The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Many people still consider anthroposophy, for example, as an uninvited guest within a society. One behaves rather refusing at first. Other scientific currents are well-invited guests of the modern spiritual striving because of the already recognised needs of the human beings. However, if one notes that the uninvited guest has something to bring that one had lost and that can be very valuable, nevertheless, in a certain respect, then one begins to treat the uninvited guest somewhat different from before. Anthroposophy is in this situation. It has to speak of spiritual-mental goods, which in a certain respect the modern civilised humanity has lost and which it has to receive again. They got lost because humanity had a certain instinctive cognition during millennia for that what is considered there; humanity cannot retain this instinctive cognition in the same way in future, it has even lost it up to a certain degree.

Just as little humanity could adhere to the medieval astronomy, it could adhere to the old instinctive knowledge about the being of the soul and with it about the real core of the human being. In the talks that I have held here weeks ago it was my task in particular to explain how in justified way the scientific thinking has taken possession of the human souls and has influenced the whole cultural development more and more. However, this scientific cognition is not suited on the other side to unveil the secrets of his own soul being to the human being, just if it wants to remain strong in the area that is assigned to it. This scientific imagination has the peculiarity that it destroys the old instinctive knowledge of the soul as it were.

Spiritual science wants to illuminate the spiritual area consciously with controlled cognition and to bring consciously again, what the human beings have lost as instinctive knowledge. Most certainly, the human beings who feel this anthroposophy as an uninvited guest will consider it just as a very welcome guest—I hope—if they have realised that this guest brings the knowledge of a lost treasure for life.

If we consider the different representations of the human soul and its being as they have appeared in the time in which the scientific way of thinking already had an impact, we realise that two of the most important questions, which were typical of the old doctrine of the soul, have disappeared almost from the scientifically oriented view of the soul. These two main questions are the question of immortality and the question of freedom. I have spoken in the last talks to what extent the question of immortality had to disappear more and more from the horizon of modern science, and I have already said that it should be my task today to approach the soul problem from the viewpoint of an at least sketchy consideration of the human freedom.

If natural sciences extend their way of thinking to the soul, they must focus their attention at first to what extent the soul has its basis in the bodily of the human being. However, this scientific view completely depends on considering the course of the outer processes causally, also of the soul processes as they take place in time. The scientific way of thinking can consider the soul only in the closest connection with the body. However, the body completely belongs to the material coherence of the outer world. The scientific way of thinking finds laws of this coherence. Nevertheless, these laws lead away from any consideration of the human soul life.

I would like to bring in one example only, while natural sciences took possession more and more of the consideration of the soul life, they also tried to apply their laws to the consideration of the soul. There they cannot but consider how a human action, how a human will impulse, how everything that the human being undertakes from his soul flows out of his bodily experience. They must experiment in their way as they are accustomed in their scientific field, and they feel deeply contented if they find with their experiments that also the soul life does not break what is ascertained scientifically for the outer natural life. One has only to consider such a thing that physiologists have experimentally found the amount of energy which the human being or the animal have taken up with their food is the amount of energy which the human being or the animal develop if they have emotions. The biologist Max Rubner (1854-1932) experimented with animals where he could show that everything that expresses itself as power in movements, in actions of animals is nothing but calculable energy of the food that they have taken up. Atwater (Wilbur Olin A., 1844-1907) carried out experiments that show that this law also applies to the human being. Everything that we exert in the work with movement and the like can be calculated as a transformation product of that what we take up materially with food as energy and transform it into warmth and the like in ourselves.

Thus, natural sciences trace the soul life back to the so-called principle of conservation of energy. They cannot but say from their viewpoint: where should something mental intervene of its own accord in the human being, create anything new like by a miracle if one can prove that everything that is active from the human being outwardly is only a transformation product of that what the human being takes up from the world? If the human emotion is that what the body has taken up in itself, then the principle of conservation of energy is fulfilled. Nowhere a new force appears; everything that appears as energy is only something that was already there. One cannot say if the human being accomplishes a so-called free, arbitrary action, it comes out of his soul, because then as if a new force would join the forces out of the blue which are already there.

Of course, someone who has familiarised himself with scientific mental pictures feels such a thing as a closed line of thought. Because this is in such a way, anthroposophy that wants to extend scientific severity to the spiritual area has a hard time. But not from some abstract sentences, but from the whole spirit of that what I have to bring forward in these talks should arise that anthroposophy does not contradict natural sciences, but that it continues and develops these natural sciences completely, although it follows a way from the sense-perceptible area to the spiritual life.

However, it meets countless prejudices there. As an anthroposophist, one knows best of all how enchanting prejudices are and how they evoke opposition. Since “proofs,” as one knows them in the usual science and in the usual life, absolutely exist within anthroposophy; but one has to understand them different from the “proofs” of the usual science. Above all that what one wants to investigate is a given. Nobody can deny that the world of the senses puts questions to us. This is not the case with anthroposophy. There the world itself must be disclosed first, about which one has to talk. Hence, a lot of the validity of anthroposophy depends on the fact that one realises: the preparatory work in the own soul that the spiritual researcher has carried out is necessary to come into the world at which he wants to look.

In science, one works on a certain basis, and then only the intellectual activity begins. In anthroposophy, the soul has to work at first, and its work is not something that finds laws about other things, but its work is something at first by which it prepares itself to observe what it concerns in the spiritual world, actually.

There one recognises that for the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science the following must be demanded what the present acknowledges only reluctantly: if one wants to attain insight of the supersensible world, one has to develop the appropriate abilities in the soul. Then it is possible to develop abilities from the undifferentiated human soul that lead to the view of the spiritual world.

Today I do not want to go into this preparation. Today I would like to refer only to my books, in particular to my writings How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and Occult Science. An Outline, in which I have shown what the soul has to carry out with itself, so that it becomes able to perceive in the spiritual world. It can attain this ability only if it makes its inner being independent from the body. Because I do not want to be repetitive, I will today not speak of how one attains such abilities. I would like only to state something of the peculiarities of this spiritual way into the supersensible area.

I would like to pronounce a truth which appears weird at first, concerning this way. The spiritual researcher must develop abilities of a path of knowledge that refers to things, which every human being would like to do the object of his consideration unless some scientific or other prejudices retain him from it. The everlasting of the soul, the nature of the human freedom and everything that is associated with it are questions for every human being. The old instinctive knowledge dealt with them. The spiritual-scientific knowledge has to go such a path of knowledge, which refers to something that everybody desires. However, the ways into this supersensible area are less popular, are almost rejected because of certain peculiarities of the human nature. There one has to consider the following in particular.

Forming mental pictures and concepts we are used to founding them on something essential that approaches us regardless of these mental pictures and concepts. We are connected as physical human beings with that which exists about which we form our mental pictures to which they refer. However, we are not immediately connected with that what the supersensible knowledge refers to. Hence, this supersensible knowledge makes use of a bigger strength of the soul than the knowledge of the sense-perceptible outside world that just is there from the start. Many people shrink from this inner strengthening of the soul life because it does not immediately refer to a being and appears as something fantastic. One can understand very well that someone who does not penetrate deeper into the matter considers the mental pictures and concepts of spiritual science as fantasy pictures because he is accustomed only to accept the mental pictures of the physical reality. However, that of the supersensible world in which the human being is interested above all must be grasped in such mental pictures of the supersensible cognition, which must be pulled out of the depths of the soul. This can happen only with stronger forces than they are necessary in the everyday life.

In the today's talk, I do not want to speak how one investigates them, but how they are in a certain respect.

The human being is used: if he forms a mental picture of something that proceeds as it were in reality, he just has a picture of something real; then he can remember it; it remains in his memory. This is a peculiarity of our usual imagining, which gives us life security, so that we can keep that, what depicts the outer world. If the spiritual researcher brings up those forces from the depths of his soul that enable him to behold into the supersensible world, he can look with the “beholding consciousness” as I have called this ability in my book The Riddle of Man. However, if he wanted to keep the beheld in mind in the same way as something of the outer sense-perceptible world, he would do a vain attempt at first. Experiences of the spiritual world, experiences that refer to the everlasting, to the immortal of our soul can be recognised with supersensible cognitive forces; but they cannot be added to the memory, they are fugitive as dreams are and are forgotten straight away.

Now you may say, may one consider this knowledge generally only as results of a fugitive dream?—One has to say, definitely yes, in a certain sense! Now the following is valid: one has to prepare the whole soul condition in a way to be able to behold into the supersensible realm; one must cause such an inner constitution every time anew so that the vision can appear. One can remember the activities that one carries out in the soul. If one has attained an insight of this or that event or being of the spiritual world, one knows which exercises one has to carry out, so that this vision can take place. Should this vision take place again after some time, one has to produce the same conditions in the soul. One can remember these conditions. What one beholds has to appear again anew. This is a big difference compared with the usual knowledge.

The spiritual researcher cannot experience something once—as paradox as it sounds—, and learn it by heart to bring it back to life again in himself like a memory.

No, if he wants to face the same spiritual being or the same spiritual event again, then he has to cause the opportunity in himself to experience it again. As weird as it sounds, if the spiritual researcher speaks of the most elementary truths—for example, during five successive days to any audience—, and he wants to speak in such a way that the spoken comes immediately from the spiritual experience, then he must do this spiritual experience every time anew. I want to express with it that one of the most important laws of our spiritual experience is: while our sensory images seem—it only seems so—, as if they could emerge later again from memory, as if they were a spiritual possession, this does not at all apply to the praxis of spiritual knowledge. One has to attain spiritual knowledge always anew.

Why do I explain just this? I would especially like to point out here that the appropriation of the spiritual-scientific way is by no means a necessity for everybody who wants to deal with spiritual science. Indeed, today it is a general aspiration to get to know to a certain degree what one should believe; and in this respect, it is justified if those who hear about spiritual science and its results ask, how can I myself conceive of such things?—However, the essentials of the relation of the human being to spiritual science are not at all that one becomes a spiritual researcher. Since the spiritual-scientific way can give life something, and the immortal life, too, only if that which appears in the vision is transformed into usual concepts. The spiritual researcher could be an ever so sophisticated being concerning supersensible knowledge, as a human being he would have nothing over any other human being because of his vision; since everything that takes place in this vision is only a way, is not the goal. The goal is to transform that what is attained with the vision into human concepts, in those mental pictures, which we have just attained in the outer sense-perceptible world even if a lot must seem to be pictorial what we express with such mental pictures attained in the sense-perceptible world.

Unless anybody wants to become a spiritual researcher, he could adopt what the spiritual researcher finds with his research. The results which he gets are clear for themselves if one is only enough unbiased. The possession of this knowledge in the usual human imagination—not in the supersensible beholding—constitutes the real treasure for life. The spiritual researcher would have nothing of his spiritual research if he wanted to indulge himself only in the supersensible beholding; this would be more transient than the usual outer sensory results. The point is that the transient vision is transformed into usual mental pictures. The soul can take them with it if it enters another spiritual life after death. You cannot take the visions as such with you, only that which the vision brings.

I have to say this once with any sharpness because even with many persons who are within the anthroposophic movement the prejudice prevails, as if a withdrawal from the outer world, from life, or a mystic deepening is important. That is not the point. The point is that one finds with certain soul exercises what applies to the supersensible world and that it can be transformed into usual human concepts. Nevertheless, it is entitled if the desire exists that everybody wants to behold into the spiritual world to a certain degree.

Literature accommodates this wish. This just corresponds to a demand of our time to believe not only, but to behold independently. However, this is not the central issue. When I have described the path of knowledge in detail with which one enters in the spiritual world, it is first to satisfy the mentioned needs, secondly, however, mainly because the spiritual researcher has to regard as a goal to give an account of how he has come to his truths.

Then, however, also that who reads such a writing as, for example, How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? or the second part of my Occult Science, can realise from the way, how the spiritual researcher describes the spiritual-scientific path that it does not concern any speculative fiction but a real entering into the supersensible world. He can realise as it were how an account is given of a reality.

This is something again that one has to add to the fact that in many respects the proofs that the spiritual researcher has to adduce have to be different from usual. The spiritual researcher has just to claim that one acknowledges the entitlement of the way that he gives bit by bit and which leads into the spiritual world. However, if he emphasises such a special peculiarity of the vision as the just suggested one is—that the beholding into the spiritual world does not at all comply with our usual soul life—, then I do this just because I want to characterise the supersensible world which you enter there.

For the usual soul life it is typical that we keep in mind what we have taken up once from the sense-perceptible world; this does not apply to the vision. While I pronounce such a thing, I point to the fact that the existence in the spiritual world is quite different from the existence in the sense-perceptible world. I state peculiarities of the spiritual world as it were; I show that one enters into a world that does not at all combine with our body as the sense-perceptible world combines with it. The sense-perceptible world combines in such a way if we perceive it with our body that we can keep the percepts in mind. The spiritual world is so far away from our body that it does not cause the changes in our body that induce memories.

This is just a peculiarity of the spiritual world that you have to consider. The right knowledge of this peculiarity is just a proof, that you are with the vision in a world that is not at all concerned with our body. That is why it is completely entitled to say, while everything that is perceived in the body causes memories more or less, that which is perceived if the soul is beyond the body, like in the vision, does not cause any memories because it is only related to our supersensible soul, not to our body.

Other peculiarities of the supersensible world are also mentioned for the same reason and in the same sense. In the usual sense-perceptible world, the matter is as follows: if you repeat a mental picture over and over again—how much educational is based on it!—, then it becomes more familiar to us, we can keep them better in mind, it combines better with our soul. The opposite is the case for what we experience in the spiritual area. As weird as it sounds, one can almost say, if I have a spiritual experience and I try to have it once again, it is not easier but more difficult. One cannot exercise to get spiritual experiences better and better.

With it something very typical is connected. There are persons who strain to get insights of the spiritual world by certain soul exercises. Forces slumbering in the depths of every soul are called that way. Thereby once a blissful, often great experience takes place, fugitive like a dream. It may not appear again for a second or third time even if the person concerned makes any effort to cause the same soul condition again. One can almost say, a right spiritual experience escapes from us if it has been there once, and we must make stronger efforts if we want to get it again.

Often those are surprised who have made the first efforts that a very significant spiritual experience does not always re-appear. I also bring in this to show how the experiences of the seer are quite different from the experiences that one has in the sense-perceptible world.

Another peculiarity is the following: you feel, while you advance in spiritual knowledge, that you have to cope with the events that face you spiritually with the ripe state of your power of imagination if you do not want to get to fantastic images. Hence, you have to realise that the preparation for the vision is of particular importance. You must already have developed a ripe and versatile power of imagination, so that you can cope with the spiritual experiences. This is again completely different from the usual sense-perceptible world. There this area of perception is spread out before us; we get more and more images of this area; we enrich our images with it. After we have had the perception, we enrich our mental pictures. With the spiritual experiences, it is just the opposite: We have first to make our mental pictures rich and versatile, so that they are prepared if we want to have supersensible experiences. This is something else than it is in the usual life and in the usual science.

With that, I wanted to indicate that the way leads us to quite different experiences and percepts in the supersensible area. Many people shrink from this other kind of perceiving, from this quite different kind of having concepts and mental pictures. Hence, spiritual science will depend, above all, on the fact that the human beings again find courage and strength to form such mental pictures that are not borne by the available sense-perceptible world.

However, mainly the scientific way of thinking develops these mental pictures. Because it has achieved great results, it has led the human beings away from the spiritual cognition for a while. Nevertheless, it will lead them back again to this spiritual cognition. Just because it points always to the material and the human beings also see through the material more and more, they will be urged to acknowledge that one has to search the spiritual in another way.

There I would like to show using certain research results of spiritual science how human knowledge will generally become something else if bit by bit the spiritual science intervenes in the pursuit for knowledge. Those listeners who listen to me more often know that I speak about something personal only reluctantly. However, I would like to indicate something because it is associated as it were with that which I have to argue: what I say now about the relation of soul and mind to the body is the result of my research for more than thirty years. Since in the spiritual area one does not obtain the things as in the laboratory one can infer from any object or any process what is to be said about it if one has developed the method. The spiritual research proceeds mainly in time. It concerns that then only one conceives of certain things if one can relate experiences with each other that are widely separated in terms of time.

The progress of the usual scientific knowledge and of the usual consciousness to the spiritual-scientific knowledge can be compared with the unmusical listening of single tones and the musical understanding of melodies or harmonies. If one hears a single tone, it is a perception just of this single tone; it is a single experience. If one wants to enter into the world of music, the single tone is to be related to other tones, and then it becomes what it is only because it is related to other tones. In the usual percipience, the soul relates to a sensory outside world. This one can compare with the perception of the single tone. In the spiritual cognition, the soul has to relate to that what proceeds in time. I want to indicate only that it is, for example, of big importance that the spiritual researcher is able to experience that which he experiences in his soul today not only as a single event of the immediate present existence but that he can relate it to an experience which maybe dates back a year as well as a tone of a melody relates to another tone of the melody if a musical conception should be there.

As one is connected by the usual percipience with the soul, with something spatial, one is connected by the spiritual experience at first with the present experience, relates it then to something that is brought up vividly from the past. One looks from an event of the past at a present experience and then from an event which is even further away. While looking within time, the soul experiences are structured, so that one may say, the usual cognition becomes something like a musical overview of the mental.

The soul is thereby not only enabled to adopt what it experiences in the body. But it relates what it experiences and remembers between birth and death—like the ear relates a tone to another in a melody—, to that which is there before birth or conception and which is there after death. However, the soul has to prepare itself for it while it relates single experiences like the tones of a melody to each other within the life between birth and death; it not only lives through the single experiences, but also extends the experience over time and experiences the different gradations, the differentiations in time like inner music.

What also appears is not only inner music, but also something that is like inner reading or listening of words where one hears not only tones which relate to other tones of melodies or harmonies, but also express a sense. Then that will originate for the spiritual researcher which I can characterise in such a way that I say, the usual scientific consideration looks at the things as one would look at a printed page if one described the form of the letters only. This method, applied to nature, is natural sciences. This is a description of the letters. The spiritual researcher learns to read. He goes adrift completely from reading letters. What he finds in nature as something supersensible relates to that what is spread out in nature before the senses like the sense of something read and heard that one takes in to the single tones that form the words, or to the single letters that are printed on paper.

However, this depends on an inner progress to which one also comes if one is not an esoteric student, but if one only grasps the concepts and mental pictures of spiritual research. One gets to know the world as it were in its real harmony; one gets to know the sense that is behind this “sounding” world, comparatively spoken.

In such a way, something has arisen to me spiritual-scientifically in the course of more than three decades that I would like to pronounce as the coherence of the mental-spiritual with the bodily that will also arise to natural sciences, which are still far away from it in the next time. Since spiritual research and natural sciences will meet each other in the middle, spiritual research from the spiritual side, natural sciences from the material side.

What I have to bring forward I have found spiritual-scientifically. However, already the modern natural sciences, physiology and biology, offer sufficient opportunity to harden completely what I have now to bring forward as a spiritual-scientific result. Considering the coherence of the soul with the body one cherishes, I would almost like to say, a fateful one-sidedness.

If you take a textbook of psychology, you will realise that you find a consideration of the nervous system as introduction. This is completely entitled from the scientific point of view. One can absolutely say, the naturalist can only relate the soul unilaterally to the nervous system. An entire consideration of life proves something else, namely that only one part of the mental experience may be directly related to the nervous system, namely only the imagining activity. So that we can say, the whole imagining activity finds—we use the term—its physical counter-image in the nervous system.

The nervous system is the physical basis of the imagining activity, but not of the emotional life. The scientific psychologists put the emotional life in second place. Theodor Ziehen (1862-1950) does not regard—rightly from his point of view—the emotional life as something independent; he speaks only of the “emotional emphasis of the mental pictures.” Every mental picture would have as it were an “emotional nuance.” This contradicts the usual soul experiences. For these the emotional life is as real as the imagining activity. It is not only any “emotional nuance” of our mental pictures, but the emotional life develops beside the imagining activity. If one relates this emotional life directly to the nervous life as the imagining activity refers to it, one commits an error. Since as the imagining activity is directly associated with the nervous system, the emotional life is directly associated with all rhythmical processes of respiration and blood circulation especially with the subtler ramifications of the rhythmical system. These rhythmical processes are the physical basis of the emotional life.

I know very well that numerous objections may arise if I pronounce such a thing. I cannot come on everything, but I would like to mention one thing only, bring in one example only how one has—indeed, much more precisely than the “exact” science—to bear down on these things if one wants to recognise them in their true figure.

There, for example, somebody could say, oh well, there comes somebody and explains amateurishly that the emotional life seizes the rhythmical processes in the body as directly as the imagining activity seizes the nervous life. Does he not know that, for example, if any musical impression takes place in us, we take it in with the ear that it is delivered at first as an image that in this living in the musical image the aesthetic experience is contained that it is nonsense to say, the feeling, which is connected with a musical impression, is not a result of the imagining activity?

I know that this objection, actually, must be generally valid for the today's mental pictures; however, it is not valid for the reality. We have only to realise that that which we take in as the sound picture with our ear is not yet the musical experience. It becomes musical experience only if the sound image is coming up to meet what reaches the brain from the ramifications of the respiratory rhythm. The rhythm of breathing, which reaches the brain, meets the sound image, which penetrates into the brain; it is the bodily counter-image of the musical impression. The whole emotional life is originally associated with the rhythmical life in our body.

Thirdly, we have the will in our soul. As well as the imagining activity is associated with the nervous life, the emotional life is associated with the rhythmical interplay of the forces which originate from the respiratory rhythm and from the blood rhythm, any will impulse is associated with metabolism. As weird as it sounds, all will processes are directly expressed in metabolic processes. I have published these scientific results in my last book The Riddles of the Soul for the first time, indeed, in a shorter form because of the present paper shortage.

However, one has to envisage that the nervous system, the rhythmical system, and the metabolic system are not next to each other in the organism. The nerves must be also nourished, of course. So that perpetually food processes take place in the nerves. Of course, all organs of the rhythmical movements must be nourished, too

Three members of the organism penetrate each other. But a precise research shows that that which is metabolism, for example, in the nerves has nothing to do with imagining but with the will process, which extends also into the imagining. Of course, if I want to imagine anything, I will imagine it; directing my attention upon the imagining is already a will process.

The embryonic state that is associated with the will is also associated with the metabolism in the nervous system. But the essentials of imagining are connected with processes which have nothing to do with the metabolism, but, on the contrary, which deal with a metabolic destruction which deal with something in the nerves that can be compared not with metabolism, but rather with a withdrawal of metabolism, with the emergence of hunger. Save that, one deals with a destruction in the nervous system that must not be confused with the destruction in the whole organism.

Such mistakes have happened. Just while I point to such mistakes, I can emphasise the characteristic of anthroposophy compared with older and even today-approved spiritual currents. Who does not know that what the new spiritual science attempts to attain with inner soul exercises which are not concerned with anything bodily, one tried to attain in former times on such ways which were much concerned with all kinds of bodily performances, with asceticism. Think only that certain mystics produced their union with the spirit by starving, by destruction of the organism. True spiritual research has nothing to do with those ways. However, spiritual research must point to the fact that a destruction that is not abnormal but normal, takes place in the nervous system if the imagining should find its expression by the nervous system. I have pointed out in the talk that I have here held weeks ago that the consciousness that one experiences in the imagining activity is associated with death. I have even pronounced the sentence: while we are imagining, we die down perpetually in the nervous system.

Only if such mental pictures are formed, natural sciences will be able to meet spiritual research. Hence, we have to say, the tripartite soul life, imagining, feeling, and willing, is connected with the whole body, not only with a part of the body; since the whole body is involved with its three organic members, the nervous system, the rhythmical system and the metabolic system. Our soul life is not unilaterally connected with our nervous system, but the whole soul finds its expression in the whole body. This is a result of spiritual science that thinking, feeling, and willing have their counterparts in the body.

However, just as these three members of the human soul life have their bodily counterparts, they have their spiritual counterparts. As imagining is connected with the nervous system, it is connected with something spiritual that can only be grasped with spiritual cognition, which I have called the Imaginative knowledge. It is the first level of spiritual knowledge, the first level of the beholding in the spiritual world.

As well as we find the nervous system as a bodily counterpart of the imagining activity, we find the imagining activity arising from something spiritual that can only be grasped with the first level of supersensible beholding with the so-called Imaginative knowledge. In a reality that appears in pictures, one can recognise what corresponds spiritually to the imagining activity. At the same time, we face what penetrates our whole existence from birth or conception until death as body of formative forces. While the substances of our physical body are substituted perpetually, the uniform body of formative forces that is at the same time the spiritual basis of our imagining activity remains to us from birth until death.

Let us consider the emotional life. To the bodily side it is connected with the respiratory rhythm and the blood rhythm; on the other side it is associated spiritually with something spiritual that can be grasped on a higher level of vision that I have called the Inspired knowledge in my writings, which does no longer need pictures, but arises without pictures in the supersensible world. However, if this spiritual origin of our emotional life is figured out with supersensible knowledge, it is not that which extends from birth to death, but which we possess in the spiritual world, before we go by birth to the bodily life with which we walk through the gate of death. Since uniting spiritually with that what forms the spiritual basis of the emotional life means: extending the vision beyond birth and death.

In such a way as our will life is associated with the metabolism of the body, it is associated with the highest that the human being can attain in vision, with that what I have called Intuitive cognition. I do not mean the usual washed out intuition, but that what I have characterised in my books as an Intuitive knowledge: I have called the real settling in the spiritual world Intuitive knowledge. This is the highest spiritual level that the human being can attain.

Now the strange appears: while the metabolism is the lowest of the body side, is that what spiritually corresponds to the will the highest that forms the basis of our being. What we have to acknowledge as the highest between birth and death, the nervous system that corresponds to the imagining activity is based on the lowest of the spiritual world, namely that what one can attain with Imaginative knowledge.

The human being realises one thing in particular if he gets to know the relationship of his spiritual-mental with this spiritual to be grasped with Intuition. However, I can characterise this only in the following way. It is not only anything that one experiences in the vision but something that every human being can experience who understands the results of spiritual research with common sense. If one accepts these spiritual-scientific results really, one gets to know what spirit is, then this means something special. This event may be described because it intervenes as something particular in the soul, this event that wakes our internal consciousness for the first time: now I know what, actually, spirit is what the everlasting is in my soul.

One can call this experience only in such a way that one says, it is an inner karmic experience. The whole human life changes possibly, gets another direction under the influence of this experience which makes known itself in the fact that we know what spirit is in us. We thereby do not need getting dull towards other karmic experiences. Indeed, we experience events in the outer life where we are on top of the world or down in the dumps. The spiritual researcher does not want to get dull towards these experiences. On the contrary, he becomes more sensitive of them because he also figures out the spiritual side of all that.

Whatever meets him in the outer life, the intervention of that what is the experience of the spirit, of the everlasting in itself is a bigger break in life, a more radical karmic situation. One recognises with it how one causes karma, because one must cause spiritual knowledge with own forces as one causes twists and turns in life, while spiritual knowledge becomes a vital question of the very first degree. This gives the understanding of the remaining human destiny, but also full understanding of Intuition. Then one notices with which the human will is associated on the spiritual side.

Then one evokes a force by such a karmic intervention in the soul life that does not only lead the supersensible cognition to that which appears in the life between birth and death, not only to that what takes place in the life between death and a new birth but to that everlasting-spiritual core that works in the repeated lives on earth. What the human being represents in his innermost core, he recognises it as associated with the impulses which have been there in former lives on earth. What he experiences now as destiny, while he performs own actions, becomes to him if the knowledge has become destiny, in such a way that he also knows it as basis of the following life on earth.

With the coherence of the tripartite soul life one gets to know the transient in the human being. With the relation of these three soul members with the spiritual one gets to know the immortal, the everlasting that goes through births and deaths, so that one surveys this entire human life which proceeds in successive lives on earth and in intermediate spiritual lives between death and a new birth. Thus, one beholds into the everlasting in the human life other than with philosophical speculations.

Not with conceptual analysis or conceptual synthesis spiritual research attempts to lead into that everlasting while it evokes the view of this everlasting. What we are as temporal-bodily beings has developed from the everlasting which consists of the Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive part, as our body consists of the nervous system, the rhythmical system and metabolism.

These are some research results about the everlasting in the human soul. The human freedom can only be attributed to this everlasting. The naturalist must stop within the transient experience: in the nervous system, in the rhythmical system that he does not at all investigate even in this respect, and in the metabolism that he confuses with the nervous life even today, while he also looks in the metabolism for the basis of the nervous life. The naturalist must stop within this material life. Hence, he also finds something for every act of volition that produces this act of volition. However, if one recognises the everlasting in the soul, one recognises that this everlasting has contents in itself which are independent of the bodily life, then that becomes reality which one experiences as freedom internally. Why?

Well, I have just explained in the last talks and in the today's one that in us a destructive process must take place that consciousness is similar in a way to death that there are death processes in the nervous system if we form a conscious mental picture. However, thereby it arises to spiritual research that not everything that belongs to the soul being is an outflow of the bodily being, but that the bodily being is only the basis of the soul experience and that this soul experience finds just its basis in the bodily life if this bodily life does not develop its growing forces, but if these growing forces are diminished. Processes of degeneration in us form the basis of the conscious soul life. Natural sciences will discover that this truth complies absolutely with the scientific results.

I point only to the fact that the nerve cells are not divisible, for example, while the reproductive cells are divisible. The typical abilities of the growing cells have just been diminished in the nerve cells and in the red blood cells for the same reason. No plant-like growing corresponds in the body to the conscious life but destructive processes. So that—where in us conscious life should develop—the bodily life must be deleted first.

Spiritual science recognises the soul life in its independence. With it, the concept of freedom gets a sense only, and it becomes completely compatible with the concept that natural sciences develop completely rightly in their area, with the concept: that our organism causes everything that appears in our actions, in our will impulses. These scientific mental pictures exist completely rightly.

Nevertheless, the organism just causes,—just because it serves as basis of the consciousness—that it annihilates its processes that it withdraws compared with the conscious processes. With it, the concept of freedom gets sense that we can characterise possibly in the following way with a comparison: the child is physically a result of the parents; but it goes adrift from the parents. If we look for the causes, we have to search them with the parents. However, if the child has grown up and acts independently, we cannot always ascribe its actions and that what it is to the parents. If the child carries out this or that, after it is thirty years old, we do not ascribe the causes to the parents. Thus, the spiritual life goes adrift from the bodily life, so that the law of the conservation of energy is accomplished after any causality. However, as with the child the cause is in the parents, and the child grows up and becomes independent, the soul life evolves into the independence from the body in which are the causes of the soul life.

With it, I have pointed out comparatively how the concept of freedom receives a sense, while we do not explain this soul life from the bodily conditions, but from the independent spiritual life that goes through births and deaths. We can ascribe freedom to this spiritual-mental being. Freedom was philosophically treated always in such a way that one spoke of either-or: either the human being is free, or he is not free. I have already shown in my Philosophy of Freedom that one copes with the concept of freedom if one envisages the independent soul life. However, this independent soul life is only gradually gained in the course of the physical human development. One cannot say that the human being is either free or is not free. One can only say that freedom is something that the human being acquires in the course of his development that he approaches it more and more. He approaches it, while he supplies the forces to the internal spiritual-mental being, which strengthen it in such a way that it can develop causality for the human action, for the human will.

This is a weird contradiction, isn't it? On one side, one states that from the body between birth and death everything has to come that the human being puts into his action; on the other side the independent free soul life is claimed.

I would like to bring to mind again by a comparison what it concerns. Let us assume that we have an air-evacuated container. The air flows into it if we open this container.

The free human decision is related in this way to an intended action. The following will already turn out by spiritual research: if the human being does not follow the impulses of his instincts, but that what I have called the purely spiritual impulses in my Philosophy of Freedom to which he has to bring himself. Then he does not let that willing immediately take place which originates from bodily causes. Indeed, the free action also takes place in such a way that bodily causes are there. However, these bodily causes are first prepared in such a way that the free concept, the free mental picture spiritually creates a void as it were, and the effect on our body follows that action which is completely conceived by our soul. As the air streams from without into the void after purely natural causes, the body carries that out according to its laws, which are now purely scientific ones, what was prepared only in it, while the free soul decision created the basis.

Tomorrow we will build on this concept of freedom, and then I will still explain it further. I wanted to show how the concept of freedom is only conceivable if one rises by spiritual research to that soul life which is independent of the bodily life. The free action only originates from the Intuitive, Inspired, and Imaginative parts of the human being.

What arises from spiritual science for the social-moral concepts that are for our tragic present of so big significance what arises for legal concepts, for the outer social life, I want to explain tomorrow. Today I only wanted to show that anthroposophy can absolutely compete concerning the seriousness and the precision of its research with natural sciences. However, I also wanted to show that for the spirit quite different ways must be taken that spiritual research itself throws its light also on nature that the whole spiritual-mental human being is assigned to the whole physical human being, his nervous system, rhythmical system and metabolism. Just because spiritual science will work with natural sciences in harmony, something great will arise for the progress of humanity.

Today one often likes to refer to Goethe. I have said in the last talk here that I would like to call my spiritual science “Goetheanism” and the building in Dornach “Goetheanum.”

The young Goethe already looked at nature not as anything that can be exhausted by such mental pictures as the modern monistic or similar worldviews have them. However, Goethe already appealed as a young man to nature in his prose hymn Nature: “She has thought and is continuously reflecting.” Spiritual science does not at all struggle for words. If anybody wants to call that “nature” what consists of matter and spirit in the world and looks for the spirit in nature only, then he may call the whole universe “nature.” If he goes so far like Goethe saying: “Nature thinks and is continuously reflecting”—even if not as a human being, but as nature, then already the concept of spirit is included for such a thinker like Goethe in the concept of nature.

To those who would like to derive from this recognition of the concept of nature that the Goethean view is consistent with any view of the limits of knowledge that one cannot penetrate into the spiritual world one has to answer repeatedly as Goethe did to the very meritorious physiologist Albrecht Haller (1708-1777) who was absolutely right from his viewpoint saying:

“No created mind penetrates

Into the being of nature.

Blissful is that to whom she shows

Her appearance only!”

Goethe protested against this naturalist. By his protest, he made clear that the human being can find those cognitive forces in himself that do not put the spirit as something unfathomable to him, but as something into which he can enter gradually with industrious, exact spiritual research. Since Goethe argued in old age against Haller's words on basis of a matured knowledge:

O you Philistine!

Do not remind me

And my brothers and sisters

Of such a word.

We think: everywhere we are inside.

“Blissful is that to whom she shows

Her appearance only!”

I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,

I grumble about it, but covertly,

I say to myself thousand and thousand times:

She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;

Nature has neither kernel nor shell,

She is everything at the same time.

Examine yourself above all,

Whether you are kernel or shell.

These words make us aware of the true Goetheanism, which acknowledges the possibility to penetrate with the human mind into the spirit of the universe and to recognise the immortality and freedom of the human nature.

Tomorrow, I would like to speak how necessary it is for our practical life to envisage such social ideas that originate from spiritual research to show that spiritual research is an uninvited guest only for those who attribute no other needs to the human being than those, which can be satisfied with the mechanistic knowledge. If one still gets to know other needs of the human being, one will also recognise the necessity of spiritual research in the social-moral area.

In the three talks of this week, I would like to discuss the results of the spiritual-scientific research concerning the human being. In this talk I would like to establish a basis to consider the supersensible human being next time and in the third talk two most significant questions, those of the freedom of will and the immortality of the soul.

Concerning our discussion today I am in a somewhat difficult situation, first because the following will be considered in particular compared with the contents of this talk what I have often brought to your attention in the course of these discussions: the fact that the results of spiritual-scientific research are, indeed, in full harmony with everything that natural sciences have performed as great achievements up to now but that which shall be said from the viewpoint of spiritual science just in harmony with the scientific results is in full contrast to that which the naturalists or those who interpret scientific results today say about these scientific results concerning the human being and his nature. On one side complete harmony with the facts, on the other side almost an unequivocal contradiction compared with those who are used to speak about these facts today—this is one objective difficulty. The other difficulty is that I have this talk only, and that that which we will discuss today would have to be the object of at least thirty talks if it should be treated in detail. Thus, I can represent the results only sketchily and can easily be misunderstood in many respects. However, today I do not intend to inform details, rather I would like to evoke a sensation of the direction which spiritual-scientific thinking has to take if it wants to discuss the question of the nature of the human being with the scientific views of the present.

The scientific views have particularly suggested the question of the relation of the human being to the animal realm and of everything that arises from this relationship to the understanding of the human being. What has worked on this question very suggestively is the form that the wholly scientific theory of evolution assumed in the last time. However, one forms wrong mental pictures of the scope and the real character of this theory of evolution, because one grasps the question always too straight, I would like to say, too trivially. So one has the idea today, as if the relationship of the human being with the animals was determined by “strictly scientific research,” the evolution of the human being from the animal realm and again within the animal realm itself the development from imperfect to more perfect beings.

Now it is not at all right to believe that the view that the human physical organisation is connected with the animals is new. It is not new at all. Even if you disregard the fact that you find the traces of it—or, actually, more than traces—already in the science of Greek antiquity, and basically also already with the Church Fathers, nevertheless, something important is contained in the fact that, for example, already Goethe as a very young person had to work his way through certain fantastic ideas of development which asserted themselves just in his time. Someone who knows Goethe from his own biography knows how he rebelled against the idea: if one only produced certain living conditions, animals could change into other animals, or even into human beings. Goethe rebelled against that, although he stood like Herder on the ground of the emergence of one organism from the other, and although they were followers of the “theory of evolution.” Besides, it is important to consider that not the theory of evolution is new as such, but that an older view was immersed into certain materialistic mental pictures that bring on the human organisation to the animal one in other ways as well. The character of interpretation, the whole way of thinking about the things is, actually, essential which has appeared in modern time. If you consider this, it will not be so difficult to find the transition to those mental pictures of evolution that we have to consider here today.

Someone who believes today to stand with a certain materialistic direction of thought on the firm ground of science and to have to characterise this theory of evolution says at first, the modern view of the origin of the human being from the animals stands in contrast with the superstitious biased way which still goes back anyhow to the Mosaic history of creation.—It cannot be my task today to speak about the Mosaic history of creation. I believe that it has often led to misunderstandings about what forms its basis, and that one deals with it in reality with an ancient human wisdom. That just as a side note. What is important to be considered today is that in an especially significant point the scientific theory of evolution is in full harmony with the Mosaic history of creation. That means this that in the course of the evolution of the living beings the human being appeared as it were as the most perfect animal or anything else when the remaining animals had anticipated their development already before him that he appears as it were as human being after the animals. The modern scientific worldview has this in common with the Mosaic history of creation.

Just the today's consideration must oppose that in particular. Thus, one could say, the novel aspect of this spiritual-scientific history of evolution consists of the fact that it must break just with that what faces it as a quite sure result today. Indeed, some of the mental pictures that can originate only on the ground of spiritual science are necessary if understanding should develop for such things, which are discussed today. It is necessary, for example, that one gets clear about such theoretical disputes, as they are quite usual that they must disappear, however, and will disappear, just if spiritual science settles more in the human souls.

Today you still meet the different worldviews that are apparently contradictory. On the one side, there are those human beings who interpret the world and its phenomena materialistically. One calls them “materialists.” The “spiritualists” are on the other side—not the “spiritists.” are meant, but “spiritualists” in the sense of German philosophy. The former represents the view that only the material is the basis of all being and becoming, and that the spiritual develops as it were from the material and its processes. The spiritualists emphasise, above all, that the “spirit” is to be observed as such in the human being that one has to take the spirit as starting point in case of every world consideration. It is completely irrelevant to spiritual science whether somebody takes materialism or spiritualism as starting point. The only which spiritual science demands from itself and from others is that one thinks the inner contents of thoughts and research through to the end. Let us assume that somebody becomes a materialist by his special disposition: if he really envisages the material and its phenomena and does research until the end, he gets without fail from the material to the spirit. If anybody is a spiritualist and does not deal with the spirit purely theoretically, but grasps it in its reality in such a way that he also grasps the manifestations of the spirit in the material, then the spiritualist also understands the bases and ramifications of the material processes. The starting point of the true spiritual-scientific researcher is quite different. It concerns that one has the inner courage to think the things through to the end really. However, this requires a certain power first which wants to think the things through to the end and secondly the ability to consider the phenomena really which one faces. Concerning the latter one can do strange discoveries. Who believes, actually, today that he stands more on the ground of the facts? This one stresses at every opportunity.

I have repeatedly pointed to an event in the sixties of the last century. However, it is always interesting to point to this fact once again. The philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann attempted to overcome the materialist interpretations of scientific results. When the Philosophy of the Unconscious appeared, the naturalists agreed that there a completely dilettantish philosopher talked about nature in such a way and knew, nevertheless, nothing right about that. Refutations of the Philosophy of the Unconscious were written. Among these refutations, one appeared by an anonym under the title The Unconscious from the Viewpoint of the Theory of Evolution and Darwinism. The author of this writing set himself to oppose this dilettantish opponent of Darwinism. Haeckel, Oscar Schmidt, and others said about this writing: it is a pity that this anonymous has not been called; we consider him as one of ours; since nobody can say the truth better than this anonymous against this scientific dilettante Hartmann.—They also contributed to the fact that the writing was quickly out of print. The second edition appeared, now with the name of the author: it was—Eduard von Hartmann!—This was once a lesson which was necessary and by which all those should be lectured who believe that somebody must always be a dilettante who does not speak about scientific results like a scientist.

Those listeners who were present at the former talks know that I have emphasised a book of the last time as an especially valuable one, namely The Origin of Organisms - a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance by Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922). I regard this book as especially excellent and especially typical for our time for following reason: Oscar Hertwig, a disciple of Ernst Haeckel, came as a young man from the more or less materialist interpretation of the Darwinist research results.

In his book Oscar Hertwig unravelled—it is a kind of Penelope problem—everything that one regarded as particular achievements of the Darwinist research results. Now from the same Oscar Hertwig a book was published which deals more with other problems; it is called: On the Defence of the Technical, Social, and Political Darwinism. I am in a special position now: I will always regard The Origin of Organisms as one of the best books that was written about these things, and I will have to regard Hertwig's last book as one of the most thoughtless, most impossible products of modern thinking. It shows how clumsy the modern naturalist becomes if he should go over from the accustomed ground to another area. Such a fact is very instructive, and one is in a tragic conflict if one has to admire on one side and to condemn radically on the other side. Now I do not want to speak about this last writing by Hertwig generally and in detail; but I would like to mention one thing only:

I have said just now, every naturalist will stress that he stands on the “ground of facts.” You find a place in this impossible book by Hertwig that one reads possibly in such a way: one has to admire how the modern natural sciences have been initiated by the astronomical researches of Newton, Copernicus, and Kepler. Science has become great because it got used to looking at the things of physics, chemistry and biology just like at the astronomical things. Now I ask you, the consideration of the facts that are immediately round us should take place after the pattern of that area where the facts are so far away from us? I am convinced that most readers overlook such an unbelievable contradiction. It appears just in such a contradiction that a significant researcher cannot think so far that this research can be lifted into the spiritual.

Because of those and similar things it has happened that the whole modern theory of evolution has taken its starting point from too straight, too abstract mental pictures which are not able at all to approach the real facts, in particular not the facts which also refer to the solution of the big riddle of the human being.

This human riddle is to be characterised from the start in such a way that the human being seems to be assigned by his whole position in the world not to know at first what he represents in the world and how he stands there in it to get that only from the depths of his being what can enlighten him about his real being. This is also the sense of spiritual-scientific research that that is brought up from the depths of the human mind by special exercises which slumbers, otherwise, in him, which the usual consciousness does not apply at all, and which enables the human being for the “beholding consciousness.” Not before from the depths of the human soul that is brought up what I have called the beholding consciousness in my book The Riddle of Man where the human being has to deal with that which one can call “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” to have a spiritual world around himself, then only one can generally tackle a solution of the big riddles.

These explanations should confirm it: the human being oversleeps his being. A part of the talks should show that the human being oversleeps a part of his being and continues the sleeping state into the waking state. In the depths of his being, something is perpetually sleeping, and his being must be awakened only. As you need that in the usual day life which sleep gives, you need for the usual knowledge if it should be fertile that which the human being oversleeps in his being perpetually. I said, we have to consider the facts at first that are round us. It matters in particular that you put yourself in the position to consider the difference of human being and animal from the viewpoint of the beholding consciousness; since, otherwise, you cannot attain knowledge of the development and origin of the human being and the animal. Now I want to explain sketchily what one can say from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint about the difference of human being and animal.

The animal realm faces us in most different forms. The animals are variously developed. Hence, one divides them into “genera” and “species.” You know that there have been numerous philosophers who were of the opinion that that which one calls “genus” or “species”—“wolves,” “lions,” “tigers” and so on—are only comprising names. What we meet in reality, is always the “material” which is formed most different by its own configuration only. Against it, one has to observe once impartially what there is, actually. There I have to recall a picture repeatedly which my old friend, Professor Vincenz Knauer (1828-1894, Austrian theologian and philosopher) always used when was talk of these things. He said, nevertheless, those people who state that these are only names that are expressed in these genera and species that it is, however, everywhere the same material they should think about whether it is really the same material that is in a lamb and in a wolf. Indeed, one cannot deny that, scientifically considered, it is the same material. However, one should feed a wolf for longer time with nothing but lambs, and one should try once whether he has assumed something of the lamb nature. There it is quite clear that that which constitutes the “wolf” which determines his configuration is not a mere “name” but something that encloses the material in this configuration.

With which is that associated that develops and configures these different animal species in its way? I have to confess, I touch personal relations very reluctantly, but because I can only outline, it is necessary that I do such a personal remark.

For about thirty years, I look at everything that physiological research produces in relation to these questions and compare it to that which the spiritual-scientific research has to say. It would be very attractive to hold a series of talks by which is proved what I state now. What configures itself in the different animal forms is intimately connected with the correlation of forces in the animal structure. Study the structure of an animal very exactly, but not only in such a way as it presents itself to the outer eye, but study the structure of an animal according to its correlation of forces: how different an animal behaves to gravity and how it overcomes gravity if the hind legs are formed different from the forelegs how different an animal appears according to whether it has hooves or claws and the like.

Study how the animal positions itself with its balance in the given relations, and then you find the most intimate relation between the conditions of earthly balance and the kind how the animal is positioned in these conditions of balance. Just these conditions of balance are radically different with the human being and in the animal realm. The human being lifts himself out of the conditions of balance in which the animal is put, by the fact that the line that runs through the spinal cord, runs with the animal in parallel with the earth surface but with the human being, it runs vertically to the earth. I do not mean the wholly outer position, because of course the human being also is in parallel to the earth surface if he sleeps. The human being is organised in such a way that the gravitational direction of the earth coincides with the line of his spinal cord. With the animal, the cerebral line is in parallel to the earth surface. The gravitational line of the human being that runs through his head coincides in certain respect with the main line of the remaining organism. His head rests on the gravitational line of the body; with the animal, it overhangs.

The human being is thereby put in a condition of balance that is different from that of the animal; thereby he is in that condition of balance which he gives himself only during the time of his life, because he is born in a similar condition of balance as the animal. While the human being lifts himself out of the conditions of balance that are forced upon the animal, he lifts himself out of all forces, which form the basis of the different genera and species; he becomes a “genus,” a “species.” He gets free from that what is with the remaining animal beings the reason of the manifold creation; he himself creates his figure, while he gets free from this determinative reason by his upright position.

Everything that is expressed in the human language, in the human thinking is intimately connected with these conditions of balance. Indeed, just the materialist research in the second half of the nineteenth century brought this to our attention; however, it could not completely make use of this fact. Since someone who thinks his way into the subtle configuration of the material can realise that one being in another way takes up the material of the outer nature, it is brought in directions quite different from all other beings. The human being thereby towers above the remaining animal realm. With it is connected that the whole human condition of balance comes about in full measure in the organism itself, while that of the animal comes about related to the world.

Take the coarsest only: the animal stands on all fours; the human being is bound to a certain balance that is not determined from without but is formed in his own organism. Now something particular is connected with this other condition of balance. Since the human being has a vague feeling of this equilibrium position that is similar to dream. This feeling is as vague as a dream, sometimes only vague as the sleep. As what does this sensation of resting on the own body live in the usual consciousness? This sensation is identical with the self-consciousness. What we get to know in the next talk as the human “mind,” which reveals itself in the ego at first, seizes itself in the human organisation in these conditions of balance that the animal does not have. I said, the modern theory of evolution-has something suggestive, so that one can believe that everything is dilettantish that is said against it. It has something fascinating if one says that the human being has as many bones and muscles as an animal has, how could he be a different being? However, in that which the human being has as the same with the animal the ego does not at all live. The ego does not live in the bones and muscles, does not intervene there, but seizes itself in the feeling at first that rests in the equilibrium.

However, there is something else. The animal realm has manifold shapes. Is this manifold configuration not significant for the human being? Because the human being separates by his other equilibrium from all conditions of balance in which the animal is forced, he has his own figure that appears like a summary of the animal figures. However, everything that works in the animal figures enjoys life in him. It is in him, but it is spirit. What is spread out as phenomena manifest to the senses about the most different animal figures is spiritual in the human being. What is it in him?

To the Imaginative observation arises that completely the same lives in the human being that gives the sensory figure to the animal, but as a supersensible nimble element. It lives in his thinking. What causes that we can think about the things is—in supersensible way—the same as that what the manifold genera and species of the animals are. Because the human being breaks away from the diversity of the animals and gives himself his independent figure that is the dwelling place of the ego, he appropriates invisibly what is visible in the animal world. This lives in his thinking. In the animal realm is poured out in the most manifold forms what is poured out in us, while we survey the world with thinking. We pursue what we can observe; we form thoughts about that. Of course, I know everything that can be argued against it. I also know the objection: are you able to behold into the animals? May the animal not have a kind of thinking as the human being has? However, someone who can adopt the Goethean principle that the phenomena are the right teaching if one observes them properly knows that that which becomes obvious in the phenomena is also decisive for the observation. One of the most essential signs is that that which is poured out sensorily about the manifold animal forms lives in the human being in extrasensory way.

While he freed his figure from the formative forces of the animals, he can take this in his supersensible. The animals are more advanced in relation to the sensory configuration than the human being is. The human being has an unstable figure. The animal is built according to the whole earth. With the human being, it is different; he has taken it in his figure. That is why he can grasp that spiritually what is expressed in the sensory form of the animal.

Already in this point, one sees what, actually, the modern theory of evolution suffers from. I am allowed to say, just because I have become a follower of the modern theory of evolution but have tried to lead it really to an end, I have found what it suffers from. It represents everything straight: the imperfect animals, then the more perfect ones, the even more perfect ones, up to the human being. However, the matter is not that way. Someone who considers the phenomena independently, gets on that this only ascending development is actually one-sided; since it lacks an essential element, which is considered here and there, indeed, in our time, but is not really investigated to an end and applied to the single one. One has to deal with a perpetually ascending development and with a perpetually descending development. The descending development would signify what is just so important for the understanding of the human being, and also there I advise you again to consider physiological matters, but without prejudice.

If one stops at the general trivial ideas of evolution, one imagines that the human being is the most perfect one of the animals that even his single organs, even if really here and there descending developments are admitted, are basically in ascending development. This is not the case. I could bring in many examples.

I want to mention one thing only. Study the human eye and compare it to the eyes of the vertebrates: if you go down in the animal realm, you find a more complex construction than with the human being. With him, the eye has become simpler again. I only want to mention that the xiphoid process and the pecten that exist with the eyes of lower animals are not to be found with the human being. The development has forced back them again. The human eye is a more imperfect organ than that of lower animals. The complete human organism has not only become more perfect if one studies it really compared with the animal organisms, but it has also receded. What has happened?

Because certain forces have been disabled, the human being could become a bearer of the spiritual-mental, could take up this spiritual-mental. What I have called up to now is nothing but a degeneration, “devolution,” in contrast to “evolution.” Take that which gives the single animal the form, which it has, and another animal another form: this thought completely determines the whole organisation of the animal. The human being, however, forms back his organisation. It does not advance so far to be determined completely, it goes back to a former level. Thereby he can give himself the equilibrium position which nature does not give him; thereby he gets free from that which nature forces upon the other beings. The whole formation of the human being has stayed behind; from it that originated which became an organ of thinking in the human being. What forms the basis of thinking is the organ of thinking because it is formed back because it has not advanced as far as the animal form has advanced, which expresses the figure externally. The human being lives the form back and can live out the form in thinking in supersensible way as the animal lives out it in the sensory realm.

One more point: we deal with the human being not only with evolution, but also with devolution, with involution. Just because the human being is more formed back than the animal, he can become the bearer of something spiritual-mental generally. With everything that I have explained up to now, something else is connected. Someone who can really observe how in the animal is expressed what must be an organ of imagination, of percipience, of feeling, so the anterior parts of the animal organisation, finds out that that which expresses itself in the form expresses itself objectively. He finds that this part has to deal with imagining, perceiving and feeling, and that the posterior part deals with the will element. Of course, both sides are connected. Because the animal is put in its equilibrium, it has that side by side which the human being has on top of each other: the will organisation on the one hand and the intellectual and instinctive organisation, on the other hand. There is another connection in the animal between the intellectual, imaginative and will element. With the human being, the organs of imagination are above the organs of will. An inner contact is thereby created between the organs of will and those of imagination. Someone who knows to observe the soul life realises that this human life of imagining is characterised by the fact that the will extends into it. Study the problems of attention, you will realise that the will works into it. Thereby the ability of abstract thinking originates which the animal cannot have because its imagination originates beside the will and not above it. And vice versa: the will and the imagining life work together, so that also the will is influenced by imagination.

Only because the organs of will belong to the subconscious ones, the will itself is expressed only like in the sleeping consciousness. The human being has the real will process in the sleeping consciousness as the other processes of the sleeping consciousness. The whole connection of imagining and willing which is typical for the human being is thereby emphasised: imagining is lightened by the will which is with the animal always in a vague, dream-like state. Likewise, the will is more intimately connected with imagining with the animal, it feels much more connected with its will. This causes again that with the human being the free emotional life relates different to imagining and will, enjoys life much more intensely than with the animal. With the animal the emotional life rests in the organisation; it is as it were only a formal arrangement of the life of thought. On the other side, the emotional life of the animal is only an inhibited or uninhibited will life, depending on whether it can reach or not reach something. This is expressed in its whole life. Just thereby, it is much more connected with the whole outer world.

If we envisage this, we can understand something else that, however, only a careful observation of the human soul life can give. Spiritual science has to proceed in many a respect different from the other science that takes up the things often from the trivial imagination and rejects them then because it cannot get on how the things are to be explained. The spiritual researcher will aim more at the positive, will not be content to take up, for example, the idea of immortality, of the continuance of the soul being, but will primarily ask, how does the human being generally get around to having the “immortal” as a thought or as a feeling in himself? How does he get around to assuming that the immortal can play a role in his soul life?

One can understand this only if one can expand the Goethean teaching of metamorphosis so far that one can approach the question, to what extent is the human being dependent on his lower nature in relation to his higher nature that is expressed by his head? While we have tried up to now to understand the special connection of thinking and willing with the human being and animal, now one has to go into that what connects the human being with the animal concerning something that is intimately connected with the problem of evolution. This enters in the animal and human life by the two phenomena of conception—I do not say of birth—what one considers as the first origin of the human, the combination of the male and the female elements, and death on the other side. Conception and death are bound to certain parts of the human and animal organism; in case of conception, this is evident from the start.

Now one has to realise that that which appears at one place in any animal form—it is similar with the plants—is also expressed in other organ systems but transformed. I would like to call attention to the following from the start: how does that behave with the human being and with the animal what is connected with conception and death, because one has already found out, nevertheless, one difference that is directly bound to the organisation? There it becomes apparent that the human and animal head is, actually, only a higher organised, transformed abdomen, as strange as it sounds, just as after the worldview of Goethe the bones of the skull are transformed dorsal vertebrae.

With the physical creation one deals with the fact that the single organ systems are real transformations of each other, and the functions of the organ systems are transformations of each other. What is “percipience”? Percipience relating to the outside world with the senses is a higher developed conception, specified by the different senses. Because the head organism stunts certain other organs, forces them into the limbs, the organism of conception develops to the higher sensory organism of the head on the one side, and thus the progressive conception corresponds to the advanced sense perception of the head. Every organic system develops the whole organism in a way; the head everything that the abdomen contains, the abdomen everything that the head contains. Because the formative forces of the limbs have atrophied that is expressed spiritually what belongs to their life in the head. The ability of production changes into the developing of thoughts. In the head, the organ of thinking is developed simply because the conceptual is developed unilaterally and the productive is formed back, but the productive thereby gives again the basis of the thoughts. Since as animal and human being produce their equals by the other organism, the human being produces himself spiritually: just the world of thought. The world of thought is the spiritualised human being.

This thought has a big scope, and only with deep regret, I exhaust such things in one single talk. Since such things are the result of decades of spiritual research. However, they must be pronounced once, because these things have to be popularised, so that someone who can investigate it in the medical centres and laboratories can also investigate the details, as they must be investigated.

In the animal life, conception and death are apart like beginning and end of the animal life. Conception and everything that is connected with it leads to the knowledge of the progressive development. Everything, however, that determines the death of the animal out of the relations of the earthly life is connected with the retrograde development. One gets on only spiritual-scientifically what conception and death are real for the animal, for the whole evolution of the animal. The animal is seized by everything that is associated with conception and production. This evolution is the highest development of the organic life. It is just like with an increase of the organic life, with fever if you like, that the usual state of consciousness, which is right for its being, is forced back. Thus, a reduction of consciousness is connected with the excitement of the organic life, and the consciousness is increased with everything that is connected with a retrograde. The moment of highest clarification, of most intensive consciousness is the moment of death—and as a spiritual researcher, I am allowed to say, a moment where the animal element approaches the human one; try only once to observe animals at death. These two moments of the highest reduction and the greatest increase of consciousness, conception and death, are with the animal like two widely separated points, like beginning and end.

With the human being, it is different. Because the head lifts out itself in the described way from the remaining organisation, the human being is so organised that he experiences the interplay of conception and death perpetually. This happens during the whole life. We are so organised that we experience in the brain which forms the basis of our thinking in its connection between percipience and will perpetually, transferred to the spiritual, with every production of a thought—but like sleeping or even subconsciously—what the animal experiences, otherwise, only once during conception. On the other hand, death is perpetually involved in our consciousness because the organism changed into the head has the head as its spiritual organism. We are dying at every moment. Precisely expressed: whenever we grasp a thought, the human will is born in the thought; whenever we will, the thought dies into the will. Will and thought belong together in such a way, as, for example, the young man and the old man, while the will thereby becomes will that the thought has died down in it, and on the other hand the will goes through its youth while the thought is born in it.

The human being is perpetually experiencing birth and death. I have described the human spatial configuration with the help of the balance relationships. Concerning time, it is in such a way that with the human being that runs through the whole life which the animal can experience only at the beginning and end; in a dreamish way he experiences conception and death perpetually in his subconsciousness. Because this lives below in the depths of the human souls, emerges from there and the human being becomes vaguely aware of that which he carries as conception and death in himself and not beside himself and thereby has the feeling: his being lives after death and birth, it encloses more than that which starts with conception and ends at death. The human being carries conception and death in himself. I pronounce it in short words. However, if you investigate everything that physiology and psychology can give presently, you will find it confirmed. This generates the idea of immortality in the human being. Thereby he carries the sensation, the thought of immortality really in himself. Only then, you can consider the connection of animal and human being if you regard this.

How does the human being stand there finally? He is more retrograde than the animal is, and this just gives him the basis of his spiritual being. If you check him completely, you find the strange: as the eye is retrograde, everything of his appearance is retrograde, is formed back into the spiritual compared with the animal. He unfolds this on the same conditions on which the animal unfolds its being. The same relations work on the animal and the human being. They work on the human being, while they provide him as it were with a “shell.” What I have described now is, actually, the inside of the human being. This is transformed in such a way that he can produce his own equilibrium that he has that, which takes shape with the animal, in the versatile forms of his thoughts. Thereby he faces the outside world like concluded by a shell.

Spiritual science actually is able to discover only what you can discover in the human being. It can penetrate through this shell. However, what turns out then? Something similar as with the memory. We perceive the outside world as it is, and process it. However, we remember in the later life what we have taken up from the outside world. Today I cannot explain what the organism of memory is based on; but it is based of course not on the organisation of the body periphery, but on that of the body inside. If you go with the beholding consciousness into that what the shell conceals, then you bring up what causes everything in the depth of the human nature that I described today.

The shell is evoked by that which determines the today's animal realm. How does that differ from it, which lives in the human inside? This becomes to the seer like an increased, beheld memory; there he gets up something from the human being that becomes vivid. As well that appears to the usual consciousness which the senses have experienced, something presents itself to the beholding consciousness, if one delves into that what is down there. Then one finds that that time of development which the human being spent together with the animals—the time of the earthly evolution—followed another time for the human being in which the today's animals could not yet develop. The human being developed before the animal realm, but in another figure of course; since he assumed the today's figure because he was put in relations that formed the animals. However, what rests in the “shell” leads back to a former creation of the earth, to a state that we do not get to know by geologic conclusions. We recognise that the human being is older than the animals that the animals originated later. They are related with the human beings but they originated later. Since we come back to a form of the planet when the animals did not yet exist. The planet looked in such a way that on the effect of its conditions that could form which must be protected today with the outer shell, which faces the animal world today.

The seer experiences that as vision first which I have explained as a thought today: he looks back at former states of the earth. However, this gives just the impulse to look at the developmental states in such a way as they are as they must be, so that one can see what one finds if one only looks.

However, there are still other relations. Today one agrees in the trivial scientific life completely to consider the phenomena of the earth like the astronomical phenomena; but it has taken some time until this thought asserted within the modern humanity. One can have an experience. If you come to Mülhausen (now: Mulhouse) in Alsace, you find a monument: On top is a celestial sphere, before it a statue of Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-1777, Swiss-Alsatian physicist, philosopher), a contemporary of Kant who invented something similar, but much more brilliant than the so-called Kant-Laplace theory. If one still added something that Lambert thought, one would not be far away from that which spiritual science is today.

However, today one is ready that the monument of that man is erected by the decisions of the city council who has a share of modern astronomy. However, if one goes back hundred years from the erection of the monument, one meets something different. At that time, Lambert was a young son of a poor dressmaker. Few people anticipated what was in him, Kant, for example, called him the “greatest genius of the century,” and his father submitted request about request to the city council that the son could get further. Then there one gave him forty francs, but only on the condition that he should leave the city and not return. This was hundred years ago. After hundred years—the monument was erected! Thus, the human development takes place, one example of many.

I come back to my starting point: The modern scientific way of thinking has the same thought with the Mosaic history of creation in common that the human being appears after the animals. Against it, modern spiritual science has to say that the human being precedes the animals, and that one has to go back to such a state in which the human being could only develop that which he was at that time while he had to expose himself to the outer conditions. There one comes back to developmental states of our life on earth, which look different from what one calls Kant-Laplace theory. Externally a primeval nebula may have developed and conglomerated. Some time ago, I have quoted significant words of Herman Grimm: the fact that once later generations will have a lot of trouble to think about the eccentricity of the present, which believed that from such a primeval nebula everything developed that is there now. However, it will take long time, until humanity will be so ripe for a spiritual understanding of the things that one can consider the riddle of the human being as I have done it today.

Then, however, another idea of development arises, and I do not shy away from repeating something that I have already brought to your attention, because I have to show repeatedly from which side life and movement have to be brought in the scientific thinking of our time.

One can have scientific correct thoughts, but these can be very far away from reality. There I have pointed over and over again to that lecture of Professor James Dewar (1842-1923) in London at the Royal Institution in which he explained how the earth would be after 200,000 years. It is calculated quite correctly and one cannot doubt it, just as one can calculate the Kant-Laplace theory quite correctly. One can also calculate this final state of the earth, cooled down below 200 degrees centigrade. There is no mistake: then our atmosphere is condensed into water. Dewar explains it in all details that then the things on earth have assumed other aggregate states. Milk will be solid of course. Indeed, I do not know how it should be produced then; but it will be solid of course. Certain objects will fluoresce; one will be able to coat the walls with protein so that one can read newspapers at night. There is no mistake. However, the question is whether it is not only “right,” but whether it is also “real” whether the thinking knows where it has to stop because it is no longer in reality. Which methods are used to calculate these things? Methods, as for example the following: anybody studies the stomach of a 30-year-old person; he pursues it for more than 300 years and calculates how after 300 years the stomach of this person would be. He can calculate this as well as Professor Dewar calculates the final state of the earth.

Only that is the mistake that then the human being does no longer live, just as the earth does no longer exist after 200,000 years. Likewise, one could calculate how the earth looked 300,000 years ago, because in the same way one can also calculate the Kant-Laplace theory; but at that time the earth did not yet exist. It concerns that one learns to distinguish realistic thinking and only “correct” thinking.

With it, I have said a lot. Since the thought that one gets by the study of the human being to relations where the earth looked completely different is only to be gained if one applies realistic thinking. Then one can also have a thought about how the human being who is protected with the characterised outer shell from the present earthly conditions—which will be quite different from those which Professor Dewar describes—, so that the human being develops into times when the earth will be very different when the today's animals will no longer exist.

This was a spiritual-scientific discussion about the origin and the development of the human realm and the animal realm. Next time I want to show how the human being returns in repeated lives on earth, so that one can again accept Lessing's view of repeated lives on earth. Today I wanted to create a basis to show that spiritual science gets to quite different initial and final states of our earth, and that, indeed, one has to break with the opinion that the animal realm was there first and the human being could then develop on its basis. The human being precedes with his development. Spiritual science will assert these things. A very spirited and vigorous researcher of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss (1853-1909) had an anticipation of it.

There you find the first beginning of these things, but there everything remains more or less assertion. These things can be investigated first if one penetrates with the beholding consciousness into the spiritual-mental of the human being, about which natural sciences cannot speak at all. Since they can only ask, how is the human being related as a spiritual-mental being to the animal organisation? However, the highest of the spiritual-mental does not relate at all to the animal organisation, but it lifts out the organisation, produces quite different equilibrium relationships, so that the experience of conception and death coincides at one moment, so that in the human being by the continuous perception of conception and death the experience of immortality vaguely lights up.

(At the end, Steiner briefly summarises the contents of this talk.)

In the cycle of lectures in Vienna on The Inner Nature of Man and the Life between Death and New birth, you will remember that I described concepts—or rather, inner experiences of soul—through which the human being can approach those worlds of which we have spoken and which we share with the disembodied souls of those who have passed the portal of death and are preparing themselves for a new life on earth. On the basis of those lectures, you will be able to imbue with life a concept which is indispensable if we seek to arrive at a true understanding of the spiritual world, and that is that many things—I say many things, not everything—are, from the point of view of the spiritual world, entirely the opposite of what is revealed in the physical world. On this basis, let us consider the way the human being steps over, and also looks over, into the life of the spiritual world.

Here on earth, bound to our physical body as we are between waking up and going to sleep, using this physical body as a tool for our experiences in the world, we feel a lack of ability to comprehend the spiritual world and grasp its revelations. As long as we are enclosed within our physical body, and in order to perceive anything, we have to use the rough and ready instruments of this physical body. We cannot avoid using them. And when we are unable to use them, as is the case between going to sleep and waking up, our astral body and our ego-being—which are recent additions from the time of ancient Moon and the earlier periods of Earth—are too attenuated, too intimate, to detect anything. Of course the spiritual world is ever about us, just as the air surrounds us constantly. And if our astral body and our ego-being were—let me say—sufficiently dense, we should always be able to perceive, to grasp, what is all around us in the spiritual world. We cannot do so because in our astral body and our ego-being we are too attenuated; they are not yet fully-formed instruments, like the physical senses or the brain, which our capacity for forming ideas uses in order to attain waking experiences in the soul.

Having stepped through the portal of death, human beings find themselves on the whole, as you know—at least for the first few decades—endowed with a degree of substance similar to that of our sleeping state while on earth. This substance cannot remain quite so attenuated as that pertaining to the time of our physical incarnation, otherwise all experiences between death and a new birth would remain totally unconscious. They do not, as we know. On the contrary, a certainly different, but much brighter and more powerful consciousness than that which prevails while we are in our physical body comes about between death and a new birth. So we must ask how this form of consciousness emerges while we dwell in our astral body and ego-being.

In physical life here on earth we possess our physical instrument which permeates us—or we could say envelops us—with all the ingredients which make up the physical world: that is, the mineral, the plant and the animal kingdoms. The physical body thus prepared for us is our tool for waking life. In a similar way a tool is prepared for us which serves us between death and a new birth. Because we are human beings, the first thing to be prepared for us after death, as soon as we have laid aside our etheric body, is something that comes from the hierarchy of the angeloi. We are mingled with the substance of the hierarchy of the angeloi. One being from this hierarchy actually belongs to us, is the leading being of our human individuality. As we now grow upwards into the spiritual world this being from the hierarchy of the angeloi who belongs to us is joined by other beings from this hierarchy, and together they mould in us—or rather for us—a kind of angeloi organism, the structure of which differs from that of our physical organism.

To make a diagram of this, we could say: We grow upwards through the portal of death into the spiritual world. This is a sketch of our own individuality (mauve in the diagram). Linked with it is the one angel being who, we feel, is given to us by the hierarchy of the angeloi (red). But when we lay aside our etheric body, this angel being forms a relationship with other beings of the hierarchy of the angeloi—it links up with them, and we feel the whole of the world of the angeloi within ourselves. We feel it to be within ourselves, it is an inner experience—except, of course, for the external experiences which also result.

This permeation by the world of the angeloi makes it possible for us to relate to other disembodied human beings who have passed through the portal of death before us. Let me put it like this: Just as here our senses link us to the external world, so the condition of being embedded in the world of the angeloi links us to the spiritual beings, including human beings, whom we find in the spiritual world. Just as here in the physical world, in accordance with the prevailing conditions, we receive an organism which is organized in a certain way, so do we receive an organism of spirit which is brought into being by this network of angeloi substances. How this network of angeloi substances is structured, however, depends very much on the manner in which we work our way up to the spiritual world. If we work our way up in such a way that we have little sensitivity for the spiritual world because we have far too many echoes of physical pleasures, urges and instincts, physical sympathies and antipathies, then the formation of our angeloi organism is difficult. This is why we tarry for a while in the soul world, as we called it, so that we can free ourselves from all that permeates us from the physical world and prevents us from forming our angeloi organism properly. It is gradually developed while we tarry in the soul world. We grow towards this angeloi organism. But concurrently another necessity arises—the necessity to permeate ourselves not only with this angeloi organism but also with another substance, that of an archangeloi organism. Our consciousness in the spiritual world between death and a new birth would remain exceedingly dull if we could not permeate ourselves with the archangeloi organism. If we were to be permeated only with the angeloi organism, we would be dreamers in the spiritual world. We would be woven out of all kinds of Imaginative substances belonging to the spiritual world, but we would dream away our time between death and a new birth. So that we do not dream this time away, so that a strong, clear consciousness can come about, we have to be permeated by the archangeloi organism (blue in the diagram).

This gives our consciousness the right clarity. Only through this do we wake up in the spiritual world. Now the degree to which we wake up in the spiritual world determines the degree to which we can have a free relationship with the physical world. And a free relationship with this physical world is something we must have. Let us ask what is the relationship of the physical world with the excarnated human beings who have passed through the portal of death. You can find the answer to this, too, in the lectures given in Vienna. Here in the physical world it is difficult for human beings, however strong their yearning, to rise up in thought and feeling to a perception of the spiritual, heavenly world. Human beings thirst for ideas about the heavenly world, but they cannot easily unfold the powerful capacity for forming ideas necessary to bring this heavenly world into their reach. In a certain sense the situation is the opposite during life in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Into this world we are followed by what we experience in the physical world; we are followed by what was important in the physical world, by what we perceived here. We are followed by all this in a very extraordinary way. The examples I give will show you how complicated these things are. In the light of our capacity to form ideas in the physical world, these examples will sometimes appear grotesque—even paradoxical—but it is impossible to enter in a concrete way into the spiritual world without also taking account of precisely these ideas.

Perception of all that exists in the mineral kingdom is lost almost as soon as we step through the portal of death. Here in the physical world, because we have senses, our capacity for perception is greatest with regard to the mineral kingdom. Indeed, we could almost say it is virtually exclusive, for other than the mineral kingdom there is not much that we can perceive as long as we are confined to our senses. You might say that we perceive animals and plants as well. Why do we? A plant is full of minerals, and what we perceive in the plant is everything mineral that streams and pulsates through it. The same goes for the animals. So it is true to say that here on earth human beings perceive with their senses almost exclusively what belongs to the mineral kingdom. When we die this mineral kingdom, so clearly perceived here, disappears. Take an example. Every day you perceive salt on your table, you perceive it as an external mineral product. But someone who has left his body and gone through the portal of death cannot see this salt in the salt-cellar. However, when you sprinkle the salt in your soup, and then swallow it, a process takes place within you, and that process, which is accompanied by the sensation of the salty taste, is perceived by the one who has died. From the moment when your tongue begins to taste the salt, from the moment when a process takes place within you, the one who has died can perceive the salt in the way it works. This is how things are. So those who have gone through the portal of death cannot perceive the mineral kingdom unless it has an influence in some way on a human or animal or plant organism. This shows that what might be called the external environment of the dead is quite different from what we are accustomed to calling our environment here between birth and death.

One thing, however, always remains perceptible to the dead, and it is important to pay attention to this. It is whatever has been filled with human thoughts and feelings; it is the human thoughts which are perceived. Salt in a salt-cellar, as a product of nature, is not perceived by the dead. Nor do they perceive the salt-cellar, whether it is made of glass or any other material. But in so far as human thoughts have come to rest in the salt-cellar during the process of its manufacture, these human thoughts are perceived by the dead. When you consider how everything around us, except what is purely the product of nature, bears the signature of human thoughts, you will have a good idea of what the dead can perceive. They also perceive all relationships between beings, including those between human beings. All this is alive for them.

There are certain things in the physical world, however, of which the dead endeavour to rid themselves; they want to expel them from their ideas and soul experiences—as it were, wipe them out. Their desire to do this is comparable to the longing on the part of human beings here on earth to gain certain insights about the world beyond. Here we long to achieve ideas about the next world. After death, as regards certain human matters here on earth—the world beyond, from the viewpoint of the dead—we long to extinguish them, to wipe them away. But to do this it is necessary to be filled with the substances of the higher hierarchies of angeloi and archangeloi. Once the dead are filled with these substances they can extinguish from their consciousness what must be extinguished.

This, then, gives you an idea of how the dead grow into the spiritual world by filling their individuality through and through with the substances of beings of the higher hierarchy. It is very important to understand that in order to remove from consciousness all the things with which they are more or less personally connected—and that means everything manufactured and consequently bearing within it human thoughts which enable the dead to perceive it—the dead must, above all else, fill themselves with the substance of the angeloi. Other things, too, must be cast aside, must be extinguished, so that the dead can find their way to a proper sojourn in the spiritual world.

Strange though it may sound from our standpoint here on earth, there is an obstacle to growing into what gives us a clear, enlightened consciousness in the spiritual world. This obstacle standing in the way of growing easily into the spiritual world is, strangely enough, human language, the language we use here on earth for the purpose of a physical understanding from one human being to another. The dead have to gradually grow away from language, otherwise they would remain stuck in the affinities which bind them to language and which would prevent them from growing into the kingdom of the archangeloi. Language is definitely only suitable for earthly conditions. And within earthly conditions the human being has, in his soul, become very strongly linked with language. For many people, especially now in this materialistic age, thinking has come to be virtually contained in language. People today think hardly at all in thoughts but very strongly indeed in language, in words. That is why they find it so satisfying to find the right term for something. But such terms, such definitions in words, are only valid here in physical life, and after death our task is to extricate ourselves from definitions in words.

In such matters, too, spiritual science gives us a certain possibility to find our way into the realm of the super-sensible. How often do I say to you that to reach a genuine concept we can only approximate; we can only, so to speak, feel our way all around the actual words. How often have I not shown you how we have to endeavour to reach the concept by approaching it from all sides, by experimenting with the use of different expressions in order to free ourselves of the actual words. Spiritual science in a certain sense emancipates us from language. Indeed it does this very fully, thus bringing us into the sphere which we share with the dead.

Emancipation from language is intimately bound up with the way the dead grow into the substance of the archangeloi. By emancipating ourselves from language in spiritual science, by creating concepts in spiritual science which are more or less independent of language, we build a bridge between the physical and the spiritual world.

Take a clear look at what I have just said. You will then find that you have understood an important connection between the physical and the spiritual world. And if you think the thought through in a living way you will discover an important means by which to understand all kinds of impulses that emanate from those brotherhoods about which we have spoken on numerous occasions in the past weeks. From various things I have said you will have gathered that these brotherhoods make it their business to fetter human beings to the material world. Just recently we spoke of how these brotherhoods are eager to make materialism super-materialistic or, in a way, to create a kind of ahrimanic immortality for their members. They can do this most strongly by representing group interests, group egoisms, and they certainly do this outstandingly.

One way of representing a group interest is followed by the most influential among these brotherhoods, whose point of departure is something I have already described to you. It is their aim to thoroughly immerse the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period in everything connected with the English language. To these brotherhoods the very definition of the fifth post-Atlantean period is that every English-speaking element belongs to the fifth post-Atlantean period. Thus, even in their primary principle, they restrict things to an egoistic group interest.

This involves something extremely important from the spiritual point of view. It means that their intention is nothing less than the aim of influencing not only human individuals while they are incarnated in physical bodies between birth and death, but indeed all human individuals, including those who are living between death and a new birth. They are striving to let human individualities enter into the spiritual world and become immersed in the hierarchy of the angeloi, but then to prevent them from becoming immersed in turn in the hierarchy of the archangeloi. The aim is, one could say, to depose the hierarchy of the archangeloi from the evolution of mankind!

Perhaps not those of you who have recently joined us, but certainly those who have been with us for some considerable time will discover, if you pay close attention to many things you have been told, that there are clear signs of such things, even in the Theosophical Society. Those of you who shared in the life of the Theosophical Society will surely remember that certain leading members of that society, especially the notorious Mr Leadbeater, said in so many words that in many ways the life between death and a new birth was a kind of dream-life. Those of you who had been members of the Theosophical Society for some time will know that such things were circulated.

It is not extraordinary that such things have been said, for in the case of some souls, who had been successfully influenced in this way and who were found by Leadbeater in the spiritual world, this had actually happened. These souls had indeed been prevented from contact with the world of the archangeloi and they therefore lacked any strong, clear consciousness. So in his way Leadbeater was observing souls who had fallen prey to the machinations of those brotherhoods, only he did not go so far as to observe what became of those souls after a while. Such souls cannot spend their whole time between death and a new birth without the ingredients which would normally be given to them by the world of the archangeloi, so they have to receive something else instead. And they do indeed receive something that is an equivalent; they are indeed permeated by something; but what? They are permeated by something that comes from archai who have remained behind at the stage of the archangeloi. So, instead of being permeated by the substance of the real archangeloi—as would be normal—they are permeated by archai, by time spirits, but by those who have not ascended to the level of the time spirits but have remained behind at the level of the archangeloi. They would have become archai if they had evolved normally, but they have remained behind at the level of the archangeloi. That means that these souls are permeated by ahrimanic influences in the strongest manner.

You need to have a proper idea of the spiritual world in order to comprehend the full significance of a fact such as this. When occult means are used in an endeavour to secure for a single folk spirit the rulership over the whole world, this means that the intention is to influence even the spiritual world. It means that in the place of the legitimate rulership of the dead by the archangeloi, is put the illegitimate rulership by archai who have remained at the stage of the archangeloi and who are, therefore, illegitimate time spirits. With this, ahrimanic immortality is achieved.

You might ask why human beings can be so foolish as to allow themselves to be programmed away from normal evolution and into quite another evolutionary direction. This is a short-sighted judgement, for it fails to take into account that out of certain impulses human beings can indeed come to long for immortality in worlds other than those that would be normal. It is well and good that you do not long for any part in some kind of ahrimanic immortality! But just as all kinds of things are incomprehensible, so you will have to admit that it must be allowed to remain incomprehensible, if people in the normal world—including life between death and a new birth—want to escape from this normal world, saying—as it were: We do not want Christ to be our guide, Christ, who is the guide for the normal world; we want a different guide, for we want to oppose this normal world. From the preparations they undergo—I have described these to you—from the preparations brought about by ceremonial magic, they gain the impression that the world of ahrimanic powers is a far more powerful spiritual world and that it will above all enable them to continue what they have achieved in the physical world—making immortal their materialistic experiences in physical life.

The time is ripe for looking into these things, because those who do not know about them, those who do not know that such endeavours exist today, are not in a position to understand what is going on. Behind everything visible in the physical world there lies something that is supernatural, something physically imperceptible. And there are today not a few who work, either for good or for bad, with means, with impulses that are hidden behind what the senses can perceive. It can be said that the world in which we live will follow its proper evolution if human beings place themselves in the service of Christ. But there are many and varied means by which this can be avoided, and some of these are so close to home that it is not easy to speak about them. People have no idea of what can spread through human souls, yet at the same time work as an immeasurably strong occult impulse.

You know—now this is close to home—that at a certain point of time the doctrine of infallibility was declared. This doctrine of infallibility—and this is the important aspect—is accepted by many people. But someone who is a true Christian might wonder about this doctrine of infallibility. He could ask himself what the early fathers of the Church, who were much closer to the original meaning of Christianity, would have said about it. They would have called it a blasphemy! In a truly Christian sense, this would hit the nail on the head. And at the same time it would point to an exceptionally effective occult method of stimulating faith by means of something eminently anti-Christian. This faith represents an important occult impulse in a particular direction, away from normal Christian evolution. As you see, we can touch on something quite close to home, and wherever we do so in the world we find occult impulses.

A similarly powerful occult impulse, which failed, was sought by Mrs Besant when she launched the Alcyone fiasco. If a belief in the incarnation of Jesus in Alcyone had taken hold, this would have become a strong occult impulse. So you see that even the mere spread of certain concepts, certain ideas, can contain strong occult impulses. And since those brotherhoods of whom I have spoken have set themselves the task of making the fifth post-Atlantean period—in the egoistic interest of their group—into the long-term aim of earthly evolution, eliminating what ought to come into this earthly evolution in the sixth and seventh post-Atlantean periods, you will understand why these brotherhoods send out into the world the things that I have described. To achieve their aims they have to create impulses which are meaningful not only for incarnated human beings but also for those who are not incarnated. The time has come when it is necessary that at least a few solitary individuals understand these things so that they can gain an idea of what is actually going on and being accomplished.

For this to be possible, concepts about the life of mankind on earth must come into being which are ever more and more right. It is unthinkable that those concepts can continue which are causing so much harm in our time. For the more human beings there are who have the right concepts, the less will certain occult trends be able to stir up trouble. However, as long as the things which are being said continue to be said in Europe today, things deliberately distorting the truth about the relationships of nations with one another, this is a sign that many occult impulses are at work with the aim of distracting earthly evolution away from the sixth post-Atlantean period. After all, important things are going to be brought about by the sixth post-Atlantean period. I have stressed very strongly that Christ died for the individual human being. We must see this as an essential aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha. He has an important task during the fifth post-Atlantean period which we shall leave aside for the moment. But He also has an important task in the sixth period. This is to help the world to overcome the last vestiges of the principle of nationality. That this should not happen, that steps should be taken in good time to prevent any influence by Christ in the sixth post-Atlantean period—this is the purpose served by the impulses of those brotherhoods who want to preserve the fifth post-Atlantean period in the manner I have shown.

The only counter-measure is to create the right concepts and gradually imbue them ever increasingly with life. These right concepts must live. Nations could dwell so peacefully side by side if only they would endeavour to discover the right concepts and ideas about their relationships. As I have said, no programme, no abstract idea, but solely the right concrete concepts, can lead to what must come about. Difficult though it is in the face of current ideas, by which our friends, too, have of course been not a little infected, nevertheless it is necessary to draw people's attention to various aspects which can lead to the right concepts. You all have at your disposal the necessary materials on which to base these right concepts, but these materials are not illuminated properly. As soon as they are correctly illuminated you will arrive at the correct, concrete ideas.

Let us now take up something we have already discussed from a certain viewpoint. Here on this globe, in the Europe we inhabit, the relationships between nations are spoken about in a way that inflicts utter torture on the dead, for all the ideas and concepts are based on the peculiarities of language. By forming concepts about nationality based on the peculiarities of language, people persistently torture the dead. One way of torturing the dead, one way of failing to show them love, is to participate in spiritualist seances. For this forces them to manifest in a particular language. The dead person is expected to speak a particular language, for even with table-rapping the signs have to refer to a particular language. What is done to the dead by forcing them to express themselves in a particular language might very well be compared with pinching someone living in the flesh with red-hot tongs. So painful for the dead are spiritualist seances which expect them to express themselves in a particular language. For in their normal life the dead are striving to free themselves from the differentiations between languages.

So, simply by speaking about the relationships between the peoples of Europe in concepts based on language, we are doing something about which we are barely able to communicate with the dead. That is why I could say that it is necessary today, or beginning to be necessary, to form concepts of a kind which can be discussed with the dead, or about which we can have communication with the dead. Of course there is no need to inundate the world with Volapuk or some other constructed language, for though it is true that all people wear clothes, they need not all wear the same clothes. On the other hand, though, we cannot be expected to see our clothes as part of ourselves. Similarly something we need for the physical world, namely the differentiation between languages—which serve the purpose of bringing the spiritual realm into the physical world—cannot be seen as belonging to our inmost archetypal being. We must be clear about this.

So how can we arrive at concepts which gradually rise above the ethnic elements which are almost exclusively based on language? In this, too, Anthroposophy must rise above mere anthropology, which has really no other means of answering this question except by referring to the differentiations of language.

As I said, the peoples of Europe could easily live in peace if only they could find suitable concepts, concepts which are alive. We took a step towards this when we discussed Grimm's law of sound-shifts. There I showed you how some languages have remained behind at an earlier stage. We spoke of the sequence of stages: Gothic, Anglo-Saxon—present-day English—and then High German. High German has continued to advance while English has remained at a certain stage. This is not a value judgement but merely a fact which has to be observed as objectively as a law of nature. In English we have d where in High German there is t, and we saw that this conforms with a certain law, the law of sound-shifts. However, this law of sound-shifts is, in a certain sphere, an expression of more profound conditions prevailing in the whole of European life. In this connection it is worth noting that certain concepts and ideas work with a vengeance, albeit unconsciously, to bring about misunderstandings. These things, too, must be seen entirely objectively.

Taking our departure from what we have said so far, we could state that in Central Europe there existed what we might call the ‘primordial soup’ for what later streamed out to the periphery, particularly towards the West. Let us take a closer look at this ‘primordial soup’ (see diagr, below). For a very long time it has been customary for the nation which represents this ‘primordial soup’ to call itself ‘das deutsche Volk’. The peoples of the West have exercised a kind of revenge on this nation by refusing to call them by the name they have chosen for themselves, a name which signifies a profound instinct. They are called ‘Teutons’, ‘Allemands’, ‘Germans’, all kinds of things, but never, by those who speak a western language, ‘Deutsche’. Yet this is the very name that has deep links with the nature of this people which is, in a way, the ‘primordial soup’. One stream of this went southwards. We described it as the papal, hierarchical cultic element.

Another stream went towards the West. We described this when we spoke of the diplomatic, political element. And a third stream went towards the North-west. We described it in connection with the mercantile element. At the centre there remained something that has retained a fluidity which allows for further evolution. You need only remember that in the periphery even language has stopped developing, whereas in the German language of Central Europe there still exists, in the sound-shifts, the possibility of growing beyond the sounds and ascending to the next stage of sound-evolution.

What is the basis for this? The ‘primordial soup’ was still virtually undifferentiated, bearing within it all the elements which then streamed outwards. They really did stream outwards. The migrating peoples moved right down through Italy. Present-day Italians are not the descendants of the Romans; they are the result of all that arose through the mingling of the Germanic tribes as they moved southwards. The whole process began when the Romans used the Germans whom they had absorbed to wage war on other Germans, for these were their best warriors. Things then continued in the manner familiar to us from history. Similarly, the Franks migrated westwards and the Anglo-Saxons north-westwards. How can we gain a proper conception of what it was that migrated outwards in this way?

The undifferentiated ‘primordial soup’ of humanity was not quite without structure, even though it was undifferentiated. It is right to distinguish between what was at first undifferentiated and what later became differentiated. The ‘primordial soup’ contains what migrated down towards the south; it is there as one of the parts. This part (red in the diagram) migrated southwards with all its one-sidedness. Drawing an analogy to what people meant by the ancient castes, we could say that a caste migrated southwards, a caste with a capacity for priestly things—a priestly caste. Since then a priestly element has always emanated from that part of the periphery. This has taken many forms and, although in an extraordinary way, even the latest phase has a kind of priestly character. Not only is the impulse called ‘holy egoism’, sacro egoismo, but also, d'Annunzio, for instance, could not have used words of a more priestly nature. Right down to the rephrased ‘Beatitudes’, everything that came from that quarter was clothed in priestly robes. Whether good or bad, everything was of a priestly nature. What remained in the ‘primordial soup’ became the opposition to all this, in the way I have described. What appeared in the Reformation was the element which had remained in the ‘primordial soup’; it came to be the opponent of the one-sided priestly element. The fact that today nothing more can be detected of this priestly element, or that all that can be detected is what is obviously there, is simply the result of that hollowing-out of which I have spoken.

The second element migrated westwards: the warrior caste, the kingly caste, the element of kingship. We have spoken of this, too. This western part only fell into republicanism because of an anomaly. In actual fact it is inwardly structured through and through in a warlike, kingly manner and it will ever and again fall back into this warlike, kingly element. Again we have something that has streamed out, so that a part of this element which has streamed out towards the West has also remained in the ‘primordial soup’ and will in turn have to provide the opposition to what takes place in the West (blue).

And north-westwards went the mercantile element. It, too, remains as a part (orange) and will have to stand in opposition to what has developed one-sidedly. No moral evaluation is meant by this, for let no one believe that I in any way share the opinion, expressed so frequently, that the mercantile element is something despicable in comparison with the priestly element. All these things must be seen in their dissimilarity, but they must not be labelled and evaluated. Indeed, for the fifth post-Atlantean period, as we have seen, the mercantile element is something utterly essential. But we really must see the realities as they exist. If people cannot see them now, then they will come to see them in the future.

From one quarter many occult impulses have emanated which have used the priestly element in the interests of certain groups, and from another quarter have come occult impulses which have used the warlike element. In the same way, from a third quarter, occult impulses are emanating today which prefer to use the mercantile element as their vehicle. They will be stronger than the others, for numbers I and II are only repetitions of the third and fourth post-Atlantean periods, whereas number III belongs fully to the fifth post-Atlantean period. Therefore, all the impulses that come from the third quarter will be stronger than those coming from the first and second quarters because they coincide with the fundamental character of the fifth post-Atlantean period. They will be as strong as certain impulses were during the Egyptian civilization in the third post-Atlantean period, and others which emanated from the Near East and transplanted themselves through the cultures of Greece and Rome during the fourth post-Atlantean period. The sorcery of the ancient Egyptians and the blood sacrifices—these are the forerunners of what comes from the secret brotherhoods of which we have been speaking, though what comes from them will be something different. Because it makes use of the mercantile element it will have a more common-or-garden character in the ordinary human sense.

We really must be clear about these things. Only if human beings feel themselves to be immersed in a living way in what truly exists can healing come to evolution. Through this alone is it possible, within what happens, to learn to distinguish what is true from what is untrue. We have heard how necessary it is to learn to distinguish between truth and falsehood—that falsehood which is the cause of the huge groundswell of impulses now running through the world. So many false ideas bear within them a powerful occult force if they are believed by human beings.

Just as in earlier times other media served the impulses which were at work, so in our own time, in the fifth post-Atlantean period, the art of printing books and everything that exists in the mercantile element serves these purposes. We have a foretaste of the terrible things to come in people's strong dependence on everything put out in the Press by mercantile groups by means of the medium of printing. The aims of these groups are anything but what they say they are in their newspapers. They want to make profits, or achieve certain things through doing business, and for this they possess the means by which they can disseminate views whose truthfulness is irrelevant but which serve the purpose of entering into certain kinds of business. In the case of much of the printed matter distributed around the world today the right question to ask is not: What does this person mean? but: In whose service does this person stand? Who is paying for this or that opinion? This is often the crucial question these days. The secret brotherhoods about whom we have been speaking are not concerned with suppressing these things, but rather promoting them as an important occult means of which they can make use. An important aim is achieved by them when what is said no longer matters, as long as it exercises influence over people in the interests of certain groups.

The important thing is to see these things as clearly and soberly as possible. And we can only discern the nuances sufficiently if we see them properly in their connections with the spiritual worlds. I am referring to the symptoms, to the symptoms of history, as I have said. Of course you must not expect to find black magic behind every phenomenon. But there are phenomena which are used in the service of grey or black magic. It is also not necessary to pass moral judgements on everything; you must simply see things in the proper light.

For someone who wants to see things in the proper way, certain words spoken by Sir Edward Grey will surely be unforgettable and startling—words appearing among other, less important, things which nevertheless also had to be said in order to make the whole thing credible. These words were part of the great speech he made to introduce England's entry into this European war, and they are saturated with the blood—I mean the soul blood—of the fifth post-Atlantean period. These words are not only true but more than true; their truth is drawn from what lives in a materialistic way in the fifth post-Atlantean period. ‘We are going’, says Grey, ‘to suffer, I am afraid, terribly in this war whether we are in it or whether we stand aside. Foreign trade is going to stop, not because the trade routes are closed, but because there is no trade at the other end. Continental nations engaged in war—all their populations, all their energies, all their wealth, engaged in a desperate struggle—they cannot carry on the trade with us that they are carrying on in times of peace, whether we are parties to the war or whether we are not,’ and so on.

The whole of western Europe stands today under the dominion of a single question of power. This talk of trade, and that it is for considerations of trade that it is important not to remain detached from the war—this is far more profoundly truthful than all the other things contained in this speech, things which only had to be said in order to make this speech credible. It no longer matters what people say, as long as it is believed. They might even say it unconsciously. Neither am I passing a moral judgement on anyone. What does matter is the ability to recognize—on the basis of the inner truth of human evolution—where the truth is being expressed. And this was a point at which the truth in the truest sense was spoken. The same facts, the same truths are truthfully expressed which, once they have been suitably developed by those brotherhoods of whom we have spoken, lead to the impregnation of the mercantile trend with occult impulses.

This must become known to mankind; it must be experienced by mankind. If human beings were not to experience this, they would not grow sufficiently strong. They must harden themselves by opposing what lies in the impulses we have described. In an earlier age there existed a tyranny which forced people to believe only what was recognized by Rome. A far greater tyranny will come about when neither philosophers nor scientists decide what should be believed but when the tools of those secret brotherhoods alone specify what is to be believed, when they alone make sure that no human soul may harbour any beliefs other than those dictated by them, when nothing new is done in the world except what is stipulated by them alone. This is the goal of these brotherhoods. And though I have nothing against idealists—for idealism is always something good—certain idealists are naive if they believe that these things are only temporary and will disappear again once the war comes to an end. The war is only the beginning of the way things are tending to go. And the only possibility of getting beyond this lies in the clear and proper understanding of what is going on. Nothing else is of any use. Therefore—although certain quarters will not be pleased to hear and see them and will take steps against them—there will always have to be people who clearly point out the full intensity of what is really going on, people who cannot be deterred from pointing out the full intensity of what is happening.

At the beginning of these considerations I said that the Germans called themselves ‘Deutsche’, but that they met with no understanding on the part of those who call them ‘Germans’, or whatever else. Seen from their own point of view, ‘German’ is exactly what they are not, for those who call themselves ‘Deutsche’ consider that ‘Germanic’ refers to all those whose languages are at the same stage historically, and this does not include High ‘German’ or anything that is ‘Deutsch’. From their point of view the Scandinavians, the Anglo-Saxons, the Dutch are ‘Germans’, and they mean by this nothing more than that below the surface their languages are related. So ‘Germans’ no longer means much to those who call themselves ‘Deutsche’ because all of this no longer has any reality today. Thus, when outside Germany the phrase ‘pan-Germanic’ is coined, this is quite meaningless to those who call themselves ‘Deutsche’ because for them ‘Germanic’ can no longer have any real substance. Different national structures have formed, and to use the purely theoretical expression ‘pan-Germanic’ is simply to regress to an earlier age; it expresses nothing that has any connection with the future or even with the present. The designation ‘Deutsch’, however, is based on a profound instinct.

Differentiated out of what I called the ‘primordial soup’ came the three castes, the first, the second and the third caste. They developed and migrated. The fourth caste I have already described as those who simply wanted to be human beings, and nothing else. They always remained where they were and, as a result, underwent developments which to the others seemed grotesque—for instance, in relation to the first sacramental stage of alliteration, which went on to develop into the sound-shift. This is most interesting because it is a link among many others.

Let us put it this way: Those who migrated were various differentiations of ‘the people’; and those who remained were ‘the people’ per se, the ‘volk’, the ‘diet’. The name Dietrich, for instance, means ‘he who is rich in people’. ‘Diet’ later became ‘deutsch’, and to be ‘Deutsch’ means nothing other than to be ‘the people’. The people who remained where they were are the fourth caste. The other three migrated, ‘the people’ remained.

So this is the profound instinct that lies behind the designation ‘Deutsch’; it simply denotes the human element. Therefore, what stayed where it was as ‘the people’ has the capacity to be felt, not as something that has developed organically, but as something that has remained fluid in its development so that it can go beyond all the differentiations. Certainly the priestly element is there, but there is the possibility of going beyond the priestly element. The warlike element is there, but there is the possibility of going beyond the warlike element. The mercantile element is also there, but there is the possibility of going beyond the mercantile element. Similarly in language; the older form was there, but there was the possibility of going beyond it.

Connected with this, though, is a phenomenon which understandably has led to endless misunderstandings. Seen at a deeper level, these are tragic misunderstandings, but they come about because, of course, in the ‘primordial soup’ there is much which contains the germs of what later reappears in the periphery. Yet whereas in the periphery it is seen as characteristic and fitting, when it is discovered in the ‘primordial soup’ it is thought to be totally abnormal. Let us take militarism. This does not belong to the nature of the German people at all, it belongs to the French. In France no fault is found with it, because there it has developed organically. But when it is discovered in Germany it is seen as something improper which ought not to be there. Fault is found with it when it comes to the fore as a result of some emergency situation such as the geographical situation we discussed at length earlier. Or take the German ‘Junker’; all he represents is what developed in the British Empire into something absolutely acceptable, the aristocratic squire. Simply because it developed in its own way in Central Europe it stands out like a sore thumb and is seen as a provocation. Thus there arise endless misunderstandings; indeed the world is full of things that are misunderstood, it is full of subjective interpretations of reality. Wherever you look, you find all kinds of ideas which crumble on closer inspection. Those who really understand what is going on have no use for these things, those whose thinking is based on reality have no use for them, and yet they work as impulses; in public opinion they act like dynamite. They elbow their way into public opinion. Some would be infinitely funny if they were not so infinitely tragic.

Here is an example. Treitschke is described by the nations of the Entente as a monster, as a person whose views are an abomination for Europe. He is presented as typifying those views about Central Europe which justify inflicting on Central Europe its just deserts. But let us look at some of Treitschke's views. What does he think, for instance, of the Turks? He thinks that they should depart from Europe, that they should not be allowed to live in Europe but should scatter themselves across Asia. What we read today in the note to Wilson exactly expresses Treitschke's view! Fault is found with Treitschke, but in this matter, as in countless others, his opinion is taken up and even acted upon. His views on Turkey might just as well have been copied straight down in the note to Wilson. This is what I mean by an idea which crumbles; as soon as you apply any knowledge or understanding it disintegrates. Other concepts disintegrate, too, as soon as a little knowledge is applied. But most people today make statements without any knowledge, much to the advantage of those who want to spread their ideas in the dark. How often do we hear today that it is perfectly ‘humane’ to surround and starve out Central Europe. Among the various reasons given for this most humane method of warfare is the justification that in 1870 the Germans did just the same. They found it perfectly ‘humane’ to surround and starve out Paris; and the relative size of the territories in question is irrelevant. Only someone who knows nothing of history can talk like this—of course I do not mean the history you can read in the newspapers!

But what were the facts? In 1870/71 Bismarck, who was responsible for starving Paris out, was totally against doing any such thing. You can read in his book how distressed he was that the impulse came from England, via the English princess who later became the Empress Friedrich, to conquer Paris by starvation rather than by any other means. He writes that unfortunately they were forced by the Englishwoman to apply ‘this humane method’ to Paris; he speaks of the humane English method.

That is the real historical context. But, of course, you have to know about it if you want to judge things without using ideas which crumble. Comparing the two situations, they seem so truly alike. But very often things are not at all alike when they are compared against the full background. In this case the ‘humane’ method of starving Paris out is an English invention of recent history. So the objection now being made should not be made, if reality is to be the basis. To work with reality, to understand things on the basis of reality—this alone can lead to salvation today.

To be able to meet the request of many of our friends to investigate current events, we have had to discuss things we usually discuss in other connections, in order that our souls might experience the deep seriousness with which the reality of events must be seen. If just a few people can be found who are willing to see things as they really are, then the grim times we are about to face will be followed by better times. The seeds take a while to ripen. But if you sow thoughts of reality in your souls today, these are real seeds capable of ripening, and we can add that these are thoughts about which one can be in agreement with the dead. It is so painful to hear on all sides these days that ‘we owe this or that to the dead’. This event, which for convenience sake is still termed ‘war’, though it has long since become something utterly different—how often do those who want to prolong this event proclaim all the things we are supposed to owe to the dead, to those who have fallen! If people only knew how they blaspheme against God when they maintain that we owe it to the dead to prolong these bloody events; if only they knew the position of the dead in this matter, they would quickly distance themselves from this blasphemy!

So, my dear friends, from all these things which come about through human beings, you see how necessary it is to build a bridge between the living and the dead. Spiritual science will build this bridge. Spiritual science will bring about a possibility of reaching an understanding, even with those who have passed through the portal of death. A life of community will embrace all human souls—those embodied on the earth and those living between death and a new birth—when the fundamental nature of the human being is understood, when it is understood that life in the body and life without the body are simply two forms of one and the same all-embracing life. This knowledge, that the human being has two forms of life, one in the body and one without the body—this knowledge, if it is fundamentally understood, bears within it salvation for the future, but only if human beings fill themselves with these ideas in a truly living way.

The truths we look for in spiritual science should not be dead facts, but should bring with them understanding of such a vital kind that it finds entrance into life in all circumstances and at every point. Taken in the abstract, as is often the case at present, spiritual science may seem to offer a diluted and unproductive kind of knowledge, and it is natural that people who know very little about it should be induced to ask: What, after all, is the use of learning that man consists of such and such parts; that humanity has developed, and will develop further, through different epochs of culture, and so on? Those who feel that a realistic attitude is demanded by modern life find spiritual science unprofitable. And it is often applied in an unprofitable way, even by its most devoted adherents.

Nevertheless, spiritual science itself is infinitely alive, and is something which in the course of time can and must bring life into our most external concerns. I should like to make this clear today by a particular example. Most of us know that our present age was preceded by the so-called fourth post-Atlantean culture epoch, during which the most important peoples were the Greeks and Romans; that the following centuries down to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries continued to be influenced by impulses preceding from that epoch; and that since the fifteenth century mankind has been living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, into which we ourselves in our present incarnation have been born and in which humanity will be living for many hundreds of years to come. We know furthermore that in man in the fourth post-Atlantean period of civilisation—the Graeco-Roman epoch—was built up pre-eminently the so-called intellectual soul through external culture and work and that cultivation of the consciousness soul is our present task. What does the cultivation of the consciousness soul mean? This abstract statement, rightly understood, contains the destiny of mankind for our entire fifth post-Atlantean period. In order that the consciousness soul may be brought to expression, the various peoples of this period of culture should work together. All the conditions and circumstances of life proclaim this truth; on all sides we find it confirmed that our age stands for the development of the consciousness soul.

Human life was completely different in the preceding Graeco-Roman period when, according to the stage of development mankind had reached, the faculties of intellect and of feeling were bestowed upon them. Intellect covers a wide field; today this is not sufficiently understood. In their soul-life the Greeks and Romans were dependent upon it in a different way from ourselves in the fifth post-Atlantean period. They received the intellect, in so far as they needed to make use of it, “ready-made”, as a natural tendency of their stage of development; there was no need to cultivate it as we must do at present, and as will be increasingly necessary in the further course of the fifth post-Atlantean period—it developed as a natural tendency. The child grew up, and as his natural tendencies developed, the natural intellect—in a certain sense—developed with them. Growing up in ordinary conditions in a particular incarnation he either possessed an intellect, or he did not. The latter case was considered pathological, or at any rate abnormal, out of the common.

And so it was with heart-and-feeling. Appropriately to the fourth post-Atlantean period heart-and-feeling developed. And though history tells us little of such things, it is nevertheless true that two people meeting for the first time knew how to tune in to each other. In this respect there is a great, difference between the preceding centuries down to the fifteenth century, and our own time. People, then, did not pass each other by with the complete indifference often shown nowadays. At present we are slow, as a rule, to make friends. We must know a great deal about each other before confidence can be established. But what is now only to be arrived at after long acquaintance—if at all—in former centuries, particularly during the Graeco-Roman period of civilisation, could be won at a stroke. In virtue of their respective individualities people were drawn rapidly together, without so much need to exchange feelings and thoughts. Acquaintance was quickly made, in so far as it might be good for the two persons concerned, or necessary to a group of people forming themselves into a community. Heart-and-feeling in the one could still reach out more spiritually and make immediate contact with heart-and-feeling in the other. Up to the present, through the medium of our senses, we can still accurately distinguish the colours, and so forth, of plants; but it will no longer be possible to do this spontaneously in the seventh post-Atlantean epoch when learning to know nature will necessitate special conditions. And there is a resemblance between our actual connection with plants and human connections in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. We must remember that this kind of feeling-and-heart connection was well adapted to that age, but a very different network of feelings and sensations spans the world of today. In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch human relationships and undertakings depended to the greatest possible extent upon personal contacts. The art of printing which has done so much up to now, and will do more and more in the future, to establish impersonal relationships, belongs to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch; and modern terms of intercourse are such that, fundamentally speaking, connections formed at a stroke are no longer even beneficial, and people can only approach one another on far more impersonal grounds.

Towards this, modern man is developing; he is no longer possessed of a ready-made heart-and-feeling with its spontaneous reactions, nor of a penetrating intellect, but impelled by the consciousness soul to develop something far more detached, more individual, more dependent upon egoism, upon human loneliness inherent in the organisation of his own body, than was the intellectual soul or mind soul. Through the consciousness soul man is much more an individual, a solitary traveler through the world. And the tendency people now show to withdraw into themselves is becoming [a] more and more pronounced characteristic of our time. The hallmark of the consciousness soul is the urge towards an isolated life, secluded from the rest of mankind. Hence the difficulty of getting to know one another, especially of establishing confidence, without the transition period of formal acquaintanceship.

The significance of all this becomes clearer if we give due weight to the spiritual-scientific truth that in the present age we are not thrown together by chance with other people. That the path of life brings us into contact with certain people and not with others depends upon the working out of individual karma. For we have entered upon a period of human evolution which brings man's preceding karmic developments to a culminating point. Think how much less karma had been accumulated in the earlier periods of earth evolution! With every incarnation fresh karma is made. At first, people had to meet under totally new conditions, with the possibility of forming fresh connections. But through repeated earth-lives we have gradually reached a point at which, as a general rule, we do not meet anyone with whom in former incarnations we have not shared this or that experience. And these experiences bring us into contact again with those who shared them. We meet other people as it would appear by chance but in reality because in former incarnations we had already met, and on the strength of this are brought together again.

Now the self-contained consciousness soul can only develop—and its development is destined to take place in our time—when less importance is attached to what takes place at present between one person and another than to what works inwardly in solitude as the result of former incarnations. In the Graeco-Roman period two persons meeting for the first time made an impression upon each other which worked with the immediacy of a blow. At present, if a meeting is to take place that is to further the development of the consciousness soul, the moving factor between them must be what emerges in one or [the] other as the result of previous incarnations. This takes longer than recognition at first sight; it implies the gradual coming to the surface, little by little in a feeling, instinctive way, of what they formerly lived through together. What we ask today is that in becoming acquainted individual corners should be rubbed off. Because it is in the becoming acquainted, this rubbing off of corners, that the still unconscious, instinctive reminiscences and after-effects of former incarnations strike upwards. The consciousness soul can only develop when our contacts with other people are made from within; whereas the intellectual and mind soul develops more through immediate contact.

What I have now described for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is only in its initial stage. And as the epoch continues it will become increasingly difficult to bring ourselves into a right relationship with others, because this demands inner development, inner activity. A beginning has been made, but what has begun must continue to spread and become more and more intensive. How hard it is already in this present time for people drawn together by karma to understand each other, perhaps because owing to other karmic connections they have not the force instinctively to conjure up all the relations leading over from former incarnations. Stirred by certain after-effects of previous earth-lives, people are drawn together in love; but other forces work against these rising memories, and friends grow apart again. And this putting the durability of their relationship to the test is not only for those who meet in life as friends; it will also be increasingly difficult for children to understand their parents, parents their children, brothers and sisters each other. Reciprocal understanding will become more and more difficult, because of the increasing need to free what is karmically imprisoned within us, and to let it rise to the surface.

Now this negative prospect of ever increasing difficulty in reciprocal understanding in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch requires of us that we should not dream our lives away in the dark, nor close our eyes to the condition of evolution, because this is an absolutely necessary condition. If the difficulty of coming to mutual understanding were not hanging over fifth post-Atlantean humanity, the consciousness soul could not develop, and people would have to live their life in common dependent upon their natural tendencies. And cultivation of individuality—which belongs to the consciousness soul—would not be able to develop either. This must take place. Men will have to undergo this test.

Nevertheless, if only this negative aspect of evolutionary conditions in the fifth post-Atlantean period were to prevail, war and strife would inevitably arise, and find their way into even our most unimportant concerns. I need refer only to one thing and it will be plain to all of us how the remedy is to be sought for one of our necessary ills—for the difficulty we find in understanding each other. I need only say—because we are living in the age of the consciousness soul, as the fifth post-Atlantean epoch proceeds more and more conscious interest will have to be felt for SOCIAL UNDERSTANDING. In this term needs are summed up which in the fourth post-Atlantean period did not exist to at all the same extent. Anyone able accurately to study the history of ancient Greece and Rome knows that for these peoples the individual was not yet possessed of the abilities that can now be made use of by European humanity, and by their American connections. This becomes clearer if we compare human beings with an animal species. Why do animals of the same species live, within certain limits, harmoniously together? For through their group soul, the soul of their species, they have this inborn faculty; it is inherent in the species, and a matter of course. But this represents a stage of development at which the animal remains stationary, but which man must outgrow. Every single human being must develop himself as an individual, and particularly in our modern age of the consciousness soul this self-culture of the individual is one of the most important matters. The Graeco-Roman civilisation is still coloured by a group-soul element. We find its peoples making part of a social order, the structure of which, though certainly derived more from moral forces, is in itself a fixed structure and will in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch be increasingly broken up. This group-soul element in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch has no longer any meaning for the fifth. A conscious form of social understanding must take its place, proceeding from a deep knowledge of the true being of the human individual. And it is spiritual science which will first develop this understanding. When spiritual science blossoms more and more out of the abstract into the concrete, into fullness of life, among its adherents a very special knowledge of, a very special interest in, humanity will be aroused. There will be people with special gifts for teaching others about the different temperaments and characterological tendencies, how this person with a particular temperament should be taken in such a way, whereas that other person with the same temperament but with a different trend of character requires different treatment. These specially gifted men will say to those who are ready to learn: “Look carefully; there is this type of person and there is that other type, and, with each, must deal differently.” Practical psychology, practical knowledge of the soul, but also a practical knowledge of life, will be cultivated, and out of this true social understanding for human development will grow.

What have we had up to now in the shape of social understanding? All kinds of abstract ideals, concerned with national welfare and human happiness, this or that form of socialism, have made their appearance. And only when certain sociological ideas are really on the point of being put into practice, is the acknowledgment of their impracticability forthcoming. What in the first place is important is not to found sects and societies with fixed programmes, but to spread the knowledge of men, notably such knowledge of human nature as will enable us to understand the growing, developing human being, to understand the child, and how each child develops according to its particular individuality. In this way we shall learn so to adjust ourselves in life that when confronted by karma with a personal connection to be made, a connection to be drawn closer, we shall establish a real and enduring relationship, of the kind which can prove itself in life to be most truly fruitful. Practical knowledge of man, practical, effectual interest in humanity, this is what counts. Up to the present mankind has gone only a short way along this path and with small success. For how do we judge a person whom we meet nowadays? As being agreeable to us, or the reverse. Look about you and you will find that this is, in most cases, the sole criterion, or if more than one opinion is pronounced there is only one point of view; “This man appeals to me, another does not. I like this about so-and-so, but I do not like that.” Foregone conclusions! We make for ourselves an idea of what someone should be, and when we find that they differ from it we criticise. No progress will be made towards a true practical understanding of man until we do away with these prejudices and fancies for this person or that, and make up our minds to take people as they are.

How often, when two people meet for the first time, one of them arouses instantaneous antipathy in the other, whom he dislikes so much that afterwards whatever they have to do with each other is coloured by this dislike. As a consequence the karmic connection between them can be entirely blotted out, or set on a false track, and will have to be laid aside until the two meet again in their next incarnation. Sympathy and antipathy are the greatest enemies of true social interests, though only too little heed is paid to the fact. But to anyone deeply aware of the importance of true social understanding for the further development of mankind, it is distressing to watch the effect teachers in a school often have upon their pupils, when out of prejudice they show preference for one rather than another, whereas it is important to take each of them as he is able and to make the very most of that.

But here we are up against regulations. Our regulations and social laws often so implacably wipe out individuality in the teacher himself, that any real effort to uphold individuality as such is impossible.

Understanding for spiritual science would cause practical knowledge of the human soul and practical knowledge of man to become matters of general interest. This is a necessity for social understanding if it is, to some extent, to create the opposite pole to the difficulty of understanding one another. It is what must come in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of the consciousness soul is to develop fully. Man must go through trials and provings, for the opposing forces set snares in our way. And accordingly feelings of sympathy and antipathy will be widespread, and it is only by consciously combating these superficial feelings that we shall bring the consciousness soul safely to birth. Social understanding between man and man will also be more and more powerfully opposed by those nationalistic feelings and emotions, which only assumed their present form in the nineteenth century but are gaining the upper hand more and more. And since good is to be found only in the overcoming of them, these national antagonisms, these national sympathies and antipathies,[as they arise] are so strong that they are fearful testings for mankind. Were they to gain the upper hand, as they bid fair to do, we should dream away the development of the consciousness soul, because nationalism works in the opposite direction, and stands in the way of man's independence by tending to make of him a mere reflection of this or that national group. This is the first thing to bear in mind if we want the otherwise empty saying to become a reality in our souls: that the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is in particular for the development of the consciousness soul. And further to this development: if as individualism increases religion does not adapt itself to the needs of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but remains as it was suitable for the fourth post-Atlantean period, a certain drying up of the religious life must take place.

Religious groups were bound to arise in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch because at that time mankind lived more as groups. It was necessary for authority to pour out dogmas, principles of religion, religious thought, upon groups of people, as common to them all. But because the urge to develop individuality through the consciousness soul in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is becoming stronger and stronger, that which speaks out of the group religions can no longer find its way to human hearts, and individual human souls. And what comes from these group religions will simply not be understood. In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch it was still possible out of the group to teach people about Christ. But in the fifth period Christ is already actually entering the individual soul. Already, unconsciously or subconsciously, we all carry Christ within us. But through ourselves alone we must find the way to understand Him anew. This will not come from the imposing of fixed dogmas, only from doing all we can to further what will make Christ universally comprehensible, to further the spread of universal religious knowledge in general, and to search out everything which can work to this end. Hence in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch the need for more and more tolerance, particularly where thought in connection with religious experience is concerned. And whereas in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch those who worked to spread religious truths did so by imposing certain dogmas and fixed principles, in the fifth period this must all completely change. It is a question of something entirely different. Because men are becoming more and more individual an attempt should be made for anyone to describe his inner experiences completely freed from dogma to another, in such a way that the latter might also be able to develop his own free life of religious thought as an individual. It is a fact that dogmatic religion, the fixed dogmas of the religious confessions, will kill the religious life of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. So that a fresh start from this age must consist in making it clear that in the first centuries of the Christian era this or that may have been adapted to man's development at the time, and that in the following centuries something different is needed. Also that there are different religions. We must try to make the essential nature of the different religions intelligible, to make clear different aspects of the Christ-conception. In this way we bring to every soul what it requires for its particular deepening. But we do not ourselves intervene in the moulding of the soul; we leave the soul, especially in the sphere of religion, its own liberty of thinking and scope to unfold this liberty.

Just as social understanding is necessary for the fifth post-Atlantean period at the point I have described, so is liberty of thought on religious grounds a fundamental condition for the development of the consciousness soul. SOCIAL UNDERSTANDING IN THE SPHERE OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS. LIBERTY OF THOUGHT IN THE SPHERE OF RELIGION—of the religious life.

This effort of ours to understand the religious aspect of life more and more, to penetrate it, and by so doing to come to terms with our fellow men even though each of them may have his own religious life to unfold, must be kept clearly in view because it is a basic need of the fifth post-Atlantean period and something humanity must acquire by consciously drawing upon their own strength. In this very age of the consciousness soul, the ahrimanic powers are most fiercely renewing their attack upon liberty of thought—the nerve and sinew in the stream of the spiritual scientific conception of life—and we know what opposition it encounters from the religious confessions in general, and what calumnies are directed from every side upon spiritual science, on account of its complete and luminous acceptance of the birth of the consciousness soul, and its refusal to take part in propagating the kind of religious life which is still dependent upon the support of the intellectual or mind soul, as in the fourth post-Atlantean period. The various forms assumed by Christianity were established in the fourth post-Atlantean period according to the requirements of the Graeco-Roman civilisation. As Church-forms they are already unsuitable and will become ever more unsuitable for the growth of free thought which must take place.

And in the age which prompted by modern life feels the first stirrings of a need to think freely, we find the opposing power at work in the so-called Jesuitism of the different religions—although much comes under this heading which would have to be described in detail. It is actually brought to life in order that the strongest possible resistance may be offered to liberty of thought, so vital a necessity for the fifth post-Atlantean period. It will become more and more necessary to exterminate Jesuitism, the enemy in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of free thinking, because from religion outwards liberty of thought must spread over every sphere of life. But as it must be striven for independently, mankind is put, as it were, to the proof, and difficulties spring up everywhere. These difficulties will increase as men of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch advance towards clear consciousness, yet feeling this at first to be a disadvantage, and in many respects stupefying themselves.

So we find the clash of sharp conflict between germinating liberty of thought and the principle of authority which works into our times like a hang-over from the past. And there is a passion for dulling the consciousness and for self-deception where belief in authority is concerned. In our time putting faith in authority has become so great and so intensified that under its influence people are losing their power of judgment. In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch they were endowed by nature with sound understanding; now they must acquire it, develop it, and their belief in authority holds them back from doing so. We are becoming bound hand and foot to our belief in authority. Only think how helpless human beings appear when compared to the unreasoning animal creation! How completely the animal is guided by instincts which lead it in a sound way even from sickness back to health; whereas modern man fights against sound judgment in this respect and submits himself entirely to authority. He has very little wish to acquire discernment for healthy conditions of living, although it is true that praiseworthy efforts are made in this direction by various societies and institutions. But these efforts need to be very much intensified; above all we must realise that we have increasingly to contend with our own trust in authority, and that whole theories are being built up which in their turn will become the basis of convictions only serving to uphold belief in authority.

In medicine, in law and in every other sphere people declare themselves from the outset incompetent to judge, and accept what science tells them. The complications of modern life make this understandable. But under the pressure of authority we shall become more and more helpless. And systematically to build up this force of authority, this habit of authority, is actually the principle of Jesuitism. And Jesuitism in the Catholic religion is only a special instance of other less noticeable performances in other directions. It begins in the sphere of ecclesiastical dogma with the tendency to uphold papal authority projected over from the fourth post-Atlantean period into the fifth where it can do no good. But the same Jesuitical principle will gradually transfer itself to other spheres of life. In a form hardly differing from the Jesuitism of dogmatic religion, we already find it in medical circles where a certain dogmatism strives after more power for the medical profession. This is typical of Jesuitical aspiration everywhere; and it will grow stronger and stronger. People will find themselves more and more tied down by what authority imposes upon them. And in face of this ahrimanic opposition—for such it is—salvation for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch will be found in asserting the rights of the consciousness soul which is wishing to develop. But as the gift of reason is no longer bestowed upon us like our two arms by Nature, as was still to some extent the case in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, this can only come about through our good will to develop the faculties of understanding and sound judgment. The development of the consciousness soul demands liberty of thought; and this can flourish only in a particular aura, in a certain atmosphere.

I have pointed out that the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is beset with difficulties on account of its pressing forward in a certain direction, to the development of the consciousness soul. The consciousness soul—just because it should develop as such—must encounter opposition and pass through trials. We see what tremendous and growing opposition there is to social understanding and liberty of thought. But this opposition is not acknowledged to be such; it is looked upon in the most extensive circles as right and proper, as something in no way to be condemned but on the contrary most carefully to be fostered.

There are, however, a great many people whose sincerity and clear vision make them fully aware of what dangers modern man is exposed to and who have a keen sense for what is already plain to see: that karmic connections having entered the period of crisis described above, the moment has come when parents and children, brothers and sister peoples and nations will no longer understand each other. There are already a sufficient number of people who realise that these necessary conditions can work for good only when they are faced with the understanding which rises from the very life of the heart. For the impulse for this new world-working must be consciously wrung out of the heart's blood. What comes spontaneously brings estrangement between individuals. We must consciously strive after what springs from the human heart. Every single soul has difficulties to encounter in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch because the consciousness soul can develop only through the testing occasioned by the overcoming of these difficulties.

How often nowadays one hears: “I don't know what to do with myself, I don't know how to organise my life.” This comes from inability to see clearly what the needs of the present time are, and what man's position is with regard to them. Many people are reduced by existing conditions to physical illness, physical strain and loss of balance. And a real understanding for this must be more and more intensively cultivated because what threatens us, and is at the same time a necessity for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, is the danger of DESTITUTION OF SOUL—destitution of the particular “shade” described in today's lecture. Many people see what this means and feel how necessary it is that we should come to social understanding on the one hand and liberty of thought on the other. But today very few are inclined to make use of the right means to this end. For social understanding, what would be necessary to achieve it, is only too often served by a hotch-potch [hodge-podge?—e.Ed] of high-sounding phrases. There is a lot of talk nowadays about the necessity for the individual treatment of the growing child. What long-winded theories are devised in every branch of pedagogy! Very little of this is to the point. Whereas an intelligent circulation of as many positive descriptions as possible of how the human being actually develops, a positive natural history of individual development, is needed. Wherever possible we should describe how the human beings A, B and C have developed and enter lovingly into such human development as takes place before our eyes—this is what we need. Above all the study of life is necessary, the will to gain knowledge of life itself, rather than to make out programmes. The theoretical programme is the enemy of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture.

Now when a society is formed, this should take place in accordance with the aims of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. This means that the members of it must constitute the chief reason for its existence, and the exchange of ideas between these actual men should yield the best results possible; and if sufficient attention is given to this, very individual results will show themselves. At present, what is the usual procedure? It begins with a drawing up of rules. This can be quite good, and may be necessary, because external conditions demand rules and regulations. But on our own ground we must be very clear that talk about programmes and regulations is merely a concession to the outside world; that what concerns us must be the life in common as individuals, what issues from actual human beings; that reciprocal understanding is what counts. This will make it possible even in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—which has centuries yet before it—that from among those who understand such things, understanding could go forth for vital individual development in the world generally, which at present puts everything into sections and regulations as if into a straight jacket. From thence come the high-sounding doctrines which from pulpit and platform proclaim the art of living. Theories crop up on every hand, dripping with abstractions and demonstrating every imaginable idea and ideal. So importance can be attached to them, but only to what is concrete, and to a comprehending penetration of the actualities of life. How can this come about?

It stands to reason that to what has been said the following objections would be justified: “Yes, indeed—but we are not qualified to pronounce an opinion upon what experts nowadays officially give out. Only consider”—it might be objected—“what the medical student has to learn! That he should learn it is right and proper, but we could not; and then add to this what the lawyer must know, and the art student, and so on.”—It is certainly out of the question that we should learn these things; but we are not called upon to be creative, we need only be capable of judging. We must allow the expert to create, but we must be able to criticise the expert. And this faculty of judgment we shall not acquire by specialising, but only by cultivating in an all-round way our powers of understanding and our faculty of judgment. This, however, can never come about through expert knowledge in some particular branch of science, but only through the all-embracing knowledge of the Spirit.

Spiritual science must be the centre around which all the sciences revolve; for it not only throws light upon the connections in human evolution, but the way of thinking peculiar to it develops in us sound understanding, and this must be produced and given out from far deeper depths than during the Graeco-Roman civilisation of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The construction of concepts and representations necessary for spiritual science, and peculiar to it, does not qualify us to become experts in any particular sphere, but it gives us the power of judging. And the reason for this will become more and more plain to see. There are mysterious forces in the human soul, and these forces, these mystery forces, will link the human soul with the spiritual world, and through our participation in spiritual science this link will enable us to use our judgment when we stand in the presence of authority. We shall not have expert knowledge but when in certain cases the expert acts on the strength of what he knows, we shall be able to form our own judgment about it.

Emphasis must be laid upon the fact that spiritual science not only teaches us but in this connection develops our faculty of judgment—that is to say, it makes possible and fosters the freedom and independence of our thinking. Spiritual science may not qualify us to enter the medical profession, but if we can penetrate to its reality it makes us capable of forming a right judgment upon the results of medicine in public life. If what I mean by this could once be fully understood, there would be understanding as well for the many, many life-giving forces of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. For very much is contained in what I mean by saying that spiritual science will, as it were, remodel the human Intellect in such a way that man's critical faculty may be able to unfold itself, and in releasing his intellectual life from the life of his soul he may be able to develop true liberty of thought.

I should like now, if you will allow me, to put these thoughts before you in a more pictorial, imaginative way» We are told in spiritual science of a concrete spiritual world; of elemental beings surrounding us; of the Hierarchies, Angels, Archangels and so forth. The world becomes peopled for us with real spiritual content, spiritual forces and spiritual beings. That we should know nothing about these spiritual beings is no longer a matter of indifference to them as to some extent it still was in the fourth post-Atlantean period. But if in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch men on earth know nothing about them it is as though, a part of their spiritual nourishment was being withheld. The spiritual world is in close communication with our present physical world of earth. You will understand this better when I tell you something which may seem strange now, but is quite simply true; and although at present it is still not possible to say very much, yet certain truths must be given out because humanity should no longer be without them.

From the point of view of humanity on earth we are perfectly justified in saying: With the Mystery of Golgotha Christ entered earth-life, and He has remained in earth-life since then; and from this point of view we can feel it as good fortune for earth-life that Christ should have entered it. But now let us consider this from the standpoint of the Angels—which is no invention of mine, but follows as a reality from occult investigation—let us transfer ourselves to the standpoint of the Angels. Their experience in the spiritual sphere was quite different, it was the reverse of ours. Christ left the sphere of the Angels to come to mankind; He forsook their world. Speaking for themselves they could say: Christ left our world to go through the Mystery of Golgotha. And they would have as much reason to sorrow over this as we have to rejoice that Christ in His healing power should have come to us in as far as we live on earth in our physical bodies. This is a real train of thought, and anyone with actual knowledge of the spiritual world knows that there is only one way for the Angels to find solace, and I described it rightly when I said that men on earth in their physical bodies should live with the Christ-thought in such a way that it can shine upwards as a light to the Angels—since the Mystery of Golgotha—shine up to the Angels as a light. Men say: Christ has entered into us, and we can develop in such a way that He will be able to dwell in us—“not I, but Christ in me.” The Angels say: Christ has gone from the sphere of our inner life, and He shines up to us now like so many stars in the Christ-thought of individual men; He shines up to us since the Mystery of Golgotha, and there we find Him again. There is a real connection between the spiritual world and the human world. And this is also shown by the fact that the spiritual beings who apart from ourselves inhabit the spiritual world look with satisfaction and approval upon our thoughts about their world. They can help us only if we think about them; and although we may not have attained to clairvoyant vision into the spiritual world, if we know about these spiritual beings they can help us. In return for our study of spiritual science help comes to us from the spiritual world. It is not merely the things we learn, the knowledge we acquire, it is the beings of the higher Hierarchies themselves who help us when we know about them. And if in future, as the fifth post-Atlantean epoch proceeds, we face the authority of the expert, it will be good to have behind us not only our own human understanding but also what the spiritual beings are able to weave into it through our knowing about them. They qualify us to confront authority with sound judgment. The spiritual world helps us. We have need of it, we must know about it, and unite ourselves with it through conscious understanding. This is the third thing which must come to pass in the fifth post-Atlantean period.

1. RECIPROCAL UNDERSTANDING IN SOCIAL LIFE.
2. THE ACQUIRING OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT.
3. LIVING KNOWLEDGE OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLDS THROUGH SPIRITUAL SCIENCE.

These three things must be the great true ideals of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. We must have reciprocal understanding in the social sphere, liberty of thought in religion and in the other branches of community life; and in the sphere of knowledge we must have knowledge of the spiritual worlds.

SOCIAL UNDERSTANDING, LIBERTY OF THOUGHT, KNOWLEDGE OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLDS. These are the three great aims and impulses of the fifth post-Atlantean period. In the light of these impulses we must develop, for they are the true lights of our time. Many people feel strongly that some change is necessary, particularly in the social sphere where a quite different way of living must be adopted, and that we must have different concepts. But out of ignorance or unwillingness they evade the ultimate conclusions. This can be seen from the attitude of so many towards the aspirations of spiritual science. And here we need not confine ourselves to deliberately malicious calumny of it or of Theosophy. We need only consider the sincere will that abounds among men today, sincere will that aims at the creation of impulses tending in the direction post-Atlantean humanity should take.

Only think how many reformers there are in every sphere, pastors and preachers on social matters; preachers too who do not belong to theological or religious circles. How they all take the floor! And often prompted by the best will possible. How is that to lead humanity in the direction towards which modern life is striving today? Good intentions are to be found everywhere, so let us for the moment consider what comes, not from bad intentions, but from good. And yet these good intentions do not help so long as they consist only in vague talk, however warm the feelings which underlie it; because the three great true ideals of human understanding, liberty of thought and knowledge of the spiritual worlds cannot reach fulfilment unless the knowledge which comes only from spiritual science is quickened into life. At present, however, except for the little company rallied round the spiritual-scientific conception of the world, understanding for such things has not yet reached even its initial stage.

But we come nowadays upon fine and lofty theories tending in this direction. And, as an example, I should like to tell you of something which happened—“by chance”, as we say—to myself. Actually it came about through karma that looking one day into a shop window my eye was caught by the title of a little book which I bought. The subject of it is modern man, what he is in search of, under what impressions he grows up; it describes the many advantages of modern times which make life easy and comfortable—the convenience of steam and electricity, and so on—all set forth in detail. Emphasis is laid upon the jostle and rush of modern life, but also upon its increased possibilities; allusion is made to the outstanding discoveries and inventions of our time in comparison with the duller, poorer, more instinctive way of living in former times—all this is described with a kind of fervour and delight. But then follows a description of the difficulties of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which I have pointed out today, only without any indication that these things proceed from the peculiarities of the age itself and its demand that the consciousness soul should be developed. What stands out is a complete lack of clear vision, in spite of an open compassionate heart. I will quote: “It is strange that a description of our modern civilisation, which begins on a high note of joy in existence, must end upon the deep note of inner destitution of soul. What we experience here in a small way” (he means by ‘a small way’ the place where he lives) “is in a far greater sense the experience of our age. An abundance of culture beyond compare, a display of beauty and power in life scarcely to be equaled in history, and side by side with it all a spiritual destitution mounting upwards to lay hold on every class.”

And now, having given evidence of so much perspicacity, the author goes on to review various possibilities whereby the true impulse in modern humanity may find its right outlet. And among these possibilities, Theosophy, as he sees it, comes into consideration. Here, among its many enemies, we find a well-wisher of Theosophy, someone who with all good-will takes the trouble to interest himself in it and for this reason claims our attention. Indeed it is not without good reason that I bring these things to your notice; it is essential that we should concern ourselves with what are the positive connections of spiritual science with the outside world.

After passing “pseudo mysticism” in review as a means of deepening life and as a remedy for destitution of soul, the writer goes on to say; “Theosophy is a near neighbour to mysticism. Many people see it only as a substitute for more trustworthy forces, or as a tendency to syncretism or to eclecticism”—that is to say a hotch-potch [hodge-podge, again—e.Ed] of religious confessions and world-conceptions, just as people who do not wish to go into spiritual science call it warmed-up gnosticism and so on. But the author of this book goes a step further, for he says; “Those who see it only as a tendency to syncretism and eclecticism, equivalent to individual inclinations, confuse it with still more doubtful symptoms of modern life such as superstition, spiritualism, apparitions, symbolism and similar trifling with the mystery-loving element in human nature. But this is not the case. We do this Movement an injustice by refusing to acknowledge its deep inner connections and values,”—Thus we stand indeed in the presence of a well-wisher.—He continues: “Where Steiner's circle at least is concerned, we must try to understand it as a contemporary religious Movement, although perhaps more syncretic than original, but going to the roots of all life.” Let us hope that as this man shows so much goodwill, he may yet find his way to the “originality” of our Movement. “We may look upon it as a Movement dedicated to the satisfying of man's super-sensible interests, and therefore as having outgrown the realism attached to the senses. Above all we may recognise it as a Movement which exhorts men to consider their moral problems, to work for inner re-birth through scrupulous concentration upon self-education.” As I have already said; I am not reading this to you out of silly sentimentality, but considering the many things said from other points of view about Anthroposophy, it seems not irrelevant that we should make ourselves acquainted with a criticism such as this:—“One has only to read Steiner’s book on Theosophy to be struck by the earnestness with which he enjoins upon his readers the necessity for purification and self-improvement. The speculations contained in it upon the super-sensible are in themselves a reaction to materialism; of course”—and now comes something to which I must beg that you will pay particular attention—“here the book loses touch with reality, and soars into the realms of hypothesis and clairvoyant fantasy, into a world of dreams in which there is no place for the realities of individual and social life. Nevertheless theosophy must be registered as a corrective phenomenon in the cultural progress of our time.”

And so there is just one thing to which the author of this book takes exception, and that is the ascent, to knowledge of the spirit, to concrete knowledge of the spirit; which means that he would be glad of the impulse towards man's moral improvement which, by his own showing, springs from Theosophy, but he does not yet understand that for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch moral improvement can only come about through concrete spiritual knowledge. He cannot perceive the roots, and he wants the fruits without them. His range of vision cannot embrace the whole connection. And he is so extraordinarily interesting for just this reason: that, as we see, he has given deep thought to the study of my book “Theosophy” and yet cannot understand that the one is impossible without the other. He would like to cut off the book's head and keep its body because the latter he feels to be important.

This bears out what I have been sayings that such people acknowledge the need for social understanding and liberty of thought—this they understand; but that the third, namely, knowledge of the spirit, must form the basis of our fifth post-Atlantean epoch they are not willing to admit; it is something they cannot rise to. And one of the most important tasks in the world-conception of spiritual science is to arouse understanding for this. People often say that rising to the spiritual worlds is a fantastic illusion. They do not see that it is the loss of this knowledge which has brought materialism upon us, with the incapacity for social understanding to which it is allied, with the materialistic way of living, and attitude towards life. And it is by studying our well-wishers that we can realise how difficult it is for people to admit the existence of concrete spiritual worlds. Because of this we must try the harder to gain understanding for such impulses as those I have brought forward today in my lecture.

The title of the little book I mentioned is “Die Gedankenwelt des Gebildeten, Probleme and Aufgaben” by Prof. Dr. Friedrich Mahling, published in Hamburg in 1914, and it is the reprint of a lecture given by Dr. Mahling at Hamburg on the 23rd September 1913, during the 37th Congress for the Inner Mission. I am only surprised that no one in our circle has ever mentioned the book, for since its publication in 1914 it might easily have come under the notice of any one of us. And although it is important to concern ourselves with the various crossing and re-crossing threads between different spheres of thought at this present time, and with the various shades of abuse and mockery by which our Movement is attacked, we ought also to interest ourselves when, for once in a way as in this case, we are met by an honest effort to understand, and when we could learn from it something about the difficulties such an effort encounters.

The purpose of this lecture has been to point out what should be the three great concrete Ideals of our fifth post-Atlantean epoch; reciprocal understanding in social life, liberty of thought, knowledge of the Spirit. In the future it will be for these three great ideals to direct the sciences. It will be for them to refine and purify life, to inspire morality with fresh impulses, to direct, penetrate and further the life of modern humanity to the greatest extent possible. But the first two demands, social understanding and liberty of thought, cannot be satisfied unless the third, knowledge of the Spirit, is added to them, because the consciousness soul should be developed. And the highest stage of the consciousness soul is the spirit-self, the natural predisposition for which will appear in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. But it cannot develop without the preparatory stage of inner self-dependence, only to be attained by man through the unfolding of the consciousness soul. And we must remind ourselves as part of our endeavour in spiritual science that what may seem to us abstract truths have in them magic power which has only to be released for clear light to pour over the whole of life. And wherever we are placed, as scientists or practical workers in whatever sphere, however small our part, if we know how to quicken into life, for whatever that sphere may be, the abstract truths we take in during our meetings, we shall be fellow-workers at the greatest tasks of our time. And our souls will then be filled with a gladness which is not superficial good cheer, but has its part in the life-giving seriousness that increases our strength; and instead of allowing life to degenerate into a mere excuse for enjoyment makes of us true workers in life.

In this sense the three great concrete social ideals and ideals of cognition will enable the consciousness soul in the fifth post-Atlantean period to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, and to receive Christ in a new way. For we forge a real link with the spiritual worlds by learning to know how these worlds also stand to the central impulse of earth evolution, to the Christ impulse. The Christ impulse will become our real link with the spiritual worlds under the influence of the thoughts which stream from them earthwards, and which we offer up again in our thinking about Christ; because in earth existence since the Mystery of Golgotha the thoughts of human souls shine upwards consolingly like bright stars, as I have described, even to the world of the angels who lost Christ from their sphere in order that they might find Him again shining up to them from the sphere of human thinking.

No, knowledge of the Spirit may not be described as fantastic. It is knowledge of the Spirit which first, of all endeavours to find a way of influencing the actual conditions under which destitution of soul, necessarily bound up with the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, arises. It is of these things that I wished to speak to you today. Let us hope that we may meet again here at a not too distant date, and that until then we may be united in thought and continue to work in the spirit of our Movement.

[ 1 ] Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel appear in their full significance quite especially to someone who considers the far-reaching impetus they gave to personalities possessed of far less spiritual vigor than they. Something is moving and working in the souls of this trio of thinkers that could not come fully to expression within themselves. And what is working as the basic undertone in the souls of these thinkers works on in a living way in their successors and brings them to world views—in accordance with the spirit—that even the three great original thinkers themselves could not achieve because they had to exhaust their soul vigor, so to speak in making the first beginnings.

[ 2 ] Thus, in Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, there appears a thinker who tries to penetrate more deeply into the spiritual than his father, Schelling, or Hegel. Whoever dares to make such an attempt will not only hear from outside the opposition of all those who are fearful about questions of world views; if he is a careful thinker, he will clearly perceive this opposition coming also from his own soul. Is there then actually a possibility of delivering the human soul of cognitive powers that lead into regions of which the senses give no view? What can guarantee the reality of such regions; what can determine the difference between such reality and the creations of fantasy and daydreaming? Whoever does not always have the spirit of this opposition at his side, so to speak, as the true companion of his prudence will easily blunder in his spiritual-scientific attempts; whoever has this spirit will recognize in it something extremely valuable for life.

Whoever enters into the arguments of Immanuel Hermann Fichte will find that a certain spiritual demeanor has passed over to him from his great predecessors that both strengthens his steps into the spiritual region and endows him with prudence in the sense just indicated.

[ 3 ] The standpoint of the Hegelian world view, which takes as its basic conviction the spiritual nature of the world of ideas, was also able to be the point of departure for Immanuel Hermann Fichte in the development of his thoughts. Nevertheless, he felt it to be a weakness in Hegel's world view that, from its supersensible vantage point, it still looks only at what is revealed in the sense world. Whoever lives into Immanuel Hermann Fichte's views can feel something like the following as its basic undertone. The soul experiences itself in a supersensible way when it lifts itself above sense perception to a weaving in the realm of ideas. Through this, the soul has not only enabled itself to see the sense world differently than the senses see it—which would correspond to the Hegelian world view—; but also, the soul has an experience of itself through this that it cannot have through anything to be found within the sense world. From now on the soul knows of something that itself is supersensible about the soul. This “something” cannot be merely the idea of the soul's sense-perceptible body. Rather, this something must be a living, essential beingness that underlies the sense-perceptible body in such a way that this body is formed according to the idea of this something. Thus Immanuel Hermann Fichte is led up above and beyond the sense-perceptible body to a supersensible body, which, out of its life, forms the first body. Hegel advances from sense observation to thinking about sense observation. Fichte seeks in man the being that can experience thinking as something supersensible, Hegel, if he wants to see in thinking something supersensible, would have to ascribe to this thinking itself the ability to think. Fichte cannot go along with this. He has to say to himself: If one is not to regard the sense-perceptible body itself as the creator of thoughts, then one is compelled to assume that there is something supersensible above and beyond this body. Moved by this kind of a view, Fichte regards the human sense-perceptible body in a natural-scientific way (physiologically), and finds that such a study, if only it is unbiased enough, is compelled to take a supersensible body as the basis of the sense-perceptible one. In paragraphs 118 and 119 of his Anthropology (second edition 1860), he says about this: “Within the material elements, therefore, one cannot find what is truly enduring, that unifying form principle of the body which proves to be operative our whole life long.” “Thus we are directed toward a second, essentially different cause within the body.” “Insofar as this [unifying form principle] contains what is actually enduring in metabolism, it is the true, inner body-invisible, yet present in all visible materiality. That other entity, the outer manifestation of this form principle, shaped by continuous metabolism: let us call it ‘corporality’ from now on; it is truly not enduring and not whole; it is the mere effect or copy of that inner bodily nature that throws it into the changing world of matter in somewhat the same way a magnetic force puts together, out of metal filing dust, a seemingly dense body that is then blown away in all directions when the uniting force is withdrawn.” This opens for Fichte the perspective of getting outside the sense world, in which man works between birth and death, into a supersensible world with which he is connected through Ws invisible body in the same way he is connected with the sense world through his visible body, For, his knowledge of this invisible body brings him to the view he expresses in these words: “For one hardly need ask here how the human being, in and for himself, conducts himself in this process of death. Man, in and for himself—even after the last, to us invisible, act of his life processes—remains, in his essential being, completely the same one he was before with respect to his spirit and power of organization. His integrity is preserved; for he has lost absolutely nothing of what was his and belonged to his substance during his visible life, He only returns in death into the invisible world; or rather, since he has never left the invisible world, since the invisible world is what actually endures within everything visible, he has only stripped off a particular form of visibility. ‘To be dead’ simply means to remain no longer perceptible to ordinary sense apprehension, in exactly the same way that what is actually real, the ultimate foundations of bodily phenomena, are also imperceptible to the senses.” And with such a thought Fichte feels himself to be standing so surely in the supersensible world that he can say: “With this concept of the continued existence of the soul, therefore, we not only transcend outer experience and reach into an unknown region of merely illusory existences; we also find ourselves, with this concept, right in the midst of the graspable reality accessible to thinking. To assert the opposite, that the soul ceases to exist, would be against nature, would contradict all analogy to outer experience. The soul that has ‘died,’ i.e., has become invisible to the senses, continues to exist no less than before, and is unremoved from its original life conditions. ... Another means of incarnation need only present itself to the soul's power of organization for the soul to stand there again in new bodily activity ...” (Paragraphs 133 Anthropology)

[ 4 ] Starting from such views there opens up for Immanuel Hermann Fichte the possibility of a self-knowledge that man attains when he observes himself from the point of view he gains through his experiences in his own supersensible entity. Man's sense-perceptible entity brings him to the point of thinking. But in thinking, after all, he grasps himself as a supersensible being, If he lifts mere thinking up into an inner experiencing—through which it is no longer mere thinking but rather a supersensible beholding,—he then gains a way of knowing through which he no longer looks only upon what is sense-perceptible, but also upon what is supersensible. If anthropology is the science of the human being by which he studies the part of himself to be found in the sense world, then, through his view of the supersensible, another science makes it appearance, about which Immanuel Hermann Fichte expresses himself in this way (paragraph 270): to “... anthropology ends up with the conclusion, established from the most varied sides, that man, in accordance with the true nature of his being, as though in the actual source of his consciousness, belongs to a supersensible world. Man's sense consciousness, on the other hand, and the phenomenal world (world of appearances) arising at the point of his eye, along with the whole life of the senses, including human senses: all this has no significance other than merely being the place in which that supersensible life of the human spirit occurs through the fact that the human spirit, by its own, free, conscious activity, leads the spiritual content of ideas from the beyond into the sense world ...” This fundamental apprehension of man's being now lifts “anthropology” in its final conclusions up to “anthroposophy.”

[ 5 ] Through Immanuel Hermann Fichte the cognitive impulse manifesting in the idealism of German world views is brought to the point of undertaking the first of those steps which can lead human insight to a science of the spiritual world. Many other thinkers strove like Immanuel Hermann Fichte to carry further the ideas of their predecessors: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. For, this German idealism points to the germinal power for a real development of those cognitive powers of man that behold the supersensible spiritual the way our senses behold the sense-perceptible material. Let us just look at several of these thinkers. One can see how fruitful the spiritual stream of German idealism proves to be in this direction if one does not refer merely to those thinkers who are discussed in the usual textbooks on the history of philosophy, but also to those whose spiritual work was enclosed within narrower boundaries. For example, there are the Little Writings (published 1869 in Leipzig) of Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who died in Bromberg on August 16, 1867 as headmaster of a secondary school. His book contains essays on “the antithesis between pantheism and deism in pre-Christian religions,” on the “concept of religion,” on “Kepler, his life and character,” etc. The basic undertone of these treatises is altogether of a sort to show how the thought-life of their author is rooted in the idealism of German world views. One of these essays speaks about the “reasonable grounds for believing in the immortality of the human soul.” This essay defends immortality at first only with reasons that spring from our ordinary thinking. But at the end, the following significant note is added by the publisher: “According to a letter of August 14, 1866 to his publishers, the author intended to expand this essay for the complete edition of his collected ‘Little Writings’ with an observation about the new body that the soul is working to develop for itself already in this life. The author's death the following year prevented the carrying out of this plan.” How a remark like this spotlights the effect upon thinkers of the idealism of German world views, stimulating them to penetrate in a scientific way into the spiritual realm! How many such attempts a person would discover today, even by investigating only those thinkers still to be found in literature! How many there must be that bore no fruit in literature but a great deal in life! One is looking there really, in the scientific consciousness ruling in our day, at a more or less forgotten stream in German spiritual life.

[ 6 ] One of those thinkers, hardly ever heard of today, is Ignaz Paul Vitalis Troxler. Let us mention only one of his numerous books, Lectures on Philosophy, published in 1835. A personality is expressing himself in this book who is absolutely conscious of how a person using merely his senses and the intellect that deals with the observations of his senses can know only a part of the world. Like Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Troxler also feels himself in his thinking to be standing within a supersensible world. But he also senses how the human being, when he removes himself from the power that binds him to the senses, can do more than place himself before a world that in the Hegelian sense is thought by him; through this removal he can experience within his inner being the blossoming of a purely spiritual means of knowledge through which he spiritually beholds a spiritual world, like the senses behold the sense world in sense perception. Troxler speaks of a “supra-spiritual sense:” And one can form a picture of what he means by this in the following way. The human being observes the things of the world through his senses. He thereby receives sense-perceptible pictures of these things. He then thinks about these pictures. Thoughts reveal themselves to him thereby that no longer bear the sensible pictorial element in themselves. Through the power of his spirit, therefore, man adds supersensible thoughts to the sense-perceptible pictures. If he now experiences himself in the entity that is thinking in him, in such a way that he ascends above mere thinking to spiritual experiencing, then, from out of this experiencing, an inner, purely spiritual power of picture making takes hold of him. He then beholds a world in pictures that can serve as a form of revelation for a supersensibly experienced reality. These pictures are not received by the senses; but they are full of life, just as sense-perceptible pictures are; they are not dreamed up; they are experiences in the supersensible world held fast by the soul in picture form. In ordinary cognitive activity, the sense-perceptible picture is present first and then, in the process of knowledge, the thought comes to join it—the thought, which is not a picture for the senses. In the spiritual process of knowledge, the supersensible experience is present; this experience as such could not be beheld if it did not, through a power in accordance with the nature of the spirit, pour itself into the picture that brings this power to spiritually perceptible embodiment. For Troxler, the cognitive activity of the “supra-spiritual sense” is of just such a kind. And the pictures of this supra-spiritual sense are grasped by the “supersensible spirit” of man in the same way that sense-perceptible pictures are grasped by human reason in knowledge of the sense world. In the working together of the supersensible spirit with the supra-spiritual sense, there evolved, in Troxler's view, our knowing of the spirit (see the sixth of his Lectures on Philosophy).

Taking his start from such presuppositions, Troxler has an inkling of a “higher man” within the man that experiences himself in the sense world; this “higher man” underlies the sense-perceptible man and belongs to the supersensible world; and in this view Troxler feels himself to be in harmony with what Friedrich Schlegel expressed. And thus, as was already the case earlier with Friedrich Schlegel, the highest qualities and activities manifested by the human being in the sense world become for Troxler the expression of what the supersensible human being can do. Through the fact that man stands within the sense world, his soul is possessed of the power of belief. But this power after all is only the manifestation, through the sense-perceptible body, of the supersensible soul. In the supersensible realm a certain faculty of the soul underlies our power of belief; if one wants to express it in a supersensibly pictorial way, one must call this a faculty of the supersensible man to hear. And it is the same with our power of hope. A faculty of the supersensible man to see underlies this power; corresponding with our activity of love, there is the faculty of the “higher man” to feel, to “touch,” in spirit, just as the sense of touch in the sense-perceptible world is the faculty to feel something. Troxler expresses himself on this subject (page 107 of his Lectures on Philosophy, Bern, 1835) in the following way: “Our departed friend Friedrich Schlegel has brought to light in a very beautiful and true way the relationship of the sense-perceptible to the spiritual man. In his lectures on the philosophy of language and the word, Schlegel says: ‘If one wants—in that alphabet of consciousness which provides the individual elements for the individual syllables and whole words—to refind the first beginnings of our higher consciousness, after God Himself constitutes the keystone of highest consciousness, then the feeling for the spirit must be accepted as the living center of our whole consciousness and as the point of union with the higher consciousness ... One is often used to calling these fundamental feelings for the eternal: ‘belief, hope, and love.’ If one is to regard these three fundamental feelings or characteristics or states of consciousness as just so many organs of knowledge and perception of the divine—or, if you will, at least organs that give inklings of the divine,—then one can very well compare them to the outer senses and instruments of sense perception, both in the above respect and in the characteristic form of apprehension that each of them has, Then love corresponds in a striking way—in the first stimulating soul touch, in the continuous attraction, and in the final perfect union—to the outer sense of touch; belief is the inner hearing of the spirit, uniting the given word to its higher message, grasping it, and inwardly preserving it; and hope is the eye, whose light can glimpse already in the distance the objects it craves deeply and longingly.’” That Troxler himself now goes above and beyond the meaning Schlegel gave these words and thinks them absolutely in the sense indicated above is shown by the words Troxler now adds: “Far loftier than intellect and will, and their interaction, far loftier than reason and spiritual activity (Freiheit), and their unity, are these ideas of our deeper heart (Gerrütsideen) that unite in a consciousness of spirit and of heart; and just as intellect and will, reason and spiritual activity—and all the soul capacities and abilities of a lower sort than they—represent an earthward directed reflection, so these three are a heavenward directed consciousness that is illuminated by a truly divine light.” The same thing is shown by the fact that Troxler also expresses himself about the supersensible soul body in exactly the same way one encounters in Immanuel Hermann Fichte: “Earlier philosophers have already distinguished a fine and noble soul body from the coarser body ... a soul that had about itself a picture of the body that they called a schema and that was for them the inner, higher man. ... In modern times even Kant, in The Dreams of a Spirit Seer, dreams up seriously as a joke a completely inward soul man that bears all the members of its outer man upon his spiritual body; Lavater also writes and thinks in this way; and even when Jean Paul jokes about Bonet's slip and Platner's soul girdle, which are supposed to be hidden inside the coarser outside skirt and martyr's smock, we also hear him asking again, after all: ‘to what end and from where were these extraordinary potentials and wishes laid in us, which, bare as swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthly covering to pieces? ... Within the stony members (of man) there grow and mature his living members according to a way of living unknown to us.’ We could,” Troxler continues, “present innumerable further examples of similar ways of thinking and writing that ultimately are only various views and pictures in which ... the one true teaching is contained of the individuality and immortality of man.”

[ 7 ] Troxler too speaks of the fact that upon the path of knowledge sought by him a science of man is possible through which—to use his own expressions—the “supra-spiritual sense” together with the “supersensible spirit” apprehend the supersensible being of man in an “anthroposophy,” On page 101 of his Lectures there is the sentence: “While it is now highly encouraging that modern philosophy, which ... must reveal itself ... in any anthroposophy, is winding its way upward, still one must not overlook the fact that this idea cannot be the fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of man must not be confused either with what philosophy sets up as subjective spirit or as finite ‘I,’ nor with what philosophy lets this ‘I’ be confronted by as absolute spirit or absolute personality.”

[ 8 ] There is no doubt that Troxler sought the way out of and beyond Hegel's thought-world more in dim feeling than in clear perception. One can nevertheless observe in his cognitive life how the stimulus of the idealism in the German world views of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel works in a personality who cannot make the views of this trio of thinkers into his own, but who finds his own way through the fact that he receives this stimulus.

[ 9 ] Karl Christian Planck belongs to those personalities in the evolution of German spiritual life who are forgotten now and were disregarded even during their own lifetimes. He was born in 1819 in Stuttgart and died in 1880; he was a professor in a secondary school in Ulm and later in a college in Blaubeuren. In 1877 he still hoped to be given the professorship in philosophy that became free then in Tübingen. This did not happen. In a series of writings he seeks to draw near to the world view that seems to him to express the spiritual approach of the German people. In his book Outline of a Science of Nature (1864) he states how he wants, in his own thoughts. to present the thoughts of the questing German folk soul: “The author is fully aware of the power of the deep-rooted preconceptions from past views that confront his book; nevertheless, just as the work itself has fought through to completion and into public view—in spite of all the adverse conditions confronting a work of this kind as a result of the whole situation and professional position of its author—so he is also certain that what must now fight for recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most obvious truth, and that through this, not merely its concerns but also the truly German view of things will triumph over any still unworthily external and un-German grasp of nature and spirit.—What, in unconscious profound inklings, has already been prefigured in our medieval literature will finally be fulfilled by our nation in the fullness of time. Impractical, afflicted by injury and scorn, the inwardness of the German spirit (as Wolfram von Eschenbach portrayed this inwardness in his Parzival), in the power of its ceaseless striving, finally attains the highest; this inwardness beholds the ultimate simple laws of the things of this world and of human existence itself, in their very foundations; and what literature has allegorized in a fanciful medieval way as the wonders of the grail, whose rulership its hero attains, receives, on the other hand, its purely natural fulfillment and reality in a lasting knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

In the last period of his life Karl Christian Planck drew his thought-world together in a book published by the philosopher Karl Köstlin in 1881 under the title Testament of a German.

[ 10 ] One can absolutely perceive in Planck's soul a similar kind of feeling for the riddle of knowledge as that revealed in the other thinker personalities characterized in this book. This riddle in its original form becomes for Planck the point of departure for his investigations. Within the circumference of the human thought-world can the strength be found by which man can apprehend true reality, the reality that gives his existence sense and meaning within world existence? Man sees himself placed into and over against nature. He can certainly form thoughts about what rules in nature's depths as powers of true being; but where is his guarantee that his thoughts have any significance at all other than that they are creations of his own soul, without kinship to those depths? If his thoughts were like this, then it would in fact remain unknown to man what he himself is and how he is rooted in the true world. Planck was just as far as Hegel from wanting to approach the world depths through any soul force other than thinking. He could hold no other view than that genuine reality must yield itself somehow to thinking. But no matter how far one reaches out with thinking, no matter how one seeks to strengthen its inner power: one still remains always only in thinking; in all the widths and depths of thinking one does not encounter being (Sein). By virtue of its own nature, thinking seems to exclude itself from any communion with being. Nevertheless, this insight into thinking's alienation from being now becomes for Planck precisely the ray of light that falls upon the world riddle and solves it. If thinking makes absolutely no claim of bearing within itself anything at all in the way of reality, if it actually is true that thinking reveals itself to be something unreal, then precisely through this fact it proves itself to be an instrument for expressing reality. If it were itself something real, then the soul could weave only in its reality, and could not leave it again; if thinking itself is unreal, then it will not disturb the soul through any reality of its own; by thinking, man is absolutely not within any thought-reality; he is within a thought-unreality that precisely therefore does not force itself upon him with its own reality but rather expresses that reality of which it speaks. Whoever sees in thinking itself something real must, in Planck's view, give up hope of arriving at reality; since, for him, thinking must place itself between the soul and reality. If thinking itself is nothing, it can therefore also not conceal reality from our activity of knowing; then reality must be able to reveal itself in thinking.

[ 11 ] With this view Planck has, to begin with, attained only the starting point for his world view. For, in the thought-weaving immediately present in the soul during life, that thinking is by no means operative which is pure, self-renouncing, and even self-denying, There play into this ordinary thought weaving what lives in the mental picturing, feeling, willing, and wanting of the soul. Because this is so, the clouding of world views occurs. And Planck's striving is to attain a kind of world view in which everything it contains is the result of thinking, yet nothing stems from thinking itself, In everything that is made into a thought about the real world, one must look at what lives in thinking but without itself being thought by us, Planck paints his picture of the world with a thinking that gives itself up in order to allow the world to shine from it.

[ 12 ] As an example of the way Planck wants to arrive at a picture of the world through such striving, let us characterize with a few strokes how he thinks about the being of the earth.

If someone pictures the earth in the way advocated by purely physical geology, then, for Planck's world view, there is no truth in this picture. To picture the earth in this way would be the same as speaking of a tree and fixing one's gaze only upon the trunk, without its leaves, blossoms, and fruit. To the sight of our physical eyes, such a tree trunk can be called reality. But in a higher sense it is no reality. For, as a mere trunk, it cannot occur as such anywhere in our world. It can be what it is only in so far as those growth forces arise in it at the same time which unfold the leaves, blossoms, and fruits. In the reality of the trunk one must think these forces in addition and must be aware that the bare trunk gives a picture of reality deceiving to the beholder, The fact that something or other is present to the senses is not yet proof that in this form it is also a reality, The earth, pictured as the totality of what it manifests in mineral configurations and in the facts occurring within these configurations, is no reality, Whoever wants to picture something real about the earth must picture it in such a way that its mineral realm already contains within itself the plant realm, Just as the trunk configuration of the tree includes its leaves and blossoms; yes, that within the “true earth” the animal realm and man are already present along with it. But do not say that all this is obvious and that Planck, basically, is only deceiving himself in thinking that not everyone sees it this way. Planck would have to reply to this: Where is the person who sees it this way? Certainly, everyone pictures the earth as a planetary body with plants, animals, and man. But they in fact picture the mineral earth, constituted of geological layers, with plants growing out of its surface, and with animals and human beings moving around on it. But this earth as a sum, added up out of minerals, plants. animals, and human beings, does not exist at all. It is only a delusion of the senses. On the other hand there is a true earth; it is a completely supersensible configuration, an invisible being, which provides the mineral foundation from out of itself; but it is not limited to this, for it manifests itself further in the plant realm, then in the animal realm, then in the human realm. Only that person has the right eye for the mineral, plant, animal, and human realm who beholds the entirety of the earth in its supersensible nature, and who feels, for example, how the picture of the material mineral realm by itself, without the picture of the soul evolution of mankind, is a delusion. Certainly, one can picture a material mineral realm to oneself; but one is living in a world-lie and not in the world-truth if, in doing so, one does not have the feeling that with a mental picture like this, one is caught in the same madness as a person who wanted to think that a man whose head has been struck off would calmly go on with his life.

It might be said: If true knowledge necessitates what is indicated here, then such knowledge, after all, could never be achieved; for, whoever asserts that the mineral earth is no reality because it must be viewed within the entirety of the earth should say too that the entirety of the earth must be viewed in the plant system and so on. Whoever raises this objection, however, has not grasped the significance of what underlies a world view that is in accordance with the spirit. In all human activity of knowing, in fact, the issue is not merely that one think correctly, but also that one think in accordance with reality. In speaking of a painting one can certainly say that one is not thinking in accordance with reality if one looks only at one person when there are three in the painting; but this assertion, within its rightful scope, cannot be refuted by the statement: No one understands this painting who also does not know all the preceding paintings of the same artist. A thinking both correct and in accordance with reality is in fact necessary for knowing reality. To consider, on their own, a mineral as a mineral, a plant as a plant, etc., can be in accordance with reality; the mineral earth is not a real configuration, however; it is a configuration of our imagination, even when one is aware of the fact that the mineral earth is only a part of everything earthly.

That is what is significant about a personality like Planck: he attains an inner state in which he does not reflect upon but rather experiences the truth of a thought; he unfolds a special power in his own soul by which to experience when not to think a particular thought because, through its own nature, it kills itself. To grasp the existence of a reality that bears within itself its own life and its own death, this belongs to the kind of soul attitude that does not depend upon the sense world to tell it: this is or this is not.

[ 13 ] From this point of view Planck sought in thinking to grasp what lives in natural phenomena and in human existence in historical, artistic, and judicial life. In a brilliant book, he wrote on the Truth and Banality of Darwinism. He calls this work a “monument to the history of modern (1872) German science.” There are people who experience a personality like Planck as hovering in unworldly conceptual heights and lacking a sense for practical life. Practical life requires people who develop healthy judgment based on “real” life, as they call it. Now, with respect to this way of experiencing Planck, one can also hold the opinion: Many things would be different in real life if this easy-going view of life and of living life were less widespread in reality, and if on the other hand the opinion could grow somewhat that thinkers like Planck—because they acquire for themselves an attitude of soul through which they unite themselves with true reality—also have a truer judgment about the relationships of life than the people who call them “dreamers in concepts” (Begriffsschwärmer) and impractical philosophers. The opinion is also possible that those dullards who are averse to such supposed “dreaming in concepts” and who think themselves so very practical in life are losing their sense for the true relationships of life, whereas the impractical philosophers are developing it to the point that it can lead them right to their goal. One can arrive at such an opinion when one considers Planck and sees in him, combined with the acme of philosophical development of ideas, a far-sighted accurate judgment about the needs of a genuine conduct of life and about the events of outer life. Even if one holds a different view about much of what Planck has developed in the way of ideas about shaping outer life—which is also the case with the present writer,—still one can acknowledge that his views can provide, precisely in this area, a sound starting point in life for solving practical problems; even if in proceeding from there one arrives at something entirely different from one's starting point. And one should assert: People who are “dreamers in concepts” in this way and who, precisely because of this, can see what powers are at work in real life are more competent to meet the needs of this real life than many a person who believes himself to be imbued with practical skill precisely through the fact that, in his view, he has not let contact with any world of ideas “make him stupid.” (In his book, Nineteenth Century Views of the World and of Life, published in 1900, the present author has written about Karl Christian Planck's place in the evolution of modern world views. This book was published in a new edition in 1914 under the title Riddles of Philosophy.)

Someone might maintain that it is unjustified to regard Planck's thoughts as significant for the motive forces of the German people since these thoughts have not become widespread. Such an opinion misses the point when speaking about the influence of the being of a people upon the views of a thinker from that people. What is working there are the impersonal (of ten unconscious) powers of a people, living in their activities in the most varied realms of existence and shaping the ideas of a thinker like Planck. These powers were there before he appeared and will work on afterward; they live, even if they are not spoken of; they live, even if they are not recognized. And it can be the case that they work in a particularly strong way in an indigenous thinker like this, who is not spoken of, because less of what these powers contain streams into the opinions held about him than into his thoughts. A thinker like this can of ten stand there alone, and not only during his lifetime; even his thoughts can stand there alone in the opinion of posterity. But if one has apprehended the particular nature of his thoughts, then one has recognized an essential trait of the folk soul, a trait that has become a thought in him and will remain imperishably in his people, ready to reveal itself in ever new impulses. Independent of the question: What effectiveness was granted to his work? is the other question: What worked in him and will lead again and again to accomplishments in the same direction? The Testament of a German by Karl Christian Planck was republished in a second edition in 1912. It is a pity that many of those who were philosophically minded and fond of writing at that time mustered up more enthusiasm for the thoughts in Henri Bergson's world view—lightly woven and therefore more easily comprehensible to undemanding souls—than for the rigorously interrelated and far-reaching ideas of Planck. How much has indeed been written about the “new configurating” of world views by Bergson: written, particularly, by those who discover the newness of a world view so easily because they lack understanding, and of ten even knowledge, of what has already been there for a long time. Relative to the “newness” of one of Bergson's main ideas the present author has pointed in his book Riddles of Philosophy to the following significant situation. (And it should be mentioned, by the way, that this indication was written before the present war. See the foreword to the second volume of the above book.)

Bergson is led by his thoughts to a transformation of the widespread idea of the evolution of organic entities. He does not set at the beginning of this evolution the simplest organism and then think that, due to outer forces, more complicated organisms emerge from it all the way up to man; he pictures that, at the starting point of evolution, there stands a being that in some form or other already contains the impulse to become man. This being, however, can bring this impulse to realization only by first expelling from itself other impulses that also lie within it. By expelling the lower organisms, this being gains the strength to realize the higher ones. Thus man, in his actual being, is not what arose last, but rather what was at work first, before everything else. He first expels the other entities from his formative powers in order to gain by this preliminary work the strength to come forth himself into outer sense-perceptible reality. Of course many will object: But numbers of people have already thought that an inner evolutionary drive was working in the evolution of organisms. And one can refer to the long-present thought of purposefulness, or to views held by natural scientists like Nageli and others. But such objections do not pertain in a case like this one. For, with Bergson's thought it is not a matter of starting from the general idea of an inner evolutionary force, but rather from a specific mental picture of what man is in his full scope; and of seeing from this picture that this man, thought of as supersensible, has impulses within him to first set the other beings of nature into sense-perceptible reality and then also to place himself into this reality.

[ 14 ] Now this is the point. What can be read in Bergson in a scintillating lightly draped configuration of ideas had already been expressed before that by the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss in a powerful and strongly thought-through way. Preuss is also one of those personalities belonging to the presentation here of a more or less forgotten stream in the development of German world views that are in accordance with the spirit. With a powerful sense for reality, Preuss brings together natural-scientific views and world views—in his book Spirit and Matter (1882), for example. One finds the Bergsonian thought we cited expressed by Preuss in the following way: “It should ... be time ... to present a teaching about the origins of organic species that is founded not only upon principles set up in a one-sided way by descriptive natural science, but that is also in full harmony with the rest of natural laws (which are also the laws of human thinking). This teaching should also be free of any hypothesizing and should rest only upon rigorous conclusions drawn from scientific observation in the broadest sense. This teaching should rescue the concept of species as much as Is factually possible, but at the same time should take Darwin's concept of evolution into its domain and seek to make It fruitful.—The center of this new teaching is man, the species that recurs only once on our planet: homo sapiens. Strange that older observers started with objects of nature and then erred to such an extent that they did not find the path to man, in which effort even Darwin Indeed succeeded only in a most pitiful and utterly unsatisfying way by seeking the ancestor of the lord of creation among the animals. Actually, the natural scientist would have to start with himself as a human being and then, continuing on through the whole realm of existence and of thinking return to mankind ... It was not by chance that human nature arose out of earthly nature; It was by necessity. Man is the goal of tellurian processes, and every other form arising besides him has borrowed its traits from his. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos. ... When the germs of his being had arisen, the remaining organic element no longer had the necessary strength to engender further human germs. What arose then was animal or plant. ...”

[ 15 ] The idea, as it lives in the philosophy of German idealism's picture of the being of man, also shines forth from the mental pictures of this little-known thinker of Elsfleth, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss. Out of this view he knows how to make Darwinism—insofar as Darwinism looks only at the evolution occurring in the sense world—into a part of a world view that Is in accordance with the spirit and that wishes to know the being of man In Its development out of the depths of the world-all. As to how Bergson arrived at his thoughts—so glittering in his depletion, but so powerfully shining in Preuss's—let us emphasize that less here than the fact that in the writings of the little-known Preuss the most fruitful seeds can be found, able to give many a person a stronger impetus than that to be found in Bergson's glittering version of these same thoughts. To be sure, one must also meet Preuss with more ability to deepen one's thinking than was shown by those who waxed so enthusiastic about the “new life” instilled in our world view by Bergson. What is being said here about Bergson and Preuss has absolutely nothing to do with national sympathies and antipathies.

Recently, H. Bönke has investigated Bergson's “original new philosophical creation,” because Bergson has found it necessary in these fateful times to speak such hate-filled words and to shower such contempt upon German spiritual life (see Bönke's writing: Plagiarizer Bergson, Membre de l'Institut. Answer to the Disparagements of German Science by Edmond Perrier, President de l'Academie des Sciences. Charlottenburg, Huth, 1915). When one considers all that Bönke presents about the way Bergson reproduces what he has gotten from German thought-life, the statements will not seem exaggerated that the philosopher Wundt makes in the “Central Literary Paper of Germany,” number 46, of November 13, 1915: “... Bönke shows no lack ... of incriminating material. The greater part of his book consists of passages, taken from Bergson's and Schopenhauer's works, in which the younger author repeats the thoughts of the older, either verbatim or with slight variation. Even so, this alone is not the decisive point. Therefore, let us be a little bit clearer and more critical in ordering the examples advanced by Bönke. They then fall definitely into three categories. The first contains sentences from both authors that, except for minor differences, coincide exactly. ...” In the other categories the coincidence lies more in the way their thoughts are formed.

Now it is perhaps really not so important to show how much Bergson, who condemns German spiritual life so furiously, reveals himself to be a right willing proponent of this German spiritual life; more important is the fact that Bergson propounds this spiritual life in lightly woven, easily attainable reflections, and that many a critic would have done better to wait with his enthusiastic proclaiming of this “new enlivener” of world views until, through better understanding of those thinkers to whom Bergson owes his stimulus, the critic might have refrained from his proclamation.

That a person be stimulated by his predecessors is a natural thing in the evolution of mankind; what matters, however, is whether the stimulus leads to a process of further development or—and Bönke's presentation also makes this quite clear—leads to a process of regression as in Bergson's case.

A Side Glance

[ 16 ] In 1912 The Lofty Goal of Knowledge by Omar al Raschid Bey was published in Munich. (Please note: The author is not Turkish; he is German; and the view he advocates has nothing to do with Mohammedanism, but is an ancient Indian world view appearing in modern dress.) The book appeared after the author's death. If the author had had the wish to produce in his soul the requirements needed for understanding the series of thinkers depicted in this present book, a book like his would not have appeared in our age, and its author would not have believed he should show to himself and others, by what he said in his book, a path of knowledge appropriate to the present day. But because of the way things appear to him, the author of The Lofty Goal could have only a pitying smile for the assertion just made here. He would not see that everything he presents to our soul experience in his final chapter “Awakening out of Appearances” on the basis of what preceded this chapter and with this chapter, was, in fact, a correct path of knowledge for the ancient Indian. One can understand this path completely as one belonging to the past. The author would not see that this path of knowledge, however, leads into another path if one does not stop prematurely on the first, but rather travels on upon the path of reality in accordance with the spirit as modern idealism has done.

[ 17 ] The author would have to have recognized that his “Awakening out of Appearances” is only an apparent awakening; actually it is a drawing back of oneself—effected by one's own soul experiences—from the appearances, a kind of quaking when faced by the appearances, and therefore not an “awakening out of appearances,” but rather a falling asleep into delusion—a self-delusion that considers its world of delusion to be reality because it cannot get to the point of taking the path into a reality in accordance with the spirit. Planck's self-denying thinking is a soul experience into which al Raschid's deluded thinking cannot penetrate. In The Lofty Goal there is the statement: “Whoever seeks his salvation in this world has fallen prey to this world and remains so; for him there is no escape from unstilled desire; for him there is no escape from vain play; for him there is no escape from the tight fetters of the ‘I’. Whoever does not lift himself out of this world lives and dies with his world.” Before these sentences stand these: “Whoever seeks his salvation in the ‘I,’ for him egoism (Selbstsucht) is a commandment, for him egoism is God.” But whoever recognizes in a living way the motive soul forces that hold sway in the series of thinkers from Fichte up to Planck will see through the deception manifesting in these statements from The Lofty Goal. For he recognizes how the obsession (Sucht) with oneself—egoism—lies before the experience of the “I” in Fichte's sense, and how a fleeing from an acknowledgment of the “I”—in an ancient Indian sense—seemingly leads arrogant cognitive striving farther into the spiritual world, but actually throws one back into obsession with one's “I.” For only the finding of the “I” lets the “I” escape the fetters of obsession with the “I,” the fetters of egoism. The point, in fact, really is whether, in “awakening out of appearances,” one has experiences of The Lofty Goal that are produced by a falling back into an obsession with one's “I,” or whether one has the kind of experiences to which the following words can point. Whoever seeks his salvation in fleeing from the “I” falls prey to obsession with the “I”; whoever finds the “I” frees himself from obsession with the “I”; for, obsession with the “I” makes the “I” into its own idol; finding the “I” gives the “I” to the world. Whoever seeks his salvation in fleeing from the world will be thrown back from the world into his own delusions; he is deluded by an arrogant illusion of knowledge, which lets a vain playing with ideas appear to him as world truth; he looses the fetters of the “I” in front and does not notice how, from behind, the enemy of knowledge binds them all the faster. Whoever, scorning the phenomena of the world, wants to lift himself above the world leads himself into a delusion that holds him all the more securely because it reveals itself to him as wisdom; he leads himself into a delusion by which he holds himself and others back from the difficult awakening in the idealism of modern world views, and dreams into an “awakening out of appearances,” A supposed awakening, like that which The Lofty Goal wishes to indicate, is indeed a source of that experience which ever and again makes the “awakened person” speak of the sublimity of his knowledge; but it is also a hindrance for the experiencing of this idealism in world views. Please do not take these remarks as a wish on the author's part to disparage in any way al Raschid's kind of cognitive striving; what the present author is saying here is an objection that seems necessary for him to raise against a world view that seems to him to live in the worst possible self-delusion. Such an objection can certainly also be raised when one values, from a certain point of view, a manifestation of the spirit; it can seem most necessary precisely there, because that seriousness moves him to do so which must hold sway in dealing with questions of knowledge.

Dear attendees,

When the topics of theosophy or spiritual science arise today, many of our contemporaries still believe that this school of thought has its roots or starting points in some oriental ideas or spiritual experiences that are foreign to our Western culture. And this prejudice is seized upon by those who believe they see in Theosophy or spiritual science something that is opposed to Christianity, or to a deeper understanding of Christianity, in so far as it permeates our entire Occidental spiritual culture. If such an opinion is entertained, it is based, in particular, on the fact that within the theosophical world view, what may be called the doctrine of repeated earthly lives or, as it is also called, the doctrine of reincarnation, is presented as a basic fact. And it is believed that such an idea, that man has to undergo repeated lives on earth, could only have been taken from Buddhism or some other oriental world view. Now, if we make such a presupposition, then the whole position of spiritual science or theosophy in the spiritual life of our time is misunderstood, because what is this idea of repeated earthly lives for modern man, or perhaps it is better to say what can this idea be for today's conditions?

Today there is a word that is indeed usually only used in connection with scientific facts, but which has a fascinating effect on the educated of the present - on those people of the present who believe they are at the height of our intellectual life - and that is the word 'development'. Admittedly, today this word is usually only used to refer to the development of external forms, that is, the forms of subordinate living beings up to and including humans. The elaboration of this idea of development for human life, encompassing the whole of human life, including the human soul and spirit, is still rarely thought of today; for if one were to engage with the elaboration of the idea of development for the whole of human , one would gradually have to realize that the same thing that we call the development of the species or genus in the animal kingdom must present itself in humans as the development of the individual individual, of the individual individuality.

But this means nothing other than that if we see how the individual species develop apart from one another in the animal world, then we must approach the individual with the same interest as we do the species in the animal kingdom, and we must speak of the development of the individual individuality in the human being. Let us commit this to memory: if we have a healthy mind, we show the same interest in the individual human being as we do in the animal species or genus. We have the same interest in the human being as we do in each individual lion – whether it is the lion's grandfather, father, son, and so on. Therefore, we must think of the same lawfulness that we think of as a law of development in animal species, we must think of it in terms of the individual individuality in the case of human beings.

So you can see that in the field of spiritual science we speak of the development of the individual human individuality. And we must come to say: What comes into existence in the human being at birth, what gradually and mysteriously unfolds from the still indeterminate facial features, expressions and gestures of the first childlike age, that is the soul-spiritual of the human being, which confronts us with each individual as something special, as an individual. We cannot attribute this to the inherited qualities of the immediate ancestors alone, but we must imagine this relationship of human life to its causes differently than the relationship of the animal to its ancestors. There we understand everything that lives in the individual animal – the form, the physiognomy – when we understand the species. But with humans it is different.

What lives in man, we find in each person in a special, particular way. What has developed in man as a generic characteristic, we attribute to physical inheritance; but what confronts us as his special being, we must attribute to what the person, as the cause of his present life, has gone through in earlier lives, in earlier stages of existence. And what we encounter in the present framework of his personality, that in turn forms the cause, the basis for his work in a later life. Thus we have a living chain of development that goes from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation. And we see everything that comes to us as characteristic of a person in such a way that we see the necessity of tracing it back to earlier soul and spiritual states.

Thus Theosophy or spiritual science is able to introduce a law in the higher realm of human life, just as it was incorporated relatively recently into the realm of the natural life of human development. Yes, today's humanity has a short memory. Otherwise it would not be necessary to point out that as late as the seventeenth century not only laymen but also scholars of natural science assumed that lower animals could develop out of decaying river mud without the introduction of germs of life. And it was the great Italian naturalist Francesco Redi who first caused this tremendous upheaval in natural science thinking by stating that living things can only come from living things.

Just as this sentence applies to natural life within certain limits, so the other sentence applies to human life within certain limits: spiritual and mental things can only have their origin in spiritual and mental things. And it is only an inaccurate observation if one wants to trace back what works its way out of the vague depths of an adolescent's consciousness from day to day, from week to week, from year to year as a spiritual-soul element to the mere physical line of inheritance of the ancestors – is just as inaccurate an observation as it is inaccurate to trace what lives in animals, even in earthworms, back to the mere laws of the substances that make up river mud just because one has not considered the living germ. It is an inaccurate observation when we speak today only of the inheritance of mental and moral abilities because we do not pay attention to the soul-spiritual core, which integrates that which it can appropriate from the inherited traits in the same way that the living germ of the living being appropriates the substance in which that germ is embedded.

Such truths always fare in much the same way in the course of human development. In those days, Francesco Redi only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today everyone, from the Haeckelianer to the most radical opponents of Haeckel, will recognize this sentence as self-evident, but only within the limits of external nature, insofar as it concerns the body. At that time, however, the sentence “Living things can only come from living things” was a tremendous heresy. Today, however, heretics are no longer burned. But if one stands on the firm ground of today's scientific facts - while in reality one only stands on the ground of one's preconceived ideas, of contemporary prejudices - one regards the law of repeated earth lives, which is the same for the higher areas of spiritual existence as Redi's sentence that living things can only come from living things, as heresy, as fantasy, as sheer madness. But the time is not far distant when it will be said of this law in the same way: It is really incomprehensible that any man could ever have thought differently.

Whence then comes this law of repeated earth-lives? Do we need to go back to some Eastern philosophy of life, must this law be borrowed from Buddhism? No. To understand the law of repeated earthly lives in the context of modern European culture, all that is needed is an unbiased, spirit-searching view that overlooks the facts. And what this view sees has nothing to do with any tradition. Like any other scientific law, it will be accepted by modern spiritual education because, based on the idea of development, it necessarily leads to this law.

But anyone who wanted to claim that this could add anything to our Western intellectual development that would run counter to Christianity is not aware of how this entire Western intellectual life is permeated by the living weaving and essence of Christian feeling, of Christian feeling. Indeed, if one is able to observe with an open mind, it can be seen that the way of thinking, the forms of imagination, even of those who today behave as the worst opponents of Christianity, have only been made possible by the education of Western humanity, which they have received through Christianity. Anyone who is willing and able to observe impartially will find that even the most radical opponents of Christianity fight it with arguments borrowed from Christianity itself.

But there is a radical difference between the Christian essence and what we can call the pre-Christian essence - a difference that is just not immediately apparent because everything in human development is slow and gradual and always encompasses the earlier in the later. There is something in the pre-Christian world view that is radically different from the Christian one, and this can be found and observed among the oriental world views, even in their most modern form, in Buddhism, for example. We can see this fundamental difference between the essence of Christianity and the oriental feeling and thinking that has found expression in Buddhism if we consider just a few of its aspects.

For this purpose, we need only recall a conversation that can be found in Buddhist literature and that is deeply rooted in Buddhist feeling and thinking. By studying such descriptions, we can gain a much more accurate insight into the essence of any world view than by considering its highest tenets and dogmas. After all, one can argue at length about whether this or that is to be understood in terms of Nirvana or Christian bliss. But how that which lives in the Buddhist and Christian way of thinking works its way into people's feelings, and how these feelings then relate to the whole world - the physical and the spiritual world - that is decisive for the value, the meaning and the essence of a world view and for its effect on human souls.

In Buddhist literature, we find preserved that remarkable conversation between the legendary King Milinda and the sage Nagasena. In this conversation, it is said that King Milinda came to the sage Nagasena by chariot and wanted to be instructed regarding the nature of the human soul. The sage then asked the king: “Tell me, did you come by chariot or on foot?” “By the chariot,” the king replied. ”Now tell me, when you have the chariot before you, what do you have there before you? You have the shafts, the body of the chariot, and the wheels before you. Is the shaft the chariot? Is the body the chariot? Are the wheels the chariot? No! Is that all you have in front of you? There is also the seat of the chariot! And what else do you have in front of you? Nothing! The chariot is therefore only a name or a form, because the realities that are in front of you are the box, the shaft, the wheels and the seat. What else is there is only name and form. Just as only a name or a form holds the individual parts together – wheels, shaft, body and seat – so too the individual abilities, feelings, thoughts and perceptions of the human soul are held together not by something that can be described as a particular reality, but only by a name or a form. So it can be said – felt in the right Buddhist sense: A central being in man, which holds together the individual human soul abilities, cannot be found, just as little as anything other than name and form can be found except for the drawbar, the wagon body, the seat and the wheels on the wagon.

And through yet another simile, the wise man made clear to [the king] the nature of the soul, saying: Consider the mango fruit – it comes from the mango tree. You know that the mango tree is only there because another mango fruit was there before, from which it was created. The mango plant comes from the mango fruit, which has rotted in the earth. What can you say about the mango fruit? It comes from the rotten seed. Now follow the path from the old fruit to the new mango plant. What does the new plant have in common with the old plant other than its name or shape? — But it is the same with the soul's existence, said the wise Nagasena to King Milinda. [It was also there only in name!] It was also a law of experience in Buddhism that a person undergoes repeated earthly lives. But this law did not prompt the actual central Buddhist feeling to seek and see something other than name and form in what passes from one life to another, just as with a mango fruit, where nothing passes from one to the other except name and form. Thus, according to the Buddhist view, we can see the effects of past lives in what we call our destiny in a life – our abilities, talents and so on. But no central soul-being passes over from the earlier life to the new one; only causes work out into effects, and what we have in common in one life with an earlier life – except for what we feel to be our destiny in the new life – is only name and form. You have to feel your way through what is actually at hand in Buddhism.

And now we could – in order to remain objective – translate that which appears to us in this story as the correct Buddhist feeling by transferring the whole thing into the Christian sense. What would the two stories sound like in a Christian sense? They don't exist, but let's try to translate them and thereby make the difference very clear.

A Christian sage would say something like this: Take a look at the chariot – when you look at it, you see the shafts, the body, the wheels and whatever else is on the outside. The chariot seems to you to be only name and form, but try to see if you can travel on a name or a form; you can't get anywhere in the world on that. Nevertheless, although only name and form are there for the visible, there is something else besides the body of the wagon, the shaft and the wheels and so on, which signifies a reality when a wagon stands before us and not just its parts. As I said, there is no such Christian legend, but a Christian-minded person felt this when he coined the phrase “parts”, which the scientifically minded person often has in his hand, but for which he lacks the context, when he said:

Then he has the parts in his hand,
Unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing.

Goethe, who coined the word, knew that the spiritual bond was a reality.

And now the second parable: Imagine the mango fruit hanging from the tree above and the one that has rotted below. Not only do they have the same name and form, but these also live in the same way in the old and new fruit. However, what makes this mango fruit the same as the other, rotten one is in the forces, in the elements, which are supersensible and which pass from the first mango fruit into the second.

Thus, in the psychological experiences that a person goes through from life to life, we see a central ego at work, a central soul being. And when we see a person in a later life, what he experiences as fate, what abilities and talents he possesses, and so on, is not only the effect of the causes of previous lives, but there is a central, cohesive being that passes from the previous embodiment into the new one.

Thus we see how the idea of repeated earthly lives - re-embodiment or reincarnation - must be brought to life through the fundamental Christian idea. Those who take Christianity seriously are not afraid that the foundations of Christianity could falter when new truths emerge in people's view. Christianity is so strong that it can give rise to feelings such as those just characterized, that it – like all other truths – can also tolerate the truth of repeated lives on earth, and even accept it willingly when human thinking has progressed to the point where this law can be impressed upon it. But then the fundamental impulse of Christianity will assert itself: the reality of the soul-spiritual, which passes through the various earthly lives as a central core.

Thus we have presented such a contrast that can make clear to us the fundamental difference between Buddhism and Christianity. We must grasp both worldviews in their basic sentiments [and not in their dogmas], because one could argue about dogma ideas and concepts not for days, but for months and years. Whether Nirvana is the same as Christian beatitude, for instance, is a question that could be argued about endlessly and which would lead to logical and dialectical quibbling. But the point is never to enter into discussions about the highest concepts, but rather to consider how religious or other ideological impulses fit into the soul, into the heart, into the hopes and certainties of life. In another, [even clearer] way, the same thing confronts us when we allow the basic impulse that inspired the great Buddha to take effect on us. I deliberately say “the great Buddha”, because to those who are able to penetrate what, like the last dawn of all pre-Christian thought, the Buddha produced as a worldview, this Buddha appears as a great, exalted figure.

The greatest influence on the great Buddha seems to us to be the legend that says: We are told - and the legend tells us more truly than any external history - that the Buddha initially spent his life in such a way, through the care of his parents, that he only got to know the joys of life, but not its suffering. But once he was led out of his parents' castle, and there he saw life in its reality. There he saw a sick person. Only now did he learn that life does not only reveal abundant health, now he learned that the same thing that calls illness into life also brings it into life. From this he learned the meaning of suffering for life. And he learned the meaning of suffering through further examples that came his way in life. He saw an old man and said to himself: old age is suffering - as he had first said to himself: illness is suffering. - And finally, when he was shown a corpse, he said to himself in the face of the end of life: death is suffering.

And in further developing this impulse, we see how Buddha recognized suffering in the act of coming into existence. He said: birth is suffering, illness is suffering, old age is suffering, death is suffering. Being separated from what one loves is suffering, being united with what one does not love is suffering, not being able to achieve what one desires is suffering. And from this, the great Buddha derived the essence of his doctrine of salvation.

Buddhism is a doctrine of salvation in that it says: It is the urge for existence, the thirst for existence, that leads that which is better than this world into the world. Only through the salvation of this world can man enter into real higher states of existence. But he can only achieve this by fighting the thirst for existence that leads him into earthly embodiment. Let us not grasp things only theoretically, but also emotionally; let us see the great Buddha with the great, wide heart full of love that he had. Let us grasp him as he stands opposite a corpse that represents the end of life for him, and he says to himself: “Death is suffering.” In the twilight of the old, pre-Christian world view, a corpse becomes the symbol of suffering for the great Buddha, the symbol that this thirst for earthly life must be fought. He teaches man to turn away from this earthly life; he teaches him to rise to what beckons him as Nirvana.

And now let us go back 600 years and then forward again 600 years and then take another look at humanity's view of life. 600 years before our era, we have the work of the great Buddha in India. Then, 600 years after our era, we no longer have to do with the Buddha, but with simple, naive minds. Like Buddha, they fix their eyes on a corpse – on the corpse of Christ Jesus, who died on the cross and who represents the Mystery of Golgotha for them. What is this corpse for these simple people 600 years after the founding of Christianity? The same as was once the symbol of a religion of redemption for the Buddha is now, for these simple people who received the Christian impulse 1200 years after Buddha, not the symbol of a religion of redemption that turns away from all earthly things, but the symbol of a religion of resurrection, for at the sight of this corpse, the certainty descends into human hearts and human souls that all suffering and all death is the gateway to the victory of the spirit over all that is physical, to liberation from death.

There was no greater, no more incisive impulse than the Christ impulse, which came into the development of mankind between the two epochs: between the epoch when even the great Buddha could look at a corpse and only find the idea of deliverance from the body, and that epoch when one could again look at a corpse, but now saw in this corpse a symbol that the highest and best, the most valuable that lives within man, will always be the victor over the physical, will always rise, will rise above the physical. This is how one must characterize the impulse, because only through it can one approach the impulse of Christianity in the right way, through feeling, as it should be, and not through theoretical ideas. And if we now want to grasp this impulse of Christianity in the right sense, we can still do so through something else.

Basically, the pre-Christian religions do not know something that only through Christianity has entered fully into the world view of humanity. Here again we can look to Buddhism. If we examine and understand it, we find that it has crystallized out of one of the highest concepts of the human being, the concept of the Bodhisattva. What is that, a bodhisattva? Well, if you want to grasp this concept of the bodhisattva, in which Buddhism sees one of the highest guides in the spiritual life of humanity, you have to look back a little at the developmental history of the human mind and soul. We must be clear about the fact that just as we live today in relation to our state of mind, this state that we carry within us is also subject to development. The way we see the things around us today and how we combine our senses with our minds – that is our present state of mind – this soul nature has developed slowly and gradually. And anyone who, without the means of spiritual science but only through thinking, looks back at the cultural development of humanity will become aware of how, in earlier times, the human soul was in a very different state.

Now, I would first like to characterize how spiritual research has to understand this earlier state. We look back into ancient times, into the times of prehistoric human development - into times to which no historical documents lead back. Man did not see the world in the same way as he does today, for example in science; in those times, a kind of clairvoyant state of mind still existed. People today are annoyed when clairvoyant states of mind are spoken of, and perhaps rightly so, because the word is so often misused today, and it is often understood to mean something highly superstitious. But what is really meant by it is quite different from the state of mind we have today from waking up to falling asleep, and the state of unconsciousness during sleep. In ancient times, there was a third state of consciousness between waking and sleeping. All that remains of this third state for today's humanity is what we must call a kind of atavism, namely the dream state. The only thing that ancient clairvoyance had in common with today's dream consciousness was the pictorial, the symbolic. But while today's dream images usually appear fragmented and chaotic, the content of what was perceived clairvoyantly could be related to spiritual realities that lie behind our sensual world, so that we can say: In an intermediate state between waking and sleeping, the spiritual world was an immediate experience for people of ancient times. Man looked into spiritual reality. And therein lies the meaning of human development: that man has descended from that state to our present consciousness, where we have bought the possibility, through the surrender of ancient clairvoyance, to grasp the world with our intellectual concepts, with our ideas.

But development continues, and in the future, this present consciousness will again unite with the old clairvoyant consciousness. Just as today some individuals undergo a development of soul through which they develop a clairvoyant consciousness in addition to the external object consciousness, so later all of humanity will attain an intellect that simultaneously functions as a clairvoyant consciousness. So we can say that people who lived in ancient, very ancient cultures could still look back to a time in the development of humanity when their forefathers had knowledge that came from direct observation of the divine spiritual world. And in those most ancient times, the leaders in regard to such knowledge were those people whom, in the sense of Buddhism, we call the first Bodhisattvas. Then the clairvoyant powers of people increasingly declined. And those peoples who particularly felt the decline of these abilities, as was the case with the inhabitants of ancient India, incorporated this looking back to the origin of man out of the spiritual into their feeling, and they said: In the way we now look at the world with our ordinary day-to-day consciousness, we basically do not live in a way that corresponds to the innermost core of our being.

People in earlier times could look back into the spiritual world to which we actually belong; but today this is only possible for those who undergo a special spiritual development. The ancient Indian people saw behind the physical world the old spiritual home of man, which could well have been seen in the past, but which can no longer be seen now. They felt this so strongly that they said: Everything that today's consciousness beholds is Maya, the great illusion, the great deception; behind it is what the ancestors beheld, what our souls themselves beheld in previous bodies. And what our fathers handed down to us in the teachings of ancient times contains the truth about the spiritual home of man. And so the old Indian strove out of Maya, the great deception, up to the spiritual home, to the spirit to which man felt connected when he said to himself in his soul: The spiritual that lives in me is one with the spiritual that lives and weaves through the world as Brahman.

That was the mood in ancient India, but humanity has always retained an echo of this ancient wisdom, and that is what we are considering here. If we look only at external evidence, we see that what people in pre-Christian times had as religions goes back to what people had as ancient wisdom, which comes from [ancient] clairvoyance. And one also sees that since those times, from age to age, great leaders of humanity must always arise who have within themselves, in their soul, the content of the ancient wisdom and truth that governs them. Thus the ancient wisdom lives on in the leaders and teachers of humanity, the bodhisattvas. And in the sense of Buddhism, one would have to regard Buddha himself, Zarathustra, Hermes, Orpheus and others as such bodhisattvas. They were initiated into the primal wisdom that they had within them as truth, and that meant that their souls were connected to the spiritual worlds. Thus, Buddhism looks up to the great leaders who, from epoch to epoch, have passed on the ancient wisdom, because “wisdom” and “truth” are roughly what the word “bodhisattva” means.

The Bodhisattva dignity is achieved by the fact that man gradually develops to such an extent that his soul can absorb the wisdom that characterizes the spiritual home of man. When a person has progressed from embodiment to embodiment to the point of becoming a bodhisattva, the next step – the highest rank he can achieve, so to speak – is the Buddha level; one goes from being a bodhisattva to being a Buddha. But the Buddha is no longer called upon to descend to earth again, but after becoming a Buddha, he has arrived where the thirst for life in the body is extinguished, where salvation occurs, where he no longer remains connected to the physical world, where he no longer lives in it. Thus the last development, so to speak, of the pre-Christian world view recognizes in the Bodhisattva the human being who stands at the boundary of that which still remains connected to earthly existence. In the moment when the human being rises one step higher, he no longer needs to remain connected to the earth. However, this world view does not yet truly know the concept of the Christ. What does the concept of the Christ consist of?

The Christ concept is higher than the bodhisattva and the Buddha concepts. We arrive at the Christ concept only when we turn our spiritual gaze to an inner experience of the human soul, an experience that is hinted at in the Christian Gospels and that we can call inner resurrection or rebirth. Usually, this inner rebirth is presented as something quite abstract. However, we need only consider a few aspects of the human soul in order to realize that this inner rebirth refers to something quite concrete. We need only consider the individual elements that form the basis of human soul life. In his outer life, man presents himself to us with his perceptions, feelings, emotions and volitional impulses. We see how he draws his ideas about the world around him from this soul, which lives in drives, passions and other impulses, and how he can ascend ever higher and higher to purer and truer concepts. Who would not admit that man feels within himself the urge and drive for ever-increasing perfection? One need only imagine the demands of all noble idealists of humanity, and one must say: These demands set high ideals, and people also live them out in methodical acts of noble human compassion and so on. Therefore, one must say: Man can, as it were, rise above himself.

We are dealing here with a fact of the human soul life that, when considered in the human sense, cannot always be called abstract. This is also admitted when one says: something lives in us like a second ego, a higher self, to which one can grow beyond the lower everyday self. Sometimes one admits in the abstract that Goethe's saying is right:

From the force that binds all beings,
the human being frees himself who overcomes himself.

But this higher self is usually imagined as something bloodless, colorless, something that for most people does not have the same immediacy and reality as those expressions of the human being that are tied to the person as he or she appears to us in life. He comes to us with all his feelings, impulses, with everything he does as a natural being, with his blood, with all the forces that pulsate through his body, with everything that nature has given him as a personality. If we want to summarize all this, we can say: Just as the human being comes to us as a natural being, so is he endowed with the forces that permeate the whole world. Just as he comes to us as a personality, so has he become through the forces of the world.

How colourless and abstract, in contrast, is what people often have as the content of their higher impulses. And how concrete it is when a person flies into a rage because of his blood. If, on the other hand, you set up an ideal of the higher self, then it usually remains quite abstract - so colourless and bloodless that it seems quite consumptive to us. For example, what Kant calls the “categorical imperative” could be described as a consumptive ideal. A bloodless idealism! Now, against what so often confronts us as bloodless abstractions, we need only hold up a word from the development of Christian impulses that is effective, Paul's word:

Not I, but the Christ in me.

With this, we have mentioned that which is able to describe the essence of Christianity in the deepest sense.

We have before us the human being as a natural personality; we see how he stands with his affects, his passions, as a confluence of all the forces that permeate and interweave the whole world. He stands there, composed into a small world, like a microcosm in the big world, in the macrocosm. And now we see how this human being is inspired by the pursuit of perfection, how he wants to experience something within himself, as it is expressed in the aforementioned saying by Goethe:

From the force that binds all beings,
man frees himself who overcomes himself.

What initially presents itself to us as a natural personality, composed like a microcosm from the forces of the world, now strives beyond itself in concepts and ideas, which may initially appear in abstract ideals as man's better self. But then we can imagine that these abstract ideals, these higher wisdoms, the highest ideals, which man can only have by rising above his natural existence, now permeate this higher self in the same way ing, and becoming an expression of that which the world experiences and interweaves spiritually, as spiritual, as world-moral, just as the physical-sensual of the personality is an expression of the whole macrocosm.

When, as if by lightning, a world being, a world essence, strikes into the highest ideals of man, which is conceived just as real in the spiritual-supersensible as the external world forces are conceived as real, which, acting in from the macrocosm, have put together the human natural personality as a microcosm Then we have the human being who frees himself – the human being who in this way rises above himself, who now lives in his higher self, which otherwise remains an abstraction, consisting of unfilled, bloodless concepts that do not have an immediate effect. Now the higher impulse that has taken hold of this person is at work; something spiritual lives in him that will become his higher personality. Now he not only has abstract ideals, the highest moral ideas within him, but he also carries a second, spiritual personality within him. Now that to which he can rise as to a highest is also permeated by spiritual personality, just as the natural man was formerly permeated by abstract ideals.

When we feel that this can happen in a person, then we understand the words of St. Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” This Christ in me can permeate and penetrate everything that is and remains an abstraction of a higher self. Thus, through Christ, we ascend to a higher personality. While the Bodhisattvas are those teaching guides of man who lead him to impersonal higher wisdom, to abstract concepts and ideas, the Christ impulse does not merely lead man to an impersonal wisdom, but to a higher personality within himself. This concept, however, only came into the world through the establishment of Christianity. Everything that happens in the world has its causes. And when today, through a development such as that indicated in the writing “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, man rises to spiritual insight, to spiritual clairvoyance, then he has this higher personality directly before him as a reality, like a new man in man - the Christ in ourselves.

But now there comes a moment for the real clairvoyant in which a word is spiritually fulfilled that Goethe used about the external, physical facts of nature and then also applied to the highest entity in man, namely the word:

If the eye were not sun-like,
How could we behold the light?

Goethe's point, with regard to the external, is: My eye is there, and sees the sun; if it did not possess the power of perceiving light, we could not see the light. But he also says:

The eye is formed by light for light.

We could not have eyes if light did not live and weave through the world: the eye is formed by light. – The Schopenhauerian truth “The world is my idea”, that is, that the world of light and color is the idea of the eye, is only half the truth. The whole truth is only found when we add: Through the world my idea is created, so that when we use the eye formed by the sun, we look into the world in which the sun is. - And in the same way we can say: As no eye without the sun, so no divine knowledge and feeling in us without God as objective God in the outside world.

In the same way, the Christ in us can be experienced objectively as a personality. And this event, where we experience our higher self in such a way that we can say: “Not we, but the Christ in us,” becomes a concrete experience for us. Then our inner soul existence is transformed, then we have become a different person, a reborn person, and through this experience a new, spiritual eye has been opened for us. And then we also see that the Christ in us needs the Christ outside of us, the subjective spiritual Christ in us needs the objective, historical Christ. To deny the Christ who went through the Mystery of Golgotha is logically the same as denying the sun that the eye has formed out of an otherwise indifferent organism, as Goethe said.

The fact that we can experience the Christ in us is formed in us as an inner experience from our soul organism, just as our physical eye is formed from sunlight. So what our inner spiritual eye is, is formed by the real, objective Christ, and those who truly experience this, not just in feeling but through clairvoyant consciousness, experience this as their most direct knowledge, which could be characterized as the clairvoyant looking up from the spiritual personality of Christ in us to the real, objective, historical Christ. We need no gospel, no historical document, we need only the true, genuine gaze of the clairvoyant, and we know that the embodiment of that being from whom the impulse for the “Christ in us” came has lived in the course of human development. That is the objective, not merely the subjective mystical experience of the Christ.

But we know something else. We know: When, under the compulsion of logical thinking, the doctrine of repeated lives on earth gradually becomes implanted in the process of human development and thus in all earthly life, then we have the Christ before us clairvoyantly as the historical Christ, who triggers the inner view in us so that we can look at future embodiments. And now we do not say, as in Buddhism: the fewer earthly embodiments, the better for the person, because the sooner he will be released from existence - but we say: as long as the Earth has a mission to educate, we, by being embodied on earth, we absorb more and more of the Christ impulse, and the Christ impulse in us becomes ever stronger and more comprehensive; higher and higher we carry it in us in every new embodiment. And so we look into a future in which more and more of us can fulfill the word, “Not I, but the Christ in me.” Therefore, we look upon future embodiments, upon our future earth-lives, as upon lives more and more permeated with the Christ, and we understand why in the pre-Christian world-picture, even in Buddhism, only an idea of redemption could arise - the Christ-impulse had not yet come, which brings ever new and new fruitfulness into every earth-life. On the contrary, the point had even been reached when it was no longer possible to perfect life on earth further. The Christ Impulse gives meaning to earthly embodiments and to the lives of human beings on earth, whereas Buddhism could no longer provide any meaning for this.

And if we now look at the history of the development of Christianity, the question is answered: How did Christianity come into the world, not the Christ, but Christianity? Anyone who wants to look at history objectively will have to say: Paul contributed the most to the development of Christianity. Let us take a look at him. Was he convinced by what had happened in the world as a physical fact or by what was described to him? As a contemporary of the events that took place in the physical world, he was able to hear everything that happened to him, but what he was able to absorb into his soul from these Christian ideas was unsuitable for making these external events appear to him in such a light that he could have changed his soul to Christianity. But then the event occurred that scientific theology has not yet been able to interpret. What was that event? Externally, what Paul could not have believed through any perception or observation in the physical world became an immediate certainty for him through what he saw supernaturally, in the spirit. No message from the physical world could be decisive for him - but it was a supernatural experience, a superphysical event. And this convinced him, not merely of the existence of some Christ, but that the Christ had experienced the event that, when translated into human life, means: In every human being, the spiritual core of the being will conquer the death of the outer covering of the lower human being, because “if Christ had not risen, our faith would be vain and vain our preaching”. Paul appealed to the risen Christ because it had become clear to him that in the Mystery of Golgotha that spiritual sun had appeared which makes the inner Christ in man possible in the first place. For Paul, the starting point of Christian development was a supersensible event that gave him the impulse to work for Christianity.

Thus, in relation to its first great teacher, Christianity emerged from a supersensible impulse, and only later were the Gospels able to provide what people needed to clearly visualize the Christ event in their minds. This event can be renewed forever, even today; if man observes the laws of inner human development, he provides himself with the opportunity to relive the event of Damascus within himself. Then he can experience the objective Christ spiritually as truth; then he can begin to believe the Gospels without needing to have historical proof, because what he beholds in spirit, what clairvoyant consciousness gives him, he then finds confirmed by the Gospel writings.

Thus, the essence of Christianity is to be sought within the human soul. And the strongest impulse for the spread of Christianity is to be found in a supersensible event of knowledge. Through this event, every human being, so to speak, immediately sees the necessity for the most important impulse in the historical development of humanity to have been the appearance of the Christ Himself. And then one truly understands that in the person of Jesus, the Christ lived as an entity that cannot be compared to any other. While the bodhisattvas progress from incarnation to incarnation like all other people until they have fulfilled their task and become a Buddha, we can only record one single life on earth for this entity that lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. And [as in the successive generations the same blood passes from father to son], so from the one Christ who lived through the event of Golgotha - this is a fact that presents itself to the higher consciousness - a spiritual impulse goes out to all those who find the way to this Christ.

This idea that the Christ is connected by a spiritual bond to the one who finds the way to him – just as the descendant is connected to the ancestor by the bond of blood – this idea not only establishes a mysticism of Christianity, but a Christianity that can be described as a “mystical fact”. There is not only a Christian mysticism, an inner mystical experience in the sense of Christianity, but what happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era is a fact that can only be understood through mysticism. Just as the course of blood through the succession of generations can be understood by natural science, so that which happened through Christ can only be grasped through spiritual realization, through the wisdom of mysticism. Through spiritual realization one can comprehend that “spiritual blood” flows from Christ Jesus into the souls of those who find their way to him.

I am with you all days until the end of the earth cycles.

To recognize and see how the impulse of Christ flows within the development of the earth and thus he himself flows – this in turn can be converted into sensations, and one will feel how such contradictions as the following allow us to look into the depths of the development of worldviews.

We have a passage handed down from Buddha that can be compared with the saying just quoted: “I am with you always, to the end of the age”. Buddha said to his disciples: “When I look back on earlier earth lives, I know that my soul has gone through many earth lives and has undergone this or that experience. It has acquired abilities and now built my body, this outer, physical body. This has become my destiny because the soul built it and led it to such places where it could experience all this. So I see in my present physical body the results of the spiritual forces that I have gathered. And he called the body a temple built out of divine powers, by way of the human individuality. [And further said Buddha:] The temple of my body is the result of the previous lives I have gone through. But I know full well that since I became the Buddha, this temple has been standing, and it is the last time that my inner powers have built such a temple. I feel exactly how the beams are already breaking, the columns bursting; this is the last body that my soul will inhabit - the last body, because I have become a Buddha.

Deliverance from the body, that is what the Buddha teaches. Let us translate this into feeling and contrast it with another saying, namely the saying where Christ Jesus also spoke to his disciples about the temple of his body. But how did He speak? Did He also say, like Buddha, that this is the last existence and that everything that led to this body will dissolve? No, the Christ foresaw that what He had become in this body would give the impulse to continue working through all earthly existence: “Break down this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.” That is the great contrast: on the one hand, the breaking of the Temple and the desire to break in order to bid farewell to the earth, and on the other hand, the contemplation of the structure of the Temple as the starting point for all subsequent human salvation. And for this stands the expression: Break down this Temple, the impulse is already there, which continues to work.

Thus we must not see the impulses that proceed from the Christ Jesus and that form the essence of Christianity in abstract terms, but we must transform the concepts so that they become sensations and feelings. Then, precisely in the realization of repeated earthly lives, we will feel the full significance of this Christ impulse. We will look at the human lives of the future and see in Christ the starting point for an ever higher and higher fulfillment of the destiny of humanity in the future.

And so we can say: We look back to ancient, pre-Christian times, to the wisdom that stands at the starting point of humanity, but which has gradually been lost until people had only the last remnants of it. Then came a time when the greatest impulse, the Christ impulse, struck humanity, which is a new starting point and leads people into the spiritual world, bringing the soul the possibility of ever higher and higher ascent, of ever higher and higher life, until man is so far advanced in terms of his earthly existence that he can ascend in spirit to the heights of all earthly existence. Nothing fulfills us as significantly, deeply and powerfully as this, which we can understand as a characteristic of the actual mission of humanity within our earthly existence. There stands the human being; he sees himself surrounded by the physical-sensual world, he strives for perfection, he sees ideals above him, he knows that through them he reaches up into a spiritual world. And he knows that from this spiritual world, spiritual forces and entities extend into his existence. But man cannot live his way up into the spiritual worlds with mere abstract concepts and ideals, because just as he is here in the physical world as a personality, so he must also educate himself as a personality into the spiritual world. Therefore, only a model personality can lead him there - that is the Christ-personality!

Thus man looks up to Christ as the Bringer of the spiritual world and says: By raising my own self to you, by ever more fully realizing St. Paul's saying, “Christ in me,” I draw down from the spiritual worlds the most intimate and potent impulses, clothe them in my human being and transmit them into our physical world, into our sense world. I am the mediator between the spiritual world and the world of the senses. I bring spiritual things into the physical world. I permeate and structure the physical with that which comes from the spiritual world. The Christ is my helper and model in this, the true Christ, who is just as necessary for the inner man as the outer sun is necessary for the physical eye, and who, as an historical being, walked on the outer physical plane at the beginning of our era.

We then feel as human beings in the world: we can hint at our mission on earth by saying that we should thoroughly imbue with a Christian spirit those words in which I would like to summarize what today's reflection has revealed about the relationship between man and the physical world on the one hand and the spiritual world on the other:

Man's sense is overwhelmed
From the depths of the world, full of mystery
The rich abundance of matter.
It flows into the depths of the soul
From the heights of the world, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They find each other in the human heart
To a reality full of wisdom.

Dear attendees! There is no doubt that the topic of this evening's lecture is one that is at the center of intellectual interest in many respects in the present day. It could easily appear as if it was chosen with regard to the various party opinions and intellectual currents that are asserted in relation to this topic today. However, those of the esteemed listeners to whom I have often been privileged to speak about spiritual-scientific matters will have seen from the overall attitude and tenor of these reflections that the world view presented here does not directly interfere with the pros and cons that arise today with regard to such questions. In view of all this, it is certainly not without interest to hear a word on the subject of “Christ in the twentieth century” from the side that has set itself the task of considering the spiritual development of humanity and the whole of cultural life from the point of view of objective spiritual science.

Perhaps one could believe that the very term “Christ in the twentieth century” is open to dispute from the point of view of objective spiritual science, since the human heart and soul already have an image of something that cannot be subject to the changing views of the centuries when it comes to the name “Christ”. But if we turn our gaze to the past of Christianity, we will be able to see for ourselves, when we visualize the various spiritual activities of humanity, how a clear change in the views of Christ has actually taken place over the centuries. And if we can speak in our time, in a certain respect, of a kind of revision of all spiritual questions, then what is connected with the tasks of the present in relation to spiritual matters must also shed light on the Christ problem. And if not elsewhere, then the discussions of the present time, which are quite lively in some cases, show above all how there is a desire in the hearts of today's humanity to come to terms with this problem, which is not only at the center of the spiritual present, but of the history of human development in general.

If we speak of development in all fields of knowledge today, then everything that exists in terms of ideas, perceptions and feelings in connection with the Christ-problem can also be brought into the light of development. Spiritual science aims to explore everything that lies behind the existence of the senses, beyond what the mind, which is bound to the brain, can comprehend. I have often indicated the sources and the nature of the research in this field. One does not research in the same way as in external science, nor does one observe and contemplate the world in the same way as in external life as one does in spiritual science. Tonight, these things can only be hinted at. More details can be found in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Spiritual science assumes that it is possible for a person to awaken certain powers of knowledge that lie dormant in his soul. It provides the methods by which these powers can be awakened. The soul that applies these methods to itself does indeed come to engage in an inner life that is independent of the senses and all physical functions, and is also independent of the mind, which is connected to the brain. An inner life is possible through which one can see into a spiritual world and observe what is supersensible and what is behind the events that have taken place in the course of human development. How can one observe without physical organs? That is the methodological question of spiritual science. The results of this method are then what is communicated as spiritual science.

This spiritual science approaches the public in the same way as the other sciences, which [explore the phenomena of the world through experiments and observe them with apparatus in laboratories and observatories, and then contemporaries come and examine the things with common sense]. Spiritual science also makes use of the experiment, the spiritual experiment, and the apparatus, the soul apparatus. What the soul can make of itself when it has broken away from the outer body and leads an inner life within itself, what it can then explore in the spiritual realm, is communicated in the same way as the results of astronomy and biological research are communicated. Common sense can judge this if it is only willing to engage with it, even though in our time it does not yet feel much inclination to do so. It is obvious that in a single lecture not all paths can be shown that lead the soul, thus liberated, to Christ, nor can all the proofs for this path be adduced now. My task this evening is solely to indicate the point of view of spiritual research regarding this Christ-being and to give an idea of how this spiritual-scientific view of the Christ-problem can be integrated into what our other spiritual culture has to say about the Christ.

Before this is possible, we must take a few glances at the development of the Christ question over the centuries since the founding of Christianity. It is not at all intended to develop everything that people have done in terms of theological and other religious squabbling, but rather to point out the main lines and currents.

A very liberal contemporary scholar, William Benjamin Smith, has pointed out a very curious fact that is likely to correct many a modern judgment about the times in which Christianity was founded. The ideas about Christ that gradually spread in the first centuries cannot be understood without taking a look at what in the first centuries was called Gnostic Christianity. Spiritual science is not a warmed-over Gnosticism, but we must concern ourselves with Gnosticism because we want to orient ourselves regarding the ideas that the past has produced about Christ. In particular, the following fact should be noted in Smith. He says: “From about fifty years before the founding of Christianity until one hundred and fifty years after its founding - and this is not said by a spiritual researcher or an orthodox theologian, but by a liberal researcher! - the greatest theosophical geniuses lived, those people who tried hardest to fathom, through their wisdom and science, what Christ actually is in the context of the whole development of mankind.

The present time has little inclination to hear such a word; it only likes to hear the word that the Christ Being is such a Being that even the simplest mind can still approach with full understanding. So why must comprehensive wisdom and knowledge be summoned to approach Christ, who is supposed to be accessible to the simplest mind? It cannot be said that anyone who raises such an objection is necessarily wrong; the tremendous power of the Christ Impulse really does lie in the fact that it is accessible even to the simplest mind. But such an objection must also be considered in another light. It is perfectly possible to say that a child, still completely uncomprehending, may delight in a flower and understand this flower with its mind, but one can also go further and say that the wise man will admit that his highest wisdom is not enough to truly understand this flower. Similarly, the highest wisdom is necessary to truly penetrate to the essence of Christ. The theosophical Gnostics, says Smith, were those geniuses who, at the beginning of Christianity, out of the bold courage of their souls, tried to truly understand the Christ Being. That which is still useful today for the truly unbiased soul from this Gnosticism should, for once, come before our soul.

For Gnosticism, the Christ Impulse was an impulse that is absolutely necessary for the entire development of humanity on earth. Above all, Basilides, Marcion, and Valentinus represented this main developmental idea of Gnosticism. Of course, the spiritual doctrine of evolution of Gnosticism will perhaps fiercely reject what is today called the monistic theory of evolution. However, this so-called monistic theory of evolution differs from the Gnostic one in that, when it looks back to earlier states, it only , while the Gnostic doctrine of evolution goes back to the times when only the spiritual existed as the origin of existence, from which then not only the human soul but also the material developed, depending on the spiritual.

I have often pointed out the purely logical contradiction of the materialistic theory of evolution. It says: We go further and further back in time, come to times when primitive human conditions prevailed, then assume that humans developed from animals, and finally come to times when only animality was on earth. And we go back even further than when life was not yet on earth at all. We can say that this materialistic doctrine goes back to such hypothetical conditions when the earth was a part of the cosmic fog within the solar system, from which the sun with its planets would then have developed. The logical error in this whole materialistic doctrine can be seen from a comparison that is often made when this doctrine is to be explained to the student. This is illustrated by taking a drop of oil floating on water. Then you cut a small piece of paper, stick it on a pin, bring it into the drop of oil and then turn it. As smaller droplets then separate out, you can show the student the formation of a miniature planetary system. The same thing, so they say, happened outside with the great nebula. Therein lies the ground plan of the monistic theory of evolution. However, a big mistake is made in the process; the teacher has forgotten something. He has forgotten that the whole thing only turns when he does it himself. Therefore, the comparison only applies if one assumes a great professor in space who turns the whole thing. Of course, one does not need to assume this if one stands on the monistic point of view.

Spiritual science, however, assumes that if we go back in time from epoch to epoch, we do not come across anything material at all, but rather that the origin of the earth and also of a planetary system lies in a sum of spiritual beings. Spirit is the origin of existence; this was also a fundamental Gnostic idea. And this spirit, which is the origin of all existence, can be recognized today when the soul is freed from the body. If one wants to deny the spirit behind all existence, then such a denial can be compared to what someone might say who looks into a container of water in which pieces of ice are floating, and then wants to say: That is only ice. In the same way, someone who has only opened their eyes to material existence can only see matter and not the spirit. But material existence is embedded in the spirit; it has developed out of the spirit in accordance with natural law; it is a condensation of the spiritual, and all material beings have arisen out of the spirit. Those who only want to accept matter overlook the spiritual only because they have not opened their spiritual eyes, as Goethe says. In primeval times, according to the Gnostics, all material things did not yet exist. These developed out of the spiritual through condensation; they are a consequence of the spiritual, a condensation of the spiritual: all material beings from stones to human beings are products of the spiritual.

One can follow how, little by little, the planetary and the natural kingdoms arose out of the spiritual, and how, at a certain point in the development of the earth, man also emerges out of the spirit and enters the earth. This was the idea of the Gnostics, which still seems correct to true spiritual science today - the Gnostics, who, with bold human wisdom, tried to fathom the nature of Christ. They assumed that at a certain point in the development of the earth, man came into being in such a way that a certain amount of what was predetermined in the spiritual world for man – a certain amount of the human soul that was present in the spirit and destined for the physical human being, found its way into the earthly human being, so that from a certain point in the development of the earth, he was endowed with this spiritual-soul, which became human. But they also assumed that something of this spiritual-human aspect had been left behind in the spiritual world when it emerged into human development, so that only part of the whole human aspect survived in the generations on earth. So people developed down on earth, but it was not the full spiritual-human aspect that was in them; rather, a part had remained behind in the spiritual world and continued to develop there, beyond the human level.

If we take the development of the earth in the sense of gnosis, we can say: From the time when man appeared on earth, we have a twofold developmental current. Firstly, the souls in people develop on earth from generation to generation, but the full spiritual, which humanity should have received from the spiritual world, does not develop. And a second developmental trend is about material existence, is about the cosmos, the spiritual realm. Then, according to the Gnostic view, something occurred in the development of humanity that could only occur at a later point in time.

Why did humanity have to develop for a time without its highest spiritual link? This had to happen because people were to complete a kind of descent within the material in their development, were to fully enter into the material; they had to become aware of themselves in the material, so that when this remaining spiritual approaches them at a later point in time, they would be able to feel and receive it all the more freely and independently. Man had to become entangled in the material so that he could then, by distinguishing the spiritual from the material, feel this spiritual in its purest meaning when it descended.

When did the spiritual descend? Gnosis says: The descent of this spiritual, which has developed in the cosmos, is indicated by what is symbolically stated in the Gospels as John's baptism in the Jordan. If we want to understand this, we can say that every person can know that the individual human being not only develops successively, but that there are moments in the existence of many souls when they feel as if something completely new has entered them, as if something has been awakened in them. For the development of Goethe, for example, it is easy to indicate when one has to make a cut in the nineties, when something completely new entered into the soul of Goethe. There are many souls that know that they not only progress little by little, but that the soul has tremendous moments of reversal and development, where they feel as if a world is flowing into them, where they take in something completely new.

This is for individual souls on a small scale what Gnosis saw on a large scale in the appearance of John the Baptist in the Jordan. Then this spiritual approached the human personality of Jesus of Nazareth. Until then, Jesus' development had progressed in such a way that he was prepared by it to experience the greatest possible change through this John the Baptist. Not only did a great change occur in this soul, but that which had remained behind in the spiritual-cosmic regions at the origin of human development entered into it; that which had developed separately in the regions of the supersensible entered into the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. It took possession of him and remained in his soul for three years, until the Mystery of Golgotha.

Those who want to apply the usual sequence of cause and effect from history to such things will not be able to understand this, but those who take into account the factors that are given in my book 'Christianity as a Mystical Fact' , will find that factors of a supersensible nature play a part in historical development, and that what is assumed by Gnosticism cannot be rejected out of hand as something effusively mystical.

What did Gnosticism say? It assumed that there are two developmental currents that lead people to the point where they are grasped by the first, the material; above this material current is a supersensible-spiritual one. At the time of the baptism in the Jordan, the second current approached the person of Jesus of Nazareth in such a way that through this event humanity was fertilized with that part of the universal cosmic human being that it had not yet been able to absorb at the beginning of the development on earth. We have here a spiritual fertilization – the fertilization of humanity with that impulse that had to remain behind in order to develop further until humanity had matured materially enough to be able to receive it. Just as it is not a contradiction that some germ in nature must first develop and then be fertilized in order to reach full development, so it is not a contradiction that humanity must first develop materially and then be fertilized by the spirit at a certain point in time.

That is one of the ideas, and indeed the main idea, of Gnostic thought. Today, everyone believes that they can move beyond the Gnostics and dismiss them as fantasists and enthusiastic mystics, although theologians – for example, Harnack in his “History of Dogma” – say that we must turn back to them, because in Gnosticism lies the real starting-point for all later religious and theological speculations; and Smith admitted that these Gnostics were the greatest theosophical geniuses! And if we want to characterize the fundamental position of such a Gnostic with regard to the Christ problem, then we find that the Gnostics had the boldness to say: The human soul is capable, through its own efforts, through the development of what lies dormant in it, of really developing such powers of knowledge that it can survey the spiritual developmental impulses of humanity. If we want to speak more trivially, we can say that these Gnostics dared to gain knowledge of the supersensible path of human development from their souls. Such a Christ-idea, as it was held by these Gnostics, thus comes to meet us at the beginning of the Christian era. If we then continue to observe the development of the Christ-question within the evolution of mankind, we comprehend the necessary process that can be recognized in relation to the Christ-problem right up to the twentieth century.

We can make a small leap from the Gnostics into the Middle Ages. Do we find the same fact there? For a few individuals, yes, but not to the extent that there was such bold confidence in the general intellectual life, such trust in the powers of perception for the supersensible. The medieval view says: That which relates to the Christ-being, that which relates to the supersensible at all, has been revealed to man in Scripture. This revelation from Scripture is accepted as it is. The essential point of the medieval view is that it says: Man can only go so far with his own powers of knowledge; but then all human knowledge must stand still and wait for what tradition and revelation give as a supplement to what man can investigate himself. With his powers of knowledge, man can only recognize nature and what appears out of it, but in relation to the depth of the supersensible, man must rely on what Scripture has handed down to him. Man cannot penetrate with his powers of knowledge into that which is revealed to mankind. The boldness and confidence of Gnosticism have vanished. One no longer admits or recognizes that man can penetrate into the supersensible worlds through his spiritual powers. Thus the development went further.

In more recent times, the epoch is now dawning that has brought about what the spiritual researcher will always acknowledge: namely, the great achievements of natural science, the knowledge of material existence and its laws, the great achievements of industrial, commercial and social life. But in relation to the spiritual, a consequence has necessarily arisen from this material progress. This could only be achieved by man's leaning towards the sensual, the material. Something pushed its way into his thinking habits, causing him to lose his inclination towards the supersensible: while in the Middle Ages divine revelation was still accepted, the more recent epoch only agreed that man should not reach into the supersensible. But then this judgment was revised and it was said: So we leave the supersensible entirely and we also only adhere to the external-material. This was the case [from the Middle Ages] until the nineteenth century.

The view of religious matters, especially of the Christ problem, was also [shaped] in this way. What were the consequences of this? The idea of a being that had developed supersensibly and then entered into human existence was something people no longer wanted to know anything about. Christ as a supersensible, cosmic being that took possession of the soul of Jesus of Nazareth, the supersensible Christ in the physical, sensual man Jesus – the new age did not want to go as far as this supersensibility. The result was that it lost the Christ and held only to Jesus. And the whole stream of development took shape as we see it now in the closing nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century as the so-called “Jesus conception”.

Truly, this view has produced many beautiful and glorious things. I would like to draw attention to something from the very last days, to the book by the Nuremberg theologian Rittelmeyer; it is called “Jesus”. And when you read this booklet, you get the impression that the author has gained something in his understanding of Jesus that corresponds to an ideal personality, which gives him nourishment for soul and spirit, to which he devotes himself, which gives him the certainty that all great human things, all that is truly meaningful, are real, that all great impulses of humanity are not a dream but reality. Rittelmeyer has in his soul what one would wish for every soul; he has the certainty in view of Jesus that he has a faithful counselor. His description is so vivid as if he could look at the living Jesus as on a brother who is both hope and salvation for him. Such phenomena have produced the Jesus conception, but it has also produced something else, which has led to significant discussions.

Then came the purely materialistic research, and why should it not also approach this problem? What I mean is quickly indicated. The historians have become accustomed to stating only that which can be proven and substantiated from historical sources, for which one can present historical documents. With the culture of the Occident it is very strange in this regard. I would like to show this with an example. The following is said about the great historian von Ranke: When von Ranke was already advanced in years, he said to a friend: One cannot simply leave out the figure of Jesus from history – and yet, if we look at von Ranke's historical view, he leaves the Jesus impulse out of consideration. Then Ranke himself became suspicious and said: “If we examine the historical facts, we find that the impulse of Jesus plays a part in them everywhere.” This did not become clear to him from the historical sources, but from his instinctive consciousness he felt that one could not simply leave Jesus out of history.

But now the question is: Does a Jesus of Nazareth even exist? — This question would have been quite impossible for the Gnostics. They knew that man can develop to the knowledge of the supersensible, and that the Christ then comes to meet him when he considers the supersensible in the course of human development. One could even say that there is an ancestral relationship between Paul and Gnosticism. Paul, although a contemporary of Christ Jesus, could not be convinced by what had happened in Jerusalem. Certainly, everything was accessible to him, but that could not convince him; he remained an unbeliever. How did he not only become a believer, but also the most important representative and founder of Christianity? Through a supersensible experience! Out of the supersensible the truth about Christ appeared to him in the so-called “Event of Damascus”. And as he saw the Christ event out of the supersensible world, he knew that it was not something nebulous. He also knew that what now lives again in the supersensible — the Christ — once lived on earth in a human body. From the supersensible he received the conviction of the historical Jesus. Thus it was also quite natural for the Gnostics that the Christ lived in Jesus. This view continued well into the Middle Ages. Therefore, the question of the historical Jesus was not yet significant at that time.

It only became significant when people had lost the Christ and only clung to the material, to Jesus. Then the historian stepped in and demanded documents, and now historical radical criticism comes along and shows that in the sense in which we today call documents historical, the Gospels are not documents. No other documents are available. You must not misunderstand me. The Gospels are fully recognized by spiritual research, but in a sense other than a purely historical one. Through spiritual research, one relives the experiences of the Gospel writers, not the other way around. The Gospels are not evidence for the historical Jesus. Harnack said: All the historical traditions about Jesus can easily be written on a quart page. Everything is contestable, and when the purely historical method of research approaches the Gospels, then only what has happened could have happened, namely that Drews has shown in a brilliant way that there is no historical proof of Jesus. That is the movement that has emerged recently. Drews is not alone in this view; Smith is on the same ground. All of them have made a discovery that was highly astounding to them. They first realized that the historical Jesus cannot be established. They say: We have no documents, and therefore the Jesus can just as well be denied. But they made a discovery: They came to the conclusion that there is a Christ, that Jesus was a god. Drews, Smith and others admit that Jesus was not just a man but a god in the time in question, that all the accounts in the Gospels are accounts of a superhuman-divine being. So what do they do? They direct the view to the Christ idea; they come back to the Christ. And what results from that, you can find in Drews or in Smith's “Ecce Deus,” published by Diederichs in Jena.

[These people say:] What the Gnostics believed, what was believed in the Middle Ages, what Origen believed, that is not applicable to a human being. And this proves to us that by Christ is meant a superhuman, a divine being. Thus, in the Being at the source of Christianity, we have not a human being but a God — a Being to whom only spiritual and supersensory attributes can be applied, who has a supersensory significance for humanity. But such a Being does not exist, these people say, and therefore one cannot speak of such a Being; it did not exist in Jesus! So this newer spiritual current has discovered the Christ, has recognized that he is a god, and therefore breaks with the Jesus view; because now that he is a god, he certainly could not have existed. Smith says: If Christ is a god, then it would be childish and simple-minded to believe in the existence of Jesus at all. This is how Christ was (re)discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, but at the same time the whole Christ being was annulled. That is how it is now!

Look, what does Drews, for example, give us as a living Christ, as a living impulse that has intervened in the course of human development, as a spiritual-living being? Drews is not a materialist, is not a monist - he is quite religious -, but he assumes a development of humanity in general; he says: everyone can undergo an inner development, everyone can come to a certain inner elevation and religious experience in their soul, so that everyone then finds something in themselves, something like a higher self, like a higher human being. This higher self suffers in the ordinary human being and wants to be redeemed from it. - And further he says: At the time when Christianity was founded, this need to develop the higher human being was particularly strong, and so the common idea of such a superhuman Christ being was formed in an early Christian community. This idea of man is the actual Christ impulse. Because Christ is a god, he cannot have existed as a human being, but only as an idea. Drews is in a sense a spiritualistic idealist. He does not deny the Christ, but for him he is merely an idea. There was no man Jesus in whom a special cosmic entity had entered, but rather a human community was once seized by the idea that something higher lives in man, a human God, and that this is the suffering God who wants to redeem himself within humanity.

Thus, from all that the development of contemporary spiritual life has been able to achieve so far, we have an idea instead of the living Christ. Just as in recent times, perhaps out of an awareness of the times, people speak of “ideas of history” in such a way that they imply that only natural human beings exist, not spiritual powers that intervene in history, so too is the Christ himself said to be only an idea. This idea of Drews is a profound idea, but if one goes deeper, one can say: one can indeed find an idea as a characteristic law of world development, but an idea creates just as little as a painted painter will create a picture. What the Christ really is is quite different from what has been conceived as a general idea by some community, just as a painted image of a painter is different from a real painter who creates a picture. The mere idea of Christ could never have produced such an impulse as the Christ event has produced in man.

But that real, genuine Being that descended at the moment of John the Baptist's baptism, that Paul experienced at the moment of the Damascus Event – that is precisely what the present needs, since it cannot relate to an abstract idea. And that is what makes the contemplation of Jesus so acceptable to many people; for how can someone who is oppressed in his soul, who is in suffering and misery, ever find great hope, consolation and confidence, and believe in the redemption of mankind by looking at a cold idea? What makes the conception of Jesus so acceptable is that in this view one is dealing with a being just like any other ordinary human being. But one is dealing with a supersensible entity when one regards the Christ as a real, living entity. And this is how spiritual science regards him. It does not want to revive the old Gnostic teaching, but approaches the Christ as it approaches other facts of the material and spiritual world. And when spiritual research approaches the Christ today, it also finds the development of mankind as it can be understood in the sense of the old Gnosis. And it finds that what man can find as the way to the Christ must indeed take its starting point from within the human being. All spiritual research takes the inner man as its starting point; it says: the soul can develop, it can bring dormant powers to revelation within it, so that it looks into the spiritual world.

Now, on the basis of its research, this science adds to today's views something that is only slowly finding its way into our present education, but which used to be fairly widespread. We first find it in Lessing's “Education of the Human Race”; he speaks of the fact of repeated lives on earth. Just as we live now between birth and death, we are not living here for the first time; our soul has often been embodied in physical bodies and will often be again. What is the meaning of all this re-embodiment? The meaning is that our soul, as it passes from life to life, always develops different powers, always different nuances of character, always different qualities. It is not that we always return in the same way. All the souls that are embodied today were embodied in the time of the ancient Persians or the ancient Egyptians for my sake, and a progression of the souls takes place through these repeated lives on earth. When we consider this progression, the Gnostic teachings make sense: our time was preceded by a time in which man first had to mature in order to then be able to receive the Christ impulse. From life to life, every soul was present in the pre-Christian era, and from life to life it found its way more and more into the physical existence so that it became more and more mature in each new existence. Then the Christ impulse came, and the souls developed further.

Today we may say: we can only understand ourselves as human beings if we look back to the distant past. Our present state of consciousness – the way we think and have a world view today – has only developed over time; in earlier periods of the earth's development, consciousness was more dream-like, but in return people were clairvoyant. The myths and legends are the reproduction of what the clairvoyant soul has seen; they are not fictitious. Man at that time had no freedom and clarity of consciousness, but he still had something instinctively divine in him. Man at that time could not have concluded from the functionality of the world that there was a divine reason for it, but the soul was still connected to the divine spirit. In clairvoyance, man was still connected to his God. In certain intermediate states, the soul was, as it were, lifted out of its body, then a divine spiritual aspect was added to it.

But that was the meaning of further development, that man had to live more and more in the material world. In this way he came to know physical nature, but lost his divine inner consciousness. The inner God, which man experienced within himself, faded away; but what could be seen with human eyes and grasped with the human mind became clear to man. Therefore, science did not begin in primeval times, but only when people began to focus on their physical surroundings, while we have myths and legends from ancient times in which man grasped the divine-spiritual in a dream-like clairvoyance. Such was the descent of the human soul. When we consider this, a word of the Baptist appears to us in a very special depth. He focuses on the characteristic of his time. In the past, the soul had a connection with its God, but now this connection no longer exists. The Baptist could say: The meaning of human beings has changed, they have lost their connection with their God. But he could also say: human development is not only a descent, but also an ascent. For this, the Christ impulse was taken up at a certain point in time; what humanity had left behind in the way of spirituality descended upon Jesus as the Christ and through him enriched humanity. Then, Jesus' body had to pass over into death. Whoever wants to understand that death was necessary for the entire Christ impulse, that the sacrificial death is something most real, can reflect on the fact that the seed must also rot before it can bring forth a new plant and bear fruit. The original divine-spiritual, which preceded the two developmental currents [of which Gnosticism tells us – that which remains in the spiritual and that which leads into matter –] descended, passed through death and became the seed on Earth, in order to now fertilize the soul, so that it may ascend again from the material and find the way back into the spiritual.

Anyone who finds this repulsive and mystical may do so, and must also find it mystical that infinite chemical and physical effects are concentrated in the sun and expand throughout the cosmos and our earth. Just as material life is concentrated in the sun, so is the entire spiritual life of our earth concentrated in that entity, which, as the Christ-being, through that which is indicated by the baptism of John, flowed into Jesus, lived in him for lived in him for three years and then had to go to his death, in order to radiate from there and express its effects over the entire development of humanity, so that linked with the Christ Being is the impulse that came into the development of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. The earth has become a different place as a result. When we look back today at the embodiments of people before the Mystery of Golgotha, we have to say: people were not in a position to allow what had come into the spiritual development of the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha to enter into their souls.

Spiritual science points out that behind what a person experiences in their everyday life, in the depths of their soul, lie subconscious depths. In that which a person is aware of, in that which lives in their higher soul, the Christ does not yet live directly for many people. Only in exceptional cases has he opened himself up, as he did to the apostle Paul. He was able to perceive the truth about the Christ through that which lived in the depths of his soul. But just as the soul has descended, so too does it ascend again. And anyone who has an eye and an understanding for this - not only the spiritual researcher who can penetrate to the certainty of these things - may say: We are now at an important starting point of human soul development. All the signs are there, if one can see into the present, that the matter is as follows.

In today's world, where we have come the farthest in the loss of Christ, in the denial of the historical Christ, where we have lost touch with the mystery of Golgotha, where we see how souls are educated by the scientific way of thinking of the new time, we also see how this way of thinking, when applied correctly, matures the souls to a new knowledge of Christ, which is the knowledge of Christ in spiritual science. One must start from the innermost part of one's soul in relation to the path to Christ. When the spiritual researcher does this, he comes to find something real, not in the conscious mind, but in that which lives in the unconscious part of his soul and which he can see as something that was not always on earth, but entered into earthly development at the time of the Mystery at Golgotha. If today the student of the soul is able to look within and draw forth from himself the deeper forces of his knowledge, he beholds something different than in pre-Christian times. He beholds the Christ in the spiritual world; in pre-Christian times he could not behold him. We can find him in ourselves, but the people of pre-Christian times could not find him in themselves. The historic Christ is the cause of the mystical Christ, which we can find in us, as true as the outer physical sun is the cause of our eyes. If the sun had never poured out its light, the eyes could not have developed. It is true that today's human soul, when it applies the methods of spiritual research to itself, finds the Christ within, because the Christ is in the soul's foundations. In the soul's undergrowth, Christ is in it and shows himself to us in such a way that through this inner Christ we realize: He is in us only because he was once there historically and entered into the development of the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha.

This Christ is not just an idea of the higher self, but he is the higher self; he is the one with whom we are connected in our deepest consciousness. This is the intimate relationship that we can gain with the Being that descended into a human body and suffered all that is human; but because it suffered divinely, it could be a helper for all people, so that at the same time it became the most intimate for the soul. Today man can say: What I find in me, what is most human in me, that lived as Christ in Jesus of Nazareth. He has become my brother, he is closest to my humanity. One understands the intimacy of the Christ of God only when one realizes His activity in the human soul from the following words of Christ: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Man only then has an intimate relationship with Christ when the spiritual essence, which as divine has participated in all that is human, mediates understanding between him and the other person, when the human soul says to itself: the Christ lives in me and also in you; when the Christ-being in one soul can seek the Christ-being in the other soul in love. This is how spiritual science speaks of the Christ. And at the same time, it finds that the human soul does not go from embodiment to embodiment, from life to life, without meaning, but that it continues to develop.

If you compare the souls of people today with those in the eighth century, for example, you will find that the human soul powers were quite different from today. If you look at the nature of today's souls compared to the past, you will find that human souls are on the way to searching within themselves; and the more they search, the more they will find the Christ within themselves. Therefore, spiritual science may say: human souls are on the way to Christ. In the time in which Christ has been lost as God, in the time in which the historical Jesus is increasingly being lost through a radical criticism, man - so says spiritual science - is increasingly being driven into his inner being through the development of the human soul. In today's world, this is still masked and concealed, but the further development of the soul happens through one thing turning into its opposite and thereby bringing forth the other.

Materialism, when people take it very seriously, when it has reached its peak, will automatically lead to its opposite. When man is closed off from the supernatural, then the countervailing forces will awaken, and we are in the twentieth century in the time of the awakening of these countervailing forces. But when these deepest human soul powers awaken, then the Christ appears in the souls, and these souls experience the event of Paul of Damascus. Every soul in our time is living towards this, and just as Paul was convinced of the historical Jesus, so this event will increasingly evoke a living conviction in humanity that once upon a time Jesus was the Christ. “This is a bold fantasy,” some may say, ”but I cannot remain silent about it, even if it sounds bold: it is the truth! Such things are not immediately taken up by the time; there will be many obstacles before one comes to such a conviction, but it can still be given as a suggestion. One who has seen through everything is truly convinced. Those who look without prejudice at the souls of our time may speak of them as being on the path to the indicated knowledge of Christ.

The souls will become ever more mature in order to behold Christ in spirit. And this beholding in spirit is the real return of Christ, that is what can be called the “return” of Christ. What has entered the earth as divine-spiritual substance through the Mystery of Golgotha will not be seen in any physical way, but because, as human evolution progresses, souls will become ever more mature and thus [ever more capable of] seeing the supersensible realm as well. Direct participation in the Christ-consciousness, sharing in the Christ-consciousness, intimate communion with Christ Jesus – that is what lies ahead for humanity. By stating this, spiritual science penetrates directly into the heart; it does not bring dull theories, but leads to life in many areas of everyday life, but also to life where it is important for humanity.

If you look at Christ correctly, if you see him as a matter of humanity, not just as a personal matter, then you can also find the way to the historical Jesus through him. But the recognition of repeated earthly lives is a basic condition for truly grasping the Christ principle. If you ask: Was it not unfair for pre-Christian people that they could have no relationship with Christ? Then you do not recognize repeated earthly lives. But we answer: In pre-Christian times, people were not yet ripe for the Christ experience. They died and then came back down to earth and matured to receive the Christ within themselves. — Thus the Christ comes into the whole development of humanity — little by little into every soul — so Christ becomes an important impulse for the development of humanity by becoming an important impulse for each individual human being. But anyone who only allows the soul to be there once can at most rise in the soul to an idea of the Christ. Therefore, it is right that the theoretical philosophy of the present can only come to an idea of the Christ. It is the living human soul that passes from life to life that gains a relationship to the living Christ.

And how this Christ-idea, which will be the experience of the Christ of the twentieth century, expands into something of wonderful beauty, which is still little understood today! When this Christ-idea will be the foreseeable one of the twentieth century, when it will live in the souls, then something else will come. This idea will be as alive as a man of flesh and blood. It bears the stamp that the Christ is truly historical, as Paul recognized at the time. But something else is connected with this Christ-idea.

This Christ-idea cannot be conceived otherwise than that the human being expands his view from the individual human soul to all human souls. In this way, the human being looks, on the one hand, to the Christ, to whom he can turn in the most intimate moments as to the one who is most akin to the human soul; people will experience what is directly within them, but they will also experience that He is the impulse that has poured over the whole earth and all humanity, and this latter will be something very beautiful if it is truly understood by people. However, it will only be understood slowly! But once it is understood, people will say: the Christ is a reality, and inasmuch as he is a reality, he is this not only for those who recognize him, but for all of humanity. - Then we will be able to face every person of a different faith, whether he is a Hindu or a Chinese, whether he has this or that belief, and we will be able to regard him as a Christian because he is a human being. When Christians understand that in reality all people are Christians, when the Christ-problem is truly understood, then one will no longer make it dependent on religious denominations whether or not to call a person a Christian. Regardless of whether people know it or not, the Christ is the all-encompassing, the fulfillment of all humanity! And this correct understanding of Christ will confirm the word spoken by Christ: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

Many a saying attributed to Christ can easily be misunderstood, such as: “Whoever does not leave father and mother for my sake cannot be my disciple.” This was not meant to break the old law, to sever the blood ties that were formerly based on love alone, but to add to the intimate human the general human. And to be a disciple of Christ means to find within oneself that which concerns all humanity, that which is comprehensive and intimate in every human soul, in terms of earth and humanity. As simple as this may be expressed, it is still little understood today. But when the Christ-problem is spiritually grasped, then the Christ will shine forth and stream into the souls and hearts of men. Today it lies latent in the development of humanity. There are, for example, some brilliant researchers of the present day who work with the deepest scientific earnest, such as Smith, whom I mention as a typical example. They made the discovery that what is told in the Gospels is not about a human being, but about a God. Now they say – and one cannot reproach them for this – that it would be childish and simple-minded to believe in the earthly existence of this God. So the Christ is only a symbolic fiction, and that is how one can prove that the Christ could not have lived in physical embodiment.

Now, however, spiritual science has to put up with childish and simple-minded people, including the most learned scientific minds, because it has made the discovery that Christ was not just a god, a spiritual being, but that he also really entered into a human life. And for this one person, he became what he has always been for countless people and will increasingly become for more and more people. And spiritual science knows very well that what Christ is must be found within the soul, just as the sun can only be found through the eye. With Goethe, spiritual science says:

If the eye were not like the sun,
The sun could never see it;
If God's own power were not within us,
How could we be delighted by the divine?

But it not only says that we need an eye to see the sun, but also that if we had only lived in darkness, we would have had no eyes at all. From the original state of man, the sun brought forth the eyes; through the sun, through the light, man has received eyes. It is true that man cannot find the Christ unless he finds him within himself. But it is also true that the Christ can only be found in our inner being because he once lived on earth. It is historically true that the Christ is the sun of spiritual development on earth and that rays emanate from him that have sunk into us. By confirming what has been lost, spiritual science returns the Christ to the twentieth century as a living being, by recognizing both the historical Christ and the [living] Christ, who can be found as the spirit-sun when one delves into oneself. If it is true what Goethe said about the connection between the inner and the outer, about the sun and the divine, then something else is also true, to which Goethe would undoubtedly have given his approval. So let us summarize Goethe's saying in the spirit of our present reflection and pour it into the words, which may sound like an extension of Goethe'

saying:

If the world were not endowed with the sun,
How could the eyes of beings flourish?
If existence were not God's revelation,
How could people come to God's fulfillment?

I can easily imagine that someone draws the conclusion from yesterday's deliberations that those personalities who belong to the groups of people, the peoples, who are only in the sixth cultural period receive their special mission because, as yesterday's expression put it, they belong to the time when development already took place in a descending line, are valued less than those who belong to groups of people of ascending development. I say I can easily imagine someone drawing this conclusion. In other words, I can easily imagine that especially in view of everything that was said yesterday, in connection with other remarks, someone is all the more likely to make a value judgment under the influence of all kinds of emotions and feelings. And so it may come about, as I pointed out, that what is said in particular in relation to these things in one place must be misunderstood in other places. Not because it is colored according to the needs of a place or certain people, but because it is not understood with the necessary objectivity, but with passion and all kinds of national aspirations. Someone might then say: So you only used words to flatter Central European culture, so to speak, and we, who belong to Eastern European culture, feel deeply offended by what has been said. Yes, when such a judgment is passed, it only proves that what I tried to show yesterday is happening, namely that it must be detached from the spiritual-scientific feeling, so detached that purely theoretical, purely abstract thinking is transformed into direct experience, that what otherwise belonged only to our knowledge is now closer to our feelings and experiences.

Anyone who would judge as just indicated would judge only theoretically and abstractly. For how would the concrete judgment that transgresses into experience be formulated in such a case? It would be formulated as follows: if what has been set apart is true, then we are heading towards a time when those who want to follow the progress of the cultural mission will no longer be allowed to be absorbed in mere national experience. The peculiarity of the fifth cultural epoch was such that the personalities belonging to it were able to merge in a certain way into the national feeling and in turn extract themselves personally from it. The sixth and seventh cultural epochs will be such that those who merely want to be national will be left behind in relation to the tasks of humanity. But this is, of course, the reason why we are pursuing a spiritual-scientific worldview: that humanity may free itself from mere national sentiment, from that sentiment which is not general human sentiment. So, what must be concluded from what was said yesterday is something quite, quite different. It is this: that the Central European national cultures are the ones that, as national cultures, have impulses within them that coincide with the great mission of post-Atlantic culture. But then there will come cultures that make it necessary for people to outgrow national impulses, and that it will not work if those who are the “excellents” today — one says “laggards”, so why not say “excellents”? — of the later cultures become completely absorbed in their national experience, and indeed with emphasis, as is happening with the population of Eastern Europe. In other words, since they have not yet received their mission in this national feeling, they are dependent on absorbing what is produced as spiritual science in order to rise above the national. Living understanding is also necessary there.

However, in today's world, where passions and prejudices are so opposed, it will be difficult to find what is necessary for people to be able to place themselves fully on the ground of spiritual science that truly strives for objectivity, to be able to place themselves fully on the ground of the purely human. We are pursuing spiritual science so that something may spread across the whole earth that goes beyond all differentiations. Therefore, those who turn to spiritual science from all nations should be able to gain objective understanding for something like what has been dealt with in that lecture cycle entitled 'The Mission of Individual National Souls', which should be studied wherever there are anthroposophists. Its significance lies precisely in the fact that it was given years before this war, so that no one can accuse it of having been produced out of the mood of this war. What matters is not that what is said here or there does not contain universal truths, but that it must be recognized how these truths are not tolerated everywhere. When I spoke here months ago, I pointed out that we in Central Europe have it easy to be objective, easier than the rest. Why we have it easier is also clear from that lecture cycle. All the deeper teachings of our serious events point out to us that something must develop out of the most diverse foundations of our present world culture that coincides with our spiritual-scientific striving. In a certain respect, one can say that these serious events are something like a powerful indication of the necessity of spiritual-scientific experience in the world. They prove that this spiritual-scientific experience must come. Therefore, what we experience here at this place can only be of secondary importance for us. Our real task is to assimilate into our soul life that which can already be understood everywhere without causing inner offence, although there are so many prejudices in so many areas.

The insights that spiritual science provides into the universal human in the human being also prepare us to be able to objectively survey everything into which we are placed by the evolution of the earth and the evolution of the world. For this, into which we are placed, is, so to speak, the soil from which we grow, and that through which we are to grow is the impulses that we take up through spiritual science. Basically, we are only with one half of our being in all the differentiations that are spread over the earth, with our physical body and our etheric body, which we also leave behind on the earth when we enter the other state of consciousness, which we can call sleep. But with the I and the astral body, we then go out of our physical body and etheric body and are then with our I and astral body in the world that man otherwise enters when he passes through the gate of death, in the world where all earthly differentiations cease, in the world into which the insights of spiritual science are supposed to introduce us. Those who can make initiation knowledge their own are truly protected by this initiation knowledge from giving any of the folk spirits special preference in a one-sided way. For how do we come into contact with the particular folk spirit to which we belong?

When we are in the spiritual world from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, with our ego and astral body, we are not in touch with our folk spirit, with the folk spirit that, so to speak, presides over our nationality, but we are only in touch with this folk spirit during our waking day life, from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep. Among the forces in which we are immersed when we enter our physical and etheric bodies, are also the forces in which the spirit of the people to which we belong is at work. We enter the field of this national spirit, so to speak, when we awaken; we leave it again when we fall asleep. But the one who acquires initiatory knowledge must, precisely during this acquisition, dwell in the world in which his national spirit is not, for he must enter the world in which we live between falling asleep and waking up. And then something special comes to light. Let us assume that a person belongs to a very specific nation. Everyone belongs to one, in that they must count themselves as belonging to a particular nationality. When a person leaves the sphere of their folk spirit when falling asleep, they no longer have contact with this folk spirit until they wake up again. Even those who acquire initiatory knowledge enter this realm, and during the time between falling asleep and waking up, they come together with the other spirits of the nations that otherwise live on earth, except for their own folk spirit. So one lives through a being together with the other folk spirits in the time between falling asleep and waking up, and with one's own folk spirit in the time between waking up and falling asleep. Only, one does not live with each individual folk spirit, but with their collective, with their association, so to speak, with what they accomplish in relation to each other, with the totality of the other folk spirits.

So you see, human life alternates – as the knowledge of initiation tells us – between an experience with the folk spirit in the waking state and an experience with the totality of the other folk spirits in the sleeping state. Only there is a means, as it were, whereby we have an abnormal coexistence with the other folk spirits, whereby we do not come together with their totality in our sleep, but come together with a particular folk spirit. This is when we hate a nation with particular passion. That is the abnormal thing: we cannot escape it when we hate a nation with particular passion, that during sleep we enter the sphere of its folk spirit. And anyone who acquires initiatory knowledge would, if they hated a people particularly for purely personal national reasons, enter the sphere of their national spirit when they enter the field of initiation, and it would soon become impossible for them to remain within it. To put it in trivial terms, I could say: anyone who hates another people because of their national passions is doomed to sleep with their national spirit. That is a trivial way of putting it, but it is to be taken quite literally.

The facts of the spiritual world ensure that the whole human race is one and that it is not possible to separate oneself from it. But if we face such facts, we can learn a lot from them. We are talking about the fact that the world in which we live externally with our senses and with our mind, which is bound to the brain, is a great deception, a Maja; but we also take this truth, that the world is a Maja, all too abstractly, we take it only theoretically. I would like to say that we still allow ourselves to grasp this truth intellectually. To grasp it full of life, not only our intellect, but often even our will, resists that. Because what is behind the world of deception, it looks like we don't want it to look that way. We shy away from it, we fear it, because the truth is uncomfortable for us. Knowing that all of humanity is, in a very real sense, one unit is not comfortable, because it does not allow us to view feelings and enthusiasm in the one-sided way that they are often viewed today, but rather it teaches us what they mean in the world of reality. But that is uncomfortable. The will often shrinks from the truth even more than the intellect does. Therefore, it is not surprising that in our time the truths of spiritual science are still widely regarded as folly, because the folly of the time fears the wisdom of the world. But only by looking beyond appearances is it possible to understand what is actually happening. I already pointed this out yesterday and now I will explain it in a specific case.

When we follow a person as he passes through the portal of death into the spiritual world, where he lives through the time between death and a new birth in order to prepare for a new life on earth, then we must realize become clear to what extent he is influenced in his life between death and a new birth by his last life on earth, and to what extent he brings with him through the gate of death into the spiritual life the echoes of his last life on earth. We know, of course, that when a person passes through the gate of death, he carries with him, after he has given up his physical body to the earthly elements, his etheric body, his astral body and

We also know that this etheric body soon separates from the ego and the astral body, with the exception of an extract that remains, and that the etheric body connects with the general workings of the cosmos. We have often considered all this. But now it is the case that after death, through his knowledge, the knowledge that remains with him after death, the human being nevertheless looks back at the fate of the ether body, and that this fate means something to him. It means something for the person after death when he looks at the fate of his etheric body, which proceeds in such a way that this progression is a kind of result of earthly life. And this result, this outcome of earthly life turns out differently for the most diverse conditions on earth, including, among other things, the different experiences within nationalities. The remains on earth that have a meaning for a person after death are quite different, let us say, for a soul that leaves a French body and passes into the spiritual world, and quite different for a soul that leaves a Russian body today and passes into the spiritual world. Souls that leave a French body today belong to a culture that has become, so to speak, mature and overripe, which allows much of this etheric body to be experienced on earth. The peculiarity of French folk culture — not the culture of the individual — is that the etheric body itself is worked through, imbued with forces and power effects, and therefore passes through the gate of death in a very sharply defined way, and then is in the spiritual world. Such etheric bodies do not dissolve for a long time; they remain present as spectra for a long time. In his imagination, the Frenchman, insofar as he belongs to it, has a very definite opinion of himself, of what he is worth in the world. But this is nothing more than the reflection of the firmly working forces in the etheric body. The etheric body is plastically formed and thus passes into the spiritual world.

It is quite different with the etheric body of a Russian person. It is not so firmly formed, it is more elastic, so to speak, it dissolves more easily into the spiritual world; therefore the souls are less tied to it. While the soul of the Frenchman is connected to the etheric body of the Frenchman for a longer period of time, the soul of the Russian is only connected to the etheric body for a short time. What the etheric body undergoes after death means less for the soul of the East. But this has a very definite, profound, significant effect on what happens behind the scenes of our existence in the present, so to speak. The destinies of the Russian soul are quite different from those of the French soul in the time between death and a new birth.

Now we know from the most diverse considerations that we are heading towards the etheric working of the Christ-Spirit in the twentieth century. This is already indicated in the exoteric sense at the appropriate point in the mystery drama 'The Portal of Initiation' by the reappearance of the Christ as an etheric physical body. And it has also already been pointed out in various reflections that this appearance of the Christ is being prepared for those people who will be able to see him since the last third of the 19th century, in that the active spirit of the time since that time is different from what it was before. For centuries before that, Gabriel was the active spirit of the time; since the last third of the 19th century, Michael has been the active spirit of the time. It is Michael who, in a sense, has to prepare for the appearance of the Christ as an ethereal being. But all this must be prepared, all this must be 'promoted in a certain way in the development, and it is promoted. It is promoted in such a way that Michael, as it were, fights for the appearance of the Christ, that he prepares the souls in the experience between death and new birth for what is to happen in the earth aura. Now sharply defined etheric bodies, which are in the elementary world around us, would always be disturbing in the time that must approach when this etheric form, which the Christ must take, is to be seen purely. Those souls who, after death, are less affected by their etheric bodies are closer to a pure conception of this etheric form. Hence the following emerges.

We see how part of Michael's work is to help dissolve the highly cultivated etheric bodies of Western Europe, which have a fixed form, and we see how Michael uses the souls of Eastern Europe in this struggle. And so we see Michael, followed by the hosts of Eastern European souls, fighting against the Western European etheric bodies and the impressions that the souls have after 'death'. So there is a living struggle behind the scenes of today's existence. This struggle exists, this struggle in the spiritual world. This fight in heaven, as it were, takes place between Russia and France in the spiritual world, a living fight between East and West. And this fight is the truth, and that which takes place in the physical world, that is the outer maya, that is the distortion of the truth. And here, as so often, when one contemplates spiritual facts, one is often given the harrowing impression that what is taking place here in the field of deception is the very opposite of what is taking place in the spiritual world as truth.

Imagine the tremendous shock for the one who acquires initiation knowledge that there is an alliance between peoples who fight each other fiercely in the spiritual world! Of course, such things must not be generalized, nor must the conclusion be drawn that everything in the spiritual world is the opposite of the physical world. Each individual case must be examined. But in this case we also get this harrowing impression, this impression that, one might say, initially crushes our knowledge. Behind the scenes of existence, things often look very different from how they appear in the outer world. But we can only understand things in their true context if we can shine a light behind the scenes of existence from the point of view of spiritual science. But then our whole conception will also be imbued with those feelings which, as it were, allow our hearts to plunge into the truth in the face of the prejudices we must be subject to when we surrender to the currents of the external physical world. Today, Central Europe is really wedged between two fighting powers and, to a certain extent, has to keep them apart. But from this arises the connection between what I called yesterday the struggle of Central European culture and what is besieging this Central European culture on both sides, as if it were in a stranglehold. That is the karma of Central European culture: to see its development taking place between two forces that must fight each other due to an earth-historical necessity. A true sense of the tragic conflict of circumstances, as they now affect Central Europe, can only emerge from such a consideration. Only when we base our view on such a consideration do we realize that, basically, non-involvement in the struggles that are actually to be fought out is what is really characteristic of Central Europe, an innocent attitude towards these struggles and being entangled in karma. And now we have also seen what the exact harmony of what is contained in evolution is: we have seen how involved the East and West of Europe are in the coming Christ event. If we consider the struggle of Central European culture with its unification, as I characterized it yesterday, of the spiritual and the physical, then we also have the special development of the Christ impulse, which is, after all, the bearer of this unification of the spiritual and the physical. So in the middle of Europe, the phenomenon of transferring Christianity into earthly events. Here, on the physical plane, something of tremendous significance is taking place, and to the right and left, something that has to be fought for on the higher planes. The physical and spiritual planes join together when we look at them in this way.

This is the supplement to what we discussed yesterday. And so it is basically with all evolution, insofar as it develops gradually under the influence of the Christ impulse. For what is happening now in the twentieth century has gradually developed. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ Impulse has entered into the earthly development of mankind, and has worked therein. But if the Christ Impulse had been limited to the way in which people have understood it, it would have been able to accomplish little so far. We are only just beginning to understand; we are only just beginning to grasp something of what the Mystery of Golgotha is through spiritual science. The Christ Impulse has worked. But it has truly worked least of all in the bickering and shouting of theologians. It would have been bad if only as much of the Christ Impulse could have entered into the evolution of the earth as people have grasped with their minds in the various epochs. But I have pointed out how the Christ impulse has worked through the centuries into the unconscious powers of the soul. I have described to you how on October 28, 312 Constantine stood against Maxentius, and how a battle was fought there that decided the fate of Europe. This battle was not fought by the skill of the generals, but by what took place in the subconscious of men. Maxentius consulted the Sibylline books. They seduced him, instead of leaving his armies in safety in Rome, to lead them out of the gates of Rome, to meet the armies of Constantine. But Constantine had the dream: to let the monogram of Christ go in front of his army. Thus it was not the sagacity of the generals that was followed, but dreams, that is to say, the impulses of the subconscious. Europe has been shaped by what emerged from this. The real shaping of the Christ impulse, over which theologians quarrelled, did not come from what the theologians argued about, but from what the living Christ was in the fields where he can work. Not the human concepts of Christ are important, but the living Christ, who works through the impulses that are His. When people did not understand Him, He entered into a realm where there is no need to understand, where one absorbs in dreams what is to pass into the sphere of the will.

And once again it was in Europe that the Christ impulse penetrated and gave Europe a certain shape: in the 15th century, when Europe took on a completely different shape through the simple country girl, the Maid of Orleans. Had England triumphed over France at that time – which the Maid of Orleans prevented – all subsequent historical developments would have been different. But truly, the shepherdess of Orleans did not have human wisdom, but in her the Christ Impulse worked through its Michaelic forerunner, outwardly in favor of France, but in reality in favor of England; for otherwise England would not have been able to undergo the development that it has undergone. But the Christ impulse worked with tremendous clarity for those who want to see through the world spiritually, for what was to come.

I have often pointed out how those old legends, those old sagas and myths contain truths that indicate that in the thirteen nights between Christmas and the Feast of Epiphany, that in these nights of deepest winter darkness is the time when the powers of clairvoyance are particularly favorable to the powers of clairvoyance. Where, so to speak, the physical forces withdraw most into inactivity, there the spiritual forces are particularly active. These thirteen nights, from Christmas to January 6th - so an old Norwegian legend tells us - Olaf Ästeson slept. And in this sleep he went through all that in imaginations, which we now recognize anthroposophically as Kamaloka, as the soul world, as the spiritual world. That is a truth. And many a person who, I might say, is at the gateway of initiation, can give this initiation its final perfection if they can achieve a very special, concentrated inner experience during this time, into which the birth of the Christ, the spiritual sunlight, has rightly been placed. One might say: If someone is to experience an unconscious initiation, when would they best experience it? Then he would experience it best if he is prepared during these nights, when he is in a state of sleep, a kind of state of being removed from the world, until January 6. Could we not assume that the shepherdess, Joan of Arc, who was certainly not educated or trained in the humanities but was inwardly spiritualized, could have been best initiated if she had gone through these nights in a kind of sleep state, a state where she would not have comprehended the outer world through the senses and the mind? She did! In the time before physical birth, one is certainly not predisposed to perceive the surrounding world through the external senses, because these senses only awaken at birth in physical existence. One is also not capable of reflecting through the mind before birth, but the spiritual part is then in contact with the cosmic spiritual environment.

Now, the Virgin of Orleans spent the thirteen days before January 6 in her mother's womb, because she was born on January 6. This is a fact that speaks profoundly of the interrelationships between worlds. The World Spirit guiding evolution needed a human soul in the body of the Virgin of Orleans, who spent the last thirteen days of pregnancy in her mother's womb until January 6, when she was born. There we see deep into those connections that are behind the scenes of existence. There we see how the world is led in spiritual terms. A soul was born that was initiated, so to speak, by the spirit of the world itself up until its birth. It is therefore a matter of acquiring a sense of how the carpet of external Mayan existence is spread out before us: if we tear it in different places, we can begin to glimpse the secrets of existence. And this must become feeling and intuition for the transforming power of spiritual science for the culture of humanity. It must become an intuitive perception that in order to look into the secrets of the world, one must radically break with the mere observation of the external maya, which of course had to occur since the splendor and fame of scientific research. But in the future this splendor and fame must be replaced by spiritual science. Above all, what humanity needs for the real assimilation of spiritual science in the soul will be a truly good will for the connection of one's own soul with the spiritual worlds. But all this must proceed from a certain self-knowledge. Yet self-knowledge is not at all easy, and it is one of the greatest illusions to which one can succumb in ordinary life to think that self-knowledge, which must be the beginning of all true knowledge, is easy.

Even with regard to the most external things, it is not even particularly easy. I have a book here that has coincidentally – in what one calls a coincidence – karmically come into my hands again these days: the book of a contemporary philosopher who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna: “Analysis of Sensations.” The person who wrote the book makes very interesting self-revelations. On page 3, he says: As a young man, I once saw my face in profile in a mirror while walking across the street, but I did not recognize it as my own face. I thought: What a repulsive, unappealing face! — So you see, even to this extent, self-knowledge of the purely external form is not even that widespread. The good man openly admits: he encounters a highly unappealing face with a repulsive character, and then he discovers that it is his own. He knew himself so little in terms of his external appearance. You see, it is not easy to acquire even external self-knowledge. You can be a university professor and still not know yourself, as this example testifies. Ernst Mach, that is the professor's name, makes a similar confession. He is completely honest. He says: “I once came back from a journey quite tired and got into an omnibus. At the same time, someone else got into the omnibus. I thought: what a run-down schoolmaster is getting in there!” — And lo and behold, it was me. — He had seen himself in the mirror. The good man knew what a rundown schoolmaster looks like, so he saw one getting on, but he couldn't identify with it, he didn't know that he looked like that. He adds to his story: So I knew the class habitus better than my own!

Much more difficult than knowing our outer appearance is knowing our soul, knowing what we actually are in our spiritual being. But without this, it is not possible if one really wants to make progress in the field of initiation. Delusion about oneself is one of the most widespread human peculiarities, and what takes place in the depths of the human soul is generally not known. It is very easy to think: Yes, I know myself, I know what I want! One forms certain ideas about oneself; but these are mostly

not really suited to express what we truly are. Down there in the soul, it often looks quite different from the region where we form ideas about ourselves. Some examples are given that not only can happen, but often do happen in human coexistence: Two people live together. One of them has something against the other, so that he actually likes to torment and torture the other sometimes, sometimes more intensely, sometimes less. Whatever the cause of this torment may be, it can be an original urge to be cruel. A person can go around seemingly quite harmlessly in the world and yet actually be a very cruel fellow who feels the need to torture a fellow human being. If you talk to this person, he will not forgive you if you think of him as a cruel fellow, as a disgusting guy who only feels satisfied when he can torture his fellow human beings. but he will say: Oh, I love this person so much, so terribly, but he just does this and that and that, and precisely because I love him so much, I can't stand it when he does that! This is in the person's conscious mind, but in the subconscious is the cruelty. And the ideas of the conscious mind are only there to conceal, to excuse us from ourselves. The way we form ideas in the conscious mind is only there to excuse us properly from ourselves. I knew a gentleman who emphasized at every opportunity that he only adopted a certain intellectual direction out of pure unselfishness, that he was not particularly sympathetic to this direction, but out of a sense of duty and unselfishness he had to adopt this direction. I said to him: What you think about the things you do and why you do them is not important, but what is important is why you really do them. And you do it because it gives you lust to do just that, because it particularly flatters your vanity to do this. — It is unpleasant to admit: I am actually quite vain, that's why I do this or that. — That's why we love our Maja, she does it differently. The Maja that we carry in our consciousness about ourselves is often even more unlike reality than the Maja that we have about spiritual science. Love is certainly a wonderful thing, and rightly so in the eyes of humanity. But all too often it is wrongly spoken of! When we were still connected with the other Theosophical Society, we often heard how it depends on people loving each other deeply and truly! Often this love was only the veil that was cast over the dogmatic quarrels. For love can often be a mask for the strongest selfishness. When someone takes particular pleasure in doing this or that, they often disguise what they do and what actually gives them pleasure as love; and they excuse themselves for what they would never actually confess, leaving it in the depths of their subconscious. Yes, when we descend into this human being, then we really soon descend into an abyss. Man can really only recognize himself by delving into the secrets of spiritual existence, by familiarizing himself with the great laws of this spiritual existence. For the human being is complicated, and it is the greatest error to believe that this human being is somehow simple. I would like to say: All the secrets of the world are combined to bring the human being together. But things must be properly understood.

Playing with self-knowledge stops very quickly when you realize something of the spiritual secrets of human existence. Let us assume that a person, through some training or other, begins to have a certain clairvoyance and even manages to see quite wonderful images that he can fix, so that people come and are completely enchanted by the meaningful connection between this person and the spiritual world. The connection undoubtedly exists, but one must see through this spiritual connection in its truth, one must see through what it can really be. You see, the human being, with its physical body, is based on the etheric body as its creator, then the astral body, then that which we call the ego carrier. All of this works on the physical body, and each higher body in turn works on the lower. If you take the etheric body and examine it directly with clairvoyance, it is a wonderful structure of shimmering colors that flow into each other. What are these colors that flow in the etheric body? Yes, these are the forces that build the physical body, the forces that not only build organs for it but also work in what is carried out by the organs of the physical body during life. But the human organs are of different importance. Take two such organs as the intestines and the brain. External anatomy examines the tissues and everything that comes into consideration as being of equal value. But these are not things, they are quite different. When we look at the human brain, as a physical organ it is complete; this is because the brain processes those floods of color. If we look at the etheric body of the human brain, we see it in relatively pale colors, because the colors were used to create the structure of the brain. When we look at the intestines, we find the flowing colors shimmering brightly and wonderfully intertwined, because the intestines are really coarser organs; not so much of the spiritual has to be used there, the forces remain in the etheric body, and only a smaller part is used for development. Therefore, the etheric body of the brain is pale, but the etheric body of the intestines is of wonderful, vibrant colors, beautiful.

Now, imagine that someone comes to have clairvoyance as I have described it. Two things can happen: clairvoyance can occur as a result of loosening the etheric body of the brain, but it can also occur as a result of loosening the etheric body of the intestines. In clairvoyance, a person often becomes aware of his or her own interior. The one who gets the etheric body of the brain out will initially see a rather pale world; but the one who gets the etheric body of his or her intestines out can reflect wonderfully flooding colors into the etheric world. In order to bring the pale colors of the etheric body of the brain into contact with the flowing colors of the cosmos, it is necessary that we first draw the flowing colors from the entire sphere of the cosmos. To develop the flowing colors of the etheric body of the intestines, we can radiate them out of ourselves, and in this way a quite marvelous formation can be seen by means of clairvoyance. It is certainly a genuine clairvoyant form, but when it is examined, what is it? It is nothing other than one's own digestive process; it is what the etheric body does during the digestive process of a person; it projects itself into the etheric space. From the anatomical point of view, this is most interesting. But we must realize that we only begin to get an inkling of what is actually present in the spiritual world when we approach the secrets of the spiritual world. We only then get an inkling that out of the wonderfully flowing sea of colors of the etheric body, there also arises that which must take place in the etheric body so that the intestines function in the right way. If one then sees this clairvoyantly, it is certainly a clairvoyant process; but it is nothing that is connected with heavenly secrets, it is nothing that brings the great cosmic facts of the world to us in any way, but it is something that brings us to our most ordinary lower self.

And just when we ascend to self-knowledge with clairvoyance, we find that the first thing we experience in terms of wonderful images is a reflection of our basest self. And only then, when we make a greater effort to get rid of those parts of the etheric body that have remained behind in us as lesser ones because the majority have been used to the heart and brain, only then do we manage to radiate out what is within us and make an impression through the more strongly applied forces on the outer ether. And then the following happens: When we project the etheric body of the physical organs, we push it out into space. When we develop higher clairvoyance, we also work outwards, but we work out what we build up between birth and death, so that it prepares what develops in us between death and a new birth. We inscribe this in space, and thus we produce an effect in the etheric world. And there we encounter that which is formed through these effects, the cosmic effects, the cosmic facts.

We are constantly working towards this. The book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' aims to express this in the most eminent sense, that the right ways are found, not to find the lower being of man through an enchanting clairvoyance, but to fathom the secrets of the world. It is pointed out again and again that this clairvoyance is difficult, that it appears pale, that one first develops through great efforts of those forces, which are the forces of the human being between birth and death, to true clairvoyance, that then the secrets of the world can be unraveled. Where these forces lie can be imagined by delving into what was said in the Vienna Cycle of 1914. There is talk of the forces that a person develops between death and a new birth, of the forces for which it is only possible to use stammering words, because words are coined for the physical world, and one can only express what is quite different in the spiritual world than in the physical-sensual world through word compositions. But people find it more convenient to imagine the spiritual world as nothing more than a kind of continuation of the physical world, only somewhat thinner, somewhat more fleeting. People would find it convenient to see figures walking around in the spiritual world, as they do in the physical world; but they find it inconvenient that one must develop a new way of thinking when one wants to enter the spiritual world. All of this should prove to you that not only human understanding, but above all human will, resists what spiritual science must bring into the world in our time. We can truly say: Not only because large sections of people today do not understand spiritual science do they reject it, but because they do not want it, because fundamentally they are horrified that the world is as spiritual science wants and must depict it.

An especially important concept must be understood in order to comprehend the experience between death and a new birth. Basically, one cannot say that a person who has passed through the gate of death has no consciousness and that his consciousness must first awaken. That is not even correct, but it is correct that he has too strong an awareness when he has gone through the gate of death, that he is completely surrounded by awareness, that he is quite dazed by the spiritual sunlight of consciousness and must first begin to orient himself, as I have explained in more detail in the cycle just mentioned. Here on earth we have to acquire wisdom in a makeshift way; but over there we are surrounded by wisdom on all sides, so we have to dim it so that we can behold it. The parts that we have subdued to human weakness are the ones we can see. So first we have to familiarize ourselves with the subjugation of our consciousness until we can find our way around. This is something that becomes particularly apparent when one really looks at the phenomena. You see, one then gradually tries to shape the words so that they properly express these phenomena. Not long ago a dear member of our society in Zurich died. Karma had it that although I had wanted to see the member in the physical life, I came too late and did not see him. But then, after a few days, we had the cremation in Zurich. I was asked to speak at this cremation, and I tried to put into words what presented itself to me inwardly as the essence of this dear member of our society. I tried to capture this essence in a few words. Then the cremation was carried out. And it was now noticeable that the first orienting emergence from the engulfing consciousness occurred at the moment when the body passed into the flames, when seemingly the flame, in reality the heat, seized this body. At that moment, the scene we had had before was before the soul of the deceased. Before, during the funeral oration, she had not taken part in it, but afterwards, when the cremation began, she looked back. And just as in physical life one has space in front of oneself, so the dead person sees things in time. What has passed is beside the dead person. He sees the scenes standing in front of him. Time really becomes space. The past is not past, it remains there, it is looked at. Then the dead descended again into a general stupor, and it then takes a long time for orientation to take place. But such moments prepare themselves, one might say, bright moments, which are then further processed. Then there is another submerging into the general flooding of consciousness, until later a complete orientation occurs.

And so it must be said that it is an important concept that reflects the wisdom that consciousness thinks in a different way after death than before death. It is not that a degree of consciousness must first mature after death, but that the immeasurable consciousness must be attenuated to a certain degree. We must bear this in mind. And then we must take the realization very seriously that the truth is often exactly the opposite of what appears on the surface. I have already illustrated this with an example. A person is walking along the edge of a stream, falls into the stream and drowns. We go after him and find him drowned, and at the point where he fell into the stream we find a stone. We can then justifiably conclude that the person fell into the stream over the stone and thereby drowned. If we do nothing further, we come to no other conclusion. But here, with regard to the physical facts, the logic of the facts may be wrong. At the autopsy, we may discover that the man had a stroke and that he consequently fell into the water, so that cause and effect are reversed. We thought the man was dead because he fell into the water; in reality he fell into the water because he was dead. In relation to the external facts, the logic was wrong. Thus we often cannot come to terms with logic for the external Maja.

Take the case we experienced in the fall regarding our pain in Dornach. The seven-year-old son of a member of the local branch who had settled in Dornach was missing one evening. And after it became clear that the child could be under a fallen furniture truck, the truck had to be lifted in the middle of the night, and little Theo Faiß was pulled out from under it, dead. What had happened? No furniture truck drives in that area, no truck drives at all. It is an extremely exceptional case for a truck to drive there. There were no trucks driving there long before or after. And little Theo always fetched what he had to fetch a quarter of an hour earlier. That evening he had been asked to wait a quarter of an hour. He could have walked on the right side while walking on the left side of the car, but he was made to go to a different exit than usual. Everything has come together so that it happened down to the second, so that the boy just happened to come under that car. If you examine the case spiritually in its karmic context, then the soul of the boy had ordered this car to find death at this time; it was all arranged that way, the physical event is a consequence of the spiritual connections. Then you understand things in a completely different way, then you also understand the connection between what happened and the further course after death. Little Theo had an etheric body that he could have had for another seventy, eighty years or more in normal life. None of this is lost, it remains there. An etheric body of a child who died at seven still has the forces within it that would have been used in life; they are present in the spiritual world. And those who have to do with the etheric aura of our building are well aware of this; for the etheric body of the little boy has been there since his death, there are the forces, the strong spiritual forces of this clever, loving, well-disposed boy. These are the forces of help and assistance for everything connected with the aura of the Dornach building.

In this way, spiritual and physical effects are connected. The times when one had to look to the spiritual world for what happens in the physical world are no longer; but they still exist. We are beginning to understand some things through our spiritual science. However, there is much in it for which we need help from those who leave the physical life with unspent etheric forces. Think of the thousands and thousands who are passing through the portals of death in the great fields of serious contemporary events, all of them people with unconsumed etheric bodies. These are all spiritual forces that could have been effective for a long time if the people in question had remained in the physical world. In physics, it is already recognized that no force is lost. In the most eminent sense, however, this law of the conservation of energy is present in the spiritual world. The forces that an etheric body has to sustain a life between birth and death until the age of eighty or ninety are not lost when someone passes through the gate of death early. The forces are there. In addition to what enters the spiritual world through the ego and the astral body and has value for the individuality, the etheric body has a general value for that which passes into the general aura of human evolution on earth. So we can look up to the fresh, vigorous, unspent etheric bodies that work down from the spiritual worlds into the times to come.

Just as we often see today that 'the dead fight with the living', so on the other side we see the etheric field, the elemental world, permeated with forces, with strong human forces, which are acquired in high confidence in the belief in ideal human goals, which are left behind by people who have gone through the gateway of death with this belief. But those who will live later will have to look up to these unspent etheric forces, which will continue to be effective. These etheric forces of those who died young will most certainly demand that they have not in vain found the transition into the spiritual world and look down from there. They will demand that they can really contribute their part to the reorganization of the spiritual world, which is demanded of humanity. These ethereal bodies are there as admonishers, admonishers that say: We have gone into the spiritual world so that forces that can go into your hearts and souls can flow to you from here, with which you can work even more strongly for the progress of the development of the earth in the spiritual-scientific sense. We must understand the interaction between the physical and the spiritual, not in a nebulous, hazy way, but as a concrete spiritual connection between people who live here on earth in physical bodies and the souls that have gone up into the spiritual world. There will be a common ground if we understand the facts and properly imbibe what spiritual science can give us. Yes, truly, an insight into the connection between the spiritual and the physical can also put us in the right way to the great seriousness of our time, and make us feel completely how what is happening can only be justified by us before the future if it is taken as the cause of a great, significant human struggle and human work on the physical plane as well. What we emphasized yesterday must be fulfilled: the right understanding between the spiritual and physical worlds. What is contained in the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit —
Guiding souls, spiritually aware
Their minds into the spiritual realm.

With Rudolf Steiner the educationalist, the scientist, the philosopher, even the sculptor and the architect of the Goetheanum, we already enjoy the degree of familiarity that translations of his books and lectures afford. We enjoy it too where, as a result of his observations and discoveries, new beginnings have been made in a host of other fields. But Rudolf Steiner’s literary work remains for the most part unfamiliar. Of course, there are grave and ominous difficulties: here more than anywhere else the barriers of language and tradition are tightly defended, hard to traverse. Yet we should not too readily turn away and admit defeat in the face of these literary problems. We might remember, after all, that the scientist-philosopher to whom the young scholar in Vienna and Weimar devoted so much sympathy and scrupulous attention, the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who wrote the Farbenlehre and The Metamorphosis of Plants, was better known to the world as one of the darlings of literature, the Poet of Faust and a great novelist and dramatist into the bargain. It is true that for Steiner the many-sidedness of the poet and artist was to be the new ideal for the philosopher too, but art, or man’s faculty of “aesthetic judgment”, was never to lose its central position or its claim to be – as the Romantics of England and Germany had argued with alternate reason and intuition – the highest and most perfect form of knowledge, because the most human. The apprehension of beauty, as Steiner once put it, “comprises truth, that is, selflessness; but it is at the same time an assertion of self-supremacy in the soul-life, giving us back to ourselves as a spontaneous gift.” [See The Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit (New York 1971), p.114.] In our own day Owen Barfield has taken up the Romantic argument anew, with renewed passion and a new sense of precision, in Poetic Diction and certain of his essays elsewhere. In all Rudolf Steiner’s later, anthroposophical work, moreover, we seem to see everything tending to assume an artistic, poetic form.

He had, of course, his period of quite straightforwardly literary activity, dating back to the last decades of the nineteenth century. He was for some years the editor of the Magazin für Literatur, a well-established literary review founded in the year of Goethe’s death, and contributed to it pieces of his own criticism on literature and drama. [These are collected as Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur (Dornach 1971).] He mingled in Vienna with many literary and some rather Bohemian figures, both prominent and obscure, and later recalled how deeply this cultural atmosphere had influenced The Philosophy of Freedom. [In From Symptom to Reality in Modern History (London 1976), pp. 132ff.]

He also edited and furnished with introductions several of the German “classics”. The occasion for his own venture into drama, however, was to come somewhat later and far from the conventional stage. This was in 1910, when his The Portal of Initiation was produced in Munich for the Annual Congress of the Theosophical Society, which Steiner was even then on the point of leaving. His work in this sphere was to be continued in the more congenial framework of the newly founded Anthroposophical Society. The Portal of Initiation was followed by a further three poetic Mystery Dramas.

It was around that time, too, that he first began to include in his lectures more detailed discussions of the working of language and “speech-formation”—the concrete substance (vowels, consonants, diphthongs, etc.) by means of which language evokes its astonishing range of sensual, emotive and poetic effects. It was in a lecture of 1911, in fact, that he first expounded one of his fundamental conclusions about the basic constituents of language. By that time his researches had reached a stage which enabled him to look back to a period of pre-history, near the very beginnings of language, when, as he says, there existed a kind of primitive human language, a manner of speech which was the same all over the earth, because “speech” in those days came much more out of the depths of the soul than it does now.

At that remote period, he continues, people felt all outward impressions in such a way that if the soul wished to express anything outward by a sound, it was constrained to use a consonant. What existed in space pressed for imitation in a consonant. The blowing of the wind, the murmur of the waves, the shelter given by a house were felt and imitated by man in consonants. On the other hand, the sorrow or joy which was felt inwardly, or was observed as feeling in another being, was imitated in a vowel. From this we can see that the soul became one, in speech, with outer events or beings. [The Spiritual Guidance of Man, Lecture II]

He adds the following example of this kind of intimate relationship between experience and the particular sounds of speech:

A man drew near a hut, which was arched in the ancient fashion and gave shelter and protection to a family. He noticed this, and expressed the protective arch by a consonant; and by a vowel he expressed the fact, which he was able to feel, that within the hut embodied souls were comfortable. Thence arose the thought shelter; “there is a shelter for me – shelter for human bodies.” The thought was then poured forth in consonants and vowels, which could not be otherwise than they were, because they were a direct impression of experience and had but one meaning. This was the same all over the earth. It is no dream that there was once an original human root-language. And, in a certain sense, the initiates of all nations are still able to feel that language. Indeed there are in all languages certain similar sounds which are the remains of that universal language. [The Spiritual Guidance of Man (New York 1970), pp.35-36. Compare the earlier (1904) discussion of this stage of language in Cosmic Memory (New York 1971), p.50. Cf. Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell Nos. 236, 241.]

This was a discovery from which a great deal could be made, in opening up the way to a wide-ranging investigation both into the nature of language in general and, especially as regards that immediate and necessary link “in the depths of the soul” between certain specific sounds and types of experience, into the foundations of poetry and poetic speech-formation.

As so often in Rudolf Steiner’s career, however, he put himself at the disposal of those around him, and developed his ideas as circumstances seemed to demand, rather than as he himself might have found it easiest to elaborate them. In any event, the lecture-courses embodying his contributions to the subject in depth do not come until virtually the last years of his life – commencing around 1919. Some of these lectures, together with a sprinkling of aphorisms and notes, have been usefully gathered together and published in English as Creative Speech: The Nature of Speech-Formation, translated by Winifred Budgett, Nancy Hummel and Maisie Jones (London 1978). Others, notably concerned with broader and less technical issues in poetry and artistic speech, are presented in this volume. In our notes we have made some effort to indicate the points at which the two books may shed light upon each other or provide the inquisitive reader with further details on a particular topic.

Both earlier and later, one of Rudolf Steiner’s main inducements to develop his work in this direction was undoubtedly the interest, the practical help, the enthusiasm and the talents of Marie von Sivers (later Marie Steiner). Whilst still in Russia, as a promising young actress in St. Petersburg, Marie von Sivers had studied under Maria Strauch-Spettini, one of the prominent figures on the stage of the German Imperial Theatre. There were later hopes that she might have returned there to help make a stand for the traditions of French classicism against the all-engulfing trend towards naturalism. For in the meantime she had spent two years in Paris studying under the direction of Madame Favart, the first lady of the Comédie Francaise, then at the end of her theatrical career, and had been attending at the Conservatoire the classes of several other notable actors of the time. But she decided against returning permanently to St. Petersburg, and her connection with the Theosophical Society soon opened out quite different avenues for her future work. In his autobiography, The Course of My Life, Rudolf Steiner describes their collaboration in those early days, and the importance it assumed for the germinating Anthroposophical Movement:

In the Theosophical Society artistic interests were hardly cultivated at all. This was understandable in a certain sense – but had to change if a proper attitude toward the spirit was to flourish. The members of such a society tend to focus all their interests in the reality of the spiritual life; man in the sense-world seems to them merely a transitory being, severed from the spirit. And art appears to concern only that severed existence, as if it were divorced from the looked-for reality of the spirit.

In view of this, artists did not feel at home in the Theosophical Society. To Marie von Sivers and me it seemed important for an artistic life to be engendered in the Society. Knowledge of the spirit, when it becomes an inner experience, takes hold of the whole man. All the powers of the soul are roused. And the light of this inner spiritual experience will shine into man’s creative imagination.

But there may be difficulties. The artist, when his imagination is illumined by the spiritual world, may feel a certain uneasiness. He finds it preferable to remain unconscious of the spiritual that rules within the soul. And so long as it is a question of his imagination being prompted by that intellectualizing which has dominated spiritual life since the opening of the consciousness-soul era, this feeling is quite justified. Such a stimulation by human intellect does have a deadening effect on art.

When a spiritual content is perceived directly, however, and lights up in the imagination, the opposite result is brought about. This leads to a resurrection of all those creative powers which have ever brought art into being in the life of humanity. Marie von Sivers was genuinely accomplished in the art of speech-formation, and had a real feeling for drama. Thus there was represented within the Movement an art-form on which the fruitfulness of spiritual perception for the arts could be tested.

The evolution of the consciousness-soul exposes the “Word” to danger from two directions. On the one hand it is made the vehicle of social understanding, and on the other it serves to communicate logical, intellectual knowledge. In both spheres the “Word” loses all value of its own. It has to be adapted to the “sense” of what it expresses. That the tone, the sound and the formation of the sound possess a reality of their own has to be forgotten. The beauty and luminous quality of the vowels, the unique character of the various consonants, are lost in speech. The vowel is drained of soul, the consonant of spirit. Speech deserts utterly the sphere of its origin – the spiritual sphere. It becomes the slave of intellectual knowledge and of a social life that shuns the spirit. It is divorced entirely from the domain of art.

True spiritual perception is also instinctively an “experience of the Word”. Through it one learns to enter into the soul-quality that resonates in the vowel, and the spiritual power of depiction that resides in the consonant. One gradually begins to comprehend the mystery of speech and its evolution: how divine-spiritual beings could once speak to man’s soul through the Word, whereas now it is merely a means of communicating in the physical world.

To lead the word back to its own sphere requires the enthusiasm kindled by such a spiritual insight. Marie von Sivers had this enthusiasm. Through her personality there entered the Anthroposophical Movement the possibility of cultivating the art of speech and speech-formation. Thus to the activity of imparting spiritual knowledge was added cultivation of the art of recitation and declamation, and this played an ever-increasing part in the events that were organized within the Anthroposophical Movement.

Marie von Sivers’ recitations on these occasions formed the point of departure for the impact of art on the Anthroposophical Movement. From them, beginning as supplements to lectures, the drama productions later staged in Munichside by side with anthroposophical lecture-cycles were directly descended.

Since, along with spiritual knowledge, we could also unfold artistic work, we entered more and more upon an experience of the spirit appropriate for our time. For art did indeed grow out of man’s primaeval, dream-image experience of the spirit. And when this experience receded in the course of man’s development, it was left alone to find its way; therefore art must find its way back to the experience of the spirit, when this is once more becoming, in a new form, a part of man’s cultural evolution. [The Course of My Life, Chapter XXXIV]

The present volume is a fragment of the work that resulted from their collaboration. It consists for the greater part of lectures held in several places by Rudolf Steiner, and these are punctuated by regular recitals of poetry, illustrating the points that the speaker has just made. The poems were recited or declaimed by Marie Steiner – generally introduced with impeccable courtesy as “Frau Dr. Steiner” – and constitute an integral part of the lecture’s meaning. Indeed the lecturer often relies entirely on the effect of her reciting to make some literary characteristic or contrast immediately obvious. And this, of course, makes for certain difficulties in point. A case in point is the basic distinction, adumbrated in the opening lectures and running all through the book, between recitation and declamation. Rudolf Steiner naturally makes no attempt to define for us what the differences between them are. A definition, after all, is not what is finally wanted. And it becomes totally superfluous when we can hear the difference through a concrete demonstration of things being recited and declaimed. Even the most precise definition would pale in comparison.

The situation with the printed poem (at least for those who cannot call upon the resources of some trained speech-formationist) is a little more difficult. Yet for all its force and vividness, even the oral demonstration would have resolved itself only gradually in our minds into a clear grasp of the distinctions involved, enabling us to discern the essentials of both modes of speech. All the more must the serious reader be content to work his way slowly and patiently forward before he can attain to a clear experience, and, excellent introduction though these lectures may be, he will certainly find himself in need, if he is to progress beyond a certain point, of contact with the living tradition of anthroposophical speech-formation. In England this is represented above all by the London School of Speech Formation, headed by Maisie Jones. Those who wish to learn for themselves the detailed methods of the art of speech which has developed on the basis of Rudolf Steiner’s investigations will there find qualified instructors, with practical experience of its complexities.

For those who simply want to approach literature and poetry with a more awakened sense of its spiritual depth, however, these lectures remain a valuable and relatively accessible source of illumination. But either way, practical or appreciative, the student must be wary of the intellectual short-cut and the neat definition as a substitute for experience. He must gradually progress along a path of knowledge, and so ultimately develop a sensitivity for the multifarious and elusive ways in which poetry, all-mysteriously, contrives to operate. It is one of the central arguments of this book that such a process is also one of increasingly definite self-knowledge – not only in the vague, Johnsonian sense of general human psychology, but even as regards one’s own deeper spiritual resources, at a level where these are continuous with the forces of organic life itself.

Perhaps we may be permitted to say a little on the subject of one of the difficulties that is likely to arise from a first perusal of the lectures that follow – a difficulty connected with the polarity between recitation and declamation. Rudolf Steiner characterises them in the opening lecture-cycle in terms of the contrast between the plastic arts and music. Recitation and metrical, regular poetry are brought into connection with music; energetic declamation is connected with a kind of powerful visual experience. In the later lecture on “Speech-Formation and Poetic Form”, however, he apparently contradicts himself by presenting recitation as a visual, plastic art, as opposed to declamation which is musical and melodic. We would suggest that, as always with Steiner’s observations, the key to understanding is to descend from the level of abstractions, and take a concrete look at which aspects of the arts are involved in these contrasts. We do not, of course, propose to discuss the question in detail. But it may prove helpful to the reader to be reminded that both music and the plastic arts are themselves very varied things, and that each at their extremes may invite comparison with the other. Within music, for example, the classical style stands at the opposite pole to the baroque. Mozart’s music is eminently metrical and regular: yet, precisely because it reaches us in a series of perfectly defined and clearly differentiated structures of sound, it can easily be compared to an exactly delineated picture, where the artist has sharply rendered every detail. With Bach, on the other hand, we are engaged by the driving-force of the music, its tremendous energy and unflagging will: and yet there is even here a certain kind of painting with which it can very appropriately be compared – as in baroque art, where we have a visual experience that, rather than lingering over every detail of form, catches us up in a single powerful movement or effect of light. When Steiner contrasts recitation and declamation as opposite poles in the art of speech, therefore, we must remember to ask which features of music and the plastic arts he is appealing to in order to explain the contrast, and realize that he might elsewhere appeal to very different ones.

Edwin Froböse, in his “Nachwort” to the German original of this work, has adduced an extract from the papers left by Marie Steiner, possibly drafted in the ’30s, where she describes the high seriousness of their undertaking, as it was carried on by her continuing work at the Goetheanum:

The endeavour of the Section for Speech and Music at the Goetheanum is to approach more nearly the riddle of language and the foundation of a spiritual knowledge of man and the universe, as uniquely expressed in the anthroposophical Spiritual Science of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, and to grasp the nature of sound-formation in connection with man and the cosmos. Through abstract understanding we have lost the secret of the creating word. This creating power of the word can be reawakened and experienced, however, through a conscious activity of thought – a thinking that is not simply a mirror of the external, but wells up vitally from deeper strata of the soul. In association with music, colour, and the new art of eurythmy (a speech made visible through the medium of the body), it is possible to instil new life into the works of our great poets, and also into works for the stage. This, at a time when interest in and understanding for the idealistic struggles of our ‘classic’ authors is on the wane, is one of the tasks that the Goetheanum has set for itself. [Die Kunst der Rezitation und Deklamation, p.246.]

This passage may also remind us, among other things, of the remarkably wide implications of what the Germans so conveniently and all-embracingly term a Geisteswissenschaft, which comes rather sadly truncated into English either as cultural or spiritual science. In these lectures poetry and the other arts are all viewed from the perspective of such a science, as the several manifestations of the human Spirit. And conversely, the rediscovery of the spiritual is seen as something with consequences across the whole range of human culture.

But how are we to coax this book into English? Poetry is traditionally defined as what gets lost in translation between two languages, and a work such as this might in the end look like nothing so much as a sort of stranded whale when once removed from the native element of German poetry to which it makes minute and constant reference. Certainly we could see little point in offering the reader the dubious assistance of the German poems in translation. But we were convinced that the principles of Steiner’s poetics could be applied, with the appropriate adjustments, to English – or any other – poetry. The only valid way of translating the book, we therefore decided, was to furnish it with a repertoire of suitable examples from the vast wealth of English verse or, in one case, poetic prose. In this way we hoped to present Steiner’s work on poetry to English readers with some semblance of its having been genuinely domiciled in English literature. How far we have succeeded it is for our readers, and particularly those pioneers who have already taken up anthroposophical speech-formation in English, to judge.

As for the examples themselves, they are no more than suggestions on our part. They lay no great claim to finality, nor indeed any authority save that we took some pains in the choosing of them, and tried conscientiously to find extracts which exemplified as precisely as possible the points made in the lecture to which they belong. Predictably, we were not always as successful as we might have wished. In some areas, German and English literature simply do move in incompatible directions: poets here in England, for instance, do not feel the apparently perennial attraction that alliterative verse has for the German poet. But at the same time the poem we eventually included (by W. R. Rodgers), besides confessing to the gulf which lies between the two languages, is indirectly valuable in pointing to something essential in the differences that divide them. It shows that alliteration in English is essentially distinctive and in important ways unlike its German counterpart, whilst sharing certain fundamental qualities with it.

We have enclosed all our editorial intrusions within square brackets, adding the briefest of explanations as to our intention in each case. It was obviously necessary, too, to preserve the original German poems employed as examples and recited when the lectures were given. Furthermore, we have on some occasions availed ourselves of a poetic licence to be frankly inconsistent, and supplied an English translation where the interest of the poem’s content seemed to merit it, or, as in the brilliant example of the two versions of Iphigeneia used in the first lecture, where nothing exactly comparable could be adduced from English. Conversely, where the German poem was a translation, and as such no nearer to the original than an English version, we have of course simply substituted the latter for the German piece. (However, the observant reader will in one case here find us guilty of double inconsistency.) In general we have tried to make the selection as interesting as we could. We have had the advantage, in cases where Steiner used the same example on more than one occasion, of being able to offer more than a single analogy from our own literature. This, too, has broadened the range of our anthology.

We have followed the lead of the German choice of examples in selecting works from the mainstream of literature. Some of our instances are in fact old favourites; some of them not so old; and some of them, perhaps, not such favourites. But they are all drawn from the central, deep channel along which the history of English literature has been directed more or less from the days of Chaucer and Langland to the present day. Only one large omission may provoke the raising of an eyebrow or two: we therefore take this opportunity of pledging our boundless admiration for William Shakespeare, even though we have chosen to represent him by a mere fourteen lines. Here, with the poet who more than any other is in himself an entire world, a microcosm within the literary macrocosm of our language, we suffered from a sheer embarras de richesse. Any choice seemed like a concession to the arbitrary or a personal whim. It seemed best, therefore, to exclude him (with entire good will) from our little republic of poetry, only erecting within it the monument of a lone sonnet to commemorate his kingly greatness.

A further disparity which may strike the reader stems from another of the differences between German and English literary history. Steiner drew a good many of his examples from the so-called “classic” period, the age of Goethe and Schiller, one of the high points in the development of German literature and poetry. But England’s equivalent of the classic period falls earlier, with the blossoming of poetry and drama in the Renaissance. Our Goethe is, so to speak, Shakespeare. In order to do justice to the splendours of our literature we have accordingly delved back a little further into the past for the bulk of our examples, and by way of compensation broadened their range to show some of the almost infinite variety of forms which have sprung up since. We soon ran into certain difficulties, however, over the language of our poems. The German “classics” are written in what is virtually modern speech; many of the highlights of English literature, contrastingly, are in a slightly archaic language. Even though the pronunciation of Shakespeare’s day was not too far removed from what it is now, there are nuances – and these are reflected in the spelling. This confronted us with the problem of whether or not to modernize our texts. Easy intelligibility argues for modern spelling and punctuation. But in poetry, as Steiner continually emphasizes, the sound and articulation of the words is all-important. Indeed, in the last of the lectures in this volume he says explicitly that “the spiritual does not speak in human words. The spiritual world goes only as far as the syllable, not as far as the word.” The preservation of the syllables of each word as nearly as possible in the way the poet envisaged them therefore seemed the only justifiable policy. Now the relation between spelling and the spoken sound, particularly in an eccentrically written language like English, and particularly in times when spelling was much less hidebound by orthodoxy than it is nowadays, is a subtle and complex one. But in those flexible circumstances a poet’s spelling obviously will form a valuable guide to the particular sound he wanted. In the superbly musical case of Miltonit is now known that the poet developed a highly refined notation for the pronunciation of his works. And we may take a more simple and blatant case: if a poet transcribed the sound he envisaged as thorough, this is plainly unlikely to be exactly what we get if we insist upon writing through. Often the difference is no more than a shade or nuance – but these are the special province of the speech-formationist, who must be thankful for any of the poet’s hints on the formation of sound that underlies his poem.

In the case of pre-Elizabethan texts we have supplied a few (hopefully judicious) critical signs, notably where a final -ed is to be sounded in defiance of later usage. It is assumed that the later conventions of pronouncing this syllable, extending to the Romantic period but abandoned in the modern, are generally understood. In our couple of mediaeval texts we have marked the final -e where it is to be pronounced for the benefit of the rhythm. It should be said very short, just suggested rather than as a full vowel. Otherwise, alterations have been confined to editing out the old orthography and adding a few helpful capitals.

The English language is at a later stage of development than is German, and has lost many of those qualities which make for a ready, spontaneous poetic effect in speech. The English poet has very much to mould a language of his own to achieve what he needs to express. And in the same way there are difficulties for the reciter who must wrestle with what Blake called the “stubborn structure” of this language. But we are far from wishing to conclude from these gloomy observations that there are limits to the future potentialities of an English speech-formation. We may therefore be forgiven for taking this opportunity to quote the vision of our “English Blake” of what speech may ultimately become. It is taken from the last, apocalyptic pages of Jerusalem:

And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright
Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions
In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect,
Creating Space, Creating Time, according to the wonders Divine
Of Human Imagination throughout all the Three Regions immense
Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age; & the all tremendous unfathomable Non Ens
Of Death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent, varying
According to the subject of discourse; & every Word & Every Character
Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or
Opakeness of Nervous fibres: such was the variation of Time & Space
Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary; & they walked
To & fro in Eternity as One Man, reflecting each in each & clearly seen
And seeing, according to fitness & order.

We turn finally to the more immediate difficulties of rendering this book into English. That certain of these are notorious does not make them easier to resolve. Particularly with regard to philosophical or semi-philosophical terms, where the original distinguishes between inner processes with a Germanic nicety, we have retained its precision at slight expense to natural English usage. “Representation” appears uniformly for Vorstellung – occasionally “mental representation”; vorstellen as “form a representation” or “represent”. For Steiner’s argument it is important to realize that what is being contrasted in one context with “concept-formation”, for instance, is the same activity of “representation” referred to less technically elsewhere in the book; consistency was thus essential. In addition we have resorted to “psychic” to fill the lack of an English adjective from “soul” for man’s subjective and emotional nature; and we have sometimes been slightly devious in getting round the problem of ordinary “imagination” (Phantasie) and Steiner’s technical use of Imagination for the more highly developed spiritual faculty.

Our translation is based on the second, enlarged and improved edition of Die Kunst der Rezitation und Deklamation (Dornach 1967), edited by Edwin Froböse. This omits the introductory lecture included in the first edition, but adds the lecture here called “Poetry and the Art of Speech”. The German book also contains a seminar by Marie Steiner and a series of short discussions of individual poets: several of them are not known at all in England, and it seemed best to leave them out of an English version altogether.

Every translation is in some sense a collaborative effort. But we have more than the common number of acknowledgements for help and suggestions to record. Work on this volume began some years ago, having been originally undertaken by Maud Surrey for the benefit of her pupils, but she was regrettably unable to complete it before her death. We inherited from her a draft of the earlier lectures, whose renderings we have not infrequently adopted, even though we have subjected it to a thorough revision, mainly in the interests of a uniform style. We were aided in the first stages of this process and for all too brief a time by Olga Holbek, who made some fine contributions and has continued to take a beneficent interest in the work's progress. We were also encouraged from the very beginning by the warm support of Maisie Jones, of the London School, herself a leading figure in the struggle to develop a speech-formation for the English language. We also have good reason to thank Valerie Jacobs and Winifred Budgett for their help at various points, and their continued good will towards our project. In moments of difficulty or desperation in the face of the German text we have benefited incalculably from the knowledge and friendly exhortations of Edwin Froböse, who also made several excellent proposals for the preface and has been in general, as they say, a mine of information. For the manifold imperfections which remain we hold ourselves solely responsible.

Cambridge, E. J. W.

You all know the words with which Goethe concluded his life's masterpiece, Faust:

All things transient
Are but a parable;
Earth's insufficiency
Here finds fulfilment;
The indescribable
Here becomes deed;
The eternal-feminine
Draws us on high.

It goes without saying that in this context the “eternal-feminine” has nothing to do with man and woman. Goethe is making use of an ancient turn of speech. In all forms of mysticism—and Goethe gives these closing lines to a Chorus mysticus—we find an urge in the soul, at first quite indefinite, towards something which the soul has not yet come to know and to unite itself with, but must strive towards. This goal, at first only dimly surmised by the aspiring soul, is called by Goethe, in accord with the mystics of diverse times, the eternal-feminine, and the whole sense of the second part of Faust confirms this way of taking the concluding lines.

This Chorus mysticus, with its succinct words, can be set against the Unio mystical the name given by true mystical thinkers to union with the eternal-feminine, far off spiritually but within human reach.

When the soul has risen to this height and feels itself to be at one with the eternal-feminine, then we can speak of mystical union, and this is the highest summit that we shall be considering today.

In the last two lectures, on the mission of anger and the mission of truth, we saw that the soul is involved in a process of evolution. On the one hand, we indicated certain attributes which the soul must strive to overcome, whereby anger, for example, can become an educator of the soul; and we saw on the other, how truth can educate the soul in its own special way.

The end and goal of this process of development cannot always be foreseen by the soul. We can place some object before us and say that it has developed from an earlier form to its present stage. We cannot say this of the human soul, for the soul is progressing through a continuing evolution in which it is itself the active agent. The soul must feel that, having developed to a certain point, it has to go further. And as a self-conscious soul it must say to itself: How is it that I am able to think not only about my development in the past but also about my development in the future?

Now we have often explained how the soul, with all its inner life, is composed of three members. We cannot go over this in detail again today, but it will be better to mention, it, so that this lecture can be studied on its own account. We call these three members of the soul the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul. The Sentient Soul can live without being much permeated by thinking. Its primary role is to receive impressions from the outer world and to pass them on inwardly. It is also the vehicle of such feelings of pleasure and pain, joy and grief, as come from these outer impressions. All human emotions, all desires, instincts and passions arise from within the Sentient Soul. Man has progressed from this stage to higher levels; he has permeated the Sentient Soul with his thinking and with feelings induced by thinking. In the Intellectual Soul, accordingly, we do not find indefinite feelings arising from the depths, but feelings gradually penetrated by the inner-light of thought. At the same time it is from the Intellectual Soul that we find emerging by degrees the human Ego, that central point of the soul which can lead to the real Self and makes it possible for us to purify, cleanse and refine the qualities of our soul from within, so that we can become the master, leader and guide of our volitions, feelings and thoughts.

This Ego, as we have seen already, has two aspects. One possibility of development for it is through the endeavours that man must make to strengthen this inner centre more and more, so that an increasingly powerful influence can radiate out from it into his environment and into all the life around him. To enhance the value of the soul for the surrounding world and at the same time to strengthen its independence—that is one aspect of Ego development.

The reverse side of this is egoism. A self that is too weak will lose itself in the flood of the world. But if a man likes to keep his pleasures and desires, his thinking and his brooding, all within himself, his Ego will be hardened and given over to self-seeking and egoism.

Now we have briefly described the content of the Intellectual Soul. We have seen how wild impulses, of which anger is an example, can educate the soul if they are overcome and conquered. We have seen also that the Intellectual Soul is positively educated by truth, when truth is understood as something that a man possesses inwardly and takes account of at all times; when it leads us out of ourselves and enlarges the Ego, while at the same time it strengthens the Ego and makes it more selfless.

Thus we have become acquainted with the means of self-education that are provided for the Sentient Soul and the Intellectual Soul. Now we have to ask: Is there a similar means provided for the Consciousness Soul, the highest member of the human soul? We can also ask: What is there in the Consciousness Soul which develops of its own accord, corresponding to the instincts and desires in the Sentient Soul? Is there something that belongs by nature to the Consciousness Soul, such that man could acquire very little of it if he were not already endowed with it?

There is something which reaches out from the Intellectual Soul to the Consciousness Soul—the strength and sagacity of thinking. The Consciousness Soul can come to expression only because man is a thinking being, for its task is to acquire knowledge of the world and of itself, and for this it requires the highest instrument of knowledge—thinking.

We learn about the external world through perceptions; they stimulate us to gain knowledge of our surroundings. To this end, we need only devote our attention to the outer world and not stand blankly in front of it, for then the outer world itself draws us on to satisfy our thirst for knowledge by observing it. With regard to gaining knowledge of the super-sensible world, we are in a quite different situation. First of all, the super-sensible world is not there in front of us. If a man wishes to gain a knowledge of it, so that this knowledge will permeate his Consciousness Soul, the impulse to do so must come from within and must penetrate his thinking through and through. This impulse can come only from the other powers of his soul, feeling and willing. Unless his thinking is stimulated by both these powers, it will never be impelled to approach the super-sensible world. This does not mean that the super-sensible is merely a feeling, but that feeling and willing must act as inner guides towards its unknown realm. What qualities, then, must feeling and willing acquire towards its unknown realm.

What qualities, then, must feeling and willing acquire in order to do this?

First of all, someone might object to the use of a feeling as a guide to knowledge. But a simple consideration will show that in fact this is what feeling does. Anyone who takes knowledge seriously, will admit that in acquiring knowledge we must proceed logically. We use logic as an instrument for testing the knowledge we acquire. How, then, if logic is this instrument, can logic itself be proved? One might say: Logic can prove itself. Yes, but before we begin proving logic by logic, it must be at least possible to grasp logic with our feeling. Logical thought cannot be proved primarily by logical thought, but only by feeling. Indeed, everything that constitutes logic is first proved through feeling, by the infallible feeling for truth that dwells in the human soul. From this classical example we can see how feeling is the foundation of logic and of thinking. Feeling must give the impulse for the verification of thought. What must feeling become if it is to provide an impulse not only for thinking in general, but for thinking about worlds with which we are at first unacquainted and cannot survey?

Feeling of this kind must be a force which strives from within towards an object yet unknown. When the human soul seeks to encompass with feeling some other thing, we call this feeling love. Love can of course be felt for something known, and there are many things in the world for us to love. But as love is a feeling, and a feeling is the foundation of thinking in the widest sense, we must be clear that the unknown super-sensible can be grasped by feeling before thinking comes in. Unprejudiced observation, accordingly, shows that it must be possible for human beings to come to love the unknown super-sensible before they are able to conceive it in terms of thought. This love is indeed indispensable before the super-sensible can be penetrated by the light of thought.

At this stage, also, the will can be permeated by a force which goes out towards the super-sensible unknown. This quality of the will, which enables a man to wish to carry out his aims and intentions with regard to the unknown, is devotion. So can the will inspire devotion towards the unknown, while feeling becomes love of the unknown; and when these two emotions are united they together give rise to reverence in the true sense of the word. Then this devotion becomes the impulse that will lead us into the unknown, so that the unknown can be taken hold of by our thinking. Thus it is that reverence becomes the educator of the Consciousness Soul. For in ordinary life, also, we can say that when a man endeavours to grasp with his thinking some external reality not yet known to him, he will be approaching it with love and devotion. Never will the Consciousness Soul gain a knowledge of external objects unless love and devotion inspire its quest; otherwise the objects will not be truly observed. This also applies quite specially to all endeavours to gain knowledge of the super-sensible world.

In all cases, however, the soul must allow itself to be educated by the Ego, the source of self-consciousness. We have seen how the Ego gains increasing independence and strength by overcoming certain soul qualities, such as anger, and by cultivating others, such as the sense of truth. After that, the self-education of the Ego comes to an end; its education through reverence begins. Anger is to be overcome and discarded; a sense of truth is to permeate the Ego; reverence is to flow from the Ego towards the object of which knowledge is sought. Thus, having raised itself out of the Sentient Soul and the Intellectual Soul by overcoming anger and other passions and by cultivating a sense of truth, the Ego is drawn gradually into the Consciousness Soul by the influence of reverence. If this reverence becomes stronger and stronger, one can speak of it as a powerful impulse towards the realm described by Goethe:

All things transient
Are but a parable;
Earth's insufficiency
Here finds fulfilment;
The indescribable
Here becomes deed;
The eternal-feminine
Draws us on high.

The soul is drawn by the strength of its reverence towards the eternal, with which it longs to unite itself. But the Ego has two sides. It is impelled by necessity to enhance continually its own strength and activity. At the same time it has the task of not allowing itself to fall under the hardening influence of egoism. If the Ego seeks to go further and gain knowledge of the unknown and the super-sensible, and takes reverence as its guide, it is exposed to the immediate danger of losing itself. This is most likely to happen, above all, to a human being if his will is always submissive to the world. If this attitude gains increasingly the upper hand, the result may be that the Ego goes out of itself and loses itself in the other being or thing to which it has submitted. This condition can be likened to fainting by the soul, as distinct from bodily fainting. In bodily fainting the Ego sinks into undefined darkness; in fainting by the soul, the Ego loses itself spiritually while the bodily faculties and perceptions of the outer world are not impaired. This can happen if the Ego is not strong enough to extend itself fully into the will and to guide it.

This self-surrender by the Ego can be the final result of a systematic mortification of the will. A man who pursues this course becomes incapable of willing or acting on his own account; he has surrendered his will to the object of his submissive devotion and has lost his own self. When this condition prevails, it produces an enduring impotence of the soul. Only when a devotional feeling is warmed through by the Ego, so that man can immerse himself in it without losing his Ego, can it be salutary for the human soul.

How, then, can reverence always carry the Ego with it? The Ego cannot allow itself to be led in any direction, as a human Self, unless it maintains in its thinking a knowledge of itself. Nothing else can protect the Ego from losing itself when devotion leads it out into the world. The soul can be led out of itself towards something external by the force of will, but when the soul leaves behind the boundary of the external, it must make sure of being illuminated by the light of thought.

Thinking itself cannot lead the soul out; this comes about through devotion, but thinking must then immediately exert itself to permeate with the life of thought the object of the soul's devotion. In other words, there must be a resolve to think about this object. Directly the devotional impulse loses the will to think, there is a danger of losing oneself. If anyone makes it a matter of principle not to think about the object of his devotion, this can lead in extreme cases to a lasting debility of the soul.

Is love, the other element in reverence, exposed to a similar fate? Something that radiates from the human Self towards the unknown must be poured into love, so that never for a moment does the Ego fail to sustain itself. The Ego must have the will to enter into everything which forms the object of its devotion, and it must maintain itself in face of the external, the unknown, the super-sensible. What becomes of love if the Ego fails to maintain itself at the moment of encountering the unknown, if it is unwilling to bring the light of thinking and of rational judgment to bear on the unknown? Love of that kind becomes more sentimental enthusiasm (Schwarmerei). But the Ego can begin to find its way from the Intellectual Soul, where it lives, to the external unknown, and then it can never extinguish itself altogether. Unlike the will, the Ego cannot completely mortify itself. When the soul seeks to embrace the external world with feeling, the Ego is always present in the feeling, but if it is not supported by thinking and willing, it rushes forth without restraint, unconscious of itself. And if this love for the unknown is not accompanied by resolute thinking, the soul can fall into a sentimental extreme, somewhat like sleep-walking, just as the state reached by the soul when submissive devotion leads to loss of the Self is somewhat like a bodily fainting-fit. When a sentimental enthusiast goes forth to encounter the unknown, he leaves behind the strength of the Ego and takes with him only secondary forces. Since the strength of the Ego is absent from his consciousness, he tries to grasp the unknown as one does in the realm of dreams. Under these conditions the soul falls into what may be called an enduring state of dreaming or somnambulism.

Again, if the soul is unable to relate itself properly to the world and to other people, if it rushes out into life and shrinks from using the light of thought to illuminate its situation, then the Ego, having fallen into a somnambulistic condition, is bound to go astray and to wander through the world like a will-o-the-wisp.

If the soul succumbs to mental laziness and shuns the light of thought when it meets the unknown, then, and only then, will it harbour superstitions in one or other form. The sentimental soul, with its fond dreams, wandering through life as though asleep, and the indolent soul, unwilling to be fully conscious of itself—these are the souls most inclined to believe everything blindly. Their tendency is to avoid the effort of thinking for themselves and to allow truth and knowledge to be prescribed for them.

If we are to get to know an external object, we have to bring our own productive thinking to bear on it, and it is the same with the super-sensible, whatever form this may take. Never, in seeking to gain a knowledge of the super-sensible, must we exclude thinking. Directly we rely on merely observing the super-sensible, we are exposed to all possible deceptions and errors. All such errors and superstitions, all the wrong or untruthful ways of entering the super-sensible worlds, can be attributed in the last instance to a refusal to allow consciousness to be illuminated by the light of creative thought. No one can be deceived by information said to come from the spiritual world if he has the will to keep his thinking always active and independent. Nothing else will suffice, and this is something that every spiritual researcher will confirm. The stronger the will is to creative thinking, the greater is the possibility of gaining true, clear and certain knowledge of the spiritual world.

Thus we see the need for a means of education which will lead the Ego into the Consciousness Soul and will guide the Consciousness Soul in the face of the unknown, both the physical unknown and the unknown super-sensible. Reverence, consisting of devotion and love, provides the means we seek. When the latter are imbued with the right kind of self-feeling, they become steps which lead to ever-greater heights.

True devotion, in whatever form it is experienced by the soul, whether through prayer or otherwise, can never lead anyone astray. The best way of learning to know something is to approach it first of all with love and devotion. A healthy education will consider especially how strength can be given to the development of the soul through the devotional impulse. To a child the world is largely unknown: if we are to guide him towards knowledge and sound judgment of it, the best way is to awaken in him a feeling of reverence towards it; and we can be sure that by so doing we shall lead him to fullness of experience in any walk of life.

It is very important for the human soul if it can look back to a childhood in which devotion, leading on to reverence, was often felt. Frequent opportunities to look up to revered persons, and to gaze with heartfelt devotion at things that are still beyond its understanding, provide a good impulse for higher development in later life. A person will always gratefully remember those occasions, when as a child in the family circle, he heard of some outstanding personality of whom everyone spoke with devotion and reverence. A feeling of holy awe, which gives reverence a specially intimate character, will then permeate the soul. Or someone may relate how with trembling hand, later on, he rang the bell and shyly made his way into the room of the revered personality whom he was meeting for the first time, after having heard him spoken of with so much respectful admiration. Simply to have come into his presence and exchanged a few words can confirm a devotion which will be particularly helpful when we are trying to unravel the great riddles of existence and are seeking for the goal which we long to make our own. Here reverence is a force which draws us upward, and by so doing fortifies and invigorates the soul. How can this be? Let us consider the outward expression of reverence in human gestures—what forms does it take? We bend our knees, fold our hands, and incline our heads towards the object of our reverence. These are the organs whereby the Ego, and above all the higher faculties of the soul, can express themselves most intensively.

In physical life a man stands upright by firmly extending his legs; his Ego radiates out through his hands in acts of blessing; and by moving his head he can observe the earth or the heavens. But from studying human nature, we learn also that our legs are stretched out at their best in strong, conscious action if they have first learnt to bend the knee where reverence is really strong, conscious action if they have first learnt to bend the knee where reverence is really due. For this genuflection opens the door to a force which seeks to find its way into our organism. Knees which have not learnt to bend in reverence give out only what they have always had; they spread out their own nullity, to which they have added nothing. But legs which have learnt to genuflect receive, when they are extended, a new force, and then it is this, not their own nullity, which they spread around them. Hands which would fain bless and comfort, although they have never been folded in reverence and devotion, cannot bestow much love and blessing from their own nullity. But hands which have learnt to fold themselves in reverence have received a new force and are powerfully penetrated by the Ego. For the path taken by this force leads first through the heart, where it kindles love; and the reverence of the folded hands, having passed through the heart and flowed into the hands, turns into blessing.

The head may turn its eyes and strain its ears to survey the world in all directions, but it presents nothing but its own emptiness. If, however, the head has been bent in reverence, it gains a new force; it will bring to meet the outer world the feelings it has acquired through reverence.

Anyone who studies the gestures of people, and knows what they signify, will see how reverence is expressed in external physiognomy; he will see how this reverence enhances the strength of the Ego and so makes it possible for the Ego to penetrate into the unknown. Moreover, this self-education through reverence has the effect of raising to the surface our obscure instincts and emotions, our sympathies and antipathies, which otherwise make their way into the soul unconsciously or subconsciously, unchallenged by the light of judgment. Precisely these feelings are cleansed and purified through self-education by reverence and through the penetration by the Ego of the higher members of the soul. The obscure forces of sympathy and antipathy, always prone to error, are permeated by the light of the soul and transformed into judgment, aesthetic taste and rightly guided moral feeling. A soul educated by reverence will convert its dark cravings and aversions into a feeling for the beautiful and a feeling for the good. A soul that has cleansed its obscure instincts and will-impulses through devotion will gradually build up from them what we call moral ideals. Reverence is something that we plant in the soul as a seed; and the seed will bear fruit.

Human life offers yet another example. We see everywhere that the course of a man's life goes through ascending and declining stages. Childhood and youth are stages of ascent; then comes a pause, and finally, in the later years, a decline. Now the remarkable thing is, that the qualities acquired in childhood and youth reappear in a different form during the years of decline. If much reverence, rightly guided, has been part of the experience of childhood, it acts as a seed which comes to fruition in old age as strength for active living. A childhood and youth during which devotion and love were not fostered under the right guidance will lead to a weak and powerless old age. Reverence must take hold of every soul that is to make progress in its development.

How is it, then, with the corresponding quality in the object of our reverence? If we look with love on another being, then the reciprocated love of the latter will reveal what can perhaps arise. If a man is lovingly devoted to his God, he can be sure that God inclines to him also in love. Reverence is the feeling he develops for whatever he calls his God out there in the universe. Since the reaction to reverence cannot itself be called reverence, we may not speak of a divine reverence towards man. What, then, precisely is the opposite of reverence in this context? What is it that flows out to meet reverence when reverence seeks the divine? It is might, the Almighty power of the Divine. Reverence that we learn to feel in youth returns to us as strength for living in old age, and if we turn in reverence to the divine, our reverence flows back to us as an experience of the Almighty. That is what we feel, whether we look up to the starry heavens in their endless glory and our reverence goes out to all that lies around us, beyond our compass, or whether we look up to our invisible God, in whatever form, who pervades and animates the cosmos.

We look up towards the Almighty and we come to feel with certainty that we cannot advance towards union with that which is above us unless we first approach it from below with reverence. We draw nearer to the Almighty when we immerse ourselves in reverence. Thus we can speak of an Almighty in this sense, while a true feeling for the meaning of words prevents us from speaking of an All-loving. Power can be increased or enhanced in proportion to the number of beings over which it extends. It is different with love. If a child is loved by its mother, this does not prevent her from loving equally her second, third or fourth child. It is false for anyone to say: I must divide up my love because it is to cover two objects. It is false to speak either of an “all-knowledge” or of an indefinite “all-love”. Love has no degree and cannot be limited by figures.

Love and devotion together make up reverence. We can have a devoted attitude to this or that unknown if we have the right feeling for it. Devotion can be enhanced, but it does not have to be divided up or multiplied when it is felt for a number of beings. Since this is true also of love, the Ego has no need to lose or disperse itself if it turns with love and devotion towards the unknown. Love and devotion are thus the right guides to the unknown, and the best educators of, the soul in its advance from the Intellectual Soul to the Consciousness Soul.

Whereas the overcoming of anger educates the Sentient Soul, and the striving for truth educates the Intellectual Soul, reverence educates the Consciousness Soul, bringing more and more knowledge within its reach. But this reverence must be led and guided from a standpoint which never shuts out the light of thought. When love flows forth from us, it ensures by its own worth that our Self can go with it, and this applies also to devotion. We could indeed lose our Self, but we need not. That is the point, and it must be kept especially in mind if an impulse of reverence enters into the education of the young. A blind, unconscious reverence is never right. The cultivation of reverence must go together with the cultivation of a healthy Ego-feeling.

Whereas the mystics of all ages, together with Goethe, have spoken of the unknown, undefined element to which the soul is drawn, as the eternal-feminine, we may without misunderstanding, speak of the element which must always animate reverence as the eternal-masculine. For just as the eternal-feminine is present in both man and woman, so is this eternal-masculine, this healthy Ego-feeling, present in all reverence by man or woman. And when Goethe's Chorus mysticus comes before us, we may, having come to know the mission of reverence which leads us towards the unknown, add the element which must permeate all reverence—the Eternal-masculine.

Thus we are now able to reach a right understanding of the experience of the human soul when it strives to unite itself with the unknown and attains to the Unio mystica, wherein all reverence is consummated.

But this mystical union will harm the soul if the Ego is lost while seeking to unite itself with the unknown in any form. If the Ego has lost itself, it will bring to the unknown nothing of value. Self-sacrifice in the Unio mystica requires that one must have become something, must have something to sacrifice. If a weak Ego, with no strength in itself, is united with what lies above us, the union has no value. The Unio mystica has value only when a strong Ego ascends to the regions of which the Chorus mysticus speaks. When Goethe speaks of the regions to which the higher reverence can lead us, in order to gain there the highest knowledge, and when his Chorus mysticus tells us in beautiful words:

All things transient
Are but a parable;
Earth's insufficiency
Here finds fulfilment;
The indescribable
Here becomes deed;
The eternal-feminine
Draws us on high—

Then, if we rightly understand the Unio mystica, we can reply: Yes—

All things transient
Are but a parable;
Earth's insufficiency
Here finds fulfilment;
The indescribable
Here becomes deed;
The eternal-masculine
Draws us on high.