The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees!

Although the riddle that is contained in the question of the eternal forces of the human soul must always be close at hand as one of the most important questions of life for every thinking, feeling human soul, it must nevertheless be the case in our time, in our immediate present - in which the riddle of death and thus but out of which, in our time, something momentous must develop out of historical necessity, in such a time, in which the riddle of death approaches man in a thousand ways, this question about the eternal powers of the human soul must also be particularly close to him. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to speak here in this place about many aspects of the spiritual science, and so some of what has been said today will sound familiar to our esteemed listeners, who have been here many times before. Nevertheless, today I would like to speak from a particular point of view – from the perspective of spiritual science – about what, at the bottom of the soul, goes beyond birth or, let us say, conception, and death, and reveals itself as the eternal part of a true spiritual research.

When these eternal powers of the human soul are spoken of, objections arise today - this must be emphasized again and again - against the assertion of reasons that one or the other has to bring forward about the eternal powers of the human soul from this or that science of the soul. Objections arise, justified objections, from the point of view of that world view that believes itself to be on the firm ground of scientific research. And a large part of the misunderstandings that are brought to spiritual science, as it is meant here, is based on the fact that the relationship of spiritual science to the natural scientific world view of the present is not seen in the right way. I have often emphasized that spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not want to be in any way out of harmony with the justified research of natural science. On the contrary, spiritual science would like to incorporate into the study of the spiritual life of man precisely that of spiritual culture which the natural scientific way of thinking of the new age has given to outer material culture and to the contemplation of the outer sense world and outer nature. Not in discord, but in full harmony with what science looks at us from a justifiable standpoint, spiritual science would like to stand. (Therefore, it looks to what this or that psychology has to say about the eternal forces of the human soul in relation to spiritual science).

On the other hand, spiritual science does not look at the many things that natural science has to say in opposition, but on the contrary, quite sympathetically. Conclusions are drawn within the framework of current psychology from judgments, considerations, these or those concepts, and observations of the life of the soul as it presents itself in everyday life or in science. These or those conclusions are drawn to the effect that what manifests itself in the soul of man in the time between birth and death is based on a spiritual essence that passes through the gate of death and enters a spiritual world; reasons are advanced from this conventional psychology that the soul life of man is something independent of the outer physical life, which in its arising and passing away cannot be dependent on the laws of physical life.

In contrast to this, the objections of the natural scientific view of the present will always be justified. I have already pointed out the meaning of these objections several times and can therefore briefly indicate them again today. It can rightly be said: If we look at the course of this soul life, see how it develops from its dim appearance in early childhood to maturity, see how it develops from maturity towards the old age conditions of the human being, we will see how this development, called spiritual, goes completely parallel with the bodily-physical development, how with the formation of the nervous system and the other organism of the human being from childhood on, the spiritual abilities also gradually develop, how they in turn decay with the physical decay. It can truly be said that anyone who looks at this with a proper scientific attitude today will see that the spiritual life, as it manifests itself in everyday life and also in science, really does appear like the flame that cannot be there without the candle being there, that is dependent on the candle and must disappear with the candle itself. One can definitely assert such a parallelism between the spiritual life, which seems to flare up from the functions of the physical body, and the physical body. And especially when one looks at those clinical studies that show how mental abilities are switched off when the human nervous system is diseased, how certain mental expressions are no longer there when this or that organ is diseased, if one looks at it, one cannot do but say: No matter how much we would like to believe the conclusions of some psychologists, the scientific view is so strong that we can hardly avoid giving our full approval to what is presented by the aforementioned side.

And so it must be emphasized that much of the opposition from the scientific community in our time arises not from dislike or antipathy to any of the spiritual assumptions, but on the contrary from a conscientious pursuit of what the new research has to say to man about man. And in a way it is even correct to say: Of course, today not all physical bodily processes can be overlooked, but science is on the way to making this overview more and more complete, and it can be scientific view that the time will come when one will be able to find complete parallelism between physical bodily processes and the spiritual expressions of the human soul in this life.

So one has to say: Compared to the preponderance of the scientific attitude, some people - who speak of the eternal powers of the human soul - have a difficult time. But spiritual science fully takes into account the scientific attitude and the scientific advances of the immediate past and present. Indeed, as far as the course of human soul life between birth and death is concerned, it is, on the basis of its research, completely justified in standing on the ground of the scientific world view. It stands on this ground for reasons that will shine forth in their justification from many things that will be said today. With regard to what develops in the soul between birth and death as thinking, imagining, sensing, feeling and willing, and what we see revealing itself in our everyday mental life, it must be said that it is intimately linked to the tools that our body, our physical self; but spiritual science, as it is meant here, is not based on the idea that one can find the deeper sides, the deeper forces of the human soul, if one only focuses one's gaze on what takes place within this soul life in the time between birth and death. Just as spiritual science is based on the fact that what can be directly seen in nature through the senses, what can be inferred through the mind on the basis of sensory perceptions, is only the outer revelation of the spirit of nature, so spiritual science is also based on the fact that the depths of the soul life are also hidden from this everyday and, in the ordinary sense, scientific soul life behind itself. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, is based on the fact that those expressions of the soul life that are directly accessible to the human being, as he is placed in his existence in the physical world, are not what can be described as eternal , but that one must look behind the veil of the soul phenomena that present themselves directly in order to come to the true nature of the human soul, just as one must look behind the veil of natural phenomena in order to come to the true nature of the spirit in nature.

Thus, the task for spiritual science is to find the way within the soul to the sources of its true nature. And here it must be said: In the knowledge of spiritual science, a certain principle presents itself to the soul in a comprehensive way, which also applies in external natural science, but which is usually not so generally accepted for the comprehensive life of the world, to which the spiritual also belongs, in a more general way, although it is generally recognized today in external natural science. It is said: The forces of nature work in such a way that no force disappears completely, but the forces transform themselves. And the transformation of natural forces, in which their strength is illuminated, is indeed a basic tenet of the current scientific world view. Conversion of work into heat, from heat into work and so on, is something that is often talked about. This principle of the transformation of forces applies, and today we will see a particular application of it to the spiritual life.

In particular, what manifests itself within the birth and death of man, what reveals itself as our soul life in the everyday, that is a transformation of the eternal forces within the human soul, and because the eternal forces transform into the temporal because they form themselves into what presents itself to us in ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, these three cannot represent the form in which the eternal must appear when the human soul life is considered in its underlying nature. It is not by applying the ordinary powers of the soul as they are that one comes to the eternal in the human soul, but by seeking a path from the activity of the soul in ordinary life to a completely different activity, by developing slumbering powers out of the ordinary soul processes, which are not there in ordinary life because they have been transformed into these ordinary powers of soul life.

There are two ways of exercising our soul life in our ordinary lives: one is more in line with the way we imagine and feel, with the way we imagine and feel as human beings; the other is more in line with the way we will as human beings. Feeling is, after all, something between thinking and willing. Today we will try to see how, on the one hand, the human being's imaginative nature can be developed and, on the other, the will, so that through this development the human being can come to a knowledge of the eternal powers of the human soul. The one fundamental power that first appears in its outer form in ordinary soul life is thinking. The way thinking reveals itself in this ordinary life of the soul leads only to a kind of overview of what is given to us through the senses. Spiritual science now seeks — and in doing so it acts entirely in the spirit of the real scientific world view — spiritual science now seeks, just as natural science tries to eavesdrop on nature's secrets through external experiments, to find the way into those spheres where the soul life can reveal its secrets through intimate soul experiments. Ordinary thinking, as it occurs in everyday life, is not sufficient for this; but this thinking is capable of development, is capable of becoming stronger - and this inner strengthening of thinking has also been referred to here several times. The technical term is used to describe what the soul has to do as “meditation” and by that is meant the inwardly evoked, particularly strong thought processes, which in ordinary life do not proceed in this sought-after way, but differently. In ordinary life, we use thinking to create images of our sensory environment and of what happens within human life that can be perceived from the outside, which we can take in as imagination. This is important for ordinary life. Now, by taking an intimate look at the inner life of the soul, by making it its business to pursue the soul life as the natural scientist pursues nature in the experiment, spiritual science discovers that thinking has a completely different side. Perhaps I can make this other side of the human mind more understandable by saying, by way of comparison, that when a person works with his hands, he does this or that; the result of the work of the hand is then there, can be seen externally. If a person works with his hand continually, he not only does this, which is visible externally, but we know that when he works in this way, he changes the inner strength of the hand itself; the hand becomes stronger and more skillful, is brought into a certain direction of its activity. Something is achieved by the hand itself. I would say that this runs parallel to the activity of what is externally visible: a perfection of the handling, in addition to the results achieved by the work! It is the same with human thinking. Human thinking, as it unfolds, gives rise to thoughts about what is in the surrounding environment or elsewhere in the course of the world. These thoughts are the main thing at first, just as the external results are for manual labor; but as it is carried out, it strengthens itself within, it is something that undergoes a certain development within itself. Of course, we look at the development in the hand; but we do not really look at the intimate inner development that thinking undergoes in thinking.

The spiritual researcher, however, takes what lies at the root of this and develops it systematically by means of an inner experiment on what is the inner strengthening of thinking. In this way he brings into the sphere of thinking a completely different way of working than is usually the case. And that is precisely what happens in meditation. Certain ideas are repeatedly introduced into the thinking activity, but this is done in such a way that the aim is not to obtain any particular content about this or that. Rather, the aim is to ensure that the thinking, as it were, remains within itself, in the activity of holding certain ideas that are arbitrarily introduced into the thinking. You virtually place your thinking in a certain stationary state, you remain in a certain thought, you concentrate your entire soul life on this thought. In doing so, it is not important to place yourself in the soul life of some ideas that mean this or that in the external world, but it is best to use ideas that you get from the advice of spiritual science, that you can see clearly can; because if you use ideas that you otherwise take from life, then you cannot know - because you were connected with them - whether or not remnants of feelings and all kinds of volitional impulses are attached to these ideas and you bring them up. One is, so to speak, not in a position to grasp ideas that one absorbs in this way completely in their purity, so that one knows: nothing is attached from the depths of one's soul life that can deceive one.

What matters is the comprehensible, the fact that one constructs such ideas from a few elements – the best ideas are those that are allegorical and do not refer to anything external and real, so that one can only persevere in the effort of holding on to such ideas. What matters is not that such thinking is true in this or that sense, but that one finds the inner peace to hold all the powers of the soul together for a time, to concentrate them on this one point, so that through this intensification this very power is strengthened immeasurably and becomes what it can be. So it is the inner calm, the application of the inner strength, the detachment from the rest of life that is important in this inner experiment. This must be considered first and foremost: that this spiritual science, unlike ordinary philosophy, does not aim to fathom this or that through thinking. This is justified in ordinary science, in everyday life, everywhere else, but it does not lead to the fathoming of that which spiritual science wants to fathom. This thinking, which leads to results in the ordinary sense, is not challenged in any way by spiritual science – because it is based on the ground of life – but for its goals, spiritual science depends on applying thinking, which is otherwise used to gain knowledge about the world, purely to develop the soul, so that it advances from its usual point of view to a different point of view. What matters is that thinking is not used as it is usually used in life, to explore something, but that it is used only to educate something in the human soul, as a means of expression.

So this different use of thinking within the human soul life is what matters. What one is accustomed to regarding thinking in ordinary science must be completely disregarded. For ordinary science, thinking serves to impart some kind of knowledge. Everything that thinking can otherwise do is not considered in spiritual science, but rather what thinking does to the human soul itself.

Now, I can only hint at the principle of what must take place in the human soul as a result of meditation for the purpose of spiritual research. You can find more details in the books, for example in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”. For what I am developing here in brief is only a general outline of what represents a long journey of the soul, which must be supported by the most diverse inner, intimate processes, and which makes it necessary for the human being – for some it takes less time, for others more – to occupy himself inwardly in this way, to return to it again and again, and thus to strengthen his thinking inwardly.

But then the moment comes in the human soul life that shows that thinking in this way can lead the soul, as it were, beyond itself, and it is because what is often still today understood solely and exclusively as a justified philosophical world view cannot be included when speaking of the paths of the soul life just characterized, and that it criticizes what spiritual science wants and is able to do from a completely different point of view than that which can only be gained by doing the inner experiment just mentioned. If one does it, then one comes – because spiritual science presupposes certain processes in the human soul that really lead down into the depths of the soul life and up to the heights – one comes in a certain way to inwardly harrowing experiences of the soul life. These experiences that one has are a necessary corollary, they are, so to speak, also markers, milestones that one has reached a certain point on the path, but they are not what really matters. What matters is that the inwardly strengthened thinking leads beyond itself. And the point that leads there has been designated for a long time by a word that only those understand completely who have at least acquired an inkling of the paths of the human soul through such inner spiritual attempts. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, has only one validity, has only the possibility of arising within our present human culture. Just as external science has progressed, and has, as it were, emerged from the twilight of ignorance to achieve the extent of our present-day knowledge of nature, so too, whatever man can bring up out of the depths of his soul as spiritual science was not there in the past. But at all times, even if it had to be done by other means than in the present and the future, people have sought the paths of spiritual research, and they have described what can only be characterized in the manner just indicated, the human soul arrives at when it comes from the point in the soul's temporal life to its eternal forces. This has been described by the words: Man approaches the gate of death. And this word has a certain deep justification. For an inner soul condition, an inner soul mood, occurs at a certain point in the soul's development.

Thus, when the strengthening of thinking has taken place, as it has been described, where, as it were, the human being is withdrawn - but now not through his mere arbitrariness, through abstract thinking, but through forces that take hold of his soul, the spiritual reality of which he can now feel and experience for the first time - through which he is withdrawn from the whole outer world and led to the human being, to himself, to that as which he stands as a human being within the world. One learns through this, that thinking, as it were, presses its power into its own being, inwardly invigorating itself. One gets to know this thinking as a kind of shaping being, through which one feels, in an inward sense of strength, as if doubled, feeling a new inner man within the ordinary man.

If I am to describe the matter more precisely, I would have to say: the person is in his ordinary life; he not only sees his surroundings, but he also feels that his physical being expands in the space bounded by his skin. In ordinary life, however, he feels this inner being only very vaguely. He feels it less dull when this physical being is permeated by pain. So what man experiences dull as the feeling of his physical being, he experiences in a new way. He feels as if he is filled and - I would like to say - pressed through by inner, spiritually organizing forces; he feels a second person in the person. And what he now experiences can only be presented in direct contemplation. Truly, just as the person who only wants to speculate will never find out that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen if he has water in front of him without the experiment being carried out, just as little can one, without this inner, intimate, soul-process experiment is carried out, to have before one, as it were, side by side, what one as a human being already felt and experienced within oneself before, and what now, through the strengthened thinking, like a new, a second human being, filling out the first, stands before one emotionally.

But in experiencing this second self within oneself, one experiences it as being bound up with that which in man is now not a constructive but, on the contrary, a destructive force. One comes to know – and this is a knowledge that can only be acquired through the experience described – one comes to know that as long as a person lives here within the physical body between birth and death, forces live within him that continually consume his body and that ultimately actually represent what leads this body to death. And one learns to recognize that this second person, whom one has now discovered, to whom the thinking that has been strengthened in itself has crystallized, that this person is the highest development of what reveals itself in man as the activity, as the effect of the forces that lead to physical death. We have the forces of life within us – we now notice this – which always bring about our growth, our recovery in relation to what we consume in life; but since we entered the physical world, we have also always had the forces of destruction within us, which consume the body. And one learns to recognize that if one could not use up the body, if it were not for that in us which uses up the body, we could not come to thinking at all in the sense in which we have this thinking as human beings; one learns to recognize that, in a sense, the highest flowering of the forces of death occurs before the eye of our soul, in that we see thinking, thus inwardly organizing itself spiritually in its power, as a second human being within the human being.

This is the harrowing experience; we learn to recognize that we must have not only constructive but also destructive forces within us, and that it is precisely the noblest of these destructive forces that are connected with our thinking. That we are capable not only of developing forces of life but also of undermining life, is connected with many things; but the fact that we can think emerges as the highest flowering. Thus we find justified the ancient mystery teaching that the human being must enter the gateway of death if he wants to come to the soul sources of existence. We must see what death works in us in order to explore the actual nature of thinking in us. And when we bring thinking to its highest peak, it transcends, as it were, its own essence and shows itself to us as what is in us as a second human being, but which represents the highest flowering of destructive forces.

And now - I said: One only learns to recognize what one finds there by looking at it spiritually. One also learns from it to recognize that what asserts itself through the condensed - things are always meant spiritually - thinking as a second human being in man, that this is in fact not connected with what is in us through our birth, what is in us through the forces of inheritance, but that it approaches this physical body from the spiritual world. From the way it relates to the physical body, from the way it takes hold of it, when you look at it, you know that the physical body does not produce these forces from within itself, and you can follow these forces into the spiritual world, and you now get to know in direct spiritual vision the spiritual fact that the human being descends from a spiritual world in which his being was before birth or - let us say - conception and that, united with what the powers of heredity can give the human being, a spiritual being unites. I would like to say: just as the male and female unite, so a third unites with this, which comes from the spiritual world and which, by incorporating itself into the body, transforms itself in such a way that it takes hold of the body and organizes it thoroughly. And by exerting itself in such a way that it consumes this body, temporal thinking appears in the transformation of what is spiritual, as it takes place between birth and death. Outer knowledge, which comes from the physical world, leaves us relatively indifferent with regard to the innermost sensation of our soul life; spiritual knowledge, which thus brings us to the sources of soul life, cannot be absent without an inner tragedy seizing the soul. One really comes into contact with what was alive in the spiritual, but what had to become a power of death, by the human being becoming alive to the physical. One learns to recognize that what gradually develops in the physical human being from childhood to maturity is the transformation of forces, and that these forces must remain hidden from the ordinary gaze precisely because they have been transformed from the spiritual into what we can call physical thinking. But we see what lives and breathes in man emerging from within the physical body, we see it emerging from its spiritual foundation, and there we see it dying, after being spiritually alive, so that man can become physically alive and develop. The spiritual life that constitutes a person before birth was transformed into something physically deadly so that the physical could exist in a living development between birth and death.

I said, my dear audience, that what is still often called the only legitimate philosophical worldview today cannot really keep up and must understandably turn against this spiritual science because that ordinary philosophical worldview has no organ to deal with these intimate soul processes, which must be carried out in faithful devotion if one really wants to attain knowledge of the soul.

We have seen that thinking must be developed in such a way that it progresses to a certain point and then transcends itself, shaping itself. This path of the soul actually has very little to do with what is often called mysticism in ordinary life, but the ordinary philosophical world view only recognizes what is called mysticism. This mysticism actually has something quite superficially similar to the true paths into the spiritual world. Namely, the ordinary mystic - the one who has an inkling that thinking must be used in a different way than in ordinary life - wants to suppress this thinking, to suppress thinking in an indefinite inner, feeling life, so that it becomes clouded, so that something dark and nebulous reigns in the soul. On the contrary, the true spiritual path does not seek to extinguish this thinking, but seeks to strengthen this thinking within itself, seeks to bring it to its highest energy. Therefore, what spiritualizes the soul is not the dull, nebulous, mystical mood that fears thinking because it believes that it cannot appear in it in its true form, but thinking is precisely sought [in the true spiritual path]. Supreme clarity spreads more and more as the path of the soul is followed to the point where thinking, as it were, transcends itself. Thus, by pursuing this path of the soul, one comes to recognize what has united with our physical organism from the spiritual world through birth or, let us say, conception; one learns, as it were, to look back on the earlier spiritual experience of the soul that has descended to the physical life. But it is precisely connected with this experience, the experience of death. One learns to understand that if one can only look at the spiritual life in this way, one learns to understand death, but no more than death; one learns to recognize that it was willed, as it were, from the spiritual, that a spiritual being embodies itself physically, that the forces that were formerly in the spiritual realm are physically consumed, that this being is led to death, that it is precisely in the process of degradation that the goal of development lies.

But we no longer learn. We would learn to understand death, but we would not yet be able to grasp the eternal powers of the human soul. These can only be grasped if we carry out the inner, intimate soul experiment in another direction, in the direction of feeling and willing. Just as the results of thinking are not within everyday thinking, so not everything that can be achieved by the everyday volition through which one performs one's actions is within the everyday volition, through which one performs one's actions, if one now also strengthens this will inwardly in such a way that one directs one's attention to what is actually happening in this will, to what it is usually not directed. We want, we carry out our actions in ordinary life. Precisely because we are absorbed in the actions, we do not see what is developing very mysteriously within the will as it develops from our childhood on while we want. We can say: we experience the will, but in ordinary life we do not look at it; we do not turn our attention to it. Yes, one must first train oneself, one must again do the inner soul experiment in order to develop the ability to focus one's attention so intensely on the will that one can recognize what lies within. One achieves this particularly by creating moments in life where one focuses one's attention on that in the will to which it is not usually directed. Let us say: You survey your daily life, you have willed this or that; now you look back on the way you behaved. You visualize yourself; you think from within, look at yourself, visualize how the intention to do this or that arose, and thus look at yourself in your volition.

Even such inner experimentation cannot work if it is simply done a few times. It depends, of course, on the disposition of the individual – but it must be done again and again, and this must be emphasized repeatedly. It can be said again: It does not depend on spending a lot of time on it; it is not the length of time that matters, but the intensity that one develops, the truly precise, attentive pursuit of these volitional processes. Here it is particularly important to try to test one's own will by living intimately with it, for example, by asking oneself in spirit: If you would plan this or that, how would the whole being that is in you agree with it. When you experience having intentions inwardly, when you are inwardly connected with what a person can strive for, when you experience it inwardly, then you become more and more familiar with the will and then you make a discovery that is again shocking. For now we discover an inner human being, but one of a completely different nature from the one described earlier. Yes, human nature is very diverse! By looking at the will, we now discover, within the person who wills, as it were, a constantly hidden inner spectator. In ordinary life we have no idea about this. We have our self-awareness! This spreads out over our observations in life; but by surveying our will as described, we discover an inner spectator, something that looks spiritually just as much at the inner workings of our will as we do at the processes of our surroundings. We discover a new consciousness. And just as the first experience is harrowing because it brings us, as it were, to the threshold of death, this second experience is harrowing because it cannot be lived through in its depth in any other way than by learning to recognize the nature of suffering in the world. One learns to recognize what suffering is actually based on; one learns to recognize it by really learning to draw attention to this spectator within oneself. Because this spectator has the peculiarity that he always looks at us. He is another person in us, he looks from his consciousness to our will development. I am talking about a reality, about something that is really in man and that grows more and more powerful as man wills through his life. So you learn to recognize something that is behind the will of man, you learn to recognize this as a full reality, but in such a way that it actually has just as little to do with the man who lives in the physical between birth and death as the other has much to do with what you have come to know as the end result of thinking. Since this observer, who is always looking at us from behind, as it were, contains these degenerative forces, and is thus involved in every activity of our physical being, he is never in a position to really intervene in what is going on in us. He has the most intense desire to be like the other person, to force his way into the person like the other person; but he cannot intervene in our organization from his consciousness. He wants this organization, but he cannot find a point of attack within our body.

And so you really get to know these two people within you as realities, these two people who are as real as physical substances can possibly be. You get to know them as opposite poles, but you get to know the second person in such a way that you know: he is on the way to becoming a person shaped as you are. Within this body, he cannot do it. If you want good, he gets to know the inner goodness of your will and enriches himself by looking at this inner goodness. If you will evil, he learns to connect it with his being and learns to recognize how it can be overcome; but he cannot intervene in your present organization. - One learns in this second man, who is merely consciousness, to recognize that which begins to live in us like a seed [as a seed emerges from the growing plant].

One learns to recognize what passes through the gate of death, what enters the spiritual world when the physical body decays. But just as one has this second inner man before one's mind's eye, one learns to recognize: When the second takes hold of the first, when the second — which is prevented by the body from being more in us than a mere consciousness man — when this is no longer prevented by the presence of the body, it takes hold of what is the organization of the degrading forces, connects and forms the seed that progresses into the spiritual world. We get to know what passes over into death. If we look at the way in which our physical life appears out of the spiritual world, as it were, as an immediate flowering of our premature spiritual life, and how thoughts and spiritual forces have been transformed into that which consumes the body to consume the body, to produce physical experiences, then through the second way one sees that which is again preparing itself to pass through the gate of death, to then unite with that which was there before birth.

These are intimate inner processes, but they lead with the same certainty to a true grasp of the eternal forces of the human soul as external scientific experiments lead to the unveiling of the secrets of nature. And basically, the whole intellectual attitude is the same as that on which the observation of nature is based.

How do we observe the plant? We observe it by following it from the seed up through the roots, leaves and flowers until the seed develops again, and in this we see the repetition of the old and the starting point of the new plant. In this way, we follow spiritually in the human being what enters through birth from the spiritual world, follow what develops as a spiritual seed, we connect the end with the beginning, as we do with the plant. Just as we connect the fruit, the blossom and the seed of a plant with that from which the plant sprouts, and thus see the earlier with the later, so the spiritual researcher sees by developing what has been mentioned as intimate processes within himself; he sees how human life is chained to human life. In repeated earthly lives, the human life develops. The full human life presents itself to the spiritual researcher as a life between birth and death, as a life between death and a new birth, as a re-entry into earthly life, and so on.

And the doctrine of repeated lives on earth, which appeared so magnificently to people in a significant epoch of spiritual life in Lessing, it is time that it received a scientific basis today, in that man changes his inner being as he changes nature, in order to eavesdrop on its secrets through experiments. But in so doing, man becomes acquainted with the eternal in the temporal, and in so doing, man brings himself into connection with spiritual processes, just as he brings himself into connection with natural processes around him through science. By studying the physicality of man, we find the confluence of what we find in our studies of minerals, plants, and animals, in our contemplation of nature; we find it concentrated in man. Man is embedded in the bosom of nature, but he is also embedded in the spiritual life of the cosmos through the forces that he discovers within himself on the paths of the soul. And once the spiritual eyes and ears are opened, man looks into the spiritual world.

It must, of course, be emphasized that the resting in the spiritual world is of a completely different nature than the resting in the physical world in it. When we face the physical world: its light shines in us, its sounds too, the effects of warmth take place in us, the effects of the outside world continue in the body. What nature does to us, we experience through the fact that we are a spiritual being wrapped in the body. Because we are in the spiritual world, it is necessary that we do not just surrender passively, but being in the spiritual world requires constant activity. We have seen that one finds this spiritual world by developing a strengthening of thinking and an increased attention to the will. These activities, which we begin within the ordinary life of the soul, lead us into the eternal forces of the life of the soul. But once you are inside, you have to be effective, you have to be active. Otherwise, if we are not able to actively experience being by feeling ourselves in our eternal, it will disappear from us, even if we have already caught it, as easily as a dream slips away from us. For this dream life is basically no different from the life within the core of the being that passes through birth and death when this core of the being withdraws from the physical body; but this dream life is a delicate fabric that evokes images. The soul is not inwardly strong enough to see through completely what it experiences in dreams. Now, just as the soul is connected with the spiritual in a similar way to the body with the physical world, so once the inner, soul-related organs are developed at all, they can be developed into a spiritual science that presents the world as a spiritual organism, just as physical science presents the physical organism. In this connection reference may be made to my “Occult Science” or my “Theosophy”. Or if you would like a shorter booklet, I would refer you to the very commendable writing of Ludwig Deihardt: “Who is Mephistopheles?”, where you will find a short extract of what spiritual science is.

I have tried to show how the human being can come to the eternal powers of the human soul. It can be seen from this that spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not come into any kind of contradiction with natural science, because it does not claim that what develops in the human soul in everyday life or in scientific observation has an eternal significance. One must go beyond this ordinary life of the soul if one wants to find the forces that lead beyond death and birth as something eternal.

Of course, one does not develop the eternal forces, only the knowledge of them. That which beholds this knowledge is always in human nature. Just as little as man creates nature in science, he creates the eternal forces in spiritual science. He only directs the soul's overview to what is always in human nature. In this sense, too, spiritual research speaks from the same attitude as science.

It can be seen, however, that this spiritual science is suited to infusing something into our lives through its results that is of tremendous importance for life. When a person knows about his eternal powers, he knows that he is in harmony with the spiritual that permeates and flows through the world; he knows that he is, as it were, at rest in what flows through the world as spiritual. The spiritual is sought in direct experience, because the path to this spiritual lies in one's own soul life. Therefore, spiritual science does not speak of the spiritual world in the abstract, as does abstract philosophy, but speaks in the concrete, describing the spiritual world as outer science describes the physical world. It approaches the riddles of this world. And just as natural science does not speak in general terms about nature, but rather investigates individual natural objects, individual plants, animals and minerals, so too does spiritual science seek to get behind the riddles of human life in the broadest sense.

Today, one of the many riddles confronts us in our immediate present. And because it confronts us, it will be discussed at the end of this lecture. I speak about this mystery in the knowledge that there may, of course, be many among the honored listeners who, if one goes into such details, may find the matter, which may already be found quite fantastic in general, to be the height of fantasy; but the spiritual researcher cannot be deterred by such things. Just as mankind, even great minds, regarded it as the height of fantasy when the world came into being, that the earth moves around the sun; and as people who regarded it as wild fantasy have become accustomed to taking it seriously, so it is with all truth. Today it must still be considered fantastic that something similar to what happened with the physical universe should now also happen with the spiritual cosmos of man. At the forefront of the newer worldviews, it was the task of those who had to give the new impulse to point out, for example: It has been said that up there the firmament limits the outer space; but there is nothing up there. You yourselves are doing that. It is the limitation of our vision. Beyond the non-existent boundary, space continues, filled to the brim. Just as the spatial firmament was swept aside in the past, so the temporal firmament is swept aside by spiritual science, which shows that only human conditioning of perception leads to this temporal firmament. There is nothing there at all. The spiritual firmament extends into temporal infinity. Man progresses through repeated lives on earth. One must look at the path that truth takes through the development of mankind if one wants to find the strength to advocate what contradicts habitual thinking. But anyone who is familiar with the course of recent scientific development will be able to find such strength and will be convinced that, of course, people will talk about folly, reverie, wild fantasy when such claims are made, as they are here today. But scientific findings have also had this fate, and spiritual scientific findings will also have this fate. They will also become a matter of course. Just as many worlds are spoken of today, the repeated lives of man will be spoken of as a truth based on spiritual observation, which can be attained in the manner described.

Now, the fact that particularly touches us today and that I would like to take a look at, is that so many deaths in an abnormal way come to us in the immediate present. We speak of a natural death that a person undergoes. We speak of a death caused by internal illnesses. But today we are looking at the death that is forcibly inflicted on a person from the outside, say, by a bullet or the like, in the prime of life. And I would not want to shrink from sharing what spiritual science can explore about the peculiarity of precisely such deaths, which so violently confront us in the present in a thousand ways, what spiritual science has to say about these deaths that are experienced on the battlefield. We see how the second of the two types of human beings described, the conscious human being, is not challenged by the inner human organization, how the physical organism is forcibly taken away from the spiritual human being, how it connects with what lives in the human being as the forces of death. In this death, the will germ takes hold of the thinking human organism, this spiritual organism, which turns out to be the second human being. Just as, through a violent blow from the outside, the physical organism is taken from the soul-spiritual, the seed of will and the decomposing part of the thinker's body, the body of thought in man, could have continued to work side by side for a long time. They have been forcibly brought together. The seed of will takes hold of the thinker before his time and leads him through the gate of death.

What could have revealed a long development of his powers on earth is cut off. Where does this come? It may be pointed out that a transformation of forces takes place. What the human being could have possessed for a long time must have been transformed. Just as the pressure I exert when I brush something with my finger is transformed into warmth, so a force that apparently disappears is transformed into another. And this is where the spiritual researcher must look: Where in the world is that which is imparted to the world in this way, unspent for the individual human being? Where is that present in the world? The spiritual researcher looks into the processes of the world when he has trained his soul in the way that has been explained, and he searches for that into which that which is communicated to the world in this way could transform itself and is taken from the individual human being – the expression is not meant badly. And now the spiritual researcher finds – this is as certain a result of spiritual research as it presents itself in natural science, that what is revealed cannot be expected at all, but it does result as a certainty when it presents itself to the eye, also here with spiritual observation, carried out in an appropriate way – the spiritual researcher finds that forces enter the world within the development of humanity, forces that bubble up out of the human soul, so that one knows: these have not been acquired by the human being.

We educate people, we design our education in such a way that what is in the soul is shaped by the effort into abilities; but we still find other forces in human nature that emerge in such a way that we cannot add to them in the sense described. These are the forces that we call the ingenious forces of human nature, through which great achievements are made in the fields of art, science and so on. But it is not only great achievements that are brought about by these ingenious powers; even the simplest person needs inventive talent. The ingenious powers only vary in degree in the simplest person, which everyone has, perhaps to a lesser extent, the inventive power that emerges as if by magic from the depths of the soul, which, as they say, is inspired in man by divine grace and emerges from him, which cannot be brought out in a programmatic way through education of self-evident powers. But in the course of human history, as it develops in such a way that all human souls are contained in it, some and others of these forces emerge. The forces of genius emerge - one might say - emerge like messengers from the spiritual world in the human soul, like something that does not appear to be directly connected with normal human nature, but rather as something that is added. The spiritual researcher explains - by taking many, many detours, as one must also do in a scientific experiment - how what emerges is the transformed form of what arises from the union of the seed-forces of the will with the degenerative forces in an earlier period than the normal one. For when the physical body is forcibly taken away from the soul, as we are now experiencing a thousand times over, what remains unfulfilled is passed on to later generations, it reappears in the human powers of genius. A mysterious connection within the progress of human development, one that shakes the human soul, is revealed.

And just as nature reveals itself wonderfully, one might say, and the unknown emerges to the surface of phenomena in a way that was previously unimagined, so too do the connections in the entire life of a person emerge through spiritual research. Gradually the connection of life reveals itself. If one keeps the spiritual view directed to the eternal forces of the human soul and their forms of transformation in life, one can say: Not the ordinary soul life, which is exhausted between birth and death and cannot pass through the gate of death, but a higher consciousness, which is an observer in us that can only be investigated by other forces, that passes through the gate of death; it is precisely the consciousness, not an indefinite soul life, but it is the consciousness that passes through the gate of death, and by entering the spiritual world, we enter with our consciousness-man. Just as we progress in our physical life from an imperfect physical form to a more and more perfect one and then back to a deterioration of it, so in the spiritual world we start from consciousness between death and a new birth, which incorporates the powers through which it is in turn able to descend again and to live out in a new earthly life. So it is not through the ordinary powers of the soul life, but through, as it were, clairvoyant powers, through powers of the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, that one attains to the eternal powers of the human soul.

But anyone who delves deeper into the essence of spiritual science will see that what is usually called clairvoyance, and with which man may be so content, is rightly viewed with concern by ordinary science. Those who do not want to delve into truly spiritual scientific methods will naturally be able to easily say: Well, one is not satisfied with what ordinary science can explore, but special abilities are to be acquired. One sees these, after all, in abnormal human souls; and why should that which is acquired in an artificial way be something higher than what one sees in abnormal human souls! Those who delve deeper will find that spiritual science, especially with regard to what is often called clairvoyance, is in fact completely in line with and in full accord with the natural sciences; for what natural research can only surmise is precisely what real observation shows, which is achieved as described, namely that what what is called hallucinations and so on, what is often called clairvoyance, that this is the dark shadow of true clairvoyance, and that in the way that such a morbid soul life occurs, one does not come to eternal human powers, not to supersensible, but to subsensible powers, to what is a caricature of clairvoyance. What is often described as a vision, where one hallucinates dreamily or imagines illusions, does not show the eternal powers of the human soul, but powers that are much more temporal than what ordinary thinking and willing bring forth.

This ordinary thinking dominates us, living in us constructively, destructively; but that which lives in hallucinations, in that which is called clairvoyance in the trivial sense, is a sub-sensible; it presses the human being deeper into the physical. While true clairvoyance elevates to supersensible vision, hallucinatory clairvoyance presses deeper into the corporeality and shows what is much more temporal than the ordinary temporal, what is much more fleeting than what can be acquired through ordinary thinking. Once it is realized that, especially with regard to pathological soul phenomena, spiritual science is not directed against the scientific attitude, but even confirms it, even leads it down into a deeper region, into what is usually called clairvoyance, in order to show that true clairvoyance is attained through forces acquired in the manner described, then one will not associate spiritual science with any old superstition, but will regard it as something that not only represents ordinary health, but a higher form of health - namely, living together with spiritual forces.

Humanity will, however, first have to break out of its usual thought patterns in order to become familiar with the inner meaning of the path into the spiritual worlds. And much of the misunderstanding stems solely from the fact that pathological aberrations of the soul life are simply referred to as clairvoyance, and people have no idea how these pathological aberrations of the soul life, as well as mysticism, , which spiritual research reveals as the true path into the spiritual world, thereby demonstrating that there is an eternal core to the human being that belongs to the spiritual world just as the physical body belongs to the physical world.

What the great minds have intuitively conceived is true: it is the human being himself who, from epoch to epoch, carries over what lives in one epoch as the soul passes from birth to birth. Thus, in today's meditation, I have tried to show from a certain point of view the possibility of man's connecting himself — connecting himself in a scientifically exact way — with the eternal powers of his soul. I would like to ask you to allow me to conclude by not linking what I have tried to present to you in a rational way, but because of what is happening in the world today , what is developing out of countless blood sacrifices, which in turn spreads as a blissful atmosphere in hopes for the future, because it is so close to our soul – allow me, as it were, to build the conclusion with a logic of feeling.

Yesterday I tried to explain how, in the great idealistic period of the German people, when the scene of thought was taken from the deepest foundations of human nature, how in this period the greatest personalities of the Germans who emerged not only by developing their individuality but by creating from the national substance - showed the way for the people into the spiritual worlds. I have pointed out that it is not a matter of taking the results arrived at by these idealistic thinkers and poets dogmatically, but of looking at how they sought to bring forth the forces that lie within the people. Then the path that we were able to characterize yesterday, which presented itself to us as the path that the German people themselves took to the realm of ideas, appears to us as an inner spiritual path on which the people try to emerge from what can be experienced in everyday life in order to rise above themselves to powers that are connected with the eternal! Meditation is what spiritual science calls this intimate inner path of the soul, which is traversed in two ways by concentrating on the inner being. Do we not almost give Fichte the wrong interpretation if we focus on the development of will, as we have spoken of it today? And if you read Fichte's late lectures, which he gave before his death, you will find that he really speaks of such a higher consciousness, of a higher meaning that opens up, of a consciousness that accompanies ordinary people. There we have one side of meditation. We have the other side of meditation, for example, in Hegel. We have the effort to grasp the world in thinking. Hegel has made the effort to lead thinking to where it, overcoming itself, shows man the dismantling forces. Therefore, in Hegel, external life also appears in the course of thought-image to thought-image, organizing itself. So that the actual eternal powers of human nature do not emerge within these German philosophers; but we see the way to them. Thus we see how the German people meditate in this period, in the eighteenth, in the nineteenth century. The German people meditating before the forum of world history, so it stands before us.

And perhaps I may confess that one can have genuine, true hope for the future of spiritual science within human development when one looks at the connection between what this spiritual science wants to be and the best that has been achieved within German idealism, where the whole nation has gone through its meditation and has set out on the path that should lead to the eternal. Seen in this light, spiritual science can appear to one as the germ, but a germ arising from the folk-spirit itself, that lies on the scene of thought in German idealism. And because of this inner necessity — that a germ has been laid in the German people through their world-historical meditation, a germ that must develop — one can gain the firm belief, the firm confidence in the inner power of growth of this German people. And one can stand within this people, especially at a time when it is so surrounded by enemies, with this faith that tells one: What has sprouted in such a way will bear fruit in the most distant times - unhindered by all hostile prejudices and all hostile forces that rise up against such national development.

And such unshakable faith in the triumph of the German national spirit also arises from the spiritual realm. It is precisely the genuine self-awareness of the nature of the German people in connection with the spiritual development of humanity that gives this confidence, this unshakable confidence, with which the German may stand, as his enemies all around him also rise and how they also slander his nature - which he thus understands, as it was described yesterday - and how they also want to persecute this nature, to brand it as heretical, to prove it in every way with the results of their hatred. He does not have to give this back, he can stand differently and look differently at what is to become of the great historical events of the present, when he has to make such great sacrifices. When the German looks back to the time when the whole German nation was meditating in this way, when it had almost disappeared under foreign rule as an external manifestation of the Reich, when he looks at the living spiritual path in his nation, then he may, quite unlike the abusive, sophistical methods of his opponents, point out the one thing that emerges from such contemplation: everything that is said and done against the German nature is brought forward or spoken, the German, by looking at the connection of his nature with the spiritual world, may say: If one tries - in a spiritual sense, but in a justified sense - to open the book of fate of world history, if one tries to explore in one's mind those pages that follow the one that is currently , then the German can hold up a single word to all his opponents, to all his enemies, a word that inspires him, unlike their so often expressed hatred, the word that opens the chapter that speaks to the German soul out of knowledge, the chapter in which the German believes and of whose fruitful content the German is firmly convinced, and that is called: The German future.

In connection with the Congress held by the “Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society” in Budapest in the year 1909, Dr. Steiner gave a Lecture-Course entitled: “Theosophy and Occultism of the Rosicrucians.” The Mystery of Golgotha is there indicated as the great turning-point between the old, now already fading Mystery-wisdom and the wisdom in its new form of revelation wherein account is taken of the faculty of thought possessed by a maturer humanity and of the advance of culture and civilisation. Theosophia, the Divine Wisdom, could not, as in earlier times, flow as inner illumination into the hardened constitution of man. Intellect, the more recent faculty of the soul, was directed to the world of sense and its phenomena. Theosophy was rejected by the scholars with a shrug of the shoulders and the very word brought a supercilious smile from the monists. Dr. Steiner, however, was trying to restore to this word its whole weight and spiritual significance and to show how the roots of all later knowledge lie in Theosophy, how it unites East and West, how in it all the creeds are integral parts of one great harmony.

This had also been the fundamental conception of the Founder of the Theosophical Society but she understood nothing of the essence of Christianity and disputed its unique significance. Her tendency to place too much reliance upon spiritualistic communications drew her into the net of an oriental stream only too ready to use this instrument for its own ends—to begin with under the cloak of Neo-Buddhism then represented in the person of Charles Leadbeater, a former priest of the Anglican Church. Annie Besant, a pupil of Charles Bradlaugh, a free-thinker and the most brilliant orator of the day in the field of political and social reform, had also been so deeply influenced by spiritualistic communications that on the advice of William Stead she went to Madame Blavatsky towards the end of the latter's life and became her ardent follower. Stead's spiritualistic circle was influential and the Theosophical Society, with its much purer spiritual foundations, had here a dangerous rival.

Dr. Steiner brought light to bear upon all these developments, upon their aims and aberrations, and raised Theosophy to heights far transcending the narrow sphere of the Theosophical Society. Alarmed by this, the Indian inspirers behind the Adyar Society, with their nationalistic aims, took their own measures.—The imminence of a return of Christ was announced and the assertion made that he would incarnate in an Indian boy. A newly founded Order, the “Star in the East,” using the widespread organisation of the Theosophical Society, was expected to achieve the aim that had met with failure in Palestine.

Not very long after the Budapest Congress, these developments began to be felt in the sphere of Dr. Steiner's lecturing activities. Disquieted by the beginnings of the propaganda for the Star in the East, Groups begged Dr. Steiner to speak about these matters. This caused alarm to the organisers of the Genoa Congress, who thought that the scientific as well as the esoteric discussions with Dr. Steiner would be too dangerous a ground, and for extremely threadbare reasons the Congress was cancelled at the last moment. Many of those taking part were already on their way—we too. A number of Groups in Switzerland took advantage of this opportunity to ask Dr. Steiner for lectures. They wanted to understand the meaning and significance of the Michael Impulse which denotes the turning-point in the historic evolution of the Mystery-wisdom. The Intelligence ruled over in the spiritual world by the hierarchy of Michael had now come down to humanity. It was for men to receive this Intelligence consciously into their impulses of will and thenceforward to play their part in shaping a future wherein the human “I” will achieve union with the Divine “I.” For this goal of the future men must be prepared, a transformation wrought in their souls; they must “change their hearts and minds.” To bring this about was the task of Rudolf Steiner. The moment had arrived for treading the path which liberates the Spirit from the grip of the material powers. The first healthy step to be taken along this path by the pupil of spiritual knowledge, is study.

As the theme chosen for Genoa had been “From Buddha to Christ,” it was natural that the lectures now given in Switzerland should shed the light of Spiritual Science not only upon the earlier connections between the Buddha and Christ Jesus but also upon the lasting connections indicated by the Essene wisdom contained in the Gospels. This is the theme which gives these studies their special character—which could only be brought out by outlining the historical development of the Mystery-wisdom. The ancient revelations of the Mysteries had shed light into many forms of culture, but were now spent; symptoms of decay and increasing sterility of thought were everywhere in evidence. Then, from heights of Spirit, the Michael Impulse came down to the Earth—in order gradually to stir and flame through the hearts of men. The intellect was pervaded by spiritual fire, the lower human “I” lifted nearer to the ideal of times to come: union with the Divine “I.” To awaken understanding of these goals, to establish them firmly on the ground of their spiritual origins and to place them in living pictures before the souls of men—such was the task of Rudolf Steiner.

This brought the inevitable counterblow from the opposing powers; into this they knew they must drive their wedge. The development of the human being in freedom, this gift bestowed by Michael, must be checked and the hearts and minds of men incited to resistance. In his Four Mystery Plays, Rudolf Steiner has given us living pictures of this: the human being between Lucifer and Ahriman—now succumbing to their promptings, now overcoming them, but nevertheless bearing them in the soul like a poison that may at any time begin to work. We too shall continue to bear this picture and its substance in our souls.

The full content of the lectures, however, has not been preserved, for we possess no good transcriptions. The fact that no really reliable and expert stenographist was available at the time seems like a counterblow from the opposing powers. Besides the abbreviated reports of the Cassel lectures, we have in some cases only fragments, in others, scattered notes strung together. But the essential threads have been preserved and an attempt at compilation has been made. The attempt does not always succeed from the point of view of convincing style, but the impetus for effort in thought and study will be all the stronger.

The activities of the Star in the East led, finally, to the exclusion of the German section from the Theosophical Society; this, however, had been preceded by the forming of a Union which included people in other countries who opposed this piece of Adyar sectarianism and led to the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society. For a time, care was necessary to prevent confusion as between the two Societies and so for the Movement associated with him, Rudolf Steiner chose the name Anthroposophy—the Divine Wisdom finding its fulfilment in man. Theosophy and Anthroposophy are one, provided the soul has cast away its dress. And Rudolf Steiner showed us how this can be done.

The new Indian Messiah soon cast off the shackles of the renown that had been forced upon him and retired to private life in California. Annie Besant was obliged to renounce her cherished dream and died at a very great age. It is rumoured that the question of the dissolution of the Adyar Society was considered but that this proved impossible owing to the extensive material possessions. Jinarajadasa, my good friend from the days of the founding of the Italian Section, succeeded Annie Besant as President. The branch of the Theosophical Society which had seceded at the time of the Judge conflict and to which Madame Blavatsky's niece belonged, had found in Mrs. Catharine Tingley a leader of energy and initiative, but she too had died.

The old conditions have now faded away. Those grotesque edifices of phantasy can no longer be associated with the Anthroposophical, formerly Theosophical, Movement, for they have crumbled to pieces. We can allow the word Theosophy again to come to its own, as did Rudolf Steiner when he was trying to restore to this word its primary and true significance.

Besides laying emphasis on the essential character of Spiritual Science in the post-Christian era, the aim of the lectures given in 1911 and 1912 was to explain karma as the flow of destiny and to point to its intimate workings. The lines of development running through the lectures have survived only as pictures of memory; the transcriptions often failed to catch the threads of the logical sequence and the notes or headings jotted down and collected here and there are really no more than indications. But the direction of the spiritual impulses given by Dr. Steiner has been preserved, and justifies, maybe, the attempt at compilation. Through meditative study these impulses will be able to work in us and deepen our souls.

These lectures and documents from the summer and fall of 1915 were a response to a crisis in the Anthroposophical Society, a crisis Rudolf Steiner wanted the membership to be aware of.

In part, the crisis was caused by Alice Sprengel, a long-time student of Rudolf Steiner, and her reaction apparently provoked by the marriage of her spiritual teacher to Marie von Sivers. Her expectations, the exact nature of which is not quite clear, were connected to the important role she felt herself playing in the anthroposophical movement. Faced with the close working relationship and then the marriage of Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers in the winter of 1914, Alice Sprengel not only sent personal letters to both but also brought her disappointment and sense of abandonment to the attention of other members of the Anthroposophical Society.

She also had a close relationship to Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch, a couple whose interest in Rudolf Steiner's work was matched by an equally strong fascination with the then emerging psychoanalytical school of Freud. Influenced by Alice Sprengel and his own inner uncertainties, Heinrich Goesch accused Rudolf Steiner both privately and publicly of manipulating the membership of the Anthroposophical Society into a dependent status. As supposed mechanisms of such manipulation he mentioned Steiner's repeated failure to keep appointments and physical contact with members through shaking hands upon meeting.

Rudolf Steiner was understandably upset by both sets of accusations and even more so by the gossiping and dissension they caused among members of the Anthroposophical Society. He used these difficulties as an opportunity to address four important questions that are as relevant today as they were in 1915. The first, primarily discussed in Lectures One and Two, concerns the nature of the Anthroposophical Society and the responsibilities its members have to accept if they want to be true to spiritual science. The very clear, pragmatic manner in which these two lectures discuss this important issue makes them a valuable companion to the recently published The Christmas Conference for the Foundation of the Anthroposophical Society, 1923/24.¹ The need for the members to move from a consumer orientation regarding spiritual teaching to a feeling of responsibility for it, the unique nature of the Anthroposophical Society as an earthly home for spiritual revelation, and the harm that irresponsible statements and actions can cause the Society are just a few of the important points covered. Steiner also takes a stand against the incessant gossiping and the mutual criticism among members as well as against their attempts to justify sexual infidelities by pointing to an incontrovertible "karma." Rudolf Steiner here urgently appeals to the members' sense of truth and exactitude as the basis for a healing and nurturing of the Anthroposophical Society.

The second question addressed, particularly in Lectures Three and Five, concerns the nature and conditions of spiritual seership. Steiner uses a discussion of Swedenborg's inability to understand the thoughts of certain spirit beings to make two fundamental points about spiritual cognition. The first is the difference between perception in the physical world and true spiritual seership. In the physical world we perceive objects outside of ourselves and take something of them into us through mental images. In the spiritual world "we no longer perceive but experience that we are being perceived, that the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies are observing us. This experience of being perceived and observed by the Angeloi and Archangeloi and other spiritual hierarchies is a total reversal of our former relationship to the physical world.”²

According to Steiner, Swedenborg did not achieve this reversal of perspective; therefore, his clairvoyance was limited, and he did not attain to full imaginative cognition.

Steiner links this difference in perspectives to that between clairvoyance achieved through the redirection of sexual energies and clairvoyance resulting from pure thinking. The latter leads to the experience that the transformed thinking activity of the human being, a thinking devoid of personal likes and dislikes, allows thoughts to appear as objective entities within the human soul. It thereby properly prepares the individual for spiritual seership. The transformation of sexual energies, on the other hand, keeps the individual tied to the physical and allows only a partial clairvoyance. Steiner therefore contends that a spiritual science and seership appropriate to our time rests not on a transformation of our instincts but on a conscious separation of the instinctual life from that of the mind and spirit.

The third issue discussed by Rudolf Steiner in these lectures is the nature of psychoanalysis as developed by Freud. While acknowledging the importance of the unconscious and the subconscious, Steiner is particularly critical of the theory of infantile sexuality. It should be noted that Steiner gave these lectures in 1915 and that both Adler and Jung broke with Freud over Freud's insistence on infantile sexuality as a primary interpretive framework for understanding psychological disturbances.³

Freudian psychology is discussed in Lectures Four and Five of this volume. They are an important supplement to the recently published lectures of Rudolf Steiner entitled Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology.⁴ Of particular significance is Rudolf Steiner's treatment of the three main physiological functions of the human being—the nerve sense system, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic system—in their historical and spiritual evolution. His insistence that the metabolic system and the instinctual sexual life are the least spiritual aspects of the human being supports both his criticism of Freud and his basic view of spiritual development.

In reading both these lectures and those contained in Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology, one can easily be led to reject much of the development of psychology in the twentieth century. Indeed the anti-psychological orientation of many students of Rudolf Steiner's work is quite pronounced. My own perspective is different. First, I see the development of modern psychology and psychiatry as co-existent with the end of what Rudolf Steiner refers to as “the Kali Yuga,” or dark age, in 1899. This means that however inadequate the evolution of psychological theories and practices has been in some respects, it has on the whole been a new and deepening exploration of the human soul and spirit. Here, I am in particular thinking of Jung in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections or of Viktor Frankl's logo-therapy or Assagioli's work. It seems to me that while there is much in modern psychology that is trivial and dangerous, there is also much that is worthwhile and helpful.

Students of Rudolf Steiner's work have the possibility to ask questions of appropriateness and relevance regarding different psychological schools, as David Black has done in “On the Nature of Psychology” in Towards.⁵ To see biophysical, behavioral, intrapsychic, and phenomenological schools of thought as addressing different levels of the human being, and to ask what spiritual science has to contribute to the evolving body of psychological and spiritual insight in the last decade of the twentieth century, is a more honest and, I believe, more helpful approach than to extend Steiner's early opposition to Freud and Jung into an unreflecting anti-psychological stance. Soul work and spirit work are intimately connected. The task of developing a more spiritual psychology is a vital task for the coming decades.

In Lecture Six, Steiner addresses the relation between love, mysticism, and spirituality. Particularly significant is his contention that the prevailing materialism of the time made it impossible for most people to conceive of a spiritual striving that did not have some erotic or sexual basis, albeit a very refined one. While Rudolf Steiner does acknowledge that this is sometimes the case, he again asserts the importance of spiritual science as a path of spiritual development for Western humanity in our time because of its reliance on the transformation of the individual's thinking.

As this volume also contains all of the correspondence regarding the difficulties in the Anthroposophical Society in 1915, readers will easily see the direct connection between the personal accusations leveled against Steiner and the lecture themes presented. The questions raised are basic ones for any modern spiritual movement that wants to contribute to individual freedom and a renewal of society. These lectures can lead members of the Anthroposophical Society to ponder their responsibilities toward the content of spiritual science, toward Rudolf Steiner, and toward their brothers and sisters in their striving. For outside observers these lectures constitute an insightful record of the social and psychological difficulties of a spiritual movement relying primarily on the insights and teachings of one individual.

However, the questions of love, sexuality, morality, and spiritual development are of immediate interest and of deep personal significance for all readers on their inner journey.

CHRISTOPHER SCHAEFER, PH.D.
Spring Valley, New York
February 1991

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, The Christmas Conference for the Foundation of the Anthroposophical Society, 1923/24 (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1990).
• 2. See Lecture Three in this volume, pp. 43-44.
• 3. See I. Progoff, The Death and Rebirth of Psychology (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973).
• 4. Rudolf Steiner, Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1990).
• 5. Towards, 1 no. 7 (Winter 1980/81): 29-34.

M. E. delle Grazie

I

Today, anyone who talks about modern trends in literature runs the risk of being ridiculed. How many immature, dilettante things are described as modern today! Critics, who often have no idea of what the human spirit has already produced in the course of its development, describe as modern many things which, to the discerning, are merely a modification of something that has long been there. I do not wish to be lumped together with these critics when I say that a radical change is taking place in our time, in artistic creation no less than in scientific conviction. This turnaround has not only recently become apparent. Goethe's youthful poetry was already characterized by it. His "Prometheus" is filled with the spirit that I would describe as modern. But Goethe, despite his depth, despite the universality of his spirit, was not energetic enough to carry out the building for which he had laid the foundation stone. His age does not correspond well with his youth. Nowhere do we find the fulfillment of what he promised us. Let us hold together the proud verses of Prometheus:

Here I sit, forming men
In my own image,
A race that is like me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy and to rejoice,
And not to respect you,
Like me!

with the humble ones in the second part of "Faust":

He who always strives,
We can redeem him.
And if love has even
Participated from above,
The blessed multitude meets him
With a hearty welcome.

The "free spirit", which finds the support of life in itself, has become a spirit of devotion, which expects the salvation of existence from divine grace. This describes the two poles of Goethe's creative work. The transformation took place slowly and gradually. If Goethe had remained in the position of his youth, we would not have "Iphigenia" or "Tasso", but we would perhaps have poems that we can now only expect from the future. Perhaps Goethe's works would not have been as artistically perfect as "Iphigenia" and "Tasso" if he had developed in a straight line from "Prometheus". But they would have been the first great products of a new era. Fate willed otherwise. Goethe abandoned the tendencies of his youth. He did not become the messiah of a new age. But he did bring us the most beautiful, the most mature fulfillment of a now dead epoch. His later poems are mature, overripe, but they are the last products of a series of developments. It is just as well. The time was not yet ripe for problems that we, a hundred years later, can barely guess at in vague outlines. Anyone who has a full awareness of these problems that are about to be born in the bosom of the present, who knows that we live in an age of expectation and have no right to dwell on the past, is what I call a modern spirit. I have never found this characteristic of genuinely modern striving, which dawned in Byron, so succinctly, so clearly outlined in any contemporary as in the Austrian poet M. E. delle Grazie. I have not formed this opinion from her first writings: "Gedichte", "Die Zigeunerin", "Hermann", "Saul"¹, but from her poems which have recently appeared in various magazines. These poems are the strictly lawful reflection of the modern world view from a deep, strongly feeling, clear-sighted soul endowed with great artistic creative power. What a comfortable and proud nature has to suffer from this view is expressed by delle Grazie in her poems. What a noble spirit feels when it sees the collapse of the old, great ideals, when it has to perceive how the modern conception of nature lets these ideals evaporate into nothingness and emptiness as insubstantial bubbles and vaporous formations, that is what we hear from the creations of this poetess. We are confronted with a mood of the present and hopelessness for the future. Only those who close their minds to the spirit that pervades our time, or who are shallow enough to laugh in the face of the bleakness, can fail to recognize the deep meaning of delle Grazie's poetry. There is nothing petty in the painful tones we hear here. Delle Grazie's sufferings do not spring from fate, which reigns over the everyday; they are rooted in the disharmonies of the cosmos and the historical development of mankind. They stand out from a significant background. That is why we do not find despondency and pusillanimity anywhere in them, but proud, bold elevation above pain. The dirty, the lowly, the common are shown ruthlessly in their nothingness, but the artist always proudly raises her head in order to be free of the despised, which she strikes with her scourge. Delle Grazie has seen through the deep irony that lies in human existence. She thinks nothing of knowledge, of ideals. These are things to which humanity aspires, only to feel all the more thoroughly disappointed when they turn out to be worthless and insubstantial appearances. But a proud spirit lives in the poet. She is able to raise herself to the height where one can smile at the nothingness of existence because one has ceased to have any desire for it.

I am looking for the reason for the mood in delle Grazie's latest collection of poems: "Italian Vignettes". There is a point in Rome's development where human greatness clashed most closely with human nothingness. Caesaric power was paired with human weakness, artistic height with ethical rottenness. The mouth that commanded nations greedily craved the kiss of the most wretched woman; a master's mind became a slave's mind when the embraces of high-ranking prostitutes subdued it. These "vignettes" reveal how this is still petrified in the remnants of old times, but how it can be interpreted by the clairvoyant eye:²

Divine dignity and divine rights
You have boldly arrogated to yourselves,
Spirit and virtue became servants,
Where the arbitrariness splashed great.

sings delle Grazie of the Roman Caesars. The mood that took hold of her in the eternal city is reflected in the words:

With elegiac whispers
Looks from the barren Palatine
A single pine tree gloomily
Towards the silent forum.

In addition to these stanzas, which are filled with a truly historical spirit, there is also no lack of those that vividly conjure up Italy's present before our souls. Here, delle Grazie captures the tone of melancholy just as well as that of cheerful humor, when it is in the nature of things. A number of poems have sprung from the impressions that Tasso's traces left in the poet's mind:

At your tomb all vain imaginings die,
Here your glory sits enthroned in majestic peace,
But where man suffered, I found tears,
And I was allowed to sob and dream here like you!

Under the title "Images and Figures", delle Grazie shares with us her feelings at the sight of great Italian works of art, such as Guercino's Sant' Agnese, Maderna's St. Cecilia, Belvedere's Apollo, Otricoli's Zeus and Michelangelo's Moses. - I have to admire the depth of the impressions in these poems as well as the spirituality of their rendering. Naples, Pompeii, Sorrento, Capri are sung about in deeply felt poems of great beauty of form. I was particularly moved by the one entitled "Two Madmen" from the cycle "Sorrento". Tasso and Nietzsche, who both walked on this soil, are juxtaposed:

Two great men walked these paths
And often both stand suddenly before my mind:
Tasso, the prince of poets by the grace of God,
And Friedrich Nietzsche ... equal was their
profit, And folly was his name ...

Both spirits had one thing in common: a drive lived in their breasts that strove unbridled into the depths of existence; both forgot that man is bound to the earth and that he must stop breathing when he rises above a certain height. Like the body, the human spirit is also dependent on the medium into which its life is once born. Tasso and Nietzsche, however, wanted to take their standpoint outside this medium in order to look down from the heights of heaven to the earthly. But in doing so, they consumed themselves.

Delle Grazie has seen all the glory that can be seen in Italy:

Like all of them, you drew me to you,
Enchanted, enraptured and beguiled,
On ruins you lied to me of a happiness,
That you destroyed hard in the sun's glare -

But she only found her worldview confirmed in one great example:

But I am not resentful ..., I am going home again,
Even if with a crudely broken walking stick -
I bring back with him the old torments
And here as there I lay him on a grave!

• 1. all published by Leo & Co. (Karl Konegen) in Vienna
• 2. Leipzig 1892, Breitkopf & Härtel (VII, 132 $.) 3 M., geb. 4 M.

A pleasant, sunny morning landscape, in a terraced garden overlooking a town with many factories.

Benedictus, Capesius, Maria, Thomasius, and Strader are discovered walking up and down and engaged in leisurely conversation. Benedictus wears a white biretta and is in his white robe, but without the golden stole.

Capesius:
Here is the place, where Benedictus oft
In soft warm sunlight of a summer morn
Gave himself to his pupils that they might
In reverent mood receive his wisdom's words.
Out yonder lies what ever must divide
With pitiless intent the souls of men
From all the wondrous beauty of the earth,
That nature's God doth shower so bounteous here.
In yon waste sea of houses in the town
Doth Benedictus ever nobly strive
To heal this human woe by deeds of love.
And when with human words so wise and true
He tells his pupils of the spirit-world,
He seeks for hearts, which free creative power
That here reveals itself in wakening souls,
Hath filled with sunshine and with love for men.
I, too, may now behold the happiness
Which through his words doth reach the heart of man.
Since he in love hath underta'en the task
Of guiding me within the spirit-world:
And now when I may feel that he is near
I shall again discover mine own self.

Benedictus:
Within the circle of my pupils here
Through free-will acts of others and thyself
A knot shall one day loosen in the threads
Which Karma spins in lives of men on earth.
Thy life itself will help to loose this knot.
In hearts of men who give themselves in truth
To follow wisdom, which I serve myself,
Thou cant by thine own power discover those
Joined unto whom thou wilt complete the work
For which in spirit thou hast been prepared.

Capesius:
Thee have I known, and I will follow thee.
As I held converse with mine inmost soul,
When I had been allowed to hear thy words
Within the spirit-realm in their true form,
And thou hadst brought me to myself again,
Then could I see portrayed in spirit-light
The aims which in the progress of the earth
I was to follow in my future lives.
And now I know that thou didst choose for me
The one right way for this to be revealed.

Benedictus:
Thomasius and Strader will henceforth
United with thyself accomplish much
That best may serve to further human health.
They have prepared the soul-powers which are theirs
With such intent since first the Earth began
That they can join to form a trinity
With thine own spirit in the cosmic course.

Capesius:
So I must thank my fate's unbending powers
Which seemed at first incomprehensible,
That when the rightful moment came at last
My life's aim suddenly revealed itself.

(He pauses meditatively.)

How wonderfully hast thou led me on:
It seemed at first as if I strove in vain
To enter with my spirit consciously
Into those worlds which by thy words are placed
So thoughtfully before the souls of men.
For many years I could find nought but thoughts
When in thy writings I absorbed myself.
And then, quite suddenly, around me flowed
The spirit-world in its reality;
I scarce knew how to find myself aright
Within my former more accustomed world.

Benedictus:
That would have hid the spirit-life from thee
For ever by its strong effective power
Unless the stronger forces of this life
Had first reduced it to a shadow dim.
Thou therefore, must with fullest spirit-sight
Behold thyself upon the threshold grim
Where other men only begin to see.

(During the last words Strader walks up to Capesius and the three go away together: after a short time Benedictus returns with Strader.)

Strader:
It gave deep pain, within mine inmost self
And weighed with heavy pressure on my soul
When on awaking to myself I found
I was again within my body pent
From which thy words had given me release.
My deadened soul-life first tormented me
On my return, yet 'twas not only pain;
For it brought forth in me the memory
Of all I lived through ere I saw with dread
What I could learn from Ahriman himself,
That every thought must cease its progress there.
I had to ask myself why I was set
By Benedictus' word within this realm
Where souls alone are taken into count
And only those are valued which can help
Towards the objects, which that power desires
To make his own through deeds that I have done.
He, in his wisdom, wanted to select
Twelve helpers from the number of mankind.

Benedictus:
Yet 'tis well known to thee why all these souls,
Which Ahriman showed forth, drew near to thee,
When he would force himself upon their fates.

Strader:
That also bitter pain revealed to me:
It showed how in a former life on Earth
I was united to a brotherhood
Which now hath formed again its mystic league,
And how those people stood towards myself,
Who were in their true nature then revealed.
And I could feel quite sure that Ahriman
Will use the bond, which e'en in future lives
Must ever surely bind their souls to mine.

Benedictus:
The cosmic powers do so direct their deeds
That these with cosmic progress may unite
By following in wisdom number's laws.
The sign how this direction is fulfilled
Shows itself clearly to the outer sense,
If it doth watch the Sun upon the course
He takes throughout the constellations twelve.
It is his place amongst those very signs
Which shows how on the Earth things come to pass
In strict succession in long course of time.
So Ahriman desired to mould the souls
Of those who are united thus to thee
To powers from whence thy work might shine afar.
He also wished to follow number's laws
In binding their soul-nature unto thine.

Strader:
Since I have learned the sense of number's law,
So shall I too succeed in rescuing
My work from out the realm of Ahriman
And offering it to the gods of Earth.

Benedictus:
It was through Ahriman thou hadst to learn
The sense of number in the universe;
So was it needful for thine own soul's good.
'Twas spirit-pupilship that guided thee
Into that realm, which thou didst need to know
If thy creative power should bloom aright.

(Exeunt Benedictus and Strader. Maria and Thomasius appear from the other side.)

Maria:
Johannes, knowledge hath thy soul acquired
From truth's cold realms. No longer wilt thou now
Weave only in thy pictures that which souls,
Still pent within the body, live in dreams,
For far from cosmic progress are those thoughts
Which but as self-begotten show themselves.

Thomasius:
'Tis love of self—although they may pretend
'Tis thirst for knowledge maketh them do this.

Maria:
Whoe'er desires to dedicate himself
To human progress and perform such work
As shall in course of time prove living force
Must first entrust himself unto those powers
Who work in deep realities and bring,
Where order with confusion aye doth fight,
The rhythmic law of number and its power.
For knowledge only hath true active life,
That can reveal itself within the soul
When it can bring to men, still clothed in flesh,
The memory of life in spirit-realms.

Thomasius:
My course of life is thus made clear to me.
I have to feel myself a twofold man.
Through Benedictus' help and through thine own
I am a being independent, strong,
Whose forces do not yet belong to self—
To mine own self that stirs within me still.
Ye now have given me a manhood new
Who must be willing to give other men
What he hath gained by spirit-pupilship.
He must devote himself unto the world
As best he can: naught from mine other self
Must mingle and disturb what now at last
He hath as true self-knowledge recognized.
Contained in his own world he will go on,
If his own strength and help from both his friends
Shall in the future serve to form his fate.

Maria:
Whether thou walk'st in error or in truth
Thou canst keep ever clear the view ahead,
Which lets thy soul press farther on its path,
If thou dost bravely bear necessities
Imposed upon thee by the spirit-realm.

[ 1 ] If the soul enters the supersensible world with clairvoyant consciousness, it learns to know itself there in a way of which in the physical world it can have no conception. It finds that through its faculty of transformation it becomes acquainted with beings to whom it is more or less related; but in addition to this it becomes aware of meeting beings in the supersensible world to whom it is not only related, but with whom it must compare itself, in order to know itself. And it further observes that these beings in supersensible worlds have become what the soul itself, through its adventures and experiences in the physical world, has become. In the elemental world beings confront the human soul who have developed within that world powers and faculties which man himself can only unfold through still having about him his physical body, in addition to his etheric body and the other supersensible principles of his being. The beings here alluded to have no such body with physical senses. They have so evolved that through their etheric body they have a soul-nature such as man has through his physical body. Although to a certain degree they are beings of like nature to himself, they differ from him in not being subject to the conditions of the physical world. They have no senses of the kind which man possesses. Their knowledge is like man's; only they have not acquired it through the gateway of the senses, but through a kind of ascent, or mounting-up of their ideas and other soul-experiences out of the depths of their being. Their inner life is, as it were, at rest within them, and they draw it up out of the depths of their souls, as man from the depths of his soul draws up his memory-pictures.

[ 2 ] In this way man becomes acquainted with beings who have become within the supersensible world that which he may become within the physical world. Owing to this, these beings are a stage higher than man in the order of the universe, although they may be said to be, in the manner indicated, of the same nature as he. They constitute a kingdom above man, a hierarchy superior to him in the scale of beings. Notwithstanding their similarity to man, their etheric body is different from his. Whereas man is woven into the supersensible etheric body of the earth through the sympathies and antipathies of his etheric body, these beings are not earth-bound in the life of their soul.

[ 3 ] If man observes what these beings experience through their etheric bodies, he finds that their experiences are similar to those of his own soul. They have thinking power; they have feelings and a will. But through their etheric body they develop something which man can only develop through the physical body. Through their etheric body they arrive at a consciousness of their own being, although man would not be able to know anything about a supersensible being unless he carried up into supersensible worlds the forces which he acquires in the physical body.

Clairvoyant consciousness learns to know these beings through developing a faculty for observing them by the help of the human etheric body. This clairvoyant consciousness lifts the human soul up into the world in which these beings have their field of activity and their abode. Not till the soul experiences itself in that world, do pictures or conceptions arise in its consciousness which bring about knowledge of these beings. For these beings do not interpose directly in the physical world, nor therefore in man's physical body. They are not present in the experiences which may be made through that body. They are spiritual, supersensible beings, who do not, so to say, set foot in the physical world.

If man does not respect the boundary between the physical world and supersensible worlds, it may happen that he drags into his physical consciousness supersensible images which are not the true expression of these beings. These images arise through experiencing the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings, who though of like nature to the supersensible beings just described, are contrasted with them through having transferred their field of activity and their abodes to the world which man perceives as the physical world.

[ 4 ] When man with clairvoyant consciousness contemplates the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings from the supersensible world, after having through his experience with the guardian of the threshold, learned the right way to observe the boundary between that world and physical existence, he learns to know these beings in their reality, and to distinguish them from those other spiritual beings who have remained in the sphere of action adapted to their nature. It is from this standpoint that spiritual science must portray the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings.

It then appears that the field of activity adapted to the Luciferic beings is not the physical but, in a certain respect, the elemental world. When something penetrates into the human soul which rises as though out of the waves of that world like pictures, and when these pictures work with a vivifying effect on man's etheric body, without assuming an illusive existence in the soul, then the Luciferic essence may be present in these images, without its activity transgressing against the order of the universe. In this case the Luciferic nature has the effect of emancipation upon the human soul, raising it above mere entanglement in the physical world. But when the human soul draws into the physical body the life which it should only develop in the elemental world, when it allows feeling within the physical body to be influenced by sympathies and antipathies which should only hold sway in the etheric body, then the Luciferic nature gains through that soul an influence which is opposed to the general order of the universe. This influence is always present when in the sympathies and antipathies of the physical world, something is working besides that love which is based on sympathy with the life of another being present in that world. Such a being may be loved because it comes before the one loving it endowed with certain qualities; in this case there is no admixture of a Luciferic element with the love. Love which has its basis in those qualities in the beloved being which are manifest in physical existence, keeps clear of Luciferic interference. But love, the source of which is not thus in the beloved being, but in the one loving it, is prone to the Luciferic influence. A being loved because it has qualities to which, as lovers, we incline by nature, is loved with that part of the soul which is accessible io the Luciferic element.

We should therefore never say that the Luciferic element is bad under all circumstances, for events and beings of supersensible worlds must be loved by the human soul in the manner of the Luciferic element. The order of the universe is not transgressed until the kind of love with which man ought to feel himself drawn to the supersensible is directed to physical things. Love for the supersensible rightly calls forth in the one loving it an enhanced feeling of self; love which in the physical world is sought for the sake of such an enhanced feeling of self is equivalent to a Luciferic temptation. Love of the spiritual when it is sought for the sake of the self has the effect of emancipation; but love for the physical when it is sought on account of the self has not this effect, but, through the gratification gained by its means, only puts the self in fetters.

[ 5 ] The Ahrimanic beings make themselves felt in the thinking soul just as the Luciferic beings affect the feeling soul. The former chain thought to the physical world. They turn it away from the fact that thoughts of any kind are only of importance when they assert themselves as part of the universal order, whose discovery is not bound within physical existence. In the world into which the human life of the soul is woven, the Ahrimanic element must exist as a necessary counterbalance to the Luciferic. Without the Luciferic element, the soul would dream away its life in observation of physical existence, and feel no impulse to rise above it. Without the counter-effect of the Ahrimanic element, the soul would fall a victim to the Luciferic influence; it would underrate the importance of the physical world, in spite of the fact that some of its necessary conditions of existence are in that world. It would not wish to have anything to do with the physical world. The Ahrimanic element has the right degree of importance in the human soul when it leads to a way of living in the physical world which is suitable to that world; when we take it for what it is, and are able to dispense with everything in it which in its nature must be transitory.

It is quite impossible to say that a person could avoid falling a victim to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements by rooting them out of himself. It is, for instance, possible that if the Luciferic element in him were rooted out, his soul would no longer aspire to the super-sensible; or, if the Ahrimanic element were eradicated, that he might not any more realise the full importance of the physical world: the right relation to one of these elements is arrived at when the proper counterpoise to it is provided in the other. All harmful effects from these cosmic beings proceed entirely from one of them becoming the unlimited master of the situation, whatever it may be, and from not being brought into the right harmony through the opposite force.

A writing,¹ I do not want to write a review about it. What I will say will be only words that express my subjective feelings when reading the writing and that may be directed from a deeply satisfied soul like a spiritual greeting to the author.

Only in this way can I speak about a writing that, from the point of view of my spiritual-scientific striving, characterizes Pastor Ernst.

I feel that, first of all, the writing expresses the deeply religious, but also the only truly plausible view, which knows that in the development of mankind nothing truly religious can arise or develop without a real intervention of the divine-spiritual into the physical world. Without a person or persons having real contact with the supersensible, nothing religious can come into the world: Edmund Ernst is quite clear about this.

That is why he starts from the reformers' supersensible experiences. He shows how Luther's whole life was basically oriented towards contact with the supersensible. How Luther was well aware of the dangers of this contact, how he knew that supersensible beings can sometimes appear in a good mask, while they are of a devilish nature. Ernst also shows how Zwingli, in a decisive point, made his behavior dependent on a truth that had been revealed to him from the spiritual world.

The spiritual-supernatural source is spoken of simply but forcefully in the book as a religious source.

In this way, however, the author's meaning is implanted in the book, which makes the religious man. The book proves to be one that is written from a spirit-filled heart living in the spirit. From such a heart-felt attitude, light-filled warmth always falls on the individual's execution. And with Ernst, this warmth is never channeled into the sought emotional exuberance; it remains objective throughout and seeks to get the “yes” and “no” for an assertion from the objective.

Given such conditions, should we not speak of the deepest satisfaction when Pastor Ernst courageously makes three main questions the content of his book? These are three questions that I myself should never have been allowed to speak about; to hear what is said about them from such a source, may be called an inner festival of life. “1. Is there a possibility, from the spiritual experience of the Reformation, to understand what presents? 2. Must the spiritually real element of the Reformation capitulate before what 'anthroposophically oriented spiritual science' possibly brings in the way of new ideas? 3. Must the results of the spiritual scientist's research be rejected from the point of view of the experience of the Reformation?"

It must be deeply satisfying to see these questions treated in a thoroughly religious way, after Ragaz, for example, has written about the spiritual science I have described: ”In this higher knowledge, God comes to Himself in man. The promise of the snake is fulfilled: Eritis sicut Deus, you will be like God. Thus Theosophy becomes Anthroposophy” (Leonhard Ragaz: Theosophy or Kingdom of God? Flugschriften der Quelle 3. Rotapfelverlag 1922, page 18). Or: “Woe to the world if it were to abandon the God of the Bible for the God of Theosophy – it would sink into dream and death, lose God and man.” Page 34. – Anyone who acquires knowledge of the human soul through spiritual research does not find a soul like Ragaz's in her dark storms against Anthroposophy incomprehensible. One can see through her in her conscious world of ideas, and also in the subconscious and semi-subconscious depths. And one recognizes how she cannot allow the feeling to arise in her from these depths: there is a path in anthroposophy to the spiritual world. Can this not lead to a renewed understanding of the biblical word of revelation, which also comes from the spiritual world? Ragaz' soul cannot come to this feeling because she has blocked the very path through the ways to the Bible that she has now chosen, through which the Bible itself - in accordance with the corresponding time - came about, and which has been recreated in anthroposophical spiritual research in a way appropriate to the responsibilities of knowledge in our time.

Now Ernst's statement (on pages 24f. of his book) is juxtaposed with a statement by Ragaz. I truly feel a spiritual blush as I transcribe the words here: “Insofar as Steiner represents the fact that it is possible to recognize the supersensible world and that it is possible to educate people to this knowledge, he presents himself as the recipient of a message from the spiritual world. Only that he also shows – and this goes beyond Luther – how others can also arrive at becoming such recipients through the path of seeing.

And Pastor Ernst understands in a clear way how I would like to apply anthroposophical spiritual knowledge to human life. It is far from my intention to appear in any kind of religious way or to interfere in any religious confession. I have no other aspiration than this: to communicate to present-day humanity, in a form of knowledge with the right sense of responsibility before today's science, what I am able to explore in the supersensible worlds. I present what I may say to myself is either appropriate for present-day humanity in its state of spiritual maturity, or something else for which individual groups of people are first acquiring the maturity in an (esoteric) preliminary training.

When the Christian Renewal movement came into being, it was not on my initiative, but on that of a number of Christian theologians who were seeking a new spiritual impulse precisely out of their genuine Christian sensibilities. believed that they could find this in the spiritual insights, especially those that are also possible through a cultus, of anthroposophy; and I was obliged to give this group of people everything I could give from my knowledge. I remained the one communicating the insights from the supersensible world; and the recipients and inquirers did what was necessary to establish the Fellowship for Christian Renewal.

You have heard of the spirits that reveal themselves to man: “Will, Wisdom, Form”. I would like to say a few more things about these entities.

You must familiarize yourself with them. Those who only consider the physical part know only a little.

All teachings are based on observations with higher organs that do not belong to the physical body, that belong to the higher bodies and are not yet developed in the ordinary human being either. Familiarize yourself with the fact that higher insights are gained.

The names of the [four] stages of perception [are]:

1. Material recognition: It is the subordinate one, only used for everyday life [recognition].

2. Imaginative cognition – recognizing spiritual beings in images: the images of the dream world, surging up and down, are chaotic and disorderly, without meaning. However, the meaning can be developed in the soul. Imago image, with which man surrounds himself. There is the fabric from which knowledge is composed [...]

Through the reality that one recognizes imaginatively, one can grasp and pass through.

3. Voluntaristic - volitional - cognition: We are no longer dealing with images. All image-knowledge belongs to the astral worlds, all volitional knowledge belongs to the mental world.

Beings that are perceived have the same substance as our human will. Volitional expressions.

4. Intuition: Will particularly developed sensitively. The will stirs. When the will becomes sentient, that is the highest kind of knowledge that man can have on the third plan. The highest plan is intuition; the stages lead up to the three worlds, where we have arrived at the limit of what

concerns man.

Intuition is the world of knowledge of the disciple who has attained the third degree.

The third degree, or swan, is the degree that connects the intercourse of ordinary people with the masters - Lohengrin.

Intuition enables a person to perceive objects within. We must learn to understand the meaning of the name “I”. Through meditation, the distinction of the I from other names becomes clear. Then you distinguish the basics of the royal yoga school.

There is an unspeakable difference between the “I” and other names. There is no thing that would have a name that anyone could attach to it, but there is a name that everyone knows, that only one can say to himself, the meaningful I. The “I” must resound from within the person, then the person enters the realm that is supersensible and the path by which he comes only from within. There, man first enters the realm that has no [gap in the transcript]

That is why, in Jewish secret doctrine, the unspeakable name [Yahweh], which means “I am,” is God, who announces himself in the innermost part of the soul, the first of intuition. If you now learn to recognize all things in the same way, if you also elicit the names of things as you do for yourself, if you crawl into things through self-abandonment, through the dissolution of the self, then you will learn all secrets, then every object will say its own ego, then all things will become eloquent. All illusions of one's own self will then have vanished. All things will then proclaim the words within them. [...]

What I am saying to you now is a symbolization of what has been said in all schools. I speak to you, you hear me through the fact that I am able to make the air vibrate in very specific forms, which are a true reflection of my words and sounds. Now you know that all things in the form of air can be liquefied. Now you think that if someone could solidify the air at the moment I utter something, then my words would fall like snow crystals. That is how man, who looked deeper, rightly imagined the world in the first place. Thus the world soul once spoke the primal words into an infinitely fine substance, into the Akasha matter. Everything here on earth is Akasha matter that has fallen down. The crystal is the condensed word of the Primordial Soul. Everything around us is the word of the Primordial Soul that has become rigid. When man ascends to intuitive knowledge, he hears the words that the Primordial Soul once spoke.

The four steps of knowledge lead to the mental plane. These four steps are taught in all Rosicrucian schools and form the content of the first seven degrees of initiation. Freemasonry also had these seven steps before it descended to the three St. John's degrees.

One comes to an understanding of the higher worlds through feeling and through calm, clear research. Trust is necessary and faith, evoked by intuitive feeling. Man is inclined towards truth and clarity; when the occultist tells him something, he finds that there is something right about it.

First of all, I will give a skeleton of the higher world and will proceed quite logically and elementarily. If you consider human development, you will become aware of the four-fold nature of man as he stands before you.

Firstly: the physical body has something in common with the mineral kingdom. When a person stands before us, they are a mixture of the physical and the higher bodies. The eye is a physical apparatus without sensation, but it is animated, endowed with sensation. Outside in the world, the realm of the inanimate is spread out, and man has taken possession of it.

1. The realm of the inanimate: physical body
2. The realm of the plant-like: etheric body
3. The realm of the animal-like: astral body I Manas Budhi [Atma]

Secondly: the etheric body: You can cut a piece of the mineral kingdom and lay it down, and it will be just the same after a year. It is different with plants: if you cut off a leaf, it will wither after a short time.

Thirdly: the astral body or the sentient body.

These three kingdoms of nature are also in man. Then there is the fourth link, the I. The I holds together the essence of the whole world in the human body. Schiller expressed it quite theosophically in what he describes as Goethe's view of nature: “You seek to know nature, but on a difficult path, by combining all three kingdoms to understand the human being.”

Here we have arrived at the point where man is today. We have what the forces of nature have made of him. The physical body is what the deities have made, it is the cleverest. The physical body is constructed wisely, the other bodies are still imperfect. The astral body commits follies against the heart, it intervenes in the wise construction in an unrhythmic and chaotic way.

The ego is the real baby, it is at the very beginning. Through these imperfections, man must first develop upwards. The European knows how to distinguish between 'good' and 'bad', 'true' and 'false'. As much as the ego has of impeccable truth, so much manas is in the ego. There is no need to vote on anything that is manasic. However much a person achieves, together with everyone else, he must recognize the truth for himself.

Becoming dispassionate. The more dispassionate feeling there is in a person, the more Budhi there is in him. As the I develops, it also becomes as rhythmic as the physical body. Two worlds.

The human being lives in three realms, but a new world is opening up for the human being, into which he must learn to live. Just as the baby “I” has risen above the animal kingdom, so it rises into higher realms. All religions have striven to lead the “I” upwards. As we ascend, we gain an overview.

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The old Christian secret doctrine calls the moon beings angels. The asuras are the origin of all kinds of selfishness, otherwise we would not have independence. Selfhood, but also selfishness. The gods of form are the constructive architectural ones. The spirits of form have worked on the physical body. Jehovah is the spirit of form. The moon gods have been particularly active in the etheric body, which is why Helena Petrovna Blavatsky calls Jehovah the moon god. The occultist approaches these beings and says that they did not develop out of nothing.

Supplement from the notes of Alfred Reebstein

The human being, the I, has taken possession of the other realms, formed an extract from them, which it now rules. The physical body is the most perfectly developed in its way; the higher limbs, etheric body and astral body, are much less developed in their way and the I only reach greater perfection in later stages.

The part of man that is completely flawless truth is called: Manas.

Budhi is what is completely independent of sensations and passions. The following are developing simultaneously with the human kingdom:

- Mineral kingdom
- Plant kingdom
- Animal kingdom
- Human kingdom – kingdom of the egos
- Angelic kingdom, lunar Pitris, moon beings, people of the moon
- Archangels, fire spirits, sun beings, people of the sun
- Archai, spirits of time, spirits of personality; Asuras, humans of Saturn
- Spirits of form, Exusiai
- Spirits of movement - activity - Dynamis
- Spirits of wisdom
- [Throne]
- Cherubim
- Seraphim

There are three terms we want to consider. We have to imagine that every spirit in the universe consists of three principles, as does the human being. We need not know the three principles for the other spirits, but they definitely exist:

1. conscious awareness
2. life
3. form.

When we consider the entities that exist on our Earth we find that all of them take their form from the mineral world, as we call it. There is no other form principle for the human being within the Earthly world. This form of the mineral world can only be taken to a higher level by giving it life. A life form can only gain a centre by life coming to conscious awareness. Form, life and conscious awareness are therefore the three principles which every entity has. The human being thus consists of body, soul and spirit. We know that the soul extends into the body, creating the soul body. This is filled, as it were, with sentient soul. The higher principle always integrates itself into the lower. The soul has conscious awareness because the spirit integrates itself into the spiritual (or consciousness) soul. Because of this, the human being has threefold nature—form, life and conscious awareness.

Bringing the different spirits in the world before the mind’s eye, we can divide them into three kinds by using this definition:

1. those where form predominates over the other two, life and awareness
2. awareness may prevail over life and form
3. all three may be in equilibrium.

For the present cycle we refer to

1. Spirits where awareness is predominant—‘dhyani’. They have a powerful conscious mind.
2. Spirits where conscious awareness, life and form are in equilibrium—called ‘substances’ in esoteric terms.
3. Spirits where form is prevalent—the ‘elementals’. ⁵⁵

For the ‘substances’, some connection exists between dhyani and elementals. Human beings were in the substance state when they emerged from the elemental spirit state and combined with the soul. They were merely models, or forms, at that time. Human beings were beautifully luminous orbs at that time, with their souls floating around them. They were ‘substance’ in the middle of the Lemurian age. Today they have gone beyond the level of being at mere ‘substance’ level. They are in the process of dhyanic evolution. In esoteric terms the principle which was ready to take possession of those bodies in Lemurian times is called 'human'.

We now ask: What are these three kinds of spirits able to do? Firstly let us consider the entities where conscious awareness predominates. Their conscious awareness is more all-encompassing than their own life and their own form. They are therefore able to have power over other life and other forms. In Christian esoteric terms such spirits are called angels of the orbital periods. What makes a planet able to orbit the Sun? The fact that it has an angel of orbital period which is able to make it move in orbit. These are the planetary dhyani or spirits. The Earth thus has its own angel of orbital period, its Earth dhyan. Let me remind you of the ‘Earth spirit’ in Goethe's Faust . Its body is the whole astral matter of the Earth.⁵⁶

The human being is in the process of becoming a planetary spirit. At present he is image of the godhead only in mineral terms, for he must still develop his astral, rupa-mental and arupa-mental nature. Then, at the end of the seventh round, he can become an angel of orbital period. The highest of the dhyan chohans will then say to him: ‘All animals and plants are given into your care.’ This will thus happen on the 7th day of creation. The human being will then be a dhyan chohan, a dhyanic cosmic spirit (chohan = cosmic spirit).

Secondly the spirits in whom form, life and conscious awareness are in equilibrium have power over form and are themselves guided by their conscious awareness. Spirits of this kind, which we know, are human beings who are at a certain level. They continue to develop and free themselves more and more of being under the control of their form, their lower nature. They seek to achieve something higher, which is awareness.

Thirdly, in the elemental spirits, form is mightier than life and conscious awareness, and their form thus needs to be controlled by conscious awareness and by life. They are the exact opposite of the dhyanic spirits. These can control more than just their form and life. In the elemental spirits form is more all-encompassing than life and conscious awareness. They therefore need a different life and a different conscious awareness to control their form. This means that elemental spirits have to lodge themselves in another kind of life and another kind of conscious awareness so that they may use it for themselves. They therefore retard the life and conscious awareness of others. The elementals are thus the spirits which hold evolution back. All parasitic life forms are governed by such elemental spirits. For us humans these life forms had already come to completion according to their kind in the lunar period, which is why form is predominant in them. They are now in decline, with their evolution in descent.

Animals with external skeletons, for example, have gone beyond evolution. Their inner development has dissolved, and they surround themselves with a horny layer on the outside (beetles, insects). They are preparing to subside into the eighth sphere. The ancient Moon also had an eighth sphere, a satellite Moon. Those life forms reached completion then, going beyond their evolution, and are now like overripe fruit. Spiders belong to the eighth sphere, for instance, and among plants, the mistletoe. Goethe therefore attributed the world of spiders and flies to Mephistopheles.⁵⁷ Anything parasitic is an outer reflection of elemental spirits living on the astral plane.

Before that the human being was also an elemental spirit. Not everything that is physical in him is destined to be redeemed. A cinder remains. This cinder, which remains there, is always present in the human being; because of it, the human being is under the influence of those astral elementals; the elemental nature which goes with it clings to him. Because of this, the human being is always connected with the principle which is inimical to his development, inhibiting and disrupting it. The spirits that cling to the human being are called 'Alben' in German mythology [elves, sprites, goblins, old English mære;—translator]. They appear vaguely in what are called 'nightmares', dreams where one thinks a spirit is sitting on one's chest. When you gain astral visions, you first of all see these spirits. (The 'dweller on the threshold' in Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni.)⁵⁸ It is a reflection of the human being’s astral knowledge of his mare, trying to fend off the enemy, a projection of an astral spirit in ourselves. It is the [lesser] guardian of the threshold. Someone unable to overcome his fear of the enemy within will usually turn back at the gate of initiation.

In the higher region of the astral plane, the [image of the] sphinx needs to be cast into the abyss before you are able to move ahead. The human being, who must develop, moves towards this moment. This is a developmental stage which people do not need to go through in the same way. It is possible for an individual to be guided through it with his eyes blindfold, as it were. If you are able to take moral nature to a higher level first, before you gain astral vision, the guardian of the threshold will appear less fearsome.

In the Atlantean race, it was above all the Turanians who gave themselves up to black magic and gained the greatest familiarity with the world of the elementals. Occult schools now put the main emphasis on practising the virtue of devotion, of selflessness and on moral development to equip people more effectively for the struggle. All occultists who continue to be ambitious, vain or self-seeking, get to know these retarding powers in evolution in a truly dreadful way, with these powers influencing them all the more strongly. We must love the teaching, be modest, humble and dedicated if we want to be sure of winning through. Evolution is retarded, held back by the elemental spirits, whereas it is accelerated by the dhyanic spirits.

• 55. See note 13. In the lecture given in Berlin on 27 October 1905 (Foundations of Esotericism, note 13), the terms ‘planets (states of consciousness), rounds or elemental worlds (life), globes (conditions of form)’ are equated with the Christian terms ‘power, kingdom and glory’.
• 56. Spirits of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd elemental worlds. See Note 6.
• 57. Goethe’s Faust I, ‘god of flies’, ‘lord of flies’.
• 58. Edward George Bulwer, Earl of Lytton (1803–1873). Zanoni; The Dweller of the Threshold, Book 4.

Dear Attendees!

As at my previous visits here in Munich, I would like to take the liberty of speaking on one of the two lecture days about a subject that does not strictly belong to the field of spiritual science, but rather touches on general German intellectual life. In these fateful times, this can be considered particularly appropriate.

And the day after tomorrow – on Sunday – I will return to a consideration from the narrower field of spiritual science, as I have been allowed to present it here for years, myself.

But it is not only because of my feelings in the face of the momentous and far-reaching events of our time that I would like to talk about today's topic, but because I may assume, not out of purely national feelings , but because I believe that I can assume, based on the facts, that the spiritual-scientific worldview represented here is intimately connected to very specific currents and aspirations of German intellectual life.

Not, dear ladies and gentlemen, to stoop to the level of Germany's opponents – the opponents of German national identity – who not only accuse but also defame what German intellectual life has produced, not to stoop to that level – I believe that is not necessary within German intellectual , but because I would like to make this observation, because our time requires a kind of self-reflection on the actual essence of the developing German national spirit, also with regard to the attainment of a spiritual world view, because self-reflection on this matter of German spiritual life must arise like a kind of basic need of the soul currently within this spiritual life.

When one engages in such reflection, one's spiritual gaze naturally falls first on the three great figures that I spoke of during my last visit here. And I would like to begin by saying a few words about these three great German thinkers and philosophers, about whom I was already able to speak here last time, even at the risk of having to say some things again that have already been said before, at the risk of having to say some things again that have already been said before, at the risk of having to say some things again that have already been said before.

First of all, our spiritual gaze must fall on that personality who had grown entirely out of German intellectual life and who, even in one of the most difficult times in German life, found tones that were suited to carry the whole nation along in a world-historically necessary enthusiasm: our spiritual gaze must fall on Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Fichte – I believe one must say of him: on closer, more thorough examination of his work, it becomes apparent how deeply true it is that he expressed what he felt to be his own sentiments in the most diverse forms. The best that he has to say in his world view was born in his soul from an intimate conversation that he repeatedly had with the German national spirit itself.

I do not want to present this as an external judgment, but rather as something that Fichte himself felt in his deepest innermost being. And what exactly is this innermost path of Fichte's striving? I think it can be described as a well-founded conviction: to so power the innermost part of the human soul, the center of the human spirit-soul-being, to so inwardly enliven it that in this heightened experience of the innermost soul life, that which interweaves and lives through the world as divine-spiritual resonates, that one enters into the innermost being of this conviction by , so that what one can go through inwardly in one's own soul - not in everyday life, but in moments of celebration in life - grows together with the spiritual-divine currents themselves, but now not only in our inner being, but also in the whole of nature and in all spiritual, outer spiritual life, which pulsates through the whole world.

Now, in Fichte it is as if something is revealed from a particular side of the soul that has taken root in him, from a soul power that was particularly strongly developed in him, from that soul power that can perhaps be described as follows: Of the three powers of the human soul – thinking, feeling and willing – he felt the willing above all. And he himself felt the I in such a way that the most essential thing in the experience of the I is that the human being can indeed come to say to himself: the I actually consists in the fact that one can will, and always will anew; and that one's eternity is guaranteed by feeling within oneself the authorization to will it again and again; and that into this volition there penetrates what one feels in the very deepest sense as a commitment to life and the world; that in this commitment to life and the world one can at the same time feel something that strikes from the divine-spiritual expanses into one's own being. So that one can say: the highest that one can experience is the duty that reveals itself to one's own soul in the whole of the world, that strikes into one's own being and gives one the certainty that, because one has interwoven into what goes through the world as a duty-bearing will, as an eternally duty-bearing will, one oneself stands in this world as an eternal being.

From such an experience, from the experience of such a relationship to the world, Fichte's entire - one cannot even say “worldview”, but entire - way of thinking and feeling and speaking about the world emerged.

But it did not follow from his nature that one could speak of a theory, of a theoretical side, about the world. It followed from his nature - and he always felt that to be the German thing about his way of thinking about the world - it followed from his nature that what was like a general sense of the world, a general view of the world, was the most direct, personal power of his nature. And so it was the most immediate force of his being that it basically emerged when Fichte was very young, a boy.

And so allow me to describe a few traits that characterize this personal relationship to the world: There we see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the son of poor people, at the age of seven – he was already a schoolboy – there we see him one day standing by the stream that flowed past his father's small weaver's cottage, and he has thrown a book into the stream. He stands there crying; his father comes to him.

What had actually happened? As I said, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was already a schoolboy at the age of seven; and since he had often been praised for his good learning, it was now clear to see how, since his father had given him the book that he had now thrown into the stream, he was no longer as attentive and diligent at school as he had been before; this had often been criticized of him. This book was a description of the deeds of “Horned Siegfried.” And when young Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who could already read, got hold of this book, he became absorbed in these great exploits; his attention to school subjects waned, and he was reprimanded for it.

But then the deepest trait of his character immediately showed itself in his soul.

However your inclination may speak, however your enthusiasm may be kindled by the figure of “Horned Siegfried” – he thought to himself – that must not be; duty is the highest. Because he does not want to diminish duty in any way, he throws the book into the water – as a seven-year-old boy! Thus, what later became the keynote of his relationship to the wider world was already alive in the boy: this permeation of the human soul with the will borne by duty, which he later felt to be the fundamental force of the whole universe.

And two years later, the nine-year-old boy Fichte, we see him in the following example: the neighbor of the estate – who later became Fichte's benefactor – had set out to hear the sermon in Fichte's hometown on a Sunday; but this neighbor from the neighborhood had arrived too late. The sermon was already over. The neighboring landowner was a little sad; he would have liked to hear the sermon. And while they were talking, they came up with the idea that there was a boy who knew how to listen to sermons in such a way, even though he was only nine years old, that he was able to repeat them quite faithfully. They fetched young Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who appeared in his blue peasant's smock, at first rather awkwardly, then warming up, repeating the whole sermon, not repeating it in such a way that he rattled it off without inner participation, but in such a way that one saw – and this had the effect, as I said, so deeply significant that the estate neighbor later became the benefactor of Johann Gottlieb Fichte – so that one saw: this entire boy's soul was interwoven with every word, and with what lived in each word, and could give the whole sermon anew, as one's own spiritual property!

Interweaving this, the environment, the why, the observation with the innermost of one's own experience in the soul, that is the characteristic that Johann Gottlieb Fichte always felt was the basic feature of the formation of a specifically German world view. This was very much alive in him, that only by strengthening this inner self, by experiencing what sits in the deepest soul, can one also experience what lives and weaves through the world as divine-spiritual.

Something like this lived, for example, in a basic trait that the profound Steffens tells us about, which he himself experienced in Jena when Fichte was already a “professor”. There Johann Gottlieb Fichte stood before his audience and said: First of all, gentlemen of the audience, think of the wall! He did not just want to speak to the audience in such a way that he communicated a content to them, but he wanted to create a living bond between his soul and the soul of the audience. They were to participate in a spiritual process that he allowed to take place directly: Think of the wall! Well, the people could do that. After he had let them think of the wall for a while, he said: So, now think of the one who thought the wall! That was more perplexing; they were no longer fully engaged in the activity he was asking of them. But he immediately pointed to this inwardly grasping and seizing of that which works and lives in the world.

Therefore, the whole way in which Johann Gottlieb Fichte presented was very special. People who heard him say how his speech flowed like rolling thunder, and how the individual words discharged like lightning strikes. Yes, we are told how he seemed like a person who not only inhabits the transcendental realm of ideas, but directly rules in it. And this is a word coined by his loyal listeners.

And indeed, they too have retained such a saying. If you have an ear for tracing history in its more intimate currents, you can follow what became of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's students and how they retained such a saying. People who understood him said: He does not just want to educate good souls, he wants to educate great souls!

This should give a rough idea of the depth of Fichte's work; for when he stood before his audience, he was not really concerned with saying this or that, he was not just concerned that his listeners should take up this or that of his words; he did not prepare himself at all for the individual wording, but he tried to live that which he wanted to bring home to his listeners - to live in it with a living, inner part of the soul. Then he would go before his audience. And, as already mentioned, it was not important to him that they should take up these or those words, but what he experienced in saying them was most important to him: to express the Will of the World, so that the Will of the World would live on in his words. That this should surge and surge to the souls of his listeners, that was what he wanted, this will that felt so alive in him in what underlies the world according to his view.

That is why he was able to find those stirring words to characterize German national character, which he found in his “Discourses to the German Nation.” No one understands their deeper meaning, which is Fichte's soul, and is unable to respond to the deep needs from which they arose. We may say: That which the German spirit had to say to the world was realized through Fichte's personality in terms of the will.

If we consider the second figure — the figure of someone who follows on from Fichte, Schelling — we see a completely different side of the German nature. When Fichte speaks, it is as if the element of will itself were rolling through his words. Schelling did not appear to his listeners that way. Even as a very young professor in Jena, still a youth among youths, Schelling spoke enchantingly, in a way that perhaps no one before or since has achieved through a directly academic speech.

Why does Schelling have this effect? With Fichte, we can say that what he said to the world lived in the will. With Schelling, everything lives from the mind, from that mind for which only the German language has a word, from that mind that wants to convince with love, even when it recognizes that it wants to submerge with love in the things to be achieved. Thus, for Schelling, what it means to be in nature flows together, and he wants to immerse himself in this with love so that all of nature becomes like the outer countenance of his hidden spiritual life, spirit in nature. He went so far that he could utter the one-sided saying, Schelling: “To know nature is to create nature.” Certainly a one-sided, in this one-sidedness quite untrue word; but it points us precisely to the essential thing with him, Schelling, to this creating and weaving of the spirit, which lives behind nature, and in which the human spirit wants to grasp itself in order to know itself as one with all natural and with all spiritual existence.

Because he worked in this way, he appeared to his listeners as a seer, so that while he spoke, Schelling was able to convey the spirituality of which he spoke and which surrounded him. While Fichte conveys the will, with Schelling it is as if he had spoken as a seer and directly said what he saw while saying it.

One learns such things most easily – I would say – from direct, traditional observation. Therefore, allow me to describe the impression that a truly deep mind, who was Schelling's friend and first listener – Schubert – had of him; because it is good to put oneself directly into what happened in a certain period of German intellectual development.

“What was it”

as Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert asks.

“that attracted young men like mature men from far and near to Schelling's lectures? Was it only the personality of the man or the peculiar charm of his oral presentation, in which this attractive power lay?”

It was not only that.

“There was in his lively words”

indeed

"an absorbing power, which no young soul, wherever it met with any receptivity, could resist. It might be difficult for a reader of our time

Schubert writes down in 1854 what he had experienced with Schelling in the 1890s

"who was not, like me, a young and enthusiastic listener, to make it understandable how it often felt to me when Schelling spoke to us, as if I were reading or hearing Dante, the seer of a world beyond that was only open to the consecrated eye. The powerful content of his words, as if measured with mathematical precision in lapidary style, seemed to me like a bound Prometheus, whose bonds to be loosened and from whose hand the unquenchable fire to be received, is the task of the understanding mind."

All of this must have been magical. I myself knew people who got to know Schelling when he was already an old man [...] because he expressed what he, as a shearer of the spiritual worlds, brought to his listeners in such a way that, as people who saw and knew him in those days say, he not only spoke to them, but his words, as he wanted to communicate them, flooded out of his eyes to them. That was still the case in old age; what must he have been like as a youth!” Schubert then says:

"But it was neither the personality nor the invigorating power of the oral communication alone that so soon after their public announcement by writing, evoked such interest and excitement for or against the direction of Schelling's philosophy, as no other literary phenomenon of a similar kind has been able to do for a long time before or since. ... In matters of sense-perceptible things or natural phenomena, one will immediately recognize whether a teacher or writer speaks from his own insight and experience"

from the spiritual world

“speaks or merely speaks of what he has heard from others, or even has thought up according to his own self-made ideas...”

Now, dear audience, it is probably fair to say today that it would be a childish view of the world to believe that by describing such spirits, one is demanding to speak to followers or opponents. In such matters, allegiance and antagonism are not important. One need not subscribe to a single word that Fichte or Schelling have written or spoken, nor need one be their opponent for not subscribing to a single word. The content is less important in this regard. The content of worldviews is in a state of dynamic development.

We will have much to discuss the day after tomorrow, especially about the living development of these worldviews and what the content has to do with it. It is not about defending this or that position that Fichte or Schelling took, but rather about looking at the lives of the personalities – at how they were situated within the whole of German intellectual life.

It is something tremendously significant when such minds try to recognize what nature is and what historical life is, so that they - as Fichte himself was well aware - grasp what is around them in a living way, submerging themselves in the things with their own knowledge. And that was what these minds strove for.

But because of this – and one really does not need to speak out of narrow-minded national sentiment, but one can speak entirely from the factual; as I said – we do not need to fall into the tone in which our enemies today fall! In this, as Fichte also emphasized, life in the German world view shows itself to be different from, say, the Western European, French or British world view.

Last time I pointed out what an enormous difference there is between this kind of Fichte and Schelling and - however much one may fight against them in terms of content - [what an enormous difference there is] between this kind of Fichte and Schelling, between penetrating into the foundations of things, where the whole outer world lives and gains life in knowledge itself, to what Fichte calls the dead world view, the world view of the inanimate among Western European minds [; where the world] of the inanimate begins, we say, within French folklore at the beginning of the seventeenth century with Descartes or Cartesius. But then it develops further, and we find it particularly pronounced, shortly before Fichte and Schelling, as has been described, appeared before their German nation, we find this world view of the dead, of the merely material and mechanical, over in France; we find it expressed, for example, in de La Mettrie.

This world view, as it can be found in de La Mettrie, for example – in this father of materialism, of modern materialism – is not to be fought against; it is only to be pointed out how precisely the French nation, in contrast to the German nation, is moving towards the dead and the mechanical. We see this already in Descartes, in Cartesius, in that for him not only minerals, plants, but also animals are merely moving machines. For de La Mettrie, the world finally becomes what he was able to put down in his book: “Man a Machine”.

Now, of course, dear audience, it is easy to find materialistic and spiritualistic elements in every culture and so on. But I am aware that I am not following this convenient mode of expression, but that I am highlighting precisely the characteristic that is related to the culture, and that for the German culture, Fichte and Schell ing in their striving - even if perhaps not in their thinking, as we shall see shortly - are as characteristic and as significant for German folklore as de La Mettrie - this could be proved in detail - for French folklore.

Everything is explained in such a way – and this is justified because it is self-evident – that one can see how man is dependent on what also works in him materially.

De La Mettrie comes to some strange assertions when he wants to prove how everything that exists depends on what is taken in through eating. Perhaps it is not entirely unnecessary to draw attention to a passage in de La Mettrie's book, “Man a Machine”, and to point out this passage in the Frenchman's book precisely in our present time. Of course, we do not need to endorse this passage in the way it is quoted here. We do not want to think such terrible things of a nation that is now at war with us, as the Frenchman de La Mettrie thought at the time. But it is perhaps interesting to quote what he says in order to prove how an entire nation, by eating in a certain way, acquires very specific mental and spiritual qualities, and thus wants to deduce the dependence of the soul and spirit of an entire nation on what is taken in materially through eating and drinking. So de La Mettrie says in the book 'Man a Machine':

"Raw flesh makes animals wild; men would become wild if they had the same food. How true this is can be seen from the fact that the English nation, which cooks meat less than we do and eats it quite raw and bloody, shows greater wildness, which is partly brought about by such food and partly, of course, by other causes, which only education can suppress. This wildness produces pride, hatred, contempt for other nations, stubbornness and other feelings in the soul that corrupt the character, just as coarse food produces a heavy and clumsy mind in a people whose main characteristics are laziness and dullness."

As I said, we do not need to subscribe to this harsh judgment of a Frenchman about the English; but it is perhaps interesting to recall it, especially in our time, when so much else is heard today, moving in other directions from this side, towards today's English allies.

The third person, who is very much honored by being present, and to whom attention must be drawn, because the third side of the German character speaks through him – and of the soul's character in general – is Hegel.

Of course, when people speak of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel today, the first thing that comes to mind is: Yes, but you really can't expect people to deal with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel! And most of them will indeed open a book and then close it again because they find it too difficult.

But, dear attendees, anyone who is familiar with the more intimate sides of intellectual life will not entirely disagree with me when I say that the time will come when these three minds will be so grasped in their striving that they can be vividly presented in modern times, so that what is essential – which, of course, had to first be expressed by them in a language that is difficult to understand – can be understood by everyone. And this treasure, which lies in these three minds, will once again bear fruit for every German child, if we are no longer too casual and too lazy to delve into the greatest treasures of the mind.

The third, as I said, is Hegel. If in Fichte it is the will that seeks that which weaves and breathes through the whole world; [if] in Schelling it was the mind, in that love is sought, which can recognize all exteriority in its liveliness – so in the present case it is the conviction that man, when he ascends to the thought that is not permeated by sensuality, when he ascends to the thought that is free of sensuality, and allows this sensuality-free thought to grow and live within him, that this thought, which the soul now experiences within itself, is a flowing in the soul, in which the divine-spiritual thoughts, from which the universe itself is created, work and weave. The soul is permeated by the Divine Being, and the soul thinks free of all sensuality.

The content may be wrong – and you can read more about this in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” – but something significant underlies it, and this in turn resonates with the most intimate trait of German spiritual life: mysticism as a striving, but not mysticism, which attempts to solve the riddles of the world in the dark and confused, which wants to reject all ambiguity, as mysticism so often wants, namely amateurish mysticism, confused mysticism, which we will talk about the day after tomorrow. Hegel's striving is mystical, namely to unite the soul with the very weaving of the world. But the goal is to achieve this mystical experience not in a dark emotional chaos or in a dark inner visionary chaos; but in the full clarity of the world of ideas, in the clarity of the world of ideas of the spirit of all things.

And this mystical connection in clarity is one of the deepest traits of the German character. One almost recoils from finding such a connection to the German character as a German and from emphasizing its significance for the German character. Therefore, let me present to you another characteristic of the German character, esteemed attendees. In 1877, someone noted in his “Diary”:

"Perhaps only the Germanic mind has the need to think for itself, to search for the source of things. The Slavs and Romans are more strongly under the rule of convention, tradition, custom, prejudice, fashion; and when they break through them, it is as a result of revolt and rebellion, without therefore recognizing from within themselves the law immanent in things, their true standard, not the written, arbitrary one that has been read into them. The German wants to get back to nature; the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Russian stop at convention."

So that I cannot be accused of characterizing from a one-sided national sentiment, I bring you this characterization, written from a soul torn by pain, and which – dear lady – was not written by a German, but by the French Swiss Amiel, in 1877! I think it behoves us to be more forgiving of the others, who perhaps have more justification from their feelings and from their observations to express themselves about the relationship of the German spirit to the other national spirits of Europe. And the same Amiel wrote in his “Diary” in Geneva in 1875:

“Thirst for truth is not a French passion. Appearance is more important than essence, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, gloss more than fertility, public opinion more than conscience.”

This is how the French Swiss write; as I said, as a German I would not say it directly.

“Appearance is more important than essence, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, the shiny more than the fertile, public opinion more than conscience.” This means that the Frenchman's center of gravity is not within himself, but in the others, in the great multitude. Individuals are zeros; the digit that forms them into a number comes from outside: That is the sovereign, the writer of the day, the most-read newspaper, in a word, the current master of fashion. All this can be deduced from an exaggerated sociability; it stifles in the soul the courage to resist, the ability to judge, personal conviction, the cult of the ideal."

Thus the Frenchman Amiel, a Frenchman who was familiar with German intellectual life, about what he had noticed. Amiel himself says, as early as 1862:

"I feel a common bond with a Goethe, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Leibniz, who are different enough among themselves, while the French philosophers, orators or mathematicians leave me cold despite their great qualities, because they do not carry the sum of general life within them, do not control the whole of reality, gag me or make me suspicious. What the French lack is direct knowledge of the living unity, a sense of the sacred, a feeling for the mysteries of being; what is theirs is the foundation of specialized sciences, the art of making a book, it is style, politeness, grace, a spirit of order, didactic art, discipline, elegance, truth in the details, staging, proselytizing zeal, strength in practical conclusions. But for the journey through Inferno and Paradise, other guides are needed; they are rooted to the earth, in the realm of the finite, changing, historical, and limited. Mechanism and dualism are the pinnacles of their intellectual flight. To break out of this circle, they must force themselves."

The same approach could be taken for other Western European cultures. But it is more important to take a look at these three minds that created a German worldview, which forms the backdrop to what German intellectual life produced in Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Herder and the others associated with them, as a flowering of intellectual human experience that can only be compared to the flowering that existed in ancient Greece. But when we consider Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in particular, when we look at them in this context, we have a special feeling; we can almost believe that something else is speaking, something higher that lives in all three of them than is expressed in each individual personality. One picture expresses more than one speaks when this feeling is expressed: the German national spirit speaks through these three personalities. And that is perhaps the solution to a riddle that must emerge when we consider the German intellectual life that follows on from these three personalities, albeit in a much more faded and forgotten form, which I will now try to sketch in a few characteristic strokes.

We are witnessing something very special. Within a more or less forgotten current of German intellectual life, which has been forgotten throughout the entire nineteenth century and into our own days – only this forgotten tone has been little studied so far – there are spirits who, in terms of their intellectual makeup, in terms of the extent of what they know and can do, in terms of the their genius, are far below the tone-setters Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, but who, curiously enough, when one looks at what must be striven for today through spiritual science, have created more of spiritual science or have created more that corresponds to it than the great inspirers: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel.

The lesser minds that come afterwards create more significant things than the great minds that preceded them. It is a striking phenomenon. It does not need to be a cause for great surprise, because it is self-evident that it is easier for those who follow; as lesser minds, they can achieve greater things than those who preceded them under certain circumstances. In the extreme, this can indeed express itself in the fact that every schoolboy can understand and grasp the Pythagorean theorem - and for its first formulation Pythagoras himself was necessary.

Thus the great men had to come; the clever ones are already there, pointing the way into the spiritual world. But that which has come out of the German folk spirit through them lives on now. Even if it is still emotionally restricted and spiritually surrounded – one can also speak of spiritual encirclement – it still forms the vanished, the faded tone in the world view that I would like to talk about now.

Here we find, dear ladies and gentlemen, the son of the great Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Immanuel Hermann Fichte, who was influenced by his father's ideas. But we also find that he is able to penetrate deeper into the knowledge of the spirit than his father, despite being a much lesser spirit than his father. Immanuel Hermann Fichte already speaks of the fact that man, on the one hand, has this physical world. He, Hermann Immanuel Fichte, calls physical the substances and forces that the outer physical world also contains. Through this physical world, man is connected with the physical substances and forces of the earth world, he is connected with what appears to him as something past. But behind this physical body, for Immanuel Hermann Fichte lies what he calls the etheric body; and just as the physical body contains within itself the substances and forces, so the etheric body contains substances and forces of a supersensible nature, which link this inner man, this supersensible spiritual man, to the great world of the spirit and place him in it.

Thus, Immanuel Hermann Fichte sees behind the other person the etheric human being, who is a reality for him, not just an image. And everything that spiritual science has to say about the etheric body, about these supersensible powers of human nature, in the sense often hinted at here in these lectures, can be found very beautifully in Immanuel Hermann Fichte.

But, one might say: Even with regard to the path that has been characterized here more often, an infinite amount already lives in the germ of another, who is to succeed in the world view of the great period of German idealism: For example, we see Troxler. Who knows Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler today? Who reads Troxler? Who, even among those who write the history of philosophy, takes more of an interest in Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler than to scribble five or six lines that say nothing about Troxler! Who is Troxler?

Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler is indeed a mind that – even if he has not yet fully mastered the spiritual science, for which it is only now at the right time – but Troxler is a personality who is on the path to this spiritual scientific research. We see then how Troxler coins strange words that show that something lives in his soul of the living spirit of spiritual science itself. Troxler coins strange words such as “supersensory spirit” and “supersensory mind”.

“Supersensory spirit” is relatively easy to understand; now, “supersensory spirit” is precisely what Goethe calls “contemplative judgment”. For – Goethe, in his real world view, is on exactly the same ground – because “supersensible spirit” is precisely that power of the human soul which unfolds in such a way that, without the help of the body, without external senses and without the sense bound to the brain, the human being directly “looks” into the spiritual environment, just as the spirit itself does – “supersensible spirit”.

But “super-spiritual sense”? By speaking of the “super-spiritual sense”, Troxler shows that he really has an understanding of the essence of spiritual science. I have mentioned it often, as there are people, idealistic philosophers, who say: Yes, of course, that is quite clear: the physical world is not the only one; spirit is present behind the physical world. Spirit, spirit and always spirit — they say. And that's where that pantheism comes out, that worldview that, doesn't it, spreads such a general spirit sauce – it doesn't specialize in that, it's nothing; maybe today you would have to say “dipping sauce” instead of “sauce” – [that worldview that] thinks it has spread such a general dipping sauce over everything that appears before people as physical objects and physical facts, doesn't it.

But that was not the case with Troxler! Troxler would have said: Those who speak only in a pantheistic way of spirit, spirit and spirit again, they seem to me to be saying: Why should we speak of tulips or lilies, of snowdrops, for example? Nature, nature is everything! And why should we speak of individual experiments in the laboratory? Nature, nature is everything. Those who speak of naturalism in this way should just / gap in the transcript /

But what matters is not just to talk in generalities about the spiritual, but to be able to point out that we are surrounded by a spiritual world that consists of individual entities and individual facts just as much as the physical world does.

That is why Troxler, because he knows this, speaks of the “super-spiritual sense” - which is of course a figure of speech, but which testifies that one can really look into, is able to look into the spiritual world and observe it in its details - not just as a “general spirit dip”.

And in yet another way, Troxler – in his “Lectures on Philosophy” in 1835, he speaks very beautifully about all these things – in yet another way, Troxler speaks of a kind of spiritual-scientific path that he has already taken. He says: The most beautiful powers of the soul that rule man here, insofar as he lives in his physical body, that man can make his own, insofar as the soul expresses itself through the physical body, these powers are those of faith, love, hope. But now – Troxler says: faith, love, hope, as great and significant as they are for the life that the soul spends in the physical body, they are – this faith, this love, this hope – the outer shell for the soul's spiritual powers that lie behind them and that this soul will experience when it has discarded the body and passed through the gate of death.

While the soul lives in the body, it lives out – through the bodily organs, of course through the finer bodily organs – the power of faith. [But, says Troxler, this power can be experienced not only as the power of faith, but also – as Troxler believes – as spiritual hearing, as spirit-hearing, in such a way that the power of faith becomes the outer, physical shell for a spirit-hearing of the soul; this organ would allow itself to be experienced free of the body – a wonderful, great thought.]

And love, this bloom of outer physical life on earth, this highest development of outer physical life on earth, insofar as the soul lives in the physical body in earthly life: For Troxler, this love, this love-power, one could say, is the outer shell again for something that the soul has within, that envelops this physical body. And what Troxler now addresses as a spiritual sense, a spiritual feeling - as one today senses physical things with the physical - lies behind the power of love. When the soul is able to free itself from the body or passes through the gate of death, then its spiritual organs unfold. And as it hears through that which lies behind the power of faith, what resounds as facts in the spiritual world, so it is able to feel the spiritual facts and entities through its [“groping”] spiritual organs, which the soul extends out of itself. While when it lives in the physical body, the spiritual feeling powers, touching powers bring themselves as love to revelation.

And in a similar way, behind the power of hope, in the power of an expectant confidence in something, lies for Troxler, spiritually, what he calls “spiritual vision”.

Thus, Troxler knows that a soul dwells in the physical body of man, endowed with spirit-hearing, spirit-touching, spirit-seeing, and that this soul passes through the portal of death with these three powers, but that it is also able to experience, when it frees itself from its ties to the body, that which spiritually surrounds and envelops us.

And, for example, Troxler expresses how he thinks – and I would like to share this with you in his own words – and at the same time points out that he has certain comrades in relation to such a way of looking at the world. He points to these or those spirits. I would like to read one of these passages to you verbatim. He says:

"The philosophers of old distinguished a fine, noble soul from the coarser body (or in this they assumed a kind of shell for the spirit), a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and that was the inner, higher man for them. This view, even if it is only an explanation, was also held by most of the first great church fathers, such as Origen, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Tertullian, and Augustine. In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire, inward, spiritual man who wears all the limbs of the outward man on his spirit body. Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about the Bonnese under-skirt and the Platner-esque soul-corset, which are said to be hidden in the coarser body rock and martyr's robe, we still hear him asking, “What is the use and origin of these extraordinary talents and desires within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthy shell? [Why was I stuck to this dirty lump of earth, a creature with useless wings of light, when I should rot back into the birth clod without ever wriggling free with ethereal wings? “The inner man,“ he says in another place, ‘this ’veiled God in nature,' is not himself of stone, like the latter.] In the stony limbs” — of man — “his living limbs grow and mature according to a way of life unknown to us. We could

”still cite a myriad similar ways of thinking and writing, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which [the one Evangelical-Apostolic idea is revealed,

"we could cite a myriad more similar ways of thinking and writing, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which [the one Evangelical-Apostolic idea is revealed that Paul expressed to the Corinthians , saying: “A body that the soul has quickened is laid down, and a body that the spirit has quickened rises, for there is a body that has been quickened by the soul, there is also a body that has been spiritualized. And in this is] the true, only teaching of the individuality and immortality of man.”

And now a remarkable – I would even say a decisive – thought arises for Troxler. He thinks something like the following. It is quite clear when you let his various writings sink in, especially his lectures on those subjects, which he had already written and delivered in 1835. The following thought is on Troxler's mind: There is an anthropology, a knowledge of man, he says. How does it arise – a knowledge of man? Man comes to know it by observing what can be observed of man with the senses and with the intellect, which is connected to the brain – that is how anthropology comes about. But this man who sees with the senses and observes through the intellect – in this man the higher man lives. And we have seen how clearly Troxler can express himself about this higher man. This higher human being, with his “supersensible sense” and with his “supersensible spirit”, can now also observe that which is supersensible and superspiritual in the other human being. In this way, just as anthropology arises in a lower realm, a higher science arises: the science of the spiritual human being - anthroposophy. And Troxler expresses himself about this in the following way:

"While it is highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which [we have long since recognized as the one that founds all living religion and] must reveal itself in every anthroposophy, thus in poetry as well as in history, is now making headway, it cannot be be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true personality or individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts with as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

Troxler speaks of a foundation of an “anthroposophy” in contrast to “anthropology”!

And so one has the right to speak of the germs of that which must now be incorporated from the universe into the spiritual development of humanity as spiritual science. One has the right to speak of it in such a way that it is present as a germ in these personalities. These germs, however, ladies and gentlemen, are firmly anchored in German intellectual life, in keeping with its nature. I can only hint at how firmly these things are rooted in German intellectual life. And how German intellectual life, through its innermost development, cannot but produce them. Everywhere we look back, we find that this is firmly rooted in German intellectual life, and we can only hope that it can incorporate itself as a spiritual science into the future development of humanity.

Such a tone has been forgotten many times; it has faded away. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, it still exists! And it was able to live in the most diverse fields. Not only does it live, so to speak, in the spiritual heights, but wherever there was spiritual striving, there were also such endeavors as these. And the time will come when people will gain a new understanding of the deepest essence of German striving, and that this must be brought up again.

Much has covered up precisely this innermost part of the German being! This can be seen when one tries to seek out the German essence in very specific, particular, concrete areas. For thirty-three years, esteemed attendees, I have endeavored – forgive me for making this personal – for thirty-three years I have endeavored to show the significance of Goethe's Theory of Colors for a true knowledge of nature that penetrates to the essence of things, and the significance of Goethe's dispute with Newton, who is rooted in British nationalism!

But, as I said, it is not only external political life that has been encircled; the deeply, deeply influential, brutal foreign scientific attitude has come to such a pass that it is still a laughing-stock for the physicist to speak of the justification of Goethe's theory of colors! But the time will come when, in this field, there will be a deeper understanding and the chapter “Goethe vindicated against Newton” will be revived, precisely on the basis of the spirituality of the most Germanic nature; and it will be revived in a completely different way than one might have dared to dream of today.

One must then be able to bear the fact that one is regarded as a fool for representing in advance what must come, what must be recognized, when one is fully aware of it. But, as I said, this striving lives not only on the spiritual heights, but also in many ways in the German character. I could cite hundreds and hundreds of cases for this; one for many shall be cited, because we do not have time to cite many. One for many shall be cited: I would like to point to a small booklet published in 1856 by a simple pastor Rocholl in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck - a small booklet. It was published in 1856 and is called “Contributions to the History of a German Theosophy”. Today, one may find much of what is written in this little book fantastic; one may even be right in much of what is said when calling the little book fantastic. But this little book, published in 1856, shows Pastor Rocholl in an awakened, true spiritual striving that at least wants to penetrate world phenomena with a “supernatural sense,” with a “supernatural spirit.” And in wide-ranging spiritual views, an attempt is made to characterize how natural life and spiritual life, sensual life, are one, and how divine spiritual forces weave and work, and how man has the possibility to ascend to them.

The level of education and the depth of knowledge are the things that come to light in such phenomena, which, as I said, can easily be ridiculed. But we also encounter this in other areas and with other personalities. Here, I would like to draw your attention, most esteemed attendees, to a spirit who, unfortunately, is all too forgotten: Christian Karl Planck.

After the Swabian Vischer – the V-Vischer – referred to him in an essay, I tried again in more recent times, as early as the first edition of my “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century), to draw attention to this primordially German world-view personality, Christian Karl Planck. But what use is that today? People generally have other things to do than to look into the German character, or the most German character.

I can only give a brief description here of what Planck's German nature was. And in his case it was certainly grasped out of his German nature, what he presented. We will see in a moment how conscious he was of the basis of his world view. I will illustrate this with an example.

When people today look at the earth as natural scientists, they see it, let us say, as a geologist would see it. The earth is seen as it is built up from mineral forces, as known from geology. For Planck, such a view of the earth would not have been considered without higher world-view questions. For him, it would have been like looking at a tree and only wanting to accept the wood and bark, but not the leaves, flowers and fruits! It is clear to him that the leaves, flowers and fruits are part of what makes up the essence of the tree, and that anyone who only looks at the wood, bark and roots is not looking at the full tree. To Karl Christian Planck, this seemed to be an earthly consideration that is only held in the sense of geology.

For Planck, the full earthly consideration is not only an ensouled, but also a spiritual-soul being. And man, as he walks on earth as a physical human being, belongs to the earth, to the essence of the earth, which one has to seek if one wants to learn to recognize the earth, just as one has to see the essence of the fruits and the flowers and leaves together with the essence of the tree if one wants to recognize the tree in its essence; a worldview - I would like to say - genuinely spiritual and genuinely interwoven with life.

Christian Karl Planck wrote many books in an effort to gain recognition; he did not succeed! For example, in 1864 he wrote a book, his “Fundamentals of a Science of Nature”. And from this book I will read a passage to prove how much this Christian Karl Planck belongs to that forgotten, faded tone of German intellectual life - the German intellectual development that was conscious for some of the personalities who worked for him, as the work is from the primal power of German nationality. There Planck says in 1864:

“The power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

the author's

"Schrift entgegensteht, dessen ist er sich vollkommen bewusst; allein wie schon die Arbeit selbst, trotz aller Ungunst der Umstände, die zufolge der ganzen Lage und Berufsstellung des Verfassers einem Werke dieser Art sich entgegenstellte, doch ihren Durchführung und ihren Weg in die Öffentlichkeit sich erkauft hat, so ist er auch gewiss, that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.

People who have different ways of thinking first see it as pure folly – then it becomes a matter of course. This is how it was with the Copernican worldview; this is how it was with everything that belongs to the development of mankind's worldview. And Planck says words that prove how he consciously penetrated from the German spirit to his spirit-based worldview. And he continues:

"What our medieval poetry has already unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation in the maturity of the times. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit (as Wolfram describes it in his Parzival), which has been visited with harm and ridicule,

1864, written before Wagner's Parsifal!

“Finally, in the strength of her unceasing striving, she attains the highest; she looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the rule of which her hero attains, that, conversely, receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the lasting knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

Karl Christian Planck wrote this in 1864; he died in 1880. In the last years of his life he had written his Testament of a German, in which he summarized all the individual lines of his world-view. In 1912 the second edition of this Testament appeared; it did not attract much attention and was not much studied. One had other works to deal with, which had appeared in the same publishing house at the time! For example, one had to deal with a world view that is truly not one that has somehow emerged from the German character or is even related to it! You can read more about this in my book, “Riddles of Philosophy.” However, the passage in question was not written under the influence of the war; it was written long before the war. In 1912, people were too busy dealing with Henri Bergson – yes, he is still called Bergson today, Henri Bergson he is still called – to deal with this Henri Bergson, who, as I mentioned last time, tells his Parisians all kinds of slanderous things in prominent places of his intellectual work! Next time he will also do it in Sweden.

When you look at this Bergson: Let us highlight just one aspect of his philosophy, one aspect that does resonate with something that is truly being recognized today: the aspect where he says – I could of course highlight many other things, among other things – the beautiful sentence that has been so admired throughout Europe: that one can only recognize the soul if one comprehends it in its duration and in particular if one understands the sentence in relation to the essence of the soul “Duration endures”. I have had to read an awful lot about this infinitely ingenious sentence by Henri Bergson: “Duration lasts”. I have never been able to find it any differently than when one says “The wood is wooding” or “The money is moneying”. But let's ignore that.

A fruitful world view would only be achieved if one did not start in an abstract way, as some do, who actually start with the most imperfect beings and go up to the most perfect, and believe that they have a perfect derivation, but if one starts from the most perfect, from man, and places man at the origin, and then considers the other kingdoms - animals, plants, minerals - and considers them in such a way that they have arisen like waste from the overall flow.

Certainly, a good thought. But it is presented in a slightly distorted way by Henri Bergson. And what is essential: long before Bergson expressed it - I point this out in the second volume of my “Riddles of Philosophy” - this thought was expressed - as early as 1882 - by the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss, most recently in his book “Geist und Stoff” (Spirit and Matter), but also in earlier books! There we find this idea powerfully expressed from the very basis that I have just characterized as the very basis of the German essence.

One can now assume two things: Bergson, who expressed this idea later, may not have known Heinrich Preuss – which is just as unforgivable in a philosopher as if he had known him and failed to mention that he got this idea from this source – one could believe the latter, now that it has come out that entire pages of Bergson's books have been copied from Schelling or Schopenhauer! However, this is a basic feature of the times, isn't it, to confront German culture, which appears “mechanistic” to him, and which he says has come down from its great heights and only produces mechanistic things.

I said it before: He probably expected that when the French shoot with guns and cannons, the Germans will come and quote Novalis and Goethe! He could hardly have expected that, could he? But he speaks of a “mechanistic culture”. I would like to know: is copying entire pages from German philosophers and then slandering them the opposite of the “mechanical”?

But we do learn a great deal in this field, and we have to find our way through these things. But the only way to find one's way, dearest attendees, is to try, as a person living in Central Europe today, to delve into that which, from a certain point of view, is able to unfold this Central European and, above all, especially the German essence to unfold, the power that must be present today in the physical world in an external way, so that in our fateful time the German can defend itself against all attacking enemies. This same power lives, expressing itself in a different way, in the German spiritual being. The two are intimately connected. The two cannot be completely separated. In the distant future, when the fateful situation of the Central European German people in this fateful time is judged, history will have to be spoken of in this way.

One needs only to consider a few figures, but these figures, which will speak to the most distant times, must come to mind when the following questions are asked: What, then, is actually confronting what is to unfold in Central Europe with the spiritual content just characterized? Not counting smaller nations: 741 million people encircle 150 million people in Central Europe! And do these 741 million people, who are facing the 150 million people, have reason to envy the ground on which these 150 million people stand?

One need only remember that this humanity encircling Central Europe owns 69 million square kilometers of the earth – compared to 5 to 6 million square kilometers of the Central European population! 69 million square kilometers compared to 6 million square kilometers in Central Europe! 9.5 percent of the earth's population is pitted against 47 percent of the earth's population! So half the world is being called out against Central Europe. That will stand out in history in simple numbers!

And how does this surrounding population, which does not even rely on direct combat but on starvation, how does this surrounding population view this population, this Central European culture, of which one says – the least one can hear –: The spirit – this spirit that is all around – fights against the raw material in the middle!

And this view, we find it in a certain modification also when we look across to the East. And there we find, as it developed throughout the entire nineteenth century, one can say from the simple Russian people, who are predisposed to something completely different - you can read more about this in my little book “Thoughts During the Time of War”, which will soon be available again; at the moment it is out of print. There we find that a Russian intelligentsia is developing from the Russian people – but one could also follow the development in other areas – that grows up to hold very, very strange views. Much of what is in my little book Thoughts During the Time of War would have to be repeated – and much would have to be added to it – if one wanted to even begin to characterize the trend that is taking hold in Russian intellectual life, the intellectual life of the intelligentsia, which draws from the belief that Central Europe in particular, but also Western Europe, is basically an aged, decrepit culture, and that it must be replaced by the culture of the East, that this culture of the East is young and fresh and must be brought into Europe because everything within Europe has become decrepit.

For example, we find – just to mention a few things, although I could of course talk about this for hours – we find, for example, as early as 1827, Kirejewskij indicates a tone that is then found again and again. Only, various things have been done to prevent the good Germans in particular from noticing this tone; sometimes strange ways have been sought to prevent the Germans from noticing this tone. One of these ways is this: after the lecture that I have given in various places about Tolstoy, no one will attribute to me the claim that I do not value Tolstoy precisely as a spirit of the very first order; but precisely with spirits of the very first order, whom one does not need to fight as spirits, one can find the characteristic peculiarities that develop in them out of their nationality. Now, even in Tolstoy's works of fiction, one finds this tone, this sense of the staleness and decrepitude of Central and Western European intellectual life. But, you will say, people have read Tolstoy's works, they can't possibly have forgotten that they found this in them!

Something strange is going on here. Until Raphael Löwenfeld published his complete edition of Tolstoy's works at the end of the 1890s – which is the most accurate – all earlier translations had deleted the passages that were directed against Germanness! All the works that Löwenfeld translated before the complete edition was published – and who had the complete edition by Löwenfeld in their hands? – all of Tolstoy's works that had been translated by others before that, were presented to the German people in this way!

In 1829, Kirejewskij said:

“The fate of every European state depends on the union of all the others; the fate of Russia depends on Russia alone. But the fate of Russia is decided in its formation: this is the condition and source of all goods. As soon as all these goods will be ours, we will share them with the rest of Europe, and we will repay our debt to them a hundredfold.”

You see what the background here is – to make Russia Russian and then generously assign to the individual what one wants to assign to him. And seriously: this tone runs through the whole of Russian intellectual life. And in a strange way, it appears in various places in more recent times. For example, in [Michajlovskij] there is a Russian spirit that takes this - as he thinks - strangely decrepit, crippled, brutalized intellectual product of Central Europe, Goethe's “Faust”, and says: What then is this Goethe's “Faust” actually like as a personality? Well, just as in Central Europe one strives for metaphysics, so Faust strives metaphysically. —- He needs the expression, this Michajlovskij: a metaphysician is a person who has gone mad with fat! I don't know how many metaphysicians one has come to know with this characteristic! But he regards Goethe's Faust as such a metaphysician, who has become alien to all human life.

But let us go to the end of the nineteenth century; there we find a mind like that of Sergius Jushakow; he wrote a book in 1885 that reflects much of what is currently in this Russian intellectual life: he despises Western Europe as something decrepit! He says, Yushakov: “Let us look across to Asia, where we find the fruits of European culture, which must be eradicated through Russia and replaced by something else. Let us look across to Asia, where we find these Western and Central European fruits of culture. There we find these Asian peoples, and it reminds Yushakov of an Asian legend that truly expresses what lies in the development of Asian peoples. He says: “These Asian peoples have expressed their destiny themselves by speaking of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Then there are the Iranian peoples, to whom the Persians and Hindus also belong; they have had to fight against the Turanian peoples, who are under the leadership of Ahriman. And as the people of Ormuzd, the Iranians, to whom the Persians and Hindus belong, have what they have conquered materially and spiritually through their culture, they have conquered it through the kindness of the good spirit Ormuzd against the evil Ahriman.

But then, according to Jushakov, the evil Europeans came and did not help the Asians to continue their Ormuzd culture, but came to take away from them what they had received under Ormuzd and to deliver them to the bondage and dangers of the Ahriman culture. Russia must intervene against this unpeaceful, unloving Western European culture. Russia must turn, says Yushakov, towards Asia and join forces with the Asian peoples languishing under Ahriman, in order to save them from the parasitism of Western European culture.

Yushakov says that it will be two powers that will join forces, two powers that express the greatest, most significant, and strongest cultural forces of the future. It will be two powers that will look towards Asia from Russia – I am not saying it, Yushakov is saying it; so if it sounds strange, read Yushakov! There are two powers: the simple Russian peasantry will join forces with the greatest bearer, with the noblest bearer of spirituality, with the Cossacks! Peasants and Cossacks will rescue the Asian population and the ancient Asian culture from the clutches of the Western Europeans. One day the world will owe this to Russia and its mission, which is made up of the deeds of the peasants and the noble Cossacks.

The book that Sergius Jushakow wrote in 1885 is called: “The” - yes, it is called “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”. And he characterizes the Asian peoples from a Western European point of view in terms of what they have suffered. He says, for example: These Asian peoples are viewed by Western Europeans – he couldn't take the Germans, so he didn't take the Germans – these Asian peoples are viewed by Western Europeans, he says, as if they existed solely

“to clothe themselves in English fabrics, fight among themselves with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English tinsel.”

And then Jushakow continues, summarizing what appears to him to be a great, pan-Asian ideal, so in summary, he says:

“England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland – I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this state, which is as brilliant as it is sad.”

I do not wish anything similar for my homeland, says Yushakov, a leading Russian, in 1885 – about England! It is probably on this path that we should seek that strange world-historical consequence – the forging of the alliance between Russia and England! For at first little was noticed of the current, of the mission to Asia, which should have come about under the influence of the peasants and Cossacks. For the time being, we can only note that Russia has allied itself with England and France, the latter of which have thus betrayed European culture in reality! It has allied itself in order to uproot the decrepit, decrepit Europeanness root and branch, at least that is what they said.

Dear attendees, it is necessary to speak out, as I said, without falling into the tone that is being struck around us, and anyone who is even a little familiar with this tone knows that today's tone has not tone of the English, French, Russians, without falling into the tone that is being struck around us today, purely on the basis of the facts, can point out what is going on within German intellectual life for self-reflection. There it is, after all, [that what lived in minds like Troxler, Planck, Preuss and so on, and in the minds of others – what was a germ, will also come to fruition as a flower and as fruit]!

However, through this tone of German intellectual life, which still resonates today, a realization must come to those of you who are present: intellectual observers of the world are not the impractical people that they are often made out to be by the very clever people – and especially by the very practical people. Because that is, after all, the general tone, isn't it, that one thinks: Well, people like Planck, like Troxler or like Preuss and so on may have very nice thoughts - but they don't have a clue about practical life. That's where the practical people have to go, those practical people who, in their own opinion, have a practical insight into practical life. Because the others are those impractical idealists!

Well, but I could also give you hundreds and hundreds of examples in support of the refutation of this sentence. Karl Christian Planck, for example, who was one of the most German of Germans, died in bitterness in 1880. And the dullards will no doubt say: something like megalomania sometimes emerges from the last thing he wrote - after time itself had driven him to a certain nervousness because he could not convey to his contemporaries what was in his heart. The dullards will even say: he became megalomaniac. But he died in 1880, and in 1881 his “Testament of a German” was already in print. It contained words that I will read to you now. So they were already written in 1880. Planck – about whom certainly quite practical diplomats, politicians and people who know everything about practical life will judge disparagingly – Christian Karl Planck spoke of the present war, of this war in which we are now embroiled. He spoke the following words in 1880. They were written by this “impractical idealist,” who was, however, a very practical thinker and who should have been put in a practical position, because the power that lives in the spiritual life also knows how to judge practical life correctly. This “impractical” Planck, who in 1880 wrote about the present war, which he knew would come, the words:

"No political cleverness, no love of peace on the part of Germany can prevent this hostile clash within the current merely national order. For the nature of the circumstances is more powerful than all cleverness; and already now, despite the friendly attitude of Germany and Austria, the hostile mood of the Russian East is only emerging all the more clearly because one could not give it a free hand in everything, but had to set a certain goal. And if it comes to a fight one day, then, however much we have to fight it for the good of Europe, the latter will not stand by our side, but as in the East, we will also have to defend ourselves in the West and in the South at the same time; on all sides, national jealousy will rise up against the new empire in their midst."

I ask you, how many diplomats believed – you can point the finger at them – much later, yes, much later, that Italy might still be dissuaded from participating in the war. I will only point out the one point. But these are the “practical” people, they have eaten practice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But the unpractical Christian Karl Planck, in 1880 he characterized what happened in 1914, 1915 and so on, so that what he said back then has appeared again exactly in the real, actual facts!

Oh, one should listen to what a spiritual man creating out of the real depths of the German essence would be able to create if this German essence were to once fully consciously stand on its own feet – symbolically speaking.

But for this to happen, the present moment in world history must provide the right conditions. For the German spirit will also one day solve the problem for the world of the fact that it must be realized from within the German spirit what it means that power – the power of the incompetent, which crushes so many legitimate aspirations – is actually the ruling power in so many parts of the world! It is precisely in this area that the German spirit must have a healing effect. Without in any way seeking to flatter national pride, this can be emphasized in the present fateful hour from the facts themselves.

Finally, let us point out to you, esteemed attendees, how those who were steeped in this German essence, who know how to grasp it with their whole soul, with their whole heart, how they always experienced what has now taken place. I may, since I have spent almost thirty years of my life in Austria and had to go through the last times just at the end of these thirty years within the struggles that Germanism had to wage there, [since I was] in the midst of these difficulties of the German essence, I would like to draw attention to how naturally it lived in a spirit like Robert Hamerling, one of the most German spirits in Austria, one of the best spirits in Central Europe in general, how he expressed what lived in him so beautifully: “Austria is my fatherland; Germany is my motherland!” These words express a vivid sense of the spiritual reality that has forged Germany and Austria into this Mitteleuropa out of necessity in these difficult times. But such minds as Robert Hamerling's not only grasped such a thing in its depth, in its full depth, but also experienced it, esteemed attendees. This is particularly evident when you look at Robert Hamerling – not, of course, in the poem that has been distributed and which so many people have fallen for, even quite clever people have fallen for it, it is, of course, a forgery, the prophetic poem that has now been widely published in the newspapers – I don't mean something like that, of course! Anyone who knows Robert Hamerling even a little recognizes it as a fake from the very first lines. But in Robert Hamerling's work, there are enough clues to see how this Mitteleuropa lived! In 1862, he wrote his “Germanenzug”. Let us highlight the “Germanenzug” from the many. In 1862, he wrote in his “Germanenzug” how the ancestors of the Germans moved among the Germanic peoples from Asia - this is described to us in a wonderful mood , as they camp there - it is evening - how they camp there still in Asia; it is a beautiful evening atmosphere: the setting sun, the rising moon, the Teutons are asleep as they move across. Only one is awake: the blond Teut. And above him appears the genius of the future Germans and speaks with him. And that which one must cite as a fundamental trait of the German striving for knowledge - the genius speaks with him, with the blond Teut of this German future - is expressed by Robert Hamerling through the genius of Germanness to the blond Teut. I would like to say: the beauty of what is a German trait is already evident in the “Philosophus Teutonicus”, in Jakob Böhme, where this Jakob Böhme regards all knowledge in such a way that this knowledge, insofar as it comes from the German mind as knowledge, is at the same time a kind of worship. Jakob Böhme says so beautifully:

"When you look at the depths

, he means the depths of the blue sky

“When you look at the depth of the sky, the stars and the earth, you see your God, and in the same you live and are you too. And the same God reigns through you and also reigns you.” “You are created from this God and live in the same. Also, all your knowledge stands in this God, and when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

This mood also lived in Robert Hamerling when he let the genius of the German spirit speak to the blond Teut:

"To whom will the word break out of the depths of the soul one day
Like your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the strings of the searching thought to the stars
so boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Whom leads so high, so deep his urge, his foreboding?
Who grasps so faithfully the near as the far?
Where does every earthly and heavenly zone
reflect itself as in your thinking, O Teuton?»

This mission of the German character - Robert Hamerling was already aware of it at the time he wrote his “Germanenzug” (The German Character).

To see clearly the full world-historical, the all-embracing world-historical significance of this German nature – one can indeed look across to Asia in a different way from that in which Yushakov did: there one sees these Asiatic peoples, how they once, in primeval times, aspired upwards to the spiritual worlds. They brought it from India; they did it by sinking and muffling everything that forms the basis of the human ego, the center of the human being, into a kind of dream life. And by muffling the ego, they created something within themselves that arose out of a dream life, which introduced them to the spiritual that permeates and lives through the whole world. This world cannot and must not arise again as it was, as a witness of what remained from ancient times over there in Asia; for after the greatest impulse that earth-dwelling humanity could experience, the Christ-impulse, had broken into the development of earth-dwelling humanity, something else must come than this former elevation to the spiritual world.

And this other - with the same inwardness, deep inwardness, with which the spirit was once to be experienced in the ancient Orient, with the same inwardness it is to be experienced again through this other; but this other is to develop in the exact opposite way: The ego is not to be paralyzed, it is to be strengthened, it is to be invigorated - precisely by rising up, by living to the full, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, want the other spirits, who are rooted in the depths of German intellectual life, to penetrate into the spiritual world: And so this German essence is to give the Orient what it once had in the form of profound inwardness in pre-Christian times; it is to give the German essence in a new way, as it must be given in the post-Christian era.

This was already clear to Robert Hamerling when he had the genius of the Germans speak to the blond Teut, the leader of the Germanic peoples, in his “Germanenzug”. Robert Hamerling draws attention to the fact that all cognition in the German is to be a kind of worship, that the German wants to know himself in such a way that he knows himself as born out of the divine-spiritual powers, living in the divine-spiritual powers, and being buried again with the divine-spiritual powers.

That is why Robert Hamerling lets the genius of Germanness speak these beautiful words to the blond Teut:

"But however proudly you may strive, high above other swarms, you will still keep a blazing, ancient, sacred fire: the dream-filled drunkenness of God, the blissful warmth of the heart of Calm existence
This holy ray, a temple fire, free of smoke, with pure flame, will glow in your chest and soul, remaining your pilot and your rudder! You strive only because you love: your most daring thought will be devotion that wants to sink into God."

So the one who, as a Central European German, feels at home in the intellectual life of Central Europe, which I have tried to characterize today, also in one of its faded tones, in one of its forgotten intellectual currents, but precisely in the intellectual current that shows which seeds, which roots of a striving for the real, for the real spirit, are anchored in German intellectual life.

The insight that this is so will always give the one who recognizes and feels German essence within himself the justified conviction: Whatever arises from the 68 million square kilometers around against what lives on the 6 million square kilometers, whatever has such roots, such germs, will bear its blossoms and its fruits against all enemies in the way and as they are predisposed in it! This hope, this confidence and also this love for the German essence is precisely what characterizes anyone who truly recognizes the German essence.

Let me summarize in four simple lines by Robert Hamerling, after I have tried to characterize such a Central European spirit to you. Let me summarize what can arise in the soul from an objective observation of the German character and immersion in this German character today, in the face of our difficult, fateful events.

I believe that these four simple lines, with which I would like to conclude today's reflection, these four simple lines by Robert Hamerling, which state that it is true, that not only out of national overheating, but out of objective knowledge, it may be said:

“And if ever the day
proves hostile to the German name,
from sea to sea
the German spirit will find its way.”