannot examine the body, can we? That if you really examine the spirit, this spirit is a co-builder of the body, that you cannot separate the body at all and give it away as it were, as was explained yesterday in the public lecture, this man has no idea. He gives away the body; but he also gives away the soul – because it feels practically like a steam engine – he only retains, as he expressly says, for theology, the “human being as freedom”. He even generously gives away “man as nature”; he retains “man as freedom.” But now, after he has kept back man as freedom, he says, of course: “Man as nature loses his independence and freedom as a component of nature; everything he experiences, suffers, he must suffer according to the law of nature.”

Thus man loses this freedom through his nature. And now just think about what this theologian actually leaves out! First he says: man as nature, he gives that to nature and reserves man as freedom; but then he states: man as nature is such that, as a component of nature, he loses his independence and freedom, and “everything he experiences, he suffers, he must suffer entirely according to the law of nature.” Now he has absolutely nothing! It is therefore not surprising that he then only speaks in empty phrases. But the good man does not notice this, and he is a typical example of how the most important people today are unaware of the discontinuity of thought that is at work today. Humanity has now reached a stage of development where that which is to be thinking about physical life must be fertilized by those thoughts that also relate to the spiritual world; otherwise, those thoughts that relate to the physical world will break down in all places because people who have a say today are not familiar with the simplest facts of the world's interrelations.

We know that people today are in a period of transition. We are not speaking in the superficial sense in which one speaks of transitional periods now, but in a different sense. We are in those transitional periods in which the old atavistic clairvoyant instincts have died out and in which conscious entry into the spiritual worlds must be attained. This is an obvious fact for the spiritual researcher. But those old atavistic clairvoyant abilities that people had also gave them effective thoughts, insofar as they needed them in their cultural epoch. History reports only a little of the greatness that the Chaldean cultural epoch or the Egyptian cultural epoch had in terms of thoughts that intervene in human life. However little they may be able to withstand our criticism today, they existed for their time. Our time must again gain thoughts that are capable of intervening in reality! But it can only do so if it is fertilized by the spiritual world just as the ancient times were fertilized by the spiritual world. But people today are not being fertilized unconsciously. Therefore, consciousness must arise if spiritual-scientific knowledge is really to be recognized by people. And we ourselves have this man, whom one can so easily prove to be seized by the worst effects of the thoughtlessness of our time, that he causes immeasurable harm by infecting so many people with his thoughtlessness, and one has no ill-willed man; one even has an insightful man before him, namely one who has precisely that insight that one can have in our time if one cannot advance in a certain respect to the real spiritual world, in the sense that even people like Jaurès cannot advance. But even people like the one who gave these religious lectures, even people like that know that humanity today is at a dead end in some respects, that we cannot continue with the thinking, feeling and willing that the old attitudes and the old elements of world view have given us. And he also knows that in modern times this has led to materialism, and he knows that things have to change. And basically he is not at all radical, because he talks about the fact that the 19th century has led people to have such concepts as sportism, comfortism, and mammonism. The man talks about all these things, which are the dark sides of materialism, and he is quite prepared to say: sportism, comfortism, mammonism, as they emerged in the 19th century, must be fought. But the way he says it, it remains a phrase for, at the end of the first lecture – one does not trust one's eyes, one does not trust one's powers of perception – the following is stated. The following can be said today by an important, famous man. He begins by saying quite correctly: All the things that happen should be evaluated differently, 'they must no longer be the ultimate goal. There must be no more merchants for whom the acquisition of money is an end in itself; enjoyment of life must no longer become the content of life; there must be no more people who live only for their health.

So, he is very radical. From the point of view of spiritual science, we will certainly not put forward such radical things; we will rather leave people to their own freedom, and we know that if they understand karma and reincarnation and the rest of what spiritual science gives, they will find their way in life in detail. But this man, who knows that people have brought themselves to a deadlock, says quite radically that people should no longer earn more money, no longer enjoy life, no longer live at the expense of their health. I once came to a sanatorium run by a famous man, which had nervous patients. I could see whole crowds of nervous patients marching past as they went to lunch. It seemed to me that the most sickly, fidgety nervous patient was the famous director of the hospital himself! But now our man, our theologian, is radical, he says: the content of life must become different; no one should live only for his health and so on. But now the following lines: “That means” - he says, and with that he comes to the end of his lecture - “everything that has been done so far should be done, but something else should be considered in the process.”

That is life reform! Just think, this is the life reform of a person who looks so deeply into what is necessary: everything must become different, that is, nothing must become different, but everything must be thought about differently: “These things must not represent the innermost, the goal, the highest value. They must be striven for with the same energy, but they must be valued – that is, they must be thought of – on a different scale than before.

Well, there is nothing more to be added about these things! It is necessary to draw attention to them, for they are not found in a single person; they are to be found throughout the civilized world today. And what people experience in their destinies comes from nothing other than this defectiveness in thinking and intuiting; that is the karma of this defectiveness of thinking and intuiting! This is what we must first focus on. At least as scholars of the spirit, we must find the strength not to listen to the things that are sweeping and raging through the world today and that are recognized as “highest values” from other impulses . But in this respect one must really be able to see these main things without being clouded by all kinds of other feelings that rule the world today and under whose influence so much lying takes place. These things have their influence. We live in such a sphere - I have already said it in Zurich - that this man, who passes on such stuff to people, so that, by listening to him, these thought beasts enter into their hearts and minds, may say: “The content of this booklet consists of 12 speeches that I gave last winter in...” — now comes the city, which I do not want to name — “before an audience of more than a thousand people.”

But – the city is completely unimportant – it now goes to thousands! That must be seen through. And it is necessary to really put all the seriousness and the whole meaning of such a consideration before the soul.

And having extracted much from the spiritual world, we must recognize what this extracted material from the spiritual world must be for us; thereby also recognizing that we are, as it were, looking into the counter-image of the world-view that is prevailing in people today much more than we realize. Unfortunately, people live far too thoughtlessly today! That is what weighs so heavily on the soul: having to look at the widespread dullness, the dullness in which humanity lives in relation to what works and guides the course of human development. We must also obtain the necessary nuances of feeling for the kind of truth contained in spiritual science by allowing ourselves to be given these nuances of feeling from the contemplation of the counter-image. What is important, therefore, is not just to look for all kinds of fine words that sound good, as if they were high ideals to be presented to humanity; rather, it is to recognize above all that it is the spiritual world that must be opened up, something that the best of our contemporaries cannot recognize. There are good reasons – and why this is so cannot be explained here because it would be too long – there are good reasons why, for centuries, humanity has been reluctant to understand Christianity in a spiritual sense. In the first centuries of Christianity there was a gnosis. You all know that our spiritual science is not a revival of gnosis, but in those days gnosis first made the effort to arrive at a spiritual science; it was suppressed because people did not want to see the Christian truths in spiritual light. The same tendency then continued and has also taken hold in scientific endeavor. Humanity has also learned a great deal from the fact that it has fought against the possibility of understanding the spiritual for centuries. But now the time has come when it will be most difficult for those who are completely immersed in our present-day culture – which is still materialism, even if it is not admitted – to recognize a real spiritual world; not just a vague talk about the spiritual world, but a direct knowledge of a spiritual world. We must, however, realize that the acknowledgment of this spiritual world is one of the most important things, and that only then can the rest come, that which must come as a new foundation of the ethical, the social, and also the other practical order of life, when one creates foundations through spiritual science, through the acknowledgment of real spiritual facts and spiritual entities.

It gave me great satisfaction that we were able to meet here in St. Gallen again after a long time, and so I considered it my task today to add to what you can learn from our literature, some of what may need to be said personally, from soul to soul, within our movement, so that it is understood in the right sense. For within our movement it is not just a matter of absorbing this or that from spiritual science in a catechism-like way, but it is a matter of finding the right relationship of our soul to the knowledge from the spiritual world. Then spiritual science will not just be a science for us, but truly a way of life, it will be soul food for us. But it is soul food that does not undermine our spiritual health and spiritual but, on the contrary, stimulates it in such a way that, despite all the resistance of the outer world, the nature of which we have partly sought today, we can still place ourselves in the world in a harmonious way. My intention today was to speak to you about the attitude of soul towards spiritual science. And if it was necessary to present to you contemporary phenomena that can perhaps only be illuminated in this way by spiritual science, it was because only a clear, distinct insight into the course of the world in which we live can also allow us, as professors of the anthroposophical world view, to find the right inner attitude, which is harmony. And from this inner harmony, harmony in our lives will also arise. And that this harmony in our lives is brought about more and more through spiritual science is, after all, our spiritual scientific ideal. In the spirit of this ideal, I wanted to give you a small contribution today.

My dear friends,

Today I should like to link on what I am about to say to the laboratory scene in Goethe's Faust just represented, and to connect it in such a way that it may form a unity, as well as a starting point for more thorough deliberations tomorrow.

We have seen that the transition from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the sixteenth and seventeenth forms a remarkably significant and suggestive incision into the whole course of human evolution—a transition from the Greco-Latin age to our fifth post-Atlantean epoch in which we are now living, out of which flow the impulses for all our knowledge and all our action, and which will last until the third millennium. Now, from all that you know of Goethe's Faust, and of the connection between this Faust and the figure of Faust originating in the legend of the sixteenth century, you will see that not only this sixteenth century Faust but also what Goethe has made of him is most closely connected with all the transitional impulses introduced by the new age, both from a spiritual and from an external, material point of view.

Now for Goethe the problem of the rise of this new age and the further working of its impulses was something very powerful, and during the sixty years in which he was creating his “Faust” he was wholly inspired by the question: What are the most important tasks and the most important trends of thought of the new man? Goethe could actually look back into the previous age, the age that came to an end with the fourteenth, fifteenth centuries, of which now so little is known even to science. As I have often said, what history tells of man's mood of soul, of his capacities and needs in former centuries, is indeed nothing but colourless theory. In the souls of men in the earlier centuries, even as in the centuries immediately preceding the age of Faust, things looked completely different from how they appear to the soul modern man, to human souls in the present epoch. And in his Faust Goethe has created a figure, a personality, who looks back in the right way on man's mood of soul in former centuries, in centuries long past, while at the same time he looks forward to the tasks of the present and those of the future.

But although at first Faust looks back to an era preceding his own, he can actually only see the ruins of a culture, a spiritual culture that has come to an end. He can look back only on ruins. To begin with we must always keep in mind the Faust of the sixteenth century, the historical Faust who actually lived and then passed into folklore. This Faust still lived in the old sciences that he had made his own, lived in magic, in alchemy, and mysticism, all of which was the wisdom of former centuries, and also the wisdom in particular of pre-Christian times. In the age, however, in which lived the historic Faust of the sixteenth century, this wisdom was definitely on the decline. What was accepted as alchemy, as magic, as mysticism, by those among whom Faust lived, was already in a state of confusion. It all originated in tradition, the legacy of older ages, but it was no longer possible to find one's bearings in it. The wisdom contained there was no longer recognisable. There were,all kinds of sound formulas here from past ages, and much real insight, but these could hardly be understood. Thus the historical Faust was placed into an age of decaying spiritual life. And Goethe constantly mingled the experiences of the historical Faust with those of the Faust he was creating, the Faust of the eighteenth century, of the nineteenth and indeed of many centuries to come. Hence we see Goethe's Faust looking back to the ancient magic, to an older type of wisdom, mysticism, that did not deal with chemistry in the modern, materialistic way, hoping to make contact with a spiritual world through its dealings with nature but no longer having the knowledge enabling it to do so in the way that was right for an earlier age. The art of healing, as it was looked upon in centuries long past, was by no means so foolish as modern science sometimes makes it out to be, but the real wisdom contained in it has been lost. It was already to a great part lost in Faust's time and Goethe knew this well. He knew it not only with his intellect but with his heart, with those soul forces that have specially to do with the well-being, the soundness, of man. He wanted to find an answer to the questions, the problems, arising from it; he wanted to know how a man, continually advancing, could arrive at a different kind of wisdom with regard to the spiritual world, a wisdom adapted to the new age, as the ancients had been able to attain their kind of wisdom which in the natural course of human affairs had now to die out. For this reason he makes his Faust a magician. Faust has given himself up to magic like the Faust of the sixteenth century. But he is still unsatisfied for the simple reason that the real wisdom of the old magic had already faded away. It was from this wisdom that the old art of healing sprang; all dispensing, the whole science of medicine, was connected with the ancient chemistry, with alchemy.

Now in touching on such a question we come at the same time to one of the deepest secrets of humanity—these secrets going to show that no one can heal diseases without also being able to produce them. The ways leading to the healing of disease are the same as those leading to its production. We shall shortly hear how completely in the ancient wisdom the principle prevailed that he who healed diseases was likewise able to produce them. Thus, in olden days, the art of healing was associated in men's s minds with a profoundly moral conception of the world. And we shall also shortly see how little what is called the new freedom in human evolution would have been able to develop in those days. Actually this freedom was not taken hold of until this fifth epoch of ours, the epoch following the Greco-Roman. We shall see what it would have been like if the ancient wisdom had persisted. But in every sphere this wisdom had to disappear so that man might make, as it were, a fresh start, striving towards freedom in both knowledge and action. This he could not have done under the influence of the old wisdom. In such times of transition as those in which Faust lived the old is passing away, the new has not yet come. Then arise such moods as may be seen in Faust in the scene preceding the one produced today. Here we see clearly that Faust both is and feels himself to be a product of the new age, in which the ancient wisdom still existed though it was no longer fully understood. We see how Faust accompanied by his famulus, Wagner, goes out from his cell into the green world where, to begin with, he watches the country people celebrating the Easter Festival out-of-doors in the meadows, until he himself is affected by the Easter mood. We see at once, however, that he refuses the people's homage. An old peasant comes forward to express this homage, for the folk think that Faust, as son of a former adept in the art of healing, must be distinguished in the same way, and be able to bring them health and blessing:

“Nay, of a truth, it is but meet
Our joyful day should see you here.
You proved a very friend in need,
In evil days when death was near.
And many a man stands here alive
Whom your good father, wrestling yet,
Snatched from the fever's burning rage,
When for the Plague a bound he set.
And you yourself, a young men then,
In every stricken house were found,
And corpse on corpse was carried forth,
But you came out, aye, safe and sound.
Steadfast in trials did you prove;
Helped was the helper from above.”

Thus speaks the old peasant, remembering Faust's connection with the ancient art of healing, not only the healing of physical diseases in the people but also the healing of their moral evil. Faust knows that he no longer lives in an age when the ancient wisdom could be really helpful to humanity, for it is already in decline. Humility begins to glimmer in his soul, and at the same time despondency over the falsity he is opposing. He says:

“Yet a few paces onward, up to yonder stone;
Here a brief while we'll rest us from our straying.
Here have I often sat and mused alone,
And racked myself with fasting and with praying.
For rich in hope and staunch in faith,
With tears and sighs and frenzied wringing
Of aching hands, to stay the Death
I thought, Heaven's Lord to mercy bringing.
And now the crowd's applause rings in my ears like scorn!
O could'st thou read what in my heart is hidden.
Father and son, no more than babe unborn,
Merit the fame that seeks them thus unbidden.
My father was a worthy gentleman,
To fame unknown, who sought with honest passion,
Yet whimsical device, as was his fashion,
Nature and all her holy rounds to scan;
In the Black's Kitchen's murky region,
Cloistered with masters of the craft.
He, guided by prescriptions legion,
Concocted nauseous draught on draught.
There a red lion with lily wedded,
A wooer bold within the tepid bath,
From bridal bower to bridal bower was speeded,
Racked by the naked fire's flaming wrath.”

After the manner of those days Goethe had thoroughly studied how the “red lion” (mercury-oxide, sulphurated mercury) used to be dealt with, how the different chemicals had been combined, what the results of these processes were, and how medicines had been manufactured from them. But all that no longer represented the ancient wisdom. Goethe also knew their mode of expression; what was to be shown was put into pictures; the fusion of substances was represented as a marriage. Hence he says:

“From bridal bower to bridal bower speeded,
And, thereupon, in gorgeous hues attired,
Shone the young Queen within the glassy cell.”

This was a technical expression; just as modern chemistry has its technical terms so in those days, when certain substances had reached a definite condition and colour, the result was called the young Queen.

“Here was the medicine, but the patients died”; they died in the days of Faust as they still die today in spite of many medicines.

“Here was the medicine but the patients died.
None asked the question: Who got well?
Thus have we wrought among these hills and valleys,
With hellish lecturaries, worse havoc than the malice
Of that same desolating pest.
Myself to thousands have the poison given;
They pined away—and yet my fame has thriven,
Till I must hear their shameless murderers blessed.”

This is Faust's sell-knowledge. This is how ho sees himself, he of whom you know that he has studied the ancient magic wisdom in order to penetrate into the secrets of nature. And through all that he has become spiritualised. Faust cannot remain satisfied like Wagner his famulus. Wagner contents himself with the new wisdom, relying on manuscripts, on the written word. This Wagner is a man who makes far fewer claims on wisdom and on life. And while Faust tries to dream himself into nature in order to reach her spirit, Wagner thinks only of the spirit that comes to him from theories, from parchments, from books, and calls the mood that has come over Faust a passing whimsy:

“I too have had my whimsies and my fancies,” (says Wagner)
“But no such freaks as that by any chances.
On woods and fields I soon have looked my fill.
I never shall begrudge the bird his pinion.”

He never wants to fly out on the wings of a bird to gain knowledge of the world!

“How elsewise flit we through the mind's dominion
From book to book, from leaf to leaf at will?”
Such snug delights the wintry eve console;
A blissful warmth in every limb comes o'er you;
Some venerable parchment then if you unroll
Ah, then, all heaven opens out before you!”

A thorough bookworm, a theory-monger! And so the two stand there after the country folk have gone—Faust, who wishes to penetrate to the sources of life, to unite his own being with the hidden forces of nature in order to experience them, and the other, who sees nothing but the external, material life, and just what is recorded in books by material means. It does not need much reflection to see what has taken place in Faust's inner being as the result of all the experiences which, as described by Goethe, he has passed through up to this moment. When we consider all that we meet with in Faust, we can be sure of this, however, that his inner being has been completely revolutionised, a real soul-development has taken place in him and he has acquired a certain spiritual vision. Otherwise he would not have been able to call up the Earth-spirit who storms hither and thither in the tumult of action. Faust has made his own a certain capacity not only to look at the external phenomena of the outside world, but to see the spirit living and weaving in all things. Then from the distance a poodle comes leaping towards Faust and Wagner. The way the two see the poodle—an ordinary poodle—the way Faust sees and the way Wagner sees it, absolutely characterises the two men, After Faust has dreamed himself into the living and weaving of the spirit in nature, he notices the poodle:

“Dost thou see yon black dog ranging through shoot and stubble?”

Wagner: “I saw him long ago; he struck me not in the least,”

Faust: “Look at him narrowly. What mak'st thou of the beast?”

Wagner: “A poodle who like any other poodle breathing
casts for the scent strayed from his master's heels.”

(The poodle goes circling round them.)

Faust: “Mark how, a mighty spiral round us wreathing,
Nearer and ever nearer yet he steals,
And see! unless mine eyes deceive me queerly,
He trails a fiery eddy in his train.”

Not only does Faust see the poodle but something stirs within him; he sees something that belongs to the poodle appearing as if spiritual. This Faust sees. It goes without saying that Wagner cannot de so; what Faust sees cannot be seen by the external eye.

Wagner: “I see a poodle, a black poodle only.
’Tis but some sport, some phantom of your brain.”

Faust: “Meseemth he softly coileth magic meshes
To be a future fetter round our feet”

Wagner: “He frisks in doubt and fear around us, lest ungracious
The strangers' welcome be. He thought his lord to greet.”

In this simple phenomenon Faust sees also something spiritual.Let us keep this firmly in mind. Inwardly struck by a certain spiritual connection between himself and the poodle, he now goes into his Laboratory. Naturally the poodle is there dramatically represented by Goethe as a poodle, and so it must be; but fundamentally we are concerned with what is being inwardly experienced by Faust. And in Goethe's every word he shows us in a most masterly fashion how in this scene Faust is passing through an inner experience. He and Wagner have stayed out of doors till late in the evening, till outwardly the light has gone, the dusk has fallen. And into the twilight Faust has projected the picture of what he spiritually wishes to see. He now returns home to his cell and is alone. When alone, such a man as Faust, having been through all this, is in a position to experience self-knowledge, that is, the life of the spirit in his own ego. He speaks as though his inmost soul were stirred, but stirred in a spiritual way:

“Now field and mead have I forsaken,
Which night enshroudeth, deep and still,
In us the better soul doth waken,
with a presaging, holy thrill.
Now stress of deed and storm of yearning
Sleep, at her all-compelling nod;
The love of man now bright is burning,
and burning bright the love of God.”

The poodle growls. But let us be quite clear that those are spiritual experiences; even the growling of the poodle is a spiritual experience, although dramatically it is represented as external. Faust has associated himself with decadent magic; he has associated himself with Mephistopheles, and Mephistopheles is not a spirit who can lead him to progressive spiritual forces. Mephistopheles is the spirit whom Faust has to overcome, and he is associated with him just in order that he may overcome him, having been given him not for instruction but as a test. That is to say, we now see Faust standing between the divine, spiritual world that bears forward the evolution of the universe, on the one hand, and on the other the forces stirring in his soul which drag him down into the life of the ordinary instincts, and these divert a man from spiritual endeavor. Directly anything holy stirs in his soul, it is ridiculed, the opposing impulses ridicule it. This is wonderfully presented now in the form of external events—Faust striving with all his knowledge towards the divine spiritual, and his instincts growling, as the materialist's mind growls, at spiritual endeavor. When Faust says: “Be quiet poodle,” he is really saying this to himself. And now Faust speaks—or rather, Goethe makes Faust speak—in a wonderful way. It is only when we study it word by word that we realise how wonderfully Goethe knows the inner life of man in spiritual evolution:

“When in our narrow chamber kindled
The lamp its cheerful radiance throws,
Bright gleams the light that erst had dwindled
Within the heart itself that knows.”

This is self-knowledge; seeking the spirit within itself.

“Reason again begins to speak”

A significant line, for whoever goes through the spiritual development Faust passes through during his life, knows that reason is not merely something dead within man, not only the reasoning of the head, but he realises how reason can become living—the weaving of an inner spirit that actually speaks. That is no mere poetical image:

“Reason again begins to parley
And hope to bloom that seemed dead.”

Reason again begins to speak of the past, of what is left alive out of the past. “Hope, blooms again that seemed dead,” that means that we find our will transformed, so that we know that we shall pass through the gates of death as spiritually living beings. Future and past are dove-tailed together in a wonderful way. Goethe now makes Faust say that through self-knowledge he can find the inner life of the spirit.

“Then for life's fountains long we dearly,
Ah, dearly, for life's fountain-head.”

And now Faust seeks to come nearer that towards which he is being pressed—nearer life's fountain-head. To begin with he seeks the path of religious exaltation; he picks up the New Testament. And the way in which he does so is a wonderful example of the wisdom in Goethe's drama. He picks out what contains the deepest wisdom of the new age—the John Gospel. He wants to translate this into his beloved German; and it is significant that Goethe should have chosen this particular moment. Those who know the workings of the deeply cosmic and spiritual beings realise that when wisdom is being put from one language into another, all the spirits of confusion make their appearance, all the bewildering spirits intervene. It is especially in the frontier regions of life that the powers opposed to human evolution and human well-being find expression. Goethe purposely chooses translation, to set the spirit of perversity, the spirit of lying (still inside the poodle) over against the spirits of truth. If we look closely at the feelings and emotions to which such a scene may give rise, the wonderful spiritual depths concealed in it become evident. All the temptations I have characterised as coming from what is inherent in the poodle, the temptation to distort truth by untruth, these go on working, and now they influence an action of Faust's which gives ample opportunity for such distortion, Yet, how little it has been noticed that this is what Goethe meant is still today made evident by the various interpreters of “Faust”; for what do these interpreters actually say about this scene? Well, you can read it; they say: “Goethe is indeed a man of external life, for whom the Word is not enough; he has to improve upon John's Gospel; he has to find a better translation—not: In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, but: In the beginning was the deed. That is what Faust after long hesitation decides on. This is a piece of Goethe's deep wisdom!” But this wisdom is not Faust wisdom, it is pure Wagner wisdom, genuine Wagner wisdom! Just like that wisdom quoted over and over again when, later, Faust speaks such beautiful words to Gretchen about the religious life:

“Who, then, can name Him? who thus proclaim Him? ...
The All-embracing, the All-sustaining ...”

And so on. What Faust says to Gretchen then is quoted repeatedly and represented as deep wisdom by the learned gentlemen who quote it:

“Who can name Him?
Who thus proclaim Him:
I believe Him?
Who hath that feeling,
His bosom steeling,
Can say: I believe Him not?
The All-embracing,
The All-sustaining,
Clasps and sustains He not
Thee, me, Himself?
Springs not the vault of Heaven above us?
Lieth not Earth firm—’stablished ’neath our feet?
And with a cheerful twinkling
Climb not eternal stars the sky?
Eye into eye gaze I not upon thee?
And floats in endless mystery
Invisible visible around thee? ...

These words of Faust's are often represented as deep wisdom! Now if Goethe had meant it to be accepted as such deep wisdom, he would not have put the speech into the mouth of Faust when he was trying to instruct the sixteen-year-old Gretchen. It is Gretchen-wisdom! We must take things seriously. The pundits are under a misapprehension and have mistaken this Gretchen-wisdom for deep philosophy. Faust's suggestion for the translation of the Bible is also taken for especially profound wisdom, whereas Goethe simply means to represent how men bandy about truth and error when they undertake much a task. Goethe has represented the two souls of Faust very profoundly indeed, here in this scene of the translation of the Bible.

“It is written: In the beginning was the Word.” We know that this is the Greek Logos. That actually stands in the John Gospel. In opposition to it there rises up in Faust what is symbolised by the poodle and it is this that prevents him from reaching the inner meaning of the Gospel. Why does the writer of the John Gospel choose precisely the Word, the Logos? It is because he wishes to emphasise that the most important thing in the evolution of man on earth, what really makes him externally man in this Earth-evolution, has not evolved gradually but was there in the primal beginning. What is it that distinguishes man from all other beings? The fact that he can speak, whereas no other being, animal, vegetable or mineral, can do so. The materialist thinks that the Word, Speech, the Logos, through which thought vibrates, was required by man only after he had passed through animal evolution. The Gospel of John takes the matter more deeply and says: No, in the primal beginning was the Word. That is to say, man's evolution was planned from the beginning; he is not in the materialistic Darwinian sense, simply the highest peak of the animal world; in the very first design of Earth-evolution, in its primal origin, in the beginning, was the Word. And man can develop on Earth a ego, to which animals do not attain, only by reason of the Word being interwoven with human evolution. The Word stands for the Ego in man. But against this truth the spirit of falsehood which has entered Faust rebels; he must go deeper to understand the profound wisdom of John's words,

“Already I am held up!”

But actually it is the poodle, the dog in him and what dwells in the dog, that is holding him up. He can get no higher; on the contrary he sinks much lower.

“Already I stick, and who shall help afford?
The Word at such high rate I may not tender;
The passage must I elsewise render,
If rightly by the Spirit I am taught.”

Seeing Mephistopheles coming to him he thinks that he is being “enlightened by the Spirit,” whereas in reality he is beclouded by the Spirit of darkness, and sinking lower.

“ ’Tis written: In the beginning was the Thought.” What is not higher than the Word. Sense, as we can easily prove, plays its part in the life of animals also, but the animal does not attain to the human Word. Man is capable of sense, thinking, because he has an astral body. Faust descends from the Ego to the astral body more deeply into himself.

“... In the beginning was the Thought. (Sinn)
By the first line a moment tarry,
Let not thine eager pen itself o'er hurry!”

He thinks he is rising higher but he is sinking lower.

“Does Thought work all, and fashion all outright?”

No, he is descending lower still, from the astral body to the dense, more material etheric body; and he writes:

“... In the beginning was the Force.”

(Force is what dwells in the etheric body.)

“Yet even as my pen the sentence traces,
A warning hint the half-writ word effaces.
The spirit helps me!”

(The spirit dwelling in the poodle. )

“From all-doubting freed,
Thus write I: In the beginning was the Deed.”

And now he has arrived at complete materialism; now he has reached the physical body through which the external deed is performed.

(Logos) Word.........Ego
Thought..................Astral Body
Force......................Etheric Body
Deed.......................Physical Body

Thus you have Faust living and weaving in self-knowledge. He translates the Bible wrongly because the several members of man's being of which we have so often spoken—the ego, the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body are working together in him, through Mephistopheles' spirit, in a chaotic way. And now we see how these impulses prevail, for the external barking of the dog is what stirs him up against the truth. In all his knowledge he cannot yet recognise the wisdom of Christianity. This is shown the way he connects Word, Thought, Force, Deed. But the impulse, the urge, towards Christianity is already alive in him, and by making use of the living force of what dwells there as the Christ, he overcomes the opposing spirit. He first tries to do this with what he has received from ancient magic. But the spirit does not yield, does not show himself in his true form. He then calls up the four elements and their spirits—the salamanders, sylphs, undines and gnomes, but nothing of all this affects the spirit in the poodle. But when he calls upon the figure of Christ, “the shamefully Immolated, by Whom all heaven is permeated” then the poodle has to show its true shape.

All this is fundamentally self-knowledge, a self-knowledge that Goethe makes quite clear. And what appears now? A travelling scholar! Faust is genuinely practising self-knowledge, he stands actually facing himself. Now for the first time the wild impulses in poodle-form, which have been resisting the truth, are working, and now he sees himself with a clearness that is still not clear! The travelling student stands before him but this is only Faust's other self, for he has not become much more than a travelling student with all a student's errors. Only now that he has learnt through his bond with the spiritual world to recognise the impulses more accurately,the travelling scholar—his own ego as up to now, he has developed it—confronts him as something more definite and solid. Faust has learnt like a scholar; he has given himself up to magic and through magic scholastic wisdom has been bedevilled. What has developed out of the old, good Faust, the old travelling student, is merely the result of his having added ancient magic to his learning. The travelling scholar is still present in him and meets him under a changed form; it is only his other self. This travelling student is himself. The struggle to be free of all that confronts him as his other self, is shown in the ensuing scene.

Indeed, in the different characters whom Faust meets, Goethe is always trying to show Faust's other ego, so that he may come to know himself better and better. Many of the audience may remember how in earlier lectures I explained that even Wagner was to be found in Faust himself, that Wagner was just another ego of Faust's. Mephistopheles, also, is only another ego. It is all self-knowledge; self-knowledge is practised for knowledge of the universe. But, for Faust, none of this is yet clear spiritual knowledge; it is all wrapt in a vague, dull spirit seership, impaired by the old, atavistic clairvoyance. There is nothing clear about it. It is not knowledge full of light, but the knowledge of dreams. This is represented by the dream-spirits fluttering around Faust—really the group-souls of all the beings that accompany Mephistopheles—and represented also by his final waking. Then Goethe says, or makes Faust say, clearly and unmistakably:

“What! am I once again then cheated?
And vanishes the spirit-foison thus?
That but a dream the devil counterfeited,
A poodle from my room broke loose?”

Goethe employs the method of directing attention over and over again to the truth. That he is representing a spiritual experience in Faust, is clearly enough expressed in the above four lines. This scene shows us too how Goethe was striving for knowledge of the transition from the old era to the new in which he himself lived, that is, from the fourth post-Atlantean epoch to the fifth. The boundary line is in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries. As I have said before, whoever thinks as men think today can hardly picture—unless he makes a special study of it—the soul-development of past centuries. In the days of Faust only the ruins of it remained. How often we experience today that men are not trying to come to the new spiritual research for which we are striving; they are trying to renew the old wisdom. Many indeed think that by renewing what was possessed by the people of old they will be able to find a deeper, magical and mystical wisdom about nature. There are two errors closely connected with all human spiritual striving. The first is that men buy ancient books and studying them come to prize them more highly than the newer science. They generally prize them more highly simply because they do not understand them, the language in which they are written being actually no longer comprehensible. Thus, the content of old books that has become double-Dutch being often put forward when spiritual research is under discussion is the one mischievous thing. The other is that whenever possible old names are given to new endeavours in order to justify them. Look at many of the societies calling themselves occult, or secret, or something of the kind; their whole endeavour is to give themselves an early origin, to talk as much as possible about a legendary past, and they delight in the use of old names. That is the second mischievous error. We do not have to do all this if we really see into the needs and impulses of our own age and of the inevitable future. If we pick up any book where traditions still existed, we can see from the way they were presented that, through the legacy of the past, the memory of an ancient wisdom formerly possessed by man, was still there, this wisdom had fallen into decay. Its modes of expression, however, continued for a considerable time.

I have at my disposal a book printed in the year 1740, that is, in the eighteenth century, from which I should like to read you a short passage, and we may be sure that many seeking spiritual knowledge today, coming upon such a passage will say: What depths of wisdom we have here! Indeed, there are many who believe they understand a quotation of this kind. Let me read you the one I am referring to:

“The King's crown should be of pure gold, and he must be married to a chaste bride. Now, if thou desirest to work upon our bodies, take the Greedy Grey Wolf who, according to his name, is subject to the warlike Mars but by birth is a child of ancient Saturn, and found in the hills and dales of the world, obsessed by hunger. Throw him the body of the King that he may feed upon it.”

This is the way chemical processes were described in olden days, the way to which Faust alludes when he talks of how Red Lion is married to the Lily in the glass. We should not make fun of such things for the simple reason that the way we speak of chemistry today will sound to those who come later just as this sounds to us. But we must be quite clear that this particular passage belongs to a late period of decline. Allusion is made to a “Grey Wolf.” Now this “Grey Wolf” stands for a certain metal found everywhere in the mountains, that is then subjected to a certain process. “King” is a name given to a condition of substances; and the whole paragraph describes a chemical process. The grey metal was collected and treated in a certain way; then this was called the “Greedy Grey Wolf”, and the other the “Golden King”, after the gold had gone through a process. Then an alliance was made and this is described: “And when he had devoured the King. ...” It comes about, therefore, that the Greedy Grey Wolf, the grey metal found in the mountains, is amalgamated with the Golden King, a certain condition of gold after it has been treated chemically. He represents it as follows:

“And when he has devoured the King, then make a great fire and throw the Wolf into it.”

—thus the Wolf who has eaten up the Golden King is thrown into the fire.

“So that he may be completely burnt up and the King released again.”

The gold once more makes its appearance.

“When that has happened three times the Lion will have overcome the Wolf, and will find nothing more of him to consume. Then our body is ready to begin our work.”

In this way then he makes something. To explain what he makes, we should have to describe these processes in greater detail, especially how the Golden King is made; but that is not told us here. Today these processes are no longer used. But for what does the man hope? He hopes for what is not entirely without reason for he has already made something. For what purpose exactly has he made it? The man who had this printed will certainly not have done anything more than copy it from some old book. But for what purpose was it done at the time when such things were understood? That you may gather from the following:

“And know that this alone is the right way thoroughly to purify our bodies; for the Lion cleanses itself by the blood of the Wolf; for the tincture of this blood delights marvelously in the tincture of the Lion's, for the two kinds of blood are closely allied.”

Thus he praises what he has been the cause of producing. He has invented a kind of medicine.

“And when the Lion is satiated, its spirit becomes stronger than before, and its eyes dart forth a gleam of pride, bright as the sun.”

(This describes the properties of what he has in the retort.)

“Its inner being is then able to do much, and is useful for all that is demanded of it. When it is made ready, children of men attacked by severe sickness and many diseases are grateful to it; the lepers run after it, hankering after its soul's blood, end all who have infirmities rejoice heartily in its spirit; for he who drinks of this golden spring, experiences a complete renewal of his nature, the removal of evil, strength in the blood, force in the heart and perfect health in all the limbs.”

This, you see, indicates that we are concerned with a medicine, but it is also sufficiently indicated that this also has to do with man's moral character. For naturally if a healthy man takes it in the right quantity then what is here described will make its appearance. This is what he means, and this is how it was with the men of olden days who understood something of these matters.

“For he who drinks of this golden spring, experiences a complete renewal of his nature”

Thus, by means of the art he describes here, he strives to discover a tincture that can arouse an actual stirring of life in man.

“Thanks to the strength of the heart's blood, and the perfect healthiness of all the limbs, they are either enclosed within or sensitive outside the body, for it opens all the nerves end pores so that evil can be driven out and good can peacefully take its place.”

I have read this aloud chiefly to show how in these ruins of an ancient wisdom one may find the remains of what was striven for olden times. By external means taken from nature men strove to stimulate the body, that is, to acquire certain faculties, not only through inner moral endeavour, but through the medium of nature herself, applied by man. Keep this in mind for a moment, for from it we shall be led to something of importance which distinguishes our epoch from earlier epochs. Today it is quite the thing to make fan of the ancient superstitions, for then one is accepted in the world as a clever man, whereas this does not happen should one see any sense in the old knowledge. And all this is lost, and had to be lost, for reasons affecting mankind; for spirit-freedom could never have been attained through what was thus striven for in ancient days. Now you know that in books of an even earlier date than this antiquated volume—that indeed belongs to a very late period of decline—you find Sun and Gold indicated by the same sign ⊙; and Moon and Silver by the sign ☾. To the modern man the application of the one sign used for Sun and Gold, and the other used for Moon and Silver, two faculties of the soul he necessarily has himself, is naturally sheer nonsense. And it is sheer nonsense as we find it in the literature that often calls itself “esoteric”. For the most part the writers of such books have no means of knowing why in the olden days Sun and Gold, Moon and Silver, were characterized by the same signs.

Let us start from Moon and Silver with the sign ☾. Now if we go further back in time, say a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, before the Christian reckoning of time, men did not only possess the faculties later in ruins; at the time when such things came into existence they possessed still higher faculties. When a man of the Egypto-Chaldean culture said ‘Silver’ he did not mean only what we mean when we say ‘Silver’. In the language of that time, the word signifying a ‘Silver’ was quite differently applied. Such a man had the spiritual faculties, and he meant a certain kind of force-activity found, not only in a piece of silver that actually spread over the whole earth. What he wished to say was: We live in Gold, we live in Copper, we live in Silver. He meant certain kinds of living forces were there, and these flowed towards him especially strongly from the Moon. This he felt that something sensitive and delicate that was in its coarsest, most material form in the piece of silver. He really found these forces flowing from the Moon, but also spread out over the whole earth, materialized in a particular way in the piece of silver. Now, the enlightened man of today says: Yes, of course, the Moon shines with a silvery light so they believe that it consisted of silver. It was not so, however, but rather men had an aerosol experience, lost today, in connection with the Moon, in connection with something dwelling as a force in the whole terrestrial globe, and materialized in the piece of silver.

Thus, the force lying in the silver has to be spread out over the whole earth. Naturally when this is said today it is regarded as absolute nonsense, yet, even from the point of view of modern Science it is not so. It is not nonsense at all, quite the contrary. For I will tell you something that science knows today although it is not often mentioned it. Modern Science knows that rather more than four lbs of silver, finally distributed, is contained in a cubic body the length of an English knot that you may imagine out of the ocean. So that, in all the seas surrounding the earth, there are two million tons of finally distributed silver. This is simply a scientific truth that can be proved today. The oceans of the world contain two million tons of finely distributed silver—distributed in an extreme homeopathic degree, one might say. Silver is actually spread over the whole earth. Today this must be substantiated—if one does so in the way of ordinary Science, by taking water from the sea and testing it by the most exact methods of investigation; then, with the means of modern Science itself it is found that there are two million tons of silver contained in the oceans. It is not that these tons of silver have been somehow dissolved in the ocean, or anything of that kind; they belong to it, belong to its nature and being. And this was known to the ancient wisdom through those delicate, sensitive forces originating in the old clairvoyance, at that time still in existence. The old wisdom also knew that the earth should not be looked upon merely in the way of modern Geology, but that in this earth, most finally dissolved, we have silver.

I could go further; I could show how gold is also dissolved, how, besides being materially deposited here and there, all these metals finely dissolved are really present. Ancient wisdom, therefore, was under no misapprehension when it spoke of silver; it is contained in the sphere of the earth. It was known, however, as a force, a certain kind of force. The silver sphere contains certain forces, the gold sphere other forces, and so on. More still was known of the silver that was dispersed throughout the earth-sphere; it was known that in the silver lies the force controlling the ebb and flow of the tides, for a certain force animating the whole body of the earth lies within this silver and is relatively identical with it. Without it there would be no tides; this movement, peculiar to the earth, was originally set in motion by the silver-content. It has no connection with the Moon, but the Moon is connected with the same force, and hence ebb and flow appear in certain relation with the movements of the Moon, because both they and the tides are dependent on the same system of forces. And these lie in the silver-content of the universe.

Even without clairvoyant knowledge we are able to see into such things, and to prove with a certainty unattainable in any other sphere of knowledge, unless it be Mathematics, that there used to be an old science knowing these things and knowing them well. With this knowledge and what it could do the ancient wisdom was connected, the wisdom that actually controlled nature has to be regained only through spiritual research, as it is today and as it goes on into the future. We live in the age in which an ancient kind of wisdom has been lost and a new kind only beginning to appear. What arose out of this ancient wisdom? Those consequences I have already indicated. If we knew the secrets of the universe we could make man himself more efficient. Think of it! By external means we could make man more efficient. It was possible simply by concocting certain substances and taking them in appropriate quantities, to acquire faculties which today we rightly assume to be innate in a man, such as genius, talent, and so forth. What Darwinism fantastically dreamed was not there at the beginning of earth-evolution, but the capacity to control nature existed, and from that to give man himself moral and spiritual faculties. You will now see that, for this reason, man had to keep the handling of nature within limits; hence the secrecy of the ancient Mysteries. The knowledge connected with these Mysteries, the secrets of nature, did not consist merely of concepts, ideas and feelings, nor merely of dogmatic imaginations. Whoever wished to acquire it had first to show himself wholly fitted to receive it; he had to be free from any wish to employ the knowledge selfishly, he was to use both knowledge and the ability derived from it solely in the service of the social order. This was the reason why the knowledge was kept so secret in the Egyptian Mysteries. In preparation for such knowledge, the one to whom it was to be imparted gave a guarantee that he would continue to live exactly as he had lived before, not taking to himself the smallest advantage but devoting the efficiency he would acquire, by his mastery over nature, exclusively to the service of the social order. On this assumption initiation was granted to individuals who then guided the ancient culture, of which the wonderful works are still to be seen, though, because men do not know their source, they are not understood.

But in this way men would never have become free. They would, through their nature-influences, have been made into a kind of automata. An epoch had to supervene in which man would work through inner moral forces alone. Thus, nature becomes veiled for him because in the new age, his impulses, his instincts, having become free, he has desecrated her. It is at most since the fourteenth, fifteenth, centuries that his impulses have been thus freed. Hence the ancient wisdom is growing dim; there is nothing left but the book-wisdom and that is not understood. For no one who really understood such things as the passage I have just read you would refrain from using them for his own advantage. That, however, would call forth the worst instincts in human society, worse instincts than those produced by the tentative progress of what today is said to be scientific, where, without insight into the matter, it is in a laboratory, without being able to see deeply into things, they obtain some result or other, perhaps that one substance affects another in a certain way—well, just what goes on today in chemistry. They go on trying this and find that but it is spiritual science that will have to find a way back into the secrets of nature. At the same time it must found a social order quite different from that of today, for men to be able, without being led away into a struggle with the most unruly instincts, to realize what nature conceals and her inmost depths.

There is meaning and there is wisdom in human evolution; I have tried to show you this in a whole series of lectures. What happens in history happens—although often by means of most destructive forces—in such a way that meaning runs right through historical evolution. It is often not the meaning man imagines and he has to suffer much on the paths history takes to its ends. Everything that happens in the course of time is sure to make the pendulum sometimes swing towards evil, sometimes towards the lesser evil; but by this swinging a certain condition of balance is reached. So then, up to the fourteenth, fifteenth centuries, a certain number of the forces of nature were known at least to a few; but this knowledge is now lost because the men of the newer age have not been attuned to it.

You see how beautifully it is pictured in the symbol standing for the forces of nature in the Egyptian legend of Isis. This image of Isis—what a deep impression it makes upon us when we picture it standing there in stone, but covered from head to foot with a veil, also of stone—the veiled Isis of Sais. It bears the inscription: “I am the Past, the Present in the Future; my veil no mortal man has yet lifted”. That has given rise to an unusually clever explanation—and a very clever people have accepted this clever explanation. We are told that the image of Isis is the symbol of a wisdom that can never be attained by man. Behind this veil is a being must remain eternally hidden, for the veil can never be lifted. Yet the inscription is “I am the Past, the Present and the Future; my veil no mortal man has yet lifted”. All the clever people then say: no one can fathom this being—are speaking about as logically as anyone who was to say: “I am John Miller you shall never know my name”. To say this is on a par with what you thus always hear said about the figure of Isis. To interpret the inscription: “I am the Past, the Present in the Future; my veil no mortal man has yet lifted” in this way, is as complete nonsense as to say: “I am John Miller, you will never know my name”. For what Isis is, stands written—Past, Present and Future; Time in its flight. Something quite different, therefore, from the clever explanation referred to is expressed in the words: “By veil no mortal man has yet lifted”. It means that this wisdom must be approached as those women are approached who have taken the veil, the vow of chastity; it must be approached with the same reverence, with a feeling that excludes all egoistic impulses. This is what is meant. It is like a veiled nun, this wisdom of ancient days. This is the feeling behind what is said about the veil.

Thus we see that in the days when the primal wisdom was a living thing, then either approached it in the proper way or had no access to it at all. But in the newer age men had to be left to themselves. They could no longer have this wisdom of old days, nor the forms of that wisdom. The knowledge of certain forces of nature was lost, those forces only to be known if experienced within—if they were at the same time lived inwardly. And at the time when materialism was at its height in the nineteenth century, at the beginning of the century, a force of nature appeared, the characteristic of which is recently expressed as follows: We have this nature-force but no one can understand it; it is even a secret for science.—You know how the force of electricity came to be used by man, and that electric power is such that no one can experience it inwardly through his normal forces; it remains an external force. And to a greater degree than one thinks that all the greatness of the nineteenth century arise through electricity. It would be quite easy to show how infinitely much in our present civilization depends upon electric power, and how much more, how very much more, will depend upon it in the future—even if it is employed in the present way without any inward knowledge. For in the evolution of human culture electric force has been put—as something by which man will be matured morally—in the place of the old, known force. Today in making use of electricity there is no thought of anything moral. There is wisdom in the progressive historical evolution of humanity. Man will mature by being able for a time to develop in his lower ego-bearer, in his uncontrolled egoism, what is deeply harmful—and in all conscience there is sufficient of this, as our own times clearly show. This would be quite out of the question should men have retained the ancient forces. It is electricity as a force in civilization which makes this possible. It is to a certain extent true of steam-power but to a lesser degree.

Now this is how the matter stands as I have explained to you. The first seventh part of our culture-period, that will last on into the third millennium, has passed; the peak of materialism has been reached. The social framework in which we live, that has brought about such lamentable occurrences in our days, is such that man cannot be subjected to it for another half-century without a fundamental change taking place in soul. For those having spiritual insight into world-evolution, this electoral age is, at the same time, the challenge to seek greater spiritual depth, a genuine spiritual deepening. For, to that force which remains outwardly unknown to sense-observation, there must be added in the soul the spiritual force line as deeply hidden as the electrical forces that also have to be awakened. Think how mysterious electrical power is! It was first drawn out of its secret hiding places by Galvani and Volta. And what dwells in the human soul, what is explored by Spiritual Science, that, too, lies hidden. The two like poles must meet each other. And as surely as the electric force is drawn out as the force hidden in nature, so surely will the force hidden in the soul,the force that belongs to it and is sought by Spiritual Science, also be drawn forth. This will be so, although today there are still many who look upon the endeavors of Spiritual Science as—well, almost as they might have looked upon the experiments of Galvani and Volta in the days they prepared their frogs and observed in the twitching of a leg that some force was at work. Did Science know that in the frog's leg lay the whole of Voltaic electricity, of Galvanism, all that is known today of electricity? Think back to the time when Galvani, it his primitive laboratory, was hanging his frog's leg to the window-latch; think of the moment when it began to twitch, and for the first time he was sure of this! It is true that it is not a question here of electricity itself being stimulated, but of contact electricity. When Galvani established this for the first time, could he suppose that the force that moved the frog's leg would someday be used by railways as a means of transport all over the world, or that with its aid thought would someday encircle the globe? It is not so very long since Galvani noticed this force in his frog's leg. If anyone had been expected such results to flow from this knowledge, he would certainly have been considered a fool. Thus, in our day, a man who presents the first beginnings of a spiritual science is considered a fool. A time will arrive when all that comes forth from Spiritual Science will be as important to the world, the moral world of soul and spirit, as a result of Galvani's experiment with the frog's leg for material civilization.

It is thus that progress is made in human evolution. It is only when we are aware of the things that we develop the will to collaborate in what can only be a beginning. If that other force, the force of electricity, which has been drawn out of its hiding place, has direct significance only for external, material culture, and only an indirect significance for the world of morality, what comes out of Spiritual Science will be of utmost importance in terms of its social significance. For the future, social institutions will be regulated by what Spiritual Science can give to humanity. Moreover, the whole of external, material culture will be indirectly stimulated by this Spiritual Science as well. I can only point to this today in closing.

Today we have seen Faust standing, as I said today, half in the old world and half in the new. Tomorrow we will expand this picure of Faust into one that will be a sort of worldview.

Today I would like to return to the subject of an earlier lecture given here in Bern and to pursue it further along the lines of what I am convinced must now be discussed among us. It is clear to me that definite things demanded by the signs of our difficult times must be said in public anthroposophical lectures, so that they will penetrate human ears. I am also convinced that definite spiritual scientific truths must now be spoken of among us.

In the previous lecture to which I refer, I described the participation in earthly life of souls who have gone through the portal of death. We undertook to study the type and manner of the impulses of the so-called dead, who continue to participate in what is done by human beings here on earth, and how connections are made between the forces of the so-called dead and those of the living. Today I wish to say more about this.

It must first be made clear that above all it is necessary for life between death and a new birth to be presented in a certain sense with images that have been taken from physical, sensible life on this earth and from mental pictures we acquire within this physical life on earth. Life in the sphere of the dead is such, however, that it can be understood only with great difficulty through earthly concepts and mental pictures. One must try, therefore, to approach this life from various sides.

I would like to say that one such attempt was made just before the outbreak of this world catastrophe in the Vienna lecture cycle, (see Note 10) in which I spoke about life between death and a new birth in relation to the inner forces of the soul. Today I would like to draw your attention above all to a domain that in a certain respect is and must be the primary concern for the human being in his earthly life. It must be a primary concern that this very domain is closed to the experience of souls who have gone through the portal of death. Think how much we have, as earthly human beings, through mental pictures that come to us from the mineral and plant realms. To these mental pictures must be added all the impressions and mental pictures that come to us from heavenly space: the starry sky above us, the sun, the moon. Since they enable us during our earthly life to have physical images as perceptions, they belong precisely to what I am now calling mineral nature. This mineral nature, and essentially—I say, essentially—the plant nature as nature, are excluded from what souls will perceive between death and a new birth.

In this connection there is something especially characteristic regarding the experiences of the so-called dead. When we human beings here on earth confront the mineral or plant natures, we have a quite definite consciousness. I have said on another occasion, it is true, that it is an illusion to speak of the absence of pain or the absence of pleasure in the mineral and plant realms. Through what we human beings perform with our actions, however, we make impressions on the mineral realm and also on the plant realm; we can say with a certain justification that these realms remain without such impressions, without such activities as are spread by pain or pleasure, sorrow or joy. You know that if we as human beings smash a rock, certain elemental beings will indeed experience pleasure or sorrow, but this does not enter our ordinary, everyday consciousness. It can therefore be said that within the experience of an ordinary human being on earth, he must have the feeling that, if he breaks rocks, if he undertakes any action within what is the mineral or essentially plant nature, he thereby causes neither pleasure nor pain in his environment.

This is not at all the case in the realm man enters when he has gone through the portal of death. One must be clear above all that there the slightest deed that man does, even if he only barely touches something (we must bring into service words from earthly language), is bound in this spiritual realm to arouse either pleasure or sorrow; it arouses some sort of sympathy or antipathy. You must therefore picture this realm of the dead in such a way that one cannot barely touch something, cannot make even the slightest contact, without causing whatever has been touched to experience pleasure or sorrow, that is, without calling forth sympathy or antipathy.

This has already been pointed out in my book, Theosophy, (see Note 11) in which the realm of the soul is described and in which the most important forces in that realm are sought precisely in the forces of sympathy and antipathy. Such facts must become living ideas, however. As one becomes conscious of the working together, in a certain sense, of the realm of the dead and the realm of the so-called living, one must also picture how the dead operate, so to speak, in their own realm. They operate in such a way that they must always be conscious that everything they do will call forth sympathy or antipathy, joy or sorrow; everything they do induces, if I may so express it, a resonance of living sensation. What one could call insensitivity in the sense of our plant and animal realms is not there at all on the other side of the portal of death.

In a sense, this characterizes the lowest realm that man enters when he has gone through the portal of death. Here, when he comes through the portal of birth into the physical realm, he enters the lowest domain, the mineral realm. When he enters the spiritual world, he finds himself in a realm with a universal faculty for sensations, in a realm where sympathy and antipathy hold sway. Within this realm he unfolds his forces; he works within this realm. When we picture him as being active there, we must also picture the sensation-bearing forces constantly proceeding from his actions, forces carrying sympathy and antipathy.

What is the significance of these forces in the entire web of relationships of the universe? You see, we have arrived at an issue that can be unraveled for our physical, earthly life only through spiritual science. You will realize its importance if you consider all the implications. So much has occurred in the present time that the person who will only find an explanation of the world within the physical renounces any explanation that he does not conceive of as an explanation.

Something that in modern times is regarded as such an explanation is the principle of evolution for the animal beings inhabiting the earth with us. I need only draw your attention to all that has appeared recently to support what is called the theory of evolution. One speaks today of the evolution of the animal world with a certain justification, in that it is believed that the animal world has evolved upward from imperfect beings to more perfect ones. A better way to express it would be to say that the animal world has evolved from undifferentiated beings to more and more differentiation, finally to human nature, in so far as man is a physical being. This theory of evolution has already entered popular consciousness to a great extent. It has even become in a certain sense a component of the secular religion of humanity. The various religious faiths make an effort to reckon with this theory of evolution. They no longer—at least in their more important representatives—have the courage that was still theirs only a short time ago to testify against this theory of evolution. To a certain extent they have accepted it themselves and have come to terms with it.

One could now ask, however, what is actually at work in this evolution of the animal beings, if they evolve from imperfect to more perfect beings. What is at work in all that one can observe in the animal world, not only in its evolution but in the overall existence of the animal world? Strange as it may sound to a modern person, one discovers upon entering the realm inhabited by the dead, through clairvoyant consciousness, that the forces prevailing over a large part of the animal world are coming from the dead. Man is called upon to be a co-ruler of the impulses in the cosmos. In the mineral realm he has only to do with what he constructs as machines and the like through his technology, in obedience to the laws of the mineral realm. In the plant realm, it is a matter of what he sows and cultivates as a gardener or farmer. In these two realms he can at most take only second place during his life between birth and death. With the realm that is mirrored here on earth in animal existence, however, he is much involved, in that after death certain forces immediately awaken in him, in that he immediately enters and works within a domain of forces that rule this animal realm. It is in a certain sense the basis, the foundation for his activity there, precisely as here the mineral world is our foundation; it is the very ground, the soil, on which he stands.

In our existence in the physical world we have the plant realm rising from a ground provided by the mineral realm. Similarly for the dead, the realm in which rule sympathies and antipathies—which then extend into the life of the animal realm on earth—provides the foundation for a second realm. In this second realm the same things are not so much at work in the dead, the mere experiences of pleasure or sorrow, the transmission of merely sensation-bearing impulses that then continue, that then are active in the world. This second realm works essentially with what can be called the strengthening and weakening of the will forces belonging to a human being after death. If you wish to know more about these will forces, refer to the Vienna lectures, (see Note 10) in which I pointed out that the will that is characteristic of the human soul between death and a new birth is not exactly like what we call will here in physical life. We can speak of it as will, however, although it is entirely different there; it is permeated there by elements of feeling and by yet another element that does not exist here on earth. This will in the life of the human soul after death is in a constant ebb and flow. When one is in communication with a dead human being, his soul life is experienced such that at one moment he feels strengthened in his will impulses, stronger in himself; at another moment his will is somewhat lamed; it sleeps. His will fluctuates between becoming stronger and becoming weaker. This is an essential aspect in the life of the dead.

This strengthening and weakening of the will are impulses, however, that flow not only into the basis for the realm of the dead but also into the human realm here on earth, not, to be sure, into our thoughts in ordinary consciousness but indeed into all that we experience here as will impulses and also as feeling impulses.

It is, of course, a strange fact that man, in his ordinary consciousness as a physical, earthly person, experiences clearly only his sense perceptions and his thoughts. Waking consciousness only exists in this perception and thinking. Feelings are actually only dreamt, and the will is generally slept through. No person knows what happens when he just raises a hand, that is, when the will plays into his bodily organism, in the same way that he knows his thoughts. There is also the rule of the feelings; although this is somewhat clearer in consciousness than the rule of the will, it is still dark; it is no brighter than the pictures we have in our dreams. Passions, emotions, feelings are in truth only dreamt; they are not experienced in the light of consciousness that lives in the sense perceptions and mental pictures, and our will is not experienced consciously at all.

In all that plays into waking life as dream or sleep, the dead are living. They live with souls who are incarnated in physical bodies on the earth. They live in them just as we live within the plant world, except that we are not inwardly bound to the plant world as the dead are to our feelings, emotions, and will impulses. They live continually in all of that. This is their second realm. While here we unfold our feelings and sensations in human life, the dead live in this life continually, and indeed in such a way that the fluctuating, which I have just been describing as the strengthening and weakening of the will, as the increasing or declining of the will of the dead, has a certain relation to what here on earth the so-called living are dreaming and sleeping through as feelings and will impulses.

You can see, therefore, how little the realm of the dead is separated from our earthly realm and what an inner bond there is between these two realms. As I have said, under normal conditions (with certain exceptions that I will mention later), the dead have nothing to do with the mineral and plant realms, but they have very much to do with what goes on in the animal realm. That is in a sense the ground on which they stand. They also have much to do with what goes on in the realm of human feeling and human will. In these realms we are not separated from the dead at all, but it is like this: when one goes through the portal of death and experiences the strengthening and weakening of the will, one can live with the so-called living in their physical bodies, though not with everyone. There a definite law holds sway: one can live only with those to whom one is to some degree karmically related. Someone living here who is karmically a total stranger is not even perceptible to a dead person; he simply does not exist. The world that the dead person experiences has boundaries that were made by his own karma that had harnessed him here in life. This world is not limited only to souls who are still on earth; it extends also to souls who themselves have gone through the portal of death.

This second realm thus embraces all the relationships a person has made karmically with those who are still on earth and other souls who like himself have already gone through the portal of death. This realm rises out of another realm that is common to the dead, a realm of animal existence, by which we must not picture earthly animals! I explicitly said earlier that our animals on earth reflect what exists in the spiritual world, that is, the group-souls of the animals. In relation to the dead, we must think of the spiritual being of the animals. From this common soil, then, there arises for each and every dead person, in an entirely different sense from what is the case in our earthly realm, an individual karmic realm. One person has made this relationship, another has made that one. Only that by which karmic relationships are balanced is there from the human realm.

Yet another law rules there; it shows us how this second realm is actually constituted. At first, whatever works on a dead person in this realm in such a way that it strengthens or weakens his will forces is limited to the circle of human beings in which he moved during his last earthly life, perhaps at first even during just a part of it. The individuals who were especially close to him, to whom he was especially related who have passed through the portal of death, are now still the ones with whom he lives particularly intensely. The circle widens only gradually to include persons with whom he had had only distant karmic relationships.

For some this lasts but a short time, for others longer. One can scarcely tell from the way an earthly life has taken its course how it will be after death. Many personalities, many souls whom one would not have expected, appear in the sphere of the dead person, because from the physical life one can easily make a wrong assessment. There is a fundamental law, however, that the karmic circle gradually widens, and the whole process of becoming acquainted in this circle takes place exactly as I described it in the Vienna lecture cycle, (see Note 10) where I dealt with life between death and a new birth. What I described there as an important element in the life of the dead is precisely this expanding life of will impulses. The will impulses are now for the dead what mental pictures are for the living, through which the dead person knows, through which he has his consciousness. It is extraordinarily difficult to explain to earthly human beings that a dead person knows essentially through the will, while the earthly human being knows through forming mental pictures. Obviously, this also makes it difficult to come to an understanding with the dead.

One can thus say that this realm entered by the dead as their second realm gradually widens. Later (this is always relative: for one it happens sooner, for another later) more distant karmic relationships are added to immediate ones. I mean this in the following way. When a dead person has spent a certain time in his life between death and a new birth, the circle of his experiences has widened and stretched beyond those souls—be they on earth or over yonder—with whom he had had particularly close karmic relationships. These souls now have karmic relationships apart from those of the dead person. It is like this: person A has a certain relationship with person B but not with person C. One sees how the dead person A lives with B as I have described and expands his experiences beyond B. Later it comes about that B becomes a go-between to person C. Previously A had had no relationship to C, but now he acquires that relationship directly through B's having a karmic relationship to C. Through this, the second realm slowly, gradually expands over an extremely large area. One becomes ever richer, as it were, in such inner experiences, experiences of strengthening or weakening the will, experiences that gradually accustom us to the realm of the dead—or living souls—after we ourselves have gone through the portal of death.

An essential aspect of life between death and a new birth is precisely that as souls we—if I may express myself trivially—increasingly widen our circle of acquaintances. Just as here in earthly existence we widen our experiences between birth and death, just as here we acquaint ourselves with more and more of the world around us, so there we undergo more and more experiences that relate us to the fact that one senses the existence of other souls, that one knows that through some of the souls one experiences a strengthening of the will, through others a weakening. This is an essential part of our experience there.

You can realize the actual significance of this for all existence, for all cosmic existence. It means that actually, in a certain relation between death and a new birth, a spiritual circle of acquaintances is being formed among a great portion of humanity around the earth, not just that faded ribbon the pantheists and mystics dream and thrill about. Really, if we look at what we experience between death and a new birth, we do not live all so far from human beings on earth. This is not an abstract bond but a really concrete one.

just as here on earth the animal realm stands as a third realm above the mineral and plant realms, so across the threshold we perceive as a third realm the realm of certain hierarchies, a realm with beings who never experience earthly incarnations but with whom we come into relation between death and a new birth. This realm of the hierarchies is across the threshold the same thing as what gives us between death and a new birth the fully intense experiences of our I. Through the first two realms we experience “the other”; through the hierarchies we experience ourselves. One can even say that as a spiritual being within the hierarchies man experiences himself as a son, as a child of the hierarchies. He knows himself as be is related to the other human souls as I have described it; he knows himself at the same time as a child of the hierarchies. As he feels himself here, when he perceives himself in the cosmos, as a fusion of the outer, natural forces and the surrounding cosmos, so across the threshold he feels himself organized, as it were, as a spiritual being through participation of the different hierarchies.

Here, if we observe ourselves as human beings—this should certainly not engender any pride in us—we see the so-called lower realm of nature and ourselves placed at the peak of these realms of nature. We go through the portal of death and find over there that we are on the lowest level of the realms of the hierarchies but as the fusion of impulses from the hierarchies. There, however, the fusion comes from above, while here it ascends from below. Whereas here our I is sunk into the physical organism so that it is an extract of the rest of nature, there our spirituality is sunk into the hierarchies and is an extract of them. One can also say that there it is our spirituality with which we clothe ourselves, while here it is our bodily nature in which we are clothed when we come through the portal of birth.

An imaginative perception can already picture the general course of life between death and a new birth. Indeed, it would be extremely sad for a person if he were not able to create such mental pictures. Just think! We are not separated from the dead at all in our life of feeling or of will. What is removed from our gaze is only hidden from our sense perceptions and our mental pictures. It will be a giant step forward in the evolution of the human race on earth, in that part of human evolution that we still must live through, if some day people become conscious of the fact that in their impulses of feeling and will they are one with the dead. Death can indeed rob us of our physical view of the dead and of our thoughts of them. There is nothing that we feel, however, without the dead being there with us in the sphere in which we feel; likewise, there is nothing that we will without the dead being there with us in the sphere in which we will.

I spoke earlier of exceptions regarding the mineral and animal realms. Such exceptions are especially valid for our present epoch. They did not carry much weight formerly, but we do not need to speak of this now. In our time, in which a certain materialistic conviction is of necessity spreading over the earth, human beings can easily miss the chance to acquire spiritual mental pictures during their earthly lives. In yesterday's public lecture I even went so far as to draw attention to how a person, if he fails to acquire spiritual mental pictures during his earthly life, chains himself to this earthly life; in a sense, he cannot escape from it, and he becomes therefore a source of disturbance. Many of the destructive forces working in the earthly sphere come from these dead individuals imprisoned in it. One must have compassion for such human souls rather than judge them critically, because it is not particularly easy to have to remain after death within a realm that is actually not suited to the dead. The realms in this case are the mineral and plant realms, actually that mineral realm that the animals bear within them, that man himself bears within him. These beings are permeated by the mineral realm. For individuals who have not absorbed spiritual mental pictures, the situation is such that they shrink from this experience after death; feelings are aroused at all times, warning them that they cannot enter the realms that govern animal and human spirituality and that they can enter only what is mineral and plant nature. I can scarcely depict this, because language has no words for it. One can only approach slowly and gradually what lies actually at the foundation, because the approach is at first something too frightful.

One must not imagine that such dead souls are then permanently banished from the life I described earlier. They draw near to this life with a certain dismay and fear, however, and rush back again and again into the plant and mineral realms, because the mental pictures they had constructed only have a certain significance in the mineral realm, in the realm of dead objects, the realm of physical mechanisms.

I consider it my main task today, through such mental pictures as these, to arouse in the consciousness an understanding of how the dead are participating in human evolution. One would really like to say these things today in public lectures, but one cannot, because people do not allow themselves such mental pictures unless they have already gone through something that has been communicated in our groups. By describing life between death and a new birth, particularly in its relation to earthly life, one satisfies or, said better, one is fulfilling the demand of our age. For a relatively long time our age has discarded the ancient, instinctive mental pictures concerning the realm of the dead, and now humanity must receive new mental pictures. Humanity must free itself from abstractions about the higher worlds and not merely speak of a kind of general spirituality; it must come truly to perceive what is at work as spirituality. We must be clear that the dead have not died; the dead are still living on and working in the historical process of human evolution. We must be clear that the forces that spiritually surround us are forces of the higher hierarchies but also forces of the dead. The greatest illusion that future humanity could entertain would be to believe that the social life on earth that people develop among themselves through their feelings and their will happens merely through earthly arrangements, with the exclusion of the dead. This simply is not possible, because the dead are already participating within feeling and willing.

It may be asked how it will be possible in the midst of impulses of the new age to develop consciousness in the right way to perceive this kind of gathering with the spiritual world. The evolution of humanity is proceeding in such a way that man in his physical body with his ordinary consciousness is increasingly cut off from the spiritual world. It was in order that man shall once again, as physical man, find the right access to the spiritual world that the Mystery of Golgotha took place in earthly evolution.

The Mystery of Golgotha is not only a one-time event and, as such, the greatest single event in all of earthly evolution. It is also a continuing event, an impulse that continues to be active. Humanity must do something to allow this force to work on it in the right way. For a long time I have been emphasizing that the task of our spiritual science is connected with the impulse of Golgotha, that spiritual science must exist in a certain way for the impulse of Golgotha to be understood in the right way in our age and in the immediate future. You can be sure that, as an earthly science that has become at the same time the world religion, natural science will gain greater and greater influence. I am often reproached for seeming to be unfriendly to the natural sciences, even in their radical developments, a reproach that belongs to the most old-fashioned prejudices imaginable, because whoever understands the course of the evolution of the earth understands that the natural sciences cannot be proved wrong and that, on the contrary, they will spread further and further. A kind of religious belief in them that now sweeps through the world is not to be halted in any way. It will come. It advances confidently, and it comes “for the blessing of humanity!” The time will not be long, perhaps only a few decades, before all the religious faiths will find themselves unable to save even the most simple, primitive human beings from consciousness of a purely natural existence such as natural science cultivates. This is inevitable.

Something else is also certain, however. Just as the purely natural scientific world conception gradually seizes human feeling (Gemuet), it will be less and less possible for the spiritual element itself to be cultivated by natural science. The spiritual element will have to be brought in just as strictly scientific a way, while natural science will still be recognizing the natural existence. Knowledge of natural existence will become more and more necessary for the fulfillment of those tasks that man in the future will have to undertake between birth and death. Whatever will lift him toward the spiritual world, however, will have to come to him from a spiritual science.

There is now a fundamental impulse in the widest circles to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha. This could be seen in earlier epochs, but it is especially apparent in our own time. Today one can already say that the greatest enemies to grasping the Christ impulse are the priests and clergy of the various religious faiths, no matter how strange this may sound. What keeps humanity furthest from the Christ impulse is the way in which the clergy and the theologians interpret this Christ impulse, because they are far from understanding what it actually is.

It is not my intention today to say essential things regarding the Christ impulse. We have already compiled a great deal about it in the course of time and will continue to do so. I would like to bring one aspect before you now, because it seems especially important at the present time, namely, that human beings need to perceive that the Christ impulse must, in the most profound sense, be dealt with differently from other historical impulses. People see that this is so, but they constantly make all kinds of compromises. They speak half-truths; they do not have the courage for the whole truth. What one must perceive is that it is impossible to speak about the Christ impulse with the same methods with which one speaks of ordinary history. Significant theologians say that it is foolish to speak of the Gospels being true in an ordinary historical sense, because all that can be offered as historical proof that Christ lived can be written down on a couple of sheets of paper. Well-known contemporary theologians thus acknowledge that it is useless to look to the Gospels if one wishes to deal with them only as historical sources. There is no way of proving that they are presenting historical facts. This is considered to be self-evident today. All that can be produced as historical proof similar to authentic documents concerning other personalities of world history can be written, according to the famous theologians, on a couple of sheets of paper. The real significance of this is, however, that even what stands written on those few sheets of paper is not true in the ordinary historical sense.

Humanity will have to acknowledge the fact that historical sources, such as there are for Socrates or Caesar, are simply not there for the existence on earth of Christ Jesus.

His existence must be grasped spiritually. This is the essence of the matter. Humanity will have to receive in the Mystery of Golgotha something for which there are no physical proofs but which must be grasped in a spiritual way.

Concerning everything else, humanity can always keep searching for historical proofs, but for the Mystery of Golgotha these will never, in the most profound sense, be of any use. Humanity should be urged not to grasp this important event on earth in a physical-historical way but to try to approach it with a spiritual understanding. He who will not grasp the Mystery of Golgotha through spiritual understanding of earthly evolution, without historical documents, will never be able to grasp it. This is the will of the gods, one can say. Regarding the most important event on earth, humanity must exert spiritual activity. The Mystery of Golgotha can always be refuted historically; humanity can understand it only if it rises to a spiritual comprehension of the world.

Only spiritual science as such can speak of the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. One could say that everything else is out of date. Read the recent book by a theologian, a book remarkable in spite of everything, which develops all the Jesus theories of the new age, from Lessing to Wrede. You will find proof in such a presentation that in this field, history really must take second place, that there must be a new kind of comprehension. This can be found only on the spiritual scientific path.

We must understand this, my dear friends, and now in our time the moment has come when human beings will really be able to experience in a spiritual way the further activity of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is the reason that I have spoken of the spiritual, etheric reappearance of Christ in the twentieth century and that I presented it in my first Mystery Drama. It will be a spiritual experience, however, a spiritual, clairvoyant experience.

There is thus an inner relationship between the Mystery of Golgotha and the necessary ascent of humanity, starting from our time, to spirituality. Truly, from this time on, human beings must rise to a certain spirituality. They must grasp in this coming time that the Mystery of Golgotha can be comprehended further only by spiritual activity, that Christianity must have an essentially spiritual continuation, not just an outer continuation through historical traditions or more historical research. I hope that what I have just said will not be taken in an abstract sense, so that someone will think, if he picks up one or two concepts about the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, that he has done everything that needs to be done. It so often happens that way. No, one must approach these things fully concretely. One must not only build mental pictures about the Christ and His activity, but one must also be able to find in a certain way the realm of Christ within the earthly realm. Christ descended into the earthly realm, and one must be able to find His domain.

Natural science, if it has someday developed to its highest level of perfection, will offer a picture of the world as it could come to be without the help of the Mystery of Golgotha. Natural science will never of itself come so far during earthly evolution that a physicist or biologist will be able to speak of the Mystery of Golgotha from his presuppositions. All science, however, will gradually, in so far as it deals with what goes on around us between birth and death, become more and more a natural science. Beside this, spiritual science will be drawing its content from the spiritual kingdom.

The question now, however, is to find not just a science but a way to stand within the spiritual realm, so that we do not find only nature. In nature we will never find the Christ impulse. How are we to find a way actually to place ourselves within the spiritual realm, not merely to have knowledge of it? You recognize from what I have been saying that the consciousness of modern and particularly of future humanity will become a merely natural consciousness, a consciousness of entirely natural facts, but that in addition to this another consciousness must be added. An entirely different consciousness must be added. For this new consciousness, the necessity of comprehending the Mystery of Golgotha as a spiritual fact will be, as it were, only the highest peak. The same approach as is needed for the Mystery of Golgotha, a readiness to penetrate through to the spiritual element in things, will have to extend through the rest of life. This means nothing other than that, beyond a purely natural view of things, there must enter human consciousness an entirely different view of things.

This view of things will come and must come when man learns, just as he now beholds the world of the senses through his sense perceptions, to observe just as consciously the course of his destiny in the world, in great events and small. What do I mean by this? Today man pays little attention to the course of his destiny. Consider some extreme cases, however. I will relate just one to you, which will show you what I mean, and it is only one case out of thousands. One could relate thousands of such cases, countless thousands.

A man leaves his house to go for a walk along a path he knows quite well. It takes him up a mountain slope to a rocky place from which there is a beautiful view. He has often gone to enjoy this view; it is his usual walk. On this day, while he is walking, a thought suddenly strikes him as if out of the blue, “Watch out! Look out!” He hears an inner voice, not as a hallucination but in the spirit, saying, “Why are you going this way? Can you not miss this pleasure just once?” He hears this in the spirit. It makes him hesitate, and he steps off the path to think for a moment. At once a tremendous mass of rock plunges down over the very spot where he would have been had he not stepped aside; it would obviously have killed him.

Now I ask you to consider for a moment what role destiny was playing there. Certainly something was active. The man is still alive. The lives of many human beings on this earth are connected with his life. All of them would have been changed if the rock had killed him. Something was accomplished there. If you try to explain it by natural laws, you will never arrive naturally at the act of destiny that took place there. Certainly you can explain by natural laws how the mass of rock came to be loosened, how the man could have been killed when the rock suddenly fell across his path, and so on. In all that can be said about the matter, however, from the standpoint of natural laws, the laws of destiny are nowhere to be found; it has nothing to do with them.

I have related to you an extreme case, but our lives are composed of just such things, in so far as our lives are a matter of destiny. It is just that man does not notice it; he pays no attention to these things. He does not notice these things as he notices what is conveyed to him through his senses as natural facts. From day to day, from hour to hour, from moment to moment, things happen of which only one example has been given, the extreme case I have just described. Think how often, for instance, you are about to leave your house and are delayed half an hour (one must study even the small things). Such things and similar ones happen thousands of times during our lives. You only see what happens when you have been delayed that half hour; you do not consider what would have happened completely differently if you had gone out as scheduled half an hour earlier!

Quite another realm is thus continually reaching into our lives, the realm of destiny, a realm to which as yet modern man pays no attention, because he casts his gaze only at what has happened and has no interest in what is constantly being prevented from happening in his life. None of you sitting here this evening can possibly know whether three hours ago you may have undertaken something that was then prevented from happening, something that would have kept you from sitting here tonight, perhaps even from still being alive tonight. You see only the thing for which spiritual impulses were already gathered in manifold ways, through which the thing did occur. You do not usually consider with ordinary consciousness that what you do in life is a result of participating spiritual impulses. Once you begin to grasp this fact, once you realize that there is a realm of destiny just as there is a realm of nature, you will find that this realm of destiny is no poorer in content than the realm of nature. Into this realm of destiny, however, which reveals itself, I should like to say, with particular clarity when some extreme incident occurs such as I have just related—becoming obvious to the human intellect—into this realm of destiny works what I was describing earlier this evening. Into the feelings and into the will impulses through which destiny moves are working the impulses of the dead. In spite of the fact that a man who says such things today is still looked upon by the entire “intelligentsia” as a superstitious fool, it is nevertheless true that, with the same exactness with which one expresses a natural law today, one can also make the following assertion: when someone has heard such a voice, it is this or that dead person who has spoken at the behest of one or another hierarchy; furthermore, from morning till evening, and especially from evening till morning, during our sleep, the impulses of the dead are constantly working into us, together with the impulses of the spiritual hierarchies who work in our destiny.

I would like to mention something here. You know already about the daimon of Socrates and what Socrates, that wise Greek, said about it, that everything he did, he did under the influence of his daimon. I spoke of this Socratic daimon in my small book, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind. In my recent book, Riddles of the Soul (see Note 12) the second chapter speaks of that learned individual, Dessoir, and you can see what he had to say about such things. I drew attention there to Socrates’ daimon. It was a matter of Socrates' coming to consciousness of something that is active in all human beings. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, certain beings directed what the dead were to carry into human life. These beings lost their power at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and the Christ impulse took their place. Now you have the Christ impulse bound to human destiny in the way described by spiritual science. The forces, the impulses of the dead work as I have described into the sphere of our will and feeling. The dead are active, but they also experience strengthening or weakening of their own will. This whole realm is an earthly realm, an earthly realm just like the realm of nature. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, however, the Christ impulse is living within it. Christ is the directing power in this realm that I have described.

One will therefore have to found a science of the Mystery of Golgotha. It will have to be known in the future that, just as the world of natural facts permeates our world, so also a realm of destiny permeates it as the opposite pole. This realm of destiny is still scarcely noticed today. It will have to be studied in the future just as fully as the realm of nature. When one does so, one will know that in this realm of destiny one is bound up with the dead. One will know that this realm, which we have in common with the dead, is at the same time the realm of Christ. Christ descended to earth to unfold his influence through the Mystery of Golgotha in order to share with human beings on earth what we have in common with the dead, in so far as the dead are active in the earthly sphere. (I refer now not to exceptional incidents but to normal cases.)

This must not remain merely an abstract truth, merely a conceptual truth, or perhaps just a “Sunday truth,” to be recalled occasionally “because, after all, something of the sort might possibly be true.” Man should walk through this realm of destiny as consciously as he walks through the realm of his sense perceptions; he should be able to go through the world making use of his eyes and yet also feeling himself to be woven right into this realm of destiny; he should be able to feel that in this realm the forces of Christ are always united with the forces of the dead. If these things were the case, dear friends, humanity would develop in itself a real, concrete, and sensitive life with the dead. One would experience, if one felt this or that or engaged in this or that, that one is united with loved ones who have already passed on. Life would become endlessly enriched.

At the present time we do not altogether forget our departed ones. We hold them in our memory. An intense life—and that will be the only true life, because otherwise life will be slept through in so far as destiny is concerned—will take hold of humanity and will lead one not only to hold the dead in the memory but to the knowledge that when you do this, when you work toward that, when you undertake this, when you succeed in that, this or that dead soul is participating. Our bonds with the dead are by no means severed by death; they continue. This enrichment of life is the prospect for humanity in the future of the earth. In this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, humanity is actually evolving in the direction I have been describing, and truly, humanity will not be able to survive the sixth epoch if people do not begin to feel these things in the right way, unless they take the reality of destiny into their consciousness just as completely as they now absorb the reality of natural occurrences.

We must perceive concretely the connection of the Mystery of Golgotha with the problem of death. This is what I wished to point out today. This is something that is intimately related to what must now enter the consciousness of humanity, because among the many things lost by humanity is the possibility of still experiencing true reality in the feeling and will impulses. Human beings have gradually been lulled into a great illusion, namely, that they can shape this earthly life according to earthly laws. This is the greatest illusion to which humanity can succumb. We find its radical extreme, for example, in the purely materialistic socialism, which arranges everything according to economic laws, in other words, according to purely physical laws. Obviously, materialistic socialism would never accept the idea that when we human beings do the smallest deed among ourselves, the dead are participating. Socialism is the extreme in one direction. At the opposite pole is the extreme of which all so-called idealists now dream, to create, without regard to anything spiritual, purely programmatic organizations throughout the world, both domestic and international, to promote programs through which supposedly all war will be abolished. It is impossible to convince people who cherish such an illusion that they do not thereby destroy what they wish to destroy but rather are burdening themselves all the more with the monster they had wished to destroy. There is plenty of good will in these things. It is simply what must emerge from the materialistic consciousness of this time, what results—I would like to say—as the political peak of the whole essence of the world.

It will lead to the exact opposite of the desired goal. The important development that must spread over the earth is an understanding of destiny. It is this that must take hold in the making of laws and the forming of political organizations, because it must provide the foundation for the structure of social conditions. Whatever is incompatible with the spiritual evolution of humanity will simply dissolve; it will break down or wear out. This is all closely connected with what the signs of the times are proclaiming today. We have no need here to do political campaigning, if I may express it so crudely; naturally, we would not do that. The demands of the times, however, must be observed carefully by persons who wish to concern themselves with the spiritual evolution of humanity. It must be understood that on the path most commonly traveled today, the Christ will only be lost. He can be won as the rightful king and lord of the earth only through humanity's ascent to spirituality. Of this you may be sure: Christ must not be sought as the various faiths seek Him today, faiths that in a remarkable way have already acceded to every possible compromise in interpreting Christ—here and there they have even agreed on how to celebrate the Christ as a god of slaughter. Christ must be sought where He is to be found in reality, through human beings coming to understand the realm of destiny as a reality in which Christ will be found, as we have suggested today. Only then will an international organization have been created that will signify the spread of real Christianity over the earth.

You have only to reflect for a moment to realize that we have not yet approached this goal. Think what would happen if you were to offer all the people who now talk about wishing to establish peace around the world—and who does not talk about it!—a program to make Christ available to humanity. Then peace would come, lasting peace, in so far as it is at all possible on earth. Imagine what all those organizations (created, I grant you, out of sincere good will) would say if you presented them with such a program! We have even experienced a “peace program” going out from “Christ's representative on earth.” You will not have found within it, however, much of Christ. I know that these things are not taken seriously enough at the present time. Unless they are taken seriously, humanity will not be able to follow a healthy path. Just as it is a necessity that the Mystery of Golgotha be grasped on a spiritual level, so it is also a necessity that human beings understand clearly the signs of the times, that they see in spiritual science something without which even the outer social structure of the future cannot emerge.

In closing, I am obliged to say something to you that I have also had to say to the other groups. It is an unpleasant task. This matter is known to most of our friends; even so, I must make formal statements for the sake of completeness. I do not know whether you are all aware that the most unbelievable slanders are being circulated in the world, tales of a character that one wonders how such a monstrous impulse could invade people's minds. Our spiritual scientific movement must be protected from such—one has to say it—vicious slanders. It is necessary, therefore, for the immediate future, regardless of the fact that help ought to be available to our friends for problems relating to esoteric development, that what have been private conferences in the ordinary sense can no longer take place. It is precisely these private conferences that have given rise to the slanders. This statement in itself would be incomplete, however; a second must follow it, namely, that whoever wishes to—obviously, only whoever wishes to!—may relate quite frankly and fully everything that has been said or done at any time in these conferences. There is nothing in our movement that needs to be hidden, if one speaks the truth.

I am obliged to take these two steps. Give me a little time, however, and I am sure other ways and means will be found by which to allow everyone their spiritual scientific rights. The spiritual scientific movement must not be interrupted, however, by things that have nothing whatever to do with it. It is therefore particularly those who belong most truly and honestly to our movement who must understand that these conferences in the ordinary sense can no longer take place and that I also release everyone from any kind of obligation. Anyone anywhere may make known what he wishes; no one must, of course, but as far as I am concerned there is no restriction, for there is nothing that cannot be told if one reports the reality, the truth. In order that the truth may be established, however, both requirements must be fulfilled. It gives me much sorrow to have to take these measures. I know, however, that the friends who stand closest to our movement will fully perceive its necessity and will be in complete agreement with it.

We need to be conscious now of the seriousness of our present situation. For this reason, such a gathering as this is for me a particularly important, serious event. Especially now, in this catastrophic time, I hope we can be truly permeated by the consciousness that we need to stand together in support of our anthroposophical cause, to stand together in the spirit. Even if for the time being we find we are not able to meet together in space, let us remain together in spirit. This is the wish I would express as I part from you: we have been together in space; now perhaps for a time we must be together only in the spirit.

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.

After Parzival stood before Titurel and had the experiences of which we spoke, an intimate and deep feeling of shame arose in him. This feeling of shame permeated him completely. He had gone through catharsis and had thought that he was now so good and pure that he could become one of the followers of the Master of all masters, the Christ. In this feeling of shame he was reminded of Christ's words: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God.” He now knew how very imperfect he was still and how much he still had to take into his striving for the good, how much he was still lacking in order to be good.

And a second feeling, a feeling of fear overcame him. He thought that he had gotten rid of that a long time ago. But it was a different kind of fear from the ones he'd known previously. It was a feeling of his own smallness and weakness as a man compared with the sublime Godly being when he let a second word of Christ live in his soul: “Become perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” These two words should live in the soul of every esoteric.

An esoteric should kindle full devotion for divine beings in his soul. Thereby the consciousness develops that what one does isn't so good, but that one should always try to become more perfect. We should look at what's developing in one's soul. God lives in developing things. If we get to the point where we're acting in a good and noble way, then it's God in us who's good. The God who lets us act in a good and noble way is our archetype itself, that created us. We must become a complete copy of this archetype.

Be it ever so hidden, there's a selfish motive in everything we do. We must realize that we can't be selfless. It's a world karma that lets us act egoistically. But world karma is God. Everything that God is and does in the way of good is better than we could do it. An esoteric should tell himself: Let me do something that I have made it my duty to do, let me do it as hard as I can and in such a way that I tell myself that the divine element that's at work in me is doing this and I'm only the instrument of this godly element—then the higher self in its striving towards perfection is revealed to him.

There are three revelations of the higher self: Through a dream, an inkling, and through meditation. If an esoteric has lived in his meditations, if he has tried to repeatedly live in his thoughts, words and deeds in accordance with the perfection principle, if he has repeatedly tried to be good—then at some point he'll realize: If I would place all the joy and suffering that I previously thought was in me outside me, then it would be as if it surrounded me like a soul-spiritual thing; I no longer live in what I have placed outside, I'm no longer touched by the waves of pain and joy. Then a pupil must learn to stand fast in the center of his existence by living entirely in the power of the mantra: Ex Deo nascimur. Thereby the pupil inserts the higher self into his humanness; this second I isn't in us and can't be found by brooding into oneself but only by growing out beyond oneself.

Through the exercises we stimulate a force in us that otherwise works more as a memory force in us and reawakens the ideas, feelings and sensations that were aroused by past things and happenings in the outer world. The pupil gets to know this as a force only; he learns how to organize it up into the brain, so that it eventually grows toward the higher self that floats above us. The pupil now lives in this newly acquired force. All outer pains and joys now seem to be outside of his center. He stands there firmly enclosed in himself against all outer influences; he feels free in himself and free of all external things.

And the pupil feels something else. Previously he had learned the teachings about karma. Now he knows that he stands under the necessity of the effects of karma. He experiences the higher self that places him into existence through birth in this newly attained force, and he sees how what develops in his destiny in the outer world must be brought about through the active necessity of karmic force. This gives him a certain joy with respect to pain and suffering. He confronts everything with equanimity.

If a pupil has progressed this far, he then gets to contemplation and thereby to consomatio of the higher self. And now spiritual eyes and ears are organized into him and begin to function when he devotes himself to the exercises with patience, persistence and concentration. He learns to see the light world of spiritual beings and the spiritual will being who resounds towards him, audible to his opened spiritual ears. And he knows that he can't have these spiritual experiences by means of his physical organism. In his experience of the pentagram (8–27) he feels that he's placed into the whole etheric and spiritual world This drawing and occult script has a soul-awakening and a spirit-liberating effect. The pupil should repeatedly place it before his soul and he'll experience that every new forces grow in his soul thereby. We saw that Parzival who stood before Titurel in solitude had the experiences that come to expression in this occult script. The whole Christian wisdom and mystery that winds around the Grail is expressed in it. The mystery wisdom is like a greenhouse plant that was only revealed to a few mature people; what the rest of mankind received was the faith content of the various religions. The Christian wisdom of the Grail is a mystery that was revealed to all as knowledge but to no one as a content to be taken on faith. All pupils of western esotericism are Parzivals.

Lohengrin is a son of Parzival. He's a personality that doesn't come fully to expression in a body. The swan is the expression of the higher individuality that radiates above him. Lohengrin unites himself with Elsa, the human soul. She doesn't ask him where he comes from, she doesn't ponder about his nature—she takes him the way he is with thanks and humility for his gifts. But when someone maliciously suggests that he's not of noble birth, she asks him about this. Thereupon, Lohengrin has to withdraw from her. He disappears up into the spiritual world. A pupil should mainly have a feeling of thankfulness for what is given to him from higher worlds in this incarnation. He should not investigate and search or interpret these talents with his ordinary intellect. For this induces the higher self to withdraw from his soul. There's a big warning for us in Elsa's fate. We shouldn't let any outer thoughts, no feelings and sensations from the outer world into the sanctuary of our mediation and concentration, otherwise that source of strength through which we attain the growing out and up of our human forces to the higher self isn't stimulated, we can't find the higher self, it repeatedly retreats before us. We should observe the projection of the spiritual world's effects into us in contemplation, closed off from all outer impressions, alone in the deepest quiet and immersion; resting in the deepest solitude we should let them work in us quietly and chastely in order to eventually become knowers of truth, to become an instrument for the work of spiritual beings.

Final Word After The Members' Conference

The fact that people today absolutely refuse to give up their striving for a new structure – well, I will bring a small sample of how these things are taken here for reading one day. The latest report from the “Basler Volksblatt” of August 27, 1920:

Theosophical corner. (Ed.) The inhabitants of Dornach and the surrounding area can expect a huge surprise in the form of a theosophical “deluge” in September. The Steiner students are being called upon to rise from their incarnation of tranquillity (that is, insignificance), to show themselves to the world and to become famous.

The Steiner battalions are currently being mobilized for the revue in Dornach. Three to four thousand people (even more according to other reports), the majority from abroad, are expected to attend a large conference.

The 'mouse trap', as popular wit has rightly christened the temple disfiguring our landscape, is to be 'inaugurated' with the organ. The organ and the temple are to be 'wonders of the world'. We are curious to know on which day and at what time of day the 'consecration' will take place.

According to the reports, a huge demonstration is planned, a huge propaganda event. (Note: We believed that, according to the official promises made, the Theosophists do not engage in propaganda.

The event is planned on such a large scale that all the school buildings in Dornach are being requisitioned as cheap accommodation to alleviate the pain of foreign currency problems. Our ailing Swiss hotel industry has little or nothing to expect from the new humanitarians. Every free space in and around Dornach is to be confiscated. The original inhabitants will ultimately have to leave their houses and beds to them, to camp outside or in the “Angel Garden”, while the “new race” of the human race (according to Steiner, the Theosophists are the fifth) can comfortably settle in.

As can be seen, Dr. Steiner is a clever and skillful doer, propagandist, and businessman. It is in his blood, so to speak. The external fanfare is meant to conceal the internal hollowness of “spiritual science”.

What do the local and cantonal authorities say about this invasion, which would exacerbate the housing shortage in Dornach and the surrounding area to an unbearable extent if even a relatively small proportion of these people were to settle here?

What is the attitude of the federal authorities towards it? Do these crowds really receive entry permits?

You can see from the last words what the aim is and how this is thought about, which is represented by this building. But, my dear friends, especially in view of all these things, it is necessary for us to consider how great our task is and how necessary it is for us to act in accordance with this task. Nothing could be better than when many visitors come here and get an impression of how necessary it is to build this as an external representative for the ascent of humanity in the present declining times. But one should also bear in mind that in general at the present time, it does us quite a lot of harm when, throughout the whole day, especially in the beautiful summer time, while the other people are working, white clothes are constantly being pushed through the working people into the building throughout the whole day. It is so with certain people who do the work, constantly generating resentment and bitterness by the fact that there are always so many idlers around – from the way people feel, all those who stand around in white clothes during working hours look like idlers – quite apart from the fact that the work and especially our working members are constantly being disturbed. This is precisely how a mood is created that is actually not at all beneficial for us. There are truly many times when no work is being done in the construction site, when you can stroll around, loiter and the like, where you can do whatever you intend to do.

In general, it is not easy when you hear: Yes, you can't deny that everything here is very bourgeois! — By “bourgeois” many people understand that they have to work while the others, I might say, loiter between spades and so on. Well, there are issues of tact here that, if used, can truly ensure that one can still let everything that this building can be for humanity take effect. One should consider what kind of impression it makes, even on someone who is an anthroposophist but who just has to work, when someone else is sitting in the building and meditating for hours on end. Do you think people will allow us to preach social reform to them if we show our willingness to participate in the development of humanity in this way?

This is not meant as a diatribe, but only to draw attention to a few things that have come to light in the last few days to a particularly outstanding degree. If it had not been revealed to such an outstanding degree, I would not have said anything about it. But now, my dear friends, it is also necessary that a number of things be hinted at. Perhaps it is better to hint at things than to leave them unsaid.

Above all, I would still like to point out a few individual things. I have already done so from this very place some time ago. You see, this building was initially built mainly with funds from the Central European countries that were used to construct it. It was only made possible by the fact that funds came from Central European countries with a full understanding of the spiritual-scientific movement as we represent it. These Central European countries are now dropping out. There is nothing more that can come from the Central European countries. In a very commendable way, and particularly commendable in view of the circumstances, the countries that remained neutral during the war have initially taken a stand for what makes this building necessary. But that too will be exhausted before the building can be completed. The countries in the territories formerly known as the Entente during the war should not leave us in the lurch, as they have done so far; they should also do something. Because if they do nothing, then we are faced with a prospect that I can only describe as follows:

If there is no awakening to an understanding of what this building should be, if the present situation continues, then, my dear friends, we are faced with the prospect that this building will remain a torso. We will not be able to complete it; then this building will remain a torso, a testament to the destroyed Mitteleuropa, a testament to the perishing Mitteleuropa. But the fact that in this area only a testament can be made, an unfinished one, does not seem to be in the interest of the development of contemporary humanity. Central Europe can do nothing else, could do nothing else, than to make its testament in this regard. What is necessary is an active, genuine understanding of the non-Central European and neutral countries. If this does not come about, then this non-arrival is also a symptom of how one wants to preserve the world in decline there, how one no longer wants to rebuild it.

I know how little seriousness is applied to such things today, but that does not make them any less serious. We cannot go on, my dear friends, regarding the rest of life as a whole newspaper and anthroposophy as the entertainment supplement. But that is basically how it is still is. If people want to bring about improvements in the world, things they believe in, dream of, or have illusions about, they do so by automatically talking and acting in the old style; if they want something like the entertainment supplement of a newspaper, a kind of entertainment supplement for life, then they may listen to anthroposophical teachings. That will not suffice for the future. It is a matter of really realizing something like what this lecture was again about.