The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When some time ago the first volume of Spengler's Decline of the West appeared, there could be discerned in this literary production something like the will to tackle more intensively the elemental phenomena of decay and decline in our time. Here is a man who felt in much that is now active in the whole western world an impulse toward decline that must necessarily lead to a condition of utter chaos in western civilization, including America; and it could be seen that the man who had developed such a feeling—a very well-informed person, indeed, with mastery of many scientific ideas—was making the effort to present a sort of analysis of these phenomena.

It is clear, of course, that Spengler recognized this decline; and it is evident also that he had a feeling for everything of a declining nature exactly because all his thinking was itself involved in this decline; and because he felt this decadence in his very soul, I might say, he anticipated nothing but decadence as the outcome of all mass civilization. That is comprehensible. He believed that the West will become the prey of a kind of Caesarism, a sort of development of individual power, which will replace the differentiated, highly-organized cultures and civilizations with simple brute-force.

It is evident that Spengler, for one, had not the slightest perception of the fact that salvation for this western culture and civilization can come out of the will of mankind, if this will, in opposition to all that is moving headlong toward destruction, is directed toward the realization of something that can yet be brought forth out of the soul of man as a new force, if the human being of today wills it so. Of such a new force—naturally a spiritual force, based on spiritual activity—Oswald Spengler had not the slightest understanding.

Thus we can see that a very well-informed, brilliant man, with a certain penetrating insight, and able to coin such telling phrases, can actually arrive at nothing beyond a certain hope for the unfolding of a brute-power, which is remote from everything spiritual, from all inner human striving, and which depends entirely upon the development of external brutish force.

However, when the first volume appeared, it was possible to have at least a certain respect for the penetrating spirituality (I must use the expression again)—an abstract, intellectualistic spirituality—as opposed to the obtuseness of thinking which by no means is equal to the driving forces of history, but which so often gives the keynote to the literature of today.

Oswald Spengler's second volume has now appeared, and this indeed points out much more forcefully all that lives in a man of the present which can become his world-conception and philosophy, while he himself rejects, with a sort of brutality, everything genuinely spiritual. This second volume is likewise brilliant; yet in spite of his clever observations, Spengler shows nothing more than the dreadful sterility of an excessively abstract and intellectualistic mode of thought. The matter is extraordinarily noteworthy because it shows what a peculiar configuration of spirit can be attained by an undeniably notable personality of today.

In this second volume of Spengler's Decline of the West, it is primarily the beginning and the end that are of exceptional interest. But it is a melancholy interest which this beginning and end arouse; they really characterize the whole state of this man's soul. You need to read only a sentence or two at the beginning in order to estimate at once the soul-situation of Oswald Spengler, and likewise of many other people of the present time. What is to be said of it has not merely a German-literary significance, but an altogether international one.

Spengler begins with the following sentence: [The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler; Volume II: Perspectives of World History. Translated by Atkinson (Knopf). The above citation, however, and all others used herein are translated from the original of Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, by the translator of this lecture. Ed.] “Observe the flowers in the evening, when in the setting sun they close one after the other; something sinister oppresses you then, a feeling of puzzling anxiety in the presence of this blind, dreamlike existence bound to the earth. The mute forest, the silent meadows, yonder bush, and these tendrils, do not stir. It is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free. It still dances in the evening light; it moves whither it will,” and so on.

Notice the starting-point from the flowers, from the plants. Now when I have wished to point to what gives its significance to the thinking of the present, I have again and again found it necessary to begin with the kind of comprehension applied today to lifeless, inorganic, mineral nature. Perhaps some of you will remember that in order to characterize the striving of present-day thinking for clarity of view, I have often used the example of the impact of two resilient balls, where from the given condition of one ball you can deduce the condition of the other by pure calculation.

Of course, anyone of the Spenglerian soul-caliber can say that ordinary thinking does not discover how resilience works in these balls, nor what the relations are in a deeper sense. Anyone who thinks thus does not understand upon what clarity of thought depends at the present time. For such an objection would have neither greater validity nor less than would an assertion by someone that it is impossible for me to understand a sentence written down on paper without first having investigated the composition of the ink with which it is written. The important thing is always to discover the point at issue. In surveying inorganic nature, the matter of concern is not what may eventually be discovered behind it as force-impulse, just as the composition of the ink is not the important thing for the understanding of a sentence written with it; but the matter of importance is whether clear thinking is employed.

This definite kind of thinking is what humanity has achieved since the time of Galileo and Copernicus. It shows first that man can grasp by means of it only lifeless, inorganic nature; but that, on the other hand, only by yielding himself to it, as to the simplest and most primitive kind of pure thinking, can he develop freedom of the human soul, or any kind of freedom for man. Only one who understands the character of clear, objective thinking, as it holds sway in lifeless nature, can later rise to the other processes of thinking and of seeing—to that which permeates thought with vision, with inspiration, with imagination, with intuition.

Therefore, the first task confronting one who wishes to speak today with any authority on the ultimate configuration of our cultural life is to observe what it is that the power of present-day thinking rests upon. And those who have become aware of this power in the thinking of our time know that this thinking is active in the machine, that it has brought us modern technical sciences, in which by means of this thinking we construct external, lifeless, inorganic sequences, all of whose pseudo-intelligence is intended to contribute to the outer activities of man.

Only one who understands this begins to realize that the moment we start to deal with plant-life, this kind of thinking, grasped at first in its abstractness, leads to utter nonsense. Anyone who uses this kind of crystal-clear thinking—appropriate in its abstractness to the mineral world alone—not as a mere starting point for the development of human freedom, but instead employs it in thinking about the plant-world, will have before him in the plant-world something nebulous, obscure, mystical, which he cannot comprehend. For as soon as we look up to the plant-world we must understand that here—at least to the degree intended by Goethe with his primordial-plant (Urpflanze), and with the principle by means of which he traced the metamorphosis of this primordial-plant through all plant-forms—here at least in this Goethean sense, everyone who approaches the plant-world with a recognition of the real force of the thought holding sway in the inorganic world must perceive that the plant-world remains obscure and mystical in the worst sense of our time, unless it is approached with imagination—at least in the sense in which Goethe established his botanical views.

When anyone like Oswald Spengler rejects imaginative cognition and yet starts describing the plant-world in this way, he reaches nothing that will give clarity and force, but only a kind of confused thinking, a mysticism in the very worst sense of the word, namely materialistic mysticism. And if this has to be said about the beginning of the book, the end of it is in turn characterized by the beginning. The end of this book deals with the machine, with that which has given the very signature to modern civilization—the machine, which on the one hand is foreign to man's nature, yet is on the other precisely the means by which he has developed his clear thinking.

Some time ago—directly after the appearance of Oswald Spengler's book, and under the impression of the effect it was having—I gave a lecture at the College of Technical Sciences in Stuttgart on Anthroposophy and, the Technical Sciences, in order to show that precisely by submersion in technical science the human being develops that configuration of his soul-life which makes him free. I showed that, because in the mechanical world he experiences the obliteration of all spirituality, he receives in this same mechanical world the impulse to bring forth spirituality out of his own being through inner effort. Anyone, therefore, who comprehends the significance of the machine for our whole present civilization can only say to himself: This machine, with its impertinent pseudo-intelligence, with its dreadful, brutal, demonic spiritlessness, compels the human being, when he rightly understands himself, to bring forth from within those germs of spirituality that are in him. By means of the contrast the machine compels the human being to develop spiritual life.

But as a matter of fact, what I wished to bring out in that lecture was understood by no one, as I was able to learn from the after-effects.

Oswald Spengler places at the conclusion of his work some observations about the machine. Well, what you read there about the machine finally leads to a sort of glorification of the fear of it. We feel that what is said is positively the apex of modern superstition regarding the machine, which people feel as something demonic, as certain superstitious people sense the presence of demons. Spengler describes the inventor of the machine, tells how it has gradually gained ground, and little by little has laid hold of civilization. He describes the people in whose age the machine appeared.

“But for all of them there also existed the really Faustian danger that the devil might have a hand in the game, in order to lead them in spirit to that mountain where he promised them all earthly power. That is what is meant by the dream of those strange Dominicans, like Peter Peregrinus, about the perpetual motion device, through which God would have been robbed of His omnipotence. They succumbed to this ambition again and again; they extorted his secret from the Divinity in order to be God themselves.”

So Oswald Spengler understands the matter thus: that because man can now control machines, he can through this very act of controlling, imagine himself to be a God, can learn to be a God, because, according to his opinion, the God of the cosmic machine controls the machine. How could a man help feeling exalted to godhood when he controls a microcosm!

“They hearkened to the laws of the cosmic time-beat in order to do them violence, and then they created the idea of the machine as a little cosmos which yields obedience only to the will of man. But in doing so they overstepped that subtle boundary where, according to the adoring piety of others, sin began; and that was their undoing, from Bacon to Giordano Bruno. True faith has always held that the machine is of the devil.” Now he evidently intends at this point to be merely ironic; but that he intends to be not only ironic becomes apparent when in his brilliant way he uses words which sound somewhat antiquated. The following passage shows this:

“Then follows, however, contemporaneously with Rationalism, the invention of the steam-engine, which overturns everything and transforms the economic picture from the ground up. Till then nature had given service; now it is harnessed in the yoke as a slave, and its work measured, as in derision, in terms of horse-power. We passed over from the muscular strength of the negro, employed in organized enterprise, to the organic forces of the earth's crust, where the life-force of thousands of years lies stored as coal, and we now direct our attention to inorganic nature, whose waterpower has already been harnessed in support of the coal. Along with the millions and billions of horse-power the population increases as no other civilization would have considered possible. This growth is a product of the machine, which demands service and control, in return for which it increases the power of each individual a hundredfold. Human life becomes precious for the sake of the machine. Work becomes the great word in ethical thinking. During the eighteenth century it lost its derogatory significance in all languages. The machine works and compels man to work with it. All civilization has come into a degree of activity under which the earth quivers.

“What has been developed in the course of scarcely a century is a spectacle of such magnitude that to human beings of a future culture, with different souls and different emotions, it must seem that at that time nature reeled. In previous ages, politics has passed over cities and peoples; human economy has interfered greatly with the destinies of the animal and plant world—but that merely touches life and is effaced again. This technical science, however, will leave behind it the mark of its age when everything else shall have been submerged and forgotten. This Faustian passion has altered the picture of the earth's surface.

“And these machines are ever more dehumanized in their formation; they become ever more ascetic, more mystical and esoteric. They wrap the earth about with an endless web of delicate forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become ever more immaterial, even more silent. These wheels, cylinders and levers no longer speak. All the crucial parts have withdrawn to the inside. Man senses the machine as something devilish, and rightly so. For a believer it indicates the deposition of God. It hands over sacred causality to man, and becomes silent, irresistible, with a sort of prophetic omniscience set in motion by him.

“Never has the microcosm felt more superior toward the macrocosm. Here are little living beings who, through their spiritual force, have made the unliving dependent upon them. There seems to be nothing to equal this triumph, achieved by only one culture, and, perhaps, for only a few centuries. But precisely because of it the Faustian man has become the slave of his own creation.”

We see here the thinker's complete helplessness with regard to the machine. It never dawns on him that there is nothing in the machine that could possibly be mystical for anyone who conceives the very nature of the unliving as lacking any mystical element.

And thus we see Oswald Spengler beginning with a hazy recital about plants, because he really has no conception at all of the nature and character of present-day cognition—which is closely related to the evolution of the mechanical life—because to him thinking remains only an abstraction, and on this account he is also unable to perceive the function of thinking in anything mechanical. In reality, thinking here becomes an entirely unsubstantial image, so that the human being in the mechanical age may become all the more real, may call forth his soul, his spirit, out of himself by resisting the mechanical. That is the significance of the machine-age for the human being, as well as for world-evolution.

When anyone intending to begin with metaphysical clarity starts out instead with a hazy recital about plants, he does so because in this mood he is in opposition to the machine. That is to say, Oswald Spengler has grasped the function of modern thinking only in its abstractness, and he sets to work on something that remains dark to him, namely, the plant-world.

Now taking the mineral, the plant, the animal, and the human kingdoms, the last-named may be characterized for the present time by saying that since the middle of the fifteenth century we have advanced to the thinking that makes the mineral kingdom transparent to us. So that when we look at the human being of our time, as he is inwardly, as observer of the outer world, we must say that as human being he has at this precise time developed the conception of the mineral kingdom. But then we must characterize the significance of this mineral-thinking in the way I have just now characterized it.

But when someone who knows nothing of the real nature of the mineral kingdom takes his start from the plant kingdom, he gets no farther than the animal kingdom. For the animal bears in itself the plant-nature in the same form we today bear the mineral nature. It is characteristic of Oswald Spengler, first, that he begins with the plant, and in his concepts in no way gets beyond the animal (he deals with man only in so far as man is an animal) ; and second, that thinking really seems to him to be extraordinarily comprehensible, whereas, in reality, as I have just explained, it has been understood in its true significance only since the fourteenth century. He thus lets his thinking slide down just as far as possible into the animal world. We see him discovering, for example, that he has sense-perception, just as has the animal, and that this sense-perception, even in the animal, becomes a sort of judgment. In this way he tries to represent thinking merely as something like an intensification of the perceptive life of the animal.

Actually no one has proved in such a radical way as this same Oswald Spengler that the man of today with his abstract thinking reaches only the extra-human world, and no longer comprehends the human. And the essential characteristic of the human being, namely, that he can think, Oswald Spengler regards only as a sort of adjunct, which is inexplicable and really superfluous. For, according to Spengler, this thinking is really something highly superfluous in man.

“Understanding emancipated from feeling is called thinking. Thinking has forever brought disunion into the human waking state. It has always regarded the intellect and the perceptive faculty as the high and the low soul-forces. It has created the fatal contrast between the light-world of the eye, which is designated as a world of semblance and sense-delusion, and a literally-imagined world, in which concepts with slight but ever-present accent of light pursue their existence.”

Now in setting forth these things Spengler develops an extraordinarily curious idea; namely, that in reality the whole spiritual civilization of man depends upon the eye, that it is really only distilled from the light-world, and concepts are only somewhat refined, somewhat distilled, visions in the light, which are transmitted through the eye. Oswald Spengler simply has no idea that thinking, when it is pure thought, not only receives the light-world of the eye, but unites this light-world with the whole man. It is an entirely different matter whether we think of an entity which is connected with the perception of the eye, or speak of conceptions or mental pictures. Spengler has something to say also about conceptions, or mental pictures (Vorstellen); but at this very point he tries to prove that thinking is only a sort of brain-dream and rarified light-world in man.

Now I should like to know whether with any kind of thinking that is not abstract, but is sound common sense, the word “stellen” (to put or place), when it is experienced correctly, can ever be associated with anything belonging to the light-world. A man “places” himself with his legs; the whole man is included. When we say “vorstellen” (to place before, to represent), we dynamically unite the light-entity with what we experience within as something dynamic, as a force-effect, as something that plunges down into reality. With realistic thinking, we absolutely dive down into reality. Consider the most important thoughts. Aside from mathematical ones, thoughts always lead to the realization that in them we have not merely a light-air-organism, but also something which man has as soul-experience when he causes a thought to be illuminated at the same time that he places both feet on the earth.

Therefore, all that Oswald Spengler has developed here about this light-world transformed into thinking is really nothing but exceedingly clever talk. It is absolutely necessary that this should be stated: the introduction to this second volume is brilliant twaddle, which then rises to such assertions as the following:

“This impoverishment of the sense-faculties involves at the same time an immeasurable deepening. The human waking existence is no longer mere tension between the body and the surrounding world. It is now life in a closed, surrounding light-world. The body moves in observable space. The experience of depth is a mighty penetration into visible distances from a light-center. This is the point which we call ‘I’, ‘I’ is a light-concept.”

Anyone who asserts that “I” is a light-concept has no idea, for example, how intimately connected is the experience of the I with the experience of gravity in the human organism; he has no notion at all of the experience of the mechanical that can arise in the human organism. But when it does arise consciously, then the leap is made from abstract thinking to the realistic, concrete thinking that leads to reality.

It might be said that Oswald Spengler is a perfect example of the fact that abstract thinking has become airy, and also light, and has carried the whole human being away from reality, so that he reels about somewhere in the light and has no suspicion that there is also gravity; for example—that there is also something that can be experienced, not merely looked at. The onlooker standpoint of John Stuart Mill, for instance, is here carried to the extreme. Therefore, the book is exceedingly characteristic of our time.

One sentence on page 13 [Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Vol. II.] appears terribly clever, but it is really only light and airy: “One fashions conception upon conception and finally achieves a thought-architecture in great style, whose edifices stand there in an inner light, as it were, in complete distinctness.”

So Oswald Spengler starts out with mere phraseology. He finds the plant-world “sleeping”; that represents first of all the world around us, which is thoroughly asleep. He finds that the world “wakes up” in the animal kingdom, and that the animal develops in itself a kind of microcosm. He gets no farther than the animal, but develops only the relation between the plant-world and the animal-world, and finds the former in the sleeping state and the latter in the waking state.

But everything that happens in the world really comes about under the influence of what is sleeping. The animal—therefore, for Oswald Spengler, man also—has sleep in himself. That is true. But all that has significance for the world proceeds from sleep, for sleep contains movement. The waking state contains only tensions—tensions which beget all sorts of discrepancies within, but still only tensions which are, as it were, just one more external item in the universe. Actually, an independent reality is one which arises from sleep.

And in this broth float all sorts of more or less superfluous, or savory and unsavory blobs of grease—which is the animal element; but there could be broth without these blobs of grease, except that these bring something into reality. In sleep the Where and the How are not to be found, but only the When and the Why. So that we find the following in the human being, who contains the plantlike as well—of the role played by the mineral element in the human being Oswald Spengler has no notion—so that in man we find the following: in as far as he is plantlike, he lives in time; he takes his stand in the “When” and the “Why,” the earlier being the Why of the later. That is the causal factor. And by living on thus through history man really expresses the plantlike in history. The animal-element—and therefore the human as well—which inquires as to the “Where” and the “How,” these (the animal and human elements) are just the blobs of grease that are added to it. (This is quite interesting as far as the inner tensions are concerned, but these really have nothing to do with what takes place in the world.) So we can say: Through cosmic relationships the “When” and the “Why” are implanted in the world for succeeding ages.

And in this on-flowing broth the grease-blobs float with their “Where” and “How.” And when a man—just one such drop of grease—floats in this broth, the “Where” and the “How” really concern only him and his inner tensions, his waking existence. What he does as a historical being proceeds from sleep.

Long ago it was said as a sort of religious imagination: The Lord giveth to his beloved in sleep. To the Spenglerian man it is nature that gives in sleep. Such is the thinking of one of the most prominent personalities of the present time, who, however—in order to avoid coming to terms with himself—plunges into the plant kingdom, thence to emerge no farther than the animal kingdom, into which the human also is stirred.

Now one would suppose that this concoction with its cleverness would avoid the worst blunders that thinking has made in the past; that is, that it would somehow be consistent. If the plant-existence is to be poured out over the history of humanity, then let the concoction be confined to the plant kingdom. It would be difficult, however, to enter upon a historical discussion concerning the man of the plant kingdom. Yet Oswald Spengler does discuss historically, even very cleverly, the plantlike activity of humanity during sleep. But in order that he may have something to say about this sleep of humanity, he makes use of the worst possible kind of thinking, namely, that of anthropomorphism, artificially distorting everything, imagining human qualities into everything. Hence, he speaks—as early as on page 9—of the plant, which has no waking-existence, because he wants to learn from it how he is to write history, and also give a description of the activity of man that arises from sleep.

But let us read the first sentences on page 9: “A plant leads an existence with no waking state”—Good. He means: “In sleep all beings become plants,” that is, man as well as animal—All right.—“the tension with the surrounding world is released, the measure of life moves on.” And now comes a great sentence: “A plant knows only the relation to When and Why.” Now the plant begins not only to dream, but to “know” in its blessed sleep. Thus one faces the conjecture that this sleep, destined to spread perpetually as history in human evolution, might now begin to wake up. For then Oswald Spengler could just as well write a history as to attribute to the plants a knowledge of When and Why. Indeed this sleep-nature of the plant has even some highly interesting qualities:

“The thrusting of the first green spears out of the winter-earth, the swelling of the buds, the whole force of blossoming, of fragrance, of glowing, of ripening—this is all desire for the fulfilment of a destiny and a constantly yearning query as to the Why.”

Of course history can very easily be described as plantlike, if the writer first prepares himself to that end through anthropomorphisms. And because all this is so, Oswald Spengler says further:

“The Where can have no meaning for the plantlike existence. That is the question with which the awakening human being daily recalls his world. For only the pulse-beat of existence persists through all the generations. The waking existence begins anew with each microcosm. That is the distinction between procreation and birth. The one is guarantee for permanence, the other is a beginning. And therefore, a plant is procreated but not born. It exists, but no awakening, no first day, spreads a sense-world around it ...”

If anyone wishes to follow Spenglerian thoughts, he must really, like a tumbler, first stand on his head and then turn over, in order mentally to reverse what is thought of in the human sense as right side up. But you see by concocting such

metaphysics, such a philosophy, Spengler arrives at the following: This sleeping state in man, that which is plantlike in him, this makes history. What is this in man? The blood—the blood which flows through the generations.

Well, in this way Spengler prepares a method for himself, so that he can say: The most important events developed in human history occur through the blood. To do this he must of course cut some more thought-capers:

“The waking existence is synonymous with ‘ascertaining’ (Feststellen), no matter whether the point in question is the sense of touch in one of the infusoria or human thinking of the highest order.”

Certainly when anyone thinks in such an abstract way, he simply fails to discover the difference between the sense of touch in one of the infusoria and human thinking of the highest order. He comes then to all sorts of extraordinarily strange assertions, such as: that this thinking is really a mere adjunct to the whole human life, that deeds originate in the blood, and that out of the blood history is made. And if there are still a few people who ponder about this, they do so with purely abstract thinking that has nothing whatever to do with actuality.

“That we not only live, but know about life, is the result of that observation of our corporeal being in the light. But the animal knows only life, not death.”

And so he explains that the thing of importance must come forth out of obscurity, darkness, out of the plantlike, out of the blood; and he claims that those people who have achieved anything in history have done so not at all as the result of an idea, of thinking—but that thoughts, even those of thinkers, are merely a by-product. About what thinking accomplishes, Oswald Spengler has no words disparaging enough.

And then he contrasts with thinkers all those who really act, because they let thinking be thinking; that is, let it be the business of others.

“Some people are born as men of destiny and others as men of causality. The man who is really alive, the peasant and warrior, the statesman, general, man of the world, merchant, everyone who wishes to become rich, to command, to rule, to fight, to take risks, the organizer, the contractor, the adventurer, the fencer, the gambler, is a world apart from the ‘spiritual’ man” (Spengler puts ‘spiritual’ in quotation marks), “from the saint, the priest, the scholar, idealist, ideologist, regardless of whether he is destined thereto by the power of his thinking or through lack of blood. Existence and being awake, measure and tension, instincts and concepts, the organs of circulation and those of touch—there will seldom be a man of eminence in whom the one side does not unquestionably surpass the other in significance.

“... the active person is a complete human being. In the contemplative person a single organ would like to act without the body or against it. For only the active man, the man of destiny” (that is, one whom thoughts do not concern)—“for only the active man, the man of destiny, lives, in the last analysis, in the real world, the world of political, military, and economic crises, in which concepts and theories count for nothing. Here a good blow is worth more than a good conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which the soldiers and statesmen of all times have looked down on the scribbler and the book-worm, who has the idea that world-history exists for the sake of the spirit, of science, or even of art.”

That is a plain statement; in fact, plain enough for anyone to recognize who said it: that it is definitely written by none other than a “scribbler and book-worm,” who merely puts on airs at the expense of others. Only a “scribbler and bookworm” could write:

“Some people are born as men of destiny and some as men of causality. The man who is really alive, the peasant and warrior, the statesman, general, man of the world, merchant, everyone who wishes to become rich, to command, to rule, to fight, to take risks, the organizer, the contractor, the adventurer, the fencer, the gambler, is a world apart from the ‘spiritual’ man, from the saint, the priest, the scholar, idealist, ideologist” ... As if there had never been confessionals and father confessors! Indeed, there are still other beings from whom all those classes of men glean their thoughts. In the society of all such people as have been mentioned—statesmen, generals, men of the world, merchants, fencers, gamblers, and so on—there have even been found soothsayers and fortune-tellers. So that actually the “world” that is supposed to separate the statesman, politician, etc., from the “spiritual” man is in reality not such an enormous distance. Anyone who can observe life will find that this sort of thing is written with utter disregard of all life-observation. And Oswald Spengler, who is a brilliant man and an eminent personality, makes a thorough job of it. After saying that in the realm of real events a blow is worth more than a logical conclusion, he continues thus:

“Here a good blow is worth more than a good conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which the soldiers and statesmen of all times have looked down on the scribbler and the book-worm, who has the idea that world-history exists for the sake of the spirit, of science, or even of art. Let us speak unequivocally: Understanding liberated from feeling is only one side of life, and not the decisive side. In the history of western thought, the name of Napoleon may be omitted, but in actual history Archimedes, with all his scientific discoveries, has perhaps been less influential than that soldier who slew him at the storming of Syracuse.”

Now if a brick had fallen on the head of Archimedes, then, according to this theory, this brick would be more important, in the sense of real logical history, than all that originated with Archimedes. And mind you, this was not written by an ordinary journalist, but by one of the most clever people of the present time. That is exactly the significant point, that one of the cleverest men of the present writes in this way.

And now exactly what is effective? Thinking? That just floats on top. What is effective is the blood. Anyone who speaks about the blood from the spiritual viewpoint, that is, speaks scientifically, will ask first of all how the blood originates, how the blood is related to man's nourishment. In the bowels blood does not yet exist; it is first created inside the human being himself. The flow of the blood down through the generations—well, if any kind of poor mystical idea can be formed, this is it. Nothing that nebulous mystics have ever said more or less distinctly about the inner soul-life was such poor mysticism as this Spenglerian mysticism of the blood. It refers to something that precludes all possibility, not only of thinking about it—of course that would make no difference to Oswald Spengler, because no one really needs to think, it is just one of the luxuries of life—but one should cease to speak about anything so difficult to approach as the blood, if one pretends to be an intelligent person, or even an intelligent higher animal.

From this point of view, it is perfectly possible, then, to inaugurate a consideration of history with the following sentence:

“All great historical events are sustained by such beings of a cosmic nature, as dwell in peoples, parties, armies, classes; while the history of the spirit runs its course in loose associations and circles, schools, educational classes, tendencies—in ‘isms.’ And here it is again a matter of destiny whether such a group finds a leader at the decisive moment of its greatest efficiency, or is blindly driven forward, whether the chance leaders are men of high caliber or totally insignificant personalities raised to the summit by the surge of events, like Pompey or Robespierre. It is the mark of the statesman that he comprehends with complete clarity the strength and permanence, direction and purpose of all these soul-masses which form and dissolve in the stream of time; nevertheless, here also it is a question of chance as to whether he will be able to rule them, or is dragged along by them.” In this way a consideration of history is inaugurated which lets the blood be the conqueror of everything that enters historical evolution through the spirit! Now:

“One power may be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and against money, there is no other” (but blood, he means). “Money is vanquished and deposed only by blood. Life is the first and last, the illimitable cosmic flux in microcosmic form. It is the fact in the world as history. Before the irresistible rhythm of successive generations, everything that the waking life has built up in its worlds of spirit finally disappears. The fact of importance in history is life, always only life, the race, the triumph of the will to power, and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money. World-history is world-judgment. It has always decided in favor of life that was more vigorous, fuller, more sure of itself, in favor, that is, of the right to live, whether it was just or not in the waking life; and it has always sacrificed truth and righteousness to power, to race, and has condemned to death men and whole peoples to whom truth was more precious than deeds, and justice more essential than power. Thus another drama of lofty culture, this whole wonderful world of divinities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities, closes with the primeval facts of the eternal blood, which is one and the same with the eternally circling, cosmic, undulating flood. The clear, form-filled waking existence plunges again into the silent service of life, as demonstrated by the Chinese epoch and by the Roman Empire. Time conquers space, and time it is whose inexorable passage imbeds on this planet the fleeting incident—culture, in the incident—man, a form in which the incident—life, flows along for a time, while behind it in the light-world of our eyes appear the flowing horizons of earth-history and star-history.

“For us, however, whom destiny has placed in this culture at this moment of its evolution when money celebrates its last victories, and its successor, Caesarism, stealthily and irresistibly approaches, the direction is given within narrow limits which willing and compulsion must follow, if life is to be worth living.”

Thus does Oswald Spengler point to the coming Caesarism, to that which is to come before the complete collapse of the cultures of the West, and into which the present culture will be transformed.

I have put this before you today because truly the man who is awake—he matters little to Oswald Spengler—the man who is awake, even though he be an Anthroposophist, should take some account of what is happening. And so I wished from this point of view to draw your attention to a particular problem of the time. But it would be a poor conclusion if I were to say only this to you concerning this problem of our time. Therefore, before we must have a longer interval for my trip to Oxford, I will give another lecture next week Wednesday.

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.